The Immaculate

by Mark Morris

  “Oh,” said Jack. He shrugged and shook his head. “No, I . . . I didn’t.” He saw her doughy face soften in sympathy and blurted, “Can I come in please, Aunty? I’ve got something to tell you.”

  “Of course.” She stood aside to let him in. “What’s the bag for? Going somewhere?”

  He looked down at the bag in his hand and only now realised how much it was making his arm ache. He put it down at the foot of the stairs and flexed his hand. “Me and Dad have had a fight,” he told her.

  Aunt Georgina rolled her eyes. “Not another one. What was it about this time?”

  Jack shrugged. He realised that when he had said “fight” his Aunt had automatically thought he meant argument.

  “And I suppose you want to stay here for a while until things cool down,” she said. “Am I right?”

  Jack couldn’t bring himself to look at her. He stared at the banister rail, ran his fingers across the smooth polished wood.

  “Whatever happened to your hand?” Georgina asked.

  The middle knuckle on Jack’s right hand was now bruised and swollen. He tried to straighten the finger and immediately it felt as though broken glass were being forced into the joint and along the bone.

  “You could do with a cold compress on that. Follow me into the kitchen and I’ll fix you up.”

  She began to turn away. Jack held up a hand—his injured one—and said firmly, “Aunty.”

  She turned back, surprised. “Yes?”

  “I . . .” His gaze skittered away from hers again. He had to force his words past an obstruction in his throat. He picked up his bag, took a deep breath. “I’m going away,” he said.

  She looked momentarily bemused, then Jack saw the familiar imperiousness begin to assert itself. She folded her arms, straightened her back and set her mouth in a terse line. Her eyes narrowed, and even appeared to harden, to change colour from azure-blue to a dull steel-grey. “Away?” she repeated, as if defying him to elaborate.

  Jack swallowed. “Yes. Dad and I, we . . . it was . . . it was really serious this time. We came to blows. I can’t stay here any more. . . .” He shrugged, grimaced. “So I’m going away. I’m leaving Beckford for good.”

  “I see,” she said curtly, “and where do you think you’ll go?”

  An image immediately formed in Jack’s mind of an opulent city, the streets paved in gold. “London,” he said.

  “London? Really? And what will you do when you get there?”

  “I’ll find work,” he said defiantly.

  “It’ll be as easy as that, will it?”

  Jack shrugged, feeling uncomfortable. “I don’t know. But I’ll be okay, don’t worry.”

  “Where will you stay?”

  “I’ll find somewhere. I’ve got money.”

  “How much?”

  “I don’t know,” Jack said irritably. “Enough.”

  In point of fact, he did know—approximately anyway—but he wasn’t about to reveal that to his aunt. He had around thirty pounds in his wallet and perhaps two hundred in his bank account.

  “Don’t you think this is all rather silly?” his aunt said, smiling indulgently, belittling him with a twitch of the lips.

  “No,” Jack said, bridling, taking two steps towards the door. “I’m going and you can’t stop me. Anything’s better than being near him. I need to get away, Aunty, can’t you see?”

  She simply looked at him, her expression unchanging; she had a knack for intimidating people without actually doing or saying anything.

  “I’m old enough to make my own decisions. I’m eighteen.” Jack became aware that he was babbling simply to fill the silence and made himself clam up.

  Eventually his aunt sighed and nodded her head sagely, as if she’d always known that one day it would come to this.

  “You’re right,” she said, “you’re an adult now.” Her voice was so neutral that Jack did not know whether she was making fun of him or not.

  “I . . . I just came to say good-bye,” he muttered. “And . . . and thanks. For all you’ve done for me, I mean.”

  Again she nodded, as if this was expected of him. “Will you at least have a cup of tea and a slice of cake before you go?”

  The offer was tempting but Jack shook his head. If he paused to think about what he was doing his resolve might evaporate. Also, he didn’t want to give his aunt the chance to dissuade him from leaving.

  “No,” he said, looking at the floor, “I’d better go.”

  She did not immediately respond, and Jack thought she was never going to. He did not feel he could make the break until she said something; perhaps this was her way of keeping him here, prolonging this moment forever. He was relieved when she finally sighed. It seemed like a signal that time was no longer suspended, that it had been allowed to move on. She said, “All right. But wait here a moment. I want you to have something.” She turned and huffed her way upstairs. It would have been easy to have fled while her back was turned, but he loved and respected her too much for that.

  She returned a few minutes later clutching an envelope. “This is for you,” she said. Jack took the envelope. It was unmarked and unsealed, the flap simply folded inside. Jack looked at his Aunt quizzically, but her expression gave nothing away.

  “Can I open it now?” Jack asked.

  “If you like.”

  He did so. Inside were two slips of paper. When he extracted and unfolded them he saw that one was a cheque for £500 made out to him and the other was a name—Molly Haynes—and an address in Wimbledon.

  “What’s this?” he said.

  “Isn’t it obvious?”

  “Yes, but . . . ,” Jack waved the cheque in the air, “I can’t accept this.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I can’t. You can’t afford to give me this sort of money.”

  “Who says?”

  “I just . . . It’s too much, Aunty. I don’t want handouts. I’m not a charity case.”

  Georgina rolled her eyes. “Oh, stop being so pious,” she said. “I’m giving you that for my own peace of mind. I’d never sleep if I knew you were down there with no money and nowhere to live. If you don’t like it you can pay me back when you’ve earned something.”

  “But . . . five hundred pounds,” said Jack. He shook his head. “I have got my own money, you know.”

  “Not very much, though.”

  “How do you know?” he said indignantly.

  “I’m not daft, Jack. Your father never gives you any, and working weekends at the co-op hasn’t made you a millionaire, has it?”

  Jack shrugged, knowing he was conceding defeat. He brandished the other piece of paper. “What’s this then?”

  “What does it look like?”

  “An address,” he said, annoyed at how stupid she made him feel sometimes.

  She smiled and raised her eyebrows. “It’s the address of an old friend of mine,” she said. “Molly was born in Bradford but moved to London just after the war. She’s a theatre designer. You’ll like her. I’ll ring her and let her know you’re coming.”

  Jack felt his stomach tightening; even in this, his breaking away, his ultimate statement, his independence was being taken from him. He braced himself to protest, but his pride could not quite supersede the relief he felt at knowing he had a solid base to aim for. He put the two slips of paper back into the envelope, folded it and placed it carefully in the inside pocket of his jacket. On impulse he stepped forward and kissed his aunt; she smelled of fresh bread. There were tears in his eyes when he stepped back. “Thanks, Aunty,” he said in a stuffy voice, trying to conceal them.

  “Come here, you great daft thing,” she said gently, and held out her plump arms. Jack moved forward into her embrace. It was tight and warm and comforting. “You look after yourself now,” she said as she released him.

  Were there tears in her eyes, too? Jack could not tell for his own were still swimming. He nodded and said, “I will. Bye. Thanks again.” He picked up his
bag and walked quickly to the door.

  He turned back once, mouthed “Bye” again, then stepped outside, closing the door firmly. The sun was a sheet of brilliant light on his face, blinding him. He shuddered despite the heat and began to stride away from the house, in the direction of Beckford’s tiny station. From there he would catch a local two-carriage train to Leeds, and then change to one of the sleek never-ending Inter Cities. Jack had never been to London before; he felt as apprehensive as he had felt on his first day at secondary school when he’d been eleven. But he felt a squirmy kind of excitement, too, and a sense of unreality at the prospect of walking down streets whose names he knew from films or the news or through playing Monopoly with his Aunt. Oxford Street, Carnaby Street, Trafalgar Square, King’s Cross. When he boarded the train for Leeds half an hour later, his heart was sprinting, his stomach churning, his mouth dry, but he was determined, too. Whatever happened, there would be no chickening out, no running back home with his tail between his legs.

  Sitting in his Mini Cooper, thirty-three-year-old Jack Stone allowed himself a faint smile. He now found it inconceivable that he and that naive eighteen-year-old boy were the same person, and yet the events of that day and the many years that had preceded it still affected him deeply. It was the most intrinsic part of his makeup, that other life, it was the foundation—indeed, the driving force—behind all he had achieved. Even now his throat was dry, his hands clenched too tightly on the steering wheel. He felt his memories sinking, a solid dull mass like a floating tumour. As if his thoughts had conjured it, a signpost rose from the grass verge as he swept over the brow of a hill. Its ominous message was: BECKFORD 6. Jack followed its pointing finger to the right.

  As he neared Beckford and landmarks started to appear, Jack began to feel a vague, almost detached sense of apprehension, as if the water tower looming on his right, the black ruin of a castle, like a jagged stump of tooth, on the hill to his left, were images from a recurring dream. He cleared his throat, which felt lined with sand. The steering wheel felt either slippery with sweat or tacky as flypaper depending on where he put his hands. At each mile a signpost appeared as if some sinister countdown were under way. As his apprehension grew, Jack began to feel as if Beckford were drawing him in. If he tried to turn the wheel now, to head back to London, he felt sure it would not respond; the car would keep moving unerringly forward. So convinced was he of this that he sat rigid in his seat, reluctant to test his theory even by easing the wheel a little to the left or right.

  Farmhouses began to appear more frequently in the fields on both sides, squared-off masses of dark stone like the roughly sculpted bodies of vast insects whose legs were the dry-stone walls that separated one crop from the next. Jack crested a hill and suddenly there was Beckford. The most prominent landmark was the slate blade of the church spire jutting from a prickly mass of stone interlaced with the grey threads of streets. Jack could see two areas of green within the grey, like irregularly shaped postage stamps: the park and the allotments that bordered the Stanmores. He saw the railway station, its track stretching away on both sides like a stitched-up scar, and some new houses whose roofs were as red as raw steak. He strained his eyes to see his father’s house on the far side, but the dense green mass of woods that rose up beyond the village swallowed the track, concealing the buildings beyond.

  “Home sweet home,” he murmured and tried to laugh. He didn’t much like the sound he made. All at once he realised that he had stopped the car, that he was holding it on the foot brake in the middle of the road just beyond the brow of the hill. “Not clever,” he told himself, put the car in neutral and released the brake, allowing himself to roll. The panoramic view of Beckford sank behind the first of its buildings. When he reached the flat ground, Jack put the car into second and touched the accelerator.

  Driving through the centre of the village was like a dream, like finding himself in one of his memories; it was amazing how little had changed. The Union Jack still flapped above the Connaught like a stubborn reminder of the past, and even many of the storefronts seemed the same. Jack was almost relieved when he passed the glass and plastic facade of a video store, and then a little further on a Chinese takeaway with a garish yellow sign that bore the proud legend, TOP WOK. He almost expected people to turn and stare at him as he drove past, but nobody seemed to pay him the slightest attention.

  He felt nervous all over again when he drew near to his aunt’s house, and almost drove straight past it until he realised it was hiding behind a mask of ivy. She must have planted that soon after he had left. He remembered her door—now white—being blue, but the leaded window was the same.

  He pulled up at the kerb outside, obscurely glad that the house looked different; it seemed somehow to prove that time had moved on, that things had changed, significantly and irrevocably. He removed his spectacles, got out of the car and turned to close and lock the door. When he turned back, the front door of the house was open and a woman was standing on the front step, arms folded, watching him. She was thin, grey-haired, sombre-faced. Jack smiled at her uncertainly, wondering whether he had got the wrong house after all.

  It was only when she smiled back that Jack realised with a shock that the woman was his Aunt Georgina. But she was so thin and old! Her flesh was wrinkled and sagging, as if the aunt he had known had been partially deflated and her hair scattered with dust. He felt a lump rise to his throat—he’d been vaguely aware, of course, that she was now in her mid-seventies, but he hadn’t expected this. Last time he had seen her his eyes had filled with tears, and now, for different reasons, the same thing was happening.

  “Hello, Jack,” she said, and he was relieved to find her voice was strong and imperious as ever. “How are you?”

  “I’m . . . I’m fine, Aunt. . . . Very well,” he struggled to say.

  “You’ve put on weight.”

  He laughed. “You’ve lost some.”

  She laughed, too, and immediately Jack felt a surge of love, the intensity of which surprised him. He pushed open the gate, marched up the path and flung his arms around her. “I’ve missed you,” he told her. “It really is good to see you again. . . .” He wanted to say more but emotion choked his words.

  She patted him on the back, turned her head and planted a kiss on his cheek.

  “Welcome home, Jack,” she said.

  INTERLUDE ONE

  1983

  The tabby cat that the boys had just stoned to death belonged to Mrs. Akhurst, Carl Priestley’s next door neighbour. Mrs. Akhurst was in her seventies and arthritic, and she doted on her little Georgie.

  Sometimes Carl heard her talking to the cat in the backyard as she hung up her washing; because of her hands, hanging up washing was a long and tortuous procedure for the old lady. Some of the things she said made him want to either puke or laugh or both: “How’s my little Georgie Porgy Pudding n’ Pie?” “Does Georgie want Mummy to get him his dinnums?” “What has my little Georgie been doing today? I hope he hasn’t been chasing those nice little birdies again.”

  But despite his contempt for the way she spoke to the animal, Carl felt bad about actually killing it. Even the fact that it had not been his idea didn’t make him feel any better. As usual, it had been Patty who’d initiated events. It was always Patty who led the lads one step further than most of them were really prepared to go. They were now standing in the bumpy dogshit-covered field that backed the houses along Carl’s street, Patty nudging the pathetic little corpse with his foot. The rest of the lads—Guy, Wally, Ossie and himself, were joking around. Carl believed that he was not the only one hiding a sense of shame beneath an outward exhibition of raucous good humour.

  The thing was, Mrs. Akhurst was old and lonely and Georgie was—had been—her only friend. And just because Patty was bored, just because Patty was feeling mean (when wasn’t he feeling mean?) . . . Carl’s stomach felt hollow. Shame was too feeble a word for the way he felt.

  They were skiving off school as usual. They ha
d decided to come to Carl’s house because his parents were out, and because Carl had an awesome collection of dirty books. Carl’s father owned Priestley’s Newsagent’s on Bridgewater Road. Kids were always nicking sweets and magazines, and it was easy for Carl to add to his collection without the slightest suspicion ever falling on him.

  They had been sitting at the edge of the field, drinking Coke and goggling at the latest Penthouse when the cat slunk into view. Without even thinking about it, simply because it was part of his makeup, Patty picked up a chunk of dark-grey slate that was lying close at hand and flung it in the cat’s general direction.

  That might have been the end of it if the slate had not struck the cat’s hindquarters. Its yowl of pain was music to Patty’s ears. Thrusting the Penthouse into Ossie’s eager hands, he stood up, eyes gleaming in a way that always made Carl feel both scared and excited.

  “Fucking bull’s eye!” he cried. “Did you see that? What a fucking shot!”

  Quickly he began to range about, looking for more missiles. Wally, who was not exactly renowned for his intelligence, said, “What you doin’, Patty?”

  “What’s it fucking look like, arsehole? We’re gonna have a competition. It’s called Splattering the Cat’s Brains.”

  Wally sniggered. The battalion of yellow-tipped spots that had claimed his face as its territory did not make him the most attractive fifteen-year-old in Beckford, but he looked even uglier when he laughed.

  Ossie was holding the Penthouse up close to his face, as if believing he could somehow slip through the glossy two-dimensional barrier and wallow in the soft, scented reality of naked female flesh. Guy, a squat, broad-shouldered troll of a boy, was picking his nose and secretly flicking the boogers at the back of Wally’s head.

  Carl recognised the cat at once. Amused as he was by the way it had yowled and leaped into the air, he didn’t really want things to go much further.

  “Aw, that’s boring,” he said. “Let’s go to the rec and play football.”

  “We will,” said Patty. “After we’ve done this. Come on, you lot, help us look for some more bricks.”