Authors: Nicola Barker
‘Maybe.’
‘Why?’
She took the cup of sugar from him and said, ‘You want to come and have some tea with me? Or coffee?’
‘No . . . I . . .’
His stutter was so pronounced that Eugenie didn’t wait around to listen to the reason for his refusal. She didn’t mind. ‘OK,’ she said, phlegmatically, handing him back his cup. ‘Some other time.’
Marcus sat down on his top step and stared into the cup. Thousands of grains. Mixed in with the pure, white granules were two extraneous tea leaves. That’s me and Belinda, he thought. The world is full of millions of people, all friendly, all benign, the same. Then there’s the two of us, destined not to get along. Belinda and Marcus. Both in the circus, this small circus. Both tumblers.
He felt relieved that his early and mid-teens had involved a longstanding but secretive intimacy with American
Playboy
. He was prepared for Belinda’s lewdness, her crudeness. His father had kept an entire suitcase full of them in the attic which he had pilfered whenever he felt the inclination. Also, he had taken Latin at school, which in certain situations he found to be an invaluable linguistic tool.
Cunnus
– vulva.
Lingere
– to lick. Like choking on an oyster.
‘Hi,’
Marcus looked up and almost dropped his cup. Belinda smiled at him. ‘Look, I wanted to apologize. I guess I must’ve shocked you earlier.’
‘No . . .’
‘Well . . .’ She focused on the strong, firm line of his jaw, its determined progression from behind his ear to the tip of his chin. ‘I just saw Alberto.’
‘Ah.’
‘I don’t suppose you want to come and see my parrots?’
‘I’m . . .’
‘Allergic?’
‘No . . . I’m . . .’
‘Busy?’
‘No.’
‘Go on, they’re very friendly.’
Inside the parrots’ trailer it was cool and dark. Belinda lit a lamp but kept the flame down low. ‘It’s bed-time for them really. I like them to be well rested. Otherwise they get cross and uncooperative.’
Marcus had seen the parrots already, in the big top. He thought them quaint but unnecessary. One day he hoped to work in a human circus, a wild circus where the performers did stunts on motorbikes and didn’t use animals – camels with lopsided humps, sad, fleshy elephants, poodles with full wardrobes. Parrots.
‘You like them?’
‘I . . .’
‘You don’t like them?’
‘No . . . I . . .’
‘You like animals?’
He sighed. ‘Yes.’
She said, ‘My trailer’s adjoining. We could have tea if you like.’
He shrugged.
Belinda opened a door and led him through. Her trailer was identical to his, only full of stuff: posters, trinkets, an extra wardrobe.
‘Sit on the bed,’ she said. ‘I don’t ever bother making it into a sofa. Too much trouble. Watch the legs are out properly. It has a tendency to collapse.’ She filled the kettle.
Marcus didn’t sit down immediately. First he inspected some of the photographs on her pinboard. ‘These are . . .’
‘Me. Yes. When I was a kid. I got gymnastics medals. I was nearly in the Olympics but I sprained my wrist very badly two weeks before. I cried for a month.’
The pictures were eerie. Belinda at eight, ten, fourteen. Belinda doing headstands, handstands, flying on the high bar. Belinda with no breasts, mosquito bites, breasts like tiny buds under the thin fabric of her leotard.
Little girls; gymnastics. He always found this combination vaguely unsettling. On television, with their stiff backs, pointed toes, determined visages. Obscene. Tumbling was different. Better.
‘Coffee or tea?’
‘Coffee.’
He sat down. The bed collapsed.
‘Merde!’ This word slid out of his mouth as quickly, as smoothly as an angry cat escaping the arms of its owner.
Belinda stopped what she was doing, turned around and then started to laugh at him, at his clumsy disarray. She said, ‘You aren’t hurt, are you?’
He shook his head and dragged himself up, then tried to rearrange the coverlet and cushions. Belinda turned back, still smirking, to complete her coffee-making.
This bed reminded Marcus in its construction of the deckchairs his parents had used at home; space-efficient but impossible to set up and make secure. He pulled out the metal bar that acted as the front legs and pushed up the springs and mattress. As he lifted he saw the tortoise.
Initially, it looked to him like an exotic seashell, or a lump of wood, centuries old, glossed up by the touch of many fingers, many hands. Then he saw it shudder, noticed a head, four feet. He reached out towards it, expecting a reaction. None came. One of its eyes was open, the other shut. That couldn’t be right. He tapped its shell. Nothing.
I’m going to have to tell her now, he thought frantically, that I’ve killed her tortoise. How will I tell her? After several attempts, he said her name.
‘Belinda . . .’
‘Yeah?’
She had put two cups on to a tray. She picked up the tray and walked towards him. ‘You haven’t managed to get the bed up properly yet?’
He stared at her helplessly, as endearing and muddy-eyed as a golden retriever at tea-time. He pointed towards the tortoise. Her eyes followed the line he was indicating.
‘Smedley!’
She quickly slid the tray on top of her dresser and crouched down. ‘What’s happened to him?’
‘The . . . bed . . .’
‘He looks all squashed.’
Marcus thought this an exaggeration, but took into account the fact that he hadn’t seen the tortoise before its misadventure.
‘Is he dead?’
‘I . . .’
‘He looks dead.’ She reached out her hand as if to pick him up but then shuddered and withdrew. ‘I can’t stand the idea of something being not quite dead.’ She added tremulously, ‘If he wasn’t dead and I touched him and he moved . . .’ The thought of this made her feel queasy.
Marcus was staring at her. She saw his face – his expression a mixture of guilt and horror – and realized that these few seconds were crucial.
‘He’s dead!’ she said, and burst into tears.
‘I . . . I . . .’
For once he couldn’t think of anything to say. Usually he could think of things only couldn’t say them. Eventually he said, ‘Sorry.’
‘Tortoises,’ she said, ‘are protected. Did you know that? I never really knew what it meant, though. Protected. I never really knew. He was my grandmother’s. He lived in her garden for thirty-five years. He was called Smedley. He didn’t hibernate, only ran about in my trailer. He wasn’t terribly demonstrative, but he seemed . . . happy.’
Marcus stood up. He was eighteen. He didn’t feel sufficiently senior, sufficiently adult, experienced enough, loquacious enough, to be able to cope with this situation. He felt like phoning his mother, packing and leaving, joining that other circus, that
human
circus, that un-animalled circus. He could see it already, how good it would be.
Belinda sat down on the bed. It promptly collapsed again. Marcus had only propped up the bottom leg, he hadn’t got around to securing it properly. Belinda scrambled up. ‘Christ! If he wasn’t dead before, he is now. Christ!’
She was still crying, but was already sick of crying. Her tears weren’t sufficiently effective. He wasn’t hugging her yet, wasn’t comforting her. Why am I crying? she thought. To seduce him? That was the sum of it. She wondered idly if you could go to hell for emotional blackmail.
Marcus took a deep breath. ‘The tortoise could be hibernating.’
Belinda stopped crying in an instant and said, ‘Five words all in a row! Well done! Five words, just like that!’ She then burst out laughing. ‘Hibernating?
Please!
’
He was mortified by her laughter. She’s evil, he thought. Absolutely insincere. Absolutely unprincipled.
He’s only eighteen, she thought kindly. Poor bastard.
Marcus turned to leave, so furious now, so angry that he felt like fire, like liquid. ‘Your face . . .’ he said, struggling, choking, ‘. . . Chinese Dragon!’ Then walked out quickly.
Belinda stopped laughing after he’d gone, stood up, walked over to the mirror. Her face was still mirthful but tear-smattered. Chinese Dragon?
He was right. She looked like one of those brightly coloured, finely painted Chinese masks, the dragon faces, covered in tears, but grinning, grimacing. A frightening face, apparently, but only, she supposed, if you were Chinese.
Belinda went over to lift her mattress, pulled up the bed and kicked Smedley out from under it. He slid about on the floor like the puck in a game of ice hockey. Click, slither, thud.
Oh, well, she thought, this could’ve been sad, but I really don’t care. I could’ve shocked myself by caring, but I don’t care.
She started to laugh again. Laughing was good for you. A kind of internal aerobics. Then she heard a voice, and it was not her own. ‘Merde!’ it said, and cackled. ‘Merde! Merde! Merde!’
Belinda stopped laughing, her eyes tightened, and her mouth – quite spontaneously – performed a sudden, gorgeous, perfectly inadvertent back-bend.
Jennifer, 42, had a special gift which God had given her – out of the blue – to compensate for all the things that had happened to her in the past. All the awful things.
Jenny had the gift of knowing that something had occurred – either nice or nasty, but usually nasty – straight after it had happened. If she trod on a dog’s foot and it yelped, if the milk boiled over on to the oven, if she dropped a glass and it smashed. Well, then she would
know
. This was the gift that God had given her and she thanked God for it.
Jenny lived in a small complex of sheltered housing close to the big Safeways in Stamford Hill. She lived independently, but if anything bad happened she had a cord she could pull in her hallway, next to the door, so that someone else – the warden, Peter – would come along and sort everything out.
The only problem with this set-up was that Jenny refused to pull the cord. She would not. She referred to it as ‘that fucking cord’ and she would not pull it. It was a matter of principle. Instead, her neighbour, Naomi, would pull
her
cord on Jenny’s behalf to call Peter over if she felt Jenny was in some kind of difficulty and Peter was needed.
Naomi was seventy-six years old and had a bad hip and could, occasionally, be clumsy and hurt herself. Sometimes she had to be taken to hospital when she scorched her hand or slipped over when climbing out of the bath.
At these times, when Naomi was absent, Jenny knew that if she got into trouble then she would simply have to sit down and think very hard about all the terrible things that had happened to her and how God had given her a gift so that she should
know
about them.
Naomi called this type of behaviour ‘self-indulgence’ but Jenny was content to feel that she knew better. To see things clearly, to register, to comprehend, well, that was surely a great blessing.
Jenny had a temper. Of course she did. And when she saw things clearly, they had to be seen properly, and everything had to happen in a certain way. She had her routines. A break from a routine was always a bad thing. Any kind of hindrance or interruption was considered by Jenny to be unacceptable. Any kind of intrusion, unpalatable.
Chad, 38, of no fixed abode, had a problem with rejection. But like Jenny, God had given Chad a gift too. His gift was that he would see things of no value, things that other people did not want, things that others misguidedly considered ‘rubbish’ and he would immediately love them.
God had chosen to give Chad his special gift because Chad had had everything – a home, a family, a good education – but he had rejected them. God understood difficult equations. God understood that Chad had been offered everything on a plate but that Chad had tipped the plate over. That made him special.
Peter, the warden, 23, was very familiar with Chad, his comings and goings, his shopping trolley, his stink, his pilfering, his cold sores.
Naomi knew Chad too. She liked to watch him picking through the rubbish, early on a Wednesday morning. The bins and the bags were put out the night before – a shiny black cluster, buzzing and rancid, ready for collection.
Jenny knew nothing of Chad. This was probably for the best.
Unfortunately, in October, when the leaves on the trees were starting to crisp and golden, Jenny’s doctor decided to change her medication. He cut it down. He expected her to try to get through the night without her extra tablet.
So now, in the dark, she’d hear the clock ticking. So now, before dawn, she’d hear the birds singing. So now, after sunrise, she’d hear the cars on the main road close to her flat and the vans pulling into the unloading bay at the back of Safeways.
She even thought she could hear the drivers having a morning smoke, taking their fags out, the click of the lighter, the deep inhalation and the tinkle of the embers as they took their first drag. She convinced herself.
Wednesday morning, six forty-three precisely, Jenny heard something else. Much closer.
Outside, beyond the hawthorn hedge, Chad was carefully undoing the plastic knot on the top of a refuse bag. At first Jenny thought he might be a local stray, a cat, but when she listened more intently she decided that his technique was too deliberate, too careful for a creature with claws, too guided and thorough. So she threw off her blankets, clambered from her bed, walked to the window and gazed out. Beyond the hawthorn she saw Chad. Chad had gained access to the bag’s contents. He’d found a broken saucepan which Jenny had snapped the handle off the day before. He was staring into it and he was thinking: is it big enough to use as a planter? For a small tomato plant? Shall I store it in my trolley? Shall I?
Jenny rapped on her window with the back of her knuckles.
‘Oi!’
Chad looked up. Jenny stood at her window wearing a well-worn winceyette nightdress. The top two buttons were undone. Her navel was visible through a gap between the third and fourth. She had blue rings under her eyes. She hadn’t slept properly for almost a week.
Chad stared at Jenny for several seconds, grimaced, returned to the bag, as though its contents held infinitely more interest for him than she did. Inside he found a wafer-thin slither of soap. In his trolley he had a self-assembled soap-cluster-ball which he’d created from just such soap remnants. It was almost as big as a cabbage.
Jenny opened her window and leaned out of it.
‘Oi! Leave off!’
Chad looked up again, focused on Jenny, drew his lips back away from his gums and showed Jenny his teeth. They were brown and slightly peggy. It was an ugly expression, like the kind of face an ill-natured cur might pull. A snarl but nothing special.
Jenny gasped, slammed her hands on to her hips, marched into the hallway, appraised her emergency cord. Her fingers twitched but she didn’t touch it. Instead she walked back into her bedroom, pulled on her dressing gown and returned to the window.
Chad had completed his dalliance with the bins and was now beating a slow retreat, disappearing from view, pushing his trolley with a combination of dignity and finesse, his back straight, his matted head held at an assured, an almost saintly angle.
Jenny slammed her window shut, piqued and disgruntled. Chad, she just
knew
, was a thief and a parasite.
‘He’s a magpie,’ Naomi said, hours later, somewhat bemused by Jenny’s fury. ‘Don’t get so worked up over it.’
‘That’s my stuff he’s picking over,’ Jenny retorted. ‘My stuff.’
‘Don’t get so angry,’ Naomi whispered, hoping to calm Jenny by speaking quieter. ‘He doesn’t mean any harm. He’s only a tramp.’
‘It’s mine!’
‘Shall I call Peter?’ Naomi wondered out loud.
‘My stuff. Private stuff. You know . . .’ Jenny thought of something and stopped scowling for a moment.
‘. . . You know, sometimes people go through your bins when they want to find things out about you. And then sometimes the people whose bin it is calls the police.’
Naomi smiled patiently at Jenny who was still wearing her dressing gown and pink mules.
‘Michael Barrymore!’ Jenny yelled triumphantly. ‘They did it to him! Going through his bins to find out stuff! All his leftovers and everything covered in tea-grains and bits of potato peelings.’
‘You mean newspaper people, Jenny,’ Naomi said. ‘That boy’s only a tramp. He’s been going through our bins for as long as I can remember. You couldn’t call the police. They’d laugh at you. He’s not breaking any law.’
‘He’s like dirty vermin,’ Jenny said, ‘a rat or something.’
Naomi went into her kitchenette for a glass of water. She returned and handed it over to Jenny. ‘Taken your pills yet today, Jenny?’
Jenny took the glass but didn’t drink the water, only stared off into the distance.
‘Coming for how long?’ she asked tremulously. ‘How long?’
‘As long as I can remember,’ Naomi reiterated, then added, ‘I’ll tell you what he’s got in that trolley of his. He’s got a ball of soap almost as big as your head.’
‘What?’ Jenny’s eyes refocused. ‘Huh?’
Naomi made the shape of a ball in the air with her hands. ‘He gets all the soap, see? All the last bits of soap from the bins and he presses them together to make a big, round ball.’
Jenny was confused, Naomi could tell, so Naomi went into her own bathroom and brought out her soap. ‘See? When soap gets wet for a while the bottom goes soggy, then if you push it on to another piece they get stuck together when they dry, and that way he’s made a big soap ball from all the last, little bits. I’ve seen him take it out of his trolley. Big as a football.’
Naomi looked up from the bar of soap she was demonstrating with. Jenny’s expression was stiff and cold, frosted with disgust.
‘Not
my
soap,’ she said, shuddering involuntarily.
Naomi rapidly backtracked. ‘No,’ she said, ‘of course not.’
Jenny’s eyes widened as the full implications of the big soap ball had their impact in that special Soap-Ball part of her brain. She imagined how intimate a thing a bar of soap was and also, this dirty man, and then the rubbing of the soap into one ball. It triggered something in her. ‘Never!’
She sprang up from her chair, spilling water on to Naomi’s carpet.
‘Never!’
Naomi went and pulled her cord.
She’d been thinking about it, at night, when she couldn’t sleep. The Soap Ball. Her privacy. That saucepan he’d taken.
She kept remembering all the things that had happened with the saucepan. How she’d bought it from Argos. A set of three. How she’d liked to boil eggs in it and cook spaghetti hoops. She kept going over the pan’s history in her head; it was bought, it was used, it was broken. All in that order. And now he had it. What had he done with it? Her pan.
Wednesday morning she was up at five. Sitting on a chair next to the window, overseeing her rubbish bags in the pile next to the hawthorn. During the week she’d packed them so carefully. She’d kept thinking about what was rubbish and what was not, what she could throw out and what she could not. Only food and packaging and broken glass. Old newspaper.
Anything potentially useful, anything personal, she kept back. A threadbare face-cloth, a used toothpaste tube, an old hairbrush, an empty moisturizing cream bottle. Anything personal. These things she stacked on her kitchen table in a sad, useless little pile.
Six-forty on the dot, Chad trundled with his trolley into the crescent, pulled up next to the pile of bags, paused, chewed his lower lip, inspecting them. Jenny pushed her face so close to the window that she steamed it up with her breath and had to pull back to wipe it clear. Chad kicked one of Jenny’s bags gently with the toe of his boot.
Chad knew about bags. He was an expert. He knew that the best kind of bag for his purposes was the kind of bag that jutted and stretched, that fought to contain something within that fought just as hard not to be contained. Jenny’s bag felt soft and soggy, like it was full of bits of food and slush.
Naomi’s bag, however, seemed distinctly more interesting. He untied it. Naomi’s hands were frail and so Chad found her knots less difficult to negotiate.
Inside, on top, Chad found a mug tree. Natural pine, one of its branches missing, the base stained with something that looked like cod liver oil. He held it aloft. He smiled to himself.
Jenny had been intending to bang on her window as soon as Chad touched one of the bags, but when he didn’t touch hers – only kicked it – she felt a loosening of her resolve.
Instead, she watched him inspecting the mug tree and enjoying a snout through Naomi’s bag. Chad re-knotted Naomi’s bag, after placing the mug tree in his trolley. Might use it at Christmas, he was thinking. Paint it green or something.
He left Jenny’s bags alone. As if he knew! she thought, furious. Almost as if he knew! She stood up and tossed the chair she was sitting on against the opposite wall.
Chad heard the commotion emerging from Jenny’s first-floor flat, glanced up for a moment, raised his eyebrows, sniffed, muttered ‘Slag!’ under his breath and then moved off.
Naomi, next door, eating her breakfast, chewing on a piece of bacon rind, heard the chair smash, jumped up and bolted towards her front door.
Peter looked at the growing pile of ‘useful’ rubbish on Jenny’s table. ‘So what’s going on, Jenny?’ he asked softly.
Jenny had made him a cup of tea but she was too angry to speak, almost. ‘I can see that you’re very uptight over something,’ Peter added sympathetically, sipping his tea and wishing she hadn’t added Hermesetas instead of sugar.
‘Naomi’s worried,’ he said, pushing aside an eggbox and an empty cornflake packet so that he could rest his cup on the table.
‘What’s his name?’ Jenny asked, her throat so taut she nearly growled.
Peter stared at her blankly.
‘His name! Him!’ Jenny yelled, picking up the eggbox, tearing it in half and then smashing it on to the kitchen lino.
‘You know what I think, Jenny?’ Peter said brightly. ‘I think you and I should take a trip over to see Dr Eric this afternoon. Maybe cutting down on your pills wasn’t such a good idea after all.’
‘His name,’ Jenny repeated, softly.
Peter took another sip of his tea. ‘I don’t know,’ he said gently, after swallowing.
Later, Naomi told Jenny – in passing, not connecting anything with anything – that Chad’s name was Chad. Jenny digested this information silently.
I knew it
! She told herself, victoriously, I just knew his name would be Chad.
Jenny was quiet for the rest of the day. In her mind she was thinking, Chad, Chad, Chad, Chad, Chad.
When she went to see Dr Eric, she purred and she simpered like a friendly kitten.
That whole week Jenny assembled all the best things she could find. Her favourite Catherine Cookson novels, her best lace tablemats, a sturdy teapot she’d not yet had occasion to use, a packet of felt-tips which she kept in a drawer for when her nephew called, a full bag of rice, a tin of Heinz baked beans. She lay out her array of goodies on her living room carpet. Then she placed them, one by one, into a black refuse bag.
Chad was late that Wednesday. He’d drunk a bottle of Tia Maria the night before which had left him feeling drugged and sweet and dumb. He was slower than normal as a consequence. And sticky.