Get Carter (12 page)

Back Hill. The woods used to seem to stretch up to the sky. Except for the patches of red-brown earth that showed through here and there. You could see the hill from the end of Jackson Street. And although the hill was a natural place for kids to play, there were never very many kids up there when Frank and I used to roam about. We used to go up there on a Saturday morning and it seemed as though we’d wander for bloody miles. There were all kinds of secret places that were Frank’s and my private property. When we were older, getting on for sixteen, we’d stroll about taking turns carrying the shotgun, placing it in the crook of the arm, just so, like cowboys, Wellingtons making that good slopping sound, lumber jacket collars turned up, taking things slow, occasionally stopping in a hidden hollow, squatting down on our haunches, just looking around, cold breath curling up to the grey sky, not talking, feeling just right. Of course that was before I met Albert Swift. Before the fight between me and my dad. Before the driving. Before Ansley School. Before a lot of things. But it used to be a great place to be. You could walk to the top (and there was a top, a small flat plateau covered in grass that whipped about in the wind) and you wouldn’t turn round until you got to this plateau and then you’d look down and over the tops of the trees and you’d see the town lying there, just as though it had been chucked down in handfuls: the ring of steelworks, the wolds ten miles away
to the right rising up from the river plain, the river itself eight miles away dead ahead, a gleaming broadness, and more wolds, even higher, receding beyond it. And above it all, the broad sky, wider than any other sky could be, soaring and sweeping, pushed along by the north winds.

This place, the plateau, was where we’d spend most of our time on Back Hill. In March, we’d huddle under the one bush that grew right on the edge, and we’d be just below the edge, on a sandy ridge, out of the wind, and we’d watch the March wind beat up the white horses on the river. In August, we’d lie on our backs and look up at the blue sky with its pink flecks on our eyes and a tall blade of grass would occasionally incline into my vision and Frank would talk really more to himself than to me about what he liked and what he’d like to do. Jack, he’d say, those seventy-eights I got yesterday in Arcade, don’t you reckon that that one by the Benny Goodman Sextet “Don’t Be That Way,” was the best? That drumming by Gene Krupa. Hell! Wouldn’t it be great to be able to do that? But if you could, you couldn’t do it in this hole. Nobody’s interested. They’d say it was a row. You can do things like that in America. They encourage you because they think jazz is dead good. America. That’d be the place, though, wouldn’t it? Imagine. Those cars with all those springs that rock back and forwards like a see-saw when you put the brakes on. You can drive one of them when you’re sixteen over there. Just think, our kid. Driving one of those along one of them highways wearing a drape suit with no tie, like Richard Widmark, with the radio on real loud listening to Benny Goodman. Cor! I reckon when I leave school I’ll go to America. Work my passage. I could easy get a job. Even labourers out there get fifty quid a week. Electricians and that can get two hundred. They can. And you can go to pictures at two in morning and see three pictures in one programme. You could get one of them houses with big lawns and no fences.

I drove down the hill past the houses with the big lawns and no fences.

The Cecil. I parked the car again and went in. The lights were lower now. A crooner in a John Collier suit was trying to sound like Vince Hill. I went over to the bar and ordered a large scotch. Keith was serving at the far end of the bar. The bar was three deep in blokes. The tables had at least six people round each one. The crooner finished. A lot of people clapped and whistled. The crooner turned into his M.C. bit and said:

“And now, Ladies and Gentlemen, and especially gentlemen, I’d like to introduce the star attraction for tonight, a little lady who’s no stranger to these parts, someone who’s having a highly successful tour of the northern clubs, and who’s managed for one night and one night only to squeeze (and I mean squeeze) in an appearance here for us tonight. In fact she needs no introduction from me, Ladies and Gentlemen, may I present Miss … Jackie … Du … Val!”

Loud cheers and whistles and all the blokes at the bar shoved along to get nearer to the front. The music started. “Big Spender.” Miss Jackie Du Val walked on to the stage, arms raised high. She was wearing a tangerine evening gown and matching gloves that didn’t. She had black hair wound up into a grotesque bee-hive and if she was this side of forty she was only just. She walked along the short dais that led a bit of the way into the tables and the band got round to the beginning of the tune again and she began to sing à la Bassey, only louder. As she sang she began going into the routine of first one glove and then the next and pushing the fishnet knee through the slit in her dress and I thought
Jesus Christ!
and turned to the bar and looked at the bottles and read the labels.

After I’d done that I thought about me and Audrey. And like when I usually thought about me and Audrey it was with mixed feelings: I used to think, Christ, what a bloody idiot thing to do, start shacking up with the boss’s wife when you’re on such a good number and then I used to think about the things Audrey could do to make me act like a bloody idiot.

God, she was good.

I’d never had anyone like her. Not that I’d had a lot. I’d had it regular from the slags that worked for us, but the trouble was all I’d had to do was to phone up and a couple of them’d be round in half an hour. And more than likely gone in half an hour.

But when Audrey touched me for the first time, that’s what it was like: the first time, and it’d taken me all my time not to blow it as soon as her fingers’d felt me.

But she’d made me wait and that’d had something to do with it too.

She’d only been married to Gerald for eight months before I started getting the picture. Gerald’d picked her up out in Viareggio while he’d been on his holidays. He’d come back early and given Rae and their two kids the boot and he’d moved Audrey in straight away. They’d got married the day the divorce came through. Les’d thought Gerald’d been a bit of a cunt about it all but he’d never told Gerald to his face. Gerald’d been like a bloody kid over her. Everything she wanted she got. But it wasn’t because of Gerald she’d got me. She’d managed that all by herself.

Keith wandered up. He was polishing a glass. He could afford the time while they were all gawping.

“Hello, Keith,” I said.

“Somebody been asking about you,” he said.

“Oh, yes?” I said. “Anybody we know?”

“Remember we were talking about Thorpey? The loan merchant?”

“Old Thorpey, eh? Haven’t seen him in a long time.”

“That’s what he was saying about you.”

“Oh, yes?”

“Yes. He said he’d heard you were visiting town and he was wondering if I knew where you were staying at, like. Wanted to look you up. Old times’ sake and that.”

“That’s nice of him.”

“I would have come to tell you but I didn’t think you’d be there.”

“Sure.”

Keith began to go red.

“I would have come, honest.”

“What did you tell him?”

He went redder.

“Nowt,” he said.

“Good. How was it left?”

“They went after they realised I wasn’t letting on.”

“They?”

“There were three of them.”

I lit a fag.

“Thorpey, eh?”

Thorpey was the kind of rat who I would have thought preferred to work on his own. Not for a governor, at any rate. He’d always been very full of himself. He’d liked being a top dog in his own little way, and the business he operated saw him very nicely. He’d like the profit margin kept the way it was. Supposing Frank had done something to upset Thorpey? Which of course he wouldn’t. But supposing. What could Frank have done to Thorpey that warranted Thorpey going to the trouble of knocking Frank off? Even if Thorpey and his lads had half the nerve. So if Thorpey was on his own, there’d be no need for him to want to see me. But, of course, there might have been a merger. The loan systems in Doncaster and Bradford and Leeds and Barnsley and Grimsby all owned by one governor might have been added to by seconding Thorpey’s little operation, just to make things nice. Thorpey would still be the figurehead, but from time to time whoever he was working for would ask him to do this and that, things that on his own Thorpey normally would have steered clear of. Like having a little talk with me. Or filling Frank up with scotch and letting the hand brake off his car.

I looked at the clock on the wall. It was quarter to ten.

“You wouldn’t happen to know where they went?” I said.

Keith shrugged.

“Could have gone anywhere. The clubs, pubs, anywhere. But wherever they are, they’ll be looking for you.”

I didn’t say anything.

“What are you off to do?” asked Keith.

“Go and see somebody who can give me a little bit of gossip.”

“Who?”

“Oh, just an old friend I haven’t seen in years,” I said.

I walked away from the bar. Miss Jackie Du Val was naked except for a g-string. She’d come off the stage and now she was moving between the tables. There was hands all over the place. One bloke held up a pint of mild and Miss Jackie Du Val sat down on his knee and dipped her left breast in it. There was a load of laughter until the woman who was with the bloke with the pint of mild grabbed it and chucked it all over Miss Jackie Du Val and the bloke. The bloke got up and Miss Jackie Du Val hit the floor shrieking. The bloke socked the woman he was with and began wiping himself down. The woman fell over a chair and landed on the floor too. She and Miss Jackie Du Val found each other and began rolling about on the floor pulling and scratching and biting. There was much cheering. The woman on top of Miss Jackie Du Val was trying to bite one of Miss Jackie Du Val’s titties while Miss Jackie Du Val was trying to remove both of the woman’s eyes. A very drunken woman on the edge of the circle the crowd was making round them put her foot forward and with the toe of her shoe lifted the dress of the woman on top right up to her waist. There was more shrieking laughter. A couple of barmen had vaulted the bar and were trying to get through the crowd. The bloke who’d had the mild all over him stopped wiping himself and picked up a pint bottle of brown ale and emptied it slowly and deliberately over the upturned bottom of the woman on top, moving the bottle from side to side so that the woman’s pants were evenly soaked. The woman began to screech her rage as I went through the doors and out into the High Street.

There’s a place on the edge of the town where they’d built a council estate somewhere back in the fifties. This place used to be what you could call a natural piece of waste land. What I mean is, there’d never been anything there that had been knocked down or carted away (like an old aerodrome) to give it that used look, laid waste, the kind of land where those erect and rusty weeds grow upright between old half-bricks and cracks in grey concrete; they just grew here anyway. The place used to stretch for the best part of a quarter of a mile away from the town. In another town they would have turned it into allotments. But in another town it might have looked as if something could be grown there.

Before they built the estate there, there had been only one house near this place, right on the very edge, as far away from the town as it could be. It was a symmetrical doublefronted Victorian farmhouse. The colour of the bricks wasn’t quite red. The window frames had been painted lime green approximately seventy-four years ago. Now, although there were curtains at the windows you couldn’t see them from the outside. The chimney was in the middle of the roof and whether it was December or July it was always smoking. There was a shed at the back, about forty yards away from the house, and two hundred yards beyond this, the steelworks began, black at first, then glowing into savage flames.

There was no formal garden to the house, no garden fence. The weeds just got shorter the closer you got to the house. If you wanted to drive up to the house you bumped the car off the road over the grass verge and just took the straightest line between two points. Which was what I did.

I stopped the car and got out. There was the occasional clank and groan from the formless black and gold of the steelworks. The wind droned across my face. I walked towards the house. There were no lights on at the front. I went round the back. A motorbike and sidecar was
illuminated by light from the naked bulb inside the kitchen. I knocked on the door. A woman of around seventy opened it. She stepped back to let me in and said:

“You’ll have to wait a few moments, she’s engaged at present.”

Stepping through I said: “I’ve come to see Albert.”

“Oh,” she said and began to close the door. “Albert, there’s a feller to see you. What shall I say?”

But before she was able to close the door I was inside the kitchen.

The telly was in the corner. It was turned up full blast. Sitting on a high stool to one side of the telly with her back to me was a woman in a top-coat with her hair in curlers. She was sitting hunched up with her hands in her coat pockets. She didn’t turn round but carried on looking at the telly. Two kids, about five or six years old, girls, were sitting on the floor watching telly as well. One of them turned her head round and looked at me for a minute then looked back at the screen. Her face was as filthy as her clothes. On the kitchen table amongst the dirty plates from at least half a dozen meals was a carry-cot. Inside the carry-cot was a baby that was no more than two months old.