Fortnight of Fear (26 page)

I stood on my chair with my head out of the skylight, miserably contemplating the rooftops and the distant Downs. It was growing dark now, and the seafront was necklaced with sodium lights. The sea shushed, and shushed, with its hollow mouthful of pebbles; and there isn't a sound in the world more weary and lonely than that.

At about ten o'clock I heard Mrs Bristow bang and lock the back door, and so I decided to go down and give Nancy another try. Perhaps she'd been tired. Perhaps it was the wrong time of the mouth. But I missed her so much. Even after just a few hours I missed her. I couldn't bear to think that she didn't want to go to bed with me any more.

I crept downstairs, and stood outside Room Two. The timing switch on the stairs clicked off, and left me in darkness. I couldn't hear anything at first except Radio Caroline playing in Room Four. “
Waterloo Sunset… I am in Paradise
…” Then I heard somebody talking; and it wasn't Nancy. It was a man's voice: thick and breathy and crackling.

Oh God, I though, she's found somebody else. Somebody older; somebody more like her. Somebody who's not all wet and poetic like me. Perhaps Vince had come back. I'd seen a photograph of Vince, black leather jacket, quiff, sideburns, and a BSA bike with a sidecar. How could a skinny Mod like me hope to compete with a heavy-duty Rocker like him? And he was Simon's real father.

I heard Nancy saying something, but at first I couldn't make out what it was. I knelt down beside the keyhole, so that the draft blew in my ear. She was saying, “… for ever? 'Ow can I stay 'ere for ever?”

“
Because I want you to stay here for ever
,” crackled the man's voice, surprisingly loudly and distinctly. “
Because I love you, and because you must
.”

“But what about Simon?” asked Nancy.

“
All children are damned, you should know that by now
.”

“But 'oo's goin' to take care of 'im?”

“
Fate will take care of him. He is only one more speck of flotsam on the ocean of the night
.”

I slowly stood up. That couldn't be Vince. According to Nancy, Vince had talked about nothing except Eddie Cochrane and motorbikes. And how could she say that I was too poetic if she was talking to somebody who said things like “one more speck of flotsam on the ocean of the night?”

In a fit of jealousy, I thumped at the door with my fist. “Nancy!” I yelled at her. “Nancy!”

There was a moment's silence.

“Nancy!” I yelled again. “Open this bloody door!”

To my surprise, I heard the door unlock. Then it opened, only two or three inches. Inside, Room Two was illuminated by a single beside lamp with a mock-parchment shade. The number of times I had lain in Nancy's bed and stared at the picture on that shade, the Spanish Armada in full sail. Nancy was naked; her skin was shining with sweat. Her blonde hair was stuck to her forehead in dark mermaid curls.

“What's the matter?” she asked me. “You'll wake Simon.”

“You might have had the decency to bloody well tell me,” I raged at her.

“Tell you what? What are you talkin' about?”

“You might have had the decency to bloody well tell me there was somebody else.”

She stared at me. I had never seen her look at me like that before. It wasn't unloving; it wasn't angry. If it was anything describable, it was sad, remote; like somebody who's being carried away from you for ever at a railway station.
Brief Encounters
, I suppose.

“There isn't anybody else,” she said, with awesome simplicity.

“Oh, I suppose I was hearing things, was I? Specks of flotsam, for instance?”

Nancy shook her head. “Must've been the radio. There's nobody 'ere.”

She pushed the door open wide. I looked into the room, but didn't step inside. It was obvious that she didn't want me to step inside. Simon was sleeping in his cot with a blanket draped over one side to block out the light. But apart from Simon, there was nobody else. Nobody that I could see, anyway – although I did notice that the wardrobe door was slightly ajar.

“Satisfied?” asked Nancy.

I didn't know what to say. I felt clumsy and juvenile. I supposed I could have challenged her to fling open the wardrobe; but what if there were nobody in it? Worse still, what if there were? What would I say to Nancy's new lover, face-to-face? “Oh, hallo, I'm David from upstairs. I used to fuck Nancy but now I'm just leaving, sorry.”

I looked at Nancy and her expression hadn't changed. I knew then that she didn't belong to me and that she never would.

I said, softly, “All right,” I bent my head forward to
kiss her but she dodged her cheek away. I've really got to tell you, that hurt. I went back upstairs and sat in my Parker-Knoll chair in the dark and cried for nearly twenty minutes. Then I wiped my eyes on the bedspread and wondered what the hell I was going to do without her.

The next morning I got a job at the Ocean Fish Bar in Montague Street. It was run by a bullet-headed former wrestler who liked his staff to call him Mr George but whose fighting name had been Skull Thomson. I learned how to dip fillets of cod in batter and how to operate the potato-chipper and how to toss a whole bucketful of chips into deep boiling fat without killing myself. I also learned how to wrap a double portion of rock and chips in newspaper so that it could be dredged in salt and doused in malt vinegar and eaten while walking along the street.

After three hours of frying I reeked of fat, but at least I was getting paid, and I wasn't going to go hungry. Mr George let us have all the fish-and-chips we could eat.

That evening, when we closed, I took two cod and chips back to 5a Bedford Row, with a saveloy for Simon. I knocked at Nancy's door and waited.

She took a long, long time to answer, and when she did she sounded very tired. “What do you want?” she called.

“It's David, Dave. I've got a job at the Ocean Fish Bar. I've brought you some fish and chips, if you want some.”

“No thanks. Just leave me alone.”

“Listen,” I persisted. “I lost my temper yesterday, I'm sorry. It was all a misunderstanding. Look, just have some fish and chips, no strings attached. I've brought a sausage for Simon.”

“Leave me alone, Dave, do you mind?”

I stood in the hallway with my warm greasy newspaper package, and I just didn't know what to do. I didn't feel like going back to my room. It was too pokey; too dark. I went for a walk along Marine Parade, and gave my fish and chips to an old tramp who was sitting in one of the concrete shelters with a bottle of cider and a cigarette-tip glowing.

After that, Nancy refused even to answer my knocking. I got another job, temporary carpet fitting for Vokins department store, and what with carpet-fitting in the mornings and fish-frying all afternoon and evening, I didn't get much of a chance to think about her, either. In early September all the art students came back to Union Place, and I made quite a few new friends. I went out with a thin lithography student called Sandra. She had shaggy hair and baggy sweaters and drainpipe jeans, and although she made it clear right from the beginning that she wasn't going to go the whole way, we had plenty of heavy snogging sessions. Whenever I got really frustrated, I bought copies of
Health & Efficiency
. Weekends with Sandra were all instant coffee and trad jazz and walks on the beach.

Occasionally, however, I would pause on my way back upstairs to Room Seven, and stand outside Room Two, and listen. Most of the time, I heard nothing at all. Sometimes I heard the radio, playing faintly. But once or twice I heard Nancy's voice, oddly thin and unsure; and that hoarse crackling man's voice.

On the last night of September I was passing Room Two when I heard the voice saying, “…
love you beyond all conceivable loves
…”

I hesitated, holding my breath. I heard Nancy saying, “… ever, not for ever …”

There was a muffled creaking noise. It sounded like the bed. Then some indistinct conversation, the man and Nancy both talking at the same time. Then the man saying, “
Soon and soon and soon, my beautiful darling … soon and soon and soon!
”

Nancy whimpered; then cried out. The she let out a peculiar strangled keening noise. I was horrified, electrified. I rattled the doorknob sharply. Then I wrenched at
it in fury and temper. I heard Nancy screaming, “
No!
” I took a step back, held on to the banisters, and kicked at the door with my Chelsea boot.

The door juddered open, the catch swinging broken. Instantly, the wardrobe door, which had been wide open, slammed shut. Nancy was standing beside it, naked, her arms crossed protectively over her breasts. She stared at me wildly, whimpering, trembling, unable to speak.

I couldn't believe what I saw. I knew it was Nancy, it had to be Nancy, but she was hideously emaciated. Her back-combed blonde hair had turned bone-white and bedraggled; her arms and legs were as thin as chair-sticks. I could see her hip-bones stretching against her white blue-veined skin. Her breasts had shrunk to empty dugs, although the gold nipple-rings still hung from her nipples, proving beyond question that it was really her. Her eyes were dark-circled; her lips were deeply-lined.

“Nancy?” I whispered. I was so shocked that I didn't know how to move my legs, didn't know how to walk. “Nancy, what's happened?”

“It's nearly over,” she told me. It sounded as if she had no saliva in her mouth at all.

“What? What's nearly over? What are you talking about?”

She sat down unsteadily on the end of the bed, with all the stiffness of an eighty-year-old woman. “It's nearly over,” she repeated, nodding her head.

I went across to the cot. Simon was sleeping deeply, whistling softly through one clogged nostril. A bottle of cherry cough mixture, three-quarters empty, stood on the edge of the basin nearby. The poor little kid was half-drugged.

I closed the door of the room so that nobody could see in. I had kicked the screws out of the latch, that was all, so it wouldn't take much repairing.

“Are you ill, or what?” I asked Nancy. I was both impatient and frightened.

“Ill?” She gave a dry little smile. “No, I'm not ill. I'm in love.”

“But what's happened to you? You look as if you haven't eaten for a month.”

“Don't need to eat. Don't need nothin'.”

I glanced at the wardrobe. “What have you got in there?”

“Nothin' in particular. Mrs Bristow's stuff. It's locked.”

“It's not locked. When I bashed open the door, I saw it open.”

“It's locked,” Nancy intoned. “Nothin' inside it, only Mrs Bristow's stuff.”

“You won't mind if I take a look, then?”

Nancy lifted her head. Her eyes reminded me of poor Miss Coates, the assembler of first-aid kits, who had been carried out of 5a Bedford Row in an open coffin, in the rain. “Forget it, Dave. It's nearly over, forget it.”

“I think I've got a right,” I told her, and I made my way around the end of the bed, and took hold of the brass knob of the wardrobe door.

“
No!
” pleaded Nancy. She climbed to her feet, and hobbled across to me, and seized my wrists with her claw-like hands.

Close-up, she looked as if she had walked straight out of Belsen. Her teeth were gone, her hair was coming out in clumps, her skin was scaly and blistered. She was so weak that she couldn't have hoped to pull me away from the wardrobe; but I stepped away in any case, in sheer disgust. I couldn't help it. It was almost impossible to believe that she and I had once made love in the dunes.

“It's locked,” she whispered, throatily. “Please, Dave, it's locked.”

I reached out again, and this time she didn't try to stop me. I tugged at the knob and she was right. It wouldn't open.

“I want to know what's in there,” I demanded. “I've got a right.”

“No,” she insisted.

“For Christ's sake, Nancy, I wanted to
marry
you once!”

“No,” she mouthed. “And that gives you no right.”

“Didn't you love me, too?” I asked her.

She slowly blinked those dead-fledgling eyes. “I thought I did. But I didn't know what real love really was, did I? I didn't know what it was really like.”

“And now you do?” I challenged her.

I heard the door of the room jar open behind me. I turned around, and there stood Mrs Bristow, in her brown candlewick dressing-gown, one eye squinched up against the cigarette that smoldered between her lips.

“I heard a commotion,” she said.

Nancy sat down again. Mrs Bristow came across the room, picked up Nancy's nightdress from the bed, and draped it around her shoulders. “I think you'd better get back to your room, Mr Moore.”

“I think I want to know what's happened to Nancy, Mrs Bristow,” I replied, belligerently folding my arms.

Mrs Bristow puffed smoke. “You heard her. She's in love.”

“She's half-dead, for God's sake!”

“Love conquers death, Mr Moore. You'll understand that one day.”

“I don't know what the bloody hell you're talking about, and I don't want to know. But I can tell you this: Nancy's coming out of this room and she's going to stay with me, and she's going to eat properly. She's got a kid to look after, for God's sake. So, out of my way.”

Mrs Bristow puffed, sipped, puffed. “She won't come with you, Mr Moore.”

“Then I'll carry her.”

“She'll always come back, Mr Moore. And she'll never love you, never. In fact, if you try to keep her away, she'll grow to hate you.”

“I'm going to call the police,” I replied. “I'm going to call the police and a welfare officer, and then we'll bloody well see.”

“No!” begged Nancy. “Dave, no, please, no!”