Authors: Monica Dickens
‘Hullo, Em,’ said Bob, and his grin was the widest of the lot.
‘Get up, you slob,’ I said, and he did, and ambled over to put his arms round Em like a tame bear. Everybody loves Em. It’s easy to be loved when you arrive in a pink and white suit like marzipan with crocodile shoes and a present for everyone. Don’t be bitter,
Kate. When she could disentangle Sammy, clamouring like a raving lunatic, she threw the parcels on the bed (thank God I’d made it), and came quickly to the sink and kissed me, and I took my arms out of the suds and put them round her all wet and scummy. I’ve never seen harder water anywhere, never. It’s something in the tank. Rotting bones I shouldn’t wonder.
Although I miss her all the time behind the back curtain of my mind, and often at the front of it, thinking of the old days when we were silly giggling girls with Moll to do the worrying, it’s when I actually see her that I realize how much I need her.
She is going away again, so all right, I can’t have her. I got over crying for what I couldn’t have years and years ago. If you could remember being a baby, I’d probably remember screaming myself blue because I was cold or hungry or wet, with results nil.
She had brought toys for the children, a cake, a blouse for me and nylons. Nylons! I haven’t even got a suspender belt. I’ll have to roll them. Cigarettes for Bob, and a bottle of port. Then she saw Mr Zaharian still standing in the doorway beaming with silly joy over the Lady Bountiful scene, and she was quick-witted enough to give him the box of biscuits and pretend they were for him. He shut the door softly and went away crooning to himself high in his nose.
‘Look, Em, you shouldn’t - ‘ I began, for we don’t need charity from her, or anyone, but she passed it off as going-away presents, and started to talk to Bob, to shut me up.
‘Katie’s going to have another baby,’ Bob said.
‘I know.’
‘It’s good isn’t it? I’ve always wanted lots of kids. Lots and lots of ‘em. I knew a chap at work once, had a whole football team. Soccer, mind. Eight boys and three girls, and they put the baby in goal. When I go in the Army, that should be next year, if they don’t call me sooner, I’m going to get Sammy a little soldier suit, with a drum.’
Never a dry eye. He’s sopping wet about the boy, Bob is. He’s taught him to salute, and they do what he calls drill together.
‘Go on, show Em how you salute.’ He did, and when we laughed because his hand come up so quick and comic, he fired up red and ran behind Bob’s legs, catching at his trousers.
‘He’s your boy,’ Em said. ‘Most children run behind their mother’s skirt when they’re shy.’
I looked at her, sharp. She was getting at something. That’s why she came. She’s always been critical of me, ever since the days at the Council flat when I used to leave Sammy alone, and she fussed at me. If she thinks I’m too rough on him, she should just have him, that’s all. She should just have him for only one day even, and she’d see. There’s only one thing that kid understands, I mean that.
He went to play with the car she had brought, and I went over to him and sat down on the floor, so gentle and tender, and showed him how to wind it up. He didn’t want to come on my knee, but I pulled him on to me and sat there smiling and talking to him, the very picture of motherhood.
OUR MISS BULLOCK never did get the chance to say anything to Kate. When I went to say goodbye, she was much better with the boy, and Bob obviously adores the children, so I suppose it will be all right.
I hope it will be all right. Surely an unhappy childhood would make you want to give your own child something better? Johnny Jordan has his theories, but if you work mostly with failures, you see defeat for everybody. Doctors think the whole world is sick, and undertakers see potential death in a newborn baby.
As soon as I was on the plane, even before it took off, I stopped worrying about Kate, and about my mother’s poor harmless face, still babyish about the mouth, and puzzled, when she kissed me, brave and tearless, and said: ‘Come back soon, Emmie.’
The gush of real love and pity I felt for her should have come much earlier. It should have come when I arrived, not when I was safely leaving.
Mrs Patterson has eminent domain. She made it sound like a skin disease, but it means that a new elevated intersection is going to scoop off the top of her house. Dodie and Brenda have already gone, and since Mr Vinson has raised my pay, or as he put it, upgraded my salary bracket, I am sharing an apartment across the
river in New Jersey with a mad Danish girl called Toni. We are planning a new store for a giant housing project on what was once a desolate marsh, and Toni is one of the draughtsmen the engineers are using for the layout, and I’m afraid using may be the right word, for when she works late, she doesn’t usually come back to the flat.
Joel delayed his leave, and he spent it all in New York with me after I came back. He is being sent to a weapons school in Texas, where wives are not allowed to go. Next year, he expects to get a posting abroad, and then we think we will be married.
We would have had to leave that room in the house of hell anyway, because there was not enough room with Susannah.
It’s a pretty name. My mother was thinking of it once for Loretta, but I picked the wrong time to say I thought it was beautiful, and they said: What the hell business is it of yours? and called her Loretta.
Sometimes I think I will take the baby round there and say: Look, I’ve got a Susannah. Sometimes I think of going and I pretend that it would be laughter and people jumping up and crying: Look who’s here! and I’m afraid I might go. When I’m tired, which is all the time, chronic, like piles, I go off on this road to nowhere like I used to when I was little and alone, and I’m afraid I might get round that corner one day and find it led to Butt Street.
Marge took Emily, and Bob turned in his job and took care of Sammy while I was in the hospital. If they’d only let you stay there a month, it would be worth having a baby every year, for the rest. But they kick you out in a few days with some brisk, kindly words about getting plenty of the right food. Smile.
Bob brought home a great piece of steak that evening. It cost a pound, and we had the bottle of wine Dino gave me for home-coming, and sat at the table and threw bits of steak to the kids on the floor and they ate it like dogs. Emily can’t chew, but if you give her red meat, she sucks it white, like a vampire. Then they curled up where they were on the rug and went to sleep, so we left the gas fire on all night, and Bob was like a mad thing, because the doctor had dared him to go after me before, the last couple of months.
But the next day, there it was all back on top of me, and no shillings for the meter, and the baby into the bargain.
We’ve got to get a bigger place, I’d keep telling Bob, and he’d smile and say: That’s right, like he does when he doesn’t intend to do a thing about it.
He did get another job though, I’ll say that for him. It’s something in a warehouse. I’m not sure what he does, but he says they move pianos fifty yards one day and then move them back the next, to give them something to do, but it’s better paid than the butcher’s shop, and it’s muscling him up. You wouldn’t know him for the limp and sloppy boy he used to be. He looks quite a man - till you try to start a sensible conversation with him.
He’s lazy still. Oh God, you could set his chair on fire before he’ll move, but in the end he had to go out and look for a new place for us to live, because of Dino.
When I got my figure back again after Susannah, or as near back as it will ever be, with the punishment it’s been getting, Dino got his interest back. He’s a waiter, that’s the trouble. He’s at work when the men are at home, and vice versa, which is to say that he’s at home when the men are out at work.
Even Mr Zaharian, who is doing something now for the Salvation Army, who have given him another pair of trousers that fit this time, was out of the house the day Dino came into my room and shut the door behind him.
What to do? When you live in a house like that, you don’t scream. You don’t advertise your problems.
Sammy told Bob, of course. Trust our Sam. Bob is a dreadful coward. He hit me and called me a terrible name, which Sammy will store up to come out with, but when I said, ‘Why don’t you go and fight it out with Dino?’ Bob said, ‘He’s gone to work,’ as if that let him out.
Three days later, we moved out, with Mr Zaharian waving us down the stairs with his lower lip in a trembling little pout, as if he wanted to come too, and Mrs O’Hara, who is an undercover agent for the landlord, watching from behind that piece of gunny she calls a curtain, to see we didn’t steal the light fixtures.
We are now in a basement flat, and although there’s more room to move about, and at least we can call the taps and drains our own, there are times when our old room seems better than it did when we were there.
At least that house had once been something, in the days when maids carried hot water up and down the stairs. I must have seen an illustration in a book, for I could always see them, with
streamers on their caps and those brass jugs. That was all they seemed to do. The drawing-room, our room must have been, with the high ceiling and the raised design round the top of the walls. In the summer, when the sun was high enough to stand over the high houses opposite, it came flooding into us through the tall windows, and there was always plenty of light.
Where we are now, there is always plenty of dark. We call it the Tunnel, Thomas’s Tunnel, and that’s about what it is. This house is in the same district, but it has always been a house of the poor, wretchedly built and full of sodden bugs and sadness. The ground floor and top floor are empty now, because of the roof, and it’s a marvel that the basement is still classed fit for habitation, let alone rentable at five pounds ten a week, which is what we are fools enough to pay.
But there’s nowhere else. When you are in a hurry to move, there is nowhere but these odds and ends of dwellings, and bloody few of them, thanks to the Spades.
We moved in here at the tail end of last winter, and before we’d really begun to feel the Tunnel’s damp soul, down here among the gnomes and mushrooms, the spring came, and then the summer, and it wasn’t so bad, and we’ll find something else before next winter.
There are two rooms, and a sort of humpy shed at the back where Bob keeps his bicycle alongside the toilet, and a passage between the front and back room with a broken stone floor where the sink and cookstove are. They call it open-plan living.
The back room doesn’t have a proper window, just a grated opening high up in the wall, which will have to be stuffed with newspaper if we don’t get out before the cold weather, or the kids will freeze to the mattress. They say it’s going to be the hardest winter for fifty years.
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.