Four New Words for Love (27 page)

Christopher confesses that he can’t.

‘And she’s got some Asian guy. He’s got a corner shop near her digs and a battalion of kids. Mum told me she goes round early closing and he keeps her in fags and samosas. You
can just see them too, going at it on the basmati sacks.’

‘If you don’t mind me saying so, her transactions add up to prostitution.’

‘I don’t mind. Don’t let her hear you say it. She’s not shy at raising her voice and what’s obvious to you would offend her to the point of going
supersonic.’

He’s in the music shop, browsing when he feels the pressure of someone clumsily brushing past, recording, from the corner of his eye, a familiar stagger. It’s impossible not to hear
with the volume and careful tipsy enunciation of each individual word.

‘Do you have any Julio?’

‘I’m sorry, we operate a strictly no-smoking policy in this shop.’

‘Never mind that. Any Julio?’

He makes his escape unseen.

‘Sometimes cowardice is the better part of valour.’

‘You’re speaking in code again, Christopher.’

‘Your mother was in the music shop this afternoon. I ran away.’

‘Did she steal anything?’

‘Does she steal as well?’

‘As well as what?’

‘As... things...’

‘Where’s all your loose change?’

‘I don’t know. Around.’ He habitually leaves loose change and crumpled notes on convenient surfaces.

‘Look around. How much change do you see. I’ve put all the notes I could find in a sock in your sock drawer. I’m sorry to have to do it but there’s no point in tempting
her.’

He’s even sorrier. Betty fails to return one evening. This only becomes apparent the following morning when they awake to an absence of cigarette smoke. He lets Gina go into the guest
room. He’s on the point of calling the local police station when they call him. She’s been found lying in a garden in the early hours and detained in custody until sufficiently sober to
recall his address. He prevails on Gina to let him go. It’s all gone horribly wrong and it’s his fault.

When he gets there he realises Betty doesn’t subscribe to the same view of the police that he used to hold, before encountering the constable on Gina’s bridge. He’s expecting a
subdued woman behind bars. She’s leaning on the counter regaling the desk sergeant with some vulgar anecdote that’s proved so contagious everyone is listening. She sees Christopher and
finishes her story quickly. The sergeant convulses in a wheezing laugh that’s taken up by unseen staff behind the partitions.

‘Here’s my lift. Must go. People to meet, things to do, gardens to sleep in.’

Another appreciative burst of hilarity. It’s he who is subdued in the taxi. She chats incessantly, an inane backdrop to his musings.

‘Can I use your mobile?’

‘My?’ He’s forgotten its existence. She takes the phone from his pocket.

‘Chokey always gives me an appetite. Never any other time. Don’t ask me why.’ Assuming permission she dials Gina to order breakfast. For the remainder of the journey she
regales one of her cronies, presumably in Newcastle, with her previous night’s activities.

‘...And then I woke up in a rockery. Gnomes an’ stuff. Ornamental pond. Garden centre advert.’

Artistic licence. Wheezing smoker’s laugh for the next suburban mile. Meter ticking up more ignored indebtedness. A week and he’s now more tired of her than he’s ever been of
any human being ever. This hasn’t worked. He blames himself. He had hoped her visit would produce some kind of catharsis. It hasn’t up until now and he now knows it won’t.

By the time they get back to the house Gina has made French toast and a reservation for Betty on the afternoon train. She takes news of her imminent departure without rancour.

‘He’s really nice,’ she says approvingly, referring to Christopher in the third person despite the fact that he’s sitting beside them. She leaves with his blessing while
a taxi throbs at the same gate she walked through a lifetime previously.

‘I want you to take this bottle of wine for... the journey.’

‘She’s already got two bottles in her luggage...’

‘What I always say is, why not?’ She pinches Christopher’s cheek as if he’s an endearing schoolboy and then gives him a searching kiss that causes him to stumble back
against the Welsh dresser.

‘Why not?’ he finds himself repeating, as another taxi ferries another person out of his life.

Gina sees her to the taxi and returns with a look of strained relief on her face. She goes to her room and only comes down to cook. They don’t talk properly till after dinner.

‘I suppose now, having met her, you can see some things more clearly.’

‘You mean about loose change disappearing and that sort of thing.’

‘I mean how I came to be on a bridge trying to sleep in a box, or didn’t you ever wonder how that state of affairs came about?’

‘I still think it strange to find someone as resourceful as you on the street.’

‘So you did wonder?’

‘Yes, I suppose I did.’

‘Didn’t it occur to you to ask?’

‘If you thought it was necessary for me to know I think you would have told me.’

‘Is that an answer?’

‘It’s not my place to ask.’

‘Yes it is.’

He makes a baffled gesture, palms upraised, as if lifting an invisible plank. ‘One doesn’t like to intrude.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning... one doesn’t like to intrude.’

‘You’ve more right than anyone else in the world. If it’s anyone’s place to ask it’s yours to ask me now.’

A pause while he sits considering. He is about to lift the invisible plank again when she interrupts.

‘So are you?’

‘Am I what?’

She leans across and knocks on his forehead. ‘Hello? Anyone home? What have we been talking about? Are you going to ask how I came to be destitute?’

‘If you want me to.’

‘What do you want?’

‘I want people to be nicer and for you to be happy.’

‘For fuck’s sake, Christopher! Haven’t you ever eaten the grapes in the supermarket before you get to the checkout?’

‘No. I don’t see what that’s got to do with anything. And I’m not going to apologise for not having shoplifted.’

‘The first night I stayed here I put the back of a chair underneath the door handle. I thought you might try something on. Call it rent. You don’t have to put that expression on.
Much as it might surprise you that kind of behaviour isn’t unknown. I wouldn’t put it past George Coleman to expect to get the leg over. Mum came back briefly, a couple of years after
Kevin had gone. It was just for a while. I even stayed with her, to see if we could maybe make a go of it. Whatever I had to offer it wasn’t enough. She disappeared again. I wasn’t sad
to see the back of her boyfriends. Most didn’t have George’s subtlety.’

Next to Betty George is the person Christopher would least qualify as subtle.

‘And did any of them... try?’

‘Yes.’

‘You weren’t... hurt?’

His euphemism touches her. ‘I was agile. That helped. Most of Mum’s men were as much of a lush as she is. I’d hear them fuck through the wall when their periods of
consciousness overlapped. But a couple of them, if they were up for it and she was out the game, came tapping on my door.’

He has an image: a bloated man with fat hands and venous nose leaning over a sleeping teenage Gina.

‘Don’t worry. I wasn’t Fay Wray. I didn’t lie back with big shag me eyes looking helpless. Most didn’t get near. One broke my nose to slow me down...’

He takes off his glasses and massages the junction of his eyebrows.

‘Mum woke. Guessed right first time and slapped him. It would have been poetic justice if she’d broken his nose, but he cracked two of her ribs on the way out. We were three up. If
we’d had a handy chip pan on the go I’d have poured it out the window and scalded the fucker on the doorstep. Like one of those mediaeval sieges. But we didn’t. She never cooked.
She never eats. She’s the only person I know who thinks you can get vitamins from smoke.

‘So we never saw
him
again. Can’t even remember his name. Punches my face, kicks Mum’s ribs and I don’t even know who he was. Says something somehow.
Doesn’t it?’

‘If it hurts you don’t have to say this.’

There’s nothing self-pitying. Her disclosure has found a momentum of its own.

‘I saw Mum on her feet. A couple of weeks till she could get to the shops on her own. But I knew that even if
he
didn’t come back there would always be another. There would
always be someone knocking on my door. I was sixteen. I left. Sixteen. I can’t even think of that now. Sixteen. I still think of Millie. I never stop thinking about her. I wonder what
she’d have been like when she was five, and ten, and fifty. If I ever thought of her at sixteen, standing on a pavement, carrying everything she owns, I’d probably burst into
tears.’

Which is exactly what she does the moment the last syllable is out. He doesn’t imagine she cries easily. He wonders how she held out for so long. What chance did she have with that raddled
phantom of a man he saw in her hall, and the woman who has just left in the taxi. He’s seen women cry before; he’s seen tears of wounded vanity, he’s seen Marjory’s tears of
social frustration, but he’s never seen anyone cry like this. The violence of these tears is vehement and purgative. He puts his arm around her. She spasms at each inhalation. He feels
something entirely unexpected: privilege. Since the death of his mother he has skated, living on surface tension. If it had been someone other than Marjory, someone who gave back, it might have
been different. There was never any immersion till she arrived. He feels the privilege of this vicarious pain. She has lent him depth.

He fishes in his pocket for the ubiquitous hanky. She rests her face against his neck and sobs till his collar is saturated and mascara-stained beyond repair. He waits till the heaving shoulders
subside. When she finally pulls away from him to accept the hanky, a long loop of catarrh attenuates from the tip of her nose to his ear lobe. Her head looks full of water. She blows her nose, a
foghorn at this proximity. He winces at the noise. The dog barks.

‘There must have been some happier times?’

Phrases come out in a hot rush, thickly.

‘There were in-between times, times that seemed good till I look back, only good because of what came before and after.’

‘You weren’t always on the street?’

‘No. But what you said,’ her speech is becoming more uniform, coherent, ‘about being surprised about me being resourceful and on the street. Sometimes it’s having nothing
that’s the test of your resourcefulness. You see, I wasn’t frightened of it. It became a place to go. There was never a home to go back to.’

She has clarified his intention.

Her breathing slows while his arm grows slowly numb. He guesses the effort of this revelation has exhausted her. His bladder competes with his shoulder for relief. He disentangles himself with a
muttered apology and returns fifteen minutes later with a tray. He’s made a pot of tea and a pile of hot buttered toast. She rouses herself and puts on the television. There’s an old
black and white film,
I Know Where I’m Going
. They sit side by side watching it in silence.

* * *

It’s a week before he can countenance another interruption to his routine. He’s more tactical this time and waits till she’s going up to bed.

‘You can always invite your friends down here, you know.’

‘I don’t know if you could stand it. I don’t know if I could stand it.’

‘Well, the invitation’s there.’

She doesn’t mention anything for the next few days. It’s Vanessa who puts the thing in perspective for him.

‘She probably feels she wants to see her friends because she’s indebted to them.’

‘So she should. They kept faith. They kept that flat going and that can’t be easy on their combined income.’

‘I don’t blame her that she doesn’t want to go back. From what you tell me it sounds like a museum to the past that she’s just recently gotten away from.’

‘She’s been in the house for a while.’

‘I mean that she’s just gotten away from it in her mind. Don’t be so literal, Christopher.’ He understands how far they’ve moved that she can chide him. ‘So
it would be good for her to see them but not go there. So they need to come here. But Gina’s hesitant to invite them because she thinks it might be too much for you. The answer’s
obvious.’

‘Not to me.’

‘You need to go away.’

‘Away where?’

‘Will you leave it to me?’

He ponders the implications of this while the Gaggia stutters out another espresso. Gina’s not on shift so they won’t be caught conspiring.

‘You don’t mean on my own?’

‘You mean do I propose to send you away somewhere on your own? That’s seriously what you’re asking me?’

‘Yes.’

‘No, Christopher. I don’t propose to send you somewhere on your own.’

‘With you?’

‘No. George Coleman. You can find your inner gay together. Of course I mean me!’

He ponders some more.

‘Some women would find this hesitation very,’ she lowers her voice in mock gravity, ‘very,’ she lowers it further, ‘insulting.’

‘Sorry. I’m not trying to offend.’

‘I know. Don’t take this the wrong way but you’re not the first man I’ll have ever been away with.’

‘Gina said you’d seen it all.’

‘Did she now?’

‘Yes. Not unkindly.’

‘Gina’s almost as incapable of being unkind as you are.’

‘You know it was her idea to invite you to the barbecue that time.’

‘Yes.’

‘And for me to invite you out for coffee.’

‘Yes. There’s this mysterious form of communication that women practice. It’s called talking. You should try it some time. And not just about the Middle East or architecture or
whatever it is you do. You know, you may not be the first man I’ve been away with but you’re the first who didn’t jump at the chance. Most of the others did the inviting
too.’

‘All right,’ he says decisively. ‘I’ll do it!’

‘Good for you. Have you got a passport?’