That evening I went along with Barry, who was as familiar to me as an old pair of jeans, and whose air of happy-go-lucky, oi-ish aggression now fitted me just as comfortably and was tamed to me into nothing more pugnacious than friendship. We slipped in the front door together as if it were a side door. Those already in the games room included Mark—Sparky we used to call him, for his penchant for setting dustbins on fire—his skirt, Susan, Fat Darrell, Chit, Dave and Vince. I can’t say I’ve ever liked Mark much, although he is indisputably one of the immortal faces of the crowd. He is simply in and one of us, without there being any question of how he got in, who let him in, if anyone actually wants him in. He’s somehow beyond all that. You could no more question his presence than you could the Queen’s head on the back of a Lady Godiver. Mark is almost a skinhead. He has a dark vagueness of fluff curving over his scalp, and one of those pale, hard faces so often seen in British playgrounds that seem inherently offensive, made to be pigged up into the absurd sneer that is prelude to a punch-up. Even his smile is offensive, all pointy, with ridges like the curve of a frisbee, dimples sharp and plasticky. Unlike most who possess such faces, faces they love to push in the faces of others, Mark is not wiry. Under his black bomber jacket Mark’s muscles are as hard as pool cues. But thicker. His physique is more that of a squaddie. Susan? I don’t know what she was on. Very pretty girl in a spiteful sort of way. She wore a ponytail and leather jacket, and her red lipstick matched her dress. She was, for all the world, like some godawful imitation of a teddy girl from the Fifties. The secret of Mark’s intimacy with her was a mystery to me. But then I suppose the secret of most couples’ intimacy is mysterious, even to them.
With tabs in their mouths, Mark and Susan were having some conversation as meaningless as chewing gum and as offensive to the outsider as a couple necking. This is when the Boy made his tentative entrance with an insubstantial air about him, as if he’d sent on a timid astral body to check if this was the right place and apologise for his lateness. Actually he was as punctual as the haunting of a ghost. Only I noticed him stretch his neck through the door of the games room and hover vaguely over to the empty stools by the table where Barry and I sat. Then, as everyone caught on to his presence, it was as if he had materialised in front of them. The assembled company either glanced at him and ignored him or stared in eyeballing, gob-smacking confrontation, a coldness that was on the hostile side of indifference. What was it about him that invited such thick suspicion, such defensiveness? I could only think that he was a sort of human mirror. His sensitivity raised the hackles of those unwilling to admit their own softer feelings. His helpless intimacy spoke to that of those who feared and loathed intimacy. His vulnerability made them feel vulnerable. As he felt out of place, so they thought him out of place. Still, behind his helplessness was a serenity that could only have been a lack of true fear.
Barry resolved the situation with that truly laconic smartness which is one of the reasons that I appreciate him. An act of true consideration and magnanimity was disguised as an act of tough self-assertion.
‘Siddown,’ he said, indicating a stool, much as he had in the shop.
‘D’you wanna drink?’ I asked, and he nodded.
‘What would you like?’
‘Bitter, please.’
These simple manoeuvres sufficed to introduce the Boy into the circle of the seated in a more or less settled and comfortable way. There was some bitty conversation between the three of us, and then Barry said, ‘Let’s see it, then!’
The boy wriggled out of his threadbare jacket, undid his shirt cuffs and rolled up his sleeve.
‘Nice tattoo, shame about the shirt,’ said Barry. ‘It’s even worse than the one you wore the other day.’
‘Really. Is that possible?’ The Boy’s intonation was too soft and serious for Barry to register the joke.
‘Where do you get your clothes, anyway, Oxfam?’
‘Well, sometimes, but Oxfam is a lot more expensive than the other charity shops, and for some reason there’s not much there in my style.’
‘I see.’
‘This is from Cancer Research. It’s a blouse, see,’ and he indicated the position of the buttons.
Mark had been observing us with unusual concentration, and made a sidelong play at entering the conversation.
‘A big girl’s blouse!’
The Boy looked his way. ‘Well, I suppose it was a girl’s blouse once, but now it’s a boy’s blouse. Mine! Actually, I think blouses are more subtle than shirts. And there’s more variety.’
Mark turned and chuckled, as if about to nudge the person next to him.
‘A boy’s blouse, eh?’
Susan wrinkled her top lip and sniffed sarcastically. ‘You wearing lingerie under that?’ she said to him.
‘No.’
‘Want to borrow mine?’
‘No, thank you. That’s okay.’
I felt sorry for the Boy. Why he felt he had to answer such questions, I don’t know. They deserved neither earnestness nor wit. Still, he must respond in his own style and, after all, if it occurred to me that he gave them more respect than was necessary, this embarrassing imbalance, in the eyes of the people present and the very air of the room, comprising a sort of existential jury, must have weighed in the Boy’s favour. It must have gone on record in the great courtroom of existence.
Mark flicked another tab into his mouth with a certain bother-boy cheekiness, lit it with his head slant-wise like a craftsman making some sort of estimate or appraisal. I noticed with the usual flicker of distaste the crudely scratched tattoo on his left wrist, two letters coupled to make a single symbol, not the initials of a lover. A cold and supreme hatred or anger that I understood well had put the boot in, kicking any soft sentiments of love in the face. In their place was an insignia whose call was militant and rousing, as inspiring as lightning. The two letters that had become one were N and F. I must note that this tattoo was a large part of the reason I disliked Mark. It was not so much that I disapproved of his flaunting runes of bigotry: I recognised that his politics were at best imprecise. If he were really interested in politics he would have updated the initials to B.N.P., but then their true resonance would have been lost. Mark’s patriotism consisted of a stubborn, regressive nostalgia for his childhood. He reproduced on his left wrist a mysterious and forbidden sign he had seen on brick walls and scratched on desktops at the age when all children begin to look beyond the lies and authority of their teachers. His nostalgia was a longing for the closed, secure world of crime and violence that is a British childhood. His equation of the ultra right wing conservatism of the National Front with rebellion was puerile, stultifying, but from the inside possessed an emotional cohesion, a beautiful simplicity, that logic could not hope to challenge. All this I understood. What I could not forgive was that Mark had deigned to make this essay at a home-made tattoo after I had already entrusted to his body one of my own works.
The spidery tattoo looked as if it were biro that would wash off. But it never would. He had probably used a compass and a bottle of ink. Now, whenever I saw the tattoo I cringed to think my own work might be associated with it. Such stupidity to inscribe on one’s wrist a shibboleth of powers one does not understand. I squirmed to see the weak point of a person who cannot bear to be weak.
‘One of yours, is it, Shane?’ said Mark. ‘Let’s have a butcher’s.’
He stood and loped over. The Boy flinched slightly when Mark grabbed his arm, then settled into a kind of novel serenity. Mark examined the tattoo silently for an inordinate amount of time, like a child trying to read some especially difficult writing.
‘Not bad,’ he said finally.
If he had been working up the banter of challenge he seemed to forget it completely now and his last words were a lame attempt to keep up his smart tone. Perhaps he had meant the words to sound sarcastic, but they had sounded reflective instead, and I was duly flattered. If I am to be honest with myself there is something in the
queasiness of my dislike for Mark that occasionally resembles a keen fondness, an affection sharp as hate that can only arise out of our mutual distance. Perhaps it is a side effect of watching his behaviour and listening to his words with a naturalist’s curiosity and trying to work out what makes him tick. I was fascinated that my tattoo of Death should have made some connection in his brain, as clearly it had. It had stumped him completely. As if he had forgotten why he had come over he returned to his seat.
Barry invited the Boy to have a game of pool with him. The Boy agreed. His playing was hopeless, but flukey. His skewed cue might completely miss the white, then with the next shot, with no attempt to aim at all, he might pot two balls after bouncing off the cushions twice. Games of doubles were instituted with various partners, and the Boy even potted the black a couple of times.
Partners and opponents in the game began to speak to the Boy, and he answered them in such a way as to convey the minimum information required. Then sometimes, breaking this pattern only slightly by volunteering a few unsolicited words, he would prove himself capable of saying the most unusual things. In fact, he seemed capable of little else, despite his modesty. It was as if he had been given the most unconvincing lines in a film and was a terrible under-actor. Everyone soon discovered he was basically friendly, just a little odd, and there was a buzz of faint intrigue in the games room. There was something too lofty about the Boy for them to take a frank and direct interest in him, but while his good humour was impenetrable it seemed to promote a sort of liberality and respect amongst those he spoke to.
The Boy had been bought drinks by more than one other person. Smoke hovered in front of the dartboard. Barry had sneakily rolled a spliff beneath the table, and I felt the pungent vibrations of the drug, like glowing embers in my head, my throat and my body. Time was as vague and slow as the mystery of the smoke, whose acrid flow was more nebulous than that of the waterfall it resembled. The Boy had retired from the pool table, and I glanced round to see him sipping a sour pint on his stool, Mark sitting next to him in my empty place.
For some reason I couldn’t shape the questions I wanted to ask the Boy. So when I saw Mark and the Boy together I was struck by strange inspiration. Of course I didn’t know what questions to ask, but I had set in motion a dialogue that would reveal the answers by itself. Mark and the Boy were too clearly like the two people who shouldn’t exist in the same universe, who you would love to see meet. They were meeting now, and I felt like I’d done it on purpose. Then I felt almost used. I decided to take a back seat for a while and see what happened. I shunted out of their gaze, to give the conversation time to catch, set my back as if into a supporting wind, and listened.
I could tell by his slight slouch and slur that Mark was more than half cut by now. He was examining the tattoo again, grasping the Boy’s arm in a rough, familiar way. Everyone had looked at the tattoo by now, and the reactions were largely the same. People seemed respectful and almost jealous, as if this tattoo had somehow placed me outside the run of normal human beings. The very existence of the tattoo was beginning to make me nervous. Now Mark was showing a renewed interest in it.
‘I’ve got a tattoo too, you know,’ said Mark. He lifted his T-shirt past the slit of his navel, past the operation scar, to reveal the shiny illustration draped across the distinct muscles of his abdomen like lustrous silk. It seemed part of his body, like a lizard’s crest, or a bird’s bright plumage.
‘Not as good as this one, though,’ and Mark slipped his T-shirt back down his gun-turret stomach and presented the Boy with his left wrist, bent to show the tattoo, as if he expected the Boy to kiss his hand.
‘I did it meself. Good, innit?’
He flexed his wrist as if showing off a watch.
‘You’re like me, see,’ Mark continued, ‘A man with a cause. You’re wearing that cross. Well, that don’t mean bollocks to me. You can keep vampires off with that, but you can keep Pakis out with this.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘You what?’
‘I doubt that’s really any more effective against Pakis than this is against vampires.’
‘You’re one of these Paki lovers aren’t you?’
‘England is a beautiful country,’ said the Boy, ‘Don’t you want people to know how beautiful it is?’
‘If you let in too many people there won’t be an England any more.’
‘Nonsense. The land beneath our feet belongs to no one. You cannot lose it unless you’ve already made others your enemies. What harm would it do to be friendly? No spirit that unafraid can be destroyed by welcoming others.’
‘Naah, naah, naah. It doesn’t work like that. I’m not racist, right, but these Pakis really do smell. We’re not meant to mix. It’s the way of the world. Everybody fights. Someone has to be on top. It might as well be us.’
‘Listen, I’m afraid I’m not very good at arguing, but I have a feeling from this conversation that I would like to tell you something. It’s no good me trying to explain properly, I’ve just got to tell you straight what I see and feel and maybe it will mean something to you. Maybe not.’
I doubt if anyone had ever spoken like that to Mark before, had ever told him there was ‘something they wanted to say to him’. Perhaps I’m wrong. In any case, he listened as he might do to the unravelling plot of a film on late night television, ready to entertain some new science fiction-like angle of reality. (Such new realities are peddled so cheaply nowadays in the world of entertainment there’s almost a new one every night.) Mark flicked another fag into his mouth and lit it in a way that told the speaker he was listening without showing too much real keenness.
‘Some time back, when I first came to this town, I didn’t have any friends except a boy I met at school. He lived near the harbour and I would often visit his house. We’d go to the hills overlooking the sea, the one with the flag and the old gun emplacement on it, and the one with the old monastery, and without further talk we’d find ourselves rolling around together on the grass.
‘That kind of fighting is something you learn very quickly. It’s wrestling really. You somehow know not to punch or kick. I’m a very weak person, but even I can wrestle. There is a sort of earnestness, when you hear the other person’s breath in your ear, and feel them kneel on your chest, a kind of bullying satisfaction that can be frightening. But when you’ve tumbled over and over, being underneath and on top, being bruised and wrenched and tangled, you begin to forget who is winning and who is losing. You just become one thing: a fight, a struggle. It’s a very intimate feeling. I remember rolling in a clinch and above me was the giddy sky, seagulls wheeling and breaking around the wind-roughened flag. I felt a knee in my solar plexus and experienced a moment of utter, helpless, winded euphoria. The fight seemed to end there naturally. We got up, brushed off bits of dry grass from our clothes and smiled at each other quite as if there had been no aggression involved at all.
‘Now, if you were in such a fight with a Pakistani, wouldn’t it be better, after you’ve stood up and brushed yourself down, to smile and carry on as friends? After such a fight how can you ever bring yourself to punch the other person in anger? It’s just not necessary. I can understand the feeling of hatred, all the ideologies of distrust and suspicion, but when you’re actually face-to-face with someone, how can you take it seriously? How can you carry it through?’
I lost the thread of the dialogue at that point and never did learn what passed between them at that table afterwards. Barry had come over from a game of pool to pass me another thin, soft burning spliff and talk. He leaned towards me, his face shadowed by his hair, and spoke in a low tone like someone tired of a party and suggesting a getaway. A strange anxiety told me I was missing the most revealing part of the whole puzzle of the conversation, so I hardly listened to Barry’s words. I sucked purposefully on the stained and withered spliff and strained my ears. Eventually I saw it was no good, and afraid Barry would notice I was elsewhere I gave up and turned my attention t
o him. A little after I saw the Boy go towards the toilet over Barry’s shoulder, and Mark sat back down with Susan where she was counting money out of her purse with a pinched expression on her face. They were talking about the Boy. Not in any idle way, either. My attention zoomed in on them. I caught a few words that fell from Susan’s mouth that somehow sliced through my stomach and bowels like an icy blade. Something in her eye, clawing hatred for the Boy after such short acquaintance, shocked me.
‘You listening?’
I swung back to Barry.
‘Sorry Baz, just a bit wrecked, y’know.’
There was a sudden burst of movement like a dog let out of a trap, and everyone looked round to see that Mark had torpedoed into the Boy, whose slack form would have collapsed onto the floor if Mark hadn’t caught it. Mark suddenly removed the caliper-grip of his arms and let the Boy drop like a sack of bones just to jerk him upright again by the wrist. He released the Boy just as he regained his balance. Then he pulled his fists back in a boxing stance and grinned.
‘Put ’em up, then.’ He dangled the words out of his mouth like a tab.
There was something distasteful in the whole scene, but Mark didn’t seem to notice the disapproval around him. No one said anything, anyway. The whole room was caught on the suspension evoked by Mark’s raised fists. The Boy hardly attempted to defend himself. Mark threw a few lazy, but sharp-curving punches, which were muffled by the Boy’s upraised arms, as floppy as rabbit’s ears. Mark aimed a kick and knocked the Boy’s feet from under him. He wasn’t trying particularly hard, but neither was he taking any care not to hurt the Boy. If the Boy remained unhurt it was because he seemed to trust Mark’s blows and so render himself elastic. He let himself be flung about like a jerky ballet dancer.
Morbid Tales Page 21
