The thud of the hammer on the carpet recalled him to himself, and he managed to control his hands before he bent to his tools. He dug the chisel into the doorframe at the level of his eyes and gripped the handle while it shuddered with blows of the hammer. By the time he’d gouged out a chunk of wood twice the breadth of his thumb, his hands were aching and shivering. He couldn’t rest yet, although there was no sound from the pestilential room—no sign, when he forced himself to glance down, of spidery legs groping under the door. He tore the celluloid off its cardboard backing and took out the gleaming metal socket, which bruised his finger and thumb as he held it steady in the splintered niche in the doorframe while he secured it with its pair of screws. The head of each screw was incised with a cross, he saw, and surely that must help imprison the contents of the room. He slid the shaft of the bolt, which was thick as a young girl’s finger but far less easy to break, into the socket so as to line it up. He drove the point of the screwdriver into the door through the holes in the metal plate and inserted the four screws, which he twisted as tight as his stinging fist could turn them. Only when an upright of each cross was absolutely vertical did he relent, dropping the screwdriver at the foot of the door. As he clasped his hands together to let them soothe each other, he felt like falling to his knees to give thanks for the strength that had enabled him to complete his task.
He could pray while he worked. He still had to clear away the mess she’d made and had caused him to make in the hall. If cleanliness was next to Godliness, he thought, what must its opposite be next to? He stored the tools in the cupboard under the sink, then he set about filling the carrier bag with all the litter: the splintered chunk of wood, the bits of metal he had pulled out of her face, the fragments of the telephone equipment she’d forced him to smash. ‘Crazed devil,’ he muttered, which was all he seemed able to say for the moment—he would surely be able to pray once he had an opportunity to catch his breath. Meanwhile the sight of the spillage from her bag enraged him, and he stalked along the hall.
The five-pound note and the coins he consigned to his pocket, where they had originated, after all. A card in an envelope and some bits of scrawled paper and a container of false medicine he threw into the carrier, and considered sending the Bible after them.
Despite its having been defaced, he couldn’t; God forgive him, it was the only Bible in the place. He tore up the loose pages on which she appeared to have drafted her fiction and stuffed them among the shards of plastic, and picked up the book. Its binding felt unpleasantly soft, and he bore the volume quickly into the main room and dropped it on the table to meet its dim blurred twin. Much of the table was occupied by her schoolwork, which could wait while he finished clearing the hall. There was still one item on the floor to be put with the rest of the rubbish, and he meant to throw it away unexamined, since he had no desire to see her eyes. When he crouched for the bus pass, however, he found her face turned up to him.
His breath trembled out of him like the beginning of a sigh, and then he took a long harsh gulp of air. He’d almost allowed himself to be swayed by memories of her, but he wasn’t to be tricked again. Try as she might, she couldn’t conceal how she already had been at the time of the photograph. Her hair wasn’t cropped, but now that made him wonder sickly whether it had been infested. Her eyes were doing their best to appear as innocent as her mother would have liked to see them, but the longer he peered at them the more false they became. All those months ago, just after he’d informed her that they had a place in Nazarill, her face had been invaded by metal emblems of wilfulness, their poison seeping into her blood. He felt as though her shrunken plastic gaze had trapped him in a crouch not far short of a genuflection, but he’d show her who held the power. He seized the slippery image of her and bent it until it snapped.
He flung the halves into the carrier as he took it to the kitchen, where he thrust it into the bin. The action drained enough of his anger to let him be calm as he restored Heather’s books to their place. ‘There,’ he told each of them, and smoothed any crumpled pages before he closed the book and caressed its binding. ‘Rest now. She can’t hurt you any more.’ By the time he’d positioned the last book on the shelf his words had acquired some of the qualities of a prayer. Now he could pray properly, he thought as he fetched the vacuum cleaner from his bedroom.
He found it difficult to think of words as he vacuumed the hall, but they came to him as he made himself advance the wide grim mouth of the cleaner to the crack beneath her door: ‘Please God let nothing be alive.’ He said more as he progressed slowly through all the open rooms, pressing the mouth against every accessible surface, but he kept returning to those words. Whenever he replaced the mouth with the pinched nozzle and thrust that into the secret places of the apartment, he felt he was crushing some unpleasantness which she had brought into the home. Each time he changed the attachments he switched off the cleaner and listened, but there was no sound from beyond the bolted door. ‘I know you’re there,’ he muttered as the tube in his hand sucked at a pair of swollen eyes. ‘Do your worst. God will give me the strength.’
23 - A different story
‘As Overseer, Mr Highstool, surely—’
‘Superior Overseer, madam, if you please.’
‘Forgive me for not using your full title, but as long as you’re that—’
‘My full title, madam’—here the grey-faced man inserted his thumbs behind the lapels of his frock-coat and rose up on his perch behind the desk that towered over her—‘my full title, I say, is Superior Overseer of Permissions for Cemetery Placements.’
The supplicant clasped together hands raw with so many years of work as washerwoman and mother, and lifted them to him. ‘I see that’s what you are, indeed I do. And as you are, you’ll permission me to have a little stone put up for my Amelia’s Christmas, won’t you?’
‘Have you not read’—the functionary pointed both his sharp pinched nose and a long grey fingernail at the front of his desk—‘have you not perused and digested the notice which I myself wrote in my finest copperplate?’
‘I see how fine it is, sir, indeed, but I can’t.’
‘Can’t read!’ announced Gustus Highstool to a drip-nosed clerk who that moment was scurrying past his cell. ‘True enough, there is no profit in teaching the poor their letters, but sans ability, what use may a stone be to you?’ This was addressed to the grey-haired widow stooped by her years and her grief, whose attention he now drew once more to the notice. ‘No permissions will be granted after three o’clock of any Friday,’ he read very slowly aloud.
‘I understand, sir, but if you’ll forgive me—’
‘Forgiveness is the business of a priest, not mine.’
‘I was going to say, sir, one thing I was taught to read was a clock.’ Here the woman ventured to indicate such a machine beneath the window thick with stalactites of ice. ‘And if you’d care to look, sir, you’ll see it’s not quite three.’
‘Not quite, you say? Not quite?’ The official adjusted his pen in its well before devoting himself to the chore of unbuttoning his coat. This accomplished, he painstakingly drew from the fob of his waistcoat a repeater, and was about the task of raising the lid of the watch when the clock began to utter its tinny chimes. ‘I believe you are mistaken,’ he said, and snapped the lid shut in his fist as he repeated in triumph, ‘No permissions will be granted after three o’clock of any Friday.’
How grey is life passed in a cell! Some seek the cells which are their lives, while others have such cells built about them. Some, of whom we have invented Highstool as our first representative, draw greyness about themselves like a cloak; while others, like the widow pleading at his desk, are greyed by the lives society requires of them. And what a factory of greyness is such a place as Nazarill! At the time of our initial visit it is sodden with a fog which creeps about the corridors, and resounding with sneezes and coughs; but even at the height of midsummer, sunlight never penetrates many of the cells where clerks sto
op over their work as a spider crouches to its prey.
What sunlight fails to dispel, might fire destroy? Perhaps some thought of the kind—some echo of the past—was awakened in the slow but honourable brain of the widow’s only son as, plodding without complaint over the cruel stones of the approach in his boots whose soles were worn thin as the last wail of a pauper’s child, he beheld his mother weeping on the steps of the grim offices. ‘Mother,’ he cried, ‘you maun’t take on so, straight you maun’t,’ and to comfort her brought forth from the least ragged of the pockets of his father’s jacket his dead little sister Amelia’s once-treasured…
Rob had had enough some pages back, but it was the dialect, even if it was remotely possible that someone somewhere had ever spoken like that, which proved too much for him. The item in the ragged pocket was a tinder-box her father would strike to amuse her, he saw in the instant of shutting the dull brown cover on the dull brown pages. They emitted a thud which succeeded in sounding muffled with dust, specks of which flew towards the chunky mantelpiece and its row of photographs. He gazed at the six ages and thicknesses of himself and wondered all over again why he’d bought the book.
After Amy had left him to be stared at by the clientele of Tea For You, several of whom had begun viciously stirring their tea as if brewing up a spell to drive him out, he’d lingered to prove their opinion couldn’t touch him, until the manageress had asked him to leave. By then Pickles was nowhere to be seen, otherwise Rob would certainly have turned his rage on him. He’d been making for the way home, glowering at anyone who glanced at him, when the bookseller had waved him over to the van he was loading. ‘Tried to catch your girl’s eye before. I found her book in a library sale.’
Rob’s instinct had been to retort that she wasn’t his girl, but he hadn’t wanted to discuss it. He’d said only ‘How much?’
‘It’s not worth marking up this late in the day. It’s yours for what it cost me. Twenty pee.’
Though there had been some satisfaction in exchanging the weight of all the coppers in his pocket for the musty book, Rob had hardly left the marketplace before he wanted to take Nazarill back. Why hadn’t he left it for Amy to buy? He’d spent half the weekend convincing himself that the only way she would find out he had it was to ring him. Last night he’d given in and called her, and had learned she’d been sent away to recuperate.
This felt as if she had been wrenched out of his life and replaced with memories whose underlying nature it dismayed him to contemplate. How much was he responsible for her condition? Ought he to have demonstrated scepticism earlier, or not at all? At first he was tempted to take the novel as a promise of her returning unchanged—tempted to feel that because he was keeping it for her, she would have to come back as eager to read it as ever—and then he saw it might make her worse than however she was or, if her retreat cured her, might cause her to relapse. Home from school this Monday evening, he’d attempted to read it so as to judge how it could be expected to affect her, but became distracted by the antics of the prose. He was beginning to think of taking it to the recycling bin in the market car park when he heard a key in the front door, and then his mother’s voice in the hall. ‘Who’s in?’
‘Just me.’
‘You’ll do to be going on with.’ As soon as she’d divested herself of the padded jacket she always wore in the car during winter she tramped into the living-room, raising one shoulder and then the other as if they could be rendered straighter and shoving her square jaw forward, and Rob had the impression that she was making an entrance to perform a speech she’d rehearsed. ‘Sometimes I think we must be crazy,’ she declared, ‘the people we let loose on the road.’
‘Anyone special?’
‘Not special enough. Too many of them. I’ve lost count of the folk I’ve met driving who seem to have forgotten everything I taught them except how the car works. Last week I had one come at me out of a fog with no lights on and flash them to say I should have had mine off.’
‘That was last week, though.’
‘That’s right, last week.’ She seemed, not by any means unusually, less than certain whether he was making fun of her, and responded with her usual comical frown. ‘Today I had someone your father sold a car to coming at my learner round a bus at fifty, that’s twice his age. I smiled sweetly at him and pointed at our name on the roof, but he was too busy getting where he couldn’t wait to be to notice. I suppose you’re thinking I’m a bit crazy myself.’
‘I wouldn’t say that to anyone.’
He felt unfair for having made that sound like a rebuke, and was thinking how to make amends when she glanced away from him. ‘School?’ she said.
‘Like usual.’
Ordinarily she would have changed the subject once she had provoked this retort, but now she said ‘The book, I was meaning.’
‘No.’
‘That isn’t like you, reading an old book for fun.’
‘Didn’t say it was,’ Rob said, and found he wanted to continue—might even do so with a little more encouragement, although discussing his feelings with either of his parents was a habit easier to break than to regain. Brooding in his room to music seemed unlikely to do him much good, any more than smoking a whole joint by himself yesterday on a lonely stretch of moor had—doing so had made the wind on his face feel like the opposite of Amy’s breath. He dragged his gaze away from the book to find his mother’s attention waiting for him, but both of them were hoping the other would speak when a rattle of keys narrowed itself down to the insertion of one in the front door. ‘Now there’s your father,’ she said with some impatience, and stumped out of the room.
In the shortest possible time his father’s rotund pink face, bristling red on top and not much less along the upper lip, presented itself around the door. ‘Dinner as soon as I’m down,’ he announced on his wife’s behalf, and was heard to jog upstairs with a muffled ‘bugger’ at missing a tread, and soon after to roar an assortment of sentences to the tune of the first line of ‘La donna e mobile’ through the rumble of the shower, ‘Best prices at Hayward’s Cars’ proving as always to be his favourite. He reappeared wearing his bathrobe, the same shade as his face now that was towelled pinker, and urged his son to the kitchen, tilting his head to glance at the title of the book Rob had dropped on the chair. ‘Who’d have thought it?’ he murmured, and seemed to forget about it. Having set the table, he stowed his lanky legs beneath it and shared descriptions of the day’s customers as enthusiastically as he attacked his meal. ‘She wouldn’t try out the Mini till I managed to fit all of me into the front,’ he eventually said, then squinted at Rob over the last slice of steak and kidney pie. ‘You and the chef share that. So what’s the significance of the tome?’
‘Positive, I’d say,’ said Rob’s mother.
‘Where do you get that?’ his father said, laying his utensils to rest.
‘Reading some old classic when he doesn’t have to.’
‘It’s not quite one of those, is it, old chap?’
‘Oh, I see, I think,’ his mother said, and hid a knowing smile behind her hand. ‘Our baby’s growing up. What is it, Fanny Hill or Lady C?’
‘You’re fiddling with the wrong switch, Marge. It’s—’
‘It’s a story about Nazarill,’ Rob said.
‘Oh.’
The syllable might have expressed sympathy or disappointment, neither of which Rob welcomed. ‘I don’t think I’ll be seeing her any more.’
‘Oh dear,’ his mother said with, he was pretty sure, some relief. She led a few seconds’ silence for the death of the relationship and broke it with ‘Don’t tell us about it unless you want to.’
‘Now, Marge, he doesn’t need our permission for that, and he knows it, am I right, old chap?’
Perhaps his father was genuinely unaware of doubling the pressure on him, but Rob saw he couldn’t get away with just a nod of agreement. ‘We had a row,’ he said. ‘Maybe you heard.’
‘How could we?’ his mothe
r said as though she would have been entitled to sound a good deal more accusing. ‘You’d walked out with her when I was trying not to cross her father.’
‘Heard about it.’
‘I didn’t, Tom, did you?’ She barely waited for that answer before demanding of Rob ‘Why, whatever were you up to?’
‘Shouting at each other where they drink nothing but tea.’
‘Not that embalmed bunch. Of all the folk to choose, the maiden aunts of Partington and women that manage to be grandmothers without having any children. If anybody needed shaking up…’ She hid another grin until she’d tempered it with some reproof. ‘What was said?’
‘They didn’t have to say anything, they only had to look.’
‘I can see how they would,’ she said, and mimed their characteristic expression accurately enough to suggest she didn’t think it entirely inappropriate. ‘But I meant what was the argument over?’
‘Something I didn’t believe.’
‘Tell me to shut them with a clothes-peg if you like, but I can’t say I’m surprised.’ When he only shrugged she said ‘Was it about that old place up there?’
The House On Nazareth Hill Page 36