by Glen Duncan
There was no kiss. Throughout dinner my mum and dad exchanged looks. I’d seen enough welcomes to register the qualification in this one. Dinah, who had a moist, pretty, antelopish face (and I’d noticed bruises on her shins like fingerprints), ate very little. Scarlet consumed only half a frankfurter and three or four chips. When she ate she curled her lips away from her tiny teeth and bit, nicely. ‘Aren’t you pretty,’ Melissa had said to her. Scarlet had lifted her chin and looked sidelong.
‘They came with me, you know,’ Dinah said. I’d been lost in Scarlet’s big-eyed face and emerged not quite at the utterance but at the lump of silence it deposited like a stone in the middle of the table. My mum and dad glanced at each other then both opened their mouths to say something before anyone could ask but they weren’t quick enough and Maude said, ‘Who came with you, Aunty?’
‘Who do you think as if you don’t know. They don’t realize I can see them, plain as day. But I can.’
‘You know Dalma’s getting married?’ my dad said.
Another silence. Then my mum said (Maude trying to work out whether she’d misheard): ‘Yes, to a doctor. She went into hospital for her tonsils and this young chap fell for her.’
Dinah laughed, not in response to this news but as if someone else had just whispered something to her while it was being delivered.
‘’Course, Sellie thinks she’s the cat’s whiskers now,’ my dad said. ‘Daughter marrying a doctor and all.’
Maude was looking around the table for confirmation she wasn’t suffering some sort of delusion.
‘Maude, can you help me clear, please?’
Dinah said: ‘You think I don’t know y’all are all in on it anyway, waiting so you can phone them.’
‘Maude,’ my mum said, ‘take Aunty’s plate. Come on.’
I saw all this, didn’t understand, observed looks passing between my sisters and brother and mum and dad, Dinah’s attention apparently engaged by something on the carpet. Scarlet tugged Dinah’s sleeve, repeatedly, until, as if after hauling her mind against the elsewhere gravity, Dinah turned and looked at her, and Scarlet cupped her hand and whispered something behind it, which turned out to be that she wanted the toilet, and wouldn’t be shown where it was by anyone but her mother.
‘She’s bad again,’ my dad said.
‘I thought she was all right?’ my mum said.
‘What the bleddy hell to do now?’
‘What’s wrong with her?’ Maude said.
‘She’s not well, Baby. You were too young to remember last time.’
‘I remember,’ Melissa said. ‘She told me there were people after her.’
The toilet flushed. ‘Owen, not a word, okay? You don’t repeat–got it?’
It had happened too fast for me to be able to repeat, but I nodded.
After dinner Melissa went out with her long-haired boyfriend, Mick–English (or at any rate white), bony of face, thin-legged, leather-jacketed, a wearer of psychedelic shirts and an earring. ‘That bleddy gandu bugger’ was how my dad referred to him, though for me the house’s ether quivered whenever he came in. Melissa was going on twenty-one, glitterily green-eyed, full-lipped, supple. (I see photos of her from then and think, Christ what a package; those guys, did they realize? Did they have a clue?) Maude, fourteen, who despite having the look and pent sex of a moody young squaw was as yet steering clear of boys, long-sufferingly sat down to her homework at the dining table. Carl–the Quiet One–went up to his room to read. The year before I’d given him the mumps and he’d missed his A level exams. He’d never been wild about me; now, after a year of part-time jobs he hadn’t planned on, dialogue between us was non-existent. I was commanded to play with Scarlet, so tipped my tub of Lego out on to the rug; the familiar abrupt plastic avalanche, the sound of limitless constructive possibility. Scarlet, kneeling with straight back and hands on her thighs, watched. Outside the colours of dusk softly endorsed my creeping excitement. Above the back wall a streetlamp was visible in its first blood-orange phase. Brewer Street had such a wealth of greys that these first moments of the streetlamps were tropically glamorous, as if giant fireflies had arrived.
‘My mummy’s boyfriend wore a wig,’ Scarlet said. Our hands among the red, white and blue Lego bricks had revealed that we were exactly the same colour. ‘I saw it on a plastic head when I went into their room.’
A conceptual traffic jam. A mummy with a boyfriend. A boyfriend with a wig. Mummy, boyfriend and wig all sharing a room. ‘When we left she called him a fucking bastard.’ I looked up to check we weren’t being overheard. I’d never heard someone who wasn’t white say ‘fucking’. Maude had sneaked the telly’s volume up a couple of degrees at David Cassidy’s appearance on screen. (David Cassidy had the American inhuman sparkliness you couldn’t see and not crave. A threadbare family joke was that when my Uncle Ronnie asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up I said American. Maude was in love. There was a Jackie in her room–which was also my room and Melissa’s room–permanently open at a page that said: ‘ONE HUNDRED REASONS WHY DAVID LOVES YOU!’) Neither she nor the adults had heard us.
‘But they shot those children,’ Dinah was saying. ‘And they weren’t part of the demonstration even.’
‘Oh, the Americans won’t stand any bleddy nonsense,’ my dad said, with a sort of relish. ‘It’s a mess. Now they’ve started with Cambodia, too.’
‘But those children weren’t even demonstrating. That’s what it’s like. They don’t need a reason. They’re everywhere.’
Shot. Demonstrating. I didn’t know what demonstrating was but I remembered a television image: A student (I couldn’t tell whether a boy or a girl) lay face down as if deliciously asleep on an asphalt road next to a lawn of scraggy trees. Even this minimal topography established it as America, something about the pale curb, sandy grass, chain link fence, even a passing dog was unmistakably American. Also the grain or snowy sparkle of the footage. Next to the body a girl was down on one knee with arms out (like Al Jolson, I’d thought), screaming. Other students with long hair and torn jeans, one in a suede jacket with tasselled sleeves like Buffalo Bill, stood around, some looking at the corpse, others looking elsewhere, still others looking as if they weren’t aware that anything unusual had happened. Then a young bearded and bushy-haired man being interviewed, looking like he was trying to be angrier than he was. There was something artificial when he swore and it was bleeped out: ‘This is the National f***in’ Guard and they f***in’ murder four innocent people, man.’ His worked-up face and slightly bouncing bush of hair had been followed by images of American soldiers walking across a long-grassed plain with a bank of smoking jungle behind them. All of them had their trousers tucked into their boots and the chin straps of their helmets dangling. The uniforms had lots of pockets and the soldiers walked with confident exhaustion, carrying their guns casually. One of them stopped to light a blinding white cigarette. Another grinned at the camera and said, ‘That’s all, folks,’ which was what came up at the end of Bugs Bunny cartoons. They were like strange angels to me.
‘How can your mummy have a boyfriend?’
‘Because she can.’
‘What about your daddy?’
‘My daddy’s gone away.’
‘Where’s he gone?’
‘Just away. Before I remember.’
Without any good reason I imagined he’d gone to America. There were bone-white car-chase roads that crossed prairies and deserts. Also the jazzy neon-lit spaces between dark skyscrapers. There was always a scene in films when a detective went into a bar with a photo of a missing girl and the bar had a stripper with tasselled nipples or spangled knickers toplessly wiggling and showing her bum while moustached men in sunglasses or fat men with cigars smoked and stared and often didn’t even seem to be sitting with their faces to the stage. It always disturbed me that some of them didn’t bother to look. That was something about adults, how they were. It was as if the telly knew something dead or bleak and it was slyly showing y
ou, enjoying making you feel uncomfortable. Scarlet’s dad knew now, too.
The guests were offered beds (Carl’s or Maude’s or Melissa’s or mine) but insisted the couch was good enough. I, thrilled by the house’s disturbed routine, demanded in on the adventure and was allowed to sleep with them in the front room downstairs.
‘He called her a nigger bitch,’ Scarlet said, returning to the subject of the wigged boyfriend. She and I lay side by side with the covers half off, shoulders touching, her foot occasionally kicking mine. Dinah was asleep. There was a streetlamp outside the bay window. The curtains filtered just enough of its light to orange the darkness, show Scarlet’s teeth, fingernails, the liquid black of her eyes. At some point it had been agreed by our bodies that we could fidgetingly hold hands or drape our arms over each other. My hand found the rubbery whorl of her navel where the T-shirt had ridden up. This was meant to happen. In fact, surely it had happened before? Somehow in the interim we’d forgotten each other, but now here we were, remembering.
‘A nigger’s a Jamaican,’ I said. Taxonomy courtesy of Brewer Street. Niggers, nig-nogs, darkies, coons, blackies and chocolate drops were one thing, Pakis and wogs were another. Muhammad Ali, for example, was a coon, whereas Mrs Gandhi was a Paki. I put my leg over hers. She pulled it out from under and put it on mine. We giggled. Did it again.
‘Shshsh,’ I said. ‘That’s my sister. And Mick.’
Footsteps outside the bay window. Two lumps of darkness in the minimal light.
‘Let’s see,’ Scarlet said.
It was a job to get to the curtains without a sound. A further ordeal to lift the hem without Melissa and Mick noticing.
‘They’re kissing,’ Scarlet said.
Yes, they were, aggressively, the way lion cubs bashed their muzzles together. Their heads kept changing angles, as if they couldn’t find the right one. It was awful the way they kept their eyes open and the way the dark windows and doors opposite dumbly watched, as if they couldn’t believe what the world had come to.
‘Look at his hand,’ Scarlet said.
Melissa had her patchwork suede (fake suede, she’s told me since) jacket on, with underneath a ribbed short-sleeved crimp-lene top. Mick had pushed this up and with his left hand was gently squeezing her lacily bra’d breast. His thumb did some jiggery-pokery and there suddenly with a turgid pop was Melissa’s nipple. To my utter astonishment, he bent his head and kissed it, put it in his mouth, appeared to suck. Melissa drew a sharp breath in as if she’d touched something icy, turned her head away with her chin lifted, closed her eyes, swallowed, visibly. It was a terrible pain to me to see her do this.
‘They’re doing the things,’ Scarlet said.
‘What things?’
‘Like in the pictures.’
Like the strippers in the American bars the detectives went in, I assumed she meant. I bet they don’t go anywhere near the pictures, my dad had said. What are you seeing? my mum had asked. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. I’d thought Butch Cassidy must be the brother of David.
Mick’s hand abandoned Melissa’s breast and with the tautly splayed fingers of a male go-go dancer travelled down her ribs and the dip of her waist, waistband, skirt. At the hem it paused, then snuck under. While he kissed her neck Melissa’s head tipped back and her eyes seemed to be trying to think of an elusive specific thing. There was something mechanical about the movement of Mick’s hand under her skirt, like a wind-up toy that must sooner or later run down. Melissa let it go on for a minute, then grabbed his wrist and forced his hand away. Then the kissing again, such violent snout-clashes I feared for my sister’s teeth, and gradually the hand under the skirt, mechanical movement, allowed for a bit, forced away. Repeated countless times.
Eventually, after several false endings, Melissa disentangled herself, prised Mick away (he made a little boyish performance of clinging and pouting which I could tell from her face Melissa was embarrassed by) and came with stealthy turn of key and latch-held close of front door inside. Mick walked back to his Vauxhall Viva, got in, started up with a blast of the Who going ‘Why don’tcha all f-f-f-fade away’, then drove off. The front room door was ajar. Melissa put her back-combed head round it. Saw what we wanted her to see: Dinah genuinely asleep on the couch, Scarlet and me with flung limbs ostensibly asleep on the floor. We lay still with our eyes closed until Melissa had crept upstairs and the house resettled.
‘They were doing the things,’ Scarlet whispered.
I didn’t know what to say. Scarlet’s head seemed a small, hard, big-eyed thing with all her soft dark hair spread out on the pillow. Her mouth was a blob of blackness.
‘Let’s play doing them.’
Another hard-boiled egg lodged in my gullet. One of Dinah’s long bare arms was just visible outside the sleeping bag. At dinner her big-knuckled fingers had been greasy from the parathas. When Melissa and Mick adjusted their face angles you saw their glistening tongues. The gullet egg went down in an ecstatic swallow, was within moments identically replaced; there was another one somewhere else, I wasn’t sure where, in my belly or up my bum. Scarlet rolled over on to her back and took hold of my hand.
‘Okay,’ I hissed.
There was a lot of lying on top of each other with mouths pressed together, mutually exchanging hot nostril breath. I liked the weight of her on me, the hard of her ribs and soft of her belly. There were repeated stabs (cranium, shoulder blades) of God watching, Jesus, too, who from the landing’s Sacred Heart swivelled his blue eyes down and left, seeing–through staircase, wall, ceiling–us, doing the things in the pictures. Dinah in her sleep rolled over on to her side facing away from us, gave us another layer of privacy. We touched tongues, poked them between each other’s lips, held them there. Every move had its intuited duration, as if we were working through a specified performance. It was difficult to keep hold of the feeling, which was a good feeling, because it was so good you kept slipping to one side of it to see how good it was. Once or twice God threatened through Dinah’s tossing and turning–I’m warning you–but we stopped, the threat subsided, we started again. Hard to say how long it went on. Eventually, we fell asleep.
The following morning, Dinah was gone.
It couldn’t, as I believe I’m old enough now to say, happen today. Dinah would be sectioned, Social Services would step in, Scarlet would go into care. The creaking penniless unthanked system would do what it does and love wouldn’t have a chance. But thirty-two years ago administration meant people writing things down on pieces of paper and sending them to other people in an envelope. Crazies were evaluated with beard-stroking puzzlement. And how does that feel? Like my head’s full of wet sand. I see. It might be time to give these a try. Dinah went in and out of Bolton Royal’s psychiatric unit, lived sometimes with us, sometimes with mysterious ‘friends’, sometimes disappeared altogether. There were dodgy men, always. When she reappeared there were long talks with my parents, eavesdropped on by Scarlet and me, hiding behind the living-room door.
‘You’ve got to think of your daughter,’ my dad said.
‘I know.’
‘There’s only so much chopping and changing a child can take.’
‘I know.’
‘Then?’
Silence but for the gas fire’s exhalation, the particular absence of speech that meant Dinah sitting with head bowed and knees together, hair hanging forward, tears pit-pitting on to her skirt. Sometimes Scarlet would leave me, run in, climb into her mother’s lap, cling. Other times she’d turn and creep away to bed and lie with her eyes open staring at the ceiling. Most of the time (increasingly, the longer Dinah kept up the now-you-see-me-now-you-don’t routine) she stayed sitting by my side, listening, saying nothing.
She came with me to school. The expectation no doubt is that we were horribly racially abused. (That was another of Nick Gough’s options: playground fable. All his options, now that I think of it, are a long way from what I’ve got, from the bloody Cheechee Papers.) At St Thomas’s we were
either too visible (pahkie, pahkie, pahkie…) or, when it came to being picked for a team or included in a game, not visible enough. There must have been a handful of non-white Roman Catholics in Bolton, but none of them was at my primary school. We were abused, of course, but there were two of us and that made all the difference. Certainly I got beaten up, but usually because I’d hit out at someone who’d insulted me or Scarlet. I was very good at losing my temper, not very good at fighting. (Where are your father’s genes when you need them? I could have inherited boxing skills. What did I get? Sticking-out ears, or as Pasha would say, yurs.)
‘Speak Paki language,’ I was commanded one sleety morning, having been cornered by a group of boys led by Ant Hargreaves. ‘Go on, say sommat in Paki.’ I could count up to ten in Hindi (Melissa had taught me) but I wasn’t going to. Aap kya khana mangtha? I might have said: What’s for dinner? Pasha liked to ask it in musical Hindi, a joke that the days of having servants were so long over and my mother–Kate Monroe!–was in the kitchen. ‘Get fucked,’ I told Ant and his fellows, and kicked out at the nearest one. They sat me down in a puddle then spread the story that I’d wet my pants.
Teachers, too, had the choice between bringing us into the existential limelight–‘And what do you have for Sunday lunch at home, Owen and Scarlet?’ (simian hysteria when I answered, ‘Chicken curry and rice, miss’)–or reminding us that we weren’t really there. ‘If you’ve brought back a letter signed by your mummy or daddy about a musical instrument, please leave it on my desk before you go out,’ Miss Livsey said. Scarlet and I looked at each other. What letter? There was for both of us a constant nervousness about having missed something, some way things worked. And there on Miss Livsey’s desk at the end of the lesson were a dozen or more letters. What should we do? I asked Scarlet. Should we say anything? No, Scarlet said, we shouldn’t. We might get into trouble. Over the next few weeks some kids started bringing to school as well as their gym bags or satchels cases carrying musical instruments. They, by occult English metamorphosis, had become the Orchestra People. I was King Herod in the nativity play. Scarlet was the lousy innkeeper’s wife. It ought to have all felt desolate and terrible, but there were, I repeat, two of us. At a parents’ evening my mum and dad were told Scarlet and I had trouble mixing. ‘They’ll mix when there’s someone worth mixing with,’ my mum said, and that was that.