1982 Janine (35 page)

Under these words was printed the bottom part of the big photograph which had greatly upset Helen two days earlier. The caption said, “Nineteen-year-old Helen Hume as she appears with Rory McBride in the Cowlay Communists' political pantomime.”

I reread the article carefully. It was cleverly written. It described a place in which fornication was conceivable, then quoted the words of one who, without knowing the place or people, assumed that multiple fornication was actual, then the words of someone who thought fornications were forgiveable, then the words of some anxious people who had also never seen the premises but were almost – but not wholly – convinced that
their
child was not fornicating. Yet not one libellous word stated that anyone was fornicating. Of course there must have been some lovemaking in the upper chamber, because a lot of mixing and joining happened in that club, but I am sure there would have been more if we had been using the North British Hotel. Communal sex is even less probable among the Scots than the private kind, which is why I had shifted my mattress into a closet.

After a long silence Helen said again, “How
could
he write that? I gave him my age and my address because I thought he would write nice things about us. I told him my parents had been upset by that photograph, and he said he would do his best to redress the balance. How
could
he write these things?”

“He makes his living by it,” said the English director.

“That is the excuse German businessmen gave for manufacturing Zyklon Β gas,” said the Scottish director.

“Exactly,” said the English director. “Exactly. Exactly. But this stuff isn't lethal gas, it's nothing but a cloud of foul language and in our business we learn to shrug that off. Three-quarters of what appears in the press is just a silly game. The pressmen know it's a game, they laugh at it themselves. So should the readers.”

Helen said, “My parents have no sense of humour, I'm afraid, and neither have I. I don't think I can go on tonight. Cowlay Communist! My dad will murder me.”

Her voice suddenly sounded like Denny's. She wept. Our
director laid an arm round her shoulders. She shrugged it off but allowed Diana to dry her tears with a handkerchief. Judy said in a matter-of-fact voice, “You must go on tonight. Because of Binkie, you know.”

“Damn Binkie.”

Judy turned to me and spoke as if opening a more cheerful topic.

“Did you sleep well, Jock?”

“Yes thanks.”

“Who undressed you, by the way?” I stared at her.

“Do you remember who put you into your pyjamas?”

I had to shake my head.

“Surely you remember the anal entry?”

“You're joking.”

“The flagellation.”

“Certainly not.”

“The fellatio.”

“What is fellatio?”

“Sisters!” Judy said to Diana and Helen in a tragic voice,

“Our charms were wasted on this man. He doesn't remember a single thing.”

I was confused. I said, “Do you mean that you er – ?”

She said, “Yes we put you to bed. You were amazingly articulate for a bit then you suddenly collapsed and went infantile. Men don't know how to handle a baby so we had to do it. By the way, who exactly is Denny?”

I stared at her again. She said, “You kept calling for Denny in the most heartrending tones while clutching as much of us as you could get your hands upon. Then you said angrily, ‘I don't love you! You aren't Denny', and wept passionate tears.”

Diana said, “I don't remember that. I remember him saying he was cold all the time. Even when we were tucking him in he kept whining about how cold he was, then he stopped and said in a perfectly sober voice, ‘I am going to marry Denny.' Then you passed out, Jock.”

This was disturbing news. Helen said, “You behaved disgustingly, Jock. We all behaved disgustingly. Especially
him
.”

She nodded grimly at the English director who frowned
then said, “Careful, Helen. You'll end up believing that hypocritical reporter was telling the truth about this place.”

“I think he was,” said Helen, and started sobbing again. Judy and the English director stood up. He said in a tired voice, “Who wants a hair of the dog?”

I went with them to the Deacon Brodie tavern where we met Brendan or perhaps it was Dominic Behan and I had several hairs of the dog that had bitten me so badly.

Helen did not withdraw from the show that night. Her performance at the start of it was shaky and nervous but by the interval she had picked up confidence and we felt everything was going to be all right. Shortly after the interval a bad thing happened. In order to keep a travelling but vertical spotlight on Helen I was moving stealthily along the gantry over her head when my foot slipped, the light crashed and burst against a girder, for a second or two I was dangling by my hands. The audience gasped then laughed and applauded as I swung myself up, screwed in a new bulb and continued as if I was perfectly resigned to accidents like these. But the laughter and applause were the wrong kind. Helen started speaking faster and faster, clearly wanting the play to end as soon as possible. She hardly let the other actors finish their lines before gabbling her own. Her vowels changed from posh English ows and aws to very flat ehs of a sort then common in the Glasgow Kelvinside district. Before the end of the play she stopped acting altogether and became nothing but a brave Scotswoman performing a distasteful duty. The audience no longer laughed. Only Rory' s final speech gave it an opportunity to applaud.

Helen did not come forward to bow at the end. I remained up the scaffolding with my back to the audience even after I had put the house lights on, even after the public had filtered out. I hated myself. I did not want to be seen or heard by anyone, especially not by those in the company. I had ruined the show and did not know how to apologise. I fiddled with a junction box while Roddy, Rory and the director cleared up below in almost total silence. At one point one of them said, “I take it Diana is looking after Helen?”

“Yes.”

A bit later someone muttered, “I doubt if Binkie found that very impressive.”

“To hell with Binkie!” said our director too loudly and too cheerfully. “We don't need him. Before he turned up last night I thought he had died centuries ago. We can't expect to do equally well every night of the week, and we've been performing steadily for nine nights running – even a professional company would find that hard to sustain. Stop brooding up there, Jock. Come downstairs for a drink.”

I said, “No drink for me tonight thankyou and I am not brooding. I'm checking connections. Some wires were wrenched.”

“See to it tomorrow. Come for a coffee.”

“No thanks. When I've finished working here I'm going straight to my bed.”

When everyone had gone I went quickly to my closet, opened the fire-exit into Deacon Brodie's close, made a quick visit to the tavern and returned from it with a quarter-bottle of whisky. I got into bed, switched the light off, downed the whisky fast. I was an alcoholic novice in those days because that small quantity made me unconscious almost at once. I had several whirling and uncomfortable dreams. In one of them I was crossing a wet street which I suddenly noticed was covered by thousands of worms, so many that I had to stand perfectly still to avoid crushing them. They were the usual thickness but their length varied enormously. One, which was travelling very fast, was twenty or thirty feet long. I heard a stumbling noise and when I opened my eyes the wormy street vanished and I saw darkness. Someone was gasping for breath beside me. A hand, I think, brushed my leg. I switched on the light and saw Helen glaring at me wildly. I was so sure she had come to attack me for ruining her performance in the play that I raised my hands to protect my face. I took several seconds to notice she was not heaping insults on me. Her voice was loud and accusing as she said, “Jock, you keep looking at me all the time, you don't think I'm completely ugly and stupid and untalented and dreary do you? Do you? Do you?”

I said, “Er no, not at all. No.”

She said, “Then show it”, and sat on the edge of my mattress. She was acting as if she was drunk but it was a poor performance. I could see that she was perfectly sober. I realised what she wanted me to do and felt terribly depressed. I started explaining that I was not good at sex, that I needed to sleep a long time with a woman before I could make love, but she interrupted me by saying, “All right, you're throwing me out, but can I wait here for just five or ten minutes please? I know I'm imposing on you but will five minutes take too much of your time?”

I said, “Please stay here as long as you like.”

She turned and embraced me, pushing her tongue deep into my mouth, and I was astonished to notice I had an erection. She withdrew a little and said, “Well?”

I gazed at her openmouthed. I nodded a couple of times. She quickly took off her blouse, jeans etcetera, got in beside me and lay perfectly flat. She said, “Right. Go ahead.”

I cried out wildly, “This is impossible!”

She said, “Are you impotent or something?”

That angered me and I knew how to turn anger into lust. I mounted her and after some stiff shoving I got inside. Everything was over in two minutes. I rolled off her and lay feeling as destroyed under the waist as a bee which has lost both sting and abdomen. I put an arm round her, hoping for some warmth and gentleness, but she sat up and said, “I need a cigarette.”

She sat crosslegged on the bed, draped her blouse round her shoulders, took a packet from her jeans pocket. The under-blanket had slid partly aside exposing the shiny cold green plastic of the mattress. She said, “Cowlay Communist.”

Her face looked stone hard and completely miserable. I wanted to tell her how wrong all this was but she obviously knew. She said, “Now, of course, you'll go about telling people I'm a whore.”

“Certainly not.”

“Then you'll go about thinking it.”

“I certainly will not.”

Whores give quick sexual relief to those who don't want affection or cannot obtain it, so I had been the whore. I started telling her this but she said, “Damn. I've left my lighter downstairs and damn, I need a smoke. Really
need
it.”

She glared at me. I said drearily, “Where did you leave your directors lighter?”

“On the table, in my handbag. You know what my handbag looks like?”

I realised that some man, probably Brian, had made her feel a helpless outcast so she was consoling herself by using me as a servant. I got out of bed feeling glad she did not love me. I would only need to console her for a short period of time. I sighed and said, “I suppose I had better get properly dressed.”

She said, “Don't be so stupidly Victorian. It doesn't matter what people do or think in this hellhole.”

So in my pyjamas, slippers and dressing-gown I went looking for her lighter.

The hour was some time between two and five in the morning. As I crossed bare floors and descended stone steps I heard a harsh repetitive roaring which grew louder and louder. At the end of the great cellar Albert Finney and a friend, or else Tom Courtenay and a friend, were slowly riding a motorbike round and round in a circle. The only other people were the Scottish director, Diana and the English director. They were sitting together in a row but seemed to have big spaces between them. The Scottish director looked furtive, Diana looked lost but strangely smug, the English director looked stunned. I walked across to them and shouted over the racket, “I'm ashamed of myself. I ruined the show tonight. I am very sorry.”

They stared at me blankly. The Scottish director shouted,

“What?”

I repeated my apology. The English director shouted, “The show. Yes, but a lot has happened since then. Never mind about the show.”

After a pause I shouted, “Has anyone seen Helen's handbag?”

They found it on a chair. I bade them good night and went upstairs. I learned later that after the show Binkie had told Diana, through the agency of the English director, that he would like her to audition for a small part in a London show, a show in which the English director had been promised a larger part. Diana was so delighted that she told
Brian, and Brian suddenly realised she and the English director were lovers. His grief at this discovery was so huge that Helen was forced to realise that he and Diana had also been lovers. It is possible too that Helen envied Diana's success with Binkie. Certainly Rory envied Diana's success with Binkie, because his grief at Binkie's neglect of him was so spectacular that Roddy decided that Rory and Binkie had been lovers, and threatened suicide. At this point Judy, who was also the English director's lover, suddenly slapped his face, said something astonishingly obscene about him and his Scottish connections, and walked out followed by the rest of the English company and their friends. Then Helen set off upstairs with an ominously deliberate tread, I suppose to seduce me, while Rory and Roddy unexpectedly went to a party together leaving the three doublecrossers to commiserate.

Helen was not in the closet when I got back upstairs. I was relieved but also worried, so I visited the well-publicised dormitory. The wall facing the door had a row of uncurtained windows admitting some light from the night sky and the streetlamps of the West Bow. I saw a bare expanse of floor with, to right and left of it, a row of mattresses supporting quiet bodies in sleeping bags. I saw Helen's mattress was occupied so I tiptoed over to it. On a large suitcase placed flat like a tray lay her folded clothing, a toothbrush, a book and the packet of cigarettes. I respected her for laying out her things, in a distraught hour, as neatly as I would have done. I was placing the handbag very cautiously beside the suitcase when I noticed she was not asleep. From deep inside her sleepingbag came muffled but unmistakable sobbing. I felt a pang of affection for her, because she was not really a stony woman. I stooped and gently patted the contour of her shoulder and murmured, “Don't worry, Helen.”