by Tobias Hill
Jem scoffs; he can’t help himself. ‘People don’t own pools.’
‘I will when I’m rich. And it won’t have water in it.’
‘What then?’
‘Golden syrup.’
‘You’ll drown in that.’
‘I won’t. I’ll dive in, and there’ll be a big golden dent, and then a bubble with me in it, and then I’ll chew my way out.’
‘Brill,’ Jem says, all admiration.
Iris looks at Pond. ‘Are you an orphan, then?’
They all go quiet, listening. No one talks much to Pond. Iris tries to be nice, but Pond makes her timid, as he makes Floss jealous and Jem shy. Ever since summer Pond has been with them, but he isn’t one of them. A fourth is useful – good for games – but Pond is no one’s best friend. No one has him round. No one asks him about the things the grown-ups murmur amongst themselves, the things children aren’t meant to hear but do, the frightening things that are at the root of all their envy, shyness, and timidity.
‘I don’t know,’ is all he says, after all that waiting, and Floss huffs and stares away.
‘But Mr and Mrs Lazarus,’ Iris says, ‘they’re your parents now, aren’t they? So you’re not an orphan any more.’
‘He is so,’ Floss says. ‘He still is. Once you’re an orphan you stay one forever.’
‘Do you? But that’s cruel.’
Jem says, ‘Is it true you lived in a hole in the ground?’
‘It is,’ Iris says. ‘We saw him. I did see you,’ she says to Pond. ‘I thought you were a German ghost, but you weren’t. That was just one of Jem’s stories.’
‘I saw you too,’ Pond says.
Jem shivers in the fading light. The horse whickers again.
‘What was it like, then?’ Floss asks, ‘the hole?’
The way he looks at her is the way he looked when she dared him to jump. There is an eagerness in him. There’s a second when he looks as if he might dare to do something. In the end, though, he just shakes his head again.
‘It was my place,’ he says. ‘But I don’t need it any more.’
A spot of rain darkens the parapet. A woman hurries past with a parcel of Friday fish and chips. They all catch the smell of it. Jem thumps onto the bridge.
‘Race you for a chip,’ he says, and they do. They go racing through the rain.
*
‘It’s too much!’ Mary exclaims.
‘It wasn’t so dear. Noakes knows a man.’
‘That’s not what I meant.’
‘I know what you meant.’
‘But Michael –’
‘It’s what we deserve.’
‘People will look.’
‘Let them. Go on, get in,’ Michael says, and Mary does.
She tries not to touch anything. She’s in the driver’s seat. The car rocks gently under her. The smell of its insides is strong. Leather, oil and cigarettes: money, men and potency. Outside, people dash through the tail-end of an autumn shower.
Mary puts a hand on the wheel. Her wheel. The wood is warm. It has the polish of good furniture. She closes her fingers on it.
Michael used to pick her up in his old man’s Hampshire, early on, when they were all still speaking. Once, too, when she was a girl, someone took her for a spin, her and half the kids in the row inside or hanging on. She has been in cars before. This is different.
She begins to look around. The roof is lined with padded satin. Near the back it has sagged, but she can patch that up. There are dials beside the wheel, and a clock set flush under glass. There is an ash-tray that shuts by itself, and a glove compartment that opens with a click and closes with even less than that, as if gloves are an indiscretion.
All these things, Mary thinks, fitted together so perfectly. Somewhere a man crafts each of them. It should cost the earth, to buy the work of so many men.
‘Budge up,’ Michael says, ‘I’ll catch my death out here.’
She can hear the enjoyment in his voice, but when she looks up his face is as it always is, at all times except when they make love: as handsome and unyielding as the face of a soldier carved in stone. He gets in clumsily as she moves over, stowing his stick between his knees.
They sit together, side by side. The last of the rain taps at the roof.
‘Do you like it?’ Michael asks.
‘It’s like being in a tent.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘I don’t know.’
Michael rolls down the window. Outside, two women are going past. One is young and sad; the other has thickened with age, but is still the prettier, with curls and rosy cheeks like those of a soapbox child. Neither of them looks at the car.
‘Oh shut up, duck,’ the rosy woman says. ‘Come along and have a drink and forget it.’
Michael watches them go. He rolls up the window again.
‘I made a mistake,’ he says.
‘Wait. Let’s just sit awhile.’
‘I can take it back.’
‘It feels so private,’ Mary says. ‘That’s what I mean. It feels like a place of our own.’
‘Do you like it, then?’
Mary reaches for his hand. ‘Take me somewhere,’ she says, and Michael frowns, but his eyes are smiling.
‘Where?’
‘I don’t care. Anywhere.’
‘What about the girls?’
‘Not yet,’ Mary says. ‘Just us.’
*
A trace of her is still on him – her fertile, musky dirtiness – when Cyril calls for him. Michael wears it out with him, under his clean shirt and shave. It gives him pleasure to know that no one else will know it’s there; all of them, and the whole city, being sunk in the stink of themselves.
They drive. Michael would walk, if he could – the nights won’t stay warm forever, and it does him good to stretch himself – but the choice isn’t his to make.
It’s not yet late, but it’s dark out. The street lamps have been off all week. The route is lit by their own car and by those few others that pass.
There are three of them this evening. The third is Cyril’s man, whose name (Cyril says it) is Oscar, and whose voice has the same laconic coldness Michael has heard before, but which he understands now as the echo of a northern country.
‘Here,’ Cyril says, and tosses Michael a bit of paper. Only by the proportions does he know it for a pound.
‘Spending money?’
‘Swan might be in. It’s time you met the old bugger. Buy a round if you get the chance. Go easy if we have a game – and don’t lose it to Swan if we do. He isn’t one for flattery.’
What do you care? Michael thinks. What business is it of yours how I play my cards? But he knows, though he cavils at the thought. Cyril is Alan Swan’s man, and Michael is Cyril’s . . . for now. A pound says he is. If Michael goes down well with Alan Swan, he’ll do them both some good. And they both want to move up in the world, don’t they? They all want to get on.
‘He’s not the man he used to be,’ Cyril says, speculatively.
They get out of the car. ‘You and all,’ Cyril says to Oscar, and to Michael, ‘I’ll want the change back after.’
They’re down on the basement steps when a drunk goes past above them. He’s singing to himself – some mucky music hall song – but Michael knows the voice. He glances back as Cyril knocks. It’s Wolfowitz, huddled in his ratty trench coat. The old man slows, waits, goes on.
Does Oscar look up, too? Michael can’t be sure. It’s gloomy in the basement yard until the club door opens, and by then Wolfowitz is gone.
‘In before the lock-in,’ Cyril winks, and they duck inside.
If Michael were to speak his mind, he’d say that Cyril’s gentlemen’s club isn’t worth the epithet. There are two girls, but neither cares much for the drudgery and both are always tired under their pancake and peroxide. There are a few card tables and no shortage of drink or men; and that’s that, as far as entertainment goes.
Cyril leads the way, past t
he snugs, into the warmth, where an old man sits with company at a stained baize table.
‘Alan,’ Cyril says, and the man peers up.
‘Cyril. I was just talking about you.’
‘This is Michael, Alan. The young fellow I was on about. Mickey, this is Alan Swan. You can shake his hand, he won’t bite.’
‘Mr Swan,’ Michael says. ‘Mr Noakes speaks highly of you.’
Alan Swan cocks his head, like the dog who hears His Master’s Voice.
‘Brum,’ he says. ‘Birmingham born, but a bit of something else at home. I wouldn’t be at all surprised,’ he says, raising his tumbler to half-mast, ‘if you had a touch of Scotch in you.’
‘A good trick,’ Michael says; but Alan doesn’t like the answer, any more than Michael likes the acuity. The old man lowers his glass.
‘Oh, it’s not a trick, Michael. It’s a skill. It never does harm to know who you’re dealing with. Michael what?’
‘Lockhart, sir.’
‘Lockhart, of Birmingham,’ Alan says. He nods, twice – as if the act unlocks and locks a file in his pale skull – then smiles benignly. ‘Well, sit down, sit down. We’re not at war now, there’s no need for formalities. What will you have, Cyril?’
‘Just a mild for me, Alan, and the same for Oscar.’
‘Michael?’
‘I’ll have what you’re having.’
‘Ah,’ Alan says, and smiles his brand new false Health Service smile.
There are three other men at the table. Alan introduces them. Michael listens to their names and shakes their hands in turn. None of them matter.
As they settle there’s a lull in the talk. Michael props his stick between his knees. One of the girls brings the drinks. She smiles at Michael as she sets them down, meets his eye and lets hers linger. What was her name? Noakes told him once, Fay or Faith or the like. A clean girl, a picker and a chooser, with a room of her own upstairs. Michael lays aside the thought for later.
‘That stick,’ Alan says, ‘that’s a shame to see, a young fellow needing that. A war souvenir, is it?’
‘An illness,’ Michael says.
‘I hope you don’t mind me asking.’
‘Not at all, Mr Swan.’
‘I find it never hurts to ask. Did you see much action, Michael?’
‘As much as I wished for,’ Michael says, but Alan won’t let it go as easily as that.
‘Norman, here, he was in Malaya. Won himself some decorations. Only got back last year. A long time gone, weren’t you, Norman?’
Norman shifts in his seat, as if he might escape attention. ‘It’s done with now,’ he says.
‘So it is,’ Alan says. ‘And you, Michael? How was it for you?’
Michael tries his drink. He wants another bland reply – truth and lies both being risks – but it won’t do to stall too long, and nothing comes to mind except passing thoughts of the girl and the more nagging recollection of Wolfowitz, up in the dark.
Something’s come up, he thinks. Well, it looks like I need to have words with him. If it’s now then it’s none too soon . . .
The men are waiting for him. Too late, now, to play it safe.
‘The war was inconvenient,’ Michael says, ‘most of the time. Some of the time it was an opportunity.’
Two of Swan’s men go still, he sees, but the third wipes at a smirk. Alan widens his pale eyes.
‘Home Front for you, was it? Not much call, I suppose, for the lame to go marching off to war.’
‘I was never much for marching.’
‘I take it,’ Alan says, ‘that you’re not much for King or Country, either?’
‘I’ve done as much for them as they’ve done for me.’
Alan waves away his neighbour’s fit of smoke.
‘An opportunity, you call it. Well, it was. A lot of people hungry. A lot of them going short. Desperate, some of them. And you took your chances where you could. What did you get your hands on, I wonder? Nothing too steady, I suppose, or you wouldn’t be shifting Cyril’s goods now. Salvage off the bombings, was it? There were tidy pickings there. You wouldn’t be the only one.’
‘A bit of that,’ Michael says, ‘now and then.’
‘And selling underhand. Not that I’m saying you were a spiv,’ Alan says. ‘Not that I’d call you a horrible name like that.’
‘I don’t mind what you call me, Mr Swan,’ Michael says, and the old man’s steady gaze flickers in . . . something. Interest or amusement.
‘Norman here, he learned all kinds of things in the war. A handy man in a tight spot, that’s what we know we’ve got in Norman. What do we have in you, Michael? An education, a trade?’
Michael shrugs. ‘Silversmith’s apprentice.’
‘Not much call for that, these days. Takes too much money to make money. Not a lot of good to us. Still, Cyril tells me you’ve been useful, down the markets.’
‘He knows what he’s about,’ Cyril says, like a salesman. ‘He’s a hard worker and all. Come rain come shine, isn’t it, Mickey?’
‘I was asking Michael,’ Alan says. ‘Michael, how are you finding things?’
‘I can’t complain,’ Michael says.
But Cyril won’t shut up. ‘Just bought himself a nice little car. A family number.’
‘Earning more than your missus can spend, eh?’ the smirker puts in, and the cougher rises and gets in another round.
Michael says, ‘It’s not as busy as I’d like. There are the wrong kind of crowds.’
‘Wrong kind?’ Alan says. ‘I thought barrowboys liked crowds. The markets would get a bit gloomy without them. Cyril’s lads would get gloomy, too, if everyone stayed tucked up at home. What kind’s the wrong kind, then?’
‘Too many selling, not enough buying. Not enough brass. Too many foreigners,’ Michael says, ‘shoving in.’
‘Ah,’ Alan says again. ‘That kind of crowd.’
The drinks are set down. Alan pours his dregs into a fresh tumbler of malt: his hand is unsteady. The chat around the table is breaking up into small talk – the Hammers game against Argyle, the blacks causing trouble up west, the boys from down Ratcliff way, who pulled a job on Alan’s patch and won’t be trying that again, not in a hurry, all of them looking three years in the face –
When Alan speaks again his mildness cuts through the voices.
‘Ever been on the sea, Michael?’
‘Why?’
‘Jetsam and flotsam. If you’d been at sea you’d know the difference.’
Michael swirls his whisky. Cyril laughs tightly. ‘You’re on a hiding to nothing, Alan,’ he says. ‘I don’t reckon Michael takes well to lessons.’
‘Well,’ Alan says, ‘do you know?’
‘I couldn’t give a tinker’s shit,’ Michael says (choosing his words, like stepping stones), and some of those at the table smile, and some raise an eyebrow and lean back, but Alan stays just where he is, and his face hardly moves at all.
‘I don’t suppose you could,’ he says, ‘but I’m going to tell you anyway. Jetsam’s what gets cast away when there’s no place left for it. Flotsam’s what comes off the wrecks.’
Michael swallows his drink. He can feel its fire in his gut. He says, ‘I’m the flotsam, am I?’
‘That’s right,’ Alan says. ‘And they’re the jetsam, all of them. All the spicks and yids and nignogs. But it all ends up the same. It’s all shit on the beach at the end of the day. From where I’m sitting, up on the prom, I can’t hardly tell the difference. The only thing I care about is whether any of it’s still alive. I want to see it crawling, up out of the muck. If it crawls then I can use it. Are you still crawling, Michael?’
Michael looks away first. The horse-head stick rests by his hand. He draws his eyes away from it and lets his gaze rest on the table, where it can do no harm. Where Alan mixed his drinks a spill has darkened the baize. Elsewhere there are older stains, dim isles and continents.
Like a map, Michael thinks. Like the atlas of a greater world.
‘Mr Swan,’ he says, ‘I’ll seem young to you, but I’m past the age of crawling. I learned to stand on my own two feet a good long time ago.’
Cyril coughs into his hand. Alan smiles a third time. His false teeth gleam like wet ivory.
‘Did you?’ he says. ‘Well, standing will do. Standing will do just as well.’
*
Afterwards, in the street, Cyril slaps him on the back.
‘You play it fine, don’t you?’
‘Here’s your change,’ Michael says, and he takes out the note.
‘What? Keep it,’ Cyril says. ‘Keep it, Mickey, you earned it. You’re a plucky fucker, I’ll give you that. You sail too close to the wind with Alan, you’ll end up like those Ratcliff boys, or worse . . . Christ, but his face. I’d pay guineas to see it again. I’d put it up and frame it. Who’s got a smoke left?’
Oscar does. Cyril’s eyes are bright, like a man whose dog has come in first.
Cyril gets out his flask. He offers it to Michael, then shrugs, sucks, bares his teeth, and tips a toast to the street. ‘Long life,’ he murmurs. ‘Here’s to a long life with plenty of trimmings. Oscar?’
Oscar takes his drink.
‘There, well,’ Cyril says, when his smoke is done, ‘may as well call it a night.’
‘I’ll walk,’ Michael says, ‘if it’s the same to you.’
‘Good idea. Work off some steam, your missus will thank you. It’s chilly, though.’
‘Not to me,’ Michael says, and Cyril chuckles in the dark.
‘You’re like my boys,’ he says. ‘You don’t feel it yet. I envy you. You’ve got your life ahead of you, Mickey, and look at you! You’re on the up. Well, mind how you go – I don’t want you getting into trouble.’
Michael watches the car pull off. When it’s out of sight he starts eastwards. He has a fair stride, stick or no, and it won’t do to wait on his man; still, it’s asking too much to expect Wolfowitz to match him, and he tempers his pace.
He’s left Clerkenwell behind before the old man draws level. ‘Wait,’ Wolfowitz hisses, ‘wait!’
They stop for him to catch his breath. Michael looks east and west. The street is dark enough.
‘Well?’ he says, and Wolfowitz spits thick matter and stares at him, hands on knees.
