New and Collected Stories (33 page)

That same Saturday I went to the barber's for my monthly DA and when I came out I saw a bloke getting on my bike to ride it away. I tagged him on the shoulder, my fist flashing red for danger.

‘Off,' I said sharp, ready to smash the thieving bastard. He turned to me. A funny sort of thief, I couldn't help thinking, a respectable-looking bloke of about forty wearing glasses and shiny shoes, smaller than me, with a moustache. Still, the swivel-eyed sinner was taking my bike.

‘I'm boggered if I will,' he said, in a quiet way so that I thought he was a bit touched. ‘It's my bike, anyway.'

‘It bloody-well ain't,' I swore, ‘and if you don't get off I'll crack you one.'

A few people gawked at us. The bloke didn't mess about and I can understand it now. ‘Missis,' he called, ‘just go down the road to that copperbox and ask a policeman to come up 'ere, will you? This is my bike, and this young bogger nicked it.'

I was strong for my age. ‘You sodding fibber,' I cried, pulling him clean off the bike so's it clattered to the pavement. I picked it up to ride away, but the bloke got me round the waist, and it was more than I could do to take him off up the road as well, even if I wanted to. Which I didn't.

‘Fancing robbing a working-man of his bike,' somebody called out from the crowd of idle bastards now collected. I could have mowed them down.

But I didn't get a chance. A copper came, and the man was soon flicking out his wallet, showing a bill with the number of the bike on it: proof right enough. But I still thought he'd made a mistake. ‘You can tell us all about that at the Guildhall,' the copper said to me.

I don't know why – I suppose I want my brains testing – but I stuck to a story that I found the bike dumped at the end of the yard that morning and was on my way to give it in at a copshop, and had called for a haircut first. I think the magistrate half believed me, because the bloke knew to the minute when it was pinched, and at that time I had a perfect alibi – I was in work, proved by my clocking-in card. I knew some rat who hadn't been in work though when he should have been.

All the same, being found with a pinched bike, I got put on probation, and am still doing it. I hate old Bernard's guts for playing a trick like that on me, his mate. But it was lucky for him I hated the coppers more and wouldn't nark on anybody, not even a dog. Dad would have killed me if ever I had, though he didn't need to tell me. I could only thank God a story came to me as quick as it did, though in one way I still sometimes reckon I was barmy not to have told them how I got the bike.

There's one thing I do know. I'm waiting for Bernard to come out of Borstal. He got picked up, the day after I was copped with the bike, for robbing his auntie's gas meter to buy more discs. She'd had about all she could stand from him, and thought a spell inside would do him good, if not cure him altogether. I've got a big bone to pick with him, because he owes me forty-five bob. I don't care where he gets it – even if he goes out and robs another meter – but I'll get it out of him, I swear blind I will. I'll pulverize him.

Another thing about him though that makes me laugh is that, if ever there's a revolution and everybody's lined-up with their hands out, Bernard's will still be lily-white, because he's a bone-idle thieving bastard – and then we'll see how he goes on; because mine won't be lily-white, I can tell you that now. And you never know, I might even be one of the blokes picking 'em out.

To Be Collected

Donnie came out of the snackshack in Heanor marketplace, paused to wipe crumbs from his mouth with a damp sleeve of raincoat. ‘Belt-up, you rag-bags,' he shouted, to his two brothers beckoning from their government surplus lorry.

He ploughed into waterpuddles, socks and flesh soaked. ‘Can't you see I'm coming? Now look at what they've made me do!' Curses ate into him like a corkscrew – ‘I'm wet through now. I'll catch me death o' cold. You poxed-up bastards,' he raved, a fist pushed further into his groin pocket when he'd like it to be out and slamming them. He broke his tirade to grin at a couple of wide-eyed shopping women who thought he might have less dirty talk. ‘Can't you wait a bit? You must have drainpipes, not guts, swallowing scorched tea like that.'

Tall Dave leaned out of the cab. His rawboned face, and grizzled-grey hair topped by a faded cap, jutted over a little boy pushing a tricycle. ‘There ain't all day. We want to get cracking to Eastwood, see what we can get' – his voice raised but reasonable. Back inside he lit a cigarette, shifted to the middle: ‘Hudge up, Flaptabs wants to park hissen.'

Bert, foot on the clutch and revving up loud, pressed himself against the door. He was the driver so, though the youngest of the three brothers, held the balance of which-way-turn and what-snackbar-stop decisions. He'd worked some time at the pitface, but too many changes of temperature, dampness and water, had marked him with pleurisy, menaced him with TB. Illness was shameful and unmanly, neither to be tolerated nor surrendered to, so he opted while sound for an outdoor life. This situation made him even more violent and morbid, see-sawed between pessimism, and hilarious pipedreams which came to nothing because he was so busy earning a living, though at the same time they enabled him to face making one.

‘It's pissing down,' Donnie observed, installing himself in the warm, smoke-filled cab.

‘Do you good,' Bert said, changing gear, ‘get you a wash.'

‘You can't beat a drop o' rain,' Donnie said, ‘keeps 'em home for when the ragman calls.' He'd been involved in the last few days, in sporadic argument with Bert, though he'd given signs of wanting to pack it in without losing pride: ‘I 'ad a wash this morning before I came out, which is more than yo' did, our Bert, you blackfaced bastard' – he grinned from his perished, intense face.

Dave hated argument: ‘Why don't you two stop fucking-well needling each other? I'm not kidding, but you're driving me off my bleddy nut, day in and day out.' Neither took him up on this so, map reading, systematic and sharp for detail, he said: ‘Left at the market then, out o' these crowds. Watch you don't hit that post office van – or you might accidentally knock-off a few thousand postal orders.'

‘If I did it'd be enough to keep us for a year at the wage we mek.' Bert took Dave's directions smoothly, as if thinking them out for himself.

As the eldest Dave felt it his right to give orders, though he was careful to modify his voice and phrases when doing so. ‘Get round this corner and we'll head for Eastwood. We've got to call at them houses we left hand-bills at this morning.' An old man, macless and without umbrella, shuffled off the pavement. ‘I'll run that old bastard down,' Bert said. ‘Can't see a foot before 'im.' He cupped a hand to his mouth: ‘Get off home and
DIE
!'

‘Less to feed,' Donnie laughed, no longer the butt-end of their fun: ‘Don't hit him, though.'

‘Listen at old soft-heart,' Bert jeered.

Dave agreed: ‘Wappy bleeder' – scornful because they obviously wouldn't run the man over, and because Donnie's sympathy reminded them that they daren't. Able to cross between studs, the old man held his pace and shambled towards safe pavement. ‘Join the army,' Bert shouted. ‘They're crying out for blokes like yo', dad!' The man turned. A worn white death-mask of a starvo face opened into a smile. He shook his fist and stood on the pavement laughing.

They waved back. They all laughed, and the lorry shot forward. Shop awnings were pelted by violent rain: ‘Whose idea was it to come out today?' he moaned, a side-glance at Donnie. ‘Shaking it down in buckets and nowt between us and getting into debt but the price o' five fags and a gallon o' petrol. What a life. Out on the road in all this weltering piss.' He grumbled with a deadpan face, drew back his gears to the pitchdown of a steep hill, going fast between houses and towards a railway on the valley bottom, scarves of mist and black smoke boiling from pit-chimneys and train funnels. ‘I wouldn't live out 'ere for a pension.'

‘Go on,' Donnie cried, the optimist who, even in the most terrible glasshouse of the British Army, averred that things might have been worse in a German deathcamp, and that pigswill was better than no swill at all. ‘We might strike lucky at Eastwood, with an old copper or a mangle. Or an old firegrate. A few stone o' woollens. You never know.'

‘All we'll get,' Bert prophesied, ‘is a couple of bugged-up bedticks that a consumptive man and wife have just pegged out on. We'll be lucky to get eighteen pence the two: a cup of tea and a bun each.'

‘That wain't keep my gang o' kids,' Donnie put in. ‘But we'll get more than that though, yo' see.'

‘I don't know why you have so many kids, Donnie. I don't, honest. You know you can't afford to keep 'em.'

‘They don't tek any bread out o' your mouth.' Donnie's family was a great consolation to him, and though he could understand why it was made a joke of by his brothers, he had never been able to see the justice of it. His face steeled hard: ‘And I do keep 'em though, don't I, eh?'

‘Well,' Dave killed the joke before it went too far, ‘even me and Alice don't get enough to live on.'

‘You might just as well put your head in the gas-oven and be done wi' it,' Ben said.

‘That wouldn't do, either,' Donnie smiled. ‘You've got no right to talk like that. No use dying, is it?' Bert's eyes half closed at Donnie spinning things out to such a dead-end conclusion and, turning a corner, he roared into his ear:

‘Wrap up. Brainless bastard' – so loud that even above the engine noise a policeman heard its subhuman command and glared into the cab to see what was the matter. Dave's eyes flashed out a picture of what possessions sprawled on the open back: a coil of rope, heaps of sacks, and a folded tarpaulin that covered nothing because it had been fine when they set out. Everything soaked. But nothing for the copper to get big ideas at either. The eyes of the law swivelled out of sight. ‘You want to be careful what you say,' Donnie called. ‘I'm a few years older than yo', you know.'

Bert became solemn, then melancholy, and gave himself up to grandiose dreams as he held the lorry fast to an uphill shove into Eastwood. ‘I'd like to build eight machine-guns into this vehicle – into the bonnet – and blast my way through owt as stood in our way,' he said with a laugh, slowing at
MAJOR ROAD AHEAD.
‘To blast coppers, that's what I'd use it for.'

‘What about the Blackshirts?' Donnie said. ‘They're coppers, aren't they?'

‘Who's talking about Blackshirts? Shurrup.'

‘Course they are,' Dave told him.

‘One 'ud put his hand out to get my licence' – Bert went on, grinning, ‘six on 'em at a roadblock, and I'd slow down a bit, as if I was all for the law and going to stop.'

‘To give 'em a Woodbine out of the ten thousand we'd got in the back?'

He pulled a face at Donnie. ‘So I'd press this specially built-in button, and hear them bullet-belts starting to move under our feet, and the road in front would get churned up and go all grey and black, and the lorry would go bump-bump over the rubble we'd made of everything, and we'd all laugh together at six coppers snuffing it behind.'

‘Well,' Dave said, winking towards Donnie, ‘you'd get summonsed then if you killed 'em, I know you would.'

‘That's what used to 'appen in Chicago though,' Bert put in. ‘Like in them old pictures, with James Cagney and George Raft.'

‘Well' – from Donnie – ‘it don't 'appen anywhere now.'

‘Not even in Russia,' Bert laughed. ‘Like it did in that revolution.'

Donnie turned serious: ‘If you did such a thing there now you'd end up filling saltbags, in the geranium mines.' And their laughter exploded, louder than any bomb or gunfire.

Eastwood was wetter than Heanor. They ascended the hill, patrolled rows of drenched uniform houses, desolate and scruffy at the backs, scruffier when TV aerials lifted Martian claws above slate-roofs and chimney stacks. Children were in school, and no one else seemed out on such a day. ‘Pull up,' Dave rapped out. ‘Let's get cracking on a couple o' these streets.'

‘Maybe somebody's left a crust o' bread for us, or a claprag,' Bert scoffed, drawing into the kerb. ‘I'll bet we don't see the sweat off a gnat's knackers – nor even as much as an old gas-stove.' Donnie caught on to this further wave of descending gloom, kept his monkey-face glum and silent. The lorry stayed by the kerb before any of them had the stomach to get out: the smell of their cigarettes and bodies made an atmosphere of homely warmth that they were loth to leave for wet unwelcoming backyards. ‘It ain't all that bad,' Dave retorted to Bert's bitter weighing-up of their prospects, reaching under the steering-wheel for a pack of newly printed handbills. ‘Before the war it was, but not since. Course, everything still looks the same.'

‘And smells the same.'

‘But all the colliers is on full time.'

‘For a bit, anyway.'

Bert laughed. ‘Everybody's got dough but us, I know that much.' For a moment their thoughts and voices had met in harmony, but drew away again when Donnie demanded: ‘We got the lorry, ain't we?'

‘Well' – Bert turned as if to rub the nub-end into his face – ‘we wokked for it, din't we?' It was impossible to deny this triumphant assertion, and all three brooded for a minute on the months of monstrous overtime in the summer as brickies' labourers on the new estates – heaving high-loaded hods on bony shoulders, unstacking fresh-baked bricks from lorry-backs and hosing them down, lugging cement bags in the sun, lips cracking under hot tea and the blinding heat of shaving fires – a nightmare that nevertheless made a good memory in this wet daylight of a Monday morning – and which ended each with a hundred pounds to club-in for their rag-and-bone lorry. Dave glared savagely at the top handbill: