by Xan Brooks
About a month after the epidemic blew through, Lucy and Tom were out with their mother when a small girl ran to the side of the pavement to shout a greeting to a friend who was seated on the upper deck of a bus. June Marsh stepped off the kerb to avoid colliding with the child and was struck by a cyclist, scattering her shopping and banging her head on the ground.
Lucy and Tom saw the accident unfold, and it seemed to them their mother was not especially hurt. The cyclist helped her collect her provisions, after which she sat upon the kerb and waited for her head to clear. The shouting child made her exit and the double-decker bus pulled away up the street. After enquiring three times whether she was really all right, the cyclist remounted his cycle and then he left as well.
Five minutes later Mrs Marsh was still feeling giddy. She laughed at her frailty when she tried to get on her feet. Then the Lambs drew up at the kerb and suggested she run herself along to the hospital. Mr Lamb would drive her while his wife took the kids home.
At St Bethesda’s Royal Infirmary, Mr Lamb helped her onto the bed and it was there she lost consciousness. The fall had caused extensive bleeding in her brain.
After it happened – after their mother died – the adults debated where the children should go. The paternal grandparents were the most likely choice, not least because Mrs Marsh’s mother had grown frail in recent years and it was whispered that she kept mislaying her marbles; she might not have many more rattling around.
One evening, still at the Lambs’, Lucy sat down and composed a painstaking letter to her Aunt Nell in Ramsgate. Aunt Nell wrote back to say that it broke her heart but that she could not have them. She said she was still getting to grips with her husband, and Jo. She said if it was just her and not Tom then that might have made a difference. She said that she loved them and that they must stay in touch. One week after that, they moved into the Griffin.
She rubs a forefinger across the wood grain and eavesdrops on the back-and-forth. Higgs wants restitution or he is walking to the police station without further ado. Mr Marsh retorts that if that’s what he’s decided, he should look lively and do it, not keep yacking on and on about it. But Higgs suspects that Mr Marsh is trying to brazen things out and that if push came to shove, the landlord would rather not have the police involved. Higgs says it is not so much the cost of the fruit, it’s all the aggravation that comes along with it. The loss of labour, the hassle of it all. He is making himself ill running after that lad. He leaves the shop unattended. He’s not sleeping right. He wants some proper restitution or he is going to the police.
Marsh looks up from wiping the taps. He feigns jovial surprise. “Bloody hell. Are you still here?”
“Right, that’s it. Have it your way.”
“Ach,” says Marsh. “What do you want from me? It’s nothing to do with me.”
“I want ten shillings.”
Marsh hoots with laughter.
“I want five shillings.”
“Well, I haven’t got it. I’m all cleaned out.”
“Five shillings,” says the grocer. “Else I shall be seeing your grandson in the juvenile court.”
“Can’t do it. Haven’t got it.”
The grocer points with a trembling finger. “You’ve got it in the till there. Open the till, give me the five shillings I’m owed, or I’ll be seeing that boy in the juvenile court.”
Marsh is amused all over again. He snorts and he grins. He points out, as a teacher might to a particularly dense student, that the till in the bar should not be confused with his wallet. The till contains money, but his wallet does not. But the money in the till has all been accounted for, which means he can’t go dipping into it every time someone barges in with a full head of steam and demands five shillings to shut him up. “Bloody hell,” he adds, “it’s no wonder your business is up the Swanee if you can’t tell the difference between your wallet and your till.”
“Who says it’s up the Swanee?”
“Everyone does. Everyone knows it.”
Higgs weighs this up. “I want my five shillings,” he says.
“I told you. My wallet is empty.”
All this time Lucy has been rubbing her finger along the wood grain at the bar. She says, “You do have it, Grandad. I know you do.”
Both men turn towards her. Her grandfather frowns. He was shamming surprise with Higgs, but this time it is real: he had not even noticed his granddaughter standing in the room. “How do you mean?” he says.
Addressing Higgs, she says, “I earned ten bob for him last night. He won’t have spent it all already.”
Higgs claps his hands. “There we are. Simple as that.”
“You can take the five shillings and leave my brother alone.”
Her grandfather fixes her with a look that is so knotted and unreadable it defeats her. She drops her gaze and returns to the woodgrain. “Well, fancy that,” she hears him say. “My little granddaughter knows my business better than me.”
Inside the saloon bar, the sun pours through the window and skewers the room with bars of drifting dust. She arranges herself on the bench, lifts the book to the beam and attempts to find her way back to the safety of the story – but it is no use. She’s like Mary Lennox, she can’t locate the door for the ivy. What had seemed so urgent just a few minutes before has become no more than a series of black-on-white blocks; words on a page, criss-crossed by dust motes. She keeps thinking of Edith, hanging over the tailgate and crying out to the drunken man on the road. She redoubles her effort to return to the book, and now she has read the same paragraph three times over. Come to think of it, where is Tom? He must have run away to the milk bar again.
In another hour or so she will devise an excuse to stand up at the window, or at least in its vicinity, so she can check on the progress of the old shire horse. But not yet, it’s too early. Those crossing dust motes have swept her up as well. She is restless, can’t settle. She should go and look for Tom. She remains on the bench.
If she wrote to Aunt Nell again, what would happen? It’s been several years since her last request. She’s nearly grown, which means she could look after Nell as opposed to the other way around. She could take a job and pay bed and board. She could care for Nell, and for Tom besides. If she wrote again and said all of this, Nell might relent and say they could come. Then again, she might say no and that she loves her and that she must be sure to stay in touch. Would it have made any difference if she had?
Something has been left on the linoleum, by the wall. The bar of sunlight picks it out where previously it had evaded her cleaning. With a grimace of distaste, Lucy sees that it is not one item but two: a complete set of dentures, upper and lower plate, laid in such a fashion as to give the impression that the owner vanished mid-sip, leaving them to drop unattended to the floor. Furthermore, she fancies that they have been watching her for a while. Any instant now they might come scuttling across the lino like some prehistoric crab, meaning to clamp shut on her feet, devour her toes one by one. She vows to pick them up before the Griffin reopens, but for the moment it is all she can do to even look at the things. She wonders whether she is sickening with a fever. She was feeling quite fine not a half-hour ago.
Grandad is bent over the supply book in the kitchen. But he is not working. He is just like the dentures: he has been lying in wait. When he sees her walk in, he glances up fiercely. “Right you are, Lucy, let’s have it all out on the table.”
She stands before him, hands clenched. She must be sickening. She does not feel herself.
He says, “Come on. Come on. If you’ve got something to say, let’s be having it.” The bars of sunlight don’t penetrate the kitchen at this time of day, so the light is all at the man’s back. It casts his face in shadow but makes his big ears glow amber. George drums his tail on the floor as a welcome.
“Someone dropped their teeth in the saloon bar.”
“Is that it? That’s what you want to say to me.”
She moistens her mouth. “I don’t think my dad would like it. You sending me to the woods.”
He says, “I don’t think your dad would like it, the fact I had to. The fact that I did it and the fact that I had to. I don’t reckon he’d like either of those things very much.”
Lucy stoops to pet the dog’s Brillo-pad back. George thumps his tail in a flurry.
“And that’s it, is it? Got that off your chest?”
“I suppose.”
“You suppose,” scoffs her grandfather. “You think you’re the only one who knew him? You think I don’t know what he’d make of all this? He’d choke on it like poison, that’s what I think. He’d think, ‘My poor little daughter’ and he’d think, ‘My poor old dad’. Isn’t it obvious that’s what he’d think?”
“He’s dead,” she says.
“Yeah, he’s dead. So he’d be thinking ‘Poor me’ as well. ‘Poor me, I’m dead. Poor old world. Everything buggered’. And fair play, he’s right, but where does that get us? Me and you and the rest of them, where does that get us? It’s down to us to keep going.”
Lucy splays her fingers in order to part the dog’s fur and expose the pink skin. She realises that unconsciously she has been checking for fleas.
“He still wouldn’t me want to do it, though.”
“Come on, girl, what do you want me to say? You want me to say sorry? Right you are, then, I’m sorry it happened for whatever it’s worth. Wish it could have been different. But there we are and that’s how it is. Wish it could have been different.”
She nods at the dog and rises to leave. In the doorway another thought strikes her and she turns back to face him. “What if one of them . . . ?”
Sat at the table, his ears irradiated, he shoots her a look of impatient inquiry.
“What if one of them puts me with a child?”
This brings him up short. “Have they?”
“I don’t think so.”
He laughs. “Bloody hell, girl. Why mention it then?”
She figures there is probably an hour to spare before the horse trundles by, although all of a sudden she feels it would be no great loss if she were to miss it. Upstairs in her room, she slides under the covers without removing her shoes and pulls the eiderdown up so that it covers her head. That traps her own heat and she can feel it banked around her; there is nowhere for it to escape to. If it is true that she is running a fever she decides she will sweat it out on the sheet and then fetch the soap powder and boil some water. There are chores to attend to but these can wait for a spell, for she is extremely busy sweating the sickness from her pores. And if her grandparents want her, well, they can shout her name up the stairs and then she will walk down as though she is perfectly happy to help. She will lie in bed until they call her name. Only then will she walk down and tackle her chores.
15
Every so often she catches sight of little Frank Perry, the post boy, except that little Frank Perry isn’t little any more. He has filled out, turned portly; apparently he has some clerical job in the town. She has seen him sat among friends outside the Angel public house. He always tips his cap when she passes by. One day she will stop and marvel at how much he has grown. She will say, “Why, it’s never Frank Perry, you are looking so well. How’s work? How’s the family? When are you going to move away and find a new job somewhere else? Or better still, why not die? That would suit me best of all.”
Back in the day they had all hated Frank Perry, the diminutive post boy who haunted the village. He wore a midnight-blue uniform and rode an oversized bike. She recalls he had to extend his toes to locate the pedals, so that he would come listing and weaving up the lane like something infected, on the edge of control; a rabid old bat that was about to expire. Nobody wanted to be passed whatever it was that he carried, and this invested the post boy with a terrible power. She had heard tales of children who came to exalt in that power, or who would play malign games to distract themselves from the task in hand. They would ring their bells in a frenzy, or they would feint to ride up one driveway only to swerve at the very last second to target the house opposite. Or they would shout, “I’ve got a message for you!” at the solitary pedestrian and then add, “Whoops, sorry, wrong person.” She understands why they did it. Frame the world as a joke and it is like taking gas at the dentist. The drill’s vibration becomes a tickle. All the same, she is glad that Frank Perry was never that way inclined. Frank Perry regarded the job as a torment and aimed to perform it with the minimum human contact. And she is grateful for that, although she does seem to recall that one unfortunate consequence of his efforts to avoid looking a woman directly in the eye was that he tended to stare fixedly at her breasts instead.
The poor, pathetic post boy. The poor, pathetic wives and mothers he called on. He had called on Margaret and he had called on Jean and she knew beyond a glimmer of doubt that he would one day come and call on her as well. This was not what he wanted and it was hardly his fault. He jingled a mortified warning on his bell as he walked his bike through the garden gate.
“Oh my, yes,” she will explain to the youths at the Angel. “I have known Frank since he was a rabid little bat. I’ve known him since he was the most hated boy in a five-mile radius. I’ve known him since he stared at breasts all day long. Surely he’s told you of the time he stared at mine too.”
Except that this would be foolish, and what possible good would it do? She has nothing against Frank Perry, aside from the fact he’s Frank Perry and had once brought her a message she did not wish to receive. And now the tables have turned and it is her haunting him, because she thinks her presence serves as a sour reminder and he looks faintly nauseous when he glances up from his tankard and lifts the cap from his head. And perhaps the thought flashing through his mind is just a mirror of hers. Why won’t she move on? Why won’t she drop dead?
And besides, who’s to say that they haven’t already moved on? The world keeps turning and it has carried them with it. In this way, the teenaged post boy becomes an office apprentice with a regular berth at the pub and a starched white collar that he irons each morning. The boisterous bride becomes just another young widow, one in two million, who supplements her pension with three days’ secretarial work. Michael, formerly a baby, celebrated his eighth birthday last month, while the fiery young man who once worked as a typesetter and dreamed of bigger things is now bone meal in the ground, with his job at the printworks passed on like a baton. The replacement typesetter has been recruited from Taunton and his name is James Winter. He is in his mid-twenties, keeps a cottage in the village and instructs the local children in football every Saturday morning. When Michael fell on the pitch and dislocated his shoulder, James Winter returned the joint to its socket and carried the boy home in his arms. On another occasion, she saw him drop a banknote on the road and then embark upon a quite comical pursuit, trying to secure the note with his shoe. Some shift in the breeze brought it over to her and with one easy motion she was able to trap it. “Pick a foot,” she said boldly. “Fifty-fifty chance.”
In the back garden next door, the neighbours’ dog is barking. She dislikes the neighbours; marvels at their cruelty. They keep the wretched creature chained up there all hours. She should go and do something, except she has turned more timid of late.
These days the streets are patrolled by spiritualists. They travel door-to-door, claiming to speak for the dead. Margaret has admitted that she has sat with two of them, which probably means that she has sat with four or five, and she swears blind that one of these frauds told her things about Jack that nobody could have known. She says, “Come on, Aud, there must be a part of you that wants to give it a try. I would have thought that you’d at least keep an open mind about such things.” Margaret says this with a tone of tender reproach. But the whole thing is enraging; she wants no part of it.
Instead she thinks that one day she will take a boat out to France. She’s read of a travel firm that arranges excursions to the field. Relatives stroll through the old trenches as if they are tourists at San Marco. They pay their respects at mass graves and eat picnics while sat on ammunition boxes. They munch sandwiches and stare at the overturned tanks and the bald, branchless trees. The prospect once struck her as ghastly, but it now seems less ghastly than sitting down with a fraud. In the early days of their marriage they often walked in the woods on the Mendips. They would find a high place to eat lunch and watch the clouds scudding by. The notion of the French trip is macabre. If undertaken, it may prove masochistic. But it nonetheless involves the breaking of bread and the contemplation of a view. It might drag the wheel full circle and bring resolution to see the place where he fell. One bittersweet holiday to put all the others to bed.
By nine-o’clock the boy is asleep and James Winter taps on the side door where he won’t be observed from the green. He is more nervous than she and in those first blundering moments he rather resembles a child himself. He is too big for the room: he collides with the furniture, treads on her foot. The rows of books on the shelves seem to further alarm him. It is as though she has set him some fiendish challenge, although she explains that they are mostly Bram’s books, left over, and that the truth of it is that they have sometimes challenged her too. She must never forget what a stiff-backed snob he could be. His love was so sweet, but it was at least partly dependent on her utter devotion to him. He viewed himself as her superior and yet – here we are, fancy that – it is she who’s left standing.
