Repeat It Today With Tears (12 page)

‘Yeah, it was really quick, at first, but not as bad as it might have been. Jill has done it before, so she knows stuff.’

‘Do you want another drink?’ I determined to see if I could block the pain away with neat vodka and ice.

‘Okay, just a quick one. I haven’t packed yet and my dad will start getting twitchy.’ Inside there were few people. Seated at the bar the drummer was playing at spoof with Barry the painter. On the stretcher of his stool his feet were bare and very dirty. ‘So, are you still seeing Mr Phene?’

‘Yes.’

‘Isn’t he, I don’t know, much older, don’t you want to go with other people sometimes? Like boys of our age for instance.’

‘No. I don’t want anyone else. I’m going to stay with him, always.’

‘Yeah, well, you say that now.’

‘I mean it. I will never, ever leave him.’

My emphasis must have been fierce, Julian looked taken aback. ‘Okay, okay, I was only saying, but anyway, isn’t he married?’

‘Yes, but that doesn’t matter, she doesn’t live in London.’

We took our drinks back to a pavement table and sat for a while longer in desultory silence. Julian picked at the sole of his shoe. On the opposite pavement a couple started to have an argument. The man’s hips were very narrow and his permed hair curled halfway down his back.

‘You’re just a slag, Vanessa, d’you know that,’ he was leaning forward from his sapling waist to berate her.

The girl was holding on to the pole of the Belisha beacon; they were both kohl-eyed and seemed to be drugged. On other occasions Julian and I would have enjoyed watching such a scene, even making a wager on which protagonist would come off best. We had still that unfeeling adolescent myopia which generally allowed us to see only the pantomime amusement of such incidents, without any comprehension of the ramifications
of people’s misfortunes or discomforts. That evening, however, the public row seemed only discordant and uncomfortable. Soon afterwards Julian and I parted on the corner of Flood Street. I knew that we had each found the other to be dull and a disappointment. If I had not been so preoccupied by the fear of being ill this failure in our companionship would have made me sadder and sorrier than it did; I would have felt the burden of responsibility for putting it right.

Next morning I was waiting on the doctor’s doorstep for his wife to unlock the door. He gave me penicillin and he looked me up and down as though to indicate that he could say more. I must have been a strange and dishevelled sight. I wore the clothes of the day before because I had felt too ill to undress. I had not removed my make-up and probably I smelled of stale sex. With enormous difficulty I swallowed two of the penicillin tablets as I walked through the sunny morning streets. The milk float was finishing its round and a woman cleaning windows called out some cheerful comment to its driver. I was glad to find that the flat was empty. I told myself that if I lay down and concentrated single mindedly I could force the infection to go away. My throat had swollen too tight to swallow.

‘You’re disgusting,’ Lin had said when I had to let saliva drool onto the pillow. I did not want that to happen in Jack’s bed.

I woke up to noises from the kitchen and my mother looked in at me. ‘Oh, you’re in, are you? What are you doing in bed at this time of day?’

‘I’ve got the tonsil thing again. I’ll be fine though, I’ve got some stuff from the doctor.’

Two tears came from the pain of the effort of speaking the sentences. She said, ‘If it’s not one bloody thing it’s another. Do you want tea?’

I could only shake my head. I heard her go back into the
kitchen, banging the kettle on the gas ring, not especially in anger, but because she always performed tasks like that with force.

At some time during the night I woke again. People in a neighbouring house were having a party and it had spilled out into the back garden. I looked down at the light falling on women in long flowered dresses. A curly haired man was passing among them with glasses and the music of a classical guitar was playing beneath the chatter. I got up for water to take more penicillin. I did not know whether the sour taste was my own mouth or the London tap water which had been lying, warmish, in the old lead pipes. I tested how I felt, reviewing my body part by part. I thought that the tonsillitis infection was abating but I sensed that there was something else wrong. The penicillin was supposed to be two stat and then one four times per day but I calculated that I must have missed some doses by sleeping through and so I took two more tablets.

When I woke again I could smell that my mother was cooking a Sunday roast. The air was full of the odour of lard which she heated to smoking point to roast the potatoes. I felt very strange. When I lifted my head from the pillow there seemed to be another head inside it, moving separately from the outer case.

I told myself that a bath would help. I undressed and as I did so I gasped to see that my body was covered with livid scarlet blotches. The shape and distribution was like the patterning on a giraffe’s skin or dappled sunlight beneath a summer tree. Instinctively I pulled a towel around me to hide it although there was no one there to see. I knew that there must be something seriously wrong. Momentarily I was afraid enough to consider calling out and seeking the help of my mother or Lin. Then, holding on to the cold rim of the bath, I realised that if I admitted that there was a problem while I was in the flat it could preclude
any contact with my father. I was appalled to think how close I had been to giving in to fear and thus to separation from him. I despised myself for such weakness. Slowly and deliberately I washed and dressed. My hands shook so much that I had to support my elbow with the other arm in order to apply makeup.

In the living room there was the malty smell from beer bottles and chatter on the radio. It almost seemed then that it could be a comfortable and homely world and for a moment I wished that I was not an outsider.

‘Are you in for dinner? Here, beat this.’ My mother put a basin of yellow Yorkshire pudding batter and a spoon in my hands. I leant against a chair back for support.

‘No, thank you. I’ll see if they need me at work, then I might go down to Alison’s.’

The big tablespoon was stamped with the name Hotel Somerset. During the war my grandmother had bought goods from the sales held to dispose of the equipment from bombed-out hotels.

‘Quicker than that, for God’s sake don’t slop it. Oh, give it here.’

‘Bye then.’ Again I wavered, tempted to seek help, I feared that I might fall over in the street.

‘Yes, off you go then… it’s all bloody lumpy now… ’

I turned away and left my mother frowning as she began to fiercely beat at her batter. Out in the sunlight white bubble and bar shapes floated over my vision. I decided that I would cross the Common for the bus, to be seen by fewer people. I walked over the hummocky stretch of grass where groves of hawthorn grew. On one slope a teenage couple were lying wrapped together, my balance was disturbed and I veered far too close to where they lay; they looked up in annoyance as I passed and their eyes were like currants in faces of dough. At the centre of the Common the
bandstand rose as for a shipwrecked swimmer, with the distance between never diminishing. At last I reached Cedars Road and I leant against the concrete bus stop for support, pretending to be lounging in Sunday idleness. When the bus came I sensed the conductress staring at me and I was afraid that she would make me get off. I sat looking resolutely forward on the top deck, fixing on the brick chimneys of the power station. When the bus stopped on the bridge I looked down and noticed a patch of flotsam in the water, bits of wood and plastic and gull feathers; the current, in chevrons, worried at the edges.

From Sloane Square I walked behind Kings Road, seeking out the privacy of the small rich streets that I had learned so well in the spring. I wished that Julian was not away and that I could find him in the Chelsea Potter to help me. I knew that despite us being out of sorts last night he would seem young and flippant and that he could stop me feeling as if I was slipping away, like the mucky white feathers on the flotsam island.

When I reached Jack’s doorstep in Oakley Street I cried with relief; although there was no sensation in my face to feel the course of the tears as they fell I saw them dropping and splashing on the stone. All afternoon I sat there; someone had not picked up their newspaper and whenever a passerby looked at me curiously I pretended to be reading it; I could see nothing but a grey mass, the colour of egg boxes. Once or twice I folded back the hem of my jeans to see that the red markings on my legs were more intense. I did not dare to look at my face in the mirror from my bag. I had parted my hair at the neck of my blouse and pulled it forward to hide as much as I could.

I may have slept or I may not have been fully conscious. Suddenly I saw that Jack’s car was there where it had not been before. At first he did not notice me. He leant in to take a VG carrier bag from the back seat. It was filled with windfall apples.
When he found me on the step he raised me up by the elbows. ‘My dear child, what have you done?’

I was more frightened by his reaction than anything that had gone before. ‘I’m not sure, but it’s okay, I think. Really, it’s okay.’

‘I don’t think it is, Susie.’ Until that moment I had not realised that he might insist upon me going home. ‘Let’s get you inside.’

He made me sit down on the bed; the room, closed up all weekend, smelled of sun-warmed air and fabrics. ‘Stay there, I’m going to ask Eunice to take a look at you. She nursed during the war.’

I knew that more tears of relief were issuing from my eyes but the nerve endings in my face were still not working. I wiped it with handfuls of my hair.

Jack was saying, ‘She’s here… if you wouldn’t mind just taking a look… I’m not sure what can be wrong… ’

I was conscious of disliking myself again, this time because I was causing my father to look lost and old and grey and anxious. Towards Eunice I felt gratitude because she was brisk and business-like and her face gave nothing away. ‘Are you allergic to anything?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘When did this start, can you remember?’ From her tone of voice and the way she sought my concentration I knew that she thought that I was losing consciousness. I did feel that I was sliding away but it was no longer frightening, in Jack’s room; now the sensation seemed amusing. I remembered the 1962 and 1963 winter of heavy snow when I would deliberately throw myself down on the white heaped drifts because I knew that it would not hurt me.

‘Try and remember, Susie,’ she had hold of one of my hands
and she was tapping on it quite rhythmically. She reminded me either of the maths teacher or the music teacher, I knew that both of them thought I was a dunce, and again I wanted to laugh; the feeling of sliding backwards was really very funny.

Then Jack leant down by my shoulder and spoke close to my ear. ‘Listen, Susie, you must try to remember, try to remember and then you can tell me, can’t you, you can tell Jack. Come on Susie, try, for me, won’t you, please try, Susie.’

I was used to doing what he coaxed me to do. ‘After I started the pills. I was getting better.’

Eunice again, ‘What pills was it, Susie, were they penicillin?’

‘Yes, that’s what I always have.’

‘Jack, I think St George’s might be a good idea.’ I saw the way she looked at him.

‘Could you… would you mind?’

‘Of course I will.’

I was glad to see that she was being so kind to my father.

It was the only time that I ever travelled in the old Citroën. St George’s Hospital was in the process of its long remove from Hyde Park Corner to Tooting Bec. In the Casualty department a number of the bays had already been stripped, you could see where curtain rails and lockers had been dismantled. So that I would not forget and give something away I tried to keep my concentration by determining whether it was every alternate bay that had been removed but the white geometry continued to dance in my eyes and sometimes my sight shut down altogether. There were pins and needles in my hands and, periodically, up and down my arms, as though the sensation was thrown over me in bucketfuls. I felt as if my fingers were made of lint rolls so that no matter how tightly I bent them there was no sensation of holding on to anything. I must have gripped Jack’s arm very hard when we walked from the car because days later bruises
remained, yet he seemed as insubstantial as air and shadow.

I kept catching at the thought that I must weight down certain lies in my head for when they asked me questions; when I had revised in the Clapham County garden on breezy days I had anchored the pages of my notes with stones and bits of stick. An immature woodlouse had scurried out on to Salisbury’s speech: ‘… with the eyes of heavy mind, I see thy glory like a shooting star… ’ Facts needed to be altered, where I was born, where I lived, my family name. I must remember. ‘Fall to the base earth from the firmament. Thy sun sets weeping in the lowly west …’ The brickwork of the corridor walls was painted grey-green. With the colour and the pipes and the dials it was reminiscent of a film set for the inside of a submarine.

A blue nurse said, ‘Bring her through, mother,’ and for a moment none of us understood what she meant.

Then Jack half rose from one of the canvas and metal chairs and spoke to Eunice. ‘Is that all right… will you go in with her?’

‘It’s probably simpler if I do.’

The nurse handed her a clipboard with a form to fill in my details. I tried hard to fix upon Eunice’s face but she did not look at me. She showed no hesitation over completing the task. ‘She’s been taking penicillin, Nurse.’

As the nurse leant to take my pulse Eunice edged the clipboard within my wavering vision. She had given me the Oakley Street address and the day of my birth as the first of March. Jack must have told her that, he was so pleased and inordinately proud about it being, as he believed, St David’s Day. The year tallied with my being eighteen. And for that one night only I was, after all, Susanna Rhys Owen. I began to slide again.