Tree of Hands (7 page)

‘My dad did that when I was a kid. He was always belting us up, me and Maureen. I reckon we deserved it, kids can be a real pain in the arse. He went a bit too far that time though, didn't he? That was his belt buckle done that, cut right through to the bone.'

Barry had been horribly shocked. He would have liked to have got hold of Knapwell, wherever he was – he had walked out on his family when Carol was ten – and cut him to his bones with a steel buckle. He loved Carol even more for her generosity of spirit, her ability to forgive. Though how she could say any child deserved that, he didn't understand. Carol didn't like children much, he was forced to admit that. It was her misfortune really that she had had three of her own. Sometimes Barry worried that she might not want any more when he and she were married.

The Isadoros were having Jason for the whole weekend and maybe they would keep him over the Monday. Beatie Isadoro's youngest was about his age, a khaki-skinned fat girl with red kinky hair. Beatie was an Irishwoman from County Mayo but her husband was Jamaican and they had produced some interesting colour combinations among their seven children. Because she had plenty of room in her two adjacent houses, Beatie ran a kind of unofficial nursery and the older girls were expected to help when they weren't at school. Beatie wasn't registered with the council as a childminder or anything like that, but that was rather an advantage since it meant she didn't charge as much as a registered childminder would have. To Barry the houses seemed full of kids, twenty or thirty of them, though there probably were not so many as that. He paid up, six pounds for the two days, which he thought exorbitant but Carol said was cheap at the price.

Karen and Stephanie and Nathan Isadoro were watching a film on the video,
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
. Barry was squeamish and didn't look. There was a little fair-haired boy strapped in a pushchair and screaming his head off. No one took any notice of him and the video viewers didn't even turn their heads. The Isadoros' home always had a curious smell about it – a mixture of pimento, babies' napkins and hot chocolate.

Barry collected Tanya and Ryan and took them back to Summerskill Road. Carol was ready by then, wearing the tweed culottes Mrs Fylemon had given her, and a cream wool polo-neck sweater that showed off her figure. She had made up her face in a very clever way so that it looked luminous and glowing and not really made up at all. Her hair was in soft floppy curls and a true natural gold. Barry knew for a fact she didn't tint it. They all went shopping at Brent Cross and had lunch in a hamburger place and then to the cinema to see a space fantasy film. Barry organized all that. Before he had come to live with her, Carol often hadn't bothered to take the kids out, she had told him. It had all got on top of her and she hadn't been able to cope.
He had more or less taken charge of the children insofar as they needed to be taken charge of. He thought they liked him.

Waiting for the bus home, Barry hoped people would look at them and think Carol was his wife and the kids his. He was young enough to hope that. Carol would catch sight of herself in shop windows and make a face because Ryan came nearly up to her shoulder, and she would say to Barry, ‘I must have been off my nut having him so young. Do you realize I could be a bloody grandmother before I'm forty?'

It made Barry laugh to think of Carol being a grandmother. He put his arms round her and started kissing her there in the street and forgot about the kids watching them.

Next day they had to go back to Four Winds. Tanya never wanted to go. She always screamed and stamped and sometimes she clung to Carol and had to be prised off. It made Barry wonder why they had to be in care if they were so happy in their home and with their mother.

‘You can
ask
the council to take your kids into care, you know,' Carol said. ‘It doesn't have to be that they take them away from you. I couldn't cope after Dave died. I had to do something about the kids. I was desperate.'

Less than two years after Dave's death, she had Jason. Barry had never asked her much about that, he didn't really want to know, he preferred to be in ignorance. He could probably even have convinced himself that Jason was Dave's child. Only one day, when Carol was telling him off and calling him a little bastard, Iris said, ‘You didn't ought to call him that, Carol. It'd be one thing if he wasn't one but he is, isn't he?'

When they were married, Barry thought, they could apply to take the kids out of care. Carol could give up work too or at least she could give up working in the wine bar. Barry was ambitious. He had a good job as cabinet-maker and carpenter in a two-man business operating from Delphi Road. Or it would be a good job when this recession came to an end and things picked up a bit. They'd be able to
move out of Summerskill Road then and maybe buy a place somewhere and be a real family. Sometimes Barry had a dream that was really a vision, it was so clear and solid, of a room in their house in the future, all of them sitting round the table eating Christmas dinner, all happy and wearing paper hats and laughing, and Carol in a sea-blue dress with their new baby on her lap.

Barry knew it couldn't all be roses. There were the children for one thing, they weren't his and they never could be, and that wasn't just nothing, that wasn't something you could just dismiss. And there was Dave, always there, always smiling out of his plastic frame. Carol might look about seventeen but she wasn't, she was eight years older than him and that much more experienced and sophisticated. And there was one other thing that troubled him sometimes.

He was a gentle person, a bit too soft, he sometimes thought. He couldn't stand seeing a kid get hurt. You had to smack them if they went too far, he knew that, but not hard and always on the leg or the behind. So when he saw Carol strike Tanya with a back-handed blow across the little girl's face and head, using all the strength of her arm, strike her again and again after that, wielding her arm like a tennis player, he saw red and pulled Carol off and hit her himself to calm her down. That was the only reason he did it, to calm her down, like he'd been told you had to with hysterical people. There was no passion in it for him, no uncontrolled violence. He took her by the arm, and because he was young and strong, he held her hard, and struck her a sharp blow across the face.

It was her reaction that troubled him. She stopped screaming at the child, she was quiet and that was all right. It wasn't that. She cringed a little but she didn't put her hand up to her face where his blow must have stung. He had the curious sensation – and he didn't know how he knew this then, he had no real evidence for it – that she was waiting for him to hit her again, that she
wanted
him to hit her again. She stood there in front of him, vulnerable,
exposed, her hands hanging a little way from her body, breathing shallowly, her lips parted, sweat on her skin, waiting for more.

Of course he hadn't hit her again. He had told her he was sorry, he loved her, he wouldn't hurt her, but he had had to do it to stop her when she was out of control like that.

‘I didn't mind,' she said and she gave him a curious sidelong look, a look that was sly and also faintly irritable.

That night, when they made love, she tried to get him to strike her. It was a while before he realized, he didn't know what she was doing, provoking him with her teeth and nails, jumping from the bed to run across the room and stand pressed against the wall with her arms covering her body, then kicking him when he came near, hissing at him, darting her head like a snake. She had to tell him because he didn't understand.

‘Hit me, lover, hit me as hard as you can.'

He couldn't. He forced himself to pat her face, tap her shoulders a little harder with his fingers. That wasn't what she wanted. She wanted blows, she wanted pain. Why? How could she? You would have thought she had suffered enough of that from that father of hers. Barry struck her. He beat her hard but only with his hands. He hated it. He had to tell himself it wasn't Carol, it was someone he hated, and he shut his eyes to do it.

She never asked him for anything like that again. He tried to forget it, to put the memory of it out of his mind, and he nearly succeeded. Sometimes he thought that perhaps he had only dreamed he was beating Carol just as he had dreamed of seeing her strike Tanya. Since then, though, their love-making had been more strenuous, more savage really. Barry didn't mind that. It was a change to find a woman who preferred it that way. But then Carol wasn't like other women. She was one in a million . . .

After the children went back, they were alone. They went to bed. That was what they always did when they got the
chance. When there were people there who were just going or when they were soon to be rid of the kids, Barry always had this sense of mounting excitement and, looking at Carol, he knew she had it too. It was all they could do to wait till the door closed. And yet such was the pleasure of anticipation that sometimes he hoped leave-takings would be prolonged or children's departure delayed so that he might be kept a little longer on this pinnacle of breathless expectancy.

Once they were alone they fell into each other's arms, desperate by then for love, kissing and licking and biting and holding, laughing for no reason unless it was at their own thraldom. In that big bed with Carol there was no one else in the world for him, no one and nothing beyond the invisible dome that seemed to enclose the bed. Carol told him that once or twice she had watched them in the big mirror, it excited her more, but he never had. His love was here and now, not even at that small remove.

They slept. They awoke in darkness, still embraced, damp and cool with their own and each other's sweat. Carol got up first and washed and put on the black and white zig-zag dress. She painted her face with brushes, big ones for the foundation and the blusher and small fine ones for the eyelids and brows and outlining her lips. She combed her hair and wound the little tendril curls round her fingers. They were going out for a drink with Iris and Iris's Jerry.

A big full moon was up, bright as a floodlight, competing with the harsh yellow that overhung Winterside Down. They went by way of the Chinese bridge where Barry's graffiti still proclaimed his love and where it was light enough to see their own faces reflected in the calm glistening water of the canal. Their faces gazed back at them as from a mirror in a room which is dark but nevertheless faintly lit by light showing through an open door. Carol dropped her cigarette stub into the water. It was just heavy enough to fracture their images and, for a brief moment, distort them so horribly that Barry stepped back, removing his own. He had seen Carol's beautiful face shudder and
collapse and melt until it became a rubber mask representing some cartoon character, voracious, lecherous and coarse, while his own was a gargoyle with bloated lips and rolling wobbly eyes.

He put his arm round her, rubbed her cheek with his and kissed her lips. Carol put sealant on her lips so that you could kiss a hundred times without the lipstick coming off. They held hands walking down Winterside Down, past Maureen's house with its curtains like fancy white lace aprons and the polished car outside. Iris and Jerry were already in the Old Bulldog, they had probably been there since it opened. Jerry was a smallish, fattish, pink-faced man, a heavy drinker but showing few signs of this. He was never drunk. His eyes looked as if they had been stewed in brine, they had a soggy yet shrivelled look, and his clothes smelled as if they had been rinsed out in gin. His favourite pastime next to going to the Old Bulldog was watching television with a tumbler of gin and water beside him.

People said Iris had once been even prettier than Carol. Barry found that hard to believe. She was fifty, thin as a skeleton and with long bony legs. She wore her dyed yellow hair shoulder-length to make herself look younger, and she always had very high-heeled sandals on, summer and winter, to show off her high insteps and her thin ankles. Barry guessed she had had a hell of a life with the brutish Knapwell. Yet she was always cheerful, carefree, making the best of a bad job. She smoked forty or fifty cigarettes a day and had a cough which turned her face purple with the strain. Iris couldn't get down to anything without a cigarette.

‘Let me just get a fag on,' she would say, or ‘I'll have to have a cig first.'

Since Knapwell went, there had been (according to Carol) a man called Bill and one called Nobby, but they hadn't lasted long and Jerry had been Iris's companion for years now. He was a mysterious man who seldom spoke, showed no emotion, seemed to have no family of his own,
and who preserved towards everything but gin and the television a sublime indifference. Even his real name was a mystery, for he had begun to call himself Knapwell within a year of moving in with Iris. He worked for Thames Water which made Barry laugh, considering Jerry's tastes. Iris had a job in a small garment factory housed in what used to be the old Prado cinema.

Barry had a Foster's and Carol a gin and tonic. She and Iris talked about childminding arrangements for the coming week. Maybe Maureen could be roped in for one day.

‘You have to be joking,' said Iris. ‘Maureen's doing up her lounge. She's been all day stripping.'

‘I'll have to take on another evening at Kostas's, that's all,' said Carol. ‘It's costing me a fortune.'

Jerry got up. ‘You going to have the other half?' he said to Barry as if his lager hadn't been the entire contents of a can but out of a bottle or jug. Knowing what they would want, he didn't waste words on the women.

‘Let me get a fag on,' said Iris. She smoked in thoughtful silence. Carol talked about taking on extra work. That troubled Barry who had been feeling happy and contented. He longed to earn more, make a lot of money, so that instead of working longer hours Carol could give up altogether and stay at home with the kids. ‘There's always the council,' Iris said suddenly. ‘You could try them, see what they come up with.'