by Barrie Shore
Jack and Mr Baines didn’t exactly like each other but they were careful to treat each other with respect. They were, after all, professionally associated; came across each other from time to time at literary functions of one sort and another, celebrations of the work of the Great Man, for example, or, less prestigiously, meetings of the Castlebridge Historical Society.
When Eva announced that she was going to find a job (defiantly, was it?) it was he who’d suggested the library, had even introduced her to Mr Baines, been pleased when he had her taken on as a trainee. Surprised as well, supposing (if he supposed anything at all, such a mire of depression and guilt he was in), that Mr Baines had overlooked her lack of experience in order to do a colleague a favour.
She had tried to warn him. Recounted stories about the Chief Librarian’s unwelcome abuse, how he pursued her between the shelves, tried to catch her in corners, pinched her bottom, brushed his shoulder against her breast. But she’d always laughed when she told him, as if Mr Baines and his antics were nothing more than a music hall joke in poor taste. And he had chosen to believe her, had chosen not to see in Eva what Mr Baines saw at once: a despair that was as great as his own.
Thursday, 8th December, 1960
A woodlouse crawling over the carpet. Chookie pigs, old Moxie used to call them.
A woman crying.
A baby kicking.
A man on his knees in a tangle of wool.
And the Queen of the Night singing, Hell’s Vengeance Boils in My Heart.
‘I’m sorry, I meant to break it a bit more gently.’
‘That was kind.’
‘I’ll go, if you like.’
Yes, go. Go now. Go to your lover. When I look round, don’t be there.
‘You can have a divorce.’
A what? She was speaking a foreign language that he didn’t understand. The woodlouse was struggling. He picked it up, watched it curl into a ball in the palm of his hand. ‘Who was it?’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘Tell me. I’ll kill him.’
‘Oh, Jack, dearest Jack, you could never kill in a passion.’
She was wrong. He closed his fist, squeezing it tight.
‘You kill very slowly and don’t even notice what you’ve done.’
She was right. He got up from his knees and went to the window, opened his fist and released the woodlouse, watched it uncurl on the sill and march on its oblivious way.
The Queen of the Night soared out to the empty street and, as she reached her glorious top F, it seemed that she was laughing at him.
Sunday, 3rd December, 2006
T. Bear has abandoned his fruitless search for sustenance and resigned himself to a life of abstinence and contemplation. To this end, he has fallen from the till onto the chessboard, where he lies nose down as if through close examination of its symmetrical squares he might find the ultimate answer to the meaning of life.
Jack leans on the counter thinking of nothing at all except for the bed that awaits him upstairs. He starts to gather the scattered chessmen but he’s too tired even for this small task, so he tucks T. Bear into his pocket, shuffles off to the door where he stops and turns and looks about, listening to the familiar creaks and sighs. No ghosts any more, no shadows from the past, only books on shelves waiting for Monday.
‘I’ve a good mind to set fire to the whole bang shoot. That would give Margaret something to talk about.’
He switches the light off and shuts the door, shuffles on to the bottom of the stairs, where he stops again, looking up at the mountain he has to climb, and the clock at the top that starts to strike, so slowly now, so tired, the clock that he mustn’t forget to wind. And in a final act of surrender, he summons the lift.
EVA
I know the Man now. I know who he is. He’s in a stand by my side of my bed, by my sidebed, beside my side of me, with a bear in his pock that has moth and the stuffing galoose, and the lines on his face are enumerous since the morning time when I was in a count of them last.
He says a hello but I don’t answer him back because he’s in a frown of battle with the cot, but it slips down in an easy which puts him into a smile and a hell’s bellery, and he says, ‘I say, budge over, old chap, there isn’t much room.’
So I do. And we sit in a squash and a cosy together but then he reaches his beloveable book from his pock and gives it a stroke or three which is a thing that spoils the squash and puts me into a cross. But he’s in a read of my mind and he says to me…
‘Don’t worry, old chap, I’m not going to read to you.’
But he does. First, he’s in a read of his name, Jack. Jack Carter. I knew all of along.
‘“To Jack Carter,”’ he says.
And then there’s a wish.
‘“With every good wish,”’ he says.
And a from.
‘“With every good wish from…”’
But he doesn’t say any more because he has a stuck in his throat and he does a rip to the page instead, a triumphery rip, and a tear into skitters and scatters that make a land on my lap like a falling of snow.
‘Good,’ he says. ‘That’s better,’ he says.
And I see a shine in his eye that drip drops onto his cheek, so I catch the shine with my thumb, the one with the denticle, and I lick it into my heart. And I say him the word I misforgot to tell him before. ‘Finesse.’ That’s what I say. ‘I finesse you.’
And he says, ‘What?’ in a droop of his eyes and a yawning.
And then I say, ‘Shlump,’ I say.
‘Mmm, yes, shlump to you too.’
‘No,’ I shay in a shout, ‘Bodgey Shlump.’
‘Oh, I see what you mean. Yes, clump. Badger’s Clump.’
So then I give him my smile that he likes, the one that made him into a love of me in a time when, that first time when, whenever it was, when we thought… what was it we thought? On a day in a life that wasn’t much of a matter and the long and the drowse that lay in between. And I wish, how I wish my mouth would tell him the things that matter and the things that don’t. But I can’t. Because. Because my mind doesn’t do what I say any more. So I try some other thing else. I put a kiss from my lips to his ear to snuggle him, to smuggle him what the answer is.
But he says…
‘No, don’t tell me,’ he says, in his lying, beguilesome, annoyity way. ‘Badger’s Clump. I know what it is, I’ll remember in a minute.’
But he doesn’t. Poor Jack, poor simplehead, he never knew what the answer was.
IN THE END
A teddy bear sits on the end of a bed, listening to the distant hum of a thousand bees. And he says to himself in that wise sort of way that only teddy bears know…
Well. Well, young men shall see visions and old men shall dream dreams and not a whit of it matters in the general scheme. And a shopkeeper’s life is not so bad. It may not be a glorious career, one that brings riches and public renown, but it’s a worthy profession, honourable in its way, that gives satisfaction, pleasure, learning, to a few and hurts no man. In fact, when one considers it all the way round, one way and another, a shopkeeper is a Very Great Man.
As the teddy bear slips into that blissful state between waking and sleep, he hears something different in the silence of the night that at first he can’t identify. And then does.
The clock has stopped.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Barrie Shore spent her early career as an actor in theatre, radio and television, and was a presenter for the BBC World Service for over twenty-five years. She came to writing in the 1980s, first for radio including an original drama on BBC Radio 4, and then for television, joining the script teams for Emmerdale (1986–89) and EastEnders (1989–2001). Her retelling of the Passion of Christ has been performed as street theatre by her local community every other Easter for over twenty years
. In 2010 she graduated with distinction from the MA course in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University.