Blue Skies (13 page)

I walked slowly back to the house and went round the back. It was quiet. The chickens had fled.

I entered the kitchen. Just inside the door a vase of dried grasses was lying smashed on the flagstones. Jars of herbs had been emptied out on to the floor; their fragrance hung in the air. The old Chinese tea canister had been upended on the table, and as I watched, it slowly rolled to the edge and clattered to the floor. I walked over to pick it up. Bright orange dried lentils scrunched noisily underfoot. I noticed that the red-and-gold lacquer on the tea canister was badly scratched. I found the lid and put it back on the shelf. Shredded cigarettes clogged the sink. Every container in the kitchen had been emptied. The contents of a box of soap powder lay over everything, an unseasonal snow. There wasn't a sound. I was too scared to call out, thinking of death. I saw his body lying tangled in a heap of bright old clothes, his tall lizard-skin boots standing empty nearby. A blaze of distorted sound flared through the serving hatch. It adjusted itself, the volume settling down to an electronic roar. Not sunny. Not nice.

Do you, Mr Jones?

The cracked voice crept and threatened round the walls, sliming them with menace. I went into the room. Records and books were thrown everywhere. Beautiful cushions had been cut to pieces; their creamy stuffing made earthbound clouds on the floor. He was sitting on the rug in front of the large empty fireplace, curled over, his arms cuddling his knees. I sat beside him. He lifted his face. A purpling knuckle graze spread from the corner of his mouth up over his left cheekbone. Tiny horseshoe-shaped tooth marks welled with scarlet along his lower lip. His nose ran, and he wiped it on the back of his hand. He sniffed and spoke. He said they had taken some dried basil away in a plastic bag. It was going to the laboratory to be analysed. They were sure when they found it that they'd got him this time. He started to laugh, making his lip bleed. Bright blood clung in thick strands across his teeth as his lips drew back in laughter. I said I was sorry this had happened. He asked what it had to do with me. He was worried about the effect it would have on his wife. As he spoke, the old blue station wagon pulled up outside.

I stood at the window as Gloria walked round, neat in her school-teacher clothes, to the child's side of the car. She opened the door, and the boy climbed out clutching a spilling armful of his bright school paintings. They turned hand in hand towards the house. Seeing me through the window, they smiled and waved. I ran to the back door to try to tell them what had happened before they walked in and found it. I met her. The boy was dawdling behind, searching under the bushes for the chickens, calling to them to come to him, his paintings falling forgotten in the dust.

‘The police have been here,' I said. ‘They were searching for drugs. They found nothing, but they made a mess looking. We'll clear it up quickly. It won't take long.'

I ushered her in like a guest. She walked across to the table and stood trickling handfuls of spilt tea through her fingers as she looked round the kitchen. The boy came in. He said nothing, but started a kind of flat-footed shuffle over the crunchy mess on the floor, enjoying the noise it made under his shoes, swaying to the music from the next room.

‘Is he here?'

‘He's next door.'

She went out. The boy and I stood staring at each other. The record stopped. The needle scratched loudly across its surface.

‘Ouch,' said the boy. ‘Daddy gets cross if I do that.'

Angry voices were coming through the hatch. I shut it. The boy sat, head bent, at the table, tracing patterns in the tea leaves with his finger. He said he was hungry. I got him a glass of milk and picked some untrampled biscuits up from the floor for him. When he had finished I asked him where the broom was kept. We fetched it together. I swept everything on the floor into a heap while he cleared the table, carefully adding his small hands of tea-leaves to the debris on the floor—he frowned with concentration, as if constructing a house of cards. We swept everything into a cardboard box and carried it out to the incinerator.

We came back inside—someone was crying in the next room. I put all the empty jars and containers back in their places and the boy ran the water hard to unclog the sink. He didn't ask why the place was in such a mess. We were just finishing, and I was wondering what to do with him now when there was a loud crash of breaking glass from the next room. The child shrieked in fright and ran towards the sound. He was wearing long grey socks, with narrow blue bands round the tops, and incredibly English-looking brown leather sandals. The backs of his knees looked golden-brown and very vulnerable. That is what I thought. I stood in the kitchen thinking it over and over, until outside the station wagon started up. ‘Daddy's gone, daddy's gone,' wailed the child from the next room. I went in.

They were both standing gazing through the shattered window. She turned to me.

‘He's gone to see his sister. To tell her how awful, how bourgeois we all are, I suppose. It's a shame he had to leave through the window.' The child's wails became louder. She picked him up, told him not to mind. ‘Daddy will be back. You'll see.'

‘When will he come back?'

‘I don't know when exactly. But he will come. Perhaps tomorrow. He'll probably sleep at Aunty's tonight.'

She dropped him still sobbing into a chair and searched through the records on the floor, picking one up and putting it on. It was a child's record with stories and music. A cheerful song about a pirate with a wooden leg who sailed on the deep blue sea filled the room. The child stood next to it, chewing his thumb, still sniffing. After listening for a minute or two, he shuffled off to his room, returning with scissors and a pile of old magazines to cut up.

‘Somebody's been in my room too. It's all messed up. The bed's all thrown on the floor. Has someone been sleeping in it today?'

‘You sound like the three bears,' said his mother. They both laughed.

‘Who's been sleeping in my bed?' he shouted, deep-voiced as any father bear.

‘Now you stay here and we'll fix everything up nicely again.' As she spoke she started putting the records back in their sleeves, not looking to see which record belonged in which cover. I gathered up the ruined cushions and carried them outside to join the cardboard box. The room was quickly made tidy again—neat and empty—but the broken window remained. It was important to fix it. Hot days. Cold nights.

Gloria went into her husband's workroom and came back with a large strip of unprimed canvas.

‘He won't like us doing this. Serves him right. There's a horrible mess in there. Lots of drawings torn up for some reason. I'd better not touch anything. He must be feeling bad about it, but it's his own fault. He didn't say where he was going last night but it was pretty obvious. I said there would be trouble. He said he didn't care. But he cares now all right.'

I felt close to her and happy. I saw him as a ridiculous figure, capering off somewhere, on the horizon.

We nailed the canvas over the window area. The late afternoon sun filtered through, and the room became pale as oatmeal. Next we went into the bedroom. Two mattresses lay on the floor. Unsuccessful efforts had been made to rip one open. The loose floorboards had been taken up, exposing Ben's old clothes collection. Gloria sat pulling them out. She picked up a
crêpe
de Chine
dress, covered in a seed-packet print of sweet peas in bloom—one of his favourites, his World War Two tart's dress: we had invented street lamps for him to stand under in it, singing the chorus of ‘Lili Marlene'. She held it against herself and strutted across the room. She pirouetted, waved a grotesquely limp wrist and shrieked ‘Bloody hell. What next? My husband the transvestite. Look at all this stuff.'

She scrabbled among it. Stray garments wheeled over her shoulder and draped themselves over the furniture. ‘Look at this. It's unbelievable. Where did he get all this stuff from? He's mad. Everyone's right. He's bloody mad.'

She rushed over to her clothes chest. She jerked open the lid. She put back her head and wailed. ‘He's been interfering with my clothes. He's been in here making them all crumpled and dirty. Look at the marks on this.' She waved the old pink velour at me like an overambitious matador. ‘I'll never get them out. It's all spoilt.'

She wept. She swore. She hammered the wall with her fists. She thought of her son nearby and stopped. She gathered an armful of things and ran through the house with them, out to the incinerator. I collected those that remained. We fed the bright things to the flames and stood side by side in sisterly concern and watched them burn. I left her, standing still and tearstained, the chief mourner at the cremation. Back in the house I finished clearing up. The boy helped me with his room. Patiently he pinned back the pictures that had been torn from his wall and returned his books to the shelf, singing and talking to himself all the time. I put his bed back together and made it. Underneath it I found his teddy bear, decapitated in a pool of stuffing. He didn't notice as I held it behind my back, edged over to the window, and threw it out, praying that he wouldn't miss it until I was gone. Together we went out to fetch his mother. She prepared a meal, which we all ate together at the kitchen table. The child grew tired. He whined throughout the meal at the lack of salt. His mother took him to his bed. He took a long time to settle down, calling her back over and over to read him just one more story, to kiss him, to tuck him up. Finally he slept and his mother and I sat on the rug in front of the fireplace.

She apologised that there was no coffee to drink. ‘Ben doesn't like it. He says it's bad for you. I keep a jar of it in the staff room at school. It's the first thing I do each morning when I get there, make a cup of coffee. Such bliss. One of life's little pleasures.' She laughed.

She asked me if I had to leave that night when the bus came by, saying that if I was there she wouldn't have to think about things seriously until tomorrow. I wondered what things. I said it was all right, that I didn't have to go, that I didn't want to go.

We found wood in a shed and built a fire. Putting out the lights, we sat in front of it, glowing redly at each other. There seemed nothing to say. Pieces of wood expanded and popped softly. It was getting much too hot. She spoke and grew pale. Did I know, she asked, that when a body was cremated in India, its relatives stood in silence round the flames, waiting to hear a loud pop. When it came, they clapped and cheered and gave thanks, because the small explosion meant that the dead person's spirit had burst through the skull and was free of the body at last. I said that I hadn't heard of it, but that India was a country I'd often felt I should like to visit. As I was thinking of all the weird things I had heard about India, she said ‘I know what it feels like. Often I can feel something tapping about in my head. I think it's my spirit lurking round my skull looking for a weak spot to get out through.'

I supposed she was joking, but she looked very serious. She said that the doctor called it migraine, but she knew the cause, if not the name. She said she also knew the cure.

I didn't ask her what it was, because James had appeared in the doorway. I was used to James's comings and goings being announced by a fanfare of squeaks and banging doors, like those of a giant mouse, if not a rat. I blinked, expecting him to vanish. Instead he said hello and smiled very nicely. I said hello back and started to laugh, suddenly realising that he must have left the car on the road and crept round the house to catch us out. Gloria looked on in astonishment as I snorted and rocked about beside her on the rug. She saw James and fluttered her fingers up at him in what I considered an arch and irritating way. She had picked up a lot of these annoying mannerisms while she was away. I supposed that that was what was meant by travel broadening the mind. Meanwhile James hovered in the doorway clutching a new bottle of whisky wrapped in green tissue paper.

‘Sorry to barge in on you like this, girls. Didn't know it was ladies' night. I thought Ben might be about. There's something I want to say to him.'

It seemed best not to enquire what. ‘Well, he's not. He's gone out. To see his sister. So you've wasted your time—come all this way for nothing.'

‘Not really. I'll run you home if you're ready. Mum's pretty wild with you. She says you ran out on her this morning when she told you she wasn't well. She reckoned I should come and fetch you back.'

I ignored this. ‘Well, I'm not ready to leave just yet,' I said. ‘Anyway, Gloria's got a headache, and she could do with a drink. Couldn't you, love?' Gloria didn't reply but sat cross-legged peering into the fire.

I rose and went through to the kitchen. James followed me out and stood in the doorway, watching as I stretched to get glasses from the cupboard. As I turned to leave the room, he slowly rearranged himself so that he blocked the doorway. This obscurely threatening behaviour surprised me. Mild-mannered reporter Clark Kent was changing into his Superman gear before my very eyes.