Page 38 of Little Wing
Gordon tapped the handset against his forehead. What a bloody stupid thing to say.
Dougie listened to the pause, his father’s jumbled awkwardness, willing his father to continue. The answerphone clicked off once again.
Gordon looked at Ben. ‘I’m not a man of many words, am I, boy? But I cannot finish a sentence when I’m speaking to a damned machine.’
Phone again, Da.
Come on, Ben, let’s take a walk around the garden while the stew warms. Come on, boy.
Gordon thought he’d try Douglas one more time, just before bed. He dialled half the numbers and then paused. Was Dougie in – and would he pick up? Gordon asked himself if he wanted to be answered by a machine. No, he did not. But nor did he want to hear the brevity in his son’s voice masking something else. He clicked the call dead.
Nell
She kicked the wall. As she was climbing the stairs to her flat it felt like she was invigilating a discordant conversation in her head between her mother and her aunt and she just wanted them both to shut up so she could hear herself think. So Nell kicked the wall. She’d grown to know the individual scuffs on the paintwork of the communal areas; they were a nice consistency, like familiar bystanders to her comings and goings. For the first time, she left her own mark and it was a big one, an impression of almost the entire underside of her rubber-soled boot. There was a limping anger to it.
In her apartment she stood, cursing herself for her minimalism because there was nothing for her to throw around or break. All those films where distress is appeased by swiping everything off tables and shelves and surfaces. If her life could be judged on her flat, then there was very little in it. Even her answering machine was empty of messages. It struck her that, in her flat, silence came not just from soundlessness but from the blank absence of things, from the quietude and order she so meticulously engineered. And, just then, it was deafening.
Nell would drive to Debbie’s. That was a good plan. Debbie was gifted with two great qualities: she was kind and sensible, she’d know what to say and advise what to do. Only Debbie wasn’t in. How could she not be in? Nell placed her forehead against Debbie’s front door, too tired to swear. She sat on the doorstep until a numbing chill told her to stand up, get a grip and either go home or wait somewhere warm for Debbie to return. With one last futile knock on the door, Nell left. She hovered by her car then walked away from it, heading from the river up East Hill towards the castle. As she walked, she recalled how frightened she’d been of the castle when she was young; it was nothing like a fairy-tale castle. It was imposingly squat and masculine and its narrow arrow-slit windows made her feel she was being spied on. The mortar around the bricks and stones looked like it was dissolving, like some vicious acid was at play. They learned about the castle at school and when she used to glimpse it at night, the ghosts of all those who’d been locked up there over the centuries called out to her. Especially the witches of the sixteenth century, tortured in the castle then cast into the river to see if their guilt floated.
Now, as the castle came into view, Nell thought back to being eight or nine years old, how one night her imagination ran away with her and she scurried into her mother’s bed shaking and sobbing about the poor souls locked away. Hadn’t her mother sat bolt upright, taken her hands and said well, we must go and release them!
How reasonable her mother had made it seem that they should put socks and shoes on, and coats over their nightclothes and march on a mission along the silent sleeping streets to the castle. How safe Nell had felt grasping her mother’s hand so tightly, being pulled along until they were there, in the dead of night, gazing up at the vast keep. In a whisper Wendy asked Nell whether she had heard Roman prisoners or those from the time of William the Conqueror? Or the medieval ones, when the castle became Colchester’s jail? But Nell told her no. She told her mother about horrible John Hopkins the self-proclaimed Witchfinder General. It was the poor witches I heard, Nell said. So they walked as close to the walls as they could, her mother brave and no-nonsense, ears peeled.
‘I don’t think there are any prisoners at the moment, Nell. Definitely no witches.’
‘But how can we be sure?’
‘Prisoners!’ her mother suddenly cried out, theatrically but deadly serious. ‘Be ye here? Be ye guilty of yon sins or be ye miscarried of justice?’
She cocked her ear with her hand and told Nell to do likewise. There they stood together, listening hard until her mother, triumphant, concluded that all was well behind those immense walls and Nell believed her.
And now Nell was standing as close as she could to the floodlit castle, swallowing down on tears, imprisoned by sudden grief and total confusion mingling with all that fury.
She meandered along the high street and headed to the George, ordering a double vodka for the scorch and the fume to cauterize the rawness and still her mind. And another. And soon enough this became her favourite place in the world. It was lively and warm and everything was bathed in a cheery orange light. The friendly and simple scent of chips and scampi and garlic bread and crisp crumbs and spilt beer; the melodic sound of chattering and joshing and laughing by everyone around her. Everyone! Nell drank her vodka, the power and the punch of it newly delicious; she made friends, best friends, and her glass was being chinked by all. Here – let me buy you a drink, love. I’m Tony, this here’s my wife Sue. Graham. Cindy – pleased to meet you, Nell. Pat – and I’m a postman, that’s why they all call me Postie.
I’m Jake and you’re gorgeous.
Hello Jake, buy me a drink?
Handsome Jake with his broad shoulders and smattering of stubble and his dazzling smile and Nell thought, I’m old enough to be his mother, almost. And Nell thought how fit and charming he was, and so generous with the drinks and the compliments and the intent focus. And Nell thought – so what. She thought, I don’t care. And Nell thought, I just want tofeel.
I just need to feel. I just need not to think. I just need to feel not so hollow.
‘Where do you live, JakeyJake?’
‘I live on the way .?.?.’
‘ .?.?. buy me another.’
‘Same again?’
‘In fact, sod the drink – let’s go back to yours.’
She watched him react, was that bafflement? Or could he not believe his luck? She decided she’d go with the second. She decided she’d go with JakeyJake, back to his placeon the way. On the way to where? Nell didn’t really need to know that. If someone could just fuck her brains out for a bit, she’d forget about absolutely everything else.
In the early hours of the morning, Nell woke with a start and lay in a clammy sweat in a cold room wondering where she was. Christ, her head. Suddenly, she was aware of a massive looming face gazing down at her, eerily hypnotic and intense. She felt pinned to the bed, unsure if she was dreaming, telling herself to wake up. Then her focus adjusted. It was Jimi Hendrix. Just a huge poster of Jimi Hendrix.
Gingerly, she sat up. Jesus Christ, her head was banging and her throat was so parched her tongue was stuck to the roof of her mouth. Her hair stank of cigarette smoke and she felt sick. She looked away from Jimi and across the bed to where a man slept, snoring. His name was Jake, she knew that. She remembered them crashing into the flat and ricocheting off the walls. She vaguely recollected a nonplussed flatmate. And taking a can of Stella into Jake’s room, sitting on his bed, sipping beer and smoking fags. The floor strewn with clothes and crap and therefore easy enough to add hers to the melee. A floordrobe. And she recalled how she told him to stop talking, to stop it with the compliments and the come-ons. And she knew that she grabbed for him first. But sitting up now next to his snoring silhouette at God knows what o’clock, desperate for water, for paracetamol, for her own bed, what Nell couldn’t remember was how any of it had felt. To be kissed again, fondled, desired, penetrated, held. Nothing.
