by Sadie Jones
‘All right.’
‘You can sleep on the settee in the office if you like.’
Jeanie went at two and Lewis walked her up the stairs and they stood in the dark doorway for a bit. It was the same doorway he had watched from the other side of the road at the beginning of the night, locked out from everything, unknowing.
‘Nice, aren’t you?’ she said.
It was very cold and she got inside his coat with him. She was looking up at him, close like before.
He kissed her. He kissed her and they kissed for a long time, while her taxi waited. Jeanie pressed herself hard against him and Lewis felt lost in her and in the wanting her and he could have pulled her apart and had to make himself be gentle. He held her and there was the wanting her, but also gratitude and feeling lucky, and he almost didn’t dare touch her at all, she seemed so precious.
‘This is like being a kid,’ she said and she put her face into his neck by his collar and he could feel her smiling, and he couldn’t remember anything so sweet ever happening to him.
He couldn’t remember ever having been touched, not touched and held, like this, or in any way at all, and it made him hurt inside it felt so sweet to him.
When she left, nothing else seemed surprising or strange. He went back down inside and Jack showed him the office and where he could sleep and it wasn’t an adventure, like it would have been the day before, it was just the thing that happened after Jeanie left.
Chapter Four
The next day Lewis let himself out of the club into the street, which was full of bright white sunshine and very cold. He walked to Victoria. It was a Sunday and he nearly missed the only train and had to run along the deserted platform and jump on as it eased away from him. It felt as if he was the only person on the train. It felt like a different train going faster through the sunny morning.
The road from the station was quiet and bright. It was colder than in London and the frost hadn’t gone completely from the verges and was still in patches under the trees where the sun hadn’t melted it. It was all still, with the sharp sun and the sky high and blue like it hadn’t been for a long time. Lewis took deep breaths of cold air and felt everything in him alive to it and smiling.
Kit thought that the cold in churches was the cold of death. It wasn’t like cold outside or anywhere else; the air was flat and smelled of stone that was like graves. There were paraffin heaters on wheels at the front, facing the pews, that made no difference at all, but hissed. She tucked her hands under her arms. The more people came in, the better it was, and the smell of scent stopped the air being so deathlike. The organist started playing something shapeless, just for the people to come in to. The Nappers came, and talked to Dicky and Claire, and sat behind them.
‘Deadly,’ whispered Joanna.
‘Slay me now,’ said Kit.
The doors closed and the vicar walked down the aisle and turned to them. Joanna started to giggle behind her and Kit hid her face to stop from snorting.
‘No Gilbert and Alice,’ said Claire and Kit looked up.
It was true, first Sunday of the Easter holidays and no Lewis.
Lewis came off the road at the big bend, climbed the fence, and cut through the edge of the woods and across the garden to let himself into the back of the house.
It was late morning. He thought Alice and his father would still be at church. He didn’t know what he was going to say to them and he didn’t care – he wanted to eat something and he wanted to sleep, and needing those things was simple.
He came down the lawn and stopped. He could see through the window that his father and Alice and a uniformed policeman were in the drawing room.
He didn’t move for a minute, but they’d seen him coming across the garden and there was nothing to do but go in. He went up to the house and opened the French doors and stepped into the room. The room was hot after the cold outside, with sun glaring through the glass. His father stood up.
‘Lewis.’
‘Sir?’
The policeman – it was Wilson – was by the fireplace.
‘You’re all right then?’
Lewis nodded, but Wilson hadn’t said it to him, he’d said it to his father.
Alice got up and took Wilson into the hall. Gilbert and Lewis stood in the drawing room and looked at each other, and they heard her close the front door and the three of them were alone in the house again with all the houses near them, empty, and all the other people in the church.
‘You’re not at church,’ said Lewis as Alice came back into the room.
Gilbert’s voice was low.
‘You didn’t come home and we’ve been very worried. We didn’t know what might have happened to you.’
‘Nothing happened to me.’
‘Just – be quiet, Lewis, please.’
Lewis was quiet. He wanted to be unaffected, he wanted to just think about Jeanie and not feel he was really there, but he couldn’t.
‘You were gone all night.’
‘Yes, sir. I’m sorry.’
‘If you run away again we’ll have to think about sending you away to a special school. Do you know what that means?’
Gilbert came closer, addressing his blank face, angrier now and loud.
‘Do you hear? There are places to send boys, places where you are taught to behave and where you can be controlled. You wouldn’t come home for holidays like you do now. Your life would be very different, do you understand? The way you have behaved recently, the way you’ve been to me and to your stepmother, and now this running away … It’s unacceptable, do you understand?’
Lewis was staring at his father’s face so hard that the side of his vision was going dark.
‘If you are in my house you will follow my rules, and if you can’t do that you will be sent away, do you hear? We will send you away.’
Lewis nodded, it was an effort. He thought of saying, ‘Please don’t, please—’ He looked at Alice, but she looked down at her hands in her lap.
‘Now go upstairs and think about what I’ve said and when you come down – if you come down – for lunch, I want to see a change in you. Go!’
The small white bedroom was his childhood room, and the room where his mother had sat on his bed and where he had lain awake and thought his thoughts all his life. His school trunk was open on the floor with things half out of it and waiting to be washed. There were his books on the shelves, some of them children’s ones that he’d grown out of. He would be sent away. There was a place for people like him. He couldn’t seem to make the things in the room stay still like they should. He stood in the middle of the breaking, moving room.
Downstairs Gilbert and Alice sat opposite one another by the hot fire, with one side of them warmed by it and the other arm and cheek chilled in the cold air of the room.
‘Do you think he listened?’ said Gilbert. ‘Do you think it will make any difference?’
‘You frightened him, I think.’
‘I want to frighten him. I don’t think he even heard. I don’t think it made any difference at all.’
Alice looked into the fire and Gilbert turned his face to the cold garden.
Lewis went to the window. The glass was close to him; hard and thin. He had a sudden memory of Jeanie holding him, and the sweetness of the feeling, and had shame about it.
He put his hand onto the cold glass pane. He felt far away from himself. He imagined putting his fist through it and the jagged hole in the pane and the points of glass still attached to the wood. He imagined dragging his wrist and his arm against them so they would cut into him. He didn’t think he would feel it. He pictured putting his face through the glass and wondered if he would feel all the pieces cut him.
He closed his eyes to stop imagining it, but it was the same, picturing the glass going into him, needing to do it. His heart started going quickly, pushing the cold blood around. He turned from the window. He realised he’d been scraping his arm with his other hand and stopped doing it.
There wa
s a sudden stillness like the gap between ticks on a clock, but the next tick never coming.
He couldn’t hear talking downstairs, they must have been sitting silently. He thought of them sitting opposite one another, staring, not moving.
He went into the bathroom and shut the door and locked it. He stood at the mirror, and looked, and the need to damage himself took him over. All he could think of was hurting himself and how to do it. He picked up his father’s razor. It was an old-fashioned one, the kind you open. He opened the razor and looked at the blade. He knew he wouldn’t feel it if he were to stick it right into himself – but the sight of the blade stopped him for a second. It had a power about it, the strength of the forbidden, and it was fascinating. It was beautiful.
His hand rested on the basin, holding the razor, and he waited. He felt cool and curious, like he could do anything and it didn’t matter. He held out his left arm and pushed up the sleeve with the hand holding the razor. He pressed the blade against his skin and immediately, just at the feel of the sharp blade on the skin, his heart went quicker and blood came back into him. He was breathless with wanting to do it. He could taste the need to hurt himself in his mouth and, when he did, he cried with the relief of it. He made a long cut down his forearm and the red line filled with bright blood very quickly and started to run. He was frightened of the blood and trying not to cut too deep, hurting himself just enough – and it did hurt, and he held his arm over the basin and rested his forehead on the edge of the basin, and the sadness and hurting were comforting to him because he could feel them.
He waited, with his head bowed, till the arm wasn’t running blood any more and rinsed it off in cold water and went back to his room to try and find something to put on it.
He felt pathetic and small and stupid now. What a stupid crazy sick thing to do, he told himself; if they know about this they will put you in a special school, they’ll put you in a hospital …
He found a school shirt that had ink on the sleeve and tore it into pieces and bound himself with it. It was tricky to do it up and he had to use his teeth to help with the knot, but once he was bandaged it was better, the cotton felt tight and steady on his arm, and he put his sleeve down and did it up. He lay on his bed and let his thoughts rest.
He wasn’t used to being up late and he hadn’t eaten since breakfast the day before. His mind felt still. His arm began to sting and ache under the cotton of the torn-up shirt. He concentrated on that and waited for Alice to call for lunch, but she didn’t call; she knocked on the door and came in before he had a chance to sit up, but then he did sit up, against the headboard, and looked at her.
‘Are you all right?’ she asked.
Lewis thought that in no sense could he consider himself all right. He nodded. She looked very nervous, and wanting to please, and it made it difficult. She hovered in the doorway.
‘Lewis … Is it something I’ve done?’
He considered this, and thought what a silly question it was.
‘Have I hurt your feelings? You know I want what’s best for you.’
She was doing what she always did. He was supposed to feel sorry for her and tell her it wasn’t her fault. She wanted him guilty and herself absolved. He could ignore her most of the time, but when she got that face there was nothing he could do; even knowing she was making him feel it, he couldn’t help feeling sorry for her. He tried to think of the best way to shut her up: give her what she wanted without having to go into anything.
‘I’m hungry,’ he said.
She smiled at him. She was so relieved she gave him a big smile.
‘It’s lunchtime,’ she said.
Chapter Five
Taking his father’s razor like that, and cutting his arm with it, had scared him. He promised himself he wouldn’t do it again. It worried him that the cutting felt so good; it was extreme and much worse than anything he’d done before, but it was the way it worked, the release he’d felt, and the rush of it, that scared him most. How do you not do a thing that you know will help? How do you stop yourself doing a bad thing if it only hurts you?
He had decided never to cut himself again, but he had cut himself again. The second time he did it was about a month later, when the arm had healed, and then again just a few days after that. Then he stopped counting. He didn’t think about it at school; it waited for him at home – the razor, neatly folded in the white bathroom, drawing him. After he’d cut himself he had to clean up and be organised and make sure nobody knew, and there was ritual in that. The basin had to have no blood left in it, the razor had to be put back where it was. Each time he did it the release was more powerful and the shame afterwards was greater. It became a habit, and normal, and the rush of it and the ritual and the shame became normal, too.
He hadn’t been able to get up to London until the next holidays and the fear of his father almost stopped him, but Lewis had been holding the memory of Jeanie close to him all through the long spring term. He had been at school and a child again, but he knew he had held Jeanie and kissed her and not felt like a child then. He pinned all his desire and all his hope onto her, and even his father couldn’t keep him from that.
He slipped out of the house on the last Saturday of the holidays. He got to the club long before it opened and went to a pub to wait. He got a drink and sat in the corner with it. The pub smelled of beer and the windows were dirty. There were stains on the red seats and two old men near him talking about dogs.
He had got drunk in the pub, but not felt quieter like he normally did, just agitated and frightened about seeing Jeanie and angry with himself for getting that way. He had drunk some more and then gone back to the club and knocked again, but there was nobody there and he was angry, and when he hit the door he couldn’t feel it.
‘Hey, man. Hey, Lewis, isn’t it? Remember me?’
Lewis turned around. It was the barman, Jack. He was standing just near him and Lewis hadn’t seen him and it took him a while to look at him properly now.
‘… Jack.’
‘Right. Jack. Come with me, man.’
Jack took him to a café and bought him a pie and some tea, and smoked roll-ups and chatted to the waitress about the police and licensing and raids on places they’d both heard about. The pie had thick brown gravy that shone, and the tea was brown too, and very strong. Lewis put sugar in it and drank it while it was hot enough to burn. When he’d finished, Jack pushed his tobacco tin over the table and Lewis shook his head.
‘You came for Jeanie?’
Lewis nodded. Jack picked up his hat and examined the sweat band inside it minutely.
‘Where’s home, Lewis?’
Lewis had a feeling there was going to be a lecture. Jack had a look teachers sometimes got. Lewis was grateful to him, but he didn’t want to talk about anything.
‘Where’s home for you?’ he asked.
Jack nodded, accepting. ‘I have a flat I share with another fella just up the road,’ he said, and then, ‘Jamaica.’
Lewis had a vague picture of his school atlas and little islands in paper blue sea.
‘Lewis … you look to me like a boy in trouble.’
There was no arguing with that, but nothing to say about it, either.
‘What time will she come?’
Jack smiled at him. ‘Jeanie pleases herself. Come back with me, I have to take a delivery. You can help me.’
Jack stayed up on the pavement and handed boxes to Lewis down in the cellar, who took them and stacked them. He got hot and took his shirt off to work because he didn’t have another one for the evening. Jack peered down at him. It had started to rain and he was wet from taking the boxes off the lorry. He laughed.
‘Forty-proof sweat, man!’
Afterwards Jack showed him where he could wash and Lewis put his shirt back on and they sat in the office for a while ‘resting’, and later on Jack counted out the float in the bar while an old man swept the floor.
The club opened and filled up, slowly, and L
ewis sat at the bar and waited for Jeanie. He kept his eyes on the stairs and waited for her. Jack told him about the trumpet player who was going to play and how they’d booked him, and Lewis was interested and happy to hear about it, but he felt he’d been waiting for a long time. It was very busy that night and the people and the dark and the smoke seemed to press against him. Jeanie would never come and the whole pitiful day had been leading to this – then he saw her coming down the stairs. First he saw her shoes, and then her legs. She wasn’t in green this time, she was wearing black. He saw black shoes, fishnets, and the bottom of her fur coat, wrapped around her with nothing showing underneath it, and then her gloved hand on the rail. She had a big beaded bracelet over her gloves that was pearl coloured and shone. She paused and her eyes scanned the room and she saw him and wasn’t surprised. She walked past the people standing at the bar and came over. Lewis wanted to get up, but didn’t move.
‘Hey, Jack,’ she said, keeping her eyes on Lewis.
‘Miss Jeanie,’ said Jack, not turning.
‘Waifs and strays.’
‘I couldn’t leave him in the street.’
Jeanie smiled at Lewis.
‘Don’t you look sweet,’ she said, and kissed him on the cheek.
Lewis couldn’t think of anything to say that didn’t sound stupid, so he kept quiet.
‘Where’ve you been then?’
‘Nowhere,’ he said.
‘I know what you mean,’ she said. ‘Jack looking after you?’
Lewis didn’t know what to say. He needed her and he didn’t know her and he was helpless. She moved up close to him and he put his head down into her neck, forgetting the people around them, and held her wrist, very carefully between his thumb and forefinger, looking at it.
‘Hey,’ she said, but she said it gently.
‘I’ve been waiting.’
‘And you wait so well,’ she said and laughed. ‘Come with me.’
Whatever he’d imagined – and his imagination had been vague – it wasn’t this. She had taken him into the office at the back, where he’d slept before. There were no windows and a bright bulb hanging from the ceiling. He hadn’t imagined, in his blurry schoolboy plan, that she would be so businesslike, or that he would have had her on a sofa, or that when he did have her it would feel like it did.