On the Far Side, There's a Boy

by Coston, Paula

After another pause, the object scoops up the string of words and deletes them with the tap of one dark finger. Black Sheep Shit isn’t active on Facebook, email or Twitter. The family’s given up looking for him: son and brother seems determined to stay missing. He’d probably never see the message, even if it went.

  * * *

  Martine

  1984

  ‘At least let it touch the sides,’ Martine’s mother said.

  It was a Sunday in late August: Martine’s birthday. All over England, mothers were serving up the traditional roast lamb with her same scolding to their children. Not many would be thirty-five tomorrow. Once a child, always a child: the truth in this brought Martine back to Harrow Weald once in a while but more often somehow kept her away, talking at least thrice-weekly down the phone. It was Jonas who, despite his move to Willesden, was the regular to what he still called home.

  The women sat at the polished repro table with its centrepiece of late pink rosebuds from the garden. The dog snuffled at Martine’s mother’s feet. There was a mound of birthday packages on the sideboard.

  Martine put most of her energy into eating because, at Harrow Weald, it was her mother who did the talking, with her unconscious trademark hum, leaving dotted-line type gaps for answers.

  ‘Dum-di-dum. Jonas seems to love his job, doesn’t he?’

  ‘Seems to.’

  ‘Did you know they’re branching into bathrooms?’

  ‘I told you that.’

  ‘Dum-di-dum. The Willesden flat seems a bit squalid – or is that just me?’

  ‘Nope, it’s everyone except Jonas.’

  ‘D’you think this girlfriend’s serious? She’s kept him away today.’

  ‘You know him better than me.’

  Her mother looked askance.

  ‘Is your workload as bad as ever? …How’s Ali? Is she better? …Will I ever get to meet Alec? …Tum-tum. When am I going to see the famous roof garden?’

  Recently there’d been a delivery to Martine’s maisonette at Stockwell: obelisks of clipped box, the trained ball of a holly tree, and a male nude statue, which she’d draped with a wry boa of dried herbs.

  The two went on with their familiar duet while under the table the older woman’s embroidered slipper kept the beat, tapping the dog. Martine felt her body language being scanned for clues as to her degree of happiness. Martine thought she felt fine: happy and fine.

  After opening her presents they entered with gusto into taking down a pair of curtains for dry cleaning, belatedly baking a birthday coffee-and-walnut cake, moving the garden bench under a window, shampooing the dog-stained carpet in the hall.

  At the same time, Martine sponged energetically at the images of an era long ago, when all of a sudden things were moved from room to room in that same house, and – for reasons other than a dog – doors were abruptly closed.

  Going upstairs, gathering up a stray woodlouse, her mother stopped.

  ‘Dum-di-dum. Do you remember how, after Dad left, you began collecting insects?’

  The bugs had to be caught in some act of success, her mother reminded her: an ant with a crumb, a spider finishing its web, a beetle mating, a bee loaded with pollen.

  ‘You kept them in all sorts. Matchboxes and envelopes and film canisters. I told you that they’d die.’ Her mother laughed. ‘You learnt, then kept going anyway.’

  Martine let her finish, though she’d heard it all before. How she’d coopted friends at school. In the playground, her employees would slide a page under the insect subject then crush it on her instruction, very gently, with a shoe. Martine drew her tiny victims, or got neighbours to take photographs. She decided early on that each must have an identifier, train numbers. Friends’ parents would bring her the digital strings if they ever went on a train ride. She transcribed them onto the backs of the photos, the scientific way. Before he left, her father had been a line engineer, managing the rolling stock at Neasden. Her mother’s umpteenth retelling suddenly revealed to Martine this time from nowhere that the insects, with their train labels, were for Dad.

  On the beds in all three bedrooms, Martine and her mother laid out a shortlist of the older woman’s outfits for a charity lunch she was going to, which made for lively debate. They walked Hairy to the top of Mountside and picked blackberries. Mum told Martine any news she had, gave her a health bulletin and shared a tale or two about the neighbours. She frowned at their short clinch when Martine left in her usual bouncing hurry.

  At the beginning of September, Mohan’s next letter came.

  ‘Anupama is helping me reading your letters again. All. You are telling me about London and your family and your friends and you are working “as a kind of teacher for teachers”. I do not understand. Please tell about you.

  ‘Also I did not find the answer to my special question.

  ‘Anupama says it is annoying I am still saying “caring of” not sponsoring.

  ‘Anyway there is always no answer for “Why are you sponsoring me.”’

  Martine gave in to Mohan’s question, after some bulking chit-chat.

  She said, ‘I met a man once. The man has gone to Sri Lanka. That’s partly why.

  ‘P.S. The man said he was lazy and a coward.’

  The ‘lazy coward’ reference she by now applied to Gerry’s rejection of her, not the Sri Lankan war. And once she’d written her explanation, it was a fly flicked out of a window: her mind was clean, and Gerry was gone from view.

  As Pimlico was on her tube line, most Tuesdays Martine called at her friends Ali and Conrad’s on her way home. On the 25th of that September, the moon was in its new phase, out of sight and out of her mind. She’d worked late. She arrived breathless, somehow sensing before she could hear it that she was missing out on fun. The house door was ajar.

  The narrow hall seemed at first glance full of mannequins tilted as if in storage, then they morphed, undulating and talking, into a mob of the usual Soho Sisters – dressed for their queen parts, which was unlike them, away from the drag-club scene. The Soho Sisters. There was Nev, stage name Old Sal, with her coltish legs in fringes of black leather, and Graham, in role as the cowgirl Araminta, in latex hat and studded sleeves and a wreath of chains. Fleur was exclaiming wildly with another tart whose name Martine couldn’t think of, the latest prozzy Ali had taken under her wing. And there was Grand Dame Tattlemouse, Bernard’s alter ego, head to sandal in gold lamé, false curves cinched in by a black corset. They’d been stooping towards some structure not normally in the hall.

  Martine exclaimed, elbowing her way in. ‘What the flamin’ fandango?’

  ‘Hi, gorgeous!’

  ‘Mar, see what’s occurring!’

  Saila Billet-Doux gave a thin pout. ‘We’re havin’ a guilt party, can’t you tell?’

  That explained the gold lamé and fetish gear – except for Saila, whose usual style prevailed, her midriff a fuzzy hollow under a sailor crop top, thighs like twigs in crisp white shorts and bright blue stockings.

  The structure was a booth, improvised from cake cooling racks and broom handles and plywood. Beside it, a curtain masked a chair. Two raw sausages were crossed and tied above the booth, which Martine could now see was meant as a spoof confessional. Below one grille, someone had hung a postbox.

  Fleur gave a demonstration in her broad Welsh yap. ‘Take a gold scrap, look,’ she plucked a bunch of shiny papers from one of Ali’s erotic bowls, ‘and write something on it. A thing you might feel guilty about, look. ’s all anonymous. No need for details of who – tharris if you’d rather not. Then bin it in the box.’

  ‘Confessing makes me feel goo-ood,’ grinned Old Sal, plumping the tower of her leather-strapped wig.

  Saila Billet-Doux shrugged. ‘Was just sayin’, I got nothin’ to feel guilty about.’

  ‘Whereas I’m guilty of just about every darn thang.’ Araminta galloped a hip.

  Martine assembled a mental list, admitting where her guilt lurked: in blanking Jonas’s coded offers of closeness;
in taking college envelopes, male porn to bed too often, the odd vino rosso overdose, Mum’s support for granted. Alec, the latest boyfriend, met while swimming, had called her clingy at the weekend; bossy, too – and then he’d dumped her. She wondered briefly, Is he another source of guilt, or a regret?

  Claire, her chief confidante at work, would have said about him, ‘Are you going to try to tie with a ribbon every hopeful episode that doesn’t work? Sri Lankan charity for the dishy Sri Lankan reporter – what for Alec: because he’s in paper, plant a tree?’

  Grand Dame Tattlemouse slithered against Martine, big lashes skating against her cheek, breathing her in. ‘Girl, do you smell fine.’

  Fishnetted arms wound round her. She sensed the unseen bulk of Grand Dame’s genitals, strapped away. She smiled and stared her favourite queen in the face, because of them or despite them. She wanted to be close to him or to have him: the male in the female, the female in the male. Difference, opposites. They completed her, brought her to symmetry, in a way she couldn’t explain.

  She broke away from the Grand Dame.

  Araminta was still focused on the postbox. ‘If you’re such a pure gal ’n’ all,’ she winked, ‘just think what you should do for the poor miners and probably haven’t.’

  ‘Or all that famine in Ethiopia, look,’ Fleur nodded.

  ‘Yeah yeah, I give my whack,’ smiled Martine.

  She hurried into the main event. The walls of the high Victorian room clashed to Prince’s Purple Rain, and Phil hammering No Regrets out of the piano, and knots of people howling Edith Piaf over shouted talk. Everyone chucking down drinks. Glitz and pancake makeup. Boots with killer heels, executioners’ masks. Dog leads and handcuffs. There was no dancing, she saw sadly, although she was hopelessly clumsy at it, like someone suddenly blindfolded and spun round. Instead she mingled, trying to wave wildly at people, masochistically restricted – aptly – in her work suit.

  Ali arrived in something black and ragged, reproachfully holding out a glass. ‘They’ve told everybody now!’

  ‘Told what?’

  ‘Don’t let Phil or Matthias spin you their disease line. It was all to get this party.’ And she sped off.

  Martine’s friend Phil was busy at the piano; she looked for his boyfriend Matthias and found him sprawled on a sofa doing his famous pelvic thrusts. As some descendant of the slave Black Bob, he got bit work butlering for the wealthy pretentious in eighteenth-century dress, which he seemed to relish in an avenging, sarcastic kind of way. Now friends had pinned him down convulsing, drawing convict arrows onto his white shirt and chinos, and he didn’t seem to mind that either.

  Martine quizzed him. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Ask Phil. He’s prepared a statement.’ Matthias laughed towards the piano.

  Phil’s vest sported convict arrows too. A girl in a judge’s wig dragged a stepladder past Martine, mounted it and began to paint a cherub on the ceiling.

  ‘Oi!’ Conrad roared hoarsely, draped over the piano, looking and sounding less buttoned-up than usual.

  Phil tossed Martine towards him with his curls. ‘Aha!’ he greeted her. ‘Someone else to tell!’

  He went on bashing the keys, conducting the so-called singing.

  ‘Tell what?’

  His musician’s talent wasted, he earned pennies playing piano in muffled hotel lounges and depopulated bars, craning among the longely regulars for signs of appreciation.

  ‘It’s decided. We’ve got the new disease.’ He sounded reckless. ‘It’s all the rage for guys like Matthias and me.’

  ‘Disease,’ Martine echoed.

  She felt suddenly overheated. She and Phil had been friends since their earliest London days; she’d helped him make his peace with coming out. She stared at his fingers scurrying on the keys. All at once they looked like shadows, as if they couldn’t last. She blew cool outbreaths, fanning her face.

  Phil bellowed, ‘It’s the plague to have.’

  When his fingers stopped, she saw he was really angry. She tried to recall what Ali had said.

  Phil wilted at her expression. ‘RIV, Regular Income Virus, not the other thing. Matthias is going to train as a priest and I’ll be selling these bad boys’, he rapped on the piano hood, ‘in Bond Street.’ He looked suddenly deflated. ‘A salaried job for both of us. Who’d have thought? The piss-awful burden of finally growing up.’

  Martine gasped. ‘If that was a joke it’s way beyond tasteless.’

  Leaning over the piano, Conrad slurred, his eyeballs rolling at her, ‘He’s trying to make us feel bad.’ He meant, she and he had both got regular jobs. He gave the room the finger. ‘He even conned us into this party. This party’s a fucking con.’

  Martine’s hand fled from Phil’s shoulder. ‘And you could do that to your friends.’

  Heart pumping, she stomped away.

  She remembered, Today, on a station platform, I saw a sparrow disappear under a train. There was no grind of machine parts, no crunch of tiny bones. Maybe nothing changed in the train or in the bird. But maybe something did. She was angry not so much at Phil’s trick but at his news. Other people’s sensible choices dulled her existence. Phil and Matthias were supposed to elaborate on her life, to give gleam to her life’s machine. The same she feared was true of the Soho Sisters. They’d become her friends originally through an adventure, an unexpected dare, and now supplied her with panache and colour. She swallowed down shame.

  At some point in the evening a painted devil joined the cupid on the ceiling, and there were multi-coloured paint sprinkles on the floorboards, and the artist had disappeared. Standing with Martine by a shuttered window, Phil was defiant, laughing about one last flamboyant gesture, a holiday he and Matthias would take. She suddenly heard ‘Indian Ocean’ and ‘Sri Lanka’.

  ‘Don’t go there, matey,’ Saila Billet-Doux interrupted. ‘There’s troubles. Black July last year, the massacres of Tamils, the reprisals ’n’ all that.’

  Others constellated round them, chipping in about the island’s civil war, and for Martine, the room just stopped.

  She slipped away, wrote on a few gold papers, folded them and dropped them into the box. One for not considering, till then, the effects of priesthood on Matthias’s life with Phil. One for her dissatisfaction with them both. One for her descent into blindness about Sri Lanka, for not following its news: for maybe, deep down, not wanting to know. Some too for some of her other, lesser guilts. There should have been a note for Mohan, since he hadn’t, as her mother might have said, touched her sides. But Martine found she couldn’t write one, even that night. She posted three blank scraps.

  At once she took the Northern line home. She resolved, Write to Mohan’s family asking how they’ve come through the violence. Interrogate InterRelate as well. That’ll be contrition, of a kind.

  Martine preferred the tube to buses, planes and cars, and not just because of her father’s ex-job with trains. She liked the smut invasion of her pores and the gusts from all directions, their conspiracy of chaos with her hair. Clattering rails, a whoosh and the dying wail of her ride as it whipped old tunnel air into the station. The heat of steel and the warm fuggy smog of hot rubber suspension. You knew where the train was going, where it had to go. A track couldn’t be veered from; of all the forms of transport, a tube train shot along with the strongest sense of purpose.

  In her carriage a boy with a bloodless face wheedled his sobbing girlfriend, ‘You’ve got to come with me. I’ll make you come with me.’

  Influence, persuasion: it was what people did, more strongly than the moon’s half-hearted pull. More like the sun, people were enforcers, intent on imposing love, and all the things they wanted to say.

  Martine emerged from the tube at Stockwell. On an impulse she delayed heading home and, dodging the babble of traffic and dark and light, made it to the wedge-shaped island at the busy gyratory. The war memorial and clocktower guarded the war shelter in their lee. Traffic beams strafed the shelter’s curved face,
blanching out any moon or starlight. A youngster in a shabby suit was swigging from a can, his leg tucked up behind him, foot to the concrete wall. They nodded to each other. When Martine neared, he moved.

  Inside her head the exhaust fumes and the traffic roar died back. Her eyes travelled over columns of names marching down the stone of the memorial. Car lights swept across them, hundreds of World War I fallen. She searched for any foreign name. Nadaud, she found: a name that to her, sounded like No Man. The dead soldier and her boy seemed equally vague with distance, sketched in the sepia of history and geography. She pondered how to plumb their depths.

  She heard movements. Footfalls, a sideways pull at her shoulder-bag. She hung onto the bag, teeth gritted, legs riveted to ground. Sacrificing her briefcase to the pavement. Her muscles tightened, and she didn’t let go. His wrench was now a wrangle, a knot of their four arms. They tussled, their breathing laboured. The youngster was pinned to the bag and her hands locked down around it. Martine determined to win.

  Ferocity pumped the blood, flogged the sinews. She threw into her combat Phil’s uncalled-for trick, his aggravating news, Sri Lankan massacres, Ethiopian famines and all kinds of self-disappointment. She wrestled on, until all at once she saw herself as she tried not to see herself, refusing to be fazed by anything, striving hard at everything. Battling for perfection. Battling to get through.

  She stopped trying hard enough to win. Next thing, the boy had punched her to the ground.

  In the morning she talked to the police and a doctor examined her.

  ‘Who can I ring?’ said the nurse.

  Martine shrank from having friends at her hospital bedside in the vomit-and-pine-smelling line between Denise, who’d walked into a car or more likely her husband late last night, and Ruari, worsted in a pissed-up brawl with a pavement. She didn’t want her friends to see her as she felt, defeated. Anyway, none of them she had in her life for their usefulness. But in the end there was no option, and she gave the nurse a list – excluding the Soho Sisters, nightbirds to a man-woman, and so mostly asleep.

  Ali wasn’t at her desk and Conrad was with a client. Rita, Claire and Lesley were in their usual Wednesday meeting. Leanne was ill herself. Mark 1 was on holiday, and Mark 2 had had to ring off: some crisis with a power cut. Discounting Mum, who she didn’t want to worry, Martine had only Jonas left.