Calabash Read online

  She took very deliberate steps in great square-heeled boots of shiny leather that defied all the traditional old lady pavement traps and would probably have seen her to the shops in a blizzard, like some kind of orthopaedic snow tractor. From the side she looked like a question mark. She smelled of lavender, not the crushed-bud-between-your-fingers kind, or even granny bottles, but more overpowering, like a toilet block. I was sixteen years old, a physically underdeveloped, mentally overactive boy verging, as they say, on manhood. It was not natural for me to enjoy the companionship of a woman as old as a tree, I knew that.

  My grandparents on my mother’s side were both dead, and Pauline hadn’t kept in contact with those on Bob’s side because they didn’t approve of second marriages and had stayed away from the wedding. Miss Ruth was a logical extension of the women within my circle. First there was Julia, adolescent, fat and invisible to boys; then came Janine, anxious to please and preparing for marriage; then Pauline, disillusioned and disappointed by men; and finally Miss Ruth, an eternal virgin who had dedicated herself to being alone. It didn’t conjure much as a composite of womankind. I got the idea that the lifespan of the opposite sex consisted of roughly four stages: mooning around over boys, becoming hysterical about settling down, spending the married years wiping floors, and finally not looking or sounding like a woman at all. All I can say in my defence is that my experience was limited, I was a late starter and it was 1970.

  The problem was simple; I put the women I didn’t know on pedestals and treated the ones I did know like men. If I’d have been an Incan priest it would never have occurred to me to shout up at the sun god, ‘Listen, Ra, instead of me chucking you a virgin, how would you like a woman who’s been around a bit, someone who’s a bit of a laugh?’ I think I needed to look up to women because I knew in my heart that respect was due, but did not really know why.

  Miss Ruth had been considered quite a scholar at one time, but people had forgotten her prodigious intelligence because it was of no use in the present school curriculum. She used to lecture on classical mythology at the old college, but the council closed the place down and the new building was too far for her to travel to—she didn’t drive—so all the knowledge that she had accumulated had nowhere to go, and stayed wasting within her unless I lingered after school to discuss the Greek myths. She also used to teach singing, and showed me how to respirate my way through a nervous attack. Bob always gave me an odd look when I told him I’d stayed late to talk to her, as if it was the weirdest thing in the world to show an interest in something other than football, cars or girls. But she taught me how to breathe, which was more than he ever did.

  But now she, too, was displeased with me. ‘I think it’s a shame, you giving up on your schooling. You enjoy learning, I don’t understand it. All you have to do is work hard for a couple of years, resit your exams and get some decent passes, then you can choose what you want to do.’

  We reached the bus-stop and stood beside each other, peering ahead at the empty yellow ribbon of road. Because I was wearing plimsolls and she had on her I-Survived-Black-Ice boots, she was slightly taller than me.

  ‘It’s true,’ I said, ‘an entire world of opportunity could open up for me in Cole Bay. If I play my cards right I could become a mobile rep for a string of exhaust replacement centres and have customers as far as the greater Bexhill-stroke-St Leonard’s area.’

  ‘Sarcasm is not a substitute for wit, Kay. If you choose to be somebody small, that’s entirely up to you.’

  ‘I’m not afraid of hard work,’ I told her. ‘But they say I’ll peg out if I go and live in a city. I’m too young to be thinking about dying.’

  ‘Teenagers are always thinking about death; you stop as you get older. Perhaps you haven’t found the right city yet. Don’t be in such a rush. Finish your learning, then worry about where to go. Does that look like a bus to you?’

  ‘You want your glasses on, Miss Ruth. That’s a boat.’

  She leaned perilously forwards, then back. ‘Oh yes.’ She sometimes carried a stick with her, but I got the impression that this was for waving about rather than leanage. If determination played a part in staying active, she had enough for both of us. To be honest, there were days when she appeared to have more energy than me. We had this weird unspoken rule, that if anyone from my class came to the bus-stop we would cease speaking to each other. This was initiated on her part, not mine. She was more worried about my reputation than I was.

  I sometimes thought of Miss Ruth as a weird counterpart to Dudley Salterton, a grim example of what happened to older people who stuck around in Cole Bay. Lost in dreams and memories, defiantly alone, marching on to nowhere. Was this all that a life of hard work amounted to? It seemed a pretty poor reward for living so long. Unlike the other kids in my school, being around old people didn’t annoy or bore me, because they had always been so kind when I was ill, and yet the mere fact that I got on with them made me some kind of an outcast.

  I wasn’t very good at remembering who I was supposed to hate. But later that day I was given a reminder of who to fear.

  Chapter 10

  Getting Together, Coming Apart

  At school that morning, an awful spirit-crushing sense of disaster hung over the morning maths test, mainly because I hadn’t studied for it. The questions involved stupid things like working out the lengths of trains that passed through stations at different speeds. What was the point? If somebody knew how fast a train was going, he would surely have a rough idea how many carriages it was pulling, because he’d be a controller. And there was this problem with a farmer and his boat that could only ford a river holding himself and either a duck or a cabbage, and how many trips would it take to get all three across. I mean, what difference in weight would a cabbage make? And anyway, why not tie the duck to the boat and let it swim behind? The maths teacher told me my thinking was too lateral, which I would have thought was a good thing, and gave me no marks.

  After lunch the same feeling of impending doom invaded the weekly physics test, which was something to do with fulcrums that, needless to say, I hadn’t a clue about, having spent too much time on Mesopotamia. Fulcrums, I thought. Come on, you can do it, concentrate. I thought hard, but could only conjure an image of circus performers jumping onto each other’s shoulders from seesaws.

  I was standing in the cloakroom absorbed in the task of turning my overcoat the right way out (my classmates thought this trick was sufficiently amusing to pull every day), when Malcolm Slattery dropped one-handed onto the bench opposite like an orangutan descending from its climbing bars, and began to hoot with laughter. This, I have to say, was not a pleasant sound because he had serious sinus problems, and produced mucus with every breath he drew. When he exhaled he sounded like the wind blowing through a damaged harmonica. You would have thought we had enough in common to be friends.

  Slattery was intelligent to the point of lunacy, and apparently had a great future ahead of him in applied mathematics. He reckoned that computers were going to be the next big thing, and saw himself making a lot of money. He was the sort of person who would, too, because he had a crafty charisma that attracted the weak. His parents were pushing him to succeed, and in my opinion they were pushing a bit too hard, because he was completely nuts. He had a particular fondness for breaking things: damaging furniture, scarring cars, ripping kids’ jackets, smashing shop windows—a psychiatrist would have had a field day with his childhood fantasies. I discovered what Slattery was snorting about when I put my hand into my overcoat pocket.

  ‘What’s the matter, Goodwin, ’snot what you expected?’

  ‘It’s what I’d expect you to expectorate.’ I withdrew my gummy fingers, wiped the contents of his nose onto the paisley handkerchief I kept tucked inside my left shirtsleeve and attempted to ignore this latest assault on my dignity, but the problem lay with my mouth. I had a shoddy sense of control over the technical brain device that edited my thoughts for aural consumption, and found myself suggesting
aloud that Slattery’s mother was, how can I put this, no stranger to the embraces of barnyard animals, the upshot of which was that, unsurprisingly, I got seven thicknesses of shit kicked out of me. The cloakroom stayed mysteriously empty until he had finished.

  ‘And the next time I see you outside school,’ he warned in a drawl copied from Clint Eastwood’s spaghetti westerns, ‘you’re dead.’ There were rumours that Slattery owned a gun. I wondered if he was planning to shoot me. The bare hatred that showed in his eyes branded me a natural enemy. As I forced my aching body from the floor, I made a decision to be more wary of him in the future.

  The school nurse made me go and sit in the A&E department of Cole Bay General until I could get my head X-rayed. It turned out that I had a couple of hairline fractures in my nose, and some bruises that made me look like a maltreated panda. It wasn’t enough to keep me out of school, but I liked to think that Slattery had ruptured his fist on my face. I’d have made a good flyweight boxer, one of those wiry little things that keep bouncing back on their feet despite the giant blows raining down upon them.

  Afterwards I hobbled off to the Pavilion Pier and watched my homework pages gently unfurl like parachutes into the sea. Then I sat staring between the rusting white pillars at the secret love of my life.

  The first time I saw her head poking up between two nodding skulls, I fell so deeply in lust that I got a stiffy every time I saw the skeleton that hung beside the blackboard in biology class. I knew that her name was Katherine, spelt with a K, which was a good omen, that she was seventeen and didn’t have a boyfriend. She worked on the ghost train taking the tickets. The front of the ride was a life-sized green railway carriage with nodding skeleton passengers in its windows, and as she faced towards them collecting money it always looked as if they were agreeing with her. That first time I had just been reading about Hylas and the Sea-Sirens, and it was quite weird because as I walked past her the ghost train siren went off, which I took to be a sort of sign. She also worked on the candyfloss counter, wrapping pink sugar clouds around sticks. Sometimes she had tea with the flat-chested girl on the helter skelter, and they stood beside each other breathing lightly onto their polystyrene cups.

  I spied on Katherine from a dozen carefully chosen vantage points (back of the dodgems, behind the gents’ toilets, side of the shooting range). She favoured breast-moulding ribbed sweaters and jeans, and looked a bit like the actress Julie Christie. I saw her on the beach once, stretched out across the pebbles on an August Sunday when the air was hot and still and the sea was bottle-green glass. She had long bare legs, shiny brown hair that brushed her shoulders, and a smooth white midriff that became exposed as she reached back on the stones. She shifted her legs slightly, stretching her miniskirt so that the hem between her thighs lifted until it was taut. You always remember things like that.

  I allowed Katherine to enter my dreams under cover of darkness. I had been reading a book I’d bought at the Cole Bay Quality Used Paperback Centre about erotic psychic attachment. It said that once you found your psychic sexual soulmate, no physical distance could part you. It didn’t tell you how to actually talk to her, though.

  I bought a bag of chips (without an onion, in case this was the day that we would finally meet) and hung about in the arcade talking to Danny, but he didn’t know anything about Katherine beyond the fact that she shared a flat on the other side of town with a girl who worked in Boots, and had once told him that she couldn’t stand marzipan. Danny was more interested in a boy that worked on the dodgems at weekends, but was frightened to go near him in case he got his head kicked in. Katherine finished work at ten and I followed her off the pier, the lightbulbs flicking out behind me as I walked, as though my secret ardour was draining off their electricity.

  I had been planning to ask her out for some time, but the moment had to be absolutely right. I knew that I would have to wait for my facial bruising to subside, and anyway I couldn’t decide on an opening line. I figured I’d say something like, ‘You don’t look like someone who works in a funfair.’ And she’d say, ‘Oh, how do they usually look?’ And I’d say, ‘Sort of hard and trashy,’ and that would be that. I longed to be casual, but everything I came up with in my head just sounded smart-arsed and creepy. All around me kids like Malcolm Slattery were treating girls like rubbish and, incredibly, getting off with them. I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t treat females as if they were a race apart, lying to them as a matter of course, simply because that was what you were supposed to do. I was rude to Julia all the time but only because she was rude to me, and that made us equal.

  Apart from its suicide record, Cole Bay provided some kind of benchmark in the number of teenage mothers who spent their days wandering around its high street with prams. If you hadn’t fathered a few illegitimate offspring by the time you were sixteen, you were considered a poof. We had the birth-rate and the death-rate sewn up; we just didn’t know much about the part in between.

  October 1970. Swinging London was starting to slow down, Cole Bay was turning like a corpse in the breeze, and I was coming apart at the seams. Something had to change before it was too late. I needed to discover a different destination, and quite accidentally, I did. But it was the last place that I expected, and in the last place that I expected it to be.

  Chapter 11

  A Shift in the Cosmos

  It was an unseasonably warm, wet afternoon at the end of the month. The esplanade shone and smelled of seaweed. Malcolm Slattery had been following me for over half a mile, and I knew he was going to beat me up again, and I knew that this time he would hurt me very badly. With him was a weaselly-looking boy called Laurence who functioned as some kind of protean henchman. The words that best described Laurence were ones of finality and termination: bottom of the class, end of the line, last one out of the gene pool, back of the queue for brains, lowest point of the food chain. He had long ginger hair, wonky pale eyes, and a weird high laugh that sounded like a seagull with a bone stuck in its throat.

  There was nowhere to hide on the esplanade, and I could tell they were gaining on me. They wore Blakeys on their boots, clattering closer like nefarious tap-dancers until they were just a few yards away. It was starting to rain again, and my chosen-for-cheapness sneakers had hardly any grip left on their soles. I heard Malcolm snort back mucus, then the high ‘heeehn-heeehn’ of Laurence’s laugh, and thought, This time they’re going to cut me up. It was common knowledge that Malcolm carried a switchblade knife. He hated me because I was top in English, because I had a smart mouth, because I was exempted from football and chose to take fencing lessons instead, because I’d been seen talking to Danny, whom everyone feared and detested, and because I was the kind of sickly speccy twit who deserved to be crushed. But this particular day he had another reason for hating me.

  I’ve always had a high regard for the value of books. I could never bear to see harm come to them, so when I saw Malcolm tearing the first page from a hardback Burton edition of The Arabian Nights I knew he was doing it to remove the evidence—the first page always carried the school stamp—and I blurted out to Mr Davis the librarian that he was stealing them and selling them to secondhand shops. This was common knowledge among the other kids, but suddenly I was a snitch and a grass and breaking into a loping run along the esplanade as Malcolm and Laurence ticker-tacked closer behind me, and I felt a searing stitch in the pit of my stomach as I wheeled sharply to my right and vaulted over the turnpike onto the Pavilion Pier without paying the gaffer his shilling. (Actually, the gaffer, Mr Aylmer, was hardly ever there because he spent most of his time under the pier in the girls’ lavatories with a hand-drill, and was subsequently exposed after making improper suggestions to a Brownie.) I galloped into the Paradise Penny Arcade, housed in the great dome that ran down its centre, hoping to lose myself between so many flashing lights, but the place was almost deserted. I ran on past the Skee-Ball slides, the Jolly Jack Tar, the Driving Test, the Flick-A-Ball slot machines, the Laughing Policeman, the
Penny Rapids, the pinball tables called ‘T-Bird’ and ‘Ace in the Hole’, the faded automata in glass cases that bore titles like ‘The Drunkard’s Dream’ and ‘The Condemned Man’, and emerged from the top of the arcade, taking a quick look back to see the pair of them dividing on either side of a boxer’s punchball, shouting to each other.

  My chest was bursting. There was nowhere to go. The pier didn’t lead anywhere. Of all the stupid moves I had ever made, this was the worst. I must have been mad running into a blind alley. As soon as I heard them behind me again, I knew I was done for. I wheezed past Katherine’s closed candyfloss kiosk, the shooting gallery and the booth where they made glass animals. The helter skelter was shutting up, but the ghost train was still running. I glimpsed the back of Katherine’s red plastic rain mac—she was loading a fresh roll of pink paper tickets—hopped over the railway tracks before she saw me and slammed in through the doors of the ghost train ride.

  The interior of the structure reeked of oil, electricity and damp painted sailcloth. After a few moments I could make out faint grey lines where the walls didn’t fit together properly. I moved to a chink of soft light and looked down at the sea drifting between my feet. It felt as though I was suspended in space. Gradually I was able to make out more detail. Wooden beams hung at crazy angles all around me, painted black. At the height of my head dangled pieces of knotted string. You were supposed to think they were spiderwebs. Somewhere in the darkness ahead there was a mechanical shriek, like a ghost calling through a hooter. The wailing sound rose and fell. It was meant to be spooky, but was also a sign to anyone working inside that there was a car on the track. I ran ahead, beyond the first set of hairpin turns, to where the luminous skeleton came out of its day-glo mausoleum.