Ten Sorry Tales

by Mick Jackson

  Old Man Woodruff, having only just managed to pull himself together, promptly fell apart again. He dropped his head into his hands and began muttering darkly. Earl was getting royally sick of his dad’s incessant carping and moaning and was about to tell him to get a grip when Leonard spotted a cottage right down by the river.

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Everyone out.’

  *

  Harold Digby had just finished a plateful of ham and eggs and three slices of bread and butter and was sitting in his favourite chair with a mug of tea in his hand. He was looking forward to a little nap once the tea was inside him. He liked a little snooze after a bit of food. He once closed his eyes about half-past twelve and didn’t come round until getting on for three o’clock and he was wondering what the chances were of him pulling off a record-breaking snooze this afternoon when someone suddenly started banging on his front door.

  ‘Isn’t that just ruddy typical?’ Harold said to himself.

  He put down his mug of tea and got to his feet. He straightened his hair, in case it was anyone important, and opened the door to find four sinister-looking fellows all dressed up in black suits, with a coffin resting on their shoulders.

  ‘Are you the ferrymaster?’ the old one asked him.

  Poor Harold felt quite faint. He somehow got it into his head that Death had come a-calling. That it planned to toss him in its coffin and take him away.

  He swallowed hard. There seemed to be no point in lying. ‘I am,’ he said.

  ‘Good,’ said the old fellow. ‘We’ve got some ferrying for you to do.’

  Harold was greatly relieved that his days on earth were not yet over and that he had any number of years still left to set things straight. All the same, he let it be known that he was far from happy taking a dead body in his boat, even if it was a dead body wrapped up in a wooden box.

  ‘Four’s usually the limit,’ he said, as he led the Woodruffs and their coffin down the rickety old pier to where his boat was tethered.

  ‘Think of him as luggage,’ said Earl, which seemed to shut him up for a while.

  Getting the coffin on to the boat wasn’t a problem. The problem was finding a place for everyone to sit. The coffin fitted quite snugly across the two crosspieces but the boat wasn’t particularly wide, so the only way to get everyone on board was for them to squeeze in around it and hang over the sides.

  Old Man Woodruff insisted he sit up front, just like in the car. The others tried several different ways of distributing themselves about the boat, without success. And all the time, their dad kept saying how they were late and that people would be waiting, until finally Harold Digby took charge of the situation and announced that as he’d have to sit astride the coffin to do the rowing, the only sensible thing was for the others to do the same.

  Which is how they came to set sail with all five of them straddling the coffin, like some gruesome fairground ride. The moment they left the quay everybody fell silent. The Woodruffs were concentrating with all their might. The whole arrangement was a bit top-heavy, but Mister Digby assured everyone that as long as they sat quite still he’d have them over the other side in no time at all.

  They were doing very well until they got about half-way over, with Mister Digby rowing and facing back towards his cottage and the Woodruffs facing the other way. They were travelling about as smoothly and quietly as they did in their hearse when Leonard started shifting and squirming.

  ‘What’s going on back there?’ said Old Man Woodruff.

  ‘It’s my underpants,’ said Leonard. ‘They’re riding right up.’

  Everyone told him to sit tight until they’d got where they were going. But Leonard couldn’t think of anything else. He lifted his backside until it was clear of the coffin, hooked a thumb under the offending piece of underpant and yanked it clear. But when he sat back down he misjudged his landing and slipped – quite violently – to the right. The others leant to the left, to try and compensate, but overdid it. The boat tilted one way, then the other, and with each swing it gained momentum, until it finally went right over and deposited the Woodruffs, Harold Digby and the coffin into the river.

  A terrible splashing and thrashing ensued, as each man fought to keep his head above the water. But as any lifeguard worth his salt will tell you, it is one thing to swim in nothing but a pair of trunks and quite another to do so fully clothed. Leonard, Earl and Vernon weren’t particularly good swimmers. Even Mister Digby was not as good as one might expect. But Old Man Woodruff had never learnt a stroke and all he could think to do was kick his feet and claw at the water.

  ‘Doggy-paddle … doggy-paddle,’ he said out loud, to try and give himself some encouragement.

  The boat was upside-down and already twenty yards from them. The only thing left floating that they could get a hold of was the coffin and once they got a hold of it they weren’t about to let it go.

  The coffin rocked and bobbed as each man got an arm around it, but it never threatened to let them down. When all five of them were attached they took a minute to clear their lungs and catch their breath.

  ‘Are you all right, dad?’ said Leonard.

  He said he was, but that the sooner they were out of the water the better. And without anyone in particular suggesting it one or two of them started flapping their feet, and soon all five of them were slowly propelling the coffin the rest of the way.

  ‘Kick,’ said Old Man Woodruff, who was suddenly an expert swimmer. ‘Kick out with your feet.’

  When they got to the other bank they stood around for a while, cursing and dripping. And when the Woodruffs had finally agreed some sort of compensation with Mister Digby and done their best to smarten themselves up a bit, they lifted the coffin back on to their shoulders and headed up the hill.

  There was a fair-sized crowd waiting for them. As they approached the church an old lady, who looked most upset and was therefore most likely to be the dead fellow’s widow, headed over towards them. They came to a halt at the church gates and the old woman looked them up and down. Their suits were sopping wet and their hair was plastered to their heads. As they stood there, small pools of water gathered around their feet.

  ‘Where on earth have you been?’ she asked Old Man Woodruff.

  He cleared his throat and mustered as much authority as he could in the circumstances.

  ‘We checked the records, ma’am,’ he said, ‘and found no sign of a christening. We thought it best to baptize him – just to be sure.’

  The button thief

  Thelma Newton wasn’t much more than a toddler. The very top of her was only a couple of feet higher than the very bottom. She hoped to do some growing up later on in life, but in the meantime she had a habit of wearing at least two or three jumpers, which made her look quite chunky, and when she wore her favourite coat on top of them she was almost as wide as she was tall.

  Her Auntie Blanche bought her that coat. In the winter Thelma wore it fully-buttoned, with the hood up. In the summer she wore it open, to let a little air circulate. She was uncommonly fond of it and on a couple of occasions had even worn it in bed, until her parents happened to notice and insisted she put on her pyjamas, like any normal girl.

  One Sunday Thelma was out walking with her father, with her hood pulled up to keep her ears warm and a pair of clumpy boots to stop her sinking in the mud. They walked over the tops to have a look at the reservoir and on their way home passed a field with an old horse standing in the middle, idly chewing at the grass. Thelma had once seen a film about a girl who owned a horse. The two of them were forever galloping off into all sorts of adventures and, for a while, Thelma had dreamed of owning a horse herself.

  *

  Thelma’s father, thinking that his daughter still had a bit of a soft spot for horses, tried to call the old nag over, which he did by hanging over the fence, rubbing his fingers together and making a sort of clacking noise out of the corner of his mouth. It took a while, but the old horse finally decided to amble over. Thelma�
��s father looked so pleased with himself at having got it moving that Thelma felt rather obliged to pretend to be pleased herself, even though she’d given up on the whole idea of owning a horse and having horsey adventures several months before.

  The old horse certainly wasn’t in any sort of hurry. It just kept ambling along in their general direction, at its own leisurely pace and all the clacking and rubbing-together of fingers from Thelma’s dad didn’t seem to make much difference at all. When it finally arrived Thelma saw what a truly mangy old beast they were dealing with. It looked about a hundred and fifty years old. A stump of bristly hair stuck up between its ears, like a toilet brush, and various other whiskers hung out of its ears and nose and chin. It tupped Thelma’s dad out of the way with its big old head, then leant over the fence, right down to where little Thelma was standing, to see what was going on down there.

  ‘Don’t worry, Thelma,’ her father told her, as if he knew the first thing about horses. ‘It just wants to have a sniff at you.’

  Thelma’s father could have claimed to have been at least half-right, because once the horse’s head was down at Thelma’s level it started snuffling and snorting with its big old nostrils and gave Thelma’s head and shoulders such a thorough going-over she could feel the heat of its horse-breath blasting all about her and its whiskers as they dragged across her face.

  Thelma wasn’t particularly enjoying having the horse’s head so close to her. For a start, it was about ten times bigger than her own head. It also had the most disgusting-smelling breath. It smelt as if it had spent the morning smoking a pipe or working its way through a sack of old onions. But Thelma gritted her teeth and let the nag continue to sniff her. Another few seconds and it’ll all be over, she told herself.

  The horse dropped its head another six or eight inches so that it was right down in front of Thelma’s and its mad old eyes stared deep into hers. It peeled its lips right back and showed Thelma the many yellow teeth which were mouldering away in there. Then it made a sudden lunge for the top button on Thelma’s coat, latched its teeth around it and yanked its big old head right up into the air.

  Thelma’s coat left the ground with Thelma still in it. Her dad did what most dads would do in the circumstances and started shouting and waving his arms about. Thelma watched him getting smaller and smaller as she went higher and higher. The horse jiggled her up and down and swung her from side to side just like a rag doll and Thelma was quite convinced that at any moment the horse was going to take a big bite out of her, like a muffin or a piece of pie.

  She hung in the air for quite a while and might have hung there a good while longer if the threads which held her button to her coat hadn’t finally broken. She fell to the ground – a distance of some four or five feet, which might not sound very far to taller people but to a girl of Thelma’s modest proportions felt like a mighty long way.

  When all the falling was finally over she landed flat on her back, which knocked the wind right out of her. Then the horse went galloping off across the field, kicking its back legs in the air in celebration and making an awful high-pitched whinny, which sounded suspiciously like horse-laughter of the cruellest kind. Thelma lay in the mud until her father put her back on her feet and checked no bones were broken. To her credit, she didn’t cry or make a fuss. She was too bewildered. But when she looked down at her coat all she saw were a couple of threads sticking out where her top button should be.

  ‘He’s eaten my button,’ she said. Then promptly burst into tears.

  Back home, Thelma’s parents did their best to console her. They gave her a bath, put her to bed and generally showered her with sympathy. As she slept, her mother cleaned the mud off her coat, and over breakfast the next morning Thelma was assured that they would find a replacement for the button which the horse had so ruthlessly snatched away. But none of the shops they visited seemed to stock anything like it. All the buttons they were offered were the wrong size or the wrong sort of colour. And, besides, Thelma knew very well where the missing button had got to and felt that a bit more effort should be put into trying to get that one back.

  Thelma’s parents explained how the button would have to ‘work its way right through the horse’s body’ and that the only way of finding it would be to go round the field and check all the horse’s ‘business’. The two of them pulled such faces simply describing the process it was fairly evident that, no matter how much Thelma begged them, they were not about to take her back up to that horse’s paddock to spend the afternoon poking about in its dung.

  So on the Tuesday young Thelma took matters into her own hands. She rummaged around in the garage and found her dad’s old motorcycle gloves which came right up to her armpits. Then, at the next available opportunity, she put on her coat, with the threads still poking out where the button had been wrenched from it, and headed off towards the field.

  Nobody seemed particularly bothered by the sight of such a small girl marching up the road without an adult. Perhaps the big gloves gave her some sort of authority. She certainly strode along with plenty of purpose. And within twenty minutes Thelma was back at the field with the old horse in it.

  It was standing some distance away and appeared to be looking in a different direction, but Thelma had the feeling that it knew very well that she was there. She clambered up on to the fence and looked around the field for horse dung. She could see at least twenty piles of the stuff, but decided that the most sensible idea would be to start with the wettest, freshest specimens, as they’d be the most recent and most likely to have her precious button hidden in them somewhere.

  As she prepared to climb into the field with that mad old horse she did her best to convince herself that by remaining alert at all times she could avoid being picked up, jiggled about and dropped in the mud again. She would keep an eye on it at all times, she told herself, and if it made the slightest move in her direction she’d run like the clappers. She wasn’t particularly tall but she was a good little runner and if that horse decided to come anywhere near her she’d be out of that field in a flash.

  She’d got one leg through the fence and was easing the rest of herself after it when someone suddenly started screaming. Thelma turned to find an old lady running towards her. One hand was waving a rolled-up brolly. The other clutched a small dog to her chest.

  ‘No you don’t, young lady,’ the old woman called out, as she hurtled towards her. ‘No sir. No siree.’

  By the time Thelma managed to extract herself from the fence the old lady was standing right over her. Her eyes were wild and she was shaking her head as if something unpleasant was rattling around inside it.

  ‘No sir, little missy,’ she said. ‘You climb in there and that …’ She paused to find the right word. ‘… that monster will bounce you from one end of the field to the other. Just for sport.’

  Of course, Thelma had her own, first-hand experience of the vicious animal and would have been only too happy to share it, but the old woman was too busy talking to listen to anyone else. She had a long list of complaints regarding that horse and was determined to work right through it. As she ranted and raved Thelma noticed how the horse slowly made its way over and came to a halt less than ten yards away. It stood and listened most intently – seemed to be quite enjoying the show.

  The month before, the old lady was saying, that blasted horse had very nearly done for her darling Pickles. The dog had wandered into the field, the horse had got a hold of it by its collar and proceeded to swing it round and round above its head. As she described the scene the old lady bared her teeth and rolled her head round and round on her shoulders. The dog, which was still clutched to her bosom, seemed thoroughly sickened at being reminded of the incident. The horse, on the other hand, threw its head back and snorted with derision and seemed quite delighted to hear the story again.

  ‘She’ll hardly walk at all these days,’ the old lady confided. ‘At least, not near here she won’t. I have to pick her up.’

  The ol
d lady looked down at her dog and tickled it under its chin to try and cheer it up, but the dog was completely lost in its own little world of worry. Thelma took advantage of the break in the old woman’s monologue to recount her own tale of horse argy-bargy.

  ‘He ate my button,’ she said and showed the old lady where it used to be.

  The old lady studied the remaining threads and shook her head. Then she turned, looked over at the horse and gave it a scowl of the greatest severity. Thelma scowled at the horse herself. But the dog, being of a more nervous disposition, couldn’t bring itself to actually look at the animal and kept its eyes averted.

  When they’d finished scowling, the old lady asked Thelma if she’d reported the incident. Thelma had to admit that she had not. She hadn’t realized there was a place where one reported such incidents.

  ‘Well, you must report it to its owner,’ the old lady told her. ‘Old Mister Edwards.’

  In truth, it hadn’t occurred to Thelma that the horse might actually have an owner. It seemed so arrogant and so thoroughly unregulated that she couldn’t imagine it answering to anyone other than itself. So it came as no real surprise to hear the horse’s owner described in the most pathetic and weak-spirited terms. All the same, the old lady insisted that lodging a complaint with him was the very least one should do in the circumstances and offered to accompany Thelma to the Edwards farmhouse straightaway. So they set off down the lane and after a while the old lady put her dog down and it did a bit of walking, but all the time it kept glancing over its shoulder, as if a horse might suddenly grab it by its collar and start tossing it about the place again.

  At the gate to the farm the old lady said goodbye and she and her dog carried on their way, with the old lady using her rolled-up brolly as a walking stick and her dog looking as if it wouldn’t be happy until it was back home in front of the fire. Thelma approached the farmhouse and it quickly became apparent that the whole place was teetering on the verge of rack and ruin. The roof of the barn was all sunk in the middle and two or three of the cottage’s windows were broken and had been boarded up with bits of wood. A few scrawny-looking hens picked over the ground and Thelma carefully made her way between them. When she reached the safety of the doorstep she knocked on the door and after a while it was opened by an old man who was wearing a pair of worn-out overalls. What was left of his hair clung to his head in a sort of froth. Long grey socks hung off his feet in great flaps and folds. He was, thought Thelma, rumpled at both ends.