“We moved house then. House and town and county. Kevin made me move. I never saw Gavin again.” she paused to eat and drink, pushing the remaining piece of cake into her mouth and chewing pensively. I thought that was it. End of story. Another piece?” she asked, and handed me the plate. I shook my head. “It started all over again, the beatings. Really it never ended. But Kevin got his comeuppance one night, the cruel bastard.” Her lips sucked the cream off her fingertip. There was a smile of satisfaction lingering there on those greasy velvet cushions. “He staggered out of a pub blind drunk and was hit by this bloke in a car. Hit-and-run, they say. Kevin was killed and they never caught the driver, but I say thank God, and I hope they never do. I’ve a lot to thank him for, whoever he was; he did Max and me a big favour. Kevin had a few of his own bones broken that night, I can tell you. When I saw him on the slab, all bloodied and bruised, I could have laughed out loud.”
She chuckled. I found myself chuckling with her, though I thought it faintly callous. “I didn’t know…” I began, and then trailed deliberately into silence. Max had had a lot to put up with. It went some way to explaining what made him tick.
“And no bloke will ever do the same to either Max or me ever again,” she said, her jaw muscles twitching, her eyes almost menacing in their intensity. For the first time I saw Max strongly reflected in them. “Do you want a cherry Bakewell tart?” she asked with a sudden and unexpected brightness. “We’ve got loads of the things. If you don’t like cherries, I’ll have yours. I absolutely adore cherries!”
* * * *
21
Saturday
Why had he started staring at me? Was that really a grey bloom of sadness or regret on his face? Or was I superimposing my own emotions upon him, the way one does with a dog or a cat?
I had a dog once, as a kid. I called him mine, but I guess he belonged to the family. A mongrel called Blackie. His coat was a glossy coal-black, and it was a totally unimaginative, uninspired name. When I was down I thought I saw depression on his slavering lips, too. When I was in buoyant mood, his tongue lolled from a grinning mouth, and his eyes were bright like brown, ripe grapes, swollen and about to burst with life. Blackie gave me all the empathy I needed. Had Wise become my surrogate Blackie? That was a queer thought; Wise was my guard dog.
I noticed it a while ago. Whereas before he simply saw right through me, paid me no particular attention, I caught him gazing at me like he was seeing me for the first time. There was no leer these days. The icy crust that normally frosted his lips and eyes had melted and revealed another, altogether warmer human countenance beneath. It unsettled me.
My life is a life of routine, of stunning similarity. Anything different jarred the senses in spite of my desire for difference. Food given to a starving man can kill him, I’d once read. I felt any sign of compassion on Wise’s hitherto compassionless face might have the same effect on me. I didn’t want to look at him. I was afraid to. Can you choke on compassion?
What worries me is that I’m so desperate for real human company beyond the confines of my prison, for the warmth of friendship, that I even detect it in Wise, which is clearly an impossible. I’m hallucinating. It is an emotional mirage. I have to be aware of these things and protect myself against them. It is just another rent in my armour through which they can poke their insidious knives.
* * * *
Ruby and I were married, uneventfully, at a register office in September 1982.
The day I thought would never come, that I harried her towards week in, week out, came at last. We’d already planned to go ahead with the wedding the previous year, but at the beginning of April there seemed a fresh urgency in the air. There was idle gossip floating around that young men were sure to be called up for the war in the Falkland islands – which, at the outset of hostilities, my young and ignorant mind put somewhere north of Scotland; I was initially confused as to what the Argentineans could possibly want with our northern windswept, barren rocks pounded by savage gales and inhabited only by seabirds. As I watched the war’s progression on the TV I hoped things would hold out until September and that my name wasn’t one of those on an advance list of recruits waiting to be ticked off and sent immediately out.
In my mind I wanted to be married at least a little while before donning khaki, my initial horror and nervousness gradually giving way to a sense of impending adventure in foreign climes. Never having been further than the east coast, the idea of fighting it out with the Argies over a desolate, sheep-strewn rock in the South Atlantic grew ever more appealing.
The road and pavements in our street had been swept of litter and dog shit, and there’d been an attempt at a dull street party in honour of the marriage of Prince Charles to Lady Diana Spencer when they married in April, and I took this as an opportunity to bid a secret farewell to those around me. Next time I came home, I thought, I’d be returning from battle, a hardened veteran, and the party would be honouring me. Or I’d be dead and this would be my wake. As I stood watching people eating and drinking, perfunctorily toasting the royal family under ragged, faded Union Jack bunting flapping in a hot breeze, I thought I would make a very noble corpse. They didn’t know I was leaving, or that I might never return. I said goodbye to each and every one of them, even the kids. In my head, of course. I imagined their tears as I said my heroic goodbyes, and that look of patient resolve carved into my firm features. “Look after my wife,” I said gravely, and they nodded seriously and looked at Ruby’s proud face, outwardly calm in spite of her churned feelings. “I must go now,” I said, waving briefly, not turning back, for I knew I’d only make them all cry. Ruby would make a proud widow, I mused.
As it turned out, the war was over by the middle of June, and I felt more than a little cheated when I wasn’t personally there to see the flag put up in Port Stanley.
It appears I was destined to be forever saying goodbye without actually ever leaving.
My best man was a gangly, spotty youth I met at work, and whom I never saw again once I left the small firm of Boulton’s Hardware where I stacked tins of paint, piled planks of wood against walls, or threaded packets of screws and nails onto plastic pegs and humped stinking sacks of fish, blood and bone fertiliser. I cannot even remember the young man’s name. But he was the next best thing to a friend I had at the time. I didn’t care. That was merely detail. I was getting married to the most beautiful young woman in the entire history of beautiful women. It is only now, as I glance back at the time, that I actually see the wedding ring I put on her finger for what it was: a nine-carat manacle that strapped her to my obsession with her. But back then we were both grateful to be offering ourselves up to each other. It was the happiest day of my young life thus far.
We took up immediate residence in rented rooms above a butcher’s shop not three hundred yards from the house I’d lived in since a child. The butcher was a Polish man, who spent the long minutes he wasn’t serving customers staring out of his shop window with icy blue eyes, watching out for the Russian army, which he thought was coming to get him some time or other. He rarely left the shop, his English wife running all the errands, and he avoided contact with other Poles, on the basis, I assumed, that the Russians would find it easier to round up a concentration of Poles than isolated individuals. He believed there was no safety in numbers, only safety in seclusion. Mr Radunski had lost his entire family in the war, and I wondered what hellish visions so haunted his thoughts that they caused him to hack away at the meat with such ferocity and strength unaccountable for in such a slight and wiry man.
But the Radunskis treated us as something special. On the night of our wedding Mrs Radunski brought a huge pot of steaming goulash with freshly baked bread up to our room, her husband supplying a huge bottle of vodka. Later in the evening, exhausted and ravenous by our lovemaking, Ruby and I set about the meal with alacrity, sitting naked in bed and laughing at the sight of us dipping the still-warm crusty bread into bowls filled to the brim with spicy goulash, our senses
honed to a pitch as high as if we’d taken some exotic drug. We drank a little of the vodka and collapsed against each other with a fire we thought would never abate. And in the morning Mrs Radunski brought us up a cooked breakfast of liver, sausage, eggs, mushrooms and bacon, with more fresh bread smothered with rich yellow butter.
Ah, Ruby, I can still see your dazzling eyes even now. Though your face is a smear, your eyes are like twin beams of splendour penetrating a fog. How deliriously happy you were. I vowed I would always endeavour to keep it that way. I think I even promised you that as you lay back on the pillow and I kissed your greasy lips. At that moment I would have died to keep that promise.
“Where you go now, eh?” Mr Radunski always asked us with a wide grin as we left the shop for work, and as he accompanied us to the door we’d always tell him we were going out to work. He never once stepped over the threshold into the yard with us, perhaps afraid the sunlight might frazzle his emaciated limbs further. But he’d ask the same question again the following morning, and we’d politely give the same answer. Sometimes he’d catch us on our way up to our rooms and occasionally force a paper-wrapped package of sausages or ham or beef into our hands. If we were both together he’d invariably enquire, “When you ‘aving baby, eh?” his broken English thick with a northern accent, and we’d laugh. He took me on one side once, his body reeking as always of freshly cut meat, his apron smeared with scarlet gashes of blood. “Your Ruby,” he said close to my ear, “she buddy beautiful. Bonny, Bonny!” he enthused, giving me a wink. “She like my sister in Lublin, before de war. Bonny, Bonny!” and he strode away shaking a head that looked far too heavy for such a scrawny neck to support. He went down the hallway and back to the shop. There I saw him sitting on a stool, shoulders slumped, gazing through the window at the world beyond the pork pies, the bacon, and the bloodied hares hanging from chrome hooks, his eyes flicking fretfully this way and that. Waiting for the Russians that never came.
We didn’t have much money between us, though Ruby’s wage far outstripped mine. The region was awash with unemployed and I wasn’t about to argue for a pay rise just yet. I realised I was fortunate to have what little I did, and glad to be rid of the dole queue. Anyhow, with our resources pooled together we managed reasonably well. I remember it as a time of warm bedcovers and hot, cooked meat, of evenings listening to the music on the radio or watching our small black and white portable television given to us by Mrs Radunski. There was little else we craved. This was tinsel enough to decorate our newly erected wedding Christmas tree. We gazed at each other and wondered how was it remotely possible that two people could be so happy together, so thoroughly satisfied. Our heady, emotional pilings kept us raised high above the raging torments of the outside world that ran like a frothy maelstrom somewhere beneath our feet. We congratulated ourselves on our capacity for discovering the cure to life’s miseries, which the entire human race was hunting desperately for and as yet hadn’t found. It was here, Ruby and me, a huge bottle of it above a butcher’s shop, at the neck of which only our fortunate lips were able to sip.
The beginning of January brought snow. Lots of it. I rubbed away at a patch of condensation on our bedroom window, seeing all the cars parked along the roadside transformed overnight into icing sugar decorations framing the edge of a gargantuan birthday cake; the roads and pavements had become one, and the entire town was coated in a pristine, powdery white tablecloth of silk, as if it had been scrubbed fresh and clean by magical hands and brushes. The dirt and the squalor, the hopelessness and despair, all rinsed away to reveal the true town beneath.
I arose early and helped Mr Radunski clear a pathway from the back door before getting ready for work, the heavy shovelling of snow still very much a game for me. Mr Radunski’s face, however, remained grave throughout. “Don’t you like the snow, Mr Radunski?” I said. “I thought it would remind you of home.”
He grunted, knocked off a hardened lump of snow that had fastened itself to the rusted and pitted blade of his shovel. “I ‘ate de buddy stuff,” he growled, staring at the miniature replica of the Alps we’d just erected by the path.
We toiled at the snow for long, silent minutes before he straightened himself up, massaging the small of his back and turned to admire the clear path behind us. Wet concrete never looked so good. “We was in trucks,” he said, but didn’t look at me as he spoke. “Dis train take us to camp somewhere. Russian train.” He pointed with the flat of his hand across the undisturbed sheet of white to his outside toilet. “Clickety-clack, clickety-clack,” he said, his head wobbling lazily from side to side in time to his words. We in dis truck dey use for cows an’ pigs. Dey was a lot of us, ‘uddled togedder ‘cos it was buddy freezin’.” He attacked another glacier-like chunk of snow, sniffing the cold air. Then, as abruptly as he began, he halted, leaning on his shovel. “Siberia,” he said, looking across at me to see if I understood the significance of the word. I nodded as if I did, but its import was lost on me.
“We get dis metal an’ we break de lock, like so…Ah!” and he imitated the movement, my eyes following his to the empty ground as he looked at the imaginary broken lock sitting by his soaked boots. “I slide open de door. OH! Buddy freezin’! Buddy freezin’! Den I says we got to jump udderwise we all dead if we stay on dis train. But dey all shook ‘eads…’No, no, no!’ like dis, an’ I say we jump now. I tumped my friend; tumped ‘im ‘ard on de arm, but ‘ee shake ‘ead too. We get killed outside, ‘ee said, ‘an I jumped. I left dem silly buggers on de train.”
I waited, but he just stood there, silently studying the place at his feet where the imaginary lock fell. “What happened?” I nudged. “Did they catch you, Mr Radunski?”
His head darted to the side as if he’d heard a suspicious noise. The next time he spoke his voice was quieter, subdued. “I ended up in big snowdrift – high, high,” he gestured to a point some way above his head. “I wait till sound of train go away and den I dig out. It night, but der was a big Moon in der sky. Der snow looked like a big blue sea. I saw de train, way off in de distance, all dis white smoke comin’ out of its funnel. Puff, puff, puff! Like a big white bird fedder!”
I watched him intently as he resumed his digging, but his heart wasn’t in it. It was as if the talking had drained the last of his strength. “What happened to them, Mr Radunski?” I asked. “Those left behind on the train?”
He looked off into the distance at a trio of cooling towers that belched thick white clouds of steam into a monotonous grey sky, as if they were attempting to pull a ghostly pall over the entire land. “Dey all dead,” he said heavily. “If you ever on train, you jump. You don’t stay on wi’ de udders. Stay on, you die. You jump, you live.” His face was deadly serious. He looked suddenly uneasy. “Dat’s enough. We finish. Too buddy cold!” and he threw down his shovel onto the pile of dirty snow and hurried into the security of the house.
His words would come back to haunt me later.
I finished the path for him and was stowing the shovels away when I heard the sound of someone’s boots causing the snow to squeak as they trudged through the deep drifts. I turned and saw Bernard wrapped in a great black overcoat, his hands hidden in pockets, the collar turned up to protect his neck. His lips flashed a smile, but it was over as soon as it had begun. His eyes looked desperate. He then brushed his hand through the greying hair over his ear, as if embarrassed, on the verge, I thought, of walking away from me.
“Morning, Bernard,” I said, which fixed him to the spot. “I thought you’d be long gone for work by now.” I closed the shed door, the thud dislodging snow from the roof, which fell back onto the recently cleared path. I cursed and kicked it away. “You want to see Mr Radunski?”
He shook his head quickly. “I came to see you, actually.”
“Oh?” We stood there, facing each other, and he did more hair stroking. “What about?” I said eventually.
“The fact is,” he began, then cleared an already clear throat. “The fact is I haven’t got a
job anymore. They finished me just before Christmas.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, Bernard,” I said, meaning every word.
“Restructuring, they called it. Short of cash is what we said it was. They finished a whole lot of us just like that. Anyhow, I ain’t there anymore and there’s nothing I can do about it. I’m looking, don’t get me wrong,” he said, as if I was about to accuse him of something, “but you know how it is.”
I did. “Is there anything I can do?” I said.
“Well, that’s what I was coming to ask.” He bent his head and strangely his eyes seemed to find the exact spot where Mr Radunski had searched out his broken lock minutes earlier. “I was wondering whether you might ask at that place of yours if there was anything going.” It was hard for him. He was old enough to be my father. “Anything will do.”
“I’ll ask for you, Bernard,” I replied sincerely. “I don’t think there are any vacancies at the moment, but I’ll put in a damn good word for you all the same.”
He grinned, but it was a shadow of its former self. “You’re a good ‘un, Collie, that you are.” And he turned and made his way out of the yard and into the muffled white world beyond.
On Bernard’s behalf I asked about vacancies, but Mr Boulton the manager met my enquiry with a smug snort, informing me that there were hundreds who were ready to pounce on any job he might have. I could tell it made him feel important, as if his grotty little DIY store had overnight become the centre of the known economic universe, a tide of desperate people swilling around him, begging, pleading, and he like some kind of self-important, entrepreneurial Moses holding back the water. He liked the fact that young Patricia, who sat behind the till, had A-Levels, and I even heard him bragging about it to a sales rep who’d called to sell him paint; almost in the same breath that he boasted about his new Ford Escort.
Blood Bonds: A psychological thriller Page 17
