The White Stuff

by Simon Armitage

  ‘Yes.’

  It was some time afterwards when Abbie spoke again, because her tea had gone cold and Felix actually thought she had fallen asleep.

  ‘Valentine?’

  ‘Valentine John.’

  She stood up and yawned, ready to go to bed.

  ‘Somebody’s love child. Poor kid,’ she said.

  Three days later Felix had a phone call from Valentine’s previous social worker in Keighley saying that his great-auntie had agreed the boy could go and live with her. He’d stayed with her before and things hadn’t worked out, but she was prepared to give him another chance on the condition that he was more helpful around the house and promised not to go to the slot-machine arcade in town. The advert had gone in the paper, but apart from the forty-pound fee that would come out of the office budget there was no harm done, because nobody replied.

  That night he began telling Abbie that Valentine John had gone back to his family, but she wasn’t interested. A letter had come from the hospital with an appointment. At the fertility clinic. She pushed the letter across the kitchen table and tapped the date with her fingernail. A leaflet, ‘Explaining IUI’, was stapled to it. Felix opened the leaflet and looked down the list of ‘frequently asked questions’. ‘What does IUI mean?’ ‘If IUI fails can we try it again?’ ‘Does IUI hurt?’ ‘How much does it cost?’ On the reverse was a line drawing of a thin, plastic tube inserted into a womb, with a quantity of sperm being injected through the tube via a syringe at the other end. Abbie walked around the table, put her arm across Felix’s shoulder and whispered in his ear.

  ‘A month from now, we could be pregnant.’

  Her breath was warm and loud. Felix looked again at the letter and at the highlighted number in the box at the bottom.

  ‘Why does it cost so much?’

  ‘It’s the drugs. To make sure I ovulate.’

  ‘It’s just about everything we’ve got.’

  Abbie pulled back and snatched the letter away from him.

  ‘You mean bastard. Our one and only chance for a baby and you start moaning about the price. Unbelievable.’

  ‘I wasn’t moaning, I was just saying…’

  ‘Forget it,’ she snapped, and slammed the door.

  Later, before he turned out the lights, Felix retrieved the screwed-up letter and the leaflet from the bin and flattened them out against the arm of the chair. He wrote the date of the appointment in his Filofax and shaded out the three days leading up to it - the period of sexual abstinence - with a blue pencil. He looked again at the drawing. It was more like something from a car-maintenance manual or the instructions for a new dishwasher than anything likely to produce a baby. And even though Felix was a man who often put his faith in such mechanical descriptions, there was something about this particular diagram that didn’t ring true. Something was missing - the man. The man who comes up with the goods. The man who has to do well under pressure. The man charged with the responsibility of delivering a feasible amount of quality sperm on the one occasion - on the one and only occasion - when it truly matters. In other words, him. He was missing. And it was at that moment, as he visualized himself locked in the bathroom with a specimen bottle in his hand and Abbie pacing to and fro on the landing outside, that Felix sensed something in his groin. Or rather he sensed a lack of something. A kind of absence. A numbness or an unwillingness between his legs, and the more he tried to concentrate, the more remote and disconnected that region of his body began to feel. As if to test himself, he dosed his eyes for several intensely pornographic minutes.

  But there was no response.

  14

  The trail hadn’t gone cold exactly but there was nothing else Felix could do from the end of a telephone. Neither did he want to waste any more time staking out refugee hostels where German shepherd dogs were given fictitious identities and received generous support from the state. Every once in a while, daydreaming, he still came face to face with the sad, watery eyes of that dog and could hear the squeaking of its solid rubber wheels as the back end of its body trundled around the corner.

  During his training, he’d spent a two-week placement with the Department of Social Security and accompanied one of the officers on a number of ‘unannounced’ visits. This involved turning up on the doorstep of a council house - always a council house - usually in the early hours of the morning. Then flashing an identity card in the face of some puzzled and sleepy occupier and touring the property for evidence of fraud. A loophole in the system meant that two people living in the same house could claim a higher rate of benefit as individuals than they could as a couple. The purpose of the unannounced visit was to rumble any man and a woman ‘living as husband and wife’, but rather than taking the bedsheets away for forensic testing, the wily officers of the DSS were on the lookout for more subtle indicators of cohabitation. For instance, a shared tube of toothpaste was considered to be proof that two claimants were more than just good friends. Likewise, the existence of a single bath towel was confirmation of sexual congress, as was a communal pint of milk in the fridge or joint use of a frying pan. In the living room, assumptions could be made from photographs or birthday cards on the mantelpiece, and from more mysterious sources such as the particular arrangement of chairs or the contents of an ashtray. If access could be gained, his-and-her slippers or dressing gowns in the same bedroom were a dead giveaway, and a condom packet, full or empty, was the ultimate signifier: the couple in question might as well have been writhing naked on top of the duvet.

  It was a humiliating experience for those under investigation, and sinister as well, in that no object or item was touched or moved throughout the whole search and few words were spoken. Afterwards, in the car, the officer would go through his checklist, ticking boxes with his pencil and making thick black -crosses in others. He’d also record a few minutes of legalistic babble into his Dictaphone, then drive off to the next unsuspecting household where the curtains were still drawn, where human beings were sleeping either in one bed or alone. Four or five visits could be made before breakfast. After that it wasn’t worth it.

  ‘The jungle drums will be banging by now, and besides, everyone claiming the dole will have gone to work.’

  Felix didn’t hate the man with the clipboard and the Dictaphone. He was just a person doing a job, someone carrying out instructions, someone at the business end of a bad idea. When the suits in Whitehall drew up a plan for clamping down on the spongers and the cheats, they probably didn’t project as far as an actual person having to scrutinize the pubic hairs in the plughole of a bath on a poverty-ridden housing estate in a godforsaken town somewhere over yonder, sometime before dawn. Or maybe they did, but what did they care? It was miles away. Someone else’s problem. Those other people, with their, different, distant lives. Felix sniggered to himself, wondering what the DSS super-snooper would have made of Maria Rosales. Wondering if there was a special box on his checklist for large dogs with Spanish-sounding names, and whether its mechanical undercarriage gave any due as to its marital status or affected its entitlement to single benefit supplement.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ Abbie asked him.

  They were nearing the outskirts of London after three hours in the car. Abbie had slept most of the way, which was fine by Felix, because it allowed him to think his thoughts as well as concentrate on the road ahead. Mo, at work, had once explained to him that, contrary to popular opinion, men were not incapable of multitasking - they were just lazy. Felix had never heard of multitasking, but as soon as the concept was explained to him he instinctively felt that popular opinion was correct. He couldn’t even unload the dishwasher if the radio was on, and one morning had nicked a sizeable chunk out of his ear with his razor when the telephone rang. Daydreaming and driving were two activities he had just about managed to combine, but driving and talking - that was more complicated. After a long journey with Abbie he’d often think of things he should have said, little phrases he could have used instead of what actually came
out of his mouth. Or he’d wonder about his performance at the wheel - whether he should have dropped into third at the roundabout at the top of the slip road, or how much time he’d spent dawdling in the middle lane when by rights he should have moved over to let faster vehicles go past.

  The traffic got heavier as they neared the end of the motorway. Roadworks forced them into a contraflow, then back to the other side of the road into single file along the hard shoulder. It was stop/start, stop/start, pushing down, then easing back with the clutch. Brake lights were invisible in the glare of the sun. Three or four cars had pulled over, bonnets in the air, steam rising from the engine, or black smoke in the case of an old Dormobile painted with lime-green gloss. After the bottleneck of the final junction, they entered busy streets where pedestrians stepped from the kerb without notice and without looking. Cars were parked in the bus lane, dogging the system, making a burst of thirty or forty yards in second gear seem like some kind of progress. Abbie, wearing her sunglasses, glanced at the A-Z every now and again and at one point suggested turning off and trying a different way. But Felix had memorized the route. He could visualize the road patterns in his head. He corrected Abbie on several occasions for saying left when she obviously meant right, and vice versa, and for railing to notice the small arrows, printed in black, indicating a one-way street. Finally they arrived, with all four windows open and the sun roof closed to keep out the heat from directly overhead.

  Inside the Family Records Centre the air was cool and the atmosphere more peaceful. Neither of them had known what to expect, but the building struck Felix as being somewhere between a library and a post office. There was a measured quietness, a controlled hush. Row upon row of huge ledgers were shelved in metal cabinets with wide, wooden tables between each stack. Things were businesslike and formal. There were no chairs; no one was being encouraged to linger or take longer than they needed to. At one end of the room was a counter and a small file of people waiting to be served. They were probably on the verge of some life-changing moment, on the brink of some cataclysmic revelation .which would alter their self-image or entirely question their identity. But they looked like people queuing to buy stamps or pay the gas bill. They looked like citizens. Customers. The lady behind the desk asked Felix and Abbie if they had been to the Centre before, then gave a brief explanation of how the ledgers were arranged and how best to tackle them. They had intended to search the volumes together, because two pairs of eyes were better than one, and Felix wanted to be with her if anything important came to light, and Abbie wanted to be with him. But after locating then throwing open the first half a dozen volumes and trawling through the endless lists of names, it became obvious they would have to split up. Either that, or they’d be at it for weeks, and Felix had only paid for two hours’ parking.

  ‘Which do you want to take?’ Felix asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. Her voice was faint, almost drowsy.

  ‘You do the marriages, then, and I’ll do…’

  ‘No. It’s OK. I’ll do it.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  Abbie nodded. Felix squeezed her hand, then watched her turn towards the section of shelves that ran diagonally to the other rows. To the registers of deaths. To the lists of the deceased, whose ranks outnumbered the living, whose lives, however long and fascinating, were reduced here to a name and a date. Millions of them, all piled up. Think of all the bodies, all the bones and possessions of the dead. Where did everything go? How could it fit? Abbie turned behind one of the shelves and vanished. Felix slotted a ledger back into the empty space on the shelf and walked his fingers along the alphabetically ordered spines to the next.

  He figured it like this: Maria Rosales was either alive or dead. That was a fact, an incontrovertible truth, and a starting place. If she was alive she was no longer known by the same name, or at least there was nobody listed under that name with either directory inquiries or the electoral roll, and in all likelihood she was married. By scouring the register of marriages, Felix could discover her new surname, although he would need to follow that name all the way through to the present day in case she had married a second or third time. It wasn’t a flawless progression of logic - it was a case of playing the odds. But the little diagram tucked in the back of his Filofax told him the odds were good. Of course, there were other possibilities, variables that were hard to control. For instance, Maria might not be living in Britain any longer. She was Spanish, after all, and could have returned to her homeland. In a more extreme scenario, Maria might have entered a convent. Or she might be living in a witness protection programme somewhere in Utah. But those thoughts took him beyond the boundary of probability. They were things that happened to people in films or books, and Felix was trying to concentrate on real life. He was a social worker. He had an instinct for this kind of thing, and his instincts told him that the name of Maria Rosales was printed on one of these pages, between the covers of one of these great books. It was just a case of which one. A book from his shelf or a book from the other side, where Abbie was looking. The books of the dead.

  After half an hour or so Felix had become quite adept at tracking down the right volume, levering it from the cabinet, laying it down on the table and flipping back the cover. Quickly he’d got the hang of riffling through the pages, like a bank teller counting a wad of notes, and homing in on Maria’s surname via the coordinates of similar-looking words. Ross - that meant he’d gone too far. Rooney, Roper, getting close. Rosier - too far again, then working back through Rosendale, Rosen, Rose - thousands of Roses, in fact, page after page after page. He went out to feed the meter and came back and carried on. He saw Abbie going to the toilet, then returning. He watched other people in the building checking the records. Some seemed like experts, crashing the books down on the table, slamming them closed. They could only be prying into someone else’s business, delving into the life of a stranger. It wouldn’t be possible to be so slick, so proficient, with one of your own. After three hours, neither of them with anything to report, they sat on a low wall across the road and ate the sandwiches Abbie had packed at home. Slow traffic grumbled along the road. People strolled past, men in their shirtsleeves with their jackets over their shoulders, women in flip-flops and flowery skirts. Abbie was still quiet. She hadn’t spoken more than a handful of sentences all day. She pulled two pieces of fruit out of a plastic box, an apple for herself and a banana for Felix. More people went by. Someone on rollerskates. A couple of lads in school uniform kicked an empty can along the pavement. It wasn’t as bright now, but the air was still humid and slow. They went back inside, back to their shelves and tables, and it wasn’t more than ten minutes later when Felix looked up and saw Abbie walking towards him. She was looking into his eyes, but in her hands one of the big books lay open. She could have been bringing him a small animal, something broken or hurt, like the owl that flew into the windscreen last autumn. The way she’d lifted it, carried it to the side of the road, kneeling as she placed it in the grass.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘She’s dead,’ said Abbie, still looking at him.

  Felix took the register of deaths out of her hands and lowered it ta the table. Abbie’s finger pointed at the name. Maria Rosales. Then at the date of birth. It was her. No question.

  ‘I found it an hour ago.’

  ‘Before lunch?’

  She nodded her head. ‘I just needed to think about it for a while.’

  Then her face began to crumple, and as she breathed in she moaned, a noise that was involuntary, beyond her control, and she lifted her hand to her mouth. She reached out for him and held on. A man next to them, one of the experts, dosed the volume he was studying and tactfully disappeared. He’d seen this before. Every day, probably. Felix told Abbie it was OK to cry. She did for a while, inaudibly, until she regained her breathing. Then she backed out of his arms and took a tissue from her sleeve.

  ‘I’m OK.’

  ‘Honestly?’

  ‘Y
es. I’m going to the loo. Will you get the certificate?’

  After she’d gone, Felix looked again at the entry. Maria Rosales. Born 1939. Died 1988. He scribbled a note on a piece of paper, then closed the cover. Then he carried the book solemnly and with respect back to the gap in the shelf and eased it gently in.

  There was a longish queue for the counter. A dozen or so people. Felix got chatting with the man in front of him, a guy in his mid-thirties, a northerner, looking for a birth certificate for a friend of his.

  ‘Didn’t take long. His surname’s Pompus. There aren’t many of them around.’

  ‘Have you been here before?’

  ‘No. But if you ask me it’s a scandal that any old Freeman, Hardy or Willis can walk in off the street and order up a copy of someone’s birth certificate just for six and a half quid and no questions asked. But I didn’t make the law. I’m just an interested party exercising a democratic right. And anyway I was in the area.’

  He said all this over his shoulder, without really looking at Felix, so probably didn’t notice whether Felix had nodded in agreement or not. Then he said, ‘It’s like shopping at that place…’

  ‘Index?’

  ‘Yeah. Or Argos. Everyone waiting with their little order form.’

  They chatted a bit more until they reached the front of the queue.

  ‘Barney,’ the man said, holding out his arm.

  ‘Felix.’

  They shook on it, and went in different directions to hand in their requests and pay the appropriate fee.

  The grave wasn’t so hard to find, despite the Japanese knotweed that had colonized the top half of the graveyard and the best efforts of many other weeds and shrubs to overrun the paths and walkways which ran parallel to every second row of headstones. Abbie walked a little further up the track, then returned with a small metal vase taken from another plot. She slotted the lilies she had bought into the vase, one at a time, placing it on a flat stone disc in the middle of the grave above the scattering of green stone chippings. Then she stood back and looked. Felix had scraped the moss from the lower part of the headstone, but there was nothing else to see. Nothing beyond the simple inscription which read ‘Maria Rosales 1939-1988’. There was a small piece of red card on the ground attached to a withered length of grey string, a gift tag presumably from a bunch of flowers, with the words ‘From B’ written in faded ink. But it could have blown over from the next grave or the one behind it, or from anywhere really. There was nothing else to go on, no other clues. Later in the car, on the way home, Abbie would lift her hands to her face and weep until the tears ran through her fingers and on to her rings and her watch, saying her mother mustn’t have married, saying she must have died alone. It was shock. Delayed reaction. Felix had been expecting it, and stopped the car to hold her and tell her how sorry he was. But here in the churchyard Abbie was blank and impassive.