Dignity Read online

  ‘I’m behind, Dad, really behind. I’m only just holding on.’ I was almost crying, pushing bits of his stew around my plate. I needed to eat it. I needed to show him this was good.

  He steadied me, with an arm round my shoulders. ‘Right, well, we’d better get you back on track,’ he said briskly. ‘From tomorrow onwards, I cook, you work, every evening,’ in that firm voice he used to put on for porters and groundsmen and hotel maids, and also for the haughtiest of the old women who’d visit the hotel for a bit of that imperial charm. I’d not heard that voice since Mum died.

  Next day he started going through Mum’s recipe books and over the next few weeks he learned to make practically everything Mum’d ever cooked for us: shepherd’s pie, dahl, Yorkshire puddings, mutta paneer, chapatis and lobscouse, marinades, pies, rarebit, pickles and home-made custard. Mum wouldn’t have believed it. He filled our house with smells and memories of her, to nourish me. He started playing his records again as he cooked. That’s when I realised home for me was Iron Maiden and roast dinner with fucking pickles.

  I passed the term with decent grades in the end and they let me through into second year. Dad was so proud when he heard that. He made me and Leah a three-course meal, topped off with apple pie and custard.

  ‘Bloomin heck,’ Leah said, tucking into pudding. ‘This is like flippin’ Windsor.’ She always tried not to swear around Mum and Dad, although Dad himself could swear like a trooper.

  I felt awful. Neither Leah nor I mentioned that the degree I was actually doing wasn’t the one he thought it was. Education was one of the things Dad was traditional about. And neither of us mentioned Ewan, because boyfriends was another.

  I’d met Ewan in Journalism class in the first semester. His first subject; my second.

  He turned up alone, standing outside the lecture theatre with the rest of us while we waited for them to open the doors like a gullet and let us all be swallowed in. He was older than the rest. Mid-twenties, maybe. In the foyer, he didn’t chat to anyone in particular. The other students were nervy compared to him. Overcharged. Their conversations clattered against the walls of the foyer, which was shaped like an ear. He was still. He smiled at the conversation of the two girls next to him who were going on, in an insecure, grasping kind of a way, about the bits they hated in the new Star Wars film.

  ‘I thought he was crap.’

  ‘Yeah. She was pretty amazing though.’

  ‘The cinematography was awesome.’

  ‘Yeah, but the fighting was lame.’

  He smiled, looking settled into himself in a way the others weren’t.

  I followed him in, and sat next to him in the lecture theatre and then regretted it because he wrote notes on his phone the whole way through the class. He had the clicks on, so every time he pressed a key on the touchscreen it made a sound. I leaned over halfway through and grabbed it out of his hand.

  ‘Thanks mate,’ I whispered. ‘That’s confiscated.’

  He looked at me, shocked. Then he smiled again. His eyes were so soft.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, and there was something in the way he said it, too loud and a bit off key, that made me think, for the first time, was he deaf? His hair was over his ears, so you couldn’t see if he had a hearing aid or whatever.

  At the end of the lecture he turned to me.

  ‘Can I have my phone back, please?’ with a fresh smile. And again, there was a separateness, between the sound of his words and the shapes his mouth made, almost like he was marking the words out, mouthing them like old Henry does, and Henry’s pretty much stone deaf without his hearing aid.

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘But can I turn them off first?’

  ‘What?’

  He didn’t have a clue.

  ‘The clicks. Your phone …’ I could feel my face flushing. ‘It makes a noise every time you press the buttons.’

  ‘Shit!’ he said, so loudly that the students shuffling out of the lecture theatre turned round. ‘Yes, fuck yes, turn them off.’ He laughed, but he looked embarrassed, or perhaps more than that, ashamed. ‘Sorry. You stop noticing them after a while, you know?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said.

  I looked through the menu of his phone for him, found the right icon, selected off, and then handed it back. I’m good with stuff like that. Our hands touched as I passed it over. Heat flooded my face. He was looking at me, carefully.

  ‘Hey, look,’ he said, ‘I really am sorry I ruined your class. What’s your name?’

  I didn’t answer. But I did say, ‘Don’t worry. It was boring as hell anyway.’

  ‘I know, right?’ he said. ‘I thought it’d be interesting. Sex and crime. But turns out it’s totally not for me.’ His hazelnut eyes lit up, warm. And now I was laughing. I couldn’t help laughing.

  Although there was an age gap, we shared a lot of things. One of them was that both of us seemed to be making it work at uni without the maximum loan. And not from being rich either. Me with the care work, a smaller loan for the fees, and living at home, and Ewan with what he called ‘the discharge cash’, and his work at the garage where he fixed carburettors, exhausts and wheel bearings, with a skill that seemed to come from nowhere. He was mercury quick at it.

  All the other students have a cut-loose feeling that gives me chills, something to do with the debt they push to the back of their minds all the time, and the big nothing we all might have to go on to after college. A few weeks into uni I realised slowly that almost none of the other students can bloody sleep; the student counselling service has a waiting list weeks long. Midway through semester, a girl from my Lit Theory class ended up in A&E. She’d taken a load of tablets, left a note for her flatmates that said she couldn’t face the future. The first time in a while I’d heard any of them mention that word that’s been taken over by sci-fi and dystopian programmes on the TV until it’s just a fucking cliché. Future. I remember now how back then, even with Mum and everything, I’d never really felt the way that girl did about it. But right now, I don’t know if I can face it either.

  ‘She might find in the future that her liver’s been fucked by those pills,’ Anna, one of the other girls in that class told me outside the lecture theatre, from behind her black, asymmetrical fringe, ‘but at least they pumped her stomach in time so she’ll still be alive to pay back her loan.’ She looked at her phone for reassurance. ‘Fuck,’ she said to herself, shaking her head.

  When the girl who almost killed herself finally came back to class, she was stick thin, and there were bandages round her wrists. I tried to smile at her, but my smile was too sad, and she turned her pooly eyes quickly down to the hand-out the lecturer’d passed round to us all.

  Ewan was different from the others. There was something quiet and clever about him that I liked, and that kind of gentle kindness that only people who’ve known real harshness have. I know now that he was afraid of the past, not the future.

  Ewan was the only person I knew who understood the way I felt about writing and the course, who understood how I held on to it. Three years of pure learning. It felt like looking out over a big bright sea. Fresh. Glimmering. Alive. We’d hunch over course texts together, reading out the best bits, which sounded almost electric in the gloom of his kitchen. We worried for hours together over two lines of my first attempt at writing a poem, trying to get the words singing together just right. He had the same need to make the words sit tight, packed in, checked and checked again, and the same anxiety that they might not say what they were meant to.

  He’d come in, waving his latest marked assignment, saying, ‘You’re not going to bloody believe it!’ And he’d have got an A again. He couldn’t take it in when he got a good mark, as if it belonged to someone else. His smile had that fear in it that he couldn’t really own it, the course, or how peaceful things were with me, in Bay’s Mouth.

  He’d not come the usual route to uni. He’d had a whole life first.

  A whole life, and, as it turned out, a whole lot of death too.
r />   Despite his hearing problems, Ewan liked me to read him the poems I was set for my course. T. S. Eliot. Federico García Lorca. Siegfried Sassoon. He’d watch me as I tried to speak my way smoothly along the lines and stanzas of them, and we walked the tricky paths of those lines together.

  He only reacted badly when I read that war poem. We were sitting together, at the small table in his flat. I’d read the words and was whirling in how sad it was. Distant and close. I took a breath for the next poem.

  ‘Stop, please,’ he said suddenly. ‘Please, no more of these.’ And there was something in his voice, a rough place, a soreness his words caught on. So I closed the book, and put it away quietly. His hands, lifting his beer to his lips, were shaking.

  He’d lost his hearing in the army.

  We were in bed, for the first time, in his small flat, curled softly into each other, when he told me.

  ‘It was an IED. I was lucky. Some of the others weren’t,’ he said, looking away from me, out of the window.

  And just like that, it came into our peaceful room. It came in, and I could almost smell it, with us in the bed, its sick fury. And I realised it’d been there, in Ewan, right from the first time I met him. The shape of it, the shadow, of what we’d learn – much later – to call trauma. I was freaked out by it, and not prepared at all. Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq were just places on the news where a few lads from school might’ve ended up, the ones school couldn’t handle, or the ones who didn’t manage to find another job. None of them were quiet and steady like Ewan, none of them had that ability he had to pick out the right word and say it gently.

  Tender. That was the word for him, and the way he was with me.

  He sat up in bed, with a sharp in-breath, separate from me suddenly. A dry laugh.

  ‘D’you know what’s funny,’ he said, ‘I didn’t even hear that thing go off. Or I can’t remember it. Everything just went muffled and quiet, and it’s been like that ever since.’ He shook his head, sitting there on the edge of the bed, but somewhere else completely. ‘The only thing I can remember about the biggest sound I ever heard is the deathly silence of it.’

  The silence he couldn’t hear was loud in the room. I didn’t know what to say.

  ‘Our CO told me to use my brain for a while,’ he said then, turning again, a pale smile, and reaching out to stroke my shoulder. ‘I figured if Dad had a brain, maybe I did too. I got a medical discharge, but they pay me for the rest of my enlistment. I’m putting that towards the fees.’

  His mate Darren, when I called round at his one of the times Ewan disappeared, to see if he was there, told me Ewan’d joined up out of desperation, when he was only just eighteen.

  ‘He was a bright kid,’ Darren said, ‘but he’d missed too much school because he looked after his dad.’

  Ewan rarely mentions his dad, who was a teacher before he got motor neurone disease. He doesn’t talk about how difficult it was for him at seventeen when his dad died and their benefit was stopped overnight. But Darren’s told me. Ewan had nothing left. No job, no qualifications. The army was good money. A quick way out of a fix.

  ‘In a way,’ said Darren, sitting in his living room, surrounded by empty bottles and full ashtrays, ‘it sorted him out. Look how he’s just powered through that fucking access course – sharp as a tack, he is. Army showed him what he could do; saw he was clever pretty quick. But the army’s messed him up too,’ taking several quick swigs of his beer, although it was only eleven in the morning. ‘Him, and the rest of us.’ Darren’s eyes were clouded.

  Darren always seemed to understand what Ewan was going through, although he didn’t see him sweating through the nights, didn’t wake to find him half conscious and staring into the dark, catatonic with fear, didn’t see how he cowered at home for days on end when things were bad, nor how he sometimes lashed out if you touched his shoulder when he didn’t know you were there. These things, between Darren, Ewan and the rest of them, are just there in the background, assumed. When I asked Darren if it was PTSD, he said nothing. Turns out Darren had problems for a while after his second tour, and the doc said it was ‘anxiety’.

  ‘You get less money for that,’ Darren tells me. ‘And anyway it sounds fucking weak. Post-combat PTSD’s what you want them to say, if you’ve got to have a fucking condition. You can’t tell your mates you’ve got fucking anxiety.’

  That first night together, before the other nights full of nightmares, I’d pretended that I was at Leah’s, for the first time of many. I sat up in bed with Ewan, a hand on his shoulder and down his back, brushing his hair away from his hearing aid with the other hand. I kissed his ear. I’d learn that he could hear me with it. Some. But not the high notes, he couldn’t catch at the songs of birds except for pigeons and crows, nor quiet sounds, not my breathing now. I’d learn that his hearing was a wrecked landscape, very few landmarks left, high places, peaks, troughs, and no perspective, no depth. Sounds couldn’t soar and they couldn’t sink. I’d learn he still liked to listen to music, with me, and watch me for the way it moved, feel its plain beat through his body.

  But knowing all that was for later. My questions, then, were the simple ones.

  ‘How d’you manage at college, in lectures?’ I asked him, bringing his face round to mine with my hands. ‘Dr Madison ’specially; her voice is tiny. Even I miss half of what she says.’

  He nodded. ‘I can’t follow much of her sessions at all,’ he said. Then, suddenly, he brightened, and there was that laughter across his face again. ‘Have you noticed there’s a middle-aged woman who sits in the front row taking notes like crazy every time?’ He was grinning, holding up the question, knowing something I didn’t.

  ‘Yep – is she deaf too?’

  His belly laugh was dark chocolate, delicious.

  ‘No, no! She’s mine. She’s my note-taker.’

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘Seriously. Look.’ He got up, naked and beautiful from the bed, went to his rucksack, pulled out the notes from the lecture, and brought them to me. Perfect. Neat. Complete.

  ‘Wow,’ I said, poring over them. ‘Can I make a copy?’

  ‘No way!’ He grabbed them and held them away, laughing. ‘Strictly needs must only.’

  ‘I have needs,’ I said.

  ‘I know,’ he said, putting the notes on the floor and kissing me, my neck, my shoulders, then tracing butterflies slowly down my body with his soft lips.

  I introduced Ewan to Dad just as a friend, although we all knew what he was. Ewan stood, hopping about on the doorstep in Darren’s old suit. It didn’t fit him, so he just looked like faulty goods in new packaging. Dad, being a professional bullshitter, has pretty good bullshit censors.

  Dad took one look at him and decided he wasn’t good enough. But he invited him in anyway. Gave him a cup of tea and some hard flapjacks he’d made. Frowned at him while he ate them, sitting all awkward on our sofa.

  ‘What’s your job, young man?’ he said, like some kind of fucking town councillor.

  ‘I’m a student at the moment. Journalism. But I’m a mechanic too.’

  Dad’s eyes were scanners. ‘Journalism?’ His voice was that arch, ironic voice he used with the guests at the hotel. He looked to me quickly, and then back to Ewan. ‘Did you do an apprenticeship before college?’ Dad was looking at him in a strange way. ‘How did you learn to be a mechanic?’

  ‘I was in the army.’

  A silence. ‘And what happened?’

  ‘I left.’

  I looked at Ewan sharply. He had a ban on talking about his hearing to anyone else. But this wasn’t good. Fuck.

  ‘Did they sack him?’ Dad asked, after Ewan left. It’s not that he cares about the army. But he cares about people hiding stuff.

  I just looked at him, and said nothing. I didn’t want to tell Dad about Ewan’s hearing yet, nor about the dreams.

  ‘I can’t get the measure of him, Su,’ Dad said. ‘I just can’t get the measure of him.’

  I didn’
t call Ewan straight away after he left. And although I did eventually, and we carried on like before, it had set something off inside me, that heavy silence at the kitchen table between them. I should’ve been the thing they had in common, but the version of me each of them wanted was so different, I was pulled two ways by different kinds of love, stretched tight between them:

  Oh our Susheela’s a great girl. She’s got such brains. Her mum’d be so proud. Studying business at university – she’ll go on to great things, you can see it. I tease her, tell her she’ll be bloody well keeping me one day.

  No, not my Susheela. She couldn’t care less about business, or money. Susheela loves swimming in the cold fresh sea, oh look how she lies back and dips her toes out and up into the air. She read a poem to me last week, recited bits of it over and over. Said fuck twice because it was so delicious. She loves what she does so much, it’s like breathing to her now.

  Our Susheela, above all, has always been as honest as the day. She was such a rock during her mum’s illness. Through everything, we’ve always known we could trust her, and she had our back. Watch how she held us all together. I look at her, now, a young woman. She keeps me going. My girl. There’s so much of her mother in her. Honesty, kindness, strength.

  But my Susheela lies. She tells her dad she’s studying business. Covers all her books with fake skin. The Norton Anthology comes with a cover saying The Principles of Profit. Steinbeck hides beneath a red one, Business in Today’s World.

  And neither of them completely false or completely true. I started keeping Ewan a secret. And it worked, for a long time; it worked like a false skin will, until it breaks.

  I sit, waiting for Ewan in the pub. I don’t put anything on the jukebox, so eventually Keith at the bar puts on his own choice. Nirvana.

  ‘That man of yours coming, is he?’ he asks me, with a grin.

  ‘Think so,’ I say.

  He rolls his eyes. ‘Not sure, are you?’ Keith can be such a fucking busybody. Ewan’s never liked him, says he’s a creep.

  I say nothing, get myself a half-pint and sit waiting in a corner, with a view of the door, so I can see him when he comes in. I will it to happen: he’ll come in, smelling of the garage, as if this is a normal day. I’ll tell him. He’ll make it OK.