Porky

by Deborah Moggach

  ‘Know what you’ve just eaten?’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Know what those stupid kebab things are made of?’

  ‘What?’

  I paused. ‘Pig meat. Pork.’

  There was a long silence. I heard the drip of our bathroom tap.

  At last he whispered,

  ‘What did you just say?’

  ‘I told you. Pork.’

  His mouth dropped open. Then the table banged against me as he got to his feet. He stood there a moment. Either he was swaying or I was dizzy. I focused on his shirt.

  ‘Why?’ His voice sounded weirdly conversational.

  ‘Why not? It’s all the same, really.’

  He stayed standing. He said lightly, ‘You went out and bought it?’

  ‘Didn’t have anything else in the shop.’

  He moved to the side, around the table. I shut my eyes.

  ‘Ouch!’

  He grabbed my hair.

  ‘Why?’ His voice soared up like a soprano.

  ‘Let go!’

  ‘How could you?’ his voice shrieked. ‘How could you?’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘Have you . . .’ he paused. ‘Done it before?’

  I tried to shake my head, but my hair was pulled tight.

  ‘Liar!’

  ‘I haven’t –’

  ‘Liar! Little bitch!’

  ‘I haven’t –’

  ‘Oh yes, and what about those men? You lied about them –’

  ‘I didn’t!’ I was sweating.

  He pulled me to my feet, dragging me upwards.

  ‘Look at me!’ he screeched. He jerked my head back. His skin had grown darker.

  I was frightened now. I wished I hadn’t spoken. His fingers dug into my arms.

  ‘Stop it!’ I shouted.

  He shook me, like a dog ‘How many has it been – since you met me?’

  ‘None!’

  ‘Liar!’

  ‘Hardly any – you’re hurting!’

  ‘Come on – who’s – got his end about?’ He corrected himself. ‘Got his end away?’ He was crying now.

  ‘That’s a crude way of putting it.’

  ‘Crude? Call me crude? Come on, Heather –’ His grip tightened. ‘Start counting.’ His voice choked with his sobs.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know . . . one or two.’

  ‘I want the numbers.’

  ‘Give me a moment . . .’

  ‘Got to tot them all up?’

  If I yelled, perhaps someone would hear. But in that house, nobody would come. I’d better tell him, quietly . . . First I had to work it out. Scenes grinded and clanked around my brain.

  ‘Come on!’

  ‘Six – no, seven –’

  It was then that he started hitting me.

  Chapter Twenty

  I FEEL EXHAUSTED, telling you that . . . Clammy . . . I’ll just wait until my heart stops thudding . . .

  Now I’ve told you, I won’t tell anyone else. I shouldn’t think Ali will, either. I expect he’s gone back to Pakistan – after all, it was over a week ago and he hasn’t turned up here, thank goodness.

  I hope he’s gone back. I hope he’s all right. Believe me. I don’t want any harm to come to him, now . . . After all, he was only trying to love me – the only person who’s ever tried.

  I just didn’t seem to be able to love him back. Poor Ali . . . he didn’t deserve any of it. But it was inevitable . . . Can you see that? Do you understand?

  Poor, innocent Ali . . . the only person I’ve ever been able to hurt.

  I’m not staying around here. When the stitches are removed I won’t need the doctors any more. I’ve phoned Am-Air and told them I’m ill, but soon they’ll want to know more. When I was talking about the butcher just now, I suddenly remembered: this morning I should be flying to Berlin.

  I won’t be flying again, that’s for sure. You can see why they won’t have me back. The passengers wouldn’t find my face very reassuring.

  I don’t feel as sad about my job as I’d expected. It had never been the same as my dreams of it. In fact, in the future I’ll probably remember my daydreams more vividly.

  None of us will be staying, because the land’s going to be sold. Dad’s getting some big offers. Soon we’ll be moving out, and I can tell myself that my childhood is over, at last. I tell myself that I’ll be rid of it, when they move to their new house. They’re looking at places in the Staines and Maidenhead area. They actually drive off side by side in the van; it looks companionable but they’re already quarrelling about what they want . . . They’ve never agreed about what they’re looking for, in life, and they won’t change.

  They haven’t got on together, all these years, and a new house won’t alter that; but I expect Mum will get her way, as usual. No pigs, for a start. When Teddy heard they were selling up he said he’d run away with the gypsies, but then Dad said he was thinking of starting up a garage business so Teddy changed his mind and said he’d stay. Dad says he’s going into business with Archie from the pub, but Archie’s a crook so we’ll see what happens to Dad’s investment. I’ve warned him, but you know he never listens.

  ‘Only natural you’d be suspicious,’ he said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘After what you’ve been through. Only natural you don’t trust ’em.’

  ‘Trust who?’

  ‘Folk . . . You know. I can see you’ve had a bit of a setback there.’ He wagged his finger. ‘But you’ll see, Heth, I’m promising you.’

  ‘See what?’

  ‘In time, Heth, you’ll see that there’s some people to be trusted. Like our Archie, for instance.’ He nodded, with his wise look. ‘Archie’s a good bloke . . . straight as me.’ He paused. ‘Straight as your own Dad.’

  You’ve been with me so long that I ought to tell you how I feel about my face. But I’ve managed to put that off. So far I’ve kept myself swaddled and timeless, like an invalid. I’m still wearing my nightie; I haven’t been out into the real world, and it’s then that I’ll be tested. I’ve got a lot of plans; yesterday my plan was to move back into London and work for a travel agent. It’s all by phone so nobody need see my face.

  Not that I’ll look so bad – not disgusting, just scarred, as if I’ve had a calamity in my past. What did that doctor call me, when he gazed at me sorrowfully? A victim of circumstance.

  When I repeat that, I have a prickling feeling, like blood seeping into a numbed limb. Victim of circumstance . . . I like that. It makes me feel better.

  They haven’t put a board by the road saying ‘Prime Industrial Site’ – nothing like that, because Dad’s still not quite made up his mind. You know what he’s like – hopeless at decisions. Only yesterday he thought he’d stay put after all. It’s that twenty years’ worth of junk out there. It looks impossible to move but then he says he’ll be buggered if he’s seeing it bulldozed into the earth.

  ‘Break my heart,’ he said. ‘All that work.’

  Mum said sharply, ‘What work you talking about?’

  I joined her. Whenever he’s wavered I’ve had another go at persuading him. This place must be demolished; it’s high time. I stop myself being sentimental; I’ve not been thinking of it as ‘home’, but ‘development land’.

  I bet you think he won’t do it. That we’ll stay stuck here, complaining as usual, unable to make the final break. You think I’ll stay here in a resentful torpor, like my Mum’s been living all these years . . . That they’re hopeless sort of people and they’ll always be, and that I’m as hopeless as them.

  There’s one way to find out. Next time you drive past the airport – past the Heathrow Hotel and the Sheraton – drive straight on until you reach the Mobil Self-Serve. I’ve described it often enough; you must be able to recognize it now.

  Slow down and have a good look. See if there’s a bungalow beyond it, set back from the road: a wooden bungalow with a pile of planks and plastic in front.

  You just see
if there is.

  Read on for the first chapter of Deborah Moggach’s brilliant new novel Something to Hide

  Pimlico, London

  I’ll tell you how the last one ended. I was watching the news and eating supper off a tray. There was an item about a methane explosion, somewhere in Lincolnshire. A barn full of cows had blown up, killing several animals and injuring a stockman. It’s the farting, apparently.

  I missed someone with me to laugh at this. To laugh, and shake our heads about factory farming. To share the bottle of wine I was steadily emptying. I wondered if Alan would ever move in. This was hard to imagine. What did he feel about factory farming? I hadn’t a clue.

  And then, there he was. On the TV screen. A reporter was standing outside the Eurostar terminal, something about an incident in the tunnel. Passengers were milling around behind him. Amongst them was Alan.

  He was with a woman. Just a glimpse and he was gone.

  I’m off to see me bruv down in Somerset. Look after yourself, love, see you Tuesday.

  Just a glimpse but I checked later, on iPlayer. I reran the news and stopped it at that moment. Alan turning towards the woman and mouthing something at her. She was young, needless to say, much younger than me, and wearing a red padded jacket. Chavvy, his sort. Her stilled face, eyebrows raised. Then they were gone, swallowed up in the crowd.

  See you Tuesday and I’ll get that plastering done by the end of the week.

  Don’t fuck the help. For when it ends, and it will, you’ll find yourself staring at a half-plastered wall with wires dangling like entrails and a heap of rubble in the corner. And he nicked my power drill.

  Before him, and the others, I was married. I have two grown-up children but they live in Melbourne and Seattle, as far away as they could go. Of course there’s scar tissue but I miss them with a physical pain of which they are hopefully unaware. Neediness is even more unattractive in the old than in the young. Their father has long since remarried. He has a corporate Japanese wife who thinks I’m a flake. Neurotic, needy, borderline alcoholic. I can see it in the swing of her shiny black hair. For obvious reasons, I keep my disastrous love-life to myself.

  I’m thinking of buying a dog. It would gaze at me moistly, its eyes filled with unconditional love. This is what lonely women long for, as they turn sixty. I would die with my arms around a cocker spaniel, there are worse ways to go.

  Three months have passed and Alan is a distant humiliation. I need to find another builder to finish off the work in the basement, then I can re-let it, but I’m seized with paralysis and can’t bring myself to go down the stairs. I lived in it when I was young, you see, and just arrived in London. Years later I bought the house, and tenants downstairs have come and gone, but now the flat has been stripped bare those early years are suddenly vivid. I can remember it like yesterday, the tights drying in front of the gas fire, the sex and smoking, the laughter. To descend now into that chilly tomb, with its dust and debris – I don’t have the energy.

  Now I sound like a depressive but I’m not. I’m just a woman longing for love. I’m tired of being put in the back seat of the car when I go out with a couple. I’m tired of internet dates with balding men who talk about golf – golf. I’m tired of coming home to silent rooms, everything as I left it, the Marie Celeste of the solitary female. Was Alan the last man I shall ever lie with, naked in my arms?

  This is how I am, at this moment. Darkness has fallen. In the windows of the flats opposite, faces are illuminated by their laptops. I have the feeling that we are all fixed here, at this point in time, as motionless as the Bonnard lady in the print on my wall. Something must jolt me out of this stupor, it’s too pathetic for words. In front of me is a bowl of Bombay mix; I’ve worked my way through it. Nothing’s left but the peanuts, my least favourite.

  I want to stand in the street and howl at the moon.

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Epub ISBN 9781446485446

  Version 1.0

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  Vintage, an imprint of Vintage Publishing,

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  Vintage is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

  Copyright © Deborah Moggach 1983

  Deborah Moggach has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  First published in Great Britain in 1983 by Jonathan Cape

  Published by Vintage in 2004

  www.vintage-books.co.uk

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library