Shape-Shifter

by Pauline Melville

  Finally, triumphantly, he reached the counter. Then he remembered the cinnamon-skinned woman in the red head-wrap:

  ‘Do you still want to come in front of me?’ he asked, politely. Vera Mullins did indeed want to be served first. She had been on duty at the hospital since six in the morning and her feet were aching.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, moving forward to address the woman behind the counter. ‘It’s for my friend,’ she explained. ‘Her glands are all swollen in her neck and under her arms.’

  ‘We can’t really treat that,’ said the assistant. ‘That is likely to be a sympton of something else and we would need to know …’

  ‘Lavender oil,’ interrupted Pistol-Man loudly from behind Vera’s shoulder. ‘Give she lavender oil.’

  Vera Mullins began to laugh. But she bought some lavender oil anyway. As she waited for it to be wrapped, the clean smell of peppermint floated into her nostrils from somewhere, reminding her of her grandmother in St Vincent whose clothes always smelt of peppermint and bay rum. People in the shop were now laughing and talking noisily. That too reminded her of home and the market in Kingstown. Taking herself completely by surprise she found herself turning round to address the shoppers:

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I driving back to Finsbury Park. Is who needs a lift in that direction – north London?’ Pistol-Man was busy at the counter ordering the bitter aloes that settled his stomach after too many cans of McEwans Export Strong Lager. He cocked his ear, unable to believe his luck:

  ‘I do,’ he said quickly.

  ‘What about those other people from Stoke Newington?’ Vera pointed towards Mr and Mrs Ebanks, who were standing, rooted to the same spot, having made no progress.

  ‘The lady says do you want a lift home?’ called Pistol-Man, in his cracked voice, gesticulating over the heads of waiting customers.

  ‘No tanks,’ replied Mrs Ebanks. ‘We fine. We jus’ wait and take our time till it get less busy.’

  ‘Anyone else?’ asked Vera, turning her head from side to side, expectantly. Brown, almond-shaped eyes looked enquiringly from a passive, oval face. Pistol-Man was staring at Vera with a mixture of pleasure and suspicious curiosity. He fingered the day’s growth of stubble on his chin and wished he had shaved that morning. Alarmed to find that Pistol-Man was the only volunteer, Vera, for an instant, regretted her offer. She could feel something fractious and nervy about the man. London was full of dangerous strangers, unlike St Vincent. No one else took up the offer. She managed a smile:

  ‘My car’s round the corner,’ she said.

  Outside, rain speckled the pavement like a bird’s egg. They walked past the drab shops, Pistol-Man talking fast and furious as a fire-cracker to disguise his self-consciousness. Somehow, the more he prattled, the more calm Vera Mullins became.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Lavender oil is good, you know. Very good.’ His accent was cockney, grafted on to some now indistinguishable Caribbean base. ‘It helped get the swelling down when my tooth was bad. I was in terrible pain that time. Two dentists I went to and they couldn’t see nothing wrong and then the third one found this tiny, tiny hole that was givin’ all the trouble. He said it was the minutest hole he had ever come across,’ boasted Pistol-Man, pleased to have suffered from a condition that defied medical expertise. It made him feel different. Unique. It was for that same reason that when the council allocated him a basement flat in a house converted into Flats 1, 2 and 3, he had taken down the notice that said Flat 1, and written FLAT A on a piece of card and stuck it on the front door. It made him feel different. It was a matter of distinction.

  As they rounded the corner, Vera realised that the little black boy with the deaf-aids was scurrying along behind them. Pistol-Man turned to see where she was looking:

  ‘Oh yeah,’ said Pistol-Man. ‘That’s my son. He’s deaf and dumb from he was born. I raise him.’

  It was Vera’s turn to feel curious. As she unlocked the door of the old, blue Ford with rusted streaks along its side, she caught the boy looking at her. His eyes were eager, full of merriment and intelligence, as if he were about to say something of great importance. If you could speak, she found herself thinking, you would say something beautiful. Suddenly, she felt safer about giving a lift to this talkative stranger who crackled with tension. Safer now that she knew the child would be with them:

  ‘What’s his name?’ she asked.

  ‘Avalon,’ replied Pistol-Man. ‘I named him that. I found it in a book of myths. I think it’s Greek,’ he added.

  Avalon. Avalon. Where wounded heroes go to rest. Where King Arthur went to heal his wounds. The boy scrambled into the back of the car.

  ‘Sorry. This car is a tip,’ Vera apologised. Pistol-Man raised his head to the heavens and cackled incredulously. The woman saved him the fares, saved him a long tedious wait in bus queues. As if he would care about a little mess. He would have been grateful for a ride in a donkey cart. They set off through the wet street, full of litter from the market. Pistol-Man crowed with delight inside himself for having secured a ride, as if he had outwitted the Fates for once. But he talked non-stop, through a sort of shyness. He couldn’t make the woman out. Because she said so little, he talked all the more. Because he did not often have the chance to talk, everything about his life and his son came out in a torrent:

  ‘He’s got five per cent hearing. He’s all right. He can lip-read. He can do sign language. And he can lie as good as any normal boy,’ added the father proudly. ‘He’s so convincing, you wouldn’t believe it.’ Vera glanced over her shoulder at the child who could weave falsehoods with his hands. Avalon was sitting with his head twisted round trying to look at an old magazine on the floor of the car.

  ‘Sometimes he’s sad,’ continued Pistol-Man, ‘because no friends come to see us. I tell him friends will come some day. I quarrelled with my family, you see. I don’t see them no more. It’s just me and him now. It’s a good thing to have a close family.’ He said it with regret, as if a family was something that had somehow passed him by, out of reach. The truth was that Pistol-Man quarrelled with everybody. He was a quarrelsome man, pig-headed, easily annoyed, impatient, fretful.

  ‘He’s at a Special School now. He’s going to boarding school in September. Then I can get back to my music. I’m a musician you see. I want to form my own band. I’ve worked with other bands and it’s no good. The people they make excuses. They don’t turn up. There’s too much hassle. Too much pressure. An’ then I get vex, you see and I blow my top because the people them drive me mad. I can see it’s goin’ to happen but I can’t stop it. I wish I could be six people at once, then I could be all the members of the band.’

  ‘Dad-dee.’ The hard-to-form words came from the back of the car. Pistol-Man turned to the boy. In the driving-mirror, Vera could see the boy’s hands moving like butterflies. His father signed a reply.

  ‘You can talk sign language?’ asked Vera.

  ‘I’m not very good at it, though,’ said Pistol-Man modestly. ‘I just told him “Lady give lift home”.’

  As they edged through the rush-hour traffic, rain spotting the windscreen, Pistol-Man threw a sly, sidelong look at the woman sitting impassively at the wheel beside him:

  ‘You could be giving a lift to a mad person,’ he said. ‘A killer person.’

  ‘I trusted you because of the child.’ As she spoke, Vera remembered she had offered the lift before knowing the child was with him. Pistol-Man had his face pressed to the window. She turned and smiled at Avalon who grinned with pleasure in return.

  ‘He’s all right.’ Pistol-Man looked over his shoulder at the boy. ‘He knows that whatever I have, he has too. We share everything. We’re equal.’ His head jerked round as something in the street caught his attention. ‘D’you see that shop? They sell fluffy things in there that you can sit on and they roll out into sleeping bags. They’re fluffy.’ He said it with relish. ‘I can’t afford one. They’re about eighty pounds.’ The quietness of the woman seeped into him,
soothing him. Out of the blue, he said:

  ‘Some people calm people down. They could get attacked but it goes the other way.’ He wished he had not been so loud-mouthed in the herbalist’s. ‘You mek fuss and people look at you as if you were mad, but if you don’t mek fuss people walk all over you,’ he muttered, half to himself.

  ‘Which road do you want?’ asked Vera.

  ‘Amhurst Road. Round to the left here. Do you know Hackney?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you know that this bit is Amhurst Road too?’ He made it sound as though it was his special secret.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Most people don’t know that,’ he said with approval. ‘Most people think it ends further up. Here we are. Pull up by that tree.’ The man and the boy got out of the car:

  ‘Bye … Bye.’ Avalon made the sounds a diver makes speaking under water.

  ‘Just a minute. Just a minute. Would you like to come in for a drink?’ Pistol-Man’s forehead wrinkled into worried lines as he peered through the car window at her. She felt drawn to the man and the child. It can’t do any harm, she thought.

  To Pistol-Man’s exasperation, the key stuck in the lock of the basement door. Avalon pulled a face at Vera that said clearly ‘Oh no, not again!’ Finally the key turned and they stepped into a small, dark passage and then into the back room.

  ‘Sit down. Sit down.’ He waved his guest towards an old settee with a crumpled, stone-coloured duvet on it that he pulled over himself at nights as he lay watching television.

  ‘Wait there a minute,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to get him his tea.’ He felt awkward, unused to visitors. He disappeared into the kitchen, shutting the door behind him so that she would not see the washing-up piled in the sink. Vera looked round the room. The walls were painted yellow ochre. The furniture was cheap and ugly. On the floor was a grey carpet as thin as cardboard. On the mantel-piece rested a semi-circular mirror flanked on either side by two big, plastic Coca Cola bottles. Pistol-Man had cut the tops of these to use them as jars which held an assortment of rulers and pencils. Opposite her, under the low dresser, was a jumble of plimsolls and trainers belonging to the man and the boy. Piles of papers and folders were stashed untidily about the place. From the kitchen came the sound of something frizzling in the pan.

  Avalon stood in the centre of the room with an expression of intense concentration on his face. Then he raised one hand, the finger pointed, as if to say, ‘I know what to do’. He dived for his black school bag and showed Vera his pencil-case and some of his school books. He puzzled for a moment over what else he could do to entertain the guest. Then he ran to the sideboard and showed her the school photograph of himself smiling, framed in white card. He scratched his head, then remembered the snakes. Two yellow traffic lanterns that Pistol-Man had stolen from the street adorned the dresser. Looped around the handle of each was a wooden, jointed snake, one brightly painted in pink, the other in green. Avalon pointed to the pink one and pointed to himself. Then he pointed to the green one and said laboriously:

  ‘My … dad.’

  Vera found the boy delightful. She pointed to a painting on a piece of paper, sellotaped to the wall. It was a picture of a boot with ‘The Rogue Brogue’ written underneath it with an exclamation mark.

  ‘Did you do that?’ she asked. He shook his head.

  ‘My … dad,’ he said again.

  Pistol-Man elbowed his way into the room carrying a plate with two hamburgers on it and some spaghetti from a tin. He put the food on the formica-topped table and turned to Avalon. He spoke and used sign language at the same time:

  ‘Go and put your pyjamas on.’ He explained to Vera, ‘I have to tell him to do that because he gets his clothes dirty and it’s me has to wash them. Do you want a drink? I’ve got McEwans Lager because that’s what I drink.’

  ‘I don’t drink alcohol. Have you got any juice?’ She hoped this would not prove awkward for him but for a minute Pistol-Man looked flummoxed:

  ‘Ribena,’ he said, ‘I’ve got some Ribena.’ He returned from the kitchen with a tumbler so brimful of the red liquid that he nearly spilled it.

  ‘I hope that’s not too sweet. Is it too sweet?’ he enquired anxiously.

  ‘It’s fine,’ she said. Avalon bounced back into the room wearing a pair of white cotton pyjamas with navy-blue triangles on them. His presence relieved the sexual tension between the man and the woman. Pistol-Man straddled a chair by the table as Avalon sat down to eat his meal. He pulled the metal ring off his can of lager:

  ‘Yeah. This is where I always am, every evening, with my cans of beer. I have to stay in, you see, because of him. He can’t ever say to me “You have more fun than me because you’re grown-up”, because he sees that I stay in too. We both stay in. He knows that everything I have, I share with him. We’re both the same. Both equal. Sometimes, he pretends to be worse than he is. Pistol-Man put his hand to his ear and pulled a sad face, mimicking the boy. “I’m deaf,” he says, “I’m deaf.” And I say, “Yes, I know you’re bloody deaf.” And we both laugh.’ He took a gulp of lager. ‘It’s a sacrifice I make, you see. No. Not a sacrifice.’ He hunted for the right word. ‘No. It’s a dedication.’ He looked over at the boy. ‘I growed him and I raised him. It’s like putting money in the bank. An investment. You watch it grow. Only it’s love. I’m not really a materialist. I’m more a spiritual sort of man.’

  More or less the only trips Pistol-Man ever made were to the betting-shop round the corner which he visited as often as possible, optimism springing afresh in his breast on every occasion. He pulled his chair round to face the woman squarely.

  ‘Now, I’m going to interrogate you,’ he said. ‘What do you do?’

  ‘I’m a nurse,’ said Vera.

  ‘Where do you come from?’

  ‘St Vincent – a long time ago.’

  ‘I’m from Buxton in Guyana,’ he said. ‘I don’t remember that much either.’ He scrutinised his new friend. She sipped her Ribena. Usually, he would have said to a woman like that ‘You’re looking nice and slim’ or ‘That’s a nice outfit you’re wearing,’ but something about this woman prevented him from doing so. He took in her honey-coloured skin and slanting, serious, brown eyes. His own skin was dark.

  ‘There’s some Portuguese in my family somewhere,’ he said. Portuguese are white people, you know.’ He rolled up the sleeve of his sweater and inspected his forearm as if expecting to see white patches appear magically on the brown.

  ‘I like you,’ he said, looking directly at her. ‘Yes. I like you.’

  Vera thought that she should leave soon. Avalon was busy on the floor, drawing something with a ruler and pencil. Suddenly, Pistol-Man spotted the dirty plate on the table and leapt to his feet. Vera almost laughed at the tableau they made: the man pointing sternly at the plate and the boy with his eyes widening in dismay, his hand over his mouth. The boy’s deafness had made both of them expressive in face and gesture, like actors in a silent movie.

  ‘Fair’s fair,’ said Pistol-Man as Avalon went into the kitchen with the plate, giving Vera a broad grin as he went. ‘I cook for him, but he must wash up. That’s only fair, isn’t it? We both share the work.’

  ‘What happened to his mum?’ Vera couldn’t help asking. Pistol-Man gave an exasperated sort of sigh and shook his head:

  ‘She left,’ he said, sitting back down in his chair. ‘She was a virgin when I met her, so I don’t know why I went with her because I don’t like virgins,’ he said candidly. ‘We lived in a little room in Stoke Newington. I was working as a cutter – you know – cloth – cutting cloth. Avalon was seventeen months old. She left on a Friday. Well, you know how horrible Fridays are.’ He opened his arms wide as if to emphasise the horribleness of Fridays. ‘You’ve been working all week and you’re tired and you’re looking forward to the weekend. Anyway, I came home and found a note stuck on the paraffin heater saying she’d gone. The baby was all pissed up in his cot. And that was that.’ He frowned as tho
ugh it was still a puzzle to him. ‘Maybe I was a bit of a tyrant,’ he said regretfully. ‘But I didn’t beat her or anything,’ he added hastily. ‘It was just that when I wanted something done, I wanted it done properly. I wanted it done the right way.’ Vera could see how the man could be bossy, cantankerous even. He continued with an expression of bewildered anguish on his face:

  ‘It’s because I want people to make progress. I want things to be better. Even with him,’ he gestured towards Avalon who had gone into the bathroom, ‘I want him to be somebody.’ He spoke with a burst of energy, enthusiasm and hope. ‘I want him to be something. He can’t hear and he can’t speak much but I want him to be the best he can. To be his own person.’ He got up and pointed out of the window. ‘That’s why I’ve let the grass grow like that.’ Vera looked to where he was pointing. Outside, the grass had run wild, nearly waist-high, in the small garden. ‘The neighbours keep telling me I must cut it, but it’s more interesting for him like that. There’s lots of things he can discover in that grass: butterflies and worms, snails and caterpillars and insects with long legs, lots of things. He can hide in it and imagine things. It’s more of an adventure for him like that.’

  Avalon came in and took his father by both forearms, then he bared his teeth at him.

  ‘Yes. That’s all right,’ said Pistol-Man. He turned to Vera, a little shame-faced, to explain. ‘I make him do that because he didn’t used to brush his teeth properly. I should stop him doing that really,’ he said. ‘He’s too old for that now. Would you like to see his drawing? He’s talented. Maybe he’ll get trained one day.’

  He ushered Vera into the boy’s bedroom. It was small and pokey. Two big wardrobes dwarfed the single bed. Over the head of the bed was a picture of Superman. On the other wall was Avalon’s drawing of Elvis Presley. Vera smiled and nodded at Avalon in appreciation. Immediately, the boy jumped on the bed and tried to pull down a big folder from the top of the wardrobe, indicating that he wanted to give her all the drawings he had ever done.