Pat Barker - Noonday

The darkness turned London into a palimpsest. That knot of boisterous young men by the crush barriers, they were probably soldiers home from Dunkirk, or just possibly stragglers from Boudicca’s army. After all, from the perspective of the poor bloody infantry, one cock-up’s pretty much like another. You had a sense on these nights of long-buried bones working their way to the surface: London’s dead gurgling up through the drains. Perhaps in these thronging shadows the living and the dead met in fleeting, unconscious encounters. Why not? How would you know?

On one of these walks, he found himself in a side street near Coram’s Fields. On the corner there was a pawnshop, its three brass balls suspended over the pavement, a symbol so evocative of his youth he had to cross the road for a closer look. In the window, as he’d expected, were rows and rows of little white cards offering rings — most poignantly, wedding rings — for sale. Probably they’d been pawned over and over again until some worsening of an already desperate situation meant they couldn’t be redeemed. Ah, redeemed. The religious language of pawnbroking had always fascinated him.

When he was a boy, his grandmother had owned a pawnshop, conducting business with her usual rapacity. Many of her clients were pawning goods in order to pay the rent on the ramshackle properties she owned. Yet Gran hadn’t been the bloated capitalist of socialist theory, but a half-literate working-class woman who’d got many a black eye from her handsome, philandering husband until she stopped loving him and learned to hit back — or rather, since she was a tiny, birdlike woman, to wait till he was too pissed to know what he was drinking and then jollop him till his arse bled.

Paul’s first job had been behind the counter of her shop: he’d done his homework in between customers. When he leaned forward, he could see his reflection in wood that had been polished to a hard conker-shine by the weight of human misery that passed over it. But it was a job, a proper job, and he had been proud of it.

God, how it all came flooding back. He was about to move on when he saw a notice in the bottom-right-hand corner of the window. Bertha Mason, materialization medium, would be giving a seance at eight o’clock this evening. The accompanying photograph was creased and grainy — obviously cut from a newspaper — but there could be no mistaking the woman. It was the Witch of Endor, no less. He bent down to make sure, but, yes, it had to be. There couldn’t be two women in London who looked like that. Eight o’clock — just time for a pint of beer and a sandwich. He thought he might as well give it a go, as much from nostalgia as anything else, though he was curious about the woman who had made a disagreeable but powerful impression on him. He wasn’t finding her easy to forget.

—

RETURNING AN HOUR later, he stepped into a shop whose smells stripped away the intervening years till he was fourteen years old again. A single bulb cast a pallid light over the detritus of hopeless lives: musty-smelling clothes hung from racks, some, with pink tickets, waiting to be redeemed; others, with blue tickets, up for sale. Racks of shoes pressed out of shape by other people’s bunions, dresses with other people’s sweat stains under the arms, a hatstand from which hung a solitary bowler hat, shiny with age. Despite the downtrodden, shabby air of it all, he kept experiencing exquisitely painful tweaks of nostalgia. Not for when he was a child serving in the shop for the first time — no; for a year or so later, when he was a pimply adolescent with hairs on the palms of his hands. The hairs hadn’t been real hairs, of course — they were what you were threatened with if you didn’t stop doing it —and try as he might he never could stop. There were some mornings when he could virtually have combed those hairs.

There’d been a girl called Gemma Martin who’d come in every Monday morning on her way to work to pawn her father’s Sunday suit. Long blond hair, the greenish color of unripe wheat, and slightly prominent blue eyes. Gran didn’t like the Martins. “I knew her mam when her knickers were that raggy she was ashamed to hang them on the line. And as for her nan — she used to sew bacon fat in her vest and bloomers every December, didn’t take them off till March. I’ve seen dogs follow her down the street.” The Martins, he gathered, gave themselves airs: a worse crime than murder in Gran’s book.

What with Gran’s beady eyes and vitriolic tongue, it had taken him nearly six months to summon up the courage to ask Gemma out. Oh, but it was worth it. And the reason he found all these smells erotic was that one evening, hours after the shop had closed, he’d managed to persuade Gemma to go nearly all the way, on a pile of unredeemed coats.

It was five to eight; he ought to be taking his seat. A thin man with round spectacles appeared and guided him past the racks of clothes and up a rickety staircase. At the top was a small landing packed with people waiting to buy tickets. More people were coming up the stairs behind him. Since that basement in Agate Street he’d hated overcrowded spaces and might have left, only at that moment the couple in front moved on, and he was level with the table. A woman with mournful brown eyes was taking the money, attempting to look deeply spiritual while counting notes with the help of spit on a well-practiced thumb. He handed over a ten-shilling note, was given a ticket and asked to surrender his blackout torch.

“Why?”

She looked at him. “When the medium’s in a trance, her eyes are very sensitive to light.”

“But there’s hardly any light.” Blackout torches were notoriously dim.

Rolling the notes into a wad, she snapped an elastic band tight around them. “ Very sensitive.” He gave her the torch.

The seance room was cramped and stuffy, lit only by three small, red-shaded lamps set at intervals along the far wall. An usher guided him to a seat near the back, though he noticed there was a whole row of vacant seats at the front. It was so dark he could hardly see to get to his seat and had to apologize constantly for trampling on people’s toes. When, finally, he was settled, he took a deep breath and looked around. Eight rows of chairs faced a stage on which stood some kind of cabinet, not unlike a nightwatchman’s box. Black curtains had been pulled back to reveal a wooden chair with arms. He noticed another chair near the front of the stage, which seemed to have black clothes draped over the back. The room was about two thirds full, and it was well past eight o’clock, but for a long time nothing happened, except whispers and coughing and more muttered apologies as late arrivals tripped over people’s feet. He could see slightly better now. In the third row, he noticed a middle-aged shelter warden, Angela Langdale, very jolly-hockey-sticks, but rather nice, with a lot of mousey-fair down on her upper lip and a genius for organization. When he was on patrol, he often called in at her shelter for a cup of tea and a cigarette. Next to her was Sandra Jobling. Now that was a surprise. He didn’t think of Sandra as the sort of person who went to seances, but then he didn’t think of himself as that sort of person either.

The thought of a cigarette, once planted, quickly blossomed into a craving, though when he looked around he saw that nobody else was smoking. Perhaps the organizers were so wedded to darkness that even the striking of a match seemed threatening? He tried to ignore the craving, but it wouldn’t go away, so he repeated the stumbling and apologizing, receiving in return some decidedly disgruntled looks.

Downstairs, he found the front door locked, but there’d be a back entrance and almost certainly a yard. He pushed between the racks of clothes, releasing a smell of mothballs which made him want to sneeze, and found himself in another much smaller room, hardly more than a passage really, with three doors opening off. The first door led into a broom cupboard containing an ironing board, a bucket and a mop. The next door opened onto a room where at last, at last, there was enough light to see by, though what he saw defied belief. He stood, rooted to the ground, jaw unhinged, gawping like an idiot.