Murmuration

by Robert Lock

  She sniffed. “You get used to it.”

  Looking at her cracked, chapped lips and reddened fingertips, George suspected the prostitute was attempting either to fool herself or appear nonchalant, but there was a resonance to her defiance, a reiteration of Zlatka’s resolve, that both moved and aroused him. “Maybe… What would you say to a nice cup of tea in front of the fire? My lodgings are nothing if not basic, but at least there is a ready supply of coal.”

  “I prefer the outdoors for business, sir.” She looked up at him with an expression in her eyes that was far older than her years.

  “That is what you’re looking for, isn’t it?”

  “Well… yes,” George confirmed. Even after years of utilising their services he was still somewhat daunted by these girls’ unabashed directness. “But where shall we…?”

  “Under the pier.” The swiftness of her reply spoke of numerous previous assignations in that location. “Unless you’ve any objections?”

  “The pier?” He had never thought of his workplace as extending its facilities in quite so lurid a direction, even though, during the early part of his career in some of the more disreputable London halls he had often been able to watch, from his elevated vantage point on stage, the whores at work round the tables. “Very well.”

  “Come on.” She reached out a hand.

  George took her hand in his. He could feel how cold she was through the thin leather of his glove, and her spontaneous gesture spoke to him of the child that remained not so very far beneath the brutalised surface, but he gave himself up gladly to this waif. Some would look at her purposeful stride, her lack of embarrassment, as that of a working girl set upon the completion of her allotted task, but not George. He was, in nearly every sense of the word, lost. This young prostitute’s guiding hand offered, albeit temporarily, a sense of direction. To be led, to be touched, was all he craved.

  She escorted him down the steps cut into the bluff of the promenade and together they stepped onto the shingle, for all the world like lovers taking a romantic stroll on the beach. A slender moon, gauzy through the remaining mist, dripped silver onto an incoming tide, but beneath the pier an eclipsed realm held sway, full of alien smells and sounds, of water moving and echoing off the boards, and the exhalation of damp iron; to George it felt like he was entering a dark enchanted forest. They made their way through the hundreds of piles on which the pier stood, until the girl was satisfied that they were safe from prying eyes and gently tugged him close.

  “So,” she said, “what is it I can do for you, sir?”

  George looked down. In the gloom her eyes were almost black.

  “Touch me, Zlatka.”

  “What’d you say?”

  “I want to call you Zlatka while you touch me.”

  The prostitute smiled. “She your sweetheart, sir? Won’t she do these things for you?”

  “That is none of your business.”

  She patted him rather condescendingly on the chest. “Don’t you worry, sir, your secret’s safe with me. You can call me anything you like for a shilling.”

  George unbuttoned his coat and jacket and leaned back against one of the stanchions. Looking up he could see the glow from the electric bulbs through gaps in the planking, but as he felt the girl begin to unbutton his trousers the bulbs went out. Tom must have finished his bookkeeping, George thought, then gasped as her ice-cold fingers wrapped themselves round his penis.

  “Sorry,” she giggled. “I’ll have to get meself a pair of mittens. Hang on a minute.” She cupped her hands together and blew vigorously into them for twenty seconds or so before reaching down again. “There now, is that better?”

  “Marginally.” He shifted slightly, pushing forward his hips and using the bulk of the pier as a brace. “Look at me.”

  Was it the thick shadow of the pier, or a magical trick of the moonlight, or simply the transformational power of his desire that caused the face that gazed up at him to so resemble Zlatka’s? Even her eyes, closed slightly as she concentrated on her work, reproduced the contortionist’s own with an accuracy that excited him beyond measure.

  “My, you were ready for this, weren’t you?”

  “Don’t speak,” George snapped, his reverie impaired by the girl’s accent. “Grip my arm… higher… as tight as you can… tighter… tighter!”

  There! At last he could feel again the exquisite pain, a true replica of that administered all those years ago, which, despite attempts with tourniquets and half-hearted squeezes from other girls, he had never previously been able to find. There was a wiry strength to this girl, and an understanding of passion’s anarchy that in normal circumstances would have disturbed him.

  Footsteps sounded on the pier above them. George tilted back his head and saw the light from Tom’s lantern swinging to and fro, a flickering semaphore between the planks. The girl looked up as well but continued her work at a steady pace. As Tom passed by overhead the girl caught George’s eye and winked. The silence was such that they could hear the squeak of his lantern’s handle between the measured beat of his hobnailed boots. George clamped his own hand over his mouth, as though he did not trust himself to keep silent both the pain and the pleasure which were building within. The stage door keeper’s tread receded in the direction of the promenade, leaving George and the starlings as the only living creatures in physical contact with the pier.

  “Zlatka… Zlatka… Oh, dear God… ” The movement of her hand increased in tempo. George whimpered, engulfed in her brown eyes. He ejaculated into the darkness, the pale arc of semen neatly dodged by the prostitute, who gave his penis a last shake before letting go.

  “There,” she said with satisfaction. “All done.”

  It happened so quickly. George, still gasping from the strength of his orgasm, and rubbing his numbed arm with his other hand, was not fast enough to react when the girl’s hand, whether for warmth or perhaps a speculative attempt at pickpocketing, slipped into his jacket pocket and brought out Victoria’s pebble.

  “What’s this?” she said playfully, holding the stone away from him at arm’s length.

  “Give that back!” George cried. The arm she had squeezed so tightly would not obey his will. The panic rising in him weakened the other.

  “It’s only a stone!” The prostitute laughed, then, with a flick of the wrist, she sent it flying. Moments later a dull clattering could be heard as it bounced and skipped and settled, returned to anonymity with a million others. Lost.

  Lost.

  This was too much. This was fate, exultant, mocking, voicing its final victory through the girl’s laughter. This was the ultimate negation of his life, a vile humiliation. It could not be borne. It could not.

  The strength had returned to his arms, an incredible strength, fuelled by the lingering imprint of four fingers and thumb embedded in his bicep. George grabbed the prostitute’s shoulders and whirled her round. How light she was! It was like playing with a child. His hands slid swiftly inwards from her shoulders, settling with an appalling comfort around the base of her neck. He did not see the light of fear spark in her eyes: how could he have done? It was so dark under the pier, much darker than the night itself, like a coagulation of night, a condensing of it.

  Beneath his fingers and thumbs he could feel tendons, the ridged firmness of a larynx, even a frantic pulse, but George was looking out towards the beach, where two figures stood waiting hand in hand, the moonlight accentuating their blonde hair. He wept, sobbed, pressed harder and harder, because only this unrelenting pressure could open the door that he so desperately wanted to walk through, a door that would close behind him, never to re-open.

  The poor girl’s flailing arms battered against his. She tried to dig her nails into his face, but they were all bitten to the quick; the best she could do was two small scratches, and to push at his face, turn his streaming eyes away from the figures who waited so patiently. He smelled excrement as the prostitute soiled herself, and then, moments, or perhaps minute
s later, she made a soft gurgling sound deep in her throat and sank to her knees, as though George had become an object of reverence. Through the blur of tears he saw Katherine and Victoria beside him. They gently lifted his hands away — Katherine whispered ‘Stop now’ — but when he reached out they vanished, leaving only the slumped figure of the prostitute heaped in front of him, her crumpled dress pooled about her on the shingle.

  George took a deep, jagged breath. The sharp sea air cleared his mind and vision with the speed and impact of smelling salts, rendering the scene before him in the most implacable of focus. This is your doing, was its definitive, incontrovertible verdict. He staggered out from beneath the pier’s shadow, fell to his knees and retched. He coughed, wiping the spittle from his lips with the back of his sleeve, aware, with an all-encompassing coalescing of senses, of the rounded pebbles beneath his knees, the susurration of the waves, the cold breeze that had stirred from its rest in the hammock of the moon and was busy ushering away the last of the mist, the pier’s presence at his back, the soft chatter of starlings woken from their roost by the change in the air, even the resort’s quiet indifference… He smiled sadly, stood, and stepped back into the darkness beneath the pier. Twenty feet away, dangling from beneath a cross-brace, was a length of rope. He patted the cold stanchion, drawing forth a soft resonance from the metal, which he knew was a promise of release.

  A young boy, taking his dog for an early morning walk on the beach, found George. The boy was not squeamish; indeed, he possessed an interest in anatomy first fired whilst watching his mother skin and gut a rabbit, and deepened by his own dissection of a frog caught in a nearby pond, so it was with a physician’s dispassionate eye that he looked up at the body of the man whose shoes dangled several feet above him. He noted the facial pallor, the purplish hue to the hands caused by pooling and coagulating of the blood, the bruising on his neck where the rope was embedded.

  The dog was barking. The boy looked down and saw his pet sniffing at what appeared to be a pile of clothes on the beach at the other side of the pier. He decided to go and see what the dog was fretting at, but not before one last look at the hanged man. The boy shifted position slightly so that he could see the man’s face properly, intrigued by how the presumably painful manner of his death had stamped itself on his features. He was surprised to see, beneath the gentle coating of frost on the man’s eyebrows and the skin’s waxy pallor, an expression of, if not exactly happiness, then some-thing akin to it. It put him in mind of a phrase his mother had used when their old dog, who had been suffering from a tumour, was put out of its misery by a sympathetic veterinary surgeon. The man must have been very sad to have felt the need to kill himself in such a way, but now, at the end, he was at peace.

  The boy turned his attention to his dog. “What is it, Billy?” He shouted. “What have you found?”

  1941

  Observer Corps

  Everybody said it was a miracle but I don’t know about that. God only shows us when we’re good and ready to see it. They said I was a hero. They said I ought to get a medal to pin on my blue overalls but in the end I didn’t. It would have been nice to have one of my own like Pa did in the first war. If I had been given a medal Ma and Pa would have been proud. Well, Pa is a ghost now but he would still have been proud because there are such things as ghosts. I saw lots of ghosts because of all the bombs and the houses falling and they aren’t scary, just a bit sad. It was all Fucking Adolf’s fault.

  That’s what Norman called him. Fucking Adolf. Fucking Adolf who stood on a stage and shouted and made all the soldiers march and he wanted them to march into our country so me and Norman and Mitch and Taffy sat on the roof of the theatre on the pier in our observation post and waited for Jerry to come. We counted up all their planes and told the people in Ops. I was there because there wasn’t anyone better than me at telling what Jerry plane was what, even if it was right up in the sky and dark. I can’t explain how I did it, I just did. Dorniers and Junkers and Heinkels and our boys as well.

  It was Uncle Walter who got me into the Observer Corps. Well he wasn’t really my uncle but I called him that anyway. He was a Warden and one day I went to his house and there was a big white board with lots of black painted planes on it that he was taking somewhere. I pointed at one of them and said that’s a Junkers JU 88 and Uncle Walter said how do you know that? And I said because its engines are near enough as long as its nose so he pointed to another and I said that’s a Messerschmitt ME109. This was a good game I thought. But it wasn’t a game for Uncle Walter. Uncle Walter got all serious and he looked at me and said how many of these do you know? So I looked at the black planes for a bit and then I said all of them. His eyes went a bit funny and starey like he’d sat on something sharp. ALL of them? he said and I said yes because it was true. And that’s how I got to be in the Observer Corps and that’s how come I was sitting on the roof of the theatre on the pier when the birds came and made me a hero.

  I was born in a cottage on the edge of the moors. I remember when I was a baby hearing a strange song. It went pweebbbooeewwbubububeepweepwee all whistles and bubbles like a river talking and I asked Ma what it was and she said it was a curlew. I wanted to see a curlew after that so Ma found Grandpa’s old binoculars from when he was a sailor and gave them to me. She said it would make a change for them to see something nice. They were really heavy. My arms ached holding those binoculars but I liked how they put the birds in my head. They were so close you could see their feathers and the shine in their eyes.

  I went out on the moors and I waited and waited and then I saw a curlew all brown and black stripes and long curly beak and it sang to me and made me cry. Ma bought me a book of birds showing where they live and what their eggs look like. I copied what it said about curlews and then after that I drew all the birds I saw on the moors and wrote how they sang and what they ate. I decided to write a book that had all the birds in the world in it with drawings by me as well. I’m going to call it Birds of the World by Michael Braithwaite. I haven’t finished it yet but after what happened I wrote a lot about starlings.

  ***

  Would you like to hear about my family? Well first there was Ma who was called Anne. She was a good Ma. She was skinny but she could beat most men at arm wrestling because Pa got killed at the Battle of Estaires so she had to carry the coal and wood and everything when me and Thomas were young. Ma waited until the men in the pub had drunk a lot of beer and then she used to beat them at arm wrestling and win us some money. Once she won an orange. We ate it with some blackberries we’d picked and my mouth still goes all watery when I think about that teatime. Ma missed Pa. She had a photo of him by her bed and when it was cold she wore his jumper. Once when she didn’t know I was there I saw Ma wearing his jumper and she sniffed the sleeve and then pretended to give herself a hug.

  I can remember a soldier friend of Pa coming to our cottage to bring his clothes and stuff after he’d been shot. Everything was in a parcel wrapped up in brown paper. I’d been playing outside and I came into the kitchen and heard a strange voice talking so I stayed in the kitchen and listened quiet. The strange man said Harry was a good man but a sniper shot him in the throat and they couldn’t stop the blood coming out and the blood made the mud turn red. The mud was red the mud was red. He said it over and over like he couldn’t believe what he was saying. Ma started crying so I came in and they looked up. Ma sniffed and wiped her nose with her finger. She had the parcel on her knees. The man tried to smile but it was just his mouth moving. It didn’t have any laughing inside it. Is this Harry’s son? he said. Yes, Ma said, this is Michael. He’s got a look of him, he said. Thomas is his younger brother, Ma said, and the man nodded.

  I’ve got Pa’s medals now. When I look at them I always think of the mud turning red.

  Thomas was my brother. He was a labourer on Squire Hinchcliffe’s farm and then when the war started he joined the navy and went somewhere in the Med. Thomas and me were different because he liked to shoot
birds and I liked to look at them. I suppose it was the same difference in the war because he shot planes down and I looked up at them. I hoped Jerry wouldn’t drop a bomb on his ship. He joined the navy before I went in the Observer Corps so he never saw my helmet which was made of steel and used to be a copper’s because it said POLICE on it in white paint. Uncle Walter scratched off the P and the L and the I and the E so that just left OC on it and that stood for Observer Corps. Uncle Walter was clever to make a new word out of the old one. I got some blue overalls as well which were too short and a bit tight and made my goolies hurt if I bent down too quick. Norman and Mitch and Taffy had berets with a badge on them but I didn’t get one of them because I was an honorary observer.

  When the next war came, Thomas went off to join the navy, and then Squire Hinchcliffe didn’t want us in our cottage any more so Ma and me moved to be with Aunty Irene by the seaside. They had more bombs there but we didn’t have anywhere else to go and anyway they said the war wouldn’t last much longer. Aunty Irene had a hotel called the Beaverbrook Hotel. It was quite nice with a bright red door and a sign that you could turn one way to say Vacancies and another to say Sorry We’re Full! but since the war started it had said Vacancies quite a bit. Aunty Irene always said that Mr Hitler was going to put her out of business. She always called him Mr Hitler like Norman always called him Fucking Adolf.

  I liked living in a hotel. It felt like you were on holiday all the time. I used to like walking on the beach and collecting shells but then they put up barbed wire and DANGER! THIS BEACH IS MINED signs on the prom. I was lucky to be in the Observer Corps because I was allowed to go on the pier which was a RESTRICTED AREA. There was an ack-ack gun in the middle and when it fired you could feel the pier shake. The boys on the ack-ack gun shot down a Dornier 215 so they had a bottle of beer each and painted a swastika on the side of their gun. I liked being on the pier especially our look-out on top of the theatre roof. It felt different like you were on a boat. I could see the Beaverbrook Hotel from there. I said to Ma I’d wave to her but she said I’d got to concentrate and keep my eye out for Jerry planes.