New and Collected Stories (63 page)

He opened his sandwich pack when the train began, and sat back to think about where he'd gone wrong. He considered that twenty-five miles was long enough to do it in – not yet knowing he would never lose that feeling of having loved in vain, and would hardly realize through the years that followed where the strength came from that he grew to need.

Yet a presentiment of this led him to wonder whether everything that had happened to Mavis could be blamed on him, and he decided against it when the pit that opened was too deep and black.

The Chiker

‘What would you rather have to keep you warm, my little pee-thing, or a new fur coat?' Ken whispered to his girl-friend in the fertile darkness of a double entry.

‘Your little pee-thing,' she giggled, which pleased him so much he gave her a fur coat as well.

The trouble was that while he was still paying for the fur coat on hire purchase his little pee-thing gave her a baby, so he had to marry her and be done with it.

If he'd been a few years older she'd have been young enough to be his daughter. He wouldn't have minded, but she wasn't even pretty, and soon looked as old as he was, which served him right for getting carried away in the first place.

He didn't like things to happen so fast. When they did he got angry and wanted to go to sleep. Perhaps that's because he had been twelve years in the army and without a trouble in the world, a time when nothing happened that was his own fault.

Even four years as a prisoner of the Japanese wasn't on his conscience, so it hadn't really happened, except that he knew it had. You could blame the bleeding generals for that. Such people were the same in civvy street or out. The managing director of the firm he worked at had a face similar to the CO of his old battalion.

Ken had fought like a mad bastard. In an attack he'd scream louder than the Japs, and couldn't forget the contemptuous look from his platoon commander as they were moving between the rubber trees. The next thing was,
he'd
snuffed it, and Ken didn't stop to pick him up or turn to see if he was only wounded.

He remembered sitting by a tree eating the last of his rations, and when a Jap stood over him with fixed bayonet what could he do but offer some? He cracked the butt on top of his head though, and took the lot, which Ken supposed he'd have done in his place anyway.

He lost half his weight and nearly died a few times. Scurvy, beri-beri, and Mongolian footrot chased themselves in and out of his system till his face was so pitted it looked like the front of a Sheffield pikelet.

His teeth went and his hair got thin, but six months back in lovely old Nottingham and he was as right as rain. It's funny how quick you change from good to bad. Other way as well, I dare say. But he never wanted to go through that lot again, knowing there are things in a man's life he can't survive twice. You could tell by his face that he used to be an optimist.

All he had to show for nearly four years was a cigarette lighter taken from a Japanese guard when the war ended. Looting was forbidden by the British officers. It simply wasn't done. You had to leave it for them to do. But he chased the Jap into the bush and beat the living shit out of him to get that lighter. He'd been weak enough at the time, with only a fortnight's good grub in him, but with fists so full of greed and vengeance nothing could stop them.

It was a fine-looking gold-plated titbit, fit to last a lifetime. Even now it was a good igniter, wind or no wind, though he'd had it repaired a few times since.

He was thirty when he came back, and looked fifty. Now he appeared the fifty that he was, a small muscular man with short curly hair that had grown like a miracle as soon as he got home to the land of rain and fog. He worked for a firm that baled waste paper from local factories and sent it off to be repulped. He screwed the press-top as high as it would go, piled in the rammel, and pushed the button that formed it into a compact bale and laced it up with wire. Then he released it from its box, and hauled out as neat a cube as any man could who'd been so long on the job.

So because of his pee-thing twenty years ago he'd had to marry her, and if it hadn't been for his mother dying of the shock of it, or near enough in time for him to think so, they wouldn't have had a house to live in.

He'd craved for his life to settle into a long routine, but the child he married her for had died at birth. Another didn't come for three more years, a girl who was now fifteen, so buxom and sloppy he'd have to keep an eye on her, though she'd already had one boyfriend from what he had seen.

But he was no angel either, and his marriage had been on the run a few times since, when the mutton-dagger dance came at him. Standing by his press at work he thought the only solution was to have it cut off, but then he got to wondering what he'd pee with if it was.

‘That's what frightens me,' he said to his mates in the pub, throwing his last dart and missing the double-seven down from three-o-one which would have wiped the floor with them in one deft stroke. ‘Otherwise I'd have the bloody thing done tomorrow.'

On a warm evening in June he stood up from the hearth and told his wife not to forget to feed the canary because he was going to the pub for an hour or two.

‘Don't get drunk,' she said, ‘and try not to be too late. It's work tomorrow. I expect I'll be in bed by the time you get home.'

Such orders satisfied them, because even though everything was dead between them, at least they understood each other. He would be glad of some fresh air, and she to see the back of him till morning.

The collar of his white shirt was spread outside his jacket, and he smoked a cigarette contentedly. Alone and on the loose he felt at peace, as if he'd swallowed a dose of pep-pills young kids talk about.

Girls he passed on the street looked fresh and smart, jolly dollies with lovely joggletits pushing their blouses out, sights that bucked him up so much he felt like singing and not being responsible for his actions. Yet the only thing left for such a runagate as himself if he craved a bit on the side was a juiceless old dawn-plucker for thirty bob who might put the finishing touches on him. It was best to walk the streets and look at it, for all the harm it did.

Fifty if he was a day, he felt fourteen and hoped he looked it to young girls he winked at in passing – but so faintly they might have thought he'd gone a bit rheumy at the eyes and couldn't help himself. Maybe all men of his age felt young enough to be their own sons. What a shame that at fourteen he hadn't realized how they saw themselves as no older than he was then, and didn't know much more about the world.

They only tricked you into thinking they did by putting on a swank about it, wearing their age or grey hairs like the corporal his stripes in the army. Now he was in the same boat and felt as if, on his way up through the orphanage and army, marriage and factory, he'd not been allowed to grow older properly like some people he knew.

It was the best part of the year, a calm summer evening when everybody had stopped work, and time had put its brakes on so that he would live for ever. When you had that feeling what could you do but think of love and let your little pee-thing stir?

One small cloud dented the sky, but on reaching the hilltop at Canning Circus it had gone, as if sucked in by the Trent and blown out to sea. He didn't feel like going into a pub, being held from such human joshing on an evening that seemed too good to waste. Something in his chemical set-up made him already half merry to himself, but it was a faint inebriation caused through a definite lack, and not from having had too much of anything.

People sat around Slab Square, and after a leisurely patrol he went down Wheeler Gate, but not too fast, nor looking into the sky. It was the wrong side of the city to bump into any friends, which seemed a good reason for coming here, then crossing the canal and going on by the station. He thought how good it would be to meet an old flame who would suddenly turn a corner and say: ‘Hey up, Kenny, how are you, my duck?' – especially if neither of them had grown a day older.

It wasn't likely. Not widow, wife, or whore with a door to knock on in the whole dead-beat district, nothing to stir the entrails of the heart in this or any other part of town during the last few years.

It was more than that he wanted. It must have been, because he couldn't think what it was. A young chap walked from the bus stop with two suitcases, into the station to take a train somewhere.

He wondered what other town he'd get to, and saw him reaching it in two hours time, a strange place whose streets he didn't know, smelling of bus fumes and dust. He'd get a room at a boarding house and sleep content in a different bed, rising early in the morning to go out and look for a job. Or maybe he had pals where he was going, or his family, or even a girl friend.

He walked faster at such questions since he had no hope of answering them, though he felt happier at speculating on the life of one man who was travelling, for it made the world bigger and more interesting, and he less alone in it. If people could still get on trains there was a chance for him yet, though he knew he would never catch one himself because he didn't need to strongly enough.

He only wanted to go where he was walking, but where that was he didn't know, except that his steps took him to a beer-off with a fading sign painted on a sheet of tin above the door saying: ‘CAKES PASTRIES SWEETS AND MINERALS.' During a guarded walk from the orphanage in the olden days such a placard would have made his mouth water, but now it only brought back the memory of his early times.

With a comforting chink of cupro-nickel in his pocket he went in for a packet of cigarettes. The meaty smell of ale and cooked ham reminded him that he hadn't yet supped his nightly pint, but he preferred to wait till it was dark so as to get the full benefit of leaving the shadowy street and entering the lighted guts of a pub.

It was nine o'clock and almost dusk by the time he leaned on the parapet of Trent Bridge. A streak of snake-yellow lay in the western sky, and the river glistened below as if it had a deep black sky of its own.

He'd had a short life so far, even though he'd done so much of it. It had passed him by in big chunks that now seemed no time at all. Every change had been set off by a hidden fuse. When he was three his father left his mother, so she put him into Bulwell Hall orphanage till he was fifteen because she couldn't afford to keep him. Then she brought him out so that he could go to work and earn her some money. A few years later she got into bed with him one morning saying: ‘I've loved you ever since you was a baby, Kenny.' The next day he joined the army.

He didn't know why he thought of it now, though it never left him. Other knocks were too recent to be considered. Perhaps they really hadn't mattered all that much, he thought, letting his fag-end drop into the sky below.

He crossed the road and went down a lane along the river bank. A breeze shaking in from the countryside made him feel colder than he'd done all day. His eyes got used to the darkness and he noticed how the twilight was lasting. Away from the river he could make out hedges, and hummocks of grass.

A courting couple lingered by a bush, arms around each other as they moved into one shape. Ken knelt to tie the shoelace that had bothered him since leaving the bridge, his eyes level on the two people, a clump of osiers keeping him hidden. The shadow came apart and he squinted as if to bring it closer.

Satisfied that no one was nearby, the man spread his overcoat. ‘What are we up to then?' Ken wondered. ‘As if I didn't know!' The girl must have sat down also, for they went out of sight for another kiss.

He wanted to clear his throat, but the trundling river some way behind wasn't loud enough to hide the noise he would make. A pint of beer would ease his gullet, but he was too intent on going forward, knees bent, hands splayed as if about to fall on all fours and push himself through the grass as he had once done so skilfully in the Malayan jungle. You don't forget anything, he thought, and that's a fact, wanting to light a cigarette but having to postpone that too till later.

A rustling from close by sounded as if an animal were stirring itself before making up its mind to lumber out and get him. Over the field was a thin white moon when he lifted his head.

The man was on top of the woman, and one of her white legs showed plainly, the almost luminous flesh moving about like a dismembered part of her. They were murmuring as they made love, and he craved to hear what was being said, as much as see what was done, because he never spoke at such times, leaving it to the woman if she felt that way.

He took the lighter from his pocket, to comfort the palm of his hand with a compact and metal object that worked to perfection and asked no questions. It helped to calm him at something he hadn't done since a child when, escaping for an hour from playtime at the orphanage, he had chiked a courting couple in the woods near by.

He felt guilty at chiking, and thought he should go back before the pubs put their towels on. The only sound was one of mutual appreciation going out to the moon. They must love each other, considering how they moaned while at it. He wondered what he sounded like at home, though not being able to chike himself it was something he'd never know.

The lighter rolled in his palm. He wanted to stop it and press the top, see its flame spurt into a yellow shape and glow on the damp grass that was wetting his trousers at the knee-cap. Though it might warm his windbitten face it would give the game away.

They went on longer than him, and didn't complain at the chill. He made up his mind to pull back and go but was fixed in their act and unable to move. His eyes grew large, outweighed his body and rooted him there.

A light drizzle blew across the fields. They ended suddenly and the man stood up. Half-way to his own feet Ken felt the lighter slide from his hand.

He glanced at the couple to make sure they had finished. The man turned but, thinking he was some low bush that had grown while they were making love, or seeing nothing strange because the details of the landscape had failed to impress him while searching for a place to lie down, he turned back to ask the girl if she was all right.