by Robert Lock
Ma waved her hand to point at all the Sally Army building around us. Isn’t this a safe place to be? she said. How do you know the starlings didn’t mean to make sure I was safe here? No no they knew you were here already, I said. They come from all over town to the pier. I’ve seen them from our observation post. They saw you coming to the Sally Army and that’s why they wrote the message. Come on Ma you’ve got to go home. Please! Ma put her hands on my shoulders and looked at me really fierce. She looked at me for ages like Ma’s do when they’re making sure you’re not mucking them about then she nodded. Alright, she said. This is obviously very important to you isn’t it? Let me get my coat and I’ll say goodnight to the girls. Hurry up then! I said. Ma lifted my helmet with OC painted on it and straightened up my hair at the front which was a bit sweaty from having to run to the Sally Army from the pier. You’d make a good warden, she said and smiled. You’re a bossy bugger.
***
There we were. Me and Ma running home through the blackout like two shadows, me half dragging Ma by the hand because I still wasn’t sure she was safe yet and both of us not knowing that we were in the middle of the miracle if that’s what it was. I could see a few stars through the gaps in the clouds. Stars look harder in the winter. There’s no need to drag me along like a dog on a lead, Ma said. When we get to Aunty Irene and Uncle Walter’s we’ll be safe I said back and just then I heard the engines in the distance. My ears are just about as good as my eyes at telling what planes are what. I knew right away that they were Jerry engines what with that wumwumwumwum noise but it was too far away yet for me to tell which sort of plane. It sounded quite high up and only one but there were two engines so that meant it was a bomber so that meant bombs. Then Ma heard it too and she looked at me like she was seeing someone different. Can you hear that? she asked and I just nodded. Why hasn’t the siren gone off? she asked but the bombers hadn’t been for ages so perhaps the boys weren’t expecting it. I wished I’d got my binoculars but they were on the pier so I just had to look up at the sky where I thought the sound was coming from. It was getting louder and definitely coming in our direction but everyone in the town seemed to be asleep or at least inside listening to the radio. Only me and Ma knew the bomber was coming.
It’s a Heinkel HE 111, I said. Single plane at approx twelve thousand feet. I wanted to shout to the boys but they must have heard it by now and told the ack-ack lads. Wumwumwum and the stars twinkled because they didn’t care that Fucking Adolf was coming. Where’s the nearest shelter, Ma said. Come on Michael we have to get to the shelter! So we started running down the black street as the wumwumwum caught us up and I imagined the German pilots looking down and seeing us running and laughing. Or perhaps they just wanted to get home like we did and see their families. We’d only got to the corner of Hillingdon Avenue when we heard a big explosion that you could feel through the road. Ma pulled me down onto the ground and she lay on top of me to protect me and that is the bravest thing I’ve seen but the Heinkel just carried on out to sea. The ack-ack lads had a go at it but I reckon they missed because the wumwumwum got quieter and quieter until it was gone and then it was all quiet for a minute until we heard the bell of a fire engine in the distance.
Ma got up and I got up and we looked at each other and we both just kind of knew where the bomb had landed. We just knew. And then we ran back where we had come from. Towards the flames and the crackle of the fire.
The Sally Army wasn’t there any more. It had been turned into a big pile of bricks and wood and stuff by the bomb. There was a big fire in the middle and a lot of the bricks were steaming and it all looked hot. The firemen came and started putting water on the fire which hissed like it was angry. An ARP warden tried to climb over the piles of bricks and stuff to see if there was anybody inside. Ma just stood with one hand over her mouth like she was trying to stop herself from being sick and with her other hand she squeezed my shoulder really hard. The ARP man looked up and saw us standing watching. You! he shouted. You! He pointed at me. Come and give me a hand laddie. I’d forgotten I’d got my Observer Corps uniform on because people treat you differently when you’ve got a uniform on. In my normal clothes people talk to me like I’m an idiot or something but when I’ve got my uniform on they reckon I can do just about anything which is fine by me, I know which one I prefer.
So I made Ma take her hand off my shoulder and said I’ve got work to do Ma. I climbed over the bricks to where the ARP warden was waiting. What’s your name? he asked. Michael, I said. Alright then Michael, he said, we’ve got to work our way through all this slowly to see if there’s any survivors. Be careful and don’t get in the way of the firemen. Can you do that? Of course I nodded so we got cracking but there wasn’t much we could do, it was all in a right tangle and the bits of wood were too heavy for us to lift.
There wasn’t much sound just the crackle of the fire and the hiss where the firemen were squirting it with water. More people came, ordinary people and wardens and then Civil Defence and another fire engine. Me and the warden climbed about on the hot bricks and wood which was a bit dangerous but I had to look for survivors. I went a bit to one side of the ARP warden where it was darker and there was a big pile of wood not on fire including a door which looked brand new so I got hold of the door handle and pulled it up. Underneath was an arm buried in the pile of wood and a hand with all its fingers missing but the thumb was still on it. There was a bit of cloth halfway up the arm and I recognised it from only a little while ago which meant that I’d found Mrs Tyler. Well her arm at least. It was difficult to see whether there was any more of her under the wood but one thing I did know and that was Mrs Tyler was dead.
I looked at her arm. Apart from not having any fingers it wasn’t much different really from when she’d been going on about unacceptable behaviour and Ma had given her a piece of her mind. It was funny to think that ten minutes ago this thing that I was looking at was all joined together with the rest of Mrs Tyler. She was able to move about and hold a cup of tea and now it looked like something in the window at Mr Gormley the butcher’s. It was a shame that Ma and Mrs Tyler had had an argument because now they wouldn’t be able to say sorry. I reached down and touched it. The fire made one side of my face really hot and the other really cold. Mrs Tyler’s arm was soft and warm. For some reason I thought of my pa and his blood making all the mud turn red. Mrs Tyler died quick and Pa died slow but it all adds up to the same thing in the end.
Did the starlings know Mrs Tyler was going to die? Did they try to tell someone or was it the right time for her to go? I wonder when my time will be.
I looked round to find the ARP warden. Mrs Tyler’s here! I shouted and he climbed over the bricks to where I was and looked at her arm. How the hell do you know THAT’S Mrs Tyler? he said. Because I was here ten minutes ago, I said, and he said TEN MINUTES? and that’s how I ended up in the paper and everybody heard about the miracle.
It’s funny but every time I said about the starlings and how it was them who told me what to do by the way they made the patterns in the sky everybody just smiled and kind of ignored that bit and went on about how I must have heard the Heinkel coming because of how good my ears are or how me and Ma were really close because of Pa dying when I was only a nipper so I had a special intuition about when she was in danger. It’s as though nobody dares to believe that the birds knew about what was going to happen. Well I know different. I know the first I heard that Heinkel was after I’d fetched Ma out of the Sally Army. I know the starlings wrote about the future and for some reason or other they let me read a tiny bit of it. Perhaps they felt sorry for me for not having a pa and knew I needed a ma. Perhaps they could tell I loved birds. I don’t know.
The war is still going on but Fucking Adolf isn’t bothering us so much now. Norman says he’s got enough on his hands with the Ruskies but we still sit on the roof of the pier anyway just in case. We drink Taffy’s terrible tea and listen to the radio and talk about all sorts of stuff but in the winter come
evening time I always watch the starlings and I wonder what it is they are writing about now.
1965
The Inscrutable Glass
Bella Kaminska twitched the curtain of her booth window to one side and looked down at the crowds thronging the beach. Her gaze scanned the seething mass of humanity, united in its determination to make the most of a fitful afternoon sun which, during its brief appearances from behind a succession of large clouds, had managed to muster a sprinkling of bikinis and trunks; tease middle-aged men out of their shirts so that the tapestry of sunbathers was flecked with the convex white of stomach-filled vests; unbutton the waistcoats and cardigans of older couples; and even entice one or two hardy souls into the choppy, brownish-green water of an incoming tide. And if any one of these determined holidaymakers had glanced up at the pier they, like so many others before them, would have been seduced by the expression in Bella’s tiny brown eyes, set deeply in a face constructed entirely of soft, smooth, curving surfaces, like sultanas pushed into a ball of dough. Forbearance is what they would have seen, a soothing acceptance of their faults and foibles, but then these were Bella’s professional eyes, constructs designed to shield the reality beneath. Reflections of the crowded beach drifted over their brown carapace, under which ran the more truthful currents of both avarice and exasperation.
“Look at them, Tom,” she said, nose almost touching the glass. A wistful note entered her voice. “No one’s bothered about the future when the sun’s shining.”
The ginger cat, which was lying on a windowsill to best enjoy whatever warming rays became available, declined the offer, preferring instead to look rather pityingly at his owner before stretching out even more luxuriously along the narrow ledge.
Bella glanced over her shoulder at the reclining animal. “Don’t strain yourself,” she said sarcastically, before returning her attention to the crowded beach. “Come on, you lot, somebody must fancy a walk on the pier!”
Business, despite her exhortations suggesting the opposite, had never been better. Since opening her fortune-telling booth in 1958 Bella had watched the resort blossom as postwar austerity and rationing gave way to a period of vigorous growth, supplying an ever-increasing number of people with sufficient cash left over in their pocket to enjoy a holiday at the seaside, money that Bella was more than happy to relieve them of in return for a few reassuring words on what fate had in store for them. Fate, or rather her own shrewd interpretation based on a fluid formula which combined observation, stereotype, subtle questioning and a modicum of what Bella liked to think of as improvisational resourcefulness. Certainly she was not privy to any genuine foresight; all Bella could see in her crystal ball was an inverted and distorted view of her booth, blotted out occasionally by the looming features of her client as they attempted to witness for themselves the impending events that were apparently parading across the inscrutable glass. Lines on the palm of a hand might as well have been hieroglyphics, and, although she had learnt the basic significances of the Tarot cards, Bella’s interpretation of their appearance was always relentlessly optimistic. Even the most doom-laden of spreads was turned into an auspicious vision of the future, dependent only on her client following Bella’s guidelines. These postscript homilies were her favourite part of the job. If she liked the person sitting across the table from her she might encourage them to try something new, or persevere, or follow their heart; if, on the other hand, the client had incurred her displeasure in any way (and this was not difficult to achieve), she favoured trying to steer them down a path that would, based on her character assessment of them, cause them the most grief. In this, Bella truly believed she was acting as an instrument of justice, helping to maintain decency and morality in the world based, naturally, on her definition of goodness. Her husband Vincent disapproved of his wife’s attempts at social engineering, saying that someday it would come back to bite her, but Bella seldom listened to anything Vincent said, so she was certainly not going to pay attention to what she regarded as meddling in her field of expertise.
The sun disappeared behind a large bank of cloud that stretched to the horizon, suggesting that the day’s sunbathing opportunities had come to an end. Bella looked up with a conspiratorial smile at the curdled grey slab drifting slowly eastward. “Oh dear,” she said to no one in particular, “the sun’s gone in. What a shame. Come on, Tom, buck your ideas up a bit, lad, they’ll be queueing up for a reading before we know it. Ooh, that’s right look, the jumpers and jackets are going on already. Just time for a nice stroll on the pier before going home for tea. And don’t bother with that idiot Gypsy Rose Lee, if she’s a gypsy I’m a monkey’s uncle. I know for a fact she comes from a posh family in Norfolk who chucked her out after some sort of shenanigans with a friend of her father’s. Julie from the amusements told me after half a bottle of Crème de Menthe, and those two are thick as thieves. And that ridiculous accent is all put on, you know. I’ve heard her talking on the phone and there was none of that ‘oh ja I vos in a caravan living for many years’, just a load of oohs and arrs like some sort of country yokel. Why she had to set up here I’ll never know, taking away my customers and making out she was the original fortune-teller.” Bella warmed to her theme. “The bloody cheek of the woman! Plonks herself down not a hundred yards from the pier when there’s all the prom to choose from. If that isn’t a deliberate… what do they call it? You know, when something starts a war. What is it?” She looked again at the cat, but he was asleep. “Well you’re no help, are you? What is it? What is it? Oh yes, an act of provocation. Yes, that’s what she is, an act of provocation. What else could you call it? Well, if it’s a fight she’s after she’ll find she’s picked the wrong one to have it with, I’m telling you. I know what her game is. She’s after this booth, Tom. She wants all the pier trade. Well, she’s got another think coming!”
The velvet curtain that separated Bella’s booth from the rest of the pier moved inward slightly, as though caught by a passing breeze, but then she noticed the scuffed tip of a shoe poking under the bottom of the curtain, a shoe she recognised.
“Mickey, what are you up to?” She addressed the curtain.
A voice spoke from the other side of the faded red material. “It isn’t too late, is it?”
Bella scowled. “What?”
“It isn’t too late, is it?”
“Too late for what?”
“A cup of tea.”
“Why would it…” Bella suddenly realised the ridiculousness of holding a conversation through the curtain. “Oh for goodness sake come in!”
The curtain flapped again, before being slowly drawn aside to reveal Mickey Braithwaite, the pier’s deckchair attendant. He beamed at Bella, but made no move to enter the booth.
“You don’t have to knock, you know,” she said.
“Knock?”
“On the door.”
He looked up at the door frame, wrinkling his nose to help keep his heavy, dark-framed glasses in place. “You haven’t got a door.”
“Well, I think you’ll find I have, sweetheart, but it’s open, isn’t it, it’s fastened back against the… I wasn’t being… Oh, never mind, it doesn’t matter.” Bella leaned forward, settling her broad, stubby-fingered hands on the velvet tablecloth. The array of gold rings cluttering each finger had a treasure trove’s allure. “Why were you lurking outside, anyway?”
Mickey’s eyes opened wide. “Slurping?”
“God give me strength,” Bella murmured under her breath. She raised her fingers off the table and perused her rings. “No, Mickey, lurking. Lurking. To lurk… to hang about in a suspicious manner.” The blank expression that greeted her definition prompted a change of tack. “I saw your foot under the curtain.”
Understanding sprang into his eyes. “I heard you talking! I thought you might have been talking to me so I got a bit closer to listen. I didn’t understand most of it, though, so then I thought you weren’t talking to me after all. Then I thought you were talking to someone who wan
ted to know their fortune, but there isn’t anyone here so that’s not right either.”
Bella sighed. She wondered why the deckchair attendant had become so attached to her. She had never actively encouraged him, unless their passing nods and hellos during her first months on the pier had been misinterpreted as signs of a desire for friendship. Had he been looking for some sort of mother substitute? Bella’s aptitude for gossip and the eager dissimulation of any calamitous chapters in people’s lives meant that she had soon possessed a sort of potted biography of many of the pier’s main characters, which naturally included that of Mickey Braithwaite, who had been a fixture on the pier since the end of the war, dispensing and collecting deckchairs with a meticulousness and seemingly unquenchable enthusiasm that to Bella appeared close to an obsession. She knew that he wasn’t quite the full shilling, that he had saved his mother from a stray bomb dropped from a German plane heading home during the war, and that fate had seen fit to balance this woman’s serendipitous escape with a brain tumour which killed her only five years later. She knew he still lived with his aunt and uncle. According to several of Bella’s most reliable sources his aunt apparently doted on him, whereas his uncle favoured putting him into an institution. She knew his brother had met and married an Italian girl, and she knew that you could show Mickey a picture of any bird and he would be able to tell you which species it was. Of course, Bella being Bella, it was the mother’s tale of miraculous deliverance and its subsequent implacable re-balancing that attracted her the most, not only as an example of Death’s petulance, but also as a lesson in how ignorance was an essential prerequisite for living a happy life. No doubt Mrs Braithwaite had thought herself incredibly lucky, perhaps even chosen or singled out for some reason. She would have taken an extra pleasure in every day’s detail, its careless beauty, a thousand such days before that first savage headache. Bella would never understand why the people who came into her booth were so obsessed with the future and what it had in store for them. As far as she was concerned there was only one, inevitable conclusion, and anything before that was down to either chance or luck. What she had not asked for, however, was some sort of surrogate idiot son.