His heart felt that it would burst with his misery. I’m not all that soft, he repeated under his breath. I’m not all that soft. It was the vilest word the gang knew: soft. There’s no one. There’s just no one.
His banishment from the gang – the seven with whom he had grown up and played in these streets – pressed upon him in an unbearable load. He could have fallen to the broken pavement with the weight of it.
Veeley Street, Cavell Street, Manson Street, Arkell Street, Arley Street – all of them gone. And his mum and stepfather moved off to the council flat, and not wanting him there unless he would go back to the factory and bring in some money.
Shitting place, he muttered. Putting bits of metal on jars moving along a bloody conveyor belt. Let them try it, eight hours a day, five days a week. Let them try.
Wish I could die, he whispered. Wish I could die.
He heard the wheels of a car crumching on the road behind him, and turned quickly. They beat you up for nothing, sometimes. He’d have no chance. They might have nicked a car and followed him. They just might . . .
But it was a bloke in a white raincoat, leaning out of the window and smiling.
‘Derek Skuse?’
‘What’s it got to do with you?’
Derek spoke truculently, as they always did in the gang, but, in his unbearable loneliness, he was not sorry to speak to someone.
‘You’ll see,’ the man said.
Derek had hardly been spoken to, since his father’s death three years ago, in a tone that was not impersonal, hectoring, facetious or whining. But there was a note in this voice that he remembered from Archway Secondary Modern. The young master had stayed only a term, but Derek still remembered his voice, without knowing that what it carried was loving authority.
‘What’s all this about?’ the boy asked, alarmed, standing in the drifting rain with his long wet hair blowing back from his narrow face. ‘I ain’t done nothing. You the fuzz?’
‘No. Please get in, Derek.’
‘I’m not queer, neither. We had a groupie in our . . . mob, see, and I had her. So nothing doing.’
‘I’m a friend. Get in.’
‘S’pose you think I’m mental, on me own in a place like this.’ Derek did not move.
‘No I don’t. You’re wretched, and so you came to a place that seems wretched too.’
‘Well yer just wrong, see, ’cos I used to live here. When my dad was alive.’ He had moved nearer to the car without knowing that he had. ‘That’s an old bus,’ he added, moved, even in his misery, by the passionate obsession with cars felt by all his gang. ‘’Bout 1937, I’d say.’
‘Thirty-eight. Get in, won’t you?’
‘Where we goin’, then? You can give me a lift, if you like. I . . . I got a home.’
‘I’m glad to hear it, son.’ The voice was quiet, yet seemed to be drawing him towards it.
‘I ain’t . . . I meant, I ain’t like some . . . that lot that always lives reely rough. In them places.’ He jerked his head towards the louring black shape of a ruined house behind the barrier. ‘I ain’t soft, neither. I been living in one of them places . . . only yesterday they come and put up the barriers, and turned us out.’
‘I know,’ the man said. ‘And I want you to come and spend Christmas with us.’
‘Spend Christmas with yer . . . Christ!’
‘Exactly,’ said the man amiably. ‘Christ. I live with some friends in a small town not far from the east coast. Do come, Derek. Just for Christmas.’
Derek was tired. He had been living rough for three days. This bloke might be a pusher, but . . .
‘And I don’t push drugs. Get in,’ said the irresistible voice.
‘But yer are a bleeding mind-reader!’ Derek was inside the car, in some way, before he knew it, and it was moving away.
He leant back with a feeling of comfort, and noticed a slight, fresh scent. Must have been a bird in here recent, he thought, and was reassured. Bloke wasn’t queer, then. That was what he would do, if he had a car – pick up birds.
‘Hungry?’ the man asked, as the car moved away from the last of the barriers into a sober road with houses and trees.
‘Christ, I am.’
‘True . . . Christ you are. I haven’t any wine or bread, but Christ will now, with my help, give you some coffee and sausage rolls. On the seat at the back.’
Moving at the unalarming pace of a 1938 model, the car had now left behind the frightening wilderness and was climbing a steep hill between walls over which looked big, leafless trees. The long hill was well lit, and there were other cars going homeward, climbing with them. Talks funny, Derek thought tiredly.
The sausage rolls were hot, so was the coffee. He ate and drank in silence.
‘Yer not ’aving nothing?’ he asked presently; he had almost forgotten the driver. It was a long time since he had tried not to drop crumbs on a carpeted floor because his mother hit him if he did, and made him get out the Hoover and take them up, but the almost-forgotten habit lingered.
‘No thanks. I’ve eaten.’
‘I asked ’cos –’ he held up the Thermos with the first faint beginning of a smile. ‘There ain’t much left.’
‘It’s all right. I got it especially for you.’
Oxfam or sunnick, thought Derek. Goes round looking for delinquents. Start on me presently – oh well, make the most of it. Warm, anyway. . . . the thought faded.
‘Can’t she go any faster?’ he asked presently, because the dimness in the car and the changing, passing, flashing white and red lights on the main road over which they were travelling, and the smooth movement, were making him sleepy, and if he fell asleep this bloke might dump him somewhere. Then it occurred to him, suddenly, that he might be a murderer.
‘No . . . that is, no I’m not,’ said the man. ‘A murderer.’
Derek sat up, wide awake and frightened.
‘But you are a bleeding mind-reader, like I said . . . ’ere . . . let me out.’
He struggled away from the white raincoat, staring in fear at the profile under the soft, old-fashioned hat. The man turned his head and smiled.
‘It was a perfectly natural thought. We’re getting out towards the lonelier roads. I would have thought so, too, in your place . . . Yes, she can go faster, but if I let her out as fast as she can go, you . . . might be frightened.’
‘Me frightened! I done ninety, once, in a mate’s bus.’
‘That must remain your limit while you’re with me, I’m afraid . . . do you play football?’
‘Used to, a bit, when my . . . my dad took me to see Arsenal, once. Arsenal was our . . . Arsenal’s tops.’
He stared aside, at the awfulness of the M1, along which they were now travelling; then said slowly: ‘It’s . . . like them streets . . . what they pulled down. You know, where you picked me up. This road gives you the same kind of feeling.’
‘Hallelujah!’ exclaimed the man loudly, turning on him a broad smile.
‘You know what –’ Derek said timidly. ‘I don’t mean it nasty-like, but are you a bit . . . you know . . . mental? A lot of blokes are, there’s no disgrace. I don’t mean you’d do a kid or anything, ’course. Harmless. Just not quite all there? I don’t mean . . .’
‘All of me is all here – unfortunately. It’s all right. I only seem mental because I don’t pretend. When I’m glad, I say “hallelujahs” . . . Now we’re going to leave this horrifying road and go somewhere real.’
The car turned aside, down a secondary road, where a few houses stood behind shadowy fences and large trees. Overhead there was starlight. London was thirty miles behind, and the headlights shone on emerald grass beside bare hedges, while ahead lay a harmless, mysterious darkness. Sometimes ivy gleamed green and dark amid silvery thorn trees.
‘Lonely,’ Derek half whispered, looking aside into the briefly lit beauty fleeting past.
‘But not lonely like the place I found you in,’ said the man, and Derek choked. ‘No . . .’ and he
began to weep – pouring out misery-laden words, stammering, protesting, writhing, turning on his companion in fury.
The man heard him in silence. Not once did he attempt interruption. The car was deep in the country now: not a house, not a light appeared on the dim fields. The headlights shone on withered, white grasses, ghostly and asleep.
Once the driver leant across the sobbing child to open a window, and the smell of damp earth floated in. There was no sound but the throb of the old engine, and Derek’s crying. When the man slowed down a second time, it was to feel in his pocket and bring out a folded white square, with the same ferny scent that was floating in the car. He put it into Derek’s hand, and presently Derek slowly wiped his eyes.
*
When Wilfred opened the door for the fifth time on Christmas Eve to inspect the weather, he murmured ‘Right – for once,’ meaning the BBC. It was snowing.
Crystals drifted through the dark air and there was a thin white carpet covering the path. He looked along the road, whose leafless laburnums and maples were already whitened. A white Christmas. She had said she would be home about seven; he had decided not to meet the train in case they missed each other.
He had hardly sat down before the television again when the front door bell rang.
Oh, it was a moment. He opened the door to see her longed-for, smiling face; it was framed in a hood of dark fur. She was thinner . . .
‘Hullo, Dad . . .’
He could not speak, and she drew him towards her and gave him a calm hug and a kiss.
But who was that, standing behind her in the shadows? Someone else . . . a fuzz of pale hair, a coat to the ankles . . . boy or girl? Oh, had she got herself a boy, looking like that? But she was turning to the bizarre figure, keeping a hand on his arm.
‘This is my friend, Sylvie Carano. You know. She was going to stay at Mrs Cadman’s alone over Christmas and get drunk, so I brought her along. Sylvie, this is my dad.’
Mary’s laugh was a little nervous.
‘Hullo,’ came out in a mumble from behind the green hair, and the head moved. How her eyes shone! Was she mental? Wilfred wondered.
‘Hullo, Sylvie. Glad to see you. Any friend of Mary’s . . .’ he said, wondering what Mr Taverner and his ladies would think of this? ‘Come in . . . come in, both of you. Here, let me have that,’ and he picked up an airliner bag, through whose broken zipper some grubby pink frills showed.
In the warm, bright living room there was silence while Mary took off her hood and shook back her hair; its glossy ends were wet with melting snow. She looked round the room, then at her father and he just moved his head. The word mother flew silently between them.
‘Well . . .’ Mary said quickly, ‘Sylvie and I’ll go up and get her room ready and then I’ll cook us some supper – we’re starving . . . come on, Syl.’
‘Just a minute, love – we aren’t staying here over Christmas,’ her father broke in. ‘We’re going to some friends of . . . of mine . . . nice people. You’ll like them,’ he added, firmly.
‘Who are they, then?’ Mary asked, with a little curiosity. The Davises had few friends outside the small circle made up of stout, talkative, sensible, salt-of-the-earth-and-down-to-it women whom Pat had known for years. ‘Now, what have you been up to while I’ve been away?’ She smiled at him and his heart glowed with love.
‘Bet you wish I’d never come,’ Sylvie said suddenly, ‘goin’ to friends.’ Her voice was so low and hoarse that he could hardly make out the words.
‘Now, Syl, don’t start,’ said Mary authoritatively. ‘Dad wouldn’t know people who weren’t nice and friendly, and we’re going to enjoy ourselves. Cheer up, or I’ll ruffle your wig.’ She made a gesture at the damp mass, and Sylvie dodged, while a grin showed on her face.
‘Let’s all have a sherry,’ Wilfred suggested. ‘I bought a couple of bottles to take along with us as our contribution . . . to . . . to the feast, as you might say.’ He turned to the sideboard.
‘Syl, sit down,’ commanded Mary, and Sylvie slowly subsided into one of the armchairs and began to undo her coat, revealing as odd a collection of garments as Wilfred had ever seen thrown upon a human body.
‘I shan’t get drunk,’ she said suddenly, not looking at anyone. ‘Might of, if I’d stayed at that old b–– cat’s, but not ’ere.’
‘We’ll all get a bit drunk,’ said Wilfred playfully, pouring out.
‘That was a joke, what Mary said,’ said Sylvie.
‘I know – I’ve had some of Mary’s jokes.’ (Missed them, too. God, how I’ve missed them.) ‘But I hope we’ll all be a bit cheerful by the time Mr Taverner calls for us.’
He held out a glass, the correct kind of glass to drink sherry from and part of Pat’s pride in her home. ‘Merry Christmas, Sylvie.’
‘Here’s . . . mud in y’eye,’ she muttered.
They drank. Wilfred was just wondering if he could get a word with Mary about doing something to modify Sylvie’s appearance before they arrived at the Yellow House, when slow steps were heard descending the stairs, and Mrs Wheeby appeared, muffled in six or seven wool scarves and cardigans, and carrying the equally muffled cage of Dicky.
‘I cannot think how it came to escape my memory,’ she began. ‘It may have been the shock, a pleasant one, Mr Davis, of being invited away for Christmas; but quite suddenly, only an hour ago it was, when I thought – Why, there’s Mary! Just the same, only thinner. How are you? and how is business? – Who’s this?’
Mrs Wheeby’s eye, suddenly pebble-like, became fixed upon Sylvie.
‘This is my friend, Sylvie Carano,’ Mary put in smoothly. ‘Mrs Wheeby lives in our house, Sylvie.’
‘’Ullo.’ Sylvie waved her glass.
‘Won’t you join us, Mrs Wheeby? Just a small one for the road?’ asked Wilfred.
‘Thank you, in a moment. But first about Dicky. I can’t of course leave him here alone for three days, nor make my way across town to feed him’ (pause, gasp). ‘And it is said snow is coming, and sure enough here it is. They were right. (I think they often are, and people don’t do them justice. I’m sure I shouldn’t like the job of saying what the weather will be tomorrow afternoon.) Nor could I trouble anyone to get out their car just to feed and water a canary. No, it wouldn’t be right’ (gasp). ‘So I got him ready, and here he is, and I only hope our friends won’t mind. You know he’s well trained. Now you,’ turning to Sylvie, ‘remind me very much, Sylvia, of my cousin Alice’s eldest girl, Georgina. She had your type of features and wore her hair all over her face to hide them. I’m sure I don’t know why, because she looked much nicer when you could see her face. If you like,’ concluded Mrs Wheeby, accepting a glass from Wilfred’s now slightly trembling hand, ‘I’ll show you a prettier way to do yours.’
Sylvie opened her mouth, but at that moment Wilfred thankfully heard the front door bell.
‘She’s here!’ he said conspiratorially as he opened the door to Mr Taverner, tall and white against the drifting snow. ‘Mary.’
Mr Taverner smiled, and Wilfred called: ‘Ladies! Your escort has arrived.’
Out they came in a procession, led by Mrs Wheeby bearing the silent Dicky, Mary looking curiously at her father’s new friend, and Sylvie. Swaggering was the word for Sylvie’s gait.
Wilfred hastily made introductions, remembering through his agitation to present the man to the ladies and not the other way round. (Pat would have been pleased with him. She had known what was correct on such occasions, though shyness had usually made her sing out, laughing: ‘So-and-so, meet such-and-such!’)
Mrs Wheeby’s steamroller advanced immediately. ‘Well, what a night, isn’t it, Mr Taverner? Quite like the song. Here is Dicky, my canary,’ waggling the cage slightly. ‘I hope you won’t mind my bringing him along . . .’ The account of her hesitations, fears and assumptions continued as she moved out onto the snowy path with Mr Taverner’s hand under her elbow.
Wilfred lingered, to put out lights and lock up.
> Lamorna’s gadgets were left in darkness, motionless and therefore even more uninteresting than usual. Icy crystals floated against his face as he hurried down the path, and in the air was the unmistakable, secret hush that whispers snow. He felt extraordinarily happy and, as always when he was happy, was silent.
Mrs Wheeby had wedged herself next to Mr Taverner, remarking that she had heard it said one was less inclined to be so dreadfully sick if one sat next the driver, having first handed Dicky over to Sylvie. (‘There you are, Sylvia. Now mind he doesn’t shake about.’) Mary and Sylvie were squashed next to Wilfred in the back seat, giggling.
‘All right behind there?’ Mr Taverner asked.
‘Dicky must be a blinking eagle, I sh’d think,’ snapped Sylvie, on whose knees the cage rested. ‘Weighs about a ton,’ and Mr Taverner laughed.
‘I’m glad someone thinks it’s funny,’ Sylvie said. ‘Me knees is nearly in half.’
‘We’ll soon be there, I expect, Sylvia. A little thing like that, all feathers and tiny bones, can’t be all that heavy. Let’s hope we don’t have a skid. But I expect Mr Taverner is an experienced driver, aren’t you?’
‘You might say that, Mrs Wheeby. Yes.’
11
Thinking
Wilfred was oddly relieved to see that a wreath of holly decked with red ribbon hung from the Yellow House’s knocker; and in one window a Christmas tree gleamed with globes of pink, blue and silver. Candles burned motionless along its branches. Just like everybody else’s house, really.
‘Well, what a pleasure! Candles instead of electric lights!’ (wheeze, pause). ‘I know some people say it’s dangerous, but not if people have their wits about them.’
Mrs Wheeby was slowly preparing to emerge.
‘No danger,’ smiled Mr Taverner, holding open the car door. ‘Our wits are all about us.’
‘Dead quiet,’ muttered Sylvie, to no one in particular, and Mary silently agreed: she would have welcomed more sound and light.
The Yellow Houses Page 12