Right now Peggy was nervous about the impending interview with Sam. She was about to enter a fortress barbed and set by her daughter at her most duplicitously welcoming. Peggy had to be calm in her mind and, above all, alert and undistracted. With Iris’s funny mood pressing in, she would have a hell of a job on and already she could picture the resultant scene, should a foot be put wrong tonight.
“Why are you so quiet, Iris?”
Iris stopped for one moment in her tracks, her mouth pulled down in scorn as she looked at the black windows of the council houses. The streets were quite silent, aside from a distant, frenzied barking. Where had everyone gone? They seemed to have crept away, turned their lights off, hidden behind their settees, as if Christmas Eve were an alarming visitor, best avoided. When Iris walked on, Peggy notice she had fallen out of step. Iris’s words were punctuated by their dissonance.
“At the moment I’m thinking about my parents’ land. The land here used to be a bit of a bleak pasture. Christmas Eves past, say in the thirties, the grass would stand high and hard as the branches of trees. We’d have to fight out way to the frozen pond. The swans slept, those ridiculous, slender necks knuckled down onto their bodies. They looked like white fists, poking through ice. And the air smelled of clay, whitening out into bizarre shapes. Until spring the ground remained like pottery; my brothers and I walked on what we called china, sculpted by our own feet when the ground was still soft.”
“Oh,” Peggy said. “Mind the dog shit,” she said, but that was frozen too.
“They’ve ripped the heart from this land,” Iris sighed. “And replaced it with an alarm clock. Which doesn’t work because the punctured chest keeps bleeding, pumps blood to this inadequate mechanism, rusts the metal and the inauthentic ticking has stopped quite dead.”
Now it was Peggy’s turn to stop in her tracks. “Iris, what the devil are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about a sense of history,” said her lover levelly.
“And you know about that,” Peggy sneered, “Mrs Orlando.”
“Why are you being like this?”
“If you must know, I’ve had it up to here with your pretentious bloody twaddle. You could at least have a little sensitivity and see that I’m in for a hard time tonight with our Sam and all. Just shut up about yourself for a bit. I couldn’t give nick about the land or your farm or bloody alarm clocks. Just think of me for a while.”
“Peggy, I…do nothing else.”
“Right.”
“I mean it. It’s just that I’ve been thinking of everyone I’ve left behind in my past. Living as long as I have, I’ve had to forget about a good many loved ones. Owning up to my true age today…well, it’s made me have to face my own immortality.”
Peggy gave a short, bitter laugh.
“Don’t laugh at me! I’m standing her, telling you, I can’t bear the fact that, whatever happens, I will live longer than you will, and I’m scared by that.”
“Bloody nonsense!” Peggy snapped. “Don’t talk to me about death.” Peggy had had her share. A thought struck her. “Anyway, you’ve just said again, about growing up on this very land in the thirties with your brothers.”
“Yes,” Iris said glumly. “The fifteen-thirties.”
“Oh, bugger off, will you?” Peggy had stopped at a garden gates. As she reached for the latch, she clumsily broke a series of icicles from the wood. “We’re here now. No more talk about history. This is now, and it’s terrifying enough.” A child’s silhouette appeared in the door’s glass panel. “Merry Christmas!” Peggy cried, swinging her shopping bag aloft.
“WHAT HAVE YOU BEEN WRAPPING FOR ME, THEN?”
Credits were rolling over Rebecca. Sam sat between Mark’s knees. He was a bit dizzy from the gin. Smells of cooking bloomed all around them. He was impressed by Sam’s sly competence in getting it all together. She rested her elbows on his thighs, drummed an ironic tattoo on the crotch of his jeans with her fingertips.
“You’ll just have to see, won’t you?”
“And will I be happy?”
Drink always did this to Mark. His most complicated statements flatted out into faux-naïf statements and he spoke with primary-coloured words. Always rather pleased with the effect, he felt that only then, pissed, was he expressing himself. Now he waited on her reply.
“I hope you’ll be happy,” Sam smiled, drawing herself back slightly. “With the way it all turns out. Now. Hold still. This is Christmas Eve, and I want to touch my husband’s heart.”
Quickly she unbuttoned the front of his shirt, briefly exposed his chest, kissed his left nipple. Right in the centre of the blue clock face he had printed there.
TEN
I AM AN AWFUL IRONIST. ACTUALLY, NO; I AM A WONDERFUL IRONIST. It’s just that I get carried away and do it a bit much. I’m sorry, Mark. You know how I am, that you have to take a pinch of salt with the way I pitch my salty wit. I’m not sure that Sam knows, however. In fact, I imagine she takes me pretty much at face value. And believes every word I write to you. Oh, dear.
I am aware by now that she reads the letters I send. It’s something I’ve picked up on. I even tailor certain things for her delectation. Like my last one, full of raving insults hurled straight at her. I wonder how she took that. I picture her flat on her back in the basement of her shopping arcade with her policeman stooped above her, and she’s mulling over my nasty missive. I wonder if that’s how it really happened.
Did you know that she sees a policeman behind your back? Behind the cardboard crusher beneath the dress shop?
No, take it from
