Two Australian men sat together.
“I fucking hate her,” one said.
“You don’t have to show it,” the other said.
“She shows it to me.”
“You’re better than her.”
“I don’t feel better than her.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Like, for starters, it’s a Saturday night, what am I doing here?”
“Here’s OK.”
“There’s nothing OK about this dump.”
“It’s close.”
“It’s not what I thought I was coming to London for.”
“You mean, you want to be somewhere fancy chatting up the girls, yeah?”
“Not now I don’t.”
“So what’s your problem?”
“I didn’t think I was coming right round the world to sit in a empty pub on a Saturday night watching old Irish buggers drink until they piss themselves.”
Because that had happened two weeks before. It had seemed quite funny.
“Yeah, well.”
“It’s just that fucking Jane. I don’t know what her problem is.”
“You just have to look at her as, like, family or something. Just accept you can’t choose your housemates in London like you can’t choose your sister or something.”
“That’s hilarious. Chinny tart.”
“You’re right. She’s got a big chin.”
“Just think of her as family.”
“That’s a nice thought.”
“No worries.”
“Because to tell you the truth, that’s really what it feels like, this woman we’re stuck with. What’s her problem?”
“She went to Oxford.”
“She never said that to me.”
“She doesn’t mention it. She only told me when I asked her straight out.”
“That’s her problem, you reckon?”
“No, there’s no explanation.”
“It’s just the way she looks at you when you’ve left a plate on the table without washing it up. Or if she comes in the kitchen and you’re there and she’s not expecting it. Or—”
“Yeah, I know what you mean.”
“I tell you something. This is weird. I was out once, on Clapham High Street, one Saturday morning, just walking along. And I see her coming. And I reckon she sees me, like I see her. But she sort of drops her head, pretending not to see me, so I look away, and I walk on, and when I look back, she’s walked straight past, not said anything, pretending not to see me.”
“But, mate, you pretended not to see her too.”
“That’s not the point. I reckon she must hate us both.”
“I don’t get it.”
“And if she was at Oxford, right, what’s she doing sharing a house with two Aussies she found through an ad? Why’s she got no friends she can live with?”
“She’s got friends, they come round.”
“Yeah, but why doesn’t she live with them?”
“Don’t ask me.”
“And what’s she doing tonight? Staying in, watching the TV.”
“You’re not saying you want her to come out with us.”
“Well, why shouldn’t she?”
“She wouldn’t want to listen to you having a go at her.”
“I wouldn’t do it if she wasn’t here.”
“Yeah, but you’d want to.”
“I tell you what. If she was the sort of girl who came out to the pub with a bloke, she wouldn’t be the sort of girl you’d want to sit here having a go at. Do you see what I’m saying?”
“Yeah, I see what you’re saying.”
“I should have found somewhere to live in Earls Court. There’s a real party scene there.”
“It’s expensive, mate.”
They went on for a while. The pub got no more full. Outside, by eleven, it might have been a country village. One old man got up to leave, held his chair by both hands, and then, like a learning swimmer at the bar of a pool, pushed off. He managed three steps, then fell, limbs waving, on to the carpet. Some people came to help. They’d done it before. The two Australians watched, one laughing, the other still unamused and cross. The first asked the second to come off it; the second said he didn’t know what he was doing in this country. In a moment, time was called, and they went home. It was only a hundred yards.
Music was softly playing from the main bedroom, its door shut. One offered the other a tin of beer, but the offer was refused. The two men went each to their separate bedrooms. After half an hour, one of them, as he had before, put on a cassette of his own and arranged a pornographic magazine open on his bed. He stripped and, standing on a chair, slung a belt over a rafter that ran through his bedroom. He hooked it about his neck, and began to masturbate, leaning quite heavily with his neck on the loop of the belt. In a moment, he slipped, and, kicking out for a foothold, kicked the chair over. Shortly, as he had not done before, he died, making small grunting noises that nobody heard. In twenty minutes, the cassette came to an end, and everything was silent again.
Jane had often been able to recognize moments of significant influence in her life; moments that enlarged her notion of what was possible, permanently. When she was tiny, her family going to stay with someone—who?—and her grandmother being there too, and for some reason she’d had to sleep in a baby’s cot with bars you could lower. Tiny as she was, she knew she was too old for this, but her grandmother had presented it as a sort of adventure, and said, “Well, you’ll always remember having to sleep in a cot, won’t you?” And she had. It was almost her first memory. And at school, once, making pots out of snakes of clay: hers had collapsed and collapsed the more she handled it, until finally it was just a kind of ashtray, hopeless. They’d had to queue to show it to the teacher before firing, and she’d remarked sociably to her neighbour in the queue that hers was terrible, really. The teacher had overheard, and growled at her to go away and improve it, then. A shameful lesson; not to apologize. Or her mother, never knowing that her mother was capable of running out of the house and stamping, in public, on the head of a snake; the idea that had come in a moment that she could go to Oxford. But not Oxford, that wasn’t any kind of enlargement, oddly enough.
It was like that the morning she’d noticed she hadn’t seen one of her flatmates for a few days, and, before going to work, had knocked on his door, had opened it, found him naked, black-faced, sprawled on the floor with a belt round his neck.
The Australians had been her friend Sarah Willis’s idea. She’d met Sarah her first week at Oxford, been drawn to her air of Manchester competency, and Sarah had gone on advising her since. They’d done Old English translations, grapefruit diets, boyfriends from Brasenose and the milk round together, ending up with different jobs in marketing. Sarah’s forward, decisive air had got her a job with a company that, it turned out, made almost everything you ever bought and used up—soap, toothpaste, bottled sauces, face masks, savoury spreads to put on toast. Jane had been shocked that such apparently wide and varied consumer experiences all came from the same place under disguised names; the salad cream and the moisturizer might turn out to be exactly the same substance. She hadn’t done so well, landing a job with a company everyone knew the name of, a firm that was only ever going to be English, a firm that made exactly what you knew it made, a firm that made, in fact, small metal toys. People smiled when you told them who you worked for. Well, as Sarah said, you could move on a bit later.
Sarah hadn’t offered to share a flat with her—or, rather, had explained why it wouldn’t be a good idea.
“You see, I’m away so much now. Every week somewhere else, I’d hardly be there. You’d be lonely, really, on your own most of the time.”
“I was thinking exactly the same thing.”
“And, of course, when I get back, I might want sometimes just to spend time with Dave.”
Dave was the Brasenose boyfriend, who, unlike Jane’s, had stuck.
“Oh, you don’t want to be s
haring a flat if you don’t have to.”
“Well, it’s not that so much, but if you move in, and then, in six months, Dave decides he wants to move in—you don’t want to be living with a couple, Jane, you’re better off like this.”
It was probably true; she wouldn’t really have wanted to live with Dave’s neat little ways in the bathroom, his constant concern for her, as if she was coming down with something, or the cute little messages he left around the flat for Sarah. Anyway, Sarah telephoned one day to announce that she’d actually found a flat for Jane to rent, just round the corner from her in Clapham, a really nice garden square. Three bedrooms—
“But I don’t need three bedrooms—”
And £180 a week.
“Get a lodger or two, make it clear that it’s your flat in the first place, and turn them out after six months. Of course, if you really like them, they can stay longer, but I wouldn’t let them get their feet under the table too much.”
It was all very much like Sarah Willis’s periodic attempts to find Jane a boyfriend, advertising men she said were really nice but who turned out only to be friends of her own boyfriend; or assuring Jane, without Jane asking for reassurance on the particular point, that yes, she did have a kind of pointed chin but it was really characterful and striking. Sarah finding her a flat looked much like that, making the best of poor material and making you feel worse, honestly, than you had before it started. But by chance it was nice, with a big sunny bedroom overlooking the children’s playground in the square. It was an elegant square from the right viewpoint: two and a half sides of it were tall stucco houses in a uniform grand cream. The fourth side must have had a bomb fall on it, and it was now the ugly 1960s back of a fire station.
Her father came down on the train—as he always said, it was all right driving to London, it was getting across London in the car he couldn’t face, and what about the parking? Sarah came with her to meet him off the train, and she saw him walking down the platform at St. Pancras with Sarah’s Londonized eyes: small and doubtful, his clothes all too beige, his padded anorak and trousers and even his shoes. He greeted Sarah generously enough—she’d been to stay one vacation, and had done her best with him—but, all the way to Clapham, walking from the Tube, letting themselves in and walking round the flat, it was clear there were things he wouldn’t say in front of her. He couldn’t help admitting that it was a nice flat, convenient for getting to work. They took a walk round, and he admitted it seemed like a pleasant area, though Jane blushed when he asked whether she was sure it was a safe place to live. It was obvious he was counting the black people on the streets. As it turned out when Sarah tactfully excused herself, saying she had to meet Dave, the things Malcolm wouldn’t say in front of Sarah were also things he didn’t know how to say in front of Jane. When they said goodbye the next day, they agreed that Jane had really fallen on her feet.
“The best idea is Australians,” Sarah said, when the question of the lodgers came up again. Jane could manage the rent on her own for a month—she’d saved enough from summer jobs—but not more than that. “They come and go, they’re always cheerful, they’re not going to want to stay for years on end. And they’ve always got loads of friends. It’d be good for your social life.”
“You can’t advertise just for Australians,” Jane said. “There’s probably a law against it.”
“They’ve got their own publications,” Sarah said. She was right; Jane always marvelled at Sarah’s knowing everything. Within ten days, she was interviewing a succession of Australians, and within two weeks one had moved in. She thought she’d try just one lodger to start with, and he seemed a nice boy, travelling round Europe and now staying in London for a few months.
The atmosphere in the flat was pleasant. The Australian was tidy, friendly, quiet. He didn’t seem to have the busy social life Sarah had surmised of his kind, but when they found themselves in the flat at the same time, he had cheerful stories of his day working—illegally, Jane suspected—as a waiter at a restaurant in Earls Court, the insulting and stupid things the customers had said, the things they’d done to food in return. She quite liked him. The only faint disappointment was discovering what these London terraces were actually like. They looked, from the outside, very elegant, with their tall white stucco fronts, almost like something in Belgravia, but you hadn’t been living there long when you worked out that they’d been thrown up very cheaply in the 1820s, with the intention of looking elegant and not much more than that. They were full of odd little gaps between floors and thin walls, through which noise travelled easily; the late-night radio, which sometimes bothered Jane in bed at night, turned out, on investigation, to come from the flat two floors below next door. “I reckon a good hard blow from a sledgehammer would peel off the front of the whole terrace in one go,” their neighbour upstairs said cheerily, when they introduced themselves on the stairs. “And if there was ever a fire, get out quick—it’d spread from one end of the terrace to the other through the attics in about ten minutes. There’s two hundred years’ worth of dry paper and wood lying up there.”
Five weeks after he moved in, the Australian said that he’d got a friend who was looking for somewhere to live. Jane had agreed. This new Australian came to see the flat, with a huge rucksack on his back; all his possessions. She knew immediately that she was making a mistake, and this new Australian somehow made the old one seem less nice. Which was odd, because it turned out that they weren’t really friends at all: they’d only seen each other once or twice before the second one moved in. He was just someone looking for a room.
Far from improving her social life, the lodgers together created a stale, soiled atmosphere. Jane started heading straight for her room when she got home. The two of them started watching hours of television, switching it on, whatever it was, and going on until they went to bed. Or if she came into the kitchen when they were both there, a silence would fall that she couldn’t, with whatever amount of brightness, fill. The flat filled with a sour, masculine smell, of bodies and obscure fluids; the second Australian had a personal neglect that gave the impression of a deliberate personal affront; the streak of black shit in the toilet bowl, the black body hair, embedded in a fatty jelly of what must be spunk in the drain of the shower, the blood-encrusted length of dental floss left on the bathroom shelf; all these she felt deliberately left for her, like the horrible gifts of a cat to its owner.
“My God,” she said.
“Jesus,” the Australian said. “Don’t look. Go and sit in the other room. I’ll call an ambulance.”
“I can do that,” Jane said. She forced herself to turn away, with a physical sensation as if caught in a fierce wind. She had never imagined seeing such a thing. The boy, too, after a gulp or two, shut the door firmly and came after her.
“I haven’t seen him since Saturday,” he said, sitting down, pale with shock. “I thought he was—”
“No,” Jane said.
“I don’t know what I thought. He wasn’t even a friend of mine.”
Jane phoned for an ambulance. Not knowing what else to do, she made a strong cup of tea for them both.
The ambulance arrived; two paramedics, with the useless tools of their trade. They made no astonished or horrified noises, and were more obviously concerned for Jane and the live Australian. In an hour, the police, surprisingly, arrived, and while the body was being removed, asked a few bored questions. “It must be a shock,” one said kindly. Once the body had been taken away, covered with a red blanket, strapped down on a stretcher, the police went into the room, emerging with an address book. “Don’t disturb anything for the moment,” they said. “We’ll inform his family. Don’t worry, we’ll be tactful about it.” Jane thought of a London policeman, helmet in hand, making the long sad voyage to Melbourne. A stubby, worried couple in their bungalow, hearing the doorbell, and opening it to find the incredible figure of an old-style foreign bobby in front of their neat square little lawn, edged with shrubs in which poisonous spi
ders lurked, waiting to pounce, under which deadly snakes coiled and loitered … But, of course, it would not be like that. They’d just telephone the details to an Australian policeman to pass on, before forgetting all about the sad and grotesque death, so far from home.
They didn’t need to do anything else much, once the body had been taken away. The police took charge of everything, only letting them know, quite thoughtfully, that the man’s parents wouldn’t be travelling over for the funeral, the cost being too high; he would be cremated and the ashes returned. There was nothing else for it: she and the other Australian would have to go to the funeral to prevent it being an entirely unattended affair.
As it happened, they weren’t alone at the funeral. The same thought had obviously occurred to a few people who had crossed the Australian’s path in London, and the chapel at the crematorium showed three or four clumps of acquaintances, none showing anything more than a straight face. No one offered to read, and there was no obvious principal mourner that anyone could introduce themselves to; so after standing around outside for a while, they all went their separate ways. “Poor bugger,” the other Australian said.
There weren’t, in truth, all that many people Jane could have told. She didn’t tell Sarah Willis, not wanting to make any kind of story out of it, or her mum and dad—there’d be no end of it if she told them. Certainly no one in the head office of the toy company. Every step of the story was ugly, and she didn’t really want anyone to know that any of it had happened to her in any way. It was just too interesting and shocking, she could see that.
“I don’t mind,” Jane said one evening to the Australian. “If you want to move out.”
They’d taken to eating together when they were both in the flat. It wasn’t anything very significant, but she had started to feel a little bit sorry for him. Once, going round the supermarket on her way home, she’d deliberately bought a bit too much and, finding he was in, asked him if he wanted some of her dinner. “It looks good,” he said and, a day or two later, had done exactly the same thing for her, shyly offering a plate of rice and chicken and vegetables, not all that bad.
The Northern Clemency Page 33