Rumours of a Hurricane Page 6

  Some biscuits?

  What is there?

  Royal Scot I think a few Rich Tea, but they’re stale.

  Charlie shakes his head, disappointed. He was hoping for a shortbread finger.

  I’ll be up in a while.

  Maureen leaves. She always goes to bed first. She is usually asleep by the time Charlie joins her, in his flannel pyjamas decorated with vertical stripes the colour of lightly stewed rhubarb. She snores lightly, not enough to keep Charlie awake but it irritates him none the less. Charlie wants to stay up tonight and watch the election results, but he feels exhausted. He smokes another cigarette, moves the trains around the track again. Once more round, twice. It is enough.

  He switches off the light in the room, checks the lounge and kitchen. Everything is switched off. Light from the orange streetlamps swamps the room. Deep pools of shadow are cast by the sofa. Charlie turns and closes the door behind him. The wood of the frame has swollen and it is a struggle to jam it shut, but Charlie works on it, believing it to reduce the risk of a fire spreading.

  He goes to the bathroom. As usual, the sight of the pedestal set his wife has purchased from the catalogue offends him. It is her area, her territory, so he doesn’t complain. There it is. Nothing to be done. Bright blue chunky-twist pile fabric, like a massed gathering of worms, covering the toilet seat, the waste bin, the toilet roll, the space in front of the lav. Maureen insists on calling it a toilet, not a lav. She corrects Charlie frequently.

  The blue fabric looks alive, as if it could spread and take over the house, eventually colonizing the lounge suite, the Marigold ‘Curtina’ net curtains, the quilted Terylene eiderdown with frilled sides that double as a valance, three-layer rouched trim, the Mandarin floral roller-blinds. It would all one day be blue worms. It would bring final unity to a flat that was a tender farrago of mismatched, copied, imitated styles, eras, fashions, materials, none of which bore any particular relationship to the others.

  Charlie stands in front of the bathroom mirror. He cannot see his toothbrush. He opens the door of the cabinet. Hai Karate, Burley, Tabac Original. Presents bought for him years ago but still there, as he suspects they will be in ten more years. Maureen’s sanitary towels. He wishes that she would store them separately. A marriage was like a life. You could only afford to contemplate a certain amount of it.

  Maureen’s Tryptophan, for her nerves. Calamine, Betnov-ate C for a rash on his bottom. Maureen’s AYDS tablets, to help her lose weight. Like the exercise, like the calculation of calories, they didn’t seem to be working. He wished it didn’t matter to him. Medication for her verrucas and her mouth ulcers. Both plague her. Robert’s various acne treatments litter the bottom shelf. No sign of his toothbrush.

  He closes the cabinet, then studies his face in the mirror again. Not bad, he decides. Good, full head of hair. Wrinkles, of course, but less than some he knows who are older. Eyes muddied by drink, but still a sharp blue. He could pass for the same age as his brother, he decides.

  From the corner of his eye he sees his toothbrush. It has fallen on the bathroom floor, by the toilet seat, and is half hidden by the tufts of twist-pile fabric. When he removes it, there are fine blue hairs intermingled with the bristles. He thinks there may have been urine in the twist pile which has now been transferred to the brush. Robert is careless when he makes water. He reluctantly tosses the brush into the pedal bin and makes up his mind to buy a new one in the morning.

  Charlie squats on the toilet now, tries to move his bowels, but cannot. His mouth feels polluted. He thinks of the old advert for Gibbs SR, the tube bursting through the block of ice in a transforming explosion, and momentarily wishes his life were like that, that it would burst through its frozen crusts. But then he decides the thought is wrong. His life is not frozen, it is tepid. And it is his natural temperature, it’s the point at which he survives best.

  He rises, pulls up his trousers, but does not bother about doing up the button; after all, he will be changing into his pyjamas in a moment. He carries a book with him in one hand, the unfinished Sidney Sheldon, and a cup of water in the other. In the night his mouth gets dry.

  As he makes his way across the corridor, he feels his trousers begin to work their way down towards his knees. By the time he has completed the navigation to the door of the room where Maureen waits, inert, Terylene-cosseted, the trousers have sunk to his calves. Rather than stop and put everything down, he moves in tiny pigeon steps. He feels ridiculous, but is too indolent to do otherwise. He is conscious of a slight but noticeable erection, caused by the rubbing of his pants against his groin.

  At this point, to Charlie’s consternation, Robert appears suddenly from his room, wearing only a pair of torn jeans. He looks his father up and down. Charlie tries to outface him. Robert says nothing, but coolly examines the spectacle of his father with his trousers round his ankles. Robert’s tongue curls around words that he does not deliver, his mother’s injunction to make peace with his father restraining him.

  Up to watch the election? says Charlie casually, feeling his face reddening.

  No, says Robert. Did you vote?

  Of course. Did you?

  Monster Raving Loonies.

  Tailor-made for the likes of you.

  Robert’s eyes flick downwards. Charlie suddenly becomes aware of his own present absurdity. He decides it’s best not too push this spat too far.

  Must be turning in.

  Good night, Dad.

  Good night.

  And Dad…

  Charlie feels the stiletto being unsheathed, braces himself for impact. He feels the cloth of his trousers chafing his ankles slightly. It was surely too good an opportunity for Robert to miss.

  Sweet dreams, eh.

  Right.

  And Robert is gone.

  Relieved and reluctantly grateful, Charlie tries the door, which is on the latch; he fumbles at the handle with the heel of the palm which is still holding the glass of water. After a few attempts, he manages, and shuffles through into the half-lit room, which is illuminated only by a small white spotlight screwed to the headboard of the bed.

  He puts the glass and book down on the Melamine dressing table, then swiftly removes his clothes, putting his underwear in the wicker laundry basket. He notices faint streaks of brown there and wonders if Maureen will notice them. He expects that she has learned not to look.

  His pyjamas have been freshly washed and are warm in the airing cupboard. It makes him feel protected against the cold air in the room. Charlie curses the council and their inability to fix a simple boiler. With the bosses and the government, they make a triumvirate that confines and presses down on his life.

  Climbing into bed, Charlie almost unconsciously runs his hand gently through his sleeping wife’s hair. His eyes rest on her Dallas outfit, carefully folded by the bed. Prompted by this, Charlie thinks suddenly of the crimson passageway that is Sue Ellen’s mouth. Unexpectedly, a full erection flowers on the vine of his imagination, making a lone drumlin halfway down the bed. This is a relatively rare event, a pleasurable conundrum that is usually solved by Charlie secretly masturbating, holding his breath to guard the silence as he ejaculates under the bedcovers into ready-waiting stippled, florally embossed kitchen roll, which he then disposes of in the toilet bowl. Or he will go and find the copies of Men Only and Penthouse that he keeps hidden from Maureen in the base of his tool box and lock himself in the lavatory. But on this occasion, although Maureen sleeps on, Charlie decides to instigate sex with her for the first time in several months. His frustration is a burden; he thinks sometimes of visiting prostitutes, but is afraid of herpes and of shame. Permissiveness everywhere. The world, he concludes once more, is going sex mad.

  The moves feel well rehearsed, doomed. He starts by fondling Maureen’s breasts, which are on the small side, like teacakes, and then kissing her neck, making a moue that brushes and vacuums her skin. He smells night cream and peppermint toothpaste. Having completed what he considers to be suff
icient foreplay, he reaches down between her legs. What he feels there is dry. Her legs do not part to his touch. She begins a light snoring, like a distant earth-mover, and he wonders if this is actually theatre. Maureen acquiesces rarely now to his touch; there is a sense in which he is grateful. In the past, after the act was finished, he always felt that something needed to be said, something he has no words for, and so there was always a pang of loss.

  But on this occasion he is not ready to give up. He thinks of Sue Ellen again; of Sue Ellen and Lucy Ewing together in bed with him, JR and Bobby unaware in their shining towers that Charlie Buck was stealing them away to his love palace in Ramsay MacDonald House, SW6.

  He considers hauling himself on top of Maureen/Sue Ellen and attempting to have sex with her despite what he now considers to be her feigned sleep. His erection feels overwhelming to him; it is something to do with not working, he briefly considers. He needs to show himself a man.

  Charlie continues to play with the pink space between Maureen’s legs, a space which he now fantasizes as belonging to the blonde homunculus Lucy Ewing, her stumpy, full-breasted body pressing against his. Sue Ellen watches, mesmerized with desire. He feels unsure down there, confused still as to the exact nature of women’s anatomy. He remembers once or twice during their marriage, when they were younger, and Maureen had seemed more generous with what was once a firm and smooth-skinned torso, that he had discovered places at the fork in her body that seemed to provoke daring, uncontained movements, and a loudening and lowering of pitch of breath. He had thought, briefly, of talking to her about the location and geography of this place, and how he might encounter it more often, but the words had died in his throat, strangled by the embarrassment that has been and remains the frequent, subterranean companion to their marriage.

  He plays with her breasts once more, inflates them in his mind, this time rolling one of her nipples between his thumb and forefinger, then kisses her neck again. He is running out of strategies. Still no response. Lucy dissolves suddenly into the Terylene bedsheet and Sue Ellen’s attention is wandering. Some part of his spirit shrivels another degree. He feels his erection. Sue Ellen has abandoned him now. Trying to be as silent as he can, he rubs himself. But the blood has drained softly back into the ocean of his body and he is limp. Maureen snores again and turns to lie on her back. There is a tiny fly settled on the corner of her lips.

  Before the retreating moment is lost entirely, Charlie redoubles his imaginative exertions, peremptorily summoning up Lucy once more. In this manifestation, she is being sodomized, doggy-style, by a panting, priapic JR. He has never suggested anal sex to Maureen, but the idea appeals to him while simultaneously revolting him. Sue Ellen, also reconjured, looks on, straddling the MFI dressing-table chair, her legs spread, masturbating with a long, scarlet-tipped finger. The summoned picture works; his erection returns as proud as before. JR is close to orgasm, his face bright and luminous. Those frightening eyebrows rise and fall. Lucy gasps. She wants more. Charlie rubs himself roughly, hoping to prevent the moment sliding by. Seconds later, he feels himself loosen, explode at the centre. JR, Lucy and Sue Ellen softly dissolve into the ceiling. He pauses, recovering himself, then goes to reach for the kitchen roll.

  At this moment, Maureen stretches across and puts her arm over Charlie’s stomach, resting herself in a puddle of freshly delivered semen. Immediately, as if she has been awake all the time, she sits up. She inspects her arm fiercely, not understanding. Droplets gather and fall from it. A faint bleachy smell rises.

  Charlie feels no option but to confess.

  I… I think I had one of those dreams. You know… one of those… dreams.

  Maureen’s face changes from confusion into a vague disgust that is diluted only by her understanding that Charlie is looking up at her as if a lost, dismal child. She composes herself, even manages a particular and rarely used smile that attempts to combine the opposites of anger and summary forgiveness. But it is unconvincing. Distaste, however modified by compassion, remains uppermost.

  I’m sorry, says Charlie, unable to look at his wife.

  Not knowing what to do, he feels the wetness at his centre, overflowing into their bed, a billion unrealized children expiring in a Terylene wilderness.

  Maureen, without another word, gets out of the bed. A car passes, illuminating the room. He catches sight of her face, tightened, sad. He sees her go, to the bathroom, he presumes, to clean herself off. He knows this is also a strategy to give him a chance to re-establish the status quo. There is limited time. He rises from the bed, takes a pair of soiled underpants from the laundry basket and wipes himself clean. He rubs at the undersheet, but he knows the stain will show yellow in the morning, confirming his disgrace.

  He hates Sue Ellen for what she has done. He finds a plastic bag that lines the rubbish bin – it is empty – puts the pants in them, ties the top and puts it in the pocket of his car coat in the wardrobe. He will dispose of it in the morning.

  When Maureen comes back, he pretends he is asleep. This, he knows, is expected of him. Time and silence may begin to cauterize the moment. Yet moments, he knows, may have lifespans; some endure years. Within a few minutes, he hears her heavy breathing once more. He waits until he is sure she is genuinely asleep. But Charlie remains alert, a mile away from sleep now. Endorphins flood his body.

  A small ball of anger has formed in the centre of his chest. He feels humiliated. It was normal, wasn’t it, for a man to want to have sex? It was perhaps even his right. He wouldn’t have done what he did if it wasn’t for her. If she hadn’t been dried up. Frozen. The word makes him think of the toothpaste tube bursting through the ice once more. Suddenly what the image means is obvious to him.

  Careful not to awake Maureen, he extricates himself from the bedcovers. His pyjamas are damp. He makes his way to the door, gently opens it and walks towards the front room.

  He feels his pyjamas adhering to his stomach. He thinks of rejection, and betrayal, and of a world falling out of the proper controls. Inflation. Decimalization. Loony lefties.

  Then he decides that he has let his wife down. He seeks forgetfulness.

  He lights a cigarette and switches on the television for Decision ‘79, with David Dimbleby and Robin Day. The picture is good. He searches through the cupboards in the kitchen for any kind of drink. There is only some advocaat left over from last Christmas. He hates the yellow stickiness of the stuff but pours himself a glass anyway. A large one, in a tumbler that features nineteenth-century scenes of a coach and horses racing from somewhere to somewhere else. The horses and footman are alive, vital with forward energy.

  Charlie sits in front of the TV. The people in the studio seem very excited. Robert McKenzie attends his swingometer, an expression of enthusiasm and childlike glee on his face. Charlie is amazed at how some people get so worked up.

  It is two in the morning and Charlie sips the advocaat. Politicians from each side queue up to state their viewpoints. There are shots from earlier in the day of Margaret Thatcher outside a school in Finchley.

  Charlie likes the way her eyes hood when she is expressing concern, the way she cocks her head to one side. The odd dowdiness of her hairstyle makes her appear attractively ordinary. The way her face seems to break down into separate, discrete expressions each aimed at a purpose. She is respectable and decent, but not his cup of tea, not really.

  Women push and jostle her. They carry placards that read ‘Mrs Thatcher, milk snatcher’ and ‘We want women’s rights – not a right-wing woman’. This latter slogan strikes Charlie as an awkward pun. Lezbos. The anger on the women’s faces frightens him. He is glad that his own wife is so mild.

  By three a.m. it is clear that his side has lost. In his own constituency, a massive majority has been overturned. The Conservative candidate has won by 1,500 votes. Yet despite defeat for his own team, Charlie enjoys the spectacle, the moment when all the double talk in the world can’t hide the unvarnished truth. Union leaders, talking to the camera wi
th all the authority of Cabinet ministers, seem only mildly dismayed; they imagine it will soon be business as usual. Callaghan smiles jovially as if nothing untoward has happened. The swingometer moves still further east.

  Well, thinks Charlie, a change for a while won’t do any harm. Shake things up a bit.

  He is surprised to find himself vaguely invigorated. The advocaat is warming his stomach. He smokes three cigarettes one after the other. The flat smells perpetually of ash, boiled vegetables, tea, escaped gas. The piles of rubbish in the street still leave a trace in the air, despite the careful closure of the windows.

  There is a shot of Mrs Thatcher appearing in her own constituency. Charlie thinks she is both stern and motherly, and is unable to muster dislike. Give the other bunch their turn. It’s the way things keep their balance. She turns and smiles at the camera. She is spruce and excited. Charlie knows that the world will wear her down.

  He switches off the television, drains the last of the advocaat and heads back to bed, hoping that Maureen remains asleep. He does not wish her to smell the alcohol on his breath. She thinks that he drinks too much. Part of him agrees. He should cut down. A little change would do no harm.

  3

  31 March 1980. Charlie is back at work. The dispute between Times Newspapers and the array of unions ranged against them has ended after a year of battle. It has been a tussle between armed camps over what turns out to be a very small amount of territory. Some of his colleagues have lost their jobs, but it has not been a deluge. More a drizzle. Charlie has received back-pay, and increases in wages of a fifth. He is now making £200 a week – well above the national average – but this rise falls slightly short of inflation, which is surging as ever. The money comes in a small brown paper envelope, which Charlie hands over to Maureen, after deducting some drink money. Maureen continues to save for their retirement, in the gap under the floorboards. Neither of them believes spending to be as virtuous as saving. Saving conserves energy; spending disperses it. Maureen also has a sum put away with a building society. Thus she is covered both ways. She has shopped around, found 19 per cent. She imagines the interest piling up, free money, if it weren’t for inflation.