Foreigners, Drunks and Babies

by Peter Robinson

  Generous applause as he reached the end of the following verse; then the students sang a last Ukrainian folk song.

  There would be a final item on the programme. By special request, Phil was called upon to tell one of his jokes. He must have tried some in the classroom, because the idea was greeted with great applause.

  ‘This is a Polish joke,’ he began. ‘There was this young English widow …’

  And he looked around the room with a leering smile.

  ‘… and this English widow, see, she was living near an aerodrome in Fortress Britain during the Blitz … and stationed there was a squadron of Polish airmen. Now this young widow had lost her husband at Dunkirk and she wanted to marry again, so she thought to herself, why don’t I invite some of those nice Polish pilots to dinner one night. After all, you never know …’

  This time Phil winked saucily at Tanya as he looked about among the girls to make sure his words were getting the innuendo across.

  ‘So she sent an invitation to the aerodrome and, on the night, the squadron’s colonel, a major, and a handsome young captain arrived for supper.

  Anyway, everything passed off well enough. All the courses were eaten and warmly praised, the drink flowed and then, the acorn coffee served, this widow decided to find out whether the young captain was married or not. But how would she do that? I know, I’ll ask him if he has any children. So, as they were all sitting back contentedly, sipping the acorn coffee, she asked: “Captain, you and your wife, do you have any children?”

  “Alas, no, madam,” replied the captain, “we do not have any children. My wife, you see, she is unbearable.”

  The young widow’s face dropped – her plan for finding an eligible bachelor in ruins. The major could see that something was wrong with what his junior officer had said.

  “Madam, please excuse my fellow officer. The captain’s English is not so good. He means to say ‘My wife is inconceivable’.”

  The young English widow looked no happier. So the colonel, seeing that the evening had suddenly taken a disastrous turn, decided he must rescue the situation.

  “My dear lady,” he said, “the English of my officers, it is far from what it ought to be. My young captain here, forgive him, madam, he means to tell you that his wife is impregnable.”’

  After so much vodka, the dancing, and the adrenalin of reading in public, Peter couldn’t help it: he was laughing convulsively. So were Rod and the other permanent teachers. Ed and Jozef had smiled. Linda was looking at the floor. Yanna was staring at Phil, not laughing at all. Maria Androvna wasn’t either. She hadn’t got the joke. Tanya was certainly smiling. Peter could see through the tears that came rolling down his cheeks. He had pulled out a hanky and quickly pretended to be blowing his nose.

  ‘So what is the word the Polish airman should have used?’ asked Phil with his professional teacher smile.

  But not one of the Russian students seemed to have any idea.

  Pain Control

  ‘… non so quel ch’io mi voglio,

  e tremo a mezza state, ardendo il verno.’

  Francesco Petrarca

  Stood on its slope with my back to the bombed-out shell of St Luke’s Church, kept up at some expense – as Patrick said – for a Blitz memorial, I was gazing down Bold Street towards the Pier Head. It was my first visit to the city made famous by Gli Scarafaggi. Yes, that’s what they’re called in Italy. It was the translation of a spelling mistake: I knew they weren’t called The Beetles. When I’d asked where to buy things in Liverpool, Patrick’s mother gave me directions to Bold Street. And she told me that, during the city’s heyday, it had been one of its most posh places to shop. And it was true you could still pick out a few remnants of the place’s former glory. There was its painting materials business that served the nearby Art School, three bookshops, and a post office with classical façade. Among them now were the ethnic groceries, their rare scents reminding me of my Indian travels. There were sad-looking cafés, empty windows, boarded-up premises … It seemed a place for the poor and left behind.

  I was standing outside the Emporium, a health food store with a fancy emerald frontage that showed it had been other things before, though not being a native, what they were I couldn’t quite tell. On the point of closing down, selling off the last of its stock at ridiculous prices, the Emporium still had a cardboard box full of tea tree soap. I’d jumped at the chance and bought four bars. Change slipped safely into my jeans’ pocket now, I glanced at my watch. It was a little after midday, the day sweltering hot, a Friday in the middle of summer. There on Bold Street, the sunshine had me narrowing my eyes against its glare. I found my sunglasses and put my straw hat back on. It was not at all what I expected, this city, so sweltering hot up in the English North. Patrick’s father, as a matter of fact, liked to call it the Costa del Merseyside.

  But as I was standing there, half-lost in thought, a rough-looking man, his beard flecked with vomit, lunged forward and slurred a request for his bus fare home. He had grasped me firmly by the hand. I gave what I thought must be a visible shiver.

  ‘Remember that social worker, years back, who was killed?’

  Unsteady on his legs, the chap was giving off a telltale reek. I allowed his swollen pink hand with its cracked and dirty fingernails to keep possession of mine; but before I could even think of a suitable reply, the man said –

  ‘My wife.’

  ‘Mi dispiace…’ I blurted out, and when he looked blank, ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I’m not very drunk, though, am I?’ he added, with tears in his eyes and as if to repent.

  I found a few coins from my pocket and pressed them into his other dirty hand.

  ‘God bless you … God bless you,’ he said, without taking his eyes from my sun-tanned face.

  ‘She never should have left me,’ he sobbed, his hand still clinging on to mine.

  Alone again on Bold Street, under the estate agents’ signs with their partnership names and phone numbers, I glanced into my two large plastic shopping bags, mentally checking the list – arnica to rub on Patrick’s needle bruises; a pair of blue cotton pyjamas; a new toothbrush; enough fresh fruit to fill his bowl; a Raymond Chandler omnibus; the vitamin B tablets … That was enough. That would surely do for now. It was time to get back to his bedside. Surrounded by the racket from road works required for its pedestrianization scheme, I could see how the fashion boutiques had given way to Oxfam and Save the Children there on old Bold Street.

  It was best to take a taxi. I couldn’t really afford one, but the buses were just too confusing.

  ‘Walton … Walton General … Hospital,’ I told the driver after he wound down his window and leaned out towards me.

  Now with the shopping bags on the seat beside me, I was sitting back in that cab being taken down Prescott Road towards the Old Swan, watching the blackbirds and sparrows drop down to their worm-filled ground. How oddly things had turned out!

  We had met first in my hometown, where Patrick would come on business trips for an import–export firm. Looking back on those first meetings, it seemed clear enough something of the sort was bound to happen. Though he’d never made a secret of being married, Patrick had become infatuated. At the time, I admit, I enjoyed his company, but didn’t expect it to go anywhere – and yet I should have known from that hangdog look of his, and the way he paid such attention to every last thing I would say. No, I was by no means infatuated, just flattered by his attentions – attentions that were easy enough to relish and resist. But the third time he came and pressed himself upon me that bit more firmly, I’d allowed my growing temptation to have its way. And, of course, I should have known. After all, Patrick was a married man … and a hopeless liar. His wife Jennifer found out, as she was bound to, and my more or less literally one-time lover, the man with whom I was now in love, had tried his best to make a complete disappearance from my life.

  The black cab was trundling on along broad avenues of the city, the place full of those litt
le English houses made of brick with cared-for bits of garden at both front and back. What most surprised me about Liverpool was how green it looked. It was hardly like my idea of a seaport town in the grim industrial North. There were so many wide stretches of parkland with sycamores and beeches in full summer leaf. There were strips of grass down the sides and middles of the boulevards, ones often lined with plane trees themselves. Before coming here, I just assumed it must be a place like Genova; but the people, it was clear, were quite different from the Genoese – whose dry sense of humour could be mistaken for cynicism or spite. No, the place Liverpool most resembled was Napoli, with its accent that even I could scarcely penetrate, its traditions of song writing, and famous comic vein – traditions I imagined must have taken root here for much the same reasons.

  And as that black cab rattled on, I found myself remembering what looked at the time as if it would be our final sad parting.

  ‘Carissimo,’ I was saying, ‘mi pare che questo per te sia un vero calvario.’

  Patrick, standing there before me, looked acutely uncomfortable.

  ‘Carissimo,’ I repeated, and embraced him. He gave a weak smile, turned, and, without looking back, disappeared into passport control.

  I had driven to Bergamo, and was waiting to ambush him there in its tiny check-in lounge: wearing my favourite full skirt, a Chinese jacket, and the shoes with a single strap fastened by a tiny button. Ever the nervous traveller, Patrick was giving himself plenty of time to catch that Stansted flight. So his anxieties about missing the plane had provided me with the best part of an hour to talk.

  I’ve never been able to conceal my emotions. My face is their perfectly tuned instrument.

  ‘Why didn’t you come?’ I asked.

  ‘I explained in my letter,’ Patrick replied.

  The letter was the latest in a series of conflicting signals he’d been sending, and it was as if at the sight of me there in the airport his resolution had failed him again. He just didn’t know what he wanted. He would tell me I was irresistible. He said it was the freckles across the bridge of my nose, the laughter lines about my eyes, that slight curling up of my top lip when I smiled, a smile that revealed the pink gums above my slightly gapped front teeth – something I’d worried long about in the mirror. My long ear lobes, he said, were like a patient Buddha’s.

  Pulling himself together, pushing back his quandaries of burning, burning and regret, he told me again there at the airport, told me the only thing he could: if he had come to see me even that once more, as he promised, there would have been too much pain to bear.

  But the course of true love, as they say in English, never did run smooth – and I had found my own painful feelings at his attraction and rejection reawakened one spring morning when a postcard arrived from Patrick asking to come and see me for a day or two. He needed, the postcard said, to talk.

  And it was as if my prayers on those nights of biting my pillow had miraculously been answered. Patrick’s wife, a social worker as it happened, had convinced herself that after his briefest of flings with me, no matter now hard he tried, her husband would never be able to forget his foreign affair. She would never be able to forgive him for what – I had to think – had been an awfully small and short-lived lapse. So after those years of silence, here he was telling me his marriage was over and, despite the old equivocal behaviour towards me, would I be willing to give it a go?

  Though I naturally treated his declarations of love with a certain caution, I really didn’t need asking twice. But then, yet once more, it seemed my chance of happiness was to be snatched away – this time, by death. No sooner had we got together than Patrick started to complain of recurrent headaches. One morning he climbed out of bed, vomited, and collapsed on the floor, his hands clutching the back of his skull. At the local hospital, the doctors found something that shouldn’t have been there in his brain. Patrick was given strong medicines, the kind that I was against on principle, and sent back to his city to have the operation they said was absolutely essential if his life were to be saved.

  But I just had to be there when he went in for surgery. That had made it more difficult for everyone, for Patrick’s parents, his estranged wife no doubt trying to lure him back, and for those friends of his I’d never met before. No I couldn’t not be there, and didn’t want to lose him after all we’d been through. But after his ten days in hospital for the operation itself, and then the painfully slow stages of Patrick’s return to minimal functioning, the strain had begun to tell. It seemed I might still have to leave and go back home. Too many changes were happening all at once. His beautiful smile could never be the same. Patrick had started calling his wife Jenny again. Perhaps Jennifer would even get him back after all. It was just too much to bear. I kept breaking down in tears, then, as a result, feeling even more ashamed of myself.

  I thought of the adopted stray cat sunning itself on Patrick’s parents’ concrete patio, the warm light tinting their garden, emphatic on the damp wood fencing beyond an emerald green lawn speckled with daisies. The convalescent day’s empty ease was unravelling on the flowerbeds where a broken branch had settled. It lay cushioned on the clump of nettles I’d promised to cut down. I was going to make some soup of them. Patrick’s father was a retired psychotherapist … and as his mysteriously bad-tempered comments crashed over his mother and me like breaking waves, I could do nothing but stare, once more on the verge of tears, at a bowl of rose petals imperceptibly aging on the parlour window ledge.

  At the moment of his relapse, Patrick’s precarious day had contracted to a worsening headache’s dual hells of shivering fever, sweaty chills, and nothing else at all. In fact, the local doctor didn’t know what it was. It could be meningitis, he said. Better be on the safe side, he said. Because they happened to have a spare bed, Patrick was admitted to the Pain Control Unit, put on intravenous penicillin, the butterfly valves taped to his wrists. That would knock those symptoms on the head, they said. Not that it was meningitis, they eventually discovered, but an inner ear infection tracking back towards the site of his operation – the wounds hardly healed and leaving behind all kinds of collateral damage. At night a sticky liquid would ooze from his right ear to stain the pillowcase with horrid dried-blood-coloured spots.

  As my darling lay there with that burning head, that suspected meningitis, asleep under the morphine, I would sit silent by his bed. I had never had occasion to spend such time in a hospital before, and certainly not an English one where they didn’t even let family members come and look after their loved ones. Each morning, the men would relate their histories of the night. Arrived early, I would be watching a magpie peck at the mossy concrete on the rooftop of the Outpatients Department opposite. Beyond it, there lay an urban skyline of neat brick gables, a fly-over and tall church spire.

  ‘Pain is pain: it wears you down,’ said the Royal Airforce Band cornet player from his sedated sphere, ‘like water running over a stone.’

  ‘Oh shut the fuck up,’ murmured Alex, but loud enough to be heard.

  Alex was sitting in his bed, the pillows piled behind him, a sheet pulled over his legs, and that morning’s opened Mirror laid across them. He must have been about forty, and had been in pain for twenty years. He was from Belfast, where he’d caught a stray bullet meant to kill a soldier. Once, while he was being bed-washed by the nurses, I saw the scar tissue of its entry and exit wounds. The bullet had grazed his spinal cord, and, despite the so many operations he’d lost count, Alex remained paralyzed and in pain.

  ‘Papish bastards,’ I heard him mutter one day as he read his paper, and made a mental note to keep my silver crucifix and rosary well out of sight.

  Alex had tried everything to ease his suffering. Booze was the mainstay for years. Neat gin or vodka worked the best, he said. But then he found he was in effect an alcoholic too and had to go to the meetings to wean himself off the demon drink. He’d even experimented with banned substances, but the side effects were so much worse. What real
ly saved his life in the end, he said, was finding that, notwithstanding the state he was in, one of the young women from social services was offering to marry him. That’s how I found out he had a wife and kids back home in Ireland. Alex was keen to get his slow drug-release implant fixed so he could return to the life that, in spite of everything, fate had allowed him to make.

  It was only a day or two later – Patrick off the morphine – that Alex began a two-week acquaintance with my boyfriend by giving him a wink and a flattering glance in my direction.

  ‘Well,’ he said, now ‘you’re a lucky man!’

  ‘You could spend your holidays here!’ somebody chuckled beside me.

  I had paid the taxi driver and, laden with the plastic bags of shopping, pushed my way through the sprung doors into hospital reception. All around were the shaved heads and bandaged limbs of patients – some pushing their IV supports round on wheels with the drip needles still in their arms. I headed towards the corridor that led round to the lifts for the various wards. There was a continuous flow of traffic going by as I walked: unsteady feet, stretchers, wheelchairs, doctors with the white tails of their coats blowing up behind them, and the visitors, finding their way, looking faintly embarrassed to be in the best of health.

  During the two weeks that Patrick was up on the ward, I came to appreciate how the Liverpudlians who worked there managed the routines of pain and its control. Each morning one of the orderlies would write on a whiteboard ‘The Daily Joke’. Though I had to admit my English was not good enough to understand them, I did think it such a lovely idea. Patrick told me about how the night nurses would give him a cocktail of two pain-killers, not supposed to be used at the same time, but which when taken together helped you get a good night’s sleep. That Saturday evening, since to all intents and purposes there was nothing wrong with him, some of the nurses were planning to spirit Alex out of the ward for an evening in the pub down the road …