With Your Crooked Heart

by Helen Dunmore

  ‘It’ll be spring soon,’ she says to Anna a bit later, as the three of them walk along.

  ‘Will it? How do you know?’

  ‘There’ll be snowdrops first, then crocuses, then the daffodils. We’ll come to the park to see the daffodils.’

  ‘How do you know?’ Anna wants to say. But they’re smiling, they’re swaying side by side, touching with every step they take. First the snowdrops, she says to herself, so as to be part of it.

  ‘And then it’ll be warm and you’ll be out here in your shorts and a T-shirt.’

  Johnnie whispers something in Mum’s ear and she laughs.

  ‘And we’ll have a picnic under those trees.’

  ‘As long as I can come,’ says Johnnie.

  ‘Oh yes,’ says Mum. ‘It wouldn’t be half the fun without you, would it, Anna?’

  Ten

  Anna’s father is at the window. He’s high up in the house, in the attic bedroom which he has made his office. The place is wired up. A computer fan hums, a fax machine spews paper. There are files, mobile phones, printers. It looks like the home office of a successful businessman, except that the resemblance is too accurate. It leaves you wanting to open drawers and pull out books in case the shelves are false. Everything in the room shouts ‘legitimate business’.

  It’s a property business. That’s what Anna says at school.

  ‘What’s your dad do?’

  ‘He’s got a property business.’

  One day they all had to write about what their fathers and mothers did for a living. It was Fanny Fairway poking her nose, everybody knew that. She had to ask, even if she knew anyway.

  ‘My dad’s a haulage contractor,’ said Courtney Arkinstall. Billy scowled at her: she’s his cousin.

  ‘Don’t you mean a lorry driver, Courtney?’ enquired Fanny Fairway.

  ‘She means a fucking haulage contractor,’ said Billy, then sat looking at Fanny Fairway with a cool straight face, daring her to have heard. Later he grabbed Courtney as they were pushing out of the classroom. ‘What did you want to tell her that crap for?’

  Mrs Fairway’s eyes lit on Anna. ‘Anna. Your turn.’

  ‘My father’s got a property business.’

  ‘A property business. Do you mean an estate agency, Anna?’

  ‘It’s buildings in London,’ said Anna, in a deliberately childish voice.

  ‘And your mother. What does she do?’

  ‘She’s a housewife,’ said Anna. She smiled, she couldn’t help herself. The wide, clear smile stayed, pinned to her face. She sensed Mrs Fairway’s baffled anger.

  ‘She looks after the house,’ Anna went on. ‘In London.’

  Everybody was listening intendy. They wanted the information, just as Fanny Fairway did, but they wanted the battle too. They weren’t sure who they wanted to win.

  ‘In London. Well, Anna, that’s a long way away.’

  ‘You can ask my dad, if you want to know any more,’ said Anna. Fanny Fairway started slightly. A flush spread from her cheeks to her nose. She turned away from Anna.

  ‘Now, we’re going to make a pie chart,’ she announced. ‘Who can remember what a pie chart is?’

  Anna’s father stands by the window. It’s dark now. Soft, yellow lights are coming on in the two cottages further down the hill. He watches them vaguely. His hands rest on the window-sill, palms down. He’s waiting for something. The fax machine begins to spool out paper again, but it’s not that. Anna’s feet run lightly across the floor downstairs. He doesn’t react.

  The phone rings. Paul snatches it up, listens without speaking. After a few seconds he interrupts the flow. ‘OK, OK, call me back when you’re somewhere you can talk.’ There are things he wants to say to Johnnie.

  He waits again. Minutes pass. He goes back to the window and stares up at the night sky, where a pattern of stars is beginning to prick through. He can never get over the clearness of the stars here. It makes him realize why people have always thought stars were important. All that astrology rubbish that his mother used to read; but suddenly he can see that it began with something real. He watches the stars take up their places. He never uses his headlights coming down the track at night. Kills them at the top, coasts down in starshine. You buy a place like this, and it’s only once you start living in it that you realize what you’ve bought. He was digging out the track in the snow all last winter. The weight of the shovel, the white blinding walls of snow, his own breath pumping smoke into the air. Little Anna coming out with a mug of hot chocolate, frowning with seriousness in case she slopped it. Giving it to him, still not smiling. Completely serious. He drank it off while she waited. ‘Thanks for that, Anna.’ And she nodded, took back the mug, said, ‘I’ll bring you some more later, Dad.’

  The phone rings. His mobile this time.

  ‘Johnnie.’

  It’s his brother again.

  ‘How’s it going?’

  There’s a noise of city in the background. He tries to picture his brother but the picture keeps breaking up. He can hear voices in the background, arguing. Nothing serious. One of Johnnie’s places. Johnnie’s voice is full, close to the receiver, flushed with something. He’s been drinking.

  ‘There’s some stuff I need to sort out here, Paul.’

  ‘What stuff?’

  ‘For fuck’s sake, it’s nothing.’ His brother sounds as if he wants to laugh. Or maybe he is laughing, with his hand over the receiver, his eyes glistening at someone Paul can’t see.

  Paul has a vision of his brother’s thin, laughing face, and the complicity he can’t get at to break. He wants to twist Johnnie’s head off.

  ‘I thought you were going to sort out Swindon for me, Johnnie.’

  The Swindon site is a new one, derelict, plenty of potential. But the survey shows lead and cadmium contamination in the soil from a burnt-out glassworks. The surveyor rang Paul yesterday, wanted someone to go down and look at the site. They’re getting figures on the costs of shifting soil. Johnnie’s supposed to have gone down there.

  ‘That’s OK, that’s all under control,’ says Johnnie.

  ‘Did you go down there?’

  ‘Wait a minute.’ Johnnie’s put his hand over the mouthpiece. He’s talking to someone else, sorting out some other stuff which has nothing to do with Paul.

  ‘Paul? Sorry about that.’ He’s back, his voice near and moist in Paul’s ear.

  ‘Did you go to Swindon?’

  ‘Chrissake, Paul.’ Laughing now, humouring Paul. Who’s the audience? ‘Listen, you don’t need to worry about the survey. I’m speaking to him tomorrow. I’ll get it sorted. He knows what we want. I’m a bit tied up now, is all.’

  Paul shuts his eyes. He feels grey and sweaty, like a hangover morning. Why do they have to go through this every time, say the same things, get nowhere?

  Suddenly, for no reason, he remembers changing the wheel of a car. His first car. Not long after he’d got started in business. He was nineteen, which made Johnnie what? Seven. Their dad was upstairs with an oxygen cylinder by the bed. He’d been back home for months, the longest he’d stayed since Paul could remember. Mum was looking after him. He didn’t want anyone else, he said, not any more. Only her and the boys. Did Mum believe that? Maybe. Paul couldn’t say anything.

  Mum was at Benediction. A hot late afternoon with Paul’s first car drawn up outside the flats, stinking of oil and metal and hot plastic seats. The car was jacked up and Paul was taking off the wheel-nuts. Johnnie was standing there, watching. He didn’t want to be inside the flat. Nobody wanted to be inside, with the noise of their father’s breathing, the horror and pity of it grasping at them like hands round their necks, suffocating them. It was going to go on for ever, they were all sure of it, Dad propped up, a slit of his eyes showing yellow, a nurse or a neighbour or Mum by the side of the bed, the hiss of the oxygen, the scrape and draw of Dad’s breath. Dad’s chest was a cage, locked shut. Nothing could get in or out without going through the bars. And the bars were
iron, they wouldn’t open.

  Paul got the spanner in place. ‘Here, you do it,’ he said to Johnnie. Together, they took off the wheel-nuts, changed the tyre, tightened the wheel-nuts again. Johnnie watched everything Paul did. His face was narrow with concentration, the effort of getting things right. Yesterday Johnnie’d gone out with Paul and had his thick, dark hair razor-cut. He thought he looked tough, but really he looked as if he’d just been born. His eyes were big and startling under the bare scalp, and his neck was pale. Paul’d wanted to stop the barber halfway through, but you couldn’t do a thing like that. It’d only make you look stupid.

  The job was done. Johnnie watched Paul put the tools back, then he asked, ‘Will you teach me how to drive?’

  It took Paul back. He remembered asking Dad the same question, one day they’d been changing the battery when Paul must’ve been Johnnie’s age. They must have had a bit of money then: it was a nice car. That was before Dad started going away.

  ‘Can I drive your car when I’m older, Dad?’

  But Johnnie wasn’t asking Dad about stuff like that. He was asking Paul. Under the stubble at his neck you could see the skin which had never had the sun on it. Mum was always saying how beautiful Johnnie had been, when he was a baby. ‘Too beautiful for a boy. It’s wasted on him.’ Paul had thought that was just the kind of stuff mothers said. Now he looks at Johnnie and he sees it may be true.

  ‘Will you? Will you, Paul?’

  ‘Sure I will.’ The words were on his lips, easy and American, making him a figure in the film of his own life. He reached out and ran the palm of his hand over the barbered fuzz on Johnnie’s head. The tickle of the fuzz shot through him like electricity.

  ∗

  Johnnie’s still there, on the other end of the phone. Paul’s sick of it all, but he’s got to keep up the talking, keep the link unbroken. Johnnie’s screwed up on Swindon. He’s not where he should be. At six o’clock he’s in a bar and he’s probably been there since the morning, if not the night before. He’s with friends. When is Johnnie ever not with friends? Johnnie’s one of those people you can’t imagine in a room on his own. If you try to, you come up blank. There are always friends, and if there aren’t Johnnie sleeps, like a stopped clock.

  Johnnie’s not that kid of seven with shorn hair any more. He’s supposed to be Paul’s partner, but he keeps screwing up because deep down he’s not interested in Paul’s kind of business, that kind of money. He wants the other kind. If he’d been anyone else Paul would have got rid of him long ago, but he can’t do that to Johnnie. He can’t believe that one day Johnnie won’t suddenly see that he’s being a fucking idiot, that Paul’s handing to him on a plate everything Paul himself would ever have wanted. A share in a good business. Johnnie should have been in Swindon. But he’s been sorting out his own business instead: Jackie and Ian Briscoe.

  ‘They’ve been getting careless,’ says Johnnie now. ‘Ian’s gone and bought a stupid car and thinks no one’s going to notice.’

  ‘Tell them to check the vacuum-cleaner bags,’ says Paul. He knows all about it: Johnnie’s made him know. He shakes his head, which swarms with knowledge he doesn’t want. ‘Don’t let them get lazy. It’s no good changing them and putting the bags out for the bin-men. Make sure they dump the bags in town somewhere, in one of the council bins.’

  It’s the little things that give you away. Vacuum-cleaner bags. Paul hunts down these stories like a pregnant woman hunts stories of birth. He has come across the trial of a couple who were convicted on forensic evidence from a vacuum-cleaner bag. The prosecution based its case on significant traces of cocaine found in an analysis of the bag’s contents. It couldn’t get them on anything else, but now they’re doing fourteen years. Paul has never met the Briscoes, and will never meet them, but he knows them well. They’re everywhere, like the mites that live on your eyelashes.

  The Briscoes will have the right faces, middle-aged, respectable, dull. The kind that quack out the time of the next Neighbourhood Watch meeting when you bump into them in the street. They’ve retired early and bought a camper van, and they can’t get enough of mini-breaks in Europe. Well, with the bargains you get on ferry crossings out-of-season, it makes sense, doesn’t it? Cost you more to stay at home! Amsterdam one month, Brussels the next. They take a load of money with them. The money tucks away everywhere, nice, easy wads of it. In the wheel arches, inside the spare tyre. Used money that doesn’t crackle. Money that’s soft with sweat and grime, money that’s been scribbled on by bank tellers and ripped going in and out of wallets. If you opened up that van you’d be looking at a fortune. They take out money, but they don’t bring anything back. Their job is to take out the money and do the business. Other people bring the stuff back. Nobody knows anything but their own link in the chain. If you can flatter what they do by the name of anything as sweet and reasonable as metal linked to metal. Sometimes it breaks and the Briscoes have to fill their secret places with flat packets wrapped in heavy plastic. And then they’ve got to do a bit of weighing and measuring and that’s where the vacuum-cleaner bags can get crucial. And the money’s a problem too, after all the handling it’s had. It’s unlikely to stand up to forensic examination.

  ‘Go to Swindon, Johnnie,’ Paul says now. ‘For fuck’s sake. Just do it.’ He looks up at the stars. Johnnie ought to come here, then they could have a proper talk. No good talking now, with Johnnie in the bar and his friends round him. If only Paul could get him away for three months, Johnnie would come back to himself.

  ‘I can’t. There’s a problem here.’

  Paul grips the phone, hears the surge of laughter and noise from behind his brother. A voice blurts in his ear, singsong and slurred. ‘Bye-ee! I’m taking Johnnie home now.’ More laughter, spurting up like vomit. They’re laughing at him, thinking the whole world’s there to be made a fool of, except themselves . They know nothing. He can’t hear Johnnie any more. The voices are louder, arguing. Is that someone shouting? Was that Johnnie’s voice? There’s sweat on Paul’s hand as he grips the mobile phone that can’t connect him to anything that’s really happening.

  ‘Johnnie!’ he shouts. ‘For fuck’s sake!’ But the call crumbles. The phone’s hanging loose, picking up background. Johnnie was on a fixed phone, not his mobile. He’s gone. Someone picks up the receiver. He hears breathing, he shouts again, ‘Johnnie!’ There’s a little laugh, then the phone clicks. They’ve hung up. The mobile sits in his hand.

  Will you teach me to drive?

  It’s all right, Johnnie, I’ll look after you. I don’t care what happens, it’ll be all right. I swear.

  Is Dad going to die?

  Yeah. I think so.

  Why?

  Look, at him, Johnnie. You wouldn’t want him to go on like this.

  How old is Dad?

  You know how old he is. He’s forty-four.

  How old are you, Paul?

  You know how old I am. I’m nineteen.

  All his brothers are on the end of the phone. Johnnie at seven, at twelve, Johnnie in the bedroom in Barking bawling his head off, Johnnie blotched and shuddering when his rabbit died, Johnnie tearless and pale, yawning with grief at their father’s funeral, Johnnie at their wedding, dancing with Louise.

  That’s enough of that. It’s gone.

  How old are you, Paul?

  It’s all right, Johnnie. I’ll look after you. It’ll be all right. I swear.

  There are other things. After five years, when Louise didn’t get pregnant, he went for those tests without telling her. She didn’t want any doctors or any mucking about, and she was so strong about it that he didn’t press it. If it happens it happens, she said. I’m not taking drugs and having my insides messed about. But he read an article which said that for men it was simple. All you had to do was go along and wank into a test-tube. They even gave you a porn mag to make it easier. So he went to a clinic and told them he was concerned, he’d like a test.

  We don’t talk about sterility, they said, when
he used the word. There were sperm, but not enough, and their motility was poor. It meant that natural conception was unlikely. It was still possible, but it was unlikely. He asked what other sort of conception there was, besides the natural, and they told him all the things that could be done.

  He went away and he didn’t tell Louise. He justified it to himself, telling himself that it was Louise who hadn’t wanted to go for the tests. She was the one who said that if it happened, it happened. She seemed to have no cares about it, so he said nothing. Occasionally he thought of the false name he’d used at the clinic, and then he would get up from whatever he was doing, quickly, and walk away from it. Sometimes he thought of his sperm, like tadpoles hanging in a jam-jar back in junior school, a frill of them mouthing the glass, immobile.

  Then she was pregnant, and when Anna was born, she looked like him.

  Eleven

  He didn’t let me meet Johnnie till we’d been going out for nearly six months. Paul was twenty-one, I was nineteen. He was the handsomest man I’d ever seen. People don’t say handsome now, but it was the only word for Paul. There was always something a little bit formal about him, a little bit old-fashioned. And then he was already wearing suits, when most of the boys I knew were in jeans. Beautiful suits. I knew a bit about tailoring even then, and I knew those suits cost money. The wool had a rich, dull sheen on it, the cut was sharp, but perfect. He always had a thing about pure cotton shirts. He’d never wear any of those easy-iron things. When I remember Paul at that time I see him at the mirror, tying his tie. He wasn’t vain. He never preened. Everything had to be right, then he forgot about it. Or he seemed to forget. If we walked by a plate-glass window together, he never looked for his reflection. Dark suits, charcoal grey, white shirts, dull silk ties. He never liked anything flash. Kidney-shaped gold cufflinks, heavy for their size, and a gold watch. He bought them himself, as he got the money to do it, but they looked like the kind of watch and cufflinks that are handed down from father to son.