The Ruby Slippers (16 page)

‘I came down with a sudden cold and took to my bed,’ he says, a little hastily, though it was true enough! There’s another hairy moment when Grace asks about the missing glass in the door. He explains it away casually, saying he had stupidly put the mop-handle through it, though by their raised eyebrows he can see it doesn’t quite wash. Later on, when Jenny is out the back, Grace comes up to him and asks quietly, ‘Michael, what happened here?’

‘I told you,’ he says, giving nothing away. ‘And what about you? What did you do?’

‘We watched
Casablanca
. I love that movie.’

‘Oh yeah and what else? Did you happen to get round to talking about the slippers?’

‘Michael. Really!’ she says, meaning,
How could you possibly not trust me?
But her protestations are as half-hearted as his have been. And so they both agree, without saying it, to cut their losses and go about their chores. He is lifted a little out of his despondency by the experience of taking little Sylvie round to see Barrell in the kennel, so luminous is her delight. And he manages it through to lunch, despite Jenny asking him every five minutes if he’s feeling any better, if he needs a hand with this or help with that, and if he wouldn’t rather go upstairs and lie down. He does, in fact, agree to this, at least to go and eat from a plate and sit in a soft chair – another departure from the norm that doesn’t go unnoticed.

All morning he’s been plagued by their questions, spoken and unspoken, yet when he finally allows himself twenty minutes to flop out on the couch, it’s the questions within Michael that keep rearing their ugly heads. Grace and he never had secrets, so why not just get the whole twisted story out in the open? The boy was dangerous and a criminal, and even if they didn’t go the police, it needed to be faced up to. Just thinking about it now makes his head spin and stirs up a kind of nausea, in which all kinds of feelings are bound up: in the first instance, guilt about how he and Grace came by the slippers, and in a deeper sense, fear of how everything goes dark and rotten at the last.

As he comes down the steps, he finds Sylvie stretched out face down, wriggling and gasping as she tries to reach for something in the gap between the shelving and the floor. Michael squats to bring himself to her level – not too sick or too old to share in the excitement of a small child. But when she eventually extricates herself, she has in her arms the hexagonal lid of the hatbox, raising it up to him like a prize, with the lining turned towards him. A shade brusquely, he takes it from her, then glances right and left to ensure there are no prying eyes. ‘Thank you, honey,’ he says and tweaks her cheek. ‘Do me a favour, will ya? Go along to the candy shelf and choose the bestest candy bar you ever wanted.’ She looks at him, flabbergasted, in awe of the wonderful prize that is to come, but then her expression changes as she looks down at her knee and sees there a trickle of red. Glass – she has knelt on glass from the broken pane. Her face crumples and she begins to wail, bringing Grace and Jenny running. An almighty kerfuffle follows this, in which he is made to feel almost as though he put the glass there on purpose. He manages to smuggle the candy bar to Sylvie in the end, but by the time Benjy arrives for work, he is ready to crash out again.

Back upstairs on the couch, he finds himself reflecting on the many strange things that have happened in so short a space of time: Rosa’s accident, then the robbery and being taken back to those terrible old times – let alone nearly dying – and all so painfully secretive. But he will not give up; if anything, all this suffering has made him even more determined to see it through; he will go back there, first of all to do what is right, and then to go through Rosa’s things one by one, to find the missing bits of him and put himself back together again.

■ ♦ ■

Four days only since she went to the city and it feels like a year to Siobhan. It has all gone by in a daze. At first Corinne was wounded and chiding: ‘You should’ve told me, Siobhan. It hurts me that you didn’t trust me enough to confide in me.’ And then she let rip with the black propaganda again: ‘Well, at least you got to see what kind of a spineless creep the man is.’ Of course she is hurt still, but Siobhan can’t forget what she saw: that for all his faults, James is real and there were things to like about him amongst the things not to like. She feels better about the fact that she has been inside his home and seen Paolo’s photograph on the mantelpiece. So, her father has a partner who is a man; he is gay. It doesn’t seem so hard to say any more, she can live with it, and she has gone back to the ordinary way of things: going to school, seeing her friends, telling them how she went to Manhattan and why. There has been no comeback; she even went out on Saturday to the cinema with Kelly and the others, and there wasn’t a smirk from anyone. Even so, the pain inside her will not just lie down and die. It has nothing to do with anyone else on earth, just him and her, father and daughter – about how she felt so small and childish and softly loved him, and then was told not to love him, and later was told to be hard and cold about him, and that he was never coming back and was never capable of being a man again. But her need is righteous; it demands to be satisfied, and she will take it up again as soon as soon as another chance presents itself.

■ ♦ ■

‘Excuse me, where did you say you were going?’

Three people are lined up at the counter, but Grace just ignores them, shoots out after Michael and stands there blocking his path.

‘You heard what I said,’ he mutters.

‘No, Michael, I musta misheard. For a moment I thought I heard you say you were going to Rosa’s.’

‘Just to do the necessaries, Grace. It won’t take long.’

‘Send in the clearance people and be done. That was what was agreed!’

Glancing back at the customers, Michael shakes his head irritably; she has no right to react so outraged and make her feelings so public.

But she will not be shamed into silence: ‘Let it go, I’m telling you! All the crap in that place you could walk in there and never come out again.’

‘Grace, listen to me, we’re talking documents, papers, things that should be kept. Bank details, stocks and shares, who knows?’

‘Stocks and shares? Since when did she have stocks and shares?’

‘Since no one knows. That’s why it has to be done. We cannot let these things go to the garbage. Go serve the customers, Grace, I won’t be long . . .’

This he says right out loud and walks away, which has the customers all agog. Grace scuttles back to her place, red of face and simmering like a hobbled pot. He won’t hear the last of this; she will not let this go. Michael is smarting hard as he goes round to the side alley, mad at himself for stopping to hear her out. He buttons his coat, takes the dog and sets off, under his arm a roll of garbage sacks wrapped around a hand shovel. A wind is shaping up all troubled as he scuffs along, shaking his head, oblivious to the tug of the dog. Really, Grace should know better, why is she being so damn intolerant? What really upsets him about it is that she’s behaving as if Rosa was already dead and buried, when all the time she is lying in the hospital. Whatever her past sins, she is a human being who lived a meaningful life, and you don’t just throw that away without preserving the best that was in it. In truth, he is at odds with himself over it all. What difference should it make to him if Rosa’s crap was to go? The place is in a dreadful state, after all, and can hardly be left as it is. Also, if he is honest about it, there is something selfish in his need to stand up for Rosa, and he can’t help wondering whether Grace would take the same stand if he were the one lying in a coma? That night at Rosa’s he had caught sight of so many old papers and the like, some of them in the old language, and he has a growing desire to know them. If there is any light to be shed on things after all this time, Rosa’s apartment is the only place on earth that holds the answers. A person should know their own history. How else could they ever claim to be complete? Michael’s anxieties start to subside as he pushes on, and he even begins to look forward to the task: going through things, sorting them – things in and things out – it’s what he does every day after all, just a little more unpleasant. He will start with the real crap, throw it into sacks and stack them to go. That way he can keep an eye out for papers and pictures and God knows what.

By the time he stands again, staring across the layers in Rosa’s apartment, he has adjusted to the idea that, when he goes in, rottenness will spill, odours will spring and things will crawl. Big to small, that will be the rule. Furniture first, to its own heap, then all the way down to clothes, books and the black matter that once was food but has long since eaten its way through its wrappers and joined with everything else that was dark and sludgy. He ties Barrell to the door handle, pulls the shovel from the roll and peels off sacks: green ones for clothes, fabrics and anything that isn’t too far gone; black ones for everything taking up space, like books and ornaments; greys for everything foul and decayed. Through clamped teeth he sucks a hank of fetid air and wraps his arms around a pile of blankets stained piss-yellow. Into the sack they go. Spluttering at the mouth, his lips all slack and trembling, Michael takes up the shovel and thrusts it in, heaving in the spillage. He turns back for a second load, and a third . . . which is when it dawns on him and he pulls up, open-mouthed, astonished: ‘My God! This . . . this is where it all started . . .’

Garbage people they called them – scum who lived on scum – their daily toil to crawl over and comb through the garbage heap that was the fallen city’s rotten heart. The Jews had once lived here; it was their quarter, before they had been shipped out and their homes levelled. An estate of waste had formed where once there had been houses. And to it had come the rats, the dogs in packs and the human pariahs, like them, to pick their way across its contours, soft and giving in the warmer months and hard and unyielding in the winter. His father, Janis, was a simple man, in truth an ignorant one, who only dug and carried for his living at the best of times, who saw reality for what it was and made no apology for what he did. He was beyond caring about the smell he carried with him everywhere, or the fact that he traded in shit. They worked the garbage or they died, there was no other way; it was their daily lot to sift life from death, literally. And if they chanced upon more than was required for their own continuing existence, they set it apart for those who had the means to pay, and haggled and lied and wrung it out, hiking their price according to the degree of their customers’ desperation. So they survived on starvation’s crude capitalism, where hunger was the index and death the market leader.

Michael stands, reeling in the rank atmosphere of Aunt Rosa’s room, his old head nodding helplessly. No wonder he had erased that awful time from his mind: it was for shame. And yet it staggers him to think that he could have stowed away in his forgetting so basic an experience, so hard a reality ingrained. Yes, he has been here before, and many times over, and all when he was such a little boy – another reason to have clean forgot.

■ ♦ ■

It is past closing time when he comes in the door. She looks up from the counter, where she has been smouldering ever since he left, sees the old battered suitcase under his arm and raises an eyebrow in place of words. He is in no mood for talk either: ‘Later. I’ll show you later. I’ll go bring up stock.’ He doesn’t tell her how much pain he has endured, how prising open one terrible memory had brought to the surface so many others, how his own history repeated had left him exposed again and suffering.

At the basin at the back of the store, washing his hands over and over, far beyond need, Michael’s mind is on ghastly things. He should be thinking of filling shelves with tagliatelle and sun-dried tomatoes, but instead he is seeing soldiers coming to the house and kicking the door in with their jackboots, seizing his father right in front of him and his terrified mother, and cruelly ripping him away. In the middle of putting sticky labels on jars of conserves, Michael winces to recall how, even as he was marched away his father had looked back and smiled, which only made his face all the more a skull and his body a corpse for a quicklime grave. And he and his mother both understood, without recourse to words, that they would never see him again; they didn’t need history to tell them he was gone for dead.

By the time Grace reminds him to go out and bring in the racks, Michael is drained. Sixty-five-year-old memories and they are fiercer and more consuming than those seeded only hours ago. But he does not say a thing. When Grace hangs up her shop coat and says, ‘Time to go and rustle up something.’ He smiles and says, ‘Righty ho.’ And when she says, ‘What’s in the valise, by the way?’ He just says, ‘Ah nothing, old papers and stuff.’

When at last he can hear her clumping up the stairs, he lifts the suitcase from behind the counter and opens it up. Inside are scattered sheaves of papers, all of them in a language he no longer knows, some letters and two photographs: the one he and Grace had seen on their first visit, of Rosa, glamorous and beautiful, and another, much larger, with words written on the back in the same writing: ‘June ’41 Monterey’. He turns it over and there is a woman in soft monochrome, naked – stark naked and completely unselfconscious. Waves are rolling behind her and she is on the deck of a yacht. One foot is off the ground, her hands reaching skywards and her head thrown back with hair flying. It is as if she is matching her body to the elements, the whole pose abandoned, charged and yet not really sexual at all. Michael stares, eclipsing all the sullied memories of his ancient aunt, and sees that in the moment this picture was taken, Rosa was her natural self – she was free – and that as much as any image of her could be, this was the real Rosa. It must have been after she came back from California and took up with Gerry Clyde, the photographer, who must have taken the picture. ‘Look at this,’ he says to himself. ‘Look at this; how did she go from this to such a sad old stinking person?’