by Sid Smith
‘Shit!’ He couldn’t move. He had a foot on Johnny’s window ledge, the other on May’s, his hands stretched out and hooked on the two window openings, the wet washing line across his neck, his cheek pressed against London bricks.
‘Bugger.’ His knees shook and the stitches were bleeding. The sweater dropped over his eyes. His crotch was splitting.
‘I’m stuck,’ he said, and with a great heave pulled himself across.
He rested, sweating and cursing on May’s window ledge, his breath misting the glass. Her curtains were drawn, but they always were. He couldn’t see a light. He thought about tapping on the window, but instead he squinted at the latch, planning where he’d slip the knife blade. He pulled the washing line down behind his shoulders.
Where it crossed his back, up between the shoulder blades, the line broke.
Tom hung on. Spread-eagled, leaning backwards, his feet on the window ledge, his arms stretched out, he gripped the broken ends of the line. ‘Shit!’ The sweater fell back across his eyes.
He tapped the window with his foot, the line sliding through his hands. But his soles were rubber, not like Dad’s. ‘May! Are you there?’
He fell. One hand holding the line, he swung down until his feet skimmed the concrete yard. Then he went sideways through glass and wood.
His legs recovered first: he found himself high-stepping from the stockroom, tangled in glass and window frame, the dog bounding against the shed door.
He limped to the van and sat breathing hard, then went back to the takeaway. Lights on downstairs, the dog berserk, as he took the bag of Johnny’s clothes.
In the van he pulled glass from his ankle. He had an excuse to look for May at the hospital, but instead he bound the cut with one of Johnny’s socks. He drove until he was lost, then sat in the dark between the street lights, the back doors open, his head on the steering wheel. After a while he saw a forest.
‘Bastards. I’ll burn the place down. Then they’ll have to come out.’
The forest was beautiful and sloping. He walked under birches in dappled sun.
‘Bollocks to them, anyway. I’ll be alone and happy.’
He’d walked for hours in the forest. Alone and happy he’d eaten fruit and roots, and had drunk from tiny streams which drained the forest’s gentle slope.
He knew this slope. He wouldn’t go down to the valley bottom, where the ground was sodden around the river, with bushes full of biting flies, and the tribes had poison arrows and worshipped a snake. And he wouldn’t go higher, where the trees thinned and there were rocky outcrops and nothing to eat except the goats of the highland folk, who leaned on their muskets watching for tigers and goat thieves. Instead he kept to this middle slope, where the trees were slim birches, and sunlight dappled onto deer-nibbled turf, and he could find the animals and plants that his tribe knew best.
‘What tribe?’ thought Tom.
So he remembered his village, the women with beads and oiled hair. He’d left after a fight. He’d walked deep into the forest, keeping to this middle slope where his people had always lived.
Because of this he found the tribe’s abandoned villages.
The first village was where his father had been born. In the middle was the village yard: trampled earth where still nothing grew. Around were falling huts, each with three scorched stones which had held the cooking pots of the tribe, who’d left when the animals and soil and food plants were finished. He found a hut whose roof still kept off the sun and the morning dew, and stayed for two days, digging tubers from a midden where the scraps of crops had sprouted again. Perhaps his grandparents wouldn’t have hated him like his father.
Tom thought, ‘What father?’ He saw a man with thick arms who beat him with fists and sticks and on the last day had kicked him, so that he walked further into the forest than anyone before.
He walked on and found the village where his father’s father had been a child. Decades of rain had washed its cooking stones. Its huts were fallen into piles of sticks, which were full of snakes. At the next village the huts had gone and the cooking stones were mossy.
He walked for day after day, the villages older and older, each a day’s walk from the last, because a hunter will only travel half a day to his traps and half a day home, even the hunters of the ancestors’ time, when men conversed with gods. He felt that he knew these men, and that he in turn was understood.
He sniffed out grubs in the deepest leaf mould, squeezing out their innards and eating as he walked. He followed monkeys by their trail of half-eaten fruit, which he gathered. He found pigs by their bitter smell and squealing young, and chewed the roots which they’d dug with their great snouts. He met a tiger that coughed and slid away, silent on the close-cropped turf.
Now the villages were hard to find, their cooking stones lost in a grassy hummock that was full of ants, its top worn flat by the forest grouse, which dances for its bride. Still he walked, looking for his tribe’s first village, where the men were freshly made and wouldn’t hate their sons.
‘Why did my father hate me?’ thought Tom. He saw a father ashamed of his son.
Now the villages had nearly vanished. On the last day he crept slowly, watching every step, hoping for the felled stump of a starch tree, or a patch of hard ground where the trees were the same age, or just a shiver down the spine because of ghosts. He was coming to the oldest village of the tribe, whose people had been wise and kind.
Instead he smelled smoke. He halted, fearing strangers. He crept on and saw a field of maize. It was tended by women he seemed to know. He crouched among bushes. At last a man appeared, half hidden under a bale of wood. The boy blinked in surprise. The man was his father.
He sat bewildered in the undergrowth. He’d left the village on the forest side, where trees came to the village edge and were kept for hunters. But he’d returned on the women’s side, where the trees were cleared for crops. He stood up in the bushes till his father saw him.
This was his homecoming. His father led him to the village, punching his arm in a friendly way. But the boy was dazed, and looked around with a stranger’s eye. The village was ragged, he saw, and his father stupid and old.
He couldn’t shake off this strangeness, which made him dizzy. At night he lay on his back, holding the bed while the stars turned the wrong way. During the day he groped around the village, which was misaligned. He’d left on one side but returned on the other, so now he went wrong among the houses, coming to walls not doors.
Finally the boy understood: he’d walked around the slopes of a great highland and so back home. But the knowledge didn’t help. He spilled his food. His drink ran down his chin. He sat by the village yard and held his head, frowning at the villagers until they told him to work.
So he went to the fields, but they sloped the wrong way and made him stagger. His father said, ‘Cut down this tree.’ The boy swung his axe but it spun him round. He sat down with a bump and gripped the earth. His father helped him up, shouting angry questions, but the boy was useless. His traps caught only his fingers; his arrows clattered among trees and were lost. He hopped in circles, one foot on the spade, leaning too far into the slope or too far out. He pissed on his feet. ‘I’ll go back around the highland,’ he thought, ‘and stop this strangeness.’
But then he picked up a hoe, which is a woman’s implement. The hoe didn’t tip him, so he worked with the wives, trying on their wide straw hats, smiling when they mocked their menfolk. In this way he accepted his strangeness. The village was odd but he didn’t care, because his way of looking was as good as another. He crouched to piss, his father baffled and angry.
‘Hang on,’ thought Tom, seeing where this led.
Every morning the father held his son’s trousers. The boy put his hands on the old man’s shoulders and stepped into the trousers with his eyes closed. If he opened his eyes he fell over. But one day he put on a blanket like a skirt, and left for the fields before his father woke.
‘Hang on.’
The blanket taught him how to place his feet – one in front of the other, as on a narrow path, so that the slope didn’t fool him. When he came home, his father said, ‘You woman!’ and punched the side of his head. At once everything was clear.
Tom said, ‘Just a minute,’ because this was blatantly a story about Johnny, not him.
The boy left home and moved to a house with three women, where he stayed indoors, cleaning and cooking and sweeping the earth floor, which was level and even. He had a delicate way of holding a cup, so that the drink didn’t spill.
Later he moved to a town by the river, and then downstream to Canton. Here he met a white sailor. They travelled to London and he left the sailor and danced in Chinese theatres and afterwards bought a boarding house on the Whitechapel Road.
Tom lay with his eyes wide and his eyebrows up. ‘So Johnny is back in London.’
18
Mac said, ‘I’ve never been really pally with Johnny. Not like you. But what the hell: it’s a come.’ A small grin with his small mouth: ‘God, Tom, you look rough.’
Mac did complicated things with his ciggie that Tom couldn’t bear to watch, various flicks and twirls, and the head thrown back to blow out smoke. Then the same flat brogue, cutting through the clamour in this City pub: ‘Of course what we want is both of them. May and Johnny. Three in a bed, me in the middle. Wouldn’t know which way to turn. Them in their naked nuddy. Sort of before and after.’ His ciggie arm now stiff down, the wrist cocked, black hairs curled over a gold signet ring, and the same numb stare, that didn’t change even when he punched you.
Six months since I’ve seen him. His thickened face, thick thighs in some kind of pin-striped wool, the morning shave already growing out on his thug’s neck. ‘A good move anyway, shagging a Chinky. Careerwise. But bloody Johnny isn’t talking to me. Doesn’t answer my calls, anyway, the mad tart.’
Tom managed to say, ‘You called the takeaway?’
‘Christ, no. Left messages on his mobile. No, his dad’d kill me. Young May not too friendly, either. Maybe she can read minds. Or dicks.’
‘Hang on,’ said Tom, feeling helpless. ‘I should have told you. Johnny is dead.’
‘What?’
‘Bloody killed himself.’
‘Wow.’ He stared at Tom, very interested. ‘His dad. His dad, you know, found us.’
‘What?’ said Tom.
‘At the takeaway.’ Mac nodded, too entertained to smoke. ‘He’s really dead? Christ.’ Filing this away as part of his own legend. ‘Well, yes. He called me so I went round. Very odd. I thought the trollop hated me.’ Again he showed his bright small teeth. ‘Tom. The state of you. What happened?’
‘You went round. Then what?’
‘Well. I was out with the guys from the office. Friday night. In here, in fact. They’d buggered off and I was feeling sad and lonely. Then Johnny phones. He says blah-blah-blah, so I hop in a cab. Stayed the night. Very nice. Highly recommended. But then you know all about that, I believe.’
Tom looked out the pub window. This was Mac’s secret: so casually nasty you were powerless. ‘So his dad finds you on the Saturday. Then what? What about Johnny?’
‘Dunno. I mean the old man bursts in, fit to kill. I was shitless. You know, mad coolies steaming up from the kitchen. Me in the fridge with the Alsatians. I got dressed sharpish. Johnny looked poleaxed. Sat in bed crying while I’m panicking. I couldn’t get any sense out of the silly slot, so off I fucked.’
‘Hang on. Crying?’
‘Upset about you and May, as you doubtless know. Then little me turns up. Then his monster dad. And I’m thinking I might be next on the menu: number 28, round-eye bollocks. So I creep downstairs and dive over the counter and out the door and back to England.’
‘How did his dad know about you?’
‘A mystery,’ said Mac. ‘Though that was a hellish squeaky bed.’
‘Did you tell anyone about . . . I don’t know. About me.’
‘No.’ Mac laughed. ‘Wait. Is that why you fell out with May? Really?’
Wearily Tom said, ‘Anyway, that’s when he died. That Saturday.’
‘No doubt. Shagged by the master. Nothing else to live for.’
‘Christ.’
‘Sorry, Tom. A joke. He was a pal, et cetera.’
‘What a shit.’
‘They do say so. But, you know, we should be friends, you and me. Who else can we trust?’ He winked: ‘Longtime buddies.’
‘Fuck off.’
Mac laughed. ‘But you saw Charlie, poor bastard. Him and his lovely fiancée. I mean the bite goes deep. Nothing else will do. What’s up? Don’t go. Sit down, you pillock. Just have a half. A coffee, then. Come on, you dick, don’t be boring. You still at that squat? Don’t go, you prat. Tom?’
He lay in the doss bag, his cut ankle throbbing, trying not to think about anything except the van: no rope for the back doors, and the tank was low. ‘I should pick up my dole. Or get a job.’ He shuddered, remembering The Dream House. A different kind of takeaway, then: Indian or a pizza place maybe, anything with a bike.
Then he thought, ‘Of course,’ because he remembered when the bad thoughts started. They’d started on his last night at the takeaway.
He’d been stoned and scared. He’d bought an eighth in Brixton, rolling joints in pub toilets, but then it was work time so he’d swallowed the rest. He was walking to Brixton Tube, cruising nicely thank you, no one would know, when it was like a bullet went past. He stopped on the pavement thinking, ‘What?’ He struggled on, then leaned against a wall, laughing till he was bent double and tasting his sick, because the pretty women were saying:
‘You want me but it’s not my fault.’
‘I lift my nose over my body, which is the least of me.’
‘I’m in a hurry, because I’m a person of business, not beauty.’
‘It’s tiring to be cute.’
Onto the Tube and he’d leered at Londoners: a big-leg lezzie; pretty, skinny little-tit women who are often mad; an obvious perv, who doubtless chats up children in parks, doubtless with smiles and conjuring tricks and a neatly prinked pink-tinted miniature poodle; sad bachelors that piss / At midnight in their bedsit sinks. But suddenly everyone looked Chinese, which wasn’t funny at all.
So then it was The Fear. He’d struggled out of the Whitechapel Tube, his hand on the tiled walls, flinching from other people – their boiled hands, the meaty heads squeezed from their clothes, but above all from the hungry laps of women in jeans. Down the Whitechapel Road and into the takeaway, but here it was lizard evil – Wei and Chung quiet and blinking, Mr Tan checking the scripts, tapping the tinfoil packs, his crocodile calm, and Tom, sick with The Fear, knowing that the food was full of horrors.
With a jeering grin Wei had given him the packs, and he tottered to the bike, queasy at the smells of food. At the first address he knocked softly and no one came. Then an old woman answered with a smile – so she wanted him inside for grisly old-person sex. At the next drop the hall light was red, with a roaring from the living room like sinners on spits, and he nearly legged it while the man went for his money. ‘You all right, mate?’
‘Yes,’ he whispered. ‘Why?’
Then a Chinese child, sex uncertain, Tom ashamed because the packs were hot as turds, but the child smiled and shut the door. Tom stumbled off, picturing the youngster inside, dragging its satin slippers over Turkish rugs, sticky with opium, and into a gloomy bedroom where its master stands, shaking with sick dependence, takes the pack two-handed, hurries to the lamp, with coiled mandarin talons rips the lid, and drinks the filthy liquid while the sulking child, watching from the shadows as its master swoons, pockets a costly trinket and is gone, the cat-flap wagging and it’s free at last.
‘You druggie dickhead,’ Tom had said, leaning against the bike, heart galloping, shaking his head in wonder. He rode down tenement canyons (bodies in bin bags), through cobbled courtyards (where the Ripper crouched), along a dogleg alle
y (puddles deep as wells), and food was crawling out the box and up his back. ‘You prat.’ He was taking a favourite shortcut when the alley narrowed like a funnel. It was only bad-dope bollocks but he could still crash.
‘Pillock,’ he said, and propped the bike against a wall. He couldn’t touch the food, which was sick and spit and shit, so he found a sodden magazine and lifted out the packs. He flopped them in a corner and pushed the bike to the takeaway, muttering, ‘The food got stolen. I was on a delivery and I got back to the bike and . . .’ But the back door was locked, then Wei and Chung edged him onto the Whitechapel Road, the doss bag full of his stuff, and May wouldn’t see him, and upstairs Johnny had the scissors.
So now he lay in the van, thinking, ‘Of course,’ because he’d seen first of all that the dreams showed families like the Tans, with maybe an outsider like himself. Then that there were people losing their bollocks, just like Johnny had stabbed himself. And then how the dreams had started in the mountains, where the river was small, and had travelled downstream and finally to London. And here was the final clue, which showed him when all this bad stuff started: it started while Johnny was dying.
19
He hated daylight so he took the Tube. But they hit the outskirts and the train came up from the dark, clattering and small, past football fields and ratty trackside trees, the light coming in and Tom defenceless.
Willesden. He climbed out of the station and into suburbia: big prams, a hardware shop that spilled across the pavement, a London bus looking lost, and Tom squinting under the milky winter sky, weary and sick as he turned into a side street, everything spread out and tiring – big houses with big gardens, an everlasting petrol station – and toiled uphill on the empty afternoon pavements.
‘Enough, Johnny, you bastard.’
