New and Collected Stories (46 page)

Back in my cell I opened the postage-stamp of lavatory paper and read
LENIN
written in wavy capital letters. He's a brittle worm-eaten nut, I said, throwing it away. Yet I changed my mind, spent time looking till my fingers groped over it, then swallowed hard into my stomach and went back to reading Byron – which was all I was fit for in those not so far-off days.

One morning he threw a terrible fit in the grub hall, and smashed everything his hands could reach. He looked consumptive, thin, almost without muscle, yet I saw a match of strength I'd never seen before. But the screws battened the roaring bleeder down and humped him off to the loony bin.

So he was buried alive, and I was stomping the cobbles in my freedom, rooting for work to stop me starving. Not that you're at liberty the minute you set your snout beyond that iron gate. Being let loose after a thousand days was both fine and dangerous, a well-concealed trap in front of eyes and feet to trip me up and send me a header into some well-stocked shop or house, and so once more into the bullock-box. It's like recovering from a broken leg or pneumonia, when you need a few weeks' convalescence for fear of dropping back. So I trod softly for my own raw good, looking normal but stepping along that piece of taut rope, which is all right when it's on the ground and your head is solid, but after jail it's as though the line is six foot above the pavement and needs but one flick of an eyelid to send you arse over backwards. You may be lucky and pick yourself up from the right side of the rope-walk, but then again you might wake with a black eye in a cell at the copshop before you know where you are, supping a cup of scalding tea that one of the bastards had brought so's you'll look good in front of the magistrate next morning – all because an unexpected windfall made you slip on to the bad side.

Air and bridgestones shook by the station as a black muscle-bound express boned its way out towards Sheffield. Coiling rubbernecks of smoke and steam shot above the parapet to spar with the sky, and I wanted to be in one of those carriages with a ticket and ten quid padding my pocket, fixed on a seat with a bottle of ale by one paw and a filled fag-case in the other, looking out at fields and collieries and feeling good wearing a new suit got from somewhere, my eyes lit up with the vision of a sure-fire job.

The steamy tea bar was full of drivers and conductors, hawkers, tarts, and angels of the dole, but nobody I knew, thank God, for I wasn't in any mood to moan about the weather and shake my head over the next war. They couldn't drop the Bomb soon enough for me, right there and then. I had no property to lose, caught sight of myself in the mirror, not looking good for much, because prison and long walks searching for work had kept me thin, my suit elbow-and-arse-patched, and prime King Edward spuds at the back of my socks, and a gap in one of my boot-toes big enough to compete with Larry Adler on the mouth organ. I never was a handsome brute, with a low forehead, thin face, and starvo eyes, and a change of fashion hadn't yet made me as prepossessing as I am now – with hair nearly on my shoulders.

I'd shaved that morning with a razor-blade sharpened on the inside of a jam-jar, but still looked as if I'd spent three years in jungle not jail, hunted by tigers, and enormous apes, swinging like an underdone Tarzan over streams and canyons with never a second's rest from chasing and being chased by devils inside and out. You can see what a man is by looking into his eyes, I thought, though I hope not everything he ever will be. I'd stared myself out while shaving, because the mirror in our kitchen was no bigger than a postage stamp ripped in half, which was why the safety razor cut me to ribbons. That's how you see anybody though, through smashed bits of mirror, and nobody can say which way and in how many pieces the mirror was going to break when it dropped and gave that seven years' bad luck. But through the pattern of such glittering scraps it's easy to tell whether a person is used to being knocked about by the world and has no option but to let it, or whether he's got something in his brain and stomach that makes him spin into action like an ant with bladder trouble against all the Bible-backed pot-loathing bastards of the universe.

The café had once been smart, done up for old ladies and Tory widows to sup tea in while waiting for buses to take them home to matchbox bungalows and yapping mole-dogs, but now the chairs were slashed and battered, a late-night hideaway for beats and riff-raff, and the wet floor was scraped from hob-nailed boots and specked with nub-ends.

A swish bint behind the counter with a soft white face and long hair asked what I wanted, and I would like to have told her the truth, though even so her heart seemed pleased when I answered: ‘A cup of tea, duck.'

I must have been dug right into myself, because I'd sat next to a girl without knowing it. Not that I'd have shuffled off to a quiet corner and brooded alone if I had seen her, but I might have sparked an opening shot before sitting down. Giving the sly once-over with one eye, I watched my drink slooshing from a hundred-watt brass tea-tub with the other.

The maroon coat had padded shoulders and thick cuffs, and she must have been walking in the rain, because I could whiff the fresh wetness of autumn on stale cloth drifting through tea-fumes and fag-smoke, and saw where raindrops had dried on the nearest cheek to me. Her face was dark, going to sallow because of thinness, and would have had a better complexion with more meat on it.

I liked the dark hair she had, for it fell on her neck in ringlets, as if the wind had blown it around before she'd had time to think of drawing a comb through it. I couldn't see her full face, but enough at this cockeyed angle to sense that something was wrong.

I made up a story saying that maybe she'd lost either husband, parents or perhaps a baby, was in a bad way and didn't know what to do now she'd finished her cup of tea.

A hand reached up to her face, a movement that startled me as if before then I'd been looking at a person not quite alive. She stared at the sheer mirror that rose like an empty sea above a rocky shore of Woodbines and matches, and the only two faces looking back from it were hers and mine, me at her and she at nothing.

I pushed my hot and untouched cup of tea across to her. ‘Are you all right, duck?'

‘What are you staring at me for?' she demanded – in such a tone that I knew she wouldn't feel too good if I answered the same way.

‘I like looking at people.'

‘Pick somebody else, then.'

‘I'm sorry. I've been seeing the same dead mugs year in and year out behind bars, and that's enough to drive even a sane man crazy. The government's had me worried and bullied blind, and I'm just about getting back into my heart.'

After such a reason she became more sociable. ‘I see what you mean. I've never been in one of those places, but I suppose it is strange to be loose again.' She spoke softly, yet jerked her words out in a breathless way.

‘You catch on quick.' I pushed a fag over, one of a couple lifted from the old man's packet that morning before he pushed me into the yard and told me never to come back because the sight of me made mother ill. I took him at his word, and never did see either of them again.

She hesitated. ‘I shouldn't smoke.'

I scraped a match along the brass rail. ‘Don't take down, then it wain't hurt.'

‘I haven't the price of a cigarette,' she said, ‘to tell you the truth.' Hair and eyes made her sallow skin look darker than it was, and she could almost have been the sister of the bloke in clink who'd plagued me with his Lenin message month after month. Smoking gave her more colour, coupled to the tea she sipped. ‘I've neither digs nor a job at the moment. I was kicked out of both as from this morning.'

I lowered my fag, to get a clearer view of her face: ‘What happened, then?'

‘I worked as a wardmaid at the hospital.'

‘I shouldn't think that'd be up to much.'

‘It wasn't. I was scrubbing floors and serving meals from morning till night, and looking after dying men. It was a cancer ward. Did you ever see anyone die of that? Nothing kills the pain with some. They spin like crazy animals, right under the bed, and I had to help the nurses get them back and give them a jab.'

‘It's the sort of work somebody's got to do.'

‘I tried. But it wasn't possible.'

‘Sure you did.'

‘I went on all right for quite some time, though I didn't enjoy it, but then I got ill and had to be looked after myself. Now I'm better, but I can't do that sort of work any more.' She wasn't the kind of girl I'd normally meet in the district I lived in, and maybe this as much as anything drew me to her. She wasn't so rare and extraordinary, but her nervous face hinted at more intelligence than usual, and I imagined that on happier days her slightly curved nose and thin lips would mark her as being witty and fond of a good time. She spoke in a clearer way than I did then, the headlights of that Nottingham accent dipped almost as if she came from some other town. I wondered how old she was, and thought she could easily have been thirty from the lines around her face. ‘What part of the world do you come from?' I wanted to know.

She didn't like my question, but answered: ‘Nottingham.'

I guessed she wanted me to mind my own business, yet went on: ‘Why do you stay here, then, if you don't like it?'

‘My husband.'

‘He don't seem to look after you very well.'

‘I've no idea where he is, and I don't much care.'

In spite of everything she seemed easier when I went on pumping her. ‘Why did you split up?'

‘He'd never work, expected me to go out and keep him. He's a wireless mechanic, quite clever, but I couldn't stand him any longer and left. Or he left me, rather. We had a room, and I had to leave that this morning because I couldn't pay the rent.'

The waitress was talking to a couple of postmen, so left us in the clear. I gave all the sympathy I'd got, for there wasn't much else I could part with, and feeling sorry for her made it seem less like trying to pick her up, for I wasn't sure whether I wanted to.

‘That's the worst of working for these great institutions,' I said. ‘They slave you to death then throw you out. They've got no heart. I know, because I was in one myself, with a big wall around it. They said my time was up, contract finished. I was a model worker and earned my remission, so I argued about the contract and rates of pay, said remission didn't worry me, yet told them that wages and conditions were rotten. But the boss swore at me, said he'd not take me on again when times were bad, that he'd let me starve if I didn't have less of my lip. I threatened him with a strike even, but before I knew where I was I was outside the gate, a hole in the arse of the suit I'd been taken in in.'

I looked at her through the mirror, and knew that nothing could dislodge the boulder of apathy across her brain and eyes. When people talk about apathy at election times they don't know what it means, I thought, hearing a speaker-van passing by outside asking us to vote for something or other.

Beyond her shoulders I saw rain falling, followed by hailstones in an October madness, a revolution of proletarian ice-heads rushing downwards to be softened by the still warm earth. A red bus came out of a rank, left gravel for tarmac and took a turning for Newark when the eyelids of the traffic lights lifted to a prolonged stare of green.

‘I'd even like to be on that drowned rat of a bus going north along an up-and-down road,' I said, ‘or rocketing down the motorway towards London.'

‘Are you another who's always running away?'

People listened to the hail and rain as if the dim voice of God would start to come through it, so that her question couldn't be heard by anyone except me among the semi-darkness and clink of cups. ‘I'm either running away from something,' I answered, ‘or running into something, I don't know which. But I'm not a shirker, if that's what you mean.'

‘Amen,' she said. ‘Try running on nothing to eat, and no money.'

‘You're right. I've never done much on an empty stomach. That's why I've always landed in trouble.'

Tea and fags were finished, and she asked if I'd ever tried working. ‘Many a time,' I said, feeling grim and rotten whenever I told the truth.

‘I'm sorry. I'm sure you did. You seem wide awake enough.'

‘Too pepped-up to find it easy. There's a shortage of work now: the bosses are frightened of losing their profits.'

She laughed – which in my stupidity I took as a good sign.

‘My husband used to say that. I don't think it means much. Not that you're anything like him, though!' – remembering her previous opinion – ‘Nobody could be as bad as he was, regarding work. He wouldn't go to bed at night and wouldn't get up in the morning. So we never had money, except what dole he wheedled, or National Assistance, or what I brought in. He didn't mind half starving, as long as he could sleep, and I think he'd really have been happy enough to see me on the streets.' This insistence upon work was grinding my nerves down, especially when I'd been wearing my legs off for the last fortnight trying to corner some.

She had no make-up on, not even lipstick, nothing to disguise the fact that she'd just fought clear of an illness. I wanted to get outside, but to leave her seemed too much of a risk. I glanced at her, not through the mirror but into flesh and blood, and, seeing her eyes closed felt afraid she'd faint, so put my arm behind her in case. Her mouth trembled, and tears came from beneath her eyelids, which gave me real distress, because in a way I liked her and felt sorry there was no useful help in me. I couldn't even offer my handkerchief, it was so black.

The girl behind the bar thought we were having a silent set-to, so stayed away and punched open the till as she served a customer, dropped a coin in with a dull click (which told me how full it was) and scooped out some change. Money. That's all she needed, a good meal, a few drinks and a warm bed, and she'd be a different woman. I pressed her hand till she looked at me. ‘Wait half an hour, duck, and I'll have something for you, to help while you get a job.'