Chaplin & Company

by Mave Fellowes

  The funeral is organised by Tomo. At the service, my parents’ coffins are draped in flags and people sing a nationalist song outside the church. After the wake there is a fight in the municipal square which Tomo is involved in.

  That night we receive a brick through our window.

  I do not go back to work for a time. I spend days sitting in my parents’ room, trying to take the information of their death. Something inside is being very stupid, very obstinate. I am thinking normal thoughts about them, as if they are alive, and then interrupt myself to try and force the fact that they are gone, but something in my head will refuse it. My sister is downstairs most of the time with her daughter and leaves me alone. She doesn’t know what to say. She thinks I have turned into a simpleton. When the new headmaster comes to visit, I can hardly string a sentence. Not good for an English teacher. He passes on sincere condolences of the other staff. The school will grant me more leave. Everyone is still outraged at what has happened, he says, and so sad to be losing their beloved headmaster.

  All this time Tomo is holding meetings around the kitchen table, making plans to kick more people out of the town. My sister and I are the figurehead of this movement, he says, we must lead the demonstrations. My sister goes. She takes her daughter, just seven, to witness doors being axed, people kicked and thrown out of their homes, swear words being painted over shop windows. The other side is just as bad. One night someone leaves a bleeding pig’s head on our doorstep.

  After a time, my sister and her husband move into my parents’ room. I go back to work. Outside the school gates is a line of dead flowers, flags and crosses in the mud. Nobody has cleaned it up. In the classroom I find a mixture of praise and obscenities scratched on to my desk. Martyr’s daughter. Fat traitor bitch. Pictures of my father are pasted on to flags and stuck on the walls. Many students tell me that vengeance will be visited on his murderers. I do not know what to say; they must wonder why I am silent.

  I am not fit to teach but people are patient. I go through my lessons like a robot and mostly my students are quiet and obedient. Over half of my class are now gone, either to the army or thrown out of town.

  I am floating through my timetable for a few weeks and then one morning something snaps. One of my students has written an assignment with a title, ‘How to Kill an Immigrant Pig’. It is violent and childish like a cartoon. But it brings out such an anger in me that I tear it in front of the class and fling it in that boy’s face. I tell him he is more stupid than a pig himself if he thinks this is a clever thing to write. I am getting hot with anger. I tell him that the new President and his cronies are a bunch of pigs who are turning the country into a hell. I tell them that my father would be ashamed. They are so surprised that none of them say one word and I leave the classroom. My face is wet with tears and with sweat.

  In the bus on the way home I am alive for the first time in many weeks. I feel that I have broken back into myself. I sit solid at the front of the bus, holding my backpack on my lap. The fact of what happened to my parents hits like a wave smashing again and again. I sit and hold tight to my backpack, I can weather it. I am back inside my body, and my thoughts are moving again from one thing to the next and to the next, no more flipping backwards and forwards and chasing in circles. My mind is returned.

  On the next morning I am greeted at the gates by the new headteacher, who tells me never again to step within the walls of this school. I have betrayed my father’s memory and spat in the face of my parents’ sacrifice. He is trembling and dark red with rage, holding his arms tight to his sides as if to stop himself from an attack. For a second I am confused, this morning I am looking forward to my classes for the first time. I am still stupid to the workings of this new system, I have forgotten the rules. Anyone who shows a thought now that is different to the mob will be reported, thrown out, punished. This is the new law.

  I take the bus back to my side of town and walk home. My sister is out, but I only have a few hours before my brother-in-law comes back for lunch. I put my clothes in a bag. I am packing up my books when Tomo, thirty minutes later, comes through the door with his two bully pals and grabs me by the face, pulling it close to his and whispering his insults: fat whore, traitor, communist, immigrant-lover. His pals stand behind nodding their big heads like dogs. I don’t know why I am not afraid. He continues and I am thinking, really this man’s vocabulary is limited. He is picking up my books and tearing pages, asking, ‘Is this where you get your traitor’s ideas, bitch? Is this why you can’t find a man and have children? Did these books take away your appetite?’ He takes me by the hair and pushes me out of the house. I fall on my hip, hard – I can still feel it today. I am picking myself off the street when he throws my bags through the door. He spits and slams it shut. I can hear him shouting at his friends as I walk down the road. I am in pain but I don’t care. I don’t feel afraid but free, completely free and light.

  I go to the house of a colleague and persuade his wife to let me in. I stay for a few days but I know they are wanting me to go, they can’t look in my eyes the whole time I am there. So I take the bus to the capital, where I stay in a hostel. I think about finding a job but: I am sick of my country. The only thing that holds me is the feeling that I am leaving my niece and my sister at the mercy of two monsters: Tomo and this new stupidity. But I go.

  When I first come to the UK I stay in a special hostel for visitors from my country, and I work there as a translator. Every day I check the database for my sister’s name, to see if she has left. My plan is to find other teaching work. There is a programme which helps organise visas for foreigners who teach or translate for international business. I am there for only one month before a boy arrives from my town. I don’t recognise the boy but he tells them something. I am thrown from the programme and they say they no longer have a room for me at the hostel.

  This is a year ago. For five months after, I live in hostels and do basic jobs for very little money. Some of the hostels are not safe, and sometimes at these basic jobs they ask questions and are catching foreigners who do not have the right documents. And I do not have the right documents. I hear of Zjelko from the other workers. He pays almost nothing but will give work without asking questions. He has bars and cafes.

  In December I go to ask Zjelko for a job. Just a temporary solution, I think, until I can think of another plan. I go to a bar on Elkstone Road as I have been told. The Portobello Queen. It is a fashionable place, they have cocktails, art on the walls. They take me to a table in the corner and tell me to wait. I am there for past one hour when this cowboy comes and sits opposite. Oil in his hair, open shirt, pointed boots. He says his name is Mr Zjelko. He looks me up and down and perhaps he is disappointed. He turns his eyes to the window and looks at the girls on a table outside. He curls out his tongue, puts a mint on it. How is my English? Can I cook? Can I serve? I answer. I must be saying the right things. He needs someone to run the most important establishment in his portfolio, he says: a cafe on a barge in a tourist destination. I am lucky, he says, that the position has recently been vacated. He makes quoting marks with his fingers as he says the word ‘vacated’. All he usually has for women is cleaning work.

  NINETEEN

  As Vera tells her story, perched on the side of Odeline’s boat, John Kettle is sitting in his seat at the Alcohol Awareness Group, between Alwyn on his left and Chris, the young lad with the rucksack, on his right. Opposite is Inga, wearing another crumpled beige outfit and her hippy beads, and Mary, who is wearing a buttoned blue floral dress, the collar faded and stiff with sweat, and a burgundy-coloured towel around her shoulders.

  When John walked up to the church porch, Alwyn had been holding the door open for Mary to wheel her trolley inside. She bumped it across the stone floor and parked it behind the door. ‘Oooh, ’tis chilly in here,’ she said, and began to rummage in the trolley, piling the pillow and tennis racket covers at one end until she found the burgundy towel. ‘Aha!’ She lifted it high and then wrapp
ed it around her shoulders like a shawl, before clicking over the flagstones towards the circle of chairs, her stick legs moving like a wind-up toy, the snaffled loafers planting outwards on each step.

  Alwyn had seemed pleased to see John and pumped his hand up and down, ‘John. Hello. Welcome!’, and gestured for him to join the others. When John sat down his eyes dropped to Mary’s lap. The wounds had closed but her hands were still ridged with pink lines. She saw him looking and moved them beneath the towel. ‘Good morning, Warden,’ she said, stretching her big, chapped lips in a smile. There was a shadow next to her mouth which could have been a bruise, or just a patch of discoloured skin like the bluish strip on her forehead.

  ‘The bonus of today’s session,’ Alwyn is saying, ‘is that we have some refreshments left over from this morning’s family service, so if anyone would like some squash or a biscuit –’ he points to a tray with a jug and stack of coloured cups on top of the bookshelf behind Inga and Mary – ‘please do help yourselves.’

  ‘Well, I certainly will,’ says Mary, pulling the towel higher around her shoulders and rising out of her seat. ‘Can I help anyone else?’ She looks round the group. Inga shakes her head. ‘I’ll have a squash, why not?’ says Alwyn.

  ‘Anything for you, Warden?’ Mary proffers a red cup in John’s direction.

  ‘I’ll have a squash too,’ he says, tipping his head at Alwyn, who catches his eye and smiles back.

  ‘Two squashes, on their way. And what about the paper-white gentleman? He looks like he would benefit from a biscuit.’ She waddles across the ethnic rug with an open packet of digestives and the lad lifts his shaved head and shoots a hand out from the cuff of his sweater to take a stack of biscuits from the top. He makes a murmur of thanks and pushes one of them into his mouth, cupping his other hand underneath to catch the crumbs. He has a collared shirt under the sweater, jeans with an ironed crease down the front, and the same pair of brown suede trainers. Not the uniform of a druggie. Gobbles the biscuit down and puts a finger in his mouth, to pick at a metal brace around his teeth.

  ‘Thank you, Mary,’ says Alwyn as she hands him a yellow cup full of squash, and John the red one. She takes a purple cup for herself and sits down with the packet of digestives in her lap.

  Alwyn takes a sip and leans forward to continue. ‘So, in our last session we thought about the idea that by getting to know something better, we are more likely to care for it. I’d like to look this time at the ways in which we neglect, or do damage to, ourselves. This is an Alcohol Awareness group and so I’d really like to talk about what alcohol does to us. What is its effect? Maybe in the short term it appears that it is helping in some way, or acting as a distraction, suppressing or managing or even solving what seems like a larger problem. Perhaps we feel it keeps us company. But we’re all here today because it isn’t helping. It doesn’t, in fact, solve any problems. Does it?’ He pushes his glasses up his nose and looks around the group. His magnified eyes are blinking through their round lenses. John Kettle shakes his head. Mary takes another biscuit.

  ‘I’d like us to take a journey together. A journey of awareness. In becoming more aware of the damage we do to ourselves, I hope that we might become more reluctant to do it. I hope we can undo some of the habits we’ve constructed which do us the most harm.’ He sits back in his seat and uses his cup to gesture to his right. ‘John, could you start us off? What does drinking do to you? Do you feel it helps in some way? Could you describe what it feels like to want a drink?’

  ‘Haven’t had a drink since Friday night,’ says John. ‘Skipped the pub last night.’

  ‘Well, that sounds great. Would you usually go most nights?’

  ‘Yep. And I didn’t go last Tuesday. So that’s two nights off.’

  ‘So you’ve managed to disrupt your routine a bit. That’s really good news.’

  ‘The plant’s coming along well too. I’ve remembered to water every day. Thinking of getting a few others, she looks so nice out on deck.’

  ‘So that exercise seems to have worked. That’s great.’ Alwyn nods. ‘Would you mind if we went back. Could you talk us through your decision not to go to the pub?’

  ‘I have a puzzle for you, Alwyn,’ interrupts the pale woman, Inga. Her voice is low and coldly accented. She pronounces his name with an ‘h’. Halwyn. ‘What if a person has no interest in looking after themselves?’ She is motionless as she speaks, her hands sit forgotten on her lap. They are old woman’s hands, frail and veined, sunken. There is a gold band on her ring finger, underneath a silver band with a large amber stone set on to it, marmalade-coloured and cut in the shape of a heart. The rings look too heavy for her bird-boned fingers. ‘What if a person no longer cares?’

  Alwyn nods at her to carry on but she is looking at the beanbag in the corner beyond him. Her words are toneless, as if she can’t be bothered to give them emphasis or colour. ‘I don’t have a problem with alcohol.’ Halcohol – it is horrible to listen to. John shifts in his seat and has a sip of squash. Scratches his beard to hear the crackle.

  She is still going. ‘I don’t even like the taste. I could stop drinking without a problem. But I don’t even care enough to stop.’ John moves his finger to his ear and rustles it around. Why doesn’t Alwyn say something?

  ‘If I drink, I become stupid, and I can pretend he is with me. I lost my husband.’ Her right hand moves up to take hold of her bead necklace. ‘I turn the music loud and we are dancing.’

  She flicks her eyes up to Alwyn. They are pale blue, puffy and lashless. Naked. John looks away towards the crate of toy cars in the corner.

  ‘So life has no more value than these moments. I am jealous of the animals.’ Hanimals. ‘They can take themselves away to die when they are ready. When they have nothing left. I want to do that.’

  ‘Shall I tell you my theory?’ Mary has decided to contribute, her mouth full of biscuit. ‘Men want fantasy, whilst women cannot help but be stuck in reality.’

  ‘Okay, Mary,’ says Alwyn, saying something at last. ‘Do you mind if I just follow up a point with Inga?’

  ‘Please,’ says Mary, gesturing to her right and swallowing the biscuit.

  Alwyn shifts forward in his chair. ‘Thank you for speaking so openly, Inga. Thank you.’ He pauses and chews his lip and then looks up again, his cheeks as rosy as a doll’s. ‘Could I ask you a question?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘You say you feel that life has no value for you now.’ He keeps his spectacled gaze fixed on her. ‘Do you feel that you, yourself, have no value? Are you not worth something? Something that would merit trying to make life better?’

  ‘Mmm,’ agrees John, nodding his head. Inga looks at him, her eyes empty, and then switches back to Alwyn.

  ‘I know that life cannot be good now,’ she says flatly. ‘And no, I do not deserve any better than this.’

  Mary raises her grey eyebrows, impressed. ‘This lady is under no illusions.’

  ‘Your second statement there,’ says Alwyn, pointing his finger. ‘Why don’t you deserve any better?’

  Inga looks back at the beanbag. ‘I left him. I was coming back, but I disappeared. For a while. And I would not tell him where. I was very angry.’ Hangry. ‘Very upset. And he died waiting for me. I broke his heart.’ Her hand grips hold of the necklace beads and John can hear them being ground together. It is a sound like one glass being twisted inside another, a bottle unscrewing, the strained squeak of polishing a valve with wire wool. He can hardly bear it.

  TWENTY

  In a gypsy caravan with a velvet interior, on a mahogany desk with brass-capped corners and a leather blotter, a brown hand, small, muscular, and creased with lines, holds a fountain pen over a blank piece of paper. The fingers are slender, and almost every one is stacked with rings: tarnished silvers, dull golds, and brightly twinkling false jewels. The hard-padded fingers of the right hand drum out a beat on the paper, rumpapum pum, rumpapum pum. Rumpapum pum. And then the forefinger of the left hand hook
s around the pen and begins to write.

  MY DEAREST ODELINE,

  The script is large swirling capitals in green ink. He ends the last letter of each word with a flourish.

  HOW ABSOLUTELY WONDERFUL TO HEAR FROM YOU. INDEED, TO HEAR OF YOU.

  Rumpapum pum, rumpapum pum.

  YOUR EXCURSIONS INTO THE WORLD OF ART AND PERFORMANCE SOUND INTRIGUING.

  Rumpapum pum.

  I AM SORRY TO HEAR ABOUT THE PASSING OF YOUR DEAR MOTHER. I HAD NOT SEEN HER FOR SOME TIME. I WONDER, WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO THE LOVELY HOUSE IN ARUNDEL TOWN?

  Here the hand draws a child’s picture of a house with five windows and smoke circling out from the chimney. And then hovers above the page for a second.

  I WOULD BE MOST HONOURED IF YOU WOULD BE MY GUEST AT A PERFORMANCE OF THE CIRQUE MAROC.

  I ENCLOSE A TICKET FOR THE AFTERNOON PERFORMANCE THIS SATURDAY.

  Three taps on the paper. Pum, pum, pum.

  IN ANTICIPATION OF OUR REUNION,

  YOURS IN ARTISTRY,

  ODELIN OF CIRQUE MAROC

  The ‘O’ of Odelin is huge and has a dancing loop at the top. The forefinger of the left hand uncurls itself from the pen and puts it down on the leather blotter. Both brown bejewelled hands wait for the ink to dry and then fold the paper twice. It is shoved into a large brown envelope along with a circus ticket, and then the British Waterways address in Lisson Grove is written in green capitals on the front. The letter is not stamped – Odeline will have to pay the 76p postage when she collects it. This is a sum she will forget to add to her accounts.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Tuesday morning, day nine aboard the Chaplin and Company. Odeline wakes up extremely late and has to rush to her second steering lesson, tucking her shirt tails into her trousers as she runs across the bridge to the bus stop. As last week, there is no time to get a hot chocolate, to ring the entertainment agencies, or to check her pigeonhole on the way as she had planned. She will have to do these after her lesson, again infringing on valuable rehearsal time. She does, though, look along the Little Venice pool as she crosses the bridge for any sign of the Saltheart. She has been checking for it several times a day. Every day there are new boats moored along the bank, cruising past: full-length narrowboats, old Dutch barges, modern houseboats with sun decks, and none of them is the Saltheart. No sign of it this morning either. She is annoyed with herself for checking so often. Ridley has no permanent mooring – he said himself that he never stayed in one spot for long. What did she want from him anyway?