The Blackpool Highflyer

by Andrew Martin

  There suddenly came a great crashing at the front door. It was not knocking but an attempt to bring it down, so it could hardly be the postman, early with the evening delivery.

  I dashed down, and there at the front door was a scruffy man with a big head and big boots, turning and looking about the street. Next to him was a small man with fair hair, light, white beard, wide pale-blue eyes and a beer bottle in his hand. It was a big one, and it was broken, too.

  As soon as I opened the door, this fellow passed this bottle to the taller one and, looking away towards Hill Street, said, 'Give him something for himself.'

  'Is it a delivery?' I said, and the broken bottle hit the side of my head. I was up and at the bottle man and got one good one in, but then he did a leap and put his whole weight into his boot and his whole boot into my stomach. I was now down on the floor in the parlour, and the fair-haired one was sitting on the sofa with my copy of the Railway Magazine, taking my place in all particulars.

  This was Cornstalk, the ticket collector I'd seen at Blackpool Central after my night with Clive at the Seashell, and then again while meeting the wife. He was the one who'd thrown the beer bottle in the air; the one who looked not like a railwayman but an angel gone to pot. I sat up on the floor as best I could, and there was a flowing free coolness on the side of my head. I slid my fingers over the skin on the side of my head and they moved through wetness, and then they were under skin. I slid my fingers back down through the blood and the skin fell; I moved them up once more and it rose again. It was a simple mechanism, like a letterbox, a shortcut to the inside of my head. The feel of it stopped me moving.

  'Some Notable Joint Stations', Cornstalk was saying, and even as he was speaking he was tearing the pages. He stood up so as to make a better fist of the ripping, saying, not to me but his mate with the boots, 'I don't go much on this paper, you know.'

  'What is it, Don?' asked Boots.

  'Fucking Railway Magazine, Max,' said the fair-haired kid. 'I don't care for it because it always seems to remind me of fucking railways. Ask him "Where's George?'"

  Max, the boot specialist, turned to me. I was still sitting on the floor. There was a warm sound in my head.

  'Where's ...'

  He had many teeth, all white but assorted shapes and sizes; all strangers to each other. He smelt of old meat.

  '... George?' I said. 'He's gone.'

  'What's that? He's a fucking gonner you say?' said Max, leaning down over me.

  'We fucking know that,' said Don to Max.

  'He's gone,' I said again. 'What do you want him for?'

  'Owes us brass,' said Max, who was taking from his pocket a bag of something. White powder. He held it out to me.

  'Stick your finger in,' he said.

  My blood was starting to stick my collar to my neck. I pulled the collar away. 'Did you two cunts put the stone on the line?' I asked Max, who was still holding out the white bag.'Did we fucking what?' he said, and I knew they hadn't.

  Don continued tearing up the Railway Magazine, fighting with it over at the sofa. His face was going pink, which made his eyes seem bluer, his beard whiter.

  'Take a lick of this fucking sherbert,' Max said, moving the bag closer to my face. He said sure bert, drawing it out. His head was too long. It looked like something you saw on its own in a museum.

  I could feel the blood a long way south inside my shirt now, heading down in force towards my belt.

  'Did George put the stone on the line?' I asked.

  Max still didn't seem to cotton on to what I was saying, but Don did, and, looking over to Max, he said: 'Doesn't sound like one of his strokes, does it?'

  But Max had only one idea in his head. 'Sure bert,' he said again, and the bag was right under my nose.

  'I don't want any fucking sherbet,' I said.

  'Are you sure about it?' he said, and I stood up and swung at him, missing, and falling over. He kicked me in the belly and I was down again, couldn't breathe, could only bleed.

  'I want to put this lot on the fire now,' said Don, the angel gone to pot, who was standing at the sofa with the remnants of the month's Railway Magazine all around him. 'I want to get a fire going and I want to get this lot on.'

  'There is no fireplace, Don,' said Max.

  'Jesus Christ, you're right,' said Don, looking at the hole in the floor.

  The wife would be back very soon. If there was trouble of any sort with the examination, if her pelvis was too small, she might be kept late. But the wife was strong and perfectly built.

  I saw now that Max, holding that powder of his, wore gloves. On a day of this heat they were not required. Max picked some of the powder from the bag and threw a little of it towards me. It hung in the hot dark air of the parlour like stars. I rolled back away from it.

  'That's it,' said Max, leaning over me with his horse's head, 'You do right. Quicklime, see. Be the blind home for the rest of your days, mate: half fare on the fucking trams, basket weaving and chair caning ... riding that long push bike with all the other fucking blind blokes. You've fucking seen 'em...' He leant forward again, roaring: 'En't yer? Six of the buggers to one bike, and all blind as fucking bats.'

  'No, Max,' said Don, who'd sat back down on the sofa, with his hands in his pockets. 'The one at the front can see. Tell him: we know Ogden's done a shit. Now where's he gone?'

  'I don't know.'

  Don was frowning on the sofa, with his legs wide apart, looking down at his pointed boots.

  'He's the landlord though . ..'

  'George has flitted,' I said.

  'Now that does sound like him,' said Don, standing up, and he nearly looked at me this time. Then he said, 'Put his fucking lights out with the quicklime. One eye, any road.'

  Max's horse's head fell forwards and changed. He was looking down at the bag of lime and the change in his face was a grin. He punched his gloved hand into the bag, and there was a clatter at the door. Two letters came floating through and I wondered if my eyes would last to see them land. I rolled away again from Max as he threw the lime. I stood up and swung the coal scuttle at his head, and he was flying at me, boots first.

  Don was at the door saying, 'Letter for George,' and then he gave a chuckle as he opened and read it. 'It's from his ma,' he said. 'She's expecting to see him tomorrow at her place. No wait, today, at seven.'

  'Has she put down the address?' asked Max, after putting me down again with another kick.

  'She has that,' said Don. 'People generally do in letters, you know, Max.' He put the letter in his pocket, saying, '54 New Clarence Road, Bradford.'

  With that they were out of the door, and a second later it was the wife who was standing there.

  'Who were those loafers just coming out of the house?' the wife asked, but the breath went out of her when she saw me sitting on the floor with the wonderfully clean and straight split at my temple, and the bag of quicklime spilled alongside me.

  'I know that address,' I said, all in a daze, 'I know the address on the letter.'

  As the wife was bandaging my head with one of her petticoats, I said, 'How was your pelvis?'

  'Never mind that,' she said, 'what about all this?'

  'It was all railway business,' I said, for it had been: railway ticket business.

  She was looking at the old mantel. 'The gold cross has gone’ she said.

  I looked up at our marriage lines, at the place where the gold cross wasn't. 'It will be put straight soon.'

  'It will,' said the wife. 'It will be put straight and it will be over, this and all railway business.'

  This was the second time there'd been scrapping in her house over trains. The first time was down in London.

  By writing to her son, George's mother had accidentally saved me, but what was she accidentally bringing on herself? I then remembered about the address: 54 New Clarence Road, Bradford, was the place George told me you wrote to in order to obtain biscuits if the machine at the Joint failed.

  I saw the second le
tter on the floor, the one that had arrived with the letter from George's mother. Holding the petticoat to my head, I picked it up and put it into my coat pocket.

  We then walked across Halifax to the Infirmary, a place I had been sure I would not be returning to until the wife was twenty-eight weeks gone, and maybe not even then. We struck barely anybody on the way.

  This time, I followed the sign for 'ACCIDENT CASES', and I was the only one, so I was taken directly through for sewing.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  As the stitches were put in, I asked the doctor whether concussion cases ought to be kept lying down or raised up. He gave a great sigh and said, 'It depends,' and I was happy with that.

  Each stitch was like a little star made of silk. Iodine was painted over the top, and it was stinging under the bandage as I walked back through the Infirmary grounds with the wife.

  'I don't know what's going forward,' she said, 'but you are to speak to the police.'

  'Yes,' I said, taking the second letter from my coat pocket. It was franked 'Blackpool', and had been forwarded to Back Hill Street from the Joint station. It was from Henry Clarke, the good ventriloquist.

  'Dear Mr Stringer,'

  I read,

  On the sands at Blackpool recently you made enquiry as to whether I had been on a particular train, namely the 8.36 Halifax to Blackpool Express on Whit Sunday last. I told you that I had not been, but there seemed something rather familiar about those details.

  On returning, directly afterwards, to my dressing room at the Seashell Music Hall, and looking in my diary, and at certain documents in my pocket book, I remembered that my ventriloquial figure, Young Leonard, was sent in his travelling basket as luggage in advance on that very train.

  Forgive me for writing but I am fairly burning up with curiosity as to why you should have made your enquiry, and I admit that I cannot put from my mind a feeling of anxiety. If my figure were to become lost or damaged, I would very soon become destitute, and it is always with the greatest reluctance that I entrust my 'boy' to the care of the railways. Leonard's basket is marked about with 'fragile', 'this side uppermost', and every label going, but it is always such a relief when he is returned to my own safekeeping. Might I close, then, by asking you outright why you put your question. I do

  so

  in every confidence that, as a conscientious employee of the railway company, you will have sought the information in my own best interests.

  Please do write to me here at the Seashell, Mr Stringer.

  Yours respectfully,

  Henry Clarke

  I stopped amid the tired flowers of the Infirmary gardens and turned to the wife. Suddenly, all was newness. 'I am going off to the Palace Theatre,' I said. 'No,' she said.

  But I knew that she would not argue with an invalid, and I set off at a lick for the centre of Halifax, calling back to the wife: 'Don't touch the white stuff in the bag on the floor of the parlour - it's quicklime.'

  Had the terrible ventriloquist Monsieur Maurice tried to wreck the 8.36, only to find his stone in the way of our special train pulled by the Flyer? And had he done it in order to kill something that was already dead?

  Young Leonard, the very lifelike figure, was a winner in the halls and could not be built again because his maker, the man in Manchester with the queer, short name that I could not bring to mind, was dead.

  Young Leonard had been the making of Henry Clarke, and in a roundabout way the undoing of Monsieur Maurice.

  As I pounded on, I saw that Halifax was a little busier by now. What had been the chances of the guard's van, or the guard's part of a carriage where the luggage was kept, being blasted to smithereens in our smash? No more than fair. And what were the chances of a ventriloquist's doll, heavily protected in a well-made travelling basket, being ripped apart in that smash?

  You'd get long odds against that. You'd have to be clean out of your senses to try it. But there again train wreckers were clean out of their senses.

 

  That summer the world was full of old men sweating in livery, and one of them stood outside the stage door of the Palace Theatre, where Monsieur Maurice was top of the bill for Wakes Week. I didn't know the exact time, but I did know we were not far off the first performance of the evening.

  'How do,' I said to the guard on the stage door, who said nothing back but stared at my bandage, I supposed because I looked like a Hindoo. 'I'd like to have a word with Monsieur Maurice,' I said.

  'Best write him a letter,' said the door guard.

  'I mean ... Morris Connell,' I said.

  'Acquainted with the gentleman, are you?'

  'We've met before,' I said.

  'What do you want to see him for?'

  'Just.. . shake him by the hand, like,' I said. 'I'm a student of ventriloquism.'

  'Follow me,' said the door guard, and he led me into the back of the theatre, past all those hot, empty gaslit spaces that must exist for the shows to go on. There was a very strong smell that was completely new on me. A tiny cat followed behind us for a bit of the way, and, through one doorway, I glimpsed a fellow wearing trousers and boots but no shirt. He was plucking at a banjo. His eyes were blackened with makeup, and as he turned to stare after me I seemed to see right into his mind.

  We came to a door with a little slate attached to it. On the slate were chalked the letters 'MM', and the word 'KNOCK'. Livery knocked, and the door was opened by Monsieur Maurice.

  'Fellow wants a word, Mr Connell,' said Livery. 'Student of ventriloquism.'

  Monsieur Maurice nodded at the doorkeeper, who went away with the ventriloquist looking after him.

  'Time was when a fellow like that would have said "sir"‘ said Monsieur Maurice. He closed the door and fell to staring at my bandage.

  I put out my hand. 'Jim Stringer,' I said.

  He didn't give his name; everybody knew it after all.

  He was not in his stage costume, but wore an ordinary blue suit. His fancy beard and moustache looked just as they did on stage, though, with the moustache stretching out wide, like the yardarm of a sailing ship.

  The dressing room was painted green. There was a looking glass with electric lights running all across the top of it, which put me in mind of Blackpool. But the lights only lit the mirror. In shadows at the back of the room was a long couch, and the walking swell figure with the moon head was stretched out on it. The thing looked about right lying down - what could be more natural than taking a breather between shows? It was a better hand at lying down than walking at any rate. Behind the couch was a closed door.

  Monsieur Maurice took a drink from a glass of something strange-coloured that was on his dressing table. 'Student of the art, are you?' he said, and he looked me over. He did not seem to recognise me from our earlier meeting, but it was hard to say. 'Lesson number one, take care of the vocal chords.'

  He looked at the concoction in the glass and I thought: the fellow's canned. That's why he's let me in.

  'Now I must be careful as regards you students,' he said. He folded his arms and looked at me.

  'Why?'

  'I call it brain stealing . . . Had most of my best ideas imitated over the years.'

  'I just really came along to say how much I enjoyed your performances, and especially the walking, which I hold to be the hardest thing of all to pull off.' He nodded and nearly smiled. 'I sometimes wonder if there's any call for it these days,' he said. 'Lately, we've had a steady rim of stars in the art who go for the knee figures: the smaller sort of doll, sitting there on the knee. They're all right in their way, but they're just comic turns really. I prefer the walking and the business with a row of figures. Ventriloquism ought to be a spectacle to be wondered at rather than just laughed at.'

  'I agree,' I said.

  As he picked up his drink and took another pull at it, a strange vapour came across to me from the glass. The stuff was yellow and bits of it lingered on his moustache, shining there in the gloomy room. Behind him lay the figur
e: sleeping so very deeply, with its head like a big toe expanded to giant size.

  'And of course, the younger chaps have all given up the distant voice,' he went on.

  There was a pause, and a sizzling sound came from the direction of the figure stretched out on the couch. It took me a moment to realise that something was happening to Monsieur Maurice's lips behind the moustache.

  'Frying fish, do you see?' he said, at which the noise stopped. 'Of course the beauty of the distant voice is that one can have an act without going to the expense of buying a figure. Do you have one of your own as yet?'

  'No,' I said, 'although I am putting a little away every week in hopes of getting one. I am thinking of going for one of the knee figures I must admit, simply on account of those particular ones being so much cheaper ... I rather like Young Leonard, you know, Mr Henry Clarke's schoolboy figure.'

  Monsieur Maurice sighed, but that's all he did.

  'That doll has a good saucy face,' I said.

  Monsieur Maurice glanced backwards at the blank, sleeping moonface of his own walking figure. 'Sauciness is all the fashion now,' he said. 'And the poor ventriloquist is merely the butt of the jokes made by the figure.'