Fallout (3 page)

The dayroom was huge, with randomly placed chairs, a piano and primeval-looking potted plants leaning against the tall panes of limescaled glass. There were a few rugs scattered over the lino and finned iron radiators. Luke stood in the doorway with the corridor stretching away behind him. There were the normal sounds of people talking or humming to themselves; doors banged and clattered as patients were taken from one place to another and a radio somewhere played classical music – of a kind – relentless, cheerful; the sort of music you would march to.

He could not see his mother. He forced himself to look more calmly. There. She was in a chair near the piano. Very often relief was worse than crisis. He wished he were more defended. His hands shook as he fetched the piano stool, carried it to her side and sat down.

The corner of her mouth was shining with saliva and her hair had not been brushed. She took a moment to register his arrival, and her speech was slurred.

‘Oh, I thought you were Dr Herrick,’ she said.

Then she smiled for him.

‘No,’ said Luke. He handed her the hairbrush from the bag at her side. She took it and held it loosely.

‘I got another detention yesterday,’ he said.

She began to brush her hair, slowly.

‘I forgot my French book,’ said Luke, ‘and then didn’t listen.’

The silence dragged. But then she said, ‘You should teach
him
French, silly man.’ And, after searching her mind, ‘Mr
Gordon
.’

Luke let out his breath. He hadn’t realised he was holding it.

‘Yes,’ he said, quietly, ‘Mr Gordon.’

When he left, Maudy winked at him. ‘See? She was all right, your mam?’ she said.

He should have liked to grab her and kiss her, brown teeth and all, and forgot everything that had just happened, picturing it. He liked the way the buttons gaped over her bust. He hoped he wouldn’t have a lifelong obsession with girls in nurses’ uniforms because of Seston Asylum. It wasn’t exactly original; not the sort of sexual neurosis you could stand behind. It didn’t help that the well-thumbed magazines boys smuggled into school were so preoccupied with them.

‘See you Wednesday then,’ said Lynne as he went.

‘See ya,’ he said.

He didn’t pause. He needed to get home.

He got off the bus in the high street, pulled a string bag out of his satchel, found money in the bottom – mixed up with fluff and pencils – and bought fish for tea. Mr Bradley in the off-licence sold Luke vodka despite his school uniform because if he didn’t his father came down and shouted at him in Polish. Neither Luke nor Mr Bradley wanted that particular embarrassment again.

The headmaster had said,
The Oxbridge term is a rigorous one, and many of you will not be suited to it. Discuss it with your parents
. . .

He walked home with his satchel and the string bag bumping and passed an hour’s joyful immersion in the French Revolution at the kitchen table before frying the fish and cutting bread to go with it. His father came in as Luke put down their plates and sat, leaving his half-smoked cigarette on a saucer next to his place.

Some of your parents may have questions. Any boy whose mother or father would like to speak to me should make an appointment with the secretary.

‘Thank you, Lucasz. Good boy,’ said Tomasz as he wiped his plate clean with a piece of bread. He stood up, slowly pushing his chair back, took his cigarette, vodka bottle and glass, and left the room. Luke cleared up and waited for his father to use the toilet outside and go upstairs then he followed him, washed, and went up himself.

In his room, he stood by his bed and said his rosary. For years Tomasz had insisted Luke attend mass, but had stopped going to church and now never spoke of his faith, or its lack. Nor would he talk about the past, never spoke of his former comrades, or his wartime experience. When he first came to England Hélène had been left behind in France, in the soup kitchen queue that stretched from Calais to Paris, and it was a year before she was allowed to join him. His squadron had been billeted outside Seston, at the asylum – the same building where almost ten years later she was to become a permanent patient. The irony and oddity of the hospital being sometime home to both his parents did not escape Luke. The irony could not escape him, but it was his home, too.

You may come to me or Mr Whiteson before half-term regarding your applications, which are in a special box in alphabetical order in Miss Higson’s office. Don’t forget to collect, please. And don’t slack off now, boys, it isn’t the time.

He had gleaned only the numbers of his mother’s life. One son; one husband; one stillbirth; two miscarriages; two suicide attempts . . . His birth had been fierce proof to her of unquenchable life, she said, and she had given him a name to span three countries. Lucas. Lucasz. Luke. She had named him for luck and light, but he could not see beyond the present. His invalid parents. The tiny house. The labyrinthine hospital; he was made up of these parts. Tomasz would not visit his mother and she had nobody else but Luke.

He stood listening to his thoughts and then he nodded, because he had told himself he wouldn’t be going to university, and smiled, because it was sort of funny that he had ever thought he might.

So Luke chose the paper mill over the colliery and his childhood ended.

He was a junior assistant clerk making £2/10 shillings a week. He worked from 8.30 until 5.30 and visited Hélène every other day.

At school he had been punished for his energy, set to do sports and extra work, and had embraced it as a distraction and challenge. The exercise had helped him sleep. Now he was older the night-times were vaguer and darker but the world was too dark a place already, and agony easily come by, and so he would put the light on and write. He had no axe to grind, no wound to pick at; he found, had always found, an intense joy in blissful escape. He was a scientist of the imagination; he could travel. He wrote poems and plays, hiding them under his bed from his own critical eyes, kept a diary and learned to play a second-hand EKO guitar. He read newspapers, the
NME
and
Melody Maker
, all the way through and through again, even the ads at the back, and stored them, with the poems, under his bed.

He had a shilling pay rise.

He obsessed about chord changes, key changes, rhyme schemes and Shakespeare; reading three or four books a week, exhausting the library’s parochial shelves. He enjoyed the librarian’s girlish thrill at the arrival of the new Agatha Christie or James Bond, and chatted to her about the characters and plot-twists. He read Plato, Proust – to see what the fuss was all about – and
The Collector
, three times.
Raise High the Roof Beam
, over and over.
A Clockwork Orange
, twice.
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner
. He read anything, everything, and then his Shakespeare again. And again.

He was promoted to assistant clerk.

Believing he had grown out of religion but fascinated by what he saw as the Catholic fetish of suffering, he built a crucifix in the middle of his bedroom out of broken glass from the bottles his father threw away. He used the pieces of glass with the labels for the Christ figure and in his youth thought himself ironic.

He went to the pictures every week, in Seston or on the bus to Lincoln –
Bonnie and Clyde
,
Blow-Up
,
Belle de Jour
,
Cul-de-sac
– films that were like visitations from exotic gods; shocking, beautiful glimpses of other minds, and evidence that it wasn’t just his eye that was a distorted, highly coloured lens. He sat through them three and four times, until he lost the narrative and just counted the beats of the shots, saw patterns in the cuts and felt the shape of the story like music. Then he would watch them again. The physical world shrank. His inner horizon took scale. He bought a television and his father, at first suspicious, quite soon became attached to it; falling asleep to the national anthem each night and waking to the high-pitched closedown shriek. Luke caught him staring at it after he switched it off, sucking the last of the life from the fading white dot as the screen went black.

When Luke watched the television he sat with his knees to his chest, as close to the flickering static-furred glass as he could get. He watched all the plays on the BBC, wrote down the names of the playwrights and transposed the dialogue in a high-speed scrawl, not looking at the page.

And the songs, the songs – there was a party going on somewhere and he wasn’t at it. He ran down the batteries on his radio late at night, looking for anything that had even half the energy that he had. Every week he heard something that broke the week before into pieces, music that was splitting its skin with every hour; growing up and getting younger. The Who, Them, The Stones, The Kinks, Aretha Franklin, James Brown, Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan. He hadn’t known pop music could grow up like that. He hadn’t known there was a mind so big in it. He bought all the records he could afford, watching the vinyl and the labels, the spinning words the right way up – angled – upside down. All the way round at 45rpm. The life inside him was tearing him up; writing himself inside out in lined-paper notebooks, rushing and looking and working and moving but knowing all the time that he was just staying still.

He wore a narrow black tie and white shirt. He greased his hair back, he let it grow, he grew sideburns, he shaved them off, he washed the grease out, he cut his hair, he grew it again. He got a job on Saturday nights at the working men’s club that had bands play once a week between the bingo and the comic, fighting off every would-be pop star and Romeo in Seston to get it and, when he did, he felt as if God’s hand had pointed down and His great voice had said,
Yes, Lucasz Kanowski, you will work behind a bar and you will meet girls and there will be music
. . . And he did. And there was. Most of the music was very bad because Seston wasn’t exactly a major stop-off on the touring circuit; it even knew itself that it was a pathetic, half-dead place. But if the music wasn’t up to much the girls were easy harmony. Almost all girls had something about them that sang. They smelled the same – hairspray and mentholated cigarettes, thick perfumed lipstick. Jill, Sheila, Sandra, Mavis; tough girls who took care of themselves, made sure he knew he mustn’t
do anything
, but then always made sure he did; wanting the heat of what they ought not do – and no babies. Christ knew Luke didn’t want babies either and he found ways of doing everything but the one thing they both wanted, taking Catholic pleasure in the ache of holding back. He had to be ingenious. He was. He used his imagination in the toilets of the club, in the alley behind his house, at the bus stop near theirs, in front gardens, back gardens, on buses and on benches, and discovered that the thrill of female pleasure, like a blessing, was enough to still the constant seeking frenzy of his mind so there was no mill office next day, no asylum, no father, no mother, just that girl, her heat and smiling whispered refusals – could he get this far, this, this – until it was over and he was left alone; satisfied if she was brave enough to touch him back or frustrated if she wasn’t and, like a cold rain falling, the truth of his life would return to him.

He got another pay rise.

He went through a phase of switching his accent at work every day to see if anyone in the mill office would notice. He jumped from French to Polish to Lincolnshire to extreme upper class but the only nickname that stuck was the Frog.

He was working as an assistant clerk in a paper mill and being called the Frog. He was going mad.

April – 1968

London’s spring was wet and harsh. Bitter rain fell on the metal, the mud and building sites and the towers that broke the soft stone skyline. With cheery brutality, in hail and chasing sun, the Post Office Tower had risen sky-high. Beneath it and around it, bowler hats and suede hats and miniskirts, shop-fronts and hairdressers, tourists and tat, music in bars, rattled through the gentility, the fresh sharp concrete, the chipped plaster of the scrabbling city. Soho’s basements burst, revealed and revelling, into the cross-currents of the seedy raincoated old guard; the jazz, the up-yours sex and post-war boozing, fag-ash dusted filth pouring life and dirt into the new plastic streets. Kensington’s invaded little shopping parades jostled greengrocers with boutiques. The city strained against the rich belt of its suburbs. Housewives, old at twenty-five, hired nannies and faced their decline, and commuters, smudgy fingered on the train, read newspaper stories of debauch.

Nina Jacobs, in her third year at LAMDA, was emerging into the world with the others. Groups of students would make forays into London like little herds of deer exploring the forest; the theatres of the West End, the boutiques of the King’s Road. Nina made friends with a girl called Chrissie Southey, who had a mane of amber hair and a crisp, knowing sexuality. Her parents lived in a house in Chelsea and Nina and Chrissie would go there and try on clothes in her bedroom, giggling over magazines, experimenting with their eye make-up and then setting forth for the delights of Carnaby Street.

‘I’m the little lamb who never gets caught!’ cried Chrissie as they both bolted one day along the pavement away from some stringy boys who told them they were photographers.

‘Leches!’ shouted Nina, careering into a postcard stand and they both fell into the shop, laughing, and bought French cigarettes with the last of their money.

She dreamed of high success; the blessed release of approval. The dusty shell of the school had nourished her, brain and spirit, plumping her up. She had played there, worked hard like a child but now, she knew, she was for the market.

‘Chop chop,’ her mother would say every morning, hurrying her out of the door, and as the days flipped towards her final term she seemed to see an axe teetering above her. Equity card. Repertory. Auditions. Agents.

The third-year productions turned the stage on which she had practised into a shop-front. Producers and agents sat in the cramped auction house of the dark auditorium, marking one-sheet cast-lists with biro hieroglyphs. Nina’s year group, who had studied together in honest brotherhood, now pretended it to cover their envy. The end of the race was too close for better feelings. National unemployment may have been at record lows, but for actors it still held its eternal majority. Proven friendships broke and reformed with sudden loyalty and unclear motivations. Students thrown into a character role where they felt themselves to be a lead or tossed a meagre two lines where a rival had speeches were bitter – bitter with fear of the oblivious world beyond their playpen. Nina had loved the exercise of self and psyche, the studying of texts, but the stage terrified her, and her mother, for all her personal dissembling, never once allowed the laziness of false praise to pass her lips.

Nina, free your voice, you sound like Princess Margaret. Where is your voice?

A guest director, Richard Weymouth, was announced to work with them. The students approached the auditions with affected professionalism, a guessed-at approximation of their future lives. Nina, nervous and proud, was given the youngest of Chekhov’s
Three Sisters
, Irina, to play.

‘Oh, Nina,’ said Marianne, and clutched her tightly. ‘Well done, well done.’ And she whispered into her hair, ‘I always wanted to play that part and never did, I’m thrilled for you.’

Nina had loved
The Three Sisters
when they studied it in her first year. She was determined to overcome her fear and do it justice. Irina was childlike, and had the child in her destroyed; she yearned for love’s escape but instead found her salvation in hard work. Nina’s soul recognised Irina blindly, as if she herself were a paper cut-out, and the written character was the flesh.

‘I’m terrified,’ she said to Chrissie in the coffee shop on the Earls Court Road after school.

They were pouring white sugar onto their cappuccinos and spooning the froth into their mouths. Skinny as they were, they were both always trying to lose weight – the lipstick and coffee diet, they called it. This was their lunch.

‘Richard Weymouth will look after you, he fancies you rotten.’

‘Don’t be silly, he’s forty,’ said Nina, not missing the implication she had been given the role for the wrong reasons. In
The Three Sisters
Chrissie was to be the ancient maid, Anfisa. She had played Juliet in February – rather badly, Nina thought – and didn’t feel sorry for her at all.

The boy cast as Tuzenbach was called Jeremy Elton. He was a year or two older than most of the others, smoked Sobranies, had silvery-blond hair and wore a long, narrow black coat. He was very much desired. In each year there were the happy few that everybody knew – or thought they knew – would have big careers, ready-made stars, untested, and he was one of them; film-actor-to-be, Jeremy Elton. Nina could not help but love him. It was easy to flirt; Tuzenbach was in love with Irina. Nina felt prettier when Jeremy was there and forgot her nerves in the thrill of their scenes together. Off the stage she was charged with joy, able to find Irina’s sadness because her own emotions had been unstopped by infatuation.
This is a crush
, thought one, cool corner of her mind, as she wrote
Mrs Jeremy Elton
on her notebooks and,
We are pleased to announce the wedding of Jeremy Elton and Nina Jacobs
. . .

A week and a half into rehearsals, he asked her out. She waited until after dinner to tell her mother. She couldn’t keep the secret any longer than that.

Marianne was making her a dress, kneeling on the ground, pinning the hem as Nina stood on a low stool and turned in slow circles like a dancer on a music box.

‘Your legs are very good,’ said Marianne as she took up more pins. ‘Your knees aren’t wonderful, but your ankles and thighs are perfect. What did you eat today?’

‘Just breakfast.’

‘Good girl! There, get down. I’ll finish it tonight.’

Nina climbed from the stool.

‘Mummy, Jeremy Elton has asked me out.’

Marianne stopped in the middle of the room, her hands to her breast.

‘I told you.’

‘He says Saturday.’

‘He’ll have to come here first, I’m not having you go out and meet him just anywhere.’

So on Saturday Jeremy climbed the five flights to collect Nina from her mother's flat. They went to an Italian restaurant in Kensington that he told her was fashionable. It was very noisy, the sound of voices and scraping chairs bouncing off the black and white tiled floors, and Nina had no appetite. None of the food was familiar to her. There were people at the next table Jeremy knew, friends of his parents, and he chatted to them and barely addressed to her. She sat, silent in her shyness and increasing misery, and couldn't think what to say or do to draw his attention.

When he brought her home they paused on the pavement by the steps. Nina, who had seen all the films, waited to be kissed but Jeremy glanced up at the lit windows of the fifth floor.

‘Shall I walk you up?’ he said.

‘If you like.’

Marianne was waiting. She was not ready for bed, but fully made-up, as if she had not moved since they left.

‘Jeremy!’, she said, rising, ‘can I offer you a drink?’

He looked much younger, standing there next to her mother, Nina noticed, and his chin was somewhat small in relation to his forehead.

‘Oh yes, thanks awfully,’ he said.

‘Gin and tonic all right?’

‘Super.’

He stroked his hair forwards and followed Marianne further inside.

‘I’m afraid we haven’t any ice and please, do forgive the humble horror of your surroundings. It’s so convenient for LAMDA and of course I can’t take any work while Nina needs me.’

‘It’s very nice,’ he said politely. ‘You’re an actress?’

‘
Resting
. . .’ A hollow laugh. ‘No G and T for you, Nina.’ She turned to Jeremy again. ‘You’re not related to James Elton, the director, are you?’

‘He’s my uncle.’

‘No, honestly?’

‘Fraid so.’

‘Don’t be
afraid
, what a funny thing! He’s the most charming man I have almost ever met.’

Nina looked from one to the other.

‘So they say,’ he said.

‘Has he passed it on?’

‘I’ve no idea, but he’s hell to work with.’

‘You’ve worked with him?’

She handed him his drink and Nina stood in the middle of the floor with the bow at her waist, like an unwrapped present, the smile fixed on her face never fading.

The three of them sat. Jeremy and her mother talked; nothing Nina could contribute to, nothing she knew about. She did not question that her mother outshone her, the fact of it was an absolute; it almost comforted her. But she had liked Jeremy so much, and he had stopped even glancing at her now, as if she were a coat left on the back of a chair.

Her mother tucked her legs up and leaned her elbow on the back of the sofa with her chin on her hand as she listened to him talk. Nina sat rigidly upright in the only other chair, raging against herself and her gaucheness. Jealously she stared at her mother’s grace; the easy way her fingers rested on her cheek, her collarbone, her hair, drawing attention from one to the other like a sales assistant in a jeweller’s. Is this to your liking? And this? And this?

After a long time, Marianne said, ‘Nina, aren’t you exhausted? Off you go to bed, darling, I’ll see Jeremy out.’

Nina stared at her. She knew she mustn’t make a fuss.

‘Darling? Bed?’

It would be more childish to argue than to go, and so she pretended relief, taking pride in hiding her feelings.

‘Goodnight, Jeremy,’ she said, getting up. ‘Goodnight, Mummy.’

Jeremy did not meet her eye.

‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ he said.

‘Thank you for a lovely evening,’ said Nina; ‘it was marvellous.’

As she left them she heard her mother say, ‘The
darling
. . .’

She had to come out of her room again to go to the bathroom on the landing and they pretended they hadn’t seen her because she was carrying her sponge bag.

When she was finally in bed, when the light was out, she turned her face into the pillow and she cried, biting her fingers until they hurt to stop it. It was pathetic to cry. She should grow up. She lay trembling, listening to her mother’s laughter, and the low hum of Jeremy’s voice.

She was not near sleep. She waited for the sound of the front door but it did not come. Straining, she thought she heard footsteps tiptoe past the door and her mother laughed again, very quietly. He had not gone. He had not left. He was in her mother’s bedroom.

She closed her eyes . . .
Be my, be my baby
. . .

That night she had a dream – a dream or a vision, afterwards she couldn’t tell. A man was coming up the stairs of her mother’s house, striding up, two at a time, with benign strength. He knew where to find her. He was coming to save her. She could not see his clothes – her eighteen-year-old mind stopped short of armour and a sword – but he didn’t seem imaginary. She was sure he was not pretend. She sensed him, and though she could not see his face at all she knew that he loved her, and he would set her free.

The clerk immediately above Luke at Seston Paper was a spare young man called Eric Trimble. He and Luke had a mismatched friendship born on Luke’s first day, three years before, when Eric, showing him the mill, office, kitchenette and toilets, had said that his mother believed he’d always have a future in paper because people needed it for both their eyes and their arses. Disappointingly, Seston Mill didn’t make paper for books or toilet rolls, but tissue-paper of exotic colours, to be shipped off to other happier locations for prettier things than could ever be found locally. Sometimes Eric Trimble came to the club and Luke gave him free drinks for whichever girl he was trying to impress. He tried not to covet and steal Eric’s girlfriends. He tried not to covet and steal Eric’s
mother
, and luckily Eric’s father had a knack of creeping in his slippers from the front room if she ever made an offer of tea.

Eric would stay behind with him at the club if he needed to lock up or they had both failed in the girl-hunt, and they would walk home past the Trimbles’ house and drop him off, Luke rattling away about whatever currently preoccupied him and Eric laughing or thinking about something else or, Luke suspected, quite often nothing at all.

They were standing together outside Eric’s house at eight o’clock on a Tuesday night in the pouring rain. Eric was finishing a fag. His mother always insisted he carry an umbrella, it was huge and they were sharing it as the rain pattered down around them. Luke was talking about
2001: A Space Odyssey
, which he had seen the night before.

‘Sounds mental,’ said Eric flatly when Luke drew breath, and he stamped out the tiny damp end of his cigarette.

‘See ya.’ And he was off up his path, leaving Luke in the rain.

It may as well have been three o’clock in the morning. Seston was empty. Luke put up his collar and started home. The pavements were bright with rain, and the gutters brimming. Then, with the discordant sound of broken-winded brakes and a sluice of filthy water that fanned up in front of him like an ocean wave, a car drew up.

It was a Mini, the wipers banging back and forth helplessly.

The driver’s window squeaked down an inch. Luke looked down to see a pair of female, Cleopatra eyes between the top of the glass and a heavy dark-brown fringe.

‘Excuse me . . .’

‘Hiya,’ said Luke.

A male voice came from the dark interior, loud, northern – slightly – but not local: ‘We’re completely fucking lost.’