The Emperor Waltz. Philip Hensher
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noise, and his arms came up, as if to hit Duncan. The door opened, and the nurse whose name was Balls stood there, her stance inclined and concerned.
‘I’m just leaving,’ Duncan said quietly, going over to her. ‘I think he’s in a little pain, but we’ve managed to talk. I think it meant a lot to him. Thank you for everything, Sister.’
‘It’s my job – you don’t need to thank me. I’ll give him some morphine for the pain,’ Sister Balls said. ‘He does seem bad. It’ll help him to get some rest.’
‘And Daddy,’ Duncan said, raising his voice over the calls of pain, ‘I’m really looking forward to tomorrow.’
But there was no articulate response. Sister Balls switched the light back on, and went to her case on the chest of drawers for the morphine. Duncan left the room and walked downstairs. From the sitting room came a violent shriek, the parrot’s yayayayaya. He ignored the aunts and their clawed familiar, and left the house with the sense of a burden lifting, or about to lift. Somewhere, a knotted little Clapham presence, a girl in a one-bedroom rented flat surrounded by her favourite objects, intensely waited. He could feel Dommie’s northward gaze on him. She knew he was back in her city, and had gone where she would not go. He saw her, in the safety of her room, surrounded by animals in plush on the bed, animals in glass and porcelain on the windowsill. In her frozen menagerie, she was expecting him.
‘Thank God he’s gone,’ Rachel said. ‘I’m going to go upstairs and get the will – the real one, the last one. And then tomorrow I’m going to put it in a very, very safe place.’
But Rebecca and Ruth just shook their heads. Rachel’s parrot raised his head, and looked around from the back of the chair where he prowled and surveyed, and gave one reprimanding, minatory, regretful shriek. He was thirty-four years old, a great age for a parrot. Despite that, his voice was what it had always been, and his plumage as black, and he looked about him with triumph. He enjoyed it when he shrieked, and made the women leap.
It was later than Duncan thought, and the train back into town was almost empty. He stepped into the carriage, its slatted wooden floor and its damp-smelling upholstery familiar but not thought of for months. At the far end of the carriage, a middle-aged black man sat, reading his book. Duncan put his bag on the seat opposite, and opened it. The Embassy would just be opening now. There was no reason not to go. It would be good to spend his first night back in London with a stranger; to get fucked by someone whose name he couldn’t quite remember at the exact moment his father was dying. The suitcases would turn up tomorrow – something else to look forward to. But in the meantime he had the clothes he had been wearing that morning in Sicily, changed out of in the toilets at Charles de Gaulle; a satin pair of shorts and a tight black T-shirt with an American flag on it. He was glad he’d taken the trouble to fold them neatly. He took off his jacket, there in the carriage, and then his white shirt; he pulled his jeans over his trainers, and folded everything. At the end of the carriage, the man had abandoned his book: he was staring, astonished, at the thin man with a shock of blond hair who had got onto the train and quickly stripped to his underpants. Duncan gave a mock curtsy to the man, whose attention quickly focused on the book again. The rackety bopping of the train’s wheels was going all disco in Duncan’s mind; the music on the dance-floor was in his thoughts. He could hardly wait. And then he wriggled into the shorts, glad that he had put on white socks with the trainers; he unfolded the T-shirt, and slipped into it. In his mind was the pump and funk of the two a.m. sweat machine, and the hot grind of jaw and hip after speed; and thirty boys he hadn’t seen for months. To the rhythm of the train’s wheels, he gave an unseen little pirouette, a twist, a shake, a small punch of the fist upwards, just there in the train carriage. And tomorrow he would call Dommie, as soon as he felt up to it.
‘I don’t know why we’ve got to come here,’ Nick said.
‘Allow it. Always the fucking same,’ Nathan said. ‘We were all right where we were. Then they say to you, you can’t stay here, you’ve got to come with us. So we come with them—’
‘Yeah, we come with them,’ Nick said.
‘And when we get there, it’s long, man. They say us, you can’t stay here,’ Nathan said.
‘Not downstairs, no way, is it,’ Nick said.
‘You’ve got to go upstairs,’ Nathan said. ‘That’s for you, is it?’
‘They don’t say that,’ Nick said. ‘They pretend it’s a treat, like it’s what they’re doing it for, like it’s total nang.’
‘Skeen. And we’re like wagwarn, having to eat all that food and make out you’re liking it, like,’ Nathan said.
‘Leastways,’ Nick said, ‘leastways we don’t have to be eating that food and shit. That looked rank, man.’
‘Don’t laugh at the food, man,’ Nathan said. ‘She said she was bringing us up some food in ten and it ain’t gonna be Claridges.’
‘Oh, man,’ Nick said. ‘I’m glad you bring that bottle of poppers, bro.’
The first speaker was a boy of thirteen, with dark blond hair in curls and thick, adult eyebrows. The second was his identical twin. Both of them had newly deep, grating voices; their faces had grown in large, unexpected directions recently, giving them big noses and angular Adam’s apples. They talked at each other, not looking into each other’s faces, rapidly and with London accents. The room they were in was a large study, with a picnic table set up in the middle with a cloth cast over it. The leather-topped desk had four drawers on either side, and a long drawer under the green leather surface, topped with gold inlay. One drawer to the left was locked, as was the long drawer. The others were all open, but contained nothing interesting: plastic pens, papers of no interest, a ball of string. On the desk sat a small hi-fi system; on it, a man was speaking over the sound of strings playing slowly.
Nick sat in the executive chair at the desk; from time to time he swivelled violently. His twin lay at full length on the green leather sofa to the side of the room, kicking at the underneath of the suspended bookshelves above him, which contained nothing but two dozen boring-sounding books about law.
‘I ain’t eating what they’re eating,’ Nick said.
‘That’s right,’ Nathan said. ‘I’m going to sniff poppers all night, I’m going to get so high, and I ain’t eating that food they’re eating. Did you see that shit?’
‘Who’s coming, apart from us?’ Nick said.
‘There’s that sket whose husband left her,’ Nathan said. ‘She’s got a kid who’s coming.’
‘Who the fuck’s that?’ Nick said.
‘I don’t fucking know,’ Nathan said. ‘She’s that sket with the fat arse down the street.’
‘That why her husband left her?’ Nick said. ‘’Cause her husband’s left her, is it? Was it ’cause she’s so fucking fat, he couldn’t stand it?’
‘Yeah, fat but no tits,’ Nathan said. ‘That’s bad luck in life, man, that’s bad luck. You’re a sket who’s fat, but you’ve got no tits.’
‘Not like Andrew Barley, then,’ Nick said. They convulsed at the thought of Andrew Barley, a boy in their class who was last to be chosen, whom they’d beaten with a torn-off branch from one side of the playground to the other, who’d produced a