Choice of Straws

by Braithwaite, E. R. ;

  Then Ginger said, ‘Identical twins. Always went around together I suppose?’

  ‘Most of the time,’ I answered.

  ‘And last night?’

  Before I could reply, Mum asked him, ‘You said there were two of them in the car. What about the other one?’

  ‘Probably the owner of the car,’ Ginger told her, ‘We’re tracing it. Black Morris saloon, registration GDX 409,’ he said, reading from his book. Then, to me, ‘That ring any bells? Know anybody has a car with that number?’

  I said I didn’t.

  ‘Any idea where he went last evening? Being twins and all I’m sure he’d say something about where he was off to, even if you couldn’t go with him.’

  Again Mum spoke up. ‘Jack was upstairs in his room when Dave left. Said something about going to listen to a jazz club, I think.’ Remembering how earlier on she’d been shaking like a jelly, I felt amazed and proud of her. She sat there looking them straight in the eye, pale but calm as you please. Our Dad was staring at her, his mouth open and a look of surprise on his face. Baldy looked at him and he closed his mouth.

  ‘What sort of drawing?’ Ginger asked me, ‘commercial art?’

  ‘No. I’m doing industrial design at the Tech. Part time apprentice training scheme.’

  Baldy asked if Dave did the same thing and I told him no. Dave was doing the straight course in Mechanical engineering. Then our Dad said if they were asking all those questions, then they weren’t sure it was Dave, that he might have lost the knife and somebody found it. And Baldy said it was possible our Dad was right; after all, they were only checking, and with what we’d told them about Dave, the ring and teeth, they’d soon know. But anyway, where was Dave? Was he in the habit of staying out all night long? And we told him no, never before. So our Dad said nothing more, just sat there twisting his fingers and looking at Mum. Baldy said they were really sorry to bring such terrible news, but as soon as they had any further information they’d let us know. He asked if we were on the phone, and I gave him the number. Then they left.

  After they’d gone none of us said anything for what seemed like hours. Then Mum stood up. Not crying or anything, though her eyes looked dead in her face. She went up to our Dad, touched his face, then started off towards the kitchen.

  Near the door she turned and said, ‘Jack, you’d better tell your Dad about last night. I’ll make us a cup of tea.’

  I looked at our Dad. His face was still grey and drawn because of what he’d already heard. Now there was more. He sat with his shoulders hunched forward, elbows on his knees, the big hands twisting each other. Tell him about last night, Mum said. I waited until his thick grey eyebrows lifted at me. You could see the pain in his eyes.

  ‘Well,’ he said.

  So I told him. Slowly. All of it. Funny thing, he seemed to be taking it so much harder than Mum. I didn’t realize he was crying till I saw the tears where they’d fallen on his hands. In all the years our Dad was okay, but he’d never make a big fuss over us or anything, so it came as a shock to see him like that. I mean, I’d never have thought that anything could make our Dad cry. I told him the whole thing. Well, not exactly. I didn’t tell him that I’d stuck the Spade. What was the use? Don’t really know why, but I just didn’t tell him about that. If Mum should mention it to him afterwards I could always say I thought I’d told him.

  He didn’t say anything. Not a word. No questions. Nothing. When I’d done he stood up in front of me, looking through me as if I was a stranger. For seconds. Then he walked off to the kitchen, me following. Mum watched us come in but went on with what she was doing. Dad sat at the table and me at the far end away from him, feeling tired, wishing that whatever was to be said would get said quickly so I could go up and get some sleep. Mum sat beside him and poured the tea.

  ‘You knew about all this, Madge?’ he asked her.

  ‘Jack told me.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Early this morning.’

  It was all so ruddy normal, us sitting there talking as if we were figuring the odds for the pools or something.

  Except that Mum and Dad never came downstairs in their dressing-gowns. This was the first time I’d ever seen either of them downstairs like that.

  ‘Don’t I count in this damned house at all?’ Dad’s voice was suddenly harsh. ‘My son gets himself killed or something, you two damned well know what’s going on but I have to hear it from the ruddy police. Don’t I count at all in this damned house?’

  Mum carefully put down the teapot.

  ‘Before I could come to tell you, the police arrived,’ she told him.

  From somewhere outside myself I watched us. Me, somehow not worrying or upset or anything. Mum so small, red-eyed and tired, but calm now as if she was prepared to deal with whatever turned up. And Dad. He sat there, big, angrily glaring at her, not at me, as if he resented her coolness and strength. I had the feeling that he was scared and the shouting was to hide it. His neck was getting red the way it did when he was all worked up, and I thought, Supposing he gets so mad that he bashes Mum? And I knew inside myself that if our Dad hit our Mum I’d tear his ruddy arm off. I suddenly felt strong enough to do just that. I drank off the cup of tea at one go, not giving a damn that it nearly burnt through my throat.

  ‘What are we going to do, Dad?’ Mum asked him, looking up into his face. She always called him Dad same as us kids did. Her voice was soft and sort of pleading, like a little girl, but not weak. And then our Dad reached out and grabbed her, pulling her to hold her tight, and began crying like a child. The way he pulled her I thought at first he was all set to bash her, and I was out of my chair and going for him when he started howling, and Mum was holding his head against her chest, protective like, and looking sideways at me. I left them and went upstairs to my room and lay on my bed. It was as if my whole body had stopped working. I couldn’t feel anything, couldn’t think about anything, except that Dave was dead. But all that meant was he was somewhere, not feeling or knowing, and he’d never come home again, never walk into this room kicking the door shut and saying ‘Hi’, which was mostly what he and me called each other. I’d never known anyone close, like family, who’d died, and it seemed strange that nothing should be changed, different, all his clothes and stuff hanging there in the wardrobe as if they were waiting for him. I wondered what I should be doing. Crying, perhaps. But I didn’t feel like it, didn’t really feel anything.

  Later on they came up, both of them sitting on Dave’s bed.

  ‘Tell me, Son,’ Dad said. ‘What made you and Dave start this thing in the first place?’

  ‘You mean last night, Dad?’

  ‘I mean the whole damned thing, deliberately going where those coloured people live to make trouble.’

  ‘We only did it for a bit of a giggle.’

  ‘For a what? So it was some kind of joke. For whom? For the people you beat up, or for your brother who’s lying stiff in the mortuary?’

  I didn’t answer that.

  ‘I want to know what started it off,’ he went on. ‘If I hadn’t heard it from your own mouth I wouldn’t have believed it. That my own sons would do such a thing. Going around beating up old men and women for no reason … ’

  ‘We never hit any women,’ I told him.

  ‘Why? Didn’t you catch any of them alone? By themselves? Look, Son, tell me. Why? What did those coloured people ever do to you? Any of them ever curse you or hit you, or … ’

  ‘Don’t get yourself all worked up, Dad,’ Mum said.

  ‘I’m not getting worked up. I’m trying to find out what all this is about. My son has got himself killed and I want to know what’s behind it, why they went around beating up helpless people.’

  ‘They weren’t so helpless when they beat you up and put you in the hospital,’ I burst out at him, talking as if he was on their side.

  ‘S
o it was for me that you did it, was it? You hear that, Madge?’ He stood up over me, looking bigger than his six foot one, the silver hairs long and stiff on his thick arms. ‘So it was for me that your brother’s dead. And the other man? Probably dead too.’

  ‘Who cares about any bloody Spade?’ The words were hardly out of my mouth before the whole world seemed to explode on the side of my face, and when the noise settled down I tasted the blood inside my mouth, hating him through the sudden tears which stopped me seeing him properly. I couldn’t get up, and when my eyes cleared I noticed he was standing there looking at his hand as if it didn’t belong to him.

  Then he spoke, softly this time. ‘You keep a civil tongue in your head when you’re talking to me.’ But he didn’t wait for me to say or do anything, just turned and walked away.

  ‘Your Dad didn’t really mean to do that, Son,’ Mum said, and she, too, went off downstairs, leaving me giddy and a bit sick in the stomach, my head ringing as if a bell was buried in it somewhere, thinking, If I’d only known he’d do such a thing, hitting me when I wasn’t expecting it, not ready to defend myself. Sitting down and he hit me. Damned bully. If he wanted to hit somebody why didn’t he have a go at those two detectives? He couldn’t because he was scared of them, scared about them coming to the house and about what had happened to Dave, and about what I’d told him. That’s why he hit me. He was scared. Just as he was scared of those Spades the time they beat him up. He wouldn’t fight back or tell the police, but he’d damn well come home and switch off the TV because none of us could object. Asking if it was because of him that we did it. Heck, after the first time I don’t suppose we thought of him at all. It was more the kick you got out of watching them standing there, too scared to run or shout or anything, knowing what was going to happen to them and waiting for it, watching you come nearer and nearer. Always go for their guts, Dave used to say. Always give it to them in their guts.

  I was so lost in my thoughts that I didn’t hear them come back until Dad said, ‘To think my own sons were living here, under this very roof and doing things like that and I never knew, never suspected anything.’

  I wished they would go away and leave me alone. What were we supposed to do, grow horns or something just because we did something he knew nothing about? He went on, saying something about how when he was our age he’d had to work too hard to be getting up to vicious tricks like that, but I wasn’t really listening. My mind was on what they’d say over at the works when neither Dave nor me turned up there this morning.

  ‘I suppose I ought to ring McGowan at the works and … ’ I heard my own voice mixing with Dad’s and I stopped.

  He stopped too, looking down at me. ‘You know something, Madge,’ he said, ‘I don’t think he gives one little damn.’

  What did he want, that I should burst out crying, for Christ’s sake? They’re both standing there looking at me as if I’m something that’s crawled away from the zoo. Especially Dad. Going on at me because of a ruddy Spade, some fellow he didn’t even know. And what about him, in spite of all this carrying on? Suddenly all sorts of things came back to my mind, things I hadn’t even really thought of before. That time when Mr Fennicott and Mr Austin from down the road came to see him and they’d stood talking in the back garden, arguing for a long time. And after they’d gone Mum asked him what it was all about and he said they’d taken on some coloured men at the building site and some of the men were against it and were threatening to go on strike, old Mr Fennicott especially, and they were going to have a meeting about it next day at the site. And Mum said what did he think, and he said he didn’t hold with that sort of thing, if there were jobs going why shouldn’t the coloureds work, after all they weren’t taking bread out of anybody’s mouth. And Mum said suppose they called a strike what would he do? And he said he’d have to go along with it, whatever the others did. And now I was wondering why I hadn’t thought of these things before. If he was against not letting the coloureds work why would he join with the others to strike?

  And then a few months ago after Old Fennicott died and Mrs Fennicott put her house up for sale with the big red FOR SALE sign in her front window, because she said the house was too big for her to live in alone and she’d decided to go and stay with her daughter at Eastbourne. And these coloureds, Indians or something like that, went to see her about buying it and she told them she’d changed her mind about selling. Afterwards she’d come and told Mum and Dad, saying how she’d rather see the house rot to the ground than bear the thought of any nasty blacks living there. And Dave and me listening. Then Dave said, just for fun, there’s nothing nasty about money no matter where it comes from. And Dad sat there and never said a word …

  The phone rang and Mum went downstairs to answer it, then called to Dad to come down. Later on she came and told me it was the police telephoning to say they wanted to come and talk to us again. I followed her down to phone through to McGowan at the works, but our Dad was still on the phone, talking to someone at his building site it sounded like, so I went back to my room. My face was hurting like hell and felt stiff all over the right side. From downstairs I could hear the sounds of Mum busy in the kitchen and the rumble of Dad’s voice, just like any day, as if nothing had changed. And there were Dave’s things. Pin-ups on the wall beside his bed, and the Youth Hostel banner we’d got on that trip to Austria last year. Whatever Mum and Dad might be thinking, it was well after nine o’clock, and if that wasn’t our Dave in the mortuary, then where in God’s name was he?

  Thinking about him, I felt the coldness creeping up inside me again. I couldn’t think of him as being dead, not coming back here, to this room, not ever. What would I do, by myself? Just me, alone. It wasn’t as if I’d any friends much, not real friends I could talk and do things with, the way I could with Dave. Sometimes not saying a word, just knowing we were there, with each other. We’d even talked Old Man McGowan into letting us work together in the machine shop and he’d said okay, he didn’t mind. We’d lie awake in the dark some nights talking about how it would be later on, after we’d taken our City and Guilds exams and we had to split up, because I was hoping to try for a place with that firm of industrial designers in Manchester. Sometimes Dave would say he might even chuck Bradford’s and come with me, but he wasn’t sure. Everybody at the works was always saying how bright he was and there was a great future for him there. Those nights, just talking in the dark and seeing it all, the big things we’d do one day, probably having a go at working together as a sort of firm with our name BENNETT BROTHERS LTD. or maybe just BENNETT’S LTD. ENGINEERS. Seeing it all, making a packet and making Dad and Mum move away from this street to somewhere nicer. Perhaps even having Dad work with us. But not BENNETT & SONS. No, people had to know who was who. Just BENNETT’S LTD.

  Now he was gone. I’d never really known anybody who died, anybody close, like a relative or good friend. You didn’t count old Fennicott because he was only someone I knew from his living down the road all those years and just saying hello to him in the street. Never even went into their house once, though they were always coming over to talk to Mum and Dad. I wondered how it felt to be dead, not feeling anything. What about all the stuff you knew in your brains, all the thoughts and plans and everything! Whatever happened to them? Supposing it was possible to make some kind of machine which could record everything a person ever thought in his life. What I mean is, we remember things, so it’s a way of recording them somewhere in our minds. Well, if it was possible to make this machine and tap it into that part of the brain where the memory was and make it play back everything in it, just sort of reverse the process.

  Thinking about that I remembered about the big diary Dave kept under his pillow that he was always writing in and wouldn’t let anyone have a look. Perhaps it would be the same as finding out what he’d been thinking of lots of things, and it wouldn’t make any difference to him now if I looked, so I fetched it out.

  It wasn’t a
diary at all. Poems. That’s what he’d been writing down. Poems, each one with a name above it and at the end his initials and the date he wrote it. I mean, if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, right there in his own handwriting, I wouldn’t have believed it. Not Dave, who was always saying he didn’t give a damn for anybody, except me and our Mum and Dad. We’d never talked about poems and stuff like that. Not ever. At first I guessed he must have copied them out of some book or other, but then I remembered I’d never seen him with any other book, only scribbling away every now and then, and afterwards stuffing the book back under his pillow. Like this one:

  Autumn Time October 16th 1956

  Cloudy afternoon

  Drizzly damp afternoon

  Earth breath steamy over dead leaves and yellowing wet grass.

  Raindrop buds on naked branches.

  Listen,

  From the distant darkening,

  In broken echoes light as falling leaves,

  The scattered sound of rooks coming over.

  Homing.

  Calling softly to other.

  Homing.

  Quickly circling, impatient for the nests

  Ragged and ugly as the naked trees,

  Yet waiting,

  Wing whispering, unwilling soon to end

  The sweet delight of the last downward swoop.

  Home,

  And sway of slender bough in mute protest.

  Rustle of feathers at the settling down.

  D. BENNETT

  Christ, he’d been writing stuff like this and keeping it all to himself. Even from me. While I shared everything I ever had with him. Even my designs. Sometimes I’d have an idea and sketch it out roughly, then show him, telling him how I felt about it. And I’d always believed he felt the same way. Yet all the time I’d been shut out of this private place like some ruddy stranger. I couldn’t even imagine how he got started on it. I mean, at Grammar School we did English literature, with poems and stuff like that, but we only did it because it was in the syllabus. We never really cared anything about it, never talked about it, at least he never let on that he was really interested. If it had been me who was keen on that kind of stuff I’d surely have said something to him. There was this short one: