2003 - A Jarful of Angels (20 page)

Bessie refused to go: she wasn’t going anywhere near Lally Tudge.

“Up your arse then!” Fatty called out.

“I’m telling my mam on you,” she said, head up in the air, ringlets bouncing. But she wouldn’t have. She’d never have said arse to her mam.

Iffy and Billy sat together in the long grass with Lally and made daisy chains, miles of them, while Fatty bent twigs this way and that and whittled away with his penknife. He built a small cradle and filled it with corks to make it float. Then he picked up the doll and handed it to Iffy, who bound it round and round with daisy chains. Lally watched intently as Iffy worked. Iffy handed the doll to her.

“Iss lovely,” Lally said, and smiled at Iffy. She lifted the doll up to her face and kissed it very gently.

“Maaama! Maaama!”

She handed the doll back to Iffy. Iffy kissed the doll on the cheek. Billy took the doll next, made the sign of the cross on its forehead and handed it to Fatty.

Fatty laid the doll gently on the cradle and secured it with some cord and white wool that Iffy’d pinched from her, nan’s sewing box. He left a long enough piece of cord to hold on to and then slowly lowered the cradle into the river.

The doll looked quite beautiful in its daisy shroud as it bobbed on the moving waters.

“Hold the cord for me, Billy.”

Billy stood up very straight and took hold of the cord.

“Now, we all sing,” said Fatty.

“What shall we sing?” Iffy whispered.

“My old man’s a dustman,” said Lally.

“Iffy?”

Something from church, she thought, something sad. She stood up, clasped her hands in front of her and cleared her throat.

“O salutaris hostia

Quae caeli pandis ostium”

Her voice rose high and clear above the sound of the rushing waters.

Fatty took out his penknife.

“Qui vitam sine termino”

The cradle bobbed dangerously.

“Nobis donet in patria.”

The doll’s eyes opened, blinked up at the blue skies above, then closed softly.

Fatty cut the cord.

The doll sailed away down the river gently at first, then gathering speed and shedding daisies as it went.

They watched until it turned the bend in the river and headed off down the valley to the faraway sea. When they looked around, there was no sign of Lalry. Just the imprints of her big daft feet in the damp grass.

Earwigging was a difficult game to play, but one of Iffy’s favourites. First she had to check that the kitchen was clear, then crawl underneath the kitchen table, resting her back against the wall with the oilcloth tablecloth as cover. She had to remember to shut the cat in her bedroom so it couldn’t give her away. Then she had to steady her breathing and wait, and wait…

At last, Nan came shuffling into the kitchen from the back parlour. She lifted the kettle from the hob, swilled out the teapot with boiling water and tipped it into the bosh.

Although Iffy couldn’t see her, she knew that she would be scooping out tea from the tea caddy which had a picture of an old king on the front. She heard the hot water splashing onto the leaves and smelled sweet fresh tea.

She kept very still, her knees tucked up tight to her chin, not daring to move an inch because Nan’s feet were almost touching her own. One move, sneeze or giggle and she’d be a dead girl.

Quietly she sniffed up all the secret under-table smells: cracked old linoleum, ancient cat hairs, disinfectant, woodworm dust, Fairy soap and lavender coming from Nan’s skin.

Iffy kept her eyes on Nan’s slippers in case she stretched out her legs and discovered Iffy. They were prickly tartan slippers, with pom poms and beady-eye buttons, which she had bought in Briggs’ shoe shop in town. Even in the summer Nan wore thick brown stockings, wrinkled round the knees and coiled like sleeping snakes round her ankles.

Iffy’d seen Nan undressing lots of times, down to her vest and drawers, but never naked. She’d never seen a naked grown-up. Bessie had only ever seen her mam in her dressing gown and once, by accident, in her petticoat.

Nan didn’t wear suspender belts like other women and her stockings only reached her knees and were held up by thick elastic garters. From the knees up there was a small gap of lily-white leg that stuck out of her salmon-pink knickers. Knickers as big as bedsprerads. Knickers knackers, Christmas crackers! The crotch of the knickers sagged down almost to Nan’s knees. Iffy thought that if she ever fell or got pushed off a high bridge, the knickers would work like parachutes.

Sometimes Nan hid money up her knickers. Once Iffy had seen a ten-bob note tucked in them, but next time she’d looked it was gone.

The queen of England’s face was on bank notes. Fatty had shown her how to fold the paper to make a bum out of the creases in the queen’s face. Bessie wouldn’t look.

Fatty had sung, “In nineteen fifty-four the queen dropped her drawers, she licked her bum and said, ‘Yum yum’, in nineteen fifty-four!”

Bessie had called him a dirty filthy pig and had run home crying.

Bessie’s mam had a picture of the queen above the mantelpiece in their back parlour. The Merediths had one of Napoleon. He was French and a dwarf, but a very clever dwarf.

Mrs Bunting came huffing and puffing through the doorway, dragging her wooden leg up over the step. The chair groaned as she sat down. Iffy stared hard at Mrs Bunting’s legs, trying to remember which was the wooden one. The right one facing her, she thought.

Up above the table, Nan poured tea. Cow’s milk and no sugar for Mrs Bunting, she had die-or-beat-us, so she couldn’t eat sweets or sugar. It made her leg go bad and she’d had to have it cut off. Fatty said they tied her to the kitchen table and did it with a rusty saw and stuffed up her mouth with old rags so she couldn’t scream. She said she still felt the false leg itching and in damp weather it squeaked.

Mrs Bunting was nice. She lived a few doors down from Iffy and she kept coconut biscuits in a wooden biscuit barrel, and she gave Iffy five at a time. She wore a hat even when she was indoors and in bed in the winter. She smelled funny. Nan said it was because she kept moth balls in her drawers but you couldn’t hear them rattling when she walked. Iffy’d followed her once, all the way across the bailey and listened.

“She’s got another one on the way, by the look of her,” Mrs Bunting said.

“Good God,” said Nan. “Twelve now, is it?”

They were talking about the woman who made babies. She was called Mrs Watkins and lived in Mafeking Terrace and didn’t have the sense she was born with.

“Don’t know how he knocks them out! There’s nothing of him.”

“AH skin and bone. You’d think if he had a hard-on he’d fall over!”

That must have been a joke, because they laughed and spat tea.

“Make a baby a year they do.”

“Wants to tie a bloody knot in it.”

“Mind you, she’ve stood by her kids, I’ll give her that. Not like some people we know,” said Nan with a tut.

“Duw,” said Mrs Bunting. “Never got over that. Never seemed the type to leave a child like that. Them foreigners are supposed to be mad about kids.”

Iffy grinned under the table. When she was little and didn’t know anything she’d thought Mrs Watkins made the babies with her hands, out of clay. She’d imagined her rolling out arms and legs, making bottoms, belly buttons and dimples. Putting an extra bit of floppy clay for the boys’ bits or making a neat little mark with a palette knife for the girls’. She’d pictured Mrs Watkins holding up the babies she had made, turning them over and admiring them, then putting them to dry on a huge Welsh dresser with millions of babies on it the way other people had Toby jugs. Iffy had wondered if she made them for other people and sold them like Mrs Williams who was famous for pickled onions and gherkins.

Iffy knew all about babies now.

Nan poured more tea. Iffy smelt the butter melting into freshly baked Welsh cakes. Her belly rumbled and her mouth filled up with spit.

The talk changed tack.

“There’s a state on that Mrs Bevan. God, she’s looking bad. I seen her coming out of the Punch – eight sheets to the wind she was – went white when she seen me, must of thought I was someone else. Said it wasn’t right what she done – ranting on nineteen to the bloody dozen.”

“The drink have addled her brain. Pity for Fatty, mind. He’s got no life, poor little dab. That father of his isn’t up to much either, he’s a right nasty piece of goods.”

“Fancy,” said Mrs Bunting slurping her tea, “they come and took Mrs Prosser’s cooker last night.”

“Her new one?” Nan sniffed. She had no truck with cookers. They were new-fangled nonsense.

“Had a win on the horses, so she says. She only paid the deposit. Never made no more payments. The man from the Gop come to take it back.”

“Dopey ‘aporth. Don’t know what she wants a cooker for, she can’t cook to save her life. All packets and tins with her.”

“Well, there was all hell up. The man come at teatime. She was cooking Albie’s tea.”

“Hotting up a shop pie, if I know her.”

“Crying she was, begging the man to wait until the tea had finished warming.”

“Up to her eyes in debt.”

“Where’s your Iffy?” Mrs Bunting said.

Iffy sat tight under the table, closed her eyes and held her breath.

“Oh, out with Bessie Tranter somewhere.”

“I seen Bessie and Mrs Tranter in town, in the Penny Bazaar. Iffy wasn’t with them,” said Mrs Bunting.

Iffy hoped that they wouldn’t lift the tablecloth and find her out. Fingers crossed. Eyes shut. Count to ten.

“I s’pect she’s out with Billy then.”

They didn’t look under the table.

“She’s like her father, that Bessie, mind. The spit of him.”

“No mistaking where she come from.”

Bessie didn’t look like her father at all. He was bald and limped. He had false teeth that clattered and chattered when he walked.

“I was behind Dulcie Davies coming up from town on the bus. There’s a whiff off her.”

“Filthy rotten, she is.”

“Like a bucket of last week’s whelks.”

Dulcie Davies was a lunatic. She lived in Iron Row. There were lots of lunatics in the town. Grancha once told Iffy that if ever Mr Hitler had invaded England and got as far as their town he would have taken one look at some of the daft buggers in the valley and run like hell.

“Something I meant to ask you, I’ve had a bit of trouble with mouth ulcers again. Don’t suppose I could have a little drop of that holy water, just to dab on them.”

“Ay, course you can. I’ll just get you some.”

Iffy put her hand across her mouth. She wanted to shout out, “Don’t drink it, Mrs Bunting!” but she couldn’t.

“Damn, it’s strong stuff that water.” Mrs Bunting made smacking noises with her lips.

The two old women talked for hours. Iffy was stiff as a poker by the time she got out from under the table and she hadn’t heard anything interesting at all.

Fatty took the lid off the box. The head of the statue sparkled in the sunshine. He lifted it out and laid it gently in his lap.