by Tobias Hill
‘I did,’ Neville says, with a sick man’s calm. ‘I died,’ he says, and sets the tea down on the table.
*
Solly and Pond are flying kites.
The Tower is behind them. The bridge is east of them. There are Saturday crowds, and tugs and lighters on the Thames, and a black police launcher, nosing down into the docklands.
If the kites come down the river will foul them, but Solly won’t let them fall. When Solly makes a kite, it does what you want it to do, it doesn’t bilk you, Solly tunes it like a watch: a kite that Solly makes you, that’s a kite you can trust. And he’s brought the boy where the wind is best. There’s always a breeze along this stretch, smooth as glass over the deep water. It thrums along the strings.
Solly grins around his pipe. ‘Alright?’ he asks, and the boy nods, his solemn face upturned, watching the diamonds lift above them.
He doesn’t talk much, the boy. Oh, he talks to himself, sometimes, but doesn’t Solly do that too, when Dora leaves him to work alone? Let the boy keep to himself – Solly doesn’t mind. Let him talk to the world when he’s ready. Where’s the sense in hurrying him? Let him speak when he’s something to say. Dora says he’s catching up at school, the teachers tell her he’s quick, and he has friends in the Buildings. The boy is coming along. Besides, chitchat is overrated. Solly’s too chatty himself. People listen to quiet men. Perhaps the boy will grow up to be a man people listen to.
Solly doesn’t like his name.
Pond: what does it mean? It’s uneasy, a name like that. He should have a proper name – a boy’s name – an English boy’s name, John or Henry. And after that name, Lazarus. If they’re going to take him in, they should do it properly. He’s told Dora, several times, and the Food Office are pestering them – the school and hospital too – but she isn’t listening. Solly has told her how it’ll be. The other kids will needle him, and that’ll be just the start. A name like that, it causes problems.
So far he’s been wrong, it’s true. People ask the boy his name, and he tells them. Pond, he says. Pond, they say, pleased to meet you, Pond; and they shake his hand, all smiles. They make allowances, as if he’s a well-bred foreigner.
Solly knows what’s going on. You don’t have to tell him: he knows what Dora’s afraid of. If they make him Something Lazarus, they’ll have to do it legit. They’ll need a new birth certificate. There are official channels, here, but official channels have no faces: you can’t reason with channels; and channels have little love for foreigners called Lazarus. What if the channels decide to take the boy away from them?
As if they would. As if they’re crying out for war orphans, or runaways, or throwaways – whatever the boy is. Those channels, besides, they’ve got enough on their hands. They’re hardly going to quibble over one less boy on the street, are they? No, Solly thinks (champing his pipe between his teeth), no, all being equal, the channels should be paying him.
(Chance would be a fine thing.)
No point pushing it. Dora loves the boy. And the boy calls himself Pond, so let him be. Oh, let him be. Things will work themselves out in the end.
*
‘It’s poetry,’ Jem says, and Floss turns the book in her hands, as if it might be hiding something. A mousetrap, a silverback.
‘Have you read all this?’
‘Just bits. My mum rents me books. This is an anthology.’
‘You’re brainy, aren’t you? But you’re not canny.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Pond’s canny, like my dad. You’re brainy, like Pond’s dad.’
‘What are you?’
‘I’m the one who decides.’
They’re at Jem’s place, in his room. Jem has his own, where Floss and Iris have theirs. Floss’s mum doesn’t know she’s here. She’s going to need a lie for later.
She flickers through the book. ‘Look,’ she says, ‘Goblin Market!’
‘That’s good, that one,’ Jem says, but Floss wrinkles her nose.
‘Goblins are for children’s stories.’
‘You like stories.’
‘Well,’ Floss says, ‘perhaps I’m growing out of them’ – and then, seeing Jem’s face fall, ‘Anyway, goblins aren’t scary, they’re not like your ghosts and trolls and that. You’re not afraid of goblins, are you?’
‘No. I’m scared of duppies, though.’
‘What are they?’
‘They’re like ghosts. In Jamaica they don’t get ghosts, they get duppies instead.’
Floss nods: ghosts she can still respect. ‘Do duppies haunt people?’
‘Sometimes. The bad ones do,’ Jem says; then, in a rush, ‘The bad ones, they dress in white, that’s how you see them coming, and if a bad duppy comes after you, you have to draw an ex in the dirt. Then the duppy stops to work it out, because ex is ten in Roman, and duppies, after they die, they forget all the numbers after nine.’
‘Well,’ Floss says, ‘I think that’s tosh. Why would they just forget?’
Jem reaches for the book. ‘I’ll read it.’
‘No, I will,’ Floss says, holding on doggedly, and she does.
Curious Laura chose to linger
Wondering at each merchant man.
One had a cat’s face,
One whisk’d a tail,
One tramp’d at a rat’s pace,
One crawl’d like a snail . . .
‘My dad’s the cat.’
‘Which one’s mine?’
‘Yours is the one with the tail. Pond’s is the snail.’
‘That’s not fair.’
‘Alright then, he can be the rat.’
The whisk-tail’d merchant bade her taste
In tones as smooth as honey,
The cat-faced purr’d,
The rat-faced spoke not a word . . .
It’s nice out, Jem sees. Dusk is coming down and the streetlamps are on. After a week of shortage they look special, like Chinese lanterns laid on for a festival. Inside his mum is boiling clothes, their steam ladening the air.
She never tasted such before,
How should it cloy with length of use?
She suck’d and suck’d and suck’d the more
Fruits which that unknown orchard bore;
She suck’d until her lips were sore –
Floss shuts the book. She purses her lips.
‘Don’t you like it?’ Jem asks.
‘It’s alright,’ she says, and turns to him, her legs crossed on the coverlet. ‘What’s the best thing you ever tasted?’
Jem thinks. ‘One time, when I was hungry, Mrs Lazarus – Pond’s mum – she told me how in the war they had to hide in the dock warehouses. A bomb came down and everything caught on fire. She said they had to run away through burning butter and treacle.’
Floss laughs. ‘But you never tasted that!’
‘I know, but I wish I could. What about you?’
‘My mum says I had turkey once for Christmas, but I don’t remember, I was just a tot.’
‘Don’t you really like the poem?’
‘Your stories are better,’ Floss says, and Jem beams. ‘Tell me one. Tell me one about the duppies.’
‘No. They’re not meant for stories.’
‘You can go in my car.’
Jem thinks about it – he’d love to go in the car – but he has to shake his head.
‘Why? You like making me stories! I don’t mind if it’s scary.’
I know that, Jem starts to say, but it’s no good, he can’t explain. He’d have to tell about Uncle Neville, who thinks he was killed in the war. And the whole point of frightening stories is to make real things less frightening, isn’t it? But a duppy story won’t do that. Duppies will do the opposite. He wishes he hadn’t mentioned them.
‘Don’t you want to go in the car?’ Floss asks, and Jem takes off his Contours.
‘Your dad wouldn’t let me, anyway.’
‘Oh,’ Floss says. ‘I don’t know.’
They sit in awkward silence. Floss looks o
ut at the streetlamps. ‘Flip. What time is it?’
‘They only just come on,’ Jem says, not wanting her to go. ‘We could play out, it’s not too late. We could find the others and do Troll.’
Floss grins. ‘Alright,’ she says, and jumps up. They make for the door, Floss with her coat halfway on.
‘Where do you think you’re going?’ Jem’s mum calls from the kitchen doorway. Her shape is heavy and new.
‘Out to play,’ Jem says, ‘can I, Mum?’
‘Who’s that with you?’
‘Me,’ Floss calls. ‘It’s Floss, Mrs Malcolm.’
‘You both best get home right after,’ Mrs Malcolm says, and they bomb it.
Jem goes and knocks for Pond. Floss runs upstairs and gets her sister. They meet up in the square. Foursquare and hollow around them, the Buildings are full of noises: the clinking of chipped dishes, the tinned songs of the wirelesses, and the men out on the balconies, smoking, twilit, asking how the missus is and what each is getting for supper.
‘It’s going to rain tonight,’ Iris says, ‘I heard it on the weather.’
‘Smart alec,’ Floss says, but Pond looks at the sky and does up his duffle, and Jem looks down and sees he’s forgotten his in the rush for freedom. Oh well, rain won’t hurt.
‘Where are we going?’ Pond asks, and Jem says, ‘Troll. Last one there’s it!’
They pelt across the square. Jem has a yard on Floss. He risks a gigglish look back. He doesn’t see the man ahead – coming in through the arch that gives onto the street – until he bundles into him.
‘Watch it, can’t you?’ the man mutters, tall and grim in the dark of the arch, and Jem’s laughter dies in his throat. It’s Mr Lockhart himself.
‘Dad!’ Floss cries, hot on Jem’s heels, ‘it’s us, look! How was the Roman? Did you make a packet? Did you fleece them?’
Iris comes up, breathless. Michael catches her by the arm. ‘Ow! What did I do?’ she squawks.
‘No playing out tonight,’ Michael says. ‘You two are coming in with me.’
‘That’s not fair,’ Floss says, ‘is it, Iris?’
‘No, and you’re hurting,’ Iris says, though he hardly is, it’s only the indignity.
‘I won’t tell you again,’ Michael says; and to the boys, none too kindly, ‘Off with you, the pair of you.’
‘Sorry, mister,’ Jem mumbles, but Pond steps up by Iris.
‘You’re hurting her,’ he says.
They all go so quiet. They can hear the Buildings in the hush, their small tea-and-supper sounds. Michael takes his hand off his younger one.
‘What was that?’ he asks, and the boy has the sense not to answer, but neither does he step down.
‘It’s alright, Pond,’ Iris says, her voice high. ‘I’m alright, look! I didn’t mean it, I was just being awful silly.’
Pond looks at father and daughter. He hardly understands, and seeing that Michael barks a laugh. ‘Get on home,’ he says, and gives the boy a push.
He isn’t rough about it. His temper is in check. He only means to have done with it, but the light is dim and the child off-guard: Pond stumbles back and falls. And there behind him is the dark boy’s mother, Mrs Malcolm, darker still in the dusk, with her son’s coat over her arm.
‘Shame on you,’ she says.
‘Mind your own business,’ Michael says. ‘You mind who you go judging.’
Bernadette comes on. She is afraid of Michael Lockhart – she admits it to herself, freely – but she has the pride not to show it. ‘Shame,’ is all she says again, and she touches Pond, just on the shoulder, like a child playing a game; and gently, though her eyes in the dusk are fierce. Like a cat’s, Pond thinks.
Little more is said between them. Lockhart mutters something gruff, and off he goes with his girls while Bernadette shepherds the boys. At her door Pond stops. She thinks she’ll have to have him in, but ‘Thank you, Mrs Malcolm,’ is all he says, very formal.
‘You’re welcome,’ Bernadette says, and still stern, ‘You stay out of his way, that man.’
‘I will,’ Pond says, and goes.
‘Bed,’ Bernadette says to her boy, and Jem does as he’s told, cowed, no fuss, though it’s still early. She lets him read to get him calm, and after she puts out the light she can still hear him whispering, reciting in the dark the lines he’s learned by rote, as if poems were protections.
We must not look at goblin men,
We must not buy their fruits:
Who knows upon what soil they fed
Their hungry thirsty roots?
*
Outside the rain begins. Under the streetlamps the pavements teem with it. Inside, Dora sings to her boy.
Unter Yidele’s vigele
Shteyt a klor-vayse tzigele
Dos tzigele iz geforn handlen
Dos vet zayn dayn barur
Rozhinkes mit mandlen
Shlof zhe Yidele, shlof.
‘What does it mean?’ Pond asks.
They are in the kitchen, Pond in the tub, Dora washing his hair by the light of the paraffin lamp. The electrics are out on their floor tonight, and something or other is broken, too, in the Columbia Buildings Baths, as something or other often is these days: so Dora must heat the kettle on the gas and wash her child herself.
Not that it’s a chore. Not that she minds doing this. Dora has catching up to do.
‘Oh, well, it’s just a song,’ she says. ‘It’s silly, it doesn’t mean much. My mother sang it when I was small. It says that, one day, you will go work in the markets, like your father. You’ll sell raisins and almonds and be a wealthy man. You like it?’
Pond thinks. He nods.
‘Sing it again,’ he says. So Dora does, running water through her fingers, running her fingers through his hair.
‘There!’ Dora says. ‘All rinsed. Let’s get you dry before you catch cold. Up you get, hutch-plutch!’
Pond finds his feet. He looks ahead, chin up, over Dora’s crouched form. Even now that he is hers he rarely meets Dora’s gaze, let alone the eyes of others: he is animal-like in that. He looks towards the window, the courts and ruins beyond made indistinct by the dark and rain and the patterned glass, the pale suds creeping down over his imperfect skin.
There are new bruises on his shoulders, but they don’t worry Dora: boys will be boys, she thinks. Worse to her is his eczema. The worst sores have infection in them. The doctor tells Dora so, but it’s not so bad, it’s not forever, they have a paste for it.
He has hair around his thing. Dora doesn’t look at that. It doesn’t frighten her any more, but she skirts it with her eyes, in much the same way that Pond skirts the dangerous faces of others. The first time Dora washed her boy, her hands froze when she saw that growth. The organ seemed, then, not to belong to him. It seemed part of a man, shadowed, glabrous. It had no place on the body of her boy.
Now she is used to it, almost. Pond is what he is. He is as Dora found him. She couldn’t have found him sooner, could she? Dora cherishes what she has. What can she be but grateful?
She wraps the towel around him. ‘We have boiled eggs for supper. And your father is getting chips and scratchings and gravy, too, if they have any to spare. Isn’t that nice?’
‘Yes,’ Pond says.
‘And when you’re dressed we can try those shoes. Your father was clever, he got them just for mending a clock and they’re almost new, but if they don’t fit yet we can put them away, can’t we? You’ll grow into them. Do you know any songs?’
For a moment she thinks he hasn’t heard her. She is about to let it go (and why even ask? He is not a boy for songs) when she feels Pond straighten under the towel. He begins to sing.
Pack up your troubles in your old kit-bag
And smile, smile, smile.
While you’ve a lucifer to light your fag
Smile boys, that’s the style.
What’s the use of worrying –
‘Don’t stop!’ Dora says, but it’s too late, he has.<
br />
‘My mum did that one,’ Pond says, ‘but I don’t remember what comes next.’
Dora sits. The towel is round Pond’s bruised shoulders. His head is bowed. If there was a light heart in him he’d look like a boy playing at knights, but there isn’t and he never will. Never playful, nor even boyish. He looks more like an old man than a boy, an old man worn to meekness, frowning at some irretrievable memory.
You must miss your mother very much. She almost says it now, as she has almost done many times. But better not. Better not to hear the answer.
How she wishes she could tip his chin and raise his eyes into the light! But that, too, Dora does not do. She is afraid he might flinch at her touch, now that he has drawn back into himself. She closes her hands on themselves and leaves his face in shadow.
The front door slams. ‘Horrible out!’ Solly calls. ‘Hello? Where’s everyone gone in here?’
Dora says, ‘I think I know the rest. We could try it together. We could sing it for your father.’
‘Alright,’ Pond says.
They begin the song again, softly and imperfectly, in the half-light of the kitchen.
*
‘I don’t know why we play with him,’ says Floss. ‘He’s not normal. It’s not a normal name, is it? You didn’t half give him a fright.’
Her dad is eating. He’s got the same tea Floss had: hot pot. She’s staying on his right side now, good and washed and dressed for bed, where Iris is tucked up already, mumbling to her made-up friends.
‘Floss,’ her mum says, ‘let him eat.’
Floss tries. She stands at her father’s shoulder. Music Hall comes on the wireless, soft, that being the way he likes it. When he’s done he takes out a Benson and Hedges. He only smokes the best.
‘You look like an actor in the pictures,’ Floss says, and her dad smiles at that. He doesn’t, really, but Floss knows that’s what he means. Even though he’s hardly finished eating he smiles for her, because he likes her best. Whatever trouble there is, Floss is his favourite, she knows. And he is hers.
When Dad was young he had a stroke. A stroke is like an awful shock. It’s why parts of him don’t work and why he didn’t go to war. That’s why Granddad cut them off. Because Dad didn’t do his bit, even after Floss’s uncles died. There was an argument. Dad called the war a fool’s errand, and Granddad could never forgive him.