Once Upon a Time in England

by Helen Walsh

  Twenty-three

  The day has finally come. Vinnie’s head brace was removed over an hour ago, but still he can’t bring himself to look. As long as he doesn’t know, he still has hope. He feels around the unfamiliar dents and crevices of his face. One by one, he runs his finger over his new, crowned teeth. It all feels regular enough and, who knows, with the miracles of surgery these days they might even just have improved his looks. But no. This is Manchester, not Beverly Hills. And this is the NHS. They’ll have patched him up as best as their budgets would allow. When it comes to the cosmetic cover-up, he won’t be holding his breath.

  The communal basin and the mottled mirror above it lie at the furthest extent of the ward. Finally he’s ready to make the daunting trip to where his likeness has lain in wait all these weeks, daring him to come and look-see. Around him, invalid life goes on, untroubled by his ordeal. Two old men in flannelette pyjamas play dominoes while Vincent Fitzgerald straightens himself up. His muscles have grown lax and incompetent from the days spent tethered to his bed and his gait is unsteady, unsure at first like a newborn foal’s. Using the various bed frames as leverage he shakily commences the journey of his life.

  He reaches the sink, places a hand on either side of the basin and, head bowed, shuts his eyes before the mirror’s gaze. He can feel the fault lines shivering beneath the surface of the moment and it feels like he, too, might crack. Slowly, he lifts his head. He knows the mirror is there, waiting for him.

  He snaps his eyes wide open in one jolting blink. He locks in to the blackened, red-rimmed craters of his gaze and stares hard, not daring to stray off into the detail that lies below. He has to look. He has to know. And finally, when he can stand this no longer, he lets his eyes roll slowly, slowly down, and left, and right, taking it all in in one horrific striptease, peeling away the dressings with which he’s bound his darkest fears.

  Without emotion, he appraises the patchwork mismatch of the skin graft on his cheek. He observes the full, jutting lurch of his underbite, his elongated jaw bringing an idiotic, a slobbering, an ape-like countenance to his face. He steps right back to evaluate the wreckage as someone else might see him, as a whole, and he sees it in all its horror, fixed and permanent. His face has set slightly higher to the left. It’s as though some gravitational pull has hooked his left cheekbone and dragged it up a fraction. It’s minimal, but it kills him. He stands there and stares, transfixed by the horrific asymmetry, cast and set and utterly irreparable. He starts laughing, and then he can’t stop. It becomes hysterical, this bellowing, dreadful, heartbroken laughter, and the old men put down their dominoes to see what’s happening.

  Once he’s made his resolution, Vincent is overcome with an eviscerating, spiritual high – better than honey, better than anything he’s ever felt. This is good. This feels right. He calls Ellie from the payphone at the end of the ward. ‘Ellie … listen. I need you … to do ss-s-something for me.’

  ‘Vinnie. You’re talking.’

  The shock in her voice makes him acutely aware of his all over again – flat and expressionless and utterly devoid of inflection. The speech therapist had told him that in time and with lots of coaching they’d be able to correct the robotic monotone. But his speech would always be slow and halting. He might never lose the stutter. He would never sound like Vinnie again – Vinnie the arch-joker, Vinnie the entertainer, the one in the know. But rather than sink him, her prognosis bore out the wisdom of the path he was about to take. There was only one way forward. ‘Promise not to … breathe … a … word?’

  ‘I promise.’

  ‘I m-mmean it. I want you bring me my … m-m-manuscript. It’s in a shhhhhoebox under the wardrobe. Will you d-do that for me?’

  ‘Yes. Vinnie.’

  ‘And d-d-don’t dare look at it. Not even a peek … I’ll know. I’ll know if you’ve looked at it.’

  ‘Should I bring in your typewriter, too?’ Her voice skips faster, dances to the suggestion. ‘Shall I, Vin? Shall I bring it in for you?

  ‘It’s ssss-still a bit early for that. I’m, like … I-I-I-I’m editing.’

  ‘What about I bring some books in? I’ve started on Clockwork Orange, you know …’

  ‘Just the m-m-m-manuscript, Ellie. And I’ll need Rizlas and tobacco. And I’m gonna need my rrrrraincoat, too.’

  ‘What? Have they given you a date for coming home?’

  ‘Jimmy, the porter – he’s going to wheel me out to the garden if it keeps dry tom-m-morrow.’ He feels bad. He can picture his sister’s face, beaming at this positive news.

  ‘I promise I won’t look, Vinnie. Cross my heart. God – this is just the best news ever!’

  He blows her a kiss down the phone. Little Ellie. He realises just how much he loves that wonderful, angry creation. He’ll have to write to her and tell her this. With all his heart, he adores her.

  ‘One last thing, Ellie. Can you bring my Walkman? It might st-st-s-still be in the pocket of my raincoat. And there’s a hundred quid … under the lid of the hi-fi. I’m going to need that for mm-m-mags and records and books …’

  ‘Wow! I’m just so … waaagh! Back at you!’

  Vinnie places the receiver back in its cradle and slides down the wall, to the cool hospital floor. His lollipop knees are quaking. He cinches them with his arms, stops them banging together, and thinks about what he’s just done. ‘Oh Ellie,’ he whispers into his knees. ‘Please forgive me’.

  Twenty-four

  Robbie catches his reflection in the mirror, the pale morning light laminating his ghoulish, pasty pallor. But rather than buck away from it, he confronts it, possesses it fully. ‘Should be end of pier, you.’ He leans closer in to the mirror, tugs at a wiry nose hair. ‘Hall of mirrors. You freak.’

  He sighs and flops back down on the bed. Something has to give here. How much longer can he keep up the good fight? Regaling the same gaggle of drunken middle-agers night after night with his cheesy Elvis spoof. He doesn’t even go in for the sex now. Hardly ever, anyway. Nor the endless free drinks and instant new friends. He hasn’t had a drink in a while. Booze, birds, none of it can temper the heaviness that now hangs in his soul. Since going back there, he’s been flattened by this mounting tristesse. Somehow he has to end this deathless cycle of being and nothingness.

  It’s still early and he could probably sleep more – if only the seagulls would let him – but there’s an even stronger pull outside. It’s Tuesday morning and with the last of the weekend tourists headed back down the motorway the prom is all his. What he’s going to do is wrap up, head down to the shore and let the stinging salt air batter him sensible. And then he’s going to sit down to a big fry-up at the Pier End Café and hatch up a plan – a plan that will let him back into his babies’ lives. This is what they need and the more he’s sobered up, the more he sees of the picture.

  Robbie dresses quickly, eager to get out there in the teeth of the wind and think it all through. What if he were to rent a flat in Orford? His residence here in Blackpool pays decent money and it would be tough to match that. But surely Helen and Irene could put enough work his way to carry him through those first few months, just till he was able to establish himself again? After that, who could say what might happen? Blackpool had given him a keen eye for talent. Out of all the fresh-faced hopefuls the tide dragged in each week desperate to make their mark on the moribund cabaret scene, Robbie could tell which of them were going to make it and which of them would be carried back out to sea again. What if he were to start his own talent agency? With all his nous and experience it couldn’t be that difficult. Two things he knows in his heart, knows them absolutely. He will never again work the rat-run, the fag of the factory line. And he’s going back. Come what may, he’ll be going back to his kids. All of a sudden his heart is lurching at the thought of telling them, telling Ellie. Daddy’s coming home.

  Twenty-five

  Vinnie shuffles along the hospital corridor. Head down, he keeps close to the wall and trav
els in short staccato steps, the left flank of his famous blue raincoat flapping out with each laboured step. With one hand, he clutches the HMV bag that holds his manuscript, while the other hauls the funnel of his raincoat up and over the wreckage of his face. Departing visitors swerve and step round him, stopping to stare at this horrifically emaciated stick-boy, inching his way towards freedom. He feels their horror, and their double takes tell him, once again, that he has to see this through. There can be no going back.

  Outside, it’s a windless spring night. Cars burn like coals through the falling darkness. A sickle moon hovers above. Vinnie slips on his headphones, invigorated all over again by the stink of diesel and the factory spew, mingling with the zest of cooling mown grass. He numbs himself to any nostalgia the scents bring on, snapping down the play button and yelping in anguished joy as the Jesus and Mary Chain’s ‘Just Like Honey’ spools out. He rewinds back to that Cure song, his eternal soundtrack to the moment before everything changed. And for the briefest dance of time, the fraught, searing vocal lunges him right back. He’s standing there, watching the love of his life like he’s made of stone. Kenny. The most gorgeously stupid thing he ever cut. This song will always be for him. ‘You never looked as lost as this, sometimes it doesn’t even look like you. It goes dark, it goes darker still. Please stay.’

  Heart waxing and waning, eyes pricking with the sweet-sour sting of what’s to come, he flips off the song and concentrates on the task ahead. His mind is made up. There is no other way.

  He pushes on through the pulsing artery of Oxford Road, students flitting like bats around him, weighed down with bags of shopping, making plans for the evening, plans for the rest of their lives. He draws his face down further into the conch of his coat, almost misses the lash of red that spins into the borders of his vision. He remembers the clutch of letters in his inner pocket and pauses to fish them out. He fingers through them and as he slips them into the post box, feels himself falling again, welling up. There’s one for Mum, one for Ellie, one for Kenny and – after writing it, trashing it, then writing it again – there’s one for his dad.

  He cuts down onto the canal path. The queer bars are already roaring, loaded with every kind of possibility. High-pitched cackling bounces off the dead skein of the water. He feels an odd superiority as he walks away, turns his back on the hassle and grab and clamour of it. All that rejection and pain shivering beneath the surface of every affair. He’s spared all of that now, all the worthless trials and affectations of love. The path he’s choosing is heroic. He’s taken enough. He’s ending it before it ends him.

  His pace quickens, his breathing eases. It feels as though he’s being buoyed along on a current, some magnetic pull from the empty, gutted peripheries of rentland reining him in towards his epitaph. The seeds of a Nietzsche trope flicker on his tongue, angling to define the moment, but it eludes him and slides away, unarticulated. He smiles inwardly, sadly. All that knowledge. All those books. The mantras and aphorisms that he’s lived his whole life by mean so very little now.

  He finds his boy, gaunt and more wasted than ever. He doesn’t recognise Vinnie. He brings the battered canvas of his face in close, showing himself to him, letting him see the horror of it up close, almost goading him to react. There are light bulbs popping in his head now, snapping through the wiped-out haze. ‘It’s you innit? The Paki lad?’ he croaks. He seems pleased to see him, or maybe just pleased he can still remember things. ‘The school boy. That’s you innit?’ He jabs his gaze closer, rakes his etiolated eyes all over his face. ‘Fuck! What happened to your face, man?’

  The irony’s not lost on Vinnie. The boy’s face is a crawling bag of boils and he stinks like a corpse. But he fixes him with a stare and tells the truth. ‘Got done over. Me and me fella. Queer-bashers.’

  Either he doesn’t hear or he doesn’t care. Maybe it’s par for the course, around here. ‘Fucking bad that, man. Bad,’ the wraith says and shakes his head. ‘You want to be careful, yeah?’ He taps both sides of his eyes with his index fingers then points them like a pair of pistols. ‘Keep these open. Yeah? Even when I’m fuckin’ sleeping, these are always open, like two fucking glass eyes on top of me lids.’

  The sprawling nose and criss-cross grid of scars tells Vinnie the lad’s taken his fair share of drubbings. Standing there with the wind in his hair and the city soup thickening around them, Vinnie feels some deep visceral connection with this wretch, this urban fox. For a moment, he senses the lad feels it too but then the manic eyes lurch left and right and back over his shoulder. It’s business as usual.

  ‘Same?’

  ‘Nah, mate. I need a ten-quid bag and a bag of the other stuff you said. Nazi crank.’

  A glimmer of something akin to enthusiasm passes over the lad’s face. ‘Now you’re talking, man. This will keep you up for fuckin’ days.’

  ‘And I need spikes too. Three of them.’

  He digs deep in his old, stained Spiewak jacket and pulls out three sealed hypodermics. ‘I’ll give you these a quid each seeing as you’re buying proper. I usually charge more for these, yeah. These is like fuckin’ gold dust, man. Me own script like, hot from Cohens.’

  Vinnie hands him all of the money – ninety pounds. The lad thinks he’s missed a trick at first. He waits to take his lead from Vinnie, see if he’s ordering more. Did he ask for three bags of each? Is he waiting for a blowjob? Vinnie says nothing, watches the lad as he goes to pocket the money. Something stalls him – not so much a conscience as a prickly paranoia. He can’t quite gauge the moment. Is this some kind of a test? Is he being played? Vinnie laughs and puts him out of his misery. ‘Image is everything in your game, maestro.’ He grins and holds out his hand to shake. ‘Get yourself some new trainers or a coat, yeah?’

  The lad stands there stumped for an instant, then grips his hand in a crazy back-to-front ‘brother’ shake. Then he turns sharp and takes off in rapid speed-fire march before the molten-faced Paki changes his mind.

  Vinnie cooks up in the stairwell of the multi-storey. He taps out a mixture of the two transparent packets into a spoon, dilutes it, heats it from underneath and then draws it up through a cotton wool ball. He repeats this a second and then a third time then, gripped by a mighty, panicking dread now, edges up and outside into the open with his three loaded guns. A wind nuzzles around him. It feels good as it licks his ears, the sound of air in motion, eddying, stirring, cleansing. The clutch of his fear passes, and he plants himself in the middle of the concrete roof. He sits down and lays out his manuscript, holding it down with his heel. He puts the syringes in his zip-up leather tobacco pouch and places it carefully between his feet to stop it rolling away. He takes off his coat, folds it up and creates a buffer between himself and the hard floor, then reclines onto his elbows. He fixes his earplugs in and turns up his Walkman and reaches for the first syringe.

  He hits a vein. The needle slides in, seamlessly. Blood kicks back into the barrel, exploding like an atom bomb. He pushes the plunger back in again. The spike slips out cleanly. Steadying himself against the thickening currents of ease washing over him, he takes the second cocktail and empties it into another vein. He’s too gone to slake the third.

  ‘Say goodbye on a night like this if it’s the last thing we ever do.’ The music carries him, lifts him high above the city.

  For always and ever is always for you …

  I want it to be perfect

  Like before

  I want to change it all

  There’s a moment, before he drifts out, where his teeth clench perfectly together and the whorled misfit of his face yields and realigns. Vinnie is young and beautiful again, for ever. The sky seems to rise up out of itself and pull the stars in tight. There’s a flimsy cord of consciousness dangling between him and the spangling vault, begging to be cast loose. He’s almost ready to let it go now, let go for good. With one final heave, he rolls over, loosening the manuscript and letting the wind take hold. Page by page, he watches his life, h
is whole sad life take to the wind. He lies back and watches a lifetime of secrets and anxieties coast and swoop and flicker away like snowflakes. He’s drifting now, smiling and drifting, and he’s so happy, so serene that he can hear his heart slowing to a stop. He’s looking down on himself, trailing away with the snowflakes, soaring higher and higher into the studded firmament where his snowflakes are blown to ashes.

  Epilogue

  All through the morning, police cars have been coming and going but this time Ellie senses that the engine shutting down outside their house is not one of them. She pulls herself up from Vinnie’s bed where she’s been lying prostrate for the last few hours, unable to speak or think, willing each breath to be her last and mainline her straight to her brother, and edges to the window ledge. He’s here. Dad.

  The anger she felt towards him this morning, for not being there – the night when they’d needed him most – fades to nothing when she sees his wrecked, broken form shuffling up the path. He’s holding a letter like he’s clinging to some last hope. So Vincent wrote to him too then. The thought brings on another onslaught of tears. Slowly she makes her way to the landing and hovers at the top of the stairs, delaying time, still holding out for something, someone, to jolt her from this nightmare, tell her it’s all a horrible mistake.

  He hasn’t knocked yet but her mother is already at the door.

  Robbie and Sheila stand there on the threshold and they don’t say a thing. The cruel realisation hangs above them, loaded, stock-still, and not even the rasping wind dare touch it. It’s Robbie that finally breaks the spell. ‘She.’

  ‘Oh Robbie …’ As though she’s been holding everything back up until this moment, Sheila slumps against the wall, pinching her eyes with three fingers as she succumbs to a silent, passionate sobbing. Robbie smothers her with a hug.