The Darkness of Wallis Simpson Page 5

  He goes out into the garden where his nine-year-old daughter, Katy, is playing on her own. Katy and the garden have something in common: they’re both small and it looks like they’ll never be beautiful, no matter how hard anyone tries. Because Katy resembles her dad. Short neck. Short sight. Pigeon toes. More’s the pity.

  Now, the two of them are in the neglected garden together, with the north London September sun quite warm on them, and McCreedy says to the daughter he tries so hard to love: ‘What’ll we do on my birthday, then, Katy?’

  She’s playing with her tarty little dolls that have tits and miniature underwear. She holds them by their shapely legs and their golden tresses wave around like flags. ‘Dunno,’ she says. ‘What?’

  He sits on a plastic garden chair and she lays her nymphos side by side in a pram. ‘Cindy and Barbie are getting stung,’ she whines.

  ‘Who’s stinging them, darlin’?’

  ‘Nettles. Look. Cut ’em down, can’t you?’

  ‘Oh no,’ he says, staring at where they grow so fiercely, crowding out the roses Hilda planted years ago. ‘Saving those, sweetheart.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘For soup. Nettle soup – to make you beautiful.’

  ‘Will it?’ she says.

  ‘Sure it will. You wait and see.’

  Later in the day, when his son Michael comes in, McCreedy stops him before he escapes up to his room. He’s thirteen. On his white neck is a red mark that looks like a love bite.

  ‘Wha’ you staring at?’ says Michael.

  ‘Nothing,’ says McCreedy.

  ‘Wha’, then? Wha’?’

  ‘Your mother was wondering what we might do on me birthday. If you had any thoughts about it . . . ?’

  Michael shrugs. He knows he’s untouchable, invincible. He’s the future. He doesn’t have to give the present any attention.

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘Not specially. How old are you anyway?’

  ‘Forty-five. Or it might be a year more.’

  ‘Which?’

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘Fuck off, Dad. Everyone remembers their fuckin’ age.’

  ‘Well, I don’t. Not since I left Ireland. I used to always know it then, but that’s long ago.’

  ‘Ask Mum, then. She’ll know.’

  And Michael goes on up the stairs, scuffing the carpet with the bulbous, smelly trainers he wears. No thoughts. No ideas. Not specially.

  Again, McCreedy is alone.

  But they have to do something. Like Christmas, a birthday is there: an obstacle in the road you can’t quite squeeze round.

  So McCreedy goes to see his friend Spiro, who runs a little restaurant two streets away, and tells him they’ll come early Saturday evening, about seven so Katy won’t get too tired, and can Spiro do steak or cutlets because Hilda won’t eat any Greek stews or fish.

  ‘No problem, John,’ says Spiro. ‘And we make you a cake?’

  ‘No,’ says McCreedy. ‘No bloody cake. Just do some nice meat.’

  Then Spiro takes down a bottle and pours two thimbles of brandy for himself and McCreedy. It’s five in the afternoon and they’re alone in the place, sitting on stools under the fishing nets that drape the ceiling.

  ‘Commiserations,’ says Spiro.

  ‘Ta,’ says McCreedy.

  They drink and Spiro pours them another. He’s a good man, thinks McCreedy. Far from home, like me, but making a go of it. Not complaining. And he does lovely chips.

  He tells Hilda it’s all booked and arranged, she can take it off her mind, and she looks pleased for once. ‘All right,’ she says, ‘good. But don’t go and spoil it by going out first and gettin’ sloshed, will yer?’

  ‘Why would I?’ says McCreedy.

  And he wouldn’t have, he thinks later, honest to God, if only the presents had been better. But Hilda has no imagination. Where her imagination should be, there’s an old tea stain.

  Socks, they gave him. A ‘Mr Grumpy’ T-shirt. Tobacco. Katy draws a house in felt tip, folds it in half like a card, forgets to write anything in it.

  He has to tell someone how pathetic this seems to him, how the T-shirt is grounds for divorce, isn’t it?

  ‘Absolutely,’ say his mates in the pub. ‘Fuckin’ socks as well. Socks is grounds.’

  They’ve done the pub up. It feels almost like you’re drinking somewhere classy, except it’s the same landlord with his face like a dough ball, and the same drinkers, mostly Irish, McCreedy’s known for fifteen years. And they all, after a couple of pints, start to feel comfortable and full of friendliness, and the world outside goes still and quiet. And McCreedy loves this feeling of the quiet outside and the laughter within. It reminds him of something he once had and knows he’s lost. It’s the best.

  He wants to prolong it. Just let everything unwind nice and slowly here. But he tells his mates: ‘Kick me out at seven. Make sure I’m gone.’

  And they promise. In between drinks, they say: ‘Plenty of time yet, John, hours of time.’ And the pub fills up and starts to get its Saturday night roar. And a spike-haired girl he’s seen before comes up to him for a light and stays by him and he buys her a lager. She smells of leather and her skin’s creamy-white and she tells him she went to Ireland once and got bitten by a horse. And she shows him the scar of the bite on her shoulder and he touches it and thinks, she’s what I’d like for my birthday. I’d like to lie down with this girl and feel the spikes of her hair touch my body.

  He’s only twenty minutes late at the restaurant. You’d think it was two hours from the look on Hilda’s face, and when he says he’s sorry, she turns her head away, like she can’t bear the sight nor smell nor sound of him.

  ‘Well,’ he says, ‘did you order?’

  ‘Nettle soup,’ says Katy, who’s wearing a funny little velvet hat. ‘I want nettle soup.’

  ‘Fuck off, Katy,’ says Michael.

  ‘That’s enough, Michael,’ Hilda snaps.

  She’s ordered a gin and tonic. She’s billowing smoke out into the room. The menus sit in a pile, pushed aside, like she thinks she isn’t going to understand a single thing in them.

  McCreedy takes one and opens it. Dolmades. Keftedes. Horiatiki. Even the lettering’s weird.

  ‘Hey!’ he calls, tilting his chair backwards and feeling himself almost fall. ‘Spiro!’

  But Spiro’s in the kitchen, as he should have remembered, and it’s Elena, Spiro’s wife, with her mournful face, who comes over with the order pad. McCreedy tells her, listen, none of this foreign-sounding stuff, just meat, steak or chops, with chips, OK, and a pint of Guinness and Coke or something for the kids.

  ‘Lilt,’ says Michael.

  ‘Lilt, then, for him,’ says McCreedy.

  ‘Which you want?’ says Elena.

  ‘One Lilt. One Coke for Katy.’

  ‘Which you want, steak, pork chops, pork kebab?’

  ‘Not pork, do you, Hilda?’

  ‘Steak.’

  ‘Steak for her. And for me. You want steak, Michael?’

  ‘Yeh.’

  ‘Katy, love?’

  ‘You said nettle soup would—’

  ‘Not now. Pork or steak?’

  She hides under the sad little hat. It’s like she’s got no neck at all. And now she’s going to start crying.

  ‘It’s OK,’ says McCreedy. ‘She’ll have steak. Small portion. With chips.’

  ‘How you want them – rare, medium, well done?’

  ‘Well done,’ says Hilda and passes Elena the rest of the menus, like she wants them out of her sight. Then she hands Katy a red paper napkin and the child holds it round her mouth like a gag and her tears are just enough to moisten its edge. She glares at her father over the top of the napkin.

  McCreedy can’t eat the food. It’s a good steak, large and juicy. But he can’t get it down.

  It’s partly the drink he’s had, but it’s something else as well. It’s what his life looks like across this table. Hatred. Indifference. Love. All t
hree staring him in the eye, waiting for him to respond, to act, to assert himself, to be. And he can’t. Not any more. For a long time, he could and did. He fought them and held them close. He wept and screamed and tried to think of all the appropriate words of apology and affection. Right up to yesterday. But that’s it, over now. They can’t see it yet but he knows it’s happened: they’ve used him up. McCreedy’s used up.

  He sits in silence while they eat and talk. Katy stares at him under her hat, stuffing chips, one by one. Hilda and Michael blather about Arsenal. Michael snatches Katy’s steak and gobbles it down. Hilda sucks the lemon from her gin glass. All McCreedy is doing is waiting for them to finish.

  And when they have, he begins gathering up the plates. Dinner plates, knives and forks, side plates, veg dishes. One by one, he piles them into a stack in front of him. It’s a neat stack, like Hilda makes at home, with his own uneaten piece of meat transferred to the top plate, and then he sits back and stares at it.

  ‘McCreedy,’ says Hilda. ‘This is a restaurant.’

  ‘I know it’s a restaurant,’ he says.

  Michael is falling around, giggling, scarlet. ‘Dad,’ he splutters, ‘wha’ the fuck are you doing?’

  ‘What does it look like?’

  ‘Pass the plates around again,’ snarls Hilda. ‘You’ll make us a laughing stock.’

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘There’s nothing on them. Except on mine. Why d’you want them?’

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ says Hilda. ‘Give us back the plates before that woman comes.’

  ‘No,’ he says again. Then he picks up his flab of steak in his fingers and lets it dangle above the stack. He takes a breath.

  ‘See this?’ he says. ‘This is John McCreedy, aged forty-six today. See it? Chewed and left. Stranded. And this is all your stuff, underneath. Cold and hard and messed up. And I’m telling anyone who wants to listen that I want to get down from here, but I don’t for the life of me know how.’

  They all three stare at him. They don’t know what on earth to make of it, except it frightens them, it’s so dramatic and Irish and odd. Hilda opens her mouth to say it must be the Guinness talking, but no words come out. She begins scrabbling in her bag for a new pack of cigarettes. Michael swears under his breath and gets up and slouches off to the toilet. Katy puts her thumb in her mouth. She watches her father drop the meat and she knows what’s going to happen next: McCreedy is going to sweep the stack on to the floor, where it will break into a thousand pieces.

  But then Spiro is there at the table. He’s smiling. He smells of his charcoal fire and his face is pink and gleaming. And he laughs good-naturedly at the stack and slaps McCreedy’s thin shoulder blades, then snaps his fingers for a waitress to take the pile of plates and dishes away.

  He waits until it’s safely gone, and then he says: ‘OK. Serious business now. Some champagne on the house for my old friend, John McCreedy. And a beautiful dessert for the princess in the hat.’

  The Beauty of the Dawn Shift

  When the Berlin Wall came down in November 1989, Hector S. was deprived of his job. He had been one of the armed Border Guards on the Eastern side, responsible for ensuring that no East German citizen crossed the wall and escaped to the West. In the course of seven years of duty, Hector S. had shot and killed five people. This is his story. . . .

  When Hector S. set out on his journey to Russia, he was wearing his uniform.

  It was his winter uniform, made of woollen serge, because this was December in East Berlin. While packing his knapsack, Hector S. had told himself that he would have to travel in his uniform, that he had no choice; he didn’t possess any other really warm clothes and where he was going, it would be as cold as death.

  He was a man with a narrow frame, not tall, with pale anxious eyes. Women thought him beautiful, but found him frigid. He was twenty-eight and he’d only slept with one girl. This one girl was his sister, Ute.

  Ute kept a pet swan in a lean-to hutch on the apartment estate. She’d named it Karl and fed it on sunflower seeds. Morning and evening, she’d let it out to peck the grass and it allowed her to stroke its neck. There were no ponds or rivers in Prenzlauer Berg, the suburb of East Berlin where they lived, and when Hector informed Ute that he was leaving for Russia, she asked him to take her and Karl with him. But he told her firmly that this was impossible, that he had to go alone with almost nothing, just his bicycle and a bag of tinned food and his rifle. He told her he couldn’t travel that vast distance – right across Poland, where he knew that hatred of all Germans, West or East, still endured – in the company of a swan.

  Ute took this badly. She clutched at Hector’s arm. She was already imagining the beautiful Russian lake where Karl would remember the lost art of swimming.

  ‘Hecti,’ she said, ‘don’t leave us behind!’

  Hector S. disliked emotional scenes. When their mother, Elvira, had died in 1980 Hector had basked in the wonderful quiet that descended suddenly upon the apartment. Now, he told Ute that it was different for her, that she would be able to fit into the new Germany and that she had nothing to be afraid of. She began to cry in exactly the same way Elvira used to cry, grabbing two hunks of her hair and saying she hated being alive. Hector walked away from her. One part of him wanted to say: ‘When I get there, Ute, I promise I will send for you’ but another part of him wanted to remain as silent as the tomb, and on this occasion it was the tomb that prevailed.

  Hector’s father, Erich, on the other hand, didn’t try to persuade his son to take him with him; neither did he try to persuade him not to leave. All he said was: ‘A frog in a well says that the sky is no bigger than the mouth of the well, but now you have to become something else, Hector, and see the whole fucking sky. In the old imperial fairy tales, frogs turn into princes, eh?’ And he slapped his knee.

  Hector replied that he had no intention whatsoever of turning into a prince.

  ‘So,’ said Erich, ‘what are going to become?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Hector. ‘Don’t ask me yet.’

  ‘All right,’ said Erich, ‘but remember, when you walk away from one place, you are inevitably walking towards another.’

  ‘I know that,’ said Hector. ‘That’s why I’m going east.’

  What should Hector take with him? This question troubled him more than many others. His knapsack wasn’t large. It was the bag in which he’d carried his lunch or his supper, depending on which shift of Guard Duty he’d been working. He would make more room in it by attaching his water bottle to the outside of it. Then there were the two saddlebags on his bicycle, but that was all.

  He decided, eventually, to line the saddlebags with underwear and socks. Then he put in jars of dill pickles and some plastic cutlery. He tucked these in with maps of Poland and the Brandenburg Marshes. He added a compass made in Dresden and five boxes of matches. The knapsack he filled almost entirely with tinned meat, wrapped in a woollen sweater. There was room for a torch and two spare batteries, a notebook and a pen. He put in a solitary lemon, a precious possession he’d been lucky enough to find in his local grocery store, and he fondled this beautiful lemon for a long time, trying to imagine the tree on which such a perfect thing had grown. He packed no books, only a small photograph album, filled with pictures of Ute, including one of her naked, developed privately by a colleague of Hector’s who had dreams of becoming a professional photographer. In the naked photograph, Ute was leaning on a stool with her back to the camera and her bottom was very pale in the bleached light of early morning. Her legs looked skinny and her soft blonde hair parted at the back and hung forward, revealing her narrow white shoulders.

  Hector didn’t tell Ute or Erich when he was going to leave, because he thought farewells were futile and also because he didn’t really know. He had to set off before the lemon went rotten, that was all. He knew he would recognise the moment when it came – and he did. It was the morning of 9 December 1989, one month exactly after the wall had started to come down. He was alone in t
he apartment. He had exchanged all the money he possessed for D-Marks at the humiliating rate of 10–1. It amounted to DM143 and he laid it out on the kitchen table and looked at the blue and pink notes, then gathered them up, stuffed them into his wallet and put on his greatcoat and his hat. It was a fine morning, cold and clear. He walked to the window and looked out at the blocks of flats and the scuffed grass in between them where a few children played. He remembered being told: ‘At the time of Tsar Nicolas II in Russia, the children of the poor had no toys of any kind. They invented games with knuckle bones.’ And now, thought Hector, the parents of these children will save on food and light to buy their kids sophisticated toys from the West. He felt glad he had no children, nor would ever have any because his sperm count was too low. At least he wouldn’t have to choose between absolute needs and infantile ones.

  He was a man who had always known what was important in life and what was not. His chosen profession had been a difficult one, which many people would have found impossible, but Hector had never faltered in his dedication to it. In fact, he had enjoyed it and he knew that he’d mourn the loss of it. Since childhood, he’d admired the stern ways of his country, and he hoped to find these still prevailing in Russia.

  He turned away from the window and picked up his knapsack. He looked at the room he was in, the room where the family ate and played cards and watched TV, and wondered if, when he arrived at his destination, he would think about this room and feel homesick for the black plastic chairs and the painted sideboard and the wall-mounted electric fire. He knew that memory was as uncertain in its behaviour as the sea; it could wash you ashore on any old forgotten beach; it could try to drown you in remorse. But he decided, no, it wouldn’t be the apartment he would miss, only certain moments in it, certain moments at dawn, just after Erich left for work at the cement works on the Landwehr Kanal, when he walked from his own room into Ute’s and got into her bed.

  It’s best to leave now, Hector told himself. Don’t dwell on Ute.

  So he walked out of the apartment without looking at anything more and went down the six flights of concrete stairs to the lobby where the post boxes had been installed. These he stared at. Neighbours passed him and said ‘Good morning, Hector’, and still he contemplated the metal post boxes, imagining news of his future life arriving one day inside them.