Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living (Picador 40th) (8 page)

— 9 —

MR OHNO'S GIFT

‘I
s this who you are? Are you someone who looks at these things? Are you someone who does this?'

He holds the postcards out to me, red velvet spilling through his fingers. My hands fly to my face.

‘Well?'

‘I didn't buy them, Robert. I didn't ask for them. They were a gift – from Mr Ohno.'

‘A tasty gift, Jean. A tasty gift for
my
wife.'

A line of stringy spittle bounces elastic from his lower lip. He pushes my hands down.

‘No. Please. I'm sorry. It's not what you think.'

‘So what is it then? What do you call this then?'

He throws the postcards onto the table and jabs at them with his forefinger, separating them, spreading them out. A crooked jumble of fleshy shadows – breasts and thighs and in most of them the dark rectangular outline of a car.

‘Do you admire the vehicles, Jean? Are you a student of the motor car?'

‘No.'

He picks up one of the cards and holds it in front of my face.

‘Here, Jean. Tell me what you see.'

‘Please. I can't.'

The postcard falls to the floor and lands between my feet.

‘Pick it up, woman. Pick it up.'

I crouch down slowly and want to stay there – to not have to get up again.

‘Stand up, Jean. Come on, stand up. Tell me what you see.'

‘Don't, please. It's humiliating.'

He snorts and thrusts his hands into his pockets.

‘Two women in a car.'

‘More precise, I think, Jean. More exact. Be a bit more systematic about it. That's what I've taught you, haven't I? What sort of car?'

‘A Ford.'

‘Two women in a Ford. Are they going shopping? Going to the pictures?'

‘They're . . . they're . . . touching each other.'

Robert brings his fingers to his temples as if to divert a strong current passing through his brain. I look at the postcard again. Two women, both with such ordinary faces – lipstick, neat permanents. One has a slightly hooked nose and the other is a little jowly. Although they wear no clothes they have a ‘dressed look' as if they have rushed out in a hurry. Both of them wear necklaces and earrings and dark leather watchbands. One holds her handbag coyly in front of her sex. They are not young women. They have round arms and thighs and soft bellies. The woman in the foreground holds one of her breasts, her fingers splayed scissor-like around the square nub of nipple. Her other hand is on the thigh of her friend. I can see where the flesh dimples from the pressure of the upholstery.

Robert snatches the postcard from my hand and crushes it. He sobs. Tears catch in the deep grooves around his open mouth. His lips are stretched tight around his teeth.

‘I'll throw them away. I'm sorry. They were a wedding gift from Mr Ohno. I don't really know why he gave them to me and I didn't mean to keep them.'

Mr Ohno had cornered me in the domestic hygiene car one afternoon as I was refilling the Insectibane atomisers. I heard his clogs on the wooden floor behind me and turned to find the top of his head a few inches from my thighs. The bow. Mr Ohno's bow was always close enough and long enough for an inspection of the child-like shape of his head and the immaculate line of his part.

He straightened, took the atomiser from my hand and held it teasingly like a gun at his head.

‘I shoot mysel for you, Miss Jean?'

‘It's too late, Mr Ohno, I'm taken.'

He shook his head and made a sad clucking noise.

‘Miss Jean, you like the country Af-ri-ca. You big, dark.' He cleared his throat in preparation for a difficult word: ‘Mysterious.' He beamed with achievement.

An embarrassed flush crept up my neck. ‘Sturdy. People generally say I'm sturdy, Mr Ohno. And Africa's not a country. It's a continent.'

‘Ah, Miss Jean.' Mr Ohno waggled his head again. He was not interested in geography. Or in retrospect perhaps he was – in the hills and valleys of the female body.

‘I have p'esent for you.' He produced a square of red velvet from the breastpocket of his coat. It looked like a small book and I started to unfold the cloth when he placed his hands firmly over mine.

‘No. Not now, Miss Jean, open later when by you alone.'

The tendons dance in Robert's forearms as he reaches out to me. I gather him in. I can feel the roots of his arms working deep within his back. I am reminded of Sister Crock's Nursing Manual, an illustration of ‘The Musculature of the Human Male' – a mass of sinuous pink fibres, of strong ropes knotting and interweaving.

‘Jean.' His voice is thick with feeling.

Sex to make good is not like ordinary sex. Each tiny movement, a reaching lip, the long blink of an eye, is imbued with a slow and heavy meaning. We peel away our clothes. There is no embarrassed fumble, he hangs above me tensely, dipping and straining. Afterwards, with his body half across me, his face in my hair, he whispers, ‘You're not a, a . . . tabby, are you?'

‘Oh, Robert, of course not.'

He makes me tea and we move from the floor to the bed where he tells me the story of Lillian and wets my slip with his tears.

— 10 —

LILLIAN'S TASTE FOR SOIL

1905

R
obert was the first born. Little Enid came next. Little Enid born with the cavity in her back – a crater of pink and scarlet tissue and the glinting white gristle of her backbone.

‘You could put a potato in it, couldn't you, Robbie?' said his mother, Lillian.

He was worried that she would – worried at the waste of a good potato. The wound shone and leaked and sucked at the special rags it was covered with.

Two weeks later Robbie was up on the moors fetching a bunch for the coffin. No cut flowers for Enid. Robbie wrenched a branch of gorse and came home with yellow flowers in his hair. It was something to look at – during the dismal service in the parlour – the torn branch of the gorse all stringy where he had wrenched it around and around. Three men carried the coffin away, each with a Woodbine between his lips. Three orange dots glowed in the dark when they stumbled back later arguing about who would go upstairs and give our Lillian some comfort.

She's always out, our Lillian, and she hardly ever cooks for him. Food comes from the pocket of her lilac coat with the foxy collar – tinned meat, soda bread, potatoes, a handful of tea threaded with lint. When she has a man Robbie waits downstairs. He dreams the parlour chair is alive – a smooth chestnut pony galloping over the moors – and wakes to find his leg caught in a bulge of greasy horsehair.

‘Red hair,' say the men that meet him on the stairs as he goes up to take their place. Sometimes they light a match and search for something in his face as it flares. ‘Jesus, you're like your mother, boy, red hair and bones like sticks.'

Lillian's hair is red as holly berries, red as Christmas, red as the tin of carnation milk she shares with Robbie. The skin on her face is spread with large mustard freckles but her private skin – breasts, bunchy stomach, round thighs – is see-through white.

Robbie wakes each winter's night panicking and congested. He struggles to dislodge the blankets, coats and newspapers that cover him. He reaches for Lillian or bangs on the wall to rouse her. The air is as cold as water against his face. He sucks, trying to separate something dry and breathable from the wet. He sucks more and more; in a long continual hiss, his chest and belly blowing up and up – a trap of air. He imagines his insides creaky and dry like a pair of kitchen bellows except at the very tip there is a hole, a wound that he must fill, or try to fill with air. The nights are long with sucking and heaving and with Lillian trickling tonic over his dry lips. In the morning they lie tumbled together in exhaustion.

Nanna Pett supplies Robbie's tonic. It comes bottled and then boxed with a poster of the Olympic Games marathon route showing all the sights from Windsor to White City. Burly men run high-kneed along the route, wearing what look to Robbie like their underclothes. They swig from bottles of Owbridge's Lung Tonic and sternly advise:
Don't buy cheap imitations.
No one runs in Yorkshire. Robbie has seen the mill workers on the common playing nipsey. He's watched them, stripped to vests and braces, swing the knur, follow the fly of the spell, and argue about bets. They huddle and saunter and swing the club, but nobody is actually going anywhere.

Robbie notices, on a long night of wakefulness, that Lillian has trouble of her own. She is up again and again squatting over the chipped potty at the end of the bed. He watches out of half-closed eyes and sees that she is full with piss, her belly is as tight as a tank.

Nanna Pett brings bread and candles, the bottom bits of rice pudding and stale parkin wrapped in greaseproof paper. She starts to come more and more often and the men all but disappear. Lillian is always home now and always hungry. Robbie catches her chipping flakes of kalsomine from the walls and melting them on her tongue like holy wafers. She sucks coal dirt from under her fingernails, chews at the sleeve of her lilac coat. She takes the tonic spoon and sits on the back step digging at the soil and answers Robbie's questioning squint with a word.

‘Brown – it tastes brown.'

They share. They always share. Except for Robbie's treasures hidden in a tin box underneath the bed – a postcard of Louis Blériot crossing the Channel in his bright orange aeroplane, a label from a Bovril jar of a smiling man in driving hat and goggles, and the Olympic games marathon poster. Robbie's treasures are about adventures – going somewhere else, running, driving, flying, getting away.

Then Robbie is sent away. Nanna Pett comes to get him on her bicycle for Lillian's confinement. He pulls his spare socks from the line and fills his pockets with soil from the yard. He is taken to Aunty Flo's in town. Flo is Lillian's sister. The hard one with the will of steel. She runs a pet shop with her husband, Willie, in the main street. Flo and Willie live upstairs with their two little girls, Cissie and Joyce.

‘You'll be sleeping downstairs in the shop,' Flo warns Robbie.

Upstairs the flat is a soft pink with swirly blue carpet. The shop is neat and bright, rows of cages line the walls and the floor is covered with straw – it's warmer than home. Each morning Flo rolls up the blind on the front window with a terrifying slap and snatches Robbie's blanket out from under him.

‘Don't sleep so close to the window. Someone might see you – a customer might see you.'

Nobody mentions Lillian. Robbie goes to Cissie and Joyce's school but they refuse to speak to him in public. In the afternoons he goes upstairs with them for bread and jam and Bovril. Cissie is the eldest with the pinched face of her mother. Joyce is dreamy with curly hair she winds endlessly around her fingers.

‘My mother has hair like yours,' Robbie lies, one afternoon.

Cissie and Joyce exchange glances. Cissie moves to take his plate.

‘What about your dad? Do you know what type of hair your dad has?'

The girls retreat to their room and leave him licking his fingers and stabbing at the crumbs. He can hear them giggling and whining behind the door. Cissie is hissing at Joyce, ‘Go on, now. Now,
do
it.' The door opens and Cissie shoos Joyce out. She sidles across the carpet up to him and to his surprise puts out her hand in the same tentative way the customers reach to pet something for the first time. Her hand brushes the coarse stuff of his shirt, she reaches for the point of his ribs where they have been blown up and out by the nights of wheezing. His own eyes flick down a hundred times a day, but he had thought, in clothes, the bony rise was hidden. Joyce runs backs to Cissie. ‘There I did it, see I did it.' They pull the door shut behind them.

‘I have a sister, you know,' Robbie yells at the door triumphantly. It opens a crack; they can't contain their interest.

‘What's her name then, how old –?'

‘Is she pretty?' Joyce butts in. ‘Is she as pretty as me?' She holds her dress out from her legs and spins on the spot. Robbie watches her petticoats fly around and around and tries to find little Enid's face in his mind. The pink walls of the flat pulse strangely. Warm pee trickles down his legs.

Flo and Willie sell finches and canaries and some expensive budgerigars from far-flung Australia. Willie breeds racing pigeons out the back – ‘not serious like, more of a fancier'. He shows Robbie Halifax Lady Henrietta. She looks like any other pigeon: grey, nervous, dry-eyed. Willie says she has the body of a champ.

‘Isn't she grand, Robbie? Here, you take her, lad, just hold her gentle-like.'

She looks harmless in Willie's big hands; he passes her across onto Robbie's chest. They smile at each other and at the bird.

‘She likes you, eh?'

They coo at her together. This is what it is like, Robbie thinks – the man and the boy and the bird, the air smelling of fresh straw and no hungry hole inside him. This is what happy is.

He carries a little soil in his pockets. When he is up on the moors with Willie or out on deliveries he collects a sample. He likes to taste the difference of it from place to place. He tells himself it is for his mother – just in case she wants some. Just in case.

One afternoon Robbie is alone upstairs for his Bovril – the girls have gone to dancing class. He takes
Pears' Cyclopaedia
from Willie and Flo's bookcase, flicks to a picture of a strangely large-headed tadpole. Stops to read:
Spermatozoa, the infinitesimal organisms constituting the generating element in male animals
. Reads on. The next entry has a smaller but even more compelling picture. An infant lying on its front, legs frog-like out to the sides and a dark terrible circle in the middle of its back.
Spina Bifida, Latin for split spine. A fatal infant deformity where the back is open and components of the spinal column are missing. Seen in the slums and amongst the working class. Poor diet in mothers, esp. lack of grains and fruits (viz. oranges) are thought to be causal.

Nanna Pett fetches Robbie home. Lillian doesn't come down to meet them when they arrive and Nanna Pett seems nervous. She unloads her basket in the kitchen and unpegs a line of nappies strung in front of the grate. Robbie hears ‘poorly' and ‘baby' and ‘no fire again' but he's not sure of the order. The house seems impossibly small and dark, the stairs are so narrow he has to angle his feet sideways. Surely he can't have grown that much? It's only been a month.

Lillian lies in bed powdering her face. She peers into the mirror of her tiny compact and looks around it at him in exaggerated surprise. She beckons – closer, come closer – until he can see the bundle that lies beside her.

‘Our Andrew,' she whispers. The baby is small and shrivelled. A line of yellow milk has dried into a crust on its cheek but more striking is the red liquid that has leaked through his swaddling and stained the sheets.

‘Go on then, give him a kiss.'

Robbie puts his hand out to touch the baby's forehead. His fingernails are rimmed with dirt. Then he darts his head down quickly and manages to kiss more of his own skin than his brother's.

Our Andrew has a soft mewing cry. He sucks at Lillian endlessly. This time of suckling is like time that has closed in on itself. Long drawn-out afternoons of Lillian in bed and Robbie creeping through the house running his fingers along the window ledges, digging in the soil, painting the step with coal dust and spit, shuffling about, heavy in himself.

Robbie often goes upstairs to Lillian. He sits on the edge of the bed and listens to the baby snuffling as it chews at Lillian's breast. After a little restless sleep Lillian changes the baby. He is always wet, not about the bottom, but from his leaking wound. Lillian dusts some medicinal powder into the hole. It is the same as Little Enid's, a gaping cavity in his back, but on Andrew the wound is higher – centered between the curved bones of his tiny shoulders. It is a deep but perfect circle. Robbie is attracted to it – tempted to lean in and touch it. The wound is the most insistent part of the baby; it is more brightly red, more liquid and more pulsingly alive than his face. Robbie makes his mouth into the shape of the hole and traces his tongue around his lips as if following its contours.

They leave the baby asleep on the bed and Lillian comes downstairs for a bath. She stokes the fire and fills the pans with water. She takes the tin bath down from behind the kitchen door, finds a shard of soap, a towel and a fresh nightdress. When the water is warmed she places the pans on the floor near the bath with a tall jug and undresses. Robbie sees she is stiff from the baby, stiff from so long in bed. She grips the table as she peels off her socks and underclothes. She fiddles with some pins and undoes a dark rag from between her legs. Robbie recoils. It looks like it is stained with lipstick, a leaking sideways kiss-stain from a pair of large lips, but it is too red, too liquid, too soaked with blood. She climbs tentatively into the bath and sits with her knees drawn up to her breasts.

‘Quick now, love, before I'm all iced up.'

Robbie pours the first jug over her back and shoulders, watching her skin soften and spread from the warmth of the water. She rubs the hard soap over her arms and shoulders and under her armpits.

‘More Robbie, on my head as well.'

The water turns her hair to dark copper with a green shine.

‘Did he bite you then?'

‘What, love?'

‘Did he bite you then, on the way out, our Andrew?'

Lillian touches a wet hand to his cheek.

‘Oh Robbie, my love. My love, you have no idea.'

Robbie downstairs listening as Lillian sings to the dying baby, her voice as soft and breathy as a child's. Robbie drawing on the back step with a stone – drawing Willie and his pigeons, Lady Henrietta on a tipsy-topsy nest of straw. Robbie thinking about oranges and grains and how much they might cost. Robbie digging up soil with a spoon and sucking on it. Having a little in his pockets all of the time in case his mother wants some. In case they might sit together once again and share.