Story, Volume II

by Dai Smith

  ‘Soldado?’ Bowcott said.

  ‘Ye…s,’ the young man gave a bitter smile.

  Bowcott puffed out his chest.

  ‘You’d better have a drink with me,’ he said in a fatherly voice. ‘Beer?’

  The young man nodded, but the proprietor shook his head nervously. Bowcott ignored him. He knew he had skills with drunks.

  ‘Two beers, pash favor?’

  ‘I don’t think…’ the proprietor began to say.

  ‘Nonsense!’ said Bowcott. ‘If two old soldiers can’t have a drink together, what’s the world coming to?’ He was pleased he said that. A Buggins would have run out of the bar at the first sign of trouble. Even Jake was sitting there like a Methodist Sunday School superintendent.

  The Portuguese lurched dangerously against Bowcott. The stump of his arm was barely concealed under the short-sleeved sport shirt.

  ‘Steady the Buffs!’ Bowcott said. He gave a friendly man-to-man wink, but it did not register.

  The Portuguese looked into Bowcott’s eyes.

  ‘Me – crazy,’ he said. It was a phrase he seemed to have learned to say, apologetically like a beggar’s set piece.

  The proprieter put the beers on the bar. The patrol had not moved and the sergeant held an empty glass in his hand like a weapon.

  ‘We all have our off days,’ Bowcott said, short of words suddenly.

  The Portuguese nodded, deeply and mysteriously to himself, swayed again, then lurched from Bowcott’s friendly arm and picked up the fresh beer glass defiantly, spilling half its contents as he raised his arm in a toast.

  ‘A Che Guevara,’ he said loudly with a sideways glance at the patrol. He said it with reverence, a name that meant something, that was dangerous to say, but would be said always, secretly and in the open, a name for such young men to conjure with.

  But Bowcott sighed dismally, reverting to his earlier feeling of dismay. Politics again… The bastards were everywhere, excluding him from their enthusiasms, waving ideas like flags, but always beating a hollow drum as far as he was concerned. It had taken him fifty-six years of his life to know his way around and learn the ropes of living, so why should he want to change anything?

  The patrol sergeant, older than the boy soldiers beside him, was corase faced and muscular, his leather shoulder-straps worn and comfortable, and the little gold wheel insignia on his beret was almost polished away with years of cleaning. He snapped a word of warning in Portuguese across the bar.

  The young man spat on the floor.

  ‘A Che Guevara,’ he said again, raising the glass and spilling the remainder of his drink.

  Two young Portuguese customers left hurriedly, a sweating youth tucking his shirt into his trousers as he went out through the door without a look behind him.

  In order to quieten the situation, Bowcott raised his glass.

  ‘A Pays de Galles,’ he said, clicking his heels to attention.

  ‘No, Che Guevara,’ the young man said. ‘Che! Che! Che!’

  It was a tense moment.

  A policeman appeared in the doorway. The flap of his holster was unbottened. He was a small, wizened, untidy policeman with the stub of an unlit cheroot stuck to his lower lip. His blue-grey uniform was shabby and his collar was unbuttoned below a podgy, unhealthy face. He drew his revolver apologetically like a tired male nurse producing a thermometer, but when the revolver was drawn and the safety catch removed, he beckoned at the young man and said one word.

  ‘Vivaldo…’

  The young man swayed uncertainly and turned towards him, putting down the empty beer glass. At that moment, seeing their chance, the patrol rushed the young man from the rear, the three soldiers, sergeant in the lead, coming around the corner of the bar like wing forwards. They knocked Vivaldo head first out into the street and as his head hit the cobblers below the doorstep, the policeman brought his boot down in a tired little kick that caused blood to spurt from Vivaldo’s nose. But the damage was done by Vivaldo’s head hitting the cobbles and he was unable to rise.

  Across the street, a woman screamed.

  Bowcott stared. The kick infuriated him. He drew himself up, brushed aside Jake who had risen to stop him, and marched to the doorstep, staring haughtily down into the face of the policeman.

  ‘Look here,’ he said importantly. ‘There is no call to kick a man when he is down.’

  It was then the proprietor called frantically.

  ‘For Chrissakes, the bogey’s got his shooter out!’

  ‘Be quiet!’ Bowcott snapped.

  The policeman looked up at him confusedly. What business was it of his?

  A sedan had driven up the street. At the wheel sat a large elderly man, deeply sunburnt behind dark glasses, the elbow of his light grey suit casually resting in the opened window. He lifted his arm slowly, a gold watch bracelet glistening then disappearing behind his shirt cuff. He seemed completely relaxed but as if by prearranged signal, the soldiers now picked up the semi-conscious body of Vivaldo and dragged him across to the car, bundling him into the rear seat and closing the door. The man nodded and drove away.

  For a moment Bowcott was tempted to run after the car, but the proprietor had joined him.

  ‘Come inside!’

  ‘I demand to know where they are taking him.’

  ‘That’s his old man, you git.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Come in before the bogey gets shirty.’

  Bowcott hesitated. There had been no mistaking that kick in the face.

  ‘Never interrupt the bastards when they’ve got their shooters out. If you was in the Army, you ought to know that.’

  Bowcott turned away confusedly. The soldiers were dusting themselves down in the gutter and the policeman lit his cheroot. Bowcott’s interruption had been brave and meaningless, like a donkey braying in the dark.

  ‘That Vivaldo,’ the proprietor explained. ‘The moment he’s got a load on, it’s Che Guevara day and bloody night.’

  ‘But…’

  Course, you can’t normally do that in Portugal, but the joke is, see, his old man’s in the police himself. So they come and get him once a month.’

  ‘You mean, his father…’

  ‘In the Chevrolet. Full up to here wiv him, he is. Must be.’

  ‘You mean, they’re doing his father a favour?’

  The proprietor nodded.

  ‘But what about the kick?’

  ‘I ’spect the bogey’s full up to here wiv him too.’

  Bowcott could hardly believe it. But it was a village scandal and a village story into which other worlds had intruded, other worlds, alien ideas. The last thing Bowcott remembered before he mooched back to the hotel, were the Portuguese women drawing their black shawls over their heads as they came out into the street to discuss the matter, their sharp tongues cawing away like crows. He remembered enough to know that everybody’s sympathies were with the father. An ordinary Portuguese would, of course, have been locked up at the mention of Che Guevara, but Vivaldo apparently had connections.

  ‘Influence,’ Bowcott thought moodily. When he got down to it, the whole bloody world was like Glamorgan.

  But how much had he understood? Had he behaved ridiculously again? He found his wallet finally, stuffed for safety on top of the Westinghouse air conditioner, then examined Lucas Thomas’ handwriting on the medicine bottle, ‘Two x 5m spoonfuls to be taken four times a day’.

  ‘Good old Lucas,’ he said, forgetting his earlier animosity. He had a sudden intolerable nostalgia for grey skies, grey faces, grey terraced streets, the bustling conviviality of teeming football grounds and men’s four-ale bars, and as if to salute them, he suddenly removed the cork from the medicine bottle, upended it, and drank copiously from the neck. He reverted to the vernacular finally, grateful for its protection. Bowels was buggers of things when you came to think of it. It was as if there was a particular danger that this slightest disturbance might make you think.

  And he was spared nothing
.

  ‘Emma… Emma…’ the voices began outside, floating up from the swimming pool as the Romford lot began to colonise it. ‘Even if it is abroad, you can’t run around without your nix.’

  He belched. There were days when it seemed as if his stomach was pressing against his eyeballs, and the way he now felt, it had all the signs of a real clogger. Lucas would eventually have to get the arrowroot out again, and Fan would probably enjoy herself for a day or two, mostly on her own.

  STRAWBERRY CREAM

  Siân James

  I was eleven that summer, but according to my mother, already moody as a teenager, ‘What can I do?’ my constant cry. ‘I’m bored. What can I do?’

  ‘There’s plenty to do. What about dusting the front room for me? Your grandmother and your Auntie Alice are coming to tea on Sunday.’

  I hated our front room which was cold and shabby, the furniture old-fashioned, the ceiling flaking and pockmarked with damp and the once mauve and silver wallpaper faded to a sour grey and wrinkled at the corners. Our whole house was depressing, each room having its own distinctive and unpleasant smell, the front room smelling of mushrooms, the living room of yesterday’s meat and gravy and the back-kitchen of Oxydol and wet washing.

  ‘Dusting doesn’t alter anything,’ I said.

  I expected my mother to argue with me, but she seemed too dispirited. ‘I know it doesn’t,’ she said. And then, ‘Just get yourself a nice library book and pretend you live in a palace.’

  Was that what she did? She was always reading; two and sixpenny paperback romances with fair-haired girls standing on windy hills on the covers, their skirts gusting out prettily around them, their long tresses streaming behind, but their make-up immaculate.

  Once I’d tried reading one of them. Caterina breathed in as Milly tugged at the corset strings around her waist. ‘Tighter,’ she commanded sharply.

  ‘Yes, Miss Caterina,’ Milly murmured in a humble voice. She loved her mistress with a blind adoration and wanted nothing but to serve her.

  I continued the story in my own way. Milly squeezed the juice of the deadly nightshade into her mistress’ drinking chocolate and chuckled as she imagined pulling the strings of the shroud tighter and tighter around the tiny waist.

  I was fiercely egalitarian. My dad was a farm labourer and he had the same attitude, speaking to his boss with unconcealed disdain. ‘You want me to do… what?’

  ‘Don’t you think that would work?’ his boss would ask.

  ‘Of course it wouldn’t bloody work, but I’ll do whatever you tell me. It’s all one to me.’

  My mother served in the village shop for two pounds ten a week and she was pretty cool too. I don’t think she ever demanded a decent wage, just helped herself to groceries to make up the deficiency, mostly items that fitted neatly into her overall pockets. We were never short of packets of jelly, cornflour, mixed herbs, caraway seeds. Or bars of chocolate. That summer, Cadbury’s Strawberry Cream was my passion and she brought me one every single lunchtime. And every afternoon I’d snap the bar into eight squares, sniff every one, bite a hole in the corner and very slowly suck out the oozy pink cream, afterwards letting the sweet chocolate casing melt on my tongue. Sometimes I could make it last a blissful half-hour.

  My father’s boss, Henry Groves, had a daughter called Amanda who was three or four years older than me and went to a boarding school in Malvern. I’m sure she wouldn’t have chosen to spend any time with me had there been any older and more sophisticated girls in the village, but there weren’t; she’d knock on our front door and stand there silently until I condescended to go out with her.

  We usually walked along by the river, kicking at stones and muttering to one another. ‘What’s your school like?’

  ‘Deadly. What about yours?’

  ‘Deadly.’ We had nothing to talk about.

  We could never think of anything to do either. What was there to do? The sun beat down on us mercilessly every afternoon, the hours stretched out long and stagnant as sermons; I felt dusty and dried-up as the yellowing grass on the verge of the path.

  ‘Don’t you have any adventures at your school?’ I asked her one day. ‘Don’t you have midnight feasts and so on? Pillow fights in the dorm?’ I wanted some sort of conversation; lies would be fine by me. Her eyes narrowed. ‘What rubbish have you been reading? How old are you anyway?’

  ‘Thirteen.’ She looked across at me. I was tall and sturdy for eleven. She was small and, I suppose, rather pretty; a turned-up nose and so on, floppy hair and so on. My God, she looked a bit like the lovesick girls on the covers of my mother’s Mills & Boon. Why was I wasting my summer afternoons with her?

  ‘Well act your age then. Pillow fights! For God’s sake!’

  I tried again. ‘Do you have a boyfriend?’ I asked.

  She gave me a friendlier look. ‘That would be telling.’ I was definitely on the right track.

  ‘I’ll tell you if you tell me,’ I said, trying to recall conversations I’d overheard on the school bus; a fierce, fat girl called Natalie Fisher, who was about fifteen I suppose, but looked thirty, who was always whispering loudly about ‘doing it’, I could pretend I was ‘doing it’ with Joe Blackwell who sometimes helped me with my science homework.

  ‘You go first,’ she said.

  ‘I’ve got this boyfriend called Joe Blackwell.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘He’s tall and he’s got red hair and millions of freckles. Quite attractive.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And… and we “do it” sometimes.’

  She was suddenly looking at me with alarming admiration; her eyes dilated and her lips moist. ‘Go on,’ she said.

  ‘Nothing much more to say. Your turn now.’

  ‘Let’s cross the river. It’s more private in the woods. We can talk better over the other side.’

  We hadn’t seen a soul all afternoon, but if she wanted to cross the river I was quite prepared to wade across with her. It made a change.

  We took off our sandals and splashed across. The sky was white and glaring, the stones in the riverbed were hot and sharp.

  ‘These are my father’s woods,’ she said.

  There was no answer to that. I knew as well as she did whose bloody woods they were. ‘This is where Joe Blackwell and I… you know.’ I said. It seemed a way to get even with her.

  ‘Show me what you do,’ she said, moistening her lips again with the tip of her small pink tongue. ‘Show me how you do it.’ She sat on the ground and pulled me down with her.

  ‘I can’t do it with a girl,’ I said, my voice gritty with embarrassment.

  ‘Yes you can, of course you can. Don’t you think I know anything?’ She was opening her dress and pulling me to her.

  ‘Do you like my breasts?’ she asked, tilting them up towards me.

  I hated breasts. My Auntie Alice was always getting hers out to feed her baby, great mottled things, large as swedes, but more wobbly; I hated having to see them, the shiny mauve veins; the pale, wet, puckered nipples.

  Amanda’s breasts were different, small and delicate, creamy as honeysuckle, pink-tipped. She snatched at my hand and placed it over one of them. It seemed like some small, warm animal under the curve of my palm. ‘What now?’ she asked. ‘What do we do next?’ Her voice was creaky like the hinge of a gate.

  Her nipple hardened under my touch. I felt shivers go down my body like vibrations in the telegraph wires. I closed my eyes as my fingers circled over and over her breasts. ‘We have to do this part properly first,’ I said.

  I peeped at her face. Her eyes were closed. She looked like the picture of St Winifred in church; as though she was seeing angels.

  ‘Now what?’ she asked again. I lowered myself onto my elbow and licked her nipples, one after the other. Her eyes flicked open in surprise. ‘Licking?’ she asked.

  ‘Licking,’ I said firmly. ‘Don’t you like it?’

  ‘I think so. Do you?’

  The shivering st
arted up again, it was lower now, my belly seemed to be fluttery as a nest of fledglings. ‘Yes, I like it.’ I tried to sound non-committal, but suddenly I was lifting her towards me and sucking, sucking her little round breasts.

  ‘That’s all I know,’ I confessed at last. Other images which were beginning to besiege my mind seemed altogether too bizarre. ‘I don’t know the rest of it,’ I repeated.

  I thought she’d be annoyed, expected her to fasten up her dress and flounce off. She wasn’t, though, and didn’t. ‘Well, we can do this part again, can’t we?’

  And we did. We did it again and again all through the last dog days of that summer. Every fine afternoon we’d set off wordlessly along the same path, crossing the river at the same spot, lying down under the same trees, finding the same stirrings of pleasure.

  At the beginning of September, it got damp and cold, the leaves lost their lustre, the birds grew silent, the woods began to smell of rust and wet earth and we realised that our time was running out.

  ‘I’m going back to school next week,’ Amanda said one Friday afternoon, ‘so I suppose we’d better say goodbye.’

  I raised my mouth from her breast and sat up. ‘Goodbye,’ I said. I felt something almost like sadness, but wasn’t going to let her know.

  ‘Perhaps we’ll do the other part next year,’ she said.

  ‘Perhaps.’

  I never saw her again. Before the Christmas holidays my father had found a better job and we’d moved from our horrid old house to another that wasn’t quite as horrid, and my mother worked in an office instead of a village shop.

  I went to a different school and forgot Joe Blackwell. But I never quite forgot those afternoons with Amanda: my strawberry cream summer.

  WHINBERRIES

  Deborah Kay Davies

  From where she stands, duster in hand in the twilight of the landing, Tamar’s mother watches her daughter drooping around in the garden. It seems as if she’s spent years of her life doing this. Spying, glancing, checking through nets and blinds and half-open doors. Trying to understand something she’s actually reluctant to know about her daughter. Tamar is doing the sort of thing she always does when she’s been sent out into the fresh air and she’s bored – scuffing her sandals in the gravel, snapping little shoots off her mother’s flowers. Just now she’s sitting on a wooden bench intent on sucking her hand. She has cut the fold between her thumb and finger. Tamar’s mother watched her running her hands through a clump of asparagus ferns. She watched as she’d held tight to the damp fronds for a moment. She’s not surprised now that Tamar has this cut. She sees the wound streaked with green sap.