The Tenement (17 page)

But it was his mother whom he hated more than his stepfather. After her first husband's death she shouldn't have married at all, or she should have married a Rangers' supporter. His stepfather wouldn't speak to him at meals. His silences were oppressive and cold: he had made the house glacial. He had read the
Guardian
, talked a lot of crap about crime and criminals. Anyone listening to him would have thought that he was caring, loving, whereas he was the very opposite of that. He had thought his stepson loutish, a being from outer space. His stepson compensated by behaving worse than he might otherwise have done. He became the blue-clad alien that his father despised.

His twin hates were Catholics and his wife. “What do you know about the Boyne?” his stepfather would say to him. “Who was the English King whom William deposed?” And he didn't know: he thought it was Henry the Eighth. His stepfather smiled his thin knife-like smile. Another triumph for him. But what did it matter if he didn't know what King it was? He knew that he hated the Catholics, Fenian bastards. His colour was Orange: Derry's wall would protect him. His happiest times were at football matches.

It was amazing that Greta had married him. But she too had come from a family that didn't like Catholics. She belonged to the Free Church: naturally she didn't drink or smoke. Catholics thought that by breeding furiously they would inherit the world. Maybe she should have bred freely too. But he couldn't stand the fact that while the Catholics were breeding secretly and victoriously, he wasn't. One should be doing one's bit to keep these bastards in their places.

In fact he sometimes thought she looked like a Catholic herself, like the Virgin Mary. She was so pale, so white, like a plaster saint. She was long-suffering, patient.

During the week he could be friendly, companionable. He had a number of jokes about the Catholics that he told her. Some however, were very sick and she didn't like them. He had even been known to make the dinner when he was in a good mood. But he would never wash or dry dishes. That was for women to do. Even when she was sick, disabled, he would never wash a dish.

But no matter what he did, the aggressiveness never wholly left him. He thought that people in the town despised him. Only Mrs Miller would speak to him. Porter would pass him on the stair without even glancing at him. Yet on Saturday mornings Hugh would dress up neatly, was bright and happy, as he set out for the pub. Why, he had been known to say “Good morning” to Trevor, though never to Mason. Mason was a Catholic bastard, beginning the process of breeding. All these Catholics went to the same butcher, the same grocer, stuck together. They were a secret society. On Saturday mornings he looked handsome in his blue suit, shaved closely but never used shaving lotion: shaving lotion was for poofs. The world seemed to him free and open on Saturday mornings. He was good-humoured, pleasant.

But as the day wore on, as he drank more and more, the devil began to possess him, the aggression simmered and boiled. Sometimes he would meet Mrs Miller at the station and they would sing a song together. Now there was a woman for you. She had the right ideas too, didn't like the blacks or the Catholics.

When he climbed the stairs on Friday or Saturday nights he staggered from side to side. There was silence everywhere. He often thought that he should bang on Porter's door or ring the doorbell and, when he came out, punch him in the face, he reminded him so much of his stepfather. But Porter was curiously quiet: he never met him on a Friday or Saturday night, though he might meet Mrs Porter who had once talked to him seriously about his wife. At least she had guts. She was tougher than her husband, she had once organized them against the landlord and won a respite from roof repairs. He admired her, but disliked her husband.

When he came home he would ask for his dinner and would eat it broodingly as the aggression built up inside him. His wife sat at the table watching him. He hated people watching him. Why didn't they turn their eyes away? Sometimes she sighed heavily. Sometimes she was so nervous that she would drop a cup or a plate. If this happened he would become even more aggressive than before. He might smash some plates to match hers, She was so patient, he couldn't finally break her. He could make her run screaming into the roadway, but he couldn't break her. She would shout for help, but no one would come. Not the neighbours certainly. Once a tall fellow, a visitor to the town, who had been walking past at the time in the twilight, had tried to interfere but he had made short work of him. It was none of his business.

After he had beaten her up he would hear her weeping as she lay in bed. And her weeping irritated him even more than her silence. “Shut up,” he would shout, “shut up, shut your bloody mouth.” But she would still carry on weeping though she would try to stuff a handkerchief in her mouth. She didn't have to go out labouring as he had to. She was too futile to earn money. If he drank, wasn't it his own money he was using? She had never earned a penny in her life.

And yet in spite of everything, she was up on Sunday morning cooking his bacon and eggs. The house was quiet then, rested, as after a storm. You could hear yourself breathe, he could be tender to her, sometimes even remorseful. Could she not understand that he couldn't help himself? Sometimes he even made good resolutions; he would work, he would have a future. But by the end of the week, following chaste virginal Sunday, the aggression had built up in him again.

She had once left him to go to her father's house, but she had come back of her own free will. Why was that? He couldn't understand it. The house was a mess when she returned, and she cleared dirty dishes away in silence. Her father, of course, had told her time and time again to leave her husband and to come and stay with him, but she didn't want to. She was frightened of what the villagers would say about her, that she couldn't keep her man, that her marriage had failed. And in any case, she didn't have any money and her father only had his pension. And it was so quiet where he lived. It was extraordinary, almost as if she missed the noise, the din. She had loved her husband in the past, sometimes even loved him now when he was in a good humour: he could be quite charming. She could laugh at his jokes, but at other times she told him that he ought to see a psychiatrist. But of course he never would. Imagine a Rangers' supporter going to see a psychiatrist! He wasn't a poof like that. No, she didn't miss the beatings: on the contrary, she dreaded them. She missed the good qualities that were buried inside him, what he could be on a good day. He should go to church, even though he was a rabid Protestant.

“How can you hate the Catholics so much?” she would say to him. (Her Free Church friends, some of them, didn't like the Catholics, but she herself didn't mind them.) “They go to the church. You don't. They get up early in the morning to go to mass, they give a lot of money to their church.” But he didn't see any contradiction in that. No, not at all. She could see it, however, and in fact she liked Linda and John. They were in love with each other, she had given them presents in preparation for the coming of the baby. Linda would sometimes invite her in for a coffee and be tactful about her black eyes. No, she wouldn't tell Linda about her husband. Yet sometimes she almost wept when she saw Linda and John together. They were so happy, their child was about to be born.

The tenement would be renewed. At the moment there were only old people, single people, those who had no future. At least John and Linda had a future. And like the other young ones they would move into a council house when the flat became too small for their growing family.

She had often apologized to Mrs Porter. “I'm sorry,” she would say. And Mrs Porter would make a distinction between herself and her husband; “Why don't you tell him to leave?” she would say.

“It's his flat.”

“Why don't you run away then? I would run away.” But then Mrs Porter was a clever woman: she had been a secretary in a school.

“You could get a job,” she would say to her. “One of these nights he'll kill you. Is there no organization you could consult? There must be an organization who would help someone like you.”

“No, thanks,” she would say.

Mrs Porter's house was always tidy, quiet. From one of the rooms she could hear the sound of a typewriter: Mr Porter never came in to see the two of them. He was much more remorseless than his wife: he didn't understand, didn't try to understand. Yet what could she do about it? Mrs Porter, on the other hand was a good woman. She helped that old man, and she was always putting flowers in the church. Mrs Porter would say to her, “Why don't you come to church with me?” But she wouldn't go, in case Hugh knew of it.

She was so bitterly ashamed. If she left her husband then Mr and Mrs Porter might have an easier life of it, for she knew that the former irritated her husband. But where could she go? She partly blamed herself for what had happened to Hugh. Maybe if she had been a better wife. He needed a lot of sex and she couldn't provide it. Her background was to blame for that. Her father had brought her up to think sex dirty and dangerous. Of course she knew that he had had other women, young girls, when he was a long-distance lorry driver. In fact he had boasted of it.

Christmas and New Year were the worst: she dreaded these. He would be drunk all the time as if there were a sanction for it at that season of the year. They had few friends, and he would never go first footing, the dark handsome stranger, but would sit sullenly drinking all through the holidays. While Christmas was for others the birth of the Child, he thought that Christmas was a drunken festival. The birth of the Child was associated in his mind with the Virgin Mary. He never sent Christmas cards and for a different reason she never sent any either: for her church believed that Christmas Day was not the true date of the Saviour's birth. He hated stained glass windows: he didn't like seeing pictures of Christ against a green background of the common earth. And then again New Year was even worse. While the New Year was for others the beginning of a new world, a fresh start, it was for her an exaggerated continuation of the old world. He was at his worst during Hogmanay. She wondered how at times like these the Porters put up with him. But Mrs Porter had told her that her husband was tired of moving.

She didn't dislike the tenement itself. They had moved in after the death of Mrs Brown. They had heard stories of her and the matron, how they were always tidying the close like witches with brooms. Hugh didn't give a damn about papers or bins: his own bin was full of empty whisky bottles. Sometimes she herself would wrap the bottles in paper so that the bin men wouldn't know whether they were lemonade bottles unless they unwrapped them. He wouldn't go to the shed for coal: she had to bring it up in buckets. The only paper he read was the Daily Record: he would sit for hours gazing at page three, which always had a naked woman on it.

She had never thought that her life would turn out the way it had done. When she was young she believed in romance, in willing bondage. She would look at the brides and bridegrooms outside the church and weep. “You watch,” said Hugh, “you can always tell the f…ing Fenians. They bow when they go into the cathedral. And they can't understand what the priest says, he talks in Latin. And they make their confessions. They tell the priest, I was feeling up a nun, Father. It was at a disco.” He never seemed to see that he himself was much worse than any of them, brutal, vicious, barbaric. She had never seen a Catholic as bad as him. It was funny to hear him attacking the Catholics for being beasts while his own face was twisted with hate and he staggered about the kitchen.

One night he had scrawled on Mason's door, “Go home, you Fenian Bastard.” She had seen John looking at it in the morning. He couldn't make up his mind who had done it, it might have been someone passing on the street late at night, since his flat was on the ground floor. Perhaps he had a shrewd idea that it was her husband. She couldn't be sure: but she didn't like the look he gave her. They said that he had a terrible temper when he was roused.

“That'll teach the bugger,” Hugh laughed.

“I should watch him if I were you,” she said in a quiet voice.

“Who, that Catholic bastard?” But he was growing fat, gross, he did too much sitting about.

One night he put his hand through the window on the stair and came in with blood pouring from it. Perhaps he was thinking of the Red Hand of Ulster. Perhaps he had imagined pictures on the window. “That's the blood of a good Proddy,” he told her. “Proddy blood, that is. Fenian blood is green.”

Another time he had beaten her up because she had bought a green tablecloth, which she had liked very much. In fact the ironic thing was that her favourite colour was green, but he made sure that the main colours in the flat were blue: blue wallpaper, blue linoleum. He wanted to paint the door in the close blue, and would have done so too, except that he was too lazy. She would have hated a blue door. He told her that a Rangers' supporter he had heard of refused to mow the lawn because it was green. None of her clothes were green. She even had to throw out one of her best hats and a handbag.

He wouldn't buy anything from the cafe near them because the owner was an Italian, and this in spite of the fact that the cafe was open late at night, long after the other shops had shut. “He puts up his prices, the Fenian bastard,” he would say. “It was the same during the war. These Eyeties had no guts.” He had served in the African desert and remembered those nights with nostalgia, millions of stars in the sky at night, camels, brothels. Sometimes he talked of becoming a mercenary and going to Africa or Arabia.

“These bloody blacks,” he would say, “I would castrate the lot of them. They're as bad as the Fenians.”

He loved hearing of Catholic missionaries, nuns, priests, being killed, and he was glad when Kennedy was assassinated. “Serve the f…ing Fenian right.” He would look at the film over and over. “Wait for it, wait for it, you Fenian bastard!” he would shout, “Good old Oswald. A real Proddy.”