When I got through the nicotine the hospital air was so hot I nearly fainted. It wasn’t just the heat. It was the officialdom of the atmosphere. I hadn’t been anywhere official for years. Not since the loony-bin. I nearly turned and walked straight out. But I didn’t let myself. I was just a visitor, not a real part of it. Just passing through. When I’d been in hospital I’d so envied the visitors with their coats and proper outside shoes with mud on. With their proper outside lives. And now I was one too.
There was a row of artificial Christmas trees, all identical, the tinsel crackling with static. The foyer was like a station with a newsagent’s, a café and a florist but instead of platforms and trains there were lifts and people milling about waiting for lifts.
I bought a card for Mr Dickens. The picture on the front was of a cat in plus-fours playing golf and inside it said, ‘I heard you were below par.’ Hahaha. I don’t even know if Mr Dickens ever played golf in his life. I borrowed a pen from the woman in the shop and put Love Lamb and then stopped, wondering if I should put Doggo too. I did in the end even though it used to annoy me at school when a girl only had to snog a boy once and she’d be signing him on her Christmas cards as if they’d been happily married for fifty years.
It took ages for the lift to come and then a crowd of visitors, patients and nurses crammed in together like sardines, strange smells and wet paper full of flowers and other people’s hair too near your face. It was friendly in a way though, as if we were all in it together – like wartime was meant to be. The man pressing up against me was not a visitor but a patient. His skin was as silver as fish skin and he smelt like fish too. I turned my face away from his scuzzy smile.
The ward was high up and you could see across the city for miles. Mr Dickens was in the end bed. He was lying on top of the blankets wearing green pyjamas. I think he looked pleased when he saw me. I didn’t know whether to kiss him. I left it too late in the end and didn’t kiss him but I got hold of his hand and half shook and half squeezed it. He wrestled with his face a bit and said, ‘Lamb, I want to say …’ but he couldn’t get the next bit out. It was as if the words had turned to bubble-gum in his mouth. I didn’t know what to say. The man in the next bed had a shaved head with a tube stuck in. I felt my knees going. It was so hot in there and the hygiene clung in my nostrils like cellophane so I could hardly breathe.
There were some skinny flowers in a vase but they’d been put where he couldn’t see them without craning his neck and I knew the trouble he had with his neck. There was a plastic beaker with a lid and spout like a baby’s training cup. It was half full of tea. I sat down in a chair. I opened the card and showed it to Mr Dickens and half his face beamed with the old familiar crinkles. The other half was smooth, as if all the lines had been ironed out. The front of his pyjama-trousers gaped a bit and it was hard to keep my eyes away from the grizzled gap even though I really didn’t want to see.
‘Lamb …’ he said again. He was getting agitated. I didn’t know what to do. He looked much smaller on the bed and much cleaner. Someone had shaved him but left a triangle of silver bristles on one side of his nose. Once I’d started talking I couldn’t stop. I gabbled on about the garden and what Doggo was doing and told him about Norma dying and how we were spring cleaning the kitchen. It was like I was talking for England or something which is not like me at all. I told him that Doggo and I would be minding his house and his dog while Sarah was away.
A crazy idea started growing in my head then that maybe we could stay in the house for ever, Doggo and me, and live there properly. When Mr Dickens came out of hospital we could look after him and the garden and the house. Be his housekeeper and gardener. I would have to brush up a bit on housekeeping though. That would be so wonderful and safe. A proper life to live.
He closed his eyes while I was talking and I looked up and saw that big grey snowflakes had started to fall, not fall but whirl, sideways across the window so the miles of view were blotted out.
‘Look,’ I said, ‘it’s snowing.’ Mr Dickens opened his eyes and creaked his neck round to see.
I took the photo of Zita out of my bag. ‘Look who I’ve brought to see you,’ I said. It was the picture from the wall. ‘Shall I put her here?’ I was going to prop the picture up but he lifted his working hand and took it. Nearly snatched it. He didn’t even look he just clutched on to it like it would save him from falling. The whirl of snow outside made my stomach lurch. Mr Dickens started getting agitated and the two halves of his face were two different masks.
‘TV,’ he shouted.
‘What?’ I said. I didn’t know what he meant. TV?
He said something like Watch out. He started shouting that. Then TV. I looked across at the screen. It was switched on with no sound. A pair of hands was kneading dough.
‘It’s all right,’ I said. Flecks of spit were making froth in one corner of his mouth. One eye started running. The man in the next bed flicked his eyes to the ceiling at me and smiled conspiratorially as if Mr Dickens had gone soft in the head. I looked away.
A nurse came up. ‘Now, now, Kenneth,’ she said. ‘They do get agitated.’ She shook her head. ‘But he’s all right really, aren’t you, Ken?’
A hopeless look passed across his face, his eyes going dull before he closed them. The knuckles on the hand he was clutching the picture with were like yellow marbles ready to pop straight through his skin but the other hand was soft as a bird.
‘What have we here? Oh isn’t she lovely,’ the nurse said, glimpsing Zita between Mr Dickens’ fingers.
‘My granny,’ I said. I don’t know why I said that but anyway Mr Dickens didn’t seem to mind.
‘You’ve got her eyes,’ the nurse said.
See. Everyone says that.
‘He’s your grandad then?’ the nurse said. ‘Funny. I thought –’
I know what she thought, that he had no relatives other than Sarah. Well then, where was Sarah? Something was obviously much more important to her than Mr Dickens. She had gone swanning off after a job and now there was only me. And Mr Dickens didn’t contradict her. He probably liked the thought that we might be related too.
‘Well anyway, we’re all right now, aren’t we?’ the nurse said patting his arm. ‘And will you just look at that weather, you’re in the right place here, Kenneth.’
She went away, her shoe-soles squeaking as they peeled off the floor tiles. Mr Dickens just gripped on to the picture and kept his eyes shut as if he was on some scary swooping fairground ride. I sat watching the snow lifting and dizzying outside the window for as long as I could stand it. The dough had been rolled out and made into a gingerbread house. A hand was sticking Smarties to the roof. My belly suddenly caved in realising what he might have meant. The news. He’d seen Doggo on the news. Watch out. I think he was asleep. I whispered goodbye and left.
When I got outside the world was broken into dots and swirls, lights trapped in fuzz and the edges between the road and path blurred over. I should rush back and warn Doggo straightaway. I slithered on the path. But Mr Dickens might not have meant that. He might have meant anything. Why should they put Doggo on TV now? It was weeks since he’d escaped.
The damp cold crept inside my jacket and made me shiver. The snow clogged up my eyelashes and stuck like a soft wig over my hair. I stuck out my tongue to catch a snowflake and it tasted like a cheap tin spoon.
Twenty-six
I walked straight up the front path. My footprints were the only footprints. I opened the door and walked straight in, half expecting a shout of Oi! from somewhere. But there was no shout. I had a perfect right to walk straight in, a perfect right to be there.
I hurried past the barred-up door and into the back room which was blazing with light and heat. I wanted Doggo to see the snow on my hair and eyelashes but he didn’t look up and it was melting anyway. He was watching television with Gordon on his lap and Doughnut at his feet.
‘Any news or anything?’ I said. I didn’t mind him not answering becau
se I knew he was grieving. And if he’d seen himself on telly he’d be more wound up than this. It was just my stupid nerves. I went over and touched his shoulder. I was so glad to see him safely there, I just needed to touch him to check that he was real.
‘How is he?’ he said, still not looking up. But I understood from the way he was sitting, his arms round Gordon, that he was just holding himself together. If he moved his head the tears would spill out. I do know that feeling. And Mr Dickens too. He was holding himself together.
Don’t we all hold ourselves together in the only ways we can?
‘Not so good,’ I said. I wanted to tell him my plan, about living there and caring for Mr Dickens, but it didn’t feel like the right moment. There was a war film on but I couldn’t concentrate.
I felt fidgety. I felt like a life-sized doll in a life-sized doll’s house. I wanted to touch everything and try everything out. ‘We could have dinner off this, look,’ I said.
I’d opened the sideboard to show him the dinner-service. ‘Isn’t it great?’ I said. ‘A proper set. Everything matching.’ I turned a plate upside down. ‘Finest Bone China, Royal Worcester,’ I read. But he didn’t look impressed. He didn’t look at all. His big toe was coming through his sock and the nail was shocking.
Bone china is made with real bone, did you know that? Bones are burnt into ash and then mixed in with the clay. That’s why it’s so thin and strong. Only doesn’t it make you wonder whose bones?
I fidgeted about in the kitchen thinking about trying to cook a meal. It was so cosy being inside in the bright and warm while outside the rest of the world was torn up into confetti and flung about. I made myself leave Doggo alone and wandered all round the house. Only the back room was warm. The rest of it had a musty, mushroom smell. Sarah hadn’t put new bulbs everywhere and some of it was too gloomy to bear.
I found the room Sarah had been sleeping in. I could see why she’d chosen it. Small enough to heat and there was a lethal-looking electric fire, the flex hairy as a bog-brush. She’d taken all her stuff with her except some handcream and a brush with blonde hairs stuck in the bristles.
By the window was a tall chest-of-drawers. Inside the top drawer there were balls of wool, folded material and a sewing box with rusty pins and needles. There was something half knitted with the needles still in. It was a pair of woollen leggings for a baby, fine pink wool. Still on the needles and with moth holes in. There was one of Zita’s wigs in a pale lavender colour. I thought I’d put it on for Doggo to see but when I picked it up millions of dead-moth wings fluttered out and wormy bits of eaten stuff. It just came apart in my hands, leaving dry traces on my skin and making me sneeze and sneeze. I shoved it back quick and scrubbed my hands on my jeans.
In the next drawer was a jam-jar full of buttons. I tipped some out in my hand, icy thin shell-buttons and rugged coat buttons, some covered in material and some shiny. One silver one with an anchor on. There were some things there waiting to be mended. Socks for darning; a shirt with a rip and a nightdress with a broken strap. Waiting for at least sixteen years. I took the nightdress out and held it up. It was made of that peachy silk which is almost like skin. The straps were thin as spaghetti. I wonder how the strap broke? Maybe Mr Dickens ripped it in a fit of passion. I tied a knot in the strap and it was suddenly mended after all those years.
I found our bedroom up a little staircase through a narrow door. It was the tower room. You had to be very careful because some of the stairs had splintery holes in. It would have been a spiral staircase if it had gone on long enough. The room was octagonal with seven windows. All the windows had sludge-green velvet curtains that felt like sludge too. On the eighth wall there was a painted-on pretend window with a view of a stormy sea outside. My heart was beating like a boogie woogie or something. From all the real windows the view was the same. Snowstorm.
Of course it was cold and damp but not more cold and damp than the cellar. There was a nearly-double bed and under it a potty patterned with twining ivy leaves. Underneath the stormy sea was the furred-up black iron throat of a fireplace. The room was like a lighthouse room, high and round and with the sea painted there. Maybe someone else thought it was like a lighthouse and that is why the sea was painted. Maybe Zita did it. Doggo the lighthouse keeper. He would love it, I knew that much about him.
I decided to fetch some coal from the cellar and light a fire. I went down and got sheets, a slippery blue quilt, the bedside lamp from Sarah’s room and the electric fire to start to warm it up till the fire was lit. Doggo mustn’t see till it was ready.
I made the bed and went back downstairs. The secret of the room was nearly jumping out of my mouth but I didn’t say a word about it. Doggo was gawping at something else now anyway and hardly noticed me. The film had finished but he hadn’t moved a muscle. I stood there for a minute.
‘What you up to?’ he said at last.
‘Wait and see,’ I said.
I went the way I never go, the inside way down into the cellar rather than back outside in the snow. There’s a door in the hall and behind it a black plunge of stairs with no light. You have to hold your breath and close your eyes and mind against the thready break of cobwebs on your face. You have to hang on to a clammy rail while your foot feels for each uneven step. But there is nothing to fear, it is only dark. And dark is only the lack of light. It’s nothing. That’s what I tell myself – but sometimes it does seem more than that. A thing in its own right, dark, a quality, a mood, a spirit.
Soon as I could I put on the light and gazed around the cellar. It was already hard to believe I could ever really have lived in that desperate choking gloom. I shovelled up a scuttleful of coal. The coal must have been there years, Mr Dickens only ever used the electric fire.
I got right back upstairs without Doggo seeing me, but I could not get the fire to light. The coal was damp. I thought maybe it was stale from all those years waiting in the cellar – but then that’s nothing compared with the age of it. When I held a bit in my hand I remembered a picture on a classroom wall, a diagram showing how the giant club-root moss mulches down under the earth and becomes the weird light stone that burns. The black greasy sheen of it came off on my skin. But it wouldn’t burn. I put in match after match. I wanted to make everything perfect and cosy, a surprise for Doggo, to cheer him up, but the coal reeked of cat’s piss and wouldn’t even smoke let alone blaze and the electric fire made a burnt-dust smell but no impression on the cold.
It got dark while I was trying to light the fire. Houses burn down accidentally all the time but I could not deliberately light this fire. I switched on the lamp and drew the curtains leaving black smears on the velvet. The wind was rumbling around whipping the snow about. I could have made it cosy in there but the coals just sat and sulked, ignoring the match flames, cold and dead right through their hearts.
After a while I heard Doggo calling me and then coming up the first stairs. I listened to him opening doors and doors. My heart was beating as if I was hiding from him – but I did want to be found. There should have been a fire though, he should have been finding me in a warm room not a cold one.
In the end he came up the nearly spiral stairs swearing when his foot went through a hole. When he came in the first thing he said was, ‘Fuck, wow.’ Then, ‘I’ve buggered my foot.’
‘I wanted to light the fire,’ I said, ‘but there’s something wrong with this coal.’
He laughed. ‘Ouch. Is it bleeding?’ He peered down at his sock but you couldn’t tell. ‘That’s not how you make a fire, you daft git,’ he said.
‘I know,’ I said.
‘Hang on.’ He went down again, walking on the heel of his hurt foot. I waited, shivering, and heard a snapping sound from downstairs. The sky sobbed against all the windows. Doggo came hobbling back upstairs, his arms full of wood and a newspaper.
‘Clothes horse,’ he said.
You can’t just go round snapping up people’s clothes horses, I thought, but I didn’t say. I didn�
�t feel like saying anything. But I knew for sure then. I love Doggo, I do, even though he does these things, drinking other people’s wine, murdering people, snapping up their clothes horses. But he does care about teeth and cry about dogs and the sound of his beating heart is the nearest thing to heaven.
He knelt by the fireplace and told me how you build a fire, twisting newspaper into tight screws, building a wigwam shape with the kindling, leaving spaces for air to draw through, balancing the coals. He was in his element, I could see.
‘Weren’t you ever a Girl Guide?’ he said leaning back, wiping his black hands on his jeans.
‘Me!’ I said. I was in the Brownies but I didn’t tell him that. I hated the ridiculous things you had to do like leapfrogging over papier mâché toadstools and singing about kookaburras. I am not a group person, me – although I can still tie a reef knot.
‘I can see you were a Boy Scout,’ I said.
He put his head right down and blew on the fire and it lit immediately but the room choked up with smoke. ‘Fuck,’ he said, ‘blocked chimney.’ It was brilliant the practical way he handled it. He raked out the burning wood on to the tiles in front and rammed a bit of clothes horse up the chimney to hook the blockage out. First there was just a sooty trickle then a shocking clot of bird bones, feathers, leaves and beaks and God knows what. I couldn’t look. I went downstairs and left him to it.
It was nice down there. Songs of Praise on the telly, a choir shivering on a hillside, the wind blowing their skirts up as they sang a Welsh carol. I decided to make macaroni cheese because it gave instructions on the macaroni packet and we had all the necessary ingredients. I did use to cook sometimes for Mum and me but not for ages. In domestic science we made Victoria sponge and even roll-mop herrings once. You don’t need to cook, not if it’s just you. But it wasn’t just me any more it was me and Doggo and because it was a snowstorm and we had somewhere to be, I cooked. Like a celebration.
Now You See Me Page 16