2003 - A Jarful of Angels

by Babs Horton

  They reached Bessie’s back door.

  “Wait by there, Bessie, and keep an eye out till I get to my door.”

  Bessie was safe. The light from the doorway of the Tranters’ house was warm and friendly.

  “G’night, Iffy!”

  “Bessie! Wait!”

  But she pulled her hand away from Iffy and shot in through the back door. Iffy tried to follow her, but the door slammed shut and the bolts were pulled noisily across.

  A cat wailed up in the gwli.

  “Moly Hairy Mother of God!” Iffy crossed herself.

  Just a few more steps then in through the back door. Nearly there. Nearly there.

  A mouse ran out from under a bucket.

  Iffy squeaked. Fear shot up her backbone and splintered into her shoulders and head.

  “Oooooooooo.”

  Shitty Nora! It was the ghost come for her. Mad Dr Medlicott fresh from the fishpond.

  “Ooooooooooo.” Dripping with slime, belching out goldfish, holding a sharpened chopper.

  Chip Chop Chip Chop The last man’s dead.

  Any second now he would appear. The chopper would slice through the air. She’d be dead without ever seeing a willy. Without learning all the filthy swear words that Fatty already knew. Without becoming famous. Her head would roll across the bailey, eyes bulging, tongue hanging out. She wondered if she’d run around headless like chickens were supposed to.

  “Oooooooooo.”

  Iffy screeched like a banshee. Her bladder squeezed tight with fright. Warm wee dropped fresh into her pants. More on the way.

  A shriek from somewhere above. There was laughter up in the gwli. Screaming and roaring. Mad men. Lunatics.

  Fatty’s head popped up above the roof of the Merediths’ outside lav, followed by Billy’s.

  Fatty, laughing like a fool; Billy, grinning with a face full of dimples.

  “You should have seen your face, Iffy!” yelled Fatty.

  “Very funny I don’t think!”

  “Had you there!”

  “Buggers. Bloody shitty buggers,” she said it under her breath. She was too close to home to swear.

  Nan came out onto the step.

  “Iffy, stop that bloody screeching, it’s enough to wake the dead!”

  Iffy raced over the step and into the light of the kitchen. From the doorway she gave the boys the two-finger sign behind Nan’s back. Not Churchill’s victory sign. The other way around. Shag off.

  “Go on, you boys…off home. Billy’s mam will be hoarse with calling him.”

  “G’night, Mrs Meredith.”

  “Good night, boys.”

  “Night, Iffy.”

  Arseholes.

  Hairy ones.

  With pwp on.

  Part 2

  July 1963

  It was a town where mostly it rained. If it didn’t rain it tamped down. But all of that strange July it boiled until the tar on the roads bubbled and sucked and got all over Bessie Tranter’s new cotton socks and made her cry buckets. It stewed and simmered until the silver fish gasped in the black mud trickle of the river that led down the valley to the faraway sea the children had never seen.

  The children turned from khaki to burned umber with freckles, except for Bessie who went pillar-box red and then peeled over and over.

  Mr Morrissey the sweet shop owner dripped sweat from under his curly black wig until his eyebrows were waterfalls. He drew down the brown paper blinds on his shop windows, but still the aniseed balls paled to pink and the coconut ice thawed.

  Up in the long grass of Blagdon’s Tump grasshoppers lit fires with their rubstick legs and blacked Mrs Tudge’s smalls that were really bigs.

  Fat bees, drunk on the heat, bumbled their way across the Black Band and crashed into late dandelion clocks.

  Mrs Bunting walked across the bailey of Inkerman without her wooden leg squeaking once. Ruby Gittins lay out in her bit of back garden and said it was ‘Fan tas tick’ and wore a yellow bri-nylon bikini that melted into the crack of her rude wobbly bum.

  Outside the Old Bake House the Brewery horse fainted with the heat and had to have buckets of snuff and whisky to get it going again.

  Winston the cockerel refused to crow at dawn. Mr Meredith’s chickens laid hard-boiled eggs.

  And Bridgie Thomas went daft with the heat.

  It was the last day of July. The town was steaming.

  The sun, a giant Catherine wheel, was spinning away high above the town clock.

  The four of them, Iffy, Fatty, Billy and Bessie, were sitting on the bottom step outside the Limp in a patch of sticky shade, taking a five-minute whiff before they headed on up the weary road through town towards home.

  They were worn to a frazzle with the heat, too tired to move, too hot to talk, staring down at the ground.

  Fatty counted feet. Four pairs: four times two, eight. Toes: eight times five, forty. No. Forty-one toes.

  Left to right. One pair of new black lace-up daps – Billy’s. Fatty’s own ancient red sandals two sizes too small. The stitching long since rotted, the uppers gaping away from the soles. One of his toes peeped out of the front. Iffy thought it looked like a friendly grub. Black daps. Iffy’s. Slip-ons with scorch marks on the toes from sitting too close to the fire. Bessie’s small feet tucked into brand-new white summer sandals. Pigskin sandals she said they were. Iffy and Fatty didn’t believe her. Fatty had said all the pigs he’d ever seen were pink or blotchy grey. Iffy’d said that if hairs started to grow on the pigskin sandals she’d pinch one of her grancha’s razors and shave them off.

  Billy stared intently at the ground. Beneath his feet the pavement was a desert of black dust: Sahara, Kalahari, Gobi. Ants were tired-looking camels, trailing over the parched mountainous dunes in search of water, coming to sticky ends in black oases of bubbling tar.

  “Smile, please!”

  They looked up lazily and were caught on film by a shifty-looking man from the Argus newspaper.

  The four of them. The only picture of them ever taken together. Four kids squinting in the white, hot heat, captured in black and white.

  Three scruffy kids and a fourth one done up like a dog’s dinner.

  Iffy always thought it was a shame that it was a black and white photograph. Colour would have shown Bessie’s new pink and white gingham dress with bows and her white ankle socks with pink frills, and her shocking-pink bunny-wool bolero. And beneath her bleached-white sun hat a face to match her dress: pink and peeling. It would have shown the dark chocolate-coloured beauty spots on Billy’s tiny face, and Fatty’s eyes, which were the deep blue and black of wet mussel shells, the most beautiful eyes she’d ever seen. You’d have seen that his hair was the colour of warm syrup; his face, the hue of a toasted teacake, and the little red scar above his lip where a fox bit him, or so he said.

  The man with the camera limped away and climbed into a shiny red Vauxhall Victor that was parked outside the Corn Shop. He drove away raising a billowing cloud of coal dust.

  Next to Iffy, Bessie breathed heavily in the heat and the settling dust. Wheezy, whistling noises came from deep down under her vest. Her ringlets were oily with sweat and hung limply around her heaving shoulders. The smell of calamine lotion and coal-tar soap oozed out from her hot skin.

  Bessie always sat next to Iffy and as far away from the boys as possible, especially Fatty. She wasn’t supposed to bother with him because he came from a family of rotters and Mrs Tranter thought Bessie might catch something: nits, fleas, worms or bad language. So she was perched next to Iffy, sitting tidily on a clean starched handkerchief to keep her frock clean.

  Bessie smoothed down her frock over her pink knees. She had a million frocks: good frocks, best frocks, very best frocks. Not like Iffy. Iffy hardly had any frocks and she didn’t even seem to care.

  Fatty sat on the other side of Iffy, their brown knees touching. Bessie gave him a sly look up and down. He wore the same old clothes day in and day out: a pair of men’s khaki shorts he
’d had since the infants, which were still too big for him, bunched up round his waist, kept up with a frayed red and white cricket belt; a faded blue T-shirt, with a rip that showed the silky brown skin of his belly underneath.

  Billy sat on the other side of Fatty with Fatty’s arm resting over his shoulder. A chick under a hen’s wing.

  The town was hushed and still.

  The orange cellophane blinds were pulled down tight on the windows of Gladys’s Gowns to stop the chalk-faced dummies from burning.

  A crow tap-danced on the crooked chimney of the Corn Shop, too hot to keep both its feet still at the same time.

  Outside the pub called the Punch, drunken flies reeled on a current of rancid beer fumes that wafted up through the trap doors of the cellar. The pungent reek of stale blood and sawdust seeped out through the plastic strip blinds of Tommy Sackful’s butcher’s shop.

  The town clock rattled, and bonged out the first lazy stroke of noon.

  The dusty crow lifted off the chimney of the Corn Shop and flapped silently away over the baked rooftops.

  In the doorway of the Corn Shop a skinny cat stretched and yawned, its gums as pink and shiny as seaside rock. Lazily it crossed the road, its paws raising tiny clouds of hot dust.

  On the twelfth exhausted, rackety bong of the clock Mrs Tudge and Lally Tudge came waddling around the corner in a shimmer of striped heat. The sharp, sour smell of the sweat from their hairy armpits reached even to where the children were sitting. The bell rang over the door of the Penny Bazaar as they squeezed through the doorway.

  Bridgie Thomas followed behind the Tudges. Bridgie Thomas lived in Sebastopol Terrace in a house filled with boxes of sacred old bones, and scrapbooks that contained the yellowing toenails of long-dead saints.

  She was a thin, poker-legged old woman. She kept her head bent low as she walked and the pleats of her long shiny grey skirt were hot blades in the heat.

  She was a maniac, but not a dangerous one as far as they knew.

  She wore a huge black crucifix around her neck, it was big enough to hang on a church wall. The weight of lugging it around had curled her bony back into a grey, darned, woollen hump. Under her clothes they said she wore vests that she knitted from stinging nettles and thistles. She put tin-tacks in her shoes to please God.

  She had quick darting eyes the colour of boiled goosegogs. Hairs grew from her sharp, pointy chin, as white and wispy as spring onion roots.

  She was in the wrong part of town. Usually she only walked from her house in Sebastopol Terrace to the Catholic church and back; once a fortnight to the Cop for brown bread and prunes.

  They watched her through eyes narrowed against the bright, hot light. She carried a Fyffes banana box that she set down very carefully in front of the town clock. From a pocket of her skirt she took a pair of black thick-lensed spectacles and put them on. They magnified her eyes: huge, green and mad.

  She stepped up on top of the rickety box, and swayed dangerously. But didn’t fall off.

  Pity.

  The crucifix swung across her chest like a giant pendulum. Beneath her grey cardigan her titties were the shape of tinned tomatoes.

  Fatty stared at them in tired fascination.

  “What’s she doing?” Iffy asked.

  “She’s going to make a speech by the look of it,” said Bessie.

  “Who to? There’s nobody here, only us,” Fatty said.

  Bessie was right though for once.

  Bridgie cleared her throat and thrust her hairy chin skywards. Her neck was as wrinkled as a dead tortoise.

  “Hark unto me. I call upon the people of this town, I, the handmaid of Christ. I come to warn you. For I tell you that God the Father is sorely tried by your ungodliness. He is sending a warning to the sinners of this valley…”

  “She’s bloody crackers,” Fatty said, screwing a grubby finger into the side of his head.

  “Haisht!” Bessie said, and sniffed.

  Billy peeped around the front of Fatty and rolled his big brown eyes at Iffy, who giggled. Billy liked Iffy. She was always kind to him and didn’t mind about him not speaking at all. Bessie gave him queer looks sometimes, slant-eyed looks that made him feel uncomfortable. He would have liked Iffy for a sister.

  He watched her face as she looked at Bridgie. Her dark curls hung down almost over her eyebrows. Smooth black curls with a sheen of deep blue. Her upturned nose made him smile. It was a nosy nose, a cheeky, question mark of a nose. She wrinkled it when she was puzzled and screwed up her deep-blue eyes. She never wore dresses like Bessie. She wore clothes more like a boy’s: shorts and T-shirts. She looked across at Billy then, and grinned. He grinned back, and blushed.

  “All this sun we’ve been having is a sign from Him,” Bridgie croaked, pointing up towards the cloudless sky.

  Iffy looked up. The sky was an empty blue dome, aching for clouds. No sign of Him anywhere.

  “To punish all the wickedness and filthy goings on hereabouts…”

  Fatty sniggered, and elbowed Iffy. Bessie told him to hush up.

  Bridgie wobbled dangerously on top of the banana box.

  Billy had a wooden, toy giraffe at home which stood on a round box. When you pressed the bottom of the box the giraffe bent his long neck this way and that, his head wobbled, his knees knocked, and his legs buckled beneath him. Bridgie reminded him of the giraffe as she struggled to balance on her skinny legs.

  Bridgie waved her bony fist at no one in particular and called out again to the silent town.

  Somewhere a window slammed shut.

  A bee fizzed loudly overhead. It flew away, higher and higher until it was a small, agitated grain of black against the hot blue sky.

  A drunk stumbled down the steps of the Punch and staggered away up the road.

  A bow-legged old woman wearing ripped daps came out through the park gates. A rheumaticky dog followed on her grubby heels. The woman stopped in front of Bridgie and squinted up at her.

  “Dirtiness and smutty carryings on, adultery and f-f-f-or-nication…”

  The old woman shook her head, turned to look at them, grinned a toothless grin, shrugged her shoulders and walked on. The dog stopped, cocked a bloodshot eye at Bridgie, then cocked its crooked leg against the banana box. A stream of yellow, steaming piss splashed down over Bridgie’s hard black shoes and dried almost as it hit the ground.

  The three of them giggled and elbowed each other in the ribs.

  Bessie edged away from them.

  “Ay, you can grin and pull your daft faces, but soon there will be plagues of locusts raining down on this town…”

  “What’s a locust?” said Bessie, edging back towards the three of them.

  They ignored her.

  “She’s bloody cracked,” said Fatty.

  Bessie sniffed again, loudly, as a warning. She didn’t like bad language. She couldn’t even say words like knickers or underpants without blushing.

  “The graves will break open and the dead will walk the hillsides and come looking for those who have done them wrong.”

  Iffy shivered and sweated at the same time.

  “Secrets will out and the sinful keepers of those terrible secrets will blister and singe in the flames of hell. Burn and scorch until their skin peels away from their bones.”

  “A bloody singed fanny might wake you up, old gel.”

  They jumped in alarm. Bessie gasped and began to cough. Iffy banged her hard on the back.

  While they’d been watching Bridgie, Georgie Fingers had crept up quietly behind them. Soft-shoe shuffle. Brothel creepers. Crepe soles and black suede uppers.

  No one was allowed to go anywhere near him, not even Fatty. Georgie was a lunatic, a dangerous one. He pretended he was a pastor and had made his own church in a shed. He tried to get girls to go in there, but they wouldn’t unless they were half soaked.

  Every day he stood on the corner and called out to the girls from the big school, “Come to me, my lovelies, and be saved, let me help you find
salvation…come to terms with all those lovely wicked thoughts.”

  The big girls laughed and shouted back, “Bugger off, Georgie, else I’ll tell my father. Dirty old get that you are. Save yourself you want to!” And they laughed and sang:

  Georgie Fingers pudding and pie

  Kissed the girls and made them cry

  When the boys came out to play

  He kissed them too

  Cos he’s funny that way!

  “Babies born out of wedlock will die of thirst at the dried-up breasts of the wicked women,” screeched Bridgie.

  “Fine pair of perky tits on her, mind, when she was a girl,” said Georgie Fingers, pointing at Bridgie.

  Fatty doubled up laughing and held onto Billy.

  Bessie gulped and started a fit of the hiccups. She got up stiffly, folded her hankie carefully and walked away, trying to swallow the hiccups as she went. The rest of them followed her quickly. Further up the road they sat down on the scrubbed steps of Gladys’s Gowns. Gladys Baker who owned the shop never minded them sitting on her step. She was nice to kids especially Fatty. She always gave him chocolate when she saw him, sometimes a bag of cakes.

  Mrs Tudge and Lally came out of the Penny Bazaar. Lally waddling behind her mam like a giant duckling. She was holding a red and yellow windmill on a stick.

  She smiled at them. Her teeth were as brown and holey as sucked honeycomb. They smiled back shyly, except Bessie who looked away quickly.

  Lally waved a pudgy hand at them. She puckered her thick pale lips and blew hot air through them until the sails of the windmill turned stubbornly round. She got bored with the windmill and stuffed it crossly into the pocket of her stripey skirt. Then she stuck her finger into her nostril and began to pick her nose.

  They watched her, enthralled and disgusted.

  Then she wiped her finger on the sleeve of her blouse.

  “Once I saw her eat it,” said Fatty.

  “Urgh!”

  “And the men who scatter their wanton seed will shrivel and droop,” yelled Bridgie and shook her bony old finger at the Tudges. “And the swollen bellies of the bad girls will burst open and spill out dwarves!”