Learning to Swim: And Other Stories

  “Looking for jobs. What’s it look like?”

  “If anyone’s going to get a job it’ll be me,” I said, tapping a finger against my chest.

  Clancy shook her head. “No,” she said, licking a finger to turn over a page, “You’ve got to perfect your painting. You mustn’t give that up, must you?”

  She really meant this.

  “You’re not going out to work while I piss about here,” I said, feeling I was adopting a stupid pose.

  Then we had a row—Clancy accused me of betraying ideals—the upshot of which was that we both went out the next Monday looking for jobs, feeling mean and demoralised.

  There was a dearth of employment, especially for school-leavers. But it was possible to find casual, menial jobs, which was all we wanted. Clancy got a job as a waitress in a pizza house near the Elephant and Castle. I went there once and bought a cup of coffee. She was dressed up in a ridiculous white outfit, with a white stiff cap with a black stripe and her hair pinned up like a nurse. On the walls of the pizza house there were murals with pseudo-Italian motifs which were worse than my pseudo-Gauguins. I looked at Clancy at the service counter and thought of her lying on the bed in the sunshine and swimming in the muddy creek in Suffolk and how she’d said: “Paint me.” It was so depressing that when she brought me my coffee we said “Hello” to each other as if we were slight acquaintances.

  I got a job in a factory which made lawn-mowers. Bits of lawn-mower came along on moving racks and you had to tighten up the nuts with a machine like a drill on the end of a cable. This was all you did all day. It turned you into an imbecile.

  Three or four weeks passed. We’d come in, tired and taciturn after work, and spend the evening getting on each other’s nerves. We thought, once we left our jobs behind then we’d return to our own life. But it wasn’t like that. We brought our jobs home with us as we brought home the day’s sweat in our sticky clothes. Clancy was still serving frothy coffee; I was still tightening nuts. Clancy would slump on the bed and I’d stare out the window. Work seemed a process of humiliation. I looked at the scrap-heaps and demolition sites which once we’d been able to ignore, which we’d even transformed into a landscape of happiness. I thought: We’d escaped, in the midst of everything we’d escaped; but now the tower blocks and demolition sites were closing in. I made an effort to keep cheerful. I read out poems from the book and I explained to Clancy how I was going to finish my mural. But she didn’t listen. She no longer seemed to care about my artistic talents. All she seemed interested in were the letters from her uncle, and when one arrived she’d read it over in a lingering, day-dreamy way and not let me look at it. It was as if she were trying to make me jealous.

  Once, as I was flipping through Sonnets and Lyrics, I came across a poem I hadn’t noticed before. “Here,” I said, “listen to this.” And I read aloud:

  Sweet Suffolk owl, so trimly dight,

  With feathers like a lady bright …

  I thought she would like it.

  She whipped the book from my hands and flung it across the room. It landed under the sink, near the zinc tub. It was a good, solid book; and it wasn’t even mine. I watched the pages come away from the binding at the spine.

  “It’s crap! All the poems in that book are crap! Artificial, contrived crap!”

  She said this with such venom that I believed her at once. A whole reservoir of delight was instantly poisoned.

  “Like those paintings,” she said, getting up and gesturing. “They’re crap too! Sentimental, affected, second-hand crap! They’re not even well painted!”

  And at once I saw my Tahitian girls—each one a would-be Clancy—for what they really were: stumpy, stick-legged ciphers, like the drawings of a four-year-old.

  “Crap, crap! All of it!”

  Then she began to cry, and brushed me away when I tried to comfort her.

  It was now past the middle of July. Everything was turning bad. Then, to cap matters, I had an accident with a saucepan of boiling water and scalded myself badly.

  It happened needlessly and stupidly. The ledge on which our two gas rings rested was only a rickety affair, held up by wall brackets. The plaster below, into which the wall brackets were screwed, was soft and crumbly and we knew there was a danger of the ledge giving way. I kept saying to Clancy I’d fix it. One day we were making kedgeree. Clancy had put the saucepan on to boil for the rice and I was bending down to scrap something into the rubbish box which was just to the left of the gas rings. Clancy suddenly said, “Look out!” A great chunk of plaster had fallen out of the wall and the left hand bracket was hanging on only by the tips of the screws. Instead of doing the sensible thing and jumping out of the way, I reached to hold up the ledge. Just as I did so the bracket came away and most of the contents of the boiling saucepan slopped over my hands.

  I did a sort of dance round the room. Clancy yelled at me to put my hands under the tap. “Cold water! It’s the best thing!” she said, trying to keep calm. But although I knew she was quite right, I didn’t want to do this at first. I wanted to scream and curse and ignore Clancy and frighten her. It was a kind of revenge for her deriding my painting.

  “Fuck! Fuck!” I said, waving my hands and hopping.

  “The tap!” said Clancy.

  “Shit! Shit!”

  The pain was bad at first, but it was nothing to the pain that began about an hour later and went on for hours. By this time I was sitting astride a chair by the sink, my arms plunged into cold water, my forehead pressed against the sink rim, while Clancy kept topping up the water, which would start to steam after a while, and sponged my upper arms. It wasn’t pain alone, though that was bad enough. I started to feel shivery and sick—Clancy put a blanket round my shoulders. At the same time we were both silently thinking that perhaps I had a serious scald which needed proper medical treatment. This frightened and dismayed us. It wasn’t just that we feared that a visit to a hospital would lay us open to discovery—we were already worried that our jobs might do that. It was more that going to a doctor would be a sort of admission of helplessness. Up till now everything we’d done, even getting jobs, had been done independently, of our own choosing, and hard though things had got, nothing had made us feel we couldn’t survive by ourselves.

  “I’m scared,” Clancy said.

  “It’s all right. I’ll be all right,” I said, my face pressed against the wet enamel of the sink. “I shan’t go to any doctor.”

  Clancy sponged my arms.

  “I didn’t mean it about your painting. Really. And I didn’t mean to throw your book at the wall. I was just depressed.”

  Most of that night we sat like that, I slumped over the sink and Clancy sponging. I was too much in pain to sleep. Whenever I took my hands from the water they felt as if they were being scalded a second time. Clancy tried to say reassuring things and now and then her hand tightened on my shoulder. We listened to the trains clacking up and down and the strange noises of the tenement. Only at about four did we attempt to go to bed, and then Clancy half filled the zinc tub with water and placed it by the bed, so that I lay on one side with my arms dangling into water—though I didn’t sleep. Clancy nestled with her arm round me. I felt her doze off very quickly. I thought: In spite of the pain I’m in, in spite of our lousy jobs, in spite of everything, we are happier now, and closer than we’ve been for several weeks.

  In the morning there were huge pearly blisters on my hands. The fingers had mostly escaped unharmed but the palms, the wrists and parts of the backs of the hands were in a hideous state. The pain had eased but the slightest touch or trying to bend my wrists brought it back instantly. Clancy got up, went out to a chemist and came back with various things in tubes and bottles including a thick, slimy cream the colour of beeswax. She made a phone call to her pizza house and gave some excuse about not coming in. The fact was that though I could waggle my fingers I could not close my blistered palms and Clancy had to spoon-feed me and literally be my hands. I knew the important t
hing with burns was to keep the blistered area free of infection and to let the skin repair by exposure to the air. So for two days we sat, out of the direct sunlight, my hands held out in front of us like a pair of gruesome exhibits, waiting for the blisters to go down. Things were like they were when we’d first run away and got our room.

  “Will it leave a scar?” Clancy said.

  “Probably,” I said.

  “I won’t mind.”

  “Good.”

  “There could be worse places for it.”

  Even when, on the fourth day, Clancy went back to work (I insisted that she did—I could just hold a spoon by this stage, and I was worried she’d lose her job if she left it any longer), the evenings were somehow special. They were not like the dull, fretful evenings we had had of late. Clancy would come in, her waitress work over, and only want to know about my hands. We discussed them and fussed over them like some third thing which tied us together. It was as if we had a child. As they began to get better we started to make grim, extravagant jokes at their expense:

  “The blisters’ll burst and pus will go flying all round the room.”

  “They’ll shrivel up into nothing.”

  “They’ll go manky and mouldy and have to be cut off—then you’ll be a cripple and I won’t love you any more.”

  I thought: When my hands are better, when I’m no longer an invalid—this happiness will fade.

  But though, after a week, my hands were no longer very painful, it was some time—over three weeks—before the skin fully recovered and hardened. Throughout this period I sat idle in the room all day and I noticed, each evening, how Clancy’s mood dulled, how she became tired again and begrudging. She saw this herself and tried to resist it. Once she came in with another brown paper parcel. It was a book—Love Poetry of the Seventeenth Century. She had made a special trip in her lunch break to get it.

  “It can’t be much fun sitting here all by yourself all day.”

  We had moved the bed permanently under the window now, and I used to sit, propped up against the metal bed-head, looking out, like some dying man on a verandah, taking his last view of the world. I thought about lots of things—in between snatches of Herrick and Crashaw—during those long, hot days. Of the lawn-mower factory—someone else would have my job by now and perhaps no one would know I’d ever been there. Of my parents and Clancy’s parents; whether they really worried about us or had forgotten us. Of Gauguin dying in Tahiti. And I thought about Clancy’s uncle. Clancy hadn’t had a letter from him for a while (she usually had one about once a week), and this worried her. I imagined him sitting, just as I was sitting, a cripple, in his wheel-chair in the sunshine. I wondered whether he really did enthuse about Clancy and our running away or whether it was just the foolish, romantic notion of a tired, slightly dotty old man who couldn’t move. Perhaps, in his enthusiasm, he merely lied for Clancy’s sake, because he was really too sick and worn out to care. I thought about the money that Clancy said he had. I didn’t believe in this money. The money of people with big houses in the country always proves to be non-existent. Or it all gets accounted for in debts and duties. In any case, the money made me uneasy. The more I thought, the more suspicious and sceptical I became. I found I couldn’t imagine the orchard wall, the creek with the jetty. I even began to believe that Clancy’s uncle and his house didn’t exist; they were some fiction invented by Clancy as an incentive—like Clancy’s father imagining he was descended from the aristocracy.

  I read from the book Clancy had bought me—Lovelace, Suckling, the Earl of Rochester—but my attention wandered. I became irritable and sullen. I had to sit with my hands inside a plastic carrier-bag because otherwise flies would come buzzing round settling on my cracked and blistered skin. Every time I wanted to turn a page I had to take out my hands, wave away the flies and use just my finger tips on the book. If I wanted to shift my position I had to do so without using my hands. Simple things became complicated feats. I would sit pondering the absurdity of my position: stuck on a bed with my hands in a polythene bag, reading Lovelace to the sound of bulldozers, half surrounded by the painting (there was still a lot of wall to go) which I was incapable of continuing. And from this I’d leap to wider absurdities. What were we doing in a condemned tenement in Bermondsey? What would become of us in the future?

  “You’ve let the cover curl up in the sun.”

  Clancy had come in. She had her tired, waitress face.

  “I know,” I said. “Sorry.”

  I used to watch the school across the road; the kids coming and going in the morning and afternoon and streaming into the playground at breaks. It was getting near the time they broke up for the summer; then the school would close for good and the demolition men would move in. Through one of the tall windows, opposite but a little below our room, I could see the teacher standing before the blackboard, but because of the level of the window I couldn’t see his seated class. It looked as if he was speaking and gesticulating to no one. I watched him struggling to communicate with his invisible audience, waving his arms and raising his voice, and I felt sorry for him. He made me think of Mr. Boyle, who even now would be offering Sidney and Spenser to the fifth year, who were more interested in Rod Stewart and Charlton Athletic. It seemed ages since I left school, though it was only a year. I thought of all my old school friends and what they were doing, whether they had jobs or not. I thought of Eddy. He’d somehow disowned me as soon as I got interested in poetry. I wondered if there were units of the Royal Artillery in Northern Ireland. I wondered if Eddy was sitting in an armoured car in the Falls Road thinking of Mr. Boyle.

  In the third week of July the school closed and the din from the playground ceased. Almost immediately several council vans turned up and took away the interior furnishings. Some of the equipment in the kitchen was dismantled and some old fold-up desks were stacked in the playground. Then the vans drove away, leaving the school like a forlorn fort amidst the besieging demolition sites. I asked myself if the kids who had gone to the school cared that it was going to be flattened. I saw some of them sometimes, playing games over the demolition sites, rooting about amongst the rubbish heaps, setting fire to things and being chased off by the site workers.

  Then one day, only about a fortnight after the school closed, there were two boys in the school playground. They were walking around, looking at the heap of desks and peering through the wired ground-floor windows. I was puzzled as to how they’d got there. Then I saw the head of a third boy—and a fourth—appear over the playground wall in the far left corner where it joined the school building. There seemed to be a loose section of the wire netting above the wall, which could be lifted back and squeezed under, and although the wall was a good ten feet, the pile of desks in the corner made it possible, even for a boy of eleven or so, to lower himself down. In a short while there were five boys in the playground, mooching about in grubby jeans and T-shirts.

  Their first impulse was to ransack everything. I watched them try to force their way into the school building through the big door from the playground. When this failed, they picked up some old lengths of piping left by the council workers and, poking them through the metal grilles over the windows, began smashing the panes. They used the same bits of piping to hack up lumps of asphalt from the playground, which they hurled at the upper windows. The noise they made was lost in the general noise of demolition. One of them climbed up onto the roof of one of the two small lavatory buildings abutting the school wall and, with the aid of a drain pipe, tried to reach the second-floor windows—but climbed down when he realised he would be visible from street level. Then they started to dismantle the lavatories themselves—crude little temporary buildings made from flimsy prefabricated materials, with corrugated asbestos roofs.

  I wondered whether these were the same kids who broke into the tenement and set fire to the litter on the stairs. They came the next day, and the day after that, and the next day again. It seemed odd that they should return at all to t
he school—like released prisoners going voluntarily back to prison. They stripped the lavatories bare so that the cisterns, bowls and rusty urinals were exposed, and these became the subjects of scatological frenzies. They started to break up some of the desks from the pile in the corner. One day I noticed them throwing about something soft and dark which they had discovered on the asphalt. They were hurling it at each other’s faces and laughing. I realised it was a pigeon, a sooty-feathered London pigeon that must have fluttered very recently into the playground to die. They kept tossing it at each other; until one of them picked it up by the wing, raised it high and jerked his arm hard so that the wing came off in his hand. They all laughed. He did the same with the second wing. Then they began a mad, yelling, directionless game of football, kicking the pigeon’s body across the asphalt and against the playground walls. The grey lumps of bird turned a dark, purply red. The game ended when one of the boys kicked the bird unintentionally over the playground wall. Nobody seemed interested in retrieving it.

  This was on the third afternoon. After the game with the pigeon they grew listless and lethargic. They sat and sprawled about on the broken-up asphalt, now and then gouging up lumps of it and throwing them aimlessly. The sun blazed down. They looked like real prisoners now, idle and demoralized inside the high walls. I thought: They’ve had enough; they’ll go now—their old playground holds nothing for them.