Sylvia didn’t usually go along, but she’d heard her customers chattering all morning about Piper’s demands. Outrageous, they said. Who does he think he is? Well, who is he, actually? It’s a bit weird, isn’t it, the way he hangs around the school. Has he ever had a girlfriend here, do you know? Sylvia buttoned her lip, but after tea she dropped Billy round at Little Elsa’s place. Elsa’s mum was lying down but the two children didn’t need entertaining when they had their Sylvanian Families to play with.
Down at the chapel they were at it full tilt.
Man 1 (pedantic, soft-spoken, keeps making notes in a little black book) – What we need to ascertain is precisely who took it upon themselves to employ Mr Piper.
Woman 1 (she was the one who always brought the yappy little dog into the café at elevenses time, however often the waitress asked her not to) – You’re not going to be able to pin that on anyone in particular. There wasn’t a phone in town that wasn’t ringing his number.
Woman 2 (Miss Ellie from the school) – I think we have to accept collective responsibility, don’t we?
Woman 3 – I mean really we were all begging him, weren’t we? We’d have paid anything. I had such nightmares last night you wouldn’t believe. Slugs it was, slugs all over.
Man 2 (he had a JCB digger, and he’d been the first man in town to wear an earring) – Remember the frogs, Gina? You dreamt a lot about them, too, didn’t you?
Woman 3 blushes. People look at her curiously. They hadn’t known those two had had a thing. Or was Man 2 just having them on? He was such a cocksure bastard. He’d have liked to have been the one who saw off the rats. He was jealous. You could tell.
The door opened and Humphrey Leach came in. He climbed straight up into the pulpit. No one had ever sat there before. He said ‘Let’s get started’ as though nothing said before he graced them with his presence could possibly be of any account. His thin woman sat down on one of the benches, with the girl beside her. Humphrey had called his daughter Jennifer – a name he considered unexceptionable and fit-for-purpose. She thought of herself as Jasmine. Her friends called her Jazz.
Sylvia was on the bench opposite. She gave Jazz a smile. She’d promised the girl Saturday work shampooing, once exams were over.
Humphrey Leach read out the invoice from top to bottom. He managed to convey incredulity at every word, from the sender’s address ‘The Bus, Elmswood Airfield’ to the directions for payment ‘Cash only’. The bill was meticulously detailed. So much for use of equipment. So much for petrol consumed. So much for subsistence (the two cheese sandwiches). So much (and yes – it was so, so, so very much) for services of expert pest-controller, as charged by the hour @ a rate that made most of those present assume they must have misheard.
Sylvia (silently to herself) – He’ll never get that. What’s he playing at?
Man 1 – We have been debating, Mr Leach, should this be viewed as a charge on the town as a collective entity?
Humphrey Leach – You bet your life it should. You’re not suggesting I should pay it, are you?
Nobody had been suggesting that, not for one moment. But now they thought, Well you could, couldn’t you? And none of the rest of us can.
They liked Piper on the whole. They thought he was good with the kiddies, and no, no one thought there was anything weird about the way a single man in his thirties liked having them around. Or if anyone did wonder about it they weren’t saying so yet.
Man 3 – There’s a lot of damage to be made good. And I’d say we ought to get the sewers sluiced through with DDT.
More voices –
Every single car-tyre. Every car parked in town. They ate the lot.
Those trees. We planted them for the Jubilee. My mum … she was ninety then … she dug the first hole.
She was a fine lady, your mum. Used to make the best lemon curd.
I’ve always liked the Mikado.
It wasn’t the Mikado, Dad, it was that other one.
Did you see how they went at the veg outside Mr Bailey’s? Not a leaf left. Not a stalk.
There’s going to be quite a few have to shut up shop.
And no one to pay compensation.
Did he say conversation.
No, darling. Compensation.
Woman 3 (she has recovered her composure) – I thought he was doing it as a favour. I mean being neighbourly. You know. Because he was the one who knew what to do. Like you’d do, you know, if there was a fire or something. You wouldn’t ask for money after, would you.
Man 2 (he drinks with Piper sometimes – not that Piper comes to the pub much) – That’s a hell of a lot of equipment he’s got. I mean it’s not just turning on a hose, is it?
Man 3 (he’s a reliable brickie. There’s contractors from Woodbridge to Beccles who call on him when they’ve got a lot of work on) – And it’s not like he is a neighbour, really, is it? I mean he’s not from here.
Medley of voices –
Not far off. His dad had the garage in Wangford.
No, that was Porter, wasn’t it?
Bob Porter. That man could whistle any tune in the hymnbook.
Never went to church though, did he?
Wouldn’t have wanted God looking into his conscience, I reckon. He was never short of a pheasant or two for his dinner, was he?
Could fix a trap as neat as he could fix a carburettor.
Anyway …
But Piper, he wasn’t anything to do with old Bob Porter.
Where’s he from then?
Been around for years, hasn’t he? I remember him with all the other lads kicking a ball about down the water-meadows.
He wasn’t at the school though, was he?
Would have been about my age. No, he wasn’t there.
He doesn’t come to the pub much.
It’d give you the shivers a bit, wouldn’t it, thinking of all that poison he handles.
Was he evacuated or something? Like in the war.
I don’t know any Pipers. It’s not a Suffolk-sounding name.
Not sure it’s his surname even. It could be, like, a nickname sort of thing.
I mean. He can’t have just dropped from the sky,
And yet, for all anybody knew, it seemed as though he had.
There were eight of the littleys from year two sitting on the top deck of Piper’s bus. They liked to pretend the bus was going somewhere. As they sat down, their jelly-shoes swinging and the prickly stuff of the seats chafing their dimpled thighs, Piper said, ‘So where are we off to today?’
Often they said ‘Seaside!’ Sometimes they said ‘Timbuctoo’. Sometimes they said ‘Fairyland!’ This time they said, ‘Into the mountain.’ ‘Not yet,’ said Piper, ‘We’ll only go there if the worst comes to the worst. Would Over-the-Rainbow do you?’ and he got out his rainbow banner and hung it from the ceiling and they all squealed and giggled and when he’d given out the pink wafer biscuits they settled down to cutting mouse shapes out of fuzzy felt.
Piper sat on his bed and started to clean his saxophone.
‘Piper,’ said tiny Elsa. ‘Will you be playing with my daddy at the Big Gig?’
‘I haven’t decided yet,’ he said. ‘That depends.’
Miss Ellie asked Jennifer Leach to come along with her to pick up the littleys. She wanted to have a word with the girl but she didn’t want to make it sound too important so she just said, ‘I’m going Wenhaston way. Anyone want a lift home?’ She knew Jazz was the only one in the class who lived in that direction.
In the minibus she was trying out openings in her head … ‘So, Jennifer, how do you feel about boarding school? … Jennifer, if you’d like me to have a word with your father … Jennifer, it’s not really for me to say, but I wondered … Jennifer, I know you’re fully capable of passing the entrance exam, but …’
She couldn’t seem to get started on
it. She was feeling too angry with the girl’s father to be tactful. She decided she’d better leave it for now. They got to the castle gate and she turned to her, and said, ‘Here you are then,’ but Jennifer looked upset, and said, ‘Can’t I come to the airfield with you?’ and Miss Ellie said, ‘Sure. Of course. If you’re not expected at home yet. Why not.’ And then they did have a talk, but it wasn’t about Jennifer’s secondary school choices. It was about Piper.
When they got to the bus Piper had got the babies lined up with their backs turned. They each had a long tail made of string, and cardboard ears fixed to their heads with stretchy hairbands. They looked weird. When the minibus came to a halt they all turned round – they had whiskers painted onto their cheeks – and they began to sing.
‘run after the farmer’s wife …’
Shrill little voices. Miss Ellie was still clambering down from the driver’s seat – she had a touch of sciatica – when Jazz blurted out, ‘My dad says the town can’t pay you.’
‘… carving knife …’
‘He says you’ve got no sense of civic responsibility. He says you’re creepy.’
‘… see such a thing in your life …’
Miss Ellie said, ‘Hush, Jennifer, we agreed didn’t we …’ but Jazz, who’d been so grown up and self-possessed in the minibus, was sobbing and sobbing and Piper knelt down and held his arms out and she ran and hugged him, and all the little mice came and clung on around her so that it looked as though Piper’s head was sticking out of the top of a child-mountain, and he patted Jazz’s back, and said, ‘That’s what your dad, says, is it? And I guess no one put a hand up to contradict?’
He looked very hard at Miss Ellie as he said it and she looked away and began plaiting the woollen strings of her cardigan.
Piper was quiet for a while. Then he pulled his mouth into a blowing shape, as though he was whistling without sound, and he said to the musical mice, ‘Come on, kiddywinks, let’s see if we can make Jennifer laugh,’ and they all began to run around her on all fours, with their bottoms in the air and their string tails switching, and they wrinkled up their noses and showed their little teeth and went squeak squeak squeak until Jazz let go of Piper. Then he said, to her and to Elsa and to all of them, ‘I think … perhaps … in view of what Jennifer’s father says … in that case … after all … I will play tomorrow,’ and they all shouted out ‘Hooray!’
The town’s main car park was an amorphous space between the Thoroughfare and the river. There were lines on the tarmac to show you how to park in neat rows, but no one paid attention to them. It was a place of dustbins and abandoned bicycles, and when the wind blew the plastic bottles rolled back and forth, as though searching for an exit. When the bright red double-decker bus trundled in it was as though a light had been switched on on a dreary evening, or as though some enormous gaudy beast had slunk into town.
‘I didn’t know that thing could still move,’ said Elsa’s dad, as he dropped her off at her mum’s house. Elsa’s mum was terribly thin now, with raw red patches on her face and hands, but she still kept saying she could cope. He didn’t know how he was ever going to persuade her to let him have the girly more often. She looked vague. She said, ‘Piper’s a pretty good mechanic. Everyone says.’
They stood together and stared as the bus reversed neatly into a space by the entrance. They both thought about the row they’d had the summer before last when their house and garden were full of ants, and when he thought she was seeing too much of the exterminator. They’d said awful words. And afterwards, although it had been a ridiculous fuss about nothing, they couldn’t settle back down together again, not with those words clawing at their minds. Now she knew he’d like to help more, he was a good man, but she couldn’t risk letting him see her when she was all undone by pain and terror, not now she couldn’t trust his love.
Piper was wearing his funny trousers. They’d become his trademark. He crossed the road and walked into the gardens by the river, with his saxophone slung over his shoulder. His hair was glossy and slicked up in a quiff, and the toes of his pony-hide boots were pointed and long. He didn’t stare about at the stripy tents where beaded headbands and dream-catchers were sold, at the food-stalls, or at the crowds of townspeople. He bought a pint and settled down at a little metal table outside the beer tent. When people he knew walked past – and he knew most people – he greeted them by lifting his eyebrows and giving a slight nod. No one sat down beside him, although there was an extra plastic chair.
When the Blondie cover band started playing, all the women crammed into the big tent and put their arms up and rocked from side to side like wobbly-men. There were a lot of children about, and the fathers sat with them on their laps, or bought them hot dogs. The small ones darted in and out of the light like midges, tiny Elsa tagging along. Grandparents brought out their folding chairs and thermoses and sat with their backs to the bands.
Jazz came in with some other big girls, all of them dressed alike in sequined vests and tight white jeans. She was wearing lipstick. She looked at Piper shyly, and walked on by.
Sylvia would have sat with Piper. She’d been wanting to see him, but Billy had a really high temperature. She kept dialling the locum but the woman just said Paracetamol, keep him warm, plenty of fluids, as though Sylvia didn’t already know all that. It was insulting. She wasn’t going to get any help. All she could do was be with him.
She lay on the big bed – Billy’d begged to sleep with her – and stared at the ceiling listening to the odd inhuman sound of his snoring and smelling the illness on his breath. It wasn’t that the music was particularly good, but the sound of a party from which one has been excluded is desolating. Sylvia began to cry quietly, because she was frightened for Billy, and because she thought, That’s it. Nothing new is ever going to happen to me again. She went to sleep, and snored too. She missed the whole drama. When she woke the next morning with her clothes still on, she thought – for the first and only time – How lucky I am that my precious baby’s deaf.
Afterwards no one could quite remember how it happened that Piper, who wasn’t listed on the programme, got to be playing on the main stage. He was just suddenly there, flapping his left hand imperiously at the sound-man. That was Johnny from the garage: when he didn’t get enough GCSEs for college, Piper had taught him all about music tech in exchange for a summer’s worth of fuel and maintenance. The women tugged their tops down and their trousers up and laughed at each other for no reason but that dancing made them feel like giddy girls again, and when Piper launched into the riff, some of the men came out of the beer tent, and put their bottles down, and paired off and began to jive.
The band whose set had been interrupted looked nonplussed for a bar or two and then the drummer picked up the beat and the lead guitarist began to do the duck-walk. (How many hours, how many hundreds and hundreds of hours, it seemed like, had he spent practising it in front of his mother’s floor-length mirror.)
The girl in the song had inordinate appetites and seven-league boots. Her allure was irresistible. She was a juvenile, sweet silly sixteen, but she had the adults gyrating around her like hungry rodents. Everybody had heard about Chuck Berry’s transgressions. But everybody, for now at least, was swaying to his fable of the greedy teenaged nymphet.
Piper was rocking forth and back like the figurehead of a ship in a deeply furrowed sea. His hair was a plumed copper helmet. His boot-heels rapped on the flimsy staging. His sax glittered and so did his sharp pale eyes. By the end of ‘Maybellene’ the beer tent was empty. He swung the sexes in together with a medley of the songs they’d courted to. He’d laid the sax down gently and taken the mike. The singer stripped his vest off, revealing a chest all over mapped in blue, and began to do back-flips.
Big men were finding frail little wives, and tremendously breasted women were laying hands on whippety-thin husbands, and couples who hadn’t really given each other a thought in years were mouthing declarations of
passion along with Piper’s wheedling baritone. They wanted, they crooned, to hold each other’s hands. They yearned for each other eight days a week. The women put their forearms on the men’s shoulders and let hands coarsened by washing-up and potato-scrubbing dangle while they pressed their soft well-used bellies to their husbands’ belt-buckles.
The two young women from Franklin’s were up on the stage harmonising with Piper. They both sang in the choir, Sundays, but, Saturday nights, they sang folk-songs a cappella, their high voices uncanny and penetrating.
Down on the trampled turf of the dance-floor the men looked sheepish, and then lascivious, and buried their faces in their women’s necks and the women let their eyelids droop, so that they didn’t see how the children had come creeping out of shrubberies where bushes formed caves, and from dens behind log-piles and from secret places down by the river where the bank did a jink and left exposed a pebbled beach big enough for two boys to lie smoking or, on this night, slyly, shyly running their fingers through each other’s hair because there was something narcotic and bewitching about the way Piper sang.
The children crept together. They didn’t approach the stage, where their parents were leaning propped against each other, sustained by sentimentality and lust and a rapturous feeling that this Piper, for all that preposterous demand he’d made, was … well, what was he … a man who could make a party go, a pretty decent singer when all’s said and done, a bit special.
The Polish builders (or were they Romanian? Nobody knew) who lived in the mildewed caravan on the airfield, next to Piper, were up on stage too now, one with a harmonica, the other with a keyboard so tiny he could tuck it under his arm. Black-nails stepped forward to take the mike. Piper let her. He picked up the sax again and made it hum softly as she belted out ‘White Rabbit’.
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