Rough Music

by Patrick Gale

The bathroom, so pristine when they arrived, had taken on the damp, chaotic look of one shared with children. As well as a scattering of sand on the wet floor, there was now a clutter of washbags and discarded clothes around the sink and a plastic spaceship lay marooned on its side in the bath. Both boys were prone to eczema so there was a great tub of the aqueous cream they used instead of soap. One of them had peed on the loo seat and John mopped it clean. He washed his face, brushed his hair, scrubbed at his remaining, jealously protected teeth and put his plate to soak in cleaner solution on a shelf out of the children’s mocking reach. Then he changed into the pajamas and dressing gown he left hanging on the door’s back. Crossing to their bedroom, he saw himself in the looking-glass. Flannel stripes, tartan dressing gown; a silver-haired, suntanned, nineteen-forties schoolboy.

  She was asleep but she woke as he climbed into bed. For a terrible moment, thinking of the horror stories Sylvia had told him, he thought she was about to panic and ask, “Who are you?” but she merely drew him to her and kissed him briefly.

  “Toothpaste,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “It was a lovely concert,” she said. “Spoiled it royally, didn’t I?”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “I’m not,” she said angrily. “Don’t patronize me.”

  “All right. Yes. You probably spoiled it for some stuck-up old trout behind us. But I was ready to leave and I think Sandy was too. How do you feel? Still sick?”

  “I wasn’t sick. Who said I was sick? I’m fine.”

  “What did you see?”

  “When?”

  “You said … Back at the church, you said …”

  “Oh.” She pulled back and settled herself afresh into her pillow. “Those carvings. It’s so sad. I wonder how she died, poor girl.”

  “Should I have let you go?” he dared to ask her.

  “Now you’re being silly,” she muttered, sinking into sleep and sounding complacent, even happy. “Where would I go at this time of night? And I’ve nothing to wear.”

  If only it got no worse than this, he thought, he would not mind the gibberish so much. Not if she said it kindly. But he knew there was worse. Sylvia had torn aside his last rags of innocence. Frances’s vomit pooling yellow on the wet grass had been an acrid reminder of what was to come. There would be rage and shit and even violence. He knew this and had accepted it as inevitable as nightfall.

  He could bear almost anything but the leaching away of whatever made her his wife. He could not nurse a stranger, when the time came. He was too shy.

  BEACHCOMBER

  Julian loved the early morning. He liked to wake early and lie in his bed thinking and listening to birdsong and the ticks and murmurs of a house still at rest. It was a time when no demands were made of him. He could read or not, as he chose, sleep or not. Recently he preferred not. He preferred thought. He had become aware that thoughts unspoken were unpoliced and that he could set aside or seize time, as now, to luxuriate in whatever thoughts came into his head. He found he could ride them like wild horses into places he could not name, could barely describe. It was like make-believe only without a girl asking questions like “How big is my crown?”

  One wild horse in particular had taken him to a place where he had supreme control. It was loosely based on the public baths Ma drove him to once a week only utterly, magically silent. As in a dream, he could be invisible at will, which helped with not feeling bad. Badness, feeling bad, came with speaking, which made a thought visible and made people cross or sad. In this place he had people who did exactly what he told them. All of them men, all of them dressed like the man in the Milk Tray advertisement and looking like him too. As people arrived at the baths the men knew without him actually saying it aloud, what he wanted. And because he did not say anything, it was not his fault. They sent the children one way, the women another and the men another. He knew this was pretty much what happened in the baths anyway but he needed control over it. He needed to be sure that no one would suddenly come into the wrong room or open the wrong door. Then one of the Milk Tray men would secure one of the swimmer men on the ground, like a sort of rocking horse, and Julian would climb on and squeeze him very hard between his legs.

  That was all. The last bit was the most important but it was over very quickly because he sensed there was a next but had only vague ideas of what it involved or required. Curiously he found he could not freeze the last bit in his head but always had to begin the story at the beginning again, reestablishing the place, the Milk Tray men, the people, before he could reach the delicious squeeze. It was worth it though because it was a sort of magic, a way of feeling without touching anything, as though mere thoughts could give one the sensation of eating.

  He had no idea how he knew that this was not something to be shared with his parents. It was not like wetting the bed or being sick, despite being every bit as dramatic the first time it happened. It was like a magic power in a book, which would vanish as soon as one bragged about it or tried to use it for the wrong reason. But he was inquisitive and longed to know whether he was alone in being able to do it. Or was it something everyone learned to do sooner or later, something they never spoke about but which kept them in bed of a morning as long as they dared? He once heard Ma boast to the chaplain’s wife, “Oh, Julian’s one of the ones who needs to be fetched in the morning. He’s never woken us up since he was tiny.” Perhaps this was her polite way of telling Mrs. Stibson, “Isn’t it heavenly! He never wakes us up so we can all lie in bed thinking unspeakable thoughts!”

  And if they all did it, did they all think the same thoughts only using different changing rooms? He knew there was more to it. Somewhere between his thoughts and the no more speakable words that Henry had taught him lay the truth. But it was as mysterious as his parents’ love.

  He knew they loved each other. It was something he seemed to have been born knowing because he could never recall a time without its constant reassurance. All parents should love just as all princesses should be beautiful. It was a given of life, like the difference between sand and water or Lady Percy and a seagull. Nonetheless he had always spied on them, just to be sure. He knew from his reading that only children were like orphans, were more vulnerable. So in a spirit of needing proof, he routinely eavesdropped on their impenetrable conversations, read their letters, tried on their clothes, lay on their still warm bed. It was necessary that he possess them as they possessed him.

  These last few days he had been watching Skip too, comparing her situation with his. He could almost taste her envy like a salt breeze. She wanted his father or wanted something of him. His fixedness, perhaps. The way he was like a rock whereas Uncle Bill was more like a girl in that he was all over the place and you never really knew how he was going to be from one day to the next, quiet or noisy, studious or like a big boy. Pa was always the same, like the father in the learning-to-read books. Julian watched Skip on the beach, so he saw how although she sneered at what she called girly girls in their mini bikinis or frilly swimsuits (she wore a plain navy Speedo one) she also stared after them with a kind of pain, as though she was swallowing a hard toast crust but didn’t want to cry. She dressed like a boy still. The new frock hung on the back of her door. She had worn it once, just once, but everyone had made such a fuss about how pretty she looked, especially Bill, that she had almost torn it off in her angry hurry to get back into jeans, and no amount of cajoling would persuade her to wear it again. But she had chosen the dress when she could have chosen a Tonka lorry instead. And she kept it neat, on a padded hanger, the way some girls kept their dolls tidily on display even though they claimed they were babyish and played with them no longer.

  His mother kept her wedding dress in the same way. It was in a big wardrobe in one of the spare rooms. The dress was huge, like a white mountain, but sometimes he took out the headdress that lived in a box on the shelf above. It had little white flowers and pearls and an old lace veil and he put it on and pretended to be a gho
st or Miss Havisham. Ma had caught him parading in it on the long landing and looked as though he was a ghost. He thought she was making-believe too, because she did sometimes, so he went whoo whoo some more and laughed. But actually she was rather cross and said to take it off at once. He had not worn it for months.

  Thinking of her, Julian felt a sudden wish he knew to be infantile to get into her bed with her still in it. When he was smaller he used to pretend to have nightmares. He would wake in the night and want his mother with an insistent, unanswerable hunger. He would try to sleep again but could think only of her warmth, her soapy, musky smell, the rustle of her nightdress and how safe she made him feel even in her heavy-breathing sleep. When he began to cry out, it was with frustration at not being able to gratify this hunger. Then someone would come, either Ma or Pa, and he would not need to say what he wanted because they would say, “It was a bad dream. Just a bad dream.” And he wouldn’t need to do anything but hold on and cry.

  Recently however he had started to have real nightmares, in which skeletal figures, whispering, long-fingered, with skin like old purses, clawed at his legs as he fled up the curving staircase at Wandsworth and if they caught him, they held him down and squeezed him between bony legs that cut like scissors. Sometimes they cut him off at the waist before he could escape them by waking up. These dreams had begun at about the same time as he had discovered he could have the unspeakable thoughts, so he dared not describe them aloud when asked, for fear something in them would betray his discovery to his parents. So he made something up, a babyish tale of goblins under a bridge or vampire bats in his cupboard, knowing that only by telling the truth could he make the dreams go away.

  He wanted her now, he decided. Wanted to share that early morning sweetness of her bed, like farts and shortbread, and have her stroke his hair and ask how he slept. So he got up and went to find her. But when he opened her door she was still asleep and he found Skip in the bed where he should have been. Skip just stared at him in a fierce, go-away manner, as if she would tell bad things she knew about him if he loitered. So he backed out, pretending he was happy to see her, and saying he was having Frosties for breakfast even though there were none left, because he knew she would want some too.

  He wanted to pee but Bill was in the bathroom singing along to a song on the radio so he played with Ma’s camera for a bit then went outside and watered the springy grass that grew from the sand, pretending to be a dog and panting. Then he took out Lady Percy and played with her and buried his nose in her fur, which always felt good.

  “Hi, Julie.” Bill came out, wearing just swimming trunks. His chest was hairy in the pattern of a tree, like the identification silhouettes in the Ladybird handbook. Julian wondered how it might feel to nuzzle it the way he did Lady Percy.

  “Hi,” he said and turned back to feed her a dandelion she didn’t really want. Pa said hi was bad and hello was good, like thanks instead of thank you and pardon instead of what. “How did you sleep?” he asked, because that was what you were meant to say next.

  Bill laughed. “Fine,” he said. “Like a very proper English log.” He crouched on his haunches beside Julian and Julian could smell minty shaving cream and toothpaste and something else. Something good. “What’s his name?”

  “Her. She’s Lady Percy.”

  Bill laughed again. “Whose idea was that? You don’t know Shakespeare yet.”

  “Only in Lamb’s Tales,” Julian admitted. “I tried but it’s too hard. I was going to call her Percy but Pa said she was a girl and how about Lady Percy. I know what play she’s in though. I found her speeches.”

  “Good. Do you miss your dad?”

  “Yes,” Julian said, feeling suddenly deeply sad and wondering if, perhaps, that was why.

  “He’ll be back soon. I’m gonna swim before breakfast. Wanna come too?”

  “Yes.”

  He put Lady Percy away, went behind a gorse bush and changed quickly into his trunks which were hanging on the line, all damp and clammy. Bill waited on the edge of the beach. He stretched high up then out behind him then pulled up first one knee to his chest then the other. Julian did it too. Bill offered him a piggyback. Julian said all right because he did not want to be rude but he was scared of Skip seeing.

  Bill did not give him a piggyback but a shoulder ride. He had Julian climb right up his back and sit on his shoulders then he ran down to the waves and jumped so that Julian flew up in the air and crashed down into a wave. The water was freezing and he screamed and spluttered and got a mouthful, which made him want to spit. Bill laughed and quickly swam hard out to the mouth of the cove as if it was a race. In the moments before the jump and the shocking cold, however, Julian had felt Bill’s big head and neck between his thighs and Bill’s thick, black hair between his fingers and Bill’s hairy chest on the back of his dangling legs and a connection was made.

  Treading water as his mother had taught him, peeing some more because the water was so cold it made him go all tight inside, he realized it was possible to have unspeakable thoughts outside his bedroom and to put real people into them as if they were just toys you could move around. He watched Bill swim away from him and in his head made him turn round and swim toward him. He made him put him back on his shoulders. He thought of the story in Tales of Ancient Greece where Pandora opened the box and let things out which could never be put back in. He pushed the hair out of his eyes and swam after Bill, determined to do the crawl properly, however hard and slow it was and however much bitter brine it made him drink.

  BLUE HOUSE

  Sharing a bedroom with Sandy, sleeping with him literally as well as figuratively, and in the same house as his parents and nephews, was dangerously beguiling. Will had never expected it would feel so natural. Had there been a photograph of his sister to hand, he would have propped it on a table just beside the door so that he could remember the truth of the situation and adjust accordingly whenever he had to face the family again. Instead, Sandy placed a chair across the closed door. This was intended to clatter and so serve as an early warning system should one of the children have a nightmare and come blundering in during the night, to give Sandy time to pull his bed away from Will’s. However Will found the small irritant of having repeatedly to move the chair reminder enough that whatever pleasure he was feeling was temporary, built on lies and not to be shown.

  For Sandy, as ever, the pleasure was entirely physical. As Will had feared, the risk of exposure made him doubly randy. He was growing bolder each day and was no longer confining fun and games to the bedroom but had taken to pursuing Will when he went swimming so as to grope him under cover of water. For Will, the pleasure was entirely domestic; the waking up together, in contrast to their habitually snatched encounters, the shared preparation of meals, even the illusion wrought by the presence of the children that they were an acknowledged family unit. Sandy’s single-minded priapism brutally emphasized this disparity in their feelings. And yet Will knew now that this pleasure he felt in seeming innocence and naturalness was about the situation and not about the man. Could he, as in a boyhood fantasy, have recast the scenario with the mere squeezing shut of eyes, so that its focus was another man, not Poppy’s husband, he would have done so the moment Sandy arrived.

  Ever since their breaking into the fourth room and his discovery of what it held, he had been itching to see Roly again to find out why he had felt the need to lie. He had been married, of course, for fifteen years, but to the man in the painting and photographs. Whenever he saw signs of life at Roly’s trailer, it was when he was surrounded by family. Whenever he was free to get away, he found the place deserted or unapproachably in darkness. His hunger for the truth frustrated, he returned repeatedly to the fourth room, feeling less guilt on each visit, and with tidy rapaciousness combed it for clues. He found a big album of cuttings and photographs, and more photographs, maddeningly jumbled, in a shoebox. There were some tapes of concerts which he could hardly play in the house without arousing suspicion but,
such was his fascination, he snatched solitary drives in the car so he could play them in there.

  The dead lover was a professional violinist called Seth Peake, several years younger, Will guessed, and they had become involved when Seth was still a music student. There was a small family: a stern-faced mother and a poised sister who looked just like him but rarely figured in the pictures. Possibly she lived in America, for in several photographs she posed with the couple by palm trees, a convertible or a swimming pool. The mother usually appeared with a spaniel, looking slightly pained. They lived in London, in a flat with a balcony over a shop, on to which they occasionally squeezed friends for dinner. Roly sculpted, exhibited to some good reviews, Seth studied and performed, gaining far less press coverage. In the early pictures they glittered.

  Then Seth changed. Either aging had stolen his glow or he suffered some disappointment. And then there were different pictures, fewer dinner parties and dressing rooms, more crowded gatherings and demonstrations. And suddenly the flood of pictures petered out. There were just two more. In one, taken on an excursion to the seaside, to Brighton perhaps, somewhere with a pier, Roly was looking away, stony-faced, and Seth, pointing at the photographer, was barely recognizable. Wearing huge dark glasses like an opera diva’s and wrapped against the cold despite the evident sunshine, he was laughing but his face and hands were impossibly thin, a death’s head on a day trip. The other picture, which lay on the very top of the jumble in the box and so gave away the ending as it were, showed a fresh grave. A heap of flowers and wreaths and fluttering cellophane and cards could not quite conceal the deep brown of freshly turned clay. There were wheel marks visible on the grass, left by a mechanical digger presumably. Roly had written a bald caption on the back: Highgate and a date. The rest of the album was empty except for the order of service for the funeral. Seth Felix Peake and his dates. He was thirty-one when he died. There had been readings from Auden and Ben Jonson and string quartet movements by Ravel and Britten. How could one possibly stick in nephews and nieces and birthday celebrations and trips to Ibiza after such an event? Undeterred, Will looked on the shelves and searched through the shoebox again, but found no hint of a sequel. Every family had its archivist and storyteller. In this one Seth, not Roly evidently had been the albumkeeper.