by Amanda Craig
‘Why aren’t they?’
‘Because, dear Xan, facts are not synonymous with truth.’
‘Is that why you don’t get on?’ Xan asked.
‘Partly,’ said Hugh. ‘He certainly doesn’t see the point of me.’
Quentin’s contemptuous behaviour to his father was almost painful to see. Even with Hugh visibly waning, it was Xan or Lottie or the long-suffering Naomi who checked that the old man was warm enough, who brought him tea or helped him to the toilet. At lunch, Hugh sat in a chair piled with cushions, and even then could only manage a couple of mouthfuls of mashed potatoes and gravy, accompanied by several stiff gin and tonics which, as it was Christmas Day, Naomi allowed him. He went back to lie on the sofa again afterwards, supported by Xan.
‘Bet the girls are all chasing you, hey?’
‘I do have a girlfriend. She’s Polish.’
‘Is she? Good people the Poles. Fought with us in the war, when they weren’t helping Nazis murder Jews. Thanks, dear boy. I hope you meet my other grandson, Ian.’
Xan was touched at being called this.
‘I’d like that.’
‘Good views here. Reminds me of our cottage, when we first moved in.’
Xan came and sat by him. Despite his relationship with Katya, he felt lonely and deeply hurt by his friends’ neglect. Neither Bron nor Dylan had bothered to message him since he moved down; they hadn’t even sent him texts on Christmas Day.
‘Read any good books lately?’ Hugh whispered. It was an old joke between them.
‘I’m not reading now I’m working in the pie factory,’ Xan said.
‘Ah. Not even Orwell?’
Xan knew that he was being teased, but winced.
‘I have read Animal Farm.’
‘Try Down and Out. Much better.’
Quentin’s father shut his eyes.
Xan feels a compassion that is so close to revulsion that there is hardly a difference between them. Hugh is already like a ghost of himself, yet how can such a huge personality vanish? Both he and Naomi are worried and sad about Mum and Dud, he knows. Hugh calls his son a bloody fool.
‘Would he listen if you said anything?’
‘No. Besides, it’d be a case of, Do as I say, not what I’ve done.’
The hypocrisy of the whole situation between his mother and Quentin is what gets to Xan most – the pretence that things are normal, when they’re not. He was shocked to find out that they had slept in the same bed for two nights. Stella asked him if they were ‘sexing’ again, but he hopes not. His mother isn’t that stupid.
‘So – boys together, then,’ Quentin says, when Lottie and the girls leave with Marta.
‘I wouldn’t call either of us boys.’
It gives Xan a stab of satisfaction to see Quentin wince. He hates being reminded that he’s an old man. Presumably he’s staying behind over the New Year because nobody in London will put up with him; Xan, though also invited to stay with Oma, is determined to earn as much as he can at the factory. Deprived of the immigrant shift workers, Humbles are actually paying overtime to their remaining workers – which is to say, an extra 50p an hour. No wonder Maddy and the other Devonians say that next election, they’ll vote UKIP, because nobody else cares. Xan has always despised anti-immigrant feelings, but out here he can, reluctantly, see that it might be different. Going in to work is weird, because he recognises almost nobody apart from Dawn, drifting about with her mop and trolley. She’s fatter than ever, her stomach sticking out even under the overalls. Xan gives her a smile.
‘Hi Dawn,’ he says. ‘How are you?’
She bobs her head.
‘You should come round and play the piano again. You haven’t been for a while.’
‘I can’t.’
What does she do during daylight hours, when not pushing a mop in the factory? The desolation of her life strikes him.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says. For a moment her face seems to swim up out of the fat that has overwhelmed it, like a diver coming to surface.
‘I wish—’
‘Can I help you?’ he asks, on impulse.
She hesitates, then shakes her head, turns away and shuffles off. Xan sighs. Katya has noticed Dawn staring at him, and remarked on it with startling unkindness (‘She is like pig, why do the English get so fat?’), and yet there’s something about her. Such a waste, he thinks, remembering her playing.
He has spent two days in Custard, which is a steel vat the size of a jacuzzi, filled with a slowly swirling yellow gloop, kept just above freezing. New batches of egg powder, water, milk and some kind of thickening agent must be made up and poured in every ten minutes to replace what is piped out to fill the sweet pies. It’s a particularly unpleasant job, even if it’s less boring than pushing pies into lines.
The bloke who works with him is chattier than normal, and like Maddy, local. He once had his own shopfitting business in Trelorn, until the recession finished it off. Two years away from being able to claim his pension, and Humbles is the only work he can get. Custard Man (Xan never learns his name) is both too old and too intelligent for the work, and has hurt his back pouring water into the vat, but he can’t stop.
‘I’d never do it if I had any choice, but if I don’t work, I don’t eat. They keep putting the pension age up and up, and haven’t a clue what it’s like to do physical labour when you’re over sixty. I never used to be a socialist until I worked here, but I am now,’ he said. ‘If I thought Labour still cared about workers, I’d vote for them, but no politician gives a damn, do they?’
Often, Xan has felt sunk in a dream. It’s becoming increasingly hard to think of any life beyond the factory. At midnight in the canteen, he caught sight of Dawn again. Her face was waxy yellow.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked.
‘I’m cold,’ she said.
It’s warm in the canteen, and Xan wondered what to say next.
‘You’re pretty good at playing the piano.’
Her face brightened for a moment.
‘My hands remember.’
‘Especially the Aria from Bach’s Goldberg Variations,’ he prompted.
‘I liked those.’
It sounds as if she’s talking about something that happened a hundred years ago.
‘Who taught you?’
She didn’t answer, but just as the bell went for them to return, she seized his wrist, her cold fingers making him shiver.
‘What is it?’
‘Help me,’ she muttered. She pressed something into his hand. It was a tissue with some brownish red spots on it.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Look at my blood.’
‘What? Are you bleeding?’
Dawn started to speak, then slumped to the ground.
There was a moment of shock, then a general hum of concern as others rushed forward.
‘Should we call a doctor?’
‘Anyone have a number for her mum?’
One of the managers came down, and made her sit with her head between her knees. It was strange to find them caring enough about one of the workers to do so; but they weren’t bastards, just stuck in the same system. Dawn recovered, though she seemed to be in pain, and left before the end of her shift.
‘She shouldn’t be working here at all,’ Maddy muttered. ‘She should be at school.’
‘Why isn’t she?’
‘They must need the money.’
Dawn has not returned to work for almost a week, being off sick, Janet said. Cycling to and from the factory, Xan wonders what she meant. What did she mean, Help me? Help her how? He has kept the tissue in the plastic bag that held his sandwiches. It wasn’t used, but neatly folded.
‘Why don’t we go to the pub?’ Quentin asks. It’s New Year’s Eve, and the TV is full of shrieking celebrities in sequins pretending to get in a party mood.
‘All right. I’m bored enough for anything.’
‘The Shipcott Arms isn’t bad.’
‘I’
ll only come out with you if we go to town.’
Rain and mud spatter the windscreen as they drive to Trelorn, the humped hills of Dartmoor discernible as deeper areas of darkness against the night. The lodge lights at the Tores’ gates shine through the drizzle with a dim, greenish tinge, like corpse-lights. Dawn must be in there, ill and with nobody but Janet for company. Xan shivers.
‘What a climate, eh? Straight off the Atlantic,’ Quentin says.
Trelorn, a sodden mound of greyish render and scaly slate, looks utterly deserted, the multicoloured lights strung up along the main street swaying and blinking.
‘You know, in Italy or France, a small town this size would have cafés and a restaurant in a square,’ Quentin says. ‘People would be walking around in fashionable clothes, and there would be flowers, and entertainment, and life.’
‘An Internet café would be good,’ Xan agrees. ‘I wonder why there isn’t one.’
‘They’re all sitting at home watching pirated DVDs over a single can of strong lager from Morrisons.’ Quentin jerks his head at an off-licence which is boarded up. ‘Madness! This part of the country has the best meat, the best fish and the best ice cream, yet finding a decent place to eat is like looking for gold.’
‘Maybe you should start one yourself.’
‘What, and live down here? I’d sooner scoop my eyes out with spoons.’
They go into a pub. Every head is white, and every head turns to stare at them. Nobody speaks. Xan and his stepfather sit by the sullen fire, sipping warm beer and munching Twiglets to occasional bursts of laughter from the wall-mounted TV.
‘I used to be on that,’ Quentin mutters.
‘Sorry?’
‘The show.’
‘Oh. It’s crap.’
‘Yes, it’s become worse since I left it.’
There seems no point in staying, so they move on to the bar of Trelorn’s only hotel, the White Hart. It has Union Jacks dripping from twin poles on the front and a big plastic stag crouching over the front door as if too exhausted to run anywhere else. Inside, the lobby smells of gravy.
Quentin orders them a double whisky and soda each, then slumps into a chair by the fire.
‘Well, if the next year is like this one, we’re fucked,’ he says.
‘Cheers,’ Xan says. Quentin drains his glass, then looks round.
‘Why is it that people never seem to understand that you should never, ever, put lighting in the middle of the ceiling? Are they trying to make everyone who sits here look like death?’
Quentin is definitely on the way to getting drunk, because after pronouncing this loudly, he gets up and switches off the offending light. Nobody seems to object. Deprived of its noonday glare, with lamps on at the side, the room does look a little more inviting.
‘Hello Xan,’ says a middle-aged woman he vaguely recognises. ‘I’m Sally Verity, remember me?’
‘Oh, um, yes,’ he says.
‘Pete and I thought we’d see the New Year in somewhere.’ Sally smiles at the burly, red-faced man beside her, sipping a whisky and looking uncomfortable. ‘And this is your stepfather I think?’
‘Oh, yes. Haven’t you met?’
‘Only in passing,’ Sally says dryly.
Quentin, ignoring her, marches over and turns off the drizzle of pop music coming out of the concealed speakers.
‘Utter and absolute shit. You know, every morning I wake up and think, the best years of my life have gone,’ Quentin says. He looks at Xan, intently. ‘You need to get out of here. Are you going to go to university?’
Embarrassed this is being said in public, Xan mutters, ‘The deadline is the middle of January.’
‘So you’ve missed reapplying for Oxbridge.’
Xan shrugs. ‘I’m rejecting them, not the other way about.’
‘Don’t you realise, it’s up to you? You’re an adult now, and nobody will help you unless you help yourself. Have you done a new Personal Statement?’ Quentin asks. ‘I expect you won’t listen, but if you do, write about working in a factory.’
‘Why should they care? All they’re interested in are my grades, and I fucked them up.’
‘What have you learnt from it?’
‘I’ve learnt that I’m a spoilt dick-head.’
Quentin sighs.
‘Do you think university is just about passing exams?’
‘Well, wasn’t yours?’
‘No,’ says his stepfather. ‘In my day, it was about learning to think, and that’s something I use every day of my professional life.’
‘University will just land me with giant debts.’
‘Really? Americans are quite used to paying almost twice as much for their education, and they do that because they know that graduates have a better life.’
Xan feels tears of anger and shame rise to his eyes. ‘There’s no point in my going to uni, because the only place I want to go to doesn’t want me. I’m a failure.’
‘There’s nothing the matter with you, Xan, other than a sense of entitlement.’
‘That’s so rich, coming from you of all people.’
To distract himself from his growing wish to punch Quentin on the nose, Xan walks over to the other side of the room. Another bloody piano. Maybe they breed with each other at night. He sits, and thumps out a couple of angry chords.
‘Go ahead,’ says Sally, kindly, and Xan, after a couple of experimental ripples, plunges in.
A long time ago, he was told by his Oma that jazz was inspired by the rhythm of the trains carrying slaves escaping from the Deep South in America to the North and freedom. Whether this was true or not, he didn’t know, but he learnt to play it as a bear lays down fat for the long winter months. The heart-stopping beat, the chords of pain, joy and forgiveness, an entirely new kind of music forged out of suffering and courage. His rage at Quentin, his frustration at being here, his uncertainties about the future, his amazement at Katya, the monotony of his job, the longing to escape, his loneliness all flow down his arms and out onto the keyboard.
When Xan stops, he’s aware that Sally and her husband are smiling. A couple of other people he hadn’t noticed in the room clap.
‘Can you play another?’ someone asks.
‘Er – sure,’ Xan says. His brain is pleasantly fuzzy with the whisky, and his fingers kick out ‘Ain’t Misbehavin”, ‘Boogie Woogie Stomp’, ‘Handful of Keys’ and ‘I’m Goin’ to Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter’. The guests listen as if they’ve never heard these before: maybe they haven’t. More and more people come from outside – it’s as if the music is somehow reeling them in from the cold and dark of the dying year to buy drinks, and talk, and smile and clap, and buy more drinks, including some for Xan. He can see Quentin and Sally deep in conversation, the last thing he’d have expected, and Peter is talking to someone else, but they’re also listening. As he plays, something in him steadies.
Long before, everything about playing the piano came easily, until inevitably he hit the first of many plateaus. The notes that had entered so easily through his eyes and into his fingers turned to clots of wriggling tadpoles that swam through the bars on the page.
It was a terrible feeling, one mistake cleared up only to be replaced by the next. He couldn’t breathe. His fingers felt like sausages, until he’d thrown up his hands in a rage and exclaimed, ‘I can’t. It’s too hard.’
Marta had said, sternly,
‘You are climbing a stair, and to rise up it to the next level will take everything you can summon. But you will go up it, and then you will wonder why you found it so difficult, until the next step, and then the next. Do not be afraid! Do not listen to the voice that tells you, I can’t, only to the one that tells you, I can. Life is struggle. Everyone who lives now, or has ever lived, is plunged into despair over and over like a swimmer falling into the raging sea, and must swim, or drown. To swim, all you need do for now is to learn to play this little piece of music, this beautiful little piece. Believe you can do it, and you wi
ll.’
Later, Xan called Oma’s speeches of this kind ‘matronising’, a different concept from patronising, being more benign, if no less annoying. Yet she was right. The tadpoles untangled (until the next time and the next) and now he can play for pleasure.
An invisible warmth spreads and relaxes in the room. He plays riffs on the Beatles, which they especially like, and then some begin to sing. One woman who has multiple piercings in her ears introduces herself as Lily Hart, the hotelier’s daughter. She stands there with a baby on her hip and two more kids playing on the floor, and belts out ‘Here Comes the Sun’ with one of those singing voices that encourage other people to sing better. Even Quentin has joined in.
At midnight, he stops so that they can all wish each other Happy New Year. By now, the room is actually crowded, and everyone is smiling and friendly.
‘Best night we’ve had here in ages,’ one says. ‘Simon, you should do this more often.’
‘It wasn’t my idea, it just happened, thanks to this young chap.’
Quentin says, ‘Time we got back home, Xan.’
‘Are you local?’ one of the tweedy men asks, in mild surprise.
‘We live at Shipcott. My son is staying with us until he goes to university.’
Xan is startled to hear himself referred to in this way by Quentin; then he thinks, He probably wants to make it clear I’m not his boyfriend.
‘Ah.’ The tweedy man pauses. ‘I wonder … What’s your name?’
‘Alexander Bredin. But people call me Xan.’
‘Well, Xan, maybe you’d be interested in coming in and playing again. Saturday evenings.’
‘How much?’ Quentin asks, before Xan can open his mouth.
‘Say … twenty pounds for two hours.’
Quentin snorts. ‘Ten pounds an hour?’
‘I’ll take it,’ Xan says, glowering at him.
‘This is my mobile number,’ the man says, giving him a card. ‘Simon Hart. Call me.’
Xan takes it, and when they go out into the dark, Quentin says, ‘Do you still think there’s no point in anything?’
‘Maybe not,’ Xan says, and this time, when they go out into the New Year, he makes up his mind to try again.
