He broke off and strode out of the room, and they heard the next class fall quiet as he went among them.
It’s all lies, Brian thought. Even if it’s the truth, it’s a lie. But he also scoffed at his own fiction of the barricades and pyramids of dead on paving-stones, convinced of nothing except the bursting top of his milk bottle at play-time and the pushing-in of a straw before sucking cool liquid into the dry chalk of his mouth, a liquid that nevertheless still tasted like the dull and sluggish iodine-pain that old Jones had blabbed about.
At four in the afternoon he ran home clutching a cardboard box, and burst into the house as his father was having tea. There’d been a rumour in class, while they were waiting to be served the respirators, that everyone had to pay for them, so much a week, and Brian had been pleasantly surprised to note when it was actually put into his hand that payment hadn’t been mentioned at all, at which he assumed that he had been given an expensive piece of equipment absolutely free. “Look what I’ve got,” he called out, swinging his treasure-box on its string. They were uninterested. Then he saw three others on the floor in a corner, their boxes already bent and battered, a strap hanging from one, Arthur doing his best to break up another. His mother was reading the Post: “There’ll be no peace in our time,” she said scornfully, laying it aside to pour Brian a cup of tea.
“No,” Seaton answered, in splendid gruff prophecy, “nor in any other bloody time, either.”
CHAPTER 14
Mr. Jones walked in with no preliminary spying. Dapper, smart, his jaw like that on a ventriloquist’s dummy, he held up a slip of paper and called, not overloud: “Robertson, come out.”
Brian heard a movement behind, and a gangly eleven-year-old walked to the front. Mr. Jones stood by the blackboard, hid Ceylon with a head as fiercely threatening as the cobra that represented the island. “So you’re Robertson?”
He admitted it, though reluctantly; not knowing where to put his hands, he tried to get them into his trouser pockets but was baffled when their entrances seemed to have closed up against him. “Keep your hands by your side when you speak to me,” Mr. Jones roared, smacking him across the ear. He held the menacing piece of paper up to his nose, chafing it like a fly so that Robertson got a smack on the other ear for trying to brush it off. “I’ve had a complaint about you from a lady who lives nearby. She says you broke her window with a football and used foul language when she came out to you.”
Robertson looked to one side, and said nothing.
“Well?”—in a roar that told the whole school he was on the warpath again. Parts of his face were streaked with tiny purple veins, like rivers on a finely drawn map, though his lips were bloodless. “Have you nothing to say, blockhead?”
Out of a sound of slow choking came: “I didn’t cheek her off, sir.”
Clap! “That’s for being a liar as well. I’ll teach you to use foul language, and lie to me.” He turned to the motionless teacher sitting at the high stool by his desk: “Give me your stick, Mr. Bates.”
The boy did not move when ordered to hold out his hand. “Are you deaf?” Mr. Jones screamed. He’s loony, Brian said to himself. If we all rushed him, though, we’d pulverize ’im. Robertson made as if to turn to the rest of the class, but no one could help him, being arranged at their desks in a helpless dead silence. “If you don’t hold out your hand, I’ll make you hold it out.” He brought the stick back and slashed at the boy’s shoulder with all his strength, but Robertson dodged it and ran, opened the door with unrehearsed dexterity, and slammed it behind him. He was heard clattering to safety along the street, running to the protection of his unemployed father. Mr. Jones threw the stick down and strode out.
Brian missed both verse and chapter from the Bible-reading that followed. On the streets, in your own land when playing at night, you still weren’t safe from the long arm of Mr. Jones. Even miles away in quiet and hedge-bound fields his rage seemed out to get you: next morning in school he might confront you with stick and piece of paper with your name on both demanding to know why you were in a certain field last night when a notice on the gate said quite plainly that trespassers would be prosecuted. Trespassers will be persecuted, more like it, persecuted by bastards like old dead Jones.
The only place he felt safe was at the Nook. Beyond the valley of the Lean and across the new boulevard, he made his way every weekend of the autumn. After the harvest, a pig was killed and the pork salted for Christmas. Mary made a list, in the back of an old laundry book, of those who wanted to buy a piece, and Brian would carry a loaded basket under the railway bridge and deliver to different houses in Radford Woodhouse.
Merton had set the date for the slaughter. “Percy’ll be ’ere at three, so I’ll not go upstairs to bed.”
Brian was at the table shelling a bowl of peas: “What pig are yer goin’ ter kill, grandad?”
“Come wi’ me, and I’ll show yer.” He took his stick, and as he walked out and along the yard, Brian noticed for the first time his slightly bent shoulders. Maybe he is very old, he thought, remembering his father’s reference to “that owd bogger.”
Merton pointed into the pigsty. “That one, Nimrod. See it?” Black and pink, they huddled together near the trough, squealing at the expectation of an unlatched gate with buckets of food to follow. “See it? That fat bogger as can ’ardly move.” He turned away to roll a cigarette.
“Will it hurt it when you kill it, grandad?”
“Nay,” Merton said, his face lost in smoke. “A man comes up special to kill it. I can’t do it myself ’cause I ain’t got a licence.” He turned and smacked one of the pigs across its rump for pushing a nose too insistently at the door of the sty, then took a steel scoop from the wash-house wall and stirred the large barrel of crusts and old potatoes, meal and bran. Brian unhooked the latch, and the pigs, smelling food, squealed and crowded at the empty trough so that Merton couldn’t get to it. He put the buckets down: “Pass my stick, Nimrod: I’ll get the boggers out o’ the way.”
Buckets of meal splashed into the trough, the pigs congealed into a solid row, gurgling and gobbling, Brian fascinated at the swill-level going down before his eyes.
The pig to be killed was driven from the food by Merton’s stick, kept wild-eyed and squealing in a corner until the rest had finished and were looking round for more. It was as if the sky had altered colour for it. While the rest seemed happy at not having been singled out for this limbo before death, the victim walked round the sty with nose to the ground, sniffing with nervous quickness. Its steel grey eyes, deeply sunk into an obese face, gazed at the sty fence that Merton and Brian leaned against; then it walked back to the trough, still unable to believe it had been left out, and expecting to find food there, hoping that its last sensation of having been set apart for some incomprehensible purpose had been only a dream. But it kept walking around the sty, repeating these expeditions to the trough, in between time squealing loudly with fear at the incontrovertible difference thrust upon it.
The pig-killer arrived, a small man of forty with a brown wrinkled face and a grey moustache. He wore a flat greasy cap and lit a cigarette as he stopped near the kitchen door. Over the cross-bar of his bike hung a small sack, in which he carried knives and an apron. “We ain’t hard up for time,” Merton said. “So we’ll ’ave a cup o’ tea first.” Brian followed them into the kitchen: “Can I watch the pig being killed, grandad?”
“Yer can for me. It wain’t hurt yer to see a drop o’ blood.” His grandmother overheard. “Don’t let ’im. It ain’t nice. You’ll see enough blood when you’re a big lad.”
“He’ll be all right,” Merton said.
But Mary didn’t want Brian to see it. He’d have bad dreams, she maintained, and Merton agreed: ay, maybe he would. Mary in fact wished the pigs could have gone to the slaughterhouse, for such piteous dying squeals chilled her; so she stayed in the parlour, turned chalk-white when the death blow was struck. It was impossible not to tremble for them: “Poor thing!” she mutt
ered. “Poor thing!”
A large tin bath was placed on the table outside. Percy sorted his knives, got Brian to tie the strings of his apron: “Mek a tight bow, there’s a good lad.” A continual grunting and squealing came from the sty, as if the pigs were somehow able to smell the last blood-stains already washed from the slaughterer’s knife. Buckets of boiling water were carried from the wash-house copper until the bath was two-thirds full. “I might ’ave another done next month,” Merton said, “if I get enough orders for this one.” More people were wanting meat than last year, for work was coming back on the market. “You know where to find me,” Percy said.
The final column of hot steam was poured into the bath. “I’ll mek it right,” Merton promised. “There’ll be a good piece for yo’.” The poultry hatches were abnormally quiet: even the dogs and cats had fled from the vicinity of the house, though they would be back for scraps when the carve-up began.
Brian felt afraid at this silent inexorable display of purpose. Each twig of the nearby tree was significant and isolated as before a thunderstorm. His grandmother had forgotten he was outside, and had gone into the parlour until it was all over. Part of the yard where he stood was empty, for Percy and his grandfather had gone to get the pig from the sty. A wall of cloud darkened the yard and, strangely enough, even the pigs weren’t whining any more. He knew this to be a good time to escape without being thought foolish by his grandfather, yet he was unable to go indoors, was held by a gap in the hedge that showed him the dead fixity of a stubbled cornfield.
Squeals came round the corner, with scuffing and the smack of Merton’s stick across a pig’s back. Then the vacuum of silence was overfilled by every pig screaming at once.
They dragged the half-crazed animal along the ground, its eyes staring like ball-bearings to where it was being taken, but seeing nothing because the squeals were in its eyes and blinding it. Legs kicked from its podged body. Merton cursed, hit it with the stick he still managed to hold, but the blows only confirmed the animal’s instinct that it was going towards some terrible fate, and so caused it to squeal louder.
Those left in the sty were infected with its fear, joined the lament in the hope that they would not be next. With one heave the pig was on the table. Merton held its hind legs and Percy the front. It stared at a patch of blue sky through the branches of the alder tree. Then its head went to one side, and in the distance Brian heard a train passing, as if the pig had turned to watch it at that moment. Percy reached for a wooden-handled knife, held it above the pig’s throat. The blade curved, almost sickle-shaped: like that picture of Shylock, occurred to Brian. Percy’s arm came down strongly, pierced the throat, and ripped it sideways. A metallic, almost human cry covered the house, and died quickly, like a train whistle.
Blood was aimed into a bucket and nearly filled it. They lifted the pig (heavy like iron now) into the bath, and the steaming water changed magically to pink. “Well,” Merton said, “that’s that.” Percy wiped his knife on a cloth.
That’s what pigs is for, Brian said to himself. Its trough-searching snout was dead meat, ready to be cooked and eaten. On the point of tears, he remembered its struggle: that’s what it’s for, though, and now he had seen it. He went into the house.
“Is it dead then?” Mary asked.
Merton was angry that she looked so pale. “Course it is, why?”
“Nothing.” She filled the kettle to make tea.
“There yer goo agen,” he exclaimed, “worryin’ yersen to death over the bleddy pig. Anybody would think I was a bleddy murderer. The soddin’ ta-tas we ’ave over this. Don’t yer know you’ve got to killa pig to get summat t’eat?” Brian had heard his mother say that these words passed every time between them. “I know. But they squeal so.”
Merton took a packet of Robins from the shelf and offered Percy one. “Well, that’s their fault. We kill ’em as neat as we can. I hope I die as quick, that’s all I can say.”
After tea, the oil lamp lit, Mary stood in the pantry salting the pork. There was a great block of salt on the kitchen table, and Merton knocked off lumps, crushing them to powder with a rolling pin, filling basins for Brian to carry down the pantry steps. Slabs of pork hung from the ceiling, so clean that it seemed life was still in it. Bowls were filled with blood and lengths of intestine ready for blackpudding next day. All Brian’s sympathy for the pig had gone—except that on his way to bed faint squeals from its dying returned and during the night mixed with train whistles that made excursions into his dreams.
Pink houses of new estates were spilling into the countryside. Men with black and white poles and notebooks came across the new boulevards into lanes and fields; they set theodolites and dumpy levels pointing in sly angles at distant woods, into and over the Cherry Orchard where the Arlingtons and Lakers lived, invading Brian’s hide-outs, obliterating his short-cuts and concealed tracks towards the Nook.
After the surveyors came the clearance men, groups of pioneer navvies breaking down hedges and making trenches in a straight line out from the boulevard. It was no longer a lonely walk from Radford: trees were ripped out of the soil, ditches dug, and the first markings of a road skirted the Nook by a few hundred yards. Brian walked out with his grandfather one day. “What are they doing all this for?” It was like pictures he had seen of the Great War: an open landscape scored with trenches, stretching over to the black wall of Serpent Wood. “Going to build ’ouses and shops,” Merton told him, sounding as though he didn’t like the idea of it. “What do they want to build ’em just ’ere for, though?”
“Because they’ve got nowhere else to build, I suppose.” He slashed at the remaining twig-sprouts of a bush, as if angry that it had let itself be pulled to ruin so easily. Brian liked the idea of buildings going up: he would see men coming along with machines, trains of lorries bringing bricks and mortar. Instead of woods and fields, houses would appear along new roads, would transform the map in his mind. The idea of it caught at him like fire: “When will they start building then?”
“Not for a long time, Nimrod. They’ve got to finish clearing yet. Then there’s the drains to be put down. It might be a couple o’ years before they get the first one up.” But Merton was wrong. Allotment gardens, football pitch, and wheatfields were soon under the hammers of annihilation. Brian looked one Saturday from the bedroom window to see enormous lorries unloading drainage pipes not far from the Nook. The bricked-out foundations of houses were already visible near the boulevard.
Seaton was able to get a job on a factory site down town. There was even an urgency for overtime, and he would be out of the house for twelve hours in fine weather. On the first day Brian took him a can of tea, saw him among a gang of other men shovelling sand from a lorry. He waved and came over to the fence, wearing a workjacket too big for him, his black hair hidden by a new cap. Having subbed a pound from the gaffer, he was able to push money into Brian’s hand: “Here y’are, my owd flower. Tell yer mam there’ll be a lot more on Friday as well.” He turned back to his work. Brian shouted out a goodbye and walked off, unwilling to look at his father, who, he thought, might for some reason be angry if he did so while he was working. To Brian, he was captured, taken from being king of the house and set among strangers where he seemed insignificant.
Yet it was worth it, everyone agreed, for there was more food in the house. There was also more money, and though it had been supposed up to then that the lack of it had been the cause of all their quarrels, it was soon clear that they went on anyway from force of habit. Seaton was born with his black temper and would die of it, and Vera had never been able to express and defend herself, first against her father, then against her husband. The only thing she could do with any thoroughness was worry, which probably sprang from thinking she hadn’t had the best out of life and never would. If there was nothing tangible to worry about she was bored, so there was always something to be harassed into a problem. The house was too small to keep her busy all the time, and rather than make or repai
r clothes, she found it easier to buy cheap new ones. Her hands were clumsy and without confidence: patches and rips to be sewn were swiftly bodged, and in spite of washday and family meals, there was still time to worry, often over lesser things of the house that didn’t really matter. Now and again the whole family became embroiled in explosive quarrels about nothing: pots flew and fists struck out, and everyone from mother and father down were isolated by bitterness and misery, until the violence of it, after several hours, thinned itself out into their bloodstreams and brought them happily together again.
By another long bout of saving, this time more open, Brian bought his second book: Les Misérables. He’d heard it as a serial on the wireless, had been enthralled by the grandiose surprises of its plot. “Nineteen years for a loaf of bread!” was a cry rising like a monolith of burning truth from the placid waters and unruffled jungle that hid the murderous go-getters of Treasure Island, and stifled the inane parrot-cry of “Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!” Hounded by the police, impervious to bullets at the barricades, carrying a wounded man on his shoulders through the serpentine arteries of the Parisian sewers, Jean Valjean’s life-long fight and death seemed an epic of reality. It was a battle between a common man and the police who would not let him be free because he had once stolen a loaf of bread for the children of his starving sister. And after such terrifying adventures of this man who did not want to be an outlaw, death was the only freedom he was allowed to find by the author of this bitter and sombre book. Good and bad were easily separated. On one side were Thénardier and Inspector Javert—both against a society of equals because Thénardier needed the rich to thieve from, and Javert the poor to persecute. On the other side were Fantine, Gavroche, Jean Valjean, Marius Pontmercy, Cosette—the weak, the young, the revolutionaries—those who could not live with the former in their midst. The barricades were stormed, the insurgents killed, but the novel was read and re-read, and read again.
Key to the Door: A Novel (The Seaton Novels) Page 21
