With Your Crooked Heart

by Helen Dunmore

Anna nods, putting fresh hay into the kitten’s box. ‘Yeah, she always up there.’

  David can’t tell if she minds. Sonia’s not her mum, anyway. She’ll be getting a good ride up there, his dad said last night, watching the Land Rover lights sweep over the shop wall opposite as Sonia slowed for the cobbled bit of the street. He went to the window and watched her tail-lights disappear. They never drew the curtains in their front room until they went to bed; nobody ever had, in this house, because they had nothing to hide. She’s been up there since eleven o’clock this morning. And his mum shut his dad up, because David was there doing his football cards, but she laughed as well. Her face looked pink and plump, like it did when she came out of the bathroom in a cloud of scented steam, with her hair wrapped in a turban. Don’t begrudge me my one bit of luxury, she said when Dad told her you didn’t get any cleaner in ten inches of water than in four.

  ‘They won’t last,’ his dad said. ‘They’ll be off.’

  His dad was always sure, like that. David was proud of his dad’s sureness, though it could be awkward. It made them different: it was like keeping the curtains open at night. Once you’d started you had to keep on, because if you suddenly drew your curtains it was worse than having them shut in the first place. His dad didn’t need to talk to anyone else before he knew what was right. They’ll be off. That meant Anna, seen off by tightness of the village.

  ‘There’s a fair on at Copstone next Saturday,’ he says now to Anna, instead of saying anything about Sonia. He unsnags the needle claws of the kitten from his sweatshirt.

  ‘Give him to me. Put him on my shoulder and I’ll hold him like you do.’

  He lowers the kitten gently. Not on Anna’s narrow shoulder, where it might slip off, but on to the soft brown-and-yellow sleeveless T-shirt she’s wearing. He’ll put the kitten inside the curve of her arm. The kitten wriggles, and he’s afraid of dropping it. The back of his hand brushes Anna’s arm, which is warmer than he’d thought it would be. He’s touched the close, pale skin on the inside of her arm. He flushes, and bends over the kitten.

  ‘I like your T-shirt,’ he says in a sudden, thick voice. He didn’t know he was going to say anything, but Anna looks up and smiles as if she’s not at all surprised, as if it’s just what she wanted him to say.

  ‘He’s a lot stronger,’ says Anna. ‘Look at him trying to climb up on my shoulder.’

  ‘Careful, he’ll fall off.’

  ‘He won’t, I’ve got him.’

  There’s sun through the barn door, warming the air that’s packed with old scents of grain and hay. David’s got the sun on his back, and it shines full on Anna. There are tiny, glistening hairs on her bare legs and arms, which he’s never seen before. She doesn’t notice him looking, because she’s got her head twisted round to watch the kitten as it struggles up her T-shirt, getting its claws caught in the cotton. Then she looks at David, laughing, saying, ‘Look at him!’ Her face glows with joy. He knows she believed the kitten would die, and now it hasn’t died, but is alive and likely to live. Soon she’ll be flaking fish for it, making pom-pom balls for it to chase, teaching it to catch a plastic mouse. I’ll have to teach it how to be a cat, because it hasn’t got anyone else to learn from. She’s keeping a notebook to record the kitten’s progress. Cats live a long time, more than seventeen years sometimes. That means we’ll be twenty-seven, nearly twenty-eight. Do you think we’ll still know each other? I think we will. I don’t know why, I just feel sure of it.

  But David has been nearly eleven years in the world, in the range of his father’s big, sure voice. Joy is dangerous, like matches in woodland. They won’t last. They’ll be off.

  Paul is up in his office, working. He doesn’t know how to stop, even when he’s possessed by a fear which feels more like an illness than an emotion. His limbs ache from sleeping badly. His eyes hurt, and in the bathroom mirror they stare back yellowly and malevolently, as if they’re hiding bad news. He coughs all the time, a hard, nervous cough.

  ‘I think I’ve got flu,’ he said to Sonia at breakfast. She flicked him one of the brief, hostile glances he was getting used to.

  ‘Go to the doctor if you’re worried,’ she said with an indifference that made him know for a second what it might be like to be old and sick and married to Sonia. He almost smiled. Imagine counting on Sonia to push your wheelchair round for you. He wasn’t such a fool as that any more. He knew what she was up to. He knows Sonia, and he knows the precise degree of cold irritation she feels for him. He is making his own betrayal too easy. He’s selling Sonia short on the range of emotion which she has a right to expect.

  ‘I never go to doctors,’ he answered, and picked up the sheaf of post and went off upstairs with it. The look on his face had stilled her for a moment. He’d felt her quick recalculations: had she gone too far? But he didn’t look round, and a little while later the sound of the car told him she’d decided it was all right, she was safe for today.

  The post is still on the table. He turns his back on the computer which will be full of messages. You have mail. He’ll deal with it, even while he’s unable to stop thinking about Johnnie. He’s eaten up with Johnnie, every fibre anxious, waiting, aching. And at the back of it there’s the cold thought that everything he’s done makes no sense, if Johnnie can walk away from it. Johnnie’s been walking away ever since he first got involved in a scam with stolen mountain bikes, when he was fourteen.

  Paul walks from room to room, comes up against a door or a window and stands there, frozen, unable to think how he got there or how to start again. Sonia’s out of the way: let her go. When he looks down his telescope at the stars they say nothing to him. He watches each one brighten in its turn, like the eye of a fox in the night. But you can’t break the patterns they make.

  He thinks of phoning Louise, in case she knows something, but every time he picks up the phone he puts it down again. She won’t know anything.

  He lies on his bed and Johnnie’s image stares at him from the ceiling, the nose knocked sideways and the mouth too swollen to speak. But the eyes stare straight at him and they’re full of strange satisfaction along with the pain and fear. This is what you wanted, Paul thinks, and he knows it’s the truth. Why else would Johnnie be so fucking inept?

  He’ll get down to London again. He’ll make more enquiries. He’s been too cautious, not wanting the word to get around that he’s looking for Johnnie. He’ll even go and see Louise, just on the off-chance. If she knows where Johnnie’s gone, there’s no way she’ll be able to keep it from him.

  He’ll sell this house, he’ll sell the roof over Louise’s head if he has to, he’ll do anything. It doesn’t matter what it costs, because he can make it again. He can use up his fortune and make it all over again. He has the muscle, groomed for use. He has persistence. He used to think everybody had the qualities he had, it was just that they didn’t use them, but by the time he was twenty-five he knew it wasn’t like that. He’s seen a room full of faces light up at the energy of his wanting, seen them turn to him and be glad. And that’s something Johnnie doesn’t understand. Johnnie thinks he knows a lot, because he found out very early that there’s no such thing as safety, only a frayed rope over a drop. He can’t stop himself putting more and more weight on the end of the rope. If he had a knife he’d cut it, strand by strand, even if it was himself dangling there, because not to be able to trust yourself is the biggest thrill of all.

  Twenty-three

  ‘I used to play on the penny slot-machines there,’ you say, pointing at the West Pier. A cloud of starlings whirls around the end of the pier, then settles while another darkens the approaching sky. ‘They must be roosting on the pier.’

  It’s early evening. The light’s deepening to a richer blue, but why does it have to get dark so early, when it’s as warm as this? The time and the weather don’t fit. Half-naked children are still playing at the water’s edge, or huddled in towels with hot-dogs. Don’t know when we’ll get another weekend like this. This might
be our summer.

  You and Johnnie stroll along, licking ice-creams from Marrocco’s. You’ve turned back on your walk now, towards the piers and the town. Young men with hard bodies and hard eyes bike down the centre of the promenade, keeping well clear of the cycle path. You are arm in arm, Johnnie’s cone in his left hand, yours in your right. He’s chosen chocolate, and you have strawberry. You walk along the promenade between the pale-green beach huts and the sea.

  ‘I don’t blame them,’ says Johnnie. ‘Nice and safe.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The pier. For the starlings. Nothing’s going to get them on the pier, is it? No one can get out there.’

  ‘They’re rebuilding it, look, joining it back to the beach. I read it in the paper. They’ve got Lottery money.’

  ‘They ought to leave it alone,’ says Johnnie.

  ‘It’ll fall into the sea if they do.’

  You walk on. You watch the starlings, millions of them it seems, rising and falling above the end of the pier.

  ‘Wouldn’t you think they’d bang into one another?’

  ‘No. Animals’ve got more sense.’

  ‘They’re not animals, they’re birds.’

  Birds, millions of them, darken the sky with the rush of their wings. You think about it, strolling on, your arm hooked inside Johnnie’s. It’s nice to know that the way you feel has nothing to do with drink. You had a glass of wine at lunchtime — a bottle between you, that was all — then all you’ve had since is a couple of beers in a pub off the Kingsway. You don’t like beer, so it was a safe choice.

  ‘Look at that,’ you say, pointing up at the sky, ‘Damtano’s Dreamworld. Fancy it still going on. I’d have thought it’d have closed down years ago.’

  The aeroplane drags its banner across the sky. Come to Damiano’s Dreamworld. But it’s late, people won’t set off now.

  ‘Where are we going?’ asks Johnnie.

  ‘I thought we could go down to the Palace Pier. I haven’t been there for years. Why don’t you take off that baseball cap? It’s getting dark.’

  ‘OK.’

  Johnnie drops your arm, takes off the cap and crushes it into a litter bin. You dart forward to rescue it, but he holds your arm.

  ‘Leave it, Lou. You’re right, it’ll be dark soon.’

  You change arms so that he’s on the outside, next to the railings. There are a lot of people about, kids on little trikes, couples with dogs, groups of foreign kids walking six abreast, shabby-faced men on their own. It’s like London by the sea, everything concrete and man-made until suddenly you hit the water and then things could go any way.

  ‘There’s a boat out there.’

  But you realize he can’t see it. Johnnie’s eyes aren’t as good as yours, and he won’t wear glasses. You’ve raised the question of contact lenses before, but the idea of fiddling round with his eyes makes him feel sick. He can see perfectly well, he says. The boat lags in the water, as if it doesn’t want to go inland.

  ‘Can’t you see the red sails?’ you ask Johnnie, and he says yes. You don’t tell him that the sails are white.

  In front of you a man and a woman walk, joined by their daughter. She’s about six, her long skinny legs ending in roller-blades and she’s talking all the time, never letting up, about how she’s getting better, isn’t she, she can nearly skate, can’t she, tomorrow she’ll be able to do it all on her own, won’t she? And then there are the dark, soft tones of her father agreeing, over and over, and the mother encouraging: Look, you push your foot like this, this way, that’s it, you’re nearly doing it. They are talking in a language you don’t know — not French or Italian, something more foreign than that — but all the same you can pick up every word. You glance covertly at Johnnie to see if he’s listening, and yes, he is. You want to drop his arm. There ought to be a space between you. A heavy, blank space which you’ve made yourself, which can’t keep its balance any more. Mummy, says the little girl in her foreign language, Daddy, and they both lean in towards her, to catch every word. Johnnie is listening, too. And although the little girl can’t really skate yet she’s actually going quite fast, with her mother on one side and her father on the other, holding her up if not actually supporting her, and bearing her along. The three of them are going slightly but perceptibly faster than you and Johnnie, and already the cheeping of the child is getting covered up by the noise of footsteps and the hiss of bicycle tyres rushing where they’re not supposed to, and you hope that the bikers will be careful near the children, so you look round to check, and then when you look back the little family has gone out of sight. You look again, but they are nowhere to be seen.

  ‘Anna,’ you say, in a voice you never meant to use, and Johnnie looks at you, a sudden, naked, terrified look. And he waits in fear of what you’ll say next.

  ‘We shouldn’t —’ you say, and you stop. Shouldn’t speak of her, shouldn’t frighten Johnnie, shouldn’t pick out of the blur of foreign tongues the words that say Mummy and Daddy. But you do. You have both stopped. You’re a two-person island. People make way without thinking of you, parting as if by instinct when they come up behind you, joining again once they are ahead of you. You stop and Johnnie stops, and you’ll never forget how afraid you are, how afraid he is, how naked in its terror is the once-beautiful face he turns to you.

  ‘I lost her,’ you say. ‘We lost her,’ and Johnnie keeps on staring at you as if this is the first moment of it, as if the anguish of it has only just dawned. You must have spoken louder than you meant to, because people slow down and look at you, curious, hearing the word ‘lost’, seeing your faces, wondering if the police have been called yet, when the search will start, whether they should offer to join in. But nothing happens, and so they walk on.

  Twenty-four

  You’re on the pier. The Palace Pier, jazzed with light and games that suck you into electronic smog and won’t let you see your way out till your wallet’s empty. Kids with pinched faces lean into the machines, narrow hips touching hips of metal, fingers on the push-buttons of pleasure. You walk on, not arm in arm now, but close. The air is thick with burger grease, candy-floss and pancakes. You stop to buy waffles because you love it when the heavy metal waffle-iron closes on the pale batter, squeezing it into toast-brown squares. The girl squiggles maple syrup, looking at Johnnie. ‘Is that enough for you? Is that all right?’ but when it comes to you she pushes the plastic bottle of syrup towards you and says, ‘Help yourself.’ You walk on, eating the waffles. lights flare on you, red, yellow, green, gold, lighting you up like presents to yourselves, and the music thuds deep inside you, too loud to be heard. You don’t talk. Sometimes you stretch your mouths at each other in a smile. You eat your waffles, corner by sticky corner.

  You go on into another arcade. There are cases of candy-yellow teddies with Disney eyes, waiting for the claw that fidgets above them, but never comes down. You ache with them, wanting it to happen.

  ‘I’ll win you one, shall I?’ asks Johnnie, and you say, ‘All right, go on,’ but his coin does no more than anyone else’s. The claw pinches at the air above the fur, and slowly shuts on nothing. But the machine’s made up its mind you’re mugs enough for a consolation prize, and it releases a dry slither of sweets into a metal chute. You find yourself scrabbling for them as if they’re money. Orange, purple, lime green, tongue-pink. ‘I don’t like bubble-gum,’ you say, and you leave them there. Johnnie shrugs and goes from your side.

  ‘You want to try the horse racing?’ he calls. You go over. Beneath a clear plastic screen, small plastic horses judder along parallel lines. The doll jockeys wear colours like the bubblegum. There’s a slot to put your money in, buttons to press to bet on the colours. Johnnie puts in his coin and the light comes on, flashing: Place Your Bets Now. You tell him to go for the red, but he presses the green button and you both watch as the horses glide forward, first the red, then the green, the purple, the orange, the yellow, the brown. The red slides to the front, too early, he’ll never keep up
the pace. He jerks as the electric impulse lessens, and the brown moves past him, the plastic jockey shuddering on his plastic mount. And there, on the outside, pushed by a sudden, calculated surge of voltage, the yellow goes smoothly forward to the winning post. The race is over. Each horse glides back to the starting-line. Already you’re feeding in more coins. The purple this time. There’s bound to be a system. Watch what happens for the next few races, and you’ll work it out.

  ‘That jockey up on the brown, he’s bent,’ says Johnnie. ‘He keeps pulling him up.’

  ‘I told you there’s a system.’

  ‘You got any more ten-pence pieces?’

  You empty your purse for him, but too violently, and coins spill on the floor. You kneel down scrabbling them together, and there it is, waiting for you beneath the cracks in the boards.

  ‘Johnnie.’

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Look. The sea’s down there.’

  He kneels down too because he hasn’t heard what you said. He thinks something’s wrong.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Look. The sea.’

  It was there all the time, stirring thickly and blackly beneath the pier. It doesn’t matter what they put up above, to distract you. Lights, music, money. It’s all the same.

  ‘Course it’s the sea,’ he says, catching on, kneeling beside you, but he doesn’t care. He doesn’t see what you see. ‘You’re on the pier, what else is going to be down there?’

  You watch it down there, black, slithering, full. Its one toad eye winks at you.

  ‘If I fell in there, I’d die. I couldn’t bear it,’ you say.

  ‘You’d be all right. You can swim, can’t you?’

  ‘Not in that.’

  ‘Let’s go and have a drink.’

  You get up from your knees slowly. You seem to be doing something you’ve done before, only you can’t remember where. It itches in your mind, like the claw hanging over the toys.