by David Storey
‘It’s all right,’ I told him. ‘I’m going to bed.’
He went back in. ‘He isn’t a Pad any rate, so what the hell d’you mean?’ he asked the girl, and slammed the door.
There was only one Irishman in the room. He was dressed in a bus conductor’s uniform and looked to be in the middle of a nightmare—he’d got the jacket on but not the trousers, and watched my entry with wide open mouth.
‘Hello, Jeepers,’ he said. ‘You haven’t got a better half wid’yew?’
‘No, I’m on my own.’
‘Tank the lord for that. We tort you had. I can keep my trousers off. … You’re not Irish?’
‘I’m from the town.’
‘From the town?’ he said swaying immediately with surprise and trying to look like the film Irishman. ‘You’re one of the natives, by gum an’ dall that? What’re you doing in this sty, son?’
‘I’m on holiday,’ I told him, and went and sat on my bed.
‘On holiday! But if I don’t see a joke there somewhere. Wait till I tell my mate. … He’s under the bluddy bed. Ay Paddy. D’you can come out now. Comenzee out.’
He bent down and dug under the bed, then unfolded, all in one breath. He’d gone red. ‘He’s one of the best sort of Irish—a Ukrainian Paddy. Isn’t that right?’ he said as a fair haired man in his underpants and vest came out holding the trousers of his uniform, smiling and looking nervous.’ He tort he heard you bringing a lady did the boy so he dived under the bed. … You’d have tort there were a hundred foot of water the way he went under. Listen at me. He’ll brain the daylights out of me in a minute. I meant to say Lithuanian. I get all these orientals mixed up.’
‘Does he speak English?’ I said.
‘Of course I do,’ the Lithuanian said with a faint Irish accent on top of his own. ‘Pass along please. No more standing. Right down the bus, if you don’t mind. Any more fares, you bastards.’
‘Isn’t that as near Irish as ever d’you want?’ his friend said proudly. ‘I can sit down and listen to him for hours speak my own language better than I can myself. Now you know what they mean when they say Shakespeare was a Russian.’
He finished undressing, and put on a pair of green pyjamas. They were still jabbering when the music had come to an end down the landing and the rest of the house and the street outside were quiet. We all three lay in our beds while the Irishman read out the headings and showed round the pictures in his English Beauties.
‘I used to be down the pit,’ the Lithuanian was telling me over the noise. ‘But you English almost work down there. I got out pretty sharp with bad health—I have a chest complaint now. The doctor advises fresh air and the open life.’
‘So he stands in the bus doorways on the corners to take in a mouthful of air as they turn,’ the Irishman said. ‘What d’you think of this—“A star in her eye and the sun in her smile.” And this one—“Difficult to approach, but a ladder in her stocking.” Gives you quite a beat, don’t you think?’
‘But my health’s improved. There’s no doubt of that. I shall soon be strong enough to be a communist and go home.’
‘Did I tell you, perhaps I forgot—I’m a republican,’ the Irishman told me. ‘You see what I mean?—Republican.’
‘My family and relatives all live in Vilna, almost on the border of that land next door. I’d like to go back there. Your climate here, it’s only weather … and this landlord, too, he’s not the kind of person I like to live next to. Cameron, and that wife of his. You should see his wife. It’s a shame. He could be good. Have you seen them? They live in that garage at the back of the house.’
‘I saw it when I came in tonight.’
‘You’ll know then. He must make twenty pounds a week out of this house, and he lives in the garage. It’s not what you expect in an over-civilized country.’
‘What the hell you live here for, then?’ his friend said. ‘Look at this one—“A Heavenly Body arrested in space.” D’you think that copper looks a fairy?’
‘This country, she’s like a car, engine and parts running smoothly, plunging over a …’
‘Oh shut all that crap off,’ the Paddy was saying. ‘He tells the same stuff to everybody he meets. Just look at this one. It’s pretty pornographic, don’t you think? They’ve tried to tone it down with that lighthouse in the background.’
The Irish-German voices eased a pain somewhere in my mind, and I slowly drifted into sleep. I finally escaped when the light suddenly went out and I heard the Paddy saying, ‘That bastard Cameron—he’s turned it off at the mains. I’d just got to that Bride in the Bath one.’ I thought a second about the money in my pocket, and the keys to the car, but the effort to wake was too great, and I subsided.
The alarm woke me like a blow.
I sat up thinking I was at Mrs Hammond’s and the alarm had gone off by mistake. They were already up, buttoning their uniforms. ‘The fire’s out, every ting’s under control, skipper,’ the Paddy said.
‘Work,’ the Lithuanian told me. ‘I’m on at five twenty and Ireland’s on at five forty-five. Don’t you work?’
‘I forgot to tell you last night,’ the Paddy said. ‘He’s on holiday.’ He turned to me to say, ‘Have a nice day on the beach,’ and they went next door where they woke someone else, and water gurgled and splashed.
The Lithuanian depressed me—he seemed displaced in every sense. I fell asleep again with his voice in my head. I thought the Paddy came in the door and said, ‘I forgot to tell you. Cameron’s wife comes round cleaning on a morning. Any money you leave in your pockets she thinks is a tip. So only leave your mess.’
When the sun reached my part of the room I sat up in bed and read some more of Somebody Up There. The house was quiet, probably deserted with everybody at work. I thought about going myself, looked at the alarm clock, and changed my mind. When I got up all the loose change had gone from my clothes.
I drove around town and got some money out of the bank. As I came down Market Street I saw Johnson on one of his morning walks. I felt tempted to go and talk, see how he felt, but I drove into a garage instead and had the tank filled up. When I came out he’d disappeared.
From the top of the valley the sight of the town working normally, but without me, made me feel outcast, an outlaw. I wasn’t allowed to live there any more. I stopped the car by Caulsby Castle. There was that smell of work in the air. The Road Services’ lorries were beginning to move off down and out of the valley: the roads were black and moving, and the City itself was almost a forest with these insects moving amongst the scrubbed undergrowth of the buildings and the stunted trees of the factory stacks. The chemical works’ six metal chimneys, joined like bandaged fingers, filtered a thin red mist of nitrous fumes over the river. Alongside Harris’s Mill a slim black pipe shot up a vivid bush of white steam, which stuck in the air for several minutes before subsiding to a lazy exhausted trickle. Occasionally one of the stocky chimneys jettisoned a great black termite streamer of smoke across the valley to go curling over the ridge and shroud the gloomy Riding Hospital overlooking Highfield. Close up to the valley side, where the road curved through the trees before ascending to Sandwood, and just below the overflowing and overgrown cemetery, the frantic panting of the steam boiler at the brickworks echoed like a railway engine dragging a long line of coaches to life. Its rapid puffs of steam mounted into the air in a bulging column, which burst and disappeared in the wind. And sprawling across the valley, down below the town, with its two huge sprouting limbs like a dead upturned body, was the power station: the only new brick in sight. It seemed to dam up the town and stop it overflowing down the valley over the small, high-hedged fields to Stokeley. Somewhere beneath all this was the one person I knew: amongst all that mass and detail was a fleck, a speck in the hundred thousand landscape, a smudge on the lattice of all those streets. From up here she didn’t count, and I might be God.
&n
bsp; During the next few days nobody intensified this feeling of isolation more than the Lithuanian. I probably felt his exile more than he did. Three days on my own were enough to change the whole shape of things. It seemed as if the debt I’d accumulated had suddenly been shoved on me without warning, and I’d been told to pay, or else. The emptiness obliterated every other feeling I had for people or for places. I imagined myself like Mrs Hammond at the time I first knew her—and I found I was glad to feel that. I only felt safe in the car. I’d never been so proud of it. I’d finished Somebody Up There Likes Me and had bought Love Tomorrow. In it, this tec called Stulton—Cheesy to his pals—had to crack a case in some town I forget, in America. And he falls for the crook’s girl friend, and she falls for him. But she’s in it so thick with the crooks that it’s not unforeseen she gets bumped off. Stulton, driven crazy by this, turns on the crooks and finishes them off in no time. Then he looks round him, and realizes there’s nothing left. The girl’s dead. He just doesn’t want to go on living any more. At the end he’s in his car, driving out of town. He gets on the turnpike and steps on the gas. In no time he’s left the place, the people, his memories far behind. The road’s clear and open. The car’s booming along. He begins to feel better, and he starts thinking about the next town, and the next sample it probably holds.
That touched me. I thought if only I could break things up like this Stulton, and get on to the next place and leave all these wrecks behind. I even tried driving out of town fast. But the roads were crammed. They twisted and ducked about. And I’d only go a couple of miles, hardly leaving town behind, before I was in the next bloody place. One town started where the other left off. There was no place to feel free. I was on a chain, and wherever I went I had to come back the same way.
Early Wednesday evening the Paddy came back helpless. The Lithuanian wasn’t a great deal better. They were both sick on the floor; then they fell on the Irishman’s bed and lay there a while in each other’s arms. I sat wondering whether I ought to clear up or clear out.
Eventually the Lithuanian slipped off the bed and knelt by mine on all fours, his head lolling between his shoulders. He began to bark—low, short barks to start with, then long howls. There was a genuine tone of distress in his voice. The Paddy grunted and belched on his back, and was sheet white—it was obvious his belly was getting ready to bring up another load.
When I got off the bed the Lithuanian bit my leg. I jumped across to the next bed and dragged the Paddy on to the floor and then to the door. I pulled him along the landing to the lavatory and dumped him with his head on the bowl. The Lithuanian was crawling up and down the room and he greeted me with weird wolf howls but no biting. I told him to get on the bed. He stopped his pacing to look up at me.
‘You’ve been drinking,’ he said. ‘We met a man tonight who knows you.’
‘Did he tell you his name?’
‘Of course he did, my friend. Do you think I don’t know how to talk to people? He said to remember him.’
‘Who was it?’
‘Who was it?’ He tried to imitate my accent. ‘Now don’t give me so many names. Let me think—Field. … No. Hill, Brook, Dale, Swallow … all these names, are you listening? Seal, Fish—they are not names. They’re a zoo. We have walked up every hill in the district—did Pad tell you? We walked up one side of the valley, then we walked up the other side of the valley. We walked up the valley, then we walked down the valley. Miles and … We were in a ladies’ lavatory somewhere. Perhaps it was up the valley. It might have been down the valley. You should have seen her face. “What do you think you are doing here, my good woman? Have you got your ticket?” I never realized it until I saw all those—what do you call them?—in a row. Have you ever been in one? It’s far more comfortable than the men’s—a woman’s world, my friend, don’t you think? They should label them better. Where’s Pad bow wow wow wow?’ He slumped on the bed and went on talking into the blankets. All I could hear was his muffled growl.
I pulled my shirts out of the drawer, bundled them up, and got the two books. Paddy was half-way down the stairs when I passed him. I didn’t bother telling Cameron I was leaving his sty. I got in the car and drove home automatically, screwing up my guts for all the moralizing I was going to hear. I hoped, on the off chance, my dad might be working nights.
But the first thing I see when I open the living-room door is neither my mother nor father—I seem to catch the ghost of Mrs Hammond intruding. She got to her feet as I came in, and my mother turned round and looked over her shoulder, pale and startled in the electric light.
We all made a few sounds of surprise, and looked at one another like new, unacquainted people.
‘What’re you doing here?’ I stumbled out. I’d often imagined her here, in this neat living-room, and now that it’d happened it was still in a dream.
‘I met your father—on City Road. He asked me to come up.’
I watched my parents performing, as if it’d all been rehearsed and we were just carrying through with the parts. I started calling Mrs Hammond Val. I said Val this, Val that, or, ‘I don’t understand, Valerie. What was that again, Valerie?’ I wanted to show them, to show her, how she was mine, and there was too much between us for anything or anybody to interrupt. I wasn’t talking to Mrs Hammond. She didn’t exist any more. Valerie being here proved it.
‘We didn’t know where you were,’ my father was explaining.
‘We rang up the football club and they said they didn’t know either. We were all worried. Then I met Mrs Hammond by chance down City Road, and I asked her to come up, just so she could talk to your mother. Your mother was …’
‘I think Val’s tired,’ I told him. ‘Do you want to be getting back, Val?’
‘And when we heard you’d been dropped we wondered what had happened.’
‘Do you want to be going, Val?’ I asked her again.
My mother had flushed. She clenched her hands together in her lap, seeming helpless, and staring at the two of us as if we’d planned it all together. ‘Mrs Hammond came up here to tell us where you might have gone to,’ she said. ‘I thought you’d be staying here for the night, Arthur, since you don’t seem to have anywhere to go.’
‘It’ll be more convenient that way for me,’ Mrs Hammond said. Both the women were putting an accent on, struggling with each other. ‘I can get a taxi home.’ Valerie, as whenever she wanted to make an impression, was prim. She watched me with that old pleading expression, frightened and uncertain.
‘No, I’ll come back with you, Val,’ I told her.
‘It’s late,’ my father said quietly. ‘Let’s get it settled quickly. If Mrs Hammond doesn’t want you at the moment it’s no good you forcing yourself on her. She might have let your room to another lodger.’
He sounded, in this woman’s war, too heavy, too crude. His voice seemed to lumber round them and they took little notice.
‘I was making arrangements,’ she said distantly.
‘There you are, then,’ he concluded.
‘But you can’t do that,’ I told her. ‘That’s my room.’
‘I don’t think it’ll be convenient at all if you returned,’ Mrs Hammond said in her best professional manner. ‘And your mother wants you to stay at home. I wish you could make him see sense, Mr Machin,’ she added to my father.
‘He’ll see all right,’ he told her, and looked at me as at some sort of invalid. ‘We weren’t quite sure … we’ve been a little worried. I’ll go and phone a taxi for you myself. It won’t take a minute.’
‘Val’s only trying to be well-mannered,’ I told him, angry now that he didn’t see how they were using him. ‘I’ll drive her back.’
She looked at my mother wildly, imprisoned. It was the same maniac-frightened look of the Friday night: a cornered animal. ‘I might as well tell you,’ she blurted out. ‘Arthur and me had a very awful quarrel and I asked him to le
ave … I asked him to leave.’
The two women looked at one another, my mother obviously building up to what she wanted to know, yet not sure of being able to take it.
‘I’ve forgiven Val—Mrs Hammond—ages ago, Mother. She knows that.’
‘Forgiven me!’ Mrs Hammond reddened with the effort of covering her emotion in front of my parents. She couldn’t believe I’d take advantage of the situation. ‘I think I should make it clear’, she said firmly, ‘that it was you who started it. It’s wrong of you to twist it like that. I don’t know how you can do it.’
She started buttoning her coat. We watched her as though the task involved us all. My mother looked at her as she might at any pro she found me in bed with. Then she said, ‘Aren’t you going to explain anything at all, Arthur? Don’t you think it’s time you let your own parents know something of what’s been happening? After all, we’ve supported you through all your troubles before.’
She looked at me directly so she could exclude Mrs Hammond altogether.
‘We had an argument—that’s all. We lost our heads. It’s only natural. We’re no strangers, and we’ve had arguments before. As Val said—it was mostly my fault. I was in a bad mood.’
‘You’ve been at Mrs Hammond’s a long time, Arthur.’
‘I know. … That’s why I want to patch it up.’
‘Perhaps after all these years Mrs Hammond feels that she should have another lodger.’
We waited to see how this affected the situation—whether it was going to blow us all up. But Mrs Hammond said, ‘I’d been thinking of a change. Perhaps a lady this time—or maybe having the house to ourselves for a while.’
‘It’s the first time you’ve ever mentioned that,’ I told her. ‘How can you afford to have it to yourself?’
My mother broke in sharply, ‘I’m sure at any rate that Mrs Hammond should not be bullied into having you back. If she’s been forced to ask you to leave then I don’t see that you’ve any right to demand to be taken back.’