Flying High
Flying High
Литагент HarperCollins
The winners of the 1993 IAN ST JAMES AWARDS.The Ian St James Awards enabled new writers from every walk of life to break into print.1993’s collection introduced more new writers than ever before, with six short stories and ten longer pieces.Entertaining, thought provoking, original, each of these stories is a winner, selected from thousands of entries from all over the world.
FLYING HIGH
The winners of
the 1993 Ian St James Awards
Copyright (#ulink_bebf6526-44a6-5157-89fa-1ac9055daa97)
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/)
Figure of Eight © Min Dinning 1993; The Spirit of the Times © Jude Jones 1993; Drawing from the Figure © Cynthia Chapman 1993; Berlin Story © Philip Sealey 1993; Karmic Mothers – Fact or Fiction? © Kate Atkinson 1993; The House with the Horse and the Blue Canoe © Cheryl Nyland-Littig 1993; The Wee Man © Lorraine Lorimer 1993; The Birthday Treat © Linda Pitt 1993; The Olive Tree © Hilary Waters 1993; Black Lizzie Black ©Jenny Maguire 1993; Good Neighbours © Stephanie Egerton 1993; Nobody We Know © Carey Jane Hardy 1993; Moira Flaherty ©Juliet McCarthy 1993; Richard Remembered © Leonard Tyler 1993; Someone to See You © Isa Moynihan 1993; Northern Light, Southern Comfort © Sheila Kelley 1993
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780006476542
Ebook Edition © NOVEMBER 2016 ISBN: 9780008235451
Version: 2016-11-22
Contents
Cover (#ubc7708c6-5da7-5a69-a6e5-c8e243e4749f)
Title Page (#u2d069de3-f95a-5b6c-80ae-9b203b53ae84)
Copyright (#ulink_add6cd6d-d111-5216-ba28-9a5a3b66c44b)
Foreword (#ulink_6bf4baca-259d-5e44-b2cd-6816593b8e17)
Judges (#ulink_f520dbdd-cd69-5253-b75c-8fd584160d96)
FIGURE OF EIGHT (#ulink_d091f312-6c0e-5f93-a0c8-c7abcdf61b0d)
Min Dinning
THE SPIRIT OF THE TIMES (#ulink_0d18991c-62de-5600-898e-0c39683f894d)
Jude Jones
DRAWING FROM THE FIGURE (#ulink_9d35eac8-9a48-5a0c-817e-598f69d8ad76)
Cynthia Chapman
BERLIN STORY (#ulink_5c6b7c90-9fd7-571d-a1e4-de976e27de39)
Philip Sealey
KARMIC MOTHERS – FACT OR FICTION? (#litres_trial_promo)
Kate Atkinson
THE HOUSE WITH THE HORSE AND THE BLUE CANOE (#litres_trial_promo)
Cheryl Nyland-Littig
THE WEE MAN (#litres_trial_promo)
Lorraine Lorimer
THE BIRTHDAY TREAT (#litres_trial_promo)
Linda Pitt
THE OLIVE TREE (#litres_trial_promo)
Hilary Waters
BLACK LIZZIE BLACK (#litres_trial_promo)
James Maguire
GOOD NEIGHBOURS (#litres_trial_promo)
Stephanie Egerton
NOBODY WE KNOW (#litres_trial_promo)
Carey Jane Hardy
MOIRA FLAHERTY (#litres_trial_promo)
Juliet McCarthy
RICHARD REMEMBERED (#litres_trial_promo)
Leonard Tyler
SOMEONE TO SEE YOU (#litres_trial_promo)
Isa Moynihan
NORTHERN LIGHT, SOUTHERN COMFORT (#litres_trial_promo)
Sheila Kelley
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Foreword (#ulink_5f37be3d-18c8-5b34-8683-dc0c941ecac2)
The sixteen stories that you are about to read emerged from over three and a half thousand entries for this year’s Ian St James Awards.
There have been several new developments in the last twelve months: the introduction of a shorter category of fiction under five thousand words alongside the established category of up to ten thousand words; for the first time this year, we opened our doors to writers in the English language from outside these shores and this volume contains stories by writers from New Zealand and the United States; the launch of Acclaim, a bimonthly magazine featuring stories by shortlisted writers in these Awards. Acclaim will publish sixty-four stories in six issues and include writers from Namibia and South Africa. All the activities associated with these Awards are co-ordinated at The New Writers’ Club. In the summer, the Club organized its first Short Story Workshop as part of the 9th Birmingham Readers and Writers Festival. There will be more to come.
Every writer who enters the Ian St James Awards – and they have to be over eighteen without a published work of full-length fiction to their name – receives an appraisal of their work. The success of this operation can be measured by the receipt at The New Writers’ Club of only eight letters consigning (a few of) our readers to the darkest depths. Not a bad ratio from such a large entry. The critiques are by no means definitive. In the time and space available, they can’t be, but they are intended to highlight a story’s strengths and weaknesses and are, hopefully, of great value to writers who find feedback so hard to come by. In addition, the Club also now appraises stories by member-writers outside the entry dates for the annual Awards and these more detailed reports are proving to be very popular.
To all the readers who have helped us arrive at this book, many thanks. Similarly, our thanks go to this year’s panel of judges who gave freely of their time to decide on the stories that would be published in these pages. I am sure that the stories that have been selected – and there is as always a real cross-section of styles and subject matter – will entertain.
To all the writers who sent us stories this year and missed out, thank you for entering, good luck with your writing and there’s always next year. This is the fifth Ian St James Awards book to be published in as many years by HarperCollins. Our thanks go to the many people at the publishers who helped with the production of this book and to all our supporters in the book trade. Finally, many congratulations to this year’s sixteen Award-winning writers who are now, without doubt, ‘Flying High’.
Merric Davidson
Director, The New Writers’ Club
Judges (#ulink_de8b823b-191d-5f84-91c1-aaad5d3402b3)
CLARE COLVIN
Writer, journalist and book reviewer
DANIEL EASTERMAN
Novelist
CORINNE GOTCH
Marketing Executive, Booksellers Association
ELIZABETH HARRIS
Novelist
MARK ILLIS
Novelist
IAN ST JAMES
Novelist
NICK SAYERS
Publisher
CAROLINE SHELDON
Literary Agent
FIGURE OF EIGHT (#ulink_7ba5b186-c7b4-5c0a-80e3-e9779058088a)
Min Dinning
Min Dinning spent more than twenty years teaching English worldwide, travelling in Europe, South America, China, Papua New Guinea and Australia. She began writing fiction at the age of seven but lapsed for more than thirty years, only to begin again two years ago, inspired by a creative writing class. Until then she had written letters, diaries and academic papers and published some non-fiction. These days she teaches Business EFL and is trying to come to terms with domestic bliss in rural Cambridgeshire. She still has secret yearnings to run away to exotic lands.
FIGURE OF EIGHT (#ulink_7ba5b186-c7b4-5c0a-80e3-e9779058088a)
He tasted of sour pickle and rice porridge and stale tobacco. I had wanted this kiss for months and now I had it. Desire was injected uncomfortably into my bloodstream. His skin was hard and chapped as he pressed it into my face. I was shocked. It was not as I had expected. I was still unsure of why I wanted him. It may have been sex, but it wasn’t straightforward; he wasn’t attractive in a conventional way, like Martin. It may have been need and gratitude.
He kissed as if he didn’t know what a kiss was. Or maybe he wasn’t kissing at all. It was me who was doing it. His mouth was stiff and immobile but betrayed a repressed emotion that I couldn’t define. It briefly occurred to me that it might be anger. I had caught him unawares, walked up to him from behind. But was it unawares? We both knew.
He was wearing his best jacket, tailored too large in stiff blue cotton in what used to be an imitation of Mao, and smelling of mothballs as most Chinese clothes do when they are seldom worn. Why did I focus on that? It detracted from the moment. Smells and tastes tried to deflect me away from the strange reality of it.
For a moment we remained in an awkward clinch, he with his eyes closed, me searching for reaction, wanting response. He took no initiative and then withdrew as I placed my tongue on his teeth.
‘No, no,’ he moaned.
‘But we must, we’ve been waiting so long. We can’t waste more time just thinking about it and doing nothing.’
‘Somebody will find out. We’ll be criticized.’
‘We’ll be discreet. Nobody will know. Anyway we haven’t done anything wrong.’
‘You don’t understand. We’re not in your country. In China this is impossible. I could go to gaol.’
‘Don’t be daft. Of course you couldn’t,’ I said, not sure. People certainly seemed to get into trouble for things that go unnoticed or are laughed off in the West.
Anyway – what were we doing? Was this adultery? Infidelity? It certainly wasn’t fornication, nor was it likely to be.
Before the momentum was lost I drew his wiry body towards me again. I sensed tension, reluctance.
‘If someone sees, it will be wrong.’
‘But if no one sees it will be right?’
He relaxed a little and laughed.
‘Chinese logic!’ I said. The idea that a sin must be witnessed to be a sin struck me as peculiar but practical.
‘Honestly, Alison. You know what I’m saying.’
Sometimes he sounded like a middle-class Englishman. These phrases, learned from World Service plays, tripped off the tongue like the rehearsed script of a thirties drama. He seemed more foreign at moments like that and a twinge of uncertainty unnerved me. Was I dealing with an inhabitant of another world? Were we as close as I thought or had I invented it out of want?
He gently removed my arms and buttoned the top button of his jacket. He did up the hook and eye on the collar and took a step backwards.
‘I must go now.’ He looked out of the blurred curtainless window at the bleakness of the early spring campus beyond. Grey concrete blocks, brightened by the occasional piece of vivid underwear hung on a bamboo pole out of a window to dry in the dusty air.
‘Don’t come down,’ he said.
‘Shall I come to the studio tomorrow?’ I asked, suddenly unable to cope with the prospect of being alone in this chilly, dingy flat, not wanting him to leave.
To my relief, he smiled. ‘Yes, come for your lesson as usual. The other guys will be there. We’ll paint together.’
I heard his footsteps retreating down the concrete stairs fainter and fainter, then the click of his bicycle lock. I watched him as he pedalled silently down the path. I kept watching until he disappeared into the heavy stream of traffic on the main road beyond the gates of the campus.
Yes, I thought, I’ve done it. I’ve changed things between us at last.
I was trying to remember how it had been at the beginning. I cast my mind back to the day when I announced I was going to China.
‘You’ll never survive,’ Martin taunted me. ‘You’ll be back in two weeks.’
I tried not to believe that he might be right. It had certainly been a rash decision for me, but he had this way of making me feel inadequate and I had to show him I could cope.
‘Of course I’ll survive. Anyway it’s only nine months. I’ll be back in the summer. You won’t even have time to miss me.’
The thought of leaving Martin for so many months made me uneasy, but I told myself I had nothing to fear. He would be there when I got back and whatever happened in between would soon be over. He still hadn’t been keen. He had wanted us to get married but I wanted to get my urgent need to travel out of my system. I thought I’d stay about a year, then go home and settle down for ever. I didn’t think Martin had the right to tell me not to go, so I made up my mind to do it, to stick it out whatever it was like, just to prove to him that I had a mind of my own. I felt I needed another dimension to myself. Martin was not enough. He was reliable, kind and rather good looking but I wanted to deny to myself that I cared for him as I didn’t relish the prospect of missing him. It would spoil my adventure. Besides, I was not interesting enough as I was. A tall, pale Englishwoman, over thirty, a virgin. A real spinster schoolmarm, in fact. I’d never worked abroad before and mistrusted foreigners on the whole. But something about China drew me. I needed to go there and see it. I wanted to be able to tell people I’d been to the Great Wall, the Ming Tombs and the Forbidden City. It would change me. The very thought was exciting, and my heart raced as I had fantasies of people in silk robes, gliding across the semicircular bridges and reading poetry in bamboo groves.
I’d got the job at the university through a friend who knew someone at the embassy. It didn’t seem to bother anyone that I had no experience of teaching university students. They seemed pleased to get a real English teacher and in the first few weeks I was treated like a VIP. When the novelty wore off and winter began to set in I felt less excited and less keyed up to learn new things. What had at first been amusing curiosities and fascinating ways eventually became tedious routine. I got fed up with the way the cleaners bobbed around with their stinking mops, the way the cook, sweating even in the ice of November, hawked and spat on the kitchen floor, and the chore of shopping at the market where my fair hair and my height set me apart as a freak or a visiting Martian. If Martin had been there it would have been all right. I wouldn’t have felt so self conscious. He was even bigger than me. It annoyed me that I wasn’t managing well on my own. ‘You’ll never survive’ – his words echoed in my head as I contemplated my inability to stride out and enjoy myself.
I bought local clothes – an army jacket and some quilted shoes – in an attempt to melt in a little. The shoes were men’s: no woman in China wore a size seven. But it made me more of a freak as the girls were by then starting to wear what they thought were Western clothes – hideous shapeless Crimplene jackets with twinkly thread and plastic high-heeled shoes. The daring ones wore lipstick. I knew I’d got it wrong, but I also knew I could never get it right. Not here.
My ideas about the country had been gleaned from National Geographic and the paperback book of the travels of Marco Polo. Reality was a rudely different shock. Nothing had prepared me for the drabness and alienation which seemed to make people physically ill in the winter, the strange food and the smells. Everywhere there hung in the air an almost palpable veil of smells. They were always stale and sickening. From the overpowering stench of lavatories which supplied fertilizer for the vegetables we ate to the acrid smoke of the miserable little market food stalls and the sweetish sickly aroma of hand-rolled cigars smoked by old ladies.
I became aware that I would have to learn the language or I would continue to feel autistic, sealed off into a bubble, in this world but not of it, as if I was watching it on television. There were no other foreigners in my unit, so I was obliged to seek out the company of Chinese English speakers, and this was how I met Liang.
‘I wonder if you could arrange painting lessons for me?’ I asked, standing at Dr Chen’s desk in the Wai Ban, the office that was in charge of me as a foreigner.
I had always wanted to do Chinese watercolours, though I was not artistic. It looked simple, so I thought I’d be able to produce something that I could hang, framed, over the mantelpiece at home.
‘Please sit down. Can I offer you some tea?’ came his high-pitched voice from behind a newspaper.
‘I’d like to learn painting.’ I remained standing. Once I sat down it would take all day.
There was a silence while Dr Chen finished reading the article he was absorbed in. On the shelf behind him there was a photograph of his son looking like an all-American boy at the University of Southern Illinois, and next to it a bottle of Mao Tai and two glasses.
‘Of course, Miss Alison. We’ll send you a teacher whenever you like.’ This was the predictable response. The answer was always yes, but I was doubtful whether it would actually happen.
‘I’d like to learn on Wednesdays.’
‘I see. You have nothing to do on Wednesdays.’ He laughed, coughed on his cigarette and peered over his newspaper.
They always seemed to think we were without inner resources. There was talk of getting a television to entertain me, as they thought I’d wither away without one. But of course there was no sign of it yet.
I wanted to snatch the newspaper away and yell ‘Get on with it, then!’ but I would have been wasting my time.
‘Well, thank you, Dr Chen. Could you let me know how much the lessons will cost?’
‘No charge,’ he said. ‘The painting unit will send someone.’
I forgot my request for a week or two, not expecting anything to happen quickly.
One afternoon I was idly staring across the microcosm of the campus, watching people going about their business. Students strode around in army coats, their numb fingers clutching texts to be learned by heart, mumbling to themselves, grannies wheeled babies dressed in jewel colours in bamboo prams, old men tended plants in pots or spoke to their geese, and cadres cycled by, puffing on their rancid little cigarettes as their bikes clanked along. I was the only one doing nothing. I was getting together the courage to go out and shop but it was always an ordeal to venture forth, head and shoulders above the nimble locals, stared at and laughed at and, I suspected, cheated by the peasants with their crooked teeth and filthy hands. I must have seemed like a millionaire, and without a word of Chinese still I couldn’t do anything about rudeness or cheating except shout in English.
There was a tap at the door of the flat. I thought it would be the Wai Ban checking up on me again, coming on some pretext or other to see what I was getting up to. But when I opened the door I saw a small wiry man with a broad grin. His hair was longer than usual for a Chinese man, and he was wearing the height of fashion, a polo-neck sweater.
‘How do you do, Miss Hutchings. I’m Liang, your painting teacher.’
He was at least six inches shorter than me and peered up like a confident child hoping to please a teacher. I almost expected him to hand me an apple.
‘Hello, Mr Liang. Come in. Would you like some tea?’
‘No thanks, no thanks,’ he protested, waving a hand.
He sat on the hard plastic sofa. His shoes were covered in mud and I noticed with dismay that he’d left a trail across my mats that I would have to sponge off.
‘The Wai Ban told me to come and teach you painting,’ he announced.
‘Well, Mr Liang, I just mentioned it. I thought it would be nice to have something to do on Political Study afternoon.’ I was free on Wednesday afternoons as foreigners weren’t invited to Political Study, though it seemed they were often the subject of discussion. Sometimes we were in favour, sometimes we weren’t. You could tell by the way they kept at a polite distance, courteous but not friendly. They usually tried to provide things we asked for and didn’t want complaints or any kind of controversy.
Liang’s real job, he explained, was to churn out numerous identical ‘works of art’ for ‘dignitaries’ and foreigners. He made me laugh. On Wednesdays he was to show me the fundamentals of Chinese watercolour painting.
‘We’ll go to the artists’ store to get your paper and brushes and paints next week.’ He paused and lit up a Phoenix, settling into the uncomfortable sofa. He slurped his flower tea and I wondered whether to offer him a piece of Cadbury’s chocolate, but decided I didn’t know him well enough yet.
So that was how it began. He used to pedal across town to my flat, where I would set up a table with newspaper, jars of water and my selection of paints, ink stick and stone and a row of brushes he had chosen for me, from the one like a feather duster to the wispy tiger-hair one. Sometimes he would talk about his studio and I hoped to be invited there one day. I imagined it. It would be romantic, arty. There would be paintings in various stages of completion and sunlight flooding in at a large window. He would be there working quietly with a few chosen friends. The little clique would have higher things on their minds than the price of oil and how to get something for nothing. It would be a haven from the turmoil of daily life.
‘Liang, what’s your studio like?’ I asked.
‘Just a big room. We all sit and get on with our work.’
‘Do you talk to each other? Do you discuss art?’
‘No. Not really. We chat about this and that, but it isn’t really necessary for us to talk about what we’re doing.’
The lessons were a bit of a disappointment as they consisted of copying various masters from a book of samplers. I spent hours trying to flick the brush into a bamboo leaf, whirl it into a rock, dab colour into peonies and lightly tease out hairs on the head of a dancer. He was a patient teacher – either that or he didn’t care that I wasn’t talented. He was just doing his job.
At last he said, ‘Next week you must come to the studio to watch.’
I was so looking forward to being introduced to the charmed circle of artists. I hoped perhaps these people would become my friends. Here was an opportunity to get to know people. The language barrier wouldn’t matter once we started painting pictures together. I felt quite privileged.
I cycled over an hour in the rain to get to the studio on the other side of the city. It was a large grey building with dirty cracked windows, and inside the main room, in light I would have thought inadequate for painting, there were rows of artists producing delicate watercolours for tourists and diplomats. Liang welcomed me with a large smile and looked straight into my eyes, which he had never done before. He was larger than life on his own territory. Complicity with foreigners was not on, so what was he trying to say? Then I realized he was beginning to treat me as a friend. I was glad I’d made the effort to come. With the weather being so foul and the prospect of cold wet clinging clothes all afternoon I’d nearly stayed in the flat, but indoors and outdoors were equally cold and dank, so what did it matter? Anyway I was curious to see him on his own ground, I wanted to know what made him tick and I wanted to meet his friends.
‘Mr Wu paints tigers. One of his pictures was presented to an African diplomat last month. We are all very proud of him.’
I smiled, slightly embarrassed. The idea of an art factory seemed so Chinese. Several artists beamed up at me as if I was visiting royalty. I still hadn’t made enough progress with my Chinese to say more than hello.
One man was painting carp from life. I was disturbed to see the fish darting around an enamel bowl, confused, their scales reflecting light from the neon strip lights above, their silly eyes staring as if in fright and their mouths mouthing a silent message. They swam aimlessly round and round, sometimes in a figure of eight. The artist had captured their movement and their fearful staring. They would be trapped in the enamel bowl until the picture was finished, then, their aesthetic purpose over, disposed of in a practical manner.
‘What will you do with them?’ I asked.
‘Eat them,’ said Liang, a mock serious look on his face.
‘But they’re pets, aren’t they?’
‘We don’t have pets here. Only rich people have pets. We like our animals best in the cooking pot.’
I was beginning to understand that my fatuous comment about a carp being a pet was very Western. The idea that eating carp was cruel suddenly struck me as silly in this context – it made more sense to eat them than to have these slithery cold creatures as pets. I had no choice but to start perceiving life around me in a more practical way. I started to see how much I was spoiled, prejudiced and set in my ways. I had recently started to dismiss the voice of Martin that often echoed around in my head pointing out various wickednesses and cruelties. He had started to irritate me. Who was he to impose his pampered views on people?
The visit to the studio was the first time I’d been interested in the real China as opposed to the fairytale version that lingered as a fantasy. I had enjoyed it in an unexpected way. It wasn’t how I’d imagined it at all, but better. It was as if the experience had taught me something, refreshed me. It was Liang who had gradually wrought the beginnings of change in me. I was at last starting to absorb those new experiences I so badly wanted and the catalyst was Liang. It was Liang who made it possible for me to open up. He too was beginning to change. No longer the distant and polite teacher. He began to be aware of me as a person. I was no longer just an awkward and large foreigner, but a source of information about outside, a companion and possibly even a woman. I reluctantly admitted to myself that I was beginning to feel a little excited in his presence. I found myself looking at the back of his neck, noticing his neat ears and his remarkable long eyelashes. I couldn’t stop myself looking at him, partly out of fascination and curiosity at his differentness and partly in the way one looks affectionately on an intelligent pet. He seemed so young. He was about the same age as me, but his cheeks looked boyishly smooth. I wondered if he shaved. His hair had the gloss of a child’s hair, which was a wonder considering the nasty sticky shampoo they used.
‘You know, Miss Alison,’ he said one day, ‘I’m really interested in seeing your country. I often listen to the BBC and VOA. I feel I know the West already. It’s different from here, isn’t it? You’ve got so much freedom. You can choose your job, your politicians, your friends …’
‘But Liang, you can choose your friends too, can’t you?’ It occurred to me that my self-appointed role of ‘friend’ to him was perhaps not exactly his choice.
‘Not really. We don’t have many friends here, not in the sense you mean it. People suspect one another, and besides you’ve probably noticed that we often say “classmates” when we’re referring to people we know. That’s because they’re people we studied with. What chance do we have to meet anyone else? You can see what it’s like in my unit. Apart from them you’re the only person I see. You’re the only outsider in my life.’ The idea that I was now ‘in his life’ sent a small shudder through me.
‘What about your family?’
‘Relatives,’ he said with a grimace.
‘What’s wrong with relatives?’ I asked, knowing what he was going to say.
‘Obligation,’ he said. ‘My wife was given to me by my uncle. She’s the daughter of some remote member of his wife’s family. When I got to twenty-seven and I wasn’t married, they said, “Liang, it’s time you had a child.” They’re peasants, you see. Within six months I was married to Wang and a year later my son was born.’
‘Couldn’t you have chosen your own wife? Why did you let them do this to you?’ I was beginning to feel resentment towards these primitive people who were his family. Didn’t they realize that he had the right to make his own choices in life? How could they foist some stranger on him like that? It was absurd.
‘It must have been awful for you.’ I realized this sounded feeble, like a schoolgirl commiserating over an embarrassing parent.
‘Not awful. I just did my duty to my family. They were right. I needed to get married and I hadn’t met anyone suitable. A man of twenty-seven can’t stay single.’
I’d been in China long enough to know he was right. He would have been regarded as a freak or people would have suspected his reasons for avoiding women.
I wanted to ask him if he loved her. I needed to know. But I was certain he didn’t. He was obviously trapped for eternity in an enforced relationship which was meaningless and gave him no joy. But he always seemed joyful enough as if it was never on his mind. He never mentioned the child.
We were seeing each other more and more. He was obviously growing fonder of me, wanting my company. And I wanted him too. I thought about him a lot. I often found myself daydreaming about him as I stood before my forty undergraduates, crammed into filthy Classroom Number Three where I attempted to teach the rudiments of English Literature. The uncomprehending faces stared back, obedient but totally unabsorbed. I must have looked as uninterested as they did. My mind was elsewhere too.
One day a group of runners training for a sports meeting ran past the open window. My adrenalin suddenly whirled as I saw Liang among them. But no, it was just someone who looked like him. It couldn’t have been him. He was wearing blue cotton running shorts and a white singlet with a figure of eight on the back and grey plimsolls without socks. His thin legs were spattered with mud and his shoulders were hunched in the cold. So unlike Martin’s rugby player’s physique. I watched him as he ran, unaware of me, intent on his task of forging ahead of the others. I thought of Liang’s slight body, unclothed – his knees and elbows, his small buttocks – and felt a blush spreading over my neck. I was jolted back to my yawning class who had noticed nothing. They sat impassively picking their noses, scratching their armpits and staring blankly through me as before.
How Liang managed to get away from his unit I never discovered. The painting lessons continued, sometimes at my flat and sometimes at his studio and I eventually managed to produce a passable, rather sentimental picture of kittens and peonies which I had mounted on a scroll. We both began to be aware that painting was no longer the only interest we had in common. I positively looked forward to his visits. We would both invent reasons for him to come.
‘I’d better have a look at your bike,’ he’d say, knowing full well that the University Bicycle Workshop checked it regularly for me.
Or he’d say, ‘Have you taken your winter ginseng? I’ll get you some at the medicine store.’
And I would cut out articles about life in the West for him and save him my Guardian Weekly. Without a telephone, we had no choice but to meet often.
He helped me with many of the small things I found so taxing in my first months in China.
It was him who showed me how to eat properly. I had been trying to survive on boiled eggs and boiled vegetables which was all I could manage to cook on the pathetic gas ring provided in my kitchen. The oil smelt so vile I couldn’t fry anything. When I tried, the wok sent up clouds of smoke and the food tasted as if it had been cooked in engine oil. Liang primed my wok for me and expertly showed me how to heat the oil to the right point. He flicked vegetables and fatty scraps of pork around and made feasts.
I gave up going to the market by myself. I waited for him to come and we would set out on an adventure. What used to be a painful experience became fun. We tried out anything new that came into season and rushed back to the flat to cook it. I ate everything: eels, their tiny heads nailed to a board while their long bodies were split with a sharp knife, rabbits bought live and their fragile necks cracked, their white fur peeled off like peeling an orange, tiny salty dried shrimp, sweet creamy yoghourt in chunky pottery jars, and delicate translucent hundred-year-old eggs with their glinting green and orange hues. Food became a fascination to me and I even discarded the fork and spoon I’d carried everywhere and learned awkwardly to wield chopsticks. I still couldn’t bring myself to use the bamboo ones in restaurants which you had to clean up with a bit of exercise book kept in the pocket for the purpose.
We started meeting on Sundays. Usually he’d come in the afternoon. I didn’t ask what he did in the morning. I was vaguely aware he might have family commitments but kept the idea at the very back of my mind. When the weather was still cold in March I lay one Sunday morning beneath my quilt, comfortable, with the sounds of the campus outside. I’d been reading one of Martin’s letters and thinking of home. He wanted me to meet him at the end of the term and have a holiday. He would come out on a package tour and I could join him in Peking. Somehow I didn’t feel elated enough about the prospect of seeing him. I wouldn’t say my heart sank exactly, but it almost did. While I was trying to sift through my thoughts on the subject, there was a tap at the door and I knew it was Liang, very early.
‘Hang on – I’ll put my dressing-gown on.’
I rushed eagerly to open the door and there he was, clutching a small parcel in pink wrapping paper tied with a piece of string.
‘This is a little gift for you.’
‘Can I open it?’
‘Go on.’ His eyes were wide with anticipation. More than ever he seemed childlike. I recalled the runners and had to look away.
It was a set of silk hand-embroidered handkerchiefs, totally impractical but pretty in a fussy Chinese sort of way. It was the sort of gift a man gives to a woman.
‘But it isn’t my birthday, Liang.’ This was silly. Birthdays didn’t mean much here.
‘No, I thought you’d like them. My cousin works at the embroidery factory,’ he said by way of justification. Suddenly I felt a rush of sentiment, of joy and of something I had never felt in the presence of Martin. I wanted to fling my arms round him and dance.
I can’t think how I restrained myself, but I felt as if I was saving it for a later I knew would come. I increasingly enjoyed the thought of it. We went out on our cycle ride, him pedalling protectively on the traffic side of the cycle lane, telling me when to stop, when to turn, giving disapproving glances when other cyclists jostled me. He was still somewhat astonished that I could ride a bike as he was certain all Westerners drove around in large cars.
We sat together in a tea house in those low bamboo chairs. An ancient man in a grubby apron poured water from a steaming black kettle as we clattered the lids of our tea dishes. I looked at Liang and wanted urgently to know more about him. He was deliberately uncommunicative about his personal life, as if his life in my presence was the only life he had.
‘Liang, why don’t you bring your wife along?’ I ventured, uncertain of his response. I couldn’t even remember her name.
‘She’s busy,’ he said evasively, looking at the violinist squeakily performing at the far end of the tea house.
‘But you never talk about her.’ Then I dared to ask, ‘Don’t you get on?’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘Well, aren’t you and your wife good friends?’
‘She’s my wife,’ he said as if this explained everything.
‘And your baby? Isn’t it wonderful being a father?’
‘Yes, I’m proud of him.’
‘But Liang, when do you spend time with him? You’re always with me!’ As I said this I realized it was true. I hadn’t been aware until I said it that he was spending time with me that he probably should have been spending with his family.
‘I see him once a week.’
It was then that I discovered that Liang and his wife didn’t actually live in the same place and that Liang was effectively a bachelor, married in name only. Shocked but overjoyed, I sensed a tremor of anticipation. Hadn’t it always been him and me, never a triangle?
‘She’s with her mother. She can’t live with me. There isn’t room with the baby. I only have one room. Anyway she prefers it.’
Liang’s life must have been bleak until I turned up. I provided him with an excuse to go out and enjoy himself. Wasn’t it his duty to see that the foreigner was kept content? It concerned me for a moment that maybe our friendship wasn’t what I thought it was after all – then I remembered the little silk hankies. No, he wasn’t pretending. The desire to kiss him welled up again, and I wanted to tell him how sweet he was and how much he meant to me and how he had freed me. I couldn’t in the tea house, so I left it until he came the following week.
It was a Tuesday evening. He was going to call in and see me before a meeting. Although I was on the other side of town he never seemed to object to the long ride. He would call in for a chat and a cup of tea. The note he had sent said he had some news.
His jacket made him look small as he stood at the door.
‘Come in. A man came round the campus with some tinned lychees today. I got you some.’
He enthused about my discovery, but urgently wanted to tell me his own news.
‘I may get a chance to go abroad,’ he said, phrasing it carefully, not allowing himself too much certainty. Going abroad was like going to Heaven. Everyone wanted it and feared it and thought they’d never be good enough.
‘You could come to England,’ I said without thinking. Then it immediately struck me that this was not a good idea. It was a potentially dangerous displacement for us both.
‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘Because I’m married it makes it easier. The authorities know I’ve got a son to come back for.’
Little did the authorities know the irony of this. From what I could tell, Liang’s son did not have a father who would pine for him while suffering in a foreign land.
Liang was looking out of the window as he spoke, with his back to me. And it was then that I chose to kiss him.
The kiss did change our lives. The relationship did take on a sexual dimension but was dominated more by intimacy than sex. We both seemed to have difficulty in expressing ourselves sexually – we didn’t easily fall into each other’s arms, we were embarrassed about kissing and bed was never mentioned. Whether he thought of it I don’t really know. It seemed out of reach, impossible and I’m not sure I wanted it. We substituted a physical manifestation of our closeness with looks into the eyes, standing close, touching fingers when we thought nobody would see. Of course, he always pretended it wasn’t happening. It was not tantalizingly erotic as neither of us understood eroticism and wouldn’t have known how to bring it about. I was certain this was more like love than the insipidness I had with Martin, who was, I suppose, a kind of fiancé. I was happy. I allowed myself the luxury of what I thought was illicit love. The fact that it might not have seemed like passion in other people’s eyes didn’t mean it was unexciting for me. Quite the reverse. I hummed with it. I had a permanent grin on my face, but in a country where grinning reflected embarrassment, a feeling appropriate to a tall foreigner, my secret was safe.
As the spring opened up into flowers and warmth in April, Liang and I began to be seen around together more. I used to get little gifts for him at the Friendship Store. He wasn’t allowed in so he would wait with the bikes outside and I’d go in and spend my foreigner’s money.
‘What can I get you, Liang? Just say what you want. It’s easy. I’ve got hard currency. Look!’ and I’d wave my notes at him.
I couldn’t fail to notice how his eyes lit up at the thought of goodies normally out of reach to all but party officials.
‘No, really. I don’t want anything, Alison.’
I’d go in and get him a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red Label and some Marlboros. He’d have to keep them at my flat. It wouldn’t have done for him to be seen with these gifts. He’d have been criticized; that is, hauled up in front of some bossy committee to explain himself. I’d started smoking Phoenixes. I kept the Marlboros for him. I even bought him – silk tie of the kind favoured by visiting Americans, but of course he couldn’t wear it. I wondered if I was overdoing it, making a bit of a fool of myself. I just wanted to please him and give him things he could have only from me.
As the chilly weather suddenly stopped I shed my army jacket and began to wear a skirt. People noticed and I thought they were making snide comments. I hoped I was beginning to look a bit less foreign. My hair had grown and I’d put it in bunches like the local girls. Actually, I didn’t dare risk the pudding-basin barber. We must have made a comic pair, I suppose, me six inches taller than him. But it didn’t matter.
At least so I thought until one day when he came along looking very agitated.
‘The Wai Ban says I mustn’t spend so much time with you.’
‘What do you mean? Do they suspect? What did they say?’
I felt panic-stricken. This could mean trouble for both of us. It could mean him losing his job or worse. It could mean me losing him.
‘They’re worried about me being influenced by you. And they’ve told Wang about you.’
For a second I couldn’t remember who Wang was. Then I remembered she was his wife.
‘What did she say?’
‘Not much.’
‘What d’you mean “not much”?’
‘Well, she has her own life. She’s never met a foreigner. She doesn’t know what to think.’
‘Isn’t she upset?’
‘Why?’
‘Well, you’re seeing another woman.’
‘She’s Chinese.’
‘But she’s still your wife.’
‘Yes. But she doesn’t see it like you do.’
‘You’re close enough to have had a child together, and you’re telling me she isn’t jealous?’
‘Anyone can have a child. It’s easy.’
He was talking about the thing most Westerners thought they wanted out of their relationships and dismissing it as if it was the easy bit. Getting someone into bed made people forgo understanding and kindness, as if sex would replace friendship or be an improvement on it. But from what I could see Liang and Wang didn’t seem to have much apart from the evidence of a fleeting sexual encounter. They appeared to have an easy-going or even apathetic tolerance of each other, and maybe some woolly notion of duty.
‘Well, what does it mean? Are they saying we’ve got to stop seeing each other?’ I couldn’t bear to think about it.
‘They want an explanation. They’re trying to be reasonable. And Wang has offered to divorce me.’ He added this last bombshell as a sort of afterthought.
I added up in seconds what it would mean if he was divorced. Would he then expect me to marry him? The thought ricocheted around in my brain. What about Martin? What about Mummy and Daddy? What about my friends? The thought of being married to a five-foot, two-inch Chinaman appalled me suddenly. He must have seen my expression of anguish and read it completely wrongly. All was confusion. Did I love him or had it suddenly stopped like a watch stops when it is overwound and the spring snaps?
‘Don’t you see?’ he said. ‘It would be wonderful.’
Wonderful for whom? I saw all the advantages for him and none for me. He would unload an unwanted wife and child and acquire the much coveted passport out of China – a foreign spouse. I would be married to a foreigner who would never fit in at home and who would make me a laughing stock. The thought was impossible. Could I see him at the Point to Point or the Hunt Ball, or meeting the vicar or Uncle Basil? They would all be horrified. I began to see the value of Martin. He was of my world, my sort. I had stepped into an alien place and been befriended by an alien. Liang was China and was inseparable from it. I could not blend the two worlds – the only piece of this world that I could take home was my picture of peonies and kittens.
Since I was lost for words and Liang was evidently hoping for a positive response, he said, ‘You could come with me to America. We could travel together and get out of this dump. We could be free together.’ What did he mean ‘free’? I was already free.
I looked into his eyes, then looked away to his frayed grubby collar and the tide-mark on his neck.
‘But you can’t just leave your family like that – they haven’t done anything wrong.’
‘I can. Lots of people do. I’ve been applying for scholarships for months and now at last one has come through. I’m going to Ohio in July.’
‘You never said anything to me,’ I said, hurt and beginning to be angry that I had not been part of this plan.
‘I wasn’t sure until yesterday.’ He started to fidget irritatingly with a loose button on his jacket. He couldn’t bring himself to look me in the eye.
So my part in the grand plan had been to help him prepare himself for the peculiarities of the West in order to make the escape less painful.
‘Do you really want to marry me, then?’
‘Of course. It would make things much easier. As the husband of an Englishwoman, I would be able to …’
I stopped listening. I was right. He was after a passport. How had I failed to see it from the very first? Why had I thought he cared for me? An icy trickle of disappointment pierced me with startling pain. Facing reality was like discovering I hadn’t won the jackpot after all. After months of the luxury of fantasy I now had to return to mundane reality. I couldn’t let the ice sear an irreparable wound. I shut it out.
There had been a point in both our lives where he needed to turn away from China and I needed to turn away from England. We had met in the centre of a figure of eight, travelling in opposite directions. We generated a small spark, a misunderstood spark as it turned out, as we passed, and now our only route was away from each other.
‘Take your wife,’ I said. ‘I’m leaving here and going back to England.’
He looked up at me. I had intruded on a dream. He remained lost in reflection for a moment, then seemed to emerge gradually like a creature coming out of hibernation.
‘Yes.’ He said it with an air of relief.
‘I’m sorry if you misunderstood my behaviour. We Westerners are not like you Chinese. We’re a bit impulsive, you know. It doesn’t mean anything.’
‘No.’
He made his excuses and left. I didn’t have any more painting lessons and we did not communicate any more after that meeting.
Much as I wanted to weep and feel wretched, I couldn’t. The moment had passed and I had evaded that peak. I was frustrated and even guilty that I couldn’t summon up any real misery. I felt numb and blank. It wasn’t the numbness of shock. It was the numbness of a bemused vacuum.
Eventually at the end of the summer term it was time for me to leave. Martin’s trip was fixed and I was to meet him in Peking. While I was packing I discovered a pair of Liang’s gloves. He had left them behind on the day we first kissed and I’d kept them hidden in my underwear drawer. I took them out and felt a slight pang. I sniffed them and they smelt of sourness and cheap plastic. They were too small for me to wear. They were useless and ugly. I threw them in the bin.
As always I had trouble at the airport, with nobody to help with my bags, being sent in different directions by different officials, and was glad to be leaving this irritating mayhem. I wasn’t all that keen on the grand tour of China, but at least we’d be insulated from the chaos inside an air-conditioned bus.
I got on to the plane at last after much pushing and shoving, but of course someone was sitting in my seat. They never seemed to manage these things efficiently, and having got up at the crack of dawn to be chauffeured to the airport in the university limousine, I was pretty tired and irritable already. A woman with a baby had dumped her things across three seats – there were endless gaping bags of blankets, fruit, enamel cups and Heaven knows what else.
‘Excuse me,’ I said in English, hoping she’d get the message. She stared up at me. She was a tiny delicate woman, maybe from one of the Minorities. She was like a pretty doll with perfect almond eyes, peach cheeks and a long black plait, and wearing a pink silk jacket, old-fashioned among the Crimplene glitter creations worn by other girls. The baby was bundled into several layers of shawls in spite of the heat and was wearing those disgusting crotchless trousers so that his little raw bottom protruded. He laughed as she swung him on to her shoulder and kicked his tiny feet in his little red cotton shoes. I felt large and ungainly, gawky and imperfect. I shifted my bulky body into the aisle to let her pass as she gave up her seat without a murmur. She shuffled with her belongings towards the smoking section of the plane at the back.
I flopped into the saggy loose-covered seat and clipped on my belt. I was leaving. I’d said my goodbyes, had my banquets, drunk my toasts to mutual friendship and was now free to be a tourist with the rest of them. We soared into the sky, and the city, still grey in summer brightness with patches of dusty green where there were parks, receded.
I didn’t look back.
Martin would be waiting in Peking and after a lot of hanging about waiting for bags to appear, I spotted him beyond the barrier and waved. I was more glad to see him than I thought I would be. I felt a bit like a soldier coming home after an arduous campaign. I had survived. I was comforted by his familiar brown tweed jacket and looked forward to his tobacco smell.
Emerging from behind him was a man that looked exactly like Liang. He had much shorter hair and was wearing a rather baggy Western-style suit. It was Liang – I recognized the tie I had bought him at the Friendship Store. Why was he here? How could he have known I would be on this plane? I was too noticeable to hide myself. I would have to brazen it out.
‘Hello,’ I said, smiling.
‘Hello, darling,’ Martin said, leaning forward to peck my cheek. ‘It’s lovely to see you.’
I looked away from him to see what had happened to Liang. He was standing there next to Martin, the same grin on his face as when we had first met so many months before.
‘How are you, Miss Alison? It’s a pleasure to see you.’
He was like a stranger.
‘Mr Liang, my painting teacher. Mr Roberts, a friend from England.’
They greeted each other formally, Martin towering like a bear a foot over Liang and leaning slightly to reach his outstretched hand. I noticed Liang’s dirty fingernails. Then Liang’s grin changed focus and became a distant stare, his eyes seeking someone in the crowd.
‘Excuse me, I’m meeting my wife. We’re being briefed for our trip to the States.’
And Liang wandered off into the throng. A few minutes later he emerged carrying suitcases, baskets, nylon holdalls and string bags, followed by the doll in the pink silk jacket. She was exquisite: three inches shorter than Liang, carrying the beaming child.
He did not bring her over to be introduced, but as they walked away he looked smugly over his shoulder at me, as if he was carrying away the spoils of the campaign.
THE SPIRIT OF THE TIMES (#ulink_c469b260-b965-5d63-a626-4732f9e82f0d)
Jude Jones
Jude Jones is a native of Hampshire and studied singing at the Guildhall School of Music. An assortment of careers followed, including opera, music-theatre, archaeology, stage-management, acting, busking, script-writing and an unsuccessful attempt at shop assisting. In the eighties, she was artistic director, actress and writer for a small-scale touring theatre company based in the East Midlands. Now equipped with two small sons, she is back in Hampshire where she started out and is completing her third unpublished novel.
THE SPIRIT OF THE TIMES (#ulink_c469b260-b965-5d63-a626-4732f9e82f0d)
My mum never knows when I skive now since I met the old girl up at Hob’s Lane. Makes me laugh the things I get to do these days and mostly everyone leaves me be which is dead ace. I’d say bugger them all but I ain’t allowed to. The old girl stop me from swearing, see? Though I does when she ain’t around.
You have to go past the old mill to get to Hob’s Lane. It ain’t a proper road though. It’s a kind of track with this stream by it and you get the cars go along it every now and then but only if they’re coming up to the cottages there. It’s a ‘No Through Road’ and it don’t even go where it was supposed to go now they built the big motorway past it. No Through is right. There’s this high fence at the end and then you turns and has to go back so the folks what walk their dogs there goes mainly round by the woods now and leave the Hob to me.
The old girl told me her name once but it was funny. I mean it weren’t the kind of old-fashioned name your mum might have or your gran even. So I lets it go. I calls her Missis and she calls me Nipper and that’s OK. We don’t like fuss, me and her.
We does chatting mostly. She knows how to gab, she does. Not that she’s particular lonesome for all she lives in the water. She got her mates same as me. I know most of them. There’s Foreman, he’s a slippery old sod. Pretends he’s a fish. And Longman, he’s the big oak. Then there’s Ringman and I tell you about him in a bit. The old girl says he’s shy. I ain’t seen Littleman yet. Littleman’s whatsit – invisible.
My mum used to bawl me out when I went up the Hob but she’s quieter now because we done the change.
When I first seen the Missis I thought it was some bored old wrinkly what topped herself in the stream. I went close to look because I ain’t never seen no corpse. Then she sits up, like she was finishing off a sunbathe and I wet me knickers. ’Course she ain’t real old. Not underneath. Not like my mum.
‘What them chaps doing over there?’
‘They’re building the new motorway, Missis.’
‘A road? They’re building a bloody road near my stream?’
‘Yeah. Why you lying in the water?’
‘A bloody road! If that don’t beat all!’
‘I thought you was dead.’
‘Well, I ain’t. A bleeding road! You know how noisy them things are?’
‘Yeah. You’ll get rheumatics, sitting in there. My gran has rheumatics every time she goes out in the rain.’
‘Your gran’s a wanker, Nipper, and no mistake. Why’d they build here? Why can’t they go and mess up some other place?’
‘My mum says it’ll make getting over to Langley real quick.’
‘Your mum’s a wanker. Why’d she want to go to Langley to start off with? Bloody awful town.’
‘Everyone’s a wanker to you, Missis. I reckons as you’re a wanker yourself.’
‘You hold your tongue, smart arse. And don’t swear. ’S’not becoming in a young girl.’
‘You swear. You’re swearing like buggery.’
‘I’m allowed. You’re not. You hear me?’
‘Why?’
‘’Cause I says so.’
‘I’m fourteen. I’m big enough to swear now. And smoke. My mum don’t mind.’
‘Your mum ain’t brought you up right. What’s your dad say?’
‘’E don’t say bloody nothing, do he? I ain’t got no dad.’
‘Don’t bleeding swear, girl. I told you once and I won’t tell you again.’
‘What’ll you do if I does?’
‘This.’
‘… Oh! … Christ almighty, Missis, how’d you do that?’
‘With practice, Nipper. I had lots of practice.’
‘Could you show me how to do it?’
‘Might. Depends.’
I got ordinary mates too, like I said. Not as many as when I was a kid but that’s sort of how things go, ain’t it? I got this bloke, Ian. He’s leaving school soon but he ain’t training for anything except thieving. No jobs round here, see?
I let him do it to me once when we was out down the Rec. I makes him get a thing, you know, a condom thing, because of the HIVs and he didn’t know how to put it on. So I done it for him.
It was quite nice but it hurt a bit.
My best mate is Marie. I took her down Hob’s a couple of times but the old girl didn’t show up. Marie said I was a nutter and I got cross. Then the silly bitch told her mum about what I said about the old girl. Marie didn’t say what her mum said back. I was real narked so I stole her trainers and slashed them with my Stanley. She keep her mouth shut now.
I didn’t tell Ian about the Hob. Ian thinks he’s tough. He’d think I was soft and I ain’t. I told Dixey though. Dix is my mum’s mate when they ain’t slagging each other off. She lives two doors down with her brats. Dix is all right. She just nods and says, ‘What, the old cow’s still up Hob’s Lane?’ and carries on frying chips. She don’t know nothing about Foreman and Longman though, so I scored there.
My mum give me some grief. Shit, she was a pain. Always going on about what time I come home at night just because some silly little prat has got herself done in over on the Park estate. She wanted me to be a nurse! A nurse, I ask you! And tight. God, tight as a duck’s arse. Mind you, I don’t have to bother with that lot nowadays. The old girl saw to it. She’s got some sense, I’ll give her that.
Mind you, the Missis come over mean when I tell her I seen Foreman down in the square drinking with the alkies. She tells me to hold my tongue and gives me a shiv when I cheeks her. I don’t mind though. I’m going to learn how to do it back. Stands to reason, don’t it? Like we was saying in Community Studies last term, it’s everybody for theirselves, ain’t it? Because there ain’t nothing else to do. Nobody else cares about you but you. That’s what the old boss, that Thatcher woman said and I agrees. The Missis calls it survival of the fittest which is what she said she’d done. Yeah, well, I’m pretty fit. And I don’t take no crap.
Anyway here’s how I first went up the Ridge.
The old girl says one day she’s off on her travels, yeah? Could have knocked me over – I was gobsmacked. I never seen her walk about much, see? Most of the time she sits around in her stream like it was a chair in front of the telly. Every now and again she’ll come and squat down besides me on the bank and wave at the cars when they goes past. But I never seen her walk about before. So I says, ‘Where you going then?’
‘Why? You want to come along, Nipper?’ she says.
I caught the old bus and got off at Yalderton. Stupid bloody place – not even a shop. Mainly farmhouses and snotty kids riding horses. I walked up the big hill like she said and threshed around in the wood at the top for a bit. Full of sodding stingers it was. And wet and muddy in spite of it being late June and dry everywhere else.
She was halfway down the other side under this great yew tree sitting in a kind of pond thing like it was her own personal swimming pool. I suppose there must’ve been a spring coming out up above somewhere. Mind you, I wasn’t going to mess my tights up finding out. Too many spiky trees around. Too many bloody bushes. I was cut to pieces, you can believe it. When I comes down to her I sees the old tree she’s underneath is all hung up with bits of rag and scraps of cloth like it’s some kind of mad washing line. Dead weird it looked.
She was making a kind of singing, droning noise too when I comes down. It had words to it. They goes:
‘Dance, Ringman, dance,
Dance, my good men, every one,
For Ringman, he can dance alone,
Ringman, he can dance alone.’
Out of her barrel, I thinks. Always was loopy but gone and ripped her hairnet now.
‘You been doing your washing, Missis?’
‘What? Quiet, kiddo, or I’ll smash you good.’
‘You finished singing yet?’
‘Yeah, I finished now.’
‘What you doing up here?’
‘Visiting.’
‘Who you visiting? I don’t see no one.’
‘See that stone there?’
‘What, the big one?’
‘That’s Ringman.’
‘That’s Ringman? Where is he then?’
‘Told you before, girl. He’s shy.’
‘He won’t come out like Longman does, you mean?’
‘Might do.’
‘Them blokes, Longman and Foreman. They ghosts?’
‘Ghosts? Nah, Nipper. They’re real. Same as you and me. They ain’t dead, you know.’
‘What’s Ringman doing in that stone?’
‘Waiting.’
‘What’s he waiting for?’
‘Tonight.’
‘What’s happening tonight?’
‘Depends.’
‘Oh, come off it, Missis. Tell us. I ain’t come all this way in that stupid bus just to fuck about.’
‘You watch your language, girl. Or …’
‘Or what, then?’
‘Or Ringman might decide he don’t like you, after all.’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘He’s good looking, Ringman is. A sight better looking’n that wanker Ian you mess with.’
‘So what?’
‘If you was to play your cards right Ringman might make you his girl.’
‘What if I don’t want to be his girl?’
‘I reckon you will. Oh yes, Nipper, there ain’t much doubt about that.’
‘What’s he like?’
‘Oh, he’s nice, Ringman is. And he’s good. Very, very good.’
My mum made one hell of a stink when I didn’t come back that night. There were pigs out all over the place looking for me. God, the fuss they made. Where was I? Who did I talk to. Did I get raped?
Raped! Took most of my cool, but I kept a straight face. I mean, who’d tell the fuzz about the old girl and the bloke? Bloody fascists, the lot of them. And my mum, she raved so much I reckoned it was funny-farm time for her. Tried to ground me, she did. Locks me up in my room. But I got to go to the bathroom now and then, ain’t I? And when I goes, it ain’t my fault if the window’s just above the extension roof. And it sure ain’t my fault if I just tests it to see if I can climb down. Which I done nice and quick. Then I borrows old Dixey’s bike and cycled the six mile up to Yalderton Ridge for another visit with the bloke.
It was all them social bloody workers what made me do it. If she’d have left them out I might have let her be. But she always had to be in charge, did my mum. I suppose I didn’t mind when I was a kid but now I tells her I’m a grown woman she just laughs at me. And I won’t have that.
I thought maybe the old girl could do something about it. And I thought right. Mind you, the old girl give me one hell of a time joshing me but I sticks to my guns.
‘How’d you like it,’ I says, ‘if you had some prying old cow asking you questions night and day about everything you does and getting a pack of half-arsed women coming around too? Bloody nosy bl—idiots. Would I like to change school? Am I happy? Happy? ’Course I’m ruddy happy long as they leave me alone.’
The old girl had a little brood and she says she’ll fix it for me. Which she done.
I got to roar each time I think about it. She got made up as one of them social workers, see? She come visiting my mum. They shuts theirselves in the kitchen and I hears Mum making her a brew and later they comes out and the old girl goes off. Didn’t even look at me, she didn’t, but she grab my hand niftyish and squeezes it and I knows she’s pulled a stunt.
Mum went all pale after that like she’d had the spunk taken out of her and she stop fussing and telling me off and trying to keep me home. It was as easy as peasy. It was wicked. Excellent.
Dixey come round next day. ‘What’s the matter with Lynda?’ she asks me. ‘Why’s she gone so quiet?’
‘Dunno. Got a cold, probably,’ I says.
Dix give me a nasty look and I gives her one back. And that worked too. She goes off like a little white mouse and don’t even give me no grief for cheeking her while she’s going.
It was more or less the same the rest of term. What’s more I got bloody good at cycling.
In August Mum says Uncle Mick’s gived her some dosh and she wants to go to Majorca with Dix and her brats. I says that’s well OK by me just as long as I don’t have to go. And that was OK with them. So I nicked Dix’s tent and went up to the Ridge. I was there all August with the bloke and he weren’t shy at all.
In September he goes back to sleep so I comes down again and gets back in harness. I don’t mind school too much, see? They learnt to treat me right now. In fact, I got school taped.
‘What you done to all them creeps, Missis?’
‘What creeps?’
‘All them folks at school and my Mum and Dixey. All them people.’
‘I ain’t done nothing to them.’
‘You must’ve. They don’t mind what I do. They don’t even mind me thieving and smashing things.’
‘I ain’t done nothing to them. I done something to you.’
‘What you done, then?’
‘That’d be telling, Nipper. You just be grateful I done it.’
‘It ain’t wrong, is it, what you done?’
‘You slimy little squirt! I never heard such hypocrisy in all my born. You really take the cake, you do! You beat the rest of them hands down.’
‘What you mean? What rest of them?’
‘You think you’re the only little tart I’ve ever talked to?’
‘Yeah, I did … You ever talked to Dixey Foster?’
‘Might have. Yeah, I remember. Snotty so and so she was. She weren’t no good.’
‘No good for what?’
‘No good for nothing.’
‘What about me, then? I’m good, am I?’
‘Ringman says you are.’
‘How long’s Ringman going to kip for?’
‘You missing it? I could get you some more, you know.’
‘He woken up then?’
‘Not Ringman. Someone else.’
‘Who?’
‘Longman’s good at it. He’s even better than Ringman.’
‘I don’t fancy Longman though.’
‘Oh, you will, love, you will.’
*
In October I missed my third period and I got dead worried. I went to see the old girl and she thought it was a right joke, she did. I goes on about an abortion but she really let rip. I’d got to have the kid according to her. Abortions wasn’t right. I told her it was all right for her to say that. She wasn’t in the club.
She took me to see Longman. He was down by the copse over near the motorway works. He wanted to touch me but I told him to bugger off. He weren’t nothing like as smashing as Ringman. I wasn’t having him but the old girl said he knew how to fix it so it wouldn’t show until it was time to get the bloody thing out and if I did it with him she might look after the brat herself when it come. So I let him and after that I didn’t mind what he looked like just so’s he didn’t stop.
The old girl was a soft touch then so I got her to show me how to do the shiv.
I practised on everybody. My mum, Dix, the brats at school, creeps in the street. I got the Head. I even got Ian’s dudes one time when they was feeling the mean Fridays and was all tanked up. I got them real good and nowadays they don’t call me those names no more.
When it was Christmas I asked my mum for everything I could think of. Make-up, clothes, Nike trainers, a Walkman, a music centre with a CD player, you name it I wanted it and she come up sweet. Don’t know where she found the juice to pay for all them things because you don’t get big money working at the Co-op but I wasn’t going to argue. Dixey give me lots too. Best Christmas I ever had and I made Mum let Longman stay nights with me. Up to then we’d been doing it outside but I never did enjoy getting my arse frozen off, though he didn’t seem to mind the frigging frost. She didn’t say much about Longman being there, except on Christmas Day when she bawled a bit when we stayed in bed. But then, she was getting proper grey round the gills. I reckoned she weren’t long for this world, see?
I stopped going down the Hob when the weather turned nasty. I ain’t good in the rain and after Christmas Longman just stayed in with us, fiddling with my CD and screwing me and that was like all I wanted. Besides the old girl had shown me how to do the shiv so sod her, I thought.
Past the New Year though, that bugger Longman ups and leaves. One minute he was listening to some old Motown crap of Mum’s on the music centre – the next he’s halfway down the garden path. I went after him yelling but he just gets over the fence into the field next door and disappears. I swears fit to bust. Who cares about the odd swear? The old girl ain’t there.
Sneaky bastard, that Longman. After all I done for him!
I waits for him to come back that night but he didn’t and I got mad. So I went round town doing the shiv to any creep what asked for it. Then I met some geyser coming out a pub and I let him do it to me round the back. He weren’t much cop but he give me a tenner and that paid for a few drinks.
Up at the Ridge there weren’t no sign of Ringman neither and I laddered my best tights climbing about round them bastard bushes looking for him.
‘There ain’t nothing for it,’ I says to myself, ‘I’ll have to go and see the old girl.’
But you wouldn’t credit it, when I goes up Hob’s she taken a bloody powder too.
I got right moody that January, see?
‘Missis! Where you been?’
‘Around, girl. Where you been?’
‘Looking for you.’
‘You’re a bare-faced liar, Nipper. I hope you passed a merry Christmas.’
‘Yeah, it was great. Look, where the hell’s Longman?’
‘He had to go.’
‘Where? When’s he coming back?’
‘Stone me, I never seen a girl so desperate for sex as you, love. Proper little nymphomaniac, you is.’
‘Oh shut it, Missis. Just tell me where Longman’s hiding out.’
‘Don’t you tell me to shut it, Nipper. You try and remember I don’t take no cheek.’
‘I ain’t frightened of you, Missis. I knows what I knows. I can hurt you too now.’
‘Oh no, dear. No, no, no. You can’t pull no tricks on me. I ain’t made quite the same as other folks and you never knows what I might do next if you was to try it, hey? It don’t make sense to make me mad, do it?’
‘Nah, well, all right. Just as long as you tell me where Longman is.’
‘Ah yes, Longman. Well, Nipper, Longman’s having his kip.’
‘Like Ringman?’
‘Yeah, just like Ringman. But don’t you fret. They’ll wake up in time.’
‘In time for what?’
‘For the baby, sweetheart. For the birth. And afterwards.’
‘But what about … ?’
‘I can arrange that too, girl. I arranged the rest, didn’t I? Look at you! No unsightly lump. No morning sickness. No backaches. No funny cravings. A fifteen-year-old sylph, you is. And so pretty. It’d make Foreman’s heart melt to look at you.’
‘Foreman! I ain’t going with Foreman!’
‘Foreman’s better even than Longman.’
‘Oh, come on, Missis. Foreman’s a nasty old sod. I seen him down the square, evenings. He’s dirty and he smells. The lads throw their cans at him when he’s pissed. I seen him throw up all over the bus shelter. He’s well out of order.’
‘Never judge by the outside, Nipper. If I’d have judged by your outside you would never have got where you is now.’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘You ever look in the mirror? You look incredible clean, girl, like some kid’s Barbie Doll. You’re so pretty, you’re boring. But I thinks hard when I sees you and I waits till I sees your insides. Then I knows.’
‘What? What you know?’
‘You’re the spirit of the age, see? The times. What you are is what this place is. You’re what they calls an epitome. See, I likes to take what I can and I likes to get it right. I likes an accurate reflection and I likes to enter into the spirit of the thing, you get me?’
‘What you mean, Missis? Can’t you talk straight?’
‘Oh sure, little Gemma. I can talk straight. Yeah, I can do that. So. You want a man, right?’
‘I want Longman.’
‘Ah no, ducks, you want Foreman. I can get you Foreman. Come on, now. Let’s have a little sing. Join in. You know this one …
‘Dance, Foreman, dance.
Dance, my good men, every one.
For Foreman, he can dance alone.
Foreman, he can dance alone …’
‘No, Missis, not him.’
‘Ah, here he is, sweetheart. You just take a look in his trousers. Go on, don’t be shy. Go on, take a peek.’
‘No, Missis …’
‘Where’s the harm?’
All February Mum was like a zombie from Outer Space. She didn’t seem to notice me and Foreman rabbiting about in the house at all. In the morning she went down the Co-op and then she come back home at tea-time knackered and quiet and sat in front of the telly till it was time for bed.
Dix come in some nights with her kids and they all sits down by the telly and just watches and watches. It don’t matter what. They watches whatever. One night I gets up out of bed and I goes down to the front room and watches them. I get the flipper switch and fiddles around all over the shop. I give them a bit of Channel Four film in Frog where you has to read the words and they don’t seem to mind that and then we goes over to Newsnight with a couple of geysers droning on about the economy and they don’t turn a hair. I messes round till one. The silly buggers was lapping it all up. I finishes with this programme with some arty doctor chap blathering on about the meaning of life to a load of short-haired hippies and it was so boring I wanted to shiv the lot. But did my zombies bat an eyelid?
When I turns the set off they all got up, still being the Living Bloody Dead and Dix and her brood goes back home and Mum goes upstairs.
I says to Foreman about it when I went back. But he grabs me and starts to do it again and I forgets about them being crazy because you can’t think about nothing else when Foreman’s doing it.
He goes out every now and again does Foreman to get rat-arsed and he don’t let me tag along. So I goes over to Langley when he does and I tarts about down round the town centre. He don’t care. He knows I’ll bring him some cans back anyway.
I got a bank account now.
End of March Mum got pinched. She’d been thieving from the till and the fuzz arrive and haul her off down the nick for a couple of days. My Uncle Mick come over from Fosshampton and bailed her out. He said he thought she’d get off with a fine because she ain’t got no record and what the hell was the matter with her? I says I reckons she’s sick but she won’t see a doctor. He wanted to know who Foreman was and when I says he’s my bloke he cut up nasty. Starts bad-mouthing him. I give Mick a well-lethal shiv and he shut his mouth and pissed off sharpish. Good riddance to bad rubbish I told Foreman but he just grunted and rolled over.
I near on gived up school. Who needs it? Sometimes I goes in for Community Studies now and again so’s I can sound off and listen to them all agreeing with me like a load of sheep. It’s a bit of a giggle and I just does it for fun, see? I might go in for politics perhaps. I’d be good at that.
When April come I got this bad turn. It wouldn’t have happened if Foreman had stayed home like he was supposed to. But no, the bastard’s got a big thirst and he’s off down town. So I done my eyes over and nips across to Langley on the train. I done a few tricks and I thought I’d swank around the Town Hall bars and pick up some more trade but halfway along up the High I gets ill. Real ill. And while I’m trying to spew up and wondering what the hell it was I ate I hears this ripping sound and me best bloody dress starts splitting away at the seams. I got the sodding biggest bun in the oven you ever see. All at once. One minute a size twelve – the next I’m practically ten months gone! With my dress hanging around like I been in a hurricane. And Christ, did it sting! I starts bawling out and screaming and it being Saturday I gets a decent crowd. Some old classy bint comes out from one of the posh side streets and starts bossing my audience about. They get me an ambulance and about time too I says when I gets in because I’m wet all down my legs. Waters broken says one of the ambulance creeps and so I gets rushed into St Cath’s with all the deedoos going.
Didn’t take long to push the nipper out but it really bloody hurt. I ain’t going through that, never again. I looks down at my belly after and I got these bastard scars just above my hips. Stretch marks says the nurse. And my breasts are all hard and big and they’re leaking for God’s sake! They wants me to breast feed but I ain’t having none of that. Sodding disgusting. The kid’ll make do with powdered milk, I tells the sister and I gives her the mean eye. Stopped her mid-lecture, that did.
Mum come in to see me the next day and she just sits there beside the bed staring at the kiddie as though it was something amazing. When the bell goes, end of visiting, she gets up and stomps off without a word to me like ‘How are you?’ or ‘What can I get you?’ Charming.
Next day I gets up and nicks some clothes out of a side ward while the woman’s in the bog and I gets dressed and takes the babe and discharges myself. I’m going straight off to give the old girl a piece of my mind. What did she think she was doing playing a trick on me like that, hey?
‘Ah, you had the kiddie, did you, Nipper? Let’s have a look at her.’
‘Yeah, no thanks to you. I thought you was going to take care of me?’
‘Well, I did, didn’t I? Best to have the baby in a nice clean hospital with lots of doctors and nurses to keep an eye on you.’
‘I thought you was going to do it for me?’
‘What, you mean you thought it’d be nice having the kiddie out here by my insanitary little stream? I ain’t no midwife, sweetie, I never said I was. Or did you think I was going to have it for you? I ain’t no bloody conjuror neither.’
‘Ain’t you?’
‘Not so’s you’d notice. A harmless eccentric, that’s me.’
‘Where’s Foreman then? I stopped off home and he’s gone.’
‘Ah, yes. Well, Foreman got tired.’
‘What you mean, Foreman got tired?’
‘They all have to have their sleep, dear. You’re a demanding girl, see? You exhaust them after a while.’
‘But what am I going to do now? What about me?’
‘Oh, I got a treat lined up for you, sweetheart, but you has to wait.’
‘What treat? Why do I have to wait for it?’
‘You heard me talk about Littleman, ain’t you?’
‘Yeah. But Littleman’s invisible, you says.’
‘True. But on a certain night in the year he ain’t. He’s good solid flesh just the same as the rest of us.’
‘So what?’
‘He wants you. He wants you bad. He wants you so bad that he thinks he might spend the whole of his one night with you.’
‘Listen, Missis, why the shit should I get worked up about that?’
‘Language. Because, Nipper, Littleman’s better than Ringman and Longman and Foreman all rolled into one. He’s the best there is. The tops. And the things he can teach you. The power he can give you. Makes me feel faint just to think about it.’
‘What sort of power?’
‘Ooh, real power. The power to get what you want just like that. You can have money, clothes, servants, fast cars, villas in the South of France, men, anything you bleeding like.’
‘But I got that now.’
‘No, love, what you got now’s just a shadow of what you could have if you let Littleman spend the night with you.’
‘If it’s so good why don’t you go with him instead of me?’
‘It’s you he wants, sweetie. He only wants you, see? And as for me I get my thrills by seeing you enjoy yourself. I like your appetite, Gemma. It feeds me.’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘Forget it. Just you nip up to Yalderton Ridge the last day of the month and I promise, you’ll have the night of your life.’
‘I don’t know. I’ll think about it.’
‘Don’t think about it, girl, do it. I ever let you down before?’
‘No. Well, I dunno. I might. OK? I might. ’Bye. See you.’
‘Aren’t you forgetting something?’
‘What?’
‘Your baby, Nipper. Your little baby what you’re going to give me to look after like you said you would.’
‘What you want her for, Missis?’
‘I got a kind heart, see? I reckons you might neglect the little one once you got your hands on Littleman. Give us the baby, sweetheart, and I’ll see she wants for nothing a mother can give her.’
‘I don’t know …’
‘Come off it, Nipper. You truly want a baby hanging round your neck once you’re gallivanting round the world with your men friends?’
‘Suppose not. All right. But I’ll check up on her, see?’
‘Good girl. You’d be unnatural if you didn’t want to see her now and then. You just come and ask and I’ll show her to you. OK?’
‘Yeah, suppose so.’
‘And don’t forget. Be up the Ridge on the thirtieth. You won’t regret it.’
‘Might.’
It was hard waiting. Even though it was only a couple of weeks I was close to busting. Most nights I went down town trolling but it was stupid. After Foreman it didn’t seem as if any guy I could find to screw knew how to do it. I started to dream about bloody Littleman and woke up howling. Mum took no notice. Once I’d got rid of the brat she’d lost interest. She was on the Social now because the Co-op wouldn’t take her back. Hardly surprising, silly bitch! Fancy thinking she could get away with lifting money out the till! Still, she was quiet enough and give me no cheek when I got iffy which I do regular when I has to go without it.
Christ, them days went slow. Sometimes I’d plan out what I was going to do once I’d got this extra zip the old girl had said I’d get. I’d buy myself a Rolls or better still, a Chevvy, and I’d get a hunk to be my chauffeur and I’d go on the biggest spending spree anybody ever went on. Other times I’d think up faces for Littleman – Nick Nolte or Kevin Costner – and then I’d think about what the rest of him’d look like and groan. Yeah, it was a shitty time for me. Had to go round with crossed legs most days.
When the day come I was in the bath all afternoon. I shaved my pits, my legs, near on everywhere. I done myself up real careful and got my black dress out so’s to look dead seductive. Not what you might call suitable for messing around in the woods up on the Ridge but the weather was fine and I’d got a spare pair of stockings ready.
In the bus going up there I was so fidgety I had to keep on changing seats. The bus creep tells me to sit down but I don’t shiv him because we can do without a sodding crash. Jesus, I was impatient. I kept thinking when I was the boss round here I’d get the buses to stop only two or three times. This bloody bus stopped all over the shop. It even bloody stopped when there wasn’t anybody wanting to get on. So I started to think about how I’d zap creeps when I come into my power. How I could even zap the old girl. Teach her a few lessons. A little respect. And then I goes back to thinking about Littleman. My hands is sweating and that’s a sure sign I’m ready for it. Christ, was I ready!
It was near dark when I gets off but I knows my way up the Ridge backwards since last summer and I belted up and tore through the wood heading for Ringman’s stone. There weren’t no sign of Littleman so I sat down to catch my breath. After a while I hears the old girl singing bloody Top of the Pops. I can do without this, I thinks, but I knows better than to interrupt. Somewhere away in the woods she’s droning on as usual:
‘Dance, Littleman, dance,
Dance, my good men, every one,
For Littleman, he can’t dance alone,
Littleman, he can’t dance alone.’
Oh, so Littleman can’t dance alone, hey? He needs a girl to make him dance. I’m bloody trembling now at the thought.
It were getting real dark but I knew Ringman when he steps out from behind his stone and I knew Longman and Foreman who come with him. I know them by their smells, specially Foreman. They comes up and touches me sort of gentle and exciting and in a little I begins to pant. They carries me into the wood and we comes to a clearing place and they puts me down very careful, still stroking away. Then I sees the old girl sitting on a log, smiling at me like I was her true nipper and she lifts her hand and points over to a dark corner and crouching there is Littleman. I wants him straight away. He’s big and blond and he looks at me like he ain’t ate for a year. Well, he can eat me all right.
‘Gemma,’ says the Missis, ‘let me introduce you to your dad.’
I begins to laugh and then I sees she ain’t joking. For a minute I wonder whether I should run off but my legs is all weak. I licks my lips and goes hot.
I says, ‘What the hell? I’ll try anything once.’
I takes off my clothes and lays down inviting in the middle of the clearing.
Headline story, Langley Evening Argus, 15 May 1992:
MURDER VICTIM USED IN SATANIC RITES?
The body of a young girl, found yesterday in woodland below Yalderton Ridge, was today identified as that of fifteen-year-old Gemma Hearnesley of 14, Coebrook Grove, Grigbourne. Her badly mutilated and partially eaten remains were discovered by a farmer’s dog in a remote spot below the Ridge.
Chief Inspector David Marsh of the County Constabulary, who is in charge of the case, stated categorically today that the police are treating Gemma’s death as murder. Police from all over the county were out in force this afternoon combing the area for clues to Gemma’s assailant.
Chief Inspector Marsh went on to say that although the body was naked and had remained concealed for about a fortnight, forensic reports showed that there was no sign of a sexual assault made on the victim. However there were certain indications at the scene of the crime which suggested that she might have been subjected to some form of black magic ritual, though the evidence as yet is far from conclusive. Her other injuries have been ascribed to scavenging animals.
Two men, Neil Hogarth (31) and Dougal Smith (23) were arrested in the early hours of the morning after tip-offs from local people. Both men are members of a group of New Age Travellers encamped on common land near Yalderton Heath and have been described as Satanists. Later they were released after questioning.
Mrs Lynda Hearnesley, the mother of the victim, was unavailable for comment. However, all day, letters of support and comfort have been arriving at her Grigbourne home from relatives and friends. This afternoon some of Gemma’s classmates delivered flowers and messages of sympathy to her door, shocked and stunned by the news of her death. Mrs Hearnesley’s neighbour, Mrs Dixey Foster, said that Gemma’s mother was too distressed to comment. She added, ‘Gemma was a lovely girl, popular with us all. Nothing was ever too much for her. When her mother was ill earlier on this year Gemma nursed her devotedly through it. We are all horrified to hear of her death and the sooner the police catch the madman who did this the better.’
Another neighbour expressed his opinion that the reintroduction of capital punishment would act as a deterrent for this type of crime.
DRAWING FROM THE FIGURE (#ulink_253fe347-fe7f-5f2d-8264-1410ffff5d56)
Cynthia Chapman
Since she gave up teaching, Cynthia Chapman’s occupations have included market stallholder, pub pianist and running a fancy-dress hire business from her home in Kent. She has been writing for about five years and has had over thirty stories published in magazines. At present she is trying to find a publisher for her first novel while working on her second.
DRAWING FROM THE FIGURE (#ulink_253fe347-fe7f-5f2d-8264-1410ffff5d56)
At twelve-thirty Mrs Oliphant removed her gardening gloves and laid them in the trug with the secateurs and bass. She straightened up from her task of staking delphiniums, conscious of a familiar twinge in the small of her back. Naturally one ignored this evidence of the advancing years; nothing was more boring than one’s own minor ailments. The way to keep young was to follow the excellent advice of all those newspaper columnists; get out and about and take up new hobbies and interests so that one simply didn’t have time to feel sorry for oneself.
However, she did feel a little sorry for herself when, just as she had arranged a lightly boiled egg and thin fingers of brown bread and butter on a tray, the telephone rang. She had to watch the egg growing cold as her friend Marjorie prattled on about nothing. As soon as she could she cut the conversation short.
‘You must forgive me, my dear – I’m due at my art class at half past one. That’s right, we’re going to tackle drawing from the figure this term. Yes indeed – one only hopes it won’t be too illuminating!’
After eating her spoilt lunch Mrs Oliphant hurried upstairs to change out of her pale-green cotton trousers and loose-fitting shirt. One did not of course dress up for an Adult Education class but on the other hand one did try to look fresh and summery. She selected a dress in a light, silky fabric patterned in soft shades of blue – reminiscent of the delphiniums that one loved so much – and white shoes with a sensible medium heel. Her fair hair was worn in a short, casual style that needed little attention, but she carefully reapplied the rose-pink lipstick that these days seemed more flattering than stronger colours. After spraying a little lily of the valley toilet water behind her ears she was ready.
Since her husband had died Mrs Oliphant had been to classes in Embroidery, Flower Arranging, Yoga (for which one had been obliged to wear a track suit) and French Conversation. This year’s choice – ‘Discovering Drawing’ – had made her feel quite adventurous, for although one had of course always adored Art it was amazing to find that one could actually produce quite recognizable pictures of assorted flowerpots, a bunch of bananas, or a jumble of kitchen utensils on a checked tablecloth.
This term the members of the class were ready to progress to ‘Drawing from the Figure’ and had been asked to pay an extra two pounds towards the services of the models. Their tutor Mr Redfern had stressed that the important thing about figure drawing was not to feel inhibited or discouraged by one’s early efforts but just to have a go. He was a likeable, friendly man and they had now got over their initial reluctance to call him ‘Teddy’ as requested. He was in fact rather like a teddy bear, stockily built, with fluffy golden hair balding at the crown, a cheerful, ruddy face, and eyes the colour of brandy. After two terms with him they all felt like old friends.
Teddy Redfern was in his early forties and had a liking for alcohol and young women; a combination which had cost him both his previous teaching job at a sixth-form college and his marriage. These days he still drank a little more than he should, but his weakness for young women was not catered for in his Adult Education classes, for the majority of his pupils were ladies of indeterminate age with more enthusiasm than artistic talent. Like Mrs Oliphant, they were charming, cultured and conventional, and if they ever detected whisky fumes on his breath they were much too well-bred to give any sign of it.
Now they were all busily engaged in drawing the young West Indian in jeans and T-shirt who leant against a table, his chin cupped in one hand, as if deep in thought. Teddy Redfern withdrew to the side of the room and surreptitiously lit a cigarette, tapping his ash out of the open window. Idly he listened to the snatches of conversation interspersed with ripples of ladylike laughter.
‘My dear, I was quite expecting a nude!’
‘Oh, we’re not nearly ready for that yet, are we?’
‘One does rather hope that one wouldn’t have to cope with a male nude to start with!’
‘But artists have to cultivate a detached viewpoint – just like doctors and nurses. The human body’s simply a machine, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, of course. It’s too silly to be apprehensive about drawing the nude figure – most of us are married women, after all.’
Teddy Redfern threw his cigarette-end out of the window and began to drift round the room, making bluff, hearty comments about the work as he went. No good being too discouraging, he thought, or he’d find himself without a class next year. Mrs Oliphant’s attempt seemed to him slightly more competent than those of the other ladies.
‘I say, Anthea – I do believe you’re improving all the time! That head’s really very good.’
‘Oh, do you think so? I felt I was making a frightful botch of it.’
‘Nonsense! Just have a bash at it and don’t worry too much over the results. That’s what life’s all about, isn’t it?’
As he moved on, a faint frown crossed Mrs Oliphant’s face, for she found this simple philosophy quite alien to her nature. One could hardly ‘have a bash’ at everything in life; either one felt that one could be moderately successful at something, or one didn’t.
It would be no use, for instance, having a bash at changing the flat tyre of one’s car, she thought some forty-five minutes later, standing in the car park feeling particularly helpless. One would just have to go back into the centre and telephone one’s garage.
As she walked up the steps Teddy Redfern swung out of the glass doors, talking away so busily to the West Indian boy that he nearly bumped into her. ‘… like a couple of balloons in a binliner. Ah – forgotten something, Anthea? I’d better come back with you. I’ve just locked up.’
‘Oh, no, no –’ she faltered. ‘It’s my wretched car; a flat tyre, and I’m afraid I’m a perfect fool when it comes to dealing with anything mechanical …’
‘Is that all? I’ll have it done in a jiffy. Can’t have you messing about with oily tools, can we? Don’t wait for me, Mick – I can get the bus.’
The young man rode off on a motor bike and Teddy Redfern accompanied her back to her silver-grey Golf.
‘Is your own car out of action?’ enquired Mrs Oliphant, watching him roll up his sleeves and set to work.
‘Yes, temporarily. Bit of a nuisance, but I think there’s a bus I can get in about twenty minutes.’
‘Oh, but I insist that you let me run you home. It’s the very least I can do after your kindness. I believe you live quite close to me,’ she went on, as he gratefully slid into the passenger seat. She had seen him one day in a ramshackle Citroën Dyane coming out of the drive of a rather nasty-looking little bungalow.
‘And you live … ?’
‘Vine Cottage; I don’t know whether you know it?’
‘Ah yes, I think I’ve passed it in the car. Is there actually a vine?’
‘Yes, quite an old one at the back of the house. Are you at all interested in gardening?’
‘Love it,’ said Teddy Redfern, who occasionally, in a wild spurt of energy, would go out to his garden and attack the lawn for ten minutes or so before collapsing into a deckchair with his heart pounding. ‘I’m afraid mine’s a bit neglected at the moment but I’ve got great plans for it. You must come round one day and advise me.’
‘Oh, I adore telling other people what to do with their gardens,’ she said effusively. ‘But isn’t your wife fond of gardening?’
‘I live on my own. Was married for a time but it didn’t work out; just one of those things, I suppose. My fault. I’m not an easy man to live with – put it down to the artistic temperament!’
He went on to tell her about his days at the Slade in the 1960s when he had been ‘a bit of a terror’ then gave her an account of his teaching career. He was naturally obliged to leave out all the most interesting bits but made up for this by enlarging on his reasons for ‘opting out’.
‘… had enough of the rat-race. I made up my mind I was going to devote myself to my own work, sink or swim. I’m simply not cut out for a regular nine-to-four-thirty job. Nowadays I can stay in bed till noon then work all night if I feel like it.’
How Bohemian he was! thought Mrs Oliphant, remembering her own husband setting off at the same hour each morning with briefcase and bowler hat. One could see how the artistic temperament would be difficult to live with but at the same time quite fascinating.
‘Perhaps you’d like to pop in and have a cup of tea with me as it’s on the way,’ she said, as they neared Vine Cottage. ‘Unless of course you’re in a frightful hurry?’
But Teddy Redfern was in no particular hurry and thought it would be interesting to see the cottage. As he followed Mrs Oliphant through the front door he was instantly struck by the unnatural tidiness of the place, then by the elegance and quiet good taste evident in the drawing room. His feet sank into a soft, pale carpet; the chairs were covered in blue-and-white flowered chintz; a few good pieces of porcelain were displayed here and there. On a low table with the colour and sheen of a new horse-chestnut stood an elaborate flower arrangement of mauve and white lilac, fat white peonies and purple irises. He felt large and ill at ease, fearful of bumping into some valuable piece of furniture or marking the carpet with his shoes.
Mrs Oliphant led him out to the neat little kitchen so that he could wash the traces of oil from his hands.
‘I think it might be pleasant to have our tea outside, don’t you? It’s such a beautiful afternoon. Why don’t you go out to my little courtyard and relax, and I’ll bring the tray in a minute.’
The courtyard was delightful with its tubs of double petunias and trailing lobelia. Behind him the vine climbed almost to the roof of the cottage, its leaves a tender pale green against the faded coral of the brickwork. He sat down on a white wrought-iron chair and gazed down Mrs Oliphant’s garden.
‘You don’t do all this yourself, do you?’ he asked, as she set the tray down on the table.
‘No, I must confess I have a man in to do the heavy work. But I think beautiful, peaceful surroundings are so important for one’s well-being, don’t you?’
This was an idea that had never occurred to Teddy Redfern. It was odd, he thought, that no yellow or orange or scarlet flowers seemed to grow in Mrs Oliphant’s garden, and he remarked on the fact.
‘But how frightfully clever of you to notice! To tell you the truth, I find those colours strike a jarring note – I love blues and mauves, and white of course, and all those heavenly things with silvery leaves. One tries to keep the effect muted.’
‘And do you get many grapes from the vine?’
‘Yes, certainly. More than I know what to do with. You must have some in the autumn.’
‘Maybe if you decide to come to my class again we could use them for some still-life work.’
‘Yes, what a splendid idea! I’m sure I shall want to carry on with the class – one feels one still has such a great deal to learn. I’m finding drawing from the figure a tremendous challenge. I think we were all a little apprehensive before today; one half-expected to be confronted by a nude!’ She gave a musical laugh.
‘Oh, we shall get to the nudes,’ said Teddy Redfern with confidence. ‘Oh, yes – the nudes are all lined up. Or nude, I should say; only one of the models will be doing it. We have to pay them more, you see.’
‘Yes, I suppose one would have to … It won’t be the young man who posed for us today, then?’
‘Mick? Oh, no. The female figure – that’s the usual drill. I shan’t be inflicting any naked male bodies on you, ha, ha!’
That was rather a relief, thought Mrs Oliphant, after she had driven Teddy Redfern home. It wasn’t that one would be shocked or embarrassed; more that one might feel obscurely uncomfortable, possibly on behalf of the unclothed male model, so heavily outnumbered.
The next week Mick posed for them again. He sat on a hard wooden chair with his arms and legs crossed, and his body seemed to be all planes and angles, difficult to reproduce on the paper.
After the class she saw Teddy Redfern getting into his little red Citroën and felt slightly disappointed that there was no longer any need to offer him a lift.
The following week a new model appeared. To Mrs Oliphant and her contemporaries she seemed hardly more than a child, though one realized of course that she must have been in her early twenties. Her dark hair was cropped short like a boy’s and her skin was as firm and shiny as a nectarine. In spite of the plumpness of her figure she was wearing black cycling shorts and an orange T-shirt that was really no more than a vest. Her black canvas shoes were dusty and her nail polish chipped.
How unattractive girls nowadays made themselves look! thought Mrs Oliphant, narrowing her eyes a little as she started to sketch the ripe curves that only too clearly needed the support of a good brassière. And how very unflattering those tight shorts were, made from some slightly shiny synthetic material … Teddy Redfern had introduced her as ‘Lynne’, and at half-time sat on the edge of his table chatting to her and laughing a lot.
On the afternoon that Lynne came into the art room wearing a gaudily patterned short kimono a frisson of excitement ran through the class, for obviously they were about to tackle The Nude.
She really looked very little better without her clothes, thought Mrs Oliphant as, after discarding the kimono, the girl settled herself on an old chaise longue. She lay in such a position as to make it clear that she was not in the least self-conscious about the size of her hips. Today Teddy Redfern fetched her a cup of tea in the break, and though she shrugged herself back into the lurid kimono she did not bother to tie its belt. He sat beside her on the chaise longue and once again did a lot of laughing.
No doubt he was as detached as any doctor or nurse, the ladies reminded themselves, for after all the human body was merely a piece of machinery. Nevertheless, one did feel that it might have been more suitable not to have given the model that jolly slap on the behind just as she was about to start disrobing, or to have whispered whatever it was that made her giggle so uncontrollably.
After the class Mrs Oliphant walked to her car with Mrs Prentice, a nice woman of her own age, and they discussed Teddy Redfern’s behaviour in hushed voices.
‘Of course, one never knows with divorced men,’ said Mrs Prentice sensibly. ‘One shouldn’t be surprised if they go off the rails.’
‘Off the rails?’ repeated Mrs Oliphant in a high, alarmed tone. ‘Oh, but surely, my dear, there couldn’t be anything like that! Goodness knows, one isn’t a prude, but the girl is young enough to be his daughter. No, I think he was just being a little bit foolish in the way that middle-aged men so often are …’
Certainly Teddy Redfern was not foolish on any subsequent occasion that Lynne posed in the nude; indeed his manner towards her seemed offhand and almost brusque. Twice he complimented Mrs Oliphant on her work. A new model came and sat for them; an elderly man with a face full of unusual lumps and bumps like a potato. Teddy Redfern pinned Mrs Oliphant’s drawing of the potato-like head on the art room wall.
At their final class Mick posed for them again. The ladies had brought strawberries and cream to eat at half-time; Teddy Redfern had provided a couple of bottles of wine; a party atmosphere prevailed. Under the influence of this Mick became quite chatty and got out photographs of his girlfriend and baby daughter. At the end of the afternoon Mrs Oliphant walked out to the car park with Teddy Redfern.
‘Will you be coming to the class again next term?’ he asked.
‘Well, naturally one would love to if it can be arranged. But I’m not quite sure what my commitments will be; I’ve promised an old friend that I’ll go to Italian classes with her.’
‘Oh, do come, Anthea,’ he said, looking at her with his warm, brandy-coloured eyes. ‘I can’t manage without my star pupil. We’ll be doing still life in the autumn; I seem to remember you were rather good at that.’
‘Still life …’ she echoed, seeing in her mind’s eye a bunch of dark purple grapes lying in a pottery dish, perhaps beside a slim green wine bottle. ‘Yes, I do feel that’s very much me.’
‘Jolly good!’ he said, like an enthusiastic schoolboy. ‘I’ll expect to see you in September. You will come, now won’t you?’
Yes, thought Mrs Oliphant, she would go, even if it clashed with the Italian class and she had to disappoint Marjorie. There were times when one had to be a little selfish, otherwise people would take advantage of one’s good nature. Almost gaily she waved, as Teddy Redfern drove away from the centre still calling out, ‘Don’t let me down!’ from his car window.
Mrs Oliphant spent the month of August visiting her married daughter in Canada. They did a great deal of touring about and the weather was very hot and, although of course one absolutely adored one’s grandchildren, there was no getting away from the fact that toddlers were most frightfully exhausting.
It was delightful to be back in the peace of one’s own charming little cottage, to rediscover the joys of solitude and the sheer bliss of pottering around one’s garden. It was not until she had been home for a week that she chanced to pick up the new Adult Education Prospectus from the library.
Yes, there it was: Discovering Drawing: Edward Redfern. For beginners or the more advanced. Drawing can simply record information, but it can also express dynamic emotion. Students will be encouraged to develop their skills in a free and original way, using a variety of techniques. It really did sound quite exciting put like that, and she began to look forward to the new term.
One day in the second week of September she discovered that the grapes were ripe enough to eat. She could not remember having picked them as early as this in previous years; it had been an exceptional summer. She toyed with the idea of taking a bunch along to her first drawing class, then the happy thought struck her that there was really no need to wait for this. She knew where Teddy Redfern lived and could perfectly well call round with the grapes she had promised him. Perhaps she could advise him on his garden at the same time.
Mrs Oliphant arranged several of the ripe bunches artistically in a shoe box lined with crumpled pale-green paper napkins – almost as if one were taking them to church for a Harvest Thanksgiving service, she told herself mockingly. But one did like things to look elegant; even a simple gift should reflect one’s personality. For similar reasons she dressed with care in a lilac cotton skirt and top that she had bought in Canada. It was still warm enough not to need a cardigan.
Teddy Redfern’s bungalow, seen close to, was even nastier than she had imagined and the poor man’s garden certainly was neglected! The hedges had simply been allowed to run riot and the last of the privet blossom gave out a warm, sickly scent; a lawnmower stood abandoned on the half-cut patch of grass; the flowerbeds were dry and choked with weeds. A large, untidy clump of red-hot pokers almost blocked the path that led to the front door.
Stepping delicately past these red-hot pokers, Mrs Oliphant rang the doorbell, then stood listening with her head on one side. She became aware of music playing somewhere inside – the sort of music with a heavy, pounding bass that somehow she would not have expected a man of Teddy Redfern’s age to have liked. She rang the bell again but this time without much confidence.
His little red car was standing on the drive so he must be at home. Perhaps he was working in the back garden. She made her way round the side of the house, hardly noticing that the music had stopped. As she came to an open window she found herself looking into an incredibly disordered living room and was about to hurry past when she was arrested by the sound of voices. They seemed to come from a sofa covered in hideous mustard-yellow velveteen which stood with its back to the window.
‘Have a heart, sweetie – I’m not a superman.’
‘That’s not what you told me half an hour ago …’
It was at this point that Mrs Oliphant caught sight of the black cycling shorts and orange vest which lay next to a whisky bottle on the carpet. She lifted her eyes and saw a plump but shapely leg rise into the air, the toes curling and uncurling. There was the sound of a slap then a giggle, followed by Teddy Redfern’s unmistakable laugh.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘Just let me change the tape first.’
The next moment Mrs Oliphant stepped back in horror as he got up from the sofa and crossed the room, revealing more of the naked male body than she ever wished to encounter again. It was clear that he had not been ‘drawing from the figure’, though he could have been expressing dynamic emotion in a free and original way, using a variety of techniques.
Her heart thudding, she tiptoed swiftly back to the front of the bungalow. Would it be best to take the grapes home with her? But then, looking at their firm, shiny plumpness, she felt a sudden distaste for them. Quietly she laid the box on the front doorstep and hurried out of the gate.
It wasn’t that one was shocked, she told herself, standing in her cool, gracious drawing room a little later. If one had thought about it, one would naturally have assumed that he must have some sort of ‘love life’, to use the rather ridiculous modern expression. It was simply that one didn’t expect that kind of thing to be going on in the middle of the afternoon, in broad daylight, and not even in his bedroom.
Absently she rearranged a spray of Michaelmas daisies in the vase that stood on the low table. With sprigs of purple hebe and a few creamy-white roses the effect was exquisite.
It was strange that she had not noticed the reddish tinge in Mr Redfern’s hair before today; she had never cared for ginger men – just one of those little irrational foibles. Of course, one had always realized that he was not quite a gentleman …
She gazed out of the window at her charming garden, a restful, soothing vista of greens and blues and silver and white. It might be agreeable to take a tray of tea out to the courtyard, she thought.
Sitting there, sipping Earl Grey tea from a fragile, bone china cup, she turned once more to the Adult Education Prospectus. Watercolour Flower Painting; how delightful that sounded! The tutor was a Bridget Coombe-Stevens, and students were encouraged to bring their own plant and flower material.
There was nothing more ageing than to get into a rut and one really had a duty to oneself to ensure that this did not happen. And of course this class had the added advantage of not clashing with Italian, and so one would be able to keep one’s promise to poor Marjorie …
BERLIN STORY (#ulink_61ea71e4-6c85-5871-a7f0-44a3b2e0a1bb)
Philip Sealey
Philip Sealey currently teaches English at the European School in Munich. He has travelled widely and written two novels and the libretto for an opera. At present he is working on a third book set, like this short story, in Berlin after the Wall.
BERLIN STORY (#ulink_61ea71e4-6c85-5871-a7f0-44a3b2e0a1bb)
Es war einmal – once upon a time.
The wood was dark and the thin ribbon of sky above their heads was already speckled with the first stars.
She was four and he was six and every few paces she had to break into a run in order to keep up with him. Her basket, filled with the berries they had been gathering, hung heavily in her small hand and she longed to abandon it somewhere. Her brother Hans had nothing to carry.
‘Why do you always go so fast?’ she called crossly after him.
‘It’s getting dark!’ he shouted back over his shoulder.
‘But we’ll be home soon, won’t we? You promised we’d only be gone an hour.’
In the middle of the path, he stopped and turned to face her. She looked at his wide, frightened eyes and, in her mind, saw the forest stretching away endlessly behind him.
‘I don’t know the way any more,’ he said.
When Greta Maier opened her eyes, the sunlight was already filtering through the gaps in the half-drawn blinds. She lay still, listening to the faint voices she could hear from downstairs. Children’s voices. How strange that, on this of all days, the old dream – or was it a memory? – should return to haunt her. But not only the dream. The three words also that, like an incantation, seemed to float in the air around her, as though she had spoken them aloud in her sleep.
Es war einmal.
But perhaps, she thought suddenly, the words contained a message for her. For when she looked back over her long life, it seemed that everything she could remember, the century’s swirling tides that she had been forced to sail upon, had now no more substance than a dream. And this city – in which so much of it had come to pass, in which more than eighty years had slipped like fine sand through her fingers – was not its history, especially its most recent past, as unreal as the events of a fairytale? And for each character, in every fairytale she had ever read, whether the ending was happy or sad, there was always a final page and one last, conclusive full stop.
There was a knock at the door. Too abrupt, too authoritative by far, for children.
‘Mother.’
But, of course, it was only Hannah.
‘Yes?’ How faint her own voice sounded.
Her daughter knocked again. ‘Mother, are you awake yet?’
Frau Maier raised her head from the pillow and cleared her throat. She must be still half-asleep.
‘I’m just about to get up.’
‘Can I come in?’
‘Of course.’
The door opened and Hannah came into the room. She was wearing an apron over the new dress the old lady knew she had bought especially for today. She was smiling, though her face looked strained. She bent down beside the bed and kissed her mother on the forehead.
‘Happy birthday, Mother. I wish you all the health and happiness you could desire for another year.’
‘Thank you, dear.’
Frau Maier reached out and hugged her daughter. ‘Are the children being difficult downstairs?’
‘You should know what it’s like. There’s so much to do and the little ones always seem to be under your feet. Lukas and Maria have baked you some currant bread. It tastes delicious. They insisted on using the old bread oven though, which meant having to light a fire. Miroslav had to chop up that old chair in the cellar for wood. You don’t mind, do you?’
Her mother shook her head. ‘I doubt if it was much good for anything else.’ She hoped it wasn’t the one she thought it was, but then was there any longer a point in hoarding these things from her past? The house was full of everything it had been possible to save from two world wars and their aftermaths. Each small ornament, photograph, or piece of furniture meant something to her, but perhaps the time had come to stop clinging on to all this debris. Maybe the oven, that had remained so long unlit, was the best place for many other things that seemed, on this morning of her ninetieth birthday, to have suddenly lost their meaning.
Hannah went back downstairs, closing the door behind her, and Frau Maier began to get up. She poured some water into the china bowl on the stand beside her bed and washed. The modern bathroom, that had been fitted at Hannah’s insistence when she moved back to live with her mother after her husband’s death, held no attractions for her. She washed, and lived, as she had always done. She took out a simple, dark-coloured dress, that she seemed to remember wearing for her eightieth birthday, and stood in front of the wardrobe mirror. Did she look any different from the last time she had worn it? The material seemed to hang more loosely from the shoulders, perhaps, her hair looked a little thinner, but other than that the only real difference she thought she could detect was a certain transparency of the skin, as if it might be possible soon to see the pale bones, like underwater coral, that had lain concealed for all these years beneath the surface.
She fastened a single strand of pearls around her neck and continued to stare at the reflection. A shadow crossed the glass and she realized that someone else had entered the room and was now standing behind her. He was dressed in uniform and his fair hair had been combed so meticulously it might have been parted with a razor.
‘You look so young tonight,’ he said, beginning to stroke the dark waves of hair that fell to her shoulders. She watched him in the mirror as he gently twisted her hair around one hand.
‘How long have we known each other?’ he asked suddenly.
She smiled, recalling that afternoon in the café on the Ku’damm when she had spilt coffee over him; the incident had lost her the job as a waitress, but gained her a husband.
‘Almost four years,’ she said.
‘And yet you’re still a mystery to me.’ He pulled her hair a little harder so that she was forced to bend her neck back towards him. ‘Look at your face, Greta,’ he said. ‘You’re not a peasant girl from the Tannenberg forest at all, are you? Your ancestors weren’t Prussian!’
Greta looked into his eyes, unsure as to whether he was being serious or simply teasing her. Still holding her hair, he pulled her head back against his chest, whilst his free hand began to caress her throat.
‘Your hair’s too dark, my love; your cheekbones too high. Some of my friends have commented on it.’
Suddenly growing frightened, she tried to break away from him, but he held her too tightly. He contained her struggles and bent his head so that he could kiss her neck. She felt his lips brush the skin below her ear. He was pressing her whole body back against him and she relaxed, as he released her hair. She tried to turn her head so that she could kiss him, but he wouldn’t let her. He held his mouth away from hers and moved his hands so that they rested over her small breasts. He squeezed her, forcing her body back against him so that she could feel the hardness of his uniform’s buttons through the thin material of her dress.
‘You scared me,’ she said very softly.
‘I didn’t mean to,’ he answered, still kissing her neck. ‘It was just that when I came into the room and saw you there, you looked almost like someone I didn’t know. Perhaps as your mother might once have looked.’ He paused. ‘I’m so sorry I never met her.’
She nodded dumbly, recalling the terrible months after they had first arrived in the city more than fifteen years before, when her mother, like so many others, had died from influenza.
‘And your father? I have just begun to realize how strange it is to have married a girl whose parents one knows nothing about.’ He paused and she felt his eyes piercing into her. ‘I bet they were gypsies! That’s why you’ve always been so secretive about them.’
‘They weren’t gypsies!’ Greta cried indignantly. ‘How can you say such things! My father was a Prussian farmer, who was killed in the war fighting the Russians. I was six years old and I saw him die. That’s no secret! You’ve known that from the very beginning. You’ve seen a photograph of him.’
‘Of course. How stupid of me to forget. I remember thinking now how much he reminded me of your brother.’
‘And Hans looks every bit a Prussian.’
She saw her husband nod slowly. ‘He does indeed,’ he said. ‘But then you look nothing like him. You take after your mother – whose photograph I’ve never ever seen.’
‘That’s because I don’t have one,’ Greta answered quietly. ‘You know what it was like then. Most of what we had was left behind in the East. Almost all the family records were lost.’ She tried to turn round to face him, but found he was still holding her too tightly. ‘You know the problems you had getting a marriage licence because I had no documents and they could find no records in the East.’
He nodded slowly. ‘I remember.’
She hesitated nervously. ‘Why are you asking me these things, Wolfgang?’
‘Curiosity. Only curiosity.’ He smiled suddenly and she saw his hands travel down across her body and begin to lift the hem of her dress. ‘I’m sorry if I upset you.’
She stared, horrified, at their reflection, as though she were watching him with another woman. He pushed the fabric up around her waist and then began to caress her bare thighs. Closing her eyes, she leaned limply back against him, and then shivered as she felt his hands slide beneath the waistband of her underwear. He was whispering in her ear.
‘You must make me a father, Greta. Tonight, when we come home. I want a son who will look just as German as I do.’
The fierce words dissolved into the sunlight and silence that filled the room but the shadow on the glass, though it seemed to fade, did not disappear entirely. Feeling weak and rather frail, Frau Maier turned away towards the window. She pulled up the blinds and pushed the curtain aside so that she could look out. She resented the way the past she had tried to forget, hers and this city’s, still found it so easy to intrude upon the present. In the last ten years since they had pulled the Wall down she seemed, in the most unlikely places, at the most unexpected of times, to be at the mercy of these memories that, unchecked, surged up to overwhelm her. Once she had been able to control them, to limit their excesses and shut out those that she found too painful to bear, but recently, as if out of contempt for her age, faces that she had long forgotten had risen up to either greet or mock her. It was as if the Wall’s demolition had released a host of captive memories that for the twenty-eight years of its existence she had kept locked within her.
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Литагент HarperCollins
The winners of the 1993 IAN ST JAMES AWARDS.The Ian St James Awards enabled new writers from every walk of life to break into print.1993’s collection introduced more new writers than ever before, with six short stories and ten longer pieces.Entertaining, thought provoking, original, each of these stories is a winner, selected from thousands of entries from all over the world.
FLYING HIGH
The winners of
the 1993 Ian St James Awards
Copyright (#ulink_bebf6526-44a6-5157-89fa-1ac9055daa97)
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/)
Figure of Eight © Min Dinning 1993; The Spirit of the Times © Jude Jones 1993; Drawing from the Figure © Cynthia Chapman 1993; Berlin Story © Philip Sealey 1993; Karmic Mothers – Fact or Fiction? © Kate Atkinson 1993; The House with the Horse and the Blue Canoe © Cheryl Nyland-Littig 1993; The Wee Man © Lorraine Lorimer 1993; The Birthday Treat © Linda Pitt 1993; The Olive Tree © Hilary Waters 1993; Black Lizzie Black ©Jenny Maguire 1993; Good Neighbours © Stephanie Egerton 1993; Nobody We Know © Carey Jane Hardy 1993; Moira Flaherty ©Juliet McCarthy 1993; Richard Remembered © Leonard Tyler 1993; Someone to See You © Isa Moynihan 1993; Northern Light, Southern Comfort © Sheila Kelley 1993
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780006476542
Ebook Edition © NOVEMBER 2016 ISBN: 9780008235451
Version: 2016-11-22
Contents
Cover (#ubc7708c6-5da7-5a69-a6e5-c8e243e4749f)
Title Page (#u2d069de3-f95a-5b6c-80ae-9b203b53ae84)
Copyright (#ulink_add6cd6d-d111-5216-ba28-9a5a3b66c44b)
Foreword (#ulink_6bf4baca-259d-5e44-b2cd-6816593b8e17)
Judges (#ulink_f520dbdd-cd69-5253-b75c-8fd584160d96)
FIGURE OF EIGHT (#ulink_d091f312-6c0e-5f93-a0c8-c7abcdf61b0d)
Min Dinning
THE SPIRIT OF THE TIMES (#ulink_0d18991c-62de-5600-898e-0c39683f894d)
Jude Jones
DRAWING FROM THE FIGURE (#ulink_9d35eac8-9a48-5a0c-817e-598f69d8ad76)
Cynthia Chapman
BERLIN STORY (#ulink_5c6b7c90-9fd7-571d-a1e4-de976e27de39)
Philip Sealey
KARMIC MOTHERS – FACT OR FICTION? (#litres_trial_promo)
Kate Atkinson
THE HOUSE WITH THE HORSE AND THE BLUE CANOE (#litres_trial_promo)
Cheryl Nyland-Littig
THE WEE MAN (#litres_trial_promo)
Lorraine Lorimer
THE BIRTHDAY TREAT (#litres_trial_promo)
Linda Pitt
THE OLIVE TREE (#litres_trial_promo)
Hilary Waters
BLACK LIZZIE BLACK (#litres_trial_promo)
James Maguire
GOOD NEIGHBOURS (#litres_trial_promo)
Stephanie Egerton
NOBODY WE KNOW (#litres_trial_promo)
Carey Jane Hardy
MOIRA FLAHERTY (#litres_trial_promo)
Juliet McCarthy
RICHARD REMEMBERED (#litres_trial_promo)
Leonard Tyler
SOMEONE TO SEE YOU (#litres_trial_promo)
Isa Moynihan
NORTHERN LIGHT, SOUTHERN COMFORT (#litres_trial_promo)
Sheila Kelley
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Foreword (#ulink_5f37be3d-18c8-5b34-8683-dc0c941ecac2)
The sixteen stories that you are about to read emerged from over three and a half thousand entries for this year’s Ian St James Awards.
There have been several new developments in the last twelve months: the introduction of a shorter category of fiction under five thousand words alongside the established category of up to ten thousand words; for the first time this year, we opened our doors to writers in the English language from outside these shores and this volume contains stories by writers from New Zealand and the United States; the launch of Acclaim, a bimonthly magazine featuring stories by shortlisted writers in these Awards. Acclaim will publish sixty-four stories in six issues and include writers from Namibia and South Africa. All the activities associated with these Awards are co-ordinated at The New Writers’ Club. In the summer, the Club organized its first Short Story Workshop as part of the 9th Birmingham Readers and Writers Festival. There will be more to come.
Every writer who enters the Ian St James Awards – and they have to be over eighteen without a published work of full-length fiction to their name – receives an appraisal of their work. The success of this operation can be measured by the receipt at The New Writers’ Club of only eight letters consigning (a few of) our readers to the darkest depths. Not a bad ratio from such a large entry. The critiques are by no means definitive. In the time and space available, they can’t be, but they are intended to highlight a story’s strengths and weaknesses and are, hopefully, of great value to writers who find feedback so hard to come by. In addition, the Club also now appraises stories by member-writers outside the entry dates for the annual Awards and these more detailed reports are proving to be very popular.
To all the readers who have helped us arrive at this book, many thanks. Similarly, our thanks go to this year’s panel of judges who gave freely of their time to decide on the stories that would be published in these pages. I am sure that the stories that have been selected – and there is as always a real cross-section of styles and subject matter – will entertain.
To all the writers who sent us stories this year and missed out, thank you for entering, good luck with your writing and there’s always next year. This is the fifth Ian St James Awards book to be published in as many years by HarperCollins. Our thanks go to the many people at the publishers who helped with the production of this book and to all our supporters in the book trade. Finally, many congratulations to this year’s sixteen Award-winning writers who are now, without doubt, ‘Flying High’.
Merric Davidson
Director, The New Writers’ Club
Judges (#ulink_de8b823b-191d-5f84-91c1-aaad5d3402b3)
CLARE COLVIN
Writer, journalist and book reviewer
DANIEL EASTERMAN
Novelist
CORINNE GOTCH
Marketing Executive, Booksellers Association
ELIZABETH HARRIS
Novelist
MARK ILLIS
Novelist
IAN ST JAMES
Novelist
NICK SAYERS
Publisher
CAROLINE SHELDON
Literary Agent
FIGURE OF EIGHT (#ulink_7ba5b186-c7b4-5c0a-80e3-e9779058088a)
Min Dinning
Min Dinning spent more than twenty years teaching English worldwide, travelling in Europe, South America, China, Papua New Guinea and Australia. She began writing fiction at the age of seven but lapsed for more than thirty years, only to begin again two years ago, inspired by a creative writing class. Until then she had written letters, diaries and academic papers and published some non-fiction. These days she teaches Business EFL and is trying to come to terms with domestic bliss in rural Cambridgeshire. She still has secret yearnings to run away to exotic lands.
FIGURE OF EIGHT (#ulink_7ba5b186-c7b4-5c0a-80e3-e9779058088a)
He tasted of sour pickle and rice porridge and stale tobacco. I had wanted this kiss for months and now I had it. Desire was injected uncomfortably into my bloodstream. His skin was hard and chapped as he pressed it into my face. I was shocked. It was not as I had expected. I was still unsure of why I wanted him. It may have been sex, but it wasn’t straightforward; he wasn’t attractive in a conventional way, like Martin. It may have been need and gratitude.
He kissed as if he didn’t know what a kiss was. Or maybe he wasn’t kissing at all. It was me who was doing it. His mouth was stiff and immobile but betrayed a repressed emotion that I couldn’t define. It briefly occurred to me that it might be anger. I had caught him unawares, walked up to him from behind. But was it unawares? We both knew.
He was wearing his best jacket, tailored too large in stiff blue cotton in what used to be an imitation of Mao, and smelling of mothballs as most Chinese clothes do when they are seldom worn. Why did I focus on that? It detracted from the moment. Smells and tastes tried to deflect me away from the strange reality of it.
For a moment we remained in an awkward clinch, he with his eyes closed, me searching for reaction, wanting response. He took no initiative and then withdrew as I placed my tongue on his teeth.
‘No, no,’ he moaned.
‘But we must, we’ve been waiting so long. We can’t waste more time just thinking about it and doing nothing.’
‘Somebody will find out. We’ll be criticized.’
‘We’ll be discreet. Nobody will know. Anyway we haven’t done anything wrong.’
‘You don’t understand. We’re not in your country. In China this is impossible. I could go to gaol.’
‘Don’t be daft. Of course you couldn’t,’ I said, not sure. People certainly seemed to get into trouble for things that go unnoticed or are laughed off in the West.
Anyway – what were we doing? Was this adultery? Infidelity? It certainly wasn’t fornication, nor was it likely to be.
Before the momentum was lost I drew his wiry body towards me again. I sensed tension, reluctance.
‘If someone sees, it will be wrong.’
‘But if no one sees it will be right?’
He relaxed a little and laughed.
‘Chinese logic!’ I said. The idea that a sin must be witnessed to be a sin struck me as peculiar but practical.
‘Honestly, Alison. You know what I’m saying.’
Sometimes he sounded like a middle-class Englishman. These phrases, learned from World Service plays, tripped off the tongue like the rehearsed script of a thirties drama. He seemed more foreign at moments like that and a twinge of uncertainty unnerved me. Was I dealing with an inhabitant of another world? Were we as close as I thought or had I invented it out of want?
He gently removed my arms and buttoned the top button of his jacket. He did up the hook and eye on the collar and took a step backwards.
‘I must go now.’ He looked out of the blurred curtainless window at the bleakness of the early spring campus beyond. Grey concrete blocks, brightened by the occasional piece of vivid underwear hung on a bamboo pole out of a window to dry in the dusty air.
‘Don’t come down,’ he said.
‘Shall I come to the studio tomorrow?’ I asked, suddenly unable to cope with the prospect of being alone in this chilly, dingy flat, not wanting him to leave.
To my relief, he smiled. ‘Yes, come for your lesson as usual. The other guys will be there. We’ll paint together.’
I heard his footsteps retreating down the concrete stairs fainter and fainter, then the click of his bicycle lock. I watched him as he pedalled silently down the path. I kept watching until he disappeared into the heavy stream of traffic on the main road beyond the gates of the campus.
Yes, I thought, I’ve done it. I’ve changed things between us at last.
I was trying to remember how it had been at the beginning. I cast my mind back to the day when I announced I was going to China.
‘You’ll never survive,’ Martin taunted me. ‘You’ll be back in two weeks.’
I tried not to believe that he might be right. It had certainly been a rash decision for me, but he had this way of making me feel inadequate and I had to show him I could cope.
‘Of course I’ll survive. Anyway it’s only nine months. I’ll be back in the summer. You won’t even have time to miss me.’
The thought of leaving Martin for so many months made me uneasy, but I told myself I had nothing to fear. He would be there when I got back and whatever happened in between would soon be over. He still hadn’t been keen. He had wanted us to get married but I wanted to get my urgent need to travel out of my system. I thought I’d stay about a year, then go home and settle down for ever. I didn’t think Martin had the right to tell me not to go, so I made up my mind to do it, to stick it out whatever it was like, just to prove to him that I had a mind of my own. I felt I needed another dimension to myself. Martin was not enough. He was reliable, kind and rather good looking but I wanted to deny to myself that I cared for him as I didn’t relish the prospect of missing him. It would spoil my adventure. Besides, I was not interesting enough as I was. A tall, pale Englishwoman, over thirty, a virgin. A real spinster schoolmarm, in fact. I’d never worked abroad before and mistrusted foreigners on the whole. But something about China drew me. I needed to go there and see it. I wanted to be able to tell people I’d been to the Great Wall, the Ming Tombs and the Forbidden City. It would change me. The very thought was exciting, and my heart raced as I had fantasies of people in silk robes, gliding across the semicircular bridges and reading poetry in bamboo groves.
I’d got the job at the university through a friend who knew someone at the embassy. It didn’t seem to bother anyone that I had no experience of teaching university students. They seemed pleased to get a real English teacher and in the first few weeks I was treated like a VIP. When the novelty wore off and winter began to set in I felt less excited and less keyed up to learn new things. What had at first been amusing curiosities and fascinating ways eventually became tedious routine. I got fed up with the way the cleaners bobbed around with their stinking mops, the way the cook, sweating even in the ice of November, hawked and spat on the kitchen floor, and the chore of shopping at the market where my fair hair and my height set me apart as a freak or a visiting Martian. If Martin had been there it would have been all right. I wouldn’t have felt so self conscious. He was even bigger than me. It annoyed me that I wasn’t managing well on my own. ‘You’ll never survive’ – his words echoed in my head as I contemplated my inability to stride out and enjoy myself.
I bought local clothes – an army jacket and some quilted shoes – in an attempt to melt in a little. The shoes were men’s: no woman in China wore a size seven. But it made me more of a freak as the girls were by then starting to wear what they thought were Western clothes – hideous shapeless Crimplene jackets with twinkly thread and plastic high-heeled shoes. The daring ones wore lipstick. I knew I’d got it wrong, but I also knew I could never get it right. Not here.
My ideas about the country had been gleaned from National Geographic and the paperback book of the travels of Marco Polo. Reality was a rudely different shock. Nothing had prepared me for the drabness and alienation which seemed to make people physically ill in the winter, the strange food and the smells. Everywhere there hung in the air an almost palpable veil of smells. They were always stale and sickening. From the overpowering stench of lavatories which supplied fertilizer for the vegetables we ate to the acrid smoke of the miserable little market food stalls and the sweetish sickly aroma of hand-rolled cigars smoked by old ladies.
I became aware that I would have to learn the language or I would continue to feel autistic, sealed off into a bubble, in this world but not of it, as if I was watching it on television. There were no other foreigners in my unit, so I was obliged to seek out the company of Chinese English speakers, and this was how I met Liang.
‘I wonder if you could arrange painting lessons for me?’ I asked, standing at Dr Chen’s desk in the Wai Ban, the office that was in charge of me as a foreigner.
I had always wanted to do Chinese watercolours, though I was not artistic. It looked simple, so I thought I’d be able to produce something that I could hang, framed, over the mantelpiece at home.
‘Please sit down. Can I offer you some tea?’ came his high-pitched voice from behind a newspaper.
‘I’d like to learn painting.’ I remained standing. Once I sat down it would take all day.
There was a silence while Dr Chen finished reading the article he was absorbed in. On the shelf behind him there was a photograph of his son looking like an all-American boy at the University of Southern Illinois, and next to it a bottle of Mao Tai and two glasses.
‘Of course, Miss Alison. We’ll send you a teacher whenever you like.’ This was the predictable response. The answer was always yes, but I was doubtful whether it would actually happen.
‘I’d like to learn on Wednesdays.’
‘I see. You have nothing to do on Wednesdays.’ He laughed, coughed on his cigarette and peered over his newspaper.
They always seemed to think we were without inner resources. There was talk of getting a television to entertain me, as they thought I’d wither away without one. But of course there was no sign of it yet.
I wanted to snatch the newspaper away and yell ‘Get on with it, then!’ but I would have been wasting my time.
‘Well, thank you, Dr Chen. Could you let me know how much the lessons will cost?’
‘No charge,’ he said. ‘The painting unit will send someone.’
I forgot my request for a week or two, not expecting anything to happen quickly.
One afternoon I was idly staring across the microcosm of the campus, watching people going about their business. Students strode around in army coats, their numb fingers clutching texts to be learned by heart, mumbling to themselves, grannies wheeled babies dressed in jewel colours in bamboo prams, old men tended plants in pots or spoke to their geese, and cadres cycled by, puffing on their rancid little cigarettes as their bikes clanked along. I was the only one doing nothing. I was getting together the courage to go out and shop but it was always an ordeal to venture forth, head and shoulders above the nimble locals, stared at and laughed at and, I suspected, cheated by the peasants with their crooked teeth and filthy hands. I must have seemed like a millionaire, and without a word of Chinese still I couldn’t do anything about rudeness or cheating except shout in English.
There was a tap at the door of the flat. I thought it would be the Wai Ban checking up on me again, coming on some pretext or other to see what I was getting up to. But when I opened the door I saw a small wiry man with a broad grin. His hair was longer than usual for a Chinese man, and he was wearing the height of fashion, a polo-neck sweater.
‘How do you do, Miss Hutchings. I’m Liang, your painting teacher.’
He was at least six inches shorter than me and peered up like a confident child hoping to please a teacher. I almost expected him to hand me an apple.
‘Hello, Mr Liang. Come in. Would you like some tea?’
‘No thanks, no thanks,’ he protested, waving a hand.
He sat on the hard plastic sofa. His shoes were covered in mud and I noticed with dismay that he’d left a trail across my mats that I would have to sponge off.
‘The Wai Ban told me to come and teach you painting,’ he announced.
‘Well, Mr Liang, I just mentioned it. I thought it would be nice to have something to do on Political Study afternoon.’ I was free on Wednesday afternoons as foreigners weren’t invited to Political Study, though it seemed they were often the subject of discussion. Sometimes we were in favour, sometimes we weren’t. You could tell by the way they kept at a polite distance, courteous but not friendly. They usually tried to provide things we asked for and didn’t want complaints or any kind of controversy.
Liang’s real job, he explained, was to churn out numerous identical ‘works of art’ for ‘dignitaries’ and foreigners. He made me laugh. On Wednesdays he was to show me the fundamentals of Chinese watercolour painting.
‘We’ll go to the artists’ store to get your paper and brushes and paints next week.’ He paused and lit up a Phoenix, settling into the uncomfortable sofa. He slurped his flower tea and I wondered whether to offer him a piece of Cadbury’s chocolate, but decided I didn’t know him well enough yet.
So that was how it began. He used to pedal across town to my flat, where I would set up a table with newspaper, jars of water and my selection of paints, ink stick and stone and a row of brushes he had chosen for me, from the one like a feather duster to the wispy tiger-hair one. Sometimes he would talk about his studio and I hoped to be invited there one day. I imagined it. It would be romantic, arty. There would be paintings in various stages of completion and sunlight flooding in at a large window. He would be there working quietly with a few chosen friends. The little clique would have higher things on their minds than the price of oil and how to get something for nothing. It would be a haven from the turmoil of daily life.
‘Liang, what’s your studio like?’ I asked.
‘Just a big room. We all sit and get on with our work.’
‘Do you talk to each other? Do you discuss art?’
‘No. Not really. We chat about this and that, but it isn’t really necessary for us to talk about what we’re doing.’
The lessons were a bit of a disappointment as they consisted of copying various masters from a book of samplers. I spent hours trying to flick the brush into a bamboo leaf, whirl it into a rock, dab colour into peonies and lightly tease out hairs on the head of a dancer. He was a patient teacher – either that or he didn’t care that I wasn’t talented. He was just doing his job.
At last he said, ‘Next week you must come to the studio to watch.’
I was so looking forward to being introduced to the charmed circle of artists. I hoped perhaps these people would become my friends. Here was an opportunity to get to know people. The language barrier wouldn’t matter once we started painting pictures together. I felt quite privileged.
I cycled over an hour in the rain to get to the studio on the other side of the city. It was a large grey building with dirty cracked windows, and inside the main room, in light I would have thought inadequate for painting, there were rows of artists producing delicate watercolours for tourists and diplomats. Liang welcomed me with a large smile and looked straight into my eyes, which he had never done before. He was larger than life on his own territory. Complicity with foreigners was not on, so what was he trying to say? Then I realized he was beginning to treat me as a friend. I was glad I’d made the effort to come. With the weather being so foul and the prospect of cold wet clinging clothes all afternoon I’d nearly stayed in the flat, but indoors and outdoors were equally cold and dank, so what did it matter? Anyway I was curious to see him on his own ground, I wanted to know what made him tick and I wanted to meet his friends.
‘Mr Wu paints tigers. One of his pictures was presented to an African diplomat last month. We are all very proud of him.’
I smiled, slightly embarrassed. The idea of an art factory seemed so Chinese. Several artists beamed up at me as if I was visiting royalty. I still hadn’t made enough progress with my Chinese to say more than hello.
One man was painting carp from life. I was disturbed to see the fish darting around an enamel bowl, confused, their scales reflecting light from the neon strip lights above, their silly eyes staring as if in fright and their mouths mouthing a silent message. They swam aimlessly round and round, sometimes in a figure of eight. The artist had captured their movement and their fearful staring. They would be trapped in the enamel bowl until the picture was finished, then, their aesthetic purpose over, disposed of in a practical manner.
‘What will you do with them?’ I asked.
‘Eat them,’ said Liang, a mock serious look on his face.
‘But they’re pets, aren’t they?’
‘We don’t have pets here. Only rich people have pets. We like our animals best in the cooking pot.’
I was beginning to understand that my fatuous comment about a carp being a pet was very Western. The idea that eating carp was cruel suddenly struck me as silly in this context – it made more sense to eat them than to have these slithery cold creatures as pets. I had no choice but to start perceiving life around me in a more practical way. I started to see how much I was spoiled, prejudiced and set in my ways. I had recently started to dismiss the voice of Martin that often echoed around in my head pointing out various wickednesses and cruelties. He had started to irritate me. Who was he to impose his pampered views on people?
The visit to the studio was the first time I’d been interested in the real China as opposed to the fairytale version that lingered as a fantasy. I had enjoyed it in an unexpected way. It wasn’t how I’d imagined it at all, but better. It was as if the experience had taught me something, refreshed me. It was Liang who had gradually wrought the beginnings of change in me. I was at last starting to absorb those new experiences I so badly wanted and the catalyst was Liang. It was Liang who made it possible for me to open up. He too was beginning to change. No longer the distant and polite teacher. He began to be aware of me as a person. I was no longer just an awkward and large foreigner, but a source of information about outside, a companion and possibly even a woman. I reluctantly admitted to myself that I was beginning to feel a little excited in his presence. I found myself looking at the back of his neck, noticing his neat ears and his remarkable long eyelashes. I couldn’t stop myself looking at him, partly out of fascination and curiosity at his differentness and partly in the way one looks affectionately on an intelligent pet. He seemed so young. He was about the same age as me, but his cheeks looked boyishly smooth. I wondered if he shaved. His hair had the gloss of a child’s hair, which was a wonder considering the nasty sticky shampoo they used.
‘You know, Miss Alison,’ he said one day, ‘I’m really interested in seeing your country. I often listen to the BBC and VOA. I feel I know the West already. It’s different from here, isn’t it? You’ve got so much freedom. You can choose your job, your politicians, your friends …’
‘But Liang, you can choose your friends too, can’t you?’ It occurred to me that my self-appointed role of ‘friend’ to him was perhaps not exactly his choice.
‘Not really. We don’t have many friends here, not in the sense you mean it. People suspect one another, and besides you’ve probably noticed that we often say “classmates” when we’re referring to people we know. That’s because they’re people we studied with. What chance do we have to meet anyone else? You can see what it’s like in my unit. Apart from them you’re the only person I see. You’re the only outsider in my life.’ The idea that I was now ‘in his life’ sent a small shudder through me.
‘What about your family?’
‘Relatives,’ he said with a grimace.
‘What’s wrong with relatives?’ I asked, knowing what he was going to say.
‘Obligation,’ he said. ‘My wife was given to me by my uncle. She’s the daughter of some remote member of his wife’s family. When I got to twenty-seven and I wasn’t married, they said, “Liang, it’s time you had a child.” They’re peasants, you see. Within six months I was married to Wang and a year later my son was born.’
‘Couldn’t you have chosen your own wife? Why did you let them do this to you?’ I was beginning to feel resentment towards these primitive people who were his family. Didn’t they realize that he had the right to make his own choices in life? How could they foist some stranger on him like that? It was absurd.
‘It must have been awful for you.’ I realized this sounded feeble, like a schoolgirl commiserating over an embarrassing parent.
‘Not awful. I just did my duty to my family. They were right. I needed to get married and I hadn’t met anyone suitable. A man of twenty-seven can’t stay single.’
I’d been in China long enough to know he was right. He would have been regarded as a freak or people would have suspected his reasons for avoiding women.
I wanted to ask him if he loved her. I needed to know. But I was certain he didn’t. He was obviously trapped for eternity in an enforced relationship which was meaningless and gave him no joy. But he always seemed joyful enough as if it was never on his mind. He never mentioned the child.
We were seeing each other more and more. He was obviously growing fonder of me, wanting my company. And I wanted him too. I thought about him a lot. I often found myself daydreaming about him as I stood before my forty undergraduates, crammed into filthy Classroom Number Three where I attempted to teach the rudiments of English Literature. The uncomprehending faces stared back, obedient but totally unabsorbed. I must have looked as uninterested as they did. My mind was elsewhere too.
One day a group of runners training for a sports meeting ran past the open window. My adrenalin suddenly whirled as I saw Liang among them. But no, it was just someone who looked like him. It couldn’t have been him. He was wearing blue cotton running shorts and a white singlet with a figure of eight on the back and grey plimsolls without socks. His thin legs were spattered with mud and his shoulders were hunched in the cold. So unlike Martin’s rugby player’s physique. I watched him as he ran, unaware of me, intent on his task of forging ahead of the others. I thought of Liang’s slight body, unclothed – his knees and elbows, his small buttocks – and felt a blush spreading over my neck. I was jolted back to my yawning class who had noticed nothing. They sat impassively picking their noses, scratching their armpits and staring blankly through me as before.
How Liang managed to get away from his unit I never discovered. The painting lessons continued, sometimes at my flat and sometimes at his studio and I eventually managed to produce a passable, rather sentimental picture of kittens and peonies which I had mounted on a scroll. We both began to be aware that painting was no longer the only interest we had in common. I positively looked forward to his visits. We would both invent reasons for him to come.
‘I’d better have a look at your bike,’ he’d say, knowing full well that the University Bicycle Workshop checked it regularly for me.
Or he’d say, ‘Have you taken your winter ginseng? I’ll get you some at the medicine store.’
And I would cut out articles about life in the West for him and save him my Guardian Weekly. Without a telephone, we had no choice but to meet often.
He helped me with many of the small things I found so taxing in my first months in China.
It was him who showed me how to eat properly. I had been trying to survive on boiled eggs and boiled vegetables which was all I could manage to cook on the pathetic gas ring provided in my kitchen. The oil smelt so vile I couldn’t fry anything. When I tried, the wok sent up clouds of smoke and the food tasted as if it had been cooked in engine oil. Liang primed my wok for me and expertly showed me how to heat the oil to the right point. He flicked vegetables and fatty scraps of pork around and made feasts.
I gave up going to the market by myself. I waited for him to come and we would set out on an adventure. What used to be a painful experience became fun. We tried out anything new that came into season and rushed back to the flat to cook it. I ate everything: eels, their tiny heads nailed to a board while their long bodies were split with a sharp knife, rabbits bought live and their fragile necks cracked, their white fur peeled off like peeling an orange, tiny salty dried shrimp, sweet creamy yoghourt in chunky pottery jars, and delicate translucent hundred-year-old eggs with their glinting green and orange hues. Food became a fascination to me and I even discarded the fork and spoon I’d carried everywhere and learned awkwardly to wield chopsticks. I still couldn’t bring myself to use the bamboo ones in restaurants which you had to clean up with a bit of exercise book kept in the pocket for the purpose.
We started meeting on Sundays. Usually he’d come in the afternoon. I didn’t ask what he did in the morning. I was vaguely aware he might have family commitments but kept the idea at the very back of my mind. When the weather was still cold in March I lay one Sunday morning beneath my quilt, comfortable, with the sounds of the campus outside. I’d been reading one of Martin’s letters and thinking of home. He wanted me to meet him at the end of the term and have a holiday. He would come out on a package tour and I could join him in Peking. Somehow I didn’t feel elated enough about the prospect of seeing him. I wouldn’t say my heart sank exactly, but it almost did. While I was trying to sift through my thoughts on the subject, there was a tap at the door and I knew it was Liang, very early.
‘Hang on – I’ll put my dressing-gown on.’
I rushed eagerly to open the door and there he was, clutching a small parcel in pink wrapping paper tied with a piece of string.
‘This is a little gift for you.’
‘Can I open it?’
‘Go on.’ His eyes were wide with anticipation. More than ever he seemed childlike. I recalled the runners and had to look away.
It was a set of silk hand-embroidered handkerchiefs, totally impractical but pretty in a fussy Chinese sort of way. It was the sort of gift a man gives to a woman.
‘But it isn’t my birthday, Liang.’ This was silly. Birthdays didn’t mean much here.
‘No, I thought you’d like them. My cousin works at the embroidery factory,’ he said by way of justification. Suddenly I felt a rush of sentiment, of joy and of something I had never felt in the presence of Martin. I wanted to fling my arms round him and dance.
I can’t think how I restrained myself, but I felt as if I was saving it for a later I knew would come. I increasingly enjoyed the thought of it. We went out on our cycle ride, him pedalling protectively on the traffic side of the cycle lane, telling me when to stop, when to turn, giving disapproving glances when other cyclists jostled me. He was still somewhat astonished that I could ride a bike as he was certain all Westerners drove around in large cars.
We sat together in a tea house in those low bamboo chairs. An ancient man in a grubby apron poured water from a steaming black kettle as we clattered the lids of our tea dishes. I looked at Liang and wanted urgently to know more about him. He was deliberately uncommunicative about his personal life, as if his life in my presence was the only life he had.
‘Liang, why don’t you bring your wife along?’ I ventured, uncertain of his response. I couldn’t even remember her name.
‘She’s busy,’ he said evasively, looking at the violinist squeakily performing at the far end of the tea house.
‘But you never talk about her.’ Then I dared to ask, ‘Don’t you get on?’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘Well, aren’t you and your wife good friends?’
‘She’s my wife,’ he said as if this explained everything.
‘And your baby? Isn’t it wonderful being a father?’
‘Yes, I’m proud of him.’
‘But Liang, when do you spend time with him? You’re always with me!’ As I said this I realized it was true. I hadn’t been aware until I said it that he was spending time with me that he probably should have been spending with his family.
‘I see him once a week.’
It was then that I discovered that Liang and his wife didn’t actually live in the same place and that Liang was effectively a bachelor, married in name only. Shocked but overjoyed, I sensed a tremor of anticipation. Hadn’t it always been him and me, never a triangle?
‘She’s with her mother. She can’t live with me. There isn’t room with the baby. I only have one room. Anyway she prefers it.’
Liang’s life must have been bleak until I turned up. I provided him with an excuse to go out and enjoy himself. Wasn’t it his duty to see that the foreigner was kept content? It concerned me for a moment that maybe our friendship wasn’t what I thought it was after all – then I remembered the little silk hankies. No, he wasn’t pretending. The desire to kiss him welled up again, and I wanted to tell him how sweet he was and how much he meant to me and how he had freed me. I couldn’t in the tea house, so I left it until he came the following week.
It was a Tuesday evening. He was going to call in and see me before a meeting. Although I was on the other side of town he never seemed to object to the long ride. He would call in for a chat and a cup of tea. The note he had sent said he had some news.
His jacket made him look small as he stood at the door.
‘Come in. A man came round the campus with some tinned lychees today. I got you some.’
He enthused about my discovery, but urgently wanted to tell me his own news.
‘I may get a chance to go abroad,’ he said, phrasing it carefully, not allowing himself too much certainty. Going abroad was like going to Heaven. Everyone wanted it and feared it and thought they’d never be good enough.
‘You could come to England,’ I said without thinking. Then it immediately struck me that this was not a good idea. It was a potentially dangerous displacement for us both.
‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘Because I’m married it makes it easier. The authorities know I’ve got a son to come back for.’
Little did the authorities know the irony of this. From what I could tell, Liang’s son did not have a father who would pine for him while suffering in a foreign land.
Liang was looking out of the window as he spoke, with his back to me. And it was then that I chose to kiss him.
The kiss did change our lives. The relationship did take on a sexual dimension but was dominated more by intimacy than sex. We both seemed to have difficulty in expressing ourselves sexually – we didn’t easily fall into each other’s arms, we were embarrassed about kissing and bed was never mentioned. Whether he thought of it I don’t really know. It seemed out of reach, impossible and I’m not sure I wanted it. We substituted a physical manifestation of our closeness with looks into the eyes, standing close, touching fingers when we thought nobody would see. Of course, he always pretended it wasn’t happening. It was not tantalizingly erotic as neither of us understood eroticism and wouldn’t have known how to bring it about. I was certain this was more like love than the insipidness I had with Martin, who was, I suppose, a kind of fiancé. I was happy. I allowed myself the luxury of what I thought was illicit love. The fact that it might not have seemed like passion in other people’s eyes didn’t mean it was unexciting for me. Quite the reverse. I hummed with it. I had a permanent grin on my face, but in a country where grinning reflected embarrassment, a feeling appropriate to a tall foreigner, my secret was safe.
As the spring opened up into flowers and warmth in April, Liang and I began to be seen around together more. I used to get little gifts for him at the Friendship Store. He wasn’t allowed in so he would wait with the bikes outside and I’d go in and spend my foreigner’s money.
‘What can I get you, Liang? Just say what you want. It’s easy. I’ve got hard currency. Look!’ and I’d wave my notes at him.
I couldn’t fail to notice how his eyes lit up at the thought of goodies normally out of reach to all but party officials.
‘No, really. I don’t want anything, Alison.’
I’d go in and get him a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red Label and some Marlboros. He’d have to keep them at my flat. It wouldn’t have done for him to be seen with these gifts. He’d have been criticized; that is, hauled up in front of some bossy committee to explain himself. I’d started smoking Phoenixes. I kept the Marlboros for him. I even bought him – silk tie of the kind favoured by visiting Americans, but of course he couldn’t wear it. I wondered if I was overdoing it, making a bit of a fool of myself. I just wanted to please him and give him things he could have only from me.
As the chilly weather suddenly stopped I shed my army jacket and began to wear a skirt. People noticed and I thought they were making snide comments. I hoped I was beginning to look a bit less foreign. My hair had grown and I’d put it in bunches like the local girls. Actually, I didn’t dare risk the pudding-basin barber. We must have made a comic pair, I suppose, me six inches taller than him. But it didn’t matter.
At least so I thought until one day when he came along looking very agitated.
‘The Wai Ban says I mustn’t spend so much time with you.’
‘What do you mean? Do they suspect? What did they say?’
I felt panic-stricken. This could mean trouble for both of us. It could mean him losing his job or worse. It could mean me losing him.
‘They’re worried about me being influenced by you. And they’ve told Wang about you.’
For a second I couldn’t remember who Wang was. Then I remembered she was his wife.
‘What did she say?’
‘Not much.’
‘What d’you mean “not much”?’
‘Well, she has her own life. She’s never met a foreigner. She doesn’t know what to think.’
‘Isn’t she upset?’
‘Why?’
‘Well, you’re seeing another woman.’
‘She’s Chinese.’
‘But she’s still your wife.’
‘Yes. But she doesn’t see it like you do.’
‘You’re close enough to have had a child together, and you’re telling me she isn’t jealous?’
‘Anyone can have a child. It’s easy.’
He was talking about the thing most Westerners thought they wanted out of their relationships and dismissing it as if it was the easy bit. Getting someone into bed made people forgo understanding and kindness, as if sex would replace friendship or be an improvement on it. But from what I could see Liang and Wang didn’t seem to have much apart from the evidence of a fleeting sexual encounter. They appeared to have an easy-going or even apathetic tolerance of each other, and maybe some woolly notion of duty.
‘Well, what does it mean? Are they saying we’ve got to stop seeing each other?’ I couldn’t bear to think about it.
‘They want an explanation. They’re trying to be reasonable. And Wang has offered to divorce me.’ He added this last bombshell as a sort of afterthought.
I added up in seconds what it would mean if he was divorced. Would he then expect me to marry him? The thought ricocheted around in my brain. What about Martin? What about Mummy and Daddy? What about my friends? The thought of being married to a five-foot, two-inch Chinaman appalled me suddenly. He must have seen my expression of anguish and read it completely wrongly. All was confusion. Did I love him or had it suddenly stopped like a watch stops when it is overwound and the spring snaps?
‘Don’t you see?’ he said. ‘It would be wonderful.’
Wonderful for whom? I saw all the advantages for him and none for me. He would unload an unwanted wife and child and acquire the much coveted passport out of China – a foreign spouse. I would be married to a foreigner who would never fit in at home and who would make me a laughing stock. The thought was impossible. Could I see him at the Point to Point or the Hunt Ball, or meeting the vicar or Uncle Basil? They would all be horrified. I began to see the value of Martin. He was of my world, my sort. I had stepped into an alien place and been befriended by an alien. Liang was China and was inseparable from it. I could not blend the two worlds – the only piece of this world that I could take home was my picture of peonies and kittens.
Since I was lost for words and Liang was evidently hoping for a positive response, he said, ‘You could come with me to America. We could travel together and get out of this dump. We could be free together.’ What did he mean ‘free’? I was already free.
I looked into his eyes, then looked away to his frayed grubby collar and the tide-mark on his neck.
‘But you can’t just leave your family like that – they haven’t done anything wrong.’
‘I can. Lots of people do. I’ve been applying for scholarships for months and now at last one has come through. I’m going to Ohio in July.’
‘You never said anything to me,’ I said, hurt and beginning to be angry that I had not been part of this plan.
‘I wasn’t sure until yesterday.’ He started to fidget irritatingly with a loose button on his jacket. He couldn’t bring himself to look me in the eye.
So my part in the grand plan had been to help him prepare himself for the peculiarities of the West in order to make the escape less painful.
‘Do you really want to marry me, then?’
‘Of course. It would make things much easier. As the husband of an Englishwoman, I would be able to …’
I stopped listening. I was right. He was after a passport. How had I failed to see it from the very first? Why had I thought he cared for me? An icy trickle of disappointment pierced me with startling pain. Facing reality was like discovering I hadn’t won the jackpot after all. After months of the luxury of fantasy I now had to return to mundane reality. I couldn’t let the ice sear an irreparable wound. I shut it out.
There had been a point in both our lives where he needed to turn away from China and I needed to turn away from England. We had met in the centre of a figure of eight, travelling in opposite directions. We generated a small spark, a misunderstood spark as it turned out, as we passed, and now our only route was away from each other.
‘Take your wife,’ I said. ‘I’m leaving here and going back to England.’
He looked up at me. I had intruded on a dream. He remained lost in reflection for a moment, then seemed to emerge gradually like a creature coming out of hibernation.
‘Yes.’ He said it with an air of relief.
‘I’m sorry if you misunderstood my behaviour. We Westerners are not like you Chinese. We’re a bit impulsive, you know. It doesn’t mean anything.’
‘No.’
He made his excuses and left. I didn’t have any more painting lessons and we did not communicate any more after that meeting.
Much as I wanted to weep and feel wretched, I couldn’t. The moment had passed and I had evaded that peak. I was frustrated and even guilty that I couldn’t summon up any real misery. I felt numb and blank. It wasn’t the numbness of shock. It was the numbness of a bemused vacuum.
Eventually at the end of the summer term it was time for me to leave. Martin’s trip was fixed and I was to meet him in Peking. While I was packing I discovered a pair of Liang’s gloves. He had left them behind on the day we first kissed and I’d kept them hidden in my underwear drawer. I took them out and felt a slight pang. I sniffed them and they smelt of sourness and cheap plastic. They were too small for me to wear. They were useless and ugly. I threw them in the bin.
As always I had trouble at the airport, with nobody to help with my bags, being sent in different directions by different officials, and was glad to be leaving this irritating mayhem. I wasn’t all that keen on the grand tour of China, but at least we’d be insulated from the chaos inside an air-conditioned bus.
I got on to the plane at last after much pushing and shoving, but of course someone was sitting in my seat. They never seemed to manage these things efficiently, and having got up at the crack of dawn to be chauffeured to the airport in the university limousine, I was pretty tired and irritable already. A woman with a baby had dumped her things across three seats – there were endless gaping bags of blankets, fruit, enamel cups and Heaven knows what else.
‘Excuse me,’ I said in English, hoping she’d get the message. She stared up at me. She was a tiny delicate woman, maybe from one of the Minorities. She was like a pretty doll with perfect almond eyes, peach cheeks and a long black plait, and wearing a pink silk jacket, old-fashioned among the Crimplene glitter creations worn by other girls. The baby was bundled into several layers of shawls in spite of the heat and was wearing those disgusting crotchless trousers so that his little raw bottom protruded. He laughed as she swung him on to her shoulder and kicked his tiny feet in his little red cotton shoes. I felt large and ungainly, gawky and imperfect. I shifted my bulky body into the aisle to let her pass as she gave up her seat without a murmur. She shuffled with her belongings towards the smoking section of the plane at the back.
I flopped into the saggy loose-covered seat and clipped on my belt. I was leaving. I’d said my goodbyes, had my banquets, drunk my toasts to mutual friendship and was now free to be a tourist with the rest of them. We soared into the sky, and the city, still grey in summer brightness with patches of dusty green where there were parks, receded.
I didn’t look back.
Martin would be waiting in Peking and after a lot of hanging about waiting for bags to appear, I spotted him beyond the barrier and waved. I was more glad to see him than I thought I would be. I felt a bit like a soldier coming home after an arduous campaign. I had survived. I was comforted by his familiar brown tweed jacket and looked forward to his tobacco smell.
Emerging from behind him was a man that looked exactly like Liang. He had much shorter hair and was wearing a rather baggy Western-style suit. It was Liang – I recognized the tie I had bought him at the Friendship Store. Why was he here? How could he have known I would be on this plane? I was too noticeable to hide myself. I would have to brazen it out.
‘Hello,’ I said, smiling.
‘Hello, darling,’ Martin said, leaning forward to peck my cheek. ‘It’s lovely to see you.’
I looked away from him to see what had happened to Liang. He was standing there next to Martin, the same grin on his face as when we had first met so many months before.
‘How are you, Miss Alison? It’s a pleasure to see you.’
He was like a stranger.
‘Mr Liang, my painting teacher. Mr Roberts, a friend from England.’
They greeted each other formally, Martin towering like a bear a foot over Liang and leaning slightly to reach his outstretched hand. I noticed Liang’s dirty fingernails. Then Liang’s grin changed focus and became a distant stare, his eyes seeking someone in the crowd.
‘Excuse me, I’m meeting my wife. We’re being briefed for our trip to the States.’
And Liang wandered off into the throng. A few minutes later he emerged carrying suitcases, baskets, nylon holdalls and string bags, followed by the doll in the pink silk jacket. She was exquisite: three inches shorter than Liang, carrying the beaming child.
He did not bring her over to be introduced, but as they walked away he looked smugly over his shoulder at me, as if he was carrying away the spoils of the campaign.
THE SPIRIT OF THE TIMES (#ulink_c469b260-b965-5d63-a626-4732f9e82f0d)
Jude Jones
Jude Jones is a native of Hampshire and studied singing at the Guildhall School of Music. An assortment of careers followed, including opera, music-theatre, archaeology, stage-management, acting, busking, script-writing and an unsuccessful attempt at shop assisting. In the eighties, she was artistic director, actress and writer for a small-scale touring theatre company based in the East Midlands. Now equipped with two small sons, she is back in Hampshire where she started out and is completing her third unpublished novel.
THE SPIRIT OF THE TIMES (#ulink_c469b260-b965-5d63-a626-4732f9e82f0d)
My mum never knows when I skive now since I met the old girl up at Hob’s Lane. Makes me laugh the things I get to do these days and mostly everyone leaves me be which is dead ace. I’d say bugger them all but I ain’t allowed to. The old girl stop me from swearing, see? Though I does when she ain’t around.
You have to go past the old mill to get to Hob’s Lane. It ain’t a proper road though. It’s a kind of track with this stream by it and you get the cars go along it every now and then but only if they’re coming up to the cottages there. It’s a ‘No Through Road’ and it don’t even go where it was supposed to go now they built the big motorway past it. No Through is right. There’s this high fence at the end and then you turns and has to go back so the folks what walk their dogs there goes mainly round by the woods now and leave the Hob to me.
The old girl told me her name once but it was funny. I mean it weren’t the kind of old-fashioned name your mum might have or your gran even. So I lets it go. I calls her Missis and she calls me Nipper and that’s OK. We don’t like fuss, me and her.
We does chatting mostly. She knows how to gab, she does. Not that she’s particular lonesome for all she lives in the water. She got her mates same as me. I know most of them. There’s Foreman, he’s a slippery old sod. Pretends he’s a fish. And Longman, he’s the big oak. Then there’s Ringman and I tell you about him in a bit. The old girl says he’s shy. I ain’t seen Littleman yet. Littleman’s whatsit – invisible.
My mum used to bawl me out when I went up the Hob but she’s quieter now because we done the change.
When I first seen the Missis I thought it was some bored old wrinkly what topped herself in the stream. I went close to look because I ain’t never seen no corpse. Then she sits up, like she was finishing off a sunbathe and I wet me knickers. ’Course she ain’t real old. Not underneath. Not like my mum.
‘What them chaps doing over there?’
‘They’re building the new motorway, Missis.’
‘A road? They’re building a bloody road near my stream?’
‘Yeah. Why you lying in the water?’
‘A bloody road! If that don’t beat all!’
‘I thought you was dead.’
‘Well, I ain’t. A bleeding road! You know how noisy them things are?’
‘Yeah. You’ll get rheumatics, sitting in there. My gran has rheumatics every time she goes out in the rain.’
‘Your gran’s a wanker, Nipper, and no mistake. Why’d they build here? Why can’t they go and mess up some other place?’
‘My mum says it’ll make getting over to Langley real quick.’
‘Your mum’s a wanker. Why’d she want to go to Langley to start off with? Bloody awful town.’
‘Everyone’s a wanker to you, Missis. I reckons as you’re a wanker yourself.’
‘You hold your tongue, smart arse. And don’t swear. ’S’not becoming in a young girl.’
‘You swear. You’re swearing like buggery.’
‘I’m allowed. You’re not. You hear me?’
‘Why?’
‘’Cause I says so.’
‘I’m fourteen. I’m big enough to swear now. And smoke. My mum don’t mind.’
‘Your mum ain’t brought you up right. What’s your dad say?’
‘’E don’t say bloody nothing, do he? I ain’t got no dad.’
‘Don’t bleeding swear, girl. I told you once and I won’t tell you again.’
‘What’ll you do if I does?’
‘This.’
‘… Oh! … Christ almighty, Missis, how’d you do that?’
‘With practice, Nipper. I had lots of practice.’
‘Could you show me how to do it?’
‘Might. Depends.’
I got ordinary mates too, like I said. Not as many as when I was a kid but that’s sort of how things go, ain’t it? I got this bloke, Ian. He’s leaving school soon but he ain’t training for anything except thieving. No jobs round here, see?
I let him do it to me once when we was out down the Rec. I makes him get a thing, you know, a condom thing, because of the HIVs and he didn’t know how to put it on. So I done it for him.
It was quite nice but it hurt a bit.
My best mate is Marie. I took her down Hob’s a couple of times but the old girl didn’t show up. Marie said I was a nutter and I got cross. Then the silly bitch told her mum about what I said about the old girl. Marie didn’t say what her mum said back. I was real narked so I stole her trainers and slashed them with my Stanley. She keep her mouth shut now.
I didn’t tell Ian about the Hob. Ian thinks he’s tough. He’d think I was soft and I ain’t. I told Dixey though. Dix is my mum’s mate when they ain’t slagging each other off. She lives two doors down with her brats. Dix is all right. She just nods and says, ‘What, the old cow’s still up Hob’s Lane?’ and carries on frying chips. She don’t know nothing about Foreman and Longman though, so I scored there.
My mum give me some grief. Shit, she was a pain. Always going on about what time I come home at night just because some silly little prat has got herself done in over on the Park estate. She wanted me to be a nurse! A nurse, I ask you! And tight. God, tight as a duck’s arse. Mind you, I don’t have to bother with that lot nowadays. The old girl saw to it. She’s got some sense, I’ll give her that.
Mind you, the Missis come over mean when I tell her I seen Foreman down in the square drinking with the alkies. She tells me to hold my tongue and gives me a shiv when I cheeks her. I don’t mind though. I’m going to learn how to do it back. Stands to reason, don’t it? Like we was saying in Community Studies last term, it’s everybody for theirselves, ain’t it? Because there ain’t nothing else to do. Nobody else cares about you but you. That’s what the old boss, that Thatcher woman said and I agrees. The Missis calls it survival of the fittest which is what she said she’d done. Yeah, well, I’m pretty fit. And I don’t take no crap.
Anyway here’s how I first went up the Ridge.
The old girl says one day she’s off on her travels, yeah? Could have knocked me over – I was gobsmacked. I never seen her walk about much, see? Most of the time she sits around in her stream like it was a chair in front of the telly. Every now and again she’ll come and squat down besides me on the bank and wave at the cars when they goes past. But I never seen her walk about before. So I says, ‘Where you going then?’
‘Why? You want to come along, Nipper?’ she says.
I caught the old bus and got off at Yalderton. Stupid bloody place – not even a shop. Mainly farmhouses and snotty kids riding horses. I walked up the big hill like she said and threshed around in the wood at the top for a bit. Full of sodding stingers it was. And wet and muddy in spite of it being late June and dry everywhere else.
She was halfway down the other side under this great yew tree sitting in a kind of pond thing like it was her own personal swimming pool. I suppose there must’ve been a spring coming out up above somewhere. Mind you, I wasn’t going to mess my tights up finding out. Too many spiky trees around. Too many bloody bushes. I was cut to pieces, you can believe it. When I comes down to her I sees the old tree she’s underneath is all hung up with bits of rag and scraps of cloth like it’s some kind of mad washing line. Dead weird it looked.
She was making a kind of singing, droning noise too when I comes down. It had words to it. They goes:
‘Dance, Ringman, dance,
Dance, my good men, every one,
For Ringman, he can dance alone,
Ringman, he can dance alone.’
Out of her barrel, I thinks. Always was loopy but gone and ripped her hairnet now.
‘You been doing your washing, Missis?’
‘What? Quiet, kiddo, or I’ll smash you good.’
‘You finished singing yet?’
‘Yeah, I finished now.’
‘What you doing up here?’
‘Visiting.’
‘Who you visiting? I don’t see no one.’
‘See that stone there?’
‘What, the big one?’
‘That’s Ringman.’
‘That’s Ringman? Where is he then?’
‘Told you before, girl. He’s shy.’
‘He won’t come out like Longman does, you mean?’
‘Might do.’
‘Them blokes, Longman and Foreman. They ghosts?’
‘Ghosts? Nah, Nipper. They’re real. Same as you and me. They ain’t dead, you know.’
‘What’s Ringman doing in that stone?’
‘Waiting.’
‘What’s he waiting for?’
‘Tonight.’
‘What’s happening tonight?’
‘Depends.’
‘Oh, come off it, Missis. Tell us. I ain’t come all this way in that stupid bus just to fuck about.’
‘You watch your language, girl. Or …’
‘Or what, then?’
‘Or Ringman might decide he don’t like you, after all.’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘He’s good looking, Ringman is. A sight better looking’n that wanker Ian you mess with.’
‘So what?’
‘If you was to play your cards right Ringman might make you his girl.’
‘What if I don’t want to be his girl?’
‘I reckon you will. Oh yes, Nipper, there ain’t much doubt about that.’
‘What’s he like?’
‘Oh, he’s nice, Ringman is. And he’s good. Very, very good.’
My mum made one hell of a stink when I didn’t come back that night. There were pigs out all over the place looking for me. God, the fuss they made. Where was I? Who did I talk to. Did I get raped?
Raped! Took most of my cool, but I kept a straight face. I mean, who’d tell the fuzz about the old girl and the bloke? Bloody fascists, the lot of them. And my mum, she raved so much I reckoned it was funny-farm time for her. Tried to ground me, she did. Locks me up in my room. But I got to go to the bathroom now and then, ain’t I? And when I goes, it ain’t my fault if the window’s just above the extension roof. And it sure ain’t my fault if I just tests it to see if I can climb down. Which I done nice and quick. Then I borrows old Dixey’s bike and cycled the six mile up to Yalderton Ridge for another visit with the bloke.
It was all them social bloody workers what made me do it. If she’d have left them out I might have let her be. But she always had to be in charge, did my mum. I suppose I didn’t mind when I was a kid but now I tells her I’m a grown woman she just laughs at me. And I won’t have that.
I thought maybe the old girl could do something about it. And I thought right. Mind you, the old girl give me one hell of a time joshing me but I sticks to my guns.
‘How’d you like it,’ I says, ‘if you had some prying old cow asking you questions night and day about everything you does and getting a pack of half-arsed women coming around too? Bloody nosy bl—idiots. Would I like to change school? Am I happy? Happy? ’Course I’m ruddy happy long as they leave me alone.’
The old girl had a little brood and she says she’ll fix it for me. Which she done.
I got to roar each time I think about it. She got made up as one of them social workers, see? She come visiting my mum. They shuts theirselves in the kitchen and I hears Mum making her a brew and later they comes out and the old girl goes off. Didn’t even look at me, she didn’t, but she grab my hand niftyish and squeezes it and I knows she’s pulled a stunt.
Mum went all pale after that like she’d had the spunk taken out of her and she stop fussing and telling me off and trying to keep me home. It was as easy as peasy. It was wicked. Excellent.
Dixey come round next day. ‘What’s the matter with Lynda?’ she asks me. ‘Why’s she gone so quiet?’
‘Dunno. Got a cold, probably,’ I says.
Dix give me a nasty look and I gives her one back. And that worked too. She goes off like a little white mouse and don’t even give me no grief for cheeking her while she’s going.
It was more or less the same the rest of term. What’s more I got bloody good at cycling.
In August Mum says Uncle Mick’s gived her some dosh and she wants to go to Majorca with Dix and her brats. I says that’s well OK by me just as long as I don’t have to go. And that was OK with them. So I nicked Dix’s tent and went up to the Ridge. I was there all August with the bloke and he weren’t shy at all.
In September he goes back to sleep so I comes down again and gets back in harness. I don’t mind school too much, see? They learnt to treat me right now. In fact, I got school taped.
‘What you done to all them creeps, Missis?’
‘What creeps?’
‘All them folks at school and my Mum and Dixey. All them people.’
‘I ain’t done nothing to them.’
‘You must’ve. They don’t mind what I do. They don’t even mind me thieving and smashing things.’
‘I ain’t done nothing to them. I done something to you.’
‘What you done, then?’
‘That’d be telling, Nipper. You just be grateful I done it.’
‘It ain’t wrong, is it, what you done?’
‘You slimy little squirt! I never heard such hypocrisy in all my born. You really take the cake, you do! You beat the rest of them hands down.’
‘What you mean? What rest of them?’
‘You think you’re the only little tart I’ve ever talked to?’
‘Yeah, I did … You ever talked to Dixey Foster?’
‘Might have. Yeah, I remember. Snotty so and so she was. She weren’t no good.’
‘No good for what?’
‘No good for nothing.’
‘What about me, then? I’m good, am I?’
‘Ringman says you are.’
‘How long’s Ringman going to kip for?’
‘You missing it? I could get you some more, you know.’
‘He woken up then?’
‘Not Ringman. Someone else.’
‘Who?’
‘Longman’s good at it. He’s even better than Ringman.’
‘I don’t fancy Longman though.’
‘Oh, you will, love, you will.’
*
In October I missed my third period and I got dead worried. I went to see the old girl and she thought it was a right joke, she did. I goes on about an abortion but she really let rip. I’d got to have the kid according to her. Abortions wasn’t right. I told her it was all right for her to say that. She wasn’t in the club.
She took me to see Longman. He was down by the copse over near the motorway works. He wanted to touch me but I told him to bugger off. He weren’t nothing like as smashing as Ringman. I wasn’t having him but the old girl said he knew how to fix it so it wouldn’t show until it was time to get the bloody thing out and if I did it with him she might look after the brat herself when it come. So I let him and after that I didn’t mind what he looked like just so’s he didn’t stop.
The old girl was a soft touch then so I got her to show me how to do the shiv.
I practised on everybody. My mum, Dix, the brats at school, creeps in the street. I got the Head. I even got Ian’s dudes one time when they was feeling the mean Fridays and was all tanked up. I got them real good and nowadays they don’t call me those names no more.
When it was Christmas I asked my mum for everything I could think of. Make-up, clothes, Nike trainers, a Walkman, a music centre with a CD player, you name it I wanted it and she come up sweet. Don’t know where she found the juice to pay for all them things because you don’t get big money working at the Co-op but I wasn’t going to argue. Dixey give me lots too. Best Christmas I ever had and I made Mum let Longman stay nights with me. Up to then we’d been doing it outside but I never did enjoy getting my arse frozen off, though he didn’t seem to mind the frigging frost. She didn’t say much about Longman being there, except on Christmas Day when she bawled a bit when we stayed in bed. But then, she was getting proper grey round the gills. I reckoned she weren’t long for this world, see?
I stopped going down the Hob when the weather turned nasty. I ain’t good in the rain and after Christmas Longman just stayed in with us, fiddling with my CD and screwing me and that was like all I wanted. Besides the old girl had shown me how to do the shiv so sod her, I thought.
Past the New Year though, that bugger Longman ups and leaves. One minute he was listening to some old Motown crap of Mum’s on the music centre – the next he’s halfway down the garden path. I went after him yelling but he just gets over the fence into the field next door and disappears. I swears fit to bust. Who cares about the odd swear? The old girl ain’t there.
Sneaky bastard, that Longman. After all I done for him!
I waits for him to come back that night but he didn’t and I got mad. So I went round town doing the shiv to any creep what asked for it. Then I met some geyser coming out a pub and I let him do it to me round the back. He weren’t much cop but he give me a tenner and that paid for a few drinks.
Up at the Ridge there weren’t no sign of Ringman neither and I laddered my best tights climbing about round them bastard bushes looking for him.
‘There ain’t nothing for it,’ I says to myself, ‘I’ll have to go and see the old girl.’
But you wouldn’t credit it, when I goes up Hob’s she taken a bloody powder too.
I got right moody that January, see?
‘Missis! Where you been?’
‘Around, girl. Where you been?’
‘Looking for you.’
‘You’re a bare-faced liar, Nipper. I hope you passed a merry Christmas.’
‘Yeah, it was great. Look, where the hell’s Longman?’
‘He had to go.’
‘Where? When’s he coming back?’
‘Stone me, I never seen a girl so desperate for sex as you, love. Proper little nymphomaniac, you is.’
‘Oh shut it, Missis. Just tell me where Longman’s hiding out.’
‘Don’t you tell me to shut it, Nipper. You try and remember I don’t take no cheek.’
‘I ain’t frightened of you, Missis. I knows what I knows. I can hurt you too now.’
‘Oh no, dear. No, no, no. You can’t pull no tricks on me. I ain’t made quite the same as other folks and you never knows what I might do next if you was to try it, hey? It don’t make sense to make me mad, do it?’
‘Nah, well, all right. Just as long as you tell me where Longman is.’
‘Ah yes, Longman. Well, Nipper, Longman’s having his kip.’
‘Like Ringman?’
‘Yeah, just like Ringman. But don’t you fret. They’ll wake up in time.’
‘In time for what?’
‘For the baby, sweetheart. For the birth. And afterwards.’
‘But what about … ?’
‘I can arrange that too, girl. I arranged the rest, didn’t I? Look at you! No unsightly lump. No morning sickness. No backaches. No funny cravings. A fifteen-year-old sylph, you is. And so pretty. It’d make Foreman’s heart melt to look at you.’
‘Foreman! I ain’t going with Foreman!’
‘Foreman’s better even than Longman.’
‘Oh, come on, Missis. Foreman’s a nasty old sod. I seen him down the square, evenings. He’s dirty and he smells. The lads throw their cans at him when he’s pissed. I seen him throw up all over the bus shelter. He’s well out of order.’
‘Never judge by the outside, Nipper. If I’d have judged by your outside you would never have got where you is now.’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘You ever look in the mirror? You look incredible clean, girl, like some kid’s Barbie Doll. You’re so pretty, you’re boring. But I thinks hard when I sees you and I waits till I sees your insides. Then I knows.’
‘What? What you know?’
‘You’re the spirit of the age, see? The times. What you are is what this place is. You’re what they calls an epitome. See, I likes to take what I can and I likes to get it right. I likes an accurate reflection and I likes to enter into the spirit of the thing, you get me?’
‘What you mean, Missis? Can’t you talk straight?’
‘Oh sure, little Gemma. I can talk straight. Yeah, I can do that. So. You want a man, right?’
‘I want Longman.’
‘Ah no, ducks, you want Foreman. I can get you Foreman. Come on, now. Let’s have a little sing. Join in. You know this one …
‘Dance, Foreman, dance.
Dance, my good men, every one.
For Foreman, he can dance alone.
Foreman, he can dance alone …’
‘No, Missis, not him.’
‘Ah, here he is, sweetheart. You just take a look in his trousers. Go on, don’t be shy. Go on, take a peek.’
‘No, Missis …’
‘Where’s the harm?’
All February Mum was like a zombie from Outer Space. She didn’t seem to notice me and Foreman rabbiting about in the house at all. In the morning she went down the Co-op and then she come back home at tea-time knackered and quiet and sat in front of the telly till it was time for bed.
Dix come in some nights with her kids and they all sits down by the telly and just watches and watches. It don’t matter what. They watches whatever. One night I gets up out of bed and I goes down to the front room and watches them. I get the flipper switch and fiddles around all over the shop. I give them a bit of Channel Four film in Frog where you has to read the words and they don’t seem to mind that and then we goes over to Newsnight with a couple of geysers droning on about the economy and they don’t turn a hair. I messes round till one. The silly buggers was lapping it all up. I finishes with this programme with some arty doctor chap blathering on about the meaning of life to a load of short-haired hippies and it was so boring I wanted to shiv the lot. But did my zombies bat an eyelid?
When I turns the set off they all got up, still being the Living Bloody Dead and Dix and her brood goes back home and Mum goes upstairs.
I says to Foreman about it when I went back. But he grabs me and starts to do it again and I forgets about them being crazy because you can’t think about nothing else when Foreman’s doing it.
He goes out every now and again does Foreman to get rat-arsed and he don’t let me tag along. So I goes over to Langley when he does and I tarts about down round the town centre. He don’t care. He knows I’ll bring him some cans back anyway.
I got a bank account now.
End of March Mum got pinched. She’d been thieving from the till and the fuzz arrive and haul her off down the nick for a couple of days. My Uncle Mick come over from Fosshampton and bailed her out. He said he thought she’d get off with a fine because she ain’t got no record and what the hell was the matter with her? I says I reckons she’s sick but she won’t see a doctor. He wanted to know who Foreman was and when I says he’s my bloke he cut up nasty. Starts bad-mouthing him. I give Mick a well-lethal shiv and he shut his mouth and pissed off sharpish. Good riddance to bad rubbish I told Foreman but he just grunted and rolled over.
I near on gived up school. Who needs it? Sometimes I goes in for Community Studies now and again so’s I can sound off and listen to them all agreeing with me like a load of sheep. It’s a bit of a giggle and I just does it for fun, see? I might go in for politics perhaps. I’d be good at that.
When April come I got this bad turn. It wouldn’t have happened if Foreman had stayed home like he was supposed to. But no, the bastard’s got a big thirst and he’s off down town. So I done my eyes over and nips across to Langley on the train. I done a few tricks and I thought I’d swank around the Town Hall bars and pick up some more trade but halfway along up the High I gets ill. Real ill. And while I’m trying to spew up and wondering what the hell it was I ate I hears this ripping sound and me best bloody dress starts splitting away at the seams. I got the sodding biggest bun in the oven you ever see. All at once. One minute a size twelve – the next I’m practically ten months gone! With my dress hanging around like I been in a hurricane. And Christ, did it sting! I starts bawling out and screaming and it being Saturday I gets a decent crowd. Some old classy bint comes out from one of the posh side streets and starts bossing my audience about. They get me an ambulance and about time too I says when I gets in because I’m wet all down my legs. Waters broken says one of the ambulance creeps and so I gets rushed into St Cath’s with all the deedoos going.
Didn’t take long to push the nipper out but it really bloody hurt. I ain’t going through that, never again. I looks down at my belly after and I got these bastard scars just above my hips. Stretch marks says the nurse. And my breasts are all hard and big and they’re leaking for God’s sake! They wants me to breast feed but I ain’t having none of that. Sodding disgusting. The kid’ll make do with powdered milk, I tells the sister and I gives her the mean eye. Stopped her mid-lecture, that did.
Mum come in to see me the next day and she just sits there beside the bed staring at the kiddie as though it was something amazing. When the bell goes, end of visiting, she gets up and stomps off without a word to me like ‘How are you?’ or ‘What can I get you?’ Charming.
Next day I gets up and nicks some clothes out of a side ward while the woman’s in the bog and I gets dressed and takes the babe and discharges myself. I’m going straight off to give the old girl a piece of my mind. What did she think she was doing playing a trick on me like that, hey?
‘Ah, you had the kiddie, did you, Nipper? Let’s have a look at her.’
‘Yeah, no thanks to you. I thought you was going to take care of me?’
‘Well, I did, didn’t I? Best to have the baby in a nice clean hospital with lots of doctors and nurses to keep an eye on you.’
‘I thought you was going to do it for me?’
‘What, you mean you thought it’d be nice having the kiddie out here by my insanitary little stream? I ain’t no midwife, sweetie, I never said I was. Or did you think I was going to have it for you? I ain’t no bloody conjuror neither.’
‘Ain’t you?’
‘Not so’s you’d notice. A harmless eccentric, that’s me.’
‘Where’s Foreman then? I stopped off home and he’s gone.’
‘Ah, yes. Well, Foreman got tired.’
‘What you mean, Foreman got tired?’
‘They all have to have their sleep, dear. You’re a demanding girl, see? You exhaust them after a while.’
‘But what am I going to do now? What about me?’
‘Oh, I got a treat lined up for you, sweetheart, but you has to wait.’
‘What treat? Why do I have to wait for it?’
‘You heard me talk about Littleman, ain’t you?’
‘Yeah. But Littleman’s invisible, you says.’
‘True. But on a certain night in the year he ain’t. He’s good solid flesh just the same as the rest of us.’
‘So what?’
‘He wants you. He wants you bad. He wants you so bad that he thinks he might spend the whole of his one night with you.’
‘Listen, Missis, why the shit should I get worked up about that?’
‘Language. Because, Nipper, Littleman’s better than Ringman and Longman and Foreman all rolled into one. He’s the best there is. The tops. And the things he can teach you. The power he can give you. Makes me feel faint just to think about it.’
‘What sort of power?’
‘Ooh, real power. The power to get what you want just like that. You can have money, clothes, servants, fast cars, villas in the South of France, men, anything you bleeding like.’
‘But I got that now.’
‘No, love, what you got now’s just a shadow of what you could have if you let Littleman spend the night with you.’
‘If it’s so good why don’t you go with him instead of me?’
‘It’s you he wants, sweetie. He only wants you, see? And as for me I get my thrills by seeing you enjoy yourself. I like your appetite, Gemma. It feeds me.’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘Forget it. Just you nip up to Yalderton Ridge the last day of the month and I promise, you’ll have the night of your life.’
‘I don’t know. I’ll think about it.’
‘Don’t think about it, girl, do it. I ever let you down before?’
‘No. Well, I dunno. I might. OK? I might. ’Bye. See you.’
‘Aren’t you forgetting something?’
‘What?’
‘Your baby, Nipper. Your little baby what you’re going to give me to look after like you said you would.’
‘What you want her for, Missis?’
‘I got a kind heart, see? I reckons you might neglect the little one once you got your hands on Littleman. Give us the baby, sweetheart, and I’ll see she wants for nothing a mother can give her.’
‘I don’t know …’
‘Come off it, Nipper. You truly want a baby hanging round your neck once you’re gallivanting round the world with your men friends?’
‘Suppose not. All right. But I’ll check up on her, see?’
‘Good girl. You’d be unnatural if you didn’t want to see her now and then. You just come and ask and I’ll show her to you. OK?’
‘Yeah, suppose so.’
‘And don’t forget. Be up the Ridge on the thirtieth. You won’t regret it.’
‘Might.’
It was hard waiting. Even though it was only a couple of weeks I was close to busting. Most nights I went down town trolling but it was stupid. After Foreman it didn’t seem as if any guy I could find to screw knew how to do it. I started to dream about bloody Littleman and woke up howling. Mum took no notice. Once I’d got rid of the brat she’d lost interest. She was on the Social now because the Co-op wouldn’t take her back. Hardly surprising, silly bitch! Fancy thinking she could get away with lifting money out the till! Still, she was quiet enough and give me no cheek when I got iffy which I do regular when I has to go without it.
Christ, them days went slow. Sometimes I’d plan out what I was going to do once I’d got this extra zip the old girl had said I’d get. I’d buy myself a Rolls or better still, a Chevvy, and I’d get a hunk to be my chauffeur and I’d go on the biggest spending spree anybody ever went on. Other times I’d think up faces for Littleman – Nick Nolte or Kevin Costner – and then I’d think about what the rest of him’d look like and groan. Yeah, it was a shitty time for me. Had to go round with crossed legs most days.
When the day come I was in the bath all afternoon. I shaved my pits, my legs, near on everywhere. I done myself up real careful and got my black dress out so’s to look dead seductive. Not what you might call suitable for messing around in the woods up on the Ridge but the weather was fine and I’d got a spare pair of stockings ready.
In the bus going up there I was so fidgety I had to keep on changing seats. The bus creep tells me to sit down but I don’t shiv him because we can do without a sodding crash. Jesus, I was impatient. I kept thinking when I was the boss round here I’d get the buses to stop only two or three times. This bloody bus stopped all over the shop. It even bloody stopped when there wasn’t anybody wanting to get on. So I started to think about how I’d zap creeps when I come into my power. How I could even zap the old girl. Teach her a few lessons. A little respect. And then I goes back to thinking about Littleman. My hands is sweating and that’s a sure sign I’m ready for it. Christ, was I ready!
It was near dark when I gets off but I knows my way up the Ridge backwards since last summer and I belted up and tore through the wood heading for Ringman’s stone. There weren’t no sign of Littleman so I sat down to catch my breath. After a while I hears the old girl singing bloody Top of the Pops. I can do without this, I thinks, but I knows better than to interrupt. Somewhere away in the woods she’s droning on as usual:
‘Dance, Littleman, dance,
Dance, my good men, every one,
For Littleman, he can’t dance alone,
Littleman, he can’t dance alone.’
Oh, so Littleman can’t dance alone, hey? He needs a girl to make him dance. I’m bloody trembling now at the thought.
It were getting real dark but I knew Ringman when he steps out from behind his stone and I knew Longman and Foreman who come with him. I know them by their smells, specially Foreman. They comes up and touches me sort of gentle and exciting and in a little I begins to pant. They carries me into the wood and we comes to a clearing place and they puts me down very careful, still stroking away. Then I sees the old girl sitting on a log, smiling at me like I was her true nipper and she lifts her hand and points over to a dark corner and crouching there is Littleman. I wants him straight away. He’s big and blond and he looks at me like he ain’t ate for a year. Well, he can eat me all right.
‘Gemma,’ says the Missis, ‘let me introduce you to your dad.’
I begins to laugh and then I sees she ain’t joking. For a minute I wonder whether I should run off but my legs is all weak. I licks my lips and goes hot.
I says, ‘What the hell? I’ll try anything once.’
I takes off my clothes and lays down inviting in the middle of the clearing.
Headline story, Langley Evening Argus, 15 May 1992:
MURDER VICTIM USED IN SATANIC RITES?
The body of a young girl, found yesterday in woodland below Yalderton Ridge, was today identified as that of fifteen-year-old Gemma Hearnesley of 14, Coebrook Grove, Grigbourne. Her badly mutilated and partially eaten remains were discovered by a farmer’s dog in a remote spot below the Ridge.
Chief Inspector David Marsh of the County Constabulary, who is in charge of the case, stated categorically today that the police are treating Gemma’s death as murder. Police from all over the county were out in force this afternoon combing the area for clues to Gemma’s assailant.
Chief Inspector Marsh went on to say that although the body was naked and had remained concealed for about a fortnight, forensic reports showed that there was no sign of a sexual assault made on the victim. However there were certain indications at the scene of the crime which suggested that she might have been subjected to some form of black magic ritual, though the evidence as yet is far from conclusive. Her other injuries have been ascribed to scavenging animals.
Two men, Neil Hogarth (31) and Dougal Smith (23) were arrested in the early hours of the morning after tip-offs from local people. Both men are members of a group of New Age Travellers encamped on common land near Yalderton Heath and have been described as Satanists. Later they were released after questioning.
Mrs Lynda Hearnesley, the mother of the victim, was unavailable for comment. However, all day, letters of support and comfort have been arriving at her Grigbourne home from relatives and friends. This afternoon some of Gemma’s classmates delivered flowers and messages of sympathy to her door, shocked and stunned by the news of her death. Mrs Hearnesley’s neighbour, Mrs Dixey Foster, said that Gemma’s mother was too distressed to comment. She added, ‘Gemma was a lovely girl, popular with us all. Nothing was ever too much for her. When her mother was ill earlier on this year Gemma nursed her devotedly through it. We are all horrified to hear of her death and the sooner the police catch the madman who did this the better.’
Another neighbour expressed his opinion that the reintroduction of capital punishment would act as a deterrent for this type of crime.
DRAWING FROM THE FIGURE (#ulink_253fe347-fe7f-5f2d-8264-1410ffff5d56)
Cynthia Chapman
Since she gave up teaching, Cynthia Chapman’s occupations have included market stallholder, pub pianist and running a fancy-dress hire business from her home in Kent. She has been writing for about five years and has had over thirty stories published in magazines. At present she is trying to find a publisher for her first novel while working on her second.
DRAWING FROM THE FIGURE (#ulink_253fe347-fe7f-5f2d-8264-1410ffff5d56)
At twelve-thirty Mrs Oliphant removed her gardening gloves and laid them in the trug with the secateurs and bass. She straightened up from her task of staking delphiniums, conscious of a familiar twinge in the small of her back. Naturally one ignored this evidence of the advancing years; nothing was more boring than one’s own minor ailments. The way to keep young was to follow the excellent advice of all those newspaper columnists; get out and about and take up new hobbies and interests so that one simply didn’t have time to feel sorry for oneself.
However, she did feel a little sorry for herself when, just as she had arranged a lightly boiled egg and thin fingers of brown bread and butter on a tray, the telephone rang. She had to watch the egg growing cold as her friend Marjorie prattled on about nothing. As soon as she could she cut the conversation short.
‘You must forgive me, my dear – I’m due at my art class at half past one. That’s right, we’re going to tackle drawing from the figure this term. Yes indeed – one only hopes it won’t be too illuminating!’
After eating her spoilt lunch Mrs Oliphant hurried upstairs to change out of her pale-green cotton trousers and loose-fitting shirt. One did not of course dress up for an Adult Education class but on the other hand one did try to look fresh and summery. She selected a dress in a light, silky fabric patterned in soft shades of blue – reminiscent of the delphiniums that one loved so much – and white shoes with a sensible medium heel. Her fair hair was worn in a short, casual style that needed little attention, but she carefully reapplied the rose-pink lipstick that these days seemed more flattering than stronger colours. After spraying a little lily of the valley toilet water behind her ears she was ready.
Since her husband had died Mrs Oliphant had been to classes in Embroidery, Flower Arranging, Yoga (for which one had been obliged to wear a track suit) and French Conversation. This year’s choice – ‘Discovering Drawing’ – had made her feel quite adventurous, for although one had of course always adored Art it was amazing to find that one could actually produce quite recognizable pictures of assorted flowerpots, a bunch of bananas, or a jumble of kitchen utensils on a checked tablecloth.
This term the members of the class were ready to progress to ‘Drawing from the Figure’ and had been asked to pay an extra two pounds towards the services of the models. Their tutor Mr Redfern had stressed that the important thing about figure drawing was not to feel inhibited or discouraged by one’s early efforts but just to have a go. He was a likeable, friendly man and they had now got over their initial reluctance to call him ‘Teddy’ as requested. He was in fact rather like a teddy bear, stockily built, with fluffy golden hair balding at the crown, a cheerful, ruddy face, and eyes the colour of brandy. After two terms with him they all felt like old friends.
Teddy Redfern was in his early forties and had a liking for alcohol and young women; a combination which had cost him both his previous teaching job at a sixth-form college and his marriage. These days he still drank a little more than he should, but his weakness for young women was not catered for in his Adult Education classes, for the majority of his pupils were ladies of indeterminate age with more enthusiasm than artistic talent. Like Mrs Oliphant, they were charming, cultured and conventional, and if they ever detected whisky fumes on his breath they were much too well-bred to give any sign of it.
Now they were all busily engaged in drawing the young West Indian in jeans and T-shirt who leant against a table, his chin cupped in one hand, as if deep in thought. Teddy Redfern withdrew to the side of the room and surreptitiously lit a cigarette, tapping his ash out of the open window. Idly he listened to the snatches of conversation interspersed with ripples of ladylike laughter.
‘My dear, I was quite expecting a nude!’
‘Oh, we’re not nearly ready for that yet, are we?’
‘One does rather hope that one wouldn’t have to cope with a male nude to start with!’
‘But artists have to cultivate a detached viewpoint – just like doctors and nurses. The human body’s simply a machine, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, of course. It’s too silly to be apprehensive about drawing the nude figure – most of us are married women, after all.’
Teddy Redfern threw his cigarette-end out of the window and began to drift round the room, making bluff, hearty comments about the work as he went. No good being too discouraging, he thought, or he’d find himself without a class next year. Mrs Oliphant’s attempt seemed to him slightly more competent than those of the other ladies.
‘I say, Anthea – I do believe you’re improving all the time! That head’s really very good.’
‘Oh, do you think so? I felt I was making a frightful botch of it.’
‘Nonsense! Just have a bash at it and don’t worry too much over the results. That’s what life’s all about, isn’t it?’
As he moved on, a faint frown crossed Mrs Oliphant’s face, for she found this simple philosophy quite alien to her nature. One could hardly ‘have a bash’ at everything in life; either one felt that one could be moderately successful at something, or one didn’t.
It would be no use, for instance, having a bash at changing the flat tyre of one’s car, she thought some forty-five minutes later, standing in the car park feeling particularly helpless. One would just have to go back into the centre and telephone one’s garage.
As she walked up the steps Teddy Redfern swung out of the glass doors, talking away so busily to the West Indian boy that he nearly bumped into her. ‘… like a couple of balloons in a binliner. Ah – forgotten something, Anthea? I’d better come back with you. I’ve just locked up.’
‘Oh, no, no –’ she faltered. ‘It’s my wretched car; a flat tyre, and I’m afraid I’m a perfect fool when it comes to dealing with anything mechanical …’
‘Is that all? I’ll have it done in a jiffy. Can’t have you messing about with oily tools, can we? Don’t wait for me, Mick – I can get the bus.’
The young man rode off on a motor bike and Teddy Redfern accompanied her back to her silver-grey Golf.
‘Is your own car out of action?’ enquired Mrs Oliphant, watching him roll up his sleeves and set to work.
‘Yes, temporarily. Bit of a nuisance, but I think there’s a bus I can get in about twenty minutes.’
‘Oh, but I insist that you let me run you home. It’s the very least I can do after your kindness. I believe you live quite close to me,’ she went on, as he gratefully slid into the passenger seat. She had seen him one day in a ramshackle Citroën Dyane coming out of the drive of a rather nasty-looking little bungalow.
‘And you live … ?’
‘Vine Cottage; I don’t know whether you know it?’
‘Ah yes, I think I’ve passed it in the car. Is there actually a vine?’
‘Yes, quite an old one at the back of the house. Are you at all interested in gardening?’
‘Love it,’ said Teddy Redfern, who occasionally, in a wild spurt of energy, would go out to his garden and attack the lawn for ten minutes or so before collapsing into a deckchair with his heart pounding. ‘I’m afraid mine’s a bit neglected at the moment but I’ve got great plans for it. You must come round one day and advise me.’
‘Oh, I adore telling other people what to do with their gardens,’ she said effusively. ‘But isn’t your wife fond of gardening?’
‘I live on my own. Was married for a time but it didn’t work out; just one of those things, I suppose. My fault. I’m not an easy man to live with – put it down to the artistic temperament!’
He went on to tell her about his days at the Slade in the 1960s when he had been ‘a bit of a terror’ then gave her an account of his teaching career. He was naturally obliged to leave out all the most interesting bits but made up for this by enlarging on his reasons for ‘opting out’.
‘… had enough of the rat-race. I made up my mind I was going to devote myself to my own work, sink or swim. I’m simply not cut out for a regular nine-to-four-thirty job. Nowadays I can stay in bed till noon then work all night if I feel like it.’
How Bohemian he was! thought Mrs Oliphant, remembering her own husband setting off at the same hour each morning with briefcase and bowler hat. One could see how the artistic temperament would be difficult to live with but at the same time quite fascinating.
‘Perhaps you’d like to pop in and have a cup of tea with me as it’s on the way,’ she said, as they neared Vine Cottage. ‘Unless of course you’re in a frightful hurry?’
But Teddy Redfern was in no particular hurry and thought it would be interesting to see the cottage. As he followed Mrs Oliphant through the front door he was instantly struck by the unnatural tidiness of the place, then by the elegance and quiet good taste evident in the drawing room. His feet sank into a soft, pale carpet; the chairs were covered in blue-and-white flowered chintz; a few good pieces of porcelain were displayed here and there. On a low table with the colour and sheen of a new horse-chestnut stood an elaborate flower arrangement of mauve and white lilac, fat white peonies and purple irises. He felt large and ill at ease, fearful of bumping into some valuable piece of furniture or marking the carpet with his shoes.
Mrs Oliphant led him out to the neat little kitchen so that he could wash the traces of oil from his hands.
‘I think it might be pleasant to have our tea outside, don’t you? It’s such a beautiful afternoon. Why don’t you go out to my little courtyard and relax, and I’ll bring the tray in a minute.’
The courtyard was delightful with its tubs of double petunias and trailing lobelia. Behind him the vine climbed almost to the roof of the cottage, its leaves a tender pale green against the faded coral of the brickwork. He sat down on a white wrought-iron chair and gazed down Mrs Oliphant’s garden.
‘You don’t do all this yourself, do you?’ he asked, as she set the tray down on the table.
‘No, I must confess I have a man in to do the heavy work. But I think beautiful, peaceful surroundings are so important for one’s well-being, don’t you?’
This was an idea that had never occurred to Teddy Redfern. It was odd, he thought, that no yellow or orange or scarlet flowers seemed to grow in Mrs Oliphant’s garden, and he remarked on the fact.
‘But how frightfully clever of you to notice! To tell you the truth, I find those colours strike a jarring note – I love blues and mauves, and white of course, and all those heavenly things with silvery leaves. One tries to keep the effect muted.’
‘And do you get many grapes from the vine?’
‘Yes, certainly. More than I know what to do with. You must have some in the autumn.’
‘Maybe if you decide to come to my class again we could use them for some still-life work.’
‘Yes, what a splendid idea! I’m sure I shall want to carry on with the class – one feels one still has such a great deal to learn. I’m finding drawing from the figure a tremendous challenge. I think we were all a little apprehensive before today; one half-expected to be confronted by a nude!’ She gave a musical laugh.
‘Oh, we shall get to the nudes,’ said Teddy Redfern with confidence. ‘Oh, yes – the nudes are all lined up. Or nude, I should say; only one of the models will be doing it. We have to pay them more, you see.’
‘Yes, I suppose one would have to … It won’t be the young man who posed for us today, then?’
‘Mick? Oh, no. The female figure – that’s the usual drill. I shan’t be inflicting any naked male bodies on you, ha, ha!’
That was rather a relief, thought Mrs Oliphant, after she had driven Teddy Redfern home. It wasn’t that one would be shocked or embarrassed; more that one might feel obscurely uncomfortable, possibly on behalf of the unclothed male model, so heavily outnumbered.
The next week Mick posed for them again. He sat on a hard wooden chair with his arms and legs crossed, and his body seemed to be all planes and angles, difficult to reproduce on the paper.
After the class she saw Teddy Redfern getting into his little red Citroën and felt slightly disappointed that there was no longer any need to offer him a lift.
The following week a new model appeared. To Mrs Oliphant and her contemporaries she seemed hardly more than a child, though one realized of course that she must have been in her early twenties. Her dark hair was cropped short like a boy’s and her skin was as firm and shiny as a nectarine. In spite of the plumpness of her figure she was wearing black cycling shorts and an orange T-shirt that was really no more than a vest. Her black canvas shoes were dusty and her nail polish chipped.
How unattractive girls nowadays made themselves look! thought Mrs Oliphant, narrowing her eyes a little as she started to sketch the ripe curves that only too clearly needed the support of a good brassière. And how very unflattering those tight shorts were, made from some slightly shiny synthetic material … Teddy Redfern had introduced her as ‘Lynne’, and at half-time sat on the edge of his table chatting to her and laughing a lot.
On the afternoon that Lynne came into the art room wearing a gaudily patterned short kimono a frisson of excitement ran through the class, for obviously they were about to tackle The Nude.
She really looked very little better without her clothes, thought Mrs Oliphant as, after discarding the kimono, the girl settled herself on an old chaise longue. She lay in such a position as to make it clear that she was not in the least self-conscious about the size of her hips. Today Teddy Redfern fetched her a cup of tea in the break, and though she shrugged herself back into the lurid kimono she did not bother to tie its belt. He sat beside her on the chaise longue and once again did a lot of laughing.
No doubt he was as detached as any doctor or nurse, the ladies reminded themselves, for after all the human body was merely a piece of machinery. Nevertheless, one did feel that it might have been more suitable not to have given the model that jolly slap on the behind just as she was about to start disrobing, or to have whispered whatever it was that made her giggle so uncontrollably.
After the class Mrs Oliphant walked to her car with Mrs Prentice, a nice woman of her own age, and they discussed Teddy Redfern’s behaviour in hushed voices.
‘Of course, one never knows with divorced men,’ said Mrs Prentice sensibly. ‘One shouldn’t be surprised if they go off the rails.’
‘Off the rails?’ repeated Mrs Oliphant in a high, alarmed tone. ‘Oh, but surely, my dear, there couldn’t be anything like that! Goodness knows, one isn’t a prude, but the girl is young enough to be his daughter. No, I think he was just being a little bit foolish in the way that middle-aged men so often are …’
Certainly Teddy Redfern was not foolish on any subsequent occasion that Lynne posed in the nude; indeed his manner towards her seemed offhand and almost brusque. Twice he complimented Mrs Oliphant on her work. A new model came and sat for them; an elderly man with a face full of unusual lumps and bumps like a potato. Teddy Redfern pinned Mrs Oliphant’s drawing of the potato-like head on the art room wall.
At their final class Mick posed for them again. The ladies had brought strawberries and cream to eat at half-time; Teddy Redfern had provided a couple of bottles of wine; a party atmosphere prevailed. Under the influence of this Mick became quite chatty and got out photographs of his girlfriend and baby daughter. At the end of the afternoon Mrs Oliphant walked out to the car park with Teddy Redfern.
‘Will you be coming to the class again next term?’ he asked.
‘Well, naturally one would love to if it can be arranged. But I’m not quite sure what my commitments will be; I’ve promised an old friend that I’ll go to Italian classes with her.’
‘Oh, do come, Anthea,’ he said, looking at her with his warm, brandy-coloured eyes. ‘I can’t manage without my star pupil. We’ll be doing still life in the autumn; I seem to remember you were rather good at that.’
‘Still life …’ she echoed, seeing in her mind’s eye a bunch of dark purple grapes lying in a pottery dish, perhaps beside a slim green wine bottle. ‘Yes, I do feel that’s very much me.’
‘Jolly good!’ he said, like an enthusiastic schoolboy. ‘I’ll expect to see you in September. You will come, now won’t you?’
Yes, thought Mrs Oliphant, she would go, even if it clashed with the Italian class and she had to disappoint Marjorie. There were times when one had to be a little selfish, otherwise people would take advantage of one’s good nature. Almost gaily she waved, as Teddy Redfern drove away from the centre still calling out, ‘Don’t let me down!’ from his car window.
Mrs Oliphant spent the month of August visiting her married daughter in Canada. They did a great deal of touring about and the weather was very hot and, although of course one absolutely adored one’s grandchildren, there was no getting away from the fact that toddlers were most frightfully exhausting.
It was delightful to be back in the peace of one’s own charming little cottage, to rediscover the joys of solitude and the sheer bliss of pottering around one’s garden. It was not until she had been home for a week that she chanced to pick up the new Adult Education Prospectus from the library.
Yes, there it was: Discovering Drawing: Edward Redfern. For beginners or the more advanced. Drawing can simply record information, but it can also express dynamic emotion. Students will be encouraged to develop their skills in a free and original way, using a variety of techniques. It really did sound quite exciting put like that, and she began to look forward to the new term.
One day in the second week of September she discovered that the grapes were ripe enough to eat. She could not remember having picked them as early as this in previous years; it had been an exceptional summer. She toyed with the idea of taking a bunch along to her first drawing class, then the happy thought struck her that there was really no need to wait for this. She knew where Teddy Redfern lived and could perfectly well call round with the grapes she had promised him. Perhaps she could advise him on his garden at the same time.
Mrs Oliphant arranged several of the ripe bunches artistically in a shoe box lined with crumpled pale-green paper napkins – almost as if one were taking them to church for a Harvest Thanksgiving service, she told herself mockingly. But one did like things to look elegant; even a simple gift should reflect one’s personality. For similar reasons she dressed with care in a lilac cotton skirt and top that she had bought in Canada. It was still warm enough not to need a cardigan.
Teddy Redfern’s bungalow, seen close to, was even nastier than she had imagined and the poor man’s garden certainly was neglected! The hedges had simply been allowed to run riot and the last of the privet blossom gave out a warm, sickly scent; a lawnmower stood abandoned on the half-cut patch of grass; the flowerbeds were dry and choked with weeds. A large, untidy clump of red-hot pokers almost blocked the path that led to the front door.
Stepping delicately past these red-hot pokers, Mrs Oliphant rang the doorbell, then stood listening with her head on one side. She became aware of music playing somewhere inside – the sort of music with a heavy, pounding bass that somehow she would not have expected a man of Teddy Redfern’s age to have liked. She rang the bell again but this time without much confidence.
His little red car was standing on the drive so he must be at home. Perhaps he was working in the back garden. She made her way round the side of the house, hardly noticing that the music had stopped. As she came to an open window she found herself looking into an incredibly disordered living room and was about to hurry past when she was arrested by the sound of voices. They seemed to come from a sofa covered in hideous mustard-yellow velveteen which stood with its back to the window.
‘Have a heart, sweetie – I’m not a superman.’
‘That’s not what you told me half an hour ago …’
It was at this point that Mrs Oliphant caught sight of the black cycling shorts and orange vest which lay next to a whisky bottle on the carpet. She lifted her eyes and saw a plump but shapely leg rise into the air, the toes curling and uncurling. There was the sound of a slap then a giggle, followed by Teddy Redfern’s unmistakable laugh.
‘OK,’ he said. ‘Just let me change the tape first.’
The next moment Mrs Oliphant stepped back in horror as he got up from the sofa and crossed the room, revealing more of the naked male body than she ever wished to encounter again. It was clear that he had not been ‘drawing from the figure’, though he could have been expressing dynamic emotion in a free and original way, using a variety of techniques.
Her heart thudding, she tiptoed swiftly back to the front of the bungalow. Would it be best to take the grapes home with her? But then, looking at their firm, shiny plumpness, she felt a sudden distaste for them. Quietly she laid the box on the front doorstep and hurried out of the gate.
It wasn’t that one was shocked, she told herself, standing in her cool, gracious drawing room a little later. If one had thought about it, one would naturally have assumed that he must have some sort of ‘love life’, to use the rather ridiculous modern expression. It was simply that one didn’t expect that kind of thing to be going on in the middle of the afternoon, in broad daylight, and not even in his bedroom.
Absently she rearranged a spray of Michaelmas daisies in the vase that stood on the low table. With sprigs of purple hebe and a few creamy-white roses the effect was exquisite.
It was strange that she had not noticed the reddish tinge in Mr Redfern’s hair before today; she had never cared for ginger men – just one of those little irrational foibles. Of course, one had always realized that he was not quite a gentleman …
She gazed out of the window at her charming garden, a restful, soothing vista of greens and blues and silver and white. It might be agreeable to take a tray of tea out to the courtyard, she thought.
Sitting there, sipping Earl Grey tea from a fragile, bone china cup, she turned once more to the Adult Education Prospectus. Watercolour Flower Painting; how delightful that sounded! The tutor was a Bridget Coombe-Stevens, and students were encouraged to bring their own plant and flower material.
There was nothing more ageing than to get into a rut and one really had a duty to oneself to ensure that this did not happen. And of course this class had the added advantage of not clashing with Italian, and so one would be able to keep one’s promise to poor Marjorie …
BERLIN STORY (#ulink_61ea71e4-6c85-5871-a7f0-44a3b2e0a1bb)
Philip Sealey
Philip Sealey currently teaches English at the European School in Munich. He has travelled widely and written two novels and the libretto for an opera. At present he is working on a third book set, like this short story, in Berlin after the Wall.
BERLIN STORY (#ulink_61ea71e4-6c85-5871-a7f0-44a3b2e0a1bb)
Es war einmal – once upon a time.
The wood was dark and the thin ribbon of sky above their heads was already speckled with the first stars.
She was four and he was six and every few paces she had to break into a run in order to keep up with him. Her basket, filled with the berries they had been gathering, hung heavily in her small hand and she longed to abandon it somewhere. Her brother Hans had nothing to carry.
‘Why do you always go so fast?’ she called crossly after him.
‘It’s getting dark!’ he shouted back over his shoulder.
‘But we’ll be home soon, won’t we? You promised we’d only be gone an hour.’
In the middle of the path, he stopped and turned to face her. She looked at his wide, frightened eyes and, in her mind, saw the forest stretching away endlessly behind him.
‘I don’t know the way any more,’ he said.
When Greta Maier opened her eyes, the sunlight was already filtering through the gaps in the half-drawn blinds. She lay still, listening to the faint voices she could hear from downstairs. Children’s voices. How strange that, on this of all days, the old dream – or was it a memory? – should return to haunt her. But not only the dream. The three words also that, like an incantation, seemed to float in the air around her, as though she had spoken them aloud in her sleep.
Es war einmal.
But perhaps, she thought suddenly, the words contained a message for her. For when she looked back over her long life, it seemed that everything she could remember, the century’s swirling tides that she had been forced to sail upon, had now no more substance than a dream. And this city – in which so much of it had come to pass, in which more than eighty years had slipped like fine sand through her fingers – was not its history, especially its most recent past, as unreal as the events of a fairytale? And for each character, in every fairytale she had ever read, whether the ending was happy or sad, there was always a final page and one last, conclusive full stop.
There was a knock at the door. Too abrupt, too authoritative by far, for children.
‘Mother.’
But, of course, it was only Hannah.
‘Yes?’ How faint her own voice sounded.
Her daughter knocked again. ‘Mother, are you awake yet?’
Frau Maier raised her head from the pillow and cleared her throat. She must be still half-asleep.
‘I’m just about to get up.’
‘Can I come in?’
‘Of course.’
The door opened and Hannah came into the room. She was wearing an apron over the new dress the old lady knew she had bought especially for today. She was smiling, though her face looked strained. She bent down beside the bed and kissed her mother on the forehead.
‘Happy birthday, Mother. I wish you all the health and happiness you could desire for another year.’
‘Thank you, dear.’
Frau Maier reached out and hugged her daughter. ‘Are the children being difficult downstairs?’
‘You should know what it’s like. There’s so much to do and the little ones always seem to be under your feet. Lukas and Maria have baked you some currant bread. It tastes delicious. They insisted on using the old bread oven though, which meant having to light a fire. Miroslav had to chop up that old chair in the cellar for wood. You don’t mind, do you?’
Her mother shook her head. ‘I doubt if it was much good for anything else.’ She hoped it wasn’t the one she thought it was, but then was there any longer a point in hoarding these things from her past? The house was full of everything it had been possible to save from two world wars and their aftermaths. Each small ornament, photograph, or piece of furniture meant something to her, but perhaps the time had come to stop clinging on to all this debris. Maybe the oven, that had remained so long unlit, was the best place for many other things that seemed, on this morning of her ninetieth birthday, to have suddenly lost their meaning.
Hannah went back downstairs, closing the door behind her, and Frau Maier began to get up. She poured some water into the china bowl on the stand beside her bed and washed. The modern bathroom, that had been fitted at Hannah’s insistence when she moved back to live with her mother after her husband’s death, held no attractions for her. She washed, and lived, as she had always done. She took out a simple, dark-coloured dress, that she seemed to remember wearing for her eightieth birthday, and stood in front of the wardrobe mirror. Did she look any different from the last time she had worn it? The material seemed to hang more loosely from the shoulders, perhaps, her hair looked a little thinner, but other than that the only real difference she thought she could detect was a certain transparency of the skin, as if it might be possible soon to see the pale bones, like underwater coral, that had lain concealed for all these years beneath the surface.
She fastened a single strand of pearls around her neck and continued to stare at the reflection. A shadow crossed the glass and she realized that someone else had entered the room and was now standing behind her. He was dressed in uniform and his fair hair had been combed so meticulously it might have been parted with a razor.
‘You look so young tonight,’ he said, beginning to stroke the dark waves of hair that fell to her shoulders. She watched him in the mirror as he gently twisted her hair around one hand.
‘How long have we known each other?’ he asked suddenly.
She smiled, recalling that afternoon in the café on the Ku’damm when she had spilt coffee over him; the incident had lost her the job as a waitress, but gained her a husband.
‘Almost four years,’ she said.
‘And yet you’re still a mystery to me.’ He pulled her hair a little harder so that she was forced to bend her neck back towards him. ‘Look at your face, Greta,’ he said. ‘You’re not a peasant girl from the Tannenberg forest at all, are you? Your ancestors weren’t Prussian!’
Greta looked into his eyes, unsure as to whether he was being serious or simply teasing her. Still holding her hair, he pulled her head back against his chest, whilst his free hand began to caress her throat.
‘Your hair’s too dark, my love; your cheekbones too high. Some of my friends have commented on it.’
Suddenly growing frightened, she tried to break away from him, but he held her too tightly. He contained her struggles and bent his head so that he could kiss her neck. She felt his lips brush the skin below her ear. He was pressing her whole body back against him and she relaxed, as he released her hair. She tried to turn her head so that she could kiss him, but he wouldn’t let her. He held his mouth away from hers and moved his hands so that they rested over her small breasts. He squeezed her, forcing her body back against him so that she could feel the hardness of his uniform’s buttons through the thin material of her dress.
‘You scared me,’ she said very softly.
‘I didn’t mean to,’ he answered, still kissing her neck. ‘It was just that when I came into the room and saw you there, you looked almost like someone I didn’t know. Perhaps as your mother might once have looked.’ He paused. ‘I’m so sorry I never met her.’
She nodded dumbly, recalling the terrible months after they had first arrived in the city more than fifteen years before, when her mother, like so many others, had died from influenza.
‘And your father? I have just begun to realize how strange it is to have married a girl whose parents one knows nothing about.’ He paused and she felt his eyes piercing into her. ‘I bet they were gypsies! That’s why you’ve always been so secretive about them.’
‘They weren’t gypsies!’ Greta cried indignantly. ‘How can you say such things! My father was a Prussian farmer, who was killed in the war fighting the Russians. I was six years old and I saw him die. That’s no secret! You’ve known that from the very beginning. You’ve seen a photograph of him.’
‘Of course. How stupid of me to forget. I remember thinking now how much he reminded me of your brother.’
‘And Hans looks every bit a Prussian.’
She saw her husband nod slowly. ‘He does indeed,’ he said. ‘But then you look nothing like him. You take after your mother – whose photograph I’ve never ever seen.’
‘That’s because I don’t have one,’ Greta answered quietly. ‘You know what it was like then. Most of what we had was left behind in the East. Almost all the family records were lost.’ She tried to turn round to face him, but found he was still holding her too tightly. ‘You know the problems you had getting a marriage licence because I had no documents and they could find no records in the East.’
He nodded slowly. ‘I remember.’
She hesitated nervously. ‘Why are you asking me these things, Wolfgang?’
‘Curiosity. Only curiosity.’ He smiled suddenly and she saw his hands travel down across her body and begin to lift the hem of her dress. ‘I’m sorry if I upset you.’
She stared, horrified, at their reflection, as though she were watching him with another woman. He pushed the fabric up around her waist and then began to caress her bare thighs. Closing her eyes, she leaned limply back against him, and then shivered as she felt his hands slide beneath the waistband of her underwear. He was whispering in her ear.
‘You must make me a father, Greta. Tonight, when we come home. I want a son who will look just as German as I do.’
The fierce words dissolved into the sunlight and silence that filled the room but the shadow on the glass, though it seemed to fade, did not disappear entirely. Feeling weak and rather frail, Frau Maier turned away towards the window. She pulled up the blinds and pushed the curtain aside so that she could look out. She resented the way the past she had tried to forget, hers and this city’s, still found it so easy to intrude upon the present. In the last ten years since they had pulled the Wall down she seemed, in the most unlikely places, at the most unexpected of times, to be at the mercy of these memories that, unchecked, surged up to overwhelm her. Once she had been able to control them, to limit their excesses and shut out those that she found too painful to bear, but recently, as if out of contempt for her age, faces that she had long forgotten had risen up to either greet or mock her. It was as if the Wall’s demolition had released a host of captive memories that for the twenty-eight years of its existence she had kept locked within her.
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Ian St. James Awards
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 17.04.2024
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О книге: The winners of the 1993 IAN ST JAMES AWARDS.The Ian St James Awards enabled new writers from every walk of life to break into print.1993’s collection introduced more new writers than ever before, with six short stories and ten longer pieces.Entertaining, thought provoking, original, each of these stories is a winner, selected from thousands of entries from all over the world.