‘Anyway, the laugh was this when I get around to it. Young was as pure and proper as a gravestone and just about as sober, so was the missus, and both of them as good as a tribe of vicars. What they had was what they had, right? No HP, no credit; he said that was like stealing and, by Christ, they were brought up honest, even if the boys did turn out nasty. Old man Young could no more borrow than he could climb Everest, never in debt to any bugger and they were all going to get on. He always said his sons weren’t going to go down pit, but that was all they wanted, so he concentrated on the girl instead. She wasn’t going to be no factory girl either, not like most of the girls round here, she was going to be different. A scientist, he said, he was always going on about science. Something, at any rate, our princess, who was so good at homework while the rest were out chasing boys, showing off tits before they were ten. She were a bonny lass, for all she was kept so close, never allowed to play with rough kids, always indoors with a book. She was cleverer even than he thought, did well at school, but of course that didn’t make her liked any better or them either. Stuck up was what they were, better than the rest of us, coming out of that house with that kid all cleaned and pressed in her school uniform, who did they think they were?’
For once the man did not end his sentence with a laugh.
‘There was no warning when the pit closed. Well, there might have been if we’d listened, but… I’d worked there, my father and his, we didn’t even know how to fight the ending, went round like zombies. Of course, Ernest Young got another job straight away, which didn’t make anyone love him better, since most of us didn’t. I suppose being white collar one place is much like another, but there was a bit less choice for any of us who knew nothing else but shifting coal. Black coal, black rings round your eyes and, as far as we could see, no job for ever, except for him, the bastard. Made him more determined than ever that none of this was ever going to happen to his darling girl, kept her even closer. This pub was fuller for a year or more; sweet all else to do. But about then I heard she was saying how she was interested in art, couldn’t stick all that science stuff he rammed down her throat. She tried painting and all sorts, went out with a book and paper all over the place. He stopped her, of course, said she wasn’t going in for any of this arty-farty stuff. Short path to the dole queue and he wasn’t having any of that. He took to saying on the bus that she’d be going to university. University? First from this street, I can tell you, bloody university and none of us sods with the hope of a job, and even while you had the same bad dreams over and over again, the whole place was changing.’
The taxi driver was a good raconteur. He knew when to wet his lips, saw Francis’s neutral expression, grinned.
‘You mean, what were wrong with it changing, couldn’t it do with some improvement? It wasn’t so bad, you know, but suddenly, it wasn’t a pit village any more. A slag heap slipped and took out three empty houses at the end of one row. They made it safe with all this landscaping and four of the other houses came empty because families with sense moved off to look for work, and then, all of a sudden, strangers moved in, people from town where Young’s daughter used to go to school. So did the other girls, but all that nonsense stopped as soon as they were fifteen, they had to go to work, specially then. One of these new people was an art teacher, from town again, there never was a school here since Queen fucking Victoria. He was a right one, this little bloke, said he wanted to live alongside us to soak up the “industrial landscape”. Started off coming into the pub every night until he got frozen out, even told us how he liked the slag heaps from the open cast, wonderful colours, he said. Daft bastard! The “landscape”, as he called it, the stuff I could see from my window, was a lot of people hanging about with nothing better to do than get drunk and fight while the life bled out of them, but then this artist was well off, wasn’t he? Artist, art teacher, who’s one of them without having money of his own? Paid to live in one of our houses, talking rubbish and painting slag as well as all sorts of weird things, like stuff he did in his back yard with pints of paint, along with his cat and his plants. We never had plants, but he kept a cat which he kissed and fed fish: he wasn’t what I would call a man at all. Couldn’t stand the bastard, but live and let live, I said. Ernest Young’s two lads, just old enough for the pub, well, they didn’t agree.’
There was a pause, a distasteful licking of lips. Francis rose without signal and fetched another pint. In the absence of any other customers, it was quickly done.
‘First, they got his cat. Put paraffin on its tail and set it alight, better than a firework on legs running down the road and fizzing in a drain, poor thing. No one spoke up and no one told him, but he might have found out. That was when he seemed to realize what we thought of him, stopped going to the pub after he knew he’d been seen crawling along the backs of the houses with a dish of sardines shouting, “Pussy, pussy, pussy … come home!”, silly as arseholes. He didn’t talk so big after that. Stayed indoors, making funny things with paint, never did a real painting or a single useful thing in all the year he was there. Somebody loved him, though. Young’s daughter, about fourteen then, used to go visit him, this so-called artist. Seemed fascinated by him and what he did, couldn’t keep away. Some said later that she was really trying to make up to him for what her brothers had done to his cat, but I think she just fancied what she found. She might have meant it, about liking art and liking people who did art stuff, but she’d have to like it a lot to fancy him and all those great big pictures he’d started to make, all mess on canvas as if someone had rolled round in it. I saw some of the stuff he did in his back yard once, and if I’d done it myself, the wife would have got me committed. Anyway, after a while of her being in and out of his house, her dad got wind of it, got mad about it, not that she’d take any notice, told him to sod off, until one day in summer, when she was late home, he sent his lads round. Seventeen and nineteen, they were, built like brick shithouses, one of them already with a baby. All they ever did was draw dole and spend it in the pub, spoiling for a job or a fight.’
Francis, sensed the crux of the long story, gestured to the glasses. The man nodded, smiled.
‘Young’s daughter may only have been fourteen but, I’m telling you, she was well stacked. Had a chest on her fit to cause a riot, not that I was supposed to notice, but of course everyone did. The lads, her brothers, went to the artist’s house like their dad said, only without knocking, and there she was. They knew trouble when they saw it: they’d been brought up proper and they never could take their drink. “Did he touch you?” they said. “No, no, he never,” she said. “He just put this paint on me. I’ve got to stand still. If I don’t mind, why should you?” She’d got a mouth on her in those days, could still answer back, she’d stand up for herself, not like later. And do you know, he had? This artist put paint all over her or let her put it on herself, same difference. She was wearing nothing but her knickers, her skin covered all over in pink and gold, bright reds and purples and this bright shining green, her lying on the floor while he was supposed to be painting another picture of what she looked like, whistling and singing when they came in, like he often did when he was busy. “He never touched me,” she kept saying. “He never touched me.” The dirty blighter.’
He took a massive swig from his glass, laughter gurgling inside his chest.
‘So they pasted him. You know that sound? Same as a wet sponge in a polythene bag beat against a wall, that’s the sound you get when you keep hitting. I suppose, I don’t know, mind, it was a bad business. No one ever said, but I know they took one of his eyes out. And the rest. They said one of his eyes was right outside his face, somewhere near his chin. Like his itty-bitty, arty-farty house that should have been lived in by a pit family, he was a right mess after with a great hole where that eye should have been, but he didn’t call for the police or anything like that. Young’s cousin was a copper, did I tell you that? And, anyway, even if that teacher were stupid, he knew enough to know there was no
point in calling the law. No one liked him, see? And he’d no business living there, really: only himself to blame. Mind you, she might have been right about him not touching her, what with him not being like other men and having no paint on himself, they couldn’t have been kissing, it would have shown. She was screaming, fighting, trying to stop them: there was blood all over the floor, all mixed up with the paint. The lads were well drunk, but she still kept saying, “He never touched me, let him be, let him be.” They didn’t let him be, not until they’d finished with him which took a little while, but, to be fair, they did call the ambulance after.’
‘I thought,’ said Francis, with the gorge rising in his throat, ‘that this was a funny story. A laugh.’ Another pint arrived, this time after a signal, followed by money left on the table, silently. No change was given.
‘What? Oh yes. Because after that, you know what they did? They walked her home, just as she was. No clothes at all but little knickers: my, she was a fair sight. Blue paint on her titties (you could tell that even if her arms were crossed), red on her face, pink on her bum and that lime-green over her eyes. They made her walk the whole length of the village and back. Someone gave her one of those plastic bin liners, but her dad, walking along and waving his stick, he took it away. There’s only three streets – only two now – up the hill in rows, the pub and the shop, that’s all there ever was, but I suppose it was big enough. Past the pub twice at seven on a summer’s evening, she did make heads turn, every single head of the fifty families following her round. Laugh! I thought we’d die. After that, when everyone had a good giggle, I heard they took her home and made her sit in the kitchen on newspaper until she learned better and got her turn in the bath. I laughed till I cried. Even her mother smiled and so she should because she looked so funny and, anyway, she laughed too. Tits like a ship in full sail, painted pink and green. Thought of it makes me sweat.’
His present laughter rang round the pub as the door opened and cold air came in with two men. The taxi man lowered his voice. The woman behind the bar grinned at the newcomers and moved to the pumps without waiting for instructions.
‘What happened next?’ Francis asked, composing his face into a rigid smile which was obviously a less excited response than the raconteur demanded.
‘The teacher bloke left, of course. Went home on the train from town. Came back for his things with a stick – no, not a stick, a fucking umbrella, I ask you. Funny glasses for his eyes, too, made him look like a robber. I saw him then, waiting for the train. He didn’t speak, but then there weren’t much to say –’
‘Never mind him,’ said Francis with the first touch of impatience. ‘I meant, what happened next to the girl, Elisabeth Young? What did she do?’
The taxi man seemed to have forgotten the girl. He was well into the depths of the story, in which the girl had somehow become irrelevant.
‘Her? Oh, I reckon she’d learned her lesson. So her dad said. He’d not brought up a brainy daughter of his to take off her clothes for no bugger, even an artist. Any road, she seemed to settle down, did more homework, lost her mouth. Used to see her at the bus stop, going into the town to school when all the other girls had stopped, never wearing anything but school uniform up to her chin, always standing with her arms crossed across her chest. Got all those exams, she did, stuck up little madam, didn’t pass the time of day much. You might have known she was Young’s daughter and couldn’t take a joke, but you couldn’t look at her without seeing that paint and those titties. Oh, what a laugh …’ This was illustrated by a choking sound into his glass of beer. Francis wondered about the wisdom of leaving Clayfields in this driver’s car, thought there might be a choice, and if there was, he would find the bus.
‘Lime Lizzie! That’s what she was called, after the paint. Mind we still heard a lot from Mister and Missus about how she was going to get this wonderful job, and she did go to college. But you know the last laugh? She never did so well after all, probably went to the bad, never got anywhere, never got married and never came back. Oh yes, for her mother’s funeral, dressed like a scarecrow. Never did nothing, her dad said in drink, never made money, never got them out of this hole, just pissed about, never did nothing with all that learning and all. Lives in a cellar, the poor tart.’
The driver drained his glass. The hand was steady, the eye clear, the laughter still brimming. If I had been born here, thought Francis, in a place which had decayed around me, I would not laugh: I might cry and be more bitter than this windy beer. He thought it timely to take the heat out of his interest in the Youngs.
‘But you,’ he asked, turning his charm upon the storyteller. ‘You got out of Clayfields? Got another job? You must have been a young man, then.’
‘We most of us got out,’ said the taxi man, rising and grinning. ‘Those with sense. Even old man Young. Went to live with one of his sons in town after he retired. He was older, you see, more difficult to move, even with his stick. Do you want a lift back? That’ll be fifteen pound, you said.’
‘Thank you, no,’ said Francis, handing over the twenty he guessed was expected. His clipped Southern accents, sharpened by his own disgust, rang round the plastic pub. The two other drinkers looked up briefly, without amusement, went back to their combined, well-rehearsed silence. The woman at the pumps was filing her nails. Francis tried to imagine what the bar would look like full of people as he took his feet to the door, his crisp, patrician ‘thank you very much’ met with a leaden nod of mere acknowledgement. The thought was threatening rather than appealing. The company of the man who talked too much was not what Philip Marlowe would have had. By now, the detective and he would have been friends, not like this, separated by centuries and a conditioning which made a chasm a mile wide. He walked back with the taxi driver to the car because it seemed a sociable thing to do.
‘Tell me summat,’ said the man with his strange, nervous, ever-present laugh, still grinning. ‘Whatya want with the Youngs, anyway?’
Francis cleared his throat. ‘Their daughter’s gone missing. Lime Lizzie. I came to see if she’d come home.’ The driver shook his head.
‘She’d not do that. Not her.’
‘How do you know? She might. Families are where you go when you’re in trouble, aren’t they?’
This time the shout of laughter was so loud it was obscene, cutting into the chill grey air like a whip. The reconstructed, featureless hills of slag were colourless in their artificial curves, patently the clumsy amends of men for other men’s carnage.
‘Not her!’ he repeated, hauling himself in behind the wheel. ‘And how do I know? That’d be telling, but I know. Is the daft cow in trouble, then, and you’re the boyfriend, is that it? She won’t have gone far. I heard she lived in a cellar and fiddles with pictures, like she always did. Down South. You going to marry her? Is it yours?’
‘I might marry her,’ said Francis evenly. ‘How do you know the family so well?’
‘Like I said, that’d be telling. Anyway. you’ve got competition. Some other bugger’s been looking – not recent, mind.’
Francis gripped his coat around himself, wished he had scarf and gloves, wished the North was not that much colder, wished too he were a hundred miles away from this brutal, smiling face with its addiction to laughter. In a mimic of the other’s nonchalant attitude, he shrugged his shoulders as if there were no urgency in this one, last enquiry.
‘Someone else? Who could that be? No accounting for taste.’ The taxi engine roared, over-revved. Maybe the driver was not as sober as he looked. Francis felt strangely drunk on two pints to the other’s murky four. The reply was cast away out of the open window as the car stuttered down the ever empty street.
‘Who else? That fucking little artist, that’s who. She always said she’d go and look after him. That’s who-o-o.’
The voice drifted away with the engine and a final bark of laughter. After the sound died, the silence was deafening.
Into it crept the sounds of dereliction, not
hing but the hum of traffic, a place isolated by the cars in the dual carriageway below, no birdsong, no wind in trees, simply these streets and this valley full of rubbish. They were not bad houses, Francis thought as he walked up the first row and down its parallel terrace: all equipped with the yard behind, a little younger than the D. H. Lawrence version, ugly as sin, but built to last and constructed for living. Some were lit: it was that kind of wintry day in which hibernation seemed routine for reluctant humankind facing nothing but winter; some were dark. He tried to picture their windows full of Christmas lights and a thriving family life inside, replete with the wherewithal for the season. Then he attempted to reconstruct the scene on a summer evening with the houses equally full, the valley with a rusty stream from the pit and a girl child paraded, clutching her large, bare breasts covered with paint, the skin more highly coloured than the blank eyes of her reflecting nothing. Oh my lovely Elisabeth, was that enough to make you what you are? No memory left but the colours of that evening, the lack of colour in the rest of life? I never knew, I never knew. You never asked, she had said. You never asked and no one ever listens. I manage by myself: I always did.
Francis Thurloe, a barrister in a camel-hair coat, stood at the bus stop, finally, where a scratched sign warned him that the wait might last another hour. As he waited in the mid-afternoon, three children toiled up the hill from the Opposite bus stop, home from school elsewhere. There was the barest semblance of uniform, but nothing pressed, starched or regulation, no caps, a disparity of training shoes. They were chattering like sparrows, but fell into silence as they walked by. One of them looked as if he had been in a fight, possibly with the other two. Once further uphill, they were in a huddle, looking back. Francis ignored them, aware with a sudden surge of embarrassment that he might have looked like some kind of official: he should not have worn a suit under this coat. Another quarter-hour. Nothing to look at, nothing. Just as he began to regret that he had relinquished the ride back to town with the taxi driver for another kind of purgatory longer but less acute, he felt their presence behind him. A small stone grazed his neck, sent to tease rather than hurt. Precious little to bait in this part of the world. He turned towards a shuffling and the banging of a door, looked stolidly towards the makeshift hills. Another stone, larger than the last, badly aimed, rolling by with a large noise. No more shuffling, a greater sense of threat. He dragged together his worldly wisdom and stepped purposefully downhill, on to the anonymous road, began to walk in the direction of the town.
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