Arthur McCann

by William Pitt

  She moved closer as though she sensed my disappointment. 'You're quite nice, Alan,' she murmured.

  'Arthur.'

  'Oh, all right. Arthur. But you're still quite nice. Do you like me?'

  'You're a bit strange,' I admitted, still sulking.' But you're quite nice, too, I suppose.'

  'Strange! A bit strange!' she exploded. 'What a bleeding nerve! How am I strange?'

  I was saved from answering by the eruption of all the air raid sirens along the coast. I did not know why they sounded but I took advantage of her astonishment by kissing her again.

  'It's the Germans,' she forecast dramatically when her lips were free. 'They tricked us, the bastards.'

  A man was running along the rough beach below us, jumping on the sheets of rusty corrugated iron and making them sound. Some other people were chasing him and they all began to whoop and shout and run in and out of the sea in their shoes. They had come from the direction of Mandles and when they saw us one of the men shouted: 'Have you heard - it's all over! The Japs have packed it in. It's all over!'

  Pamela and I got to our feet. 'Thank God,' I said like a grown man. I wouldn't like to be in that lifeboat again. It was hell.'

  She turned tenderly to me and I thought that, at last, she had heard what I said. 'Watching war films won't be the same now, will it?' she said. 'You'll always have that feeling that they're only acting. Before it all seemed like it was real.'

  'No,' I mumbled, defeated. ' I suppose there's that to it.'

  'I'll have to go,' she said looking towards the lights of Mandles. 'There's the bus.' She glanced at me. 'Will you want to be seeing me again, or are you fed up with me?

  'How could I be fed up with you?' I said.

  'People do. You'd be surprised. All right. Next Thursday, come down here. We can get in for nothing, because I know the man on the door and he always lets me in.'

  'You mentioned it.'

  She kissed me quickly and with only passing interest and then trotted towards the bus.

  'Goodbye Pamela,' I said dejectedly, watching her go.

  'Goodbye Alan,' she called cheerfully.

  I went back to Mandles to see if there were any spare girls left for I was naturally reluctant to waste an evening on which I had been paraded as a hero. But everyone had gone home. Two men who were sweeping the floor with wide brooms said that people were dancing around bonfires in the town.

  When I walked back through the streets everybody was up and celebrating the final, definite, end to the war. Some were taking the rare opportunity to embrace neighbours in their nightclothes, and there was a lot of berserk kissing and fondling going on, as though it had not been permitted during hostilities. There were also more fires burning in the town than there had been during all the air raids put together. They were burning the tar in the middle of the streets and people were throwing shrubs and bushes from other people's gardens on to the blaze. One man was trying to retrieve his front door which had been thrown on to a roaring fire outside his house. Nearly everybody was having an unusually good time.

  It was very odd, but my house was much quieter than the others. I went into the living room and there they were. My father was just pouring himself a whisky and not his first by the look of him.

  'Here he is,' he said like an accusation. 'At last.' He eyed me sourly. 'I take it you've had a fine time,' he said.

  'Yes, more or less,' I answered. 'The war's over.'

  'I know. They're burning all the garden gates down the street.'

  'I saw them,' I said.

  'Your grandfather's dead,' said my mother sadly. 'He was dead when they got him to the police station. Your roller skates are over there.'

  'Buggered up the end of the war for us,' grunted my father. 'Completely buggered it up.'

  I walked out of the house and went down to the police station. 'Heart failure,' said the sergeant. 'You can hardly wonder putting up a fight like that at the door. And on roller skates! It's the roller skates I can't understand.'

  I felt dull and hopeless as though I understood nothing. 'Mandles used to be a roller skating rink in his day,' I told him. ' He must have thought it still was. He just wanted to get into the Heroes' Bloody Ball, that's all.'

  That's no way to speak of Newport's returned heroes,' he said, sternly.

  'No, I suppose not,' I agreed quietly. 'I'm a bit upset about Murky, that's all.'

  'Murky?'

  'The old boy. My grandad.'

  'The attendants wouldn't have laid a hand on him if he hadn't tried to fight them out of the way,' said the sergeant. ' He wanted to take them all on, and on skates. No wonder his heart gave out.'

  'Did he say anything?'

  'Plenty. Effing something terrible he was. Kept on shouting about a giant sloth he'd seen, or something like that. It will all come out at the inquest.'

  'He had,'I said.

  'What?'

  'Seen a giant sloth. In South America.'

  He looked at me uncertainly as though thinking the whole family must be mad. ' I don't suppose there's many people seen one of those,' he agreed. He began to write in a large book as though it was important information. He looked up and seemed surprised that I was still there.

  'No. Not many,' I said. 'Well, thanks very much for telling me about it.'

  I went out. It was four o'clock and the people were more subdued, standing in groups about their gateless gardens, recalling the fine daring days of the war. The fires were low and glowering, sitting in big holes in the road. The council would have some filling-in to do the next day.

  The war was over and as I walked I thought that, in a way, poor old Murky had been its last casualty.

  Anyone who, before their seventeenth birthday, had been shipwrecked, murdered a man with a spanner, had voluptuous affairs with two large white women, and a traumatic experience with a thin black one, would have found working in the Newport Food Office far from enervating. That is where I found myself, counting millions of coupons and countless grubby ration books, filling in forms and deciphering plaintive, scrawled letters.

  My courting, for that is what it formally was, of Pamela made life no more enjoyable. After all I had been through, and I choose the phrase carefully, it was painfully like going back to school. I kept with her for there was no other and because I was always in hope that one day, one night, I would slip around her podgy girlish defences and give her what I had given Rose and Mrs Nissenbaum with such obvious success. But my desirability for women of my own age was apparently far less than it had been for my seniors. The Americans, that all-embracing army, and the already returning British servicemen from the dead war were fighting it out, literally, for the presentable girls of the town. Few women wanted to listen to my story of the lifeboat and those who patiently heard it out did not believe it; not even my male colleagues at the Food Office believed it. I had Pamela. As far as she would let me.

  We went to dances at Mandles and twice a week to the Pavilion, the Odeon, or the Super Cinema, frequently winding up a turgid evening stuffed into the corner of the gaseous fish and chip shop at the bottom of our street.

  I, Arthur McCann, who had stood to be applauded at Sardi's and Club 21 in New York City, renewed my acquaintance with the sensation of vinegar leaking through the pages of the South Wales Echo.

  Our goodnights were less than spectacular. While I was trying to get my fingers on her nipples she would be recalling Alan Ladd's excesses in the film we had just seen. Sometimes, but with decreasing incidence, I tried to compare the screen heroism with the real thing, as exampled in my own experiences in an open boat, but she always managed to head it off with one of her tangent remarks. She continued to bring her grandfather's senility to the boil by permitting him to view her through the keyhole, so she reported anyway; but when I suggested that her grandfather appeared to be doing rather better than I was, she brushed it away with the excuse of age deserving certain privileges.

  This attitude apparently extended to take in my own father
also, for when I took her home to tea one Sunday he quickly had his hands around her chubby waist and her protruding little bottom. After that he was always smacking his lips and asking: 'When are you bringing that lovely little Pamela home to us again, Arthur boy ?' I liked the 'us'; my mother had less enthusiasm, for the obvious reason, and additionally because Pamela, who turned out to be an outstandingly clumsy girl, had toppled the teapot on to an entire plate of Welsh cakes which had been made, in those difficult rationed times, for the occasion.

  Our goodnights were accomplished in a variety of dark slots and corners, and Newport has an abundance of these. The town might almost have been planned for lovers who had nowhere to go. Not that, with us, there was much to hide or to see. As each dull kiss succeeded the next my patience withered and eventually I asked her point blank what was the difference between my pressing her chest with my chest, which she permitted, and my putting my hands in the same vicinity.

  'Skin,' she said. 'It's your skin, Arthur. You know very well. When you press your chest to my .. . er . .. chest... you've got your coat and your waistcoat, shirt and vest, between you and me. Sometimes, if it's a nasty night, you've got your mackintosh as well. But if you put your hands there it would be your skin, and that would spoil it Arthur, honestly it would.'

  On the following night I told her that I wouldn't be seeing her again because I was going to nightschool and I wouldn't have the time. Besides which there was a girl at the Food Office who wanted a partner for rumba and tango lessons and I thought I would like to learn the dances as a standby in case I ever went to South America.

  I had the craft to tell her these tidings at the beginning of the evening so that she could dwell on them in the cinema or perhaps stalk off even before we got there, thus saving me the price of her seat. In those days I had to think of such practical things. To my disappointment she took it quietly, even agreeing that I ought to go to nightschool if I wanted to improve my prospects.

  But during the course of The Affairs of Susan (Joan Fontaine and George Brent) the information worked into her and her head was noticeably drooping as we walked along my street towards her house at eleven o'clock. It was raining and the street lamplight was spread in the puddles.

  All right then, Arthur,' she said abruptly, her head coming up with decision. ' If you want to, very much. That much. Where shall we go ?'

  The breath in my body seemed to heat. 'Honest?' I said. 'You mean it?'

  'I said all right, didn't I ? Where do you want to go ?'

  It had to be done there and then. If we continued on to her street she might change her mind. Our street had as many sly corners as any of the others, but the rain was thickening.

  There was an alley at the side of our house and an overhang of corrugated iron from the roof of a garden shed next door. But it was insufficient for two and as I faced her with businesslike romance the rain dripped drearily down the back of my collar. I took her by the reluctant hand and pulled her into our back garden.

  'In there,' I said nodding to the old closet standing like a sentry box.

  'There!' she exclaimed horrified. 'But that's a lav! I’m not going in there with you!'

  'It's not used now,' I urged pulling her on. 'We've got one inside, now. The council put it in. Come on, it's quite clean. And it's dry.'

  The dual arguments half convinced her and with ill grace she went in as I gallantly opened the door. I closed it after us and then we were facing each other in the dark, the wooden rim of the bench toilet seat against the sides of our legs.

  'I must say I expected better than this,' she sniffed sulkily.

  'Just for tonight,' I pleaded. 'Just for now, Pamela.'

  'You've got the chain dangling over your shoulder,' she observed. ' I can feel it.'

  I pushed the thing away and then had to grab it in the dark to stop it swinging dangerously. Even I had to admit it wasn't the best place. The rain was rattling on the tin roof and a thin, evil draught came inquiringly under the door.

  'Would you like to sit down?' I invited formally.

  'I still don't want to let you do it,' she muttered, her chin down.

  'Oh, for God's sake, Pamela. You promised.'

  'I know. I just don't like the idea that's all. And I'm not sitting on there.'

  We stood facing, not touching, hardly seeing each other in the rattling dark. Our silence was an ultimatum.

  Then she mumbled: 'I'll let you have a look, instead, if you like. Just a look, mind.'

  'All right,' I said controlling my anticipation. 'Fair enough.' If she showed them then the rest must surely follow.

  She didn't move for a moment then she said firmly: 'All right then,' and began to fumble in the dimness. She undid her coat and then her cardigan, then a blouse. Her white flesh glowed, but indistinctly. She hesitated at several stages, but then made a movement which I knew meant she was slipping away her straps. Her breasts showed blurred white and tantalising.

  'I can't see them,' I complained.

  'Well I'm showing them. I've got them out.'

  'But it's too dark. Go on, let me touch.'

  She sensed my movement. She pushed me forcibly against the wall behind my back. 'Touch me, Arthur McCann,' she warned, 'and I scream this lav down.'

  'Pamela,' I groaned. 'I can't see a thing. You might as well not be showing them.'

  'You can get a bit closer,' she agreed like someone negotiating an armistice.' Bend down a bit and have a look. But you touch me, Arthur, even with your nose ...'

  'All right,' I promised. ' I won't.' I bent forward, rather like the men in the Times Square peepshow had been bending. They were not allowed to touch either. My eyes were three inches above her fat flesh and I thought' If I dip my nose in now, there's nothing she can do about it. Except scream.'

  'I still can't see anything,' I sighed. ' I'm going mad not being able to see them like this, darling. When they're so close. It's more than flesh and blood can rightly stand. It's worse than not touching them.'

  'Don't you dare lay a finger,' she muttered again. 'I meant wht I said. The roof would come off this closet, believe me.'

  'Well, that's that, then,' I said with a tone of finality. 'There's nothing more to be done, is there?'

  'Have you got a light,' she suddenly suggested.' You could have a proper look like that.'

  She knew I didn't smoke, but with joy I remembered that a candle and a box of matches were kept, in the days of the outhouse's usefulness, on a little shelf by the cistern. When my father used to lock Murky in there as a punishment the old man, when he was fatigued with kicking the door, would light the mournful candle and sing to himself.

  'Just the thing, a candle and matches,' I said, reaching up and finding the candle and the box with one open hand. I heard her sigh. ' Go on, sit down,' I said. ' It's clean. My mum still scrubs it.'

  I could feel her sulking in the darkness. She sat down heavily on the wooden seat though, and I tried to strike the first match. They were damp. I tried three, then angrily rattled the box.

  'They're wet through,' she said more cheerfully. 'We can't even keep newspaper in ours. Gets soaked.'

  Then, delight, a match flared and I swooped it carefully to the candle and, turning, held the candle before her. She was sitting, a sort of condemned smile on her face now, her clothes pulled away from her neck and shoulders, down to her upper arms. Her breasts were only half way out. I moved forward but she said: 'Wait. I'll do it.' As though she were keeping to the strict rules of a game she pulled her garments lower down her puffy arms, and like two round heads coming over a wall they oozed up and out into my view, white and fatty, the nipples seeming to blink at the rosy light. I was transfixed by them in the candlelight.

  'My darling,' I muttered. 'Pamela, my beautiful, lovely darling.'

  I think she sensed the accident a moment before it happened because she jerked on the seat. But she was too late. As I bent with my love fervour, moving my lips down to her front, I let the candle tip and the hot liquid w
as streamed over the lip and splashed on to that tender bulging flesh. She screamed savagely and shot upright, knocking the candle out of my hand as she did so. She went on screaming for a full minute and at the end of that minute the door opened and there stood my father with a torch.

  She must have been trying to scrape the candle grease off her because she was still exposed. When she saw him she pulled the front of her clothes up and began crying.

  'I might have known,' growled my father after there was nothing left to see. ' I might have bloody known. Come on out, mister. I'm about fed up with your antics with women.'

  At which Pamela howled again and ran off ponderously into the rainy night. All the neighbours were at their bedroom windows. The following day I decided to make the sea my life's work.

  It was not just this incident, crucial as it was, which made me decide to return to the oceans. On the following morning I had good reason to believe that my father had been killed by a bus in Commerical Road. When I discovered he had, in fact, survived I thought the time had come for me to go.

  I did not go to work in the Food Office that day. When I reached the bus stop I realised that I could not face another mound of grubby ration books, nor another million coupons, nor the strangled cabbage and chips of the canteen (for a Food Office the meals were horrific) nor the talk of motor bikes and compliant girls which filled my inky colleagues' conversation. So I walked up our street again and went upstairs and lay on my bed. I wrote another chapter of 'All The Coloured Lights of the World by Arthur McCann', a gloomy episode this one, and stretched out again on the counterpane where I had once trembled at the thought of being dragged out for execution on the direct orders of Mr Winston Churchill. I thought of writing to Mrs Nissenbaum once more, but I rejected it for I had already written twice and there had been no reply. Poor Errol Flynn, stupid beast. She would never forgive me, I knew.

  My mother was out shopping. Someone came to the front door and began ringing the bell - the only doorbell in the street, everybody else had knockers - with such urgency that I got up and went down. It was the greasy grocer, Mr Tyler, whose shop was down the street, on the opposite side.