That evening’s panel on Juke Box Jury was Jack Good, Johnny Tillotson, Helen Shapiro and, making his only appearance on the show, Bobby Camino. Curly was also a fan, and hung on every word he had to say about the Dovells’ ‘Bristol Stomp’ before he was shut out by Mr Fowler’s chortling joke that ‘They’re more like the Bristol Zoo than the Bristol Stomp. That’s hungry animals crying out to their keepers, that’s what that is.’ And Henry and Curly longed for the day when they would agree with him, without equivocation, without even a frisson of excitement at the wailing which defied propriety. That was the teatime when the Fowlers taught Curly canasta.
Then it was Henry and Curly, Curly and Henry. Curly wasn’t a card, nor was Henry. Curly wasn’t a caution the way his brother had been, he was as cautious as Henry. It was always Henry and Curly, in that order, according to age and experience. Henry took the boy they had somehow overlooked off his parents’ hands, their cack-hands when it came to their younger one, now, terribly, their only one. They were happy, Mr and Mrs Croney, to let their boy hang around with their lost one’s friend. It never occurred to them, nor should it have, that there was anything mucky (a well-used word of Mr Fowler’s) about this friendship. They were right. Henry and Curly never even talked of girls or sex. Stanley’s death had relieved Henry of the pressure to compete in an adolescent contest which he’d not wanted to partake in. He was no longer obliged to boast of conquests which he hadn’t made, hadn’t the nerve to make, lacked the will to make. Had Stanley really believed him when he said he’d fingered Cathy Pelly, when he said that Sally Sanger had unzipped his Terylene trousers? He had only been echoing Stanley after all. Stanley had never expressed incredulity, had never questioned his seductive prowess. So he had believed him? Not on your life.
Henry was happy that the onerous obligations of mucky behaviour had been lifted. He was a loner in most regards – he had few friends other than Stanley and now Curly – so why not be a loner in sex too? It was a private matter, sex, not to be shared, not to be witnessed save by the morosely mocking eyes of the monochrome girls in the discreetly proportioned pocket magazines which he stole from the near-blind Mr Gough, the newsagent whose devotion to such magazines had brought him to that state, had brought him out in brown stains on his skin, had done for his hearing too. Henry could open the door to the shop without causing the sprung bell to ring, without disturbing Mr Gough, frotting and coughing in his cell of tobacco and flesh at the far end of the shop.
Henry knew it was wrong to steal these profane images. But stealing was appropriate because it augmented his shame, it doubled his sin, it increased the guilt attached to his betrayal of his parents with meaty tarts, it made sex conditional on crime even if that crime was venial and the sex was the glueing together of silky pages that were potent beyond their size. These thefts were, so far as he could recall, the only crimes he had ever committed. Try as he might he couldn’t remember anything half as bad. He was out of step with his contemporaries’ judicious delinquency. He saw the good sense in not jaywalking. He was contemptuous of the kudos attached to getting (a girl) into trouble. And whilst other adolescents were swept along by the glandular revolution within their bodies and allowed it to determine their mores, Henry resisted the hormonal call. At the age of sixteen he was already the victim of a longing for the certainties and stasis of his comfy past.
Stanley had persuaded him to read books by writers with beards. He preferred tales of wartime aircrews’ escapes after being shot down over occupied France. He enjoyed the pitchfork’s tynes in a haystack, the shy peasant girls, the radio transmitters disguised as sewing machines, the mortal sacrifices, the Gestapo beating testicles with rubber truncheons. He admired the looks of the men shown in the jacket paintings: tough yet kind, decent and modest, with regular brave blond acne-free features. They were adventurers with right on their side, heroes whose lives were uncontaminated by equivocation and impure thoughts. Henry lent Curly such memoirs as T.D.G. Teare’s Evader, Bruce Marshall’s White Rabbit and D. Baber’s Where Eagles Gather. Curly had only just finished Fugitives by Night when Mrs Croney asked Henry to take the boy for a dental check-up.
Curly was soon anaesthetised, soon dreaming that Mr Etherington was the collaborationist dentist to whom Squadron-Leader Victor Wraxall had had to submit. He was grateful when he came round that Henry was with him. His mother so loathed the smells of gas and burning tooth enamel that she might have had a turn. Henry claimed – stoically? genuinely? – to enjoy those smells which are also undertakers’ trade smells, the smells of crematoria which are also the smells of duty and profit.
This was not the only dream that aircrew yarns would prompt.
Curly dreamed of Stanley falling, parachuteless, from a fuselage which burned to reveal an armature of riveted girders. Stanley’s howl as he plummeted through the night sky was the howl that Curly made as he woke before the body made contact with the sinuous lines of a marshalling yard where Wehrmacht troops patrolled between flaming braziers. He woke, twisted and sweating, uncertain where he was – where had the window moved to?
His howl of terminal fear woke Henry in the sleeping-bag along the other side of the small tent pitched beside a stream on a damp Cornish moor. That was the summer they took their bicycles on the train to Exeter and headed west. At Henry’s insistence – he was in loco parentis and now working in the family business thus a routine witness to the result of quotidian rashness – they pursued his safe-cycling policy. Viz.: ride up hills, tonic for Achilles’ tendons and hamstrings; dismount and push bicycles down hills because to achieve speeds of over thirty miles an hour on these precipitous gradients is a risky frivolity, a brief gratification of an appetite that is better suppressed. There were enough dangers without courting supplementaries – there were caravans listing and swaying like the callipygian buttocks of drug-tranced dancers; there were cars performing six-point turns in sunken lanes jammed by caravans; there were bulls sated on meadow grass and anxious to exercise; there were vipers on the heaths; there were sheep everywhere.
They bathed in hidden coves. They lay under the sun on cropped turf incised with rabbit paths. The confectioner’s red of sunset delighted them. They learned not to pitch the tent near trees which were contorted and silently screaming because that was the way the wind went, whistling as it bullied. They cooked on a spirit stove and convinced themselves that bacon and beans so prepared tasted miles better. They got used to damp clothes, to rising at daybreak, to lying outside the tent feeling themselves part of the system to which the stars belonged, marvelling at the sidereal patterning and misnaming formations with confident ignorance. When they drank from burbling steams they were, Henry insisted, refreshing and feeding their bodies as man had done since the dawn of time but without the intercession of engineers who had so denatured water that it is taken for granted rather than regarded as a gift from the Earth to its children, a gift from the Earth’s core welling through strata of immemorial accretions to be lifted high as clouds and returned to earth in a cycle of beneficence and generative necessity.
Henry and Curly lunched on crisps outside pubs whose names proudly celebrated the West Country’s criminal past: the Smugglers’ Inn, the Skull and Crossbones, the Buccaneer, the Pirates’ Nest, the Wreckers’ Flare, the Slave Master’s Arms. The descendants of criminals sported lavish widow’s peaks which began between their eyebrows. Their arms were girt as telegraph posts and blue with tattoos from all the world’s ports. Their faces were all avarice and cunning. They ran pubs with the same relish their forebears had brought to running slaves. They treated their customers, the grockles and emmets, with bonhomous contempt and smiling malice.
Henry asked a licensee called Dennis Jacka where they might camp nearby. Mr Jacka slid his tongue inside a nostril to think. Then he told them how to reach ‘a beautiful spot’ further down the wooded estuary. That was the afternoon Curly got sunburned. He stretched out prone squinting through tufts of grass towards the headland and the river’s mouth, listen
ing to the narcotic drone of bees in broom, getting the perspective wrong as he grew drowsy and dozed off. Henry sat, all the while, beneath a stunted tamarisk, neglectful.
It was too late when he rubbed sunblock into Curly’s back and shoulders which had gone red as an angry glans.
The dogs arrived just after dusk, galloping across the scrubby plateau, their pelts bouncing with belligerent ire, their tongues like horizontal pink standards, barking war cries and followed by Dennis Jacka’s cousin Ted Nancecarrow who had no teeth but made up for that lack with a string of convictions for assault, ABH, GBH, affray, etc. He couldn’t remember the number of foreigners he had fought for Cornwall and he never allowed anyone on his land. He carried a torch like a cosh, his stick quivered as though the hand holding it was in the throes of a fit. Henry and Curly used the crossbar of a bicycle as a ladder to the boughs of a sycamore. Curly was sore. He’d have been sorer still had the dogs known how to climb but they didn’t because they were dogs. Ted Nancecarrow struck the tree with his stick, he referred to the dogs as ‘my wolfs’. He struck them too. ‘My wolfs is hungry,’ he repeated. The torch’s beam picked out a leaf, a grimace, a wrist, a sappy twig broken in the rush to escape the slavering fangs. ‘Don’t like strangers on my land … don’t like strangers at all.’
He walked around the tent, prodding the canvas. He tried and failed to pull up a peg with his mud-crusted clumsy boot. He kicked over a jerrycan spilling all the water they had. He picked up a pack of sausages from beside the Primus stove and threw it to the dogs at the foot of the tree. They demonstrated their teeth, their greed, their ingestive urgency.
‘They like their scran: don’t you my wolfs? They’re not too fussy about it neither. Eat anything, they would.’
‘We didn’t know,’ said Henry. ‘Please …’
Ted Nancecarrow toyed with the fearful rictus in the boughs. He took pleasure in the pleading whine – it meant that he had stripped the foreign trespassers of their dignity and English pride. They were almost as humiliated as victims with bleeding eyes and hairline fractures begging him to put down the adze. He took pity on himself: he couldn’t chance it – another offence and he’d go down again, even if he was justifiably exercising a landowner’s right. His most recent suspended sentence had fourteen months to run. What would his wolfs do without him? They might attack the wrong people – they had a taste for Meriel Spargo, had to be held back, and they always went for old Bob Nankivell because he’d never washed beneath his foreskin for forty or more years ‘tis said. They might even be put to sleep.
‘You two. You got ten minutes. I’ll be back in ten minutes. And if you’re still here … You want to learn to keep off of other people’s land. Ten minutes I say.’ He had saved face. He could live with himself. He clapped his hands and the dogs followed him out of Henry’s and Curly’s lives.
They cycled through the night, not knowing where they were going, ignoring maps, signposts, stars, anxious only to be far from that flat scrubland. Fear fuelled their tendons, pushed the pedals hard. They were oblivious to the sycamore’s grazes and to the stiff hills. Their tyres purred. They passed hamlets, silos, byres, kennels, the illumined windows of hostile hearths. The swarthy bulk of a moor’s escarpment slumped against the sky, a beast best left to lie. The world was every shade of black: slave, sump, crow, char. Clumsy clouds lumbered into each other, blind, bloated, slomo, piling up in a piggyback of obese buggers over the terrible trees. The night was loud with the shrieks and moans of creatures berating their fate and their want of shelter. When the rain came it was from a sluice that stretched from one horizon to the next. The road became a tide against them.
It was Henry who took the decision to turn back, to follow a lane beside a bridge across a swelling stream. Their clothes were soaked. The stony surface was no impediment however in the quest for shelter. They stood to pedal. Where the lane diverged uphill from the stream there were grouped trees high above the western bank. Up on the knoll which the lane led to there stood the intact chimney and ruined buildings of a former tin mine’s engine house. Along the same contour, 400 metres away there were more buildings, unlit, discernible by the orthogonal pitch of their roofs, by their comforting straight lines. The rain made tympanic mayhem in the leaves above them but the trunks cut the wind. And no stream could rise, they reckoned, by a man’s height overnight to flood the tent in a demi-glade. The were right about that.
Curly scrambled down the bank to fill the jerrycan Ted Nancecarrow had dented with his foot. They ate emergency chocolate, failed to tune into Radio Luxembourg because the rain had got to the batteries, cleaned their teeth of the cloying chocolate (at Henry’s instruction). While the rain played pingpong on the canvas Henry reminisced about all the times he and Stanley had got soaked to the bone – great old times. When Curly started snoring Henry hardly noticed even though this was not the boy’s habit. He fell asleep and dreamed of rushing clouds, bicycles, coffins, trousers.
It was barely light when Curly howled. He twisted within his quilted blue nylon sleeping-bag. He drew it around him. He cried and apologised for crying. He managed to get outside before he vomited a streak of bile marbled with chocolate. Henry stood over him, tentative arm round the shoulder as he repetitively retched. Soon there was nothing left to express, but his stomach and gorge didn’t know that and he jerked forth spasmodically. He ate grass like a dog. By the time that the sun rose over the hill beyond the stream Henry, too, was on all fours shitting from his mouth, writhing, blaming God and Cornwall. He crawled, he moaned as he spewed. When he got as far as the steaming bank of the stream he saw the leucous opacity of the water. It burbled and tumbled like blue-tinted milk, liquid Stilton. He stared at it wondering what had coloured it. He groaned as a ratchet was tightened in his belly. Sweat oozed from him, he was as wet as he would have been from total immersion. There was a hiatus between his seeing the clouded water and his realisation that this was the source of their sickness. Then he spied a dead minnow bobbing. He cursed the stream, he cursed the bully who had caused them to drink from it. When he spoke to say ‘We’ve been poisoned Curly – look at this’ his voice was hoarse, his throat was inflamed.
All that day they lay in the sun as pain played with them, now dull, now sharp, now in their joints, now in their innermost organs. There had been nothing in the water’s flavour to indicate that it was contaminated – which was a solace of a sort. If it was tasteless then it couldn’t be that bad, could it? He didn’t want Curly’s illness on his conscience, he didn’t want the second brother haunting him, too. They hadn’t the will or strength to swat the corpulent flies which leeched their blood. They resigned themselves to files of ants passing over their damaged bodies. It was Henry who suffered hallucinations; he’d drunk that much more water the night before. The trees mutated into jagged webs of metal and wire. Their leaves were oxidised blades and the sibilance of the breeze in those blades was deafening, a sussurant din as though conches were glued to his ears and he were being force-fed a Eustachian diet of sea, sea, sea. Each blade of glass owned a hue different to all others. There was a smell of scorched flesh in his sinuses. The soldiers who found them, foetally curved and twitching, were actually two schoolboys dressed in camouflage fatigues skiving from a CCF exercise to smoke Consulates (pure as a mountain stream) and drink scrumpy. Their inebriation and fear of being caught AWOL combined to make it two hours before they called an ambulance, which delivered Henry and Curly to the cottage hospital at Bodmin, whence they were released the next day by Dr Tarpley who advised them to boil water before drinking it. Their bicycles and tent had been stolen. They ran up whopping taxi debts.
Going on twelve years later Henry, a father of two with a throbbing molar, flipped through a glossy magazine in his dentist’s waiting-room. In a drink supplement he found an ill-wrought article titled ‘The Scrumpy Bar Kid’. The writer reminisced about bunking off from CCF field-days to drink coarse cider poured from the barrel into a jerrycan, about cycling from one scrumpy bothy to
the next on a Raleigh Spacerider. That was the marque and model of bicycle that Henry had lost. Henry ripped out the article, pocketed it. That would be a man to hunt down, to trace. He liked the idea of such detective work, of a quest with a cause.
Chapter Five
Clotted cream. Devonport Dockyard (proposed closure of). Lorna Doone on telly – ‘and did you know Lorna was a made-up name?’ Naomi reminiscing about a school trip to Appledore or her dad’s friend Nat’s Austin Somerset or her protestation that ‘you don’t have to be Jewish to stay at the Imperial but it helps’. The wreck of the Torrey Canyon. Harold and Mary Wilson’s Scilly Isles bungalow. The Boyhood of Raleigh. Artistic potters. Prisons. Paddington Bear. Messy abstracts.
At any mention of the West of England Henry and Curly would mime ralphing, retching and reaching. No matter how obliquely it was alluded to it was enough to set them off. That holiday was a weld in their fraternal bond. They’d been through it together. They’d survived where minnows hadn’t. Ben and Leonora, a.k.a. Lennie, grew up listening to their father and their Uncle Curly making the noises that they had just grown out of, baby noises and bad gurgles.
‘I don’t know,’ said Mr, Fowler, looking over his spectacles from the abridged Treasure Island he was reading to Ben and Lennie, ‘I don’t know, a varsity man and all. I think your uncle’s soft in the head I do.’ Curly made a wailing bark and stumbled round the room clutching his tummy. Ben laughed and pointed. Curly picked him and swung him to and fro.
The Fowler Family Business Page 5
