A Lovely and Terrible Thing

by Chris Womersley

  I could have explained all this to Juliet but instead, mercifully, she threaded her arm through mine and I was spared the agony of articulating what she doubtless sensed anyway. She tugged me away from the corner. ‘Come over to mine for a cup of tea, then.’

  ‘Puckle,’ I said, without thinking.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The girl’s cat is called Puckle.’

  She stopped. ‘You’re right. It was called Puckle. How did you know that?’

  After leaving Juliet with Mr F that day in Brighton, I found myself pacing the boardwalk, trying not to think of what exactly he was doing to her. The intimate violence of the ‘procedure’ – as the intermediary had referred to it – made me feel queasy. I bought a chocolate ice-cream but was unable to take more than a few bites before tossing it into a bin.

  The boardwalk was packed with couples and children. The ice-cream van played its sad, tinkling song. The air was mild and still, discoloured with a milky haze of smoke. I could smell burnt rubber on the sea breeze. All week there’d been rumours of a riot in the nearby Russian sector, dozens of people beaten and shot, but no one was talking about it in public. Life was hard that year, and not only for me.

  Eventually, I stood at a rusted railing and stared out over the Channel. The water was grey. The wreck of the gunship HMS Elizabeth still lolled on a sandbank a couple of miles from shore. Gulls stalked the pebbly beach like twitchy, energetic derelicts, picking up and discarding cigarette butts and empty wrappers. Above the hubbub of the waves and the crowd milling on the sand, I heard a kid screaming in the distance, the rhythmic tap tap tap of a hammer. Life going on, despite everything.

  An elderly man standing beside me gestured out over the beach with his yellowed fingers. ‘Terrible, isn’t it?’ he said.

  Unsure whether he was actually addressing me, I merely nodded in a way calculated to discourage him from including me in whatever prognostication he was preparing to make. My lack of enthusiasm didn’t stop him, however.

  ‘I remember when there used to be mermaids out here,’ he said, waving his bony, nicotine-stained fingers towards the few blackened struts of the pier still poking up through the water like stitches through skin. ‘Swimming in the shallows, lounging about beneath the old pier. Mermen, too. Whole families. At night you’d see them. So beautiful. So very beautiful. Their tails, their soft voices. Incredible. Doesn’t seem that long ago, really. Makes me cry to think of them gone, although I still expect to see them some day. I come down here most evenings, you know. Such a shame.’

  I followed his gaze, unaccountably disappointed to see none of the creatures he had described. ‘They’ll be back,’ I said.

  He turned to face me. ‘You really think so?’

  I had no idea why I’d encouraged his preposterous fantasy, but his delight at the thought of the mermaids’ return obliged me to persevere. ‘Yes. I do think so. Why not?’

  ‘Why not, indeed!’

  We talked for a few minutes more before I bade the old man farewell and walked to a dingy pub, where I drank a pint of lager. By the time I returned to the hotel it was almost dark. There were very few people around and the narrow streets had gathered about themselves a menacing air.

  In the room, Juliet was lying on top of the narrow single bed. Her face was very pale, but she smiled when I walked through the door and the sight filled me with almost inexpressible relief; part of me had expected the worst of the whole encounter. There were stories of rogues, after all – sinister tales of infection and malpractice.

  ‘Never fear,’ she scoffed with a thin smile, evidently seeing my relief. ‘I do not plan on dying merely to provide a catalyst for your emotional narrative.’

  ‘I can’t fool you, can I?’

  ‘Nope.’

  She sat upright, with one hand on her brow, but I could sense her energy building, a little roiling storm about to break. She began to cry and I comforted her as best I could.

  ‘There’s nothing to say,’ she sobbed, and I was relieved for, indeed, I could think of nothing to say.

  I remember the faint smear of blood on the back of her hand, her fingers digging into my shoulder and, outside the window, streetlights rippling through the glass. That these should form part of my final memories of her fills me with tender grief, a bruise forever on my heart.

  The next morning we took the train back to London. Although the city had not been bombed in some weeks, the streets were a mess. Debris, wrecked cars, the ruins of buildings and the smell of torn electrical wires. A woman on crutches made her way along the footpath, singing a hymn. A boy sold newspapers.

  It was warm. A beautiful day, almost. Juliet and I made our way – by bus, then on foot – to our now familiar spot by the canal, where we sat on what we thought of as ‘our’ bench. The silence was immense.

  After a while, we became aware of a curious, siren-like mewling. We peered around, searching for its source. There, among a pile of rags, was a black and white mother cat with her brood of four kittens clambering all over her.

  We watched the little feline family for some time until, eventually, I opened my mouth to speak. I was preparing to say that we could take two of the kittens and perhaps give one to the little girl I’d seen searching for hers after the night of the air raid. The other we could keep for ourselves. We could take it home and look after it. All these thoughts in a split second, accompanied by fantasies of our kitten rolling about on the floor, tangling with a ball of wool, sleeping. Its soft fur, tiny ears.

  But before I’d spoken a word, Juliet shook her head. ‘No,’ she whispered.

  And she was right, of course, for how could we, really, expect to care for anything else when it was so hard even to look after ourselves? Foolish, sentimental thoughts.

  We sat in silence for a while longer, watching the kittens.

  And then – inevitably, it seemed – the moan of air raid sirens echoed through the late afternoon, but for the first time I felt no urge to escape, no desire for shelter. It seemed too difficult, too pointless.

  Neither of us made a move to stand. After a few minutes, Juliet rummaged through the outer pockets of her overcoat, producing two coins, one of which she offered to me. ‘Put this under your tongue,’ she said. ‘Just in case.’

  I stared at the pound coin gleaming in my hand. I heard the drone of planes, blasts rolling nearby like approaching thunder, the tinkle of glass on a road. The mother cat had jumped up at the sound of the first explosions and was pacing about, her milk-heavy belly dragging on the ground, ears pinned back. Her kittens meowed tremulously and two of them had also leapt up and staggered drunkenly about. Another blast – this one much closer – and they shrank down, cried. Such tiny eyes, sodden fur, no idea of what was happening, just their terror. It was a heartbreaking sight, one of so many in those dreadful years.

  ‘Do you remember that morning when you first took me back to your place?’ I asked Juliet.

  ‘After that wild party at the Prince George? Of course I remember.’

  ‘And you made me tea?’

  ‘Yes.’

  I shook my head, fearful that if I tried to say anything else I would only weep. What could I say, anyway? How could I even begin to explain how the tea and the sight of its steam rising from the cracked cup in the morning sun restored me in ways I would never truly be able to fathom? Her skin so pale and warm, the distant sound of traffic.

  The bombs were falling quickly now, arriving in crackling flurries, in the usual pattern. Falling all over Dalston and Islington, to judge by the sound of them, and almost certainly getting closer. Shortly it would be carnage: fire and blood.

  Eventually, I was able to speak. ‘Thanks. That’s all I wanted to say. That’s all.’

  We each placed our coin beneath our tongues. A damp little clink of metal against teeth. Juliet took my hand and squeezed it. I sensed the action of her bone
s beneath the skin of her fingers; I sensed my own in response.

  And by the canal we sat, so hopeful, so very hopeful, with money in our mouths the flavour of blood.

  A Lovely and Terrible Thing

  What a burden it is to have seen wondrous things, for afterwards the world feels empty of possibility. There used to be a peculiar human majesty in my line of work: the woman with hair so long she could wind it ten times around her waist; old Frankie Block, who could wrestle a horse to the ground; the boy with a fox tail. There was a good reason we referred to ourselves as The Weird Police. Now it’s more likely to be a conga line of Elvis impersonators sponsored by McDonald’s. Somewhere along the way the job lost its magic, but perhaps that’s just me.

  It was dusk when I pulled over to phone my wife. I would be gone for only two nights, but caring for our daughter Therese was gruelling, melancholy work, like tending to a fire perpetually on the verge of going out. More than once I had come home to discover Elaine sitting in the near dark, weeping with the endlessness of it all, and there was nothing I could do but hold her until she felt better. It took hours, sometimes. Others, all night.

  My phone didn’t have reception out on the back roads. I trudged into a cold and muddy field with it held foolishly over my head, but it was no use; I would have to call from the motel in Kyneton.

  When I returned to the car, the damn thing refused to start. I fished out a torch, popped the bonnet and peered at the engine, but the mass of wires and pipes might have been Sanskrit hieroglyphs for all the sense I could make of them. No cars passed. There was not a house in sight. I cursed my decision to take the scenic route. At least on the highway someone might have stopped and helped. On the highway my phone would have had reception.

  I jiggled a few wires and checked the radiator, but it was no use. By now the horizon was darkening and the wind had turned sharp and bitter. Again I stared at the mute, incomprehensible engine and it occurred to me that a mechanic might have fared better with Therese than any of her medical specialists had over the years. I held my freezing hands over the engine, but the heat it gave off was minimal and diminished as I stood there.

  I was beginning to resign myself to the prospect of spending the night in the car when a voice startled me. I swung around to see a large man approaching through the gloom. ‘G’day,’ he said again.

  Embarrassed to have been discovered warming myself over a dead engine, I took my hands back and greeted him.

  ‘Everything all right?’ he asked.

  I gestured to the engine. ‘Car’s broken down on me. I pulled over to make a phone call and now it won’t start.’

  The fellow was about my age, dressed in overalls, with a shock of grey hair that flapped about like a bird’s broken wing. He stood nodding at the roadside verge and considered me for a moment. ‘Want me to take a look?’

  ‘Yes, that would be great. Thanks.’ I held out my hand. ‘I’m Daniel Shaw, by the way.’

  The man grunted and shook my hand, reluctantly, it seemed. ‘Dave. They call me Angola ’round here.’

  ‘Angola. Like the place?’

  He started. ‘You’ve heard of it?’

  ‘Of course.’

  He paused. ‘Well, I spent a few years there.’

  He took my torch, positioned it on the rim of the bonnet where it would provide the best light, and set about poking around inside. After a few minutes he urged me to try the ignition again, which I did, but without any luck.

  ‘Dunno, mate,’ Angola said, wiping his hands on a rag produced from a back pocket. ‘Reckon she’s stuffed for now, though. Where you going?’

  ‘Kyneton. How far is that?’

  Again he looked at me as if puzzled to find me there at all. By now it was almost dark. The only light was from my torch which, at that moment, splashed its beam across the right half of his face. I imagined us from a distance – two men, strangers to each other, on a lonely road – and felt a jolt of fear.

  ‘Too far to walk,’ he said at last, above a roar of sudden wind. He undid the bracket supporting the upraised bonnet, grabbed the torch and let the bonnet fall. ‘But you can stay the night at my place, if you like.’

  ‘I need to be there by two tomorrow afternoon. There’s something I have to verify. I work for Ripley’s Believe It or Not, and there’s supposed to be a parrot that can count to a hundred and fifty. I have to check it’s true. We might use it in the next annual.’

  That piqued his interest. It usually did. Angola sauntered closer and looked me over. ‘You work for Ripley’s? Like the TV show? Ha. You musta seen some pretty weird things.’

  I laughed. The world’s most tattooed man, the girl with eighteen fingers, the ultra-marathon runners. He didn’t know the half of it.

  With his thumb he indicated the field beside the road, beyond which, presumably, he lived. ‘My daughter has a pretty special trick, actually. Maybe you should come and see her? Put her in your big old book.’

  He said this in a mildly lascivious manner I didn’t care for but, as usual, that word pricked my heart, deflating it ever further. Daughter. I thought again of poor Elaine, poor Therese: my silent, waiting family. I hoped my wife had at least turned on the lights before pouring her first Scotch.

  ‘You got kids?’ Angola asked me, handing back the torch.

  ‘Yes, I have a daughter, too, as a matter of fact.’

  He grinned. ‘Then you know what a lovely and terrible thing it is.’

  It was an incongruous and curiously poetic description, particularly coming from his gap-toothed mouth. I nodded. For a moment I could not speak. I looked off into the bleak distance, then at this man, and there was something in the sad shake of his head and the way his hair flapped about on his scalp that filled me with unreasonable warmth. A decent man out here in the country, with mud on his boots and the grease of a stranger’s car on his hands.

  For reasons best known only to the darker parts of myself, I felt immense shame about Therese, and rarely told anyone of my troubles; I had colleagues, for instance, who were completely unaware of her existence. But, for some reason, out on this road, I felt compelled to tell this man what had happened to her.

  I coughed into my fist. ‘But my daughter is – she was in an accident. Eight years ago. She cycled onto the road when she was eleven and got hit by a car. She lost the use of her legs and became brain damaged. We don’t even know if she knows who we are – my wife and I, I mean. They say – the experts, that is – to hope for a miracle, that she might recover some of her movement and coordination. It has happened before, you know. Small breakthroughs, they say. Keep an eye out for small breakthroughs, whatever they might be.’ I could have bored the poor fellow with talk of trauma and lobes and the ripple effect, but instead I tapped my head with my index finger. ‘We don’t really know what goes on in there.’

  It was at this point that people usually said something consoling, along the lines of I’m sure she’ll come good one of these days, but the man called Angola merely stared at me, listening, until I said all I had to say. And it was perhaps for this kindness that I enquired after the ‘trick’ of his daughter’s. Normally I would not follow up on every stranger’s claim – we all believed our children to be possessed of special talents, even those of us whose faith had been worn so thin – but I felt I owed him this courtesy.

  Angola waved my polite query away. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘You’d never believe me.’

  ‘I’ve heard some pretty wild stories, you know.’

  He looked at me for a long time. It was unsettling. I saw now – by what light I couldn’t say, for the sun had well and truly set – that his face was pitted with acne scars and his left earlobe was malformed. But there, by the road, he told me something so bizarre, and in such a strange manner – looking from side to side, shrugging, mumbling – that I had no choice but to believe him.

  I carried the torch as
we squelched across a field and ducked between the barbed wire of several fences. I asked him about Africa, but he was reluctant to disclose his reasons for being there and became sullen, saying merely that it was a terrible place and that he hadn’t deserved to be there at all.

  It was only when we saw the lights of his small house in the distance that I realised, and stopped. ‘Your name,’ I said, trying to keep the panic from my voice. ‘It’s not for the country, is it?’

  My companion paused and wiped his meaty paw beneath his nose.

  It was freezing. My shoes were sticky with mud. ‘It’s for the prison, isn’t it? In America.’ I recalled an entry from the 1972 Ripley’s annual: an inmate who – although he had never left the state of Louisiana – built a precise scale model of central Paris from toothpicks, complete with street signs and roadside markets, tiny apples and pears.

  ‘Course it is,’ he growled, and continued walking.

  I stared after him until I could barely make him out in the darkness. I pondered my options, which were few. A minute passed and I staggered after him.

  Angola’s house was large, but cluttered with thick-legged furniture, piles of toys and the detritus of domestic activity: mounds of knitting, fishing bags, a cricket set. Angola’s wife Emma, elbow-deep in dishwater, seemed perplexed to see me in her house but shook my hand with her own sudsy one and offered me a beer. A teenage boy appeared and grunted at his father before skulking off. I peered around for the daughter about whom I had heard such amazing things, but there was no sign of her. Another son materialised, dutifully shook my hand and vanished. The television blared and I recognised the dopey voiceovers of Australia’s Funniest Home Videos. The sons laughed themselves stupid at something. I think I’ll take a walk up here on the icy roof . . . Angola and his wife bickered good-naturedly about an unpaid bill. Boinggg.

  With their permission, I phoned Elaine from the dim, unheated study at the rear of the house. The windowsills were lined with children’s sporting trophies. Football, cricket, tennis. Best and fairest. Under 12 Champion. The small desk was covered with bank statements, shopping catalogues, letters from a local school.