War

Abstract

War Simon Howells (bio) 'My mum says you dance like a fairy,' said the girl. We were in my street yet I had the problem. 'Some questions for you,' I said and she pointed her chin at me. Bigger than the rest of her face, it ended like a potato. 'Wha'' she said and I pocketed the t. 'Number one: Who is your mother? Number two: Where has she seen me dance? And number three: How does a fairy dance?' 'Fuck off,' she said. Her blonde hair was nearly white. Nastiness slid across her eyes like cataracts. I expected her to leave but she stayed with her body braced for a war she clearly thought winnable. 'Well?' I said and my street was round me, the houses an army. 'You're a poof, that's what she means,' she said. 'You dance like a girl.' 'Not like a fairy?' I said. 'Or are all girls fairies? Are you one?' It was the questions that did it. She wasn't used to the form. Or she was and she was used to getting them wrong. 'You're weird,' she said. 'And you should peel your chin and make some chips,' I said. I didn't feel good but then she'd forced me low. She went off crying. I walked the green. Houses were on three sides. On the free side, parking spaces. I knew every house. Not the inhabitants. Only houses were worth knowing. And maybe their front gardens. I now turned to Mr Morgan's. He couldn't bear anyone to look at it for long. As if we had a dirty way of looking at things. Rose bushes on parade. Measured borders and a perfect circle in the middle full of little flowers yapping their colours. It was a room, his garden. If anyone so much as breathed on his hedge he raced out followed by his wife, a small woman whose voice was bottled. Even when she was speaking into your face you wondered where it was. A girl came up. A woman really. Today's jeans marked out hips so that women became diagrams. Her legs went on for ages. If you started at the top you ended at her flares and high-heeled boots. If starting at the bottom you ended up between her legs where there was a tremendous flatness. She lived nowhere near but cut through our close. She looked too thin to pause, as if she might snap, but pause she always did. And she always mentioned my dad who I already knew was lovely to women. 'Hello,' she said and her perm wobbled. 'On your way somewhere?' I said. 'Just to the shops,' she said. 'I'm going to the club tonight, though.' 'Oh, yes.' Our conversation a kind of formula. 'I might have an early night,' I said. [End Page 124] 'Babysitter?' she said and I said no. My babysitter, a girl called Veronica, was a horsegirl. She picked up horseshit with her bare hands, something I would never get over. 'Mum staying in then?' she said and I nodded. She thought of my dad wifeless. 'Oh, he's smashing,' she said and despite her heels skipped off. I wandered to the beech at the top of the green. Mrs Tate, a birdy woman, was closing her front door. I could see her hat, round and purple like a sweet. She now walked up her steps holding on to the rail. There was ivy round the rail, delicately wound by a clever hand. The ivy was the clever hand. There wasn't much space for her owing to brambles on both sides. Waist-high and alive with bird and blackberry. Some said the birds never left and then became too fat to fly. Mrs Tate lived next door to the Morgans and one garden threw the other into relief. I liked hers better. Mrs Tate went to bingo every day but I preferred to think she was visiting a duke who showered her with tiny, expensive gifts. She smiled as she passed me, didn't react to the shout from my house. My name was in the second shout and...