Ludmila's Broken English, page 29
‘Bollecks tosspet English fuck!’ Maks gestured through the window. ‘Wenker!’
‘All right,’ English prepared to hoist himself from the chair. ‘I mean to say. Is Millie with you?’
‘In car. Quick, bollecks!’
‘All right, all right.’ English shuffled to the door, turning to flick off his standard lamp, and collect his satchel from its hook beside the desk. ‘Catch down your cuckoos, for God’s sake.’
*
Such was English’s weariness that he didn’t notice one of Ludmila’s shopping bags rustling and squeaking on the train. Even once the bustle of King’s Cross Station slid away, once military emplacements gave way to countryside, and the trio sat quiet in the gently vibrating hush of their carriage.
‘English, did we get for the pay?’ asked Ludmila.
‘Yes,’ said Bunny, ‘You’ll bank about nine hundred, after everyone’s paid.’
‘Hoh,’ Ludmila turned to Maksimilian, speaking Ubli, ‘and if you would stop driving like a pimp around the town, and go to recover the Fone-Bay debt, we could bank twice that.’
Maks tossed up his chin. ‘Well, if you can advise what time in the earth’s eternal calendar they will revisit their abandoned premises, I will go and smash down something highly resemblant of their heads and upper bodies.’
Ludmila frowned through the window at streaks and flashes of light industrial foreground occasionally peppered with military drab. ‘And I’ll tell it to you only once again: I will take the car back if you don’t make it pay. Do you think it’s a charity I’m running?’
‘Is there a Scotch egg?’ Bunny asked, as much to staunch the flow of Ubli, as to quell any peckishness.
Ludmila reached into a shopping bag, and pulled out three packaged products. Bunny perused them solemnly before pulling a Cornish pasty across the table.
‘I want the pasty,’ said Blair.
‘I mean to say, Blair. You only want it because I want it.’
‘Well, I just want it. Give it to me.’
‘You ask for Scotch egg, English,’ Ludmila reminded in a motherly tone.
‘Yes,’ Blair reached across the table. ‘You asked for a Scotch egg, not a pasty. Give me the pasty.’
Bunny sighed wearily, and pushed the pasty to Blair.
‘And I want the Scotch egg as well,’ Blair wrapped a protective arm around the pasty.
‘Well you’re not having it,’ said Bunny. ‘It’s mine.’
Ludmila swept both the pasty and the egg into her shopping bag, and crumpled it on to the floor. ‘Then you both get nothing. Instead shut up.’
‘I mean to say.’ Bunny sat back with a sigh.
Blair’s lip began to tremble.
A tense silence accompanied the group north, and in the taxi to Albion. During this time, the kitten squeaked loudly, and Bunny was presented with it. He stroked it, relinquishing it to Blair after he went on and on about it.
It was teatime when they reached the home. Matron swept the kitten into her office with a saucer of water, while Bunny went to linger on the spot he and Blair had traditionally stood between meals; the corner by the foyer and green lounge, with a view of the corridor that ran to the kitchens. He hung there as regular people hang anywhere familiar, anywhere habitual, as if waiting for a bus he’d caught every day for thirty-seven years; stood and mused like someone who looked back on the phases of their past with embarrassment and dismay, knowing that very moment would itself seem awkward when looked back upon.
It was a big day at Albion. A reunion coinciding with the fifth anniversary of privatisation. To the sting of antiseptic was added a layer of party feeling, a specially engineered saccharine that made the residents assertively coy. Its engineer was Matron. She had a lot of practice in this, as every Sunday at the institution was traditionally a free day. Whereas the home’s tall spaces usually rang with clinks and clatters, Sundays brought Frank Sinatra. A rare gloss coated those days. Frank would flow from low-quality speakers across Albion’s museum spaces, and a saturated light always seemed to glow through the sash windows; at least, it made itself noticeable in the soporific clearing of the day. There also came a mood, a relief, like that of elder statesmen having survived unspeakable intrigue, or like graduates on the last day of college, being warm and being noble where ordinarily they might not. The music, and the relaxation of routine that it caused, made the residents slide like silk, feeling as though they were part of a wider global flow. Even Matron was relaxed on Sundays. She usually wore a simple woollen dress and cardigan with no-nonsense shoes. Flecks of make-up would shine on her face, giving her the stipple of a half-restored painting.
Matron was proud of her Sunday atmosphere. From outside those grey walls it might have seemed a sad emulation of normality, but the loose emotion it stirred were lollies of genuine human spirit in every way.
Bunny soaked up the old Sunday feeling from his spot beside the foyer. It was one of Matron’s typical Sunday affairs. Plus – there were balloons.
Still a nervous flutter ran through him. It was because he felt part of nothing. He was no longer a part of the Albion community. And still not a part of any community outside it. He stood alone by the shadow end of the foyer, watching Ludmila and Blair answer questions from Matron, bathed in light from the entrance. Still, unease persisted in him, and he realised it would stay until one of his old co-residents came past. He saw nobody from the old days. They wouldn’t be expecting him back, though they knew the day also held a short memorial service for Blair.
Presently Matron came over, pulling little Blair Aleksandr by the hand. ‘So much for the colour code!’ she barked by way of hello. ‘You want putting away, dressing him up like that.’
‘You what?’ Bunny fell from his reflections.
‘More than a year since they banned red in schools, and here you are, in a care environment with antisocial problems of its own, parading the little soul like a ruddy ambulance light.’
‘Well, Matron, I’ve not dressed him. He’s not mine, you know. His mother’s dressed him to match her, look.’
‘But the lass isn’t to know, she’s not from here, Bunny. Honestly, you’ll have to exert some influence, you can’t just leave things happen. And in your brother’s absence you should be paying the child more mind. You did marry the girl, for God’s sake – at least try and make a go of things.’
‘Well, but it was an immigration issue. I mean to say, I love her to bits, and all her mad little ways, but I was only trying to do the decent thing, under the circumstances. I’ve not slept with her or anything.’
‘Honestly, Bunny, what are we going to do with you? I’ve had no sense out of the porters since she walked through the door, you want thrashing for wasting such a lovely lass as that. Bloody thrashing, you want.’
‘Well, but Matron, I mean to say –’
‘It’s not unhygienic, Bunny, so don’t start. It’s what makes the world go round.’
‘I wasn’t going to say unhygienic, actually.’
‘Well, she’ll not be foreign for ever, will she? She might not be from here, but she’ll catch on, you’ll see. For goodness’ sake, start exploring your options – there’s many a man’d kill to be where you are.’
Ludmila walked tall and erect towards the whispering pair, light finding exquisite hollows beneath her cheeks, dazzling reflectors in her teeth. Maks trailed behind her like a grave digger, trying to finish an exchange in Ubli.
‘I tell you,’ he said, ‘we could buy the propeller factory back home – it’s at least as big as this place, we could fill it with the same kind of cripples. Fantastic amount of money they must be making here.’
‘In saints’ name, can you not open your mouth without insulting?’ Ludmila smiled as Matron saw her approach. ‘Anyway, the place needs doctors and many other things than just a building. And it needs a government that will pay – do you think for a second the Gnezvar-Kuzhnisk government would give money for a place like this?’
‘Hoh! Doctors? If you had the cell of one eye in your face you would see these types are perfectly healthy. A bit turned, is all. A bit of porridge and a television is all they need.’
The pair reached the corner where Bunny and Matron stood, little Blair dangling from Matron’s hand like a monkey. Ludmila turned to hiss a final note to Maks, ‘And if you can’t spend the day in English, just cut your hatch.’
‘Hoh, and the very next moment I’m having to deal with Qazaqs or Bengalis!’
‘Tsst!’
The group strolled down a long corridor. Lumbering up it came Gretchen, a familiar face from Bunny’s day. Each twelve paces were punctuated with a little dance; a locomotive wriggle of her behind, fists pushing and pulling at her side like levers on a wheel. Then, just before she resumed her walk, she would flash over one shoulder a smile of innocent confidence.
She passed Bunny by without noticing him.
The group made their way to the activities room, where a smattering of adult guests mingled in a heat that curled the edges of sandwiches on a buffet. Residents were excluded from the gathering, as gin was being served, as were wine, and warm beer.
Beside the gin stood Donald Lamb.
A younger man fidgeted beside him, who by his attentive blinking gave himself away as Lamb’s assistant.
Lamb beamed when Bunny and Ludmila entered the room. ‘Hello, hello,’ he sang, moving to greet them. He crouched for a moment to comment on Blair’s height, and his ferocious scowl, then he made affable chat with Ludmila. And when Matron finally drifted away to mingle with other guests, and Ludmila and Maksimilian took Blair to peruse the buffet, Lamb and Bunny made a start on the gin. It conspired with sunshine, and the sound of bees and flies, to provoke conversation about the morning’s play in the test match at Lord’s. And this parlayed into more sensitive musings, which the day’s resonant airs seemed to call for, or at least allow.
‘Always meant to ask,’ said Bunny, ‘if it was a ploy, sending us away like that?’
‘I wouldn’t say that,’ said Lamb. ‘I wouldn’t say that at all. I don’t mean to harp on, but the situation really is more complex. Very messy business, privatisation. Unpredictable. Let’s just say we felt your interests were better served outside the glare of public interest.’
Bunny nodded gently. His eyes joined Lamb’s on the floor beneath their gins. ‘And it was you wrote that letter from our dad?’
‘What would make you think that?’
‘Harp on – you say that in the letter.’
‘Well,’ said Lamb, ‘the situation really is more complex. Though actually, on that score, I’ve a bit of a treat for you tonight. Bit of an introduction to make.’
‘Oh?’
Ludmila’s voice rang out from the buffet. ‘No, Maksimilian! No orange Fanta!’
And the subject melted into the eve. On and on the stifling air was moved around Albion by wandering English people, and standing English people who simply moved their arms. The warmth shifted in dusty clouds around the activities room, until the people moved away, up the hall to the foyer, past the room of a man said to have a brain like a jellyfish, with only a thin cap of grey matter suspended in cerebrospinal fluid. Presumably a nerve connected it to the body of this man, who everyone went to the trouble of addressing as Mister, went to the trouble of dressing, caring for, and speaking to, because there, but for the grace of God, go we all.
Gin flowed until dark, and still flowed after it. And when finally a rousing tango gripped Albion’s air, only Lamb, his assistant, and Bunny remained in the large hall. Lamb checked and rechecked his watch.
Bunny stood himself upright in the middle of the room.
His feet began to scissor, chop, and flash to the tango, but within a few steps, and barely one twirl, he stumbled, and fell.
Lamb’s assistant tensed, ready to spring to his aid. But Lamb stood still, watching quietly. This held the assistant back.
‘Will I help His Royal Highness?’ the lad whispered after a moment.
‘Leave him,’ said Lamb. ‘He’ll have to find his own feet.’
As the crumpled ex-parasite tried to find his balance, the sound of crunching gravel puffed through Albion’s windows. A fleet of black cars swept up the drive.
Lamb was about to step forward, when Ludmila’s head poked through the door. ‘English!’ she called. ‘Come, let’s go home.’
‘I might stop a bit.’ Bunny glowered at his legs. ‘I might just stop here a bit – Millie? I mean to say. I might just stop back now.’
‘Come, English,’ she sharpened an eye on his gin. ‘What you devour, devours you.’
Bunny turned, and gazed through his goggles like an albino fly.
Ludmila took another step into the room. She arched her back a little, pouting. One eyebrow rose.
‘Come, English: Friday tomorrow – shepherd’s pie.’
The End
Thanks:
Outrageous fortune, All who took me back,
All who kept me in, Authors, Capybaras, Quint.
Father Tom and the fine people of Aughnasheelin and County
Leitrim, where the stars go sleep at night.
About the Author
Born in Australia, DBC Pierre spent a lavish upbringing in Mexico learning the tools of his undoing. He undid himself on three continents during his twenties, spending his thirties in London and the West Indies. Having plied a piecemeal trade since childhood as designer, photographer, film-maker and cartoonist, his first novel, Vernon God Little, erupted just before his fortieth birthday. It went on to win the MAN Booker Prize, the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Bollinger Everyman Woodhouse Award for Comic Writing in 2003. His second novel, Ludmila’s Broken English was published in 2006. He lives in County Leitrim, Ireland.
By the Same Author
VERNON GOD LITTLE
Copyright
This ebook edition published in 2011
by Faber and Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA
All rights reserved
© DBC Pierre, 2006
The right of DBC Pierre to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–26843–6
DBC Pierre, Ludmila's Broken English
