by Miles Gibson
“Will you get married?” I asked.
Figg sat down on the edge of the mattress and sighed. It was the last bed of the day and she was tired.
“Yes, I think we’ll get married.”
“When?” I could not resist asking the question although I dreaded the answer. I knew that as soon as Percy managed to marry my Figg she would no longer be allowed to come and work at the hotel. Percy would forbid it. I hated the prospect of losing her morning visit. I wanted nothing to change. I wanted to be able to walk around an eternity of little bedrooms, peeping between the buttons of Figg’s nylon coat and gloating at her underwear.
“Perhaps in the autumn, if we can afford it. Or perhaps we’ll wait until the spring,” she said at last.
“You might get tired of him,” I suggested hopefully and smiled balefully at her knees.
“What d’you mean?” she said.
“Well, you might find someone else. A millionaire, a film star,” I conjectured lamely.
“But I love Percy,” she protested.
“Yes, but you might meet someone else. You must not be impatient You shouldn’t throw yourself away,” I warned.
“I’m not throwing myself away, Mr Burton,” said Figg, a trifle annoyed.
“But you could marry anybody in the world,” I laughed bitterly.
“Ah, but there’s no one quite like Percy,” she said and carefully crossed her legs.
Her voice softened whenever she spoke about Percy. It was the tone of voice old women use on their poodles. And her expression widened from surprise into amazement. She perched on the end of the bed and stared in silence at the wall. I was wounded.
“You’ve lost a button,” I snorted and marched from the room.
I skulked behind the curtains in the breakfast room, watching Percy strutting up and down the street, until the front door slammed and Wendy Figg ran to join him. I saw him grin and lock his arm around her neck. She said something in his ear which made him glance back in my direction and sneer. Then they walked away.
What made Percy so attractive to women? He was a monster. His hair was long and oiled. His mouth was full of broken teeth. I couldn’t understand it. He was nothing but a villain in a cheap suit and elasticated boots.
I spent the rest of the day on my hands and knees, scrubbing the kitchen floor and dreaming of Figg’s breast bulging from its cotton sling. I had made no real friends at school and the hotel prevented me from finding adventure on the beach where a thousand office girls buttered and burned themselves in the sun. Figg’s fat breast was my singular object of desire. It haunted and tickled and teased me until I had worked the floor into a stupendous lather. My ears burned. My hands trembled. While I tried to rinse my scrubbing brush in the bucket my elbow clipped the draining board and knocked a milk jug on to the floor.
It landed badly and exploded loud enough to wake my mother from her latest romantic adventure. She came limping into the kitchen, clucking and flapping her wrists.
“What will you do when I’m gone?” she chided as she helped me to pick up the pieces.
“Gone?”
“I won’t last forever,” she threatened, wiping her hands on her cardigan.
“I don’t know …” I shook my head.
“Well, you can’t come with me. You’ll have to stay here,” she said, as if she already knew that the Kingdom of Heaven would refuse me entry.
“Alone?” I was suddenly shocked by the idea.
“Good gracious! You’ll get married – the hotel will belong to you,” she said to comfort me.
“So nothing will change,” I suggested.
“It will please your father …” she whispered and patted my hand.
I said nothing. Sometimes she grew confused and spoke about my father as if he were not dead but merely gone on a long journey. There were moments when I wondered again if he was really still alive and hiding in some Bolivian mining camp, writing my mother secret letters on onion skin paper which she hid beneath her bed. But, gradually, as her condition grew worse, my mother would begin to talk about my father as if he were sitting in the next room and it was she who had died and was reaching out to him from another world. When this notion invaded her brain she refused to eat and crept around the house dressed in a blanket. I did my best to keep her hidden under the stairs because I was anxious she should not frighten the guests.
That night I woke up to find my pillow sodden with blood. My mother remained calm as she helped me change the linen. But I knew there was something wrong and the next day the doctor was summoned and shone a torch up my nose. I spent my birthday in a hospital bed with my nose wrapped in a bandage.
No one told me why they thought it necessary for a surgeon to poke needles into my nostrils. I knew that if I asked my mother what was happening she would shrug and call it the penalty paid by those who breathe through the mouth. But I accepted the treatment with few complaints, sat in my pyjamas and peered at people along a gun barrel of gauze bandage. The summer season had almost finished and I felt confident that my mother, with Figg’s assistance, could manage very well without me. Her health seemed to improve when I was not there to nurse it. I was content to sit in my hospital bed and spit into freckled enamel bowls.
They knocked me out and worked on my nose as soon as I arrived and my first full view of the ward was painful and slightly blurred at the edges. I discovered an old man grinning at me from the adjacent bed. He was a collection of yellow bones sewn roughly together at the joints and pasted over with skin. He breathed with a whistle and smelt like a horse.
“Are you going to die?” he whispered gleefully.
I shook my head carefully. The question had taken me by surprise and I needed time to consider the prospect.
“It happens to everyone,” he insisted. “Your tongue goes black and your lungs collapse. Your toes shrivel and your fingers drop off. They tie a knot in your rhubarb and stare at you. After a while they throw you away – dig a big hole and drop you in it. I know, it happened to a friend of mine once.” He cackled and wheezed with delight as he remembered it. The next morning the bed was empty.
At breakfast they gave me a bowl of grey porridge. The handle of the spoon stuck out from its centre like the arm of a man drowned in glue. I felt lonely and confused. But the other patients in the ward introduced themselves and soon accepted me as a member of their tribe. They shuffled around the bed, pulling open their pyjamas, prodding at their bandages and offering me snorts of smuggled rum or special prices on black market cigarettes.
The empty bed was filled, a few days later, by a man called Blakey. He was a plumber with a blockage in one of his pipes. He was a plumber during the day but at night he became a magician. It was his passion and his pride.
Blakey was the man who changed my life. He made no deliberate attempt to influence me in argument or discussion. But he had a profound effect upon my feeble imagination which he nourished and exercised until it had a life of its own. It was magic. Blakey could snap his fingers and turn the world upside down. He could turn milk into water and hospital sheets into flags of all nations. He could steal the buttons from your pyjamas and pluck hens’ eggs from the ears of exasperated nurses.
He was a large man with the complexion of a peeled grape. An ugly, steaming bulk of a man. Yet although he looked massively clumsy he had the most dainty hands which he liked to display by keeping them folded against his chest. They curled from the sleeves of his dressing-gown like a pair of pale and venomous snakes, waiting to dart at the unsuspecting spectator. They moved so fast that they left you breathless, wondering what trick they had performed while you were blinking. When he slept he left his upper teeth in a tumbler of water beside his bed and even this seemed to be some diabolical magic designed to intimidate me.
Blakey introduced himself by snatching a green silk chrysanthemum from thin air, offering it to me with a flourish and then making it explode into blue confetti as I reached towards it. This caused a great burst of applause i
n the ward and a withering scowl from the matron. I was enchanted.
At first he refused to discuss his conjuring tricks when I asked to know their secret.
“Magic is the art of the impossible,” he would declare.
“Show me,” I demanded.
“A magician never reveals his tricks. It’s against the law,” he said majestically.
“I won’t tell anyone. I promise,” I said. But Blakey would only tap his nose mysteriously and smile.
As time passed, however, he grew easier to hold in conversation and taught me to juggle bananas and throw my voice.
“A great magician can do anything. He can even make himself disappear,” he revealed one morning.
“Can you disappear?” I inquired.
“Yes, if I say the magic words.”
“Whisper them in my ear,” I begged.
“No, I can’t even whisper them,” he said. “If I whispered the magic words in your ear we’d both disappear.”
Blakey taught me that it was possible to control and contradict the natural order of the world. He taught me that laws were made to be broken and that, in breaking them, it is necessary to know of other, secret laws. He taught me that any attempt to solve a mystery is doomed to failure because it merely creates new mysteries that have no solution. Blakey taught me all these things without the need to talk of any of them. He snapped his fingers and produced a shower of snowflakes, a peach, a pencil or a puppet made from bandages.
Here was power beyond my understanding. Power that might make me master of the known world. I juggled my bananas with greater concentration. I must make my fingers dance. I must touch without touching. I would practise until I could plop one of Figg’s fat breasts into the palm of my hand without her knowledge. I tried to throw my voice across greater distances. I wanted to be able to answer for my father when my mother, in her mad moments, tried to call to him through closed doors. I would learn to breathe fire, swallow razor blades and cut beautiful women in half. Who could resist such magic?
My mother came to visit me only twice during my time in hospital. On her first visit, the evening after my operation, she brought magazines and Lucozade, biscuits and plums. She was full of laughter and nonsense, clucking sympathetically at my wounded nose and resisting her usual temptation to tell me to shut my mouth. She charmed everyone in the ward. They grinned foolishly from the beds and tried to comb their hair with their fingers. I was very proud and reached out to kiss her as she left but only succeeded in bending my bandage.
Her second visit, the day before my release, was a very different affair. I did not recognise her when she first appeared at the door. She had withered into her cardigans and her face was grey. I had been waiting for her impatiently, anticipating the general admiration of the ward and hoping to demonstrate my new skills as a magician. But the moment she sat down in the chair beside my bed I knew she was lost. Her feet had found their way to the hospital but her mind was far away. She sat in silence for some minutes and when she finally spoke it was in a crushed whisper, her face tilted towards my pillow.
She had come to complain about my father. He refused to help her manage the hotel, would not lift a finger in the kitchen and sulked all day in his room. The butcher sold her condemned beef, the servants stole the soap and my father did nothing but sit in his room and whistle. I listened to her with dismay and wondered how poor Figg could survive with this mournful old lunatic bickering at her heels. My mother had often brought my father back from the dead but this time she seemed determined not to let him slip away again.
I held her hand and let her whisper her complaints to my pillow. I did not relish the prospect of going home.
*
The following morning I said goodbye to Blakey and was released from hospital before breakfast. My mother seemed pleased to see me home again and fed me a quart of chicken soup. The last guest had left the hotel and the town was closed for the winter. Storms rolled off the Atlantic and scrubbed the streets. I rested, practised my conjuring tricks and watched the rain chatter against the windows.
My mother had no more complaints against my father and her recovery seemed as shocking to me as her madness. The ancient bundle of misery that had sat beside my hospital bed bloomed again within a few days until she looked absurdly young. She curled her hair and painted her fingernails. She did not abandon her cardigans but their colours grew brighter, she even wore bracelets and a smudge of rouge. Perhaps I felt uneasy with this relaxed and happy woman, for I kept expecting her to crumple once more into madness. But she gave no sign of trying to bring back my father, and he, for his part, did not seem anxious to return.
We worked together through that winter, varnished the stairs, painted the bedrooms and boiled the curtains.
During the long evenings I tried to entertain her with my modest magic, making her hoot and clap her hands as I rumbled with scarves and playing cards. For a few cold months we were happy together.
My mother waited until the peak of the season the following summer before she took a spade again to my father’s grave. She smuggled his ghost back into the hotel without any of the headaches or complaints that she usually used to announce his approach.
I went to her room one morning with a cup of tea and found her crouching behind the door. Her hair was glued to her forehead. There were bubbles in the corner of her mouth.
“Where’s your father?” she hissed as I offered her the cup.
I shook my head.
“He’s hiding in the bathroom,” she snapped.
I nodded.
“Why doesn’t he help me with the breakfast?” she inquired bitterly.
I shook my head again.
“He’s too drunk to fry eggs,” she shouted.
I placed the saucer over the cup and laid it down beside the bed. When I turned to face her she gave me a sly glance that I did not trust. She looked so cunning that I thought her madness might be no more than a threat, a morbid method she had devised for winning a day in bed. I smiled. She replied with a horrible mocking grin. She was wearing a dressing-gown the colour of gravy. She hoisted the collar round her face.
“Don’t worry,” I said gently. I was looking at my mother but I was talking to myself.
I crept downstairs to the kitchen. It was very depressing. As I boiled the water I kept glancing across my shoulder, hoping to see her walk through the door, sensible and smiling. She would not leave me to manage the hotel alone. As I sliced the bread my hands started to tremble impatiently and I wanted to run back up the stairs, grab her by the shoulders and shake her from the trance before she sank too deep and was completely lost to me. But I had to wait. I had to wait until the breakfasts were finished and every last guest had been seen safely off the premises before I could go back to her room. And when I finally opened her door she had gone.
The sight of the empty room made the hair bristle on the back of my neck. There was no hope in pretending she was suffering from anxiety or fatigue. She was not asking for a day in bed with lunch on a tray. Her brains were scrambled. I was looking for a crazy woman with a meat axe in her fist. I tiptoed through the hotel, peering under beds and tables, whispering her name. But my mother had vanished. She had escaped. She was probably already running, screaming, along the beach with her dressing-gown wrapped around her head. I locked myself in the attic and tried to calm myself. I didn’t know how to recapture her or where to turn for help. It was terrible.
Figg found my mother again. They met in the street, Figg trotting towards the hotel with her nylon coat on her arm and mother marching away from it with a blanket thrown round her shoulders. I don’t know how Figg managed it but she brought the old lady home and helped me put her to bed. Then she slipped into her nylon coat and began to clean the kitchen as if nothing had happened.
It was several days before Figg mentioned the incident again. In the past she had always remained passive when confronted with my mother’s peculiar antics and preferred to forget them. But this time I co
uld see that even she had been impressed by the spectacle of my mother foaming at the mouth and roaming the streets in her dressing-gown. We were hard at work polishing the huge mirror that hung in the breakfast room when she finally spoke about it.
“Don’t you think you should send for the doctor, Mr Burton?” she suggested casually as she smeared her reflection with Windolene.
“He came yesterday,” I sighed.
“What did he say?”
“He told her to lie down and stay calm,” I panted as I bullied the Windolene into the glass with my duster.
“But she hasn’t been out of bed since we put her there,” said Figg, frowning at herself through the smear.
It was true. My mother had taken the doctor’s advice seriously and had barely moved a muscle since his visit. She lay on her back and stared at the ceiling in silence. She ate whatever I left on a tray and refused to utter a word.
“The cure could take months,” I shrugged and shook my duster.
“But you can’t manage the hotel alone, Mr Burton,” Figg protested.
I rubbed at the mirror with my duster until I had cleaned a round spyhole about the size of my fist in the pink sludge. I pretended to polish it while I squinted at Figg through the flapping of the duster.
She was standing beside me and staring at the duster in her hands. Her face was very flushed and the eyebrows arched so high they were hidden by her hair. The fat little mouth had popped in surprise. I massaged away at the Windolene until I had uncovered Figg’s shoulders and breasts. I rubbed at them gently until I found the courage to speak.
“I was hoping,” I said at last, “I was hoping you could move in here for the summer …”
There was a long and terrible silence. We disguised our fright with a ferocious attack upon the mirror, scrubbing at the silver as if it might dissolve and let us pass through to the other side.
“I don’t know … it won’t be easy,” panted Figg.
“There’s a very cosy bedroom in the attic,” I said. My heart was pounding and I had trouble trying to control my voice.
