by Patrick Gale
While they warmed up in the shower and dressed, he snatched the pile of postcards, although both he and Will had several more to write, and took it up the track to the letter box. He hoped to still his thoughts with walking but the flood of poisoned memories was such that he had posted the cards in a clumsy fistful before he remembered that Poppy’s was still only half written. He imagined her concern as she turned it over in her hand, heard her sad assumption that such forgetfulness spelled the beginning of a senility so stoutly held off until now. He wondered again at her motives in booking this house and recognized the open-handed innocence of the gesture. He felt a glow of consolatory pride that there, at least, was someone they had always succeeded in protecting, someone undamaged, in her youth at least, by too much of the wrong sort of truth.
BEACHCOMBER
A gust of wind blew rain against the windows so abruptly that they both looked up. There was another gust and the door came open. Bill stopped typing and went to close it. Julian rearranged himself in the armchair, trying to be as much like a cat as possible while still reading The Happy Prince and Other Stories. He wanted Bill to notice but Bill merely strode back to the dining table and continued typing the moment he sat down, as though he had been mid-sentence when he broke off.
His words were an unstoppable flow apparently. Julian knew all about writers and painters having Muses—had recently learned all the Muses’ names and disciplines by heart to impress his father, who had not been impressed at all but had merely corrected his Greek pronunciation. He had always pictured a Muse as a lovely blonde lady in a white pleated dress and gold sandals who would sort of kiss the writer on the back of the neck and murmur ideas in their ear so they believed they were having the thoughts themselves. But now that he was seeing writing in progress, he realized that someone like the lady behind the library counter was more appropriate, someone with huge bosoms but no children and with two sets of spectacles, who knew where every book was shelved and could even summon up its Dewey decimal number, even though it was obvious she thought nine-tenths of the books published not worth reading.
The words came and came and if they stopped for a minute or two, Bill frowned and kept his hands ready at the keyboard. It reminded Julian of Ma’s relentless piano exercises and did not seem fun in the least. Julian had tried reading just one word to each click of the typewriter keyboard but it began to make him feel sick. He revised his ambition to become a writer and reinstated an earlier one of being merely very rich.
Overnight the weather had changed. Something called a cyclonic gloom had arrived bringing a thick lid of gray cloud and intermittent, stinging showers that soon emptied the beach. It was, Julian decided, rather pleasant. For once breakfast had brought no insistence on bracing outdoor activity or cultural expedition and, finding him guiltily curled up in an armchair with a book, Ma had merely stroked his hair and said what a relief it was that he knew how to entertain himself. A particular stress in her comment plainly indicated Skip, who had already complained loudly about the weather and how there was nothing to do and had twice been reprimanded for swearing. Ma was currently pacifying her with a shopping trip to Bodmin.
The prose drew him in again and he forgot to be a cat, forgot all about Bill in fact. It was a book he had read several times before and found himself rereading at least once a year. He felt compelled to do so only partly by the content of the stories, all of them sad and most of them unsettling. They were a little like Hans Christian Andersen’s tales of cold Kay with the shard of looking-glass in his heart and the mermaid prepared for love to feel as though she walked on knife blades. Wilde’s cruel Infanta and amoral Star-Child affected him in a similar way. He sensed there were darker truths, adult truths, behind the selfconsciously fairy-tale tone. These were stories adults never offered to read at bedtime. There was something fascinatingly sickly about them too, like the fluttering of wounded birds or the terrible wincing of salt-sprinkled slugs. Life is savage, the stories said. People are vicious. But there is love and there is a chill, unloving beauty in stars and flowers, and both can be admired.
Julian was also compelled in his reading of them by an interesting fog of disapproval that seemed to hang about adults when they spoke of the book and its author. Ma implied that the stories were not quite nice, as though Mr. Wilde had gone too far, as though making stories so desperately sad were a kind of showing off. He sensed that what she was actually saying was no more about the stories than the stories were about what they said they were about. There was a darker truth at work. She disapproved of the author, or was frightened of him, but something stopped her saying this aloud so she voiced vague unease about the stories instead.
The Puffin edition said little about him other than that he had written the stories for his two little boys. However, Julian found The Birthday of the Infanta in a cherished Puffin anthology of his, A Book of Princesses, where a more detailed author biography said that Wilde’s middle names included the wonderful Fingal O’Flahertie and that he had been sent to prison for two years and had subsequently died in France. He had gone to prison, it said, because he was convicted of libel in 1895. He had been criticized, it said, for his eccentricity and morals. Asking, with no specific reference, what libel was, he was surprised to find it was merely speaking ill of another, surely not a crime worthy of prison, not like abducting children or killing your wife.
Exploring his parents’ big bookcases one day he found The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. Like a bible it was bound in dark blue leather and stored in a special box. Only it was more frightening than a bible and he soon saw that the box was to restrain not to protect it. It had an unread smell and the paper was so thin you could see through it.
Julian hid behind the biggest sofa and turned the pages one by one, stopping to read now and then but too nervous not to keep moving on. The book clearly had a power, like a book of spells, and might do things to him that were not necessarily pleasant if he read too much at a go. There were pictures—surely a rarity in grown-up books—and they were strange, even nasty: Salome kissing John the Baptist’s head on a dish, a portrait of a monstrously ugly man being stabbed by a terrified young one who looked like an angel and there, near the back, a dim photograph of a prison, Reading Prison, only the book rather quaintly called it Reading Gaol.
At first he had been amazed and thought it was a prison specifically for writers, where perhaps they were forbidden to read or made only to read the books the governor chose for them, like special Sunday books only all week. Then he had said the name aloud, in the car one day, when he saw it on a signpost, and Ma had laughed at him and said,
“Redding, silly. It’s pronounced redding,” adding, with sinister carelessness that sounded like a covert warning, “there’s a prison there. You can see it from the train.”
Daunted by his parents, he had resorted to asking Henry. A man jailed (as Will then suspected but now knew for certain) for raping a postmistress in the course of a robbery could hardly disapprove of a man who had been imprisoned merely for saying something bad about someone else.
“Henry, why don’t people like Oscar Wilde?” he asked.
The answer was straightforward but sadly had met a mystery with a riddle. “’Cause he was a shirt-lifter,” Henry said. “A chutney ferret. No one likes one of those and you shouldn’t either. You ever find yourself with an arse-bandit like that you get your back to the wall and if he gives you any trouble you break his nose.”
Henry was rarely so vehement. Something in his face frightened Julian and he hurriedly changed the subject by asking to roll cigarettes rather than demand a translation. He added the words to his forbidden list however. Arse-bandit. Shirt-lifter. Chutney ferret. Knowing they were bad, while having absolutely no idea of their meaning, anatomical or otherwise, only added to their potency.
The statue of the Happy Prince, stripped of its gold and no longer admired, was taken down and melted. Julian paused. He did not turn greedily to the next story as he sometimes did, but r
elished instead the odd ache the sad tale induced in him, a sort of hopeless, deep-down wish to turn back time and change things. It was almost remorse, as though by reading the story he had made the sad things happen for the selfish pleasure of feeling—what? This curiously pleasurable hurt somewhere in his chest? Then he realized the typing had stopped.
He looked up and found Bill watching him. He had amazing eyes. Dark as a dog’s, they looked too close and saw too much. He was like a man off a big poster who had come to life but had not learned to tone himself down and look like everyone else. Ma often said of people that they were too much. Bill was too much. Julian looked down, turned a page and started to read again but he was only pretending and the words danced. He looked up again and found Bill still watching. Bill smiled.
“You’re really into that, aren’t you, Julie?” he asked.
“Er, what do you mean?”
“I mean you really like reading, don’t you?”
“Sometimes I like it best of all,” Julian admitted. “Better than real life. Once I pretended to be ill so I could stay in bed and finish The Weirdstone of Brisingamen. It was too scary to read at night but I had to know what happened.”
“I wish Skip read like that. I mean, she reads when she has to, when she has a comprehension to write or a history chapter to do but … books have never grabbed her.”
Julian remembered his parents’ instructions that he was to be especially nice to Skip because she had a dead mother. “She likes other things,” he suggested. “She runs very fast and she’s a good swimmer. If we fell off a boat, I’d drown and she’d survive.”
“She’d save your life,” Bill said. “Got her gold lifesaver medal last fall.” He stood and stretched so vigorously that his shirt came untucked and Julian saw his belly button. “You wanna come out on the bike?”
Julian glanced out. The rain had stopped and sunshine was breaking through the clouds at last. Nothing would frighten him more and yet he wanted it more than anything. “Why?” he asked, playing for time. “Have you finished your book?”
“No way near.” Bill laughed and tugged a sheet of half-typed paper from the machine. “But I could use the air.”
“The ground’ll be wet. We might slip.”
“We might but we won’t. Come on. It’ll be fun. Put some color in those bookish cheeks.”
Julian felt himself blush. He hated blushing even more than being told not to show off or to grow up. “Pa said I wasn’t to,” he admitted scrupulously. “Ma told me.”
“Well he’s not here to see. Don’t you want to? I mean, I don’t mind. I just need some air. I’m meant to be keeping an eye on you and if you come too I can do both at the same time.”
The way he said this made it seem as though Julian would be impolite not to accept. Besides, Bill spoke walking to his room, as though the answer were not something that mattered greatly.
“Yes please, then,” Julian said.
Bill made him wear his huge leather jacket. “Makes you look bigger and it’ll protect you if you fall off. Not that you’re gonna.”
He straddled the bike and Julian climbed on the back. He made sure Julian’s sandals rested in the right place because there was a pipe that got really hot, and he told Julian to hold on to him tightly. Then he started the engine and they were off.
He must have sensed Julian was nervous and did not want a policeman to find them breaking the law so he stayed off the road. First they went up the drive to the car park and down again, which was frightening because the gravel slipped underneath them and the motorbike kept going sideways. Then Bill drove them out on to the beach. The tide had not long gone out so the sand was still damp and firm. They made big circles. They flew along on the water’s edge raising a salt spray that splashed their legs. They described a figure of eight over and over until Julian was laughing so much he was afraid he might wet himself. Only he didn’t care. Bill felt totally safe, the way a big brother was supposed to. He didn’t bother wearing a jacket in case they fell off so Julian could feel the heat of him through his shirt and smell him. Close to he smelled different from Pa, who smelled of Old Spice and ironing. Maybe because Bill did not wear proper shirts like Pa’s, you could smell him instead of starched cotton.
The speed took his breath away. Once Bill knew he was holding on tight and would not fall off, he caused the bike to fly along in great surges that made Julian feel he had left half himself behind and it needed to catch up. Because he was so much shorter than Bill, he could not rest his chin on his shoulder and he was a bit nervous of them stopping suddenly and him hitting his nose and making it bleed, so he pressed his cheek against Bill’s back and watched the blurring sea sideways on.
When they stopped because Bill wanted to type more of his book, Julian had to fight the temptation to be babyish and demand they carry on. As it was, he was clinging on so tightly that Bill had to prize his hands off and laughed, saying how sweaty Julian had made his back. This made Julian feel awkward so he got off and quickly took off the huge jacket, even though it gave off a good smell, like horses and Henry’s tobacco.
“I won’t tell your mum if you don’t,” Bill said.
When they came back indoors, Julian needed to pee. But he also felt a strange need to be alone to adjust. It was as though all the flying up and down and around on the motorbike had blown his face into strange distortions, like astronauts in training, and he needed to sit calmly to let it settle. So he sat on the lavatory a little longer than was necessary. Washing his hands, he paused to examine himself because he still felt peculiar. The black eye was a shock, of course, now that it was turning a rich purple with greenish edges, but it was a surprise to find no other change visible for his lips felt hot and swollen and his eyes felt twice their usual size, like Johnny Morris’s lemur’s on Animal Magic.
While Bill continued to type, only pausing to light another cigarette or take hurried gulps at a mug of iced coffee, Julian found he could not concentrate on his book anymore. It was too familiar suddenly and the chair fabric felt too prickly on his bare legs and the urge to talk and be silly was almost overwhelming. Instead he went into the back garden to give Lady Percy a carrot. While she munched in frantic little rushes, nose quivering, wary of the shadows of circling gulls, he pressed his nose into her fur and hummed Gentle Jesus Meek and Mild.
When she came back with Ma, Skip knew immediately what they had been up to. “You rode on the bike,” she said.
“You didn’t!” Ma exclaimed. “Julian!”
Julian just stared, waiting for a cue from Bill, not wanting to get him into trouble. “What makes you think that?” he asked at last.
“What kind of babysitter do you take me for?” Bill asked. “I rode. Julie just made me coffee and watched, didn’t you, Julie?”
Julian looked at him and nodded and Ma set him and Skip to clearing the table for lunch.
But after lunch, when the grown-ups were dozing on their towels by the rocks, Skip made Julian come surfing with her. She was determined he should learn how to learn to use his board. And he wanted to because when she did it, it looked like fun.
“When Bill taught me,” she said, “I was only four and we didn’t use a board. We just used him.”
“How do you mean?”
“How do you meeen?” She imitated his voice. Sometimes he hated her but he felt he had to follow her around and do whatever she said so in some way he must have liked her too. She was a bit like a big dog that could be fierce on your behalf if only you could work out how to train her and win her respect. “I meeen,” she said, “we used him as a board. He’d float and get me to lie on his back and hold on tight then he’d swim out and line himself up and catch a wave coming in and he’d bodysurf and I’d just cling on for dear fucking life.”
“You swore!”
“So?”
“I know some bad words too. Really bad ones. I learned them from the prisoners.”
“The convicts?”
“Of course.” He had
never told anyone this before. It was a huge risk. He realized how desperately he must want to be her friend.
Skip narrowed her eyes, standing firm against the surf churning around her. “Bet you don’t know what they mean,” she said.
“I do,” Julian lied. “But it’s just silly.”
“So did you enjoy the bike?” she asked suddenly.
Her question was like a little knife pushed up under his armor and he had to answer truthfully only it came out all wrong and gushing and babyish.
“Oh, it was marvelous!” he said and she mocked his accent and his enthusiasm. “I don’t make fun of you,” he said at last.
“What’s to make fun of?” she asked, maddeningly confident.
“Your ugly accent. Your manners.”
“What about them? I’m American. So fucking what?”
“You’re common,” he said. “Only I’m not allowed to say that because your mother was killed.”
“She wasn’t killed, doll-brain,” she said. “She fell out of a window. You don’t know anything.”
Curiously this cross exchange did not lead to a furious argument but seemed to make Skip relax with him. She was patient, even kind, as she showed him how to use the polystyrene board. When he finally succeeded in catching a wave and was dragged all the way to the shore, triumphant despite the pain of scraping his belly on sand and pebbles, she seemed genuinely pleased with him. Later, however, her mood turned sour again, as though she had suddenly remembered their earlier hostility. He was showing her a deep rock pool where he was sure a vicious Moray eel must lurk beneath the weeds when she suddenly said, “God, Julie, you’re such a girl!”
“I’m not.”
“How can you stand to let Bill call you Julie, then. It’s a girl’s name.”
“It’s short for Julian.”
“Jules is short for Julian. Julie is strictly for girls. You’re weird. You’re a weird girly-boy.”