Constance

by Rosie Thomas

  He said at length, ‘It doesn’t seem right. Poor Mum.’

  The weather man materialised in front of his bands of cloud and clear sunny intervals. They watched the sweep of his arm as he indicated the movement of a front. Weather seemed just as irrelevant as politics or football. Bill drank some of his whisky and the rim of his glass slipped and clinked against his teeth.

  ‘I can’t get my head round it,’ Noah muttered. ‘It’s not fair, is it?’

  Life had a tendency not to be strictly fair, Bill reflected, although Noah was still too young to appreciate precisely how unfair, how meticulously and even poetically unjust it could be.

  Noah said after a while, ‘Dad? I’m glad you didn’t decide, you know, that you were going to try and keep it from me. Thanks for telling me straight away. I’d much rather hear than have to guess.’

  ‘It was your mother who asked me to tell you tonight,’ Bill scrupulously pointed out. He didn’t believe he should take the credit for courageous honesty when most of his instincts had been to keep the truth from his child for as long as possible.

  He was used to being the speaking intermediary between Jeanette and Noah, but he had long been aware that he was only valuable on the median level. The simple exchanges, relating to mealtimes or rooms to be tidied or homework to be completed before television was to be watched, those they had easily and naturally dealt with between themselves through a mixture of sign language and lip-reading and a range of facial expressions. It had fallen to Bill to put into words for Noah the more mundane but complex facts – timetables, instructions and information connected with day-to-day living. This responsibility had occasionally, he thought, made him appear duller and more pedestrian in his son’s eyes than he really was. On the deepest level, for those communications that involved the most intense emotions, any intervention from him would have been superfluous. Mother and son had always understood each other and conveyed their responses to one another with a level of fluency that Bill didn’t feel he possessed.

  And now, cruelly, there was this. The relaying of more information, tactfully delivered by a concerned doctor, that was nonetheless savage.

  Noah didn’t ask about how Jeanette had taken the news, or what her state of mind now appeared to be. This he would find out directly from his mother: Bill understood that.

  There was one more piece of information he felt he should convey.

  ‘Mum’s afraid that she’s letting you down.’

  ‘Me? How come?’

  ‘By dying before you are grown up. Before her job’s done, is the way she put it.’

  ‘But I am grown up,’ Noah said quietly.

  At last, Bill’s gaze slid from the television screen to his son’s profile. Noah’s chin was tipped to his chest. Through the mask of adulthood Bill could quite clearly see the child’s underlying features, even the soft curves of babyhood. Was the job ever done? he wondered. Probably not. Jeanette wasn’t quite fifty. No wonder she felt that she was leaving too much undone.

  ‘What happens now?’ Noah asked.

  ‘Once she recovers from the hospital and the operation, she won’t be too bad for a while. She may feel almost herself. I was thinking, perhaps we could go on a holiday. Somewhere we’ve never been, so there aren’t comparisons and memories waiting round every corner. Jeanette will have to decide about that, though.’

  A holiday? It would be hard to plan a trip to the Loire Valley or Turkey, Noah thought, with the prospect of death so close at hand. But he had no real idea; he had hardly ever thought about death.

  ‘That sounds like a good idea. And what about you, Dad?’

  Bill hadn’t yet had time to put the question to himself. Or perhaps had chosen to evade it.

  ‘I want to try to make it as easy as I can for her. Whatever’s coming.’

  Noah only nodded.

  ‘I need to ask your advice,’ Bill continued.

  ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘Should I tell Constance?’

  As soon as he uttered her name it seemed to take on a weight of its own, as if it occupied a physical space between them. Noah shifted a little sideways, away from his father, to make room for it. He rocked the beer bottle on the arm of his chair, still studying it with apparent attention.

  ‘Tell her that Mum’s ill, you mean? Doesn’t she know?’

  ‘I haven’t told her.’

  And Jeanette certainly would not have done.

  Noah considered further. ‘It’s going to be a shock for Connie, if she doesn’t even know that much. I mean, it’s bad enough for us, and we’ve kind of been in on it all along.’

  ‘The later it’s left, then the worse it will be.’

  ‘But it’s for Mum to decide. It’s their relationship, isn’t it?’

  ‘Exactly. It’s Connie’s as well as Mum’s. Don’t you think we should – I should – let her know? Jeanette, you and I, we’re her only family.’

  Noah shrugged. Here at last, in this raw new dimension, was a place where he could direct a jet of anger. ‘I don’t care. I only care about Mum. If she doesn’t want Auntie Connie around her, then she doesn’t. Simple as.’ He grabbed the bottle by the neck and tipped it to his mouth.

  ‘Maybe you’re right,’ Bill said. Half-truths and evasions and unspoken confessions crowded out of history and squeezed into the room with them. Their shadows cut him off from Noah at the moment when he wanted to feel closest to him. Neither of them spoke until Noah sighed and pushed himself to the edge of his chair.

  ‘Dad, I think I’ll go up. Unless you want me to stay with you? I could make a cup of tea, if you like.’

  ‘No. Go on up to bed. Get some sleep, if you can. Do you need anything?’

  ‘No, thanks. I’ll see you in the morning.’

  They both stood up. They hesitated, up until now not having had the kind of adult relationship that involved conspicuous hugging or shedding of tears. Noah rested his arm awkwardly round his father’s shoulders and Bill put his hand to the back of the boy’s neck. Noah was the taller by an inch. He inclined his head until their foreheads touched and they shuffled together, a rough two-step of grief. It was Noah who broke away first.

  ‘We’ll manage, Dad,’ he said.

  ‘Of course we will.’

  Noah hugged him briefly then dashed out of the room.

  Bill stood for a moment, then took the empty beer bottle off the arm of the chair and looked round for somewhere to put it. In the end he replaced it on the tray of drinks. He picked up his own glass, sloshed whisky into it and drank it down in one.

  In his room, his childhood bedroom, Noah took his mobile phone out of his pocket and studied the display for a moment. Then he laid it on the table next to his bed. He unlaced his trainers and placed them side by side on the floor beneath the table, undid his belt and took off his jeans. He had always been tidy, Jeanette had insisted on that and even after he had left home he had somehow been unable to cure himself of the habit. There was a row of his old paperbacks on a shelf, a couple of posters and some club flyers pasted to the wall. Noah clenched his fist and thumped the wall beside his bed, just once, but hard enough to make him wince. The silence of the house was undisturbed.

  Noah lay down in the remainder of his clothes and locked his hands behind his head. The geography of the ceiling, laid out like an enigmatic map, reminded him of being a child. He screwed his eyes shut and then opened them wide, stretching the orbits, but the reality was still there. At length, bringing faint relief, tears rolled out of the corners of his eyes and ran down his temples to soak into his hair.

  Roxana was on the stage. She had been nervous when she first started at The Cosmos, but she learned quickly. The two Brazilian girls were the best dancers, which meant that they earned the most money from giving private dances, so she had watched very carefully to see what they did. And then she had copied their best tricks into her own routine.

  She slid her body up the pole, slowly winding one leg around it, then tipped her head back and
arched her spine until only her heel kept her anchored. Then she whipped herself upright again, raised her chin and slid her hands up the pole to stretch further upwards, up on tiptoe, to her full height. This, she knew from having checked it in the mirrors, made her look hard-bodied and imperious. So next she softened all her muscles and sank onto her heels, bending her neck so that her head nodded like a flower on its stalk. From this vulnerable pose she raised her eyes, as if coming out of a dream, and stared straight into the wall of men who lined the bar. Her gaze would connect with one of them, and stay fixed while she rotated around her pole.

  She would play a game with herself, to see if she could compel the customer to walk down to the front of the club and take a private dance.

  Roxana caught her bottom lip between her teeth and smiled at the man she had chosen. When she looked away from him, unhooking the front of her black bodice with deliberate twists of her fingers, and then flicked her glance back again, he was still grinning at her.

  This one was almost too easy.

  She rotated on her pole again, then detached herself for long enough to peel off the bodice. She stood with her naked back to the audience, braced on her high heels, swaying gently to the music. Then she crossed her arms across her front before turning back again, her face lit up with a teasing smile. This dance was almost over.

  The girls stripped to their pants on the pole and no further, that was the routine. Nakedness was reserved for the private customers. The spot would blink off and come up on one of the other dancers while Roxana slipped off the stage.

  It wasn’t difficult work. The nights were long and the other girls were bitchy, especially the two Brazilians, but Roxana had done worse jobs. It was quite safe, for one thing. Mr Shane’s rule was absolute, customers were never allowed to touch the girls. The law for himself was different, but in the week that she had worked at The Cosmos he had hardly tried anything with her. His preference was for the dark-haired voluptuous girls, not ‘skinny-arsed Russian tarts’, as one of the English dancers had called her backstage, well within her hearing.

  ‘I am from Uzbekistan,’ Roxana told her flatly, but the girl had only stared though a pall of cigarette smoke and then turned away to laugh.

  With her clothes on again, a short black top over a lace bra, she worked her way through the crowd to the bar. Her customer was one of a group of men in suits with ties pulled open at the neck. They had flushed faces, hair that was either shaved to the skull or fixed in little spikes, and they drank beer from bottles that they slapped down on the bar.

  She went straight up to him and said, ‘Hello. I am Roxana.’

  The other men jostled, grinning and showing their teeth. Heat seemed to rise off the mass of them.

  One said, ‘Oi Dave, yer in, mate.’

  ‘Hello darlin’. Give us a special dance, then.’

  She took Dave’s hand and wound past the tables to the chairs at the front in their partially screened alcoves. Only Mr Shane, up in his room behind the one-way mirrors, could see everything that went on in the booths.

  ‘That will be twenty-five, please,’ she murmured in Dave’s ear before the dance. Her lips almost touched his skin. He took a note out of his wallet and waved it in the air before tucking it inside her garter. It was fifty pounds. Quite often, the men liked to demonstrate to each other how much money they could spend. Roxana thought that was funny, but it worked to her advantage.

  She gave him his dance, a really good one. It brought small beads of sweat out on his crimson forehead. The folded note crackled minutely against her skin.

  And after Dave, two of his friends wanted private dances too. It was a successful night. When it finally ended, Roxana had earned over three hundred pounds.

  Most of the girls took taxis home, but Roxana preferred to save her money. A small wad of notes had already accumulated, wrapped in an old T-shirt that she kept under her mattress. She walked towards the night-bus stop with the hood of her outdoor coat pulled over her head.

  Once she was outside the club, the elation brought on by dancing and making men appear to do what she wanted quickly faded.

  Tonight she felt hungry and thirsty, and at the same time faintly sick. She hadn’t eaten anything since before work, and then only a banana and some slices of white bread. With a customer she had drunk some of the sweet fizzy wine that passed for champagne, but that had only made her more thirsty. Close to the bus stop there was a twenty-four-hour supermarket so she turned towards it. Through the murky glass the lights showed drained blue or dull orange that made the goods on sale look as if they were coated with a sticky film.

  A boy and a girl came out of the shop. They were her age, perhaps younger. The boy was carrying a bag of groceries under one arm and the girl had a round sweet on a stick that she licked and then offered to the boy. They balanced against each other for a second while he closed his mouth on the sweet, making a pop-eyed look at her, and then they danced apart again. They brushed past Roxana and hurried away.

  There were few other people in sight, but they all seemed to be couples hurrying home to burrow together in a warm bed.

  Loneliness descended like a black bag dropping over her head. Through the shop window she could see shelves stacked with packets and tins but she couldn’t imagine what she was going to buy. Not even the thought of the night’s money zipped against her ribs offered any comfort. She hesitated, then turned away from the shop and walked heavily towards the bus stop.

  The house was silent when she let herself in. It was very late; the running feet and slamming doors, even the music, had all subsided. Roxana pressed the timed switch next to the front door and walked quickly up the stairs because the light only stayed on for a few seconds.

  Dylan’s door was closed. Then she looked at her own and her breath caught.

  The wood was splintered round the lock. There were splits in the panels where someone had kicked them.

  She put out her hand and reluctantly pushed, and the door swung open.

  Her bed had been tipped over, the mattress now lay beneath the frame and the pillow had been slashed. Her clothes lay scattered and little shards of blue plastic and metal from her transistor radio glinted among them. Her packets of rice and biscuits had been upended and the debris lay on the floor in a swamp of soured milk.

  Roxana knelt beside the mattress and felt for the folded T-shirt. She recovered that, but the envelope of money was gone.

  She backed out onto the landing. It was hard to work out which felt less safe now: her ripped-apart room, the shadowed stairwell with its stained walls and scrawled graffiti, or the streets outside. Then the light blinked off and left her in darkness.

  Roxana shuddered but she made herself keep steady. She felt her way across the landing to Dylan’s door and knocked. Softly at first, and then when there was no response she banged with her clenched first. At last he opened the door and a crack of yellow light shone through.

  ‘Did you do this?’ Roxana hissed.

  She saw at once that he had not. Dylan looked too thin in his holey vest, too scared and fragile himself. His black hair stood up where he had slept on it.

  ‘Jesus, no. I did not. What d’ye take me for?’

  ‘Who did, then?’

  Dylan shook his head. ‘Dunno.’

  She could have gone back into her room and cleared up the mess and found a way to wedge the door shut, but she knew that however much effort she made it wouldn’t be enough to keep the house at bay. Not in her head, anyway.

  One thing at a time. Get through this night, first of all.

  ‘All right. Can I sleep with you tonight?’

  A flash of eagerness lit up Dylan’s face. ‘Sure ye can.’ He was already reaching for her as she stepped back.

  ‘Not like that. Just let me put my stuff on your floor.’

  ‘Eh? Oh. Right. Well, yeah, I suppose.’

  ‘Help me with my mattress.’

  They dragged it into his room and squeezed it into the small flo
or space. Carefully Roxana unstuck the beach postcard from her wall and brought it with her, placing it next to her torn pillow. When Dylan turned the light off she lay in the darkness, her fingers resting on sand and palm trees.

  ‘They stole my money,’ she whispered.

  ‘Did they so?’

  ‘Was it Kemal?’

  ‘Dunno,’ he repeated. He probably did, but he wasn’t going to risk telling her. ‘Animals, they are.’

  Roxana closed her eyes. Her body buzzed with adrenalin. Sleep, she ordered herself. Sleep now, and tomorrow find somewhere else to live.

  Within touching distance, Dylan scratched and fidgeted. ‘Don’t ye want to come in here with me?’

  It would be a comfort to feel the warmth of another body. To concentrate on sex might be to forget everything else.

  ‘No,’ Roxana said. She turned her back on him and pulled the blanket over her shoulders.

  In his flat in Hammersmith Noah was yawning and making coffee and playing one of Andy’s mixes. Normally at this time on a Sunday morning he would be asleep, but today he was planning to go home again to see Jeanette and Bill. He glanced at the number when his mobile rang, but didn’t recognise it.

  He knew her voice, though, as soon as she spoke.

  ‘Hello. Is this Noah?’

  ‘Roxana. How are you? Where are you?’ Now it was happening, he realised how often he had imagined this exchange. Mild fantasies had provided an escape route from worrying about his mother.

  ‘I am…I am in a telephone box, near to where I used to be living.’

  ‘Used to be?’

  ‘There is some trouble.’

  ‘Tell me about it.’

  An hour later, he was waiting for her at the entrance to the tube station.

  Roxana came up the escalator and struggled through the ticket barrier with a cheap tartan suitcase. She looked bruised today, not surprisingly after what she had told him about the break-in. There were circles under her eyes and her hair was greasy and flat, but her mouth was lovelier than he remembered.