Wake

by Anna Hope

  “Good morning.” She turns to see Robin standing in the doorway, his broad frame encased in a tweed jacket and trousers, smiling, as though he knew something pleasant about what today might have in store.

  Irritating. Immediately irritating.

  “Good morning.” She makes her voice as neutral as she can. There’s little point making much of an effort. He is still quite new—has only been here a week or so. There have been many Robins. They come for a month, for two; sometimes, the sturdy ones, for as many as six, armed with their smiles and their good intentions, and then, after a month or two, they leave, defeated by the monotony, the misery, and the men. One of them lasted only a day, a small, red-faced man who’d been a teacher before the war. Someone had made him cry. As he was leaving, he turned at the door and told her she was a fool, that this was worse than being in France.

  Robin picks up the battered kettle and leans over the sink to fill it. “Nice day,” he says, nodding appreciatively at the open window. “Good and crisp.”

  “I’m not sure that you have enough time for that.”

  He looks surprised. “I suppose not.” He puts the kettle down on the other side of the sink. “How are you this morning?”

  He looks so fresh and rested. So friendly. He actually seems as though he’d like to know.

  “Fine,” she says. “I’m absolutely fine.” She leaves him standing by the window, picks up her satchel, and makes her way into the small office, where the hunched shapes of the waiting men are visible outside. The first few in the queue are slumped on the ground, asleep most probably; they will have been there for hours. When she switches on the light the men outside notice and wake, and those who are sitting on the ground haul themselves to their feet amid a general pushing and jostling about. She can hear their muffled expletives through the glass.

  As Robin enters the room behind her, she checks she has everything she needs for the morning’s work: sharpened pencils and enough of each of the differently colored forms that she must fill in for each case, each comment, each complaint. Pink for officers, green for the other ranks. Then she looks at her watch. Three minutes to nine. She takes her bundle of keys from the top drawer of her desk and goes over to the door.

  “Early,” says Robin.

  “Yes, well.” She turns back to him. “Are you ready, or not?”

  He maneuvers his tall frame around his desk, and when he’s settled in his seat, salutes her. “Ready or not.”

  She rolls her eyes and opens the door.

  There’s a surge from the back, and some of the sleep-dazed men at the front topple, before regaining their balance. Evelyn steps out into the chill morning air. “Any men caught making a nuisance will be asked to leave or go to the back of the queue. Is that understood?”

  A bit of heckling rumbles from further down the line.

  “Is that understood?”

  The heckling quiets. A few sheepish Yes, Misses float toward her. Evelyn goes back to her desk, feeling the familiar tug of concern for this shabby bunch of men. But compassion is a swamp. It’s better not to get stuck in it. Especially not at nine on a Monday morning. She’d never get through the week.

  As her first man makes his way over toward her desk she gives him a swift look. Amputee. From the way his right trouser leg is pinned it looks as if it has been taken off all the way to the hip. There’s no false leg; the stump was probably too small to fit against. He takes his place on the seat before her. It’s a game with her, to guess a man’s rank before he speaks. In this post-khaki world, the extremes at either end of the scale are easy to spot, and have remained, so far as she can see, as rigid as they ever were, but the middle ground is different; it has not yet settled. The temporary gentlemen are the trickiest: those who were promoted from the ranks for their service in the field and are now stuck between society’s strata. Temporary gentlemen: such a mean-spirited little phrase; still, it just about sums it up. This one, she is sure, is no gentleman, temporary or otherwise; from his dress and bearing, he is a private through and through.

  She dips her head and takes out the first of her forms.

  When her fourth man approaches the desk, she knows that he’s trouble without looking twice. “You ready for me now, then?” he says, sitting down before her.

  There’s something about him, a confidence, a posture. Officer? His accent is indeterminate. She lines up the form against the side of her desk. Rank? Difficult to say; she can’t call this one.

  “Name?”

  “Reginald Yates.”

  “Rank?”

  “Second lieutenant, as was.”

  She writes “Reginald Yates” on the top of a pink form.

  “And is this your first visit to the Ministry?”

  “No,” he snorts. “I’ll say it’s not.”

  He has a sharp face, brown hair greased tightly back from his forehead, and a neat mustache. It’s difficult to tell his age. He could be twenty-five, but he could be ten years older. There’s something restless, something bristling, about him. Evelyn is used, now, to assessing the potential danger that might come her way; a woman was attacked once, a year ago, by a man with a knife. Her last female colleague. The woman spent the night in hospital and never came back.

  “I’m getting less,” he says, extracting a packet of shag from his pocket and rolling himself a quick, expert cigarette.

  She slides the ashtray in front of him. “Less money, you mean?”

  “Yes.” He lights up and blows smoke into the air between them.

  “This happens I’m afraid, Mr . … Yates.”

  His eyes find hers through the smoke.

  “May I ask what your injury was?”

  “No, you may not.”

  At this, she sees that the sheen has come off his cockiness somewhat. “All right,” she says. “That’s up to you.”

  Buttocks then, or groin; those are the ones that never want to say.

  He leans forward, jabbing the air with his finger as he speaks. “The only thing you need to know is I was on seventeen bob a week, and now I’m getting less.” His accent, she notes, is slipping a little now.

  “Well,” says Evelyn, “you should know, Mr . … Yates, that for what the department calls second-grade injuries—and these are any injuries that do not include the loss of a limb—the payment drops after three years. Can I ask when the injury was sustained?”

  “1917.”

  She opens her hands. “There we are, then. I’m sorry, Mr. Yates. You’re welcome to file an appeal.”

  The man spits a stray piece of tobacco out onto the floor. “Is that it?”

  “That’s it, I’m afraid.”

  “You’re not going to tell me if I’m going to get more?”

  Evelyn sighs. It astonishes her still that she is here, the mouthpiece for a committee that regards every claim as suspect, every man a malingerer, guilty until proven innocent, forced to plead for scraps from a government that has long since ceased to care.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Yates, but we’re only a first port of call. If you wish to file an official complaint, then we are able to register that complaint and forward it on. You should have a date for reassessment, which will include a medical examination, within the month.”

  “Within the maaanth?” He leans forward, mimicking her accent. At this he is, she notes, not bad at all. “What about the benefits, then? How come if I’d stayed a private I’d be drawing more? Land fit for heroes, is it?”

  He’s right. In a way, the ex-privates are the lucky ones; they have been given a small unemployment benefit. No such benefit has been given to the commissioned classes; they are supposed to have friends, or means. Temporary gentlemen have come down to earth with a bump. He leans back in his chair, pointing his cigarette at her as though deciding whether to fire. “Fucking woman.”

  “Yes, well,” she says. “I’
m afraid unemployed women haven’t been given any benefit, either.”

  He looks as though he could spit.

  She shoots a quick look over to Robin, but he is deep in conversation with a redheaded man in front of him. Something the other man has said has made him laugh.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Yates,” she says, turning back. “Now, if you’ll—”

  “How many kids you got at home, then?”

  “That’s none of your—”

  “Five.” He says. “I’ve got five.” He coughs, then leans forward, lowering his voice. “You haven’t got any, have you?”

  She says nothing.

  “Spinster, aren’t you? I’ll bet you’re dry as a bone down there.”

  Whatever sympathy she may have had is long gone. She imagines hitting him, or stabbing him in his hand with her pencil.

  “I bet you love this, don’t you? Up there on your high horse.”

  “Of course I do.” She says, leaning back in her chair. “Do you want to know why?”

  “Why?”

  She leans forward again. “Because I’m a sadist.”

  He opens his mouth, then closes it again. “Bitch,” he swears, under his breath, standing up, his chair legs scraping against the floor.

  “That’s right, Mr. Yates. I’m a sadistic bitch.”

  Then she reaches out a hand and, without looking up, puts the pink slip on the pile to be filed.

  “Next!”

  . . . . . . . . . . .

  Thick bars of morning light stripe Hettie’s bed, touching the faces on the pictures above her, tacked in a careful arrangement on the wall: Vernon and Irene Castle in the middle of a foxtrot, Theda Bara, and, in a still from Broken Blossoms, Lillian Gish. Beside them are the Dixies, in a photo cut from the paper just before they left London: Billy Jones, Larry Shields, Emilie Christian, Tony Spargo, and Nick LaRocca, brandishing his trumpet like a lethal weapon.

  They all look happy this morning, grinning in the unexpected sun.

  In the room behind her she can hear Fred getting ready to go out. Her mother has already gone to work, long before the light. Once Fred has gone the house will be hers for a few blessed hours till she has to leave for the Palais at twelve. She’ll boil some water and have her bath. First, though, she wants to lie here, in this lovely bit of sun, and think about the man from Dalton’s: Ed.

  She closes her eyes and tries to conjure him. The smell of him. The way he danced. The way he talked, as though everything were a game: Two minutes constitutes a lurk.

  No one has ever talked to her like that.

  Behind her head Fred’s wardrobe opens with a judder she can feel through the wall. Hettie snaps her eyes back open, defeated. She can’t concentrate on anything good with her brother rooting around in there.

  Fred woke her up again last night. It was just a few short shouts this time, and then he must have woken himself, because everything went quiet after that.

  Clothes hangers clatter as he takes his jacket out. He gets dressed every morning and goes out, even though he hasn’t anywhere to go. Hasn’t got a job. Not since coming home from France, two years ago in December, just after their father died. For weeks after his demob, he didn’t leave the house; he just sat there, in their father’s armchair in the parlor. She would come back from work at Woolworth’s and he would still be in the same position as when she had left. Often, the dim light and something about the way he sat made her think it was her dad, come back from the dead. It gave her the creeps. But Fred just stayed there, hour after hour, as if that old armchair might tell him where to get a job.

  That was when she had to start handing over half her wages. And there was Fred, just sitting there, doing nothing about it at all.

  He wasn’t like that before. You couldn’t shut him up. He was annoying. He took up room. He would spread his bicycle bits all over the kitchen table and tease her about her dance classes and her film cards. He worked at the lamp factory down at Brook Green with their dad. They both used to set off together in the morning on their bicycles. Peas in a pod. Sometimes after work he would go to the pub and come back singing, and their mum would pretend to be angry, but you could tell she wasn’t really, because Fred was always her favorite. He had a girlfriend called Katy—who had hair so fair it was almost white and who smelled of pencil shavings since she worked at the stationer’s down by the tube.

  He could be kind, too. Once, when he came back on leave from France, it was over Hettie’s birthday, and he wrote and asked her what she wanted. She’d asked to go to the theater, and he bought tickets for Her Majesty’s to see Chu Chin Chow. It was the first time she’d been to the West End, and the show was full of musical numbers and dancing and real animals on the stage. In the middle there was a zepp raid, and instead of going into the cellar with everyone else, they both went out on the street and shared a cigarette and watched the airships as they floated past in the late evening light, their bellies swollen like giant whales.

  “Don’t tell mum.” Fred had winked, as though they were in on it together, and she’d felt excited, and grown up, and grateful for it all.

  But the next time he came back from France he had changed. It was as though all of the noise and mess and life had been blasted out of him and only the empty, silent shell remained.

  Hettie hears his footsteps pass her doorway now, his soft tread on the stair.

  “Fred?” she calls out. He doesn’t reply, and she slides out of bed, goes over to the door, and opens it.

  He is standing halfway down the stairs.

  She leans on the banister above him. “Going out, then?”

  He nods, cringing, as if caught in the act of something shameful.

  “Where you off?”

  “I’m just—” He shrugs, clears his throat, turning his hat in his hands. “Going down to the labor exchange. To have a see what’s what.”

  “Going to try to get a job?”

  There’s a horrible, stretched silence in which Fred’s cheeks flare a painful-looking red. He seems about to say something—but busies himself instead with straightening the brim of his hat. “’Spect so,” he says eventually. “Yes.”

  Then he puts his hat on and almost runs down the stairs.

  Hettie goes back into her bedroom, closing the door behind her and leaning against it.

  He doesn’t go down to the labor exchange.

  She saw him once, when he was out for one of his walks. Just shambling along, like an old man. He has become like those men from the Palais, the quiet ones: the ones who hire you and then shuffle around the floor, their silences like the thin skin on blisters, covering the things they cannot say.

  Her eyes light on her dance dress, discarded by her bed.

  If Fred got a job, at least she’d have a bit of money for clothes.

  Why can’t he just move on?

  Not just him. All of them. All of the ex-soldiers, standing, begging in the street, boards tied around their necks. All of them reminding you of something that you want to forget. It went on long enough. She grew up under it, like a great squatting thing, leaching all the color and joy from life.

  She kicks her dance dress into the corner of the room.

  The war’s over. Why can’t all of them just bloody well move on?

  . . . . . . . . . . .

  “Morning Mrs. H. What can I get for you today?”

  The butcher boy’s apron is red with wiped fingerprints. The smell in here is strong today, hitting Ada like a wall as she steps inside.

  “What have you got that’s good, then?”

  “This liver’s grand.” The lad presses the purple meat with his finger, and a small puddle of blood oozes onto the silver tray beneath.

  “I’ll have some, and about half a pound of that beef.”

  “Right-o.” The boy, whistling, turns around for his knife
.

  Ada takes her purse from her bag. There’s a cage of ribs laid out on the counter in front of her, the whitened bone sticking out of one end of the marbled flesh. The heavy smell seems to increase. She looks away, out onto the street, to where the sun is striking the ground. Two women stand beneath the awning of the fishmonger’s and a young man is walking past them, his head turned away from her.

  The boy is slim and brown-haired. He looks like Michael. He looks like her son.

  “Mrs. Hart?”

  The butcher’s boy is handing the parcels of wrapped meat over the counter. Ada doesn’t take them. Instead, she rushes out onto the street. At first she can’t see him but then catches sight of the back of his head, fifty yards in front of her on the other side of the road. He is walking briskly, his arms swinging at his sides. She shouts after him, but he is too far away and doesn’t hear. A van makes its way up the road between them, cutting off her view with an advertisement: sunlight soap for mother; a shy-looking girl in a blue pinafore and hat holds out a box of flakes. Ada weaves behind it. Her son is still there, walking steadily up the street in the sun, heading toward the park.

  “Michael!” she calls, quickening her pace, but he seems to be moving more quickly than before. She tries to close the gap between them, keeping him in her sights. He looks well. She can see this, even from behind. He has both of his arms and both of his legs. He walks strongly and easily and his head is not bowed, and his hair is clipped just as it was the last day she saw him; and the sun is touching the tips of his ears, and whatever has happened to him, wherever he has been, he has come through it and is alive and well. She shouts his name again.

  A small queue is gathered outside the grocer’s, but she pushes her way through it, feeling heads whipping around to stare. Her heart is racing now, sweat breaking at her hairline, on her back, and it is difficult to catch her breath, but the gap between them stays the same. He must feel her behind him, because he seems to be varying his pace to hers, as though they are playing some kind of torturous game.