by Sarah Waters
‘He won’t have a clue,’ said Viv. ‘His wife—she’s kid-crazy. It’s all she wants him for. What he gets from me, it’s different.’
‘I’ll bet it is.’
‘It is!’
‘Well, not in nine months’ time it won’t be. Eight months’ time, I mean.’
‘That’s why I’ve got to fix it by myself,’ said Viv. ‘Don’t you see? If it turns out that, after all, I’m just like her—’
‘And you really want to fix it? You couldn’t—Well, you couldn’t have it, and keep it, or—?’
‘Are you kidding?’ said Viv. ‘My father—It would kill my father!’
It would kill him, she meant, after everything with Duncan. She couldn’t say that, however, to Betty; and suddenly the burden of so many secrets, so much caution and darkness and care, seemed unbearable. ‘Oh!’ she said. ‘It’s so bloody unfair! Why does it have to be like this, Betty? As if things weren’t hard enough already! Then this comes along, to make things harder. It’s such a little thing—’
‘I hate to break this to you, kid,’ said Betty, ‘but it won’t be little for long.’
Viv looked at her, through the darkness. She folded her arms across her stomach. ‘That’s what I can’t bear,’ she said quietly, ‘the thought of it inside me, getting bigger and bigger.’ She seemed, all at once, to be able to feel it, sucking at her like a leech. She said, ‘What’s it like? It’s like a fat little worm, isn’t it?’
‘A fat little worm,’ answered Betty, ‘with Reggie’s face.’
‘Don’t say things like that! If I start thinking about it like that, it’ll make it worse. I’ve got to try the pills that Felicity Withers tried.’
‘But they didn’t work for her. That’s why she chucked herself down the stairs! And didn’t they make her sick?’
‘Well, I feel sick, anyway! What’s the difference?’
She didn’t exactly feel sick now, however. She felt agitated, almost feverish. It seemed to her, suddenly, that she’d been living in a kind of trance. She couldn’t believe it. She thought of the days and days that had slipped by, while she’d done nothing. She sat up straighter and looked around.
‘I need a chemist’s shop,’ she said. ‘Where can I find that kind of chemist’s? Betty, come on.’
‘Hang on,’ said Betty. She’d opened her bag. ‘Hell, you can’t just drop this sort of thing on a girl, and then expect her to—Let me just have a cigarette.’
‘A cigarette?’ repeated Viv. ‘How can you be thinking about a cigarette?’
‘Calm down,’ said Betty.
Viv pushed her. ‘I can’t calm down! Do you think you’d be able to calm down, if you were me?’
But all at once she felt exhausted. She slumped back again, and closed her eyes. When she looked up, she found Betty watching her. Her expression, in the darkness, was hard to read. There might have been pity in it, or fascination; even a touch of scorn.
‘What are you thinking?’ Viv asked quietly. ‘You’re thinking I’m soft, aren’t you? Like we said Felicity Withers was.’
Betty shrugged. ‘Any girl can get caught out.’
‘You never have.’
‘God!’ Betty took off her glove and tapped like mad at the bench. ‘Touch wood, can’t you? That’s all it is, after all: just luck, good luck and bad…’ She fished about in her bag again, looking for her lighter. ‘I still say, anyway, that you should tell Reggie. What’s the point of going with a married man, if you can’t tell him things like this?’
‘No,’ said Viv, almost soundlessly. They’d gone back to speaking in murmurs. ‘I’ll try the pills first; and if they don’t work, I’ll tell him then. And then, if they do, he’ll be none the wiser.’
‘Unlike you, hopefully.’
‘You do think I’m soft.’
‘All I’m saying is, if he had worn his raincoat—’
‘He doesn’t like it!’
‘That’s too bad. You can’t muck about, Viv, when you’re a chap in Reggie’s shoes. If he was a single boy it would be different, you could take chances; the worst thing would be, you’d end up married sooner than you meant.’
‘You’re making it sound,’ said Viv miserably, ‘like it’s something you think about, something you plan—like buying a bedroom suite! You know how we feel about each other. It’s like you said just now, about touching wood. He’s only married to another girl through rotten luck, through bad timing. Some things just can’t be helped, that’s all; it’s just how they are.’
‘And it’ll go on being just how things are, for years and years,’ said Betty. ‘And he’ll be grand, thank you very much; and how will you be?’
‘You can’t think like that,’ said Viv. ‘Nobody thinks like that! We might all be dead tomorrow. You have to take what you want, don’t you? What you really want? You don’t know what it’s like. There isn’t anything else for me, except Reggie. If I didn’t have him—’ Her voice thickened. She took out her handkerchief and blew her nose. ‘He makes me happy,’ she said, after a minute. ‘You know he does. He makes me laugh.’
Betty finally found her lighter. ‘Well,’ she said, as she struck it, ‘you’re not laughing now.’
Viv watched the spurting up of the flame; she blinked against the plunge back into darkness, and didn’t answer. She and Betty sat almost without speaking until it grew too cold to sit any longer; then they linked arms, wearily, and stood.
They had just moved off across the garden when they heard the sirens go. Betty said, ‘There you are. That’d put an end to all your problems—a nice fat bomb.’
Viv looked up. ‘God, it would. And no one would know, except for you.’
She’d never thought of that before, about all the secrets that the war must have swallowed up, left buried in dust and darkness and silence. She had only ever thought of the raids as tearing things open, making things hard. She kept glancing up at the sky as she and Betty walked to John Adam House, telling herself that she wanted to see the searchlights go up; that she wanted the planes to come, the guns to start, all hell to break loose…
But when the first of the guns began to pound, up in north London somewhere, she grew tense, and made Betty walk faster—afraid of the bombing, even in her wretchedness; afraid of getting hurt; not wanting to die, after all.
Hey, Jerry!’ Giggs was calling out of his window, two hours later. ‘Hey, Fritz! This way! This fucking way!’
‘Shut up, Giggs, you gobshite!’ called someone else.
‘This way, Jerry! Over here!’
Giggs had heard of a prison being bombed, and all the men with less than six months left to serve in it being released; he only had four and a half still to do, and so, every time a raid started up, he’d drag his table across his cell, climb up on to it, and call to the German pilots out of his window. If the raid was a bad one, Duncan found, the shouts could really unsettle you: you began to picture Giggs as something like a great big magnet, sucking bullets and bombs and areoplanes out of the sky. Tonight, however, the raid seemed distant, and no one was much bothered by it. The thuds and flashes were occasional, and soft; the darkness thickened and thinned slightly, that was all, as searchlights swept over the sky. Other men had got up on to their tables and were calling to one another, about ordinary things, across Giggs’s shouts.
‘Woolly! Woolly, you owe me half a dollar, you git!’
‘Mick! Hey, Mick! What are you doing?’
There wasn’t an officer to make them be silent. The officers went straight down into their shelter as soon as a raid started up.
‘You owe me—!’
‘Mick! Hey, Mick!’
The men had to shout themselves almost hoarse, in order to be heard; someone might call from a window at one end of the hall, and be answered by a man fifty cells away. Lying in bed and hearing them yell was like going through the wireless, finding stations in the dark. Duncan almost liked it; he found, at least, that he could filter the voices out when they began to get on his ner
ves. Fraser, on the other hand, was driven mad by them, every time. Now, for example, he was moving restlessly about, grumbling and cursing. He raised himself up, and punched out the lumps of horsehair in his mattress. He plucked at the bits of uniform he’d laid on his blanket for extra warmth. Duncan couldn’t see him, because the cell was too dark; but he could feel the movement of him through the frame of the bunks. When he lay heavily back down, the bunks rocked from side to side, and creaked and squealed slightly, like bunks in a ship. We might be sailors, Duncan thought.
‘You owe me half a dollar, you cunt!’
‘God!’ said Fraser, raising himself again and punching the mattress more violently. ‘Why can’t they be quiet? Shut up!’ he shouted, slapping the wall.
‘It’s no good,’ said Duncan, yawning. ‘They won’t be able to hear you. Now they’re after Stella, listen.’
For someone had begun calling out: ‘Ste-lla! Ste-lla!’ Duncan thought it was a boy named Pacey, down on the Twos. ‘Ste-lla! I’ve got something to tell you…I saw your twat, in the bath-house! I saw your twat! It was black as my hat!’
Another man whistled and laughed. ‘You’re a fucking poet, Pacey!’
‘It looked like a fucking black rat with its throat cut! It looked like your old man’s beard, with your old girl’s fat fucking lips in the middle! Ste-lla! Why don’t you answer?’
‘She can’t answer,’ came another voice. ‘She’s got her gob on Mr Chase!’
‘She’s got her gob round Chase,’ said someone else, ‘and Browning is slipping her a length from the back. She’s got her fucking hands full, boys!’
‘Shut up, you naughty things!’ cried a new voice. It was Monica, on the Threes.
Pacey started on her, then. ‘Moni-ca! Moni-ca!’
‘Shut up, you beasts! Can’t a girl get her beauty sleep?’
This was followed by the crump! of a distant explosion and, ‘Jerry!’ Giggs called again. ‘Fritz! Adolf! This way!’
Fraser groaned and turned his pillow. Then, ‘Hell!’ he said. ‘That’s all we need!’
For on top of everything else, somebody had started singing.
‘Little girl in blue, I’ve been dreaming of you…Little girl in blue…’
It was a man called Miller. He was in for running some sort of racket from a nightclub. He sang all the time, with horrible sincerity, as if crooning into a microphone at the front of a band. At the sound of his voice now, men up and down the hall began to complain.
‘Turn it off!’
‘Miller, you bastard!’
Duncan’s neighbour, Quigley, began to beat with something—his salt-pot, probably—on the floor of his cell. ‘Shut up,’ he roared as he did it, ‘you fucking slags! Miller, you cunt!’
‘I’ve been dreaming of you…’
Miller sang on, through all the complaints, through all the distant roar of the raid; and the worst of it was, the song was tuneful. One by one, the men fell silent, as if they were listening. Even Quigley, after a while, threw down his salt-pot and stopped roaring.
I hear your voice, I reach to hold you,
Your lips touch mine, my arms enfold you.
But then you’re gone: I wake and find
That I’ve been drea-ming…
Fraser, too, had grown still. He’d lifted his head, the better to hear. ‘Hell, Pearce,’ he said now. ‘I think I danced to this tune once. I’m sure I did.’ He lay back down. ‘I probably laughed at the bloody thing, then. Now—now it seems stinkingly apt, doesn’t it? Christ! Trust Miller and a popular song to be so honest about longing.’
Duncan said nothing. The song went on.
Though we’re apart, I can’t forget you.
I bless the hour that I first met you—
Abruptly, another voice broke across it. This one was deep, tuneless, lusty.
Give me a girl with eyes of blue,
Who likes it if you don’t but prefers it if you do!
Someone cheered. Fraser said, in a tone of disbelief, ‘Who the hell is that, now?’
Duncan tilted his head, to listen. ‘I don’t know. Maybe Atkin?’
Atkin, like Giggs, was a deserter. The song sounded like something a serviceman would sing.
Give me a girl with eyes of black,
Who likes it on her belly but prefers it on her back!
’Cause I’ll be seeing you again, when you—
Miller was still going. For almost a minute the two songs ran bizarrely together; then Miller gave in. His voice trailed away. ‘You wanker!’ he yelled. There were more cheers. Atkin’s voice—or whosever it was—grew louder, lustier. He must have been cupping his hands around his mouth and bellowing like a bull.
Give me a girl with hair of brown,
Who likes it going up but prefers it coming down!
Give me a girl with hair of red,
Who likes it in the hand but prefers it in the bed!
Give me a—
But then the Raiders Past siren started up. Atkin turned his song into a whoop. Men on every landing joined in, drumming with their fists on their walls, their window-frames, their beds. Only Giggs was disappointed.
‘Come back, you gobshites!’ he called, hoarsely. ‘Come back, you German cunts! You forgot D Hall! You forgot D Hall!’
‘Get down out of those fucking windows!’ roared someone out in the yard, and there was the rapid crunch, crunch of boots on cinders, as the officers emerged from their shelter and started heading towards the prison. From all along the hall, then, there came the thump and scrape of tables: the men were leaping down from their windows, hurling themselves back into their bunks. In another minute, the electric lights were switched on. Mr Browning and Mr Chase came pounding up the stairs and started racing down the landings, hammering on doors, flinging open spy-holes: ‘Pacey! Wright! Malone, you little shit—If I catch any of you fuckers out of your beds, the whole lot of you’ll be banged up from now till Christmas, do you hear?’
Fraser turned his face into his pillow, groaning and cursing against the light. Duncan drew up his blanket over his eyes. Their door was thumped, but the racing footsteps went past. They faded for a moment; stopped; grew loud, then faded again. Duncan had a sense of Mr Browning and Mr Chase turning snarling about, thwarted and furious, like dogs on chains. ‘You shit-cakes!’ one of them cried, for show. ‘I’m warning you—!’
They paced back and forth along the landings for another minute or two; eventually, however, they tramped down the stairs. In another moment, with a little phut, the lights in the cells were switched off again.
Duncan quickly put down his blanket and moved his head to the edge of his pillow. He liked the moment when the current was cut. He liked to see the bulb in the ceiling. For the light faded slowly, and for three or four seconds, if you watched for it, you could make out the filament inside the glass, a curl of wire that turned from white to furious amber, to burning red, to delicate pink; and then, when the cell was dark, you could still see the yellow blur of it inside your eye.
A man gave a whistle, quietly. Someone shouted to Atkin. He wanted Atkin to carry on singing. He wanted to know about the girl whose hair was yellow—what did she like? What about her? He called it twice, three times; but Atkin wouldn’t answer. The matey, mischievous feeling that had gripped them all, ten minutes before, was losing its hold. The silence was deepening, growing daunting, and to try to break into it, now, was to make it seem worse. For after all, thought Duncan, you could sing or bellow as much as you liked; it was only a way of putting off this moment—this moment that always, finally, came—when the loneliness of the prison night rose up about you, like water in a sinking boat.
He could still hear the words of the songs, however—just as he’d still been able to see the glowing filament in the bulb against the darkness of his own eyelids. Give me a girl, he could hear in his head. Give me a girl, and I’ll be seeing you, over and over.
Perhaps Fraser could hear it, too. He changed his pose, rolled on to his back,
kept fidgeting. Now that the place was so quiet, when he passed his hand across the stubble on his chin—when he rubbed his eye, even, with his knuckle—Duncan heard it…He blew out his breath.
‘Damn,’ he said, very softly. ‘I wish I had a girl, Pearce, right now. Just an ordinary girl. Not the kind of girls I used to meet—the brainy types.’ He laughed, and the frame of the bunks gave a shiver. ‘God,’ he said, ‘isn’t that a phrase to freeze a man’s blood? “A brainy girl.”’ He put on a voice. ‘“You’d like my friend, she’s ever so brainy.” As if that’s what one wants them for…’ He laughed again—a sort of snigger, this time, too low to make the bed-frame jump. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘just an ordinary little girl is what I’d like right now. She wouldn’t have to be pretty. Sometimes the pretty ones are no good—do you know what I mean? They think too much of themselves; they don’t want to mess their hair up, smudge their lips. I wish I had a plain, stout, stupid girl. A plain, stout, stupid, grateful girl. Do you know what I’d do with her, Pearce?’
He wasn’t talking to Duncan, really; he was talking to the darkness, to himself. He might have been murmuring in his sleep. But the effect was more intimate, somehow, than if he’d been whispering into Duncan’s ear. Duncan opened his eyes and gazed into the perfect, velvety blackness of the cell. There was a depthlessness to it that was so unnerving, he put up his hand. He wanted to remind himself of the distance between his and Fraser’s bunk: he’d begun to feel as though Fraser was nearer than he ought to have been; and he was very aware of his own body as a sort of duplication or echo of the one above…When his fingers found the criss-crossed wire underside of Fraser’s bed, he kept them there. He said, ‘Don’t think about it. Go to sleep.’
‘No, but seriously,’ Fraser went on, ‘do you know what I’d do? I’d have her, fully clothed. I wouldn’t take off a stitch. I’d only loosen a button or two at the back of her dress—and I’d undo her brassière, while I was about it—and then I’d draw the dress and the brassière down to her elbows and get my fingers on to her chest. I’d give her a pinch. I might pull her about a bit—there wouldn’t be a thing she could do if I did, for the dress—do you see?—the dress would be pinning her arms to her sides…And when I’d finished with her chest, I’d push up her skirt. I’d push it right up to her waist. I’d keep the knickers on her, but they’d be that silky, flimsy kind that you can work your way about, work your way up…’ The words trailed away. When he spoke again, his voice had changed, was bare and not at all boastful. ‘I had a girl like that, once. I’ve never forgotten it. She wasn’t a beauty.’
