After two or three weeks, Valerie did ring him about Helen Brown. Val and Colin had tickets for a musical show at the new theatre in the town, and the friends who were booked with them could not go. She had invited Helen. Would Tim like the other ticket?
‘I don’t know, Val,’ he said. ‘I’ll have to look at my calendar.’
‘Come on, Tim,’ she said, as if she knew he hadn’t got one. ‘You know you love the theatre.’ He did. In the summer he was going to volunteer again at the Boathouse, the little repertory theatre down by the river.
‘All right, then.’ At least it was a musical. If he had to sit by this Helen person, he would be wrapped round in music and not have to make conversation.
She was not much in the talk line herself. They all had pizzas before the show. Helen Brown sat across the table and hardly looked at Tim. She ate her pizza slowly, with sticky cheese on her narrow chin, and listened to Colin holding forth. She was short, which was just as well, quite a lot shorter than Tim.
Helen had unassuming biscuit-coloured hair held back with a stringy bit of ribbon, not smart, by Webster’s haberdashery standards, but better than the great harsh-toothed clips the girls stuck in their heads, which they might whip off in a flash and use to crush your knuckles.
Tim thought she was older than he was, and she had been through this marriage to the drunken sailor, and the turbulent shoals of a separation or a divorce, but it did not show on her. She was not your experienced divorcee. Nor was she your hapless maiden yearning to be rescued by a white knight. She was quite old-looking, to tell the truth, and quite ugly. Bits that should be big, like eyes and mouth and bosoms, were small, and bits that should be small were big.
At the theatre, Val told Helen to go down the row first, and Tim hung back, hoping that Colin would go next, then his sister, then him, on the aisle. But Val pushed him in next to Helen, and then went to the bar with Colin. Helen did not want to go, so Tim stayed. They had to wait in their seats for quite a time, getting up to let people through who had timed it better. After they read their programmes, he had to say something.
‘Have you known my – Val – my sister long?’
‘I used to see her quite a lot. I had a little boy in her play school.’
‘Oh?’ Most of Valerie’s customers were screwed up, above or below the neck.
‘He’s in boarding school now.’
‘Oh.’ He must have grown out of it, whatever it was.
She had spoken without turning her head, looking towards the stage where the curtain waited to reveal delights, quivering slightly at the bottom, a bulge appearing here and there at elbow or buttocks height, like the stomach of a pregnant woman.
‘So you live – I mean, you’re on your own.’ Keep calm, I’m not a rapist. I just sound like that.
‘When I’m at home. I’m employed at the Hall School.’ A teacher? She did not look or sound like one. ‘Do you know it? I’m in the housekeeping department.’
‘That’s nice.’
‘Fair.’ She made a face that did not improve the shape of her nose and mouth. ‘It leaves me free weekends and holidays when Julian comes home.’
Well done, Tim. ‘Ask her to tell you about herself’ (Pocket Pickups). ‘No girl can resist that. She’ll think you’re sensitive and understanding.’
She’ll tell you a few boring things and then shut up and read her programme again. Val and Colin had come back from the bar, but were talking earnestly together, in the way they did. Now Helen should be asking Tim about himself.
She didn’t, so he cleared his throat. ‘I work at Webster’s. I expect you know it.’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m in Fabrics and Soft Furnishings. It’s a –’ It’s a what? A drag, a fine store, a bore, a challenge, nest of thieves?
She waited, the flattish front of her grey-pink jumper going mildly up and down as her narrow ribs breathed.
Two women in black ducked through a hole under the front of the stage. Thank God, the orchestra was coming in. Young men, grey men, competent girls, old bags with cellos. Tim and Helen watched while they tuned up in that wonderful carefree discordance, and then the conductor came out of the hole and summoned a crash of sound, and the disembodied voices started and the curtain went up, and Tim’s senses were invaded by swirls of colour and sound.
Once, when he looked down, he was quite surprised to see the reality of Helen’s grey wool lap beside him, her hands lying together like dead leaves. He looked at her to see if she was enjoying the show. She wasn’t looking at the stage. She was looking at him.
Help! Did he look ridiculous, carried away like that? But she was not laughing at him. She looked rather glum.
The package from C.P. Games revealed that Domain of the Undead had progressed quite a bit since Tim last sent in his movement sheets. The ploys of his disguised warlord character Blch, to infiltrate behind the desecrated graves and burst coffins which were the front lines of Necrotic’s ghoulish army, had succeeded, but so had the slaughter waged by giant maggots on the churls who kept the Pass of Perish.
‘Your back-up party now has only a dozen plus-2 weapons and three mage spells,’ said the message from Kevin Sills, who ran the C.P. office end of this game. ‘It has been said that men with heads of beasts have been seen in the dead oak forest behind you. In the mountain hexes ahead, those whose super power points have not doubled will not get through, or die trying to.’
Using the map, Tim now had to find a way round the heaving bog, or go underground through the catacombs, where booby traps of foetid gases could turn you into a dybbuk and you would have to pay another five pounds to start the game again.
Some characters had disappeared, as other players got sick of them, or were killed off, or dybbuked, or ran out of money. Some new characters had turned up, to complicate the struggle for conquest, and Captain Necrotic seemed to have played a dirty trick by metamorphosing into the living human form of the Black Monk, once trusted by the people, but now a diabolic traitor.
Tim wrote a note to Monk, care of C.P. Games, protesting, ‘Not Fair!’, because some of the disguised Blch’s possessions had been entrusted to the Black Monk’s care. ‘Now I don’t know if I’ve still got ’em. What are you playing at?’
He also wrote to whoever was playing Grue, to discuss some technical matters connected with the poisoned-draught capacity of a mummy’s skull. Grue did not reply – probably an illiterate twelve-year-old – but Necrotic, alias Black Monk, wrote back fairly soon: ‘Wot am I playing at? I’m playing the game, aren’t U? My name is DeAth. Trust me.’ That could mean ‘Don’t trust me’ in fantasy game strategy.
Tim wrote back. Necrotic’s name was H. V. Trotman, and the address at the top of his small, cramped postcard was – amazing! The forces of fate were at work – a small town only about ten miles away.
‘We might run into each other some time,’ Tim wrote. ‘Who knows?’ It would be interesting to discuss fantasy affairs, and, with any luck, H. V. Trotman might turn out to have a decent games group, more reasonable than Gareth and Co.
Fired up by letter writing, Tim bought a new pad of paper and a green Biro in Webster’s Stationery at employees’ discount, and risked a letter to the BBC to Mary Gordon, who, though obviously not over the hill, sometimes captured hints of his mother’s comfortable reassurances, as when she promised him ‘alovely (she always said it as one word) sunny day’. He wanted to write to her, ‘You are the sister I would like to have.’
He wrote carefully, with some curlicues on the capital letters to please her eye. ‘May I ask for a picture of yourself? I enclose stamps.’
This was his lucky month, this chill and windswept March, when the cold blasted you outside Webster’s staff entrance, howling down the alley, and even Mary Gordon could not promise lovely days. She sent him a photograph with a printed signature. It was amazing. She did look like someone’s sister, with undemanding hair and a smile that turned up more at one side than the other.
It was quite a little picture. Poor Mary. She was probably being exploited on a small salary. Tim put it in his wallet, but took it out the next day in case he was run over in the street, and put it into the drawer with his fantasy books and games material. The drawer was locked, in case Brian or Jack came up to the flat.
Brian did come up one evening when Tim was working through a Willard Freeman book in his pyjamas and navy dressing-gown. He had the grace to knock instead of using his key, so Tim had time to put the book and dice and bowl of sugared popcorn away. Was there time to put his clothes back on? A second knock and a friendly shout sent him to open the door.
Brian had a piece of treacle tart on a plate.
‘This was so good, we thought you should have some.’
‘Thanks – I mean, thanks, it’s–’
Must he invite him in? Brian did not look surprised at the dressing-gown and pyjama legs, but he did raise an eyebrow and say, ‘Bit cold for bare feet,’ before he turned and went nippily down the outside staircase with his knees turned out.
Tim’s feet were long and pale, with good straight toes, because his mother had heard of children whose toes had been deformed by ill-fitting shoes, and even of a mythical character who had developed a club foot from wearing shrunken socks.
Tim guessed and cheated his way to the end of Abominable Pestman: Another Fantastic Freeman Fantasy. Caught up in the adventure, he could not bother with all the rules. If he learned that leeches had sucked out every last drop of his body fluids, or that his limbs had been torn off his torso by two mastodons galloping in different directions, he resuscitated himself with an illegal roll of the dice. Back among the devilish intrigues of Willard’s mind and his intricate baroque illustrations, Tim achieved, with a muffled shout, the paragraph that cried, ‘Marvellous you! Abominable One is vanquished, and Our Hero lives to triumph again in another Fantastic Freeman Fantasy (see inside back cover for titles).’
Closing the book with a sigh, Tim got out the pad and green Biro, and wrote to Willard Freeman, at the publisher’s address, for a photograph. He would start a collection. People did this. They stuck the pictures in albums that were sold for thousands of pounds after their death.
A few days after he had gone to the theatre with Helen Brown, a letter from the great Willard Freeman was on the doormat when he came home from work. Tim was hardly surprised. Luck came in peaks and chasms, and his was soaring. There was no photograph. ‘A pic? No, you don’t catch me, mate. I stalk among mankind unknown.’ The letter was short and breezy and Tim folded it carefully and carried it to work next day in his inside jacket pocket.
‘Good luck, chum,’ it ended. ‘All the best, Bill.’ Hospital staff would be quite impressed to read that, if Tim was run over.
The potency of it sent him up the stairs to the second floor at a run, instead of leaning against the wall of the lift, and carried him lightly over the heavy duty carpet, as he approached the department office by his traditional route of marching and countermarching between the rows of cutting tables, slapping their cool formica tops to a military rhythm.
‘Take off that face,’ Fred said. ‘It’s only Tuesday.’
‘My good news day.’ Tim grinned.
Fred grumbled at him, as they went into the office for Mr D. to inspect them: hair, shave, and the clothes brush handed silently for application to The Suit.
‘Good luck, chum. All the best.’
The folded letter in Tim’s pocket kept him happy and untroubled through the morning. When his lunch hour came, he took a piece of paper and an envelope and a stamp from Mr D.’s office, and wrote another fan letter to Willard Freeman while he was eating sausages in the canteen.
‘Ever your faithful admirer, Tim W. Kendall.’
After posting it in the street outside, he went up in the lift, and traversed the second floor enigmatically, easing himself round display racks and draped dummies and turgid customers: invisible man. ‘I stalk among mankind unseen.’
By the end of the afternoon, the pleasures of hero-worship and daydreams had begun to seep away like a rain puddle soaking into the earth. It was always like this. The waters of fantasy ebbed and flowed. Sometimes he was quite fanatically absorbed, and then the whole thing would start to seem silly and childish, and he bundled all the games and books into the drawer, and was bored and lonely again.
Back in the flat, he opened a tin and ate a whole steamed pudding, cold, because he was too hungry to wait for it to heat up, and lay on the floor to digest it and examine his life.
Where are you going?
Last summer, they had done Godspell at the Boathouse Theatre. ‘Where are you going? Where are you going? Can you take me with you? For my hand is cold and needs warmth. Where are you going?’
He was good enough at his job to be department manager one day, but Mr D. would not retire for ten or fifteen years. The best Tim could hope for was that Lilian got pregnant, and Tim could spend six months or so in her place as assistant manager, with a larger plastic label to accommodate name and rank.
Why would Tim, the youngest, be chosen over Gail or Fred? Because Gail was a rebellious girl who threatened every week to drop out and pursue her real career in fashion design, and Fred was getting past it, to say the least. He knew his fabrics, and could add up and multiply to make your head reel, without using a calculator, but his lips and teeth were slack, and over the backs of his hands, very evident in this line of work (Tim’s were too small, but you could call them deft and artistic), crawled knotty veins and scaly patches.
‘Our boy is dangerously quiet this evening,’ Brian said to Cindy. ‘I haven’t heard the radio or the telly since he came in, and none of that condemned cell pacing.’
‘I hope he hasn’t overdosed.’ Cindy was stretched out in the most comfortable armchair, wiggling her large toes and liking the feel of her 10-denier tights. ‘I’m afraid he’s rather lonely. Do you think we should invite him down here, or take him out for a meal?’
‘With you dressed like that?’
‘Why not? I pass, don’t I – arms shaved and tits level?’
‘Now listen, Jack.’ Brian was getting angry; his eyes narrowed and almost disappeared. ‘When we bought this house together, you swore you’d never take any chances outside. Enough’s enough.’
‘For you, it is. What about me? Why can’t I go public? Cross-dressing’s not illegal.’
‘Unless someone spots you and complains. Then you’re up for Conduct Leading to Breach of the Peace.’
‘I’m going out for a walk tonight.’
‘And get killed by the local rapist.’
Jack sighed. ‘It’s always the woman that pays.’
‘You want a divorce?’ They were off into their game. ‘I get the house, though, remember that. You can have the children.’
‘What would the children say?’
‘Ask them.’
‘We never had any.’
‘That’s what’s been wrong with our marriage from the start.’
‘And who’s at fault?’ Cindy sat up and pointed a finger with a carved jadeite ring on it.
‘You, Bri. My sperm count’s as high as yours.’
Brian dismembered the wooden chair that came apart easily, and brandished a leg over his head.
‘Go ahead.’ Cindy turned up her square-jawed face for the blow. ‘Open the curtains and let all those people out there in their cars see the spectacle of a battered wife.’