Alligator Playground

by Alan Sillitoe

  They lay side by side in bed, and the terrors came into his dreams. He didn’t tell her, but she knew they did because they spilled into hers as well. Melanie and her mother sat in a deep armchair in the lounge of The Tummler Hotel. Ann saw the high chairs from the back, and on turning to look saw their bloody and decaying faces. The room wasn’t the same because bales of straw were scattered among grey cobwebs, and Sailor was hanging from a beam, but still living, his body turning and turning as if a high wind was blowing, at which gyrations Melanie and the old woman began to laugh.

  ‘What’s the matter, love?’

  She grasped him. ‘I was having a bad dream.’

  ‘Seemed like a nightmare the way you screamed. But don’t cry. You’re all right now. You’re with me.’

  ‘I’m sorry I woke you.’

  ‘I’m glad you did. That’s what I’m here for. But go to sleep now. You’ll be all right.’

  In the morning Sailor was comatose and could hardly breathe, but he got out of bed and came down for breakfast, a lifetime’s drill helping him to live. ‘You’ll have to see the doctor,’ she said, but knew he wouldn’t when he reached for the bottle even before eating.

  The cat scratched to go out and do its business, and so, putting away the temptation of another drink, she opened the garden door to follow. Teddy shouted in argument with his mother, and the echoing smack of a hand which must have come from his father set him on a long wail of rage and protest.

  Evening clouds formed a hose for letting down rain. She hoped the ululation of a car alarm wouldn’t waken Sailor, who said they reminded him of danger signals on a ship. A white sparrow perched at the nuts finished gorging then flew off with one in its beak.

  The end of the June day turned chilly, and she sat mindlessly till the first drops of water told her it was time to go in. Annoyed at the smell, she assumed Midnight had messed before being let out, though he had been a well-behaved cat, ever since Sidney had put its kitten’s paws into a pat of lard so that it wouldn’t forget where it lived.

  In the front room Sailor’s head had fallen among bits of the puzzle, hands loose over both arms of the chair. The car alarm stopped, and Midnight mewed as if his tail was trapped. Bending close, she saw that Sailor’s eyes were open, tear marks on his cheeks, a bottle half empty on its side.

  Her hand and his damp forehead grew cold together, while Midnight played ‘in and out the window’ around her ankles, his mewing as loud as a baby’s cry. ‘What shall I do, Sailor?’ Unable to do anything, she yearned for him to tell her while holding the icy hands.

  She screamed in the garden as if to get her heart going again. Edna was putting rubbish in the outside bin. ‘Whatever’s the matter, duck?’

  ‘It’s Sailor.’ Rain spattered the overgrown lawn. ‘I’ve got to use your telephone.’

  The Pakistani doctor told her what anyone would have known. ‘What was it?’ she said, standing by the door as if to stop him leaving.

  ‘Liver, heart, everything. We’ll know later.’ It was Friday evening so he said she could call at his surgery for the death certificate on Monday. He clicked his bag shut and went away.

  She reached for the bottle, and sloshed out a glass. That would have been Sailor’s advice. ‘Wouldn’t it, Sailor?’

  ‘You’ll stay with us tonight, duck,’ Edna said. ‘We’ve put Teddy on the parlour sofa, and he thinks it’s a great adventure because that’s where the hi-fi is. And we had to promise he could see the body.’

  Bill scarcely credited that the doctor had helped so little. A vein at his temple turned dark with anger. ‘You mean he just told you Sailor was dead, and then pissed off?’

  Sailor wasn’t with her anymore, so it didn’t much matter. ‘Yes.’

  ‘We’ll have to call the undertakers first thing tomorrow.’ Edna took the bottle from Ann, and emptied the brew into a flowerpot. ‘You shouldn’t drink so much. It’ll rot your guts. It’ll kill you, just like it’s done poor old Sailor.’ She swept the pieces of the jigsaw into a cloth bag. ‘I allus knew this would happen, him coming back night after night with bottles sticking out of his pockets.’

  They spread two eiderdowns on the table and laid the body down. Edna cleaned up the mess and covered Sailor with the largest sheet in the house. ‘I know what to do because I helped a woman with my mother when she died.’

  There wasn’t even enough spare change to buy a bottle of beer, every wallet, purse and pocket empty, but she found supplies all over the house, mostly half bottles in crannies of the wardrobe and under the beds, or behind the linen shelves, with a nip or two still left in each. Two boxes of chemical wine tasted so sour she slopped them into the toilet, wondering when he could have brought them in. An almost full bottle of White Horse, hidden in the fuse box cupboard by the back door got her through the funeral without falling down.

  Edna filled in forms to get the interment costs settled by the DHSS, and Ann signed with a quivering hand. She was looking after herself but not, Edna saw, very well. ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you,’ Ann said, alone with the cat after five years married to Sailor.

  Edna spread papers from the cigar box and Sailor’s case over the floor. ‘It seems you’re knackered, duck,’ she said on going through them. It was a blessing Sailor had died when he did, she explained, otherwise she would have been living in a cardboard box under a bridge somewhere. ‘And just look at these gas and electric bills: they haven’t been paid for months. He’s left you in a bottomless pit, and no mistake.’

  Her credit card with a limit of five hundred pounds had been overdrawn by fifteen hundred. Letters from the bank asked for repayment but, stranger still, another letter of a later date offered to lend her more, at which Edna broke into a long choking laugh: ‘Bloody effrontery! Would you believe it?’

  Ann stared into space, then smiled at Sailor’s audacity of overdrawing her account to the tune of fifteen hundred quid.

  ‘It’s bloody villainy, really,’ Edna said, ‘though I suppose we should be grateful he was the sort who saved every bit of paper.’

  Ann felt she must defend Sailor’s good name, even so. Only one suit was left out of five that once hung in the wardrobe, and she had long ago noted his precious Japanese tea service missing, as well as the walnut-cased clock from school.

  ‘He even got rid of that teapot we brought you from Turkey,’ Edna said. Pawn tickets cascaded from an old wallet, and a wad of betting slips fell out of a box. ‘He’s left you in a real bleddy fix.’

  ‘There’s no money left then to pay anything?’ She had never doubted that he had got the money from somewhere for their life of Riley, and tears fell at the thought of Sailor not seeing how she appreciated such open-hearted behaviour in doing his best to make both of them happy.

  ‘Don’t cry, duck, it wasn’t your fault.’ Edna took her hand. ‘You’re up to your neck in it, but the debts of the dead die with them, so let the bank whistle for their money. They can’t get blood out of a stone. You’ve got to promise not to drink anymore booze, that’s all.’

  ‘This is when I need it most.’

  Edna unfolded her arms and picked up the mug of coffee. ‘I shan’t come and see you again if you don’t pack in the rat poison.’

  ‘I like it.’

  ‘So do I, now and again. But you’ve got to stop. You can if you want to. Me and Bill will help. One good turn deserves another. You looked after our Teddy while we was on holiday when nobody else would.’

  ‘I’ll do the same again if ever you want.’

  ‘Not if you don’t get off the drink. You won’t be capable. Think what it did to Sailor. Two bottles a day, you tell me. He must have been a man of iron to last so long. You’d have been in your bury-box as well in another few weeks.’

  He had died when he did in order to save her, she would like to think. ‘Sailor was looking after me, as well.’

  At the supermarket Edna kept hawk-eyes on what Ann put in her trolley. ‘I’m not a young girl,’ she said. ‘I
can look after myself.’

  Edna sniffed, a hand pushed over her face in disbelief. She rummaged by the till and found whisky under cat food and packets of frozen peas. Not without a tussle she put it back on the shelf. ‘I told you, no booze.’ She couldn’t keep an eye on her every minute. ‘You can have four tins of shandy a week, that’s all.’

  Ann replaced two half-bottles of rum that Edna hadn’t found. ‘I don’t want anything.’

  She got up from the settee. The days were longer but the nights flashed by. She didn’t dream about Melanie and her mother anymore. Maybe Sailor had taken them away. She didn’t even dream about him, and found that strange. But he was present every moment of the day.

  She’d had little booze since the funeral and, looking back on a month of nights, wouldn’t taste it again. Tears fell from her thinning face as she shook the thousand pieces of the jigsaw puzzle back onto the table. Call me Sailor, he had said, in a voice never to be forgotten. His smile during however much time was needed to put it together would show her what a villain he had been to leave her in such a state, but she was getting enough from the DHSS to manage. She didn’t know whether she would glue each piece firmly till it could be framed and hung as they had talked about, or scatter the completed picture broadside into the fire, hoping to see Sailor one last time among the flames.

  Alan Sillitoe

  was born in 1928, and left school at fourteen to work in various factories until becoming an air traffic control assistant with the Ministry of Aircraft Production in 1945.

  He began writing after four years in the RAF, and lived for six years in France and Spain. His first stories were printed in the Nottinghamshire Weekly Guardian. In 1958 Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was published, and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, which won the Hawthornden Prize for literature, came out the following year. Both these books were made into films.

  Further works include Key to the Door, The Ragman’s Daughter and The General (both also filmed), The William Posters Trilogy, A Start in Life, Raw Material, The Widower’s Son, Her Victory, The Lost Flying Boat, Down from the Hill, Life Goes On, The Open Door, Last Loves, Leonard’s War, Snowstop, Collected Stories, Alligator Playground, and The Broken Chariot – as well as eight volumes of poetry, and Nottinghamshire, for which David Stillitoe took the photographs. He has also published his autobiography, Life Without Armour.

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  By the Same Author

  Fiction

  Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

  The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner

  The General

  Key to the Door

  The Ragman’s Daughter

  The Death of William Posters

  A Tree on Fire

  Guzman, Go Home

  A Start in Life

  Travels in Nihilon

  Raw Material

  Men, Women and Children

  The Flame of Life

  The Widower’s Son

  The Storyteller

  The Second Chance and Other Stories

  Her Victory

  The Lost Flying Boat

  Down From the Hill

  Life Goes On

  Out of the Whirlpool

  The Open Door

  Last Loves

  Leonard’s War

  Snowstop

  Collected Stories

  The Broken Chariot

  Non-fiction

  Life Without Armour (autobiography)

  Poetry

  The Rats and Other Poems

  A Falling Out of Love and Other Poems

  Love in the Environs of Voronezh and Other Poems

  Storm and Other Poems

  Snow on the North Side of Lucifer

  Sun Before Departure

  Tides and Stone Walls

  Collected Poems

  Plays

  All Citizens are Soldiers (with Ruth Fainlight)

  Three Plays

  Essays

  Mountains and Caverns

  For Children

  The City Adventures of Marmalade Jim

  Big John and the Stars

  The Incredible Fencing Fleas

  Marmalade Jim on the Farm

  Marmalade Jim and the Fox

  Copyright

  Flamingo

  An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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  Published by Flamingo 1998

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  First published in Great Britain by

  HarperCollinsPublishers 1997

  Copyright © Alan Sillitoe 1997

  Alan Sillitoe asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

  This collection of stories is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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  EPub Edition © MAY 2010 ISBN: 978-0-007-38730-4

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