by Mark Dunn
“I’ll fetch you a bromide, love,” said Vivien.
After Vivien Colthurst dashed off, Ruth sat down next to Maggie, who was staring with an empty gaze. “She said she hated me,” said Maggie.
“Who?”
“Molly. I remember her exact words: ‘I hate you so much right now, Maggie, I can’t even see straight.’”
“She didn’t mean it. I know she didn’t.”
“What if something happens to her in Worcester and I don’t get to tell her how sorry I am for provoking her?”
Ruth touched Maggie comfortingly. “Nothing will happen to her. She’ll come back and you two will patch this thing up in no time. Good God, Maggie, you’ve had tizzes with every one of us at one time or another. They always blow over.”
Maggie nodded and tried to smile. “I don’t enjoy being a bitch.”
“Of course you don’t, pussy. Of course you don’t.”
Mr. Matthews wasted no time in sacking all three men. He told them he had been fully informed about what they had been up to and he had no doubt that all this business had contributed to the ghastly deaths of the other two young men who’d been in his employ. “I don’t want to see the bloody lot of you ever again. I thought you was all good lads. I find out instead that you’re a bunch of sodding buggery reprobates who stick your bleeding pecker spanners in the works of everything you do. And I never held with your cack-handed way of delivering my coal neither—skimming and overcharging and keeping the difference for yourselves. Don’t look at me that way. I’ve been on to you blighters for some time. I’ve been against this war since both my boys was killed, but I’d like to say something you’ll never hear me say to another soul: Go and bloody enlist. Now get out of my sight.”
Holborne and Castle and Katz got out of Matthews’ sight. First they went to Funland, which wasn’t far from Matthews’ warehouse, where they played the noisy pin-tables and a couple of games of Radio Billiards. Hardly a word was exchanged in the hour they were there, as if each needed some private time to recover from the shock of what had just happened. Even after Holborne lost half a bob trying to scoop up a cigarette case he fancied with the electric crane, and gave up, muttering to himself that the game was rigged, not a word was said in either agreement or commiseration.
However, they more than made up for their reticence once they reached the Fatted Pig.
Though its publican, Mr. Andrews, looked at them suspiciously when they showed up at a time when they should have been busy making deliveries for Matthews, he served them beer nonetheless and took their money.
“I wager it was Pardlow,” said Will. “He told Ruth and then she told Matthews.”
“Blooming pity we can’t ask him,” said Tom. “The poofter’s gone and made that just a little difficult.”
“Or it could have been Ruth it came from,” suggested Will. “She told somebody else and they told Matthews.”
“All I know is that someone’s going to pay,” grumbled Tom.
“Cor!” cried Jerry Castle, tipping backward on two legs of his chair. “Will you give a listen to yourselves? Cain and Pat are dead—dead. We just had our jobs terminated by that human tin of stinking pilchards, who only hired us in the first place because we were happy to sit the war out on our arses—this whole escapade one bloody disaster—and then the two of you still refusing to surrender the football and exeunt the bloody field. I’m exeunting the field, lads. I’m joining the army and kill me some sons-of-Huns. But first I’m going to the one I wronged and set things to rights, so I don’t have that on my conscience.”
“You have a conscience, Castle?” laughed Katz. “What’d you do? Dig one out of the shilling bin at Woolworths?”
“You’re right. I’ve got no conscience. I never had a conscience. My kind is expendable, gentlemen. But here’s the difference between me and the two of you: I know I’m a worthless placeholder in this world gone crackers. The two of you—you’re both too daft or just too full-blooming deranged to see it in yourselves.”
Will made as if to push Jerry backward, toppling him to the floor, but Jerry quickly righted himself. “So they win,” said Will with a sardonic smile.
“The girls? Okay, they win. Ask me if I care a rap one way or another.”
“Pat is dead,” pressed Tom. “And that girl’s father killed him.”
“I’m not like Cain,” said Jerry. “I never fancied putting a wig on the lad and taking him for a twirl round the dance floor at the Palais. In fact, if you want the truth, I always found Pat to be a bloody nuisance and Cain a sexual miscreant, and I know you won’t deny it, Holborne, because you once saw the man in action. Why else did he always turn pansy yellow every time you went at him? I don’t care to avenge anyone’s death. I just want to break up this miserable little society of ours and let each of us go our bloody way.”
Jerry got up.
“Where are you going?” asked Katz.
“If I’m lucky, someplace I can avoid the two of you whilst waiting to go wynken and blynken with the eternal poppies.”
Jerry drifted out of the pub.
Will looked at Tom and Tom looked at Will with reflective gazes that revealed nothing. Then Will turned to the bar. His eyes clapped on the large ceramic pig sitting on the top shelf and looking very much like an oversized piggy bank. The pig’s expression matched that of the pig on the sign which swung over the door to the tavern—self-pleased, blissfully unaware that he might at a moment’s notice be converted into a tasty loin of pork or piping hot pork pie.
“She treated us like pigs,” said Will to himself, though his statement could not help being audited by his increasingly besotted and equally belligerent companion.
“Who?”
“Who what?”
“Who treated us like pigs?” asked Katz. “I thought they all did.”
“Ruth. The one who wouldn’t have anything to do with us. I remember that sour look she gave me when Carrie and me were crooning like cats at the Palais.”
Katz laughed. “We all looked at you like you were dotty. You were making a bleeding disturbance.”
“She gave you that look too, Tom. She gave it to all of us. Like she was some bloody toff—better than the whole lot of us.”
Katz took a pull on his beer. “Maybe she is.”
“Bollocks.”
Will sank deeper and deeper into vengeful thoughts—thoughts of how he might right things in a very different way than that sought by his now foolishly forgiving former friend Jerry Castle.
Night and darkness came quickly. Maggie had been home for several hours and didn’t quite know what to do with herself. She’d yet to hear anything from her mother, but held to a shred of hope that some valuable piece of information might somehow find its way to her—perhaps from a go-between of some sort. With the mandatory blackout now drawing down upon both Maggie and all her fellow Londoners, she thought she might walk over to the Balham Underground station.
Maggie had got quite good at negotiating the streets in the darkness. Even though she generally took along her torch, it having been recently fitted with both new Number Eight batteries and a fresh globe, she rarely used it. Perhaps it was the carrots her mother, with typical wartime economy, had put into nearly every soup and casserole she served, or the fresh bilberries Maggie loved (berries which were keen for the eyesight and thought to give R.A.F. pilots the upper hand over their German adversaries).
Maggie had thought during her trip back into the city with Ruth that a very good place for a fugitive and his “gun moll”—as the Americans so colourfully put it (or at least those Americans who worked on the Warner Brothers gangster pictures)—to go “underground” was actually to go underground—that is, to lose themselves among the throngs of Londoners who queued up each night to shelter themselves from bombing raids by descending like Lewis Carroll’s Alice into the city’s deepest rabbit holes. Maggie could easily fancy her mother and the man who would have become her father, should things have transpired differently,
spending long evenings in the Balham tube—and perhaps a good part of their days Underground, as well.
Maggie had nearly convinced herself to take a look when there came a knock at the door. She hesitated. She peeled up one corner of the blackout paper that covered the front window. Through the exposed glass she got a sideways view of the front step…and the man standing upon it. It was Jerry Castle, the person in all the kingdom she least desired to see again.
“I’ve come to apologise,” said Jerry to the door.
“I’m over here at the window,” Maggie shouted through the glass, her lips all but pressed against the spot where she’d turned up the gummy paper. “Apologise to me over here at the window and then pop off.”
Jerry wheeled round to address the windowpane. “I’m sorry I behaved so abominably. I am an abominable person and deserve to be removed from your life forever. I am without any hope of redemption. Accept this apology and I’ll be on my way.”
“Apology accepted. Now go.”
“I’m going to enlist.”
“You’re making a list? What list?”
“No. To enlist. In the army.”
“Oh. Well. Take care of yourself. Cheers.”
“I will. Cheers.”
Jerry started down the flag walk just as the air raid siren began to blare. He halted and looked up into the sky. Overhead, the silver-grey barrage balloons drooped in limp silhouette, the conical searchlights that would soon animate them not yet switched to full power.
Maggie looked at him for a moment through the spot where she’d pulled the paper away and where the light from inside seemed, she thought, to be escaping with such brilliance as to target her house for a made-to-order bomb drop from an approaching Heinkel or Messerschmitt.
Then she went to the door. Reluctantly, she opened it. “Come inside. We’ll go round back and you can wait out the raid in my Anderson.”
Jerry nodded and followed Maggie through the empty house and out to the backyard. “Where’s your mother?”
Maggie spoke to Jerry over her shoulder. “It’s a sad but interesting story. You know part of it already. We’ll have plenty of time for me to tell you the rest once we put ourselves beneath the corrugated.”
This particular air raid lasted over an hour. With the bombs falling frightfully close and the two feeling that copping it right then and there was a palpable possibility, Jerry took Maggie in his arms and held her closely and protectively. Maggie didn’t resist. She had, like Jerry, become a helpless victim to the peril of their circumstances. She was frightened. She was also exhilarated.
Soon Jerry was kissing Maggie and undressing her with ravenous paws. Maggie forgave him for every hateful, stupid, boorish thing he’d said, and even forgave his participation in “the game,” for which he blamed Tom Katz, who “had a way of forcing people to do things that were against their generally good natures.” And whereas Pat and Molly had been like two adolescents, exploring one another with tender and curious innocence; and whereas Will and Carrie had delighted at the Hammersmith Palais in all the possibilities inherent in “that which could very well be”; and whereas Ruth and Cain had melded minds and joined their two hearts to the extent that their settled penchants permitted them; and whereas Jane had submitted to a seduction that was less seduction and more a brutal conquest of body, mind, and spirit; Maggie and Jerry found in their present situation the opportunity for union of a different species, enhanced by an aphrodisiac of immense potency. They reeled over the possibility that the climax of their spirited animalistic coupling might be death itself in the form of either an advertent or inadvertent gift from Adolf Hitler and Hermann Goering.
It did not end thusly but it did end with feelings of receding rapture that Maggie would have been hard-pressed to describe in words.
No. Maggie hadn’t danced a dervish with the devil, but there was still the distinct smell of cordite and sulphur in the air.
And it made her wonder…
Chapter Twenty
Bellevenue, Mississippi, February 1997
“Where are my panties?”
“Is that them hanging on that rake?”
“That isn’t a rake. It’s a yard broom.”
Jerry was sitting on an upturned wheelbarrow. He was enjoying the scene of a totally naked Maggie Barton searching the tool shed for all the clothes she had flung off before having impromptu, devil-may-care sex with him. “I’m kind of out of my, um, element,” said Jerry teasingly. “I’ve never had sex in a tool shed before.”
“Well, neither have I. In fact, I’ve never had sex anywhere before. That is, if you don’t count the times my sick bastard incestor father put his hands inside my underwear.” Maggie stepped into her panties. “How can you just sit there naked and freezing your ass off?”
“I’m not cold. I think you really got my blood to flowing.”
“Yes. I can see one spot where it’s still flowing.”
Jerry looked down. “Oh yeah.” Maggie handed Jerry his undershirt. “Thanks. Is that why your mom kicked your dad out?”
“That and the fact that he clipped his toenails in front of the television and ate whole boxes of Cheetos while sitting on the toilet. Would you please get dressed so we can go inside and get warmed up? Are these your underpants?”
“Nope. Not mine.”
“What?”
“I’m kidding. You seem to have a healthy attitude for somebody whose father did that to her.”
“Oh, you think so?” Maggie pulled her blouse over her head. “I was a virgin until this very afternoon. That’s right, Mr. Castle. I lost my virginity in that thunderstorm. And the other half of my dirty little secret is that I’d been thinking about going the rest of my life without sex until you had to go and look so sexy in the rain.”
“You looked pretty sexy yourself. You looked like you were in a wet T-shirt contest.” Jerry jumped up and started to get dressed.
“I knew you weren’t really an asshole,” teased Maggie.
Jerry smiled. “Oh I’m an asshole, all right. But every now and then I like to take a little vacation.”
“I’m glad you took your little vacation with me. I’m not ashamed of what we did. I’ve been very tense lately and very depressed. I really needed this.” Maggie, fully dressed now, busied herself by folding up the tarpaulin she’d thrown down on the shed floor. “I know I’m acting like my father didn’t mess me up big time. He actually did. I was really afraid of boys all through junior high and high school. And that just carried over into adulthood. The whole idea of sex scared me to death. I went through a long period of time worrying that if I let a guy do it with me, he might accidentally pee inside of me.”
“I’m not sure that’s possible.”
“I didn’t know that. I didn’t know anything, except that sometimes fathers come into their little girls’ rooms and do things you’re not supposed to tell anybody about.” Maggie chuckled to herself. “Of course, I wasn’t one of those little girls who did what they’re supposed to do. I went straight to my mother and told her everything. Maybe this is why I put up with all her weirdness. She believed me—just when I really needed her to. She sent him packing that very night. From what I understand, most mothers in situations like that would become like the ‘Queen of Denial.’”
“I don’t know why we put on these wet clothes. We should have just run into the house naked and then thrown everything in the dryer.”
Maggie shook her head. “Not a good idea to go streaking across the backyard in the middle of the day. I have nosy neighbors, and you never know when somebody might be looking over the fence. Didn’t you put your nosy nose over that fence looking for me about an hour ago?”
Jerry nodded. “Let’s go inside and get naked again and put all these clothes in the dryer.”
“I like it when you aren’t acting like a dick. Can you keep on not acting like a dick for a little while longer?”
“Okay.”
Maggie and Jerry went inside through the back
door off the patio. The second they opened the door, they heard voices. Turning the corner from the mud/laundry room into the kitchen, they saw Clara Barton and Lucille Mobry sitting at the kitchen table. The room was filled with the smell of freshly brewed coffee.
“There you are!” Clara cried.
“Don’t hug me. I’m all wet.”
“It looks like the two of you got caught in that thunderstorm,” said Lucille. “I nearly did, but luckily your mother had come home and she gave me shelter. Isn’t this nice, Maggie? Your mother’s come home.”
“Are you okay, Mama?”
“I’m fine, honey.”
“Oh, this is Jerry. He works at the casino. Well, he worked at the casino; they fired him today.”
“Yes,” said Clara, going over to the coffeemaker. “Lucille was telling me all about it.”
“Who told you?” asked Jerry of Lucille.
“Ruth.” Lucille gave Jerry a strange look.
“You’re really dripping, honey,” said Clara, looking her daughter up and down. “Go upstairs and put on some warm, dry clothes. Jerry, follow Maggie up and grab some of my husband’s old clothes to wear while we dry yours. I’m sorry you lost your job, but I’m sure you’ll find another one you’ll like even better.”
Maggie started from the room and then stopped. “Mama, did you find Michael?”
“I found him. I can’t tell anybody where he is and that includes you, but I found him. He’s thinking about giving himself up, but he wants me to call the assistant district attorney’s office first and find out what kind of charges he’s looking at.”
“Well, the charge would be murder, wouldn’t it, Mama?”
“But the question is if he could plea out for manslaughter.”
“It wasn’t an accident, Mama.”
“But he wasn’t in his right mind, honey, and I know in my heart that he didn’t set out to pitch that poor boy out the window.”
