A Partisan's Daughter Read online

  “Too late?”

  “He was fucking me. He didn’t want someone else on the boat to get in the way of the fucking.”

  I hated it when Roza talked like that. I found it offensive. It was coarse and vulgar, and I didn’t think that it reflected her true nature. She did it just for effect, with a kind of artificial casualness, and she always looked directly into my eyes because she was testing my reaction. In any case, I felt vicious pangs of jealousy when she talked about sex with anyone else. It hurt me to think about it. I said, “You make it sound like you had nothing to do with it,” and she said, “OK, I was fucking him too. I was fucking Alex out of my system, OK? And it was making love, it wasn’t just fucking.”

  “So, who was Francis?”

  “Why? You think maybe you know him? OK, he was maybe about thirty, and he was very nice, and he was tall, and he had plenty of money. I liked him enough. I could have fallen in love with him maybe. He made me feel affectionate.”

  “Did he fall in love with you?”

  “Sure.” She pulled on her cigarette and tapped the ash into the ashtray on the greasy arm of her chair. Then she stubbed it out. “Do you want to hear about being on the boat?”

  I said, “OK, tell me about the boat.”

  “It had a little toilet and you had to pump it to make it fill up. And on the wall it said: ‘Don’t put anything in here that you haven’t eaten first,’ so it was OK for vomit anyway. Down there I always felt sick if the boat was moving. And there was a little sign by the wheel that said: ‘The Captain’s Word Is Law.’ ”

  I looked at my watch and realised I’d have to go if I wanted to miss the rush hour. In any case, I loathed the feelings that I was getting in my guts, so I said, “Look, Roza, I’m afraid I’ve got to go. Can you tell me next time?”

  She kissed me goodbye at the door. One kiss on each cheek, and a kiss on the lips that almost seemed about to turn into a proper kiss. When I drove away in that shit-brown Allegro, and thought about that nearly-kiss, I felt a lot better.

  TWENTY

  Voyage

  I never even killed a dolphin.

  Mrs. Thatcher came to power, and everyone was wondering what was going to happen. I wasn’t sorry to see the end of Callaghan. I don’t think anyone was. It was all very well having a nice man in charge, but he hadn’t really been in charge. The most memorable thing he did was to sing “My Wife Won’t Let Me” at a conference. Roza didn’t care one way or the other. Her only political concern was whether or not Tito was going to die.

  At that time I remember being tormented by a song that my daughter kept playing on the gramophone. It was called “Roxanne” and it was by some man who sang in a sort of falsetto voice, and it was all about how she didn’t have to put on her red light, and it made me think about Roza saying that she used to charge five hundred pounds, and I was wondering how many men she’d had sex with. It made me feel repelled by her, without actually being repelled enough to stop wanting her. To be honest, the thought of it was also arousing. I don’t know why, because it shouldn’t have been. It was perverse. Maybe it was because I thought it increased the chances that she’d sleep with me. I still feel ashamed of having been like that.

  My daughter was beginning to be very concerned about my interest in the music she was playing. It didn’t seem right to her at all. It made her question her own good taste. I said to her, “So, the whole point of it is to exclude your parents?” and she laughed, but didn’t deny it.

  When I called round, the BDU was wearing a black armband again, because of Mrs. Thatcher. I looked at him and I thought, “I’ll give you ten years and you’ll be voting Conservative just like your mummy and daddy. And then ten years after that you’ll be admitting it, and ten years after that you’ll be out canvassing for them.” Of course I didn’t say anything. There’s no point in patronising the young; you’ve just got to wait for them to become whatever they were always eventually bound to be.

  Roza was in the basement in her usual greasy old armchair by the gas fire, and I was astonished to see that she had the BDU’s cat on her lap, and she was combing it. It was a black-and-white fluffy animal with yellow eyes and a pointed nose, and it was kneading its paws and purring like an old Mercedes. I said, “Roza, I thought you had a phobia about those things!” and she just smiled and said, “So did I, but this one’s nice. It waits for me and rubs against my legs when I get in, and at night it wants to come in and sleep with me. I’m not getting a pet bird this time, though.”

  I said, “Well, I’m amazed.”

  “Things change,” she said. “In the end everything changes, everything.” She smiled at me in a way that I can only describe as suggestive.

  I sat down while she made me coffee and looked at the cracks in the walls. They were getting bigger every time I visited. I wondered when they’d get round to demolishing the place and rebuilding it.

  She came in and put the coffee down, and said, “I was telling you about Francis and the boat.”

  “So you were,” I said.

  “He was nice,” said Roza. “You know, he had something sad about him. He made me feel like a mother.”

  “ ‘Maternal’ is the word.”

  “OK, maternal. Anyway, he was good with the boat. Always busy, always checking things. Always looking ahead at the sea. I was thinking, ‘Sure, he only took me on board because he wanted to screw me,’ but he wasn’t doing anything about it. Sometimes he touched me, as if it was an accident, and I thought maybe it was and maybe not. I thought, ‘Maybe these English are just very polite or something.’

  “Anyway, one day he asked me, ‘Why are you leaving home?’ and I told him lots of things, and then finally I told him about Alex, and I started to cry, maybe a little bit on purpose, maybe not, and we were sitting side by side in the galley, and he felt sorry for me and put his arm round me, and he said, ‘Hey, Roza, everyone’s had a broken heart. It’s not a good enough reason to leave home.’

  “Because he was kind to me, it made me cry properly, and he was giving me his handkerchief and all that, and I put my head on his chest and my hand went inside his shirt. It was an accident, but he thought it wasn’t.”

  I said, “And where was the Australian?”

  She said, “He was out shopping. We were in the harbour at Rimini. It was very romantic.

  “I said to him, ‘Sometimes I wish I was someone else,’ and he said something nice about liking me as I am. It made me feel warm inside. You know, and then we started kissing, and it all happened after that. Once he said he had the same problem, being tired and bored with himself. I thought, ‘No, it’s impossible, you’re rich and young and good-looking, and you don’t even have to work,’ but now I know that everyone’s escaping from themselves. Everybody’s on the run, and then one day you’ve stopped running, and that’s when you’re dead, and nobody ever gets to be where they wanted. Don’t you think so?”

  I said, “How come he had so much money?”

  “Bubblegum.”

  “Bubblegum?”

  “You know, stupid songs for stupid bands of pretty boys and pretty girls. They get one big success, and then, phoo, you’ve never heard of them again. Francis said it was called bubblegum. That’s why he got depressed sometimes. He had a big talent for composing crap songs. It makes you rich and also embarrassed. Maybe like being a good whore. Anyway, I said, ‘Why don’t you write a book?’ and he said, ‘Well, one day when I think of a story.’ I said, ‘You can put me in it,’ and he laughed. I said, ‘You know what? This boat, it’s like the Young Communist Pioneer Camp. You get up early, and you do lots of compulsory activities.’ He thought that was good. I think maybe he fell in love with me because I said stupid things to make him laugh a little.

  “I tell you what, I never worked so hard. My skin went all dark, and all my fat came off. I got so healthy it was like being drunk, very nice. I saw dolphins and porpoises, and there were birds that stopped and rested on the wires, and my mouth, it always had the nice
taste of salt, and all my fingernails broke because of the work with the ropes, and my hair even got blonde bits when it was black before.

  “Francis wanted to make the journey as long as possible, because he was in love with me and he was liking the fucking. We stopped everywhere. He wanted to show me lots of nice things. You know, it’s fantastic how fast you can go with sails up. And when the wind doesn’t work, you go with engines. A new harbour every evening! It was so romantic. My passport got full of stamps. What was boring was always being searched for drugs, you know, dogs on the boat and all that stuff. I felt guilty and I’d never even seen drugs before in my life.

  “I liked Bonifacio. Alicante was OK. On Gibraltar there was an ape that tried to take my handbag. Those apes, they’re like bloody Albanians for thieving. Portugal was nice; Figueira da Foz, Matozinhos. I never ate so much fish. And everywhere everybody knew Francis, the customs men and the fishermen and the taverna people, and everyone let us use their shower because the one on the boat was shit.

  “I did fishing too. I got put off mullet because in the harbour when you flush the toilet on the boat, the mullet eat the shit. They wait by the toilet hole, and you see the water boiling because of them competing for it. I thought, ‘Bloody hell, no more mullet for Roza. I’m not eating fish that’s made itself out of shit,’ but sometimes we stopped the boat and we caught nice fish. I caught the ugliest fish in the world, and it had big horrible eyes and it was all funny-shaped and with spines. I said, ‘I’m not eating that,’ but it was very nice.

  “You know everything on a boat is called by another name? Like wall is bulwark and kitchen is galley, and left is port, and behind is aft, and you have special words for knots and everything on the boat. Once I remembered them but now I forget, unfortunately.”

  “Weren’t you seasick?”

  “Oh shit, I was sick in the Bay of Biscay. It was the nasty sea. Storms and rocks and wrecks. We used the engines, no sails. Francis listened to the weather reports on the radio. He was always drawing lines on the maps, you know? Those waves were like hills, all coming from different places, and you had to try to face into them if you had the time to turn. If I was on deck I got freezing wet, if I was down below I got sick. I had a long wire with a clip and I was always attached to something, because of the waves. And it was raining, raining, raining, and the wind was sharp like glass.

  “We stopped at Arcachon and looked at the biggest sand heap in Europe and ate some oysters, and they had little red squirrels in the pine trees, very pretty, and then we stopped at Brest and we did all our washing in a launderette, and we fell asleep in there while we waited, because of being so tired. We went in a hotel and had a proper bed and a proper shower, and we ate steak frites. It was the first night we never did any fucking, but it was OK again in the morning. And then in the English Channel the big problem was tankers. They spoiled it because you were always watching out, they didn’t give you any peace. They were like whales, and you were feeling like the smallest little fish in the world.

  “You know what? Everywhere I went, I sent a postcard to Alex, and on every one I said, ‘Dear Bastard, I am very glad you are not here.’ It was very bad. I sent proper cards to Mama and my daddy and Tasha and Fatima. I kept thinking, ‘I can’t believe I ever wanted to marry Alex.’ ”

  I interrupted her: “Does that mean that now you wanted to marry Francis?”

  “I was thinking about it. About what I’d say maybe, if he asked me. Anyway, it didn’t work out. You know, one day I was watching the dolphins, and they were crossing the front of the boat and having a big game, and I said to Francis, ‘Why are they always so happy?’ and he said, ‘It’s because all that swimming makes you incredibly fit, and when you’re incredibly fit you feel glad to have a body, and you just throw yourself around a lot.’ On the boat I was happy like a dolphin. Sometimes when I think about how everything got fucked up, I think, ‘It’s OK, Roza, once you were happy like a dolphin.’ It’s nice, thinking that I did manage it once.

  “Francis said that in Corfu they’ve got stories about dolphins rescuing sailors from the sea, and if you kill one, even by mistake, it’s one hundred and fifty years of bad luck. You know, I had big bad luck after Francis, and I never even killed a dolphin.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  Getting In

  If I didn’t love you so much, it wouldn’t bother me.

  Next time that Chris came round I was feeling a bit sad because I had just heard on the radio that John Wayne was dead. I’d been listening to that Deer Hunter tune, which I liked back then, and the news came on. I used to watch all those stupid westerns in the afternoons before I went back to the hostess club, and my head was still spinning with last night’s champagne and cigarettes.

  Because I was sad, I gave Chris an extra big hug when he came in, and he was very pleased. It made him all smiley. I told him about John Wayne, and he said “I always liked James Stewart really. Destry Rides Again: what a great film!”

  “I never saw it,” I said. Years later I did see it, and I enjoyed it a lot. It had a kind of sweetness.

  Once I’d got him a coffee and we were sitting in the basement, and I’d lit up, Chris said, “You know, it makes me very anxious, the amount of smoking that you do. It’s like watching somebody committing suicide.”

  “I started smoking big in the hostess club,” I said. “You drink and smoke a lot. I only smoked a bit before then.”

  “Last time I left here to see Dr. Patel, he asked me if I’d started smoking, because I smelled of it.”

  I just looked at him, and he said, “It wouldn’t matter if I wasn’t fond of you. If I didn’t like you so much, it wouldn’t bother me, you committing suicide.”

  I had the impression that he had been about to use the word “love” but changed to “like” at the last second. It made my heart jump. Chris said, “I had an uncle who was a big smoker. He was a strong man, very well built, he’d been a boxing champion in the army. He smoked a lot, and then quite suddenly his lungs packed up, emphysema, you know. Because he couldn’t breathe, his body wasted away, and he could hardly do anything at all. Once I was round there, and I had to help lift him off the toilet. He weighed almost nothing, and his hip bones were sticking through the skin. He had plasters over them. Do you know what he did?” Chris paused for the effect. “One day he put a shotgun under his chin and blew the top of his head away. Brains and bones and hair all over the walls and ceiling. I was in the house at the time. It was the worst experience of my life, going into that room and seeing that horrible mess after we heard the shot and ran upstairs. My aunt lost her marbles straight away and died a few months later, mostly from the shock, in my opinion. That’s why I want to shoot everyone in the tobacco trade. They’re worse than Hitler. Just think how many millions they must have killed.” Chris looked at me very coolly, and I looked at my cigarette. I stubbed it out, even though it was only half smoked. The heap of butts in the tray suddenly looked horrible to me. He said, “You were going to tell me about getting into the country.”

  “Well,” I said, “it was quite something when you look back, but it annoyed Francis a hell of a lot. It was the first time that I’d really pissed him off, and it made me feel like shit.

  “We were in the Channel, and he said, ‘I think we should take you to Dover. It’s a proper port of entry, and they’ll have all the people there who can process your papers.’

  “I’d been dreading getting to this point. I said something stupid like, ‘Oh that was a musical sentence,’ and he raised an eyebrow, and I said, ‘Proper port of entry, people process papers,’ everything begins with a p.’

  “He laughed and said, ‘Yes, but what about entering at Dover?’

  “You know, I took a great big breath, and I had a dread in my stomach, and I said, ‘I don’t think I have the papers.’

  “He looked at me like I was a complete idiot. He said, ‘You don’t have the papers? What do you mean, you don’t have the papers? You told me you didn’t need
a visa. Is this a joke or something?’

  “I was very embarrassed, I was sweating and my face was burning. I said, ‘I was afraid you wouldn’t take me.’ He shouted at me, ‘Damn right I wouldn’t have!’ His eyes were glowing and fiery, and I felt like an insect. He’d never raised his voice to me before, and it was shocking.

  “So I did what I had to do, and I started to cry. I was saying, ‘But I wanted to be in England,’ and he was saying, ‘Well, you bloody well can’t be, can you?’ and I was saying, ‘But please, I want to be in England.’

  “ ‘I’m going to take you in and hand you over,’ he said, ‘and they can bloody well deport you if they want to. What the fuck did you think you were doing? Do you think I’m going to sail you back to Dubrovnik or something? How the fuck can you be so fucking stupid?’

  “It was the first time I ever heard Francis use any bad words, and it made me feel very frightened. I was crying and saying, ‘Don’t leave me, don’t leave me.’ He was saying, ‘I could be fined! I could lose my boat! They could put me in prison for all I know! Jesus Christ! I thought I could trust you!’

  “ ‘Look,’ I said, ‘we got in everywhere else.’

  “ ‘They were tiny places where the harbourmasters know me, and people like to visit for a couple of days. England is where every bloody foreigner wants to live, for some reason.’

  “I said, ‘Everyone speaks English.’ He glared at me, and I said, ‘Can’t you ask someone if I need a visa?’

  “ ‘You expect me to radio the coast guard and ask how to get a Yugoslav into the country? You’re madder than I thought.’

  “ ‘Can’t you radio someone else?’

  “ ‘Who, exactly? Do you think my mother has a radio set?’

  “‘OK,’ I said. ‘My head is made of shit. Mad bloody people from the Balkans.’ Then I said, ‘England’s big, yes?’