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She finishes preparing the breakfast table, and as she puts the kettle on to boil the twin boys come rattling down the stairs and launch into the food, clutching their spoons like fighting sticks. She tries to talk to them about the day, what are they going to do and would they like to go with Nana and Papa to see Auntie for tea, but their mouths are full of soggy cereal and it is all they can do to breathe between shovelfuls. She relents, and tells them they must not go further than the shop at the end of the street and that they must not go into people’s gardens without asking.
She strokes them both on the head, as if to bless their day, and she tells them to be good, and as they leave the room she sees again her daughter standing in the doorway, her head leaning up against the frame and her big eyes looking blankly upwards. She is wearing the floral dress with the gold edge which was made for her by Auntie, she is looking pretty she thinks. She says what would you like, and the young girl says nothing but slides into the chair vacated by her brother and pours herself a bowl of wheatflakes. She eats slowly, gathering the flakes into small spoonfuls, looking out of the window, chewing each portion thoughtfully.
And when she is finished she turns to her mother and says mummy can I watch cartoons now, just like that, no expression, as if she were a child extra in a cheap soap opera and not the centre of a loving family. Her mother nods her assent and watches her drift through to the front room, trailing her hand along the wallpaper.
Perhaps she is nervous about starting school, she thinks to herself, or perhaps she is becoming poorly. She turns to the window and touches her face, she is feeling weary of the day already. The boys stamp down the stairs and out of the front door. It is not yet eight o’clock. She runs the tap to wash the children’s dishes. She clenches her fist under the rushing water until it becomes hot, she holds it there.
The man in the attic flat of number twenty-one, he is watching the twin boys from next door running in the street, he is leaning from the window to smoke a cigarette, he is being watched by the woman lying on the bed behind him. They are both naked. They’re out already he says, them kids from next door, they’re out already, what time is it? You probably woke them up with your snoring the woman says, rolling onto her side and stretching across the floor to pick up her watch. They’re cheeky little shits them two the man says, I saw them throwing stones at those girls over the road last week, when they was sitting in their own garden. Probably just looking for attention the woman says, you know what boys are like. It’s not even eight she says, I’m going back to sleep she says, but she doesn’t and she lies awake looking at the nakedness of the man, at his feet tilted upwards and the tension rising up the muscles of his legs as he stretches to lean out of the window, and the rise and pause and fall of the curve of his shoulders as he savours his cigarette. At the small dragon tattoo on his shoulderblade. At the long pink lines and the small purple scuff marks scattered all over his skin, scratches and bruises she’s gifted him in heated moments of fury and passion.
She props herself up on one elbow and catches sight of herself in the mirror, she looks at herself, her skin clean and unmarked except for a single thumb-sized bruise at the top of one arm. She looks at her hair, newly dyed a deep henna red, she turns a length of it in her fingers. She’s still pleased with it, even though he hasn’t yet said anything. She likes the way it complemen
ts her eyes.
They’re looking in people’s windows now the man says, his irritation furrelling over his shoulder like smoke, what are they playing at? Forget it she says, come back to bed she says, and she rolls to one side to make room for him. Little fuckers he says, they’ve got water-pistols he says, and he turns away, back into the room, striding across the floor to squash his cigarette end into the ashtray. What did you say he says to the woman, I missed that. She says, I told you to come back to bed and she reaches out her arm towards him and when he kisses her the stubble on his face smells of smoke and sunshine.
In the street outside, the twins from number nineteen are peering into the front window of number twenty, the slightly older one balanced on a pair of bricks to see better, looking through a small gap in the curtains. In the room in front of them, a man with thinning hair and a carefully trimmed moustache is doing stretching exercises, lifting his pale arms high in the air, lowering them towards the floor, placing his hands on his fleshy hips, arching his body from side to side. He is completely naked, and the boys suddenly giggle out loud and cover their mouths, the man with the tidy moustache turning and waving them away, dragging the curtains more fully closed.
They vanish, and he stands by the now safely shielded window, clenching and unclenching his fists, breathing a little heavily. They are not good boys, he is thinking, they are not good boys at all. He has seen them, he knows about them, he has seen them dropping their crisp bags in the street, their sweet wrappings. He stretches his hands towards the floor, his knees almost straight, his bony fingers only half a dozen inches from the carpet. He straightens, slowly and carefully, he puts on a dressing gown and he steps into his small kitchen, reaching for the kettle, glancing into the backyard and his hands yank suddenly up into the air as if he were shaking out a tablecloth and he mutters shameful words, he says to nobody what is it now? where does it come from all of this? and he pulls down the kitchen blind so that he does not have to look at it.
In the flat upstairs, an old man is looking for a box of matches to light the gas under the kettle, he turns to the table and he sees an envelope lying there, his name scratched across it in wavering handwriting. He smiles, he turns and opens the cutlery drawer of the Welsh dresser, he takes out an envelope with his wife’s name on it, his own handwriting as newly unreliable as hers.
He places the two cards side by side, he thinks about opening his for a moment and decides not to. He looks for the matches, and he thinks about that day.
It wasn’t a spectacular wedding. It happened in a hurry, and they only spent one night together before he went away again, went away properly. They’d been told to tie up their loose ends, and they knew what that meant, so he’d sent her a telegram, just before his leave, saying are you at a loose end stop buy a nice dress stop will buy rings stop, and they’d rushed off to the registry office, dragging in the woman from the cake shop for a witness.
But it was a wedding, and they looked each other in the eyes and said the words, they made their vows and they have kept them all these years.
Her hand in his hand, watching him say to love and to cherish, watching him say until death us do part.
When they kissed, as they were signing the register, the woman from the cake shop turned her face away, as though she was embarrassed.
And they took the wedding certificate back to their new house, propped it up on the chest of drawers at the foot of the bed, and spent the whole evening looking at it, both feeling as though they’d just stepped off a fairground ride, both feeling dizzy and exhilarated, struggling to get their breath back, struggling to absorb everything that had happened.
She said, tell me the story of us, tell me it the way you’ll tell our children when they ask.
She said it a lot, in those first few years, when she was feeling sad, or poorly, or she couldn’t sleep. She’d lay her head on his chest, her hands tucked up under her chin, and she’d say tell me the story of us, tell me it the way you’d tell our children.
And he’d always say it the same way, starting once upon a time there was a handsome soldier boy with a smart uniform and he went to a dance with his friends and minded his own business, and she’d always lift her head up and pull a shocked face and say you were not minding your own business you were making eyes at me all evening you’re a big fat liar.
And he’d always put two fingers to her lips and say so the handsome soldier boy was surprised to see a nice-looking young lady standing in front of him and asking him to dance, and she’d say what happened then, did they dance, did they dance well?
Oh yes, he’d always say, yes indeed, they did dance, and they danced very well, spinning and twirling and looking deeply in one another’s eyes so they didn’t know everyone else was looking at them so amazed and you know what happened that very moment he’d say, not waiting for her response, what happened without them even knowing was they were in love.
And then? she’d say, what happened then? Did they kiss? and he’d say no no, not so soon, he was a gentleman you see, a gentleman as well as a soldier and so he didn’t kiss her until the second time they met he’d say, and she would ask him for more details and he would tell them to her, their first meetings, where they went to, what they did, the first night they spent together in the hotel in Blackpool and she’d say you mustn’t tell the children about that bit and he’d laugh and say no.
And that first time he’d told the story, that night, lying side by side on the bed, fully clothed, neither of them said anything when he finished, they just lay there looking at the certificate, looking at the official type, the formal words, looking at their names laid down in sloping black ink.
And she’d whispered it’s a good story isn’t it?, unbuttoning his shirt, spreading her fingers out across his chest as though smoothing wrinkles from a bedsheet, and he’d said yes, yes it is, it’s a good story. And the last thing she’d said to him, just before she went to sleep that night, quietly, almost as though she thought he was asleep, she said you will come back won’t you, you will keep safe, please, you will come home?
Chapter 7
When I got back from that first appointment it rained for a day and a half.
It woke me up in the middle of the night, a quiet noise at first, burbling across the roof, spattering through the leaves of the trees, and it was good to lie there for a while and listen to it.
But later, when I got up, it was heavier and faster, pouring streaks down the windows, exploding into ricochets on the pavement outside.
I stood by the window watching people in the street struggle with umbrellas.
