Complete Short Stories (VMC) (87 page)

‘I said, “Go on! You! Liar! Rat!” To myself.’

She bit her lip. ‘What are the others like? The other nurses.’

‘Sister’s very nice. She’s not a bit cruel. She lets me mind that little baby in the corner. If it falls on its back, I ring the bell. Now can I read to you?’

She sat and watched the clock and listened to him reading, stumbling and monotonous. He sat bolt upright in his untidy bed, with the book held
high before him. One or two of the other women looked across and smiled at him, then at her. A boy at the end seemed very ill. He stared before him, his face grey and small; his eyes and the way of holding his head, like an old man. His mother sat beside him and watched him. They did not speak.

‘The fox then hid behind the door …’ he read on.

‘Children’s stories are always full of foxes, and they are forever wicked,’ she mused. ‘How odd, coming to hospital to be read to.’

And then the clock outside in the sunlight struck the hour. Three o’clock. A young nurse came in and stood there smiling in the doorway, waiting for them to go.

‘Darling, I have to go now.’

‘Oh, I haven’t finished the book.’

‘Practise it and read the rest next time.’

‘I’ve been practising it since half past five this morning.’

‘I’m sorry, pet.’ She bent and kissed him and cords twisted up tightly in her throat as she felt his warm, dry lips on her face. He was sitting up straight on the high, narrow bed, his eyes steady and bright beneath the bandage.

‘Good-bye, my darling. The minute I am gone you shall open your parcel.’ He looked excited at that. Other children were setting up a wild howling. The look he exchanged with her showed contempt for this. He waved his thin hand as she turned away. The other was on the string of the parcel.

‘Good-bye.’

She walked proudly down the corridor with the other mothers. All their eyes were over-brilliant with anxiety; hers with pride and anxiety.

‘He’s not spoilt,’ she thought. ‘When it comes to it, he isn’t. He’s independent and he adapts himself.’

She stepped out on the bright gravel.

He laid the parcel unopened on his pillow and lay down and closed his eyes. Tears were red-hot and hard like bullets beneath his lids. ‘My darling Mummy,’ he said to himself. ‘My darling Mummy. My darling …’

‘Tea, Harry,’ said the nurse. ‘Tired already?’

He sat up and smiled.

‘You haven’t opened your parcel.’

‘I couldn’t – undo it.’

‘Oh, it’s only a bow, you lazy-bones. And look at your bed. Let me tidy you up again. Now Sheila, that’s quite enough of that. You try to be sensible like Harry.’

Harry looked neither to left nor right, neither at Sheila nor the nurse. He picked up a piece of bread and butter from his plate and took a bite. It hurt his throat going down, but he went on eating. He sat there with his eyelids lowered, looking rather prim and self-satisfied as he ate.

This Sunday had begun well, by not having begun too early. Jasper Jones overslept – or, rather, slept later than usual, for there was nothing to get up for – and so had got for himself an hour’s remission from the Sunday sentence. It was after half-past ten and he had escaped, for one thing, the clatter of the milk-van, a noise which for some reason depressed him. But church bells now began to toll – to him an even more dispiriting sound, though much worse in the evening.

The curtains drawn across the window did not meet. At night, they let a steamy chink of light out on to the darkness, and this morning let a grey strip of daylight in.

Jasper got out of bed and went to this window. It was high up in the house, and a good way down below, in the street, he could see some children playing on the crumbling front steps, and two women, wearing pale, tinselly saris and dark overcoats, hurrying along on the other side of the road.

In this part of London, nationalities clung together – Poles in one street, African negroes in the next. This road – St Luke’s – was mostly Pakistani. Jasper thought he was the only West Indian all the way along it.
His
people were quite distant – in the streets near the railway-bridge, where the markets were, where he had been unable to find a room.

This bed-sitter was his world. There was distinction in having it all to himself. In such a neighbourhood, few did. He had never in his life known such isolation. Back in his own country, home had bulged with people – breadwinners or unemployed, children, the elderly helpless – there was never an empty corner or time of real silence.

White people and coloured people now walked in twos and threes along St Luke’s Road to the church on the corner. The peal of bells jangled together, faltered, then faded. Church-goers stepped up their pace. The one slow bell began and, when that stopped, the road was almost empty. For a time, there were only the children below playing some hopping game up and down the steps.

It was a very wide road. Fifty years ago, all those four-storeyed houses had been lived in by single families – with perhaps a little servant girl sleeping in an attic – in a room on the same floor as Jasper’s. The flights of
broken front steps led up to the porches with scabby pillars and – always – groups of dirty milk bottles. The sky was no-colour above the slate roofs and chimney-pots and television aerials, and the street looked no-colour, too – the no-colour of most of Jasper’s Sunday mornings in London. Either the sky pressed down on him, laden with smog or rain or dark, lumbering clouds, or it vanished, it simply wasn’t there, was washed away by rain, or driven somewhere else by the wind.

He was bored with the street, and began to get dressed. He went down several times to the lavatory on the half-landing, but each time the door was bolted. He set about shaving – trimming his moustache neatly in a straight line well above his full, up-tilted lip. He washed a pair of socks and some handkerchiefs. When he had dusted the window, he spread the wet handkerchiefs, stretched and smoothed, against the pane to dry, having no iron. Then – in between times he was trying the lavatory door without luck – he fried a slice of bread in a little black pan over the gas-ring and, when it was done, walked about the room eating it, sometimes rubbing the tips of his greasy fingers in his frizzy hair, which was as harsh as steel wool.

He was a tall, slender young man, and his eyes had always looked mournful, even when he was happier, though hungry, at home in his own country. Tomorrow, he would be twenty-six. He remained, so far, solitary, worked hard, and grieved hard over his mistakes. He saved, and sent money back home to Mam. Poverty from the earliest days – which makes some spry and crafty – had left him diffident and child-like.

At last – having found the lavatory door open – he set out for his usual Sunday morning walk. People were coming out of St Luke’s, standing in knots by the porch, taking it in turns to shake hands with the Vicar. Their clothes – especially the women’s – were dauntingly respectable. One Sunday, Jasper had rather fearfully gone to the service, but the smell of damp stone, the mumbled, hurried prayers, the unrhythmical rush and gabble of psalms dismayed him. He had decided that this sense of alienation was one he could avoid.

Pubs had just opened, and he went into one – the Victoria and Albert – and ordered a glass of beer. This he did for passing time and not for enjoyment. Sweet, thick drinks were too expensive, and this warmish, wry-tasting one, for which he tried to acquire a liking, was all he could afford. It made him wonder about Londoners, though, as that church service had. There seemed to be inherent in them a wish for self-punishment he could not understand – a greyness of soul and taste, to match the climate. Perhaps in total depression there was safety. His own depression – of fits and starts – held danger in it, he guessed.

The barman went round the tables collecting glasses, carrying away five in each hand, fingers hooked into them. The pub was filling up. As soon
as the door swung to, it was pushed open again. After a time, people coming in had rain on their shoulders, and wiped it from their faces. The sight of this was a small calamity to Jasper, who had planned to spend at least half an hour queasily sipping his beer. Now he would have to drain his glass quickly and go, because of his shoes and the need to have them dry for the morning – and his suit.

The rain brushed the streets, swept along by the wind. He changed into a run, shoulders high and his head held back to stop the rain running down his spine, so that it spurted instead from his eyelids and his moustache. His arms going like pistons, his knees lifted high, he loped slowly, easily. In one way, he loved and welcomed the rain, for giving him the chance to run. He always wanted to run, but people stared when he did so, unless he were running for a bus. Running for running’s sake was an oddity. He was worried only about his suit and shoes, and the shoes were already soaked, and there was a soapy squelch in his socks.

He reached home, panting and elated, and sprang lightly up the three flights of stairs. When he had hung up his damp suit and put on his working overalls, stuffed his wet shoes with newspaper and set them to dry, soles facing the gas-ring, steaming faintly, he began to mix up his dinner. Two rashers of bacon went into the frying-pan, then he took a handful or two of flour and rubbed in some dripping. He shaped the dough carefully into balls with his long, pale-palmed hands, and put them into the bacon fat. They were as near as he could get to his mother’s fried dumplings. Perhaps, just at this moment, she would be making them at home, dumplings and sweet potato pudding. He imagined home having the same time as England. He would have felt quite lost to his loved ones if, when he woke in the night, he could not be sure that they were lying in darkness, too; and, when his own London morning came, theirs also came, the sun streamed through the cracks of their hut in shanty-town, and the little girls began to chirp and skip about. He could see them clearly now, as he knelt by the gas-ring – their large, rolling eyes, their close-cropped, frizzy hair. Most of the time, they had bare patches on their scalps from sores they would not leave alone, those busy fingers scratching, slapped down by Mam. They all had names of jewels, or semi-precious stones – Opal, Crystal and Sapphyra, his little sisters. He smiled, and gently shook his head, as he turned the dumplings with a fork.

All the afternoon, the rain flew in gusts against the window. If he could not go out and walk about the streets, there was nothing to do. He took the chair to the window, and looked through the blurred pane at the street below; but there was no life down there – only an occasional umbrella bobbing along, or a car swishing by slowly, throwing up puddle-water with a melancholy sound.

The launderette round the corner was open on Sunday afternoons and evenings, and sometimes he took his dirty shirts and overalls and sat there before the washing-machine, waiting, his hands hanging loose between his knees, and the greenish, fluorescent light raining down on him. He might make a dash towards it, if the rain eased up a little. His heart began to ache for the bright launderette, as if for a dear dream.

Half-way through the afternoon, he quite suddenly experienced utter desolation. He knew the signs of it coming, and he closed his eyes and sat warily still, feeling silence freezing in his ear-drums. Then he got up quietly and began to pad up and down the room; stopping at the far wall from the window, he leant against the wall and rhythmically banged his forehead against it, his eyes shut tight again, his lips parted. Very soon, a sharp rapping came back from the other side – his only human recognition of the day. He reeled away from the wall, and sat on the edge of the bed, sighing dramatically, for something to do.

What light there had been during the day seemed to be diminishing. Time was going. Sunday was going. He lay on his back on the bed, while the room darkened, and he counted his blessings – all off by heart, he knew them well. There was nothing wrong. He was employed. He had a room, and a good suit, and his shoes would soon be dry. There was money going back home to Mam. No one here, in England, called him ‘Nigger’, or put up their fists to him. That morning, he had sat there in the pub without trouble. There
was
no trouble. Once, at work, they had all laughed at him when he was singing ‘I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas’ as he loaded a van; but it was good-humoured laughter.
Tall Boy
they called him; but they had nick-names for some of the others, too – Dusty and Tiny and Buster.

Jasper thought about each of them in turn, trying to picture their Sundays from Monday morning chat that he always listened to carefully. The single ones tinkered with their motor-bikes, then went out on them, dressed in black mock leather, with a white-helmeted girl on the pillion. The married ones mended things, and put up shelves, they ‘went over to Mother’s to tea’, and looked at the telly as soon as the religious programmes were over. Dusty had even built a greenhouse in his back garden, and grew chrysanthemums. But, whatever they did, all were sorry when Monday morning came. They had not longed for it since Friday night, as Jasper had.

The rain fell into the dark street. Whether it eased up or not, he had to catch the last post. He fetched pen and ink and the birthday-card for himself that he had chosen with great care, gravely conscious of the rightness of receiving one. He dipped the pen in the ink, then sat back, wondering what to write. He would have liked to sign it ‘From a well-wisher’, as if it were to come out of the blue; but this seemed insincere, and he prized sincerity. After a while, he simply wrote, ‘With greetings from Mr Jasper
Jones’, stamped the envelope, and went again to the window to look at his Sunday enemy, the rain.

In the end, he had to make a dash for it, splashing up rain from the wet pavements as he ran with long, loose strides through the almost deserted streets.

He thought Monday morning tea-break talk the best of the week. He could not sincerely grouse with the others about beginning work again, so he listened happily to all they had to say. This had a comforting familiarity, like his dreams of home – the game of darts, the fish-and-chips, Saturday night at White City, and
Sunday Night at the Palladium
on telly while the children slap-dashed through the last of their homework; beef was roasted, a kitchen chair repainted and a fuse mended, mother-in-law was visited; someone had touched a hundred on the motorway, and was ticked off by his elders and betters; there had been a punch-up outside the Odeon, but few sexual escapades this week – as far as the young ones were concerned – because of the weather.