The Northern Clemency

by Philip Hensher

  Twenty minutes later, she heard the front door shut. She hadn’t heard it open, she reflected, though it usually made a solid clunk. He’d opened it quietly, she guessed, as if he had sneaked in; he’d thought there was no one in the house so he’d shut it as he normally did. It wasn’t much of an adventure, really. She got up, picked up her notebook and went into the house for a drink, brushing down her print dress as she went. She should have gone with Daniel to Hathersage for a swim. She’d said she probably would, that morning over breakfast, just before her dad went off to work.

  “We said we’d stop at the next service station,” Alice said, noticing a sign.

  “Yeah?” Bernie said, not concentrating on what she was saying. “Sorry—”

  “I said, we told the removers we’d be stopping at Leicester Forest East,” Alice said. “The service station. It’s the next one—I think it said seven miles.”

  Bernie was gritting his teeth: he was stuck between lorries, thundering along at a frustrating ten miles an hour below the speed limit, boxed in by faster lines of traffic solidly flowing to the right. He felt like a box on a conveyor belt. “Not a bad idea,” he said. “They won’t worry if we don’t, though.”

  “It might be as well,” Alice said. “Sandra.”

  “What about Sandra?” Francis said, his chin resting on the back of his mother’s seat, his face almost in her hair.

  “Oh, nothing,” Alice said.

  “Your mum means,” Bernie said, “that she might be fed up of riding in the lorry by now. The excitement might have worn off.”

  “I didn’t mean that exactly,” Alice said.

  “Or on the other hand they might—” Bernie broke off. “We ought to get a radio in the car,” he said, after a while. “Aren’t you hungry, Frank? I’m hungry. That wasn’t much of a lunch.”

  “It couldn’t be helped,” Alice said. “Everything was packed away.”

  “I know, love,” Bernie said.

  New experiences filled Francis with automatic dread. He had disappeared when the removers had arrived, feeling that demands would be placed on him, but dreading most the presence of rough men in their emptying house. He had never eaten in a motorway service station before; whenever they had travelled, picnics had been packed to be eaten in fields or off the dashboard, according to rain. Now he felt, knowing it to be stupid, that indefinite dangers were presenting themselves, dangers involving crowds of strangers, unfamiliar islands of retail and cooking, the probability of being lost and abandoned. The fear of abandonment was always high in him, and the specific dread, on this occasion, was of the family losing their possessions, now loaded into an untrustworthy, wobbling van.

  “Here we are,” Bernie said, as the half-mile sign flashed past; he signalled left, and then Francis’s favourite thing, the three signs indicating three hundred yards, two hundred, a hundred, with three, then two, then one finger. You could work out how fast you were going: just count the seconds between each sign and multiply by whatever. But, of course, they were slowing down. There was a fragile bridge, glass, metal and plastic, over the breadth of the motorway, and people walking across it as if they did not know they were at any moment to be plunged, shrieking, into the metal river of traffic when the structure collapsed. At this new terror he shut his eyes.

  “And there they are,” Alice said, with soft relief. The van was reversing into a bay in the lorry park to the left; they drove right, and Bernie found a space. They got out and waited for the men and Sandra; but as they approached, they were a few feet behind her; she was walking with brisk anger. The youngest man had a flushed face, as if he had just been discovered in some peculiarly personal activity; the chief remover’s mouth was set.

  They waited by the Simca, Alice smiling defensively. “Lovely day for it,” she called to them, but they didn’t reply. Sandra, scowling, came up and took her father’s arm.

  “I think it’s best,” the chief remover said, “that your daughter ride in the car the rest of the way.” He had stopped; the other two kept going.

  “I thought she’d get fed up of it before long,” Alice said hopefully.

  “We’ve got the directions,” the chief remover said, ignoring this. “We’ll see you up there in a couple of hours, I reckon.”

  He walked off, following the others. Bernie squeezed his daughter; no one said anything. In a moment, they went inside; Bernie had seen that the men were going upstairs, but there was a nearer café on the ground floor. They went into that and ate fish and chips, all together. And when the men went out, back to the lorry, they pretended not to notice, and sat there for fifteen minutes longer. Alice even had a piece of cake. Everyone did their best to be cheerful, talking around rather than to Sandra, and by the time they had finished, they could look directly at her. Although she was still a bit red, she no longer seemed about to burst into tears.

  Daniel was home by half past four. He’d been at Hathersage all day, pretty well; it had been a hot day, a perfect one. The pool was built on a hillside just outside the Derbyshire village. Surrounded by schoolmasterly red-brick walls, it was concrete and tile inside; outside were the Derbyshire hills, and the huge sky. If you hurled yourself from the highest diving board, you were horizontal for one moment, poised above the water, framed against the sky and hills. Perfect. He’d got there at ten, in the first bus of the morning, still empty; later buses were full of kids, as he said to himself. Barbara had been supposed to come, and he’d told her to meet him at the bus stop at the bottom of Coldwell Lane at nine, but she hadn’t been there when the bus came. He’d got on anyway; not a bad excuse to dump her, especially since she hadn’t been on the next bus.

  He’d spent an hour thrashing up and down, throwing himself off the diving board in bold, untidy shapes, enjoying more the gesture and the moment of flight than anything else, and grinning when he surfaced after a bellyflop, his stomach red and stinging, joining in with the laughter of the girl lifeguard. By eleven or so another bus had arrived from Sheffield, much more full, and they came in; some he recognized from his school, three girls from his sister’s year, finding Daniel splendid in his exercise, brown limbs jumbled, the disconcerting swirl of his turquoise-patterned trunks, flying above the vivid oblong of water which shone with the Derbyshire blue of the sky. He’d met some friends and made some more; he always did. But in the end he went home on his own, hardly saying goodbye, burying his face in a bag of cheese and onion crisps from the machine.

  The bus home, the three-thirty, was as empty as the morning bus had been—too early for most people—but with all that day’s exercise he ached, sitting at the front of the top deck. Ached, too, slumping up Coldwell Lane when the bus let him off; it was uphill all the way, and just a bit too far; his black sports bag, the one he used for school, banged away in the heat at his bony hips. Half enjoying his exhaustion, groaning as he slouched up the hill, he almost expected Barbara to be sitting on the wall outside their house. Perhaps crying.

  There seemed to be nobody in the house. Daniel was terribly hungry; he hadn’t had anything to eat since breakfast, apart from the crisps. He went through to the kitchen, dropping his bag in the middle of the hall, and went through the cupboards and the fridge, banging the doors as he went. He poured himself some vividly orange squash; it was always too weak and watery when your mother made it for you, and he liked it about one part to three. In a few minutes, he’d got the stuff for a magic sandwich together, and sat down with a breadknife, contentedly putting it together and eating the constituent parts individually as he went.

  “That looks revolting,” Jane said, opening the kitchen door. She must have been in the garden.

  “You don’t have to eat it,” Daniel said, putting the sandwich spread on awkwardly with the breadknife. “I’m starving.”

  “I bet you had some chips in Hathersage,” Jane said. She put down her notebook and pen on the table. He noticed that her dress was stained with grass.

  “No, I didn’t,” he said. “What’ve you been
doing? Writing poetry?”

  “No,” Jane said. “Where’s Tim?”

  “I don’t know,” Daniel said. “I only just came in. You know Jason in my year? Him and his brother Matthew were out on the crags a week ago and he said to me, ‘I saw your sister. And she was sitting on a rock and gazing at the landscape and guess what she was doing? She was making notes in her little book.’ Making notes.” He broke into hilarity.

  Jane flushed, picked up her notebook and hugged it to her. “I couldn’t care less what someone like that says about anything I do,” she said. “Whoever he is.” She knew who he was: they’d thrown a stone at her.

  “Making notes, though,” Daniel said, subsiding. “It was dead funny.” He leant back in his chair, took a satisfied look at the complex sandwich he’d put together, with ham and sandwich spread, cheese and salad cream, all bursting out from the sides, then took an enormous bite. Much of it fell out, splattering his red shiny shorts and his brown legs.

  “That’s disgusting,” Jane said. “You know what? Dad came home this lunchtime.”

  There was a noise from upstairs, a little thud and a door opening—Tim coming downstairs. “I thought he’d gone out,” Jane said. “I haven’t seen him all day.”

  “Upstairs reading his snake books,” Daniel said. “He’s made himself a sandwich, though.” He nodded at the mess on the work surface. “He’ll not have been starving.”

  “That was me,” Jane said. “I was saying, I thought you’d gone out.”

  “No,” Tim said. “I was upstairs in my room. Can I have a sandwich?”

  “Make it yourself,” Daniel said. “Upstairs with your snake books?”

  “Yes,” Tim said, and then, in a singing tone, “Do you know—”

  “Probably not,” Daniel said.

  “Do you know what the most venomous snake in the world is?”

  “No,” Jane said, with a feeling she’d been asked this before.

  “Lots of people would say the cobra or the rattlesnake. But it’s not. It’s the inland Taipan. It can get up to eight feet long. If it bites you you’re bound to die. It’s brown, it’s called Oxy, Oxyripidus something. Oxyripidus—Oxy—I’m almost remembering it—”

  “Where’s it live?” Daniel said.

  “Australia,” Tim said.

  “Just so long as it doesn’t live near me,” Daniel said.

  “It wouldn’t hurt you,” Tim said. “It’s quite timid, really. It would avoid you and it’s probably more scared of you than you would be of it. You wouldn’t have to worry about it even if you were in Australia. Most people think snakes would attack you but they wouldn’t, really. They only bite if they’re in danger. I like snakes. I wish I could have one. Do you think if I asked they’d let me have a snake in my bedroom? I’d keep it in a glass case. I wouldn’t let it out and it wouldn’t have to be venomous—or not very.”

  “What do you mean, ‘if’ you asked?” Daniel said. “You ask them all the time, about once a week, and they always say no. You’re not getting the most venomous snake in the world to keep under your bed. Face facts.”

  “I’d save up,” Tim said, reciting his case stolidly on one note, “and I’d pay for it myself. I wouldn’t want an inland Taipan—I wouldn’t want any venomous snake, really. And I’d buy the mice with my pocket money. They don’t need to eat very often, it wouldn’t be expensive. I wish I could have a snake. It’s not fair.”

  “I dare say,” Jane said. “Go and make yourself a sandwich or something. I’m going to watch the telly.”

  “There’s nothing on,” Daniel said. “It’s rubbish.”

  “It’s better in the holidays,” Tim said. “There’s stuff on in the mornings. For children.”

  “It’s still rubbish.”

  “This boy told me a joke,” Tim continued with his dull reciting voice, though the subject had changed.

  “What boy?” Daniel said.

  “This boy I know,” Tim said.

  “You haven’t seen anyone for five weeks,” Daniel said.

  “Yes, I have,” Tim said, not crossly, but setting things right. “I saw Antony last week. We went to the library.”

  “Did smelly Antony tell you a joke?” Jane said incredulously. Tim occasionally gave the impression of a rich and varied social life once out of sight of his family, but Antony was its only visible representative. They’d all concluded, with different degrees of worry or amusement, that Antony, a boy as pale and quiet as a whelk, was not the tip of some festive iceberg but probably Tim’s best or only friend.

  “No, it wasn’t Antony’s joke,” Tim said. “It was another boy, at school.”

  “You’ve been saving it up for five weeks?” Daniel said.

  “I only just thought of it,” Tim said. “There are these three bears, right?”

  “I thought this was a joke,” Daniel said. “I don’t want to hear Goldilocks.”

  “It isn’t Goldilocks,” Tim said. “And these three bears, they’re in an aeroplane.”

  “Not very likely,” Jane said. “They wouldn’t let three bears on an aeroplane. They’d eat all the meals and then they’d eat all the passengers. And they’d open the doors at the other end and there’s no one there except a lot of bones and three bears who weren’t hungry any more.”

  “Well, there’s mummy bear and daddy bear and baby bear,” Tim said, persevering, “and they’re in an aeroplane.”

  “Where were they going?” Daniel said. “I can’t remember stories like this if I don’t know where they’re going.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Tim said. “They never got there, anyway. Listen to the story and you’ll find out.”

  “Is this a joke or a story?” Jane said. “You said it was a joke. Now it’s a story.”

  “I want to know where they were going,” Daniel said. “Can they be going to Spain? I’d like a bear who went to Spain. Or can they be coming back? Then they’d have those hats on, those sombreros. A bear in a sombrero, there’s a sight you don’t see every day.”

  “They weren’t going anywhere,” Tim said. “Stop interrupting. I’m telling a joke.”

  “They’ve got to have been going somewhere,” Jane said, “or they wouldn’t have been in an aeroplane in the first place. Go on, tell us your joke.”

  “All right,” Tim said. “So they’re in this plane, and suddenly the engines catch fire. I forgot—I should have said there’s only two parachutes on the plane.”

  “There’s only two parachutes on the plane?” Daniel said. “For three bears, and a plane full of passengers, and the crew as well? That’s not very sensible.”

  “There’s not a plane full of passengers,” Tim said, getting red in the face. “There’s only three bears.”

  “But even supposing there are only three bears—I suppose they’ve eaten all the other passengers, or maybe everyone in the departure lounge saw three bears getting on the plane, and thought, Hmm, do I want to get into a confined space with three hungry bears or, really, do I want to go to Spain that much anyway, and changed their mind and went home—I mean, even supposing that, there’s got to be someone flying the plane.”

  “Or even two,” Jane said. “I think you have to have two pilots. When we went to Paris last year there were two pilots in case something went wrong with one of them.”

  Tim thought for a very long time, breathing noisily. Finally, he said, “Daddy bear was flying the plane. Because he knew how to.”

  “Oh, that makes perfect sense,” Daniel said. “An untrained savage wild beast from the Canadian wilderness who’d learnt how to fly a jet plane. One of the most majestic yet complex machines ever invented by the human race.”

  “No, it was invented by a moose,” Jane said. “Everyone knows that.”

  “Called Harold,” Daniel said.

  “And the daddy bear said to the mummy bear, ‘There’s only two parachutes, one for me and one for you.’ So the daddy bear puts one on and the mummy bear puts the other on and they jump out of the pl
ane.”

  “What—they didn’t even try to hold their infant?” Daniel said. “Their poor suffering infant who they loved better than anyone else in the world? They just left the baby bear to die in a plane crash? This isn’t a funny story at all. It’s deeply moving and tragic.”

  “No, wait, because they go down, they go down in their parachutes, I mean, and then at the bottom, when they get to the bottom, there’s baby bear anyway.”

  “I’ve heard this before,” Jane said. “It’s crap.”

  “And they say, ‘Oh, baby bear oh, kissy kissy, how did you get down safe and everything?’ And the baby bear says, ‘Me not stupid, me not silly. Me hold on to daddy’s willy.’”

  There was a lengthy silence. Daniel and Jane exchanged a sorrowing look.

  “That’s it, that’s the joke,” Tim said. “It was funny, I mean, it’s funny if you don’t ask stupid questions all the time.”

  “What I don’t understand,” Jane said, “is why they have to be bears. They could be anything. They could be people, or they could be donkeys. It wouldn’t make any difference to the joke.”

  “They couldn’t be donkeys, though, could they?” Daniel said pensively. “If you think about it.”

  “Why couldn’t they be donkeys?” Jane said.

  “Well, you couldn’t hold a cock with your hooves,” Daniel said. “If you were a donkey. Have some sense, woman.”

  “You could try,” Jane said.

  Tim was crying now, fat tears amassing at his already reddened lids. The other two watched the familiar phenomenon. “It’s not fair,” he finally said. “No one ever listens to anything I say. I don’t want to talk to you any more.”

  “I wish,” Jane said, in her mother’s posh or telephone voice, “I wish you two would stop making Timothy cry. It’s not kind or clever.”

  “Do you want to go and watch Why Don’t You?” Daniel said. “I’m bored of this.”