Blasted Things Read online

  ‘Goodnight,’ he says. ‘Sleep tight and that.’

  Kenny glares at him.

  Vince looks round at the mess: scattered bits of jigsaw, toy cars, a tin gorilla that clashes cymbals together when you wind it. He picks this up and together they watch it weakly stamp and clash a few times before it tips over sideways. ‘You want a good tidy up in here,’ he says. ‘Done your homework?’

  ‘It was only some sums.’

  ‘What happened on the picnic?’ Vince asks.

  ‘What?’

  ‘That picnic you went on with Mum and Mr Chamberlain.’

  ‘Don’t remember.’

  Vince waits. Eventually Kenny says, ‘We went in his motorcar. It’s an Austin Seven. Seen it?’

  ‘And?’

  ‘He drove really fast till Mum got cross. Then we had sausage rolls and ginger beer and we was going to have an ice-cream, but Mum slapped him and we came straight home with no ice.’

  ‘Why’d she slap him?’ Vince asks.

  Kenny shrugs.

  ‘I’ll get you an ice, next chance,’ Vince promises.

  ‘Promise?’

  ‘Hop into bed now.’

  ‘Will you do me a trick?’

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  ‘Teach me one?’

  ‘Can’t go giving my secrets away.’ Vince taps his nose.

  The boy climbs into bed and picks up his comic. ‘Go on,’ he says. ‘I won’t tell.’

  ‘Night-night.’ Vince closes the door. Job done. It’s not so hard, is it? You just have to be firm. Christ, he was sergeant of a regiment, should be able to get one little kiddie into line!

  Slapped Ted, eh? Interesting. Downstairs he finds the blighter propping up the bar, Doll leaning over, talking to him, serious faces.

  ‘Little tyke,’ Vince says, butting in. ‘Took some doing but he’s in bed now.’

  Doll turns and gives him a vague smile. ‘Oh, you’re ever so good, dear,’ she says and squeezes his arm. That doesn’t go down well with Ted the look he gives him. ‘Clear them glasses, will you?’ Doll says, ‘Just having a word with Teddy here.’

  Closing at last. Ted had left soon after his talk with Doll. Vince, ears on stalks, had tried to get the gist, but picked up nothing – nothing but the way he squeezed her hand before he left, the way her eyes followed him to the door.

  ‘Go easy, dear,’ Doll said when Vince tried – a bit too forcefully – to eject Amos. But he couldn’t help it. He felt jumpy. What was that bloody smarmy bastard after?

  They cleared away the glasses, emptied the ashtrays. Doll always insisted on that of a night; the rest could wait till morning. She seemed distracted.

  ‘Penny for them?’ Vince said. ‘Shall we have a nightcap?’

  He hoped a nightcap might lead to more but she shook her head. ‘Tell you the truth, I’d rather have a cuppa. Be a dear and make a pot, will you, and bring it up? My feet are killing me. Should never’ve worn these shoes.’

  She’d stomped up the stairs and he’d stood twitching before the sluggish kettle. Come on. Come on. Could he just come straight out with it and ask what that was all about? It looked like a pact, that hand squeeze. Asking her out again, was he? Another crack at the picnic? Or something more than that, worse than that? Unease slithered in his gut, muscles twitched and tugged at the scar. What to do, what to do? Think like a soldier. Strategy – the best form of defence is attack.

  Upstairs he finds Doll with her feet up on the arm of the sofa. She opens her eyes as he comes into the room with a tea tray.

  ‘Nearly nodding off,’ she says, and gives another great yawn. ‘You are a dear,’ she adds, clocking the tray.

  ‘You want to get out of that corset.’ Vince goes to the fire and stirs the embers.

  ‘Blooming cheek!’ She giggles tiredly. ‘What do you know about corsets?’

  ‘I know what’s under them.’

  She snorts and swings her legs round. ‘You’re the limit! Go on then, pour us a cuppa.’ The gas lamp sputters; Vince turns it up, pours her tea, milky with two sugars the way she likes it.

  She takes the cup, blows on it, then sips noisily. Some has slopped into the saucer and she tips it back into the cup, blows and sips again. Vince stands, leaning on the mantelpiece, lights a cig.

  ‘Bit of a struggle to get Kenny down,’ he says. ‘But he went like a lamb in the end.’

  She smiles tiredly, opens her mouth to speak, takes a preparatory breath, changes her mind, drinks more tea.

  He picks up the tank from the mantelpiece, winds the matchstick and holds it while it twizzles round. ‘Got an empty cotton reel going spare? We’re making another tank so we can race. I said I’d teach him some tricks.’

  ‘Listen, dear.’ She hesitates. ‘You know I wanted a word with you the other day?’

  He nods, taps his ash into a saucer, scar tissue contracting.

  ‘It’s been nice having you to stay and help and all, and you’ve been lovely with my Kenny – I know he’s not always the easiest of kiddies – but you know I have to make allowances. What with him losing his daddy and everything.’

  ‘Exactly. What he wants is a man around the place.’

  She sighs. ‘Yes, dear, but I don’t want you adding two and two and making five.’

  ‘What does that mean? I can add up all right.’ He tries to keep his voice light. He kneels down. ‘Poor old trotters, let’s have a go at them.’ He knows she can’t resist that. He’s getting to know her so well; she’s the type who takes the path of least resistance. He picks up one of her feet, flesh spongy and ridged where her shoes were digging in, lumpy little darns in the rayon. He pulls her toes the way she loves and she sighs. ‘Ooh, that’s lovely, that is.’

  ‘How about,’ he says and stops – an idea like a bloody great hothouse flower suddenly blooming in his mind. Get her right away from here, from bloody Chamberlain, woo her properly. He takes up her other foot. Here he is kneeling at a woman’s feet! Who’d have thought it?

  Her eyes have been shut in bliss but she opens them to look at him. ‘How about what? Ooh, yes, squeeze like that.’

  ‘A break, a little holiday. Walton-on-the-Naze.’

  ‘If pigs could fly,’ she murmurs.

  ‘Maybe they can. Just think how Kenny would love it. We could get him a bucket and spade and a windmill and that.’

  ‘Cost an arm and a leg though, wouldn’t it? And I’d have to shut up shop.’

  ‘You leave all that to me,’ he says, squeezing the fleshy ends of her toes one at time. ‘This little piggy went to market,’ he says.

  ‘You fool!’

  ‘This little piggy stayed at home. This little piggy had roast beef.’ He bites the end of the toe quite sharply and she shrieks. ‘This little piggy had none – oh, poor piggy – but this little piggy’ – he tugs her little toe – ‘this little piggy cried wee wee wee all the way home!’ And he runs his hands right up her stocking under her skirt and she laughs and slaps, but she doesn’t stop him. He reaches the naked flesh where the stocking ends – hasn’t been this far since God knows when – and she begins to sigh as he burrows his fingertips into the clammy place beneath her drawers.

  ‘Vincey,’ she whispers, ‘you’re a devil you are.’

  23

  THE LANDLADY GIVES him a very iffy look when he walks in, and jerks her chin towards the stairs. ‘She’s here, same room.’ Can’t blame her for thinking this a rum do. It’s a rum do all right. And he’s late and all.

  After he parked the bike he got a fit of the jitters, crossed the bridge, smoked a cig on the riverbank, watching the water and the boats, a swan – vicious brutes, they are, have your eye out given half a chance. Ha! What a laugh! But the scar tugs and flinches just as if a beak was jabbing in.

  Now he mounts the stairs. Doesn’t mind admitting he’s nervous. Is she going to want him to strip off? That’s what life modelling means, everyone knows that. Does ‘sit’ mean sit or is he going to have to sprawl on the bed with a rose betwee
n his teeth? He sniggers at this as he makes his way along the corridor and knocks at the door.

  ‘I thought we said ten?’ says Mrs Married.

  ‘I’m here now.’

  She looks different, hat off, sleeves of her blouse rolled up, hair a messy bundle. She’s pulled the curtains away from the windows so the room’s brighter and she’s all set up with her sketchbook, pencils, a little box of paints.

  ‘What on earth did you say to her?’ He points at the floor.

  ‘Only the truth.’

  ‘She’ll be thinking all sorts!’ he says.

  ‘She can think what she likes. We have until one o’clock.’

  ‘I’ll have to be off before that.’

  ‘Best get started directly, then. Hat and coat off, please.’

  Vince turns his back on her to remove them, and to adjust the specs. ‘All right. Where do you want me?’

  She arranges him on a chair – literally sitting, and fully clothed, thank Christ – beside the window. Her plan, she tells him, is to sketch him quickly from different angles, only five minutes or so of stillness each time, and then she’ll ask him to hold a position for half an hour while she goes into more detail.

  It’s all right. Hard to let someone stare at you like that at first though. For the past couple of years he’s shied away from that kind of scrutiny, but she isn’t looking at him like a person, more like a thing. It’s not personal. Last time someone looked at him like that . . . A shudder right up his spine remembering the tin-nose shop. The physical memory returns and he grits his teeth. The woman artist standing so close, painting the prosthesis to match the other side of his face, her breath smelling of something sour as well as peppermints, a crumb of sleep in the corner of one eye. She did a bloody good job though, he had to give her that. That memory swims at him now as if through a snowstorm and he blinks to dispel it.

  Mrs M. hums under her breath as she sketches, does she realise? Talk about easy money though! Think about the holiday, get that sorted before Ted pounces. Last night he remembers with a snort.

  ‘Can you hold still, please?’ she says.

  He holds his neck stiff – needs to swallow, surely that’s all right? Last night the bloody chancer turned up again, parked himself up at the end of the bar as if he owned the place, hanging around like a bad smell till Doll stopped for a chat. Left Vince run ragged.

  ‘Could do with a hand here,’ he called out in the end.

  ‘Well, I could’ve done with a hand earlier,’ she said in that dear grumpy way she had. Vince grinned and shrugged at Ted, man to man, quite the henpecked hubby!

  ‘How’s the boy?’ Ted asked later and Doll started on about his poor school report.

  ‘I could give him a hand with his sums,’ Ted said. ‘Got quite a way with numbers, me.’

  ‘I bet you have!’ Doll treated him to that special smile, and Vince, though he hadn’t meant to make it definite till the money was in his pocket, blurted, ‘Has Doll told you what we’ve got in store?’

  Ted shook his head and Doll pulled a face, just like she’d been caught out in something.

  ‘Two pints of light and bitter when you’re ready,’ called someone. There was a proper scrum building up at the bar.

  ‘I’m taking Doll and Kenny on a holiday,’ he said.

  Ted’s face when he heard that!

  ‘Keep still, please,’ says Mrs M.

  ‘Nothing’s decided,’ Doll said.

  ‘A holiday, eh?’ Ted pulled his chin in, reached for his pipe, fingers worming in his tobacco pouch.

  ‘We’re dying of thirst over here,’ called some wag.

  ‘No rest for the wicked,’ Doll said. ‘Come on, Vince.’ They set to pulling pints, leaving Ted to stew in his own juices.

  Mrs M. sighs, tears out and screws up a sheet of paper. ‘You’ve got rather a smirk – can you try to look more neutral?’

  He obliges. Of course he’ll have to bring in temporary bar staff, and then there’s train tickets, hotel, how many rooms? Will she let him share hers? Probably not with Kenny there. So, one room with a double bed, one with two singles, and then he can shift in the night once the boy’s dropped off. They’ll look just like a proper little family. Perhaps he’ll get Kenny a kite. They can kick a ball, paddle in the sea, and the kid can scoff candy floss and ice-cream till it comes out of his ears. And when the moment’s right he’ll grab Doll’s hand and pop the question and he won’t take no for an answer. He needs a ring though, something to slip on that finger. He eyes Mrs M.’s sparkler – but that would never fit his Doll.

  ‘Can you sit still?’ she says. ‘No, on second thoughts move a bit and I’ll start again. Turn your face this way a bit – that’s it.’

  How much is he going to get per time? Should have got that straight from the start: first rule of business, agree the terms. Odd business this though, not actual graft. But it is taking time, it is a job, and it deserves a decent hourly rate.

  On the jaw the skin’s thick, scraped clean with a razor; higher on the cheek the texture’s finer, a slight trace of white scar, a faint freckle here and there, and then the transition to the metal. Whoever painted this was an artist; it’s an exquisite piece of work. She sketches the arms of the specs – clear glass, it appears, an ingenious way to hold the mask on. Makes him look clever too. But he’s aged since it was made. In his real eye socket the skin is thin and shadowed and there are lines, and at the corner of his eye a deep spray of crow’s feet. He’s caught the sun a bit too, so the colour is not quite matched. The eyebrow is painted like the real one but there are hairs emerging from behind it; the bony ridge retains some follicles.

  ‘Move, please,’ she says. ‘Have a good wriggle, then look at me straight on.’

  A mistake. It’s unsettling to have him focused on her; she begins to feel self-conscious, unable to lose herself in detail. ‘No. Look over there.’ She indicates somewhere over her right shoulder, turns the page, selects a harder pencil and begins again, this time picking out the thinning hair pushed back from his forehead. How old is he? Thirty-seven? Forty, even? Or perhaps not quite; the war aged people. Yet her own skin is perfect, creamy, flawless. Like her mother’s, they say, who had not a single line on her face when she died at thirty-six. Clem could almost wish for a flaw, a scar – something to show for all she’s seen, for Ralph’s death, for Powell’s.

  ‘All right?’ Vince says.

  ‘Move a little that way. That’s it.’

  Concentrate. Just the eyes this time: first, the real eye, the charcoal rim around the silvery grey, the pupil small, the lashes sandy, the pinkish lid, slight droop of the skin beneath the brow, the neat brown hairs; the simulacrum so faithfully painted to match in colour, the dreamy far-off gaze of it. Powell’s gaze in the pigment – impossible but true. There he is. Powell. Steadfast, loving, everlastingly distant.

  The pencil drops.

  ‘One minute.’ She scrabbles for it at her feet, face filling with blood as she stoops, notices a cigarette burn on the green rug. Stop this foolishness. Up she sits. He returns to the pose. On the side of the nose is a tiny sliver of shadow where the prosthesis isn’t quite snug against the skin. Her eyes are drawn to it, drawn into the darkness. No. Return to the eye: the lashes, tiny fragments of wire, some damaged, the smoother skin around it, the eyebrow with its minute feathered brushstrokes.

  ‘Have a rest,’ she says. ‘You’re doing well.’ He gets up and stalks about, yawns and stretches while she examines her work. Good. Curiously, the prosthesis appears more real in her sketch than the rest of his live face. Oh . . . powerfully it comes to her again: she wants to see behind it. She wants, needs, to really see it, see him. Vincent Fortune. She needs to touch the place, like a blind person, run her fingertips over the skin. She needs to draw it, make it her own.

  He’s looking at her oddly. A noble man, so noble in his cheerfulness, the way he tries against the odds. Look at him. He worked his way up through his regiment, only to get spat out the other
end, disfigured, everything lost: looks, wife, livelihood. Her heart overflows with tenderness. Not only for Mr Fortune, but for all the damaged people. And for myself, she thinks, with my perfect skin, my blasted heart. I need to see him.

  There’s quiet for a moment. Her breath is constricted.

  ‘You all right?’ he says at last.

  ‘Would you consider removing the . . . ?’ Her hand goes to her own left eye and she sees him stiffen, confusion like a cloud across his face. ‘It would make a marvellous companion piece.’

  ‘I’d sooner not if it’s all the same to you,’ he says stiffly.

  ‘It would help me,’ she says. ‘Please.’

  He watches her, mouth a little open. She sees his tongue lick the centre of his bottom lip. ‘Help you?’ he says, and is there now a sort of cunning, a calculation?

  ‘To see you . . . to see you as you are.’

  ‘How’d that help? You’ll be wanting me to strip off next!’

  She says nothing. The pencil’s pinched tight between her fingers. All the strings of all her muscles are taut as bowstrings as if the pencil could fly like an arrow and pierce his heart.

  He waits for her to speak and she closes her eyes as she tries to make sense of what she wants: ‘You see, my wound’s invisible.’

  ‘Aren’t you the lucky one?’ he says bitterly.

  ‘No, listen. It’s in here.’ She makes a fist to press against her breastbone. ‘But yours is . . . well, if I saw it, if I . . . I think if I drew it, made it mine, it would help me.’

  He walks around the tiny room, creaking the boards. ‘What’s in it for me?’ he says finally.

  ‘I’ll pay more,’ she says.

  ‘How much.’

  ‘I don’t know – more.’

  He turns away from her, regards his own face in the mirror above the mantelpiece. She watches him from behind, catches the tremble of tension. When he speaks he sounds muffled. ‘I’ve never even seen myself like that,’ he says.

  ‘You don’t ever look in the mirror without it?’

  She can’t imagine that. In her bedroom, in the bathroom, in the mirror in the hall, her face is her own companion. She searches for a flaw, for a sign that she’s alive; she sits in front of the mirror brushing and brushing her hair . . . Oh, Powell, the day he washed her hair at the beginning of the life she should be leading. A tear slides from her eye and though her practice is not to cry in front of anyone, she lets the tears fall. They drop on the paper; strange that they are transparent, one could almost expect them to be red.