Frankie Styne & the Silver Man (10 page)

Liz held out her hand. If she took the chicken she wouldn't have to speak, other than to say thanks. It was easier. Alice smiled and settled herself against Liz's gatepost.

‘You haven't seen anything?' she asked. ‘No? I know it's a cheek to ask, but what can I do? The worst thing,' she continued, ‘is that it's spoiling our sex life. You can imagine. If
he
doesn't want to, I just flip. And even when he does want to, half the time
I'm
putting on an act. I know I shouldn't, but supposing he thought, well, I've stayed with her and she doesn't even fancy me! See what I mean? I have to take my temperature every morning—the sperms live for three days, you see, and the eggs for forty-eight hours—well, how am I supposed to forget about it all, doing that? Down today, three tenths of a degree. So we've got to do it tonight or the month's wasted . . . You must think I'm a real misery, but that's not my nature, not before this happened—you wouldn't recognise me!'

Jim was asleep. He really did, Liz thought, have a knack for cutting out of conversations like this. Perhaps, eventually, she'd learn to do it too; not only not to speak but also not to hear. One day she would go into a trance. Just fall asleep on her feet and wake up in the Zone . . . I could buy wax earplugs, she thought suddenly, for the meantime. But maybe it would be cheating.

‘. . . 
She's
managed it. So it's me that's the problem. Unless hers isn't his of course . . .'

When they send babies like you from the Zone, Liz thought at Jim, like ambassadors, like Jesus—Henry Kay was just a vehicle—it must often be a waste. If a person is lucky enough and knows what they've been given, they can learn. But most people screw it up,  do everything they can to make the baby like all the others, and failing that they send it away to a home like Purvis suggested. But I won't, she thought at him. I know a Silver Lining when I see one.

‘In this day and age these things aren't accidents, are they? And it wasn't just him that made this happen. He wanted to get out of it but he couldn't, he says. Like being in a swamp . . .'

The chicken was cold and slippery. Liz transferred it carefully to her other hand and flexed the freed fingers to warm them up. Every word avoided, she told herself, is a tiny step towards the Zone.

‘Haven't you got any gloves? I'll look you out a pair . . .' I wasn't expecting, Liz thought, to have to hold a frozen chicken for half an hour . . . Did it count, though, thinking replies? Probably—

‘I'd like to ring her up, tell her exactly what I think of her. But I don't know her number. The note I found about the baby wasn't signed. In his sandwich box! Said she'd like him to be at the birth, whatever he decides to do about it all in the end! I ask you! Just signed “A.” No address, and I can't find one in his things. Maybe he never wrote it down. You know how you go somewhere once and just recognise the house by what's in the garden . . .'

If the world were in some way warmer, Liz thought at Jim, perhaps your brain would quicken into life, the way goldfish do when ice melts on the pond. If the earth heated up perhaps you'd be one of the few to survive. Perhaps—

‘. . . Or maybe she lives in a big house you couldn't mistake from any other, like that one with the round window on Kimberlake Avenue. Last night he had the nerve to tell me I ought to feel sorry for her, left on her own with a baby. I said, do
you
then? He said, no, she was a bitch. So I said, why the hell should
I?
I could murder her.' Alice closed her eyes for a moment, opened them again.

‘A baby would be something solid,' she said.

True, thought Liz, feeling the sling pulling her shoulders forward. When Silly was born, she remembered, he was only about the size of this damn chicken. She gazed steadfastly at the top of his head, knowing that Alice's eyes were seeking hers out.

‘Not just to match hers, but a real thing between us. And something separate, for me . . .'

You are growing, Silly boy, Liz thought, all the time, every minute of the day, so many grammes a week. One day you'll be a Silver Man. That was almost frightening. But at the same time he was staying the same, frozen in time—again like the chicken—and somehow that was comforting.

‘I hope she has a miscarriage.' Alice's words skipped from her lips, light as table-tennis balls. ‘I'm telling you because I can't tell Tom things like this. Doesn't put me in a good light! Sometimes the phone rings and I think it might be her calling from the hospital in floods of tears and I
rush
to answer it. Born dead, or with something wrong with it—webbed feet, a great blotch on its face, no brain—terrible, but look what she's done to me. I get an acid feeling just here, all day. That doesn't help with the sex life either!'

Liz tried to ease the straps of Jim's sling and the chicken slipped from her other hand. It hit the ground with a crunch. Automatically Alice bent to pick it up, wiping grit from the plastic with her sleeve. It seemed to jolt her into another groove. ‘Have you got a baking tray big enough? I've an old one you could keep.' She peered at Jim. ‘Solids soon, I suppose—you could always pop around and do a batch in my liquidiser, then keep it in our freezer.' She passed the chicken back. ‘Such a
good
baby, isn't she? Has she smiled yet? That's supposed to be quite something, their first smile . . .

‘I can't see how we are going to get pregnant if we hardly ever
do
it. Did you know, some women are allergic to their husbands' sperm?' She laughed, but at the same time her eyes scanned Liz's face for reaction, making it impossible to think about frozen chickens or the Zone or anything at all except wanting to escape.

‘Sometimes I do feel a bit sore the next day, but that's probably just not being into it. I'm having a test, though, just in case. Spend half my time in the doctor's these days. Sometimes I think the high point of my life was passing my driving test, but ever since all it's led to is going to the shops and the bloody doctors! You know, I almost wish I
was.
Allergic. That'd settle it once and for all, wouldn't it?' The stare continued. There was only one way to end it.

‘Yes,' Liz mumbled, tucking the chicken under her arm. We don't need a baking tray. We don't need a liquidiser or smiles, she thought. We've got quite enough things and we know where we are.

‘See you soon,' said Alice.

Hope not, thought Liz.

Frank peered into the bathroom mirror—another shot set up by the documentary crew. They'd carefully avoided showing his face close-up so far, but now they were going in for the kill . . . The mirror was the only one in the house, small and round. Normally he avoided it. It magnified, just right for arty bastards like them. It magnified his ugliness. It showed the pores, the stretches and slackness, the lines and hairs. A single improvement would have no discernible effect. Even if you got rid of the red birthmark and covered the whole thing in new skin, removed the pouch-like cheeks, smoothed over the dimple, bang in the middle of the chin, unshavable, dark, huge. Even if you grew a beard, which he'd tried. Puberty had added insult to the original injury, and age had confirmed it.

Skin should be smooth and evenly coloured, like Katie Rumbold's silk. This was scarcely a face at all—it was a waxwork, warmed and then dropped on a dirty floor. He leaned closer and soaped it. He began to shave. The razor hissed. His breath came and went in time to the strokes. Anyone could see. And those bastards would be quite happy to say it as well . . .

The documentary would be followed by a panel dis­cussion: ‘One can only admire the man for making a fortune of such a raw deal . . .'

‘It's obvious that he can never have—'

Drying himself, Frank noticed a speck of blood on the towel. A disproportionate wave of misery rose up inside him, turning halfway between his chest and eyes into fury. It bore him to the kitchen where he sharpened a knife and began to slice mushrooms, very fine and very fast.

He was late, because of the lunch. He was not actually hungry, again because of the lunch. He skinned an onion and began to slice that. He imagined a television studio built as a combination of boxing ring and cockpit. The imaginary audience tittered, then roared and stamped their feet, threw things.

‘Mr Styne—' no—they'd call him
John
—‘John, surely it's the case that you write about your own ugliness? How does it make you—?' The camera was a kind of gun. It homed in on him, then moved closer and closer, point-blank. It magnified, just like the shaving mirror. It would be hard not to show he was hurt, with the lights on his face as it wrinkled and twisted, shining with mucus, his mouth opening in a roar. Very, very hard. He would be unable to speak. They would film his speechlessness.

Really controversial, Katie Rumbold would say with a gleam in her eye, as she egged them on. Good for sales. He sliced and sliced. He threw the vegetables in the pan and the oil frothed. The kitchen filled with the rich smell of onions and the subtle aroma of fungi, the sweat of fat. He turned on the fan. If only it could extract thoughts, suck them away and leave peace behind . . . Suppose what was inside did count more, as his mother had so often said, in this very house, this very room, before everything changed? In the last years her voice had grown thin and querulous. He had cooked for her, but she disappeared inch by inch . . .

‘What's inside counts' assumed, for no reason at all, that the inside was always better. But suppose it was worse? It could well be worse. He crushed mustard seeds. Inside even beautiful people was likely to include a lot of shit . . . literally. As for metaphorically—he smelled the faintest touch of burning, lowered the heat—he did at least eat well. Maybe his shit was better than most, but it was not a lot of consolation, because it was still shit and anyway insides took longer to discover than outsides.

How did the insides get there anyway? People, thought Frank Styne, cutting fresh ginger root into tiny cubes, are not like this; not a rich flavour and firm texture inside a shabby carapace that can simply be peeled away. He slipped a sliver of the fibrous yellow flesh into his mouth. People are more complex. The outside affects what the inside becomes. People are marinated and cooked, over time. The flavours blend. The recipes are accidental. Circumstantial. Sometimes the results are appetising, sometimes not.

He pared the pork thin, cutting across the fibres, patted it carefully dry and soaked it on a plate in the juice of a lime. He set miniature saucers of spices alongside the hob in order of their use. He tested the rice. He adjusted the flame, threw in the meat. He turned on the radio.

‘The issue here,' a nasal voice said, ‘is one of genre. It's a case of treading a knife-edge between cliché and its transgression or transmogrification. What's so exciting about his work is the way in which—'

‘Surely much of it's just a rather infantile kind of comic strip, better written, arguably, than other such, but not, nonetheless, something that should be commended?'

‘But look at this passage for instance on page 145—the scene where Annie Smith is blinded with a hot iron in the bathroom. The whole point is: it could be, but it isn't. Styne has always pushed the form to its outer limits and then beyond—completely transformed it—and I think he does that because—'

It was for real. With the end of the spatula, Frank, shortlisted for the Hanslett prize, cut them off. Almost immediately the phone rang. Like a fool, he answered it.

‘Joel Freeman here. Congratulations, Mr Styne. Long overdue, if I may say so! Always been a fan. I'm dreadfully sorry to ring at this hour, but you've been unavailable all afternoon. You must be horrendously busy, but I would love to do a feature . . .' Frank hung up.

It was possible, he thought a little later as he began to work, that Katie Rumbold had already known about the shortlist at lunchtime. It was more than possible. More than probable. Perhaps she'd fixed the whole thing. The words of her letter and of Pete Magee's statement about contractual obligations mingled with the real discussion on the radio, the imaginary documentary, the hard-pressed words on the page, and multiplied even as the monster pumped his vile juices into his wife; as, after, he lay heavily over her insensate body.

‘Slowly,' he wrote, ‘I felt my scaly lids draw together over my eyes. My muscles relaxed and my terrible sex organ began to shrink; and, as it did so, I could feel myself change with each heavy breath back into the man I had been. My breath grew sweeter, my odour salty and fresh. Later we woke, man and wife, convinced that we had suffered a nightmare . . .' But neither of them, particularly the wife, would be able to explain or to forget the blood on the hearth rug.

The phone rang again: Katie Rumbold. Frank wrote on and let it play unanswered through the machine; her voice, loud with triumph, echoed through the house. ‘I knew it, John! I expect you're celebrating. Ring me in the morning . . .'

Together the husband and wife would perform and wait for the home pregnancy test, and later visit Dr Villarossa to put her in charge of antenatal care. They'd hold hands and visit their nursery, fingering the mobile and smoothing the diminutive sheets. There was peace between them, of sorts. Now and then, separately, each would remember the monstrous coupling, and see it as a dream.

The next big scene was the attempted abortion, after which the husband would lock Sandra into one room, doing with her what Pete Magee wanted, until her time came. There were pictures of pregnant women in one of the magazines . . . He leafed through. Many of the images looked physically impossible, for one or both parties. He considered for some time one of a woman crouched, her wrists thrust through her legs and tied to her ankles with washing line, making a banana-like bundle of hands and feet. You can't see her face at all, he thought.