Playing for the Ashes

  “Has Denton gone to bed, darling?” she whispered against his mouth.

  Denton? What had Denton to do with anything?

  “He won’t be wandering into the kitchen, will he?”

  The kitchen? Did she actually mean them to…No. No. She couldn’t mean that.

  He heard the sound of his zip being lowered. A veil of black gauze seemed to fall before his eyes. He thought about the likelihood of his passing out from hunger. Then her hand was against him and whatever blood was left in his head seemed to pound elsewhere.

  He said, “Helen. I haven’t eaten in hours. Frankly, I don’t know if I’ll even be able to—”

  “Nonsense.” She brought her mouth back to his. “I expect you’ll do just fine.”

  He did.

  OLIVIA

  My legs have been cramping. I’ve dropped four pencils in the last twenty minutes, and I haven’t had the energy to pick them up. I just take another out of the tin. I keep writing onwards and try to ignore what my handwriting’s evolved to over the past few months.

  Chris came through a moment ago. He stood behind me. He rested his hands on my shoulders and kneaded my muscles in the way I love. He put his cheek against the top of my head. “You don’t have to write it all at one go,” he said.

  I said, “That’s just what I’ve got to do.”

  “Why?”

  “Don’t ask. You know.”

  He left me alone. He’s in the workroom now, crafting a hutch for Felix. “Six feet long,” he told me. “Most people don’t understand how much room a rabbit needs.” He usually works with music playing, but he’s kept both the radio and the stereo off because he wants me to be able to think and write clearly. I want as much as well, but the telephone rings and I hear him catch it. I hear the way his voice goes soft. It’s gentle round the edges, like brandy if brandy were composed of sound. I try to ignore it, the “Yes…No…No real change…I won’t be able to…No…No, it isn’t that at all…” A long terrible silence after which he says, “I understand,” in a voice that hurts me with the way it aches. I wait for more, telltale whispered words like love, like want, miss, and if only, telltale sounds like sighs. I strain to hear even as I recite the alphabet backwards in my head to block out his voice. I hear him say, “Only patience,” and the words get fuzzy on the paper before me. The pencil slips and falls to the floor. I reach for another.

  Chris comes into the galley. He plugs in the kettle. He takes a mug from the dresser, tea from a cupboard. He places his hands on the work top and lowers his head as if he’s examining something there.

  I feel my heart beating inside my throat and I want to say, “You can go to her. You can go if you like,” but I don’t because I’m afraid he’ll do it.

  It hurts too much to love. Why do we expect it to be so wonderful? Love’s misery on misery. It’s like pouring acid into one’s heart.

  The kettle boils and clicks off. He pours the water. He says, “Want a cuppa, Livie?” and I say, “Ta. Yes.”

  He says, “Oolong?”

  I say, “No. Have we got any Gunpowder?”

  He rattles through a cupboard for the tin. He says, “I don’t know how you abide this stuff. It doesn’t taste like anything but water to me.”

  “One needs a subtle palate,” I say. “Some tastes are more delicate than others.”

  He turns. We look at each other a while. We say in silence all the things we can’t take the chance of saying aloud. Finally, he remarks, “I ought to finish that hutch. Felix’ll want a place to doss tonight.”

  I nod, but my face feels tight. When he passes me, his hand brushes near my arm and I want to catch it and press it to my cheek.

  I say, “Chris,” and he pauses behind me. I breathe and it hurts rather more than I expect. I say, “I’m probably going to be at this thing for a good few hours longer. If you’d like to go out…take the dogs for a final run or something…pop into the pub.”

  He says quietly, “I expect the dogs’re all right.”

  I look at this yellow lined pad, the third I’ve started since beginning the writing. I say, “It can’t be much longer now. You know.”

  He says, “Take your time.”

  He goes back to work. He says to Felix, “Now tell me, son, would you like a western or eastern exposure in your new accommodation?” and the hammering begins, quick blows, one-two for each nail. Chris is strong and skilled. He doesn’t make mistakes.

  I used to wonder why he took me on. “Was I a whim of the moment?” I’d asked him. Because it didn’t make sense to me that he’d pick up a whore, buy her two cups of coffee and a spring roll, take her home, put her to work at carpentry, and end up inviting her to stay when he had no intention—not to mention no desire—of screwing her. At first I thought he meant me to whore for him. I thought he had a habit to support and I kept waiting for the sight of needles, spoons, and packets of powder. When I said, “What’s this all about anyway,” he said, “What’s what all about?” and looked round the barge as if my question referred to it.

  “This. Here. Me. With you.”

  “Is it supposed to be about something?”

  “A bloke and a girl. Together they’re usually about something, I’d say.”

  “Ah.” He shouldered a board and cocked his head. “Where’s the hammer taken itself off to?” And he’d set to work and set me to work as well.

  While we were finishing the barge, we dossed on two Lilos, to the left of the stairs, at the opposite end from the animals. Chris slept in his underwear. I slept in the nude. Sometimes in the early morning, I threw the covers off and lay on my side so that my breasts looked fuller. I pretended to sleep and waited for something to happen between us. I caught him watching me once. I caught his eyes slowly wandering the length of my body. I saw him look reflective. I thought, This is it. I stretched to arch my back in what I knew from experience was a lissome movement.

  He said, “You’ve remarkable musculature, Livie. Do you exercise regularly? Are you a runner?”

  I said, “Hell.” Then, “Yeah. I suppose I can run when I have to.”

  “How fast?”

  “How’m I supposed to know?”

  “How do you feel about the dark?”

  I reached out and played my hand down his chest. “Depends on what’s going on in it, actually.”

  “Running. Jumping. Climbing. Hiding.”

  “What? Playing war games?”

  “Something like that.”

  I slipped my fingers into the waistband of his underpants. He caught my hand in his.

  “Let’s see,” he said.

  “What?”

  “If you’re good at something besides this.”

  “Are you queer? Is that it? Are you undersexed or something? Why don’t you want to do it?”

  “Because that’s not how it’s going to be between us.” He rolled off the Lilo and got to his feet. He reached for his blue jeans and shirt. He was dressed in less than a minute, his back to me and his neck bent so that I could see the knob at the nape where he looked most vulnerable. “You don’t have to be that way with men,” he said. “There are other ways of being.”

  “Being what?”

  “Who you are. Of value. Whatever.”

  “Oh, right.” I sat up, pulling the blanket round me. Through the stacks of timber and the unfinished framing of the interior of the barge, I could see the animals at the other end. Toast was awake and chewing on a rubber ball, as was a beagle Chris called Jam. One of the rats was running on the exercise wheel inside the cage. It made an odd sound like the rat-a-tat-tat of machine-gun fire heard at a distance. “So go ahead,” I said.

  “With what?”

  “The lecture you’ve been so hot to give me. Only you’d better be careful because I’m not like them.” I flung my arm towards the animals. “I can walk out of here any time I like.”

  “Why don’t you?”

  I glared at him. I couldn’t answer. I had the bed-sit in Earl’s Court. I had
regular clients. I had daily opportunity to expand my business out on the street. As long as I was willing to do anything and to try everything, I had a steady source of income. So why did I stay?

  At the time I thought, It’s because I intend to show you what’s what. Before this is over, little bean, I’ll have you baying at the moon, I’ll see you so randy that you’ll be grovelling at my feet just to lick my ankle.

  And to do that, of course, I had to stay with him on the barge.

  I grabbed my clothes from the floor between the Lilos. I stuffed myself into them. I folded my blanket. I ran my hand through my hair to comb it. “All right,” I said.

  “What?”

  “I’ll show you.”

  “What?”

  “How fast I can run. How far. And whatever else you’ve a fancy to see.”

  “Climbing?”

  “Fine.”

  “Crouching?”

  “Fine.”

  “Slithering on your stomach?”

  “I expect you’ll find I’m expert at that.”

  He coloured. It was the first and only time I ever managed to embarrass him. He toed a piece of wood to one side. He said, “Livie.”

  I said, “I wasn’t going to charge you.”

  He sighed. “It’s not because you’re a whore. It’s got nothing to do with that.”

  “It has,” I said. “I wouldn’t be here in the first place if I wasn’t a whore.” I climbed up to the deck. He joined me. The day was grey, and the wind was blowing. Leaves scratched along the surface of the towpath. Even as we stood there, the first of the rain began to dimple the surface of the canal. “Right,” I said. “Run, climb, crouch, slither.” And I set off, with Chris following close behind, to show him exactly what I could do.

  He was testing my skills. It’s obvious to me now, but at the time I assumed he was devising strategies to keep himself from caving in to me. You see, I didn’t know he had any outside interests then. For the first several weeks that we were together, he worked on the barge, he met with clients who needed his expertise in renovating their houses, he cared for his animals. He stayed in at night, reading mostly, although he listened to music and fielded dozens of phone calls that I assumed—from his businesslike tone and the many references he made to both city and ordnance maps—were related to his work with plaster and wood. He went out for the first time at night some four weeks after he’d taken up with me. He said he had a meeting to attend—he said it was a monthly do he had with four chaps he had been at school with, and in a way it was, as I found out later—and he told me he wouldn’t be back late. He wasn’t. But then he went out a second night that week and then a third. On the fourth he didn’t get back till three and when he came in, he woke me up with his clatter. I asked him where he’d been. He answered, “Too much to drink” and he fell onto his Lilo and into a stuporous sleep. A week later, he began the process again. He was meeting with his mates, he said. Only this time on the third night out, he didn’t come back at all.

  I sat on the deck with Toast and Jam, and I waited for him. As the hours passed, my worry about him began to curdle. I said to myself, All right, two can play at this game. I dressed in spandex, spangles, black stockings, and heels. I made my way to Paddington. I picked up an Australian film editor who was working on a project at Shepperton Studios. He wanted to go to his hotel, but that didn’t suit. I wanted him on the barge.

  He was still there—asleep and splayed naked with one arm crooked to cover his eyes and one hand on my head where it rested against his chest—when Chris finally returned, quiet as a housebreaker, at half past six the next morning. He opened the door and came down the steps with his jacket in his arms. For a moment I couldn’t see him clearly against the light. I squinted, then stretched quite happily when I saw the familiar halo of his hair. I yawned and ran my hand down and up the Australian’s leg. The Australian groaned.

  I said, “Morning, Chris. This’s Bri. An Aussie. Lovely, isn’t he?” And I turned to minister to him, increasing the volume of Brian’s groans. He accommodated me further by moaning, “Not again. I can’t. I’ll be shooting blanks, Liv.” As far as I could tell, he hadn’t opened his eyes.

  Chris said, “Get rid of him, Livie. I need you.”

  I waved him off and continued with Brian, who said, “Wha’? Who?” and struggled to his elbows. He grabbed a blanket, which he threw across his lap.

  “This’s Chris,” I said. I nuzzled Brian’s chest. “He lives here.”

  “Who is he?”

  “No one. He’s Chris. I told you. He lives here.” I pulled at the blanket. Brian held on to it. With the other hand he began feeling round the floor for his clothes. I kicked them away, saying, “He’s busy. We won’t be bothering him. Come on. You liked it well enough last night.”

  “I’ve got the point,” Chris said. “Get him out of here.”

  And then there was another sound, a low whine, and I saw that Chris wasn’t holding his jacket at all. It was an old brown blanket with its piping ripped away, wrapped round something large. Chris carried it through the barge to the far end where the animals were. The galley was finished now, as were the animals’ space, and the loo, so I couldn’t tell what he was doing up there. I heard Jam bark.

  Chris called over his shoulder, “Have you at least fed the animals? Have you taken the dogs out?” Then, “Oh hell. Forget it.” And much more quietly, “Here. It’s all right. You’re all right. You’re fine,” in a gentle voice.

  We stared in the direction he’d gone. Brian said, “I’ll shove off.”

  I said, “Right,” but my eyes were on the door to the galley. I struggled into a T-shirt. I heard Brian clump up the steps. The door closed behind him. I went through the galley to Chris.

  He was bent over the long work top in the animals’ space. He hadn’t turned on the light. Weak morning sun filtered through the window. He was saying, “You’re all right. You are. You are,” in a tender voice. “Rough night, wasn’t it? But it’s over now.”

  I said, “What’ve you got?” and looked over his shoulder. “Oh good God,” I said, my stomach lurching. “What’s happened? Were you drunk? Where’s he come from? Did you hit him with a car?”

  That’s all I could think of when I first saw the beagle, although if I’d been less woozy from drink, I would have understood that the sutures running from between the dog’s eyes to the back of his head were not recent enough to be indicators of emergency surgery performed in the night. He lay on his side, drawing slow breaths with great spaces between them. When Chris touched the back of his fingers to the dog’s jaw, his tail flopped weakly.

  I grabbed Chris’s arm. “He looks awful. What’d you do to him?”

  He glanced at me and for the first time I saw how white he was. “I pinched him,” he said. “That’s what I do.”

  “Pinched? That…? From…? What in God’s name’s the matter with you? Did you break into a vet’s?”

  “He wasn’t at a vet’s.”

  “Then where—”

  “They removed part of his skull to expose his brain. They like to use beagles because the breed is friendly. It’s easy to gain their confidence. Which, of course, is what they need before—”

  “They? Who? What’re you talking about?” He was frightening me, just as he had done the night I first met him.

  He reached for a bottle and a box of cotton wool. He daubed the sutures. The dog looked up at him with sad, cloudy eyes and ears that clung, drooping, to his wreck of a skull. Chris took a delicate pinch of the beagle’s skin between his thumb and index finger. When he let it go, the skin stayed in place, pinched.

  “Dehydrated,” Chris said. “We need an IV.”

  “We haven’t got—”

  “I know that. Watch him. Don’t let him get up.” He went to the galley. Water ran. On the work top the dog’s eyes drooped closed. His breathing slowed. His paws began to twitch. Beneath his lids, his eyes seemed to flick back and forth.

  “Chris!” I
called. “Hurry!”

  Toast was up, nudging at my hand. Jam had retreated to a corner where he chewed at a piece of rawhide.

  “Chris!” And then when he came back to the animals with a fresh bowl of water, “He’s dying. I think he’s dying.”

  Chris set the water down and bent to the dog. He watched him, resting a hand on his flank. “He’s sleeping,” he said.

  “But his paws. His eyes.”

  “He’s dreaming, Livie. Animals dream, you know, just like us.” He dipped his fingers in the water, held them to the beagle’s nose. It quivered. The dog cracked open his eyes. He lapped the drops from Chris’s fingers. His tongue was nearly white. “Yes,” Chris said. “You take it this way. Slow. Easy.” He dipped his hand in the water again, held it again, watched the dog lick it again from his hand. The dog’s tail tip-tapped against the work top. He coughed. Chris stood by him patiently, feeding him the water. It took forever. When he was done, he gently lowered him to a nest of blankets on the floor. Toast hobbled over to snuffle round the edges of the blankets. Jam stayed where he was, chewing away.

  I was saying, “Where’ve you been? What’s happened? Where’d you get him?” when a man’s voice called from the other end of the barge, “Chris? Are you here? I only just now got the message. Sorry.”

  Chris called over his shoulder, “In here, Max.”

  An older bloke joined us. He was bald, with an eye patch. He was impeccably dressed in a navy suit, white shirt, speckled tie. He carried a black bag of the sort doctors use. He glanced at me, then at Chris. He hesitated.

  “She’s all right,” Chris said. “This is Livie.”

  The bloke nodded at me and immediately dismissed me. He said to Chris, “What’ve you managed?”

  Chris said, “I’ve got this one. Robert’s got two others. His mum has a fourth. This one was the worst.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Ten ferrets. Eight rabbits.”

  “Where?”

  “Sarah. Mike.”

  “And this one?” He squatted to look at the dog. “Never mind. I can see.” He opened his bag. “Take the others out, why don’t you?” he suggested with a nod at Toast and Jam.