Wake: A Novel (9 page)

Evelyn pushes Reginald Yates to the back of her mind and works steadily: each man a new piece of paper, each complaint copied down and registered on the correctly colored form. At a quarter to eleven she rings a bell and locks the door for a break. There’s a groaning from the men outside. It’s not too bad today, though. After the chill start the weather is mild, unseasonably so; the sun has been pouring through the front window of the office all morning, making the room stuffy. She could do with some air. She snatches her cardigan and cigarettes and pushes her way out into the dirty little courtyard at the back, where she leans against the wall and tips her head to the sky. Her neck is still sore from sleeping upright on the train last night. She puts her hand on her head and cricks it from side to side.

“Mind if I join you?”

She turns to see Robin in the doorway.

“I didn’t know you smoked.”

“I don’t. I’m having a fresh-air break,” he says with a smile. “If I’m not disturbing your peace?”

She shrugs.

Fresh-air break.
Trust him to say something like that.

He takes a place against the wall beside her. “How are the troops, then?”

She lights up, blows out smoke, shrugs. “Same as ever.”

There’s a slight pause before he speaks. “I had rather an interesting one.”

“Oh?”

“Someone I’d known a little, before the war.”

“Really?” She looks up at him. “How?”

“We used to climb together.”

“Climb? Climb what?”

“Mountains.” He gives a brief, rueful smile. “We met in Wales. The hostel at Pen-y-Pass.”

She takes a drag of her cigarette. “That must have been nice.”

He either misses or ignores the sarcasm in her voice. “It was,” he says. “We were there in 1912. Again in ’13. We’d climb in the day and drink and talk at night. It sort of felt as though anything was possible.” He is staring straight ahead, as if his past is somewhere there, hovering in front of him, instead of a scrappy courtyard and a soot-blackened wall. “He lost a leg,” he says, “same as me.”

She looks up at Robin, properly, for the first time. He isn’t unattractive. Lots of people might even think him handsome. He is well built, with a broad body, a pleasant face. The sort of man that’s made for mountain peaks. But there’s something about him: his health, his
niceness.
The very idea of him exhausts her. She looks at her watch.

“Time to go back already?” He sounds disappointed.

“Yes.” She rubs her cigarette out on the wall behind her and pushes past him, back to her desk.

The cardboard box is beside her on the blanket. Ada isn’t touching it, though. Her hands are in her lap. But they are itching and her head is buzzing as though a swarm of bees is trapped inside.

Why has she seen him again? Why now?

Is it her? Conjuring him? Making her mind play tricks?

No. It is that cold, stuttering boy.

Reaching out for her.

Scuttling like a crab across the floor.

She lifts her head. The room around her is empty; the only signs left of her son’s habitation are the slight differences in color, the faint shadow of the paste Michael used to stick his football pictures to the wall. She puts her fingertips to them now, tracing their pattern.

Test me on the players. Go on, Mum.

Her son’s twelve-year-old face, screwed tight with concentration, as he sits in the kitchen after school, uniform on, with the door open to the garden and the summer afternoon outside:

Parker,

Jonas,

McFadden,

Scott.

Clapton Orient.
The O’s.

Jack started taking Michael along to home games when he was six—his small hand clasped tight in his dad’s—and neither of them ever missed one after that, not as far as she can remember, right until they stopped the football in 1915. By that time all of the first team had joined up. Their picture was on the front of the newspaper, smiling away in their uniforms. That was the year of Kitchener, his image plastered everywhere: omnibuses, tramcars, vans; his finger accusing you from every last patch of wall.
YOUR COUNTRY NEEDS YOU!
Wherever you moved, he held your gaze. Guilty. That’s what he made you feel. She used to wonder how on earth they made it work.

At the last football match of the season all the players processed around the stadium, then walked down the High Road to show themselves off. Ada stood and watched with the rest of them, Michael in front of her, all of them waving and shouting themselves hoarse, cheering with the crowd.

The next day Jack found Michael down at the recruiting station, standing in the queue trying to join up. He pulled him out of the line by his ear and marched him up the road to their house. Michael was spitting. He couldn’t understand why they were making him stay at home when he had the chance to fight alongside his heroes.

The rows they had, after that.

Once, when Michael had stormed out of the house, she went up to Jack, who was standing by the sink, staring out the window. She touched him on the arm and he jumped as though he’d been burned.

“What?”

“Perhaps we should let him go,” she said. “The war will be over soon enough.”

Her turned on her:
“You believe what you’re told, do you? That the war will be over? With Kitchener’s brave men?”

His contempt shocked her. Because she did believe it. It was everywhere that summer—a growing feeling of optimism, of hope.

They were all training: Parker, Jonas, McFadden, Scott, and the rest of the Clapton O’s. Joe White, Sam Lacock, and Arthur Gillies from their street—boys Michael had grown up with, just a little older than him. They and a million other young men were training, turning into the soldiers who would win the war.

The whole country was waiting that early, lovely summer of 1916, waiting for them to be ready, as though everyone was holding their breath.

The guns started in the last week of June. Ada could feel them from her Hackney kitchen, a sort of low booming, just on the edge of hearing, day and night for a week. Then they stopped. Half past seven in the morning, the first of July. She walked out onto the street of brown-bricked terraces, in the sudden silence of a midsummer morning in which the sun was already high. Other women were out there, too. Ivy White was there. She crossed the street toward where Ada was standing. “That’s it, then,” she said. “Isn’t it?”

She gripped Ada’s hands in her own slick wet ones. They were covered in suds. “They’ll be going over now, won’t they? It’s the end of the war.”

But it wasn’t the end. Jack was right. It was the beginning of something terrible and new. The papers printed the casualty lists, longer and longer each day. Ivy’s son Joe was missing, presumed killed. Ada would see her sometimes, at the end of the day, standing at the front window, looking out onto the street, expectantly, as if Joe were going to appear there, whistling on his way home.

Even Kitchener was killed. Drowned on his way to Russia. Sunk by a German mine.

Sometime at the end of that July she came home to find Michael sitting at the kitchen table, a newspaper open in front of him, his head in his hands.

“What is it?” she said. “What’s wrong?”

He looked up at her, his face white, shoved the newspaper toward her, and went outside.

At first she couldn’t see what he had been looking at. Then she saw the photograph:
PRIVATE WILLIAM JONAS, CLAPTON ORIENT.
His black hair was plastered down into a smart parting, his young face serious above the deep V of his strip. The paper said he had died in a trench alongside Sergeant McFadden. Beside his picture was a list of his football record:
CENTER FORWARD—73 APPEARANCES, 23 GOALS.

Outside, there was the sound of a ball being kicked angrily against the wall.

She went outside, the paper held in her fist. “Look,” she said. “Look at me.”

Michael carried on kicking.

“Aren’t you glad you’re here?” her voice was high, uncontrolled. She didn’t care. “Aren’t you glad your dad brought you home that day? That you’re safe? It could have been you.”

He stopped the ball beneath his foot, and turned on her.

“Safe?”
her son spat. “There’s no such thing, is there? Not for anyone, not anymore.”

She went inside, sat down, and held her shaking hands in her lap.

He was right.

And she knew then it was coming. That it was coming for them all. It was like the Bible, the stories she remembered from childhood, as though an order had been issued for all the boys to be killed.

The autumn came, the days began to shorten, and conscription began to take hold. She began to pray then—something she hadn’t done in years. She prayed selfishly, frantically, for herself, for Michael, for the war to stop at her door. She didn’t know who she was praying to, didn’t know who was more powerful: a distant God, who may or may not be listening; the hungry war itself, growling, just beyond the gates; or Kitchener, his weather-faded face half-covered over by adverts for Ovaltine and cigarettes, but his finger still pointing, still accusing from beyond the grave.

Michael’s birthday was February 20, 1917. The recruiting letter came in the first week of March.

The afternoon before he left for France, when he had finished his training and was home at the end of a week’s leave, she knocked on the door of his room. He was packing the last of his things, his big bag and greatcoat already waiting in the hall. He had his haversack open in the middle of the floor, and laid out around him in a fan shape were bits of his kit. She walked around the neat half circle he had made. Toothbrush, soap and small towel, two spare bootlaces, mess tin, fork and spoon. The window was open, and pale sunshine was filling the room. He looked up at her, squinting in the light. “You inspecting me, Mum?”

“Might be.”

He sat back on his heels. “Proper sergeant major you are.”

She crouched down beside him and picked up a small sewing kit, turning it around in her hands. “They teach you to use this, then?”

“Just a bit.”

She put it back in its place on the floor and went over and sat on the bed, watching her son. He was stronger-looking than when he’d left for his training. The soft, changing shapes of his boyhood were settling, the lines emerging of the man he would become. She watched his head as it bent and dipped, his long narrow back, the sunburned skin moving across the bone at the top of his spine. There was something hanging from his neck. “What’s that?” she asked, pointing.

He looked up at her and then followed her gaze down. “It’s my tag.”

“Can I see?”

He brought it out of his shirtfront, stood up, and walked over to her. “That’s my name,” he said, pointing at the brown fiber disc. “My regiment there. And my number.”

She stared at the number. Six digits. His pulse in the vein beside it, keeping time. Her son.

“You all right, Mum?”

“Grand.” She nodded, tucking the tag back into his shirt, doing the button up.

He left in the morning, before the sun was fully up. They had offered to walk him to the station, but Michael hadn’t wanted them to. They didn’t argue. They just stood together at the door and watched as he shouldered his pack, then waved his funny, overladen silhouette off, his tin hat bumping against the back of his neck. He turned, once, at the bottom of the road, and lifted his arm in the brightening morning, before he disappeared from view.

A train passes on the tracks outside, making the windows rattle in their frames.

Ada reaches out and brings the box into her lap. She tries to pick at the knot, but it is stubborn, tied so tightly that she’ll need something to open it with. She hesitates, briefly—but it is only brief, the hesitation, before she goes downstairs to fetch a knife.

“Afternoon, lovely.” Graham the doorman salutes Hettie with his good arm. “How’s my favorite dancer, then? You on a double today?”

“’Fraid so.” She leans into the little hutch where he sits by the door, oil heater on. It smells cozy—of warm wool and pipe. Graham is a fixture of the Palais. A brawny Cockney with an accent to match, he used to work on the railways before the war, and his stories are legion. It is said you can lose hours in his cubbyhole, emerge blinking in the light, and be ten years older, your youth stripped away:

One of the last to be called up.

Didn’t want an old bugger like me.

Proud to lose it in the end.

Two days till the Armistice!

Saw it there, twitching on the ground. Hand still moving.

Knew it was mine from the tattoo on the wrist!

“Commiserations,” says Graham.

“Need the money.” Hettie shrugs.

“Don’t we all. Hang on a sec.” He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a tin, opens it and takes a tablet out. “Here you go.” He passes it over the hatch toward her, a Nelson’s meat lozenge, brown-red. “Keep your strength up.” He winks. “Kept us going for hours, they did. Route marches. All the way ’cross France.”

This is what he always says.

“Thanks,” says Hettie, tucking it into her cardigan pocket. “I’ll keep it for later.”

This is what she always does. This is their little routine.

Does he suspect that she keeps the stinky little tablets only long enough to put them in the dressing room bin?

But it is their ritual, and she supposes it makes both of them feel good.

“I don’t know how you girls do it,” he says, shaking his head. “Dancing for hours. I really don’t.”

Hettie shrugs, as if to say,
What’s to do?,
then pulls her cardy round her, heading down the long, unheated corridor to the strip-lit dressing room at the end. The scattered girls turn to greet her, and they exchange hellos as she hangs her corduroy bag on the rail. Those girls who are changed already are sitting, chattering, puffing on illicit cigarettes despite the
NO SMOKING
signs nailed to the walls.

The chilly Palais dressing room is one of the dubious perks of the job. It’s not what you’d expect, though, from the ones out front, which are all decked out with Chinese wallpaper covered in pagodas and birds. The walls back here are just covered in paint, and a dismal green color at that. Some of the girls have scratched their initials into the plasterwork, which is already starting to peel. Some wit has even written a poem at knee height: