We Are Family

by Emlyn Rees

  ‘But can’t die there,’ he said, surprising himself that he’d spoken the words aloud.

  The thought of being anchored to this tiny corner of the world for the rest of his life filled him with horror. Yet in the same breath, he doubted his ability to leave. He’d tried before and he’d failed.

  He’d made his break, going to Durham University in 1948 to study civil engineering after he’d done his national service in the army. But he’d only lasted six months, before returning home to run the shop. Exhaustion . . . it had been etched into his mother’s brow and bagged beneath her eyes at the end of his second term at Durham. Although she hadn’t complained once, he’d realised the moment he’d seen her that it had finally started proving too much for her, managing the shop and bringing up Rachel. And so he’d given his studies up.

  And now he couldn’t – wouldn’t – leave, not while he was still needed here. He’d vowed that much to his dad.

  Can’t die here, then, but probably would.

  Years ago, he used to imagine this view being covered with structures he’d engineered himself. He’d dreamt of fantastical bridges spanning the rivers, a great pier to rival Brighton’s, funicular railways climbing the hills and the pinnacle of an opera house reaching for the sky.

  He still had the drawings under his bed at home, along with his collapsed drawing board and the one photo he’d kept of Susan Castle, the girl he’d been engaged to at university, but who’d broken up with him after he’d dropped out, and not joined him here as he’d hoped.

  But enough of dreams. And regrets. He checked his silver-plated wristwatch. Its glass face was cracked. His father had been wearing it the day he’d died. Bill had never got it fixed, preferring to be reminded of what had happened each time he looked at it. He never wanted to forget his dad.

  Bill walked over to his old black Norton motorcycle, which he’d fixed up with the help of his best friend Richard Horner. Mounting the bike, he gunned it into life and pushed it across the rough ground to the road. It was half past seven already: time to get back to the shop and start the working day.

  At the bottom of Summerglade Hill, Bill drove straight over the crossroads and on to the high street. Halfway down, outside the freshly painted church hall, a couple of schoolboys were play-fighting in front of the Viva Zapata! poster glued to the green metal bus stop. Several cars could be seen in the car park at the harbour end of the street.

  Bill turned right almost immediately, driving beneath the lolling branches of a towering oak tree and into the alleyway which ran between Vale Supplies and Giles Weatherly’s ironmongery store next door.

  Cutting the engine, Bill propped the Norton up on its stand, behind Giles’s delivery van and then rolled himself a smoke. It was a habit he’d taken up during his time he’d spent in the army. He’d hoped to see the world, even fight, but he’d ended up in a barracks in Yorkshire instead, learning how to shine boots and march in them.

  An alley door led directly into his family’s house, but Bill went through into the tiny backyard instead. He stripped off his shirt and washed the dirt from his hands and face with freezing water from the tap. As he towelled himself dry, he peered over the back fence which his father had erected to keep him and his sister safe as kids.

  Several feet below, the River Step sparkled in its channel. Boulders broke its surface every couple of yards, as grey and slick as seals. Bill loved the sound of the chattering water. He’d been brought up on it. Quite literally. Supported on struts, his bedroom had been built out over the yard, so that it now stretched out over his head, protruding over the river.

  It was the same with all the terraced houses backing on to both sides of the river channel. With nowhere else to expand, they’d pushed out backwards, so that now the gap between the properties on the east side and west side of town was less than twenty feet.

  Inside the kitchen, it smelt of polish and Drummer pine disinfectant. Dried bunches of lavender hung from the creosoted beam which cut the low white-plastered ceiling in two. The gas stove gleamed as good as it had done when they’d had it installed five years ago. Brass pots and pans and stainless-steel ladles and knives glinted on the wall.

  Bill walked on through the parlour and into the gloomy hallway, only to find his mother, wrapped in a heavy blue dressing gown, sitting patiently at the bottom of the stairs. She was a pretty woman, aged forty-six, with dark hair and a generous smile which failed to conceal entirely a perpetual sadness in her eyes.

  ‘Good morning, William.’

  ‘Mum . . .’ He leant down to kiss her, a puzzled frown agitating his brow. ‘What are you –’ doing there, he’d been about to ask. But he’d already guessed. He reared up. ‘Rachel!’ he bellowed up the stairs.

  ‘Don’t waste your breath,’ said Mrs Vale. ‘She can’t hear.’

  ‘Won’t hear, more like,’ Bill retorted, before demanding, ‘How long have you been waiting here?’

  ‘Well, not long . . . you see, I was going to try and see if I could . . .’ Mrs Vale didn’t look at him as she spoke and he guessed that she was trying not to get Rachel in trouble. The fact was, she’d probably been sitting here waiting for half an hour.

  ‘She should have come down to help.’

  ‘Well, you’re here now,’ his mother said hopefully, ‘so why don’t we just –’

  ‘Just what, Mum? Pretend it didn’t happen? Pretend she’s not as selfish and lazy as she is? Rachel!’ he shouted up the stairs again.

  Still he got no response.

  ‘You were exactly the same when you were her age,’ Mrs Vale tried pointing out.

  But Bill wasn’t listening. He and his sister were nothing alike. He did; she did as little as she could: that was the plain fact of the matter.

  ‘She knew I’d dropped your chair round at Giles’s last night,’ he said. ‘I told her before you went to bed. And I told her I was going up to the allotment first thing this morning, so it would be up to her to help you out this morning.’

  His mother’s wheelchair. That was the chair he was talking about. One of its wheels had seized up and he’d taken it next door for Giles Weatherly to mend.

  Ever since Mrs Vale had lost the use of her legs, she’d worked hard at making herself as independent as she could. She was a methodical woman, who still kept the store’s accounts immaculate, and who’d also developed a system giving her almost full mobility around the house. She had two wheelchairs, one upstairs and one down, and could negotiate the stairs between herself. Apart from this morning, when – as Rachel had known – Mrs Vale would have to make do with just one.

  ‘I’ll fetch it down for you now,’ Bill told her.

  The moment his mother had wheeled herself into the kitchen to make breakfast, Bill ran back up the stairs and glared up at the ladder which led to his sister’s attic room. The chipped, yellow-painted trapdoor at the top was shut and pinned to it was a notice in Rachel’s erratic handwriting, which read:

  Rachel’s Place!

  No Bill Stickers!

  No Bill Vale either!

  ‘Selfish little cow,’ he growled.

  He climbed up and unceremoniously punched the trapdoor open with the butt of his hand, listening with grim satisfaction as it keeled over and slammed down on the floor above.

  That’ll teach her, he thought. That’ll make her sit up and listen.

  Emerging through the opening into the crepuscular light of Rachel’s pot-pourri-scented room, Bill saw that she hadn’t, in fact, moved at all. On her face was a look of beatific peace. Everything about her, in fact – from the statuesque folds of the white sheet which covered her body, to the healthy blush of her cheeks – spoke of the serene, as if she were no mere mortal at all, but rather an angel drifted down from heaven during the night.

  All of which pissed Bill off more than he could ever have expressed.

  Bill tore down the thin green material which covered the skylight and let the sunlight flood in.

  But still she didn’t stir. />
  He reached forward to shake her. But then he froze mid-motion as a better idea entered his mind. Bill wasn’t a cruel man and, in spite of his present mood, he did love his too-big-for-her-boots little sister. But a short, sharp shock would do her good. He leant in closer. He’d get his mouth as close to her ear as possible . . . and then he’d fill his lungs . . . and then he’d –

  It was a magnificent roar, an emperor of a roar, the roar of two half-starved, five-hundred-pound Bengal tigers fighting over lunch. It was the kind of roar which vibrated crockery off shelves, the kind of roar which could have torn down the walls of Jericho, and undoubtedly the right kind of roar to put the fear of God up a lazy, good-for-nothing, seventeen-year-old girl and show her who was boss.

  Aside from one salient fact: it was Rachel who’d roared, not Bill.

  Just as Bill’s lungs had reached their maximum capacity, just as he’d opened his mouth to bellow into Rachel’s ear with all his might and convert her into a quaking, gibbering, respectful wreck . . . her eyes had flashed open and she’d emitted an ear-piercing roar of her own.

  Jumping back, Bill cracked his skull on the beam above and dust avalanched down.

  ‘Get up!’ he shouted, rubbing furiously at his eyes.

  ‘I am,’ she yelled back. And – he now saw – she was. She’d leapt up and, tearing the sheets from around her, she now strode towards him in her crumpled white nightshirt. ‘Get out!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Out!’ she repeated. ‘Now!’

  ‘Now you listen to me –’ he started.

  ‘No, you listen to me. You know what it says on the door. You know you’re not allowed.’

  He tried to be calm, tried to remain the adult. ‘I’m not going until you listen to what I’ve got to say.’

  ‘Go ahead then, talk. Talk as much as you bloody well like and then get out.’ She stood there, glowering at him.

  ‘Do you know what I came back from the allotment to find?’ he began.

  ‘Let me guess,’ she said, ‘a nuclear bomb?’

  ‘No, actually,’ he said, electing to ignore the sarcasm. ‘Mum: sitting at the bottom of the stairs.’

  Rachel’s lip curled. ‘Gosh. Our own mother. In our own house. What do you want, a medal?’

  ‘Do you know why she was sitting there?’

  ‘Shock me.’

  ‘Because you were too bloody lazy to get up and carry her chair down for her,’ he snapped.

  ‘Don’t swear at me,’ she said.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I’ll just swear bloody right back at you.’ But then her expression suddenly altered. ‘What do you mean Mum needed help to get in her chair? Oh,’ she then said, her expression suddenly altering again, ‘you took the other chair over to Giles’s house last night, didn’t you? And I was meant to . . . shit . . .’ Crestfallen, she clamped her hand over her mouth. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry, I forgot.’

  He was tempted to say more. To tell her that sorry wasn’t good enough. And that they had to work as a team, because if they didn’t, then the whole thing – their business, their family – would fall apart. And to tell her that it was his responsibility to look out for them all and to keep them safe. To remind her that that was what he’d come home to do.

  ‘Tell it to Mum,’ he told her instead.

  Because there was no point in lecturing Rachel. Because he already knew what she thought: that he was interfering, petty and dull. And that she didn’t want him to act like a father towards her, because she was old enough now to look after herself.

  And, looking at her now, he was beginning to see that she was probably right.

  Bill had only a couple of deliveries to make that afternoon and, as he set out from the alley on the shop bicycle, he was clean-shaven, with his fingernails scrubbed, his starched white shirt sharply creased and his previously unruly hair now pacified with a wet brush. In every way, he was as orderly and well presented as the shop itself.

  The high street was quiet with the morning’s shopping mostly done and people now at lunch. A heady mix of beer, cider and smoke funnelled from the windows of the Channel Arms and the Smuggler’s Rest, while the acrid vinegary whiff of battered cod and saveloys drifted through the doorway of the Captain Ahab fish-and-chip shop.

  Bill cycled quickly past, waving to grey-haired John Mitchell, who was leaning out of his upstairs window, watering the hanging baskets of daffodils above his bright orange front door.

  At the corner of Bay Street, liver-spotted, tittle-tattling Mrs Carver flagged Bill down and made him promise to remind his mother about the Women’s Institute meeting that Saturday afternoon.

  Then Bill was off again, turning right at the end of the high street, before juddering along the cobbled quayside, weaving around the lapping cats and slapdash vermilion splashes of spilt mackerel guts. The tide was out and fishing boats lay tilted on the chocolatey muddy harbour bottom to his left. The briny stink of drying fishing nets was all around.

  Bill’s stomach sprung like a jack-in-the-box as he rode over the stony hump of Harbour Bridge. He pumped the pedals round faster, charging like a knight on a steed through a fluttering explosion of indignant squawking seabirds.

  His first delivery – tea, coffee, Cadbury’s Fingers – was to the utilitarian and uninspiring red-brick town hall, which slunk beside St Hilda’s Church. Bill, his mother and his sister had been members of the church’s congregation for as long as Bill could remember. This last Sunday gone, he’d stood behind his mother’s wheelchair for twenty minutes in the cool shade cast down by the church’s clock tower, staring at the immaculate granite crucifix which marked his father’s grave.

  The second delivery was to another of Bill’s regulars: the Sea Catch Café. It had been run by Mr and Mrs Alun Jones for the last thirty years, although recently there’d been rumours – largely spread by Mr Jones, who was keen to retire to his homeland of Wales – of them putting the place up for sale. Only his wife, Mavis, having no one to hand the business over to, was yet to be convinced. Their natural successor and only child, a disgraced daughter, had run off with an American during the war.

  The Sea Catch Café was a three-storey building, double the width of Vale Supplies, backing on to the opposite river bank. Downstairs were the tearooms and restaurant. Mr and Mrs Jones lived upstairs and also kept a few rooms for bed and breakfast.

  Bill leant his bike up against the wall of the side alley, next to the bins and their attendant stink of boiled potatoes and fried onions. Tucking the packed brown paper grocery bag from the bike’s basket under one arm, he reached out to knock at the door.

  Before his knuckles connected with it, however, the door swung open, revealing Tony Glover, whose face promptly turned ashen.

  ‘Still here, then?’ Bill said. He looked Glover unwaveringly in the eye. ‘Alun’s not fired you yet, then? Not given you your notice?’

  Glover scratched at his brow, not answering.

  ‘He will.’ Bill said. ‘You’ll mess up. Just you wait. You won’t be able to help yourself. And when you do, no one else will give you a job. And then you’ll know it’s time to leave this town.’

  Glover lowered his hand from his face. And that’s when Bill saw it: the swelling on Glover’s eye, the cut above, and the bruising on his nose.

  ‘So who do I owe a drink to?’ Bill asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘For giving you the kicking you no doubt deserved,’ Bill explained.

  ‘I fell over.’

  Bill wanted to hurt Glover, like whoever it was who had done this to him. He wanted it bad. But that would make him no better than Glover, he reasoned. That would make him an animal, too.

  Bill thrust the bag roughly at Glover.

  ‘Tell Alun everything’s there,’ he said. He glared at Glover, hard. ‘And hurry up,’ he told him. ‘Or I’ll be putting in another complaint to your boss.’

  The doorbell rang with a brittle chime as Bill opened the front door
of Vale Supplies and stepped inside. The white-and-black-tiled floor was spotless from when he’d mopped it that morning. Familiar products were stacked up high and in symmetrical order on the shelves: wide, cylindrical jars of sweets, canned soups and vegetables, bottled sauces and jars of instant coffee and cocoa, packets of suet and semolina, and boxes of scouring powders, soap flakes and oats.

  Mrs Macgregor was wedged into the shop’s public telephone booth, gripping the black Bakelite handset like a cosh, as she gave her weekly lecture on the perils of drink to her son Arthur, who’d moved to Bristol three years before. Behind the burnished counter, Rachel was up the old wooden shop ladder, reaching for a bottle of Camp Coffee and Chicory Essence from the top shelf. She brought it down and rang the sale up on the black till, before bagging the bottle and handing it over to Norman Miller with a smile.

  ‘Bill,’ Norman said civilly, tipping his trilby in acknowledgement. He had a son, Alan, who was Bill’s age. He’d gone away to university at the same time as Bill and now lived in London with a good job at a bank and a pretty wife and a baby boy.

  ‘Beware of Bristol,’ Mrs Macgregor remarked cryptically as she followed Mr Miller outside. ‘It’s a crucible of sin . . .’

  It was stifling inside and Bill wedged the door open after her, then turned to his sister, who’d picked up a magazine. She looked up and smiled at him like the morning’s argument had never occurred. Capricious didn’t come close. Teenage girls, he thought. He’d never understood them when he’d been a teenager himself, so what chance did he have now?

  Rachel closed her magazine. It was a copy of Illustrated, with Marilyn Monroe on the cover, glistening with diamonds and wearing a low-cut red-and-black lace dress. ‘What do you think?’ she asked, holding Monroe’s face up next to her own.

  ‘About the diamonds?’ he teased. ‘Oh yes, they’d really suit you.’

  She rolled her eyes. ‘I mean the hair. Do you think I should change my colour to match hers?’

  ‘Would it make you happy?’

  ‘It might get me a new boyfriend.’

  He chose to overlook the use of the word ‘new’, which implied that she already had one.