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The White Horse Fiction |
Tony was standing outside Yates’s Wine Lodge, his hands deep in his pockets. The fog was thick now. His head was wreathed in it.
‘Have you seen the others?’ he asked, as Nina came up. She wasn’t sure what others he meant. With Tony, she rarely asked questions, in case they were stupid ones which would make him whistle through his teeth and then say, ‘Little Nina,’ in a way which even someone who wanted to couldn’t possibly think was affectionate.
‘They’re probably inside,’ he went on, moving towards the entrance.
The man with the violin was playing. He wore a shabby loose-sleeved coat which he never took off. His face was morose, but when his bow whipped the music which came off it was as bright as flowers. You would imagine a different player if you closed your eyes.
‘He’s getting past it,’ said Tony.
‘What?’ Nina was too much astonished, and so the question jumped out of her mouth. It was Tony who’d told her that the violin man had played with Toots Thielmans once. Yates’s would be nothing without him.
‘Little Nina,’ said Tony. His eyes were scanning the upper floor. ‘There’s Chris.’
There were five or six of them at the table, but to Nina it was dozens. Maggie moved up to make room for her, and a packet of cigarettes was thrust towards her. She took one and sat back, hidden in smoke. Bodies pressed in on either side.
‘Did you move in all right?’ asked Maggie.
‘Yes.’
‘Good.’
Maggie was twenty-five. She was in love with Tony, or at least, Nina thought so.
‘You want to get your own stuff up on the walls,’ said Maggie, ‘That’ll make it feel better.’
‘Posters, you mean?’
‘Yes, posters.’ Nina heard a tang of impatience in Maggie’s voice.
‘I know a guy who works in advertising,’ said Chris, leaning forward out of the noise, ‘He could get you a poster, Nina.’
‘You don’t know anyone who works in advertising,’ said Maggie, half-closing her eyes.
‘He pastes the adverts onto billboards,’ said Chris.
'They’d be a bit large for Nina’s room.’
‘They come in sections. He’s pasting up whisky ads at the minute.’
‘Whisky ads,’ repeated Nina.
‘White Horse,’ said Chris.
‘Oh!’ She thought of a white horse, as big as the side of a building, galloping across Mrs Bersted’s wall. Or even a section of a horse. Its head, perhaps, or a pair of flashing hooves.
‘I’ll ask him for you,’ Chris promised. ‘What’ve you done with Mal?’
Nina said nothing. She hadn’t heard from Mal for a week.
‘He’s gone to Leicester to score some dope,’ said Tony.
‘I shouldn’t have thought there was any necessity for that,’ said Maggie. ‘All he has to do is walk around the corner.’
‘Afghan gold,’ said Chris, and tapped the side of his nose. ‘Are you not drinking, Nina?’
‘She’s waiting for someone to buy her a drink,’ said Tony.
‘I’m not!’ said Nina eagerly, ‘I’ve got money, I’ll buy you a drink.’
‘We don’t want her going up to the bar,’ said Maggie quietly.
Nina took one of the pound notes out of her bag, and pushed it across to Tony.
‘What do you want, then?’ he asked her.
She couldn’t think of a drink in the world that she wanted to put into her mouth. She stared at the walls for inspiration. They was a metal plaque with Stone’s Ginger Wine embossed on it in curling letters.
‘I’ll have a glass of ginger wine.’
‘Don’t waste your money, it’s not even alcoholic,’ advised Chris.
Tony shrugged. ‘It’s her money,’ he said.
‘You have a drink too, Tony,’ said Nina hastily, ‘and Maggie and Chris - and everybody.’ She had forgotten the others’ names.
Tony took the order for the table, and went to the bar.
‘You don’t want to go buying drinks for everyone,’ said Maggie, ‘It’s not as if you’re earning.’
‘It’s all right,’ said Nina, but already her mind was making quick, panicky scampers. If each of them had a pint of beer, that would be ten shillings, and then her own drink too. She didn’t know how much ginger wine cost. Maggie would only have a lemonade or something like that. Perhaps it would be all right. She could get by for a week on a pound, as long as she ate as much as possible at school dinners. She would have two bottles of milk at break.
Maybe Mal would ask her to Sunday dinner at his place. She’d been there once before. His mum served up the roast and then they all took their plates through to the lounge so they could watch a film while they ate. Mal’s mum put her feet up on a leather pouffe which was seamed with deep cracks. Sometimes she made a comment about the film, and Mal’s thin dark face eased into a smile. Nina kept very quiet, on the sofa next to Mal.
‘Here’s your ginger wine,’ said Tony, and put down the glass in front of her on the table. It was full up and had an oily wobbling surface. ‘First time I’ve ever asked for that.’
He had carried four pints to the table first, balancing them carefully, frowning when Maggie moved to help him. Then there was a small glass of tonic water for Maggie, who never drank alcohol.
Nina waited for Tony to reach into his pocket for the change, but nothing happened. She stared down at the surface of her drink. Her ears hummed. With a flourish, Tony produced a bag of crisps and dropped it in front of Nina.
‘Little Nina,’ he said.
Maggie eyed him, but said nothing. Tony smiled, as if he was waiting for something. Nina sipped from the top of her drink. After a minute Tony said, ‘It’s Peter Stuyvesant you smoke, isn’t it, Nina?’
‘No.6.’ She was not going to explain that she only smoked Peter Stuyvesant when she had taken them from her father.
‘Pity,’ said Tony. Like a conjuror, he produced four packets of Peter Stuyvesant and held them in front of Nina. She made no move. ‘Don’t you want your change?’
Nina’s lips hurt. Probably it was the ginger wine. She swallowed down the taste. ‘Thank you, Tony,’ she said. Maggie shot Tony a dark look.
It was two days later that she met Chris in the Black Olive. He was carrying four long rolls of heavy paper.
‘Here’s your white horse. No, don’t unroll it now.’
Nina was sitting alone. She knew Chris wouldn’t stay, because he hated poncey coffee bars full of students. She stroked the smooth back of the paper. It was time for her to go. Last time she’d sat more than two hours over a cup of coffee, doing her art homework in the warm, before the owner came over and asked if she was going to pay him rent for the table, seeing as she wasn’t buying anything. There were some friends of Mal’s over in the corner, but they didn’t speak to her and she didn’t speak to them.
Nina looked up. Through the window she saw a girl coming down the narrow passage to the entrance. Her head was bent over something she was holding. Nina saw a smudge of white through the fuggy glass. The girl’s face was small, narrow and very calm. It was a girl called Sarah, who’d had to leave in Upper Sixth, because she was pregnant. She was two years ahead of Nina. She came in through the door and looked around the café. From the corner table a man raised his hand and beckoned.
Nina hadn’t expected the unwieldy rollicking of the posters as she unrolled them on the floor. If she could get all four of them laid out flat together, like a jigsaw, she could see how big the whole picture was and work out how to fit it on her walls. But as fast as she weighed down a corner with a books or a bag of sugar, another corner broke free and began to roll up. The room filled with a sickly smell of printers’ ink and new paper. The posters would never fit on her walls, even if she could get them to stay there. She decided to concentrate on the rectangle which showed the horse’s head with its mane flying free, and blue sky behind it. The wallpaper was old and pitted, and had come away from the skirting board. She would stick up the fresh new poster with sellotape.
She criss-crossed it at the poster’s corners, and ran strips along the edge. She had to bend down to fix the bottom and when she straightened up her head filled with blackness. She stood quite still, waiting for her vision to clear. When it did, there was the white horse, nostrils wide, glaring at her. Its head seemed angry at the separation from its body.
But it was better than before. Now she would boil her egg. The reason she felt dizzy was that she was hungry.
The eggs looked smaller than Nina thought eggs ought to look. ‘Pullet’s eggs’ her father would have called them. They were dead white, and cool from being outside. She cradled one in each palm, then lowered them carefully into the roiling water. A plume of white ran out, coagulated and began to whirl as she quickly turned down the ring to 2. She buttered three slices of bread and cut them into fingers. It was three minutes for a just-set egg, she knew that, but these were so small that perhaps she should allow less time. Her alarm clock had no second hand, so she counted aloud, ‘one and two and three and’ until she got to thirty, and then she lifted the eggs, one by one. The best thing to do would be crack them open and mash the soft-boiled egg.
She took her plate over to the table counter and began to eat ravenously, cramming the food into her mouth. Egg dripped off her fingers and she wiped up the drops and licked them. She finished both eggs and took another piece of bread out of the packet to wipe the plate. Suddenly her stomach clenched. Sweat started out on her forehead and she sat very still, clutching the sides of her chair.
There was a sound. A corner of the poster detached itself and began to roll up, slowly but with an authority which could not be interrupted. The poster moved across the wall like a wave, cleansing it. The horse’s head had almost disappeared. There was a final small sound and then the last bit of blue sky vanished as the poster fell right off the wall and disappeared behind Nina’s bed.
She had left the saucepan of boiling water on the ring. The sellotape had steamed off. There was a fine film of moisture all over the surface of the wallpaper.
Nina went to the window and opened it as wide as it would go. There was a chock to prevent the sash from running all the way up. The iron smell of the eggs left her. The fog that had hung over the city for days had all blown away, and there was a cold, wild look to the sky.
In the crook of Sarah’s arm, her baby shone like a star.