by Sid Smith
He woke slowly after the operation. He stared out the window, then lifted the sheet. A full English breakfast. Then the stitches got infected, so he read May’s China books for a month, horny with someone else’s dick, till she lit candles around the bath and they drank wine among the bubbles while her dad rattled the door and went away muttering.
‘We could try tomorrow,’ she said. But they couldn’t because she was drunk and then the two cooks took him to play pool and the next night he was dumped.
So now he crept back to the Aussie doctor. Dark in the alley, though the sky was brightening. He laughed. Long Frank was still upside down on the railings, pop-eyed and grunting through the gag, and no one had come. Tom admired the loops of line around the wrists and ankles and across the mouth to hold in the tie, then he crouched to whisper.
‘I might let you go, pal. I might let you go. But first you have to tell me something.’ He loosened the line across Frank’s mouth and waited till he spat out the tie. ‘Right. Any shouting and your teeth are on the deck.’
‘You . . .’
‘Yes? Want to say something? Maybe you’d better say nothing. Better just answer the question. Here it is. You ready?’
‘I . . .’
‘Shut up. OK. Think carefully. Here’s what I want to know: how did Johnny die?’
The doctor frowned, bewildered.
‘Not hard, Frankie baby. You must know. Come on: how?’
‘But it’s not a secret, for God’s sake.’
‘Just answer, OK.’
‘It was in the bloody paper.’
‘OK. Fine. Just answer the question, all right?’
‘Stabbed himself with scissors. In the groin. Bled to death.’
‘Right. All right. Not hard, was it.’
‘Let me down.’
‘Certainly. No problem.’
He undid the line, cutting it to leave one wrist tied to the railings with many knots, trying to think of a smart comment.
The doc said, ‘It was in the damn paper.’
‘Good,’ said Tom. ‘I’m glad.’
‘What does that mean?’
Tom hurried back to the van and drove, the back doors flapping. He got out and water was running over his feet. Some sort of flood or burst main. He tied the doors with washing line and got into the driver’s seat. Damn shoes have been wet for months, big-toe nails poking through the cloth.
He sat for a long time, thinking about Johnny with the scissors. ‘Of course.’
When the daylight was too horrible he started the van. He parked outside Brixton Tube, women climbing out to the pavement. But it was hopeless, sitting in a stink of ill-luck. May’s fault.
He saw two Chinese boys across the road, big Chinese-Brits with thick smooth chip-fed limbs. He jumped out and stood up and shouted gleefully, ‘Hey, Chinky boys. Fly lice? Wery wery dericious. Fly lice, OK?’
The boys stared, then Tom remembered Johnny and drove off disgusted. He parked in a side street, listening as the engine cooled and ticked.
‘I should call Dad.’ So he pictured the phone in their crappy front room, and this was a distraction. On weekdays it sat on the little altar between a gilt cup and two plastic incense holders. And his dad would say, ‘Hello. This is Convocator Lawson,’ because he ran the Gathering of the Brotherhood of the Golden Dawn, a wilfully retro cult founded by Tom’s granddad, a wiry working man who sat behind his moustache in a fading picture on the mantelpiece, knees apart in his Sunday suit, flat cap folded in his big foundryman’s hands, and what seemed like a frown of special enquiry for Tom. And every Friday, which he called ‘the Sabbath’, Tom’s dad stood among his devotees, dangerously near the gas fire in their little front room on the scruffy council estate, his linen robes wafting, the shiny black toecaps poking out.
He loved his leather shoes, black for Friday and brown for the week. Straight-backed, he strode through the dingy streets with a crunch of gravel – he didn’t drive and was proud of it. And there were shoe-stands and shoe-stretchers and a proper wooden bootbox with brushes and rags and tins for the weekly clean, into which Tom was sometimes inducted till he maddened his father again, particularly in the matter of insteps, which must also be polished. Then little Gillian got old enough, and was a natural polisher.
Soon after, his dad did something awful and his mum walked out so that she wouldn’t have to talk about it. Lawson was satisfied: he’d always said she was pointless, weeping on the sofa or creeping about with a damp hanky, pretty and silly, only useful for making their problems seem trivial. Now she’d gone like a scapegoat. He said, ‘You weren’t breastfed. Not a drop. Bad for her figure or something,’ so Tom cried less.
His dad also triumphed over the neighbours. He got punched at the factory and went on the dole, his windows were smashed and Tom’s friends stopped calling. But his church didn’t suffer, being based on the cunning idea that the dead would speak through the bereaved. In the poky front room, widows reminisced or aired old rows, till Lawson said, ‘Let him talk,’ and sometimes the woman felt her dead husband speak through her lips, giving his side of things but saying that perhaps she’d been right after all. His dad – rouged and handsome – would raise a hand, a blessing and a barrier, and draw himself up, straight-backed on his leather heels like wood that made Tom fear for his toes.
Tom was the altar boy. In a green nylon jacket he’d greet the whiskered women, who bent to kiss him. But then they’d change. Tom held the wine and wafers on a plastic tray, but if the women moaned for their dead he’d tremble and his dad would rescue the tray. He wrung his hands if the widows did, and if they wailed then his eyeballs bulged till he thought they’d pop out.
He took a hammer from a shop and cycled past parked cars, whose wing mirrors he smashed. Crossed by his dad or a teacher he ran to butt them, or put his head down and swung his fists crabwise, the men trying to guard their bollocks with dignity.
Because of his dad, life at school was a solitude interrupted by fights. But still he talked about adventures with his classmates, his dad impatient then angry: ‘So we climbed on the roof only there was this big bird, like a crow, probably a crow, and it tried to peck us and it did peck us, not me but the others, only we killed it, I killed it, and then the teacher came and we came down, and then,’ his dad walking away and Tom breathless but unstoppable, trotting behind, waving his hands, his elbows pinned to his sides.
Then he grew spotty and his dad was disgusted. Tom had to wash his own underpants, and his dad still cooked for him but couldn’t watch him eat, and wore washing-up gloves to collect his plate. Gillian was tolerated, although illness was making her messy.
And there were new women at the services, younger and louder, not widows, often not wives, who came for a week or two and then got bored, talking about men who drank or fought or stole, the ones who left and the new ones who came. The widows didn’t approve, shaking their wattled throats, lipstick on crooked, but his dad had a new giggle, virginal and shrill.
He told Tom, ‘You always creep about. Why? When I walk about, people hear me coming,’ and he stamped his leather heels, Tom thinking, ‘That’s just about it.’ Later he understood: his dad was going deaf. But Tom was sixteen and unforgiving. He’d left school, and had lost his place at the séances to pretty twin brothers, recruited as they waited for their mum in a supermarket car park. So he idled through that summer with plastic soldiers from his childhood, who sniped across the sofa or fell to the carpet with drawn-out cries, until his dad said, ‘This is Mrs Walston.’
She was a health visitor who affected to be harassed. She’d come to see Gilly but stayed for the service, sitting forward on her chair, glancing at the window and the door and back to Lawson, as if ready to listen although her days were full, her hair pulled back to a clip like a bear trap. Afterwards she shook Tom’s hand with her arm straight. ‘You can help Harold,’ she said.
And this, now that he thought about it, was where the whole China thing began.
10
The wallpaper was ripped. She pulled the rip and found a door and another set of stairs. She went up the stairs to a dusty room. The room was beautiful, with a balcony over the river and stairs down to another door. She went down and pulled the door and heard a ripping noise and peered through torn paper to a nice flat.
She crept away and cleaned the room and one day Tom came from the other flat. They were happy in the room but her father spoiled it all.
‘No,’ said Tom, stirring in the van.
He put himself on a tractor. May was planting rice. She heard the tractor and straightened, barefoot in the muddy water. She smiled, shading her eyes with her brown hand.
‘China,’ he thought. ‘China.’
Tom dreamt he was at the hospital. He was looking for May, groping from bed to bed. He passed two blind beggars who’d fought for a pitch (accidentally beating a passer-by to death with their white sticks), someone whose woman stoved his skull in (for laughing when she started coming), a man in for circumcision (who must piss / Childish spirals like a barley-sugar stick), a man grappled by neighbours (who’d overheard a / Sexual ecstasy they thought was murder), on through Maternity (they clutched their bundle like an amputee), and into the nurses’ room (where they wheeled like a military brass band and mooed, through tongueless tubes). Now here’s that trainee nurse – dragging her lover like an afterbirth.
Tom dreamt that May dreamt that she was free. She was out of London, happy in the country. She had leather wristbands and boots made of fur. She had a short skirt. A short leather skirt.
She was a bandit and led a gang of bandits. They were all women. They wore leather skirts and ran bare-breasted through the mountains. They bathed in the river, splashing and bold, and then danced naked in secret groves, and men sometimes hid to watch, though if they were caught they died.
The women danced to praise the goddess. This wasn’t the fertility goddess of men, who pray for sons or a rich harvest or fat fish. Instead it was the goddess of a woman’s self-love as she looks down at her body, her emblems being the moon over water, a marsh flower, the prow of a boat.
The women got dressed. They painted their faces, each painting another. They hid by the river road. When travellers came they spared the women but told the men, ‘We’ll cut off your head or your precious parts. Choose.’ And the men who gave up their parts were dressed as women and did the lowest work while the bandits pleasured each other.
But May had a secret: as the moon changed so did her body. Every month she said, ‘I’m going to the mountains, to talk to the goddess.’ But actually the moon was growing and so were her precious parts.
So May crossed the mountains and for two weeks she was a man and the chief of a gang of men. When travellers came May said, ‘Stab the child so the parents are helpless.’ The bandits spared young men but killed the women and children and staked the husbands to the ground, May cross-legged on their chests, watching their eyes dim, saying, ‘You told your wives to run with the children, but they stood shrieking, their hands to their mouths, or they shrieked and held your arm. And so you die.’
In each gang there was a lieutenant who was the chief’s lover. One month, when May left the gang of women, her lieutenant secretly followed her into the mountains. At the same time May’s male lieutenant came to the mountains, wanting to know where his chief spent half the month.
The lieutenants watched from their hiding places as May crossed the river waist-deep and emerged as a man. Their spears met in his heart.
But then they wept. They saw each other weeping and embraced. They lived together in the mountains, talking often of their beloved chief who was dead, and at first they were chaste but later they were husband and wife, until the two gangs killed them and fought a battle where many died.
‘No,’ said Tom, awake in the van.
He put himself with May in Chinatown. They were in a caff, sitting stiffly. He said, ‘It’d be great, you know, if we could get back together.’
They stared out the window. May said, ‘What about a job?’
‘Yes. Definitely.’
‘Not the takeaway.’
‘No, no.’
‘Is that a beard?’
‘I’ll shave.’
‘You smell.’
‘Yes. Sorry. A bath, straight away.’
Even her dad was fine. On Sunday afternoons he took Tom to Chinatown, Mr Tan fat but sprightly, dapper in a flat cap, his white shirt open sportingly at the throat, playing poker with his pals in a Gerrard Street basement, salty snacks in a glass dish, his fat fingers spread on the cards, Tom staring at their lips and eyes but now he was learning Cantonese. ‘More Chinese than damn Chinese boys,’ said Mr Tan. He put the fag in his mouth to shake with the other managers, and then they were off to the wholesalers, Tom heaving fat bags of rice into the car boot, trays of floppy-headed greens on the back seat, and back to Whitechapel, Tan angry at his English son-in-law, but what can you do.
Asleep, Tom said, ‘I’ll be the son you lost.’
Tom dreamt that May dreamt that she was a bandit’s daughter. She lived by a fast river, very arrogant towards her father’s men and towards a poor boy who roamed along the river, fishing and begging for rice water and killing birds with a sling.
One day in a rage she locked her door. The bandit said, ‘Whoever opens her door is my friend.’ But the girl ignored the threats and persuasions of the bandit and his men.
That night the boy went to her door. He crouched down and miaowed like a kitten until she silently drew the bolt. The bandit rushed in while she cursed the boy.
The bandit was pleased with the boy, but his lieutenant said, ‘Beware, because he is called “Cunning Orphan”. When he was young his family were crossing the forest. The boy complained so they left him and a witch came and put him on her back and ran towards her den. The boy pushed his fingers in her eyes, but she laughed and said, “I’m blind, little one,” and ran even faster through the trees. The boy said, “I’m small. But my father is fat, and my mother is pretty, and my sister is young and sweet.” So the boy led the witch after his family. First she caught the little girl. Then the mother, who wasn’t pretty but the witch couldn’t see. Then the father, who reached their house but she broke the door and killed him. Now the witch was full of blood and the boy said, “Tie me to this tree, aunt, so you can sleep.” The witch tied him with rope and fell asleep. But the tree was only the broken doorpost and the boy climbed up the post and lifted the rope off the post and killed the witch and that’s how he was named.’
The bandit grew thoughtful. He sent for the boy and said, ‘Read my dream. I dream every night that I’m beheaded and my head lies in a grey field.’
The boy lied to the bandit. ‘Your dream was nothing,’ he said. ‘Swim in the river.’
The bandit swam in the river and the boy said, ‘See? Your head is like a severed head in a grey field.’ The bandit’s men praised the boy, though May spat and said, ‘He’s a stupid beggar.’
Now the bandit’s men came to the boy with their dreams. He always found a happy answer, so the men paid him and said, ‘He should marry our chief’s daughter.’
May heard this talk and said, ‘Never!’ and took a secret lover among the men. But her father suspected and called his men together and said that the boy would search out who had spoiled his daughter.
May cried, ‘He’ll trick you. Above all, don’t be afraid.’
But the boy told them, ‘I’ve seen your dreams and now I’ll see your hearts. In the evening I’ll call you together and smell your loins and smell out who enjoyed this girl.’
That night the bandit’s men were called together and the boy went sniffing among them. Of course he smelled nothing, but then he smelled a man who had perfumed his loins. It was the bandit’s lieutenant, who was beheaded while May shrieked her hate.
May devi
sed a trick. The bandit had a jewelled knife which was the symbol of his rule, but now it vanished. May said, ‘That beggar boy, your great wizard, can see six feet into the earth. But can he find the knife?’
The boy saw that this was his biggest test. On the first day he burned spices and odorous woods, and May came jeering and said, ‘Have you found the knife?’
He said, ‘I see it vaguely,’ so that May ceased to smile.
Next day the boy danced and sang and May came again and said, ‘Have you found the knife?’
He said, ‘I see it more clearly,’ and May went away angry.
On the third day he fasted and prayed, sitting cross-legged and calling on the Enlightened One. May came again, but before she could speak the boy looked into her eyes and said, ‘Now I see the knife.’
In her anger and fear May threw the jewelled knife in the dust and said, ‘Keep my secret or I’ll kill you.’
The boy took the knife to the bandit, saying that he’d found it in the dust, and he was rewarded and said, ‘Now I’ll marry your daughter.’
The bandit said, ‘But she hates you.’
‘I’ve seen into her eyes and overmastered her.’
‘But you are a beggar boy!’ said the bandit.
So the boy took the jewelled knife and cut off the bandit’s head, which rolled in the grey dust, and the bandit’s men took him as their leader, and he told May to marry him.
Instead she killed herself. She sat cross-legged in the Underworld, sitting on bones and chewing bones and pleasuring herself with a leg bone, the hair down over her face.
11