by Linda Grant
‘But why?’ I cried. ‘Why was she to be a human sacrifice? Didn’t she deserve better?’
‘No, no, you don’t understand. She elevated him to her level, not the other way round. She turned him into a human being.’
‘I don’t think that’s true. She told me he used to sing her American songs, from the films.’
‘Did he? I never knew that.’
‘She said he was different, then.’
‘Well, maybe she knows him better than me–I only knew him as a brother. And as a middle-aged man who insults his future sister-in-law. Deliberately, as you saw. But I never heard him sing no songs and I never knew him going to see no films either. But always you ask the questions not me. What do you do with yourself, how do you spend your time?’
‘I fight Fascism,’ I said, with some pride, hoping for his approval. I hoped he would think that I was doing some small thing to make amends for the years he had spent as a slave.
‘And how do you do this?’
‘I told you already, I hand out leaflets.’
‘A leaflet. Very nice. What does the leaflet say?’
I explained our important political message to the people of London about this Nazi menace hidden behind a lying face of British patriotism.
‘Well, I’m sure they will listen. Who could disagree with a leaflet? What about the boy Claude, does he go with you?’
I had tried to conceal my relationship with him. I felt my uncle would not understand what I was doing with a common boy, a rough boy, as he called him, with the leather jacket and the job below ground. But he must have caught sight of the two of us together, coming home from the pub, or of me sneaking out of his room in the early morning before I got my own flat in the house. And the swastikas. I was ashamed.
‘Are you worried about Eunice?’ I said, changing the subject.
‘Yes, of course I am. That’s why I’m in a hurry to marry her, so she will get out of that flat and come here where she will be safer. It’s not a good neighbourhood.’
‘Sándor, tell me, why do you always go out with black girls?’
‘Why?’ He looked at me and smiled that same kind smile he had given the waitress, a smile full of charm and somehow the lower lip, that Hitchcock profile, softened into a sensitivity I’d only occasionally seen in him before. For he could be the cold businessman, the beast who roared for his profits, who carelessly bought on credit the tawdry goods he craved because once he was a slave whose balls had been beaten until they broke, but then his features once or twice would melt, re-form, assume another shape.
‘I never saw a coloured girl until after the war. I barely knew such a person existed except maybe in those American films your father says he went to see, which I doubt. But when I left it too late to leave Hungary, when communism stole up on us when we were not looking, we were cut off from the rest of Europe. The dance bands, Tommy Dorsey, the singers, Frank Sinatra, people like that, they never came to the East. We had brotherly love, we had comrades, and among our comrades were the Americans. American communists. Once, there came to the café where I was made to work as a waiter, a torch singer from America, a communist torch singer.’
He threw back his head and laughed. ‘What an idea, but you know, that’s what she was. Her name was Elvira. She had a sequined dress and high-heeled shoes when the women of Budapest wore a man’s jacket and leather boots to keep out the bitter winter cold. Elvira from Kansas City. The most beautiful woman I ever saw in my life, before or since. I don’t know what happened to her, I tried to find her records, but I don’t think she ever made any. She was a true communist, a Party member. I made sure she had the best pastries, the ones we kept on the special tray for the Party officials and the visitors from Moscow. Ever since then I lost my taste for white women. Her grandmother was a slave, and I told her that just four years ago I too was a slave. I drank Tokaj from her shoes. I’ll never forget that, in my little flat with a bottle of wine from the vineyards of the Zémplen, drinking it from the heel which smelt of her sweat and all her odours and still it was the sweetest drink in all the world.’
When the last train leaves for its destination, when the passengers have disembarked at the final terminus, and the train’s lights flash, then darken, the trains roll on to their night-time rest.
What do they get up to, down there in the dark?
‘I want to do it with my bird on a train,’ Claude said.
‘What? In broad daylight?’
‘After we stop running. I’ll take you to the depot.’
‘Are you allowed to do that?’
‘No, but it doesn’t mean to say that you can’t, neither.’
We had no common interests, no social life together; mostly we just lay around in bed looking at his tiny fish with their dot eyes. Sometimes a fish would develop a white fungus and die slowly, occasionally they jumped out on to the hotplate, with self-evidently suicidal intentions: it was a very constrained world in there.
The death of a fish upset him for days. The little bodies would be wrapped in a tissue and buried in a shallow indentation he made with a teaspoon in the garden, but then a week or so later he would dig them up and examine their skeletons before they too disintegrated. He felt sad that they had to lie in the cold English soil when they came from faraway seas and warm climates.
The night after I accompanied my uncle to scope out engagement rings at Harrods, where I had seen what there was to be had on the special tray, I got dressed in my jeans and leather jacket and waited close to midnight on the platform at Camden station, northbound.
The last passengers were on their way home, the pale revellers and weary night workers slumped against the walls; the final train is a lonely business, the day closing behind you. A strong wind blew along the tunnel, signalling the train approaching. The indicator board lit up and faded, trains came and went until the last train of all. The doors opened and Claude swung out, searched the faces of the crowd and beckoned me on board. I stepped on lightly in my monkey boots, the doors closed behind us and we were on our way.
‘Come here,’ he said, ‘let me cuddle you, you look cold. You been waiting long?’
‘I’m all right.’ We were in the little space between the rattling carriages, the shifting floor where the carriages are coupled together and you feel that you might be torn asunder, one half of your body moving away from the other.
‘Can I blow your whistle?’ I said.
‘Yeah, here it is, go on, have a go.’
I put it in my mouth, it was still warm from his lips, and I blew, long and hard and piercing.
We rushed north. Claude ran through the carriages, his cap down shadowing his eyes, his jacket loose around his shoulders and grey with ash. He wasn’t handsome: his nose was too sharp, his hair too fine, everything about him came to a point, except that mouth, those lips that looked like they had been grafted on to his face not for talking but sucking, kissing. But the young girls homeward bound after a night out stared at him with bold laughing eyes.
He said I was his girl and I laughed. I said we were just fuck-mates. So it was true, he was too common for me, he taunted. I’m here, aren’t I, I said. Look at me, you’ve got your common hands on my breasts. You just want a bit of rough, he said. And what do you want, I asked. What’s your agenda?
‘I’m after your money, girl, what do you think?’
‘Take it,’ I said. ‘Eight pounds a day is my fortune, I’ll give you all of it.’
‘I fancy being a kept man, the plaything of a rich old lady. An old lady like you.’ The sudden, abrupt laugh. ‘It’s funny, ain’t it?’ He couldn’t keep his hands off my hair. ‘Let me stroke you, old lady. You’re like the Queen of Sheba. She was in the Bible and the King gave her gold and presents. I’d give you gold if I had the money.’
I wished I could have shown him my bedroom at Benson Court, the ballet picture, the china dog, the horse bookends, the horrible hand-me-down clothes in the wardrobe, but he would never see inside Benson
Court. That was his attraction. We were just bodies, in free fall.
At Golders Green we came out from the deep tunnels up on to the overground tracks. Above ground the train seemed more frail and vulnerable, as if an underground creature had burrowed up to the surface and was exposed to all its natural predators.
The train stopped at Hendon, Colindale, Burnt Oak, then reached the end of the line at Edgware. Sleeping passengers were woken; they struggled through the ticket turnstiles and made their way home. ‘But don’t you get off,’ he said to me, ‘we’re not there yet.’
A long time we waited, the carriages standing silently and emptily at the darkened station before we moved again, shunting slowly south, then gathering speed, black outlines of trees, houses on the embankments above us, and above that, a sultry summer moon.
‘There are trains that are supposed to be haunted, did you know that?’ he said. ‘Passengers die on the trains all the time, and some trains have killed people, they’re murder trains, but you don’t know which ones, they change their numbers.’
‘How do they kill people?’
‘Suicides throw themselves down in front of them and the blood flows along the tracks.’
We pulled into the Golders Green depot. I heard the driver’s footsteps echoing along the walkway as he left for the night. We were alone in the silence. Outside foxes moved stealthily through the bushes, Claude said; he saw them sometimes.
‘So it’s just you and me, girl,’ he said, taking off his cap and jacket. ‘I wish we was moving but I couldn’t risk it.’
There was nowhere to lie down but the floor, a surface covered in empty crisp packets, torn newspapers, plastic bags, cigarette ends, chocolate wrappers, a baby’s dummy, a wallet with its contents removed, a hat, a shoe, a shirt, torn-up tickets. He opened the windows and let in the night air.
‘Unzip your jeans,’ he said. He unzipped his own, reached forward and pulled down my panties to my hips then placed his hands in the straps that came down from the roof of the carriage. It was so dark in there, I could hardly see him, he was a shape, and an echoing voice. ‘Kiss me for a bit, then put it inside you.’ I pulled myself up until my knees gripped his narrow hips. We hung there suspended, him from the roof and me from him. When it was over he wiped my thighs with his jacket.
I didn’t say anything. It was his fantasy, not mine. I felt we had gone too far: like the tube train leaving its designated path on the map, we had lit off out for unknown quarters. He rolled a cigarette in the dark. I sat down.
‘Do you mind if I sit on your lap for a minute?’ he said.
‘OK.’
His body was as light as a bird or a phantom.
‘You’re so thin,’ I said, holding him carefully so that he would not break. You don’t eat enough to live,’ I said, stroking his face.
‘I’m living, aren’t I?’ he said, turning his head away.
‘You’re wasting away, you were much stronger in the spring. Those tablets you’re taking are slimming pills, did you know that? That’s what the doctors prescribe them for, it’s why you have no appetite.’
‘I live on air,’ he said. The voice came from the little coal glowing in the blackness: ‘that’s what my grandma once told me. She’s one of the tinker folk and they’re related to the pixies.’ He laughed. ‘I’d like to be from the other world. I sometimes think I don’t belong in this one.’
I knew that it was almost over, but that did not mean that I would ever stop longing for him, or that the tenderness he sometimes showed would not continue to move me, or touch a heart that was already healing itself with invisible calluses
‘Shall we each tell each other a secret?’ he said. ‘That’s what the night’s for, isn’t it, stories?’
‘I don’t mind.’
‘Who’s going to go first?’
‘It was your idea.’
‘All right then. Here’s one.’ He began to talk in a low, quick voice, as if he was hunting down his thoughts to kill them. ‘It happened when I was little kid just starting at the big school, right? And we had to have a pair of long grey socks that come up to your knees. That’s how you knew you was in the big school, them socks. When I come home the first day, my dad sent me out to the yard to clean the dog’s dishes.’
‘What kind of dogs?’ I knew his fear of them. He had told me before how the smell made him feel sick.
‘Two big mongrels with pointed teeth and matted fur. And they had black lips and their eyes was always crying. I don’t know what my dad wanted them for because he never took them walks or nothing, he just left them chained up but he come from Ireland, somewhere in the country, and he said a man’s not a man without a dog.
‘So I’m bending over to pick up the dishes and this dog, Alf, my dad called him, after a bloke down the street, he picks up his leg and pisses on me. I could feel it trickling down on to my socks, warm and wet and stinking of that ammonia smell, all yellow. And I ran inside bawling my head off and me mum was just standing there laughing. She gives me a kiss and takes the socks off and washes them and dries them overnight in front of the fire. But when I went to school next day the whiff was still coming off me and all the kids was calling me names so come milk break, I ran away.’
‘Where did you run away to?’
He laid his face against my cheek and I kissed it, as you kiss a child.
‘Down to where the ships come in, some sheds I knew about. I slept with the tramps and they gave me cider. I was only eleven, but I liked the taste and the way it felt when it got into your veins. They were all right, I didn’t mind them, though they stank of course, but then I stank too. I was like a cat that’s gone wild, do you know what I mean? Have you ever felt like that? Like you don’t belong to nothing or nobody? I thought I could stay there for ever and never go back to school but they came for me in the end, with a policeman and a woman from the social and I had to go home. My mum threw the socks away and bought me another pair but I always thought that people could smell that dog’s wee, that it would follow me around as long as I lived.’
‘You smell fantastic,’ I said. ‘Didn’t you know that?’
‘Yeah, girls have said it before now. But you never really believe them, do you? I wash a lot, to make sure.’
The doors opened and further down the train the cleaners began their work, with rubbish bags, mops, cloths. He stood up.
‘We’ve got to go now,’ he said. ‘They might report me. I liked sitting on your lap, we’ll do that again some time.’
It was still only 1.30, the long night was ahead of us.
‘Where are we going now?’
He said we could start walking home when it got light, but we would have some tea first in the mess room. ‘And now you can tell me a story. Make it a good one, eh, girl?’
I remember the tiled clinic, the green waiting room, the frightened girls, my mother’s hand wiping the sweat from my neck, the bus, the smell of the plastic seats, the awful pain. But who can really remember pain? It’s impossible, you don’t remember it, you only fear it returning. These thoughts are like stitches–you sew together a memory with them and the flesh heals over into a scar. The scar is the memory.
My mother brought me tea in bed. ‘You must be careful how you wash,’ she said, ‘you must not get an infection. The place down there has been opened to the air.’
The tea tasted like iron filings. ‘I can’t drink this.’
‘A glass of water?’
‘That would be better.’ But when it came it was oily and rank.
What does the body know? It understands very well that it has been invaded, whether by a fused cell or a tube that aspirates away the clump of living matter. It will never let you forget. There were holes in my body. Gaps, deficiencies. I tried to pay them no attention.
‘Oh, shut the fuck up, will you? You can’t kill a baby.’
‘I didn’t kill a baby.’
‘Yes you did. It’s dead, ain’t it? If it’s not dead, where is it? Where’s t
he baby, Viv, show us your baby.’
‘Stop it.’
‘Stop what? You killed a little one and you want me to feel sorry for you, is that it?’
‘But I told you the story, don’t you understand I had to. What choice was there?’
‘There’s always a story, people are full of excuses. You hear them all the time, oh, he said he’d marry me, I thought you couldn’t fall the first time, the silly slags.’
He threw a bag of sugar across the mess room; it rained down from high on the plastic chairs, the maroon vinyl floor, the Formica table. ‘Look what you made me do.’ His face was sickly under the fluorescent light, half starved, demented.
I remembered the hand on his back as his father pushed him up the hill to church.
‘Some priest has been filling your head with rubbish,’ I said.
‘Hell’s a real place. Just because the priest talks about it, don’t mean it’s not true.’
I didn’t know him at all. I didn’t understand the first thing about him, he was an opaque mass of matter in a leather jacket and a T-shirt. Behind his eyes some complicated person lay in hiding. I had not touched him at all.
‘I’m going,’ I said. ‘I’m walking home. You’re crazy.’
‘Great. See ya round.’ He began to roll a cigarette but his fingers were trembling. When I turned back at the gate, he was standing at the window watching me, as if he belonged, suddenly, to another time, another dimension, framed in the rectangle with the light behind him, one square of light in the utter blackness of the depot, like one of those ghosts he believed wandered the empty trains at night, the ghosts of suicides.
The sky gradually lightened as the dark broke over London. City of towers and steeples, railway lines, wormed with tunnels, and the closer I got to home, the faster I went until I broke into a run, running through Chalk Farm until the whole bright day dawned, the sun rising in along the estuary.