Key to the Door: A Novel (The Seaton Novels)

by Alan Sillitoe

  By Sunday dinner Gyp hadn’t come back. Merton was in an amiable mood, bland with a few pints of soothing brown ale inside him, and asked at the table if anybody’d seen Gyp. They hadn’t. And no wonder, Violet said, after such a pasting as he’d given the poor bogger. For nothing, as well. Can you blame him for not coming back? Well, it should do as it’s towd, Merton maintained, then it wouldn’t get stick so often. I expect he’s roaming the fields, though. A forkful of mutton fat went into his hatch. He turned to Brian: “Shall you come wi’ me, Nimrod, and see’f we can find ’im after dinner?”

  “O yes, grandad.”

  They rounded to the house-back and set off up the sloping path, passing the sentinel well and making a bee-line for Serpent Wood. Was the stick he carried to help him on his walk, or to beat Gyp with for desertion? Yesterday he hated him for hitting the dog, but now, trailing behind in the heavy-clouded silence of green fields, he was unable to. Maybe they’d seen Alma, he thought, hands deep in his pockets when his grandad had told him a thousand times to take them out, though he didn’t suppose they would because she went to Sunday school as a rule.

  They turned south from the wood, towards the railway. Merton stopped now and again, calling: “Gyp! Gyp!” each gruff cannon-ball shout met only by an echo, or by an uprising bird that didn’t know how lucky it was Merton hadn’t a gun with him. Two partridges took off from a bank, flap-winged over an elderberry bush, turned high in a steep curve, and vanished beyond the railway.

  Great clouds were piled high in the distance like a range of mountains suspended in space. Merton leaned on the iron railing as if wondering whether to cross the railway and search there. Bush leaves swayed with a noise like waves against sand when you put a sea-shell to your ear, and tree branches creaked. “We’ll climb the bank, Nimrod, and see’f we can see owt in Farmer ’Awkins’ field. If we can’t we’ll goo back and see’f your gran’ma’s mashed. It looks as if it’ll piss down soon.”

  Brian was already over and halfway up to the railway, then jumping from one steel rail to another, Merton close behind. He looked beyond, saw nothing but silence. Wheatfields swayed with the wind but made no noise, and smoke from a grey-roofed house went obliquely into the sky. It was funny, he thought, how soil smelled of rain when you’d think it’d be the air it came from. A steel-grey cloud-base stretched for miles, and there was no sign of the dog.

  He shielded his eyes from an imaginary sun: “Can’t see ’im, grandad.”

  “We’ll go back ’ome then. ’E’ll cum when ’e’s ’ungry.”

  Brian turned to recross the railway: the long stretch of track disappeared round a bend to the right, no trains flying. Then he turned his head leftwards and, about to face front and leap over the lines, saw something white tucked into one of the sleepers.

  He knew what it was before beginning to run, stared at the splashed blood on the ridge of each parallel track. It’s been run over, he said to himself, it’s been run over.

  “Grandad,” his wavering voice called. He detached the bloodstained collar and folded it into his back pocket. They walked to the house without speaking.

  Merton came later with a spade and buried Gyp in the field. While he was away Brian heard his uncle George and aunt Violet talking in the kitchen. “He led the poor dog such a life,” she said, “that it must have done itself in by laying on the lines till a train came.” Brian was sorry she said this because he’d been with his grandad when the dog was found and, walking back with him, noticed how he hadn’t said a word all the way, which was, he knew, because he was sorry he’d hit the dog. George agreed with her: “He’s got too much of it.” Too much of what? Brian wondered. But they said nothing to Merton when he came in.

  Brian went home that evening, for it was school in the morning. His small figure walked quickly along, waving a stick, his pockets jingling with pennies and ha’pennies that his grandad, uncles, and aunts had given him.

  CHAPTER 5

  Eight-wheeled lorries came by the motorworks and followed each other towards the high flat tongue of land that had been raised by months of tipping and was slowly covering a nondescript area of reedgrass and water. From nearly every precipice men walked to where they hoped the loads would be dumped. Empty sacks flapped over their shoulders, and they called to each other, waving sticks and rakes. Brian, having already used his judgement, was scraping into a heap of swarf and scrap steel picked clean days ago, but which still gave off a pleasant smell of aluminum shavings and carbolic, oil and the brass dust of big machines his father had sometimes worked. He kept one eye on the rapid movements of his flimsy rake, and the other on a small pile of wood covered with a sack nearby. Bert had promised to be at the tips later, and Brian hoped he’d come soon to get something from the four lorries—and the convoy of high-sided horsecarts trailing at walking pace behind.

  “Where’s it comin’ from, mate?” Brian asked. Steelpins were popped out and the back ascended slowly. Half a dozen men, waiting for the avalanche of promise, watched the heavy handle being worked by a driver who rarely spoke to the scrapers, as if he were ashamed of being set within the luxurious world of hard labour. Even uncommitting banter was rare, and the scrapers looked on, waiting, never offering to help so as to get the stuff rolling sooner to their feet. “Prospect Street, young ’un,” the driver answered.

  Them old houses. A few bug-eaten laths. Wallpaper, dust, and brick was already streaming down the bank, filling up oil-stained swamp-pools and crushing rusty tins at the bottom. A piece of wall made a splash like a bomb, and that was that. The back was wound up, and the lorry driven off. Brian rubbed pieces of cold water from his ear. Men were scraping systematically at the rammel, though expecting little from those poverty-stricken, condemned, fallen-down rabbit-holes on Prospect Street. Yet you never knew: such exercise in hope may gain a few brass curtain rings, a yard of decayed copper-wire (from which the flex could be burned over the flames), or perhaps a piece of lead piping if it was a lucky day. A man whistled as he worked: speculation ran too high for speech.

  Brian, having netted a few spars of wood, rubbed grit from his knees and stood up, gripped by a black, end-of-the-world hopelessness: Please, God, send a good tip, he said to himself. If you do, I’ll say Our Father. “What’s up, kid?” Agger called from the top of the bank.

  “I’m fed up,” Brian said gloomily.

  Men looked around, grinning or laughing. “Are yer ’ungry?” Brian said no, scraped a few half-bricks to reveal a fair-sized noggin of wood. “Sure? There’s some bread and jam in my coat pocket if y’are,” Agger said.

  “No, thanks. I’ve got some snap as well.”

  “What yer fed up for then?” He couldn’t answer. Like the old man often said: Think yourself lucky you’ve got a crust o’ bread in your fist. Then you can tek that sour look off your clock. But Brian couldn’t. “What does your dad do?” Agger wanted to know.

  “He’s out o’ work”—already forgetting despair.

  Agger laughed. “He’s got a lot o’ cumpny.” Agger came on the tips every morning—in time for the first loads at nine—pushing an old carriage-pram, an antique enormous model that may once have housed some spoon-fed Victorian baby and been pushed by a well-trimmed maid. There was no rubber on the wheels; all paint had long since blistered from its sides, and a makeshift piece of piping served for a handle. Another valued possession of Agger’s was a real rake unearthed from a load of brick and tile tippings, an ornate brass-handled tool of the scraper’s trade with which he always expected to pull up some treasure, good reaching under the muck for good, but which he used with relish whether it made him rich or not. Other scrapers envied it: Brian once heard one say: “Lend’s your rake five minutes, Agger. I’ll just get some wood for the fire.” The men around stopped talking, and Agger stayed mute: just looked at the man—a faint touch of contempt at such ignorance of the rules of life—though the blank look was forced on to his face mainly because the request was unexpected, and unanswerable if he was to maintai
n his sharp gipsy-like dignity. The man got up and walked away, beyond the fire’s warmth. “The daft fucker,” Agger said loudly. “What does he tek me for? He wants chasing off the bleddy premises.”

  Agger often referred to the tips as “the premises”—a high-flown name as if “premises” was the one word and only loot he had carried off under his coat from some short term of employment—at being ordered off them himself by a despairing gaffer. “Premises” to Agger was synonymous with some remote platform of life where order might have been created from the confusion within himself, if only he could be respected as king for some qualities he hadn’t got—but wanted because he knew them to exist.

  Winter and summer he wore a black overcoat that reached to his ankles and flapped around his sapling body. On the morning when his weekly gatherings had been sold to the scrap-shop for a few shillings, each deep pocket of his coat held a quart bottle of tea, panniers that steadied the folds of an otherwise voluminous garment. Each morning he coaxed a fire from the abundant surface of the tip, stoked it to a beacon with old oil cloth, tar-paper, and arms of brackenish wood that had laid between the floors and walls of back-to-back houses during generations both of people and of bugs.

  On fine days, Brian noticed, some scrapers worked little, stood talking by the fire, and only ran madly with coats waving when a lorry came; others scraped industriously every minute of the day whether there was a fresh tip or not, working solidified rubble on the off-chance of finding something that might have been missed. Brian belonged to the latter sort, searching the most unpromising loads because hope was a low-burning intoxication that never left him.

  While the damp wind—seemingly foiled by jersey and coat—concentrated on Brian’s face, he forgot it was also reaching into his body. He whistled a tune through a mixture of brick, wood-chippings, and scraps of slate, feeling snatched only when the division between an unreal cotton-wool dreamland and the scratches on his numbed fingers broke down and flooded him with a larger sensation: “snatched”—eyes and face muscles showing what the innermost body felt even though he hadn’t been aware of it, perished through and through, so that a blazing fire would only bring smarting eyes and a skin thicker though not warmer.

  Agger worked nearby, cleverly wrapped up and more impervious to cold because he had been on the tips longer than anyone else—straight from Flanders at twenty, he said. The useless slaughter of employable sinews had crushed his faith in guidance from men “above” him, so that he preferred the tips even when there had been a choice. Sometimes he’d gaze into the quiet glass-like water of the nearby canal and sing to himself—a gay up-and-down tune without words—punctuating his neanderthal quatrains with a handful of stones by aiming one with some viciousness into the water, watching the rings of its impact collide and disappear at the bank before breaking out again into another verse that came from some unexplored part of him. Born of a breaking-point, his loneliness was a brain-flash at the boundary of his earthly stress. Still young-looking, though lacking the jauntiness of youth, perhaps out of weakness he had seen the end too near the beginning, had grafted his body and soul into a long life on the tips even before his youth was finished. The impasse he lived in had compensations, however, was the sort that made friends easily and even gave him a certain power over them.

  Brian broke wood into small pieces and filled his sack, stuffing each bundle far down. “How are yer going to carry it?” Agger asked.

  “On my back.”

  “It’ll be too’ eavy.”

  “I’ll drag it a bit then.” After a pause for scraping, Agger wondered: “Do you sell it?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “How much do you want for that lot?” Brian reckoned up: we’ve got plenty at home. I wain’t mek much if I traipse it from door to door. “A tanner.”

  “I’ll buy it,” Agger said. “I know somebody as wants a bit o’ wood. I’ll gi’ yer the sack back tomorrow.” Brian took the sixpence just as: “Tip,” someone screamed towards a corporation sewer-tank veering for the far side of the plateau. Agger ran quickly and Brian followed, more for sport since his only sack-bag rested by Agger’s pram.

  He scrambled down the precipice to watch the back open above like a round oven door, a foul liquid stink pouring out. Then the body uptilted and a mass of black grate-and-sewer rubbish eased slowly towards the bank, coming out like an enormous sausage, quicker by the second, until it dropped all in a rush and splayed over the grass at the bottom. “Watch your boots,” Agger snouted as he began scraping through it. “This stuff’ll burn ’em off.” He turned to Brian: “Don’t come near this ’eap, nipper. You’ll get fever and die if you do.”

  Brian stood back as half a lavatory bowl cartwheeled down from a lorry-load of house-rammel. “Tek a piss in that, Agger,” the bowler shouted. It settled among petrol drums and Brian amused himself by throwing housebricks at it until both sides caved in. One of the men uncovered a length of army webbing: “Here’s some o’ your equipment from France, Agger”—throwing it like a snake at his feet.

  Agger held it on the end of an inferior rake. “It ain’t mine, mate. I chucked all my equipment in the water on my way back”—put his foot on it and continued scraping. The stench made Brian heave: he ran up the bank holding his nose, and stopped to breathe from fifty yards off.

  At twelve they straggled to the fire for a warm. All swore it looked like rain, some loading their sacks to go home, though Agger and most of the others stayed through the afternoon. Brian took out his bread, and Agger passed him a swig of cold tea. Jack Bird lay back to read a piece of newspaper: “Now’s your chance, Agger,” he said, lighting a lunch-time Woodbine. “What about joinin’ up for this war in Abyssinia?”

  Agger reclined on a heap of shavings. “You on’y join up when they stop the dole and chuck us off these bleeding premises—when there’s nowt left to do but clamb.”

  “They’ll never stop the dole,” Jack Bird said. “It’s more than they dare do.”

  “It wouldn’t bother me, mate,” Agger rejoined, “because there’ll allus be tips, just like there’ll allus be an England. You can bet on that.”

  Brian emptied pebbles from his left boot, shook the sock, and put it on again. Holes were visible, and when he pulled to tuck them under at the toe the gaps ripped wider. He doubled the long tongue of superfluous wool underfoot to keep stones from his flesh, careful at the same time to leave enough sock above the boot-rims to stop them chafing his ankles. It was a successful reshuffle of wool and leather, he found on standing to walk a few yards, bumpy underfoot, but there wasn’t far to go.

  An empty tipscape stretched to the motorworks. Lorries wouldn’t be back till two, and he swivelled his head to view the building at the opposite far end of the tip, where corporation carts unloaded dustbin stuff into furnaces. Its high chimney sent up smoke as thick as an old tree trunk, a forest giant whose foliage flattened and dispersed against low cloud. The red-bricked edifice was far enough off to be slightly sinister in appearance, an impression added to by its name, the Sanitation Department, or Sann-eye, as the scrapers called it. A miniature railway had been laid towards the tip, where men wearing thick gloves worked all day pushing wagons of still hot cinders along its embankment, emptying them into the marsh on either side and forming another tongue of land which would eventually join up with that made by the lorries.

  “Then they’ll make an aerodrome,” Brian speculated, “to bomb old houses like ourn was on Albion Yard.”

  “To flatten the Germans, you mean,” a scrapper put in.

  “They’ll build a factory,” Agger argued. “Or a jail. I’m not sure which they’ll need most by then.”

  Along the high embankment by Sann-eye Brian saw his cousin Bert. Was it? He shaded his eyes and looked again. Yes, it was—walking towards the tippers’ camp—a long way off and coming slowly with hands in pockets, kicking the occasional half-burnt tin into the too-easy goal of waterpools below.

  To meet him meant crossing the swamp by st
epping-stones of grassy islands, and tin drums that had rolled from high levels. Brian’s feet were pushed well forward as he went through spongy grass towards the opposite ash bank, surprised that such a varicoloured collection of mildewed junk could meet in one place: half-submerged bedticks and ’steads, spokeless bicycle wheels without tyres sticking like rising suns out of black oily water, old boxes rotting away, a dinted uninhabited birdcage in front like a buoy at sea. Farther in the canal direction lay a dog-carcass sprawled half out of the water, its scabby grey pelt smoothed down by wind and rain. I’ll bet there’s rats whizzing round here at night, he thought, big rats with red eyes, and maybe cats with green ’uns. The pervading stench was of rotting diesel oil, as if countless foul dish-rags were soaked in suffocation and held under the surface. Patches lay on the surface like maps of gently rounded coasts, making whorls of blue and purple and greyish Inland, beautiful patterns that he now and again pelted with stones to see if they were real enough to stand explosions, but they merely let the stones through, and re-formed to a slightly different design.

  He walked on, excited at swamp-roving, zigzagging from what he sensed were deeper scoops and gullies. His no-man’s-land was small, for he could still hear the sharp-voiced scrapers on the tip behind, and at the same time see Bert almost above him on the grey wall in front, a ragged-arsed sparrow calling out:

  “Don’t come up: I’m coming down. I’ve got some chocolate ’ere”—patting his back pocket, walking to different parts of the slope before deciding which was freest of hot cinders. He waded through a pile of blue-shining burnt-out tins, stepped over ragged clinkers (like a cat on hot bricks, Brian thought), holding into the steep slope in case he should keel over and begin rolling. “Who gen yer the chocolate?”