by Anne Peile
I was wearing a T-shirt patterned with stars. It was quite tight. Jack was easing it over my head. When he undressed me he was very careful always to lift my hair out of the way, so that it did not get pulled by a neckline or snagged on buttons. Sometimes his hands shook.
‘So, on St David’s Day next you will be all of nineteen years old?’
‘Yes.’
‘God, but I’m a lucky bastard.’
On Saturday afternoon the Great Gear Trading Company was quiet and I was helping Jimmy to sort out the metal fittings which fixed in the pegboard walls so that traders could hang their goods on display. We sat on the floor in the orange painted office. The fittings were all tangled and knitted together, thrown carelessly into a cardboard carton.
Jimmy said, ‘Bollocks, we’ll have to tip the whole lot out to do the job properly.’ I began sorting them into piles by size. ‘So, when did you lose your virginity then?’
‘What?’
‘When did you lose it, I’ve been trying to work it out. When you first came here to ask me for a job I would have put money on your still being a virgin, right? Now, you’re very obviously not.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘Oh come on, Suse, it’s just one of those things, you can tell, right, at least a man can. What I’ve been trying to work out is when, where and with whom?’ He spoke the w sounds in an exaggerated, theatrical elocution. ‘Which lucky punter in the Potter? They were all sniffing around you, you know.’
‘I know. Somebody offered me money to do it with him.’
Jimmy hooted with delight. ‘Who, who was it? No don’t, tell me, let me guess.’
‘Actually, I promised him I wouldn’t tell anyone.’
‘Fucking hell, Suse, the man was trying to buy your body, I don’t think you’re under any moral obligation to him.’
‘Okay then, it was Gordon.’ Gordon was a property developer with a number of large schemes in Fulham. He often sat at the bar of the Chelsea Potter, his long grey hair straggly and at odds with his fashionable, expensive clothes.
Jimmy hooted again. ‘I love it, I love this day! Can you believe it, Mr Big, having to pay for it! What did he actually say?’
‘He said that I had a beautiful face, and that he would pay for it. He said he’d done that before, you know, paid and stuff, with a loo attendant at the Dorchester, but they got caught and she got the sack. He said he spoke up for her to the management but that it made no difference.’
Jimmy was laughing so hard there were tears in his goat pale eyes. ‘You wait till he comes in poncing around in his Piero di Monzi suit next time, you fucking wait mate, schadenfreude, do I love it, yes I fucking do.’
‘Don’t tell him that you know.’
It’s all right, I won’t let on. Did he, by the way, with you?’
‘No! No, it’s not him.’
‘So who then, is it somebody in the pub? How can you be so good at secrets at your age?’
‘No, it’s nobody in the pub.’
‘It better not have been some spotty youth that tools around your school gates with his tongue hanging out. You want someone who knows his way around, especially when it’s your first. God, Suse, you could have had me, it makes my balls ache to think about it. So, is he good? Do you like it?’
I smiled down at the shining heap of silver fixtures, ‘I’m not saying anything.’
‘It’s all right, you don’t need to.’
When you are young people upbraid you for the use of superlatives. ‘How can you possibly know’ they will say, ‘How can you make such sweeping statements’, and ‘You’ll learn, one day, you have to compromise in this life’.
People are very stupid; obtuse. After all, you do not qualify your reaction to art or music (unless you are an academic), you respond in the superlative. So it is with love and joy. I knew, with the Easter kiss, that it was the most perfect that I should ever have. In the same way, I knew that on the evening when I lay naked in my father’s arms and he read to me from Kenneth Grahame, that it was the happiest hour in my life.
‘Do you know this book?’ he had asked when I picked up from his desk a copy of Dream Days. I shook my head, sometimes it is easier to lie if you do it with signs and gestures rather than the spoken word. In my mind there ran a picture of the art nouveau end papers and the boy’s thick-nibbed pen: John (Jack) ap Rhys Owen.
‘I’ve always loved it,’ he said, ‘especially ‘The Reluctant Dragon’ story. I had a copy once, when I was a boy, a smashing edition with these sort of Rackham-esque illustrations. Don’t know what became of it. Anyway, I’ve set myself a project, I’m going to do a set of drawings from it. Just for me probably, though I may approach the author’s estate, if they turn out well enough.’
I wished that I could tell him that the first copy was safe. ‘Do you miss it?’
‘What?’
‘The book, the other one.’
‘Do I… I don’t know, really… No, it’s only things I suppose, isn’t it, not like people… you can’t hang on to everything… ’
‘Read it to me,’ I said, ‘read me your favourite story.’
‘Really?’
I nodded and so he stretched for the book that lay upon the desk. The cloth binding was a dull orange brown, this edition had no illustrations. Jack asked me if I was comfortable. He supported the book with the hand of the arm that was around my shoulders, my head rested upon his chest so that as well as his heartbeat I could feel the sound vibrations as he spoke. He began to read: ‘Footprints in the snow have been unfailing provokers of sentiment ever since snow was first a white wonder in this drab-coloured world of ours.’
Sometimes, among schoolchildren at that time, you would hear one charging another with an untruth told: ‘You’re a born liar,’ they would accuse.
I suppose that I was a born liar. I did not want to lie, not to Jack. Sometimes, in the times when I was joined to him, I wanted to tell him the truth. Once he paused and asked me, ‘What do you think about, when we’re doing this?… In here… ’ He touched my forehead with his thumb as though there were a smudge there, ‘what are you thinking about, in here, Susie?’
Inside my head I might just have been repeating the diminutives of father over and over again.
‘You,’ I said, ‘just you.’
Because I loved him so much and he told me, often, how happy I made him and how lucky, I never saw that what we did was wrong. But I did know that outsiders would fail to understand. In consequence, I knew that I must absolve him from all possible blame by never telling him the truth. I kept Dad and Daddy dumb, unheard inside me.
How many years ago had it been when Christine Threadgold, thickset and the bully of the junior school, had challenged me at the playground gate. ‘Where’s your dad?’ she demands. Her fringe is ginger and her cardigan salmon pink; already she has the mannerisms of the Battersea mothers, chin up, bottom out.
‘Away at sea,’ I say; so I was a liar even then, ‘he is, he’s away at sea.’ It was an expression I had heard a post office crony of my mother’s use about the husband of some third party whom they disparaged and picked to pieces over the aerograms and parcel labels and the scarlet beaked bottles of Gloy glue.
‘I don’t believe you,’ says Christine and she is echoed by the mothers’ meeting chorus of her supporters. Her own father, small with a Useless Eustace grin and hair soap and water slicked back, is sometimes seen following the Threadgold women through the market stalls of Northcote Road.
‘He is,’ I repeat fervently and look up to the white London sky above the roof lines and chimneys, ‘he really is.’ And tears try to come pushing out with the force of my conviction.
‘My love,’ says Jack when his voice is husky and he takes me into his arms, ‘my love, my own best girl.’
And, born liar that I am, I became most adept at evading any direct questions from him about my home life or family. I had told him that my mother had died in an accident when I was very small. He was g
entle and sympathetic, he said, ‘I am so sorry, Susie, it must have been very difficult for you, I’m sure.’ And I, looking beyond his thin kind face, recalled her as she threw the dolls’ cake and told me that he was dead and a useless bastard and let the sketchbook be ruined; I found it hard to conjure any expression of wistfulness. I told Jack that my surname was James, which was Alison’s name. Just as on that first night in the Phene, when I had pictured the Prince of Wales Drive flat for my home, so I pictured Julian’s father for the role of mine. Fleetingly and coincidentally whenever I did so, I gained an understanding of what a good parent Peter was. I said that there was an aunt that stayed sometimes, to look after us. Jack did not ask me very much about them; I guessed that he would have imagined the reaction of my relations to the age difference between us.
When Jack said that I was very bright and should be at university instead of working as a waitress I made reference to some vague problems I had had, over teachers. ‘But I will think about it, later on,’ I told him. I knew that if he could have found out about Oxford he would make me go. I also knew that I would be quite incapable, physically, of going so far away from him. One day when I was looking for my hairbrush the annotated copy of Richard II fell out of my bag.
‘Are you reading this, Susie?’
I took it back before he could find my name and form number and date of issue in the front. ‘Yes, I did it at school. I liked it so much that sometimes I read it again.’
‘You are a funny mixture,’ Jack said.
A few days later he was reading the paper and he made an exclamation of pleased triumph.
‘Do you know what, there’s going to be a new production of Richard II by the RSC, real landmark stuff, two actors taking it in turns as Richard and Bolingbroke. I could take you to see it, would you like that?’
‘Yes, I would, very much.’
He never did. On the first night, when Richard Pascoe and Ian Richardson bowed to applause on the stage of the Aldwych theatre, my father Jack was already dead.
Although my occupation in those months was ceaseless I never felt any fatigue. I worked and revised and sat my exams; I practised endless complicated deceits and I travelled miles backwards and forwards across the Thames bridges. In my father’s bed the passion and desire for him, in my body and in my head, was close to a kind of derangement. On the narrow mattress whole hours would pass when I was detached from the real world and from reason. I might have committed any crime for him. Truly, it was a form of possession. And yet I was never weary, rather, I was quickened and energised by that life I led. Perhaps it was the deep sleeps that I slept beside Jack, so cherished and safe-guarded as I was. He played me Ella Fitzgerald, and she sang ‘Someone to Watch Over Me’.
Sometimes, if I returned home in the evening, I would find the flat filled by a gathering of Ron’s friends. In those days there was a structured hierarchy of London’s criminals; I expect that it may be different now. Lin had intimated that because members of her boyfriend’s family had served as lieutenants to the Brothers Kray, they enjoyed some standing in the underworld. I knew that Scottie the cat burglar was deemed to be a gentleman thief. I had myself heard him expostulate with righteous indignation over the report of a gang who had run down a policeman during a robbery. But among Ron’s associates there were criminals of the pettiest kind. These were minor thieves; they traded stolen goods from market stalls, some made a livelihood through illegalities in the motor trade, some organised poker games in lock-up garages on suburban alleyways where weeds grew up through the concrete.
One night I had returned early from Chelsea to revise for my biology paper; biology and chemistry were the only sciences I liked, I detested maths and physics because I found them incomprehensible. The flat was full and smoky and noisy from Ron’s new stereogram. He and his friends were especially fond of Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis and also of Ray Charles; ‘Busted’ was being played. Ron broke off from singing along with it to call out, ‘Here’s a dolly bird, someone get her a drink.’
I shook my head but he took no notice. I sat down on the floor beside the man I knew to be the quietest member of their group. He was called Tommy Sutton; he was a plumber by day and he lived in a road off the south side of the Common with his elderly mother. He was fair-haired and bearded and noticeably neat and softly spoken amid the rest of the company.
‘You look as if you find all this a bit much,’ Tommy said.
‘It’s not that, it’s just that I have an exam in the morning, biology O-level.’
‘Does your mum know?’ He nodded towards my mother who sat on the other side of the smoky room; she was watching intently as the short man that they called Diddy Dave demonstrated a balancing trick with drinking glasses and beer mats.
‘I don’t know, probably not.’
‘Look, you try and slide out to your room. I’ll see if I can persuade this lot to call it a night.’
‘Thomas,’ Ron called loudly, ‘don’t you go chatting up that right little raver over there, you know your mum wouldn’t like it.’ Then he protruded his lips into a pout and bent one hand over at the wrist in a gesture which was supposed to indicate effeminacy.
‘Go on,’ said Tommy to me.
I managed to leave the gathering without attracting comment. In my room I put my pillow at the foot of the bed so that I could sleep by the open window and let the fresh night air lift the smoke smell out of my hair. Before I settled I made myself review in my head the component parts of the kidneys, lungs, heart and inner ear. Then, only when I was sure that I could repeat each feature without faltering, I allowed myself to think of Jack. How I had learned that when I was above him, even by the minutest of movements I could affect him. I was fascinated to see myself causing these changes in his man’s face, watching for it to tighten and grimace and for him to beseech me, on and on, until he had convulsed out all he had into me and his expression became smoothed again and he smiled for me. I believed then that it was all the power that I should ever need.
Next day, in the long, hushed examination hall, I made a good job of the biology paper. I took far more care with diagrams and drawings now that I had sat for hours on the bed watching Jack at work. I saw him conjure small and meticulous acts of magic as he made a story appear upon the blank white page. His infinite patience and the steady, absorbed breathing intensified the quiet of the room, as did the stillness of the cat, sitting sentinel at his side. I thought that one day he would make a picture of himself at the table with the cat and in that picture he made he would be working upon the picture of himself, at the table with the cat.
On the way to Chelsea the bus stopped at Battersea Garage to change drivers. I looked over the road at the dark prison yard walls of the Morgan Crucibles factory on the riverside. The widower father of a girl in my class had worked there but in the Christmas term he had died. The girl Joanne said that it was because of him being widowed, that he could not bear her mother being gone and so he had just given up, he had died of a broken heart. I found it most affecting; I told my mother but she said that it was impossible. ‘Nonsense, there’s no such thing as dying of a broken heart.’
In bed that night my father made a remark that was supposed to be flippant and light-hearted but it filled me with such panic and terror that I thought I should lose my mind. It happened because I had perfected ways of touching him with such gentleness that when I began it he could hardly tell that my fingers were there at all. His body would incline to me as though by tropism but I would make him wait and keep my touchings as soft as breath. This prolongation could cause him to cry out in sounds that were quite primeval. If I had heard them anywhere else, merely as a bystander, I think I would probably have been afraid. Then, as he gave in and I had the warm stuff running out between my fingers I would kiss him as if our mouths were glued together. Afterwards he made the remark that so terrified me. He said, ‘Sometimes, with you, I think I must have died and gone to Heaven.’
Perhaps I was overwro
ught from the exams. I sat up in the bed and the terror and alarm that seized me prevented me from breathing properly. My mother had told me that he was dead and for years I had believed it to be so. Then I had got him back. Now that he himself spoke of it, and it was presented to me again, I could see only the colour red, the inside eyelid colour and the ambulance blanket scarlet. And I could hear in my head some alarming discordant sound which was like blood rush mixed with the bells of ambulances. I tried over and over again to catch my breath in but it would not go over the top. Also I must have begged him incessantly, ‘Don’t say that, please don’t say that. He is not dead, he is not dead.’ Because I begged him so many times the plea took up the rhythm of a prayer that is repeated in decades but the panic between the lines felt like falling down many flights of stairs. Jack stayed very calm. He held my head tight between his two hands so that he was pressing on the bone of the skull and he tried to make me look at him but I could not, for fear, in case it was only his ghost that spoke to me.
‘It’s all right, Susie, listen to me, it’s all right. It was just a foolish thing I said, that’s all. Nothing more, nothing worse than that. Come on now, be still.’
He had switched on the desk lamp and for a long time I sat staring at the same patch of the wall. My hand was still sticky but now the stuff was gone cold. The salt from my tears was stinging my cheeks as if they would chap straight away. In my chest I felt a pain like a stitch after running. ‘I can’t breathe.’
