Birthday: A Novel (The Seaton Novels)

by Alan Sillitoe

  When Jenny and Brian stopped going out together, somebody else put a bun in her oven, and her father wasn’t big enough, or fat enough, or maybe even fit enough, or not caring enough, or perhaps she kept it from him until it was too late (he wouldn’t put it past her) but that was no excuse for not chasing the bastard up and kicking the guts out of him. More likely Jenny hadn’t let on as to who the man was, luckily for him, because her father was, after all, a dab hand with pick and shovel at the coal seam.

  Brian would never have got her preggers, and that was a fact, because he cared about such things, and hadn’t fancied living out his time in a Nottingham council house. He got away because he had the brains to do it, and the guts to live for years in a London bedsitter before earning any money. I sometimes wonder though whether he wouldn’t have been happier staying where he had been brought up.

  Basford Crossing as he had known it was a far-off country, and he sometimes found it hard to decide whether he’d actually lived there, or had dreamed it in his working time at the machine, as if lost in the early mist of a summer’s day that lasted till night time, clearing only at moments to let him see the old buildings and crossing gates.

  Reality behind the eyes showed scenery almost too good to be true, yet the ruins of the place were now like those of Pompeii in Italy he had seen on a coach tour with Avril, wrecked, flyblown, empty, resentful at being abandoned, a sudden pull out from the prime of life, as if the RAF had done a thorough job back in the war.

  He hadn’t seen the area for years and then, passing through one day on his way to somewhere else, he noted that death had already taken place, as if a gigantic fist had picked up the locality and given it a good pasting, people fleeing in all directions as they must have done from Pompeii when fire and ash came down, while those who survived the upshake were rattled to the core, had only enough spirit to pick up their tranklements and form their columns of refugees.

  Nowadays there was nobody, no footsteps, no laughter, no joshing voices, no shrieking kids to wave the next train through. A few people walking by in a hurry looked as shifty and guilty as if they’d been responsible for the area getting ruined. Cars going somewhere else were driven by those who in the old days would have walked or taken a tram, and he supposed they hated to be reminded of the place because they’d had no car or television or fridge or washing machine or a mobile phone, maybe only a wireless or radiogram. Far from being happy with all they’d got now, they were dead from the neck up.

  He recalled the girls he had taken to the fields around Top Valley Farm, an area now covered with houses and old folks’ bungalows, in one of which his mother had lived. The girls were fourteen or fifteen (maybe younger: they didn’t tell him and he didn’t ask) but when snuggled up to in a hedge bottom they melted softly into the warmth of each other’s bodies, hardly knowing it would end in going all the way, unable to tell at that age the difference between spunk and cuckoo spit as they strolled lovingly hand in hand back to Basford Crossing. He knew where in the bedroom Brian hid french letters, and helped himself, until Brian twigged some were missing and told him to get his own, since he was already bringing in money from the bike factory.

  He supposed all the girls he had shagged – good looking, passionate, and knowing what they wanted – had got married and had kids, some of them divorced and living as single mothers in flats provided by the council – and good luck to them. Nearly everybody he knew had been divorced, as had he, after Doreen put the kibosh on their ten-year marriage.

  He got home from the factory, knackered after an eight-hour stint, the sweat barely dried, and she came out with it before he was halfway through the doorway: ‘I’m leaving you. I’ve had enough. I can’t stand any more. The life we lead is no good. I’m too fed up for it to go on.’

  Of what she was fed up he didn’t know, because at times he felt a lot more fed up than she could ever know about. He was fed up now, and had been for a long time, though why she suddenly wanted her life to change he couldn’t think, blinded by her unexpected decision. She hadn’t caught him with another woman, because he worked too hard to find time chasing them, much as he might like to.

  But now that she’d spoken he knew that he wanted to split up as well, and though he couldn’t come out with what enough was, it certainly seemed to be so when they went on to argue about why they hadn’t said enough was enough years ago, and wondered why they’d ever got married.

  Smoking a cigarette, he stood by the door, watching her face thinned by the firmness of her stand, though the colour was coming back because she had found it easier to tell him than expected, and to get his agreement. It felt as if the boat was sinking under him, water already soaking his boots, on her saying she needed three days to move out so as to have time to make arrangements and clear things up.

  She’d been thinking about it, and that was a fact, while his fantasies at the machine hadn’t included this one. Maybe she had a boyfriend, a bit of you know what going on with a neighbour or the window-cleaner, but if so he had no interest in finding out. He wasn’t one for trying to save a marriage, deciding to get shut of her and the house as soon as possible in case she changed her mind. ‘You can have all the time you like to pack up,’ he said, unwilling to put up with three days of hatred, ‘because I’ll be going instead. Keep everything. I don’t want any of it.’

  At the beginning of their marriage they had shared a house with her deaf mother, and her boyfriend from India whom they always called Chumley, a middle-aged man who spoke so little it was impossible to tell what was in his mind, which was all right as far as Arthur was concerned because Mrs Greatton loved him, and had no time to interfere with him and Doreen.

  ‘You don’t say a word to Chumley,’ Doreen said to him more than once. ‘He’s only human, you know. He wouldn’t mind if you said hello now and again.’

  ‘When did you notice the last time he opened his mouth and said hello to me?’

  ‘It’s the way you look at him. I can tell you don’t like him.’

  ‘It ain’t true. We don’t have anything in common to talk about. I offered him a fag the other day but he refused it because he didn’t smoke my sort. He didn’t even want to try it. And when I asked him out to the pub he said he didn’t drink alcohol. What can you do with a bloke like that?’

  ‘You’re only making excuses,’ she said. ‘You’re lying like you’ve always done.’

  Then one day Chumley packed his bags (one of which, Arthur joked, must be full of hard earned money) and told them with a smile that put life into his face for the first time, that he was going to Wolverhampton. Tears and ructions from Doreen’s mother, but he went on smiling and backed out of the door, a taxi waiting on the crescent.

  Arthur and Doreen got a council house not long afterwards, and when they called on Mrs Greatton one day found her dead at the kitchen table, a cup of cold Ovaltine by her hand. From then on Doreen said that her mother had died of a broken heart because of Chumley having gone due to Arthur being so rotten. ‘He couldn’t stand it any more.’

  Well, he didn’t know about that. He had respected Chumley for never missing a day in the factory, and assumed he had only slung his hook to get married to one of his own people. Mrs Greatton knew it, and if she had died of a broken heart that was her lookout. Nobody could have done anything about it, though he was sorry, all the same.

  And now the split had come for them as well, though maybe she was getting rid of him before he could do the same to her. He slept on the couch, and in the morning collected money due to him from the factory, then walked out of the house with two suitcases and a kitbag, and the clothes on his back. After a few days at his mother’s he rented a room in a house owned by a Polish man, as far from Doreen as he could get yet still in the same city.

  He hadn’t seen her since, nor wanted to, and if he refused to blame her for the break-up it was only because he had no intention of blaming himself. But whenever he thought of her, which was more often than he cared to, he saw that
she hadn’t been happy, and that neither had he much of the time, but it was no crime to be unhappy, in fact lucky that both had been because when the break came there was a better chance of improvement for both. His only pain was that letters to Melanie and Harold went unanswered, and his feelings were not friendly on knowing Doreen had poisoned his children against him. Life was long, and there was nothing to do but endure, though the virulent wound from not seeing his son and daughter closed slowly.

  Twenty years later Melanie recognized him on the street. He wondered who this nice young woman with the big smile was, reaching for his arm. She was married, with two kids, and was as glad as all get out to see him. ‘Hello, dad! Fancy meeting you. I didn’t think you were living in Nottingham anymore.’

  He stood, near to tears but holding back all sign while they talked in a café. The kids wanted Melanie to take them home, but she encouraged them to kiss Arthur and call him grandad, trying mischievously to embarrass him, but he enjoyed it, kissed them back and gave each a pound coin. Doreen had been married again, Melanie told him, but the husband died last year, and she was running a pub with a woman in Bedford.

  Melanie and her husband Barry were buying a house on a new estate less than a mile from Arthur and Avril. Barry was a cabinet-maker never out of work, and when they called with the two kids he wanted Arthur to tell him what it had been like living in the sixties. Arthur didn’t think the decade had been anything special, yet gave a lively account of his non-attendance at a Beatles concert, and did his best to dredge up whatever else might interest his new found son-in-law.

  Harold, a year older than Melanie, had taken the trouble to locate Arthur when he was twenty-one, calling to say that Doreen had kicked him out, and he hadn’t a penny to his name. As tall as Arthur, he stood dead scruffy in sweatshirt and jeans, wore a ponytail, and sported an earring, only a parrot missing to complete the appearance of a pirate. Arthur gave him a fiver, and said he could have another after he had cleaned himself up and found a job – when of course he wouldn’t need it, as Harold bitingly reminded him.

  Arthur and Avril married not long after their divorces came through. At the same time he also found a better job and, standing at his bench one day, he couldn’t help thinking that the death of Doreen’s second husband had served her right. He knew it to be unjust, because sooner or later something gets its claws into you or, even worse, he was to realize years afterwards, into the person you love most, though Avril between bouts of chemotherapy carried on with courage and dignity as if life was normal, saying she would fight it, would never give in, wouldn’t go easily.

  His father and two sisters had been taken by the same malign illness. He secretly admired Jane, who kept it from everyone until she lay on the sofa one Friday night after work saying she wouldn’t be going back on Monday morning, dying ten days later. A scarf around her throat had hidden the swelling, and no pleading could get her to a doctor. She told her husband to mind his own business. ‘I’m just not feeling well. Leave me alone. I’ll get better when I’m ready. It’s a sore throat. One of these days it’ll go as suddenly as it came, though I don’t suppose before it’s good and ready. It’s only a cold that won’t go away.’ She was in her forties, and hadn’t seen a doctor because she was too frightened to find out what was the matter, or maybe too fed up to care whether she lived or died, which was another story.

  Avril, who at the first twinge in her left shoulder called at the doctor’s, was told it was a touch of rheumatism. X-rayed nevertheless, still nothing showed, but when the pain persisted deeper X-rays indicated something was definitely not right.

  Arthur heard that if cancer was caught soon enough you had an even chance of beating it, but how soon is soon? And how can you know? Cancer can be nibbling away for months before there’s any sign of pain, like a sly snake that finds its billet, and the gnawing goes on till it’s too late to do anything, by which time you’re dead.

  Cancer seemed to be everywhere. His sister Margaret had died of it thirty years ago, and might still be alive if the doctor hadn’t told her it was only backache. ‘It’s nothing,’ he said. ‘Pull yourself together, and take these tablets.’ When she could stand the months of pain no longer he sent her for an X-ray. She didn’t have a chance. You aren’t grown-up if you think doctors know anything.

  Jenny’s husband lived donkey’s years after having the guts crushed out of him by a slab of iron, and couldn’t even die when it was the only thing he wanted, while other people fight every inch of the way, and it gets them just the same. Maybe Jane had been right to thumb her nose at the cancer. What he would have done in her place he didn’t know, nor in Avril’s now that she had got it, though he wanted her to beat it more than anything in the world. If it did get him he would take Jane’s way out and say fuck you to God, let the disease do as it liked, the sooner the better, it would be quicker that way, because even though the doctors knew you were going to die they still had you tortured with chemotherapy.

  Thank God Avril wasn’t like Jane. He would stand by her whatever happened, because she didn’t seem too bad at the moment and might well come through in the end. She looked more or less the same as anybody else on the street, making it hard to believe that she had such a thing, though doctors don’t lie, with X-ray machines to prove what they see. She had it right enough, and it was no use thinking otherwise.

  Basford Crossing went bump-bump under his wheels, but he didn’t need to be reminded about the nightmare that had them by the throat. Everybody had their troubles, and we all have to die, tramps as well as emperors, but we want to put it off as long as we can. Even if we’re old we don’t want to say goodbye to all that we’ve sweated for.

  Women live longer than men, so it was puzzling why Avril had got cancer and not him, though if he had any say in the matter he would gladly take it on himself. Cancer was eating her, and worry was eating him. She didn’t worry, and he hadn’t got cancer, which was strange if you weighed it up. Worry wasn’t fatal but cancer nearly always was, though worry could lead to cancer if it went on for long and got too deep inside.

  It was like roulette: as you crossed a busy road a double-decker missed you by inches, but while you were laughing at the fact that you were still alive cancer had dug its claws into your tripes when you were halfway over, and you hadn’t noticed. Some illness or other was always lurking to get at you.

  He wondered whether Avril pined after Fulham where she’d lived till she was eighteen, but she told him, and he had to believe her (because she was the sort who knew her own mind and would always speak the truth), that she was happy anywhere providing she loved the person she was with.

  She had managed a factory canteen for over ten years, then got laid off when the place closed. Maybe that hadn’t helped, but she knew the healthiest things to eat, planned all the meals for taste and goodness, so you couldn’t say eating the wrong food had caused the cancer, otherwise why hadn’t he got it as well? When you were young there either weren’t mysteries or you were too busy living to let them matter, but as you got older they wouldn’t be kept in place, and plagued your life.

  A daughter from Avril’s first marriage lived in London, and her son worked as a heating engineer at a brewery in Nottingham. The only other relation was her cousin Paul, the indispensable chief fitter at a factory, who kept all sorts of ailing machines going, a skilled job that paid good money. He’d been married to a woman called Adelaide, who had three kids from a previous marriage. After they’d had one of their own she went to work in the office of a place making bedspreads, and that was where the trouble started.

  Paul was tall and thin, and as strong as an ox. He wore a little sandy coloured beard, and Arthur often wanted to reach out and pull the crumbs away, but didn’t, as much for the crumbs’ sake as Paul’s, not wanting to deprive the refugee bread of its hiding place, or see Paul eat it when he handed it back to him.

  Though Adelaide had married Paul for love, or so you had to suppose, she would never stop telling him tha
t he was too rough in his ways ever to make her happy. Paul worshipped her, would do anything she asked, except remove his beard, or cotton on to the extent of looking more presentable. Maybe he had a screw loose, though he was clever with his hands and must have had a brain because of the job he did. Adelaide was a beautiful and personable woman, who told Paul time and time again that he just wasn’t good enough for her; for which, Arthur thought, I would either have smacked her in the chops or sent her packing, probably both.

  Paul only ever stopped working to sleep. He would come home in the evening from the factory, stuff a sandwich into his lantern jawed face (without washing his hands, Arthur supposed) then put in a few hours at a building site fixing machinery till midnight, all to coin extra money so that Adelaide could buy more pots of make-up and have something to spend at the hairdressers’. Arthur once called at the site to have a chat, and Paul was so tired he didn’t notice him walking out with a bag of nuts and bolts, which he took back a few nights later, minus a dozen to fix some bookshelves.

  Disaster to Paul’s marriage happened when one of Arthur’s workmates’ wives, who had a job at the same place as Adelaide, told her husband she was being fucked stupid by one of the chief embroiderer’s. Arthur’s mate informed Arthur, who passed the information on to Avril who, Paul being her cousin, had to tell him about Adelaide’s fling, thinking it only right that he should know, and that it was better to be honest because he could then sort out his marriage and go on living amicably with Adelaide, for the children’s sake at least. Arthur had always said, even before learning about the affair, that sooner or later Adelaide would start doing it on her cousin. ‘And so would I,’ he went on, ‘because he won’t tidy himself up. A man’s got to look good now and again in front of his wife, like I do for you.’

  Avril laughed, but rewarded him with a kiss. ‘I know. You were always a smart dresser.’