2003 - A Jarful of Angels (13 page)
Read 2003 - A Jarful of Angels Online
Authors: Babs Horton
The clock on the mantelpiece ticked loudly, a kettle hissed in a room that led off the parlour.
Mr Edwards’s voice drifted in from the shop, “Good day to you, Mrs Titley…well we were glad of that drop of rain. Right, one cob and four custard tarts…there you are, that’ll be – ”
The sound of the till ringing cut off his words.
“Let’s go!” Bessie whispered. “I don’t like it.”
“We can’t, it would be rude.”
“He might be funny. We’re not supposed to talk to strangers.”
“He’s not a stranger, he’s Billy’s dad.”
“Yes, but we don’t know him.”
The clock chimed the hour and they both leapt in alarm.
Iffy looked at the empty chair next to her. A chair waiting for a dead boy to take his place at the table. She trembled.
Bessie was biting her lip, her eyes wide and anxious. The velvet curtain jingled on its gold rings. Iffy held her breath. The air in the room was stiff with fear. She breathed out as Mr Edwards stepped back into the parlour.
“Well now, Bessie, as you’re in my wife’s seat perhaps you could be mother. Just a second while I fetch the tea.”
Iffy looked again at the place next to her and thought of Billy sitting up to every meal next to the empty seat, waiting in case his brother came back.
Mr Edwards came back into the room carrying a heavy tray. She forgot about Billy then, and his dead brother. On the tray was a teapot shaped like a house, a china house with a roof and a chimney, with windows and doors, with a spout growing out of one wall and a handle from another. There were three plates full of cakes, the most dainty, miniature cakes she’d ever seen. They were beautiful. Tiny, thumb-sized chocolate eclairs, marzipan fruits – oranges and lemons with tiny green leaves, bananas and bunches of grapes – butterfly cakes, tiny ring doughnuts that looked light enough to float around the parlour.
A feast. Food for queens and kings.
Not the sort of food Iffy and Bessie ever got to eat.
“Well, Bessie, you be mother.”
Bessie smiled proudly and carefully lifted up the beautiful teapot house and poured three cups of tea.
“Pour a cup for Johnny too. I expect he’ll be wanting to wet his whistle.”
Bessie poured a fourth cup, but when she laid down the cup in front of the empty place her hand shook and the cup rattled noisily against the saucer. She blushed with embarrassment.
Iffy watched the curtained doorway with one eye in case Billy’s brother should choose today to come back from the dead and join them at the table.
Mr Edwards beamed at them and offered around the plates of tiny cakes. They took a ring doughnut each, and ate carefully, licking the sugar from their fingers and lips.
Mr Edwards offered the plate again.
They ate steadily, slowly and politely, savouring every sweet mouthful.
The cakes and tiny fruits were delicious but when Mr Edwards laid out a selection of cakes on Johnny’s plate, Iffy’s appetite slipped away.
“Of course, I expect Billy’s told you all about his brother,” he said nodding at the empty chair.
Iffy tried hard to swallow but couldn’t. The marzipan grapes stuck in her throat. She thought Mr Edwards must be a mad man. How could Billy have told? Mr Edwards must know that his own son couldn’t speak.
“It was Billy’s birthday…his fifth. They went for a walk over the mountain to visit his auntie…his mam’s sister, but of course they never arrived.”
The clock on the mantelpiece ticked sadly. The tulips in the silver vase dropped their heads.
Bessie began to wheeze, a slow rattle like a train going into a tunnel.
“There was a big wheel up the mountain, you’ve seen one like it I expect, it pulls the drams of coal along on wires.”
Iffy nodded.
Bessie rattled.
“It was just a game to the big boys – swinging on the wires.”
Across the table from Iffy, Bessie’s chest clanked noisily.
Mr Edwards sipped his tea and stayed silent for a few minutes.
Iffy swallowed her tea loudly and felt herself go red.
“Eat up, girls.”
They helped themselves reluctantly to more cakes but the charm had gone out of them.
“Some dropped off straight away but the biggest and daftest hung on and just before they reached the wheel they let go.”
Mr Edwards’s eyes brimmed with tears. The girls looked down into their laps.
“Eat up, girls.”
They ate unwillingly out of frightened politeness.
Iffy could hear Bessie’s bony knees knocking together under the table.
“My boys stopped to watch.”
Tears dropped from Mr Edwards’s eyes, big fat milky tears that ran over his round pink cheeks, down his neck and were soaked up by his shirt collar.
“One of the big boys dared our Johnny to have a go…but he wouldn’t, he was sensible, see.”
Outside the window in another world a bird sang a cheery song.
Mr Edwards stood up so suddenly that the cups rattled on the saucers. He screamed out, “Chicken!”
Bessie choked on her tea.
“Wark! Wark! Wark! Wark!” Mr Edwards flapped his arms against his sides like a demented bird. “Chick chick chick chick chicken!”
Bessie’s eyes grew huge and watery.
The room was a human chicken coop.
Iffy didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry.
Then Mr Edwards stopped as suddenly as he’d begun. The clock began to tick again. He slumped back down into his chair. Underneath his white coat his chest heaved with exertion.
Still the tears rolled from his eyes.
“A boy called Walters lifted him up to reach the wires, he was too small, see…Billy should have stopped him!”
Bessie’s chest was clattering dangerously. Mr Edwards didn’t seem to notice. He was talking as though there was no one else in the room with him.
“He rode the wires like the big boys, higher and higher.”
Outside, in the sunlight, in that other world, someone whistled a tune.
His voice grew quieter, little more than a whisper, “Higher and higher. Let go for Christ’s sake. Drop, you daft bastard!”
Bessie gasped. Her face paled, as white as flour.
“But he didn’t. Too afraid to let go he was.”
Silence. The clock held its tock.
“Somebody ran for his mam. She was shaving her legs. Luckily the men from the pit got to him first…They took him away in brown paper bags. Only his shoes were untouched…not a mark on them…brown sandals with crepe soles that his mam hadn’t finished paying for. The price was still on the bottom. Well, look at the time, I must get back to work. Any time you’d like some tea, come again. Come again,”
They stood up. Iffy’s legs were shaking almost uncontrollably. They followed him silently back through the curtained doorway.
The gold rings jingled gaily. The air in the shop smelled sickly sweet. The bell tinkled above the door.
Iffy and Bessie stepped out together into the bright sunlight, and walked without talking all the way to the hump-backed bridge.
Bessie was sick first. Then Iffy.
Side by side the two small figures stood heaving and retching into the long grass.
The rain had stopped by the time he reached his destination; dark clouds scurried across the sky, blowing away over another valley. Will stepped down from the bus just as the town clock struck the hour. He stood for some moments looking up at the clock and soaking up the long-remembered smells of this town, similar to all the other towns in the Welsh valleys. There was still the heady scent of rich, oily black earth and of rain-drenched nettles that made his eyes water. The bitter-sweet essence of coal smoke that rose up from the chimneys was not as strong as it used to be.
The picture house had long-since closed and was now a discount furniture shop. He lingered for a while looking up at the building. Written on the stonework above the double doors he could just make out the faded letters 0, Y and P. The rest of the letters had been worn away over the years. Olympia.
He took the faded photograph from his briefcase. A photographer from the
Argus
newspaper had taken it, he’d thought it would be a good ‘heatwave’ photo but it hadn’t been used in the end. Someone else had snapped a bunch of well-dressed kids over in Ponty eating ice creams.
Will studied the photograph intently. A black and white photograph of four children sitting on the steps of the Olympia. Four kids sitting there on a boiling-hot day, sweating in the fierce heat, their eyes screwed up against the sun. Three scruffy-looking urchins and the fourth one done up to the nines. A few weeks later and one of them had disappeared forever.
Will booked into a pub. A spruced-up pub painted in rich dark green and gold with a sign that declared it to be the Firkin. It was a long way from the scruffy pub it had been when he had last visited the town. It had been called the Punch then.
He took a slow walk up through the town. Once it had been a thriving, bustling place, but was now a shadow of its busy industrial self. It had been a pit town then with the pavements ringing to the sound of colliers’ boots and the pubs full of worn-out men on their way home from a shift, damping the thick dust in their throats with a few pints of ale. When he’d last been here there had been a Woolworth’s, a busy Co-op and a host of butchers and bakers.
Now, almost every other shop was boarded up and To Let signs hung haphazardly above their windows. The few remaining shops looked to be on their last legs. It was a town decimated by the closure of the pits and the out-of-town shopping centres that had sprung up all over the valleys.
Only a few of the old shops remained. He stood outside one of them for a few moments. Curiously, Gladys’s Gowns had escaped any signs of either modernisation or decay. It was from another age and just the same as the ladies’ dress shops of his childhood. There were still the same white-faced dummies in the window wearing dated designs: tweed suits and olive-green twin sets, belted mackintoshes and day dresses. At the front of the window were a row of dismembered heads wearing wedding hats. There were still orange cellophane blinds to pull down in case of hot weather.
He walked on past a multitude of boarded-up takeaways, Indian, Chinese, kebab, Kentucky-style chicken.
It was a totally different place to the one he had known years before.
Halfway along the high street Will stopped. In the middle of the one-street town there was a sight that gladdened his eyes. The Italian café still stood there – Zeraldo’s.
As a young man it had always fascinated him that so many Italians had ended up in the Welsh valleys running cafes and chip shops. He had often wondered why they should have left home and hearth in Italy and set off to a damp, industrial place like Wales to sell ice cream and chips.
Will peeped in through the misted-up window. A very old man stood behind the counter polishing glass tumblers. Looking up he saw Will and gave him a gold-toothed smile. Will smiled back.
A blue-eyed child in a window seat stared up at Will and smiled a gappy toothed grin. A child with a face smeared with ice cream and raspberry sauce. Ice cream melting slowly in a silver dish.
A little of the old place remained after all.
He wondered if there would be anything left of the past, any clues that would point him in the direction of finding out what really happened all those years ago. He doubted it. He thought that he had set out on a wild-goose chase, something to occupy a mind that didn’t want to concentrate on dying.
Iffy and Bessie, bored to buggery, were sitting on the wall opposite the Old Bake House watching Lally Tudge who was skipping in the middle of the road.
Every time Lally jumped over the rope her thingies flopped up and down. Down. Up. Down. Up. Until Iffy felt giddy from watching.
Lally wasn’t wearing a brassiere even though she had great big huge ones.
Brassieres were what grown-up women wore. Upper decker flopper stoppers. Over shoulder boulder holders.
She elbowed Bessie in the ribs.
“Stop it, Iffy!”
“She should wear a thingy.”
“What’s a thingy?”
“A brassiere.”
Bessie went red and looked the other way.
“You shouldn’t be looking, Iffy Meredith.”
Up and down went Laity’s thingies.
Faster and faster. Titties. Bosoms. Tits.
There were two wet patches on the front of her blouse. The patches grew bigger as she continued to jump the rope.
Lally smiled at them. Iffy smiled back. Bessie didn’t.
“Cowboy Joe from Mexico,
Hands up, stick ‘em up,
Drop your guns and pick ‘em up.”
“Bit big to be skipping, ent she?” Bessie whispered.
“She’s twp,” Iffy said.
Lally skipped on, her big daft feet raising dust storms on the cracked road.
“Look!” said Iffy, nudging Bessie again, but Bessie wouldn’t.
Lally sang the ‘Cowboy Joe’ song again and when she got to ‘drop your guns and pick ‘em up’, she bent down to pick up her pretend guns. That was when Iffy saw that Lally didn’t have any knickers on! She nearly fell off the wall and almost pulled Bessie with her.
“Careful, mun, you’ll rip my clothes.”
Iffy hissed in Bessie’s ear, “She’s got no knickers on.”
“Pack it in, Iffy!”
“Honest to God, Bessie, look!”
But Bessie still wouldn’t look.
Iffy did.
“Drop your guns and pick ‘em up!” sang Lally Tudge, and bent down again for the pretend guns.
Iffy saw her bum, her big fat arse. She saw it five times. It was huge and round and naked. It was white and greasy as lard. She even saw the black crack of it.
Then Lally changed her song.
“Nebuchadnezzar King of the Jews
Bought his wife a pair of shoes
When the shoes began to wear
Nebuchadnezzar began to swear.”
And Lally swore at the top of her voice, SHIT SHIT SHIT! FUCK FUCK FUCK!
Bessie did fall off the wall then. Arse over tip she went in a flurry of lacy knickers and frothy petticoats, taking Iffy with her. They scrabbled together in the dust, Bessie trying desperately to pull her frock down over her knees.
