Where we were staying, on the other side of the road, is where the council houses stand, where the pit used to dominate the landscape and the old rows of back-to-backs stretched from the main road. There were always people passing on that side. The pit used to gorge and disgorge half the village every day, the men clonking in their clogs down the lane towards its smoking chimney and the smouldering stacks, their snap tins and flasks flapping in buckled canvas bags at the hip.
Now, when I walk along Grime Lane, the coloured county runs towards its westward moorland horizon, its patchwork of light and dark, now mixed with linseed blue and yellow rape, is as crystal in its clarity as the clear blue above. When I was a lad, the view was a forest - a wilted forest - of chimneys and smoking stacks. On a good day you might see the blackened-stone county offices in Bromaton, or the cathedral spire poking through the murk. Last week we could see twenty miles beyond the older limit, our community now able to look beyond the narrow confines of its own reality. Its problem today, of course, is that its reality has become a myth, while for those rooted in its past its confines are a now longed-for cell.
As we walked along the lane, gentle domesticities decorated the near silence that sat above the constant but distant murmur of traffic along the main road. There was a skylark singing its own constant, but mellifluous rattle, barely audible above the occasional lorry. A dog yapped here, a child offered a yelp. There was the high-pitched whine of a washing machine on fast spin, a vacuum cleaner sucking at fitted carpets and an occasional wheeze from a pumped garden spray. But there were few people in view and even fewer words, an occasional greeting placed to maintain distance rather than invite contact.
As the double-decker lurched on its air suspension past the newly excavator-renovated graveyard, I couldn’t help looking across at the old estate on the right, the houses’ half red brick, half pebbledash straight-line uniformity contrasting with the crescents of their roads. It was just beyond these, in the new estate beyond the school where Mrs Brown’s goats and Mr Taylor’s sheep grazed, where the previous afternoon we had made our latest attempt at reconciliation with a daughter we have both loved at distance.
Dulcie, as ever, would have nothing to do with us. We rang the bell, its bing-bong apparently amplified by the laminate flooring before a lounge curtain twitched.
“She’s not answering,” shouted a voice neither of us recognised.
“Dulcie must have a new fellah,” said Suzie.
“This is probably Mr Thursday,” I observed, “or perhaps Mr Wednesday doing the morning shift as overtime. It wouldn’t surprise me if she didn’t have a collection of the testudinarious spermologists chained up in the cellar. Duchess Blond Hair in her castle...”
“These new houses don’t have cellars,” said Suzie. “They don’t have chimneys either.”
We took a step back from the door and, for some reason, looked up towards the bedroom window. The curtains were still drawn beyond the nets. We looked down the side of the house, but the gate in the planked fence was shut. I tried it, but it was locked.
Back at the door, Suzie bent down and lifted up the letterbox flap, its lipped white plastic much flimsier than its appearance suggested. Suzie peered through the hole. “She’s got one of those penicillate black brushes screwed on the inside of the door. I suppose she won’t accept any post that hasn’t been brushed clean.” Then, after the briefest of pauses, she began to shout through the hole.
“Dulcie Cottee, Dulcie Bradley, Dulcie Whatever-the-sanguine-hades you’re calling yourself these days, it’s your matripotestal mother standing out here in the cold. I’ve come home from Spain to visit you. Will you open this porraceous door!”
“Extricate yourself copulatory,” or words to that effect came back in Dulcie’s dulcet from within. “Extricate yourself copulatory back to where you copulatory came from, you copulatory cow.”
“I don’t think she wants to see us,” I said. “Let’s go back to Auntie Jean’s.”
“Just come and open this porraceous door, you ungrateful, stuck-up little detritus! It’s your matripotestal mother and your patroclinous father out here. We’ve come back from Spain to see you. Open this door!”
“Intercourse off, both of you, and don’t come back!”
Suzie stood up, slammed the letter box shut and then turned to look at me. Neither of us said a word for a full minute. It was a moment when indecision provided something to do. We just stood there and stared at one another. She wanted to cry and wouldn’t. I wanted to cry and couldn’t. We both wanted to be angry, but daren’t. I wanted to act, but there was nothing to be done. She wanted to retaliate, but couldn’t find the nerve. Suzie then turned and walked away and I followed. We stopped after six paces had taken us to the gateposts at the end of the drive. Dulcie’s green Corsa now stood between us and her front door as we turned back to look. The door opened. Dulcie, looking larger than ever in her pink quilted housecoat half-appeared momentarily in the void. “And I’m pregnant. You’re a fatidic grandmother and you’re a felicific granddad.”
“Oh Dulcie, that’s marvellous. Who’s the father?” said Suzie, smiling broadly as she took a couple of paces back past the car.
“I don’t conglutinating know!” shouted Dulcie as she slammed the door, thus stilling Suzie’s advance, “and I don’t refollicating care,” she qualified, muffled but clear from within.
And so we went back to Auntie Jean’s. Suzie cried a lot, too much for me to take all at one go. I did my best, but there’s only so much a man can do. So I decided to leave Auntie Jean and Suzie together. I went to Bromaton on the bus for a pint.
But there was at least some method in my madness. It was just a short bus ride and walk before I found myself standing at the bar of The Fleece. There were a couple of locals spending their social security money. The landlord was doing stereotypical things like loading the glass washer. It was what we drinkers used to call ‘early doors’. We’d been chatting for a while, like blokes do, without using a surfeit of words and with silence outlasting sound, when I introduced my topic.
“There’s a bloke I know back in Spain who comes from Bromaton,” I said. “He was brought up near The County and until a couple of years ago he lived on the Punslet Road with his girlfriend, Karen.” There was no initial spark of recognition, “He’s called Phil Matthews. He’s a black fellow, but I think his mother was white. He’s thirty-ish, quite a big, thick-set bloke. And he has a very strange manner. He seems to be all loose-limbed and uncoordinated. Do any of you know him?”
“Phil the Darkie,” came a voice from the end of the bar, from a shaven-headed man with glasses. He was of indeterminate age, anything between twenty-five and forty-five depending on wear, and had the manner of a bar-fly, the fixture that logs every event, has an opinion about everything but keeps most things to himself, judgmentally. He had been reading the paper, but, as ever in such surroundings, listening.
“Oh him,” said the landlord. “Yes, he’s a big fellow, thick-set, with a shaved head... And he looks like he’s tripping up over his feet when he walks.”
“That sounds exactly right. That’s him. He told me he used to be in the army.”
“Yes, that’s him all right,” said the landlord. “He was in the army from leaving school. He was pensioned off a few years ago on health grounds. He was shot - not in action - it was an accident. He had a bullet lodged in his back. He even lost a kidney, I think. He was in rehab for two years or so. Had to learn to walk again. He did well in the end to get over it.”
“He and Karen, his girlfriend, work with my wife. They run a bar in Benidorm.”
“What? Phil the Darkie working? Now there’s a thing,” said the bar-fly, angling his head down so that he could peer comically over his rimless glasses. He had time to have a sup of his pint as punctuation before he spoke again, his lack of gesture retaining the interest and silence of his aud
ience. “I thought he made his money selling cigs and knocked-off stuff. He’s a well-known face in Bromaton. He comes round the pubs selling cut-price fags. He says he brings them from Spain in his van. He’s got a big white Transit and it comes packed full of stuff. He moves personal belongings and packages, but he stuffs everything with fags. He also does cheap cameras, phones, iPods and things like that. They’ll be nicked.”
“Yes, he does have a van...”
“Of course he has a van. And it’s easy to spot. There’s lots of white Transits around, but this is a big one, long wheelbase, and it’s a left-hand drive on British plates. Can’t miss it. He parks it in the streets near Bromaton Quartet’s football ground and then takes the bus back into town where he stays. He says he can’t park the van in town. At least that’s his story. I reckon it’s because he doesn’t want anyone around to see when he gets in and out of it. ”
“You seem to take quite an interest in Phil Matthews. Have you known him long?”
“I used to go to school with him. I used to know him well. He moved away when he joined the army, of course. And then I saw him quite a lot when he was around again after his accident. He shot himself, you know. He was due to go on active service, to Iraq. But he wasn’t much of soldier and was scared. He shot himself and claimed it was an accident with the gun.”
I was confused. “But did he try to kill himself? He was shot in the back, you said. And he lost a kidney...”
“Shot in the back is the phrase he uses. The bullet finished up in his back. He was trying to shoot himself in the leg at the time and his hand shook. As far as I can gather, he was aiming at his thigh, the fleshy part. His hand was shaking and the bullet went up instead of down. As I said, he wasn’t much of a soldier. He wasn’t trying to kill himself, it’s just that he tried to shoot himself and missed the trivia he aimed at. The army investigated, but decided there wasn’t enough evidence to court-martial, so they let him off, calling it an accident. They said the kit had malfunctioned. And if you believe that, you’ll believe anything.”
We chatted for a few minutes more. It was clear that there was a good deal of knowledge about Phil Matthews around the bar. Then I finished my pint and said goodnight. I couldn’t leave Suzie at home alone. As I rose to leave, the bar-fly spoke again.
“Give Phil my regards when you see him.”
“I’ll do that. And your name is...?”
“Doesn’t matter. Just say you met me drinking in The Fleece.”
But, of course, all of that happened the night before we sat on the top deck of the bus on our way to Ribthwaite to keep Suzie’s appointment. As we bounced along the perimeter of the now re-opened Kiddington Colliery, I read the sign that announced the existence of the Kiddington Open Cast Project. What they are doing is sifting through the old tailings, the stuff that was rejected as slag when the deep mine was working. Now that energy prices have risen, there’s enough profit in the leftovers to justify sifting, sieving, pushing and piling the discarnate stuff. The muck-stacks that were levelled, smoothed and then landscaped are now growing again. The only difference is that now no-one from the village is involved. The whole job has gone to a contractor and the company imports its labour.
A couple of miles down the road we went through Gagstone. The landscape here has changed. The old baths have gone and the main road is no longer dominated by the big, grubby pubs that crowded the pavements. But beneath the surface little has changed here since I was a kid, except that the coal has gone, of course.
Then we went past Ribthwaite crematorium, a place dedicated to all those who have gone to Switzerland, before our bus climbed the hill up past the old barracks, a Victorian red-brick building that looks like a fort. A century ago, soldiers were called out from there to fire on striking miners, to break their picket lines and provided some with the pretext to shoot themselves in the foot so they could avoid the trenches. It’s now converted into luxury apartments that haven’t sold because there’s a council estate at the back.
Fifteen minutes later we had already walked down the hill on the other side of town and found the waiting room outside Dr Brown’s consulting room. We were early, but we didn’t have to wait long.
“Mrs Cottee?” asked a very accommodating, very young and very large nurse, black-stockinged and blond-haired. She had enormous protuberances and a lisp.
Suzie got to her feet without a word and I followed. The three of us filed into the doctor’s room, Suzie first, the pneumatic nurse behind me.
He’s a genial sort, old Brownie. We’ve got to know him quite well over the years. He’s fifty-plus, overweight, wheezes, breathes like a foot-pump and dribbles occasionally. He’s Jewish, but I can just see him with a bacon sandwich.
“Mrs Cottee, nice to see you. How are you feeling?” Suzie shrugged and stayed quiet. “Now I saw you a few weeks ago for your regular check-up,” he said, his eyes now not rising from the file he had opened on his desk. He began to move loose papers from right to left, and then from left to right. We both craned to look, but Brownie stared at us, his confusion apparently asking why on earth we might want to read his papers. The nurse had taken a seat on our left. There were pages of text, things in colour, sheets of numbers, folded fax papers rolling at the edge showing whitish patterns on a crinkling black, things that folded out, others that folded in. He paused to read, to read carefully, quietly to himself, his concentration palpable and imposing its own dictatorial quiet on the room. It was the nurse who broke the silence by crossing and uncrossing her legs, the friction from her figured tights giving a little rip between her ample thighs to accompany the swish of her uniform skirt. Then there was quiet again before Dr Brown spoke.
He closed the file with a suggestion of finality and then sat back in his chair. His head came up, his glasses off, his hand down to the desktop. “Mrs Cottee,” he said. “...”
“Yes, Doctor?”
“You’ve been coming here on and off for over five years.”
“Yes, Doctor.”
“It’s over two years since your surgery and the completion of your treatment.”
“Yes, Doctor.”
“...and the surgery was a success.”
“Yes, Doctor.”
“...and you have had no symptoms since the completion of your treatment...”
“No, Doctor.”
“And how have you been feeling lately?”
“I’ve been all right. I’ve been a bit tired, but then I’d have expected that because I’ve been working very hard. I’m running a bar in Benidorm now. It’s really picked up since I took over and there’s a lot to do.”
“Good,” he said, with a perfunctory air. “And so now you live in Spain?”
“Yes, Doctor. We’ll have been there a year in a couple of months.”
“Have you moved there permanently?”
“That was our plan. We have a mobile home.”
Doctor Brown opened the file again and spent a moment studying the detail on the inside cover. “You are sixty-four years old now?”
“Yes, Doctor.”
“What about treatment facilities where you live? Are you registered for healthcare? Do you have a doctor?”
“We are on E-one-elevens, Doctor.”
He paused again here. He seemed unsure of what to say next. He opened up the file and re-read two of the typed sheets in detail. “Mrs Cottee,” he said at last, “I’m afraid you have several small secondary tumours. They are in your sternum and in the lymph glands on the left side. You also have some small melanomas on the scar tissue where the breast was removed, plus a question mark over the left lung. The melanomas can be removed by surgery. The sternum we can remove and replace with a prosthesis. The lymph we can treat with chemotherapy. As for the lung, that will need some investigation, a biopsy and analysis. It is likely, however, that we would use radiothera
py to treat whatever is there.”
There was a pause. My head was full of words, but my mouth wouldn’t work. Suzie seemed impassive. I hesitate to say unimpressed, but it was the word that sprang to mind. Then she spoke.
“I don’t want any more treatment,” said Suzie, forcefully.
“It would be better if you had the treatment here with us,” said Doctor Brown, his voice still in the same paragraph, as if Suzie’s words had not registered. “We know you. We know your case and so we will be able to get started on what’s needed straight away. Time may be of the essence.”
“I don’t want any more treatment, Doctor Brown.”
The doctor looked up, his gaze fixed solidly on Suzie. She looked back, and then silently away. He glanced towards me, and then back to her. She did not look up.
“What exactly are you saying, Doctor?” I asked. “Are these new tumours treatable?”
He sighed. There was a hint of a shrug. “As I said, the ones on the skin can be removed. They may or may not recur. The breast bone can be removed and replaced with an artificial one. There’s a chance that the tumour will spread to the ribs, but the likelihood can only be assessed after we’ve successfully removed what’s there. The lymphoma will probably respond to treatment, but we can’t cure it. We have to hope that it goes into remission, which it should do if it responds to what we can do, but it will never go away. And as for the lung, I can’t possibly say until we know more about it. I can’t make any predictions, of course, but...”
“I said,” Suzie interrupted, asserting her right to speak by imposing a momentary silence, “that I don’t want any more treatment.”
“Mrs Cottee, I realise...”
“You realise nothing, Doctor Brown. I don’t want any more treatment.”
“Without treatment, Mrs Cottee, these tumours will...”
A Search for Donald Cottee Page 31
