Tales of Sin & Fury, Part 1 (23 page)

‘Then she held out her hand and touched my shoulder through the bedclothes. It was like an electric shock. But it was a particular type of a shock because I think I fell asleep right then. I can't remember anything after that.

‘That night I dreamt I was talking to my chick. Begging her to come back. Which I would never do in real life. To humiliate myself, I will not do that. Someone to see me begging, oh no. I never did phone her or nothing while she was gone. I knew that she would not enjoy herself staying with her brother. I knew that she would come back in the end. It might take months, it might take years. I didn't care. I would not phone her.

‘But in the dream, there I was begging.

‘As it happens, my chick came back two days later. Almost like she'd heard me. She just walked in with the boys and put the food in the fridge and cooked a meal without saying a word.

‘She never believed I saw the old lady. She thought I was drunk. She doesn't believe in
duppies
.

‘But she came back to stay. And ever since then I believe in
duppies
. 'Cos I seen one.'

Alex was humming the tune of
Darling Clementine
. ‘There's a ghost in that song,' she said. ‘I'm trying to remember it…' After a pause, she sang ‘“In my dreams she still does haunt me, dressed in….” something about seaweed draped over her… “dressed in seaweed mighty fine” (that's not quite right), then it ends: “Though in life I used to love her, now she's dead I draw the line… ”' Alex giggled.

Duane was looking at her with no expression on his face. ‘You think it's funny, yeah?'

‘And Molly Malone. She dies of a fever, and it goes: “Now her ghost wheels her barrow, through streets broad and narrow, singing cockles and mussels, alive, alive-oh….”' Alex's voice was strong and tuneful.

Duane continued to stare at her.

‘I'm not taking the piss,' said Alex. ‘I'm saying ghosts are a part of popular tradition. Folk songs can be very wise.' She giggled again, ‘But I'm not saying I believe you saw a ghost. You thought you saw one, yes.'

Duane took a deep breath, ‘I know what I saw.'

Alex's face sobered, ‘But I do believe it must have been awful for you when your wife left.'

Duane's face cracked into a smile and he shook his head. ‘I blame her brother's wife for all that problem. Religious types like her can do a lot of damage. Because they are always so sure they are in the right. The brother's wife, I think she was born again. With some people, you'd think once was enough.'

‘Do you think all religious people are dangerous?' asked Alex, spreading the top sheet over them both.

‘No, no. I do believe in God, myself. But my God, not hers. The ones that make problems, it's the ones who like God so much they hate people. Like the landlord we used to have. He was one of them Jews so religious they always wear a hat.'

Alex lifted her head. ‘Where did you grow up?'

‘We lived near Ladbroke Grove, we shared with my cousin's family. That's my aunt, my Mum's sister, and her children. One of those big old houses, right, with a porch in front, we were on the second floor. On the ground floor there was an old white man, he'd lost his wife, kept complaining about the noise. Miserable, he was. But it was mostly blacks round there. It was Jews owned the houses, people like that Rachman, they lined their pockets with the money of the black man.'

Alex sat up, pulling the sheet around her. ‘Wait a minute, what about the Jews who were poor?'

He looked up at her from the mattress, slowly stroking his chest. ‘I never met any.'

She asked ‘Do you actually know any Jewish people? To talk to?'

‘I don't want to.'

‘Perhaps you don't know much about Jews.'

‘Let's put it this way. At school in the race fights, the Jews and the Pakis always sided with the whites. That's why I hate them. They think they're better than us.'

‘But you're not in school now. You're old enough to understand how history has landed both Jews and black people in this country. Most of them arriving with pennies. They've got a lot in common. I'm shocked. Coming from you, a black man.'

He raised an eyebrow and rolled his brown eyes away from her up towards the ceiling. ‘All I know is, we lived in a shit-hole, pardon my French. Paint peeling on the outside of the house. The roof leaked. We had to share the toilet. You took the toilet roll down with you each time and bring it back up again. Or it got nicked by the people renting below. And they never wiped the seat.

‘Our sitting room was nice but we weren't allowed in. We were all crowded in the kitchen.'

‘Was it a close family?' asked Alex.

Duane hesitated. ‘You could say that. If one of us got a cold, we all came down with a cold. But there was always secrets. Like diseases that never got spread, right. But they got to you all the same. The air in the kitchen was full of them.'

‘Like what?'

‘Like different things. Like where my dad went when he went out.'

‘Like where?'

Duane pursed his lips. ‘Perhaps I should not tell you this, but you ask a lot of questions and maybe you can keep secrets too.'

‘Maybe I can.' Alex smiled.

He looked past her at the corner of the room. ‘My dad was always happy of an excuse to go out. He said it was too noisy in the house.

‘“Where you going now?” my mum would call out.

‘“For cigarette,” he shouts. He puts on his old trilby hat, and we hear his feet going down the stairs and the front door slam.

‘Sometimes my mum made my dad take me out with him. He walked to the shop and bought cigarettes, or he sat in the pub and I played with a football outside. But mostly he went to his friends to play cards.

‘Once on the way home he stopped at a house in Aldridge Road and told me to wait outside for a few minutes. I sat down on the steps. I waited a long time. It started to get dark. I looked up at the lights in the windows and wondered what room he was in. When the door opened, there was a white woman with my dad, I didn't know her. She was wearing a flowery dressing gown. She moved back inside, and on the way home my dad said not to mention nothing to my mum. “Some things women don't understand,” he said. That was how he put it. He told me if my mum asked to say we'd been to his friends to play cards.

‘Excuse me a minute.'

Duane got up and ambled across the room. He left the door open and light poured in from the landing. The toilet flushed upstairs. As he came back in, his penis swaying from side to side, Alex pulled the blankets over the bed. She asked him ‘Do you believe the old lady with the cats came back to help you? Perhaps she felt she owed you one.'

He smiled. ‘Maybe. Maybe after all that story I owe you one.' He bit the top off another condom packet and pulled the blankets away from her.

Their bodies made arcs around the floor, a swaying knot of brown and white arms and legs in the twilight of the lamp. Afterwards they lay beside each other in silence.

Alex was almost asleep when she opened her eyes and asked: ‘Do you always sleep in your woolly hat?'

‘Not always.'

‘Can I take it off?'

‘No. That is out of bounds. That is personal.'

‘So the rest of you isn't?'

Duane said, ‘Only my chick gets to take that off,' and rolled onto his side.

Alex shrugged and yawned. Five minutes later they were both asleep, breathing softly in unison, Duane in his brown woolly hat resting on the pillow next to Alex's curls.

7

Reckoning the Random

Wednesday 19th December 1990 5 am

Morton woke when Anthea fell out of bed, taking the duvet with her.

‘Ant? What you doing?' His speech was slurred. His arm reached behind him for the duvet but didn't find it. ‘Ant?'

He turned over and found her curled up on the floor, eyes staring, hand clutched over her lower face. ‘What's the matter? Ant? Hello?'

She looked at him, dropped her hand and sat up. ‘I'm sorry. It was a nightmare.'

‘The same one?' he asked.

‘I dreamt I was falling.'

He tugged at the duvet. ‘Come on. You're going to freeze.'

She climbed back into bed. She whispered to him: ‘I was falling from the edge of a cliff. Somehow I stepped off – I didn't mean to – and then suddenly the air is rushing past my ears. Then it stops, like a freeze frame in a film. I'm suspended in space. I can hear your voice and Bert's voice. I can see your faces large and close to me, trying to say something. Then it's like the film starts again at double speed and the fear rises in my throat and it wipes out my vision and my hearing and I'm clutching at things but I just keep on falling. There was terror. Then I woke up.'

Morton let his hand rest for a moment on her large bosom. ‘I can feel your heart pounding, love. Let's get back to sleep.' He tucked Anthea and himself under the duvet and closed his eyes.

She waited until his breathing became slow and regular, then she extricated herself from Morton and the bedding. She took the torch from her bedside and went to the chest of drawers on the other side of the room. From the wicker box she took the diagonal-edged bone. In the light of the torch she examined it. She dabbed at the bit of Greek earth trapped in a little hole. She rubbed the bone between her two hands as if she were trying to warm it. Then she clasped it to her cheek. ‘I am not afraid,' she said, ‘I am not afraid.' She shivered as she crouched in the dark repeating like a mantra, ‘I am not afraid. I am not afraid. I am not afraid.'

Wednesday 19th December 9 am

Alex and Duane woke when Ren tiptoed down the stairs and out of the front door.

‘She's working again today?' asked Duane, sitting up in the makeshift bed.

‘It seems a lot of people need help around Christmas.' Alex fished her bra out of the bedclothes and put it on.

‘You know what I think?' said Duane, ‘I think she's working too hard.'

Alex said, ‘She looked tired last night at supper. Listening to other people's problems all day can't help.'

‘The thing with Ren, right, she likes to help people.' Duane stroked his bare chest. ‘But you know what? Sometimes you got to help yourself.'

He pulled his hat down lower over his ears. ‘My chick's birthday today.'

Alex asked ‘How did you meet Ren?'

He replied, ‘I'll tell you in the pub. I need one for the road.'

She said, ‘I need breakfast. I'm starving.'

Back in the pub at the same table as the night before, he said, ‘I'm sitting here and every minute that passes my chick is waiting for me at home. All I hope is that her brother's wife isn't there. She will be making trouble. She is always forcing her views down people's throats, know what I mean. Like I said, she is one of those people who is too religious to like anybody except God. I'm meant to be at home now, she's probably sitting in my kitchen right now, telling my chick that I am out on the devil's work. Poisoning my chick against me.'

‘Why don't you just go?'

‘You see, I'm the kind of guy that does not like pressure. If someone wants me to do something, you know, if they try to make me do something, right, then I will be doing the opposite thing. I'll answer your question. About Ren. Then maybe I will feel ready to go. You asked me how I met her, right? I'll tell you.

‘It was five years ago. I'm a painter decorator, right? I got a job to paint the front of her house. Landlord hired me. She was renting the top half of the house then, just like she is now. I was on the scaffolding outside, stripping the old paint. It was summer and the window was open, she sees me through the window and smiles and offers me a cup of tea. Some people don't bother, right, they think it's just workmen out there not people, right. Next day I'm doing undercoat and she offers me a cup of tea again, this time I come in through the window to drink it. So it goes on. By the time I'm finishing the gloss I'm spending more time with Ren than painting but all the foreman knows is that I went up the scaffolding and I haven't come down so he thinks I'm hard at it. Well, I would have liked to be, but not at what he thinks. Ren didn't respond the way most women do. I didn't know she went the other path, you know what I mean. She don't look at a geezer that way. Not like most women do.'

‘So what happened with most women when you stopped for a cup of tea?' Alex asked.

‘Well, things happened from time to time. I was painting houses. Women get lonely at home all day. The men go out and lock the front door behind them, they think the house and the wife is safe. Burglar alarms, all the rest. They don't realize there is a short cut into the white man's fortress. Scaffolding. Sometimes just a ladder. Through the upstairs window you see right in. And if she opens the window… '

‘But Ren didn't have a husband?'

‘Ren was always different. That is how come she is still my friend and I am here now. She was always special, actually. I didn't know why. Then one day, after I'd known her a few months, and I'd finished work on this street, she offers to give me a massage. OK, I say, can't do any harm. I lie on the table, at that time she used to do it in the sitting room at her place. She had a folding table. She was very professional, once she started. Like she didn't know me personally. “Relax,” she goes. “Focus where the touch is. Let yourself receive what you need from the universe.” She talked like that even then. So I shut my eyes and what happened was peculiar. It was more naked, right, than sex. Maybe that's why it made such a big change on me. Her hands felt as if it was something red hot touching my skin and reaching right in to my bones. It felt like her hands were speaking to me but I couldn't catch the words. It was something like, Duane, I know you and I've always known you and I will always know you in the future and you are a good person and there's something special inside you. I can't really think of how to explain it, but she'd say, perhaps she'd say, “harmony,” that kind of word. The feeling, right, was very strong but it was not like how it is in sex. More peaceful. And you know something? That massage changed my life.'