There was a girl in that house under the railway line, in Lilian’s father’s house in Holly Street where the lad lived with the wisp of beard and the collection of funny books, there was a girl in there, Louise by name, but it did no good. The trains went to and fro, they shook the house, and one of them one morning, the 6:05 London to Edinburgh that doesn’t stop here but goes for the viaduct like a beast leaping, the 6:05, running ten minutes late and angry no doubt, went over his funny head. Nothing Louise could do. In Lilian’s view men ask too much of womankind. To hear you talk, she says, a woman’s to blame every time a man gives up the ghost. We need a lot of looking after, Mrs. Clack, says Joe. You can say that again, she says, from the cradle to the grave it never stops, you’re always round our skirts wanting your noses wiped. A woman never has time to do anything else. That’s in the nature of things, says Bowles. Men have all the worries, they have to answer the big questions of life. It’s only right and proper that women should get their tea and try and cheer ’em up a bit. He shoves his pot across. Dumbly the men watch Lilian work the handle of the pump. Down and down and down she depresses it.
Of Louise it was widely known that she loved nothing better than to synchronize the climax of her sexual pleasure with the coming of an express train. She was a dab hand at this, she didn’t mind admitting it. Her young men got used to the idea, and only the stupidest among them took offence. Some, of course, after the conceited nature of the male, imagined her shudders were due to them themselves; but they were at best a vessel the god locomotive briefly filled. She loved all the trains, even the ancient puffing billies that pottered by in slack periods, trundling a few empty wagons; also the local couple of carriages that never got up steam; and the long, sometimes as it seemed never-ending march of clanking coal trucks. But she loved the through trains best, the terrific expresses hurtling north or south, and they were the ones she rode into her finale. It was said she could hear them crossing the Tees or the Tyne, that she was attuned to the first vibration of the miles and miles of track and could feel it beginning to throb and could hear the iron beginning to sing long before anyone else could. But that is very likely lies.
Louise often came knocking on our friend’s door. Often? Well, if she had no company or if she woke up too late to get to work. His room was upstairs at the back of the house, over the yard. You’re nearer the trains than I am, Louise said. Lucky you. The worst room in the house in every other respect: never any sunshine, distemper flaking off, a rattling sash that wouldn’t shut, a cracked pane, a boarded-up hearth and soot coming down behind it and bits of brick and birds. But it’s true about the trains. The first thing to start and the last to finish was a big glass lampshade dead in the middle of the ceiling. It started like a tickling under the belly button. Nothing wrong with that room, says Lilian, nor with any other room in Father’s house, and no sense throwing away money on decorations when people aren’t stopping. She dabs her diamanté eyes: the one for Father who drank himself to death, the other for the waif who laid down his head and died. She can’t forget the day he turned up on her doorstep asking did she have a room to let for the foreseeable future.
Louise cried when she heard what had happened, and she broke her heart crying when she saw our friend’s funny books. She moved out next day and married a signalman. Now she travels where she pleases on his special pass.
But what was she like, this Louise? What were her chief qualities? A creamy white skin; a triangle of maidenhair of an astonishing blackness and copiousness; a kind heart. Plump? She was rounded, her curves were firm. She was said to be very careless in her dress. The postman and the milkman always knocked, Jehovah’s Witnesses and men selling encyclopedias called there oftener than elsewhere and once a quarter when they left home to visit 39 Holly Street officials of the Gas Board and the Electricity Board whistled and sang and polished the peaks of their caps. Some say she never noticed what she had on and what she didn’t have on. Lilian: Don’t give me that. She’s answered the door stark naked to my certain knowledge. Still half-asleep, Mrs. Clack, it could happen to anyone. Rat-a-tat-tat, here comes the postman, she’s nearest the door, she stands there rubbing her eyes and yawning in his face.
Late in the evening if there was nobody with her or late in the morning if she had overslept she might come up and pay our friend a visit. Either time he’d be in bed. The door was never locked, she knocked, he never answered, she opened it and said can I come in? He never answered, he’d be sitting propped up against the greasy wall with his hands outside the covers, flat, he had lovely hands, she said, except his nails were dirty. Their conversations, such as they were, took place mostly across the gap from the door to the bed. I’m out of sugar, she began, or have you got a slice of bread? It was remarkable, she observed, how little he seemed to occupy the room. Apart from the few books there was little sign that anybody lived there. He had a kettle and a cup and a few other bits and pieces for catering, and perhaps there was another shirt or something in the wardrobe. She was comparing the place with her own room, where human occupation was obvious in a big way.
It was Slim who said that about the whiteness of her skin and the blackness of her burning bush. He knew a man in town called Peg who knew a lad called Ike who had known Louise. Slim said it as though he had known Louise himself. She leaned in the open doorway with her dressing gown coming undone and asked our unhappy friend for the loan of a spoonful of sugar or a slice of bread and when he said help yourself, she still stood there and after a silence tried something else. It seems she had none of the ordinary womanly designs on him, but the thought of him up there all on his own in the back room overlooking the dustbins preyed on her mind or at least it occurred to her and gave her a funny feeling if she woke up with nobody to have breakfast with or if it was late in the evening and there was going to be nobody in her bed. None of the other lodgers interested her, though she interested them; anyway, it is not known that she ever went knocking at their doors on the scrounge.
How you feeling today then? she asked, and a conversation might follow on from that. He had a posh voice, slightly squeaky; the sight of his lips moving in their bits of beard gave her the creeps. Certainly there was something of the insect about him. Stetson, for instance, was of the opinion that squashing was what he wanted. He said this at the bar, whenever the subject came up. Louise thought otherwise, she was not appalled by spiders (fortunately in that house) and would go to some trouble to save them from drowning in her bath. Those lodgers who were interested in Louise but in whom she was not interested opened their doors a crack when she went for a bath, since it was always on the cards that she might walk past a minute later naked and carrying a spider in her gently clenched fist. Our friend smiled a lot, but always in a sneering way or as if his lips were being pulled by a spasm. His teeth, alas, were in a poor condition. He wore spectacles—Jesus, says Joe, do we have to think of these things?—which he often removed as he spoke or as she spoke, and rubbed his eyes, the lids of which were sometimes as red as cockscombs. His hair was like his beard, nothing much.
To her enquiry after his health he replied: Better, thank you, how kind of you to ask. If it were evening and she enquired what sort of a day he’d spent he raised his hands and let them fall and said words failed him, he must be very blessed, he doubted whether many people ever had days like his. He had sat under the broken statue of Apollo, he said, in Wharton Park, and had watched the trains, it was an excellent place to watch them from, you could see them coming, out of the north and out of the south, at a great distance.
When he mentioned the trains she glanced at him searchingly to see if he knew her open secret, and there was indeed a look of insinuation in his eyes; but what he was alluding to was his own business, of course, and he was darting her glances to see if she had guessed it. Finally, since one insinuating look looks much like another, she could not be sure, but said in an even and friendly voice: I’ll come along with you one of these days, I like tra
ins too, you know. The motioning of his hands was courtesy itself, but his lips twitched like a devil’s and what he emitted was a high giggle which soon faltered and broke.
Do you know, he said, you are the only person I have spoken to since a week last Friday. Louise was horrified. But in the shop? she said. He served himself, there was no need to speak, the woman told him what it cost and he gave her the money. The Chinkies do the same, they never speak, I’ve been observing them. And at the NAB? I nod my head, he said, or shake it, as the case may be. I sign on the dotted line and go away again. I shouldn’t come bothering you, says Louise. You mebbe like not talking. Once in a while, he says, can’t do much harm. And listening? You’d mebbe rather not listen to human speech? Mostly I don’t, he says, I overhear a few things, but on your average day no one addresses me.
The next step, obviously, was to ask him what he thought about all day then, sitting up there under the statue of Apollo or down in the square under Lord Londonderry and not speaking to anybody and not listening and never being spoken to, and our friend had maybe hoped she’d go that far; but her instinct warned her off. If Louise wasn’t afraid of spiders she was terrified by the thought of a spider swirling down the plughole and drowning in the drains, and the thought of what he filled his skull with day after day seemed to her very like a plughole and a long long fall and a drowning in the dark.
There must have been a silence then, our suicidal friend a trifle peeved perhaps that Louise had not asked to be shown the contents of his head, and Louise herself backing away in her thoughts from the horror of him and moving on to the safer ground of a general pity for the lonely and the beginnings of an uneasiness on her own account. Then, in the silence, she felt the first still very distant vibrations of an approaching train, one from the south, an express certainly. She looked towards the bed again, and for perhaps ten seconds was able to study its occupant’s face without his knowing. The features had lapsed into an expression of complete sadness, without sarcasm. Then he too, still before the lampshade on the ceiling, picked up the tremor of the train, and his eyes turned to hers. They frightened her, there was a gleam of wicked hope in them. She continued to stare at him, ever more fixedly, as the train approached and as her famous sensations intensified she set them against his.
Hard to quite locate the agonies a shivering lampshade causes in a man. Sometimes it seems to start in the core of the heart and go down through into his cock and not come out of there but course up and down the lengthening innermost capillary with shock after shock; and sometimes from the back of the head and down the spine with a terrible quick tickling into his vestigial tail; and always under the belly there’s an itch that can’t be scratched. If that were the only noise the room would have been unlivable in and a man in bed there would have expired if it had gone on for very long; but pretty soon it was lost in the general din. Louise, no doubt, could hear that lampshade, or some similar thrilling and tickling, under all the ensuing racket, running through it like an exquisitely thin reed. The sash started rattling, the gas fire buzzed; the noise came on at a steady gallop, its wheels pounding the track, which whined like ice. The whole room shook, you felt it seized and battered by the noise, you lay in bed and felt broken apart.
When the train came overhead they both closed their eyes. When they reopened them, when the long tail of carriages had been drawn away and the room little by little and each part after its particular tone (the lampshade last, lingering and lingering) had ceased to tremble, when they opened their eyes, our friend the first to, only Louise was smiling. It’s good in here, she said, you’re lucky. Sometimes they hoot, I like it when they hoot. His hair was damp, his face was the colour of the wall, he was biting on bits of his Fu Manchu moustache.
Louise began to talk. He nodded for her to continue, so she did, but his eyes were away on the far wall, staring and desperate. He wore a white shirt in bed with a filthy collar, down which he pushed a finger from time to time. He was damp throughout. Louise talked, not looking at him. She wondered aloud whether she shouldn’t just chuck up her job—if she missed many more days they would sack her anyway—and go down to London for a few months. She had a friend down there she thought would let her stay. She wondered sometimes why anyone stuck around in this dump. What she liked about the trains, she said, was that they were always going somewhere, even the slow ones, even the little local ones, and if you got one you could change and catch another, the lines went everywhere, like veins, so she believed, like the veins and arteries that went all over your body.
Slim had it from Peg who had it from Ike that Louise if ever she went rambling on and nobody was paying much attention would absent-mindedly start feeling herself through the gaps where buttons were undone (or missing more like) in her slatternly dressing gown. That is, she liked the feel of her own skin, for which nobody can blame her, so while she talked she gently rubbed with the flat of her hand or searched over herself with her fingertips or scratched with her nails and pushed down naturally off her creamy tummy into her abundant curly private hair and went on talking about getting out of this place and moved her hand up feelingly over her ribs and tickled herself in the armpit and felt the heartside of her lovely bosom and stood in the open doorway leaning back on the doorpost, one foot in a shoddy slipper and with the other, bare, feeling the length of her leg from the knee to the ankle.
On the late evening before the day in question she came up after closing time with a bottle of Bull’s Blood and her Mickey Mouse mug. Sunny Jim was in bed, sitting upright. Mind if I come in? she asked. He didn’t say no. For once she shut the door. Mind if I light the fire? she asked. I’ve had a bath. He didn’t say no. She had: the skin under her open dressing gown was rosy and damp, blotched here and there with talc. Her black hair, where it lay on her neck, was wet. She knelt and lit the fire. Mind if I open my bottle? she asked. It’s my birthday. He didn’t say no. He said: There’s a knife in there with a thing on it. In the drawer under his books. The knife was the sort a jolly old scoutmaster might wear, dangling from a leather belt on a clip on his hip, a big black jackknife, rough to clasp and having for parts: one blade, one gouge, one corkscrew, sprung like sharks. You do it, she said.
Fastidious fingers with dirty nails—he picked the spiral out—handed the knife back with the tool protrudent. You do it, he said. Louise sat down on the bedside chair, she bored the cork, she screwed, she gripped the bottle between her slippered feet, oh lovely view of her rosy breasts, the folds of her tum, her hairy lair, intensely foreshortened. Our friend had closed his eyes.
The cork coming out made her laugh. You got a cup? she asked. Never mind, we’ll share. Glug, glug, glug, glug—you first, say Happy Birthday. When he smiled it occurred to her that perhaps there was something wrong with his mouth, perhaps there always had been and he had tried to hide it with his bits of hair. When he smiled his mouth looked like something a surgeon had made for him. He smiled and smiled and toasted her with the Bull’s Blood, cocking his funny head to the right. He handed her the cup and she drank from the other side.
I’m going away, she said, I’ve made my mind up, no sense rotting in this hole anymore. Did you get any presents? he asked, did you get any birthday cards? That’s usual, isn’t it? People send things, the postman comes. I was still in bed, Louise replied, I had to get up and answer him. Our friend reached for the mug and drank it off. Thin throat, she thought. He took off his glasses whilst she poured some more. Her nipples, both on show, were pink as rosebuds; his eyes looked like bits of old foreskin. He looked eyeless when he sat there with his eyelids down, as though he were left with two red holes. How have you been? she asked. Oh better, he cried, oh better and better—isn’t it obvious? And what have you done all day? I watched the trains. From up on the hill? No, from another place, close to.
She drank. You’re a funny boy, she said, I’ve not met many like you. I’d be surprised if there were any, he said. She shrugged. A train, a slow one. They sat a
nd watched one another through the noise. It’s behind his eyes, she thought, behind his red eyelids mid somewhere at the back of his eyeballs. The train was interminable, a laborious clanking. I quite like the slow ones, Louise said. I don’t, he said and nor would you if you were me. If you were me you couldn’t imagine anything worse than a slow train, and the slower the worse.
They drank in turns, passing the cup. Soon she was careless of which side she drank from. She sat on the chair by his bed, her breasts came out, she covered them when it occurred to her to, her knees poked through, the length of her leg showed as far as the black shadow. It’s as though you’re poorly sick, she said, and I’m here visiting you. I’m incurable, he said, I’m beyond the reach of medical science. You look like Jesus, Louise said, at least you do when you take your glasses off. He took them off, he lolled his head against the dirty wall. It’s the beard, I suppose, she said.
In Another Country Page 12