The old man pursed his lips. The bus was swaying down the valley towards them. He tapped Pigeon on the arm.
“Only, the trouble was that the sound man had left his tape running for wildtrack nearby as he went off to help the cameraman load the car, and when he played it back he heard something, and we heard it clearly since Tracy and I, me in attendance naturally, had not moved: My God. Did you see their scrunched-up, contemptible little faces. They really, truly, wanted me to be less than human, didn’t they?So I gave them my best thespian works. But, you know, even then, in character, I was still human, wasn’t I? Not in their prejudiced excuse for a life I wasn’t. I was an oik. A scrounger. A nobody. A no-hoper. A scumbag. Well, scuttle back off to your sewer, you rats, and feed your transferred poison to your bosses. Me, I’m off to evening class at the Centre. Short stories from Chekov to Carver, without a Cartland in sight.
We could see, immediately, the confusion it caused. The recording chap looked hard at Tracy. But the breeze and some sound from up the street had distorted it a bit. He was, in a sense, thank goodness, unwilling to believe what he’d actually heard. I sidled over as he re-played the wildtrack. I grinned at him. I said, ‘Wassamarra, butt? Aaahs all come offa radio, mun. Schoolteachah biddy, uppa road, allus loppin’ inna sum clever-dick play, or somepin, she is. Cow, mun.’ I left it there. And so did they. Or else, I tell you, the game might have been up, and the first steps of revelation might have begun to suck us into their world of sensibility and submission.”
Pigeon stuck out a hand to hail the bus. The driver took Pigeon’s bus fare, gave out a ticket and waved the old man and Pigeon on and into the bus with a “Good afternoon, gentlemen”. They sat, together, at the back as the bus crawled, stop by stop, filling up along the way, down the valley to the Heritage Park at the valley’s mouth. Pigeon and the old man knew most of the faces on the bus. Nearly all were amongst the cast assembled locally for that night’s performance. The first of the season in the Heritage Park’s small theatre. The committee had decided to dramatise the Tynewydd Colliery mine rescue of 1879. Exploring underground flooded workings. Trapped man. Heroic rescue work. A boy scared. Medals for bravery bestowed. It was due to start, ninety minute tableau of dialogue and effects, rehearsed for weeks, at 7 o’clock that night. The first Cultural Tourism coaches from the Capital, generally genealogically-alerted Americans, would be arriving around six. Plenty of time, the old man said, to get into costume and to melt back into Victorian character. Then, by nine o’clock the cast would assemble again, with some invited others, in what they knew amongst themselves, as the Centre, to consider the lessons to be learned from further study of pre-1914 syndicalism in the Rhondda and workers’ cooperatives in post-Independence Bengal. The old man would lead the discussion of the former and sit back to learn from their guest speaker’s knowledge of the latter. They had all embraced the need for the long haul. Their retrieved culture would be ransacked to inform their future politics. But for now he leaned over to Pigeon, slipping in and out of the actual present to ready himself for a re-enactment of the past.
“Oi, butty,” he said. “Tonight, mind, when it goes dark and you’re supposed to be trapped when the workings flood, remember you, David Hughes, are only thirteen, and thinking you’ll drown, and die, so remember to shake with fear, real fear, because it’s actually happening. Only, me, Isaac Pride, master collier, risking life and limb to tunnel towards you after you’ve been trapped for four days, you and your butties, me, Isaac Pride, will take you and hold you tight in my arms so that you’re to stop shaking and sobbing when I say, ‘Now, now, boy bach. Now, now. We’ll ‘ave ewe back with ewer Mam in no time at all, butty. No time at all.’
“Orright, Grancha ,” said Pigeon. “Orright. Only don’t kiss me and squeeze me too tight, like you did in dress rehearsal, eh? Or else some of them punters might get the wrong impression. Innit, butt.”
Avengers
Pitfalls
For him, killing them had always been easy. He was familiar with it. He even liked doing it. It was a release for him. The bludgeoning of them. A kicking. Punching. Strangling, Drowning them. Taking one of his sharpest knives, there were many, to cut their throats. The manner of it depended on his mood, and the circumstances they had caused. How he did it had never been a problem for him. Moving the bodies, to be rid of them, had become the problem. So the next one to transgress would be killed on the spot where the body would also disappear. It would need to be a bullet for it to be quick and easy. The one he called Nigger was the first one to be shot. He had left his teeth marks, white indents on her pink skin, punctuation points more than actual bites, on her freckled right forearm. That was enough for her grandfather. He told her so, and that it would happen as soon as he was ready. The girl had cried then, even tried to reason with him, that it was her own fault for encouraging him, by being so playful with him. Nothing she could say could move her grandfather. He’d made up his mind the moment he saw her arm. He had his rules. Few were ever able to keep them for long.
Two years before it had been Tiny who had to be punished. He was always hungry, mooching around the back kitchen door, for scraps of food. She let him come into the house though she knew the rules forbade it. But that was not what had caused him to be killed. He’d taken one of the chickens which were kept behind a wire mesh fence which penned them into their dirt-packed run in the back garden. In his hunger he must have sensed one would not be such a loss.
Her grandfather kept a dozen hens at a time, for eggs and, after he slaughtered them at Christmas time, for selling and eating. She used to watch him through the side kitchen window when the time came to kill them. He would fling six or seven birds at any one time into the flagstoned back yard. The chickens would open their wings. They would flutter and then cower into corners whilst he clutched them, one by one, and sliced their pre-historic heads off their jerky, feathered necks. She was fascinated by the blood which spurted from them in squirts of bright red string before falling onto the flagstones as bright globular bubbles, pooling wine-dark. She was always astonished, year by year, that the headless hens would continue to hop about, running and flapping their wings in one last attempt to fly off to a safer place. One by one, she knew, they would flop to the ground, fall onto the feather beds their frenzy had created and die in their own blood and shit. He would pick them up then and hang them upside down from the washing line to drain away their last flow of blood.
Tiny had been sated at last and dozing in the outhouse shed where he lived when her grandfather came across his dog, and the ripped yellow flesh and scavenged pink bones of the chicken carcase. His anger possessed him. He picked up the heavy shovel. He hit the sleeping Tiny with it, over and over, until the head was smashed and flattened into a pulp of blood and brain and bone. When dusk came he wrapped Tiny’s bulk in sacking and put him in a wheelbarrow. When night fell he pushed the wheelbarrow down the back lane and across the field to take Tiny’s corpse to the disused mine shaft which was now only used as the means of pulling fresh air into an adjacent pit workings as a downcast. Though he was wiry, he was not a big man or young anymore, so bumping the wheelbarrow and its inert load along an overgrown path in the woods which skirted the river, and then hauling the whole thing backwards across a mound of broken bricks and rubble tired him so that he cursed out loud. He threw the heavy body down the shaft to join the others he had variously dispatched and disposed of there in the past. But the effort was too much that time with Tiny, and he vowed he would never do it that way again.
Which is why he had decided, in advance, to deal in cold blood with any future breaker of his rules with a bullet. He could, he knew, buy a gun for a few quid and some consideration. Fresh meat he’d butchered, or maybe some of that old fashioned brawn his wife made for a special treat. It was the gun he’d seen, oiled and ready, unwrapped from its cotton covering beneath the table at the Legion Club. It was a Webley, a big heavy pistol for keeping British order overseas since Victoria was on the throne, and
for close arms firing in both World Wars. This one was one of the latest models, purloined from an officer in the second, and last, of those wars. The one in which his son had died. There would be no questions asked. He arranged it within days of the latest transgression. It would be the way to do it from now on. With the gun, snug in his pocket after a session at the club, he decided they would walk together to the shaft. It would be easier, too, if he made the girl go with them. Besides, it would be a lesson for her as well. To see it happen. To realise why it was happening. So it wouldn’t have to happen again. Perhaps.
He pulled her from her bed at two in the morning, and made her dress. They fetched the dog from the shed. He walked two paces behind her and, as he called him now, “Your Nigger”. They stumbled through the undergrowth where the woods edged up to the riverbank. It was clammy in the late summer even at this time of the morning. She could smell the buttery rum on his breath in the stillness of the night. At the lip of the shaft he pushed them forward, together, so that they teetered on the very edge. The girl had said nothing. She felt fear, but uncertainty too as if the lesson which was being taught was not clear yet. He took the dog’s rope lead from her hand and held it in his left. He pushed her to one side. Then she saw the heft of the long-barrelled pistol in his other hand, and when “her Nigger” turned his neck, straining to see her, he shot him between his deep black eyes. A third eye, a dark red hole of an eye, gaping and bleeding, sprouted between them. The girl screamed so he slapped her smartly across her cheek, and as she shook, gulping on her sobs, he toe-ended his latest victim, the first he had ever shot, into the void. The returning sound was a muffled whump from the long fall to the bottom of the shaft where the bones of the coal black terrier she had loved too much would rest with those of the too greedy bulldog. That night she, too, decided something. That she would hate her grandfather forever. Or, at least, until he died.
* * * * *
The terror through whose random application he ruled did not stop or start with animals. Domestic disobedience, however trivial or unintended, would have a violent outcome. When he returned from the trenches of the First World War in which as a sapper he had scuttled about like a rat, a collier rat, one amongst many so praised for their underground and undermining skills behind enemy lines, he was be-medalled and, they said, be-mused by shell shock into bursts of anger. His wife saw most of those bursts at first hand, and behind closed doors. He would bunch up his bony little fists and beat out a tattoo on her face and her shielding arms. For weeks at a time she would, after these assaults, not be seen outside the house. He would skulk in whichever Workmen’s Club he was favouring at the time and sink into the oblivion of beer and whisky chasers. He was not alone in this, nor in his behaviour. His wife, though ever silent on the subject, had reasons of her own to know that it was not the war in itself, the cloak for his savagery, which had triggered his lifelong malevolence. As best she could she protected her son. Since poverty was everwhere in those years between the wars, their own condition of misery did not seem so exceptional. They survived on bits and pieces of war pension and dole money, and the work his wife did as a seamstress or washerwoman for others. When work increased at the pits with the approach of another war, it was the boy who did it, and brought his money home. The new war took him away, though not before he had married. His wife was pregnant with their child and working in a munitions factory when they received the telegram telling of his death at the beachhead at Anzio in Italy in 1944. It seemed another of the hammer blows of fate which none could escape at that time in that place. When their daughter was born the mother found work in a post-war brake-lining factory on the new Industrial Estate. Her wages were sunk into the household until, one day, she was no longer there, and none could find her. The child was, once more, kept from her grandfather’s rages by the wife who had stayed through it all, until in the girl’s tenth year her grandmother became bed-ridden with the slow cancerous growth which would, surely they all said, tut-tutting on visits to the kitchen and bearing home-cooked pies and stews for the stricken family, kill her. He said, furious at the smell of sickness in the bedroom, that the famous White Medicine, which hung in gloopy suspension in its oversize bottle like a milky concentration of spermatozoa, would likely do the trick by itself.
It was the girl, more absent than not from school, who tended to her grandmother and turned to serve his needs by washing, ironing and mending his faded and patched clothes. Nothing had ever been shop-bought in that house, so she had learned from her grandmother how to bake bread, make a thin stew of root vegetables and cheap cuts of meat, how to strain and re-use tea leaves and water the milk, and fry the occasional rashers of bacon he brought home when flushed with his winnings on the horses. He worked on his allotment, near the river, and from it, grown and harvested seasonally, would come potatoes and onions, radishes and tomatoes, runner beans and peas, carrots and leeks, and sweet strawberries which he would generously give to neighbours who would then think him not so bad as some made out.
The chickens were fed from troughs of grain in their wire-fenced run at the back of the long, narrow garden set above steep stone steps leading from the back kitchen’s yard. He sold the eggs in the Club, and a few chickens at Christmas, with just one kept back for them, and not even that if a last minute drunken request was made over a few too many pints. His own upbringing on a smallholding, curtailed when his father had abandoned it for the wages of a collier in the Edwardian boom years of the Valleys, had stayed with him in the memory and so he had the skills he could bring to bear, from his youth, at harvest time, and in the sheep round-ups of the hill farmers who supplied milk from the churn to the terraced houses below and their animals for the local slaughterhouses. His sour taciturnity suited the need for distance which the farmers liked to keep between themselves on the stony grey outcrops of their tilted fields and the ceaseless clank and thump of the murmurous world of mechanical work which had invaded the valley bottoms like a swarm which would never settle. For his labours he was rewarded not with money but by being given a lamb, or a ewe, or, best of all, a pig whose carcase he would sling over his slight frame to carry down from the mountain and the top-most streets to his riverside terraced house.
He knew how to prepare an animal for butchering. He knew the cuts to make and how to avoid any waste. He had a butcher’s cleaver which he kept honed and cleaned for its purpose. He had long-bladed knives for slicing and curved knives for boning. He had short-bladed knives to cut and to gouge and to stick into the animal’s parts. The girl saw the pleasure he took in all of this butchery, and with what precise skill he would wield a hand-held blow lamp to remove hair and bristle before cutting off the ears of a pig’s eyeless head so that it could be put into boiling water to start to become brawn. He loved that sticky, pungent meat most of all, relishing it for its unmistakable odorous taste, and because the cheapest was, for him, the best.
After the coal industry had been nationalised in 1947, the Union had grown stronger. A delivery of concessionary coal every six months was secured for him. He refused to pay the little extra to have it bagged up, so it came as lump coal. The back lane was too narrow for vehicles to enter and it was dumped from the back of an NCB lorry onto the road, spilling across the pavement, outside his front door. A ton or more of black boulders of coal blocked the pavement and the road until it was taken through the house. First, rough coconut matting had to be laid down in long strips on every surface of its journey from the front door through the house so that as little coal muck and none of the “black pats”, glossy backed beetles which might arrive with it from the pit, could dirty or infest the house. All this would be for his inspection later since he had never carried the coal through himself. This, for him, was work for the women. And then the girl.
Piece after piece of the shining, fissured steam coal had to be put into aluminium buckets, two at a time, and carried along the narrow passage, into the middle room, out of the back kitchen, up the stone steps onto the garden path, an
d then up the garden, past the chicken run, into the shed, to be emptied and stacked, tier by tier, against the back and side walls. It would take her two hours, sometimes more, to do all this after she had come home from school. After his afternoon’s drinking sessions, her grandfather would examine her handiwork, her effort, and its result. A grunt would be praise enough. She took care to meet his exacting standards, and to give no excuse for words or blows to rain on her and upset her grandmother.
It was about two years after he had shot and killed “her Nigger” that an unloaded coal delivery would threaten the life of the latest dog he’d acquired. This one was a lurcher, a stiff-haired and brindle-coloured bitch he’d bought from a farmer who often drank with him on Saturday nights. The lurcher was a cross between a whippet and a Bedlington terrier, bred for speed and tenacity in the hunting and catching of rabbits, and vermin. When it was not proving its worth, he kept it tied up in the coal shed by a loose rope knotted to a butcher’s wall hook. This dog, for once, had caused no trouble. He called it “Cassie”. “After your grandmother” he’d told the girl ; “because she’s another beaut, just like you”, he’d told his wife. Cassie was no disappointment in herself. What did disappoint him was that, try as he might, he could not interest the girl in the dog. She resolutely refused to pay it any attention.
All That Lies Beneath Page 9
