by Nick Salaman
‘Ahh.’
‘Quiet, please.’ He withdrew his hands and stood over her. She put her legs down feeling slightly sick. She reminded herself that there was no indignity that she did not deserve.
‘You are two months pregnant? We must not wait too long. Bring the money. Would tomorrow be suitable?’
‘Yes. I suppose so.’
‘Suppose, suppose?’ he lectured her as she dressed. ‘You should have supposed when you got up to your tricks. You should have supposed the time-honoured consequences. Yes? What is it now, old cow? Can’t you see I am busy with this young lady?’
The Asian woman had come in with a slip of paper. ‘Mrs Shamir wants some pills for the dog,’ she said, smiling broadly in explanation to Marie, ‘he got worms.’
***
Marie booked into a cheap hotel and lay on the curve-shaped bed looking at the ceiling. Outside, the autumn evening was squeezing dull tear-like rain from a brooding sky. All around her, in the little cheap rooms of the cheap hotel; in the shoddy bed-sits and the squalid flatlets; in the hopeless bed-and-breakfast establishments where homeless families waited eternally for housing; in the council estates where children screamed, muggers mugged and fear and apathy stalked the graffiti-ridden walkways like the smell of fried ‘convenience’ individual dinners and urine; in the sodden squats; in the lodgings; in the hostels; in the Council Care Centres; in a hundred thousand pokey little flats and houses, the inhabitants of that particularly despondent part of North London waited for whatever deliverance from pain, hunger, boredom or despair the evening would bring. The human engines throbbed like clapped-out taxis and the massage parlours did their best to cope with the traffic.
For Marie, as the light declined, the darkness brought no relief. She thought, if I am not prepared to kill myself, I cannot kill the child. All right then, I must kill myself and have done with us both. But that would be two deaths and I should be twice damned. Not that I believe such things. I am damned anyway by blood. And if I believe that, should I not then kill the child who is heir to it too? The child will be quarter monster?
She fell into a restless sleep racked with dreams in which she pleaded for her father’s life who also turned out to be her bloodstained child.
She woke up early, horribly hungry, to a brilliant sunrise, determined not to go back to Mr Patel. She would have the child and leave it safely somewhere as soon as it was born. The question now was, what should she do for the next seven months? Winter was coming. She had saved, from her Merrymaid pay, about three hundred pounds. It wasn’t going to get her or the little bastard far.
She went out and had breakfast in a Kwality Bar. The predictable breakfast platter – bacon, egg, sausage and tomato – accompanied by toast and coffee confirmed her feeling of determination. The menu said ‘please ask your waitress if there is anything further you require’, so she asked her. The waitress’s bosom – she would have done well as a Merrymaid – projected the name Elise on a plastic rectangle.
‘Yes?’ said Elise, halted in her clackety course across the ‘farmhouse’ tiles.
‘I need somewhere to live and I need a job.’
‘You and who else, luvvy?’
‘Just me.’
‘I mean the whole world’s looking for ’em, ducky.’
‘Oh.’
‘Sorry.’
‘It does say ask on the menu, I mean if there’s anything further you required.’
‘It doesn’t mean accommodation.’
‘I know.’
Elise was momentarily interested. Her real name was Tessa. She thought it boring but she was much more of a Tessa than an Elise. And Tessas – as opposed to Theresas – are usually rather nice people. Who was this girl who was playing games with management’s carefully researched menu board? A thought struck her.
‘Are you pregnant or something?’
‘Yes.’
‘You poor thing.’
‘My fault.’
‘You want to get rid of it quick.’
‘No.’
‘You’re soft in the head. Look, I must get on.’ Someone was shouting ‘Elise’ from an edifice that looked like a brick-kiln in the centre of the restaurant.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Marie. ‘Thank you anyway.’
‘Come back tomorrow at four. I’ll see what I can think of.’
‘Elise,’ shouted the chef.
‘What’s the matter? Caught your dick in the microwave?’ She shouted back.
One or two of the other regulars joined in. Insults were part of the early morning feast at the Kwality Bar.
***
Marie bought a street map and spent the rest of the day wandering round the neighbourhood. It had struck her that perhaps she might have gone to somewhere more wholesome than King’s Cross. It might have been better for the child. But somewhere wholesome could contain people who might have heard of her – Brickville, putting the word out, alerting the police. Somewhere wholesome could even have people who knew her. Girls from her school came from all over the wholesome place. And somewhere wholesome would have been expensive.
Besides there was something suitable about this part of town. It was, she discovered as she walked, a sort of down at heel no man’s land between the classical elegance of Bloomsbury and the ordered gentility of Islington. There were Georgian houses, but they had come down in the world.
The shops themselves were indications. Food was cheaper here: a hundred little Asian establishments stayed open till all hours undercutting the big supermarkets. There were strange junk shops crammed with spindly chairs and derelict nests of tables. There were Indian restaurants and Chinese takeaways; laundromats; pawnbrokers; a little low shop which mended watches, called Time Out of Mind: Antique and Ridiculous.
She passed in front of this and finally went in. She had in her bag an old fob watch given to her by her aunts on her sixteenth birthday, which she’d been told had belonged to her grandfather, and which she thought she might be able to sell if it could be made to work.
Inside, the shop was filled to the roof with timepieces of every description. There was a constant irregular noise of time at work, a whole choir of ticks and tocks from the slow basses of a couple of grandfathers (one with a moon, the other with a ship sailing across its face), on to the tenors of the hunters and half-hunters and the half-heard descants of the wristwatches, which lay in a glass case jumbled under the counter.
An ancient spring-bell, which had sounded as she entered, seemed to have no effect on whoever ran the establishment. She waited patiently for she was in no hurry. She closed her eyes and listened to the time.
‘Chronos, Chronos, mend thy pace,’ said a soft Fife voice, a little way behind her. ‘You are perhaps the still unravished bride of quietness, close friend of silence and slow time that I have been waiting to meet.’
She opened her eyes and saw a man in his late thirties, of medium height, slight build, dusty brown hair and pale blue watchmaker’s eyes.
‘You have a watchful manner,’ she said.
For the first time in two months she had made a joke. She started to cry.
Instead of being embarrassed, the man came round the counter and held her comfortingly against his shoulder.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, after a while, ‘it was the joke.’
‘People normally laugh at jokes,’ said the man, proffering a handkerchief. ‘Especially their own.’
‘You come from Fife,’ she said, blowing her nose.
‘That is true. How did you know?’
She hesitated. She did not want to give any hints to anyone, not even to the nice watchmaker.
‘I had a friend once who came from Fife,’ she said, ‘from Pittenweem.’ It was where Nanny had come from, a fishing village.
‘I know Pittenweem,’ he said. ‘We came from nearer Edinburgh.’
‘It’s a long way from Fife,’ she said, gesturing round.
‘I’ve been here twelve years.’
‘Wil
l you go back? Will ye no’ go back again?’
‘Maybe. In time.’
It made her feel good to hear the soft Scottish voice. She wanted to keep him talking.
‘Time is the operative word everywhere,’ he said.
She dug around in her bag. ‘Could you mend this watch?’ she asked.
He examined it, opened its glass, prised up the back, inspected the little, still engine inside. He put a round watchmaker’s magnifier in his eye and peered at the cogs and wheels. It made him look both quizzical and expert.
‘It’s very dusty,’ he said. ‘It needs cleaning, and the winding shaft is broken. I’ll have to make a new one. Can you leave it three weeks?’
‘It’s no good to me like that. What would you say it’s worth mended?’
The man looked at her curiously. ‘You wouldn’t want to sell it, would you?’
‘Maybe.’
‘I’d give you fifty pounds for it now.’
‘Done,’ she said.
‘No, no,’ he said. ‘Let’s see how you feel about it when it’s going. I won’t charge you if you still want to sell.’
She tried to make him change his mind but he was adamant.
‘You’re a funny sort of businessman,’ she said.
‘I’m not a businessman at all,’ he replied.
She suddenly had an idea. It was silly, of course, but there was no harm in asking.
‘You wouldn’t be needing an assistant, would you? Someone to clean up and … help with the business … deal with the customers while you’re working?’
The man scratched his head. ‘Well, now,’ he said. ‘That of course is exactly what I need. There’s only one problem.’
‘What’s that?’
‘No money.’
‘I wouldn’t need much.’
‘How much is not much?’
‘Well…’
‘I couldn’t afford more than forty pounds a week,’ he said.
‘That’s enough…’ she replied.
‘You can hardly get a room round here for forty pounds a week. Do you have somewhere to live?’
‘I’ll manage,’ she told him.
She suddenly knew that this was where she wanted to be until she’d had the baby: in this house of hours and minutes, with the strange watchmaker who spoke with tones of home.
All at once, as if to confirm her certainty, all the clocks in the place started striking twelve.
‘If I’m employing you, I’d better know your name,’ he said.
‘Sinclair,’ she told him, the name coming easily to her again. ‘Marie Sinclair.’
It was only a half-untruth.
***
Elise, whose real name was Tessa, had changed her white apron for a navy-blue coat and met Marie outside the Kwality Bar, taking her across the road to the Anacapri where they had a cappuccino each.
‘I’ve got something for you,’ she said ‘but I don’t know as you’ll like it. It’s a squat.’
‘A squat?’
‘Yeah. My boyfriend lives there but he says there’s a room going.’
‘What would it cost?’
‘A squat costs nothing. Mind you, you have to pay for the electricity and things. I should think a tenner a week would see you through. Then there’s food and things. You contribute as and when. I always try to smuggle a bit out of the Kwality if dickhead’s not looking. Anyway, what d’you think?’
‘It sounds good.’
‘Come and see anyway.’
They took a bus north towards Archway, and walked up Filkins Street, a little road lined with mid-Victorian houses terraced up the side of a low hill. On one side, some of the houses had been boarded up, and here Tessa stopped, ducked round behind a shrub that was growing in a derelict front garden and knocked twice, then three times at a boarded window. Marie was aware of an eye being applied to a knothole in the wood. There was a pause. She looked around her with some misgiving. It didn’t look exactly the sort of place where one would prepare a layette.
‘Hiya, Tess, love.’
A young man with a ponytail and an earring was approaching from around the side of the house. He put his arm round Tessa and they kissed each other.
‘This is Will,’ Tessa told her. ‘Will, meet Marie.’
‘Hiya, Marie.’
‘Hiya,’ she said.
Will let them round behind the house to a pitted yard half-full of ruined prams and bits of bicycle. There was a door open through what had once been a small French window.
‘Come in,’ he said. ‘Mind your skull.’
Inside, there was a slight smell of damp mingled with a whiff of gas, but the room she entered was reasonably clean, if sparsely furnished. A long-haired girl was sitting on a sagging chaise-longue knitting a baby’s pullover and listening to the radio. There was a pram beside her in which a baby was sleeping.
‘Chrissie,’ said Will.
‘Hiya,’ said Chrissie.
‘Hiya,’ said Marie.
‘Chrissie is Will’s wife,’ explained Tessa. ‘She’s also my sister.’
Marie paused for a moment to digest the relationship between the three of them. It all seemed perfectly natural.
‘Family of drop-outs,’ said Chrissie. ‘Father was a beatnik before beatniks were invented and never grew up.’
‘Is he here too?’
‘Somewhere. He bust his brains on acid so he’s a bit vague. Mother’s here somewhere too.’
‘I didn’t expect a family house,’ said Marie to Tessa. ‘It’s very nice.’
‘You must be joking,’ said Chrissie. ‘I’ll show you the room.’ She put down the knitting and led the way upstairs. Tessa and Will stayed behind with the baby. ‘Mind the third one up,’ she continued. ‘Dad put his foot through it.’
They arrived at a half-landing where there was a bathroom. Chrissie opened the door.
‘That’s an old gas boiler thing. It works most days. It’ll kill you if you don’t open the window. Gets a bit nippy but it’s better than being dead. At least that’s the general view.’
They climbed to the top of the house and Chrissie threw open a door at the end of the landing. The room inside was lit by a gable window which looked out on to the yard and beyond to a little park. The light, already beginning to fade, was sufficient to show a white chair, a white tallboy, a white table with a cracked mirror on it and a cast-iron bedstead on which a very large man in a Kaftan was asleep.
‘Oh God,’ said Chrissie, and shook him.
‘Ugh,’ said the large man, and turned over.
‘Dad,’ said Chrissie resignedly, then suddenly shouted ‘Pigs.’
The monosyllable had an electrifying effect. The large man sat bolt upright with a look of terror on his face, swung his legs off the bed, dashed out of the room and clattered down the stairs without a word. Somewhere below they heard a door slam; then silence.
‘I know it’s cruel,’ said Chrissie, ‘but it’s the only thing that seems to work. He’s got a room of his own. This is the spare. Like it? Sorry about the carpet. Still, it is the Torygraph. You can walk over the Establishment.’
Marie saw that the floorboards were covered with back issues of the Daily Telegraph.
‘I like it very much,’ she said. ‘Can I move in tonight?’
‘Sure. Why not? Tessa tell you about the money? If you want to eat with us, it’s twenty quid a week.’
‘Fine.’
‘That’s settled then. You can meet Mum later but she’s tanning at the moment.’
‘Tanning?’
‘Sure. She’s got a sunbed in her room. It’s her hobby.’
‘Tanning?’ repeated Marie.
‘Travel magazines,’ said Chrissie.
‘Ah. Right,’ said Marie, falling back on Pilgrim’s Piece talk.
‘Like it?’ asked Tessa when they returned to the living room.
‘It’s great. Thank you very much.’
‘You’re a funny one,’ said Chrissie. ‘You talk po
sh. Don’t suppose you want to tell us who you are?’
***
There followed, for Marie, a long interval of respite. She could not call it happiness because happiness is impossible when you have lost certain habits of self-esteem. A monster’s blood … she had to be always on her guard, always conscious of the guilt that she carried in her veins. It robbed her of any satisfaction that she might have had at her own beauty or the growth of the child within her, for its blood too was tainted.
She sometimes thought of David – it was a line of conjecture she tried to avoid because it brought with it so much pain – but when she thought of him it was still with love. It had not been his fault, or his parents’. The fault was hers. There was nothing anyone could do about it.
It was such an irony that she should be carrying the child of the man she adored, who did not even know that she was pregnant; a child that half of her still believed she should do away with now, while there was still time. But she was instinctively protective of the child and incapable of killing it. She knew that it would have to be abandoned as soon as it was born – a little Spartan to be left on a bare doorstep.