A Lovely and Terrible Thing

by Chris Womersley

  The stranger sat back on her haunches, evidently satisfied that alerting me to her knowledge of the incident had fulfilled its function, whatever that was. I felt the shameful heat of incipient tears. ‘Are you the police?’

  ‘Hardly.’

  ‘Then who are you?’

  She coughed once into her fist and looked around again, as if she were unsure herself. ‘Don’t cry,’ she said at last. ‘It’s all right, I won’t hurt you. My name is . . . Anne.’

  I wiped my nose. ‘But what are you doing hiding in our garden?’

  A fresh pause, another glance towards my house. ‘I’m not hiding, thank you very much. I’m always here.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’m waiting for my turn on the throne.’ The woman looked at me again, and it seemed to me her mouth had tightened. ‘Princess Anne, waiting to enter the castle as queen at last.’

  By now it was almost dark. The woman’s dress was indistinguishable from the foliage surrounding us, so that only her pale face was visible, the deep pools of her eyes; an apparition in her undersea grotto. She jumped when my mother called out for me to come inside for dinner – looked set to run off, in fact – before relaxing again at the sound of retreating footsteps and the screen door slapping shut. ‘Yell out you’re coming,’ she whispered.

  Succumbing to the innate authority adults wield over children, I did as I was told.

  ‘Smells delicious,’ she said a few seconds later. ‘Like lamb.’

  I nodded.

  ‘I hear your mother is a good little cook.’

  I was suffused with filial pride. ‘She is. She makes a beautiful apple crumble, too.’

  ‘Keeps a nice house. Tucks you in, reads you stories, makes biscuits.’

  My mum didn’t make biscuits. The curious woman didn’t even seem to be addressing me but, rather, talking out loud to herself. ‘That’s very nice,’ she continued, as if I had agreed with her summation of my mother’s housekeeping capabilities. ‘Why don’t you bring me back some of that lamb later. Wrap a few slices in some wax paper or something. Let me try this famous lamb.’

  ‘I don’t know –’

  ‘Go on, be a sport. And one of your father’s cigarettes.’

  ‘He gave up.’

  The woman sniggered. ‘Like hell he did. Why don’t you look in his study. There’s a green volume of Dickens on the top shelf of his bookcase, Great Expectations, naturally. It’s hollowed out and there’s a packet of Marlboros hidden in there. Bring me a couple. But don’t forget the matches.’

  I didn’t ask how she knew this; I had a feeling I didn’t want to know. I had become unaccountably afraid in the past minute or so and stood up to leave as best I could beneath the low branches. At school they advised us not to talk to strangers in the street or at the park, but no one said anything about finding one in your own garden.

  ‘I suppose you want your ball.’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  She slung me the football. ‘Nice manners. Don’t forget to bring me those cigarettes after dinner. I’ll be right here.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Don’t smoke them all yourself, will you, now you know where they’re hidden? They’re for grown-ups.’

  ‘I don’t smoke.’

  ‘Good boy. It was nice meeting you at last, Tom. You can’t tell anyone you saw me, though. Remember what I know about you and those lemons. A certain broken window. Don’t want your mum to find out, do you? Or the police. Tell anyone you saw me here and I’ll blow your whole house down. Like what’s-her-name, Princess Leia.’

  I didn’t bother to correct her version of who Princess Leia was or what she might be capable of, and went inside for dinner. Afterwards, when everyone was watching TV, I went into my dad’s study and found the cigarettes exactly where she said they would be. I stood there a long time, staring at them, before lifting the packet out of the miniature grave carved into the book. The smell of dry tobacco was both familiar and exotic, full of dark promise. On our wall calendar in the kitchen were marked the months since my father had smoked his last cigarette and the money his hard-won abstinence was saving our family. The ways of adults were as mysterious to me as a forest; they spoke often in their own unintelligible tongue. In the other room my family laughed at M*A*S*H, even though they were all repeats.

  Without really knowing what I was doing – much less why – I withdrew a cigarette from the packet, put it between my lips and lit it. The flavour was strong and terrible. Smoke wafted into my eyes. My immediate coughing fit brought my two older sisters running to the study doorway, where they stood giggling with disbelief after calling out for our mum.

  When she arrived, my mother slapped the cigarette away and demanded to know what the hell I was doing. My father was the last to arrive on the scene and he weathered my mother’s tirade with his gaze fixed not on the book, with its cigarette packet-shaped hole, that my mother brandished at him as evidence of his flagrant dishonesty, but on the curtained window, as if expecting to see something unwelcome step in from outside.

  Season of Hope

  Mr F was short and squat, well dressed, with the sort of small, dry hands you might expect of a bureaucrat. I was horrified to observe a tiny spot of tomato sauce on his striped tie. At least I hoped it was tomato sauce. He entered the hotel room quickly, before the door was even fully open, slipping inside with more agility than I’d expect of someone of his age and build. What we were doing was highly illegal; the appointment had been complicated to organise and arranged through an intermediary. I’d never met anyone like him before – anyone who did what he did, I mean – and I was anxious. Besides that, I didn’t even know his real name, so, without thinking, I stuck out my hand and said, ‘You must be the abortionist.’

  I heard Juliet’s swift intake of breath behind me.

  Mr F closed the door carefully, put down his bag, pulled the yellow curtains and turned to me with a sour little smile. Juliet sat on the end of the bed and rested one hand on her stomach before quickly removing it, as if scalded.

  Then Mr F turned to me with an expression of great forbearance. ‘Why don’t you go and get yourself a drink or something? Some chips, perhaps? We won’t be too long.’

  Strangely, neither of them uttered a word when I put on my coat. I kissed the top of Juliet’s head and told them I’d return in an hour.

  I’d met Juliet about four months earlier at a party in Dalston. She was dancing by herself to an ancient techno song in a dingy hallway. As people arrived, they watched her enviously or indulgently for a moment, then sidled past, towards the music and dope smoke at the back. My friend Donald introduced us. She was dark-haired, scrawny and not very attractive but her Bristol accent really did something for me. She shook my hand and said, Awright?

  I ran into her on the street late one afternoon a week later. We exchanged awkward hellos. She looked better in sunlight, but fragile, like her legs might give way at any moment. She was wearing a dark overcoat and, beneath it, a cream-coloured dress patterned with red flowers. We chatted about the weather, exchanged some gossip about mutual friends. Her eyes were blue and her voice husky. There are times in life when you’d do almost anything to get into a girl’s pants, so when she asked me if I wanted to see where Nick Cave had been murdered, I shrugged and told her to lead the way.

  To be honest, I only dimly remembered Cave, but Juliet knew his tale well – a long night on the booze, a misunderstanding, a hammer within reach. Violent death was so common in those long years that such events passed almost without remark. The woman who’d killed him, Juliet said, was in a psych ward somewhere. She told me you could still see the bloodstains on the carpet through the window of the flat, as if this were explanation enough for our curious pilgrimage.

  We walked in silence for a while. I was acutely aware of the tap tap tap of her heels on the cracked footpath. The afternoon wa
s hot and a greasy slab of pollution hovered over our heads. We passed a roadside stall selling computers, another selling fruit. Donald had told me Juliet had been to Paris before the war, so I asked her about it.

  ‘Oh,’ she said with obvious fondness, ‘it was so great.’

  ‘Is it true what they say about the Eiffel Tower?’

  She stopped to light a cigarette and tossed away the match. Then she considered me, like she was debating whether I was worth entrusting with a secret. ‘Yeah. It was beautiful. And Notre Dame. I can’t believe what those fuckers did to that city. Although the Eiffel Tower was only supposed to be temporary,’ she added, as if this exonerated those who had destroyed it.

  She continued walking, but paused at the top of some concrete stairs. ‘We’ll go down here,’ she explained when I caught up with her, ‘and walk along the canal to Islington. That way we’ll avoid the checkpoints.’

  The canal smelled muddy. An oily slick coated the Coke-dark water, full of rubbish. We passed an elderly man fishing from a small rowboat on the canal, although I found it hard to imagine anything living in that water; all I’d ever seen were bicycle wheels, dozens of empty bottles and cartons and numerous deflated soccer balls. Weeds sprouted through cracks in the path beside the water.

  Eventually, we sat on an old wooden bench by the canal. It was strangely peaceful and I’ll always remember her lovely knees, the crease along the side of one of her burgundy Mary Janes, the way she fidgeted with her cigarette. A bird hopped about on the grassy bank in front of us and I wondered if normal life was like this: sitting by a canal on a mild afternoon with a pretty girl, smoking cigarettes and chatting. I knew, suddenly, that I would never leave London again, a realisation that filled me with a sadness made pleasurable by the accompanying understanding that it was merely my ration of the melancholy we all shared during that long and long-ago war.

  ‘It’s hard, isn’t it?’ she said suddenly, as if reading my thoughts.

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Well. This.’ And she gestured around feebly with her half-smoked cigarette. ‘I fear that my heart has grown small and mean. It used to have more room for things. Those unnecessary things. Beauty. Love. A sense of wonder. It’s all been squeezed out by desperation and the fear of imminent death, worrying about fresh food. All that’s left are such thin pleasures.’

  A stark analysis, but true. I looked around and made a sound of agreement. ‘Are you afraid of death?’

  She thought about this for a long time before answering. ‘You hope it’s quick, don’t you? After all, as the Duchess of Malfi pointed out, we are sure to meet such excellent company on the other side. I would see my mother and father again. My friend Charlotte. She died early on. She couldn’t take it. Can’t say I blame her.’

  ‘You really think there’s another side?’

  She sucked hard on her cigarette and, when she spoke again, grey smoke jetted from between her lips. ‘I hope so. You know, I spent three hours last week helping a young girl find her cat. The poor creature was missing after an air raid and I foolishly offered to help.’

  ‘That’s not so foolish, is it?’

  ‘I say foolishly because I saw the poor creature dead under some rubble almost as soon as I started looking, but I didn’t have the heart to tell the girl. You have to give the kids some hope, don’t you? Youth is the season of hope and all that. Even if it’s just a black cat. It’s something, at least, isn’t it? I can’t remember the cat’s name now. Poor thing. Poor girl.’

  Then Juliet and I heard the wail of air-raid sirens, almost detected the collective groan go up, followed by the scraping of chairs on lino floors as people stood from their kitchen tables, took a final sip of tea and headed down to the cellar or nearest shelter. I flicked my cigarette into the canal – half expecting the water to ignite, there was so much oil on top of it. But Juliet didn’t move.

  ‘I hate those fucking shelters,’ she whispered.

  I knew what she meant. There was something abject about crouching in the near dark with dozens of strangers: listening, identifying the types of bombs, trying not to pay attention to those eager to speak the names aloud, as if in so doing it afforded some sort of occult protection. Whistler. C10, I think. Pause, a collective flinch. That’s a . . . Scrambler. I preferred not to know the names of the missiles seeking me; I hoped my own death would be a surprise. The ground shuddering, plaster trickling from the roof, a child coughing. Close one, that.

  I stood up. ‘Well. We probably shouldn’t stay here,’ I said to her eventually. My body was fizzing with adrenaline. It was not an entirely unpleasant sensation. Indeed, one of the stranger aspects of the bombings (and I’m not alone in this, for others have written of it, too) was the millenarian carnality it fostered.

  The sirens wound down, then started up again. We had perhaps ten minutes before the bombs began to fall. Juliet stood and held out her hand. ‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘I know a place.’

  Juliet led me through the dimming streets to the Prince George. I thought the pub was long closed, on account of its boarded-up windows, but it had in fact become a venue for bacchanalian air-raid parties. My chagrin at being uninitiated into this little secret was more than compensated for by what I discovered inside. It was hot, sweaty and smoky. Condensation dripped from the ceiling. The atmosphere was charged with a desperate sort of pleasure and, best of all, the music was loud enough to drown out the noise of all but the closest bombs. People danced with abandon, a woman spilled liquor on my shirt, laughed and then kissed me hard on the mouth by way of apology.

  Someone clapped me on the back and called my name. It was Donald, red hair sticking up all over the place, his face aglow. Juliet slipped from my grip and melted away into the throng. I lost sight of her. I tried to shake Donald but he would not be fobbed off and insisted I open my mouth.

  ‘Why?’ I yelled.

  ‘Because acid,’ he said and placed a tab of it on my tongue. ‘Micky got hold of some of the old-school stuff . . .’

  And it was done before I could think better of it, the hallucinogen washed into my body with a slug of beer. From there the night lurched away, spinning closer, then further, again closer, like a monumental carnival ride, all lights and frenzy, thrown gloriously off its axis. If the world were to end tonight, I thought, oh please, take me with you.

  In the morning, or perhaps it was even the morning after that, I staggered from the Prince George into the street. My jaw ached and I felt like I’d smoked a thousand cigarettes, which, quite possibly, I had. So much had happened but I could recall almost none of it with precision. A conversation about clouds, I think, the intricacy of the broken bathroom tiles and a fellow dancing naked on a table.

  Outside, the air was dusty and smelled of acrid smoke and smashed mortar. I heard a police siren drawing closer, voices yelling, shots. Not an uncommon sound in those days. Probably the police firing at looters; they had orders to shoot on sight. I listened some more. Nothing. Even the birds had abandoned the city. Things shimmered at the corners of my vision, glimpses of people, of leaves fluttering in the breeze.

  A bewildered-looking girl walked past me calling for her cat. I watched her shrink into the distance. A girl looking for her cat. Just a girl looking for her cat. She would never find her pet, I thought, and this dead-end realisation filled me with sudden and acute despair. That’s how it went: your friends would be killed, you’d hear of so-and-so vanishing, your house would be destroyed and you’d manage to contain all that terrible grief until a girl looking for her lost cat broke your fucking heart.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  It was Juliet, standing right beside me on the pavement. I’d hardly seen her during the night – or nights – of the party and yet her presence then seemed so inevitable and right.

  I wiped tears from my cheeks. ‘A girl looking for her cat.’

  Juliet shrugged into her coat, f
ag hanging from her lower lip. With smudged eyeliner and her hair tousled just so, she looked wretched, beautiful, immensely desirable.

  ‘Really?’ she said in that husky voice I’d already begun to love. ‘Where?’

  I pointed along the street, towards Graham Road. ‘Gone now.’

  She stared down that way, then looked at me suspiciously. ‘Did you take some of that acid, by any chance?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Ah. That explains it.’

  ‘Explains what?’

  She laughed. ‘Do you have anywhere to go?’

  That summer I was living alone in the basement room of a bombed-out squat in Richmond Road, quite near London Fields. My water came through a garden hose hooked up to the place next door, and electricity was sporadic, to say the least. I could have found better accommodation but I lacked the wherewithal to do anything about my situation. In any case, it was hard to defy the superstition that a bomb wouldn’t fall twice in exactly the same place, and I felt strangely protected there. Sometimes at night I watched the war on TV, eating Indian takeaway, drinking Special Brew, a blanket bunched over my shoulders.