Playing for the Ashes (18 page)

I leaned my head back against the wall and slammed my skull against it.

“You will,” I sobbed. “To me. Right now. You will.”

I dragged myself to my knees. I fi xed my mind on the two of them—Barry and Clark— and I began to rage through the
fla
t. What was breakable, I broke. I smashed plates against work tops and glasses against walls and lamps against the floor. What was made of or covered by cloth, I hacked with a knife. What little furniture we had, I toppled and trampled as best I could. In the end, I fell onto the tattered, stained mattress of our bed, and I curled into a foetal ball.

But doing that forced me to think about him. And Covent Garden Station…. I couldn’t afford to think. I had to get out. I had to be above it all. I had to fly. I needed power. I needed something, someone, it didn’t matter what or who just as long as the end result was getting me out of here away from these walls that were shifting towards me and the mess the smell and what cock to think Shepherd’s Bush had anything to offer when there was a world out there just waiting for me to conquer it so who needed this shit anyway who even wanted it who asked for it to be part of life.

I left the flat and never went back. The
fla
t meant thinking of Clark and Barry. Clark and Barry meant thinking of Dad. Better to score drugs. Better to pop pills. Better to
fin
d some greasy-haired bloke who’d put out the money for gin in the hope of having it off with me in the back seat of his car. Better to anything. Better to be safe.

I started out in Shepherd’s Bush. I worked my way over to Notting Hill where I crawled round Ladbroke Road for a while. I had only twenty pounds with me—hardly enough money to do the sort of damage I wanted—so I wasn’t as drunk as I would have liked to be by the time I finally made it to Kensington. But I was drunk enough.

I’d not given any thought to what I would do. I just wanted to see her face once more so that I could spit in it.

I stumbled down that street of proper white houses with their Doric columns and white-lace bay windows. I weaved between the parked cars. I muttered, “See
you
, Miriam-cow. In your ugly fat face,” and I staggered to a halt directly across the street from that shiny black front door. I leaned against an antique Deux Chevaux and peered at the steps. I counted them. Seven. They seemed to be moving. Or perhaps it was me. Except that the entire street seemed to tilt in the oddest way. And a mist fell between me and my destination, then cleared away, then fell again. I began to perspire and to shiver simultaneously. My stomach roiled once. And then it heaved.

I was sick on the bonnet of that Deux Chevaux. Then again on the pavement and in the gutter.

“It’s you,” I said to the woman inside that house across the street. “This is you.”

Not
for
you. Not
because of
you. But
you
. What was I thinking? I wonder that even now. Perhaps I thought that an indissoluble connection could be got rid of through such a simple means as vomiting it up in the street.

Now I know that’s not the case. There are more profound and lasting ways to break a tie between mother and child.

When I could stand, I lurched along the pavement the way I had come. I scrubbed my mouth against my jersey. I thought, Bitch, witch, shrew. She blamed me for his death and I knew it. She had punished me using the best method she could find. Well, I could blame and punish as well. We would see, I thought, who was expert.

So I set about the project and worked like a master at blame and punishment for the next
fiv
e years.

OLIVIA

C
hris is back. He’s brought take-away with him, as I thought he might, but it isn’t tandoori. It’s Thai, from a place called Bangkok Hideaway. He held the bag beneath my nose, saying, “Mmmm, smell, Livie. We’ve not tried this yet, have we? They cook peanuts and bean sprouts with the noodles,” and he took it below, through his workroom and into the galley where I can hear him banging crockery about. He’s singing as well. He loves American country western music, and right now he’s doing “Crazy” only slightly less well than Patsy Cline. He likes the part about tryin’ and cryin’. He belts those lines out, and he always makes
crazy
into three syllables:
cuh-RAY-zee
. I’m so used to the way Chris sings it that when he plays Patsy Cline on his stereo, I can’t adjust to hearing her instead of him.

From my spot on the barge deck, I could see Chris coming along Blomfield Road with the dogs. They weren’t running any longer, and from the way Chris was walking, I could tell he was juggling the dogs’ leads, a bag, and something else, which was tucked into the bend of his arm. The dogs seemed interested in this something else. Beans kept trying to jump up to give a look. Toast kept hobbling and nudging Chris’s arm, perhaps in the hope that whatever was there would fall. It didn’t, and when they all came on board—the dogs first, dragging their leads behind them—I saw the rabbit. He was shaking so hard that he looked like a grey and brown blur with
flo
ppy ears and eyes that resembled chocolate under glass. I looked from him to Chris.

“The park,” he said. “Beans routed him from beneath a hydrangea. People make me want to be sick sometimes.”

I knew what he meant. Someone had got tired of the trouble of a pet and decided he’d be ever so much happier if he was free. Never mind that he wasn’t born wild. He’d get used to it and love it, so long as some dog or cat didn’t get to him
fir
st.

“He’s lovely,” I said. “What shall we call him?”

“Felix.”

“Isn’t that a cat’s name?”

“It’s also Latin for
happy
. Which I expect he is, now he’s out of the park.” And he went below.

Chris has just come on deck with the dogs now. He’s got their bowls, and he means to feed them. He usually feeds them below, but I know he wants me to have the company. He puts the bowls near my canvas chair and watches the dogs tuck into their kibble. He stretches, then arcs his arms upward. The late afternoon sunlight makes his head look covered with rust-coloured down. He gazes across the pool to Browning’s Island. He smiles.

I say, “What?” in reference to that smile.

He says, “There’s something about willow trees in leaf. Look how the breeze makes the branches sway. They look like dancers. They remind me of Yeats.”

“And that makes you smile? Yeats makes you smile?”

“How can we know the dancer from the dance?” he says.

“What?”

“That’s Yeats. ‘How can we know the dancer from the dance.’ Appropriate, isn’t it?” He squats by my chair. He notices how many pages I’ve filled. He picks up my tin of those jumbo child’s pencils and sees how many I’ve worn down so far. “Shall I sharpen these up?” is his way of asking how it’s going and if I feel up to continuing.

My way of saying all right to both is, “Where’ve you put Felix?”

“On the table in the galley for the moment. He’s having his tea. Perhaps I should check on him. Want to come below?”

“Not just yet.”

He nods. He straightens up and when he does my pencil tin rises with him. He says to the dogs, “You lot stay on board. Beans. Toast. D’you hear me? No prowling. You keep an eye on Livie.”

Their tails wag. Chris goes below. I hear the whirring of the pencil sharpener. I lean back and smile.
Keep an eye on Livie
. As if I’m going somewhere.

We’ve developed this peculiar shorthand way of talking, Chris and I. It’s comforting to be able to speak one’s mind without having to touch on the subject. The only problem I
fin
d with it is that sometimes I don’t have all the words I want, and the message gets confused. For example, I haven’t yet come up with the way to tell Chris I love him. Not that it would make any difference to our situation if I did tell him. Chris doesn’t love me—not the way one ordinarily thinks of love—and he never has. Nor does he want me. Nor did he ever. I used to accuse him of being queer.
Bum-boy
, I called him,
pansy, ginger beer
. And he’d lean forward in his chair with his elbows on his knees and his hands clasped beneath his chin, and he’d say earnestly, “Listen to your language of choice. Notice what it says. Don’t you see how that tunnel vision of yours is indicative of a greater ill, Livie? And what’s fascinating is that you’re really not to blame for it. Society’s to blame. For where else do we develop our attitudes if not from the society in which we move?” And my mouth would hang open. I would want to rail. But one can’t fi ght with a man who doesn’t carry weapons.

Chris comes back with my pencil tin. He’s brought a cup of tea as well. He says, “Felix has started eating the telephone book.”

I say, “Good thing I haven’t got anyone to ring.”

He touches my cheek. “You’re getting chilled. I’ll fetch a blanket.”

“You needn’t. I’ll want to come below in a while.”

“But until then…” And he’s gone. He’ll bring the blanket. He’ll tuck it round me. He’ll squeeze my shoulder or perhaps he’ll kiss the top of my head. He’ll direct the dogs to lie on either side of my chair. Then he’ll set out dinner. And when it’s ready, he’ll come for me. He’ll say, “If I may escort Mademoiselle to her table…?” Because
escort
is part of our shorthand as well.

The light’s growing dim as we lose the day’s sun, and along the canal I can see re
fle
ctions in the water from the lamps burning in the other barges. They’re shimmering oblongs the colour of sultanas, and against them the occasional shadow moves.

It’s quiet. I’ve always found that odd because one would think you’d hear noise from Warwick Avenue, Harrow Road, or either of the bridges, but there’s something about being beneath the roadways that sends sound off in another direction. Chris would be able to explain it to me. I must remember to ask him. If he finds the question odd, he won’t say. He’ll merely look pensive, run a
fin
ger through the scrap of hair that curls behind his right ear, and say, “It has to do with the sound waves and the surrounding buildings and the effect of the trees,” and if I look interested, he’ll get out paper and pencil—or take mine from me—and say, “Let me show you what I mean,” and begin to sketch. I used to think that he made up these explanations he seems to have for everything. Who is he, after all? Some skinny bloke with pock-marked cheeks who dropped out of university to “make real change, Livie. There’s only one way to do that, you know. And it has nothing to do with being part of either the structure or the infrastructure keeping the beast alive.” I used to think that anyone who mixed his metaphors like that with so little conscience could hardly be educated enough to know anything, let alone to be part of some great social change in the future. I used to say with great boredom, “I think you mean ‘keeping the building’s foundations sound,’” in an effort to embarrass him. But that was, aside from an obvious need to belittle, the daughter of my mother speaking. My mother who was the English teacher, the illuminator of minds.

That’s the role Miriam Whitelaw played in Kenneth Fleming’s life at
fir
st. But you probably know that already since it’s part of the Fleming legend.

Kenneth and I are of an age, although I look years older. But our birthdays are actually a week apart, a fact among many that I learned about Kenneth at home over dinner, somewhere between the soup and the pudding. I first heard about him when we were both fifteen. He was a pupil in Mother’s English class on the Isle of Dogs. He lived in Cubitt Town with his parents in those days and what athletic prowess he possessed was demonstrated mostly on the river-damp playing fields of Millwall Park. I don’t know if the comprehensive had a cricket team. It probably had, and Kenneth may well have played on the
fir
st eleven. But if he did, that was part of the Fleming legend that I never heard. And I heard most of it, night after night, with roast beef, chicken, plaice, or pork.

I’ve never been a teacher, so I don’t know what it is to have a star pupil. And since I was never disciplined enough or interested enough to attend to my studies, I certainly don’t know what it is to be a star pupil and to find a mentor among the instructors who drone endlessly on at the front of the classroom. But that was what Kenneth Fleming and my mother were to each other from the very beginning.

I think he was what she’d always believed she could find, cultivate, and encourage to grow from the sodden river soil and the dreary council housing that constituted life on the Isle of Dogs. He was the point she had been trying to make with her life. He was possibility personified.

One week into Autumn term, she began to talk about “this clever young man I’ve got in class,” which is how she introduced him to Dad and me as a regular dinnertime topic. He was articulate, she told us. He was amusing. He was self-deprecating in the most charming of ways. He was completely at ease with his peers and with adults. In the classroom, he had astonishing insight into theme, motivation, and character when they were discussing Dickens, Austen, Shakespeare, Brontë. He read Sartre and Beckett in his free time. At lunch, he argued the merits of Pinter. And he wrote—“Gordon, Olivia, this is what’s so lovely about the boy”—he wrote like a real scholar. He had a questioning mind and a ready wit. He engaged in discussion, he didn’t merely proffer ideas that he knew the instructor wanted to hear. In short, he was a dream come true. And through Autumn, Spring, and Summer terms, he didn’t miss a single day of school.