John Lawton - Riptide

‘That’s not fair!’-the cry of younger siblings everywhere. ‘You’re making me stay at home just so you can go on swanning around up West.’

‘That’s got nothing to do with it. I work up West. Bow Street ain’t exactly the Mile End Road, you know. I can’t roll out of bed and be at work ten minutes later! Will you lay off. Will you all just lay off! I am not moving back, and that’s final.’

Vera gathered up plates, an oversized show of bustle, as much noise as she could make. And when she’d dumped everything in the sink, she faced Kitty across the width of the kitchen and uttered the single word, ‘Bitch.’

Kitty pushed back her chair and yanked open the kitchen door. Cal sat nonplussed. He’d never seen anything like this. In his family it simply didn’t happen. His sisters would never call each other a bitch, they’d simply point out that one was being boring-the greatest sin the family knew of, to be boring.

‘Calvin!’ Kitty said from the doorway.

Out in the street it was already dark.

‘Will you take me home?’ she said.

‘To Covent Garden? Sure. I’ll get us a cab at the end of the street.’

‘No. I meant to your place. To Claridge’s.’

‘To Claridge’s?’

‘I can’t stay here. Not with that lot. And I don’t want to be on my own. So just take me home with you, will you.’

‘Am I ever going to see where you live?’

‘You wouldn’t want to, really you wouldn’t.’

Afterwards. Lying in the bed. Lights out, windows open, curtains flapping. A single sheet pulled over them, Kitty with her head on his chest, one hand splayed across his belly. Cal said ‘Are they always like that?’

‘Like wot?’

‘Angry.’

‘Oh, that. Yeah. I think it’s the only way Vera and Tel have to show emotions. Like they don’t have the vocabulary for all the others, so they use the one they know. Vera’s as cut up as the rest of us, but it’s the only way she’s got to show it, to take it out on Miss Greenlees and me and young Tel.’

It was the most analytic statement he had ever heard Kitty make.

‘Doesn’t let you off the hook though, does it?’

‘You mean I lost me temper too?’

‘That… and the fact you can’t bear to be there.’

‘If you lived with ‘em you’d know.’

‘I do know. I told your mother much the same thing while you were in the kitchen with Vera. She asked me why I joined up. I told her, not in so many words, but I told her I’d done it just to escape my family. It’s not unique to the English. You joined the cops, I joined the army. Amounts to pretty much the same thing, really.’

Kitty propped herself up on one elbow. He couldn’t see her eyes but he knew she was looking at him.

‘You slyboots,’ she said.

‘Slyboots.’ He weighed up the phrase.

‘Answer me this, then. You wear them bifocals-specs to read-specs to look at objects more than about thirty feet away-how did you ever get into the army in the first place? You can’t be better than A4 with peepers that bad.’

He was wearing his glasses now. He’d put them back on within a minute or so of rolling off Kitty. He could get by without them and a lot of the time he had to-but he could see her the more clearly with them. He’d made love to her out of focus-in the afterglow he rather wanted to be able to see her. He put his specs on much as most men lit up a cigarette. Unconsciously he pressed a finger to the bridge and shoved them an infinitesimal fraction further up.

‘Well?’ she said.

‘I cheated.’

‘You cheated!?’

‘I had a friend sat the eye test a little ahead of me. He has what’s called an eidetic memory. You know what that is?’

‘No.’

‘Means he sees things as pictures and takes them like a camera. When he wants to remember something he just summons up the picture. Anything from the arrangement of flowers in a vase to pages of print. He can hold thirty thousand words of text in his head, without even thinking of them as words. He just sees a block of images.’

‘That’s amazing.’

‘He sat the test two hours ahead of me. Came out, drew all the eye charts for me and I learnt them by rote-the hard way. Passed Al.’

‘That’s amazing. I never met anyone like that.’

Cal had, he’d known two people with that gift. One was Billy Blick, who’d helped him into the army. The other was Wolfgang Stahl.

In his room in a London lodging house, Stahl could not sleep. He lay on his cot oblivious to the noises of an uneasy household of single, displaced men-grunting, arguing, farting, fighting-the walking wounded of life, not war-and stared at the ceiling. Image after image flashed onto it, the family trees of battle formation: Army Group North, von Leeb, 21 Infantry Divisions; Army Group Centre, von Bock, 32 Infantry Divisions; Army Group South, von Runstedt, 63 Infantry Divisions. If that didn’t put him to sleep he’d start on the Panzers.

Cal was woken by the ‘phone. Eight thirty. Walter time. Except that it couldn’t be Walter. Not today. It was. He shook Kitty.

‘Get up. For God’s sake, get up!’

‘Wossmatter?’

‘Your father’s here.’

‘So?’

‘This time he’s coming up.’

Cal tugged her naked into the bathroom, resisting all the way. He turned on the taps.

‘What are you doing? Leggo!’

She jerked free of him, and he slammed the door with his backside, pressed against the panel.

‘Stay here. The noise of the water should smother any sound you make. Just stay here!’

He slipped out, dashed around the bedroom. Pulled on his robe. Gathered the scattered clothing Kitty had peeled off and thrown down the night before. He shoved the bundle at her through the bathroom door, but she grabbed him by the arm and pulled him in.

‘We don’t have to hide.’

‘I don’t,’ he said. ‘You do. Or would you rather your father found us like this?’

‘Like what? Calvin-I’ll be thirty this summer. He can’t possibly think I’m a virgin.’

‘Do you really want what he might think to be confirmed this way?’

They could hear Stilton knocking at the door now. She lowered her voice.

‘They can’t nag me about not being married at twenty-nine and expect me to be a virgin, now can they?’

‘Get dressed and stay quiet. I’ll get rid of him.’

He opened the door, feigning sleepiness, when even the hairs on his head stood to attention.

‘Walter?’

Stilton pushed past him. Pacing the middle of the room. Antsy in a way Cal had never seen him before. Then he seemed to sniff the air. Oh, God, Cal thought, what is it-her scent, or worse, the reek of illicit sex?

Stilton snapped to, plonked himself down in one of the bucket chairs by the window. ‘We’ve work to do,’ he said. ‘Things we both forgot.’

Cal stood still. Pretended to scratch his head until he realised that this could only make him look like Stan Laurel.

‘Walter, are you sure this is a good idea? Isn’t this a little too soon?’

‘Work’s the best remedy I know of. I’ll be fine. Don’t you worry about me.’

‘The family, Walter. Aren’t there things to be… to be… arranged?’

‘Like what?’

‘Like… a funeral?’

‘You need bodies for a funeral. My lads are five hundred fathoms down in the Atlantic.’

Of course-it was a stupid remark.

‘Walter, would you give me a few minutes to get myself together?’

‘Aye-I’ll read the morning paper. But chop chop all the same.’

In the bathroom Kitty had settled into the bath and was soaping herself lazily, a hand gliding the length of one arm, cupping one breast, nipple up, lips pursed to blow bubbles off it and create one of the simplest pleasures known to man-soapy tits. Cal wished he could ignore this, wished she’d stop what she’d started. He sat on the lavatory seat, eyes on her body, mind struggling back towards the remote outposts of common sense.