by Maggie Gee
VE day, now, that was really an event. We were all together. All part of it.
But these new events were something quite different, something he couldn’t understand, something that happened behind his back, as if life went on, but he was left out.
Darren’s voice stabbed him as he tried to doze. You wrecked my life. Alfred winced and fretted. You terrorized us. The boy was upset.
Put it out of your mind.
But he couldn’t, just yet.
Chatting to Thomas had been very pleasant. A nice young man, a decent sort. Bit of a perpetual student, maybe, bit of a dreamer, but a good heart. Pity the wife had run out on him. That was women, though. They liked men to be men. If you were too soft, they would trample on you. (Not May, of course. His lovely wife. May was a very feminine woman. He was still in love with her, forty-odd years on.)
I hope we make it to our golden wedding.
It had been agreeable, talking to Thomas. For an hour or so, he had forgotten it, the thing the doctors had told him today, the thing that was waiting at the bottom of the bed, the thing that was lurking inside his head … I was feeling pretty chipper, talking to Thomas.
Then Darren barged in and lost his rag.
Please let me sleep.
I need to sleep.
I took the bloody pills, I deserve to sleep.
They clanked so much, the bloomin’ trolleys. And the swing-doors swinging and whooshing closed. And the low thunder of the air-conditioning, he’d never held with air-conditioning, or was it the heating, it was always too hot – It was never quiet, on the ward. And the voices of the nurses. Sweet and low. There had been a song once, Sweet and low, sweet and low when he was young … They were sometimes quite loud, to tell the truth, but he admired the nurses. Always patient. Always smiling. Even the coloured ones. Lots of them were coloured. That gave him a surprise, to see so many brown faces. But he had to be fair. They were as good as the white. Not that he’d tell the white girls that, he wouldn’t dream of hurting their feelings … They were all good girls. A decent lot.
It was just that at night, he didn’t want strangers.
His own bed, his own dear wife.
His eyes wandered restlessly across his blankets. That statue thing that Shirley had given him. A great disappointment, once unwrapped, which he’d finally done when they all went away. It looked marvellous in its packing. Shining, gleaming. A bottle of really special spirits, he’d guessed. Very nice at Christmas, or on his birthday. Cherry brandy, maybe, to which May was partial. It would glow like wealth on the front-room sideboard. But when he got the paper off, he saw the little figure.
Ugly little bugger, to his eyes, at least. What did she want to buy a thing like that for? A nonsense, really. Expensive rubbish. There never was a John Bull, that he knew of.
And I know my history. Most of it.
‘Land of Hope and Glory.’ Stuff and nonsense. We had it once. Hope, and glory. Now the British Empire doesn’t exist. I never thought that day would come. In my own lifetime, the end of the empire.
He reached out fretfully to push the thing away, but his arm was tired, his hand was heavy. He closed his eyes so he wouldn’t see it. Just go to sleep and leave it be …
Then he jerked awake, and it was looking at him. False little smile, like a wicked little demon, a devil that had got inside his bed. Or inside his head. He had to get it out. He gathered his strength and lunged out towards it, to turn it round so he couldn’t see its face, but without his glasses in the dim light he caught it clumsily, it spun on its side, tottered, nearly fell, and he tried to steady it but only succeeded in pulling it towards him – it fell against the metal bedstead and then on the floor, with a sickening crash.
He thought of the woman next door’s bare feet. Wandering around in the middle of the night.
Guilty, ashamed, he rang his bell, and the nurse came at once, tall, leaning forward as if she had lived her life in a hurry, a young coloured nurse who had bathed him this morning, though he’d told her he could manage alone –
But now he needed her again.
‘I’m sorry to be a trouble,’ he said. ‘Got myself in a pickle, here.’
She had washed his back where he couldn’t reach. Oddly enough, he hadn’t felt ashamed. But now he did. That stupid toy … And he shouldn’t have been fiddling around with it.
Now she would be doing his dirty work. May would have done it, if they’d been at home.
‘What a shame,’ the nurse said, in her low night voice, her low sweet voice, as she swept it up. ‘Did the family bring it? Never mind, Mr White.’
But Alfred did mind being old, and clumsy, and the tall young woman crawling round at his feet …
He must have slept for an hour or two, for when he looked at his watch, it was three a.m. He would never wake at that time, at home. The bars of light that criss-crossed the ceiling were turned down for the night, to a kind of dead salmon, dead fish stretching from side to side.
His stomach was suddenly gripped with anxiety. Dread, dread, fear and dread. A horrible time to be awake.
His head felt funny. He didn’t like to move in case he set it off, whatever might be coming, whatever horror was waiting for him. Blockages. Spreading. Pressure in his brain. There were funny feelings in his neck, his temples.
What he’d talked about to Thomas. Not a word of it was true. In Alfred’s mind the Park had gone dark. As he saw it now, everything was black. All he could remember was horror. Horror.
They had burned down the bandstand. A smoking wreck. With thatch like that, it would have gone like a torch. Just the iron was left. Black, buckled.
Then the children’s train. They’d poured petrol on it. The police worked it out after it was all over. When he was right over the other side of the Park, at lock-up time, closing the small gate on Leeson Road, they’d thrown lighted rags over the cemetery wall. He’d smelled something, then he’d heard the crackling, and come back at the double over the crown of the hill and saw it blazing, like a scene from a Western, the little train blazing orange and black. Soon there was only the black, and the mess, and the flecks of dark smut all over the Park.
The bigger lake, at the back of the café, which the council could never decide what to do with. It was a bit off the beaten track, but always a favourite spot, with Alfred. Once there had been irises, flags they used to call them, yellow or purple or a beautiful blue. And the grass kept short, and picnic tables. But it was a lot for the gardeners to look after, and then they cut down the number of gardeners, and if they had to skimp on anything, it made sense to do it in a part that didn’t show.
When the grass got long, and the weeds well-established, and the seats and tables were half-rotted through, some clever bugger down at the council decided it could be a Nature Reserve.
Nature Reserve! They made him laugh!
But it suited him to have it overgrown. That way he could slip away on his own and have a quiet thought, when things weren’t busy, a quiet sit on the rickety seat. There were always birds. Butterflies, lots of them, thick in the air once the nettles grew.
And frogs. He never took much notice of them. There had always been frogs, all over the Park, hopping like the snapping of a rubber band out from under his feet in odd damp places. They spawned in the lake, late February, March, and a few weeks later there’d be millions of tadders, flitting about like shooting-stars. People came and took spawn from the lake for their ponds, and there was so much of it, he turned a blind eye, though one day he’d had a horrible turn when he saw a plastic carrier hanging from the fence, and as he got closer it moved, it shook, and he thought Dear God it must be a baby, but when he brought himself to look inside, it was a bag of spawn and panicking frogs.
Then a few years ago – five, six? – something went funny with the spawn. They laid all right, mountains of it. It lay there glistening, and the frogs, worn out. But it never developed from full-stops to commas. The tadpoles never wriggled away. It lay in the water, and then i
t sank, and the eggs went white, and the water went milky, and then it darkened, it was black as black, and after a bit it started to stink. The next spring, the same thing happened. And the next.
He rang London Zoo, who were very nice, always very nice to a fellow professional. They told him it might be the ultra-violet. The ultra-violet in the sunlight. There was too much of it now, they said, and it was killing spawn all over the planet. ‘They’re like the canaries down the mine,’ the man said, having a bit of a laugh with Alfred. ‘They fall off the perch, and we’ll be next.’
Then Darren wrote that article, months later, about human sperm counts going down. (Darren needn’t worry; he had four children.) Thirty per cent since the war, he said. And sperm, after all, were very like tadpoles.
Are we dying, then? Shall we all die out?
Although he had to die, Alfred didn’t want that. He wanted a world for his grandchildren. (Not that he knew them. They wouldn’t remember him. That was a sadness, that they wouldn’t remember him. And now it was supposed to be all his fault. His fault that Darren never brought them to see him.)
And what kind of world would be there for them? At three in the morning, everything felt poisoned.
Outside the hospital, vandals abroad. Every summer, usually twice a year, he’d find the café in the Park broken into. Smashed glass, splintered wood, ice-cream smeared everywhere. It was kids who shinned over the fence at night, and Alfred would find it on his morning round. The cheery despair of his mate in the café.
As if we couldn’t stop them. Not any more. As if everything had gone too far.
(Dirk is a thug, and Darren hates me. You wrecked my life. Unfair, unfair.)
The things Alfred found. The things no one knew. The children would never understand, but the job was stressful, the job was hard. Was it surprising he sometimes let rip at home? –
Things he could no longer put out of his mind, as he lay awake under the queasy fluorescent.
A mass of blood and flesh in the bushes. He never decided what it was. Some poor girl, he thought, some poor girl – And they say there’s never been a death in the Park.
He was proud of Shirley. She never did that.
But her child was lost, and that was their fault, lost to the family, Alfred’s grandchild. And Shirley was different; she didn’t bear a grudge. Surely she at least didn’t bear a grudge. She would have brought the little one to see them …
He’d never told Shirley that he was sorry. Could never manage to get it out.
She wanted to keep it. We should have helped. I tried to talk to May, but she wouldn’t have it. She said the neighbours would never let it drop, but I said to her ‘May, stuff the neighbours.’ I gave it up though. May knew best.
Sorry, Shirley. I’m sorry, my duck.
Once Alfred had dreamed that the child came back. He could see she was theirs. She looked just like Shirley.
42 • Dirk
Ran for it. Legged it. If I were caught … Once we heard the sirens, I ran like crazy.
If they told my dad, I knew it would kill him. Or he’d kill me. That was my only thought.
We all split, in different directions. Well, none of the others came with me. I ran off up the hill where I could see better, up the hill where the moon was very bright, dipping and weaving between the trees, but I didn’t feel right, I was still bumping into things – Then down over the other side. I thought I’d shin over the gate on Leeson Road which isn’t as high as the other one. But then I thought the police might come that way. Sounded like two or three cars, to me, the fucking racket they were making, I don’t know what’s gone wrong with the police, waking up decent people in their beds –
I remembered the graveyard. It’s fucking enormous. No one would find me, if I hid in there.
I’d never go in there, not normally. I must have been well pissed to do it. I’ve always had a nasty feeling about dead people, as if they might come back to get me. Like wriggling up from their graves, half-rotten. Like in an old movie, only real –
(Maybe I’ll be frightened of my dad forever. Even when he’s dead, I’ll still be frightened – Not frightened, of course. He’s a great dad. It said it on the card Mum gave him on Father’s Day; Thank you for being a Great Dad. I don’t think any of us kids remembered. I dunno why not, there were cards in the shop. I don’t mean scared, but sort of – in his shadow. As if he might give me a piece of his mind. As if he might give me a slap on the head –
I couldn’t wait to get out of that Park.)
It was damp and brambly and chilly, in the graveyard. A cat shot out and half-scared me to death. Fat black moggy, screeching and yowling as if I’d stuck a fag up its arse.
I will do, one day, ’cos it gave me a fright.
The sirens stopped dead. They had parked, somewhere. I heard them, shouting, over the hill, and a short-wave radio, blaring and crackling.
There was a low flat grave between two other ones as big as houses, Victorian jobs. This one was modern, it felt like marble, ice-cold, sort of shiny, slippery. If I lay right along it on my belly and poked my head a bit to the left I got a not-bad-view of the Park. The voices went on, but no one came. After a bit, my neck got tired. I rested it on my arms for a moment …
Next thing I knew, it was already light. The birds were singing, it was deafening, like thousands of them on different notes, maybe millions of them in a fucking great choir, all singing down on me, endlessly, they were hiding in the trees, their little bird eyes, little glass eyes all staring and flickering, sharp little heads peeking out of the leaves, and the leaves were sharp too, pricking and shaking, so many points even I could never count them, and I was all on my own, in pain.
I was practically frozen to the fucking gravestone. My head felt as if it had been split with an axe. Whenever I moved, the pain rolled back. My eyes were golfballs, sticking out of their sockets. My tongue had glued itself to my mouth. Sort of furry glue. Gasping. Desperate.
I didn’t want to live. I felt like death.
I got up like a fucking geriatric, sort of unbending myself bit by bit.
And I was cold, but the morning was warm. The sun was, like, blinding. The grass was shiny. The Park looked perfect, as if Dad had tidied it.
Dad’s got cancer, was my first real thought.
Dad’s got cancer. Dad’s going to die.
And then I remembered about my job.
Then I remembered the football match.
Then I remembered how I got the brush-off from Darren and Shirley at the hospital.
Then I remembered the barney in the pub.
Then I remembered the fight in the Park.
It was like bombs bursting, one by one, one after another, inside my head. I was twitching and wincing. Every time I winced, the pain in my head got twice as bad. As if my brain was connected to my feelings. Which can’t be true. Or maybe it is.
I wanted to cry. Then I didn’t any more. I wasn’t a wimp. I wasn’t weak.
I looked across the Park. It was green and sort of – yes. Green as a table-tennis table. Greener. More like a snooker table. Blank and shining in the sunlight.
My dad’s whole life had been spent in that Park …The hairs on my arms all stood on end. (Mind you, I was chilly, but that wasn’t the reason.)
It was beautiful, yes, that was the word. It was beautiful, and it belonged to us. Like the pubs, and the shops, and the streets, and the graveyard. Our people built them, and – fought the war for them. The sun was so bright, I could hardly bear to look at it. Blurry and flashing, my eyes were watering –
If so it was fucking tears of courage. Tears of fucking courage, you snotty bastards, all of you bastards, laughing at me, Shirley and Darren and Mum and the teachers. I stood there, making a fucking vow (but I wanted to sit down, I needed my breakfast, I had to get Mum to wash my clothes, there was a long yellow tongue of sick down my jacket) –
I stood there and made a fucking vow.
No more running. No more retreats.
>
Stand and fight, now. Stand and die.
Crouched on top of the wall between the graveyard and the Park, Dirk looked at his watch. It was nine fifteen. Nine fifteen on Sunday morning. The sun was out; it felt warm as summer. The grass was wet, as if the world had been washed. It made him feel dirtier. Thirstier.
Normally Dad would have been doing his rounds.
Dirk wished he could see him. Walking at the double across the hill, in his flat cap, waving. Or waving at someone who was doing something wrong. He was fearless, Dad. He would tackle anybody. If Dad was there, everything would be all right.
Everything might have been all right.
But Dad wasn’t there, and Dirk had a sudden horrible feeling he would never come back.
And at the very same moment he realized that he was perched on the wall like a thief or a mugger, and if Dad was there he would have blown his whistle, so Dirk dropped to the ground, the soft green ground, the English ground of Albion Park.
This morning, no one would have opened up.
And then he saw a little figure in the distance, a small dark figure in the very far distance, at the foot of the hill, walking between the trees. Dirk turned on his heel and began to make off towards Leeson Road, guiltily, hurriedly.
And then he thought, no, I’ve done nothing wrong. I made a vow not to run away. It was probably just a temporary Park Keeper, and Dirk could have a chat with him about his father. Dirk walked towards him, straightening his jacket and scratching at the long scab of sick as he went.
No, it definitely wasn’t a policeman.
Was it one of the animals they’d chased last night? They come here and try and walk on our faces. And that Paki, yesterday, laughing at me –
How he hated them. How he hated himself. His filthy clothes, his disgusting mouth, tasting of sick and beer and decay.
I’ll die if I have to go down the Job Shop. Queueing with all the losers and coloureds.
