Frankie Styne & the Silver Man by Kathy Page Page B

thing. That was why the aerial socket was there in the front room, waiting.
    Next door had TV. She could hear it in the evenings. And probably the other side did too, though you couldn’t see because of the blinds. Alice and Tom would have a long job running through their possessions in their heads. They’d be defeated by the contents of their own fitted wardrobes and bedside tables: twenty, thirty, forty garments apiece on separate hangers; drawers crammed with underwear, socks and ties, swimming costumes; soft blankets; empty suitcases on the top shelf; five or six pairs of shoes; alarm clock, radio, cold cream, tweezers, paperbacks, massage glove, anglepoise lamp . . . But the 24-inch television set glimpsed in their front room was the only thing of theirs she coveted.
    â€˜That girl, Suki, was a junkie!’ she told Jim as she felt her way carefully up the stairs. She had never used to talk to herself but now she found herself liking the sound of her voice in the empty rooms. The words were heard, but at the same time left intact, like fresh snow.
    Frank lingered in his shady kitchen, watching coffee sludge harden in the bottom of his cup. He had drunk far too much of it but he knew it was not caffeine but the far stronger drug, fear, that made his pulse flutter so. Katie Rumbold, it seemed to whisper, Pete Magee  . . . He was frightened of the future. He knew that Katie Rumbold and Pete Magee had started a process of change—activated it, against his will. There was no telling when or where it would end, but he was certain that today was the first day of something terrible, a course of events which would work itself out step by step, dragging him along and, at the same time, back.
    Once the tiled walls of this kitchen had been painted in sickly gloss, the floor covered in linoleum. There had been a 6o-watt bulb, not spotlights. Once there had been a metal sink with a plastic curtain, matching the one at the window; a cream-coloured cooker that leaked gas; a counter, sticking out from the wall, covered in speckled Formica, which lifted at the edges. He used to run things underneath, seeing how far it would rise.
    â€˜Stop that—you’ll only make it worse. You shouldn’t have run,’ his mother had said in that kitchen on the evening of his first day at school. ‘You shouldn’t let them see you care . . . Come, whisk these eggs up for me . . .’
    Girls ran away from Frank—then John—the fastest. Their hair streamed out behind them; they gathered together around the corner, in a close bundle, like one many-limbed creature. John ran heavily after them. Everyone had a cross to bear, his mother said, separating eggs. Look at her and her life, but she wasn’t complaining: ‘I still have my Johnny, after all . . .’ And he had her. It would always be so. She hugged him. But of course, he understood much later, only for one of them, most likely, and as it happened, her. He didn’t realise then that he would sit for hours in that room where he had first met his own ugliness—the dressing table in the window, his mother in the bed, the photograph on the table by her side. In the last years she had been terrified that he would send her away.
    â€˜Frankie! Frankie Styne!’ the girls had called, mistaking, he was later to discover, the maker and his monster made of corpseflesh, scraps and tatters not fitting, doomed. Always they kept their distance, just so. They would not close that gap even together, even to be cruel. Yet neither would they run right away . . . He must be brave. He must stick up for himself, she said. ‘I love you.’ She did. ‘To me, you’re beautiful.’ He was not the only one. There were people far worse off.
    Have him different? Of course not. Or, only if it made him happier. Maybe the answer really was ‘no’: she wouldn’t have him