The Baby and Fly Pie

by Melvin Burgess

  While we tidied up the shack after breakfast, Scousie talked non-stop, boasting about himself. He’d been living in camp towns all his life, on and off. In between he’d done everything.

  ‘I sailed round the world four times,’ he boasted. ‘Four times and I was never sick except when I was drunk. I wouldn’t do it again though. Boring, the sea is.’

  He’d been a seaman, an oilman, an engineer, a mechanic, but mostly he’d been a thief. He was very proud of it and he claimed he could steal anything. He didn’t explain how it was he’d spent so much time in jail, though. To Scousie, thieving was a respectable occupation. He complained that all the young men were joining the gangs and dealing drugs when they ought to be out stealing things for their families. He hated the gangs. He said they were thugs who couldn’t even shoplift if they didn’t have a gun in their hands.

  That reminded me what that man and the shopwoman had said to us earlier, and I asked if the Squads ever came to Santy.

  ‘We don’t get Squads out here,’ he said. ‘No one to pay ’em, is there?’

  After breakfast we walked to the local store where we’d bought the stuff for our tent. The shopkeeper smiled warily when he saw we were with Scousie. A small woman with long dark hair was buying food.

  ‘I wouldn’t buy anything off him, luv – he’s a thief,’ Scousie told her. The man laughed.

  ‘I know,’ the woman said. ‘But so am I!’ She and Scousie beamed and laughed. Then he leaned across the counter and threw the polythene at the shopkeeper.

  ‘We want our money back,’ he said.

  The shopman pulled disgustedly at the torn wet stuff. ‘These goods have been ruined, I can’t offer you a refund on that,’ he said. ‘Now if you’ll excuse me I have a customer to deal with …’

  ‘It’s no worse than the rest of your stock,’ said Scousie. The man ignored him and turned to the woman.

  ‘You’re a cheap thief!’ bellowed Scousie. He started waddling round the shop seizing hold of dresses and clothes hanging on the racks and flinging them about the place. ‘Stolen, all of it stolen. Rubbish too – you’re not even a good thief, you can only steal rubbish!’ he bellowed. We cringed at the back of the shop out of the way.

  The shopkeeper tried to ignore it, but when Scousie started beating the potatoes with his stick, he lost his temper and tried to throw him out. He might as well have tried to throw a cow out. Scousie just stood there watching him while the man strained and heaved.

  ‘We want our money back,’ he repeated. Then he walked off, dragging the shopman after him. He began knocking pots and pans and knives and forks off the shelf with his stick.

  By this time a crowd of people had gathered. They were all egging Scousie on. We hid as far away as we could because we were terrified the police would come. Funnily enough, even the shopkeeper seemed to enjoy it, because in between losing his temper he kept smiling and laughing, amused by the whole thing at his own expense.

  ‘All right, all right!’ he yelled at last. Scousie was lining his stick up at the crockery. ‘I’ll give you a refund – this once!’ The crowd roared with laughter and he beamed at them; you got the idea he’d said that ‘this once’ lots of times. ‘Thirty quid,’ he said, going to the till.

  ‘Sixty!’ said Scousie flatly. We’d paid forty-five.

  The man closed his eyes in despair. ‘Sixty – for that lot!’ he complained.

  ‘Look – he’s shocked by his own overcharging!’ shouted Scousie. He turned to us. ‘Sixty quid, weren’t it?’

  Sham and I nodded. Jane stuck her chin out, but in the end she nodded too because she didn’t dare go against Scousie after all that fuss.

  The shopman paid up the money to claps and cheers from the spectators. But Scousie didn’t stop; he was having too much of a good time.

  ‘Look at these apples!’ he yelled when we got outside. He began taking apples out of a box by the door and throwing them to the crowd. ‘Full of worms – rotten. You try ’em. There’s more juice in my beard! He stole these apples from Ozzie’s warehouse!’ he yelled at a startled passer-by. The man laughed uncertainly. The shopkeeper came out of the shop and began raving and arguing again, but in the end he admitted it was all true. He gave each of us an apple to eat.

  ‘Do me a favour, kids – shop somewhere else, will you?’ he groaned. He chucked the baby under the chin and went back inside for a little cotton all-in-one to wear. It was secondhand, but good.

  ‘Do you know him very well?’ asked Sham as we walked away.

  ‘Oh, aye, everybody knows me,’ said Scousie. ‘But anyway, he wouldn’t dare pull one over on me because my son Sammy’d soon sort him out if he tried anything funny.’

  Scousie wanted to go and sort out the shop where we’d bought the clothes for Jane, but we were frightened. So he showed us around Santy instead.

  I suppose we should have been dashing about making our phone call and everything. Mother Shelly would be on our trail, maybe even the Monroes. But we were having a good time and no one wanted to get back to business quite so soon. Besides, there was Scousie.

  Scousie boasted all the time, but a lot of it was true. ‘Everyone knows me,’ he said, waving his stick generously in the air. Everyone did. Everywhere we went people shouted hellos or came up to talk to him.

  ‘This is my son Hammy,’ he’d say. Or, ‘This is my daughter Jules who runs the café where we all go.’ I thought he must have hundreds of children, but after a bit he started introducing us as his sons and daughter and I realised he did that to everyone.

  He was a really nice man. He had a good life there. I wouldn’t want more than to have a life like that. He showed us where to buy things and introduced us to the shopkeepers so we’d get a good deal, as if we were going to stay for ever. He was going to help us build our own house – he was getting some of his ‘sons’ to work on it. He was even going to find jobs for us. When he discovered that I wanted to be a baker he took us straight round to the local bakery. It was only a little shack with bread and cheap cakes laid out on tables inside. The oven was built of bricks round the back and they had to light a fire inside it to get the heat up – not like Luke’s gas ovens. But it made good bread. Scousie was going to ask if I could help them there.

  I got excited about it for a while. I could have made a proper life there – if it wasn’t for the baby. She was having a great time, tucked away under Scousie’s great smelly beard and watching everything with big, wide-open eyes. I thought she couldn’t buy me anything better than the chance to learn to be a baker, even in this poor place, not for all her seventeen million pounds.

  And he showed us where the Monroes hung out. It was a brick building, much better than any of the others. ‘They drink and gamble and have floor shows and that sort of thing,’ said Scousie shortly. He didn’t approve.

  We ended up with a visit to one of his friends. ‘This is our Sally,’ said Scousie proudly. ‘And she’s the most marvellous person in the whole place – except for me, that is.’

  We sat on cushions drinking tea and milk out of chipped mugs. Sally had a baby a few months older than ours crawling around the floor, and she got out a load of old baby clothes to give us, and even an old pushchair. It was a bit wobbly, but it worked. She and Jane started talking babies and to listen to my sister you’d think she’d been a mother all her life, instead of a couple of days. I didn’t like it. She wasn’t like my sister at that time. She was putting on a show but she never used to be anything but herself.

  ‘Mashed potatoes and belly pork for dinner,’ said Scousie with relish. We bought the meat in a little house of sticks and mud. There was a table with the meat under a net to keep the flies off. It was clean and smelled nice which wasn’t often the case with meat shops in Santy. Scousie bought a newspaper and when we got home he sat himself down in his armchair to read it, glasses perched on the end of his nose, his carpet slippers on, just like I’d first seen him, while we cooked dinner.

  Jane was mashing the potatoes and
the shack was full of the smell of frying meat. That smell! We were slavering. Freshly cooked meat was something we never had. There was cold stuff from the Tip and once or twice I’d bought myself a kebab, but this was proper meat cooked in a proper frying pan. I kept touching it in the pan with my finger and licking it and Jane kept slapping me.

  ‘They reckon that kidnapped baby is dead,’ said Scousie suddenly. There was a second’s silence.

  ‘No one can prove they’ve got her.’ He peered at us over his half moon glasses. ‘The police think she might have been killed. Or they’ve lost her.’ He looked at Sy and laughed. ‘The gangs’ll be going mad!’ he said gleefully. ‘They’ll be turning the place upside down. Everyone’ll think everyone else has her. Trouble with the gangs – they don’t trust one another. They always end up tearing themselves to bits. Now, when I was a working thief, we used to cut out a window round the back, slide in, take what we wanted and slide out again. No one would know a thing about it till they found the window the next day. This lot – they kick open the door and go charging about shooting everything up and tearing the place to pieces and they call it theft. Thieves? A bunch of thugs! I just wish my boy would pack it in and get on with it on his own. Waste of a good thief!’

  Scousie looked at Jane. ‘Didn’t I tell you?’ he said, all wide-eyed innocence. ‘My boy Sam’s in with the Monroes. Oh, he’s a big man. Danny Monroe doesn’t do anything without asking our Sammy what he thinks. Everyone knows him round here. I keep telling him – he’ll get shot up one day. He’ll be around tomorrow. You’ll meet him if you’re about.’ And he peered at us again over the top of his glasses.

  ‘We’ll … have to go and make that phone call,’ said Jane. Scousie nodded and went back to reading his paper. I watched him for any sign he knew what was going on but he kept his nose in the paper and never said another word.

  After we’d eaten Scousie went out. ‘Going for a drink,’ he said. ‘I won’t be long. I don’t drink like I used to,’ he promised, as if we knew how he used to be. He put on his hat, picked up his stick, and the door closed behind him.

  ‘He knows,’ said Jane at once. I pulled a face. ‘Why did he tell us what it said in the paper, then?’ she demanded. ‘Why did he say his son was coming tomorrow?’

  Sham said nothing. He was lying on the floor, wedged in between the fridge and Scousie’s big chair, playing with Sy. Jane had fed her and changed her and she was full of herself, grabbing at Sham’s hair and squealing.

  Jane licked her lips. She glanced from him to me. ‘We ought to tell him,’ she said.

  ‘Tell him?’ snapped Sham. He sat up and put Sy on the floor. She wailed in frustration.

  ‘Get him on our side,’ said Jane quickly. ‘He can read and write. He’s done lots of things. He’d know what to do – he’d help us …’

  Sham stared coldly at her. ‘He’s a Monroe,’ he said.

  ‘His son is,’ I said.

  ‘Same thing.’

  ‘He told us that for our own good,’ insisted Jane. ‘And he knows anyway, I’m sure of it. We might as well.’

  ‘If he knew he’d have said,’ said Sham. He lay back down on the ground, picked Sy up and began tickling her toes. He shook his head. ‘No one would miss a chance to get in on a thing like this if they knew about it.’

  Jane scowled. ‘What do you think, Davey?’ she asked me.

  I liked Scousie. I trusted him. I was sure he knew. But – ‘I don’t know, I don’t know,’ I complained angrily. ‘Don’t ask me … Anyway, I’m fed up with the whole thing. I don’t want anything to do with it. I’d be happy to stay here and help that baker. That’d do me …’

  ‘You don’t mean that, do you, Davey?’ said Jane. She sounded so surprised. I suppose I was being a coward. Looking back, I don’t know what I wanted. I’d have loved to stay there and bake bread in that brick oven in the field. But the baby was a crock of gold.

  Sham ignored me and carried on. ‘Why should we share the reward with him? We can do it on our own, right? Besides, I don’t trust him. He’s got a big mouth.’

  And I thought – he’s up to something. Sham hadn’t been idle. Why was he so sure Scousie didn’t know? What right had he got to talk about trust?

  ‘If you’ve got a big mouth, you don’t know what’s what,’ said Sham. And he looked up at me.

  I knew what that look meant. He was giving me a last chance to come in on it with him. Sham was right and Jane was wrong but I knew at that moment I wasn’t going to betray my sister for the likes of him. First her – then me. That’s how it’d be. I couldn’t trust Sham as far as I could spit.

  ‘He’s the one we can’t trust,’ I said suddenly, nodding at Sham. He turned to watch me. ‘You don’t know him,’ I told Jane. ‘No one trusts Sham. He drops people, he does everything on his own. He’s up to something. We ought to …’

  ‘I don’t want to hear this,’ said Jane angrily. She shook her head. ‘Sham’s part of this with us – all together. What’s wrong with you?’ She hated to hear things that didn’t agree with her plans. But I knew Sham and she didn’t.

  ‘All together, yeah – that’s why he asked me to dump you and go off with him,’ I said.

  Sham looked at me, a real poisonous look.

  ‘Is that true?’ demanded Jane.

  ‘Sure it’s true,’ said Sham. ‘That was yesterday morning, and it’s taken him this long to make up his mind.’

  That made me wince. It didn’t seem to matter that I’d ended up sticking with her.

  ‘I see,’ said Jane. She got up and began tidying up – sorting things out on the shelves, putting them in neat little piles. ‘Davey’s made his mind up now, Sham,’ she said. She was trying not to cry.

  I could feel Sham looking at me. I’d let both of them down. There was a long silence, filled only with Jane rattling away tidying. Sham was half sitting up watching us both like the rat he was.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ I asked her in a minute.

  ‘I’m not doing nothing,’ said Jane. She picked up a cloth and began wiping, wiping away at the clean table, at the clean shelves. ‘If Sham wants to betray us, I can’t stop him. I’ll deal with it when the time comes. But I’ll tell you this.’ She turned to look at Sham. Her eyes were brimming over. ‘You give us away, you let us down a hundred times, but I won’t ever let you go. If I escape you and finish this business, I’ll track you down and I’ll hand over your share as if you was my own brother. I’ll trust you no matter what you do. I promise, I promise …’ She was really crying now. ‘You remember. Okay? Okay? I promise, I promise!’ she screamed.

  ‘Okay, all right, I heard you,’ hissed Sham furiously.

  Jane sat down and she wept.

  It sounded brave but what else could she do? As for Sham, he turned back and pretended to play with the baby again but I could see he was hiding his face. He was blushing, a real deep crimson blush. I didn’t realise the sort of effect she was having on him. After a couple of minutes he got up and made for the door.

  ‘Tomorrow we go into town to make that phone call,’ said Jane. Sham paused at the door. ‘All three of us,’ she went on. ‘See what’s going on. Okay?’ she said.

  Sham nodded and ran out. Jane ran to the door after him.

  ‘It could all be over in another day,’ she called.

  Jane came to sit by me. I couldn’t look at her. ‘It’s all right, Davey,’ she said. ‘I know how it is. He knows it all, doesn’t he? And I’m just a girl. But that’s not all there is to it, see. You see how he is with Sy. He loves her. That means something.’ She paused and giggled. ‘Did you see him run out? He was crying, I think.’

  I hadn’t seen that. Could she do that to him? If anyone had told me that my sister could make someone like Sham blush or cry I’d never have believed it. I began to wonder for the first time if Jane really could turn the whole thing round and just walk up to the parents and give them the baby back and win everything. Maybe – but not with Sham around. Sham was ou
t there on his own and he could be up to anything. I don’t know, maybe I just wanted to believe in her because I felt I’d let her down.

  8

  SHAM CAME IN late, when we were getting ready for bed. We didn’t ask him where he’d been and he didn’t say. I don’t know what time Scousie came in. He was asleep in the middle of the floor the next morning, and the whole place stank of sour booze.

  There were no telephones in that part of Santy – no telephones, no electricity, no gas. You even had to buy bottled water in the shops. We were going to get a bus into London to make our call. Scousie had offered to organise a radio phone, but we wanted to get right away from where we were staying in case they traced the call, so we told him we had to go somewhere to try and meet our parents.

  Nearly all the buses from our part of Santy went by Farthing Down and we didn’t dare go through there. We had to catch one bus across Santy and then another into London. We were in Sidcup before we felt far enough away.

  We got off by a pub on a busy street corner and almost at once we were sick scared. This was it. I’d never heard of anyone trying to ring up a man like John Tallus. You had the feeling bad was bound to come from it – that it was bad luck even to mention his name, even though we were only trying to do him a favour.

  We walked up and down the street a few times. Sy was happy, rattling along in the pushchair Sally gave us. Sham walked behind, as if the whole thing was nothing to do with him. He wasn’t part of us now, not since last night. Jane was worried because we might not have enough change to put in the telephone so we went and changed some money – loads, far too much of it. Sham was looking the whole time as if he knew better, which he probably did. Then we walked up and down while Jane kept trying to decide which phone box was the best one to call from, as if that made any difference.