The Slow Natives (20 page)

“I'm leaving, too,” Keith said.

“Okay then!” Chookie said, cruel out of embarrassment. “What's stoppin y'?”

“No. I mean home. I've had it.”

“They'll have the cops out after y',” Chookie warned. “Y' too young. Don't be a mug.”

“What about you?”

“Me? I'm older. Bin workin' for years. They'll be glad to see the last of me. Well, mum maybe won't. But the ole man'll give three cheers.”

“I thought we could hitch north together,” Keith suggested. “Or south. Though that's where they'll think we've gone automatically. Maybe that would be a tactical error.”

“What d'y' mean, tactical error?”

Keith sucked his cheeks in. “Strategy. Plan. Get it?” Dim brain, he thought. “I've got a bit of money on me. Not much. A couple of pounds. Enough to buy us meals.”

Sated Mr Mumberson, having been put in his place, picked some fried potato from his front teeth. Cops. That was it. After this kid and they'd land him, too, both of them wriggling in the same trap. No, sir! Coppers! When he replied he felt his voice break suddenly.

“Jesus, no!” he said. “Y' can't tag in with me. I'm in real trouble.”

A certain pride then gazed down at his dirty nails, inspecting them without repulsion, nicking them together.

“Why? What have you done?”

“You'd split.”

“Why should I?”

“Well . . .” Chookie hesitated, torn between confession which would unburden and the need for concealment. Watching the lonely blue water he shuddered with the same convulsive wave-sweep. “It was this ole girl I worked for. I done her over.”

“You mean killed?” Keith asked, appalled and excited.

“Gawd, no. Done. You know. Stuffed. Well, how old are you?”

“Raped, you mean.”

“That's what they call it.”

“Did she make a fuss?”

“Oh Geez! That's it! She squawked, the mad old geezer, and shot out of the house and all the time I thought that was what she was after, callin' me in and everything and sittin' aroun' with half her clothes on.” Unexpectedly he blubbered because he couldn't do a thing right “Somethin' got into me. I just couldn' stop m'self once I'd started. And I felt sorry for her, too. I liked her. Can
you
believe that?”

Mournfully he ate his last couple of chips, pushing them one after the other between puffy lips now split and chapped by salt air while he cried without attempting to conceal his face and the tears ran unchecked down his cheeks and onto the
jacket at which he swiped with the clumsy palm of his hand.

They were ugly hands, Keith observed, and strangely pitiful with their cracked joints and scaly early-morning-milking surface.

“See that coat,” Keith said, not breaking even, not trying one-upmanship, not doing anything at all except attempt grace. “I stole that”

“Did y'?” The other brightened. “Still”—relapsing—“that's only petty theft. Y' notice how well I got me terms. I mean, y' can't compare that with—with what I done. They'll say you done it for kicks and let y' off if y' dad pays.”

“So what?”

“So everything. Don't tell, will y'?” pleaded Chookie, grabbing Keith's arm. “Don't tell no one.”

“Oh, cut it out!” Keith shook him impatiently. “Repeating things is for bastards. Don't tell me. I hate the gossip-monger!”

“If you do,” Chookie threatened, not following the other anyway, “I'll dub you in proper.”

They walked back, two of a kind, along the front towards the river into the late afternoon.

Bogus is as bogus does. Gay as all-get-out, Leo tried on before his shaving mirror a false bronze moustache, busy as a squirrel's tail and simply crazy man crazy with the black torpedo. Nevertheless it added a homely something to his too plump lower lip and made nonsense of a scar that ran from the corner of his nose to his mouth.

He fixed it firmly in position with gum arabic, plumped out his green foulard cravat and eased off into the living-room.

“Oh my God!” Tommy Seabrook cried involuntarily. “What's happened?”

“Change of face, change of heart!” Leo cried. But underneath, his heart, unalterable as diorite, knocked regularly against his ribs.

“Where's Keithy, lad?” he asked.

“Not back yet. His board's on the porch, though.”

“Is it? Little bitch, shutting us out like that. I don't suppose he thought we'd bust in. Well, well!” Leo twiddled his false
whiskers reflectively and went back to the dressing-room to do something about the window catch he had forced, a matter of not many moments, after which he gave himself into the wardrobe and nosed around.

“Clothes are gone,” he called, muffled by artificial fibre, “and his bag.” Piqued, but fighting it, he returned to the other room determined not to lose even this false face. “I suppose he's gone home, silly little bastard. What a temper! Well, we'll simply have to struggle through without him, Tommy lad, and I suggest we glue up the pieces of our hearts by stepping townward. Razamatazzy taz!”

He did a soft-shoe routine.

“
Mad about the boy,
” he hummed, winking gaily at Tommy, then took it
da capo. “There's something sad about the boy.
” Exaggeratedly pouting, yet not, not. . . .

But Mr Varga couldn't quite get the kicks out of it, and around ten he decided to put a trunk call through to Leversons to see if the laddie were back. Indeed he would be—and he hummed lightly as he waited for the little number (“Bet she's got a bouffant!” he had hissed in aside to Tommy) at the exchange to connect his call. And hello there, Bernard, and yes indeedie, it was Leo Varga speaking. Had the prodigal returned. What? He couldn't quite catch that. Not? Oh, then . . . yes, he realized he was responsible, but there was absolutely nothing at all to be alarmed at and after all the lad was fifteen. Yes. He could see all that. No. They'd simply been for a swim—separately—and on returning. . . . In his annoyance at the silly business Leo pulled his moustache too hard and it hung askew until he managed to gum it back insecurely with absent-minded spittle. Pips sounded. Yes, extension please, said Bernard to bouffant, a faint and furious forty miles distant. Police? What was that, the police? Oh Leverson, dear fellow, surely not necessary at this stage, do you think? Give the lad time. Probably on a spree somewhere. Remember how it—you don't? Well, never—till eleven then? All right. If not by eleven . . . after all for God's sake he wouldn't have rung, would he, if he hadn't been anxious? Yes, yes. He'd see to it and he'd ring first thing in the morning if there was no sign.

Dear sweet angels, Leo said softly as he hung up and tottered back to the drooping Seabrook fatigued on a post-office bench. Pal-wise, he squeezed the boy's arm, friend and comforter, and, promenading him back to the car, explained the set-up with the accent in his favour.

“What about my place?” Tommy suggested, not very cleverly.

“Oh, I hardly think so. Remember the situation there, boy. Really!”

Tommy was snuffed out as if some hollow cone had been lowered over this last little spark. Did the sod have to keep reminding him? Did he? In the neon-sparked dark he hated Varga with his phoney voice and false moustache and stinking little
objets d'art
. Hated his abilities and techniques, his jokes, his superb cooking, his skill on a board, his coaching college where, weekly, one of the minions pumped him full of matriculation maths. Loathed loathed loathed.

Funnily his oblique eye imagined as they cruised back along the tourist-dabbled main street that it glimpsed Keith emerging from a hamburger bar. He wasn't alone—some sort of ginger lout tailed behind.

“I say!” he started to cry excitedly, but his resentment jerked the reins. Let Leo suffer.

“Mmmm?” Leo asked abstractedly, negotiating a welded set of lovers and a car.

“Nothing,” Tommy said. “Nothing. Just thought of something.”

Leo had every light blazing in the shack like a sailor's welcome; he set it electrically on fire, drank brandy cokes and spun endless Previn discs. Writhe, clunk! Tommy muttered sleepless on foam-rubber bunk in the sleeping annexe. Worry your pansy guts out. And he smiled through his insomnia until eleven when he heard Leo bang out of the shack and restart the car, a signal for him to nose under the bar and pour himself a muscular drink which he took back to bed.

“I'm having my Ovaltine, mumsie,” he murmured to the shadowy wall. “It brings out the best in me.”

“T
HIS
—
BLOODY
—
PLACE
,” Sister Beatrice murmured, “will drive me up the wall. She swung her face, stuffed redly with unsaid words, and stared across the placatory landscape. It gave back its unblinking calm.

Sister Celestine nibbled at arguments like the most timid of mice.

“No one can perform miracles,” she suggested. “If you can't get it done before September, you can't get it done—and that's all there is to it.”

“My dear,” Sister Beatrice said, “living, living like this is the great miracle. Oh, don't be shocked. It's true. Reverend Mother doesn't expect miracles”—twisting the ring on her left hand savagely—“she gives cold commands. ‘Then all smiles stop together.' Oh, that woman should have been an Inquisitor! Can't you just see her roasting the heretics? Basting, perhaps!”

“Sister! Sister!” Shocked Sister Celestine turned away from the big woman, who laughed out loud.

“Oh, come. It's simply that an old pupil of mine was visiting last month to show me her first baby—a gorgeous little boy. And do you know what she told me? Just as she drifted off under the ether she said, ‘Please, Reverend Mother, may I have permission to have this baby without curtseying?' The doctor told her later. Isn't that a scream?”

Sister Celestine went scarlet and could not reply. She turned her beautiful grave face away to the protection of the grape-green trellis.

“No wonder they won't have women in the hierarchy!” Sister Beatrice continued. “Imagine it! Lady Popes!”

“Lady what?” asked a voice from the other side of the leaf curtain.

The vine ceased its writhing and Sister Philomene, angled crazily, came blinking out of the sun with her unshockable eyes and triangular smile. “I'm no Beauvais, no Stogumber. Go on. Finish what you were saying, Sister.”

She swung her beads threateningly while Sister Beatrice, knowing that every community must have its spy, pulled a large white handkerchief from her pocket and dabbled at her damp forehead.

“Nothing,” she said. “It's nothing. The anguish of the servant, that's all. Time-tables. Time-tables. Bells, bells, bells.”

“It's nearly end of term,” Sister Celestine, the heavenly optimist, consoled. “Then we will all be able to have a change of scene.”

“Is it jelly for tea, Sister?” Sister Beatrice demanded blandly and suddenly. “Hadn't you better make it now? It will never set in this heat, despite the refrigerator. You should add a pattern of shamrocks in angelica in case Monsignor might call.”

Sister Celestine was shocked, yet although humility and youth both prevented her speaking, she was scorched by the other woman's laughter shivering through the grape trellis and clusters of round plump fruit.

Sister Philomene smiled her crooked, bitter smile and inwardly planned to report this heresy.

“To be Hibernophile is not an article of faith, my dear, though criticism uttered audibly in some places seems to constitute heresy. This country has built the Church on the superstitions and courage of the Irish. It's natural they are a little arrogant among their own.”

Elderly Sister Philomene turned away, pointing her feet slowly in their well-polished crinkled black. Examining the toe-cap of each shoe, she was hypnotized by the sun-spot on each, the tiny turbulence of light, the only morsel of warmth she seemed to carry with her, despite the angry red capillaries that latticed her cheeks. Beneath her guimpe she folded her arms and moved crabwise to the rear of the convent building, apexed towards vengeance.

‘“Where there is no love, put love, and there'—so one supposes—'you will find love,'” Sister Beatrice quoted, her eyes absorbing more sky colour than they could possibly hold. “Heaven knows, I try. I try to love her, but she affects me the way Sister Matthew used to. But no longer. Once I could not raise a hand, let alone a heart. No one seems to help or touch her. She is so lonely, so alone.”

“But we are told you are never alone when you have God,” Sister Celestine said, a shade too sanctimoniously, but tearing a grape from a stalk as she passed and putting it to her beautiful mouth.

“My dear, you are so very young.” Sister Beatrice patted her arm kindly. “That is the greatest and most terrible loneliness of all.”

The younger woman was not sure if she should listen or even if she understood; yet observing Paddy glumly hoeing beyond the basket-ball court, his face set expressionlessly over routine, she was perplexed. Could it be, she wondered, that there was too much joy in her relationship with her Creator, that sanctity was more arid than she had supposed and all this abandonment of self was a sensual—dreadful word!—pleasure, a subjective one that should not be tolerated? Crossing the lawn in front of the stony saints, she had a further glimpse of him sauntering round the corner of the building trailing his unwilling hoe and whistling mournfully. Too shy to speak she watched him amble past, accepted his grunted good morning and grin with a smile that crept out like a mouse, then saw him bowl up to Sister Beatrice and start chattering away, an old friend.

When does the joy cease? Sister Celestine inquired of the faceless sky. Will I settle into the despairs or these older people? Following Sister Philomene she re-entered the safety of the convent walls, pausing by the chapel door which, opened, gave out its own peculiar atmosphere of silence, prayer, and security. She went in to pray for all of them, but Sister Philomene continued her angular course down the passageway to Mother St Jude's office where, having entered with her bitter virtue, she proceeded to expose this or that folly, to insist, to complain, to demand.