I can remember the look of utter disbelief on Johnny’s face as I slipped the knot around his legs with a single pull. I can also remember the sensation of anaesthetised disbelief I felt when, on pulling the little lad behind me, he snagged the rope and fell on his face into the muddy water. There was a second, thinner, smaller twine completely tangled around his other ankle. He fell flat on his face, gulped mucky water, spat, screamed, cried, scrambled and clutched at mud before I could right him. And then it took me a good fifteen minutes of trying and then five minutes of selective sawing with the edge of a skimmer brick I managed to prise out the bed of the stream to release the tangle of twine around Johnny’s foot. It was fishing line, high breaking-strain from a broken bakelite reel, discarded mindlessly by its owner into the beck, probably on his way home from a spoiled visit to the Common’s dam, an afternoon of fishing cut short by material failure.
Johnny could hardly speak at the best of times. After an overnight stay in waterlogged wellies, tied to a pram and tangled into a wet, subterranean prison, he was utterly incomprehensible. But perhaps alone in Kiddington, save for his mother, I knew him well enough to be able to interpret everything he said.
Sam Stokes and Mick Watson had imprisoned me and my cousins some years before. But this was something special. I never gleaned for sure whether Mick Watson was also involved this time, but I have my suspicions and I would bet on their truth. The knot around his leg was a plaything, designed to slip with the slightest pull on the loose end.
But Johnny Green wouldn’t have known a loose end even if he had found it in his own brain. So for him, the merest entwinement was a prison. The tangle around the other foot was put down to his own panic, but it was a tangle that created complete confinement and made a death cell out of the Red Beck tunnel.
When he died a month later of pneumonia, it was attributed to his pre-existing condition and not as a consequence of his night in the stream. Bella left Kiddington for good, taking off with another man. Jack stayed on alone in the house for a couple of years and then stuck his head in the gas oven. Sam Stokes went to a special school and then prison for a while after he had been caught house-breaking, only to reappear in Kiddington many years later as the successful proprietor of a chain of old peoples’ homes. Joey Stokes joined the army well before this incident, and was not involved. He was killed fighting in Borneo that year. Mick Watson, however, who may or may not have been party to the crime, stayed well clear, blissfully clean, with only his unreliable conscience as witness.
Twelve
Survey results have become something of a passion... - Don considers identity and origin and recalls Mick’s chequered past. Don and Suzie visit Mick and Olga at home and meet other members of Mick Watson’s circle. Mick gives Don a present.
Survey results have become something of a passion since my retirement. They can liven up an otherwise dull day by provoking reaction, sometimes violent, before ten in the morning. It reassures me that I am still alive and, some days, kicking.
The latest provocation via the airwaves came a couple of days ago. Researchers of the Policy Investigation Group ‘Launch It Aloft Really Sleazy’ commissioned a poll of customers on their way out of public toilets in Punslet. The results were startling. Almost one in nine of all people currently resident in the United Kingdom were not born there. Of those who were born there, only forty percent admitted using public toilets, whilst of the non-born residents, sixty percent were willing to confess. I was speechless.
The fourth year course, S499, An Introduction To Social Science Research Methodology For Beginners That Should Be Taken Before Every Other Course, or AITSSRMFBTSBTBEOC for short, provided me with significant insights into what might be wrong with such a study. Were, for instance, the subjects of the inquiry self-selected? Did some of them have the runs, thereby opening the possibility of duplication or repetition, at least? Had respondents been screened for toilet fetishism? And did the researchers allow for the fact that for men a visit is a quick in and out, unless you’re over fifty, whereas for women it often takes as long as a hairdo? These are all important considerations that need to be placed alongside the findings to inform the reader of their true significance.
And, allowing for sampling error, misquoting, poor design, inadequate reporting and the occasional lie, I was immediately astounded by the revelation that eleven point one one one one one one one recurring percent of the people who currently live in the United Kingdom were not born there.
We British, and by that I mean the real British, the ones who have been there for ever, such as the Romans, Normans, Anglo-Saxons and Central European Celts are not prone to go and live somewhere else. We always want to stay at home. It is, after all, our home. We’ve never been anywhere else, except to package tour hotels on the Mediterranean or the Gulf of Siam where we can safely mix with our own, quaff British beer, mash Tetley teabags, spread traditional HP sauce over bacon butties and play bingo, except if you are a nob, in which case you retire to Tuscany or France, pronounced Frornts, drink Pimms, and eat foie gras, unless you harbour environmental or animal rights objections to the forced corn-feeding of ducks.
I accept the evidence presented in Human History H143, of course, detailing an obvious truth that human beings have pursued regular mass and minor migrations ever since human history began (this course was first offered in 1997 and new evidence may since have come to light), that no race on the planet can reasonably claim ownership of a specific location, country or continent, that DNA records suggest that different nationalities, even races, are ninety nine point eight eight eight seven percent identical in their genetic make-up; but it remains true that it’s the one point one one one three percent that counts and also that the British have been on home soil since the end of the last ice age, a bleak epoch that is just approaching its conclusion in many of the pit villages near Kiddington.
So who are the outsiders, these immigrants? It’s a loaded word, after all. They Came From Somewhere Else, the famous cliff hanger film was called. It was true, but not, naturally, of the British. We have been there for ever, as opposed to here, where we have been for about four months. Where other people speak of rights, we British claim natural rights because we are rightly natural. Other nations always were below us in the pyramid of things. That’s why we won the war. There was even a bloke in The Castle the other night saying that, as immigrants, we should learn Spanish, eat Spanish food, and keep out of politics. I agreed about learning the lingo, por favor, but I soon had him straightened out on the rest.
“Here,” I said, “I’m not an immigrant! I’m British!”
He seemed to laugh before finishing his pint. I should have clocked the strombuliform cumshaw.
But it’s true. As a nation, we don’t travel a lot, do we? And we don’t go and live anywhere else, preferring our green and pleasant land, satanic mills, pounds and ounces, rods, perches, furlongs and chains, not to mention British thermal units, now only used by Americans. Suzie and I, of course, are here, not there. Most days we don’t know where we are, to be quite honest, but that may be a result of purely local significance. We have tried to integrate. I even invited the Moroccan guy from the café near the camp site for a pint at The Castle. He smiled at me and mumbled something unintelligible that he wouldn’t repeat. It sounded like his having to fiddle his time. “On fiddle” is all I caught through the strange stresses, but it sounded more like “In fiddle” to be honest. I drank alone that afternoon. It’s not easy. But you do know you are becoming accepted in a place when you start making friends. And when you find you have things in common, it gets even better.
It happened to us a few days ago. Now that Suzie is well ensconced in The Castle, we seem to be getting more invitations to ever more significant occasions. Last week Mick Watson invited us to a barbecue at his place. It was to be a formal do, because he had a business associate coming along, so I wore a vest.
Olga greet
ed us at the Watsons’ door. And it’s a greeting whose anticipated repetition lifts my heart-rate above comfort. And that’s not the only thing that rises when I imagine that beautiful, delicate vision of potential ecstasy. Men never grow up next to youth and beauty.
We have been to the Watsons’ three times already so we have long-since graduated to the kissing stage. We now do it twice, in fact, once on the right and once on the left, unless we do it in Olga’s Central European way and extend to an oscillated third osculation. Olga is Mick’s latest. Brenda was his first. She was one of my classmates at Kiddington Junior. She always was one to show off. After her ninth birthday she came to school in a new bright yellow dress. It was real nineteen fifties, with layer upon layer of petticoat built into its superstructure. It would have looked perfect on a matchstick in an Elvis Presley film, but on a flat-chested, plump, negotiably-washed terrible infant from a Kiddington Street, it seemed somewhat incongruous. And she slavered.
She went up to Mrs Cartwheel straight after the morning bell and told her about her new attire. Just before playtime Mrs Cartwheel introduced Brenda’s new dress to the class as though she hadn’t already had each and every one of us inspect it at close quarters in the playground, complete with verbals. She asked Brenda to go to the front of the class to demonstrate its capabilities. The young lass duly stepped forward into the space and began to twirl. The idea was to show how the dress would unfurl its under-hanging layers into a floating carousel of beauty, but after three spins, poor Brenda was as dizzy as a struggling piglet and fell flat on her arsis, her legs flailing the air. They separated after ten years of marriage after she ran away with a bloke who travelled in ladies underwear and found his way inside some of it on his afternoons off. Mick discovered them in flagrante delicto in the front bedroom of their semi on the new estate behind the church. His major problem was that she had been bringing in most of the money and a few months later he had to move out to keep the bailiffs and a repossession order at bay, since his overtime down the pit had dried up. Came to the same thing, really.
He moved to Bromaton and it was only then that he got into the entertainment business, doing nights in a dress suit and bow tie as a bouncer at the Mecca. An inch out of line and he would land you one. He was well suited to the job, well suited by the job. But after a couple of years he got the chance to run the bar and, from that day hence, he seemed to develop the Midas touch. Everything he did worked. The Mecca bar became a Bromaton venue, and a venue with a bit of class, preserved by the necessity to pay half a dollar to get into the place. People used to go there and never made it onto the dance floor, especially the blokes, who would stand, pints in hand, to watch their girlfriends make circles around their piled handbags. When the time came, Mick was an obvious choice to manage the Bromaton Variety Club.
The place was already in decline by then, was serving all of its prawn cocktails without any prawns and booking the kind of act that might grace a Working Men’s Club Best Room, but would never soil Beat The Clock on a television screen. But to give Mick Watson his due, he turned the place around and had a couple of good years. It wasn’t a patch on what it had been before, of course, but by that time, in the mid-1970s, a fiver was no longer a fiver and cloth had to be cut. We’d had three-day weeks and miners’ strikes, though we had not yet graduated to winters of discontent made glorious south-seas summer by that she-child of Grantham.
Mick remarried during those years at the club. Effectively he managed its bar through the business’s closure, so he could hardly claim those apparently lucrative years as a success. There were rumours of fingers in the till and fiddles that weren’t played by the band. In the eternal words of a less than eternal Kiddington codger as he eyed the bar staff in the Working Men’s Club, “Wherever there’s money there’s fiddles. And wherever there’s big money, there’s big fiddles.” After eighteen months in what everyone knew to be an ailing business, Mick Watson clearly had himself cast as a very big fiddle, a double bass at least, in the form of another new house, a new wife and a Jaguar XJ10, albeit second-hand, and with more than a suggestion of rust along the sills. But true to form he had the carcinomas filled in with fibreglass and then the whole thing re-sprayed in metallic silver. It appeared regularly on Kiddington streets, cruising along at fifteen miles an hour with the windows down and the stereo blasting out Slade, the new blonde draped over the passenger seat and Mick dangling his arm out of the open driver’s window with an air of obsequious, planned nonchalance.
Her name was Annie. I never knew her. She started as a waitress at the club, and later was one of the dancers. By then, of course, Mick was heading off into his thirties, while she was a mere nineteen. He told me he had never heard from Brenda again, and had never tried to seek her out. He definitely knew she was living with her knicker man less than ten miles away in Ribthwaite, but claimed indifference and advertised disdain. One thing I do know is that when he got the Jag with the blonde tottie in the passenger seat, he regularly cruised past Brenda’s house in the same way that he courted Kiddington. By 1975 Brenda had left her lingerie behind. I don’t think she’s been heard of since. Her parents died in the 1980s, she was an only child and had no kids of her own. Her family seemed to disappear from the Kiddington landscape without even an apology.
I never met Annie, except to say hello or goodbye when Suzie and I went to the Variety Club. When they fished her body out of the canal at Bromaton in June ’76, suicide was the only verdict anyone could contemplate. She was a known junkie, a word we had learned to use in even polite conversation. Such proclivities were hard to keep private in those days. No-one, of course, suspected Mick in any way. In fact, there was considerable sympathy for him in recognition of his efforts to keep her on the straight and narrow. It had become common knowledge that he had taken her under his wing more out of charity than lust in an attempt to put her straight, at least that’s what the charitable said. The less than charitable saw an easy piece, submissive, grateful and exploitable. But it was in this context that he left for Spain three months later and, everyone agreed, as usual he had managed to get what he wanted.
When I first met Olga, I almost called her Annie. I don’t know why, because, apart from the blondness, which in Olga’s case might just be the Eastern European Out Of A Bottle Complete With Dark Brown Roots variety, she doesn’t look the least bit like that ill-fated young lass. Annie was extremely slim, a form certain newspapers might talk up to ‘petite’ to sell copies, while others might use the term ‘anorexic’ for the same reason. Olga is not large, but her beam is more substantial, a tad broader than the suggestion of allure she dons each morning from her wardrobe or the face she repaints at the dresser. The blouses seem always to be heavily frilled, the décolletage always deeply on show, but the promise is obviously greater than the substance, a creation of wired up-thrust and gather, rather than natural endowment. And Olga is Russian, not a Bromatonian like Annie. And Olga speaks seven languages at the last count, whereas Annie could barely manage one. Olga can switch from Russian to English to Spanish to Dutch to French to German to Italian at will. Suzie says it’s because she has had to deal with a varied bunch of customers, but that’s a different story. She manages Paradise for Mick, doing all the day-to-day dealings with staff, suppliers and customers, while Mick does the strategic stuff. Suzie, of course, now has to deal with Olga on a daily basis, their interminable telephone calls conducted in business pidgin, dancing apparently effortlessly between beer supplies, bar staff, finances, comedy routines, who has reductions on what in the shops and what’s on special offer this week in Lidl.
Two desks sit side by side in Paradise. One is labelled Olga, desk-top published with bubbles, balloons and bunting. The other, from the same pre-installed templates, displays MICK in bold 72-point capitals, a single metallic sparkle adorning the extremity of its K. The intended implication, of course, was that Olga is menial whilst Mick is management, while the reality suggested brain versus brawn.
“Mr Mick,” she shouted into the interior as we crossed the threshold of their hilltop villa, “it is Mr Donkey and Suzie.”
Olga’s accent has to be described, but how to achieve that end I know not how. She seems to chew every word for a minute before spitting it out. Every consonant seems to stick in her throat, while vowels are instinctively rejected. She always places the title Mr before a male name, but never uses anything but the first name of a woman. In contrast with the Alpine passes of her speech, her body hardly ever moves. Like a great Central Asian steppe, she hardly interrupts her horizon, despite the creaking leather trousers that invariably hide her legs. Today, at home, they terminate not in the spangled strappy fustigate-me shoes she wears for work, but in a pair of fluffy pink mules, straight out of Doris Day’s bedroom.
“Nice to see you, to see you nice,” came the signatory words, echoing diminuendo along the tiled floors of the corridor. Its right angle turn towards the back door seemed to serve as the villa’s front.
“Hi, Mick,” I said, realising too late that the Kiddington “How’d you do” with the stress on the “aaah” had not even tried to stretch my tongue. It’s instructive to notice change. I offered my hand, but Mick went straight to Suzie to whom he granted loud slobbering kisses on right and left in the Spanish manner. Good job he’s not Belgian. He’d have gone for three and I’d have biffed him one!
“Come in, come in,” he said, offering a playful, unengaged slap of my palm, as if we were two footballers celebrating the fact that we had not quite scored a goal. “Come in and meet Johnny and Mil.” I followed, intrigued to make the acquaintance of someone called a thousand.
A Search for Donald Cottee Page 12
