Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall, page 25
On the afternoon of the funeral, a teacher who was going out on his own to celebrate his forty-second birthday had his face cut open. At exactly the same time. What is the sense of those two things happening at the same time I thought, those two ceremonies, just what is the sense in that, just when …
Sometimes I think I no longer know what love means, I said. But I know one of the things it means; it means the way O stayed with Boy in the six days after this man’s death, not just standing beside him at the funeral, but standing by him for each of those one hundred and forty hours. And the way O never, in all that time, never said to him, ‘Are you alright?’
The morning after the death itself, when it was so cold, and the water was still spilt on the hall floor and the smell of the smoke was still clearing, he sat with him in the living room and held his hand all day, for Boy was in some kind of state of shock, as if he hardly knew what he had seen or done. As if he could not face whatever the next thing might be after all that was over. They sat there in the cold side by side, O made some toast and tea but Boy could not eat anything; it just sat there and went quickly cold. The flat seemed empty, whereas before it had felt full with just the two of them in it; and it felt wrecked in some way. Boy was certainly not doing any housework now, in fact, it seemed necessary to leave the place exactly as it was for a while, as if preserving the evidence of what had happened, the proof. They even left the bedspread in the middle of the hall floor. In the panic of trying to fill the bath with near-boiling water, the small bathroom mirror, the one they used for shaving, had got broken, so that there were dangerous silver splinters in the bath and on the bathroom floor. They were still there. The day after the funeral (four days after the death), white-faced and tight-lipped and barefoot, Boy went into the bathroom, but not to clear up; without asking O’s permission or explaining himself, he got up from his chair in the living room and walked purposefully into the bathroom, not caring if he cut his feet open. There, using a fist wrapped in a towel as his weapon, he broke the other mirror, the big one, too. Then he went and smashed the full-length mirror in the bedroom, the one they watched themselves fucking in. Then he went to the kitchen and yanked open the fridge door and with both hands scooped the food off the fridge shelves and onto the kitchen floor, all that pointless food he had bought, and he went on without stopping and broke the plates, the milk jug, the butter dish and the sugar bowl which he had bought especially for those elaborate breakfasts. He did all this in silence, though he was breathing heavily through his clenched teeth.
Then he got the two bin liners and the shoe box and the packing case from the bedroom, and he carried them into the hall, and emptied them in the middle of the bedspread, in the middle of the hall floor, in the very spot. And then he set fire to the heap of letters and to the bedspread and he stood there and he watched them burn. When they were well and truly alight he did not stay to watch but went back into the living room, as if so satisfied by the act that he did not need to witness its completion.
O followed him while he was doing all this, but did not try to stop him; he was just watching to see that he did not cut himself on any of the shards of mirror and china. When the fire in the hallway got dangerous and started to scorch the walls O brought saucepans of water from the kitchen and threw them over it, so that there was more foul-smelling smoke and a wet mess of charred and blackened paper.
Not everything was destroyed in this fire, but most of it was. Even Boy’s own original and precious collection of letters and photos was burnt. O saw the photo of the First World War soldier lying in the black mess, only burnt along one edge, and he saved that.
That night Boy opened their bedroom door wide, he threw open all the doors inside the flat, turned on all the lights, and turned the television off, so that everything that happened in their bedroom could be heard and everything could be seen in every other room, and he took O into the bedroom and when they made love he cried out just like a boy of sixteen, he cried out in his pleasure just like he used to before there was anyone to hear.
And then, only then, having done all that, did Boy throw open all the windows, and then go and throw open the front door so that there was a bitter draught coming in from the front door, he let the cold come in and began to clean the house.
At the end of the week, working together, they swept the broken mirror from the bathroom floor, and O called someone and had the boiler fixed. He turned the thermostat right up. The gas came on with a great thump and the flat began to heat up again, room by room, as the hot water flowed from each cold radiator to each cold radiator. When the water was scalding, O turned the bathroom taps on full, and to the sound of that gushing water he stripped Boy and carried him bodily into the steaming bathroom and lowered him into the almost unbearably hot water, then washed him, dried him and dressed him and took him out for the night. Took him out to The Bar, where else.
And on that night, of all nights, it was O and Boy themselves who were assaulted.
They never even made it to The Bar. Not even to the appropriate bus stop. They were halfway there, on a street with plenty of cars going past, and plenty of streetlamps, a safe street, a street where there usually wasn’t any trouble, when they heard people talking behind them, laughing, and then people overtaking them, jostling them, and then it had already started to happen, there were five men standing in front of them and four men behind them.
It was ten o’clock on a Friday night, a public holiday had been declared (the Christmas lights were going on), so people were out and a bit drunk; there was more shouting than usual. But I have to say that Boy and O were not in any way in the wrong place at the wrong time. Normally they would have seen it coming and crossed the road and gone another way; but on this night, the seventh night after being witnesses to a death, seven nights after Boy had had a man die in his arms, Boy’s whole attention was taken up with the simple act of walking down the street, practising being part of the world again. And O’s whole attention was on Boy; he was apparently walking calmly and normally by his side but in fact he was waiting, always ready to catch him should he fall, or to fold him in his arms should he suddenly cry out and crumple to his knees. That is why neither of them noticed what was happening until it was too late. All their senses were straining to accomplish this ordinary task of walking up the road to the bus stop and thence to an ordinary Friday night out at The Bar, and when they looked up from the pavement and saw the five men in front of them they were taken by surprise, they were surprised to see that it was already too late, that they hadn’t seen it coming, that they were already in trouble.
Boy had read lots of thrillers. Often they had contained the phrase ‘You’re in danger of losing your life’, or descriptions of how cold a gun muzzle is when pushed between your teeth by a man who’s saying, Now do you get the idea or do I have to explain the whole situation to you? – but he had never expected to feel just like the books say that people feel like in these scenes, that is, very calm. It didn’t occur to him for one moment that he might get killed. This despite the fact that he knew that two people had been killed that year, he knew, because I’d told him.
He felt very calm and was watching everything very closely as it happened and felt that he had time to notice almost everything.
He noticed their fashionable clothes. Their jewellery. Especially the gold chains. Their smiles; how cheerful they were, not sinister. Their looks which meant, Oh, I could enjoy hurting you. I could talk about that with my friends afterwards, I could watch a film about you getting killed on the TV or a documentary about you dying and I would probably laugh if I was having a beer, if I was with the kind of friends who’d laugh at that then I’d laugh too, I would.
O was waiting for the first move. Without having to turn round, he was as aware of the men behind him as he was of the five in front. His back was waiting for the first push between the shoulderblades. Without thinking, he took hold of the scruff of Boy’s jacket with his left hand, and just held on to it. He knew that two men are harder to push down than one.
No one was saying anything. O could see his own breath, it was so cold.
Then he heard them starting, someone was saying, Oh, excuse me boys, someone giggled and said, Oh, excuse me girls, they even used the most stupid old lines, one of them actually said, backs against the walls, boys. To them it was not a serious situation at all.
O thought it was coming any minute now, so he looked down (he remembered Stella telling him that this was the right thing to do if things got this bad), looked down for a half brick or a piece of wood to use, trying to imagine as he did so what it would feel like to slam it into the side of someone’s face, that one who was grinning; but then O looked up, there wasn’t anything close to hand, O looked up and saw something out of the corner of his eye, saw a movement of an arm, something metal; O spun round, O turned and saw one of the young men reaching out his hand to touch the back of Boy’s head.
There was no knife coming down this time – there was no knife, O saw that at once; the gleam of metal which had alerted him to this movement was from a heavy gold bracelet. The man had a delicate wrist, an elegant hand, O thought, and, as he lifted his gold-braceleted hand slowly to the back of Boy’s head, O realised that what the man really wanted to do was just to touch him, that he was was going to run his fingers across Boy’s precious black hair. The young man was saying, quietly, Oh, oh such a pretty boy.
After what they had been through, not just the death but also the courtship, the engagement, the wedding and all their nights together, all their ceremonies, O could not bear it that anyone should touch his Boy for so slight a reason as petty hatred.
And so he did the only thing he could do to express his outrage. Without thinking, O opened his throat so that the cold night air dropped into his lungs in one single, massive breath, and then he shouted, roared, he shouted right in the man’s face, without thinking, shouted right at the top of his voice, but in a voice which he had never heard himself use before, something that sounded more like a car crashing than a human voice, and what he cried out in the man’s face was Not a hair upon his head you fucker.
Then there was silence again; nobody moved; the man held his braceleted hand in mid-air, six inches from the back of Boy’s head; and then O shouted again with all the breath in his body, Go home.
And the young men realised that these two men who they had assumed would be afraid were not afraid, or seemed not to be, and they began to back away. The man who had reached out his hand to touch Boy from behind pulled it back as if from the bar of an electric fire.
They backed away, saying nothing, and, inexplicably, it was over.
It was over quickly; no one had been hit.
But when they had gone O felt just as if he had laid into them with his bare hands; he even looked down at his knuckles, expecting to see them split open and bleeding. Then he took Boy in his arms and felt him all over, as if checking for broken bones, and he examined his face, tenderly, for cuts or bruises. He touched his own lips with a quick touch to make sure that they were not split or swollen. And then his arms suddenly ached as if it had been a big fight or as if he had been swimming too long, too far out at sea, at night. And then he hugged and held onto his Boy just as if he had actually hauled him dripping from some deep, freezing and dangerous water.
They held onto each other until they were warm again, and they kissed.
Then they started walking again, not to escape from further threat or because they wanted to get to The Bar, but because they had to do something to work off the extraordinary anger that they felt. They knew that they had to keep moving. They walked fast, sometimes even broke into a half run, saying nothing. But then when they passed a phone box, O stopped, panting, and said to Boy: ‘Do you have any change?’
‘Yes – why?’
‘I’m going to call Mother.’
And they didn’t smile, but it felt like it, and Boy said: ‘Well tell her that we were perfect.’
But Mother was not there; the phone rang and rang and rang, but she was not there. She just was not there when they needed her most.
And they didn’t smile all that evening, and they never made it to The Bar, and they never talked to Mother, but they stayed out late amongst the crowds that night, brave-faced and apparently unshaken, for it was, as I have said, a public holiday and the crowds were out in their fine clothes to see the Christmas lights turned on, even though it was a cold winter’s night, and for four more hours after this attack on them O and his Boy did not go home but they made their way slowly through the city hand in hand, holding hands in public all the night. They went through the city as if inspecting it, having escaped unharmed from this immediate threat, having escaped, it seemed, from almost everything and being able now to walk down the streets almost in freedom; for in their strength, as they walked side by side that night, as they walked hand in hand, they felt that the city could not touch them and could not hurt them now. And this was not folly on their part and it was not ignorance; for they did still on that night hear, see and feel everything around them, O and his Boy, it is not true that they only had eyes for each other. As they walked the night streets of the city they saw all the great plate-glass windows shining, they saw all the money and the lack of money, they heard the contemptuous voices of the noisy and the eager, the arrogant and the stupid and the vain, the too-rich young men driving their too-fast cars down the narrow streets at night with their music on too loud, they saw the too-young men sleeping half-mad with alcohol under the bridges, the floodlit and empty churches, the begging children at the railway stations, the crowds assembled for the public holiday, just as they had seen on other nights crowds gathering on the streets for all the city’s other reasons, the genuine rage, the useless violence, the pleas for justice, the demands for payment, the acts of arson, the insults, the underpaid teachers and nurses and the confident buyers and sellers of everything and the words BLACK and VICTIM in bold type on the front page of the newspapers, and the handsome young blond policeman trying to do his job. They heard all of the city’s one hundred and four languages and all its slang, its argot, filth, radio stations, its music, advertisements and sirens, and they also heard the calm, educated voice which rose over everything saying, A lot of our people, many of our people who are gathered together here tonight understand that tonight we celebrate the fact that this great city of ours is once again on the way to being great again, and we can say that with pride, we can celebrate, and, you know, they are glad to join us now in this celebration; this is surely a time for us all to join together, to enjoy and admire. But let us also remember our future and think of our children and the city which they will inherit, I would just say that, and may you all have a splendid time, thank you, and they saw the lights going on all over the city, the fireworks, and the great crowds cheering, and plenty to see and plenty to buy everywhere, and amidst all this they felt entitled to walk the streets these two, they felt entitled to stand side by side, to be as remarkable as they were and yet go unremarked.
Inexplicably, no one looked at them, though they must have looked as striking as they always did when they were together. Inexplicably no one stared at them when they paused to kiss under the strings of coloured lights by the river. The waiter did not look at them twice when he brought them their drinks. The band did not stop playing when they started to dance with all the other couples, a slow waltz; for some reason no one turned to watch when they left the dance floor hand in hand and went on through the crowds and into the night to begin their journey home.
And when they got home at four a.m. the night did not end there for them, but went on until way past the dawn, and they were for that night and for several other nights of that remarkable year perfect, perfect, perfect.
The reason why they couldn’t get hold of Mother that night was that she wasn’t at The Bar. And the reason why someone else at The Bar hadn’t answered the phone was that The Bar wasn’t open any more. Boy and O were the last ones in town to know that The Bar had been shut for the seven days of their mourning, and in fact was never to open again, at least, not to open in the same way, with Mother running it. When they heard that, they realised that Mother wasn’t just leaving them alone for a few days with their grief or shock, as she had once left them alone with their happiness; she was gone. She had walked out of the door and she was gone.
A week later, the cheques began to arrive.
The first one just had written on the back, So you see, I still love you both.
The next one came with a postcard enclosed; it said, Darlings, I just couldn’t stand it any longer.
A second postcard, which arrived the very next morning, as if Mother was eager to explain herself, said, And I realised that you didn’t need a Mother any more.
The third cheque, a week later, expanded on this point further, or rather the letter which accompanied it did:
Darlings,
I realised that leaving was one solution. I feel that I’ve done my time, you’ve all heard my song by now, you’ve had all of me, and if The Bar has to close, well, there are others. And God knows I’ve set you two up. I hope that Gary and co. have organised the selling off of my books, feathers etc properly like I asked them to, some of them were worth quite a lot. I want all the money to go to the annual collection; can you make sure my instructions are being followed, O, god knows we need every penny this year of all years.
You should be very proud of me, boys, and not sad at all; all I took was the make-up, the Vechten photographs in a big envelope and all the jewellery, which of course I can’t wear here.
