Unfinished Business...
EIGHTEEN
I ARRIVED at 400 West 32nd Street at the same time as Sandra. Stiffly, she eased herself off a tram and joined me in inspecting our new accommodations. She was wearing a green dustcoat sort of thing that presumably was her uniform. The colour was so bilious I felt safer in not commenting.
As we contemplated the place, Sandra described her day. It had been almost as boring as mine, consisting of engaging and disengaging the cable as the passengers got on and off and collecting their tokens, on which the economy seemed to be based. She had at least had a variety of views; her tram passed a factory complex and a couple of faceless stores. She’d talked to some of her passengers, and hadn’t found one who’d been here more than six months. I considered not telling her about Sgt Armstrong’s tenure but, in fairness, I had to. She was horrified. And I felt all sorts of a bastard.
The accommodations weren’t up to much. From the outside, the building was identical to just about every other building I’d seen in twelve hours of monotonous tramping around largely uninhabited streets.
Our new home’s interior didn’t rate a letter home, either. We found ourselves reporting to the landlady, Mrs Harvey, a flint-eyed harridan who would have been equally at home running a Dickensian poorhouse – and, for all I knew, might have. She laid down the rules – no running, no unnecessary noise, no littering and, most important of all, no fraternising in your rooms, thank you. She took us up to the fourth floor where Sandra and I had adjoining and identical apartments. ‘Apartment’ was putting a bit of a gloss on it. It was a gas-lit bed-sitter that had no kitchen, no toilet and no heating. What it did have was wall-to-wall linoleum. The toilets, we discovered, were in the communal shower blocks, of which there were two on each floor. That made one toilet to every 25 rooms. As a bloke who has always valued privacy in the bathroom, I was not thrilled.
The tour concluded with our introduction to the dining room, which was simply a forty metres by twenty-five annexe at the rear of the ground floor. There were three rows of four tables made of what looked like pine and each accompanied by eight equally crude chairs. A cafeteria-style servery was in action, three po-faced females doling out meals to a sluggish line of customers. Their ladles clacked loudly against the metal plates, emphasising the sombre quiet of the place, even though it was three-quarters full. Hardly anyone was speaking, and then without enthusiasm. I’d been in merrier mausoleums.
“You’re expected to take your plates back to the servery,” Mrs Harvey snapped before she turned and marched off. I reflected that, if there was a Mr Harvey, he must have done something really bad.
We lined up and got ourselves served. The food, in common with the decor, was basic; meat and potatoes plus tea or coffee. No sweet course. It wouldn’t have won any ribbons at the Royal Show but it seemed nourishing enough.
While I tucked in, I tried talking to the others at the table. Waste of time. They preferred to eat in silence; an uneasy silence it seemed to me. Then I twigged. I was still in uniform and making them uncomfortable. Some things never change. I whispered to Sandra that I’d have to dress for dinner from now on.
My little gag got no response. I looked closer at her, wondering if she’d heard. She hadn’t. She was sitting frozen, staring at her plate. Her look of horror was back.
“Mark,” she whispered, turning to me with huge eyes, “dead people don’t need food. Why are we eating?”
Bloody good question, and not unlike the one I’d asked myself when I found myself fronting St Peter. If I was dead, why did I need a body? A Descartes I’m not, but a little Mason philosophising gave me the answer, or one that satisfied me, anyway. Which was that we humans just do not have the wit to imagine ourselves in any other form – or with no form at all. So, to keep our trolley from jumping the track, we are given this illusion of continuity.
I offered this to Sandra, who thought about it.
“What’s the point? If we don’t eat, we aren’t going to die.”
That one was easier. “No we aren’t, but we’ll feel bloody hungry. Right?”
She thought again, then nodded. She smiled sardonically as she forked a spud. “Sustenance for the living dead,” she muttered to no one in particular.
She went to speak again but a voice towards the rear interrupted. A singing voice. It belonged to a Negro woman of forty or so. She sat alone, staring unseeingly at the far wall with mournful eyes. And sang in a most beautiful contralto. It was ‘Gloomy Sunday’, a Billie Holiday classic from the early thirties. I hadn’t heard it in years, but the plaintive lyric was unforgettable, especially one stanza:
Little white flowers will never awaken you,
Not where the black coach of sorrow has taken you,
Angels have no thought of ever returning you,
Would they be angry if I thought of joining you?
It was a woman’s lament for her departed lover and, in this place, possessed a poignancy that even Billie couldn’t manage. An ineffable sadness filled the room, and even I felt a catch in my throat. I glanced at Sandra, hoping she hadn’t seen my lapse from manly stoicism, and saw immediately she’d interpreted it differently. She was thinking of Angela. Her shoulders shook as she fought back the tears, a battle she soon lost. She put down her knife and fork and quickly left the room. I went to follow, then remembered Mrs Harvey’s stricture about taking back our plates. I whisked them to the servery, then followed Sandra’s footsteps.
I saw her door close as I turned into our corridor. I walked up to it and went to knock, but again the spectre of Mrs Harvey intervened. No fraternising in your rooms, thank you. Not that consoling came under the rubric of fraternising, I would have thought. Then it occurred to me – how the hell could I console her? What could I say? I’d probably make it worse. On that cowardly thought, I went to my own room.
I lay on the crude bed, not all that proud of my behaviour. The sound of Sandra sobbing didn’t make me feel any better. At that moment, I could have done with some consoling myself.
So ended the first day.