by A. L. Barker
“Oh, we shouldn’t tell her. We’d give her the bottle of medicine and she need never know. After all it doesn’t say on the label, does it?”
“You want his blood and his sweat to be that colour, you want him that all through, and you want him to feel it because then you feel so white, don’t you, you feel like gold—” Her whole body was laughing, gusting with it, except for her eyes—and they looked as if she was dying with it.
Joe couldn’t think what it was about. If the doctor’s skin meant all that to her, if she couldn’t see it for blackness, she shouldn’t have married him. But she had, and it could only be for the things Rumbold had told him about—which made her blacker than any nigger.
The doctor smiled punctually and with the same degree of gentleness. He put one hand round the nape of his wife’s neck and began to knead and soothe with his big pink-tipped fingers. “We’ll drink coffee together before I go to the hospital.” She looked up at him, the breath knocking in her throat. “Go and make a nice pot of coffee—” his fingers moved up into her hair and she leaned back, shuddering, on his hand—“black coffee, Lise”.
*
She wouldn’t open the door when Joe took the medicine. She told him to go away, she didn’t want anything. So he left the bottle outside and for two days he didn’t go back. She had whisky, some tea and half a loaf—he thought she’d crawl back of the wardrobe and come out when she was better.
In the middle of the week he went to the top of the basement steps and looked down. The medicine was there, so were three half pint bottles of milk. She could be drunk—it wouldn’t be the first time—and he waited again, till evening, after he’d had his supper.
It angered him, seeing those bottles outside the door. He wanted to kick them flying, but he didn’t want to go down there to do it. If she was sick, if she was in trouble, it was her trouble, he wasn’t going to get in under it. He knew what that would be like. Once when he was playing in the river he surfaced in a patch of oil. Feel, taste, smell, it was all over him, it stayed long after he had washed himself clean.
He went down the steps slowly, kicking the stumps of banister rails. The milk bottles glimmered out of the dusk. There was nothing in that room, only junk and dirt and cockroaches and a crazy old woman. She kept trying to make him look further than his own nose, to see something else, something she could see. That was when he got angry and shouted and she ran away. She always ran away.
Then he thought perhaps she was dead. He went to the door and knocked the special knock. He thought of her dead and wet all over like Christy’s drowned kittens.
The medicine smelled of paregoric. It was a clear treacly colour until he shook up the sediment and tasted the cork. It soured his tongue with its fumy sweetness. He spat, remembering Esther. He had started remembering her lately, it was her doing, her kind of doing, slipping in and out the back end of his mind. He always forgot again before he had time to think anything particular about her.
He knocked twice more. He had never been able to hurry Mrs Martineau and it wouldn’t be decent to try now. He wondered if her eyes were shut. You couldn’t go by the kittens, they hadn’t lived long enough to open theirs.
At first he didn’t believe the rubbing on the other side of the door—it was only fancy. Then the bolt grated out of its socket and he was angry because she didn’t know when to stop. Anyway, it was finished for him, he wasn’t coming down here any more. He wouldn’t even have waited to tell her if she hadn’t been standing in the doorway instead of running as she usually did.
“Here,” he said, “what’s the game?”
“Game?” The way she spoke, she might have been rational. “Game, Joe?” She had a hat on top of the balaclava, an old crushed straw with roses round the rim.
“You look a crying sight.”
“Do I?” She touched the hat, seeming pleased. “I couldn’t go without saying goodbye.”
“I get you medicine and you leave it out there with the milk. Three days’ milk—you want people to think you’re dead?”
“Ask and it shall be given unto you. I asked first thing in the morning and the last at night. It was a comfort to have it in words. But it was never given. Asking isn’t enough.” The old roses shivered delicately on her hat. “He helps those who help themselves—I’m going to find Victor.”
With the toe of his boot Joe began pushing the milk bottles into the room. “That’s right, he can’t have got far—he’s maybe still at the bus stop.”
“He wanted us to live in Brighton because there’s plenty to see, there’s the Aquarium. He used to say he could always lose himself in the Aquarium.”
“Think he did?”
“That Indian,” she said, “he’s got a knife. He watched the bungalow all day Sunday. Why did he do that on his day off?”
“I’m not coming any more,” said Joe. “I’m not coming with your groceries and your pension, and you’ll have to ask Stogumber to get your whisky.”
If she heard, it wasn’t more to her than the buzzing of a fly. She stooped over the milk bottles with bright annoyance. “White medicine? It’s bismuth again, because I have a pain round my heart is it always indigestion?”
Joe picked up the cough mixture and thrust it at her. “Try putting this in your tea and it will be indigestion.”
She didn’t seem able to hold the bottle. It slipped through her fingers and he caught it as it fell. “Paregoric—you’d have smelt what it was if it had broke.”
“My head’s aching, let’s go into the garden. I can go with you, but not alone, not any more. He’s got a knife, Victor. Give me your arm. He waited all day Sunday—which of us is he waiting for?” If she’d tried to touch him Joe would probably have hit her. She was trembling steadily and the hat had settled over one eye. “I’d have gone to Brighton, I never minded where we went—you were the place I wanted to be.”
There had been a change these last three days. She had sunk away into her clothes, sunk to the bottom of them, leaving only a glimmer of herself. The substance seemed to have run out from under her skin, it was transparent like the whey on curdled milk.
“Let’s go into the garden. My head aches, and my chest. If Victor was here he’d get them to water the dust. ‘I can’t have you live in a place like this,’ he said, and he went out to look for somewhere else. Asking isn’t enough—”
All at once she started screaming, short and sharp like a rubber doll that was being squeezed. She flung herself at Joe, her hands beat at his chest, clawed up towards his throat. She kept crying, “The knife, Victor, the knife!” her mouth gapping black, not from any face he knew, but from the lantern bones of a skull.
He struck out, wild with fright. His fists went in deep, meeting nothing solid, nothing human, just a swaddle of clothes. She dropped like a great soft fly at his feet.
He ran up the steps and into the street, running away, not stopping until he got to the end of the Terrace. Outside the corner house Jamaicans were sitting, singing to the wheezy sweetness of an accordion. When he looked all the mild oily faces were pooled and there was only the black doctor with his brandy-ball eyes sitting under the porch.
*
Mrs Stogumber had sent for the ambulance and they were all down there, the ambulance men, the nurse—a sandy-faced woman in a starched bib—Mrs Stogumber and Jessie. Esther, Christy and the Lampitt boys sat on the top stair and were chased off it every few minutes by Mrs Stogumber.
No one could get in. There were two more milk bottles outside the door and the bolt was home on the inside. Mrs Stogumber had knocked, so had Jessie, the ambulance men had put their shoulders to the door and the nurse had called out, “Now come along, dear, you’re only making things worse.”
“This is how it is for years,” said Mrs Stogumber. “She is mad. Never admitting anyone but the boy.”
“She may be in a coma,” said the nurse, briskly repinning the front of her apron.
“Funny,” said Jessie, “her picking on Joe like that.”
One of the ambulance men said to Mrs Stogumber, “What about the windows? Could we get in that way?”
“There are windows but they are iron barred. Like the Zoo.”
“We haven’t got all day to wait.” The nurse looked at her watch. “I should say all night.”
“Those bars’ll snap out sometimes, like a stick of celery. Depends if they’re old enough.”
“They’re old enough,” said Mrs Stogumber. “Wasn’t nobody born when these places were built.”
“While we’re standing here,” said the nurse, “there might be an urgent maternity call. People are slow about dying, but they’re always in a hurry to be born.”
“Why don’t you get Joe?” said Esther from the top of the steps. “She’d open the door for him.”
“Get Joe!” bawled the youngest Lampitt, fingering his nose at the nurse.
Mrs Stogumber stood at the bottom of the steps and pushed with her meaty hands. “Away, you children, it is not for you to see.”
The eldest Lampitt put a cigarette stub in a corner of his lip. “Go back to Berlin, you old frow.”
“I reckon she’d open the door to Joe,” said Jessie. “That’s all you want, to get in and catch her, don’t you?”
“Catch her?”
“If she can still run, she’s going to,” said Mrs Stogumber.
The ambulance man jerked his thumb at the door. “Where’s she going to run?”
“You’ll see,” said Jessie, “when you get inside.”
*
Esther was sent to the garage to fetch Joe. She wouldn’t tell him what it was about, but he knew when he saw the ambulance outside the house and the little crowd in the hall. And he knew what they would want him to do.
“Pop down and get her to unbolt the door,” said Jessie. “She won’t do it for us and the ambulance is waiting to take her.”
He let them ask, then he refused.
“Be the making of her,” said Jessie, “a nice clean bed in the hospital.”
“The death, you mean,” said Joe. “I’m not going down there.”
“Why not?” asked the nurse. “Why won’t you?”
This was the question he couldn’t answer. He wasn’t on Mrs Martineau’s side—if anything he was against her—but that didn’t mean he was on theirs. “Why pick on me?”
The nurse spoke brightly, as she did to difficult patients. “Because nobody else can get into that room, and if you won’t, what are we going to do?”
“Leave her alone.”
“He’s scared what he might see,” said Jessie.
“Don’t be frightened, Joe,” said Mrs Stogumber kindly. “Your momma will be with you.”
“Momma will be with you, Joey!” wailed the Lampitt boys.
Jessie laughed, the ambulance men grinned, Esther’s lips just tasted the smile. He couldn’t blame them, though he tried. It wouldn’t have mattered what happened to a crazy old fool like Mrs Martineau, but he had gone down the basement steps in a fury, without anyone’s fist in his back, ready to beat the door down, and what happened to her happened to him—and all because someone laughed.
He knocked loudly to show that he wasn’t frightened. The ambulance men came and stood behind him, the others crowded on the steps. In the silence water shrilled, belched and shrilled again a note higher. Mrs Stogumber whispered thick and churchy to Jessie.
He could see Esther out of the back of his head, downbent over her hands, her smile slid away out of sight—as much as he ever saw. Sometimes in his waking nightmare he saw less, neither face nor hands nor fugitive smile, but just two brown middles.
It had to happen there, in front of Mrs Martineau’s door, with them all watching him get the breeze because once he’d seen a girl without her clothes. A skinned rabbit on a slab, clammy, the flesh stained like a bruise and the middles, the two brown middles the colour of tea—
The nurse said, “Try again, there’s a good lad.”
She was there. They heard her behind the door, fumbling like a paper bag. He knocked. There was a long obstinate pause, the nurse’s starched bib creaked as she breathed.
He turned to say it was no use, they’d have to break the door down, but the nurse, head cocked, hissed him into silence.
The bolt was being drawn. As it left its socket the ambulance man shouldered Joe aside and pushed the door open.
She was on her feet, peering at them, trying to see into the passage. She seemed as if she couldn’t speak, her lips gathered, dropped, gathered and fell again with a little drumsticks rattle. He knew what it was about. “Joe,” she was saying, “Joe—”
One of the ambulance men blew between his teeth, the other said “God A’mighty!”, the nurse crackled with shock and then was silent. Not that there was much change as far as Joe could see. She had the straw hat hanging by its string down her back with a dreadful touch of girlishness. Her skin was no more than tissue, a rub of a thumb and her bones would come through it. The rest—hung, wrapped, pinned, bundled, knotted and crammed—was like nothing live or dead. It could be a split bale on its way to the rag mill, or the pickings from the banks of a railway cutting. To Joe it was Mrs Martineau. She had no flesh and blood like other people, only a belly of wool—and of all the kinds it took to make a world she was just one.
He was not prepared for what happened next. If he had thought at all about after the door was opened it was to suppose himself going away and leaving them to it and never setting foot in the basement room again. But it had started and he was still there, unable to move because the crowd—bigger now that people were coming in from the Terrace—had swarmed down the steps and into the passage. It started as soon as the nurse pushed Joe aside. Mrs Martineau saw her, she saw the ambulance men, and if she couldn’t see the others she could hear them.
“Come along now, dear,” said the nurse. “Not going to give any more trouble, are we?”
Who knows what came alive for her then? What she had shut out and barricaded against, what she had endured at night, lost under her own eyelid—it came in starched cuffs, smelling of lysol, and in big boots and railway caps and the rubbing murmur of a crowd.
Perhaps they thought they could just pick her up and peel her. Perhaps they didn’t think she could run. One minute she was there, the next she wasn’t.
“Now where’s she gone?” said one ambulance man.
The other turned to Joe. “Mean to say she lives like this?”
“Is she expecting to go somewhere?” said the nurse. “Everything stacked up as if she was moving out?”
“Always the same,” said Mrs Stogumber from the door. “She is mad like a coot and no one put a finger on her. We have live over a volcano, yes, and any time she blows her top.”
“Now come along, dear,” called the nurse. “We’re not going to be silly, are we?”
“Looks as if we’ll have to winkle her out,” said one ambulance man.
“Hampton Court maze is nothing to this,” said the other. “You go that way, I’ll take Wardrobe Alley.”
“I’ll be here when she pops out this end,” said the nurse. “Now back everyone, please—” She pushed Joe and Mrs Stogumber back over the threshold. “I’m going to shut the door.”
She tried, but it would only move a few inches.
“Can’t, nurse,” said the Lampitt boy. “There’s a screw in the hinge.”
“More likely the toe of your boot,” retorted the nurse. “Get away now, do!”
She dived at them with a crackle of starch, hustling, shoving, beating up a whiff of antisepsis.
“Nannie, you’re hurting!” screamed a Lampitt. “You kicked me in the teeth!”
“You’ve broken my truss!” roared another.
The crowd, laughing, crammed and broke over the threshold. At the same moment there was a shout from one of the ambulance men. The nurse was too late to catch Mrs Martineau as she came out from under the lee of the wardrobe and vanished back of the piano. The ambulance man blundered out, s
wearing.
“Sorry, Tom,” said the nurse. “I missed her.”
“So did I. Back there she’s got a sort of den.” He made a face. “Fair turns your stomach.”
The second man put his head round the chest of drawers with such a puzzled expression that the crowd burst out laughing. “Not a sign of her—”
“Did you look under the bed, mister?” shouted someone.
“We’ve wasted enough time,” said the nurse. “I’ll go and fetch her out.”
“Shall I get my dog? He’s a good ratter—”
“Let’s keep this private,” said the man called Tom and tried to shut the door. He had no more luck than the nurse. Someone pushed a length of piping into the jamb, and when he got down on his knees to release it people started spilling over him into the room.
From then on it was out of hand. Joe was pushed bodily over the threshold. Staggering, he felt the ambulance man’s fingers under his boot. Others came with him—Jessie, Mrs Stogumber, Esther—those at the front pushed forward by those at the back. Boys and men from other houses on the Terrace shoved each other past the doorway. Surprised, incredulous, they stood looking at the huge, abyssmal room, the teetering furniture, the cobwebs bellying, the rind of dust.
It might have stopped there if the Lampitts hadn’t caught a glimpse of the straw hat. Whooping and yelling, the pack of them broke after her. That touched off the rest. In a moment a dozen boys were beating up and down, laughing, whistling, hammering with their fists at the walls of furniture.
How she went to earth among all that crowd, nobody knew. They could not find her, they kept finding each other—the nurse, the ambulance men, the boys whipping up the joke. Things were smashed, a tin hip-bath went down with a mangling clatter. She must have had some hole or corner small and unlikely enough, and crouched there while they battered up and down. Until finally she was pricked out by her own terror.
That was the last Joe saw of her, running as he had so often seen her run, not going anywhere, just getting away, like a rabbit on a wire. Her eyes had been pushed back into their sockets and he thought she was already dead, he thought she wouldn’t have stayed even for that.