Sarah sat on a pedestal as comfortable as the seat of a bicycle, inserted fifty pence and watched a man with a mask run up the street on the screen in front of her. Windows opened each side of him; the enemy dropped bombs on his head, emerged from doors and windows with the sole purpose of assassination. Pressing a button and pulling a lever in an unnatural feat of co-ordination would shoot the killers into the sky and save the refugee from the gang of thousands. She failed dismally: he was dead within seconds, gone in a big boom, noisier than all the rest. Game over, said the screen.
‘You know what you are,’ Rick yelled in her ear. ‘Useless! Another?’
To her left, a boy stood, his body braced, his hands moving so fast they were blurred, his eyes transfixed by green monsters which bathed his hair in the same colour, his screen emitting the rat-tat-tat of a rifle and the muted sounds of artificial, bloodless agony.
‘No thanks. Where do you go to draw breath?’
‘Why?’ he shouted.
‘Is this all there is?’
He grinned. ‘Isn’t it enough?’
He liked the noise, but heard the message, led her to the back of the arcade where a voice still had to be raised to make sense, although not as much. She was temporarily deaf and blind. The light was eerie here, the carpet ran out into a couple of anterooms, one containing a table, chair, sink, kettle, cardboard boxes and signs of disuse, the other, more machines, untidy, unlit, strangely lifeless, lurching towards one another. They reminded her of the graveyard.
‘Dead ones,’ said Rick. ‘I don’t like to see them really. Some broken. Mostly gone out of fashion. They change all the time. Nothing lasts long. The kids master them, want something else. Don’t want to see the dead ones. I stay out front. There’s nothing else out here, only a back yard.’ He opened a door beyond the silent machines. The remnant of fast-fading, natural daylight on the cusp between late evening and summer night was faintly shocking after the dazzle of the screens. In that light, Rick looked exhausted. The bruises had merged into the lights of the arcade; out here, they formed extra shadows to his handsome face. An attractive boy, ten years her junior. His face should not have held the merest line. The world should be his for the asking: he should be full of dreams.
After an hour in a pub called the Globe, he had volunteered to show her the arcade, or was it because she had asked? He couldn’t remember, forgot as well how he had worried about this rash offer of a drink in the pain of near dawn when she had done his housework, just liked being where he was, with her, half hoping everyone he knew, except Jo, of course, would see. Which they did, good bit of gossip tomorrow and a lot of explaining to do to poor old Stonewall. Then, looking up into the stars visible from the back yard of the arcade, he felt suddenly sad, bereft, lonely, wanting to spill his guts, tell her stuff he never told. Also sleepy, the bruised ribs and early rising taking a toll. Must be the beer, the unaccustomed silence, the perfume. He slid down the wall and stayed at the bottom. She squatted beside him.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Things catch up, you know?’
‘You’ve gone all pale, Rick.’
Without thinking, he felt for her hand. Must be drunk.
‘You’re nice, you know? Why’d you say you’d come out for a drink? You said you fancied a walk by the sea, but I’m a wreck, look at me.’
‘A nice wreck. Place is full of your friends.’
He struggled to his feet. ‘Think that’s good enough reason to go out the back way. Cup of coffee’s what I need. I live round the corner. Goo’night. Sorry.’
‘I like coffee too.’
There was a shame in it, sneaking through the alley from the back yard of the arcade on his night off, back up the road to Swamp Cottage, letting her in with him to see the place where he lived. Tidy, scruffy, but clean; he was good at cleaning, good at nothing else. Strange the way she took over without being bossy, just as she had this morning. Made toasted cheese sandwiches without asking where anything was, terrific. You’d think she’d been here dozens of times, it was like being with Stonewall only not like that at all. It was food he needed, food he had forgotten all day. A whole day with nostrils full of hamburger onions or ice-cream with a chocolate flake stuck on top; a man forgot to eat, he explained. The room came back into focus, leaking sofa and all, he was still proud of it. He loved the way she ate, long fingers, nibbling mouth, and he still wanted to spill his guts. Wasn’t much good for a bargain, was he? She’d wanted to have a look at the sea, talk about the Pardoes and he’d never mentioned anyone but himself. And Jo. Oddly, it hadn’t felt like a betrayal, talking about Jo. It felt nice when she’d told him about Jo dressing up earlier to go out with the girls. Not with some other bloke. That was the point when the room refocused with shocking clarity. He’d been talking about Jo for twenty minutes.
‘Why did Edward warn me off?’ he asked out loud.
‘Edward? It was Julian. You told her.’
That was what it was like, being with a woman who listened. You didn’t have to explain anything, all your disjointed, drunken, exhausted thoughts were assembled for you.
‘No. I met her once. Told her how her brother told me to fuck off. I meant Edward, of course. Julian’s all right. He wouldn’t do that. He wouldn’t threaten you if you were behind with the rent, no more than his dad would have done. Edward told me to fuck off or get evicted. Not that there was any need. I love Jo, you know? We’ve played together since kids. I fancy her rotten, but what’s the use? I’m not much use to a gorgeous bird like that, am I? Even if I love her. Even if I want her so much I think about her all the time.’
‘Why?’
It was the only piece of his evening’s rambling conversation which she did not seem to follow, she who seemed to piece together what he said even while he said it, she should have known this last bit, but how? Christ, she’d had half the story of his life, the arcade, his dreams, all but the greatest. She’d been more than perfect, she’d raised his stock with the multitudes, including his dad, sitting in the corner of the bar with his mouth open, serve him right, and she still didn’t know nothing. About him being a virgin, at his age, the only one never quite able, out of fear of failure, and even after fumbling efforts, to do anything but grope.
‘Why aren’t you any good for Jo?’ the woman was reminding him gently.
‘I got too many kickings from dad!’ he yelled, loud enough to be heard over a thousand screens filled with computerized deaths and loud heroes. ‘He did for me, Dad did. I think.’ He was holding her hand again, didn’t know why, there didn’t seem too many minutes since he first had, sliding down the wall of the yard, and then here, a moment or two before the focus on his own room came back, still holding. He could smell her, wanted to smell her. Cheese, toast, perfume. Long sleeves of stuff he liked to touch, felt like suede. Here was this fancy bird, watching him crying like a kid. Just like Stonewall had on the beach this afternoon, when he’d found his dog’s collar come in with the tide, as if he’d needed any confirmation that the bitch was dead.
Still holding hands, him and this older bird, sitting on his couch, in tune with all that old corrosive despair and shame. Her doing something else, touching something else, saying not much, putting her chin on his chin, tiny as she was, no doubt so she could look into his eyes and laugh herself sick. Only she wasn’t. Smiling but not laughing, she was doing something else. She seemed to have lost her shirt. There were pretty little marks on her arms, like a series of meaningless tattoos.
‘Kicking’, she was saying from a distance, ‘doesn’t do an ounce of harm, never did. Big man like you.’
He thought of the big man he and Stonewall had found, hung like a donkey, skin so white, dead like his attributes. It had mattered more to him than any imprint from Dad’s boot, and he also knew he’d seen the last of those. The last, the last, the very last, of both sensations of disgust.
He would wonder later how it was he lost either his fear or his virginity on his sinking, third-hand couch with the stuffing h
anging out. He would have liked to remember the details, recall them for inspection.
Rick woke, admiring himself for what he knew he had done for the first time in his twenty-one years. Fucked someone, slowly, beautifully. Someone who left him with a blanket up to his chin, his feet out of shoes, his head steady, a waft of perfume and a sense of pride which owed nobody.
Edward lay after dark and slept. He could have gone fishing, but he didn’t. Fishing to prove he could do something, or to please a dead father, or simply to gain power over the fish, he didn’t know which. It was an addiction. The old silk coverlet was twisted, the space next to his own body empty and cold. Ever since little Joanna had crept into his bed to tickle him awake in an orgy of innocence each morning, a practice she had suspended long since of her own accord, Edward woke with the expectation of finding her there. She had crept into bed at a dangerous age for a boy teased at school, tormented by his hormones and scolded at home for laziness. He had simply let her remain etched on his mind and imprinted on his skin as the only desirable girl in the world, rehearsed in wet day-dreams his own part in her deflowering, envisaged her whimpering joy and the slavish passion to follow. He saw them both, she blonde and round, he dark and slight, copulating in the sand of the dunes, riding each other, and then racing naked into their own private stretch of sea. The result was simply himself, getting up fastidiously, to change the sheet.
The light was gone. The doll’s house in the room was covered. Edward now stood with his easel facing the window. A piece of watered paper was stretched on a frame, showing under the light a portion of Ordnance Survey map copied on a larger scale. Instead of the marked paths and the symbols, he had drawn depictions of the things themselves. The pine woods along the coast formed a forest of tiny, dark green trees. The footpaths were bordered by bramble bushes, hung with miniature fruit. There were untruthful innovations on his version of the map, such as the village church being Mediterranean white, the fields corn coloured, the gardens full of palms. He had moved the graveyard nearer the coast, depicted highly coloured half-human figures like his mother, dancing and digging their own graves; made the high street houses Georgian dwellings of immaculate proportions to replace the crooked, uncontrolled and irregular cottages. All this gave Edward a sense of power. The village and the coast became an elegant habitation under his rule. All of it slipping away, like his rod when he cast, like the fish he always failed to land, however savagely he tried with whatever expensive equipment. Like Jo.
Perhaps it was a vision he was simply too lazy to shift. Such devotion. Sandwiches every day, whether he needed them or not, a hot bottle in his bed at night, his shirts ironed, his paint brushes clean, even his fishing bait kept under her eye, a child seeking his approval in everything. But that was the other Joanna. Not the one flaunting herself this evening, not the girl who once let him choose her childish clothes but was now immune to his criticism and who looked as if she could stop a party by simply standing in the door. In whose clothes? With whose expertise? Sarah Fortune’s. The hired help Joanna had previously referred to as the cow, suddenly friend, confidante and creator of glamour, all in one destructive day.
Edward had abandoned all thought of fishing. He had glared at his giggling mother with murderous eyes as she waved Jo goodbye. Knowing how capable he was of striking her, Mother giggled more, withdrew to the kitchen, then to bed, while he went to his own room to brood until after dark, which was now, when hunger struck.
The normal Joanna would not have left the house without leaving him something for supper. For him and him alone. Not his brother.
They collided in the kitchen doorway, both of them looking for the light switch, each recoiling from the other.
‘Sorry, Julian. Didn’t know you were in.’
‘Sorry, Ed.’
Each wanted food, but rarely the company of each other which they avoided as often as possible, except breakfast, dinner and the more than occasional late-night snack which could be necessary after one of Jo’s more experimental meals. Their habits made her claim she could never keep stocks, never quite knew what there was.
Julian was looking at the newspaper on the floor of the pantry. Edward’s bait for fishing, given pride of place because they were Edward’s; fish hooks in the drawers of the kitchen table, reels and bits all over the place. Julian could not look at the bait without imagining the lugworms lying so docile on the inside. Lugworm, harbour ragworm, white ragworm: they could live for a few days in newspaper, but Edward was always over supplied as if it increased his own chances to acquire them and let them die. Julian could never pass the supplies on the cool pantry floor without wondering why it was so many of the civilized men he knew could bear to pick up a worm and spear it so bloodily on to a hook, simply in order to fish for the dabs they could easily buy.
‘I wish you wouldn’t keep these in here, Ed,’ he said, keeping the irritation out of his voice.
‘They can’t get out, you know. I’ll put them somewhere else, if you like.’
Edward was being conciliatory, even jovial.
‘Want a drink. boss?’
‘Yes,’ said Julian, surprised into acceptance simply because he wanted what Edward offered, a single slug of indifferent-quality whisky which made his mouth pucker. Julian did not keep the stuff near him: it had been dangerous in the past, cured no ills, turned insomnia into nightmare.
‘Where’s Jo? And Ma?’ he asked, not because he needed to know, simply for something to say.
‘Ma’s in the land of nod. Jo went out earlier. I saw her as I was coming in, wanted to have a word with you about Jo. And about our learned lady solicitor.’ Edward practically spat the last words.
‘Oh.’ Julian was wary, always in the habit of mistrusting everything Edward said, especially if he was serious. He could always give Edward his seventy-seventh chance, but since childhood the boy had never departed from being liar and cheat, features Jo simply refused to see, while he saw them all the time, that and the idleness. Be fair, he told himself. Mother had always spoiled the boy, while Father had seemed to dislike him from the moment he could walk. He could resist the opportunity to be fooled yet again, but not the chance of discussing Miss Fortune, however obliquely. The very same unsettling creature he had seen, minutes before, as he passed the arcade, sitting on a pedestal seat like one of the kids, playing a game with enthusiasm while under the wing of some unidentifiable lad. The sight had given him the same terrible jolt of recognition as last night when she stood in the doorway. So much for his original estimation: the woman was a lightweight, a silly cow . . . The violence of his own unspoken descriptions appalled him in their patent unfairness. He was simply looking for excuses.
‘Look, Julian,’ Edward was saying, ‘I just don’t like that woman. She’s far too charming to be anything other than a bad influence.’
‘What? On you?’ Julian joked.
‘No. On Jo.’ Julian waited for explanations, warmed to his brother’s seriously concerned face, thinking, Perhaps I misjudge him, I must not be so hard.
‘Listen, when I came back home this evening, I met our sis going out, highly pleased with herself, showing off to Mother. Dressed in that solicitor’s clothes, I ask you. Done up in black, like some high-class call-girl. That isn’t Jo. That’s somebody else. She’s still a child at heart.’
Which is what you want to keep her, Julian thought wryly, somehow pleased. How often had he urged Jo to dress like a young woman instead of a juvenile? He dismissed the thoughts easily, knowing they would return, willing to suspend criticism of Edward’s suspicious resentment in his own wilful search for an excuse to get rid of their visitor, simply because he found her disturbing. Edward’s eyes shone with the sheen of sincere dishonesty, the guile of his own, strange corruption; Julian chose to ignore it all. He rubbed his hand over his forehead.
‘Sorry, been a long, long day. I just went to Miss Gloomer’s. She’s been burgled, poor soul. Some bastard holiday-maker. A loaf of bread and her stick, pathetic
. She said it was a ghost, but I think she’s just picked up on gossip. A man with white hair: she saw him going away, couldn’t move. Wouldn’t have a sedative, so I prescribed sherry, it made me hungry. Anyway, you were saying, Sarah Fortune?’
Edward was blushing slightly, swallowing fast, never hesitant for long.
‘I think, since we need a lawyer, we should get someone else. This one’s too . . . subversive. Impertinent, over familiar. She makes Mother hysterical with excitement and Jo bolshie.’
They looked at each other in a moment of rare complicity. Julian nodded.
‘I agree. We’ll tell her tomorrow.’
‘Fine.’ Edward moved to leave.
‘Ed? Talk to me more, will you? For what it’s worth, I know you think you’ve had a rough deal, and I’m sorry. It’s not been an easy year.’
‘No,’ said Edward, horribly surprised and touched. ‘No, it hasn’t.’
The ghost with the white hair and the all too human face moved no further away than the garden immediately beyond Miss Gloomer’s tiny patch. This allowed him to watch the doctor come and go, wait for the fuss to die down, sit on the still warm ground and eat the bread in great gulps, three slices at a time, rolling it into a doughy ball, swallowing it whole. He would have killed for the services of a dentist on his back teeth. He supposed it was vaguely dangerous to stay where he was; there were other things to do, the beach hut he had chosen for the night’s lodging was a long walk. In a year, he had not driven a car, eaten a decent meal, entered a shop or looked any living person in the eye. His own worm ate him, kept him alive in the process of consumption.
A year which had sped, or rather eclipsed, since the day he had been caught by the tide. Made himself float on the cold water under the warming sun which saved him, surprised that it was time to die until he became indignant. Acted cunning with the tide, moving minimally to save his strength to make a burst for the shore five miles from where he had begun. The nakedness of his state, the liberation of it, had made him run for cover, hide in a half-derelict church while putting up two fingers at God, revelling in the sheer pride of outwitting even the ocean. He felt omnipotent and free, intensely alive, at one with the flat wilderness of the coast, wandering through it like a king surveying his country.
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