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

  Or there was a third take on the situation: that they were just teenage thugs who enjoyed beating up niggers and queers to get a taste of White Power in their parched mouths.

  Myself, I had no opinion. I didn’t have the means to arrive at any conclusions, other than hearsay.

  Now, no one in my family had ever joined a movement or a party. The Kovacs went on living, they had this capacity to adapt to circumstance, either by leaving the country like my father, or working out ways and means of beating the system as far as they could, as my uncle had worked up the pimping side of his business when he was forced out of real estate by the race laws. The bigger picture didn’t interest them. They were not ideologically driven in any particular direction, communist or Zionist, it was just a matter of keeping your head above water until the flood subsided, as they believed it eventually would. Even in the labour service, my uncle was never involved in plans to escape or mutiny. The ‘look out for number one’ quality was too ingrained in him, and he wasn’t given to romantic or quixotic gestures.

  All over London a badge with this design on it began to appear on people’s clothes, pinned to lapels, dresses, jumpers, shirts:

  At first I had no idea what it meant and had to ask someone standing at a bus stop. He took a leaflet out of his shoulder bag and that explained everything.

  It seemed to me that it was the least I could do, to avenge my uncle’s horrible suffering, to join this organisation, this league, and fight the Fascists here in London.

  What an eye-opener that was. As if my eyes really had been shut and my parents’ paranoia had some substance.

  I was sent to stand outside pubs and hand out my own leaflets. They received a varied response. Human nature is not necessarily a pretty sight, close up. You see walking towards you a perfectly respectable man with his dog with a running nose and a poorly leg–a dog which he pats and says, Poor lad, you’ve been in the wars haven’t you? So although you are afraid of dogs, and particularly don’t like the smell of this one, which is sick, you bend down to touch its rough fur and force a smile and try to hand its owner the leaflet. Which he examines, then tells you that dusky immigrants, monkeys barely down from the trees, are going to swamp the white race, Enoch Powell was dead right, and did you know they pushed their stinking turds through old ladies’ letterboxes, he’d set his dog on them when Buster got better, he was training him to smell a nig-nog, ha ha.

  I would come home and find my mother handing me sheets of paper covered in messages in her strange, erect Mittel European handwriting: Mick telephoned, he says, urgent you must come to the Red Lion with the leaflets and give them to Claire. And Dave has the money to give you to give to Steve which they need to pay for the printing. And on Saturday you have to assemble on a corner, the one he says you know, at Old Street. ‘And who are these people, these Micks and Daves and what kind of family do they come from? A good family? Do you know? Vivien, I’m talking to you!’

  Sándor was concerned only to protect Eunice. ‘She must come and live here, with me,’ he said. ‘Wood Green where her flat is, it’s not a good neighbourhood for her. Those people are all over the place. But she won’t come, she won’t live with me, she says it’s not respectable. What can I do?’

  ‘Is this what it was like in Hungary with the Arrow Cross?’ I said.

  ‘This? Ha, ha. Nothing will ever come of these people, they’re scum. They like to make a big noise, that’s it, and you deal with them the same way you deal with any scum, anywhere.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Well, you know, on their own terms.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘You fight fire with fire, what can I say?’

  I told him I had joined an organisation. ‘Very nice,’ he said. ‘And what do you do in this organisation?’

  ‘I hand out leaflets outside pubs.’

  ‘Oh! A leaflet, very good. I feel safe now, and so will Eunice when I tell her.’

  But I didn’t care. You only had to remember four things about the Front (though nearly thirty years later I can’t recollect what three of them were: only what they said about themselves–The National Front is a racialist front. I still don’t know the difference between racist and racialist, though I’m certain it was once explained to me). The content of my leaflets spoke for itself, I had nothing to add. Out on the street with the leaflets, I could talk to anyone as long as I kept to what was on the piece of paper and didn’t get sidetracked into other discussions. This single-minded insistence on one topic was not easy for me, I wandered away from the point, I was told, and was too easily led into other people’s agendas. But I stuck with it. I went out every weekday evening leafleting. I picked up discarded leaflets from the pavement, I rescued screwed-up leaflets from litter bins, smoothed them out and came home and ironed them so they could be distributed again tomorrow. I went everywhere with those sheets of paper, anywhere they sent me. I’d even go across the river, south, to Lewisham, Brixton, Tooting, Morden, places that were just names to me on the tube map. The world radiated outwards from Benson Court, and the mansion block on Marylebone High Street became just a pin-prick, a dot, an intersection.

  The dirt of London was under my nails and the dust of its pavements under the soles of my shoes. These were my streets, this was my territory. The slight incline of a hill beneath the concrete slabs of civilisation, a hill with an old stream, a meadow buried under traffic got inside my own body’s navigation system. I had a right, I felt, at last to say that I belonged here.

  To belong to a place, now that is really something. No Kovacs ever felt that before!

  There came a morning when I was holding the hairdryer in my hand as I straightened my bush of black hair, looking in the mirror at myself, and thinking, What would it be like if I didn’t have that jungle round my face? And all these bloody old clothes. Claude laughed at them. He thought they were completely weird and I realised that what had begun as a liberation from my parents had turned into just an affectation.

  It was a complicated manoeuvre, what I was trying to do. Whenever I try to describe this early part of my life to people I feel that they don’t have a clue, or maybe I don’t know how to explain myself properly. I was a kind of embryo that can’t make its mind up if it’s going to be a chicken, a carrot or an Australian bushman. It keeps acquiring feathers, then turning orange, then growing skin. I look back on that fragile, uncertain young self with some humour and some compassion. I can sympathise with the young Vivien, even though the lengths she went to to try and form herself into a person now seem so absurd. But that’s it, being young–you’re free to be ridiculous, to wear hideous clothes because they’re all the rage, and to strike attitudes and postures. You see yourself in those old photographs and you wince, when what you should do is touch the glassy paper with your finger and try to revive inside you the naïve audacity you have at twenty.

  Claude said, ‘Why don’t you let me cut your hair? I can do it. I’m handy that way.’

  For the black bush, he said, got on his nerves, he couldn’t see my face. Our relationship was erotic, and nothing else. We were definitively sex objects for each other. He read the leaflets I gave him, and he looked at them with little interest. Politics gave him a headache. ‘We have a few of those around our way,’ he said, finally, under pressure. ‘They all have heads that look like they was boiled. A lot of them have dogs, and I told you, I fucking hate bow-bows.’

  Ours was not a relationship of shared interests or exchanges of views, we didn’t even talk about music. Claude was a pill-popper, a speed freak and, apart from his coloured fish, he had no hobbies. The marshy dampness of the Isle of Sheppey ran through his veins, and the sharp-eyed instincts of his tinker forebears. He was always looking out for an advantage.

  If anything interested him, it was his own body. He was saving up to get himself an elaborate tattoo, had already drawn experimental sketches in a notebook he would not show me. ‘It’s gonna be big,’ he said, ‘and all over my shoulder, that’s t
he bit I’m sure about. You can’t get rid of a tattoo so it’s got to be bang on target. You’ve got to be dead sure, but by the time I’ve got the money together I will be.’

  He had a strong sexual curiosity, would paint his face, using the little mirror of my tarnished gold powder compact, and his male hardness dissolved into a disturbing androgyny. When he was at work in his guard’s uniform, I’d dress up in his jeans and leather jacket and when he came home he would have to beg me to take them off so we could go for a drink to the pub. Not because he didn’t want to be seen with me dressed like that but because he had nothing else to wear. Get your own bloody jeans, he said. They suit you better than those ratty dresses.

  So he wanted to cut my hair, he was sure he could do it. I sat down on the edge of his bed with a towel round my neck, while he knelt behind me with a pair of scissors, held that dense, wiry mane in his strong fingers and hacked it off. There was no mirror in the room, just hair everywhere, hair drifting across the floor, floating like dead pieces of myself. Hair got inside the crevices of my body, in my mouth, my ears, my nose, under my fingernails and inside my socks, settling between my toes. Hair floated on the surface of the fish tank. The shorter the hair on my head got, the more I felt full of suppressed emotion, tearful, like the prisoner who is released from jail after a twenty-year sentence, free at last from the neurotic, slightly mad girl carefully nurtured in the dusty corridors of Benson Court.

  The mirror of my gold compact could not do justice to the violent transformation that had come over me, the inch of black halo, the dark shadow on the upper lip, the kohl-fringed eyes, the slash of red across the mouth.

  ‘Fantastic,’ Claude said. ‘You look the business now. You should get some monkey boots. Go and show the fishes.’

  We went to bed, struggling and thrashing on its narrow platform. I fell asleep for a while. Maybe snakes and butterflies and other things which change from one form to another have to have a rest after the strenuous endeavour to alter themselves, both inside and out. I slept heavily, one of those descents straight into dreamless blackness.

  When I woke up, Claude was looking through my handbag and I watched him for a while, though narrow slits of eyelids. He pushed my lipstick up and down in its tube, stared at his face in the gold compact mirror, and then examined all the bits and pieces in my wallet. I thought he was going to take the eight pound notes that my uncle had paid me, but he merely counted them, licking the tips of his fingers, then put them back, with care. No corpse-robbing today, I thought, then pretended to wake, stretching my arms out towards him, and he put the bag down and came back to lie next to me, stroking my hair this way and that, like iron filings.

  My uncle got it into his head that he wanted to hold a birthday party for me, in his garden. I was going to be twenty-five. His plan was to bring in workmen to clear the ground, raze the weeds and saplings, push back the bushes and erect a marquee. He even thought of hiring a dance band for the occasion or, failing that, borrowing the large sound system that they used at the dance classes. The birthday party plan was part of his show-off side, the man who had once owned a house in Millionaires’ Row, who had flown first class to New York in 1961 and had seen Eartha Kitt perform live at Carnegie Hall. The love of indulgence, of cream cakes and fleshy whores, had been there before he became a slave in the Ukraine, but when he was no longer a slave, it returned with ferocity. He had a hunger, a greed, for life, for material possessions. Food, luxuries, flesh. Then fourteen years back in prison. His existence was a series of heavens and hells.

  So he dreamed my birthday party. He was no longer a millionaire, and even when he had been, most of it existed only on paper; but he was not poor, and he had nothing to spend his money on. Whatever else you could say about my uncle, he was never a miser. It wasn’t money he loved, but what you could buy with it. Wealth for its own sake didn’t interest him.

  I did not believe he was serious about the party until workmen arrived with sawing equipment, scythes, a flamethrower, gallon plastic jugs of weedkiller, and shears. The dandelions, daisies, buttercups, saplings, the tightening ivy, the lines of mint sending their underground runners through the fence, the fence itself with its rotting boards, were obliterated. Bald earth with a few tufts of bleeding, wounded grass, the lilac bush and an ash tree were all that was left. The following day after this scorched earth policy had reached its conclusion, they came back, dug a hole, and planted a flowering cherry tree which they promised would burst into blossom the following spring.

  I don’t know if Eunice tried to dissuade him from his increasingly elaborate ideas. He was hurt by her jealousy. I was all he had; I was the one who would redeem him, not just through the relating of his story, the book he really imagined would be printed and published and for sale in bookshops, but through an enduring memory in another mind, a sense that he was as much a father to me as his brother. Or even more so. For he must have understood that I was closer to him on the scale of human extravagance and lust for living than to the pale bespectacled jeweller in the dusty suit who counted out his days through the shadow land of the TV screen.

  And he was right. I am like him. I do bear all his faults.

  So the plans for the party took shape. A marquee was booked; Eunice arranged the catering.

  ‘Do you mind,’ my uncle asked, ‘if I invite some of my associates? I want them to see what a beautiful secretary I have, and what a book she is going to make of me. Of my life.’

  ‘Sure,’ I said, amused at his hubris. The party seemed to me to be a farce, I didn’t know if anyone would come. But Sándor was inviting everyone, Jim from the dance class and the instructor with the double-sided crocodile handbag. ‘We’re going to have an exhibition tango,’ he said.

  ‘What are you going to wear?’ Eunice said. ‘You look more of a beatnik than ever.’

  ‘Well, of course,’ said my uncle, ‘we’ll take you to the shop to buy you a dress. Special for the occasion.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ I said, ‘I have a dress, the one you bought me.’

  ‘No, no, you have to have a new dress. Oh, and by the way, will you invite your parents?’

  ‘Why not?’

  Even though they had never been friends, not even in childhood, I believed they should be brought together again. And then I found out that this was exactly what my grandmother would have wanted and that it was up to me, the next generation on, to carry out her last wishes.

  It was her death, in November 1956, which brought him here to London, not the failed uprising against the Soviet tanks. A tumour had grown unnoticed in her chest; no hand had touched or caressed it since her husband had been taken off for labour service in 1939. She lay in the hospital ill and frail, and said, ‘Son, go and find your brother, go and be with him, my two children belong together. Go,’ she said, ‘go.’

  She cherished the letters my father sent her from the end of the war onwards, in which he carefully stuck to generalities and avoided any mention of his life in London, to avoid the censor’s pencil. This was the first time Sándor mentioned, obliquely, that he had a niece, waiting to see if I would take the bait, but I didn’t, not then. I was digesting the information that my grandmother had known all about me from my birth until I was three years old, when she died. She had a picture of me in a silver frame which stood on the little bureau in her apartment and came with her to the cancer hospital. I was there, with her when she died, Sándor said, both of us were: him and the little girl. He still had the photograph but not the frame, of course, he had to abandon that when he got out but the picture was inside his breast pocket, next to his heart, as he left Budapest.

  He would show it to me a week later, after the party–a piece of paper with deckled edges and me on it, a round-headed black-haired baby, held in my mother’s arms in our living room at Benson Court. I had forgotten how luminous my mother’s eyes once were and how softly shining her hair. A disembodied hand with manicured nails is on her shoulder: my father. I have no idea who took this picture
.

  On 1 December, two weeks after my grandmother died and her oldest son stood in the cemetery knowing that he was bound now to no one, that there was no one left alive who was once a Klein who came from Mád who was not ‘up the chimney’, he walked in the snow with a party of other refugees across the border into Austria, the army firing at them as they disappeared into the trees. It was easy for him, he said, ‘just a little stroll in the forest compared to what we did during the war, and this time with a good coat and boots’.

  A blizzard came down and covered their tracks. The lights of a village were visible ahead; the wind dropped, everything went silent. Someone said he thought he saw an eagle, and everyone laughed. How could there be an eagle, which was a bird in books and fairy stories? A child was wiping his nose with his sleeve, and his mother began to tell him off for ruining a good jacket with snot. My uncle was thinking of all the girls he had ever slept with, and their names, the order they came in. The one with the wig because her hair fell out, the one with the crippled foot, the one with the deformed hand, and he suddenly realised that he was drawn to females who were disfigured in some slight way, not quite perfect or whole. He wondered why. But he was not of introspective disposition and he dropped the thought.

  They crossed the border. My uncle saw the West for the first time. Was given a new suit. He spent a couple of weeks in a refugee camp; then Vienna and the journey in a railway carriage to what he had never seen before, a coast. The sea. Grey, furrowed. Unstable. The ferry, making landing at Dover, and the steam train north to London. A beautiful clear, bright day, frosty and cold, he said. Overwhelmed by everything outside the window, the steam billowing across the lemon sun, and inside the carriage the maroon plush seat he sat on, damp from his excitement.