It was a long way over to that place. She'd get a 188 to the Elephant, then a 44, and sometimes she'd have to change again in Tooting. It wasn't so far from Epsom. So even by the route I took, the route I already knew, there was plenty of time to talk. But we used to hang around afterwards anyway and just sit in the camper or on one of the benches in the grounds if the weather let us. She said Jack had never seen June, or only the once, only that first time. He'd never gone to see her in the Home. I'd never known that for certain, though I had my guesses. I thought maybe there'd been a time once or he had his own arrangement still, his own private arrangement, he just didn't like to talk about it. But he never went. That was Jack's failing plain and simple, she said, that he didn't want to know his own daughter. And her failing, she could see it, she could tell me, was just the opposite, that she'd kept on coming, two times a week all these years, and it made no difference, but she couldn't stop now, a mother was a mother. And if he'd only come himself just now and then, just once in a while, it might have balanced things out, she might have spared some of her visits for some of his, and they wouldn't have become the people they'd become, pulling opposite ways on the same rope. But it was too late now.
She said she chose between him and her. It was a simple fact. She couldn't help it. She knew it and he knew it.
I said that was a hard choice, or I tried to say it, because choosing my words wasn't so easy either: to pick the one who didn't know who she was and maybe never would, not the one who was sound and whole and she'd been married to anyway for nearly thirty years. And she looked at me, slow and careful, as if it wasn't my turn to speak, and I thought I'd torn it.
She said, 'You think Jack knows who he is?' I said, 'Never met anyone more sure about it.' Then she smiled, she laughed under her breath. 'He's not such a big man, you know, when it comes to certain things. He aint such a big man at all.'
I said, 'He got me through, in the desert.' But I didn't say, like I half wanted, like I was half going to, 'And so did you.'
When she went in to visit I used to stay put in the car park, or I'd mooch around the grounds. There were lawns and paths and some of the inmates would be shuffling about. They didn't look so different. Like you could get mistook.
When I watched her walking across the car park and in through the entrance I used to think, She looks about as on her own as I am, and I'd start to ache. But it never occurred to me, not at first, that maybe it would clinch it if I went in to see June too, if I did what Jack hadn't ever. And maybe that's what she was wishing me to do all along. I thought I was holding back because it was only right, because it wasn't my place, I was only there to drive her. Or else I was just plain scared. But on the third or fourth Thursday I said to her, 'Can I come too?' And she said, 'Course you can, Ray.'
I don't know what you say about some things, some sights. I don't know what you say about a woman still in her twenties with a body that was just like any other woman's, soft and curved, and if it was dressed up better and you could blot out the rest, you might even say it was lovely, but with a swollen, slobbery head that only a mother could ever love. I don't know what you say about a woman who's twenty-seven years old and whose name is June but she don't know it because she hasn't even got the brains of a child of two. I suppose you should say that life's not ever so unfair that there's not a worse unfairness than yours, and that you can't ever get so stuck in your ways that there aren't worse ways of being stuck, like from the word go and for always.
But one thing I learnt sitting there that Thursday afternoon, not saying nothing, just sitting there, just like June herself, with that nurse eyeing us, wondering where I'd sprung from, was that Amy hadn't been going there twice a week for twenty-two years because it was some duty she just had to go through, a habit she'd just settled into, like she said. She'd kept going there because she'd kept hoping that one day June might recognize her, one day June might speak. You could tell that just by looking, by looking at Amy. And you could tell just by looking at June that it wasn't ever going to happen and that it was all wrong. It was as wrong that Amy had been coming here all them years as it was wrong that June had been born like she was in the first place, as wrong as there should be a mother of forty-six who still had her faded looks while her daughter aint never had any. But two wrongs don't make a right.
So I thought, I've made the first move, there's another move I should make now.
We sat on the bench, watching the pigeons. We didn't have to go straight back. It took half the time in the camper it would take her on the bus. I didn't know what to say about June, I didn't know what you should say, but I felt like saying some crazy things that didn't have nothing to do with June. I reckon Amy was all sort of fragile on account of having seen June for the first time with a stranger. Friend. I reckon one way or the other she needed a hug. I felt she was leaning on the little slice of air I left between us, like she should've been leaning direct against me, and I felt my pecker starting to grow like it hadn't ever much since Carol left. I wonder if women can tell.
But what I said was, 'Have you heard from Vincey at all? I hear they're going to ship 'em all back home.'
But next time when I picked her up I had the words all ready and the opportunity all crying out to be taken. It was a bright, breezy day in April. It was like this day, with Jack's ashes. I felt, Life can change, it can, even when you think it can't any more. All the same it took me all the way to Clapham before I said it. The sun was flickering through the trees on Clapham Common. I said, 'We aint going to the Home today, Amy, we aint going to see June.' Somehow I knew she wouldn't argue. I said, 'I've got a picnic all ready in the back there. Sandwiches, thermos.' It was the spring meeting at Epsom. I said, 'You fancy a day at the races?'
But we didn't see so much of the races. It must've been the first time I'd been to a racecourse without taking a proper punt. I parked up on the Downs and we wandered down to the track in time for the two o'clock. We did a bet with each other, like a couple of amateurs. Her horse against mine, a quid says, and I made sure she won. Conquistador, seven to two. I could have put fifty on it and come home flush. But the weather was changing and before the next race it came on to rain, like you might have said it was timed special. Sometimes luck just runs. So I said, 'Picnic time,' and we hurried back to the camper. I suppose two people know when something's going to happen, even when they're not so sure it ought to and they don't know how they're going to bring it about and they're as afraid of it as wanting it. But they know if it's ever going to happen, now's the time. There were curtains you draw across the windows in that camper, blue and white check, so no one would know. Except by the rocking of the suspension. But I don't suppose there was much of that. I said, pulling the curtains, 'Just like home, eh? Home from home.' The rain was drumming on the roof. I thought, It can't be helped, even if it aint right. I thought, Amy chose June, she didn't choose Jack, now I've chosen Amy. They weren't so faded. When the rain stopped we heard the crowd cheering for the three ten, the big race, the strange noise of people getting het-up over a bunch of horses. And afterwards that became our regular spot, Epsom Downs, every Thursday, for fourteen weeks, racing or no racing. Till Vince showed up, then Mandy.
Lenny
Well, I should've known better than to pick a fight I hadn't got a hope of winning. But that's one thing I aint ever known, better. They say it was the boxing bashed out my brains all them years back, but if you ask me there never was much brains there in the first place. I should've known better when I came out the Army than to get back into the fight game. You'd think that five years of shooting and being shot at and picking up the pieces of your dead mates would teach you a better way to make a living than trying to knock another man off his feet, but it was that or pushing a fruit-and-veg cart and that aint got no glory to it, nor quick readies neither.