Reheated Cabbage (19 page)

She wished that she had taken his advice and succumbed to letting him shell out on the first-class ticket he had offered to get her. Sydney to LA to Miami was a nightmare. The economy class would have been okay, but for the toddler who peered over at her from the seat in front, never breaking his stare, despite her attempts to stay buried in her book. And there was his baby sibling next to him, in the arms of its mother; how it screamed and shat with a vengeance, filling the cabin with ear-splitting cries and noxious fumes.

Despite a relief that she wasn't in the woman's shoes – a woman, she noted, not that much older than herself – Helena wasn't volunteering to help out the stressed mother. She wanted nothing to do with anybody else's children.

Sitting back, ignoring the toddler and turning to the plane window, she copied the dozing man next to her and shut her eyes, letting Miami fill her thoughts. All Helena Hulme could think of was what was going to happen with her lover. He was a generous man, too reckless with his cash, she fancied, but it wouldn't have been right to let him pay for a first-class fare. Not with what she had to tell him.

The sun burned relentlessly over the bay, with not a single cloud defiling the azure sky. Although his preference was to stroll in the evenings when it was cooler, Albert Black decided to go for a walk and rose from under the parasol. He looked at the panama hat on the table in front of him. He felt somewhat foolish wearing it, but he had to protect his bald pate from the sun, and the alternative of the baseball cap offered by Billy was simply out of the question. Assuming this hat was William's, he picked it up again, and put it on.

Setting off at a steady pace, pleased that he had extricated himself from the house, Black meandered through Miami Beach, down to the art deco district towards Ocean Drive. His problematic right knee was stiff; the walk would be kill or cure. He recalled that fright some five years ago, when it just gave out one afternoon, sending him into recumbent shock onto a pavement in crowded George Street. His puzzlement and fear at how something that he had relied upon for so long could just withdraw its hitherto under-appreciated services in a split second, transforming his life in the process.

The knee was holding up though. Despite the intense heat on his back, causing his shirt to stick uncomfortably to his skin, Black was hitting a decent stride and making good progress. When he came onto Ocean Drive, he immediately cut through the crowds of posing youths and holidaymakers, crossed its Bermuda-grass verges, and approached the sea. He watched the Atlantic lap up against the vanilla sands. The sea was steady, with small breakers rolling in and washing up on the sunkissed coast. Already, quite a few bathers were out, working on their tans. Yet as soon as Black became aware of a vague sense of idyllic contentment, it was abruptly broken, seized as he was by a vice-like grip inside him. It seemed to crush some of his organs, and he realised what it was: an insinuating thought, pulsing and poignant, that somehow Marion was out there, waiting for him! He struggled for breath, his palpitations big and heavy as his eyes gaped out over the aquamarine prairie.

What am I doing here? I have to go home . . . she might come
back . . . everything will be a mess . . . the house . . . the garden . . .

Two bikinied girls, supine on beach towels, caught a glimpse of his stricken figure, and turned to each other and giggled. His schoolteacher's instinct to hone in on sources of mischief got the better of him as Black observed their derision, and saw that he was its object. His face flushed red and he turned away, traipsing dejectedly across the sand, leaving the beach for the bustle of Ocean Drive. At the News Cafe he went to the adjoining shop and picked up a two-day-old
Daily Mail
.

Paying for the paper, he made his way back down the street. He soon became aware of some impending commotion ahead: people were hastily peeling aside as a growling, wild-eyed figure lurched forward, pushing a cart. Unlike the others on the street, Black did not move, maintaining steady eye contact with a skinny, crazed-looking Negro man, as the strutting tourists grimaced and al fresco diners turned away. The man stopped his trolley in front of Black and glared at him in hostility, screaming 'muthafucker' three times in his face.

Albert Black was still, but felt that terrible rage working his insides again, and envisioned picking up the metal fork on the table close to him and ramming it into the man's eye. Driving it into his brain.

This thing alive, spared, while my Marion's gone . . .

Instead, Albert Black stared back at his aggressor with a look of loathing so focused and total that it reached the man's brain through its narcotic icing. With deliberate enunciation, Black spoke the Latin motto of his old regiment, the Scots Guards: —
Nemo me impune lacessit!
The bum lowered his head, picking up the meaning from the body language and tone of the old soldier.
No one assails me with impunity
. He quickly steered his cart round the rigid-spined Black, mumbling inaudible curses as he departed.

That foul creature, beyond sin, walking God's Earth in mortal
pain; surely deliverance from its torment would be the act of a righteous
man . . .

Terrorised by his thoughts, Albert Black looked around, and turned on his heels, heading back to the News Cafe, where he sat down in a heap at the pavement-side table and looked onto Ocean Drive. A young man minced towards him.— What can I get you? he performed.

— Water . . . Black could only gasp like a man marooned in a desert.

— Avec gas, sans gas?

This thing lisping at me! This land of monsters!

— No gas, Black coughed, still shaking at the violence of his thoughts. Wiping the back of his dripping neck with a hanky, he turned to his paper. The news from the UK told him that a child had been kidnapped in Sussex, police suspected a paedophile. This disgusted Black, but then all the news did. There seemed to be evil, sloth and degenerate behaviour everywhere. He recalled the watershed election of 1979 when he'd voted for Thatcher, seeing the free market as a way to enforce discipline on a feckless and destructive working class. Later he realised that she and her ilk had, in consumer capitalism, unleashed a godless, amoral wrecking ball; a satanic genie you couldn't get back into the bottle. Far from delivering the British proletariat from squalor and ignorance, it had reduced them to new depths of despair and immorality. Drugs replaced jobs: Black watched the scheme and the school where he worked, slowly give up and die.

Now with Marion's restraining and calming influence gone, his head was filled by the dark thoughts of violence he'd struggled all his life to repress. He thought of his family; how it had all been a sham.

It would be fitting if our souls were taken: my own, William's,
Darcy's and the boy's, so that we may join Marion, spared of any
further mortal pain and treachery.

No, that was a weak and sinful thought! The thought of a monster!

Forgive me.

Restore unto me the joy of Thy salvation; and uphold me with
Thy free spirit.

Then will I teach transgressors Thy ways; and sinners shall be
converted unto Thee.

At his table, oblivious to the crowds, Black's thoughts raced back to those years of teaching, to that desperate war of attrition with other teachers, education committees and, most of all, the pupils.

Such a vain and thankless battle. The waste of a life. Nobody from
that school had been a success. Ever.

Not one of them.

No, that wasn't quite right. There was one. Black had seen him. On the television, at some pop-music award ceremony he'd mistakenly tuned into. Sitting up, lost, in the old family house, with Marion in the hospital, vapidly gazing at the television. He'd been about to change channels, but then had instantly recognised an ex-pupil, teetering up onto the stage, obviously drunk, to receive his award. He had that distinctive, almost albino, whiteness that he'd retained. He had mumbled some nonsense to a nervous host before leaving the platform. It was a few days later when Black had seen his image again, this time on the front page of a magazine: silly pop-music tripe for imbeciles, which he'd nonetheless been moved to purchase. The boy – now a man – was staring back at him with the same sneering insolence he recalled from bygone days. Yet, such was his pride in his old school, Black had been rather delighted. It was good to see an old boy doing well. The article told of a number-one hit single with a well-known American singer, Kathryn Joyner. He knew the name, had recalled that Marion had liked her. It said that the ex-pupil was now working with some established artists, one of whom he had heard of from the Sunday papers: a shallow, manipulative woman who had led a selfish, decadent and sinful life before supposedly 'finding God'.

American lies and blasphemy! No man or woman who has sinned
can be born again in this life! The sin has to be carried, suffered,
prayed against, and then, on the Day of Judgement, we fall upon the
blessed mercy of the Lord. No pope or priest or prophet, no mortal
man can absolve us!

But Albert Black had nonetheless gone back to the hospital that evening, enthused enough to anticipate telling Marion the story of the ex-pupil. When he got there, the curtains were pulled around her bed. A nurse saw him. He knew everything he needed to know by her face. Marion had gone, and he hadn't even been there. The nurse explained how they'd tried to call him. There was no answerphone. Didn't he have a mobile? Black ignored her, and pulling aside the curtains, kissed his departed wife's still-warm head and said a quick prayer. Then he walked off the ward and into a hospital toilet where he sat down and cried like a madman, in furious, demented rage and abject misery. When a male nurse came to attend to him, knocking on the door, he'd insisted that he was fine, then simply stood up and pulled the flush, washed his hands and unlocked the stall, appearing before the young man. Then he signed the appropriate documentation and went home to organise the funeral.

But when he reached his house something compelled him to read more of the music magazine article and Albert Black dissolved into apoplexy.

I can honestly say that I learned nothing from my school, from my teachers. Fucking zero. In fact, they often went out of their way to discourage me. All I wanted to do was music . . . they make you do all that utterly pointless shit . . . stuff that you've no interest in, nor any aptitude for. We were all treated like factory fodder at our school. Then when the factories shut down, dole and YTS fodder. The only decent teachers I had were in English and Art. It was the only time I was treated like a human being. Other than that school was a concentration camp run by weak, stupid wankers with no morality. No fucking spine.

Black had hoped for affirmation in that article. Instead, he'd found only scorn and contempt. He'd cut out the offending passage, keeping it in his wallet, and no matter how many times he reread it, it never failed to induce rage. Here in a busy cafe in South Florida, shaded from the oppressive heat, he was moved to look at it again. Surely Ewart – that was his name – surely he was joking; it was just the so-called ironic anti-establishment posturing so beloved of such publications, usually owned by the satanic profiteers of the multinational media corporations. Black cast his febrile mind back; dates and faces slowly started to mesh together. The exhalted art teacher would no doubt be the harlot Slaven, with her short skirt and husky voice, unaware that the basis of her supposed 'popularity' lay solely in the boys' hormones. No, it was probable she was aware of this fact only too well.

How could the girls do anything but fall like dominoes to teenage
pregnancy, with a wanton slut like that on the staff to set the
example?

The English teacher would most likely be Crosby. Sitting back in the staffroom, pontificating and agitating; spreading cynical discord wherever he went.

I crossed swords with that Trotskyite a few times before . . . a troublemaker.

Like this Carl Ewart character. Not a thuggish type, more of a subversive. Possessing that snide ability to wind up the dimmer pupils with his wilful rebelliousness. He was in cahoots with the wee laddie, Albert Black recalled, the one who'd died. Black had attended the funeral (a tawdry civil service in the crematorium) in order to represent the school. A former pupil had passed over to the mercy of the Lord. The death would have gone unmarked and unrepresented had Miss Norton not said in the staffroom that she'd heard how the lad who had fallen from George VI Bridge after a bout of stupid, drunken horseplay had gone to the school.

He'd looked up the details. Another nobody: a poor, unremarkable wastrel of a youth. Yet how could pupils feel connected to the school, believe in it, if nobody even acknowledged that this boy had been part of it? The school failed the likes of that young man, Galloway, he recalled, and in return, they failed the school. That was it: complacency, laziness, the lack of belief, the absence of standards, it all came down to one thing: secularism.

And now, sitting at the News Cafe in Miami's South Beach, oblivious to the passing crowds, Albert Black's racing brain recalled where he had seen Carl Ewart's name even more recently. It had been on a large poster in his own grandson Billy's basement bedroom! The big emblazoned logo, it had jumped out at him on his brief tour of the subterranean labyrinth of the house: N-SIGN.

That was what Carl Ewart called himself:
N-Sign
. Of course, Ewart wouldn't be aware that this referred to Ensign Charles Ewart, a giant Scot who was a hero of the Battle of Waterloo, single-handedly capturing the French standard of the Eagle. No, doubtless he picked it up from passing by or sitting inside the grubby hostelry on the Royal Mile which exploited that brave soldier's name.

Carl Ewart. A millionaire, and he was a
disc jockey
. This would mean that he played records, presumably on radio stations. How could someone become a millionaire through playing other people's records? Black suddenly felt the need to know. But the article had also said that Ewart 'remixed' records for people, for
artists
. This was how the people who made that trash referred to themselves. Presumably this meant that those 'recording artists' taped their offerings, their banal instrumentations, and the likes of Ewart reordered this material, adding those ghastly sound effects and horrendous drumbeats that you heard everywhere. In the magazine piece, Ewart had pompously spoken of his work as 'revolutionary'. That pounding, monotonous racket that had become so ubiquitous, even less palatable than the screeching guitar and vocal sounds that used to predominate. This, in essence, was the extent of Ewart's revolution: to take something vile and disgusting and then debase it even further. And Albert Black heard this ungodly racket everywhere here in Miami Beach, from the courtyards of the local boutique hotels and the expensive passing vehicles driven by exhibitionists, to his own grandson's bedroom. He would ask Billy about Carl Ewart when he got back. If nothing else, it might help to build some sort of dialogue between them.