by Louise Dean
‘Matters of the heart?’
‘Yes. I mean, I wasn’t a complete prick. I felt sorry for both of them, you know, Ken and Pearl, not being happy. I was eighteen.’
In the swimming baths, his father, half-submerged, looking with hatred at their mother as she came down the metal stairs into the pool, and Nick saw her the way the old man saw her. His mother at the back door, handkerchief in hand, and Nick saw his father through her eyes.
‘I was more of a prig than a prick. You see, I’d decided to have a career in law, because I wanted to deal in truth. It seems laughable, I know. Anyway, Dad was away for a couple of months. He was just “away”. But a friend of mine saw him on a train with a woman. Her husband had left her a pub in Eastbourne, apparently, and he couldn’t resist it. Anyway, I decided I’d tell Mum, but that I’d do it when we were all there so it would all be above board. I think I thought we’d have it out in the open and somehow, them being the grown-ups, they’d make sense of it. Well, Ken went berserk. I’ll never trust you again, he said to me. He packed a bag and went to leave, and I think he asked her if it was what she wanted. And I remember all she said was, I suppose you’d better. And Dave, he went with him. I never expected that either. He said, We can’t just throw him out, he’ll be all alone! And there we were, she and I, Mum and me, in just the space of a few hours, together in that house, half a family. The woman wouldn’t take him in, so they ended up in the caravan park.’
‘I don’t know why he didn’t go back, Ken.’
‘He couldn’t. There was no way back.’
He could remember a shepherd’s pie on the side ready for the oven. She gave it to the dog after Ken and Dave left. She put the Pyrex on the floor. He could remember the noise of it on the tiles and hitting the skirting boards with the dog’s nose pushing it round and round and her watching, mesmerized.
He drank his coffee down. ‘And hey, so much for a mother’s love,’ he said, his voice tinged with the bitterness of the dregs. If he went to kiss his mother, she turned away from him. She hated him, that was plain. All right then, he said. In the summer, after his exams, he left home.
He called Dave from Cambridge during that first Michaelmas term. Dave and his father were sharing digs in Hastings then. He thought he might come down.
‘Best not, mate,’ said Dave. ‘Dad’s still hopping mad.’
There was only the communal hall phone in college. He called his mother a few times but had little in the way of a conversation, and gave it up. He spent Christmas in his room at Cambridge. He wasn’t supposed to be there, but nobody caught him. He’d left a back window open and climbed in on Christmas Eve. In the Lent term, the phone rang a couple of times and the girl who lived closest to it would shriek up the stairs, ‘Is there a Gary here?’ There was no reply. And after another call or two, she said starchily, ‘This is Downing College, Cambridge. We have no “Gary” here.’
And that was it. Apart from the occasional call from Dave, no contact. He didn’t ask anyone to his graduation. He moved to London to do his law conversion course. A year or two later, there was Dave’s wedding. A village-hall affair with heavy smokers in shiny suits, elbows out, jogging along to Level 42 songs, balloons in clusters of three, not much in the way of speeches, and a scuffle or two when the bar closed. His mother didn’t go to the party. His father made a song and dance about not speaking to him there. He was with June.
On a Christmas day in his twenties, after a few drinks, he called his old man to say he’d got a place in a firm, and his father told him he’d like to knock his ‘bleeding block’ off. You’re nothing to me now, he said. Apparently, his mother felt the same way for he heard nothing from her.
He had never imagined they’d turn on him as they had each other.
‘You’re lucky your parents are so normal,’ he said to her.
Her parents functioned as a couple; his didn’t. Ken and Pearl went straight to a scrap, were nimble with name-calling, quick to up the ante and reckless with ultimatums. When it came to his father’s chauvinism, his mother was his equal sparring partner; she hated men. If Astrid’s dad, Malcolm, would not exactly say sorry, he would take out the bins, mow the lawn, run a bath for her, make a cuppa. If her mum, Linda, would not exactly say sorry, she would at least call out that the programme was starting.
Ken and Pearl would finish the milk to mock the other’s tea, cook separate meals, sleep apart, begin the day in grudging silence and end it with a shrug or a curse. He’d go, or she’d go, for one night or two. The entire village would know about it. Time passed, wheels of the mind turning, turning, grinding meat into mince. And yet he could recall too some wonderful times, when they laughed with each other, and he and Dave egged them on, when they spoke in funny voices, like a comedy double act, their voices shrill and wild, and they seemed to reprise some old-time vaudeville act with him calling her ‘Mother’ and her calling him ‘Father’. And just occasionally there was something flirtatious to it and their dad would whisper something to her and all they’d hear was the sibilance of it – though maybe a whole word would slip out here and there – and then their mother would come over sly, then grab him and order him to kiss her. These were thrilling glimpses of the promise of adulthood for those two small boys.
‘It’s hard to know what love is,’ he said, ‘it takes some working out.’ He took her hand and kissed it. ‘She’s really something, though, my mother,’ he said.
‘That’s the first time you’ve said anything like that.’
‘You should meet her.’
She laughed. ‘Hang on, I’m just getting over Ken.’
‘I miss her,’ he said miserably.
He thought he saw Pearl in Tenterden, a couple of months back, coming down the high street, swaying with the weight of the bags she was carrying. It was hard to tell if it were her. She was wearing men’s clothes and her hair was salt and pepper. She stopped, grimaced, put down her bags, looked up at the church tower and unzipped her jacket as if she were having a hot flush. She resembled, he thought, her father.
Before they left Ortygia and the Hotel des Etrangers et Miramare, he and Astrid made quiet fierce love. They arrived in exhilaration at the same place at the same time, together, then fell apart, gradually extricating themselves bit by bit, swapping limbs, trading a leg for an arm, and sighing.
They slept holding hands.
Chapter 22
‘Try and cheer him up a bit. You know,’ says Audrey, explaining to Roger that Ken will be going with him to fetch the body. ‘It’s his idea of a day out.’
But Roger is not prone to small talk; he’s economical with everything, and not just the truth, and when he does issue a statement, it’s accurate. Otherwise he’s rarely perturbed, trusting the limits to original thought and deed.
Ken sits beside him, winding himself right up in his rival’s presence, resenting the man’s very breathing.
‘Don’t say much, do ya?’
Roger passes him his bag of Glacier Mints.
‘Who’re we picking up then, up the hospital?’
‘Dead woman.’ Roger pops a sweet into his own mouth, arms locked, an impassive expression on his face. Only his drooping eyes change shape and become round, when the minty sensation tingles in his mouth.
The corridors of the hospital are sallow. Roger has a piece of paper to present to the reception desk. Ken stands back, waving people between himself and Roger with unappointed officiousness, his face as deliberately expressionless as a guardsman’s. He likes wearing the black suit. He’s got black socks and black gloves. He offered to buy his own hat, but Audrey dissuaded him. ‘When the time comes, Ken, we’ll see you right with a hat.’
Roger’s wearing a dark navy sweatsuit. He is leaning on the counter, waiting for the woman’s direction, moving a sweet around his mouth.
Ken rolls his eyes. ‘Blow me, you’d think we’d come here to use the facilities.’
Roger swivels as if hinged to the counter at the elbow. ‘Won’t be long,
’ he says. Between Roger’s knees is the folded gurney and body bag.
Ken looks him in the eye. ‘You weren’t in the army, were you?’
‘No.’
‘I didn’t think so.’
They head to the female geriatric ward, with Ken’s soles like a snare drum on the floors. A man in a green top directs them to the far bed, with the curtains drawn around it.
Their arrival creates a stir through the ward of crippled-up womenfolk, as if they were film stars. As best they can, the women hoist themselves and there are catcalls. It makes Ken jumpy, but nothing impedes the slow plodding donkey-like way of Roger going about his work. Ken catches sight of an old girl with half of one leg amputated and bandaged, lying there three-quarters akimbo with her nightie awry.
‘All right, darling,’ she rasps.
‘All right,’ he replies evenly, eyes front.
Roger’s disappeared and Ken’s like the understudy, trying to get through the curtains but failing to find the parting. The curtain rings clatter and the material flaps, and the old girls are all sitting up, passing comment and laughing.
‘Don’t worry, sweetheart! No rush! She ain’t goin’ nowhere!’
‘Nicely turned out, innie, Wendy? For an old boy!’
He points a finger at the one-legged troublemaker to warn her, which sets them off, from laughter to racking coughs and back again.
When he makes it through the curtain, he shrugs his collar off his neck and shakes his hands away from his cuffs. ‘Right now, let’s see about this,’ he says, standing well back.
Roger has the gurney unfolded, the wheels locked, and is placing the body bag on to it, smoothing it out.
‘Mothers’ meeting out there,’ says Ken.
The body on the ward bed has been more or less tossed into blankets, vaguely concealed, like chicken in a basket. Roger peels back one of the plastic-backed paper blankets to take a look.
‘Come on then,’ he says, and he and Ken go to lift her. Roger takes the shoulders and Ken the feet. Ken holds his breath and averts his eyes. The woman’s long curled toenails drag across the front of his jacket and a toe gets caught momentarily inside his lapel. He checks Roger’s face. In the great calm expressionless shape are two sad eyes that look like those of the boy left out of the team. The sag of his shoulders, the resigned way of his, tell the story of a man disappointed. They lower the wrapped body on to the gurney and Roger arranges it in the body bag. The lady’s face has a shocked expression, mouth and eyes wide open.
‘You done a good job there, mate,’ says Ken, catching his breath. Roger zips the bag. ‘I’ll let you do the honours,’ he says, finding the side of the curtain, ‘while I keep the animals at bay.’ Roger gives him a shy smile and dips his eyes as they wheel the body past the women. But they’re otherwise occupied now. On the TV, a woman has won something and the woman with the half-leg is saying, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe it,’ and she means it. Whatever it is, it’s fantastic. She’s delighted; she looks around to find any face she can, to share this good luck a bit, like offering her grapes. She points at the TV.
‘Yeah, good, innit?’ says Ken. ‘Cheerio then, ladies. Get well.’
‘That you, Kenneth?’ pipes up a voice from the last bed on the right as they begin to wheel the body out of the ward.
‘Jesus Flaming Christ.’
It’s Pearl. Two sons, dogs and cats, five houses and money problems; they were married for just under twenty years and he hasn’t seen her for more than twenty since.
‘All right?’ is all he says, and he stands there, hands at the end of her bed, one corner of his upper lip twitching.
Pearl turns to address the black woman in the bed next to hers.
‘Oh yeah, smashing! D’you hear him? Here I am in a hospital bed, laid up, and that’s what he says to me. All right?’
The other woman laughs as if she’s been poked; it’s a short-lived response. She’s wearing headphones; her eyes remain on the suspended TV screen.
Roger has lumbered on, solo, pulling the gurney.
‘I’ll be with you in a tick, Roger,’ Ken calls after him, stuffing his hands in his pockets and looking at his ex-wife. There was always something Victorian about Pearl: useful and harsh, sly and sentimental. She was a good-looking girl and she didn’t stand for any flannel. And flannel was what he gave her. It became just so much easier not to go home and get an earful.
‘Unkind!’ He used to upbraid her, ‘Unkind!’ ‘But not untrue!’ was her retort. What he objected to was that she wasn’t any kind of Pat. She wasn’t doting, or patient, or quiet, or careful, or willing to go second, or last, or without.
Pearl rises, and Ken shrinks. Her elbows push into the pillows, and his hands delve in his trouser pockets. She rolls her eyes to the ceiling and they come back white for a moment until she fixes on him her uncompromising eyes, dark as sloes.
‘See Jill there,’ she says. He looks at the woman with the half-leg. Her mouth is moving to Judy Finnigan’s on the TV as if she’s the ventriloquist. ‘One leg. Lost her tits. You’d look at her and think she was unlucky, wouldn’t you?’
She’d replaced her sex appeal bit by bit with a caustic sort of humour. Very quickly, she was headmistress of the school of hard knocks.
‘That Jill, she’s bald more or less. She snores at night something shocking. So loud it wakes us all up. She lies over there, her nightie up to her armpits – it’s a sight for sore eyes, I can tell you. She gave her kid away. Half-caste he is. Gave him up for adoption and he comes in with his wife and kids to see her now! Can you believe that? They come in and call her Nan and sit with her and they laugh and chatter like you wouldn’t believe.’
He gives a reed-thin laugh, makes a glancing acknowledgement of Jill, nodding at her as she’s looking their way. She offers them a childish wave, folding her fingers a couple of times.
‘You take a good look at her, Ken. Do you know what? I’d trade places with that woman. She’s got a sodding sight more than me. So you can stuff your “all right” and sod off back wherever you came from.’ She shuts her eyes.
Falteringly, he approaches the visitor’s chair at the head of the bed and he stoops to whisper. ‘Sorry for your troubles, Pearl. Anything I can get you while I’m here?’
Her chest rises and falls.
‘No.’
He hovers. ‘What about them chocolate bars you used to like? I could nip down the café and get you a Bounty bar.’
She opens her eyes. ‘I’m diabetic; you might as well bring me arsenic.’
‘You look well.’ He smiles. ‘Considering.’
One eye separates from the pack. It was her party trick, her lazy eye; she could do it at will. And there was the way she bit the tops off beer bottles, and the arm that never set after she broke it at the elbow and she could flick it this way and that. Those were just some of her tricks. She could recite famous poems; she could recite lines and lines of them, word perfect.
‘You used to be able to do the splits, din’cha, Pearl?’
‘What are you doing here anyway, Ken?’
‘Voluntary work. Doing my bit, a’n’ I?’ He looks round for support.
She laughs as if he’s made a crude joke. ‘Save it for someone who believes you. You wouldn’t do nothing ’less there was something in it for you. Pull the other one. So, what are you doing? Nicking the rings off the fingers of corpses?’
‘THAT’S RIGHT!’ Her neighbour bursts out, nodding and grinning, eyes on the screen.
Ken gives the woman a sour look. ‘Loud, i’n’ she? That’s an unkind thing to say, Pearl. And it ain’t true, as it happens.’
‘I know you, Ken.’
‘MMM-HMM!’ comes the resounding note of her neighbour’s approval of what’s happening on the TV.
Ken flinches aggrievedly, and turns his back on the neighbour to block her. ‘You sin the boys at all, Pearl?’
‘David come in to see me. You sin ’em?’
‘Not a lot. Went to
Dave’s place not long back.’
‘Oh, did you now. With June.’
‘You sin Gary at all?’
‘Nicholas, you mean.’ She turns her face away from him, and it’s then he remembers her fully. He knows the slackness about the mouth and the way the eyes slide.
‘Naargh,’ he lies. That’s a habit formed early on, when he was a kid; you didn’t tell the truth so as not to make a person feel worse. You hid your luck, whatever it was. And it wasn’t just about sparing the other person’s feelings of course; it was also a case of not wanting to have to share whatever you had.
‘I thought you had,’ she says. She could always smell a lie. He sits down on the chair. ‘Not a word.’
‘Miserable little shit.’
‘’Ere, Pearl,’ his voice quavers, delight stirring, ‘that’s our son we’re calling a miserable shit! ’Ere, remember when we got him that set of drums for his birthday and he said to us, That it? Cor dear! Miserable! Always talked posh, dinnie? Thought he was better than us. Used to give us that funny look, dinnie, even as a baby? You used to say, Look at ’im, Ken; ’e’s givin’ us that look! Like he’d smelt something bad, wannit?’
‘With Dave you’d get a thank you, but not with Gary.’
‘We used to call ’im misery guts. We used to say to him, Can’t you look on the bright side a bit?’
She eyes him cynically.
‘Christ, you look old.’
‘I am old, a’n’ I?’
‘Hoo-hoo!’ chortles the neighbour.
‘Turned out like you, Gary did. No regard for anyone but himself.’
He says nothing, but moves his teeth in his mouth.
‘Christ, it nearly killed me giving birth to them boys. But I tell you, it killed me again and again cleaning up after you lot, making your dinners to be treated like dirt . . . Never a thank you, and if I was ill – God forbid – you’d moan about it being women’s business. Minute you had spare time, off you went the three of you, off on a jaunt without me. When I mopped the floors, I used to cry into the bleeding bucket and think to myself, Well, that’s a way to do it without making a mess, and I used to say to myself, if my mind wandered, Now don’t give over to dreams and fancies, Pearl, don’t go dreaming . . . But, Ken, just something! Some sort of a thank you. You never once got me flowers. You never did nothing for me. Not one of you ever said you loved me. And then that Mrs Morris, she said to me, They only treat you like it because you let ’em. And she was right. What a stupid cow I was. Still, I got what I asked for. Didn’t I? Look at me now.’
