They all drank and laughed and flirted and smoked and drank some more and it was all very cosy and convivial if you liked that sort of thing.
I slid onto the floor and sat propped up against the slot machine, forgotten. I propped my chin on my knees and waited. I could have broken free and escaped to my old haunts for an hour or two at least, they were just a very short walk away, but, just then, they held no allure for me. I waited, hoping that my mother would tire of impressing her sycophantic companions, she was bright enough to know how false they really were, and that she would remember that there were brighter places she could be and that there were truer companions that she could be with.
Time slipped by, but Mr. Freeman retained his place and my mother’s laughter became a little shriller and the fug of cigarette smoke swirling around her a little denser. I grew impatient with them both, almost contemptuous, and though I knew it would do no good, I nursed my resentment and felt a little better for it. At last, I stood and moved into my mother’s eye-line.
“Oh, there y’are, Mikey,” she said with a touch of surprise. “I wondered where you’d got ter.” She hadn’t. I had never crossed her mind once. I knew it and so did the overly after-shaved idiot who was attempting to nuzzle her neck. He guffawed and threw me a five-pound note.
“Go to the arcade, son,” he said. “Yer mum’s busy.”
I let the five-pound note fall and ignored it.
“I wanna go now,” I said belligerently.
“In a while,” she replied with the touch of a whine in her voice. “We’ll go when I’m ready Mikey. Can’t you piss off for a while and find somfink to do. Get somfink from the bar if you want it. Tell ‘im to put it on my bill and I’ll settle it up later. Gerrof.”
This last was to the amorous companion on her left, the neck nuzzler, and, having tired of him, she turned to the other on her right to exercise the power of her attraction. Neither of them having any principles or self-respect or any honest affection for her they were both as easily conquered but, whatever their own egos may have told them, they had never, nor never would, lay a hand on either her money or her body. Still, it was not a spectacle that a nine-year-old boy should witness, and I turned away muttering some choice swear words as I pushed my way past denim-clad bums to the bar.
“What’s it to be, son?” the skinny barman asked, looking longingly and hopelessly over my shoulder at the rich, pretty woman.
“A pint of lager,” I growled. “Me mum says I can.”
“I’ll lose me job,” he scoffed, then added loudly, “you can ‘ave a pint of shandy and a packet of crisps and like it.”
Nonetheless, the pint when it came was mainly lager and cold comfort it was too.
I smelt the cheap perfume before I saw her. She saw me before she saw my mother and I saw Mr. Freeman draw forward in his seat and his gaze sharpen.
“So, Mikey.” She was behind me before I could move from the bar and before I had sipped the false courage I suddenly felt in need of. “You’re ‘ere again.”
“Leave me alone.” I twisted away, and the lager slopped out of the glass and onto her shoes and the dark green carpet.
She grasped my arm in a vice-like grip, unheeding of her shoes or of anything but her purpose.
“Did you give ‘er the message?”
“No,” I said, preparing for flight. If I ran for the door, would she follow me? I should have said yes, she wants to see you, she’s outside or she’s gone to your house or anything that might have got Vi outside and away from the pub but instead I said, “She ain’t here.”
Vi knew I was lying and, in one of those moments when there seems to have been, not divine intervention, no certainly not that, but the intervention of the devil himself, the press of people parted, and all the world could see her. At that same moment my mother, in mid-laughter, locked eyes with her own personal Nemesis and began to know that all was lost.
For me, it was like one of those scenes in films where something happens so fast that, to allow the dull-witted audience time to appreciate the full, gut-wrenching dreadfulness of the event, the action is presented in slow motion. It certainly was a dreadful moment. A moment full of dread. But with a fair amount of alcohol in her blood, the pseudo confidence created by her money and a belief in her own invincibility my mother’s courage was high. She shouldered her burly companions aside and threw open her arms.
“Vi!” she cried. “Get yourself a drink girl and come and join us.”
Vi was not so magnanimous but then she, admittedly, had a lot more to forgive and she was just not the forgiving sort. Venom oozed from every pore, you could almost see it. The barman had already placed a drink on the bar for her. She took it without glancing at it or acknowledging him and people parted before her as she strode forward. My mother’s bravado wavered visibly as her erstwhile friend and bosom buddy dragged a chair carelessly from beneath the hovering bottom of a stout Irish woman on the next table and placed it directly opposite her. The Irish woman having narrowly and not very elegantly avoided a dangerous pratfall was outraged enough to attempt a quite vociferous protest. Ordinarily she might have bested even the redoubtable Vi, but on this occasion, it only took one look at Vi’s set face, her eyes fixed with icy intent on my frightened mother, to persuade her that even if, in her world, discretion was never the better part of valour, it might not do to get embroiled in someone else’s blood feud right then. She opted instead for cursing Vi with visitations of all things painful and unfortunate, rudely appropriating another chair from a small man with a rather spectacular port wine stain on his scrawny neck and watching with interest from a safe distance.
Vi never flinched. I don’t think she was aware of anyone else in the suddenly hushed room. The two aging Lotharios in their bright shirts drew back, as men faced with confrontational women always do. They watched warily. Others who had previously claimed to be intimately acquainted with my mother adopted nonchalant stances and, without seeming to do so, melted away.
“’Ello, Vi,” said my mother shakily, “I’m glad I’ve run into you.”
“Run into me!” Vi hissed. “Run into me? You know where I live, you know my telephone number.”
Her voice was harsh, like chalk on board. There was hatred and the bitterness of betrayal in every frayed syllable. I have told you enough to expect that. I certainly did, but it wasn’t just that envy and malice had been encouraged to fester in her soul, there was something more. Or perhaps it was something less. Something was missing that should have been there and that would, might have ever so slightly mitigated those harsher emotions.
It was hope that was absent.
She was coiled tighter than a compressed spring, her neck and shoulders visibly taught and her long skinny shoulder blades protruding like folded wings from her naked back. She had lost weight in the short time since I had last seen her, and it did not suit her. Her skin, always tinged with a yellow sallowness, was stretched tight across her cheekbones and her prominent nose was more prominent and beak-like than ever before. She reminded me uncomfortably of one of the uglier birds of prey and my poor frightened mother was fixed in her sights.
I crept past the obstructing legs of the erstwhile hangers-on and pushed myself onto the bench beside my mother. What else could I do? She muttered something of which ‘bin busy’ were the only audible words.
“I wanted what was due to me,” Vi hissed, heedless of all else around her. “You owed me.” It struck me forcibly that she spoke in the past tense, but my mother did not notice. She forced her lips into a sickly smile.
“Well, let’s talk about it. Let’s…let’s go somewhere else.”
She stood unsteadily but Vi’s claw shot out and grasped her wrist just as I wrapped my hands around her other arm. I had to get her away, far, far away from this hawkish woman.
“Let ‘er go, Mikey,” Vi’s voice crackled like breaking glass.
“I said leave ‘er be.”
I couldn’t help her. Vi had pounced as I knew she would. There had been an inevitability about this meeting from the first moment, probably two or three days ago, that mum had decided to come back to Canvey Island. It had been pre-ordained, not by any supernatural power, but simply because of what mum and Vi were.
I relinquished my tenuous hold on my mother and sat back defeated. I met Mr. Freeman’s eyes across the smoky room. He had a clear uninterrupted view of us now and he watched unblinkingly.
Vi pushed my mother back onto the bench beside me and cast a look to either side of us. The hangers-on melted away and we three were an island. To my mind, Vi had always had the power to make people want to leave but there was, as I have said before, something particularly unnerving about her today and no one wanted to be near. Her hair was untidy, and her black halter neck dress was loose and looked as if it had been slept in, but mainly it was the expression in her eyes that caught at your heart and took your breath. It was a look of absence, as if all the normal, everyday thoughts that constantly crowd us, had been wiped out and replaced by the fire of one furious intent that raged continuously and had subsumed everything that she had once been. It was, in short, as if, driven by the devil, madness had claimed her.
She hunched over the blood red drink in her hand and glowered at us. My mother shrank towards me and at any other time that would have been gratifying.
“I know that you got the money ‘cos of what we done.”
Mum shook her head jerkily and swallowed with difficulty.
“Don’t Vi…not in front of….Mikey.”
Vi threw her chin forward and ejected a short mirthless rap of a laugh.
“’E already knows, doncha Mikey?”
Her eyes glittered in my direction. Yes, I knew, but I did not reply. I was watching Mr. Freeman because he knew too. I don’t think he had known before but the second he saw them together he found them out. Hatred and anger swirled through the room like black oil in dirty water and my mother and me were at the centre of the vortex.
“I know that money came to you because of wot we done, it weren’t no in’eritance and it weren’t no big job neither. That ‘usband of yours ain’t got it in ‘im. ‘E’s small-time,” she sneered. “’E ain’t got the balls for nuffink big. ‘E ain’t even got the balls to do what we done.”
“Shut up, Vi,” snapped my mother drawing strength from her fear. “You’ll ruin everything and then you’ll get nothing. Keep your mouth shut and I’ll see you right. I always meant to once I’d sorted meself out but there was conditions, about the money...”
“Oh, you always meant to see me right, did you?” Vi spat back.
“I came back, didn’t I?”
Vi leaned forward and grasped my mother’s wrist in her claws until she winced in pain. Most eyes in the pub were on them and, though the two women kept their voices low and indistinct, there was so much malice implicit in their tone and movements, it was clear that this was no ordinary fight.
“You left me, ran out wivout a word, you are a stinking whore and I am gonna make you suffer like I am suffering only you’re gonna suffer much, much longer than I will.”
I put my hands on Vi’s and tried to prize the cold bony fingers loose. I made not the slightest impression.
“What do you want Vi, ‘ow much? You can ‘ave whatever you want. We’ll go to Greece together. I always meant that. I just needed to get away for a while to clear me ‘ead, that was all, after everything I…, we, went through. I was always coming back. I’ve money for both of us, ‘ow much do you want?”
Vi threw my mother’s hand from her in contempt.
“I don’t want your money, I’ve ‘ad plenty from that ‘usband of yours and could ‘ave plenty more, ‘e’s that soft in the ‘ead about you. ‘E’d pay through the nose every day of ‘is life to save you if ‘e could. But ‘e can’t ‘cause money can’t do nothink for me now, it’s too late. I’m dying – so they say, and money can’t save me. I thought for a while that it could, but it can’t so I’m gonna live just long enough to make sure that you pay.”
My mother nursed her bruised wrist and stared back at the twisted face of a vengeful woman who had focussed all her rage and all her pain on the one person she could reach and do the most damage to. She would be true to her words, she had nothing to lose and nothing to gain, except the knowledge that she had spread her own misery amongst the closest of her acquaintance and that they would suffer because of her.
“I dunno why ‘e gave you the money,” she leaned towards us over the table, her eyes narrowed with hatred and intent, “but, I know ‘e did, so I’m gonna find out and then I’m gonna tell ‘im and everyone what we done, you, me and Ethan, and ‘ow we done it and why we done it, and ‘ow ‘is little wife didn’t die straight off but ‘ow you ‘elped ‘er along a little…”
“That ain’t true…” my mother breathed, “it ain’t.”
The black vortex swirled around us.
“No?” Vi leaned back and regarded her sardonically. “I think it is. I think that’s exactly what you told me when you phoned me that day. And my boy will back me up. But don’t worry luv, you’ll be very popular wiv the ladies in ‘olloway. You’ll be right at ‘ome ‘cos you’ll be wiv your own kind at last, the ‘ores and the thieves and the slags. Yeah, you’ll be right at ‘ome,”
“Don’t do this, Vi,” Mum whimpered, grasping the table before her until her knuckles turned white. “We can work something out, I can make it right for you…”
“But you can’t, can ya? And I don’t want yer ter make it right, I just want you ter get yours and I’m gonna make sure you do.”
“Don’t, Vi. I won’t let you.”
“Can’t stop me”, she crowed. “The old geezer is right behind me and I fink I’ll start wiv ‘im.”
“No,” said my mum in a low voice unlike her own. “I won’t let you.”
My mother was very drunk of course, but I am not convinced that alcohol had very much at all to do with what happened next. I have said before that she was a bright woman but her emotions (anger, lust, fear I mean, not the softer emotions with which she was less acquainted) tended to cloud her limited judgment. A cold hysteria had taken hold and, let the consequences be what they may, my mother would fight to the death. Vi threw back her head and cackled scornfully.
“You can’t stop me, bitch. I want revenge and I’m going to have it,” Vi spat the words triumphantly. She brought her hand down hard on the table between us and with one almost graceful movement swept off the dirty glasses and filled ashtrays so that there was an explosion of splintering glass as she turned away.
Mr. Freeman stood at that same moment, his eyes locked in icy realisation on the women who had brought about the death of his sweet wife.
The shot cracked through the old pub like the breaking of a bone and Vi hesitated for a moment, continued towards Mr. Freeman, hesitated again and then crumpled heavily onto the stained threadbare carpet and rolled over amongst the strewn fag ends and broken glass.
21
An eye for an eye will only
make the whole world blind.
Mahatma Gandhi
My mother was the first to move and I was the second. In the sudden silence, before the screams and the shouts, she fled. Feeling nothing at all, I followed her, stepping over the dead woman with the fixed and staring gaze, exactly as she had, and slipping through the double doors as easily as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened at all.
Mr. Freeman was the third person to move and I know that because he made an unsuccessful attempt to grasp my arm as I passed. My mum was at the car door, fumbling for keys in the depths of her bag and cursing like an Irish navvy. I stood by her but when I put out my hand to offer
help and urged her to hurry she snatched the bag away and then as suddenly flung it away from her. The deadly calm deserted her at that moment. The bag hit the tarmac and burst open, disgorging make-up, money and the gun and scattering them over several square feet of the car park.
She grasped her head and pulled at her pretty hair, then, as her flowery-shirted men friends appeared shocked and white-faced at the door behind her, she ran. I ran with her. Across Point Road and up Sea View towards the Eastern Esplanade, past pretty well-ordered houses where lived tidy and well-ordered people we ran, my mother and me. Her shoes were high heeled, and she stopped briefly to pull them off and fling them onto a neat lawn. Already breathless and sobbing she took the opportunity to turn to me.
“Sod off, Mikey,” she gasped, the tears running down her face. “Get lost, you can’t help me, just bugger off.”
“No, mum,” I wrapped myself around her for the first time in my life. “I want to stay with you, I can help. I won’t be a bother anymore, I promise.”
Did she embrace me? Just for a fleeting moment, the barest slightest moment.
A Patient Man Page 19
