A Ton of Malice

by Barry McKinley

  He had pliers in my mouth, so I couldn’t answer, but I would have told him they were okay, in moderation.

  “You know, when a Pom goes out for a drive, he doesn’t look at the scenery – he looks at the fucking petrol gauge. That’s his life. Starts out full, ends up empty.”

  I felt some blood trickle down my throat and I wondered if it was possible to drink yourself dry. Bob put his face very close to mine. I didn’t want to hear any more antipodean opinions, and maybe he sensed that. He pushed my tongue aside with a metal spatula.

  “Couple of stitches, mate.” He worked away for ten or fifteen minutes and then said, “That’ll be forty quid.”

  I stood up and paid him.

  “Remember, that’s an open wound in your mouth, so if you’re popping into the poof bar, I wouldn’t be doing any of that.” He made a vulgar fellating gesture.

  Four hours later, I’m on my way to France. The train for Newhaven pulls out of Victoria station at 9:05 pm. It’s a rolling dustball on wheels, powered by a Morris-Oxford three-cylinder lawn-mower engine. The compartments smell as if somebody has opened a tin of human sweat, poured it over a wet dog and fanned it with a chip butty. Also the driver could go on strike at any minute and jump from his cab, shaking a clenched, oil-stained fist and screaming anti-Thatcher slogans.

  On the plus side, I have an entire compartment to myself. I don’t have any luggage, just a change of underwear in one jacket pocket and a toothpaste tube in the other.

  We flick past a cemetery and I think of the Rainy Town. Dwyer’s Monumental Sculptors. Their window display of mock headstones, commemorating people who never really died. People who never really lived. The inscriptions are so sad that sometimes townsfolk stand outside the shop and weep:

  ANTHONY REED, DIED IN INFANCY.

  AGED THREE YEARS. MOURNED BY

  HIS MOTHER, FATHER, SISTER KATE

  AND NANA.

  ‘SAIL, SMALL BOY, ON THE PAPER BOAT

  OF OUR PRAYERS.’

  I don’t feel well. I close my eyes. The conductor announces, “We are now stopping at Eastwoods…Salfor…Horley…” It’s one long platform that runs through my dreams.

  The compartment door slides open. I keep my eyes shut. I hear the voices of black women.

  “Nobody here except for one pretty skinny boy and he’s all asleep like a babe in the woods.”

  They come in and unpack themselves all around me. The quiet is killed by the sound of crinkled plastic bags and low gurgling laughter.

  “Are you awake? Hey skinny boy. Yoo-hoo! Skinny boy, are you awake?”

  I open my eyes and say, “I am now.”

  “Ooh! I think he’s cross because we woke him up.”

  “Very cross and very skinny. What a combination.”

  “What’s your name, skinny boy?”

  “Barry.”

  “I think we prefer Skinny Boy.”

  There are three of them, sisters, two in their mid-twenties and one about my age. They introduce themselves. Laura, Sylvia and the girl my age is Sonia.

  “But everybody calls her Sunny.”

  “Our dad gave us names that end in aaaah! Because he says that’s the sound of pleasure.”

  “The sound he made when he was making us.”

  Laura and Sylvia laugh at their own naughtiness, but Sunny turns away in embarrassment.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’m going to France,” I say. “Paris.”

  “Are you French?”

  “I’m Irish.”

  Laura leans across the compartment and squeezes my knee. “We do love the Irish,” she says.

  “They say the Irish invented the English language. Is that true?” asks Sylvia.

  Before I get a chance to answer, Sonia speaks. “I have to apologise for my family. You were all nice and private in here and then we came along.”

  Laura and Sylvia begin again. “We talk all the time. It’s incessant.”

  “Continuous.”

  “Constant and uninterrupted.”

  “No chance for anyone else to get a word in edgeways.”

  “Our dad says we’re like sirens.”

  “The ones on top of the ambulance.”

  They shriek and bump shoulders together. They whisper in each other’s ears. Sonia shakes her head in dismay as Sylvia probes further: “If you’re going to France, let me ask you this, how come you don’t have any baggage?”

  I show her my toothpaste tube.

  “Mmm. A boy needs fresh breath if he’s going to kiss a girl.”

  “Now you’re taking it way too far,” Sonia says.

  “Listen to little sister. You think she never kissed a boy in her life.”

  “You should come back to our house.”

  “Our daddy is a professor at King’s College.”

  “Mama could feed you up with hushpuppies and saltfish.”

  “Jerk chicken and Run Down stew.”

  “Calabaza and callaloo.”

  “Bammies ’n’ patties.”

  “Don’t forget the Mannish Water.”

  “It’s an aphrodisiac.”

  “He needs to put on some weight if he wants to be a proper son-in-law.”

  “He can stay the night.”

  “Of course. He has his own toothpaste.”

  “What a treat for little sister Sunny. She could be your hot water bottle. She has never before been with an Irishman.”

  “And I’ve never been with a…” I stop in mid-sentence. Everything drags to a halt. Only moments ago, these women were laughing, joking and teasing each other, but now they turn curious and strangely disappointed. The sentence can only end one way because I don’t know their ethnicity. I don’t know if it’s Jamaican, Trinidadian or Barbadian. Maybe they’re not even West Indian.

  “I’ve never been with a…”

  Laura, Sylvia and Sonia look at me and wait, but I can’t finish it now. I can’t say the obvious words. They hang in the space between us like a dead bird on a wire. Normally I don’t care if I behave like a jerk, but this feels different. There is only one avenue of retreat: I close my eyes and pretend to sleep. I listen to their silence and inside my head I repeat the mantra, “Hushpuppies and saltfish. Jerk chicken and Run Down stew. Calabaza and Callaloo.” And then I sleep.

  “Hayward Heath… Plumpton… Cooksbridge… Lewes… Newhaven.”

  I wake up and the girls are gone. Noise erupts everywhere. Forklifts and cranes. Whistles. Shouts. Announcements. I join a line for the traditional frisk and tickle. A greasy-looking woman with a lumpy bra directs me to an immigration official behind the vinyl curtain.

  “Please take a seat and empty the contents of your pockets on the table.”

  I scoop out everything I own: a one-way ticket to France; £22 and some change; my pocket knife, underwear, passport and toothpaste.

  The man on the other side of the desk has spent too much time in the sea air. His skin is bright red. He’s turning into a lobster. He extends a pincer and prods my possessions. “Twenty-two quid? Is that all you’ve got?”

  “Yeah,” I say, “I thought there would be more myself.”

  He switches out the blade on the knife. “It’s a flick knife.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “It’s illegal.”

  “Not in France.”

  “But you’re not in France.”

  He opens the toothpaste tube and squeezes out a striped inch.

  “Spearmint. Don’t care for it myself.” He picks up the passport and skims through it from the back. “You’ve got some missing pages here.”

  I vaguely remember being beaten up by the Brilliantined Levantines, lying on the floor in Gloucester Place as one of them sprinkles me with green paper.

  “Passport isn’t valid unless it’s completely intact. This document is useless.”

  “I need to get to France.”

  “Too bad, mate. The only place you’re going is back to where you came from.” He slams the p
assport down on the table. “Do you have any other form of picture ID?”

  I open my jacket to reveal, clipped on the inside pocket, a BNFL identification tag.

  He reads the words slowly. “British. Nuclear. Fuels. Limited.” He unfastens the tag and holds it up alongside my face. “That’s you all right.” His expression says, How did an ignorant Paddy land a cushy job in a fancy office in a place without seagulls and birdshit? And my expression replies, I have no fucking idea.

  He pushes my possessions back across the table.

  An hour later I’m standing at the stern of a ship beside a frozen flag. I am the only man on deck. I unroll the tin tube of toothpaste and wiggle the blade inside. Out pops the plastic wrap. The powder sparkles under the cold moonlight. Four sharp snorts of crystalline snow and it’s Christmas in my nose. I look at the knife before I fold it away. Am I crazy enough to do something stupid or stupid enough to do something crazy? Is there a difference?

  A port and a starboard lighthouse slash their beams at one another like illuminated swordsmen. They cleave the sea with their mighty swipes and their blades come up glistening, dripping with the lifeblood of the English Channel. Smoke pulses out from the towering stacks and everything trembles: the rail, the lifeboat, the capstans, and me.

  I think of Laura, Sylvia and Sonia in a house filled with good books and fine cooking. Hushpuppies and saltfish. Jerk chicken and Run Down stew. Calabaza and Callaloo.

  “AND I HAVE NEVER BEEN WITH A BLACK WOMAN!” I shout into the vast, deserted sea.

  There is no satisfying echo because the water soaks up everything. Even under the cover of darkness, I am ashamed.

  31

  SOULS

  FRIDAY, DECEMBER 21, 1979

  It’s 7:15am and the apartment building in Saint-Germain-des-Prés where Kim Sutton lives is still locked. The concierge comes to the window. She pulls a strand of hair back from her face.

  “Bonjour,” she says.

  “Bonjour,” I reply. “Je suis ici pour visiter ma petite amie.” I’ve lifted the sentence straight from a phrase book.

  She points at her watch and says “Huit heures.”

  I find a café and wait. An American-style drugstore across the square is just opening up. One window sign says Marlboro, the other Lucky Strike. The boxy turret on the nearby church is under-ornamented, Calvinist and dour. Aren’t the French Catholic? I can’t be sure because I didn’t listen at school.

  The waiter wants to shake hands with me. His fingers are cold and wet. He looks like he has too much energy and this hand-shaking is how he gets rid of it. I don’t like being part of somebody’s exercise regime. Go outside and do push-ups or run around the block. Masturbate in the men’s room, but don’t touch me.

  I ask for a coffee. He gives me options: café this or café that? I nod. He brings me a cup that belongs in a doll’s house. The coffee is bitter and gone in three seconds. He tries to engage me in conversation. I say, “Je ne parle pas français.” He tries again, hoping for a sudden transformation in my linguistic abilities. I stare at him and say, “I do not speak fucking French.” Thankfully he takes offence and goes away.

  I inspect the crinkly French notes I acquired in the bureau de change in the railway station. I like them – all Racine, Voltaire and Berlioz – but I get the feeling they won’t go very far. This is a problem because, apart from the mixture of PCP, dentist dope and Sealink speed still raging through my system, I don’t have any more medication. It is the furthest I’ve ever been from a source. How would I even go about getting more? “Excusez-moi, monsieur. Avez-vous junk?” Is it like buying dope in England, where everyone with tattoos and six children is a dealer? I don’t know.

  The waiter returns with a plastic saucer containing my bill. “English?” he asks.

  I nod and confirm his hatred for the wrong race.

  Outside the church, a woman takes baskets from the back of a Citroën van. Her husband or boyfriend sits in the driver’s seat with a cigarette slouching between his lips. I do not like his look: the languid wave of greasy hair and the beaky nose with oversized nostrils. He watches her in the rear-view mirror like a pimp observing a lazy whore.

  I’d like to hit him. To pull him out onto the cobbles and kick him in the cobblers. I’d like to bind him hand and foot, toss him into the back of the van and roll it into the Seine. I’d watch his panicky face in the back window, his giant nostrils steaming up the glass. I often think thoughts like this. Is it normal? Does everybody want to murder everybody? Should I be concerned?

  The woman arranges the baskets outside the church. She puts up a wooden sign that says “Fleuriste” and her companion drives away.

  I look at the baskets and think of Baudelaire. Les Fleurs du Mal.

  And I remember how my bad habits started with a friend in a field full of flowers.

  “Opium is just like turnips or spuds,” said Tom Kavanagh. “You weed it, you water it, and you walk away from it. There isn’t going to be any funny business because funny business would land the pair of you in reform school.”

  Eight acres of bursting poppies leaned one way and then the other under a blue Irish sky. My friend Paul and I were sixteen years old and we didn’t have enough grey matter between us to form one small sensible idea. We were dumber than the day was long, and this was high summer, 1975. Standing on the headland, we did our best to conceal our stupidity in a haze of cigarette smoke.

  “We’ll drop the hut down before lunch so you have some place to get out of the sun,” said Tom Kavanagh. “But don’t be spending all day inside, or it’ll be taken away just as quickly. Am I making myself clear?”

  We nodded our vacant heads.

  Tom Kavanagh turned and left the field. He could have opened the five-barred gate but he chose instead to vault the wire. It might have been a cool move for a younger man, but he snagged the tip of his boot and fell on his face, and then didn’t look back because he knew we were snickering. He got into the old Commer pickup and drove away, humiliated.

  “What a moron,” said Paul. “I can’t believe I’m putting up with this shite for twelve quid a week.”

  “Twelve quid,” I echoed, and then we both laughed and laughed until it wasn’t funny anymore. Paul spat on his hands as if he were about to do some serious work, but then he just leaned on his hoe and looked off towards the hills.

  “Pink Floyd play Knebworth in July,” he said.

  We looked at the flowers rolling like ocean waves and said nothing for quite a while. A little after twelve o’clock, a flatbed lorry pulled up with our hut on the back: an eight-by-eight box made from ship-lapped pine, it smelled of creosote and pipe smoke. The lorry driver and his helper winched it down onto the tarmac, then we had to drag it into the field. I left the door open hoping that it would air out, but the smell was ingrained and refused to depart.

  Paul dodged inside. He looked out the window and snarled, “Get off my land!” He pointed the handle of a rake at me and made a kaboom noise. I dropped to the ground, clutching my chest. I lay there looking at the cloudless sky, wondering why I wasn’t spinning off the planet, into the blueness above.

  “Do you believe in gravity?” I asked.

  Paul came into my frame of vision. “Do you know anything about this stuff?” he said, nodding towards the poppies.

  “Only what I read in the National Geographic.”

  “Do we need any special tools?”

  “Just a sharp blade, I think.”

  He pulled out a Stanley knife and waved it around. “Would you sell your soul to see the Floyd in concert?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  Paul made a slashing gesture across his palm with the Stanley knife and before I could get out of the way, two or three droplets of bright red blood came splashing down on my cheek.

  “Hey! What are you doing?” I said, jumping up.

  “Let’s sign our satanic pact in blood.”

  “I don’t want your blood all over me.”

  He t
ook a paper tissue out of his pocket and held it tight in his fist. I took the knife and nicked the back of my middle finger.

  “Our souls for Pink Floyd and Knebworth,” we chanted as we mixed our blood together.

  The Angelus bells in the Rainy Town started ringing.

  “Wooooohhh!” said Paul in a ghostly warble. “That’s the devil clanking his balls together.”

  “When does he come to pick up our souls?”

  “I don’t know,” said Paul, lighting a match and flicking it into the air. “But probably before we’re twenty.”

  At lunchtime, a stream of cars headed into town. The men and women from the offices in the Agricultural Research Institute looked lost and meaningless as they gripped their steering wheels. Tom Kavanagh cruised past slowly, craning his neck, watching us as we weeded with fake energy. He beeped the horn twice but we didn’t look up.

  “What a moron,” said Paul.

  After the last car departed, we got down to business. We slid into the middle of the field, taking care not to leave any obvious path through the poppies. Paul slashed away with the blade and I followed close behind, squeezing the milky juice from the bulbs. After forty-five minutes, we went back to the hut, ate our sandwiches and drank our tea. In two weeks, we had a quantity of gum about the size of a tennis ball. We wrapped it in a supermarket bag and hid it under a cool cluster of dock leaves at the end of the field.

  It was Paul who came up with the idea of selling the tennis ball to Wuzzy Ryan. Wuzzy was a red-haired boy with powerless eyes. He came from a grim home where nothing ever worked out. There was an older brother called Scuzzy and a younger sister called Huzzy. Scuzzy was kicked out of the army after less than two months, when they discovered he had a tendency to hurt people while they were asleep. Huzzy was a scary combination of shapeliness and mental retardation. Whenever she answered the dog-scratched door to their council home, she would turn sideways, making you squeeze past her speed bumps. She licked her lips and batted her eyelids, a lot. It was as if a space alien had hijacked a human body, but never learned to work it properly. Paul once summed up the family by saying that somebody had broken into their gene shed and robbed a bunch of chromosomes.