The Twisted Heart (14 page)

Kit could feel her cheeks warming.

‘Priests,' said Dean, ‘when they go in the nick, you know how they carry knives?'

‘Really?'

‘In case they have to cut a man down. Hopefully, in case they catch him in time, unless it's Adrian Marcett, in which case, let the fucker dangle.'

‘Look—don't,' said Pauly. ‘Just don't.'

Dean's whole body went rigid. In a menacing voice, he said, ‘I'm having a
conversation
here.'

‘Leave her alone,' said Humpty.

Kit's heart began to thump. Involuntarily, she caught her breath.
Senator Voorhees
, she said to herself,
Meta Cherry,
Hunker
Chisholm
, Young Billy Nay
—

Pauly stared downwards.

Joe raised a hand in warning.

—
Nettie Slack, Polly Ripple, Baldy Drinkwater, Ebenezer
Ward
—

‘Yo.' Donald made an idiotic quacking noise, then lapsed back into silence.

The others remained as they were: static, arrested.

Dean looked round the table at his leisure, pitched a loud quack back again, like someone saying ‘
boo!
', then mockingly laughed at them all.

Kit breathed again in a secret gasp.

‘You cunt,' said Dean to Humpty. He rearranged himself in his chair with exaggerated ease. ‘If your brother wasn't here, I'd clip you one. Tell you what, you know what Adrian Marcett's mother says to him when he gets out? She says, “You don't belong in this family. You're the
shit on our
shoes
.”'

‘That's not nice,' said Donald. He snorted at the idea of it. ‘Man, that's fucking horrible.'

‘No it's fucking not,' said Dean. ‘He misbehaved himself. What d'you expect?'

‘Gobshite,' said Donald. ‘She's his mum.'

Dean's mobile rang. He pulled faces for everyone's amusement as he said to the person the other end, ‘Look, fair play, I told you I'd get the tickets but it was like
four
quid on my phone because I had to ring from work.
They keep on bloody give you all these options, round the bloody houses. Like,
four
quid. I mean, I said I'd do it, but, like, if you want to buy me a pint or whatever, it's up to you.'

‘What's your line of work, then?' said Pauly. ‘Student, right?'

‘Fat Steve,' said Dean, putting his phone back in his pocket. ‘Cunt.'

Kit, who had been transfixed, changed register with difficulty. ‘My work?' she murmured. She turned to Pauly and tightly shook her head, as though she was, by this means, reordering the glittery bits in a kaleidoscope. ‘I kind of study Charles Dickens,' she said.

‘Kind of?'

‘Amongst other things,' she said.

Heart-sinkingly, Dean called across to them, ‘Wasn't Maria in a Dickens film?'

‘Thomas Hardy,' said Pauly, adding, for Kit's benefit, ‘she used to be an extra, from she was—' he held a hand out to indicate the height of a child. ‘Her mum was into it. She did
Jude, The Saint
, all sorts of shit.'

‘Maria?'

‘Pauly's wife,' said Donald.

‘My ex-wife.'

‘Oh, I'm sorry,' said Kit.

‘Ran off with this bloke, then she finds out she's bloody got throat cancer,' said Pauly. ‘You have to laugh,' he said.

‘No you don't,' said Donald.

‘You know what's the first thing she does when she finds out?'

‘No,' said Kit.

‘She lights up.'

‘If you can't have a fag when you've just heard you're going to die—'

‘All right, Donald,' said Dean, swatting him.

‘I'm sorry,' said Kit again.

‘Well I'm not,' said Pauly. ‘I'm glad. She pops her clogs, it gives me less to think about.'

Kit was worried by the fact that she hadn't quite understood whether Maria was already dead or not. ‘And the man she went off with?' she said. They seemed to be talking about it, so she asked.

‘Used to be a fucking postie,' said Pauly. ‘Two years he got his mates to nick all my letters, like everything's
my
fault. Had to have stuff sent to my nan's, my sister's, if I even knew. Bollocks. I was an extra once, kids' thing, BBC. Took us out to Great Tew in a monster fucking bus. Remember Billy Walsome?' he said to Dean. ‘His dad was driving that bus. We had to be Victorian firemen, but there was no fire and no water. Put it on afterwards, CGI. All they had was smoke bombs, and these little kids jumping out the windows.'

‘Really?'

‘Put it all on afterwards. Except, like, these little kids. I was surprised they was allowed to, like, little kids—' he whistled a downward slide, ‘—out the windows. Got fucking tedious running around with these empty buckets and everyone screaming and it's only a couple of smoke bombs. I left my hat on that bus. I thought I would've got it back, but I never did.'

Kit stood up, murmuring, ‘I need the ladies.' Which wasn't true, or not very. Had she wished to, she could easily have held on.

The toilet, at the back end of the building, left Kit feeling sullied, with its drip-spattered seat, barely functional door bolt and its banked rolls of loo paper on the floor, all with swollen, ruffled patches on them where they'd been wetted and allowed to dry out again. The sink was so dirty, she decided it would be more insanitary to wash her hands than to leave them.

As she sloped back again, past the rear side-exit, and into the closeness and warmth of the pub, level with the partition next to their table, clear as anything she overheard Dean say, ‘So, Joe, about that blonde you was out with the other night. Quality goods, my son.'

Kit stopped dead and focused her thoughts narrowly on the elegant sheaves of barley and hops etched into the partition's opaque glass; though as she stared, it came to her that through a spray of hop cones she was seeing a distorted image of Joe's face, he himself, she now made out, looking intently across the pub towards the bar. Kit was so unpleasantly affected by Dean's remark that her immediate thought was to go back and hide in the loo. What a pitiful thing to do, though. She turned her head to follow the line of Joe's gaze, not to the bar itself, it transpired, but to the mirror behind it; to Joe's reflection as he looked at her reflection in the mirror behind the bar. For a split second their eyes met in the glass.

She had overheard Dean asking him about a blonde. Joe
had seen her overhear this, which meant that—he knew that she knew that he knew that she knew.

So much for mirrors. With a dull sense of her own worthlessness, Kit stepped round the partition.

She squeezed herself back down onto the bench. The mood at the table seemed drunker. She had intended, as she went past him, to compare Pauly's right ear with his left ear, but forgot to do this. Humpty looked almost asleep.

‘Give it a year,' said Donald, ‘one of us probably will be capping it on St Giles.'

Kit, who no longer cared about something indefinable that she
had
been caring about before, asked, ‘How so?' She wasn't sure she'd heard correctly, and if she had she didn't understand.

Donald swept a phantom hat off his head and held it out as a beggar—held it out to her, and as a beggar waited, and waited, until she began to feel uncomfortable, not handing over any coins.

She tried and failed to stare Donald down, before quoting disdainfully at him: ‘“They haunt the shadows of your ways, In masks of perishable mould: Their souls a changing flesh arrays, But they are changeless from of old”.'

Donald retracted his arm. ‘Come again?' he said.

‘What is that, Kit?' asked Pauly.

‘“The Statues”?' she said. ‘Poem, 1899, Laurence Binyon. He thought London's real statues were its beggars, considering that they were always there, out in the open, and motionless, I guess;
capping
it.'

‘You do my head in,' said Donald.

It suddenly struck Kit—how had she missed this before?—that Binyon's use of ‘changeless' could be read as a pun; presumably not deliberate though.

I am a very stupid person, she said to herself, because, up until Dean Purcell asked Joe about this blonde he asked about, I wasn't especially minding what happened next, and now I slightly feel quite upset, even though Joe doesn't owe me anything, even though—

Kit's thoughts scattered as a pinched if not-blonde girl put a wine glass down beside her, filled with a blush-coloured, gas-rich drink, indicating with her thumb a wish to sit down on the bench. Kit was forced to shunt up close to Donald, who nodded his approval.

No one acknowledged the meagre girl's arrival. The talk had moved to football. She glanced at Kit several times, unimpressed. Kit was unimpressed back. After a while, the girl murmured confidentially, ‘How does it feel then, to be sat here with us lot, a rose amongst the thorns?'

‘What?' Kit inclined closer, not because she hadn't heard, but because she wanted to feel as though she hadn't heard.

Before the girl could repeat herself, Kit jerked back again. She turned round to catch Joe's eye, who questioningly tilted his head towards the door at the front of the pub.

Kit was filled with relief. To the girl she said, ‘Could I ask you to—'

‘Joe, Joe,' said Pauly anxiously. He had a hand on Humpty's shoulder—Humpty, who was now slumped over, legs knotted, eyelids barely open. ‘Back to yours tonight, or what?'

Joe looked at his watch. ‘Are you here till last orders? I
could walk Kit home and be back in time to get him?'

‘Go ahead. It's okay,' said Dean. ‘We'll keep an eye.'

Donald snickered. ‘Unless Alison Stannard walks in.'

‘I'd rather fuck an exhaust pipe,' said Dean passionlessly.

The skinny girl snickered too. If she had moved her legs, it wasn't detectable. Kit was forced to edge out round the table with her body kept bent in sitting position.

Joe, as he observed this, appeared displeased.

‘I can go home on my own,' Kit said, but he quelled the suggestion at once with his eyes.

‘I'll be back in a bit,' he said to Pauly. ‘He hasn't been doing this during the week?'

‘No, mate.'

‘I'll just—' Joe fished some money out of his pocket and gave it to Pauly. ‘In case,' he said.

‘No need,' said Pauly, though he took it.

‘Don't worry, mate,' said Dean.

‘I won't be long.'

Humpty struggled towards speech. ‘Hundred,' he slurred, and raised a limp fist.

Kit stumbled over a plastic bag the girl had left on the floor.

‘Have a nice trip,' called Donald, before adding more quietly, ‘Fuck me, she's tall.'

‘Don't think she'd have you, mate,' said Dean.

‘I'm crying already,' said Donald.

Kit heard the girl laugh hysterically.

‘I mean, what—Joe uses a fucking step ladder or what, when—!' There was a plosive cry.

Kit looked back. She couldn't help herself. Dean was gazing ceilingwards. Donald was clutching his stomach.

‘Come on,' said Joe.

At the door of the pub, their way was barred by a strikingly pretty girl—as Kit observed, instinctively on her mettle—in an outfit of white denim fringed with silver. ‘Dean back there?' she said.

‘He is,' said Joe.

‘Wanker. I knew it. I'm coming out the toilets in The Bunch of Grapes, because, God forbid I should ever drink lager because I just, like,
piss
, and Dean comes up to me and—'

‘Look—' said Joe.

‘—he goes—'

‘—look, I'm sorry,' said Joe, ‘but I don't have time to—'

The girl stepped backwards out onto the pavement to stop him passing her. ‘Is Ailie in there?' she asked.

Again, Kit remembered too late that she had meant to check Pauly's other ear.

They left the girl standing amongst the cigarette ends that lay in a spattered arc outside the pub. When they were a little way off, she screamed after them,
‘I'm not a fucking nobody, you
know
.'

Joe shifted the line of his walk closer to Kit's, and gently touched her elbow. ‘Hey there, woman,' he said, ‘I thought you told me you didn't have any poetry memorised?'

‘Me?' she said. ‘Oh. Yes—no. No, no, I have some lovely things stored inside my head.'

As they turned into the Woodstock Road, Joe said, ‘Thank you.'

‘For?'

But there was no answer.

After a few minutes of silence, Kit pulled herself together.

‘Joe, what's going on? What are you thinking?' she said.

‘Sorry.'

‘No, don't apologise.'

He sighed. ‘I was wondering—most wars, to date; Humpty's always talking about—I suppose they're still usually only going to be possible if a large number of people can be persuaded to kill whoever's immediately in front of them, right? Even now, this is still true, right? But with Dean, I can't figure out whether he's the sort of person—whether you can sense he's someone who'd be almost happy to do this, at least at first, or whether—whether he'd be impressively more ready than most to resist.'

‘You're toying with the idea of him being perfect trench fodder, as it were? Can one still say that?'

‘No, not that,' said Joe slowly. ‘I'm toying with the idea of him being immediately willing, in a way I wouldn't, to take up arms to defend my mother and father. I don't know. When Humpty loses Dean's protection, then I think we're really in the shit, and I'm—'

Joe was jumping about too fast for Kit to follow. ‘Protection?'

‘Sorry,' he said. ‘It's complicated.'

‘Why does Humpty say you want him to go and live in a field?'