A Little, Aloud

by Angela Macmillan

  ‘All the better,’ said Donald, turning back to his paper.

  Why was it better? Did they want him to meet the Pigman?

  Slowly, wondering why his feet and legs didn’t refuse to move, Eric went through into the kitchen. ‘There it is,’ his mother said, pointing to a brown-paper carrier full of potato-peelings and scraps.

  He took it up and opened the back door. If he was quick, and darted along to the bucket at once, he would be able to lift the lid, throw the stuff in quickly, and be back in the house in about the time it took to count to ten.

  One – two – three – four – five – six. He stopped. The bucket wasn’t there.

  It had gone. Eric peered round, but the light, though faint, was not as faint as that. He could see that the bucket was already gone. The Pig-man had already been.

  Seven – eight – nine – ten, his steps were joyous and light. Back in the house, where it was warm and bright and his train was waiting.

  ‘The Pig-man’s gone, Mum. The bucket’s not there.’

  She frowned, hands deep in the pudding-basin. ‘Oh, yes, I do believe I heard him. But it was only a moment ago. Yes, it was just before I called you, darling. It must have been that that made me think of it.’

  ‘Yes?’ he said politely, putting down the carrier.

  ‘So if you nip along, dear, you can easily catch him up. And I do want that stuff out of the way.’

  ‘Catch him up?’ he asked, standing still in the doorway.

  ‘Yes, dear, catch him up,’ she answered rather sharply (the Efficient Young Mother knows when to be Firm). ‘He can’t possibly be more than a very short way down the road.’

  Before she had finished Eric was outside the door and running. This was a technique he knew. It was the same as getting into icy-cold water. If it was the end, if the Pig-man seized him by the hand and dragged him off to his hut, well, so much the worse. Swinging the paper carrier in his hand, he ran fast through the dusk.

  The back view of the Pig-man was much as he had expected it to be. A slow, rather lurching gait, hunched shoulders, an old hat crushed down on his head (to hide his ears?), and the pail in his hand. Plod, plod, as if he were tired. Perhaps this was just a ruse, though; probably he could pounce quickly enough when his wicked little eyes saw a nice tasty little boy or something . . . did the Pig-man eat birds? Or cats?

  Eric stopped. He opened his mouth to call to the Pig-man, but the first time he tried nothing came out except a small rasping squeak. His heart was banging like fireworks going off. He could hardly hear anything.

  ‘Mr Pig-man!’ he called, and this time the words came out clear and rather high.

  The jogging old figure stopped, turned, and looked at him. Eric could not see properly from where he stood. But he had to see. Everything, even his fear, sank and drowned in the raging tide of his curiosity. He moved forward. With each step he saw more clearly. The Pig-man was just an ordinary old man.

  ‘Hello, sonny. Got some stuff here for the old grunters?’

  Eric nodded, mutely, and held out his offering. What old grunters? What did he mean?

  The Pig-man put down his bucket. He had ordinary hands, ordinary arms. He took the lid off. Eric held out the paper carrier, and the Pig-man’s hand actually touched his own for a second. A flood of gratitude rose up inside him. The Pigman tipped the scraps into the bucket and handed the carrier back.

  ‘Thanks, sonny,’ he said.

  ‘Who’s it for?’ Eric asked, with another rush of articulateness. His voice seemed to have a life of its own.

  The Pig-man straightened up, puzzled. Then he laughed, in a gurgling sort of way, but not like a pig at all.

  ‘Arh Aarh Harh Harh,’ the Pig-man went. ‘Not for me, if that’s whatcher mean, arh harh.’

  He put the lid back on the bucket. ‘It’s for the old grunters,’ he said. ‘The old porkers. Just what they likes. Only not fruit skins. I leaves a note sometimes, about what not to put in. Never fruit skins. It gives ’em the belly-ache.’

  He was called the Pig-man because he had some pigs that he looked after.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Eric. ‘Good night.’ He ran back towards the house, hearing the Pig-man, the ordinary old man, the ordinary, usual, normal old man, say in his just ordinary old man’s voice, ‘Good night, sonny.’

  So that was how you did it. You just went straight ahead, not worrying about this or that.

  Like getting into cold water. You just did it.

  He slowed down as he got to the gate. For instance, if there was a question that you wanted to know the answer to, and you always just felt like you couldn’t ask, the thing to do was to ask. Just straight out, like going up to the Pig-man. Difficult things, troubles, questions, you just treated them like the Pigman.

  So that was it!

  The warm light shone through the crack of the door. He opened it and went in. His mother was standing at the table, her hands still working the cake mixture about. She would let him scrape out the basin, and the spoon – he would ask for the spoon, too. But not straight away. There was a more important thing first.

  He put the paper carrier down and went straight up to her. ‘Mum,’ he said. ‘Why can’t Dad be with us even if Donald is here? I mean, why can’t he live with us as well as Donald?’

  His mother turned and went to the sink. She put the tap on and held her hands under it. ‘Darling,’ she called.

  ‘Yes?’ came Donald’s voice.

  ‘D’you know what he’s just said?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He’s just asked . . .’ She turned the tap off and dried her hands, not looking at Eric. ‘He wants to know why we can’t have Jack to live with us.’

  There was a silence, then Donald said, quietly, so that his voice only just reached Eric’s ears, ‘That’s a hard one.’

  ‘You can scrape out the basin,’ his mother said to Eric. She lifted him up and kissed him. Then she rubbed her cheek along his, leaving a wet smear. ‘Poor little Ekky,’ she said in a funny voice.

  She put him down and he began to scrape out the pudding-basin, certain at least of one thing, that grown-ups were mad and silly and he hated them, all, all, all.

  FOR A FIVE-YEAR-OLD

  Fleur Adcock

  A snail is climbing up the window-sill

  into your room, after a night of rain.

  You call me in to see, and I explain

  that it would be unkind to leave it there:

  it might crawl to the floor; we must take care

  that no one squashes it. You understand,

  and carry it outside, with careful hand,

  to eat a daffodil.

  I see, then, that a kind of faith prevails:

  your gentleness is moulded still by words

  from me, who have trapped mice and shot wild birds,

  from me, who drowned your kittens, who betrayed

  four closest relatives, and who purveyed

  the harshest kind of truth to many another.

  But that is how things are: I am your mother,

  and we are kind to snails.

  READING NOTES

  A young mothers’ group was interested in the line ‘Why did grown ups do everything in such a mad, silly way’, as it suggests there might be lessons to be learnt from looking at a situation from the opposite point of view. Sometimes the gulf of understanding between the world of childhood and the adult world appears too wide to cross. On the other hand, readers have been interested in the way in which the lines between adult and childish behaviour are blurred in this story and have talked about the imaginative way that Ekky sees things in comparison to his mother. What will her failure to answer his final question do to the boy, and to their future relationship? How much damage do we cause through failure of imaginative sympathy?

  People have wanted to talk about the feeling of closeness between mother and child in the poem despite the fact of the divide between innocence and experience. ‘I see, then that a kind of faith prevai
ls’ has proved to be an important line in this train of thought. How does the phrase ‘that is how things are’ make you feel?

  Love’s Lonely Offices

  ALL THE YEARS OF HER LIFE

  Morley Callaghan

  (approximate reading time 14 minutes)

  They were closing the drugstore, and Alfred Higgins, who had just taken off his white jacket, was putting on his coat and getting ready to go home. The little gray-haired man, Sam Carr, who owned the drugstore, was bending down behind the cash register, and when Alfred Higgins passed him, he looked up and said softly, ‘Just a moment, Alfred. One moment before you go.’

  The soft, confident, quiet way in which Sam Carr spoke made Alfred start to button his coat nervously. He felt sure his face was white. Sam Carr usually said, ‘Good night,’ brusquely, without looking up. In the six months he had been working in the drugstore Alfred had never heard his employer speak softly like that. His heart began to beat so loud it was hard for him to get his breath. ‘What is it, Mr Carr?’ he asked.

  ‘Maybe you’d be good enough to take a few things out of your pocket and leave them here before you go,’ Sam Carr said.

  ‘What things? What are you talking about?’

  ‘You’ve got a compact and a lipstick and at least two tubes of toothpaste in your pockets, Alfred.’

  ‘What do you mean? Do you think I’m crazy?’ Alfred blustered. His face got red and he knew he looked fierce with indignation. But Sam Carr, standing by the door with his blue eyes shining brightly behind his glasses and his lips moving underneath his gray moustache, only nodded his head a few times, and then Alfred grew very frightened and he didn’t know what to say. Slowly he raised his hand and dipped it into his pocket, and with his eyes never meeting Sam Carr’s eyes, he took out a blue compact and two tubes of toothpaste and a lipstick, and he laid them one by one on the counter.

  ‘Petty thieving, eh, Alfred?’ Sam Carr said. ‘And maybe you’d be good enough to tell me how long this has been going on.’

  ‘This is the first time I ever took anything.’

  ‘So now you think you’ll tell me a lie, eh? What kind of a sap do I look like, huh? I don’t know what goes on in my own store, eh? I tell you you’ve been doing this pretty steady,’ Sam Carr said as he went over and stood behind the cash register.

  Ever since Alfred had left school he had been getting into trouble wherever he worked. He lived at home with his mother and his father, who was a printer. His two older brothers were married and his sister had got married last year, and it would have been all right for his parents now if Alfred had only been able to keep a job.

  While Sam Carr smiled and stroked the side of his face very delicately with the tips of his fingers, Alfred began to feel that familiar terror growing in him that had been in him every time he had got into such trouble.

  ‘I liked you,’ Sam Carr was saying. ‘I liked you and would have trusted you, and now look what I got to do.’ While Alfred watched with his alert, frightened blue eyes, Sam Carr drummed with his fingers on the counter. ‘I don’t like to call a cop in point-blank,’ he was saying as he looked very worried. ‘You’re a fool, and maybe I should call your father and tell him you’re a fool. Maybe I should let them know I’m going to have you locked up.’

  ‘My father’s not at home. He’s a printer. He works nights,’ Alfred said.

  ‘Who’s at home?’

  ‘My mother, I guess.’

  ‘Then we’ll see what she says.’ Sam Carr went to the phone and dialed the number. Alfred was not so much ashamed, but there was that deep fright growing in him, and he blurted out arrogantly, like a strong, full-grown man, ‘Just a minute. You don’t need to draw anybody else in. You don’t need to tell her.’ He wanted to sound like a swaggering, big guy who could look after himself, yet the old, childish hope was in him, the longing that someone at home would come and help him. ‘Yeah, that’s right, he’s in trouble,’ Mr Carr was saying. ‘Yeah, your boy works for me. You’d better come down in a hurry.’ And when he was finished Mr Carr went over to the door and looked out at the street and watched the people passing in the late summer night. ‘I’ll keep my eye out for a cop,’ was all he said.

  Alfred knew how his mother would come rushing in; she would rush in with her eyes blazing, or maybe she would be crying, and she would push him away when he tried to talk to her, and make him feel her dreadful contempt; yet he longed that she might come before Mr Carr saw the cop on the beat passing the door.

  While they waited – and it seemed a long time – they did not speak, and when at last they heard someone tapping on the closed door, Mr Carr, turning the latch, said crisply, ‘Come in, Mrs Higgins.’ He looked hard-faced and stern.

  Mrs Higgins must have been going to bed when he telephoned, for her hair was tucked in loosely under her hat, and her hand at her throat held her light coat tight across her chest so her dress would not show. She came in, large and plump, with a little smile on her friendly face. Most of the store lights had been turned out and at first she did not see Alfred, who was standing in the shadow at the end of the counter. Yet as soon as she saw him she did not look as Alfred thought she would look: she smiled, her blue eyes never wavered, and with a calmness and dignity that made them forget that her clothes seemed to have been thrown on her, she put out her hand to Mr Carr and said politely, ‘I’m Mrs Higgins. I’m Alfred’s mother.’

  Mr Carr was a bit embarrassed by her lack of terror and her simplicity, and he hardly knew what to say to her, so she asked, ‘Is Alfred in trouble?’

  ‘He is. He’s been taking things from the store. I caught him red-handed. Little things like compacts and toothpaste and lipsticks. Stuff he can sell easily,’ the proprietor said.

  As she listened Mrs Higgins looked at Alfred sometimes and nodded her head sadly, and when Sam Carr had finished she said gravely, ‘Is it so, Alfred?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why have you been doing it?’

  ‘I been spending money, I guess.’

  ‘On what?’

  ‘Going around with the guys, I guess,’ Alfred said.

  Mrs Higgins put out her hand and touched Sam Carr’s arm with an understanding gentleness, and speaking as though afraid of disturbing him, she said, ‘If you would only listen to me before doing anything.’ Her simple earnestness made her shy; her humility made her falter and look away, but in a moment she was smiling gravely again, and she said with a kind of patient dignity, ‘What did you intend to do, Mr Carr?’

  ‘I was going to get a cop. That’s what I ought to do.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so. It’s not for me to say, because he’s my son. Yet I sometimes think a little good advice is the best thing for a boy when he’s at a certain period in his life,’ she said.

  Alfred couldn’t understand his mother’s quiet composure, for if they had been at home and someone had suggested that he was going to be arrested, he knew she would be in a rage and would cry out against him. Yet now she was standing there with that gentle, pleading smile on her face, saying, ‘I wonder if you don’t think it would be better just to let him come home with me. He looks a big fellow, doesn’t he? It takes some of them a long time to get any sense,’ and they both stared at Alfred, who shifted away with a bit of light shining for a moment on his thin face and the tiny pimples over his cheekbone.

  But even while he was turning away uneasily Alfred was realizing that Mr Carr had become aware that his mother was really a fine woman; he knew that Sam Carr was puzzled by his mother, as if he had expected her to come in and plead with him tearfully, and instead he was being made to feel a bit ashamed by her vast tolerance. While there was only the sound of the mother’s soft, assured voice in the store, Mr Carr began to nod his head encouragingly at her. Without being alarmed, while being just large and still and simple and hopeful, she was becoming dominant there in the dimly lit store. ‘Of course, I don’t want to be harsh,’ Mr Carr was saying. ‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll just fire him
and let it go at that. How’s that?’ and he got up and shook hands with Mrs Higgins, bowing low to her in deep respect.

  There was such warmth and gratitude in the way she said, ‘I’ll never forget your kindness,’ that Mr Carr began to feel warm and genial himself.

  ‘Sorry we had to meet this way,’ he said. ‘But I’m glad I got in touch with you. Just wanted to do the right thing, that’s all,’ he said.

  ‘It’s better to meet like this than never, isn’t it?’ she said. Suddenly they clasped hands as if they liked each other, as if they had known each other a long time. ‘Good night, sir,’ she said.

  ‘Good night, Mrs Higgins. I’m truly sorry,’ he said.

  The mother and son walked along the street together, and the mother was taking a long, firm stride as she looked ahead with her stern face full of worry. Alfred was afraid to speak to her, he was afraid of the silence that was between them, so he only looked ahead too, for the excitement and relief was still pretty strong in him; but in a little while, going along like that in silence made him terribly aware of the strength and the sternness in her; he began to wonder what she was thinking of as she stared ahead so grimly; she seemed to have forgotten that he walked beside her; so when they were passing under the Sixth Avenue elevated and the rumble of the train seemed to break the silence, he said in his old, blustering way, ‘Thank God it turned out like that. I certainly won’t get in a jam like that again.’

  ‘Be quiet. Don’t speak to me. You’ve disgraced me again and again,’ she said bitterly.

  ‘That’s the last time. That’s all I’m saying.’

  ‘Have the decency to be quiet,’ she snapped. They kept on their way, looking straight ahead.

  When they were at home and his mother took off her coat, Alfred saw that she was really only half-dressed, and she made him feel afraid again when she said, without even looking at him, ‘You’re a bad lot. God forgive you. It’s one thing after another and always has been. Why do you stand there stupidly? Go to bed, why don’t you?’ When he was going, she said, ‘I’m going to make myself a cup of tea. Mind, now, not a word about tonight to your father.’