What Becomes (14 page)

‘But with so many . . . it isn't your fault, but you must see that you're disturbing.' Her hands waver in front of her, as if she can't quite bear to point at them. ‘You are disturbing. I'm sorry, but you are.' She nods. ‘There must be places you can go to where you'd be more comfortable.' Her fingers take hold of her wrists and cling.

And the lads don't speak.

She stays standing there and hasn't got a fucking clue.

And the lads don't speak.

Dan can tell that she has no idea they're deciding to be still, to be the nicest they can be, working up to it by deciding they will mainly forget her and what she's said and who they are.

And the lads don't speak.

She gives them a disapproving face, touch of impatience.

And Fezman nods, thoughtful, and says – he's very even, gentle with every word – says to her, ‘These are new trunks. I like these trunks. They are
DILAC
trunks, which you don't understand.' He presses his face in mildly, mildly towards her, ‘They are
Do I Look A Cunt in these trunks?
trunks and I am going to swim in them this morning. And you look a cunt and you are a cunt, you are an utter cunt and I am sorry for this, but you should know and you should maybe go away and try being different and not a cunt, but right here, right now – a cunt – you're a cunt. You are a cunt.' He nods again, slowly, and turns his face to the water and the girls and boys.

Dan watches while the woman stares and her head jumps, acts like they've spat at her, or grabbed her tits and his gone arm trembles the same way that Gobbler's does and he wants to run, can't run, wants to – wants to throw up.

The woman kind of freezes for a moment and then takes a little, hobbled step and then another, everything unsteady, leaves them.

The lads wait.

Dan sees when she reaches the opposite wall and starts yakking to a guy in a
DILAC
suit, guy who's standing with a Readers' Wives type of bint – they're colleagues, no doubt, fellow educators. He decides that he has no interest in what may transpire.

Dan and the lads take a breath, the requisite steps, and drop themselves into the water. They join Pete. They swim – show themselves thrashing, ugly, wild.

Dan watches the ceiling tiles pass above him and has his anger beneath him, has it pushing at the small of his back, bearing him up. It wouldn't be useful anywhere else.

And he makes sure that he watches – regularly watches out – twists and raises his head and strains to see, makes sure that the kids have cleared out of his way, out of everyone's. He wants no accidents.

In his heart, though, in his one remaining heart, there is a depth, a wish that some morning there
will
be an accident: a frightened kid, scared boy, choking and losing his way. When this happens Dan will be there and will save him.

He practises in his head and in the water – the paths that his good arm will take, the grip, the strength he's already developed in his legs.

Once that's over it will mean he has recovered himself again – become a man who would rescue a boy, who would always intend and wish to do that – would not be any other man than the man who would do that, who would be vigilant, be a brave bastard and take care.

He never would have done the thing that he couldn't have. He never would have been the man he couldn't be. He never would.

No tricks of the darkness, no sounds in the pre-light, no panic, no confusion, no walking downstairs to find it, to see how it lies like it's frightened and shouldn't be hurt. No mistake.

There should be no mistake.

There should be no mistake.

There should be no mistake.

MARRIAGE

This isn't working, he can tell.

Anybody would be able to tell.

The fact of this not working is so very obvious that he can picture it forming a cloud, an area of staining somewhere in his brain which will be exactly the colour of failure – failure being, now he thinks about it, a mix of yellow and acid green. With maybe a touch of brown. Yes, there ought to be brown. Shit brown.

Reconciliation, a ramble, pottering in shops, preparation for a smooth start to their night: none of this will happen, only the failure.

There is a little rain – dusty, irritating – and more to come, the greyness overhead creeping into their clothes, their skin, while something bruised and potentially drenching gathers above and to his left. Since they passed the library the threat of spiteful weather seems to have been tracking them, almost implausibly watchful. And her shoulders are already locked in that depressive-looking flinch away from him. The usual.

So they won't have a giggle. They won't be companions. They won't chat. They will just walk, trudge on. She will trash their afternoon.

Her feet will continue to bang down with a rhythm that is not his own, that doesn't even seem quite hers. She will beat up ahead of him, striding out for that full yard of distance, keeping it wedged in between them. She likes making him study her back – a back which grows more eloquent the longer he stares at it. Currently, it is both wounded and resentful – in another half an hour it will be martyred and she will be an icon of patient suffering. He realises he has already started shrugging at passers-by to offset her effects. Any especially interested strangers are offered a little purse of the lips, a slight raising of his eyebrows, suggesting something along the lines of –

My wife – you have to love her, eh? Well, I have to, anyway. She's temperamental, you might say. A bit overbred. Still, we weather the storms. Oh, indeed we do. Both of us. Here we are. Weathering.

Or sometimes he droops his head, the well-disciplined husband, peers out at possibly like-minded gents.

In the doghouse again, then. Silly me.

A few streets ago, she raised her pace and she's still rushing. She's not
running
, though: nothing as frank and outgoing as that, and nothing casual or girlish, she won't break into a trot – she is a subtle woman and has settled for a kind of driven scamper, because this will disturb him most. She is forcing her body to seem endangered, animal, and draws him on behind her into a state of contagious despair. He feels himself caught in the movements of an anxious man: pursuing, pursued, escaping, arriving too late for essential – but undefined – aid, losing support.

Not that I ever am late. That's her trick. Punctual, me. Punctual parents – that's what sees you right. Conditioned before you know it and, as a result, you're courteous. Whenever you're needed, you're already there.

He folds his hands into his pockets – soft flannel lining, warm.

The flannel there at his request.

My request.

My coat.

It's a consolation. The only piece of clothing that he's ever had made. Bespoke. Specifically cut and fitted for his shoulders, his arms, his back, the touch of it against him like a light embrace, something manly, brotherly. She'd remarked on its cost at the time, of course, couldn't help herself. At least, she'd looked at him and never even smiled while he told her about this amazing little old-fashioned shop he'd found and the bolts and bolts of tweed they had inside and the remarkable, genuinely surprising, lack of expense about it all if you considered the work involved and the fact that such an overcoat would last a lifetime, very easily a lifetime. She had simply shaken her head at him as if he'd been fooled, as if advantage had been taken. Which meant that he'd not had a chance to mention the tailor –
his
tailor – the pallid and serious face, the deft hands as they measured, the voice so very certain and precise as it rattled off a pattern of numbers to an assistant – his tailor had an assistant – and marked out the code to record a form, to recall it and set everything snug with it. And he didn't, until later, make a point of describing the atmosphere of complete civility.

Not fawning, nobody likes that – they just had a proper way of seeing. They saw me. I gave them my time, they studied, paused for thought, and then they understood the way I want to be, the way I really ought to be. They surprised me with myself.

First fitting, and the man there in the mirror, he's wearing a big coat, a long coat, something with personality, something to draw attention. He's standing well, firmly, so the cloth hangs as it should. He doesn't fidget, doesn't have to, he meets my eyes – no staring, only confidence, interest, calm. I like him. I like myself.

My better self.

My better whole self.

I'm not that tall, not striking, but they knew – the shop folk were sure I could carry it off. My coat.

I didn't ask for any changes, only let them refine their work – chalk and pins and whispers – let them give me this one thing which is absolutely as it should be.

Nice to be able to redefine what you deserve.

While she scurries on ahead, he feels the coat clap at his shins, its weight pressing and cuddling around him. Serious weather shows it off to advantage, naturally. Breezes sleek it against him, or flare it wide. Rain lets him turn up his collar as he did when he stepped outside this morning, a part of his mind dipping quickly through into a finer, much more elegant world of couples whose romances started on ocean liners, or cross-country trains: careless and witty people who solve mysteries, sing in nightclubs, only fight before falling much harder and deeper back into love.

He and his wife were not falling, not anywhere.

They were walking – had been for hours, further and further into the Saturday mess of downtown. They hadn't gone according to his hopes, hadn't stopped for lunch, hadn't taken the tiny ferry, knees tucked together on the fibreglass bench, hands touching as they bobbed across the inlet, swung above a jaunty depth, the push and clap and swell. They hadn't bought lunch on the island: a lobster apiece and melted butter, or Dungeness crabs, something messy and tasty and special. They hadn't simply chosen apples from the market hall, those organic ones that taste particularly healthful –
Ambrosia? Nectar?
– they've some pseudo-religious name, but he can't quite place it. Just a bag of apples that have nothing wrong about them and smell clean, it would have been good to hold that.

He'd wanted to give her a splendid day, but she wouldn't listen, wouldn't agree, wouldn't let him take her hand, wouldn't stop chasing from street to street, crossing where she shouldn't, darting out between moving cars. And he had to follow. For a few blocks she'd picked a run of alleyways: abandoned pallets, bins of food waste, furtive doorways, the stink and the threat of feral activities. He wondered if the impulse was self-destructive, or if it was him she intended to be destroyed.

These last few months, he couldn't tell what she intended. Back at home, their rooms were almost emptied, only necessary items still in place, two new walls of filled boxes in the hallway. By the end of Monday he'd be gone, enjoying the change of setting, the extra space, and wanting her to like it, too – wraparound balcony and not a bad view of the park. Going up in the world. She'd told him that she was excited by the move, but then she'd filled up those bags with her clothes – a good deal of her clothes, most of them – fussed through one entire evening and then put them out to be thrown away. All right, she'd lost weight lately, some of the blouses, skirts, they might not still fit, but even so – and she never did explain it, her motivation, this desire to sacrifice.

Or else she was hoarding – that was her other extreme. There was the time he'd caught her opening a finished box, cutting its tape, sliding an ugly little coffee cup with its saucer in among the packing, ‘They're Victorian.' Accusation in her voice, when all he'd done was head across the corridor and happen to notice her, this was before he'd said a word.

‘They're Victorian and hideous.' Which they were, he was being factual with that.

‘They were my mother's.'

‘I've never seen them before.'

‘I know.' Glancing up at him as if she were at bay, as if his seeing them would harm them, make them even more violently painted and chipped than they already were.

And she'd closed the box over again with this dreadful, melodramatic slowness, plastered new tape across it, binding the wound in the cardboard – that's what it looked like – binding a wound and guilt. He'd been bewildered – no, astonished – astonished was the better word, when he described the scene to his friends he would say
astonished
. No use talking to her, as ever – he'd just gone and sat up on the kitchen counter, opened a beer. Warm beer, the fridge defrosting, small detonations of ice beside his head. He'd wriggled his feet in the air, breathed slowly, tried to drop right back into enjoying how soon they would leave and the way that took his every action here and made it light.

And the austerity of his home as it was – boxed, packed, stripped – he appreciated that. Their bedroom, for example, had nothing left in it but the bed. Ghosts and traces on the carpets, the walls, where belongings once belonged, but now there was the bed and no more. Last night this had seemed remarkably fine for a while – his room, his wife, his bed. It had been an invitation. He'd walked into the dark and let it tease him, heat him, as he padded from the doorway, all the naked surfaces giving him echoes as he moved, enlarging everything he did into wonderful shocks, each sound like a break, a snap, a slap.

I don't know where she's going.

I don't believe that she does either.

His wife has reached a series of concrete barriers, chain-link fence, and beyond them an artificial chasm where the city is digging out foundations for a new railway line. The construction work has sealed off cross streets and gouged out blocks of the road it seems she had wanted to follow.

So maybe she did have a purpose.

Or maybe she's only confused.

She could be lost.

That's not too improbable. Or else she's worn out and a touch bewildered, overwrought.

Me, too.

He could close on her, stand at her shoulder, but he chooses not to because this might upset her more and perhaps lead them into some kind of disturbance. Other pedestrians, he notices, quite often glance at her, but never smile or speak. They won't engage her, either. Also, although he has kept his distance from her and has, for hours, made no sign that he even knows this woman ahead of him, still no one has drifted into the space between them, no one has intervened. He finds that strange.

She starts off again, much slower. He ambles along in her wake, rounding the blunt end of the site and then tracking along beside the line of fencing, the warning signs, the sunken din. As she goes, she is peering through and down to look at the excavation and he can see her face, her right cheek and eye.

I felt it that time.

For sure.

Jarred me in the forearm.

She forgets that I'm left-handed sometimes, ducks the wrong way.

Other times she doesn't see it coming.

And to be fair, he rarely hits her in the face – it isn't something she'd expect.

But in that bedroom – so hungry, empty, blinded out around him – what's there was purely, truly exactly his – what was needed – pinned back to the essential – she is his wife, she is married to him – she was there in his home, in his room, in his bed in his dark and supposed to be his love – the feel of her smile, he was trying for that, his mouth idiotic with trying to find out that, with expecting her to be alive for him – but she turned away, she turned her back – this endlessly, endlessly cold, stupid bitch – just turned her back.

Oh, in the end, she let him – eventually she let him – lying like meat and he's being
allowed
– he's being
allowed
– his own wife.

So he stopped.

Pulled out and stopped.

Hanging.

Damp.

Hot.

Breath so loud in his head.

Hit her.

Just the once.

The noise of it.

Fantastic.

Like a shot.

Came after that.

Back in her and came.

Like a shot.

Which is why she had to be so awkward about today.

She's halted, her right hand with its palm pressed flat against the fence, three fingers hooked through the links, tensed. Because it finally feels possible to do this, he paces slowly in towards her, stops near enough for the cloud of her breath to reach him. Below there are two men with shovels standing on what appears to be fragmented shale. It is the same clotted purple and grey as the sky, or perhaps it is only wet and is somehow reflecting the sky for a while, but is, in itself, much less impressive. There is anyway something odd, he thinks, about all of this – shovels seem old-fashioned for such a modern undertaking, a high-speed rail link, an urban showpiece. The rock there odd, too – this echo of the sky discovered underfoot and three or four storeys of digging to reach it, to expose something so secret, so permanent, that it shudders the city round about him, the laughable buildings, the slow damage that is inside everything.

Beneath them, the metal shovels grate as they're driven into the loosened stones, gather them up.

She starts to cry. ‘I don't know how they stand it.' No fuss. Soft weeping.

Together they watch the two men work under the rain. Every time the blades bite home there is a mineral squeal, a sense of historical weight.