So Many Ways to Begin (19 page)

35                              
Tobacco tin; used for storing buttons,
beads, safety pins, c 1960s

Let me smell your breath child.

The words spoken low and calm, the gaze intent and steady, the grip on the arm already bringing a soft smudge of bruising to the skin. Eleanor's friends looking carefully in the other direction, edging away, brushing down the backs of their skirts with their hands. The cigarette floating away between driftwood and dead fish and polystyrene scraps, rising and falling on the swell, the paper unfurling and spilling burnt tobacco down into the dark water. Ivy leant closer into her daughter's pale face.

Breathe, she said. Eleanor looked at her. She exhaled as weakly as she could but Ivy must still have smelt the damp sour stink of cigarette smoke. She stood back and slapped Eleanor hard around the side of the face. Her friends jerked their shoulders at the sound and moved a few steps further away. Eleanor's face coloured suddenly and her eyes started to shine.

I'm sorry Mam, she whispered. I'm sorry. Ivy pulled her closer.

Don't give me sorry, she said, it's too late for sorry child. You'll get what's due and keep quiet, aye? Standing close to each other, intimately close, blind to anyone else, their world reduced for the moment to this self-enclosed space of anger and resentment and shame.

Eleanor tried to say something, sorry perhaps, or I won't do it again, or they made me, or any of the other weak responses she knew wouldn't be enough. But her words crumpled under the weight of Ivy's glare, and all that came out was something like a whimper.

What's that? said Ivy. You say something? There was no reply, and perhaps it was only then that something snapped inside Ivy, the sight of her louring daughter, the embarrassment of people turning to watch, the knowledge that people would be talking later in the day. Or perhaps it didn't take anything to snap for Ivy to pull her daughter suddenly by the arm, to swing her round and point her in the direction of the steep road home. Get going girl, she spat into her ear, pushing the back of her head, get going quick or you'll see what I don't do. Eleanor walked quickly across the quayside, her head bowed and her shoulders turned protectively in, keeping her eyes to the ground. Or she walked tall, daring any of the onlookers to meet her eye, even turning to wave to her friends. Or she ran, her eyes a blur of tears. Before Ivy followed her, she turned to Eleanor's two friends and called out to them: I'll be talking to your mothers too, Ruth, Heather, don't think I won't. They watched her silently, and she turned and followed her daughter home.

The walk back to their house was a steep one. The pavement was stepped in places, and there were handrails bolted to some of the houses, to be caught hold of on icy days. The first time David went to see her parents he'd had to stop twice on the way to catch his breath, and Eleanor had laughed at him, saying he was nothing but a soft southern sass.

I never said a word more, she told him, safe in their bed with the lights out and the covers pulled up around them, I could just hear her steps and her breathing at the back of me. I thought she might have calmed down once we got to the top, or that she might be too worn out to do anything much. But she had this way of winding herself up, you know? David looked at her eyes in the half-dark under the covers; they were calm and clear, almost puzzled, as though she was considering something that had happened to someone else, as though she was still surprised by it all.

The door closed behind them, and Eleanor turned to face her mother's fury in the unlit hall. There were open-handed slaps at first, to the arms and legs, to the face, each slap held high in the air like a question - as if to say do you want this one too my girl? - and although Eleanor held out her hands to block them, Ivy was always quick enough to find a way through. There was nothing frantic about it. There was no loss of control. Each blow was considered, aimed, carefully delivered. And there was no sound from either of them; just Ivy's laboured breathing and the occasional wince or whimper escaping through Eleanor's tightly gritted teeth. The slaps closed up into tightly clenched fists, thudding into her ribs and the side of her head. Eleanor cowered under the punches, wrapping her arms around her head and crouching against the wall as Ivy whispered why don't you stand up, child, stand up now, eh? Or Eleanor refused to buckle, looking her mother in the eye, flinching with each thud of a fist but not falling down this time; Ivy realising with a sudden shock that her daughter was now an inch or two taller than her.

Didn't you ever try to push her away, or hit her back? David asked, stroking the side of her face.

It didn't occur to me, Eleanor said. I was used to it. I knew she'd stop eventually. I didn't want to make it worse, she said.

Ivy paused a moment, lifting her daughter's face to look her in the eye. Is that enough for you child? she asked. Will you be lying to me again? Eleanor didn't speak. Did you hear me there? said Ivy, raising her voice. I asked you a question. Eleanor looked at her, her mouth firmly shut, and Ivy, infuriated, lunged forward, shoving her fists against Eleanor's shoulders, knocking Eleanor off balance and against the front-room door, the door banging open and Eleanor stumbling backwards to the ground. Stewart was standing there, staring at Ivy, his fists trembling by his side.

God's sake Ivy, he said tensely. Do you not think that's enough now? The two of them looked at each other. Eleanor struggled to her feet, pushing past Ivy and up the stairs to her room.

You'll not be eating tonight, Ivy called out after her.

Later, she told him, after her parents had gone to bed, she stood in the washroom and eased out of her clothes, hanging them up on the back of the door and looking at her pale marked body in the mirror. She splashed herself with water, flinching against the cold, and worked a bar of soap into a lather across her skin. She ran her hands carefully across her body, working around the bruises and the swollen cuts, rinsing off the soap with cupped palmfuls of cold water which splashed down her chest and her belly and her legs and on to the dirty towel on the floor; taking her time, as though soap and water might wipe away the bruises and the hurt and the fear of it happening again one day soon.

And the next time she saw Ruth and Heather, nothing was said. They didn't ask if she was okay, or offer sympathy, or make any reference to what had happened at the harbour or to what they assumed had happened afterwards. There were things which didn't need to be said, or which had been said before. Instead, she told him, they took a packet of cigarettes each across to the golf course, and sat on a bench together, and smoked their way relentlessly through the evening until Eleanor was sick into the bushes, the girls laughing and applauding as she wiped her mouth and pretended to light up once more. It was funny, she said. We laughed about it for hours. It felt like some kind of triumph, you know?

36                                   
Catalogue from museum exhibition,
'Refugees, Migrants, New Arrivals', 1975

It wasn't difficult to find material. He did a series of presentations at social and religious centres - the Irish on Stoney Stanton Road, the Ukrainian on Broad Street, the Polish on Whitefriars, a mosque, a synagogue, the Sikh temple which had taken over the old Bamba Nightclub explaining the nature of the project, inviting participation, and his office quickly filled with boxes of loaned material, photographs, interview tapes, lists of people still to visit. This project is about the journeys you or your parents made to come to Coventry, he told them, the ways you remember those journeys, and the ways you remember the places you or your parents came from. He wasn't surprised by the number of responses he had to these presentations. He'd learnt, working at the museum, how many people wanted someone to tell their family's story to, how often the children of people who died would bring their parents' possessions to the museum to be archived or put on display, assuming that because these objects had belonged to someone who was no longer alive they would naturally take on a historical importance, assuming that the words museum and mausoleum were somehow the same.

He wasn't surprised by the interviewees' eagerness to loan him their few treasured keepsakes - the watches, the framed photographs, the religious artefacts - trusting him to keep their last attachments to a lost home safe, pushing them gladly into his arms. But what he hadn't quite been expecting was just how readily people held these things to hand, arranged together in the alcoves of their front rooms, or across a chest of drawers in a bedroom, or filling a glass-fronted cabinet in a kitchen, like miniature museums of their own. He interviewed, and was offered material by, people from all across Europe, from India and Pakistan and Bangladesh, from Vietnam, from Africa and the Caribbean. He interviewed people from Ireland, Scotland, Wales, from Sunderland and Southport and Somerset, people who had at some point come to Coventry in search of work and ended up staying. And he found himself hoping that when people contacted him from the Irish Club one of them might start by saying so I left home when I was a young woman, heading for London, looking for domestic work. I came over on the night boat. I had to leave London just before the war ended, on account of a sort of disagreement with my employers. He wondered how that would feel, to hear the beginnings of that particular story, to be able to hear it out to the end.

They based the exhibition around a map of the world, with Coventry at the centre illustrated by an image of the three spires, and with red threads reaching out to each of the countries the interviewees had travelled from. At the end of each thread they placed a photograph of the interviewee, or of one of the objects which had been loaned for the exhibition. It took Anna and him three evenings just to put the map together, staying behind while the rest of the staff went home, passing each other scissors and paste and Letraset, talking and disagreeing about which images to use. It took them another two weeks to finish the rest of the display material, putting it together down in the conservation room, spreading the work across the wide wooden desks while they selected the best extracts from the transcribed interviews, the most relevant artefacts, the clearest images.

Sometimes, when they had finished for the evening, packing the uncompleted work away, they would stay there for a while, leaning against the table, talking about things other than work. Anna told him about her wedding anniversary, and he asked what her husband was like, what he did for a living. Chris had gone straight to a job at the car-works when they'd left school, she told him, working on the same line as his father, getting used to working long hours for good money until they closed the factory after a round of strikes. It was the worst time really, she told him, it was only a year after we'd got married and we didn't know what we were going to do. She asked him again about Eleanor, and he said well, she's better in a way, you know, with the medication, but she's still not right, and she said oh that's awful, that's so sad, how do you cope? Once she said do you ever regret it? Getting married, I mean. Saying sorry sorry as soon as she'd said it, looking away from him, picking up her bag. Saying sorry only sometimes I wonder.

She was younger than him but he only ever noticed when she said things like that, when she seemed to be asking his advice, talking to him like an older brother. There were only six or seven years between them, and even that didn't seem as much as it once had. She had dark hair, tightly curled, cut to her collarbone. She had a small flat nose, and dark eyes, and she held her hand to her mouth when she spoke, as if she was afraid of letting her teeth show. She was tall. She was slimmer than Eleanor had lately become. They talked. That was all. They worked together, and while they were working they talked.

But one evening she touched him, for the second time, and he didn't pull away or say anything to stop her. It came from nowhere, a lull in the conversation, her hand drifting to the back of his head with her eyes fixed firmly on his, her fingers trailing down through his hair to the expectant skin on the back of his neck. She said sorry, as if it had been an accident, and for some reason he said sorry too and they said no more about it, and he tried to forget the feel of her long fingers, the delicate scratch of her fingernails across his traced and tingling scalp.

They'd finished all the displays, and were going over the layout plans, disagreeing over the need for additional text and trying to work out where to put the model steam engine a Russian man had been very keen to loan. They were both leaning over the desk, the papers and designs spread across it, the glare from the desk lamp getting harsher as the evening quickly darkened outside. He was saying I'm not sure about all this Anna, maybe we should look at it again tomorrow, and then there were her fingers, trailing down to the back of his neck.

And all that happened next was he looked at his watch and stood away from the desk, turning on the main overhead light and saying I think we'll take another look in the morning. That far corner looks like it will be too cramped, visitors will be squeezing past each other. And all she did was shrug, smiling, starting to tidy away the papers from the desk. Okay, she said with her back to him. See you tomorrow, she said. He walked away, and when he got halfway down the corridor and turned back to look through the open door she wasn't looking at him. She was marking something on the floorplan, running her fingers up and down the back of her head, through the dark tangle of her hair.

My dad came here the long way round, Chris told him, dangling his empty pint glass between his finger and thumb, watching it swing. He went east to get away from the Germans, and ended up on a boat to England, ended up in the air force loading bombs to send back at them. He watched Anna walking back from the toilets, squeezing past a group of men by the bar, resting her hand on someone's shoulder by way of an excuse me. His eyes narrowed slightly before he turned back to David.

My mum came west a few years later, he said, to get away from the Russians. She met my dad in the Ukrainian club up in Leeds, and they moved down here when he heard about jobs going on the cars. Turned out they were only born twenty miles apart, he said as Anna sat down, saying it like a well-worn punchline, sitting back on his stool and turning to look at the bar.

Your parents? Anna asked, and he nodded.

We could have interviewed them if you'd mentioned it, David said to Anna, and she shook her head.

I don't think they would have wanted to take part, she said. Chris stood up, taking their empty glasses.

They don't like immigrants, generally, he said, turning towards the bar.

He was a broad-shouldered man, and people moved naturally aside to let him pass, as if they'd felt his approach without looking. As he got to the bar Anna said, murmuring, he's working again now you know, for the parks; it'll probably only be until the end of the summer but it's something at least. David nodded.

That's good, he said. That's something.

She looked at Chris, who was laughing briefly at something the barman was saying. It's not as bad as it was, she told him now. My money's enough for us both really. David watched him heading back across the room towards them, the three drinks held awkwardly out in front of him. He noticed Anna moving the back of her thumb across her wedding ring, rubbing it clean, the same way she'd been doing a few nights earlier when she'd told him about their anniversary. Five years though, she'd said, tutting and sighing fondly, seems hard to believe sometimes, and he hadn't known whether she meant hard to believe how quickly the time had passed or hard to believe they'd got married at all.

Where's your missus tonight anyway? asked Chris as he sat down, the three glasses knocking against each other and slopping beer out on to the table.

She's staying in, David said. She's, I mean, she's a bit under the weather at the moment.

Really? said Chris. Nothing serious is it?

Well, said David, no. Nothing serious. He noticed Anna looking at him, looking like she wanted to say something, an edge of worry in her eyes.

She not made it to the exhibition yet then? Chris asked, and David shook his head no. Pity, Chris said, it's a good bit of work. He moved his hand across Anna's thigh, grasping it, leaning in towards her. It's a smart idea she had there, I reckon, he said, and David nodded in agreement, Anna smiling with surprise, turning suddenly and kissing her husband on the cheek.

David sat back a little, not wanting to intrude, a familiar resentment turning over in his stomach. He wanted to be able to sit in the pub with Eleanor beside him, having a drink with their friends and talking about the small things. He wanted not to have to explain her absence every time, and almost always to have to lie about it. He wanted at least to know how long this was going to go on for, or to know that there was something he could do about it. He wanted their life together to be the way they'd told each other it would be when they first got married, instead of the empty helpless waiting his life had become. He wanted - and he felt a rush of shame as he realised this - he wanted her to make more of an effort to get better. He couldn't be expected to wait for ever, he thought, trying to silence the words even as they formed in his head. He pushed his glass away with half the pint still undrunk.

I'm sorry, he said. I'm going to have to get going.

Anna and Chris looked round.

Say hello to her for us, won't you? Anna said, reaching her hand out across the table. Give her our best wishes and everything, she said. Chris muttered something along the same lines, and David said that he would, looking back at Anna, looking at the tilt of her head, the reach of her arm across the table, her fingers arching a little. Looking at her bottom lip, caught by the concerned bite of her teeth.

I'll do that, he said. I'll say hello for you.