Pat Barker - Noonday

Bertha Mason sat, naked, on a table, facing him, surrounded by three middle-aged women, all dressed in black, but he had eyes for nobody but her. The sheer size of her: chins, neck, breasts, belly — all pendulous — the sagging, wrinkled abdomen hanging so low it almost hid the fuzz of black hair beneath. Like a huge, white, half-melted candle she sat, eyes glazed, a fag end glued to her bottom lip. She made no move to cover herself, just sat there, breathing noisily through her open mouth. He stared, he couldn’t stop himself, until one of the women darted forward and slammed the door in his face.

Dazed, he opened the third door and blundered out into a small yard where he lit a cigarette, dragging smoke into his lungs like oxygen. What he felt was neither pity nor revulsion, but something altogether more complex. An image was taking shape in his mind: the Willendorf Venus. That featureless face beneath elaborately styled hair, vestigial arms, roll upon roll of fat, each roll resting on the one below, vestigial legs, no feet. But it’s not negative: she has no eyes because she contains the world; she has no feet because everything comes to her. It’s an image of power.

At least Bertha Mason had a face, though it had been completely blank. Was she in a trance? Had to be, something like that. He crushed the remains of the cigarette beneath his foot, taking his time, grinding it away to nothing, then went back upstairs to the crowded room, where a buzz of expectation was running along the rows.

His seat had been taken. The back rows were full so he crept down the aisle and took a seat on the end of the front row. Nobody challenged him, though he saw that all these seats were marked “Reserved.” Evidently only known supporters were allowed as close to the platform as this.

The lady of the ten-shilling notes mounted the stairs and announced in a markedly nasal voice that she would now invite a member of the audience—“chosen at random”—to step up and examine the medium’s clothes. The randomly chosen one, who’d been sitting in one of the reserved seats on the front row, shook the clothes, turned them inside out, ran her fingers ostentatiously along every seam, and then, with a brisk nod, handed them back. The garments were ceremoniously carried out and returned, shortly afterwards, with Mrs. Mason inside them, wheezing from the climb upstairs. Her breathing was so bad Paul was inclined to shout: Oh for God’s sake, stop messing about, call a doctor! She had to be helped onto the platform. Once there, she took a moment to get her breath, then entered the cabinet, where she lowered herself into the chair and let her head fall back, shortly afterwards emitting a succession of grunts and snorts as the curtains, with a great rattling of brass rings, were pulled across. Raggedly at first, then with more conviction, the audience began to sing “Abide with Me.”

Paul didn’t know what to expect. Fraud, yes, of course: only he’d thought it would be subtle. Skilled. What followed was fraud, all right, but blatant, crude, embarrassingly unconvincing fraud. He didn’t understand how anybody could possibly be taken in by it, but people were. One woman looked positively radiant as she recognized the face of her dead son, though, to Paul, the returning spirit was very obviously a papier-mâché head stuck on the end of a broomstick and draped in cheesecloth; cheesecloth which smelled strongly of fish.

Mrs. Mason had two spirit guides. The one who appeared most frequently, who acted as a kind of impresario, was Albert, who’d apparently seen service on the Western Front, and had passed over, as he put it, on the first day of the Somme. Albert’s voice was convincingly masculine; his public-school accent much less so. This was no more than a music-hall imitation of a toff and even that was starting to slip a bit. The other guide, who popped up from time to time, was a little girl of truly awful sweetness who would keep bursting into song: Shirley Temple, but without the talent. Paul was sickened by it. No, quite literally: he felt sick. Probably he should have walked out, but the memory of that naked figure, the wheeze of her labored breathing, held him back. Instead he closed his eyes, determined to detach himself from the proceedings.

But then the curtains were drawn back. Mrs. Mason, looking decidedly the worse for wear, announced she would give a few individual messages. The audience leaned forward: this was the moment they’d been waiting for. Their turn.

It was the usual trite, banal rubbish. At one point she looked directly at Paul, and he tensed, afraid she was going to give him one of her messages, afraid, irrationally afraid, of what the message might be. At that moment he realized this visit of his was not curiosity about Mrs. Mason, or a trip down memory lane, but something more driven, less rational: part of the endless, exhausting search for Kenny, which still went on even though he knew there was no hope of finding him. He wasn’t detached from this: he was just like all the other people here.

He was afraid of her. It was a relief when she turned her attention to the back row, to yet another middle-aged woman with a missing son. A voice began to speak, every bit as convincing as Albert, but offering no banal message of comfort: no reassuring platitudes. The beach at Dunkirk, dunes being sprayed with bullets, sand kicked up into the air, cracked lips, no water, his friend dead in the sand beside him — not a British plane in sight. Where were they? Where were the British planes? The words dwindled to an angry mutter before finally winding down into silence. Seconds later, along came Shirley Temple and “The Good Ship Lollipop.”

But now, suddenly, a commotion broke out near the back of the room. People started turning round, trying to peer into the darkness, one or two of them even stood on their chairs. A tall woman, wearing mannish tweeds, strode down the aisle, shining a forbidden torch on the stage — and not a blackout torch either: a proper prewar flashlight. Mrs. Mason ran back into the cabinet and, with a rattle of brass rings, pulled the curtains across. No sooner had she disappeared than the tall woman leapt onto the platform, pulled the curtains apart and revealed an empty chair. Mrs. Mason was on her knees, waving a doll with some kind of vest or camisole attached, and still prattling away in that awful cutesy-pie voice as if unable to grasp what was happening.

The tall woman grabbed the doll, Mrs. Mason refused to let go, and an ugly tug of war ensued in which the doll’s head came off. Everybody was on their feet now, riveted by the squalid battle. At last, Mrs. Mason managed to wrench herself free and again ran back into the cabinet, where she could be seen trying to stuff the doll’s head up her skirt. At that moment the overhead lights came on, dazzling everybody. Transfixed by the sudden glare, Mrs. Mason was still for a moment, then leapt out of the cabinet, roaring with anger.

The tall woman took a step back, but persisted. “Come on, give it to me, I know you’ve got it. Come on, I want to see what you’ve got up there.”

“What, and show everybody me knickers? I will not. There’s men in here, case you haven’t noticed.”

The tall woman had been joined on the platform by three men, who crowded round Mrs. Mason, demanding to see the doll. Turning swiftly, she picked up the chair and began wielding it as a battering ram. “I’ll brain the whole bloody lot of you, bloody buggering bastards!” And then she simply yelled, a great battle cry that seemed to require neither words nor intake of breath.

Paul was pushing his way up the steps onto the platform. Perhaps he should have been pleased to see such cynical fraud exposed, but three men jostling one woman was altogether too much like bullying for his taste. Surprising himself, he fought his way to her side. “Mrs. Mason.” Her eyes stared at him without recognition. So she had been in a trance — there was no other way she could have forgotten that encounter downstairs. “Calm down, now. Deep breaths.” He turned. “And you lot, back off. Can’t you see the state she’s in?”