‘In this weather, it can’t be much fun having to sit around like that,’ Dottie said, but Sophie barely glanced at her, her eyes still longingly fastened on the Church of the True Christ. Talking of the unpleasant weather made Dottie think of Hudson. She had hoped that November would bring him back. She had set great store on the cold, and even more store on his sixteenth birthday. She had not thought he would be able to resist coming back, just to see what fuss they would make of him. But he had! He had not even sent a postcard, or a note. On the day of his birthday, Dottie had been left at home on her own, waiting without hope for his return. Happy birthday sweet sixteen! Sophie went to spend the night with Jimmy, which she did at least once a week.
Dottie had met him only once, when he brought Sophie home late one evening. It was clear that he was not at his best, his eyes watery and blood-shot, and his movements a little wayward and out of control. He was a shortish man of about thirty or so, just beginning to turn plump and carrying a hint of a stoop. He wore a thin, clipped moustache which gave him the look of a dandified movie villain. His appearance suggested something just about to go bad, just on the point of slowly turning sour or running down. Dottie knew her glimpse of him not only caught him at a disadvantage, but that it had only been brief. None the less, the sight of him made her feel concerned for Sophie. That was the only time he had come to their room. Usually it was Sophie who went to him, sometimes in Camberwell or New Cross, occasionally in Catford where he had friends.
‘Where does that man live?’ Dottie asked, exasperated for Sophie’s sake, but Sophie laughed, enjoying Jimmy’s unpredictable ways. Men want to be free, Sophie said. That’s the way men are.
Once Jimmy took her to Leeds for the weekend, to go to a party there. When Dottie laughed at the thought of going that far for a party, her sister looked hurt. You’re just jealous, she said. Afterwards Dottie admitted to herself that she had felt a pang of envy and a kind of homesickness. She thought of Sharon and the man she had told her about, who had loved her and had her children christened. Dottie Badoura Fatma Balfour! Sometimes she thought she remembered him. She must have been nearly five when they left Leeds, and sometimes when she was alone she saw him walking a dog and smiling down at the child beside him. But that could only be her own day-dreaming, she thought. She did not remember anything, only Sharon going from one bad man to another, surrounded by creatures who misused her and fed her diseases and alcohol. And she was afraid of Sophie travelling down the same road, and of Hudson going bad and turning into one of those scavengers.
3
Then one day, when the gloom of winter had thoroughly set in, and the nights had drawn in so that light turned into darkness and night into day without drama or demarcation, Hudson came back. The house had fallen silent at that late hour, only the gurgle and slosh of winter drains breaking its muffled stillness. Sophie was out, as she usually was on Saturday nights, and Dottie was already in bed. When the noise of his footsteps first reached her, although she did not know that they were Hudson’s, she remembered a story she had read about an old man who falls asleep while reading in front of a fire. The man lives alone, surrounded by the few objects he has gathered together over the years. He is suddenly woken by the noise of knocking. A storm rages without and at first he does not hear the knocking. Something taps on his window, and the knocking resumes with an insistence that cannot be denied. He opens the door to find that Death has come for him, but that first Death wants to have a chat about mortal coils and various undoings that the old man had been party to. Dottie had enjoyed most the moment of Death’s arrival. She was terrified as she read but was impressed beyond belief at the audacity of making Death speak to the victim in such a reasonable way. She lost interest before the end of the story, put off by the high-flown poetic excesses that Death was credited with, but she had no doubt that the visitor had everything his own way after all was said and done.
The steps on the stairs paused dramatically on the landing and then continued upwards to the next landing. She heard the ceaseless chatter of the Polish woman who lived above them, and talked to herself, suddenly stop. She must have heard the steps on the stairs, and perhaps shivered at the thought of the solitary reaper calling on her. After a few moments the steps came down again, and Hudson knocked on his sister’s door.
He looked haggard and ill. His face was gaunt with pain, and his eyes dark with fatigue. ‘Come in,’ Dottie said, after a moment. Her initial impulse, to move forward and hold him, had made him start back nervously. She touched him as he walked past her, laying a hand on his shoulder and feeling him twitch as if he would shake her off. He sat in the old arm-chair that Ken had bought, his head drooping and his shoulders hunched. ‘Are you all right Hudson?’ she asked.
His head was nodding jerkily as if he was dropping off to sleep, so she repeated her question loudly, with a note of panic in it. He looked up after a moment and smiled. Gently he lowered his head on his chest and closed his eyes.
A River Journey
1
He would not tell her what had gone wrong and she was worried about being too insistent, in case he took himself off again. There was no doubt that his adventures had wounded him and worn him down. He had lost weight, and lost strength, and no longer showed any signs of the youthful zest for cruelty that had been his unpleasing characteristic. Sitting by himself, he flicked his left hand across his face, as if irritably brushing away a fly that was hovering near it. He rubbed at imaginary marks on his body, frowning and frantic with effort. His jaw went rigid and locked into a grimace of distress – teeth bared and eyes bulging out of their sockets. Once she heard banging on the stairs which sounded like a soft, bouncing ball. When she went to look, she found Hudson on his knees, hitting the step with his forehead. Such gestures seemed the classic symptoms of disorder to Dottie, so obvious and predictable that she wondered if Hudson was playing a cruel joke on them, the prodigal nut come home to roost. At times it was as if he found his whole performance funny, and he grinned and chuckled with mad intensity.
The next thing would be for him to start talking to himself, she thought, like the public madman who held court outside Stockwell tube station and performed antics on request, making a living out of the hand-outs amused passers-by donated. His favourite trick was to warble an incomprehensible verse, if that was what it was, and then claim it was a praise song in Fula, his mother tongue, which he had especially composed for the worthy whom he hoped would reward him with a piece of silver. Failure to do so usually released a torrent of abuse from the madman, to the delight of passers-by, who then happily donated a few coppers. But Hudson did not sing or talk to himself. He did not talk to anyone. If left to decide for himself, he retreated to his little room upstairs and kept out of the way.
When Dottie went to get him, which she did every evening, he came and merely sat in the room with her, as if he was sacrificing himself. When the evening had worn on, he rose and left without a word. His silence scared her. There was a violent, cruel undertone in it, and it confirmed all her most lurid fears. Whenever she spoke to him or asked him a question, which she did softly and with exaggerated care, his head dropped a little and his shoulders hunched, as if he was hiding himself from her. He did this with resignation, with submission, sometimes smilingly accepting the shame of his silence but none the less refusing to break it. She knew there was a strain of defiance in his wretchedness, an obstinate refusal to be cajoled out of it.
‘What happened? Have you got yourself into trouble?’ she asked again and again. At first she would be gentle and cajoling, determined to reach him with kindness and sympathy, but finally she would become impatient with what to her seemed like childish obstinacy. If he was mad, then it was out of simple wilfulness. When was he going to stop thinking only of himself? He was nothing more than a selfish little sod. All she earned for her outbursts were small, pitying smiles, or once a loud howl of derision. In his eyes she was the ranting lulu who would not leave him in peace. She wished she
could, but he was there for the whole world to see, a sixteen-year-old wreck. How could she just smile at that and wave it past? At least he was back, she consoled herself, out of whatever horror it was that had reduced him to such an abject silence. And if he stayed locked away in his room, he was also getting some sleep and recovering his strength.
She tried other methods. For a whole evening she ignored him. She thought if she ignored him long enough he was bound to get hungry, and then he would have to come and seek her out for food, which would be a start. Dottie held out for as long as she could, but half-way through the evening, shivering in the unusual cold of that cruel winter and imagining that his little room would be like a freezing cave, she was forced to go and fetch him. She could not leave him to freeze to death or starve in his cramped cell. She tried feeding him suggestions, to which he only needed to nod or shake his head to confirm their truthfulness. Was he ill? Had he done something criminal? Was he hiding from the police? Had somebody hurt him? Whatever it was that had happened would not make her love him any less. He knew that, didn’t he? Why couldn’t he understand? Why could he not speak? What was the matter with him? Why was he so incredibly stupid? He lowered his head with the look of submission that reminded her of the beaten dog in the garden. His soft, sniggering laughter, which before had had the sound of water tumbling over smooth slippery rocks, now contained the beginnings of a whine, she thought.
Even Sophie’s powerful embraces, which Hudson had often found irresistible before, failed to move him. He suffered them without protest, deflating himself and going limp in her arms. Sophie had wept bitterly when she first saw her brother in this state, and she too made suggestions, tried to probe without being too insistent. She cooked dainty little sweets for him, as she had done before, and tried to tempt him into indulgence. At least that would show that he still took pleasure in something. When these subtleties failed as well, she knelt at his feet and begged him to speak. Hudson laughed at her and called her Fatty. That was his first word.
Tearfully, she turned on Dottie, on the brink of accusing her, of blaming her for what had happened. Dottie saw the blame, and saw the words tremble on Sophie’s lips. Yes, have a go, she thought. Let’s have a proper family carnival. The words did not come in the end. Sophie sucked in a large snivel, and swallowed her phlegm, allowing her eyes to make the accusation. Dottie knew the words would come one day, and she thought she knew what Sophie had almost said. That it was her fault Hudson was as he was, because she had brought him back from Dover to their life of misery. It was she who had taken him away from that picnic on the wonderful cliffs bathed with sunshine.
Perhaps Sophie blamed her for the way her own life had turned out as well. She wondered what her crime against Sophie was. Who else could they blame but her? As for Dottie herself, she could blame the stars or the fates that her life was as it was. She should have been born the daughter of a lord who was master of large estates in the garden of England, who could feed her strawberries out of season and whisk her south out of the winter cold. Better still, she thought, she could have been born the son of such a nabob . . . Sophie threw herself on Hudson again, rocking him in her arms as she sobbed. Between the confusion of arms and shoulders, Dottie saw a smile on Hudson’s face. It seemed a fully wicked smile at that moment and she was filled with disgust. When he caught Dottie’s eye, there was brief spark of shock before he looked away.
His dejection slowly lessened with passing days, and he began to lose his look of abject submission. Slowly, he began to speak. He said bizarre unconnected things at first, hesitantly positioning the words in a difficult symmetry that required thought and labour: the price of dung in a bottle, the tall blue ceiling on the canal tow-path, dirty nail varnish. When they applauded his efforts, he laughed with manic abandon, grunting and hopping like an excited monkey. Dottie could not get over the feeling that he knew what he was doing, that he was manipulating them. Occasionally he would be lucid, stringing several sentences together and smiling because he was making complete sense. One day, she found him in an animated conversation with the old Polish woman who lived upstairs and talked to herself. She was undoubtedly mad, living with uncountable cats and emptying her chamberpot out of the window. Usually she ran away as soon as she caught sight of anyone, which was just as well because she smelled so bad, but Hudson stood talking to her on the stairs while she smiled and talked back at the same time. She spoke Polish while he spoke English, yet they were both grinning delightedly. A couple of nuts, Dottie thought, wishing she had not witnessed the scene.
When she managed to catch a steady sight of them, his eyes told her that something terrible had happened to him. When she looked in on him in the morning, he was always sleeping, curled up like a sick old man. He looked hot and feverish, and his skin glistened with stale sweat. She left money for him before she went to work, but dared not touch him. He looked so ragged, like something discarded. Once she called his name because she thought she heard him muttering, but he groaned without waking. He stayed in his cramped room for long hours of the day, lying in bed with his face turned to the wall. In the evenings he disappeared, and on some nights did not return.
One night, returning late from his nocturnal wanderings, he came to announce his recovery. He banged on their door until they woke up and talked at them with abounding merriment for over an hour. He would not leave, going on at them with flashing smiles and darting eyes. Long after either of the sisters could disguise their exhaustion, Hudson stood between them, performing his high jinks.
Dottie was not so innocent and ignorant that she did not begin to suspect the meaning of what was happening. It took her a long time to think openly that what Hudson was doing was evil. At first she thought that he used the money she gave him for drink, but she soon saw that that could not be right. The amount of money she could spare for him was not enough to get him into the fearful state of abandonment he was in. Where did he get the money for that? His soiled crumpled appearance in the mornings made her fear that something truly horrible was happening to him. Anyone could see that he had been places, that he had done things. He gave off a smell which was familiar but which she could not quite identify, and which made her think of a body that was turning putrid. His clothes were soiled with what looked like mud, or the dried slime of decomposing winter streets.
She tried to talk to Sophie about her suspicions but could not interest her. Sophie spent more and more time with Jimmy now, and was inclined to distance herself from Hudson and his dramas. When by chance she saw him, she was sarcastic and cold, and only spoke to him with sneering, disapproving quips. She made her eyes glaze over whenever Dottie started to talk to her about him, or offered peremptory advice that was intended to halt the conversation in its tracks. Just ignore him, Sis. You should go back to your reading. When was the last time you went to the library? Tell me that. You’ll lose all that book you know already if you don’t keep practising. At other times she quoted Jimmy, who was as authoritative on loafing younger brothers as he was on everything else on which he pronounced. Dottie was pleased that Sophie was so obviously devoted to Jimmy, though. She must’ve misjudged the man that one time she met him, she thought.
2
In the late days of winter in the new year, mobs of white citizens of the United States of America were attacking black schoolchildren in the streets of New Orleans and Baton Rouge, Louisiana, for wanting to attend the same schools as their children. The terrified children ran down charming and odorous alleys of these French-built towns to escape the wrath of their oppressors, while their fathers and mothers massed like zealots in their gloomy catacombs, fomenting the uprising. And while this was happening, Frenchmen were throwing bombs at Algerians in their own capital city for daring to defy the settled order of things. In late February of that same year, Patrice Lumumba, the deposed Prime Minister of the Congo Republic, was murdered in Elisabethville, the capital city of Tshombe’s breakaway Katanga. Lumumba had been captured on his way to Stanleyville, his p
ower-base. The new tsar of the Congo at that time was Joseph Mobutu, but he did not want Lumumba’s blood on his hands, so he had him flown to Elisabethville, the city of his arch-enemy, for disposal. Lumumba was tortured on the plane. A young American diplomat had struck up a friendship with him and may even have been one of the many who persuaded him to give himself up. He was later to become a US Secretary of Defence but at that time he was only a friend. The announcement of Lumumba’s violent death was made by Godefroid Munongo, Minister of the Interior of Katanga, in whose custody Lumumba had been for six weeks. Lumumba’s Katangese murderers danced in the streets while their paymasters toasted each other from the torrents of blood they had released by their greed and desire for power.
On this dark night in winter, Dottie was on her own in her room in Balham feeling the lethargy and depression that had overtaken her days and nights. She sat by her open window, watching the yellow glow that hovered like a thickening cloud over the dirty city. The world was growing smaller, she thought, the rain slanting in even as she hid her face from the driving wind.
When it was close to midnight, Hudson came banging on the door for one of his maniac chats. He talked at her like a fury, laughing and jigging with high spirits, and bringing her close to tears with his mockery. He was dressed for the streets, in his tight trousers and studded leather jacket, and both his voice and the poses that he assumed reminded her of his friends and their intimidating ways.
He went on into the small hours, talking about everything, his school days and what his friends had said and done. He even talked about love, his words taking flight when he tried to describe the strength of the emotions that beat in his breast. Sometimes he came up to her as he made accusations or sought to drive a jibe home. He hovered and wheeled over her, prodding and clawing with malice. He ate everything Dottie had in the room, spooning cold tinned vegetables out of the tin, and tearing at hunks of bread with his teeth. Biscuits, milk and what was left in a jar of plum jam. She watched his hysteria as he replenished the energy he had used up, and groaned at the thought of the torture that was still to come. She watched him with an anguish she had not felt before, for she knew at that moment that his life would not be long. In the end she saw him beginning to wilt and became tempted by the thought of confronting him as he weakened. It was not so much calculation as opportunism. She had tried everything else. When the signs of his exhaustion were coming thick and fast, his eyes sliding out of focus, legs wobbling out of control, and long stertorous yawns escaping him, she guessed the moment was right. In any case, she thought, it was worth a try. She saw the look of agony on his face when she asked him the question, and she repeated it, demanding a reply.
Dottie Page 17