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Vic was slumped next to Frankie in the back. The window had been wound right down. Unlit gas lamps hung where the wind came from, then swept past. Forbidden headlights made the iron beaks of warehouse hoppers poke from speeding, eyeless cages. The night was a tall sack ripped by a car’s roar, and the air driving to meet his face tasted of coal.
Still his evening replayed itself. He mustn’t close his eyes. ‘It’s your money, Vic. Yours, mate. All you have to do is pick it up.’
He’d been wary. ‘Me? Don’t expect to see that kind of item in a month of Sundays.’
‘More ways to skin a cat, aren’t there? Come on, pick it up. Think what a difference a twenty would make. And twenty more like it.’
The tyres screeched in a left-hand corner. Frankie was forced against him. Vic’s shoulder hit the right door and he was pinned under her. The car swung again. Her eyes screwed tight, she raised an arm and clung on to his neck. Then her other hand slipped across into his. He clasped at it. She made words in his ear he couldn’t catch.
He’d danced with her. To the muted trumpet and the whining sax, she’d answered his arm’s inclination and the nudge of his hip. When they’d sat down again Phyllis and Tony were drinking through straws from each other’s glasses. Blatant and provocative, the twenty-pound note was still on the table.
Now beside them careered the black brick ends of streets, the outlines of sheds, the ironwork of a bascule bridge. A pub sign hung above the scream of another high-speed turn. Beyond Frankie’s perfumed hair Vic saw the city momentarily framed, a hard silhouette that touched low cloud. He’d made a deal. The food was taken care of, the rent, and shoes for little Jack. He and Phyllis could tide themselves over, pull themselves up … but there was a condition attached, some codicil that he still couldn’t recollect.
‘Well, Vic? What am I worth to you, Vic? What would you do for me?’
Tony thrashed the engine through the gears. Tall cranes angled darker strokes on dark. A ship’s hull, huge, loomed almost within touching distance.
Vic had come back from the gents, his legs loose, his brilliantined hair flopping over his eyes in strands. Through them he’d stared at the persistent banknote. There were glasses and ashtrays around it. He’d been taken up with the detail, the King’s head, the faint lettering, the fine lines that looped and scrolled.
His own head reeled with the thought of it, and with the weight of the girl thrown now this way, now that by the lurching car. Frankie’s fingers held on. She was managing to stroke the side of his face. So like the girl he’d fallen in love with, he could almost imagine … The sequence was scrambled. He’d stretched out his hand over the note, poised to give it back, or reluctant to touch it. ‘Did you drop this? Tony?’ The note was a test. It was Frankie’s eye he’d caught, and not Phyllis’s. ‘I know what you mean, Tony, but you can count me out of all that.’
The engine raced hard, accelerating. ‘It’s yours, mate. Yours for the taking.’
The straight run was a relief, a lampless high street. Frank’s eyes remained closed. Her breath was warm and damp and she was naked in his mind. No, she was slipping out of her purple evening dress and the flesh-coloured underwear. Or his hand was against the suspender hitch, where the silk of the stocking met the silkier skin of her thigh, still bearing the bruise of Tony’s fingers.
Vic saw Phyllis’s head loll on to the back edge of her seat. Now a long bend bumped it against the pillar and she must have felt the hurt. Her fur stole rucked up over the leather as she shifted down, curling herself out of view. Frankie moaned and hardened herself against him. He tried to speak. Literally behind his wife’s back, his drunken imagination was unbuttoning a prostitute to the jazz, there on the dance floor. Or here in the car, and all the time wishing for Clarice Pike. There was a fox fur caught up on Phyllis’s seat back, with its little cub mouth and eyes and sharp suggestive teeth. What would he do for her? ‘For you, Phyllis, anything. You know that. You know that, don’t you, darling. I love you … beyond measure.’ They’d all laughed.
Vic pulled himself away. Tony braked hard, swore, and then jumped a red light. The girl’s face lifted for a second, her eyes suddenly open in surprise, her lips slightly parted. On an impulse, Vic met the mouth and held the kiss. They broke off just as Tony shouted back to them, ‘Enjoying yourselves, you two? Just goes to show. You can never tell with snobs, can you?’ The voice had a hint of triumph. ‘What do you think, Phylly?’ There was no reply from Phyllis. ‘Must be asleep. Tell the missus later, shall I, Vic?’
Vic recognised the occluded shop fronts of Beckton Road, Canning Town. Once more, the car accelerated fiercely. Soon there was nothing but the long stretch over the East Ham levels, the stink coming off the marshes of rot and salt and the oily wash. They were going too fast into the night and Tony had caught him red-handed – hadn’t he? ‘You should’ve gone left,’ he said.
‘Scenic route,’ Tony called. ‘Any objections?’
He’d taken the money. He remembered picking it up. The kiss, was it good or bad? Clarice would always be the other side of the world. Suddenly desperate, light-headed, Vic played up to his wife’s manfriend. ‘You know. We’ve got this little place in the country, Phyllis and I. We go there at weekends. We’d love to see you. Why don’t you all come down?’ He shared the laugh.
At Ripple Road he was looking into the child’s room. If Phyllis’s sister had called in she’d left no trace of herself. But Jack was fast asleep, as though in the child’s mind there’d been no alteration, nothing of the bounce of the music and the foxy, foxtrotting on the dance floor. Frankie’s kiss still stung Vic’s lips. He’d made a deal.
In the chamber-pot the mess of his vomit reeked. The couple who ran the shop below had the only bathroom, half-way down the stairs. The chain cranked in the iron cistern. He cleaned up and rinsed his mouth. Back in bed there was Phyllis’s body, its familiar and unfamiliar smells.
At last, the deal held its focus and he realised what he’d agreed to. It was to do a job with Tony Rice. If he loved Phyllis. His heart thumped in his chest.
‘And no backing out.’ Tony had sealed it, laughing.
‘Yes, Vic. No backing out.’ She’d hold him to it. His head ached, cracking up. In the darkness, the bright, jazz-hard lines around his wife horrified him.
AWAKE TO THE SHRILLING of birds, Jack carried his box of toys into the front room of the flat. Through half-drawn drapes the sun made a glinting, near-horizontal bar, and the child sat in the gleam of it, where the dirty brown rug stuck a plaster over the join in the floor. All along the length of the join, except for the rug, the striated, mustard-coloured lino had chipped away to show the string and glue inside it. The join was the edge of England, and when the tin bomber came Jack’s mother would be all right because of the soap packet. That stood for the wooden house, lifted by low hills, which his parents always reached when they rode on the tandem. If he sat, so, on the rug, he believed he could save her.
Jack didn’t like Ripple Road. There was a dog’s muzzle in the coal scuttle. It was a brass creature whose gaze had cracked the leather in the two chairs. Pugs and griffons lurked behind the hat-stand; sometimes he ran at them with his wooden sword. The war was a dog in a gas mask with eyes like dinner plates. Any moment it would burst in, carrying the tin bomber on its back. Jack’s mother said Ripple Road was in Barking, and from that the three-year-old imagined a perpetual canine gape ready to swallow his family.
Vic Warren stepped around my brother, or half-brother, to draw the curtains. Through dirty uneven glass, taped crosswise, the sunrise hurt his eyes. Below him, on the opposite pavement, a shirtsleeved newsagent was putting out a sign for a Sunday paper: LONDON – 200,000 CASUALTIES STILL EXPECTED.
One or two cars were