The Clothes On Their Backs: A Novel (No Series) Read online

  ‘It’s true not nice things happened to him,’ my father said. ‘Still, they could have made him a better person, and they didn’t. He never changed.’

  My mother said nothing. It was my father who kept returning to him, as a dog snuffles in the garden, looking for a mouldy old buried bone.

  That morning I heard of my uncle’s conquests, his many girlfriends, his business deals, his accumulation of money in the bank, his reputation in the coffee houses of the city, and then his call-up papers for labour service, in what was known as a supply unit. It was the army, he said, but an army where a soldier wears a yellow badge and doesn’t have a gun.

  ‘But we’ll talk about that tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Today is enough. By the way, the workmen are coming this afternoon to fix that boy’s window. Satisfied now?’

  I sat at the table and transcribed my morning’s work, while Sándor went into the bedroom and spoke on the phone for a long time to someone he evidently knew very well and to whom he was an indulgent father, but still the boss, the one in charge, who gave instructions, but did not receive them.

  ‘In the middle of the night is best,’ he said. ‘And no monkey business, just in, and then out. You understand?’

  Two small piles of paper were building up, the original and the carbon. ‘How many pages do we have?’ he asked. I checked. Forty-six.

  ‘Good, and we’re not even at the beginning of the beginning,’ he said. ‘This is going to be some book.’

  He gave me my £8 in an envelope. ‘Now I’m going to Soho, to Maison Bertaux, where they do a strawberry gâteau like you never seen. You know that place?’

  ‘Is that the one on Greek Street?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘I had a chocolate éclair from there once, it was scrumptious.’

  ‘Well, this will be even better. You wait and see. Don’t eat too much breakfast tomorrow.’

  ‘OK.’

  Down in the hall, Claude was letting himself in at the front door. He was wearing a guard’s uniform and a peaked hat, which cast a partial shadow over his upper face. The jacket was too big for him, it swamped his shoulders, as if it was a child’s garment that a parent buys confident he will ‘grow into it’. I felt sorry for him that his job should force him to wear clothes of such ugliness.

  ‘You again,’ I said. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be at work?’

  ‘I am, I’m on a course but we’re on a wildcat strike so I came home.’

  ‘How can you be on strike? You haven’t started yet.’

  ‘Well, it’s the union, that’s what they said. Anyway, I’ve got to go and buy a bicycle.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘To get to work. I’m going to be on the Northern line and the depot where we start is at Golders Green.’

  ‘So why can’t you get the tube?’

  ‘Are you thick?’ It was true, I had no practical intelligence, my head was full of ideas and feelings. He was standing there laughing at me, under his peaked cap. His eyes were sea blue, as Alexander’s had been, but not looking up, sightlessly, trying to bore through the lid of a mahogany box.

  ‘That jacket looks itchy.’

  ‘It is, I’m fucking dying to get it off.’

  A workman came up the steps, holding a toolbox and a pane of glass and asked for flat five.

  I was very surprised to find that I had some influence with my uncle, for the discussion of the window had been, on my part, more of an abstraction, in order to determine whether or not he was as bad a man as the papers made out. I didn’t believe that I had won the argument about the rights and wrongs of fixing broken windows, but thought that this was some kind of personal gift, like the cream cakes and the tango dancing dress–his helpless, eager desire to please.

  But Claude, looking at me as the glazier manoeuvred the pane into the tiny room, said, ‘You’ve got him twisted round your little finger, haven’t you?’

  ‘There’s hardly any room to swing a kitty-cat in here,’ the glazier said. ‘Call this a flat?’

  ‘Pitiful, isn’t it. Do you want to go out in the garden for a bit, Miranda? It’s not bad out.’

  The afternoons were long, after my sessions with my uncle. I would see a film, or walk in Hyde Park, or come home, shut the door of my bedroom and read.

  ‘How do you get there?’

  ‘There’s a door, but he always keeps it locked, I just go out the window and jump.’

  The glazier had removed the broken pane and was preparing the putty. ‘Look, it’s just a little drop,’ he said. ‘I’ll go first then I’ll catch you, but I’m going to get changed first.’

  He was looking at me all the time he was pulling his arms out of the guard’s jacket and replacing it with the leather one which hung on a hook behind the door. Looking as the white T-shirt underneath rode up above the belt of his serge trousers and I saw his stomach, pale, the dark hairs rising up from below, the shadows the abdominal muscles cast across his skin. Looking as he pulled the trousers down, stepped out of them and put on his drainpipe jeans. Looking to see if I was looking at the white underpants. I turned my head away, ashamed.

  ‘Are you coming or what?’ he said, half smiling with that sultry mouth, the little teeth biting the lower lip, reddening it. ‘Make your mind up. I’m going down anyway.’

  I watched him crouch on the window ledge on his haunches, then jump, lightly like a cat, landing on all fours, stand up again and raise his arms.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he shouted back up at me. ‘I’m good at catching.’

  I felt the metallic excitement in my mouth of the unknown outcome. To turn back into the room, walk across the park, sit down on a bench, watch the water birds, then home to Benson Court, or raise myself on to the window ledge, and let myself fall.

  ‘Are you going to be there all day? Are you coming down or what?’

  ‘I don’t know, I—’

  And then I jumped. I fell down into his arms and they held me, they felt thin and hard, and now my face was against his skin that smelt of lemons mixed with an arousing odour of leather and warm zips. I was held. Then he released me.

  Down in the garden, the grass reached my knees, thistles reared up with jagged leaves and poisonous hairy stems, great tufts of coarse dock grew next to them. The dandelions were in various stages of their development, the sturdy, sunny flowers, then the ghostly clocks. In balder patches, buttercups and daisies struggled towards the sun. Old rose bushes were covered in last winter’s brown hips, and blasted red roses lay in tatters on the branches. Ivy was everywhere, and saplings growing up through the branches of a laburnum bush. Lines of mint sent out roots under the ground to colonise and strangle the lavender, which was jutting up its purple spikes. A tabby cat sat on the fence, and under the derelict trees lay the skeletons of baby birds, the tragic record of their first failed flight.

  I looked up at the house, to the many floors and the partitioned windows. Sándor’s was at the front, he couldn’t see me down here. I didn’t want him to see me. I didn’t wish to be observed by him. Not with this boy.

  It had rained early that morning, I’d heard the patter of the drops on my own window pane and turned over restlessly in my sleep. The damp grass had gone to seed and had shot up long pale green curled envelopes you pulled apart with your fingers to examine the tiny, hairy dots inside. It was still too wet to sit but Claude took off his leather jacket and laid it out for me to lie on.

  ‘This is nice,’ he said. ‘We haven’t got a garden at home, just a yard where we keep the bins. What about you?’

  There was the communal garden behind Benson Court. Gilbert sometimes took a drink out there in the early evening and fell asleep over a book, and a few ambitious remarks had spread around the building about holding a party to mark the Queen’s jubilee, perhaps with a marquee, but nothing had come of it, and we watched the whole thing on TV.

  ‘Yes, we’ve got a garden.’

  ‘Has it got flowerbeds?’

  ‘It does.’

&nbs
p; ‘What’s in them?’

  ‘Just flowers.’ I didn’t really know their names, apart from the obvious things like roses. When I was little, my mother came home one day with a packet of mustard and cress seeds and together we went out into the garden and I pressed them into the soil with my fingers. We waited for rain and then they came up. We cut the shoots and put them into egg sandwiches which I took to school. But then we tried hollyhock seeds and they failed, the shoots were sickly and died. I kept caterpillars in a pencil box but the look of them squirming and turning themselves into chrysalises made me sick. Then I learned to read, and the garden became the site of imaginary gymkhanas, and invented horses with elaborate names from my child’s book of Greek myths.

  I lay back in the grass. The triangular section of window pane was near my head like a garden mirror that had formed organically out of the soil, pushing its way to the surface. A few thin cirrus clouds moved quickly above me in the upper atmosphere, heading east towards the coast, running towards the Thames estuary and out to sea. Above the traffic, closer, more piercing and insistent, bird song. I think it might have been a thrush.

  ‘This is nice,’ Claude said. ‘I like it out here. The yard at our house stank of empty dog-food tins. Me–I can’t stand dogs.’

  ‘Me neither.’ Alexander’s house had smelt of them; it sickened me. ‘Where do you come from?’ I asked him.

  ‘Ever heard of the Isle of Sheppey?’

  ‘No. Where is it?’

  ‘It’s way out east, along the river, in the estuary. It’s not even far but no one knows about it, no one ever comes there, no visitors, no strangers. Apart from my mum and dad, they were immigrants to Sheppey. Which is good because then at least you know if there’s a road in, there’s got to be one out again. Unless you need a passport or something and the police turn you back when you try and get into Kent.’ The short laugh, without humour, like a hated dog’s bark.

  The more he talked about Sheppey, the more I felt I’d never heard of a more dismal place in my life. It was just marshes and prisons and docks and dog shit and wind and flatness. If you shouted, he said, the sound would carry for miles out to sea, but no one ever shouted unless they were scrapping in the street. The population was too depressed for raised voices.

  His father came over from Ireland after the war and his mother was from a family of Kent tinkers who settled on the island to sharpen knives and make eiderdowns out of the feathers of geese and ducks, and sometimes chickens which they stole from farms and ponds. She was a bathing beauty for a season, queen of Herne Bay, 1951, but never got any further in the contests. When they were hard up for ready cash, she’d go out with her friend and sell white heather, casting a gypsy spell on it for good luck and they came back laughing, jiggling change in the pockets of their cotton dresses.

  A childhood of church Sundays, pushed up the street to Mass by his father’s hand in the small of his back. His mother never went, she worshipped other gods with names no one recognised, in a language no one else spoke. The true Romany comes from India, he said, but he didn’t know what his mum was. She liked secrets. Still, she was a good mother to him, he missed her a lot.

  ‘What does your dad do?’

  ‘He works on the fruit docks but I think he’ll be made full-time redundant soon. That’s why they sent me off the island to get a job.’

  That was the story, in full. It only took a few minutes and I had a sudden perturbing sense of someone without a history, as I understood it; I mean thick history, the story of how lives get caught up in other people’s grander plans. A week ago, I too was a person without a history, but my uncle had changed all that.

  ‘So do you want to go to a party later?’

  ‘Me? Go to a party with you?’ I was startled by this proposition. He was just a boy on the ground floor, a victim of my uncle’s shysterish tendencies: a leather jacket and a tank of technicolour fish. When he smiled, two vertical lines appeared at the side of his mouth, but he didn’t smile much, was just prone to those sudden, abrupt bursts of laughter.

  ‘Yeah, why not? Do you think I’m too common to be seen with you?’

  ‘What kind of party?’

  ‘Too early to tell.’

  It started to rain again. A few drops on my face, then the bushes began to bend their leaves under the weight of the drops. The flowers turned their heads upwards to the sky, to drink. I shivered, then sneezed with a force that shook my bones and by this, and suddenly–with a sensation that smacks you on the back of the head like a wakening blow–I knew that I was alive, a person, not a wraith.

  ‘We have to go in,’ I said. ‘How do we get back?’

  ‘I climb up the drainpipe.’

  ‘I can’t do that.’

  ‘Then there’s the other way. Come on.’

  We stood up and he pulled aside a broken plank in the fence. We pushed our way through into the next garden, which was as overgrown as this one, and across it to another tumbledown fence, until we had passed four houses and arrived at an alley, which led on to the street and back to the front door of Sándor’s house.

  ‘So are you going to come tonight or what?’ he said, as I turned to walk to the tube station.

  ‘No, I…’ and then I sneezed again, four quick times, and this involuntary force which took hold of me reminded me yet again that I was not dead but alive. But alive to what end, what purpose? To live? ‘Maybe,’ I said.

  ‘Good. Eleven o’clock, under the arches at Hungerford bridge, I’ll see you there.’

  ‘Don’t count on it.’

  He gave me a quick, light kiss on the cheek, then jumped up three steps together and into the house.

  It was very hard in those days to stay up all night in London, you had to know where to look to find the young vampires, but the people who drove the trains and blew the whistles and closed and opened the doors saw the city differently from those of us who lived above ground. They were always in motion and lacked our mental limitations.

  I was apprehensive. I didn’t know how to behave or dress. You could not grow up here London without understanding that there was a secret city, a freaky underground that came out like glow-worms after dark, the muscle men, the lipsticked drag boys, the girls with green hair, dyed-blond platinum queens, gold-painted things of no obvious sex.

  Looking back over that summer, I remember almost everything I wore. I can recount my whole wardrobe, but this night is a blank. I changed and changed and changed until the bed was piled with discarded clothes, mountains of silks, crêpes, velvets, belts, scarves, high-heeled shoes, jeans, bell-bottom trousers, bras and knickers. Deep uncertainty about what to put on has wiped clean the memory’s slate and what the final choice was. Which is strange, because I recall everything else, vividly. I revisit it often when I have trouble sleeping.

  At Hungerford bridge, under the arches, where the down-and-outs and alkies lived, fires had been started from ignitable rubbish and the flames illuminated the dripping walls. Only a foot or two inside, the stench of urine smacked your lungs.

  And I was hammered too by the sight of him, in his leather jacket, leaning against a wall, marred only by the way his legs bowed backwards in his drainpipe jeans, as if they wanted to retreat while his body was advancing. His legs denied him gracefulness. But other than that, he could have been a model for a Da Vinci head, with hooded eyes, sharp nose and that perfect, sultry mouth.

  ‘Hope you’ve got your sea legs,’ he said, ‘we’re going on the river.’

  ‘You never said anything about a boat.’

  ‘I didn’t know, you never know until the last minute. Then you have to ring up and they tell you. That’s how it works, didn’t I say?’

  But he had said almost nothing. He was a master of knowing evasion.

  The vessel we boarded was a dredger. The sound of the machinery churned beneath us as we pushed off from the Embankment, evacuating the river silt. ‘Are we allowed to be on here?’ I said.

  ‘Not really.’

 
; It was a strange kind of party. There was no music, no drinks, just a restless anarchy on board, a depraved beauty. A girl had painted her lips silver and bared her breasts in the night air, the nipples swollen and purple as grapes. A boy had tied his legs together with chains and padlocks, a punk Houdini. A lot of drugs were available, mainly pills. ‘This one’s nice,’ Claude said, sorting them in the palm of his hand. ‘That one you can fly on, but I’m scared of flying. This is the one you want, to keep you up.’

  I had only smoked a few joints, at university. The pills made me nervous, with their many chemical colours. I would have preferred a glass of wine but there was no wine, just these alien characters standing on the rusty deck, the sky black, the moon coming and going in the gaps between the clouds.

  ‘Take it,’ Claude said. ‘Go on.’

  I shook my head.

  ‘I’m not carrying you home through the streets because you’re half asleep.’

  ‘I don’t want to stay up all night. I never agreed, I didn’t—’

  ‘Take it,’ he said, tenderly, and put his fingers to my lips and parted them. ‘You’ve got really pretty teeth, all white and pearly and straight. Open wide, go on. Go on.’ My tongue flicked out and licked his finger. It could not help itself. He smiled. ‘That’s nice.’ He laid the pill on my tongue and it went down easy.

  I felt I had been drugged, that even before I took the tablet from him I was out of my mind. It was the night, and the river and the smell of his skin. I was turned on by him. It was bizarre, it was crude, it was so incredibly surprising.

  The drug was his masculinity, his poise and certainty, his sexual certainty and that there was nothing to know about him. Sheppey Island, Sheerness. The fruit docks. The mother with her knives and feathers. The photograph on a mantelpiece of the swimsuit, a sash and a crown. The father in the kitchen reading the paper. The pulley and the smell of damp vests drying in the heat of the coal fire. That’s all.