‘Look at Gabriel.’
I did look at her. No wings but great legs. Still I was tired and did not want to argue theology with a young woman I had never met. I thought about the bunk and the Scotch and started feeling sorry for myself. I decided to go and tackle the Purser.
‘You stay here until I get back’ I commanded, ‘I’ll straighten it out.’
I didn’t straighten it out. The ship was crammed to the lifeboats. The Purser, like me, like any normal person guided by Bible basics, had assumed Gabriel was a man’s name. That’s why we had been yoked together. Second Class ticket holders can’t be choosy. I had to explain all this to her but she didn’t flinch. Either she was as innocent as she looked or she was an old hand. Some of these girls have been milking men since breast-swell. I didn’t want any trouble.
‘Top or bottom?’ I asked, getting ready to move my stuff.
‘Top’ she said. ‘I like heights.’
She climbed up and lay down and I eased myself below, keeping my shoes on, in case my feet smelled. I was disappointed. I had expected to share but I had hoped for some tough guy who wanted late night Scotch and a pack of cards. When you dig under the surface, past the necessities, men and women don’t mix.
Her head came dipping over the side of the bunk.
‘Are you asleep?’
‘Yes.’
‘So am I.’
There was a pause, then she asked me what I did for a living.
‘I’m a business man. I do business.’
She was looking at me upside down, like a big brown bat. She was making me feel sea-sick.
‘What about you?’ I said, not caring.
‘I’m an aviator.’
Eight days at sea. One day longer than God needed to invent the whole world, including its holiday pattern. Two days longer than he took to make her Grandmother Eve and my Grandfather Adam. This time I am not falling for the apple.
We sat up on deck today, Gabriel Angel and myself. She told me she was born in 1937, the day that Amelia Earhart had become the first woman to complete the Atlantic crossing, solo flight. Her granddaddy, as she calls him, told her it was an omen, and that’s why they called her Gabriel, ‘bringer of Good News’, a bright flying thing.
Her granddaddy taught her to fly in the mail planes he ran between the islands. He told her she had to be smarter than life, find a way of beating gravity, and to believe in herself as angels do, their bodies bright as dragonflies, great gold wings cut across the sun.
I’m not against anyone fastening their life to an event of some significance and that way making themselves significant. God knows, we need what footholds we can find on the glass mountain of our existence. Trouble is, you climb and climb, and around middle age, you discover you have spent all the time in the same spot. You thought you were going to be somebody until you slip down into the nobody that you are. I’m telling you because I know.
She said, ‘I am poor but even the poorest inherit something their daddy’s eyes, their mother’s courage. I inherited the dreams.’
I leaned back. I could see in her a piece of the bright hope I once had in myself and it made me sour and angry. It made me feel sorry for her too. I wanted to take both her hands in mine, look her in the eye, and let her see that the world isn’t interested in a little black girl’s dreams.
She said, ‘Mr Stewart, have you ever been in love?’ She was leaning over the side, watching the ocean. I watched the curve of her spine, the slender tracings of her hips, beneath her dress. I wanted to touch her. I don’t know why. She’s too young for me.
Before I could answer, although I don’t know how I would have answered, she started talking about a man with stars in his hair and arms stretched out like wings to hold her.
I moved away as soon as I could.
What is there to say about love? You could sweep up all the words and stack them in the gutter and love wouldn’t be any different, wouldn’t feel any different, the hurt in the heart, the headachy desire that hardly submits to language. What we can’t tame we talk about. I’m talking a lot about Gabriel Angel.
If I were able to speak the truth, I’d say I had a fiancée before the War, and we’re going back to 1938 now. She had a thick plait of hair that ran all the way down her back. She could wrap her hair around her as though it were a snake. I was no snake charmer.
She was a farmer’s daughter, had a heart like a tractor to pull any man out of himself. Her hair was red the way the sun is red first thing in the morning. She had a look about her that took everything seriously, even the wood pile. There were plenty of men who would have traded their bodies for a split log, just to be under her hands for five nunutes. I know I would. We didn’t touch much. She didn’t seem to want it. When we said goodnight at the bottom of her lane she let me run my index finger from her temple to her throat. Such soft hair she had on her face, invisible, but not to my hand.
If I were young again, I would have bounced up to Gabriel Angel on the dock and asked her to come with me on the later sailing. That would have been the Italian line, the real cruise ship. SS Garibaldi softly rocking the Mediterranean. Forget the direct Atlantic crossing, carrying workers and immigrants to a cold place they’ve never seen. I could have held her hand through Martinique, Las Palmas, Tenerife. I could have put my arm around her waist through the straits of Gibraltar. At Barcelona I would have bought her gem Madonnas and seed pearls. Then we would have continued by sea to Genoa and met the boat-train for England. That railway, through Italy, Switzerland and France was laid in the 1850s and was one of the first to be constructed. I’m told that Robert Browning, poet, and Mrs Elizabeth Barrett Browning, also poet, travelled along its length. I would have enjoyed that connection. I should like to run away with Gabriel Angel.
As it is, we’re on this ferry boat to Southampton, the short direct brutal route, and Gabriel Angel has never been in my arms.
It turns out that the two lesbians are missionaries. Miss Bead, the one with a face like a love-note somebody crushed in his fist, tells me they have been in Trinidad for thirty years. Miss Quim, the cricket ball, has taught three generations of hockey teams. They are on their way home to buy a farmhouse together in Wales and get a dog called Rover. I realise they are happy.
I am not sleeping well. Below my cabin is dormitory accommodation, the cheapest way to travel. That’s all right, what’s wrong is the Barbados Banjo Band, twenty-five of them, on their way to the dancehalls of England. It isn’t easy to sleep well piled on top of fifty feet, five hundred fingers and toes and forty-six eyes. Above me are the maddening curves of Gabriel Angel.
In the ship’s lounge, proudly displayed, is a large map of the Atlantic threaded through with the red line of our route. Every day one of the stewards moves a gay green flag further along the red line, so that we can see where we are. Today we have reached the middle; the point of no return. Today the future is nearer than the past.
I don’t have anyone to go to in England. No one will be waiting for me at Southampton or Victoria. I have a two-bedroomed terraced house in London. I have had it let for the past twelve years and I’ll have to live in a boarding house until it becomes vacant again next month. I won’t recognise anything familiar. I had the agents furnish it cheaply for me.
Later, my cargo will arrive and I’ll start selling Caribbean crafts and trinkets and I suppose I’ll go on doing that until something better comes along or until I die. Looking at my future is like looking at a rainy day through a dirty window.
‘You must be excited Mr Stewart.’
‘What about, Miss Angel?’
She has been reading my copy of Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë and now she wishes she could live in Yorkshire. I must be careful not to lend her Rob Roy.
Is compassion possible between a man and a woman? When I say (as I have not said), ‘I want to take care of you’, do I mean ‘I want you to take care of me?’
I am materially comfortable. I can provide. I could protect. I have a lo
t to offer a young woman in a strange place without friends or money.
‘Will you marry me Miss Angel?’
It is early in the morning, not yet six o’clock. I have dressed carefully. My tie is even and my shoes are well polished and double knotted. Anyone can look at me now. Up on deck the sea chops at the boat, the waves are like grey icing, forked over. The wind is whipping my coat sleeves and making my eyes water.
Today we will dock at Southampton and I will catch the train to Victoria station and shake hands with my fellow travellers and we will wish each other well and forget each other at once. I think I’ll spend tonight in a good hotel.
Last night I could not sleep, so I climbed the bunk ladder and stared at Gabriel Angel, lying peacefully under the dim yellow safety lamp. Why doesn’t she want me?
The sun is rising now, but it is 93,000,000 miles away and I can’t get warm. Soon Gabriel Angel will come on deck in her short sleeved blouse and carrying a pair of borrowed binoculars. She won’t be cold. She has the sun inside her.
I wish the wind would drop. A man looks silly with tears in his eyes.
My Son the Hero
Clare Boylan
Clare Boylan (1948–2006) was an Irish author, journalist and critic. Born in Dublin, she began her career as a journalist, winning the Journalist of the Year award in 1974 when working for the Evening Press Award. Boylan went on to concentrate on fiction, and published seven novels and three collections of short stories.
On his way home from the pub my son Ken rescued a kitten up a tree.
‘Must have been a big kitten,’ I said when I saw the state of his shirt. Bits of it had stuck to his chest where something had clawed through fabric and flesh.
‘No,’ Ken said solemnly. ‘It was only small.’ He made a shape with his hands about the size of a rat. His nose was cut and there were great big rusty tracks down his face.
There was something about the shirt – all bloody and chewed, like a hen left by a fox. Already I didn’t like that kitten. ‘If it was up a tree’ – gingerly, I peeled it off and pushed it into a bucket – ‘you should have left it. Cats know how to get out of trees.’
Ken scoured his head with the insides of his eyes. He had a way of considering the simplest question as if it were complex and profound, of looking back into his head for answers. ‘There was a gang of kids standing round the tree. They had a dog – big, fat bastard. Cat was afraid.’
‘Weren’t you afraid?’ I touched him and he trembled. ‘They give you a hard time?’
‘Yeah.’ He put his hand to his bloody nose. With his fingers close to his face he gave a start and then drew back to study the purple semicircle behind the thumb, as if his hand had been caught in a gin trap. He put his two hands away carefully between his knees. ‘She bit me,’ he said indignantly.
‘Who bit you?’
‘Bloody dog.’
‘Mind your language, Ken!’
To tell the truth I didn’t care about the language, or the shirt. I was proud of Ken. He’s not bright. People think I’ve wasted my life on him. Even his own father said that. Then he left us. Well, there’s worse things to waste your life on. I know there’s not much going on but there’s courage and there’s tenderness. That’s worth something. You need some tenderness in the world today. Every day you read terrible things in the papers – babies murdered, old women robbed, their jaws broken and their false teeth smashed. Only the next day there was a story of some poor young girl missing. It gave me a start because it was in our own neighbourhood. I did a wash to take my mind off things, but when I went to get Ken’s shirt, it was gone. ‘Ken!’ I said. ‘Did you take that shirt from the soak?’
‘N-no!’ he said, and he looked as guilty as a dog.
He was watching telly, so I went upstairs and searched his room. Break your heart to go in there – trainers, size 12, and a bed full of teddies – everything in a heap on the floor. Under the mattress a stack of chocolate wrappers, and the wet shirt, seeping into a pile of magazines. It was when I looked at those magazines that my heart went through me. They were men’s magazine’s – not the girlie ones with women showing what they’d had for breakfast, but dirty, cruel filth. I sat there shaking as I turned the sodden pages. Then I bawled down the stain. ‘Ken!’
He lumbered up and peered round the door. ‘You mad at me?’
‘Why would I be mad?’
‘My good shirt – all torn.’
‘What about these?’ I held out the magazines.
He gave a sort of sneer. ‘Where did you get them, Ken?’ He shook his head and looked away.
‘Can’t say. Reg told me not to say.’
Reg Fuller? ‘What have you got to do with that scum, boy?’
‘I’m not a boy.’ His eyes filled with tears. ‘I’m a man. Reg called me a man. He said men were mad for magazines like these. He sold me them.’
I swatted him with the bundle of wet filth. ‘Did you like them, son? Is that the kind of thing you like?’ I was scared. To me Ken’s still a child. He began to cry. I put my arms around him. ‘Men don’t like those magazines, pet,’ I told him. ‘Reg Fuller was lying. They’re just dirty rubbish. Where do we put dirty rubbish?’
‘In the stove,’ he snivelled.
‘That’s right, Ken. Put them in the stove.’
Poor Ken doesn’t understand much. He put the shirt in the stove along with the magazines. Wet smoke belched out and I thought I could smell blood rising over the stench of burning fabric.
He didn’t go out that night, maybe because his face was scratched and bloody or it might have been that gang. We watched the news, but it was all about that poor woman appealing for information about her missing daughter. A picture of the girl was put on the screen – little blonde, face like a flower. She was last seen talking to a man with a raincoat. ‘Please don’t hurt Denise,’ the mother kept saying, but I could tell from the way her voice squeezed on the name that she knew Denise was already dead. Ken’s face mimicked the anguish of the mother. ‘He knows too,’ I thought. People like him often do. ‘Come on, love,’ I said. ‘Let’s go down the pub for a drink.’
Off we went, him hanging on to my arm – the odd couple. Funny to think how much we share. The instinct to protect, for one. I’ve passed that on to him. Then there’s the other thing, never admitted, the need for sex or love, the need to connect. I’ve taken magazines to bed too, stupid bare-assed hunks – probably gay. We’re outcasts, Ken and me. All we’ve got is each other. No one will have him because of the way he is and no one will have me because I’ve got him. Something stuck in my brain like a splinter on that walk, but it couldn’t work its way out because Reg Fuller turned up with his mates and started teasing my son.
‘Got a girl, have you, Ken? We saw you with a little blonde. What have you done with your girlfriend?’
‘You leave him alone,’ I said. Ken sank his face in his collar, puffy and bright pink. ‘Have you got a girlfriend, Ken?’ I said gently. He shook his head.
‘Wouldn’t know what to do with a girl, would you Ken?’ they called after him
He shuffled on for a bit, then turned back jerkily. ‘I would!’
‘How would you know, Ken?’
I hurried him on. I hadn’t much covered that side of life with him. Best not to stir up what’s never going to crop up. ‘Those magazines,’ he mumbled.
‘Oh, Ken, no!’ I held his face. ‘That’s not what you do with a girl.’ He didn’t understand. He didn’t understand anything.
Denise Carroll’s body was found in a wheelie bin. Terrible things had been done to her. She was 21, an economics student, out for a drink with some friends. The thing that struck me was how she had fought to live. Bits of the man’s skin and clothing were under her nails. His hair was in her fists. Extraordinary how people cling to life, even when it is most debased. Extraordinary how human evil can make an ordinary thing like a bin sinister. Ken felt it too. When I asked him to put out the bin he gave a shudder. I watched him sta
nding in the rain, just staring at the bin. ‘Where’s your raincoat, Ken?’ I called out. He peered down at his body as if he expected to see it there.
‘Gone,’ he said in surprise.
‘Where?’ You get exasperated, but it’s no use.
‘I left it somewhere.’
‘Weren’t you wearing it when you went to the pub the other night?’ I said and suddenly I remembered what it was that had stuck in my head. He couldn’t have rescued a kitten from a tree on his way home from the pub. There are no trees on that walk.
‘Ken,’ I said. ‘Show me where the kitten was.’ I grabbed his hand and dragged him back to the pub.
‘It was there!’ He stabbed his big blunt hand in several different directions.
‘There’s no tree there, Ken.’ I was trying to be patient but my voice was shaking. ‘You have to show me the tree.’
He looked around blankly. ‘Gone,’ he said with interest.
I forced him to look at me, trying to find a way past that blank expression, trying to imagine how she must have felt when she faced him. ‘There was a girl, Ken, wasn’t there?’
He looked vague for a minute and then he nodded.
‘Why didn’t you tell me about the girl?’ I seized him and shook him. It was like trying to shake a bear.
‘I forgot about her,’ he said.
‘Jesus, Ken. She must have been scared to death.’
He thought about this inside his head. He gave a sentimental smile and nodded. ‘Yeah. She was really scared.’
‘How could you do such a thing?’
‘Because, because… ’ I sometimes thought his brain must be like an old rubbish skip, where he had to throw out nearly everything before he could find anything that was useful. ‘Because she wanted me to.’
That evening the police came. They said it was a routine enquiry, house to house. I had bathed Ken, scrubbed his nails, brushed his hair until it more or less sat down but I saw the way they looked at those gouge marks down his face. ‘Where were you on Friday night?’ they asked him. Ken peered back into his head. There was nothing I could do. There were witnesses who’d seen him – Reg Fuller, people in the pub.
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