The Year of the Ladybird (11 page)

Tony and Pinky took me for lunch. They told me I was no longer on probation. I hadn’t known that I was on probation. You’re
one of us
, Pinky said. I wasn’t certain
whether that meant I was good at wearing an eye patch or draping myself in the flag of St George.

‘Speaking of the old days, who’s polishing the Brass?’ Tony said, and Pinky looked glum. Nobody wanted to polish the brass, it seemed. Every Sunday afternoon the camp was
visited by a brass or silver band representing a colliery or a village somewhere in the North of the country. The musicians travelled a long way by coach to play. All that was required of the
Greencoat was to place deckchairs around the bandstand and then fold them up again after everyone had gone. It was hardly onerous and I said I’d do it.

Tony and Pinky looked at each other. ‘Why can’t they all be like you?’ Pinky said. A ladybird settled on his brow and he seemed not to notice. ‘Where’s that fucking
Nobby?’

I was very glad of the chance to sit still. I hadn’t felt right since I’d almost plunged to my death. The jolt had put the world out of joint. Meanwhile the brass band was a sadly
outmoded feature of the entertainment programme; notionally it was kept on ‘for the oldies’ and in truth that’s who turned up to listen. The white-haired old folk. They bought
with them thin white-bread processed-meat sandwiches and thermos flasks filled with tea.

I helped the brass band set up, too. They were the Brigthorpe Colliery Band in smart sky-blue cotton blazers. They had already appeared earlier in the season. As I was tightening a music stand
the bandmaster said, ‘Are you new? What happened to Nigel?’

Nigel, I gathered, was my predecessor in the job. ‘No idea,’ I said. ‘He cleared off.’

‘Shame. Good lad, Nigel was.’

After everyone was settled I slumped into my own deckchair with a printed repertoire programme and the band struck up. The pure sounds of the brass band went to work on me at once. My breathing
returned to normal. I started to drift into a world where I was half asleep, floating and soaring and falling with the music. These unfashionable musicians carried with them a beautiful sadness
even when they played something jaunty and up-tempo. We had the William Tell Overture. They played the Floral Dance. They were into Largo from the New World Symphony when I felt someone settle
lightly into the deckchair next to me, and I felt sand closing over my head. I lurched awake, opened my eyes and found Terri sitting next to me. She said nothing.

‘I don’t want you to think,’ she whispered, ‘that I’ve come here just because you are here. Because I come here every week.’

Maybe I looked sceptical.

‘It’s the only place he will allow me to come on my own where he knows I’m not going to get chatted up.’ She indicated the snowy-haired audience with a nod of her head.
‘But I like it. And I knew you would be here.’

I waved away one of the ladybirds that were becoming a plague. ‘How?’

She shook her head. ‘It’s all all right. All of it. It’s meant to be. You’ll see. It’s meant to be. But it’s all all right.’

The band stopped for a breather and to swig water. The sunlight winked on their tubas and trombones and cornets. Sweat ran down the faces of the musicians and pooled in the crevices of their
armpits. Then on a command from their leader they picked up their instruments and started up again. I went to speak but she held up a hand to stop me. I looked at my programme: Adagio for Strings.
Terri sat forward in her deckchair, hands clasped under her chin like someone praying. Every now and then, as the movement began to swell, I stole a glance at her. Then I saw that she was indeed
weeping. Not just a pretty tear rolling down her lovely cheek, but bitter, bitter, tears expressed in silence. I felt my own chest constrict. I wanted to do something but I couldn’t. The
music had completely taken her over and it was almost as if she no longer knew I was there.

A ladybird alighted on her face, on the angle of her cheekbone. I do believe it was drinking from her tears. She brushed it away.

The afternoon was evaporating in a shimmering haze. I felt very strange. For a moment I hallucinated that the men and women and boys and girls of the band were all made of glass, and their
instruments, too. They were transparent and fragile, and I feared for the hammer that could so easily break them. The sun refracted off the brass instruments, but slowly, and air was filled with
music, fat glass globes of sound rising from the band and drifting across the camp like bubbles blown from a child’s water-pipe. I know I wasn’t asleep, and anyway it only lasted for a
second or two. But I felt like I’d had a glimpse at a world just behind the physics of this one. I’d been delivered into a state of unaccountable bliss, happy just to be sitting next to
her all afternoon.

‘Do you ever think,’ I said ‘that you might have someone watching over you?’

‘Never,’ she said, a little sharply. ‘Do you?’

‘I think I might have,’ I said.

‘Like an angel?’

‘No, not at all like an angel.’

She looked at me sideways. Then she settled back into her deckchair and closed her eyes.

The concert came to an end. The elderly folk got up from their seats and shuffled away. We were the last to get out of our chairs.

‘Come on. Someone will see,’ she said, standing up.

‘What will they see? Two people sitting in deckchairs?’

‘Yes. And that will mean a lot more than two people sitting in deckchairs.’

I made out I didn’t understand that, but I suppose I did. ‘Are you around this evening?’ I said.

‘No,’ she said sharply. ‘Madness.’

Then she walked away from the bandstand, across the grass, in the direction of the sea wall.

But she was around that evening. And how.

I’d spent the early evening as a checker on the cash bingo in the Slowboat. Nobby called the bingo from an elevated chair, with a glass cabinet powering numbered ping-pong balls through a
Perspex tube. When one of the punters – it had taken me about a week to graduate from calling people punters instead of campers – shouted for a line or a house it was my job to collect
the winning ticket, take the ticket over to Nobby and run through the numbers. If all was correct – and it usually was – play could continue and the winners collected their cash at the
end of the session. It was mind-numbing, oddly comforting and hugely popular with both the campers and the punters.

When the bingo was over, most of the players drifted back to their chalets to get washed and changed for the evening, whereupon they would float back again to the very same venue. It was all a
bit like the sea ebbing and flowing. During that time the Slowboat residential band – three amiable Brummies in silk shirts and sparkling waistcoats – would set up ready for the
night’s steady stream of cover versions. One of the band – Eric the drummer – was telling me a joke, something about an adulterer who was in church when he remembered where
he’d left his bicycle. I sensed but didn’t hear him getting past the punch-line.

‘You’re not listening,’ he said. Then he scoped where I was looking. ‘Don’t blame you, matie.’ Eric moved away and rippled his fingertips along the edge of
his cymbal as if to underscore some point or other.

Terri stood against the bar. Wearing that same dark, figure-hugging dress, this time she wore opaque black tights and a pair of shiny black high heels. Her eyelashes had been highlighted with
mascara and she wore a thin trace of lip-gloss. I saw her in front of me and it was like I was speeding along a motorway with a car crash happening way up ahead, but instead of slowing down I was
accelerating into it.

‘Are you back at work?’ I said.

‘Yes. But they’ve taken me out of the theatre. I’m cleaning the refurbished chalets in D block.’

‘You look amazing,’ I said.

She smiled at me but then said, ‘Hush!’

‘What am I supposed to do?’

She flicked her hair and glanced at me sideways. Then she looked away again.

‘What’s going on?’ I said.

She let out a little moan. ‘I don’t know.’ Then she picked up her handbag from the bar and leaving her drink unfinished she said, ‘I’m going into town.’
Without a backward glance at me she walked out of the Slowboat bar.

I stood frowning at the space she’d vacated. She was going into town? Dressed like that she was going into town? I had to fight myself to stop from running out after her and bringing her
back. I turned away from the bar. Eric the drummer, perched on his stool behind his kit, was watching me. He blew on his hand and flapped his wrist, as if to cool burned fingers.

Monday I woke after a bad night. Every time I slipped into sleep I was tortured by images of Terri giving herself to men in town. It was ridiculous. I didn’t own her. But
I was torturing myself with pictures played out on the back of my retina. Perhaps it was something of this that made Colin the way he was.

Yet Terri wasn’t a flirt. She didn’t toy with people’s feelings, nor did she smile or flash her eyes or lick her lips or swing her hips. Just the opposite. Neither did she ever
play the double-entendre game that gave the kitchen girls so much fun. With the exception of one impulsive, stolen, dry kiss, she’d held me at arm’s length. At almost every moment
she’d avoided giving me any kind of signal. Either she was the most manipulative woman since Mata Hari or she was genuinely trying to stay true to her monster of a husband. Even so, as I
tossed and turned, I couldn’t get rid of feverish pictures of her lavishing her favours on the men in the town.

I didn’t see Terri all of that week. Since she’d been taken off the theatre duty she was deployed in various places. I didn’t see her in the daytime and she didn’t show
up again in any of the evening bars. I felt as though I was always looking over my shoulder for her.

On the Wednesday morning I went into the briefing and I caught Nikki glaring at me. I tried to catch her eye but she looked away. She’d been frosty with me for some days now and I had no
idea what I’d done to upset her. I was determined to ask when I got the chance.

It was the morning of the magic show. Tony asked me to ready the props and I started by wheeling the sword casket from the props cupboard, which was actually an alcove adjacent to the theatre.
After a few moments Nikki appeared. She was Tony’s assistant in the show and as such she was required to wear a sequined costume and to climb into the sword casket. I made some lame remark to
her about dodging the swords and she completely blanked me. Turning her back on me, she stripped off and wriggled into her fishnets and her sparkling costume. Then she started brushing her long,
lustrous black hair.

I’d had enough. ‘Right,’ I said. ‘Will you tell me what I’ve done?’

She narrowed her dark eyes at me and brushed her hair with angry vigour. I wondered if she somehow knew about what was happening between me and Terri, and disapproved.

At last she spoke. ‘Let’s just have a think, shall we? A think.’

It didn’t seem to me possible that she could be jealous. It didn’t seem possible that she could even know. I shook my head. I had no idea.

‘Didn’t take you long to team up, did it?’

‘What?’

‘Fun, was it?’

‘What fun, Nikki?’

‘Joined the gang, have we?’

‘The gang?’

‘You went to one of their meetings.’

‘Meetings?’

‘What do you think that says to me, David? You know what they want to do to people like me and my family? They want us sent off in cattle trucks, that’s what they want.’

I felt embarrassed and stupid at the same time. I hadn’t realised that in Nikki’s lovely dark looks she carried the genes of a different race. Nor had I thought what others might
think about my attendance at that meeting. I was horrified. ‘No! Wait! Nikki! I didn’t even know you were . . .’ I couldn’t find a word or phrase that wouldn’t
compound the problem.

She supplied one for me. ‘Half-caste? Mixed race? Oh fuck off, David.’

‘I swear! I didn’t know what I was getting into! Tony said come and meet some people and I thought it might be like a conjuring circle . . . or I don’t know what. Next thing I
found myself up to my chest in flags and skinheads and . . . I had no idea.’

‘You came home with all their horrible literature though, didn’t you?’

‘Literature?’ I suddenly recalled the copy of
Spearhead
in my room. ‘Who told you that?’

‘Nobby saw their papers in your room.’

Nobby had reported to Nikki! My room-mate had grassed me up.

‘One. One paper. I was about to throw it out. That’s the truth!’

‘So why have you even got one? Why, David, why?’

Her dark eyes were moist with anger and hurt and my protestations were getting me nowhere. ‘I swear to you, Nikki, I have nothing to do with those people.’

She shook her head. ‘David. You’re like . . . like a little puppy. You’ll follow anyone anywhere. You’ve got to be careful about where people will lead you.’

‘I’m sorry! I really am.’

She gazed at me in silence before someone came blundering into the semi-darkness of the backstage. It was Tony, still wearing his fez. ‘Lover’s tiff, is it?’ he said
cheerfully. Then he began singing loudly, something about the course of true love never running smooth. Nikki sighed and headed off towards the ballroom.

Tony took off his fez and became serious. ‘You have to be precise about how all this stuff unpacks and gets put away afterwards, look here. Take hold of that box.’

Later I asked Nikki how I could make things up to her.

‘You can buy me an ice-cream.’

I agreed, as if to do so would solve the pressing problem of racism that was hawking the country.

‘On the pier. Saturday.’

When Saturday came I had breakfast in the canteen in my civvies. Every time someone came in I looked up, thinking it might be Terri but fearing it might be Colin. Neither
appeared. I was eventually joined by one of the security guards who asked me if I was interested in Formula One car racing. I said I wasn’t and he proceeded to tell me about the history,
business and current state of competition in the sport, just as if I’d said yes. When he finally paused for breath, I asked him if he’d seen Colin.