The Hide

by Barry Unsworth

  The Hide

  BARRY UNSWORTH

  W. W. NORTON & COMPANY • NEW YORK • LONDON

  Fosh . . .

  THERE IS REASONS for wanting to get off this stall. Not that I been here long. I only been here a month. Mortimer has been here longer, that’s my friend. He’s been here since before Easter. A change is as good as a rest, I tell him. He likes it though. There is plenty other jobs, I tell him, this time a year, plenty, but he don’t want to move.

  It is Mrs Morris mainly. She never lets you alone. Besides, the job is boring. Crowds of people going backwards and forwards, the hoopla opposite with that Cyp yelling his head off and if you don’t want to look at that and Christ I would not blame you, there is the sea, you can look between the stalls at the sea. I got no time for the sea, myself. A course, I know it gives us fish, which is a brain food. A bloke told me once they are going to farm the ocean bed, actually getting ready to do it, but he was having me on. You will never get men to spend their working lives under water, never.

  Old Mrs Morris—she is on at you all the time. Look at him working that rock, she says, every five minutes or so, meaning the Cyp. That’s what I call grafting, she says. She has got hairs growing out of her face, which is continuously wobbling like. She can not keep her head still. Look, she says. Look at him. I have to look. (Mortimer wouldn’t, a course, not Mortimer.) This Cyp has got sticks of rock bunched up in his hand and he is poking away with them, jabbing away with them and yelling, yelling, same thing over and over, come on—who’s having ago—six rings a tanner—any score gets you a prize and a stick a rock—stick a rock—stick a genuine Blackpool rock. I can see the shine on his face from here and his big mouth open all the time, he goes on yelling even if he happens to be eating a sandwich, that is disgusting in my opinion. I got no desire to see the contents of your mouth, you bloody Cyp. That is what Mortimer shouted across to him once, but I dunno if he heard. That’s what I call grafting, Mrs Morris says. Getting the rock in, gives people that holiday feeling like. Calls himself Henry but he is a Cyp. Mortimer says they ought to be kept in compounds, either that or incarcinerated. (He has a big vocabulary, Mortimer not the Cyp.) Coming in here, taking the bread out of our mouths. (I often enough seen bread in his.) I never knew, before Mortimer and me had a conversation about it. I mean, I never liked Henry’s eating habits and so on, but Mortimer said you have to be a realist, they are all the same, they are scum. Coming in here, taking the bread out of our mouths. Think big I always say, Mrs Morris says.

  You can not get away from Mrs Morris on this job. Two sides to the stall and where they meet is kind of a little glass cage with her inside it, so she can see both ways, who is fiddling, who is taking time off. Six attendants to watch, all of them scum to her. Her cash box in front of her, full a coppers and tanners and threepenny bits. That is what I call grafting, she says. You lot—Her head never stops moving, I’d put an end to myself. She’s got her eye on me now, I got to start shouting. You hit the bull you get your picture took. Six shots a shilling, twopence a time, the camera can’t tell no lie. Over the heads of the crowd. I never look anybody in the eye on this job. I feel a fool as a matter a fact. And that is the main reason I want to get off this stall. I am not suited to it, shouting, making a show of yourself.

  I can hear Mortimer talking next to me but I don’t look round. He has picked somebody out of the crowd, he can do that, just pick somebody out of the crowd like he’d actually lifted him over. Hey, you sir, excuse me sir, yes you, one moment please. And the bloke stops and listens. That’s another thing that gets me down here, the noise. All the people on the stalls around, shouting the odds, people screaming on the Dipper and the swings, the Dodgems crashing, the music full blast on the roundabout, O Donna Clara, the crack of the rifles. Excuse me, sir. Mortimer has this quiet way of talking but as if he didn’t really care, and that is a funny thing, it doesn’t matter how much noise there is I can always hear him talking. Yes. Now you see this target here, the centre button controls a camera, what happens is this, if you hit the bull’s eye, that light there, yes, over the target, that light goes on and your photograph is taken. Holding the rifle. Six shots a shilling sir, have a bob’s worth, yourself actually holding the rifle, yes. . . . Show the missis, show your mates, well I mean, it’s proof, isn’t it? They nearly always have a go when they listen this far, Mortimer has a way with him, very persuasive, besides he is educated, Mortimer is, you can tell. It gives people confidence.

  Albert starts up on the other side of me. That’s another thing that is getting on my nerves, Albert. He’s not a bad bloke but he can only talk about this one thing, this girl he got in the family way when he was a nightwatchman. That is his only topic of conversation. It is limited, Albert, Mortimer once said to him, as a topic of conversation it is limited. The other thing is that he is cross-eyed, so you never know if he is looking at you or what he is feeling. Well, he says, it was dark like. How was I to know? Every night around nine she come and she’d sit talking. Lipstick and all, earrings, silk stockings. She didn’t get on with her dad, that’s what she’d talk about mostly. Her brother’s in the army, he’ll be looking for me now, well, bugger him . . . . He ought to have had Plastic Surgery for them eyes, too late now a course, it’s gone too far.

  Mortimer is standing, watching the man shoot. Mortimer is tall and well-built. He looks like Prince Philip but his nose is shorter. Distinguished, that is the word that springs to mind. He always looks superior. I am the only one on the stall he has any time for, he told me that himself. That is because I am not a typical stall attendant. (His own words.) He always calls me by my full name, Josiah. He is the only reason I would have for not leaving. But what I think is, I could get a different sort of job, I don’t have to leave town, me and Mortimer could go on seeing each other. If he wanted to, a course. That is what I call grafting, Mrs Morris says and then straight after she belches. She’s got no manners at all, she’d never dream of saying pardon or putting her hand up. . . . I take a squint up at the sun. Getting on for four o’clock. It will be time for my break.

  ‘What time is it, Albert?’

  ‘How was I to know, the light wasn’t good, man to man, it’s quarter past four mate, she always come at night. I never saw her face clear like, not in two bloody months, you don’t look at the mantelpiece when you’re poking the fire, do you. Come on now, have a go, you will get somethink better than prizes here. I’m cold, she says, its cold, she says. Have my jacket, love. It must be warmer in that tent of yours, she says. Here, you sir, can I have a word? Earrings, made up like that, I never knew, see, I never knew how old she was, she was only fourteen.’

  ‘Quarter past four, that’s past my break-time.’

  ‘Every night I had her down inside the tent, every night for a bloody month I screwed her, wouldn’t you of done?’

  It must of been too dark for her to see Albert’s cross eyes. I wish it could of been me instead of him getting her down inside the tent. I am nearly twenty years old and I never had it yet, not the complete thing. I have had everything but, a course. . . .

  I look down the stall at Mrs Morris. ‘It is my break-time,’ I say. ‘I’ll be going off for my break.’

  ‘You should of been coming back by now,’ she says. She knows I haven’t got no watch. I can tell just by looking at her dozy old head that she is going to do me out of my break and I get this feeling coming over me same as I always do when someone is doing me down and I can’t do nothing about it, my face gets hot and for a bit I don’t see so well, then I hear Mortimer’s voice saying, ‘Better late than never, my old darling. Quarter past, that’s my break-time, so the two of us can go together.’ And he don’t even wait for an answer, he strips off the white jacket and reaches behind him for his own. Then he just
steps over the front of the stall. ‘Come on,’ he says, ‘Josiah, you slowcoach.’

  ‘All right,’ Mrs Morris says. ‘You better both go together, it’s a slack time.’ But he does not even look at her. Mortimer will never be beholden to nobody. When I first met him, when we first got talking, I asked him what his birthday was and I was not surprised when he said August the twelfth. He is a typical Leo. I am an Aquarian myself.

  I do not look at Mrs Morris again either. I put on my jacket, dark brown corduroy, I always wear this with my blue denim shirt, it’s a good combination for me because I have blue eyes and dark hair. Mortimer has on his black serge suit, he wears black or navy and always plain ties, maroon, dark blue, mustard, and single colour socks, there is never a stripe or a dot about Mortimer.

  He puts his arm round my shoulder as we walk off. Mortimer is six inches taller than me. ‘You don’t want to let that old bag lay the law down to you,’ he says. ‘Tell her to get stuffed.’ Mortimer is very outspoken, a course. I know he is pleased with me at the moment because of that way he put his arm round my shoulder, but I don’t know the reason, he isn’t like that all the time. What it is, I’m sensitive to people’s feelings. I am psychic, really. So I know I done the right thing. Right for Mortimer and me together, that is, not right for me on my own because I should of stood up to Mrs Morris, but them kind of thoughts mix me up. I think it is more important that Mortimer is pleased with me. I can feel his hand heavy on my shoulder. When we are walking together like this I often get a feeling that I don’t weigh nothing and my feet are not taking any weight, but Mortimer’s steps are taking us along like. I used to feel the same when I was walking beside my dad. (When I was little I mean, a course, that was before he left us and took up with his own half-sister, my Aunt Sady.)

  ‘These old bags, they need watching,’ Mortimer says. ‘Where’s Mr Morris, anyway?’

  ‘I dunno,’ I tell him. ‘I never saw no Mr Morris.’

  ‘She did him in.’

  ‘Did she honest?’ I think maybe that is why she has the trembles now.

  ‘Ah, bugger it,’ he says. ‘I don’t know. You take everything for gospel. I wouldn’t put it past her, though, would you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How would you fancy having it with her?’

  ‘Christ, no.’

  ‘You wouldn’t get a hard on, not in a thousand years.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Youth at the prow and pleasure at the helm,’ he says. Then he starts smiling. ‘You’d be immobilised, Josiah,’ he says. He is in a good mood and I feel good too, because we are taking our break together and I will have a chance to get in a bit of conversation with him.

  The cafeteria is never very crowded this time of day. I look round as we go in. A couple a lads off the Dodgems, some other blokes I know by sight off the stalls. All the rest the public. We get our tea and carry it over to one of the tables.

  I hold my cup in both hands and look over it at Mortimer, thinking now I am going to tell him how I feel about this job, now I am going to get a bit of advice like. He always listens to me, he’s the only one ever took any real interest. Mortimer listens, then he says it back to me, only better expressed like, more exact. That might sound funny, but Mortimer has a bigger vocabulary than me. Sometimes when he says things I get a shock, I can’t hardly believe them things started out in my own mind. Like when I told him about the Cyp Henry getting me down and it turned out in the course of our conversation that it was the same with all of them. Now I know they should be incarcinerated.

  That was the time we had our one and only row, because he referred to me as a Gyppo. Not that he meant any harm, but nobody calls me that. I was born in a house. My dad settled down. Him and his half-sister and my mother, they settled down in Nottingham and he went into the carting business. I was born after that. Not that we got anything in common, my dad and me, he took up with his own half-sister and made my mother do all the work. I never go there now. But that’s not the point, I was born in a house like anybody else. After talking about the wogs and the niggers, You Gyppos, he said, you are a funny lot. In the same breath, as you might say. Don’t you call me that, I said. What hurt me was him classing me the same as all them others. Nobody calls me that, I said, but I wasn’t angry. I couldn’t be, not with Mortimer. He just sat there, looking at me straight, smiling a bit, and before I knew it tears come into my eyes and Mortimer saw. You don’t want to take things so much to heart, was all he said. But he never called me that again. Now I go on looking at him for a bit, over the top of my cup. I only known him a month but it seems like all my life.

  ‘I been on this job a month now,’ I say.

  ‘So you have,’ he says. ‘You are a model of staying power, Josiah.’

  ‘I am fed up with it, matter a fact,’ I tell him. ‘It don’t suit my character.’

  ‘You feel that it does not give you scope? Why not try a change?’

  ‘A change, that’s it, I need a change.’

  ‘You will never get the gold watch, Josiah.’

  ‘What are you on about?’ I ask him. Times like this I wonder whether our friendship really means anything to Mortimer. For all he knows I might be going to leave town.

  All this time he has been letting his tea get cool—he never drinks nothing hotter than tepid. He drinks half of it now in one go, looking at me steady. ‘That girl,’ he says, ‘the one who came to the stall every night last week just when we were closing, and you went off with her, what was her name, Joan was it?’

  ‘Not Joan, Joyce.’

  ‘I knew it was something like that, I knew it was a name of that sort.’

  ‘She’s gone back to Wigan.’

  ‘She didn’t belong here then?’

  ‘No, she come to spend a week with her married sister. I told you that before, Mortimer.’

  ‘Did you? She’s gone then, has she? Back to Wigan? You won’t be getting it every night then. You’re missing it, that’s what it is. That’s your trouble, mate, you are missing your shag.’

  ‘Yes,’ I say straight off without thinking. ‘Yes, maybe that’s it.’ Truth is, I want Mortimer to think I was poking her, I don’t want him thinking I never had no girls, not in the fullest meaning of the word, I mean. So I keep quiet a minute. Then I start thinking about Joyce. Nice grey eyes, she was a very shy girl, and her hands always warm and a bit dampish like in the palms, not wet, it’s different to wetness. She cried on the last night, because the week was up. I’ve never done this for anyone before, she said. I’ve never opened my blouse for anyone before. She gave me her address written out on a piece of paper. Beautiful handwriting. There was education there, you could tell. Mortimer is smiling at me and I know he doesn’t really believe I was poking Joyce every night. ‘Well as a matter a fact I never got there,’ I say, all in a rush.

  ‘What?’ he says. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘If she’d of stayed another week maybe I’d of got there.’

  It’s a funny thing about Mortimer, you never know how he is going to take things. Now he is put out, I can tell by his face. He never wanted me to admit that about Joyce. Even though he never believed it in the first place. I can’t understand this and it makes me feel sort of lost. He is the best friend I ever had, well I been travelling about since I was fifteen but I never met anyone like him, I mean he takes a real interest. So now I think the only way of getting back to where we was before is to tell him everything we done that last night.

  ‘She wanted it,’ I say. ‘She wanted it all right, dying for it, but she was scared, see. She wouldn’t lie down. We was down under the pier and I wanted her to lie down but she wouldn’t. I was getting into her blouse like, but she said don’t be rough, she said, and she undone all her blouse for me, undone it all herself. There you are, she said. She said I was the first bloke she ever undone her blouse for. All she had on underneath—’

  ‘First man she undid her blouse for, I bet she’s got a hole like the Mersey Tunnel,’ Mort
imer says in a kind of harsh way, not like his usual speaking voice at all, and now I am really lost. I don’t know why he’s getting so much against me, I don’t know what I have done.

  I went out with her,’ I say. ‘You didn’t.’

  ‘Didn’t need to,’ he says, more quietly like. ‘I could see it a mile off, there was no need for anything . . . tactual, Josiah, I never needed to fumble her up, no.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You have to get things straight,’ he says. ‘You have to see things steady and see them whole. They will all try to tell you they are virgins. Any rotten old tart. Any old moribunda will tell you that, even in the midst of a standing shag from a syphilised seaman. With it in her up to the hilt, she’d still maintain.’

  ‘What call have you . . .?’ I say. He is moving now in spheres where I can’t follow him. Anyway, Joyce never said nothing about being a virgin, she never used that word.

  Oh no,’ he says. ‘She couldn’t ask you to deny your own eyes, could she?’ He swallows the rest of his tea, then he starts smiling. ‘Basing ourselves,’ he says, ‘on the proviso that the said jolly jack is actually shooting her a length at the moment of enquiry. No. She would say it was only the body, the shell, given over to base usages. Like all this when they say a certain woman is essentially innocent. She’s had it through every orifice you could name and a few you couldn’t but she is essentially innocent. Untouched. That is a lot of balls, Josiah, you take my word. I hate that kind of talk. I saw a couple having it once. Up against the side of a coffee stall. The woman was eating chips out of a packet. Youth at the prow and pleasure at the helm.’

  As usual I don’t know what to say. Mortimer has mastery of language like, he has a terrific flow of words in my opinion. But I still don’t understand how you can tell anything just by looking. He never even talked to Joyce. I take a look at his face. He has a long face, long and narrow, with a long chin. His hair always very neat, short back and sides.