The Suburbs of Hell

by Randolph Stow

  ‘How?’ asked Frank languidly.

  ‘After I cleaned the rifle—’

  ‘That was a stupid fucking move,’ said his friend, more in his normal manner. ‘If you hadn’t done that, we could tell if he had cleaned it.’

  ‘Frank, that int been moved since I put that back Sunday evenin. Stoopid I may be, but I had an idea when I was doin that. After I stacked the wood the way it was, I put some bits of cotton, free freads, acrost it. They int been touched. He never had a fing to do wiv that, I’m glad to say.’

  ‘Yes, he did,’ Frank said, without emotion or emphasis. ‘I know that. I know it. He saw the threads, of course he saw them. He’s wary, he’s canny. And I bet the crappy thriller that you got that idea from is one that belongs to him.’

  ‘Thass true,’ said Dave, a little out of countenance.

  ‘Pull up here, will you,’ Frank said, ‘at the top of the hill. I want to look at the view.’

  From the rise, long fields of winter-bitten grass sloped down to the saltings, and to a line of bare trees hiding a sandy beach. Dave pointed at a tall shape among them. ‘Thass our crane there, I mean Charlie’s crane. I went wiv ’em yest’day, so Harry could show me the ropes. I mean literally, like, show me the ropes. Goo-to-hell, boy, that was somefing cold at four or five o’clock in the mornin.’

  Frank’s mind was on a different tack. ‘Don’t you get nervous, alone in that little house with him?’

  ‘Ah, you’re off again,’ Dave sighed. ‘Well, I lock my door at night, since you give me the idea. But funny enough, last night he done the same. I was awake when he got up this mornin, and I heard his key in the rusty old lock. Thass a laugh, innit? He must be finkin I’ll do for him before he can let it all out to Taffy.’

  ‘I could guess that,’ Frank said. ‘That’s why I asked if you weren’t nervous. There’s a lot more cause for it now, when he thinks he’s got reason to be nervous of you.’

  There was uneasy silence from Dave. Then he said: ‘Well, you and me, we just don’t see fings alike, mate. The way you see him, thass just unbelievable to me, and I’ve told you that. Less drop the subject.’

  ‘Sure of that, are you?’ Frank asked. ‘Quite, quite sure?’

  ‘I don’t fink—I don’t fink you’re really sane about him, just now. No, I int sure, o’ course I int sure, I can’t see what goo on inside him. But I int scared, neither.’

  ‘You can’t see anything, can you?’ said Frank, listlessly. ‘You can’t see outside yourself. You can’t see me, and what’s ahead for me. Oh Christ, I can, and I’m shaking inside.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Dave, low.

  ‘I know you don’t, I’ve just said that you didn’t. But I can see what’s coming. I always was a bit of a favourite with our bobbies, on account of a couple of horse-pistols I owned. Now they’re convinced; they’re not trying to hide it; and I think Donna is somewhere at the back of this. And because I didn’t do it, it’s unlikely that they’ll ever be able to charge me, let alone get a conviction. However, along rides Harry Ufford to their rescue. Imagine the joy at the nick when Taffy Hughes breaks the news. De Vere is nailed—not for what they’d like to see him nailed for, not for the big one, but nailed. Well, I hear that murderers have a high social status in gaol, and I suppose I’ll take that reputation with me. Maybe some of my glamour will rub off on you.’

  Dave was staring. ‘But—that weren’t all that serious, was it? Not my part of it.’

  ‘Ah, don’t go all innocent on me, Dave. It was always serious. And to get me, they’re going to talk it up, pull out all the stops. Which means that for you it’s going to be made as tough as it could possibly be.’

  Dave’s black beard moved as he munched on his lip. He was scowling, but looked more hurt than angry.

  ‘Down there,’ Frank said, ‘do you see, down there, there’s a bit of a roof just showing through the trees. I used to know that place well. That’s where Black Sam was found.’

  ‘Oh-ah,’ Dave muttered.

  ‘Poor old Sam. Now I know the feeling. It comes all of a sudden. It breaks like a storm. Suddenly you know that what’s been threatening all your life has happened at last. For the first time, there’s no choice, no way out, no hope of recovery, no free movement ever again.’

  ‘Hey,’ Dave said, and reached out a hand and laid it tentatively on Frank’s shoulder. ‘Hey, don’t,’ he pleaded. Frank’s face was turned away, pressed to the cold glass. His weeping was a series of gasps of pain.

  ‘Frank, don’t,’ Dave begged. ‘I’ll do somefing. Thass goonna be all right, you’ll see. Frank, don’t talk like that about not havin no free movement no more. Frank, when—when she dies—I’ve got to mention that—when that happen, less goo away from Tornwich. I mean, together, like. I need a partner, I’m that sort of bloke. I mean, I know I int very bright, but I’ve stuck to you, ant I? Bloody Tornwich, there int nofing there, never was; but somewhere else we could make somefing of ourselves, you and me.’

  ‘We’ll be leaving Tornwich, all right,’ Frank said. ‘For Her Majesty’s Prison at Norwich.’

  ‘No!’ said Dave. ‘I told you, I’ll do somefing.’

  ‘Have you seen a way out of this?’ Frank asked. His tone was sardonic. When he turned his head, his face was strained, but calm.

  ‘Yes,’ said Dave, in a low voice. He was looking down at his hands, clasped on the steering wheel. ‘There is a chance. A serious chance, I reckon. Serious.’

  Harry Ufford opened his front door, and his animals, from the yard, came bursting through the cat-flap in the back door and rushed on him. He squatted to fondle them, murmuring endearments and praise. All Harry’s geese were swans. They were the most remarkable cat and dog in the world, because they were his own.

  He switched on an electric fire, and took off the canvas bag that hung on his shoulder, then the heavy coat. He was cold without it, but soon would have a real fire, winking in the polished horse-brasses and in the sides of bottles containing ships. He would have an hour or two of warmth and lassitude among his friendly possessions, listening to the tick of the cuckoo-clock, before the early bedtime his work imposed upon him.

  He was always comforted by his house, the familiar composite smell of it. He loved the peaceful frame of his middle years.

  But a thought came into his head and gave him a sudden look of sternness, a look which was always potentially there, in the broad cheekbones and lean weathered cheeks. He went to the door on the stairs, and shouted: ‘Dave! Dave, you there?’ When no answer came, the forbidding expression passed.

  He went to the canvas bag and took out of it a bottle of whisky in a cardboard box. Looking at it, his face brightened, and he was genial once more.

  From the drawer of a bureau he excavated some Christmas wrapping paper and coloured string, and on the flap of the bureau he made a neat, bright parcel of the whisky. He looked at it with pleasure. Then he went to his coat and took an envelope from its inner pocket. He produced a birthday card, and in his awkward hand wrote a message inside it.

  He went into the kitchen, and opened a high cupboard, whose lower shelves were crammed with tins of pet food. Reaching high, he stowed the parcel away behind some cleaning gear.

  ‘You better promise to be a good boy,’ he said to nobody. ‘Don’t, you shan’t have it.’

  Harry stood on his front doorstep and looked at his two animals sitting gazing at him from the middle of the floor. Their eyes were sorrowful. ‘I shall be back,’ he told them; ‘I int gone for ever.’ He switched off the light, and slammed the door against their mourning approach.

  In the street behind him Dave was waiting, massive in donkey-jacket and sea-boots, hunched against the black cold. It was a quarter to five on a gusty March morning.

  They passed side by side through the narrow streets and narrower alleys, companionable to appearance, but awkwardly apart. They had hardly exchanged a word for two days, and could not begin to speak, with so many questions and so much pr
etended ignorance hanging between them.

  On the wall at the top of Gorse Creek the slap of the low water rose to them, spiteful with wind, white-capped in the light from the waiting barge. In the blackness of land, sea and sky the little wheelhouse below them glowed yellow and warm.

  By the head of the ladder which at low water gave access to the barge, Harry paused, and settled his heavy clothes around him. Clumsy in his thigh-high boots, he made his way down to the deck. He opened the wheelhouse door, spilling brightness, and said a word to the two figures inside. Then he turned back to the ladder and held it steady for Dave, who was bulkily descending.

  Together they lifted the ladder down and laid it on the deck. ‘Righto, boy,’ Harry said, ‘you lash that to the side of the wheelhouse like I shew you the other day. Thass your job now, you bein the noo boy.’ He went away forward to the moorings.

  When he came back, Dave’s frozen fingers were still fumbling with the rope, and the throbbing, juddering barge was on the move. ‘You’ll get handier in time,’ said Harry. ‘You’ll find thass a nice place, our wheelhouse, and you won’t hang about out here.’

  The time spent in the wheelhouse was the bright point of his working day, all that the job offered of warmth and sociability. Crammed in the fuggy stall with Charlie the crane-driver, with the taciturn Dutch skipper and with Dave’s chirpy predecessor, only a few feet from the icy water, he was always in a mood to count his blessings. Though he scarcely knew the Dutchman, who lived on board, he had a fellow-feeling for the man who had made his living-quarters in the stern so snug and seemly.

  The Dutchman, at the wheel, stared straight ahead; but Charlie had busied himself, and turned about holding out a mug of black coffee well spiked with whisky. ‘Where’s the lad?’ he asked.

  ‘He’s now comin,’ said Harry, and moved aside as Dave entered. Dave leaned his back to the door, and blew on his hands, slightly nodding at the crane-driver.

  ‘He takes up more room than little Eddie,’ Charlie remarked. ‘We’re going to have to build an extension. Here, Dave, have a swallow of something warm.’

  ‘Ta,’ said Dave, taking the mug and warming his fingers on it.

  ‘I am thinking,’ remarked the Dutchman. There was respectful silence while he thought. ‘I am thinking,’ he continued, ‘about your police. They will take the fingerprints of all of us, every one?’

  ‘So I hear,’ said Harry. ‘I hear they’ll be gooin from door to door, askin everyone—every male over fifteen, that is—to report to the nick. Thass voluntary, like; but if your name int crossed off their list, they int goonna just forget you.’

  ‘I am not in favour,’ said the Dutchman. ‘I am not British. Why should the British police have my fingerprints?’

  ‘They’ll destroy them after,’ Harry said. ‘After they’ve got him, I mean. It said in the paper they’ll shred ’em, like.’

  ‘After they’ve got him,’ repeated the Dutchman. ‘May we all live so long.’

  ‘It sounds as if they’ve found something,’ Charlie said, ‘at last.’

  ‘I don’t believe that,’ said Harry. ‘Thass just window-dressin, in my opinion. Thass gettin them down, the rude things they read about themselves in the noospapers.’

  Out in mid-estuary the movement of the barge was unsteadying. It made him feel drowsy. He leaned beside Dave, going with the motion. Sometimes, making the trip by daylight, he was struck by the view ahead from that point, the wooded headlands so unexpectedly massive in a country which rolled so gently. That long road of water made him feel like an adventurer, perhaps a Viking, striking into the heart of unfamiliar land.

  Half an hour later Dave slipped out of the wheelhouse, and Charlie asked with an unfeeling grin: ‘He all right?’

  ‘Oh Christ, yes,’ said Harry, stoutly. ‘He’s like me, he’s a fisherman’s son.’

  He was pleased when Dave came back looking perfectly normal, and went to stand near the wheel.

  ‘Harry,’ said the Dutchman, not turning, ‘pontoon ahead. Get down and tie up.’

  ‘Jawel, mijnheer,’ he murmured, and went out, carefully shutting up from the freezing air the wheelhouse’s hoarded stuffiness.

  He went down the two steps from the door and moved to go forward, but something caught at his clumsy boot. Something had trapped him. He felt irritation, alarm, panic. He groaned out the one word: ‘Ladder!’, pitching head-first into blackness.

  My soul, like to a ship in a black storm,

  Is driven, I know not whither.

  Vittoria Corombona in The White Devil

  The water is black, but pied with foam from the violent wavelets that dash themselves against his calling mouth.

  His swamped sea-boots are pulling him down. He is struggling to be rid of them, trying to float on his back and at the same time free his legs of that weight. For a moment he disappears in his contortions, but when he surfaces again one overlarge boot has gone. It calms him, that success, and he works, with one hand and a stockinged foot, less frantically at removing the other. Now the weight of water is on his side. The clinging thing yields and drops to the bottom of the sea; his legs are suddenly amazingly light and limber.

  The stern of the barge is going away. But they have missed him, and their shouts come to him across the waves which to them appear so small. Now he must think of the dragging weight of his coat, and he thrashes and writhes in the water, but cannot escape it. He sinks again, and comes up gasping, still hampered by the coat.

  From the moment he touched the water he has had no hope, but will fight till the last moment, as a duty.

  The barge has turned and is bearing down on him. It is travelling empty, and he is astonished at the height of its sides. In front of the wheelhouse, silhouetted against its light, two black figures are gesticulating.

  He sees the commotion of the churning propeller, and suddenly he is in terror. He begins to shout and wave. And perhaps they see him, perhaps they make out his pale hands and pale face, because the barge veers off, the propeller merely tumbles him in its wake.

  Now he tries again to be rid of the coat, and keeps on trying, but the struggle is wearying him, and again and again he goes down and swallows water.

  And the strong incoming tide is bearing him away, to the farther shore, upriver.

  He goes with the tide, swimming breaststroke in the freezing water. Strangely, he does not feel the cold. He only knows that he is very tired.

  He feels something more elevated than self-pity. He feels grief; he mourns. It is tragic and pitiful to him that all his life—the rebellious law-breaking boyhood, truculent adolescence and man’s life of loving and feuding—has been tending towards this, the death of an unwanted kitten.

  The sky has grown light, traversed by long ribbons and tatters of black cloud. Now he is near the other shore, where bugles are sounding, he is amazed to hear bugles. Near this place there is a naval training school where the boys are being roused from their beds. Soon he can hear their voices, frivolous before the beginning of their disciplined day.

  The current carries him on, taking another course, back to the other bank, driving always inland. Now he is too weary to swim for long, but much of the time floats on his back, paddling feebly. The lighter of the clouds are pink and golden, the black trees are turning blue.

  He thinks that the craft which passes in mid-channel is probably a lifeboat from Old Tornwich, whose crew would be men he knew. But he cannot tell, or care much, and something—tiredness or darkness or salt—has weakened his sight.

  The current bears him on. His thoughts drift also, far from the river. Now he returns again and again to the disappointments of his life, the satisfactions denied, the pledges not honoured, the vague something, indefinable, sought in bouts of drunkenness or aggression and never found, always withheld from him.

  He cannot tell that the lifeboat has seen him, that messages are flying through the air. Taken out of that world, he drifts.

  When the barge reappears he is far from e
verything. He has not noticed that it is now full daylight, and that he is once more near land. The height of the barge’s side astonishes and disheartens him. Hands, and then ropes, are reached down to him, but his snatches at them are feeble and unconvinced.

  He sees the ladder against the barge’s side, and leans back his head to look up the length of it, to the downturned solemn face of Charlie, and the face of Dave, the handsome boneheaded boy, passive in everything, a passive murderer.

  He reaches for the ladder, but his fingers will not close on the rung. They open, they slip away. He drifts from the ladder’s foot, and closing his eyes, goes down and breathes in his death.

  8

  A DEFIANCE…

  ‘He was strong all right,’ Frank De Vere said. ‘What, two hours, was it, he was in the water? And he swam over five miles. Swam and drifted, I suppose. He must have had a heart like a bull.’

  Dave Stutton said nothing, but got up from his chair and began to mend the fire. When he had sat down again, he snapped his fingers at the dog. It came, and he scratched the tan-coloured silk behind its ears.

  ‘What will become of that now?’ Frank wondered. ‘What did Harry’s brother say?’

  ‘That’ll stay here for a while,’ said Dave, with his face turned away. ‘I shall look after fings for him. You know, there’s a lot of them Uffords, brothers and sisters. They’ll get fings worked out between ’em after a while, but thass likely to take time.’

  ‘You’ll be staying on in this house, then?’ Frank said.

  ‘Yeh,’ Dave said, ‘for the time bein.’

  ‘And what about the job on the rig?’

  ‘I shall keep that, until I fink of somefing else to do.’

  ‘That’s a good idea,’ Frank said, ‘probably. Stick at it till the inquest, at any rate. It will look better. Though I don’t know: it would sound natural enough if you said you couldn’t face that barge any more.’

  At last Dave looked round at him. The young face above the beard was set, and the black eyes hostile. ‘No more I can’t,’ he said. ‘However, I shall have to. I need a job.’