The Children's Bach (11 page)

If Dexter had been there he would have said, ‘Film, Arthur, not movie. Movie's an Americanism.' She seized the top sheet and whipped it free of the mattress. ‘Don't tell me the plot,' she said, ‘for God's sake.'

‘And there was this mighty sword which had become stuck in a mighty rock, and whoever could manage to pull it out, well he could be the king.'

‘I don't want to hear a story, Arthur. I've just woken up.'

‘And there was this boy – well, he was a young man really, or a teenager –'

‘Shutup, Arthur. I'm busy.'

‘– who was befriended by Merlin, the greatest magician the world had ever known, and he –'

‘Will you shut
up
?'

She turned round with her arms full of stinking sheets. He had not heard a word. His eyes had gone out of focus, his pitch was up, his pace was accelerating, his smile was the one-sided, manic grimace of the born raver: he was away on the high seas of narrative. In the wide planting of his feet, his blithe assumption of an audience, she saw Dexter, oh poor Dexter, gone away on a plane to try and pull the sword out of the stone. Her insides quivered with what she thought was laughter. She pushed the chattering boy aside: he turned to follow her, pointed his rapt, jabbering face in her direction, but she stepped out into the passage and closed the door on him. He took no notice: as she walked away his chipmunk voice rattled on without interruption.

She stood among the rank stalks of the tomato plants. Her legs itched and the sun struck through the back of her cotton nightdress. A bird sat on the fence and trilled madly. It spotted her and flipped away across the vegetable patch to a tree, where it threw back its head, opened its beak like a pair of scissors, and sang tune after tune.

*

‘See that boy?' roared Arthur into Vicki's ear. ‘Well his name is Dennis Dwyer. He gets the strap all the time. He's a really horrible type of person. Not very bright either.'

The boy strolled up and cast himself on the concrete step above them. His shoulders were blistered and flaking. He looked straight into Vicki's face. ‘Hullo miss,' he said.

Vicki smiled at him. Arthur withdrew ten feet and squatted frog-like in his green bathers, dripping and spearing bitter looks at the boy, who got up and darted away into the water.

All afternoon he kept coming back. Each time he lay closer to Vicki, his thin chest heaving, his eyes red with chlorine. He was patiently waiting his turn. When Arthur took Billy to the kiosk, the boy made his move. He lifted his head from his arms and spoke to her.

‘Know what?'

‘No. What?'

‘I haven't got a mum any more.'

‘Haven't you?'

‘No. I've just got a dad and a nanna.'

‘What happened to your mum? Did she d – get sick, and die?'

‘She went away.' He sat up and folded his arms round his blue knees. ‘And I don't think she's coming back.' He was taking his time.

‘Gee. How did your dad feel? Did he get mad? Or upset?'

‘Hoo yeah. He says he's gonna shoot her.'

He nudged himself across so that his upper arm was touching hers. They sat parallel; they stared out over the glaring water with its moving threads of light and shadow. Over the boy's head she saw the empty scaffolding of the gasometer: clouds sailed in and out of its framework in great masses, stately and unhurried.

‘How do you feel about it? Your mum going away.'

He gave a small turn of the shoulder and shone his face at her for a second. ‘Oh – all right. How many kids have you got?'

‘Two,' said Vicki.

‘I seen the big one at school. Is the other kid yours too?'

‘Yes.'

‘He's got something wrong with him. Spazzo.'

‘Not spastic,' said Vicki. ‘Just a bit vague.'

‘He's spazzo,' said the boy.

‘I haven't got a mother either,' said Vicki.

‘What happened to her?'

‘Died. Got cancer.'

They went on sitting there. Their arms touched, their knees were drawn up to their chins, their faces

grinned into the sun.

‘What's the time?' said the boy.

The big clock was exactly opposite them, on the wall of the dressing sheds. ‘Just after four,' said Vicki. ‘Can't you tell the time?'

‘Not on them old kind of clocks.'

Vicki took a bottle of lotion out of her basket, squirted some into her palm, and ran her hand across the boy's shoulders. He did not draw away, but presented his whole back to be coated. The cream disappeared into his skin: his back was the colour of a burnt stick, his shoulders crackled with broken blisters. The job done, she took her hand away. Immediately he twisted round and turned up his face like a plate being offered.

‘Look at me scabs.'

‘One of them's loose,' said Vicki. She pulled it off his top lip. He winced with his eyes closed, giving her his face without defence. His blond hair was sopping, thickened into greenish matted clumps. Vicki saw the tender stalks of his eyebrows. ‘What happened?'

‘I come off me bike. Over the handlebars.' He was almost in her arms, his eyes squeezed shut, his face turned up. Her basket had been overturned. The pages of her magazine riffled in a gust of dry wind: her hat brim whirred.

The PA squealed and a man's voice bellowed,
‘that boy in the red bathers. stop your pushing. report to the manager's office.'

The boy's eyes popped open. He glanced down at himself to check the colour of his bathers. They were blue. He sprang up without a backward look and galloped down the high steps to the water.

The afternoon changed its colour. The wind dropped, people raised hands to their eyes, the screaming children paused for breath, the water flattened and turned brassy. Dexter paid at the turnstile and ploughed through the herd of dripping midgets.

‘Here's Dad!' shrilled Arthur.

There was no-one with him. She must be at home, getting the tea ready or taking the clothes off the line before it started to rain. Vicki saw Dexter scoop up Arthur in his arms, saw Arthur struggle to be put down, panicking lest his friends see his father treat him like a baby. She kept her hand round Billy's wrist and waited for news. Dexter seemed to be coming very slowly towards her, with the twisting boy in his arms. People were scrambling out of the water and running away to their towels. The remaining heads, breaking the slate meniscus, looked like the victims of a massacre.

‘Look at that inky sky!' chattered a voice among the group on the step below her. ‘Remember the dust cloud last year? Wasn't it awesome when it came over the flats!'

‘You could tell this wasn't New York!' said another. ‘If that had happened on Manhattan everybody would have been saying
Oh my gahd!
Did you notice? Not one single person said
Oh my gahd!
'

He came up the steep concrete levels to the wall against which she sat, and put Arthur neatly back on to his feet. The boy was red: he hitched up his bathers and turned his back. The dry wind gasped and began again. The girl and the man stared at each other. Dexter's eyes seemed to have darkened and fallen back into his head. Something important is happening in this family, thought Vicki, and I am part of it now, whether I like it or not.

*

Elizabeth reflustered her wind-flattened hair and examined the cut of her jacket in the reflecting front of the beer fridge. She was pleased. The barman went out the back to look for the Campari, and she picked up off the counter one of those little four-page bulletins on duplicator paper which announce the results of inter-pub darts and pool competitions. There was a joke at the bottom of the page. She read it.

‘
Gynaecologist to dentist
: ‘‘I don't know how you can stand your job, smelling people's bad breath all day.”'

Her legs surprised her: that old, almost forgotten sensation, as if all the blood were draining rapidly out of them, leaving them fragile and chalky, unable to support her. They do hate us, she thought. The weight of disgust that loaded the simple joke made her bones weak. She thought, I can't bear it, I can't. She thought, I should be able to bear it by now. It has just caught me off guard. She thought, Dexter would think it was funny. She screwed up the bulletin and dropped it into the ashtray at her feet.

‘Campari,' said the barman, returning. ‘Never drunk that. Nice, is it? Italian drink, is it?' He twisted the top of the paper bag into a hard twirl.

She paid him the money and did not speak. When she turned her back to leave he pulled the corners of his mouth down, niddled and noddled his head, and twitched his hips in imitation of a stuck-up walk.

There was no way he could have known that her heart, for the thousandth time, felt as if it had turned into a sharp splinter.

There was weirdness in the turbulent air. They all felt it, as they passed the flailing fig tree and came up the hot concrete steps to the kitchen; but Billy was berserk. He struggled, he shrieked, he bit his lips until they bled. When Dexter put him down he flung away and galloped among the chairs, overturning them and cannoning off the fronts of cupboards.

‘Can't you do something?' cried Vicki. ‘I wish Athena was here!'

‘Well she's not,' said Dexter. ‘Anyway she can't do anything with him either when he's like this. It's electromagnetic.'

‘Sing to him.'

‘I don't feel like singing,' said Dexter. His face was grim. ‘
You
sing.'

‘Me?
I
can't sing.'

The little boy, wailing like a fire engine, was trying to cram himself into the greasy space between the bench and the stove. His shoulder was smeared with dirty fat, his bathers were twisted round his loins and his erect penis showed white and pointed as a fish. The noise in the room was deafening: the chairs crashing and rolling, the thin voice screeching, the hot wind whining through the half-open window. Dexter was stupefied, he was ugly with sadness.

‘Do something,' said Vicki.

‘There's somebody at the door,' shouted Arthur.

In came Elizabeth, all cool and high-heeled and clean, carrying the bottle in its paper bag and a net sack full of oranges.

‘What
is
this?' she called in her piercing, silvery voice. ‘This place is a madhouse!'

She put her load on the table, righted the lolling chairs and dragged the roaring boy out of his oily hiding place.

‘Here, you take him,' she said. ‘I don't know what to do with kids.'

Dexter snapped out of it. He seized Billy's hands and spun him round, crouched, enfolded him like a foetus in a cage of limbs and torso. The boy was defeated, but he raged and clamoured: he could scream even with his mouth shut, the very bones of his skull were in commotion.

‘He's chucking a mental!' cried Vicki.

‘Fill up the bath and stick him in it,' said Arthur, calmly colouring in at the table. ‘That's what Mum does.'

Vicki ran to turn on the taps.

The boy stopped to draw breath, and the rain started. A mass, a block, a volume of water crashed on to the roof. The temper of the air changed: in some meteorological bureau the dials flicked back to zero. Elizabeth opened the back door and they stood in a row, Dexter with the limp boy over his shoulder, and stared out at the wall of rain.

Elizabeth lined up the knife, the board, the squeezer, the glasses, and began to work with easy efficiency. As she sliced she spoke to Dexter over her elegant shoulder.

‘So. She wouldn't come back, eh?'

He twisted his head away.

‘Come on, Dex. Don't be a drama queen.'

‘Think it's funny, do you.'

‘She'll be back. Listen to me! I know him. He has the attention span of a stick insect. I'll lay odds she'll be back in a couple of days.'

‘And then what happens?'

‘That's up to you.'

‘Couldn't you have stopped it?' he said.

‘What for? It's none of my business.'

‘But you must have known what was going on.'

‘What if I did? You didn't expect me to dob her, did you? I have got some shreds of feminist loyalty left. Anyway if it hadn't been Philip it would've been someone else.'

‘No! It's
his
fault. She was naive. He saw that. He took advantage of her.'

Elizabeth gave a snort of laughter. ‘You don't think much of her, do you.'

‘She's a saint! Someone like you couldn't even see that!'

‘
Someone like me
,' said Elizabeth. ‘What's that supposed to mean?'

‘I hate the way you talk,' he said, ‘and I hate the way you live. Smashing everything. Smash, smash, smash, smash – then what?
Fuck
, you say. Fuck this and fuck that. I even hate the way you pronounce the word.'

‘It's a simple word,' she said. ‘I'd never even heard it used till I met you. There's not much range available. Fuck. Fewck. Furk.'

‘It's the shape of your mouth when you say it. It's blunt. You spit it out.'

They had never fought before. They looked ugly to each other, swollen with the desire to do harm. He was afraid of the way he imagined she lived; and she wanted, in some obscure sadism, to induct him into it, into the rough sexual world that lies outside families.

Vicki heard their voices turn low and nasty. She sang in a whisper to the placid boy in the bath: ‘A band of angels comin' after me, Comin' for to carry me home.' It was one of the few songs he would tolerate. She swilled the water up his back in a rhythm, scrubbed at the horny skin of his heels. There was a stoned voluptuousness in his acceptance of her caresses which, if she let herself think about it, made her gorge rise, but still she sang and sloshed the water up and down his unblemished back.

There were heavy steps outside and the bathroom door flew open.