Wait Till I Tell You (21 page)

Whatever the state of the rooms and houses we visit, Geoffrey comments only on their inhabitants. At home, he can smell if the iron was on two hours ago. But he’s not bothered like that with other people. I have learnt not to pass comment either, myself. In this way, I suppose you could say Geoffrey is a good man.

I have liked Geoffrey a bit since we’ve had the new fridge. Yes, I’m mercenary, but not for fridges. Now we’ve got the thing, which is white and makes no sound, while the other revved and changed down and sluiced its gums all day and night, now we’ve got this silent cave of ice, Geoffrey seems to have calmed down a bit. In the week before we took delivery (this is how Geoffrey describes it on the telephone to anyone from his school, called colleagues), the flat was full of brochures. Geoffrey makes it his business to know an appliance inside out before committing himself, or he has done since we were married. And you
could
get into our fridge. I knew a girl knew a man who was frozen to death in the refrigerated hold of a cod trawler. He was holding this great big cold fish, for the comfort. I suppose you would. Cod have those whiskers though, don’t they?

We purchased the fridge from a white goods warehouse. White goods is the word for big things you don’t buy often in a lifetime and which don’t move about easily. The whole place was full of those cardboard boxes people can live in, though not from choice, a cliff face of heavy-duty cardboard. I thought of all those machines stripped of their cardboard housing, and left cold and white, some of them with the one big eye at the front for loading. I thought of all the mess and spillage, the dirty clothes and half-eaten meals and used dishes that those shiny white blocks would deal with, and for once I felt quite glad to be human. I felt quite patriotic for the human race, dirty and incomplete, but still somehow at the cliff face, holding on. There were little ledges in places up the cliff of cardboard and you could think of gulls hanging there, no nest to speak of, just like at by the sea near us. Except on these ledges it said ‘VORSICHT ATTENTION ATTENZIONE MADE IN BRITAIN’. The white machines clad in their heavy-duty board seemed like something military, a machine army, the forces of cleanliness ranked all together. Yet if you could choose just one or a couple of the machines you could use them for your own ends, human purposes. There were small fork-lift trucks moving between the alleys of white goods as I thought about this. The personnel were all kitted out in yellow. We were in like a huge hangar full of peacetime machines. I looked at Geoffrey. I suppose what we have is all we have. We have spent time together. I suppose that this spent time makes up a past, even if it is a very new past.

Fire and Ice, that was the name of the lipstick. I can’t remember the prayer yet, but it’s coming. I told Geoffrey these thoughts in the gulch between the white goods and he spoke to me as though I was just someone we were visiting to pick up an old table, and not his disappointing wife. ‘Thank God,’ he said. ‘Does this mean you’ve let up on being the perfect bride?’

I didn’t understand the words of what he was saying, but I got the sense. Not that he’s been the groom of your dreams. I was happy in myself on the drive home from the white goods warehouse. I told Geoffrey to stop outside The Deep Sea.

The Deep Sea is a chip shop. We had curly bits of fish as big as chestnut leaves in autumn and two little paper sacks each of thick chips. I had salt and vinegar, but Geoffrey had tartare sauce. Tartare sauce is composed of mayonnaise with good bits in. It is especially palatable with sea-food dishes. He ate his fish first. Everything smelt of deep fat. The inside of our car was all steamed up. Usually Geoffrey won’t eat fried food and anything smelly has to be eaten in a gale. He has been using a breath-freshening spray for work. We sat in the car with the heater on and the wipers going to and fro making smears on the windscreen.

There wasn’t much rain but we kept the wipers on high speed, for the fun of it.

Advent Windows

In the blue dark, the building’s twenty-four east-facing windows were closed, with the inside shutters fast, trapping slabs of cold air which would leave melting ferns of frost in the morning.

By the orange light of a street lamp and the white glare of the Chinese chip shop, it was possible to see that it had once been more of a small street than a building. One side of it was scarred where walls and floors and chimneys had been: there were traces of flowered wallpaper, and one fierce square of purple where, perhaps, someone had expressed rebellion from the beige trellised life in the next room. For these were once family houses, extending down what was now a triangle of waste ground, ending with the shop on the corner, which had been round as the elbow of a fat woman. A sign had swung from the shop, green and gold, on a bracket like a pub sign. It had read ‘Don’t say Brown say Hovis’. By the time of demolition, the last word had been changed to an uglier one so often that none of the insults was legible.

Mr Lal, who had run the shop, and no longer lived nearby, was driving past the building this Christmas Eve.

He imagined the scenes behind the twenty-four windows, shuttered not against the hot sun but the cold wind. The two terraced houses had become five flats. That meant five tall green trees covered with red and gold tinsel, sheltering bright drifts of presents. And for lights, not soft points of flame in oil, but strings of hard electric buds. Mr Lal braked to allow a young couple to cross the road; their heads were down against the cold wind as though they were acknowledging a bitter truth. Both were dressed entirely in black, funny clothes which must mean something since they appeared neither warm nor attractive. The young woman held a lumpy white infant casually against her hip; at least it was properly wrapped up. He wished the couple would speed up: he did not want his wife to see the baby. If she had a baby, she would not carry it like that, carelessly.

The young couple let themselves into the building. They closed the door securely behind them. Mr Lal thought of them going in to their flat, sitting around their big green tree, probably singing some carols, maybe mulling some wine, almost certainly wassailing, whatever that was.

He drove on. Business as usual tomorrow, indeed rather brisk sales, especially to the lonely who could not always rely, he learnt, on much conversation in church.

Lara and Ben took their white burden into their flat. They went straight to the kitchen, which gleamed with brushed metal. A magnetic band holding knives and a cleaver was fixed to the wall. ‘Get me down the kitchen devil and I’ll deal with it while I’m in the mood,’ said Lara. She unwrapped layers of white to expose naked pink flesh. She was intent, almost artificially so. They did not look each other in the eye.

‘It’s you who wanted it,’ he said.

‘I know, but you’ll be glad too . . .’

‘When it’s over.’

‘Not long now,’ she said and brought the beautiful quick knife across the gizzard of the turkey. Then she cut and snapped off each scaly yellow foot; they flexed, and there was sand in the nails.

‘I thought we were giving Christmas a miss this year,’ said Ben. ‘No tree because of the ecosystem. No presents because of the cost of this’ – he felt for a derisive word – ‘dwelling. And no turkey because they suffer in life and are full of hormones. Don’t please tell me it’s free range. If I know its biography I shall feel worse.’

‘I know all that,’ Lara said, ‘but I suddenly thought of everyone else, all jolly, trees, presents, turkey . . .’

‘Rosy cheeks and figgy pudding,’ Ben yelled. But it never did to be satirical in a loud voice. The other person thought you were being emphatic.

‘And those too,’ said Lara, and met his eyes. Wrestling with the dead flesh had brought some colour to her.

Sometimes Ben thought he might like a child, but where would it go, among all the metal and glass? He knew of no storage system for small humans. ‘I bet Tabby’s had hers stuffed all week, and the tree probably has self-sweeping needles,’ he ventured. Easy malice about their efficient neighbour bound them for a moment. They kissed and their kiss was reflected back to them in every shining cupboard door, silver and white and black, decorating the high cold room.

Tabby had done everything perfectly, well in advance, and now she was blind drunk. When she and Donald, her good kind husband whom she disliked, had moved to this new flat, he had said to her, ‘Now, Tabitha, I’m taking a decision here; you can have the benefit of the doubt no more. The type of person who lives here will be able to identify preprandial slurring and overlavish use of perfume.’ And here she was, doing it again. The problem was perfection. She aimed at it, achieved it, resented it and ruined it. The tree was lovely; grey and green only this year, and all the wrappings too. She had peeled the chestnuts herself, with their inner skins like mouse-fur. Donald did not like labour-saving foods; he said he felt that they could not taste as good. ‘If labour is so essential why not give it a positive vote and get me pregnant?’ Tabby would shout, the shouting she did so quietly that no one in any of their homes had realised she was anything but over-adequate, let alone a drunk. She knew the answer to that. Until she could show herself worthy, Donald was sorry but he had to draw the line somewhere and where he drew it was the impregnation of inebriate hysterics.

Tabby remembered her own childhood each Christämas. She had grown up in Uganda and still thought of England as a country where someone had turned down all the control knobs: no bright colours, no real noise but the hiss of good behaviour pressing down damp dirty feelings to give things a temporary smoothness. She was homesick for a place which had ceased to be when she left Africa for her English boarding school.

‘Though heaven only knows what they taught her,’ Donald would say at dinner parties, ‘since, when she met me, I’ve reluctantly to report, she thought shirts ironed themselves.’ She’d married him to unload some of her sex-appeal, which bored her and tired her out. This evening she cut kisses in a hundred pearl-sized Brussels sprouts. She stuck a glowing white onion with the scented nails of cloves. She prayed for Donald to die, nothing painful, on his return from his mother’s flat north of the river. Then she heard the small flat feet of the children upstairs and called down the wrath of God upon herself.

Upstairs things were neither very good nor very bad. Tyrone, the baby, who did not know how immanent were babies in how many grown-up minds, who did not know that it was a baby who came to earth to save us all, was nonetheless certain that one baby alone ruled the part of the earth which was familiar to him.

‘See the lights, Tyrone.’

‘Come to Mumma, Tyrone.’

‘Tyrone, see what Daddy has for you.’

‘Let me lift you, and you see the star, Tyrone.’

‘It’s over so quick, isn’t it,’ observed the grandmother, who was sugaring a big yellow pie. ‘I mean they are old so soon.’ From her tone you might have inferred she was indicating a crone, some venerable pipe-smoking great granniema in a rocker. But she was looking with tart tenderness at Ella, aged seven, whose legs were long and whose questions awkward. Ella sang the verse about not abhorring the Virgin’s womb again and again, knowing somehow that it ruffled an idyll which her adults needed.

The MacPatrick family had invited the old lady down for punch and a dish of puss preyers, hot and fishy and sweet. She wanted to hold Tyrone, who wished to withhold favours for a time. He was flirting with her; in his blue sleeping suit he looked like the best parcel in the world. He advertised the shelly pinkness of his toes. He patted his circular black curls. He sucked his index finger, palm outwards, showing the small world map of lines on his hand.

‘He’s saying something, surely,’ said the old lady upstairs.

‘Da, Da,’ said Tyrone.

‘Star,’ said his mother and the old lady, both of whom were devout, but who had not attended each other’s churches in spite of protestations of intent to do so.

‘It’s Dad he’s saying,’ said the men.

Ella, who had uttered the same gnomic syllables and at an earlier age, was fiddling with the catch of a shutter.

The doorbell rang. It was the residents of the fifth flat, Adam and Bill, come to say happy Christmas before they went off to their separate families. They had had to be apart in this way at Christmas for twelve years.

‘It’s a family time,’ they were saying to Mrs MacPatrick, as they handed over presents and the keys to their flat.

‘A family time,’ echoed the old lady from upstairs. She was a widow and her daughter had married a man who made parts for rigs and could not take a joke.

Ella was humming under her pink tongue, ‘Lo. he abhors not the Vi-ir-gin’s womb.’

With a gesture of revelation, she threw open the shutters.

Scared, Tyrone lifted high his arms and cried, ‘Ad. Ad.’

Adam lifted and held the child in the bright room, standing before the revealed window, behind him the trees, the smiling faces, the buds of coloured light.

Eyes burnt by the white light of the Chinese chip shop, a passer-by stopped in front of the building with twenty-four windows. Raising his eyes, he saw what he wished to see, a man with a child in a room full of light.

On the Seventh Day of Christmas

Further into the wood, the ground was so slippery with fallen needles that your feet were pulled ahead of you, but the rest of you was held back by the starry arms of the pines. In each direction where a path was visible it was possible also to see a spray of new paths off that path, a replication on the ground of the branches above with their many jagged green elbows and conjunctions, ending with hair’s breadth options of angle between the bristling needles at each eventual tip. If you looked up, you saw a deep furred green darkness pierced at its heights with sharp dazzles of winter sun. It was like looking up at the stars, though the darkness was made of green needles and the stars of naked white sky.