Life_ An Exploded Diagram - Mal Peet [18]
The front room — the “best room”— was a grim and crowded museum of Victorian furniture. A framed photograph of a young woman and a soldier stood on a heavy sideboard next to a threadbare stuffed squirrel inside a glass dome.
The parlor had only two armchairs, one on either side of the hearth. On each sat a ball of wool transfixed by knitting needles.
It seemed to George that every mark in the place — every scar on the skirting boards, every nick and chip in the stair treads, every dent in the dull brass doorknobs — was a trace of dead people he had never known and wouldn’t have wanted to. Dim presences to whom he had no connection. Who frightened him. This place was old and poor. It was not the bright new world he had been told he was fighting for. He had come home to the past, a past that wasn’t even his own. He felt, suddenly, panicky and claustrophobic.
He went out into the back garden. The colder air went to his bladder, and he pushed open the outhouse door. It clattered against an obstacle, a galvanized metal bath hung on a hook. A speckled spider had spread her net within it. Relieving himself, he noted that the bog roll was newspaper scissored neatly into rectangles the size of ten-shilling notes and hung on a nail.
He went to the end of the garden and surveyed his new and awful domain. The hedge had grown wild. Things he presumed were edible protruded from weeds. A fork with a broken handle angled into black soil. Two rusted upturned buckets.
He lit a cigarette. The last of the sun slanted onto the roof. The thatch was ragged and greened by moss; below and to the left of the half-ruined chimney, a sheet of corrugated iron had been slid in to slow a leak.
He pulled on the ciggie and straightened himself.
Discipline. Drill.
“Men all present and correct, Sarn’t?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Ready to kick the shit out of Jerry, Sarn’t?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Excellent. Carry on.”
Men in burned-out tanks who’d come apart like overcooked chickens when you tried to pull them out. You threw up and then you dealt with it.
“Burial detail! Over here!”
They’d fought — he’d fought — for sex. To capture the brothels of Benghazi and Tripoli from the Italians, the Germans. Then take the tricks learned there home to wives and girlfriends who were starving for it. Unless the ruddy Yanks had been there first.
Ruth had got heavier; there was no denying it. She’d slumped, somehow. Having the boy, presumably.
Two months ago — no, three now — he’d been in a back-street bar in Cyprus, being served miraculously cold beer by a gracious Egyptian prostitute wearing see-through trousers and a spangled bra.
“You’ll not be getting much of that in Norfolk, lad,” he told himself — correctly, as it turned out.
As the light died, he heard footsteps on the path. His mother-in-law, a shade or two darker than the gathering dark, came around the corner of the lav.
“Ayup, Win,” he said.
She turned, lifting a hand to her chest and stumbling as if a sniper had got her.
“Who’s that?”
“It’s George, Win.”
She peered as he walked toward her.
“George who?”
“George your son-in-law.”
“What’re you doing here?”
He flicked his cigarette away and said, “It’s nice to see you, too, Win.”
The can that Ruth opened was the Spam. She fried slices of it in a bit of lard with an onion and served it with a boiled potato each and tough garden cabbage.
Win said, “You’re cut that Spam thick, Ruth. That wunt see us out the week at that rate.”
At ten o’clock, Ruth pretended she needed him in the kitchen.
She said, “I’m gorn up to bed, George. Give us five minutes.”
He went outside and smoked