The White Room (2 page)

‘Evenin', Jim,' said the man. ‘This her, then?'

‘Aye.'

The man looked down at Monica, smiled.

‘By, you're a pretty one, aren't you?'

Monica said nothing. She looked at the ground, checked for cracks. Moved her feet away from the paving slab edges, tried to force her feet to shrink to stand safely within the protective lines.

‘How old are you?'

She kept staring at the ground.

‘Answer the man.'

She looked up at her father's voice.

‘Seven,' she said.

‘Seven, eh? You're a bonny lass for seven, aren't you? You just come from school?'

She said nothing.

The man looked away from her and back to her father.

‘Quiet one, eh?'

His smile disappeared. He dug into his pocket, handed over some notes and coins. Her father took them, counted them, pocketed them.

‘Right,' he said, ‘I'll be off, then.'

He dropped Monica's hand.

‘Aye,' said the man. ‘You leave her with me. You know when to pick her up.'

The man went to take Monica's hand. She didn't move. He pulled at her, rougher than her father had been.

‘Come on, then.'

Monica didn't budge.

‘Monica,' said her father, ‘come on. Be nice. Hey, I'll buy you a present, eh? An' we can have fish and chips on the way home. You like that, don't you?'

Monica stared at the ground. All the paving stones around her were cracked. There was nowhere to stand. There was nowhere she could be safe. Reluctantly, she allowed herself to be led into the house. The green door closed behind her.

Her father looked at the door for a few seconds after it had closed behind his daughter. Then, patting his pocket, smiled and walked off, surreptitiously adjusting his trousers so his erection wouldn't show.

Jack walked out of the slaughterhouse and on to Scotswood Road, his steps halting, tentative, as if he had just been given his freedom and didn't know what to do with it.

He walked, with no particular destination in mind, just wanting to move his legs, breathe in the air.

He breathed. The air was fresh with soot from the factories by the Tyne. He had the smell of industry in his lungs, but he couldn't erase the deeper smell from his nostrils. His mouth. Clothes, skin and hair, hanging on him like a carcass on a meat hook.

He had been in the job for less than a week, work being hard to come by for returning soldiers in the North-East. He hadn't had a hero's welcome. By the time he had been demobbed the novelty had worn off, the celebrations ended. He had been given his suit, his money, but no job. He had had to find that for himself. His brother had got him a job at one of the Scotswood slaughterhouses. Jack hadn't wanted it, but it was that or nothing. Now he had nothing.

He was conscious of the way he must seem to the outside world: his walk too hesitant for a young man, his hair all wrong. He pulled his cap further down on to his head, trying to cover his hair. Unnaturally white, leached of any tone or hue, lifeless, like thin fibres of bleached bone.

He took another deep breath, smelled carcasses, blood, skin. Skin was the worst. He had been sick the first time the skin lorry had turned up at the slaughterhouse. Bovine hide expertly cut, pig skin blowtorched to remove hairs then stripped from the dead animal. Waste, meat by-products, turned into coats, shoes, watchstraps, belts, anything. There was no limit to human ingenuity. The smell of the skin as it was loaded on to the skin lorry, the smell of the lorry from years of accumulation was rank. He had piled them in, gagging as he did so, vowing never to do it again.

He shook his head, tried to trade blood air for industrial air.

Scotswood hadn't changed. It looked just as it had when he had left three years previously. The river's-edge factories and gasometers still fronted a dark, sluggish Tyne. Chimneys still pumped out clouds, cloaking and choking the city, turning red brick to black, white paint to grey. Street cobbles worn and dusty, like seaside pebbles awaiting the splash of waves to shine them up. The lines and blocks of uniform, flat-fronted terraces stretching from factories upwards to Benwell and the West Road as if trying to escape.

Nothing had changed.

Except the world.

And Jack.

The lambs. They affected him the most. They arrived in vans, small and lost-looking, scared to leave the stinking metal shell, waiting to be led. The men would walk up to them, stick their fingers in their mouths. The lambs would suck, expecting milk, food. Trusting. The men would lead them to the pens, then the killing floor. Bleating and screaming too late.

Lambs to the slaughter. True enough.

He walked. Street after street, around corners, along roads. Trying to lose himself. Trying to find himself. He was hungry, empty inside, but he could think of nothing he wanted to eat.

Places triggered memories. Brought back an earlier life. He let the memories come to him, hoped they would replace the mental newsreel footage he had experienced at the slaughterhouse.

Lights flickered, film whirred. A corner shop where an eight-year-old Jack and his friend had shoplifted a quarter of black bullets, earning himself a strapping from his father. He had never done it again.

A back alley where Molly Shaw lifted her skirt and took down her drawers to show Jack and six of his friends what was underneath. They had looked on, confused, as she pulled them up again, laughed and ran off.

Topper's front door. His best friend, now gone. Eighteen years old, blown up by a German landmine. He sighed, shook his head and walked on.

The memories continued. The films unspooled. It was watching a life from the back of a deserted cinema, unable to join in with the rest of the audience, unsure of what his responses should be. The images were familiar, yet the language of common, shared experience was completely alien to him. Foreign with no subtitles. No one there to explain the meaning. A life of simple definitions: good and bad, right and wrong, black and white. A life lived in a far-distant country, a long time ago. A life Jack couldn't relate to any more.

He walked on. People nodded, sometimes spoke: a small greeting. Jack nodded, sometimes spoke in return. He walked on.

He knew the way they looked at him. Surprise, shock. He felt their stares, could almost hear what they were thinking: no nineteen-year-old should look like that. Should walk like that. Not when you think what he was like before. And his hair … He knew they wanted to ask him about the war, what he'd seen, where he'd been, but he knew they wouldn't. They didn't want to hear the answers. So they would stay behind their windows and nets scrutinizing him, reaching their own conclusions. If they met him and had to say hello, they would do so quickly, just enough to catch the hollowness of his cheeks, see the ghosts lurking behind his eyes, before looking away fast and excusing themselves, hoping that whatever he was carrying wasn't contagious.

Among them but no longer of them, he was able to see Scotswood and its people objectively. What he saw was poverty. A lack of nourishment in all areas. A community badly housed and badly educated, dressed in old clothes made drab through repeated washing, pressing and repairing. The make-do-and-mend ethic shot through every aspect of their lives. A cold, hard life lived in cold, hard houses. Just bodies piled upon bodies. Existing, not living. No heating or water. Children playing in the streets dirty and ragged.

Jack found it hard to believe they were on the winning side.

He walked on with no direction.

He didn't want to go home, back to the house he had grown up in and in which his mother, father, brother and sister still lived. It was too small and no longer a home to him, just a place he slept, usually uncomfortably. He needed something to do, somewhere to go.

He put his hand in his pocket. His fingers curled over a piece of paper. Finding it unfamiliar, he drew it out and unfolded it. It was a flyer. He read:

MEN:
WHEN YOU RETURNED HOME VICTORIOUS FROM FIGHTING FOR YOUR COUNTRY, DID YOU EXPECT SOMETHING MORE? WE AGREE. WE ALSO BELIEVE IN THE ENRICHMENT OF LIFE.
IF YOU ARE LIKE-MINDED, JOIN US TONIGHT
AT 7.30 AT THE ROYAL ARCADE.

THE SPEAKER WILL BE MR. DANIEL SMITH.

SOCIALIST SOCIETY

Men had been handing out leaflets as he had entered the slaughterhouse that morning. He had absently accepted it but never looked at it. He looked at it again, read it slowly, picked out what were, to him, key words:

Socialist Society. Enrichment of life. Did you expect something more?

He stopped walking, looked around.

Poor, badly housed and badly educated.

He folded the paper, replaced it.

Did you expect something more?

Seven thirty, Royal Arcade.

He would be there.

Monica walked down the street, absently pushing chips into her mouth. The chips were hot, salty and vinegar-soggy. They burned her mouth as they went in, blistered her gums. She didn't care. She wanted them to hurt, wanted to feel something that would block out the earlier pain.

Her tears had stopped. The man had given her a handkerchief to wipe them away before her father picked her up. She had cleaned herself up all over with it. It stank. She obviously wasn't the first person to have used it.

Her father walked alongside her, eating his chips and fish from old newspaper. They walked slowly: he to make his meal last, she because she hurt. They said nothing to each other. Under his arm he carried a boxed doll. She had looked at it once when he had picked her up, but she hadn't touched it. She wasn't in a hurry to play with it. It seemed small and inappropriate, like a bandage that wouldn't cover and didn't heal a wound.

She opened the battered fish with her fingers. Hot steam escaped. She picked a piece up, fat and batter burning her fingers, and shoved it in her mouth. More pain.

‘Hey, careful,' her father said. ‘You'll burn yoursel'.'

She chewed, ignoring him. Tears came into her eyes, whether from the pain of the food or the earlier pain she didn't know. She didn't care. She fought them back, swallowed. There were no children playing on the street now. They had all gone home. Home, she thought.

Her father finished his meal, threw the grease-sodden newspaper in a bin.

‘Good, that,' he said. ‘Always nice to have a treat.'

Monica looked down. Her shoes were scuffed and there were bruises developing on her legs. Her feet hit the pavement indiscriminately. She no longer avoided the cracks. She walked on as many as possible. The paving stones wouldn't protect her.

She felt a hand on her shoulder, looked up. Her father was looking down at her, smiling.

‘You're a good lass, you know that?'

Monica said nothing. Smelled the beer on his breath. Beer and whatever was in the hip flask in his coat pocket.

‘A good lass. You know, you're special. A special little girl.'

Monica said nothing.

He squeezed her shoulder.

‘Sometimes people have secrets. Things that other people shouldn't know about. They wouldn't understand. You know that, don't you?'

Monica said nothing.

‘I know you do. Your mam … well, it's best not to say anything to her about where we've been. Understand?'

Monica said nothing.

‘I know you won't. You're a good girl.' He gave a little laugh. ‘What we've got is special, you know that? What we've got—' he looked around quickly ‘—is love. Real love. I know men aren't supposed to say it, because it sounds sloppy, but I love you, Monica. You're a special girl.'

Monica swallowed the hot potato in her mouth.

‘I love you too, Dad,' she said, her voice a small, caged thing.

Her father smiled.

‘Good.'

He squeezed her shoulder again. Monica put more burning food into her mouth.

They walked home in silence.

Later and the streets of Newcastle were damp and dark with night and drizzle. Jack didn't care. He was elated. Those streets seemed transformed in his mind into avenues of possibility. What he had seen and heard in the Royal Arcade had, he felt, changed him.

He had been nervous about going in, thinking the people there would have all been better read, better educated than him. But he had been welcomed unequivocally. For the most part they were just ordinary working-class men and women, coming along after finishing work or taking time off from household chores. He tried to remember names: Jack Common, Billy Beach. They had talked, even argued quite heatedly, violently, but Jack sensed it was a healthy argument; they were all on the same side.

Jack had become lost at times trying to follow the conversations and had had just to sit back and accept the incongruity of the situation: in the rarefied and genteel atmosphere of the old Victorian Royal Arcade, shipworkers and bakers talked knowledgeably and at great depth about social justice, equality, politics and the arts. Admittedly, some of the plays and films he had never heard of, but he tried to catch some of the names:
The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari
was one,
Battleship Something or Other
was another. He sat there, nodding occasionally, sometimes offering a small opinion when asked. He was asked if he had been in the war. He had nodded, given rudimentary answers, not elaborating. There had been glances at his hair following that, but no questions, none of the staring, the fear he had encountered in Scotswood. These people seemed to know what had happened to him, or at least understood. There, in that company, he began to relax for the first time in months.

More than that: it was as if windows and doors, long barred and boarded inside himself, had been flung open, allowing him access to inner places he had only suspected existed. He knew what wasn't right within, where he didn't belong. Now he felt he was beginning to discover where he did belong.

Halfway though the evening, Jack Common had stood up and introduced the speaker: Mr Daniel Smith. A small man, about thirty, Jack reckoned, with neat hair and passionate eyes, he had taken the small stage, looked out at his audience and began to speak of his vision. He spoke with clarity, yet without betraying his working-class origins. His voice was that of the working man, of a shared commonalty.