Mountains of the Moon (2 page)

Releasing me, the judge, slumped under the weight of his own wisdom, suggests I go to a bail hostel in Reading where I can stay temporarily.

“Please, milord,” I want to say, “anywhere but Reading.” But I don’t say anything and a travel warrant is issued. I walk from the court to the railway station. The day is bright and bitterly cold—I don’t have my coat. I go into the cafe on the platform to wait. The man behind the counter is happy in his work. When it goes quiet he comes over.

“Can I get you anything?” he says. “You’ve been here a while.”

“I’m waiting for the train to Reading.”

“You’ve missed a few, there’s nothing now for an hour.”

“Dragging my heels,” I say.

“Can I get you something?”

“To be honest,” I say, “I’ve just got out of prison.”

He’s surprised.

“I’ve got a pound note but I gather they went out of circulation.” I show him. “I’ve got a one-way ticket to Reading.”

I’ve got a plastic bag with Irene’s letters in it and a closed-up piercing in my left ear. The man goes away to the counter, comes back with a mug of coffee, ham rolls and chocolate bars.

“I know how it is,” he says.

“Thanks ever so much,” I say.

He pulls out a chair and sits down.

“Where are you from?” he says. “You sound a bit London, south, Home Counties.”

I shrug; I’ve no idea where the Home Counties are. I probably sound a bit Holloway Prison, a little bit Ladbroke Grove, a little bit Suffolk, Yorkshire Moor, West Midlands, Dorset, Sussex, Kent. A little bit of everywhere and nowhere you can name. He puts a pinch of tobacco on the table in front of me.

“I’m Bernie,” he says. “What did they get you for, then?”

Through the plate glass I see people in winter coats and scarves and hats, collecting on the station platform.

“Colorful, int it?” I say.

At the bail hostel in Reading there’s a single room for me, but the other thirty inmates are half my age, waiting to go to prison, and I’m just coming out. They don’t know what to make of me, there’s something not right about me being there. I’m an undercover policewoman, that’s what they deduce. I walk in and silence the communal room. One warm spring day I find Heath in the lobby, visiting a bailed mate. It has been eleven years. His red and green leather jacket has faded to pink and gray with age, but the number 9 on the back is still bold and black. He hasn’t aged a day, still has a beautiful face in profile, like a medieval saint.

“Hello, Heath,” I say.

We always saw eye to eye. The four scars drawn on my cheekbone make me unforgettable. He smiles. Laughs out loud.

“You look good, Kim,” he says. “Fuck, do you look good!”

He means my prison-gym physique.

“Punchbags and medicine balls,” I say.

“Still hacking your hair with a knife.” He laughs, invites me to spar in the open space of the lobby.

But I don’t. He puts his arm around my neck, hard-sells me bygones and a lot of water under bridges.

I get a job in the bowels of a warehouse, mixing mountains of potpourri with a shovel. Every day I choke on a different fragrant chemical. My wellington boots fill to the rim with ingredients from around the world. The boss is pleased about having someone he can trust. I do deliveries to London in the van, serve customers in the warehouse and go to the bank with the cash. I work fourteen hours a day for the same money I’d get on the dole, and he makes sure he gets his money’s worth.

“What do you want from me, blood?” I say.

The boss laughs; he thinks I’m joking but I’m not. I lie about where I live and where I’ve been. When the wage packet comes I send a fiver to Bernie in the station cafe with a note saying thanks. I pay rent for the room in the hostel and the use of the kitchen. It isn’t great but it’s somewhere to try and sleep. There’s reporting in and out; a night curfew of ten o’clock; there’s someone who shits in the showers and someone who’s got a gun because the police come wearing bulletproof vests and break down my bedroom door by mistake. A member of staff gives me a list of organizations that help with resettlement and housing. I phone them up. They can help me if I’ve got children; if I’m fleeing from domestic violence; if I’m a refugee or from a minority group; they can help me if I’ve got issues with alcohol or drug abuse. I don’t fit the criteria. I never have. The last one on the list balks when I mention prison.

“Our organization only helps and supports young women who have problems with their mental health.”

“OK, sorry to bother you,” I say and hang up.

Upstairs my room has been broken into and trashed. The wages I’ve been saving have gone from my hiding place. I phone the mental health people back. It’s a different woman that answers my call. I lie about my age. She asks me if I have suicidal thoughts; I say yes, about four times a week. They give me somewhere to live, a room in a halfway house. It’s in Bristol, a city I like, the city where my love lives.

I hitch to Bristol down the M4. The house is comfortable, clean and safe. Except that, on account of the other women in the house (who have problems with their mental health) it’s only halfway all right. One mad old woman knocks on my door constantly, threatens to kill herself if I don’t come out. I don’t come out. Another girl phones the police all night, every night, to complain about raging parties next door but the elderly couple living there go to bed at eight o’clock, there isn’t a sound. I am the love object of another, she gropes my breasts and between my legs at every passing chance. I ask her nicely to stop but she doesn’t. I have to get assertive and shove her off but then she does it more, for sport, to wind me up. I could kill her but I don’t. One day I find Heath in the kitchen and all of the halfway women laughing.

“How did you know I was here?” I ask him.

“The bail hostel told me,” he says. “I had a look in their filing cabinet. I had a Bristol drop so I thought I’d come and say howdy-do, as you do.”

Heath lives in Manchester now with a woman called Sharon and her kids. He can’t wait for me to meet her. I don’t ask about Gwen, he doesn’t ask about Pete. We go in the street to look at his Scania parked up the road. The Rolls-Royce of lorries.

“I’m driving it myself,” he says. “But this time next year I’ve got two on the road and the following year I’ve got four. And where am I?”

“At the dojo?”

“Fishing,” he says.

Every hair on my neck stands up. I look at Heath; remember the story of the crossbow and the gun, the two killer boys in the woods. Witch’s house makes me shiver. Bygones.

I have to serve extra time in that house, eighteen months, reducing my suicidal thoughts to once a week, then once a month, until finally the organization decides that I’m able to take care of myself and they fix it with the housing association for me to have this apartment.

I sound ungrateful, I’m not; a housing association apartment is, after all, a guaranteed home for life.

It’s chucking-out time at the pub opposite; I hear a fight unfolding and a woman screaming. Through a gap in the trees I see the ambulance come and the landlord with a bucket, swilling blood off his doorstep. There’s a payphone below my window, it’s used as an office by a man with a taxi: he sits by it with his engine running and waits for work to phone him. When he’s gone it rings. The phone rings and rings until he returns, and off he goes again. A street lamp across the road filters in through the trees. I light a candle and tackle another job application. Warehouse pickers and packers. Today’s date? I don’t know. July 1996. Title: Louise Alder. 9/19/65. Education and qualifications.

“None,” I say, but write O levels in English, Home Economics and Biology. I give myself Cs. The school I went to, the work history and all the dates—I make them up. The entire form is a work of fiction, even my name.

The apartment above me has a stream of visitors throughout the night: internal doors crash and bang; there’s thumping up and down the stairs, they ring my bell by mistake. Men knock asking for Veronique.

“You want number 24.” I point across the landing.

Her name is Sally really. I met her on the stairs: she told me to be careful passing the park, there’d been a rape, a nasty one, she said. Everyone seems to get where they’re going via me; lucky for them I’m awake. I pace around the apartment, knock my forehead on this wall and that, walk diagonally from corner to corner, alternate hips on door frames. It might have been a trick of the light but I thought I saw something run across the kitchen doorway. Every time I hear a car door slam I go and look out of the window; I’m waiting for Peter to come. I’ve left a note with a friend of a friend, of a friend of his, to say I’ve moved and where to, this time.

One time Jimmy Jackal Smithers seen me do it, said he’d give me his cats’ eyes to do it gain but I never, I can’t do stuff with people looking; sides,
it int proper to make marbles out of cats’ eyes, not when you could eat them. Mum says I got lucky legs, lucky they don’t snap and stab me to death, that’s how come I int cuddly. When Auntie Fi comes she always turns me around in the kitchen, wets her finger, tests to see what color I is underneath the dirt. She can’t get over the color I go in summer, Six Weeks in the Bahamas Brown, makes my eyes and teefs go white.

Auntie Fi says I’m Long, Limbed and Lean but I is a Fine Tuned Running Machine. Running’s important especial if you want to get somewhere and fast, like the phone box outside the Taylors’. I is fast, even in my jarmas. I always has to go cos Pip’s tonsils get too big and he can’t talk to the telephone. I wait out the front for the police and the amblance. Bare feets is best for running but I has to be careful in the Masai Mara grass cos there might be lions or broke glass. Mum says she int taking me to the hospital gain, next time I can bleed to death.

Pip bashes his face in the pillow, makes noises like a washing machine. That’s how he gets to sleep, down a bumpy road. Sometimes bashes til his nose bleeds. We don’t have to wash our sheets no more. Pip got a good idea and now we sleep on newspapers, stead. He goes to the shop and gets the yesterdays. One time he done my bed with newspaper sheets what was pink. Sometimes we get words on us. Still we has to wash our jarmas; Mum says “you wet them you wash them,” which is right I think. We does them in the bath. Pip gets his arms right in the cold but I help him to wring them out and pass pegs for the washing line. Our sleeves get wet and stinky, in the wintertime they go crunchy. Sheba’s in a curl on the end of Pip’s bed, tending to be sleeping but she int. One ear is always watching me. I don’t think Sheba is her real name cos when you call her she don’t come. Her hair gets everywhere. Pip rolls it into sausages, stops cold coming in around the winders. And she don’t like Pedigree Chum, Chappie is what she eats, which is good cos it don’t cost much. Piss drips on the lino underneath Pip’s bed and then I know he’s faster-kip. Sheba waves her tail when I get out of bed. The wardrobe door squeaks like an agony and then the long mirror gets the light. Lucky we got a giraffe outside, looks in the
winder shining oringe. Next giraffe int til Merrylands. I get the fat pen and careful nice does my face. When everything is black I wake Pip up. I squashes his lips up like a kiss, tells him “Say television.” Good cos always wakes him up.