Burning Your Boats: Collected Short Stories Read online

  They stood together and gazed at Lola’s pathetic fragmented corpse. Both were touched with a cold finger of awe and dread and a superstitious sorrow; the lady who did not go into public bars was suddenly no more than a few graceless splinters.

  ‘Do you know if he knows?’ whispered Nelson. It did not seem right to talk in a loud voice.

  ‘I haven’t seen him since the trouble began.’

  ‘Even if he does know, well, he ought to have a bit of company, at a time like this, a few friends around him . . .’

  ‘Maybe he’s up in his room.’

  They found out from the landlord that Jameson had been lodged in an attic room high at the top of the old rabbit-warren of a place. Fenland mist had crept into the pub and it blurred their vision as Geoff and Nelson climbed flight after flight of stairs. It was very late, now, and cold, with a bone-chilling, wet, cold. Then, without warning, every light went out. Stricken, Nelson clutched at Geoff.

  ‘Len, it’s all right, don’t take on. It must be a fuse, or something, perhaps the wiring – rotten old wiring they have in houses as old as this.’

  But he himself was badly scared. They both felt an alien, almost tangible something in the darkness, felt it in the damp kiss of the mistsoaked air on their cheeks.

  ‘A light, Geoff, now.’

  Geoff clicked his cigarette lighter. The tiny flame only intensified the darkness around them. They reached the topmost landing.

  ‘Here we are.’

  The door swung open. Geoff held his lighter high. They saw first a chair, overturned on the floor. Then they saw the open, empty case of a double bass on the cheap taffeta bedspread. The case was shaped for all the world like a coffin. But Lola would not lie in it, although it was her own.

  And in the still circle of light, swung a pair of feet, gently, backwards and forwards, forwards and backwards . . . Geoff raised his lighter above his head until they could see all of Jameson, hanging from a disused gas bracket, his gentle face black and twisted. Bedded deep in his neck was a brilliant silken rag, the rag he had used for so long to polish his bass. Something glinted on the floor beneath him – his glasses, dropped, broken.

  A sodden wind came in through the open window and swallowed the lighter flame at once. Then there was engulfing darkness and in the darkness no noise but the slow creak, creak, creak. And the two men grabbed at each other’s hands like frightened children.

  In a room beneath them, the same little wind trickled through an ill-fitting window frame and tickled Simeon Price’s throat so that he coughed and stirred a little, uneasily, in his sleep.

  A Very, Very Great Lady

  and Her Son at Home

  ‘When I was adolescent, my mother taught me a charm, gave me a talisman, handed me the key of the world. For I lived in terror, I, so young, so shy of so many people – i.e. those who spoke with soft voices and sounded the h in “which”; cinema usherettes who, in those days wore wide satin pyjamas which mocked my unawakened sex with unashamed lasciviousness; suave men who put cold hands on my defenceless, barely formed breasts on the tops of lonely November buses. So many, many people.

  ‘My mother said: “Child, if such folks awe you, then picture them on the lavatory, straining, constipated. They will at once seem small, pathetic, manageable.” And she whispered to me a great, universal truth: “THE BOWELS ARE GREAT LEVELLERS.”

  ‘She was a rough woman, my mother. She picked her teeth ceaselessly with a fork and she would take off her felt slippers, in the evenings, and probe out the caked, flaked skin and dirt from between her toes with a sensual, inquisitive finger. But she was possessed of great wisdom – the brutal, yet withal vital, wisdom of a peasant.’

  The woman’s voice, high and clear as the sound of a glass rapped with a spoon to summon a waiter, ceased in meditation for a moment. Only two endlessly long miraculously slender legs emerged from the pool of coagulated shadow in the corner where she sat.

  Petals dropped from a red rose in a silver bowl on to the low, round, blood-coloured mahogany table with a soft, faint, exhausted sound, as of a pigeon’s fart. The woman recrossed her legs; rasping planes of silk flashed out as they caught the light, like the blades of scissors, slicing all that came between them. She resumed her narrative.

  ‘I had been a shy child. A lonely child, lost in the middle of a large family – twenty-three children, of whom eighteen reached maturity! – cooped up in a meagre dwelling, the loft above my father’s stable. Ah!’ she cried, ‘how often I lay awake at night comforted by the gentle whickering of great, grey Dapple, with the ruffs over his hooves, like a pierrot!’

  Again she paused for a moment’s recollection; then resumed her narrative.

  ‘By tragic paradox, so crowded was our home, so continual the to-ing and fro-ing, that my isolation was total. I was alone, so alone; so tentative, unable to grasp the fact of myself as an entity, a personality.

  ‘I was introverted to the point of extinction, and in that great, surging mêlée of humanity – my family – only behaviour extroverted to the point of sheer exhibition drew attention to oneself.

  ‘I remember how one of my brothers – or perhaps it was a sister: one forgets, one forgets – plunged his little bare feet in the suppertime soup one night, to bring to my parents’ attention how great his need was for new boots. Or shoes. Or sandals. Or socks . . .’

  The voice died away and then welled out again in passionate regret: ‘The significant detail – one forgets it! One forgets it!’ But soon she resumed her narrative.

  ‘Poor little fellow, he – or was it she – was scalded almost to the knee. The suppertime soup, the cabbage leaves bobbing in it – I remember, though, the suppertime soup. And the faces round the table, so many, many faces. And such meagre soup that many a time, my small stomach sonorous as a pair of maracas, I would creep down in the silence of the night to scoop up a little of Dapple’s steaming mash on my fingers, for myself.

  ‘Indeed, though one would scarcely credit it, for many years my mother, in error, called me by the name of an elder sister who had died in infancy. My father, on the other hand, a grey, precise man who smelled of horse dung and kept a list of all our names (together with brief descriptive notes) sewn to the inside of his black greasy hat, scrupulously referred to me by my baptismal name whenever he chanced to see me, removing his hat and running a gnarled finger down the columns until he came to the thumbnail sketch which tallied with the wide-eyed, pigtailed child before him. Those were the only occasions on which I recall him taking off his hat.

  ‘Jason, cigarettes.’

  The boy, cross-legged at her feet, leapt into darkness; came the sound of an unsnapped case, a clicked lighter. The red tip of the cigarette glowed in the shadows like a warning traffic-light – STOP – and the petals on another full-blown rose trembled but did not fall.

  ‘Forced into myself, I became bookish, walking five miles to the free library in my cracked clogs. I read, I read, I read. Anything, everything . . . My father, dipping the quill in the penny bottle of ink, laboriously added “steel-rimmed spectacles” to the note beside my name in his directory. Charity spectacles. I was so ashamed.

  ‘But I was a helpless addict; so precious were those books to me that I carried them around next to my heart, beneath the ragged liberty vest from the parish poor-box but above the layer of newspaper that, for warmth, my mother sewed around us, renewing it each autumn.

  ‘My mind grew in the darkness like a flower. But my isolation increased. I could not communicate my love, my wonder, my veritable lust for things of the spirit, the intellect, with my parents – nor, indeed, with my teachers, for them I hated. They bound my face in iron: first my eyes, then my teeth.

  ‘“Teeth in brace,” my father amended by the guttering light of the farthing candle. Or was it a penny candle? Or a halfpenny rush dip? One forgets – one forgets.’

  Again the brief cry; then she resumed her narrative.

  ‘Life went on. The years passed. The bright peonies
of the menstrual flow blossomed. My breasts grew like young doves. I had a fever and they cropped my hair. To my wonder and delight it grew again in little soft curls.

  ‘I stared at my reflection in Dapple’s trough. I took off my spectacles and pulled the brace from my mouth. I dimly saw this white face and this golden topknot and I was afraid, for the child I had been was dead; dead and replaced by a beautiful woman whom I did not know.

  ‘Jason, the candles.’

  He – the boy; slight, fair, delicate – struck matches, and the branched candlesticks sprang to life.

  Her face was a painted mask of beauty. Eyes bluer than their blue-stained lids, precise discs of scarlet on her white cheeks, lambent hair piled above the winking lights of her tiara. And the diamonds burned with no more dangerous fire than did her white breasts, exposed to the nipples by the black chiffon robe that fell away from her thighs.

  She was as beautiful as Venus rising from the waves in the celebrated picture by Botticelli, only more so. She was as beautiful as the celebrated bust of Nefertiti in the Louvre, only more so. She was as beautiful as the statue of the young David by the celebrated Michelangelo that gazes on the thronged traffic of Milan with such serenity, only more so.

  Slowly she ground out her cigarette in the wounded onyx of an ashtray on the arm of her chair. She resumed her narrative.

  ‘At fifteen, I went walking in the park. I glowed with beauty on the boating pond, in a canoe, at half a crown an hour. I disputed about Plato, whose books I read deeply, with a small brown man in a loin cloth, and all the time I gazed on my reflection in the rippling water.

  ‘When I concentrated on my reflection, I was that lovely being. Je suis un autre. Dizzied, drunk on the miracle of arriving at a personality with the suddenness of epiphany, I turned from the pool to make some brilliant point to my companion – and my new self fell away like a cloak. I wept, stammered: ten years old again.

  ‘I ran, stumbling, back to the familiar warmth of the stable, to weep saltily into Dapple’s warm mane. And there my mother, coming from the streets with her hands full of potato peelings that she gleaned from the ashcans of our neighbours (when no one was looking; she had a fierce pride), to enrich Dapple’s mash . . . my mother, returning, saw me.

  ‘“Susan,” she said, “hush your moitherings.” And then she paused, bewildered, laid her burden on a nearby tea chest and came close to me, so close that I could count the grey hairs growing from her nostrils. Her rheumy eyes filled, overflowed.

  ‘“But you be not my Susan!” she cried. “My Susan didn’t live to be as old as you!” And she buried her head in her apron and her shoulders heaved with sobbing. But, selfishly, I dried my own tears on Dapple’s tail, for my mother had at last recognised my true identity and I perceived a glimmer of hope.

  ‘Jason, my knee.’

  He knelt at once and began to massage her knee. The bones clicked under his long fingers. A candle flame flickered, casting a momentary shadow over the lower part of her face resembling a small black moustache and imperial.

  ‘“Mother,” I said, “I am so shy.” It was the first remark I remember addressing to her in my whole life. “Mother,” I repeated; the word tasted wholesome as bread and milk in my mouth.

  ‘She gazed at me thoughtfully, rolling a corner of her apron into a probe and cleaning wax from her ear with it. Then she gave me the formula, irradiating my life.

  ‘“If you picture them all on the lavatory, constipated, straining, then all the toffee-nosed bastards will seem defenceless and pathetic,” she said.

  ‘“THE BOWELS ARE GREAT LEVELLERS.”

  ‘It was a revelation. I rushed out into the world, never to return, repeating those words, living by them.

  ‘Jason, the world was my OYSTER!’

  Her voice rang like a sudden, brass-throated trumpet. The full-blown rose at last allowed itself to collapse, almost with the quality of muffled applause. The woman’s beauty was so intense that it seemed to have the quality of a deformity, so far was it from the human norm. The bones in her knees jostled one another with a faint mumbling.

  As if recollecting vague, soft, fragrant, long-ago things, she murmured (more to herself than to the boy): ‘Ah, Jason, the childish thighs and baby buttocks of great men. You can stop massaging.’

  He drew away. She lit another cigarette at the candle flame. Blinking, he drew a hand through his hair. The candle light shone along the brace in his teeth, made blinding pools in the steel-rimmed spectacles over his eyes. He backed, bumping against the mahogany table where the petals pooled redly.

  ‘Jason,’ she asked sharply, ‘why are you staring at me? Jason?’

  He coughed. He fidgeted, the toes of his bare feet curling and uncurling in the thick carpet.

  ‘Jason?’ more urgently.

  ‘And do you look pathetic on the lavatory, mother?’

  The cigarette fell from nerveless fingers; she opened and closed her mouth but not a sound came out. She crashed forward on to the carpet and lay there, a tree felled, motionless.

  The boy went to the door and vanished, laughing, into the night.

  A Victorian Fable

  (with Glossary)

  The Village, take a fright.

  In the rookeries.

  Here the sloops of war and the dollymops flash it to spie a dowry of parny; there the bonneters cooled their longs and shorts in the hazard drums.

  In every snickert and ginnel, bone-grubbers, rufflers, shivering-jemmies, anglers, clapperdogeons, peterers, sneeze-lurkers and Whip Jacks with their morts, out of the picaroon, fox and flimp and ogle.

  A Hopping Giles gets a bloody Jemmy on the cross of a cut-throat; the snotters crib belchers, bird’s eye wipes, blue billies and Randal’s men.

  In a boozing ken in the Holy Land, a dunk-horned cutter – a cock-eyed clack box in flashy benjamin and blood red fancy – shed a tear by the I desire.

  But when he got the water of life down the common sewer, he bullyragged so antiscripturally that the barney hipped and nabbed the rust.

  ‘This shove in the mouth makes me shoot the cat! Me dumpling depot is fair all-overish!’

  He certainly had his hump up. He absquatulated. The bung cried: ‘Square the omee for the cream of the valley!’ But the splodger had mizzled with his half-a-grunter.

  At his ruggy carser, his poll – a killing, ginger-hackled skull-thatcher – kept on the nose for her jomer.

  She had faked the rubber for her mendozy and got him up an out and out glorious sinner. There was an alderman in chains, a Ben Flake, a neddy of Sharp’s Alley blood worms, with Irish apricots, Joe Savace and storrac.

  ‘Pray God,’ she said, ‘that he be neither beargeared, bleary, blued, primed, lumpy, top-heavy, moony, scammered, on the ran-tan, ploughed, muddled, obfuscated, swipy, kisky, sewed up nor all mops and brooms! Or that he hasn’t lapped the gutter, can’t see a hole in a ladder or been to Bungay Fair and lose both his legs!’

  But what a flare-up in the soush! He dropped into her on the spot. He’d got a capital twist for a batty fang and he showed her it was dragging time; she was sick as a horse. He was a catchy fancy-bloke.

  ‘You mouldy old bed-fagot, you rotten old gooseberry pudden, you ugly old Gill, you flea-ridden old moll!’ he blasted. ‘I’ll give you jessie, you Mullingar heifer!’

  A barnacled cove (a spoffy blackberry swagger with a Newgate fringe) from the top floor back sang out: ‘Knife it, you head beetler! Stow faking!’ But got a stunning fag on the twopenny that sent him half-way to Albertopolis.

  She had bought the rabbit with that slubberdegullion. He peppered her and clumped her and leathered her till she went flop down on the Rory O’More and then he stepped it for the frog and toad, to go to Joe Blake the Bartlemy.

  He hopped the twig on her.

  ‘He ought to go to the vertical care-grinder!’ she chived. ‘He ought to be marinated! I’ll never poll up with a liver-faced, chatty, beef-headed, cupboard-headed, culver-headed, fiddle-faced, glumpish
, squabby dab tros like him again!

  ‘I’m fairly in half-mourning – it won’t fadge, it just won’t fadge. He gives me the Jerry go Nimbles. I’ll stun him – I’ll streak. I’ll pick up my sticks and cut.’

  So she bolted and took a speel on the drum to the top of Rome.

  On Shitten Saturday, the worms pinned that scaly shaver of hers in a Tom and Jerry for starring the glaze; he went over the stile at Spike Park and got topped.

  Glossary

  Village, the

  London

  take a fright

  night (rhyming slang)

  rookeries

  a slow neighbourhood inhabited by dirty Irish and thieves

  sloop of war, a

  whore (rhyming slang)

  dollymop, a

  a tawdrily dressed maid-servant, a streetwalker

  flash it, to

  show it, to display one’s wares

  dowry of parny, a

  a lot of rain

  bonneter, a

  one who induces another to gamble

  cool, to

  to look, to look over (back slang)

  longs and shorts

  cards made for cheating

  hazard drum, a

  gambling dens, where the honest escape penniless, if at all

  snickert, a

  low alley way

  ginnel, a

  still lower alley way

  bone-grubber, a

  a person who hunts dust-holes, gutters, and all likely spots for refuse bones, which he sells at the ragshops, or to the bone-merchants

  ruffler, a

  beggar pretending to be an old, maimed soldier

  shivering-jemmy, a

  a begger who exposes himself, half-naked, on a cold day to obtain alms. This occupation is unpleasant but exceedingly lucrative