Playing for the Ashes

  Things were different this time, just like he’d said. We weren’t dossing in some smelly dump three floors up with carpet squares on the floor and mice in the walls. We had a first-floor conversion with its own bay window and posh Corinthian pillars on either side of the porch. We had a fireplace decked out in ironwork and tiles. We had a bedroom and a kitchen and a bathtub with claws. We went to Julip’s each night where Richie’s band made the music. When the place closed down, we went on the town. We partied, we drank. We did coke whenever we got the chance. We even hit on some LSD. We danced, we shagged in the back of taxis, and we never once got home before three. We ate Chinese take-away in bed. We bought watercolours and painted on each other’s bodies. One night we got drunk, and he pierced my nose. In the late afternoons Richie jammed with the band, and when he got tired, he always turned to me.

  This was it this time. I wasn’t a ninny. I knew the real thing when it slapped me in the face. But just to make sure, I waited two weeks for Richie to cock things up. When he didn’t, I went home to Kensington and collected my things.

  Mother wasn’t there when I arrived. It was a Tuesday afternoon and the wind was blowing in gusts that came and went in that waving kind of pattern that always feels like someone in the sky is shaking out a big sheet. I rang the bell first. I waited, shoulders raised against the wind, and rang again. Then I remembered that Tuesday afternoons had always been Mother’s late day down on the Isle of Dogs, when she tutored the great minds from her fifth form classes, willing them to be unlocked so she could fill them with Truth. I had my house keys with me, so I let myself in.

  I skipped up the stairs, feeling with every step like I was shedding yet another aspect of constipated, constrictive, bourgeois family life. What need had I for the smothering tedium prescribed by generations of English womanhood—not to mention my mother—doing the done thing? I had Richie Brewster and a real life to take the place of everything implied by this looming mausoleum in Kensington.

  Out of here, I thought, out of here, out…of…here.

  Mother had anticipated me. She’d gone to Cambridge and collected my gear. She’d packed it, along with every other possession of mine, in cardboard boxes which sat on my bedroom floor, neatly sealed with Sellotape.

  Thanks, Mir, I thought. Old cow, old girl, old mackerel tart. Thanks ever so much for seeing to things in your competent fashion.

  I went through the boxes, decided what I wanted, and dumped the rest on the bed or the floor. Afterwards, I spent a half-hour wandering round the house. Richie had said that money was getting tight, so I took what I could to help him out: a piece of silver here, a pewter jug there, one or two porcelains, three or four rings, a few miniatures laid out on a table in the drawing room. It was all part of my eventual inheritance. I was merely getting a head start on things.

  Money stayed tight for months on end. The flat and our expenses were tallying up to more than Richie made. To help out, I took a job stuffing jacket potatoes in a caff in Charing Cross Road, but for Richie and me holding on to money was as easy as chasing feathers in a gale. So Richie decided the only answer was for him to pick up a few extra gigs out of town. “I don’t want you working more than you already are,” he said. “Let me take this gig in Bristol”—or Exeter or York or Chichester—“to set us right, Liv.”

  Looking back, I realise that I should have seen what it all meant: the tightness of finances in combination with all those extra gigs. But I didn’t, at first. Not because I didn’t want to, but because I couldn’t allow myself to. I had far more than money invested in Richie, but I wasn’t about to consider that. So I lied and donned blinkers. I told myself we were hard pressed for cash and it was reasonable that he might have to travel to make it. But when the cash got tighter and his travelling didn’t make a difference in what we were bringing in, I was forced to put the facts together. He wasn’t bringing it in because he was laying it out.

  I accused. He admitted. He was drowning in expenses. He had his wife in Brighton, he had me in London, he had a tart called Sandy in Southend-on-Sea.

  Not that he mentioned Sandy at first. He wasn’t a fool. He kept me focussed on his wife, the martyred Loretta, who still loved him, couldn’t make herself part with him, was the mother of his children, and all the etceteras. He’d taken to dropping down to Brighton for a visit now and again, as any dutiful father might. He’d extended his visits with three or four—or was it five, Richie?—safaris into Loretta’s knickers. She was pregnant.

  He cried when he told me. He said what could he do, they’d been married for years, she was the mother of his children, he couldn’t turn away from her love when she offered it to him, when she couldn’t get over him, when she’d never get over him…It didn’t mean anything, she didn’t mean anything, together the two of them didn’t mean anything because “You’re the one, Liv. You make me make the music. Everything else is crap.”

  Except Sandy, as things turned out. I found out about Sandy on a Wednesday morning, directly the doctor explained how what I thought was an inconvenient and uncomfortable infection was really herpes. I was through with Richie by Thursday night. I had just enough strength to throw his belongings down the front steps and make arrangements to change the lock on the door. By Friday night, I thought I was dying. On Saturday, the doctor called it “a most interesting and prodigious infection,” which was his way of saying he’d never seen anything like it.

  And what was it like? Like fever and burning, like screaming into a towel when I went to the toilet, like rats taking large bites out of my twat. I had six weeks to think about Sandy, Richie, and Southend-on-Sea while I travelled from the doctor to the loo to my bed and felt that gangrene couldn’t be any worse than what was tearing through me.

  I got down quickly to no food in the flat, filthy laundry piled in doorways, and crockery broken against walls and doors. I got down quickly to having no money. National Health took care of the doctor, but no one took care of anything else.

  I remember sitting by the telephone and thinking, Hellfire and hot ice, I finally qualify. I remember laughing. I’d been drinking the last of the gin all morning, and it took a mixture of gin and desperation to place the call. It was Sunday, noon.

  Dad answered. I said, “I need help.”

  He said, “Livie? Where in God’s name are you? What’s happened, my dear?”

  When had I spoken to him last? I couldn’t recall. Had he always sounded so gentle? Had his voice been at once so kind and so low?

  He said, “You’re not well, are you? Has there been an accident? Are you hurt? Are you in hospital?”

  I felt the oddest sensation. His words acted like anaesthetic and scalpel. I opened to him painlessly.

  I told him everything. When I was done, I said, “Daddy, help me. Please help me get out of this.”

  He said, “Let me work on things here. Let me do what I can. Your mother’s—”

  “I can’t hold on here,” I told him. I began to cry. I hated myself for it because he’d tell her I was weeping and she’d talk to him about children who engage in manipulation and parents who stand firm and keep true to their word and their law and their miserable belief that theirs is the only right way to live. “Daddy!” I must have wailed because I could hear the word in the flat long after I said it into the phone.

  He said gently, “Give me your phone number, Livie. Give me your address. I’ll speak to your mother. I’ll be in touch.”

  “But I—”

  “You must trust me.”

  “Promise.”

  “I’ll do what I can. This isn’t going to be easy.”

  I suppose he presented his case as best he could, but Mother had always been the expert when it came to Family Troubles. She held true to her position. Two days later she sent me fifty pounds inside an envelope. A sheet of white paper was folded round the notes. She’d written on it, “A home has to be a place where the children learn to live by their parents’ rules. When you’re capable of guaranteeing you’ll ad
here to our rules, please let us know. Tears and pleas for help are simply not enough at this point. We love you, darling. We always will.” And that was that.

  Miriam, I thought. Good old Miriam. I could read between the lines of her perfect handwriting. This was all about washing one’s hands of one’s children. As far as Mother was concerned, I’d got what I deserved.

  Well, to hell with her, I thought. I wished upon her every curse I could think of. Every disease, every ill fortune, every unhappiness. Since she was taking pleasure in my condition, I would take heady pleasure in hers.

  It’s odd to think how things work out.

  OLIVIA

  The sun feels warm against my cheeks. I smile, lean back, and close my eyes. I count a minute off the way I was taught: one thousand and one, one thousand and two, and so forth. I ought to go to three hundred, but sixty is just about my limit right now. And even then, once I hit one thousand and forty, I tend to rush things to get to the end. I call the minute “taking a rest,” which is what I’m supposed to do several times a day. I don’t know why. I think “take a rest” is what they tell you when they don’t have anything more productive to say. They want you to close your eyes and slowly drift off. I fight that idea. It’s rather like asking someone to get used to the inevitable before she’s ready, isn’t it?

  Except the inevitable is something black, cold, and infinite while here on the barge in my canvas chair, I see the red streaks of sunlight against my eyelids and I feel the warmth press like fingers against my face. My jersey soaks up heat. My leggings distribute it along my shins. And everything—the world especially—seems so terribly forg

  Sorry. I drifted off completely. My trouble is that I fight sleep all night, so there are times in the day when it takes me unaware. It’s better that way, actually, because it’s a peaceful thing, like slowly being drawn from shore with the tide. And the dreams which come with a daytime sleep that seduces one from consciousness…those are the sweetest.

  I was with Chris in my dream. I knew it was him because I felt so sure that he wouldn’t drop me. I clung to his back and we soared high above a green-and-black rocky coastline like the Cliffs of Moher where the ocean sends spray a thousand feet in the air. And his hair was long for some reason, not like Chris’s hair at all, long and pure black and straight as the shaft of a spear. It covered me as we flew. And I could feel his shoulders, the strength of his legs, and the wind on my face. When we landed, it was in a barren place like the Burren, and he said, This is where it will happen, Livie. I said, What? He said, Children spring from the stones. And when he smiled, I saw he had changed to my father.

  I killed my father. I live with that knowledge, along with everything else. Chris tells me I don’t bear nearly the amount of responsibility for Dad’s death that I seem to want to bear. But Chris didn’t know me then. He hadn’t tumbled me out of the rubbish heap and challenged me, in that perfectly reasonable way of his, to act as big as I talked, to talk as big as he believed I could be. I’ve asked him since that time why he took me on; he shrugs and says, “Instinct, Livie. I could see who you were. It was in your eyes.” I say, “It’s because I reminded you of them.” He says, “Them? Who?” but he knows who I mean, and we both know it’s the truth. “Rescue,” I say. “That’s your real forte, isn’t it?” He says, “You needed something to believe in. Like we all do.” But the fact of the matter is that Chris has always seen more of me than was really there. He sees my heart as good. I see it as absent.

  Which is what it was the last time I came face to face with my father.

  I saw Mother and Dad right outside Covent Garden Station on a Friday night. They’d been to the opera. Even in my state, I could tell that much because Mother was head-to-toe in black, wearing a quadruple strand of pearls. It was a choker, something I’d always told her shortened her neck and made her look like Winston Churchill in drag. Dad was in a dinner jacket that smelled of lavender. He’d had his hair cut recently, and it was much too short. His ears looked like conch shells pressed against his head. They gave him an air of surprise and innocence. Somewhere he’d unearthed a pair of patent leather shoes, which he’d polished to mirror quality.

  I hadn’t seen or spoken to either of them since I’d talked to Dad that day on the phone when I called for help. Nearly two years had passed. I’d had six different jobs, gone through five flatmates, and lived my life as I saw fit, answerable to no one and liking it that way.

  I was with two blokes that I’d met on King Street in a pub called something like the Ram or the Ox. We were heading for a party rumoured to be blowing off the rooftops in Brixton. At least, I was heading there. The blokes were following. We’d snorted some coke in the gentlemen’s toilet and afterwards—when things seemed funnier than they would otherwise—we’d had ourselves a good laugh about doing a threesome with me taking it in both ends at once. They were sweating to do it to me, swearing how much I was going to like it because they were warriors, they were kings, they were absolute studs. They were grabbing, poking, and working themselves up, while I was sweating for the coke. I could see it was a case of who was going to get what from who when, and I was clever enough to know that the minute I put out the way that they wanted, I’d be shut out and finished.

  You shudder as you read this, don’t you? You lay these pages aside. You look out the window until some exterior beauty there fortifies you enough to come back to me.

  Because your life hasn’t been like mine, has it? I imagine you’ve never done drugs, so you don’t know what sort of human slime you can end up slithering through when you want to get high. You can’t see yourself, can you, kneeling on the cracked tiles in the gentlemen’s toilet while some bloke who plays banker in the City all day fumbles with the zip on his I’m-incognito leather trousers and laughs while he grabs your head and says, “Come on. Do it.” You can’t imagine that, can you? You can’t even imagine considering it in the first place because you can’t think what it’s like in the aftermath, when those few obliging if somewhat nasty minutes in the gentlemen’s toilet on your knees with your head in someone’s crotch buy you power, wit, energy, brilliance, and the knowledge that you are the most superior creature God ever put on earth.

  Because that’s what it’s like when the stuff shoots up your nose and sets your eyeballs on fire. But I wasn’t so far gone in the need for coke that I’d forgotten how to play for what I wanted. So I laughed along with them, kneeling on those tiles with the broken edge of one knifing through my jeans, and I gave each of those blokes just enough mouth to act as a preview of future delight. When they were hot, I leaned back on my heels. I yawned, eyelids drooping. I said, “I need another hit,” because as far as I was concerned, neither one of them was getting anything more off me till I’d gone through my fair share of their dope.

  They were simple blokes, for all their public school received pronunciation and their posh jobs in the City. They thought they had me where they wanted me, so they decided it was time to be mean with the drug. I suppose they thought that a good spot of stinginess would keep me interested.

  They were wrong. I said, “Buzz off then, nancies,” and that was enough to make them decide a show of good faith was in order if their grubby little dreams were going to come true. We paused long enough to do a couple of lines on the boot of a car, then we arm-in-armed it up to the station. I don’t know about them, but I felt eighty feet tall.

  Clark was singing “Satisfaction” with a new set of lyrics designed for what he expected his future sexual circumstances to be. Barry was alternating between sticking his middle finger in my mouth and rubbing himself up to keep in shape for the fun. Like a hot knife through whipping cream, we parted the herd of pedestrians that are always mucking round Covent Garden. One glance in our direction and people simply stepped off the pavement. Until we ran into my parents.

  I still don’t understand what they were doing at the station that night. When she isn’t able to drive her own car, Mother has always been strictly a taxi pers
on, one of those women who act as if they’d allow their toenails to be pulled out one by one before they’d wander through the entrails of London transport. Dad never minded the tube. To him a ride on the underground was a ride on the underground, efficient, inexpensive, and relatively trouble-free. He went from home to work and back again on the District Line every Monday to Saturday, and I doubt he ever gave a passing thought to who was sitting next to him or to what might be implied by arriving at the printing factory in anything less than a Ferrari.

  Perhaps that night, he had won her over to his means of transport. Perhaps there had been not enough taxis available when they left the opera. Or perhaps Dad had suggested they save a few quid towards the yearly summer’s holiday on Jersey by taking a rumble along the Piccadilly Line. At any rate, there they were where I least expected to see them.

  Mother didn’t speak. Dad didn’t recognise me at first, which is understandable. I’d cut my hair short and coloured it cherry red and tarted it up with purple on the ends. I wasn’t wearing clothes he’d seen before—other than the blue jeans—and my earrings were different. There were more of them as well.