I don’t know why I destroyed the evidence by eating it and yet write about it now in my manuscript. If they take this paper away from my desk to read it Wise is in trouble. But I don’t care. He could have killed me.
Why the hell should I pretend to have a stomach pain? Nothing would please me more than to see Wise in trouble. I’ve even thought of leaving this page open on my desk. Look, guys. Look at what Wise is doing. Naughty boy!
But Wise’s expression nibbles away at me later on in the dark. It’s the same one as mother wore when she looked at me as if to say, ‘that’s it. There’s no more can be done. He’s going to die. Your dad’s going to die.’ The words never left her lips, but they didn’t have to. Wise was saying it all over again, as if he’d been there in the hospital and seen my dad with all those tubes sticking out of him, and the machines bleeping away like a metallic heart, a surrogate beating, because his own heart was thin and used up.
And all that kept filling my mind was dad and his allotment, not dad and the tubes. The way he piled his care and attention into it, just as he piled in the horse manure, shovelfuls of the wet, steaming stuff tipped from his rusty old wheelbarrow. He laboured at it for weeks. “Dig for victory,” he’d say to me, and I didn’t know why, but smiled when he smiled, and I tried to whistle like he did but it came out as air and spit. I helped him plant the carrots, the potatoes, the beans, my knees caked with the damp soil. I helped him plant the flowers because he said it would help with pollination, and sat wrapped in their thick, comfortable smells, reading my comics and listening to the sounds of birdsong and the blade of his spade slicing into earth. I lugged water from the tap, spilling most of it down my little legs, and poured it religiously over the first rows of green feathers that poked their heads tentatively above the warm soil, and I was as excited and expectant as he. “Think of all the dinners, son!” he said. “Just think of all those dinners!”
And I remember his disappointment when he tugged up a carrot and all that popped out was a fat stump with holes bored in it. Small, perfectly round holes, that made it look as if the carrot was hollow, as if you might just squeeze it and it would crumple in on itself as easy as anything. I had never seen him so sad, except when his brother died, my Uncle Geoffrey. Each and every one of them was a pathetic little deformed stump that he tossed onto a pile that grew steadily larger. “I can’t understand it,” he mumbled, looking as if he was embarrassed to face me directly. “Did it by the book, and it still hasn’t…” In the end he gave up on them and left them to go to seed. Nothing turned out like he expected, so he abandoned them all, and each of the green children he’d lavished so much attention on was left to wilt and die. Row upon row of miserable yellow leaves, like parched tongues stretched out on the soil. “That’s it,” he said one day. “It’s all over.” And he locked the shed up for good.
That’s it. It’s all over. Mother never spoke the words, but I knew what her eyes meant.
That’s why I knew I’d have stomach pains when I next exercised, because death was involved. It was death that was under Wise’s skin, which transformed his face so. It might have been my mother looking at me from inside Wise, as if she’d been there just beneath his stubbly chin, sitting under his pockmarked cheeks flecked with red veins, as if she’d been peering out of his skull through his eyes.
That’s it, Philip. It’s all over.
* * * *
It’s been a few days since Wise gave me the cryptic note, and I’ve calmed down a bit. I tell myself that it’s all been imagination and that the note-thing never really happened. I even do my best to ignore it. I visualize taking a huge eraser in both hands and scrubbing away at the image of Wise’s face till he gradually disappears, every little of him, like the maths questions on Mr Walton’s blackboard. And that works for a time. But I sense he’s coming back. The eraser’s not working properly.
Things get to you in this place far easier than they do on the outside. Still, there’s an urgency whipping my mind into a frenzy. I must go up a gear. I have to move on faster. It is easy to be drawn into thinking that this could go on forever, thinking that as long as I have this manuscript to write then things are going to be OK. I don’t like to contemplate the end of it, because it’s like coming to the edge of a cliff and looking down. Nowhere to go from here. Nowhere but down.
The feather burns. I can feel it warming up through my shirt pocket. It’s telling me in a hot breath to hurry up and finish this damn thing then we can get on with the business of breaking free. Remember freedom? Remember how you used to crave it? What’s gone wrong? And I want to answer that I need to lock up the shed for good; throw my tools in and slam the door on them. I’m too tired with it all.
But I’ve got to move on.
* * * *
“An’ I look, an’ I say, Connie, you don’t look good. What’s dat on face? She hide it, but I see it. Big bruise on cheek. Mr Radunski, she say, just give me dem pork chops. All mad, like. I give ‘er chops, but I tell ‘er she best see doctor wid dat bruise. Connie, I say, go to buddy doctors wid dat bruise, an’ she just grunts like pig at me, as if I stupid, or sumtin. What I know about bruises? I want to tell ‘er it not walking into side of de door dat done it, but I just tell ‘er to see doctor. Such a pretty cheek all puffed up an’ bruised like dat.”
Mr Radunski shook his head slowly. Mrs Radunski was sitting by the fire in the back room, foot tapping agitatedly; I could see her craning her neck to watch us through the open door, and from her stony expression she knew the subject matter, almost as if she’d primed up Mr Radunski to grab me and relate it all as soon as I stepped in from work. What they thought I might do about it, I couldn’t guess. I hadn’t seen Connie for ages, or Bernard for that matter.
“It was probably the door that Connie walked into, causing her bruising, Mr Radunski,” I said. “If you leave it open…” He looked doubtful. “I know Bernard,’ I defended. ‘He wouldn’t hurt a fly.” He’d even give it a leg up to a pile of shit, I thought.
“I not say it is Bernard,” Mr Radunski said, though I noticed he flashed a glance at the mended window. It was a long time ago, but he seemed to flinch as if a piece of coal might still come hurtling through. He danced awkwardly from foot to foot. “She ‘ad big mark on wrist, too,” he said. “That the door as well?”
I shrugged. The thought of Connie going through what she felt sure she’d escaped caused my stomach to flutter. But what could I do? “It’s their life,” I said. “I can’t interfere in it.” I heard Mrs Radunski sigh heavily. There was something more significant to that outpouring of air. Mr Radunski sensed it too, as if it had been a prompt of sorts, not a sigh.
“Where’s Ruby?” Mr Radunski said as I left him to go upstairs.
I hesitated. They must have heard the argument between us. Arguments. It got pretty loud. I hung my head slightly. I couldn’t see Mrs Radunski, but I bet she was craning her neck even more, painfully so. “We had a bit of a disagreement,” I said with the thinnest veneer of nonchalance I could muster. It was no good lying about it. They must have heard everything. I could see from the way they regarded me that morning that they saw a different me to the one they thought they knew, and it must have come as something of a shock judging from their faces. I must have sounded like an animal, bellowing at Ruby like I did.
“She’s…” I began.
“She’ll be away long?” he asked gently, sympathetically. He rubbed at the blood smears on his apron.
I scratched my head, as if I’d been given a puzzle that had an answer I couldn’t fathom. “I don’t know. I hope not. I wouldn’t blame her.”
He waved it away. “All dis just flash in pan. We do it ‘undred times. She go to mudder an’ I left ‘ere alone. All de time.” He lowered his brows. “But I never hit ‘er,” he said. “Never strike my wife.”
I shrank back at the thought. “And I never will either, Mr Radunski!” I said, truly horrified that he believed I might.
“You need a house, Philip,”
Mrs Radunski joined, her voice curiously distant. “You need a house of your own not a place above a butcher’s shop.”
I left them and made my way to our room, shedding my coat and kicking off my shoes. I sat down in the armchair, the place an empty shell without Ruby, like a skull that’s had its insides scooped out. The clock ticked loudly on the old 1950s sideboard we’d been given. I watched the fingers ease themselves around the face, but couldn’t be bothered to get up and fix myself something to eat or drink. Instead I replayed the loud voices of the night before, the accusations which hung in the air like a stale fug, looking to the vacant space where she stood in the corner defending herself against my mindless barrage of hostility fuelled by my own personal inadequacies and disappointments. She hated this room, she hated me, she hated being here in this stinking little town. And I hated her; I hated her puffed-up job and puffed-up friends. She hated being married. I hated being married. We were both firecrackers full of hate going off in each other’s faces, and I couldn’t pin down what exactly had started it all. I had the feeling that it was me. I think I started it.
That’s not true. I knew it had been me that kicked it off. Jealousy gets stoked up in you like a furnace, till its white-hot and spews out in a storm of fiery abuse. Till you get angry with someone for just being that someone. Just for being Ruby, for being popular, for having a decent job, for being attractive. Just because you feel useless and used up. Young and used up. Why me? Why me? I was screaming this over and over in my head, and all the time saying, I hate you, Ruby! I hate the sight of you!
Which wasn’t true, because I loved her more than anyone on this godforsaken planet. And when she finally threw some things into a carrier bag and hobbled downstairs, tearful and fuming, I was screaming in my head, Come back, Ruby! I love you, I need you! But as she opened the door I’m telling her to bugger off to her stuck-up friends and precious little job of hers. I’m telling her to take that smug face of hers and shove it under a bus. Those beautiful lips! Those gorgeous eyes! And I hope it splatters you all over the bloody road, I said. Till the front door slams and I slam our room door in heated response, and I sit in the armchair and tell myself I hate me. I hate me! I hate me! I hate me!
Ruby!
* * * *
24
Thursday
A room. Think about that. Think about what a room actually is.
It’s really four brick walls (on average). A box.
Any meaning, sentiment, feelings for it, they disappear when you think about it like that. It’s a box inside which we lay out personal things and then ascribe a name to it to try to give it meaning.
But it’s still a damn box all the same.
I never thought about such things until coming here to this island. I never thought about that when Ruby and I stepped into our room above the butcher’s shop.
When we walked through the door for the first time we might have seen only the awful pink flowered wallpaper and the limp nets hanging at the window; but we had been swift to imagine ourselves occupying the space the walls created, filling it with our few sticks of furniture, with our desires and hopes. As we stood in the doorway with Mrs Radunski breathing loudly behind us because the stairs had taken her breath, as we clutched each other hip to hip, it became ours. It became an extension of us. In our heads this box was a home before it became a home.
But when had it ceased to be? When had the room died and reverted to being simply a box laid out with personal things?
It was as if the room had been dead until we arrived and our combined energy breathed life into it, gave it a soul, the four brick walls no longer a stale vacuum. But it had grown sick and died. Its soul, its meaning, had drifted away from it, leaving behind the empty shell we first stumbled upon. When had that happened? Had it been gradual?
The longer Ruby stayed away the more morbid I became. The wallpaper that had been awful, but quaint-awful, was awful again, and the room was filled with that familiar cloying smell of dry, aged carpet that I thought had vanished for good. I had the sense of something old and decayed, of a body long-dead. The same smell as that which hung about Uncle Geoffrey’s belongings when my father, in a rare moment of affection and emotion, brought them down from the attic to show me. His old, heavily foxed books on fishing, a number of tatty black and white photographs, a trilby, an old thin tie from the 1950s. There were precious few things in the box that once held twenty-four tubs of sunflower margarine and now held the shoddy remnants of a life. He’d been a boxer in his youth, a meaty bloke who’d trained by lifting concrete blocks, so you’d expect the carton to be bigger. I stared hard at the scattered bits and bobs on the coffee table, trying desperately to visualise him, but failed. The things were alien to me. They didn’t smell like Uncle Geoffrey. He reeked of aftershave and Brylcreem and soap.
Our room had started to smell like Uncle Geoffrey’s margarine box.
I became bored of gazing at the bars on the electric fire in front of me, wondering why there was plenty of heat coming from them but no warmth. I became sick of listening to the television humming away downstairs, and the Radunski’s combined chortles at Terry Wogan and ‘Blankety Blank’. I thought of myself, hunched there on the old sofa, shrivelled and lifeless, ossified like Max’s dead rat inside its shoebox coffin, the world outside ticking steadily away, unaware of me sitting noiselessly and breathing in my own noxious vapours.
For someone to turn to I took a stroll down to my parents’ house. My mother was there, as always. She’d never worked, not in the sense that she went out to a job. She never had one, not since leaving the factory when dad married her at twenty-one. It was a time she recalled as being an intensely blissful one, the getting up at daybreak, the sandwiches of bread and jam, the laughs with the other young girls, flirting with the factory lads. Work, to my mother, was coloured by her brief and jaunty encounter with it, and she found it impossible see what all the complaining and striking was about. She now spent her days tidying up and rearranging that which she’d arranged the day before. With no-one to care for but the two of them she had plenty of time on her hands, and the house had become a showpiece. When I arrived I had the impression that she looked faintly disappointed, because she was armed with a plastic bucket and cloth, apparently on the verge of cleaning the kitchen, and now she’d have to put it off till another time, thus disrupting her tight schedule. Something in my demeanour must have speared her motherly conscience, for she packed away her cloths in an instant and put the kettle on to boil, which meant I had at least twenty minutes of her valuable time.
She knew things between Ruby and I weren’t too good, but as always she put it down to just another young lovers’ tiff, which, though they’d been happening with alarming regularity, she chose to ignore, except by comparison with a few she and dad had had over the years. Their arguments had been far worse, of course; worse than anything Ruby and I had encountered, and they’d survived unscathed. One thing was clear, though, any difference between us had only one origin, and that had to be Ruby.
“She spends far too much time reading books. All that learning, just think what that does to a brain. The problem is she doesn’t know anything about real life. Too immature. She wants to start getting out into the world, not being cooped up in some silly textbook all the time,” she said, making sure the pleats on the curtains were a regulation two inches across. Ruby’s acceptance onto an MBA had provoked many a discussion, I gathered.
“She’ll be back,” she added, with the same tone she once assured me the Sun would still shine in the morning, that the night always went away and that there was nothing at all under my bed that shouldn’t be there.
Which was all very fine. But I wanted to tell her that I was the problem, not Ruby. I was the bastard. Her son. Her precious one and only. I was not a nice person. How do you tell someone that they’ve raised a defect, when their world is all about perfection and toilet blocks? You can’t. They don’t listen. Whatever you say is mere air landing on their ears b
ut not exactly entering, because it might be taken as blame, and blame leads to guilt. And how crushing to find out that after so many years that the one thing you’re proud of achieving you suddenly have to start feeling guilty about.
So she doesn’t listen. She hovers around the fireplace touching a photograph frame, moving it a fraction of an inch, moving it back, steers me to talking about Auntie Daphne’s new Eldiss caravan, and how their daughter takes her for granted, because it’s far easier and far more comfortable for my mother to spot and live with someone else’s imperfections. She’s like a catalogue, not a person. She turns over the pages one by one, and it’s all about what’s been bought, what’s for sale, what she’d like, what others have got. I get this picture in my brain of my entire family posing before their lawnmowers or their Kenwood food mixers, models in a massive celestial mail-order catalogue standing on grass too green under skies too blue with smiles too white and stretched skin too perfectly flawless.
I drank tea, and found I could not speak of what I wanted, reduced instead to emitting a string of superficial words that seemed to have meaning, but carried with them no meaning whatsoever. I wondered what would be put in mother’s margarine box. Those plastic and silk roses? A can of spray polish with real beeswax? Her list of favourite dress shops? It had been a mistake seeing her. Really seeing her.
We broached the subject of Bernard and Connie. This kind of conversation came easier for her. She sat down, visibly stiffened in her chair, her hands clasped regally on her lap as she assumed the haughty pose of a judge, her grey tight locks completing the portrait. Drunkenness was a sign of failure, and failure was not to be tolerated in any form. She had this idea that you could tidy up your mind like a living room; if it got into disarray all it required was a good dust and vacuum. She equated anyone incapable of doing this cleaning of the mind with those that did not dust or vacuum as regularly as they should, like Auntie Bernadette in Coventry who left the grill pan messy for weeks on end.
Blood Bonds: A psychological thriller Page 20