While she lumbered downhill the owner of the apartments handed Barry's passport to the policeman who had never spoken to him, and who clanked open a hulk of a lighter to melt it. The last flaming scrap curled up in the dust as the woman reappeared in a dilapidated truck. The policemen lifted Barry off the post and slung him into the back of the vehicle and slammed the tailgate.
The last he saw of them was their ironic dual salute as the truck jolted away. Sweat and insects swarmed over him while the animal smell of his predecessor occupied his nostrils and the traveller's cheques turned to pulp in his mouth as he was driven into the pitiless voracious land.
No End Of Fun (2002)
You don’t mind, do you, Uncle Lionel? I’ve given you mother’s old room.“
“Why should I mind anything to do with Dorothy?”
“I expect you’ve got happy memories like us. Is it all right if Helen sees you up? Only we’ve got paying guests arriving any minute.”
“You really ought to let me pay something towards my keep.”
“You mustn’t think I meant that. Mother never let you and I’m not about to start. Just keep Helen amused like always and that’ll be more than enough. Helen, don’t let my uncle lug that case.”
“Are you helping with the luggage now, Helen? Will that be a bit much for you?”
“I’ve done bigger ones.”
“That sounds a bit cheeky, doesn’t it, Carol? The sort of thing the comics used to say at the Imperial. Is that old place still alive? That can be one of your treats then, Helen.”
“Say thank you. Helen, and will you please take up that case. Here are the boarders now.”
When the thirteen-year-old thrust her fingers through the handle, Lionel let it go. “You’re a treasure,” he murmured, but she was apparently too intent on stumping upstairs to give him his usual smile. Remarking “She’s a credit to you” brought him no more than a straight-lipped nod from her mother. He had to admit to himself that Helen’s new image—all her curls cropped into auburn turf, denim overalls so oversized he would have assumed they’d been handed down if she’d had an older sibling—had rather startled him. “So how have you been progressing at school?” he said as he caught up with her, and in an attempt to sound less dusty, “You can call me Lionel if you like.”
“Mum wouldn’t let me.”
“Better make it uncle, then, even if it’s not quite right. Great-uncle is a mouthful, isn’t it, though you liked it one year, didn’t you? You said I was the greatest one you had, not that there was any competition.”
All this, uttered slowly and with pauses inviting but obtaining no responses, brought them to the third floor, where he held onto the banister and regained his breath while Helen preceded him into the room. Dorothy’s sheets had been replaced by a duvet as innocently white, but otherwise the place seemed hardly to have changed since her girlhood, when children weren’t expected to personalize their rooms: the same hulking oaken wardrobe and chest of drawers she’d inherited at Helen’s age along with Dorothy’s grandmother’s room, the view of boarding-houses boasting of their fullness, the only mirror her grandmother’s on the windows!!!. As he stepped into the July sunlight that had gathered like an insubstantial faintly lavender-scented weight in the room, he thought he saw Dorothy in the mirror.
It was Helen, of course. She resembled Dorothy more than Carol ever had— elfin ears, full lower lip, nose as emphatic as an exclamation mark, eyes deep with secrets. As she dumped Lionel’s suitcase by the bed, the mirror wobbled with the impact. The oval glass was supported by two pairs of marble hands, each brace joined at the wrists; the lower of the left hands was missing its little finger. He lurched forward to steady the mirror, and his arm brushed the front of Helen’s overalls. He expected the material to yield, and the presence of two plump mounds of flesh came as more than a shock.
She twisted away from him, and her face reappeared in the mirror, grimacing. For a moment it exactly fitted the oval. The sight set his heart racing as though a knot of memories had squeezed it. “Sorry,” he mumbled, and “I’ll see you at dinner” as she slouched out of the room.
Laying his socks and underwear in Dorothy’s chest of drawers and dressing her padded hangers in his shirts and suits made him wonder if that was more intimate than she would have liked. By the time he’d finished he was oppressively hot. He donned the bathrobe that was waiting for him every year and hurried to the attic bathroom, to be confronted by a crowd of Carol’s and Helen’s tights pegged to a clothesline over the bath as though to demonstrate two stages of growth. Not caring to touch them, he retreated to his room and transferred the mirror to the chest of drawers so as to raise the sash as high as it would wobble. Hours of sunlight had left the marble hands not much less warm than flesh.
He might have imagined he heard the screams of people drowning if he hadn’t recognized the waves as the swoops of a roller coaster. Soon he was able to hear the drowsing of the sea. Its long, slow breaths were soothing him when he saw a passerby remove her topmost head. She’d lifted her small daughter from her shoulders, but the realization came too late to prevent Lionel from remembering a figure that had parted into prancing segments. He lay down hastily and made himself breathe in time with the sea until the summons of the dinner gong resounded through the house.
Even in their early teens he and his cousin had squabbled over who sounded the gong, until Dorothy’s mother had kept the task for herself. While it was meant to call only the guests, it reminded him that he didn’t know when he was expected for dinner. He was changing, having resprayed his armpits, when a rap at the door arrested him with trousers halfway up his greying thighs. “Would you mind taking dinner with the others?” Carol called. “We’re not as organized as mother yet.”
“I’d be happy to wait till you have yours.”
“We eat on the trot at the moment. You’d be helping.”
In the dining room a table in the corner farthest from the window was set for one. All his fellow diners were married couples at least his age. A few bade him a wary good evening, but otherwise none of the muted conversations came anywhere near him. He felt like a teacher attempting to ignore a murmurous classroom, not that he ever would have. As soon as he’d finished dinner—thin soup, cold ham and salad, brown bread and butter, a rotund teapot harboring a single bag, a pair of cakes on a stand, everything Dorothy used to serve—he followed Helen into the kitchen. “Would you be terribly upset if we didn’t go anywhere tonight?” he said.
“Don’t suppose.”
“Only driving up from London isn’t the picnic it was.”
“She wouldn’t have been joining you anyway. It’s dirty sheet night,” Carol said, wrinkling her nose.
He did all the washing-up he could grab, and would have helped Helen trudge to the machine in the basement with armfuls of bedclothes if Carol hadn’t urged him to tell her his news. Now that he’d retired from teaching there wasn’t much besides the occasional encounter with an ex-pupil, and so he encouraged Carol to talk. When her patient responses betrayed that she regarded his advice about the multitude of petty problems she’d inherited with the boarding-house as at best uninformed, he pleaded tiredness and withdrew to his room.
At first exhaustion wouldn’t let him sleep. Though he left the window open, the heat insisted on sharing his bed, Dorothy’s ever since she was Helen’s age. He found himself wishing he hadn’t arrived for the funeral last December too late to see her. “We never said goodbye,” he whispered into the pillow and wrapped his arms around himself., covering his flaccid hairy dugs.