‘I asked where you were going,’ she snapped.
‘What difference does it make? I don’t know.’
‘Well, I’ve got to know. I’ll want money from you every week. You don’t think I’m going into a factory to keep your kids, do you?’
‘I’ll see you’re not short.’
‘You’re always ready with the money, I will say that. Money cures everything, don’t it?’
‘What do you want me to do? Chop off my legs and leave ’em behind? If it’s finished it’s finished. Or maybe it’s only me that’s finished. I’m twenty-seven and I feel like sixty.’
‘I don’t know what you mean. I don’t think you do, either.’
‘Maybe not. I’m off just the same.’
‘I hope you enjoy it.’
They stood like two armless people under the short claymore sentences chopping across each other, dry, painful and cutting deep. ‘I suppose you’ve been fed up with me, as well, lately,’ he said.
‘I was fed up with you five years ago. But I’m not like you. I thought: “We’re married, and as far as I’m concerned, that’s that. This ain’t what I thought it would be like at all, not what the stories and magazines or my own mind led me to believe, anyway, but here it is, this is life.” That’s what I thought, and it didn’t take me long to get to it.’
‘I can just hear your mother saying that. “You made your bed, now lie on it.” It must have made her happy to say it. But I’m not going to be the one to lie for good on the bed you’ve made. Nor on the one I’ve made, either. It’s finished, I tell you.’
‘Don’t keep saying it, then. And don’t call my mother. She’s not here to answer back. It’s a good job for you as well, or you wouldn’t be getting off so light. She helped us a lot when she was alive.’
‘I’m not getting off anything at all. I wouldn’t even bother to argue with her if she was here. I can never argue with people I hate. I just want to get away from them.’
She laughed, and he felt bitter because it stunned the fact that he really wanted to explain things. They stood, unable to walk back from each other, attracted and held like two magnets in a field of iron filings. Their thoughts struggled towards unity of expression, but found it as difficult as if buried deep under a mass of twisted metal, pinned hard, stultified and killed as soon as the desire for release became known. They had lived together too long to produce explanations that either would in any case believe.
He picked up his case and opened the door, walked out of the house for good, a departure so quick that he later reflected that it must have left her with an appalling undying bitterness. He went along the path, a lighter tread than when he came in from work every evening. The gate slucked, instead of the backdoor rattling. His footsteps got quieter, instead of him walking gruffly across the kitchen to hang his grease-stained cap, mac and knapsack on the hook, before swilling his face at the sink and sitting down to tea and kidnoise.
He stood, leaned on a gate, head down and roaring like a muzzled bull before the shambles. It was a black road, with no moon to help, no stars to goad him on. If his legs hadn’t suddenly and for no reason gone on strike against walking, the wound would not have burst. Immobility was still his death. It wasn’t that he had regrets, wanted to go back and wallow again in the bitter salt and honeycomb; but he was roaring at blind solitude surrounding him, at a hermit-like future pulling him in and boding little for his own good. He wondered how long he could go on living through various days and black nights before being drawn into the pit of another job, bed, and life even more null and commonplace than the one that he didn’t yet know in any respectable language why he had left.
Autumn was no time for travel, certainly, hitch-hike, push-bike and footslog, but he was cursed by the St Vitus zig-zags — and who looked at a calendar before running from a long and painful suffocation? He’d intended making his way slowly around the country, but free transport winged him beyond this speed. His skill at driving often shortened each lift in time, and his gift of talk also made a long drive shrivel, the road a spinning discarded umbilical cord lost in bad weather between green fields and sunken crossroads. England was tiny, he’d always known that, but the proof of it in getting from one side to the other in a day gave him the delirium trembles and the kennel-mania shackle-fits. In a fortnight he’d been up to the Lake District, dipped into Cornwall, bounced against Wales, and sped over the flat ditch-crossed Fens between Spalding and Wisbech; hypnotized on the beach near Grimsby by long shimmering febrile blue-black waves speeding at even pace up the immense zone of sand — each one following the other as if to get out of reach of the deep sea where they might drown. Dogger Bank and the Rhumba-Humber, a North Sea cloud spat in his eye and drove him over on the ferry to Hull, as if ‘Bill Posters will be prosecuted’ were written on every blade of grass and white sea wave and he was William himself on the run even beyond cities.
All through the twelve years of his factory days and the years of his marriage he had brooded and built up the Bill Posters legend, endowing the slovenly Bill with the typical mentality of the workman-underdog, the put-upon dreg whose spiritual attributes he had been soaked and bombarded with all through his school, home and working life. Frank had fought them off, being like him in no single way at all. Yet the Bill Posters ethos hung around him like a piteous and dying dog and, being so hard to throw off (he sometimes wondered whether this would ever be possible until he kicked the bucket himself) made life more deep and harrowing for him. It was difficult to get rid of him precisely because his sympathies were in the right place, and because the conditions that made Bill Posters still persisted. In some big way Bill Posters had also been responsible for his exploding out of life so far, leaving wife, home, job, kids and Nottingham’s fair city where he had been born, bred and spiritually nullified. Yet it wasn’t so easy, and on buses and foot he was often cast back into those barren streets to dwell upon the predicament of that man who had a firm place still in his heart.
Poor Bill Posters. Everywhere he was threatened with prosecution. The alarm had been raised for him. The whole country, it seemed, was after him, had been for years in fact, certainly for as long as Frank could remember. He must know no rest, for they were still out to get him, painting his name big and square at every corner, and threatening prosecution. What had he done? Frank had always asked, and nobody would ever say, so it was bound to have been something serious and shameful. He had never seen Bill Posters, but pictured Bill as if he’d known him well, almost like a cousin; saw him as he’d seen him even as a kid of six just learning to decipher those words of menace, as a fairly tall thin man of twenty-seven, thin faced and wearing a threadbare unbuttonable jacket as he hurried, looking from left to right, along the street and round a corner — dodging his everlasting evertrailing prosecutors. Bill was always in a hurry, travelling furtively, travelling light, an unwrapped piece of bread in his jacket pocket which he sometimes munched at as he went along. Sometimes not as much as that to keep him going, maybe only the smell of an oil rag and even that was rancid.
But the great and marvellous thing was that they never got him! Bill had been on the run from birth and was more than a match for his persecutors. They could write his name on every street corner, but they’d never catch Bill — hurrying always one street ahead of them, or perhaps even behind, for he was clever and must have his moments of triumph as, from behind a newsagent’s shutter (the sublime light of underprivilege spreading a smile over his good-natured and cunning face) he watches them painting his name big upon some massive waste-ground walclass="underline" BILLPOSTERSWILLBEPROSECUTED — just wanting to burst out laughing yet too smart to give himself away.