Elaine asked her mother, How old is Ashton? Nobody rightly knows, was her answer. About your age, I’d say. – So he could be going to school like me? – Could be, said her mother, could be. Elaine did her homework at the big kitchen table while her gran and Edith got on with things. Ashton sat opposite her, drawing or writing. At first his humming and purring were a wonder to her. She didn’t know what to think of it, so she had nothing to say about it either, only stared at him. But soon she got used to it, bowed her head over her work and sometimes, very quietly to herself, made a humming of her own.
Ashton drew a drystone wall with a hogg-hole through it, in great detail, all the clever fitting of the stones, and behind the wall rose the moor, and on the skyline, larger than life, sat two crows. And in his airy flowing script, with long pauses between each sentence, he wrote: Elaine’s dad doesn’t move his arms when he walks. He keeps them still by his sides. He stoops a bit. He goes up the hill at a steady pace. I have to run to keep up with him. He says when he was my age he was always out on the moors. He knew every rock and every stream. He says when it’s a bit warmer he’ll take me up there with Elaine. Then he’ll teach me all the names.
Elaine looked at Ashton’s writing upside down. It’s better than mine, Ashton, she said. Whenever he saw Miss McCrae she opened the skyblue folder and he put his new work into it.
Once Elaine’s homework was to learn a poem by heart. It’s quite a sad poem, she said. But Mrs Entwhistle says it has compassion. Elaine read two lines silently, then looked away from the book and said them aloud. Ashton watched and listened. You could test me, she said, if – Unbidden, he came and sat next to her, on her left side, so close their bare arms touched. With the index finger of her right hand she pointed along the lines of verse. Their heads inclined together over the words. Then, unbidden, he covered the poem with his left hand. She looked up and in a poetry voice said:
When I sailed out of Baltimore,
With twice a thousand head of sheep,
They would not eat, they would not drink,
But bleated o’er the deep.
Into the pens we crawled each day,
To sort the living from the dead;
And when we reached the Mersey’s mouth,
Had lost five hundred head.
Yet every day and night one sheep,
That had no fear of men or sea,
Stuck through the bars its pleading face,
And it was stroked by me.
Ashton shook his head, disclosed the text, she studied it, he covered it, she tried again. In that way she got the poem by heart and recited it to the company over tea. Ashton helped me, she said.
After that, some evenings when she had done her homework, she fetched one of her old reading books, sat Ashton by her on her left side, and pointing along the lines read aloud to him in a clear and schoolmistressy voice. Well? she said. He nodded solemnly. It’s hard to tell with Ashton, she said to her mother. He’s a quick learner, her mother answered. But perhaps he knows it already, said Elaine. Best assume he doesn’t, said her mother. Besides, it won’t hurt to learn it again.
Elaine’s class were given a project: Memories. They had to ask one or two grown-ups, the older the better, to remember things, happy or sad, childhood, going to school, getting a job, getting married, good times and bad, and you had to write them out in your English book, perhaps with photographs; or better still, if you could, make a recording of the person remembering aloud. Fred bought Elaine a small tape-recorder and said she should ask her gran to talk about growing up in the city when Queen Victoria was the Queen.
Elaine practised on her mother, to get used to pressing the right buttons and saying, Recording now! This was at the kitchen table. Ashton watched and listened. Where did you and Dad meet? she asked, in a professional sort of voice. At the British Railways Club in Gorton, Edith answered. At a dance. Then there was a silence. Ashton and Elaine looked at Edith. Go on, Mam, said Elaine. You have to say more than that. You have to talk. He came down off the moor, said Edith, looking for a wife. And he found me. Was it love at first sight? Elaine asked. Edith leaned over and pressed Stop. Mam, you’re blushing, said Elaine. Go and ask your gran things, said Edith. She’s a better talker than me.
A couple of evenings later Elaine called Ashton into her room. She was sitting on the bed. Listen, she said. She pressed Play. Her gran’s voice started, the accent very pronounced, it was her somehow brought closer, the tone of her, almost too clearly her, and only her. She was saying, Your mam had no father growing up. She was only eighteen months when he was killed. She only knew him in photographs and what I told her about him which wasn’t much. My father looked after her quite a bit. He’d come to our house for tea every Friday. Gramp, she called him. He always went through the market on his way and she’d be waiting for him on her scooter at the bus stop. He bought her oranges. They were in a brown paper bag in a shopping bag and she hung them on the handlebars of her scooter. Then she went on ahead of him. She come in round the side, shouting, Mam, he’s here! Mam, he bought me some oranges! Elaine pressed Stop. She looked up at Ashton. His eyes were very wide, his lips were pressed tight shut.
10
Every year on the Sunday nearest to 12 July, weather permitting, the family went for a picnic on the moor, for Fred’s birthday. That year the sky was a cloudless blue. Fred, as always, invited Edith’s mother. You coming, Mother? he said. Fine day, you’ll enjoy it. And she always said, It’s your day, Fred. You three go. I’ll stay home, thank you very much. But she baked a cake which they took with them as part of the picnic. So the day had its ritual. But that year there was Ashton. You four go, she said.
They parked in the usual place just past the Boggart Stones, mid-morning, hardly any traffic, no one else on the moor. First things first, said Fred. And he took out the spade and the sack. Back then nobody thought you shouldn’t help yourself to a bit of peat if you wanted to, for the garden, for potting. Still Fred didn’t like to be seen doing it, which made Edith laugh. He strode off up into the moor, into a black rift he thought of as his own, where the peat was thick and firm and where from the road he was invisible. Edith stood by the truck getting everything ready. Sunhats, she said. One each, snow white. Elaine grabbed Ashton’s left hand and hauled him away, past Fred, digging, his sack already beginning to be bodied into shape by the rich black after-life of plants, the layered seasons, the compacted goodness. The children ran off. You know where we’ll be, he shouted. He watched them climbing away, his surviving child and the foundling, dwindling away and above him over the rough terrain. He saw, and then faintly heard, a lark rising over them. He wished they would turn and wave, but they were intent on the climb, so small already and diminishing further, the girl a dot of skyblue, the boy a dot of red. Once he saw her stumble. Ashton was on her left side then. Fred saw her reach for him – she must have seized the sleeve of his shirt with her flipper fingers, steadied herself – and they went on, until, in the hillside, a soft ravine of peat took them out of sight. He knew the ground, every character and variation of it, as well as he did every syllable of every word of the language of his daughter’s body, the growth of that vocabulary year upon year as she shaped herself to live with, and become ever more dextrous, agile and expressive despite, the born deformity. But not till they reappeared, scampering higher, did he resume his digging.
On the rocky knoll the children turned and waved down to the truck, Fred heaving in his sack of peat and the spade, Edith standing by with the hamper till he should be ready to help her with it up to the picnic place. She waved and Fred did, and the children, on cloudless blue, waved back again, semaphore of love across the sunny slope, its textures of black and brown and many greens, its vigorous yearly renewal through the blonde dead grass, the bracken unfurling, the scent-dizzy bees in the heather, the black groughs, gold gorse, soft white cotton grass and, from where the children stood, the untold acres
of ripening bilberries. Looking west from up there you can see the trig point on Broadstone Hill, turn south over the reservoirs to Featherbed Moss, east gives you Wessenden and the grains and the brooks that flow into it: so you might triangulate the Pattison family’s happiness that sunny day. And north, over Broadhead, Rocher and Black, over Butterly, Warcock and Pule, by moss and hill, on and on, to the north you might open it more and more and for ever.
That night Elaine was woken by Ashton crying out. It was sounds, not words, but sounds such as she had never heard from him before, terrifying, utterly confusing her, so that for a while – too long – she did not know where she was or even who she was that she should be hearing cries of that kind. She jumped out of bed, ran from her room and was hurrying to fetch her mother – but saw that his door was open and, in the light from the landing, that he was sitting up and covering his face with his hands. Seeing that, to be an immediate help, she went in. Ashton, she said, it’s all right. There’s nothing the matter. You’re all right. She stood by him, leaned over, he uncovered his face and she saw the depths of terror that had been in hiding behind his hands. You’re all right, she said again. I’ll fetch Mam and Dad. But he closed his two hands on her hand that barely emerged from the left sleeve of her nightdress, enfolded the bulb and the slewed fingers in his warm grasp, shook his head, again and again shook his head, shook through and through, she sat by him on the bed and could feel him shaking as though all the cold of all the long winters of earth had taken possession of him. He would not let her go to bring help from a grown-up person. She sat with him, old as him, till his shaking lessened, his eyes in hers, her eyes in his, he watched himself better out of hers, she saw it happening, his terror being evicted. Sat, watched, till he was quiet and he let go her hand. Then abruptly he lay down, closed his eyes, slept.
Next morning he gave her a sheet of paper on which in his airy and flowing script he had written: It was only a bad dream. Even when you are happy you can have bad dreams. Please don’t tell your mam and dad. Elaine read it, nodded. OK, she said. Then she added, Ashton, why won’t you talk? It’d be more fun if you talked.
11
Six weeks later Edith was ironing in the kitchen. She had her back to Ashton. He sat at the big table, drawing. In summer Edith liked to iron by the window, for the light. And she was watching for Fred coming home with her mother and Elaine. Silence, but for Ashton’s humming and purring as he worked; and that was an accustomed sound, like the crackle, sighing, sudden collapses of the fire in winter, or the chickens scratting around in the yard, accustomed, one ingredient, only occasionally singled out for particular thanks, in her own reassurance. Then suddenly, from behind her: Mam? She stiffened at the shock of it, but held steady, looking out through the window at a row of geraniums in pots along the south-facing shed. She would not look round. Well? she said, taking another of Ashton’s shirts from the basket and laying it out on the board. Mam, he said again, in an accent as though he were flesh of her flesh, Mam, our Elaine says if I start talking I could go to proper school and you and Dad would let me go in on the bus with her. – Elaine doesn’t know everything, Edith answered, over her shoulder, ironing his shirt. It’s not up to us to say if you’ll go to proper school or not. – But if I start talking? – Well it certainly won’t happen without you start talking. So the sooner you start the better, in my opinion. She reached for the next thing, a pair of his shorts. Our Elaine says you and Dad’ll take us bilberrying this Sunday, he said. Very likely we will, she answered. – I can read, you know. All the books Elaine gave me, I can read, he said. I should hope you can, said Edith.
The truck pulled into the drive. They’re back, Edith said. Only now did she turn to him. She saw how he questioned her face. Don’t shut up now, love, she said. Not now you’ve made a start. Then your dad and I will ask about school.
12
On Saturday 23 November Edith took her mother to the market I called Ashton after, where he was found. Many Friday evenings Edith’s grandfather, coming round for tea, had brought her oranges from there; and many Saturdays, as a child and until her marriage, she had gone there with her mother. It was the best market on that side of town, worth the trip. So two or three times a year, for a treat, mother and daughter drove down from the moor.
Barmy Mick – the third (at least) of that name – was the star of Ashton Market. His wife backed him up with teas on the row behind, and his son – a Kevin, a Jack, a Keith, a boy of eleven or twelve as he always seemed to be – helped out at the front until he grew sick of it, till he really did think his dad was barmy, till it embarrassed him scurrying among the women with their purchases; and then he vanished and was replaced by another son who looked much like him. Going back two or three times a year to Barmy Mick’s, however old you got, you might well feel some good things last for ever and will never change.
Mick’s customers were all women. He faced them over his trestle tables, over mounds of ladies-wear, in the sun when there was any sun, under the awning and lit by tilley lamps in the seasons of rain and cold. In frocks or macs, in hats that might be as fancy as Easter bonnets or nothing but thin plastic bags, they stood there wanting him to make them laugh.
Edith and her mother stood on the fringes, but were soon enfolded into the midst as other women came and went. Barmy by name, he was shouting, barmy by nature, and as my missus tells me twenty times a week, You get much barmier, they’ll take you away. So buy ’em while you can, ladies, not three, not five, not ten, it’s fifteen pairs I’m offering and the socks to match, any colour you like so long as it’s red, black, yellow, purple, puce, lime-green or orange, and all fluorescent, and I’m not asking ten quid, I’m not asking five, God help me, mother, I’m not even asking two pound ten, call the yellow van now, I’m asking one pound seventeen and six, for the fifteen pairs and the socks to go with ’em, match ’em how you like or go for the contrast, each foot different, suit yourself, give the old bugger a treat, it’s Saturday night. That lady over there, son, that lady who looks like Audrey Hepburn, fifteen is it, madam, and the socks just as they come? And Alma Cogan, just behind you, thirty, did you say? Take that lady thirty, Kevin, and here’s the socks, it’s Saturday night, give the old bugger a heart attack and off you go out and find yourself something younger.
Audrey Hepburn was standing near Edith. She had a friend with her, more a Diana Dors. It’s his last chance, she was saying. If this doesn’t perk him up I’m off with the butcher. Kevin pushed forward with her purchase in a paper bag. One pound seventeen and six, missus, he said. – You’re sure they’re all in there, sonny Jim? – Kevin shrugged. Count ’em if you want, he said. Audrey Hepburn did, holding them up. Kevin waited patiently. Puce goes nicely with black, he observed. Edith was watching him. That must be the lad who found our Ashton, she said. Her mother nodded. Very like, she said. Kevin moved on to the blackly bouffant Alma Cogan, and already Mick was calling him back. Leave them ladies alone, he shouted. Thirty pairs over here, another fifteen over here, Brigitte Bardots, both of ’em.
Edith drew her mother away, out of the crowd. It was starting to drizzle. You wanted some of your ointment, Mother, she said. And I thought I’d get some chrysanths. And then we’ll have a cup of tea. But she halted on the outskirts, watching the boy dash in and out of the pack of raucous women, his father’s patter accompanying and directing him. He ran to and fro, quick as a ferret, bringing the purchases, taking the money, giving change out of a soft wallet on his hip, a nifty boy, shrewd and grinning, self-possessed too, with a sort of reserve in himself, as though he were thinking this won’t last for ever, one day I’ll be off. Still Edith hesitated. Should I not tell him who we are? she asked. Tell him our Ashton is doing well and say thank you for finding him? And Mick, and his wife who does the teas, should we not go and say thank you for looking after him and fetching the policeman and the ambulance so that he got seen to quickly and came to us? Edith’s mother shook her head. Best not, I’d say, she sa
id. The less we go back there, the better, in my opinion. Have a cup of tea, if you like, then you’ll have seen all three of them, where it started. But don’t go introducing yourself. That would be my advice. The less talk about our Ashton, the better.
Raining again, ladies, Mick was saying, and twenty-six shopping days to Christmas. Kit yourselves out now for the festive season. Fifteen pairs for one pound seventeen and six and the socks to match. Look very nice indeed under the mistletoe in a paper hat. Mick’s your man for the Christmas spirit. All good stuff, all hand-made, all guaranteed to give lasting satisfaction. One pound seventeen and six! As my better half never tires of saying, They lock ’em up when they get like you, our Mick. Nowhere cheaper in the whole North West, except maybe Liverpool, and what woman in her right mind goes traipsing off to Liverpool?
Kevin dashed again through the crowd of women, towards Edith and her mother on the fringes. Edith looked hard, to remember him, she took in his intentness, his sharp canny eyes, the quickness and confidence of all his movements. When he was close, he caught her looking at him. She smiled at him, Thank you, Kevin, she said under her breath. And with her mother she turned and left the market.
The Best British Short Stories 2014 Page 10
