Facing the Tank

by Patrick Gale

  ‘Course.’

  ‘Is there someone you want to hear from, then? Yes, I think there must be,’ she teased. ‘Your face, my lady, is as a book.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Just this once. Because you’ve got rid of my bloody backache.’

  ‘Fantastic!’

  ‘Come on then.’

  Deirdre walked into her sitting room and set about lighting candles.

  ‘Do you want a dope cake?’ Dawn asked her.

  ‘Yes, but it’s OK. I’ve still got one of the ones I offered Merloozy in this tin.’ Munching, she took her usual seat and told Dawn to turn off the music and bedside light then come to the sofa. Dawn did as she was bidden.

  ‘What now?’ she asked. ‘Do you need a name or—’

  ‘Ssh!’ Deirdre interrupted her. ‘Just sit and listen. Sssh!’ Slowly her breathing came under such control that Dawn would never have believed she was a smoker. Then it grew slower and slower. And slower still. Tense on the edge of the sofa, Dawn clenched her eyes tight and conjured up a silhouette against the glinting Bross. A bush of red hair. A gleam of muddy thigh. A narrow, childish leg.

  ‘Sasha,’ she thought. ‘Sashasashasasha.’ Deirdre’s breathing stopped altogether. ‘Christ!’ thought Dawn. ‘The old bird’s heart’s stopped.’ She opened her eyes and was about to speak when there was a growl from the chair opposite. In the thin wash of light from the candle she could just see Deirdre’s lips curled back like a dog’s. Her teeth – not her own, Dawn had once seen the Dentufix in her desk – her teeth were just visible. They looked wet and sharp. Dawn could just hear the tobaccoey phlegm flapping in the older woman’s throat. Another growl emerged, louder this time. ‘Sasha?’ Dawn whispered. ‘Is that you, Sasha?’ the growl lurched into a blood-chilling guttural bark and Deirdre flew forwards out of her chair, knocking out the candle, and tried to bite Dawn’s ankles. Dawn swore brutally and, leaping to her feet, pushed her back hard with a foot. The growling continued, enraged. Dawn lost her nerve and ran to flick on the standard lamp. After much groping for the switch, she was successful and span around.

  Deirdre was on all fours, her dressing gown hanging open on her unlikely underwear. Her eyes were turned up into her head so that only their blood-laced whites were showing. She was dribbling profusely. She looked far from friendly.

  ‘Sasha?’ tried Dawn once more and the beast in Deirdre took another lunge towards her.

  Snatching her bag from the bed, Dawn ran from the flat, slamming the door. She ran as fast as her remarkably good legs would carry her, down the great stairs, past the portraits of previous Bishops and out of the front door which took two hands to lug it open. A light rain was falling. She put up her collapsible umbrella and hurried on down the avenue. At the gateway she ducked back into the shadows to watch the Bishop arrive home in a taxi.

  39

  Faith Forum had been an unmitigated success. It was as if the representatives of his opposition had been selected precisely for their qualities of narrow-mindedness and crass obstinacy. (This was more than likely, on reflection, since the powers that were would do anything for ‘good’ television, but tant piss as mother would say.) They had defeated themselves ignominiously and all he had had to do was charm. There had been several telephone calls to his dressing room from friends wanting to know how things had gone and with each description that he gave, he had felt his awkward public anger being tidied up, painted bright new colours and renamed Growth. He had gone for a celebratory sherry with an important friend in Lambeth then caught the fast train home, basking in the kind of glow he had not felt since his initial appointment. Things went from good to better as he walked to the taxi rank outside Barrowcester station. None less than Mrs Delaney-Siedentrop was lying in wait for him. His look of terror changed to one of bewildered relief as she wrang him warmly by the hand, introduced her husband St John, and congratulated him on his performance.

  ‘So many of us have underestimated you, my lord,’ she said and all but curtseyed.

  Gavin gave the taxi driver an extra-large tip and strolled, heedless of the rain, to the front door of the Palace. All was dark within. He was on an economy drive to enable the funding of a crêche for working mothers in an empty flat over the garages and Mrs Chattock respected his whims. Having slung his document case and mackintosh on the stairs, he hurried down the passage to the chapel. There he flicked on the small light over the altar painting, a crude but charming, late fourteenth-century nativity with glory of angels. He knelt for a few minutes, saying thank you, then sat back in a seat, watching the painting and listening to his breathing until he knew he was calm.

  There was a sudden gust of wind and the door blew open behind him with a bang. Gavin sighed. In his excitement, he must have forgotten to shut the front door. He was very happy sitting where he was, but the rain would be coming in and splashing the hall floor and making more work for poor Mrs Jackson. He observed with curiosity that, while it had been quite cold outside, this draught felt warm. He stood with a quick glance at the altar and walked back along the passage. The draught continued and seemed to become warmer as he neared the hall. He had obviously had one sherry too many with his friend in Lambeth. Hands in pockets, thinking that when he had shut the front door he might nip along to the kitchen to fix himself a little something from the fridge, he turned into the hall and came to a startled halt. He was not alone.

  There was an extremely tall man waiting for him at the foot of the stairs. A Barrowcester blond. Perhaps he had the wrong night for the meditation class.

  ‘Hello,’ said Gavin. ‘Can I help you in some way?’ The man, who seemed familiar, said nothing. The warm draught had ceased but the temperature was definitely higher; pleasantly so. There was also a delicious smell which Gavin could not place; somewhere between rosemary and freshly cut lemons. ‘Just let me find the … oh.’ Gavin had reached out towards a light switch but found the power was dead. ‘Oh dear,’ he murmured. Then the door of the downstairs lavatory flew open. Its light was on, but seemed far stronger than usual. The man smiled kindly at Gavin then walked along the path made by the light in the dark hall. Gavin just had time to see that he wore no shoes on his spotless feet before the door slammed behind his visitor. Then a hot wind blew full in his face, shutting his eyes. There was a sound of rushing waters. When the wind dropped seconds later he found the words ‘Borrowed time, I’m afraid’ to the forefront of his mind as though they had just been spoken, or he were on the point of voicing them. The light had gone off in the lavatory but Gavin had just had an idea who his visitor was and so did not bother to check as he knew there would no longer be anyone there. He staggered to a hall chair and sat down. He wondered if he were going mad but he feared that what he had just seen and felt was beyond any malfunction of a puny brain. A distant murmur made him look up. Remembering his mother, he climbed the stairs to her rooms, cranefly legs straddling two steps at a time.

  He knocked quietly on the door then again, more loudly.

  ‘Hello?’ he called and let himself in and switched on the light. At first he saw nothing but the mess where a candle had been knocked in a pool of wax to the carpet. He was on his way to look in her bedroom when another murmur made him turn. Her legs were poking out from the skirts of a long-legged armchair. He stepped round to the other side to find the rest of her. She was dressed only in her underwear – something he had not seen in years – and her dressing gown lay in a heap beside her. She was clutching a great bunch of unseasonal roses to her breast. The thorn of one had pricked her and there was a trickle of brilliant blood from her plump side. The buds were beginning to open, split seams revealing fleshy pink. The leaves were still wet with rain. He knelt down and touched her cheek. She was warm. He sniffed her breath for alcohol but smelled nothing. He lifted one eyelid and saw her eyeballs swerving wildly back and forth, apparently sightless.

  ‘Can you hear me, Mam? It’s Gavin, What’s been going on?’

  ‘Lovely,’ she murmured. ‘Lovely.�
�� Her voice was slurred and content as if she were talking from the gaudy midst of a pleasant dream.

  ‘Mam?’

  ‘Lovely.’

  He pushed the chair off her and had a difficult time trying to make her decent, for her panty-girdle had slipped and she was no longer a sylph. There was a telephone on her desk. He rang Dr Morton.

  ‘Hello?’ said a keen voice on the other end.

  ‘Dr Morton?’

  ‘Speaking.’

  ‘Sorry to bother you so late. It’s Gavin Tree.’

  ‘Splendid programme earlier. Brenda and I watched it all.’

  ‘Oh. Thank you. Actually, there’s a bit of a problem with my mother.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I think she may have had another stroke.’

  ‘I’ll be there in six minutes. Is she in bed?’

  ‘No. She’s on the carpet. She seems quite comfortable.’

  ‘Don’t move her, just keep her warm.’

  ‘Fine.’

  Doctor Morton hung up with a professional grunt. Gavin turned back to his mother who was still murmuring lovely from time to time. He freed the mound of roses from her grasp and tossed them miserably into her bathroom wash basin, then he looked for something with which to keep her warm. Picking up her dressing gown he found it torn in strips.

  ‘Mmm. Lovely,’ sighed Mrs Chattock and yawned widely.

  40

  The old prewar cinema had been converted into two smaller ones. In one deserted auditorium Evan wept with an increasing lack of restraint through a re-release of Mary Poppins, then sat morosely through the late show of a strangely unerotic piece of soft porn in the more crowded other. He ate the banana during the first film and the white chocolate buttons and two chocolate sundaes during Oriental Kittens. The brandy bottle was drained and thrown furiously aside by the start of the ‘It’s a Jolly Holiday with Mary’ sequence but the cinema had a small bar where he slipped out every twenty minutes or so for another double. By the time he lurched into the night his vision was a long way from twenty-twenty.

  It had started to rain again, not hard but penetratingly. He had suede brogues on and they were blackened beyond recovery. The steaming streets, dangerously underlit in the name of conservation, were largely empty except for Barrowcester’s disaffected youth whom Evan felt he was meeting for the first time. Outside the Gladstone, the town’s principal hotel, he stood to applaud as an extremely smart black couple were helped out of their chauffeured Bentley. The doorman asked him to move on.

  ‘Do you know who I am?’ Evan asked him.

  ‘Just move on, would you, sir? I don’t want to be unpleasant.’

  ‘I am an … an eminent angelologist.’

  ‘And I’m a very busy doorman. Goodnight, sir.’

  ‘Bastard.’

  ‘Oi!’ The doorman gestured to a policeman but Evan had already moved on.

  He found a place rejoicing under the name of the Saucy Kipper where he lingered to eat a piece of tasteless battered dogfish and a bag of chips, most of which ended up on his coat-front. There was a sign above the counter. A kipper grinned and pointed a flipper at the words ‘The chippy furthest from the sea’. Stumbling homewards along a back street behind the Gladstone, he passed a familiar limousine. He paused, chuckled back to where it was parked and, his face contorted with spite, dragged Mrs Merluza’s latchkey hard along its glossy surfaces. The screeching of metal on metal disturbed him however and he staggered on, pausing only to piss into a prissily painted tub of flowers outside a front door near the Cathedral. In Dimity Street, he stopped to shout up at a lit upper-storey window.

  ‘“For without are dogs and sorcerers and whoremongers and murderers and idolators and whatsoever loveth and maketh a lie!”’

  The window flew up and a woman put her head out.

  ‘Do you know what time it is?’ she asked him curtly.

  ‘Time for the whoremongers?’ he suggested, slightly abashed. He recognized her as the hostess he had overheard saying that she just couldn’t bear entertaining black Americans.

  ‘You’re drunk,’ she snapped. ‘Go home or I’ll get my husband to call the police.’

  She slammed her window down again and drew the curtains. Evan stared up for a moment then felt in his pocket for a pen. On the clean white paintwork of her Queen Anne porch he scribbled:

  ‘Beware the dogs without! A well-wisher.’

  He walked for what seemed like hours, round and round the hill, on to the Roman Bridge and down to the Bross. He even spent some time wandering in the cemetery and Gardens of Remembrance but a very large someone else was moving around in the darkness there, which scared him. By the time he let himself in, the sky had begun to turn from navy blue to grey. With the dawn and apprehension that he was both wet and bitterly cold, came the aching return of sobriety and a terrible wakefulness. He sat at his desk, opened his diary and wrote,

  ‘The herbaceous borders of the Earthly Paradise are nothing but a genteel attempt to divert the attention of the uneasy from the gateway to Hell that is set, a brazen trap door, in their midst.’

  Then he abandoned the attempt, peeled off his soaking clothes and went to lie like a corpse between the clean sheets which someone had kindly laid on the bed for him.

  41

  Mrs DelMonica raised a long, chocolate thigh from the oil-skinned water and rubbed the kneecap with a body brush.

  ‘Sweet Jesus, I do not want today,’ she whispered, chafing her heel with a pumice stone then sliding the leg back into the soothing waters before repeating the process on the other side. On waking in the bridal suite of the Gladstone, she had telephoned to the next room to wake Mr DelMonica then had called down to defer their breakfast for an hour while she bathed. Breakfast was something she took seriously; her dietician had pronounced it the only useful intake of the day. As she ran her bath, as she poured in Chanel No. 5, as she tossed a knob of cocoa butter with practised accuracy beneath the flow of the hot tap, as she pissed, weighed and sighed, Mrs DelMonica had offered a series of prayers to Saint Rita, reputed to be of great efficacy in the happy salvation of utterly hopeless causes.

  ‘Holy Rita,’ she now exclaimed, standing to rub her lathered self all over with a battery-powered massage mitt, ‘you know I just adore you, but how can I be sure you’re giving me anything in return?’

  The bathroom was in that side of the hotel that faced across the rooves of Dean Row to the Close. The sunlight played on the stained-glass saints of the Cathedral’s east window. It also played on the declining cheeks of Mrs DelMonica’s biscuit-coloured bottom. Mrs DelMonica patted herself dry.

  ‘Rita. Lady Rita. If our baby’s doing the right thing, give me a sign,’ she begged. ‘Right now,’ she added, banging herself all over with a talc puff. A fine shower of the scented powder fell around her so that, when she finished the task and returned to her bedroom to choose a dress, she left the outline of two size sevens on the bathroom carpet. ‘Rita,’ she said, throwing on a little Givenchy frock because she had decided to make up her mind after breakfast had given her strength, ‘Rita you’re hopeless.’

  In her sprawling kitchen in Dimity Street, the mother of the groom stirred two cupfuls of grated sweet potato into the bowl of a rumbling cake-mixer.

  ‘Are you quite sure it says two cupfuls?’ she asked, frowning as she wiped her juicy hands on her threadbare kaftan. Dawn was making chicken and sweetcorn patties, dextrously slapping them into shape with two small floured boards.

  ‘Quite sure,’ she replied in her peculiar monotone, ‘but I’ll check.’ She rubbed the flour from her hands and picked up a new cookery book that was propped between a chicken carcass and a bunch of small green bananas, delivered at considerable expense from New Covent Garden that morning. ‘Yes,’ she confirmed, ‘page seventy-eight, Trinidad Wedding Cake: two cupfuls grated sweet potato. There’s an asterisk, though.’

  ‘What’s it say?’

  ‘“Or more, to taste.” You’d better bake it quick if you wan
t to ice it.’

  ‘What’s the time, then?’ Lydia asked, scraping the cake mixture into a carefully lined tin.

  ‘Just past eight.’

  ‘Damn! Dawn, can you be an angel and finish the rest for me? There’s not much left to do. I’ve made the icing but it’s not nearly cool yet.’

  ‘D’you think it’s going to set with all that molasses in it?’

  ‘Oh God, I don’t know. If it’s still that consistency around eleven, you’d better knock up something else. What are the other icings they give there?’

  Dawn stretched out languorously for the book once more and scanned the index. Her voice was quite uninfected by her employer’s nerves.

  ‘Well it says here …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Wait for it, wait for it. Icings. Icings. Yeah. I quote. “Icing, Banana Cream. Icing, Jamaican Planter.” That’s what you’ve made. Then, “Icing, Pineapple Glacé, Icing, Royal Grenadan and Icing, Rum Butter.”’

  ‘What’s in Royal Grenadan?’

  ‘“Royal Grenadan – pee one-oh-five”.’ Dawn flicked to the one hundred and fifth page of Caribbean Cuisine for You and Me and stared hard at what she found. Lydia decided that she was being slow to vex her. ‘It’s a sort of syllabub,’ she announced finally. ‘Lots of lemon juice, not much sugar and a couple of tablespoons of sherry.’

  ‘Not very Caribbean. OK. If this muck doesn’t work, try that and if that doesn’t work, just dust it with icing sugar and tie something pretty round the sides. It’s revoltingly rich anyway.’

  ‘Right you are, then,’ Dawn mumbled, returning to her stack of patties. The telephone rang. Lydia wiped her hands on her kaftan again and answered.

  ‘Hello,’ she said, far too brusquely, then melted so audibly that Dawn grinned over her work. ‘Oh, Fergus. What a lovely surprise. Look, I’m so sorry we couldn’t have you and Emma round last … Oh. She did? Well it’s sweet of you to say so. Maybe next week … Well, yes. It is rather hectic … Tell me quickly, then.’ There was a longer pause as Fergus told her a story. ‘No!’ she exclaimed, then ‘Oh poor …’ and let the poor trail off into a moan of sympathy as he continued. ‘Is she allowed visitors?’ she asked when he had finished. ‘Oh, I see … Dawn? Yes. She’s here. Slaving away … Yes I’ll tell her … Bye, Fergus love.’ She hung up. ‘That was Fergus,’ she said.