Porky (25 page)

‘So do I,' said one of his friends, feebly.

‘Smelly-bum!' Teddy rushed at him; they thundered off like elephants through the rhododendrons.

‘Tits! Tits!' They raced out of the bushes and across the grass. Toddlers rose up and down on the see-saw, watching them.

I'd never had a letter like this. I couldn't think how to reply, so I put it off until the next week, when I was in New York. He wanted to know what I was doing; I told him that I'd put a mud-pack on my face. I said I was sitting in my hotel room; there were cop sirens on the TV and down in the street, both at the same time. I ended it by saying that I hoped he was well, and that I'd love to see him again, if he came to London, and he must let me know the date. I ended it ‘all my love' because he did.

It didn't seem an adequate reply, a bit flat, but I didn't seem to have any feelings except lust and curiosity. I should have been terribly flattered, but I kept thinking: how can he say all that when he doesn't know me? Does he think he knows me? My one fear was that somehow he'd come to my home. I imagined him standing at the main road and realizing that the place with the pigs wallowing in front belonged to me.

Porky, Porky, Poo-ee
. . . They'd thought me filthy, too . . . They knew how I felt. This Ali hadn't found me out yet, but what difference did that make?

When my face moved, the mud-pack cracked. I showered, and beige water trickled into the drain. Later that night I met a Lebanese man; I used my Intermediate French with him as he sat beside me, his hand up my skirt, and told me how
très important
he was in the government. Later still, I lay beneath him and gazed up into his nostrils, which were stuffed with hairs. He was pompous and overweight; I hated him.

Gwen used to make herself sick by scratching her throat. I remembered that, as I pressed him into me.
Ali, want to love me now?

I made my escape through Ali. In April a letter arrived; not flimsy blue this time but a creamy envelope posted from London. He was in Earl's Court; he'd found a flat and moved straight in, the first day. Could he see me? Now that he was only seventeen miles away, the letter was formal in tone.

I met him in a trattoria. We sucked in spaghetti worms, though neither of us was hungry. We only relaxed when he leaned over to wipe my chin, tenderly, with his serviette.

‘You look so different', he said, ‘with your hair up.'

‘Don't you like it?'

‘No.'

‘Shall I take it down?'

‘Not now.'

Our plates were taken away. He said in a low voice, ‘The flat looks out on the Cromwell Road . . . you know, the one with all the airport traffic coming in. I've been sitting there imagining that one of those cars had you in it.'

‘But I didn't know you were here.'

‘London
is
you . . . Then I couldn't wait any longer.' He paused. ‘Do you forgive me?'

‘For asking me out?'

He shook his head. ‘For talking like this.'

‘I like it.'

‘Only like?' He paused. ‘I'm sorry. I shouldn't ask you. I told myself that before I started.'

‘What's happened at home?'

He raised his eyebrows, hopelessly. It came back in a rush; how I'd kissed his lovely mouth, how his skin smelt. How warm his hands had been inside my clothes. I melted inside. I wanted him right now . . . all afternoon and all tomorrow.

‘Heather, I've broken their hearts . . .'

He lit a cigarette. He didn't see the waiter hovering beside him, holding the menu for dessert.

‘My mother cried for two days. Everywhere in the house there were doors opening and closing . . . My uncle was called down from ‘Pindi . . . My sister Bibs wouldn't speak to me . . .' He rubbed his head and raised it, with the same sorrow I'd seen before, weeks back in the hotel room.

‘They said . . . oh that they'd brought me up to be decent and responsible, and what was I doing leaving the family like this, leaving my sisters . . . deserting the business, running off on impulse, acting shamefully.' He paused. ‘I wish they hadn't said shamefully.'

‘Are you ashamed?'

He shook his head, as if to clear it. ‘I'm confused. They know I'm not just sowing wild oats. They know I'm not like that.'

‘They must hate me.'

‘Just at the moment.'

‘Luring you away.'

‘But they're angrier with me. Worse than angry – disappointed. Sad.'

He stubbed out his cigarette. He wore a blue tee-shirt; not one of the smart suits I'd seen him in before. After all, he was unemployed now.

‘You've given up an awful lot,' I said. I was imagining rolling up his tee-shirt slowly, taking my time; rolling it up like a window blind.

‘I love you,' he said.

Three days later I moved to Earl's Court. Dad watched me pack up the Mini. Now I knew I was going, I'd become more friendly with him.

‘It's not Honolulu,' I said. ‘It's half an hour away.'

‘Beats me what you see in it. Filthy place, London. You're a country girl.'

‘Call this the country?' I said, my arms full of clothes.

‘Fresh air, here.'

‘Kerosene fumes and pig-shit, you mean.'

‘It's London makes you swear like that.'

‘Dad! It was you.'

I climbed into the car and wound down the window. From here I was level with his belt as he stood beside me.

‘Well, Dad . . .'

‘Earl's Court, you say? You watch out . . . full of wogs. Wogs and Jew-boys . . .'

A silence. Neither of us knew what to say; we never did, at moments like this. I looked around at the yard: his sightless lorry, its windscreen broken . . . the blond grass, swept flat by yesterday's rain. I pictured myself being buried there, and the grass was my hair sticking out. I looked at the caravan, its hardboard panels buckled and peeling.

‘Remember when you was little?' he said. ‘Couldn't get you out that trailer. Had all them bottles in there.'

Remember when I was little, what you did in the hen-house? Twelve years old, I was.

I spoke something to the dirty denim of his trousers. A plane roared overhead.

‘What's that?' he said.

‘Nothing.'

We paused.

‘We'll be seeing you at the weekend, your Mum and me?'

I nodded and drove off, jolting over the potholes. Cars hooted as I swerved into the main road.

I reached Earl's Court in twenty minutes flat, speeding through the lights as they changed to red, and flashing cars that got in my way. Drivers swore at me as I passed.

Leaving the car, I ran up the stairs and into Ali's arms. I pressed my cheek against his scarred skin.

‘Are they upset?' Ali asked. ‘Will they ever speak to me?'

‘They don't know about you. You're two girls called Daphne and Rose, you work for British Caledonian.'

‘Should I feel guilty, plucking you from your family's bosom?'

I shook my head, wordlessly. We rocked backwards and forwards.

‘I still can't believe it,' he said. ‘I can't believe my luck.' He hugged me tighter. ‘Tell me about them and little Teddy. I want to know everything about you.'

‘I wouldn't bother.'

‘You're a mystery girl, know that? I'll find out. We have all the time in the world. I want to know you through and through . . .'

‘Stop it, Ali!'

He drew back. ‘What a challenging look. Try me.'

I was loved. No doubt about that. I hope that some time in your life you've been the object of such tenderness as Ali lavished on me. He opened out like a flower – honestly, there's no other word for it. He shed his stilted good manners; he bloomed with confidence.

I'm sure you deserved it more than I did. I was used to lust, of course, and to people fooling themselves with the words they were saying when their blood was up. But Ali meant what he said. When he urged me to tell him everything, he meant exactly that. If I'd replied: my father betrayed me, he scrumpled up my childhood and threw it away like soiled paper out of a car window . . . If I'd said that, oh, and a hundred other things, it would have been all right. Ali would have been outraged but he'd have held me in his arms and loved me even more fiercely. He'd have said: trust me.

If only it were that simple. In women's magazines, on the problem page, they always advise: talk to him about it. They're so silly. If you're able to talk – if you want to share it – then where's the problem?

Closing my eyes, I can describe every detail of that flat. I can think myself back into it; nobody can take that away from me. It was on the second floor. Down below was a porticoed porch, with flaking columns. The hallway was silted up with bills and cards for 24-hour minicabs; yellower ones were heaped on the table. It smelt of torn cats and escaping gas. I never saw the people who lived on the ground floor. On the first floor lived a woman who passed me once and muttered in something that sounded like German. On the third floor, above us, lived some Iranian students whose pop music thudded dully through our lovemaking and the rhythm of my bad dreams. There must have been someone called Miss Maguire on the floor above, because letters addressed to that name disappeared from the hall.

Our flat: a big front room, fitted carpet, and embossed wallpaper like an Indian restaurant. Through the nylon curtains you could see down into the Cromwell Road, busy day and night with the traffic coming in and out of London. Amongst the cars came the airport buses, big as queen bees, carried along in the flow. Our first day I realized: it's the A4. This is the road I'd lived on all my life, and I'm still living on it . . . Still here.

There was a partitioned-off kitchen, with a high, stained ceiling, and a bathroom, and the bedroom at the back. It overlooked a dark well of yards. Beyond the houses you could see a church, one of those monster, sooty, Victorian ones, all boarded up. Its spire rose above the TV aerials. At night all the lights came on in the little windows, all those flats where people lived who I'd never meet, nobody knew anyone in Earl's Court, I soon realized, because nobody was there long enough . . . hotel-land, bedsitter-land, foreigners and transients and girls, six to a flat, waiting to get married. So many other girls, you couldn't count the numbers, who'd run away from home. All the lights came on but the church stayed black.

Our flat . . . You probably want to know about me and Ali, but that flat meant a lot to me. We didn't do much to it; it was furnished, and anyway we didn't have the inclination. Someone's child had pasted Flash Gordon stickers to the hardboard where the fireplace had been. Someone else had hung a net frill around the electricity meter; I wondered about that person. The flat never really became ours, though we inhabited it. For days I didn't even know the address. We didn't move the furniture around; it was enough to be there.

That's what Ali said, anyway. He'd say, ‘Let's stay here all day.'

‘My feet are cold.'

‘Darling, your poor toes.'

He lunged over me to tuck in the blankets. The bed was double but the blankets were single.

We'd get up some time in the afternoon, the curtains still closed and the rooms greeny-dim, as if we were wandering around on the floor of the sea.

He couldn't bear me to put on my clothes, after all those hours in bed. He'd bought a paperback book of love poetry, he was romantic like that, and he'd read it out in a special sombre voice that made me blush. His favourite bit was by someone called Donne, a poem about eyes mingling on threads, and another one, which didn't sound so gruesome. It went;

He said it hurt when I zipped up my skirt and pulled my jumper down; he was losing a part of himself. He'd press his lips, one last time, against my disappearing skin.

We'd wander outside. He'd flinch at the noisy traffic. It was so brutal, he said, after our silence . . . You see, he told me everything; he trusted me.

We'd cross through the traffic and wander down the Earl's Court Road, doing our shopping. We'd buy some Vick Inhaler because we'd caught a cold off each other. He liked to come with me everywhere, he couldn't let me out of his sight.

Bustling and cosmopolitan, they call the Earl's Court Road. It's always crowded; he'd hold my hand tight. There's robed Arabs, and people in anoraks, just emerged from the Underground, bowed with rucksacks and looking as dazed as Ali. There's plenty of take-a ways to choose from; that area never closes. We'd buy kebabs in a carrier bag and dawdle back to the flat. In the side street I'd see my Mini, yet another parking ticket on its windscreen.

Ali and I lived timelessly. I only knew it was April because Sketchleys had pasted a daffodil frieze round their window, to promote a spring cleaning discount.

Oh, yes . . . and there was the tree.

Out the back, way below, lay the bare earth belonging to the unknown being in the basement. Nothing grew there, though the students above threw stuff into it; once I remember opening the bedroom curtains and finding a chapatti on our window sill. Out on the front it was paved, with dustbins. But on the pavement the council had planted a tree. It was still young, just a sapling; I think it was a cherry. During our first weeks it was struggling into blossom.

I remember because it was the first time that I'd told him something about my past. I'd fended off the questions until then. But the night before, I'd had a violent dream about my mother . . . I'd been holding her and she turned out to be pieces of chalk in my arms, moaning chalk, her powdery legs squeaking together. She kept telling me she wasn't, but I heard the squeaking. I'd woken up crying, with Ali's arms around me. He'd held me for ages, he was sobbing too because he couldn't reach what was happening inside my head. It was out of both our control. And then we got up and he gave me a bath, both of us frail, like elderly people.