While I was trying to make the sauce the phone rang and I nearly shot right out of my skin. It is so ridiculously loud. I nearly didn’t answer it. I nearly didn’t realise it was up to me to answer it. When is the last time I answered a phone?
‘Thought you weren’t there,’ Sarah said.
‘I was – um,’ I said.
‘Everything all right? Warm enough?’
‘We’re absolutely fine.’
‘And how did Uncle seem?’
‘Happy as, you know, Larry,’ I said thinking that was maybe going a bit far.
‘Really?’
‘Well quite … settled. Comfortable, you know.’
‘That’s good. Did he ask you about the money? There was some in the sideboard, hidden in a serving dish or something.’
‘Nope.’
‘Well, if you’re all fine. Is it snowing there?’
‘Yeah it’s wild.’
‘Good job I went when I did or I’d never have got here.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Any problem, here’s my number.’ She reeled off a number but I couldn’t see a pen anywhere and there was a horrible smell coming from the kitchen. ‘It’s really kind of you,’ she said.
‘No probs, got to go,’ I said. ‘Bye.’
A woman on the telly was saying how having cancer had converted her into a Christian and in the kitchen the cheese sauce had converted into a solid stinking lump. I tipped it in the bin. Now there would only be macaroni. But never mind. Upstairs Doggo was building us a fire and later I’d have a bath and then we would be warm together in the lighthouse room while the wind tossed the snow about outside.
Twenty-seven
Doggo made a different sauce out of tinned tomatoes and dried herbs. He opened a bottle of cold greenish wine that tasted like stone. We sat in front of the television with our plates on our laps. I lifted my glass and said, ‘To Norma.’ Doggo looked back at me with dazzles in his eyes. I thought the poor dog must be frozen solid by now. I wanted to ask him whose dogs they were. If Norma wasn’t his, maybe he should let someone know that she was dead. But he looked so desolate I left it. Part of a relationship is knowing when to let things be.
Last of the Summer Wine was on and there were roars of laughter washing round the room like waves. Doggo kept his eyes on the telly most of the time but he didn’t laugh or even smile and nor did I. In Norma’s honour we were sombre – but still it felt good to me to be somewhere I had a right to be, somewhere warm and light and with another person, especially with Doggo. It made me feel more like a proper person myself.
Last Christmas in my American lady’s house I’d had light and heat, telly, a bed and a deep pink bath but I had moved about that house like a woman made of smoke, someone who would vanish if you opened the door too fast.
I ate some of the macaroni and sauce. I didn’t want Doggo thinking he’d cooked for nothing, though I don’t know if he’d have noticed if I hadn’t. He ate a ton of the stuff, more and more helpings, shovelling it in with his eyes on the telly, slurping down the wine. He wouldn’t win any prizes for his table manners, Doggo, but I don’t care.
While we were waiting for his sauce to cook I’d redone the plasters on his hands. The skin was healing up, each burn drying and pursing from the outside in. Next time, maybe, we could leave the plasters off.
When his hands were done I knelt down to look at his foot. The sock was stiff with dirt and his foot filthy, the nails ragged with black stuff caked under them. The splinter from the stairs was jammed between his big and second toe with dirt and half-dried blood crusting round it. I got the washing-up bowl and filled it with warm water. I pulled out the splinter and new blood leaked out.
His feet stank. I squirted Squeezee in the water and washed them, rinsing the squiggles of dirt from between his toes, scrubbing his heels with a pan scourer till they were pink. They are thin feet. The second toe is longer than the big one. There are wide spaces between his toes and wiry black hairs on the top of each one.
I washed his feet slowly, learning every bit. He lay back with his eyes closed, flinching if it tickled or hurt but not saying a word. I found a speckled verruca, big as a five-pence piece, on his right heel. I cut his toenails which were so long they’d started curling under. I sprayed the Savlon on the leaky place where the splinter had been and then I rubbed Sarah’s handcream into the whole of his feet. He didn’t say a word but a blissful look spread over his face, and the feeling spread from him to me.
I’ve never looked at a person’s feet before, not properly studied them. Doggo’s feet were beautiful. As I washed them, I went over in my mind some things he’d said.
While he was frying an onion for the sauce he’d told me this: his dad, who was called Sid, was violent to his mum. One day he hit her with a fish-slice, he hit and hit and hit while Doggo and his brother sat at the table watching. Nothing they could do. When Sid had finished he went out and left her covered with stripes of bruise. And sometimes he locked her out. If she ever went out at night he locked the door and wouldn’t let her back in. Doggo said he remembered her banging at the windows and shouting Let me see my kids, her face pale and wild behind the net curtains. Then one day she was gone. Doggo said he woke one night and her hair was against his face and it smelled sweet. It made him feel happy and safe that she was so close and he went back to sleep smiling. But in the morning she had gone.
For a long time he’d thought she was dead. Sid said they must never mention her name in that house again. Doggo cried every night for ages but in a way he was glad she’d gone. At least he didn’t have to see her being hit and bullied any more and Sid never once laid a finger on his boys.
While he was talking I thought about Mrs Banks, how quiet and ordinary she is. I just can’t see her shouting and banging wildly at windows or being beaten up with a fish-slice. Or running out on her little boys.
After we’d finished eating Doggo told me more. ‘Sid never cooked a thing in his life before she went.’ He ran his finger round his plate to get the last of the sauce. ‘But when Mum was gone he did. He learned. In some ways he was a right bastard but he did try. Our best thing were banger mountain, mashed spuds with bangers stuck in top and ketchup all over. When Mum left he learned to do that and we had it every Saturday for years. He had tattoos all up his arms of bulldogs and hearts and a Union Jack. He used to stand in the kitchen in his vest with all his tattoos showing and mash those fucking spuds like he was beating the fucking shit out of someone. Nobody ever mashed spuds like my old man. They were like silk.’
‘God,’ I said.
It was the most Doggo had ever spoken in one go. It was the most he’d ever told me. It’s a weird thing, but sometimes the more you know about someone the less you feel you know. By the time he’d stopped I was prickling with questions. I could hardly keep sitting still. I waited for him to go on but he didn’t so I asked him whose dogs Gordon and Norma were. He poured out the last of the wine, hitting the bottom with his palm like it was a bottle of ketchup.
‘Eh?’ I said.
‘Why?’
‘Dunno,’ I said, ‘I’m interested.’
‘Like you’re a fount of information about you,’ he said. His shoulders hunched up. I thought maybe he was about to turn nasty again. I held my breath but he looked up and grinned.
‘Fount!’ I said and threw a bit of macaroni at him. He threw it back. He was OK but he clammed up again. It was like a door had blown open then slammed shut. The news came on and I went like a ramrod with fear but there was nothing about him, or any wanted man, just the usual terrible arguments and sufferings of the world.
The water was gurgling hot in the pipes so I had a bath. I’d never had a bath at Mr Dickens’ before. Even though I love bathing it wasn’t a tempting prospect. The bath was disgusting with a ginger stain under the taps and the plug-hole clogged up with grey hairs and fossilised slime. The air was so cold it turned to solid steam as soon as I switched the hot tap on. I got in and lay under
the steam looking at the silver hand against my scraggy tits and the hairs everywhere that shouldn’t be there. My silly scratch was nearly better. It wasn’t deep at all. A lot of fuss about nothing, that had been. Soon it would be just another scar, turning from purple to silver-white.
I tried not to look at the sides of the bath, all the rings of grey and khaki and nearly black. You could probably count all the baths that had been had in it for years. I bet it hasn’t been cleaned since Zita died. I bet one of those rings has bits of her in it, skin-cells and DNA and stuff. A scientist could probably clone her from a scraping of that bath.
The bottom was gritty against my bum and there was nothing nice, no oil or anything only cheap green soap which rubbed up into scum. But still it was good to be in the hot water. I let my head go under and the water gurgled in my ears. When I came up for air I heard Doggo shouting through the door for me to leave the water in.
‘It’s not my dirt in there,’ I said when I came out.
When I got up to the lighthouse room it was warm and the fire was crackling. It was like a scene stolen from a dream, the walls shuddering with flame-light or maybe from the wind, and the snow like numb little thoughts sliding down the glass when I peeped between the curtains.
I unfolded Zita’s nightie and shook it out by the fire. I wanted to try it, what it felt like to wear a nightie like that. I took off my clothes and stood there for a minute watching the firelight and shadows lick over my skin. Funny how flame-light can make the worst things look OK. Flame-light and enough wine inside you. The nightie flowed over me like cool water. There was no mirror so I couldn’t get the full effect but it clung. Even though I was much thinner than Zita it clung to my tits and stroked across my goosy belly. Imagine how it would look on Sarah, silk against her curves. There were little rot holes on the front I hadn’t seen before. Moth or rot but it didn’t matter. It was like a new skin and I didn’t feel like me at all.
I knelt down by the fire, not thinking about Sarah, thinking about Doggo, how it must have felt to watch his mum get beaten up. I poked the fire with a bit of clothes horse trying to remember my parents together. Maybe I could remember them holding hands. Their hands above me like a pink knot and the shadow stretched between them on the ground, joined up like cut-out paper dolls. I must have been so small. And they used to fly me between them. I do remember the jolt and swing as my red shoes flew up and they shouted Wheeeee!, my wings tugged tight between their arms, my hands squashed up in theirs, flying as if I was their own trapped bird. But no hitting. And I have never been hit that I remember, not once in my entire life. Not yet.
I felt a trickle inside me like the gradual start of a landslide thinking of the scary jolt and swing between their safe hands, the giggle and skirt flap and scuff of my shoes and me probably saying More, more till they were sick of it. Thinking about my mum. How after Daddy died she had red eyes and always the lump of a bunched-up hankie in her sleeve. I didn’t cry of course because I was too small to know what I had lost.
I was going to get into bed but before I could, Doggo came up the stairs with a towel round his waist. He’d only stayed in the bath about a minute. His nipples were like two wet and fuzzy flowers.
His eyes flared when he saw me. ‘Stand up,’ he said. I wanted to crawl under the bed but I did stand up and did an idiotic twirl. ‘That is …’ he said but the words died in his mouth. The towel poked out in front of him like a tent. And he did really fancy me. He really fancied me. Me. ‘You look so sexy,’ he said. And I knew that I did, in the dim firelight in someone else’s nightdress, I did. Pity it was only me inside.
‘I’m not sexy,’ I said and tried to laugh but it came out as a bleat. He shook his head and stepped towards me.
‘Changed your mind then?’ He took me in his arms and kissed me. It was like a Hollywood kiss. I felt as if I should bend myself back in his arms, arch my body up the way they do. His damp skin got on the silk till it was practically dissolving. I opened my mouth and his tongue slipped in. I thought it would be all right but then the nightdress seemed to be disappearing and it was still me under it, my own rough skin, my own self turning into splintery wood.
His hands crawled down my back to my bum. His towel was pushing out so far I knew it was only a matter of time before it fell right off. I tried not to think. Thoughts were rushing in but I tried to stop them. I tried to think, I can do it, I can let him do it. I love him, I can, I can. But then one of his hands tried to go up inside the silk and I didn’t want him to feel me and the towel fell off. His prick sprung up and it reminded me of Mr Harcourt. Not that it was a horrid whiskery prawn like Mr Harcourt’s, it was smooth and kind of hopeful-looking, but still I couldn’t touch it or let it near. I jerked away so hard my head banged his nose. I didn’t mean it.
‘Fuck.’ He let go of me and bent over, hands cupped over his nose.
‘Sorry,’ I said.
He took his hands away and there was blood running from his nostrils. I hid behind my hands, feeling naked, feeling stupid, feeling scared. If he was ever going to kill me it would be now. I looked between my fingers but he hadn’t moved. Standing there with a hard-on and the blood streaming down. The blood was shiny red, gorgeous in the flames.
‘Sorry.’
‘Stop fucking apologising.’
I picked up the towel and chucked it to him to mop the blood away. ‘You should tip your head back.’ There was blood all down the nightdress. I went down to fetch a cold wet flannel but when I got back the bleeding had almost stopped.
‘Sorry,’ I said. I couldn’t think what else to say.
‘Sorry,’ he spat. He went downstairs.
I took off the nightie and threw it on the fire. It wisped into flame and bits of it flew up the chimney before the rest sizzled on the coals. The smell was of Doggo’s burning blood. I put on my T-shirt and knickers and got between the cold sheets. I thought he would never come back upstairs. I lay there for ages wondering what he was doing down there, what he was thinking. Wondering if he would ever come back up. Listening for the slam of the door. But after a while he did come stumping back up.
‘What is up with you?’ he said. His voice had gone stuffy and thick as if he had a cold. I couldn’t look at him.
‘Nothing.’
‘You’re a fucking tease,’ he said. He was so angry. I could smell it coming off his skin.
‘I’m not.’
‘You were begging for it.’
‘I wasn’t. You said it didn’t matter if we didn’t do it,’ I said and dared to look up at him. His penis had given up hope and flopped down.
‘I never said it didn’t matter,’ he said. He put some clothes on and got into bed but so far away from me he might as well have been on another planet. ‘It does matter,’ he said after a while. ‘That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?’
I wanted to say, What what’s all about? but I didn’t say anything. I wanted to say, That’s not what it’s all about for me but I just lay there. How could I explain? I was nearly afraid to breathe.
‘Why didn’t you just say no?’ he said. ‘Christ, Lamb, you didn’t have to head-butt me.’
‘Didn’t mean to.’
‘Don’t know if I can do without,’ he said, ‘not with us being so close together. And what are you doing dressing up in that fucking négligé thing and prancing about if you don’t want it. Fucking tease.’ I opened my mouth to say it wasn’t a négligé it was a nightie but shut it again. We lay side by side in a stiff sulk.
I thought about what he’d just said. I don’t know if I can do without. Did that mean he’d rape me or he’d leave me if I wouldn’t do it with him?
I lay for ages listening to the crackling fire, the wind, to Doggo’s breath and the invisible sound that snowflakes make. It felt as if the room was rocking. Doggo’s breath turned from angry snuffly breath to calm breath and then to sleeping breath.
When I was sure he was asleep I slid across the cold sheet and into the edges of his warmth.
I was so wide awake it was like someone had opened up my skull to the wind and snow. I moved up against Doggo until we were touching and after a while he curled round me and the weight of his warm sleeping arm came across me. I screwed up my eyes but the flames flickered right through the lids.
Twenty-eight
The phone woke me, ringing on and on for ages. I didn’t move, holding my breath hoping that it wouldn’t disturb Doggo but it was OK, he didn’t even stir. It was morning and an odd bluish light was filtering between the curtains. There were dark splatters of blood on the pillow from Doggo’s nose-bleed. I could only see his hair above the slippery quilt. Sharp quiffs of feather were poking through the material and I lay there pulling them out, wondering what kind of bird they came from.
In the end I got up. It was freezing and silent, as if the whole world had put a finger to its lips. I pulled my sweater on and went to the window and looked between the curtains. The sky was bright toothpaste-blue and the garden and the roofs, the whole city, muffled with snow. The fire had gone out, just a clag of grey cinders and a powder of silky ash all over the carpet that stuck to my footsoles.
Excitement swooped through me. On snowy days when I was a kid I used to rush out into the garden before breakfast and stamp about in my Wellingtons, making the first footprints in the whole wide world. I felt like doing the same now.
Of course it would be all right with Doggo. I would somehow make it be all right. His sleeping breath was like a kind of charm.
I crept out and down the stairs listening to the creaking of my feet on the treads. It was as if part of me was still down there in the cellar, listening to the feet moving about above. But these feet were mine and I was not down there any more. This was me up here. The real me. The other one was like a kind of ghost or shadow.
The back room was sweltering because we’d left the electric fire on high all night. It stunk of dog breath. Gordon and Doughnut got up and wagged their tails but when I put my hand out to pat Gordon, he side-stepped. I know he blames me for Norma, but it was not me. I would never hurt a dog.
Now You See Me Page 17
