by A. L. Barker
“When did I come? How long ago?”
“Noon yesterday you weren’t there when I fetched water from the tank. This morning first thing you were laid under it. I come back down for my breakfast thinking you might walk yourself off, but when I went up again I thought you were dead.”
“So did I.”
“They have a fair old game throwing peanut shells and empty bottles on deck and they come on board to dirt or love or just sleep it off, but no one ain’t died here yet.”
I as good as died, she thought. There couldn’t be much more to it, only the blankness and coldness—there’d be much more of that.
“You weren’t decent, you had your legs cocked up and muck all over you. I fetched you down here to lay you out tidy and when I was washing you I see you still ticking.”
“You washed me?”
“Dead bodies ought to be decent.” His doglike grin broke out. “I didn’t undress you till I saw you wasn’t dead.”
“You had no right!” Shock pitched her voice to a thin cry. “No decent man would molest an unconscious woman—”
“Molest? What’s that? I’m not decent, but I an’t so hard pushed as to fumble with cold mutton.” He was still grinning but now there was a depth to it that frightened her. “Here’s your things, you can get dressed and muck off.”
She tried to reach the bundle of clothes he held out, but everything went tipping and turning like a bent gramophone record. She lay back with a groan.
“You’re the colour of a kidney-bean all over. What’ve you been up to?”
She didn’t need him to tell her she was bruised, her body was on fire with pain.
“He didn’t know his own strength.”
“Who?”
“Your old man—or was it your fancy beat you up?”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I’ve a right to, though.”
“Don’t you think I’ve a right too?”
“Maybe you were stitched. I don’t like to see a woman with a skinful, I like a woman to be on the holy side.” There was mockery and a kind of appetite on his wide wet lips. Shuddering she made too sudden a movement and cried out with pain. “Or was it an accident? Did you get run over?”
“I don’t know.”
“The way I look at it, you owe me that much.”
“I don’t know!”
“Proper gramophone, aren’t you?”
This was the moment when she had to look behind her, to turn and take a long look at nothing. It seemed to her that it was what everyone was afraid of and it was worse than they thought—bogey, dragon, devil, it was worse than any thing. It was like water—necessary and welcome while it came out of the tap, but too much, a little too much was enough to drown in.
“I don’t know how I came here or how I got hurt. I don’t know who I am. I can’t remember.”
“I got no head for details, either.”
His side of the grin, and hers—was that all there was to the world?
“I can’t remember anything—” But it would have been nearer the truth to say she remembered coldness and the impure spaces of the dark. “Is it funny? Do you think it’s funny?”
“You’re not the first woman that’s been aboard this boat.” He picked up a short black pipe and tapped it into his palm. “Don’t alarm yourself you’re anything of a rarity. They come because I ask them and because they’ve a mind to. What’s more, they’re not afraid to give their names.”
“I’m not afraid. Oh, how can you be so stupid—”
“I like that, I like it all. Tell, you what missis, you’re not very civil.”
“I’m sorry, but don’t you see I’d tell you if I could?”
“People don’t forget their own names.” He sat rubbing his thumb over the bowl of his pipe, seeming put out and sulky.
“You don’t know what it’s like.” The absurd thing was that she was trying to tell him. “It’s like a wall—no, it isn’t, it’s like nothing, like having nothing to live in. You don’t realise how much you live in the past until there isn’t any past.”
“Here and now’s enough for me.”
“Because you’ve got all the rest, you know what it’s been like and you expect it to be the same again. But whichever way I look I’m in the dark. I’ve never felt so lonely—or have I? I don’t even know that. I don’t know what I am because I don’t know what I’ve been—”
“Sounds like a put-up job. A respectable woman would have a handbag, wouldn’t she? With something in it.” He struck a match across the table top and lit his pipe, swallowing the smoke like water. “Letters, bills, savings-book—she’d have something to know her by.”
“Perhaps I’ve lost my handbag. But there must be something—My clothes! What about my clothes? Isn’t there anything in the pockets? Let me look—”
“I looked already.” He threw the bundle on the bunk. “You emptied your pockets before you forgot your memory. You’re not very flush either—two and threepence and a soap coupon you’re worth.”
She unrolled them, unremarkable clothes with the impress of her body in them. They were neither new nor old, except for the shoes which were worn and bulging. Everything was wet, a tweed coat—mudstained and torn, a jumper and skirt and some underwear of a serviceable kind which she hastily rolled up again and pushed down the side of the bunk.
It was as he said, in the pockets of the coat she found a few coins and a piece of paper entitling her to fourpence off the price of a packet of soap-powder, and a handkerchief smelling of peppermint.
“Is this all?”
“What else should there be?”
He had taken his pipe out of his mouth and was looking at her with drop-jawed innocence. It was all beyond her, even his obvious playing of some little game. For her there was nothing obvious, a nod meant as much as a wink.
“When you throw something away,” she said, “you don’t leave your name on it.”
“Look, missis, if you’ve forgot your memory you don’t start to worry till you get it back.”
“I wish you wouldn’t call me missis.”
“Why not?”
“How do you know I’m married? I haven’t a ring.”
“Got to call you something, haven’t I?”
She looked at him with surprise. He was picking things up and setting them down on the table, he even picked up the loaf and thumped that down in a pestered sort of way. “Got to have a name, haven’t you!”
“I don’t know yours.”
He picked up a tin full of nails and banged the table with it in a last defiant gesture that seemed to round off his anger. “Garnett. The painter.”
“Painter?”
“You might say. You might say Garnett the nailer, Garnett the plugger, Garnett the oiler, Garnett the jobber of them all. Painting’s respectable work, if I’m asked I say painter.”
“You’re not married?”
“Not for a gold clock. This old boat’s all the she I want.”
He was inviting her to share a joke, but she did not know what the joke was, she did not want to know.
“Where is it going—this boat?”
“She an’t going. If you tried to make her she’d open out like a cabbage. It’s only the weed that holds her together.”
“Why do you stay here?”
“It’s a place to live. It suits me. It’s cheap. She’ll see me out—any bit of straight-grained oak could do that. You know, missis, for a pot of tar and new strakers she’d be ready to work again.”
“Work?”
“She’s an old fly-boat, used to work the cuts with a couple of horses, carrying coal mostly. She’s out of date now, they all want steel boats with engines, so when she stemmed up on a mudbank no one troubled to take her off. When I come aboard she was carrying coal dust and river rats.” He grinned. “It suits them too.”
But not me, she thought, this wooden box doesn’t suit me. This is his world, I’ve got to find mine. She felt
for the clothes she had pushed down the side of the bunk.
“You’ve been very kind. I shall always remember it.”
“Shall you?” His grin deepened.
“I’ve told you the truth as far as I know it.” She meant that to be dignified, but it sounded forlorn. “I think it’s time I went. I’ll get dressed, my clothes will soon dry. I’ll get dressed now.” She undid the bundle with one hand, with the other held the blanket under her chin. He sat pipe in hand, expectant. “Please let me get dressed.”
He did not move. He could make her so tired, just the sight of him, that rash, ribald colour defeated her, as if she wasn’t defeated already by the task of getting herself out of this place.
“I can’t with you watching. Please—”
He put his pipe in his mouth and tilted his chair back. What tired her most were his eyes, not so much their blueness and wetness as having to see the funny side that he saw with them.
“Please,” she kept saying, holding on to the word. “Please—”
*
She had spent what will she had on the gesture of getting away. Honour, conscience, something had been fobbed off and she did not try again, not even when she was able to get about, self-tender and feeble as a half-drowned fly. In fact she began to be afraid of it then, afraid of leaving this place which she could remember from one moment to the next and where her shortcomings were allowed for, however casually. Not yet, she thought, because I could do no good, I’m afraid for the wind to blow on me. When I’m stronger—she gladly left it at that.
She was willing to lie for hours on the bunk in the narrow cabin, watching the jazzing of the water on the wall and hearing the secret noises of the river. She thought of the water as black and very deep, after a stone had been thrown in and the ripples were running shuddering to the brink. She shuddered with them, the ripples of shock ran over her, distorting her thoughts. She had dreams about people, she was among crowds of people whom she did not know but who knew her. Whatever she started to dream about—anything under the sun—a crowd would come into it, busy and predatory, closing on her with a lot of sharp small noise like the clatter of birds. They had spoon faces and they were sometimes comic, sometimes dreadful because she thought they were a clue which she couldn’t read. Then like the back of her hand she hardly noticed them and if they were a clue it was only to her blood pressure or the state of her nerves, or anything skin deep.
Sometimes she tried to get back, she set herself at her first coherent memory to fix and extend and relive it. A black road was what she remembered, and being on it all her life. Whatever else she had done and no matter how long for, was no use, no life without she remembered it. She cast about endlessly, picking over and worrying the memory until it got the high gloss of nightmare and she doubted it had happened. She came to believe that she had been left, abandoned somewhere on that road. She had no grounds for thinking so, it did not follow, as everything else did, from her present situation. So surely it was memory?
Sometimes she lay, half sleeping, half-waking, letting whatever might come. Some critical process was at work even then, because of all the blown and furtive images that went through her mind one emerged as different, plain and ordinary. She felt no shock of recognition, it had been too gradual for that, but it was a shock to have proof that she knew all the time.
What she had taken for a pair of wall-eyes staring and following or just rolling round like everything else, were the headlights of a car and a car implied a driver, a man. There was no identifying him, yet if he were to come now she would feel the matching coldness in her heart. Because he, whoever he was, was to blame for it all.
She got no further, could put neither face nor person to him. He was a shadow and his enmity was all the past she was allowed. Knowing that the rest was there made her angry but she could only cry with it and she was soon too tired even for that. So then she lay quiet while the salt dried on her face and she examined piece by piece all she could see of the place she was in.
She always liked it. Cramped and cluttered though it was, it had unity and handiness because everything was there to serve a need. Getting—and keeping—this private corner seemed to her an achievement. Through the long afternoon stillness the dirty crockery, tins, rope, oil-drums, even the thumbed picture of the bathing girl waited to be used again. There was poignancy in that. She felt a pang of envy, of sickness almost, for something of her own.
Surely she had left her mark somewhere, there was a place somewhere that was hers, things she had used, that her hands remembered? She tried associations, thought of pouring tea, winding clocks, washing dishes. She imagined herself setting a table or sitting in a chair, her own chair, so familiar that her body could anticipate and would be there resting a full second before she sat down in it. She thought of curtains, of herself drawing curtains across a window, always the same window with the same view. But it was as if she hadn’t been born, only finished—her imperfections and her years wished on her. Was it possible for a woman to be created tired and disheartened and stiff in the joint? For what purpose? For some sort of freak, perhaps, to happen once in a world where everything had to happen?
That was thinking the worst. It took Garnett to cure her of it. She used to lie, watching dusk and then the dark, waiting. She would hear him come, sounding like a crowd, even along the river bank where there was only mud—he could be noisy in mud. She used to think he had people with him and had left them outside the cabin, but she never heard anyone go away afterwards. He would come in with more than a stir—it was a kind of riot—throwing things down, breathing, treading, creaking, even his clothes rubbing over his body, were noisy. He would strike a match, holding it high so that the first thing she saw was his face.
“You still here?” He could say it with genuine surprise. “Beats me how you lie in the dark.”
“Did you think I might be gone?”
“Got to go one day, haven’t you?”
Go—as if she were an engine that started on a button, go popping away out of sight, out of mind.
“I’m in the way, aren’t I?”
“Not in mine, I only kip here.”
She touched the side of the bunk. “I’ve taken your bed.”
“Would you sooner we shared it?” He was lighting the lamp, it showed the skin of his face fiery and taut as the skin of an apple. “Moral, an’t we? Don’t even sleep in the same cabin.”
“Do you want me to go?”
“I’ve no feelings either way.”
“I do try,” she said, “I try to walk a little each day.”
“Here we are—” he was pulling paper bags out of his pockets, “sausages, beans, bread, grease—everything for a fry-up.”
“I can’t without holding, though—if there were nothing to hold on to I’d have to crawl. Not that I’m so weak, but I just can’t trust things. I’m holding them down more than I’m holding on—”
That was a discovery but he wasn’t listening. He was eating biscuits, stuffing them three at a time into his mouth.
“You don’t believe me, do you?”
“Here,” he held out the bag, “have one.”
“You don’t believe anything I say.”
“I take as I find—you an’t forgot how I found you?”
It was true that he had no feelings either way. He allowed for her presence by leaving her the bunk, and for her weakness by putting food down beside her, but if he did not cook a meal for himself she had to do without. When he did cook he gave her half, if she could not stomach what he provided—fried food and warmed-up pies—he ate her share.
She could forgive him for not making a sick nurse. It was his open mind she resented, and the way he kept it. As far as her bodily sickness was concerned he gave her the benefit of the doubt, inferring that if she needed anything more she would have to help herself. Her loss of memory he treated as a joke and laboured it until she could have screamed. He tried to trick her into giving herself away, and she always knew when h
e was going to try, his cunning stood out round him like a halo.
“I’ve done a bit of everything in my time, from stoking to horse-breaking. If I had it over again I’d get in a bit of whaling too, I like anything real. And I’d start sooner—I never set foot outside the farm till I was twelve. I did a man’s work, you can do plenty in a sixteen-hour day, seven days a week. They didn’t send me to school because I wasn’t on the books and I was never let loose for questions to be asked. They found me in a beansack, two days old and a fair exchange for a quart of beans. They didn’t think so, they never forgave me for making short weight, but when I was twelve I reckoned I’d paid them back and I walked out. Sixpence was all I had. You could get pennyworths those days, remember? Sweets, cakes, bus-rides, cigarettes—remember the pennyworths? You and me are of an age and that was your time too. You don’t forget what happened to you when you were a kid, if it was bad you remember the good times better. Look at me, never slept under a blanket till I went to sea, but I remember what I got with that sixpence. I spent every penny of it on sweets and if it had been half a crown I’d have done the same. Crazy for sugar I was, couldn’t get enough—that’s what years of boiled bacon and salt porridge brought me to. I’d sit dreaming about stickjaw and jam and cakes and how I’d take my fill and my mouth used to run water and I’d have done murder to get it. I an’t felt so strong about anything since, not even women.”
Sometimes, surely, he got a lion’s share of what he wanted? There would always be something insatiable about him, a still wholesome appetite for more: sugar or women, he would never get enough.
“I was greener than grass. I’d never seen a street of houses nor a double-decker bus and if you asked me what high living was I’d have said sixpennorth of boilings. But I was used to roughing it and I was big for my age, so people let me alone. They let me starve, then I cottoned and began to help myself. I’m still at it, I wouldn’t lift a finger for any one else.”
“You’ve been kind to me.”
‘I let you alone, that’s all.”
“You didn’t let me starve.”