Heading Inland (6 page)

Mr Lippy

The first time Iris met Mr Lippy he was in Hunstanton, sitting on the ocean wall, watching the tide from the Wash as it lapped away at the concrete just below his feet. His right fist was wrapped up in a thick, white gauze. Iris guessed straight away that he must have sustained this injury in a fight. She should have avoided him. Naturally. If only she’d known what was good for her. Perhaps she didn’t know. Or if she did, she didn’t care.

‘Hi,’ she said.

‘I don’t talk to girls,’ he responded.

‘You from the West Country?’ she asked, brutally, registering some kind of rural burr in his voice.

He said nothing.

‘How’d you hurt your hand, then?’

He ignored her.

‘Live around here?’

She sat down next to him and swung her legs. She was eighteen and liked a challenge. She wore sandals and a halter-neck top even though it was late October.

His bottom lip stuck out while she spoke to him. He pouted without thinking, like he was sulking about something, only he didn’t know what, didn’t know, even, that he was sulking.

‘What’s a good-looking man like you got to sulk about?’ she said.

‘Pardon?’ He turned and looked at her.

‘Mr Lippy!’ She laughed. She stuck her bottom lip out, mimicking him.

‘I wasn’t doing that!’

‘Wanna bet?’

‘I wasn’t!’ He switched on his brain and stared at her properly, for the first time.

From that moment onwards, Iris always called him Mr Lippy if he scowled or sulked or swore at her. His real name was Wesley but she called him Wes. She always wanted things different from the way they were.

Wesley had yearned all his life to be close to the sea. His dad had been a sailor. But he was born inland and had lived there until he’d arrived at the Wash under his own steam aged twenty-four. Now he was twenty-eight.

Sometimes he worked on the funfair in Hunstanton. Sometimes he went potato picking. He worked in the sugar beet factory until they closed it, and then, after a spate in the arcade, got a job ferrying tourists across the Wash in an open-topped, antiquated hovercraft to visit Seal Island.

Iris didn’t know that Wesley’s broken fist had been sustained, not in a fight as she’d imagined, but in an accident at work: one of the other lads had reversed the hovercraft too close to the ocean wall where Wesley was stationed at the back of the craft, ready to put out the gang-plank. The lad’s foot had slipped off the brake on to the accelerator, and Wesley’s hand had been crushed that way.

An accident. But Wesley relished the pain. He liked punishment. And anyhow, he’d received several hundred pounds in compensation, just like that. A gift from the gods. So he opened a bank account and nested it there.

Iris was living in a bed and breakfast facing the seafront. She was a bully but he thought it was because life had been hard on her. He was wrong. They made love under a single duvet. If Wesley got carried away, if he threatened to come before she was ready, then she’d squeeze his bad fist until he saw only stars. It was good, she thought, to keep him distracted. Just a little bit.

He’d known her for a month when she told him she was pregnant. She didn’t know anything about him.

‘I don’t care,’ he said, ‘what happens, really, so long as I can stay close to the sea.’

‘Why?’ She was only two weeks pregnant but already she felt different about things and she wanted Wesley to feel different too.

‘I don’t know. My dad was a sailor.’

‘Really? And your mum?’

‘She lives in Gloucester.’

‘Yeah? Think she’ll be pleased?’

Wesley shrugged. Iris waited for Wesley to ask about her mum and dad. He didn’t ask. She wanted him to.

‘Do you love me?’

‘I’m used to being on my own.’

‘Don’t you have any plans? For the future, I mean?’

Wesley rearranged the gauze on his fist.

‘Not me,’ he said.

‘Why not?’

Wesley closed his eyes.

Seal Island. In the summer the boat was packed to its gills with children. Clutching their packed lunches and their cans of fizzy pop. They’d all passed the morning on the big wheel and the dodgems, eating candy-floss and bags of sticky honeycomb. And now they were headed for Seal Island. They had dreams of palm trees and Captain Hook and hidden treasure to help them over the brown sea and the lurching waves. An island, full of basking seals.

When the tide was out, you might see the sluttish brown outline of the sandbank. You might see a lethargic seal, on its edge, rolling to the bank’s perimeter, and then the flip of its tail as it swam off and under. If the tide was in, you were lucky to see that much.

Seal Island. Wesley loved it. Every day. The tears, the screams, the disappointment. He loved that stuff. He’d turn and he’d look at the children, the occasional mum, the odd uncle. And he’d think, ‘Good, they should learn that life is shit. Good they should know it.’

Iris became worried about Wesley’s motivation. ‘That’s cruel,’ she’d say, ‘to lead the little buggers into thinking that they’re getting more for their money than they’ve a right to expect.’

‘No crueller,’ Wesley said, ‘than leading them into thinking that life is anything better than a bitch.’

One day Wesley came back to Iris’s room to discover her parents there. They weren’t at all as he’d imagined.

‘Mum and Dad want me to come home again,’ Iris said, ‘and I want you to come with me, Wes.’

‘Home, where?’ he asked, shifting his weight from foot to foot.

She’d promised him it was close to the sea. In the back of the car, they sat. One suitcase between them. ‘Nearly there,’ she kept saying. ‘Nearly, nearly.’

Iris’s father showed Wesley the shop, the nursery, the rabbit pen, the pet section, the field with the ponies, the café. The whole kit and caboodle. Finally he showed him the owl sanctuary. Twenty cages.

‘What’s it mean?’ Wesley asked. ‘Sanctuary?’

‘Couldn’t survive in the wild,’ Iris’s father said. ‘Some come from exotic places.’

Wesley stared at the owls. They stared back. Not blinking.

‘You never told me,’ Wesley said, that night, in their bedroom, ‘that your parents were rich like this.’

‘Never asked,’ Iris said.

‘I don’t understand,’ Wesley said, ‘why anyone should want to run away from something that’s as good as here.’

Iris shrugged. ‘I’m back, aren’t I?’ she said, all saucy.

‘It’s far from the sea,’ Wesley said.

‘Fuck that shit.’

He turned to look at her.

‘You don’t even like the sea,’ she said, ‘not really. It just makes you sad and angry. It’s all mixed up in your head with some stupid fantasy about your dad.’

Wesley was injured by this. It was almost as though, he thought, Iris didn’t respect his reasons. Like his reasons weren’t good enough.

Big eyes. Big wings. Big beaks. He’d feed them little chicks and small white mice. Their keeper, Derek, told Wesley all about them. ‘See those big eyes,’ he’d say. ‘Well, that leads people into thinking that they’re wise and all, but they aren’t.’

‘No?’

‘No. Their eye sockets take up much of the space in their skulls, so their brain is as tiny as a hazelnut, just about.’

Wesley would stare at the owls for hours on end, unblinking, but only during the week. At weekends he avoided the sanctuary because then it was crowded with tourists who whistled and screamed and pointed. Some of the cages had little notices which read: mind fingers and noses. these are wild animals. do not touch wire mesh.

Wesley worked in the nursery. Sometimes he helped out in the cafeteria. Iris would trail around after him, trying to make him smile.

‘Aren’t you happy here?’ she’d ask. ‘Don’t you love me?’

He did quite like her, actually.

‘Do you resent me being pregnant?’

‘Nope.’

‘Will we ring your mother yet and tell her about it?’ ‘Nope.’ ‘Why not? Why
not
?’ It had started to gall Iris, his inability to celebrate
anything
.

One owl especially. He’d stare and stare. It was as big as a spaniel. Grey feathered. Pop-eyed, crazy-looking. Like an emu. Like something unimaginable.

Wesley wondered what would happen if he set the bird free. When he was younger he’d dreamed about freedom, but now he was resigned to a life of drudgery. Free, he’d whisper, and then, die. Free. Die. Free. Die. Free. Die.

Derek had told him, you see, that if the owls were released they would starve to death or some of them would freeze. They were too bloody conspicuous, Wesley thought, for their own safety.

‘Why don’t you want me to meet your family? Are you ashamed of me? Am I too young?’

Wesley stood up, picked up his coat, as if to leave the room.

‘Where are you going?’

‘Outside.’

‘Where? To look at those bloody owls again? I swear you spend more time looking at those owls than at me.’

He left her. She followed him, in her slippers, barely dressed. It was dark out. He ignored her. He went to the owl pens.

In the dark he could hardly see them, only the white ones. He made his way to the pen of his favourite. If he stared and he stared he could make out the pale moon-slip of her beak.

‘What are you doing?’ Iris whispered.

Wesley tried to see the owl more clearly but his eyes weren’t yet adapted. He could hear the others, though. Ghostly trills. Occasional squeals.

‘It’s worse at night, don’t you think?’ he asked. ‘To keep them here?’

‘What?’

‘People watch them during the day and they don’t seem too bad, but at night, that’s their time. That’s when they wake and want to fly.’

Iris crossed her arms over her chest. It was cold out here.

‘I’m haunted,’ Wesley said, eventually, ‘by things that happened in the past.’

‘What things?’ Iris asked. ‘Why won’t you tell me, Wes?’

‘I lost my right hand,’ Wesley said.

‘What?’ Iris was confused now.

‘People kept leaving me. When I was a boy.’

‘Your dad?’ she said, trying to follow him.

‘And all the time,’ he said, ‘I wanted to try and find the thing I’d lost. Searching. Searching. Punishing everyone.’

‘What?’ She was shivering now. It was cold. It was cold.

‘But I’ll tell you,’ he said, ‘that I’ve finally realized something. All the time I thought I was punishing others I was actually only punishing myself, but not
properly
.’

He was trying to see the owl in the darkness. He could make out her shape now.

‘Let’s go in,’ Iris said. ‘Let’s talk inside.’

He turned to face her. ‘I must do something,’ he said, ‘to show you how much I love you.’

‘What?’ He had lost her, completely.

‘For the baby,’ he said.

He stretched open his right hand in front of her face. For a moment she was frightened that he might try to hurt her. He might hit her or smother her with that hand. But then he turned from her and slowly, deliberately, finger by finger, he pushed his hand into the wire mesh of that giant and wakeful emu-owl’s cage.

He could see his white fingers in the darkness, and finally, too, he could see her. She could see him. She was still. She was silent. He heard one of the other birds calling and then she was on him. Ripping and tearing with her beak like a blade.

Iris screamed.

She couldn’t forgive him. On his right hand was left only a thumb. She griped that she’d almost lost their child with the shock of it. He apologized. Over the following months he kept apologizing. He stopped pouting. He couldn’t stop smiling now. Sometimes she’d catch him touching his spoiled hand with his good one, talking to himself, but so softly, like it was a child’s face he was stroking.

On the night their baby was born he left her. An envelope lay on the bed. Her parents found it and brought it to her. Inside was a cheque for several hundred pounds and a note which said only: ‘Heading Inland’. That was all.

The Piazza Barberini

Tina was doing Rome on a budget. Her companion was horrible. He was called Ralph. She met him accidentally, and he stuck to her like a burr, like a leech, until he grew bored of her. Then he let go, just as suddenly.

He had, she discovered, over seven different ways of describing the rectum. His favourite was ring which he used and used until it was quite worn out. Ironically – she just
knew
this was funny – Ralph was actually an arsehole himself. But she was too polite to say anything. He even looked like an arsehole. Not literally, but he wore dark glasses, a furry trilby – right there, on the back of his head, monstrously precarious – and thick-soled loafers. She presumed that he thought his look was, in some way, Italian. She knew better. Even the Italians knew better.

Ralph was staying at a
pensione
south of Termini. It wasn’t particularly salubrious around there. Tina didn’t like it. She, by contrast, was staying in Old Rome, in the heart of Rome, close to the fruit market, the best piazza, the better cafés.

Tina had met Ralph while she was queueing for the Vatican Museum. It had been a ridiculously long queue, but she presumed that the wait would be worth it. Ralph had joined the queue behind her, had introduced himself, had asked whether she’d mind saving his place for him while he popped off for a minute, then disappeared. An hour later, when she’d nearly reached the front, he reappeared again. She’d completely forgotten about him by then. She almost didn’t recognize him. His glasses were pushed up on to his head. His eyes – bold, empty – stared at her: a mucky brown. Two round hazelnuts. He said he didn’t have quite enough money for the entrance fee – ‘What? You’re kidding! That much?’ – so she paid for him on the understanding that he’d pay her back later.

He never did. Ralph was from Reading. He worked for British Telecom. He had a smattering of Italian. He could order coffee, ice-cream, several flavours of pizza, without even consulting his guidebook.

Tina felt sorry for him. He wore a Lacoste polo shirt, but it wasn’t actually Lacoste because the alligator was facing the wrong way. She knew about these things. She was training to be a buyer at Fenwicks, New Bond Street, London. Ah, yes.

Ralph tried to persuade Tina to have a piece of brightly coloured cotton twine plaited into her hair on the Spanish Steps. Several men, unkempt, like hippies, were offering this service for a small sum.

‘I’d rather not,’ she said, noticing their dirty hands, their tie-dyed shirts. ‘I think I might just climb up to the top of the steps and look at the view.’

Ralph followed her. He was like a naughty spaniel; bored, precocious, snapping at her heels.

The view was fine. When they’d had enough of it, Ralph said, ‘I wanna take you somewhere special. It’s called the Piazza Barberini. It’s not far from here, just down the hill. When she was in Rome, Sophia Loren used to live nearby.’

He took hold of her arm. Tina allowed herself to be led. She followed him obligingly because it was a pretty street, a steep, deep incision into the hillside. Grand houses frowned out on either side of them.

She was too obliging. What kind of girl, after all, takes any trip on her own? A bold girl? A silly girl? Oh, she wanted to be both, for once. Even Ralph, even he was a step in the right direction. A step, and she was on a trip, a voyage. Rome, she knew, held something special just for her: a fresco, a figurine, a shady walkway, an orange tree. If she kept on looking, she would find it.

In the Piazza Barberini she paused for a moment to stare at a fountain.

‘I’ve got fountains,’ Ralph said, contemptuously, ‘spouting out of my brush.’

Close by was a second, smaller fountain which was covered in big carved bees. ‘That,’ Tina said, pausing for a moment, ‘is very sweet.’

‘Yeah.’ Ralph walked on.

‘And if it was in London,’ she said, ‘it would be covered in bird dirt. They don’t seem to have pigeons here, or if they do, they don’t mess nearly as much.’

‘In Rome,’ Ralph said, conversationally, ‘you’re only considered gay if you’re passive during sex. If you screw other men, but aren’t screwed, then you’re not gay.’

Tina scowled. ‘That’s disgusting.’

Ralph grinned. ‘In Italy the men are men and the women are glad of it.’

Tina rolled her eyes. She decided that Ralph had been in Rome for too long. He’d been here a week already. She’d arrived a mere thirty-six hours ago. She was glad that she was staying for only five days. After seven days Ralph was bored. He seemed incapable of seeing the prettiness around him. He was growing cynical. He didn’t appreciate how good the weather was.

Ralph led Tina towards a church – In Rome, she thought, what else? – and up some steps. At the top, slightly out of breath, he turned and proclaimed, quite seriously: ‘Here lies dust, ashes, nothing.’

‘What?’

‘It’s written on the wall,’ he said. ‘Inside. I kind of liked it.’

She moved towards the entrance. ‘No,’ he said, turning from her, ‘not there. This way.’

Ralph cut to the right, through a small door and down into rock, into a clammy darkness.

The stairs were steep. She followed. ‘The friars here,’ he said, over his shoulder, most informative, ‘had cappuccino named after them.’

‘Why is that?’

‘Bugger knows.’

It was musty and dusty. At the foot of the stairs lay a cramped, airless, stone chamber. It had been transformed, very badly, in an almost purposefully amateur way, into a shop. There was a till and a rack of cards. Nothing much else.

A friar appeared, as if by magic, silently, out of the stonework. He was draped from head to foot in mudcoloured hessian. He stood in front of Tina and blocked her way. He stood close to her, too close, invading her personal space with the kind of bald insolence and gall that only a religious man could muster. She could tell by his eyes that he spoke no English.
She was a stupid girl
. That’s what his eyes said.
She didn’t understand anything
. He wanted to compress her, to liquidize her. He hated her.

In his hand the friar held a bucket. In the bucket were coins. He shook the bucket. He had a grey beard. Blue eyes. Tanned skin, like leather. He came from another century. Tina kind of hated him, too, somehow.

She put her hand into her pocket and pulled out some money. ‘Give him something small,’ Ralph said, materializing next to her but making no effort to contribute himself. ‘You have to give a donation.’ She threw some coins in. The friar shook the bucket again, more vigorously this time. Tina took out a few extra lire and tossed them in. The friar grunted, still giving an impression of intense dissatisfaction, before turning his back on her.

‘This way,’ Ralph said, his voice rippling with enthusiasm. ‘Through here.’

From the chamber, to the right, was a short passageway. This was a crypt, Tina decided, a real crypt. It smelled of soil. Of course. On the floor was a thin coating of brown earth.

‘That’s specially flown in,’ Ralph said, kicking it up with his loafers, ‘from Jerusalem.’ He snickered.

Brown. Everything was brown. Everything was wooden. It felt like a Spanish villa: whitewashed walls and dark bark. All this stuff. Candles, soil,
stuff
.

‘Not wood,’ Ralph said, as though he could sense what she was thinking. ‘Not wood.
Bone
.’

Bones. Hundreds of hip bones, delicate, like oyster mushrooms, arching in an extraordinary design, a beautiful design, across the ceiling. Ribs as lamp fitments. Vertebrae as candelabra. One wall was only skulls. Thousands of skulls balanced one on top of another on top of another.

Tina walked, numbly, dumbly, from chamber to chamber. Some contained friars, like the one outside but recently deceased, still in their hessian, hands suppliant, fingers, fingerbones. Some were newly buried, thinly covered, freshly coated in soil.

Angels hung, corpse-like, soggy, badly, ugly . . . oh dear. Their wings were collar bones. They flew under bone arches. Tina walked, from chapel to chapel, smelling earth and death and candlewax.

‘Four thousand!’ Ralph whispered. ‘Over four thousand dead Capuchin friars in this small place!’

Tina felt full of skin. Full of moistness. Kind of fleshy and watery, but also dead inside. She was walking through Death’s rib-cage. The whole world was bone and she was such a tiny part of it. In the final chamber, two arms were hung on the wall. Ready to chastise, ready to embrace. Mummified.

Where was Ralph? Behind her?

‘Watch this,’ he said, leaning over, putting out his hand, grasping a bone, yanking and pulling. The friar Ralph engaged with was headless, was armless, was a sagging punch-bag of dust and rot. The bone Ralph yanked at emerged from the neck of a rotting cassock, but it could’ve come from anywhere, originally. It was approximately eight or ten inches long – as round, skinny and hollow as a penny whistle – and when it snapped, it gave out a crunching sigh, like the sound a slightly soggy dog biscuit might make if held in eager jaws.

‘Ralph! Stop it! Leave it!’

‘Hey! Tina!’ Ralph said, dancing in front of her and holding the bone to his lips like it was a little pipe he would play.

He puffed out his cheeks and his fingers flew up and down it.

Tina took two steps back. Her eyes were wide. She was mortified. Ralph! She didn’t like him, not one bit. She hadn’t trusted him all along. She’d never met anyone from Reading before. He was as foreign to her as pesto or tagliatelle or tiramisù. Just as strange and inexplicable.

Tina turned and stumbled away from him, staggered at first but then found her feet, found herself moving faster and faster, picking up speed from chapel to chapel. Wanting, needing fresh air.
Had to get out. Where was the friar? Nowhere. Was Ralph following? Didn’t seem to be
.

Soil flew upwards and outwards in an arc, some of it she kicked with her heels against the back of her calves where it slid and it niggled, down her socks, into her shoes. Soil from Jerusalem. She kept on running.

It was so hot.

Tina was in her hotel room. The window was open. The nets were shifting, shuffling in the breeze.

She had pulled off her shoes and her socks. Her feet were itching. She dusted them with her hands, delved between her toes with the tips of her fingers. Her mind was still dipping and churning.

Where was Ralph? Why had he done that? Should she have intervened? Should she have stopped him? He was hateful. She imagined him, still laughing and grinning, relentless, in his own hotel, south of Termini. She wouldn’t see him again.

Tina kept touching her lip, which felt, repeatedly, as if a cobweb was dangling from it, a silky strand, a tiny feather, tickling her, irritating her. She hoped she wasn’t getting a cold sore.

She felt lonely. That was stupid. She touched her lip.

‘I must stop doing that.’ She felt heavy. ‘Stop this. You’re being silly.’

She clambered on to her bed, fully dressed, lay down flat and closed her eyes. ‘Thank God,’ she muttered resolutely. ‘Thank God I’m not a Catholic. Thank God I’m just a buyer at Fenwicks, New Bond Street, London.’ She turned over and sighed.

Tina dreamed. Tina dreamed she was doing Rome on a budget. Her companion was horrible. He was called Ralph. She met him accidentally and he stuck to her like a burr, like a leech, until he grew bored of her. Then he let go, just as suddenly.

And when Ralph let go – this was the good part – Tina met Paolo. In the botanical gardens. Paolo was half-American, half-Italian, a doctor and an amateur botanist. He was dreamy.

The day after the dust, the bones, the dirt and the death of the Piazza Barberini, Tina consulted her guidebook over an espresso and then picked her way slowly and cautiously through the via della Lungara to the botanical gardens in Trastevere.

You see, Tina knew that Rome held something special, just for her – a fresco, a figurine, a shady walkway, an orange tree – and that if she searched for it she would find it.

The weather was temperate. Plants were growing. Everything looked glorious in the Italian sunshine. The trees and the specimens were extremely well labelled. Tina wandered around the botanical gardens, smiling to herself, trying to expel all thoughts of candlewax and hessian and dark bark from her mind. And Ralph. Him especially.

Inside one of the greenhouses a smart group of horticultural Italians – smelling of starch, scent and shoe leather – were inspecting the finalists in an orchid exhibition. Tina slipped in to take a look.

The orchids seemed alien, like sophisticated intergalactic creatures. They didn’t look real. Tina squatted down in front of one, closed her eyes and inhaled. The air was warm and smelled only of soil.
Soil
. She shuddered.

‘You know, that orchid is a colour you see nowhere else on this earth apart from in one other place. It is a purple-brown the colour of the human kidney,
sì
?’

Tina looked up.

‘I’m Paolo. Hi. I could see you were not with the others. I guessed you were English from your shoes. Am I correct in so guessing?’

‘Oh.’ Tina looked down at her suede moccasins and then back up at Paolo again. ‘Uh . . . The flowers were so lovely . . .’

‘Orchids.’

‘Yes. They almost look . . . plastic.’

‘I suppose you could say that. God is a master technician , huh? I should know, I’m a doctor. I studied in America for several years, in Boston.’

‘Your English is excellent.’

‘Thank you. I enjoy the chance to, ah, take it out for a test drive every so often.’

Paolo shrugged his strong, square shoulders. Tina smiled.

‘Your hair is in such a pretty style,’ Paolo said. ‘The English are so original.’

Tina put a hand to her pale brown bob. Paolo’s beautiful dark eyes clouded over, momentarily.

‘You must think me so presumptuous. You have not even had the chance to introduce yourself.’ Paolo took hold of Tina’s hand. ‘Your name?’

‘Tina.’

‘Forgive me, Tina.’ He kissed her fingers, so softly that she barely felt his lips, just his breath, which later, she discovered, was sweet and nutty and flavoured with pistachios.