A Year of Marvellous Ways (4 page)

5

F
rom Victoria Station Drake took the underground
to Farringdon and came up the stairs into a chill misty dusk. A large rat passed in front and looked at him with indignation. Yeah, I’m back, said Drake and he walked up Turnmill Street with the constant rumble of trains to his left, the ever-watchful dome of St Paul’s behind. The air smelt grubby, tasted dusty. He’d forgotten what it was like. So many people rushing towards him heading for home. But he hadn’t forgotten, not really; it was in his marrow, this city, and had given him life. The air stirred as a dark cloud-front moved briskly across the rooftops. He picked up speed and crossed the road into Clerkenwell Green towards the streets beyond. He managed to get to the lodging house moments before a heavy rain fell.

He waited at a small table in the hallway as damp traffic clambered past. Overhead a body fell upon a bed and the ceiling creaked and the light above him swung to and fro, casting him intermittently into shadow. The smell of wet wool mingled with the smell of overcooked shepherd’s pie and he could feel the rise of nausea again. A young woman passed him and he tried not to look, she tried not to smile. His face was coloured by two summers of a French sun, his body shaped by war and building. His hat was French, his cigarettes too. He travelled light; at his feet a small suitcase carried all the necessities accumulated along the way. He watched the woman climb the stairs. Good legs. In the living room behind him, Louis Armstrong sang low from the wireless.

He glanced at the telephone next to him and realised there was no one in this world he could possibly call. He felt his chest tighten, felt the languid motion of liquid beneath his feet. He leant forwards and breathed in a deep slow lungful of air.

Room’s ready, said Mrs Marsh, the landlady, coming down the stairs and handing him a set of keys and a wad of cut-up newspaper.

Lavatory’s outside, she said. Don’t use too much.

Ah, England.

The room was shabby but the sheets were clean. The reading lamp cast a pitiful light across the bed and he went to turn on the overhead light but saw that the bulb was missing. Blue flock wallpaper peeled away at the ceiling edge where a haze of mould had made its home, and a garish picture of chrysanthemums hung above the headboard. He crouched down and switched on the electric fire; one bar blushed but little heat came. He went to the window and looked out on to a dirty night made dirtier still by the drab buildings that huddled either side of him, some boarded up, one derelict. He pulled the curtains to. He took the letter out from his jacket pocket and placed it on the mantelpiece in full view. It seemed different somehow, looking at it back in England, the first part of its journey complete. What he thought was mud was actually old blood, and he caught himself apologising for not coming back sooner. It sounded like someone else’s voice. It was just all a mess, he kept saying, and he had never heard himself say that before and it shocked him because he sounded like a child, all those sorrys.

He sat on the bed. The mattress, an unwelcome lump beneath his arse. He took out a packet of Gauloises. His hands were shaking again and he wondered when that had started. He lit a cigarette and blew the pungent smoke towards the mottled shade above. In the dingy light it swirled and hovered, thick like mist. He closed his eyes and lay back; imagined he was warm, not cold. Imagined he could hear the sound of seagulls rather than the argument next door. Imagined he was anywhere else other than here in this dismal room.

It was after the war that he had stumbled to the south of France where the light was soft and the welcome real. He smiled, seeing again his café at sunrise, chairs laid out in the square, a small black coffee as thick as dirt, fishing boats returning to port, selling their catch of octopus and urchins on the quay. Pastel shades of fishermen’s cottages, so beautiful in the syrupy dawn light. He had hauled vegetables from vans, he had served drinks and built decks and fishing sheds, fuck, he’d done whatever they’d wanted him to do and there was always work for him, the Liberator of France. Women had kept an eye on him too, sprayed perfume in intimate places just in case, but he stayed away from the women, seeing that his dick was as soft as brie.

Days off, he walked aimlessly around, pretending that nothing bad had happened, that the violence he had seen, the violence he had enacted on men like himself, on women like his mother, had been worth it and had left him untouched, with a heart still capable of care. War had been his first experience of violence. He’d run bets for violent men as a kid, who hadn’t? But they’d seen something in him, a fissure of gentleness, of innocence, and had taken him under their ample wings and protected him as if he was the mirror of their own lost souls.

Days off, after rain, he built sandcastles on the beach. Soon, castles turned into villages, ruddy intricate things with moats and boats, fairy-tale imaginings that soothed him. Digging like a dog, he made sure that everything unpleasant – everything fetid – was buried like shit in the sand.

Oh, he could have lived there all right. Sitting at a table in the outside for ever and for ever unknown, never thinking about the letter or returning to England because in his mind it was as far away as the moon and just as blue. It was perfect. For a whole year. So bloody
parfait
.

But then his mind began to play tricks. Memories had taken root in the cool of that bottomless dark and had broken through like marram grass, binding and enduring, and soon he saw faces again and smelt the acrid stench of burning hair, and so he took off in the night. No goodbyes, no thank yous. Just him running from what had been good.

He kept away from stations and ports and headed inland and further north to the hidden hamlets and farmsteads in need of men. He slept in barns and the movement of the cows was good company in the twilight. He lived like a monk, quiet and alone. Did his job and ate bread and cheese and the occasional stew, and he never spent the money that came his way. And then one night, outside Tours, the daughter of the house crept to the barn and bedded down beside him. She unbuttoned him and took him in hand. He was embarrassed, blamed the proximity of livestock with all their snorting and all their pissing. But she knew a lot for a girl of eighteen and she bent down and took him in her mouth and he grew hard in her mouth and that seemed to quieten the cows. He came quickly. He didn’t move and she didn’t move. He stroked her hair to see if she had fallen asleep. She lifted her head, her mouth glistening and inviting. Nobody had ever done that to him before and he doubted anyone would again, so he kissed her hard and even the discomfort of tasting himself couldn’t halt the strange peace he momentarily felt.

They sat side by side, backs against the old barn wall. Strangers. Not talking, not hoping. She left at the sound of her father’s call.
Adieu
, she said. Farewell. Alone in the stall, the fetid stink from the straw softened and became for him the smell of a rimy cheese, and he felt so hungry he could have chewed his fucking hand off. He ate the last of his bread and realised that it wasn’t hunger that he felt but loneliness. It was an empty space where a heart should have been. That’s when he decided to return to England. He needed to find something that belonged in his chest, if only to stop the hunger.

Drake stubbed out his cigarette. He got up from the bed and pulled back the curtains. The pavements glistened but the rain had stopped. He lifted his suitcase on to the bed and flicked open the catch. He took out a half-drunk bottle of gin, put it into his raincoat pocket and was about to open the door when his sight was drawn back to the letter. Tomorrow, he whispered. I promise you, tomorrow. He left his room and the argument next door and headed down the stairs, out into a darkness unadorned by barrage balloons and crisscross shafts of searching light. Headed out into the sweet silence of a world at peace.

6

T
he streets were empty. Night had devoured the
living like an ancient plague. Faint outlines of buildings and people could still be seen in the desolate maws where daisies now grew. Ghosts had never bothered him, only the living had, and occasionally he heard footsteps behind but on turning saw his own edginess startle in a streak of gaslight. He veered down St John Street where St Paul’s rose in the distance. A city of saints run by sinners, that’s what the aunts used to say. Maybe they were right about that, he thought. The loading bays of the meat market were deserted. Just him and paper bags swirling in the gathering breeze.

He wasn’t shocked by the devastation. How could he be? He had witnessed the bombardment of Caen. Waves of bombs had blasted that city until nothing was left and they had marched into the narrow rubble-choked streets, undercover of the dust and smoke, and the air was corrugated by the winds of fire, by the scream of falling masonry, and the pathetic cry of the invisible injured. The dead affected him less as war went on but the decimation of homes choked him. Hundreds of years of brick upon careful brick gone in minutes. And when civilians climbed out blinking and trembling from the cellars, gradually they began to clap and to cheer and it fuckin’ did his head in – was he supposed to take a bow? He hadn’t thought it at the time, of course, but he had afterwards. That was why his hands shook, he was sure of it. Everyone had a limit.

He picked up his pace now and hurried on down past the hospital, down towards Old Bailey. He didn’t know what he was expecting to see but when he caught sight of the old pub on the corner and the grubby tenement next door, he felt dizzy, seasick almost. Something caught in his throat, something good, he knew it had to be because his eyes were stinging and his nose was snotting. That’s where he had spent his first eleven years, with his mum, of course. Two rooms for two people; it had been enough. And he wished he could have turned back the years on that fast-moving clock and told her that. He heard chatter and laughter inside and he stood by the window and peered in. No Mr and Mrs Betts tending bar, no Mr Toggs playing on the piano, no Iris, no Lilly with their grubby stories of sex and men. Sixteen years had passed and everyone he had known there was long gone. But he knew it wasn’t war that had taken them, simply life because that’s what it does. No, he wouldn’t go in, not that night. He closed his eyes and listened to the familiar sound of a train and a trolleybus rumble by.

He walked aimlessly through the streets where he’d played as a kid, where he’d waited for the neighbourhood men to return from factories or pubs so he could latch on to them and imagine them as older brothers, and sometimes fathers. They were his lemon drop moments: sweet-sour moments that had made his mouth water, and later, his eyes too. For when light would fade and tea was called, those same men would prise him away like a bur and head inside to the light of their own families. And he would stand and watch through the windows the scene of this drama, sometimes for minutes, sometimes longer, and when time was called and the curtains were drawn, he would turn away gutted, embarrassed even, at the burning realisation of all he didn’t have. Of all he would never have. And those moments buried down into his legs and stopped him working right, for when he should have run he stayed put. And when he should have stayed put, he ran and the running felt good to a fatherless boy.

Missy was the only person he had ever told about this and she said that moments like that make us stronger. An
antigen
, that’s what she used to call it, like an inoculation, to protect against the loneliness of the future. Missy said a lot of daft things, except the things she should have said and then she wasn’t there any more, and no one, he realised, had ever invented an antigen to protect him from that.

He’d last seen her – Jesus, when was it? – autumn of ’39? Could it have been? Just come out of the Savoy, she had, all done up like a movie star with hair so perfectly waved and a waist so small you blinked you missed it. On her arm a man as flashy as a bracelet. When she saw him she beamed and shouted, Freddy! because she was the only one to call him that, and she unpeeled herself from Flashman’s grip and headed over to him with arms out wide with a smile so red, so genuine, so bloody wide. She said, You’ve turned into a right looker, Freddy. Always knew you would, and she touched his cheek and felt him blush.

He said, I’m nineteen. I’m getting out of here as soon as I can.

What d’you wanna do that for?

Someone has to fight. Why not me?

A hundred reasons, doll, and Freddy laughed.

Flashman hailed a taxi. Missy let go of Freddy’s hand and began to walk away.

Where you heading? he asked.

Café de Paris. Ken Johnson and his band.

I like to listen to him.

I’d say come with me, but—

Say it and I will.

Oh Freddy.

He followed her to the waiting door.

Not dressed quite right, am I? he said.

Good enough for me, she said, and she slid into the back seat as smooth as the silk she wore. You make sure you come back safe, you hear me? Keep your head down, you little idiot.

I will.

And come and find me, Freddy.

Where will you be?

Café de Paris, of course!

Drake was running now. Down past St Paul’s, islanded and adrift in its sea of dust. Down Godliman Street and across Queen Victoria. His collar was up and he knew where he was running to, could run it blindfold. The salted muddy smell of boyhood rang a hundred bells and it was a good sound even though he didn’t feel so good. Down the narrow cobbled lanes towards the wharfs he went, a single feeble gaslamp lit, and his breathing was loud and his memories were too, as he neared the wet steps calling him down towards the Thames.

There! The river! The beautiful, the beautiful river.

And that old dog of a river watched him come. Had watched him cross in the tail lights of a passing motor car. Lit up briefly, he was. Collar high, and shoulders hunched, blowing warm nicotine breath on to his cold calloused hands. Brow furrowed. Eyes lost. Old Thames wept and the waters rose a sad mucky inch. So different from the boy I knew, said river.

Drake stopped at the edge of the warehouse wall. The water was bloated, shimmering in the gloaming. Silver crests licked light from the night and splashed against the stairs, caught the front of his shoes. He felt the familiar heavy pounding in his chest as he crouched down towards the current. The river slowed in his presence, made him lean in, made him listen.

Don’t tempt it, he could hear his mother say. Stand back! It finds its way into the strongest of things and rips ’em apart – a wall, a jetty, a
family
– it ruins everything including love. You keep away now, Francis Drake. You keep away.

His mother had a lot to say about water, had a lot to say about most things except his father. Just that his eyes were blue and he was a sailor and he never came back.

He never came back and his eyes were blue, You loved him so but he never loved you. Ta dah!

Drake opened the bottle of gin. He grimaced as he swallowed the first mouthful.

What was his name, Ma?

Stop asking me questions.

What was my father’s name?

Lucky.

What kind of name’s Lucky?

The only one he had. Now sleep.

The power station was pumping out muck and a fine mist was drawing over the city. Mist or smog, he wasn’t sure which, but the lights looked pretty in the haze. The familiar cranes that rose opposite stood mute and melancholy like tired old men keeping watch over the city. Drake took off his raincoat and placed it in the shadow of the wall. He sat down, wrapped his jacket more tightly around himself. It was a damp world and it crept through to his bones like the memories themselves. He lifted the bottle of gin to his lips. He sees again his mother creeping through the fog to this very shore. He is eleven and he watches her from this same spot and he watches her call out for his father who never comes home and he doesn’t understand because he is too young and he doesn’t tell anyone in case she is mad. For a whole month she did it. Backwards and forwards to the calling of the river. Then one morning she never woke up and everything changed. Something wrong with her heart, that was what the doctor had said. But Drake knew there was nothing wrong with her heart. It was just too heavy so it broke.

The sound of a brewer’s cart echoed in the mist as hoofs clopped their way across the bridge. Drake finished the remains of the bottle. He stood up groggily and threw it into the black river. He watched it bob briefly on the surface before the tide carried it down to Silvertown, to Wapping, to the open sea beyond. He felt spent. Fuckit, he was drunk, his stomach was on fire. He climbed back up to the streetlights above, to the sober majesty of St Paul’s Cathedral, to a cold lodging house with a garish painting of chrysanthemums above the bed.

He stopped. Turned back for one last muzzy look.

And that old dog of a river sighed.