Heavy, p.4
Heavy, page 4
They left Hong Kong to the sound of a man’s voice, broadcast from a window, speaking softly of spies, and Mr Shoe’s bowels in a knot.
* * *
At Singapore more harbourmasters wanted bribing.
* * *
Somewhere in the islands that scattered across the bottom of the Thai peninsula, Mr Shoe stepped onto an airfield. It was tiny, and it was hidden, and the steep rocks and crashing waves reminded him of nothing so much as Surt, somehow warmed up and rendered verdant.
In light of the association he skipped the pork dinner and felt a little queasy.
We’ve found a pig.
The plane left at dawn. It was a cousin to the pirate craft he’d come out of Guangdong in from the looks of it, possibly operated by a large rubber band, hope, and methylated spirits – just like half the Stage used to drink.
On Surt it had taken three months, cold, miserable, and dogged by death, before there’d been a plane, and he was smaller then.
Mr Shoe glanced out of the window as the tiny island disappeared among a smattering of others, and the world dropped away with a lurch. At least on Surt his brother had been here to bear witness. If he hadn’t been, then Mr Shoe would have assumed that he himself had run mad at the tender age of ten.
* * *
A stop for refuelling in Rangoon became a stop to change planes in Rangoon as it transpired that whatever giant rubber band powered the aircraft had reached its rubbery end. Mr Shoe was not surprised; he drank tea, with milk, for the first time in years, and thought about the Hackney Empire and the Soft Shoe Twins and what the hell spies did when they weren’t spying any more.
It seemed premature, but the only other thoughts he had left to play with, as his host – a liquorish Englishman with liquorice-hued teeth and a local wife who had succeeded in keeping the old sot in line – ushered him back inside during aeroplane negotiations were Xiao Huli’s death and the Other Mr Shoe’s imminent approach. The two fixed points of a spectrum of emotion were so distant from each other that he elected for a moment to think again of Surt for some more distant pain.
A pistol was produced during the conversations about navigation but the piece remained unused. Mr Shoe was grateful: he slept all the way to the delta, and gave no more thoughts to Surt, the stage, Mr Shoe, Xiao Huli, black cliffs, white waves, pigs, Nanjing, poetry, reports, or bureaus old and new, until Dhaka.
* * *
In Dhaka he borrowed the gentlemen’s conveniences attached to a bar in order to weep for a moment into his new set of clothes.
And then he climbed onto a brand new aeroplane, British manufacture, military designation, filled with returning soldiers and civil servants, and he went home.
Heavy: Three
Nausea roiled in his stomach; the scars on his face tightened like a net over his breath. Pig mumbled, “Good morning, Mrs. Foley, Golding Holdings Insurance and Assurance—”
“Well,” she said, and beneath the cut glass of a class he didn’t belong to he thought he heard slurring, the sound of sodden women in the pubs near Mr Goldstein’s lodging house. “I don’t know about that.”
“We understand that your husband—” Pig tried again, sweating.
Beside him, the girl with the tinted hair who kept trying to make him smoke had lit up another cigarette.
“Oh yes,” said Mrs. Richard Foley, and her enthusiasm was bountiful in its absence. “Yes, he handles financial matters, not me. Perhaps I shall tell him you called.”
No, Pig thought, his fingers clamping on the Bakelite phone casing, but company policy was a firm yes. There was a whole different script for talking to the man of the house, and as a male caller Pig was suited to delivering it. They didn’t trust the girls, Mr Wallace said. Women might be fearsome little computers when it came to codes, he granted, but the gentleman buying a policy didn’t trust a girl to have her head straight about money.
“Or I could just let you call the other number,” Mrs. Richard Foley went on, aimlessly, addressing no one and nothing in particular. “But then I should have to call him first, I suppose, and he doesn’t like that.”
Pig put his free hand under the remains of his nose to keep the smoke out. “Thank you,” he said, wishing she would just hang up on him. “Mrs. Foley.”
“Would you like the other number?” Mrs. Foley murmured. Genteel and what Pig assumed was gin didn’t go together in his experience, but her accent was refined and her syllables were slipping. Then again, his experience of her sort was limited to orders given from several yards away – and on one occasion a wildly-waved pistol that had come to nothing much.
“Thank you, Mrs. Foley, if it’s not too much trouble,” he said. Trying to remember her name: the girl on the base, or rather her mother with the high-ranking husband. The one with the pistol and the aggrieved sense of her daughter’s propriety which her daughter didn’t share. Something racy-sounding.
The whole memory reeked of bathtub liquors and a drinking contest with the Americans and he wasn’t sure she’d ever even told him what she was called. He’d never wanted to remember and his memory obliged him.
“Who shall I say called?” she asked, a little more sharply. Pig realised she’d probably asked him once already.
“Mr. Ridell at Golding Holdings Insurance and Assurance,” Pig said, as the girl with tinted hair peered at him through a cloud of smoke, her own phone call abandoned as they so often were.
“Mr. Ridell,” said Mrs. Foley, and she coughed, delicately. Somewhere in the open floor, a girl in the calling bank replied with a harsher, barking cough, and a cacophony of lungs answered in chorus. “Here is the other phone number, Mr. Ridell, I shall tell him you are calling first or he won’t accept the call.”
Pig, caught up in the monstrous rattle of coughs, in the girl with the tinted hair surreptitiously slipping her cigarettes back into the beret she’d been told several times to stop leaving on her desk, had to ask her to repeat it twice.
When she was gone he stared at the number, and massaged the prickling lines across his cheeks. A temporary reprieve brought no comfort. They never brought any comfort.
The tea trolley, however, brought distraction.
“Good morning, Mr Ridell,” said Joan, brightly.
Pig collected some syllables and pointed them at her.
“Just the one sugar is it, Mr Ridell?”
He nodded vaguely. Beet sugar never quite lived up to his expectations. He couldn’t remember cane sugar – had never had enough money – but he did damn well remember honey, and Mr Patterson’s bees, and why the hell they couldn’t just, somehow, keep bees in Clerkenwell…
Joan gave him a thin smile, her duty discharged, and laid the beige cup and saucer in front of him. Tin, painted to look like china, fading to tin. But they gave you a saucer, because you weren’t an animal, and this wasn’t the army.
Joan explained to the girl with the tinted hair that there was no coffee.
The girl – Maureen – sighed and accepted her tea without milk or sugar and with a look of disappointment. She had another cigarette in her mouth, or else the last one had been induced to burn backwards.
The tea trolley, and Joan, were Mr Wallace’s attempt to stop the girls from taking twenty minutes out to natter half-way through the morning. They congregated around the trolley, in the middle of the floor: Mr Wallace’s plans in ruins.
Pig drank his tea scalding. His neighbour, regarding him over the top of her own steaming tin mug, said, “I always wonder, you know, can you smell anything with those—”
He said, “Not really.”
She gave him a penetrating look and blew across her tea. “Daddy had his lungs scorched up by gas just at the start of it,” she said, as if this was as conversational and normal as the girls gossiping around the trolley. “He says everything smells of wet socks since then so he always pinches his nose shut when he eats.”
“Does it help?” Pig asked, throwing the remainder of his tea into his mouth. He knew the answer. Everything smelled of burning flesh, everything would go on smelling of burning flesh until nothing smelled of anything ever again. On worse days, if he was unlucky, he could smell gangrene.
She shook her head. “Of course not.” She pointed her cigarette, still pursed in her lips, at his face. “You know that, don’t you? It’s all on the inside, so he can’t shut it out.”
“I have to call someone,” Pig said, setting down his empty cup on the edge of the desk for Joan. The girls, and the other fragmentary men on the floor, took their cups back to Joan’s trolley: it broke up the day. Pig didn’t care much for Joan’s attempts to keep her face straight when she looked at his.
“Rightio,” said Maureen, putting her untouched tea down. “I say, you finished that quickly.”
Pig shrugged, and picked up the number, scrawled on his list beside (unspecified). Her eyes on him were like search lights.
He raised the handset.
He slowly, carefully, dialled the number.
“State name and nature of call,” said a voice he didn’t recognise, without a single ring to warn him it had connected.
Something cold and Grey-clad pushed at Pig’s consciousness, and he bit the tip of his tongue.
“State name and nature of call,” repeated the voice, sexless and abrupt.
“Mr. John Ridell, Golding Holdings Insurance and Assurance. Financial services.”
There was a mechanical click. A gentle whirr. Another click, and the sound of air on the line.
“Jack,” said a voice he did recognise, from the sudden pressure inside his ears to the panicked softening of his bowels to the crashing sound of waves inside his mind. “Good grief, what a surprise.”
Pig said nothing, his tongue tied and his mouth parched.
“It’s been a while,” Captain Richard Foley added, amiably.
“I’m calling on behalf of—”
“Oh, stuff them,” said Foley, without rancour. “How did you get hold of this number?”
“Your wife—” Pig began, his voice distant, deeper than ever, thick and congested.
“Ah, again,” said Foley, a slight note of regret. His voice had changed very little in the intervening twenty years: puberty had not ravaged his range the way it had destroyed Pig’s. The tone and timbre were evocative of that older and higher child’s voice, the tenor commanding, the chest resonance more present perhaps. The accent, too, was immaculate. Pig marshalled his vowels, his consonants, his diction; arranged them in a line, and recalled that first, half-giggled judgement:
You sound like a farm hand.
“She’s really not supposed to be handing that around,” Foley said. “I shall have to talk to her about this again.”
Pig made a kind of abortive noise that, if pressed, he could claim was the beginning of his script.
“Listen, old man,” said Foley, “I’m hellishly busy at the moment – they do flog one rather here – but if you’ve the stomach for a reunion I shall be only too happy to stand you a pint at, let’s see, seven tonight? At The Volunteer – do you know where that is?”
Pig almost shook his head. “No.”
“Just veer right along Baker Street after the station, near the Lost Property Office. You can’t miss it, I’m afraid – it took a mortar back in ’46 and they rebuilt the back but left the front alone. Looks like a mangled tooth.” Foley gave a small laugh, and added. “So, shall I see you?”
Pig made a noise that might have been assent, just like he had before.
In school, Maureen had been an embarrassingly frequent visitor to the headmistress; for ‘snooping’, a charge which the girls liked to level at one if one was caught in the process of establishing evidence for a theory regardless of whether the outcome affected them one whit. Miss Percival-Haines had not held much enthusiasm for Maureen’s anti-authoritarian leanings, nor for her excited discourse on the praxis of surveillance, and as a consequence she had spent a good deal of her education enjoying either lines or – when the offence had been particularly morally offensive – The Slipper.
At Golding Holdings, Maureen froze with a handset and a dead line to her ear as Mr. Ridell departed from his script. She took a slow breath from her straight and pretended to be examining her list.
He looked awfully ill.
“Mrs. Foley,” she heard him say, “If I could speak to your husband, perhaps?”
Well, there was nothing especially untoward about it, she supposed. A little variation, despite what Mr. Wallace thought, should hardly bring the company to its knees. The bloated capitalist tick grew fat sucking the premiums of worried war widows, after all. But there was something in his voice – it was an odd voice, thanks to all of the damage to his face – which kept her listening.
Maureen refuted the idea that the presence of a list of snotty, tiresome sorts with nothing better to do than gas on the telephone about their miserable lives might have played a role in this decision.
“I’m sure he wouldn’t mind if you gave me the number,” Mr. Ridell said, his voice croaking. Maureen glanced at him out of the corner of her eye: long and thin and wide of shoulder, faded blond and bent up like a safety pin over his desk. One of that generation of boys who’d hopped out on boats ahead of the atom bombs and then, when the Kingdom failed to be obliterated, had hopped straight into the army for further punishment. Doing their duty to King and Country.
She pulled furiously on her cigarette as Mr. Ridell muttered something downright suspect to his interlocutor and hung up.
She made polite conversation about the weather while Joan offloaded pale, watery excuses for hot drinks and the rest of the floor surged up to meet their cheap substitute of an opiate for the masses. Mr. Ridell, putting away tea as if his very life depended on it, did not seem to have noticed her stealthy interest in the situation, and as she picked up her handset again Maureen crossed her toes that he’d soon be lulled into a secure enough state to let something else slip.
But he went on with his next conversation like an automaton: Maureen suppressed her frustration, and lit another cigarette.
“I could be there,” Mr. Ridell said, his cheek twitching. Maureen held her breath. “If you’d like me to be.”
The accent he sometimes slipped into had come back.
“Seven, then,” said Mr. Ridell.
Maureen noted the time and pretended to be scanning her list, pencil stub in hand.
The rest of the day passed at a crawl: Mr. Ridell took lunch in the staff canteen, where they were treated to steak and kidney pie that was more properly kidney and kidney pie which had somehow scrimped on both the pastry and the filling but had generously filled in all the available spaces with brown water pretending to be gravy. It tasted as though someone had replaced the corn starch with plaster dust. He did not invite conversations, and his face forbade friendships.
Previously Maureen had felt almost sorry for him on this count, but now she wondered if this isolation was a deliberate move. It would be foolish to call so much attention to himself – perhaps he was intended as a distraction.
In the afternoon, she called four women by the same name and Lily Dawkins tried to report her for shirking. They were obliged to try to close the window, again, as rain came in. Instead, Maureen volunteered to fetch a tin tray from the kitchens to collect any further rain, but Mr. Wallace rather abruptly told her to concentrate on “doing her blasted job” in a certain temper.
At five Mr. Wallace sent them home.
Maureen loitered across the street from the building, in the shadow of the fire station, and waited.
Mr. Ridell typically headed east or south, she’d noticed. He would push on down toward Clerkenwell Road, or through Farringdon. Today, to her delight, he stamped away westward, toward Bloomsbury, without a single glance over his shoulder.
Maureen laced up her shoes and followed.
His legs were rather longer than hers, and his pace military. Several times she was obliged to hop on the back of a bus, and hop back off again when the conductor noted that she did not in fact have any business being on the back of the bus without a ticket. Each time she went a few hundred yards down the road, although once getting on the bus lost her time as it sat idling behind a milk wagon for longer than she’d anticipated.
Her quarry barrelled through Tavistock Square, skirting the smashed remnants of Georgian houses on the east side rather than cutting through them as some of the schoolboys liked to, seeing no sanctity in walls that had fallen to bombs twenty or more years ago. The ones that were being rebuilt by Irish work gangs went up the fastest, but progress was still slow without enough builders to wrestle with the fragments. Mr. Ridell drew up short at Tottenham Court Road, and turned right: began to slow as he picked his way north, and west, past Goodge Street, north again among the shrapnel-pocked edifices and Municipal Restoration Workers.
By now Maureen was glad of the respite: he gave no indication of anything but single-minded walking, no messages dropped and no glances exchanged with passers-by, even when that worthy tide of shop, office, and municipal and trades workers stared at his torn-up face – or conspicuously avoided staring.
When Mr. Ridell reached the head of Chiltern Street Maureen was half-convinced that she’d come on a fool’s errand – that she’d worn down her shoe leather and missed her supper for some dreary assignation with a married woman that would doubtless be worth its weight in gold in office gossip but which had no real political value. She considered, as Mr. Ridell rammed his hands deeper into his pockets and pushed past a lady in a muted slate wool coat as if she was furniture, that perhaps it might be wiser to call it quits and pretend this had never happened.
But no. There was something amiss about Mr. Ridell, and she would not have been third in command at the local Chapel of amalgamated Trades Unions and Socialist Supporters (membership twenty-eight, and growing) if she were not diligent and exhaustive in rooting out potential plants, spies, and threats both to worker solidarity and the nation’s sovereignty. Besides, what married woman would want him with his face like that?
