Mercury Falling

by Robert Edric

  No one spoke. Duggan studied Devlin closely.

  Devlin decided to act, seizing whatever small advantage he might have gained from the lie. ‘You say everything as though it’s the gospel truth,’ he said. ‘So what if you don’t believe me? So what if you never heard of the place? We were flooded out, like hundreds of others. We lost the house and the family split up to stay wherever we could. At least you three got back to your own home.’

  ‘This dump?’ Duggan said, looking around him.

  ‘At least it’s something. It’s more than some ever did.’

  ‘Any kids?’ Duggan said.

  Devlin shook his head.

  ‘So how come you ended up here?’

  ‘The drainage pointed him at us,’ Duggan’s father said. ‘Perhaps they wanted to make up for the last one they sent.’

  ‘No one’s seen hide nor hair of him,’ Duggan said. ‘And, believe me, I’ve looked. And what’s worse, the thieving little bastard owed money everywhere I asked.’ He turned to Devlin. ‘I will find him, incidentally – just in case you were thinking of following in his tracks.’

  ‘And when you do …?’ Devlin said, more to encourage Duggan than to hear his answer.

  Duggan made a strangling motion with his hands. ‘Guess,’ he said.

  Alison Duggan started laying the table. Before Duggan’s return, it had been agreed that Devlin would pay for a single evening meal each day, nothing more.

  ‘Tell me where your mother’s staying now,’ Duggan said unexpectedly as the three of them sat and waited for their food.

  ‘Why her?’

  ‘Because if you do scarper, then I’ll know where to start looking. And if you run past her, I’ll see what she’s got to cover the cost.’

  Devlin hadn’t seen his mother for two years. He had no idea where she was now. The last he’d heard she was living somewhere in Terrington Parish, close to his sister. ‘She lost most of everything she’d ever owned in the flood,’ Devlin said. He was beginning to wonder if the flood might not be an answer to everything: geography and history wiped clean and ready to be made anew. As far as Devlin was concerned, he’d been abandoned by his father when he was five, and by his mother ten years later.

  ‘So you say,’ Duggan said. He picked the dirt from the hairs on his forearms.

  ‘You think a son would lie about a thing like that, about his own mother?’

  ‘It’s what you are – a liar,’ Duggan said. ‘We already established that much.’

  ‘And what’s this place?’ Devlin said. ‘You make it sound like a four-star hotel, room service, all that.’

  The room he had been given was bare except for a sheetless bed, a dressing table, a chair and a small wardrobe. There was a mirror on the wall in the shape of a flower, and on the wall by the solitary window, a small black cross. He had taken this down and put it in a drawer. And then a minute later he had retrieved it and hung it back on the wall. Besides, it had left a mark on the wallpaper, and a cross of any sort was still a cross.

  For a second time, Duggan looked hard at Devlin. ‘I recognize you,’ he said. ‘Our paths have crossed.’

  ‘It’s a small world,’ Devlin said.

  ‘Oh, it’s that all right. It’ll come to me.’ He closed his eyes for a moment.

  Devlin watched the slow smile form on Duggan’s lips.

  ‘Were you Army?’ Duggan said.

  ‘Lincolnshires. Like I said, Engineers. You?’ It was what men did.

  ‘Royal Norfolks. I was overseas for two years. Then back here, and then down in Colchester.’ He continued looking directly at Devlin as he said all this.

  Devlin guessed the man to be eight or nine years older than himself, ten at a push. He had a tattoo on each forearm, military insignia, the blue ink blurring beneath the hairs.

  ‘Perhaps our paths crossed then,’ Devlin said. He pretended to read the newspaper in the old man’s lap, as though he might divert Duggan’s calculations.

  ‘Perhaps they did,’ Duggan said. ‘It’ll come to me. It always does. You need a good eye and a memory for faces in my line of work.’

  Devlin resisted asking him what that was.

  Alison Duggan put a bowl of steaming potatoes on the table, followed by a plate of sliced meat, and the four of them ate. Devlin waited until the other three had helped themselves before scraping what little remained on to his own plate.

  The old man looked at this and said, ‘That all you want?’

  ‘Perhaps he lost his appetite,’ Duggan said.

  Devlin told Alison Duggan that the food was delicious and she shook her head at the remark.

  When the meal was finished, Duggan’s father said, ‘We applied to all the Boards for compensation. They told us straight off that we had nothing coming. Lost everything and no one was to blame. Act of God, see? We had no insurance. Who does?’

  ‘We were in the exact same boat,’ Devlin said, glad to be back in these calmer waters. Feeling suddenly brave, and guessing that he would be allowed to stay, he said to Duggan, ‘So, what kind of work are you in?’

  Duggan sat picking at his teeth for a moment before answering. ‘This and that,’ he said.

  It was what Devlin had guessed, what he had wanted to hear. Three small and seemingly insignificant words, and yet he now knew precisely where he stood with the man.

  ‘What is it – scrap, salvage? I saw your load. I daresay it’s a good time to be in that particular line.’

  ‘It’s been worse,’ Duggan said. He looked closely at the speck of food on the tip of his finger.

  Salvage merchants. Scavengers and thieves making a small fortune in the receding waters of other people’s lives.

  Devlin weighed up his chances. ‘I could give you a hand,’ he said. ‘If ever you needed it, I mean.’

  Duggan shook his head. ‘You’ll be worn out from all the digging and fetching and carrying you’ll be doing at the drainage. Besides, you’ve got to know what you’re doing, otherwise it’s a mug’s game.’

  Right, Devlin thought, but said nothing.

  After a short silence, Duggan’s father said, ‘What you get, then?’ to his son.

  Duggan was reluctant to talk in front of Devlin. ‘A few bits and pieces, scrap mostly,’ he said. ‘I’ll offload it in the morning. Might make a few quid, might not. Depends.’

  ‘It’s something, I suppose,’ the old man said.

  Duggan lit a cigarette and blew the first mouthful of smoke into Devlin’s chest, where it struck him like a cloudy fist.

  Point taken, Devlin thought. He looked down at the smoke, which first caressed his arms and face and then sank down over his stomach and into the space between his legs.

  6

  A WEEK PASSED. Devlin laboured at the drainage. He slept at the Duggans’ run-down home and he ate with them each evening. He was unaccustomed to the heavy work and it exhausted him; most nights he was asleep by nine. He listened to old man Duggan’s convoluted Bible talk and withstood his son’s constant jibes and complaints. The food hardly varied from day to day. When Alison Duggan served up fish one night, both Duggan and his father refused to eat it, adding bread to their potatoes instead.

  No one at the flood repair work recognized his potential and he remained a labourer. When he tried to tell the foreman of his military experience with engines, the man laughed at him and said, ‘You and a million others, chum, you and a million others.’ The water was always cold and the mud always filthy, clinging and heavy. He was never free of the stuff. He washed himself each day with a hose in the Duggans’ yard, but it stuck to him and dried on him wherever he missed it.

  After that first week, as Devlin and Duggan sat together one night listening to a football match on the radiogram, and as Duggan’s father slept and snored in the chair beside them, Duggan leaned towards Devlin and said, ‘I might have a little job in the offing could use some extra muscle. You interested?’

  ‘When?’ Devlin, as usual, was tired. The football finished in ten minutes
.

  ‘Tonight.’

  ‘What sort of job?’ Devlin could see Alison Duggan in the yard outside.

  ‘What does that matter? Yes or no?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ Devlin said.

  ‘No need to sound too keen.’

  ‘I mean yes,’ Devlin said, rubbing his face.

  Two hours later, as darkness finally fell, Devlin sat beside Duggan in the uncomfortable cab of his lorry as they drove beyond Kirton before turning off the road towards the Welland, where the old and new sea banks met.

  A mile from the river, Duggan pulled over and switched off his headlights.

  They waited without speaking. After ten minutes, a solitary light shone on the horizon. Duggan started up the engine and they continued slowly towards the water. The path was uneven and ill-defined. A steep bank fell away on one side.

  ‘You look worried,’ Duggan said as he briefly lost control of the wheel on the soft ground.

  ‘We’d be down that bank and under the water in five seconds flat,’ Devlin said.

  ‘Three, probably. Cheer up, misery, nearly there.’

  They stopped closer to the solitary light.

  Duggan turned off the engine again and climbed out, careful not to slam his door. Devlin did the same.

  Duggan pointed at the light. ‘Dogs,’ he said.

  Devlin looked around them. Beyond a low hedge, machinery stood covered in tarpaulins. The same machinery he saw every day along the drain. He followed Duggan beyond this, to where bundles of piping and sheets of metal lay stacked.

  ‘Start loading that,’ Duggan told him, pointing to a mound of cisterns.

  ‘That’s not scrap,’ Devlin said.

  ‘What, you thought we’d come all this way in the middle of the night to do an honest day’s work? Besides, that’s common land. As far as I know, all this gear’s been dumped here.’

  ‘They’ll trace this back to you in hours,’ Devlin said, guessing.

  ‘Us,’ Duggan corrected him. ‘More like days. Besides, what do you take me for? By the time we get back to our beds, this lorry will be as clean as it is now. You going to start loading or what?’

  They carried the cisterns, followed by as much of the piping as they could manage to load. Devlin did most of the work while Duggan went off to search the remainder of the site, coming back with several jerry cans of petrol and coils of fabric-coated wiring.

  ‘Good money for that,’ he said as he threw the coils into the cab. ‘You’ve got to box clever these days.’ He stood for a while looking at the distant light. ‘Night-watchman gets himself over there for a bit of the other most nights. I know the tart. We got at least two hours. Most nights he sleeps off his hangover until he drags himself back here an hour before the foreman arrives.’ He smiled and rubbed his hands together. ‘Not that he’ll be here for much longer after this little caper.’

  There was a night-watchman at the drainage works depot. Devlin had spoken to the man. He wondered how long it would be before Duggan started asking him questions about that particular little set-up.

  Eventually, the bed of the lorry sagged on its axles and Duggan told him to stop loading.

  The journey back along the narrow track took twice as long with the weight they were now carrying. Reaching the road, they turned towards Holbeach.

  After a further long silence, Duggan said, ‘It’s finally come to me.’

  ‘What has?’

  ‘Where I’ve seen you before.’ Duggan smiled at the realization.

  Devlin tensed at the remark. ‘Where was that, then?’ The words dried in his mouth.

  ‘You was in the Colchester barracks nick. Military.’

  ‘Not me,’ Devlin said.

  ‘You got a twin, then. What was it you were in for?’

  ‘I already told you—’

  ‘And I heard you. What was it? Pilfering Army goods?’

  Devlin turned to look out into the passing darkness. Isolated lights shone in the distance. The lorry’s headlights barely illuminated the road ahead of them.

  ‘I knew it,’ Duggan said. ‘How long was you in for?’

  ‘End of hostilities,’ Devlin said. He’d served five months for stealing fuel and selling it to a garage owner in the town. Red petrol, easy to spot, not much harder to trace. Everybody Devlin knew was at it. Perhaps not everybody, but a good few. He’d been caught making his third delivery to the man. Caught, charged, tried, found guilty, imprisoned, all in the space of a week. The two others he’d been with had both avoided capture and had gone on stealing and selling the fuel until their discharge a year later. Devlin had hoped they might have compensated him for keeping his mouth shut, but nothing came, and both men went back into the world without him even knowing where or when.

  ‘What about you?’ he said eventually to Duggan.

  ‘What about me what? Did I serve time, you mean? Hardly. No, I used to deliver in and out of the barracks and the prison. A bit of black-market stuff now and then. But I always knew exactly how far to push it, see? Most of the redcaps in that place were as bent as Essex. You just didn’t know the ones to get on your side. Besides, how old were you?’

  ‘Eighteen, nineteen.’

  ‘Christ. Conscript? And I bet that’s as far as you ever got – Colchester nick. Am I right?’

  ‘So what?’ Devlin said.

  ‘You take offence too easy, son. Most of the blokes I know have been inside at one time or another. Some of them for long spells. Stealing petrol? They wouldn’t take two steps out of their way to get involved in that little lark. And especially not in the last few months of hostilities. I knew a quartermaster-sergeant once, stationed in Italy – Naples – and he said that nine-tenths of everything that was ever delivered to him went AWOL the first night it was there. Said it was like trying to stop a river. Said he was happy if he held on to what was left. You got caught, that’s all.’

  They arrived at the outskirts of Holbeach and Duggan turned on to the fen road towards the South Holland drain. ‘Not far now,’ he said.

  And even as he spoke, Devlin saw a line of trailers and lorries parked on the roadside ahead of them.

  ‘That’s us,’ Duggan said. He pulled up alongside the line.

  Devlin saw then that it was the trailers, lorries and dismantled machinery of a travelling fair.

  ‘You stay put,’ Duggan told him. ‘I mean it.’

  He climbed down and walked away, vanishing in the darkness.

  He reappeared ten minutes later accompanied by two men and a woman, all of them Devlin’s age. Despite the night air, the men were naked from the waist up and the woman walked with a sheet held over her shoulders. All of them, Devlin guessed, had been asleep.

  Duggan motioned to him to go out to them.

  The two men, Devlin now saw, were nearly identical in their appearance, both dark-skinned and black-haired.

  ‘Meet the McGuire brothers,’ Duggan said. ‘And sister. They might be gyppos, but they try not to be too dishonest where I’m concerned, and, better than that, they take everything I need to move on in a hurry and pay cash-in-hand. No hanging about with this crew.’ He put an arm around the shoulders of each brother.

  The men, taking no obvious offence at what Duggan had just said, looked suspiciously at Devlin, then one of them shook himself free of Duggan and pushed a finger hard into Devlin’s chest, causing him to stumble back against the lorry’s hot radiator.

  Duggan laughed at this. ‘He’s stronger than he looks,’ he said, meaning Devlin.

  Both brothers laughed.

  Then the three of them went to the back of the lorry and Duggan unfastened the tarpaulin.

  The woman came closer to Devlin and he saw that she was younger than he had first thought, eighteen or nineteen perhaps. Her hair and skin were as dark as her brothers’.

  Devlin introduced himself.

  ‘So?’ she said to him.

  The McGuire brothers pulled themselves up on to the bed of the lorry and started throwing down
the cisterns and lengths of piping.

  Having climbed up to look inside the cab, the girl came back to Devlin and said, ‘I’m Maria. I’m their sister. They’re Patrick and Colm. Patrick is the elder by a year.’

  ‘How old are you?’ Devlin wondered why he’d asked.

  ‘How old do you think?’

  ‘Twenty?’

  ‘Then twenty it is.’ She watched Duggan and her brothers for a moment. ‘What work do you do?’ she asked him.

  ‘Drainer,’ Devlin said, pleased at how easily the word now came. ‘Are you with the fair?’ He nodded to the parked trailers.

  ‘On our way to Cambridge. We do the circuit. It’s why Duggan likes to sell to them. This time tomorrow we’ll be forty miles away. They’ll only give him half of what he’d get from any of the local dealers.’

  Devlin saw the simple efficiency of it all.

  ‘You his new skivvy, or what?’ Maria said.

  ‘I lodge with him, that’s all.’

  She watched her brothers again. ‘People are scared of him,’ she said, her voice low.

  ‘Duggan?’

  ‘He has a reputation. He turns nasty. One minute he’s all smiles and drinks-all-round and the next …’ She clicked her lips.

  ‘Thanks for the warning,’ Devlin said.

  ‘What warning? You knew that much already. And if you didn’t, then more fool you.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ Devlin said. He took out his cigarettes and offered her one, which she accepted, leaning close to him as he lit it. He caught her sharp scent. She brushed the long hair from her face as she smoked.

  They were interrupted by Patrick coming back to them and pulling her away. Devlin was about to protest at this rough treatment, but he saw by the way the girl looked at him that he should say nothing. Patrick cupped a hand to her head and whispered something to her. Maria then reached beneath the sheet she still held over her shoulders and took out a roll of banknotes. She opened this and counted through it, giving the notes she peeled away to her brother, who took them and went back to Duggan and the unloaded cisterns.

  Maria came back to Devlin. ‘Neither of them can read or write,’ she said. ‘I doubt Patrick can even count to ten.’

  ‘Unless it was pound notes.’