Chaplin & Company

by Mave Fellowes

  ‘So there is one more thing I’m going to ask you to do. As well as turn up to our meetings. I’d like you to take this away with you today and keep it alive. It needs water once a day, just enough to fill the tray, and it needs to be kept in a sheltered spot. Inside near to a window is ideal.’

  ‘Is this a joke?’ says John Kettle, looking round at the others holding their plants on their laps like a bunch of bridesmaids. ‘Fucking pot plants? Excuse my French.’ He sees a flicker of a smile on the pale woman’s lips. Maybe she’s not so snooty.

  ‘Mine smells lovely,’ says Mary, leaning forward to sniff.

  ‘Bear with me, John,’ says the vicar. ‘The point is, it’s something for you to remember. Every day, you’re making time to do this. It may seem stupidly simple, it may seem pointless –’

  ‘Too right.’

  ‘– but in remembering to look after something as small as a plant, we can begin to remember how to look after ourselves.’

  ‘I look after myself just fine, thank you.’

  ‘Hmmmm,’ pipes Mary, raising both eyebrows and pouting her flaky lips.

  ‘You shut up,’ he growls through his beard. ‘Dirty old witch. Stinking pisshead. Excuse my French again.’ The pale woman doesn’t smile. ‘What’s the problem, blondie, are we not amused?’

  ‘John, if you’re frustrated with the situation, then direct your abuse at me, not other members of the group.’

  ‘All right then. Alwyn.’ John Kettle stands up. ‘You can keep your bloody plant. Keep it for another one of your mad drunks or druggies. Or why not stick it in your lovely flowerbed out the front?’ He slams the pot down on his seat and soil spills everywhere. He pushes the sleeves of his shirt up his arms. ‘I don’t need a bleeding awareness programme. I don’t need first-names-only with some speccy pipsqueak. I don’t need to sit in the kids’ corner with the beanbags and the train sets. I’m not one of your nut-jobs.’ He taps the side of his head. He is gathering momentum, getting louder. He can hear his voice booming in the empty church. ‘I don’t need to be stuck in here with a bunch of tramps and zombies, sniffing bloody flowers. I’ve got work to do. I’ve got things to keep an eye on.’

  Eye on, eye on, the church vibrates with his last note.

  ‘Okay, John,’ says the vicar, putting his pot plant down on the carpet next to his chair. ‘I know what happened last week. They passed on the report.’ John Kettle winces and looks away towards the fluorescent-lit altar and the glaring lights. He can hear the whine of the electrics. The vicar is speaking in a stupid, muted voice.

  ‘Everyone here is in a different situation.’

  John Kettle’s fingers are twitching. He can’t remember the last time he felt more like laying someone out. The vicar stands up and puts an arm out but doesn’t touch him. Wisely.

  ‘You may consider others to have bigger problems, or that there are better ways to spend your time, but all we ask is that you come along. As far as I understand, that was one of the conditions of your release from hospital, is that right?’

  John Kettle spins around. ‘Fucking Nazis, haven’t got a bloody clue about a person’s life. All the other stuff he might have to do. Four p.m. on a Thursday afternoon? Some of us have proper jobs. Reverend. This is a fucking waste of time.’

  Time, says the church, backing him up.

  The vicar lowers his arm to his side, and says very quietly, ‘The report mentioned that you had had your position suspended, is that right?’

  . . .

  ‘Is that right, John?’

  . . .

  ‘John?’

  . . .

  Eyes so tired.

  Suddenly. So tired.

  He rubs them.

  Mouth aches. He lets it go loose. Rubs jaw, hears the bristles scratch.

  He drops his head, jams his hands into the pockets of his trousers. Starts to rock back and forth, a nodding donkey, a cresting ship.

  Shoulders curl in.

  ‘Sit back down, John.’ The vicar leans over and lifts the pot plant from his seat, brushing the soil off with his hand.

  John sits down and takes it back on to his lap. Shall he do what he’s told? Doesn’t know any more. What are the others doing? The woman opposite is looking down at the ethnic rug. He doesn’t want to look at Mary. He catches eyes with the lad on his right, who flicks his glance away, starts chewing on his lip.

  The vicar is leaning forward, his elbows on his knees. He pushes his glasses up his nose and blinks, big-eyed. ‘No one has to engage with any of the work we do here, if it makes them uncomfortable. Everyone is welcome to tell me where to go if I cross a line, or get something wrong. That’s almost bound to happen. This is a process – I’ll be trying my best but I’m sure to make mistakes. Some of the exercises might not work for some of you –’ he looks around the group – ‘but I’d just ask that you give each one a try. Does that sound fair enough?’

  ‘I say so,’ shrugs Mary.

  ‘Shall we start again?’

  ‘A clean slate,’ she announces, emphasising the ‘t’.

  ‘Exactly. Great. Okay. I’d like us each to look at our plants.’ He lifts his to eye level and turns it around in front of his face. John copies him and lifts the plant up with both hands. ‘Really closely, under and all around it.’ John turns it around the same way as Alwyn. ‘Really notice the stalks, how many and their texture.’

  Six rough stalks.

  ‘The shapes of the leaves and their colour.’

  Round-edged, dark-green leaves covered in fine, grey fur.

  ‘Their underside.’

  John tilts the pot up to see underneath. Light green, shiny as plastic.

  ‘How many flowers, and the different colours.’

  Six flowers with heart-shaped blue petals. Purple smudges like ink stains spreading from their middle. Nucleus of small bright-yellow beads. So many and so small he can’t count.

  Alwyn brings his plant down to his lap and the others follow. ‘So the idea of this is that in seeing our plant, in looking at it and really seeing it, knowing our plant better, we will be more inclined to remember it. To remember to look after it. Now we know our plant, it is harder to forget about it.’

  ‘Objection,’ says Mary. ‘I don’t know about that, Alwyn. I forget about everything. No long-term memory. It’s my special talent.’

  ‘Absolutely everything?’

  ‘Except the words to songs.’

  ‘That sounds like another special talent.’

  She shrugs and pouts her lips out. ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘So could you all put your plants down now, just on the floor or somewhere.’ Alwyn lowers his to the floor and John copies. The pale woman twists and puts hers on top of the bookshelf behind her. ‘I want us to look at our hands, to really look at them, and see them.’ He lays a hand, palm up, on each knee. John does the same. His hands are thick and stubby and deeply lined. The palms are a rough, rubbery red and separated from his leathered forearms by deep creases across his wrists which make them look as if they have been screwed on. There is dirt in these creases, and in the deep tracks across his palms, which are cross-hatched, woven like ropes. Each puffy section of finger is scored with vertical lines.

  ‘Have a look at how they move.’ Alwyn opens and closes his fingers like the tendrils of an anemone.

  John does the same, and sees his yellow, overgrown nails: thick with dirt, rimmed with muck, bowed like claws. The nails on his thumb and forefinger are striped brown from the fags. As long as a whore’s! He shuts his fists and looks to the right. The lad next to him has his hands face down on his knees, the cuffs are halfway up the hands and he’s not doing any of the movements Alwyn demonstrated. He’s just staring at them, shaved head hanging forward like it’s too heavy for his long, white neck. The fingers poking out of the cuffs are long and white too. John can see chipped blue varnish on the nails, just at the ends, as if they have been dipped.

  ‘So the idea is the same here. That in knowing something b
etter, we are more likely to care for it. To look after it. These are our hands.’ He lifts his up either side of his head, fingers splayed. John starts to copy, and then sees that none of the others are doing the same and drops his hands back down to his lap.

  ‘They are different to everyone else’s. No one else has the unique shape, pigmentation, the same fingerprints as we do. Our lives are in these palms, this pattern of lines is our experience.’ Alwyn links his fingers and leans forward. ‘We overlook ourselves so easily. So many things in life tell us they are more important than caring for ourselves, coming back to ourselves. We can lose touch with ourselves just as easily as we can with friends and family members. And it’s when we become strangers to ourselves that we neglect ourselves most harshly.’

  Mary raises a finger. ‘But it’s also true, is it not, Alwyn, that sometimes when we look too closely, we don’t like what we see.’

  The pale woman gasps, very faintly, and lifts a hand to her mouth. She is staring at Mary’s hand, which hangs in the air, poking up from the cuff of the mackintosh, making its point. There are raised welts crossing the back of the hand, sticking out pink and shiny from the black skin in crossed lines like a tally chart. John looks down to Mary’s other hand, which is sitting like a claw in her lap, similarly striped and swollen.

  Alwyn cranes forward towards Mary. ‘What happened to your hands?’

  ‘Oh, these old things.’ Mary flutters her hand in the air and then puts it inside the other one. ‘So long ago I can’t remember. I told you that was my special talent.’

  ‘Those wounds look recent.’

  ‘Well, these things take time to clear up. Sometimes they flare up.’ She chuckles and shifts back in her seat.

  ‘Mary, did someone else do that to you?’

  ‘Oh, I expect so.’

  ‘You remember who did it?’

  She rolls her eyes up to think and makes a little whistle with her mouth. ‘I couldn’t possibly say. It could have been any one of them.’

  ‘Them?’

  ‘The angry people. They don’t like you sleeping on their street.’

  ‘Can you remember where it happened?’

  She shakes her head and whistles again, the matted hair makes a brushing sound against her mackintosh collar. ‘No, sir. I rotate. And I don’t keep a diary.’

  ‘Did you report it?’

  ‘My memory is full of holes but there are some things I am sure about. I can safely say that I did not.’

  ‘Have you been attacked like this before?’

  ‘Oh, many times.’ She cocks her head and bats her eyelashes at him.

  ‘And never gone to the police?’

  ‘Perhaps the first time, but that really is too long ago to remember. Stop testing the old girl.’

  ‘Okay. I’m sorry. I would like to help you find somewhere safe to sleep.’

  ‘Save your energy, young man. I like my rotations. Many have taken this challenge and failed. I am an impossible situation.’

  ‘I would like to try.’

  She shrugs. ‘Alas, another ship heads for the rocks.’

  At the end of the session John Kettle carries the pot plant back through the estates and along the towpath back to his boat. He holds it out in front of him, in both hands. He puts it on the section of deck by the cabin wall, where it will be sheltered, and fills the tray with water. He sits on the deck next to it and rolls a cigarette to smoke. And then goes up to the Lock for a drink. He deserves it.

  SEVENTEEN

  11 a.m. on the last Sunday in August: Odeline’s seventh waking on board the boat Chaplin and Company. Sunlight streams fully through the portholes (she forgot to pull the curtains across). Her head is throbbing and she is hot in her nightdress. She kicks the quilt down to the bottom of the bed, but doesn’t sit up and start the day. Instead, she sinks back into the events of the day before. They are even more vivid than her dreams.

  Ridley is back. The Saltheart hadn’t been there yesterday morning as Odeline made her way to the barge cafe. But suddenly, while she was watching Vera pour hot water into her cup, he had appeared in the doorway.

  ‘Hello,’ he said. That easy, rumbling voice. He was standing squarely on the step with his hands in his pockets. His hair was tied back and he was wearing a short-sleeved shirt with a green vest underneath and khaki-coloured trousers. No shoes. His feet brown and sinewy, surprisingly clean. The right one was tattooed with busy bars of music, notes crammed into the lines. He dropped his head to see what she was looking at and said, ‘Fiddle music.’

  Odeline hadn’t known how to be. ‘Hello,’ she said, and leant against the counter. The radio was playing some noisy song with explicit lyrics. From your head down to your toes . . . She picked up her hot chocolate from the counter and gulped at it. The liquid scorched the roof of her mouth.

  ‘So, John Kettle is okay,’ he said, raising the eyebrow with the two gold rings in it. ‘He just said thank you to me. Amazing!’

  ‘Amazing,’ Odeline had repeated, and taken another sip of her drink. It was still scaldingly hot, but she needed something to do.

  ‘So,’ he said, ‘do you remember I was telling you about my friend, the one who has the parties on her boat in Kensal Rise? There’s one tonight and I was planning to go along, if you wanted to join. They welcome new performers. I don’t know who will be there but it could be interesting for you. And there’s usually good music.’ He turned to Vera. ‘Perhaps you would like to come as well?’

  ‘Me?’ said Vera, tucking her hair behind her ear.

  ‘Sure. It’s not all performers. Some people just come along to watch and listen.’

  Odeline looked at Vera in her mauve T-shirt and huge denim skirt. Surely she would be out of place at such a creative gathering.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Vera. ‘I don’t know. I have jobs.’

  ‘Well,’ he shrugged, ‘I’m relaxed. I’ll be leaving at seven, if anybody wants a lift over. You are both very welcome to come.’ He stepped back and took his hand out of his pocket to wave goodbye, his wrist thickly bound in its ropes and copper bangles. He then spun himself around on the ball of one foot and walked off smoothly through the cafe tables, swaying his hips to dodge a chair. He was very elegant in motion, Odeline thought. A dancer, a will o’ the wisp. She couldn’t believe she had only spoken two words. For some reason her brain had switched off. She wished she’d asked where he’d been.

  ‘Are you really going to go?’ she said to Vera, who was leaning into the cupboard under the sink. She imagined herself and Ridley trying to whisper to each other under the willow tree like Romeo and Juliet, with Vera as the fat chaperone in the background.

  ‘I don’t know. I have to make sandwiches for tomorrow. And Mr Zjelko gives me a shopping list. We have run out of everything here.’ She took out a thin baton of black bin bag, unrolled it and shook it out. ‘Including these.’

  Odeline took a sip of her hot chocolate, which was at last the right temperature. She had been so surprised to see Ridley that she had forgotten to ask for all the crucial information about tonight. The dimensions of the space, for example, or the time allotted for each artist.

  ‘How big will the performance space be?’

  ‘Tonight?’ Vera flips the bin lid back and hooks the bag around the rim, leaning on the fridge to press it down inside.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How do I know this, Odi? He says it is on a boat, so . . . I don’t know. Same as this?’ She uses the fridge handle to pull herself up again.

  ‘So no stage?’

  ‘I don’t know. It sounds, you know, like a party.’

  Odeline couldn’t imagine how this would work. Would people be drunk, like the Covent Garden job? Would Ridley be drinking – and would it be safe to travel on his boat if he was? Should she take her A–Z in case she needed to get home independently? What time would the gathering end? Was it safe to travel alone from Kensal Rise late at night? But then maybe she wouldn’t have to travel alone . . .


  She put her hot chocolate down on the counter. ‘If you want I can help with your jobs, so you can be ready in time for seven o’clock.’

  At quarter past seven they were on board the Saltheart, travelling up the canal towards Kensal Rise. With Odeline’s prop box inside the cabin, there was room for them all on the wide steering deck at the back of the boat. Ridley steered, leaning back against the wooden rail around the deck, with one leg lifted underneath himself – like a heron – bare foot pressed against the rail. He had changed into a different shirt from earlier – this one was striped and collarless with bells for buttons – but he was still wearing khaki trousers and no shoes. He hadn’t read his Manual: he didn’t maintain the eyeline over the roof of the boat, instead looked around at the buildings as they passed them, and at the mug of beer which he held in his left hand. Odeline sat on the right-hand side of his boat, holding on to the rail as they chugged along. Vera sat on the left with her hands in her lap. She had her eyes closed and her face lifted to the low evening sun. Ridley didn’t talk much either at the start, just offered them a drink, which they both declined. ‘I want to keep a clear head,’ Odeline had said, ‘for my performance. What size is the performance space?’

  He’d shrugged. ‘I don’t know. It’s just a boat.’

  She was wearing her tailcoat with a wing-collared shirt and red braces holding up her pinstriped trousers. She had decided not to wear the waistcoat as well because of the warmth. She wasn’t wearing full make-up, just some eyeliner and rouge for the cheeks. She had rubbed some rouge on her lips as well, thinking of Ridley. She didn’t want to look too manly. It had been hard to see the effect of the make-up in the bathroom mirror with the light broken – she hadn’t yet managed to get the cover off to see what bulb was underneath. Brushing her hair had made it stick out more, so she had splashed handfuls of water on it from the tap. She had brought her bowler but hadn’t put it on yet, and picked at the rim now as she looked around. The light glowed orange on the buildings. She remembered passing these high tenement blocks the day she arrived.