Life: An Exploded Diagram (28 page)

“I’m sorry to see yer mother here, Ruth,” he said. “She dint seem as mental as the rest of that lot. Why don’t yer see if yer can’t talk some sense inter her?”

He noted the mackintosh over George’s arm.

“An see if yer can’t get that coat on her. That ent a pretty sight, is it?”

And with that, he plodded on his way.

Ruth looked at the faces around the square. There were none she didn’t know, hadn’t spent her life among. The idea of them all watching her as she made the long walk to her mad mother, the shame of it, brought her to the edge of nausea, of swooning. She burst into tears, noisily, and stumbled back into the churchyard. Reaching the bench where, in her long-gone age of innocence, she’d shared lunch with poor soft Stanley, she sat down, took off her spectacles, and wept.

George came to her and, after a moment or two of hesitation, sat beside her and put his arm around her shoulders.

“I’m sorry,” Clem whispered.

“Don’t say that. Don’t spoil it.”

They were lying on their sides with their arms around each other. He could feel Frankie’s breath on his neck. His fingers trembled in her hair.

“It was nice,” she said.

“Was it?”

He remembered her short hiss of pain, or anger, her lips pulled back from her teeth. It had shocked him.

The light had changed, brightened. A wind they could not feel rattled the gorse above them. He wondered about the tide, how high it might come, and when. Stupid holidaymakers were always getting cut off by high tides, all along the coast. Having to be rescued. If he and Frankie were . . . God. He quelled a ripple of panic.

She said quietly, seriously, “I expect it’s something one gets better at with practice. Like the violin. Or anything, really.”

He sort of laughed, or scoffed. He couldn’t help it. She lifted her head and looked at him gravely. Her eyes were so dark and liquid and lovely. He forgot this, sometimes, because he thought so much about her other parts.

“What? Don’t you think so?”

“Yeah. I spose.”

“You
spose,
” she said, mocking him. “Well, let me tell you, Clement Ackroyd, we are going to find out. We are going to put in lots of practice.”

She kissed him.

“Lots and
lots.
Okay?”

“Yeah. Okay.”

She propped her head on one hand. “You don’t sound too sure.”

He was in a state of sticky wilt. He didn’t know what to do with himself.

“Frankie, leave off.”

“Or are you one of those boys who lose interest in a girl once they’ve had her? Are you going to finish with me now that you’ve made me a tart?”

“Yeah,” he said. “You read me like a book, Frankie.”

“Or a poem.”

“Or a poem,” he agreed.

“Tell me you love me,” she said.

But before he could speak, she pressed two fingers onto his lips.

“Don’t say it if you don’t mean it. Don’t, honestly. Don’t say it just because we’ve, you know. Had sex.”

“I love you, Frankie.”

“More than before, or the same?”

“More.”

“Good,” she said, and lowered her head onto his chest.

He looked up at the colorless sky, where gulls drifted, scolding and mewling.

We’ve done it, he told himself. We’ve actually done it.
Yes!

Yet what he felt was worryingly familiar and childish: something like getting caught stealing fruit from someone else’s garden.

They walked back along the beach, making silly dramas of dodging the slow overlaps of low surf.

She said, “We’ve never done this before.”

“I know that,” he said.

“No, not
that.
I mean, we’ve never walked anywhere holding hands. I really like it.”

Something, a slight catch in her voice, made him look at her. She was nearly crying.

“Hey,” he said. “Hey, c’mon, Frankie.”

They stopped, and he put his arms around her, awkwardly.

“Hey. Whassup?”

She sniffled into the folds of his jacket, shaking her head.

“I hate everything. I really do, actually. All I want is to be with you. Everything else is such absolute shit. So
boring.
D’you know what I wish?”

“What?”

“That the world
would
end right now. That Kennedy or thingy, the Communist, would blow us all up. I expect it would hurt. It would be ghastly for a minute or so. But then it would be all over. I wouldn’t have to go back to Mummy and Daddy and tell lies about where I’ve been and then think up more lies so I can meet you next time. I don’t want to do that anymore. I really don’t. I can’t bear it. It’s all so
mucky.
”

He thought, She’s ending it. Because I was no good.

Suddenly he was exhausted by the very thought of the long ride back. Sickened, as though he’d already smelled the warmed-up and congealed Sunday dinner waiting for him. As though he’d already tasted the lies that he, too, would tell.

Frankie seemed to have read his thoughts somehow.

“I don’t want to go home,” she said, so childishly, so innocently, that it made Clem laugh.

“I don’t,” she said more fiercely. “I can’t bear the thought of it.”

“Nor can’t I,” he said. “Come on. The tide’s coming in.”

When they could see the rooftops of Hazeborough hunched at the cliff top, they heard voices. Yells ripped meaningless by the wind and the surf. At some distance ahead of them, an ancient timber jetty sloped into the sea, sand and shingle banked up against it. Two — no, three — young boys, their shapes made indistinct by sea glitter, shouting and throwing stones. As he and Frankie drew nearer, Clem saw that the boys were not stoning the jetty but something close to it, half buried. Something rusty black and spherical with stumpy little legs.

Clem would never be sure if he’d recognized it in that last instant. Whether he’d yelled a warning just before everything stopped making sense, before all memory turned false. Before all that had been separate and different — sea and stones, wind and sand, his and Frankie’s place among them — erupted into the same thing: a silent roar with huge rough hands that picked him up and changed him terribly and threw him away. It all seemed to take a long, long time. Something was happening to his arms and legs and face, but those parts of him were far away, floating by themselves. He wondered where Frankie had gone, thinking that he should be looking after her, that she would be frightened.

Then something big thumped into his back and he was still.

Just before he went to sleep, he heard a pattern of sound:
ssshh-tick-tock,
ssshh-tick-tock.
Like someone kind, a nurse perhaps, trying to persuade a clock to stop.

When he woke up, he was dreaming. His head was in a bubble through which he could see the empty sky. The bubble was the glass cab of a big machine, but nothing would obey the controls. He sent urgent blurred messages out to its limbs. After a while he saw, at the corner of his eye, something come alive and lift itself out of the sand. It looked a bit like a hand at the end of a ragged tube. It seemed to be pointing. He looked beyond it and saw a pair of legs, splayed and painted red, sticking up out of a drift of sand, close to a dummy’s head wearing a red mask and a black wig.

He could not understand why he couldn’t hear anything while at the same time his head was full of noise.

Frankie?

The word came from nowhere.

His eyes refocused on the hand at the end of his arm. Actually, it looked more like a red knitted glove that hadn’t been put on properly. Then fiery fingers that were colder than ice pressed themselves against the side of his face and ushered him down into a merciful and fathomless darkness.

I
AWOKE BRIEFLY
on days five, six, and seven and spoke her name before sliding back under the surface.

Ruth, who’d sat beside me all that time, must have been deeply disappointed. Sons are supposed to call out “Mother!” when Death comes to visit. I didn’t.

My first coherent question was, “If she alive?”

Ruth said, “Who?”

“Frankie.” It seemed to take the better part of an hour for my crippled mouth to form her name.

“That Mortimer gal?”

“Yef.”

“She’s alive.”

“If she orright?”

“I dunt know,” my mother said. “I hent asked.”

For which, God forgive me, I never forgave her, even though she’d been crying for a week.

They’d identified me by the label (which I had been at pains to conceal from Frankie) stitched to the waistband of my underpants.

Rule 19: All items of clothing, including socks and underwear, are to be clearly labeled with the pupil’s full name.

I don’t know how they identified Frankie.

Goz came to see me in Norwich sometime between my second and third operations. Not that there was much of me to see. I was bandaged like a mummy, just the right side of my face — eye, nose, and half mouth — showing. My white-packaged left arm was propped up on a sort of cradle. My white-parceled left leg hung from a wire attached to something like a gallows. Goz, to his credit, didn’t flinch. He sat down on a chair where I could see him by swiveling my eye.

“It probly don’t look that way to you,” he said, “but you are a lucky sod. That mine blew a hole in the beach you could park a bus in. Two buses. You heard about the three kids, I spose?”

I had, yes. George had told me, shakily.

“During the war,” he’d said, as though talking to himself, “we’d sometimes put stones in the coffins when we couldn’t find all their bits. To make up the weight, like.”

Goz said, “You were in all the papers. There was even a bit on the telly.”

I knew that, too.

“Frankie,” I managed to say.

Goz seemed to see something interesting on the floor.

With difficulty, slurping the words, I said, “D’yer know how sher if? No one’ll tell me anyfing. Gof?”

“She’s gone, comrade.”

“Gone? Gone where?”

“London, so I’m told. Some private hospital. A week ago.”

“Yer know how sher if?”

“No,” Goz said. “They wouldn’t tell me anything, neither. I said I was her cousin, but they didn’t believe me.”

It was Goz who told me, some days later, about Win and the Brethren. He’d been there, stayed to the bitter end. He hadn’t found out about me and Frankie until the following day.

Ruth and George had fled the shameful display in the square and gone home. They’d stopped answering the phone, unable to face any more calls about Win. Just before five o’clock, a police car stopped outside the house and two officers knocked at the front door. Ruth assumed their business concerned her humiliated mother, and it took her some time to grasp what they were telling her. When it sank in, she sank with it. She fainted and fell backward against George, who was unable to take her weight. He also fell backward and was pinned to the floor by his stout wife. After an ungainly struggle, he was freed by the policemen.

During that Sunday afternoon, the square had filled with people. Must have been all of Borstead there, Goz said, and more besides. The piss-taking and joking gradually died out, and it got very quiet. It was like everyone was listening to mad Enoch Hoseason reading out that crazy stuff about plagues and earthquakes and Beast number 666 and all of that. But you could see that the Brethren were suffering, getting knackered. Fighting off doubt. Now and again some of them would start to moan, “Let it come, Lord; let it come.”

Goz said that the atmosphere got weird. Some of the onlookers started encouraging the Brethren to stick at it. Like they’d started wanting the Bomb to drop, too. Two carloads of police arrived to reinforce P.C. Newby, but they didn’t interfere. The Reverend Underwood had a heated discussion with them, then stormed off, waving his arms about.

Come evening, with the light going and a thin drizzle falling, the crowd started to dissipate. Goz went home and had his tea and returned to the square. There was still a good number of people there. Hoseason was still reciting, but some of his followers were clearly in a bad way. Doreen Pullen, who ran the Cosy Tea Shop, unlocked her premises and carried chairs out and persuaded some of the Chosen — including Win — to sit. She also brought cups of tea and rather dry slices of cake, but these were refused. Someone draped a coat over Win’s shoulders, and she didn’t cast it off. Goz was puzzled that none of us — Ruth, me, George — were there. He went to the phone box at the top of the square and called our house. (He got no reply, of course. By then, my parents were arriving at the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital.) Newby and one of the police cars had disappeared; the remaining three officers were enjoying Doreen’s hospitality.

There was muted talk of an explosion — another one of them mines — on Hazeborough beach.

By the time the church clock struck eleven, the Brethren were wet, wilted, and dejected. Hoseason and his brother were the only two left standing. Enoch was now on his twelfth recitation of the book of Revelation, and his voice was as coarse as the rasp of a file on a horse’s hoof.

At the last stroke of midnight he fell silent and lifted his face to the rain. Some of the few remaining onlookers applauded, self-consciously. Most of the Brethren were now asleep or semiconscious on chairs or the ground. Enoch and Amos went around the circle, shaking them vigorously. Some responded; some did not. Then the two brothers, alone and caring not who followed, walked away in the direction of Angel Yard. Halfway there, on the pavement outside the Star Supply Stores, Enoch stopped dead and fell on his knees and cried brokenly, “‘My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?’”

Amos helped him to his feet, and they went on.

Win was left slumped on one of the Cosy Tea Shop’s bentwood chairs. Goz was by now very perturbed that we were not there to get her home. Then Chrissie Slender and the poacher, Bert Emery — with whom she lived in sin — stepped out of the darkness and helped her into Bert’s van.

Some weeks later, Goz reported that Enoch Hoseason had disappeared from Borstead. The rumor was that he’d moved to the West Country, presumably to found another sect in preparation for the next end of the world.

It was during that same visit that Goz told me he’d heard that Frankie had gone to America for treatment at some special clinic. He didn’t know where.

I progressed from bed to wheelchair (Goz whizzing me along the hospital corridors in defiance of all protocol) to crutches.

I went back to Newgate at the end of September 1963. By then I needed only a walking stick. My new nickname was Frankenstein, and I answered to it, causing embarrassment. (Although, one day a Maggot burst into tears when he looked at me, and that hurt.) Tash Harmsworth and Jiffy and Poke Wilkins gave me extra tutoring. My right hand was undamaged. Writing and drawing were okay. Painting was more difficult then. Too much color mixing, too much changing hands.

I was solitary, dislocated. My few school friends had left at the end of the summer term. Goz was at Cambridge, the first person from Millfields to go to university. And thus getting higher Above Himself than anyone from the estate had ever been before: a working-class Icarus.

The months in the hospital, the surgery, the physiotherapy, the obsession with physical and mechanical functions, had left me emotionally numb. Clumsily robotic. It was as if the last general anesthetic hadn’t worn off. But, slowly and surprisingly, school woke me up. I started to feel again, to reassemble myself. Often I wished that I hadn’t. At the core of the wreck of who or what I was, there was a vacancy, an absence whose name was Frankie. My rediscovered feelings had nothing to attach themselves to, no purpose. They were like a wardrobe full of a dead man’s clothes. My parents treated me with careful circumspection, as if I were a delicate and rather embarrassing alien visitor from a remote star entrusted to their care.

Because I found it difficult to paint, I was not going to do very well at the A-level exam. My portfolio of drawings (many of which featured a stylized girl’s body in dark imaginary settings) was good, though. Jiffy had a word with his old art college, and they gave me a place.

I left Norfolk for London without a backward glance, with my paltry possessions in a suitcase that looked like leather but was made of pressed and laminated cardboard. I had fifteen pounds, cash, in my pocket and a council grant worth ten pounds and ten shillings a week. George was quietly outraged. It was pretty much half what he earned, and he didn’t get to look at girls with no clothes on.

I loved the late 1960s. We all did. It was like stepping out of a black-and-white movie to find yourself standing on sunlit uplands full of color. But for me, personally, the crucial and life-changing thing was that it became compulsory for young men to have long hair. I gratefully hid most of my face behind Cavalier-style black locks and peered out at the world from between these curtains with greater confidence. In 1969 I was working as a designer for an early “style” magazine near Covent Garden. One of the writers was a very pretty girl who sometimes wore thigh-length maroon suede boots below her miniskirt. Her name was Julie. I was, it seemed, invisible to her, but one day we happened to be leaving work at the same time and she said, “Coffee bar or pub?” It was a hot July evening. The day before, an American called Neil Armstrong had stepped — well, sort of hopped backwards — onto the surface of the moon. This was only slightly less amazing than the fact that Julie Hendry had spoken to me. It was a great deal less amazing than the fact that after a couple of drinks and a meal at an Indian restaurant, she came back to my flat with me.

She was amused that I kept my dope inside the hinged hump of a wooden camel.

“Where’d you get this? Morocco?”

“Yeah,” I lied.

The following summer, word spread of a free music festival near Glastonbury, in Somerset. Julie and I traveled down there with a couple of friends in their wagon, an old post office van painted all over with rainbows and
BAN THE BOMB
signs. The festival site was on a farm. It was a strange scene; “far out,” in the parlance of the times. A rural landscape a bit like Norfolk: long low hedges, willow and chestnut trees, gently rolling fields, cows. And winding through it an erratic parade of longhairs: guys in headbands and pastel-colored bell-bottoms and stack-heeled boots, barefoot girls in minis or translucent cheesecloth skirts, their faces decorated with stars and flowers. The mingled odors of dung and hashish, the sound of the Grateful Dead on the wind. As we neared the field where the stage had been set up, we saw, just ahead of us, a merry mob gathered around a bald but bearded man dressed in black. I assumed he was some sort of performer because he was attracting a great deal of laughter and applause. Then I recognized him. He was standing on a sort of dais with a densely lettered signboard in front of it.

“Turn away!” he shouted. “Turn ye away from inebriation and fornication!”

“No way, man,” someone called out. “We’ve come all the way from Birmingham for some of that!”

Laughter.

“Turn ye away, for ye stand at the very gates of Babylon, the Mother of Harlots and Abominations of the Earth! She who sitteth upon the scarlet-colored Beast with seven heads and ten horns!”

Cries of “Whooo!” and “Yeah!”

A blond boy wearing a tie-dyed T-shirt and a top hat turned to the gathering and said, “He’s got to be tripping, man.”

A girl who was clearly not wearing a brassiere beneath her lace dress reached up to offer Hoseason a drag on her spliff. Someone else tried to tempt him with cider.

I pulled Julie away.

Apart from the reappearance of the Apocalypse Man, it was a great weekend.

Julie and I married two months later at Camberwell Registry Office. Neither of us invited our parents. We were very happy for the first six years and not very happy for the next two and a half. She left me in May 1979, the day after Margaret Thatcher was elected prime minister. It was a pretty rough week all around. I don’t blame her. (Julie, that is.) I’d always felt grateful to her for loving me, and gratitude isn’t a good basis for a marriage. Feeling grateful all the time will make you bitter eventually. She left me for a charming (and handsome) property developer called Martin. They’re still together. We exchange Christmas cards.

I’d gone freelance by then. I was hardly ever out of work. At first I did anything and everything: graphics for newspapers and magazines, cookbooks, album covers, travel guides. Then I started to concentrate on book illustration and eventually started writing, too. Nonfiction. I don’t have much time for novels. Two of my books were taken up by an American publisher, and in 1990 I flew to New York to do promotional stuff. I fell in love with the city. By the simple trick of overwhelming me, it relieved me of my emotional luggage, like one of those superb hotel doormen pushing a cheap and careworn suitcase toward the gutter with his toe. In 1992 I sold my London flat and my studio, and I’ve lived in Upper Manhattan ever since. I have no regrets. I am content.