The Chop

by Graham Hurley

  35

  The Chop

  Graham Hurley

  First published in 2008 in Great Britain by

  Barrington Stoke Ltd

  18 Walker Street, Edinburgh, EH3 7LP

  www.barringtonstoke.co.uk

  Copyright c. 2008 Graham Hurley

  The moral right of the author has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  ISBN (print version): 978-1-84299-55-6

  To Ben and Harry

  with love and clifftops

  The Chop, a note from the author.

  All books come from one little seed. This one came from the first two sentences. When they appeared on the paper, I wondered why. Only later, when a friend suggested I turn them into a book, did I realise that I’d have to tell the story of Old Wonky, and his Grandad, and the millions of deaths that came fluttering down on the wing.

  My father died on Sunday. For the time being they’ve put him in the fridge at the supermarket because everywhere else is full. I’d like to go and see him and say goodbye but the supermarket’s only open on Thursdays and the supervisor put a padlock on the fridge after one of the check-out lads arrived at work looking for space for his dead sister. The new Prime Minister was on TV again last night; his Churchill moment. That’s a pity, too. Dad loved Churchill.

  My best friend Maddie thinks all this is a bit of a joke. Not a joke exactly, more a business opportunity. She and her partner, Elmore, invent ring tones for other peoples’ mobiles. Last night she phoned me up to tell me about it and then sent me one for free. She says that now people only talk on the phone, and not face to face, there’s going to be huge money in ring tones.

  I listened to her latest while mum double-boiled the eggs she gets free from the supermarket. Apparently the ring tone comes from a recording Elmore made at a funeral he went to specially last week. The funeral was in a little village called Bassington. They were burying half a dozen people at once, which Elmore thought was a bit industrial, but with everyone dying and no one wanting to meet anyone else I can see the point.

  Elmore said that he and the undertakers were the only people in the church. That’s a shame because Elmore’s got a terrible voice and I expect they had to sing hymns. Afterwards all three of them stood by the big grave and Elmore had to help with getting them all in. One of the dead people was the vicar and they had to lie him down in the grave the other way round to everyone else. Elmore says that ordinary people are buried with their feet to the east so when they rise they face God. I thought that might be nice for the vicar, too, but apparently he has to face west so when he rises up all his flock can see him. That’s OK, I suppose. People might like a bit of leadership, even when they’re dead.

  I played Maddie’s new ring tones to my mum after tea when she was trying to find our spare bottle of bleach. It’s just a church bell going bong every three seconds. I know a bit about church bells (I’ll explain later) but Mum said she’d be scared to death to answer a call like that because the bongs mean someone’s died. I laughed and said it was probably Maddie’s sense of humour. She told me she wants to market it at a special toll-rate. Tolls are the sound that sad bells make. Mum doesn’t think that’s funny, either.

  Mum works at the supermarket, by the way, which is why she gets the free eggs (no one touches eggs anymore, except us). It’s also how she managed to queue-jump and get Dad a rack of his own in the big fridge where they used to store all the frozen poultry.

  I don’t know how it is with you but round our way they’re definitely running out of places to put people after they’ve died. Apparently dying doesn’t necessarily kill the bird flu virus so you’ve got to be a bit careful. Up at the top of the estate, on the old bit of car park where everyone used to do Cycling Proficiency, they’ve parked a couple of those big freezer lorries. The lorries come from the local chicken factory. Not many people know that but our next door neighbour told me if you look really hard you can see the word “farm-fresh” where the paint they’ve used doesn’t cover properly.

  The neighbour’s sister (who also lives on the estate) used to work at the chicken factory and after they went bust last month they had to sell all the lorries. They’ve only been using these lorries to keep dead people in since the week before last but the neighbour’s sister turned out to be one of the first to be frozen which is no surprise really because the virus loved chickens and she spent eight hours a day tearing their innards out. Apparently she always said she was immune to dying, on account of the work, but she got exactly the same runny nose and sore throat and everything that dad got so it couldn’t have been true, could it?

  I was going to tell mum about this, too, but decided against it. At least she can sneak a look at dad on Thursdays if she wants to. Up at the car park, that would be impossible. The barbed wire, for one thing. And the soldiers, with guns.

  Thinking about guns, mum says we’re very lucky to be living in England just now. The virus is everywhere, of course, all over the world, and in places where people have started to panic (like North Africa, and bits of the Far East, and even France), there’s lots of rioting when the vaccine starts getting short, and people ambushing lorries with fresh supplies, and even fighting outside hospitals when people think there’s loads of fridges full of the stuff inside.

  Just yesterday on the TV news a patient at a hospital in Marseilles used her mobile to film police shooting a man who’d taken a nurse hostage just to get himself innoculated. I don’t think they killed him, and mum said it was probably the best place to get shot because he got treated right away.

  Even so, all this violence is starting to make people frightened. You can see it in their faces if they’re brave enough to be out and they happen to walk past policemen. You always see policemen in twos and threes these days and they all carry guns, too, but we’re not very keen on rioting in England so it’s still pretty safe. Like dad would have said, it’s the virus that’ll get you, not a bullet.

  About dad. The funny thing is, he’d been old since I can remember, much older than mum. Mum’s still very beautiful, even at fifty which she was a couple of weeks ago, and when I last did the sums I worked out that she was only fifteen when she had me. That made dad twice her age when I came along and part of the shame of him dying like that was all the pension payments he missed. In between listening to his Churchill tapes and reading about the Battle of Britain, he’d been looking forward to getting out a bit more. He wanted to take mum to Paris on the train but Paris is closed, too, just like London, or at least that’s what dad told me. He was already sneezing by then, which I now realise isn’t a good sign, so maybe he got the Paris bit wrong. It wouldn’t have made any difference, though. Anyone with a cold can’t buy a ticket at the station, even with a vaccination certificate, and mum hates walking, especially as far as Paris.

  It’s funny not having dad at home any more. He never talked very much, not that I can remember, but mum thought the world of him. When I was a kid, dad used to keep pigs. Our granddad, mum’s dad, worked on a farm all his life and mum says he was always trying to teach dad about horses and ploughing and hedging and stuff but dad never wanted to know. He said he never wanted to work for a big farmer because that way they owned you, a bit like the horses. Better to set up by yourself, just a little bit of land and a few pigs, and this is what he did.

  He started with a kind of pig called a hybrid, that’s a pig with lots of other kinds of pigs in it, and when the babies came along they got fat very quickly and in the end they went off to become sausages and streaky bacon. Dad used to get very upset about all this because you can get to to be good friends with pigs and he hated seeing them going off to the sausa
ge factory and in the end mum said he ought to be thinking about chickens, rather than pigs, because then he might start talking to her, rather than the pigs, but dad never had any time for chickens. He thought they were stupid and smelly and boring and he wouldn’t even eat them on Sundays when they got really cheap. That upset mum, too, because we never had much money.

  Our town is called Overly. It’s got busier and busier recently, with everyone complaining about the terrible traffic jams. I work as the lollypop man outside the school, helping all the kids and mums across the road. I’ve been doing it for nearly twenty years now and it’s true that the queues of cars get longer and longer. The toddlers from Reception Class are really slow, even with their mums, and sometimes the drivers get angry, especially the men, but since the virus the roads are empty. They closed the school weeks ago, after one of the dinner ladies got sick and died, but I still turn up for work every day, just in case. They might forget to tell me if the school was open again and then there’d be no lollypop man. You can never be too careful, especially these days.

  I’ve always lived at home, mostly because I’ve never wanted to leave. Mum and dad gave me the little bedroom at the back. I’ve got some of dad’s Airfix wartime plastic aeroplanes he used to make hanging on bits of string from the ceiling and when the wind’s blowing from the east they all move around in the draught from the window. If I wake up in the winter and hear the Spitfires and Messerschmidts banging together over my head I know it’s going to be really cold. On those kinds of days I wear a big thick pullover under my yellow coat and borrow a pair of dad’s old gloves because it’s better holding the metal pole on the lollypop that way. I’ve got boots, too, with fleecy insides, but they can make pedalling the tricycle a bit difficult.

  My trike is a Pashley Picador with three gears and a big metal basket on the back. The basket’s especially useful now because I’ve started getting shopping for all sorts of people on Thursdays when the supermarket’s open. The supermarket’s at the bottom of the hill by the station, which means lots of pedalling back to the estate with a full load, and mum says the weight’s falling off me.

  One of the last things dad did before he got sick was to fix a pole on the back of my trike. When Elmore and Maddie last came back from Tibet (they go there lots), they brought me some prayer flags. The flags are like long banners. They come in all colours, like yellow, green and red, and Maddie wrote me out what each flag means. It’s very complicated but the Tibetans (who live in the mountains) believe the wind is good for us and makes things better for everyone (there’s lots of wind in the mountains).

  I’ve got a whole collection of flags which I tie to dad’s pole on the back of the trike, and each day I change them around depending how I feel. I’ve got a Large Wind Horse Flag, and a Kurukule Power Flag (which is very hard to spell), but my favourite is the Vast Luck Flag. It’s got a peacock on it, and an elephant and a wind horse, and it’s meant to protect life and health.

  I’m telling you all this because (according to the news) the Tibet people aren’t much affected by the virus, which has obviously got a lot to do with the prayer flags they fly. I’ve tried telling other people about this, and even offering to lend them a flag or two to try it out for themselves, but they don’t seem very convinced because they say this country’s different to Tibet. Maybe they’ve got a point. The morning dad was especially ill I parked the trike underneath his window with the Vast Luck Flag on the back but there wasn’t much wind that day and he died just after lunch.

  Dad going like that was very sad. Twice running I’ve tried to get the key to his fridge at the supermarket but the supervisor keeps saying no. He never says no to mum but I think that’s because he likes her a lot, especially now dad’s gone. Like I said earlier, it would be nice to say goodbye properly but I don’t suppose dad would even notice. That’s not the point, though, is it? You’ve only got one dad and life’s not the same now he’s not here.

  Dad’s favourite model aircraft was a big black Lancaster bomber. He took weeks making it, and painting it and stuff, and then he hung it up in the bedroom where him and mum sleep. I thought mum would take it down right away because it’s right over the stool where she sits in front of her dressing table and you can’t look at yourself in the mirror without seeing this huge black thing with the bomb bay doors open but she didn’t seem to mind.

  When I asked her why not she said about grandad, and what he did in the war. Then dad explained about being a tail gunner on the Lanc, stuck out at the back for hours on end in the freezing cold way up in the sky over bits of Germany. He said I should ask grandad about it myself, and I will. It turns out mum really loves that model Lanc. After dad died I tried to take it down, thinking she didn’t want reminding, but she wouldn’t hear of it.

  Grandad’s real name is Arthur Blossom (Blossom’s what we’re all called). He’s very old, 84, and he’s a tiny man, very brown, even in winter. He’s got very blue eyes that go watery when the weather’s cold and he’s also got quite a big nose that goes red round the nostrils when he has to blow it too much. He lives in a little cottage out Fetchbury way and it takes me about half an hour to get there if the wind isn’t against me.

  Grandad worked on farms all his life, because there wasn’t much else to do, especially in the olden days, and he’s still got a patch of garden round the back of the cottage near where he keeps his pigeons and he’s out there most days. In the summer, like now, he grows strawberries especially for mum because he knows she loves them. I like them, too. I go out there a lot. I take him milk from a diary farm down the road, and stuff from the supermarket that mum keeps in her deep freeze. He calls me Old Wonky and I call him Gramps. I’m never quite sure about Old Wonky but I think it’s got to do with the way I ride the trike.

  Yesterday, I was asking Gramps what he thought about the flu virus and everything. He just laughed. He’s got an old telly in the cottage which he watches a lot and we started talking about having to show vaccination certificates before you got to be with other people (like on trains or buses or in shops). Apparently you can get pretend certificates now, sold by criminals, but they cost at least a £100, which is a lot of money on top of a bus fare.

  Like me, Gramps thought that was quite funny but he said something else which made me think a bit. In the big war before the last war – that’s the war Gramps’ dad was in – seven million people got killed. But at the end of the war there was a different kind of flu which Gramps thinks came from pigs kept specially for the soldiers and guess how many people caught the flu and died after the shooting stopped? One hundred million. That’s more than all the people in the country, which is a lot.

  Whenever I go over to Gramps’ cottage he takes me round the back to see his pigeons. He used to race these pigeons properly but it got too expensive so now he just lets them out for a fly on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. Yesterday was a Tuesday and they all went out for a fly but only four came back (out of nineteen). Gramps says he heard a gun being fired, a shotgun, and he’s been on the phone to the farmer to find out what happened.

  The farmer’s name is Mr Bridgeman and he shoots birds a lot. In fact I used to go beating for Mr Bridgeman when he had pheasants and rich people down from London to shoot them (beating means getting the birds to fly past the guns). According to Gramps, Mr Bridgeman didn’t know anything about the pigeons but the way Gramps said it I know he doesn’t believe him. People hate all birds now, because of the flu virus, but Gramps really loves those pigeons of his and I could see how upset he was. Everyone knows they’re his because of the way they fly together, round and round, and killing them, he said, is like aiming a gun at Gramps himself.

  Gramps used to work for Mr Bridgeman’s dad before he died (not of the flu), and Gramps’ cottage still belongs to the farm. Gramps isn’t very happy about that, either, especially because he once tried to buy the cottage but Old Bridgeman just laughed and said he’d never be able to afford it.
Gramps still says that was rude and ignorant.

  When money was different Gramps says he only ever spent coins and never notes. He put all the pound and ten shilling notes in Branston Pickle jars in the cupboard where he still keeps his own shotgun and by the time he wanted to buy the cottage he’d started his seventh jar. I don’t know how many full jars you need to buy a cottage but Gramps loves Branston Pickle so he’s not short of empty ones.

  A while back, when Gramps twisted his ankle falling over a molehill in the dark, Mum said he could come and live with us. Not just until his ankle got better but forever. Gramps said no. He said that in his time he’d seen what happened when old people got shoved away in their own families and he never wanted that to happen to him. The only person to carry him out of his cottage would be the undertaker and until that happened, thank you very much, he’d be his own company. Gramps is like that, very stubborn. Maybe that’s why I like him so much. He knows who he is. A bit like me.

  Thinking of Mr Bridgemen and the pigeons made me ask Gramps about his time in the Lancaster bomber. Gramps has always been a good shot and I realised that must have come from the war. A photo dad gave me before he died showed Gramps in his little glass turret at the back of the plane. The plane looked huge. The turret went round and round and Gramps had four guns, two on one side, two on the other, and his job was to shoot German planes before they shot him.

  In the photo Gramps is grinning fit to bust and when I asked him why he said the photographer had brought his girlfriend along to show her the aeroplanes. Gramps says she was really pretty and when he blew her a kiss she winked back. They went bombing that night and nearly crashed on the way home, which Gramps said would have been a shame. The girl’s name was Frances. I think he must have seen quite a lot of her afterwards because they got married in the end and soon after that Frances had my mum, whose name is Peggy. My name’s Norman, by the way (not Old Wonky).