The Death of William Posters: A Novel (The William Posters Trilogy Book 1)

by Alan Sillitoe

  He stood on the landing. Outside, rain scattered its pellets across shining slates and the heavy blackening evergreen of autumn. No sound came from the nurse’s room and, shoes in hand, he stepped softly down stairs that creaked, vibrating so strongly into every room that he expected her door to flick open.

  The kitchen was cold, in spite of the single burner left glowing, so he switched on others and set a kettle to boil, washed dishes from the previous night to the futile dizzying beat of Light Programme light music coming from an eye-level radio. An S O S message before the news requested Mr Albert Handley, last heard of at Skegness in 1943, to please ring Leicester Infirmary where his mother Mrs Clara Handley was dangerously ill. The dragnet was out for some poor bastard who lit off nearly twenty years ago, and even if he wanted to ignore this message he couldn’t because his mates at work this morning would say: ‘Hey, Bert Handley, is that you the wireless meant? Hard luck about your poor mam. When are you going? There’s a train at eleven-five.’ And maybe poor Albert will spit on his luck, or change his job, or hotfoot it back to his mam’s, just to see her out as a good son should. Which only goes to show how you can never be left alone.

  A loud fry-up drowned the news. He sat to breakfast at the kitchen table, hoping the sky would run out of rain and let him walk dry-shod over the wolds. An hour had slid by since opening his eyes, and at this speed he wouldn’t be leaving till four o’clock. Newspapers flapped through the letterbox. He lit a cigarette, put up his feet to read. The Mirror and The Times. Out of curiosity he looked at The Times first: adverts on the front page, and most of the back ones full of stock exchange and company reports. A property firm made a profit of seventeen million, and a woman had lost her dog.

  Eight o’clock. The kettle on again. Her larder was well stocked with the essentials of life. It didn’t seem right to leave without saying good-bye and thank you after she’d picked him up off the doorstep half dead from exposure and crippled feet, nursed him back to life even though he was a stranger. What a legend! Talking so much last night, it seemed as if he’d known her for years, even though he hadn’t been to bed with her. She was handsome as well as generous, an unbeatable combination which only came to him forcefully on the point of leaving.

  He opened the back door and slopped out tea leaves. Daylight and rain showed a garden ending at a meadow, a clump of trees on the rise of it like a secret meeting of amateurish burglars whispering to decide which house to do tonight. The garden was dug over in patches, other parts gone to bush and speckled weedgrass, a few dead potato heads overlapping what remained of a path. A good plot – with a few months’ loving care, strong arm and boot. He remembered his night in the hut on Harry’s allotment before leaving Nottingham. The soil and damp smell was the same. But then, at that time, there had still been the scent of stubbled wheat and fallen poppy heads, potato tops, snapped runner beans and updug soil, vanishing scents of a receding summer that barely penetrated his rubbed-out brain as he zig-zagged towards the hut.

  He had wakened to Harry’s spade rhythmically shifting soil outside. There was no one else he could visit after his goodbye to Nancy, so he’d left his car at Bobber’s Mill, drunk half the whisky neat between switching off the ignition and opening the door, then cut across the maze of gardens towards Harry’s. He let himself in with the spare key under the waterbarrel, sat on a stool and finished off the whisky, then slid to the floor.

  He had twelve eyes in his face all trying to look into one another and, when succeeding, only meeting twelve more staring back into each fragmentation, and then into his heart calling him a bloody fool like the opening mouths of ten million goldfish. He pulled a hand to his face, sensing he could put his head in the crook of his arm and crush it like a walnut. Nothing remained but the fleshless knot of his headache, a fizzled-out brain. He stood up to find a cigarette, but fell down again, head thumping painlessly against the floor, a rubber ball dropped by somebody else.

  Harry said: ‘I see you’ve had a drink or two?’ A fist came from Frank’s guts: that’s the way to talk! Harry the railway shunter out of contact with the acid and battery world; or was it just sarcasm? He was too far in to tell. Harry lit a paraffin lamp, stepping around as if Frank were a normal feature of the hut floor, some garden novelty such as a little boy pissing in a fish tank taken in out of the rain. Frank lay waiting until the anchoring ropes of earth and moon unknotted themselves from his head. He watched Harry pump a primus, and promise tea, while all he could do was tap his ankle and croak: ‘Water!’ when he bent down to hear what he wanted.

  ‘It’ll make you sick,’ Harry said. ‘Tea’ll be O.K. – if you drink it slow.’

  ‘Water!’ Frank said, as if covered in sand. Someone rammed a javelin into his mouth. It stretched from throat to belly and burned like prime acid. He wanted to cough or be sick, jettison it from him, but was unable to make the effort, and in any case if he did all his life’s guts would go with it. He was sure of that, waited for his own heat to melt the metal of the javelin, so that he could dare to move again and one day stand up. When he tried, the earth spun in and blacked him out.

  ‘This is no joke,’ Harry said. ‘You might not be at death’s door, but you’re at the bloody side-entrance if you ask me. Was anybody mixing your booze?’

  ‘Give me some water.’

  ‘You’ll get some as soon as this kettle boils, so hold on.’ He closed the hut door and sat on a stool looking down at his guest. ‘You can take an Aspro as well, and have something to eat. There ain’t much I ain’t got in this hut. Home from home. Ida’s been on her holidays this last week, and I slept here a couple of times, so you’re lucky we’re well provided for. I’ve got some sardines and a chunk of bacon on that shelf, and some yesterday’s bread.’

  Frank’s eyes were closed; the words ‘bacon’ and ‘sardines’ made him retch, but it stopped at that, though ever-ready Harry pushed a piece of sacking at his head: ‘Use that if you’ve got to.’

  The clean aromatic smell of hot tea came to him, worse than the idea of oil-dripping sardines, though still the javelin stayed lodged in his body when another set of spasms jerked up from his stomach. ‘That’s what drink does,’ Harry handed him a cup of tea, ‘fills you full of bile. You ought to keep off it. Want summat to eat?’

  ‘Ay, give me a deathcake – and a cup o’ quick poison while you’re at it.’ He groaned, rolled away from the white heat of the flaring lamp. ‘You been in a fight?’ Harry wanted to know.

  ‘Only with myself. I’m still in it.’

  ‘Now you’re being funny.’

  ‘Do you ever think about the future, Harry?’

  ‘Eh? Get this.’

  ‘Water. I’m drowning in lung fluid and stomach piss but I’m thirsty as if I’ve worked a week in soot-dust. My breath’s a blowlamp.’ He tried to light a cigarette, choked, and lay back down, felt, in spite of feeling weak, sick and near death’s outward fires, as if his interior had been renewed after destruction, and the experience of scorched guts and humiliated stomach had somehow rejuvenated his heart and soul. Never before had so much happened in one day, and the thought made him laugh.

  A sip of tea set him talking, relieved that his mouth liked the heat of the liquid. Maybe I’m coming back to life. A pan on the fire was frying bacon for a row of breadslices, and after a day’s gardening the smell of it was pleasant to Harry: ‘Of course I do think about the future. Even at my age. I suppose you’re too young to bother with it,’ he grinned.

  ‘You’re wrong. I’m full of it, the future, it’s on my mind all the time. Maybe it’s because I don’t know that there’s going to be any future. You remember that last crisis? Planes were going over day and night and I used to watch their vapour trails from the factory roof – all loaded to the gills with hydrogen bombs ready to go off any minute towards Russia. I felt my nerve going as I saw what might come – a complete deathfire burning everybody. But I’m strong, too bloody strong, and I just went back to my machine. “What’s the use?” I tho
ught to myself. But I wondered why everybody was dead at a time when they should be alive. And I thought: maybe it’s because everybody’s talking about it on the telly and reading all about it in the papers, and while this goes on they think it’s a game and can’t happen. You don’t have a bleeding future while you’ve got the telly on, and that’s a fact. I feel I’ll go looney though if I don’t get on the move. I’d like to walk ten miles every day for ten years. I feel as if I’m being strangled. This country’s too little for me – you can walk to any coast in a week – a bit of eagle-crap dropped out of the sky. I look at all the people round me who have boxed their future up in the telly, and it makes me sicker than that whisky I slung down. The wide open spaces would frighten any dead bastard who didn’t like other people. That’s what the telly does anyway, teaches you to despise your fellow man. There’s nothing left to believe in in this country, nothing left, not a thing.’

  ‘Careful,’ Harry said. ‘That’s because you’ve got nothing to believe in yourself.’

  ‘You may be right. I’ll have to find it then. There’s nothing in this country that can help me do it and that’s a fact. There’s a spirit of rottenness and tightness in it.’

  ‘You can’t condemn a whole country.’

  ‘I don’t. I never wanted a country to believe in, either. I’m out of a factory. A machine will do me. I was just talking about the feeling. I feel like an ant on a gramophone record that can’t get off.’ He was sitting up, legs spread along the floor, having eaten his way through a bacon sandwich and drunk the mug of tea. Harry had said little, let him rave on, let the fire in his eyes burn undiminished, glowing as if he’d put back a bottle of paraffin instead of whisky. A hard wind kept up a continual bumping against the hut, as if a huge dog running blind across the gardens stumbled at the hut it could never learn to see: ‘You can talk, but the world will go its own way.’

  ‘As long as I go mine. That’s all I feel fit for now.’ He felt good for even less, but couldn’t admit it to Harry: head full of stones, legs dead, body paralysed and yet to be woken up from, as if the whisky had killed him, stopped his heart so that he had actually wandered around in the black limitless emptiness of unearthly death in the hour before Harry found him; travelled among star-sparks of half life on his way back into his eyes and brain, toes and stone-cold bollocks, hands and shoulders that, thanks to the bacon and blind talk, and after so long, were getting blood through them again.

  Harry spread more slices in the pan. ‘It’s all right you blabbing about England being rotten, but it’s better than some places I could name, for all its faults.’

  ‘That don’t say it can’t be better though. It won’t last much longer.’

  He laughed, and turned the bacon over. ‘It’ll last me out.’

  ‘Enjoy it then, while you can.’

  ‘I’m not enjoying it. I’m too bloody busy living to let things get my goat the way you do.’

  ‘There’s some as can do both,’ Frank reminded him.

  ‘And there’s some as can’t help but do both,’ Harry said, ‘and delight in it’ – turning the rashers over for a final crispness. The hut air was close and heavy with breathsteam, fagsmoke and the top-heavy odour of burning fat, a total blend suggesting warmth and protection from the outside world. It was comfortable, even though Frank’s enduring prostration on the hard boards wore his bones away and ached into his muscles. It was inside, away from the vile attack of problems, and here the only problem Was in talk, and to catch into talk the numerous problematic thoughts that came into his head – before they spun away and lost themselves maybe in the sort of protected atmosphere he’d stumbled into, where no real problem could get at any other problem. His head dizzied at such spinning arrows. He wanted to get up and go outside, lean against the hut, push and strain until the whole ricketty fabric, Harry included, fell into a heap. But he wasn’t even strong enough for that after so much drink. I’m waking up in a way I’ve never wakened up before; or maybe the whisky’s scorched the jungle from my brain and left only a few steel bolts and rods that I can find my way through at last. Unless it’ll only feel like that until the last drop of whisky’s all pissed out and I get into my old leaf-bag skin again.

  He reached for another sandwich, while Harry set the kettle on the primus in a self-indulgent excuse to keep the blue flame comforting the vitals of the hut. ‘Death means nothing to me,’ Frank said to him, ‘because my future has been taken away. Yet I can’t live without a future, Harry. There’s got to be something, but when the whole world can go up in five minutes, what is there? There’s not even a chance of crawling back into the swamps and living off fish and snakes. There’s nothing at all, because the future doesn’t mean anything. But to me it’s got to. I’ve got to rip something out of it. So am I supposed to make a future out of this world that’s already taken it away? People are, better off without a future, tamer, docile. No, I’ve got to figure one out for myself, which means I’m on my own, even when I don’t want to be.’

  He ate, and relaxed. It felt like a truce in life – a white handkerchief slowly ripping in the outside wind. Harry often came here and had this truce with himself, yet he was the one who at work said life was a long continuous battle from cunt to coffin. The wind jumped, caught the hut beam end on, shook but didn’t budge it. I don’t want to go out into that wind. It’s dark outside, and cold. I want to stay where the bacon’s frying and the lamp’s lit. That wind can never bash the hut flat, but it might crash me down if I go out into it. But what’s the use of talking? My mind’s made up to go out into it whether I go out into it or not.

  He shut the back door quietly so as not to wake Pat, felt like an island, drifting away from the continent of his life, almost as if he’d been pushed off by it like some lifeboat no longer needed. The twenty-seven years of it, three times nine, seemed to be receding from the isolated point at which he found himself. He felt more cut-off from life than even when walking the lonely hedgebound roads an hour before dusk. It was a weird feeling, limboed in some Lincolnshire cottage, feet on the table and drinking tea, radio piping softly.

  He had to leave, yet without knowing why, as if there were slow-moving springs in his legs over which he had relinquished control, months ago, before he had even thought about blowing up the bridges of his life. He stood to re-set his pack, wrote on a note-pad: ‘Dear Pat, thanks for everything, Frank.’ She’d had quite a life compared to his: fiancé drowned, married life to an advertising nob, nursing on and off, and God knows what else. Mine’s been tame, stuck in one place, factory, house, pub, same pals, brands of ale, glorying in a pushbike and then a car, dull when you think of some people. With all her books and records she’s a better educated person, and they’re the people who move and live exciting lives. Things happen to you, the more you know, the more you think.

  Rain had stopped brewing itself into the derelict garden. The brimming waterbutt became still, reflecting the sky growing lighter above the hillock, and clouds as if ready to get a move on at last. He walked along the path, smelling the fresh damp air, soddened grass and the distant whiff of rotting tree bark; sedge underfoot was clean and heavy after the night of saturation. Wind jumped the trees, flicked the outer edge of emptying twigs left and right. In Nottingham the streets would be on the move, main roads flooding well, yet there was a sense of movement around this silent garden which he was beginning to understand.

  He stepped back into the kitchen, meaning to get his pack and go. Pat stood by the table, having glanced at his scrawled note. She wore a long dark-blue dressing-gown, her face pale from sleep, hair falling loose. His entrance made her jump: ‘I thought you were already off’ – not meaning to sound so brusque.

  She was more relaxed, lines on her face, a smile less bright, less stern and sure of herself than she seemed last night. Straight out of sleep, a recent battleground of dreams, she wasn’t yet accustomed to daytime and the presence of this man she had given shelter to. He made her feel as if she was in a strange
place, a home not her own that she had woken up in out of a dream. Her senses were overdrawn, exposed, isolated from what surrounded her. She wanted him to vanish, then to stay. There was something pleasurable in the power facing her, so that she distrusted it but could not retreat. Some people, he thought, get up after a night’s sleep; other people recover from it, and you can see it on their faces – as it was on hers. He stood close: ‘Not yet. I made myself comfortable for breakfast.’

  His hands were on her elbows, moved up her back. ‘Stop it,’ she said. ‘What are you doing?’

  The answer was a massive rockface, a cauterization of all social feeling, a force that no will or protest could stop. He pulled her to him, face against the side of her neck. ‘This’ – kissing her warm smooth skin, feeling her body slowly pressing. Her head drew back, eyes closed. ‘No, leave me, for God’s sake.’

  Her lips were hard, opening so that her teeth were against his, and neither could speak. She forced herself away, saying anything that would preserve her from him until the right moment; whenever that would be. ‘Not now. Stay though, if you like. I have to dress and go to the stores in the village.’

  He sat in the parlour reading a book to the background of the Clarinet Concerto and a coal fire scorching his ankles, finding it pleasant the way she took the fact of their morning kisses so coolly, being accustomed to this as a time of snap and quarrel, a canyon separating you from the woman you’d just been funny with. But she acted as if they’d done nothing, or as if they’d been courting a year already. Nevertheless Pat found it strange the way he seemed at home so soon, took to a book and Mozart as if he’d been familiar with both all his life. Maybe this was what he’d craved since leaving his wife: a new home, though he’d never admit it. ‘I don’t know what I’ll do with myself while you’re shopping,’ he joked. ‘I can’t wait till you get back.’