I sat and turned towards the warm stove. ‘What shall we do?’
‘Price’s hope would be that I’d do his work or that we’d move away.’
‘This is our home,’ I said.
Daddy looked at me as if for the first time in weeks and he placed his right hand on my left shoulder. ‘My feelings are the same,’ he said.
We stayed together in the kitchen for the rest of the afternoon. We drank mugs of hot, milky tea and at around four o’clock Cathy pulled a couple of bottles of cider from the cupboard. We discussed what Mr Price had said to Daddy and what could be done. Daddy told us again that Mr Price cared nothing for the copse. Daddy said that Mr Price just hated to feel the weight of helplessness. To interfere with the lives of others was to carve for himself a presence in the world. Mr Price detested that which he could not control. We lived here on his doorstep yet he had no access to our lives. We did not pay him rent, we did not work for him, we did not owe him any favours. And so he feared us. Daddy said that to Mr Price people were like wasps zipping around his head, ready to sting at any moment. He liked to know their movements. He liked to know their intentions. And when he knew those things he could catch them and put them in a breathless jar.
Daddy said that we should seek out his few friends in the village. There were a handful of people that he had helped in recent months and though Daddy was reticent in his favours, there were perhaps a couple he felt he could confide in. His friend Peter had less affection for Mr Price than we did and we resolved to pay him a visit.
Chapter Ten
We went the next evening. The morning we spent together on the rough, wet grass outside our wooden house. After an early start Daddy carried the kitchen table and chairs outside and set it up with a chequered cloth. I got the eggs and bacon on. Cathy brewed the tea and we took it all outside to eat in the cold bright sun. The bacon was from the butcher, Andrew, who was also one of Daddy’s few friends. It was well salted and he had cut it thickly but I made sure the rind was crisp before I lifted it from the skillet. The eggs fried quickly in the bacon fat and took on salt from the meat so their bottoms formed caramel crusts while the yolks remained golden. I warmed the plates first in the oven before serving up and afterwards finished them with a slice of fresh bread.
Eating a full breakfast outside with my Daddy and sister was always a joy but this morning more than ever. There were troubles, we knew. Our home was in danger. But right now, with a bright white sun shedding its light onto my pale, thin arms, and thick crispy bacon held between two slices of soft, warm bread, I could not have been happier.
A clutch of gulls cut through the eggshell sky, their bellies caught in dark shadow.
Breakfast and its lazy aftermath took most of the morning and the afternoon was spent in the copse or round about. We set and checked traps and Cathy and I called Daddy to make the kill if there was a catch. Otherwise we saw to the hens or cultivated the kitchen garden as it was needed.
Daddy contacted Peter in advance from a pay phone in the village. We walked down together as dusk fell and Cathy and I huddled outside while Daddy went into the box with a stack of ten pence pieces. The spot stank of piss.
It had been an old, red phone box but the paint was chipping and now it was little more than a rusted metal shell. The glass in its panes was cracked but not yet smashed. Daddy picked up the receiver and I heard an amplified crunch and its echo then a clear dial tone.
Cathy pulled out her smoking equipment and started to roll up. The ground was already strewn with cigarette butts of various ages like little brown slugs slithering in different directions through the ash-stained mud. She rolled a cigarette for me too and lit it with a match from a box in her top jacket pocket before turning the match to the end of the roll-up she was holding between her lips. I inhaled as deeply as was comfortable and blew my smoke in the direction of my sister and up into the night air.
Daddy’s voice sounded muffled from within the box. He spoke to Peter briefly and gave him a few details. When the conversation finished he pushed open the door, took the cigarette from my mouth, took a drag and replaced it.
‘Let’s go.’
It was half a mile walk but we hardly spoke along the way. The main street through the village was lit with amber streetlights. Security bulbs flashed on from the houses by the road as we passed. They darkened again almost as quickly. Some of the houses had televisions playing that could be seen flickering behind the closed curtains. We passed a house where a man and woman were shouting at each other and a baby was crying. Daddy slowed as we passed that house and listened hard but then walked on with us and the shouting and crying faded to nothing.
Peter’s house was on the outskirts of the village and had a long back garden that stretched way out amongst the fields. The house itself was not much bigger than ours. 1970s build. Pebble dash. The inside was sparsely decorated. A TV stand but no TV. CDs but no hi-fi. That sort of thing.
His bed had been moved into the back room so he no longer had to climb the stairs. The double doors through to there were partly open and revealed a jumble of sheets and pillows and a couple of green beer bottles and a box of tissues on the bedside table.
‘So Price wants you to work for him?’ said Peter as soon as Daddy, Cathy and I had sat down. ‘He’ll be getting you to kick me out of here, next.’
‘You’re his tenant?’ asked Daddy.
‘I am,’ said Peter. ‘At least I have been so far only I can’t afford the rent any more. He wants me out, faster than even law would get me out. I bet he’ll want you to do it. Break you in by getting you to shift a friend from his home. He’ll know you helped me that time. That time you saw to Coxswain in that car park.’
That evening we drank the best part of two bottles of whisky. Daddy said the day merited something hard and sent Cathy out with a well-used fifty pound note to get the best spirit stocked by the village shop. Daddy and Peter drank the lion’s share between them. They poured approximate double measures into their glasses then returned for more.
Cathy and I drank more slowly and mixed our whisky with drops of water. She smoked and I had a few too. We stayed in the men’s conversation for the most part but dipped out now and then.
‘Most people round here rent their houses from Mr Price,’ said Peter. ‘And if they don’t rent from Mr Price, their landlord is a friend of his. All the landlords round here go drinking and shooting up at manor. They all have dealings, as they say. They’ll have money invested together. Bubbling around in the same pot.’
‘Where’s pot?’
‘I don’t know, John. Don’t ask me. I don’t even have a bank account any more and when I did it’s not like I had cause to care much for interest rates and investments. But they all have fingers in the same pies. All landlords round here. All led by Price. They’ve all got investments in same businesses and give each other tips. Trading tips. Farming tips. Landlording tips. That sort of thing, I don’t know. But Price is top dog. Always that. So if he takes against someone, they’re out. And it means that – one way or another – Price owns county.’
‘A lot of his business is legal then?’
‘Most of it. Ninety per cent of what he does is above board. It’s just you see other ten per cent because that’s world you’re in, John.’ Peter let out a half-laugh. ‘Why? You thinking of following some kind of paper trail? Uncovering evidence? Going to police?’
Daddy looked at his huge, knotted hands. ‘No. No, you know I could never do owt like that.’ He almost blushed. ‘And you know I could never involve police, neither. As you say, what’s ten per cent of Price’s world is all of mine, as well you know. Nothing I have is based in any law.’ He looked over at Cathy and me, watching him gently. ‘Not land. Not cash under my bed. Not my profession. Not even them.’ He nodded at us. ‘Not even my children. I don’t know if any law or piece of paper could connect them to me. But they’re mine through and through, that’s plain to see.’ He looked back towards Peter and drained his glass
. ‘And I woundt involve police anyway. They belong to Price around here too. Big ones anyway. Police chiefs and councillors that I’ve seen driving up to manor.’
Peter refilled Daddy’s glass and continued to speak. ‘I know of two families he’s put out on their arses in last year because they coundt meet rent increase. But don’t take my word for it. You’ll need to speak to others if you want to know more. Ewart Royce and his wife, Martha. Ewart’s the cleverest man for miles around and he still cares about area. He were a union man, back when the pit were still open. And he were a decent one. He’s well connected among the people who aren’t connected to Price. Ex-miners, sons of ex-miners, tenants, labourers and unemployed. He knows about the law too, though I know you don’t want that. But he’s part of your world too. He likes a bet. He likes a horse-race. He likes to watch a good fight and he trades with travellers and gypsies as well as working men. You want to know how to keep your house? You should talk to Ewart Royce.’
We stayed up for hours. Daddy and Peter drank all through the night and I fell asleep in the beanbag I had been sitting in with my head propped against a cushion that was in turn squashed between the radiator and a cabinet. I woke thirsty and when the first light came up on the horizon I went to the sink to fill my empty glass with water. I drained it and filled it for a second time to take back with me to my makeshift cot.
Peter was asleep in his bed and Daddy was there too, under a thin blanket, sprawled with his head at Peter’s feet. Cathy had made herself as comfortable as she could on the floor with cushions, a duvet and her head resting awkwardly on the other beanbag. I saw an empty glass by her left hand. I picked it up, rinsed it under the tap and filled it with water for when she woke up, parched like I had been, and needed a drink. She stirred when I placed the full glass on the floor but not enough to wake. I returned to my place by the radiator, shut my eyes and slept intermittently for the next two or three hours.
Daddy, Peter and Cathy woke only when the sun was so high in the sky it could not be ignored. It was nearly 10 o’clock and it was bright. Sharp rays had nudged the hems of the thin poly-mix curtains to the sides and filled the room with a precise light.
Daddy rolled to his side, woke, and was up. He headed straight to the bathroom. I heard the taps running and the sink filling with water and a few minutes later the sound of that cold water being displaced by his head as he plunged it beneath the surface. The door opened with his elbow against it, pushing. He had taken off his shirt and had washed his body too. The black hair on his chest was wet and soapy where he had not rinsed himself properly. He was rubbing his face dry with a tea towel but water dripped from his hair and beard onto his shoulders and onto the carpeted floor below. He roughly shook out his shirt and put it back on, fastening the buttons from bottom to top.
Peter stirred. He was slower to wake than Daddy. Cathy was lying on her back. Her position was the same as it had been when she slept but her eyes were now wide. She watched Daddy as he buttoned his shirt. I had been sitting up on my beanbag for some time, sipping water, unable to sleep but unsure of how to be awake.
We left the house soon after. A girl, a boy, two men. Hungover, half-asleep. We stopped for a quick breakfast at a bakery on the High Street. In the mornings it served bacon, sausage and egg sandwiches. I had bacon then asked Daddy if I could have an iced bun like a shy child with a sweet tooth. He paid 50p for three. For the road, he said.
The Royces lived in a nicer part of the village where the houses were well-spaced and the gardens greener. There were cars here, parked in driveways, washed and polished. The privet hedges were trimmed regularly and the well-mown front lawns that sat to the sides of the gravel drives were surrounded by planters, ready for the spring shoots. Net curtains obscured every window and most were so clean and clear it was as if the glass was hardly there.
The Royces lived in a house with double-glazed windows. They drove a dark blue Volvo. There was an undersized fountain in their front garden that was half-hidden by an overgrown buddleia. The water burbled from within a shard of limestone.
Cathy, Daddy and I waited by the gate while Peter offered himself to the front door. It was only fair to give them warning, Daddy had said. Like with Peter.
The wheels of Peter’s chair negotiated the gravel easily and he shifted himself with his strong arms onto the step to reach the bell. A woman came to the door first and looked down at Peter while he spoke to her in a voice I could not make out. She was smaller than me. Possibly 5′4″. Her hair still had some dark blonde but it might have been dyed. This made her look younger than fifty but something else told me she was older. It was not that her face looked old. It was not that her neck looked old, though it is the neck which tells the greater truths. She did not have wrinkles or rivets that I could see from my place by the gate and her skin neither drooped nor darkened in places where brown spots of age might come to appear. If these were there she had hidden them well. It was the way she held her body that told me she was in her late sixties. It was the way she planted her feet on the floor and the way she sat her hips and the way she held her shoulders. The woman wore baby pink tapered trousers that were fastened over a plump waist. She positioned a jumper fashioned in sweatshirt fabric covered with printed, photo-realistic flowers at the waistband. Cream, fluffy half-slippers covered her little feet. Gold rings adorned her hands and there was gold too at her ears and at her neck. She wore large, plastic, purple, oval glasses that covered her face from her cheeks to her eyebrows.
A man approached. He lifted his right arm up behind the woman to lean on the door frame. He wore olive-green trousers that were so dark they were almost brown and with a sharp crease down the front of each leg. He wore a white shirt under a maroon V-neck jumper but no tie. He spoke to Peter and listened to his wife then looked over at Daddy and then at me and at Cathy. He beckoned us inside.
The vestibule was cramped as we all gathered in it to take off our shoes and our jackets and to place them in the cupboard or hang them on the coat stand. The carpet was soft with a pink and gold baroque pattern like the pattern on the carpet in Granny Morley’s entrance hall years ago and miles away. The walls were cluttered with pictures in varnished wooden frames. Most were photographs of children in school uniforms against a cloudy lilac backdrop. The children appeared to have been grouped in sets of siblings, either two or three together. The same children had been photographed at different ages, their hair lengthened and shortened. At some point, each had been photographed with missing front teeth. There were too many children (and all given equal precedence) for these to belong to the Royces. They were nephews and nieces, godchildren, the children of friends and friendly neighbours.
Peter made the introductions briefly when we were in the vestibule but he had given a fuller account of whom we were while we had waited by the gate.
Martha invited us to come through to the lounge. She was primarily speaking to Cathy and me. Ewart was already leading Daddy through.
Martha asked us if we wanted tea or coffee. I asked for coffee. Martha left the hallway and bustled into the kitchen. I heard the kettle being lifted from its stand and filled with water. Cathy made for the sitting room and took one of a couple of chairs by a table in the corner. Daddy and Ewart sat on the large, satin armchairs that took pride of place in the room. Peter wheeled his chair around and back into a position between the two other men, to the side of the fireplace. There was an electric fire on the hearth that had not yet been lit that morning.
Martha returned from the kitchen with a tray of mugs, a bowl of sugar and a milk bottle. The liquid was hot and bitter and I poured in as much milk as the vessel would take and stirred it with three teaspoons of granulated sugar. It went down easily that way and the cup was soon half empty. I could drink coffee and tea when it was still piping hot unlike Cathy who always had to wait for the liquid to cool. It was the only thing I could best her at and so of course I turned it into a competition and made a show of it when I could. Once, years ago when
we still lived with Granny Morley by the coast, she had become so angry at my skill that she had swallowed the whole cupful in great, scolding gulps, almost as soon as the water was out of the kettle. She had burnt her mouth and her tongue and even her throat and the blisters had lasted for over a week. She had done it to show me she could, but had soon learnt her lesson. Even I could not down hot drinks that quickly.
It was the same with the cold. I could bite hard into scooped ice-cream and I would bare my teeth to do it to show my sister that I could. I could swallow ice-cubes whole. In the winter I would take handfuls of snow and stuff it into my mouth or rub it onto my face or body in front of her. She would pour ice and snow down the back of my jacket, right under my jumper and shirt, and I would stand motionless like it had not affected me at all, like I could not even feel it. It would drive her mad. She would shiver even from the touch of the snow against her gloved hand as she picked it up to do the deed. She would shiver from even that and there I stood, still and smiling, like I was having my morning shower. It made her mad.
‘He’s a slimy toad,’ said Martha as she came back into the room with her own cup of tea and took a seat on the edge of a footstool. ‘He always has been, and I’ve known him for a while. Not well, mind – I’d be surprised if he even knew our names – but I’ve known him from a distance. Everyone around here has done, or those of us who’ve been around a while and still have our memories. As a young man he were always sloping around where he wandt wanted. He were a little thing, then. He’d suddenly turn up on his better-than-yours bike and start causing mischief. He’d make sure he’d get his own way and if he dindt that’s when the threats would start. His father had quite a force of labourers then, before everything was just one man and a tractor, and even then if any of these men wanted to keep their jobs – casual work it was – they’d better do what young Price told them. Farm labourers, day labourers, seasonal workers dindt have unions. Not like them lot in pit villages who went down mines. Like my Ewart. Farm workers had to do what they were told and they did. And I reckon there were some pride in it. Doing young Price’s bidding and beating up a couple of miners’ sons. There were a bit of rivalry there, you know.’
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