by A. L. Barker
“For a big woman you’ve a sinful small appetite. Do you always pick your food about?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’ve got big bones—I’ve seen them.”
He expected her to share the joke and she came pretty close to it, she couldn’t look into that blue glimmering stare and keep her own perspectives.
“I think I’m getting stronger. If my head didn’t go round so when I try to stand up—”
“What’re you going to do?”
“Do?”
“When you go. That’s what we’re talking about, how soon you can get away. If you forgot your memory like you say, you’ll go to the police.”
“The police!”
“They keep a list of them that have gone missing.”
She recoiled at the idea. It was the first hope she had been offered, the first step she could see her way to take, and she was flustered, panicky. “I don’t want to be told, it wouldn’t do any good. I want to remember.”
“The old man’ll be glad to see you back.”
“What old man?”
“Yours, your husband.”
“I may not be married.”
“You’re married all right, a fine woman like you.”
The joke wasn’t always to be shared, it wasn’t worth sharing, there was no reason to feel out of anything, no reason for another of these disproportionate pangs of loneliness. Was it fear of shortcoming, of inadequacies in herself that she still had to face up to? Or was some mindless part of her still being reminded?
“Maybe you know something about rings, too.” He came and leaned on the bunk. “See this?” He pulled a piece of string from under his shirt, it was knotted round his neck and there was a ring threaded on it.
He held it close to her face, a heavy gold ring with a chasing of diamond-shaped facets worn smooth. It had gone a brassy colour with years and use, it looked like someone’s wedding-ring.
“Belonged to my mother.” He pushed it on the top of his thumb and wagged it under her nose.
“You said you never knew your mother.”
“I said I was found in a beansack, but it takes more than a bean to make a baby. I reckon I had a mother. See, here’s her initials cut on the inside. A.O., an’t it? Annie Oakley!”
His grin widened into laughter and the ring was dropped back under his shirt.
It occurred to her that he had talked to make her talk, without a grain of truth in any of it. At the same moment she understood with a shock of pleasure that he was a born liar. That was the use of the blue stare and the grin. She welcomed the knowledge, she told herself she had to welcome any knowledge. In a private way she was comforted, too.
*
One morning she got up on to the deck. It was an effort, everything went watery and sly as if she was looking into a distorting mirror, but apart from her mind being blank and her body all bruises there was nothing wrong with her.
She could make herself believe that for about five minutes, but she preferred to think there was a lot wrong, enough, anyway, to keep her from action. Action was complicated and dangerous, one thing led to another and no one could foresee the outcome. In the cabin she was safe and willing that whatever had been started in the past should finish there. She did not want to start anything else.
The boat was moored on a bend, she saw an island stuffed with rhododendron bushes, a few feet of towpath and the top of a derrick. Nothing more, except the river which was the colour of a beer bottle.
Coming up here was action; she had taken it to prove there was nothing the matter with her. In one respect there wasn’t: liquids and solids soon sorted themselves out, what she was seeing now was near enough what anyone would see.
Yet there was something the matter just the same because what she was seeing—trees and the river—made her go cold. They were in someone else’s landscape. So was everything beyond this boat and she knew exactly how it would look—wrong side out and the people like foreigners without a face between them.
See, she told that part of herself—honour, conscience, whatever it was—I wouldn’t get anywhere if I was to go now and walk till I dropped—and I should soon drop—the answer’s inside me. I’ve got to wait for it to come out.
The Rose Vermuylen was the crust of a boat. Everything that could be spared and a great deal that couldn’t had been unscrewed and sawn and wrenched and prised off. It had left scars with clamp holes and brass stains still in them, and scabs where a varnish finished and the unsalted wood had dried out like a wound.
She moved about, finding her limitations and keeping to them. It was quiet, it always was while Garnett was away—but prepared rather than peaceful. It would take more than a few hours to fade him out. He was strong about the place, even here where she had never actually seen him and there was nothing she could pick on, nothing that couldn’t have been done by or belonged to anybody else. He wouldn’t strip the boat, there was too much detail in that. The muddle, the unswept deck boards, screwed papers and empty cartons were him all over, but they were people on the towpath too. Yet he was here and they weren’t, she wasn’t even here herself so much as he was—
That’s nonsense, she thought, that’s the sort of silly habit I’m getting into. What else did I lose besides memory?
There wasn’t much to explore—a hatchway covered with tarpaulin and a paraffin tank under a wooden housing. The cabin and the galley ran two-thirds the length of the boat, humped under a felt roof splatched with bird droppings—it looked like a Noah’s Ark squatting into the water. Some kind of lifting tackle with a broken shank and a wheel was built over the hatchway. Garnett had tied string from it to the rails and hung out his shirt. She touched the shirt, bunching and weighing the slack cotton in her hand. Yes, this was his, this belonged—she was still trying to locate him, it seemed a silly marvellous thing that he could be so strong without being here in the flesh. It’s only like an animal that leaves its smell, she thought.
That wasn’t the answer. It didn’t explain the readiness nor the feeling she had of being outside the picture. Picture? Of this? Or dirt and empty Cola bottles? I’m grateful, she thought, but I don’t have to pretend.
She pushed at the bottles with her foot until one rolled free, then she bent painfully, picked it up and dropped it over the side. She picked up another, and another—some of the bottles didn’t sink, they bobbed away, necks up, to the opposite bank and stuck in the mud. But she kept on, stooping and finding every bottle on the deck and putting it overboard. When they were all gone she was unsteady with weariness but she felt surer of herself. She leaned against the side, looking about her. ‘It wants cleaning up—’
Next moment she found herself going, head and shoulders backwards in a slow inexorable arching that made her cry out with pain. Her feet slithered from under her, she had a glimpse as she turned her head of black water with a skin of oil. Something bit into her back, then with an agoinising twist she wrenched herself round, caught at the tipping deck-rail and fell across it, her thighs dragging on the wooden side of the boat.
The rail had opened like a gate, but it didn’t break. She was able to ease herself back and drop to her knees on the deck. There she stayed, crying a little into her hands, with sickness and fright.
When she told Garnett about it she was still raw with shock.
“Swim, can you?” he said.
“No—I don’t know—anyway I’d be too weak.”
“You’d drown then. There’s ten feet of river under the shelf.”
“Why don’t you mend that rail? It’s dangerous—”
“Not if you can swim, missis.”
*
The next day she tidied up in the cabin. She concentrated on the table which had been worrying her. There was nothing to clean with except a broomhead and the yellow soap that Garnett used for washing and shaving, but she got the tins and the rope on to the floor and the dirty crockery into the pail that did for a sink. She washed the table and covered the bread and sug
ar with a newspaper. Everything else she piled neatly on one side after she had held and examined it all—the bags of nails, paint-brushes, candle stubs, everything down to a black banana skin. They were his, Garnett’s, and any one of them might give her an advantage. That was what she was looking for, he was no mystery, all she needed was to be able to go one better.
Among the things on the table was a mirror. She breathed on it and rubbed it and took it to the light. The first thing she saw was a mole the size and colour of a raisin in the crease of a thick white neck. She tipped the mirror and looked into wide nostrils, tipped it again and there was brownish kinky hair starting strongly from someone’s forehead. She didn’t recognise the forehead nor the eyes under full pink eyelids. They were soft and bloomy and gave nothing away.
She put the mirror down, disappointed. What had she hoped to see? Was there such a fixed, private memorable thing that could not be confused or swallowed up or taken over? More likely the skin had broken and everything of hers had spilled out and if she wanted to be herself she would have to start again making a self to be. I could do better than this, she thought. She didn’t see how, but she was conscious of dissatisfaction and a desire to be different. Garnett would be the starting-point. When Garnett came everything would begin again. Properly.
She was on the bunk, resting, when he came in. She heard him singing along the towpath, but she knew he was coming before he got within earshot because everything pricked up. It was an uncomfortable feeling, not joyful so much as ready; she always felt that with Garnett she had to be ready.
He was singing ‘Rose Marie’ in a strong maudlin voice that put up the darkness like a flock of birds. The boat filled with him when he stepped on board.
She had no chance to speak. He stood in the doorway mouthing the words of the song round that indestructible grin of his. It will go my way now, she thought, I’m going to pull the strings, what I’m going to say will change everything.
He sang ‘Rose Marie, I love you, I’m always dreaming of you—’ swaying about, making faces. He looked beery and stupid and vulgar. It was a tremendous relief to despise him, something huge and onerous dropped off her and she thanked God. She was lightened and entire, this was the difference, this was being herself. In a moment she could begin to remember.
“Well,” said Garnett, “did he come?”
They were not on that footing now, everything was different and he must be told.
“Did he come? Did he find you?”
“Who?”
“You wouldn’t be asking if he had. Here’s me been kicking myself for saying too much. How was I to know what you’d been mixed up in?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Well, what? If I waited for you to tell me!”
He sat astride a chair, his arms across the back, mouth ajar, tickled still by that private joke. “You’ve surprised me, I wouldn’t have credited it. I was giving you the benefit of the doubt. You’d have gone long ago else. ‘She’s respectable,’ I kept saying, ‘anyone can see she’s that.’ What you can’t see matters most though, eh, missis?”
It was fear, of course, that kept her the same, this unspecified dread that came on like sickness—
“Here you are, quiet as moss, and I kidded myself you were a decent woman. Shows how wrong I can be.”
“I haven’t done anything wrong. I can’t remember, but I haven’t done anything wrong.”
“What I heard, you wouldn’t want to remember.”
It had been second nature to be afraid and now he was going to tell her what she was afraid of.
“If I’d known what you’d been up to I’d have kept my mouth shut. You should have confided in me. All that flack about forgetting yourself might have been true—how was I to know?” There was a kind of fondness in his grin. “So now he’s on to you like a dog ferret and you won’t shake him off.”
“Who?”
“A long nose and big feet. If there’d been more light I’d have spotted the feet right away, but he came down to the bulks and it was dark as Jericho because I was fixing the wiring. ‘I’m looking for someone, a lady,’ he said. ‘She an’t here,’ I said, ‘without she’s a lady rat’, and then he told me it was you he was after.”
“Me?”
“‘I got reason to believe she’s on the river,’ he said, ‘if she an’t in it. I got to find her for her own good.’ That’s how he put it, so naturally I told him.”
When she didn’t speak he nudged her to be sure she realised the enormity of it. “I told him where you were—”
She turned her head away, sickened not by him or his funny side but by the creeping Jenny she had to call herself. There had been no miracle, everything was the same.
“He’ll come for you tonight—plain clothes men fancy themselves at night.”
“I haven’t done anything.”
“I wouldn’t be in your skin for a gold clock. Hark!” He held up his hand, jaws gapping with glee. “Here he comes! Hear his big feet coming over the deck? Why don’t you run? What are you waiting for?” He rocked the chair, sweating with laughter. “Why don’t you bloody well run?”
The shock had gone deep and wide and suddenly everything hung fire, even he slackened and was still, with the fun drying off him. She was drying too, shrivelling at the source. She saw what else there had been to lose and beside it her defeats amounted to a row of beans.
In the pause the old boat eased its timbers. There was a sound like the slow crushing of paper. She had heard it before when she was alone and been comforted by thought of the wooden shell around her.
She climbed out of the bunk. Movement was still painful and when she stood upright the usual wave of dizziness engulfed her. She put on her shoes which had dried and stiffened after the wetting, then she took down her coat from the door.
“Here,” he said, “what’s up?”
“I’m going.”
“Where?”
“That’s what you want, isn’t it?”
“An’t you afraid of meeting that plain clothes man?” He wiped the grin over his face. “Out in the dark? He fancies himself in the dark.”
She struggled into her coat. There was a patch of dried mud on it and she thought of the first night she remembered, walking and falling in a black gutter. That was where she was going now.
“Here, missis, here,” he called softly, urgently, as if she were an animal to be coaxed, “I’ve got something to tell you. There’s no one outside, not a pimple, no one’s looking for you.”
He really thought he had to tell her and that being told she would bounce right way up again.
“I was joking.”
What do I want then? she thought. That it should matter whether I’m up or down—to someone, anyone—that’s what I want. But there is only him.
“I never did see you laugh. I wouldn’t know you if you did.”
She had her hand on the door, outside was another black night and the same smell of mud and she stood up in all she possessed—there was nothing to wait for.
“If you didn’t button it up you wouldn’t have such a bad face.”
“I’m going. You want me to go.”
“I do? I could put you off if I did.” He rolled a cigarette in his fingers and touched the gummed paper along his tongue. It was his grin that kept her. She was trying, not for the first time, to account for the fondness in it—only a dog or a fool would grin like that.
He struck a match across the top of the table she had cleared. “You’re free, so am I. This don’t stake you, not if you was to scrub down to the keel. You can frig about, but you don’t pay. You get what I give and if I don’t give, you go.”
So he had noticed her attempts to tidy and he was suspicious—his sort always saw themselves in other people. But I see you, she thought, and only you. I’ve nothing else to get in the way, I’ve an uninterrupted view, I can see right through you.
Which was uppermost in that, her pleasure or her pain? How was it possibl
e to cherish and despise for the same reason, for a shortcoming, for littleness, a kind of uniformity?
She was pleased of course with the knowledge—knowledge was the most precious thing in life and she had so little of it that to know something was a tonic, a shot in the arm. It filled in a fraction of emptiness. But pain, she thought, what’s pain to do with it?
“I was tired doing nothing, so I washed the table and threw away the banana skins. That’s all.”
“You’re wasting your time, you can’t give me the appetite to be tidy.”
“I haven’t got any time, it takes other people to make time.”
“You’re an effing mystery.” The cigarette stuck like a straw on his lip. Common, she would call him, but there were two sides even to that, there was the untouchable side that was a weapon in itself.
“It would help me if you’d let me do things—just dusting and washing-up. I’d put everything back as I found it. Having something to do would help, something to think about—”
“You want to think about dirt and tea-grouts?”
“I could cook, couldn’t I cook for you sometimes?”
“Cook? An’t you forgot that too?”
“I don’t think so.”
“No, that’s a safe thing to remember. My old mother was the only one I ever knew could tell a scorch from a roast.” He drew on the cigarette so that it flared up like a little bonfire. “Let’s try you, let’s hear you make a brown stew.”
She sat on the bunk, still in her coat, still looking at him because there was something else to see, something less, and again she was the loser and was comforted.
“With a pound of scrag that’s got to be made to melt like butter in the mouth.”
Why me, she thought, what can I lose? And why comforted?
“Let’s hear how you’d set about it.”
“Making a stew is just cooking meat and vegetables together, all together, for an hour and a half, perhaps two hours.”
“I said brown stew. Which means you fry the meat and onions first, in dripping. Either you’ve forgot or you never knew. My mother made dumplings big as ballcocks and pure as snowflakes. I’ve watched her throw the flour and suet together—”