by Trevor Hoyle
‘Be-Cause,’ Colin Purvis said softly from the shadow of the doorway, ‘he’s got it coming. That’s what for.’
‘I thought you’d have more sense,’ Margaret said to Terry, and his heart leapt because she’d spoken to him directly. She said, ‘If I see him I’m going to tell him.’
‘Tell him then,’ Terry said, knowing with a kind of sickly pleasure the expression that must be disfiguring his face. He didn’t care; he revelled in his depravity.
‘I’m not going with him, you know.’
‘What if you are?’
‘I’m not though.’
From the depths of the doorway Colin Purvis said, ‘Who does she think she is, bleedin’ Lana Turner?’
‘Nobody asked you,’ Margaret flared up.
‘Chicken shit,’ said Colin Purvis, his latest catchphrase.
‘I think you’re rotten, the lot of you,’ Muriel said. ‘Three onto one isn’t fair. You wouldn’t like it if a load of lads set on you. What if the South Street gang came down now and beat you up?’
Colin Purvis let go a deep rasping fart. ‘I’d batter their faces in.’
‘You’re a load of pigs,’ Margaret said.
‘If you’re not going with him why are you so bothered?’ Terry felt compelled to ask.
‘She fancies him,’ Alec Bland said. ‘He used to stuff her,’ which pierced Terry’s heart like the point of a knife. He didn’t want to hear this: he wished it had never been said. Roll back time, erase everything, start again.
‘I know I wouldn’t let you touch me,’ Margaret Parry said, flaring up fiercely and thrusting her face at Alec Bland. ‘Nor any of you. And you—’ Margaret said, looking him full in the face. ‘You, Terry Webb. I’m really disappointed in you. A boy who goes to the High School behaving like – like a pig and a bully. You think you’re clever but you’re lousy, rotten, a bloody stinking sod.’
‘Yeh,’ Terry said with grim, gloating satisfaction. ‘I am.’
When the two girls had gone off in the drizzle they left a silence, almost a vacuum, behind them, which didn’t last long – less than a couple of minutes – because just then a lad in a windjammer came pedalling along Entwisle Road and pulled over to the kerb when he saw them. It had to be Shap of course, and it was.
A Blazing Row
TERRY WENT THROUGH THE BACKYARD WITH A slight ache in his jaw, like nagging toothache. He touched his chin, wondering if there was a bruise. Before he’d reached the back door he could clearly hear the row going on in the kitchen, the by-now familiar interplay of his mother’s high cracked voice and his father’s guttural bass. He stopped with his hand on the latch and listened. It didn’t take long to pick up the gist of it, which was to do with Barbara going out on her own one night a week (even though Joe refused to take her out for a drink, dancing, or to the pictures); with the state of Barbara’s nerves, which had reduced her to ‘a nervous wreck’; with the cause of that situation, which amounted to his total inability to show her any real affection or love, apart from the once-a-week ritual (Terry guessed what this meant); with his mean-fisted obsession with money – or rather the lack of it – which was driving her into an early grave; with the fact that she had again been to see Dr Charles, who had advised a course of ECT treatment at Sparthfield Clinic; with the crying need to get out of ‘this bloody rabbit hutch’ into a place big enough for a growing family; with the fact that Dr Charles had agreed to write to the Housing Department and recommend that due to her health they be given priority on the waiting list, and with lots of petty everyday irritations that Barbara rhymed off as though she’d been rehearsing them for months.
Terry waited, his thumb on the latch, for a suitable moment to interpose himself on this scene. He prayed, his heart thudding in his chest, that Joe wouldn’t resort to violence, as had happened in the past. Even the thought of it made Terry’s stomach churn and his hands tremble. The notion that his parents might separate had, on a holiday in Wales three years before, transfixed him with terror. Now he pretended to believe (or convince himself) that they rowed no more, or any less, than Male Smith’s mam and dad, or Alec Bland’s, or Spenner’s. All parents had rows; it was only to be expected.
Eventually there was a lull in the hostilities and Terry made a show of clearing his throat, kicking the dirt off his shoes on the step, pressing the latch and opening the door. The air was charged with static. You got the feeling that if anyone struck a match there would be a mighty explosion, ripping number 77 Cayley Street asunder.
Barbara wouldn’t look at him directly as he came in. ‘Get your supper, love,’ she said, gazing at his left shoulder.
Terry put a bowl and spoon on the table and stood on a chair to get the Shredded Wheat. He poured milk from the bottle, sprinkled two heaped spoonfuls of sugar, and sat down to eat, all to a background of silence that seemed to set the molecules vibrating in his ears.
The milk dripped from the spoon. The Shredded Wheat crackled between his teeth. The soreness in his jaw made it difficult to chew properly.
‘Where’ve you bin?’ Joe said. He sat motionless in the rocking-chair.
‘Gowers Street.’
‘Who with?’
‘Alec Bland and Colin Purvis.’
‘Did you get your head wet?’ Barbara asked.
‘No, we sheltered.’
‘Whereabouts?’ Joe said.
‘In a shop doorway.’
Terry suddenly remembered that he had to ask for four shillings to pay for a trip to York Museum organised by Mr Redfern. He opened his mouth and put some Shredded Wheat inside it.
‘How would you like to live in a new house?’ Barbara said.
‘Where?’
‘Kirkholt Estate. You’d have your own bedroom. And there’d be a proper bathroom, like your Auntie Martha’s, and an inside lavatory. There’d be a garden as well.’
‘You’d have to get rid of your pigeons,’ Joe said. ‘They don’t allow animals on council estates.’
‘He could have a shed, couldn’t he? Somewhere?’
‘No. I’ve just said. They don’t allow pets.’
‘You’d have your own bedroom though, Terry. Just think: you could hang your model aeroplanes up and have pictures on the walls. There’d be cupboards and drawers for all your things.’
‘When are we moving?’
Barbara gave a little dry laugh, more like a croak. ‘Oh, it isn’t fixed up yet. It’ll be ages, next year probably. I’ve got to go and see the Housing Manager and arrange everything.’
‘I thought you said Dr Charles was writing to them?’ Joe said.
‘He is, he is writing to them, but we’ve got to get our name down haven’t we? How do you expect to get a house if your name isn’t even on the list? Talk sense.’
‘I am talking sense, woman. It’s you, you can’t tell a proper tale. One minute you’re saying one thing—’
‘If you showed a bit of consideration – understanding – a bit of gumption – you’d offer to go down there yourself and talk to them. But oh no, sit back, let muggins do it. I’ve been on at you for six months to write or go and see them but you won’t bloody budge your big fat arse off that chair. You’ll go and pay your Union, you’ll traipse off to watch bloody ’Dale in all weathers quick enough, but when it’s something for other folk you sit back and do nowt.’
‘When have you asked?’ Joe said. ‘When did you ask me?’
‘Umpteen times.’
‘When – that’s all I’m asking – When? That’s what I mean about you. You never come out with a proper tale. You invent things to suit yourself.’
‘I do not!’ Barbara screamed at the top of her voice. She jabbed her finger, her face white and strained:
‘You twist every little thing I say. You’ve never shown me that much’ (she snapped her fingers feebly) ‘consideration all the years we’ve been married. Not once. You’ve never ever thought, have you Joe, “I wonder if Barbara would like me to do something for her”? Not once all these years.’
‘Do what for you?’ Joe said, his face crinkling grotesquely. He was fractious, non-comprehending, on the edge of real anger.
‘You see, you don’t even know.’
‘Don’t know what?’
‘What I’m on about.’
‘Of course I don’t know, woman, if you won’t bloody tell me!’ His voice had risen to the level of hers. His normal high colour had faded, his face ashen.
‘All these years,’ Barbara said, beginning to weep. ‘A complete total waste.’
‘What you on about now?’ Joe said. ‘What are you on about?’ He heaved himself out of the rocking-chair. She was leaning over the sink. He poked her in the back. ‘Tell me what you’re on about now I’m asking you.’
Joe’s eyes were wide: there was fear as well as anger in them.
‘I said What You On About Now? Answer me. Will you answer me?’
‘If you don’t know now you never will.’
‘Know – what?’
The argument was like a locomotive with a full head of steam that couldn’t get started because the wheels kept spinning on the track.
Barbara was standing at the sink crying freely. Terry was crying silently, the tears dripping onto the pieces of Shredded Wheat he was unable to swallow.
‘I’m losing me mind,’ Barbara said, holding onto the sink. ‘No wonder me periods keep being late. I’m losing control of me own mind.’
‘Rubbish, woman,’ Joe said.
‘You ask Dr Charles; why do you think he’s put me down for shock treatment at Sparthfield?’
‘It’s just nerves, I keep on telling you,’ Joe said. ‘Nerves.’
‘Aye, what’s left of them.’ Barbara shakily blew her nose. She turned from the sink and said, ‘It’s past your bedtime, our Terry. Get off upstairs.’ She saw he was crying and said, ‘Oh love.’
‘Don’t mard him,’ Joe said. ‘Go on, do as your mother says.’ He gestured with his thumb and made as if to move forward, only half a step (if that) towards the table, and Terry said:
‘Keep your filthy hands off me.’
Joe knocked him off the chair and the momentum carried him head-first into the cellar door. Things went muffled and distant for several moments after that, but at least he had enough sense left to stay down on the coconut matting. In a weird kind of way (because he believed in the justice of the jungle and the workings of fate) Terry supposed it was only what he had coming to him: fair and just retribution for what they’d done to Shap.
The crash must have wakened Sylvia, because from above came a wailing cry.
There were footsteps on the flagstones and a wicked draught swirled everywhere as Jack came in through the back door cradling a tiny brown puppy inside the wide lapel of his overcoat. ‘Got this little chap for fifteen bob from a fella in the Cloverdale.’ Jack nuzzled the puppy’s nose with his own. ‘Swore he was a pedigree. I’m going to call him Champ.’
Just a Black Eye
IN FACT LEACH GOT HAMMERED SOONER THAN anyone expected. It had been growing all morning, starting during Physics with the Bull, when Leach – out of sheer obnoxious perversity – kept taunting Taylor about his stupid tongue-lolling appearance and calling him ‘the village idiot’. It continued after the break and right through Latin with Mr Neddiman, Leach saying such things as: ‘If I looked like Taylor I’d commit suicide’ and ‘The reason Taylor can’t run is because he keeps tripping over his tongue’. Jackson abetted him in this constant barrage of taunts and jibes, adding his feeble wit whenever the pace started to flag.
Terry understood perfectly why Taylor was such an irresistible target. Partly it was that he never put up any defence, but mainly it was his reactions, which were so comic: he would drool and roll his eyes helplessly, wincing whenever Leach or Jackson made a mock assault, cowering behind his gangling arms. It was this display that spurred them on to devise other more fiendish methods of mental and physical torture.
Mr Neddiman departed, having spent an abortive forty-five minutes trying to teach the class Gaudeamus, the school song, which everyone was required to bellow out on Speech Day at the Champness Hall. There were two lines in it that convulsed them:
Vivat nostra civitas
Maecenatum caritas
– the last word of each line, as sung by 1C, coming out as ‘kiwitarse’ and ‘carrot-arse.’
Mr Neddiman watched, hawk-eyed, for any smirking (having taught Gaudeamus to innumerable First Years) but always managed on his lightning sweeps of the class to miss the smirks by one-tenth of a second.
After he had gone the rhyming couplets involving kiwit-arses and carrot-arses went on, amid much chatter and screaming laughter. And when Reggie Short still hadn’t arrived to take them for French, Leach and Jackson turned once more on Taylor. He was Prize of the Day, imbecilic, defenceless, inviting their scorn.
‘Hey, Taylor, is your prick as big as your tongue?’ called Leach across the class, grinning with all his large teeth.
‘He dun’t know,’ a crony chimed in. ‘He can’t tell the difference.’
Leach flicked an ink-soaked pellet with his ruler which skidded along several desks, leaving an inky trail. The class was resentful but there were no complaints. Terry would have bet a month’s spence that Leach was the type who as a kid cut worms into little pieces and inflated frogs with a straw till they exploded.
‘Hey, Leachie,’ Jackson shouted, ‘let’s see if it is as big as his tongue.’
‘What?’
‘His prick.’
They closed in on Taylor, both of them with anticipatory grins on their faces, and made a sudden grab, Jackson pinning Taylor’s arms behind his back while Leach stamped on his feet to keep them still and started rummaging at his flies. Nobody interfered. Leach had unfastened the buttons and put his hand inside when Taylor got one of his arms free and hit Leach in the teeth with his fist. Leach fell back, already bleeding from the mouth, cross-eyed with stupefaction, and somebody from the back of the class said faintly but urgently, ‘Get him, Taylor!’
It was like a story in the Rover when at last the tables are turned and the timid trembling underdog suddenly rebels and thrashes the bully and braggart to within an inch of his life. Everybody crowded round in a circle, jumping on desks and banging their feet, cheering as Taylor stood face-to-face with Leach and jammed into him. The stored anger was like high-octane fuel, feeding Taylor’s aggression so that he was nearly insensible to what he was doing, and even when it became apparent that Leach had had enough (which didn’t take long), Taylor still went on hitting him, sometimes to the body but mostly in the face.
Terry was behind every blow, fists clenched, lending his impotent strength and cheering along with everybody else, urging Taylor on with shouts of encouragement. He exulted in seeing the large white teeth ringed with blood and Leach’s sick, frightened, defeated face and hearing him say again and again, ‘Enough, all right, that’s enough, that’s enough, that’s enough.’
It wasn’t enough, however, until Taylor had exhausted himself and Leach was lying between the desks, blubbering softly and rather pathetically, his chin covered in blood, his collar and tie soaked through.
Tom Sorenson put his arms round Terry’s and John Tidmarsh’s shoulders and all three grinned at one another and hugged one another.
‘I’m right glad!’ Tom Sorenson said fiercely. ‘It were great! I’m right bloody glad!’
It was a good moment, the best Terry had known since coming to the High School five weeks and several lifetimes ago.
He was surprised on his way home that same afternoon when Margaret Parry came up to him in the bus queue and said quietly, ‘Do you mind if I stand next to you?’
Terry shook his head. It struck him that her face looked rather pale, but he said nothing. There was something different about her, even rather odd, the dark eyes withdrawn and inward-looking.
The bus arrived and they went upstairs. Margaret sat near the window. The town centre was busy with schoolchildren, shoppers and a f
ew office workers on their way home. It was the time of year when people were beginning to think of wearing scarves and overcoats. In less than a month, Terry thought, it would be bonfire time. He said:
‘I’m sorry for acting so daft.’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘Honest?’
She didn’t respond.
‘Will you go with me again?’
Margaret nodded, looking through the window, and started to cry.
Terry was moved. A girl had never cried over him before. He felt a lump in his own throat. What an idiot he had been. The summer had been wasted through his jealousy and stupidity and spite. He felt deeply ashamed of what he had done to Shap. Even though Margaret knew, of course, what he had done, Terry wanted to confess to her, to unburden himself, purge his guilt. He tried to summon up the nerve, and just when he thought he had, Margaret said, ‘Betty Wheatcroft died today in school.’
The bus started and jerked all the heads back in unison; the town centre slid away outside the windows as the bus laboured up the shallow incline of Smith Street. It stopped at the lights.
In place of thought or emotion Terry felt an urge to say something frivolous like, ‘What did she die of, short of breath?’ but he knew he couldn’t say that and yet couldn’t think what else to say. The bus set off again, grinding its gears.
‘They took her to the Infirmary at dinnertime with a black eye.’
Terry rotated his head to stare at her.
‘She fell in the yard and banged her forehead. She was all right at first, she just had a black eye. We all thought it was funny. Then she started to go dizzy and kept falling down and Miss Brookes took her up to the Infirmary in her car. She had a clot of blood in her brain and they tried to operate on her but she died.’
‘All she had was a black eye?’
‘There was no cut or lump or anything. But when she fell it must have …’ she didn’t know how to express it ‘… shaken a clot of blood loose or made it form or something. Miss Brookes came into Biology this afternoon and told us all.’ Margaret’s face suddenly screwed itself up into vertical and horizontal lines. ‘Miss Brookes was crying herself.’ She made a noise and the people in front turned round.
