Uniform’s all right, it saves coupons, she tells herself. If she’d been able to go to the grammar school she’d have worn uniform there, a black blazer with a gold crest on the left pocket. She thinks the thought quickly then sheers off from it. She’s in uniform now, like everyone else. But when Frederick walks towards her, all fine and supple with life, she can’t turn aside from the thought of the death he’s kitted out for.
Thick rain continues to fall. It’s April, a sharp night but not cold. There’s a cough in the dark close to her, and Rose shivers. There’ll be couples all along the row of bus shelters, locked together the way she wants to be. In the dark each pair carves out its tiny privacy and the rain on the roof drowns out the sounds they make. Rose tenses, listening, feeling her uniform skirt rasp her knee through the nylons Frederick has given her. She must be mad, wasting nylons on uniform. It’d be against regulations if anyone thought a girl would be stupid enough to do it. Probably it is against regulations.
The dark blue uniform suits Rose. She has the kind of body that makes itself felt through boxy cloth. And then there’s her skin, that fine-grained olive skin that still looks good when fair-skinned girls flag from lack of sleep.
‘Where’re you from?’ Frederick Lafayette asked her the first time she danced with him.
‘Staffordshire,’ she said. ‘The Black Country.’
He laughed, deep in his chest and then high and sweet like a little boy. As soon as she heard it she wanted to make him laugh again. That voice of his. That grain in his liquid voice, like comb suspended in a honey-jar.
‘How come you call it that?’ he said. She soon found that he had two ways of speaking, as she had. His home voice, and then something flatter, for every day and officers. It took a minute for him to feel his way back inside his real voice, each time he was with her. And Rose dropped the voice she’d been learning so that one day, if the war went on long enough, she could be a telephonist, a wireless operator …
‘It’s a real place,’ she said. ‘Do you know where the Midlands are?’ Probably he thought all Brits were the same, living elbow to elbow in their packed, rainy little island. The Yanks didn’t seem to think life over here had any scale. One she’d met didn’t know there were other cities besides London. He’d laughed disbelievingly when she told him about Manchester and Birmingham, as if they were villages she was trying to make big.
But Frederick frowned. ‘They give us a map,’ he said coolly. He was a reader. An electrician by trade, but he went to night school back home, to study economics. He intended to go to college one day, when the war was over. He reckoned that there’d be scholarships for GIs.
‘How about you? Were you a college girl?’ he asked the second time they met. She glanced sharply at him, but he was serious. He couldn’t tell about British accents, any more than she could tell about American ones. He really believed she might be a college girl. College over there meant university here, she knew that. His mistake struck inside her like a bell, shaking everything.
‘I got a scholarship to the grammar school,’ she told him. ‘But I had to get a job.’
He nodded. She saw that he understood.
‘I went to look at the grammar school once,’ she went on, telling him something she’d never told anyone. ‘It was over the other side of town, so I went on the bus after work. It was getting dark and they’d locked the gates. I looked through the railings. There were still some lights on in the buildings. They were huge, those buildings. Like another town inside the town, separate.’
Frederick said nothing. Did not bring out any experience of his own, did not say she’d done well for herself since. He put out his hand and cupped the side of her face. It was the softest touch she had ever felt, his fingers touching her jawline as if it was beautiful. She rested her head in his cupped palm.
A couple of yards from Rose the red tip of a cigarette pricks the dark. It lights up a man lounging against the back wall of the bus shelter, eyes down. Then the soft, pitchy curtain of rain and blackout settles round her again. The man must have turned aside, because she can’t see his cigarette end any more. But he hasn’t moved away. She’d have heard him. She’s an expert on footfalls, man or woman, boot or shoe.
She can hear trains clunking in the yard. Always trains now, night and day. Things are hotting up. Everyone knows it’s coming. A vast prickling excitement is building over the tiredness they won’t get rid of ever, not if they sleep for a month of Sundays. Ask any one of the girls what she wants most and she’ll say, ‘To have my sleep out.’
He’ll go soon. That’s what he’s over here for, to go. All those tall easy Yanks, full of food from the PX, food Rose hadn’t seen in years until she met Frederick. Tinned ham and corned beef and tinned pineapple. It’s true that eating as much meat as you want gives you a different energy. The Yanks are full of it. They spill out of their lit-up cities and come over here not really believing in the darkness. Next to them, the British look like thin and tired. But the same thing’s coming to all of them. The tension’s like a boil, swollen to bursting-point. Fights break out and are broken up; trains clank down the rails all day and all night. It’s coming. Everybody knows it and they speak about it in a different voice from the voice that’s served for long grey years. Something’s coming that you want and want – but when it’s so close that you can nearly touch it, you’re afraid too. You want to pull back, to hide in waiting again.
It’s always when she stops thinking of him coming that he comes. A finger touches the top of her spine. His voice grazes her ear.
‘Jeezus, I didn’t have a hope in hell I’d still find you here. You wet, baby? You got rain on those pretty shoes?’
They laugh. He has small feet for a tall man and Rose’s feet in their uniform boats look nearly as big as his.
‘Don’t start on my feet again,’ says Rose.
‘I have no intention of starting there,’ he assures her gravely. ‘Come on. We’re gonna go find us a park.’
It’s easy in the dark. No one sees them. They’re a courting couple like any other, hungry for their own patch of earth that’s stayed dry under the canopy of laurel. There’s an etiquette to finding your space. You can be three yards from another couple, but you don’t see them and they don’t see you. At night everyone is free, even Rose and Frederick. The park is safe, not like the street. When they walk down the streets, Rose watches ahead, bracing herself when she sees a clump of men in uniform. The ratings are rowdy, but some of the GIs scare her. The white ones. They spit on the ground as she passes with Frederick. They look at Frederick with something she hasn’t ever seen on a man’s face before when he looks at another man. Not before a fight, not anywhere.
‘They bring their Jim Crow law over here with them,’ Frederick says. The Americans separate their army into two armies, black and white. That’s Jim Crow law, Frederick says. She tells him of a story she’s heard, about an old farmer way down in Devon somewhere. They asked him what he thought of the Yanks stationed nearby. ‘I love the Americans but I don’t like those white ones they’ve brought along with them,’ he said.
Frederick told her how his daddy had brought the family from Atlanta, Georgia up north to Chicago, and never gone back. Never would go back, never would set a foot south of the line again. Not for a visit, not for nothing. His daddy was buried in Chicago soil. He’d never wanted that Atlanta earth to touch his body again.
Those white GIs would scare her if she let them. They see her walking with Frederick and you would think it was their country, not hers. Once, in the crush of the pavements, a GI had grabbed her breast, openly, although Frederick held her arm. As if Frederick wasn’t a man. He grabbed and kneaded, tweaking her nipple, grinning at his mates to show them, as if she was anybody’s. Frederick was looking ahead the way he did, his face impassive. In the crowd, he hadn’t seen what was happening. Rose said nothing. She hardened herself too, shutting her nostrils to the close angry smell of the men and the beer on their breath. She shut her
ears to the things they said. She stared straight ahead, as Frederick did, and would not give them the satisfaction of knowing that she felt anything.
They’d be gone soon, she told herself, and she felt easier. But then she remembered that when they went, so would Frederick.
The park is full of scents. There’s the sharp smell of city earth, and a honeyish smell from a shrub she can’t name. Rain rolls off the leaves and spatters their clothes and skin as they push through the branches. Rose doesn’t like the park, but it’s the only place. They find a space and he spreads his jacket on the earth. It’s damp, but she’s known worse. When they first met it was January, with slush on the ground, a raw wind fingering up her skirt and Frederick with the worst head cold he’d had in his entire life.
They lie under the dirty old laurels, on the dirty old ground.
‘Welcome to the black country,’ he says. It’s an old joke between them now. She tells him that one day she’ll take him to see the real thing. What would Iris and Dickie make of Frederick? Iris is bashful. She won’t say much to anyone she doesn’t know. But Dickie’s gone the other way, living his own life at thirteen, hardly coming home except to sleep. She doesn’t have to worry about what Mum and Dad think. Mum’s been dead five years now, and Dad’s married again. Iris is still living with them, but she wants to lodge above the shop where she works. She told Rose about it, secretly, last time Rose was there.
‘But Auntie Vi doesn’t want me to leave home.’
‘She’s no more your auntie than my elbow. And it’s your wages she doesn’t want to leave home,’ Rose pointed out.
‘She’s all right, Rose.’
‘She’s soft. She’ll do anything he tells her.’
‘I’ll wait until I’m sixteen, then I’ll go.’
‘You’re only fourteen and a half.’
‘I know.’ Iris ducked her head so her hair slipped forward over her cheeks.
‘Listen, Iris. Soon as I get a place of my own, after this war’s over, you can come to me. And Dickie too if he wants.’
Iris looked up. Disbelief and longing fought in her face, but the idea was too big for her. ‘It’s a nice room, Rose. It’s lovely. Mrs Lambert let me go up and look at it. It’s got a window that looks over the street. You can sit and look down on the people. All their hats go bobbing underneath you and they never look up so they never know you’re there. ’F you open the window a crack you can hear what they’re saying. I was thinking, I could sit there after work. And Mrs Lambert’s going to let me paint the walls.’
‘Where’re you going to get paint from?’
‘I know, but when you can. After the war.’
‘She’ll let you hook your own rag rug as well, will she?’ asked Rose sarcastically. But Iris just gave the willing smile she used to hide the times when she wasn’t following what Rose said.
‘It was nice the way Mum gave us both flower names,’ she said at last. Iris was always busy like that, cobbling up a mum for herself out of nothing. A mum who thought about her and loved her but just happened to have gone away.
‘Maybe she knew he was going to marry a woman called Violet after she was dead.’
Iris had risen silently and gone out. Rose lit a cigarette and dragged in smoke. She wanted to smash everything in the room. After a while she stood up and went into the back kitchen. Iris lifted her face from the blue-and-white towel that had hung from a wooden bar as long as Rose could remember, washed so often that the blue had all but gone. That towel’s lasted longer than my mother, Rose thought suddenly, remembering her mother’s hands fastening it back in place after the wash.
She must not say such things to Iris. Iris’s face was mottled with crying. Those red patches always sprang up on the same place, on her temples and around her eyes. When she was a kid it took hours to calm Iris down after one of her do’s.
‘Here, have a drag of a fag,’ said Rose, handing the cigarette to Iris.
A faint smile appeared. Iris took the cigarette with a practised gesture.
‘You are a daft ha’porth,’ Rose said.
‘I know.’
‘I brought chocolate for you too.’
‘Chocolate!’
‘American chocolate. It’s called a Hershey Bar.’
‘Where’d you get it, Rose?’
‘That’s for you to ask, and me to know. Here, catch.’
‘Are you courting a Yank, Rose?’
‘Maybe.’
‘What’s he like?’
‘Handsome.’
‘Did he give you those nylons too?’
‘No, that was the man in the moon.’
‘Can I try them on?’
‘You’re taller than me. Your suspenders’ll burst them.’
Iris was tall, like Dad. She looked beggingly at Rose, her mouth full of chocolate. ‘Please, Rose! Just so’s as I can see how they look on me.’
Her sister’s legs were long and pale. The stockings only went halfway up her thighs. American Tan stretched over white skin. That’s what some girls call soldiers like Frederick. Tan GIs.
Rose and Frederick know just how many buttons to undo, how far to pull up her skirt. Rose arches her back automatically to unfasten the hooks of her brassiere. Then she looks around. The rain has stopped and the sky is clearing fast. A thick, curdy mass of cloud blows over a brighter space where the moon is hidden. They are the only ones left under the laurels now. She thinks that the other couples must have gone because of the rain, dripping and seeping everywhere. But it’s not as dark as it was. Now she can see him a little. Quickly, Rose pushes his hands aside and kneels up.
‘Rose, what you doing?’ he complains.
‘Wait.’
She sheds clothes. Skirt, jacket, blouse, petticoat, brassiere, suspenders, stockings, knickers. They peel off and fall away like cards in the hands of a dealer. Rose piles them out of the way, quick and neat as always. She kneels up, naked. Can he see her?
He can. ‘Jeez, Rose, look at you.’
‘You do it too.’
‘What if somebody comes? You want to get me court-martialled?’
‘Yes.’
He hesitates, on the brink of the cold water where she is already far out. And then he smiles. She hears the smile in his voice, though there’s not enough moonlight to see it by.
‘OK,’ he says slowly, ‘OK. If that’s the way you want it.’
He takes off his clothes more slowly than her, folding each item with a care that shows her he is suddenly nervous as he’s never been before. Then he’s naked too. She puts out her hand and it shows pale against his arm. She has never seen him like this before. She does not really know what he looks like. They know each other by touch, through clothes, standing up on the coldest of nights, lying down where they can.
Rose lies on top of him for a long while. Neither moves. If one of them moves an inch it will all start, a ripple in one flesh spreading to the other. How long can they hold still, like this? She can’t tell where he ends and she begins. He’s different from the other men she’s known, who have no sooner got her legs open than they are pumping into her as if there’s a fire, their faces twisted and their weight crushing her breath. Afterwards they don’t want to talk, don’t really want to see her even. They haul themselves off her with a suck and a heave. They have no idea that there’s anything left to want. Worst of all are the ones who are doggily grateful, as if it’s all been done for their sake, a gift they got away with because Rose is stupid, or easy. And maybe most of the time that’s true, thinks Rose.
Suddenly she is chilled, and as lonely inside herself as she’s been all those other times. She moves one leg, very slightly, against his thigh. She skims her right hand across his chest and touches his nipple, the feathery touch she’s learned from him. He gasps deep in his throat, between a laugh and a groan. She leans forward. His face snaps sideways and he begins to move inside her. She tastes his mouth as if it is a fruit she’s read about but never imagined she would eat.
&n
bsp; It is cold now. The moon’s brighter, too bright. Rose can hear wind tickling the leaves along the path. It sounds like the rustling of a newspaper with bad news in it. As soon as they’ve done it, outside comes pressing in on them, she thinks. Their heads, screened by rhododendrons, are only a few feet from the path. Twice she’s heard footsteps. She moves her head so that she can see past Frederick’s shoulder, and looks up at the moon through the laurel leaves. It’s still pushing back the night clouds. For a second she lets her gaze follow the long curve of his shoulder, his back, hip, buttock, thigh, then the legs going away. She can’t see his feet at this angle.
But if she can see him, so can anyone. Military police patrol this park with torches sometimes. Frederick eases himself up on his elbows, and looks down at her. She wonders what he can see, but for once she can’t find her mirror face to look back with. She just lies there and lets him see her, naked as a baby. Then he is up and brushing loose dirt from his hands, bending over his pile of clothes. Rose sees that he is ready to turn from her, back into the world of uniforms.
‘If my mama could see me now,’ he says, looking down at Rose over his shoulder.
Rose does not reply. She does not want to hear about anyone’s mama. She knows enough about Frederick’s family. His brother who is still in junior high. His baby sister, and his father in the Chicago soil. Every time he speaks of them she hears responsibility in his voice. He has got to take care of them. His brother is a bright kid and he’ll have the chances that time wasn’t right for Frederick to have.
Girl, Balancing & Other Stories Page 18
