Paper Faces (14 page)

Then a few days later, the other girl, Sally, came dancing across the playground and said she'd just got hers back.

“He was in a camp. He's a bit thin, though.”

“Where he been?” Dot asked. She had seen pictures in the newspaper that Mrs. Parvis had delivered every day of men and women who'd been kept locked up in a camp till the Americans came and found them. They were thin. Had Sally's father been in one of those places, too, in striped pajamas with shaven head?

“No, not him. Them's the Jews you're thinking of. Mine was in Burma,” said Sally.

“That's ever such a long way off,” said Dot. “I expect.”

“Yeah, it was hot over there and he didn't have nothing to eat except rats. That's what he says. I dunno if he's making it up. You can't eat rats. D'you want to come and have a look at him?”

She was so proud of this father. She talked about him all day. Then she invited Dot and three others to walk home with her after school. She lived in a big old tenement block. They climbed up to the top floor and stood around in the corridor while Sally went in to fetch him out.

“Here he is!” she said at last. “My daddy!”

A thing appeared in the doorway beside her. It looked to Dot more like a skeleton in clothes than a father. He had heavy army trousers held up with a huge leather belt and a thick army shirt. Inside the clothes there was nothing. Brown sticks stuck out of the sleeves where there should have been wrists, and his head was like a hard dry acorn, sunburned and bald, no hair. The children backed away. They didn't know what to do. Then the mouth opened, and the father's skull smiled. That was the worst bit.

The other three turned and bolted off down the stairs. Dot stayed just long enough to smile back. He was so thin, he looked like even the birds wouldn't want to peck at him. He looked as though he'd crack if you touched him.

“See you tomorrow,” she called to Sally, but couldn't think of anything to say to the man, so she ran off after the others.

Next morning, Dot was surprised when Gloria got up early and left for the Housing Applicant Office the same time as she went to school.

“They're running a draw for the houses,” Gloria explained.

“A draw?” said Dot.

“A lucky dip like. They ain't got enough homes. They want to make it fair. We're each going to get a ticket. I just know it's me lucky day.”

In the evening Gloria cried a bit when she came home. Dot comforted her. She had waited all day in a hall with her lottery number. But it hadn't been her lucky day after all. Her name wasn't picked from the hat.

“All I wanted was to get moved in somewhere nice before he comes back.” Dot wanted to tell her how they were much better staying just as they were. No home. No father.

Gloria had missed high tea. Wearily she took off her stockings and hung them on the back of the chair to get ready for bed. She inspected her bare feet and started to paint the toenails. Dot watched as her mother applied the shiny flame-red lacquer to each toenail.

“You're getting yourself ready for him coming back, ain't you?” Dot said.

She had decided what must have happened to him, why he was taking so long to return, and why she could never recall his face.

“He were a pilot, weren't he?” she said. A fuel tank had exploded. He had caught alight. “Got his face all burned up. Like them men we saw on the newsreel, ain't he?”

Gloria snapped back, “No, I told you before, he weren't never a pilot. Never went up in the air. Though don't you go thinking, just because a fellow don't get airborne, didn't stop me liking him. In my own way.” And she went back to her painting.

Dot stroked her mother's other white leg stretched out along the bed, with the varnish drying on the toes now like five scarlet flames.

“You got ever such nice legs,” Dot said. “Hope I get legs like yours when I grow up.”

“Oh, leave me alone with your silly talk, can't you!” said Gloria, then softened and gave Dot's cheek a gentle pinch. “Your dad once said how I had legs like Betty Grable. So you'll have to put on a bit more flesh if you want film-star legs. Still, you're coming along, aren't you now?”

Dot wanted to know, if he wasn't a pilot, what did he do?

“He were a rigger, supposed to be.”

Dot didn't know what a rigger was.

“Important job. Planes can't take off without the rigger there to pull away the chocks. Maybe he'll tell you about it himself sometime.”

Dot hoped not.

19

The Dancer in the Street

Next day there was music outside school. After the register, the evening prayer, the curtsies and bows to teachers, and the let-out bell, Dot ran with the others across the playground, through the iron gate, toward the jangling sounds.

Clustered on the narrow pavement were the waiting mothers with outstretched hands, the mothers with prams, the mothers with toddlers attached to their skirts.

Children surged forward to find the music. Some mothers held their children tightly, letting them watch from a safe distance but not too close.

The dancing man was standing out in the middle of the road as though unaware of the scarlet double-decker that might trundle down the High Street at any moment to knock him down. He had a monkey and a performing cat. The monkey in a waistcoat was on a chain attached to the dancing man's belt. The cat wore a jeweled collar. He didn't seem to see the crowd of mothers and children watching him. He ignored everything except his music making, his monkey, and his cat.

He was a misshapen giant, hunchbacked by the drum attached to his shoulders, which seemed to beat by itself. His knees were distorted by brass cymbals attached on the inner leg. Brass bells hung like bunches of ripe grapes to each thigh. He played first a whistle, then a mouth organ, then a trumpet.

He seemed to have a score of hands and a hundred musical fingers. His toes danced, his elbows danced. His monkey skipped and pulled on its lead and held out a tin cup to the crowd.

He was the most beautiful creature Dot had ever seen, a creation of this city that was the center of the world. You'd never in a million years see a dancing man in a field in the country. Yet when he trilled on the water whistle, he seemed to create birds singing in the branches of invisible trees overhead.

“Well, fancy that!” said one of the mothers. “Haven't seen a one-man band since way back. Times must be getting better.”

“It's cruel,” said another.

Dot thought at first she meant it was unkind for the man to be so constricted by the many instruments strapped to all parts of his body. But she must have meant the monkey, for another mother said:

“It's only an animal. It doesn't mind. My brother saw monkeys when he was coming back through Gibraltar. They were quite tame, he said. Look, it's smiling. And I once saw a dancing bear when I was little. It liked it, you could tell. It really liked dancing.”

Some of the mothers let their children dart forward to drop a penny in the monkey's mug, though none let their children too close. Dot had no meeting mother to restrain her. She was free to go as close to the man's music as she dared, to stare as long as she wanted, to dance on the curb right beside him where he seemed so tall he almost blacked out the sky, and the music so overwhelming you could hear nothing else.

The others drifted away. Dot stayed. She longed to ask what was his monkey's name, though she knew she mustn't speak to strangers. So, when still playing, still marking time with the great drum strapped to his back and clashing the cymbals, still rattling the bells and making the melody with his mouth organ, he began to half dance, half walk down the middle of the road, she followed a few paces behind and safely on the pavement. He never looked round. He never asked for money. Where would he go next?

Nobody stopped her following. Perhaps they thought she was part of his troupe?

Where was he going? Where were they now? His music so changed the streets that the gas lamps looked brighter, the spiked railings more friendly, the painted front doors more brightly colored than where she lived. Then she saw how the Oxo boy on the advertisement hoarding smiled and she realized that they had come a different way by a different route and that she was nearly at Mrs. Parvis's boarding house.

The dancing man stopped playing, and as he turned to unbuckle the strap of his cymbals, he saw Dot was still behind him.

“You'd best go home now, lassie,” he said. “Back to your mum and dad before they start to miss you.”

Dot wanted to tell him that she hadn't got a dad. But she knew that telling things the way you wanted them to be rather than the way they were didn't change anything for longer than the moment of the lie. She said, “My dad's not home from the war yet.”

“He will be. So you better be ready for him,” said the dancing man. Then he picked up his monkey and the cat and strode with the bells on his knees jangling.

20

The Man Who Went to War

Dot was glad she'd been warned by the dancing man because there was no warning from Gloria. In the morning, Dot went off to school and he wasn't there. In the afternoon, she came home and he was.

Mrs. Parvis was standing out on the front doorstep, pretending to watch out for something in the sky. Dot knew what she was really up to, waiting to be first with bad news. She didn't like it when Dot slipped in unseen, and with Mr. Brown gone off to college, she hadn't so many people who would listen to her.

“He's back, then,” she said.

“What?” said Dot.

“Not ‘what.' ‘Who.'”

Dot's heart began pounding, first with anxiety, then with an irrational hope that it just might be Mr. Brown who was back.

“Downstairs. Your ma went to pick him up this morning.”

Dot tried to edge by.

“So he'll be popping up to the palace with the rest of them, to pick up his medals.” But she said it as though she already knew different, for then, as though speaking to another invisible adult, she added, “I
don't
think. If there's one thing I've learned out of the past six years, it's that anybody can get out of anything if they try hard enough.”

Dot managed to wriggle past and down the stairs, and there in the basement room sat the man in the drab, ill-fitting, demob suit.

He wasn't a smiling skullman, he wasn't a melted airman. He had a blank sort of face, and that was about all there was to him. No twinkling sky-blue eyes to match a sky-blue uniform. No bright rainbow of medal ribbons on his breast.

Dot knew from just looking at him that he was no hero, no villain, either. He wasn't anything much. He was a nothing.

She felt almost relieved. Maybe she'd known it all along. There was that thing Mrs. Hollidaye said, about how each person could only be brave in their own way and there wasn't room on earth for everybody to be a hero. She'd told Dot there'd got to be the ordinary people too, so that the few could be visibly valiant. He was one of the ordinary ones.

Dot sat herself cross-legged on the bed and watched him perched on the chair by the window, blinking and twitching and fidgeting but never looking her way, then seeming to fall asleep and looking quite young, younger than Mr. Brown, anyhow, and certainly not at all like Sally's dad who'd been to Burma and eaten rats.

Gloria was next door making a pot of tea in Mrs. Parvis's kitchen. When she came in carrying the tin tea tray with a scratched picture of Buckingham Palace, she whispered, “Don't stare like that. It's not nice. Haven't you no manners?”

“Just trying to get used to him, ain't I? He don't look too well, do he?” People used always to be saying that about her. Now she could say it about someone else.

Slowly, he took off the jacket and folded it neatly into a rectangle, which he placed on his knee. Gloria took it from him to hang on the back of the door. He sat down again on the very edge of the chair and they drank the tea in silence. He moved slowly, like a tired man wading through cold water. He didn't look at Dot. He didn't look at Gloria, either.

“We don't have much sugar left,” said Gloria. “D'you take sugar?” Then, “Mrs. Parvis says she'd be obliged to have your ration book as soon as possible if you please.”

Dot wanted to ask, He hasn't got a wooden leg, has he? But she knew he hadn't. Some of those boisterous brave men with stretched paper faces, with stumpy two-pincered hands and tiny lidless eyes, had lost legs as well. This one had both legs and all his fingers, yet you still felt there was something missing.

“And you better start calling me Mum,” said Gloria. “It'd be more natural-like, now we're a family.”

It didn't feel natural.

“And you call him Dad.”

Dot wasn't going to call him anything.

That night, Dot was to sleep on two extra blankets folded over to make a thin mattress, for he, the man, would be in the bed where Dot used to sleep.

It was not uncomfortable down on the floor, just lonely. Dot used to have Gloria to snuggle up to in the dark. Not anymore. Gloria had to belong with him now.

She tried not to wish he could go away, even though the room was cramping them.

After school, she took as long as she could dawdling back. He was still there lying down with his eyes shut. Dot guessed he might have been only pretending. Dot wondered if they'd been arguing. She beckoned Gloria into the dark passage outside the room.

“You got to tell me,” she whispered. “Where's he
been
? Why's he
like
that?”

“Who's ‘he'? The cat's father? I can't hear if you don't talk proper,” said Gloria in a low voice. “Speak nice and call him Dad.”

“But what's
wrong
with him?”

“Oh, heck, ducks, you might as well know. He was a nutter. Went barmy in the army, you might say!” She laughed, but it wasn't a real laugh. “That place I took you, run by the military, that was like a sort of special asylum.”