‘A bit,’ I said.
‘You like fish and chips?’
‘I don’t think that’s what dad had in mind. He gave me twenty pounds.’
‘What time is it now, eight o’clock?’
‘A few minutes after.’ I had been looking at my watch nearly every five minutes, but perhaps not as discreetly as I’d thought.
‘Wasn’t Karl expecting you tonight?’
‘Nothing was arranged, I just said I might go round.’ I didn’t want to mention Karl’s phone call. Remembering it there was something about it I hadn’t enjoyed, but I didn’t want him judged by repeating words spoken in over-excitement – really nothing more than “a fair amount of gibberish” like mine.
‘Will the Reichian therapist be there?’
‘Not before ten, she’s working late.’
‘And don’t they live close by?’
‘In Cross Street.’
‘That’s where Ada’s flat is.’
‘Auntie Ada lives in Tufnell Park.’
‘Is there another Cross Street in Tufnell Park?’
‘12F Cyprus Street,’ I said.
‘It sounds quite similar,’ said Jack.
‘I suppose so.’
‘But Karl is definitely in Cross Street, which is less than five minutes away.’
‘Yes.’
‘So what are you waiting for?’
‘I don’t want to leave you.’ In a window as we passed it I saw our reflection, two passing figures like so many others, all with secrets of their own. The lights inside were on, and although the yellowish tinge of our outline in the glass made us seem more united, what I had just said to Jack was only partly true. No, I didn’t want to leave him alone, but I did want to see Karl. To spend half an hour with him would be enough.
‘I’ll wait for you somewhere. And then we’ll make our way back together.’
‘Let’s eat first, and then I’ll decide if I want to see Karl. Where’s the fish and chips place?’
‘On the way,’ said Jack. ‘Come on, we haven’t got all night. The Reichian therapist looms…’
‘Salt and vinegar in both?’ asked the man behind the counter.
Jack and I both nodded.
‘In or out, open or closed?’
‘Let’s at least sit down,’ I said.
‘In,’ said Jack.
‘Open is fine, if you don’t have plates.’
The man looked at me blankly.
‘Open,’ said Jack. ‘And we’ll also have a couple of Fantas.’
‘I’m paying,’ I said, and already the man was taking money out of my hand.
Captain Cook’s Fish and Chips was “authentic” according to Jack. Auntie Ada had spoiled me, and I would have described it as a little bit better than “basic”. It had some tables at the back, it was clean, and it wasn’t very busy. But it was too brightly lit. The pickled eggs in the jar on the counter looked like biological specimens, and the bubbling golden oil gave an aura of radiation. Too brightly lit and also too green: the walls were green; the plastic tablecloths were green; the floor tiles were green; made of thin shiny metal, the chairs were like mirrors filled with green… A little bit better than basic as long as you didn’t mind green – the glare from the fluorescent strips swept the greenness off the floor and off the walls and made everything green. I was gaping at our spread of fish and chips. It was as green as our side of mushy peas, and so was Jack.
‘What’s wrong? You don’t like the fish? Mine’s delicious.’
‘Mine’s delicious too, but it’s green. Everything in here is green. You look green. I’m sure I do too.’
‘Now you mention it, you do look a little bit peaky,’ Jack said, and we both tried to muffle our giggles. ‘Now come on, eat up. The sooner we’re finished, the sooner we’ll be out of here. And while you’re visiting Karl, I’ll wait for you on a bench in Islington Green. Turning green with envy.’
We were very good at giggling but terrible at muffling, and the small crowd of atomic Martians were all staring at us. I dug into my food self-consciously, abandoning the useless plastic fork for my fingers, easily breaking the rigid battered fish into pieces and eating them like popcorn, while occasionally slurping from my bottle of Fanta. Jack, who hadn’t even bothered to pick up a fork, was holding up his fish horizontally, rotating it and biting into it as though it were corn on the cob. And when eventually it broke into two, he used what was left on either side to scoop up at least some of the forgotten mushy peas.
‘It wasn’t so delicious after all,’ Jack nodded at my leftover fish.
‘Well, well, well, what have we got here then, mm?’ A burly posh-sounding boy, too smartly dressed for a fish and chips shop on a hot Tuesday night in north London, had appeared out of nowhere and was standing over Jack, looking down at him sideways with his back half-turned to me. ‘We know each other, don’t we?’ He was loud and aggressive, like he was trying to make a show out of looking for trouble.
‘I don’t think so,’ said Jack.
‘Course we do,’ the boy shot back.
I had pushed my chair away from the table, to have a clearer view of Jack and at the same time of most of the shop. The three people at the table next to ours made a noise getting up, and the boy took a bow as they hurried around him on their way to the door, walking out without looking behind them.
‘Course we do,’ the boy repeated, picking up his rant where he’d left off. ‘But in case you need reminding, I’ve seen you in here before, had your arm round this old guy, plebby type as I remember, with this lopsided rug on his head. Your sugar daddy I’m guessing, am I right? But wait a minute…’ He paused to scratch his head, darting glances at the two younger boys who were watching his performance from the counter and were probably his friends. ‘Yeah, it’s all coming back to me now. A hooker with her pimp, that’s what I thought at the time. And don’t get me wrong, I’m an open-minded guy, live and let live as they say, but only up to a point, and way beyond that point is this here sorry excuse for a male of our species, a queer today, and tomorrow an even worse kind of queer when he kits himself out as a bird, like he did last time I saw him, sitting at this very table with his sugar daddy perv…’ While he thrust his finger back and forth, pointing at Jack as though about to jab him, he had swung his body around to face the counter, but every two seconds he would turn to look at Jack, almost spitting the words in his face.
When I turned around too, the whole shop had come to a standstill. The last two customers were hesitating at the door; the man who had served us had two open bags in one hand and the big pot of salt in the other; arms akimbo, the woman beside him was looking defiant; insipidly the two boys looked on without making a move.
Jack now had his elbow on the table and his head on its side in his hand. He gave me a wink before slapping his gaze at the boy – he was big, but no older than fifteen or sixteen. I knew his type from school; young kids who imagined themselves to be clever and hard – so much cleverer and harder than they actually were.
‘Have you finished?’ said Jack in his manly voice.
‘Have I finished? I haven’t even started!’
‘No, I think you’ve finished,’ said Jack.
‘Come on, Mike, just leave it,’ said one of the boys at the counter.
But it was too late for Mike to just leave it. Mr Captain Cook of Captain Cook’s Fish and Chips already had him by the scruff of his neck and was manhandling him roughly as he showed him the door.
‘And don’t show your pretty face in here again,’ Mr Captain Cook was barking at him as he pushed him outside, ‘or I’ll have my wife deep fry it with the fish, and then I’ll serve it personally to the dogs. As for you two shrinking violets,’ he howled, turning to the boys who stood frozen by the counter, ‘I suggest you have a think about the company you keep, before that psycho gets you both into trouble. Now go on, take your fish and chips and skedaddle.’
He shut the door and locked it, turned the sign around from OPEN
to CLOSED, and as he approached us he gave a big shrug of his shoulders.
‘To think we’ve put a man on the moon,’ he exclaimed at the sky. ‘And we still can’t teach our kids right from wrong. You know what really bugs me? How the spoiled ones, who’ve never lacked for anything, are usually the worst. How are you, Miss Mia-Mia? I thought you looked familiar when I served you, but my brain just didn’t click. And your friend is she okay? First time in our restaurant and this had to happen.’
Mr Captain Cook had pulled up a chair and was turning now to Jack and now to me, all the time wiping his hands on the sides of his apron.
‘Yes, I’m okay,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’
‘We’re both fine, Frank, really,’ said Jack. ‘But I’m Jack now.’
‘Oh I see, Mr Jack, yes of course.’
‘Just Jack, Frank,’ said Jack.
‘And Miss Mia-Mia, she won’t be coming back with Mr George?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘but Mr George might be coming back with Jack.’
‘This is Jane,’ said Jack. ‘Jane is George’s daughter. Jane, this is Frank, and over there behind the counter is his lovely wife Norma.’
When Norma waved hello I waved back.
‘Well, it’s a shame we won’t be seeing Miss Mia-Mia, but I’m glad we’ll be seeing more of Jack.’
‘And of Jane,’ Norma shouted from her place behind the counter.
‘Now if you’re sure you’re both okay, I think we’ve got some customers waiting outside,’ said Frank, and he got up to shake hands first with me and then with Jack.
I walked out of Captain Cook’s Fish and Chips to a world that felt bigger, harder, more unwieldy, where opposites constantly collided and people got hurt, not just strangers but people I was actually close to. The world I had built for myself was no longer self-contained and shielded from danger; “my own world” had always been a temporary fiction. The way I had experienced the loss of my mother was different. Today there was nothing that I hadn’t understood. Everything that happened from the moment I walked in on Mia-Mia in the bathroom was part of “real life”, encompassing fear, and anger, and outrage, but also pride, and resolve, and affection. But these were all easy feelings. The night could so easily have had a different outcome, whose immensity I knew because I had experienced it before. But this pervasive uncertainty was just another part of “real life”, and if it made it seem unbearably precarious, it also made it feel more exciting. My father’s words rang in my ears: ‘The world out there is ugly, and it doesn’t let you feel just with words.’ I thought of Karl’s fear as he hurried away from the unfamiliar world he’d strayed into, and of how naturally Jack had played ball with its children. Human action took innumerable forms, and gave rise to a vitality that went beyond making everything certain.
I had my hand around his arm, and it struck me again how physically fragile he was. But Jack’s stride was steady and firm, and he was leading me in the direction of Cross Street. My legs were short compared to his, and I almost had to run to keep up, with Jack and with a night that had not yet run its course.
‘Shouldn’t we go home? I think we should,’ I said, but I said it without trying to slow him down.
‘Why? Because of what happened?’
‘You nearly got beaten up.’
‘Nothing happened, and I didn’t nearly get beaten up. Believe me, I should know. I’ve been beaten up enough times before. That was just an idiot showing off, a bigmouth, that’s all. If he really wanted to beat me up… no, let me rephrase that, if he was going to beat me up he’d have had his fish and chips and waited for me outside. Violence likes the dark.’
‘Who was beaten up, Jack or Mia-Mia?’
‘Oh, we’ve both been beaten up. But not for a while now, with time I’ve got better at slipping away. God knows I’ve had a lot of practice. And that was one thing about being with your dad, I always felt safe.’
‘I hope you went to the police,’ I said, and when Jack started to laugh and wouldn’t stop, ‘But why’s that so funny? Isn’t that what people do when they get beaten up?’
‘Yes, people.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Well, nor do the police. There’s precious few Normas and Franks in this world, and precious none of them have joined the police.’
‘That’s not possible,’ I said, and already we had passed the telephone box on the corner with Cross Street, just ten houses separating us from Karl’s.
‘So, show me where your genius boy lives.’
‘But it’s a quarter past nine.’
‘Let’s hurry then,’ said Jack.
We could now hear the music, not exactly pouring out but rather wafting freely through the open ground floor windows. There were eight steps to the door, wide, deep and high, really quite majestic, and I had run up and down them a thousand times before, but at the thought of climbing them tonight I felt nauseous.
‘Beethoven. Piano Sonata No. 29 in B-flat.’
‘You know everything,’ I said.
‘I know Beethoven,’ said Jack. ‘Dad was a fan. Still is, I imagine.’
‘He likes to play this a lot. I think it’s too sad.’
‘What is joy without sadness?’
‘You really think that’s true?’
‘What I think is that there’s no time to be getting philosophical. If you go in now, you’ll have him to yourself for at least half an hour. Come on, I’ll take you to the door and I’ll even ring the bell for you, and then I’ll wait for you at the top of the street by the telephone box. He’s good, your boy. He’s very good.’
Jack had walked with me up the steps, and when the bell had been rung, I felt his breath whispering ‘Good luck!’ in my ear, before he flew like a feather down the steps and disappeared. The music had stopped, but the evening was now drumming in my head, as though remonstrating with me for an act made more selfish by everything I hadn’t said to Jack. So much was hidden in the things he had told me, begging many questions I ought to have asked.
‘You came,’ said Karl, pulling back from the door to open it more widely.
The first thing Karl did was to telephone his mother, to laugh about Chopin and say that he needed the house to himself for an extra hour.
‘I can’t stay long,’ I said. ‘I need to get back home to my dad.’
‘But you hate him, what’s the big rush?’
‘No I don’t, when you called me…’
‘I know. You told me you were tired of being angry. And that’s good, I’m happy for you.’
‘It’s because of what you said.’
‘See? So tonight let’s be happy together.’
‘I can stay for half an hour. But then I have to go.’
He was standing so close to me I couldn’t see the whole of his face, but I knew he wasn’t smiling.
‘I really like you, I wouldn’t be like this if I didn’t,’ he said, and already he was starting to kiss me. First my neck, then my mouth, while touching me only lightly in places I would rather not be touched - not tonight, not so soon. But the kisses were so coy and the touching so light that I didn’t resist. And now I was kissing him too, running both my hands through his hair.
‘Let’s not stay standing,’ he said. ‘Let’s go upstairs to my room.’
I had thrown myself out of the door, then I had bolted down the steps, and now I was running, running as fast as I could, shaking as I ran in the middle of the road, holding back my tears, choking on the scream I held in for as long as I had to for Karl not to hear, blinded by headlights that instinct alone made me swerve to avoid, drawn at last to the shadow, slender and tender and tall, unmistakably the shadow of Jack, who had swayed like the wind into my path so that I could fall into his arms.
I sobbed and I sobbed and I sobbed, and as I sobbed I felt the surge of violence in Jack’s chest, which I knew I would have to but wasn’t yet ready to quell. My scream had died in me before I found the strength to give it sound, and for some time it was all I co
uld do to breathe in and out in short, snivelling, hiccupping gasps, my breast rising and falling at the suffocating speed of that same shallow rhythm. With one arm around me Jack held me tightly in place with a strength that I couldn’t have imagined, while with barely the tips of his fingers he was stroking my hair to one side and keeping it out of my eyes.
When I loosened my grip by a notch, Jack did the same, and our eyes met as I lifted my head up away from his chest, to let it fall back in the cusp of his hand.
‘I have a handkerchief,’ he said, and when I blinked as I nodded, he let go of my head to dig into his opposite pocket. ‘Here. Dry your eyes first, then blow into it as hard as you can. You’ll feel better after that, I promise.’ Holding onto it by a corner, he had given the handkerchief a jerk to unfold it, and when he handed it to me it was so big that I wished we could hide under it and conjure ourselves somewhere else. ‘It’s your dad’s,’ said Jack. ‘I’ve always liked to borrow his.’ I fell away from him a fraction more, bringing both hands to my face, to dry my eyes first, and then to blow into the handkerchief as hard as I could, following Jack’s instructions to the letter, his clutch now unfastening little by little as my own strength returned. The muscles in my legs had again become tense, almost supporting my weight by themselves.
‘Better?’ Even as our bodies drew apart, held together only by fingers spread across the small of my back, I still felt enveloped by him.
The light from the streetlamps was pale, diffusing as it fell to the ground, to spread dimly across the pavement until it dissolved. I could see a long line of smaller and smaller bright circles, and they reminded me of being in the spotlight, defying the plastic blades of Sweeney Todd. A passing car whooshed by, cutting into the muted yellow haze with headlights that the driver hadn’t dipped, and when Jack saw my face in the brightness he answered his question himself.
‘No, you’re not better,’ he said, but when he tried to move closer, I placed my open palms against his chest, holding firmly on to the distance between us.
‘I don’t know how to tell you what happened.’
‘Did he hurt you?’ Jack’s words sounded broken – as hard and uneven as the beating I could feel inside his chest.
The Madness of Grief Page 10