by Max Hennessy
He heaved himself to his feet and cocked a leg over the gunwale on to the tumbledown wharf. ‘I’m goin’ to make meself a cup o’ tea,’ he said. ‘Want one?’
I nodded and climbed after him.
‘Won’t be ten minutes,’ he said, dumping across the broken timbers. ‘Then maybe you’ll knock me off a letter to my old Ma. We can tell ’er I’ve cut me ’and again.’
I nodded and, as he disappeared, I stared at the water for a while. I could hear the slap of the wavelets that washed the seaweed to and fro like long brown hair around the piles, and the soft bumping of the boat as the river caught her and elbowed her against the wharf. I felt a bit depressed just then, what with knowing I’d got to start work where I didn’t want to and Old Boxer being in prison and, according to Yorky, likely to be in worse trouble as soon as he came out.
All my life I seemed to have lived among unhappiness. I’d watched Ma growing daily more careless about her appearance as she nursed her grievance and her imaginary ill-health, and Dig growing by degrees more silent, the hurt look in his eyes like a kicked dog’s. With a sudden feeling of maturity, I realized I was lonely. I’d often been lonely. I’d not spent much time in the company of youngsters of my own age. Most of my leisure had been spent with Old Boxer.
And you never knew where you were with him. He was bitter, sour and sarcastic, savagely cruel one minute and the next tender and thoughtful, but always unreliable, drunk or sober. It was only Yorky’s vast zest for life, his enormous interest in everything that went on around him, that made Old Boxer bearable at times.
I wondered for a moment if Old Boxer would ever sort out the tangle of his financial affairs, and if Ma would ever speak civilly to Dig and grow out of her imagined grievance. The relationship between them, like their relationship towards me, was always a bit distant. With Ma, I was unfriendly, I suppose, always just beyond her reach. With Dig, I was willing to be friendly but it always broke like a wave in an anti-climax when I realized his attention had wandered to a book.
Perhaps this was why I liked Old Boxer in spite of his sulky moods. Sometimes he’d give you a grin of flashing brilliance that charmed the heart out of you. At least he was never gloomy and dull in the way that Ma was gloomy and Dig was dull. You could always reckon on fireworks, whatever his temper, and I’d always preferred the shambling, rambling, tumbledown old boat-yard, as ramshackle as Old Boxer’s life, to No. 46 Atlantic Street, which had no more happiness about it than a graveyard.
Staring unseeingly along the wharf, busy with my thoughts, I gradually became conscious of an erratic splash of oars behind me that disturbed the even whispering of the river. Turning to squint into the last of the sunshine, I recognized Pat Fee in a skiff.
I knew the girl with him. I’d cherished a bosomful of sighs for her ever since I’d first met her, in spite of the fact that she was three years older than I.
Pat pulled the boat to the end of the wharf and leaned on his oars as it drifted slowly on the tide.
‘’Lo, Jess,’ he said. ‘You know Minnie, of course.’
‘’Lo, Pat,’ I said, and nodded to Minnie.
Pat was smoking and he took the cigarette from his mouth with a confident gesture.
‘Yer Pa mad?’ he queried.
‘Yes, Got to start work on Monday, he says.’
‘So’ve I,’ said Pat ‘Got to ’elp the old lady with the lodgers. And I’ve got a job as barman for Minnie’s Ma in the pub at night.’
Minnie sat back in the stern of the boat and preened her hair as though she were enjoying my staring eyes and Pat’s admiration. She’d a mature figure, plump in a tight summer frock that didn’t leave much to the imagination, but there was something about her face that just missed being pretty.
‘Ma says we only need a chucker-out now,’ she pointed out to me. ‘Fancy the job?’
I blushed, knowing she was only mocking me.
Pat struck one thumb in the armhole of his waistcoat and grinned. ‘You don’t need no chucker-out, Minnie,’ he said cheerfully. ‘The Steam Packet’s a well-be’aved pub.’
Minnie’s Ma had kept the Steam Packet Inn at the end of Gibraltar Lane, a spit and a jump from Atlantic Street, ever since her father had broken his neck falling down the cellar in a drunken daze. It was a dark little place down by the waterside, with nut-brown rooms, floored with flag-stones and smelling of stale beer. Its backyard was a stone jetty where dinghies were moored. Once it had been a coaching house of some importance where merchant skippers and ship-owners met their crews for the first time with signing-on papers. But now its customers consisted of deck-hands, donkeymen and greasers out to enjoy themselves on the proceeds of a long voyage home, and the dockside touts with their greasy betting slips and fag-ends.
‘You got to work, Pat?’ I asked, uneasy at the absence of conversation and Minnie’s bold stare.
‘No.’ Pat shrugged. ‘Only Ma says if I can go poachin’ I can go out to work. Still, I’ve ’ad a good run.’ He chuckled suddenly. ‘What you think of Old Boxer, eh? Proper old boy, ain’t ’e? The things ’e said to that old Mayor. Enough to make yer ’air curl, it was, Minnie.’
‘Bad enough being sent down the line for stealing,’ Minnie said primly. ‘Without fighting in police-courts.’
Pat grinned easily and held out a packet of cigarettes to her.
‘Fag?’ he asked.
‘Don’t mind,’ Minnie said, taking one.
‘Should be able to pick up a bit in bets at the Steam Packet,’ Pat observed to me. ‘Sailors is a bit free with their money. ’Specially if they’ve been a long time comin’ ’ome.’ His eyes suddenly had a faraway look. ‘Wouldn’t mind startin’ a book of me own if I’d got the cash.’
I was silent before all these mysteries of adult life of which Pat spoke so glibly. I couldn’t have afforded them even if I’d been interested.
Pat was squinting saucily at Minnie. ‘Would you marry me, ducks, if I started to make some ackers?’
‘Wun’t mind,’ Minnie was non-committal, and Pat put an arm round her waist and deposited a smacking kiss on her cheek. It set the boat rocking crazily and Minnie squealed and shoved him away.
‘Minnie and me’s goin’ steady,’ he informed me. ‘Aren’t we, Minnie?’
‘People don’t want to get too cocky,’ Minnie warned him.
‘Where are you going?’ I interrupted, suddenly remembering that Pat was a long way from home.
He grinned slyly, ‘It’s not so much where we’re goin’ as where we’ve been,’ he said. ‘In the woods along the river. ’Ired the old barge ’ere. Bob an hour. Feeling flush. Come up on the two-thirty today.’
‘What you been doing in the woods?’
Pat winked. ‘Go on with you,’ he said as Minnie smoothed her thin frock over her ample thighs. ‘What we been doin’? A bit of the old kiss and cuddle, fat’ead. What’s a chap take a girl in a wood for? Play marbles with ’er, or something?’
I felt I was on the edge of something unpleasant.
‘Like a romp in the grass, don’t you, Minnie,’ Pat said, laying his hand on her knee.
‘Go on with you, Pat Fee,’ Minnie said coyly.
‘Well, young Jess…’ Pat suddenly realized they’d drifted away from the wharf and the conversation was being conducted in shouts. ‘…got to be off. Got a date at the Odeon, then a meal and a pint to finish off with in Minnie’s back kitchen. Come on, ducks. Don’t want to be late.’
‘People wouldn’t be late,’ Minnie pointed out, ‘if they didn’t stop gossiping to people.’
‘Oh, come off it,’ Pat grinned. ‘You wasn’t so much on your ’igh ’orse this afternoon.’
He bent over the oars and, splashing badly, they went slowly and erratically up-river, the sun picking up the splashes and the ripple at their stern in diamond points. Pat had never been much good in a boat, but he was cutting a bigger dash than me just then in his pearl-grey flannels. Minnie had had her hair frizzed for the occasion, too, and her skirts
were short, adult beyond her years. I watched them out of sight, full of uncomfortable, jealous ideas. Maybe I was growing up.
I wished until it hurt that I could take Minnie to the pit stalls of the Odeon, wished I could sit beside her at one of the scrubbed tables’ of a chip shop beneath the garish light of an unshaded bulb and drink beer with her afterwards. I wished I could take her in my arms, warm and vital and desirable, and make love to her.
The blood mounted to my face and neck, and there was a sudden choked feeling in my throat. I stopped short, ashamed of my thoughts.
I shoved my hands into my pockets, a bit bewildered with myself, and turned my back on the murmuring river. From the sail-loft the thin wheeze of the concertina that Yorky had carried round the world and back with him was grinding out the nostalgic notes of ‘Shenandoah’. Unaccountably, I felt miserable inside.
IV
The Weekly Gazette and News Letter, where I started work the following Monday, was called ‘the Local Bible’ round our way, and its news was accepted as gospel. Not that it carried much news, mind you. Just the police-court and town council stuff, and that was about the lot except for accidents. It was mostly jammed full with company notices and shipping movements and drapers’ adverts, and yards of three-line ads. Secondhand washing-machines and ten-foot dinghies. Ship-chandlers’ wares and farming implements. Old clothes and scrapyard cars. All bundled together in a heap with the births, marriages and deaths. The news pages seemed oases in the deserts of small ads that sprawled unrelieved wherever there was room.
The front office in the High Street was an imposing affair – white stone and gilt letters and windows full of photographs – but the rear end finished up in a maze of grubby alleys among the secondhand bookshops and the auction sale-rooms and the rabbit warren of the solicitors’ quarter. They put me at this end – in a room that was as far from light and air and breathing space as they could make it, a dusty little closet next to the works manager’s room and looking out on to the courtyard where the newsprint was delivered.
It was a bleak and empty life I lived there, and I hadn’t been there two months before I thought of looking for another job. I rejected the idea in the end because of the hurt, unhappy look I knew I’d see in Dig’s eyes.
I did my best for him, but I never liked it. They employed me chiefly, as far as I could see, to fetch snuff or cigarettes, and sandwiches on Fridays, the day the paper went to press. Not what you’d call an exciting job. And I had three years of it. Three years! Each one of them as long as centuries. Each one of them a lifetime to me. My face as I went to work in the mornings must have given Dig a few heart-burnings. I knew from things he said that he thought often about me and worried in case he hadn’t done the right thing. I think he knew he’d made a mistake sending me to the printing works instead of the boat-yard. It was his dislike of the sea that had made him turn down that idea. There’d always been at the back of his mind the fear that Ma’s connection with the sea and her admiration for ships and seafaring men had had something to do with her mental sickness. I suppose he thought it might affect me in the same way.
Poor old Dig, he never knew of the time I wasted sitting in the lavatory whistling tunes or reciting ‘The Shooting of Dan McGrew’ over and over to myself to pass away the time, or staring from the window of the store-room where I could lock myself in and enjoy in peace the dirty strip of river that flowed nearby. It was a dull enough strip, fringed by tall buildings, but it was the river nevertheless, and I knew it flowed into the sea and its water was blown by the wind over the horizon.
When I could, I slipped away to the wharfside, down to Old Boxer’s boat-yard for a mug of strong tea with Yorky and a sniff at the dark water or a glance at the horizon. But these trips were few and far between. I never seemed to have time for them, what with overtime and night school and errands for Dig, and even they came to an end eventually, for Old Boxer sold his property to Wiggins’s as Yorky had predicted and went off to sea.
With him when he left, carrying his concertina and a brown paper parcel that held a couple of clean collars and a clean singlet, went Yorky, continuing his blasphemous martyrdom as Old Boxer’s servant and protector. After that, during the three years I worked on the newspaper I saw Old Boxer only occasionally and then he was invariably so drunk he could only concentrate on getting to the dreary room he rented at Ma Fee’s lodging-house. Shabbier than ever he was and, strangely, with no time for me. As Yorky had prophesied, the money he raised on the sale of his property went in one terrific bender that landed him in gaol again with the magistrates’ instructions to the police to see him safely off to sea when he came out. He shambled down to the docks a fortnight later, dragging a kit-bag, shabby and dull-eyed, and followed by Yorky and a watchful bobby.
It was then I lost touch with them. Even Katie Fee, who was growing into a tall, dark-eyed young woman, helping her mother in the time she could spare from Wiggins’s boat-yard, where she’d started in the office, could never tell me when they were likely to be back…
* * *
I remember studying that bare, dusty little office where I worked one day, the grubby desk covered with the works manager’s snuff and the stubby chewed pencils and scrap-paper, and deciding I wasn’t going to live and die there, doing a job I detested until I faded away, just as Dig had been doing for twenty-five years or more. I looked at the windows and couldn’t recall when they were last open. I squinted at the bare light bulb which took the place of the daylight that never quite managed to get into the room, and listened to the clattering machines beyond, and I nodded and said out loud: ‘Not likely. Not much more of this, Jess, me boy.’
With three more years on my shoulders, the determination to get away from it had grown to a hard little knot at the back of my mind. But I still hadn’t the courage to put it behind me. It takes a lot of doing, throwing up a good job, even if you don’t like it. And I’d always got that miserable hurt look in Dig’s eyes to think of.
Yet, while it takes some doing to throw up a good job, it also takes some doing to hang on to it when you detest it. It takes all the sparkle out of life and makes it dull and drab and monotonous. When old Boxer and Yorky went, there was nothing left, nothing to relieve the dreariness of it. And, Lord knows, I was young enough to want a bit of excitement.
There was nobody to lend me a boat or give me a trip to sea. Wiggins’s turned over a dinghy to me occasionally – on the strength of Dig working there, I suppose – and I did odd trips on the ferry at week-ends when they were short of a hand, or helped with the fishing in summer, But Dig never liked that. I used to come home tired out and falling asleep on my feet, and then I never heard the alarm next day and it used to worry Dig when I was late. I don’t think he’d ever been more than a minute behind time at Wiggins’s all the time he’d worked there – even with Ma to look after.
But what suited Dig didn’t suit me. I’d just about had my bellyful of printing and words and paper. I remember standing in the doorway of that office that day and having a rare old sorting-out of my thoughts. It had been raining, and the sky was dull and the room dark and the dust on the windows had been splashed by the drops that had fallen off the roof and blown against the glass. The grey light in the room reflected my thoughts.
Just when I’d decided I couldn’t see any way out, a tap on the window made me jerk my head up.
‘Now then, sonny!’
I looked round to see Pat Fee’s face pressed to the glass, his nose a bloodless triangle against the pane.
‘Got some paper for you, youngster. Better come and get it unloaded or someone’s goin’ to cop it. Come on, now, or do you want me to take me strap to you? Just ’cos the boss’s across at the Crown knocking back his lunch-time pint, it’s no excuse for slacking.’
I gave him a dirty look and, picking up my receipt-book, followed him outside.
He was leaning against the wall, whistling to himself, the same old Pat, confident to the point of getting on my nerves, a cigare
tte dangling from his lips, another behind his ear.
He’d long since ceased to work for Minnie’s Ma at the Steam Packet. The pittance he received as a barman had soon become too small for his maturing tastes and even the attraction of Minnie hadn’t held him there for long.
He’d tried his hand at various jobs – a bookie’s runner, a pawnbroker’s clerk; even, it was rumoured, a little bit of fraud. Finally, with his winnings from a day at the races, he’d scraped up enough to buy himself a small lorry and had gone into business as a carter at the station and was doing well at it. In addition, he helped his Ma at the lodging-house, his part of the business being to make sure that the old rag-tags who inhabited the place paid their rent on the dot or went out into the street.
Despite all this, though, his tastes were such that he was always short of cash and not above borrowing five bob from me when I had it, a loan that had something of a threat in it for me, being younger and smaller.
As I went out into the sunshine of the court, I treated him to a scowl.
‘Got my money yet?’ I asked.
‘What money?’ Pat pushed his cap to the back of his head and stared. ‘I got no money of yourn.’
‘What about that half-crown I gave you to put on a horse for me. It won.’
‘You never gave me no ’alf-dollar,’ Pat said nonchalantly. ‘Come on, now, kiddo, let’s get this paper off. I got another job at the gasworks in a bit.’
‘I gave you half a crown,’ I said, mad as a bluebottle in a window. ‘I wish I hadn’t now, and I wouldn’t have if you hadn’t been at me for half an hour saying it was a cert.’
‘You’re imagining things. Come on. ’Urry up. Think I’ve time to argue with a kid?’
