Fifty-Minute Hour

by Wendy Perriam

  Bello:

  hidden talent rediscovered!

  Bello is a digital only imprint of Pan Macmillan, established to breathe life into previously published classic books.

  At Bello we believe in the timeless power of the imagination, of good story, narrative and entertainment and we want to use digital technology to ensure that many more readers can enjoy these books into the future.

  We publish in ebook and Print on Demand formats to bring these wonderful books to new audiences.

  About Bello:

  www.panmacmillan.com/imprints/bello

  About the author:

  www.panmacmillan.com/author/wendyperriam

  Contents

  Wendy Perriam

  Dedication

  Foreword

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty One

  Chapter Twenty Two

  Chapter Twenty Three

  Chapter Twenty Four

  Chapter Twenty Five

  Chapter Twenty Six

  Chapter Twenty Seven

  Chapter Twenty Eight

  Chapter Twenty Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty One

  Chapter Thirty Two

  Chapter Thirty Three

  Chapter Thirty Four

  Chapter Thirty Five

  Chapter Thirty Six

  Chapter Thirty Seven

  Chapter Thirty Eight

  Chapter Thirty Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty One

  Chapter Forty Two

  Chapter Forty Three

  Chapter Forty Four

  Wendy Perriam

  Fifty-Minute Hour

  Wendy Perriam

  Wendy Perriam has been writing since the age of five, completing her first ‘novel’ at eleven. Expelled from boarding school for heresy and told she was in Satan’s power, she escaped to Oxford, where she read History and also trod the boards. After a variety of offbeat jobs, ranging from artist’s model to carnation-disbudder, she now divides her time between teaching and writing. Having begun by writing poetry, she went on to publish 16 novels and 7 short-story collections, acclaimed for their power to disturb, divert and shock. She has also written extensively for newspapers and magazines, and was a regular contributor to radio programmes such as Stop the Week and Fourth Column.

  Perriam feels that her many conflicting life experiences – strict convent-school discipline and swinging-sixties wildness, marriage and divorce, infertility and motherhood, 9-to-5 conformity and periodic Bedlam – have helped shape her as a writer. ‘Writing allows for shadow-selves. I’m both the staid conformist matron and the slag; the well-organised author toiling at her desk and the madwoman shrieking in a straitjacket.’

  Dedication

  For God the Father Almighty

  (Clapham Common Branch)

  Sigmund Freud: Analysis Terminable and Interminable (1937)

  Who, if I cried, would hear me among the angelic

  orders? And even if one of them suddenly

  pressed me against his heart, I should fade in the strength of his

  stronger existence. For Beauty’s nothing

  but beginning of Terror we’re still just able to bear,

  and why we adore it so is because it serenely

  disdains to destroy us. Each single angel is terrible.

  And so I keep down my heart, and swallow the call-note

  of depth-dark sobbing. Alas, who is there

  we can make use of? Not angels, not men;

  and already the knowing brutes are aware that we don’t feel very

  securely at home

  without our interpreted world.

  Rainer Maria Rilke: Duino Elegies (1912–22)

  Chapter One

  ‘Hallo. This is 246 2321. John-Paul is not available at present, but if you leave your name, address, phone number and a short message, after you hear the tone, he will get back to you as soon as possible.’

  Liar.

  ‘Hallo. This is 246 2321. John-Paul is not available at present, but if …’

  Not available. That means sleeping, shirking, eating Garibaldi biscuits. I buy them now myself.

  ‘He will get back to you as soon as possible.’

  He used to say not ‘he’, but ‘I’ and even ‘we’. Royal we. He never phones me back. I rarely leave a message, though I think he knows it’s me. I have a special way of breathing, of putting down the phone.

  ‘John-Paul is not …’

  I like to hear his name, especially when he says it. His voice is rich and dark, like those jams they sell in tiny pots at twice the price of normal jars, then call ‘preserves’, to justify the cost. John-Paul is ‘preserved’. Old, but not admitting it. I think he wears a toupee. His hair (or hairpiece?) is very dark and straight. I often want to tug it, to see if it comes off, but his first rule says ‘No touching’, and the rules are very strict. He’d never touch me, ever, not even if I’d just been mugged or gangbanged, or crawled out of the wreckage of a near-fatal bloody car-crash – no arm around my shoulder, or brief squeeze of my hand. I’ve been wild to touch him all these last six months; dreamt about it, fantasised, embraced him in my mind, even heard his heartbeat thumping into mine, though in cold and cramping fact I’ve not so much as brushed against his jacket-sleeve, or jogged elbows when I’m going in and out. You can die from lack of touch. John-Paul, John-Paul, John-Paul, John-Paul.

  I chose him for his name – half Mayfair hairdresser and half Vatican incumbent. It was difficult to choose. There were hundreds on display, all with blurbs and selling-points, strings of letters after names, countries where they’d studied, universities which had granted them degrees; perversions, specialities, suicides, successes. He had the shortest blurb, the simplest name, and was by far the smallest there. He’s not a dwarf, but near it. He thinks he’s tall, but most men do, regardless of the facts. Just last year, a leading diet foods company in Welwyn Garden City commissioned a new survey on body-image. Seventy-seven per cent of women of normal weight described themselves as worryingly obese; eighty-seven per cent of men below five foot six regarded themselves as ‘average’, if not tall. Which makes me somewhere near a giant. I’m five foot ten in flatties, which I never wear, in fact. Tall girls in flat shoes seem to be apologising. I suppose I should say sorry all the time. I’m loud, large, dark, big-boned, and was twenty-six last birthday, and any woman worth the name should be small, slim, fair, demure and under twenty-five.

  I don’t know John-Paul’s age. I know nothing much about him, not even the colour of his eyes. He wears dark glasses all the time. It may be affectation, or chronic conjunctivitis, or a need to get attention, stand out from the crowd. Does he sleep in them, I wonder? I imagine him at night, taking off the glasses, removing his dark suit, the silk tie with its tiepin (a pearl one – probably real), the old-fashioned stiff white shirt. Nothing ever creases on John-Paul. His shoes look always pristine, never scuffed or stained. I dreamed about his shoes once. I was crouching at the bottom of his wardrobe, surrounded by a thousand pairs of shiny black size sevens. I was smaller than the shoes, and very flat and thin. Perhaps a sort of shoehorn. ‘Phallic,�
�� John-Paul commented, lighting up a Chesterfield, which itself was surely phallic, then droning on about the ‘obvious connotations’ of the word horn, and the fact it went ‘inside’ a shoe. He finds it very difficult to stay away from phalluses. I dreamed about dead mice once, and he said they were limp pricks.

  I remove my lemon Chewit, dial his number – seventh time.

  ‘If you leave your name, address, phone number and a short message …’

  I leave someone else’s name and an extremely lengthy message, which the answerphone cuts off. It’s fairly safe if I give my name as Mary. He specialises in Marys – nice quiet unassuming girls who have problems with religion, and still live with their parents, and are sweetly fair and small. I meet them on the stairs. They always smile and lower their blue eyes. I glare, and keep on glaring.

  I put the phone down, count the minutes till ten past two on Monday. Three thousand, one hundred and sixty-four. Weekends are just lost time. My week starts on Monday, when I see him; stops on Friday, when I don’t. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, are all living breathing days, not golden, but alive. Friday dies and shrivels. Saturday is putrefied. Sunday tugs the rotting flesh from bones. Monday resurrects again. The whole world hates a Monday: black Monday, back-to-work-day, end of the weekend. Not I. I bless them, hail them, pant and groan and thirst for them. Even winter Mondays, with snow above and slush beneath, and hold-ups on the tube, I’m singing psalms and swinging thuribles.

  It’s half past nine on Saturday, so things are very bad – not winter, but October, which is worse. Summer’s over, the snow and slush to come. Poets love the autumn, but they lie. Words like ‘mellow fruitfulness’ are simply syllables. Things are actually rusting, breaking down. Grazes scar the countryside, scabs form over ponds. Farmers burn dry stubble, gardeners burn old leaves. You can smell the whole world scorching, even in the towns. The bones begin to show beneath the flesh – bones of trees, of leaves.

  I haven’t got a garden, though my bedsit’s called a garden flat, which really means a basement looking out on dustbins and a dreary square of concrete. The windows are all barred. So are John-Paul’s windows. I like to think we have some small things in common. I tried to make a list once, though I didn’t get that far: dark straight hair; heavy brows, which look better on a man; long nails; long slim fingers (his are stained with nicotine); Garibaldi biscuits and the bars.

  I fetch my purse and shopping bag and set off for the butcher’s. I haven’t got a car. John-Paul drives a hearse. It may be affectation, like the glasses, or something more symbolic to do with Thanatos. Or perhaps his father was an undertaker and he was left it in the will. You can drive a hearse extremely fast if you’re not carrying a corpse. John-Paul speeds. I dawdle; kill off fourteen minutes. Three thousand, one hundred and forty-four to bear.

  I live on a main road in what politicians call the Inner City, which means poverty and problems, but also Yuppies sniffing around. There seems to be a natural cycle with most areas of London splendour, slow decay, downright squalor, then back to almost splendour. My own patch is still decayed, though a hundred years ago, or less, it was stately-smug and fashionable, and there are still relics of that grandeur left: a self-important town hall and assembly rooms, its Corinthian pilasters flaking like dry skin; half a naked lady still clutching half her drapery with one dock-fingered hand; a granite clock-tower erected to the memory of one Albert Henry Basing, now spidered with graffiti and stained by drools of urine, mainly dogs’. The clock has stopped. It’s always half past twelve. John-Paul’s clocks never stop. They go faster than any clock I know. Or slower.

  I trudge along the grey and dingy street. Albert Henry Basing would not have liked the litter, nor the vulgar Dixon’s with its rash of shouting signs, nor the launderette which smells of Madras curry, nor the stale and fetid air. Inner City air is always breathed-out air, expelled from sickly lungs. No young and frisky oxygen. And you can hardly tell one season from another. There’s very little sky left, and trees are luxuries. The only green is mulched and rotting cabbages chucked into the gutter from the market stalls. Keats would never have written Autumn had he lived here, only Melancholy.

  There’s a queue at Bullock’s, but Wilhelm lets me jump it. I wouldn’t say we’re friends, more business partners. We trade in dreams, not meat. I don’t like meat, especially not in Bullock’s, where decapitated rabbits swing from hooks, pathetic scraps of fur still patch worked to their twisted bleeding carcasses. A few last desperate feathers cling round naked turkey necks; livers and intestines coil black in neat white trays. I prefer to eat things which have neither lived nor died. Even lettuces can scream when they are shredded. Cheese and milk are safer: strawberry-flavoured milk in plastic cartons, or very mild white babies’ cheese mushed up in silver foil. No mould or rind or oozings, no strong sour smells reminding me of cows.

  ‘Hallo, pet,’ says Wilhelm. His accent is quite thick still, though he’s lived in England since 1956. He must be seventy-five now, and rumour says he was an SS guard at Auschwitz, who escaped reprisals and set up home in Twyford with Welsh collies and an English wife, then moved to London after his divorce. His dreams are like the rumours – shocking, very violent, and drenched in blood and guilt. My own dreams are far too timid: drab and grey and often just fragmented shreds and wisps. Not gas chambers, but 1930s wardrobes; dead mice instead of decimated Jews. I’ve been making much more progress since I borrowed Wilhelm’s dreams. Not borrowed – bought. I pay Wilhelm in sex. He rattles off a dream or two while he’s still slicing tongues or gouging eyes from calves’ heads, then he takes me out the back, where the sawdust’s damp with gore and later sperm. I’m meant to swallow it, but it’s not that hard to cheat. We’re restricted to fellatio, since both time and space are short. The room is very cold and full of corpses. You can hear noises from the shop: meat-saws hacking thigh bones, choppers cleaving breasts. Afterwards, he adds a few more details, or even a new dream, and also gives me luxuries like veal or T-bone steaks, which my landlord’s wife accepts in lieu of rent. It’s a complicated system, but it works.

  Wilhelm’s very tall (which makes me less conspicuous), and also very bald. As if in compensation, other hairs luxuriate – fierce dark hairs in nostrils, long grey hairs in ears, jutting shelves of eyebrows meeting in the middle, hairs sprouting from his shirt neck and tangling with the medal, coarse hairs on wrists and thumbs. He wears white, like a doctor, but blood-stained white to match his blood-stained hands.

  I unzip his blood-stiff trousers, kneel down in the sawdust, coax his foreskin back. He hates it if I bite, so I draw my lips right down until they’re covering my teeth, keep them firm and taut, like a schoolgirl’s small tight cunt. I try to build a rhythm, as much for my sake as for his. Once my mouth and hand are moving up and down, up and down, more or less together, more or less in time, I can slip away to Shropshire. I was born in Ludlow, where autumn was dramatic, even as it died, and winter had a grandeur in its cold and splintered cruelty.

  I flick my tongue up and down his frenulum, climb the hill beyond my childhood home. The bank of oaks and beeches is so bright it seems on fire, blue smoke choking from the pyre of golden leaves, the sky bleeding in reflection. I can’t smell fire, but chestnuts; leaves rotting underfoot; the sweet pink smell of dolly-mixtures clutched in my hot hand. I can hear a nut-hatch chiselling at beech mast, splintering the shells, snatching the soft kernels as they spray into the air. Other sounds intrude: Wilhelm’s German gaspings (he always comes in German); a woman talking sausages, whose shrill and discontented voice soars out from the shop. ‘The beef are far too salty, and those pork are solid fat. Heart-attacks with mash.’

  I close my eyes, concentrate on Wilhelm. He’s taking far too long, yet the one mingy dream he gave me was brief and even boring. He’s less generous than he used to be, or maybe just too old, so his memories are dulling, the nightmares tailing off. I increase the pressure slightly, use my other hand to graze his testicles, nails scratching, almost clawing. He
likes me to be rough, so long as it’s not teeth. He comes, at last, with a great guttural German cry. His sperm tastes bloody, and is tepid on my tongue. I hold it in my mouth while he straightens up his clothes and fusses with the sawdust, which we’ve scuffed and disarranged. Then I spit it out, guiltily and furtively, pretending just to cough. Impossible to swallow it, to have Wilhelm’s guilt inside me, churning through my bloodstream. Already I feel tainted – a quisling, a collaborator; Wilhelm’s hands my own now, as I whip the naked prisoners to their camps. How could I have done this for a dream? Would I murder for John-Paul, exterminate six million?

  Yes, I think I would. I suspect he found me boring before I had good dreams, and it’s essential that he likes me, doesn’t cast me out. I’d shave my head if he said it made me pretty, lop it off completely if he preferred to see me with just a gaping neck. He seems excited by the dreams, says I’ve stopped repressing all my violence. I remember as a five-year-old crying one whole Sunday because I’d found a wounded bird. I’m not well-trained in violence, but I have to make an effort, fight to be more interesting than all those bashful Marys, who probably dream of bloodbaths every night.

  I shudder as Wilhelm passes me the limp and soggy package. Sweetbreads? Maybe brains? I never check until I get back home. That would make me seem a prostitute, counting out my coins.

  ‘Same time next week, mein Schatzlein.’ I try to nod and smile. My mouth tastes bloody still. I can hear the cries of butchered Jewish children. ‘And I hate those herbs you put in them,’ the sausage woman nags. ‘They look like specks of dirt.’ Why is she still there? Years have passed, whole decades. She should be old by now, or dead. Shrivelled like a sausage skin.

  People shift and mutter as I pass them in the queue; see I haven’t paid. I long to shout, ‘I have paid.’ Far too highly. I sneak out with my head down, limp along to Waitrose. It’s a very large exotic branch which sells Israeli pomegranates and ewes’ milk with no additives. I buy two pots of instant noodles and a yogurt labelled ‘passion fruit’, and John-Paul’s Garibaldis. I sent him two huge crates once. He never thanked me, though he crunched them every session, which I suppose was thanks enough. He has a problem with orality and eats or smokes continuously.