New and Collected Stories (64 page)

Ken ran his hand through the grass to pick up his lighter. It was time to make his secret retreat. But he didn't want to go. He was happy enough to stay there for ever.

The girl was smoothing her skirt: ‘We'll be late.'

Late for what? he wondered, his hand moving quickly to look for his lighter. They were kissing again, in a subdued and tender mood, and he paused in case he might miss something, then hoped they would get down a few more minutes so that he could search for his lighter without being seen.

Extending the area, he lost the exact spot where he supposed he had dropped it. Swearing, he sent his arms in wider circles, half on his feet as if for a better view of what was too dark to see anyway.

He stood up and kicked at the grass he had been lying on, longing to feel its gentle knock against his toecap.

‘There's somebody there,' the girl said, in a voice of shame and alarm. ‘He's been there all the time,' she wailed. ‘Look!'

‘Hey you, you bastard,' a gruff voice called, responding to her clear invitation to get him.

Ken would normally have squared whoever named him such a thing into a similar pulverized shape to that which came out of his press when he had given it the works. But it was raining, and who could be bothered at such a time? Having watched them at their games, he'd rather not show his face – though what could they expect but get looked at if they did it in the open?

There was a rushing of feet through the grass: ‘Come 'ere, you dirty bleeding chiker.'

He felt he ought to run, but could not do a thing like that. A grip latched at his elbow, more than any man could bear who was out on a harmless walk before going into a pub for his evening pint. He swung, and caught the man a full hard blow in the stomach.

‘Oh Bill!' the girl cried, as if she had felt the pain of it, and now thinking that a chiker might be more dangerous than her boyfriend seemed to.

The fact that Ken's solid fist landed where it did, when he had meant it for a higher place, showed how much taller the man was. He had time to wonder not only why he hadn't run when there was still a chance, but why he had strayed by the river at all.

He brooded afterwards. Being taller, the man had the advantage of a longer reach, apart from being half his age. He took Ken by the lapels and lammed into him, not just out of revenge for the first strike which, Ken felt as the stars spun, must have been feeble by comparison, but also because he had moral right on his side at having been disturbed in his sweet evening fuck on the grass.

Ken fell under the vicious hailstorm, and the man stood with fists poised for when he should get up. ‘I'll kill you,' he said.

At the feel of wet blood and flesh on fire Ken stayed kneeling, afraid the man might actually try to. ‘I was looking for my lighter,' he explained. ‘I lost my lighter.'

‘Tell me another, you chiker.
You chiker!
' – and he aimed a screaming kick that knocked him flat.

The girl pulled his arm: ‘Leave him, Bill. He's just a rotten animal. They can't help it.'

‘I ought to throw him in the river.'

‘Oh shut up, and come on.'

They went away, arguing.

Things were never as bad as they seemed, though the pain told him that they almost were. He stood up when the couple were beyond sight and earshot and walked back to where he had lain. He couldn't find his lighter in a month of Sundays, nor ever recognize the man who had bashed him up. Revenge was out of the question, a desolate sensation.

He smoothed his jacket, glancing around in case the man in his poisonous rage was waiting to paste him once more. But he was alone, and dipped his handkerchief in a pool to wipe his face. Got in a fight in a pub, he said on his way to the bridge. Gave the bastard what-for. I know I'm bruised, but you should see his mangled clock. Lighter? Got my pocket picked. I'll have to get a new one. I was fed up with it, anyway.

Talking thus to his wife, or even his mates at work, he walked into the lights to get the last bus home, feeling far away from any convivial pub.

The usual lamp post didn't shine, because somebody had put its bulb out the night before, but going towards home it felt as if the scalding burn of its filament had been transferred to his own flesh. The window was in darkness, so it seemed everybody was in bed.

From the pavement the front door opened straight into the parlour, and pressing the light-switch he saw Janice lying under her boyfriend on the settee. The place stank so much it nearly pushed him back into the street.

They straightened themselves. Janice, expecting him to rant and bawl, was more frightened the longer he kept quiet. Usually so talkative, he held his face at an angle, not wanting to take in what he plainly saw, even though it only heightened the bruises on his cheeks and forehead.

‘What's wrong with your face, dad?'

‘I saw you,' he cried, his hand brushing her question away as if it were a troublesome fly.

‘We was lying down,' said Bernard, a youth who lived a few doors along the street.

‘Is that what you call it?'

‘What did it look like?'

‘Less o' your bloody cheek!' But he hung his jacket on the back of the door with a gesture that took the bite from his words and made Janice think it might yet be all right.

She straightened her skirt: ‘I don't see what you've got to shout about.'

‘It stinks like a brothel.' He turned to Bernard: ‘Get out, you.'

‘I was going to make him a cup of tea,' his daughter said.

Ken reached her quickly and the sound of his smack at her face bounced from the four walls right back against him. ‘Pick up your pants, you filthy bitch!'

‘I'm not a filthy bitch,' she wept, reaching down to the settee.

‘Touch her once more, and I'll do you,' Bernard said, though plainly afraid of him.

‘Get to bed,' he ordered Janice.

‘I'm fifteen,' she cried out at the injustice of life, ‘and I go to work. I'm fed up with this.' On seeing his hand move she rushed out of the room and up the stairs.

Bernard was sullen. ‘You'd better not do that again.'

‘Piss off, you.'

‘She'll let me know tomorrow if you do.'

He lit a cigarette from a box of matches on the shelf. The door clicked softly as Bernard left. He'd show 'em. She was too young for it yet, even though she'd had it already. There wasn't much you could do about it if the world was to go on, but at least they could stop using his front room.

Smoke from his cigarette inflated him with a sort of warmth. The good mood he'd started the evening with came back to him, and reminded him of his lost lighter. He sat and brooded on it, and didn't like brooding because it got you nowhere. Anybody knew that, so it was best not to do it, except when you couldn't help it.

The canary woke and made merry, while Ken was black with a grieved sort of worry. It sang as if wound tight by some mysterious force that wouldn't let up no matter how late it was. A piece of his own heart had been ripped away, and he didn't like it: ‘For God's sake, stop your noise.'

It might have heard, but took no notice, flitted around its circular cage and went on whistling. Birds had to sing when they were cooped up, though why did it go on without stopping? It was no good putting your hands to your ears because such noise could get through anything. Its beak pointed at him when he stood, opening and closing as if trilling a tune to the four corners of the room in turn.

‘Be quiet, you bastard. Knock off.'

He smiled when it stopped, as if obeying him, but suddenly it started again, more full-throated and clogged with life than ever.

A blaze joined his eyes together, packed in with ice at the temples. He set the cage on the rug and, careful to prevent the bird escaping, opened the door and stuffed in crumpled newspaper, one piece after the other till it filled half the cage. The bird sat on top, flitting around in the small space left to continue its endless and piercing song.

He took the firescreen away. The cage fitted the grate as perfectly as his packs of waste paper slotted into the press-jig when he baled them.

Lighting another cigarette, he threw the dead match down. There was no time left. He felt neither young nor old, neither lit up nor black dead, only a cubic area of matter sitting by a cool summer fireplace that had a bird cage in it, from which a concatenating whistle chipped away the last fibres of his organism.

Face set hard with emptiness, he struck a match and held it through the bars of the cage: ‘
Now
stop it.'

He had a vision of smoke and flame drawn swiftly up the chimney. With a roar and rustle it would put a final stop to the singing. He dropped the match when it burned his finger.

Being alive again, he bent and opened the cage, put his hand in to get the bird again and set it free.

The firescreen fell at his attempts to grasp it, and blood flooded his head from the quick change of position. He sat exhausted in the armchair. The bird stayed where it was, in spite of the door being open, but it didn't sing any more.

A car went by, like a heavy blanket being dragged along the street. Stones weighed at his heart with so much force that it was even more difficult to say what was tormenting him. He exchanged the silence for deep sobs which rent every part of his body.

His wife came downstairs, wondering what it was, softly in case it was nothing. She stood behind the door, breathing slowly so that he shouldn't hear her through his weeping. ‘That's twice he's done that in the last year,' she said to herself. ‘I'd better leave him alone so's he can get over it.'

She walked slowly up to bed, needing her sleep because she had to get him to work in the morning.

Ken drew the curtains fully back and opened the window on to the street. He looked blankly at the bird and the wide open door of its cage, but it seemed as if it would never make a move.

It sat on its perch and kept quiet, waiting for him to shut it before beginning its song again.

The End of Enoch?

I was asked by the matron of a clinic where I recently had an operation whether I would ever write a sequel to ‘Enoch's Two Letters', which she had read in a magazine. She wanted to know, and quite rightly, what finally happened to an eight-year-old boy who had been abandoned by his parents.

At the time I was in no position to consider her request, and now that I am I can only argue in her favour. Perhaps I should have finished the story properly at the time, but I felt then that the important thing was why he was abandoned, and not so much what took place after he was. Yet thinking about it, it seemed quite natural that Miss E––, or indeed anybody else, should want to know more about Enoch. I would also like to know, and so decided to find out for the possible benefit of all concerned.

Of course, this is a story, not a case history, and so it isn't simply a matter of writing a few letters, or going to Nottingham to read the newspaper files, or talking to the neighbours in the street where Enoch stayed with his grandmother. It's not as easy as that.

Nor is it easy to write the end of the story. Even after finishing this one I might be lucky enough to get a letter from some reader, irate or otherwise, asking what happened after that. And then after that. There is rarely an end to any story, only an arbitrary decision by the writer when he's had enough and can't think of anything else to say, or when various demons in the people of the story have temporarily run out of mischief. Or let's say he tries to stop writing when something definite has happened, when the climb down from a big event has landed the main character either in marriage, a mental home, or a state of near-contentment according to the rules and expectations of the society we live in.

The first story about Enoch happened many years ago, and I can bring you up to press (as they say) in a few more pages. Enoch's mother left the house one morning intending never to come back to the husband, and as the demon that held them apart would have it, the father left home on the same day determined not to return to his wife. Each thought that the other (whom they had had enough of, to put it succinctly) would still be there to look after the fruit of their ten-year misalliance – red-haired, round-faced Enoch – when he came home that afternoon from school.

But no one was there, and after staying the long night by himself – poor little bogger, as the neighbours said sympathetically when the story got out – he had the gumption to get on a bus and go to his grandma's house miles away across town.

When his mother reached Hull she wrote to her husband, and when his father arrived in London he dropped a line to his wife – one envelope white and the other blue (as if it made any difference) – and both were picked up by the grandmother when she went back with Enoch the following day. She took Enoch and the letters home with her, and all three items stayed unopened for years, the letters propped behind the walnut-wood biscuit barrel on the sideboard, waiting, like Enoch himself, to be claimed, or sent on when news was heard.

Many a time when Enoch was in bed and she sat by the fire waiting for her forty-year-old son Tom to come back from his surreptitious courting, she picked them up and turned them over. She saw herself opening them, heard the sound of crinkling paper as she unfolded it, to see if any address was inside so that maybe she could put Enoch back in touch with his parents. But a letter was a letter, and neither one was addressed to her. They had stamps on that had been bought with money, and she had no right to touch or read anything that was inside. All she could do was wait until they came back – one or the other of them – so that she could hand them over, together with a piece of her mind, which meant the biggest bloody rollicking they'd ever had in their selfish and unthinking lives.

Whatever they'd done they'd done it for good though, or so it appeared, which was something she helped to make sure of by selling off their furniture and telling the agents that they'd left the house. When she walked past it a few weeks later it was already filled with another family. What bit of money she got for the furniture and belongings bought a secondhand telly and a few clothes for Enoch – at one canny blow providing for his physical and spiritual wellbeing.