What Was Promised (31 page)

But at night anything can happen and you have to watch yourself. The sleepy man could come or the police, or there was fighting. It began with drink or no drink. Once there was a knife and he was no longer small but he tried to make himself colourless. A man was cut and the next day he came back down with stitches in him. His flesh opened up warm and deep and they went and shut it up. That’s what the cut man told him. He wasn’t happy about it. They went and stitched me up, he said.

In the days he ate and lazed. He was fed by God. To get the daily bread you had to hear the good news and the cut man never listened but he did. It was fair enough. Or some days they didn’t go to God but mostly it was the same arrangement. You listened and ate, you ate while you listened. Sometimes it’s best if you nod. An old lady told him odd things. The burned child is not the sinner. Cities give us collision. The blade itself incites violence. Other things he didn’t like but she had food so it didn’t matter.

He didn’t ask for the room but the old lady gave it. She had nine of them but none for the cut man. She only wanted him and once a woman who wept and later a black woman who made him think of Mrs Malcolm though really she was nothing like. She wore only white and ate only white food and drank milk. She powdered her skin with anything white she could get her hands on. They gave her flour because with that she could do no harm to herself. He stayed with the old lady for four hundred and ten days, four hundred and eleven nights. She had
Tales of Arabian Nights
. She had books and he could borrow them. Some of them he could read but some were French or half in Japanese or Russian. She had two rooms just for books and one for newspapers. She liked the crosswords. Sometimes they did the ones she’d missed. They had to dig for them. Or they just played games with words. He made them up for her.

They were washing up. He said, ‘A Go ace went north, always tending seawards, homewards, triumphant.’ She liked that. She made him say it again and the next day she wrote her answer and left it on the hallway table. It said, ‘O, if you only could listen! Nothing whatever surpasses tenderness.’ And that night he said, ‘I do, but when other people cluster together, listening dissipates.’

Some nights they listened to recordings. There was one piece she had which was so beautiful he covered his ears because it was unbearable. Other nights they drank strong drink and those nights she came to him. Her flesh was warm and deep and he found he wanted it.

Her name was Alice and in the end she died. It was night and he packed his things. He didn’t want to be with the dead. That was his last time in Brighthelmstone. He went down to the sea and it was a good night, soft. He sat down on the stones. The sea was hardly breathing. It was like a pond, and in the pond, a moon.

He walked inland. He knew about the countryside but he hadn’t lived in it. He had read books but not enough. The weather was turning and it was colder than he knew. If it’s warmth you want you need the places where other people live. There’s a warmth you only get where people come together. You can’t kindle it in yourself. You can’t do it alone. That’s what the cities are for. That’s why people huddle and hug and touch, for the warmth it brings. Cities give us collision. They strike the fire out of us.

He thought he would harvest apples and sleep in hay as his reward, but it wasn’t like that. He slept in woods under leaves. What people there were there were poor, with nothing to spare for him. Once he went too close and their man shot a gun at him.
Run now
, Moon said,
run
, and he hadn’t moved but then he did. He went into the woods and lay under a broken tree, and for days he kept on running and sleeping wherever the days left him.

He was hungrier than he had ever been. He followed the slots of deer and found them but he couldn’t kill them. They looked him in the eye. He knew not to eat the mushrooms. He drank puddles if the rain was fresh and groundwater where he heard it gibbering out of the earth. He broke the awns from the last corn and cooked them over embers. He made fires from flints and lichen, but their warmth never got into him, he couldn’t get enough of them.

He came to Crowborough and asked for the London road. He went across the Weald. He followed the roads but didn’t walk them. Alice was dead and he was afraid the police would come for him. At Tunbridge Wells he saw them waiting and he went away over the fields.

Winter was coming. He looked for holes, but the animals were small and jealous and he wasn’t strong enough to dig anything better for himself. He wondered if he had the strength to live that way again. He had grown older and softer. Moon was looking out for him but still, he didn’t know.

He went closer to the roads. One night a lorry stopped for him. He asked for London but the man was only going east as far as Canterbury. He got down where the lights began. The man said Whitehorse Lane and when Wednesday came he found his way. He listened to the news of God and ate as much as they would give him.

He heard about people like him who had died. The Sally Army First Lieutenant told him. The cold can take you just like that, the First Lieutenant said, and he snapped his fingers. His other name was Hughes and he had been all over, Newfoundland to Africa. He was older than Alice. It worried him that Hughes would die. He didn’t want to see that again but he needed a place to last the winter and Hughes offered one.

It was alright, that place. There were steps that pulled down with a hook. The bloody old banger lived at the bottom and he lived at the top. There were boards across the beams and they made an attic. There was a camp bed up there with old tyres under broken springs. There was a round window, quartered with cobwebbed panes, and on clear mornings the sun was caught in it. It was alright except you couldn’t stand up in it.

They had a bargain. His side of it was: one, to keep himself presentable; two, odd jobs; three, to be in at night, to put the wind up the burglars. It was a good bargain. There were never any burglars. Hughes’s side of it was: one, the roof over his head; two, breakfasts and suppers, and if there was hoarfrost or night frost he could eat them in the kitchen. Afterwards he could sit by the range and read for half an hour.

Most days he did the odd jobs. Wednesdays, Hughes put on God’s armour and they went to Whitehorse Lane to give out soup, soap and salvation. Sundays too, and then he laid out the books and chairs and took them in. The harvest songs frightened him and he was glad he had missed them.

This is the field, the world below,

In which the sower came to sow;

Jesus, the wheat; Satan, the tares;

For so the word of God declares.

And soon the reaping time will come,

And angels shout the harvest home.

Saturdays he had to wash in the tin bath by the kitchen door. And he had to shave. Hughes taught him. He lent him a razor but his hands shook. He didn’t like to use it. They were only safety blades but Moon laughed when he read that.
Hide one
, Moon said, but he never did. He knew about the blade itself.

There were books but only true ones. There were no crosswords because Hughes took no newspapers. Hughes didn’t hold with printing lies.

We believe that our first parents were created in a state of innocencey, but by their disobedience they lost their purity and happiness, and that in consequence of their fall all men have become sinners, totally depraved and as such are justly exposed to the wrath of God
.

That was what the true books said and they made sense to him.

There was no drink, except there was. Hughes hid it from himself like filth. Sometimes he could smell it on him and those nights Hughes made him drink and wept in the armchair beside him. He told him about Ricks and Hendry who had gone down like Vikings. They were good men who had looked to him. He hadn’t known what he was at. Those are pearls that were their eyes.

They were drinking. Hughes said, ‘You do know there is no God? It’s the worst lie there ever was. All we have is us. It’s only us and we have to make a bloody fist of it. You know that, son, don’t you?’ And he said he did although he hadn’t, not until then.

They had a bargain. He had kept his side and Hughes had kept his, but still, he left in the spring. Hughes was sorry to see him go. He said so and he meant it. And he didn’t say but he was sorry too. He didn’t say that he was afraid Hughes would die. ‘It’s for the best,’ he said. Hughes didn’t see it, but it was. It is. It’s for the best to leave before your sins catch up with you. They come like cloud shadows, they race across the land behind you, and you do well to run. That’s why he left Solly and Dora. He misses them more than anyone, but the memories he has of them are still pure, wheaten, golden.

He went towards London. Hughes put him on the train but at Chatham he got off. He had clean castoffs but the guard was watching. And it was April and fresh and he wasn’t in a hurry. He followed the estuary to the river and he walked inland beside its coombs and downs of mud.

From Hughes he had money and the castoffs. They were suits and shoes. They were too big for him but the old clothes were too small and anyway he liked them. They smelled of Hughes, of his house, and on his lapel Hughes had pinned a Sally Army badge.
Blood & Fire
, it said. Hughes said he’d grow into them but he thought he was done with that. He was smaller than other men but stronger than they thought and smarter. Small and smart is useful things. You shouldn’t bet against them.

In Erith he stopped for three years. The shoes were chafing. He sat by the memorial and watched the people come and go into and out of London. There were drinkers and they welcomed him. There were dogs too but they didn’t mind. Library Mary, Little Mary, Yorkie and Arnold were the drinkers’ names, and Arnold said they would be friends and that the place to go was King’s. He found it by the drinking fountain and paid a night up front. They had room for him but no rooms, it was only cubicles. In the washroom there were basins and you could ask for soap. You hung your clothes in front of you so as to keep an eye on them. The orderly said they had no fishers but he didn’t know what that meant. He thought it was to do with meals. He said he didn’t mind but the orderly laughed at him.

He never slept well at King’s. You could hear the other men tossing and turning in the dark, each within his own partitions. Sometimes they cried out or moaned into their bedding. But you always slept in the end. It was warm, it was spring, and by day the drinkers were kind to him.

Arnold taught him something:

There are men in Erith

That no one sees or hears,

And there looms on the marge of the river a barge

That no one rows or steers
.

‘That’s us,’ Arnold said. He’d never seen the barge but he’d met a man who had.

King’s was a dosshouse. Some men could never settle in them. Yorkie said he couldn’t breathe indoors. Other men had other names for King’s, they called it The Royal or The Crown. If they expected letters they called it The Eighth House. The postmen knew what was meant. Most people knew most of the names. They were old and worn and they didn’t hide much, but some men were always ashamed and so they went on using them.

The tenth night when he woke his castoffs were gone. It wasn’t all of them. It was the trousers he had used and the jacket he had saved, but in that jacket was all the money Hughes had given him. Arnold said he had been fished. You did it with a hook and line over the cubicle partitions. They all knew which fellow it was but by the time they looked for him he was long gone himself.

You were to pay each night up front at King’s and he couldn’t. He spent a fortnight rough. He went with Arnold and begged for the shillings for King’s. More often than not the wind came inland off the estuary and brought a sour haze of dust from the cement factories. People fretted about the dust and there were slim pickings then, but sometimes, if the wind was clean, they did well enough to drink. The Lord provides a man with bread but precious little wine. It was a long time that he begged in the end but he didn’t feel it pass. The drink made the days run together, riverine. They were his days, but their surface was placid and he never felt their current.

He had never begged on purpose. His first mum had hated beggars. She had called them bad men, had said they were not fit to love. He hadn’t ever wanted to become the thing she’d hated. He wasn’t any good at it. He wanted to be colourless, to be one of the Men of Erith, but that was no use for begging. You needed to be seen. To beg you have to prove yourself, to be the proof of what you lack. You have to leave yourself open to the sidelong glances; and when you do you see your state reflected in the eyes of others.

A man stopped in front of him. He looked him up and down and dropped a shilling on his jacket. He said, ‘What are you thinking?’

He said, ‘I’m thinking it will rain tonight. That will buy me something to keep me dry. Thanks for it. I’m grateful.’

The man with the money frowned at him. He looked let down, as if he’d been shortchanged by a fairground slot. Not shortchanged by much: one coin was no great loss to him.

It was a lie, about the rain. What was he thinking? Sometimes it was why he didn’t go on into London. Sometimes it was the kites. Solly at his shoulder and the strings drumming in his fingers. Sometimes he tried to sing the songs that Dora sang for him. Often he thought of Mrs Malcolm. The time she stood up for him against the man who took her life, and the time she died in the street of flowers with the flowers all around her. It might have been one of those things, but this was years ago and he really can’t remember. Whatever it was, it wasn’t something you sell to a man for a shilling.