Fifty-Minute Hour (14 page)

‘Look, I'm angry with him,
too
!' I yelled. ‘We need to stick together. I mean, all us patients probably …'

‘Patient? Are you joking? I'd no more pay to see that shyster than make an appointment with a cut-throat.' He sounded totally contemptuous, as if a patient was some lower form of life; but at least he didn't push me off – even let me follow him as he swooped across the road and started striding down the street. It took me all my effort to keep up, since he was untrammelled in old trainers while I hobbled in new shoes. Yet the exertion calmed me down, removed the sense of struggle from my psyche to my legs, and after another hundred yards or so, I even plucked up courage to speak to him again. And now I've got his name – the ‘Seton' part, at least. I limp on a bit further, dodging a large puddle and a black kid with a Dobermann, then ask him for his surname.

‘What?' I shout again. A motorcycle's revving past, colliding with his voice.

‘Cusack.' He repeats it.

I'm not sure how you spell that, but it's Irish, isn't it? Which means we may have Gaelic blood in common, as well as just John-Paul. Not that he looks Irish, rather Middle-European, with sallow skin, dark untidy hair and eyes the sludgy colour of black olives. Seton Cusack. I try it on my tongue. The two names don't really harmonise, sound prickly and defiant.

I was wrong about his age. He's much older than I thought at first, and can't be John-Paul's son – looks nothing like him, actually, except for just their colouring. It was the clothes which fooled me – and the speed. He was acting young and dressed young, careering down the steps in skin-tight jeans, long hair. If you put him in a suit and sent him to the barber's, then arranged him very stiffly in a chair, he wouldn't look much younger than John-Paul. But why he's so attractive is, in fact, his energy. There's a dash and thrust about him – in his voice, his movements, body – as if he's fuelled by something different from normal low-key people who creep along the B-roads while he scorches up the autostrada. Also, he's so tall – six foot three, at least – which makes me feel more normal, an average sort of woman who doesn't dwarf her men friends. I can actually look up to him, which I do a moment, catch his eye, and suddenly he's laughing – a booming, crazy sort of laugh, as if the whole thing's been a joke. He even stops, as if to give the laughter time to breathe, or share it with the news-vendor who's screaming out ‘Jumbo-jet disaster – ninety-seven dead!' I laugh myself, though mainly from sheer nerves. It's been a pretty jumpy day, so far, and if I've cried, I'd better laugh, even up the score.

‘Want a drink?' he asks.

‘What?' My laugh breaks off, sounds frightened now and forced.

‘D'you say “what” to everything?'

‘Er-no, I …'

‘I said “Do you want a drink”?'

‘Yeah. Okay. Why not?' I try to make it casual. My soggy skirt is clinging round my thighs. At least a drink would mean a roof.

‘How much time've you got?'

It seems a funny question, but I calculate the minutes until two-ten the next day, feel a sudden terror at the thought of John-Paul creased and limp still. Will Tuesday have restored him? Will I dare go at all? ‘Time's no problem,' I say rashly. What's another lie?

‘Sure?'

‘Mm.'

‘Okay. Let's go to my place. If we stop off at a pub or something, I'll only run into the traffic and never get back home. It's a hell of a trek anyway, even out of rush hour.'

‘Where d'you live?' I'm feeling really nervous now, especially when he doesn't answer, just zips around the corner to a side street. Are we about to drive to Brighton – or to Bradford? And why's he parked his car so far away? We must have walked a good half-mile, in dousing spoilsport rain.

It's not a car, but a battered Transit van, with no seats in the back, just a scrum of clutter – paint, rope, empty cans, an oil-stained duffel coat, two sleeping bags, some fishing rods, and a cardboard box marked ‘JOHN WEST PILCHARDS. THIS WAY UP'. I fight a weird image of him fishing for canned pilchards as I climb into the front. His clothes and van and duffel coat don't match his voice and face, both of which are haughty and exclusive; sort of public school fused with Polish aristocrat. I'm also surprised by his driving, which isn't fast and slapdash (as somehow I'd imagined), but courteous and careful, even cautious. He's apparently quite willing to pulverise John-Paul, yet he stops for two old ladies trying to cross the road, and waves on other drivers, even when it's not their right of way.

We're heading east, pass quite close to my place, though I decline to mention that; don't want to give too much away until I know who this guy is. The conversation isn't exactly flowing. I suspect we're both haunted by John-Paul. My own thoughts keep fretting back to him, and surely Seton must be brooding on those two violent confrontations, feeling guilty or resentful, or planning further onslaughts. John-Paul's a third person in the van, squeezed between the two of us, invisible but huge, silent but accusing. We're all three cold and wary, shivering in damp clothes. We carry on in silence to Deptford, Greenwich, dreary Woolwich, past used car lots and video shops, ‘The Treasure Inn' (a sleazy Chinese restaurant), ‘Hair Affair' (‘Free blow-dry with restyling'), and rows of other small and squalid shops, some boarded up, some vandalised. At last, he turns towards me. ‘D'you smoke?' he asks.

‘Yes,
please
.'

He fumbles for his cigarettes, offers me a Capstan Full Strength, which must be higher in both tar and nicotine than any other brand I know. I grab it like a starving woman, seize the lighter from him, i-n-h-a-l-e. Christ! It's strong, or maybe six months' abstinence has just made me overreact. I'm coughing like a schoolgirl being seduced by her first fag, feel terribly embarrassed, especially when my eyes stream, but Seton barely notices – just one brief glance, then eyes back to the road, his own cigarette clamped between his teeth. Once I've recovered from the coughing, I inhale a second time, fight an instant wave of dizziness, a sudden queasy feeling. I'm amazed that just two puffs should affect me quite so strongly, yet, even so, I know it's right to start again. Mentally, I'm more relaxed already and my hands now have a function, whereas the last few months they've been totally superfluous, just dangling dead appurtenances with no real role in life. Who cares what I die of, when John-Paul won't be there? I don't even
want
him there – all weak and wet and bleating at his first sight of a tumour.

‘So how d'you know John-Paul?' I ask, taking another slow deep drag to give me courage.

‘I'm a friend of his ex-wife.'

‘Ex-wife?' I'm riveted.

‘Yeah. They split two years ago. Though it was a good three days before he even noticed she was gone. He's so involved with his own life – if you can call it a life.'

‘Did he … ever …' (I plug my mouth with my cigarette, need another fix before I dare complete the sentence) ‘… marry again?'

‘Who'd have him, for fuck's sake? He lives with these two huge wolfhounds, though it beats me how he finds the time to exercise them. Midnight walks, I suppose.'

I don't say a word – I can't. I'm trying to work out whether I'm more (or less) jealous of two wolfhounds than one wife. And why wolfhounds, in the first place, and not spaniels or Welsh corgis? Power again, presumably. Wolfhounds stand nearly fifty inches high. I know. A client had one once, talked about him constantly, even when we were both still horizontal.

I'm so bemused by dogs and wives, I hardly notice where we're going, until suddenly we're jolting down a rough and pitted track with what looks like country wilderness stretching to both sides. Last time I checked the road, it was belching factories, hatching dreary council flats; now it's breeding cows and sheep, a flock of cackling geese – yes, honestly – just twelve miles from the City and we're passing a real farm; straggling barns and outhouses with two mongrels nosing round; combed brown fields studded with white stones (which transform to wheeling gulls at our approach). The gulls keep soaring, soaring, seem to melt into the sky, which looks huge and sort of billowy, as if it's been shaken out and spread to dry, instead of crumpled up to nothing, as in London. London's disappeared. Noise and traffic, dirt and smoke, have simply been erased. Even the rain has stopped, at last; faint rays of wary sunlight flickering through grasses or rainbowing the puddles. There's a sudden stir of wings again, powerful ragged flapping wings, slate-grey against the curdled milk of cloud.

‘Oh, look!' I shout. ‘A heron.'

Seton shrugs. ‘They're two a penny here.'

‘Where's “here”?'

‘Dartford marshes.'

I daren't say ‘what' again, though I must admit I've never heard of them. Dartford to me is just a boring tunnel, a nothing sort of town. I hadn't realised there were marshes, least of all such lonely ones, no more farms or buildings, no sign of man at all.

I'm wrong. ‘DANGER, PYROTECHNICS!' says a notice, and Seton stops a moment, points towards the high wood fence, emblazoned with barbed wire.

‘See the fireworks factory? It's ancient, that old place, looks more like a relic, though it's still producing fireworks. In fact, it's buried in the wilds here because it also happens to make TNT for the Ministry of Defence.'

I peer up at a second notice, headed ‘Explosives Act, 1875', feel a shudder of unease. We've already passed the Woolwich Royal Arsenal. Too much dynamite.

I'm relieved when he jolts on again, and we reach a sort of no-man's-land, overgrown with bushes, dead and tangled grass, and intercut with weed-embroidered creeks. The light is really beautiful – the last glints and shimmers gleaming on the rain-washed land, gilding the grey water. As I watch, it seems to slowly fade; sky and water melding, colours smudging, blurred. Greys and greens and browns and rusts all creep towards each other and embrace. The birds are dwindling too, now, larks skittering less wildly, piebald peewits flocking home to roost, one lonely kestrel hovering almost motionless. I can feel poems exploding out of me – winged and feathered poems, soaring high, migrating south, guided by the sun and constellations. I've always loved the country, feel calmer in it, grounded, as if I need a landscape to frame me, shelter me; need cleaner purer air to blast away the grit and fret of London. Yet this is London – unbelievably.

‘There's the Thames,' says Seton, pointing not to water, but to the tops of distant boats – a mast, a sail, a chimney-stack – no hulls. ‘See how low we are here – way below the river. And the land's still sinking, actually, subsiding just a fraction every day. That's why it's preserved, I suppose. No one dares to build on it. A solid house could land up in the bog.'

‘So how about
your
house?'

‘Who said I had a house?'

I recall his offer of a drink, see us gulping water from a creek, roosting with the birds. I don't mind at all. It seems simpler that way, safer. Possessions are so complicated, and walls make prisons, don't they?

Suddenly he stops, turns the engine off. I can hear the silence now; smell the marshes, a faint tang of mud and slime, overlaid with brine, as if they've been salted to prevent them putrefying. We both get out, walk towards the river, which means a lurch and pant uphill before we're standing by the wide grey brooding Thames – not the City river with its busy shipping, swarming wharfs, but a river almost empty, reflecting on itself as it ripples in towards us, weeds and bushes fringing it, instead of refineries and factories. It's cold, it's bitter cold; a savage wind blowing off the water and clawing at our faces. It's hard to light our cigarettes, so we turn back to the marsh again, following a winding creek which is edged with thick black mud. It's such perfect mud I long to take my clothes off and sink down down in it; feel it pressing close against my skin – rich, dark, oozy, slimy mud, soft and probably warm.

‘Well, how about our drink?' says Seton, head bent against the wind.

I look at him, astonished. Is he about to conjure up a cocktail-bar from a waste of weed and water, pump draught Guinness from a creek? No. He strides on down the tangled path, turns a corner, stops beside a boat – well, half a boat – pulled up out of the water, so it seems to float on scummy grass, a flotsam of old debris lapping at its sides: gaping shoes without their soles, stained and tattered newspapers, a purple Crimplene dress looking solid like a corpse as it huddles on itself, even a rusty broken pram. The hull is battered, peeling, the deck stained with oil and paint, the brass around the portholes green with verdigris. Seton swarms up a rope-ladder until he's standing on the deck, motions me to follow. The rope is wet and treacherous, so I'm terrified of slipping. I reach the top (with difficulty), stare down at the amputated stern. It's hacked right through like those ladies in old travelling fairs who were sawn brutally in half. The surgery looks amateur, the severed edge encrusted now with scar tissue – weeds sprouting from the wound.

‘Why half a boat?' I ask.

Seton doesn't answer, is already clambering down a second ladder into the main cabin below, which is strangely neat and tidy, as if the boat's inside and its outside are owned by different people. The two narrow bunks are spread with tartan rugs, the tiny kitchen clean and almost bare, though with a detritus of smells – Calor gas and paraffin, damp timber, cooking-oil. Seton has to stoop, is too tall for the cabin and especially for the kitchen which has a lower panelled roof. He's finding glasses, pouring drinks; doesn't ask me what I want, just hands me half a tumblerful of Kentucky bourbon – neat.

‘Cheers!' I say, as we squat down on the bunks. Again, he doesn't speak, just gulps his whisky swiftly, as if it were mere water, then gets up to light the lamp. It's some ancient sort of gas lamp which makes a sullen hissing sound, as if resenting my intrusion. I begin to feel uncomfortable. Perhaps Seton doesn't want me there, is already regretting his rash offer of a drink. I glance uneasily around me, my gaze stopping at two pictures I vaguely recognise – wild explosive abstracts in savage blacks and browns. I get up to view them closer, touch the thick encrusted texture of the paint.