The White Room (5 page)

Grunts and moos, howls and squeals. Communicating their fear, their terror. Pushing and jostling, trying to escape, throwing themselves against their bars, stumbling, legs quivering, collapsing from terror and exhaustion. Knowing one of them would be next.

Then they came, unbidden: other slaughter, other carcasses.

‘No …'

Jack hadn't realized he had spoken aloud.

‘Don't worry,' said Isobel, her mouth full, ‘I've got you.'

The images again, the Pathé horror newsreel.

Jack couldn't stop them, flickering back to half-life against his closed eyelids.

The stick people. Men, women and children. Skin shrunken down to their bones. Faces skeletal, eyes filled with terror.

Squashed into bunks smaller than veal crates.

Bodies piled high, bulldozed into graves.

Bones and flesh just ashes in the furnace.

People no longer human. Just meat and bone.

Walking meat.

He smelt carcasses, blood, skin.

Expertly cut, blowtorched to remove hairs then stripped from the dead animal. Waste, meat by-products, turned into coats, shoes, watchstraps, belts, anything. No limit to human ingenuity.

The bull staggered, dead but not yet realizing it.

Metal sparking off metal. Eyes lit by butchers' gleam.

Grunts and moos, howls and screams. Communicating their fear, their terror. Knowing one of them would be next.

Lambs to the slaughter.

The slaughterhouse. The abattoir.

Belsen.

‘What's up with you?'

Jack opened his eyes, looked down. Isobel was holding his limp penis in her hand.

‘Don't you fancy us?'

The question was asked teasingly, but her eyes held a grain of truth.

‘Ye – yes.'

‘Then show me.'

She began pumping him again, head bobbing speedily up and down.

He put his head back, kept his eyes open. Stared at the ceiling.

He heard voices, looked.

A celluloid Ralph Richardson talking to Raymond Massey. Both dressed in white jumpsuits. He wondered what they were saying, didn't listen. White actors in white clothes on white sets.

White.

The future.

Isobel's pace increased, head bobbed faster. He forced the other images away, concentrated on the screen, on Isobel's actions.

Cut to: the city. Huge, gleaming buildings. White.

Images washed over him: he saw skyscrapers, tower blocks with walkways linking them, cars flying between them.

The future. He was seeing the future.

He felt movement in his body, moving towards a release.

Dan Smith's earlier words:

Stop having dreams and visions. Start turning them into reality.

He relaxed, comforted by what was before him.

Isobel's head bobbed faster.

The future.

White, gleaming.

Skyscrapers, tower blocks.

White.

He felt it, then: his body bucked, springs, wood complaining.

The future.

White.

Gleaming.

He came.

June 1956:

My Baby Love, My Baby Love,
My Baby Love

Monica Blacklock lay on the bare boards, the wood cold, worn and splintering. They smelled of age and neglect. She didn't notice. She screamed and gasped: a serrated spasm of pain knifed through her belly, up her spine.

Her left hand twisted the old, threadbare, green candlewick, her right scrabbled for purchase on the floorboards. Her nails caught the wood, splinters embedded themselves under her fingertips, into her naked back and buttocks, increased the pain. She didn't notice. The pain in her belly consumed her.

Gradually it subsided, washed away. Her body regained its equilibrium in slow waves. She loosened her grip, stretched her fingers. Gulped air down, gathered herself for the next wave, hoped she would have the strength to ride it. She tried to prop herself up, support her torso and swollen abdomen. But she couldn't. Her arms trembled and shook. Bones felt brittle enough to snap. She lay back on the floor breathing deep, conserving her energy.

She hadn't felt well all day. She had woken up with pains in her back. Bad ones. She had thought it was just the strain of carrying a baby inside her. She had spoken to Brian, told him she didn't feel up to working today.

‘You've got punters.' He had shrugged. ‘They mean money. Don't fuckin' start with yer whingin' again.'

But Brian, she had wanted to say, it hurts. When they put it inside. It hurts. She rubbed her stomach as she thought this. She looked at his hands: knuckles pink and deflating, twitching and jumping to be reddened and reinflated. She read his mood from them. Said nothing.

It was often wise to say nothing. Brian was deaf in one ear, and Monica often found herself saying things she thought he couldn't hear, only to be painfully reminded that he had heard and fully understood.

He sat at the small kitchen table while he waited for Monica to boil the kettle, make him his morning cup of tea. He looked away from her, not even acknowledging her presence. She spooned tea from the carton into the brown pot. She set the spoon down, turned to him.

‘Please, Brian. I'm eight months pregnant. This could … could damage the baby. Come on. Please.'

Brian looked out of the window. Grey sky above Scotswood. Black soot on the buildings.

‘You've got a job to do,' he said, eyes beyond the glass. ‘Do it.'

She crossed to him, stood before him, cowering slightly.

‘Brian.' Her voice was fragile and small. ‘Just let me use me hands. Just me hands. Or even—' she swallowed, her saliva bitter ‘—me mouth. I'll use me mouth.'

She looked at him, eyes flickering between his face and the table, pleading and timorous.

He looked at her, eyes fixed and direct, alive with anger and revulsion.

‘They don't pay for that. If you want to do that, do it extra. But they pay to fuck a pregnant lass. An' that's what they're gonna do.'

The kettle let out a shrill, insistent whine.

‘Make the tea.'

Monica turned, switched off the gas, poured hot water into the teapot. Her hand shook, water spilled on to the wooden benchtop. She kept her back to him, willing herself not to cry.

She heard the chair move behind her, the scrape of wood on lino, footsteps moving towards her. She felt hands encircle her waist, rest on her swollen abdomen. She tried to keep busy, put the lid on the teapot, but those hands, not hard yet not soft either, persistent, the only hands she allowed herself to be touched by without paying first, stopped her. She sighed the fear, the fight from her body, sank back against Brian. She felt his strength through his shirt; his frame wiry and taut, muscles like coiled, knotted rope.

‘Not for much longer,' he said. ‘Not for much longer.'

She sighed again, drew what comfort she could from his body, his words. She nodded, resigned.

‘I'll make the tea.'

She pulled gently away from him.

He resumed his place at the table. She wiped at the corner of her eye with her thumbnail.

She poured his tea.

And that was how her day had started.

The front door had slammed shut. Her last punter leaving. There seemed to have been a long time between her first contraction, when her features contorted from faked pleasure to unchecked pain. Between him withdrawing, suddenly shrivelled and disgusted, and him leaving the flat, she had asked him for help, implored him to go and get someone. He had said and done nothing, just watched, fascinated at what was happening, mesmerized by Monica's body. But after a while it had all become too real for him. Sex and birth combining in a way that left him appalled and horrified. He had gathered his clothes about himself and left.

Any other time, Monica would have laughed. Asking help from a middle-aged, middle-class professional. Asking him to deliver a baby. A seventeen-year-old prostitute's baby. Just a child herself, really, someone whose body he had paid to use for a while.

She breathed deeply, looked around the room. It was bare, neutrally coloured. No warmth or life. Not clinical, not even neglected. Just functional. Where the punters got what they paid for. She tried to look out of the window, down into the street, but couldn't see anything beyond flat, grey sky.

She felt another wave of pain build inside her. She braced herself, gripped the candlewick hard with her left hand, just had time to notice the blood pooling beneath the fingernails of her right hand, leaving tiny trails of red on the bare boards.

The wave hit, crashed within her.

He was handsome, no doubt about that. That was the first thing she had noticed about him. And he looked like he knew what to do. Not like the other boys in the area, all fingers and panting, roughness and trembling. Not like the men, either, gropers and talkers, their pathetic lust counterbalancing their shame. He was younger than Monica, too, although he seemed much older. Like he'd had more life than he had years. She recognized that in him, knew a kindred spirit when she met one.

And the way he cocked his head to one side, listening when she talked. She liked that a lot. It made her feel like he was listening to her and her alone. Made her feel special. She didn't know it was because of his partial deafness.

She remembered their first meeting well. Nearly a year ago. She had been sitting on a bank staring at the Tyne, the factory chimneys and gasometers of Low Elswick all around her. The soot-black Scotswood bridge stretched over the slow, lapping, dark water like a huge drawbridge over some medieval moat. She imagined it could be pulled up, keeping thing she wanted inside, banishing those she didn't. This was her spot: her special place where she came to think. Straighten things out in her head.

Keep things she wanted inside, banish those she didn't.

She screwed the top off her father's hip flask, took a mouthful. She often took his flask without him knowing it. She liked the feeling of taking something from him. Cheating him. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. The gin was neat, and it burned as it went down. She liked it that way. She replaced the flask in a pocket within a pleat of her skirt and looked across the river to the Redheugh breaker's yard, at the piles of old metal. Scrap, worthless to anyone, she would have thought, but deemed valuable enough by someone to hang on to. She looked at the shapes the metal and shadow cast and formed, imagined not things deemed useless but a strange, new jungle populated by new and exotic beasts. A land that existed only in her head, but a land that was wholly and exclusively hers. Not scrap, not worthless, but precious and priceless. Just waiting to be seen that way.

‘This private, or can anyone join in?'

Monica jumped, the voice startling her. She turned around, ready to run in case she was about to be told off for trespassing. But this was no factory worker. Dressed in a suit with a fingertip-length drape jacket, shirt and tie and crepe-soled shoes. Tony Curtis DA. A boy dressed as a man, carrying himself as a man. Smiling at her like a man.

She smiled back, suddenly aware of her bare arms, of the way the hazy white sun and the gin had made her skin, her head, tingle.

‘You made me jump,' said Monica.

‘You were miles away.' He looked around. They were alone. ‘Can I join you?'

Despite the warmth of the day, Monica trembled.

‘Uh-huh,' she said, nodding.

He sat down beside her, following her gaze to the river.

‘What you lookin' at?'

‘Nothin'.' She crossed her legs at the ankle. The top foot bounced off the bottom foot. ‘Just thinkin'. I come here to think.'

‘What about?'

She shrugged.

‘All sorts. Just come here to think.'

She lay back, propped on her elbows, body stretched. The boy watched her.

‘What's your name, then?'

‘Monica. What's yours?'

He looked at her, smiling again. She looked up at him, his shadow looming over her, blocking out the sun.

‘Brian.'

She smiled, pleased at not having to squint.

‘Pleased to meet you, Brian.'

Brian lay down beside her, back flat on the grass, hands pillowed behind his head.

‘Haven't seen you around here before,' said Monica.

‘I'm from Byker.'

‘Long way.'

‘Aye.' He turned to her, smiled. The sun danced on his eyes. And Monica saw something in those eyes, something kindred. In that moment a connection was made. Monica felt warm yet shivery.

‘But if I'd known you were here then I'd have come sooner.'

She giggled and blushed, turned herself away from him.

‘I mean it,' he said, laughter in his voice.

She didn't reply.

‘Can I kiss you?' he asked.

Monica laughed. ‘You don't waste time, do you?'

Brian rolled over on to his side, body propped on one arm, legs crossed at his ankles. He was giving her that smile again. She smiled back.

‘All right, then.'

He moved his head forward. Their lips met. She lay back on the grass, closed her eyes. Her head was swimming with more than the gin. She felt his hands, his legs, his body flowing over her.

And that was how their relationship had started.

She tried to breathe, to speak, use something that would help her regain control of her body and retain it. Use words instead of screams. Keep focused instead of scrunching her eyes into darkness.

‘Brian …' she gasped through clenched teeth, strained lungs, ‘Brian … you bastard …'

Another wave. Back arching in spasm, serrated knives stabbing.

‘Where are you … you bastard …'

The pain dissipated. She gasped in air, felt her body unclench, unlock. She lay flat on her back. She imagined herself beached, washed up on a shore, saved from drowning in dark, oily waters, drowning in pain.

Monica blinked, felt water gather in her eyes. Salt water, threatening to spill over into tears. She gritted her teeth. She wouldn't cry, wouldn't give in. Brian would be back soon. He would help her. He would sort her out.