by Maggie Gee
Gripping the wheel with big white knuckles, Shirley roared on towards the Towers.
They loomed towards her out of the haze, standing up like guns, identical, as if the architect had only one idea, which had replicated, blindly, where people were poor. They rose above the earth like a forest of dead trees, their tips in sunlight, their root-balls dark.
Dirk has been out of prison three months. He still doesn’t quite believe he is free when he wakes from sleep, shaking and terrified.
Dirk was in prison long enough for the bolts and bars to grow inside him. His original sentence was considered light, insultingly so by the victim’s family. The barrister got the charge reduced to manslaughter, claiming the victim had made a sexual suggestion, which had naturally horrified his client in his state of distress over his dying father.
Dirk felt quite hard done by, hearing this speech. That Winston geezer was a fucking pervert!
Though he got full remission for good behaviour, and some extra wangled by the prison chaplain, who was always happy when the men found God, prison seemed to Dirk like the unending hell he has teetered on the edge of all his life.
Why has no one helped him to make a life? It can’t be too late. He is only in his twenties.
Other white prisoners liked him at first, since the man he killed was black, and also a poofter. ‘One less of them does no harm,’ someone hissed. He came in with a rep for having bottle.
But quite soon the others turned against him. They said he smelled bad. They called him Banana-Face; he looked in the mirror and saw it was true, prison had made him look yellow and crooked. And his hair was thinning, which made him wretched. Like he had to grow old before he’d had any chances.
And the cell had been small. Small and stinking. There was trouble with the drains, with all the rain. Some days the sun never seemed to shine. Life had got smaller, uglier. Smaller and darker. If possible. Life with May and Alfred had been small enough. Dirk got the crap bedroom, because he was the youngest. He had the crap job, in a newsagent.
There’d been poofters in prison, wherever you looked. Nowhere you could go to escape them. There were things that had happened at night, sometimes, which made him twitch with disgust the next day. In there it had been a jungle, or a pigsty. In there he had had to let standards slip. For a few minutes life flashed red and alive, but afterwards shame made it worse. There was no … no … Whatever it was that his cow of a mother hadn’t given him wasn’t here either. People did it to each other out of hatred, and they hated Dirk, of course, and he hated them, but still he had to do it. And live with it, half-closing his eyes. Swearing never again – never again. Knowing it would always happen again.
But now he’s found something he thinks is his own. Dirk has his own vision of heaven, a mount of blood and gold and glory, a place where his enemies will burn like straw, all the people who picked on him.
One day some priests had come to visit. All the lads volunteered to go, to wind them up. Dirk had looked at the slip of paper. He didn’t read as fast as some. ‘The Brothers and Sisters of the Last Days’. (Sisters and brothers. What good were they? Dirk’s sister Shirley had married a darkie, and his big brother Darren had fucked off abroad.)
Dirk read it, very slowly and effortfully, because he was bored, because he wanted something, he wanted anything, he needed, he needed – it was like hunger, pressing him on.
‘We believe in saving souls,’ he made out. ‘Anyone can be saved. Come home to the One Who is All.’ (At first he read it as ‘the One Who is Ali,’ and thought, disgusted, they must be Muslims.) ‘One Way, One Truth, One Path. Open your hearts, and come home.’
Something like a pain, like indigestion, had risen up towards his throat, and an odd hot feeling scratched at his eyes. When he’d read it again, for the meaning, the pain got clearer, catching him out, sneaking up on him. He had crumpled the paper into a ball, flung it into his chamber-pot, watched it go yellow, then dark, then sink into the foul depths…
Mum had come to see him a few times in prison, and told him some lies, but quite soon, she stopped. Even when she came, she had never stayed long. Then she started writing letters, but they made him depressed, going on about Shirley having babies and Darren getting divorced again, all the normal achievements that seemed beyond him.
In fact, his mother hated him.
She always had done. (There was nothing, no one.)
So did Shirley, his sister, who had once seemed to love him. That was over for ever, since Dirk had killed Winston. The pansy fucking brother of Shirley’s black boyfriend.
(It was the one moment in Dirk’s life to date when he had felt like himself, or at least like someone. They were in the park, where his father was God, but Dad was in hospital, on his last legs, and the coloureds took advantage, they were everywhere, laughing, and this one had lured Dirk into the toilets, and Dirk went in after him to do Dad’s work, to protect the park, to stand up for justice, but then the man played with himself, in the dark, and Dirk had to kill him to save himself from the raw red hunger that came upon him. For once he had power over another body. But the blood was soon everywhere, the mess, the terror, and he had been left as before, alone, creeping back like a rat before his mother could see him.)
But Mum must have noticed. Must have gone to the police. She tried to blame Dad, when she first came to visit, but Dirk knew Dad would never have told of him. They all said it, though, even the police, and Shirley, the one time his sister came to see him, they all pretended Dad had grassed him up. But Dad had been fond of him. Hadn’t he? Dad had tried to teach him football, in the park, for weeks, and only gave up because Dirk was hopeless.
Now Dad was dead, the only one who’d loved him.
They had sent Dirk to Gallwood, the city prison, which was only a bus ride from where Mum lived, but she didn’t bother. She’d forgotten him.
So he hadn’t told her he was out of prison. She wouldn’t be glad. She wouldn’t want to know. He didn’t need Mum, or Darren, or Shirley.
It didn’t matter now, because he had a new family. Now Dirk had Brothers and Sisters again, the Brothers and Sisters of the Last Days. He was accepted at last. He was one of them.
He was, wasn’t he? He went to the meetings. No one had actually turned him away.
‘Open your hearts, and come home.’
‘Oh here you are dear,’ said Faith (insincerely, for when the women she worked for weren’t around she sometimes called them ‘that cow’ or ‘that bitch’) as she finally opened the door to Shirley. ‘I hope you haven’t had to wait.’
It had seemed an age to Shirley, who was horribly late, who had climbed the stairs, because the lift was broken, who felt she’d stood for ever on the bleak, echoing landing above the narrow, precipitous stairwell, clutching the hands of the twins, afraid; they were trying to wrest away from her. It felt dizzily far above the dank basement. She clutched the boys tighter, though they yelled louder, and tried not to hear what Faith was saying, what she had somehow known she would say – ‘I did say eight thirty and I don’t want to, you know, make a big thing of it but we are trying to, you know, help you out, I should have been in the centre by nine because Mrs Segall’s kid can’t really be trusted to go to school even though Lola is sixteen now –’
She broke off briefly and at last let Shirley and the twins in through the door to the welcome fug of warmth with its undernote of damp, but as Shirley let go the little hands at last Faith’s small eyes glittered and she pounced again. ‘– But then, the mother’s got more money than sense. You car-drivers,’ she said, with a meaningful look, ‘whizzing round polluting everything, no offence, but do a good turn when you can, is what I say, it’s very central, it’s on your way –’
‘But Faith, you don’t know where I’m going –’
‘– I don’t suppose you know Mrs Segall, Lottie? Used to be a looker, now she’s getting on a bit, just drop me off there and then we’ll all be happy.’
‘I thought you were going to
be here with Kilda?’ Shirley asked blankly. But the large determined bottom had barrelled away. ‘Where is Kilda?’ Shirley asked the wall.
‘Mummy kills cats!’ shouted Franklin triumphantly, hugging Winston, who hugged him back. The two boys began kissing each other’s faces like cats licking each other, making little breathy noises of happiness. Franklin broke off first. ‘Mummy drives on top of cats! The cat got dead!’
‘That cat got dead. Poor cat,’ said Winston, and suddenly began to cry, big tender tears in which, as Shirley stooped to wipe them, she briefly saw a perfect miniature ribbon-crossed parcel of light, the reflection of the four-paned kitchen window; a black cross on a white background. There had been a large cross just inside the front door. Perhaps Faith or Kilda had become religious. Shirley felt glad; it would keep her sons safe. But the tears kept welling from Winston’s eyes.
Faith reappeared in a blue velvet coat with frogging, which Shirley guessed had once belonged to an employer. It gaped over Faith’s big reddened chest. ‘I can’t hang about,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry about the kiddies, Shirley.’
‘Where is Kilda exactly?’ Shirley inquired, finding herself hustled out of the door, as the boys began to understand she was leaving and set up a desolate caterwaul.
‘Well she has to wash her hair, obviously,’ Faith said.
‘But the boys –’ said Shirley, more insistently.
With a martyred air, Faith screamed like a banshee: ‘KILDA! GET YOUR ARSE IN HERE AT ONCE OR I’LL KILL YOU!’ To Shirley she said calmly, ‘She loves her bed. Sleep is very good for them, at that age.’
Kilda came stomping through from the bathroom. Red eyes, pale face, Medusa rats’ tails of dark red hair, a strong jaw in a jut of temper. She said loudly right in her mother’s face: ‘Do you mind, Mum? I was washing my hair.’ But she winced swiftly away when her mother yelled back at full volume: ‘WELL YOU’VE DONE IT NOW HAVEN’T YOU YOU LAZY COW?’ And then continued in a normal voice, quite as if nothing had gone amiss, ‘Mrs Edwards wants to see you having a nice play with the boys.’
A frown creased Kilda’s forehead over wet-pearled eyebrows. Then her face relaxed, and you saw her gleaming beauty: her waxen skin, cream-pale, unmarked; her cheek like the curve of an altar-candle: the serene, full symmetry of her lips.
Youth, thought Shirley, was beauty. In that second Kilda was as lovely as a saint glowing in a window, looking down from the glory of her height, for Shirley wasn’t small, but the girl was much taller. ‘Shall I put a video on?’ the vision inquired. Her voice was low and musical. ‘No, don’t worry’ Shirley said hastily. ‘But you can’t really leave them on their own, you know, Kilda, they’re, you know, always on the move –’
‘Well they are a bit difficult,’ said Kilda with a queenly condescension she had learned from her mother. ‘But they’re all right with me. I don’t mind kids. I think we’ve got Ram Raiders Three somewhere.’
‘Good,’ said Shirley uncertainly, scouring her memory. ‘Oh yes, Raiders of the Lost Ark. Lovely.’
‘Later on I might take them out.’
Shirley decided not to ask more. ‘I’ll pick them up at two and take them to the zoo.’
‘Kilda’s lazy,’ said Faith loudly, to Shirley, but speaking entirely for Kilda’s benefit. ‘She never gets off her arse, you know –’ She suddenly seemed to remember that this person was the one she was recommending to Shirley.
Was this the best Shirley could manage? Yes, she told herself silently as she trotted after Faith down the endless steps back to the drenched car park.
‘If the rains keep on, we’ll be in boats,’ said Faith, with a kind of perverse satisfaction. ‘They say they are diverting the floods from the centre. No one cares about people round here.’
‘That can’t be true,’ said Shirley, desperately, partly because her boys were there. ‘In any case, it’ll soon dry out. If the sun holds up. Which I expect it will.’
By the time she reached the Institute it was gone eleven. The sun had disappeared. It was raining again. She was red in the face with shame and frustration.
As Shirley parked, badly, and ran towards the door, a large blonde woman in a sleek grey fake fur was just flinging some money at a taxi driver. ‘If you’d listened to me,’ she was shouting, loudly, ‘we’d have got here much sooner, and I wouldn’t be late.’
Shirley recognized her suddenly: someone from her Accessing Culture class which all first year students had to go to, a chic woman, fortyish, who came irregularly. Close-up, she saw the fur was probably real. What was her name? Lottie Something. That was a coincidence. ‘You’re for Paul Bennett’s class, aren’t you?’ Shirley panted in passing, and at once Lottie turned away from her fight with the driver and her face lit up in a beatific smile. She had blonde springy curls, seeded with rain-drops. In fact, she might well be older than forty, but she had a perfect, polished look, as if every curve of her skin was buffed and burnished.
Shirley wished her own hair looked like that. Lottie’s lipstick was glossy, she smelled exquisite, her shoes and bag looked impossibly groomed. Before Shirley had children, she too looked like that. This woman probably didn’t have children.
‘Oh how wonderful. Someone else is late. Come along,’ said Lottie, pushing Shirley forward, a surprisingly strong hand in the small of her back. ‘I’m Lottie by the way. Lottie Segall-Lucas. You’re Sheilah, aren’t you? Haven’t you got two little boys? I saw you with them, gorgeous, I could have eaten them. I always think half-castes are so attractive! My son Davey’s got a lovely black girlfriend, frightfully brainy, not that I’m a judge…’
‘God said to Noah, “The loathsomeness of all mankind has become plain to me, for through them the earth is full of violence. I intend to destroy them, and the earth with them.” The Lord said, “Make yourself an ark with ribs of cypress …”’ In Victory Square, there was a wide raft of people round a placard like a mast, painted in red. The letters dripped and ran down like blood. ‘LAST DAYS’, it proclaimed. ‘ONE WAY OUT.’ ‘Awake,’ roared the man, addressing the crowd. ‘Awake and look around you! What do you see? Filth! Corruption! In God’s sight the world has become corrupted, for all men are living corrupt lives on earth.’ The rest was inaudible, but every so often, ‘Awake’ surged up again, like an island in the flood.
Around the preacher stood a little knot of the faithful, facing outward, like soldiers, towards the crowd, clutching hundreds of pamphlets of cheap thin paper. The face of a young black man gleamed with faith: Samuel believed that the good would be saved. Next to him, his white wife Milly pulled back her shoulders and threw up a ‘Praise him’. She felt happy; she began a new job tomorrow, cleaning at the City Swimming Pool. Next again, a middle-aged white woman with a thin pinched face sighed and yearned, eyes turned ecstatically up to heaven. ‘Amen,’ Moira called, ‘Amen, Brother.’ As she spoke, one bony hand ruffled, then smoothed the coat of an enormous red-brown mongrel with the longing eyes of a labrador. She dropped a few pamphlets and began to panic, hissing explanations as she crouched to pick them up. ‘They’re wet,’ she lamented. ‘Everywhere’s wet.’ As she spoke, it started to rain again. ‘Be still now, Moira,’ said Samuel, kindly. ‘We’ve thousands of copies of the thing.’
In a twenty-storey tower two blocks away, people who made books were arguing.
‘Thing is,’ said Delorice Edwards firmly, ‘it isn’t original.’ She was talking about Emma Dale’s new book, provisionally titled A Breast in Winter, an ‘upbeat rural cancer saga’, as the marketing department’s notes informed them. Delorice hadn’t meant to say this – wrong time, wrong place – but the constant rain made her feel depressed. There was a nagging sense that her years of study, the way she had turned her life around, her amazing coup with Farhad Ahmad, had not finally brought her the thing she wanted; just a room of polished surfaces and blank whiteness.
Ten faces swung towards her round the oval table. In the centre, a glinting hi-tech tin of waxen lilies, rather larger than life, stuck u
p boldly, redolent of incense, interrupting their eye-lines. The expressions she could see ranged from annoyed to amused. Mohammed, who was newer than her, looked interested.
Briefly Delorice flunked the challenge. She gazed out of the window: two pigeons swooped past, dive-bombing downwards through the sunlit rain. Somewhere desolate, sirens wailed. A plane engine gnawed like a distant headache.
She had had a major breakdown when her brother was murdered. Brilliant Winston, who had always been their pride. Delorice’s mother had to care for little Leah; now her daughter was five and still living with her grandmother. They had all come back from the edge of despair (and she herself from the edge of madness) through Delorice becoming what Winston had been, the straight-A student, the hope of the family.
Now she pulled herself back into the lily-drugged room, and made herself smile sweetly as she said, ‘This book is naff and sentimental and dated.’
Helena Harp, Headstone’s editorial director, felt a sudden twinge of hatred for the girl she had hired, who sat before them, smiling, all glossy with newness. Delorice must have thought she had it all: that lacquered black hair, pulled back from a face with high cheek-bones and dark clever eyes; a reputation as the brightest new kid on the block; the glozing trade profiles, which never failed to mention the tragedy of the murdered brother; that whiff of grief and integrity.
Ignorant, she thought. And arrogant.
‘You don’t think it’s original?’ she said, and smiled. Then the smile snapped to nothing, like a rubber band. ‘It is a mistake,’ she enunciated, slowly, ‘to think our job’s about looking for genius.’
‘Course, I didn’t mean –’ Delorice flushed with embarrassment.
Then, just as swiftly, she was furious. At college she had proved to be brilliant at English, since she’d always been a reader, in every spare moment: in bed; in the bath; when she breast-fed Leah. Her shyness, too, had quickly vanished as she learned to use the language of her lecturers. Delorice was afraid of nobody, now.