‘No point in biting the hand that feeds us. We don’t have to go straight away. We can stay here for a bit.’
Donny stood still on the landing, his hands in his pockets, with bitter humour in his eyes.
‘Listen. I would bite not only the hand that feeds me but any other fucking hand within tooth-reach: the helping fucking hand; the hand across the sea; the hand out; the hand-up; the upper hand; the hand of God. Whatever hand is fucking available, I will fucking bite it.’
They went on up the stairs to their own flat.
‘Donny, I don’t think you should have come back … the police might be looking for you. We don’t know where Mark is or what he’s said.’
Before Ella could finish Donny turned on her with a look of burning contempt. He looked around their flat. It still bore the imprint of the police raid in the broken locks, the damaged record player and the piles of books that had been taken down and scattered around. He picked up one of the books and let it drop. Ella sensed that he could barely contain his rage at the violation. He pulled on his jacket.
‘I’m going out for a few minutes.’
*
When Donny came back, Ella was curled up on the sofa trying to read an old biography of Diaghilev.
He ignored her and walked straight over to the window. The grey evening light caught the top of his head. His hair needed a wash and gleamed dark chestnut. The collar of his jacket at the back of his neck was stiff with dirt. He stared out of the window without seeming to see anything. His facial muscles tightened and then contorted. He held his chin, then moved his hand down slowly, pulling his face into a sort of grimace. There was an earthquake of sadness behind his eyes. He behaved as though the rest of the world had evaporated and he was in the room on his own. The light from the unshaded bulb overhead was harsh and yellow. Ella raised herself onto her elbow and watched him. For a while he stood in the centre of the room just holding his chin and staring at the floor. Then he turned away from the window and pulled out a twopenny piece from his jeans pocket. He spun the coin towards the mantelpiece, with a gesture that was both vicious and dismissive. The coin hit a large yellow vase that exploded into shards. The shattering of that vase seemed to release in him a simultaneous burst of violence. Some savagery emerged from the depth of his nervous system that plummeted him down to the level of the black explosion of a boar.
Ella pulled her legs up onto the bed and leaned back against the wall, keeping absolutely still as he picked up the iron from the floor and flung it with the movement of a discus thrower. It left a black hole in the partition wall. The room began to shatter and buckle. Plaster fell from the ceiling. Ella remained motionless in the eye of the hurricane. The violence did not feel directed at her personally. It was an elemental storm; a frenzy introduced into the world of comfort and security. More plaster and powder showered her head as he hurled a cast-iron frying-pan at the ceiling. The pan fell back and bounced off the bed onto the blue carpet. Picking it up again, he held it over his head and used it to smash the table, which buckled and disintegrated into splinters and matchsticks. The order of the world exploded.
There was a dangerous electrical sweat over Donny’s face like the leakings of an old battery. His features twisted into a grimace as he went about the destruction, looking dangerously well, possessed and empowered by some illness of the soul. Ella knew there was no point in speaking or even calling his name. He had retreated into his own interior desert, seeing and hearing nothing around him and with no idea who the enemy might be. Pitiless, holy and horrible, he was in a state of battle frenzy. He started hurling furniture at the window: first a chair which crashed out and fell to the pavement four storeys below; then a bookcase which became wedged between the window frame and the guttering, allowing most of the books to tumble to the ground beneath. His eyes were oddly distorted, one eye open wide and blazing, the other narrowed to a slit. The light caught the horseshoe dent on his forehead. Before he flung it, he gazed at each piece of furniture as if it were both a sacrament and pollution. And throughout all this there was an expression on his face of exaltation, repulsion and mad humour.
Somewhere far below, amidst the sounds of tearing destruction, Ella heard the sound of the front doorbell.
‘That’s the bell. I’m just going to see who it is.’ She edged towards the door and flew down the stairs.
When she opened the front door, brilliant lights shone in and uniformed men wandered up and down the front steps as if aliens had landed or she was on a film-set. She shaded her eyes and saw four police squad cars parked, headlights blazing, with their noses drawn up in a semi-circle around the house. A gentle rain was falling. The drizzle, caught in the headlights, looked like dancing atomic particles. On the damp pavement were damaged books and the wreckage of half the bookcase that had finally fallen out.
‘A neighbour called us,’ said the local policeman with a radio. ‘Said there was a disturbance.’
Ella did not have time to say anything before everyone’s attention was distracted by the sounds of continuing destruction inside the house.
None of the police volunteered to investigate. Ella shivered. She had run out without a coat. Everybody looked towards the front door which gaped wide onto the dark interior of the hall. Eventually the sounds from inside ceased and there was silence. Outside there came the gravelly call and response from one of the officers on his radio. Then came the unmistakable noise of someone descending the stairs with uneven steps and the occasional slithering crash. Among those waiting below, tension grew. The police instinctively stepped back and formed a semi-circle some fifteen feet distant from the front door. Ella went and stood with them, taking her place in the middle of the curved line. After a while Donny appeared in the doorway brandishing a piece of broken banister. His body looked odd, all angles, as if he had turned around in his skin. One wild, shining tuft of hair stood up on his head like a jet of black blood. His eyes were mobile as if they had got loose in his face. He looked deranged. Nobody spoke. After a while he put down his weapon and surveyed the scene in front of him. His eyes focused on Ella, standing in the line of police, with a mixture of surprise and pleasure.
‘Ella,’ he said. ‘You’ve joined the police force.’
Everyone started to laugh.
Donny smiled with them. He looked over his shoulder and pointed at the open front door.
‘That house has had too much to drink,’ he said.
One of the policemen spoke into his radio: ‘It’s a domestic.’ He looked at Ella. ‘Are you all right, miss?’
She nodded. The other policemen headed for their cars. Each in turn drove away. Donny staggered off awkwardly, as if his feet and knees were turned backwards. He disappeared around the corner, leaving Ella on her own in the dark street.
*
Ella climbed the stairs to their flat. She was exhausted. The curved banisters on the top landing were smashed and broken. In the sitting-room, water from the large broken flower vase on the mantelpiece still purled silently onto the small tiled hearth. The panels of the door were all cracked. The room felt cold and full of a tangible ugliness as if the air had been poisoned by violence. She sat on the edge of the sofa bed and smoothed the coverlet. Puzzled, she noticed that the cheap bedspread was damp to the touch. Then she realised that rain must have come in through the shattered windows. Everything in the room was stiffly rearranged in fragments: vicious shards, jagged splinters of glass, shattered wood, pottery and pieces of plaster were strewn about.
She went over to the window. The bottom end of the bookcase lay wedged in the guttering outside the window. The other half lay in the street below, where it was possible to see pages of the books fluttering here and there. A cold wind blew into the room. The window panes had shattered into the sharp peaks and troughs of a child’s drawing of mountains. One curtain, partially caught on the spikes of glass, twisted and flapped. The wind filled the other curtain, making it billow into the room. Ella felt that some sort of wildness fro
m outside had invaded her home. She looked around. Everything was unfamiliar. There was the black outline of a hole in the wall above the skirting-board. Not an ornament remained intact on the mantelpiece. It was as if the room had witnessed the roaring black violence of a mad god. Nearly everything was smashed. The only item that remained undamaged was Donny’s beloved television set.
Ella lay on the damp bed. She slept fitfully in her clothes and woke with a start. She looked at the bedside clock. Half past five. The early morning light lit the empty pillow beside her.
Systole: the contraction or period of contraction of the heart. He had not returned. A pitiless bird outside unstitched the dawn with its trilling song.
The next morning, Ella phoned the theatre and told the stage manager she had flu and would not be coming to rehearsal. The inside of her mouth was parched and dry. She lay staring at the wall and the iron fireplace. At around eleven she heard Donny coming up the stairs. He entered the room. His boots scrunched on the broken glass. He fetched a broom and began to sweep. She lifted her head up from the pillow.
‘Do you want a cup of tea?’ she asked. He looked drained and tired.
‘Aye. That’d be a good thing,’ he said.
*
Shortly after that episode the electricity board cut off their supply. Ella prepared food and cooked by the light of the gas stove. They had replaced the smashed table with a small trestle-table and they ate by the light of one candle, its flame remaining almost motionless, in the shape of a molar tooth. Donny’s face, caught in the pale yellow light, was haggard. Her love seemed to part and stream round him like a river that flows around a rock.
‘I have to go away.’ He wiped his plate with a piece of bread.
‘Because of the police? Do you think Mark might have said something to the police? If they were looking for you, why didn’t they arrest you the other night?’
‘They were local police, not Special Branch. The two don’t always connect with each other.’
They sat on the bed. Ella stroked his arm.
‘We don’t know what Mark might have said or done.’
He shook her arm off.
‘I don’t give a shit. Mark is a cunt, a whole cunt and nothing but a cunt.’
‘Perhaps you’re right. It would be safer for you to go away.’
‘I’m always fucking right.’
‘What about us? I want to have a serious talk about our relationship.’
‘Oh yes?’ Donny raised a challenging eyebrow and looked at her with a humorous glint in his eye. ‘Who with? Not me, I hope.’
He gave her a reassuring kiss, hugged her and rolled himself a cigarette.
‘Look. I’m not going away because it’s safer. I don’t give a fuck about safety. I don’t like this city. No horizons. Everything’s dead here. A wasteland. Nobody seems to be awake in London. Everybody’s in some dream. It’s a fucking hall of mirrors. A big shopping arcade; all windows, reflections, lights and illuminations. It’s one long conveyor belt of tarted-up garbage. We should both leave. I was talking to the trawler men up north. I might try Norway. I need to see horizons. Now then, switch on the telly.’
‘The telly doesn’t work without electricity.’
Panic bubbled up in Ella. She put her arms round his neck and rested her head on his shoulder.
‘How will you keep in touch? I will have left this house. How will you find me? When will you come back? Will you send me a postcard?’
‘I’d rather dip my hand in boiling lead than write a fucking postcard. I’ll find you through your mum.’ He cheered up for a moment and kissed her. ‘And if the fucking revolutionaries turn up again tell them how I’ve been distributing literature to the working class in Bethnal Green.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘I threw the bookcase through the window, didn’t I?’
His guffaws of laughter took some of the pain away. Donny went out and got six bottles of wine. He took out his guitar and began singing ‘In the Summertime’, imitating Mungo Jerry. After a while Ella danced around the room, partnered by the wild gyrations of her shadow on the wall.
‘I love it when you dance like that,’ he said. ‘We’ll be all right.’
Later, when they were lying in bed together, a wind burst through the broken window and extinguished the candle.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
A week later, Donny phoned from Aberdeen to say he’d found work on a trawler. Ella felt a rising anxiety as she asked:
‘Shall I come up and see you off? I’m not working till Thursday night.’
‘No. No. Let me be. We’ll be together again. Soon. Don’t worry.’
She could hear the wind behind him battering the window panes of the phone booth, and could only just make out his words.
‘Look. I want you to do something for me. There are four sticks of gelignite that I hid under the tiles of the roof. If you go to our window – the one that I broke – and lean out and twist round to look at the edge of the roofing you’ll see two loose tiles above you to the right where the gutter is broken. They’re under there. I want you to take them to the river and throw them in, at night. Otherwise they can trace them to the site where I was working. OK? They won’t go off without detonators. They were going to use it to blow up Fort Halstead or some fucking thing. Have you got that?’
‘I think so.’
‘Good. Bye then. I’ll call you tomorrow.’
‘Don’t go for a minute.’ Ella could not bear for the contact to be broken. She heard the humorous exasperation in Donny’s voice.
‘I’ve got things to do. People to see. I’m trying to say goodbye here and you’re clinging on to that phone like an octopus. Bye for now. I’ll phone you tomorrow.’
Ella went immediately to the window. She leaned out, twisted round and saw the loose tiles. She lifted off the two reddish, cracked tiles and could just see the sticks of gelignite. She retrieved them and put them under the pillow on the bed. Her hands reeked of the oily marzipan and almond smell of gelignite. Ella decided to dispose of them after the show. Then she ran round the house putting the gelignite in various different places. Each time she put it somewhere after ten minutes she would panic and move it somewhere else. In the end, she left it in the wardrobe in their bedroom covered by a dressing-gown. Although she scrubbed her hands, the smell remained and gave her a headache like a bad hangover, so that when she went to class the next day she found it difficult to balance.
*
After class in Floral Street, Ella hurried straight to the Royal Opera House. The new cast list for Swan Lake was to be announced. Despite the upheavals at home, she could not wait to see if her name was on the noticeboard. It would be her first step towards becoming a soloist and a principal dancer. The cast list was always pinned up in the draughty corridor backstage. She decided that she would find somewhere else to live and concentrate entirely on her dancing until all this had blown over. She ran her eyes up and down the list. Her name was not on it. Manuela’s name was there as one of the cygnets. Ella’s name was at the bottom of the list but only as a member of the corps de ballet, not one of the named performers. She checked and re-checked. At that minute the artistic director of the company poked her head around the door of her office and called her in.
‘Sit down, Elissa.’
On the office walls hung the black and white posed, signed photographs of Fonteyn and Beryl Grey and Leonard Massine; demure, distant, frozen black-eyed sprites, corybantes and maenads. Ella sat upright on the chair. The director spoke briskly.
‘Now Elissa, you have done very well this year. We are very pleased with you. We had a long discussion about the cygnets. You are suited in every way, but in the end we decided that for the look of the production you are slightly too dark to be cast. The director of this production wants all the cygnets to look as similar as possible. It’s an entirely aesthetic judgment on the part of the designer and director and no reflection on your abilities as a dancer. I just wanted to reas
sure you that you’re making excellent progress, and perhaps there will be something else later in another production.’
Ella nodded her head in polite acknowledgement. She gave no indication of what she was feeling. Inside she was aghast and her stomach agape with misery.
The director continued: ‘Would you pop along to Miss Wren’s office? We would like you to attend the Friends and Associates function this year.’
Ella was numb. She avoided the curious eyes of the other dancers around the noticeboard and made her way down the corridor. In a daze she knocked on the door of Miss Wren’s office.
Miss Wren was a skinny, flat-chested but efficient woman who wore her black hair in an old-maidish bun and was secretary to the Friends and Associates of the Royal Ballet. She opened the door and ushered Ella into her cramped office. The ‘Friends and Associates’ was an organisation that supported and sometimes donated funds to the ballet company. Amongst other things, Yolande Wren arranged an annual function. Each year some eminent sponsor of the ‘Friends’ would throw open his or her house for a bash, allowing sycophantic balletomanes to meet members of the company. The members were mostly grey-haired afficionados who had lost their souls to ballet years earlier.
‘Now dear. We would like you to be one of the company who goes to the function this year. It’s quite an honour for you to be invited. It will be tomorrow, Saturday. I’ve checked that you don’t have either a matinee or an evening performance.’
Ella was in a trance, half aware of the fan in the ceiling circulating the stale air of the office. The woman went on:
‘Lynn Seymour is coming back to the company to dance Anastasia in the MacMillan ballet and she has promised to attend. We will meet at the stage door at one thirty and cars will take everybody there, but you will have to find your own away home. Is that all right?’
Ella nodded. She left Miss Wren’s office, went into the Ladies’ toilets on the first floor and examined her coffee-coloured skin.
Eating Air Page 24
