Sacred Country (15 page)

He was holding Harker’s leg so tightly that Harker couldn’t move it.

‘It’s cold in the cellar,’ said Irene. ‘You’ll catch cold.’

‘I can find the cellar,’ repeated Billy.

‘I’ll take him with me,’ said Harker.

Irene lit another night light and gave it to Harker. He carried his son in one arm and held the small light out in front of them. Together, they moved through the dark house and heard what the storm was doing to the street, making the lids of dustbins fly and milk bottles fall over and sending pantiles sliding off the roofs.

In the kitchen, Harker lit the Tilley lamp.

He opened the door to the cellar. It felt cold. It sounded as if there were a burn down there rushing down a hillside.

‘Water,’ said Billy.

Harker sat Billy down on the steps and told him not to move. Not moving was an unbearable condition for Billy Harker. He saw his father wade out into the black lake. He saw twists of wood-shaving bobbing on the water like boats. He began to laugh.

‘It’s not funny, Billy,’ said Harker, ‘it’s a flood.’

But then he thought, well, perhaps it is. Perhaps it is funny. Not just this river coming into my workroom, but all of it. Because here I used to be, a quiet person with passion for nothing except bats, a former nun, fond of silence and order. And now there is not only Irene. There is not only that. There is Billy. He rampages through the house pretending he’s a car. He uses his cot as a trampoline. He does somersaults on the landing.

Pete Loomis had smelt the storm long before it came. He made coffee and sat in the bus and waited for it.

The bus rocked. After all its years of service on the trolley route and then as his home, was it going to get blown into the sky?

Pete sipped the scalding coffee and decided to remember Memphis. He hummed a Gospel tune, ‘Dust on the Bible’. He
sat himself at the bar in his favourite honky-tonk called Jo Ann’s Lounge. Outside in the night beyond the bar, a storm was coming. The lights kept flickering out. He hadn’t known it then, but in this night of the Memphis storm Pete Loomis was going to meet the girl who would bring to an end his lovely life in Tennessee.

She came into the honky-tonk. She sat down by Pete and ordered a chocolate milk. She was shivering. She wore a cotton dress with short sleeves.

Pete was drinking coffee and chatting to Jo Ann. Tennessee was a dry state back then. Jo Ann said she didn’t have any candles but she had a ton of soap. Could you burn soap if the lights went out? Pete said, Yes, if you had a lamp, you might be able to burn it. If you melted it down and put it in a lamp and lit the wick. The girl on the stool next to him in her cotton dress said: ‘That’s baloney, mister. Why y’all talking baloney about soap?’

He laughed. He had noticed the girl had a pretty face. He said that seventy-eight per cent of what human beings talked about was baloney, but it kept them alive.

She looked at him hard. She had a thin moustache of chocolate milk. Pete could feel his wall eye wandering round like a compass needle, searching for a contact with her hard stare. He knew what she was going to say and he didn’t want her to say it. If he let her speak, she was going to make a comment on his ugliness and this was – at that moment, in that bar with a storm creeping on and there being no candles to burn – more than he could stand. So he said: ‘I know what you’re thinking, miss. But you’re wrong in your thoughts. My name’s Pete and I’m from England and I can tell you there’s plenty of goodness and beauty in me, it’s just that the beauty don’t show.’

She turned away and smiled.

The smile was embarrassed and mocking. Jo Ann laughed. The musicians standing by laughed. Pete thought, well, I made them laugh and it’s late and now I should go home before the storm gets here.

But he knew that he wouldn’t go home. He knew that he had to bring this girl around to his way of seeing himself. He had to stay with her and be with her till she recognised his inner beauty. He had to.

The rain had begun now. The wind whipped it sideways so that it stung the windows of the bus like a shower of pins.

Pete’s coffee was cold. His Memphis thoughts had held him so still, he’d forgotten to drink it. Only his heart and his eye were jumping everywhere.

It was raining in Mary’s room. When the lightning came, the rain had a shine on it.

Mary lay and stared at it. She thought, this is not meant to happen. Rain in a room is all wrong.

But it was of no vast significance. She was fifteen and she could see and feel damage all around. It had begun in her. Her flesh had refused to harden as she believed it would. It had disobeyed her mind. In her mind, she was Martin Ward, a lean boy.

She touched her breasts. The skin of them was very white, their texture indescribable, like no other part of her. They seemed like sacs enveloping the embryos of other things, as if something had laid two eggs under her skin and now these parasites were growing on her.

She always touched them when she woke, hoping vainly to find them shrunk or burst or sliced away. She touched them under the bedclothes in the dark, where she couldn’t see them. She couldn’t stand to look at them. In the day, she wound a crepe bandage round and round them seven times and fastened it with a safety pin. She was Martin in her mind and she hoped that, with the bandages on, it would be her mind that showed.

They were still there, hard yet squashy under her pyjamas. It was raining in her room but nothing else extraordinary had occurred, like the disappearance of her breasts. Mary had studied the monsoon in Geography. Rain could bring change. There could be rivers where streets were, with dry goods and silk tassels floating on the water. Some people could be saved
from starvation and others ruined. It might be the same in Swaithey, but nothing had happened to her.

Mary got up and went to the window. The next time the lightning came, she could see something large and metal lying on the grass. It was the television aerial. It had lost its original shape. Now, there would be nothing on the television screen for Estelle except a white storm. She would sit down in front of it and there would be no picture and no voices, so she would get up again and go looking for her pills that she carried round with her and put down anywhere and lost.

Mary listened for sounds of her family awake, but nobody seemed to be moving about and she thought this typical of them – a tempest comes and they all stay asleep in their own useless dreams and never hear it. Then, in the morning, they’ll be amazed: Oh look, the roof’s blown away, the cows have gone mad with fear and reared up in their stalls like stallions, the chickens are swimming! Sonny will swear and shout. Estelle will sit down with her pills and pull grey hairs from her head. Timmy will dry the chickens, one by one, in a tea towel and they will peck his knees.

Mary put on her dressing gown and fetched her torch from her night table. She liked her room. She didn’t want it ruined by rain.

The house was silent. Mary tip-toed like a thief. In the kitchen she found Sonny asleep with his head on the table in a puddle of stout. The room smelled of his stout breath. Mary shone her torch on his face. There were bubbles like spittle in his coral ear. Since he’d bought his combine harvester and gone into debt for it, his drinking had got bad. Mary thought, one day, he will fall over on the earth and his ear will will hit a stone – a stone that was never picked up and put into a starfish pail – and he will die.

She went to a cupboard and found some bowls. She decided she would set them out in a line under the eaves of her room and watch over them, like a person watching over saucers of spice in a Bombay market. The big monsoon drops would clank into them, making a peculiar kind of music.

Timmy Ward hadn’t passed the Eleven-Plus exam. Long division he saw as a queue of numbers at a gate. You had to open the gate and make them go through, but they would not. And then there was his spelling. He thought the first two letters of ‘world’ were w and r; he thought ‘America’ must have a y in it.

He was sent to the Secondary Modern School in Leiston. He struggled to understand what a cross-section was. He set his hair alight with the flame from a Bunsen burner. He thought, the air they give you to breathe here in this school is old. It’s been breathed before. You can’t see anything clearly in it.

On Friday afternoons, his class went swimming at the Leiston baths. Pale, greenish light fell on the water and on the white limbs of the children. Those who couldn’t swim were towed up and down, like barges by their horses, held by a strap on a long pole. Some of them were afraid of the water but Timmy wasn’t. Here, at the baths, the air was luminous and when Timmy’s feet kicked off from the slippery tiles to launch him, weightless, on a width of breaststroke, he felt as happy as a frog.

From widths, he progressed to lengths. The swimming master was surprised by his speed. He was small for his age and a dreamy-seeming boy. He would look peculiar in a team. The swimming master told his wife: ‘We’ve got this little lad from Leiston Secondary and I’ve never seen a boy swim quite like that.’

The only other time Timmy felt anything like his swimming-happiness was on Sundays in church. He still sang in the choir. He knew grown-ups cried at the sound of his high voice. The air above the choir stalls did not smell as if it had been breathed before and the light from the stained glass had the clarity of water.

When he swam, his body followed an imaginary horizontal line that pulled him on. Singing the Psalms, he sent his voice up an invisible vertical wire.

These two lines made a 90
^o
angle in his mind. A 90
^o
angle was a simple thing and this gave him hope that all the other more complicated sums he couldn’t understand at school would, in some future time, turn out to be superfluous. But he wondered where the two arms of his 90
^o
angle were going. Did they stop in blank space or go on until they collided with something?

He began to search, while lessons went on around him – while meals at home were eaten in silence in front of Estelle’s television – for the thing with which they might collide, but he couldn’t see anything at all, only the two lines going on and on and up and up.

He wanted to tell Estelle about his angle. He asked her to come and sit down in his room. He closed the door. Estelle couldn’t bear to be told important things. She wanted nothing to be important and nothing to matter. She stood up and walked around Timmy’s room, looking at the things he’d pinned up on the walls, one of which was a list of the winners in the men’s swimming events in the Olympics of 1960 and Estelle began to read out: ‘J. Devitt (Australia) 100 metres freestyle, 55.2 sec. M. Rose (Australia) 400 metres freestyle, 4 min. 18.3 sec …’

‘Please sit down,’ said Timmy.

‘Yes, Tim,’ she said. But she didn’t sit. She examined a dusty palm cross, a set of instructions for life-saving with drawings of a drowning person who could have been boy or girl, child or man, it was hard to say, and a photograph of herself and Sonny standing in front of the combine, neither of them smiling.

She said: ‘I’m no good at secrets. I always forget to keep them. Better not to tell me one.’

So Timmy changed his mind about the angle. He said: ‘It isn’t a secret. I wanted to ask you, can you come to the swimming gala at Ipswich?’

She laughed. ‘Gala!’ she said. ‘What a word!’

‘Can you?’

She looked amazed. ‘Will there be diving?’ she enquired.

‘Yes,’ said Timmy.

‘High diving?’

‘Yes.’

‘I like to watch that.’

‘So will you come? I might win the under-13s boys’ butterfly.’

Of course,’ she said, ‘if it’s not too
grand
, as long as no one has to pretend it’s grand.’

And then she told Timmy that she had to go, that it was time for
Hancock’s Half-Hour
and that she didn’t like to miss any of her favourite shows.

Timmy knew that his father wouldn’t understand about the horizontal and vertical lines, but he needed someone else to think about where they were going and whether they were likely to end. So he went into Mary’s room late at night and shone his Woolworth’s torch onto her sleeping head. She didn’t move, but just opened her eyes and looked at the light. Her pillow was bunched up. Underneath it Timmy saw a pile of bandages. Still not moving, Mary said: ‘Timmy, fuck off out of my room.’

He turned round and went back to his bed. He thought about the bandages and how the sight of them had been revolting. He had gone to talk about a secret thing, his angle, and instead he had seen the bandages, which he knew from the way they’d been pushed under the pillow, were part of some awful secret of Mary’s.

He said a God Bless prayer and left her out of it. He thought how stupid he’d been to imagine that his sister, who cared for nothing and no one except herself and her school and Cord and the Harker family, would tell him anything helpful about an imaginary thing with a measurement of 90
^o
.

And he decided that when he went out with Sonny after school to feed the hens he would tell him what he’d seen in Mary’s room in the night. Then, Sonny would do something about it. He would do something about Mary.

Sonny did something.

He crooked his left arm round Mary’s neck and pinioned her against his chest. With his right hand he pulled off her school tie and opened her shirt. She screamed. She tried to push his hand away. She kicked his shin.

The crepe bandages were exposed. They were grey by now. They could have been secretly washed and hung to dry out of Mary’s window, but part of her had refused to believe that she would keep on needing them.

Sonny pushed her in front of him towards the kitchen table. She clawed at his arm. He pulled open a drawer and took out the kitchen scissors. His wrist was against her windpipe, beginning to choke her. She felt blood go streaming to her eyes. She felt her legs weaken.

Sonny cut into the wad of bandage in the cleft between Mary’s breasts. The scissors were blunt and the bandages wound round her seven times. One arm of the scissors dug into her breast bone, bruising her.