2003 - A Jarful of Angels

by Babs Horton

  Fatty smiled. His eyes gleamed wickedly.

  She forgave him instantly.

  “Anyway, what you doin’ out in the dark all by yourself?”

  It was pitch black outside the window. Black as a collier’s nose.

  Fatty was like a bloody tom-cat, out all hours, running ragged. He wasn’t a bit afraid of the dark or ghosts or anything.

  “Listen, Iffy, I reckon Bridgie Thomas was right.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Cold fingers ran up her spine and across her shoulders.

  “About the Big House. About keeping away.”

  “Why?”

  “I was coming past the gates and I heard something.”

  “What?”

  “Someone in the garden crying.”

  “Honest?”

  “Honest to God. I got up close as I could. I think it was old Mrs Medlicott.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I called out.”

  “You didn’t!”

  “I did. And she whispered back.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She said, “Is that you, cat?””

  “What?”

  “‘Is that you, cat?” Whispering she was that they didn’t bury the baby cat…Then she said, “I’m sorry, cat. I’m so sorry I thought bad of you’…Something like that.”

  “Why was she talking to a cat?”

  “I dunno. I fancy she’s a bit simple or else…”

  “Or else what?”

  “Remember what your nan said about her not being safe…Well, what if she’s right? P’raps she kills things…anything. Kittens. Babies. Grown-ups even.”

  “You want to keep away from there, Fatty!”

  “Not likely! P’raps there’s bodies buried in the garden. Skeletons in the cellars…Remember that skull you said you saw? To be honest, I didn’t believe you at first, Iffy, but I reckon that’s what you did see. It probably came from the grounds. It got washed down into the river.”

  “Pack it in, Fatty!”

  “Strange things have happened since she came back.”

  “Like what?”

  “Them frogs, for a start. When was the last time you seen it rain frogs?”

  Iffy shook her head. “My nan didn’t believe me about the frogs,” she said.

  “That’s the funny bit, Iffy. I don’t think anyone else saw them, only us.”

  “I was worried it was because we drank the holy water. That God was paying us back.”

  “No. He wouldn’t send frogs, would he? I mean it’d be a lightning bolt or leprosy or something.”

  Iffy shivered.

  “I think it was a sign,” said Fatty.

  “What for?”

  “To warn us.”

  “What about?”

  “To be on our guard. Remember what Bridgie said about there being secrets in our town?” Iffy nodded. “Well, there are.”

  “Are what?”

  “Secrets, Iffy!”

  “How do you know?”

  “I just do.”

  “What sort of secrets?”

  “I can’t tell you.”

  Iffy screwed up her nose. She hated secrets.

  “I don’t believe you!”

  “Honest Injun.”

  “How do I know you’re telling the truth?”

  “I am. Cross my heart.”

  “You could just be saying that.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Prove it then!”

  He looked over his shoulder into the darkness of the garden.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Just making sure there’s no one there.”

  He made her swear to secrecy. Standing on the lino, the moon picking up the blue-black glint of her curls, she crossed her heart.

  “Say it, Iffy,” he said.

  “Cross my heart and hope to die stick a needle in my eye!”

  “Promise?”

  “Double promise.”

  And then Fatty told Iffy about what he’d seen. About the terrible things in the jar on Carty Annie’s dresser.

  She didn’t believe him.

  Then he said, “I’m bloody boiling. You fancy coming for a swim?”

  “A swim! In the pitch black! Where?”

  “Up the top pond. It’s lovely up there. Cool you down a treat. You want to come?”

  She shook her head. She wasn’t allowed to swim in the mountain ponds. Drunk men and wild boys had drowned there and sometimes the bodies were never found.

  “I’ll see you in the morning, then. Remember your promise.”

  “Good night, Fatty.”

  “Night, Iffy.”

  He winked at her in the flickering light. His eyes shone, underwater eyes, the blue and black of mussel shells. And then he was off.

  She watched him amble down the little bit of garden, leg it over the wall like a monkey and drop down into the darkness of the gwli where ghosts and dead people walked at midnight.

  He was the bravest kid she knew. The bravest in the whole of Wales and probably the whole wide world. She listened to him as he went whistling along the gwli and then she pulled the window down quick, yanked the curtains together and shot back across the lino. She leapt under the covers. She didn’t want any walking skeletons or mental old women getting hold of her.

  The town clock clattered out eleven o’clock. She thought of the secret that Fatty had told her and even though she didn’t believe him, she wished he hadn’t told her.

  She slept then and dreamed. She dreamed of her mam whom she’d never seen. Not a skeleton, bone-rattling mam, but a mam with soft satin skin, who tucked her up tight in bed and stroked her face with her dainty wedding-ring hands, kissing her with her warm silky lips. The bed rocked with her soft songs and Iffy felt her mam’s heart beating against her own through the starchy sheets.

  She dreamed of dead men floating up from the bottom of black ponds, their mouths opening and closing and spewing out live fish. She dreamed of a pirate ship with a skull and crossbones sailing up their little river. She dreamed of blind eyes staring and dead men’s tongues hanging out.

  She woke up with a jump. The hook in the ceiling was turning round and round, faster and faster.

  She screamed the place down.

  Footsteps came rushing through the black back parlour, the latch on the door lifted.

  Grancha came round the door waving a poker, his eyebrows like birds flying. Her nan came behind him, eyes wide in the candle light.

  Then she was safe in Grancha arms, he was cwtching her tightly and her nan hushing and blowing soft kisses. Grancha cradled her in his arms like a baby, carried her out of the room and up the worn-down stairs, kissing her with his sandpaper whiskers.

  “Come on, little gel. Nothing to be scared of,” he said, and laid her down gently on the big high bed in the upstairs bedroom.

  “It’s that bloody Bridgie Thomas and all her half-cocked tales frightening the kids to death!” said Nan.

  “You don’t want to take no notice of her, mun. She’s cracked.”

  Nan tucked her up in the big high bed, tight up against the wall, safe from the long arms of bogeymen and the walking dead. Grancha went back down the stairs to lock up for the night.

  She watched her nan undress through half-closed eyes. Nan pulled her nightie down over her head. It was as big and white as the tents that posh people had weddings in. She undid her bun and her hair slipped from the hairnet and as she climbed into bed it slid over the pillow towards Iffy, a silver river of sweet-smelling hair.

  She was safe, lying beside her nan, smelling the warm, soft smells of Fairy soap on her wrinkly old skin and the pear-drop smell of her breath.

  She lay quite still, listening. Downstairs she heard the ghosts whispering softly from their seat on the settle.

  Her nan’s breathing slowed until a soft whistling sound came from her chest and her arm felt heavy and cosy over Iffy’sbody.

  Later, she heard her grancha climb
up the stone stairs that they called the wooden hill, the soft pad of his slippers on the worn-down stone. She heard his knees creak as he bent down to pray. He stayed on his knees for a long time.

  She tried to hear the words but they were just a whisper. She could smell the coal on him even though he bathed after every shift down the pit. He smelled of lots of things all mixed together: of snuff and warm corduroy, of damp wool and sticky toffee papers. The smells tickled her nose. She closed her eyes and listened to his bare feet squeaking as he crossed the lino to snuff out the candle.

  The only light was warm moonlight.

  He climbed into bed and soon he was snoring and whistling in his sleep as if to farm dogs in his dreams.

  Far away the town clock bonged midnight.

  The Old Bugger hooted amongst the crooked graves.

  Iffy thought of the statues in the grounds of the Big House and Dr Medlicott sleeping at the bottom of the fishpond, of the horrible things in Carty Annie’s house, of Fatty swimming alone in the black pond.

  Bessie and Iffy looked all over the place for Fatty and Billy, but they were nowhere to be found.

  They checked under the bridge. Walked down to Gladys’s Gowns in case Fatty’d gone on the scrounge for food. No good. They even trailed over to Shanto’s shop, which was out of bounds.

  Willy Shanto’s shop was over near the Catholic church. It wasn’t so much a shop as a tin hut, a rusty tip of a place with cracked dusty windows and higgledy-piggledy shelving that bore everything from candles to nails, hairnets to gripe water. Shanto had only one eye. He had lost the other one in France in the war. The false eye was made of glass.

  Shanto sold fireworks all year round, squibs and bangers, jumping jacks and Catherine wheels that hardly ever worked. He sold them cheap and never asked anyone’s age.

  Iffy was banned from Shanto’s for life. Her nan would skin her alive if she ever bought bangers again because someone somewhere that somebody knew had had their leg blown off by a firework. And there was the matter of the twenty bangers they’d put under a bucket on the top of Winnie Jones’s lav. There was a bang! And a pasting to go with it!

  Bessie wouldn’t go anywhere near Shanto’s. She said Shanto was a filthy discustin’ pig and waited for Iffy further along the road.

  The day they’d bought the bangers, Bessie had gone into the shop and up to the counter because she was the only one with any money. Shopkeepers were always nice to her because she spent a bomb. They always kept an eye on the rest of them, especially Fatty, though he never pinched from a shop. Only apples and stuff off trees.

  “Twenty bangers and four bars of Fry’s Five Boys,” Bessie had said, dead sweet.

  Willy Shanto had put the chocolate bars down on the counter and then counted out the bangers.

  “Close your eyes,” he had said to Bessie, “I’ve got a present for you.”

  Bessie had shut her eyes tight, grinning like a fool.

  Shanto had winked at the others with his good eye, turned around then back again. He put something into Bessie’s hand, and closed her fingers round it tightly.

  “Something to see you through the week,” he’d said.

  Bessie had opened her eyes first and then her hand. Shanto’s glass eye had looked up at her. It was all blue, shining and staring.

  Iffy had seen it wink at Bessie.

  “Waargh!”

  The eye had shot up in the air, landed by Bessie’s feet and rolled across the wooden boards. Bessie had shot out of the door roaring.

  They’d had to go after her because she had the money to pay for everything, but she wouldn’t go back in the shop again. Fatty had to go back for the chocolate and the bangers.

  And she had cried and cried and ran all the way home.

  So Bessie kept a lookout further down the lane while Iffy went up to the shop and peeped in through the dusty windows. It was empty. No customers. No Shanto. No Billy or Fatty.

  They had no luck at the rec, either. No sign of them at all.

  Iffy and Bessie stood together on the hump-backed bridge and called out their names but there was no answer. Sometimes Fatty took off like that, away down the river on the scent of foxes or badgers…going where none of them dared to go. He slept out in broken-down barns or in abandoned cars in quiet fields. They’d always said that one day they were all going to run away for an adventure, like Fatty. They’d follow the river right down the valley till it came to the sea. They were going to wear wellies and take sandwiches and fishing nets to catch their supper. They were going to sleep under the bridges at night, for a month at least. They were just waiting for the right day, that was all.

  They never, ever, called at Fatty’s house to see where he was. They were too afraid. Mr Bevan was huge and red, hairy and bad-tempered. Mrs Bevan was always drunk. It was a place to keep away from.

  Iffy and Bessie walked down past Armoury Terrace and along to the bakery to see if Billy was there.

  Bessie went into the shop first. The bell above the door tinkled merrily, and the smell was mouth-wateringly lovely: caramel and custard; flaky sausage rolls and juicy steak puddings; icing sugar and raspberry jam; Swansea batch and red-hot bloomers; coconut and almond; marzipan. The air was sweet to breathe, gritty with sugar. The floor was a carpet of flour and crumbs.

  Billy’s dad, Mr Edwards, stood behind the counter, his clean, pink hands clasped over his rounded white belly.

  He smiled down at them. “Good morning, ladies.”

  “Morning, Mr Edwards.”

  “Is Billy coming out to play?” said Bessie.

  “Billy’s not here, my lovelies…he’s away with his mam for a few days.”

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  They turned to leave.

  “Don’t rush off, girls. I don’t suppose you’d like to join me in a little something special…a spot of tea to keep you going?”

  They turned slowly back towards him. They never ever got asked to tea.

  “You’re Billy’s friends, aren’t you?”

  They nodded shyly. They didn’t really know Billy’s mam and dad, just enough to nod to, not to talk.

  He beckoned to them and the girls went behind the counter, and followed him through a velvet-curtained archway into a cosy little parlour at the back of the shop. It was a very pretty little room. There was a squidgy green sofa over which a creamy lace cloth had been draped. There was a small table with a blue gingham tablecloth that was laid all ready for tea. In the middle of the table stood a silver vase with six deep-pink tulips. There were four dainty china plates with shiny gold rims and tiny pink roses, and matching cups and saucers.

  “Come in. Come in. I won’t bite!”

  Iffy and Bessie giggled and looked nervously at each other.

  “Take a seat, ladies, take a seat.”

  They stepped gingerly towards the table.

  “Now, what are your names, girls?”

  “I’m Elizabeth Tranter. Only everybody calls me Bessie,”

  “Iffy Meredith,”

  “That’s an unusual name.”

  Iffy smiled and began to explain, “Really it’s Elizabeth Gwendoline. But I’m always called Iffy. When I was little I used to say if all the time: if I was bigger, if I was rich. So my nan said they ought to call me Iffy. So they did, and it stuck.”

  She didn’t tell him that her nan had said, “If, if, if…if Granny had balls we’d call her grandad,” in case he thought she was a rough girl from a filthy family.

  Mr Edwards laughed. He had a nice laugh and a kind face, plumply pink, with tightly rounded cheeks, teeth as white as wedding-cake icing.

  “Well, Bessie, sit down do.”

  Bessie sat down very daintily on a high-backed chair.

  “And you, Iffy.”

  Iffy pulled out the chair opposite Bessie.

  Mr Edwards jumped nervously.

  “Oh, not that seat, Iffy, that’s our Johnny’s chair. We lay a place for him every day just in case he comes in through the door.”


  Iffy looked across at Bessie, but Bessie looked away quickly.

  Johnny was Billy’s dead brother. They knew that.

  Out in the shop the bell rang.

  “Make yourselves comfortable. I won’t be a moment.”

  Mr Edwards went back through the curtained archway into the shop.

  Iffy and Bessie sat in stiff-backed awkwardness, afraid to speak and break the humming silence.

  Iffy gazed warily around the room, there was a painting on the wall of some dried-up sunflowers in a vase, and a photograph of two small boys holding hands – Billy when he was about five and his dead brother – both smiling shyly at the camera.

  The clock on the mantelpiece ticked loudly, a kettle hissed in a room that led off the parlour.

  Mr Edwards’s voice drifted in from the shop, “Good day to you, Mrs Titley…well we were glad of that drop of rain. Right, one cob and four custard tarts…there you are, that’ll be – ”

  The sound of the till ringing cut off his words.

  “Let’s go!” Bessie whispered. “I don’t like it.”

  “We can’t, it would be rude.”

  “He might be funny. We’re not supposed to talk to strangers.”

  “He’s not a stranger, he’s Billy’s dad.”

  “Yes, but we don’t know him.”

  The clock chimed the hour and they both leapt in alarm.

  Iffy looked at the empty chair next to her. A chair waiting for a dead boy to take his place at the table. She trembled.

  Bessie was biting her lip, her eyes wide and anxious. The velvet curtain jingled on its gold rings. Iffy held her breath. The air in the room was stiff with fear. She breathed out as Mr Edwards stepped back into the parlour.

  “Well now, Bessie, as you’re in my wife’s seat perhaps you could be mother. Just a second while I fetch the tea.”

  Iffy looked again at the place next to her and thought of Billy sitting up to every meal next to the empty seat, waiting in case his brother came back.

  Mr Edwards came back into the room carrying a heavy tray. She forgot about Billy then, and his dead brother. On the tray was a teapot shaped like a house, a china house with a roof and a chimney, with windows and doors, with a spout growing out of one wall and a handle from another. There were three plates full of cakes, the most dainty, miniature cakes she’d ever seen. They were beautiful. Tiny, thumb-sized chocolate eclairs, marzipan fruits – oranges and lemons with tiny green leaves, bananas and bunches of grapes – butterfly cakes, tiny ring doughnuts that looked light enough to float around the parlour.