Fifty-Minute Hour

by Wendy Perriam

  ‘John-Paul?’ I say myself.

  ‘Yes, Nial?’

  I settle back, say nothing, don’t need to talk at all. It’s enough to know he’s there and real and listening. I like the tiny noises from his body, which prove he’s still alive – a rumble from his stomach, the slow sucking of a sweet. I wish I were a sweet myself, so he could suck me very slowly. Or a ship, so he would put me in his bottle. Or his half-a-boat, so he would lie down on my deck. I cut out every John and Paul I could find in all the magazines and newspapers, joined them all with hyphens, hung them over road-signs, stuck them on to street-names. Every road now leads to him, every house contains him. He’s living in my basement, and in all the rooms above it, one to five.

  I couldn’t eat the fatted calf. My stomach wasn’t right, wasn’t quite developed. I was still inside his womb, still feeding from his blood-supply, still waiting to be born – born a proper son. I felt very safe and snug, floating in warm fluid, continually tugged back to him by the umbilical cord, the steady clock-beat of his heart ticking very rhythmically, recording my nine months.

  The clocks are ticking now. I don’t mind them any more, don’t object to anything, now he’s made me special, now he’s had me back. I listen to him swallow the last sliver of his sweet, know he’s going to speak. I can nearly always tell. He sometimes moves his chair a fraction, or breathes just slightly differently.

  ‘Nial,’ he says, in his patient kindly mother’s voice. ‘It’s five minutes to time now. I’ve written down those dates for you, so you can put them in your diary and be absolutely clear about the time I’ll be away.’

  I close my ears immediately. He tried explaining earlier, but I didn’t hear then, either; just untethered my tired mind and let it graze in another field entirely. He wouldn’t go away, never takes a holiday, has nothing in his life beyond his patients – not even lunch hours now. He can’t eat lunch, or sleep; just hasn’t got the time. I don’t eat or sleep myself; want to be the same as him – male like him, and thin like him; very quiet and calm like him.

  He tries to say goodbye, wish me happy Christmas, but I don’t say either back. It’s not Christmas – it’s still spring – and anyway he’s not meant to say goodbye. No greetings or ‘How are you?’s, no hallo, goodbye. That’s the way they heal you, saying almost nothing. I think I’m almost healed now.

  I ease up from the couch, and he gets up as well, hands me a small sheet of stiff white paper. I glance at it perfunctorily, thrust it in my pocket, then as soon as I’m downstairs and through the door I screw it up to nothing, toss it in the gutter. All the same, it makes me feel uneasy, slows me to a crawl. I don’t think I’ll go home. It’s safer to stay close to him, so he can’t slip away or vanish when he thinks I’m off my guard. I lost Seton by not watching; lost John-Paul himself; have only just recovered from those winter weeks without him.

  It worked all right last night. I camped out near the tower, to make sure he couldn’t leave, and when I pressed the buzzer at exactly ten past one, he was still safely in his room, answered me immediately. I tried to sleep in the College of Technology, but they shooed me out at ten. I was quite upset at first, but then I found another niche, still closer to the tower; felt less lonely sleeping in the open than caged up in my bed-sit.

  I cross the wide and busy road which leads down to the river. It’s not time to think of sleeping – still broad sunny daylight, another perfect day – air crisp, sky nervy blue, bandages of sunlight soothing raw grey stone. The plane trees are twice dappled, once by nature, once by sun and shadow. My own shadow blends with theirs, so I become half a tree, a bare tree, but with leaves and spring throbbing in my finger-twigs. The water’s also throbbing, restless, never still – quivering and rippling, as reflections of reflections drown themselves, resurface. River Lazarus.

  I find a bench and dream there. I forgot to bring my coat or scarf, but I’m not uncomfortable at all, hardly feel the cold; even when the hours slip by and the sun sinks slowly down. It lacquers the whole sky, stains me gold inside. My thoughts are on John-Paul still, rarely leave him now. I try to write him poems in my head, but they all seem very thin – just bony ribs and skeletons. I toss them in the water and two mallards lunge and flurry, imagining they’re bread. Everything seems hungry – poems, ducks, the river – everything save me. For me it’s always lunch-time, and I’m always feeding, feeding – feeding off John-Paul. I wonder if he’s lonely without a wife, or dogs; imagine him beside me, the bright points of our cigarettes weaving their own language in the air. The light is dimming, fading, the gold darkening into red, the wounded sky bleeding into swirling scarlet water.

  A police launch cuts the red with black, skimming down the river. The policeman-skipper smiles at me, and waves. He must have seen my own smile, know how well I’m feeling. I watch him dwindle into dusk, listen to the silence. Police mean blaring sirens, and there wasn’t any siren.

  No sirens means I’m healed.

  Chapter Twenty Six

  ‘Mother?’

  ‘Yes, Bryan.’

  ‘I’ve … er … got a little surprise for you.’

  ‘Surprise? Well, I hope it’s not flowers again. The last ones dropped all over the place and I’m sure they overcharged you for all that fancy fern. We’ve got better in the garden.’

  Bryan said nothing. There was little in their garden except gloomy laurel bushes and a small square of mangy grass which had never earned the distinction of being called a lawn.

  ‘Chocolates, is it, Bryan? I’m not keen on those great nutty ones you bought for me last month. They kept sticking to my teeth.’

  ‘No, Mother, it’s not chocolates.’

  ‘Anything to eat?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I try to cook you decent meals. If you’re complaining that you’re hungry, I’d say you’ve got a tapeworm. It’s not natural being hungry when you’ve just wolfed down shepherd’s pie and semolina – and all made with milk.’

  ‘I’m not hungry, Mother. I didn’t even mention food.’

  ‘You did. You said you …’

  ‘I didn’t, Mother. All I …’

  ‘Are you lying to me, Bryan, again?’

  ‘No, Mother.’

  ‘Good boy. Now turn up the television. I’ve missed at least five minutes, and that insolent little hussy was just telling her poor mother she was in the family way – at fifteen and a half. I know what I’d do if …’

  Bryan fiddled with the volume knob, then sagged back in his, chair. He’d been trying all weekend to break his news. Saturday had vanished in a drag and clog of shopping, jostling in the sleety rain from a tinsel-wreathed Co-op to a crowded glaring Woolworth’s, buying Christmas goodies in a mood of distinctly unChristian hostility and spleen. He had loathed his fellow shoppers who impaled him on their Christmas trees or gloated over their expensive loot from hi-fi shops or male boutiques. Why couldn’t he buy Italian silk striped smoking jackets, or liquid-cooled speaker systems, instead of deodorised foam insoles, sugar-free baked beans, and three cut-price pork pies which were past their ‘sell-by’ date?

  They’d eaten the pork pies later on that evening, with Branston’s pickled beetroot, which had made him think of car crashes as he forked in blood-stained pastry, gobbets of raw flesh. He’d tried again to broach the vital subject, but his Mother was entrenched in The Two Ronnies and refused to let him speak. She professed never to watch television, complained about it constantly – the vulgarity, the violence – yet never had it off. It made reading very difficult. He sometimes found dramatic lines from Neighbours or EastEnders were clashing with his close-packed prose on chaology or superspace, resulting in more chaos and a sense of constant crises, since neither matter nor the universe nor the players in the soaps seemed to know what they were doing, nor have any great control over their fate or their existence.

  A night had passed, a day had passed, and they were still staring at the screen; the words he’d practised all week long, unspoken, rusting up. He wa
tched dispassionately as the sobbing pregnant schoolgirl downed half a pint of gin, quickly got a word in as she disappeared to run a scalding bath. ‘Don’t you want to hear about the surprise?’

  ‘What surprise?’

  ‘Look, may I turn this off, Mother? I need to … talk to you.’

  ‘What d’ you mean, “talk to me”? We’ve been talking all the evening. Which is why I’m in the dark about the father of that baby. Do you know who he is?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s probably her teacher. I disliked him from the start. They let anybody teach these days – perverts, socialists …’

  ‘Mother, this is urgent.’

  ‘Bryan, I’ve never known you like this. What’s got into you?’ Lena dropped her knitting suddenly, stared at him in horror. ‘You’re not trying to tell me you’ve got a girl into trouble?’

  He blushed, saw Mary in his head again, her stomach swelling with their child, her breasts engorged with milk. ‘No!’ he almost shouted, hands gripping both the chair-arms as he forced the fateful sentence out before it mouldered and turned rancid, poisoned him inside. ‘Mother, I’ve … I’ve booked us on a holiday.’

  ‘A holiday – what for?’

  He hesitated, lost for words. He couldn’t think what holidays were for. It was so long since he’d had one.

  ‘Well, I hope it isn’t Margate. It’s a very common place is Margate. It had class before the war, but now they’ve …’

  ‘No, it’s Rome.’

  ‘Rome?’

  He nodded, a surge of wild elation flooding his whole being. He’d not only got the word out, he’d booked a glorious fortnight there, paid for it in full, had the blessed confirmation smiling in his wallet. Fourteen days with Mary among the ancient ruins, the romantic sparkling fountains. There was still the minor problem of disposing of her husband, shaking off his Mother, but love would find a way. He had to rescue Mary – it was a duty, a necessity, to save her from that bestial James who cheapened and abused her with those disgusting sexual implements. All last week his mind had kept returning to Mary’s home and bedroom, her sudden startling mention of John-Paul. Whatever could it mean, the fact she knew his doctor, and knew him well enough to recommend him? He’d agonised for hours about it, lost sleep, lost vital working time, upset his boss at work. Totally impossible to imagine her in therapy herself – a woman so serene, so calmly sanely normal. He’d finally concluded it was James who was the patient – James and his perversions – not just the vibrators, but other vile debaucheries he couldn’t even think about without blind and jealous rage.

  He glanced up at his Mother, whose own anger seemed diluted with amazement. Her knitting needles were frozen in mid-row, the screen abortion totally forgotten. ‘But Rome’s abroad,’ she faltered.

  ‘Yes.’ He gloated to himself. He’d be getting his first passport, flying in his first jet plane, tasting foreign food – real Italian pasta, not Heinz spaghetti hoops.

  ‘You know I hate abroad, Bryan.’

  ‘You’ve never been abroad.’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t want to, would I? Rome’s a very dangerous country. It’s full of Communists. I saw it on the news.’

  ‘It’s full of Catholics, Mother.’

  ‘They’re just as bad. I’ve never trusted Catholics, not since Bridget O’ Riley used to underweigh the bacon.’

  Bryan bit his lip, subsided in his chair. How could he explain that they were going on a pilgrimage in the company of at least two hundred Catholics, the fervent and committed kind, with a six o’clock alarm call for Holy Mass each morning, their own Spiritual Director, and a ticket to some shindig which involved a brand-new English saint? It was the only way they could get to Rome at all. He’d left it far too late. Every other package-tour was completely full by now, and to fly out independently and book his own hotel would be prohibitively expensive. The pilgrimage had worked out very cheap, in fact, but only because they’d be sleeping in a dormitory in a disused Roman seminary which the brochure described as ‘quaint’. All the brochure’s language was alarming. Homely, modest, simple, unpretentious, were all alternative words for poor and bare, and ‘friendly’ probably meant they were squashed so close together in the dormitory, it would be impossible not to strike up an acquaintance – or even come to blows.

  He had dithered hours and hours before he finally made the booking, had rung a score of other agents, even other pilgrimages, but the reply was always ‘Sorry, Sir, nothing left at all. You should have booked up in September.’ How could he explain to them that he’d been someone else entirely in September, hadn’t had a Mary in his life; would never have found the courage to stand up to his Mother, break the pattern of thirty-two past Christmases? Lena was still fretful, her steady drone of protest providing a soft descant to the shrill sobbing of the half-aborted teen. She had snatched her knitting up again, a mishmash of odd balls of wool, which grew longer every week, yet, like the universe itself, seemed to have no ultimate point or purpose, no consoling shape or pattern which could pin it down, define it with some name. The neat squares of his childhood had long since disappeared, as if to prove that life became increasingly chaotic as adulthood took over and each baffling year lurched by.

  ‘Rome hasn’t got a government, you realise – just the Mafia. And it’s very old and dirty.’

  ‘It’s ancient, Mother. That’s the reason people go there, to see the ancient ruins.’

  ‘We’ve got ruins enough here. You should have seen London in the war. And anyway, coaches make me sick.’

  ‘We’re not going on a coach. We’re flying.’

  ‘Flying?’

  ‘Yes.’ He closed his eyes. It was the only way to go to Mary, soaring through the sky, leaping earthly obstacles, leaving jams and scrums behind.

  ‘Bryan, do you want to camp for five days in an airport with nowhere to sit down and the toilets all bunged up?’

  ‘That was just a strike, Mother. And Spain, not Italy. The Spanish air controllers had …’

  ‘Spain? Rome? What’s the difference? It’s all abroad, isn’t it? And you still get all the terrorists.’

  ‘What terrorists?’

  ‘At airports. You can hardly move for terrorists. And bombs on all the planes. I suppose you’ve forgotten Lockerbie, my lad.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I haven’t.’ He tried to fight the sudden stab of black and scarlet fear, replaced it with a golden thought of Mary. How could he be panicky when winging to his Love?

  ‘Mrs Fenton in the paper-shop was stopped by those security men and had to unpack all her bags. She was terribly embarrassed. They were full of … well, I’d rather not say, not in male company. And then they did a body-search – the cheek! Well, no one’s going to search my body, terrorists or no.’

  Bryan glanced at Lena’s body, which went neither in nor out at chest or waist or hip, but continued in one bony line from narrow scrawny shoulder to swollen veiny leg. It was shrouded in grey Crimplene, a life-denying shade, which reminded him of ashes or mouldy pigeon droppings. Her slippers, fawn, with fake-fur trim, had been purchased via mail order and tended to slip off, so that he could always hear her coming – nag and flap, nag and flap.

  He turned back to the screen, watched the credits rolling, the sun-kissed suave commercials for other people’s holidays, other people’s mothers; always sugar-coated, always silver-lined. The next programme was a game-show, its ageing host, Les Dunkley (saved by toupee and fake tan), already cracking his first joke.

  ‘I tried Lady Grecian on my hair. The grey’s still there, but my dandruff all went black.’

  Hurricanes of laughter, hailstorms of applause. Bryan scanned the cache of prizes dazzling into view – a microwave, a video recorder, a portable TV, a bulging Christmas hamper complete with turkey, Christmas pudding, and what Les called ‘all the trimmings’. He tried a different tack with Lena, as ajar of cranberry sauce loomed into crimson close-up.

  ‘I thought you’d like the change, Mother. You alwa
ys say how tired you are of cooking Christmas dinner. Well, this year someone else can cook it and you can put your feet up.’

  ‘Bryan!’ Lena cheetahed from her seat, knitting lashing like a tail. ‘You’re not telling me we’ll be away for … for Christmas?’

  ‘Yes, Mother.’

  ‘But that’s impossible.’

  ‘Impossible?’

  ‘We’re always home at Christmas.’

  ‘That’s why you need a change, Mother.’

  ‘Don’t tell me what I need, boy. You don’t imagine foreigners can cook a Christmas dinner?’

  ‘Yes, they can. It said so in the brochure. “A traditional Christmas dinner with turkey and mince pies.” ’ He didn’t add that the seminary had no restaurant of its own, so they were being ‘bused’ for all their meals to a small ‘family-run’ hotel, where they would have to eat in several different sittings, due to the smallness of the premises. He prayed they’d get first sitting in the evenings. The latest one was past his Mother’s bedtime.

  ‘But I’ve already bought the mincemeat, and the brandy butter. In fact, I’ve stocked up for a month, at least. You saw the bill at Tesco’s.’

  ‘It’ll keep.’

  ‘Keep? You think a turkey keeps? Or Brussels sprouts?’

  ‘But you haven’t bought the turkey, Mother, or the …’

  ‘I’ve ordered it, haven’t I, went to all that trouble asking for a fresh one, just for Mr Fusspot here. Frozen would have done for me – and half the price, I’ll have you know. And d’you think I’d spend those hours and hours stirring Christmas puddings till my arm was dropping off, just to feed my own face?’