Five Boys

by Mick Jackson

  She prized Bobby’s hot little hand off his suitcase handle and led the way down the hall. The case was small but surprisingly heavy and as she headed toward the parlor she wondered what on earth it might contain.

  Boys’ things, she told herself.

  She sat the boy down on the settee by the fire and had a good look at him. His coat was buttoned right up to his throat.

  “It must be windy in Mrs. Willcox’s motor,” she said, which seemed to Bobby to be more of a statement than a question, so he carried on looking around the room.

  They sat side by side for a while in silence. Then Miss Minter turned to him and said, “Does your daddy let you look at the newspapers?”

  Bobby nodded.

  Miss Minter leaned over the end of the sofa, picked up a couple of old Daily Sketches and dropped them in his lap. Bobby looked at the newspapers as if he might have to memorize them.

  “Do you like treacle toffee?” the old woman asked him.

  Bobby nodded again.

  That night he slept on the settee, under an eiderdown, which smelled powerfully of mothballs, and rested his head on a pillow which was about as accommodating as a sack of cement. He lay on his side, with his hands tucked between his legs, kept wriggling to try and make himself comfortable, until he felt the settee’s cushions begin to shift and spread beneath him, and decided that he had better lie still or risk being swallowed up.

  He was surprised not to have been told to brush his teeth, and when he clamped them together they still took some getting apart. He thought about the paper bag Miss Minter had offered him and the oily slabs of toffee inside. Of slipping a finger between a couple of pieces which were welded together and trying to wrench one free.

  He dozed off for a few seconds, then forced his eyes open. Found that he was indeed in the parlor of a strange old lady, many miles from home. He thought about the train and the coaches. Thought about his mother not wanting to let go of his hand. He stared at the fire, to try and calm himself down. Concentrated on it—and found that it had caves, like the bag of treacle toffee, but caves that were alive and red-hot at the core.

  Miss Minter had always been a light sleeper, so when she surfaced briefly around four the following morning, to plump her pillow and turn to face the wall, her dreams parted just long enough for her to recall Mrs. Willcox smiling on her doorstep and the boy on the settee down below.

  She stared into the dark and began to wonder. Wondered what young boys were fed on … how much sleep they needed … how to keep them occupied. If she could only stop him from starving or drowning or catching pneumonia, until someone with the proper qualifications came along, she told herself, then she would have more than done her duty and could set about trying to forget the whole sorry affair.

  The only boys she had any experience of were the ones in the village, who seemed to divide their time between a sort of sleepwalking stupor and a primitive savagery, with not much in between. But even these village boys were a mystery to her. There was no telling what went on inside them and the only thing Miss Minter’s encounters had taught her was to give them plenty of room, like young cattle, in case they started kicking and bucking about.

  She stared at the ceiling until daylight dragged the room from its shadows, racking her brains for tips to do with boys. She must have heard something over the years, she thought, but the only thing she could come up with was the supposed benefit of getting children out of doors. It was an idea which made more sense every time she returned to it, especially a boy from London whose lungs were apparently full of soot. A lack of any other ideas did nothing but lend extra conviction to this one and though, in truth, Miss Minter could see no particular virtue in being exposed to the elements when there was a fire in the grate, she began to see the wisdom in getting a child away from the house, so that any harm which befell them might be blamed on somebody else.

  As she dressed she told herself that no matter how ill-conceived her attempts at child-minding, it was essential they be carried out with unwavering authority. So, even as Bobby ate his bread and jam Lillian was fetching his jacket from the coat stand, and before he’d finished rinsing it down with a cup of tea she was feeding his arms into his jacket’s sleeves. He was barely awake when he found himself being ushered out through the same doorway Mrs. Willcox had been so eager to usher him through the night before. He put the brakes on long enough to ask Miss Minter what time he was expected back. Miss Minter assumed an expression of unflappable self-assurance.

  “You’ll need to be home before it gets dark,” she said.

  Bobby looked up at the sky, which had not a trace of darkness in it. The hours of daylight seemed to stretch right over the hills. He wondered if the days down here were somehow shorter and turned to put this to the old lady, but she was already shutting the door in his face.

  Dreams of Heavy Women

  BOBBY STOOD by the gate, bewildered, while Miss Minter watched from an upstairs window and quietly willed him on his way. Left and right both seemed to go nowhere. There was nothing to aim toward, but after some deliberation Bobby buttoned his coat, turned to his left and followed the lane down to a bridge, then onto a crossroads, and went straight on up the hill.

  The night had swept away all the motor cars and coaches. Bobby had never had so much space to himself. It was a disconcerting feeling, and as he tramped up the lane the hedgerows towered around him and he entered a steep green corridor of stillness, with a ceiling of blue sky high overhead. He hiked up that lane for what felt like half an hour, with nothing but his own anxious thoughts bearing down on him, then the hedgerows finally fell away and he passed the gates to a farm, then a couple of cottages and a post office and more cottages, each with its own orderly garden and smoke pumping out of its chimney pot.

  The whole village appeared to consist of nothing but the three lanes which met at the war memorial, where Bobby stopped and read the inscription to see if there were any dead soldiers with the same surname as his. There weren’t, so he crossed the road and had a look at the big old church and the gravestones scattered around it and was studying the church notice board when a loud tapping sound suddenly started up.

  He turned around, but the village was deserted. Not just devoid of people, but spick-and-span—as if someone had just been through it with a dustpan and brush. There was no natural place from which the sound could have originated and Bobby was beginning to think he must be losing his mind when the tap-tap-tapping started up again and he spotted a figure at the window of a cottage who, seeing how his tapping had finally got Bobby’s attention, began to frantically wave at him instead. Bobby glanced over his shoulder—thought the figure in the window must be waving at someone else—but the lane behind him was just as empty as the one in front and the more baffled he became, the more tapping and waving he seemed to provoke.

  Bobby finally grasped that it was he who was being beckoned and slowly made his way over. The windowpanes were thick and flawed and the closer Bobby got the more the fellow behind them looked like some swimmer trapped under the ice. He was an old chap, in a threadbare jerkin, and when Bobby was near enough to make him out the fellow stopped flapping his arms and pressed a coin up against the glass. He opened his mouth but the words which came out of him were so deadened and distant that they made no sense at all.

  A bout of indigestion was brewing up in Bobby to rival the one brought on by Miss Peebles’ cheese-and-onion sandwich and didn’t improve when the old man put his thin lips right up to the glass and proceeded to move them in a slow and deliberate manner, like a lunatic at the bars of his cell. Plenty of pointing and face pulling followed but Bobby managed to stay put long enough to realize that the old man was actually directing him around the side of the house.

  There was an old wooden porch in which Bobby stood, like a sentry, and after a while the door opened far enough for a head to pop out and look him up and down.

  “Got your wits about you?” said the head. “Eyes and ears, eh?”

&nb
sp; Bobby was disheartened to find that even when the words were perfectly audible they were just as meaningless as the ones which came through the glass, but there was such expectation in the old man’s eyes it was clear that all he was after was confirmation, which Bobby duly offered, then a hand crept out toward him, turned and opened, to reveal a couple of coppers in its palm.

  “Get some cakes from old Marjory,” said the old man, “and see what’s stretching.”

  The old man smiled, which cheered Bobby—he was pleased that the old man’s thin lips were capable of such a thing—although he was no closer to understanding what was being asked of him.

  His mystification must have been apparent, for the old man suddenly became exasperated.

  “The shop, boy,” he said. Then, “The post office,” and nodded down the lane.

  Bobby felt that he was now at least in comprehension’s neighborhood, even if he didn’t have the exact address, and took the coins.

  “Whatever you fancy,” said the old man. “But no scones. And no Eccles cakes,” as if he had just recognized in Bobby the tendency to dabble in such things.

  The hand retreated into the shadows, the head followed and Bobby was about to set off in search of Marjory and her cakes when the head sprang back out.

  “Remember,” the old man said and narrowed his eyes. “You’re a mole.”

  He looked left and right, then settled on Bobby.

  “There’ll be questions,” he said, then disappeared.

  Within five minutes Bobby was back with his bag of cakes, knocking at the door and bracing himself for the old man’s head to pop out at him like a jack-in-the-box. But from deep inside the cottage a voice called out, “It’s open,” so Bobby held down the latch, heaved against the door and eventually landed in a large, low-ceilinged room, dimly lit, with the old man in an armchair by the window, hunched over a cluttered tray.

  “Nearly there,” said the old man without looking up.

  All the walls were lined with bottled butterflies. The old man was nipping and tweaking at something with a pair of tweezers and had a quilted sleeping bag pulled right up to his armpits, which made him look as if he was emerging from his own rather tattered cocoon. As he waited, Bobby had a closer look at one of the bottles. A tiny ship sat in a ruffled pool of turquoise plaster. Its sails billowed stiffly and its rigging of threads was as taut as an egg slice. A handwritten label beneath read, “The Bentinck, passing Aden, 1844.” And as Bobby watched, all the other butterflies transformed themselves into miniature ships.

  “So,” said the old man, setting his tray down on a table, “what have we got for our elevenses?”

  He nodded at a footstool by the window and as Bobby went over and settled himself on it his host picked the cakes out of their paper bag and explained how sultanas and raisins tended to get under his dentures and not want to come back out.

  “An inconvenience I hope you’ll be spared,” he said and took the iced bun, leaving the Bakewell tart for Bobby. Then the old man sat back in his armchair and slipped his free hand down into the sleeping bag where, Bobby imagined, it would be nice and warm.

  “So what was Marjory up to?” said the old man.

  Bobby thought for a moment. “Nothing,” he said. “Just getting the cakes.”

  The old man winced, as if he had woefully overestimated Bobby’s abilities. The iced bun hung in the air and he stared down at the rug, as if setting an example in the kind of concentration he had thought Bobby capable of.

  “Anything else?” he said.

  Bobby was gravely aware that he had somehow forfeited one precious chance and might not be granted many more, so he paused and thought hard about the big fat lady in her tiny little shop.

  “I think,” he ventured, “she might have been sucking on a sweet.”

  The old man’s face lit up. He nodded. “That wouldn’t surprise me,” he said, then chuckled, and his hand shifted in his sleeping bag. “She’s always at them jars of sweets.”

  Bobby wondered briefly whether the old man’s interest in the lady at the post office wasn’t simply the appreciation of one person with a fondness for jars and bottles for another.

  “And what do you reckon she was sucking on?” the old man asked. “Did you happen to catch a whiff?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Bobby and saw all the hard-won warmth drain from the old man’s face. So he thought back to the woman tucking the sweet into a cheek as she leaned over the counter and asked Bobby if the old goat up the road had got him running his errands for him. “But it might have been cinder toffee,” he said.

  The old man gazed out of the window and nodded.

  “Could be,” he said. “She likes her cinder, does Marjory.”

  The old man’s thoughtful little interlude gave Bobby the opportunity to take a bite of his cake. He had never had a Bakewell tart before and was surprised (but not entirely disappointed) to find that it tasted quite like the treacle toffee he had had for his supper the night before.

  “What did you make of her?” the old man said.

  Bobby continued to chew with great deliberation, as if giving the question some thought.

  “… generally speaking,” the old man said.

  By the time Bobby finally got around to swallowing he still had no idea what reaction his answer was going to get.

  “I thought she was quite large,” he said and looked meaningfully out of the window, just as the old man had done a minute before.

  The shipbuilder beamed, recognizing a fellow after his own heart. He let out a deep sigh, accompanied by further activity in his sleeping bag.

  He nodded. “She’s a fair size, is she not?” he said.

  Bobby was again struck by how differently things were done down here: the days were shorter, the meals were sweeter, and speaking frankly about people’s size was quite acceptable. A year or two earlier he had made some quite innocent comment about a fat lady in the queue at the butcher’s and got a terrible telling-off from his mother on the way home—a recollection which stirred such strong emotions in him and brought such a significant lump to his throat that his mouthful of Bakewell tart couldn’t find a way past it and he began choking, which broke in on the old man’s reverie and had him worrying he might have to turn the boy upside down.

  Thankfully, this proved not to be necessary and when at last the food was heading in the right direction Bobby wiped the tears from his face.

  “Went down the wrong lung, that bit, didn’t it?” said the old man, but the boy kept staring at the floor.

  “Yes,” the old man said to himself. “She’s a fair old size, is Marjory Pye,” then looked over at his tray of tiny tools and slivers of wood and balls of thread and for a while talked abstractly about the perils of drilling a jib boom when you’ve got icing all over your fingertips.

  Bobby had just about recovered himself when the old man suddenly turned to him.

  “I don’t believe you’ve been introduced to the Captain, have you?” he said.

  Bobby wasn’t sure he was up to anymore introductions. He wanted to be back home, tucked up in his bed. And it was only when the old man got to his feet and held out the hand not holding up his sleeping bag that Bobby realized how the Captain and the old man with whom he was having his elevenses might be one and the same.

  Miss Minter was finding that, contrary to popular wisdom, Bobby’s being out of sight in no way constituted his being out of mind and the moment he disappeared down the lane she began to worry what she was going to do with him when he returned.

  Considering how long it took her to come up with the idea of giving him breakfast and getting him out of the house, the idea of bathing him came to her with comparable ease. Certainly, it came a good deal easier than the effort necessary to generate enough hot water to fill her old tin bath. The fire in the range needed stoking, then constant attention, and there were countless trips between the boiler and the pump out in the yard, as well as dragging the bath in from the outhouse in order to b
ring it up to room temperature and avoid it instantly chilling any hot water introduced to it.

  She began heating the water soon after lunchtime, convinced that Bobby would come skipping up the path at any moment, covered from head to toe in mud. Meanwhile, Bobby, mindful of her instructions regarding his return was, in all his mindfulness, having difficulty recalling whether it was meant to precede, coincide with or follow the onset of darkness. So, having had his elevenses at the Captain’s and investigated the last few corners of the village soon afterward, he climbed through a hedge halfway down the leafy lane and spent most of the afternoon throwing stones into a field.

  He must have lain down and closed his eyes at some point for he dreamed of old Mr. Evans (which was odd as he hadn’t seen Mr. Evans in years). Then he climbed a tree, kept an eye on the sun until it began to sink between the hills and went down the lane after it.

  Bobby had no trouble finding the old woman’s cottage. He just followed the thick column of smoke pouring from its chimney, but it wasn’t until he entered the house that he appreciated what was producing it. As soon as he opened the parlor door the heat hit him with all the force of a cricket bat and a great cloud of steam billowed out into the hall. The windows dripped with condensation. The sills were dappled with small, mercurial pools. There was so much steam that all the linen on the clothes rack, which had been bone-dry that morning, looked as if it had just been dragged out of the wash. Bobby could just make out Miss Minter, bent over the range like a fireman on the foot plate of a locomotive. She looked over her shoulder, but her spectacles were so fogged up she had to tip her head forward and peer over them.

  “Here he is,” she said, without a hint of reproach. “I’ve been keeping the water hot.”

  She dragged a damp tangle of hair back from her forehead and hooked it behind an ear. Stepped forward and took Bobby’s hands in hers.

  “Good God,” she said. “You’re freezing.”

  On the contrary, Bobby thought the old lady was roasting. Miss Minter, meanwhile, was noticing how little mud Bobby had on him, but taking solace from the fact that the bath would at least heat him up.