The Death of William Posters

by Alan Sillitoe

  She knew little about Frank, though such a lack didn’t stop her liking him. Abiding by her natural talent for scrupulous honesty, she could like him for what he did rather than for what he was. Afraid of drawing too favourable conclusions, she could not let what he did act as a pointer to what he might become. Once bitten, shy forever. In that way, if there was a let down it would be gradual and not from very far up. If their love prospered and she really fell for him then that would be even more of a surprise and ten times as pleasant.

  Frank went to the pub now and again, had his pint before closing time, and came back – more for the walk, he said, than the drink. One cold and starlit night he set out earlier. Pat had left the house at six on call, and he wasn’t at home when she returned at nine. She made a meal and ate by herself. The ten o’clock news was disturbed by the phone. ‘Hello?’ she answered. ‘Nurse Shipley.’

  Button A was pressed. ‘Love? This is Frank.’

  She smiled into the phone, surprised at her happiness: ‘Where are you?’

  ‘In the village.’ In spite of his closeness she thought the phone or line must be faulty. ‘But I’m blind drunk, so I thought I’d let you know. Then you won’t be shocked. I’m on my way back, but go to bed. Don’t see me. I’ll be O.K. I feel marvellous, but I’ll see you tomorrow.’

  Even before the phone went dead she was laughing, her head back, happier than when she had first heard his voice a few minutes ago. She sat in the armchair, feeling as if she had just been told some hilarious story while still young enough not to have experience and age spoil it for her. The black years fell away, as if she were sixteen again and sensing the possibility of easier and freer days than those of puberty, waiting for a shattering experience that would release her from it.

  She had no thought of going to bed and cutting off her day as he had wanted. This strange recall of youth and happiness was more mature than the actual one which had had the storms of her twenties before it. There were no storms before her now (she was so much a woman and sure of herself) and she was more capable of enjoying it because she knew what it meant without wanting to know the cause of it.

  She looked around the living-room: decorated and set out with all the taste that remained from her marriage. She had scoured auction sales in the market towns, collecting furniture, books, lamps, odds-and-ends to achieve the harmony and comfort of a spiritual base. The house was her own – except for small mortgage payments each month. Twelve hundred pounds seemed paltry when set by the stature she now felt. The first payment and necessary modernization had taken her last penny. It was a venture, to accumulate all this, for who knew when she would have to give it up and go elsewhere? No one ever knew that, but if her life had taught her anything it had been to live where she was, to the maximum that could be achieved, and not to think about what she would be doing in a year so much as how she wanted to live at the moment. On reaching a new job, a new place, one must set down roots as if one were going to stay there forever. She had done this, and the fact of it was part of the present happiness that overwhelmed her.

  She decided to put out all lights so that when he came in he’d think she was in bed. There wasn’t long to wait – which she was glad of, darkness not being a good cloak for the way she was feeling. His key turned, and she stifled her laughs as he bumped over the threshold.

  It was hard to get much sense out of his words, but she felt his relief at thinking himself alone: ‘Blindoe,’ he kept saying. ‘Hate anybody to see me blindoe. Gutterdrunk. Where is she? Snoozing in a warm bed. What a night. A pint of mild and a double rum. A double rum and a pint of mild. The roundabout, as I explained; wouldn’t serve me. Well, I said, I’ll serve myself. Then he did. Didn’t want trouble. Neither did I. I wanted a drink.’

  He was falling through the living-room. Hands, unable to get bearings, scooped a book off the table, went by her face. ‘Noise, noise – I’ll wake the goldfish. I’m in the bloody wrong room. Get upstairs, Frank.’ She thought it no joke at all, wondered how she could break it.

  His hand touched her, and she laughed again, still at the same pitch of happiness. ‘I knew you were there because I’d seen you,’ he said. ‘Put the light on now, love. Only dead people sit in the dark, and I hate the darkness.’

  ‘You were so funny,’ she cried.

  He blinked at the flooding light. ‘I’m sure I was. I suppose that’s your idea of a joke. Well, it’s better than snatching the chair from under me, I suppose.’ He pulled her out of the chair, dead sure and strong now back in the presence of her. The darkness had been grey and gridded, impenetrable. She spoke between his kisses: ‘You sit down, and I’ll make us some coffee.’

  ‘Don’t bother. I’m done for until morning.’ She had left him, was already plugging in the kettle, opening bread tin and cheese dish. He lay in the chair she had sat in, head back, feeling like a survivor on the rim of an explosion – thumped and thrown, drowsy and happy because it seemed that the earth, haying spared him, was his friend. He wondered: What am I doing here? This can’t be my home. I was never meant to land up here. But maybe I was. You end up where you were never meant to end up. He wondered what Nottingham looked like from the air, but fell like a stoned and frozen bird back near the middle of it. Recollections were never hazy: even half drunk they were sharp and concise in the meaning splayed out to him. I was meant to leave, and that’s true. On the Saturday morning of his departure, back from his car ride in the country when he’d given the soldier-lunatic a lift, he parked it and set off on foot down Boden Street, midday chips already steaming in their homely bins, a coalman coming back with his empty lorry, black-faced assistant resting his arse on the scales. The last few years had bored him to death and distraction. He’d even tried following his father’s advice and joining a working man’s club, but that was worse than sitting at home with the telly smashing one tab, and kids bruising the other with their screams and squabbles as he tried to get the guts out of some book or other. No politics, lads, and no religion. Just drink your pints and sling your darts, heads down for Bingo and look alive to win a fiver at the end. When you’re off sick we’ll look after you, lad, give you a bit of club money, like, and a seaside booze-up once a year. But no religion, no politics. Don’t think. Heads down. You’re all free as long as you do as you’re told. Legs eleven, bed and breakfast, key of the door. Heads down and look in, sink in that pound of treacle. Oh its own: number one; the messages fell sharp and fast.

  One street funnelled him into space, a view across rubble that a few months ago had been a populous ghetto of back-to-backs and narrow streets. He lit a fag, to shock absorb the sight of all these acres cleared of people, smashed down and dragged to bits. It wasn’t unpleasant, this Stalingrad of peace, and he’d heard that a start was one day to be made on this triangle of three main roads now with heart and guts scooped out.

  He walked into space, few paces taking him across a clearly marked street plan on which as a kid each moss-dewed corner and double-entry had seemed miles from each other, different nations and tribal zones locking their arteries in handshakes of tumultuous life. You could still see the sockets from which lamp-posts had been tugged out like old dandelions and stacked ready for transport to the melters. He thought of going home immediately to Nancy, swinging on his heels this minute. But he rejected the impulse, unwilling to go back there like a bat into hell. Streets in all directions had been clawed and grabbed and hammered down, scooped up, bucketted, piled, sorted and carted off. Where had the people gone? Moved onto new estates, all decisions made for them, whereas he also wanted to uproot himself but must make his own moves, create something positive from the irritating mists of discontent – a freedom which he thanked and cursed at.

  He crossed towards real streets, hoping to find a pub. But these streets too were down for demolition, nearly all empty. One or two still had people living in them, isolated houses encased in ruin and desolation. It must have been strange to live there, waiting for the dark ceremonious smash before the
dawning of some new house nearer to fresh air and fields. Two up and two down, they were finished after eighty years of life. Many had doors and windows off, smashed in destructive joy by kids, and Frank walked into one, the living-room piled with planks and bedticks, shattered glass and slates, bricks and the heaped throw-outs of family living. He looked over the panels of a half ripped-off door, towards sombre backyards of taps and lavatories. From the fireplace a large rat blinked – though didn’t move. ‘Robert the Rat,’ he said aloud, ‘your number’s up. They’re coming for you.’ The half brick flew from his hand, but the rat clawed a way up the chimney, unharmed.

  On the next street corner was a pub called The Rising Sun, which he thought at first to be untenanted, but a few Saturday morning people had already gathered there when he pushed his way through to the bar. It was a clean, cheerful sort of pub, customers mostly elderly. He unclipped a pound: ‘Pint of mild, mate’ – his call over loud since he wasn’t used to being served straight away. He also wasn’t a regular at this dying beacon among the ruins, and all the stares of the old men were on him. He leaned against the bar and stared back, thinking: ‘Christ, am I going to be like that in twenty years? Not if I know it. But maybe I don’t know it. Not much I don’t.’ They turned from his thoughtless eyes, back to low talk and dominoes, the comfortable vacancy of a half empty glass. He put his drink down after one medium sip.

  In over ten years he had formulated certain rules about drinking beer. For example, he wouldn’t drink bad beer, and to cut down the chances of this he would never be the first at the bar for a drink when the pub opened its doors, wily enough to let some other get that hop-spit-and-a-sawdust down his unsuspecting gizzard. He often left a pint, walked out after one swallow if it tasted the slightest bit off-centre. Too many pals, himself included at one far-off time ago, had come to work on Monday suffering more from a couple of pints than some men did from a sling-down of forty. You couldn’t be too careful. And this fancy bottled beer they were always trying to shove at you had more heartburn in it than any of the draught stuff. As far as beer in tins was concerned, excuse me while I commit suicide – no, don’t wait, just turn your back. But the worst of all, bottled or not, was warm beer, and that’s what this pint of mild was that had just been dished up.

  He invited the publican over. ‘This ale’s rotten. It’s warm,’ he told him. Everyone stopped what they were doing, and stared again, that concentrated stare kept by the old or finished for a member of the encroaching young, or a plain enemy with the expression of friend on his face. He slid it towards him: ‘It’s rotten. Taste it. Warm as Monday’s suds.’

  ‘You must be mistaken,’ the publican said. ‘My beer’s never rotten.’

  ‘Taste this, then.’

  ‘I have, friend, I taste every barrel before it’s put on.’

  ‘A young ’un like that don’t know what ale is,’ an old man-called, while the others chuckled comfortably.

  ‘Still,’ Frank said to the publican, surprised at the tense atmosphere over a matter nearly always rectified in willing silence, and quickly. ‘Still, whether you tasted it or not, that ale’s rotten, and so would my guts be if I drunk it. Warm ale once gave me the colic for a week.’

  The publican’s face grew redder. ‘That’s about the tenth time you’ve called my ale rotten. It ain’t rotten.’

  ‘It’s warm though, and that’s the same to me. So how about changing it?’

  ‘I’ll do no such thing.’ He smacked one-and-six down on the counter. ‘Clear out.’

  ‘You soon know where you stand in this place. I expect it’ll be flat on its face next week.’ He took the pint jar, slow, mechanical, absent-minded almost, a black feast for all staring eyes, including the publican’s, and emptied its ale onto the floor: ‘I don’t drink warm suds,’ he said. ‘You should have changed it.’

  Frank realized that he, in any case, ought not to have splashed out the beer with such deliberation, ought simply to have left it and walked out – or maybe knocked it accidentally with his elbow while turning from the counter. ‘Get the police,’ a voice called above the muttering cauldron of advice.

  ‘Set into him,’ someone else cried. ‘He don’t belong here.’

  He walked unmolested as far as the door. On his way there he observed a good fire going in a side parlour, horse brasses above every shelf, regulation dartboard on the wall, coloured prints of horse races in black-bead frames, as well as the usual sick, dog, children, blind and ex-soldier collection boxes along the bar. The publican caught him by the arm. ‘Come back, you bleeder.’ Grey eyes, pupil and retina, glazed into one unseeing pint-sized point, were beamed onto him: The publican thought Frank was drunk, even though he seemed to carry it rather well. ‘You’re coming back. I want your name.’

  Frank’s hand was on the door. People closed around to make themselves part of a climax. He looked at the publican’s concerned, determined face that hadn’t bargained for trouble this Saturday morning: he wore a blazer with an Air Force wing badge on his lapel, and a Marks and Spencer’s old school tie of black and red pattern. ‘Come and clean it up.’

  ‘Ar, that’s right,’ ran the chorus, ‘that’s just.’

  Frank wanted to hit the man for suggesting he was the sort that would wipe up some mess, especially one that he had made. A bastard like that had never done a real day’s work in his life, he thought, as his fist stamped into him, causing a startled cry as the publican fell into the not so old man who had called out: ‘Ar, that’s right. That’s just.’

  He was back in the street of empty houses, running along it and holding his fist, shoes crunching over smashed slates, kicking against half bricks and rotting woodlumps. The publican’s gang weren’t far behind, and he expected nothing less than lynching if they caught up. At great speed he ran into the same house, along the hallway and back into the living-room. By the fireplace he trod on the startled rat before it had time to shift, but it had scattered up the soot-banks and into the chimney before the publican’s boots squashed all life from it.

  Frank, in the backyard, heaved himself to the roofs of a dozen insecure half-gutted lavatories, his egress fixed now into the next street. A brick parapet divided the sloping roof of one set of lavatories from the slates of the next, and Frank stood precariously astride this high ridge – a ridge so rotten that he could bend down now and again to lift up a brick from it, or even a piece of one, to threaten his attackers – since they too had access to bricks and were now industriously prising them loose for a short-range stoning.

  He was perched eight or nine feet above, and at his first shot they scattered. Frank had had enough, was ready to make his retreat towards Hartley Road and back to his parked car. But the world swayed, as if he were about to faint, to roll down limp at the feet of the exulting posse.

  A brick caught him weakly on the shoulder. He hurled two, clearing the space of backyards. The earth swayed again, his shoes moving slightly on the slates, several bricks cascading from the parapet between his legs. Are any of them bastards pushing at the walls? No, they couldn’t, otherwise he would have seen them. He stood under the clear sky, fighting for his balance, a horse on all fours, then straight and uneasy, ready at any second or footweave to use his hands again. He hurled his last brick through a window that still had glass, and at the force of his swinging arms the whole line of lavatories swayed like a slate-blue wave of the mid-ocean sea. His attackers drew back terrified into the house, as if running for their lives from some huge towering scar-faced monster high in the sky behind that Frank could not see.

  He heard them falling over each other (trod on that poor bloody rat again) scrambling back through the house to the comparative safety of the street as if the whole district might crumble, only too glad to go laughing in to their snug pub at the poetic justice of that young bogger up to his neck in ruins and bruises.

  When the collapse began under his feet, Frank slid pell-mell down the slates and onto hard asphalt of another backyard. The lavatories coll
apsed as if dynamited, like a bit of war from a silent film of long ago, ending in a mass cave-in of bricks and splintering wood, a rising grey stench of bug-ridden slatedust settling over the lot as he made his way out of it, back towards the car, and hoping the same fate would be soon in store for the pub from which he had been so discourteously thrown.

  She came back with a laden tray, set it on a low table somehow missed on his crazy zig-zag across the room. He was drunk no longer, yet she needed to shake him as if he were, back into the immediate environs of love and care at the heart of Lincolnshire: ‘If you want to drink and not suffer you should eat a slice of bread first, with butter half an inch thick. Or drink a glass of water between each glass of whisky – or whatever it is you drink.’

  He waved his hand. ‘What’s the use getting drunk if you prepare for it in such a scientific way?’ Pills and Alka Seltzer were on the tray. ‘Knowing so much would stop me enjoying it.’

  ‘If knowing stopped you enjoying life, then you wouldn’t be much of a person. Come on, love, eat. Drink.’

  His eyes were fully open. ‘Would you marry me?’

  She looked, all laughter gone. ‘As far as I’m concerned, we are married. Why do you ask?’

  ‘I suppose we are. You don’t need to answer. I’m in love for the first time in my life.’ He found it impossible to say why he loved her, had been so busy in his life that she was the first woman he had thought to ask this question about, frightened into it because early on in his stay he would sometimes wake up in the morning and be unable for a few moments to think of her name. Such a thing proved how completely she had altered his life, and you could only be in love with a woman who had done that to you. She had become a midwife indeed, getting him out into some new lit-up world still beyond the touch of his hand and brain to reach.

  6

  Furrow-lines refused to break as he walked over them. Frost made the earth hard as steel, coated the ridges that bent the arches of his feet. A copse on the opposite hill was bare, sky visible through upright posts. A dead bird seemed a piece of hoar-shaded soil until he was right up to it. There was no wind: winter had brought a biting lacquer of frost that numbed his face and half-closed his eyes. At two in the afternoon the land was silent, all doors locked against it.