Frankie Styne & the Silver Man (13 page)

It was moving from dusk to real dark now, all the contrast changed, so that the dome of Jim's head seemed more silver than pale. The ground was beginning to vibrate with the insistent rhythm of a train. It transmitted itself up to Liz's knees, was muffled in the thicker flesh of her thighs, found again in the wood she sat on. ‘The down-train,' she said. ‘Every forty-five minutes.' At first the hiss and rattle of its coming was something which she imagined, deduced from the feeling, and then came an instant when she could be absolutely sure that she was hearing and not remembering it. At that moment the past seemed so very real. She moved Jim to the other side. He sucked hard on the new nipple, causing a sudden twist of feeling at the neck of her womb, and although it wasn't pain a lump grew in her throat and a soft pressure behind her eyes. The carriages and their inhabitants seemed to breathe gently about her—she could hear them even through the raucous panting of the train as it passed—and although she couldn't see them, she sensed that when the rattling chain of yellow lights had streaked past their shapes would gradually emerge, the still, solid rectangles and the moving figures picked out in the firelight. But when even the last faint tremor of the train had gone the thing she felt inside remained, invisible. She sat in an absence, the after-image of something gone. Without realising, she had begun to cry.

‘Silly—' she whispered, then broke off. The sound of footsteps was very clear. ‘Who's there?' she called, pulling her cardigan together and twisting round.

‘Who's asking?'
a voice answered quickly. The footsteps stopped. There was a sound halfway between a snort and a laugh. Liz's eyes picked over the darkness, finding the man's shape at last, half hidden against the higher ground behind him. He was standing about twenty feet away, between her and the path. She could feel him looking at her as hard as she was at him; she could hear a slight grinding sound as he shifted his weight on the cindery ground. The fact that he hadn't moved on could mean only danger. It was wrong, she knew suddenly, to ask who was there; it was possible he hadn't even seen her when she spoke.

But somehow she knew he had. Perhaps he hadn't realised she was a woman. He'd only seen her back, in the dark. But there again, she somehow knew that even if he wasn't sure, he wanted her to be one. Should she have said something casual, mumbled, ‘Evening,' the way two people walking dogs do when they pass in the street, pulling a quick smile then looking back at the ground or saying, ‘Here!' In any case, it was best, she calculated, not to say anything more. She stood, then paused, relaxing her grip on Jim just a little. Thank God, she thought, amazed: he's
asleep!

At what she calculated to be a normal pace, she made for the path, keeping as far away from the man as she could. Stones on the ground seemed to press right through to the soles of her feet, inciting her, against her judgement, to run. As the sound of one step ended and the next began she veered between feeling utterly disembodied and being nothing but insides—neither more nor less than her own heartbeat. The man was large and quite tall, and as she progressed he shifted slightly on the spot so as to keep her in view. She was drawing a circle, with him at its centre: or he was drawing it, sending her around on a string . . . And any minute, she must strike out.

‘Stop!' he called. She obeyed. ‘Come here!' She stayed where she was, waiting to run, but desperate not to, yet. A few seconds dragged, one to the next. ‘What's
your
name then?' The man's voice was scornful. It had been wrong to ask ‘Who's there?' All speaking was wrong, mistaken; look where it led, to traps and bindings, even something as simple as that. But should she answer now, though, to keep him at bay? Once you start you've got to go on? Perhaps so long as she answered he'd stay where he was? Perhaps talking they'd stand here forever, caught in the moment before whatever was to be happened, happening now slowly, in words—

‘What's that you're carrying?' he said, and took a single step forwards.

‘It's my baby.' Her voice sounded calm, though also as if it belonged to someone much older. ‘Goodbye.' She stepped out of the circle as she spoke, and turned her back on him. After three or four paces the man began walking too, his steps falling between hers. Together they were like a large animal, something fierce and wounded with a limp.

‘I bet it's not,' he said quietly. ‘Babies cry.' Liz reached the path, the point where running became feasible, as he was unlikely to know it so well as she did. She drew breath sharply.

‘Don't,' he warned. Liz shifted her grip on Jim, holding him tight with her right arm across his back, her hand tucked between his legs—and flung the other arm out for balance as she propelled herself forward. Jim's legs began almost immediately to slip down. If she fell she'd crush him. He woke—crying, not his usual cry, but for the first time full-throated and vigorously like other babies; suddenly, as if he'd just encountered the world for the first time and wanted to blast it away. His sobs and his breath came, shaken out of him in gasps like hers and in time to her steps. Her feet glanced off the path. Brambles brushed across her but there was no pain—she could tell from the small dragging sound they made as they let go of her coat, the very faint tearing on the skin of her face and hands. She ran by feel, her eyes fixed on the darkness ahead, her ears alert to what was behind. She could tell the exact moment the man gave up, but she ran all the way to Kimberlake Avenue.

The Three Compasses lurked just behind the gasworks. The lower panes of the windows had been painted, as in a betting shop; cheaper than curtains, Frank supposed. People scratched them with keys. It was his weekly night off and he always spent it here. The public bar was huge and dwarfed the people in it.

Hanging from the void of a towering ceiling, untouched—unseen—for generations was a sixties light-fitting consisting of eight chunky wooden arms which curved ever so slightly downwards. Some were capped with red cube-like shades, some were bare bulbs, some nothing. Only the bar, with its own lights, and the colour television propped high above the door to the gents, were clearly visible. Below the dado rail was a zone of embossed wallpaper painted in cream gloss, hastily wiped at here and there, which only made it look dirtier.

Frank would rather it hadn't been so bad. In the old days some kind of gentleman's club might have served the purpose, but so far as Frank knew there were none of these in town. Besides, he had a horror of joining things, and the lack of curiosity suited him well; people were more or less content just to know his name: ‘Frank,' without the Styne—he didn't want that known. Though their letters were an encouragement, he had never actually met one of his fans and didn't want to run the risk.

‘Another one, Frank?' He drank Scotch, which set him a little apart: ‘Don't get much of it, do you?'

‘It's stronger stuff,' he replied. The other man—eldest of a pair of brothers and known as number one—grinned. At least I'm clean, Frank thought. Number one smelled of sour sweat, his face glistened as if every pore were working overtime. A rag of greying hair had been flattened across his scalp, stuck there, flat and damp. He smoked a thin roll-up and all the features of his face seemed to be gathered about it, drawn towards the mouth and crammed into a narrow horizontal zone between the expanse of forehead and scalp above and the encroaching beard below.

‘Like it strong, do you, Frank?' His teeth were so yellow that they were almost brown. Frank drank whisky because he liked the feel of it, spreading slowly to his stomach, and even more subtly across the membranes that separated nose from mouth. Also, it didn't necessitate going to the urinals.

‘What are you doing with that beard?' he said to number one as the drink arrived.

‘Comes off on a Monday,' said number one, rubbing it with relish.

‘Looks like an old pro's cunt,' said number two, sitting heavily between them, turning to Frank. He was the younger, clean shaven and he had a full head of hair, longish, combed straight back over the crown of his head.

‘Doesn't it?'

‘How would I know?' Frank smiled, sipped a little of his whisky as he watched the two brothers laugh at his joke. Without the sound, he thought, you'd think they were afflicted by some awful pain, such as someone applying electric shocks to the soles of their feet. When it was over their faces subsided into heavy vacancy. Only the eyes moved as they and Frank watched the barman, because they could think of nothing else to say. The barman's complexion was extraordinarily pale, mottled with soft, fawn-coloured freckles; it would have been beautiful on a shy and slender boy out of doors, blinking in a patch of light under a canopy of trees, but there, on a fat folded face caught in the yellow glare of electric light, which made the pale lashes and brows all but vanish, it was grotesque. The barman moved sedately, as if his protruding belly contained something precious, and when he reached for a packet of tobacco, he supported himself on the counter with the other hand.

‘What sort of day was it out?' he asked as he turned, catching their stares and looking at them with watery pale­ blue eyes.

‘Horrible,' said number two. ‘Hot as hell.'

‘The Greenhouse business is to blame.' The barman jerked his head at a newspaper lying at the back of the bar. ‘Be like the Costa Del here in a few years' time.'

‘Good thing,' said number two. ‘We can all retire.'

Frank felt he had just a little in common with the barman, in that both of them worked indoors and had smoothish hands. Most of the men who used this pub worked outside, on the railway, in construction. No one had ever asked him, straight out, what he did. Perhaps they thought of him as someone technically unemployed, but who arranged or kept an eye on things just outside the law.

‘You shouldn't use spray cans and everyone'll have to get their cars converted.'

‘No harm in beer though, is there?' said number two, and Frank nodded at the barman to fill them up.

‘They say it's what causes these famines,' the barman persisted, eyes on the filling glasses before him. Often he tried like this to begin some kind of conversation. Time and time again Frank had watched him give up. He himself feared the complications of joining in more than he anticipated the benefits. Besides, it was not a subject he knew much about—what he had on his mind right now he had to keep to himself. Either they'd think he was mad or they'd try to stop him.

‘Desert's spreading, you see,' the barman elaborated as he reached up to the optic.

‘Well that's cobblers,' said number one, ‘isn't it. Over-breed, don't they.'

‘Ah well . . .' the barman sighed, and set the glasses down. He slotted a tape into the cassette player. As if on cue, the rush began. A tight knot of customers formed around Frank and the two others at the bar.

In the avenue there were people and cars about. Liz sat under a streetlamp on a bench which bore a tarnished plaque in memory of someone's departed wife. Both of them swam in sweat; Jim had been sick, and the streetlamp illuminated a scratch across the top of his head. She shivered, took his hat from her pocket and slipped it on. He whimpered as she refastened the sling and wrapped him tightly inside her coat, sopping wet, acrid. Headlights streaked across them. Behind them, the blood-red house had lost its colour, become just a shape, light seeping around the edges of curtains and blazing out from the porch.

It was the time when wives collected their commuting husbands. From inside the cars they peered out, their eyes fastening briefly on Liz and Jim, then torn away by the movement home. It would be nice, she thought, if one of them stopped and offered a lift; just that, no fuss. She would say yes. But no one did.

‘Okay,' she whispered after a while, easing herself up.

Every muscle in her body ached. When she began walking, something hurt in her back every time her right foot touched the ground. ‘At least it's downhill. We'll get to the junction, then we can have a rest.'

By the time they reached Annerly Road the ache, the drag of Jim's weight in her shoulders and the heaviness of her legs had been joined by a fierce pressure in her bowels and bladder. There was no part of her that didn't insist on being noticed, again and again. She considered standing in the road, stopping a car, and asking for a lift. But Annerly Road was grander even than Kimberlake Avenue, the houses old and all but hidden behind mature trees, the road humped and subject to a 20 mph speed limit as if out of respect. Very few cars passed through and those that did, lumbering carefully over the humps in the road then turning into gravelled drives and crunching slowly into silence, seemed ghostly and unapproachable. It was as if they were walking through a time before proper traffic existed. The people in the screened and shadowy houses, ‘Deepdene,' ‘Tadhurst,' ‘Sandymere,' were marooned here, between the SLOW signs at either end of the road. They couldn't go beyond, for then they would suddenly turn to dust and their houses would crumble down behind them in silence and slow motion.

‘We'll get to the next entrance,' Liz said. There were no streetlights to go by. ‘Loughton,' it said. She leaned for a while on one of the posts that marked it, thick as a railway sleeper but planed smooth, then slipped behind the fence and the hedge which spilled outwards over it. No lights showed through the trees. A thick layer of dead leaves collapsed softly beneath her feet and new living ones whispered faintly above. The trees were densely planted, their lower branches tangled. There was no point in wandering about. She loosened Jim's sling and squatted, emptying herself violently on the ground. After, it took some time to recover. Her legs shook, as if the train were running again.

‘We stink,' she told Jim, ‘the pair of us. Let's get to the next corner.' Draymuir Road was lit, narrower, its houses more uniform though still large. Soon they'd be back among the terraces, home.