by A. L. Barker
“Where are we going?”
“The usual route.”
“Where to?”
“We’re just passing Ted Summers’ place.”
“Summer?” she said, “Summer? I’m cold.”
He pulled the window shut, thinking about the way she spoke. It would make a story if she’d been into the Wheatsheaf after all.
“You know me?” she said. “You do, don’t you?”
“Seen you enough times.”
“Where have you seen me? What was I doing?”
He couldn’t look at her just then—in these lanes a wheel dropped into the ditch like a penny in a slot and was as easy to get out. “What’s up?”
“Who did you say I was?”
“Did I say? I didn’t think it was necessary. If you want an identification parade the name’s Bissett—Harry—and you’re Mrs Robarts of Stalybridge Farm.”
“Robarts? Robarts—” She tried it over, tasting it. “I don’t think so.”
“See those lights across the fields? That’s the farm.” In another five minutes she’d have old Robarts to tell her who she was.
“That’s not right. I don’t live on a farm. I’m not Mrs Robarts.”
“No?”
“It’s like trying on someone else’s clothes.”
He swore bitterly under his breath and stopped the van. When he turned round she was sitting so close behind him that their faces almost touched. “All right,” he said, “so who are you?”
“Who could I be?”
Whatever it was, it wasn’t a game to her. She expected an answer, waited for it to drop off the tip of his tongue. He drew away from her. “Been inside, have you?”
“Inside?”
“Where you were sitting outside. I could have sworn you were Mrs Robarts, that’s where she waits when she misses her bus. I should get glasses.” He kicked open the door of the van. “Here’s the end of the free ride.”
“Where are we?”
“Up the lane’s Stalybridge Farm, down the lane’s my supper.”
“Stalybridge?”
“Walk about a bit and sober up.”
Face to face she was nothing like, but he could see Mrs Robarts in her somewhere.
“I’m not drunk if that’s what you think. I don’t know what happened, perhaps I had some sort of accident—”
“Oh yes. Is that why you’re all over blood?”
“Am I?” She looked down at herself.
“Oh, come off it, I wasn’t born yesterday. Are you going to get out or must I make you?”
He would have, he was no respecter of drunks, male or female, and it sickened him to see her keep touching her face and neck and then her thighs—checking that she was all there. She damn well wasn’t.
She got herself out of the van somehow and as soon as she was clear he slipped back in and pulled the starter. He had to laugh at himself for picking up a woman like that, he thought she was probably looking for the other sort of ride too. The joke was on him, but she would have her share of it—she had a long walk in front of her.
As he swung out for the bend he looked back. It was too dark to see much: she’ll be all right, he thought, as if someone was worrying.
*
Afterwards, with a struggle, she remembered. Her body felt enormous and had to be to accommodate its misery. A struggle was the last thing she wanted, but this was the only memory she had and she had to fight for it.
Something, she thought, had kept her moving, the need perhaps to reach a place where she could give up. Anywhere would not do, not while, in a small circumscribed way, she was still able to think. Keeping on had turned out to be easier than not, she travelled along a black gutter that led nowhere and when finally she made herself climb the bank it was because soon everything, even pain, would be over. Brambles tore her hair from its knot and scattered it down her back. The final place was not yet, but it was near.
Now she was on tussocky ground, struggling like a bad swimmer. The sudden shaping of the dark she took for the shape of her own ending and went to meet it. The last thing she remembered was the ground getting up under her feet and being aggrieved that death, even death, should have to be climbed up to.
It wasn’t much of a memory, but only when it was secured would she allow herself to come back to the present.
She opened her eyes on a gaping landscape, trees, sky, the sun itself were black as if the heart had burned out of them. She blinked and the colour flooded in, all bright and unlikely. She was lying in a curve of blue-green wood with flashes of orange rust round the nail heads which she did not think unusual because she had no idea what might be usual.
The sun shone right between her eyes. By pressing her cheek to the boards and looking along under her eyelids she made out one or two things which fell into place later—a heap of newspapers pulped with rain, green scum under a drizzling tap—at the time they looked no more than part of scenery which had been on the squalid side throughout. The smell of mud she breathed off the planks where she lay and off her own clothes. When she tried to moisten her lips she tasted it and whimpered. The man who was watching her moved so that his shadow fell across her face.
She saw his feet first, toes thrust into canvas shoes several sizes too short, leaving the heels bare—big heels of a strong lardy whiteness that shone through the dirt. There was something ribald about the naked ankles and the toes bursting out of the canvas like a row of sausages. The feet were slowly overshadowed by a pair of knees. He sat on his heels, staring at her. Neither then nor for some time after did she get any clear idea of him, she couldn’t try, his presence was a drain on her strength. She shut her eyes and he remained as a shape against her lids.
But not for long, there was too much blood in her head and everything melted into that red twilight. So would she have done but for a twinge of respectability—it could only have been that since there was no self for her to preserve. Moving, just moving her arms went against the grain, and when she lifted her head she thought the air was full of iron hoops dropping. It was too much, anyway, to pay for respectability and perhaps not be getting even that, there must be more to it, she thought, with her lips stitched back over her teeth, than just managing to sit upright.
There was relief after a while, enough to let her look beyond her nose and see that the man had gone. She was certainly grateful for that. The rest, though she was seeing it for the first time, did not surprise her, it had been at the back of her mind that she was on a boat. A long narrow working sort of boat, nothing pleasurable or smart. Yet someone had found pleasure, had smoked and chewed sweets and sat the bottom out of an old cane chair. There was some kind of housing, very low and narrow, with a tarred roof—it all had a spent-up look except for the tin chimney that was putting out strong blue frying smoke.
We are at sea, she told herself, we’ve stopped at a foreign place. That’s a foreign tree and that man, that creature, was a native, that’s why his feet were bare. In a moment the Captain will come in a white suit and ask me to sit at his table.
She saw her legs stretched out before her, scratched and swollen, the stockings ripped, shoes caked, her skirt rucked up showing the fat green veins on her thigh. Everything foreign was dirty. She plucked at her skirt to pull it over her knees but it was crumpled under her and since she hadn’t the strength to raise herself she tried rolling on her side and working it free. That set her blood moving, suddenly her miseries were there in the flesh, she was aware of every one, from the piling pain in her head to the revulsion of her skin against her wet soiled clothes.
When the talking began she identified it with her distress, another of the curiosities in her head. Him too, the creature bending over her, she was seeing as she had all the other monstrous blown up things here one minute and gone the next. It was all in the nature of a stunt, she only had to wait and the laugh would be over.
*
At least it wasn’t a private joke. Touching the sides of her coffin she was reconciled, bec
ause if death was comic everyone was in the same boat and it didn’t matter who—or what—was having the laugh. So long as it wasn’t anyone she knew. Quietness was what she would have expected, freed of heartbeats and the pressure of blood, but she was surprised—not having thought of the grave as cosy—at how warm she felt. And when she opened her eyes what she saw was in some way expected too, though never, surely, on the other side? The jokey side, she reminded herself, where everything was going to turn up in ever-been-had style.
The size, for instance, should have been much smaller or immeasurably bigger. Here was a narrow, homey place, nothing funereal or fine, all brown varnished wood and smelling of warmth. On a level with her thigh light came in through a pane of glass, not much light because it was at the bottom of somewhere—a hole, of course, a grave. A window in the grave struck her as an unhappy idea, but there was no call for the dead to be happy, or complacent. There’d be something to stop complacency, worms or decay or the dirt itself. A viscous, pappy thing moved stealthily under her fingers but when she lifted her head all she saw was a half-eaten apple and in the fullest possible way it brought her to her senses.
She still had all her senses—she saw the apple and on it teeth marks going brown. She saw that she was wrapped in blankets and felt their hairiness against her skin. They smelt human. What she had taken for deathly silence was a stirring and breathing—someone, even if only herself, was breathing. She turned her head, there was wood all around, the ceiling was of brown boards with a dark toffee glaze and so low that she could trace the nails along the seams. No wonder she had jumped to conclusions. What she lay in had wooden sides and she had to prop herself on her elbow to see over.
A man sat just below, an enormous man who wore the place like a crab wearing its shell. He was bent over a table, she could see his big ball head and the leather of his scalp shining through his cropped hair. The table was crowded with crockery, tins, rope, bread, a dirty towel and a bundle of woman’s clothing—she knew it must be a woman’s by the pink shoulder strap hanging down.
The man had made room in the middle for the magazine he was reading. He had it open at a coloured picture of a girl in a bathing suit and he was following with his thumb the outlines of her figure. When he came to the breasts he traced two generous circles and two smaller inside them. His thumb moved down and rubbed deeply between her thighs. He seemed absorbed, but suddenly he yawned, putting his head back and sucking the air into his lungs. She recognised him then, with his mouth wide open and his throat bared—a white throat too short ever to get the sun. He was the creature who had sat on his heels and watched her.
When was that, she wondered, and where? Not here in this brown place. There had been a lot of light then, too much, and she had been cold, trying to get her skirt down over her knees.
They looked at each other, she with a sinking of the heart that was partly fear, he with jaws still agape after his yawn. He wore a fisherman’s jersey and a pair of serge trousers crusted with paint. There was a flash abundance about him that did not come from his clothes or his manner but from strong over-primed flesh laid on with a trowel. His cropped hair was the rash colour of a fox. It pricked out round his jaw and in ginger tufts from his ears. His eyes were a blatant blue, wet and bright and communicative as a bubble. In a personless way they played on her fear and localised it. She thought of the blankets she was wrapped in, she felt the hairy weight of them over her body—all over because she was naked.
It had gradually become very noisy, machinery of some old battling sort was driving into the brown place as if it was going to flush them out. Everything went into a routine of slowly dipping and slowly rising, a roomy motion, almost a roll. The bundle of clothes fell off the table and spilled out stockings and a suspender belt. Worst of all was seeing the creature, jaws agape, dipping and rising in the same stealthy curtsey.
She lay back but she couldn’t shut anything out. The darkness went on dipping and the machinery drove into her head. She wondered how much more there was, what this—rhymeless and reasonless—could lead to. Some people wouldn’t have stood for it, would have refused at the outset. She hadn’t even been there at the outset, she didn’t know where she had been nor what it was like—but it would be some private place of her own, and never like this.
Something fumbled at her side. She opened her eyes. The creature was standing over her, he put the half-eaten apple, core and all, into his mouth.
So he’s the next, she thought, it’s been bad, now it will be worse. She saw the apple being pulped between his teeth and his tongue: the cushioned tongue rolling and arching was obscene, insulting even. It’s been working up, she thought, this is what it’s been coming to.
He was full of an apish capacity for harm and this brown place was heavy with the threat of it—not that there could be any bargaining or escape. It was not a threat, it was a certainty. She had been brought here for violence, everything that had gone before and made no sense would add up now. The creature lifted his butcher’s arm and she braced herself. There was not going to be time to add it up.
“That’s the Ida,” he jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “Hear her carking? She’s got a screw like a dog’s ear.”
She would have liked to make something of it, these were words and it was so long since she had heard any.
“Twice round the island for half a dollar.” She tried to moisten her lips, words might have saved her if she could find the right ones. “The Ida sits all over the river, she can’t keep a course with that screw.”
He was stooping, watching her with eyes like bright blue jelly. She said, “Don’t kill me.”
They weren’t the right words, as soon as she had said them she knew that the idea of killing her hadn’t been in his mind. Now she had put it there.
“Eh?”
He was a slow thinker and the idea took time to arrive, time for her to sweat and grow cold again.
“Kill you?” It was there, he was pleased with it, his face split with pleasure. “Shall I? Shall I screw your neck? Or bash your face in? Or rip you up?” She shut her eyes, it wasn’t even the end, that had been long ago. “Can’t make up my mind which I’d like best. I’ll think about it.” He burst out laughing. “I’ll let you know.”
The place was full of him, his laugh bellowed to and fro, he stooped and beat it out on his knees. He looked worse then, his face and neck purple and flecks of spittle standing on his chin, it was shaming to have amused such a creature.
He wiped his face with his hand. “I like a laugh, you’re a caution, you are.”
She hadn’t expected a wave of desolation, yet it was only more of what she had been feeling. Perhaps what had frightened her was this precarious present. Her eyes filled with tears, she was sorry for herself because there was nothing else to be sorry for.
His grin slackened as he watched her cry. It gave him a lopsided look, almost a snarl. “You got a pain?”
This could be worse than loneliness. She turned away, but he had a trick of leaving his shape under her eyelids. It was the trick of strong sunlight and exploding fireworks: she could not see what blaze of glory there was to an oversized man in a torn jersey.
While he moved about, clattering crockery, his shape spread and ran out with her tears. She was ready to find them black with it but all they did when she opened her eyes was to brighten and magnify him.
“You lost a pint of liquor already. Drink this up.” He got a hand under her neck and pushed a cup against her teeth. The first mouthful choked her—it was tea, sweet to bitterness. “Plenty of sugar, that’s for cases of shock. I reckon you’ve had shocks.” She tried to get away from the cup but his arm was like iron behind her head. “Drink it, you don’t want your blood to run dry.” Some of it went down her throat, some over her chin. She fought off the first wave of nausea and felt neither worse nor better, only fetched-back in a rough and ruthless way. “Now you can eat.”
He turned to the table and she tried to say that she didn’t
want anything, she thought she had said it, but he was back with a wad of bread. “You can start on this.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Eat it!” He pushed the bread into her face. “You’re going to need your strength,” His grin frightened her, she took the bread and touched her mouth with it. “You can’t eat laying down.” He thrust his hand under her neck and as he pulled her to a sitting position the blankets fell off her naked shoulders. Only then did she connect the bundle of clothes on the table with herself.
“Those are my things—” She dragged the blanket up to her chin, she was so shocked she kept saying, “Those are mine—”
“Well they an’t mine. Come on now, eat up.”
“You took them off me?”
“Couldn’t undo your stays, you’ve still got them.”
“Oh God, oh God—”
“What’s up? You didn’t lose nothing but your duds and you’ll get them back when they’re dry.”
“But I didn’t know—I didn’t know what you were doing—”
“You were in safe hands,” he said, “me being a medical man.”
“A medical man?”
“I got a certificate somewhere.” He rummaged about the table and took up the magazine with the picture of the bathing girl. “Studying anatomy, an’t I?”
At that moment, when she should have dreaded him most she realised that his jaws gaped like a happy dog’s and some of the dread went out of her. “Am I on a ship?”
He gave a bellow of laughter. “I’m the Captain and this here’s the Captain’s table.”
She knew she had thought about the Captain’s table before and it seemed important, it seemed to be a fingerhold on something.
“You can read, can’t you? I painted her name big enough. The Rose Vermuylen—you must have seen it coming aboard.”
“I didn’t see anything, I don’t remember seeing anything—I can’t—”
“If you start that again I’ll bash you.”
It didn’t matter whether he would have or not, it was his falling back on such resources that was significant, if only she could see what it signified.
