Mr Golightly's Holiday (17 page)

F
OR ALL ITS SQUALOR
, J
ACKSON’S PLACE HAD
once been his own, where he could eat his breakfast off the floor – however filthy – if he felt like it. But now his home had become a dungeon, where the gaoler had once been his to command and ignore.

Jackson’s labile inner state was pressed still further by nagging thoughts of Ellen Thomas’s secret. The castle in the air he had been building with such pride and devotion had been exposed as made of straw. The image of the man he had seen in his beloved’s arms worked corrosively through his system, dragging with it haunting thoughts of the boy whose face she had favoured over his own.

Arriving home that evening he heard music, and coming into the lounge saw the object of his jealousy ensconced at the keyboard and wearing one of his own sweaters which Paula had shrunk in an overenthusiastic wash. An unusually pink Johnny – also from enthusiastic washing – had found Paula’s keyboard and discovered that he could pick out tunes by ear.

Paula had taken off her shoes and was jiving with a long scarf tied to the door handle. The lights were full on, making sparkles of her glittering toenails, ‘Mauve Crazy’ courtesy of Georgina’s.

‘If you can’t find a partner take a wooden chair!’ Paula
yelled, picking up the bar stool she had recently smuggled back from the Stag and swinging it wildly round.

Jackson stared, tried to speak over the music, failed to make himself heard and turned tail. Ellen Thomas, Paula, womankind – they could all go fuck themselves the lot of then for all he fucking cared. He paused on his way down the path to kick a stone-effect toadstool, presided over by a pixie with pointed shoes and a pointed hat which, with Johnny’s help, Paula had brought over from her mum’s earlier that afternoon.

News travelled fast in Great Calne and, almost as soon as the event was accomplished, Wolford heard from his mother, who had heard it from Nicky Pope, that Johnny Spence had been taken in by Paula up at Jackson’s. Wolford arrived at the Stag and Badger just as Jackson was ordering his fourth pint. Barty Clarke was relating to Paula’s mum and Kath Drover details of some case over in Plymouth, where, he claimed, a local man was on trial for immoral earnings. Sam Noble was loudly deploring the sexual mores of the times to Luke Weatherall, who had dropped in to buy cigarette papers and made some remark about throwing – or not throwing? – stones, anyway, he was a poet and the remark was incomprehensible to Sam.

Wolford sat down at the bar next to Jackson, ordered himself an orange juice and asked Jackson if he fancied a chaser.

‘Don’ mind, yeah,’ was the muttered response.

When the beer and a couple of doubles had been downed, Wolford enquired about Johnny. ‘Got the kid who was helping you out building up at yours, I hear.’

Jackson belched. ‘Little shit.’

‘Well, you know women…’ said Wolford, and waited.

‘Bitches, whores and liars!’ Jackson pronounced, definitively.

This came close to Wolford’s own assessment. ‘Yeah, but we love ‘em, don’t we?’ he enquired ambiguously.

‘You might,’ said Jackson, trying to drain an already empty glass. ‘I reckon they’re the Devil in disguise.’

‘Have another,’ suggested Wolford, ordering another orange juice and a double and a pint from the girl who was standing in for Mary Simms, who was still off sick. ‘That room you’re building. How come you’ve got the boy helping you, then?’

‘’Twas her done it,’ said Jackson, moodily. ‘She wanted it.’

‘Paula?’ asked Wolford.

‘Nah – Mrs Thomas,’ said Jackson, his rumbling turbulence threatening to erupt into naked rage.

‘Really?’ said Wolford. ‘What she want another room for anyway. All by herself, isn’t she?’

Behind them, Barty Clarke was regaling Sam with statistics about prostitution. ‘Most of them are under age,’ he assured.

‘Dunno,’ said Jackson, struggling to keep faith with the memory of his Beloved of the White Hands.

But Wolford’s feral instincts smelled a secret.

‘She got a boyfriend or anything?’ he hazarded.

It was a tame enough guess; but to Jackson, in his unhinged state, it seemed like the last straw. Everyone but him had known the truth about Ellen Thomas.

‘She got someone, I reckon.’

‘Really?’ asked Wolford, smoothly ordering another double. ‘Anyone we know?’

A voice far down in Jackson whispered that he was about to err, that he had already gone too far, that he had better retreat, that he was about to trespass on a shrine and that the deity who dwelled there was relentless, and merciless, and, once roused, would pursue him for all time.

‘Have another, why not?’ said Wolford, sliding the glass of whisky towards him. ‘You know what, we’ve got this con still on the loose. No trace of him. Any strange men we have to investigate – you’d be helping us in our enquiries, in a manner of speaking…’ He flipped open his wallet and indicated a twenty-pound note.

‘Appalling!’ reiterated Sam.

The sight of the note set off competing strains in Jackson. He wanted to strike the wallet from Wolford’s hand, pick up the bar stool and smash it over the screw’s head. He had no need of cash. Ellen Thomas paid him each week on the dot; and while Paula extracted the lion’s share, he was not fool enough to let her know the full extent of his earnings. For the first time in his life he was flush. And, in fact, Jackson was not a mercenary man; had he been so he would have
been more regular in his habits. Money meant little to him, but he was experiencing that sense of thwarted entitlement which arises when desire and deserts are mismatched. Caught in a conflict, Jackson hesitated.

Wolford took out the twenty-pound note and then, laid on top of it a tenner. He held out the two notes just a little in front of Jackson’s sweaty face. ‘Between friends,’ he remarked. ‘We won’t say anything to anyone. I’ve met your good lady.’

Intending to give an impression of moral support, Wolford was referring to Paula, but Jackson supposed it was Ellen the screw meant. To Jackson’s drunk-dazed, hope-smashed, frenzied mind, everyone knew his adored one better than him. More to get them out of his sight, and the whole nightmare over with, he grabbed the notes and shoved them into his pocket.

‘She’s got him staying in her spare room. Don’t never see him daytimes,’ Jackson said.

As Mr Golightly walked up the garden path at Jackson’s, a chorus of voices advised him that they were only twenty-four hours from Tulsa.

Johnny was sitting at the keyboard, a very different boy from the furtive creature Mr Golightly had first seen flattened beneath the Traveller van. And Paula, dancing barefoot, her purple vest showing gleaming tattooed shoulders, resembled some record-breaking, pint-sized javelin thrower.

Jubilation is an expansive emotion. A feeling close to pride began to fill Mr Golightly’s breast. ‘I’m sorry to break in on the fun,’ he said.

Johnny, thrilled at the chance to show off, started up wildly with ‘Love Me Do’, but Paula checked him. ‘Manners! Mr Golightly’s come special to see you,’

‘Oh, please,’ said Mr Golightly, who hated to stand on ceremony.

But Johnny appeared quite at home. ‘What’s up, chief?’

‘I’ve a message for you,’ said Mr Golightly, trying, and failing, not to sound mysterious.

‘S’all right,’ said Paula. ‘I know when to make meself scarce. I’ll put the kettle on. Coffee, en’t it? Or there’s scrumpy, if the vicar’s left us any, that is…’

Jackson, his skin filled with an inflammable mix of whisky and Newcastle Brown, walked tremblingly back from the Stag. Halfway up the path he paused to piss on the figure on the toadstool. The stream of urine fell short of the pixie which leered cunningly up at Jackson.

‘You’re out, boyo,’ it said. ‘Finished, washed up, vamoosed, vanished, neither here nor there, an ex-person, no kind of a man at all.’

‘Din know you was Welsh,’ said Jackson, beerily.

‘Cornish,’ said the pixie. ‘A piscie, if you want to know. And this is a mushroom, not a toadstool. Not that you’re worth telling, hardly.’

It resumed its position of stony aloofness.

Jackson continued his unsteady progress up the path. The front door was wide open and through the lounge door he could see Paula in her purple sequinned strap top. Her skirt had ridden up her thighs and her face was alight with sweat. ‘I ain’t nothing but a hound dog…’ she crooned.

‘Bitch, more like,’ said Jackson. But the pixie – or piscie – had knocked the stuffing out of him, and no one heard him as he made his way on hands and knees up to the bathroom.

J
ACKSON WAS WRONG ABOUT
E
LLEN AND
J
OS
Bainbridge: the tableau which had caught his dismayed sight, as he peered through the bungalow’s crazy interior window, was not of two lovers. At least not in the way that he supposed.

The night she found him in her kitchen, Ellen had seen Jos Bainbridge, and those we see truly we love – and for all time. They met in the space between worlds, where the rule of quotidian concerns – prudence, common sense, custom, cupidity – like the law of gravity, at a distance from the earth’s strong pull, attenuates into airy nothingness, and we are let free to be ourselves; that liberty itself induces love, for who does not secretly long to be released from the cramp of self-obsession and the prison of self-regard? Somewhere in our being the scent of freedom lingers, like the elusive smell of cut grass from a dream of lost summer, or the breeze off fresh and endless oceans. The everyday world is at once too carping and too cautious to admit such recollection, although, if we are lucky, it catches us, fleetingly, as we ride, or run, or paint, or cook, or make love – or music, wine or stories. Only to the blessed does it return in a single quenching shaft, as it did to Ellen Thomas the night she met Jos Bainbridge.

Eros is protean and adopts many shapes, and not all take
the forms of amorous attachment. Their nights were spent in a series of picnics, such as children devise away from the peerings of adults, in secret glades or twilit clearings, where the entrance to faeryland might be found and tales are told of rash ones, who have lost their way inside that hidden kingdom and have never been returned.

The night that Jackson had peeped through the window Ellen had been folding Jos Bainbridge in her arms, as a mother might a scared child, or a sister a much-loved brother, off for many years to sea; or a man his sick dog.

‘What did happen to put you there?’ she had asked. ‘Can you say?’

He had told her; and as he spoke his past requisitioned her own memory, so that she knew in future it would never again be entirely hers.

When he woke, he said, his head hurting like hell and fuddled in his mind, he had not gone back to the farm for several days. What disturbed him most was that the man had found out their secret place. Later, he realised that it probably wasn’t secret – that the man had known where to come. When he finally returned, the police were called to ‘interview’ him – he laughed at the word, ‘as if,’ he said, ‘I’d applied for a job with them, or something!’ She had explained her state to her father by saying he, Jos, had forced her to have sex and her father had called the police and made her repeat the allegation…he saw now it was fear – fear of her father’s anger, fear, for all he knew, for her life, from that man, that made her say it…

‘First time I heard the voice it was in the police cells, waiting to see what they were going to do with me. I’d already “confessed” that I’d been with her, slept with her and told them – they get you to say all kinds of things you don’t see the harm in at the time, you see, so I’d said how guilty I felt. But I did. I felt guilty as hell. I didn’t force her and it wasn’t me who beat her up – but I kept hearing those voices in my head saying I was the Devil, I had done the work of the Devil.’

‘But you told them about the man you saw?’

An owl hallooed across the darkening hollow beneath the hills before them.

‘I didn’t. At first because I didn’t know what she’d said, and I wouldn’t say anything to get her into trouble with her father. Then, when it became obvious they wanted me to confess to more than having sex with her, I knew there was something going on. But I didn’t know what. And there were the voices telling me I was wicked, you see. And I didn’t want to say anything to hurt her. So I said nothing and they kept taking me out and putting me back in the cells till I was almost mad – if I wasn’t mad already. And then one night there was this other voice that drowned all the others.’

‘What did it say?’

‘Have you heard a nightingale ever?’

She shook her head.

‘Hard to describe unless you’ve heard a nightingale. It was achingly clear, but also a kind of extraordinary chuckle,
a chink into something so deep and so pure and so…so lovely, you would die to hear it – like the sweetest bird’s song it was, hidden in the dark.’

A bird. She might have guessed. Jos Bainbridge knew what it was to be put in a cage.

‘The barrister said I should plead guilty because they’d already got a confession out of me, you see, and my sentence would be lighter. But I wouldn’t…I can’t hear the song of a bird now simply as a sound – it always has that other meaning for me.’

‘What is the meaning?’ she asked again, and her heart hurt in her ribcage. But it was not the hurt of the tiger’s maul – it was the clamour of something wild to be free, like the caged redbreast.

The owl made its faux forlorn call again.

The quiet they sat in was almost too huge to bear. But you sat in darkness and then, if you sat there long enough, you learned to see. Sitting with him like this she was learning to make things out in the dark.

‘It’s truth,’ he said, finally, and she had the sensation that around them the creatures of the night had paused to listen. ‘The meaning. A bird can’t lie. When I wouldn’t plead guilty, the barrister wanted to use the epilepsy with balance of mind disturbed. But it wasn’t a fit and I never hurt a scrap of her. I couldn’t lie about it, you see.’

Speak the truth and all things vouch for you…Yes, thought Ellen Thomas, but that is more likely if there is another on your side.

‘But she lied, your girl lied about you?’

He answered so quietly she had to ask him to repeat it. Then, as if addressing not her but some brilliant star chamber, convened far up in the bruised-purple sky, he lifted his chin and spoke – and long afterwards she felt the shadow of the tremor of pity and terror shiver through her.

‘She said, in court, I’d raped her and beaten her up. I got ten years, without parole,’ he said.