I hesitate in front of their lavish fridge. I’m not hungry, but I know I’ll remember that fridge later when I am and wish I’d helped myself to some cheese and yoghurt and ham. If I steal anything he’ll think that was all I ever wanted from him. Not at first, for a few days it will hurt like hell. But after a week or two he’ll find reasons not to love me.
I don’t take anything. Just walk out of his front door.
In the Bunker
Can’t sleep, can’t eat, can’t talk. My body and mind have floated off and left me here on my bunk. Can’t live without him. And now I’ve got to.
Mum’s hand comes up like an old lizard and touches mine. She’s talking to me, perhaps she’s been talking for some time. ‘I’m here if you do want to talk.’ What’s the point? How could she understand the first thing about love? Silence is like another bunker where I shelter. ‘Never give all the heart,’ she says.
My voice comes back from Planet Ben. ‘What was that about heart?’
‘Never give all the heart. It’s a poem by Yeats, very sound advice. Or, as Dorothy Parker said, “Don’t put all your eggs in one bastard.”’
Reluctantly I giggle. ‘Mum? Can I ask you something?’
‘Of course.’
‘You once said Leo wasn’t my real dad. So who was? Was it Uncle David?’
‘This is going to sound crazy, but I don’t know.’
‘But he could have been, right?’
‘Yes, it’s possible. Why do you ask me that?’
‘Because it’s suddenly become the most important question in my life.’ Before I can explain Jonathan rushes in with his flock of screaming, laughing kids.
Night after night I lie awake, vaguely aware of the others sleeping around me and Mum tossing with useless sympathy in the bunk below. It’s all your fault. I’ve inherited your problems and your crazy, impossible story, and now you’re going to go and die and leave me even more alone. Ben’s the one thing I’ve ever really wanted, and I can’t have him because of you. I hear the first tube trains rumble and roar on the other side of the wall. Strange how I always know when it’s morning, even down here. I feel weak and dizzy, but I have to keep going back to the tree where we used to meet.
I pull on my clothes and go out before the others are awake. The morning is dark, Marble Arch seethes with rush-hour traffic and the park is carpeted with soggy leaves and conkers. Usually autumn is my favourite season, but this year there’s no beauty anywhere. As I approach our tree the cool sun is rising. I shiver and wish I’d pinched a second jumper from the communal box. I sit on damp leaves, my back against the tree, and cry for him. Every day I have to go back to the tree to check there’s nothing there. The rain would have soaked through letters anyway. But there aren’t any letters. Ben doesn’t know where I live, and I’ve no idea what he is doing. Probably gone off to university like middle-class kids do. Left home, left London, gone to a new park with new girls in it.
I sit with Rosa in a café in North Audley Street. ‘But you can’t just do nothing on millennium night. Go on, Abbie, love, do yourself a favour, have another muffin. Well, I’m going to, anyway, it’s screaming “Eat me.” Never seen you look so scraggy. You used to be quite pretty. Tell ya what, you come out with me and Ali millennium night. We’ll watch the fireworks, river of blood – sounds like fucking Hannibal Lector, innit? Then I’ll fix you up with one of Ali’s friends and we’ll go clubbing down Brixton. You listening, Abbie? Gawd almighty, that cappuccino must taste like chicken soup, all that salt water you’re dripping into it. What is it, darlin’? You don’t want to get yourself all of a trauma ’bout some bloke. You pregnant? Want me to help you get rid of it? Mind you, might be an idea to hang on to it. Be a bit of company for you when your gran finally kicks the bucket, and if you’ve got a baby they’ll have to give you a flat. Kids are great, I love Kevin to bits now he’s grown up a bit. Might have some more babies with Ali – wouldn’t mind having a football team. He’s all right, Ali is, treats me like a fucking lady. Sixth time lucky. You ought to try this marriage scam like me. Oh, Abbie, stop crying. It’s like talking to Viagra Falls.’
I see Rosa, hear her and feel her sympathy but can’t form any words. She gives me a fiver – Rosa’s always generous when she does have money. I get on the bus. I’m shivering in my denim jacket, the warmest garment in the communal box that still fits me. I’ve had a cold and a sore throat for weeks. From the top of the bus I gaze down on shops tarted up for Christmas, on the city I have no place in.
Last time I did this journey it was a summer evening and I was full of health and trust and hope. It’s raining when I get off the bus and walk down the quiet suburban road. He can afford to despise it. I’m afraid I won’t recognize his house in the dark. It looks exactly like all the others yet somehow shrieks at me. Bikes and cars outside, these people have so many possessions. Mum and I could move with a couple of carrier bags – if we had anywhere to go – but Ben and his family would need a fleet of lorries. Soaking wet, coughing, I stand outside his house. All the curtains are drawn, five windows gawp back unhelpfully. His room is the middle window upstairs, the dark one. I just stand there staring up at his window, don’t know what I want – I want him. If there was a light on up there I’d throw stones up and make him see me, make him let me in. Perhaps they’re all downstairs, sitting around a fire in a room as full of winter evening as it was once full of summer and us. Leading their proper family life in their proper family house. If Ben has gone out he might come back and see me and then somehow it’ll be all right and Uncle David will understand and they’ll let me in.
I stand there for hours, freezing, getting wetter and wetter, not thinking at all really, just feeling. But his window stays dark and he doesn’t come.
When I get back to the bunker late that night I feel really ill, and it’s such a relief. Too ill to have to help with the kids or go out singing or think about Ben. It’s like being little again and letting go of everything except that all-powerful grown-up hand. Mum’s been nursing me. She says I’ve been ill all through Christmas. I had a fever, and I think I must have talked about Ben. Mum seems to know all about him, and that’s a relief, too.
This morning I wake up feeling like I have a brain. A tiny, mouldy, shrivelled thing floating in the sea of snot and tears and gunk inside my head. Anyway, I feel able to talk, and we can because Jonathan’s taken the kids out and me and Mum are alone in the icy bunker. She piles up all the sleeping-bags on her bunk and we lie there together, both so skinny we can fit into the narrow bunk and so filthy we don’t mind each other’s smells.
That weird feeling as Mum’s fingers flutter, walking over my face, extracting me like juice from an orange. ‘You’ve been very ill. Your cheeks have lost their childhood curves, your cheekbones and nose feel quite sharp now.’
‘Bet I look a right old ratbag. Red eyes, greasy hair – thank God we haven’t got a mirror down here.’
‘We used to be beautiful,’ she says in a puzzled voice, like beauty is a place and she’s forgotten how to get there.
‘Mum, am I stupid to love him so much?’
‘I think it’s the people who can’t love who are stupid – or to be pitied.’
‘Did you ever love a bloke so much you felt a part of him?’
‘Oh yes.’
‘Who? Dad? Which one?’
‘When I was your age I fell in love with Leo.’
‘How did you meet him?’
And she tells me this story, so strange that for a few minutes I forget about my broken heart and imagine her falling in love with the magician or con artist or whatever he was. Lying beside the ancient crone I shut my eyes and see the beautiful young girl, and I can almost shake hands with her across the years.
‘Jesus, if you’re really over a hundred you must remember 1900.’
‘I can see this image of two tiny girls in white frilly pinafores welcoming the new century. It might have been me and my sister Lizzie, or a film I saw once. Memory’s a
scavenger, swooping over you with titbits in its beak that might be succulent fruit or the entrails of the dead. I’ve stopped wondering if things are true or if all this can have happened to the same woman. Too late to worry about identity now.’
‘So have you been happy, Mum, whoever you are?’
‘I never even ask myself that now. The happiness I once knew, that mixture of love and narcissism and joy in the outside, visible world, will never come again. Sometimes it seems that being too busy to ask the question is a kind of happiness. But it doesn’t really matter about me any more. Abbie. If you really love this boy you must find a way of being with him.’
‘But I’ve got to look after you.’
‘No you haven’t. Seize the day, my darling, before it seizes you. Anyway, I’m going to die soon. But first I have to find Leo.’
‘Why can’t we find him?’
‘I haven’t really wanted to, or tried to, until now. I’ve never stopped wanting him and missing him, but I needed to escape from him. Now I see that wasn’t fair on you. The confusion about your birth is a kind of curse that has to be lifted before I can die.’ I hate the way she talks about dying in that matter-of-fact way.
Then the kids come screaming in, and Mum gets up to look after them. Around us the hullabaloo of millennium fever rages as they make their plans for tonight. There’s going to be a giant street party all over London, with fireworks and music and a fair in the Mall. Even Kevin is planning to stay up all night, and they’re waiting for Rosa, who has promised to take all the children out in a gang.
I cough, can’t stop. I sit up, feeling breathless again, that horrible, gasping dry retching that leaves me drained, then I sink back down under the sleeping-bags. But I can’t afford to miss the prosperous crowds that will fill London. I’ll have to sing for my supper, and I haven’t sung for weeks. My voice is a croak.
Flashback
A life sentence is better than immortality, but I still find the days too long. Anxiously, I examine my face in the mirror each morning in the glum yellowish light of my bathroom. There are lines around my eyes and mouth, a thoughtful-looking furrow between my eyes – deceptive, because I can hardly even concentrate on a book any more. The thought of all the books that have been printed since that pushy Caxton decided to spread the affliction of literacy depresses me. I look about forty now. If that’s my biological age I might have to glare at myself in the mirror for another forty years.
The Metaphysical Bank has done very well out of my early retirement. My substantial holdings as a director have been haggled away to a life pension, index-linked, and a solid portfolio of Pasts (1837 railway shares, 1492 shares in Nicholas Jenson’s printing press in Venice and 1620 shares in the East India Company) as well as some promising Futures (Intergalactic Efinance, Fly Me To The Moon and Grow-Your-Own-Kidney Bags). Anyway, I have more than enough to live on. If this can be considered living.
Strange how the days are longer now they’re numbered. I can’t be bothered to make any new friends, and two thousand years of energetic lechery have left me indifferent to the flesh. I find my own repulsive, other people’s unappetizing. The dog looks gloomy, too, as it sighs and farts and drools, ageing like me. I’m glad it’s dumb. I couldn’t stand a talkative companion.
If not for Johnny’s whining I would never go out. I feel like another old dog, or perhaps a wolf, loping around London. Once I do get out I realize that I like walking. It soothes my worst moods and tires me out so that I am able to sleep without the pills I’ve become dependent on recently. He drags me to the open-air drawing-room of Holland Park, saturated with memories of them both; to the wilds of Hampstead Heath, where she stayed with George and Molly after she returned from Italy in the sixties. Most of all, Hyde Park draws us like a magnet. Day after day, the dog walks me up the North End Road, turns into High Street Kensington, across Kensington Gardens to the Serpentine and then over to Marble Arch and Bayswater. It gets dark early now, and I still prefer night to day. Slinking through the crepuscular trees, I feel pulled as if the dying vegetation is willing me to stay. Dangerous? Then you haven’t understood what a release it would be to feel the mugger’s knife at my throat and to know that, this time, death is real.
Today cafés and pubs and buses are humming with people making plans for millennium eve. Not another one! My last. At midday Johnny drags me from Hyde Park to Marble Arch, and we pass through one of the pedestrian tunnels under the road. As I walk down the concrete ramp the dog strains at the lead and starts to bark and yelp hysterically. I hear the last few lines of ‘The Streets of London’, sung in a husky girl’s voice. I used to hate music, except the raucous bawling of music-hall songs and the most nihilistic rock and pop, but recently I’ve noticed it has an extraordinary effect on me. This sweet, melancholy young voice goes through me as if I was a field of wheat and her song was a wind bearing compassion. The voice must belong to the seedy-looking girl sitting under a blanket. Although she has stopped singing by the time I pass, I put a pound coin in the green baseball cap beside her. The beauty of the girl’s singing seems all the more poignant when I see how frail and skinny and apathetic she looks. I try to walk on, but Johnny won’t let me. The dog is almost strangling himself as he strains towards the girl, who stares back at him in disbelief and then glances up at me.
An old woman is standing near by. At a second glance I see that she’s grotesquely old, dressed in an odd assortment of clothes: a man’s tweed jacket, a pair of green jogging trousers, disintegrating trainers, a scarlet baseball cap and a bright yellow scarf. She holds herself very erect and looks as if she might break out into poetry, a speech of Hecuba’s, perhaps. Then I notice that my curiosity is being ignored and something in the milkiness of her eyes tells me she’s blind. I stop beside her.
‘Who is it?’ she asks in a surprisingly youthful and educated voice.
‘Nobody – a friend. Are you hungry?’ I desperately want to hear her voice again.
Instead of replying she stretches out her hands and brushes my face with light, dry fingers. There is unexpected power in her touch, as if she is moulding the clay of my face, not just learning it. As she explores my face I stare into hers, into leathery folds and wrinkles edged with dirt, a toothless mouth, deep lines running from its edges up to the bony hill of her nose. The sightless eyes have once been dark, sunken now into bowls of shadow.
She laughs. ‘You’re waiting for me to make the first move, Leo. You always did.’
The girl under the blanket says, ‘Hello, Daddy.’
They are in my arms, and the reality of their bodies is a shock. I’ve been alone for so long that I’ve forgotten how other people feel – and smell. They do stink. And there is so much to say that we walk up the concrete ramp together in silence, towards the swelling daylight.
I buy them lunch in an Italian café in Park Street. Although it’s crowded, nobody wants to sit at our table. Jenny perks up over the meal, as soon as she has some hot soup and a glass of wine inside her, and we reminisce about our music-hall days. Abbie hardly says a word. Johnny sits between her knees and she reaches down to touch him occasionally, looking bewildered.
We stand on the pavement outside the café. We’ve talked over lunch, but it isn’t enough, it will never be enough. Abbie clutches her blanket in exactly the same way as she used to hold her panda when she was three. She has hardly spoken or eaten during lunch, and her white, traumatized face worries me even more than the gargoyle that has been carved out of Jenny’s beauty. ‘Well. Two o’clock. The children will wonder where we are.’ Jenny turns away from me, reaching out for Abbie’s shoulder.
‘No! You can’t just go like this. I’m coming with you. I can’t let you disappear again.’
Jenny shrugs, and Abbie gives me another of those terrible blank looks. I take Jenny’s arm firmly – like a policeman, I think uncomfortably – and Abbie walks in silence on her other side. Jenny stinks of urine and decaying unwashed flesh. She stumbles a few times on the unfamiliar paveme
nt. We walk back through the subway where I found them, across Speakers’ Corner and down to a labyrinth of tunnels hidden beneath Marble Arch, where I’ve never been before. The buskers and beggars who congregate here all greet Jenny and Abbie warmly and look at me suspiciously. In the café I felt that I was a respectable citizen generously feeding two derelict and none too fragrant females, but down here I feel that I’m the outsider. Johnny’s lead is held by Abbie now, and I feel oddly bereft.
Abbie takes a key out of her pocket, opens a door marked Emergency Exit and leads us down a dark corridor. Long before we reach the bunker I’m disorientated and nervous, half expecting to be attacked in this darkness seething with transient life. I still hold Jenny’s arm with one hand and with the other clutch my wallet in the breast pocket of my corduroy jacket. After a long walk Abbie unlocks another door and we enter a dark, cold space, more like a cave than a room.
We’ve left daylight far behind us in the world above. My eyes make sense of the new space by the feeble yellowish light of a camping lamp. Bunks line the walls, which drip with condensation, and there is no other furniture. Only children, swarming like maggots, shouting and laughing and playing. When they see Jenny the maggots run up to her and bear her off to one of the bunks. Abbie, still silent, sets about preparing some kind of repulsive instant soup in dozens of plastic cups. I hover in the doorway, reluctant to be swallowed up by this subterranean chaos.
Loving Mephistopeles Page 33