Decision taken. Tell you later. Much later. Like in another life entirely. A life without fluence.
Pendel brought his four-track to a halt just a foot from the car in front and waited for the car behind him to smash into him but for some reason it refused. How did I get here? he wondered. Maybe it hit me and I’m dead. I must have locked up the shop without noticing. Then he remembered cutting the dinner jacket and laying the finished pieces flat on his workbench to consider diem, a thing he always did: took a creator’s farewell of them until they came back to him, basted into semi-human form.
Black rain was hurtling onto the bonnet. A lorry was slewed across the road fifty yards ahead of him, its wheels shed like cowpats in its path. Nothing else was visible through the waterfall except lines and lines of clogged traffic going to the war or trying to get away from it. He switched on his radio but couldn’t hear it over the thunder of artillery. Rain on a Hot Tin Roof. I’m here for ever. Banged up. In the womb. Doing time. Turn off engine, turn off air-con. Wait. Cook. Sweat. Another salvo coming. Hide under the seat.
Sweat pouring off him, heavy as the rain. Running water gurgling under his feet. Pendel floating, upriver or down. The entire past that he has buried six feet deep, crashing in upon him: the unexpurgated, unsanitised, un-Braithwaited version of his life, starting with the miracle of his birth as related to him in prison by his Uncle Benny and ending with the Day of Absolutely No Atonement thirteen years ago when he invented himself to Louisa on an immaculate white man’s lawn in the officially abolished Canal Zone with the Stars & Stripes flapping in the smoke of her daddy’s barbecue and the band playing hope-and-glory and the black men watching through the wire.
He sees the orphanage he refused to remember and his Uncle Benny resplendent in his Homburg hat leading him away from it by the hand. He had never seen a Homburg before and wondered whether Uncle Benny was God. He sees the wet grey paving stones of Whitechapel jolting beneath his feet as he trundles trolley-loads of swaying garments through the honking traffic on his way to Uncle Benny’s warehouse. He sees himself twelve years later, the same child exactly, just larger, standing spellbound among pillars of orange smoke in the same warehouse and the rows of ladies’ summer frocks like convent martyrs and the flames licking at their feet.
He sees Uncle Benny with his hands cupped to his mouth yelling, ‘Run, Harry boy, you stupid tart, where’s your imagination?’ to the accompaniment of ringing bells and the clatter of Benny’s hastily departing footsteps. And himself locked in a quicksand, can’t move hand or limb. He sees blue uniforms wading towards him, seizing him, dragging him to the van, and the kindly sergeant holding up the empty paraffin can, smiling like any decent father. ‘Is this yours, by any chance, Mr Hymie, sir, or did you just happen to have it in your hand?’
‘I can’t move my legs,’ Pendel explains to the kindly sergeant. “They’re stuck. It’s like a cramp or something. I ought to run away but I can’t.’
‘Don’t worry, son. We’ll soon put that right,’ the kindly sergeant says.
He sees himself standing bone-thin and naked against the brick wall of the police cell. And the long slow night-time while the blue uniforms take it in turns to hit him, the way they hit Marta but with more deliberation, and more pints of beer under their belts. And the kindly sergeant, who is such a decent father, urging them on. Until the water covers him over and he drowns.
The rain ends. It never happened. Cars sparkling, everybody happy to go home. Pendel tired to death. Starts the engine and the slow crawl forward, propping both forearms on the wheel. Watches out for dangerous debris. Starts to smile, hearing Uncle Benny.
‘It was an explosion, Harry boy,’ Uncle Benny whispered through his tears. ‘An explosion of the flesh.’
Without the weekly prison visits Uncle Benny would never have been so forthcoming about Pendel’s origins. But the sight of his nephew seated to attention before him in his box-pleated denims with his name on the pocket is more than Benny’s good guilty heart can bear, never mind how many cheesecakes and books on keeping fit Auntie Ruth sends along with him, or how many times Benny chokes out his thanks that Pendel has kept faith through all the circumstances. He means, kept shtumm.