The Backward Shadow (20 page)

The street was a sad one, one of those neighbourhoods which has known much better days but which is now just one rung up the ladder from a slum. The houses were, or had been, beautiful, and their frontages still had a certain magnificence, although the moulding, pilasters—even the window-sills—were crumbling away and it was many years since any of them had been painted. But they had a splendid Regency uniformity, a whole terrace built at once with an integrity of design which had retained its splendour through every degree of indignity and neglect.

I found the place easily, though the number on the pillar at the top of the flight of wide, once-gracious steps had been chipped away and defaced. The blistered and peeling front door was not locked, and swung open when I fell against it, stumbling over a roller-skate on the porch. At first I was too nervous to venture into the dark, murky-smelling hall, but then I realised I would have to—there were no individual bells; I really had no notion of how I could possibly locate John in this large warren, filled to bursting-point, I could sense, with sleeping humanity. The hall was almost pitch-dark,
but as I got used to it I found enough light came in through the front door to prevent me bumping into two or three prams, a push-chair, a child's waggon and two bicycles that all but made even that spacious hall impassable. Several tiles were out of the marble floor and I had to make my way slowly and with the greatest care to the foot of the curving stairway, whose stone steps, once adorned with carpetting, now bore no traces of it except one forgotten stair-rod which nearly caused me to break my neck by rolling under my foot, and clattering musically down to the bottom.

A door opened on the first floor and a woman's voice whispered querulously, ‘That you at last, you bit of stopping-out dirt?' I stopped in my tracks in momentary terror, but then, realising this might be my salvation from the hell of knocking on strange doors, I hurriedly groped my way up the last stairs and confronted a dim headless wraith in a long pale garment. The head, which was there but too black to perceive, made itself manifest by opening its white eyes very wide. ‘Who you?' it asked.

In a low, polite whisper, I said I was looking for John.

‘What John you wanting? There's three Johns here. My son's name John. You not looking for him, I hope, cause you won't get to him this time of night.'

‘The John I want isn't anybody's son. He plays the guitar.'

‘Oh, him. Third floor front …' The sleeve of the pale garment raised itself apparently without human agency and an invisible hand indicated the general direction. The disembodied eyes watched me curiously as I felt my way round the banisters, and answered with a suspicious roll when I turned to whisper good-night.

The stairs were apparently endless, curving onward and upward; there are few things bleaker and colder than uncarpeted stone stairs. The only light came from the huge curtainless windows at every landing; it felt like an empty house which has been filled up with refugees who are not involved in any part of it except their own rooms and corners.

On what I judged to be the third floor I groped to the only
door I could see and knocked on it very softly. By this time I had quite decided that I was suffering from a rather prolonged fit of madness, but having pointed myself in this direction, crazy though it undoubtedly was I couldn't seem to turn aside. I knocked again, and this time I heard a movement in the room—a grunt, the squeak of a bedspring; then a well-remembered voice said, ‘Who that? Somebody out there?'

‘John!' I hissed joyfully. ‘It's me—Jane!'

I heard the padding of large bare feet, and the door was unbolted and opened a crack. We stared into each other's faces in pitch blackness for several seconds.

‘Jane?' John's voice asked incredulously.

‘It's me, you fathead! Let me in!'

In another moment I was being clasped against a vast expanse of chest. ‘Jane! Jane!' he kept saying exultantly. ‘You come to see me! You come back again!' He almost carried me into the room and instantly switched on a single ceiling light, holding me, almost off the ground, out in front of him.

He hadn't changed much. Well, not at all, really; it was just that I had hardly ever seen him in any other surroundings than my room or his at Fulham, except a few times at the hospital after David's birth. This big, rambling, underfurnished room was such a contrast to the little cupboard at the top of the house in Fulham where he had lived next to mine; now I saw him in a room big enough not to make him look like a giant in a gnome's cave and I realised he was not so enormous as I had always thought. His big black face was split from ear to ear with a smile of simple delight. He rubbed his hand back and forth over the top of his woolly head and with the other held my shoulder and rocked me violently to and fro while we both laughed like idiots.

Suddenly an irritable movement at the other end of the room caught my eye, and to my astonishment I saw that there were three beds in the room, and that two of them were occupied. I clapped my hand over my mouth. John followed my eyes and said in a normal voice, ‘Oh, don't mind them! They just share the room, that's all.'

‘But we'll disturb them!'

‘So what? You think they never disturb me? Ain't no prizes for guessin' which from us three does the less disturbin'.' He led me to a ricketty kitchen chair, took his guitar and a pile of dirty clothes off it and made me sit, ‘They got their lady-friends comin' and goin' all night every night. You the first lady-friend I had to visit me since I moved in with them randy bastards.'

‘Shh!'

‘What “shhh”? I talk how I like. I don't owe them nothin'.' He picked up his guitar and struck a loud, deliberate chord. The hump of grey blankets in one bed didn't move; the other heaved and a dark voice from the depths said peevishly, ‘Can't a man sleep without the damn radio playin' half the night?'

‘That ain't no radio, boy!' retorted John, strumming louder. ‘Won't hear nothin' that good on no radio!'

The other man sat up in bed sharply and said, ‘Kill it, frigger, before I slit your black skin from your neck to your navel!' He was wearing a flannel sweat-shirt with the words ‘Go Man Go' written on it.

John laughed and said, ‘Since you asked me so nice—' and put the guitar aside. The other man turned his back, lay down and went to sleep with a deep sigh.

‘Why do you have to share a room?' I asked. ‘Money?'

‘Not that so much. I got a goodish job now, same band I with before but they move up in the world and me with 'em. Now we get lots of dates, lots of good places; you know what's a debutante?' I nodded. ‘Very rich kind of girl with stinkin' rich daddies. Well, them kinds of people gettin' very liberal now, want to show they ain't colour-prejudice, and besides we play good; so they engages us to play for their dances. Big deal! Best hotels, sometimes in their own country houses, some even send a car for bringin' us. Some of them's real democratic, we even get champagne to drink and same food as the guests; but that ain't every time of course. It's more often beer and sandwiches and havin' to play five, six hours on the trot, take your break when it's not your solo.
Them kids, though, Jane! You look at 'em, start of the evening, in their lovely clothes, and you think how pretty they are, how clean, and how their riches make 'em look somethin' better than humans, different somehow. And everyone's so nice to each other, so polite, you know what I mean—cultured. You feel like you're playing for a bunch of angels. And then they start dancin' and every time it give me a shock to see how they dance,
wild
, like anybody, like I seen these two here dancin' with their whore-women, only it looks worse in them long dresses. I'll tell you somethin', when their daddies and mummies gets up to dance, what do they do? Same kind of wild twistin' and Bosanovarin' and stuff as the kids do. I seen one old mummy, her crown fell right off and got kicked clear across the floor before she could bend her old self over to pick it up. False teeth and glasses falling off you often see, but when one of them little diamond crowns falls in among all them jumpin' feet it gets you.' He shook his head sadly. ‘I asked the other boys, that time—what we blowin' for? Just to send these people? Look at what we're doin' to 'em! They ain't theirselves no more, they gone back to the jungle they say we come from. Because of course they don't talk so liberal when they get a bit of that champagne inside their bellies, then you get to hear what they really think, and they don't mind you hearin' neither, sayin' things like—well, I wouldn't tell you what they says, but personal, real personal. And some of them pretty dressed-up little debutantes, they gets to feeling so curious, there ain't nothing they won't do to satisfy theirselves about … and some of our boys don't stop at nothin' neither. Course, I don't—lower myself—to doin' nothin' like that, Jane. Somehow I don't even like to think of it. But these fellows here—' he jerked his big thumb over his shoulder at his sleeping room-mates—‘they'd take three or four of 'em out into the bushes or into the back of a car in their beer-break and come back after it and tell the rest of the boys in the band all about it while they're shakin' the wet out of their saxes.'

‘Are they in the band—those two?'

‘Naaa—they're just fellows, they got no music, no nothin', they just work anyplace. They're big black bodies with heads on 'em but nothin' inside the heads, you know what I mean? I hate 'em,' he said dispassionately, ‘and they hate me because I ain't like them.'

‘But John, then why do you live with them?'

‘Jane, you can't understand. It's hard to find a place where to live in this white man's city. Oh, there's places, there's houses, but they're mostly like this—broken down, nobody carin' for nothin' except the rent. I told you I wasn't doin' so bad for money, but I couldn't rent this room for my lone self. You know what each of us is shellin' out for our third share? Four pound. And for what? Well, look around and you'll see. One bathroom downstairs which the bath is always full of dirty water cause the drain's blocked, no cooking allowed for the bachelors, no privacy, no nothin'. Four pound a week.'

‘God!' I said, appalled. ‘Wasn't it better at Doris's?'

‘Better?' he cried. ‘I tell you, I look back on that bug-run like you'd look back to paradise. Them days, Jane—last year, with you and Toby and old Doris, and Charlie, and that funny woman, what was her name, the nosy one—'

‘Mavis—'

‘Yes, her. She died, did you know that?'

‘Mavis? Died?'

‘Yeh. Fell down them damn stairs, poor old woman. I was real sorry, even though she wouldn't have no dealin's with me on account of me bein' a spade. She was kind to you though, wasn't she?'

‘Yes,' I said. I was very shocked.

‘That happened before I left. We all went to her funeral—Doris cried just like a baby. I cried too, but I was cryin' mostly because she reminded me of them good times with you and Toby.' He gazed at me through sad yellow eyes. ‘They was the best times I ever had. And you two was my best friends. I won't never have no friends again like you two.'

I took hold of his huge hand and played with the fingers, dark brown on top, sort of beigy-pink underneath, with a
brick-like callous on the side of the thumb from strumming. ‘Why did you leave Doris's?'

‘Lonely. I tried to be friendly with a girl who came to live in your old room, but she didn't want no truck with me, she was scared stiff of me, used to run if I spoke to her. She pretty soon married a young fellow who had Toby's room after Toby left. Then they went and some awful people came, I think they were gangsters or something. I was never so sure they didn't have somethin' to do with that poor old woman fallin'. Maybe they bust in on her and scared her or—well, I can't be sure, but they were real ugly people, the two of them. I used to hear funny conversations through the wall. Whispers—you know; like plannin' somethin', with just a few words comin' plain when they didn't agree 'bout somethin'. One night I was practisin' some music real soft, and suddenly that little window—you remember, high up between the rooms—that got smashed right to bits and this fellow put his fist in with a whole lot of bits of razor blades stuck between his knuckles. He shook it at me and said, real quiet and threatening, from behind the partition, “If you don't stop that row you black animal I'm going to kick that door open and flay the skin right off your face.” Well, I'm no hero. I believed him, so I stopped. And couple of days later I moved out. Doris was sorry in the end. She was scared of these white boys, and I guess she'd found out I was harmless. Funny how she'd come round to me. But with you and Toby and Mavis and me gone, I could see what she was thinkin'. The house'd fill up somehow with the real bad types and there'd be her and Charlie, never knowin' when they was goin' to get done up in the night.' He shook his head again, really concerned for Doris. ‘That poor old cow, she never had no judgement. It was just her good luck she got people like us.'

‘
She
probably looks back on that time as
her
golden age, too. After all, it was when she married Charlie.'

But John was pursuing his own thoughts. ‘Maybe you ain't noticed it so much, living in the country,' he said. ‘But this bad world is gettin' worse and worse all the time. The people's
gettin' worse. Better at hatin', better at grabbin'. I tell you somethin', I'm real scared to go out alone some nights.' He sat back on his bed and looked at the two recumbent figures behind him. ‘You ask me why do I live with these two randy spades and I tell you, money. But that ain't the only thing. I wish I could find somebody nice to live with, but I can't seem to find nobody real nice that ain't fixed up with a wife or somehow, and I sure ain't aimin' to live on my own no more. These two ain't much, but they better than nothin'.'