by Adam Thorpe
A hiccup. The friendly word – something rambling about the weather – is met by a grotesque wink from Muck. Have I mentioned that his eyes bulge and that his eyelids close over them like a crocodile’s?
‘You’ve got a mote in your eye, Muck,’ I say, pointing at it and slopping my drink on his boots.
Hag’s face. A terror visiting me at night, even here.
‘Watch out there, Mr Arkwright. Folk’ll be thinkin’ I’ve missed.’
‘Like you missed them pigeons, boy,’ said Wall.
‘Here, you watch y’mouth or she’ll be losin’ a tooth or two.’
John Wall turns to me with a crumpled smile, as if the teeth have already dropped out.
‘Do you reckon all mouths are fee-male, Mr Arkwright?’
‘In French they are, but purely by linguistic chance. La bouche.’
John Wall peers at me through drifts of his friend’s smoke.
‘Your mouth,’ he says, slowly, ‘goes all funny when you does that, Mr Arkwright.’
Muck makes kissing noises, thrusting his lips out and towards John Wall’s cheek in a spittly lunge. Wall reacts with wide-eyed panic – yes, it’s definitely panic – flinging his hand up so abruptly that Muck loses his glass and almost topples from the stool. My trousers are wetted. Definitely panic.
‘Whoa, boy, now look what you’ve done,’ says Muck, with the lassitude of someone drunker than he seems. The glass is intact. I pick it up off the rubber floor mat and place it on the bar. He was referring to my trousers. I brush them uselessly and make non-committal noises as Ted peers over.
‘What’s up then, you load?’
One of the nearby drinkers makes a reference I don’t catch, which switches John Wall’s panicked eyes into post-box slits. Ted chuckles and turns away. The ripples the little accident has created wash through the pub and fade within the minute. The two men are staring at my trousers.
‘Now you’re up a gum tree, Mr Arkwright,’ says Muck. ‘Folk’ll think you weren’t whipping it out in time.’
‘I’ll clean ’em for you, if you want, Mr A.,’ John Wall says. ‘Send this fairy-turd the bill.’
‘And this turd’ll send you to bill, cunt,’ growls Muck, over his shoulder.
Words to that effect. You’ve heard worse, in the sanny.
‘People wash their hair in beer,’ I remark, and start to move away. Muck grabs my arm. Strong grip. Almost painful.
‘You’re gettin’ on a bit now, aren’t you, for that lark, Mr Arkwright?’
I swallow involuntarily. Play the innocent, though I could do such unspeakable things.
‘Lark, Mr Petty?’
‘Don’t you try to hide it, Mr Arkwright.’
I stare at him. His expression is not malicious, however. He’s prodding my chest with his finger, grinning conspiratorially. His smoke stings my eyes.
‘Arn time ’ee gets tired of Mrs Marlow, send her along to yere, boy.’
Jessica must have come to my room through the bar. The thickening into dialect, the use of the familiar ‘ye’, the realisation that it’s not Rachael at the bottom of his cajolery, makes me almost want to hug Muck, at that moment. Is that so extraordinary, Mother? A dab of mustard in the corner of his mouth, his breath sour and hot, the worn front teeth making an elegant arc, like a pack-horse bridge, under which his tongue gleams like bloodied water: but he is suddenly of the old days, the bits of them that still echo or lie low in my soul. Drink turns us into fools before it turns us into demons: Muck’s foolishness is pitiable, like Caliban’s.
So I smile.
‘I feel most flattered, Mr Petty, that you think my visitor this evening was there for anything other than an old man’s advice.’
‘Turn you into a toad, see.’ He belches, horribly.
‘Fee-fi-fo-fum,’ murmurs John Wall.
My costume of patient civility serves also to avoid a scene. I continue to smile cheerily.
‘I don’t think I’m ready to croak yet. Would you mind releasing my arm, by the way? The blood’s gone out of my hand.’
Muck looks at it, his own hand treating my bicep as he no doubt treats his gun. The thumb stroking the wool of my sweater. He’s considering something, tinted glasses tucked into his top pocket. Clearly been drinking all day – a habit that the filigree of purply fissured veins beneath his dark skin suggests is chronic and old. If I try to tug myself free, I’ll pull him off his stool. John Wall seems to be elsewhere, staring at the wet floor.
‘Sing afore breakfast, cry afore night,’ murmurs Muck, with a sphinx-like intensity, as if I have travelled the length of the desert to hear it. Perhaps I have.
Your loving son,
Hugh
Awful carols, much too early. Mucky weather.
Dearest Mother,
He lets go of my arm.
‘Thank you,’ I say.
As I am turning away, he sings, very softly, in a soft drawly harshness, ‘Tiptoe . . . through the raamsons . . .’
What? What’s that? Na whatee dat ting dere?
The hair on the back of my neck tingles. The kick-wrestling veteran is blocking my way. Stupidly, I glance back, still bearing my cheery comedy mask. Something more than a leer on his face. Intimacy, mutual knowledge, the veil of smoke and chit-chat and beer fumes torn away along with aged skin and flagging flesh, the years shredded to a green and tingling time. Our time! Oh yes! He’s hauled me back there and I might wrestle with him as young men did once, stripped to the waist, bare-fisted, bleeding noses and mouths and ears. I might not even finally pummel his face to pulp. Smoke comes out of his nose, misting him, as if he’s looking through glass, squashing his face against glass. But that’s his normal face.
I glance at John Wall, who’s still dreaming. Wall was not yet born, of course. Most in this room were not yet born, or were still children. How long has Muck known? Yes, of course, long before Ray Duckett talked to him over the fardels. From the very day Wall’s father spied on us, probably. The two would have been the same age, lads together, poaching cronies. Frank Petty, Jack Wall. My God – might Jack Wall’s crony have been there, too, stuck up in the tree, sniggering between the boughs? Might Muck have actually seen it all? He’s impaled me, like one of his pigeons. I’m hovering without the power either to alight or rise. The smoke shrouds him. Aunt Rachael peers through it, as she always did. They talked to each other, bleary-eyed, his cup smeared black with his fingers and mouth, hers concealed in her trembling hand. Chortling chit-chat in the damp dark kitchen, years and years of it. God knows what he knows.
The one becomes the other in my dreams, Mother, over a mug of tea. That’s the true horror.
Your loving son,
Hugh
Cold and wet. If I close my eyes, Christmas will go away.
Dear Mother,
Now the man is pointing up with jabs of his finger, discreet little jabs – his head thrust forward, his expression flatly stupid, like a bad puppet’s.
I look, of course, automatically, as one does: the bulgy ceiling, jaundiced by decades of tobacco smoke; the black-and-red flex of the light bulb; the dwarfish plastic shade. Nothing, in other words.
Hands up like claws either side of his nose, face towards his lap. Pilot. Goggles. No, binoculars. Harpo and Chico’s old charades routine! His face appears again. He points down, this time, and I look. His boots on the bar stool’s cross-piece. Short man. Stub ends. Lost crisps. Wet pool. Now there’s a discreet little movement close to his chest, private, between us only. A man in braces blocks us for a moment, his back dark with sweat, holding a pool cue. Why do I want to see? I could turn and walk away and never know. But it is like a game, after all: the word isn’t finished, the title, the well-known phrase. It’s not a film or a novel or a play, either. Braces has passed. The claw, close to the chest, now rounded. A cup. A well. The other hand’s forefinger poised and now bouncing in and out of the well or the cup. Pipe. Me filling my pipe, when I had one. No. I’m so slow, Mother! Don’t you remember?
>
John Wall’s father up in the tree. Binoculars. Down there, oh no. In and out, in and out, his finger goes. The man’s huge face like a god’s above, florid and slightly frowning at me, as if all this takes thought and concentration.
Filth.
I have not moved. I would like to leap but I have not moved. I am frowning back at him. The pub’s din has hollowed out, it’s a sort of roaring silence. Then the face melts, alters. I am frightening it, yet I have not moved! He’s flinched. Now there’s an ear. The face has turned away, flinching. It worked, though my eye did not deliberately spit.
Let me explain, Mother. It’s my work. I am going to write a book about it just as soon as I’m up and running again. My notes are lost, but it’s all in my head. I have read and re-read Bacon, Gayton, Heywood – I know it by heart! They mumble to me in my sleep! Listen. Our passions stir our spirits, they ripple through the aether, they enter the spectators by the eyes, they agitate their spirits. Actors knew this, once. Sweet Shakespeare knew it. The force of imagination can stir a corpse – Francis Bacon said this! Up in Eilrig, we have struck each other with an emanation at fifty feet over gorse and heather, so that we all but stagger. It took years of repetition. Passion drill, I called it. Yet that passion is only what our Elizabethan masters would call ‘counterfeit’, Mother. Real, and also unreal! Like masks or fetishes or words, words, words! After five years we had got back to something like it, blown the dust off, cleared the centuries’ cobwebs. Five years up in the heather, behind the whitewashed walls, learning and learning and learning! The sweet exile years of Eilrig. This was my work – is my work! Rigorous scholarship drives it. We do not call our acting ‘authentic’, but ‘apt’. How I love that little word, ‘apt’! How free of pretension, and yet what howls of change inside! For I have changed the face of British theatre, Mother. Oh yes. I am highly respected. I have done rather well. And it is all getting bigger and bigger.
I did not counterfeit my passion in the pub. It was tested on my teeth. It spat through the air and burned, and went on burning. You can’t lave the burn of the evil eye. For that is what it was! The acid spittle that sends a man to his doom. I have worked on such things for the sake of art, aptness, the honouring of genius. I will work on them again, just as soon as I’m up and running, which will be soon, oh yes.
The room blurs into noise and I stare at the floor. My emanation slips back into my eye and snakes towards its home in the entrails.
Revenge, I murmur.
I murmured the same word after reading Rachael’s letter in my perspex nutshell, our blockbuster flaming somewhere in the shells of houses behind us. I murmured it as I walked back down the bomber’s corridor, bruising my shin against one of her bulkheads, tumbling over another so that her ribcage and my ribcage met; murmured it as I dropped on to the concrete and walked under the fuselage, a tiny hot fellow with a hotter metal belly over his head, noticing the others in a group at the rear, their hair astray in the cool dawn wind. And there we stood, studying the dangling tank and rivet of what had been the rear turret, of what had been Reg’s place. The wind through the rivet still fluting softly.
Whatever tune it was, it soothed my private furies.
But I never ever forgave them. Nuncle and this new Rachael, I mean, not the Germans! I just said nothing: no reply, nothing. Nuncle wrote to my superior asking if I was still ‘upright and walking’. Another letter from Rachael, full of mystic rubbish about stars, platonic types of love, the fact that she knew – for certain – I had been her brother in a past life (another lonely only child, you see). Silence is a privilege, isn’t it, Mother? The shield’s glassiest polish: it threw back their own snake-crowned ugliness. My hatred for Nuncle went on sharpening itself, as Father used to sharpen his cut-throat by leaving it in a certain compass direction. Just by leaving it.
Then the silence was broken when a tuneless whistle stopped. I’ll explain. London, a cold autumn evening, ’44, on my way to the theatre. Over the rumble and natter and car horns comes this horrible sound, somewhere between a moan and a kettle on the boil. It’s a doodlebug. (If it cuts out, pray hard.) It’s keeping going, it’s overhead, it’s come a long way and it’s keeping going –
Lamplit faces looking up, astonished, into a silence. Where’s it gone?
We all start to run. We’re off I’m opposite Thresher and Glenny’s, the gentlemen’s outfitter’s – remember Thresher and Glenny’s? The big plate-glass windows start to move outwards. Everyone crouched, clawed at by a gale of ice. A pram is shredded. A hairnetted woman grimaces at her naked legs. A spiv holds his face and rolls gently into the gutter. A couple are crawling about as if looking for a coin. There are detached arms, legs, heads – but they’re mannequins, oh good. Heat and bits of bright ice. A man stands with a tweed waistcoat over his head, the price-tag still attached. Blood appears in ridiculous quantities, as if swollen bags of it have been dropped from very high up. A lot of it appears on my torn trouser-leg. My best pair, too.
I don’t consider for a moment that the blood comes from inside me. I cradle a man’s head as he’s dying, wondering whether to pick up his bowler with its silk lining, to adjust his tie above the mess. ‘Don’t let me go,’ he keeps saying, sobbing away, ‘don’t let me die. I don’t want to die. Oh, God. Oh, fuck. I don’t want to die.’ Then he wants his mother, though he’s grey and balding. ‘She’s coming,’ I say, ‘she’s coming in a minute.’ ‘Mummy,’ he keeps saying, ‘Mummy.’ Then he says, ‘I’m fine, now,’ in a very firm voice, looking straight at me. A little shudder, as if he’s smelt something unpleasant, and his soul flies away too far from me to bring it back.
I fainted in the ambulance, and came to with fifty stitches in my thigh and just enough blood to keep the valves going. Flesh is a liquid but a very thick one, Mother, too thick and slow to recover itself like water after the steamer’s split it: Quiri would have much to say about my thick white mark. I limp ever so slightly – a certain stiffness on damp days. But that’s all.
Father was contacted, I received visits. Father shuffled in and out every evening, tapping my hand but saying almost nothing, as if it was all his fault. I was under pain-killers – morphine, I think – when Rachael called. I see her face there in the hospital, the flowers she’s bought, her hands crossed on her skirt. Her hair now cut and curl-ironed, in the fashion. Happy, she seems. Pale, a little dreamy. But happy. And I’m looking at her through binoculars again, from behind the spindle-tree. I shake my head, bring her nearer and into focus. The moment was exquisitely embarrassing, as if she found me on my knees, over my Meccano or Lotts Bricks. The morphine dulled my hurt but made me think of witty and hurtful things to say, or made me think they were witty and hurtful.
‘Take dictation, Mrs Prendergast.’
‘Sorry, Hugh?’
‘Did you hear about the wife who was hurt while cooking her husband’s breakfast in a horrible manner?’
I lobbed them like cricket balls in a game without any other players, or happening in a mist. Herbert E. Standing pretended to be a doctor in the distance, smiling.
‘That was a close shave.’
‘It was, Hugh.’
‘No, it was me. But anyway I don’t like beards. I’m glad to see you’ve got gloves. Are they made from your own skin?’
She looked around her, I suppose for a nurse. She was a nurse. Or used to be. She was living at Ulverton now, doing her bit locally. Typing out his work, his letters, pasting up the Scarab.
‘Births, deaths and mirages. Play a straight bath. The fire brigade could not distinguish the flames. I just hope you’ve got an up-to-date road mop.’
‘I want to talk about things when you’re better, Hugh. Not to explain, but to be friends. No, relatives. That’s what we are now, isn’t it? My children will be your cousins.’
‘Very well, Auntie. Or should it be plain Aunt Rachael, Aunt?’
She sighed, laid a Vanity Fair assortment on my blanketed feet, and left. I kicked my feet and the nurses had to scr
abble after them. Ha ha. In doing so I tore a few stitches. The pain was somehow right, if severe, particularly in the first few minuets. Nurses on their hands and knees for ages, like polar bears ready to bounce. All I wanted to do was giggle, or maybe goggle, and I think I did.
As for Nuncle: I was hobbling about when he dropped by, my mind no longer gibbering, no white lint to unstick from it or the wound. A grin from behind a carton of books from his library.
‘Hello, Hugh my boy. Glad to see you up.’
His deep, ringing voice turned heads. I had planned to riddle him with sarcasm, but I wasn’t on morphine now and the jokes wouldn’t come. Faces watching, so I sat on the edge of the bed and behaved civilly, on the surface. As he emptied the carton, commenting on the titles (books he didn’t want, hopeless books of Aunt Joy’s, forgotten novels and dull travelogues), I knew that my secret weapon was to curve away from him for ever, the link severed. My strength would be in absence, the silence of a doodlebug, the whistle cutting out when it was time to drop: chilling, that. Much more than just not replying to their letters. I could even visit them, be civil over dinner, eventually. Anyway, I was fond of Ulverton, the garden, the woods, the downs. But set firm on my own course, as firm as the ruts in ancient marble roadways, carved merely by the to-and-fro of countless wheels, I would have the power and dignity to cope. That’s where it really began, Mother. A crowded ward. Late wartime. North Kensington under black wraps.
He was shocked when I showed him the puckered wound stretching from the knee to the groin. In a poem written by him a little later, it appears rather ungraciously as My own thin stocking-flesh, laddered by war’s thorn. Not that I minded. Why should I have done? That was the very least of it. He’s done worse since, Mother. You’ll see what worse he’s done.
