Kate and Emma

by Monica Dickens

  The front room isn’t bad, if you like a nice view of people’s feet and ankles going by. Sam and Emily play out in the little space there, and at first I tried to stop Sammy going up the stone steps and into the street, but he’s three and a half now, and there are a lot of kids out there for him to play with. He almost got run over once, and the woman in the car asked him where he lived and brought him home. Before I could begin to thank her, she started in preaching to me that he shouldn’t be on the street alone. In the old days, I would have told her what she could do with it. Now I can’t be bothered. I just said: Yeah, and leaned on the doorframe patiently, until she shrugged her shoulders and went away.

  This house is between street lamps, and when the night comes down, our basement is very dark if you don’t have the lights on, which often we don’t because we are playing Tunnel games.

  One we play is that we are doomed miners, trapped by a fall of coal. We have just the one box of matches and a bottle of Coke between us. Bob and I sit on the floor in the passage and sing hymns and tap on the wall in code and talk about our wives who are waiting for us in those shawls, at the pithead.

  We do it usually when the kids are in bed, because this one isn’t any fun for them. They like the gnomes and rats one better. Sometimes we are men with beards and khaki shorts, exploring an ancient pyramid. We take turns to be the Curse of the Pharaohs, the walking mummy that comes looming out of the shed with a towel round its face, greedy for human flesh. Sometimes we are people in an air-raid shelter, waiting for the dust to settle after the Bomb so we can get out and see who’s left, and we plan what we will do with London if there’s no one else.

  The Tunnel has its points, if you can find them, but then I get to thinking of Moll, and of Em, and Em’s flat. It seems I can’t get it out of my head, the flat, with that marvellous colour in the pictures they had up, and the smell of clean hair and cooking.

  It is all gone. The flat. Em. Molly. Me, the real Kate. There are times when I actually hate Bob. I hate him like red fire, and I would hurt him, kill him I expect, if I was bigger and he wasn’t so strong. If I go for him, he can get hold of my two wrists in one of his huge clumsy hams and hold me yelling while he hits me with the other.

  Violetta, the big coloured woman a few doors down, who I am friends with because she has a T.V., says, when I get in a temper: Take it easy, or you kill yourself, child.

  Well, I will die, and they’ll all be sorry for what they’ve done to me. What have they done? Violetta asks. She makes me ill, she is so stupidly contented. What has she got to be contented about? Her husband has a piece of his jaw eaten away by cancer because he wouldn’t go to the hospital soon enough. When she tried to make him, he would laugh and say: You the one who’s sick, not me. So now he has to have his food mashed up, and use a plastic glass because his teeth chatter.

  Violetta never hits her children, but I think she dopes them, the babies, hers and the ones she minds for women out at work. They sit on chairs or beds quite still, with those eyes like cream sandwich biscuits. No trouble, she says. It’s one of her great expressions. Nothing bothers her. She is huge all round like a barrel, with all the grease she eats coming out on her skin and through her blouse.

  No trouble. She takes babies for nothing sometimes. She should have Sammy if she wants to see trouble. He does everything he can against me. Why can’t you be like your sisters? I ask him, and he just looks at me with those ancient eyes and goes off and breaks something, or gets himself into a mess because I’m changing the baby and he’s jealous.

  I have dreams about him sometimes. Bad ones, always. I don’t understand why a mother would dream about her child like that. He is dark, like Bob, but he hasn’t got Bob’s big moon face. His cheeks and chin are made of small, angled bones, like mine. He looks like you, people say, but if I had looked at my mother with that haunted stare, she would have put me in the canal.

  Bob is fond of Sammy. He likes him better than the girls. But then Bob likes being married to me. That’s the difference.

  The day Bob got fed up with the job at the warehouse, he brought home a dog. A dog, of all things, a great big collie with a self-conscious smile like a woman trying on hats, and a brand-new collar.

  ‘Where did you get him?’ I asked.

  ‘I bought him.’

  ‘The collar, perhaps, but that’s a class dog. They don’t give them away.’

  You don’t get them on the hire-purchase either, like the radiogram, and the big blue pram with the white-wall tyres he got me for Susannah, and I knew how much cash he had, or hadn’t, unless he’d had a lucky horse at last.

  ‘A chap gave him to me,’ he said with his head down, talking from under his hair like he does when he’s lying.

  ‘Very nice,’ I said crisply. ‘Just what we need.’ I was preparing to turn the animal out, when Bob said in his soft way, like a kid bringing you a fistful of dandelions, ‘I got him for you, Katie. I thought he’d be company.’

  ‘What do I need company for?’ I said, but softening a bit, ‘in this madhouse of retarded children?’

  ‘Protection then,’ he said, ‘when I’m at work.’

  ‘I thought you said you’d chucked it.’

  ‘I’m getting something else. A fellow I know is going to get me in to the small-parts shop where he works, back of the coal yards. You’re so pretty, Katie. I’m always afraid someone’s going to get in after you when I’m out.’

  There are times when I wish someone would. Even Dino with his hearthrug chest would make a refreshing change. But I know how to treat Bob - I should after four years, for he’s about as subtle as my big toe - so I kissed him then, and thanked him for the dog, and he’s been Bob’s dog ever since.

  Bruce is his name. He barks if anyone moves fast, and lifts his leg on the legs of furniture and even on people, if he’s in the mood, but otherwise he’s all right.

  Bob buys his food and gets his dinner ready, while Bruce lays on the cushion on the chair watching him, like a prince.

  You’re daft over that dog, I tell Bob, and he says: The dog is daft about me, but he likes Sammy best, actually. He lets the child take pieces out of his dish, even. I think that’s very nice, in a dog.

  I still think Bob may have stolen him, but I’ve said no more, for if he did, I don’t want to know.

  I think he does knock off a bit now and again, but if I ask him, he goes dreamy, or turns a silly joke about it, so I let it go. He is very dreamy at times. Those weeks he was out of work - for the small-parts shop was part of the dream, it seems - he’d take a chair and sit out in the passage with his arm along the draining-board, flicking ash in the sink, and looking at nothing by the hour. It’s one of his favourite places, especially now that Bruce is always in the good chair. We fall over him, but he sits there, chainsmoking and dreaming.

  He used to sit like that sometimes in the room at hell house. I can see him that Christmas, when the Salvation Army woman came to see Mr Zaharian, and she looked in on us with some oranges and a little stocking for Sammy.

  Sudden kindness always dissolves Bob - he cried, even, when Dolly brought us up that plaid blanket - and I remember him saying, sitting there by the sink with his feet round the rungs of the chair and his hair all over his eyes, ‘If I had a bit extra money,’ he said, Td give it to you people.’

  I thought that was a nice thing to say, but the woman said, very sharply, ‘If you had a bit extra, you should do something for your family,’ and went out the door and left us looking at each other. I hope she didn’t hear us laughing.

  When Bob’s at home, he plays with Sammy, or takes him out sometimes, and that helps. He takes him up West to see the Life Guards, and they hang about all day watching the sentries at the Palace, or going to a newsreel - God knows what they get up to.

  The warehouse wasn’t riches, but it was better than the unemployment money, and we were already behind on the rent as it was. I was getting up my nerve to go down to the National Assistance office, although I
hate the woman there, and it would be sure to be her day. She is a werewolf. She prowls at night, devouring teenagers. One day she’ll forget to change back at dawn, and she’ll come in behind the counter in that booth with the dirty remarks scrawled on the partitions, and the bell that you could die ringing before anyone would come, and all the patient, humiliated, desperate people on the benches will look up and see her fangs and red eyes.

  She said I was rude to her, and I was, but only to stop her being rude first.

  Just in time to save me from the dripping jaws, the Labour Exchange came up with something for Bob on the roads. He doesn’t like working outdoors, but he had to take it, and they advanced something for the rent too.

  Sammy had got used to having Bob home, and he played me up. He took Susannah one day - he can just carry her - and I found him trying to put her down the toilet. Another time, he turned on the gas tap on the stove. I lit it then, and put his finger in the flame, to show him.

  Bob took off at me about that, but I said: ‘What do you want him to do? Gas us all? Pull a pan of boiling water over on Emily?’

  For he is always at the stove, that child, fiddling, always fiddling and messing where he’s no right to be.

  I caught him in the bedroom smearing lipstick all over his face. He looked funny, I suppose, like a painted savage, but I didn’t see it that way. It was a new refill, Pyramid Pink, and the girl in the advertisement looked like I used to when my hair was long and I had that sweater dress. I was so angry I didn’t even know I’d hit the child until I saw his face after, and where I’d cut his lip with my ring.

  When Bob came home, he didn’t even ask what had happened. He picked up a piece of wood and hit me flat in the stomach. It hurt terribly and I ran off and laid on the bed and screamed, and after a bit I went to sleep. When I woke, I still hurt, and I thought, well, maybe it’s a good thing. If I am pregnant again, which I think I am, though I’m afraid to go to the doctor and hear him say it, this may fix it up.

  For the first time for ages, I thought about my mother, and let myself wonder what it was she’d done to try and get rid of me. Funny joke, maybe I should ask her some time. And have the kid born with its hands coming out of its shoulders, like Mrs Olson’s across the street that she won’t have put away.

  Yeah.

  TRUE TO HIS word, when I got my holiday the next summer, Uncle Mark paid half my fare to come home.

  I should have wanted to come home, but I didn’t. Bess had invited me to Cape Cod, and I would rather have spent the three weeks there, with Joel. We need to be together more. There is too much for us on the surface. Not enough of the stuff that turns your guts. If we quarrel, it means nothing. If Tom and I ever fought, we used to be physically sick, both of us. I remember doing it once at his house, in separate basins, one up, one down.

  So we try to be together, when the Air Force doesn’t foil us. By the time they sent Joel back to the Base on Cape Cod, Uncle Mark had sent me to Toronto to work with the Canadian engineers and architects who arc designing the first B.B. market there.

  When that’s rolling, I am to come back to England for good. Uncle Mark, who my mother accuses of being power mad, but who really only wants to make more money, is going to lay siege to the housewife in the north of England, and my American experience is needed for the wooing. My experience. Me! Hell, it is getting so they can hardly start a supermarket without me. It’s exciting, finding that you are useful after all, not just a dross. The first really important fight with Joel is going to be when he wants me to give it up.

  Just before I left for home, Joel heard that he would be going to a base in Scotland. He will be going there about the time I come back to Toronto but, when I am in England again for good, he will still be there too.

  So when I got home and was settled into the flat, and had said I liked the off-white rug, and wouldn’t have wanted anything for my first dinner but what my mother cooked for me, and had heard the beginning of the disaster saga, from sour wastepipes to the woman in the flat above with Army boots - there was more to come - I told my mother about Joel.

  I thought she would be pleased. Anyone would think that a mother - even my mother - would be pleased to hear that her twenty-three-year-old daughter was thinking of marrying a decent-looking man of her own age with a job and a family who had nothing to hide, or if they did, they hid it skilfully, in Santa Barbara.

  Her first words - I shall never forget them - were, ‘When you told me you were coming back for good next winter, I counted on you living here with me.’

  Useless to remind her that we had all known that I would be working in Yorkshire, Joel or no Joel. She decided then and there, in pique, that she would ask a widowed friend to come and live with her.

  ‘Not Connie! I thought you hated each other.’

  ‘She is my friend,’ my mother said, in a tone that implied that everyone else had betrayed her.

  ‘She’s depressing.’

  ‘So am I.’ When my mother says things like that, you want to run for cover. What is her special gift that makes you feel you said it first? ‘She’s lonely, Emma. You try being a widow in Criccieth. At least, if I can’t have happiness, I can try to bring it to someone else.’

  Did she really say that? ‘I may have made that bit up afterwards,’ I told Alice when I went up to Birmingham, ‘but it’s helping me to decide about Joel. I begin to see why you married Gordon. Anything to get away.’

  Gordon laughed softly on a level note, crinkling his gold-lashed eyes as if I were a private hysterectomy with expensive injections to follow. He is not always sure whether I am joking or not.

  I didn’t go to see my father. My mother wanted me to, saying that he would be hurt, but I think it was because she wanted me to get a look at the nest he has built with Benita, and report back.

  ‘You can tell him about Joel, if you want,’ I said. ‘Give you a good excuse to get past the guards.’

  ‘I don’t want to see him,’ she said, truthfully. It was Benita she would like to see.

  ‘You’ll have to see him at the wedding.’

  ‘Would—would she come?’

  ‘Hardly.’ Though if she did, and Joel’s mother and father each brought their second mates, it would be quite a party.

  ‘He will be hurt if you don’t tell him yourself.’

  ‘I want to hurt him. Had you forgotten that? It’s none of his business now anyway whether I get married or go to a nunnery.’

  ‘You weren’t thinking of that?’ She would dislike that too, combining as she does the true Church of England ragout of ritual church-going and a horror of the cloister.

  I will go to see my father when I can take Joel with me too. When I can show him I don’t need him. Show him that I have found someone completely different from him in every way. Someone who will never let me down.

  I can’t find Kate. She has disappeared, and I must go back to Canada without seeing her.

  When I went to the tall scabrous house in the yelling street, the jelly-fish concierge had gone. On her balcony, a row of coloured children were perched on the railing like black snow birds, like targets at a fun fair, inviting you to topple them into the area.

  Half of the front door is always open, since none of the bells work and the knocker went long ago, probably for a weapon. I went up the stairs without seeing anybody, and knocked on Kate’s door. There was no one there, and I was looking for a piece of paper to push under the door with the telephone number of the flat, when I saw that the strip of stamp-paper gummed to the wall said O’Connor.

  She had promised me. She had promised, last time I was here, that she would not move again without telling me. She had my mother’s address in London. She had the address in New Jersey, and the one in Toronto, if my letters had reached her somewhere and not disappeared into the sad silt of the G.P.O.

  The more she needed me, the more she rejected me. Why? I was afraid for her, and I wanted badly to see Sammy. I had seen his tight gnome face many times in my co
nscience in the last year, this sickly child who once was almost mine.

  Defeated, I turned to go and saw Mr Zaharian standing silently a few feet away. He greeted me soberly but with warmth, and wrung my hand in his calloused one that was not the right shape for work. Nobody knew what he used to be, nor where he came from or why. He never told. If you asked, Kate said, he looked blank, and she thought he did not know any more himself.

  ‘Where’s Kate?’ I asked, while he was still crooning with gentle pleasure and stroking the back of my hand he held.

  ‘Gone away.’ He shook his head. ‘This people—’ he pushed his soft wet lips at the O’Connors’ door— ‘drinking and fighting, we don’t got no fun no more.’

  ‘Don’t you know where she is?’

  He shook his head again, so fast that his near-set eyes merged for a moment into one. ‘Sorry,’ he said, rolling it like a cat purr. ‘So sorry.’

  When I asked him if he knew why Kate and Bob had left, he told me, ‘They was trouble with a man.’

  ‘You?’

  ‘Me?’ He exploded into giggles. ‘Me?’ The idea was too absurd for him to bear. He doubled up, holding the top of his trousers, which were tied round with the cracked belt of a mackintosh. He was delighted. I had pleased him more than anyone had pleased him for years.

  BOB WAS SITTING at his old pitch by the sink one evening in late October, listening to this little transistor radio he’s bought.

  Bought? I don’t know. I won it, he’ll say sometimes when I question some little item he brings home. I won it. And I am supposed to conjure up a vision of Bob and his mates sitting round among the picks and shovels in the dinner hour, playing cards on an upturned barrow.

  He sets the radio on a little shelf behind the draining-board where I keep the bits of soap, and listens to it with his head on one side like the dog and one eye closed against the cigarette, playing very soft, like a private world.