Alligator Playground Read online

  ‘I met Ernie Guyler yesterday, up Radford Woodhouse.’ The words were impulsively out. ‘Do you remember him?’

  Her grey eyes looked straight at me, hands seeming to shake less. ‘Oh yes, I do.’

  ‘I liked him, because when I was a kid he used to give me cigarette cards, and the ha’penny from the packet of Players fags.’

  She sat down, a hand quickly over her cheek. Albert turned to the fire because he could make nothing of our talk. I looked around the room to see all the objects of my grandparents, remembered from when they had lived at the cottage: the pot dogs with such benign almost human faces on the shelf which I supposed were valuable antiques by now, my grandfather’s showcase of the last half dozen horseshoes, the stacked tea services of my grandmother in the glass-fronted cupboard, and many other tasteful gew-gaws hardly seen anymore, each a solid memory for me, but an eternal veil of protection for Ivy and Emily who had known them from birth.

  ‘Ernest Guyler used to take me rabbiting,’ I went on. ‘I’ll always remember him. He’s still thin, and coughs a bit.’

  ‘He’ll never alter,’ Ivy said with a smile. ‘I know he won’t, not Ernie.’

  ‘He was walking under that railway bridge towards Old Engine Cottages where grandad and grandma lived.’

  She was hardly able to speak. ‘Was he?’

  Albert turned. ‘He sounds nowt but a bleddy owd poacher to me.’

  ‘What do yo’ know about it?’ My tone was so hard that the light of unassailable malice went from his eyes, because he knew that as old as he was I would have thumped him if he’d said much more. Yet I knew enough as not to anger him in case he took it out on Ivy after I’d gone, even though I’d kept the tobacco in reserve so that he would feel jollier when I had.

  Ivy winked at me, and smiled again, and when I said I had to be going gave me two passionate kisses, a good one for myself and loving one for Ernest Guyler, or so I wanted to think.

  The next time I called she was obviously ill. So was I, not in my body, of course, but from some bleak misery or other, locked up in a life she could know nothing about, and which I shouldn’t have been in at all but was, and which she would certainly have laughed at as being of no consequence.

  She should have been in bed, but wasn’t, coming from a family where bed was something you got to exhausted in order to sleep until getting up next morning to work – or to die. Her hands shook as she lit a cigarette. For me to help would have been an insult. ‘I’ve just come out of hospital,’ she said, adding it was the first time she had been in such a place. ‘But I’ll be all right now.’

  Albert took his tin of tobacco, his claw reaching out, and gave no thanks, because he knew that to do so would be a compliment to Ivy for having such a generous nephew. I’d got his number all right, but to throttle him would only make it worse for Ivy, and Emily.

  In spite of her affliction she made me a cup of tea, and while Albert was down in the cellar filling a bucket of coal for the dying fire she looked at me with her grey eyes shimmering with tears and said: ‘Alan, take me away with you. I can’t stand him or this anymore.’

  Then she smiled, as if to inform me that she knew it could only be a joke, giving me the opening I both wanted and had to have, and smile in turn as if to agree that I knew she didn’t mean it, that the notion of me going back to London with an ailing seventy-year-old woman was out of the question – knowing that she knew but that having said it was all she had wanted to do, to see what I replied, and knowing that at least I thought of the right answer and was troubled by saying what I did which proved enough that I loved her. Because of course she couldn’t uproot herself and come with me to my uncertain life, even if I’d pleaded that she should.

  But I wish I’d spontaneously said yes, please come, I’ll look after you, thus giving her the chance to turn me down. It was one more betrayal in my life, one more solid trail of anguish fading into the rear horizon that will dog me to the end, but another zenith of self interest because guilt and anguish of that sort are necessary motors to keep me going.

  ‘No,’ Emily said, ‘he can’t,’ as if to add, though it wasn’t necessary either to Ivy or to me, ‘What will happen to me if you go?’

  Albert came up with the coal and put a lump onto the fire, and I said I must be going. She died a couple of years later, and I didn’t go to the funeral because I was away in some foreign country or other. I tried to imagine Emily stuck in that house with Albert when I heard the news, and can only think it must have been the worst cat-and-dog situation. However it was, conveniently for him, she had a heart attack on coming out of church one evening, while crossing the road and making for the pub on the opposite corner.

  I called on Albert some time later, and he hadn’t changed. He barely mentioned Ivy, though I talked about her. I thought such lack of interest meant he was going ga-ga – he certainly wasn’t grief-stricken – but at eighty he was still healthy, well able to look after himself, and smoking his pipe all the time.

  The house was condemned by the council, the mangonels of synthetic modernisation on the march, and Albert had to leave. It was still a good house, solid enough in structure, but thousands were being demolished when they only needed a bathroom above the scullery for them to last another seventy years. High rise hen-coops were deemed to be the order of the day by those who would never have to live in them but had decided that that was how the ‘working classes’ ought to want to live.

  Albert had talked his way into living again with his sister Hilda, in a village thirty miles away, and when she threw him out for the second time, as no doubt she would, he’d become the Hitler of the old folks’ home and live comfortably to the end.

  Before the house was knocked down I went to have one last look. There were boards at the windows, but I went up the yard to the back door and kicked it in. The place was empty, yet clean and neat still, as if only waiting for the next tenants to move in with their furniture.

  I stood for a moment in the front bedroom, in which both my grandparents had died, and Ivy also, the same paper on the walls, then stepped across the narrow landing to the other bedroom, also empty. I wondered what Albert had done with the furniture, and all of my aunts’ possessions. He couldn’t have taken it to his sister’s, or to an old folks’ home. He had obviously sold it, and pocketed the bit of money the junk man had thought to give him. What about the tea service, and my grandfather’s horseshoes? He’d had his own way, but there was no one to blame but myself.

  Traffic streamed inconsequentially by along the road and, turning from the window, I noticed a piece of screwed up paper on the floor, the only sign of untidiness. I picked it up, and slowly unfolded it from the tight ball.

  If he had been in the house just then I would have bludgeoned that smile from his face, killed him no less, or threatened him to death. The paper was the marriage certificate of himself and Ivy and, before departure, his last act had been to throw it away, and leave it behind like a piece of rubbish.

  I couldn’t imagine where he had got such spite, what he’d had in him to hate her, why he was so rotten as not to put up with the best qualities a woman ever had. He must have known that he had none by comparison, but you might have thought, after she was dead, he would realise that people living together have much to put up with from each other, and that forgiveness is all.

  I walked out with the certificate carefully folded in my pocket, wondering about the one big mistake in Ivy’s life and, on the train back to London, speculating on the fact that so many people make at least one.

  Holiday

  DANIEL HAD WORKED through Christmas to New Year so as to wangle a fortnight’s holiday in January with Jean to Egypt. On the all-night run down to London the A1 was awash with rain, and the Dartford Tunnel no picnic, but they made Gatwick car park with an hour to spare at half-past six.

  The booking halls were calm and they were soon through passports and security. Daniel bought whisky, vodka, and four cartons of fags at the duty-free bef
ore taking that funny little internal train to the final departure room. Jean bagged a seat and read the Sun, looking after his big tranny radio which he couldn’t be without because he wanted music and football results at all hours and wherever he was. He even carried a coil of aerial wire to get stations loud and clear. She smiled at him striding around the shaver and watch showcases like a security guard trying to pass himself off as an ordinary passenger.

  Rain beaded the windows as the Boeing built up revs and began its run. ‘I hope it don’t skid’ – at which he could only laugh. The packed plane lifted straight into grey-belly cloud, juddering a few moments before breaking through and leaving the miserable weather below. She had noticed no dawn in the lounges but now the sun was brilliant in an upturned basin of blue.

  ‘God’s kitchens must be up here,’ she said. Such a picture didn’t help the jitters, which she didn’t mention in case Daniel got rattled. He was never nervous, because every year before they were married he’d flown to Benidorm with his mates. Safety belts unclicked, she released his hand. ‘I hope the kids’ll be all right.’

  ‘They will, don’t worry.’ He passed a cigarette, and held the lighted match. ‘Your mother’s good with ’em.’ She talked as if there were ten, instead of only two as yet. ‘She’ll keep the house warm as well.’

  ‘How long before we get there?’

  ‘Five bloody hours.’ He pulled out the airline magazine to see where they were going. ‘They’ll give us summat to eat soon. A bucket to drink as well, I hope.’

  The yellow-orange sunball just above the tops of the palms was sinking while they looked at it. ‘I never thought I’d see this.’

  ‘It’s marvellous.’ She held his arm. The first room they had been shown to had a double bed, but they wanted twins because otherwise why would you come to such a posh hotel? Then the twin-bedded room looked out over a lot of sheds so Daniel went downstairs and gave ’em what-for at the desk. An hour later they were able to change to one with a view over the river.

  ‘I’ve always wanted to come to Egypt.’ He looked towards the far bank wooded with palm trees, a slender minaret pointing like a biro about to write on the pale slate of the sky above a dimming line of hills.

  ‘It’s the Nile,’ she said. A solitary mop-headed palm above the rest looked as if it would rub out any message it didn’t agree with.

  ‘If we go down to them bulrushes we might find little Baby Moses!’

  A sandbank seemed to get bigger and greener in the dusk, as if waiting for someone to scatter seeds and grow something good before the flood came. Tucked by the side of the hotel the blue patch of swimming pool was deserted. Pennants on moored boats waved in the breeze. ‘Must be cool as well outside,’ she said.

  An hour before supper she went into the bathroom, and came out in underwear bought specially for the trip. She was thirty, her skin clear, eyes open and blue, hair so buffoned up she looked about twenty. ‘Hotels always mek me feel sexy.’

  She went up to him, and he needed no second telling.

  They walked hand in hand along the avenue of recumbent rams at Luxor temple. Some had heads missing, paws gone, horns and tails snapped off as if, he thought, a football coach had stopped and the lads had got to work, though they’d had to give up and leave most unscathed because the stone was too tough, even for Randall’s Vandals – as the gang used to call themselves. ‘How old did that book say it was?’

  ‘About three thousand years.’

  ‘Looks it.’ He hadn’t fancied the salad at last night’s buffet, so the grub had stodged his guts. You couldn’t even clean you teeth in the tap water in case you got the screaming ab-dabs.

  The temple was a place for hide-and-seek, with so many columns and back ways. ‘It’s a bomb site, really,’ he laughed. ‘Lovely to see, but just like a bomb site.’ Among the ruins, as if to encourage his opinion, an aerial photo was displayed behind the glass of a notice board, which indeed looked like a picture of Dresden after it had cooled down.

  He was bored with aimless circuiting, and they wanted some coffee. ‘They’re trying to tell us that people lived four thousand years ago. I could ’ave told ’em that. I don’t think I’d have lived very well in them days. I’d have been a slave, I expect, building these bloody temples for people like us to come and gawp at.’ He was sweating under his straw hat. ‘The sun’s getting hot.’

  ‘Even for January,’ she said. They walked down the riverbank road and into the Old Palace Hotel. He led her to the cool arcade by the swimming pool. ‘There’s no music here,’ she said. ‘I hate it when it’s too noisy.’

  They sat in the silence till midday, when the ululations of the male faithful sounded like a nation of sheep going to the slaughter. ‘Just listen to ’em.’

  ‘It’s their way,’ she said.

  ‘They can have it.’ He ordered another coffee. ‘Karnak they call it,’ he said, ‘and I’m karknackered already!’

  ‘It’s only the first day.’

  ‘Don’t worry, love, we’ll have a good holiday. I’m enjoying it, anyway.’

  ‘So am I.’

  ‘We’ll go into that tourist office after we’ve had some dinner. Maybe they’ll give us a pamphlet and a map.’

  The drivers of taxis and horse-drawn carriages called at them to get in and ride, but they preferred walking the streets. A fly crawled up a beggar’s nose as if to get its elevenses, he quipped. The Mar-haba Restaurant was only half full but it took twenty minutes to get served.

  ‘It’s a go-slow,’ she said.

  At least there was pitta bread and two beers on the table already. ‘Like being at home, at Akbar’s Snack Bar. I wonder how the lads are managing without me. It gets hotter in that boiler-room though than it does out here.’

  ‘Somebody at the hotel was saying it’s like an oven in summer.’ They had asked for kebabs but got koffta – whatever that was – but it sounded all right. ‘I wanted kebab,’ Daniel said to the waiter.

  The waiter shrugged. ‘No more kebabs.’

  Ten minutes later kebabs were taken to the next table. Daniel stood when the waiter came. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Kebabs,’ the waiter said.

  ‘You told me you’d got none left.’

  ‘New ones come in.’

  Daniel sat. ‘I should throw him to the fucking crocodiles.’

  ‘Eat your dinner, duck.’

  ‘The croc would choke. Let’s have some more of this delicious beer.’ He stirred at his plate, rice instead of chips. ‘I like the Egyptians, but I wouldn’t like to be one.’

  ‘Well, you’re not used to it.’

  ‘I never would be, I’ll tell you that.’

  She finished her food. ‘That was delicious. I wouldn’t like to wear one o’ them veils, though.’

  ‘If you did I might fancy you even more!’ He gave the waiter a twenty note to meet the bill, and waited for the change. ‘He’s forgotten,’ she said. ‘We’ve still got to finish our smoke and coffee, so don’t fret.’

  ‘I won’t,’ but when the waiter passed he called: ‘What about my change?’

  ‘Two minutes.’

  Daniel read the bill: several kinds of service already deducted, it seemed. The small denomination bank notes were so worn he thought the whole population played a game of passing them around before they fell to pieces. He left some for a tip. ‘It’s more than he deserves.’

  ‘They’ve got to live,’ she said.

  ‘Let’s go, then.’

  The man in the tourist information office stood as they came in. Daniel asked if he had any gen on the area. They wanted to cross the river but didn’t know what was what on the other side, though what they could see looked beautiful. He was dressed in a fawn suit with waistcoat, a young man who, Jean thought, was very handsome, especially since he seemed to be giving her the eye all the time they were there. But I suppose he’d even do the same for a woman of sixty. He produced a booklet, and a rough kind of map, pointing to the places with the tip of
a real pen.

  Jean spread out her best smile. ‘Can we have these?’

  ‘All yours,’ he smiled back. ‘But before you go, I would like to invite you to have tea with me.’

  Daniel wasn’t much interested in a friend for life. ‘We’ll be stuck for an hour.’

  ‘I’d be honoured if you’d accept.’ The man still looked at Jean, she was sure, as if he wanted to strip her there and then. ‘Just a glass of tea,’ he said.

  He was serious, but Daniel didn’t want to give in, or insult him, since he was pleasant and friendly enough. ‘Thanks very much, but we’ve got to go to the bank. We’ll come back tomorrow.’

  He wasn’t put out by the refusal, and offered his little blue and scented card, which Jean took. ‘Have a nice time over the river.’

  ‘He was a lovely chap,’ Jean said. They walked along the river side of the road on their way to the ferry, the pavement bumpy and sand showing underneath. She could have fallen in love with him, and that was a fact. He was something to dream about, but there’d be no reason to see him again and that, she told herself, was a pity.

  ‘We could have gone on that conducted tour from the hotel,’ Daniel said, ‘but it’ll be a lot better doing it on our own.’

  They went down the wide flight of crumbling steps to the river, stopping for a ticket on the way. Among so many people he kept a fist over the money in his trouser pocket, and walked half-left behind Jean, watching her handbag and camera. He would have done the same anywhere. ‘Let’s get on the top deck, and see the view.’

  A large square of seats faced inwards, young men in long garb and white pillbox hats sitting or standing to talk. A bootblack and a couple of peanut vendors touted for a bit of trade. ‘I didn’t like the looks some of ’em gave me as I walked up the stairs,’ she said.