Prowlers

by Maurice Gee

  Kitty though was the one he wanted. You’ve seen photographs of Kitty? Lomax was right, a pretty girl. And before you get on your high-horse, Kate, let me say good looks mattered to her. She spent hours in Mum and Dad’s bedroom, sitting in front of the dressing-table, trying out hair styles. She loved trying on Mum’s dresses too. A big girl Kitty, even at twelve – yes, frontally. Phil was someone she could experiment on. One night we sat in the living-room after dinner. Mum was knitting socks, though she hated knitting, and Dad was reading the paper and going tsk, tsk; but in a way that expressed helplessness more than disapproval. ‘And Sir John French said it was all going to be over in three months.’ (That’s the war, Kate. Do you know any history? French was supreme commander. He was talking about the whole thing. A chap called Hamilton was in charge in the Dardanelles. Sir Ian. Believed a nation reached maturity by shedding the blood of its young men. And very fond of poetry, I believe. Our men were in the poppy field about that time. Look it up.)

  Kitty came in wearing one of Mum’s dresses and not only her clothing was different but her air was ladyish; that is, proper, for us, and seductive, aimed at Phil. How did she know that second part; and how could I pick it up, for it was on a wavelength not for me? But Phil and I, remember, were in a state, and I could not be separated from him.

  I thought at first she was a visitor, and half got up from my chair, then flopped back, and watched the little drama concealed in her display. Mum and Dad didn’t see it. ‘Kit, is that you?’ Dad was pleased and put his paper down. She smiled and curtseyed at him, then placed her hands on her hips and turned a circle. ‘Does it fit?’ she asked Mum.

  ‘Not in the waist. Come here.’ She took material in thumb and fingers and pulled it in. ‘There, that’s better. It’s not your colour, Kitty. You want something to tone you down.’

  ‘The pale blue!’ She flashed a smile at us and was gone.

  I looked at Phil. His nose and mouth had thickened; in fact the fellow was all swollen up with desire. It’s a condition that makes one look very stupid. A little fire was burning in the grate for our first cold snap and he stared into it, with hanging mouth and brutish mien and I heard the lumpy coursing of his blood.

  Kitty came in skipping, in the blue. She had done something to her hair, made it, somehow, virginal, but in spite of it, because of it, proclaimed her readiness – she stood not on that side of knowledge but on this. I make us sound like depraved children. We weren’t that. We were all fast caught in innocence – Phil in his male condition, Kitty learning him, and I aware – we preceded any state of sin. I don’t, in any case, believe in sin; but recognize corruption, that’s something else. No one was corrupt, or corrupting, beyond what was natural and proper, on that night.

  Mum put a stop to it. Perhaps she caught a whiff. She let Kitty pirouette once, and said she looked nice, then said, ‘No more. Bed-time, Miss.’ And we went to bed.

  No sin, you sin-sniffers, in what comes next. We lay in our narrow room with three feet between our beds. The curtains, half open at the window, stirred in a breeze. A little watery light from a quarter moon washed over us. He pushed his blankets down and aimed it at me – huge, dumb, pathetic; not all of them words I’d have chosen then.

  ‘You be a sheila in bed eh, and I’ll come in the window.’

  ‘No,’ I said; and hissed at him, ‘There’s someone out there.’ He got himself covered quick. He lay with eyes closed and mouth open, terrified, and made no move. As for me – what was there, at the window? I still don’t know. Wind in the curtain? Moth, cat, cloud shadow? Or Kitty, my sister, open-eyed? If so, she saw enough for her needs.

  We heard movements in the house. Mum opened the door and put her head in. ‘Enough talking, you boys. Go to sleep.’ We heard her open Kitty’s door and say something to her. Apart from whispering, ‘Jesus!’ Phil did nothing more that night.

  And I’ve got nothing more to say. A couple of days later he was gone to the Ogiers’. He learned a lot, he profited from us. He held himself in and watched and mimicked. Tup Ogier was right, he had a good brain. As for what he gave us, I don’t know. He put a little charge in the air for Kitty and me. We weren’t the same when he had gone. I won’t speak for Kitty, but I, Noel Papps, looked on my body differently; had moved some way to knowing the instrument it was for pain and pleasure. The pain I’m speaking of is mental pain. I’d seen the close connection, body with mind, and glimpsed dark places to avoid. Is this too much to say one randy boy learned from another? I know it’s not.

  Do you think you’ll be able to use this, Kate?

  13

  Tup Ogier did not make a happy marriage. His confusion makes me sad, even though he learned to take pleasure from his mistake. ‘We have to live with our decisions, Noel. No getting away.’ In the beginning he was the boy in the cake shop who finds all the goodies made of plastic. (Aren’t plastic meals an industry now, with the Japanese?) The promise of Lotte Reinbold must have been immense. I don’t mean he simply wanted pleasure, even comfort, although he was a pleasure-loving, comfort-loving man; but that in a sense he sought completion. He sought, through her, a kind of masculation, through her he meant to find his elusive powers. It was, of course, unfair and stupid of him and Lotte Ogier suffered, no doubt, but there’s nobility in Tup’s mistake. Is nobility a word you’ll let me have?

  She grew very fat. She scolded him, she nagged him, she would not let him read but came and closed his book and took it away, using his bad eyes as an excuse. She gave up her pupils – except Irene, who gave up her after a while – and fought poor Tup with her piano. Boom! it went, and Bong! with short-arm jabs and round-house swings, then tinkled away out of his reach. He had loved her for her music. Now it gave him headaches and left him out.

  Their marriage bed was an unhappy place. Lotte had ample flesh but cold. I have it from Phil; and when I heard it first it made in me the sort of hole it must have made in Tup, for she had been Venus rising in my fantasies. Phil listened in on their unhappiness. He brought me bulletins. What he did not say – I saw it for myself – was that they contended for him. They had no children, though Lotte was not quite forty when they married, but had Phil. She did not welcome him, and it’s plain what a lump he must have made in a path she had wanted smooth. But when she saw how Tup began to love him, then she took him for herself. Phil watched it all with a hard, quick eye. He wasn’t sure of his place at first. But when he had it sorted out he allowed Lotte to be his ma; and, like her, he left Tup out.

  What started thin and bitter soon was abundant, soon was pure. She loved him with a vast maternal love. She trained his hair with oil on her palm, and would have licked it like a cow. She buttoned his coat and polished his shoes and tied his laces. She wrapped him in her arms and sent him off to school sweet with her powder, Port-rat Phil. He began to like comfort very much, and kept himself for himself by sneering at her. I don’t blame him. He had to stay clear of suffocation.

  Phil brought out in Lotte behaviour I hadn’t come across before and took for German. ‘Philip,’ she cried as he walked in after school. ‘Phili-will, my dumpling, my darling.’ She fed him on cake, she fed him on cream, and I, as his best friend, got my share; although I preferred my father’s cakes, and liked his savouries even better. So did Phil. He sold his torts at school and spent the money on sausage rolls from our shop. ‘Sit, sit,’ she cried. ‘Eat, eat. But a kiss for Mama.’ He kissed her. He said, ‘Can Noel come in, Mrs Ogier?’ For that is what he called her. Pottie Lottie at school; Mrs Ogier at home. She did not complain because she did not hear. She caught her own love as it bounced back and took it for his.

  To all this Tup was spectator. Wonky-eyed, he stood and watched, and then he sighed and walked away. There are situations where an imperative rules. Tup walked away. And where did he walk to? Why, to me. He could not love me. The temptation, I’m sure, was never there. But he could experience feelings more in his control – approval, admiration, even delight – as I went my way, and through me claim
back things he must have thought were forfeited.

  They lived in the cottage that had been Frau Reinbold’s – where Edgar Le Grice had kicked the doors out – so Tup became our neighbour, and I could let myself out the gate in our back fence and run along by the park and shin up a cabbage tree and squat on the wall, then pad four-footed down like a spider monkey, and enter the garden shed unseen, where Tup had made a science workshop for me. Unseen by Lotte Ogier in the house, unseen by Phil. Tup was at the door, face all a-grin with crooked teeth and his happy ‘Tup-tup’ beckoning me. Climbing over fences, what a plus that gives relationships! I’ve been the one who climbs and the one who waits and I don’t know which is more exciting. Well, yes I do. A woman came to me that way once, waiting has the edge. But behind Tup in the shed was the oxidizing flame and the microcosmic salt, and iron, copper, barium, manganese, and girls could not have had more delightful names.

  Tup must have spent hundreds of pounds on me. There was no gas laid on in the shed so he had to buy a field burner. He bought beakers, flasks, burettes, pipettes, a Steelyard, a Jolly’s Spring Balance, and mineral specimens, crystal specimens, common and rare, and acids and refractors and prisms. He bought a microscope.

  I went on fast. It was not all fun. He made me learn the valency tables and the atomic weights. I could rattle through them like ‘The Lady of Shalott’, I still can, Aluminium, Antimony, Argon, Arsenic, down to Yttrium, Zinc, Zirconium, and pick out any one you want. Try me. Gallium, Ga, 69.72. Tungsten, W, 183.92. Easy. I can draw the periodic table like a two-storied house, with basement for the coal and attic for old furniture on top. I had all that before I went to College so it’s no wonder I was dux.

  And Tup narrated to me the history of science, and gave me heroes, Lavoissier and Boyle and Priestley and Scheele – my favourite, a boy like me, mixing chemicals in a little room – and I conversed with them and told them I was setting out to join their company. I no longer dreamed of scoring the try that wins the match, I gave a little sniff at that and put on my genius look. I dreamed of – I practised – inventing a piece of apparatus like the alembic, like Boyle’s pump, that would leap chemistry ahead; and formulated laws and discovered principles and tried the name Papps against Avogadro and found it lost little in dignity.

  I put myself in danger: side by side with Davy inhaled ‘nitrous air’, and chased fluorine with the pioneers and had that ‘wild spirit’ flash from its container into my face. I loved the danger (but of course Tup let me have nothing dangerous) and the drama and the poetry – ‘wild spirit’. The poetry in shapes – carbon skeleton. There was humour too. Priestley, isolating oxygen: ‘This pure air may become a fashionable article of Luxury. Hitherto only two mice and myself have had the privilege of breathing it.’ And I tried naming things, undiscovered yet or discovered only in my mind. I had no Greek and so could not make atom, hydrogen – but named my new elements Pappsium, Irenium and, feeling pure and stern, Stargon. I held a bit of pretty stuff in solution in the light and saw the sun strike through it and make a colour only I could see. ‘Stargon,’ I breathed. It was chemical and elixir and vehicle to the stars. There was not a single property I refused it.

  What brought me back from this, brought me up short, was the tale of men who sat and thought. They unnerved me, they made me cold and small, I saw my tiny size and knew the shortness of my step. I worshipped them but did not really like them: Dalton thinking his way to atomic theory, Mendelyeev sitting in a room, working out the periodic law in his head. For Tup it meant that thought was creative, imagination precedes discovery. I sensed that would be too hard for me, I would never travel there, and I got very busy practising skills, learning tables. I became very good at it. Don’t run off with the idea that I’m not happy with what I achieved.

  But Tup wouldn’t let me stop at chemistry. ‘The whole keyboard’s there in front of you. Why only play middle C?’ – although, when he thought about it, middle C was geometry. So we collected bugs and leaves and lichens and shells. We germinated peas, we crossed pollens. For a while we kept two mice in separate cages and fed one on grain and one on meat, but when we put them in one cage to breed they turned out to be males and killed each other.

  And so I should not be a philistine Tup gave me ‘great books’ to read. My father did the same and between them they got me through Thackeray, hard work; and through Dickens. I acted him – Bill Sikes and Quilp and Mr Turveydrop – and liked him better. (That’s too tame, I was captivated: that magnified inner life, those monstrous obsessions. My small deceits and guilty fantasies stopped hurting me.)

  And I learned the history of medicine, astronomy, philosophy, physics – Archimedes and Aristarchus, Pythagoras and Plato, Galen, Ptolemy, Harvey, Kepler, Newton, Darwin, so on; not all at once, over the years, things outside my school curriculum. Tup had me speak of science as natural philosophy, which I kept up for a while; but people laughed at me and I gave it up. He spoke of dark times when human reason slept and I pictured a great swamp full of black mud and cold vapours, with people sliding round it on their bellies, and priests squatting there, mumbling Latin – he hated priests – and then the sun rising after centuries of night, and dark things sliding down into holes and people turning up their faces to the light and standing upright. I drew it and showed Tup, and he was pleased, but said with a caution that puzzled me, ‘Of course, Noel, it wasn’t quite as simple as all that.’

  Suns rising, suns rolling in the sky, were very much a part of my thinking then. The sun became my symbol for the scientific mind, and that was original at least. I did not care for the moon, I tried to keep her without attributes. But she was the one I was able to look at. I mapped her as an exercise, up in the observatory on Settlers Hill. I don’t think Phil ever went there again but I was there on clear nights, mostly with Tup but now and then by myself. I saw the moons of Jupiter and they made a hollow in my chest, as though they’d drawn some of my substance off. I saw Mars and Venus. They looked back and saw me too, hardy at my post. I countered their menace with a litany of facts – fourth in order, period six hundred and eighty seven days, diameter four thousand two hundred miles, distance from Earth one hundred and forty one million miles. That kept Mars in his place, though he loomed large. And so for Venus. And I was even tougher with the moon. If I’d let her have any life at all she would have had me squatting in a corner hiding my face.

  The observatory belonged to the Jessop Philosophical Institute and Tup was honorary curator. The building was a Berthon-type with an equatorially mounted clockwork-driven five-inch refracting telescope. I know all this not just because I went there as a boy but because the Lomax Institute took over the observatory in 1937. Tup was dead by then.

  He put his hand on the telescope, which now and then he called, ‘My optic nerve.’ ‘I watched Halley’s comet through this. I watched it come, and watched it while it was here, and then I saw it go away. You remember Halley’s comet, Noel?’

  I remembered that whisk broom in the sky. At nine I had thought too much fuss was made of it.

  ‘I’d like to find something up there. Halley’s comet. Tycho’s star. Ha, Ogier’s folly. But I wish…’

  That was the damage in Tup. He had never been wishful before. Uncertain sometimes, regretful now and then. But he had never said, I wish.

  Phil Dockery, that’s who I was telling you about. The day before Germany’s capitulation the schools were closed because of the Spanish flu epidemic. But the bigwigs got us together, flu or not, and marched us through the streets waving flags, then made us run races at the sports ground. Phil and I went round to Cathedral Square that night and watched a mob burn the Kaiser. We reckoned Edgar Le Grice would have done a better job. But it gave me a funny feeling to see the Hun up there, with epaulettes and buttons and high boots and moustache. He even wore the helmet I’d worn in the pageant. His moustache flared like straw and armies of sparks crept on his face and turned it black. The helmet fell off and people cheered and a man ran forward and kicked it into
the fire. He howled and held his toe. The Jessop City Brass Band played ‘Land of Hope and Glory’.

  The Ogiers did not show their faces. Les Dockery, the Gasman, was there. Gas caught him in the battle at Ypres, mustard gas (dichloroethyl sulphide (CH2C1.CH2)2S – I got that out of my head, Kate, didn’t have to hunt in any book). It burned his lungs out, ruined them; and I’d say his life ended there, except that something kept on in his mind. He gave the impression of a dead man walking. But something was alive, he talked to someone. He walked ten yards and stopped to breathe, or try to, and walked another ten, grey-faced, in khaki army greatcoat summer and winter, and underneath the wheeze turning in his chest like a rusty wheel, a murmured conversation never stopped.

  ‘Who does he talk to?’

  Phil shrugged. He did not want to be an expert on his father. He passed him in the street with just a nod. Even when the Gasman clutched rails in the park and seemed to stop himself from falling over, Phil went by. ‘He goes around and tidies up his room,’ Tup said. ‘He does his shopping for him and makes a cup of tea.’ And Tup looked out of his window one day and saw the Gasman in the garden, where he sometimes sat on summer afternoons, and Phil was sitting with the poor ruined fellow and had his arm round his shoulders and was pointing out the sparrows in the dust. But I never trusted Tup when he praised Phil and I’m not sure it was true.

  There were plenty of reminders of the war in our town, a blind man, a wooden-legged man, and men funny in the head, and soon we had a monument in the park, a soldier making a bayonet thrust, with more than a hundred names engraved on the plinth; but for most of us Les Dockery was the one who kept it alive. Children named him some time in the twenties – the gay decade, one writer called it, he wouldn’t now. Les Dockery, the Gasman. He died on a seat in the park in 1935, and sat there several hours with his head on his chest before a lady tapped him on the shoulder and he fell over. Tup Ogier died in Jessop Public Hospital, of cancer of the bowel. Phil lost both his fathers in the same year.