by Adam Thorpe
Keep your hooter out of it, Howie. Asking for trouble.
He hears kids’ squeals, like an echo. There’ll always be kids to keep things going. He heaves himself up, knees complaining, and heads for the sound, the bare trees dissolving to swings, a slide, a climbing frame in a little paddock, mums and dads and their safe, fenced-in toddlers. Big bright scarves. Faces all colours. And then Jimmy Savile turns up, waving, and they usher him in among them, laughing and bedazzled. You could hardly warrant it. Always found him creepy, but Diane considered him a bloody saint. ‘Don’t be an old grump; you know he does so much good in the world.’
No, I didn’t know. A perv in a shell suit. Should’ve had his nuts cracked in public. To the cheering millions who’d thought him the Barry McGuigan.
What about the swings?
The old pair, not this spanking-new lot. All bright-yellow and postbox red, with rubber safety mats – heavy-duty rubber compound, those are. A kid would bounce off. No bloodied knees and hands. So would a dead cat. You’ve got to learn your own parameters from bitter experience though. Life isn’t all padded walls and floors, mate. It’s a jungle, with thorns and claws. Wolf country.
Maybe the old lot of swings are still there. Or maybe not. Maybe they took them away, afterwards. Out of respect. They’d been there donkey’s years before he came along, probably. He’ll take a peep. Just a peep.
He goes off to the left, between the laurel hedges, his ticker speeding up from anticipation. A little out of the way the old swings are, which is why he always liked the spot. A spread of turf, the trees just behind, deep in bracken in the summer months. He’s puffed. That’s the nerves, heart reminding him of its miraculous fidelity to the job in hand. Day in, day out. Banging on. Pistons.
He clears the laurel and sees them: just the metal frame now in brown shags of winter-dead grass. Six rusty legs and a horizontal bar. Walking to nowhere. The chains and wooden seats have gone; just the frame has survived, with its four hefty eyebolts rusted in. You can understand it, the dismantling. A little dip where the shoes scuffed, now grassed over. A healed scar, that.
He positions himself right where he’d stand in front of Lily on the swing. He’d always make ugly monster faces as she came squealing towards him, and then he’d give her a little shove to set her swinging back again, tick tock, tick tock, the chains creaking and squeaking against the eyebolts, time passing, the frame a touch loose, ground anchors needing adjustment probably. Andrew gurgling in the pushchair.
Lily loved that. So did he for some reason. He has the right to look again, remember the happy times.
He crouches stiffly and sticks his tongue out and growls. The gobble monster! Yaaaah! Raaaah! Oi, Lily! Look this way, pet! Raaaaaach!
A girl, twelve or thirteen, hard to tell at that age, right in his line of sight beyond the uprights, a bit dark against the mist. Gawping at him. Close enough to talk to. Christ alive. It could have been … He thought for a second, just a second, that it was … Nearly bust his old ticker, thinking that. That’s all it takes to be carried off. A bolt loose, the shock. So where did she pop up from? With an ugly little dog, on the path, appearing out of the shadows. She’s staring at him. Petrified. She was camouflaged by her muddy-red coat and big fur hood – blimey, more effective than a combat pattern, if you discount the orange leggings visible over the verge. His monster face dissolves and he straightens up with difficulty. He tries to smile reassuringly but she hurries off, the dog following.
Thin, white, toothy face. Pink laces on her trainers, like Lily once had as an infant, but they’re all the rage for all ages now.
Pretty with it, however. Big eyes. Must have thought he was barking mad. A girl like that can’t be too careful. Big eyes like a calf’s. Her slim body budding all over like the trees. And so it goes on, life. Natural. Slim body budding all over. Little buds.
A shock, though. Even though she was too old to be …
There’s a creaking, a squeaking and a creaking. Faint.
Eh?
He stays standing exactly where he stood long ago when pushing the swing seat, his own little angel on it squealing with delight. Now there’s no little angel and no bloody swing. He cocks an ear. Tinnitus from the factory floor, the forge, the engine-testing. That’s what it is. Don said once that he ought to get a hearing aid. ‘Not on your nelly, mate. I prefer catching only half of what you say.’ And then he had to, anyway. Now he reaches behind one ear and presses the button: up to the stronger level on two beeps. Space flooding in, like walking into a cathedral. Funny that.
Squeak, louder. Then a creak. Then a squeak. Tick tock. Trees can creak like that, and he glances over his shoulder at the clump of bare trees, feeling the age in his neck. Still a dark place. Bracken dead like skinny white fingers.
He turns back and something bumps his shins.
‘Ouch,’ he says.
He takes a step backwards, sways a little. Internal spirit level’s pretty well shot these days.
Then something hits his chest. He shouts out what you’d never shout in front of the kids, all but coming a cropper as he backs off, stumbling. He knows what it is, what hit his chest: a tiddly pair of shoes.
The creaking is longer in duration now, with a little skip in it at the apex of the arc. The arc, pausing in the eyebolts to descend again. What the swing is making. Change of the pendulum. Sweeping past.
Squeak. Pause. Squeak.
Except that there isn’t a swing; just the empty frame, not even shuddering a bit, as it used to do if Lily swung high enough up.
He wants to scarper, but he can’t. Paralysed. He takes hold of the frame’s nearest upright and stands there, to one side, out of range, mouth wide open, sucking in air as best he can. The ticker barking and barking.
Broad daylight, but his head is moving from side to side, following the squeak, the creak, the squeak with his eyes, as if the swing seat and the chains are still there solid as steel and not vanished.
He doesn’t dare walk in front to see if he gets hit again. He wants to, but he doesn’t dare. It’d be like walking in front of a plane. So what he does is, he leans close, hand on the rusty upright, still short of breath so he has to take pauses, ‘I’m sorry, little girl. I’m so sorry.’
What was her name, now? June? Julia? Gina? Then he remembers it in a flash.
The creaking stops.
He doesn’t know where to look, that’s the worst. He is waiting for it: the little cold hand in his. It is waving about, looking for his own sweaty hand to tug. But he’s now got both of his hands clamped under his armpits.
Taters, it has suddenly turned proper taters in a nasty way. Beginning to get dark too. Or is that his eyes? He looks up. The sky bright enough, the mist swirling a bit darker in between, but yellowish. No, they’ll be closing the park soon. Dusk. A rustle in the dead bracken under the trees. He looks there. Butterflies flickering about in the spots of sunlight, a cloud of midges, a thrush. Summer has come all of a sudden, bang into the latter part of January.
It is a very good thing indeed, saying sorry. He’s always believed that. One of the great virtues, the ability to apologise. His chest feels bruised.
‘Sorry, Judy,’ he shouts towards the dark clump of trees knee-deep now in green bracken. There is no response. Everything going on as before. Butterflies. Midges. Wobbly spots of sunlight …
You’ll be lucky.
They are now in the sitting room, the cricket highlights on Sky Sports: Pakistan versus England. All frying under the Dubai heat, the pitch a dust-grey rectangle from crease to crease. Nice for some. They all look up as if they’ve been worried.
‘Have a nice stroll, Howard? Out in the chill?’
They are finished with the game and are embarked on the Veras, clinking nicely under wodges of lemon. The Miserable Gits Society has only three rules, apart from having sweated away the best years of your life for British Steel Special Steels Division and not arsing about with your mobile during get-togethers even in emergencies: no cheating, no dirt
y talk during the game, no gin until six o’clock. It is just past five of the clock.
He slumps into an easy chair and says, ‘I saw her. I bloody did.’
‘Eh?’
‘I saw Judy Beeswick.’
Gary, who only joined three or four years ago, says, ‘Who’s she?’
‘Little girl what was done away with,’ says Don, picking up the remote and cutting the volume on the adverts. ‘In the park, at teatime, July 1971. We advised you not to go, Howard. Ice, lemon?’
Howard nods. Don knows you can’t drink the stuff without the clinking, the bobbing about, the burn of it on the upper lip. Why ask?
‘You look very pale,’ says Ian.
‘As if he’s seen a ghost,’ Trevor remarks.
Howard says as he didn’t really see her, visually speaking. He explains. The others nod sympathetically. Silent white puppies are knocking over pyramids of white toilet rolls, silently. The heating is on too high. He undoes his coat. Tickles of sweat from his armpits.
‘The missus likes that one,’ says Trevor, indicating the screen with his arthritic ring finger.
‘Andrex,’ says Eamon pointlessly.
‘I’d have used ermine,’ Ian says. ‘The royal touch. Puppies running over ermine.’
To rhyme with vermin. Not like the fine, benign, draw-the-line Ermine council estate. Now there’s a mystery.
‘Animal rights,’ Don points out. ‘Charlie isn’t going to wear ermine robes at the coronation.’
‘Told you, has he?’
‘Trevor, I have ears in high places.’
They all chortle except for Howard. There is a little, strained silence.
‘So what exactly were you doing that afternoon, Mr Howard sir?’ asks Gary.
Quite the joker is Gary, but that one falls flat as a pancake. He is too young at sixty. Howard cradles his double Vera. No one has commented on the breaking of their own rules (senile indulgence, probably), and he explains to the new boy what happened. The others stay respectfully schtum, even though they’ve heard it a dozen times over the years.
‘The thing is, I loved taking the kids up there, on the swings,’ says Howard, gazing into his drink. ‘Making me monster faces. Lily loved it. Loved being frit, as they say round here.’
‘Do they?’ Trevor chuckled.
‘But I couldn’t stand the creaking and the squeaking. It was the council’s job, but that’s just it. It’s too simple, isn’t it?’
‘Chronically incompetent, that lot,’ says Don, who has nevertheless greased a few of their palms in his time. ‘Where does one begin?’
‘As the Somalian taxi driver said,’ jokes Ian, although no one gets it. Always a deep one, Ian Glossop.
The cricket tutting again, the Abduls hitting to the bound-ary. Bloody horrible neon-yellow stumps. Look at them. In case the bowler is myopic. Eamon’s right: hi-vis everywhere like a disease. Eurobollocks.
‘Overspenders,’ Howard presses on, ‘unless it’s on something useful. They’d have replaced the swings with a brand-new set, using our money. Paper money to them. So I took it upon myself. Grease. Wheel-bearing grease, state-of-the-art, safe from high thermal exposure and wet. Took me half an hour. Hey presto, silent as a lamb.’
‘You can tell he was in the Jet Engine Division,’ jokes Trevor.
‘The next day,’ continues Howard, ‘Judy Beeswick vanishes.’ He gulps without meaning to. It makes him cough for a few seconds, like something’s caught. ‘Sorry.’
Ian stirs. ‘Take your time, Howie.’
‘Right. Found twenty-four hours later.’
‘Strangled,’ adds Don with a squirt of relish.
‘On the swings one minute, slipping off into the trees the next. Naughty, that was. Because even at five years old she knew it was wrong, slipping off like that into the bracken while her mum was deep in a book.’
‘She’d be deep in her bloody mobile these days,’ murmurs Don into his tipped-up glass, the ice sliding into his mouth, where he audibly crunches it. As if he never uses one.
Howard leans forward on the sofa with some difficulty and fixes Gary’s eye. ‘She – the mum – says to the papers how she never heard the swing stop. She never heard it stop. She would never have heard it bloody start. Because someone’d greased it.’
After a polite pause Gary says, because he is younger, ‘That’s confusing cause and effect, mate.’
The others chuckle. The gin’s viscosity is as high as ever, oiling his thoughts already, all those little molecules creeping in. Maximum cold cranking. His bladder tells him he needs a gypsy’s, urgent, but his mind is thick-skinned. Outside is now night. Or that’s the impression from in here. The floor-to-ceiling curtains need closing. He can see himself, reflected. Old and haggard. No surprises there. You think you’re Paul Newman in his twenties until you catch your reflection or someone takes an instant on their mobile. Then it’s a rude awakening. Diane withered down to her dentures, if they bother to put them in. Such a beauty once. Spilling his birdlime. That flowery swimsuit, all clinging polyester. Always up for it. His hand under them hard wet cups. Right there on the pebbles, under the seawall. And leave the rest (chuckle) to me. Play the Frankie Vaughan at her funeral, why not? Not a dry eye in the house.
‘Christ, another four for the Pakis,’ says Don, making him jump.
‘Too many Pakis, too many runs,’ says Ian.
Gary crosses his stretched legs at the ankles. ‘There aren’t too many of them over our way, over here, though. Are there? Mostly doctors or teachers or summat.’
‘We don’t want ’em,’ says Don. ‘Not on top of the Polacks and whatnot. Romanians. Any minute now.’
‘Roma,’ says Ian. ‘Watch your throats.’
They’re not the same thing, you berk, thinks Howard. The drop-dead gorgeous nurse at the home told him. But remonstration just makes enemies, as he learnt long ago. ‘She’s still on them swings,’ Howard continues almost to himself. ‘And they need more grease. Forty years of use. Silent and deadly.’
Trevor clears his throat and says, ‘They never did find the bloke, did they?’
Eamon, the quiet one until a chance to moan offers itself, pops up again from his turtleneck. ‘Too many nutters about. And the worst ones are even more ordinary than you or me,’ he adds, surprising them.
Ian has another go: ‘We lost fair and square this time, eh, Howie? But it’s only a game.’
‘I’ll drink to that,’ says Don, who has cleaned them out by sixty-five quid, so he is happy. But his glass is drained.
Howard says, quietly, staring into his own half-supped mother’s ruin, where the melting ice is making flow patterns like a wind tunnel’s, ‘Win some, lose some. Win some, lose some.’
Don licks his lips. ‘That’s the spirit,’ he says. ‘Drink up. You’re two behind us lot, if we’re talking lez aperiteefs. If we’re talking women, I have no idea.’
‘To Graeme Swann, still the best off-spinner in the world,’ says Ian, raising his glass at the screen. The others don’t budge.
Irreparable damage, Howard thinks. He needs to move.
‘I tell you what,’ he announces, staring at the screen. ‘I’d like a memorial bench when I’m burnt bread. Seriously. When I fall off me bike. In the park somewhere where you get that view eastwards towards the sea. IN MEMORY OF HOWARD BUCKSBAUM, WHO SAT HERE WITH HIS DIANE. You can add whatever you like after that. Something biographically relevant.’
SURVIVOR OF THE KINDERTRANSPORT, he was assuming. Obviously.
After a little confused silence, Don says, shaping the plaque in the air with his finger and thumb and enunciating each word with care, ‘A GOOD LOSER.’
4
COSMINA
12–23 May 2012
When she finds herself sitting under the hedge, it is an effort to recall what happened, how she arrived in such a position. The car struck the bicycle in some way – clipped it more like, and she was thrown bodily. She remembers nothing more. Her arm is painful and her th
umb hurts and her bottom is sore; she has blood on her face, bright red blood. She feels her face all over, then checks her teeth with her tongue. The lane’s verge is soft enough and the hedge is not thorny, it is something like laurel – evergreen anyway. On the other side of the hedge are the grounds of some exclusive club or hotel – she passed the sign and then the large gate of wrought iron. The big red SUV did not even stop: maybe the driver had not felt her, had not noticed when he roared past.
She examines her bicycle, which is lying like a wounded horse after a battle: half on the verge, half on the road. She is breathless and wonders if her chest has been damaged in some way, or whether a blood clot might have formed in her brain from her head hitting the ground and in a few minutes she will drop dead, having thought herself free, let off to live another day or another lifetime in this strange and wonderful country.
The bicycle seems fine but on wheeling it a little way she sees that it has been subtly twisted and the chain makes juddering noises. The front wheel is stroking the support bar (if that’s what you call it) and she feels upset. Her day has gone cabbage: she was planning to visit the monastery near Tealby, having the afternoon off before the night shift. Buy a jar of honey, send up a little prayer. The monastery is in the Wolds, which she has never seen and which seem to her special and mysterious. The weather has been sunny and cold for days, but now on her day off it has turned grey and cold, even though it is May. She wants to find out where the blood is coming from on her face because she has several tender spots but no actual breakage of the skin.
Then she feels her ear, leaning the bicycle against her thigh, and twitches with pain. The blood is trickling from her ear down her jaw and her neck, and when she feels her ear it is like touching half-melted sugar in a pan. In the shell of her ear there is a creature, a sand-covered lump of gristle. On the tip of her finger is a smear as black as plum jam. Does blood go black that quickly? She realises she has landed on her ear and cut it up.
She reaches for her phone. It isn’t in the pocket of her cycling jacket. She looks in all the pockets. Then she sees something glinting on the road. The phone has been crushed, the screen starred with fractures. It still lights up, but she can’t press the screen without slicing her thumb. She cries a little and swears through her tears and works out how many long hours she has worked to pay for this brand-new iPhone, but then thinks how lucky she is not to have lost her life. It is a bargain in Heaven: five hundred pounds against her life. No one else passed her on the lane, which she chose because it was too narrow for lorries and in the right direction for the monastery.