by Carol Birch
Pete gave him a lift back. Neither of them spoke and the headlights, acid white, burned the darkness ahead. Everything in the beam was ghastly and unreal, everything outside it nothing. The tops of the branches in the spindly hedges either side of the road sparkled and crackled.
‘There y’go, mate,’ said Pete, dropping him off.
‘Seeya, Pete.’
The night was black.
The house was dark and cold. The fire had gone out. He lit a fire and lay in front of it, stretched out on the settee. Hell of a racket coming from that room. Never sleep with that going on.
They all want in. Oh miaow! Miaow! Tragic. Trying out for the opera. Sod it. He opened the door and let them in. And of course because they were cats and awkward bastards by nature, they didn’t want in any more.
‘Fuck you,’ he said, went back to the fire and fell asleep. When he woke up, he thought someone had just spoken. The weather was calm and there was only the sound of water dripping, and he had no idea what the time was.
There’d been something, a noise.
He sat up.
But no. Nothing but water, a gentle musical accompaniment. He should get up and go to bed, but instead he fell asleep again.
Time passed.
When he woke – a minute, an hour – who knows? – he thought once more, someone spoke, just now, and strained his ears to catch the ghost of the sound; but there was only a merging of several random small sounds, which came together by degrees and were suddenly clear, undeniable, identifiable: the sliding of a hand on the bannister, a discreet cough, bare footsteps on the stairs.
20
Through the green rank-smelling forest after last night’s wild night, to the stream. I have to wash my socks and knickers with a bar of soap. I remember Johnny washing his clothes in a bowl at midnight in Carmody Square. He would have loved this life in some ways. Ideally he’d have been a hobo riding the rails into the sunset but he’d never have been able to take the dirt, God knows what a boxcar would have done to him. Took at least two showers a day, even when we had no hot water. Standing on an outdoor landing pouring cold water over his head, his naked body brown and skinny and shiny in the early morning light. He could have been simpler, it would have suited him. He could have been a mendicant monk somewhere in the East, a sage on a rock in contemplation, with his begging bowl and his long black moustaches dripping down into the purling stream that meanders beside him through the rocks. Too fastidious though. So careful in some ways, so hopeless and careless in others. He’d lose a twenty pound note just like that. You might as well give it to the dog. Oh well, he’d say with his gentle infuriating eyes, I suppose we’ll just have to get some more.
And here I am, bashing my clothes on a rock in the stream. Johnny had no patience for drudgery. Life’s too short, he’d say. They live like insects, people, mindless, crawling the surface of the earth, scarcely conscious. Not me. Not me. I’m not afraid to plumb the depths. What else is life for? Life, Lorna! Your life! And you, you, you try to tell me what to do. Well, I don’t care about all that. I don’t care about cleaning the floor and getting nice towels and hanging them up, all that bourgeois shit. I care about what’s really important. Don’t you ever try and bring me down to that level. I mean it. I’ll never join the herd. Never. You think that’s real? That – shit. I’d rather be dead.
Oh, the end times with Johnny were terrible.
Lily was the reef on which we foundered. For a long time I had denied the obvious. How could it ever end? We were, I believed, old souls somehow joined through the dimensions. Don’t even start to ask me what that means, I haven’t a clue. Just that for so many years things had remained effortlessly right in spite of our differences, which were never few. They just didn’t matter.
Until they did.
I became irritated by the silly piercing look of his eyes. I never used to see that. How did it creep up on me? He was a serious man, he’d always been a serious man. Nothing wrong with that. The politics, we were together on that. Oh Johnny, the world was shit. That’s what you said. There was suffering everywhere. The beggars no more than children, babies, at the mouths of tube stations. Polite, a bit shy: ‘Spare change please?’ Only I was sick of going to bed and hearing the impassioned murmur of the two of them, him and Maurice still rattling on two hours later when I got up to go to the bathroom. Lily called him the Roundhead because he objected to her clothes. He couldn’t stand it when she giggled and guffawed, and shouted: Oh my Ga-a-a-a-a-awd! ‘Is the Roundhead here?’ she’d chirrup, coming in from school and flinging down her schoolbag. ‘Is that what that droning is?’ He was pained by the way she made stupid kissy mouths whenever a camera was brought out. ‘Your friends are facile, Lily.’ He’d say it to her in his soft way: I’m sincerely trying to help you. ‘They don’t know any other way to be.’
She was fifteen when she started going out with Terry, the boy who fixed the pipes in the house next door to Wilf. Terrible Terry, thick as two short planks. Rawbones, we called him. He was eighteen. He worked with his Uncle Dave all over from Shepherd’s Bush to Notting Hill Gate, plumbing and painting, putting in kitchens, bathrooms, bits of all sorts. He and his uncle drove around in a green van with Rapid Drain Repairs written on the side. Someone had altered the D so that it now read Rapid Brain Repairs. Suddenly Terry was in and out of our place all the time with his gormless hulking presence and big ruddy face. He didn’t talk much at first, but after a while started to regale us with sudden bursts of nervous rambling opinion that veered all over the place and were capable of expressing two opposing views in one sentence. He could bang on about foreigners having it cushy and we’re all mugs one minute, and the next be extolling the virtues of multiculturalism. ‘Shit for brains,’ said Johnny. God knows what she saw in him, we wondered. Maybe it was because he ran around after her like a little dog. ‘I want some chocolate,’ she’d say, and he’d jump up and dash off and be back in ten minutes with a Wispa. ‘Oh ta,’ she’d say and wolf it down.
He was too old for her, Johnny said.
But he was harmless.
‘Yeah, but get this!’ said Lily one day. ‘He’s done a job for that horrible woman. Phoebe Twist.’
‘Phoebe Twist!’ Johnny sitting forward, suddenly wide awake.
Oh, Christ, no, not her again. This woman was the Bad Fairy, the one whose face sours the milk and makes the baby cry.
He’d put in a new kitchen and a shower with his Uncle Dave.
‘She really likes Terry.’
‘Terry?’
‘Yeah. She always asks for him, whenever anything needs doing. Not his uncle, Dave. Only Terry. She’s got a thing for him.’
‘Told you the woman was mad,’ Johnny said.
Johnny talked to him a lot at first, eager for news about the Twist woman’s horrible habits. She had a big running sore on her leg that stank. ‘And she’s really dirty,’ said Lily, ‘isn’t she, Tes? If you open her fridge, it’s bogging.’
‘Yeah.’
‘And she goes on about other people!’
‘She’s dead creepy,’ said Terry. His cheeks were such bright apple red you could almost see the blood running just under the surface. ‘She just goes – brush – brush – brush – all day long.’
‘What’s she brushing?’
‘Clothes. Hair.’
*
I went to see Wilf. I wanted his laid-back perspective. He knew Terry, I figured. He’d done some work on a stone wall in Wilf’s back garden.
Wilf was sitting in front of the telly eating thick beef sausages and baked beans from a plate on his knees. He was a sous chef at a bistro off Queensway now, but at home he lived on kids’ food. The gas fire blasted heat. Kids were racketing about upstairs and Jananda was yelling at them. Wilf thought everything was OK.
‘He’s all right, Terry,’ he said. ‘Anyway, it’s not like she’s marrying him, is it, Lor?’
‘Do you think he’s a bit old for her? Johnny thinks he might be.’
‘Nah. Eighteen? What? That what he is? Fifteen, I’d have said. Know how it is, girls mature quicker than boys. No no, Terry’s just a kid, you don’t have to worry about him.’
‘A kid with a dick,’ I said.
‘Don’t say that, Lor.’ Gently. ‘Doesn’t sound nice.’
‘Well, you know what I mean.’
Wilf put on a considering face. ‘We-e-ell – I might be bothered if he was a different sort of kid but I honestly think he’s young for his age. Nothing’s going on.’
‘You seem very sure.’
‘Oh, I know my Lily,’ he said complacently. ‘Believe me, we talk things through.’
It made me feel awful that she talked so easily to Wilf, because she never talked things through with me. Sex, for example – I tried once, she just said, ‘How dare you, of course I know what I’m doing, what do you think I am, an idiot?’
‘Are you OK, Lor? Things going all right?’
‘Oh yeah. They’re just driving me mad a bit. It has got worse.’
‘Him and her?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I don’t mind if she wants to come here for a few days,’ he said.
I should have minded that. I should have wanted her to stay with me, but a few days’ peace would have been nice. No chance. ‘Are you kidding?’ she said. ‘Spend all my time wiping arses? Oh yeah! Their eyes light up. Oh look, babysitter. Lily, would you just mind watching Biff for a few minutes? I’ve just got to…’
‘She says I always take Johnny’s side,’ I said. ‘He says I always take hers. Sides? Sides? What are they on about? Sometimes I just want to scream at them both.’
‘Never stops, Lor, does it?’
‘No.’
‘Life. Just never bloody stops.’ He smiled. ‘All things must pass, girl.’
‘Thought for the day,’ I said, getting up.
‘Got to dash, have you, Lor?’ said Wilf, putting his plate on the floor and reaching out to touch my hand. ‘God’s sake, girl, you’re always dashing off somewhere. Ease off. Send her over. Give yourself a break.’
*
Later when I mentioned what Wilf had said about Terry, Johnny just huffed. ‘You know what he’s like. If the bomb dropped, he wouldn’t worry till it actually hit him on the head.’
21
How many years had he been boring himself stupid here? Used to be OK. The old days, when he used to come in with Eric. And Mary, look at her, yellow-fingered Mary, constant fag between her fingers. All those years, and now. Eighteen from the back, fifty-five from the front.
‘Do you want that filling up, Dan?’ she said, smiling.
‘Yeah, go on, Mary.’
‘Gonna be another hot one tomorrow.’ Marlon, wiping down the bar.
‘No one can tell me this is normal weather.’ Mary pulled a pint of Old Peculier, her brick-coloured forehead glistening. ‘Pissing down one day, scorching the next. It’s getting ridiculous.’
‘We’re doomed,’ said Marlon, tossing the rag onto his shoulder, ‘doomed I tell ye.’
The pub was quiet for the time of night. Something weird and old and black and white played too quietly to be heard on the telly over the bar. He was putting off going home. ‘Where is everyone?’ he asked.
‘Midweek.’ Marlon counted change.
‘Here y’are, love.’ Mary put his pint before him and he thanked her and took a swig, looking at the screen over her head. Foreign film, subtitles: Have you brought your examination book? Something strange and serious. He kept reading the words because there was nothing much else to look at. An old man was having a nightmare. You have been accused of guilt. A soft low hum of voices came from the far end of the room, vague music, the clink of bottles. But my wife has been dead for years. The old man was a doctor and he had to examine a woman slumped in a chair with her eyes closed. Rows of weird people watched him. Please diagnose the patient. The old man leaned over the woman. The patient is dead, he said. She opened her eyes and laughed in his face, and her laugh got wilder and wilder and more horrible.
‘Look at that,’ said Dan, ‘what is that?’
Marlon glanced up. ‘I’ll turn it over,’ he said.
‘No, leave it.’
People drifted in. Eric, a few tourists who gathered round the parrot’s cage, some lads from the creamery. Dan bought some spicy nuts and they were too hot but he ate them anyway. Marlon changed the channel. Football. He turned the sound up till it resembled a distant roaring that surged along with all the other sounds. If I leave now, thought Dan, it’ll just about still be light when I get home. Should have left the light on. No reason not to. But that’s giving in. Or go back when it’s dark. Dark house, dark garden, dark yard, dark stairs.
So what?
It was half and half when he finally left. A hand lifted – goodbye. Nice night. Twilight coming on. Still warm but that drenching feeling gone. All still. He set off at a brisk pace, the sound of his own shoes intrusive. Passed the old boys’ clubhouse, the field with goalposts. Sports day. Her, mum, standing on the sidelines shouting, ‘Come on, Danny!’ at the top of her voice, clapping her hands very loudly and calling, half whistle, half war-cry. Sports day, parents’ night, all those things, she was never really with anyone. Not that she didn’t talk to people, she did, but she was never really with anyone. Why was she like that? Because she went away? Couldn’t be that. Other people did. He was sorry for her, always, a horrible nagging ache that hung over his schooldays. Standing there pretending to be just like everybody else, then soon as she got home changing back into her usual watery wreck of a self as if putting on comfy old clothes. In the door, flop down, at ease: ‘Ooh, can you make me a cup of tea, my love?’
Poor weak hand on brow like she’s in a silent film, down on her back on the settee, eyes scrunched, turning, tossing, pressing her face into the back of the settee. Long long sigh. ‘Oh, my feet!’ She’d start to ramble as he built up the fire, drinking her tea, smoking her cigarette. First thing he ever learned – life was desperately sad. Bad. And people were bad. You had to be careful. ‘Your dad,’ she’d say, ‘he taught me that. Oh, your poor father!’
And then, staring straight ahead and growing profound: ‘There’s no such thing as forever.’
A course in existential dread for a childhood. That’s what he’d had.
‘But then there is!’ Bashing her cup down on the coffee table. ‘And that’s worse! Don’t you think? To live forever? Oh, that’s unbearable! This! Forever! And never getting anywhere.’
Yeah, Mum. Fucking terrible.
At the end of the village, on the verge, the lime tree had one arm hanging down. Look at that. Vandals. Kids. Pulled the arm right off that tree. Let me catch ’em, he thought, good clout round the earole.
It was pitch black all round the house. He felt his way along the wall to the back. It couldn’t help but creep back on him, that single brief moment when he’d heard, or thought he’d heard, something on the stairs and gone out into the hall with hackles up and eyes wide open – and there was nothing, nothing on the stairs, nothing anywhere, and the second after it happened, it hadn’t happened because it couldn’t have happened. A sound, when gone, there’s nothing to replay, no proof. It didn’t happen.
He fumbled the key in the lock and went in.
And if it was her? If it really was?
Fuck off, Mum.
Lights on. Telly on. Kettle on.
Cats came prowling. The big orange one round his legs. Getting to look old, that cat.
‘Yes,’ he said to it, squidging the teabag against the side of the mug, ‘yes, it is, I know.’
He took his tea and a bottle, a stick of wood and a knife, and went and sat on the back step. It was better out here than in there. He stretched, rubbed his forehead and blinked, assessing his body for pain. There were a few problems, aches, peculiar sensations, crap sight, but it could have been a lot worse. He started whittling. Look at that sky! The universe vibrated, the constellations ramped across the sky. He
drew in his breath as if something was rushing at him, looked down, and there in his memory, so clear, was his mum sitting on the blue painted chair in the garden, the one that now stood on the top landing with a bucket on it for catching the drips when it rained. She’d been in one of her weepy dreadsome moods and he’d made her go outside, saying look, it’s a nice day, the primroses are out, look, you’ll feel much better if you get a bit of fresh air. You go out and I’ll put these sheets in the washing machine and get you a cup of tea. Here. I’ll put this chair here. He’d brought her out a sandwich and a cup of tea, and a bit later when he got back in, looked out of the kitchen window and saw her holding the sandwich half-way to her mouth, head turned slightly towards the house. He thought she was probably crying, he just knew she was, and there was not a thing he could do about it. It made him want to cry, not that he ever did. Ever. And she was looking at him with this look, this look of wistful reproach and loving sadness. How did she always manage to make him feel so mushed up and bad? That jacket he hated. She spent all her money on it one Christmas, bloody awful it was and he had to pretend to like it, used to wear it down to the bus stop then take it off, try to carry it without letting it be seen, impossible. What she want to go and get a thing like that for? Just showed how much she really knew about him, didn’t it? Buying him a jacket like that and thinking he’d wear it. Didn’t know him at all if she could even think he’d wear it. And she was so pleased. Her face when she gave it to him. He still cringed to think of it.
Still, shitty as everything turned out, there’d been good things.
He wished she’d stop. Just be normal.
Jesus, though, what if it was? Her on the stairs. Stop thinking about all this. Drink.
Couldn’t handle that.
Oh that’s unbearable! To live forever. Nah, she wouldn’t hang around. Couldn’t wait to get away, could she? Why would she want to come back? But the sound on the stairs kept replaying in his mind and his heart was tight. The terror of eternity came down and sharpened his mind. All those times you feared death and found comfort in the fact that it had not yet arrived, it still would one day. Tick. Tock. Stop any time. It happens. The next second.