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Ray

She would go and see June twice a week. Mondays and Thursdays, regular as clockwork, like she still does. And this was when I swung it so I only worked three days at the office, Mondays to Wednesdays, two days less for only a quarter less pay, taking into account my increment. Hen-nessy said, 'You're up for promotion, take it from me,' putting a finger to his lips. 'All you have to do is be a good boy till your annual review.' He was taking pity on me, I think, on account of Carol, and had put in a word, reminded them I was still working at the place. He said, 'About time too, Ray, if you ask me. How old are you these days?' I said, 'Forty-five.' But I wasn't interested in promotion, I wasn't interested in getting on in insurance. I was interested in the opposite. I said, 'They could do me a better turn than that. Less time for less pay, that's what I'm interested in, I don't want no leg-up.'

It stood to reason, with only me to consider. And a camper-van.

Besides, I was getting lucky, I was getting canny, I was starting to live up to my name. The gee-gees were doing me favours, if no one else was.

And why shouldn't a man who's all on his own, with no one to fend for but himself, arrange his life to suit his own hankering? Mondays to Wednesdays at the office, Thursdays to Saturdays at the races or on the open road.

It's just the gypsy in my...

And any shortfall in my pay-cheque the horses made up, more or less, sometimes with extra on top. It's the same business, after all, the chance business. Insurance, gambling.

Hennessy said, 'And by the way, what do you fancy for Goodwood?'

So Amy would go and see June on Thursdays and I would be chasing off all over the country, following the nags. And for a long time I thought about it before I said it, for a long time I chewed it over, then one day I plucked up and I said it. I said, 'Amy, I aint going nowhere this Thursday. I suppose the horses can run without me. That's a long old bus ride you have to do. Let me drive you over to see June. Let me take you in the camper.' So she said, 'All right, Ray,' and I took her.

And it was either the second or the third time I took her, either the second or the third Thursday, that I said, 'I met you same time as I met Jack, did you know that?' She looked at me, puzzled, and she said, 'What, in the desert?' I said, 'Yep, in the desert. Egypt.' She sort of frowned and laughed at me at the same time. So I said, 'I saw your photo,' and when I said it my voice wasn't like I meant it to be, like I was just playing a game, answering a riddle, it came out different, it came out sort of like the truth. I aint ever been a dab hand with women.

She looked at me, long and hard, soft and sharp at the same time, and that was when I knew that she knew, or that she'd wondered all along. That I'd just had this thing about her, always. In spite of Carol, in spite of Sue, in spite of her being Jack's anyway, in spite of her having lost her looks by now. But there's a beauty in that itself, I reckon, that's a lovable thing, fading beauty, it depends on your attitude. And they aint all been lost. In spite of her and Jack getting stuck in their ways as if they'd been put in a mould long ago and come out and gone solid. But I suppose we all do that. We all need something to stir us up.

I'd had this thing about her always.

And I'd say it worked in my favour that Sue and then Carol did a flit, one after the other, because I reckon she took pity on me. Not Hennessy's kind of pity. Maybe she'd always taken pity on me, and if all it ever was was pity, I suppose I wasn't going to complain.

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.