Permafrost

by Peter Robertson

  This was an unforeseen development as my mother had always been a physically strong and resolute woman.

  We had lived out my childhood on the council estate, in a small two-bedroom house that backed onto an abandoned railway line. Occasionally children threw stones into our garden, shattering the few remaining pieces of glass in the greenhouse where my late father had puttered about during the summer.

  After his death, my mother collected a pension but also worked two part-time jobs each day, as a lunch server and as a cleaning lady, at the local school, the very same school that I attended.

  Her menial presence there was our painful little secret.

  She got to work each day at eleven, riding on a bike with a broken bell and a basket in the front, a half hour before the ready-cooked meals were delivered. At twelve, the first lunch shift was served. And at two, when the cafeteria closed, the foil containers were washed and stacked, the tables wiped, the floors swept. At three, the catering company truck swung back, and a flirtatious yob in a stained and sleeveless T-shirt winked at the women and picked up the empties. After that she sat with the other women and smoked the third of her five allotted Silk Cut King Size cigarettes of the day, washed down with a mug of strong tea, sweetened by a dark chocolate digestive biscuit.

  My mother began cleaning the classrooms from four-thirty in the afternoon, a half hour after the last period ended, until the job was done, which was usually at around seven-thirty or so, when she came home to drink the mug of strong tea I had diligently brewed. On a Monday and Wednesday she sat down to watch her favorite television show, her tea mug in hand, her last cigarette of the day glowing in a nearby ashtray. On the screen a working class soap opera played out on a cobbled street in an industrial town with bleached-blonde gossips in salt-of-the-earth workingman’s pubs.

  She thought it silly. Yet she watched it religiously.

  We saw the most of each other in the mornings, when she got up early and made my breakfast. In the short, dark winter days we had hot porridge, with a dollop of strawberry jam in the center, the whole glutinous mass floating in the cream from the top of the milk bottle. We ate corn flakes garnished with slices of banana in the summer months.

  She ate well at breakfast, tended to nibble from the lunch stuff at work, and usually made do with the biscuit with her tea in the evening.

  I got a school lunch each day, and cut myself thick wedges of cheddar cheese on slices of white pan loaf for my dinner (we were sufficiently working class to refer to it as “tea”).

  I was always home first, and after I finished all my homework I sat down in the tiny kitchen to eat alone, a science-fiction paperback propped against a ketchup bottle, a record playing loudly on the stereo in the front room. My mother liked the Beatles, I did too, but I could never admit to that. So instead I made myself listen to the albums the other children brought to school for music appreciation class: Emerson, Lake, and Palmer and Deep Purple mostly. We forced our poor teacher, a keen classical music lover, to endure both sides of ELP’s crass brutalization of Pictures at an Exhibition.

  The man must have truly hated us.

  I listened to the White Album at home. “While My Guitar Gently Weeps.” George Harrison was my favorite Beatle, even though I knew that Eric Clapton played the best guitar parts on that song.

  My strongest memories of my mother are inexplicably frozen in my mid-teen years. She naturally existed before and after that period but my sense of her then is hazy at best. She was somewhere in her forties at that time, with me an awkward fourteen or so, shy and skinny, a bookworm bound for university, which was as much her dream as it was mine.

  When I dropped out to stay in America and marry Patricia, my mother was crestfallen, and would stay that way, until after Patricia’s father died, until she could see that I was standing on my own two feet, without the aid of a rich man, and without the crutch of a university degree.

  I think she was finally a little proud of me then.

  But when I was fourteen she fretted. Were my school clothes fine enough? Did I need a new father? (She did meet men occasionally, at the pottery classes she attended at the poly, even once at a Sunday School picnic where they chatted each other up across the aisle of the bus heading home in the late afternoon, flirting and plainly oblivious to the snickering children full of fizzy pop and potato crisps, and me, silently mortified.)

  Her very worst fear was that the children in my class would discover that she was a menial at the school.

  Naturally we had the same surname, but it was a very common one. That alone wouldn’t give us away.

  To my knowledge we were never detected by the bulk of the student body. Several times I stayed behind for an after school activity, the chess club, or war games society, and she, armed with her metal bucket full of sudsy water and large mop, would enter the room, her pale blue uniform over her clothes, her red hair tied up with a white handkerchief. She was never alone. They cleaned the school in teams of three.

  The other women never once let on they knew me, per her instruction.

  Of course there were a handful of children who lived near me, who were close to me in age, who I knew, and who did know our secret. Each of these houses had been canvassed by my mother, who had spoken to the doubtless bemused parents, asking that her place of employment never be divulged.

  Stranger still, my mother’s rule of silence apparently extended to the teachers at the school, who had to know, but who never, to my knowledge, let on. My mother, a small wisp of a thing with her flaming hair, was clearly a much-feared dictator.

  But that was then. On entering her seventies, her mortality seized her.

  So Patricia and I were summoned home that year.

  In her retirement she had moved into a small gray stone house on a busy main street. It was smaller than the council house I grew up in, if that were possible, but she owned it, or rather the building society did. An economic slump had lasted for years, and in its wake house prices were in a state of free-fall. The mortgage payments on the small house were therefore reasonable. Her savings, and her tiny pension, along with my father’s pension, more than covered it and left her well provided for, especially given the frugal lifestyle that she led.

  But she hadn’t possessed the necessary cash for the down payment.

  And I did.

  She would never forgive me for lending her the money. It was never mentioned. Yet she never forgot it. It drove a wedge between us. But I was still glad I had done it, because she loved her new house, and lavished great care on it, care our council place had never received.

  We sat with her the first night, in her tiny living room, as she watched her television and occasionally talked, her eyes seldom leaving the screen. She looked much the same. Yet she had aged. The world had enclosed her, and left her more fearful.

  Perhaps the media was to blame. Because every mean and senseless act made tabloid headlines, and somehow lost all proportion and distance, in the transition to large black ink, or in the strident voice of the ratings-seeking investigative journalist.

  So when she ventured out to the corner store, the two young men standing at the postbox would likely stab her and leave her to die if she walked past them. And a baby crying in a crib was likely an abused child. And a man buying a bottle of inexpensive wine in an off-license was in all probability a killer or rapist.

  She talked that way much of the time. I found it very hard to listen, and even harder to square the vision of my new mother with the indelible model I had, proud and protective and fearless, at least for herself.

  After a day or two of paranoid captivity, I had to escape, if only for a couple of hours.

  As unlikely as it seems, my mother and Patricia got on well, sharing a love of afternoon talk shows. Within the genre, they even favored the same kind of show. The rule of thumb was wholesomeness: discussion groups on relationships, on tough love
, crisis interventions, and self-help. The lower-grade programs, the sexist fluff with teenage transvestites and whores who were expressing impotent rage at years of suppressed abuse, were promptly turned off, and a large video library of past feel-good episodes would be ransacked for a treasured old favorite.

  From her overstuffed floral print sofa my mother looked beseechingly for a beacon shining in the lurking moral darkness she was certain existed just beyond her front door. My mother monitored these shows for a sign of hope.

  I never did know what Patricia saw in them. It occurs to me now that they would both have relished the warm feel-good spectacle of Connie Alexander’s twin boys and their twin wives-to-be declaring their twin loves before a beaming and bespectacled Sally Jesse.

  So one night I served two cups of tea, fetched my coat from the bottom of the stairs and left them to a show devoted to adopted children who had determined in later life to seek out their true birth parents and to then wallow in the subsequent cathartic release.

  On an impulse I left the rented car parked outside the house and instead caught the bus into the city.

  I sat in the upstairs, in the past the province of small children and unrepentant smokers. Now the buses were all smoke-free. I stared out the window, hunting for familiar landmarks as the bus left our town and slunk through the first suburbs of the city. When I was a child, a thin buffer of farmland had existed between the town and city, an unobtrusive farmhouse and a thin strip of grazing for a handful of oblivious sheep. The membrane was forever gone.

  The city too had changed, offering newer and bigger supermarkets with parking for a battalion of shoppers. In general, there was much more traffic on the roads. Yet as we neared the city center, I also sensed that the heart of the place remained stubbornly unchanged. It was still gray and wet, never more than half an hour until the next gentle shower on the Georgian stone of the new town, with its monuments to dead inventors and tall imperious columns slick and shiny and green, moss-bound from the winds that blew in from the sea. The yellow glare of the streetlights reflected in the damp stone, and the smooth sheen on the cobbled streets warmed the darkness of the night that stole away fully two-thirds of the daytime in the long winter months.

  It was raining as I got off the bus.

  In the west end of the city center, I ducked under a wide pavement, beneath a venerable old building now housing a building society, where a fashionable wine bar now resided. Upscale yuppie chic came with a false bohemian façade. Posters of avant-garde productions hung in a near pitch-black room constructed out of what had once been a wine cellar. An arm and a leg was being charged for thin burgundy wines by the bottle or glass, or else a warm, cloudy real ale from a wooden barrel that sat on the counter beside the bored bargirl who was wearing an improbable beret set at a jaunty angle and reading Melody Maker.

  I ordered a glass of the house red and sat in a far corner. In the early evening, the drab hours between the after-work office crowd at five and the first sightings of the night people at closer to nine, I had the place to myself.

  I breathed in the solitude.

  “I can turn the music up if you like,” the beret girl said helpfully. “It’s Queen’s Greatest Hits.”

  “Would it be okay if you didn’t bother?” I asked her.

  “Oh sure.” She smiled. “Tell the truth, I cannae stand them much either.”

  “Can I get something to eat?”

  “Oh sure,” she offered. “We do brilliant crepes.”

  They were good, if nutritionally suspect, coming drenched in grease and cheese and mushy overcooked mushrooms, with a great mound of chips on the side. The beret girl also handled waitress duties, and brought me a small loaf of warm garlic bread and another half bottle of the house red.

  She also offered me her paper. I peered suspiciously at the front page. None of the names meant a damn thing to me. In my college years, I had squandered a good portion of my grant money buying limited-edition, multicolored vinyl punk singles by the very latest loudmouthed, thin-trousered collection of talentless yobs. I wondered where those yobs were now. And where my lurid green and pink 45s were for that matter. I peered at the small print. How could she read in this subterranean darkness?

  I smiled and handed the paper back.

  “I like your beret.” I said.

  She touched it, as if she had forgotten it was there. “Thanks. I got it at the January sales. Trez sheek, nez pa?” Her accent was so truly excruciating I was inclined to believe she was trying to be funny.

  I smiled anyway.

  Outside it had stopped raining. The wind had strengthened to a formidable northerly that left me momentarily breathless. As I zipped up my leather jacket, I looked at my watch. It was still early.

  I remembered a favorite bar from somewhere in my youth, a room of dark paneled wood, a real fire with cracked brown leather bench seats close by, that had to be fought for on a cold night. The place was impossibly old, and steeped in all kinds of largely dubious history.

  Even if the wool-scarved theology students from the local university dormitories had laid claim to the large table in the center of the room for their earnest alcohol-driven debates, and in the process driven all the old timers in their cloth caps supping their slow halves to moan and do their unhurried drinking elsewhere, it was still a decent enough place. But it was a long walk, up a steep curving hill into the oldest part of the city.

  At the corner of the street, an old church stood in the center of a ruined cemetery where a tormented poet of questionable talent and legendary sexual prowess, a famously obese and politically connected brothel keeper, and a pioneering spirit in the field of anesthesiology were all buried under tombstones cracked and crumbling and smoothed into a uniform anonymity by the harsh undiscriminating elements.

  The church was a well-known one, a gothic-towered haven of dour evangelism, past and present. It now boasted an anachronistic minister of the old order, who packed the pews with the fearful, and with a fiery retrogressive rhetoric foretold of just damnation, in a manner that brought to mind the hellfire-stoked, blinkered morality practiced in the Presbyterian churches of yesteryear.

  Beneath the church was a cavernous hall, where hot satisfying meals were dispensed to the lost, where two lines of crisply folded camp beds awaited the destitute, and from which earnest young people with comforting homilies on buttons attached to the lapels of their sensible coats were dispatched, to stand on the nearby corners, in their sensible shoes, and bear loud and articulate witness to the miracle that is Our Salvation Through Christ Jesus Our Lord.

  On this occasion a girl with frizzy light brown hair turned to the texture of a Brillo pad by the moist air, in a brown duffel coat, brown wool tights, and a loud scarf in the striped colors of one of the city’s better private schools, was beseeching us to let The Lord Jesus Into Our Hearts.

  She was a young yet wise-enough orator. Having doubtless grown up in a nice part of town, sired by tweedy, stolid parents who wordlessly loved her, and drove an expensive yet practical car, and played passable golf, and read one of the thick quality newspapers on a tranquil Sunday morning over muted strains of Vivaldi or Radio Four, she lacked the necessary credentials for a spectacular witness to her own personal redemption. There was for her no rough road traveled before her Damascus. So, clever lass that she was, she had herself a prop. A genuine downtrodden, one of the clearly fallen, a lost soul, a wretched bum at the gates, a Dickensian image sprung to life and perched at the edge of the fiery abyss.

  I stood there astonished.

  She had Keith Pringle by her side.

  He stared sullenly at the ground. His army greatcoat was much too large for him in the body, and his thin arms stuck out from the sleeves like twigs. His hair was cut brutally short and he needed a shave. His suede shoes were old and shiny and the cuffs of his corduroy trousers dragged along the pavement.

  “My
friend Keith here was once lost and alone in the world.”

  I hoped he would look up then. But he didn’t. The contrite pose he had adopted was perhaps unintentional, but it was clearly appropriate for the occasion. He was the very essence of a lost sheep.

  “But Our Lord in his infinite goodness found Keith in the darkness and brought him to us.”

  And as I stood there listening and not listening I thought I understood the methodology. Keith might very well be saved. He might even be repentant. But more likely he was just hungry and tired, and therefore willing to perform this silly, silent mime of contrition, of abject subjugation, for a bowl of hot soup and a cup of milky tea in a bent metal mug, and a night on a metal framed single bed, with a rough blanket over him, and a thin foam pillow under his tousled head, and the company of the other ersatz repentants, all snoring and dreaming and turning fitfully in the night, sweating off their benders and gripped by the dream-state horrors that their minds, laid waste by all forms of physical and spiritual malnutrition they could fashion for themselves.

  They, like Keith, were bought men. And bought cheaply.

  The girl continued to speak. “That he might be saved by Christ Jesus. And that his plight might speak to us. For we should never forget, that without the grace of The Lord we are all just like Keith.”

  He looked up then, for the first time, at the sound of his name. Like an obedient pup. And our eyes did meet. Did he smile then for a second? And was it a smile of relief? Or was it instead a cynical smile? It was very dark. And it lasted only a second.

  He pulled his coat about him. He looked at the girl as she spoke. And I knew then that he wanted her to stop. He wanted his reward, his food, his shelter. He wanted his doggy treat.

  And I was certain then that he believed about as much as I believed.

  Which was none at all.

  “We all need to eat from the Bread of Life. To take comfort in the Presence of the Lord. To enter into the Many Mansions of his Heavenly Father.” She was now unloading platitudes at a ferocious pace. Then she took his hand in hers. He looked up in surprise and I assumed the movement was unrehearsed. They stood together in silence.