Repeat It Today With Tears (10 page)

‘Have you had a lot to drink, Susie?’ Jack asked me.

‘No, not much, it was somebody’s birthday at work, that’s all.’

‘When is your birthday, by the way?’

‘The first of March.’

‘St David’s Day, then.’

‘Yes, I suppose, when is yours?’

‘November the fourteenth. It means that I am a moody soul with a darker side, or so they tell me.’

I was light headed with the Pimms. Julian had said that the sugar in the lemonade sent the alcohol into your bloodstream quicker.

‘Imagine,’ he had said as he tried to spear a maraschino cherry which was eluding his cocktail stick, ‘imagine it, the actual bubbles might actually be fizzing in our veins, now. We might feel them popping… pop, pop, poppity pop… Happy birthday, Suse, and many more of them.’

I stood in the middle of the room visualising the coursing of the tawny coloured bubbles. I felt the sensation of being pleasantly drunk and the anticipation that at any moment Jack would start to touch me. I recalled the events of that morning and of other birthdays and of how little I had liked them and, except for the short time with Alison, how little I had liked life in general until I had come to find my father. Apart from the occasions when it was lifted and defaulted by some passage in a book or line in a poem it had always been dreary, as though somehow, through some fault of my own, something lacking in me, I had missed the meaning and the rules that other children found straight away, like the clues in a treasure hunt. Now I seemed to have been saved; I felt that when I looked back it was someone else’s life behind me.

I was wearing a T-shirt patterned with stars. It was quite tight. Jack was easing it over my head. When he undressed me
he was very careful always to lift my hair out of the way, so that it did not get pulled by a neckline or snagged on buttons. Sometimes his hands shook.

‘So, on St David’s Day next you will be all of nineteen years old?’

‘Yes.’

‘God, but I’m a lucky bastard.’

On Saturday afternoon the Great Gear Trading Company was quiet and I was helping Jimmy to sort out the metal fittings which fixed in the pegboard walls so that traders could hang their goods on display. We sat on the floor in the orange painted office. The fittings were all tangled and knitted together, thrown carelessly into a cardboard carton.

Jimmy said, ‘Bollocks, we’ll have to tip the whole lot out to do the job properly.’ I began sorting them into piles by size. ‘So, when did you lose your virginity then?’

‘What?’

‘When did you lose it, I’ve been trying to work it out. When you first came here to ask me for a job I would have put money on your still being a virgin, right? Now, you’re very obviously not.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘Oh come on, Suse, it’s just one of those things, you can tell, right, at least a man can. What I’ve been trying to work out is when, where and with whom?’ He spoke the w sounds in an exaggerated, theatrical elocution. ‘Which lucky punter in the Potter? They were all sniffing around you, you know.’

‘I know. Somebody offered me money to do it with him.’

Jimmy hooted with delight. ‘Who, who was it? No don’t, tell me, let me guess.’

‘Actually, I promised him I wouldn’t tell anyone.’

‘Fucking hell, Suse, the man was trying to buy your body, I don’t think you’re under any moral obligation to him.’

‘Okay then, it was Gordon.’ Gordon was a property developer with a number of large schemes in Fulham. He often sat at the bar of the Chelsea Potter, his long grey hair straggly and at odds with his fashionable, expensive clothes.

Jimmy hooted again. ‘I love it, I love this day! Can you believe it, Mr Big, having to pay for it! What did he actually say?’

‘He said that I had a beautiful face, and that he would pay for it. He said he’d done that before, you know, paid and stuff, with a loo attendant at the Dorchester, but they got caught and she got the sack. He said he spoke up for her to the management but that it made no difference.’

Jimmy was laughing so hard there were tears in his goat pale eyes. ‘You wait till he comes in poncing around in his Piero di Monzi suit next time, you fucking wait mate, schadenfreude, do I love it, yes I fucking do.’

‘Don’t tell him that you know.’

It’s all right, I won’t let on. Did he, by the way, with you?’

‘No! No, it’s not him.’

‘So who then, is it somebody in the pub? How can you be so good at secrets at your age?’

‘No, it’s nobody in the pub.’

‘It better not have been some spotty youth that tools around your school gates with his tongue hanging out. You want someone who knows his way around, especially when it’s your first. God, Suse, you could have had me, it makes my balls ache to think about it. So, is he good? Do you like it?’

I smiled down at the shining heap of silver fixtures, ‘I’m not saying anything.’

‘It’s all right, you don’t need to.’

When you are young people upbraid you for the use of superlatives. ‘How can you possibly know’ they will say, ‘How can you make such sweeping statements’, and ‘You’ll learn, one day, you have to compromise in this life’.

People are very stupid; obtuse. After all, you do not qualify your reaction to art or music (unless you are an academic), you respond in the superlative. So it is with love and joy. I knew, with the Easter kiss, that it was the most perfect that I should ever have. In the same way, I knew that on the evening when I lay naked in my father’s arms and he read to me from Kenneth Grahame, that it was the happiest hour in my life.

‘Do you know this book?’ he had asked when I picked up from his desk a copy of
Dream Days
. I shook my head, sometimes it is easier to lie if you do it with signs and gestures rather than the spoken word. In my mind there ran a picture of the art nouveau end papers and the boy’s thick-nibbed pen: John (Jack) ap Rhys Owen.

‘I’ve always loved it,’ he said, ‘especially ‘The Reluctant Dragon’ story. I had a copy once, when I was a boy, a smashing edition with these sort of Rackham-esque illustrations. Don’t know what became of it. Anyway, I’ve set myself a project, I’m going to do a set of drawings from it. Just for me probably, though I may approach the author’s estate, if they turn out well enough.’

I wished that I could tell him that the first copy was safe. ‘Do you miss it?’

‘What?’

‘The book, the other one.’

‘Do I… I don’t know, really… No, it’s only things I suppose, isn’t it, not like people… you can’t hang on to everything… ’

‘Read it to me,’ I said, ‘read me your favourite story.’

‘Really?’

I nodded and so he stretched for the book that lay upon the desk. The cloth binding was a dull orange brown, this edition had no illustrations. Jack asked me if I was comfortable. He supported the book with the hand of the arm that was around my shoulders, my head rested upon his chest so that as well as his heartbeat I could feel the sound vibrations as he spoke. He began to read: ‘Footprints in the snow have been unfailing provokers of sentiment ever since snow was first a white wonder in this drab-coloured world of ours.’

Sometimes, among schoolchildren at that time, you would hear one charging another with an untruth told: ‘You’re a born liar,’ they would accuse.

I suppose that I was a born liar. I did not want to lie, not to Jack. Sometimes, in the times when I was joined to him, I wanted to tell him the truth. Once he paused and asked me, ‘What do you think about, when we’re doing this?… In here… ’ He touched my forehead with his thumb as though there were a smudge there, ‘what are you thinking about, in here, Susie?’

Inside my head I might just have been repeating the diminutives of father over and over again.

‘You,’ I said, ‘just you.’

Because I loved him so much and he told me, often, how happy I made him and how lucky, I never saw that what we did was wrong. But I did know that outsiders would fail to understand. In consequence, I knew that I must absolve him from all possible blame by never telling him the truth. I kept Dad and Daddy dumb, unheard inside me.

How many years ago had it been when Christine Threadgold,
thickset and the bully of the junior school, had challenged me at the playground gate. ‘Where’s your dad?’ she demands. Her fringe is ginger and her cardigan salmon pink; already she has the mannerisms of the Battersea mothers, chin up, bottom out.

‘Away at sea,’ I say; so I was a liar even then, ‘he is, he’s away at sea.’ It was an expression I had heard a post office crony of my mother’s use about the husband of some third party whom they disparaged and picked to pieces over the aerograms and parcel labels and the scarlet beaked bottles of Gloy glue.

‘I don’t believe you,’ says Christine and she is echoed by the mothers’ meeting chorus of her supporters. Her own father, small with a Useless Eustace grin and hair soap and water slicked back, is sometimes seen following the Threadgold women through the market stalls of Northcote Road.

‘He is,’ I repeat fervently and look up to the white London sky above the roof lines and chimneys, ‘he really is.’ And tears try to come pushing out with the force of my conviction.

‘My love,’ says Jack when his voice is husky and he takes me into his arms, ‘my love, my own best girl.’

And, born liar that I am, I became most adept at evading any direct questions from him about my home life or family. I had told him that my mother had died in an accident when I was very small. He was gentle and sympathetic, he said, ‘I am so sorry, Susie, it must have been very difficult for you, I’m sure.’ And I, looking beyond his thin kind face, recalled her as she threw the dolls’ cake and told me that he was dead and a useless bastard and let the sketchbook be ruined; I found it hard to conjure any expression of wistfulness. I told Jack that my surname was James, which was Alison’s name. Just as on that first night in the Phene, when I had pictured the Prince of Wales Drive flat for my home, so I pictured Julian’s father for the role of mine. Fleetingly and coincidentally whenever I did so, I gained an understanding
of what a good parent Peter was. I said that there was an aunt that stayed sometimes, to look after us. Jack did not ask me very much about them; I guessed that he would have imagined the reaction of my relations to the age difference between us.

When Jack said that I was very bright and should be at university instead of working as a waitress I made reference to some vague problems I had had, over teachers. ‘But I will think about it, later on,’ I told him. I knew that if he could have found out about Oxford he would make me go. I also knew that I would be quite incapable, physically, of going so far away from him. One day when I was looking for my hairbrush the annotated copy of
Richard II
fell out of my bag.

‘Are you reading this, Susie?’

I took it back before he could find my name and form number and date of issue in the front. ‘Yes, I did it at school. I liked it so much that sometimes I read it again.’

‘You are a funny mixture,’ Jack said.

A few days later he was reading the paper and he made an exclamation of pleased triumph.

‘Do you know what, there’s going to be a new production of
Richard II
by the RSC, real landmark stuff, two actors taking it in turns as Richard and Bolingbroke. I could take you to see it, would you like that?’

‘Yes, I would, very much.’

He never did. On the first night, when Richard Pascoe and Ian Richardson bowed to applause on the stage of the Aldwych theatre, my father Jack was already dead.

Although my occupation in those months was ceaseless I never felt any fatigue. I worked and revised and sat my exams; I practised endless complicated deceits and I travelled miles backwards and forwards across the Thames bridges. In my father’s bed the passion and desire for him, in my body and in my head,
was close to a kind of derangement. On the narrow mattress whole hours would pass when I was detached from the real world and from reason. I might have committed any crime for him. Truly, it was a form of possession. And yet I was never weary, rather, I was quickened and energised by that life I led. Perhaps it was the deep sleeps that I slept beside Jack, so cherished and safe-guarded as I was. He played me Ella Fitzgerald, and she sang ‘Someone to Watch Over Me’.

Sometimes, if I returned home in the evening, I would find the flat filled by a gathering of Ron’s friends. In those days there was a structured hierarchy of London’s criminals; I expect that it may be different now. Lin had intimated that because members of her boyfriend’s family had served as lieutenants to the Brothers Kray, they enjoyed some standing in the underworld. I knew that Scottie the cat burglar was deemed to be a gentleman thief. I had myself heard him expostulate with righteous indignation over the report of a gang who had run down a policeman during a robbery. But among Ron’s associates there were criminals of the pettiest kind. These were minor thieves; they traded stolen goods from market stalls, some made a livelihood through illegalities in the motor trade, some organised poker games in lock-up garages on suburban alleyways where weeds grew up through the concrete.

One night I had returned early from Chelsea to revise for my biology paper; biology and chemistry were the only sciences I liked, I detested maths and physics because I found them incomprehensible. The flat was full and smoky and noisy from Ron’s new stereogram. He and his friends were especially fond of Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis and also of Ray Charles; ‘Busted’ was being played. Ron broke off from singing along with it to call out, ‘Here’s a dolly bird, someone get her a drink.’

I shook my head but he took no notice. I sat down on the floor beside the man I knew to be the quietest member of their group. He was called Tommy Sutton; he was a plumber by day and he lived in a road off the south side of the Common with his elderly mother. He was fair-haired and bearded and noticeably neat and softly spoken amid the rest of the company.

‘You look as if you find all this a bit much,’ Tommy said.

‘It’s not that, it’s just that I have an exam in the morning, biology O-level.’

‘Does your mum know?’ He nodded towards my mother who sat on the other side of the smoky room; she was watching intently as the short man that they called Diddy Dave demonstrated a balancing trick with drinking glasses and beer mats.