‘I don’t know. Hurt him. Or frighten him.’
‘Hurt him. But how?’
‘Easy peasy Japanesy,’ she said, looking away.
‘If it’s so easy peasy tell me how.’
‘Don’t be pathetic,’ she said. ‘Just do it.’
That night, Daddy had one of his dreams. The scream ripped my sleep open and left me trembling. Hazel burrowed her head under the pillow and pretended to be asleep. I lay wide awake, my thumb in my mouth, my heart hammering so hard it hurt. I could hear more sounds, something like a man crying. But it could have been wind and rain moaning round the roof. I could hear Mummy padding about, a sigh as she went past our door, her feet on the stairs, the bathroom taps running, the toilet flushing, doors clicking, and, finally, quiet again. I lay at the edge of my bunk, leaning out a bit so I could see the red glow of the night-light in the corner, all patchy where Hazel had stuck bubble-gum stickers over the spots, and thought about what she’d said. Hurt him or frighten him. How could I? I couldn’t. Hurt Puddle-duck? I could not do it. But although I never could, the thought stirred inside me. Deep down in my stomach I felt a sort of tightness, a sort of excitement but very dull and muffled. Because you don’t deliberately hurt or frighten people, that is what I’d been brought up to believe and the belief had soaked right through me. Was part of me. Hurt Puddle-duck? I could not do it.
8
The bridge is blown up. I knew, of course, that it would be, because I’ve seen it before. Good. Is that the right response? What a bloody stupid film. Anything to do with my father? It is only a story. But did he help build a bridge like that? Not like Alec Guinness at all, don’t know where I got that idea from, more like Jack Hawkins, black hair when he was young, a widow’s peak, thick-set. But not much like Jack Hawkins either. Why should he look like anyone?
I switch the television off and rewind the video, listening to the whirring that grows in volume like an aircraft preparing for take-off, then a click and quiet. The quiet is a relief.
I could take it that Daddy wants me to look at the papers. That’s why he appeared, that’s why he rested his hand in the place where they are. I could take that as my excuse to pry. Pry! How Foxy would scoff. It wouldn’t be prying. If Daddy was really here that could have been what he was indicating. If he really was here. The idea makes me go cold again. I don’t believe in ghosts. But there was something and it did not come from me. I did not summon Daddy up. I wasn’t even thinking about him. I never would have thought to summon up that smell, his spicy, pipe smoke smell. Not a ghost because I do not believe in ghosts. But maybe a good-bye visit.
I could have said I love you.
It was my chance.
I could ring my mother and tell her I’m going to open the envelope. But it’s half-past two. I cannot ring her now. What if she is sleeping? And she’d only say, ‘Whatever you like.’ Or pretend not to know what I mean, what envelope? She doesn’t want anything to do with waking the sleeping dogs. If I took the envelope, unopened, with me tomorrow and suggested that we look inside together, she would not want to. What’s inside might upset her and then she would blame me. It might make her angry, it might cause a rift between us just when we should be drawing close.
I open the Atlas again. South-East Asia. Burma. On the map it looks quite innocuous. Area: 261,789 square miles; Population: 20,500,000; Capital: Rangoon. Geographical facts. The shape of it, a frill at the bottom that is the Mouths of the Irrawaddy. I strain my eyes to find the River Kwai, I cannot find it in Burma or in Thailand. It is not there, or if it is, it’s too insignificant to mark. Scale: 1 inch to 158 miles. Think what life is taking place within each flat square inch – the loving and the fighting; the birthing and the dying; the screams of birds. All those beating hearts. Staring at the grid of fine black squares that mesh the page I feel quite dizzy at the concentration of life they represent.
The tape on the flap of the envelope has gone brittle with age. It is hardly stuck down, easy to remove. But the flap is stuck fast, old glue, old spit, it will not come up. I slit it with the cheese knife, stupidly, in a rush now, and cut my thumb.
He does not want me to open it. Funny if it was nothing but bills or … old love letters … or money? I stop. Money? Some sort of crime, hence the secrecy?
Blood is running down my thumb, not a bad cut, a little flap beside my nail. My imagination is running away with me. What do I think he is, was? A great train robber? The sort of cut that stings and catches. I lick away the blood and suck my thumb. The memory of comfort conjured up by the sensation is acute, the ball of my thumb, nestling in the ridged hollow behind my upper teeth. The rhythmic suck comes automatically back though I haven’t done it for – twenty years? My mother never minded me sucking my thumb. My father wouldn’t have noticed, but my Swedish grandfather would scold, tell my mother to smother it in mustard, warn that I’d ruin my teeth. But my teeth are perfectly fine. Nice teeth. Straight. Nicer than Hazel’s actually. Oh get to the point, Zelda. The taste of blood. Get on with it.
I slip my hand into the manila envelope and pull out a letter and a further envelope, foolscap but folded round its smaller wad of contents. I put this aside and with my thumb back in my mouth, I read the letter:
Dear Ralph,
You will no doubt have me down as an abject coward when you have read this. You have my absolute permission to think ill of me, to think what you like.
I have done wrong by you 3 times. You entrusted me with a parcel of papers when I was moved from Kanburi to Tarsao thinking they would be safer with me since the Japs were turning the camp over. When we met in London that once in 1948 you expected me to hand over the diaries. I told you that they’d been found and confiscated by guards at Tarsao. I lied. It turns out, Ralph, to be as hard to confess this by letter, and, I hope, from beyond the grave as it were, as it would have been to do so to your face.
Bear in mind I was utterly demoralized and degraded. Literally demoralized. Suffering from dysentery on top of Malaria I was very far gone. The fact is I was so humiliated by the filth of my body that I used every possible means to clean myself up. I know you will understand at least that much, that you experienced illness of at least the same degree. I used much of your diary as lavatory paper, Ralph. I have no excuse. It was a diabolical thing to do when you had trusted it to my safe keeping. I thought I would not survive, possibly you would not survive, and thus it would be of no significance. I am sorry. Would that I had had more self-control. That was my first wrong.
The second was in my lie to you: that the papers had been found and confiscated, a plausible fabrication, so much so that I almost became convinced of it myself.
The third and greatest wrong, and one that I could put right, even now but out of cowardice I will not, is of not confessing to you face to face, not giving you these remaining scraps. Even as a mature man, a man of God, I cannot face this test. It is my greatest failure of nerve. I have done wrong by myself in this, Ralph. For I have been unable to seek your forgiveness and will die, still with my guilt weighing me down.
My memory of you is of a brave man. I know how you suffered in your soul over the Vince business. I wish it had been possible to talk and to pray with you. I do pray that you found peace with yourself. I do not think you did wrong.
I pray you will find it in your heart to forgive me.
Yours sincerely,
Benjamin Priest
I fold the thin blue paper and put it down on top of the envelope. I walk about the room. My back aches, I’ve been sitting cramped forward with my shoulders hunched. I need someone to rub my shoulders, Foxy with her fierce fingers, probing so deep it hurts as it helps. It is all so horrible I want to laugh. My father’s diary used as lavatory paper. So mundanely tragic. This man, this Reverend Priest suffering a lifetime of guilt for that. I am almost glad Daddy will never know. Would he have laughed? He would have forgotten about the diaries, I’m sure. This farcical confession would only bring it all back. Bring what back? The V
ince business? What’s that? His dreams? I do not think they ever went away, not for more than a few weeks at a time. What was it that was in his dreams?
I am glad not to have to show him the letter.
Now the Reverend Priest can never be forgiven.
Would Daddy have forgiven him?
How can I know? I do not, did not know him. And he: did he know me?
He knew the woman who visited, in disguise. I never wore my own sort of clothes home. Normally I dress in period gear from the shop. Right now, I favour 40s’ stuff – fifty years celebrated in Second Hand Rose. My favourite dress is a navy-and-white rayon knee-length number with a belted waist and white buttons down the bodice. I wear it with fake pearl beads and Cuban heels and my hair sausage-rolled round my head. I like the way people stare: older women stop me sometimes to tell me how I take them back.
But for going home I’ve always chosen something classy but nondescript. You could not read me by my clothes. Well-cut slacks, lambswool sweaters in navy or camel, tidy silver studs in my ears, hair dried smooth as it will go. Lipstick, just a dab of pink. It is not just for appearances or to fool them. It is not just a masquerade. Those sensible clothes make me sensible. Make me the sort of daughter I think they would like me to be. Of course, I should not be running a shop. I should be a solicitor, like Hazel, or a teacher, at least. Mummy sees me here when she visits, she knows more, sees more, in any case, I think, could see through me. Though she doesn’t say much her eyes are very piercing. But Daddy: all Daddy knows is what he sees. Saw.
I did so want him to be pleased with me. I nearly married once. Daddy would have approved if I had married Guy. He was the right sort of man: an architect, well spoken, quite – but not too – handsome.
I thought I was in love with him. The love blossomed up in my heart whenever we sat, together with my parents, round the table and Daddy laughed at one of Guy’s jokes, or Guy leant respectfully forward to listen to Daddy’s advice. I felt approved of, grown-up, included. But when we were alone … At first it was good. We bought a flat in Highbury. Guy had the roof converted to a garden with a sun-lounge and Astro-turf where we could sunbathe naked, visible only to helicopters and low-flying planes. But I grew bored with Guy. I knew it when I found myself obsessively inviting people round to dinner or organising outings. The prospect of a weekend at home with only the two of us appalled me. ‘We’re never alone,’ he’d complain, and when I caught myself mentally adding, ‘Thank God’, I knew it was over.
I could never have taken Foxy home to sit at the table with Daddy. I have never loved a person like I love Foxy. It is so intense … I don’t think I would wish to love like this again.
If Foxy was gearing up to finish with me tonight then I have had a reprieve. Poor Daddy. One effect of his … he could not have foreseen. If she was going to finish with me then she still will. I must not be complacent. As if I ever could where she is concerned. She will have to wait now. How long … weeks? months? till after Christmas? till I am ‘over it’ whenever that might be?
Over it? I don’t think I have started it yet. He is not really dead to me yet. And until then, how can I grieve?
When I have a nightmare Foxy holds me and soothes me, her voice gentle in my hair. She holds me until the fear has begun to subside, until I feel too hot and then, although I still want to be held, I move away to my side of the bed. In the worst nightmares I kill people. I do it carelessly, without thinking much about it and then I realise. Often the person I kill is a child. Sometimes I carry the dead child with me for a time, even dressing it, bathing it, tucking it into bed, until I realise that it is dead, that I killed it, and that is when I wake with the fist-in-my-throat attempt to scream.
Although Foxy is so lovely in the night about my nightmares, she does not want to hear about them in the morning. She’ll listen if I insist on telling her, but when I start trying to work out the meanings she gets snappy. Dreams mean nothing, she says, it’s just waste electricity crackling about in your brain. So now Connie and I swap dreams over our morning coffee. I recounted to her one of the child-killing dreams. I said: ‘It is a warning, I must not have a child.’ But no. She said that the child represented an aspect of myself. ‘What aspect?’ I asked. She pinched her cigarette-holder between her lips and leafed through her dream book. ‘A part of your psyche you have discarded or should discard,’ she said, which gave me something to think about.
One night, after one of Daddy’s dreams, I got up. Hazel was at a pyjama party at Bridget’s house so I was sleeping in her bunk which she hated me to do. ‘You make it smell,’ she always said, if she realised, but I did not and I never ate biscuits in her bed so there were no crumbs for her to complain about. I preferred the top bunk anyway, but I liked to sleep in Hazel’s bed when she wasn’t there. I don’t know why. The scream was not so loud from the bottom bunk but it woke me all the same and for a second I could not think where I was, could not think what the dark thing looming above me – the top bunk – was. The scream yanked me from a deep sleep into a sweaty trembling wakefulness. Because I was alone I got out of the bed. I went and stood by the night-light. I picked one of Hazel’s stickers from a white spot. Quietly, I opened the door and peered out on to the landing. I could hear Daddy’s voice. He wasn’t screaming now, he was making a high, soft, keening noise. I could hardly believe it was his voice – but there was no one else whose voice it could have been. The noise fluctuated, as if he was rocking back and forth. I was shivering and had a feeling like acid eating up my stomach. I had to go to the toilet. I crept out on to the landing and across to the bathroom. In the mirror I looked very white and old. Mummy came in. ‘What are you doing?’ she said. She sounded very angry. ‘Back to bed.’ ‘I need a pee,’ I said. ‘Bed.’ She wet a flannel under the cold tap and wrung it out hard so that her knuckles stood out. ‘Bed, I said.’ She picked up a towel and pointed towards my bedroom. She had big brown semicircles under her eyes like bruised smiles.
I went back to my room and stood by the door. I could not believe that she could do that. Make me go back to bed when I needed the toilet. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right. It would be all her fault if I wet the bed. But I could not get back into bed. I felt swollen to twice my size with indignation, but filled too with a sickly excitement. I looked out of the door again, but at that moment Daddy lurched out on to the landing. He was wearing only pyjama trousers tied with a white cord, but the fly was gaping open and I saw, for the first and only time, his penis, like a big squashy purple acorn. I shrank back into the room and leaned against the door. His face had been purple too, and wet, his brown eyes without spectacles wild and wide like a madman’s. He had not seen me. I could hear him in the bathroom being sick, then Mummy’s voice again and water running.
I crept back into Hazel’s bed. I could not get the sight or the sound of him out of my head. I lay with my thumb in my mouth waiting for everything to settle again so that I could go and pee. I noticed pencil marks on the wall beside Hazel’s pillow. I squinted closer: it was a list of dates written in tiny writing, faintly in pencil, stretching back over the past two years. I didn’t understand what they were for, completely random dates, except two were the same, two December 24ths, but all the others were random, about seven or eight a year.
I heard Mummy go downstairs. I knew she would be fetching the whisky for Daddy. Maybe to help him get back to sleep. Nothing could help me. I got out of bed and put on the big light – at least I could do that with Hazel away. But I missed her being there, her breathing, her cross presence in the bunk below me to keep me still.
‘You’re not allowed to write on the walls,’ I said to her during an argument.
‘I haven’t.’
‘Have.’
‘Haven’t.’
‘What about by your bed?’
‘You’ve been in it again, haven’t you, when I was at Bridget’s. I knew you had. It stinks.’
‘Doesn’t.’
‘I hate you. I wish I had my ow
n room. When I’m twelve I’m making Mummy let me have my own room where you won’t be allowed in, ever.’
‘I’m telling about you writing on the wall.’
‘Don’t care.’
‘Am.’
‘Tell tale tit, your mother can’t knit, your father can’t walk without a walking stick.’ She stuck her fingers in her ears.
‘They’re your mother and father too.’ She was humming, a high-pitched sound, pretending she couldn’t hear. ‘If you tell me why you wrote those dates I won’t tell,’ I shouted in a voice she must have heard. But she stamped out of the bedroom and slammed the door.
Later, I heard her in the kitchen talking to Mummy. ‘When can I have my own room? We’ve got lots of rooms. Why can’t I now?’
‘When we get round to decorating.’
‘I hate Grizzle.’
‘No you don’t.’
‘I do.’ She went out to the tree-house then. I watched her flounce down the lawn and up the ladder, then the ladder jerking violently up through the trap-door. I thought of telling Mummy about the writing on the wall, but I didn’t. I lay down on Hazel’s bed instead and ran my finger over the pencilled dates.
9
The night is deep. Three o’clock is the deepest time. Night-time is like a lake that must be swum, a vast, deep, black lake. For the first few hours there’s still the light behind you from the shore you’ve left, drifting music or voices perhaps, still the comfort of other presences. And later towards dawn, there’s the sense of a community ahead, lights flicking on, radios, early buses trundling along the shore. But in between there is the cold swallowing dark in which you can be lost, in which either shore is too hopelessly far behind, too far ahead. It is no wonder that people die most often, in the small mean hours, the lost hours of the night.
My toes are cold. I sit on the floor in front of the gas-fire hugging my legs, feeling the satin of my white pyjamas warming, reflecting orange back at the flames. On the video, the dots between the 3 and 03 flash on and off, on and off. There is no ticking. I would like a ticking clock, a clock with a pendulum that swings, one that you wind up with a key. A chiming clock. A chiming clock would be a friend in the night.
Easy Peasy Page 6