Mother of Pearl (11 page)

It was noon, a Sunday morning, the shocked stillness of the Sabbath. Three constables stood at the door of Number 24, Jericho Street. Taylor led the expedition, a lean man with sandy hair, troubled with scruples about the task at hand. Procedure and jurisdiction had determined that this arrest was his baby. He squared his shoulders and rapped the wood with his knuckles, a brisk tattoo. Its clatter reverberated on the deserted street. As they waited, he turned to his companions and said: ‘Let's make this as civilised as possible.' But he feared the worst.

Stanley answered the door. He was in his stockinged feet, a stocky man in crisp white shirt and braces, still wrestling with his collar studs. His jaw dropped. This guy knows, Taylor thought, guilty as sin.

‘Yes?'

‘Mr Godwin?'

‘Yes.'

‘We'd like to have a word with you.'

Taylor edged his foot between the door and the jamb and gauged Stanley's weight and strength.

‘It's about Mr Piper, I suppose,' Stanley said. The bastard is going to press charges, he thought, couldn't take his punishment like a man.

‘Perhaps inside would be better?' Taylor ventured. He was thinking of himself. He didn't want a scene on the street.

‘Anything you've got to say to me, you can say to me here,' Stanley said blocking the aperture of the door with a stout arm.

Taylor decided to change tack.

‘Is Mrs Godwin at home?'

‘This has nothing to do with her. It was a private matter between Mr Piper and me.'

‘And your daughter, Mr Godwin?'

‘What about my daughter? Now listen, here …' He moved quickly to shut the door but Taylor, anticipating him, rushed at him, his two companions moving in behind.

‘What the …' Stanley gasped as the three strangers tussled with him in the hallway, pinioning him to the wall. Behind him at the foot of the stairs, a woman stood holding a small girl by the hand.

‘Mrs Godwin?' Taylor asked, releasing his grip on Stanley's arm.

‘That's right,' she said quietly.

‘I think you know why we're here.'

‘Yes,' she said simply. ‘He knows nothing. I'm the woman you want.'

Taylor knelt on his hunkers and took Pearl's hand. Pearl frowned and looked up at Irene.

‘This kind man is going to take you on a trip,' Irene said, her voice glittery, her eyes bright with tears, releasing her grip on Pearl's hand and prodding her gently towards the policeman.

‘He's going to take you across the river, he's going to bring you home.'

Stanley watched blankly as Taylor led his daughter away. She went meekly, trusting Irene's bright tone and mistaking Stanley's incomprehension as compliance. From the street he could hear one of the constables saying to Pearl ‘We're going in the car, would you like that?' and the beginnings of Pearl's whimpered protests as Taylor shut the door on them. He looked at Irene and saw a stranger. He had understood absolutely nothing. She turned her back on him and Taylor led her into the parlour. He was relieved that the operation had been achieved with a modicum of dignity. It was the last Stanley saw of his wife. The second constable ushered him out of his own home, the song of Solomon echoing in his head.

‘See, said the king, it is all. My child lives and thine is dead, on the one side, and Thy child is dead and mine lives on the other. Bring me a sword. So a sword was brought out before the king. Cut the living child in two, he said, and give half to one, half to the other. Whereupon, the true mother of the living child cried out, No my lord, give her the living child; never kill it! …'

Taylor sat with Irene Godwin as the sun, tempered by sharp gusts, railed against the small house on Jericho Street, sank into a peach-coloured dusk. It was her only request – that she would be taken away under cover of darkness.

 

SHE WAS MRS MEL
Spain. Who would have believed it? In the few months she had been married Rita struggled with the notion. She was in a constant state of amazement, bewildered as a dreamer who wakes to find the world has dispensed with all its jarring logic. She felt both omnipotent and helpless – all she had done was to
wish
for this. And yet, this life with Mel (
her
life she had to keep insisting to herself) still seemed outlandish. Every morning when she woke she would examine him lying there next to her. The thin menace of moustache, the clouded ridge of brow, the dark whorl of ear. She concentrated on these fragments in the hope that when she put them all together they would convince her. She watched his rituals avidly – how he smacked his face after shaving as if it were part of some rough penance, the vigorous grace with which he applied hair oil, the way he shrugged his shirt on as if he were a horse swatting flies from its flanks – in the hope that these might help her to believe. (His casual nakedness was still a shock, though. His pale haunch, a violet cargo of tongue and gizzard; she had not imagined it would be so ugly.) But so used was she to contemplating him from afar that she found this closeness rendered him unreal and mysterious. He remained the not quite attained dream, the distant object of longing, the youth with the shorn hair and cheery grin, the boy from the Mansions whom Rita
really
fancied. Like a birdwatcher, she had been satisfied with sightings. His figure emerging from a doorway, his hunched silhouette toiling up a rainy street. Even passing the dairy on Gloucester Street where bored gangs of boys lounged and smoked butts, was less of an ordeal if he were among them. Rita would suffer their sly, sidelong glances and the great guffaws of laughter in her wake just to get a glimpse of Mel Spain. As for Mel, if he knew he was being so intensely observed, he never pretended, greeting Rita with a hearty ‘How'rya!'

It unnerved Mel to waken and find her, beached and blurred, scrutinising him, yet lost in a dreamy distance.

‘Give over,' he would mutter, sour with sleep. ‘Don't look at me like that.'

‘Like what?' She was afraid he might detect her sense of disbelief.

‘Like you could see through me.'

Mel Spain was twenty-two, an usher at the La Scala Cinema, vain as a trumpet player in his black uniform with the red piping. He stood in the foyer swinging a string of torn-off stubs, whistling and snapping his fingers as if a band had just struck up. It was a Saturday afternoon. Matinées at the La Scala were noisy, crowded affairs. Seats snapping in the artificial night, scuffling in the aisles and a furious scrabbling at ankle level. This accompanied by industrious chewing – toffees that left fingers and seats sticky, ice-pops, garish and gaspingly cold. Boys joined in on the on-screen battles, ducking, crouching, pointing fingers that were guns or puffing up their cheeks pretending to be bombs which exploded as a frothy burbling in their throats. The films were already old when they came to the La Scala. The prints were flawed. The huge blue skies of Westerns were flecked with what looked like the crushed bodies of insects. The soundtracks cracked and farted. The La Scala had once been a variety theatre and still wore its tatty, showy costume. Brown, flocked wallpaper, gilted boxes by the stage, swing doors with milky glass panels marked ‘Parterre' and ‘Balcony', a sweeping stairway in the foyer that flounced like a neglected belle. It hosted a cocktail of bad smells. Waves of disinfectant from the lavatories, stale cigarette smoke and the acrid smell of thwarted sex. Thwarted alright, Mel thought ruefully.

‘That one has the hots for you,' Joey said, poking Mel in the ribs as Rita Golden passed them in the foyer. Joey Tate, heavy-set and dour-mouthed, was the senior usher at the La Scala who spoke always in asides. Older than Mel by a decade, he saw himself as Mel's mentor; he wanted to see him right. He was a betting man; he lived on the vicarious crumbs of other people's victories and disasters. He took equal pleasure in both. Rita Golden was with Imelda Harris, a tall girl with coppery hair and a green gaze. Even though they had only left the convent three weeks before, Imelda already seemed to Rita like a woman of the world. She had started her hairdressing apprenticeship at Eileen's (late of New York) salon. Late of New York; it gave the poky shop on Great Brunswick Street an air of glamour and experience, as did its proprietor. Eileen, leathery-skinned and smoky-voiced, who called all of her customers ‘honey'. The girls parted on the street outside, Rita to cross the bridge over the river back to Mecklenburgh Street, Imelda to meet a date on the north side.

It was a June evening, the sun cooling on the cracked pavements. A mild sense of dissatisfaction had niggled at Mel since morning. After he clocked off, he knew that he and the boys would hang around the forecourt of the Mansions as they had done since they were twelve-year-olds, trading boasts and insults. Later, they might have a few pints, a game of darts or billiards, then on to a dance. He might get to walk a girl home; there would be some feverish groping in a doorway, a patch of flesh exposed as a consolation prize. He longed for a break from the predictable mechanics of boyhood companionship and the hot, laboured struggles – but rarely compliance – of a Gladys or Noreen.

‘Go on,' Joey hissed, ‘dare ya!'

Rita Golden had barely registered with Mel, beyond a vision of a schoolgirl in tunic and tie cycling down Mecklenburgh Street, her fair hair afloat, the wings of her gaberdine coat flying. The notion that she might harbour some feelings for him had never occurred to Mel; he would never know that Rita Golden had nursed a furiously melancholy crush on him for several years. Flattered by Joey Tate's narrow-eyed appraisal of his chances, Mel looked at Rita more closely. She was a tiny creature (four feet ten inches in her stockinged feet, he was to learn), with a nest of honey-coloured hair which seemed to clamour around her pert, pretty little face. Her eyes were impossibly clear, a blameless, baby-blue. And so out of boredom, and to match Joey's gruff challenge, he followed her.

Afterwards he would remember every detail of that journey, considering it now like the condemned man's path to the gallows. Over the stagnant river and down the dusty quays, the golden light of late summer dipping behind the domes and spires, a pink hue in the west. Left through a maze of cobbled alleys; then a piece of open ground, a large rubble-strewn patch. The Court Hotel which smelled of soiled carpets and stale hot dinners. St Xavier's, set back from the street, only the gable porch visible, old confetti gathering at the kerb and the frocked figure of the sacristan spearing litter with a stick. The Lido Café. Mc Mahon's the butcher's, sawdust dragged out on the street, the word
VICTUALLER
set in brown and beige tiles below the window. Glimpse of the chopping block like the rump of a fossilised mammal and the sheen of the circular slicer. And there at the corner of Mecklenburgh Street, he caught up with her, and brazen as you like, as he told Joey later, he kissed a startled Rita Golden.

What he didn't say was that he felt she had compelled him. The power of her yearning – the sum of three years' infatuation – reached out and almost felled him. And Mel Spain, off-guard and seemingly invincible, surrendered. Only when he felt the hunger of that first embrace – for him, the showy flick of a card, find the lady – did Mel realise that Rita's ardour was more powerful than any lazy affection he might be able to muster.

Three weeks later he took her to a derelict house on Rutland Street. For Mel it was an end, a way to be free of her hypnotic wistfulness. The house was propped up by two wooden crutches, as if it had polio. It smelt inside of damp masonry and a febrile rot. Underfoot, earth and rust-coloured rubble. Thistles sprouted around the shattered windows, the sills were bearded with moss. It was forbidden territory. Haunted. When she was younger, Rita and her friends had dared one another to go in there alone in the dark. A woman was said to have been murdered there, done in with a hatchet. Now Rita was here, but with a man (Mel, being four years older), which made it safe. And lying down on his spread-out jacket, that too was safe. And being stroked, his fingers in the crook of her neck, a hand on her bare thigh where he'd pushed up her skirt, murmuring words that sounded both venomous and sacred. He gasped when he touched her, as if it wounded him. And then … and then, it stopped being safe. Wan light drained from a mauve sky. Above, the rafters gaped …

They were living over her father's shop on Mecklenburgh Street. Golden's Boots and Shoes. This only added to Rita's incredulity. She would wander through the house – the musty, brown, front parlour, rarely used since her mother's death, the small front bedroom she had slept in for years, the cramped back kitchen giving off on to the shop – touching familiar things to reassure herself that she was on solid ground. The framed photographs on the sideboard, the grandfather clock on the return of the stairs, even the cups and saucers all remained resolutely, and infuriatingly, indifferent. She resented their stubbornness, their refusal to conspire in her transformation. It was hard for her, when she was alone like this, to believe that anything had changed. Only when she stood in front of the dressing table in her old room, and saw herself multiplied by three in the triptych mirror, did brute reality intrude. Then she would wistfully try to imagine herself back in the winter before. Back to a time when she had been Rita Golden. Plain and simple. A convent girl, the apple of her father's eye, a late and much-longed-for only child. But the singularity of it defeated her, particularly when she looked down at herself, huge and distended, bloated to the size of two, and felt the sudden lurch of a baby's kick. The morning sickness, her sudden aversion to the smell of shoe leather, even the heaviness of pregnancy had not dampened her euphoria. But the violent struggle she could feel within as if this being was resisting
her
, terrified Rita; it punctured the sickening kind of dreaminess she had nursed from the moment she had first laid eyes on Mel Spain.