by Unknown
‘Chess,’ interrupted George, stamping his boots and nodding his head with pleasure.
Dotty wasn’t to be checked, by chess or by George. She wasn’t so much telling Kidney’s story as her own. ‘But Joseph always makes the same mistake, every single time. He bought Kidney a book of poems by Donne, with a silly message inside – To My Friend. It was supposed to be meaningful and it meant sweet fanny-all really.’ Her voice was uneven, but her face was turned from Balfour and George and it was difficult to tell if it contained anger or grief. ‘I mean, he’s bought the same book for so many people at one time or another, with the appropriate inscription inside – To My Friend, or My Wife or My Love – and it’s a shame really because they’re nice poems and you can’t even look at them after Joseph has finished with you. Every gesture he makes is just a monotonous repeat of a gesture he’s made somewhere else. You see, Kidney really thought Joseph was interested in him. Really thought he cared.’ She stopped talking. She wasn’t thinking of Kidney at all.
For a time Roland played with his boat in the stream. It was a lovely colour, his red boat, bobbing up and down. He moved his bare feet roughly to slap small waves against its sides and it still rode the water. He didn’t care for the feel of the wet mud beneath the soles of his feet and there were sharp things down there, stones and a fragment of glass and a piece of something blue and gold that seemed to move as the water rolled over it. It wasn’t a fish and it wasn’t a jewel. He would have touched it if he hadn’t been alone. Once a strand of wet moss clung to his ankle and he hated that. He put his fingers in the stream and pulled, and it wrapped itself round his wrist like a green bracelet. He held his arm up in the air, water dripping from the sleeve of his blue jumper, and shuddered with revulsion. The moss fell into the water and slid away downstream. He picked up his boat and climbed on to the wooden bridge and put on his sandals, rubbing his wrist against the cloth of his trousers. ‘I don’t like that,’ he said out loud. From somewhere behind him he could hear voices, high up on the hillside, up there where the pines grew. He twisted his head and thought he saw pieces of another hut, painted white, fragmented by the branches of the trees. He began to run up the steep slope towards Hut 4.
He had to stop after a time; he was just too tired. He wasn’t cold any more. His cheeks burned and the fringe of hair clung to his forehead. Everything was motionless about him, everything just like a painting he might do at school: all the leaves on all the trees exactly in their places, bits of green paper cut into ragged shapes and gummed against the sky. The hut was up there beyond that beech tree and if he climbed the slope he would be there, except that he must go by the path because the other way there might be nettles and nests of wild bees and perhaps even a snake. His father would never bother with the path, or George, but then his father had big rubber gumboots that crushed the nettles underfoot and George was the tallest man in the world and nothing could harm him.
Slowly he continued along the path. His mother, he thought, would probably be missing him now or having a rest on the Victorian sofa in the living-room, all her hair in little curls about her neck and one fat hand clutching her handkerchief. When she woke she would call his name and then reach for her cigarettes; they would be near but he wouldn’t be. She had told him over and over to be nice to Joseph and give him lots of kisses and not to tire him too much. Lots of kisses, he told himself, watching his sandalled feet go along the path, curving round the hillside towards his father.
Then he remembered that Balfour had mentioned that there was another hut beyond the bushes, above the path. George had made it himself out of planks of wood, and inside there was a lavatory – not a proper one but a big can with a chemical inside that killed all the germs. Roland looked at the grass, pressed flat by the recent rain and thought of all the germs multiplying beneath the trees. Balfour had said that George had made all the huts in the forest, with the help of Mr MacFarley and Willie, the odd-job man from the village. Roland looked beyond the bushes and saw the square black hut with its door swinging open. He approached it from the side and searched with his hands on the rough wood for the heads of nails, but he couldn’t feel any. Then he bent down and looked under the hut and saw that it was built against the hillside at the back and that the front was propped level with red bricks. The grass underneath had died; it was colourless like glass. Between the mortar of the bricks he could see a spider’s web, the same shade as the dead grass. He put his head on a level with the ground and looked for the spider, but it wasn’t there. Something moved within the hut.
He saw Kidney, frowning and ham pink, seated with his corduroy trousers in folds about his ankles.
‘What are you doing?’
‘I’m on the lavatory,’ said Kidney. Earnestly he gazed past Roland at some point beyond the trees.
‘You have got white legs.’ Roland looked at Kidney’s knees. In the gloom of the little hut they glowed. ‘Funny,’ he said, ‘because you’ve got such a red face.’ He stepped back and examined the hut again. ‘You do look nice, Kidney. All those leaves round the door and you in your little house sitting there.’
Kidney shifted himself on the seat but said nothing.
‘Have you got any toilet paper?’ Roland asked him.
‘Yes, thank you.’
‘Are you sitting on the germs?’
Kidney wouldn’t answer.
Roland kicked at the door with his foot and it swung inwards and back again.
‘Go away,’ Kidney said.
Obediently Roland ran away up the path to Hut 4 to find his father. He found him on his knees beside the wicker basket. With a nail file Joseph was turning a screw in a white plug.
‘What’s that for?’ Roland squatted down beside him and watched the shiny screw come loose.
‘My electric razor. I’m trying to mend it.’
‘But you’ve got a beard.’
‘I know.’ He probed with the nail file at the veins of red wire, sucking a strand of beard between his full lips.
‘William hasn’t got a beard,’ said Roland. William was his mother’s friend, who missed his last bus home sometimes and was in the bathroom in the morning, standing before the gold mirror, scraping soap off his chin.
‘Oh well,’ said Joseph. ‘I like to keep my neck tidy.’
‘It’s a super toilet,’ said Roland. He lay on the floor and spread his arms wide as if he were swimming.
‘Lavatory, not toilet,’ Joseph told him. ‘Toilet’s too damn refined.’
‘They say toilet at school.’ To add weight he added, ‘Mummy says toilet.’ He moved his legs up and down in the invisible sea. ‘It’s all black and leaves all round the door – and that bastard Kidney sitting on the can of germs.’
‘Don’t you like Kidney?’ Joseph sat back on his heels and spat shreds of wire out of his mouth.
‘Yes,’ said Roland. He stopped swimming and looked round the hut. ‘Don’t expect there’s anywhere to put your plug here.’ He looked carefully at all the places where plugs might go if this were home.
For a moment his father was silent. Then he shrugged his shoulders and opened the lid of the basket and dropped the plug and nail file inside. ‘How right you are,’ he said, getting up from his knees and wiping dust from his trousers.
Kidney entered the hut and saw Joseph at the mirror, legs braced wide apart, combing his hair back behind his ears.
‘Wash your hands,’ Joseph said, putting the comb away. ‘We’re going over to George’s hut for tea.’ He avoided looking directly at Kidney. Roland had opened the wicker basket and was holding the useless plug in his hands. ‘Put that down,’ his father told him.
Blushing, Roland dropped the plug into the basket and fiddled with the strap of his brown sandal. He didn’t like being shouted at in front of Kidney.
At the far end of the hut, at the sink, Kidney dried his hands carefully on the red towel which Joseph had placed on a hook above the draining board. The towel was one from the flat that Joseph lived in, th
at he lived in too. He used it in the mornings before going to college with Joseph. He used to go to college every day, but recently Joseph hadn’t come into his room in the mornings and he had lain there in his bed listening to the sound of Joseph doing his exercises, the tea being made, the soft buzzing noise of the electric shaver as Joseph tidied his neck and throat, the footsteps running downstairs, the slam of the door and the final sound of the car being started. Only then did he leave his bed and go to the window, staring along the street in the direction in which Joseph had gone, imagining he saw the vapour of the exhaust still rising in the empty road. Then he would wander from room to room, not knowing what to do, picking up the book of poems given him by Joseph, not reading them – he had never read them – just holding the thin book in his hands. Sometimes Dotty came out of the bedroom in a long nightgown and a face white as chalk, not looking at him at all, not seeing him, as if he didn’t exist, looking only for the box of matches. He turned to face Joseph, nervously crumpling the towel in his rubbed-dry hands.
‘Do you want me to come?’
‘Of course, you silly bastard.’
‘I thought I might stay here and read a book. I don’t feel very hungry.’ Kidney looked down at the floor, lost in a vision of being alone while they had tea, sitting with a book, a good book, and reading all the words, alone in the empty hut.
Abruptly Joseph said, ‘Oh, stay if you want to,’ and strode out. Roland struggled to his feet and ran after him. Kidney heard him call ‘Wait for me’. Then Joseph’s head appeared at the window. ‘Come on, Kidney,’ he said gently. ‘Come and have some tea with us.’ Almost tenderly he added, ‘We want you to come.’
Smiling, Kidney lumbered out of the hut.
2
After a supper of sausages, followed by cups of coffee, Roland had been put to bed in the long barn at the back of the hut. He had protested at being couched out there, alone in the field. Privately Dotty had agreed with him, thinking he was too little and too spoiled to rest easy away from the main hut. She had kept her opinion to herself, fearing Joseph might remember why it was the child couldn’t sleep with him, deciding at the recollection that it was unjust, and that she, not his lovely boy, must sleep in the barn with only a strip of brown carpet edged with mud between her and the restless Kidney. Guiltily she watched Roland carried from the hut in his father’s arms.
‘Look up there,’ Joseph entreated, standing in the damp grass under the black sky, wanting Roland to observe the stars. But Roland wouldn’t raise his head. In the darkness a bird flew from a swaying tree. Roland made sounds of misery. Once in bed, laid down in the puffy darkness, Joseph told him to be a good boy and go to sleep.
‘Tomorrow,’ he said, stroking the child’s head, ‘I’m going to take you up the mountain. Just you and me. We’ll be explorers. We’ll go very early,’ he continued, soothing himself as much as the child, ‘and we’ll see the tower and we’ll look down and see the countryside spread out just like a map.’
‘I don’t like being here alone,’ whispered Roland in despair.
Joseph tucked the rough blankets more firmly round the boy. ‘You won’t be alone. Kidney is going to sleep in the other bed. We’re all going to bed shortly.’ His voice receded towards the door. ‘Now go to sleep, Roland, and no more nonsense. I’m only next door. You’re not alone … Good night, boy.’ To which Roland wouldn’t reply, leaving his father no alternative but to shut the door and stumble back over the grass to the paraffin-lit hut.
Roland, in bed, wiped at his face with the sheet and thought how cross his mother would be when he told her how frightened he had been at night. Soundlessly his lips shaped the words betraying his father, and he saw her face looming before him, eyes widening at the terrible story, her teeth set like pegs between her lips. ‘All alone, my little boy, left all alone.’ He looked up at the square of window above his head, trying to see the stars, but the glass was too thick and he didn’t dare kneel upright in the bed. He remembered something his teacher had told him about stars, how they weren’t really there, only the light coming down every night for ever. Maybe his mother would buy him a train set to make up for him being so unhappy out there in the wood.
In the hut Joseph was trying to justify his treatment of his son. ‘You were an only child,’ he told the placid George. ‘Do you feel you were deprived or lonely as a boy?’
‘No,’ said George.
Balfour, dabbing his eyes with a square of handkerchief, saw that Joseph was regarding him attentively. ‘Hay fever,’ he apologized and blew his nose violently.
Dotty rose and went to the end of the hut. She pulled the wicker basket out from under the settee and rummaged inside. Crouched sideways on her haunches, chin down, she looked like an athlete landing after a pole vault.
‘What are you doing?’ Joseph asked.
‘Getting the Chablis.’
‘What on earth for?’
‘Because I feel like a drink.’ She stood up and walked to the table, not putting down the wine, face sullen in the yellow light. ‘I did buy it with my own money. Have you a bottle opener, George?’
Balfour went into the kitchen, taking with him the paraffin lamp, leaving the others in near-darkness, finding the corkscrew hanging from a nail on the wall. He thought, not for the first time, surveying the pan scrubbers and ladles, the weighing scales, the cake trays, the jars of herbs in a row on the shelf, that there were more things in this hut than in most normal houses. He brought the corkscrew and the light back into the room.
‘Here we are,’ he said, giving Dotty the corkscrew and going back for the glasses. Dotty withdrew the cork herself.
‘Must be fair,’ she said, pouring the colourless liquid into the tumblers.
‘Why only four glasses?’ asked Joseph in triumph, anxious to put her in the wrong. He turned to look at the corner of the hut where Kidney was sitting, face completely in shadow, only his legs and feet illuminated.
Balfour hurried to fetch another glass from the kitchen.
When they were all drinking, Joseph leaned forward in his chair and looking directly at Balfour asked, ‘What do you do?’
‘I’m in a factory.’ Tongue thick with alarm, Balfour moistened his worker lips. ‘That is, I’m a tool-fitter.’ He drank quickly, disliking the taste, hearing Joseph say, ‘A tool-fitter. How very obscene, but fascinating, I’m sure. A man who works with his hands.’
‘Not with his hands,’ said George. ‘With machines.’
Gratefully Balfour echoed, ‘That’s right. I work with machines.’
‘It’s not very fascinating either,’ added George, swilling his wine round in the thick tumbler. ‘He’s been wanting to escape for years. My father says – ’ his shoulders slumped somewhat, as some part of him always did at mention of Mr MacFarley – ‘that Balfour is needed for better things than machines.’
Oh God, blasphemed the inward Balfour, hating to be reminded of the better things. He drank his wine, not noticing the taste as much.
‘What things do you feel you are needed for?’ asked Joseph.
‘I-I don’t feel that I’m needed at all,’ said Balfour. ‘It’s Mr MacFarley that seems to think that. I don’t think about it.’
‘Ah come now, tell me,’ Joseph persisted. ‘Tell me the truth. What do you do with your life apart from your machines?’
‘I w-work with young people,’ said Balfour. Then, in a rush, feeling liberated by the wine and compelled to answer, he added: ‘We have a c-club and we take lads into the country and we bring them here.’ Giving credit where credit was due, he continued: ‘Mr and Mrs MacFarley and George let us have the huts and we let them climb the mountain and we try to help them appreciate the c-countryside.’
‘It sounds marvellous,’ said Joseph, ‘and very unselfish. Now me, I’m afraid – I’d find it difficult to devote my time to young people in that way for so little return.’
Dotty banged her glass down contemptuously on the table.
Balfour wanted to
ask Joseph what he was doing with Kidney if it wasn’t to help him, but he didn’t know exactly what Kidney’s problems were and he couldn’t guess the kind of returns Joseph meant. Instead he said, gulping his Chablis: ‘But there’s enormous returns. It’s very r-rewarding, believe me. I could tell you a lot of things about that. Very r-rewarding.’ He was aware that his speech was becoming unsteady. Shaking his head, he affirmed: ‘Very rewarding. If you c-could see the kind of homes I go into in the course of my d-duties you’d know what I mean. You see, I go to some houses to f-find out why some kid hasn’t been to the club and there’s a bloody big tenement block of flats with a stone courtyard like a kind of barrack square and I …’
‘I know exactly what you mean,’ interrupted Joseph with enthusiasm. ‘Terrible architecture, no sense of community life, no feeling of life at all. How can people grow and flourish with such ugliness all around them? How can their lives possibly have meaning?’
‘Light is needed,’ said George, ‘and space and a better use of concrete. Ideally they should build their own dwellings to their own needs.’
Jesus, thought Balfour, hanging his head in defeat.
Joseph continued, ‘You see, in proper planning they’d know that people need to be in a community. They’d know that ugly surroundings imprison a man and that beauty liberates him. They’d use colours and play areas and they’d leave the trees standing.’
‘The trees should be left,’ said Balfour. ‘I agree they should leave the trees. B-but half the bloody kids in the flats would pull them out by the roots. And they did try a playground bit in the new flats and a square of green, down in Windsor Street, and every morning you couldn’t see the grass for the f-french letters.’