The White Room Read Free

worst. He had been sick the first time the skin lorry had turned up at the slaughterhouse. Bovine hide expertly cut, pig skin blowtorched to remove hairs then stripped from the dead animal. Waste, meat by-products, turned into coats, shoes, watchstraps, belts, anything. There was no limit to human ingenuity. The smell of the skin as it was loaded on to the skin lorry, the smell of the lorry from years of accumulation was rank. He had piled them in, gagging as he did so, vowing never to do it again.
    He shook his head, tried to trade blood air for industrial air.
    Scotswood hadn’t changed. It looked just as it had when he had left three years previously. The river’s-edge factories and gasometers still fronted a dark, sluggish Tyne. Chimneys still pumped out clouds, cloaking and choking the city, turning red brick to black, white paint to grey. Street cobbles worn and dusty, like seaside pebbles awaiting the splash of waves to shine them up. The lines and blocks of uniform, flat-fronted terraces stretching from factories upwards to Benwell and the West Road as if trying to escape.
    Nothing had changed.
    Except the world.
    And Jack.
    The lambs. They affected him the most. They arrived in vans, small and lost-looking, scared to leave the stinking metal shell, waiting to be led. The men would walk up to them, stick their fingers in their mouths. The lambs would suck, expecting milk, food. Trusting. The men would lead them to the pens, then the killing floor. Bleating and screaming too late.
    Lambs to the slaughter. True enough.
    He walked. Street after street, around corners, along roads. Trying to lose himself. Trying to find himself. He was hungry, empty inside, but he could think of nothing he wanted to eat.
    Places triggered memories. Brought back an earlier life. He let the memories come to him, hoped they would replace the mental newsreel footage he had experienced at the slaughterhouse.
    Lights flickered, film whirred. A corner shop where an eight-year-old Jack and his friend had shoplifted a quarter of black bullets, earning himself a strapping from his father. He had never done it again.
    A back alley where Molly Shaw lifted her skirt and took down her drawers to show Jack and six of his friends what was underneath. They had looked on, confused, as she pulled them up again, laughed and ran off.
    Topper’s front door. His best friend, now gone. Eighteen years old, blown up by a German landmine. He sighed, shook his head and walked on.
    The memories continued. The films unspooled. It was watching a life from the back of a deserted cinema, unable to join in with the rest of the audience, unsure of what his responses should be. The images were familiar, yet the language of common, shared experience was completely alien to him. Foreign with no subtitles. No one there to explain the meaning. A life of simple definitions: good and bad, right and wrong, black and white. A life lived in a far-distant country, a long time ago. A life Jack couldn’t relate to any more.
    He walked on. People nodded, sometimes spoke: a small greeting. Jack nodded, sometimes spoke in return. He walked on.
    He knew the way they looked at him. Surprise, shock. He felt their stares, could almost hear what they were thinking: no nineteen-year-old should look like that. Should walk like that. Not when you think what he was like before. And his hair … He knew they wanted to ask him about the war, what he’d seen, where he’d been, but he knew they wouldn’t. They didn’t want to hear the answers. So they would stay behind their windows and nets scrutinizing him, reaching their own conclusions. If they met him and had to say hello, they would do so quickly, just enough to catch the hollowness of his cheeks, see the ghosts lurking behind his eyes, before looking away fast and excusing themselves, hoping that whatever he was carrying wasn’t contagious.
    Among them but no longer of them, he was able to see Scotswood and