In Another Country (13 page)

The doorbell rang. It was Gladys, smiling. Nobody in at 97, she said. So I've come back here.

Coffee. What a pretty rose, said Gladys.—Yes, said Arthur Barlow, I bought it for Mother on her seventieth birthday. It flowers late and well into November.—I'll have to leave in half an hour, said Gladys. My youngest is only looked after till one o'clock. We moved down here ten years ago. My husband thought it would improve our chances. He was an accountant, working for a charity. But three nights a week he drove a fork-lift in a warehouse and died in an accident, sadly. I thought of going back north but the children were settled here by then. My youngest is eleven but because of a problem she isn't quite that grown-up yet. My kind neighbour looks after her while I do my Saturday job. My boys are big and strong. I hope they will find work they can enjoy. Do you enjoy your work, Mr. Barlow?—Arthur Barlow stood up abruptly and answered her staring into the garden. I used to enjoy it in a funny way but lately I've not enjoyed it even in that funny way. They moved me to the cull and destroy program and, to be honest, I have begun to find that particular job a bit depressing. I have to find the dead who have been dead eight years or more and dispatch them to the incinerator. You wouldn't believe it, Gladys, there are twelve miles of medical records just in the place I work.—He turned and sat down again.—It's very good of you, Gladys, to come back in for a few more minutes. Mostly when the bell rings it's the postman with a new volume of verse and I thought it might be him but I was more pleased it was you. Otherwise it's only the gas or the electric. And twice a year two lads come down all the way from North Shields selling fish. I generally buy from them though I don't like cooking fish. The worst are the estate agents. They come asking would I like to sell. They know I'm in this house all on my own. They've got clients on their books would kill to have my house, being where it is, and make bedsits of it.—My mam and dad, said Gladys, looking Arthur Barlow full in the face, when they got off the boat at Salford Docks they stayed in Seaton Street with my aunty and uncle who had come over three or four years before. Next morning they signed on at the Labour Exchange and by the end of the week she'd got a job in a Jewish gabardine factory in Ancoats and he had started on the buses though at home he'd been a studio photographer. After a while they moved to a place of their own in Darcy Street and that's where my two brothers and me were born. I went back looking for the houses before we left but Seaton Street and Darcy Street and all the other streets round there have gone. Good riddance, I say. There was no nice accommodation in those parts. It shocked my mam and dad to see how poor the locals were. And then the drizzle and the fog and never any music.

Arthur Barlow again went to the window
.
Gladys, he said, I'm very likely getting worse. My shock this morning said as much. I keep thinking of those estate agents, if that is what they are. One night last month the noise at Number 19 was worse than ever. It was late on a Friday and I wanted to sleep so as to be fit for my Saturday morning trying to write a poem. In the end I thought they'll surely not mind me asking them will they turn it down. And I put my shoes and dressing gown on and walked across. The door was open and I looked inside. I've never seen such a sight and it was as though they'd never seen anything like the sight of me there on the doorstep looking in. I asked them nicely would they mind turning it down or shutting the front door at least because I couldn't sleep. And everybody laughed. Such a din of youngsters laughing at me because I feared I wouldn't sleep. Then one of the lads said—forgive me, Gladys, this really is what he said—he said, Fuck off and die, granddad. Our sort live here now. I was very hurt by that—I mean, I'm not a granddad—and I suppose I must have stood there open-mouthed. And then a very big young man, very big and strong, walked over from among the girls and lifted me up. He lifted me up and held me in his arms as though the weight of me was nothing at all. And he said to the others, Where's he from? and when they answered, Number 2, across the road, he carried me across like that and set me down at my own front door, which I'd left open, and said, Sleep tight.—Arthur Barlow came back to the kitchen table. Gladys averted her eyes and said, And you a gentleman with all those books.

Gladys rose to leave. Arthur Barlow followed her towards his front door. But reaching the parlour, his downstairs library, she stepped inside.—So much poetry, she said. And the first two rooms of it upstairs. And the postman delivering more and more. And you yourself, Mr. Barlow, writing and writing. Tell me, have you shown what you write to any living soul?—I did once, said Arthur Barlow, in the year after Mother died. I was all at sea and I fell in love with a young woman in the hospital. I gave her the poems I wrote for her, every Monday morning I gave her a sheaf of them, I'm sorry to say.—Why sorry?—Because she did not want them, because it was bad manners, because she told me to lay off, because I let myself go, because nobody should let himself go the way I did with her. In the end she complained about me and the Supervisor gave me a warning. They moved me out soon after that, to the repository I spoke of where there are twelve miles of medical records.—I see, said Gladys. And when you read poetry, am I right in thinking, from something you said earlier, that you read it aloud?—Oh yes, said Arthur Barlow, it's best read aloud. That way it comes more alive in you, if you see what I mean. And only by reading it aloud can you get it by heart, of course.—You know some poetry by heart, Mr. Barlow?—Indeed I do. I suppose like most people I wonder how I'd manage if I were put in solitary confinement or if I ever have to leave this place and can't take my books with me, I ask myself how I'll manage if I don't have a store of poetry by heart.—Is there any for children here? Gladys asked. My Edith is a great one for poetry. You should see her face, Mr. Barlow, when she sings one of our songs or says a poem.—Over there, said Arthur Barlow, behind that armchair near the window, there's two or three yards of poems for children. I've always collected them specially, old and new, from all over the world.—And do you have any by heart?—For answer Arthur Barlow straightened his tie, clasped his hands, stood very upright, looked through the window at the ugly street and said:

 

The Forest of Tangle

 

Deep in the Forest of Tangle

The King of the Makers sat

With a faggot of stripes for the tiger

And a flitter of wings for the bat.

 

He'd teeth and he'd claws for the cayman

And barks for the foxes and seals,

He'd a grindstone for sharpening swordfish

And electrical charges for eels.

 

He'd hundreds of kangaroo-pouches

On bushes and creepers and vines,

He'd hoots for the owls, and for glow-worms

He'd goodness knows how many shines.

 

He'd bellows for bullfrogs in dozens

And rattles for snakes by the score,

He'd hums for the humming-birds, buzzes for bees,

And elephant trumpets galore.

 

He'd pectoral fins for sea-fishes

With which they might glide through the air,

He'd porcupine quills and a bevy of bills

And various furs for the bear.

 

It carries on, said Arthur Barlow, but I think I'd better stop there.—Thank you, said Gladys. And now it's time I went.—Again she shook his hand, again he led her to his front door. He said goodbye, he watched her turn the corner, golden, out of sight. He fiddled with the knot of his dark tie. Late morning, dank.

At the far end of the street the postman was proceeding slowly towards Number 2. Just as well stand here and wait and see, said Arthur Barlow. So he went to the gate and stood on the pavement watching the progress of Naz, the postman, who was always glad for him when his post looked like a book. Gladys, returning, got very close before he turned to see whose the footsteps were. Arthur, she said, if I came back here with my Edith on a day and at a time convenient to you, would you be so kind as to say her a poem and read her one or two out of your anthologies? And if you like, I'll read you some of the Caribbeans in my voice from home so that they come alive in your room, as you put it, those strong men and women.—Naz came up. Good morning, Mr. Barlow, he said. Looks like another book for you.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Trains

 

 

 

T
he approach of a train. Above their heads it whistles and the pretty glasses shiver. In the silence then they listen to the clank of trucks. The Widow's bosom heaves. I can't bear hearing 'em, she says. I was born and brought up under the railway line but since that young feller went and did what he did I can't hear a train without getting palpitations. There's hardly a night I don't start up in bed. Hook-nosed, white-powdered Mrs. Clack. Her podgy fingers fidget on the bar. Him with his wisp of beard and frightened eyes. He lay in bed. She thinks of him lying there listening to the trains, the north- and the southbound, the goods trains full and empty with their different beats. Who knew the trains and where they were coming from and where they were heading, and chose himself one, and having chosen it he chose a bit of track and went and watched his train go by. How many times? He turned away, back down the embankment and through the allotments where fathers of families were tending their leeks and dahlias. Kept turning away, until his courage was adequate, or his despair. The Widow remembers him coming for a room as though it were yesterday. Would you have a room? he asked, head on one side, standing in the gloaming in his thin clothes. They said you might have a room. How long for? she asked. He shrugged: For the foreseeable future. Those were his words, she says, I'll never forget those words. Well, she had a room in Holly Street, just round the corner from her public house, in her dead father's house, last one on the left, at the dead end, where the embankment blocks the street and where the trains go, fast or slow, after they've come over the viaduct or before they stretch themselves across it. Suited him fine, with his no possessions but a few funny books, under the trains, the windows rattling many times a day, many times also in the night. Whistle, and steadily approaching leap of devouring noise.

There was a girl in that house under the railway line, in Lilian's father's house in Holly Street where the lad lived with the wisp of beard and the collection of funny books, there was a girl in there, Louise by name, but it did no good. The trains went to and fro, they shook the house, and one of them one morning, the 6:05 London to Edinburgh that doesn't stop here but goes for the viaduct like a beast leaping, the 6:05, running ten minutes late and angry no doubt, went over his funny head. Nothing Louise could do. In Lilian's view men ask too much of womankind. To hear you talk, she says, a woman's to blame every time a man gives up the ghost. We need a lot of looking after, Mrs. Clack, says Joe. You can say that again, she says, from the cradle to the grave it never stops, you're always round our skirts wanting your noses wiped. A woman never has time to do anything else. That's in the nature of things, says Bowles. Men have all the worries, they have to answer the big questions of life. It's only right and proper that women should get their tea and try and cheer 'em up a bit. He shoves his pot across. Dumbly the men watch Lilian work the handle of the pump. Down and down and down she depresses it.

Of Louise it was widely known that she loved nothing better than to synchronize the climax of her sexual pleasure with the coming of an express train. She was a dab hand at this, she didn't mind admitting it. Her young men got used to the idea, and only the stupidest among them took offence. Some, of course, after the conceited nature of the male, imagined her shudders were due to them themselves; but they were at best a vessel the god locomotive briefly filled. She loved all the trains, even the ancient puffing billies that pottered by in slack periods, trundling a few empty wagons; also the local couple of carriages that never got up steam; and the long, sometimes as it seemed never-ending march of clanking coal trucks. But she loved the through trains best, the terrific expresses hurtling north or south, and they were the ones she rode into her finale. It was said she could hear them crossing the Tees or the Tyne, that she was attuned to the first vibration of the miles and miles of track and could feel it beginning to throb and could hear the iron beginning to sing long before anyone else could. But that is very likely lies.

Louise often came knocking on our friend's door. Often? Well, if she had no company or if she woke up too late to get to work. His room was upstairs at the back of the house, over the yard. You're nearer the trains than I am, Louise said. Lucky you. The worst room in the house in every other respect: never any sunshine, distemper flaking off, a rattling sash that wouldn't shut, a cracked pane, a boarded-up hearth and soot coming down behind it and bits of brick and birds. But it's true about the trains. The first thing to start and the last to finish was a big glass lampshade dead in the middle of the ceiling. It started like a tickling under the belly button. Nothing wrong with that room, says Lilian, nor with any other room in Father's house, and no sense throwing away money on decorations when people aren't stopping. She dabs her diamant
é
eyes: the one for Father who drank himself to death, the other for the waif who laid down his head and died. She can't forget the day he turned up on her doorstep asking did she have a room to let for the foreseeable future.

Louise cried when she heard what had happened, and she broke her heart crying when she saw our friend's funny books. She moved out next day and married a signalman. Now she travels where she pleases on his special pass.

But what was she like, this Louise? What were her chief qualities? A creamy white skin; a triangle of maidenhair of an astonishing blackness and copiousness; a kind heart. Plump? She was rounded, her curves were firm. She was said to be very careless in her dress. The postman and the milkman always knocked, Jehovah's Witnesses and men selling encyclopedias called there oftener than elsewhere and once a quarter when they left home to visit 39 Holly Street officials of the Gas Board and the Electricity Board whistled and sang and polished the peaks of their caps. Some say she never noticed what she had on and what she didn't have on. Lilian: Don't give me that. She's answered the door stark naked to my certain knowledge. Still half-asleep, Mrs. Clack, it could happen to anyone. Rat-a-tat-tat, here comes the postman, she's nearest the door, she stands
there rubbing her eyes and yawning in his face.

Late in the evening if there was nobody with her or late in the morning if she had overslept she might come up and pay our friend a visit. Either time he'd be in bed. The door was never locked, she knocked, he never answered, she opened it and said can I come in? He never answered, he'd be sitting propped up against the greasy wall with his hands outside the covers, flat, he had lovely hands, she said, except his nails were dirty. Their conversations, such as they were, took place mostly across the gap from the door to the bed. I'm out of sugar, she began, or have you got a slice of bread? It was remarkable, she observed, how little he seemed to occupy the room. Apart from the few books there was little sign that anybody lived there. He had a kettle and a cup and a few other bits and pieces for catering, and perhaps there was another shirt or something in the wardrobe. She was comparing the place with her own room, where human occupation was obvious in a big way.

It was Slim who said that about the whiteness of her skin and the blackness of her burning bush. He knew a man in town called Peg who knew a lad called Ike who had known Louise. Slim said it as though he had known Louise himself. She leaned in the open doorway with her dressing gown coming undone and asked our unhappy friend for the loan of a spoonful of sugar or a slice of bread and when he said help yourself, she still stood there and after a silence tried something else. It seems she had none of the ordinary womanly designs on him, but the thought of him up there all on his own in the back room overlooking the dustbins preyed on her mind or at least it occurred to her and gave her a funny feeling if she woke up with nobody to have breakfast with or if it was late in the evening and there was going to be nobody in her bed. None of the other lodgers interested her, though she interested them; anyway, it is not known that she ever went knocking at their doors on the scrounge.

How you feeling today then? she asked, and a conversation might follow on from that. He had a posh voice, slightly squeaky; the sight of his lips moving in their bits of beard gave her the creeps. Certainly there was something of the insect about him. Stetson, for instance, was of the opinion that squashing was what he wanted. He said this at the bar, whenever the subject came up. Louise thought otherwise, she was not appalled by spiders (fortunately in that house) and would go to some trouble to save them from drowning in her bath. Those lodgers who were interested in Louise but in whom she was not interested opened their doors a crack when she went for a bath, since it was always on the cards that she might walk past a minute later naked and carrying a spider in her gently clenched fist. Our friend smiled a lot, but always in a sneering way or as if his lips were being pulled by a spasm. His teeth, alas, were in a poor condition. He wore spectacles—Jesus, says Joe, do we have to think of these things?—which he often removed as he spoke or as she spoke, and rubbed his eyes, the lids of which were sometimes as red as cockscombs. His hair was like his beard, nothing much.

To her enquiry after his health he replied: Better, thank you, how kind of you to ask. If it were evening and she enquired what sort of a day he'd spent he raised his hands and let them fall and said words failed him, he must be very blessed, he doubted whether many people ever had days like his. He had sat under the broken statue of Apollo, he said, in Wharton Park, and had watched the trains, it was an excellent place to watch them from, you could see them coming, out of the north and out of the south, at a great distance.

When he mentioned the trains she glanced at him searchingly to see if he knew her open secret, and there was indeed a look of insinuation in his eyes; but what he was alluding to was his own business, of course, and he was darting her glances to see if she had guessed it. Finally, since one insinuating look looks much like another, she could not be sure, but said in an even and friendly voice: I'll come along with you one of these days, I like trains too, you know. The motioning of his hands was courtesy itself, but his lips twitched like a devil's and what he emitted was a high giggle which soon faltered and broke.

Do you know, he said, you are the only person I have spoken to since a week last Friday. Louise was horrified. But in the shop? she said. He served himself, there was no need to speak, the woman told him what it cost and he gave her the money. The Chinkies do the same, they never speak, I've been observing them. And at the NAB? I nod my head, he said, or shake it, as the case may be. I sign on the dotted line and go away again. I shouldn't come bothering you, says Louise. You mebbe like not talking. Once in a while, he says, can't do much harm. And listening? You'd mebbe rather not listen to human speech? Mostly I don't, he says, I overhear a few things, but on your average day no one addresses me.

The next step, obviously, was to ask him what he thought about all day then, sitting up there under the statue of Apollo or down in the square under Lord Londonderry and not speaking to anybody and not listening and never being spoken to, and our friend had maybe hoped she'd go that far; but her instinct warned her off. If Louise wasn't afraid of spiders she was terrified by the thought of a spider swirling down the plughole and drowning in the drains, and the thought of what he filled his skull with day after day seemed to her very like a plughole and a long long fall and a drowning in the dark.

There must have been a silence then, our suicidal friend a trifle peeved perhaps that Louise had not asked to be shown the contents of his head, and Louise herself backing away in her thoughts from the horror of him and moving on to the safer ground of a general pity for the lonely and the beginnings of an uneasiness on her own account. Then, in the silence, she felt the first still very distant vibrations of an approaching train, one from the south, an express certainly. She looked towards the bed again, and for perhaps ten seconds was able to study its occupant's face without his knowing. The features had lapsed into an expression of complete sadness, without sarcasm. Then he too, still before the lampshade on the ceiling, picked up the tremor of the train, and his eyes turned to hers. They frightened her, there was a gleam of wicked hope in them. She continued to stare at him, ever more fixedly, as the train approached and as her famous sensations intensified she set them against his.

Hard to quite locate the agonies a shivering lampshade causes in a man. Sometimes it seems to start in the core of the heart and go down through into his cock and not come out of there but course up and down the lengthening innermost capillary with shock after shock; and sometimes from the back of the head and down the spine with a terrible quick tickling into his vestigial tail; and always under the belly there's an itch that can't be scratched. If that were the only noise the room would have been unlivable in and a man in bed there would have expired if it had gone on for very long; but pretty soon it was lost in the general din. Louise, no doubt, could hear that lampshade, or some similar thrilling and tickling, under all the ensuing racket, running through it like an exquisitely thin reed. The sash started rattling, the gas fire buzzed; the noise came on at a steady gallop, its wheels pounding the track, which whined like ice. The whole room shook, you felt it seized and battered by the noise, you lay in bed and felt broken apart.

When the train came overhead they both closed their eyes. When they reopened them, when the long tail of carriages had been drawn away and the room little by little and each part after its particular tone (the lampshade last, lingering and lingering) had ceased to tremble, when they opened their eyes, our friend the first to, only Louise was smiling. It's good in here, she said, you're lucky. Sometimes they hoot, I like it when they hoot. His hair was damp, his face was the colour of the wall, he was biting on bits of his Fu Manchu moustache.