New and Collected Stories (12 page)

On every visit she would glance from time to time at the fishing-boat picture, the last of the fleet, hanging on the wall above the sideboard. She often mentioned how beautiful she thought it was, and how I should never part with it, how the sunrise and the ship and the woman and the sea were just right. Then a few minutes later she'd hint to me how nice it would be if she had it, but knowing it would end up in the pawnshop I didn't take her hints. I'd rather have lent her five bob instead of half-a-crown so that she wouldn't take the picture, but she never seemed to want more than half-a-crown in those first years. I once mentioned to her she could have more if she liked, but she didn't answer me. I don't think she wanted the picture especially to sell and get money, or to hang in her own house; only to have the pleasure of pawning it, to have someone else buy it so that it wouldn't belong to either of us any more.

But she finally did ask me directly, and I saw no reason to refuse when she put it like that. Just as I had done six years before, when she first came to see me, I dusted it, wrapped it up carefully in several layers of brown paper, tied it with post-office string, and gave it to her. She seemed happy with it under her arm, couldn't get out of the house quick enough, it seemed.

It was the same old story though, for a few days later I saw it again in the pawnshop window, among all the old junk that had been there for years. This time I didn't go in and try to get it back. In a way I wish I had, because then Kathy might not have had the accident that came a few days later. Though you never know. If it hadn't been that, it would have been something else.

I didn't get to her before she died. She'd been run down by a lorry at six o'clock in the evening, and by the time the police had taken me to the General Hospital she was dead. She'd been knocked all to bits, and had practically bled to death even before they'd got her to the hospital. The doctor told me she'd not been quite sober when she was knocked down. Among the things of hers they showed me was the fishing-boat picture, but it was all so broken up and smeared with blood that I hardly recognized it. I burned it in the roaring flames of the firegrate late that night.

When her two brothers, their wives and children had left and taken with them the air of blame they attached to me for Kathy's accident I stood at the graveside thinking I was alone, hoping I would end up crying my eyes out. No such luck. Holding my head up suddenly I noticed a man I hadn't seen before. It was a sunny afternoon of winter, but bitter cold, and the only thing at first able to take my mind off Kathy was the thought of some poor bloke having to break the bone-hard soil to dig this hole she was now lying in. Now there was this stranger. Tears were running down his cheeks, a man in his middle fifties wearing a good suit, grey though but with a black band around his arm, who moved only when the fed-up sexton touched his shoulder – and then mine – to say it was all over.

I felt no need to ask who he was. And I was right. When I got to Kathy's house (it had also been his) he was packing his things, and left a while later in a taxi without saying a word. But the neighbours, who always know everything, told me he and Kathy had been living together for the last six years. Would you believe it? I only wished he'd made her happier than she'd been.

Time has passed now and I haven't bothered to get another picture for the wall. Maybe a war map would do it; the wall gets too blank, for I'm sure some government will oblige soon. But it doesn't really need anything at the moment, to tell you the truth. That part of the room is filled up by the sideboard, on which is still the wedding picture, that she never thought to ask for.

And looking at these few old pictures stacked in the back of my mind I began to realize that I should never have let them go, and that I shouldn't have let Kathy go either. Something told me I'd been daft and dead to do it, and as my rotten luck would have it it was the word dead more than daft that stuck in my mind, and still sticks there like the spinebone of a cod or conger eel, driving me potty sometimes when I lay of a night in bed thinking.

I began to believe there was no point in my life – became even too far gone to turn religious or go on the booze. Why had I lived? I wondered. I can't see anything for it. What was the point of it all? And yet at the worst minutes of my midnight emptiness I'd think less of myself and more of Kathy, see her as suffering in a far rottener way than ever I'd done, and it would come to me – though working only as long as an aspirin pitted against an incurable headache – that the object of my having been alive was that in some small way I'd helped Kathy through her life.

I was born dead. I keep telling myself. Everybody's dead, I answer. So they are, I maintain, but then most of them never know it like I'm beginning to do, and it's a bloody shame that this has come to me at last when I could least do with it, and when it's too bloody late to get anything but bad from it.

Then optimism rides out of the darkness like a knight in armour. If you loved her … (of course I bloody-well did) … then you both did the only thing possible if it was to be remembered as love. Now didn't you? Knight in armour goes back into blackness. Yes, I cry, but neither of us
did anything about it
, and that's the trouble.

Noah's Ark

While Jones the teacher unravelled the final meanderings of
Masterman Ready
, Colin from the classroom heard another trundle of wagons and caravans rolling slowly towards the open spaces of the Forest. His brain was a bottleneck, like the wide boulevard along which each vehicle passed, and he saw, remembering last year, fresh-packed ranks of colourful Dodgem Cars, traction engines and mobile zoos, Ghost Trains, and Noah's Ark figures securely crated on to drays and lorries.

So
Masterman Ready
was beaten by the prospect of more tangible distraction, though it was rare for a book of dream-adventures to be banished so easily from Colin's mind. The sum total of such free-lance wandering took him through bad days of scarcity, became a mechanical gaudily dressed pied-piper always ahead, which he would follow and one day scrag to see what made it tick. How this would come about he didn't know, didn't even try to find out – while the teacher droned on with the last few pages of his story.

Though his cousin Bert was eleven – a year older – Colin was already in a higher class at school, and felt that this counted for something anyway, even though he had found himself effortlessly there. With imagination fed by books to bursting point, he gave little thought to the rags he wore (except when it was cold) and face paradoxically overfleshed through lack of food. His hair was too short, even for a three-penny basin-crop at the barber's – which was the only thing that bothered him at school in that he was sometimes jocularly referred to as ‘Owd Bald-'ead'.

When the Goose Fair came a few pennies had survived his weekly outlay on comics, but Bert had ways and means of spinning them far beyond their paltry value. ‘We'll get enough money for lots of rides,' he said, meeting Colin at the street corner of a final Saturday. ‘I'll show you' – putting his arm around him as they walked up the street.

‘How?' Colin wanted to know, protesting: ‘I'm not going to rob any shops. I'll tell you that now.'

Bert, who had done such things, detected disapproval of his past, though sensing at the same time and with a certain pride that Colin would never have the nerve to crack open a shop at midnight and plug his black hands into huge jars of virgin sweets. ‘That's not the only way to get money,' he scoffed. ‘You only do that when you want summat good. I'll show you what we'll do when we get there.'

Along each misty street they went, aware at every turning of a low exciting noise from the northern sky. Bellies of cloud were lighted orange by the fair's reflection, plain for all to see, an intimidating bully slacking the will and drawing them towards its heart. ‘If it's only a penny a ride then we've got two goes each,' Colin calculated with bent head, pondering along the blank flagstoned spaces of the pavement, hands in pockets pinning down his hard-begotten wealth. He was glad of its power to take him on to roundabouts, but the thought of what fourpence would do to the table at home filled him – when neither spoke – with spasms of deep misery. Fourpence would buy a loaf of bread or a bottle of milk or some stewing meat or a pot of jam or a pound of sugar. It would perhaps stop the agony his mother might be in from seeing his father black and brooding by the hearth if he – Colin – had handed the fourpence in for ten Woodbines from the corner shop. His father would take them with a smile, get up and kiss his mother in the fussy way he had and mash some tea, a happy man once more whose re-acquired asset would soon spread to everyone in the house.

It was marvellous what fourpence would do, if you were good enough to place it where it rightly belonged – which I'm not, he thought, because fourpence would also buy a fistful of comics, or two bars of chocolate or take you twice to the flea-pit picture-house or give you four rides on Goose Fair, and the division, the wide dark soil-smelling trench that parted good from bad was filled with wounds of unhappiness. And such unhappiness was suspect, because Colin knew that whistling stone-throwing Bert at his side wouldn't put up with it for the mere sake of fourpence – no, he'd spend it and enjoy it, which he was now out to do with half the pennies Colin had. If Bert robbed a shop or cart he'd take the food straight home – that much Colin knew – and if he laid his hands on five bob or a pound he'd give his mother one and six and say that that was all he'd been able to get doing some sort of work. But fourpence wouldn't worry him a bit. He'd enjoy it. And so would Colin, except in the space of stillness between roundabouts.

They were close to the fair, walking down the slope of Bentinck Road, able to distinguish between smells of fish-and-chips, mussels and brandysnap. ‘Look on the floor,' Bert called out, ever-sharp and hollow-cheeked with the fire of keeping himself going, lit by an instinct never to starve yet always looking as if he were starving. The top and back of his head was padded by overgrown hair, and he slopped along in broken slippers, hands in pockets, whistling, then swearing black-and-blue at being swept off the pavement by a tide of youths and girls.

Colin needed little telling: snapped down to the gutter, walked a hundred yards doubled-up like a premature rheumatic, and later shot straight holding a packet with two whole cigarettes protruding. ‘No whacks!' he cried, meaning: No sharing.

‘Come on,' Bert said, cajoling, threatening, ‘don't be bleedin'-well mingy, our Colin. Let's 'ave one.'

Colin stood firm. Finding was keeping. ‘I'm savin' 'em for our dad. I don't suppose 'e's got a fag to 'is name.'

‘Well, my old man ain't never got no fags either, but I wun't bother to save 'em for 'im if I found any. I mean it as well.'

‘P'raps we'll have a drag later on then,' Colin conceded, keeping them in his pocket. They were on the asphalt path of the Forest, ascending a steep slope. Bert feverishly ripped open every cast-down packet now, chucking silver paper to the wind; slipping picture-cards in his pocket for younger brothers, crushing what remained into a ball and hurling it towards the darkness where bodies lay huddled together in some passion that neither of them could understand or even remotely see the point of.

From the war memorial they viewed the whole fair, a sea of lights and tent tops flanked on two sides by dimly shaped houses whose occupants would be happy when the vast encampment scattered the following week to other towns. A soughing groan of pleasure was being squeezed out of the earth, and an occasional crescendo of squeals reached them from the Swingboats and Big Wheel as though an army were below, offering human sacrifices before beginning its march. ‘Let's get down there,' Colin said, impatiently turning over his pennies. ‘I want to see things. I want to get on that Noah's Ark.'

Sucking penny sticks of brandysnap they pushed by the Ghost Train, hearing girls screaming from its skeleton-filled bowels. ‘We'll roll pennies on to numbers and win summat,' Bert said. ‘It's easy, you see. All you've got to do is put the pennies on a number when the woman ain't looking.' He spoke eagerly, to get Colin's backing in a project that would seem more of an adventure if they were in it together. Not that he was afraid to cheat alone, but suspicion rarely fell so speedily on a pair as it did on a lone boy obviously out for what his hands could pick up. ‘It's dangerous,' Colin argued, though all but convinced, elbowing his way behind. ‘You'll get copped.'

A tall gipsy-looking woman with black hair done up in a ponytail stood in the penny-a-roll stall, queen of its inner circle. She stared emptily before her, though Colin, edging close, sensed how little she missed of movement round about. A stack of coppers crashed regularly from one hand to the other, making a noise which, though not loud, drew attention to the stall – and the woman broke its rhythm now and again to issue with an expression of absolute impartiality a few coins to a nicky-hatted man who by controlling two of the wooden slots managed to roll down four pennies at a time. ‘He ain't winnin', though,' Bert whispered in Colin's ear, who saw the truth of it: that he rolled out more than he picked up.

His remark stung through to the man's competing brain. ‘Who ain't?' he demanded, letting another half-dozen pennies go before swinging round on him.

‘Yo' ain't,' Bert chelped.

‘Ain't I?' – swung-open mac showing egg and beer stains around his buttons.

Bert stood his ground, blue eyes staring. ‘No, y'ain't.'

‘That's what yo' think,' the man retorted, in spite of everything, even when the woman scooped up more of his pennies.

Bert pointed truculently. ‘Do you call that winning then? Look at it. I don't.' All eyes met on three sad coins lying between squares, and Bert slipped his hand on to the counter where the man had set down a supply-dump of money. Colin watched, couldn't breathe, from fear but also from surprise even though there was nothing about Bert he did not know. A shilling and a sixpence seemed to run into Bert's palm, were straightaway hidden by black fingers curling over them. He reached a couple of pennies with the other hand, but his wrist became solidly clamped against the board. He cried out: ‘Oo, yer rotten sod. Yer'r'urtin' me.'