Separate tracks, p.12
Separate Tracks, page 12
The children came straggling past, abruptly audible, then as abruptly silenced. “—said you’d give me two for a gobstopper. It’s not fair.”
“I never, I don’t even want your smelly gobstopper anyway, I’d rather’ve had chews—” Orph stood invisibly, watching their black shapes pass, and then the silence. After a few minutes another small figure materialized, slow-moving this time. It was thick and shapeless, the blob of its head curiously broadened by some sort of hat. The hunched outline of the back and blob head gave it the look of a tortoise—the tortoise Orph had spotted at the post office counter, minutes ago. As she shuffled past, Orph moved silently out on to the pavement behind her. She was going very slowly and making a slight whistling sound through her teeth each time she breathed out. He walked close enough to hear her. From behind, the bulk of her silhouette was rendered even broader by the fat, shiny handbag she clutched to her right side.
The little whistling figure and her silent shadow moved on away from the shops and turned left at the first corner. When they had passed the third ineffectual haloed streetlamp Orph took a quick step to bring himself level with her, and snatched at the bag—pulling it backwards from under her encircling arm. It should have come away easily, but it didn’t. If he had paused to watch her finish her business through the post office window, he would have seen that after she had stashed her pension away she had wound the long shoulder strap of the bag twice around her bony wrist before tucking it under her arm, with the careful deliberation of an old person performing a movement ritualized by habit.
It slid from under her arm, but remained attached to her. She gave an astonished squawk, and Orph pulled violently at the bag again, unbalancing her. She toppled towards him, black mouth wide open but making no sound. Falling, she pulled the bag from his grasp. In the muffling, deadening air she crashed horribly loudly, her rounded shape disintegrating into a black mass on the pavement. Orph grabbed again at the gleam of the shiny leather bag and again her puppet arm tugged out with it.
He was breathing harshly and whispering now on his breaths—“Let go fuck you stupid fucking cow let go let fucking go—” He threshed the bag from side to side and the attached arm danced in the dark air beneath it. The old lady was making a noise like a saw, not panting or sobbing or screaming, but sawing harshly and desperately with her open black mouth and open white staring eyes. He kicked at her noisy staring head and felt along the strap to her papery hand. The strap was tight across her knuckles, twisted and pulled tighter by his tugging at it. Swiftly he unwound it and the limp arm dropped back into the shapeless blackness of the rest of her. Orph vanished, and the sounds of the struggle, of movement and harsh breathing, ceased abruptly. Filling up space, the dark mist closed in over the black lump on the pavement.
Chapter 28
Emma’s relationship with David followed a predictable course. She had already decided that she was far too old to still be a virgin.
That’s it then. Red and raw. Sore and raw. Does he think I—was it all right then?
She knew it wasn’t. The desire that had made her skin prickle with sensitivity switched off, click, when he tried to do that. And there was a dry tight body not knowing what it should do, and a feeling of turning a knife while she shrank back horrified to feel herself wounded. Is that what it is? Can he tell? She didn’t know. Smile. Get dressed. Kiss. Is he looking at me? I can’t tell. I don’t know what it should be. It’s happened, then.
He stands there in the light, in the doorway. Thinking what?
“Why don’t you stay? It’s crazy to go home now.”
Again. Why don’t I stay? “No—I just want to. It’s OK.” Dry peck on the cheek again I’m cold I’m shivering what’s the time? Unlock the bike in the dark and the chain’s stuck in the spokes clanking and clattering, cold numb fingers weave it through here—here—sod it. She pulled hard and the chain flew out of the spokes and hit her knuckles. Slow down. Front light. Back light. Bag strap over head, crossing the chest. Gloves? In his room still, no, I’m not going back. He’s still standing there, it’s taking so long. OK. She negotiated the clumsy bike out of the gateway, backwards, keeping the gate open by bumping it gently with her hip, turned the front wheel now and was out. “Goodnight.”
“Emma?” She waited, blank, for him to say something. He took a step forward, she couldn’t see his face because of the light behind him. “Nothing. Goodnight.”
What should I say? Slowly, clumsily, she got on to the bike and the shock of pain as she sat on the saddle brought it back to her. I’ve done it. We did it. She stood on the pedals and rode home slowly, crouching over the handlebars, not wanting to sit. Blackness everywhere, each light looked alone and helpless, shining away to no effect, the blackness was everywhere. Few cars, no one about. Red eye of traffic light. She straightened her back, feet on the ground, waiting. Amber. Green. She stood over the bike, eyes fixed on the light. Nothing happened. Amber. Red. She hadn’t gone. What was it? She was standing there in the empty dark with a bicycle, and a light was telling her what to do. Amber. Green. Go now. It stared at her, imploring her. Go now. But her muscles were petrified. She stared at the green eye, waiting for the message and command to filter through her brain. Nothing. I’ll stand here all night. Amber. Red. Minutes are ticking by. No traffic. It tells you all night, on and on and on—go—wait—stop—go—wait—stop. Even when no one’s here to see it, messaging to no one. Go. Stop. A car was speeding up from behind. Red/amber changed to green. The driver shifted gear and sped on without stopping. Look how easily he got through. No problem. Didn’t even stop to think. Amber. Red. If I wait till it’s green again. How can I make myself go? Amber. Now. Green. Her brain lifted her right foot on to the pedal and pushed the left toes against the ground. Her fingers tightened on the handgrips. Very slowly the bike began to move. She wobbled, nearly sat down then remembered, pushed the left pedal down hard and was moving. In the middle. Amber. What if I stopped here? In the middle. Amber red. Just stood here. Nothing. Nothing would happen because I’m not really here. It gives its message and I don’t go. I’m not really here at all.
Slowly, incredibly slowly, the bike wobbled across the controlled square of road. Her fingers were clenched tight on the grips, painfully cold, stiffening. Coming up now. Street light. Bushes. Not ride on the gravel tonight. Not balance. Every movement was an old woman’s, as she dismounted slowly, carefully, whose is this body? What’s it done? and carefully pushed the bicycle into the drive into the dark shadow of the bushes and the gravel crunched under her feet and the tyres now it’s very dark. Afraid of those bushes? You were once. What a good hiding place. But there’s no one there. There’s no one there and who cares if there is, no one will harm me. I’m not here either. Her fingers unclasped from the handlebars slowly, one at a time, like prising open a box, and she held them cold and immovable in front of her. What? The stars are shining. I don’t care. Where’s the chain? But her fingers couldn’t bend and fiddle the chain through the spokes, they were clumsy and aching with cold. She stood, helpless a moment by the wall with the icy chain in her hand. What must I do? Get the key. Unlock the door. Go in.
She couldn’t. The chain dropped, and she crouched to find it, clasping her hands down between her legs for warmth. And began, slowly and hopelessly, to cry. She was this—a small thing by the wall in the dark, unable to lock her bicycle. Different, not transformed—nothing. She had no will, she had no feeling. Not to say, “I feel that”, or to want to stay or to want to move. Not to know that it had been important—to know that it hadn’t. This happens to everybody. But it’s different. I can never move now. I’m here, my hands are cold, the chain’s in the gravel. There’s no warmth in me.
Pins and needles started in her foot and she shifted to ease it and toppled over, and was shocked enough to scramble up. Blindly, the unwilled tears streaming which were nothing to do with her, she went to the door and forced the foreign hands to open the purse and identify the key and press it into the stubborn lock and twist it.
She went in. They must all be in bed. It’s dark here too, with orange patterns on the floor from the street-light falling in. This is where I live. So why am I crying? Why didn’t I stay? I just didn’t. She undressed in the dark and got into bed, icy cold, and lay obediently under the blankets waiting for something to happen, for some warmth to come back, for her eyes to stop pouring and pouring these tears that were nothing to do with her. I’ve done it. I’m different now. But she felt she would never be different, though she wanted that more than anything in the world.
Chapter 29
When Emma got home at 5 pm the next day there was no one in. The house was a mess. Last night’s dishes were piled high in the sink, the table was smeared with breadcrumbs and cigarette ash. She felt empty. She made herself a cup of tea and sat at the table without bothering to wipe a clear patch. Where was Alison? With Phil? At a meeting? And where was Orph? She couldn’t imagine. Suddenly she thought he might be in his room, and went upstairs. She stood holding her breath outside his door, listening. No sound. “Orph?”
No reply. Gently she tried the handle. The room stank. She crossed quickly to the window and drew back the curtains. She had a struggle to open the window. One of the sash cords was broken, and it obviously hadn’t been opened for years. She managed to raise it a couple of inches, and breathed in deeply. She turned to examine the room. His bed was like an animal’s, a nest of dirty blankets and sheets. They were wound round into a knot in the middle of the mattress, leaving the edges bare. There were some neatly folded, dirty clothes on the chest of drawers. She walked around the space, looking at it. Dust had gathered in balls along by the skirting board. A row of cigarette butts stood like soldiers on the mantlepiece, balancing ash. There was no fire. That had not occurred to her before. She and Alison had electric fires in their rooms. She would have to do something, take him to the laundrette, and show him how to use a vacuum cleaner.
She realized that she was staring at something under the bed. Something ridged. There were stacks of magazines there. Great piles of them, with thick spines and glossy covers. It was strange, she couldn’t recognize the shape of them. National Geographical or something, must have been left by the people before. She pulled one out. Glossy, thick, pink flesh leapt to her eyes. Playboy. A spread-eagled naked woman, hands fondling breasts, wearing a bright red smile. Emma’s eyes blurred. She went quickly to the stairs and ran down to place a kitchen chair near the front door, so that it would bang if he came in. She pulled out all the magazines. Pornography! There were stacks of them, fifteen or twenty at least. Incredulous, she leafed through the pile. Bondage, Mates, Playboy. . .
Naked girls ogled her from the shiny covers. A large blonde, half reclining on a black sheeted bed holding herself open between the legs. Emma sat back on her heels. Where had they come from? Why had he got them? She opened one—a photostory of two girls who invite the electrician in—and stared at the poses and pouts and proffered nipples and cunts. The women smiled out with plastic faces, not human beings but dolls for one purpose. Imagine them doing it, manipulating their cunts for the camera, legs round the tripod, face aching with smiling. On the next page was a lot of print—a story about a girl who went motorbike riding naked with her boyfriend at night and achieved multiple orgasms by driving over fields. A letter from a man describing the seduction of his best friend’s wife: “She was saying ‘No, no,’ over and over again, but she was hot and wet for it, her quim was brimming with juice.”
Emma stared at the words. She stood slowly and went to the window. She was hot. Incredulously, she realized that she was sexually aroused. A wave of hotness went over her, a kind of thickness in her mind. She could feel her nipples pricking against her shirt. She held herself perfectly still. No. I don’t believe it. Hotness came up and up in her, and her knees were suddenly weak. She moved stiffly forward and gently pressed her groin against the window ledge in front of her. Sharp pleasure and expectation lit up through her belly and breasts and she turned quickly back to the wall, beside the window so that she could not be seen, and slid her hand inside her jeans. Suddenly she was standing there gasping for breath, shaking, her right hand held in front of her as if it belonged to someone else. She slid to a sitting position, back against the wall. She felt sick. The hot desire shrivelled into nausea. She could feel what seemed like a strong pulse beating inside her, between her legs, and she squeezed them together to drown it away. Her stomach was nauseated. Like an animal—because of that—those pictures. She didn’t want to believe her own reaction. Slowly she raised her hand to her nose and smelt the smell of herself. She was shaken by disgust.
She crawled over to the magazines again and mechanically turned the pages. Body after body, breast after breast, cunt after cunt. Shiny, impersonal, disgusting, degrading. How could she—could anyone? And yet she had felt like that.
Quickly she piled them up and pushed them back under the bed. Stood, then knelt again to check that they were as she’d found them. The room looked the same? Closed the curtains, shut the door, moved the chair from the front door. She went and washed her hands carefully, as if they were contaminated, and went back to her room. She imagined him leafing through and pausing to stare at a particular page. No. But why not? What had she thought he was? He had needs and lusts, the same as anyone else. A body, the same as anyone else. I bet he’s never even touched a girl, she thought. The enormity of his life rushed at her. What did he do? She began to cry in guilt and self-pity. He had turned into a man who read pornography. Disgusting, degrading. But who did he have? What were his pleasures? And I did that. I am the same too.
But his mysterious life became something tangible and stinking. What had she expected? His life must be full of disgusting incidents. Suddenly she thought, I will never be able to get rid of him. He’ll follow me through my life like a disease, something dirty I don’t understand that clings to me. How will I ever get rid of him? When I leave here, wherever I go he’ll come after me, move into my house— She wished violently that she had never invited him. It wasn’t fair. But I. The other little voice piping up, trying to get through. But I. Remember?
As time went by, Emma pushed this incident completely out of her mind. But Orph retained, for her, an extra aura of ugliness now—something that made her shrink from contact with him and avoid his eyes. He made her guilty. Later still, an image came to her of their lives, with the remorseless momentum and helplessness of a nightmare. As if they were on railway tracks, Orph and she, rolling silently near to each other, tracks crossing but never touching. Sliding on to different ends, in places far apart. She could not speak to him as, in a dream, your muscles turn to water and you cannot stir to save your life. She could do nothing but stand and watch, paralysed. His life is his own. I am not responsible.
When she and David were coming back from town with some shopping, she saw him. He was staring at her across the street, and she recognized him with a cold jolt. Too late, she smiled and nodded. She didn’t say anything to David, but she glanced back over her shoulder twice on the way home, and although she didn’t see him, she was sure he was still there.
Several days later David suddenly said, “That boy of yours—the lout—is he all right?”
“What do you mean?”
“Is he all right in the head?”
“What do you mean?” She was filled with dread.
“I keep seeing him. Everywhere. In town. Going home. On my way here. He’s always hanging about, staring at me.”
Emma re-experienced the cold shock of meeting those dead eyes across the street. “I—it’s just coincidence. He’s unemployed, remember, he spends most of the day wandering about.”
“You should make him get a job. He’s peculiar. I don’t like the idea of him hanging around you all the time. You’ll wake up one morning to find your house stripped clean. You’re asking for it.”
“Leave him alone.” She was angry. David’s matter-of-factness was crass. She knew Orph watched them. There was nothing she could do. Superstitiously she dreaded making something unthinkable happen by talking about it. If it was unspoken, it was at least partly not there.
Chapter 30
One night they were sitting on the sofa watching TV when Orph came in. They moved quickly when the door opened, and Emma said, “Hello!” very brightly. Orph slumped on the floor, leaning against the sofa arm as he always did. There was some politician on the screen. It was very quiet after Orph had settled down, and the man’s voice seemed unnaturally loud. “Of course, we view the prospect of increasing unemployment with alarm,” he was saying in a slurred oily voice, “but we are totally unwilling to throw away the sacrifices already made—already made—” he stressed as the interviewer tried to interrupt him, “by vast sections of the working population of this country, in terms of real income, for what can only be a temporary. . .”
Emma and David were moving on the sofa. Orph heard the very faint sound of a breathed whisper from David, and Emma whispering back, “No!” Then there was a gentle brushing sound, as of skin touching skin repeatedly. A slight shift of position on the sofa—it moved fractionally, behind his back—and more whispers. On TV the politician continued to propound his views on what could be done for the young and discontented unemployed. Emma seemed to sigh—he could hear her breathing, regularly but slightly fast; they seemed to be squirming about as if not quite comfortable.
