Eating Air

by Pauline Melville

  The police would have been even more surprised had they been able to see what happened then. As soon as she was inside the house Hetty Moran ran up the stairs and let herself in to the first floor flat. Without switching the light on she darted to the window and stood to one side behind the curtain so that she would not be visible from the street. She watched the two officers sitting in the car. When she saw the policeman approaching the front door she dashed to her bed and crept between freshly laundered sheets which were stiff and white. She lay motionless for a while, heart thumping with anticipation, as she waited for the doorbell to ring. Nothing happened. She propped herself up on her elbow, listening intently. On hearing the police car drive away she was half-relieved and half-disappointed. She checked the window, then poured herself a vodka and took it into the front room.

  After a while she pulled the curtains shut, switched on the table-lamp and went to stand in front of the large gilt-edged mirror that hung over the mantelpiece. The top of the mirror leaned forward a little from the wall. In the lamplight the room reflected in the mirror seemed unfamiliar and mysterious. Hetty preferred that reflected room to the real one in which she stood. She examined her own image: a pretty face with no strong features and a torrent of blonde curls. She felt empty. A wave of disgust came over her. She needed some Dionysiac remedy for the dryness and desolation that plagued her. A tug of envy pulled at her stomach when she thought of Ella and Donny. After a while she went to bed.

  The engaged couple came round a week later. Hetty cooked for them and admired Ella’s sapphire ring.

  ‘Oh it’s gorgeous, honey,’ she crooned.

  *

  Donny McLeod knocked on the door of the first floor flat in Muswell Hill and Hetty opened it. Hetty’s hair was piled up untidily. She wore a pale blue polo-necked sweater and had a lighted cigarette in her hand. The hoover which she had left on blared hoarsely in the background.

  ‘Did I leave my tobacco tin here, hen, when Ella and I were here the other night?’

  ‘I don’t know. Come in and have a look.’ Hetty pushed some loose strands of hair back over her shoulders, yawned and switched off the hoover.

  ‘This place is a tip. I’m just cleaning up.’

  Donny came in and looked on the coffee table, under the table and on the mantelpiece.

  ‘Nah. No luck. I must have left it somewhere else. Shame. I liked that tin.’

  ‘Here, have one of these.’ She tapped a cigarette out of a packet of Marlboro. ‘I’ll make some tea.’

  She came back out of the kitchen with two cups of tea.

  ‘What time is it?’ She looked preoccupied. ‘Sorry if I’m a bit all over the place. I’ve been trying to cope with some bad news from home.’

  ‘Oh aye.’ Donny sounded wary. He disliked hearing bad news.

  Her expression changed, as quickly as fleeting clouds from pain to stoicism.

  ‘Never mind. It doesn’t matter. Just the usual demons that continue to haunt my family in the States.’ Hetty pulled a grim face and sipped her tea.

  ‘They should come over here and join my demons. My demons are having the time of their lives.’ Donny lit up his cigarette. Hetty gave a rueful smile:

  ‘Sometimes I wonder if I’m clinically depressed.’

  Donny looked at her askance:

  ‘Why do you have to be clinically depressed? Why can’t you just be fucking ordinarily depressed like the rest of us? Where’s the sugar?’ She handed him the bowl and he put four teaspoonfuls into his cup.

  Hetty laughed, then her lower lip suddenly trembled uncontrollably.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Her voice slid upwards tearfully. ‘But my dad’s just gone back into a mental hospital.’ She bit her lip and twisted her head to one side, shaking tears out of her eyes like transparent jewels. ‘Christ. What’s wrong with my family? I need some medication myself. Do you take pills ever?’ She wiped her nose with the back of her wrist.

  ‘Nope. I don’t need tranquillisers. I just make do with a wall to smash my head against every now and then.’

  She came and stood in front of where he sat on the sofa. Hetty’s eyes were the colour of mineral chrysoberyl: a greenish yellow or gold. They changed colour with the light, as if they could reflect back at people what they wanted to see. She looked directly at him, breathing so rapidly that she was on the verge of hyperventilating. She folded her arms across her chest looking distressed and gulped:

  ‘Donny, can I ask you a favour?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Could you give me a hug? I really need one right now. I really need to be in your arms for a few minutes.’

  He put down his tea and stared at her with distaste, as if she were a hair in his soup.

  ‘Fuck off. That’s all I fucking need. Mata Hari from Minnesota or wherever the fuck you’re from. I’m away.’ He rose to his feet with a gesture of irritation and made for the door.

  Hetty, changeable as the skies, immediately metamorphosed into a pragmatic, calm and dignified young woman. She sat down on the bed and patted it, indicating that he should sit down beside her. He remained standing.

  ‘OK. I’m sorry Donny. I’ll tell you why I’m upset. I’ve never told Ella about all this. My dad served in Vietnam, OK. He was a colonel in the Third Commando Division. When he came back my mother couldn’t handle him. He had these rages. He was hospitalised. Then one day last summer my mother came out of the wash house and found him hanging from one of the apple trees in the orchard at the back of the house.’

  Donny was still staring at her:

  ‘How picturesque of him.’

  ‘She had to cut him down. He survived. He’s been in and out of mental hospitals ever since.’

  There was now a look of open dislike on Donny’s face. Hetty shrugged and raised her eyebrows in mild disdain.

  ‘OK.’ She stood up, smoothing her skirt, and said with composure, ‘I really don’t mind if you believe it or not, sweetie. That’s up to you. I have to get on with the hoovering.’

  He put out his cigarette still looking at her.

  ‘You know what you’re like – a fucking film-set. All façade. You’re all front. Behind you is just fucking emptiness. You’re like the set of an American Western, very convincing from the front, but at the back it’s just a flat one-dimensional film-set supported by struts and looking out on to nothing but bare earth and emptiness.’

  Donny made for the door. He turned to look at Hetty. Her face had become stiff and turned grey like a stone angel. For a moment the stone angel with its ancient pitted face of porous lava rock and cavernous eyes stared back at him. Then Hetty smiled her golden smile. She could have been awarded a billion-dollar contract for smiling. She pinned back some loose corkscrew strands of hair, turned away and switched on the hoover.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Ella told her mother about Donny and the wedding plans. She took Donny down to Kent to meet Alice, who waited for them on the doorstep. Alice now lived in a small miner’s cottage. There was an air of desolation about the place. The cottage had once been condemned and was almost entirely held together by plaster and by its dull pebble dash exterior, but Alice liked having a garden where she could hang her washing. Two horses grazed in an adjacent field. Her sister Doris lived in nearby Elvington and they worked together with miners’ wives picking fruit and vegetables on a local farm. Ella noticed how shy and flustered her mother looked as she welcomed them in. She seemed older and diminished in some way.

  ‘Come in and have a cup of tea and a bite to eat. How’s the dancing?’ her mother asked.

  ‘It’s fine.’

  After eating steak and kidney pie and salad in the kitchen, they went into the small sitting-room. The room had been tidied, the cushions plumped, the carpet swept. There, with great courtesy, Donny asked Mrs de Vries for permission to marry her daughter, while Ella sat on the settee in silence turning the pages of a mail order catalogue.

  ‘Yes. I suppose that’s all right if that’s what you both wa
nt.’ Alice wiped her hands on her apron. ‘Now then, what about some pudding?’ She turned to Donny, who was looking out of the window. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have given you salad. You’re a working man like my brothers. My mother wouldn’t have known a salad if she saw one. Nobody had ever heard of egg mayonnaise in our house.’

  ‘What’s that railway-line doing there?’ asked Donny peering through the window.

  ‘Oh that’s just a little local line that brings the coal wagons from Tilmanstone Colliery.’

  Donny smiled:

  ‘We used to have a line just like that when I lived in Dalkeith. I helped deliver the milk churns.’

  Alice was pleased to find common ground:

  ‘We had milk churns when I was a girl. Some of the miners’ families still use them round here. The miners are getting ready to go on that big protest march in London. They’ve hired buses. I’m helping to sew their banners. You should see the work in them. All that beautiful stitching. I love sewing. My best friend Emmie was apprenticed to do church embroidery. I love to see the banners in a procession. Mind you I don’t know what’s happening with all these strikes. I might even go for the liberials next time. Or do I mean liberians? The ones in the middle of conservative and labour.’

  Donny laughed a gurgling laugh and nearly choked on his tea.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘They all get on my nerves.’

  The laugh was infectious. Alice laughed with him. She began to feel more at ease and risked teasing him.

  ‘Oh you’ve got nerves, have you? You’re lucky to have nerves. We couldn’t afford them in my day. Nobody had nerves then. Or am I being spiteful? We cockneys can be spiteful, you know. If we see somebody wearing gloves we say it’s because they haven’t got any fingers. Now do you want another cup of tea before you go?’

  Alice watched Donny open the gate and let Ella through. He was pointing at the grazing horses and Ella was laughing at something he had said.

  *

  After they’d gone her sister Doris’s face peered tentatively around the door.

  ‘How did it go?’

  ‘I think it went off all right.’ Alice was sitting in front of the television. ‘Move the cat off that chair and sit down. He seems all right. At least he’s not posh. Since she started moving in that other world I’ve always been frightened that she was going to bring back somebody who was so la-di-dah I couldn’t understand them. Like that play I went to see the other day up in London.’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘Age Concern didn’t want their tickets so they gave them to us. What did we see? Oh what was it called? It had a funny name and it was by someone. Adrenalin, was it?’

  Alice fished for the programme in her bag.

  ‘Here it is. Andromache. I might as well have stayed at home and cut my throat with a rusty razor.’

  ‘I know what you mean,’ said Doris. ‘They took us to see A Midsummer Night’s Dream.’

  ‘What was that like?’

  ‘All right but there was a bit too much Shakespeare in it. Is she happy, do you think?’

  ‘Ella? Oh, she’s happy as a butcher’s dog. She doesn’t say much. She never was forthcoming.’

  ‘Seventeen is young to be married. But I suppose then she’d have time to get a divorce and marry someone else. What did you give them to eat?’

  ‘Beef pies and salad. And then some plums and custard.’

  ‘That’s not much.’

  ‘You can talk. You can’t cook anything. You’d burn water.’

  ‘Well I hope she’ll be all right.’

  Alice shrugged and handed everything over to fate:

  ‘You can’t stop them. They do what they like anyway. He’s got a lovely laugh, though. He could warm the world up with a laugh like that.’

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Students and members of the company took it in turns to perform the steps diagonally across the brightly lit top-floor studio, while others leaned against the barre watching or limbering and stretching.

  Ella had tied the arms of her grey cardigan around her waist to make a flap at the back. Her black hair was pinned on top of her head but a crest of it had come loose and quivered as she moved. She set off across the room making the infinitesimal adjustments required by inertia, spin and the friction of her pointed toe on the floor. With the dancer’s instinctive understanding of gravity and balance, she managed to achieve four pirouette turns, giving her spin back to the earth which was also spinning in the same direction. The slenderness of her legs belied their muscular strength. When she leaped into the air, her legs scissored open in a grand jeté and she seemed to hang there allowing the earth beneath to change its orbital trajectory by one tenth-of-a-billionth-of-an-atom’s width to accommodate her landing.

  One of the other dancers was looking out of the studio window on to the street.

  ‘Who is that man who looks like a young Gary Cooper? I keep seeing him hanging around.’

  ‘It’s Ella de Vries’s boyfriend. I think she’s going to marry him.’

  ‘Really? She’s a dark horse, isn’t she?’

  Donny was waiting outside the pub opposite the studio. It was a December mid-morning of furious bright blue skies and sleet-cleaned streets. Tiny flakes of snow spangled his collar-length hair and lodged in his moustache. A knife-whetting wind sliced at his face. He pulled the collar of his jacket up for protection. His toolbag, containing a level, a string-line and a trowel, rested at his feet.

  Class finished and minutes later Ella was running up the road towards him. She had wound a red woollen scarf around her neck. There was always the fear that if she kept him waiting too long he would disappear. They had planned to go Christmas shopping. Jingles and tinny carols piped out from shop doorways into the streets.

  As they made their way towards Oxford Street, they could hear in the distance the sound of chants and echoing shouts through megaphones. The noise grew into a roar. They turned a corner to find themselves confronted by a flood of people and the ebullient swirling energy of a huge demonstration. An elderly man marched by, his cheeks crimson with cold like the last flare of sunset. Donkey-jacketed stewards gestured for demonstrators to keep up with the marchers in front. The air was filled with the shriek of whistles. Workers’ banners swung high along the street. Office workers hung out of their windows looking down on trades unionists, communists and Trotskyists marching together, yelling ‘Kill the Bill’ in unison. People handed out leaflets.

  ‘Come and join us,’ enthusiastic demonstrators beckoned to the onlookers.

  A phalanx of miners under the ornate banner of their branch of the NUM, and accompanied by the braying of a brass band, marched past Donny and Ella as they stood on the pavement and watched.

  ‘Perhaps that’s one of the banners mum helped sew,’ Ella said, as the miners swung past. Behind them came a group of jaunty actors with a banner that said: ‘Save Our Profession.’

  Ella recognised the familiar face of a leading actress.

  ‘Look. I think that’s Vera Scobie.’

  Wearing a black knitted beret and high-collared winter coat, the actress with fine features and swimming-pool blue eyes was walking backwards leading a small group and conducting a chant:

  William Shakespeare, William Blake

  We are marching for your sake.

  The actress then proceeded to make a speech through a megaphone which was drowned out by the colliery band.

  A scuffle broke out nearby. A young man with a mane of light brown hair was bracing himself against two policemen as they dragged him towards a police van. Placards and poles were being thrown at the police line. The police lost their hold on the young man who ducked back into the crowd.

  There was a look of dislike on Donny’s face.

  ‘Come on. Let’s get the fuck out of here,’ he snarled.

  ‘What are they demonstrating about?’ asked Ella.

  ‘Fuck knows. Having moral principles is against everything I believe in.
I am against anybody who is for anything. War I don’t mind. It’s patriotism that I hate. Flags and shite. I hate things to do with flags, parades, glory and honour. All I want to do is wander about the earth. I don’t give a shit about nations or politics or anything. Come on.’

  The shouts of the marchers receded behind them as they made their way back through the Christmas shoppers.

  Ella hurried behind him trying to keep up as he pushed his way ahead.

  ‘What do you believe in then?’

  ‘Nothing. Children. The innocence of children. Humanity. Die for an idea? What a load of fucking shite. You can be imprisoned by an idea. And all the wankers who have ideas try to slaughter you. Which ideas, anyway? Communism? Paradise? Ideas are things that are all alike. That’s why I like children. They don’t say go and die for this or that. They’ve got too much sense.’

  He pushed open the swing door of a pub.

  ‘Come on. Let’s have a drink? We’ll go shopping later.’

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Entering the pub was like diving underwater into a brown river. Donny dumped his toolbag by his feet at the bar. Only one other customer sat in the corner. He was a fat, bald, snub-nosed man, a cheerful pub regular who raised his glass of beer to Donny. He had wispy grey hair and a smooth face; half cherub, half satyr. A cigarette drooped permanently from his lips which gave him an air of whimsical, disrespectful humour. Donny greeted him.

  ‘Hello, Sil.’

  Ella loosened her red scarf.

  ‘Can you get me a lemonade. No. I’ll have a coke. I’ve got to be back in the theatre in a couple of hours. If I have alcohol before a performance I fall over.’

  Donny downed his double whisky, enjoying the sensation as it cut a warm channel through him. He ordered another. The pub door swung open and seven or eight demonstrators crowded in. The first one was out of breath and laughing. He was the one they had seen escaping from the police. He tossed back his lion-head of tawny hair and examined the rip in the sleeve of his pale brown sheepskin jacket.