Frankie Styne & the Silver Man (3 page)

Liz possessed neither watch nor alarm clock. And there was no point, she believed, in getting up as soon as she woke; a waste of warmth—also, and more importantly, a waste of the special freedom that lingered after sleep, when she couldn't quite remember what it felt like to be who she was, where she was, how she got there, nor how long it was that she must stay. A square of buttery light fell in ripples over the crumpled bedclothes and she moved her hand into its warmth.

She set herself to imagine that she was a visitor from another planet, waking to her first dawn in the body of a human. She looked out through the borrowed eyes and asked: What kind of place is this? If she didn't like it, she could always go somewhere else, or far back across the galaxies, home . . .

So: the place that contained her was roughly a cube, with the four vertical planes smooth and white. The surface beneath her was made up of dark stripes, not quite regular; the one above was patterned with a kind of white stubble, as if something had once dripped from it and all of a sudden frozen: she must not forget to take a sample home. In the centre of this hung a small transparent globe, peppered on its upper curve with dust (perhaps it was an eye?) and at the corners between the vertical and upper horizontal planes bundles of fine greyish threads (some kind of primitive plant?) had gathered and moved gently in the atmospheric tides. A large framed panel made of something hard and reflective had been set into the vertical plane to the right of the bed. It displayed an image which, when examined very closely, seemed also to be moving, just. It was pretty clever, she admitted grudgingly. It seemed almost as real as the space she was in—

A hammering at the front door reverberated through the empty house. Liz kept her face loose and still, her eyes fixed on the window. They'll go away, she told herself, half statement, half spell. They
will
go away. She proceeded to examine the faint steam rising from the roof tiles visible through her window: what was this substance? She must remember to mention it in her report . . . (And it couldn't, anyway, be Purvis who would never knock like that: hard and fast, four rapid beats then a pause, then again, and again the pause growing shorter each time.) Police? she thought, without much conviction. I wonder, she willed herself to consider as a tabby cat eased itself onto her windowsill, what kind of being that could be a picture of? The knocking stopped then and silence pushed through the house as aggressively as sound had done the moment before.

Liz sighed, swung her legs over the edge of the bed. The mechanism was crude, she noted; generally, the earth-body was rather poorly designed and the need to empty it of liquid poisons three or four times a day was its crowning indignity. Still, seeing as it was only a short visit, the creatures being (not surprisingly) so short-lived, she'd probably manage to bear it. She glanced back at the bed, observing that it contained a small human being with a disproportionately large head covered in silver-white down, sleeping. So: she must be what they called
female.
She made for the stairs (very awkward device), catching her foot on a small round-headed tack protruding from the boards; a pretty-­coloured liquid, she observed, the brightest thing I have seen here so far . . . and the sensation also most peculiar.

The knocking recommenced as she reached the bottom of the stairs. She stood frozen, unable to decide, then changed direction and opened the door just a little way. She had a duty; it might be of interest.

‘Mrs Meredith?'

‘Mrs Nothing,' she said. The stocky man standing on her doorstep was wearing a tightly belted all-in-one garment, made from synthetic fibres; blue, very smooth, with a faint sheen. It was too clean and smart to be called a boiler suit and too practical for a leisure garment. The pocket, emblazoned with a yellow ‘T', bristled with pens. He was holding a clipboard, also yellow. They have come to greet me, she told herself—the custom is to smile.

‘Phone,' he said, twisting the clipboard around so that she could see a tiny laminated photograph of him. He had only knocked, he added, for such a length of time because the neighbour had said she must be in. He nearly went away, and then she'd've had to wait another three weeks, so she should thank her lucky stars.

‘What for?' she asked. She was wearing only a large T-shirt, milk-stained across the breast—not that she cared about that—and her legs were crinkling in the cold. Earth has a
most
unpleasant climate, she thought, and then realised that she was probably stuck there for good.

‘Telephone. You asked for it.' The man tried to step in, pushing the yellow clipboard forward ahead of him like a shield.

Liz stood her ground, holding the door. ‘I never asked for a telephone. It's a mistake.'

He stuck his foot forward and leafed through the papers on the board. He was calmer when he looked up. ‘It's free,' he said, ‘the installation, that is.' He added in a lowered voice, ‘Social Services. Because of the baby. Okay?' He handed her a thin blue paper covered in faint carbon marks. Liz held it just long enough to see two signatures: her own—faint, as if written by a ghost, and certainly she couldn't remember writing it—and another, very firm.
A. Purvis.
She screwed it tight in her hand. Purvis. Purvis was tying her up in little knots, stitching through her skin with a flat-ended needle and nylon fishing line. It hurt. The scarlet blood was bright and real.

‘I don't want one,' she repeated, pushing at the door just enough to keep it where it was. The man pushed back.

‘But it's free,' he said, grunting slightly as he increased the pressure. He lowered his eyes as he pushed, and his face seemed all skin; freckled, the soft lids fringed with pale lashes.

‘If you don't use it except for emergencies it won't cost you a thing—'

‘But I don't want a phone!' I do want a television, she thought, but I bet no one's going to knock on the door with one of those . . . Another inconvenient feature of human design, the tears lurking just behind her eyes. ‘I don't want one!' she repeated and suddenly the man stopped pushing. The door swung a little between them, as if to say, What next? Liz's T-shirt had ridden up her hips. The man took a step back and coughed, glancing briefly at the stiff fringe of hair that showed beneath its hem.

‘You'll have to sign a declaration then.'

‘No,' said Liz, ‘I'm not signing anything.'

‘Please yourself.' The man turned on his heel, walked stiffly towards the gate. It came off in his hand, the screws pulled clean from the post. Knowing she hadn't shut the door he froze for a second, holding it.

‘I'm sorry,' he said, casting around for somewhere to prop the gate. ‘It's rotted.'

Liz shrugged. The screwed-up paper dropped from her hand. ‘Did you tell—?' she asked quietly indicating 129 with a movement of her head, noticing her T-shirt and pulling it down. She could hear Jim crying upstairs. He had an unusual cry—people had remarked on it in the hospital—persistent but not urgent, irregular in rhythm and pitch as if he were trying to find a hidden frequency.

‘Of course not,' the telephone man said. He set the gate carefully on the tangled lawn. There, Liz thought as she closed the door: a Silver Lining. Could've been worse.

Jim was lying on his side, curled tight, his face flushed and shining. As she sat heavily on the bed the crying stopped briefly and then resumed. She was beginning to get used to it.

‘So!' she said, her voice shaking slightly. ‘You notice me.' After a few minutes, she carried him downstairs to the bathroom, sat herself on the toilet, placed him on the changing mat on the floor between her feet and reached down. His soft skin, opal white, was covered in sticky yellow. Her bladder emptied steadily as she folded the nappy up and began to wipe him. The pair of us, she thought. Him and her, both caught short. Her legs had blotched purple, her feet on the lino tiles were bloodless.

‘Phone . . .' she muttered, slipping the soiled wipes into the sink for removal later. ‘If Purvis thinks I'll walk into that one, she's wrong! Because I know how to hide.' Her breasts ached. One thing, she thought, one thing at a time.

‘It was Grammy,' she announced, realising that she had more or less succeeded in forgetting Grammy, hadn't thought of her, not directly, since that time in the hospital . . . ‘It was Grammy, Jim, who taught me how to hide, when I was very small.'

Hiding was an art, Grammy had said. ‘Always choose the unexpected place,' she had said—like the railway carriages. Also, she'd explained how to plant false clues; to imagine herself in the seeker's position, and calculate what they would see and how they would think; for instance, not going to London, where everyone would look . . . To open the cupboard door a little, but not go in. To screw herself tight and stay like that, waiting, head in lap, waiting. To hold her breath impossibly long. To hide so well that even she herself scarcely knew she was there and then leap out with a roar. But, according to Grammy, the real, the most difficult hiding was more than that. It was something you could do without, actual physical concealment. Using the exact same tactics—that was the real art. Always look them in the eye, tell them what they want to hear. Then do what you want, quietly, Grammy had said.

The Ties that Bind

Grammy took her wedding ring from the ship matchbox in the kitchen drawer and held it out on the creased palm of her hand.

‘Now you've got one,' she'd said, picking it up between finger and thumb of the other hand and holding it to her eye like a lens. ‘You can see what they are. No protection against the worst things in life. Just a bit of gold, like a Polo mint. Suck if you want, but don't swallow it whole . . .' Then she laughed the laugh which Liz's mother said was like a fishwife's. Later, in bed, Liz slipped the thin, pale ring into her mouth. It tasted bitter, and she spat it onto the pillow. If you did swallow it, you would probably have to be cut open, she'd thought, for them to get it out. You might bleed to death in the operation; definitely there would be a scar, crawling across your stomach like a white centipede.

At that time, just before she moved into the Black Swan with Liz and her parents, Grammy was sorting through her possessions. She wanted to dispose of all but the essential. The rest—piles of magazines, shelves full of jars and interleaved plastic bags—was all packed up and collected by the council. Parcels of clothes, many unworn for decades, were washed, ironed, folded in brown paper and despatched to charity shops. The inlaid writing bureau was sent as a surprise to an old friend who had once admired it. The next-door neighbours, who had for twenty years kept faithful and fruitless watch for burglars, received the silver cutlery and a selection of tinned food—ham, chicken, mandarin orange segments, some of it very old.

Grammy's last week in the flat was spent with only one chair and no curtains. She was nothing if not thorough and she made no secret of the fact that she had written a will in which she bequeathed the proceeds of the sale of her flat to a complete stranger—a young man she'd read about in the local paper under the caption ‘Sound Worlds'. He wanted to write music with only the tiniest of spaces between the notes: it was a life's work and he needed expensive computer equipment to do it. Grammy had never before shown any interest in music of any kind, but declared that it was a fine idea.
‘Always,'
she said, ‘try to be original.' Grammy spoke mainly in imperatives and assertions of fact. Questions were entirely foreign to her.

‘Always avoid the ties that bind,' she often said, and: ‘When I'm gone, try to forget me. You can forget anything if you try hard enough. Forgetting, like hide-and-seek, is an
art.'

Another of her commands was to always search for Silver Linings. It was worth it because with a flick of the wrist a dull garment, something like a school mac, could be transformed. It was a kind of magic, perpetually waiting behind the everyday, the intractable, the
boring.
Finding a Silver Lining made Grammy laugh like a fishwife. She did it as often as possible.

‘Damned if I can see one in this place,' Liz's mother would say.

The search for Silver Linings, the avoidance of ties that bound, hiding and forgetting: these were Grammy's most repeated, most strenuous commands. But there were many more. Some began with
always,
others with
never,
but only the one: ‘Try to forget me,' with
try to.
In her later years Grammy issued her commands from bed, sitting straight up, her face immobile and her hands resting on the turned-down sheet:

‘Never
sit with your legs crossed.'

‘Always
look people in the face when you're speaking to them. Especially if you're telling a lie.'

‘That child,' Liz's mother said, ‘will do nothing we ask, but she's putty in your mother's hands.'

Long before all this, the first thing Liz remembered anyone saying about Grammy was that she was a widow. At that time she hadn't known what it meant, but guessed it must somehow refer to the ways in which Grammy wasn't like other people of her age. She genuinely enjoyed playing hide-and-seek; she left bits of her dinner she didn't care for on her plate without even pushing them to the edge; she loved to watch television, the same things as Liz herself: vampires and rayguns, shootouts, aliens—
rubbish.
She was someone who slipped through the net that held other grown-up people fast. She had her independence, then, and couldn't be told what to do.

Against a tide of disapproval, Grammy dyed her wisps of hair jet black and this made the scalp glow even whiter beneath. As they both grew older—and it was important, too, that they both counted years—Liz helped her with this, standing behind the upright chair to paste on the foul-smelling dye, her eyes torn between the task at hand and the television screen. So although people naturally would say that it was the divorce, or pubs, which had made Liz turn out how she did, they would be mostly wrong. It was Grammy, who in her own way had predicted it all.

‘Of course,' Liz's father often said, ‘I don't expect anything back. She struggled to bring me up—'

‘Probably had a right old time while she did it—'

‘—But she might leave that money to help her own grandchild. Or something like cancer research.'

‘Something like
us.
A sum like that.'

‘I never asked them to bring me here,' Grammy told Liz when she had moved into the Swan. (It was an Edwardian structure and stood miraculously preserved in the middle of a modern housing estate. The inside had been done up in modern style. Just like the one before, it was going through bad times. Nightclubs, Liz's father said, were to blame . . .) ‘It was a
fait accompli,'
Grammy continued.
‘Always
avoid, dear, the ties that bind. Indeed, you really ought to avoid me now.' But when Grammy said that, she smiled. Ought was like try to; it didn't seem to be quite so absolute a command as the others. There was room for failure.

Grammy was awkward. Sometimes she answered the telephone and put people off. She was temperamental, she was ungrateful and selfish. Grammy was senile: her brains, Liz's mother explained, were slowly thickening and scrambling, like eggs. Liz's mother had a way with expressions like that—said them in a tone of voice somewhere between distaste and wonder so that they seemed to mean exactly what the words said. In the end, that voice suggested, Grammy's brains would stick to the bottom of the pan and a great deal of scouring would be necessary.

Her wrists were weak and she regularly left taps running, so draining the hot water tank. She would rise in the middle of the night to stand on the balcony and search for stars and unidentified flying objects, or else walk downstairs, through the deserted bar, right outside, and, because of her wrists, leave the front door open when she came back in. A tomcat once followed her back, leaving a stink which lasted for weeks. After that, she was locked in her room at night or when everyone was out. Grammy turned night into day, Liz's mother said.

But the worst of all was that Grammy was incontinent, doubly and prolifically so. It was this which made Liz's mother call Grammy ‘Your Mother' when she talked with her husband, just, Liz noticed, as she herself was often called ‘That Child.' It was another thing they shared, the way she and Grammy often seemed to feel less than connected to both Liz's parents. ‘That Child is besotted,' ‘Your mother will stop at nothing.' Her mother's tone when she spoke of Grammy was one of icy relish; her father, Liz noticed with horror, said nothing in Grammy's defence.

Grammy shrugged. ‘He'll suffer for it. He just married my opposite. People are always doing things like that. It won't last.' And Liz had wanted to carry Granny off and live with her in a cottage miles from anywhere. They could watch what they wanted on the television, far into the night, and only eat when they felt like it. She would do all the chores without complaining. It would be a love without duty, a pure thing. That, Grammy said, but softly, was both a contradiction and a tie that bound.

‘It's all very well,' Liz's mother said of Liz's passion for Grammy. ‘But I have to change her sheets. I never expected this.'

‘I'll do it,' countered Liz. ‘I don't mind.'

Her mother paused long enough to look angrier still, then bundled the sheets into a plastic bag as she continued. ‘She depends on us. On me, in fact. So do you, until you grow up.'
Avoid the ties that bind.
But only days later her mother pulled down the covers of the bed, stood aghast, then folded her arms and said, ‘Here then. Go on, you do it. A bit of practice'll stand you in good stead, if you ever have a family of your own.' The smell of piss mingled with that of the lavender cologne which Grammy sprinkled to conceal it. Thinking of her doing this, in the dark, made Liz want to cry.

‘See what I mean?' her mother said. ‘It's not a bed of roses.'

‘She is no longer the woman I remember . . .' declared Liz's father—he was Grammy's only son, named Richard after his father, long dead or departed, it was never clear which—shaking his head from side to side. Liz recognised her mother's words emerging through his lips, as if swallowed and regurgitated, or as if there had been some kind of infection or transfusion such as took place when vampires kissed. To stop it, she knew, you had to drive a stake hard through their hearts.

‘We have to be firm,' he said.
Firm
meant: not indulging melodrama, balanced meals at set times, sleeping pills at night and then finally, for a reason never explained but which could only be some kind of punishment, rationed watching of the television set.

Liz's mother came up from the bar when trade was slack, to check, and she unplugged it if it was on. The picture shrank to a dot, leaving them both feeling somehow naked and shocked, even though it was a simple matter to get it back when she had gone. Liz's mother had always hated television.

‘That child's being raised on TV,' she often used to say, years back when they first acquired one, as she served a hybrid of lunch and supper when Liz arrived home from school. Once a day the family would be together the way other people's were. Except that she herself rarely sat down to eat it, and Liz's father said that eating so early upset him.

‘Would you prefer me to make our tea after closing time?' she'd ask—for such questions she often used her softest, sweetest voice—as she set the plate before him. He picked; Liz cleared hers rapidly. They talked as if she were intermittently invisible. She stared at the wall, feeling what it would be like if it were she who decided when.

Occasionally Liz's mother would take her aside and whisper that she was sorry that everything was dreadful and she was so bad tempered, but she was hounded to it. When they got out of pubs, she promised, things would be different: everything. But it didn't seem to happen. Clutched between her mother's arms and knees, the soft words tickling at her ears, was, Liz grew to feel, something like being embraced by a vampire who charmed her victim into the first deadly kiss.

‘If I help you in the bar, I haven't much choice but to leave her watching TV for hours on end. The rest of the kids in her class can already read.'

‘She doesn't seem to mind,' her father said, adding, ‘I was a late reader. It's not the end of the world.' After this the silence ached.

I'm
glad
I'm raised on TV, Liz thought. Everything her parents said was dull and flat and had been said often before. There was no music, just the scrape of spoons in bowls, the clash of knives and forks in the sink as her mother washed up from the first course. No special effects, no real fights with blood and laser guns and flashing lights, no last-minute escapes; no one won and nothing ever changed. As soon as Liz was finished, she could leave the table. Without television, she thought she would die.

‘How long?' Liz's mother said abruptly one day. ‘I never expected this, you know.'

‘How long what?'

‘Until—'

‘When we get to the new pub, we should be able to take on help,' her father would say. When that had proved itself several times wrong, he'd come up with another idea. ‘My mother could come and live with us. She could help out. Not in the bar—I mean company, for the kid.'

‘But she can't look after her own self!' Liz's mother said, her gloved hands steaming. ‘What
help
is she going to be?' Nonetheless, Grammy had come to the Black Swan.

And because the television was kept in Grammy's bedroom, sanctions against it were obviously aimed at both of them. Watching secretly with the volume right down drew them even closer together. Mostly you could get the story, even without the words and sound.

‘Means we can talk at the same time,' Grammy said, her eyes fixed straight ahead, pupils wide—that, of course, was the Silver Lining. By then it had become a habit. They found them for each other automatically and only noticed if one wasn't there. Liz sat next to Grammy on the bed in the dark watching the pictures move. Sometimes they sucked sherbet lemons as the watched. If she ever thought of the rest of her life, Liz just imagined it going on like that. In her infatuation and outrage Liz didn't at the time see the irony, nor believe, as her mother had warned, that one day
the chickens would come home to roost.

The chickens were brochures for old people's homes. They flapped their way through the letterbox and then landed clumsily one by one in a dead heap. Liz's parents had agreed to avoid the tie that bound them to Grammy. It was impossible, they both declared, to run a pub and a nursing home at the same time. There was, for a while, peace between them. Perhaps it was the desire to avoid being seen as a hypocrite which made Grammy sign the forms without complaint. And perhaps she did purposely choose Christmas Day to die on, when she was supposed to move into the home on the first day of the New Year—meaning they'd gone through all the bureaucracy but got none of the benefit.