D. Compton - The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe

I panned around the dormitory. Ex-army two-tier bunks, bentwood chairs, worn paving stones, people. People shambling in, people sitting around, people coughing and scratching and groaning. Such people. I was glad it wasn’t Tasmania. Beside this sort of social realism Tasmania was mere travelogue. The nave of the church was given over to eating and cooking arrangements. A sign pointed the way to Ablutions through a door behind the pulpit. While beyond the screen the sanctuary was dark and silent, a single red flame burning, a tiny spark of mystery in this most unmysterious of worlds…

A tiny spark of mystery — it was a good phrase, one I’d like to get back to Vincent. I made a note to dub it in later. I could hardly sit there on my bunk in the crowded dormitory and talk noble tellyese to nobody in particular. The ablutions, I hoped, would give me the privacy I needed.

Hot air blasted up through grilles in the floor, making the place smell of sweat and cheap dinners, and scorched dust. High above us the medieval vaulting had been painted and richly gilded in some last-stand moment of magnificence, but it was at the grilles that we warmed our hands and hearts. We kept our voices low also, in case echo should take them up and expose us to the indifferent stones…

I wasn’t watching Katherine Mortenhoe at the precise moment when she fell off her bunk, but the small noise she made and the chain reaction of short-lived silence that followed it immediately attracted my attention. Anyway, panning back to the bed and suddenly finding it empty was technically more interesting. I got up and went in my stockinged feet over to where she lay. Her rigor appeared to have eased. Evidently she was on to Day Two in Dr Mason’s guided tour.

Everybody was watching me. And listening. ‘We all go to hell in our own ways,’ I said. ‘But I think mine’s better.’

They were my first words to her ever. To her, ignoring the others. And if later she’d ever asked me to explain, I would have denied them. She had no right to explanations. She was a middle-aged woman, dirty, indescribably dressed, paralytic, dishonest, lying on the scrubbed paving of a down-and-out’s church dormitory. She was lying, in fact, on the memorial stone to one Suzann Pierce, beloved wife of Samuel Pierce, mother of Jonathan, Mary, Gathcart, Borden, and Sumner, born 1793, died 1867. So I stooped, and lifted her off the stone, and hoped she would never read it, and put her back on the bed.

‘I’ve had it before,’ she said. ‘It passes.’

‘I hope you’re right.’ It occurred to me that if she was going to pass as a wino she ought to smell of the stuff. ‘What are you using?’ I said. ‘Horse? Or just bennies?’

She stared at me. Clearly the idea of an alibi hadn’t entered her head. ‘Something of the sort,’ she said finally.

I sat down on the bed. It creaked unpleasantly beneath our combined weights. On it I noticed her handbag, the invaluable handbag. Without it we’d never have traced her. We should have known enough about her, but we didn’t. Discussing it, and bearing in mind the taxi driver’s information, we’d placed her in dark glasses and an expensive wig, somewhere sunny six hours’ flying time or so out of Amsterdam. After all, she had the money. The call from Vincent’s tail showed us just how little we knew about her.

‘Why not let me take off those goggles?’ I said.

Just leave me.’

‘Hell no.’ The viewers needed a proper look but I reckoned it could wait. ‘Where you from?’

She just stared.

‘Where you going?’

If there was a rule among our sort that these things weren’t asked, she didn’t know it. ‘Out of town,’ she said.

‘So am I.’

‘Not in my direction.’

‘The way you look you could do with company.’

‘No.’

I waited, but nothing else was coming so I got up and went back to my own bunk. If she wasn’t ready, she wasn’t ready. There was plenty of time. Instead I tried, for local color, to get into conversation with the man on the bunk overhead. ‘Not a bad old place,’ I offered in his general direction.

After a pause I offered it again. One idea at a time, not to strain him. He leaned down over the edge of his mattress.

‘A bloody fine lot you know about it. Greenhorn.’

So it showed. ‘Never too late to learn,’ I said.

‘Never said a truer word, mate.’

‘So teach me.’

He hesitated, then surprisingly produced my boots. ‘Lesson number one. Yer boots is yer best friend. Never let yer mince pies off of them.’

‘Thank you very much.’ I reached up for them.

‘Hoi, hoi… Thank you very much, he says.’ He dangled my boots higher. ‘These boots is going to cost yer.’

‘How much?’

‘A quid.’

‘Haven’t got it.’

‘Haven’t got it?’

‘You heard me.’

I had the rest of the night to spend in that dormitory. If I admitted to money I was sunk. I could have snatched the boots and pounded the old wreck to a pulp. Except that by now we had gathered an audience, and I doubted if they’d love me for it.

‘Haven’t got it?’

‘Would I be in this dump if I had that sort of money?’

‘Dump, he says. Not a bad old place, he says. Ought to make his bleeding mind up, I say.’

‘Five bob. And that’s tomorrow’s dinner.’

‘Five bob? Do me a favor.’

Against all common sense I was losing my temper. ‘Look, you’re an old man. I—’

‘And you—’ He leaned over farther, showing me the rusty blade of a surgical scalpel. ‘And you, sonny, are a naming nig-nog.’ There was laughter. He dropped the boots into my lap. ‘Go on,’ he said, ‘have the flaming things. They was too big anyway. Thing is, you might of been from the Benefit. Get up to all sorts, they do.’

I put the boots on. They were missing their laces but the lesson was cheap at the price. Only the man from the Benefit would have argued. I punched the bulging mattress above my head. Not too hard. My mentor was delighted.

‘You watch it, mate. Just you watch it.’ He threw down the laces. ‘Lesson number two — never take the bottom bunk. Where’ll you be when I pisses me pit come morning?’

‘Same place as you, friend. Up shit creek without a paddle.’ There was more laughter. But the repartee wasn’t mine (I was too cautious that evening), it was Katherine Mortenhoe’s. Seemingly her paralysis went as quickly as it came. She was standing, leaning on the bunk support, her face inches away from the gent’s upstairs. He glared back. . ‘Fuck me,’ he said, ‘I do believe it’s a woman.’ ‘I wouldn’t fuck you, friend, not if the future of the human race depended on it.’

‘Think I’d trust my cock to your pox-shot old fanny?’ It was a new insight into the continuous, the only true Katherine Mortenhoe. She was, in this, her father’s daughter. Though why she had come to my assistance I couldn’t imagine… Anyway, I’d kept her in picture — Vincent could buzz out any of the words he didn’t like. I saw now that she had nothing left. She had come out with only just so much ammunition, and a shield only just so thick.

I stood up, and led her away, back to her bedspace. Jeers followed us. But the old man could be allowed his victory. They could all be allowed their victory. Mine was an entrance into the only true Katherine Mortenhoe. And hers… well, I didn’t suppose she really had one.

She’d thought him very kind, and — in this order — very sensitive, very intelligent, and very handsome. The beard did not hide his fine bone structure. He had a strange accent, not quite American, but pleasant all the same. And she’d sent him away because there was no room in what was left of her life for people, no, for men who were kind and sensitive and intelligent and handsome. And young. She’d made the correction out of honesty, as she lay on her back waiting for the paralysis to go away. Then a further honesty had corrected her yet again, and she had rescued him, and he had rescued her. She was forty-four, and dressed like a freak, and dying, and therefore safe. And her new freedom meant she could make friends of whom she chose. Could, in fact, make friends.