by Wesley Stace
“Evie’s gone now,” I said. “Queenie and Reg are married, living in the old house. Frankie knows. I know.”
“You’ve just got it all worked out, haven’t you? It’s all very pretty where you live.” She spat tobacco from the tip of her tongue. “Couldn’t stand the shame of an illegitimate child who could only see her father on visiting days. Better a perfect dead war hero than a shameful live criminal. What does he care anyway? I’ve never even met the man.”
“Reg thinks Evie shopped him.” I couldn’t help but smile at how reasonable this ludicrous sentence sounded.
“Which time?” She rolled her eyes. “All of them?”
“It destroyed him.” I wanted to tell her about Reg — his advice, the pack of cards he gave me my second term at school, how he asked me to be his best man, how he was the one person to insist I got help — but there didn’t seem any point just now. And I knew from my own experience: there were times when you didn’t want to be cheered up.
There was a knock on the door. She yelled, “Hold on!” and walked down the corridor. I heard mumbling through a door partly opened. She was telling someone she couldn’t do whatever it was they expected. The door closed. She sighed as she returned.
The quiet was disturbed only by the radio’s harsh metallic crackle. “As for perfect dead war hero . . . ,” I said, “I think you had the pick of the fathers.” She narrowed her eyes, as though I was patronizing her. “I mean it, Sylvia. I found stuff Joe wrote in the war. He hated his mother, his marriage; he was only too happy to ditch his family and escape to war; he found out about you in a letter from Queenie; he wasn’t a war hero at all. He was in love with somebody else, who died, and he was pleased to die himself. . . . Look, you’re the only person I can tell. They don’t know any of this, so you can’t tell anyone.”
“Does it fucking look like I’m going to tell anyone?” Sylvia stubbed out her cigarette. There didn’t seem much more to say, and she surprised me with a question: “And when did they tell you?”
“After they got engaged. They just thought it was better out in the open. They rang you that Christmas.”
“No, not about me. When did they tell you about you?”
I didn’t answer her immediately. About me.
“I don’t know much,” she said, “but I know families are happy to repeat the same mistakes over and over again. And you and me are the same. You know about your father, right?”
Oh, that. Now I knew what she was talking about. She knew I knew.
“Yes, of course. Car-racing accident at Silverstone. Handsome married bloke. They met at the Clarendon. Queenie’s told me everything.” The radio was still spitting out tinny hits punctuated by the unctuous tones of the early-afternoon DJ. Now it was her turn to be silent. “Can you turn that radio off?”
“Yeah.” She sat back down. There were children playing in a nearby playground, screaming and laughing, laughing and screaming.
“Look what’s happened to you, George. You were such a lovely little kid, so happy, so outgoing.”
“Like before you cut your hair,” I said, ashamed that in her eyes, my fall was somehow as great as hers.
“You and me, George; we’re what playing happy families does.” She shook her head. Unexpectedly, she reached out to hold my hand. I was still smoking, so I let go of George. Her hands were rough, like the edges of my bitten nails. “Listen to me: the racing bloke wasn’t your dad. . . . Queenie thought so, ’cos Frankie wanted her to, and apparently she still thinks so. I didn’t mean to tell you. I thought you knew.” I closed my eyes as she dug her nails into my hand. “I don’t know who he was: her and Evie always kept that to themselves. But I remember Evie telling her: ‘He’ll hold you back! He doesn’t deserve you! He’s not a strong man!’ and Frankie crying her eyes out in her room. And it was never to be mentioned after that. Nothing was allowed to get in the way of her precious career — not him, not you, not me. But I never knew who he was. Only Frankie and Evie knew.”
I let her massage my hand as the dark shadows of her eyes filled with reflective tears. Without my assistance, George flopped back on my chest and tumbled to the floor.
We were the same after all, me and my forgotten Auntie Sylvia.
“I know who,” I said.
The silence was broken by another knock at the front door, which she tried to ignore, though she whispered when she spoke. “I’m so glad, Georgie. I didn’t want to break that to you. I don’t want you to think of me like I think about Evie. I want it all to be over, done.”
I nodded. There was another knock.
“Fucking fuck off!” she muttered. I stood up and bundled George back into his box. I had tried to put it to the back of my mind, scared to think of it, to hope it was true. “Don’t go now,” said Sylvia as I threw my rollies into my coat pocket and did up the catches on the box. “Not right now,” she pleaded, but I could make her feel better another day. She clung to my sleeve. “No!” she whispered through her clenched teeth. “Please. At least, not till he’s gone.” She thrust a thumb in the direction of the front door: hers was a pragmatic request. We stood like musical statues. I slowly extricated myself, letting her know I would wait. “Just five minutes, till the coast’s clear,” she said, and closed the kitchen door gently. “It’s not how it looks, George. It’s the landlord, that’s all.”
We stood in silence. She put her arms around me and held on as though only extreme concentration would send him from the door.
“Sorry, George. Sorry,” she murmured, partly in apology, partly in sympathy.
“I miss you,” I said. “I miss you singing in the kitchen. I miss your laugh. Queenie does too.”
“You wanted to ask a question?”
“You answered it.” My eyes stung. “This is real, right?”
“Yes, Georgie. It’s real.” Her head fell on my chest, and I put my fingers through the scrub of her hair. We stayed there longer than we had to, she needing the warmth of another human, I thinking of what I now had to do.
“I have to go,” I said. She pulled away from me.
“Thanks,” we both said at the same moment. She opened the front door cautiously. When nothing pushed by, she let me pass.
“George, don’t send the cavalry.” I shook my head. She pointed at George’s box. “And I don’t want to see that fucking thing ever again. Or hear it.” She pulled my head towards her and kissed my forehead. “Good luck, boy.”
The weather on my return to London was dismal, the slow train empty except for the occasional shoal of sheltering children who left puddles when their journeys ended two stops later. That morning’s news carelessly decorated the floor, temporary doormats for those bothered to wipe their feet. Another herd traipsed in, blue and grey, blazer and tied. A stolen cap was hurled around on a dare. They were only four or five years younger than I was.
I moved into the corridor, where I sat down on George’s box. Rain spat across my face as the white noise of passing countryside mixed with the rhythm of the train. The two carriages shifted backwards and forwards at my feet like miniature tectonic plates. I stood up and put my head out of the window, a dog in the passenger seat. Stung by the rain, I remembered a cold, windy trip to the seaside where Frankie, clutching her fedora, watched me from the safety of the deck chairs while I stood on the stony beach and let the waves crash over me. Des called me in, but I felt invincible. Afterwards, I took her to tea at a pier café for her birthday. I was seven.
Unable to open my eyes against the rain, I let the world rush by, imagining the rolling fields and ragged hedges, the bottles of beer thrown down the embankments, and now the houses, their fenced back gardens, their families whose dreams were full of trains. It was getting dark.
The noise gathered in intensity, like takeoff, as we smacked into another tunnel. I shouted into the echo chamber, my voice lost in the churning roar of the engine and wheels. And then we were through, slowing down to make another stop. Schoolchildren got off, and the car park was sl
owly emptying. Mothers, waiting for fathers on the next commuter train, read by interior lights: not a care in the world.
An endless procession of suburbs announced the city, and I turned my attention to the tracks themselves, glinting beneath the early-evening moon and the lights of the wet metropolis. I fixed on one and let it take me away, away, and then back, as it converged with another line. An empty train also heading for the city seemed about to careen into us but gracefully steered itself parallel in a polite race.
London didn’t notice or bother me, until I went underground and emerged into the echoing greenhouse of Charing Cross. With time to kill, I went to the station pub, a grim sanctuary for a congregation of solitary pilgrims and lost souls, with an unused fruit machine that kept burbling noisily, suggesting it was going to spew cash at any moment. A woman with glass red lips, her breasts frothing above the V-neck of a white sweater obscured in the cloud of its own fluffiness, asked me what was in the box. I didn’t answer, and she turned her attention elsewhere.
The train west was full of commuters, doing the same crosswords, reading the same sports news. I fell back into the corner, lulled by the noise and the motion, the box safe under my knees. I thought of Brenda’s bed and wondered where I would sleep tonight. Fishers were used to strange beds, but I couldn’t remember two nights where I hadn’t known where I’d be sleeping. Last night’s soft pillows and firm mattress had become this evening’s headrest and cold windowpane: what would they be tonight? In sleepy panic, I couldn’t find the Polaroid. By the time I checked my inside top pocket and felt its sharp corners, I was asleep.
I woke with a parched throat. It was 8:45 and dark when I bundled myself out. I walked down the meagre main street, past the barber’s and the newsagent, past the toy store where boys bought their records. There were no taxis, no buses, no cars. Only the pub, the Duke of Athole, showed signs of life. I had little money, but at least enough for a pint of beer.
Some of the Upside staff favoured the saloon bar, so I went into the public bar, a dissolute and smoky Olympics of bar billiards, darts, shove ha’penny, and competitive drinking. I peered into the saloon beyond, where business, tweed, and Barbour mingled. At the far right, as if my imagination had placed him there, stood Mr. Morris, deep in the reception of a joke. He took the head off his beer, wiping his top lip with finger and thumb. Patrick would be thinking about university.
My pint, and my money with it, was gone before I noticed I was drinking, and I set out for Upside, the country lanes glistening in the moonlight. Occasionally a car passed, announcing itself throughout the countryside, bare trees slicing through the glow of its headlights, and gave me a wide berth. George was heavy in his box.
Finally, I was at the end of the driveway, thinking about the last time I had made this trip. I checked for cars, ready to duck into the undergrowth. An unknown young man holding a small wooden tuck box and walking the Upside driveway in the middle of the night was suspicious. The hour obviated my only good excuse: “I’m an old boy. Just having a walk down memory lane.” Beyond the conker trees, I caught sight of the school for the first time. I took a left turn past the unused cricket pitch, cordoned off for the winter as usual, to the rear of the pavilion, where Donald had kept his tools. The smell took me back.
Dropping the makeshift curtain, I turned the light on. The supply room, where Donald and I had spent so many hours chatting, looked like a bomb site. I had half thought of spending the night here, but there was no chance of that. The armchair was covered in traffic cones, and the two chairs around the table were occupied by tubs of congealed white marker. I rolled a cigarette and put the pewter ashtray down, pleased to reunite it, however momentarily, with the table where it had sat so often, but I could barely find room for George’s box.
It’ll never do was the phrase that went through my head, over and over, as I looked at the mess. So I set George on the windowsill to keep guard and started to tidy up, a task complicated by the fact that I didn’t want anyone to be alerted by the light. This meant a great deal of circular shuffling of the contents, Rubik’s cube–style, before I opened the door to make some space. Hidden in a drawer, I found the current groundsman’s guilty secret — a half-drunk bottle of scotch. I sniffed it to make sure it wasn’t turpentine, meths, or petrol and, reassured, took a sip. Now I was getting somewhere. Emboldened, I sifted out the junk — antique lawn mower parts, splintered wickets and smashed hurdles, rotten pads, handleless shovels, slats of a broken cricket cradle — and turned the light off: out it all went. I also wheeled out the marker machine and the two mowers to give myself more elbow room.
Back inside, light on, I was left with the salvageable, the cricket score numbers, the cones, the creosote, the petrol cans and bottles of turpentine, the balls of yarn and odd lengths of rope, the usable tools, and the various forlorn items that had never received the required repairs: the broken weather vane, goals of net, trampled boundary flags. I cleared off what had once been a work space and hung the tools back on the nails in sensible order. I had no idea how long I had been working: the scotch made it a pleasure.
We admired my handiwork. I wasn’t tired and I had a sudden craving for the smell of the marker paint. I merrily mixed the powder with a little water from the rusty tap above the trough, as I had been taught, first making a smooth paste before diluting it further and stirring well. This done, there wasn’t anything for it but to pour it into the ancient machine, apparently the same one I had trundled around the hockey fields. Armed with the bottle, I took the marker outside.
I sat George against a tree, took a stake that I drove into the ground in the centre circle, and unraveled a ball of yarn. Then I started to practise: straight lines weren’t easy, but the circles represented a huge challenge, and there was barely any moonlight to guide me as I found a way of leaning into the curve, which seemed to smooth my progress. It was all feel: I could barely see the ground beneath my feet. Time to get to work.
When I could no longer hear the mixture slopping against the sides of the bucket, I finished — my supply of both scotch and mixture ran out simultaneously, and unexpectedly quickly, while I was marking one of the centre spots. I regretted that I was not allowed the satisfaction of leaning on my shovel and gazing across the new boundaries of my kingdom. That would wait till tomorrow.
I’d worked up a sweat and found myself shivering in the darkness. Though I now had the choice of a usable deck chair or a nearly cleared table, the pavilion was too cold for a bedroom — where was that little fan heater when you needed it? — and it was surely the alcohol that persuaded me that it was a shame to shiver in silence when there was a schoolful of beds so near, one of which had to be unoccupied.
I hid George’s box behind the chair, put him on my arm, and walked towards the school, seeing few lights except those left on in empty classrooms and deserted corridors. I passed the new assembly hall (long finished, though it still had the air of a recent development) and looked into the murk of the copse behind, unable to see from which perch I had enjoyed my bird’s-eye view of the Vox-inspired mayhem.
The back gate was unlocked, and I walked along the gravel path, past the headmaster’s study. The griffin door closed itself politely behind me. No one would come running at the click of a door. My only goal was to avoid being seen.
Inside, nothing had changed. It could have been a hundred years either side. I half-expected The Daily Mail on top of the billiard table cover to be dated the day I left. I had imagined that Upside would seem diminished, Lilliputian, but the school was actually somewhat larger than I remembered. Perhaps I felt small; I was certainly tired. I walked past the tuck box room, past the kitchen, and past the changing rooms, where my footsteps echoed louder and the disks dangled in formation. I walked up the back stairs and past the elder boys’ dormitory. It was too late for the Blackout Society, too late for reading under the covers, too late even for Matron to be making her rounds. It was even too late for me.
One final set of stairs
, just past the deputy headmaster’s rooms, and I was on the top floor. Nothing stirred, beyond the infrequent squeaking of metal bed frame and the creak of floorboard underfoot. Swift, Dryden, Johnson, Pope. All present and correct. My eyes accustomed to the gloom, I looked in each in turn. I walked down the rows of beds, between the bodies, slowly. A dreamer murmured from the other end of the room. “You’ll have to . . .” The rest of his sentence drifted back into his sleep.
I could have happily slipped between some sheets, regardless of the consequences, but there wasn’t a spare bed, so, in the humming darkness, I tiptoed to the location of my old bed, though nothing was wedged in as mine had been. I sat on the end of the nearest bed; the slumbering occupant generously rolled away from me to give me more room. In his dreams, perhaps I was his father, the under-matron, his dog. I sat there, exhausted.
George whispered: “ ‘There’s a one-eyed yellow idol to the north of Khatmandu, / There’s a little marble cross below the town. . . .’ ”
The moan of a dreamily murmured question was met with a satisfied purr of reassurance from elsewhere. I was conducting their dreams. And there I stayed, pulling their sleepy strings, until I was too tired to do anything but sleep myself.
Walking past the dispensary, I remembered the sick bay, a legendary (and perennially unoccupied) Eden of warm milk and kindness, comics and cough drops. Past the washbasins on parade, I opened the door that led to this Shangri-la: few had been there, and those who had were never able to find their way back once they’d been discharged. It turned out to be another dull corridor, from which came three rooms. I could just make out two beds in the first and I opted for the nearest one. Closing the door behind me, I sat George down on the bedside chair, took off my jacket, and slipped under the top cover. Lying in bed, I thought of Brenda, into whom I was just disappearing when a timid voice materialized in the darkness.