Frankie Styne & the Silver Man (5 page)

Neither the cot nor its furniture had been used for Jim, though she did drape her clothes over the cot's sides: one calf-length Indian-print skirt, purplish, voluminous, with an elasticated waist and tassels around the hem (the only thing that wasn't thrown away by the hospital); one track suit, grey with maroon piping, saggy at the knees; one horizontally striped T-shirt; one plain white T-shirt with the sleeves cut off; two acrylic mohair jumpers, one purple, one black; one pair of Dr Martens boots; one pair of flip-flops; two nursing bras, little worn; various underpants, socks; one pair of skin-tight footless tights; one navy blue woollen coat, second- or third-hand like the rest, a little stained here and there but good quality—thick, lined, with deep pockets and a wide buckled belt, a coat to shelter in, to live in if you were stuck with no things and not even a roof over your head . . .

She'd decided to use the front bedroom as a kind of enormous closet for Jim's clothes. Those that were still slightly damp hung over the wooden frame of an unfinished airing cupboard which surrounded the hot water tank. The rest were arranged on the floor in piles: velour babygrows, small vests, felted woollen jackets, tiny socks, plastic pants—too many to count. In high-street shops, baby clothes cost a quarter of what she and Jim had to live on for a week, but second-hand they were virtually free. The world must be littered with them, she thought; so many people had been born and temporarily inhabited a series of such garments, sloughing them off like snakeskin every month or so . . . She liked looking at the piles, stripes of different colours. Like liquorice allsorts. Already some were too small.

Downstairs, there were two rooms, matching the bedrooms upstairs, plus an extension for the kitchen and bathroom. The bathroom contained two packs of disposable nappies, the powder, soap, toothbrushes, cotton wool and cream, one plastic bath that fitted inside the main bath, one bowl, one bucket, one thermometer, one mat, three towels on the rail . . . But these were things for Jim, so probably they didn't count.

In the kitchen were two pans, one non-stick; one mug, blue with white stripes; two side plates the same; one dinner plate in pale green with faint ridges around the rim; assorted cutlery—all there on her arrival. On the shelf above the counter were food supplies and the book,
Infant Care,
which Mrs Wingfield had given her at the clinic. She had overheard Mrs Wingfield talking to the receptionist last week, ‘It could be avoided,' she'd said. ‘Look at the poor kid. I don't think it'd be wrong.' Soon, the book warned, there would have to be other kitchen things, in particular a fridge; it talked as if there were no question of someone not having a fridge, though so far Liz had managed perfectly well without, drinking the last of the carton of milk every night so as to save waste, buying small amounts. It made sense when you had to carry everything home.

‘Always store in the fridge,'
Infant Care
said of almost everything, and warned that there would have to be bottles, teats, brushes, a steriliser, a spouted baby mug, a bent plastic spoon, a stiff bib with a ridge and more. Perhaps, though, it could be avoided.

The room next to the kitchen—the one with the stuck door—contained only the brackets for the shelves someone took away with them and a paper lampshade left behind. The room was just something to be walked through on the way to the stairs. Apart from this path, the dust on the floorboards had been undisturbed since that first day when, halfway between kitchen and stairs, she had paused and on impulse crossed the room to open the door of the understairs cupboard. It had been—still was—full of clean jam jars, packed in softening cardboard boxes.

In the front room, where the television aerial socket was, were the four cushions Liz had brought with her. She had made the covers herself, when she was at the B & B, stuffed them with other women's discarded tights. On the ledge of the ceramic tile surround of the gas fire she kept several pine cones, a white-coated flint, the skeleton of a holly leaf brought back from one of her walks—these were not real
things,
she felt, neither possessions nor possessors; they were more like visitors.

‘I don't think somewhere to live is a thing,' she informed Jim. ‘Food neither.' That just travelled through the body and came out the other end. Cotton wool, nappies . . . They cost money, but were just a means to an end—like all Jim's things, they were safe. ‘I don't think you'll get too attached.'

Things that people had given her, unasked, were also safe; she could walk away from them any time. But what about a television set? ‘The main point is the pictures,' she explained to Jim. Pictures—as clear and large and lifelike as possible, and then the sound, second—both produced by immaterial signal—these were as un-possessable, you'd think, as water or air. ‘A television set, really, is part of somewhere to live.' Part of home, which wasn't a thing. That was why the aerial socket was there in the front room, waiting.

Next door had TV. She could hear it in the evenings. And probably the other side did too, though you couldn't see because of the blinds. Alice and Tom would have a long job running through their possessions in their heads. They'd be defeated by the contents of their own fitted wardrobes and bedside tables: twenty, thirty, forty garments apiece on separate hangers; drawers crammed with underwear, socks and ties, swimming costumes; soft blankets; empty suitcases on the top shelf; five or six pairs of shoes; alarm clock, radio, cold cream, tweezers, paperbacks, massage glove, anglepoise lamp . . . But the 24-inch television set glimpsed in their front room was the only thing of theirs she coveted.

‘That girl, Suki, was a junkie!' she told Jim as she felt her way carefully up the stairs. She had never used to talk to herself but now she found herself liking the sound of her voice in the empty rooms. The words were heard, but at the same time left intact, like fresh snow.

Frank lingered in his shady kitchen, watching coffee sludge harden in the bottom of his cup. He had drunk far too much of it but he knew it was not caffeine but the far stronger drug, fear, that made his pulse flutter so.
Katie Rumbold,
it seemed to whisper,
Pete Magee
 . . . He was frightened of the future. He knew that Katie Rumbold and Pete Magee had started a process of change—activated it, against his will. There was no telling when or where it would end, but he was certain that today was the first day of something terrible, a course of events which would work itself out step by step, dragging him along and, at the same time, back.

Once the tiled walls of this kitchen had been painted in sickly gloss, the floor covered in linoleum. There had been a 6o-watt bulb, not spotlights. Once there had been a metal sink with a plastic curtain, matching the one at the window; a cream-coloured cooker that leaked gas; a counter, sticking out from the wall, covered in speckled Formica, which lifted at the edges. He used to run things underneath, seeing how far it would rise.

‘Stop that—you'll only make it worse. You shouldn't have run,' his mother had said in that kitchen on the evening of his first day at school. ‘You shouldn't let them see you care . . . Come, whisk these eggs up for me . . .'

Girls ran away from Frank—then John—the fastest. Their hair streamed out behind them; they gathered together around the corner, in a close bundle, like one many-limbed creature. John ran heavily after them. Everyone had a cross to bear, his mother said, separating eggs. Look at her and her life, but she wasn't complaining: ‘I still have my Johnny, after all . . .' And he had her. It would always be so. She hugged him. But of course, he understood much later, only for one of them, most likely, and as it happened, her. He didn't realise then that he would sit for hours in that room where he had first met his own ugliness—the dressing table in the window, his mother in the bed, the photograph on the table by her side. In the last years she had been terrified that he would send her away.

‘Frankie! Frankie Styne!' the girls had called, mistaking, he was later to discover, the maker and his monster made of corpseflesh, scraps and tatters not fitting, doomed. Always they kept their distance, just so. They would not close that gap even together, even to be cruel. Yet neither would they run right away . . . He must be brave. He must stick up for himself, she said.
‘I
love you.' She did. ‘To me, you're
beautiful.'
He was not the only one. There were people far worse off.

Have him different? Of course not. Or, only if it made him happier. Maybe the answer really was ‘no': she wouldn't have him different, even if it were possible. Often she said how happy she felt and that she loved him. They were far closer than most mothers and sons. They ate with the best silver cutlery, walked together in the park, arm in arm, her stately as a ship. And when they grew older they still walked just the same and he always accompanied her to the doctor's and made her take her pills on time. Perhaps she had even made him how he was, on purpose.

Dear games teacher,
she wrote for him,
my son has a delicate
constitution and should not be forced to perform strenuous exercise, particularly out of doors. I would appreciate your co-operation in this matter 
. . . Regarding the rest of education she was, however, strict: ‘You need to develop your brain.'
She
needed someone special in her life: ‘You, Johnny, my special little man.'

It was a pitiless world and many of its injustices would only be righted after Death, when the poor were rich, the suffering were happy, the separated were reunited. Meantime, you had to fight in any way you could, and be brave.

‘Do you want to know,' John, becoming Frankie Styne, roared after the girls in the playground, ‘about the hairs I've got on my back?' No one said ‘yes', but they stopped and no one ran any further away. He described parts of Frankie Styne they couldn't see, making them even worse than they were. ‘Do you want to know . . .?' Their jaws dropped. He took a step closer, they—almost in unison—took one further away. ‘Do you want to know about the maggots that live in my armpits? I eat them.' He told them how he ate rats, dug up graves. ‘The corpseflesh feels like butter,' he said, ‘smells like old pilchards. Your fingers sink through it and suddenly they hit something hard and cold that's bone.'

Their eyes grew wide. Still no one wanted to sit next to Frankie Styne, but they listened to him. He had made them listen, and made them change what they did, and was excited by the power he had over them. It was his reward for being brave. They believed him and they wanted to know how the worms twisted and turned, millions of them: ‘I swallow them down and I can feel them wriggling and tickling inside.' He almost believed it himself.

Behind him, even the boys listened avidly. ‘Go on, Frankie!' Some tried to copy, but no one,
no one,
could do it the way he could. Things were all right for a while.

‘All the time,' his mother said to her friends, who listened respectfully despite having heard it before, ‘I could never believe my luck. To me, Derek looked liked a god. I could watch him for hours. Muscles like iron. Every feature perfect . . . When he touched me the hair stood up on my flesh.'

Flesh. At school it was called tissue. Frank learned about sex; how the woman and the man got married, how they had intercourse. The penis swelled and grew. It had happened to him already, in the bath. The pleasure involved was nature's way of encouraging reproduction and not the main point. The real purpose was that it could go inside the woman's vagina and put in the sperm. The real point, then, was making him, his mother's own, John, also Frankie Styne.

‘I felt like I'd got the prize,' she'd say. ‘I felt so ordinary myself. After that, you don't bother with second best . . .'

The girls, lipsticked and too dignified now to run, bent their heads conspiratorially over their books. He, who always got good marks, shaded, printed his labels and obediently underlined them with his ruler. He knew it would become a joke, the idea of one of them and him. Of which there could be no point at all.

The result of the procedure was fertilisation. The egg split into two and each half grew and split and so on. After nine months the baby—made somehow of half of each of the parents—was born through the vagina. Another joke: perhaps his mother had had sexual intercourse with someone else. With something not human. Occasionally the local paper would report strange lights or expanses of flattened vegetation on the common, and people walking their dogs would claim that they had encountered visitors from outer space. She would have had to slip out in a billowing nightdress, perhaps with a coat over the top, and wait shivering in the dark for whatever it was: half vegetable, half man. But why would she, when his father was like a god and anything else would be second best?

According to biology, it all happened on a scale far too small to see. There were dominant and recessive genes, chromosomes, DNA. Tiny bits of code which made you how you were, writ large and visible. One day science would understand, but in the meantime it felt like fate or chance depending on your view.

It was awesome and not something, the teacher said, to be undertaken lightly. It would happen to each of them in God's good time and there was no need to hurry. At all, Frank thought. In case. People should think. He sat without moving on the science-room bench, at the back. Even then he had preferred the present, had wanted to stretch each minute of the lesson so that they would never get to go outside.

‘Blown to bits,' his mother would conclude. ‘A mine.' Anything could happen. Anything. ‘Nothing left. And I could still keep count of the number of times . . . Still, when you have a child, it's a blessing. You keep going. You have to.' God, Frank thought, just let me off. Give me a note. Some of the class walked home hand in hand. Another joke: that any one of them would let him get that near—nearer than near, inside their body. If he was them, he wouldn't. And in any case, the bathtime erections stopped—though he thought, to begin with at least, that sometimes they still came in the deep privacy of sleep. Awake, nothing—no picture, thought, or touch, no situation real or imagined would bring his penis to life.