Frankie Styne & the Silver Man (4 page)

Liz was nearly fifteen then. Grammy had lived with them for six years. The sickbed was taken to the council dump, its odour of lavender and ammonia lost amongst less astringent smells. A desk was moved into the spare room so that Liz could use it to do her homework: she'd got very behind at school. The television also was disposed of.

‘Forget!' Grammy had commanded.

Liz sat in Grammy's old room, with her textbooks and exercise book open on the desk. The dry little letters marched across the page, endlessly across and back again. She found she couldn't focus her eyes, though there was nothing wrong with them. She couldn't make much sense of the letters. But if she stared long enough without blinking they faded and went away.

‘Back to normal,' Liz's mother said. ‘If such a thing exists.'

They had always been in pubs. The first one Liz could properly remember was The Grapes; huge, Victorian, badly maintained and situated on the railway side of the city where everything was perpetually being demolished. The Grapes was jinxed, her father said, as a joke, though no one laughed. Three managers had left in the last year and one had committed suicide. You couldn't make the place run on lunchtimes, not unless the customers wore suits, and who would want to risk their neck getting out there and home in the dark? In the short, irritable afternoons he would talk endlessly of using some of the upstairs rooms for functions, but it was a question of persuading the brewery.
Functions
or not, Liz's mother pointed out, people would still have to risk their necks. She sounded the ‘k' and the ‘s' very sharply.

In The Grapes they had two floors above the bars—more space than they knew what to do with. All the rooms, even the toilets, were enormous and echoed if you so much as cleared your throat. Most of them had fireplaces that had been sealed over to allow the fitting of gas fires. It all seemed to have been made for a race of giants: the fist-thick marble mantelshelves on their clumpy brackets, the dirty mirrors so high that not even grown ups could see themselves inside. None of the furniture looked right in the rooms. The place swallowed things, her mother said.

Liz slept at the back in a room with two sash windows, larger than any windows she'd ever seen before. Plaster vines twisted around the central lamp, light from which seemed to struggle to reach the floor and corners of the room. When the bulb died her father had to fetch a ladder to replace it. The milky glass shade was always full of dead flies. It was difficult to fall asleep in such a huge room; it stretched about her like an empty auditorium. Any minute, in the dark, something would happen to fill it up, or else it would swallow her along with the furniture . . . Draughts sneaked through the old sashes and puffed out the heavy curtains, dragging their hems against the carpet with an uneven sighing sound. Noise from the bar rose faintly, too distant to be of any comfort.

It wasn't a room for a child, and her mother told her father so. Leaving her high-heeled shoes downstairs she would come up halfway through the evening session to make sure Liz was all right. She sat gently on the edge of the bed. At that time, she'd be wearing her pearls and would smell of yeast, sweet-sour spirits and the heavy tang of tobacco. Her stockings rasped gently as she crossed her legs. Her hair would be up.

‘It's a bit busier tonight,' she'd say as she smoothed the sheets again and again,
‘compared,
that is . . .' Sometimes she would stay for almost half an hour, explaining in soft monotone why the Grapes would never succeed. ‘Fifty years ago, yes, but nowadays people have expectations . . . It's not right, is it, love? It's no life, is it?' she'd conclude. ‘Dreadful.' Each time her mother went away, Liz knew she would be wearing something different the next time she saw her. And sometimes it seemed to Liz that her mother was not one person but many; different ones for different times of day, put on and off just like the clothes.

After closing time, when the street outside erupted with clattering and song and her parents had climbed the creaking stairs to sleep in the bedroom next to hers, her mother would come in again, wrapped tightly in her frilled dressing gown. Lipstick off, hair down, she would sit heavily on the bed and rest her chin in her hands. At that time she smelled of soap and her voice evaporated in yawns.

‘Think of nice calm things. Think of the seaside on a sunny day. Hopefully we'll go away—somewhere, even just England—in August. Let's hope we'll be out of this dump by then. I sometimes
pray
for bankruptcy . . . Or think of eating strawberries, or learning to fly, things like that. Now, be good.' Again, she'd leave.

With effort, Liz learned to banish the shadowy room and replace it with the swimming pool. She had been there only once, with school. It had struck her as she turned the corner of the changing rooms and saw it as a most beautiful thing, shimmering and huge like another planet or universe. She had stood at the edge, gazing enthralled at the sloppy knitted patterns on the water's surface, but as she climbed in she had felt afraid of the water and been unable to obey Mrs Jay's barked orders to put her head under it and breathe out through her nose. It was optional, and she'd not gone the next time. In her mind's eye, however, she could see herself walking confidently to the deep end and standing a moment looking down the length. It was a gala; her mother and father were seated in a crowd on the ranked seats that surrounded the pool, leaning forwards and holding hands—they were no longer in pubs.

Liz saw herself dive in, emerge and breathe slowly in and out, the way you were supposed to do when you swam. She saw herself sliding through the water, alternate lengths of breaststroke and crawl, registering the crowd's appreciation as she lifted her head for air. She swam longer and longer between breaths and imagined a turquoise world, which she populated with shoals of small bright fish like those in the dentist's tank . . . One moment she was making everything develop nicely, the next everything slipped into nightmare; something caught one of her legs—an octopus arm with sucker pads was winding itself around her, pulling her under water. Circles of skin tore off, the blue water was threaded with red. For some reason it didn't hurt, but any moment it would. As her lungs grew tighter and tighter, no one came, and then she had to open her mouth and gasp the water in—

She would lie a few moments listening to her heartbeat echoing in the bedsprings. The room was dark. She feasted her eyes on its emptiness and felt her pulses slowing down.

The bedroom door was flung open. Her mother's voice was abrupt, and now she was only a shape against the landing light. ‘What are you doing, calling out now? Count to twenty, and when you've got there, start again.
Bore
yourself to sleep. Think of nothing. Now, shut your eyes.' The door closed firmly; there would be no more mothers until the morning one, lipsticked but pale, wearing a housecoat and smelling of nothing at all.

The vision of the swimming pool came most nights, with variations: sharks, submarines, piranha fish, cramp. It was only when the television arrived that Liz learned how to make the swimming pool vanish—just as the channel could be changed—by thinking very hard of something else or, in drastic situations, by opening her eyes, which was like turning off the set. Sleep still eluded her, but time passed.

And then they moved to the Black Swan and Grammy came . . . And then she was gone, leaving behind her a space that seemed bigger and more yawning than that drafty old room at the Grapes. She knew something would happen, and it did.

A few months after Grammy's death Liz's mother announced another move. It wasn't one of the ordinary moves to a more promising pub; Liz and her mother were to live in one place, her father was to stay behind. On Wednesdays he was to call and take her out, and her mother discussed with her how she was to deal with him should he call on the telephone and ask about her; Liz was to tell him nothing. She was not to mention him to her mother, nor her mother to him. These were the rules.

Liz helped pack clothes and kitchen things. Her mother's eyes were red, her movements abrupt. She wore a pair of new denim jeans which looked stiff like cardboard and a sweater with embroidered flowers round the yoke. She had taken off her wedding ring.

‘You know I've never liked living in pubs,' she said. ‘Always hated it. We'd've been all right, if it wasn't for that.' There had been no discussion as to whether Liz should stay with her father, in pubs, and just as he had never defended Grammy so he had never asked for her. But perhaps he wouldn't be in pubs for very long, because the brewery preferred couples.

Liz's mother wrote what was in each box on the outside with a thick felt pen which Liz thought smelled of sick. Liz herself had no objection to pubs. She liked the low red glow when the lights were on in the bar, and helping for half an hour in the early evening. She liked the cellars and the smell. A house, a permanent house as her mother called it, would be odd.

‘I said when you were born—it's no place to bring up a child. I said, I'm not having another one if we carry on like this. And I didn't. Well now—' her mother's voice began to break—‘I don't need to set foot behind a bar ever again.'

Liz knew that pubs weren't the reason for the divorce—she saw that very clearly as Grammy's revenge, from Beyond the Grave, on her father for wanting to send her away—
It won't last—
but she put her arm briefly around her mother's narrow waist and told her that, yes, that was the Silver Lining to it all. Startled, her mother looked her full in the face.

‘You're a funny thing,' she said. Her eyes filled with tears, but at the same time the corners of her mouth pulled upwards in a smile. ‘Now we'll be able to get to know each other, won't we?' Liz grunted and bent over the box they were supposed to be packing. She felt frightened and then the frightened feeling separated out into layers. Just beneath fear was a kind of barbed spite, terrifying to feel.

It was confusing. She knew the stake had to be driven home hard, right through the heart when they least expected it, but at the same time it hurt them—you felt sorry and you had to screw your eyes tight shut to go through with it . . . It just wasn't possible, but she would have liked to warn her mother that she was going, too: tell her that the Silver Lining to that was having a completely clean slate, and not to worry, she would be all right. She looked older than she was: Grammy had taught her many things, and the very first of these, years back when she still lived in the flat, was hide and seek.

Just the Two of Us

‘
Of course,' Liz informed Jim on the morning of the telephone man, ‘we all make mistakes. I did get caught out in the end . . .' The real catching—had it been done by Henry Kay, who made her pregnant with Jim, by the police, the hospital, or by Mrs Purvis? It was Purvis whom she blamed. Purvis was a skinny woman, about thirty-five, with mousy hair cut fashionably short and her lips painted bold red. She had huge grey staring eyes that followed you around the room and rubbed up and down your face like a pair of cats that wanted feeding. Somehow Mrs Purvis seemed older than her appearance; it was, Liz thought, the way she
fussed
and the way that every remark she made included Liz's name, as if she thought there were others present who might think her words were intended for them. If it wasn't the first word of the sentence, a terrible kind of tension built up until it was uttered. It made Liz writhe like Chinese water torture, which she had seen once in a programme.

‘What about the father, Liz? What about your family, Liz? Liz: why did you decide to leave home? Where did you get that ring you wear, Liz?'

‘Mind your own,' Liz had muttered, tucking her hands beneath the covers the way Grammy used to.

Mrs Purvis had never grown angry. The ruder Liz was, the softer yet more insistent her voice became. She fiddled with her jewellery, then moved from her chair to the edge of Liz's bed and sat there with her legs wound tightly around each other like barley sugar twists, her hands in her lap.

‘Listen, Liz, I've got to be satisfied that you and the baby'll be all right. Otherwise we'll have to take him into care. So, Liz, okay, perhaps you don't need to tell me about your family, but I do need to know your surname, otherwise how will you manage? How will we register the baby's birth, Liz? How will you get somewhere to live and all the help you'll need? Do you see my point, Liz?' And that had been the last time, before this, that Liz had thought of Grammy. For an instant she'd actually seen her, sitting up straight in bed just as she herself was at the time, bolt upright with her thin jet black hair tied in a knot on top of her head. A prisoner, but hiding. Her eyes were canny, sly. Liz could tell she didn't approve, but on the other hand, she had nothing helpful to say as to what to do in circumstances like these.

‘Well, Liz?' asked Mrs Purvis, making Grammy disappear. Under the sheet Liz had clenched her hands over her huge belly. The baby that was to be Jim kicked. Could YOU escape? In the TV programmes, of course, they did.

‘Elizabeth Anne Meredith,' she'd said. The truth. It couldn't be unsaid. It had been, without doubt, a mistake.

‘After that,' Liz told Jim, as she sat on the toilet in Onley Street and smeared his buttocks and genitals generously with zinc cream, ‘I couldn't shake her off . . . Came every bloody day. I'm surprised she didn't sit and watch while I gave birth. “Push, Liz. Harder, Liz! That's it, Liz . . .”'

There had been three low lounge chairs arranged around a circular table. The doctor leaned back in his; Mrs Purvis sat straight up as if a string were attached to the top of her head and tied to a hook in the ceiling. They both had clipboards on their laps and there was a plastic cup of machine tea in front of Liz's chair.

Liz put her feet on the table, and then took them off. They'd said their bit and then waited for her to speak.

‘Well,' she'd said, examining her hands, now so peculiarly clean, then looking up. ‘I never wanted one at all. So I suppose it's not so bad not having a proper one. Not so bad as it would be for someone else.'

‘Proper?' said Mrs Purvis. ‘Another way to look at it, Liz, is that he's different. Special.' Her voice was over-bright. Both she and the doctor were embarrassed. ‘There are just lots of different kinds of babies, Liz.'

‘Mmm . . .' said Liz. It seemed fair enough, but not the point. ‘What I mean is, so long as I just do the necessary things, as kindly as I can, that's it, isn't it? I won't have to worry about what school, or teaching him things myself. Or about his career and stuff like that.' She looked up at them. ‘This is
better,'
she said, and smiled. ‘I'm not like the rest of them in that ward.'

‘Just—' began Mrs Purvis, but the doctor had interrupted:

‘Of course, there's always some hope . . .'

‘We can certainly do without
that,'
Liz told Jim, though at the time she'd been hiding well; she had half smiled, looked the doctor straight in the eye until he looked back down at his notes . . . She set Jim to air on the mat at her feet, wiped herself, examined the tissue, and wondered idly if Jim's shit would change to the adult colour all of a sudden or gradually.

‘Just the necessary things is a lot, Liz,' Mrs Purvis had said when the interruption was over. Her eyes slid away from Liz's relentless gaze, then returned, slid away, returned.

‘There will be problems later. When you're thirty-five—I know that's difficult to imagine, Liz—Jim will have grown up, but he won't have left home. There are facilities, but they're always under threat. And it's harder to let go later on. You might get terribly lonely and frustrated.'

‘I don't,' said Liz proudly, ‘get lonely.'

The doctor cleared his throat. ‘You're saying you want to keep Jim?' he'd asked.

Want wasn't quite the right word, but agreeing saved time and so Liz nodded forcefully.

‘Liz, you're barely nineteen,' Mrs Purvis said. The word
barely
had made Liz want to laugh, but she kept her face still. ‘You're on your own. Perhaps care is an option you should consider seriously, Liz.'

‘No. I'll try it on my own,' Liz had replied, because the thought of filling in another official document made her insides melt. Years ago she and Grammy had watched a programme in which a man was spread-eagled on the ground, his arms and legs tied to pegs which were driven into the ground. Each of the forms she had completed and signed since she'd made the mistake of telling Purvis her name had made her feel just like that. She was losing her freedom—not that she'd used it for much, but that was her business. Now she lay exposed in bright midday light. Anyone could find her, if they wanted to. A broad column of ants would march in a straight line across the sand and begin to devour her bite by bite.

‘You're sure?' Mrs Purvis had asked, fingering the slender chain that went around her neck and then down inside her blouse. Above the enormous grey eyes her brows were pulled together and her forehead divided into wavery squares. ‘Liz, it's easier now. When you've had him for a few years, they'll think you can cope and they won't put themselves out. And, Liz—you could still go and visit him, every day, if you wanted.'

‘No,' said Liz, tossing back her hair, then remembering: ‘thanks.'

‘If she wants to keep it, you should let her,' the doctor said. Liz could tell that he cared about her less than Purvis, but somehow she'd liked him more.

After, Purvis had walked back with her to the B & B. For a long time—and for once, Liz had thought—Purvis didn't seem to be able to think of anything to say. Then, when they were almost there, she cleared her throat and asked, ‘Liz, I know there were problems at first, but do you
love
Jim now?'

Liz wiped her sleeve across her face. She thought that if she answered right they would leave her alone, and that was worth almost anything, even the loss of a limb or faculty—even having had a baby. She met Purvis's eyes and said, ‘Yes.'

Purvis took her arm and she'd let her, though she felt like seizing it back. ‘I'll do what I can, Liz,' Purvis said. ‘I'll put your point of view as forcefully as I can. I think you and Jim need a house. With a garden. But it might be a bit further out of town. Okay?' They'd parted at the front door. Liz slipped inside and slammed it hard behind her.

So when they'd arrived at 127 Onley Street a week ago there were newly installed gas fires, bedding, a cooker—and on the floor just by the door lay a fat letter from Purvis. It had
Liz
and
By Hand
written on the envelope; inside was a wodge of leaflets stapled together and a handwritten letter. Purvis's writing was like a pile of string tipped onto the page. It explained how a cot would arrive the next day and how Liz was entitled to an allowance for paint, then went on to say that Purvis would drop by at 3:15 next Monday afternoon, but not to worry if Liz was busy—if she missed her, Mrs P would phone and fix another time. It wished her the best and was signed
Annie.
Liz had noted with satisfaction that there was no telephone for Purvis to ring her on and thrust it deep in her pocket. She should have known.

The downstairs ceilings had recently been repaired and the fine pink powder of plaster dust lay on the floor, showing tracks where various people had been in and out. A pile of rusting floorboard nails lay on the bottom stair. It was cold, the windows were blind with condensation, but there was running water, both cold and hot; you didn't even have to wait for it to heat.

She had put the cushions she'd brought in the front room, then unloaded the baby things in the kitchen. The back door was stuck, but she could see the garden well enough from the back bedroom window: a strip of land between two high fences—a thick scalp of wet green parted by the paths of other people's cats. Here and there was a bald rubbly patch, or the submerged bulge of some different growth: a yellower green, a bush half buried, a few flowers on thin light-seeking stems, purple or white. Now and then a blowing drift of dandelion fluff rose and passed across the garden, then sank again.

Liz had looked at the back garden several times since. It seemed to grow taller and thicker almost daily, and she had a feeling that it was waiting—waiting for the low siren, the almost underwater wail that precedes the slowly gathering sound of a train accelerating down the line, shuddering past the stationary carriages in the sidings, carving its swift way through the stillness, then gone and back and gone again as the land further down the tracks shields and then releases the noise and its echo.

She missed that sound. She had lived in the carriages longer than anywhere else except the Black Swan, and she had found them herself. The trains came every hour. The garden was a bit like the sidings. She could imagine a train shooting through the back of Onley Street, flattening the fences one by one, shaking out windows. But she was in a house now, with hot and cold, and when she watched the grass stir in a breath of wind she was glad of the protection glass seemed to afford.

One door was enough. It could stay stuck.

‘And one good thing about you, Jim,' she'd said as she finished the initial inspection of the house, ‘is that there's no need for me to do that baby talk routine. If I want to speak I'll say what I want, when I want, how I want. Perhaps you'll enjoy the sound, but that's it. There's fuck all I can teach you. Nothing.'

No capacity for language,
the doctor had said, while Mrs Purvis went to get more tea from the machine.

‘Whatever that means,' said Liz on the morning of the telephone man, still sitting on the toilet as she reached for the tap to rinse her hands. ‘It's possible of course just,
just,
that they're wrong. You could somehow be understanding, the way animals do; just different, but they don't realise, because the clever-dicks can't measure it.' The sink, plugged with nappies and wipes, filled with what looked like pond water. She turned off the tap and paused, considering her own words, as she dried her hands on her T-shirt.

‘But even if you don't, makes no difference to me. Because it's just the same with talking people anyway. Purvis, for example.
Yes, yes,
she goes,
I know what you mean, Liz,
she says,
mmmm—
but I don't think she does. In the hospital there was no end to it. Not just her, though she was the worst.' Liz screwed a piece of damp tissue into a ball, stared at it a moment, then looked back at Jim, bent to wipe his nose.

‘Maybe,' she continued, lowering her voice, ‘that understanding crap isn't so important anyway. Not the point. I've thought of that. But even then, see, it's still better I talk to you, because you probably
can't
and so nothing I say will upset or confuse you or make you do anything and you won't make me lose the thread by reacting. Makes it easier to say what I want. Complete freedom. If I want . . .'

She bent low over Jim and stared into his eyes, examining the two tiny reflections of herself. He still wasn't blinking very much, even though they'd managed to teach him how at the hospital. As an experiment she tried not to blink herself, but it made her eyes water. His skin was cold. Liz fastened the clean nappy, fed his legs back into the pink babygrow. She set him on his back in the bath while she cleared the sink.

‘All on our own,' she smiled at herself in the glass. ‘Just the two of us. And let's keep it that way.'

It was a long time since she had had so much—the first time really, and it worried her. Things, she knew, could be ties that bound. People attached to them like barnacles to rocks. She remembered a girl called Suki at the carriages who talked all the time about being attached and how it fucked people up. Things involved people in getting and keeping them.

She thought of the things she had: one three-quarter-size bed with head and footboards in dark oak, plain, except for a moulded border at the top; one mattress, satisfyingly sunk in the middle; two pillows in striped ticking covers; three pillowcases; three off-white sheets; two crocheted blankets; one faded pink satin eiderdown; one lime green candlewick bedspread; one wooden cot, with sides made of dowelling bars, painted yellow; one plastic covered mattress with pictures of kites (split at the side); various small sheets and blankets. All of this had been in the house when she arrived, given by Help, arranged by Annie Purvis.