Umbrella (35 page)

gubbins
of a newly renovated overground station. Or is it a hospital – because, now he ponders it, all the city appears implanted with hospitals: small cottage ones in detached villas and terraced rows, large concrete ones dating from the sixties, seventies and eighties that now house multi-generational tribes of the economically paralysed – then there are the glass- and wood-slatted ones, more recent these – that act as sun-traps for convalescent bourgeois.
Not to mention
. . .
the private ones, which are ranged around courtyards, their mock-Regency façades discreetly masking the moans of OxyContin addicts. He feels the talismanic shape of his Freedom Pass through the soft stuff of his tracksuit bottoms –
Freedom in what sense?
Only a monetary one, for, far from allowing him to do
whatever the hell I want, it’s sharp corner
spurs me on
. . .
to train, tube or bus, where he must sit: conscious but completely powerless to influence the route taken by the vehicle –
as powerless as
. . .
its driver
. Hot grease spots Busner’s throat as he marches across the road in time to the p’pop-pop-pop-p-p-p-p’popping. He shushes along the privet alley, mounts the bridge, bongs over the tracks and descends to the Station Road, where, beyond minicab madrasa and fret-worked Taj Mahal, he locates a kiosk-sized café, in its window entrance gap-toothed lettering
P E & ASH, 2   GG,   A ON,  AUSAGE,  HIPS &  EANS
. There’s a newsagent next to the café – he might sit, the Guardian folded to a single column and tucked underneath the lip of his plate,
as men of my age in all ages do
, the eggy vapours condensing on the inside of his glasses, making it quite impossible to read about the cardigans being worn on the campaign trail. He is hungry – and the antidote for famine is well known: white sacks stencilled
UN F
 D
A
D
P O  AM
.
But what was the antidote for chlorpromazine? Kemadrin? Kema- Kema-droll . . .? Chemodoll? It is as he exercises his liberty and the barrier opens that Busner realises: There can be no resistance any more – no gg or usage, no procyclidine or orphenadrine, let alone mere diazepam, can tranquillise the through train that blasts past, sending diesel shockwaves dirtying over him . . .
Along comes Zachary
, trailing guilty streamers and wondering only this: If
time, the March Hare, has got there first
– time, lolloping along the gutters, yellow lines toothpasting from its rear end, so that on the streets where this spoor has been laid nothing can ever stop again: the traffic must course on, just as the National Grid sparks through rail and brain. . . .
Along comes
a slow
stopper
, from where he stands by a Plexiglas-fronted cabinet full of these curiosities: berry-flavoured water, Skittles,
A Mars a day makes you work, rest and
. . .
Busner can see a few passengers gathered by the doors, their bodies swaying, pathetic counterweights to the train’s mighty inertia. Gracie said this: that once, when she went see her people at Reading, she changed trains at Windsor and people were still speaking of it – how the Russian troops had come through in the night. One train must’ve stopped for a while, and they got out, walked up and down the platform, arm in arm, looking up at the Castle keep, their soft fur-lined boots soundless on the flags. Anyroad, the next morning all the slot machines had been jammed with rouble coins. Fancy that! Those daft Russkies trying to get out bars of Fry’s and what-not an’ juss loosin’ all their brass, they must’ve been browned off. Rouble’s probly a lot of money in Russiya . . . Audrey had only wondered: Do they really have slot machines on Windsor Station? but now she laughs good-humouredly at
dear Gracie
, who’s done so much to make the painfully cramped cubicle they share bearable – pinning up grey silesia over the single windowpane because it’s a trifle gayer than blackout cloth, although such fripperies risk the ire of the hostel’s superintendent, Missus Varley, who, maddened by whatever tincture it is she keeps in her own room – or the lack of it – dresses down the girls, slaps and fines them. Gracie, sucking on her bottom lip with her skew-whiff teeth, leaves off her rearrangement of the mementos with which she’s lined the single shelf above her black iron cot to say: Wotcher laughin’ at, Ordree? then comes over to where Audrey sits on her own cot, lays a hand on her arm: Aw! Yer not laughin’ at all, yer cryin’, aincha? Wonderment in this, because Audrey Death is known to all the canaries to be
hard as nails
. — Audrey looks at the sulphurous hand on the embroidered sleeve of her best blouse and says, No, don’t worry, dear, I’m not crying – or laughing at you – I’m only trying to stop . . . this . . . Her hands speak for her, scampering on her lap: fugitive creatures that,
tethered by my arms, can flee no further
. At first glance they appear seized by bumbling chance, only Audrey who experiences their darting and their digging from within knows it is not random at all, but a peculiar elaboration upon the repetitive motions they have been describing all day: the yanking of the levers and the turning of the hand-cranks that operate the filling machine, the hammering of the mallet she wields to pack down the last cupfuls of Trotyl and the final wads of guncotton into the shell casings. Yes, an elaboration peculiar and subtle, because it is not these motions alone that her poor hands replicate, there are also – in the casting off of looped forefinger and thumb – those of the turret lathe she operated for six months in the New Fuse Factory, just as the sideways flicking of her right-hand little finger represents the fossilised trace of all those grosses of
p
’s struck during her three years as a typewriter for Thomas Ince & Coy, Manufacturers of Umbrellas, Fine Ladies’ Walking Parasols, Garden Tents and Beach Pavilions, etcetera. More dreadful yet, the uncontrollable crooking of the thumb on the same hand reaches back still further to the hours of thimble drill at the National School in Fulham, as does the tweezering together of her left thumb and forefinger, a tic, Audrey realises, that occurs precisely once in every seven yanks on the invisible headstock lever, and which runs a hot wire through her nerve fibres from the needle drill that once accompanied it. – C’mon – come on! Gracie grasps the mad hands in hers and their energy runs up her arms,
shivering
her timbers.
Dear Gracie
, whose skin and hair now match, so that once she’s pinned it up and stands before the glass putting on her paint for the concert party, to Audrey it seems she is creating her drooping lower lip, her small eager pink eyes and her ever-so-slightly sunken cheeks for the very first time.
Dear Gracie
, who preserves in her tin trunk the dried-out nosegay he bought her at Barnet Fair, together with all the Field Service postcards Gunner John Smith has sent her from the Front – two or three a week – making a pack as thick as it is wide, which, on the one occasion Gracie permitted her to hold, Audrey could not desist from riffling, so that, despite their sender’s diligent crossings-out, they blurred into a single – and more sincere – incomprehension.
Jingling . . . jingling . . . jingoism
. . .
Audrey hasn’t shown her friend the cards she receives from her own sweetheart – missives that in their own way are perfect complements to the Gunner’s War Office effusions. I’m ready, she says, blowing out the candle. Gracie has opened the door and the gasoliers in the passage make of the photograph of
my own sweetheart
on my own shelf an
Ivory-light:
Stanley Death, Corporal, Machine-Gun Corps, whose image floats in the central panel of a leather-bound triple frame, flanked to the left by the Cheriton Bishop Deers, and to the right by Violet the Hello Girl, posing in her VAD uniform beside a Doric column on the capital of which sits a field telephone. Stanley, lolling in his oval of lost time, his hair combed straight back from his fine brow, his face unsullied as yet by war or any other carnality, his expression proud and puckish, while between his creamy flannel knees there is propped one of his own flying machines, its flimsy parallelograms, triangles and circlets of wood and wire covered in glacé silk. Albert has only half the picture, Audrey thinks, as she walks behind Gracie along the corridor of the hostel – a single-storey cage knocked up expressly to house the canaries – and what can Datas do if he doesn’t have all the data? . . .
So you’re wrong, sir!
Audrey knows the Arsenal’s production not by statistics and calculations but by touch and feel. Of the thirteen thousand, eight hundred and twenty-four 50-pounder shell casings filled daily in the Danger Buildings, she adjudges a large percentage – perhaps as high as fifty – will be duds: the wadding too loose, the mixture of Trotyl and guncotton incorrect. Moreover, of the thousands of casings as yet unfilled and piled up under tarpaulins, in sheds and lean-tos, Audrey knows that many will have been imperfectly brazed and welded –
the tonic wine of rainfall drips through their torn seams
. . .
Gracie, no more than the other girls whose boots rapper-ti-tap on the rough pine floorboards, should not be blamed – she should be walking out with her young man beside a giggling brook, white linen skirts pressing upon nodding irises and perky primroses, not serving as a helot under the whip-eye of Missus Varley, who stands grudgingly counting them out into the summer evening. The hostel’s superintendent, Audrey reckons, steals at least three shillings every week out of the ten the munitionettes hand over. Embezzles – and squanders still more on keeping the gas-jets lit solely to provide her with a pretext for barging unannounced into the girls’ cubicles, on the lookout for the little bottles of Sanatogen so many of them have come to depend on. Bottles she confiscates – and drinks.
Dear Gracie
takes Audrey’s arm and they follow behind the others as they scatter across the broken and uneven ground, raucous geese with russet and tawny plumage. Out here on the fringes of the city there are forlorn paddocks housing windy horses, the broken-down fences are kept standing by nettles – a jerry-built row of houses is unfinished, it simply stops short in a tumbledown of rabbit hutches and pigsties. Down towards Greenford a handful of factories up thrust their stubby chimney fingers, smearing sooty marks on the glowing sky, while from the unseen river comes the desolating t’t’t’tooooooooooot! of a tugboat. Long before the war and its blackout this region was, Audrey thinks, benighted – a dark penumbra around the London sun. The lych-gate of the mouldering church the girls wade past through meadow grass lies drunk on its perished hinges – the graveyard is
coiled with
barbed blackberry wire
. Whence, Audrey fumes, will Gilbert’s gleaming towers and motor-car highways come? What machine can thresh plenty out of this chaff? Light stripes the underside of drapes and doors, delineating the church hall, and Gertie, the
corker
in the lead, turns towards it, striding high-hipped and more manly than any man, the others in her train. They are living in that precise moment of the earthly revolution when colour fades, silver nitrate dusts the grass and the gravel surrounding the hall, and
gathers in drifts along the ditches – all is resolved into dark shapes and quaint silhouettes
. . .
We ’ad t’do it, didn’t we, Ordree? Gracie says out of the blue – and, despite the unexpectedness of this remark, Audrey knows of what she speaks, so, drawing Gracie tightly to her, close enough to feel the eccentric beat of her toxified heart, she replies, Yes, we ’ad t’do it, we ’ad t’do our bit, no matter what we thought about the sheer folly of it, and the dunderheaded vanity, we ’ad to set aside our own ambitions for the duration – we couldn’t abandon ’em over there.
Dear Gracie
whimpers, An’ . . . an’ I’m awlright, ain’t I, Ordree? Audrey recalls the
peachy young thing
in suffragette colours that she met at the WSPU meeting near Arnold Circus and is grateful that eventime has drained Gracie’s skin so she can with conviction say –. I say, says a one-legged boy with officer’s crowns on his collar and a comical fez on his head, who leans against the wall of the hall, you gels have a confounded cheek! The others have clattered inside and now the Honeysuckle and the Rose blooms out from the open door. – We’ve an absolutely spiffing feed all set out, and you’re loitering out here gassing. The boy’s jaunty air, the flash of the monocle across his breast as he swings round on his crutch to usher them in – are the false notes plucked upon his broken body. The cold black barrels of his pupils bore into his ghostly face . . .