by James Runcie
It got to the stage where the pressure of looking after my husband became so difficult that it was almost impossible to carry on and so Len and I found a home that could take better care of him. We both knew that George would be happier with proper nursing and we could always take him out for day trips to give him a bit of company when he needed it.
The woman at the home was a bit off when we came to sort it out but I told her it was going to be best for all of us and once I’d paid a cash deposit she didn’t take it further. I visited twice a week and George and I sat in the garden when the weather was clement. He liked it out there because it could be a bit depressing indoors. The window in his room was that bit too high so he couldn’t quite see out of it but as it looked out on the back it didn’t really matter.
Meanwhile Len and I got on with our lives. Neither of us was getting any younger and so I told him that it was only right that he should take care of me. There was hardly going to be anyone else at this stage of the game.
‘I’ll look after you anytime, old girl …’ he said.
‘Less of the old, dear,’ I said.
He laughed but the joke was wearing a bit thin because it had been a while since men had stopped speaking when I walked down the street. I had to make a bit more of an effort with my appearance. It was getting to be hard work just to look decent.
Lily had the right idea, of course, having a child as soon as she could and then dying before she lost her looks. Sometimes I worried I was going to turn into one of those childless women I’d always dreaded, putting on a brave face, making the best of things with the past behind me, looking after an invalid husband and everyone giving me pitying looks. That’s another reason why George had to go. I couldn’t take the embarrassment.
When Len and I were out and people thought I was Martin’s mother, I could almost believe that we were a family and that I’d done it after all. I could see strangers watching us and thinking, They’re all right. Sometimes I thought it would be easier if George was gone, and then Len and me could be together, but it was terrible to think in that way. Imagine wishing your husband dead.
But whenever I tried to look smart and went out for a dance with Len we got these catty looks. At first I thought it was jealousy because not many couples could match our triple chassé round a corner in the quickstep, but it soon became apparent that it wasn’t that at all. It was because people thought we were enjoying ourselves that bit too much.
Well, if they were going to talk, I thought I might as well give them something to talk about. Len and I had never got round to any of that saucy business in the past – well, not properly, because Martin was always snooping around – so we’d had all of the gossip and none of the pleasure.
So eventually I decided enough was enough. I told Len to smarten up and come round for an intimate birthday dinner at my house. It would make a change from the two of us going out for a meal in a restaurant and we could take things at our own pace. I would make sure that everything was right and then, at the end of the evening, we would be ready for each other.
The day before the meal I went to London and made a treat of it, shopping, meeting a friend for lunch and having my hair done (restyled, swept back, a hint of titian in the colouring; I wasn’t going to be one of those women who dye their hair so black it looks purple). I went to Dickens & Jones and bought a new brassière, a girdle, suspenders and a couple of pairs of stockings in case I laddered one of them. I wanted underwear that looked good underneath but which could still give pleasure when the clothes came off.
The colour scheme, I decided, was going to be silver and pink. I bought a rose chiffon blouse and found the shoes and the lipstick to match. Then there was a grey pleated cashmere skirt with a zip down the side that would be easy enough for Len to locate should he so desire.
On the day itself I made sure that as much of the food as possible could be prepared in advance. I didn’t want to have to change at the last minute or spend time cooking while leaving Len alone in the living room. We were going to have salmon with new potatoes and green beans, followed by summer pudding, keeping the pink theme going. I didn’t want a heavy dessert like a pie or a trifle because I wanted Len to have some appetite left at the end of the meal.
I put on some music to relax as I laid out the pink candles and the silver napkins. Len was a bit late which suited me because when he arrived everything was ready. He was wearing a navy-blue blazer and had done his hair so that he smelt nice and clean, of hair oil and cologne, and I knew I’d been right to make such an effort. He was impressed with the preparations and soon we settled down and laughed and felt at home.
When we had finished the meal I asked Len to move over to the settee and he looked a bit surprised, saying that he was quite happy staying at the table.
‘Come on, Len,’ I said, ‘let’s make ourselves comfortable.’ I took off my shoes and sat down next to him.
‘Isn’t this the time to open my present?’
I thought of joking, pretending there wasn’t one. ‘It’s here,’ I said. Even the wrapping paper was silver.
‘Looks a bit thin,’ he said. ‘I wonder what it is.’
‘You’ll have to open it.’ My voice had gone high, and there was a slight laugh that I didn’t know I had.
‘What’s this then?’ Len asked, tearing open the paper.
‘What do you think?’
‘These are empty packets of women’s underwear. Suspenders and things. What would I want with all that? Are you having a laugh?’
‘Haven’t you guessed?’ I said.
‘What do you mean?’
He looked a bit scared.
‘I’m your present,’ I said. ‘And there’s a lot more unwrapping to be done.’
Martin
I couldn’t stand seeing them together. Whenever they were in the house, and it wasn’t dinner time, I went off on my bicycle, down Smallgains Avenue towards the sea, cycling along the esplanades and up the coast towards Leigh, thinking how much I hated them, remembering my mother, wondering what I could do to keep her memory safe.
At school, I listened hardest to the stories about water. I read about Noah’s flood, and every deluge in the world that followed. I drew diagrams of the water cycle, and coloured the coastline of the maps, shading the black lines of land with a light-blue crayon, edging it as carefully as I could. I wanted to fill in the details of the sea rather than the land. Instead of London, Manchester, Glasgow and Dublin, I named tides and currents, tectonic plates, streams of air and water.
I wanted to learn as much as I could about the sea and remember my mother in everything I did. I studied the currents from the estuary and out into the North Sea, how they came together and then diverged, the water rising from below to fill the place where the streams had separated. The names of the channels were ghosts of the past: Knock John, Shivering Sands, Black Deep.
In the National Geographic magazines in the library, I saw pictures of the sea wearing down the coast by chiselling out and wrenching away fragments of rock. As the cliffs were undercut, huge masses fell away to be ground in the mill of the surf, becoming weapons of erosion. On the shore, I looked at the ceaseless grinding of the pebbles, the fierce thunder of the billows, the whiplash crack of the rising waters.
After school and at the weekends I rode round the island collecting fossils from salt-water pools, the brine of ancient seas hidden deep under the surface of the earth. I knew there were billions of tiny shells and skeletons, the limy or siliceous remains of all the minute creatures that once lived in the upper waters, fragments of meteorite, rock, sand and volcanic dust. This was the abandoned history of the world.
I imagined the sea expanding and contracting as I breathed, a giant presence from which I could never escape. This was what it was like to live in the shadow of ocean. It was the same as the shadow of loss. It would never rest.
Three
Linda
I hated having to go round for tea with them but our mums had be
en friends and I felt sorry for Martin. His voice was late to break and he held his head to one side in a shy way; like a wounded bird. Of course, I knew about all the gossip and how everyone disapproved of Len and Vi after they’d carted her husband off to a home. The two of them went around like they were a couple but whenever anyone suggested anything she took the hump. Too good for us, she thought she was.
Martin had passed his eleven-plus and was already at Southend High School, but you could tell he was clever just by looking at him. He had one of those foreheads where all the brains are pressed close and seem as if they are about to burst through at any moment. When you talked to him, he didn’t speak straight away but waited until he had something to say; he never spoke when he didn’t have to. In fact I think he quite liked silence, just as I did, and so once we stopped trying to like each other for the sake of our parents we found that we got on quite naturally after all: it was that and the fact that Martin grew into his good looks and came out charming.
I loved the softness in his eyes. They were dark grey and appeared to fold around his pupils like clouds. I told Martin that his eyelashes were like pencil marks. I think he was embarrassed but I knew he was flattered to be seen with me.
I suppose he brought out the mother in me even though I’ve never really felt maternal. He certainly wasn’t someone a girl would fancy straight away but he listened well. I didn’t know anyone else who was so concerned about my stupid little hopes and fears; not since Dad left anyway.
By the time Martin hit sixteen, he was six foot tall and had decided to become a water engineer. He wanted to be the first member of his family to go to university and he went to Cambridge to talk about the qualifications he needed to get there. They told him he needed decent A levels and six months’ practical experience in a machine shop.
That might have put some people off but Martin found work in a factory run by his friend Ade’s dad at the Point. By the end of the six months he had made sure that he knew how every tool in the factory worked, learning how to weld and use the lathe, taking his turn on the shaping, slotting and milling machines, even if it meant staying late. Some of the lads there had already become my friends, especially after I’d shown them how I could take their jokes about power tools, hot rods and insertion rates.
The boys were all Mods and they wore classy suits with the Army Surplus parka coats to protect them when they were riding the Vespas and Lambrettas. We spent weekends drinking and then bombing along the back routes to Leigh and Westcliff. We liked to make old men stare.
I knew why I liked Martin but I was never sure why he was keen on me. Perhaps he thought I was confident. Or easy. Perhaps he even liked my painting.
I was about to go to art school and I’d done these spirit pictures, people against the night seas and the moon, making them look dreamy so that you could see through them while knowing, at the same time, that they were there, like angels except they were real people. I’d imagined they were dead already or hadn’t even been born, the spirits of my friends apart from their physical bodies.
Martin had never met someone who wanted to be an artist and he talked about his mother and how he found it hard to believe in the idea of resurrection, and so what was I doing painting these dead people? Did I understand something that he did not?
I did a series of tiny paintings on pebbles and bits of sea glass. I wanted to use driftwood, plastic, rope and even seaweed, anything that had been discarded or worn away. Martin and I beachcombed together, collecting fragments of old beer and wine bottles on the shore, glass made smooth by the action of waves.
Martin gathered his own secret supply and stayed on late at work for two weeks, using the tools in the machine shop to make me a necklace. He’d graded the sea glass carefully, so that the darkest brown was at the centre to match my eyes, the stones becoming paler as they stretched round to the back of my neck, meeting in a silver clasp. When the boys first saw the necklace they were embarrassed, dismissing Martin’s dedication because it was all too much. But I could tell that they wished they’d thought of it themselves. ‘You’ll get to go all the way for that, Marty,’ I heard his friend Ade telling him.
But Martin was never pushy about sex, not to begin with at least. It was like he thought it was something other people did. The boys couldn’t understand it. My friend Dave, who was going to be a pop star, even asked if Martin was a homo.
‘Of course he isn’t,’ I said. ‘He’s just taking his time. Unlike some I could mention.’
‘You were keen enough when we started.’
‘It’s over, Dave. Over. You said so yourself.’
‘Doesn’t mean I can’t come back for more, though.’
‘It does, Dave, you’ve had your share.’
When it started, boys, sex, all that, I had trouble keeping people like Dave off me and I wasn’t sure any of it was worth the hurt when it ended so Martin came as a bit of a relief. He was serious, like he wanted to wait, and I respected him for that.
We were walking on the beach, following the strandline, looking for sea glass amidst the hornwrack and the mermaid’s purse, and Martin had his arm round me when he finally asked, ‘What’s it like?’
‘Sex?’ I said.
‘Kissing. With tongues.’
‘Wanna try?’
‘You’ll let me?’
‘You don’t have to ask,’ I said.
Martin
Linda was tall for her age – about five foot nine, I suppose – and she was thin, skinny you’d have to say, with boyishly short dark hair. She held her body askance, aware that she had a peculiar beauty which she couldn’t be bothered to display, and she spoke so little that people thought she was odd, too odd. Even her parents had thought she was backward and wanted to have another child quickly, ‘just in case’.
Her eyes were so many different kinds of brown and gold and amber, the ring of the iris a confusion of spots, wedges and spokes of colour like the kaleidoscope I’d been given as a child. If she hadn’t had the height and the confidence, people might have said that her features were pixie-like, but she was too beautiful for that and she wouldn’t take any lip. Her chin jutted forward, challenging all comers, and her voice had a withheld power.
What do you want with me, Martin?
She was a mixture of flirtation and aggression. When I looked at her mouth, I was surprised by her fearlessness and the darkness of her laugh.
What now, then?
Once I kissed the whole of ‘God Save the Queen’ on her bare feet. They were dark with sand and street, but the tips of her toes were pale pink. Linda told me to stop because it tickled so much but I’d already got to the second verse.
‘What are the rules?’ I asked.
‘There aren’t any.’
‘No limits?’
‘Anything you like …’
‘Anything?’
‘Well. Not below the waist, of course.’
‘I’m already there. At your toes.’
She looked down and smiled. ‘I mean naked.’
I’d tried to learn lessons from the readers’ letters of pornographic magazines which Ade rented out for sixpence a night: Hefty, Hi-Ball, Jigger and Jade; Sheer, Shanty, Sextet and Score. Ade talked about the stages he’d been through on a scale of one to ten and I tried to work it out; kissing on the cheek, the lips and then with tongues were the first three, fondling with clothes on was four, breasts five, and a fumble down below was six. But what were the stages between six and ten? Ade talked about ‘a full house’ or a ‘right royal flush’ and I wondered if that was actually number seven and there were three more things I didn’t yet know anything about. He and Dave then started to go on about ‘relief’, ‘sandwiches’ and ‘doing it with animals’ so that I even wondered if there were ten further stages.
I went to the library to do some research and learnt the words for each bit of Linda’s body. I told her I wanted to kiss every part of her like the song, the foot bone and then the ankle bone; I was going to
be the first man to kiss her all over.
She was still keeping at least some of her clothes on but she never told me to stop. I turned it into a sort of horse race, doing a commentary in an Irish accent that I’d heard in the bookie’s with my father – he’s coming up the arm, he’s passed the wrist, he’s heading towards the elbow, and now he’s on the upper arm, he’s reaching the armpit (a bit of hair to negotiate here even though it’s been shaved quite recently) and he’s on, on to the collarbone and neck, the lips, the nose, the eyelids and forehead, back down the hair, the neck towards the right shoulder, down the arm again, across to the breast, it could be hours, literally hours, before he reaches his final destination but this man shows no sign of stopping, he’s kissing every part of her, he can’t be stopped … He’s going for parts no man has ever kissed before …
‘Steady,’ she said.
It’s true, every part of her body will be covered, there’ll be no flesh unkissed, what a demon, what an animal, this man is …
She told me I had to wait, she didn’t want to get too serious, but I went to the barber’s for the condoms just in case. The atmosphere was heavy with soap and lubrication, Brylcreem and hair oil. It was the smell of anticipation.
I thought if I had the condoms and told her I was all prepared then Linda would have to let me go with her in the end. I tried to imagine what it would be like; the release of desire and for how long it could go on. In the magazines, they talked of lasting for hours, so I dreamt it wouldn’t be messy and grubby and quick like Linda had once said it was. I wondered how far her friend Dave had gone and if there had been others but each time I asked she laughed and changed the subject.
‘When are you going to let me?’ I asked.
‘It’s no big deal,’ she said. ‘I don’t think it’s all it’s cracked up to be.’
‘So you know …’
‘I might do, I might not.’
‘Then why don’t we do it?’
