The Aerodynamics of Pork

by Patrick Gale

  ‘Oh. My word.’ His voice was on the stairs. ‘Perhaps I should …’

  ‘Nonsense. I’m not infectious. Just bored.’

  He came in. She saw at once that he had caught the sun. It made his milky eyes bluer and his hair a more interesting mouse.

  ‘If I’d known that you were laid up in bed, I’d have brought some flowers for you to smell, or some gin to help you sleep it all away.’

  ‘You can’t buy flowers in Saint Jacobs, only fish. You haven’t asked what’s wrong with me?’

  ‘Enlighten me.’

  His teeth glistened. She mimicked Marilyn Monroe.

  ‘Something unsavoury and intestinal,’ she cooed.

  ‘Enough said.’

  ‘Quite.’ She waved a graceful arm at the chair. ‘Won’t you sit down. Just shove those books on the floor. God, it’s nice to see a human face! They’ve been rehearsing all day.’

  He sat down and looked over the titles he had displaced.

  ‘Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play. Now that is good.’

  ‘Isn’t it? A friend up at Oxford told me it was essential reading. He was taught by her, lucky thing.’

  ‘Has no-one been to see you?’

  ‘Not a soul. Usually there’s the charlady, but she isn’t much of a conversationalist. Everyone’s too busy making music. Even if they weren’t, Mummy’s very strange about illness and wouldn’t tell anyone. She looks upon it as a sort of moral lapse – like doubt; one of those things that children go through which are best not discussed in public. She was ruthless about making sure we got through the worst as soon as possible. If a friend had measles, we’d be sent around to play in their sickroom for a whole afternoon in the hope that we’d get infected. She got terribly cross once, because she heard that I’d upset one little patient by insisting that Seth and I be allowed to kiss every one of her chicken pox scabs.’

  ‘Monstrous!’

  ‘Why are you so brown? I’d lain here fondly imagining that in all this glorious sun, I had at least one fellow sufferer, cloistered in the shade. I thought you’d have been slaving over a hot typewriter.’

  ‘Heavens no. I find I can only write for about three or, at the most, four hours a day.’

  ‘So you write all morning and visit the sick and fatherless all afternoon?’

  ‘Usually. But sometimes there are variations. Right now I’m in one of the phases when I’m asleep all morning, bored all afternoon and only in the mood to write about seven-thirty P.M.’

  ‘Well, what’s so wrong with that? Sounds rather civilized.’

  ‘Round about seven-thirty the Mob comes home from sawing on its catgut and we all have to sit around the farmhouse table for our convivial evening meal.’

  ‘God, how awful!’

  ‘What’s more, it seems that most of these “Professionals” hadn’t met one another before, and by the second night they were so busy making up for lost time that the place fairly reeked of licence.’

  ‘Can’t you lock yourself away in your room?’

  ‘I try, but the noise comes through the walls.’

  ‘At least you’re spared the College horror of gory details over breakfast.’

  ‘Thank the Lord.’

  Barnes shuddered perceptibly.

  ‘I remember there was a man who used to sound as if he was murdering this girl,’ Venetia began. ‘He’d start by the usual grunts and moans, and then the grunts got louder and louder. And all the time there was her pathetic wail, which I’m sure was quite fake – that kind of girl. Finally, he’d just be yelling with the effort as if he were belabouring her with a blunt instrument. I was quite frightened the first time I heard it. The word got around College and people started calling at unearthly hours on bogus missions, in the hope of catching the crucial moment. Benji, he’s the friend who wants to write a thesis on you, by the way, Benji said it was a new concept in performance art and that I should learn to live with it as something savagely chic – a new dimension to interior design.’

  Barnes laughed aloud.

  ‘Why is it so ridiculous?’ he asked.

  ‘I suppose it’s because lovers are so off their guard. It’s like catching someone dancing alone or talking to themselves in the mirror.’

  ‘But don’t you feel ridiculous when you do it yourself?’

  ‘But of course.’ She was caught off guard. ‘That’s why I try to do it as little as is humanly possible,’ she lied. ‘How about you?’

  ‘Oh, it’s worse for me. Well, I guess it’s worse from one point of view and infinitely better from another.’

  ‘Don’t be so cagey. What do you mean?’

  She wished Benji were a fly on the wall taking notes.

  ‘Well.’ He paused and recrossed his legs, leaning forward and looking fixedly at her knees. He picked his phrases deliberately. ‘Clinically speaking, I suppose one would have to say that I was gay, and one of the charms of being gay is that the members of the fraternity tend to be either so unspeakably vulgar that one never meets them, or else so deliciously overwrought with confusions that in their company sex rarely finds a moment to rear its ugly head.’

  ‘That explains it.’

  ‘Explains what?’

  ‘Well, not only why I liked your books, but why I felt sure when we were introduced the other night that I was bound to like you too.’

  ‘Perhaps I shouldn’t have told you.’

  ‘Don’t you like people to know?’

  ‘Not much. It’s so very limiting.’

  ‘Then they won’t. All the Professionals can think that you’re making passionate love to me while they’re out sawing catgut.’

  They laughed.

  ‘Seth’s gay, isn’t he?’ he asked, with no air of enquiry. Venetia looked surprised. It seemed curiously irrelevant.

  ‘Oh, no, I don’t think so,’ she replied at once, ‘just polite and rather sensitive. Why do you ask?’

  ‘Nothing really. Just a writer’s magpie curiosity for character. Would you like to come to New York?’

  ‘Who told you?’

  ‘No-one’s told me anything.’

  ‘I’ve been dying to go there ever since I was about twelve. I was planning on trying to get there after Finals next summer.’

  ‘What would you do?’

  ‘I don’t know. Obviously, I’d want to get a job to pay my way, but it’s meant to be almost impossible to get a work permit unless you show them written confirmation that someone will employ you once you get there.’

  ‘I could employ you.’

  Venetia’s eyes grew as round as her midriff.

  ‘Might I enquire, Sir, in what capacity?’ she asked, Blanche Dubois.

  ‘Can you type?’

  ‘Not much, but I could learn by next June.’

  ‘Well, I need someone to help me out, but someone with a brain and no American connections so that they could get on with the work on their own, and wouldn’t keep sloping off to stay with said connections. You’ve got a brain, obviously, and you clearly don’t have any friends in the States or you wouldn’t be looking like Betty Boop.’

  ‘Don’t be mean,’ she laughed.

  ‘And I think I’m right in saying that we seem to get on OK.’

  Their smiles met once more, clean and confident.

  ‘What would I have to do besides give people the idea that I’m your good-thing-in-residence?’

  ‘Well, I’d want you to take dictation, and you’d have to stop being rude, and help with research for novels and the lectures at Yale, and you’d have to be nice to my mother on a regular basis.’

  ‘Oh, God!’

  ‘No she’s wonderful, honestly.’

  ‘Well, of course you’d say that.’ She felt it was time to take a little control. It was too good an opportunity to be lost in a mess of jokes. ‘We’ve plenty of time to talk about it, at least to write. I’ve got a whole academic year to get BA’d, and you’ve got a whole one to think up a bloody good excuse for not employing me. N
o, but seriously.’ She enjoyed stilling his smiles. He was a pushover. ‘Seriously, I don’t have any other plans. I want to find a job to use my brain, I need to find one, and I don’t want to do another degree, even if I get a First. The chances of my finding an ideal or even a reasonable job over here at the moment are distinctly slender. I really can’t see any reason why I couldn’t come over.’

  ‘So you’re really interested?’

  She assumed a US accent. ‘You bet.’

  ‘Well don’t go having a change of heart and settling down in the Home Counties to have someone’s babies.’

  ‘No way!’ There was a desperate edge to her chuckle. She blunted it by taking the initiative. ‘Maybe you could find the time to come over to the Fens next term to give a lecture, then we could talk some more?’

  He stood and walked over to the window, faking a yawn because he felt slightly ill at ease in this English girl’s bedroom.

  ‘Can your Mama see her church from here?’ he asked, ignoring her suggestion. ‘Oh no. Not quite. Ah, but I do see that kid brother of yours walking over the slope of the field with that old woman of the hills.’

  ‘Seth and Bronwen?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘They’ve been on a walk along the cliffs.’

  ‘Well. I must be off.’

  ‘Stay and have some tea.’

  ‘No thanks. It’s my day to peel the potatoes. Try and get well for Thursday night.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘So you can come and hear my talk on Trollope.’

  ‘Oh yes. Sorry.’

  ‘No. The talk doesn’t matter, although it would teach you what you’d be putting up with for the next few years. No, I thought maybe we could go out afterwards. You can show me Penfasser by night.’

  ‘Lovely. I’ll try and get well.’

  ‘Don’t move. I can see myself out.’

  ‘Bye.’

  She grinned a farewell. He was rather good company. She nestled back into the pillows as he walked down the stairs. And far less acidic than Benji. She was astonished at the rapidity with which they seemed to have broken down all the usual barriers. She liked that Americanism in him. She heard him click the garden door to, and felt flattered to have become a chosen among women. She patted the hump, secure now in the belief that it could not last long. The door opened again downstairs. Her soul magnified itself.

  ‘Hello,’ called Seth, fatuously, ‘I’m back.’

  TUESDAY three

  Mo chained her bike to a lamp-post and slung her helmet over one arm. Some kids were kicking an empty Coke can against a nearby wall. A tubby runt of a girl with carroty hair stopped and stared as Mo walked over and started up the stairs. Then she put on a Hilda Ogden accent and called out,

  ‘Any more of them flaming bikers round these parts and I’m writing to Council, I’ll give yer that straight!’

  Mo climbed on through the peals of laughter. Kids gave her the creeps. She had slapped one once in a supermarket and the mother had screamed blue murder.

  Suffolk House was one of the older blocks, probably from the late Forties, before they started doing towers. It was red brick and long and six storeys high. The staircase ran up one side, giving on to a balcony corridor at each floor. You knew which was your floor by the colour of the doors. Green, yellow, blue, violet, red and brown. Mumsy’s was a brown one: sixth floor. There was litter everywhere and a strong smell of piss. No lift, so Mo did most of her shopping for her. Mumsy said her friend had a lift and it was always breaking down and anyway, six floors were easier to climb than sixteen. A clatter of dance music and a couple of black kids with a ghetto-blaster ran out of the red balcony and passed Mo on the stairs. Off to beat the living daylights out of Carrot-Head. Mo grinned fleetingly.

  She swung off the staircase on to the brown balcony and walked past the strings of gaily coloured washing to number twenty-nine. She rang the bell and waited. She rang it again. Still no-one. She pushed open the letter-box and called out,

  ‘Mumsy? Here! Mum?’ The old love must be asleep. Mo pulled out her spare key and let herself in. There was a tiny hall, then a lounge, bedroom, bathroom and kitchen. Mo set down her helmet and walked into the lounge on the left.

  ‘Hello, Mumsy.’

  She had dozed off in her chair without even taking off her scarf and coat. A bag of shopping was at her feet. Mo touched her gently on the hand. In the window, Sandra let out a chirrup. Sandra the budgie. They’d been together now for so long that Mumsy wanted to get her stuffed. For the sake of the bird’s dignity, Mo hoped that Mistress might go first.

  Mumsy’s eyes opened, blearily pink with strain. A broad smile dawned across her face.

  ‘What? Oh, hello, lovie. Happy birthday for Saturday! Had I nodded off? How awful. Must be getting old. I must … oh gawd, look – I hadn’t even taken off my coat!’ She stood and gave her daughter a kiss. ‘Hello, love,’ she said.

  ‘Hello, Mum. Ta ever so for the card.’

  ‘Did you get it on time?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Oh good. I can never remember about Saturdays. Post goes queer at weekends. Did you get any nice presents?’

  Mo thought of Hope.

  ‘Yeah,’ she said with a smile, ‘one or two.’

  ‘Well? What did you get?’ asked her foster-mother, after a short wait.

  ‘Come on. Let’s make some tea and I’ll tell you when we’ve sat down again.’

  ‘No you don’t. It’s your special day. I’ll make the tea and you sit here and put your feet up.’ She pushed Mo into the settee and shuffled, humming, into the kitchen with her bags. Mo obliged, it was quicker.

  ‘How’s work?’ called out Mumsy.

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Nothing exciting at the moment?’

  ‘Not much. Just burglaries and that. I’m going to get my picture in the Standard, though.’

  ‘Really?’ There was genuine delight in the voice. ‘When?’

  ‘Later this week, maybe. Some stupid photographer of theirs following me about. Right pain.’

  ‘But why are they photographing you?’

  ‘I dunno. Got to photograph something, I suppose.’

  ‘You’re as bad as your father was. Too modest by half.’

  Mo sat and stared at Sandra who sat and stared in her mirror. Mo tapped the cage so that the mirror swung slightly, and smiled to watch the bird move her ugly head to keep up with her image. Mumsy set down the cups and saucers, and a pink frosted cake. One candle in the middle.

  ‘Now don’t go teasing Sandra. You’ll make her sick again.’

  ‘How d’you mean “again”?’

  ‘Well she took weeks to get over that Birdie-Chew thing you gave her,’ said Mumsy, walking back to the kitchen. ‘I think it was meant for mynahs or something. Didn’t agree with her at all.’

  The kettle started to whistle. Mumsy let it reach its highest pitch before she turned off the gas. Strict beliefs about the properties of tea and water.

  Mo knew that she ought to suggest to her mother that she come to live with her in Hackney, but she could never bring herself to do it. It felt like giving up. They’d been much older than all her mates’ parents at school. That was probably why they’d adopted in the first place; too old for kids of their own. They’d married late. It must have been for love because it certainly wasn’t a shot-gun job. Dad had been a brikky, and trained the lads down at the gym at nights. Even at sixty his coffin had been enormous. Mumsy had always sworn he could tear a shirt-sleeve with his biceps, and Mo had boasted about this to kids at school. It made up for having only one skirt if your dad could tear a shirt-sleeve like that. Mumsy had worked nights as an usherette at the Empire, so it was always Dad who got Mo up in the mornings and saw she had enough breakfast. School was just down the road so he always walked her to the gates and then went on to his site. No boy trouble, of course, and she’d worked hard and never complained; the perfect kid. She looked at the sugar rosettes and decided that she hadn’t got to k
now Mumsy properly until her teens.

  ‘Tea’s up,’ said Mum, lighting the candle. ‘Only one, I’m afraid, love, but then …’

  ‘Yes, I know. I’m a blooming dinosaur.’

  ‘That’s not what I meant at all,’ she went on, pouring the tea. ‘It’s just that, well, birthdays aren’t so important once you’ve grown up.’

  ‘It’s a lovely cake, Mum. You are clever.’

  ‘It’s a pleasure to do,’ she laughed. ‘Well go on. Blow it out.’ Mo smiled up at her as she obeyed. Mumsy clapped then said cryptically, ‘You stay here. I’ll be back in a jiffy.’

  Mo cut two slices of cake while she was gone. The cake-slice and stand only came out for birthdays. Mumsy’d gone to cake decorating classes once.

  ‘Happy Birthday, dear Mo-oh. Happy Birthday to you!’ Mum sang, returning with a large parcle. It stood about a foot high and was nearly twice as wide. ‘Now,’ she said, sitting down and taking a mouthful of cake, ‘bet you can’t guess.’

  Mo’s heart sank, but she kept up a smile as she undid the ribbon and pulled back the happy paper. Baring her teeth she lifted the cage on to her lap.

  ‘Oh Mum!’ she produced.

  ‘Well, I know you’re not very partial to budgies, even though I think they’re much better pets, but then Bren across the way’s got a hen canary as well as a boy one, and it laid a load of eggs and she let me have this fellow. Isn’t he sweet? He’s a boy, so he’ll sing.’

  The bird was enchanting; yellow, with a bright green cap of feathers on his head. He hopped from perch to perch then, as she put her head nearer the cage, he hung his head on one side and let out an inquisitive ‘cheep’. Mo laughed.

  ‘Oh Mum, he’s a duck! He looks just like a little school kid with a cap on.’

  ‘Now d’you really like him? I worried so much after I’d brought him back. You see I’d forgotten all about your Andy.’

  ‘Oh heck, Andy.’

  ‘Well, I gave it a bit of thought, and I realized how as you could hang him up in the kitchen. It’s good and warm, and if he had a hook from the ceiling, Andy couldn’t get up and frighten him. Bren says they like being where there’s lots to see.’

  ‘Like a bit of action, do you, lovie?’ Mo asked. He chirruped back.