Tenterhooks

by Suzannah Dunn

  But I could not explore London with Uncle Robbie, because he did not like crowds: he was afraid of not bumping into people. But once, buoyed up, on my way home, I detoured to my family’s old house. After a search, I found it, but it seemed to have shrunk, and in an upstairs window stood a man with a mobile phone. The rooms were stocked with distressed pine: apt words for my own feelings, on the journey back to my little flat. The following week, I tried in vain to interest Uncle Robbie in a trip to St Paul’s, where, as far as I could remember, I had never been. Where, as far as I was concerned, I should have been.

  ‘Ah,’ he enthused, ‘“Tuppence a bag.”’

  I said, ‘What?’

  ‘“Tuppence a bag.”’

  Suddenly I remembered, sang, ‘“Feed the birds…”?’

  And he smiled, Yes.

  I said, ‘At primary school, one of my favourite songs was “La Cucaracha“, which I never knew meant cockroach. How could anyone compose such a jolly song about a cockroach?’

  The smile expanded, somehow, to include his eyebrows. ‘Well, I suppose that you could say, If-you-can’t-beat-’em, sing-a-song-about-’em.’

  But I was doubtful: ‘You could …’

  Then I remembered, ‘“John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave”, can you believe that we would gather around the piano with our tambourines and triangles to sing that?’

  He laughed, ‘And I bet that none of you knew who John Brown was,’ before adding, ‘and Dixie.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Dixie: yet more Confederacy mysteriously misplaced in British schools.’

  I frowned.

  So he frowned. ‘You never had music lessons?’

  ‘No,’ but now I was remembering, ‘our other favourite was “My bonnie lies over the ocean” which I thought was “My body lies over the ocean”, which never made much sense.’

  He said, ‘No.’ Then, ‘“Like a patient etherised upon a table.”’

  Fairly seriously, I reminded him, ‘I’m not seventeen, I don’t need our conversation to be littered with literary references.’

  And he ruffled my hair. Or perhaps the breeze ruffled my hair.

  I said, ‘Do you know what I really remember when I think of primary school?’

  ‘No?’

  I was not quite sure if he or his smile had spoken.

  ‘Apollo II, which happened when I was leaving primary school, leaving for good, moving on to secondary. Those men were going to the moon, and I was going to secondary school: everything was changing, everyone was moving on. Except for my grandpa, I suppose, because he was in the Whittington for the last time, and I went to watch the moon landing with him, on the telly in the day room. He was thrilled, he told me that we were watching the future. But what was wrong with televisions, in those days? Because the astronauts looked like ghosts, do you remember? They were moving around but they were see-through.’

  Very quietly, he was exclaiming, ‘Goodness, aren’t you young.’

  ‘No,’ I said, looking away over the drab park, ‘not any more.’

  Around this time, I began to see more of Helen, of whom, in the past few years, in the way of the world, I had seen very little. My visits became more frequent, but carefully low-key so that she would not notice. Not that she was the noticing kind; noticing was not her strong point. She had two small sons, by then, and seemed to work by instinct: she climbed the stairs to comfort the children before I had detected their cries, she ran baths before they were dirty and cooked meals for the moment when they complained of hunger. She was married to the boys’ father: a boring bastard, she would say, almost fondly, but wistfully because only the boring was apposite. He drove a bulky BMW, and spent the weekends driving around the country to displays and parades of old-fashioned fire-engines: fire-engines with no cutting equipment, she had explained to me, contemptuously.

  One day, I managed the question that I had been longing to ask her: ‘Do you ever think of Uncle Robbie?’

  Was he still Uncle Robbie? To him, so far, I had avoided any form of address.

  ‘Oh, yes.’ Her face became misty, and not simply with a sigh of cigarette smoke. We were sitting on spindly stools at the breakfast bar which she kept in her house when everyone else had converted to old pine tables. Her hem was high and sharp on her thighs, and there were dimples on the thighs which had nothing to do with youth. She began to talk about Uncle Robbie as if he had been an old drinking partner (which was, in a sense, I suppose, exactly what he had been): no real talk, nothing specific, but lots of appreciative murmurs, the verbal equivalent of back-slapping. Not for the first time, I wondered whether she had that lack of memory common to people who care for small children, who are required to live in an excess of the present. As she talked, or murmured and sighed, she dropped ash, which was how she had survived ever since she had ceased to be an old soak: by relying upon smoke and ash to take the edge off the world.

  What I loved about Helen was the scent of her that survived the smell of cigarettes: a scent which women are not supposed to have; or, perhaps, the scent which women are supposed to have, but are not bold enough to wear and choose to wipe away. She smelled ripe, both sweet and musty, sweet but on the turn: old sweat and babies, even though her babies were grown. In her younger days, in the days of Uncle Robbie, I had heard her refer to herself as a strictly soap-and-water girl, but now she did not even seem to bother with the soap. There was something else that I loved: the black which rose in her to darken the rings around her eyes, to silt under her nails and in their cuticles, to fatten her moles and display the natural colour of her dyed and nicotine-stained hair. These were glorious imperfections, adding to the rich patina of bruising left by the rough-and-tumble of the little boys. Each time I went to see her, I was struck by her faded grandeur; although, in a sense, there was nothing faded about her, she was extravagantly flawed.

  My mother liked to refer to Helen’s appearance as the love-me-or-leave-me look. But I knew where my heart lay. And, anyway, no one had ever left Helen. If my father attempted defence by saying, Helen has kept her looks, my mother would laugh, Kept them where? Then he countered, There’s nothing so unattractive in a woman as bitchiness. The problem between my parents was simple but serious: my mother was hardening with age, but my father was softening. Helen was oblivious. Having no vanity to trip her up, to lay her low, she was a survivor. My parents had always complained that Helen doesn’t care; but the only person about whom Helen did not care was herself.

  ‘He’d love the boys,’ she said, suddenly. Then, ‘And they are his, in a way.’

  I tottered on my stool. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean … I mean …’ she shrugged, chucking ash, ‘I mean, he made me who I am, and now I’m making them who they are.’

  I came to her because I needed to know if she ever thought of Uncle Robbie, and what she thought of him, but also because I wanted to replace his photo. Her photo. Of him. The photo that I had taken from a pile in her house sometime in the year following his death. Borrowed, rather than taken. Not that she would have noticed. Not that he was even looking into the camera. The photo that, for weeks, I had been carrying in my bag between my home and hers. But now, suddenly, I wanted to hold onto it, for dear life: rigid on that ridiculous stool, I tried to quell my fear that the little boys would come downstairs for their ritual rummage in Auntie-Miranda’s-bag and would come across my booty.

  A week later, when I met Uncle Robbie, I mentioned Helen. Which was my first mention of her, to him. ‘I saw Helen, this week.’

  ‘Ah, Tink,’ he enthused. ‘How is she?’

  Rain was clattering all around us onto leaves, onto a park-load of leaves. I had remembered to bring an umbrella, beneath which I stood alone but nevertheless wetter than him. ‘She thinks you’d love the boys, her two little boys.’

  ‘Oh, I do, I do,’ the same tone.

  I tipped up my umbrella, to follow his eyes. ‘You do?’

  ‘I do,’ he echoed, smiling
over the park. The smile was for no one I could see. From where I was standing, I looked up into and through his eyes. Not very different from looking down into clean sunny water: the bottom everywhere, in suspension.

  ‘But how do you know them?’

  ‘Well …’ he seemed surprised by my question, he seemed not to know, ‘well, I can see.’

  My body crackled with shock, with the hundreds of implications, the chief of which was that he must have been able to see me, too, over the years. But for now, all that I needed to know was, ‘Do you, have you ever …’ how to ask? ‘… have you ever been in parks with anyone else?’ I added a pathetic, euphemistic, ‘In recent years?’

  ‘No,’ he said, so forcefully that the word tore like a plea.

  I held harder onto the stem of my umbrella, which shook above me and dropped rain. ‘Not even with Helen?’ I dared, but timidly. ‘Or …’ I had never spoken the name of the woman who had eventually followed Helen, I had never even thought her name, ‘Lorna?’

  ‘Listen,’ he emphasized, ‘they’re my past, but you’re my future; only you are my future.’ He laid his hands on my shoulders, and I was certain that I detected his touch. ‘Do you understand?’ he implored.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, because I loved him, but this was the first real lie.

  My lie shut me up for a while, for our walk back to the road. For weeks, I had been holding back my questions for the time when I would feel closer to him. But six weeks had passed, and I was no closer.

  When we came to the end of the path, he said, cheerfully, ‘You’re my second chance, my last chance.’

  I did not know what I felt. Until I remembered an old word, an old favourite, which had come with me from childhood into adolescence with an appropriate slip in meaning: spooked.

  He was saying, ‘Same time, same place?’

  Which was hardly a question, because I would hardly say no.

  But, ‘No,’ he said, suddenly, ‘same time, in your favourite bookshop.’

  Before I could ask him how he knew which bookshop was my favourite, he smiled and disappeared. He disappeared, which he had never done before, to me. Or not that I had noticed. But perhaps, until then, I had been too happy to look behind me, or not for long enough, or far enough, or hard enough.

  The following week, I found him by Languages, scanning the shelves.

  As I approached him, he pointed to one of the books: ‘Absolutely fascinating, don’t you think?’ It was a book of Japanese lessons, Minimum Essential Politeness. ‘Do you think that you could possibly hold the book for me, and turn over a page or two? And then, perhaps, with your help, I could cover a lesson each week.’

  I laughed, boisterously, probably impolitely. ‘Japanese? I can’t imagine anything less you.’

  Chivalrously, he echoed with his own laugh, but one which was less convincing, less sure, slightly slow and broken.

  ‘Ah, but, well,’ he explained, bashfully, ‘Japanese is the language of the future.’

  ‘Yes, but you don’t have a future,’ my words skidded from me; I had been thinking them, and then suddenly they were real, spoken.

  He looked at me. Or perhaps he was already looking, but he stayed looking; his eyes stayed still. Which was a look that I had never seen from him. Careful. Neither of us moved, nor breathed. We waited for the moment to settle, to die away. Then one of us – I thought that it was him, but it must have been me – folded my hair behind my ear, and I stood exposed, chastened.

  ‘How very right you are,’ he said: a sonorous murmur, like something spoken to reassure a child.

  What I did not know was if I had inadvertently hit on the truth, like a child.

  I followed him from the shop, bumping into people and chanting a mantra of apology. A bookshop is not an easy shop to leave in a hurry: the customers positioned singly and still, and bowed in contemplation, like anglers. Dodging them, I shook with the bass-beat from my furious heart. Because if he was not there when I reached the pavement, there was nowhere for me to look for him. As I passed people, I wanted to yell into their closed-down book-focused faces, This is a matter of life and death. And then, pushing through the doorway, I saw that he was there, looking upwards into a sky sliced of horizon and shrunk to inky thumbprints on a backdrop.

  When he sensed that I had joined him, he announced his change of subject: ‘I’d love to spend some time with you away from London,’ he mused, breezily, ‘but unfortunately I have no car.’

  I swooped low to try to catch my breath.

  Above me, he continued to muse: ‘I wonder if I still have a licence.’

  ‘Robbie,’ I shouted, snapping upright, ‘why did you drive into that tanker?’

  His face was luminous and slack with shock. ‘I hope that you don’t mind me saying,’ he began to recover himself, his voice remaining faint, ‘but I’m not sure that it’s really a question of why.’

  He was right, of course: this was not the question, merely a wail. The real question was: ‘Why did you not think?’

  He had no answer for me; his mouth opened and closed, and his eyes went somewhere else, anywhere else.

  ‘Had you been drinking?’ Because he had died in the old days, when people drank and drove.

  ‘No …’

  ‘Why did you not brake?’ My shriek was muffled by the wobbly throb of a stationary bus.

  ‘I did brake, that was the problem,’ and he appealed, ‘you know that was the problem.’

  ‘Less hard, then.’

  He dropped back, announced to no one, ‘This is ridiculous,’ before straightening to insist, ‘if I had braked less hard, I would have definitely hit the tanker.’

  ‘Oh, so,’ I had lost control, ‘the hit that you did achieve did not qualify as definite?’

  He despaired audibly, looked down to the pavement.

  And I cried up into the sky, ‘Why did it rain?’

  Quietly, he dismissed this: ‘There is always rain somewhere; one has to learn to live with rain.’

  I was crying, but his face seemed more pained. My face felt cool, calm, nothing but a wash of tears. His hands were high and cramped to match his expression; they hovered helplessly over my shoulders, then dropped down but fell through me.

  He said, ‘I made a mistake, a momentary mistake; a miscalculation.’

  Were we referring to the same accident? Were we speaking the same language? I did not know how to make him see.

  Fiercely, I told him, ‘But that’s the kind of miscalculation that you simply do not make.’ Then I cried, ‘Did you not think of us?’ Of whom? Me, Helen, perhaps even the Lorna-person, and Helen’s children, and even, one day, my own children: all of us, the living, a party-load of guests who had been dumped by our host.

  Defensively, he explained, ‘I wasn’t thinking, I was driving; and you know very well that whatever anyone says, however hard one tries, there’s a difference.’

  I continued, ‘Why were you driving so fast?’

  ‘I always did, that was what I did.’ And then he admitted, ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘And why did you wait seven years to come back?’ Which, for seven weeks, was all that I had really wanted to ask.

  He had an answer. ‘I couldn’t have come any earlier, because you had to do your mourning, you had to have done your mourning.’

  ‘Oh,’ I piped sarcasm through my tears, ‘and do I seem to have succeeded?’

  He admitted, ‘I had no idea.’

  ‘Perhaps you don’t know as much as you think that you know.’ But I was not telling him the whole truth, which was that I had had no idea, that these tears were a surprise to me, too.

  His eyes came back to mine, and he offered, tentatively, ‘But, then, I was never much good at knowing when people were angry with me.’

  He had avoided saying women: I smiled, in spite of myself. ‘But you could have come sooner: I was over you – as much as I was ever going to be over you – in a year or so.’ For some reason, suddenly, I was almost laughing: ‘So why s
even?’

  He shrugged, ‘I was late?’

  And I did laugh, a little.

  But then, foolishly, he told me his other reason: ‘You were in a relationship.’

  I stiffened, self-conscious but also suspicious. ‘So?’

  ‘So,’ he emphasized, patiently, ‘I had to wait.’

  I waited for an explanation.

  ‘Oh, come on,’ he hurried, ‘think: think of the secrecy involved in this; I could never have come back when you were involved with someone.’

  I bit slowly into my lip, not to clamp shut my mouth but to try to prompt some words.

  ‘For me,’ he explained, ‘you were dangerously close to someone else.’

  My words, when they came to me, seemed to be the only words that I had ever had. Any other words which I had ever spoken had been utterly unimportant. ‘I loved you so much.’

  He was flapping, blinking, coughing, treating this as inconsequential: ‘I know, I knew.’

  ‘Actually, no,’ I contemplated, ‘I don’t think that you did know. Because if you’d have known, then you would never have died.’

  Flustered, he countered, ‘Oh, really …’

  I shrugged, but did not lower my arms, folded them instead around my body. ‘I happen to think that it’s true: you would never knowingly have hurt me so much.’

  He tried, ‘Hitting the tanker was not something that I did.’

  I muttered, ‘Just obeying orders from testosterone?’