Another part of the wood

1

Balfour, unbearably shy, was waiting for them.
He sat on the gate hunching his shoulders, squinting up into the sunlight as the open car came round the corner and went too fast over the bridge. He watched the car’s approach with a fixed smile – too wide, too foolish – listening with eyelids fluttering to the optimistic voice of P. J. Proby loud above the noise of the engine.
George MacFarley had told him to meet the visitors. ‘You meet them and I’ll make tea,’ he had promised. ‘Right you are,’ Balfour had agreed, and half ran, half walked, down the track to the entrance of the woods, leaving George towering outside the door of the Big House, his scarf wound about his throat, his melancholy eyes regarding the forest below him. The Big House was merely one large room with a kitchen built on at the back and a bedroom at the side. Nailed to that was another room, very small, furnished with two bunk beds and a hanging lamp. This was George’s bedroom, where he kept his drawing board, his set-square, some hammers, an axe and two spades. His saw, always greased after use, hung in a sack behind the door. Pinned to the wooden wall beside the bunks was a plan of the woods which George had drawn showing the positioning of the huts and the various species of trees. In the bottom corner were printed the words ‘Plan of Nant MacFarley Camp’ and then, modestly small, ‘George David MacFarley, Flintshire.’ The name Nant MacFarley Camp wasn’t always used. George’s mother referred to the estate as the Family Resting Ground, the haven to which they could retreat when the demands of city life became overwhelming. Most weekends Balfour accompanied the MacFarleys to the Resting Ground – returning to his factory bench on a Monday morning in a state of exhaustion. When there weren’t any dead trees to be felled and sawn into logs, there were living ones to be inspected and new ones to be planted. There was drainage to improve and space to be cleared, chemicals to be dug into the soil and fungi to be torn out, paths to be laid, steps to be cut, hinges to be oiled, window frames to be examined for warping. A porch was planned for the entrance of the Big House. Another shed would be erected on the other side of the stream to hold the increasing stores: fluorides and chlorine, acids and caustics, sulphur dioxide, cyanide, methyl alcohol, strychnine, carbon bisulphide, paraffin, Calor gas, petroleum, turpentine – the list was as endless as the work to be done. Under the pampered trees and the curving sky the MacFarleys toiled without ceasing. Balfour called it the Labour Camp. Nevertheless he had arranged to spend his summer holiday, his fourteen days away from the factory, at the Camp. Mr and Mrs MacFarley wouldn’t be there; they had gone abroad. But Balfour had discovered on arrival that he wasn’t going to be alone with George. George had invited friends – a man with a beard called Joseph and somebody named Kidney. What was worse, Joseph had apparently taken it upon himself to ask two other people to stay – people whom George had never met. George said that very possibly Joseph would also bring a woman. He usually did. Balfour could tell that George was none too pleased about the arrangements, though he didn’t say much. George never said much.
The car, radio blaring, stopped. Seated beside Joseph was a fair-haired girl, between them a child in a pom-pom hat and in the back a youth with a rosy face. Raindrops slid off the dark blue bonnet, and P. J. Proby still shouted up into the trees, long after the engine had stopped, that somewhere there was a place for them.
Joseph got out of the car and went easily over the mud, thrusting his hand forward and saying ‘You must be Balfour. How are things? How’s George? Everything under control?’
The child in the car clambered over the edge of the door. He said petulantly, ‘Can I have the kite now, Daddy?’ and without waiting for an answer began to tug at the handle of the boot.
Joseph, stretching his arms high, said, ‘Wait a moment, Roland, just wait a moment. Dreadful journey.’ He lowered his outflung arms and looked at Balfour, still hunched on the gate. ‘I picked up Roland in Liverpool, you know, but I’ve come all the way from London. Bloody cold, bloody awful journey.’
‘George is making tea,’ said Balfour, clearing his throat, too shy to look at the girl. ‘He thought you could do with a cuppa.’
Joseph noticed his bad complexion and felt sorry for him. He extracted a kite from the boot. The string was red knitting-wool bound round and round a piece of cardboard. ‘There’s no wind, Roland,’ he said. ‘Leave it until there’s a wind.’
The other passenger had remained where he was in the car. He sat stiffly and stared at the windscreen. ‘We had a bad journey,’ he said, speaking to no one. ‘We had a bad journey.’ Looking up, he saw Balfour on the gate and blushed.
‘This is Kidney.’ Joseph motioned with his hand at the youth in the car.
The child dropped his scarlet wool into the mud and broke out crying. Balfour got down from his perch and lifted the string from the path.
Joseph was moving luggage from the back of the car – some cases, a wicker basket, a long red and black cardboard box. ‘Had to bring this. Dotty can’t live without her Monopoly,’ he said.
Cleaning the kite wool, Balfour nodded, expressing sympathy, he hoped, giving the blonde girl a quick glance. But she was looking at Joseph, with eyes narrowed, and he bent his head again.
‘Come on, Kidney.’ Joseph addressed the figure in the car severely. ‘Stir yourself, boy.’
Stirred, Kidney opened the door of the Jaguar and stepped down. He looked at the ground and shifted his feet. ‘It was a bad journey,’ he repeated, face flushed and manner intent. Round and contoured like a girl, buttocks vast in his corduroy trousers, he waved fat hands in the summer air. Silently he removed things from the seats of the car.
When the car was finally unpacked, they went in single file through the gate, keeping to the path that climbed upwards through the trees. To the right the pines rose to the edge of an unseen field. To the left the ground fell away to the stream in the valley below, hidden among the black poplars and the beech trees. The air hummed with gnats. Mrs MacFarley called the valley the Glen. She called the light at early evening the gloaming. She liked to go Roaming in the Gloaming in the Glen.
They passed a badger’s hole at the foot of a tree and a clump of foxgloves lolling in the breeze. ‘Don’t ever touch one of those,’ said Balfour strictly, apparently to the child, manoeuvring himself and the Monopoly box round the swollen purple heads. ‘George wants them to seed.’
‘Really,’ said Joseph. ‘Spot of colour, what?’ He turned on the path, halting his followers, and spoke to his son. ‘You heard what Balfour said, Roland. You mustn’t touch the foxgloves. George wants them to seed.’
‘George is the biggest man in the world,’ sang the child. ‘George is a giant. I told them at school. I told them George was a giant.’ He jumped anxiously along the track.
‘How high is he?’ asked Kidney. Behind the bottles of Ribena, he blinked sweat from his eyes.
‘Six foot eight, nine,’ Joseph said. He leapt athletically over a small boulder, gracefully landing with luggage swinging and beard quivering. ‘Quite a size, Kidney.’
Balfour tried to remember what George had told him about Joseph. He was divorced, apparently, from a wife who painted, the administrator of a technical college, living with a woman, presumably Dotty: a man, according to George, given to stimulating talk, a non-conformist. To Balfour, even on such short acquaintance, Joseph seemed the arch-conformer of all time, stereotyped, well-bred, unemotional. Nothing had been said about Kidney.
Joseph put the cases down in the grass and wiped with a handkerchief at the spots of mud drying on the leather of his boots. Dotty looked at him with hostility.
‘Must keep up appearances you know,’ Joseph shouted to Balfour. Stooping, he picked up the cases and asked, ‘All right, Dot-Dot? Everything all right?’ He tried to put an arm about her, a case in his hand, and caught her a blow on the hip, knocking her against him. She scowled, and stepped back to her rightful place behind Joseph and in front of the blocked Kidney.
‘George is making tea in Hut 2,’ called Balfour.
‘Hut 2, Hut 2,’ echoed Joseph, somewhere behind him on the path which had grown steeper and more waterlogged.
The girl said something then, but her words were inaudible to Balfour, as he hastened up the slope hampered by his self-imposed Monopoly burden. He hoped she hadn’t remarked on his acne. One foot after the other, keeping his balance with difficulty on the uneven ground, he strained to reach the summit of the path.
Roland began to sing. He piped shrilly under the dripping trees:
‘Bobby Shaftoe’s gone to sea,
Silver bottles on his knee …’
‘Buckles, buckles,’ corrected his father, trampling mud underfoot, swinging his elegant luggage high above the damp grasses.
‘He’ll come home and marry me-e,
Bonny Bobby Shaftoe-O.’
‘We’re there,’ Balfour shouted. He jogged thankfully down the home path, heart thudding in his breast.
Hut 2 was made of wood without embellishments of stone or slate: one long room with bunks at the end and an iron stove opposite the door, the kitchen through an opening to the right of the stove. There was a bench outside the hut and two wooden steps at the door. Red curtains hung on either side of the end window. Laid down on the bench outside was a hammer and some nails. From the path the mountain wasn’t visible. Nor was George.
Balfour put down his Monopoly box on the scrubbed top of the table and told them apologetically that he couldn’t imagine where old George had got to. He went into the kitchen but found it empty, and the kettle empty also, the cups still on their hooks above the sink. ‘Must have gone to look at something or other,’ he said. He stood in the doorway of the kitchen, resentful that he should be left in such a position, looking at Kidney still outside the hut, arms full of groceries. He was aware that no one save himself felt any embarrassment. The girl had seated herself in the rocking chair by the stove, rugs in a heap on the floor where she had dropped them, arms folded across her chest. Joseph had found a pocket mirror on the shelf. He was holding it cupped in one hand, face twisted as he studied his image.
‘I’ve got another cold sore coming. I can’t bear a marked face,’ he told Balfour bitterly, dabbing at his erupting skin with his mud-stained handkerchief.
Balfour, only partly shielded by the doorway of the kitchen, raised an arm to cover his blemished complexion but dropped it again: after all, he couldn’t spend the next six days with his face hidden. Though the journey from the entrance of the woods to Hut 2 hadn’t been a noticeably merry one, he was conscious that the visitors’ spirits had fallen.
Roland came in from his search for George and flung himself against the rocking chair, pushing his head, still in its pom-pom hat, against the girl’s face. ‘Why don’t we do something?’ he asked. Already he was bored.
His father glanced once about the room and yawned loudly, thinking of all the preparation: the denim outfit bought to make Dotty feel secure, the choice selection of paperbacks, the sheets freshly laundered, Roland’s kite, all the business of stopping the milk and leaving the caged bird with the people downstairs. Now that they were here, it was as he had suspected: nowhere was either better or worse than anywhere else. Most of all he thought of his good intentions. He shrugged his shoulders, trying to rid himself of dejection, looking at the girl fondling the child’s cheek. Making a determined effort for Roland – for Dotty, for himself – he said, ‘Well, troops. Action stations. We better get settled in.’
‘You’re in Hut 4 on the other side of the stream,’ mumbled Balfour. But Joseph was already nodding his head in a business-like way, picking up rugs and cases in readiness for departure. ‘Come along, Dot-Dot. Mustn’t be lazy.’
‘I don’t think I’ll bother, if it’s all the same to you. You go and get settled in and I’ll wait here for you.’ Deliberately she leaned her head against the back of the rocking chair and closed her eyes.
Without further comment Joseph left the hut, passing Kidney on the path. Meekly, unquestioningly, the youth turned about, chin down to the edge of his load, and followed him. Lastly Roland ran out of the door, leaving Balfour alone in the hut with Dotty. For a moment he stood where he was, waiting to see if she would speak to him; but she didn’t, so he sought refuge in the kitchen, willing George to return and deliver him. As he ran water into the tin kettle a spider moved across the bottom of the sink. He removed the lid from the kettle and slopped water against the animal. Dismayed at its clinging persistence, he put down the kettle on the draining board and with the edge of the washing-up bowl rammed the spider into the plug hole and turned the tap violently.
When Joseph reached the stream at the bottom of the valley, Roland immediately wanted his red boat to sail in the water. After an argument, Joseph unzipped the bag handed to him by his ex-wife in Liverpool and ferreted out the required toy.
With instructions as to how to find Hut 4 and how not to fall in the water, he and Kidney continued their climb up the path and left the child to play. With only Kidney to care for, Joseph withdrew into himself and strode up the rough slope, yawning repeatedly. At the hut he kicked open the door with his foot and put his cases down on the floor, instructing Kidney where to put the grocery box and the wicker basket, in a voice perfectly polite, his body active and his mind empty of everything save the business of settling in. Expertly and tidily he laid out the luggage and snapping the locks of the pigskin cases told Kidney to unpack his clothing.
The youth began slowly to do as he was told. He laid his pullover down on the narrow settee and stared at it. Empty of him and newly washed, it looked too small. His mother had knitted some part of every night for almost three winter months. Occasionally the ball of wool had fallen from her knee and rolled away under the sofa and then he had gone down on hands and knees to retrieve it for her. He would press his head sideways against the frill of the sofa and let his hand crawl in the darkness over the soft pile of the carpet. Grunting with exertion, he would place the wool back on his mother’s lap and sit again in the armchair, hands still curved. The nights his mother had gone out to her bridge, or to cocktail parties with his father, the knitting lay pierced by its steel skewers on the top of the television set. He had looked at the pictures moving on the screen and up at the woollen shape, and sometimes it seemed as if the flickering images were just an extension of the needles flashing and his pullover was growing without his mother’s help. When the compulsion to touch became too strong, he would go upstairs to the bathroom and clean his teeth. Once he hadn’t been able to and had pulled at the knitting needles. Under his fingers the stitches began to dissolve away. His mother was angry and threatened never to finish his present, so he stopped watching television the nights she went out. At Christmas when he had unwrapped it from the patterned paper he had felt only disappointment at its fat completion. Here in the hut with Joseph he began to feel protective towards it again. He folded the pullover carefully. Once he glanced up to see if Joseph was watching him. When he saw he wasn’t, his eyes filled with tears. Frowning, he tied the arms in a knot and bundled it into a drawer.
‘Not that drawer,’ said Joseph. He rose and strode over to the chest of drawers, pulled out the offending jumper and threw it back on to the settee. Bending down to finish his unpacking of the wicker basket, he said by way of explanation: ‘That drawer is for Roland. Next to mine. Me and Roland together. Get the idea? Anyway, that’s no way to treat your clothes. Fold it properly.’
‘Sorry,’ mumbled Kidney with effort, and sat down heavily on the sofa.
Joseph turned to look at Kidney. ‘Do you want to know where the lavatory is?’
‘Yes, please.’
‘Down the path and through the trees.’
Joseph got up from his unpacking and taking Kidney’s arm guided him to the door. ‘Down that way,’ he explained again patiently, pointing along the mud path.
‘Down that way,’ repeated Kidney. The width of his trousers so extreme that his limbs floundered in corduroy, he rolled walrus-fashion along the path.
Joseph stayed framed in the doorway, gazing before and around him – at the wet field, the slope of damp grass, the thread of path disappearing under the trees. Out of a brown field rose the mountain, partially obscured by mist. Tomorrow, he promised himself, he would take Roland by the hand and together they would climb to the summit and explore the tower. He would make it like an adventure for the boy, like a challenge, like a prologue to all the bigger and better adventures that they would have one day, like a stepping stone to the real mountains, capped with snow, that they would surely climb. It would be a beginning. He tried to imagine a grown Roland in a man-sized anorak, and failed. His wife had told him not to take a girl along with him. How had she put it? … ‘Try to be alone with Roland for once and leave your bloody women behind.’ He studied the mountain beyond the trees. Of course it was really more of a large hill, but it would do for a start, and Roland was only seven. Or was it eight? He felt suddenly depressed at the thought of how easily Roland tired, how his clear treble voice asking intelligent questions could degenerate into a whining request to be carried. Their outing in the end could be a disaster and not a triumph.
The mountain, he realized, looked not unlike Kidney in shape. Why did he find it so difficult to like someone so fleshily built – or too thin, or too small, or too old? Why was it so difficult to like anyone for any length of time, let alone love them? He wasn’t sure if he was unable to love because he had no tenderness for himself or because he felt himself to be perfect and out of reach of compassion. His ex-wife said it was because he was a selfish bastard, but that was the same thing. She talked a lot of words about love entering and making one grow and how his particular soul was too small to allow anybody entrance. Possibly she hadn’t always thought he had a small soul. His memory of his marriage, of his whole relationship with his wife, was so frail that he couldn’t remember for certain why it was they had separated or how long they had been apart, or the duration of their time together. But then he didn’t remember either the lengths or the depths of any of his involvements with any one person. He was either absorbed or empty, and one feeling followed the other.
He thought he remembered his wife when they were first married, the girl in the long nightgown with a sleepy face, broad bare feet going over the blind-school matting – not going away from him but towards him. He did remember that. He did remember some things. She was always coming towards him, it seemed, mouth shaping his name, a low-pitched droning sound, full of meaning and heavy with love, the sound of a bee making for the hive. When they ate a meal she held his hand or laid her fingers on his knee or leant her head against his shoulder. When he turned his shoulder her hair clung to the cloth of his jacket; if he removed his hands from hers on some pretext, she looked at him with unbearable reproach and laid her damp rejected palm down in her lap and bowed her head. Recovering, but denied bodily contact, she would imprison him by the strength of expression in her eyes. He was forever trying to extricate himself from her touch, her glance, the sound of her voice, all charged with love, sticky as honey, clinging, like the strands of her hair, to the surface of his life. In bed she had swung her pulpy thigh across him and laid her mouth to his breast as if to tear out his heart. When she was pregnant and couldn’t sleep, they had gone for walks along the streets late at night; no doubt he had held her hand. She had cried a lot, wept over the deficiency in him, over not getting the response that she craved, the safety she wanted, at being cheated out of her love. He had felt it wasn’t him she loved at all, that it was some anonymous love-source that she believed existed within him and was determined to rip out of him at all costs. If he bled in the process that was of no account.
His ex-wife had grown fat now. Kidney wasn’t really fat, at least not depressingly white and trembly; but he was feminine in shape and perhaps his whole problem was one of bulk and excess of tissue and nothing at all to do with a trauma over his mother. Perhaps all that had to be done was to dissolve the inhibiting flesh and release the prisoner within. Maybe Kidney would then emerge to function normally, even though there wouldn’t be anyone waiting for him outside. He must insist that Kidney do some hard physical exercise and see if it made any difference.
Tomorrow without fail he and Roland would climb that mountain. Believing it, Joseph looked for a moment longer at the forest, at the pattern of light and shade on the mud path before going back inside the hut to finish his unpacking.
In Hut 2 Balfour was watching Dotty. She was leaning against the double-tiered bunks at the end of the hut, her arms stretched wide in a crucified position. Behind her head, the red curtains, crushed by the mattress, framed a view of trees. First there were only leaves; and then beyond, part of a trunk, and further still, proportioned by distance, a whole tree, a mountain ash with arms held out as if in mimicry of the interior girl. Supported by the bunks she moved her arm, and unbuttoning the breast pocket of her denim jacket withdrew an oblong of tobacco in a silver wrapping and a red fold of cigarette papers. Turning round now to face the window, she laid them down on the bed and hunched her shoulders
Balfour himself didn’t smoke, but he watched her bent head and imagined her hands pushing the mahogany grains along the line of thin paper and her pink tongue flicking out to wet and seal the cylindrical fold. She looked as if she could be weeping, crouched over the side of the bunk bed, a line of hair, yellow as butter, fringing the collar of her jacket.
To Balfour it seemed as if they had all been in the hut for years and years and never spoken, he on his stool and George, returned without apology or explanation, seated on the rough bench by the stove, forearm balanced on his knee. Wrapped round the thick column of George’s neck was a woollen scarf that fell in equal lengths between his knees and touched the floor and folded once, twice, in knitted bands of maroon and black. As always, he managed to convey both serenity and imbecility at one and the same time – the first by the purity of his limpid eyes now turned towards Balfour, and the other by the curious looseness of his never-ending legs anchored to the floor of the hut by his monstrous army boots.
Dotty left the bunk bed and moved between the two men. She held her cigarette aloft in one hand and with the other touched the lid of the stove.
‘Is this thing lit?’ she asked. Without waiting for a reply she bent at the waist, and putting one end of the cigarette to her mouth and the other against the surface of the iron stove attempted to draw heat. She tried several times, making little sucking noises, until George said, ‘No, it’s not lit.’
She stood then, hopeless, the fold of unlit paper clinging to her dry upper lip. ‘Matches,’ she said, and looked directly at Balfour, who got up at once and fetched them.
‘Better let me keep these,’ she told Balfour, taking the matches from him. ‘I use an awful lot of matches and I do get jumpy if I don’t get a light.’
Her cigarette now glowing, she seemed fatter and happier.
She tapped George on the shoulder and asked brightly, ‘Don’t you ever light the stove?’
‘At night.’ George shifted his boots about and looked in the direction of the open door. ‘Only at night. At night one needs the stove. We shut that door and the kitchen door, and we light the lamps and we all sit round the lit stove.’
‘What else do you do?’ Dotty enquired.
‘We talk or we draw,’ said George. ‘Sometimes we go down to the pub in the village, and we discuss things.’
‘I don’t do any drawing,’ said Balfour abruptly, sweat accumulating under his armpits. He hated to be associated with George and his artistic evenings round the stove.
‘We’re going to play Monopoly, though,’ Dotty said. ‘I’ve brought my Monopoly set. We play every night at home, every blessed night. Well, sometimes. Me and Joseph and Kidney.’
Balfour couldn’t imagine what home might be like, but he could visualize a table and three chairs grouped about it, and on the chairs the pudsey Kidney with rosy cheeks and the debonair Joseph, dressed maybe in a silk dressing-gown, and Dotty rolling her cigarettes. All of them playing Monopoly.
‘Of course, Kidney doesn’t really play,’ Dotty said, finding herself at the window, viewing the trees and the path empty of Joseph. ‘But he tries, and Joseph tries to teach him, though lately he’s lost patience.’
‘Is he a relation?’ asked George.
‘No,’ said Dotty. ‘But you know what Joseph’s like – he thinks he’s God. Kidney was referred to the college by some clinic or other. To do pottery. Joseph just happened to see him in the canteen. He’s got it into his head that there’s nothing wrong with Kidney.’
‘And is there?’ asked George.
‘Well, he’s certainly thick or something,’ Dotty said. ‘There was a change at first,’ she added grudgingly. ‘When Joseph first took him over. He got him to come and live at the flat. He played music to him, read poetry, talked a load of rubbish to him. Kidney really seemed to respond … at first. He even began to play chess.’
‘Chess,’ interrupted George, stamping his boots and nodding his head with pleasure.
Dotty wasn’t to be checked, by chess or by George. She wasn’t so much telling Kidney’s story as her own. ‘But Joseph always makes the same mistake, every single time. He bought Kidney a book of poems by Donne, with a silly message inside – To My Friend. It was supposed to be meaningful and it meant sweet fanny-all really.’ Her voice was uneven, but her face was turned from Balfour and George and it was difficult to tell if it contained anger or grief. ‘I mean, he’s bought the same book for so many people at one time or another, with the appropriate inscription inside – To My Friend, or My Wife or My Love – and it’s a shame really because they’re nice poems and you can’t even look at them after Joseph has finished with you. Every gesture he makes is just a monotonous repeat of a gesture he’s made somewhere else. You see, Kidney really thought Joseph was interested in him. Really thought he cared.’ She stopped talking. She wasn’t thinking of Kidney at all.
For a time Roland played with his boat in the stream. It was a lovely colour, his red boat, bobbing up and down. He moved his bare feet roughly to slap small waves against its sides and it still rode the water. He didn’t care for the feel of the wet mud beneath the soles of his feet and there were sharp things down there, stones and a fragment of glass and a piece of something blue and gold that seemed to move as the water rolled over it. It wasn’t a fish and it wasn’t a jewel. He would have touched it if he hadn’t been alone. Once a strand of wet moss clung to his ankle and he hated that. He put his fingers in the stream and pulled, and it wrapped itself round his wrist like a green bracelet. He held his arm up in the air, water dripping from the sleeve of his blue jumper, and shuddered with revulsion. The moss fell into the water and slid away downstream. He picked up his boat and climbed on to the wooden bridge and put on his sandals, rubbing his wrist against the cloth of his trousers. ‘I don’t like that,’ he said out loud. From somewhere behind him he could hear voices, high up on the hillside, up there where the pines grew. He twisted his head and thought he saw pieces of another hut, painted white, fragmented by the branches of the trees. He began to run up the steep slope towards Hut 4.
He had to stop after a time; he was just too tired. He wasn’t cold any more. His cheeks burned and the fringe of hair clung to his forehead. Everything was motionless about him, everything just like a painting he might do at school: all the leaves on all the trees exactly in their places, bits of green paper cut into ragged shapes and gummed against the sky. The hut was up there beyond that beech tree and if he climbed the slope he would be there, except that he must go by the path because the other way there might be nettles and nests of wild bees and perhaps even a snake. His father would never bother with the path, or George, but then his father had big rubber gumboots that crushed the nettles underfoot and George was the tallest man in the world and nothing could harm him.
Slowly he continued along the path. His mother, he thought, would probably be missing him now or having a rest on the Victorian sofa in the living-room, all her hair in little curls about her neck and one fat hand clutching her handkerchief. When she woke she would call his name and then reach for her cigarettes; they would be near but he wouldn’t be. She had told him over and over to be nice to Joseph and give him lots of kisses and not to tire him too much. Lots of kisses, he told himself, watching his sandalled feet go along the path, curving round the hillside towards his father.
Then he remembered that Balfour had mentioned that there was another hut beyond the bushes, above the path. George had made it himself out of planks of wood, and inside there was a lavatory – not a proper one but a big can with a chemical inside that killed all the germs. Roland looked at the grass, pressed flat by the recent rain and thought of all the germs multiplying beneath the trees. Balfour had said that George had made all the huts in the forest, with the help of Mr MacFarley and Willie, the odd-job man from the village. Roland looked beyond the bushes and saw the square black hut with its door swinging open. He approached it from the side and searched with his hands on the rough wood for the heads of nails, but he couldn’t feel any. Then he bent down and looked under the hut and saw that it was built against the hillside at the back and that the front was propped level with red bricks. The grass underneath had died; it was colourless like glass. Between the mortar of the bricks he could see a spider’s web, the same shade as the dead grass. He put his head on a level with the ground and looked for the spider, but it wasn’t there. Something moved within the hut.
He saw Kidney, frowning and ham pink, seated with his corduroy trousers in folds about his ankles.
‘What are you doing?’
‘I’m on the lavatory,’ said Kidney. Earnestly he gazed past Roland at some point beyond the trees.
‘You have got white legs.’ Roland looked at Kidney’s knees. In the gloom of the little hut they glowed. ‘Funny,’ he said, ‘because you’ve got such a red face.’ He stepped back and examined the hut again. ‘You do look nice, Kidney. All those leaves round the door and you in your little house sitting there.’
Kidney shifted himself on the seat but said nothing.
‘Have you got any toilet paper?’ Roland asked him.
‘Yes, thank you.’
‘Are you sitting on the germs?’
Kidney wouldn’t answer.
Roland kicked at the door with his foot and it swung inwards and back again.
‘Go away,’ Kidney said.
Obediently Roland ran away up the path to Hut 4 to find his father. He found him on his knees beside the wicker basket. With a nail file Joseph was turning a screw in a white plug.
‘What’s that for?’ Roland squatted down beside him and watched the shiny screw come loose.
‘My electric razor. I’m trying to mend it.’
‘But you’ve got a beard.’
‘I know.’ He probed with the nail file at the veins of red wire, sucking a strand of beard between his full lips.
‘William hasn’t got a beard,’ said Roland. William was his mother’s friend, who missed his last bus home sometimes and was in the bathroom in the morning, standing before the gold mirror, scraping soap off his chin.
‘Oh well,’ said Joseph. ‘I like to keep my neck tidy.’
‘It’s a super toilet,’ said Roland. He lay on the floor and spread his arms wide as if he were swimming.
‘Lavatory, not toilet,’ Joseph told him. ‘Toilet’s too damn refined.’
‘They say toilet at school.’ To add weight he added, ‘Mummy says toilet.’ He moved his legs up and down in the invisible sea. ‘It’s all black and leaves all round the door – and that bastard Kidney sitting on the can of germs.’
‘Don’t you like Kidney?’ Joseph sat back on his heels and spat shreds of wire out of his mouth.
‘Yes,’ said Roland. He stopped swimming and looked round the hut. ‘Don’t expect there’s anywhere to put your plug here.’ He looked carefully at all the places where plugs might go if this were home.
For a moment his father was silent. Then he shrugged his shoulders and opened the lid of the basket and dropped the plug and nail file inside. ‘How right you are,’ he said, getting up from his knees and wiping dust from his trousers.
Kidney entered the hut and saw Joseph at the mirror, legs braced wide apart, combing his hair back behind his ears.
‘Wash your hands,’ Joseph said, putting the comb away. ‘We’re going over to George’s hut for tea.’ He avoided looking directly at Kidney. Roland had opened the wicker basket and was holding the useless plug in his hands. ‘Put that down,’ his father told him.
Blushing, Roland dropped the plug into the basket and fiddled with the strap of his brown sandal. He didn’t like being shouted at in front of Kidney.
At the far end of the hut, at the sink, Kidney dried his hands carefully on the red towel which Joseph had placed on a hook above the draining board. The towel was one from the flat that Joseph lived in, that he lived in too. He used it in the mornings before going to college with Joseph. He used to go to college every day, but recently Joseph hadn’t come into his room in the mornings and he had lain there in his bed listening to the sound of Joseph doing his exercises, the tea being made, the soft buzzing noise of the electric shaver as Joseph tidied his neck and throat, the footsteps running downstairs, the slam of the door and the final sound of the car being started. Only then did he leave his bed and go to the window, staring along the street in the direction in which Joseph had gone, imagining he saw the vapour of the exhaust still rising in the empty road. Then he would wander from room to room, not knowing what to do, picking up the book of poems given him by Joseph, not reading them – he had never read them – just holding the thin book in his hands. Sometimes Dotty came out of the bedroom in a long nightgown and a face white as chalk, not looking at him at all, not seeing him, as if he didn’t exist, looking only for the box of matches. He turned to face Joseph, nervously crumpling the towel in his rubbed-dry hands.
‘Do you want me to come?’
‘Of course, you silly bastard.’
‘I thought I might stay here and read a book. I don’t feel very hungry.’ Kidney looked down at the floor, lost in a vision of being alone while they had tea, sitting with a book, a good book, and reading all the words, alone in the empty hut.
Abruptly Joseph said, ‘Oh, stay if you want to,’ and strode out. Roland struggled to his feet and ran after him. Kidney heard him call ‘Wait for me’. Then Joseph’s head appeared at the window. ‘Come on, Kidney,’ he said gently. ‘Come and have some tea with us.’ Almost tenderly he added, ‘We want you to come.’
Smiling, Kidney lumbered out of the hut.