lipstick on the host

316 Pages·2016·0.89 MB·English

by  Mathews Aidan Carl

Lipstick On the Host by Adian Carl Mathews
Harcourt Brace;
ISBN: 0151525757
Copyright 1993
Train Tracks
All in a Day’s Donkey-Work Timmy leans across the arm-rest of his window
seat and tells the airhostess that he’s sick.
He might have told the cabin steward, the one who brought him the magnetic
chess set with the missing bishop ten minutes before, but he didn’t; he may be
only twelve, twelve and a bit, but he’s learned already from his mother and his
sister that secrets are best shared with women.
The hostess smiles at him. Her smile is brisk, professional; her eyes are tired. A
little fluid is oozing from her left earlobe where the pearl stud ought to be. He
wonders whether it’s tender, remembers his sister having her ears pierced by the
ex-nun on her thirteenth birthday. Did the Germans take the earrings as well as
the gold fillings from the men and women they killed in the camps he couldn’t
pronounce?
Sick?”
A bit.”
In your head or your tummy?”
In my stomach,’ he says.
Maybe you drank that Coke too fast. Would you feel better if you put your seat
back? Or if you got sick? Sick into the bag.”
No.” He has already stowed the sick-bag and the in-flight magazine and the
sugar sachet from the lunch that was served, in the pocket of his school blazer as
souvenirs of the flight.
We’ll be in Dusseldorf soon,’ she tells him; and she reaches across the other,
elderly passenger to rumple his hair with her red fingernails.
Now that she’s touched him, he has to confess. He hopes the other passenger
won’t overhear, but the man seems to be asleep, his mouth open, a dental brace
on his bottom teeth as if he were a child again, and a slight smell of hair-oil from
his button-down I can’t go,’ Timmy tells the airhostess. ‘I’ve tried to go ever
since I woke up at home this morning. I tried at the airport, in the departure
lounge, and I’ve tried twice since the plane took off, but I had to stop because I
was afraid that there’d be other people waiting outside. And it gets more sore all
the time.”
She laughs; it’s meant kindly.
That’s only constipation,’ she tells him. ‘It’ll pass. And now you know how
women feel when they’re having babies.”
She begins to move away as the elderly passenger comes to.
I could report her,’ he says to Timmy. ‘I could report her for saying things like
that.”
Timmy doesn’t answer. Instead, he stares out the window, tilting his glasses
slightly on the bridge of his nose to bring the countryside beneath him into
sharper definition. What do women feel when they’re having babies, and why is
it wrong to say so? His stomach tightens again, the pressure to pass a motion
makes him gasp.
Are you all right?”
Yes. Thank you.”
The elderly passenger in the next seat holds a Ventolin inhaler to his mouth, and
sucks sharply on it. After ten or fifteen seconds, he exhales again slowly, as if he
were blowing invisible smoke rings. He glances at Timmy.
The good life,’ he says.
Were you in the army during the war?”
Yes. I was.”
Timmy’s delighted. He puts the bottoms of two pawn pieces together, and their
magnets meet precisely.
In the commandos?”
In catering.” The boy’s face falls. ‘Don’t despise it. An army marches on its
stomach.”
But Timmy looks away at the window. Far below him, he can see a river that
must be the Rhine, a thin tapeworm the colour of concrete; and near it a road,
perhaps an autobahn, a relic of the Reich. But where are the train tracks?
Surely there must be train tracks between Dusseldorf and the city of Krefeld
where the Sterms have their home. After all, there are train tracks every where in
this strange, sinister land; and the train tracks lead from the cities through the
country to the concentration camps, and everybody knew that they did, knew at
the time, and said nothing.
The boy thinks of the depots, of the huddled deportees. He thinks of the
chemists, the teachers, the mezzo-sopranos, squeezed into stifling cattle-trucks,
sealed carriages; men with beards who had lectured in anatomy, artists and
actresses whose dressing-rooms were lavish with insect-eating plants from
Argentina; people who could talk in three languages, yet who had to pull their
dresses up or their trousers down and squat over straw while the train roared
towards the watchtowers.
Would you like to see the cockpit?”
The hostess beams at him. She seems revived. Or is she coming back because of
what the elderly man said? Could she lose her job because of him?
No, thank you.”
Don’t you want to be a pilot when you grow up?”
He looks at her, at the weeping earlobe, a wisp of brown hair black at the roots.
No,’ he says. ‘I want to be aJew.”
She frowns, the elderly passenger turns to stare at him; and the plane begins its
descent.
His classmates troop through the shallow chlorine pools back into the men’s
dressing-room. They peel off their swimming togs, and wring them out over the
basins, excitedly chattering in this vast wooden space with its lockers like
baskets. One of them whistles the theme song from The Monkees; another
pushes a hair-clip up his nostril to scrape out a scab.
I’m dying for a drink. Water, water.”
One of the boys, pretending to be thirsty, lets his tongue loll. A taller child
volunteers the tiny pink nipple on his chest, and the thirsty one nibbles greedily
at it.
There you go, my child. Suck away.”
Timmy twists his regulation gym shorts, twists and tightens them until the last
little strings of water drip down on to the floor. He’ll have to wear them again on
the bus journey back to the school, because he forgot his togs today, for the third
time in a single term. As a penalty, he has to write out the Our Father twelve
times, once for each year of his life.
Into the showers! Into the showers! Quickly, quickly!” It’s Mr Madden, standing
in the doorframe, shouting. He’s carrying the large Tayto crisps carton where he
puts the boys’ glasses and watches for safe-keeping while they’re in the pool.
Timmy hurries into the shower, jostling, being jostled in turn, the hips and
buttocks of the other boys grazing against him. He lifts his face to the hard hail
of the water.
Do it now, Hardiman. Come on. Do it now.”
One voice, two, tllen many, all of them. Timmy joins in, though he doesn’t quite
know what it is that Hardiman must do. The boy beside him lifts his wrist.
There’s a phone number written on it, a five-letter phone number; it looks like a
camp tattoo, it looks like You all have to pay me sixpence. All of you.”
They nod solemnly; they’re hushed now. Hardiman folds his arms across his
chest, and stares at his penis. One of the boys stops the shower; the others
surround Hardiman to shield him from the door. Outside they can hear the
shrieks of the prep class, dog-paddling on their yellow floats, and a distant
whistle. Timmy wishes he had his glasses.
Things are blurred without them. He has to squeeze the edges of his eyelids with
his fingers in order to make anything out.
You look a bit Chinese that way,’ says the boy beside him.
Do l?”
A bit. Listen, Tim, when you go to Germany next week, will you bring me back
some Hitler stamps?”
Any moment now,’ says Hardiman; and, sure enough, his penis begins to grow:
slowly at first, then more swiftly, it stiffens, straightens, and stands up.
The boys stare at it in silence, at its beauty, its lack of embarrassment.
And I didn’t even have to stroke it,’ says Hardiman. ‘Most people have to stroke
it. But I can make it big just by thinking. ‘ Thinking what?” says Timmy. ‘What
do you think?”
‘Never you mind,’ Hardiman says.
They’ve left the airport, arrived at the station, boarded the train and found a
compartment, before Timmy has an opportunity to examine Frau Sterm closely.
Modest and mild, she doesn’t much mind such inspection.
Instead, she smiles benignly out the window, watching the long, low barges on
the river.
The Rhine, ‘ she tells him. ‘The Rhine. ‘ And she laughs, laughs because this
strawberry-blond boy is looking at her so seriously, as if she were an
ichthyosaurus or some other creepie-crawlie in the Natural History Museum
where she brings her own son, Claus, on rainy Saturdays.
She laughs, and lifts her hands to her forehead to flick back her fringe. The two
boys will hit it off, she thinks: they’re different, and difference, despite what
universities may say, is the fountainhead of friendship. That was the aim and
outcome of these programmes, a pairing of peers, of boys whose fathers had
fought as enemies but whose sons, she thinks, whose sons will build rabbit
hutches together.
Timmy’s intrigued by the hair under her arms. He’s never seen it before.
Neither his mother nor his sister have anything like it. He hasn’t even come
across it in the National Geographic or in his father’s large, forbidden volume
called Diseases of the Breast. Is it restricted to Germans or to German-speaking
countries? Or is it found in Italy and France as well? Frau Sterm doesn’t seem
shy or secretive.
After all, she’s wearing a sleeveless dress. Besides, Europeans are different. In
Spain, his sister wouldn’t be allowed out without an escort; in Greece, she’d
have to wear a black frock if her husband went and died. The world is peculiar.
Are you afraid?”
She grins at him, showing her teeth. She has many gold fillings. If she were aJew
when she was little, they would have torn the gold out of her mouth with
mechanics’ tools. But she can’t be Jewish, and not because theJews are dead
now, but because she’s married to a man who served in the Wehrmacht, to a man
who got frostbite in Russia. So perhaps the gold is from a Jew, perhaps it’s
migrated from one mouth to another; perhaps it was used to the sound of
Lithuanian, to the taste of kosher sweetbread, and now it hears German
greetings, and chews sausage.
No,’ he says. ‘I’m not afraid.” And then, because he can’t bear her to look at him
without speaking, he decides to tell her about the presents.
I have duty-free bottles for you,’ he says. He can’t remember what they are; his
parents chose them. ‘I have a model airplane for Claus.
I have a Heinkel, a Heinkel bomber. There are a hundred and fifty bits. Do you
know Heinkels?”
Yes, ‘ she tells him. ‘Yes, I know Heinkels. ‘ She becomes silent again.
Timmy’s got to go to the toilet. It’s the same problem, the need to shit something
strong and solid that seems stuck inside him, the inability to shift it. He leaves
the compartment, squeezes past a woman holding a hat-stand like a stag’s antler
in the passage way. He excuses himself as the two of them manoeuvre, excuses
himselfand wonders whether she’ll think he’s English, and, if so, whether she’ll
hate him, remembering perhaps a charred torso under masonry.
Thank you,’ he says.
You’re welcome.”
In the toilet, he’s alone. The seat is plastic, not wooden like at home. And the
lever for flushing is attached to the cistern behind; it doesn’t hang from a chain.
Timmy lowers his trousers, studies his underpants to ensure that they’re not
stained, but they are, slightly.
How is he going to clean them without Frau Sterm finding out; and if she does,
what can he tell her? His mother’s warned him twice, three times that a boy is
judged by the state of his shirt-collar and the condition of his underpants. He sits
and strains, sits and strains.
He feels behind him with his fingers, between his cheeks, to where the tip of the
shit is wedged, but he can’t pass it. The pain is too much.
The toilet is dry. Timmy can see down through it, though there’s a loop in the
exit pipe. Sleeper after sleeper after sleeper, thin strips of gravel and grass, a
whirling monochrome, a rush of field-grey greyness. They would have seen the
same, the ballerinas and the butchers, their eyes pressed to the chinks in the
shoddy wooden goods trains.
The boy tears the identification tag from the lapel of his blazer, the one with his
name and flight number on it, the one the airhostess with the red fingernails had
written. He holds it over the bowl for a moment, feels it flap in the uprush of the
breeze, and then he lets it go.
Voild,’ says Mr McDonagh; and he whisks the sheet away. ‘ Voild.
That’s German, I think, or maybe it’s French.”
Timmy fumbles with his glasses, blows the short hairs from the lenses, and puts
the glasses on. Mr McDonagh has followed his father’s instructions to the letter.
His hair is more closely cropped than it’s ever been before. He looks denuded,
ridiculous. His cheeks flush pinker.
I was only obeying my orders,’ Mr McDonagh says.
The customer in the next chair chuckles.
Jesus,’ he says. ‘You look like something that walked in out of the camps.
When is it you’re offanyway?”
In three days.”
Bring us back some reading material,’ says the other man. ‘Will you do that?”
A bit of culture,’ Mr McDonagh tells Timmy. ‘The Rhine maidens out of
Wagner.”
Diegrossen Fraen, more like. Do you know what I’m getting at?”
Timmy shakes his head.
Leave him be,’ says Mr McDonagh, blowing quietly on Timmy’s bent neck.
The child’s a holy innocent.”
Timmy peers up at Mr McDonagh’s reflection in the mirror.
The boy I’m going to,’ he explains. ‘His father was in the German army. He was
in Russia. He got wounded there. It was the same year Mum and Dad got
married. So while he was sheltering behind some tank during snowstorms, my
parents were on honeymoon down in Parknasilla, except that the hotel was full
of priests. Isn’t that strange?”
Not really,’ says Mr McDonagh. ‘Priests had a lot of money twenty years ago.”
Do you remember the invasion of Russia, Mr McDonagh?”
Do I remember the day I got engaged? Of course I do. I was in the army myself
at the time.”
Where? Whereabouts?”
I was stationed in Limerick. I was in the Irish army.”
Who did you want to win?”
The Allies, of course. I wanted the Allies to win. But …”
‘But what?”
Mr McDonagh cleans his glasses with the end of his navy-blue tie.
I wanted the Allies to get a bloody good thrashing first. After what the British
done to us.”
The boy looks down at his lap, around at the floor. Thick tufts of his own hair
litter the lino. It was strange to think that your own bits and pieces, toenails,
fingernails, follicles of skin, strands of hair, an assortment of your own bodily
parts, could be sorted out and swept away, like dog-dirt or a broken salt-cellar.
And it was still stranger to imagine the small, sodden mounds of human hair that
the barbers of Belsen and Buchenwald had shaved from schoolchildren, from
tots whose first teeth were still intact, from teenagers who cycled bikes without
holding the handlebars.
What about the Jews, Mr McDonagh? Did you know about the Jews?”
Ah, the Jews,’ he says, shaking the sheet he has taken from Timmy.
‘TheJews.
A very versatile people. Sure, every second actor is aJew; and they’re all over
Hollywood. What happened to theJews was such a pity.”
The other customer clears his throat. A soft ball of phlegm sits on his under-lip.
There’s some lovelyJewish women as well,’ he says. ‘Not so grossen now, but
every bit asfrauen. Now why the fuck wasn’t I born in Munich?”
Frau Sterm shows Timmy round the house. She shows him the kitchen, the
living-room, the study where Herr Sterm works on his legal cases, the narrow
ground-floor bedroom for any visitors. He doesn’t notice much at first, because
the whole house has a strange smell he can’t identify. Aerosol sprays are new to
him; back home, the maid cleans the bookshelves and the table tops and the
brass canopy over the fireplace with sponge and spittle, the elbow-grease of
ages. Here it’s different, a bright, brittle world.
You like it?”
Frau Sterm lets the bed down by pressing a catch. It emerges from the wall and
folds away slowly to the floor. Timmy’s never seen one like it before, or the