Dark Lies the Island (12 page)

‘A pleasure,’ he said.

Rainbow played a ragga step-out on the sound system and could be heard back there to gurgle and hiss and his sister called to him to keep it down, would you, boy, and she too was called a bloodclat. Rainbow, in a huff, then left the flat, screaming vengeance from his blue lips.

He was alone with the sister. She was not a shy girl by any means and she turned her doleful eyes to him and here, sure enough, and now – yes – this was where the heart might be spoken of.

‘Each morning,’ she said, ‘he’d wake me up with his dick in my back. That was lovely.’ He was a skinhead, she said, and it was the first time ever she had been with one of those. Definitely it was love, she said, there was no question about that. She exhaled a heavy greenish smoke that lingered and he felt a tingle from her look.

‘But then he start coming home later,’ she said, ‘didn’t
he
, and I’m, like, what the fuck? And was days he didn’t come home at all. And nights. I said you got another an’ she stashed someplace?’

Her features flashed a hard look as she revealed the skinhead’s treachery.

‘Turn out he was sticking his dick in more than one back,’ she said. ‘Turn out he couldn’t keep it away from backs.’

As he sat and listened, as they smoked the weed together and sipped at their tins of Red Stripe, he found himself growing angry. It was the way that she kept talking about dicks.

‘I’m not one of your girls,’ he said at last.

‘You what?’

‘You’re talking to me like I’m one of the girls,’ he said. ‘It’s dick this, dick that, and dick the other. You’re talking to me as if I don’t have one myself. You’re talking to me as if I’m not even here. You’re talking to me as if I’m not even a possibility.’

‘You’re not,’ she said.

‘No?’

‘You’re depress’,’ she said.

He walked with the weed back to the terrace house. The Excelsior lager was busily washing down the gullies of the Connemara men a feed of chips and saveloys from the homicidal takeaway on the corner – someone had managed to walk. He had at this hour
presumed
the burp odour of low-grade meat products on the air, but even so it was a trial, and he sat among it feeling dickless and wild. The only way not to smell the saveloys was to eat one and quickly he succumbed.

‘I’m after a run-in with a Jamaican bird,’ he said. ‘She had some arse on her now.’

The Connemara men ignored him. They watched a quiz show as they ate. There was heavy breathing in the room between mouthfuls, much too heavy for the ages of these men. Soon the heavy fug of the marijuana was laid atop the meat odour and also there was the sour tang of the Excelsior that was warming at the bottom of tins.

‘She’d want to phone a friend here?’

‘She would and all.’

‘Tits on it?’

‘Diddy wank.’

The babyish interest that was taken in the show was too much for him. He went to the bathroom out back for a wash and a think. He attempted to arouse himself with thoughts of Rainbow’s sister but it would not take. Depress’ is right, he said. He’d show the bitch depress’ if he got a chance. No he wouldn’t.

‘Anyone for the Ducks?’ he asked on returning to the room.

But there were no other takers for the local and he walked there alone. The dank streets of east London, in low January, and he trod a purposeful beat, with the shoulders held erectly, for show. The atmosphere at the Ducks as he entered its bar-room was rancorous.

‘If you want me to stand up out of my seat,’ growled an old Irish, ‘then I’ll do it, and I’ll knock seven types of fucken shite out of you while I’m at it.’

The Irish wanted to watch the dog racing from Walthamstow on the satellite buy-in.

‘You was born ignorant,’ said an old West Indian. ‘It’s your poor wife I feel pain for. She deserve better. A good-lookin’ lady. And she get hersel’ a pig for a man.’

The West Indian wanted to watch the cricket from Barbados.

The breakdown across the bar-room of the Ducks was about evens. The clacking of dominoes from the West Indian tables; the slow slurping of mystic Guinness from the Irish. The barman, a baleful English, argued for compromise, for the dogs to be let on a while, then a switch.

‘Don’t surprise me,’ the West Indian said, ‘that you come back up the pig-man. He who come in here, with his red face …’

The West Indian stood then – he was most elegantly waistcoated, he was dapper.

‘… he who come in here, in his
unpleasant
jacket.’

‘Leave a man’s clothes out of it,’ the Irish said.

This would go on for the night, he knew, and so he moved through to the lounge, where the slot machine garbled and the pool balls conversed in great agitation. He bought a pint bottle of Magners – ‘the taste of summer’– and he poured half of it to a glass filled with ice. The lounge began to fill up. The night was climbing up itself. One bottle gave onto the next; the first three were distinct, come the fourth they began to blur. The lounge was full of lively young creatures laden with trinkets and jaunty with menace. There was a bus organised for a nightclub in Essex. Eyes rolled up in their heads. The whites of eyes were everywhere conspicuous.

It was not so long until he was seeing double. Twice the shaven heads and twice the pool balls, and every image mirrored in the mirrors behind the bar was doubled again and he had to shut one eye tightly for the crowd to halve in number. It was in such a condition that he saw her come
across
the lounge. The illusion held for the usual dream of a moment but then persisted. She broke through the field of his myopia and kept on coming. And then she was leaning down to him, there in his chair, in the lounge of the fucking Ducks, in fucking Leytonstone, and she was saying:

‘Daniel?’

He wasn’t sure about trying out some words. He opened the shut eye and the world threatened to double up again but to his relief it held.

‘Ah Jesus,’ he said, and he tried to make it sound as casual as possible.

She laughed and leaned closer again – he could smell her – and she kissed his cheek.

‘I knew you were east somewhere,’ she said, ‘but Jesus!’

‘What the fuck are you doing here?’

The shock of it sobered him. She pulled up a stool beside. She crossed her legs.

‘My uncle died,’ she said. ‘He was Leyton?’

‘Only down the road,’ he said, and he ran a hand through his hair.

‘I know,’ she said. ‘I just walked it with my cousins. How’re you, Daniel?’

‘It’s like I’m trippin’,’ he said. ‘On fucken mushrooms or something?’

‘You’re not still at that caper?’ she said.

‘Hardly,’ he said. ‘Since.’

‘How’ve you been, Daniel?’

‘Making steady progress, all told,’ he said.

‘Still a bit of a rocket, I’d say … Jesus, this is unreal!’

‘It’s bizarre,’ he agreed.

She looked around, uncertainly:

‘Who’re you with?’

‘I’m on my own.’

‘Ah, Daniel, on a Saturday night?’

It was three whole months they had been together. Then she took the heart out of him and ate it.

‘Jesus,’ he said.

‘And here we are,’ she said.

‘Daniel and Alicia,’ he said. ‘Long time since those names been seen in consort.’

‘Consort!’ she said. ‘There you go with your words.’

‘Well this is it,’ he said.

‘You’re skinny,’ she said. ‘Are you looking after yourself?’

‘Ah I am.’

‘Where are you living?’

‘Place called Matcham Road. Grand, just around the corner. Sharing a house there. It’s grand.’

‘Who’re you sharing with?’

‘Lads from Connemara,’ he said.

‘Uh-oh,’ she said.

‘Ah they’re grand. They like their Excelsior.’

‘Their what?’

‘It’s a hard lager. Super-strength. Come out of the can it’s the colour of honey.’

‘And you’re working?’

‘IT.’

‘Good money?’

‘Grand.’

‘Are you okay, Daniel?’

‘Why do you keep asking me am I fucken okay?’

‘What, I’m sorry, it’s just …’

‘Just what, Lish?’

‘You look sad.’

‘Would you not be,’ he said, ‘when I’m seeing you every day?’

He hadn’t sobered.

‘When I see you come walking the street towards me and below in Stratford station and I see you in all the offices?’

‘Daniel?’ she said. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘I’ve seen you in the park,’ he said. ‘And I can’t come home because I’ll see you there for sure and I know you don’t want me.’

‘Ah Daniel.’

‘And I don’t want to put you out,’ he said.

He leaned forward and sipped from his Magners. She wasn’t getting up from that in a hurry.

‘I’ve to go,’ she said.

‘Ah yeah.’

‘We’re going to a disco in Essex someplace.’

‘Party bus,’ he said. ‘Massive.’

‘Don’t want to really, it’s just my cousins.’

‘Party bus,’ he said, ‘and the uncle still warm in the ground.’

‘Daniel,’ she said, ‘you’re so funny.’

She moved in and she kissed his cheek again and he closed his eyes.

‘I’ll see you around home sometime,’ she said. ‘Be careful!’

‘Right so,’ he said.

He drank his cider. The vision doubled on him again. Let them all off to their party bus. The bell rang for one more and he opened his eyes and stood uncertainly and he walked towards the bar. He didn’t know how many Magners he was after.

The barman sucked his lips as though in warning as Daniel approached.

‘You sure?’

‘Listen,’ Daniel said. ‘Will you tell me something straight up please. Was I just talking to a girl there?’

‘The black-haired piece?’ the barman winced. ‘Ooh. She was a sort. How’s it you know her? She work community Outreach?’

‘Okay,’ said Daniel. ‘Magners.’

‘What about half a lager?’

‘Better plan,’ Daniel said.

He walked home a while later. What had earlier been clear sky had clouded over and now it was unseasonably mild. There was no gainsaying the past. With all else that had happened, he had held her too, and that could not be taken away. He turned in the gate of number 126 to see what way they were getting on inside with the Excelsior.

DOCTOR SOT

LATE IN JANUARY
, Doctor Sot felt the bad headaches come on again and he drank John Jameson whiskey against them. The naggins slipped pleasingly into a compartment of his leather satchel but they needed frequent replacing and he thought it best not to replace them always from the same off-licence in town. He aimed the car for the 24-hour Tesco on the outskirts of town. A cold morning was coloured iron-grey on the hills above town – brittle and hard the winter had been, and it was such clear, piercing weather that brought on the headaches. The heater in his eleven-year-old Megane juddered bravely against the cold but inadequately and his fingers on the wheel had the look of a corpse’s. Steady nips of the Jameson, he found, kept in check the visions of which these headaches were often the presage.

The Megane had a personality. It was companionable and long-suffering and he had named it Elizabeth for his mother. Car and mother had in common a martyr’s perseverance and a lack of natural advantages.

‘Small devil loose inside my head, Liz,’ said Doctor Sot, ‘and it’s like he’s scraping a blade in there, the little bastard.’

As he crossed the hump-back bridge over the White Lady’s River he whistled the usual three-note sequence for luck, a
bare
melody, and he sucked in his cheeks against the pain. He groped inside the satchel for a naggin. He wedged the naggin between his thin thighs. He unscrewed the top and fate dug a pothole and the pothole caused the Megane to jolt. The jolt splashed whiskey onto the trousers of his Harris tweed.

‘Oh thank you very much,’ said Doctor Sot.

He checked the mirrors before raising the naggin. Clear. And it was just his own eyes in there, which was a relief. Mirrors, typically, were more troublesome for Doctor Sot earlier in the morning. He drained what was left of the whiskey and great vitality raged through him and he tossed the empty naggin in back.

‘Another dead soldier, Liz,’ he said, and with his grey lips he bugled a funeral death march.

The Tesco at eleven this weekday morning was quiet and the quietness for Doctor Sot had an eerie quality. As he walked the deserted aisles, wincing against the bright colours of the products, he felt like the lone survivor in the wake of an apocalypse. What would you do with yourself? All the fig rolls on earth wouldn’t be a consolation. So taken was he with this grim notion he walked into a display of teabags and sent the boxes flying. He was upset to have knocked them and got down on his hands and knees to remake the stack in a neat triangle. He felt the hot threat of a urine seepage. He summoned his deepest reserves to staunch it – he was wearing, after all, his finest tweeds.

‘Well this is a nice bag of sticks,’ he said.

The seeping was tiny – a mercy – and the boxes of tea were at least in some manner restacked. He proceeded with
as
much nonchalance as he could muster. From the bakery counter he picked up a chocolate cake for his wife, Sal, who was the happiest woman alive. Also he placed in his basket some mouthwash, a family pack of spearmint gum and eight naggins of the John Jameson. A patient, Tim Lambert, appeared gormlessly around an aisle’s turn with a duck-shaped toilet freshener in his hand.

‘Tricks with you, Doctor O’Connor?’ he enquired.

Doctor Sot put his basket on the floor and went into a boxer’s swaying crouch. He jabbed playfully at the air around the old man’s head.

‘You’re goin’ down and you’re stayin’ down, Lambert!’ he cried.

Tim Lambert laughed, and then he eyed, for the full of his mouth, the contents of the doctor’s basket. Sot picked up the basket and primly moved on, the humour gone from him. The consolation was that Lambert’s lungs wouldn’t see out the winter – he had told no lie. Oh and he knew full well what they all called him behind his back. He knew it because another of his elderly patients, Rita Cryan, was gone in the head and had forgotten that the nickname was slanderous and meant to be secret.