Meeting the English (3 page)

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But a lot of the time it wasn't at all bad. For a start, the sleeping thing. How many hundred nights had Phillip spent stalking sleep across the dark moors of the small hours, or tracking it on the flickering dial of his Roberts radio? How many bunches of hops had he shaken at it, how many cups of hot milk had he abjectly offered, shivering in the doorway in his dressing gown and slippers, only to have it shake its flanks and evade him at the last moment? It was a satisfaction, then, to have it curled up so, plumply on his plumped-up pillow. All Phillip needed to do was shut his eyes (he thought he was learning to move one eyelid. No one had noticed) and sleep would cover him with its scented mink, release him into spectacularly liberated, near-hallucinogenic dreams.

Even when he was awake, memories seemed near, and enormous: meringues from his fifth birthday party, warty with burnt sugar; his great-aunt's fruit cage in supernatural 3D Kodachrome. And they weren't static, these visions, they weren't photographs, oh no. They moved, billiard balls on an infinity of baize. You could travel with the croquet ball, smack through the butterflied hoop, chase its textured scarlet roundness through the tunnel of long grass. A lot of the visions had to do with tunnelling, in fact, a side effect, surely, of the black cone which seemed permanently round his eyes (he did wish he could move his head), but a pleasant one. Like being a camera. You could home in on that greenfly on your great-aunt's raspberry bush, on the very bulbous fruit. Spectacular. Smashing. Everything there but the smells.

3

Literary Giant seeks young man to push bathchair. Own room in Hampstead, all found, exciting cultural milieu. Modest wage. Ideal ‘gap year' opportunity. Apply Prys Box 4224XXC.

 

It was Mr Fox who passed Struan the ad. He had been handing Struan things at the end of class, all year, ever since Struan had taken 20 out of 20 on the
Macbeth
Test. Books, mostly, but also newspaper articles, also flyers for poetry readings in strange Edinburgh pubs. Struan took it, as he had taken all the others, slowly and courteously, pausing to put his sports bag on the floor and rest his great length on the foremost flip-top desk, to turn the paper over in his extra-large, spade-shaped fingers. It was clipped from the
London Review of Books,
a journal he had not previously encountered.

This, on Struan's behalf, was pure philanthropy. Cuik Library was well stocked, and Struan's card well dog-eared. Struan had read
The Outsider,
Huis Clos,
and
Franny and Zooey
(though not, it is true,
Portnoy's Complaint
) well before Mr Fox handed him his precious paperbacks. Nor had Struan, appreciative though he was of poetry, any wish to go in a pub before he was of age, or indeed to journey twenty miles to Edinburgh on a week night. Struan stayed and talked to his teacher because outside the classroom you could hear the engine growl of tall fifth-years talking from the bottom of their newly broken voices, from the bases of their acned throats. You could hear the chafing sound of third-years kicking the corridor wall. Almost, you could hear the spit they were saving, gargling from one side to the other of their mouths. Struan stayed to keep his teacher in the classroom where it was safe and warm, where the sun was coming briefly through the too-large windows. Struan stayed because he worried about Mr Fox.

He had done so from the first minute, when Mr Fox had bounced into their Higher English class waving his Bog People poems and his unconventional hair. Mr Fox was undersized. He was English.
English
English: a voice like the telly. He was filling in for Mr Nicholl, who had taught twenty-five years at Cuik, and who had recently suffered a heart attack – an actual, red-faced, groaning, gratifying heart attack during which had shouted at his third-years and clutched at an imaginary tawse. Mr Fox was at most twenty-one. He was keen on
acting out.
He was a ditcher of worksheets, an importer of photocopied poems about blackberries and frogspawn, poems by Catholics, or folks at any rate with Catholic names, and he believed Shakespeare was gay.

In such circumstances, there was very little Struan could do, but he always wiped insulting graffiti off the board before his class, and regularly removed toilet rolls and once a turd from the teacher's chair. Struan had the authority to do this. No wee guy, young or old, had bothered Struan since he got his height and his dadhad died, which had happened at the same time, two years ago. Overnight, his identity as one of a beleaguered group of skinny swotty third-years with overloaded bags had disappeared into an aura of peculiar, lofty virtue. Now, he was a sort of Lazarus figure, six two in his nylon socks, his grey jaw and set green eyes gazing into another country. It was to Struan, not the staffroom, to whom the third-years ran when they had driven Mr Nicholl to apoplexy, and Struan, not the staff first-aider, who had administered the kiss of life and heart massage and saved the bristly old man's life. Struan read the lesson at Prize-Giving. He was mentioned in Talks to prospective pupils, and in dispatches to the Council. His outlandish good marks were popularly forgiven as a sort of excess of grief, like his height, rather than a hideous striving after distinction. So Struan could afford to throw the heron's wing of his protection over his small fluffy teacher as he bounced down the corridor, and he did, as often as possible.

But none of this, he could see now, had done any good. Mr Fox's hair had declined, flat to his scalp, and his friendly beery eyes had retreated into his head. He had developed a cower. His original nickname,
Mr False
– a tribute to his accent – had given way to the simple
Turdy-Man.
And now he seemed to be telling Struan he was quitting altogether.

‘You're going back to England, sir?' said Struan, as kindly as he knew how.

Mr Fox started, blushed, then shook his head.

‘Oh no,' he said, ‘I wasn't thinking of me, Struan. I was thinking of you.'

‘Me?' said Struan.

‘You're the one who works in the old folks' home,' said Mr Fox, who had been horrified when he realized Struan had kept up this job, all weekend and three evenings, straight through his exams. ‘I think that's what “bathchair” means.'

‘Bathchairs are wicker, are they no?' said Struan. ‘They cannae seriously be using equipment like that.'

‘It's a joke,' said Mr Fox. ‘An old literary guy. And look:
Prys Hampstead.
'

‘Oh,' said Struan. He crumpled the piece of paper over in his hand. A flush of blood spread up his strange, grey complexion, highlighting his freckles. ‘It wouldnae be Phillip Prys, though.'

‘Why not?' said Mr Fox. ‘He had the stroke, remember. We read about it?'

‘Still,' said Struan, ‘it wouldnae.'

‘They do exist,' said Mr Fox. ‘Famous people. So does London.'

Struan knew that. He had taken Standard Geography. He knew Newcastle was there, beyond the great orange bings that surrounded Cuik, over the vast emptiness of the Borders, and York beyond that. He knew Paris was out there too, and New York, somewhere, full of masturbating Portnoys and Woody Allen, and California, and Lanzarote, where he'd been with the Sunshine Promise People and sat with his dying father on a hot black beach. But London was different from these other places, and Struan felt irritated with his teacher for ignoring this self-evident fact. Plenty folk in Cuik had been to Spain, and even Portugal, and come back burnt red, and settled back down to their Cuik lives. No one assumed their journeys had put them above themselves, or made them homosexual. But no one Struan knew had ever come back from London.

‘You could send your CV,' persisted Mr Fox.

‘Ma curriculum vitae?' said Struan.

‘Yes,' said Mr Fox. ‘Just – speculatively, you know.' He liked saying that. CV. Speculative. In 1989, CVs were in the air. All of a sudden, everyone had one and was sending it somewhere, by fax. Mr Fox had whizzed his own off that morning, as it happened, to a London publisher's.

‘Actually, sir, I did a CV, last week, in secretarial studies,' said Struan. ‘I'm taking a module, you know, now I've done my big exams. We had to pretend we were applying to the Council, for a summer job.'

‘That'll do, then,' said Mr Fox. ‘And you know, it wouldn't affect your dentistry application, Aberdeen would hold your place.'

Aberdeen had already asked him to delay a year, in fact. Struan should have told his teacher so. But he didn't. He was thinking about his CV, and the loathsome, pallid person who had somehow emerged from his busy clack-clacking. He had nothing to put under ‘other interests'. Not Duke of Edinburgh, not Drama, not Sport. You couldn't put Death, or The Elderly, or Gran in any of those lists. ‘Badminton,' he'd lied, in the end. ‘Current Affairs.' That meant telly.

‘It's a good idea,' said Mr Fox, as he had been saying for months, ‘to get some life experience. Seventeen is too young for university.'

Struan gulped. ‘They'd feed me?' he asked. ‘It wouldnae be just the room?'

Mr Fox nodded. ‘It says “all found”,' he said. ‘Anyway, Struan, look, you're just applying, right? You're just shooting off an arrow in the air. Who knows where it will land, mm?'

Struan closed his eyes momentarily. He clenched his fists. He pictured that arrow, buffeting merrily across a blue, English sky, its feathers fluffy and nonchalant as Mr Fox's former quiff. Then he pictured his grandmother at the kitchen table with her cup of tea. She wasn't saying anything mean, that was never the trouble. She was saying, ‘I'm that proud of you, son,' and her pebbly green eyes were watering as they did so often now, since his father died. He didn't want her to wipe her hands on her pinny because of the rasping noise it made. Would she be proud of him if he did this? Would she mind? He could say, ‘Look, Gran, the Uni want me to take the year off, and there's no work here,' and she'd know that was true. There had been no work in Cuik for a decade, since the mine closed. Not even the old people's home could give Struan more hours for the summer. If he did this thing, went to England, he wouldn't need to ask Gran for anything. He'd saved up his money from the Home, he could get his own clothes and ticket, he could even leave her a bit of cash, just take maybe £50 with him, as a starter.

‘It's only England,' said Mr Fox, ‘in the end, just a few hours on the train. You can always come home.'

‘Ah've never been though, Mr Fox,' said Struan, ‘never been South.'

‘Then you should,' said Mr Fox, nodding emphatically, ‘then you really should. Everyone should travel, at least a bit. Broaden the mind. I went to Thailand, you know.'

Thailand, Struan wanted to say, was one thing. Mr Struther's new wee wife came from Thailand. Hampstead was another. But:

‘Uh-huh,' said Struan. ‘OK. Thanks, Mr Fox. I'll give it a shot.'

4

July 1989. The news continued strange and beautiful. In South Africa, President P. W. Botha met the imprisoned Nelson Mandela, face to face. In Siberia, three hundred thousand coal miners went on strike and were not attacked with tanks, or forced into gulags. The first President Bush visited Poland and Hungary, and was not attacked, either. In London, the summer continued equally lovely and unreal: each day, a sky like a dazzling silk tent; each night, breezes hot as breath, and spurts of stink like steam from a ham-bone.

In Yewtree Row, the long, closely placed sash windows had been open for weeks, their hand-blown glass flashing in the sun, their shutters pulled half across. In the black-and-white shade behind them, the rooms sighed, and rustled, and smelled: tar, teak oil, polish, dust, the very bricks seeming to give up the last whiff of the horse shit they'd been mixed with two centuries ago.

On the first floor, Shirin was at work in the en-suite bathroom. She had taken to spending most of her time, when she wasn't with Phillip, in here. Cramped – but that wasn't much of a problem, for not only was Shirin herself very small, but she painted miniatures, postmodern Persian ones, in acrylic, on boards as big as her hand. The bathroom light was good: high and a little diffused, and one could run a little water in the round grass-green bath for background ambience. If you shut the bathroom and bedroom doors, you could not hear the nurses come and go at all; or Myfanwy, using her key with abandon, banging economical, self-righteous brooms.

At the moment, Shirin was simply letting her. She had an opening in a week, on Cork Street; it would make the papers because of the Iranian election, and her Khomeini/Father sequence was not even half done. So she'd let Myfanwy put an ad in the magazine, instead of employing a professional nurse as the hospital had suggested. She'd accepted that it was necessary to think of the children's trust fund. She'd insisted on knocking through from the study to the loo under the stairs to make a sort of bathroom for Phillip; but she'd let Myfanwy veto a ramp to the front door, on the grounds that the door case was listed, agreed that a bit of plywood would work quite well instead. She'd let Myfanwy run through the CVs, pick out the Scottish boy; she was currently letting her sort out the room. Shirin had no idea if this was wise: it had not happened to her before that her semi-paralysed husband was returned to her care within six months of marriage while she was preparing for her first major show. Shirin would consider wisdom later. In the meantime, four pieces were still in gesso. One was actually wet.

As it dried, she was gilding: the scimitar of a prince leaning from a black car against a textured silky red and purple background which on closer inspection seemed to be either a gathering of blood corpuscles or a crowd of cowed, veiled heads. Shirin breathed on the foil to make it stick, licked it down with an infinitesimally tiny sable brush.