Once Upon a Time in England

by Helen Walsh

  Since the night Robbie had stayed out, four whole days ago, she’d been moping around in a fug of gloom. He’d stolen in the next morning, sheepish, the worse for wear. He’d held up his hands in instinctive protest and cranked out a clumsy apology. But even then his tone implied that it was she, not him, that was at fault. That she was being unreasonable. ‘It was too late to call. It was one in the morning for Christ’s sake. Irene took my keys, didn’t she? Said there was no way I was driving home in that state – that she’d never forgive herself if anything happened … And I was done in. First gig nerves and all that … you remember how it was.’ And then, as though to pre-empt any further comeback, he dropped his eyes, lowered his voice, seemingly hurt, and said, ‘Well then. Are you not going to ask how it went?’

  And she did want to know. She wanted to know every little detail; what the venue looked like, what songs he sang, did he bring the house down? But her soul was heavy with fear and sadness and she couldn’t dredge up the words. She wanted to believe him – it hurt too much not to – and yet none of this made sense. Something indefinable and ominous now lay between them and it seemed to emanate from him and not her. Week nights he stayed back later and later at the pub and when he did stumble in, sozzled and inattentive to his children, he floated around as if in a dream. Could it be possible that Robbie had found someone else? A woman who could love him properly?

  The drag of weary sorrow in her heart almost kept her from making the bus, and only a shout from Liza, mouth pressed to a tiny gap in the sliding window, snapped her back into action.

  Vincent sat in his cubbyhole, flicking through the Alty Grammar brochure. He’d found the den by accident. Waiting in the dining hall, which doubled as the gym, though they hardly ever used it, about to hand his sick note to the games teacher, he found himself precipitated into a store room as the door he’d been leaning on nudged open. Though it was completely dark at first, he could sense the room was large. He blinked to acclimatise himself to the light. He could make out its furthest extent, cluttered with boxes and gym apparatus and bits of stage and set from the school play, before he could see directly in front of him. Vincent checked outside, shut the door firmly behind him, and came inside for a proper look. The light switch didn’t work, but he could see just fine, the longer he stayed in there. In the weeks that followed, it became his second home. He made a little hollow behind the gym horse, hung a stretch of curtain up for added seclusion and lay odd costumes and beanbags and bits of sports kit out for him to flop down on. It was warm, insulated, safe and comfortable. As Christmas beckoned and the days got colder, he got a real thrill from stowing away there. If he was careful, taking nothing for granted and always, always checking thoroughly before coming and going, this bolt-hole could see him through till he left St Mary’s.

  Initially, his mother had been pushing for Tower College, St Ambrose or North Cestrian. But unless he could bag a free place, such seats of learning were way beyond his parents’ means. So they’d gone for the next best thing – or the best if the Avon Lady was to be relied upon. Altrincham Grammar, according to Jean Bishop, was far better than any of the fee-paying schools. Oh yes! Her entire face was trembling with self-righteousness as she boasted how her eldest, Charles, had scored within the top one per cent of A-level results in the country. Sheila looked into it, and for once Jean’s outlandish vaunting seemed to carry some credibility. Fact: for the last twenty years, Altrincham Grammar had been among the country’s top five schools for both O and A-level results. Fact: the school dispatched the highest number of students to Oxbridge outside of the network of top public schools. Fact: 99 per cent of all its students went on to university. A cursory flick through the brochure revealed Alty Grammar to be pretty much like the other posh schools in the area; lots of very uncool lads wearing thick-rimmed glasses, stooped over Bunsen burners. What mattered most of all to Vincent was that he would be able to start afresh.

  If he got into Altrincham Grammar, he could reinvent himself from scratch. And, reassuringly, the brochure was smattered with other brown faces, though these were glaringly the very uncoolest of the uncool. This, too, gave him a glimmer of hope. Maybe, at Alty Grammar, he’d be cool! There was no good reason why not. Why, with its plethora of brown students, you could almost call the school Balti Grammar! There would be an abundance of gaylords and Pakis who’d deflect attention from him and maybe, just maybe, he’d make friends. In a school like that there’d be kids who were into books, into image, into music. He was tingling at the thought of it – at the thought of his new life. But first he had to pass the entrance exam. He stowed the brochure under the threadbare Trojan horse, safe till he came back at first break.

  Sheila forgot her sadness as she stepped off the bus. She’d never seen anything like this – not here in England. Not on a Wednesday, on her doorstep, a bus ride away. As the bus had slowed to a stuttering chug up teeming Wilmslow Road, Liza sat back in silent satisfaction as Sheila’s eyes widened. It was a bazaar out there. Every single face was brown. Liza had to nudge her friend twice, then prod her hard to jerk her from her trance.

  Sheila was torn. She wanted to stop at every stall, touch every bolt of fabric, finger the silk, smell the fresh spices, relish the bantering ebb and flow of the barter. But this was Liza’s gig. Happily amazed to know that Sheila had never been, Liza was revelling in the theatre of bringing her to Rusholme – and bringing Rusholme to Sheila. Lunch was on her mind and, until they’d done the curry thing, there was no prospect of a real go-around the street market. Sheila committed every little nuance to memory, made a pledge to herself that she’d be back, as soon as possible, and followed her nimble leader up the road, past dozens and dozens of wondrous-looking cafés and curry houses until Liza stopped and led her by the hand into the Rhani. Taking in the draught and the waft of the spice stream, separating each delicate frond of the aroma and feeling dizzy in its sensual rush, Sheila couldn’t keep the big grin off her face.

  Liza lit a cigarette and gave a cursory sweep of the menu. ‘Shall we have red?’

  Sheila raked the menu once, twice, unsure of what her friend was referring to.

  Liza tuned into her indecisiveness – or unworldliness – and gave her a helping prod. ‘Do we think we’ll be eating lamb or chicken?’

  So she was referring to the meat then. ‘Mutton,’ Sheila replied, her eyes dancing childishly to the suggestion. ‘I haven’t had mutton since I was back home.’

  Liza tilted her head a fraction and rolled her eyes across the room to where a small huddle of men congregated expectantly. With the faintest smile she crooked a finger and summoned one over. ‘We’ll take a bottle of Shiraz. And a jug of iced water.’

  Sheila realised her faux pas and flushed red. And when the diminutive waiter filled her glass with the crimson poison, she daren’t concede that she didn’t drink, not really, and on the rare times she did it was under duress – typically a glass of lemonade shot through with a sliver of Advocaat or Cinzano. Instead she followed Liza’s lead, inhaled at the heavy waxy surface, sipped reflexively and made the requisite facial gestures. She pretended to like the taste. She summoned up all her reserves of strength, trying to banish the sense association she always had with alcohol – of the time, as a young girl, she’d got drunk on home-brewed toddy with her cousin Navamalar. She took another sip, barely supressing a retch. It seemed to get worse with each taste.

  ‘So. I mean. How did it happen?’

  ‘What?

  ‘Kuala Lumpur. That’s where you’re from, right? How the fuck do you come to end up in a place like Warrington?’

  Sheila had never heard Liza swear before. It made her giggle. ‘You really want to know?’

  Maybe it was the wine – all three paltry sips of it – but she felt more relaxed with Liza now and instead of reeling out her usual response, that she came here to do her training, met Robbie and stayed, she teased out the moment, delved deep inside herself and spoke from her heart, like she’d seldom done before. />
  ‘When I was eleven, my sister and I found a purse by the railway line on the way home from school. We kept it. There wasn’t a lot of money inside but, to us, it was a fortune. We knew the police would never hand it back and we were each just waiting for the other to say: come on, let’s keep it. We ended up splitting the money. Java, my sister, was older, but she was the nearest of my sisters to me in age and we were more like best friends than anything. She took her share and bought so many sweets. Oh blimey, Liza – there were enough sweets to last her a year, all the fancy imported American rubbish, too: chews and jelly snakes and all that … crap.’ Sheila put her hand over her mouth at the filth she’d just spouted. Liza didn’t seem to register.

  ‘Know how I spent mine? I went to see a movie. That wasn’t allowed, you see – too many girls got big ideas from going to see the English films. My mother would have killed me if she’d found out.’ She pulled back a moment, sipped on her wine. She liked the way it was starting to feel around her belly, in her limbs. She took another sip. And then another.

  ‘It was Christmas time – there are lots of Catholics in Malaysia, you know? Oh yes. Lots of Malay Catholics, lots of expatty British types, too. They used to put on all the old classics for them – didn’t matter how old the film was, there used to be queues around the block. I went to see It’s A Wonderful Life.’ She gulped at the recollection, swallowed it back down with her last mouthful of wine. She looked at the empty glass, almost rueful.

  ‘Go on …’ Liza replenished it.

  ‘Sounds so stupid now …’ She looked up for encouragement. Liza gave it with the very slightest incline of her head. ‘The film changed my life. All I could think about after that was how to get to Britain.’

  ‘But … it’s Hollywood, isn’t it?’ It was out before Liza could stop herself. She put a hand to her mouth. ‘I’m so sorry … I didn’t mean to …’

  Sheila shushed her with a smile and squeezed her hand across the table. ‘Liza, to me, it was England. They spoke English. England was the country you could get to. And anyway …’ The drink was beginning to ripple through her now. She hoped she wouldn’t lose her thread. Muff her lines. ‘Anyway, it wasn’t that that got me. It was that thing of looking in on your life from the outside. I’d never really thought about my future or anything important at all. But suddenly, well – I just didn’t want to be like all my cousins and aunties and all the women around me in the kampong. I didn’t know what I wanted, but I didn’t want to end up like them. Everything I did after that, the subjects I studied at school, the books I read, the sort of jobs I thought I could do – it was all about getting away.’

  ‘You ran away?’ Liza was wide-eyed.

  ‘Well, not quite. It wasn’t a midnight bunk or anything like that. My brother, Rasa, he was my angel. In a way now I realise he was doing it – what’s the word?’ Liza opened her mouth instinctively but then checked herself. ‘He wanted me to escape as much as I wanted it myself. He took extra shifts and he saved and saved, and he bought me my airline ticket. I couldn’t have done it without him. He helped me through the whole thing – money, finding nurse’s training in England, everything …’ Sheila dropped her eyes guiltily. ‘I think he thought – I think he hoped …’ She looked her right in the eye again. ‘That I might come back. I think he hoped that England wouldn’t be the promised land I’d been dreaming about.’

  ‘But you never went back, right?’

  ‘No.’ She hung her head. ‘That only happens in the film.’

  Liza was mesmerised by her story. The cigarette she had lit remained untouched, just one long flute of ash. Sheila sighed and looked out onto the bustling street.

  ‘Rasa saved me. He worked so hard to pay for me to come over here. One day I would like to pay him back the money. But I guess that’s just the guilt that England has taught me. Back home you do not need to pay anybody back.’

  They ordered mutton kari and mopped up the ghee with pesh-wari naan and, tipsy from the wine, swapped intimacies about their husbands. Some of Liza’s revelations Sheila found shocking; Vernon was close to bankruptcy. He refused to throw the towel in, claiming the workers relied upon the likes of himself for their livelihood. Her father was trying to hand over his chain of South Manchester pharmacies to him, joking that valium and methadone were future currencies of the UK. But most shocking of all was her throwaway confession that, since the troubles started, since he’d had to start laying the Cormax workforce off, Vernon had ceased to pay her any attention. Sadly, eyeing Sheila through the mist of her wine glass, Liza added, ‘But I suppose that happens, hey?’

  After a moment, Sheila realised it was a question. All she could offer back was a shy smile but, this time, Liza wasn’t letting it lie.

  ‘Yourself and Robbie. Do you …?’

  Now she thought about it, it didn’t seem such a taboo at all. She wanted to talk about this sort of thing. She wanted to know what was normal, and what things were like for other girls, too. She took a timid sip and, keeping her eyes on the wine glass, responded in kind. ‘Only sometimes. Hardly ever, these days …’

  Liza seemed more dejected than relieved. She turned her brilliant blue eyes on Sheila. ‘Look at you, though. You’re gorgeous! What man wouldn’t …?’

  ‘Like you say, Liza, I think it’s just what happens. They’re tired. They have preoccupations.’

  ‘I know.’

  She sighed, hard. ‘It’s just… I don’t know. Don’t you ask yourself what it’s all about, sometimes? How you end up together? Why you stay together?’

  ‘More than you could ever guess.’

  Sheila laughed, but her eyes were prickling now. She forced a giggle. ‘I’m sorry. I’m not usually … The wine must have gone to my head. This is all so …’ She sat back, took a deep breath and tried again. ‘I haven’t talked like this. Not in a long while. Not since leaving the nurses’ home.’

  Liza manoeuvred herself to the edge of her chair, narrowing the space between them. She cupped a hand around Sheila’s wrist and left it there. She made to speak, her plaintive, needy look suggesting she was about to share a secret of her own, but she seemed to change her mind and instead turned the spotlight back on Sheila. ‘Whatever it is you can tell me you know.’ She smiled, dug deep into the wells of Sheila’s eyes as she tried to divine her thoughts, then added, ‘In absolute confidence of course.’

  Sheila hung her head, stared into the oily receding surface of her wine.

  ‘I see a sadness in you. Most of the time you conceal it well, but it’s there and I can see it now.’

  Sheila looked up, her eyes shining on the brink of tears as she struggled to batten down the heave of sweet-sour emotion in her throat. As though sensing the imminence of some kind of outpouring, Liza edged a finger under Sheila’s cuff and began to stroke her. Little shockwaves of pleasure darted up Sheila’s shoulders and smouldered in the pits of her arms. The moment hung over them, huge, alive, suspended.

  It was Sheila who broke it. She was anxious, suddenly – denuded by the stream of confession that sat on her lips. For all she trusted Liza implicitly, this was still the boss’s wife, for God’s sake. She should not be confiding in her – in anyone – about matters so intimate, and whatever had happened just then was over. She leant back across the table, reclaimed her wrist and returned to the menu. ‘Room for rasmalai?’

  Liza was still eyeing her intently. ‘It’ll all be fine, darling,’ she said. ‘You’ll work things out.’

  Sheila couldn’t bring herself to meet her gaze and as she drained the last dregs of her glass, she found herself wondering if they really would.

  After walking Ellie home, changing out of his school uniform and cramming a small selection of treats into the pockets of his parka – namely a packet of Wotsits, a Viscount biscuit and a Twix – Vincent headed for his bridge under the mantle of dusk. From up here, in the falling light, his street seemed scarcely to exist, but closer, a little way up the dirt track that flanked the canal, the lights
of a caravan became apparent as the gloaming hardened around it. Vincent’s heart grew heavy as he sank deeper into his thoughts. He’d tuned in to his mother’s turmoil the morning his father hadn’t come home and how he wished he’d had the fortitude to speak to her, to lend her his support. More and more his father was giving vent to his disapproval about this or that, his latest bête noire being her friendship with Liza. Yet his mother remained keen to please him. She nourished and nurtured family equilibrium by way of a conspiracy of silences, of sacrifices, of putting up and shutting up – and it made Vincent seethe. Sometimes, his dad would come home from the pub a little earlier than usual, stumble into the living room where they’d be snuggled up watching Coronation Street or Dynasty and he’d screw up his nose in disgust and spit, ‘Jesus, She! You’re not watching this, are you?’

  The inference was that he, the worker, had been grafting at the coalface while they, the dilettantes, had sat around painting their toes and smoking opium. This was Sheila’s cue to shuffle off into the kitchen and tend to his tea. Without fail his mother would pull the same hurt face, instantly transforming it into an embarrassed, caught-out smile, and off she would scuttle. How he wanted to race over and slam his fists into his father’s face. Of course they were watching Coronation Street! They’d been looking forward to it since Monday night’s episode. It was something they did – together! Why didn’t he just stay down by the canal or the caravan site or wherever it is he went when he was pretending to work overtime? God, how he would have loved to say that – to stop his reddening father mid-sentence and say to him, ‘Was that you I saw down at the caravan site, Dad? No? Oh, nothing – just wondering. Don’t see that many orange Lada Rivas round here, do you?’