Writing on Skin

by Sara Banerji

  The sudden influx of water caused something to burst in the relationship between the skinhead and the gardener, a continuation, perhaps, of the scene Hermione had witnessed with Dinah.

  Peering through the streaming glass, she saw Slug make a sudden violent movement towards the other gardener – at which Gerald went down like a felled tree. Then Hermione saw the rain that rushed over the fallen figure become stained with red. Seized with dismay she rushed outside.

  ‘He made passes at me,’ muttered Slug, shifting from one foot to the other, and smiling with mixed shame and pride as though he had behaved in a way that caused his teacher to punish him and his parent to reward him, and he did not know which reaction to expect from her, ‘sexy like,’ he added for illumination, presumably seeing blankness in Hermione’s face, while at his feet Gerald in his pin-striped suit rolled and groaned and grabbed at his crotch. Hermione felt disappointed not because of Gerald’s revealed sexual predilection but because he had failed to maintain his impeccable exterior. Until the arrival of Slug he had talked only in terms of rhizomes, capillary matting, organic pesticides and systemic weed-killers.

  ‘So I showed him my head.’ Slug rapped smartly on the shiny dome, on which the words ‘Never grow old’ were almost obliterated under rain-diluted blood. During the head-butt, Hermione thought, he must have cut his scalp on one of Gerald’s buttons. ‘I just give him a bump so he’d know that he won’t never grow old if he acts dirty. It’s a threat like, see.’ Then, bringing his hand away from his head, he saw the blood and began to shriek.

  Chapter Five

  After the fight Hermione had expected every hour that either Slug or Gerald would leave, fearing that a power struggle must be going on which would result in nothing being done in the garden at all. But gradually, and with a sense of relief, she had become aware that she must have overestimated or misunderstood the significance of the head-butt for some kind of understanding seemed to be growing up between the two men.

  Once, when Slug was bent over hauling a rock chunk, Gerald reached out and stroked the tattooed head with the palm of his hand and even from where she watched Hermione saw a shiver run through Slug’s body.

  The patches of dug-over ground started to fill with planting.

  Gerald, clutching the slim trunks of baby shrubs and trees, balancing them gently in the hole over the carefully mingled till, muck and bonemeal, leaning over now and again to draw some of the nourishing mix round the tender root system, would be heard instructing, ‘A bit more on that side, ducky! No, don’t push it in too hard yet, I’m not ready,’ while Slug carefully tilted soil from a shining spade.

  ‘There we are, ducks! You can put pressure on now,’ came when the tree was positioned to the satisfaction of the qualified gardener, and Slug, laying down his spade, would flatten the area round the tree with his big boots.

  Once Hermione saw Slug reach out towards Gerald as though trying to catch hold of his coat and Gerald moved lightly sideways so that for a moment she thought another fight was about to break out. But then she realized there had been something gentle, almost ecstatic in Slug’s gesture, as though the sight of the small tree now so comfortably settled had filled him with a gust of warm feeling.

  Another time she came upon Slug and Gerald quietly. They were rolling in the grass, landing soft kicks and punches on each other’s bodies. They sprang to their feet when they realized she was there, petals and grasses in their hair and jerseys, and stood before her like guilty children, heads lowered, expressions of giggling embarrassment on their faces.

  That evening, planning out the next day’s work she said to Gerald, ‘Slug been misbehaving?’

  ‘No, fine. He’s coming along well,’ then quickly changed the subject to trilliums and fritillarias for the shady edges.

  ‘I mean if he’s posing problems …’

  ‘No problems,’ said Gerald firmly, shaking his head.

  ‘He seemed rather agitated a few weeks ago …’ Hermione tried cautiously.

  ‘That’s all sorted out now,’ said Gerald dismissively.

  ‘Well, good,’ said Hermione, who knew when she was beaten. But the mark on Slug’s head where he had caught Gerald’s button was still visible.

  ‘Where do you go on your day off? In the evenings? Get drunk with?’ Hermione asked Slug when she thought the stage had been reached for the question not to seem threatening.

  ‘Mates,’ said Slug.

  ‘I’m glad you’ve got friends,’ said Hermione.

  But after a while, during which she never caught sight of these nebulous persons, she began to believe they were figments of a lonely imagination.

  But Slug’s friends were real and thought of themselves as ‘the gang’. Three months earlier, before Slug had begun working for Hermione, the gang had found him drawing flowers on the pavement.

  ‘What you doing there, Slug, mate?’ they had asked suspiciously.

  Slug had straightened, smiled his toothy grin, Dumbo sweet. ‘Pavement chalking, mate.’

  Slug was the gang’s mascot. When they roared about the countryside on their motorbikes Slug would be seen riding pillion, his mouth dragged back in a rictus of delight, head often as not glistening with drizzle.

  ‘Why don’t you never wear a helmet?’

  ‘Hide the words, see.’ Why waste words that had been such agony in the etching?

  Helmet, wrist-hung as long as possible, hastily snapped on at a pig-hint.

  ‘Didn’t know you was an artist, mate.’ Was there something a bit poofter about these pink pavement petals? ‘He’ll be drawing pansies next.’

  ‘They give good money for it, mates,’ gurgled Slug. ‘I’ll treat you to a beer in the park.’ Slug, on his social security, did not have money to spare for hospitality.

  ‘Go on, let him at it. He’s only a spastic’ They roared away in a burst of pollution, to return later to Slug waiting with lager and crisps.

  Then the old lady had come along.

  ‘Slug’s hooked one,’ rustled the gang, keeping their distance so as not to scare off the fish.

  Now they were growing impatient.

  ‘What’s happening? Come on, Slug mate, let’s get on with it,’ said the gang.

  They waited at the bottom of Hermione’s garden, their nostrils tucked into plastic bags, burning and thrilling to the indrawn fumes of glue, snurr snurr, one runt gurgling with a snot-blocked nose. Not suffocating like toddlers but dying all the same, another death, slowly. The dampening fags of the gang were as red as stars among the young trees Hermione had tried to lie for. Coughing in the mists rising out of the wet land where Hermione and Lalia had dug their pond, the gang waited for the agreed-on signal when Slug would shake the curtain across the lighted window.

  They would have had the old couple bound, gagged and robbed long ago, kicked in if they made a fuss, if the old fellow hadn’t gone and beaten them to it by dying.

  ‘Hang on, mates,’ advised Slug who was very much into it now, the centre of the gang’s hopes, almost a person of importance. ‘Wait till things die down. She’s loaded.’

  But things were dawdling, not dying, the gang told each other. They watched from beyond the woods, bikes leant against the trees, and sometimes saw Slug do strange things with the professional gardener, as though the pair were performing the dance of the gay.

  ‘Let’s go in tonight,’ said the gang.

  ‘Hang on a while, lads,’ said Slug. ‘The sons keep coming round.’

  Unity had rung from Calcutta. ‘I’ll soon be able to get away and stay with you,’ she said. Hermione felt hopeful. But it was Edward who came first.

  Slug told his friends joyfully, ‘He’s an addict like us, mates. He hides the stuff in the lawy.’

  After that the gang watched Edward pacing nervously over the garden with a special interest, and almost approved of him because he was one of them and not big and bulky like his father had been, and not like his youngest brother, Daniel.

  Edward was thin, s
lightly stooped, not even tall, as though like the gang itself, he had been deprived in childhood. His head was narrow, his nostrils small and quivering, and his ears tight against his scalp. He had a way, even when it was hot, of wrapping his arms around his body like taxi drivers do on chilly mornings. The gang did not feel threatened by this eldest Crombie son as they did by the other two. They almost identified themselves with Edward, giggling, ‘Shall we offer him a sniff then?’ Some feeling of affinity with this Edward Crombie made them hesitate to act.

  Then Rupert came, the one from Arabia, Slug told them. He was tall and lanky, crinkly brown-haired, and with a dancing way of walking. He would emerge from the house wearing silk shorts and a vest each morning, no matter what the weather, and would go jogging on a pair of white shoes as big and puffy as marshmallows. In the afternoons he emerged from the house again, this time some kind of racquet in his hand, badminton, tennis or squash, and dressed in the outfit appropriate to his game. There seemed, to the goggling gang, no limit to the numbers of sporting costumes Rupert owned. But Rupert was not only proficient at ball games. Once or twice they had seen him going out with a shotgun under his arm, off to a clay shoot.

  They decided that it would be better not to tangle with a person whose reactions, muscular condition and armoury were clearly so superior to their own.

  After Rupert had gone and the gang began to feel confident again, Daniel came. And the gang shuddered at the sight of his huge frame. This was not at all the sort of person the gang stole from.

  Unity still had not come and Hermione wished she would. She had felt distressed by Edward’s visit as though she had caught his fear from him, and her heart would sink when, every four hours or so, he would begin to grow restless, shiver, start to look this way and that as though suddenly filled with desire then, making some excuse, vanish to the bathroom. He would reappear after ages looking calm and happy, a mood which distressed Hermione more because she knew what caused it and thought it was her fault.

  She had not been ready for Rupert with his rapacious appetite for team games and physical fitness. She had been put off by the smell of body and mud that surrounded him when he returned from his strenuous day, and irritated by the gigantic noisy baths which used up all the hot water and left the bathroom in a mess.

  When Daniel came, Hermione had at first feared she would not enjoy this either, and felt dismayed at the great weight of male body she had unloosed upon the earth. Her floorboards seemed to moan as he prowled around the drawing room.

  ‘Why don’t you sit down, Daniel?’

  Eventually she settled back, preparing to enjoy the chaos created by his heavy presence: cigarette stubs piling in the ash trays, whiskys splashed while pouring, ice chunks bouncing over the kitchen floor, sudden gusts of wet roses ripped with bleeding fingers from the garden and placed dripping on the piano. He would abruptly bend to give her a scratchy hug or a great nicotine kiss.

  Daniel stayed on and the waiting gang winced, day after day, at the sight of his lush car still standing in the drive.

  Hermione began to laugh again with Daniel. Even against her will sometimes.

  ‘What a sexy creature that gardener’s assistant of yours is,’ he joked to her.

  ‘You know your father hated it when you talk like that.’ said Hermione quickly.

  ‘Come on, Mother, dearest,’ smiled Daniel, tickling her under her chin. ‘Just because darling Father has left us there’s no need for you to lose your sense of humour. There, look, you’re smiling again.’

  Daniel had always been able to make her laugh like this.

  His father had had a sense of humour, too, and Hermione never had understood why the two got on so badly.

  Hugh had adored all the little boys, getting down on his hands and knees when they were toddlers to race round the nursery with them on his back. When they were older he would prance round the garden with the three little fellows at his heels.

  They performed rain dances in this way. And ‘Ra ra ra we hate school, our headmaster is a fool,’ they had chanted on the last day of the holidays.

  ‘You encourage them in homesickness,’ objected Hermione.

  Hugh changed the chant to, ‘We’re going to school, going to school, because otherwise we’d be a silly fool.’

  Edward, a nervy, skinny nine-year-old, had cautiously pointed out that this would not do because of the singularity of fool as opposed to the plural subject.

  Daniel, seven, already renowned for challenging his father, began to shout, ‘Dad’s song was bad, poor old Dad.’

  Hugh hit him.

  Hermione remembered the panic she had felt as the huge man’s fist had come dashing down on to the tiny child and she had watched dismayed, and unable to intervene, as a purple mark had rushed into the little boy’s cheek.

  Shaken by the violence of the blow, Daniel had staggered and fallen silent for a moment. Then, leaping out of range of his father’s hands, had changed his chant to, ‘That didn’t hurt! That didn’t hurt!’

  Hugh had hurried back into the house ignoring the jeering boy, and shutting the door of his study had not been seen for hours.

  Hugh and Daniel had always had an edgy relationship which sometimes flared up into rows but after this episode things had got worse, as though a barrier was steadily growing between them.

  When the boys were respectively sixteen, thirteen, and ten, a disaster occurred that had almost ended Hugh’s career. His assistant, a hand-picked successor in whom Hugh had been putting his total trust for fifteen years, was discovered by the accountants to have been swindling the company all the time. But after a month or so the clamour of the scandal died down and Hugh had pushed it to the back of his mind, permitting no discussion on the matter from anyone.

  Daniel, already showing his talent, had written and directed the community’s New Year’s Eve show and persuaded his brothers to perform with him. ‘When I am famous, Edward, Rupert, you’ll be able to tell everybody you once took part in a show with me!’ Daniel, like his father, had a subtle knack for getting people to do what he wanted.

  The show seemed a marvellous success: Daniel’s witty dialogue, clever directing and topical humour were wildly applauded, not least by his own father in the seat of honour at the middle of the front.

  Suddenly on to the stage came all three brothers dressed in toddler’s rompers, bottoms high, heads to the ground in the posture of their childhood ritual. Round and round they went chanting, ‘Poor old Dad, poor old Dad, what a shame! You’ve been had!’

  The audience, all people working under Hugh, and their families, stared grimly. If the three actors had not been Hugh’s sons they would probably have felt it good policy to boo or offer some other evidence of solidarity with their general manager. If they could have seen Hugh’s expression they would have known what their reaction ought to be and whether he was in on the joke. But because no one could see his face, the act was received with a nervous silence in which one or two tiny giggles were hastily suppressed.

  ‘What the hell did you do it for?’ Hermione had raged. ‘It wasn’t even remotely funny,’ and to the two older boys, ‘You should have known bloody better you stupid fools!’ Dread at what would follow provoking uncharacteristic swearing.

  Daniel had gazed at her, apparently quite unashamed, unafraid, and then laughed, and in that moment Hermione had understood that Daniel did not like his father.

  The coldness grew between Daniel and Hugh. Hermione sometimes suspected that Daniel, in his desire to wound and knowing his father’s old-fashioned prejudices, had exaggerated his own leanings towards homosexuality.

  After Daniel became famous things improved a little, in spite of Hugh’s continued distaste for what he saw as Daniel’s perversion. He had felt proud of his son’s success and attended each new show, though because of the New Year’s Eve episode he was always a little nervous, often saying almost sadly on the way home, ‘Do you suppose the fellow was poking fun?’

  When Daniel had bee
n with her two days Hermione began to feel jolly and brought out a bottle of champagne someone had given her for her birthday, but which she had not had the heart to open.

  ‘We’ll drink a toast because you are here.’ Cork and champagne came roaring out over the pictures so that mother and son both laughed, then the phone rang.

  While Daniel talked out in the hall Hermione leant forward with her palms pressed together, already knowing what he would return to say. ‘I’ve got to go back to London tomorrow.’

  ‘But you’ve just come.’ She hadn’t meant to say it, hadn’t mean to cling, yet did not regret the words if they got him to stay on a little longer, ‘I mean what’s the point… the point of coming?’

  The champagne sighed and relaxed in the glasses as though depression, gathering like monsoon skies, was affecting it as well.

  Hermione realized that Daniel could not stay for ever, yet suddenly she could not face the thought of the house empty of the smell of man again, male lotions, heavy shoes and the grunting sound big men make when they sit. Daniel’s presence had made her feel briefly she was alive once more.

  ‘I’ll stay another day then,’ he said, reading her expression.

  Because she had not drunk alcohol for so long, the champagne affected her fast so that she found herself saying things she would not have otherwise done.

  ‘He was my friend, your father.’ As soon as she had spoken, from the way Daniel looked at her, she felt she had betrayed herself.

  ‘That’s an odd thing to say about your husband.’

  Yet it was true, Hugh’s loving cuddles, gentle strokings, warm voice telling her of his love for her, had eased the great pain that scalded inside her.

  ‘I felt very fond of him. And grateful!’ she told Daniel and winced inwardly because she knew it was not enough.

  Daniel, after a pause, said with a smiling frown that was so like his father’s, ‘And passionately in love?’

  Hermione felt colour flame into her face, and to hide it she leant forward and poured herself another glass.