by Gavin McCrea
—Pur ti miro, it sang: full-bodied, exquisitely pitched and of a timbre whose quality sometimes seemed to shock even her.
Iris responded with:
—Pur ti godo, a beat too late, fine, but flat, coming only from the larynx.
Her mother ran a clenched fist down her front as a signal to her daughter to press downwards to find depth. Which Iris wanted to obey but she was distracted by her uncle. Eyes flicking sideways and over her shoulder, she could not forget that Simon was present.
At the end of the first verse her mother knocked a knuckle on the top of the piano and Iris stopped playing.
—Simon, sweetheart? her mother said. Can you give us a few minutes, would you mind?
Simon mumbled something to himself. Put the cigarette he was about to light behind his ear and went outside with his coffee. Kicked the door shut behind him.
—Now, Iris—
Alissa pulled on the child’s shoulder in order to turn her round on the stool.
—do me a favour and have a look. The whole room, take it in. The height. The length. The volume, do you see the vol-ume of this place? Your voice ought to fill it all. By not even trying, you’re being mean, nothing more. Keeping yourself for you alone and not sharing out. Denying us the gift that only you can give us. Your voice. Your expression. Nothing less than who and what you are.
Iris sat on her hands. Looked down at the space between her thighs. Jigged her knees from side to side.
—I mean, you’re only ten years old, for God’s sake, what could you possibly possess that’s so precious that you should keep it locked away?
Her mother put her hands on her hips:
—Hmm. Let’s do something else.
They tried ‘Abends will ich schlafen gehn’ from Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel, which came out better. Not great; better. Iris’s voice carried further this time, but in her rush to get from one note to the next she was over-modulating, which resulted in loss of breath and some unnecessary swallowing. Her mother exaggerated the movement of her lips and jaw and emphasised the consonants in an effort to tell Iris to slow down. Enunciate, she mouthed while Iris was singing, e-nun-ci-ate. For more than anything else what people loved was a sharp voice which left each word distinct. If one wanted to be respected in this world, one had to become articulate; one had to master speech. And the most effective way to do that was to learn how to sing.
—Was that all right, Mama?
Her mother pulled down both ends of her mouth.
—You look tired, she said, loath to praise her daughter for doing what she ought to be capable of. Her rule was never to reward half-efforts or flukes but only advanced work achieved through diligence and graft. As a child one heard so many lies.
—I’m fine, Mama.
—Did you sleep?
—Ahuhn.
—Were you reading?
—Ah-ah.
—You know you shouldn’t get tired. The doctors said.
—I have to read for my lessons. I’m not going to stop reading.
—Just not so late.
—It wasn’t that late.
Her mother put the sheet music back into the folder.
—Have you taken your tablets?
—At breakfast. You saw.
—Tone, Iris.
Iris inflated her cheeks in frustration:
—Mama!
—All right, madam, we’re finished.
Jumping up, Iris tucked the stool under the piano and stood before her mother for the final inspection; an advertisement for filial obedience. Her mother fixed her collar and picked a loose hair from her front.
—Don’t forget to wash that face of yours before you present yourself.
Iris nodded dutifully, though she did not quite understand this need to be clean, when her tutor Miss Fletcher seemed permanently to be three days after a wash.
At this point, when her mother normally tapped her on the chin and sent her away, she did something different. She knelt down in front of Iris and gripped her arms and said:
—One moment, my love. Before you go. Tell me. How has it been since your sister got back?
Iris shrugged: fine.
—Are you getting on all right, the two of you? Are you fighting?
Iris shook her head: a lie.
—You know your sister means well, Iris. You must try to understand where she’s coming from. It’s not all roses with her either, though she tries to give that impression.
Iris sucked in her lips and looked at the floor.
Her mother let go of her, suddenly, and went to the window.
The distant sound of traffic.
Rain on glass.
Room.
—And what do you make of the new girl?
Iris stopped scratching the itch under the elastic of her knickers.
—The secretary, I mean. Doris. Do you like her?
Iris thought about this for a while, looking for the trick.
—She’s nice, she said then.
—Nice?
Her mother came away from the window. From the props table she took a package wrapped in brown paper and brought it to Iris.
—Listen, Iris. This is for you. A gift. But first I need to tell you something.
—All right.
—It’s an adult thing, so it’s not easy for me to say. Can I ask you to be mature and to listen and try to understand?
Iris nodded. Her throat had gone dry, her hands cold.
—Have you noticed that Doris and your father have a close friendship? Hmm? Well, the fact is, you see, they’re sort of girlfriend and boyfriend. I don’t think this should be kept from you because over the coming weeks you’re going to see certain things and I don’t want you to be confused by them. You aren’t stupid, children aren’t. I don’t think pretending is fair on anyone.
—You’re not Papa’s girlfriend any more?
—I am. I’m still Papa’s wife, and I love him very much. And he loves me. That hasn’t changed. That has not changed. It’s just that sometimes life is complicated, more complicated than in story books and magazines, and people don’t like to talk about it, but it’s quite common, actually, that mothers and fathers have other friendships, with people from the outside. We’ve just decided to be more open about it than some others are, that’s all.
—Do you have an outside boyfriend?
Her mother actually smiled.
—No, darling. I have the theatre, my acting, and that’s enough for me. But your father is different. He has, what’ll I say, a bigger appetite. When my mind is on my work, I’m distracted, you see, I can’t give him everything he requires. Someone else is needed to, as it were, make up the shortfall. Can you comprehend that?
Iris nodded: she could.
Her mother kissed her on the cheek.
—Good girl. Now open your present.
Iris knelt down and put the package on the floor between her thighs. Began to tear off the paper.
—Hold on, her mother said, crouching down and halting Iris’s actions by laying a hand on her arm. There’s one more thing. You’re not to get too close to Doris. Her job here is just a temporary arrangement. She’s not going to be around for long. You can see yourself, she’s young. With us she’ll grow a bit and then she’ll leave. I can’t allow her to overstay. Her friendship with your father, it has a beginning and an end, do you understand?
Iris nodded.
—And when she has to go, her mother said, it might not be pleasant either. I want you to be prepared for that.
—All right.
—Good. That’s all I wanted to say. Finish opening your present.
Beneath the wrapping was a Chinese lantern of carved red wood and glass panels painted with mountain scenes. Long red tassels hung from the mouths of four dra
gon heads that pointed out of the top.
—Do you like it? You put a candle in here, you see—
Her mother opened the front panel.
—and it all lights up. The whole room. Do you see the pictures on the glass?
Her mother held up the lantern and turned it round.
—We’re going to hang a few these around the theatre, to give the place an Eastern feel. But this one is all yours. No one will be allowed to touch it without your permission. We’ll put it by the bed. It’ll be perfect for reading. Late, too, if you can’t sleep. All right?
She woke on wet sheets and surrounded by a barrier of cushions.
Keith, who was still there, said:
—How you feeling?
Then he wiped her forehead with a damp cloth, and, when she got up, helped her to heat water for a bath and to soak and scrub the sheets. He stayed with her all of that day and slept at Wherehouse that night, and the next night, and every night following. Though he did not say it expressly, it was clear he liked the set-up. The factory-cum-theatre barely seemed plausible to him as a place of habitation. The space was so large, so sparsely populated, its angles and volumes so improbable, it was like a stage within which a second stage had been built merely as an amusement. He felt like an actor in a film.
—We’re like something off the telly, he would say when they sat on deck chairs on the roof, drinking cider and looking out over King’s Cross.
Or:
—Is it the candid camera? when Iris would suggest a game of water pistols in the auditorium.
Notwithstanding the dirt and the draughts and the fact that at night the local children threw stones at the boarded-up windows and tried to break in and had to be chased away, in almost every aspect Wherehouse beat what he had before. There was no landlord breathing down his neck. No one stealing his things. No one waiting to jump onto his mattress as soon as he rose from it. On a couple of occasions he took the bus back to the Hill to look after some business, but Iris did not worry that he had gone for good. He would come back, she knew, and loyally he did, most recently accompanied by two Negro acquaintances of his, these ones real Jamaicans.
—This is Glen and Eggie, he said, my neighbours from up the road. They got into a spot of trouble, went behind on their rent and got chucked out. Can they crash here for a few nights?
She could not say no. The previous day someone from Álvaro’s international network, a Swede, had arrived on the doorstep, and she had allowed him to stay. Never let the record show that she let the blond stranger in and barred the London blacks.
—Are you drawing Security?
—Yah, that’s right, miss.
—Good. Because you’ll have to pay a pound a week into the house fund.
—A pound for two of we?
—All right, a pound for you both. The rooms in the lodging house are locked, so you’ll have to bed down in the common room. I’ll show you the way. Got sleeping bags? All right, we’ll find you a blanket or something. There’s a Swede sleeping in there at the moment. Per is his name. It’s up to you to get along with him. No messing, yeah? Smoke your reefers on the roof. And keep a watch out. In this country you go to jail for a joint. Don’t go into the upstairs rooms. My uncle lives up there and he doesn’t appreciate visitors. No touching the artwork. I mean hands fucking off, you understand me? And you can only stay until the collective gets back from Paris. Not a day longer. As soon as they’re home, you’re out.
—We get pounce on?
—Don’t rule it out. Have you got political opinions?
—Nah, miss, us don’t fill our heads with that fuckery.
—Fine by me. Just don’t tell them that. Clear off when they come and there’ll be no aggro.
The Jamaicans were in windcheaters and long t-shirts and broken jeans. They wore knitted globes to hold in their hair.
—Now Keith, do me a favour, can you? said Iris. Look at your friends.
Keith looked at Glen and Eggie.
—Now look at me.
He looked at her.
—Now look at yourself.
He looked down his front.
—Notice the difference?
He put his hands in his pockets and, from there, pulled up his sagging trousers:
—What?
—We’ve got to get you some new threads, spade! You’re in gainful employment now. You can’t go around looking like you’ve been dressed using coupons. You’ll chase off the punters. They’ll think you’re a snitch.
She did not want him to look fake, so she decided against Carnaby Street and took him instead to the market at Camden Lock.
—These clothes are cheap, he said.
—That’s the point. You wear one rig-out this week and a different one the next. Life is change, man. A flux. You going to ride it? Or resist?
It was what Eva called the peaceful production of the means of destruction; the perfection of waste. It was what Iris called being alive today.
She picked him out a bright yellow shirt and pair of flared jeans.
—Try these on.
—You ragging?
—All I’m asking is that you open your mind.
—To yellow?
—To beauty. To self-expression.
—Is this part of the deal? I try these on, I get my slice of lunch?
—Give and take, the only two forces in the universe.
He went to change in the corner of the stall.
—If you’re trying to make me believe London is swinging, he called out from behind the curtain, and that I can be a swinger too, it ain’t going to work. Don’t look so bloody swinging to me.
He pulled the curtain across and stepped out.
—Fuck yeah! said Iris. Do you dig it?
He looked into the mirror:
—Yach!
—The important thing is that you’re not plastic. That you feel yourself.
He wiped his hands down his front. Burrowed a finger into the crease in his crotch in order to adjust how his testicles were sitting.
—I don’t feel meself.
He looked like someone madly normal dressed up as someone mad.
—We’ll take them.
The batch of LSD was large — two hundred paper trips and a hundred sugar cubes — so they had to work the days as well as the nights to shift it. The late mornings were for sleeping. The afternoons were for the squats and the party flats. The evenings: Scotch and Mason’s Yard and Speakeasy and All Nighters. The nights: the dance clubs and the afters. Such a full schedule gave no leeway for nursing hangovers. Iris had to stay sober. Failing that, she had to limit herself to a quarter-tab or a few tokes of a joint. Which was not easy. Being lucid at the midweek house parties was tedious; being so at Middle Earth on Friday night was a horror show.
Having Keith there helped. He was hungry for the money promised at the end of the job and so did everything to ensure the operation stayed on track. When she felt tempted to dabble, she would turn to him like a child seeking permission from an overseer, and he would shake his head and say:
—Let’s get this job done first. Then you can switch on all you like.
On their travels around the city, she had a number of seizures in inconvenient places, like on the stairs of a squat, and in the aisle of a supermarket, and on the floor of Flamingos, and on the first Tube. On each occasion she woke up to Keith fussing over her. Kneeling beside her. His face in hers. One hand resting on her forehead to keep her head steady. The other hand stuck in her mouth to free her tongue from her clenched teeth. Observing him in her stupor, she wondered if he existed, he was so unlike anyone she had met before. He was not fearful of her. He did not feel sorry for her. He did not hesitate to reprimand her.
—I thought I told you to take your meds, he would say. Next time I’ll put them up your arse meself.
Sometimes during the onset of a fit, she received warnings. She started to notice bad smells like charred meat or burning rubber. Or she became dreamy and saw bright auras around objects. When this happened, she would alert Keith, I’m about to, and he would grab her and shake her by the shoulders and scream No! This was the startle-and-shake response, which in theory was supposed to halt the oncoming seizure, but which in practice rarely did, leaving Keith to push any furniture or bodies out of the way, and to help her onto her back, and to put a gag between her teeth, and to loosen her clothing, and to lay her head and her arms and her legs firmly on the ground and put pressure on them for the duration.
Once, when they were alone on the roof after a long day of work, Iris lied to Keith that she was about to have a fit because she wanted to see his actions with clear eyes. She let him shake her and shout at her. She watched him clear away the chairs and make a space for her on the ground. She gave him her body to be laid down. And there, prostrate beneath him, overcome by feelings of tenderness and gratitude towards him, as well as tinglings of passion running from her throat to her vagina, she reached her head up and kissed him on the lips.
He recoiled. Wiped his mouth with his sleeve.
—What was that? he said.
—Oh, she said, her feelings plummeting.
—You’re not having a fit?
—It must have gone away.
—You sure?
—I think so.
—Jesus. You keep me on me toes.
—Sorry.
—It’s okay.
—Come and lie beside me.
—On the ground? No. It’s dirty.
He went back to sit on the deck chair.
She sat up. Tucked her feet behind her.
—You think I’m ugly, don’t you?
—No. Get that out of your head.
—What is it then? Are you queer?
—What? No! Your mind is a sewer.
—Well, are you?
—I said, no! Can’t there be anything else between a normal man and a normal woman? An innocent friendship?
She pointed at her can of beer on the low wall by the roof’s edge.
He got up and brought it to her.