When I left, it had started to rain. Fallen leaves had turned the wet windscreen into a brackish porridge. I sat in Nuala’s car for a few minutes, conscious that they might be watching from the window but not having the nerve to stick the key in the fascia, to commit myself to beginning the journey, because that would mean I’d have to end the journey. Not going anywhere was a safe option. Temporary, but it helped.
At last, I got underway. I drove through the centre of Warrington, hardly recognising the place where I’d grown up. All the pubs looked alike, neon and chrome jobs with huge signs for karaoke and Sky. The one way system fed me into a snarl-up by Bridge Foot. I could smell the Mersey, thick and rank, through the fans in the car. It took me back to a time of riding my bicycle to Wally Rez for a swim with school friends, picking brambles off the hedges, trying to nonchalantly play football in the park while girls sat around and we pretended not to watch.
I took the road through Grappenhall and joined up with the M6. I listened to music on the way to Kendal – Curve, Heathrow Browns, Starlover – in order to distract my mind from funerals, friends, narcolepsy. London.
I arrived at the church and parked the car, self conscious because nobody knew me and I could see people muttering about this flash bastard in a BMW. I stretched and walked to the gate and smiled at a few of the mourners who were standing around, having a cigarette. One of them nodded; the others turned away. I heard someone say ‘London’ as if it were a dirty word. I felt two hundred miles of bitumen tugging at me, sucking me back to the oily heart of the city. The sunlight filtering through the trees, the little stone church, the child clasping its hands together and smiling beatifically… it all made my teeth ache.
‘And you are?’ said a voice, a reedy, Lancastrian whinge. It was the smoker who nodded at me.
‘Adam,’ I said. ‘Adam Buckley. I’m a friend of Claire’s.’
‘Course you are,’ he intoned, dragging deeply on his cigarette and flicking the stub towards the gravestones. ‘Course you fucking are. Everyone’s a friend of Lu-cin-da’s.’
I felt intimidated by the sly coil of his words and his face, which was a hastily stitched affair without a pattern. His nose had been broken on many occasions, unless he was just violently ugly.
‘Do you play rugby?’ I asked. His eyebrows joined and crept down the bridge of his nose.
‘You bein’ fresh, chief?’ he asked. ‘You poncey-arse southern fuck.’
‘I’m from up here,’ I protested. ‘I’m a northerner.’
He nodded. ‘You sound like a Cockney to me.’ He leaned in close. I smelled Marmite and Old Spice on him. ‘Twat.’
‘Look, why don’t we leave this till after the funeral? It’s not exactly respectful to the dead, is it?’ I was wondering whether or not to get a pre-emptive strike in, to clock him one and then leg it, forget about the funeral altogether. And then Claire stepped in and pushed him away.
‘Get lost, Dom,’ she said. ‘You’re not being very helpful today. Go and lick a plug socket or something.’
Dom sloped off, but not without mouthing the word ‘Later’ at me.
‘Who was that?’ I asked, angry that I was shivering from fear at his threat and his wrecking of my re-acquaintance of Claire. ‘What brought all that on?’
‘That’s my baby brother. Seventeen years old and spoiling for a custodial sentence. So he can be like his mates.’
‘Seventeen?’ I spluttered, my fear dissolving. ‘But he just near enough promised to put me in hospital!’
‘Hot air, Adam. And it’s his way of dealing with all this. Come on, calm down, tell me what’s been happening to you.’
The funeral went quickly and I was horrified to feel myself dropping off just as the coffins were being conveyed through the plush velvet curtains. Once out in the fresh air again, I revived a little and made my way over to Claire, who told me to follow the cortege to her grandparents’ house where there would be a buffet and a drop of something to warm us all up.
I was stuck behind Dom in his Nova on the way to Claire’s. He would sneer at me when we got to traffic lights, or give me a V-sign, or perform an airwank.
The house was a tiny terraced house that looked as if it had been squashed by its neighbours. Inside, there was a faint naphthalene odour, coupled with a fustiness, that I associated with my own grandparents. I sat on a sofa in the living room, along with two other people: a tight squeeze. The armchair by the window was already occupied by, I guessed, Claire’s grandfather, a grim-looking man with a hawkish nose and tufts of baby-fine white hair. He was gumming at a sandwich but couldn’t keep his mouth closed. He worked at it for minutes, turning it into paste, before swallowing. Noticing me looking, he gave me a solemn wink before returning to his ham and pickle.
I met a few of the relatives, and was aware they were studying me, not without hostility, as if I, a stranger, was somehow unsettling the familial cosiness of their grief. A couple of them were friendly enough, but I could see I wasn’t welcome and knew that the longer I stayed, the greater was Dom’s chance to commit some form of violence with impunity. I couldn’t blame them. I wouldn’t have liked a stranger making me feel self-conscious at such a time.
I was about to make my excuses when I saw Claire standing by the window, slowly losing it. Her grandmother was trying to get her to have some Harvey’s Bristol Cream, obviously trying to distract her from her misery, but it wasn’t working. Her face was crumbling like a sandcastle at high tide.
She shook her head and disappeared upstairs just as Dom drained his glass and made a beeline for me. It was the only encouragement I needed. I slipped into the tiny culvert between kitchen and living room and, pulling back the grimy curtain across the stairwell, climbed into a thick, airless gloom, my shoes echoing on the thinly carpeted risers.
I wondered later – especially on the long, silent journey home, when I was aware that Nuala was gearing up for her own unlikely revelation – whether Claire had heard me coming after her; certainly the house was not an ally of stealth. The walls were thin, the woodwork noisy.
She was standing in the sister bedroom, the door partly open. I could see in the dressing-table mirror her body as she slipped out of her clothes. The scars looked like heavily embroidered belts of purple and whitish pink wrapped around her: she looked like an escape artist ready for action. They did not reach above her chest or below her thighs. Her arms were clear. The ragged coils were smeared with light where the shiny, fatigued skin had stretched. In between these harsh borders, the no-man’s land of her flesh was pockmarked with half a dozen ugly craters, as if she’d been punctured. Her buttocks had been slashed and knitted into a grotesque weave. A substantial section of her pubic patch had not grown back because of the shiny red weal carved deep into her crotch.
Maybe she heard my ragged breathing, or had known I was there all along, thinking it right that she should calmly acknowledge my presence at that moment. I went to her. It didn’t matter that she was naked. It didn’t matter who saw us. We were in our own little pocket, protected from the outside world. She cried so hard that the V between her breasts, where she was pressed up tight against me, collected a pool of tears.
‘I miss him,’ she breathed.
My father had gone to bed when I got back. I could see, through the living room window, Nuala alone, curled on the sofa with a mug of something hot, steam making uncertain the reflected, dead light on her face from the TV.
I didn’t want to see her then. I needed to remain alone.
I let myself into the garage and shut the door behind me. Something scampered among the old wicker fishing baskets in the corner. There was a smell of old things: oil, grass cuttings, sweat. Mum’s Fiat was dusty, smaller than I remembered it. I got in and sat in the driver’s seat. Positioned the mirror so I could see her in the back. Her wheat-coloured hair, her beautiful big hazel eyes. I talked to her for a long time.
Driving back, I said little to Nuala about how the funeral had gone. Like a funeral, I’d
said, when she asked me. Only without all the usual gut-busting laughs, I’d said. Snapped, more like. But she accepted it, kept quiet, rubbed my hand a little.
Claire’s scars wrapped themselves around my focus.
It was a beautiful day. Very cold, with a sheet of corrugated cloud roofing the towns and villages and factories as we swept along the M6. A jet moving against its patterns looked as if it was slipping unnaturally from its trajectory.
They clung to her like jewelled snakes, these scars — there was something beautiful and compelling about them that kept broadsiding my revulsion. Her skin seemed dull and tired compared to these lustrous strips, these brilliant wounds. They swarmed across her upper body, biting into her breasts where they defined a new shape for her. Their architect had been careful. His had been a strategic cruelty.
She told me how Shaun had begged her to marry him, even while he was carving her into separate territories, the borders of which would be defined by the barbed wire ghosts of thick sutures. I tried to imagine the faces of the nurses at casualty who saw her come in, clutching the pieces of her stomach together, wondered how they swallowed her story of an attack at the hands of a gang of anonymous lads outside a Morecambe pub.
She’d fled to a safe house in the north, close to her parents. Shaun never tried to follow her. At the time, we had all thought it was because she was homesick, had gone home to retrain as a teacher. That was the line trotted out by the Chief Sub, anyway. Claire told me how she was sleeping less and that her insomnia had started up when she thought about Shaun with another woman.
‘I almost went back to him then,’ she said to me, a retreating look in her eyes, ‘just to stop him from doing this to someone else.’
But she’d persuaded herself to stay put, reassured herself that he must have acted the way he did because she was in some way unfit, that she deserved to be brutalised. He would probably enjoy a stress-free relationship with the next one along.
‘I was there,’ I said aloud and Nuala jerked out of her reverie. She turned to me. The radio masts outside Rugby scrolled past the window behind her head.
‘Where?’ she asked, frowning.
‘The day Shaun asked Claire out.’
‘Claire? The one who just said goodbye to her parents? So who’s Shaun?’
I explained who Shaun was but I didn’t tell Nuala what he’d done to Claire. It felt too private, too close, a horror to share. And then it was tumbling out of me anyway, as if I was no more in charge of my mouth than a doll with a speech-cord attached to its back.
‘It was at this magazine I worked at. In London. Where Greg – a friend of mine – got me in. I’d been there about a week, hadn’t really talked to anyone. There’d been a slew of new recruits around that time and the company were getting a bit worried that there’d be claims for RSI – you know – if they didn’t get somebody in to teach them how to sit at a desk properly, and hold a mouse the right way.
‘I was scheduled to sit in with an instructor with a bunch of other people; some of them had been there a fair while. You could see they were potential RSI cases because they walked like crippled apes. This guy took us, looked like he was fresh out of business school. He really had a strut about him. Crisp, white shirt. Power tie. Close shave. He looked like he should have been called Dirk or Garth, rather than Roger.
‘He had an overhead projector and a big notepad that he wrote on with a fat felt tip. “Okay,” he goes, clapping his hands. Big on eye contact, big on remembering and using first names. “Okay, what happens to us when we’re stressed?” We came out with a few suggestions. Heart rate increases, sweat glands juice up, nervousness… He’s nodding all the while, saying “Yep, that’s good, what else?” We dry up. “Some of us do this,” he says, writing SWEAT MORE on the pad. “Some of us do this…” SMOKE MORE. “Aaa-and some of us do this…” DRINK MORE.
‘Made me feel really guilty, that did, although I only had the odd pint at lunchtimes. Shaun sat next to Claire and was whispering stuff under his breath, making her laugh. Roger kept casting them glances but he didn’t say anything. I saw Shaun… I was the only one who saw this… I saw Shaun reach out and trap Claire’s nipple through her blouse with his fingers – he kind of had his arms crossed on the desk in front of him so nobody would see. And he nodded down at his groin. Claire was already reddening but she looked down too and went even redder.
‘She came into work wearing the same clothes the next day. And I saw her wince whenever she sat down. Everyone noticed but nobody said anything. I think it was because we didn’t want to embarrass Claire but really, now, I reckon it’s because we didn’t know how Shaun would react. He was unpredictable. I know that sounds ominous now, but we didn’t attach anything unpleasant to it then. He was a bit of a nutter, that’s all. Every office has one. “You don’t have to be mad here” and all that. Claire left when he left but she didn’t look mad keen. She lingered near the Art department but when he looked up from the door, she went. It was like he was drawing her towards him. She was trapped as early as that. He’d take her home and use her as a canvas for all of his anger and frustration and she’d never say a word. And none of us knew about it. Until the funeral.’
‘Why are you telling me this, Adam? Why do you want to frighten me this way?’ Nuala’s voice was tiny and brittle. I looked at her and blinked. I hadn’t even realised we were still driving. My eyes had frozen on the industrial sprawl on the horizon as I battered down the silence in the car.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, squeezing her leg. ‘I didn’t mean to scare you. I had to tell you.’ I turned my attention back to the road. It was gradually filling up as the tributaries fed it. London was less than twenty minutes away. I could feel its suck; it was a starving, ruined baby, looking for nourishment from any quarter. Defiled, indiscriminate, blind. It devoured us all, digested us in its poisonous juices for years and then spat out the bones.
Back in Nuala’s flat, she drew me a hot bath and added some lavender oil. She poured me a big whisky and put John Lennon’s Look At Me on constant loop on the CD player.
‘No animals?’ I asked, smiling. ‘No chittering weevils performing Sinatra? No cane toads belching Burt Bacharach?’
Look at me. Who am I supposed to be? Who am I supposed to be?
She didn’t protest at my ribbing her. She just smiled and stroked the hair from my forehead, and sadness settled badly into her face like cheap moisturiser.
Who am I? Nobody knows but me…
She rubbed me down and led me to the living room. The window was open and a cat was sitting on the ledge, washing itself with the kind of intensity that could at any moment convert itself into the need to chew leaves or rake a claw down a curtain. She pushed me gently into a chair and went over to a cupboard behind the television. Inside was a large red safe box. She unlocked it and pulled out three video cassettes.
‘I said I had something to show you. Well, here it is.’
She gave me the tapes and left the room. Then she came back in again. ‘No,’ she said, holding up her hands as if I was aiming a gun at her. ‘I should be in here with you for this.’
‘I should play these now?’ I said. There were no labels to tell me what was on the tapes.
‘If you want to. If you can stand it.’
I slotted the first one in and pressed the play button on the remote. Immediately, the screen was filled with a wet-wax image of lurid colours. It took me a while to work out what was going on, and then a while longer to work out that it was Nuala lying there doing it, along with three permed, heavily bearded men. Tinny music warbled in tune with the thrusting and the grunts. When Nuala’s mouth was free for a few seconds, she clearly said ‘Fuck me’, but the tape was dubbed into some Scandinavian language and some breathless female voice took over. Nukken me! Slap me an daf!, it sounded as though she had cried.
‘Jesus,’ I said, ‘who is that?’
‘The one with the tattoo? His name’s Eric. Known in the trade as The Baguette.’
>
‘And the other one, the one whose lips are drawn back. The one who you’re, um…’
‘He’s Joe. Pokin’ Joe Longhorn.’
‘And the short guy?’
‘Graham. Footsie.’
‘Footsie?’
‘Yeah, Footsie. His – you know – was a foot long.’
‘Right. And what was your trade name?’
‘Martini.’
I watched the film. I was getting a hard-on, as you do. I tried to watch with as much detachment as possible, knowing how tough this was for Nuala, knowing how much she must think of me to be able to share a secret such as this. I offered observations and asked questions too.
‘That has to smart,’ and ‘Did you have to do exercises to be able to do that?’ and ‘Woah, you did that in one take?’
Nuala cried a little, but then she started giggling when I made some funny comments and she could see how relaxed I was about it. I made her feel okay about it. It was in the past. It didn’t matter any more.
Later, she slipped my boxers off and in my excitement I sprang out and hit her on the chin. ‘Martini,’ I said, stroking her head. ‘Forget The Baguette. Meet Croissant Man. Meet Mr Finger Roll.’
I dreamed I was sitting on a foot-wide plank, supported only by a few rotten trestles, a hundred feet above the ground, inching my way along, my arms filled with the foetuses that would become my friends and family. If only I could make it to the other side, a couple of miles away, I could plant them and enjoy a rich life of love with them. A strong wind, filled with freezing rain, made the plank swing; I could feel the tenuous grip of my sodden denims upon the grain of wood giving way. I could let go of these almost-humans, these blueprints, and save myself. When I looked down, they had decayed in my arms. I let them go and put my hands out to grip the wood at the precise moment the whole fucking mess gave way.
London Revenant Page 19
