David and Goliath, I thought. My scalp prickled, and I felt steel pins cold against it. Last night had been too busy for the combing. My hair fell smoothly down my back, but hidden above the nape of my neck there was a secret pad of fuzziness which, if slept on for a second night, would require a howling hour to unknot.
The house of Jacob was built of brick in a quiet colour of brown, with a white-painted gate and a tree in a tub outside. One huge window stared out at a grass verge, with a sapling; and the road curved away, lined with similar houses, each in their own square of garden. We stepped out of the heat of the car and stood jelly-legged on the verge. Behind the plate glass was a stir of movement, and Jacob opened the front door to us, his face breaking into a smile. He was a tall slender man, and I liked the contrast of his white shirt with the soft sheen of his skin. I tried hard not to say, even to think, the term that is not the one polite people use. Jacob, I said to myself, is quite a dark lavender, verging on purple on an overcast day.
Eva came out from behind him. She had a compensatory pallor, and when she reached out, vaguely patting at my little brothers, she did it with fingers like rolled dough. Well, well, the adults said. And, this is all very nice. Lovely, Eva. And fitted carpets. Yes, said Eva. And would you like to go and spend a penny? I didn’t know this phrase. Wash your hands, my mother said. Eva said, run upstairs, poppet.
At the top of the stairs there was a bathroom, not an arrangement I had reason to take for granted. Eva ushered me into it, smiling, and clicked the door behind her. Standing at the basin and watching myself in the mirror, I washed my hands carefully with Camay soap. Maybe I was dehydrated from the journey, for I didn’t seem to need to do anything else. I hummed to myself, ‘You’ll look a little lovelier… each day… with fabulous Camay.’ I didn’t look around much. Already I could hear them on the stairs, shouting that it was their turn. I dried carefully between my fingers with the towel behind the door. There was a bolt on this door and I thought for a moment of bolting myself in. But a familiar pounding began, a head-butting, a thudding and a giggling, and I opened the door so that my brothers fell in at it and I went downstairs to do the rest of the day.
Everything had been fine, till the last hour of the journey. ‘Not long to go,’ my mother had said, and suddenly swivelled in her seat. She watched us, silent, her neck craning. Then she said, ‘When we are visiting Jacob, don’t say “Jack”. It’s not suitable. I want you to say,’ and here she began to struggle with words, ‘“Daddy… Daddy Jack”.’
Her head, once more, faced front. Studying the line of her cheek, I thought she looked sick. It had been a most unconvincing performance. I was almost embarrassed for her. ‘Is this just for today?’ I asked. My voice came out cold. She didn’t answer.
When I got back into the downstairs room they were parading Eva’s children, a toddler and a baby, and remarking that it was funny how it came out, so you had one butter-coloured and one bluish, and Jacob was saying, too, that it was funny how it came out and you couldn’t ever tell, really, it was probably beyond the scope of science as we know it today. The sound of a pan rocking on the gas jet came from the kitchen, and there was a burst of wet steam, and some clanking; Eva said, carrots, can’t take your eye off them. Wiping her hands on her apron, she made for the door and melted into the steam. My eyes followed her. Jacob smiled and said, so how is the man who took up the cudgels?
We children ate in the kitchen – my family, that is, because the two babies sat in their own high chairs by Eva and sucked gloop from a spoon. There was a little red table with a hinged flap, and Eva propped the back door open so that the sunlight from the garden came in. We had vast pale slices of roast pork, and gravy that was beige and so thick it kept the shape of the knife. Probably if I am honest about what I remember, I think it is the fudge texture of this gravy that stays in my mind, better even than the afternoon’s choking panic, the tears and prayers that were now only an hour or so away.
After our dinner Tabby came. She was not a cat but a girl, and the niece of Jacob. Enquiries were made of me: did I like to draw? Tabby had brought a large bag with her, and from it she withdrew sheets of rough coloured paper and a whole set of coloured pencils, double-ended. She gave me a quick, modest smile, and a flicker of her eyes. We settled down in a corner, and began to make each other’s portrait.
Out in the garden the little boys grubbed up worms, shrieked, rolled the lawn with each other and laid about with their fists. I thought that the two coloured babies, now snorting in milky sleep, would be doing the same thing before long. When one of the boys fetched the other a harder clout than usual, the victim would howl, ‘Jack! Jack!’
My mother stood looking over the garden. ‘That’s a lovely shrub, Eva,’ she said. I could see her through the angle made by the open door of the kitchen; her high-heeled sandals planted squarely on the lino. She was smaller than I had thought, when I saw her beside the floury bulk of Eva, and her eyes were resting on something further than the shrub: on the day when she would leave the moorland village behind her, and have a shrub of her own. I bent my head over the paper and attempted the blurred line of Tabby’s cheek, the angle of neck to chin. The curve of flesh, its soft bloom, eluded me; I lolled my pencil point softly against the paper, feeling I wanted to roll it in cream, or in something vegetable-soft but tensile, like the fallen petal of a rose. I had already noticed, with interest, that Tabby’s crayons were sharpened down in a similar pattern to the ones I had at home. She had little use for gravy colour and still less for bl***k. Almost as unpopular was the double-ended crayon in morbid mauve/dark pink. Most popular with her was gold/green: as with me. On those days when I was tired of crayoning, and started to play that the crayons were soldiers, I had to imagine that gold/green was a drummer boy, so short was he.
On the rough paper, my pencil snagged; at once, my reverie was interrupted. I took in a breath. I bit my lip. I felt my heart begin to beat: an obscure insult, trailing like the smell of old vegetable water, seemed to hang in the air. This paper is for kids, I thought; it’s for babies who don’t know how to draw. My fingers gripped the crayon. I held it like a dagger. My hand clenched around it. At my toppest speed, I began to execute cartoon men, with straight jointless limbs, and brown ‘O’s for heads, with wide grinning mouths, jug ears; petty Goliaths with slatted mouths, with five fingerbones splaying from their wrists.
Tabby looked up. Shh, shh… she said; as if soothing me.
I drew children rolling in the grass, children made of two circles with a third ‘O’ for their bawling mouths.
Jacob came in, laughing, talking to Jack over his shoulder, ‘…so I tell him, if you want a trained draughtsman for £6 a week, man, you can whistle for him!’
I thought, I won’t call Jack anything, I won’t give him a name. I’ll nod my head in his direction so they’ll know who I mean. I’ll even point to him, though polite people don’t point. Daddy Jack! Daddy Jack! They can whistle for him!
Jacob stood over us, smiling softly. The crisp turn of his collar, the top button released, disclosed his velvet, quite dark-coloured throat. ‘Two nice girls,’ he said. ‘What have we here?’ He picked up my paper. ‘Talent!’ he said. ‘Did you do this, honey, by yourself?’ He was looking at the cartoon men, not my portrait of Tabby, those tentative strokes in the corner of the page; not at the tilt of her jaw, like a note in music. ‘Hey, Jack,’ he said, ‘now this is good, I can’t believe it at her young age.’ I whispered, ‘I am nine,’ as if I wanted to alert him to the true state of affairs. Jacob waved the paper around, delighted. ‘I could well say this is a prodigy,’ he said. I turned my face away. It seemed indecent to look at him. In that one moment it seemed to me that the world was blighted, and that every adult throat bubbled, like a garbage pail in August, with the syrup of rotting lies.
I see them, now, from the car window, children any day, on any road; children going somewhere, disconnected from the routes of adult intent. You see them in twos or threes, in unlikely c
ombinations, sometimes a pair with a little one tagging along, sometimes a boy with two girls. They carry, it might be, a plastic bag with something secret inside, or a stick or box, but no obvious plaything; sometimes a ratty dog processes behind them. Their faces are intent and their missions hidden from adult eyes; they have a geography of their own, urban or rural, that has nothing to do with the milestones and markers that adults use. The country through which they move is older, more intimate than ours. They have their private knowledge of it. You do not expect this knowledge to fail.
There was no need to ask if we were best friends, me and Tabby, as we walked the narrow muddy path by the water. Perhaps it was a canal, but a canal was not a thing I’d seen, and it seemed to me more like a placid inland stream, silver-grey in colour, tideless though not motionless, fringed by sedge and tall grasses. My fingers were safely held in the pad of Tabby’s palm, and there was a curve of light on the narrow, coffee-coloured back of her hand. She was a head taller than me, willowy, cool to the touch, even at the hot end of this hot afternoon. She was ten and a quarter years old, she said; lightly, almost as if it were something to shrug away. In her free hand she held a paper bag, and in this bag – which she had taken from her satchel, her eyes modestly downcast – were ripe plums.
They were – in their perfect dumpling under my fingertips, in their cold purple blush – so fleshy that to notch your teeth against their skin seemed like becoming a teatime cannibal, a vampire for a day. I carried my plum in my palm, caressing it, rolling it like a dispossessed eye, and feeling it grow warm from the heat of my skin. We strolled, so, abstinent; till Tabby pulled at my hand, stopped me, and turned me towards her, as if she wanted a witness. She clenched her hand. She rolled the dark fruit in her fist, her eyes on mine. She raised her fist to her sepia mouth. Her small teeth plunged into ripe flesh. Juice ran down her chin. Casually, she wiped it. She turned her face full to mine, and for the first time I saw her frank smile, her lips parted, the gap between her front teeth. She flipped my wrist lightly, with the back of her fingers; I felt the sting of her nails. ‘Let’s go on the wrecks,’ she said.
It meant we must scramble through a fence. Through a gap there. I knew it was illicit. I knew no would be said: but then what, this afternoon, did I care for no? Under the wire, through the snag of it, the gap already widened by the hands of forerunners, some of whom must have worn double-thickness woollen double-knit mittens to muffle the scratch against their flesh. Once through the wire, Tabby went, ‘Whoop!’
Then soon she was bouncing, dancing in the realm of the dead cars. They were above our head to the height of three. Her hands reached out to slap at their rusting door-sills and wings. If there had been glass in their windows, it was strewn now at our feet. Scrapes of car paint showed, fawn, banana, a degraded scarlet. I was giddy, and punched my fingers at metals: it crumbled, I was through it. For that moment only I may have laughed; but I do not think so.
She led me on the paths to the heart of the wrecks. We play here, she said, and towed me on. We stopped for a plum each. We laughed. ‘Are you too young to write a letter?’ she asked. I did not answer. ‘Have you heard of penfriends? I have one already.’
All around us, the scrapyard showed its bones. The wrecks stood clear now, stack on stack, against a declining yellow light. When I looked up they seemed to foreshorten, these carcasses, and bear down on me; gaping windows where faces once looked out, engine cavities where the air was blue, treadless tyres, wheel arches gaping, boots unsprung and empty of bags, unravelling springs where seats had been; and some wrecks were warped, reduced as if by fire, bl***kened. We walked, sombre, cheeks bulging, down the paths between. When we had penetrated many rows in, by blind corners, by the swerves enforced on us by the squishy corrosion of the sliding piles, I wanted to ask, why do you play here and who do you mean by we, can I be one of your friends or will you forget me, and also can we go now please?
Tabby ducked out of sight, around some rotting heap. I heard her giggle. ‘Got you!’ I said. ‘Yes!’ She ducked, shying away, but my plum stone hit her square on the temple, and as it touched her flesh I tasted the seducing poison which, if you crack a plum stone, your tongue can feel. Then Tabby broke into a trot, and I chased her: when she skidded to a halt, her flat brown sandals making brakes for her, I stopped too, and glanced up, and saw we had come to a place where I could hardly see the sky. Have a plum, she said She held the bag out. I am lost, she said. We are, we are, lost. I’m afraid to say.
What came next I cannot, you understand, describe in clock-time. I have never been lost since, not utterly lost, without the sanctuary of sense; without the reasonable hope that I will and can and deserve to be saved. But for that next buried hour, which seemed like a day, and a day with fading light, we ran like rabbits: pile to pile, scrap to scrap, the wrecks towering, as we went deeper, for twenty feet above our heads. I could not blame her. I did not. But I did not see how I could help us either.
If it had been the moors, some ancestral virtue would have propelled me, I felt, towards the metalled road, towards a stream bed or cloud that would have conveyed me, soaked and beaten, towards the A57, towards the sanctuary of some stranger’s car; and the wet inner breath of that vehicle would have felt to me, whoever owned it, like the wet protective breathing of the belly of the whale. But here, there was nothing alive. There was nothing I could do, for there was nothing natural. The metal stretched, friable, bl***k, against evening light. We shall have to live on plums for ever, I thought. For I had the sense to realise that the only incursion here would be from the wreckers’ ball. No flesh would be salvaged here; there would be no rescue team. When Tabby reached for my hand, her fingertips were cold as ball-bearings. Once, she heard people calling. Men’s voices. She said she did. I heard only distant, formless shouts. They are calling our names, she said. Uncle Jacob, Daddy Jack. They are calling for us.
She began to move, for the first time, in a purposive direction. ‘Uncle Jacob!’ she called. In her eyes was that shifty light of unconviction that I had seen on my mother’s face – could it be only this morning? ‘Uncle Jacob!’ She paused in her calling, respectful, so I could call in my turn. But I did not call. I would not, or I could not? A scalding pair of tears popped into my eyes. To know that I lived, I touched the knotted mass of hair, the secret above my nape: my fingers rubbed and rubbed it, round and round. If I survived, it would have to be combed out, with torture. This seemed to militate against life; and then I felt, for the first time and not the last, that death at least is straightforward. Tabby called, ‘Uncle Jacob!’ She stopped, her breath tight and short, and held out to me the last plum stone, the kernel, sucked clear of flesh.
I took it without disgust from her hand. Tabby’s troubled eyes looked at it. It sat in my palm, a shrivelled brain from some small animal. Tabby leaned forward. She was still breathing hard. The edge of her littlest nail picked at the convolutions. She put her hand against her ribs. She said, ‘It is like the map of the world.’
There was an interval of praying. I will not disguise it. It was she who raised the prospect. ‘I know a prayer,’ she said. I waited. ‘Little Jesus, meek and mild…’
I said, ‘What’s the good of praying to a baby?’
She threw her head back. Her nostrils flared. Prayers began to run out of her.
‘Now I lay me down, to sleep,
– I pray the Lord my soul to keep’
Stop, I said.
‘If I should die before I wake—’
My fist, before I even knew it, clipped her across the mouth.
After a time, she raised her hand there. A fingertip trembled against the corner of her lip, the crushed flesh like velvet. She crept her lip downwards, so that for a moment the inner membrane showed, dark and bruised. There was no blood.
I said, ‘Aren’t you going to cry?’
She said, ‘Are you?’
I couldn’t say, I never cry. It was not true. She knew it. She said softly, it is all right if you w
ant to cry. You’re a Catholic, aren’t you? Don’t you know a Catholic prayer?
Hail Mary, I said. She said, teach it me. And I could see why: because night was falling: because the sun lay in angry streaks across farther peaks of the junkyard. ‘Don’t you have a watch?’ she whispered. ‘I have one it is Timex, but it is at home, in my bedroom.’ I said, I have a watch it is Westclox, but I am not allowed to wind it, it is only to be wound by Jack. I wanted to say, and often he is tired, it is late, my watch is winding down, it is stopping but I dare not ask, and when next day it’s stopped there’s bellowing, only I can do a bleeding thing in this bleeding house. (Door slam.)
There is a certain prayer which never fails. It is to St Bernard; or by him, I was never quite clear. Remember oh most loving Virgin Mary, that it is a thing unheard of that anyone ever beseeched thy aid, craved thy intercession or implored thy help and was left forsaken. I thought that I had it, close enough – they might not be the exact words but could a few errors matter, when you were kicking at the very gate of the Immaculate herself? I was ready to implore, ready to crave: and this prayer, I knew, was the best and most powerful prayer ever invented. It was a clear declaration that heaven must help you, or go to hell! It was a taunt, a challenge, to Holy Mary, Mother of God. Get it fixed! Do it now! It is a thing unheard of! But just as I was about to begin, I realised I must not say it after all. Because if it didn’t work…
The strength seemed to drain away then, from my arms and legs. I sat down, in the deep shadows of the wrecks, when all the indications were that we should keep climbing. I wasn’t about to take a bet on St Bernard’s prayer, and live my whole life knowing it was useless. My life might be long, it might be very long. I must have thought there were worse circumstances, in which I’d need to deal this final card from my sleeve.
‘Climb!’ said Tabby. I climbed. I knew – did she? – that the rust might crumble beneath us and drop us into the heart of the wrecks. Climb, she said, and I did: each step tested, so that I learned the resistance of rotting metal, the play and the give beneath my feet, the pathetic cough and wheeze of it, its abandonment and mineral despair. Tabby climbed. Her feet scurried, light, skipping, the soles of her sandals skittering and scratching like rats. And then, like stout Cortez, she stopped, pointed, and stared. ‘The woodpiles!’ I gazed upwards into her face. She swayed and teetered, six feet above me. Evening breeze whipped her skirt around her stick legs. ‘The woodpiles!’ Her face opened like a flower.
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