Afterwards. Lying in the bed. Lights out, windows open, curtains flapping. A single sheet pulled over them, Kitty with her head on his chest, one hand splayed across his belly. Cal said ‘Are they always like that?’
‘Like wot?’
‘Angry.’
‘Oh, that. Yeah. I think it’s the only way Vera and Tel have to show emotions. Like they don’t have the vocabulary for all the others, so they use the one they know. Vera’s as cut up as the rest of us, but it’s the only way she’s got to show it, to take it out on Miss Greenlees and me and young Tel.’
It was the most analytic statement he had ever heard Kitty make.
‘Doesn’t let you off the hook though, does it?’
‘You mean I lost me temper too?’
‘That . . . and the fact you can’t bear to be there.’
‘If you lived with ‘em you’d know.’
‘I do know. I told your mother much the same thing while you were in the kitchen with Vera. She asked me why I joined up. I told her, not in so many words, but I told her I’d done it just to escape my family. It’s not unique to the English. You joined the cops, I joined the army. Amounts to pretty much the same thing, really.’
Kitty propped herself up on one elbow. He couldn’t see her eyes but he knew she was looking at him.
‘You slyboots,’ she said.
‘Slyboots.’ He weighed up the phrase.
‘Answer me this, then. You wear them bifocals – specs to read – specs to look at objects more than about thirty feet away – how did you ever get into the army in the first place? You can’t be better than A4 with peepers that bad.’
He was wearing his glasses now. He’d put them back on within a minute or so of rolling off Kitty. He could get by without them and a lot of the time he had to – but he could see her the more clearly with them. He’d made love to her out of focus – in the afterglow he rather wanted to be able to see her. He put his specs on much as most men lit up a cigarette. Unconsciously he pressed a finger to the bridge and shoved them an infinitesimal fraction further up.
‘Well?’ she said.
‘I cheated.’
‘You cheated!?!’
‘I had a friend sat the eye test a little ahead of me. He has what’s called an eidetic memory. You know what that is?’
‘No.’
‘Means he sees things as pictures and takes them like a camera. When he wants to remember something he just summons up the picture. Anything from the arrangement of flowers in a vase to pages of print. He can hold thirty thousand words of text in his head, without even thinking of them as words. He just sees a block of images.’
‘That’s amazing.’
‘He sat the test two hours ahead of me. Came out, drew all the eye charts for me and I learnt them by rote – the hard way. Passed Al.’
‘That’s amazing. I never met anyone like that.’
Cal had, he’d known two people with that gift. One was Billy Blick, who’d helped him into the army. The other was Wolfgang Stahl.