by A. L. Barker
He stood where they had shoved him, with his back to the barren fireplace, smelling soot and stinging dust. The air swarmed with it, they were putting it up from where it had lain for years, they were dragging things aside, filling the alleys—breaking it up.
That was something he had wanted to do for his own sake—to break it up, punch the paper bag and show himself there was nothing in it. Nor was there—for him. Whatever was in it for her was only what she had put there out of her own craziness.
Now he was seeing it go, there was no more in it for him than there ever had been, and he didn’t have to care about her because everything of her that mattered went years ago.
In another minute it was over. The nurse, coming from behind the chest of drawers, saw Mrs Martineau running towards her and held out her arms—a pity she hadn’t the face to make it look a loving or welcoming gesture—and Mrs Martineau went straight into them. She seemed to roll half way up the nurse’s bib and then drop at her feet and the nurse bent down as if she’d missed a catch.
They took her away in the ambulance. Esther was laughing. Her cheeks were pink, she kept turning her head aside, laughing and flapping her hand as if the joke was too funny. Mrs Stogumber fetched Mr Stogumber to put the boys out, and then she locked the basement room and went off with the key.
“She’s going to dig round on her own,” said Jessie. “Why didn’t you take the key, Joe?”
“Why should I?”
“Your friend, wasn’t she?”
“No friend of mine.”
He went back to the garage. Rumbold was serving petrol, and instead of going into the bay Joe went round behind the workshop where Pyefield had laid a concrete slab. He had meant to have a cigarette, but he left it on his lip without lighting it.
He found he remembered everything, how it looked and sounded and smelt as it happened and how there was nothing in it for him. Then he started again from the beginning and worked through to the end, and from the end he worked back to the beginning and then the same thing kept happening—she kept running past him with her empty eye holes and gapping mouth—over and over again as if she was caught in a groove.
*
If Joe had wanted to he could always have called his mind his own. But it was never much of a possession, he was not a dreamer and he seldom drew on his memories. Things happended for the first time and that was enough. He knew what to think and when he had thought it, he forgot it.
After that night he forgot Mrs Martineau. The crazy years of dirt and hope and whisky traps were time out of mind. What had happened to her had happened to him, they were neither of them going to be the same again. He didn’t dare even look for the damage, he was broken wide open.
What he couldn’t forget after that night was Esther. Not that he thought about her, she just moved into his mind and stayed. She knew about everything he did, and when he saw her in the flesh she held it against him. Sometimes he didn’t see her for days. She wasn’t up when he left in the morning and at night he stayed away until she’d gone to bed. He hung around the garage or sat in Evie’s over a cup of tea.
Evie gave him cigarettes and stale cheese-cakes, he told her he couldn’t go home because his mother had a late shift worker for a lodger. Evie was interested and so he tried her with a few stories about his mother and the lodger and the lodger and Mrs Stogumber, playing green and unenlightened. It was something he had never done before, the idea was to entertain Evie and if he had something out of it for himself—a feeling of having got back in some deep way at Esther—he took it without question and without any particular satisfaction.
Brind came every day to the garage. While he was there he took over the office and Rumbold had to go into the workshop. That left the pump bay for Joe because Rumbold was like a cat on hot bricks and didn’t seem able to bear the sight of him.
There was nothing personal in it as far as Joe was concerned. What Rumbold really could not bear was his sight of himself. He got the same view every time he met anyone’s eye.
Men came to the garage to see Brind. They were a queer assortment, some in expensive clothes driving American cars with wide slaughtering lines, some in overalls driving lorries, some in pinstripes and homburgs driving little pre-war Morrises and Austins. Rumbold always went rushing out, but Brind would call them into the office where there was scarcely room for two.
There had been changes. Rumbold had paved the yard at the back and put up breeze walls with a tin roof over to make a store shed. Joe couldn’t find out what they were going to store, sometimes he thought Rumbold didn’t know either. If he was uncommunicative with facts it was probably because he had none to communicate. He was becoming more and more of the garage-hand, doing repairs, greasing, serving petrol when they were busy. Brind never touched a spanner or lifted a hose, he called Joe to fuel his car and check it over. Joe would have done it anyhow, his passion for the car was the one thing he still recognised in himself.
Brind kept busy in the office. He did a lot of telephoning with the door shut. All Rumbold’s papers lay on the desk in front of him. The garage books were shoved down between the desk and the window to keep the glass from rattling. There was nothing to show when he had gone, except cigarette butts.
Sometimes he followed Joe to the café. He was popular there, the carmen liked his stories, which were nearer the bone than any of them knew how to go. He talked pornography in an easy conversational voice which was audible, if the urn wasn’t hissing, in every corner of the room. Once old Charley, the cabbie, ducked his thumb at Evie. “We’re in mixed company.”
Brind had put his hand on Joe’s shoulder. “He won’t always be a virgin.”
He treated everyone gently, the smile never left his throat, whether he was talking his brand of bitter dirt or asking Evie for buttered toast. But for Joe he had something extra, a mock deference, sporting, almost arch—the sort of manner he might use to a woman. If he had kept it for Evie, the short hairs wouldn’t have crawled so far along Joe’s spine.
Sometimes he bought Joe a meal and Joe ate it because he was always hungry. He was not a reader of character, the good as well as the bad had to be rubbed in before he was aware of it. Though he didn’t credit Brind with a heart, he couldn’t see, either, what a plate of egg and chips could buy. His company, perhaps? Brind, himself bringing the food from the counter, seemed to want that. He would sit and watch Joe eat. When the light did not pinpoint the lenses his eyes looked marbly behind his pince-nez. He talked soberly, asking questions, waiting for Joe’s answers, or supplying them, accepting and considering the curtest monosyllable, his mock deference softened, pulped almost, to humility. Joe was most afraid of him then.
He tried to say as little as possible—any few words might be a give-away—he even tried not to listen because to listen might be to understand. Once he wouldn’t have minded that, once he thought himself so well cased he would have been curious to know.
“Got a girl, Joe?”
That was one of the first things Brind asked, he kept harping back on it. “Why haven’t you got a girl? Don’t you like women, Joe?”
It occurred to Joe then that Brind didn’t: as a sort, as a race, as a human quantity, he didn’t like women. If he had to have them, that was another thing—he would rather see them damned first.
Once Joe said, “I got no time for it,” and Brind said, “At sixteen you’ve got nothing else,” and flashed his eyeglasses at the joke. Then he leaned forward, his cheeks very long and soapy, “At any age, come to that. The rest is camouflage—politics, war, religion, money to burn. The Shop Street garage is what Joe Munn covers up with. Think about that next time you’re greasing, Joe.”
“When I’m greasing I think about grease.”
Another time he talked about money. “How much do you get a week, Joe?”
“Three pounds.”
“Would you like a rise?”
Joe shrugged.
“I’ve watched you working—you like to work, don’t you? Well
enough to do it for its own sake, to let yourself be undervalued and underpaid?”
“He says he’ll give me more when I’m worth it.”
“I’m in charge of finances.” Brind took out two cigarettes and rolled one across to Joe. “It’s a kind of game, when you take out more than you put in, you’re winning.” He held his gold lighter for Joe. “If you want a rise you’ll have to ask me.”
“I’m not asking.”
He knew about the car, too. “I’ve watched you—” Was he always watching Joe? “You’d like a ride, like to warm it up out on the bypass, wouldn’t you?” He was watching then, as if he could see the hoops Joe was going through. “I doubt if you could hold it. It’s got too much poke.”
Joe stood up. “I got to go home.”
“Why, you’ve never even held your breath, have you? Nothing’s ever got under the rubber.” It served him for laughter, that flashing and glinting of eyeglasses. “If you can’t bounce you can always roll, but only one way, Joe—only down.”
It didn’t matter what it was all about. People talked for a lot of reasons, not always because there was something to say.
As he went out, Evie said, “You’re not going home yet, are you?”
“Why?”
“It’ll be another hour before the night shift starts.” He stared, forgetting his stories about the lodger, and Evie went pink. “You mustn’t believe all you see, Joe. And don’t let anyone tell you what to think, it’s people’s minds that make the trouble.”
“What trouble?”
“She’s your mother, Joe. Always remember that.”
He went along Shop Street thinking of a story for tomorrow. He wanted something that would bring Evie up all breathy and shocked. She liked to be shocked, and it was funny, in a way, how she could be, seeing that she had a working knowledge and he hadn’t. The darkness was warm and lively. The gusts pocketed in the street smelt of spring and fried batter and exhausts. He could pile it on and Evie would enjoy it. Would Esther? Esther was only meant to know, as she knew everything else.
He kept walking because walking was all there was to do. Billy Diprose and others were standing on the corner of Clydach Street, but Joe already had company and he wasn’t going to give her anything to smile at. He turned off into the web of roads that were The Welshies.
Now that he was alone, everything was her kind—the houses he didn’t know, the people he didn’t speak to. They were bricks and plaster, men, women and strangers, and she had a finger in them all. That made her seem clever, which she wasn’t. She was no cleverer than water that can creep into a crack.
Thinking had never done him any good and he wasn’t surprised to get no help from it now. He couldn’t get away though, wherever he went she would be there first. He accepted his dispossession without pleasure, without rancour, without particular feeling at all. He did not wonder how long it would go on nor even remember that there had been a lifetime when he had kept himself to himself. It had ended a week ago and that was too far back to remember.
He must have been cherishing a hope that there were still ones she couldn’t touch, people so full of themselves that they wouldn’t give her an inch or he wouldn’t have followed the girl in the red coat. That bright crackerjack daub was a far shout from Esther Munn—something free and fancy was going down the street.
He had never followed a girl before: this girl was different. She kept trying to be someone else. When she walked stiff legged, rolling her hips, she only needed a tight dress to be making faces at him from behind. When she went limp and flowed along, he could fill in the rest for her. When she flung up the collar of the red coat and took short crisp steps with the toes of her shoes just sipping the pavement he knew she was being a cut above Clydach Street.
Then suddenly she would forget to be anything and there was just the red coat jazzing in and out the shadows and he followed as he would have followed a brass band, not wanting to be parted from it.
At first she didn’t realise he was there, she was too busy changing her nature. A man called from a doorway and she looked round her shoulder. That look used to turn Joe’s stomach. Now he didn’t care, he trod louder, gritting his boots so that both the girl and the man in the doorway saw him.
After that there was just Joe and the girl, fifty feet apart, walking along Conway Road and Glasnevin Street. Once she turned to look back as he passed under a lamp. Her face was in shadow but he didn’t care whether she was pretty or plain—she was different. Sometimes gusts of wind caught the coat and filled it like a poppy. Then he wanted to burst it between his hands.
She had fixed on a sort of sprightly saunter, pretending interest in everything except what was behind her. Joe had to dawdle to avoid catching up, but he was happy just keeping her in sight. Halfway down Glasnevin Street she started to hurry. One moment she was idling along, the next she was running and the coat flew out like a red wing. She might suddenly have got frightened, except that Clydach Street, with people and lights, was a few hundred yards away and she could have turned into it any time. Or she might be late for something, any moment she might arrive somewhere and that would be the last he’d see of her. He lengthened his stride, but she drew away. He broke into a shambling run, she turned a corner and disappeared.
Following wasn’t enough for him then. Seeing wasn’t going to be believing again, he had to get his hands on the red coat and be sure there wasn’t a particle, a breath of Esther Munn in her. But when he rounded the corner she was nowhere in sight.
At the end of the road were sodium lights, the entire block of the Khedive Cinema lay between Joe and the liver-coloured buses rocking up Clydach Street. She could never have got that far in the time, nor could she have gone the other way because he would have seen her cross the road. There was nowhere she could have gone, no doorway, no shadow deep enough to swallow up that red coat.
A sound made him look up. Facing him, monstrous, functional, and from this non-business side, dimly lit, was the Khedive. On the outside fire-escape something moved. With a small clangour of feet on iron the red coat was sparking up towards the emergency exit.
It would have been a queer place for anyone else to choose. The higher he went the queerer it was—like running up an iron cobweb—but he wouldn’t have expected less of her. His boots made such a clatter he couldn’t hear how far ahead she was and when he stopped to listen it was as still as if he were alone on the staircase. Of course she wouldn’t bring it down to Park level as soon as she got her back to some railings—she would have gone on to the roof.
It was queerest of all up there. The Khevide had a mechanically operated globe that flooded red and green neon as it revolved. There was nothing much else, just a big place, flat and tidy as the deck of a ship, with occasional brick outcrops and shaft heads and a squat chimney. It was quiet: the building acted as a baffle and the noise of the traffic broke round it in a huge soft shoe shuffle.
Joe stepped over the parapet and looked round. She could be hiding anywhere. “Come on out, I can see you.”
He wished he hadn’t shouted, it didn’t seem to get any farther than his own breath. She might be watching and laughing because she’d led him up to the roof. He kept thinking he saw her out of the corner of his eye—a kind of wink, as if there was something solid behind him, and when he turned there were only the lights chasing off the globe. It was driven by dynamo, close to he heard the whine of it, and a steady crackling like peanuts being shelled.
He walked about looking for her. There weren’t many places to hide, only behind the brick headings and something that looked like the top of a lift shaft. There was a door marked DANGER in white letters a foot high. He kicked it, then he crossed to the far side and looked over the parapet.
People crawled and clustered like blowflies and the traffic greased round them and no one looked up at him looking down. He was on this roof with everything they did spread out for him to see and they went on going as far as they could and if it wasn’t as far as they’d
like it certainly wasn’t because he was watching. He thought of getting on the parapet and making out he was going to jump so they would all have to see him, but it was only a thought.
Nobody knew where he was except the girl in the red coat, if she had ever been here—which she hadn’t. He was sure of it now, he was on this roof alone.
The globe swirled, sending a spate of red, green, red, green over everything. His own body flashed like crazy traffic signals. The different girl had gone away into thin air and in Clydach Street under the sodium lights everyone was the same. He went back over the roof and stepped on to the fire-escape. The same was the best thing to be.
Halfway down was the emergency exit, lit by a single bulb. Before he got there he had to pass a smaller door with an empty socket where the light should be. Something stirred and broke the shadows. He didn’t need telling what it was, he would have run by and been glad to if she hadn’t called.
Close to the coat was the colour of Father Christmas. Every year Mr Stogumber got a job at the Toy Fair, sitting beside the bran tub selling lucky dips at sixpence a dip. They gave him a stuffed reindeer and a red flannel robe stuck with imitation snowflakes. He looked all right except for the newspaper that always rode up out of the backs of his shoes.
Joe remembered his excitement and hope and longing for something the red coat had seemed to promise. He couldn’t even be sure now what that was. All his dread of her kind had come back, of the faceless girls against the Park railings, of the things that asked to be done, of the sweet itch and crawl of his skin at the nightmare of doing them. Drymouthed, he stood staring at the red coat. The girl sighed, shifting into the angle of the doorway. A faint light fell across her cheek—she was Esther Munn.
Amazement, disappointment, shame, a kind of superstitious rage—he felt them all, and overriding everything else he felt relief. He was so relieved he could have laughed.
“You been here all the time?”
Hands in pockets, she rolled her head sleepily against the wall.