Frankie Styne & the Silver Man by Kathy Page Read Free Book Online Page B

Liz,’ Purvis said. ‘I’ll put your point of view as forcefully as I can. I think you and Jim need a house. With a garden. But it might be a bit further out of town. Okay?’ They’d parted at the front door. Liz slipped inside and slammed it hard behind her.
    So when they’d arrived at 127 Onley Street a week ago there were newly installed gas fires, bedding, a cooker—and on the floor just by the door lay a fat letter from Purvis. It had Liz and By Hand written on the envelope; inside was a wodge of leaflets stapled together and a handwritten letter. Purvis’s writing was like a pile of string tipped onto the page. It explained how a cot would arrive the next day and how Liz was entitled to an allowance for paint, then went on to say that Purvis would drop by at 3:15 next Monday afternoon, but not to worry if Liz was busy—if she missed her, Mrs P would phone and fix another time. It wished her the best and was signed Annie. Liz had noted with satisfaction that there was no telephone for Purvis to ring her on and thrust it deep in her pocket. She should have known.
    The downstairs ceilings had recently been repaired and the fine pink powder of plaster dust lay on the floor, showing tracks where various people had been in and out. A pile of rusting floorboard nails lay on the bottom stair. It was cold, the windows were blind with condensation, but there was running water, both cold and hot; you didn’t even have to wait for it to heat.
    She had put the cushions she’d brought in the front room, then unloaded the baby things in the kitchen. The back door was stuck, but she could see the garden well enough from the back bedroom window: a strip of land between two high fences—a thick scalp of wet green parted by the paths of other people’s cats. Here and there was a bald rubbly patch, or the submerged bulge of some different growth: a yellower green, a bush half buried, a few flowers on thin light-seeking stems, purple or white. Now and then a blowing drift of dandelion fluff rose and passed across the garden, then sank again.
    Liz had looked at the back garden several times since. It seemed to grow taller and thicker almost daily, and she had a feeling that it was waiting—waiting for the low siren, the almost underwater wail that precedes the slowly gathering sound of a train accelerating down the line, shuddering past the stationary carriages in the sidings, carving its swift way through the stillness, then gone and back and gone again as the land further down the tracks shields and then releases the noise and its echo.
    She missed that sound. She had lived in the carriages longer than anywhere else except the Black Swan, and she had found them herself. The trains came every hour. The garden was a bit like the sidings. She could imagine a train shooting through the back of Onley Street, flattening the fences one by one, shaking out windows. But she was in a house now, with hot and cold, and when she watched the grass stir in a breath of wind she was glad of the protection glass seemed to afford.
    One door was enough. It could stay stuck.
    â€˜And one good thing about you, Jim,’ she’d said as she finished the initial inspection of the house, ‘is that there’s no need for me to do that baby talk routine. If I want to speak I’ll say what I want, when I want, how I want. Perhaps you’ll enjoy the sound, but that’s it. There’s fuck all I can teach you. Nothing.’
    No capacity for language, the doctor had said, while Mrs Purvis went to get more tea from the machine.
    â€˜Whatever that means,’ said Liz on the morning of the telephone man, still sitting on the toilet as she reached for the tap to rinse her hands. ‘It’s possible of course just, just, that they’re wrong. You could somehow be understanding, the way animals do; just different, but they don’t realise, because the clever-dicks can’t measure