With Your Crooked Heart

by Helen Dunmore

  But before that, at the time I’m talking about, it was just him and me and the little grey street outside, where the day-time world was waiting. This was years before Anna wasn’t born. Nothing had happened. Johnnie was still a boy. I’d stand inside the door. I wouldn’t have had my bath yet and I could smell myself, and Paul on me from the night before. He’d fold himself round me as if it didn’t matter about anything, not the dark suit nor anything. Then he’d pull the weight of my hair up in his hands then let it fall. And I’d feel the cool of it flickering down over my skin like feathers.

  He went out into the day-time world, and I stayed. That was how it was, though I did work from home, typing stuff for him, and taking messages. We always wanted children, but it went on so long that we forgot ‘having a baby’ meant more than reaching a goal we’d set ourself. Paul wanted me to be pregnant but it didn’t happen. I was small then, not thin, but small. He used to put his hands round my waist, or even my neck. It’s a very strange feeling when a man puts his hands around your neck, and Paul is the only one I’ve ever allowed. I never flinched from him, or from the mirror. I knew there was no fault to find.

  People say that drinking stops you knowing what drink does to you, like an anaesthetic stops you feeling the cut. If they see a woman in the doorway with her bags and her ankle socks on bare legs stuck straight out in front of her, and a trickle of dark liquid between her open thighs, they think, She’s out of it. She doesn’t know. They notice that her flesh is grey, mottled with purple and brick-red, but it’s the way they would notice the colouring of a safari animal, not a human being.

  You can feel pity. You can feel contempt if you want, and she can’t stop you. I don’t feel pity, because I know her.

  And when she looks up and meets my eye I know she knows me. We’re two of a kind, but you won’t find me on any street. I’ve got a lovely house, and in the mornings the sun pours through the sticky windows on to the sticky glasses, and I think, ‘I’ll tidy up a bit later because Anna’s coming,’ but time doesn’t work like that. I sit down. I’ve got my dressing-gown on and I pull it up to let the sun get to my legs. I lean back. I’ve always got a beautiful tan, I’ve got that kind of skin. I don’t care what Paul thinks, I like my own legs. I stretch them out in front of me and let the sun soak in. Time slops round in my head, the minutes pulling away from the hours. I think of Paul and me, and Anna, and Johnnie.

  Paul told me a story about Johnnie, the second time we went out together. I didn’t understand that it was a story about Johnnie at the time; I thought it was about Paul. Johnnie is Paul’s brother, but there are twelve years between them.

  This was the story. Paul was living with his mother and Johnnie in a flat in Barking. Johnnie was a baby, about six months. Where their father was I don’t know. He came and went a lot after Johnnie was born. He came back in the end, of course, after he got ill, for Maureen to nurse him. I found out about all that later from Maureen, Paul’s mum, when we got to know each other.

  It was night-time, and they were all asleep. Paul woke up first. He saw a line of light under the door. As I understand it, there was a kitchen with a bath in it, properly plumbed in but with a lid which came down over it except when you needed it. Then there was a sitting-room where Paul slept on a sofa-bed, and the bedroom where his parents slept, with the cot in it as well. The line of light was coming from the hall. His mother never left the hall light on. Then he heard a drawer open, and a clinking sound.

  Maureen had silver-plated cutlery for a wedding-present, and she kept it in that drawer. Paul used to polish it for her.

  ‘You’ve no idea how little we had then,’ Maureen would say. ‘It was just after the war when we got married, and nobody had anything.’

  More clinking. Paul was still half-asleep, and he thought to himself, ‘What’s Mum doing, getting the knives and forks out in the middle of the night?’ Just then, he heard a man cough. Paul was out of bed, through the hall and into the bedroom in a second, and shaking his mother.

  ‘Mum! Mum! There’s a burglar in the kitchen!’

  She was deep asleep, with the baby tucked in beside her. He shook her shoulder and she started to wake up, but just then Paul heard the door open from the kitchen on to the hall. He knew his mum kept a wooden door-stopper by her bedroom door in case of burglars, so he got hold of it by one end and pulled open the bedroom door. It was a big heavy mahogany thing, and you could beat someone’s brains out with it. There was the man, just coming out of the kitchen. He had his back to Paul and he didn’t see him for a minute, which was long enough for Paul to swing up the door-stopper and hit him with it on the back of the head.

  It wasn’t enough to knock him out, but the man went down on his knees and the silver spilt out all over the hall lino. Paul had the door-stopper up again, ready to smash him if he tried to rise. He was a big man. Maureen was out of bed snatching her dressing-gown round her, and the baby was screaming. Paul didn’t dare move in case the man made a spring. He kept the door-stopper up. ‘Get the police, Mum,’ he said. Of course they didn’t have a phone.

  ‘I’m not leaving you here with him,’ said Maureen. The man was big, and he was nasty-looking too. It turned out later that he’d done dozens of flats all round Barking, getting a ten-bob note here and a pack of cigarettes there. People didn’t have all the TVs and videos they have now. So Maureen started yelling out to get the neighbours to wake up. She tried shouting ‘Police!’ but after she’d been screeching that out for a while she realized it wasn’t going to work, so she changed to ‘Fire!’ After a long time there was a mousy little tap at the front door of the flat. It was Mr Berridge from downstairs.

  ‘Is there anything wrong, Mrs O’Driscoll?’

  ‘Yes, there bloody well is! Didn’t you hear me? We’ve got a burglar in here.’

  ‘Well, we heard some sort of a row, so we’ve been down in the cellar.’

  There was a lot Maureen felt like saying, but she just told them to get the police. There was Paul, still holding the door-stopper while Johnnie screamed and screamed. Then some other people from the flats upstairs came down, and that was that. The man was sent to prison, I believe.

  The first thing Paul did when the police came was to go into the bedroom and pick Johnnie up from the bed. He was so worked up he was shaking. Paul got him calmed down while Maureen talked to the police and went through her drawers to see if anything else was missing. And the thing was, they found he’d taken twenty Players from her bedside table, as well as a silver crucifix from her dressing-table drawer. So he’d been in there while she was fast asleep, with the baby tucked in beside her. It made Maureen shiver.

  Paul held Johnnie, stroking his head. Johnnie was still hiccupping out those big, reproachful sobs, there was sweat all over his head and his hand was clutching the sleeve of Paul’s pyjamas. His knuckles were white. And Paul thought, ‘I’ll look after you, even if no one else will.’ He remembers quite clearly thinking that. It was like a promise to the baby. His father wasn’t there, you see, and his mother was fast asleep while the burglar walked around their bed, taking what he wanted.

  Maureen hadn’t got all that much sense, even when she was awake. She tended to panic. Paul often came back to that night: the big man rummaging through everything they’d got, as if he had the right, and his mother asleep, and then Johnnie screaming and screaming.

  When people tell you stories like that about their lives, when you first know them, you don’t understand what it means. I thought the point of it was Paul telling me about the way he’d kept a grown man pinned to the ground, when he was only a boy of twelve. But, as I’ve said, the story was really about Johnnie, and about how Paul could never leave him, or give up on him. So in its way it was a kind of warning, though again, it took me a long time to see that. Perhaps that’s why Johnnie could sit on the edge of my bath and we’d touch and float, but never fuck. Only the one time, and that was enough. Paul stood in for Johnnie in all sorts of ways, and Johnnie stood in for Paul. />
  I don’t want to smell of drink when Anna comes. I’m still in the sun, though it’s moved around a bit. I look at all the flesh of my legs. When you make bread you have to leave it to rise, in a quiet place, covered up. It stretches to the top of the bowl and knocks against the cloth. Dough. Then you knock it back and knead it some more and in the end you get bread. It’s a long time since I’ve tried. I’m the dough bulging up against the cloth. I don’t mind the fatness of women who are meant to be fat, with their tiny hands and their dimply wrists with threads in them, like baby wrists. There’s a tightness in their fat, as if it’s bursting with juice. It looks right. But what’s happened to my body doesn’t look right.

  Paul pays the Council Tax and the upkeep. All my bills are paid. I don’t bother with my cheque-book any more. I have the money Paul gives me, new notes in new envelopes. But then he’s always preferred to give money in cash.

  ‘That’s what you do for your mistress,’ I said to him, ‘not for your wife.’

  He was in my bed when I said this. It was the way his eyes went blank when I said ‘mistress’. And that look of his travelled over me, up and down, and I knew the dressing-gown was gaping wide again.

  I’m his wife. He may think what he likes, but he can’t change that. He keeps coming back here. I’m his wife until we both the, and when we’re dead I’ll still be his wife, one flesh.

  Seven

  The room is hot and high. The radiator hisses, but otherwise it’s quiet, even though there’s a child in the room. She sits at a table, drawing. There are crayons and felt-tips scattered over the table-top, and discarded sheets of paper crushed into balls. The child bends down over her drawing, her mouth slightly open and her tongue poking out between her teeth. She is drawing with long vigorous sweeps of a black Conté crayon. She draws a hutch against a wall, a wired run, and a rabbit inside with its body flattened against the grass. She keeps getting it wrong. She keeps laying its head back like a hare’s, and putting big startled bubbles of eyes on top of its head.

  On top of the hutch there is a cat. It is striped like a tiger, too much striped, Anna sees now, but she likes the slash of black and white. The cat skulks forward and its whiskers lie back against its muzzle as it watches the rabbit in the run. Anna knows cats. She has sat in her mother’s garden, her legs tucked up, her arms hugging her knees, watching the wild cats her mother says she mustn’t touch. The drawing goes wrong again. Anna crumples it, and sweeps together the heap of discarded drawings, and stands up. But although she keeps crumpling up her drawings, she doesn’t seem frustrated.

  She goes to a chair, and picks up the Little Bear pyjama case which lies there. She holds it tight, rubbing its floppy body against her cheek, then puts it down again and sits on the carpet. Dark, ornate, highly polished slabs of furniture lean over her, like cliffs she cannot climb. The carpet is a thick-piled, dense maroon. Money’s been spent here.

  The walls are painted plain cream, and have the sheen of hospital walls. Everything bounces off them: light, sweat, marks of hands that have splayed against them, trying to get out. They wipe clean every time. Anna thinks about the people who were here before them, and wonders if they had any children. They furnished this room to last. It flaunts itself: I may be ugly, but look how expensive I am. Paul has rented the house, while he makes up his mind what to do. It gets him down.

  Anna stands up. She picks up the pyjama case again, and holds it like a stage prop as she walks noiselessly to the window. She’s practised walking like this. The sill is too high for her to look out, or down, but she can look up. There are black branches, criss-crossing, and the corner of the fire-escape. There’s the grey graininess of a London sky in midwinter. A ginger-and-white pigeon on the ledge looks back at Anna. She knows it well. It has a withered claw, and it stays up here, out of trouble, waiting to plunge down to the basement for scraps. No animals are allowed in the house: it’s a condition of the lease.

  Anna looks up at the sky for a long time. Its chill reaches for her through the glass, and she’d like to lean her cheek against it, but the sill is too high. She makes a circle of her forefinger and thumb, and looks through it. There is the sky, looking quite different now, framed, mysterious, with the black fingers of the branches walking across it like writing which Anna can’t read. A message. Something is about to happen. Anna takes hold of the window-sill with both hands, tips her head back, and waits.

  It comes. The sound she’s been waiting for. Deep in the belly of the house a door opens, then closes. She knows exactly where he is. He’s inside the front door, opening the inner door, closing it again. Taking off his coat, hanging it up. Frowning at himself in the big mirror, meeting his own eyes without needing to smile. The big mirror like a dark cup where you float to the top, surprising even yourself. He leans close to his mirrored face and adjusts his tie. He looks up the stairwell to the landing. He walks briskly across the silent, spongy carpet, to the foot of the stairs.

  Anna hears another sound. Voices. Two voices, twining together. She stands quite still, the little Bear pyjama case in her hand limp and grinning. Anna’s face remains mute, like the face of her father looking into the mirror. She goes to the cupboard and gets out a doll, and a small steel comb which her mother used whenever Anna came back from school with headlice. Anna hasn’t played with dolls for a year, but she sits down again with her back to the door, and untles the pale blue ribbons from the doll’s plaits. The doll’s hair springs out, a stiff, glistening bush of yellow. The metal comb goes through it, dragging the hair away from the bald patches on the doll’s scalp.

  ‘I know it hurts,’ says Anna, ‘but it’s the only way I can get rid of them. Those chemicals give you cancer. Be a big girl.’

  They’re outside the door now. Her father’s hand is coming up to grasp the doorknob. She waits for the sound of the knob turning in its socket, but it doesn’t come. All she can hear is her own heart beating thickly in her chest. His hand will be on the cold brass. Then she hears the two voices again, mixed together like hot and cold water from a tap.

  The door opens. It’s cold, that’s why the incoming draught makes her back arch. She lays her doll carefully on the carpet and turns.

  ‘Anna,’ he says. His eyes examine her. Beside him there is a woman in a slender, ice-blue suit. Anna’s met her before, and knows her name. She is called Sonia, and one of her hands rests lightly on Anna’s father’s arm. She has long, white fingers, and on one of the fingers is an emerald surrounded by diamonds. It stabs out light as Sonia glances down at the doll’s spilled yellow hair. Her slim, busy lips are still, and she makes no attempt to move towards Anna. Already her perfume has crept like smoke into Anna’s mouth and nose.

  Anna clings to the smell of her mother, not as she is now, but as she was. Her mother picks up baby Anna on a wet spring morning in the square and makes her dive down to smell the white bunched heads of narcissi. They smell of sherbet, fine and sharp. Anna’s mother says, ‘They’re called Pheasant’s Eye, fancy that.’ Her lips are full and pale and they come close, then brush aside to touch Anna’s cheek. Anna slips her hand inside her mother’s white shirt, and nesties it into the warm crack between her breasts. Anna’s mother laughs and says she’s trouble.

  That was a long time ago. Now Anna’s mother leaks the smell of old alcohol. It’s like nail-polish remover. It’s on her skin and in the folds of her flesh as she presses Anna close. The smell of alcohol squirms and burrows into Anna. The funny smell is stronger than perfume, much stronger than spring mornings. Anna’s mother has alcohol in her eyes too. Her morning face is dull and shallow as a puddle. She kisses Anna, digging at Anna’s back as she squeezes her close, into the smell. Then, if someone else is there, they say, ‘Give her a break, Louise.’

  Sometimes her mother is Louise, but she can be Lou, Louie, even Lulu. She has no name that stays the same. In her mouth Anna is as big as a world you’d like to eat, but never can.

  Anna’s father is smiling, with Sonia’s hand on his arm.
‘You know Sonia,’ he says. ‘Listen, Anna. Sonia’s going to marry me.’

  The radiator hisses louder than ever. Anna folds her hands in her lap and looks up at her father.

  ‘What do you say?’ asks her father.

  Anna moistens her lips and blinks. The ice-blue column of Sonia glitters at her father’s side. Sonia smiles, and takes a hesitant step forward, so Anna smells her perfume more strongly. But as well as Sonia’s perfume she smells her father’s skin, and the cologne he splashes on his neck after shaving. Sometimes she watches him while he shaves. There’s no one else there, only the heavy, swinging door of his mahogany wardrobe, the slosh of brush in soapy water, the scrape of his razor. He won’t use an electric razor. She watches him in the mirror. Sometimes he reaches behind him, fumbling at the towel rail, and she puts a white towel into his hand. The towels don’t belong to them either, which is why they have other people’s initials embroidered on their corners. Anna doesn’t like using towels with FMB embroidered on them, so you can’t help it touching your skin. She keeps thinking someone will burst in and shout at her: ‘What are you doing, drying your arse on my towel?’ Arse, thinks Anna. That’s what Johnnie says: ‘Get your arse in gear, Anna, we’re going out.’

  ‘When?’ asks Anna. Sonia’s features bunch together and sparkle. She is still smiling, but now it’s clear she’s not going to hug Anna. She made her step forward, and that was all. Her father reaches down and puts his big warm hand on Anna’s head, as if he will press her into the earth that lies four floors down beneath the thick carpets, the regiments of stairs, and the cold, infested floor of the basement.