Now That You're Back

by A. L. Kennedy

  Yes, up and out would be the better choice – avoid hellos and awkwardness.

  Funny that he still had such a clear image of that woman’s face and the shape her curled legs made under the sheet. Walking down the sand yellow steps to the embankment and the river he tried to make himself still inside, to let her ease away. After all, he wouldn’t see her again.

  It was too early for the sun to get into the stone, but the wall behind him, the fat block under him where he sat, were beginning to flare with light. The coolness from the river was pushing up under his chin and feet and the sun was pressing down. His hair was drying – he liked to let it do that in the sun, the process seemed to make the bristle finer. He could smell his own aftershave, soap, a trace of depilatory cream, the laundering and cloth in his shirt. Everything to do with him smelt clean.

  Back up on the street, away from the surprisingly sweet river, there must be a Métro station because there were snatches of that, too – a very warm, very dry, almost spiced kind of smell. It was hard to pin down, but exactly the smell of the Métro and nothing else.

  He reached into his pocket for the sweet tin and pulled off the sharp metal lid with its black and white cat. Here they even drew their cats to look foreign: that was to say, French. He could almost feel the scent of imitated strawberry and sugar. It made him twitch his nose. The cotton of his trousers was snug over his legs, smooth, his shoes giving out a good shine. In fact, he couldn’t deny that he was well turned out in an exterior way. She was still there inside, though, with that sickly way of smiling and her short nails. If she gave him a hard-on now that would not be neat.

  The soil here was ridiculous, like face powder or crumbled biscuit with shells of flint. He adjusted the weight on his shoulders and began to enjoy the easiness in his walk.

  Brace up, John, brace up.

  He didn’t need to do this, of course, the show was paying him enough, he didn’t need to work the booth, might have left it at home instead of dragging it round like a bloody penance.

  He couldn’t have left it, though. He couldn’t have come here and stayed for so many months knowing that he hadn’t the choice just to walk away one morning and set up the booth, get inside the guts of it where no one else could join him, because no one else would fit.

  The booth always gave him the feeling he had when he sat absolutely still in the middle of very loud music: just didn’t move anywhere, but in his head. Used to make his grandfather demented, that.

  ‘Why don’t you bloody breathe, Doy. Sitting there, like you were stuffed. Enjoy yourself; everyone is looking.’

  But he would keep on sitting, knowing that he would certainly one day completely explode with the pressure of music and secrets and hate packed up inside him. He would try to imagine his grandfather’s face when that happened – when John Boyce Hughes suddenly burst into powder and fire.

  But now he was going to put down the booth and grow; that was how it worked. Before he did anything else, he would just stand with that weight lifted off and feel his legs, his neck, his back, all easing upwards and a little over scale.

  ‘Brace up, John, brace up.’

  That was very nice, to brace up like that, nobody needed any more to tell you that you should be taller or straighter or bigger than you were, because you knew all about it. No need for grandfathers now, the job was done.

  Which didn’t mean you wouldn’t hear those words, fumbling about in the back of your mind, and in his voice, mind you, not even your own bloody voice. You would hear him from all of those times before, you would see the words dripping down from under that old yellow rag of a moustache.

  ‘Brace up, John. Brace up.’

  That awful operatic rumble he had, down under the wheezy lungs and the tar. God, you could really almost actually see him, hunched under one of those slim little trees over there, slapping his hands down hard on the black hoop armrests of his chair. Horrible old chair, like something he’d made up out of his head. He would sit under the silver green leaves and whatever you did, you would feel him looking at you and then through and out at the back, like always.

  ‘How did you do at school, then? Still stupid?’

  ‘I don’t, I don’t know.’

  ‘Ha! So what does that make you? Not even knowing. Ha!’

  ‘Stupid. Stupid, Tad-cu.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Stupid, Tad-cu.’

  ‘Which means.’

  ‘Hn?’

  Because you couldn’t say a word then. He knocked all the words clear out of you, you see, not laying a finger anywhere near you, but hurting and making it not possible to speak, because he was looking at you, because he was there. And probably he wasn’t even concentrating so terribly much on you, you not being so terribly important. He would be speaking, but also rolling up a thread of cigarette, tight as his mind.

  ‘Tad-cu: it means? Surely to God, you haven’t forgotten.’

  ‘Grandfather. It means grandfather, grandfather.’

  Words getting slippery with panic. Very hard to get out in the open air. You seemed to squeal instead of speaking.

  ‘Literal translation.’

  ‘Gra- Um . . . Father. Dear father. Kind father.’

  And he would bloody wait. You knew you’d got it right, absolutely, but he couldn’t, he wouldn’t say. He would just stare you out; see if he could push you to change your mind, to cry, to do anything other than stare at him back and try not to swallow again and not to blink.

  John thought of the smile shining under his grandfather’s moustache, a flicker of something hard and slick, before another drift of smoke rolled up and hid it away.

  ‘So, I’m your dear father, am I?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Don’t yelp. You’re a boy, not a dog. A boy with Welsh blood in him and we’ll make a Welsh man of you, will we not? Even if you were born out of place. Dudley. Dudley, I ask you, why the bloody hell your mother ever came here and ruined herself . . . Ruined you. Didn’t think of that, though, did she, spoiling her own son.’

  It was nice, being spoiled, you knew what you were and where you were immediately and forever. Many people never had something like that.

  John dropped the pins into the hinges carefully, feeling his Tad-cu still watching, like a smoky blurr from under the tree. Still, never mind the old bastard, the booth was taking shape now and becoming the small miracle it was designed to be. He had made it a box that could hold him completely, or fold up and fit on his back. People would come up to watch only that. Children who couldn’t stay long enough to see the show would stand and see the panels turned upward and outward, high and smooth in solid crimson and gold.

  But nobody saw the best bit, nobody came with him inside into the black brown canvassy dark that pressed his skin to the bone. It smelt of him in here: cloth, sweat, earth, skin: himself.

  Hook the puppets up under their shelf, being both gentle and precise, letting the feathers settle, things like that. You check the curtains and let your mind flow through what it will do today, nice and easy, no sweat, yet. Then stop altogether, take a breath, get full of breath. Ready.

  ‘Hello, God.’

  Lovely. It always made him laugh to say that. Even the first time.

  ‘Go up any hill in Wales, boy, and you can talk to God. They’re all Mount Sinai, they’re all Ararat. We have them so we can be closer to God. You understand?’

  ‘Yes, Tad-cu, I do understand.’

  ‘Then look it, John Hughes, look as if you bloody understand.’

  And they’d gone, of course. Only the once, but they’d gone to Wales, away from that sulphur and metal Midland air and into something else. It was somewhere in the North, they stayed – up above a little horseshoe bay and a village Tad-cu wouldn’t say if he knew or not. No one seemed to know him, but that might have been because of his moustache which perhaps he hadn’t had before.

  Didn’t matter, anyway, not at all, because up above the village, there was space to run away. You were enco
uraged to run away. There was an entire hill there, almost a mountain, for you to climb up and make yourself fit and manly and Welsh.

  The heat in the booth, it always reminded you of lying down flat on the banks that hid the pathway when it turned above the tree line. You would wait there for the crickets to sing.

  At first, you couldn’t find them and then as soon as they heard you running, they would stop, as if they’d been something you’d only had inside your mind. But then you learned to be still and to wait and those high pulsing notes would start up in the wiry grass, all around you, perhaps because they had forgotten you, or perhaps because you were no longer frightening. Their noise had frightened you at first, when it was so close and surrounding. Then you learned to see them, with the tiny stripes of different green along their sides and the pink, too, an amazing kind of pink. They looked wonderful, like God’s little singing machines.

  He stayed with the crickets for hours, not really wanting to go any higher, in case God saw him. Only there seemed to be nothing up there, if you looked, except some sheep and hillocky grass, rabbits maybe. So, in the end, it seemed safe to edge towards the top of the hill, a touch more each time.

  At one point, you could shield your eyes from the sun, the way explorers did and overlook the next valley. There were villages pressed into its curve, like cups lined with scales of slate. Everywhere there were people here, there was slate: tiles and slabs and big, ragged teeth of it, speared down into the ground for fences. Slate and smoke and people and slate – this must be the way God saw it, rings of smokey slate, way down under, anchoring threads of prayer.

  On the second last day they spent there, John walked really to the summit. He could remember himself some days, even in the booth, lowering to his knees and sinking into the comfortable spring of turf, up high, up there.

  He’d kept his eyes looking ahead while he filled his lungs taut against his stomach and chest. There were other hills, higher than his where God would very likely be close enough to make something fire and cloudy happen – scare hell out of the poor bugger sheep – but this was as far as he could risk.

  He battened down his thoughts and fed out the words, high as those further hills. Must have been as high as that, perhaps more.

  ‘Hello, God.’

  He’d thought he would die, be called up to the angels and away from his spoiling and from Tad-cu and his high black chair. Didn’t happen, of course.

  In the end he was so scared, so sprung with waiting for blazing wings to lift him off that he couldn’t do anything but run and when he fell, he rolled and scrambled and ran even more, making his ears pop, he was dropping so fast and not even minding the eyes of the clever ram licking over him as he passed.

  After a while, it seemed good that God didn’t want him yet. It was just bad that Tad-cu still did.

  There were people outside now, children. He could watch them through the gauze, see what they were like, how best to please them.

  He worked Pool on to his arm, took the wing rods and smoothed the feathers perfect. No crow had ever had feathers like this. He knew that because he had made them, his creation. They seemed to live and so did Pool the crow, because John knew how to do that, the timing, the manipulation, like clockwork silk. He knew about puppets. He pushed his face nearer the gauze.

  ‘Want me to make you happy, then? Lucky little bastards. Lucky little French bastards. All the same really though, aren’t you? Just want to be happy. I know.’

  That woman, she could have come in here with him, the first time anyone else had done that. There would have been barely room for them both; they would have had to stand very close. It would be like bringing somebody into his home, his real home.

  Not that you brought it along – ‘the booth – because you were some kind of snail. Perfectly possible to be at home anywhere. No, this was a reminder to the others that he could do something they could not. It was a confidence thing, worked both ways, helped him up and left them down. Everyone knew that only he could do puppets – the moves, the voices – never mind walking into ‘Lear’ with Pool on his arm, being the Fool and being the bird, swapping the lines between them is if he was born expressly to do nothing other than that and making it different every night. You couldn’t say that wasn’t good, wasn’t more than alright.

  Pool would look at Mr Robbins tonight and sing.

  He that has and a little tiny wit,

  With heigh-ho, the wind and the rain,

  Must make content with his fortunes fit,

  Though the rain it raineth every day.

  Pool could have all that, because it left John his face free to watch with and then to say the prophecy which was more fun. Things like that, he could choose how he did them and the others could not, ask all the questions they liked.

  ‘Mr Hughes, John, tell me, how do you see the Fool?’

  ‘Mr Robbins, all the Fool does is to tell you that you’re stupid and all that you do is to prove that he is right.’

  ‘Ha, that’s good, John. That’s awfully good.’

  ‘Don’t mention it, Jim.’

  While he packed down the booth again, finished up, he could feel the two boys watching. They smiled when he looked at them. He smiled back.

  ‘Gentlemen, if you don’t go away, I am entirely likely to beat your little heads in. Now fuck off, fun’s all over.’

  The boys kept on smiling, eyes slightly clouded, but the mother came and scooped them off. Must have understood. Most people did, You tried to return the compliment – swap languages the way they all seemed to, but sometimes. Well, sometimes. That girl in the office, every day, the exact same thing.

  ‘Bon matin, Monsieur Hughes.’

  But how did she pronounce it? YooGess. Like that, YooGess.

  He’d told her and she hadn’t listened, or something hadn’t clicked because she kept on saying, ‘YooGess’.

  ‘No, no. Look. S’il vous plaît. Soyez vous si gentille d’écouter. Hn? Hn?’

  Little expectant face she turned up to you at that point.

  ‘The last time I say this. La dernière fois. OK?’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Hughes. Mon nom est Hughes. Après moi. Um . . . comme la chanson “Harley Davidson”. That song. Vous la connaissez? Well, I’m not going to bloody sing it. “Je ne connais plus personne, en Harley Davidson.” Hn? Huh. OK?’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘OK. Fine. Then . . . puis . . . Oooo. Comme ‘il est où?’ Ooo. OK? Huh – Ooo. Puis . . . Puis, Zzz. Comme les mouches, eh? Zzz. Huh – oo – zzz.’

  ‘Oui, YooGess.’

  ‘Non! Encore une fois!’

  Embarrassing in the end because she was crying and the manager seemed to think it was all because she was black. Hadn’t even noticed she was black, nothing to do with it, she had no pronunciation – that was all. The whole thing had been messy – the sort of confusion you could only get in a cheapskate little theatre, up the arse end of an impasse.

  Girl hadn’t spoken to him since and she’d flicked him a nasty smile when he left with that woman; with, Martha. Fuck, that was her name, God help us, she was called Martha, he’d remembered. Astonishing. He could imagine Tad-cu’s face at that.

  ‘Martha boy, Martha, what kind of a bloody name is that, then? English, is she? With you, is she? There’s a bloody miracle. Ha!’

  But she was English and she was with him – had been with him. Martha had been with him all night and, in a way, he could thank Tad-cu for it – all those Welshness lessons to fit all her neat little questions.

  ‘Where are you from, John?’

  ‘Hm?’

  ‘Where are you from? You have an accent I can’t place.’

  ‘Oh, I’ve moved so much, you see. There’s hardly anything left.’

  But you should paste it on thick now, Boy Bach, otherwise this will not work.

  ‘I’m . . . well, I’m Welsh, really.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where?’

&n
bsp; ‘The North. You wouldn’t know it, only small, see – the place. The crow – you know the crow I have in the play?’

  ‘I loved it.’

  ‘Thank you. The crow is called Pool, but actually it’s Pwyll – after Pwyll, Prince of Dyfed.’

  ‘Say that again.’

  Oh, the lure of a foreign language.

  ‘Pwyll.’

  Got her. You should smile now, big and shy, let the hands fold on to the table. She would like to look at the size of your hands. There’s lovely, but never as lovely as now, and look in her eyes.

  ‘Who was –?’

  ‘Pwyll? He was a mythical hero – only kind we have. My grandfather taught me about him, taught me lots of things like that. He brought me up. My mother and father . . . they weren’t around.’

  ‘That’s awful.’

  Yes, it bloody was, but not tonight. Tonight it is only useful.

  ‘No, not awful, not really. Hard sometimes, that’s all.’

  But everything serves a purpose eventually – even Tadcu – all you have to do is wait.

  Martha proved that was right. After the show, she’d been almost grateful. She shook your hand. No, she shook your wrist; held you there, very firmly and smiled full in your face.

  ‘You were wonderful. Why didn’t you take your bow?’

  ‘Oh I . . . My part is over so long before the end. Sometimes I even leave the building. It’s um . . . I’m glad you liked it.’

  And you were glad. You could let in her liking and be glad because she couldn’t harm you. You’d waited so long that no one could harm you again. You had been patient and certain that people would like what you did in the end and wouldn’t hurt you. You just had to wait.

  Even Tad-cu, he couldn’t reach you now. He’d pushed you so far inside – done it himself – that he couldn’t get you and now it was safe to come out and take what you’d always been waiting for.

  Not like the first time, the first time wasn’t fair. When you’re still young you never know what to expect, you don’t know what might be reasonable, what might not. Like the first show you did, the first thing half worth looking at and a sort of party going on this one night – somebody’s birthday. You’d known Tad-cu had been out there watching, nice seat, but he hadn’t come round – not a sign of him.