If he could believe anything now, he wanted to think she hadn't really seen him or had failed to understand. He watched the bidding come to an end, and felt as though it concerned someone other than himself or who had ceased to be. The woman plodded to scrutinize him afresh, pinching his face between a fat clammy finger and thumb that drove the gag deeper into his mouth. 'Will do,' she said, separating her wad into halves that the policemen stuffed into their pockets.
While she lumbered downhill the owner of the apartments handed Barry's passport to the policeman who had never spoken to him, and who clanked open a hulk of a lighter to melt it. The last flaming scrap curled up in the dust as the woman reappeared in a dilapidated truck. The policemen lifted Barry off the post and slung him into the back of the vehicle and slammed the tailgate.
The last he saw of them was their ironic dual salute as the truck jolted away. Sweat and insects swarmed over him while the animal smell of his predecessor occupied his nostrils and the traveller's cheques turned to pulp in his mouth as he was driven into the pitiless voracious land.
No End Of Fun (2002)
You don’t mind, do you, Uncle Lionel? I’ve given you mother’s old room.“
“Why should I mind anything to do with Dorothy?”
“I expect you’ve got happy memories like us. Is it all right if Helen sees you up? Only we’ve got paying guests arriving any minute.”
“You really ought to let me pay something towards my keep.”
“You mustn’t think I meant that. Mother never let you and I’m not about to start. Just keep Helen amused like always and that’ll be more than enough. Helen, don’t let my uncle lug that case.”
“Are you helping with the luggage now, Helen? Will that be a bit much for you?”
“I’ve done bigger ones.”
“That sounds a bit cheeky, doesn’t it, Carol? The sort of thing the comics used to say at the Imperial. Is that old place still alive? That can be one of your treats then, Helen.”
“Say thank you. Helen, and will you please take up that case. Here are the boarders now.”
When the thirteen-year-old thrust her fingers through the handle, Lionel let it go. “You’re a treasure,” he murmured, but she was apparently too intent on stumping upstairs to give him his usual smile. Remarking “She’s a credit to you” brought him no more than a straight-lipped nod from her mother. He had to admit to himself that Helen’s new image—all her curls cropped into auburn turf, denim overalls so oversized he would have assumed they’d been handed down if she’d had an older sibling—had rather startled him. “So how have you been progressing at school?” he said as he caught up with her, and in an attempt to sound less dusty, “You can call me Lionel if you like.”
“Mum wouldn’t let me.”
“Better make it uncle, then, even if it’s not quite right. Great-uncle is a mouthful, isn’t it, though you liked it one year, didn’t you? You said I was the greatest one you had, not that there was any competition.”
All this, uttered slowly and with pauses inviting but obtaining no responses, brought them to the third floor, where he held onto the banister and regained his breath while Helen preceded him into the room. Dorothy’s sheets had been replaced by a duvet as innocently white, but otherwise the place seemed hardly to have changed since her girlhood, when children weren’t expected to personalize their rooms: the same hulking oaken wardrobe and chest of drawers she’d inherited at Helen’s age along with Dorothy’s grandmother’s room, the view of boarding-houses boasting of their fullness, the only mirror her grandmother’s on the windows!!!. As he stepped into the July sunlight that had gathered like an insubstantial faintly lavender-scented weight in the room, he thought he saw Dorothy in the mirror.
It was Helen, of course. She resembled Dorothy more than Carol ever had— elfin ears, full lower lip, nose as emphatic as an exclamation mark, eyes deep with secrets. As she dumped Lionel’s suitcase by the bed, the mirror wobbled with the impact. The oval glass was supported by two pairs of marble hands, each brace joined at the wrists; the lower of the left hands was missing its little finger. He lurched forward to steady the mirror, and his arm brushed the front of Helen’s overalls. He expected the material to yield, and the presence of two plump mounds of flesh came as more than a shock.
She twisted away from him, and her face reappeared in the mirror, grimacing. For a moment it exactly fitted the oval. The sight set his heart racing as though a knot of memories had squeezed it. “Sorry,” he mumbled, and “I’ll see you at dinner” as she slouched out of the room.
Laying his socks and underwear in Dorothy’s chest of drawers and dressing her padded hangers in his shirts and suits made him wonder if that was more intimate than she would have liked. By the time he’d finished he was oppressively hot. He donned the bathrobe that was waiting for him every year and hurried to the attic bathroom, to be confronted by a crowd of Carol’s and Helen’s tights pegged to a clothesline over the bath as though to demonstrate two stages of growth. Not caring to touch them, he retreated to his room and transferred the mirror to the chest of drawers so as to raise the sash as high as it would wobble. Hours of sunlight had left the marble hands not much less warm than flesh.
He might have imagined he heard the screams of people drowning if he hadn’t recognized the waves as the swoops of a roller coaster. Soon he was able to hear the drowsing of the sea. Its long, slow breaths were soothing him when he saw a passerby remove her topmost head. She’d lifted her small daughter from her shoulders, but the realization came too late to prevent Lionel from remembering a figure that had parted into prancing segments. He lay down hastily and made himself breathe in time with the sea until the summons of the dinner gong resounded through the house.
Even in their early teens he and his cousin had squabbled over who sounded the gong, until Dorothy’s mother had kept the task for herself. While it was meant to call only the guests, it reminded him that he didn’t know when he was expected for dinner. He was changing, having resprayed his armpits, when a rap at the door arrested him with trousers halfway up his greying thighs. “Would you mind taking dinner with the others?” Carol called. “We’re not as organized as mother yet.”
“I’d be happy to wait till you have yours.”
“We eat on the trot at the moment. You’d be helping.”
In the dining room a table in the corner farthest from the window was set for one. All his fellow diners were married couples at least his age. A few bade him a wary good evening, but otherwise none of the muted conversations came anywhere near him. He felt like a teacher attempting to ignore a murmurous classroom, not that he ever would have. As soon as he’d finished dinner—thin soup, cold ham and salad, brown bread and butter, a rotund teapot harboring a single bag, a pair of cakes on a stand, everything Dorothy used to serve—he followed Helen into the kitchen. “Would you be terribly upset if we didn’t go anywhere tonight?” he said.
“Don’t suppose.”
“Only driving up from London isn’t the picnic it was.”
“She wouldn’t have been joining you anyway. It’s dirty sheet night,” Carol said, wrinkling her nose.
He did all the washing-up he could grab, and would have helped Helen trudge to the machine in the basement with armfuls of bedclothes if Carol hadn’t urged him to tell her his news. Now that he’d retired from teaching there wasn’t much besides the occasional encounter with an ex-pupil, and so he encouraged Carol to talk. When her patient responses betrayed that she regarded his advice about the multitude of petty problems she’d inherited with the boarding-house as at best uninformed, he pleaded tiredness and withdrew to his room.
At first exhaustion wouldn’t let him sleep. Though he left the window open, the heat insisted on sharing his bed, Dorothy’s ever since she was Helen’s age. He found himself wishing he hadn’t arrived for the funeral last December too late to see her. “We never said goodbye,” he whispered into the pillow and wrapped his arms around himself., covering his flaccid
hairy dugs.
He wakened in the middle of the night and also of the heat with the notion that Dorothy had grown an unreasonable number of legs. He raised himself on his elbows to peer sleepily about, and realized she was staring at him. Of course it was her oval photograph, except that there was no picture of her in the room. As he jerked upright he saw her face balanced on the marble hands, crammed into the mirror. She looked outraged, unable to believe her fate.
Lionel snatched at the overhead cord to drag light into the room. The mirror was deserted apart from a patch of wallpaper whose barely discernible pattern gave him the impression of gazing straight through the frame at the wall. When the illusion refused to be dispelled he turned the light off, trying not to feel he’d used it to drive Dorothy into the dark. She was gone wherever everyone would end up, that was all; how could dreaming summon her back? Nevertheless he felt as guilty as the only other time he’d seen her in the mirror.
It had been the year when she’d kept being late for dinner. One evening her mother had sent him to fetch her. He’d swaggered into Dorothy’s room without knocking; they’d never knocked at each other’s doors. Although it wasn’t dark the curtains had been drawn, and at first he’d been unsure what he saw— Dorothy stooping to watch her face in the oval mirror as she’d squeezed her budding breasts. While she hadn’t been naked, her white slip had let the muted light glow between her legs. The smile of pride and quiet astonishment she had been sharing with herself had transformed itself into an accusing glare as she’d caught sight of him in the mirror. “Go away,” she’d cried, “this is my room.,” as Lionel fled, his entire body pounding like an exposed heart. He hadn’t dared venture downstairs until he’d heard her precede him.
The breakfast gong quieted his memories at last. In the bathroom he was relieved to find the tights had flown. He showered away most of his coating of mugginess. and thought he was ready for the day until he opened the kitchen door to hear Carol tell Helen “You’re not to go anywhere near him, is that understood?”
Surely she couldn’t mean Lionel, but he would have been tempted to sidle out of reach of the idea if she hadn’t given him a wink behind Helen’s eloquently sulky back. “A boyfriend she’s too young to have,” she said. “Do you mind sitting where you did again?”
Lionel had hoped they could have breakfast together, but tried to seem happy to head for the dining room. “Morning all,” he declared, and when that stirred no more than muted echoes “I’m her uncle, should anyone be wondering.”
Did explaining his presence only render it more questionable or suggest he thought it was? He restrained himself from explaining that Carol had divorced her husband once she’d resolved to move in with her aging mother. He made rather shorter work of his breakfast than his innards found ideal so that he could escape to the kitchen. “Are we going for a roam?” he asked Helen as he set about washing up.
“Too many rooms to change,” Carol said at once. “Maybe we can let her out this evening if you can think how to occupy her.”
He strolled up to the elongated Victorian garden that was the promenade and clambered down a set of thick hot stone steps to the beach. The sand was beginning to sprout turrets around families who’d staked out their territories with buckets and spades the colors of lollipops. He paced alongside the subdued withdrawn waves until screams rose from the amusement park ahead, and then he labored up another block of steps to the Imperial.
The theater was displaying posters for the kind of summer show it always had: comedians, singers, dancers, a magician. It took the mostly blonde girl in the ticket booth some moments to pause her chewing gum and see off a section of her handful of paperback, which was proportionately almost as stout as its reader. When she said “Can I help you?” she sounded close to refusing in advance.
“Could you tell me whether there are any, you won’t take offense if I call them dwarfs?”
She met that with a grimace she supplemented by bulging her cheek with her tongue. “Any…”
“Small performers. You know, a troupe of dinky fellows. They used to perform here when I was a child. I don’t know if you’d have anything like them these days.” When she only tongued her cheek more fiercely he grew desperate. “Tiny Tumblers, one lot were called,” he insisted. “Squat little chaps.”
“The only little people we’ve got are Miss Merritt’s Moppets.”
“That’s fine, then,” Lionel said with an alacrity she appeared to find suspicious. “Any chance of a pair of your best seats for tomorrow night?”
“Best for what?”
For persuading Carol to give Helen an evening off. he hoped: she was working the child harder than Dorothy had ever worked her. “For watching, I should think,” he said.
From the theater he wandered inland. Behind the large hotels facing the sea a parallel row of bed and breakfast houses kept to themselves. Victorian shopping arcades led between them to the main street, which was clinging to its elegance. Among the tea shops and extravagant department stores, not a pub nor an amusement arcade was to be seen. Crowds of the superannuated were taking all the time they could to progress from one end of the street to the other, while those that were wheeling or being wheeled traversed the wide pavements more slowly still. When Lionel discovered that matching the speed of the walkers made him feel prematurely old, or perhaps not so prematurely, he turned aside into the park that stretched opposite half the shops.
Folding chairs could be hired from a spindly lugubrious youth decorated with a moustache like two transplanted eyebrows. Lionel plumped himself and the swelling that was breakfast onto a chair close to the bandstand. The afternoon concert was preceded by an open-air theater of toddlers on the lawns and secretaries with lunch-boxes, a spectacle he found soporific. By the time the elderly musicians in their dinner jackets assembled on the bandstand, he was dozing off.
A medley of Viennese waltzes failed to rouse him, as did portions of Mozart and Mendelssohn. He was past being able to raise his head when the orchestra struck up a piece he would have thought too brash to win the applause, much of it gloved, of the pensioned audience. Though he couldn’t name the opera responsible, he recognized the music. It was the Dance of the Tumblers. Far from wakening him, it let a memory at him.
A few days after he’d seen Dorothy at the mirror, her mother had taken her and Lionel to the Imperial. She’d made them sit together as if that might crush whatever had come between them, but Dorothy had sat aside from him, knees protruding into the aisle. She had seemed to take half the evening to eat a tub of ice cream, until the scraping of the wooden spoon had started to grate on his nerves. As she’d lifted yet another delicate mouthful to her lips, the master of ceremonies had announced the Tiny Tumblers, and then her spoon had halted in mid-air. Two giant women had waddled onstage from the wings.
He’d never known if Dorothy had cowered against her seat because of their size or from guessing what was imminent. The long-haired square-faced figures had swayed to the footlights before the flowered ankle-length dresses had split open, each of them disgorging a totem-pole composed of three dwarfs in babies’ frilly outfits. The dwarfs had sprung from one another’s shoulders, leaving the dresses to collapse under the weight of the wigs, and piled down the stairs that flanked the stage. “Who’s coming for a tumble?” they’d croaked.
Lionel had felt Dorothy flinch away from the aisle, pressing against him. If she’d asked he would have changed places with her, but he’d thought he sensed how loath she was to touch him after his glimpse in her room. As two dwarfs had scurried towards her, swivelling their blocky heads and widening their eyes, he’d dealt her a covert shove. Her lurch and her squeak had attracted the attention of the foremost dwarf, who’d shambled fast at her. She’d jumped up, spilling ice cream over the lap of her skirt, and fled to the sanctuary of the Ladies‘. Her mother had needed to ask Lionel more than once to let her past to follow, he remembered with dismay. Part of him had wanted to find out what would happen if the dwarfs caught
his cousin.
He came back to himself before the thought could reach deeper. He’d grown unaware of the music in the park, and now there was only clapping. He was awakened less by the discreet peal than by a sense that his body was about to expel some element it was no longer able to contain. His midriff strained itself up from the chair as the secret escaped him—a protracted vibrant belch that the applause faded just in time to isolate.
He excused himself as quickly and as blindly as he could—he had a childish half-awake notion that if he didn’t see he wouldn’t be seen either—but not before he glimpsed couples staring as if he’d strayed from the Imperial, which they barely tolerated for its appeal to tourists. Several pensioners on the main street frowned at his excessively boisterous progress, but he was anxious to take refuge in his room. Since Carol and Helen were busy in the kitchen, only shortness of breath delayed him on the stairs. He manhandled the door open and slumped against it, but took just one step towards the bed.
Whoever had tidied up had returned the mirror to the windowsill. It must be himself he could see in the oval glass, even if the face appeared to recede faster than he stumbled forward. Presumably his having rushed back to the hotel made him see the face dwindle beyond sight, carried helplessly into a blackness that had no basis in the room. He rubbed his eyes hard, and once the fog cleared he saw nothing in the mirror except his own confused face.
The marble hands had stored up warmth. They brought back the touch of flesh, which he’d avoided since losing his parents, not that he’d encountered much of it while they were alive. He planted the hands on the chest of drawers and turned the glass to the wall, then lay on top of the duvet, trying harder and more unsuccessfully to relax than he ever had after a day’s teaching, until the gong sent its vibrations through his nerves.
The Collected Short Fiction Page 138
