The Blind Light

by Stuart Evers

  ANNEKA: We could live together. A big house in the countryside with a swimming pool.

  SUSAN: Two pools. One indoors and one out.

  ANNEKA: And you could have a pony.

  SUSAN: No. Horses. Two horses. And a stable.

  ANNEKA: I’d like a bright red swimming costume and a white swimming cap.

  SUSAN: I’d like a red riding jacket and white jodhpurs.

  ANNEKA: And no boys.

  SUSAN: No boys at all.

  13 February 1971, this:

  ANNEKA: There was ice inside the window this morning.

  SUSAN: Dad’s like a ghost haunting the house. He just sits in his chair. He’s drinking now.

  ANNEKA: It’s strange having him home when I get back from school.

  SUSAN: Yeah. I don’t like it. I wish the strike was over.

  ANNEKA: When they say strike, I always think of matches.

  SUSAN: I always think matches smell like birthdays.

  ANNEKA: Don’t talk to me about birthdays.

  Anneka remembers that last conversation, fleetingly and without much consideration, as she turns over on the too-soft bed. She woke at just before midnight and cannot get back to sleep. She’s tamped down by thick layers of blankets, but the outside chill permeates past and present, blasting icy through memories of sun. I’ll never again wake in daylight, she thinks. I’ll always come round with feet half-numb and fingers dug deep into pyjama bottoms.

  In her and Susan’s house the heating would always be on; every morning would be summer, even in the lash of autumn. She’d walk in her gingham pyjamas to the pool house, change into her red costume and swim lengths, the lights low and the dawn breaking around her. Afterwards, she’d wrap herself in a towel with a hood, its hem brushing her ankles as Susan clacked poolside, smelling of bridle and brushwork. Outside, the horses in the fields would skitter and neigh, a sheepdog called Meg would snuffle the hedgerows. The radio would be on and there would be no news bulletins, just music and chatter and laughter. After breakfast, they’d drive to the beach in a drop-top sports car. Fine sand and no wind, the sea as meek as a lake, the whole expanse to themselves.

  Yes. A perfect day. But others, too.

  Susan was kicked to death by horses as she took her morning ride. There was a car crash on a coastal road; Susan in a coma, Anneka in a wheelchair. Meg got into difficulties and drowned. Men abducted them and their bodies were never found. Men killed Susan. Men came and Susan left of her own free will, laughing as she closed the front door. There was a bomb and everyone died. The pool was empty and she was telling Susan they would need to eat the horses. In her torn and filthy riding gear, Susan was crying. These the days she sees, these the ones she imagines.

  There is a sound from downstairs, the front door being slowly opened. In the books she reads, there are burglars, smugglers, robbers, kidnappers. Anneka closes her eyes and holds her breath. The click of the door and the sound of keys falling to the ground, a metal splash on lino. She looks at the clock. She assumed her father was home, but it has to be him. No one else with keys.

  Anneka steals out onto the landing and puts her hands on the balustrades, cold like school railings, and watches her father stumble into the sitting room. He is wearing his suit, his tie slouched around his unbuttoned collar. He hums a tune. Something he likes to listen to on the record player, a woozy clarinet instrumental. He goes to the kitchen and comes back holding a glass in both hands, sipping Scotch like it’s cocoa. Even from upstairs, she can smell his booze, his sweat.

  She’s seen drunk at a wedding; she’s seen drunk on the television; she’s not seen it in her father. Never much seen him drink at all, aside from when they went to see the Carters. She watches him take off his trousers, sit there in just his underpants. Money for drink. Money for that, but not her bedroom. How much a roller-blind. How much for booze.

  Her anger is close, close to her skin, how it broils and hisses. She knows some dirty words, some filthy words. Dickhead. Fucker. Bastard. Silent curses, hurled in silent rage. Money for this, but not to help her sleep, money for this but not a thought for her.

  Her father stands and catches his foot on the hem of the rug, trips and lands close to the hearth. Anneka vaults down the stairs, puts her hands on him. He looks dead. For a moment dead, then alive and stinking.

  ‘I’m okay,’ he says. ‘I’m okay. Just fell over.’

  He remains in a mound on the rug, head so close to the tiles and brickwork.

  ‘I’m fine,’ he says again. ‘Go back to bed.’

  She goes to the kitchen and fills a glass with water.

  ‘Drink this,’ she says. ‘Get up and drink this.’

  She taps him with her foot, his stomach soft, rolling back into place.

  ‘Drink this or I’m going to get Mam,’ she says.

  He gets up, takes the water and drinks it down. She helps him collapse into his chair.

  ‘You can take me swimming on Saturday,’ she says. ‘And afterwards, we can go and buy a wardrobe.’

  ‘We can’t,’ he says. ‘I’d love to but I have to go away on the weekend.’

  ‘Away?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where?’

  He looks confused. He begins to put on his trousers.

  ‘Up to Uncle Jim’s.’

  ‘Without us?’

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Just me this time.’

  ‘I want to go with you.’

  ‘Well you can’t,’ he says. ‘Now go to bed.’

  He returns then, him straggling out of the confusion. That look on his face, that familiar look. Do not disobey. She is already walking to the stairs, Annie; she is already retreating.

  ‘You stink,’ she says on reaching the safety of landing. ‘Dad, you absolutely bloody stink.’

  8

  Gwen does not leave him tea, does not set a pair of aspirin and a glass of water on his bedside table. She does, though, fold his trousers, lay them neatly on the chest of drawers, remove his wallet and take three of the five notes she finds inside, the two remaining reserved for food. A dirty way to get money; but needs musting. She looks down on Drum, the damp on the pillow from his open mouth. A murder scene and her the pathologist assessing the body. Dirt under the fingernails, small red-wine fangs at the corners of his mouth, his smell acrid, spilled booze and beef in sauce. She opens the window. Let him wake frozen, knowing the window’s a pointed comment.

  Since the strike, Drum has taken the weekday breakfast shifts, letting her sleep while he fixes porridge and mediates the fights and disagreements. She suspects there are fewer when it’s just him; that the children’s behaviour is better, more loving, without her. For him, sitting at table, not arguing for more sugar, not complaining one had more or less than the other, neither claiming a stomach ache that prevents them from attending school.

  She makes porridge as Nate and Annie bicker. Soon they will leave for school and the house will sigh, revel in the short silence, and there will be ten minutes before her bus to the library to fix make-up and style hair.

  ‘Gwell i chi fod yn dawel, you two,’ she shouts.

  She is serving the porridge, but looks up to see her daughter screw her face into a witch’s gurn and slap her brother across the face. The moment of shock and then his scream, the cries and the hot salt tears, him quickly into Gwen’s arms.

  ‘You nasty girl,’ Gwen says. ‘You apologize this instant.’

  Annie looks directly at her mother, eyes locked and burning ice. Still in her pyjamas, child dressed but adult raged, her face now resting witch. Taunting, saying nothing.

  ‘Don’t make me wake your father,’ Gwen says.

  ‘Wake him up,’ Annie says. ‘See if I care.’

  The defiance of the girl-witch face.

  There was a day, years before, almost perfect. They’d driven to the beach, impromptu, the morning surprising bright and already hot. On Westcliffe Beach, the tide out and a rug thrown down, Drum took Annie and Nate into the water. She watch
ed Annie swim parallel to the beach, Drum just behind, ready to catch her should she fall. She did not fall, her swimming stronger than Gwen had reckoned on. It was the first time Drum called her Fish.

  Gwen had watched her dappled, dripping family splash each other, sink under waves and breakers, re-emerge, shaking like dogs. She lit a cigarette none of them saw, dug her toes in the cool shingle. When they eventually tired of the water, she stood and welcomed them with sun-warm towels. Drum bought ice creams, strawberry sauce on soft white mounds, wafers so crisp they threatened teeth. When she kissed him, his lips were cold from the ice cream, then warm.

  The children had joined a game of stick cricket, a big group, their shoulders red, their teeth bared in victory or defeat. And she lay her head on Drum’s naked chest, and they dozed under the sun as the kids played and the tide turned.

  ‘You know,’ Drum said. ‘At some point Annie’s going to be too big for me to pick her up.’

  ‘I suppose,’ she said.

  ‘I won’t remember it, will I? There’ll be a last time and I won’t even know it’s happening.’

  She saw something on his abdomen, flicked it onto the beach.

  ‘I can’t imagine them hating us,’ she said. ‘But they will. Kids always do.’

  At this he laughed, took her and rolled her onto the blanket, lay on top of her.

  ‘No one could ever hate you,’ he said. ‘It’s not possible.’

  They kissed. On that perfect day they kissed and she could remember it all: Nate’s sunburned shoulders; the waves claiming the sandcastles; the look on her daughter’s face as Drum carried her to the car, limp and exhausted. It could have been then, the last time he carried her. It could easily have been. She was reminded of that angel face as Annie looked at her, the hate in those eyes, pure-eyed that hate; combustible with it.

  ‘What did you say?’ Gwen says. ‘What did you just say?’

  ‘I said, “Go and wake him up, see if I care.” Didn’t you hear me? Are you deaf?’

  Gwen crouches, covered in howling boy, looks up to her daughter; her daughter looking down on her. She looks freed and ragged. Gwen strokes her son’s hair as he whimpers, shushes him as she eyes her daughter. She wants to slap Annie. Hard. Across the face. Watch her shocked little face with a red hand on her cheek. Annie just runs off, thudding upstairs, not waking her father, though she seems determined to do so.

  ‘There, there,’ Gwen says to Nate. ‘It’s all okay. You’re fine. You’re all okay.’

  Annie leaves without saying goodbye, without her brother, a slammed door meeting Gwen’s shouting voice. Sheepish Drum comes downstairs, unshaven and rough, but dressed at least.

  ‘You should have woken me,’ he says. ‘I would have done breakfast.’

  ‘She hit Nate,’ she says. ‘Did you not hear the screams?’

  ‘No,’ he says.

  ‘Well you can take Nate to school, I need to get ready.’

  Shouldn’t be so harsh, shouldn’t be terse, when all things considered. Went to get money, the same as going to the factory. The same thing, but with fewer ethics.

  ‘You’ll be back from picket before school’s out?’

  ‘Yes,’ he says.

  ‘Good,’ she says. ‘I’ve left a list.’

  *

  A sludge of a morning, the rain settling in, comfortable against the library roof, a smatter of it, the old men smelling of wet dog. Remember days like this in the pub, Nick steaming on entering, never one for umbrellas. Would like to see him walk through the door now, take a pew, offer his tasteless ear.

  The morning is slow, toddlers and the mothers reading books and playing games, hiding out from the rain. In an atlas she looks up Nuneaton. Looks at the word on the page, sounds it out – nun eaten – and laughs at that. The virgin consumed. Gwen tidies the desk, does not think of eaten nuns, just tidies the desk, making nice, making neat.

  She hears a tap on the desk and looks up. A woman in a red and stylish raincoat. Her hair is long and black, centre-parted, dead centre, defined as a line of chalk. From a large bag she takes a stack of large-print books and places them on the counter. There are six books. Gwen looks at the date stamped inside each one, but knows they are not even close to being overdue.

  ‘Thank you,’ Gwen says.

  The woman looks at her, the look hard, pitying, angry, victorious. A week they have been out, some only a day. Ray’s mother dead. Dead certainly. Or a message. Or both. Both dead and a message.

  ‘Thank you,’ Jenny says. She swings her bag gently as she leaves the library, opens up an umbrella at the door, and looks back at Gwen, smiling with a wide and violent mouth.

  JAMES CARTER

  When I think of Service, I think not of the food – no one would wish to remember that filth, especially, if like me, you were responsible for its preparation – or the training, or the routine boredom, or the uniforms, or the COs, or the privations of life on a base, but of friendship and camaraderie. That is the overwhelming memory, as I write this, some twelve years after demob; the sense of men from all quarters getting along, finding common ground, a common language.

  Over the years I have met many other former servicemen, and few seem to have kept in contact with their comrades. All have fond memories, however; many of them talk with great affection for men they have not seen since. I feel that I am most fortunate, however, to have met one of my very closest friends while on the parade ground, and to still count him as such today. I have long since forgotten the best way to cook bully beef, how to polish boots to a mirror shine, how to fire a rifle or use a bayonet, but thankfully my friendship with Alan – not his real name; he asked me to ‘keep him out of it’, which is instructive of his character and temperament – remains a part of my life.

  Alan was the first member of what I suppose we would call the working classes I’d ever met, unless of course you count those people in my family’s employ. He was also the first socialist with whom I had consorted, and the first person of my own age who had been at work since the age of sixteen. On our first meeting, he saved me from ruin in a game of cards run by a pair of youthful conmen, and from then on, we became if not thick as thieves, then close as charlatans.

  We were both given lucky stations; both given the greatest of chances of survival, as members of the Catering Corps. No postings abroad for us, no gunfights and bombs. We stayed at the same base for the almost all of our two years, found the ways out into town, drank beer with locals, made chit-chat with local women. Long before the universities were opened up for working-class folk, Service allowed the classes to mingle, to be educated – at least after a fashion – and to show us all a different side of life.

  Had I not been sent down from Oxford, I feel I would have moved entirely in the set direction one is ascribed at birth, from dreaming spires to gainful employment, from marriage to children and all that comes with such joy. But meeting Alan changed my trajectory, not by much, but still by the finest of degrees. Many of the friends and acquaintances I have made over the ensuing years have been from backgrounds that do not mirror my own. And for that, I will always be glad to Service and to Alan. Over the years, he has saved my life several times – once literally – and so Service will always hold an uncommon affection. Without it, I would not have my Panza.

  James Carter (author), retrieved from B. S. Johnson Archive, British Library, File 414 (Submissions for All Bull: The National Servicemen). Marked with annotation in pen by BSJ – ‘We have enough of these upper-class nostalgia riots! Reject with glad heart.’

  10

  A long walk around the estate to outrun the hangover, the old sensation of it, so long out of practice, so long since waking dry-mouthed and gut-punched. A long walk in the rain, ending up on the high street, shopping to fetch.

  Greengrocer’s as usual packed, but no one there he knows. A relief, that. The worst is bumping into other striking men accompanying their wives; the sense of being taken to the shops by mother. Avoid eye contact. Better for al
l to do so, better to say nothing.

  The butcher is cleaning down after the morning rush, silver platters of heart and liver, kidney and tripe; pigs hanging from hooks, rabbits still furred, chickens unplucked. He looks at the kidneys, would like the kidneys but Gwen can’t bear the smell in the pan. The soft face of Mr Dutton, the sort of man who dreams of anything but being a butcher, but once sure of his fate, embraces it with zeal.

  ‘Hello there, sir,’ Dutton says as Drum walks through the rainbow streamers. ‘Weather for ducks, isn’t it?’

  At home, still sick from drink, he unpacks the shopping, begins the hoovering and the dusting, the wiping down of surfaces. He changes the bedding upstairs, resists the temptation to tidy Annie’s room, then tidies it anyway. He does the same to Nate’s room, then attacks the bathroom.

  This what men do. Think of plans, execute them. Even when cleaning a lavatory pan. Better to be doing that than at the picket. Better to be doing something for the family. Carter’s is a simple plan. One he’s sure has been offered to others first, but by elimination has arrived at his door.

  ‘Who else could I rely on?’ Carter said. ‘Who else can I trust with my family’s life?’

  A good question, one meant to ruffle peacock feathers. Appeal to their special affection, the bond between them, and their families. How good it would be for Gwen to be closer to her family; how good it would be for Annie to be closer to Tommy; how good it would be for Nate to live in the good, clean air of the countryside. How Drum was the only one Carter could trust to protect them if he were away when things went down. How he could trust him to run the bunker in his absence.

  Carter looked like he believed all of this; believed it too, when he said that Drum would take to the work, would become a true farmer in a matter of months. Believed it when he said Drum was doing something the Carter family would never forget; believed it when he said that Gwen would understand.

  ‘All you have to say,’ Carter said. ‘Is that I’m fronting the money for you to buy the farm next door. That you can live there for as long as you like, all on me.’