by Trevor Hoyle
‘Nowt. Why?’
‘Somebody after you?’ His wide confident grin revealed the row of off-colour teeth, big as tombstones. It was hard to imagine Shap without his yellow smile. You got the impression that he carried it with him wherever he went, ready to be slapped on at a moment’s notice. Terry thought that he too would probably have a smile like Shap’s if his mother ran the Post Office.
‘Do you want a fag?’ Shap said, surprising them both. He gave them a full Player’s each, which felt like a cigar in Terry’s mouth.
‘Where’s the rest of them?’ Terry asked, meaning Shap’s pals.
‘Gone in,’ Shap said.
They moved into the doorway with him, watching the snow thicken and come flurrying down onto the road in a deathly hush; a bus came by and spoiled the bland smoothness, sending slush curling into the gutter.
‘What time is it?’ Male asked.
Shap looked at his watch and said that it was five minutes past nine. This gave Terry an idea. He had been puzzling over what to buy his mother for her birthday in March, and thought now of a watch. He’d seen some advertised in the back pages of the Sunday Pictorial: ‘Ladies 17-jewel Swiss-movement Cocktail Watches. ONLY 15/-DEPOSIT! £1.7.6d a month. Cash Price £5.19.6d.’ If he could get a paper round at 12/6d a week he could easily afford the payments. He tried to work out how much £1.7.6d was by the week.
‘Bet you don’t know who I’ve bin with tonight,’ Shap said.
‘Who?’ Male said.
‘Guess.’
‘We haven’t a clue,’ Terry said.
‘Margaret Parry.’ Shap was grinning. ‘Behind the garages.’
Terry didn’t want to hear any more but he had to stay. It was the price of the cigarette he was smoking.
‘What did you do?’ Male said.
‘I didn’t actually stuff it,’ Shap said, an admission that surprised Terry by its honesty. ‘But I pulled it out and she held it.’
‘Go on,’ Male said with unfeigned interest.
‘Well,’ Shap said, ‘we were messing about round the back of the garages, nothing dirty, just creeping up on the girls and frightening them. Margaret was hiding so I went looking for her. She was hiding behind the concrete garage with the flat roof and when I found her she said “Keep quiet. Don’t tell the others where we are”. Anyway, then we started snogging – proper French kisses – and I had a feel up her legs. She didn’t say owt, didn’t even pull me hand away. She was wearing these kind of silky knickers and I put me finger inside and rubbed her up. She was giving me belting kisses: you know, slavvery. Anyway, after a bit I thought I’d try it and see what she did. She got hold of it, really tight. I thought “Bloodyhellfire” and put me finger up her fanny.’ He held up the finger in question as if in evidence of the truth of his claim.
It might have been true, it probably was true, every word of it, but Terry didn’t wish to hear any more. In one way he could visualise Margaret Parry doing precisely what Shap was describing, and yet in a curious contradictory way he found it impossible to believe that such a sweet attractive creature (as he imagined her to be) could participate in anything so blatant and disgusting. It degraded her in his eyes to the level of gross bodily appetite and cheap crude sensation. The rather disturbing notion entered his head that perhaps girls were attracted by such behaviour: he thought of Carol and how crudely Colin Purvis had treated her and how she had never once complained, allowing him to do and say anything he pleased. Were all girls like that? Did they want a big rough moron like Colin Purvis or Shap to put his hand inside their knickers and tickle their fannies? Was that all there was to it?
Terry looked at Shap’s mouth splayed in a vast stupid grin; he felt weary and despairing – of ever being able to understand. Did Shap know the secret, and did the secret consist of nothing more mysterious than the cruder the better?
Male said reverentially, steaming Nora,’ in wonderment and envy at Shap’s tale, and flicked the fag-end into the steadily falling snow, now obscuring the lights as it swept down in a thick silent curtain.
‘Wait till next time,’ Shap said smugly. ‘I’ll go all the way.’
‘She won’t let you,’ Terry said.
‘She’s dying for it.’
‘How do you know?’
Shap said, ‘You’re only a kid. You’ve never touched a girl or played stink-finger with her.’
‘How do you know?’ Terry said, throwing the cigarette-end into the snow.
‘Who then?’ Shap challenged him.
‘I’m not telling you.’
‘Because you’ve never bloody done it.’
‘Neither have you. I bet you’ve never even kissed Margaret Parry.’
‘I’ve just been telling you haven’t I?’ Shap said, the smile finally extinguished.
Terry made a scoffing sound.
‘Look,’ Shap said dangerously, ‘I don’t want a kid like you telling me I’m a liar. If you don’t believe me, smell it,’ holding up the index finger of his right hand.
‘What does that prove?’
‘It bloody proves—’ Shap said, and then must have realised there was no need to prove anything, least of all to a squirt like Terry Webb who everybody knew was a cocky little know-all. This infuriated Shap, mainly because it threatened the mellow good mood that had enveloped him so snugly; fortunately he had a method for dealing with kids who thought themselves smarter than everybody else, and also the strength to implement it: Terry was sent slithering on his back in the snow and was momentarily lost to sight, a dark huddled shape obscured by the whirling flakes.
Shap waited for retaliation, his broad pale fists poised ready, but Terry had risen and gone, swallowed up in the blizzard of white.
After Dinner
ON SATURDAY MORNING THE SNOW LAY DEEP and crisp and even. Along the Top Track it was packed hard and glossy from the wheels of the coal wagon and the horse-drawn milk float and the van delivering bread to Wellens’s shop. The Gang were out in force with their sledges, sliding one after the other down the Brew so that the slope was buffed and burnished into a channel of glass upon which it was impossible to stand upright.
Terry’s sledge had been made by his Uncle Jack, when he stayed with them after his demob: a rigid box construction with a pair of cast-iron runners that Terry had polished with Brasso and rubbed up with lard. It wasn’t the fastest sledge (Roy Pickup had an all-metal one that went like greased lightning) but it was strong enough to carry two, three, even four lads all at once. This could be hazardous if the sledge went out of control halfway down and skewed ninety degrees, throwing the top three onto the icy slope, then overturning with the steerer hanging on and sliding the rest of the way upside-down and arse-about-face. The year before, Danny Travis had been thrown off and semi-concussed, lying in an awkward heap with a purple lump the size of a half-a-crown gathering nicely on his forehead.
Spenner, as usual, came up with the craziest schemes. ‘Five of us on one sledge. How about it?’
They tried it, Roy and Kevin lying flat, Terry and Male astride them, Spenner standing at the back holding the rope like a stagecoach driver whipping a team of four across the prairie. It nearly worked, very nearly, except that Spenner’s weight upset the equilibrium of the sledge which reared up like a bronco, throwing Spenner off the back, dislodging Terry and Male, leaving Roy and Kevin hanging on to finish at the bottom of the Brew on their backsides with the sledge on top of them.
Spenner came limping through the frosty grass, red-faced with laughing, and Male was jumping up and down to shake out the snow that had been scooped inside the legs of his short trousers.
‘You’re all looney,’ Teddy Travis said, sitting on his Norton at the top of the slope. ‘You could have broken your bloody necks.’ He was fair, like his brother Danny, with a fresh open face that the sun, when it came, would bring out in a deluge of freckles.
‘Are we having another go?’ Spenner said.
‘Bugger off,’ Kevin Hartley said. ‘I’m not committing suicide f
or you or anybody.’
‘We could tie three sledges together and all the lot of us pile on.’
‘You’re cracked,’ Teddy Travis said. Only three years separated him and Spenner, yet they were the vital years that marked the division between sledging with the Gang on the Brew and inhabiting the grown-up world of jobs, money, girlfriends and gleaming black Nortons. Already Teddy had forgotten how he used to roam the ash-tips and swale the railway embankment, paddle across the river on a raft of planks and oil drums, raid the pens down the Figure 7 for crab-apples. What he saw was a bunch of crazy kids with not a ha-puth of sense between them, unable to distinguish danger from tomfoolery; Spenner especially, who Teddy thought a complete raving nutter.
Terry went to stand in the respectful group round the Norton, breathing in its throat-filling smell of oil and leather and metal-polish. The lads already knew the answers but still asked the questions:
‘What will it do?’
‘How much was it?’
‘Will you give us a ride?’
‘Where’ve you bin on it?’
‘Will it beat an AJS?’
‘Will you give us a go round the block?’
Sometimes, when he felt like it, Teddy would take one of the younger lads on the pillion and do a circuit of the Top Track, hammering the throttle along the length of Kellett Street and bouncing over the potholes, the confined roar of the twin exhausts banging back and forth from the house fronts. Terry had been round twice, but today Teddy couldn’t be bothered. Besides, he said, it was too dangerous on the ice and snow.
At twelve o’clock Terry and Male went in for their dinners, no bones broken but the tops of their legs smarting with frost, and with sore red rings where the edges of their wellies had been rubbing. The Gang had already decided to go sledging that afternoon on the hill behind Heybrook School: a terrifyingly steep slope which finished up – if you weren’t quick enough – in the shallow but ice-flecked water of the brook.
Terry kicked the snow off his wellies against the back step and went into the kitchen. His mam said: ‘Don’t tramp slush in here. Throw ’em under the sink.’ Turning from the stove she said: ‘Wait till Denis gets to be his age’ – this to Mona Sysons who was sitting in the rocking-chair nursing a six-month-old baby boy. Mona was the eldest girl of Barbara’s friend Madge who lived on Ramsay Street; she was a thin waif of a creature with dyed red hair, a sallow complexion, and a tiny cracked voice that sounded to Terry as though it had a struggle to get out of her throat. Mona had been married for thirteen months. The little boy on her knee looked the picture of health.
‘Say hello to Mona,’ his mam said.
‘Hello,’ Terry said.
‘Say hello to little Denis.’
‘Hello Denis.’
‘How’s our Terry then?’ asked Mona.
‘All right.’
‘In’t he getting a big lad now?’ she said to Barbara.
‘Eleven on Tuesday. Wash your hands and sit down.’
Terry sat down at the kitchen table and ate his dinner. He was wiping up the gravy with a piece of bread when Sylvia came in and got told off for being late. Barbara put her dinner on the table and resumed the story she was telling Mona about this woman who’d had to have an operation, and when she came to a certain word lowered her voice to the level that made Terry prick up his ears. The word was ‘abortion’; probably Spenner or Roy Pickup would know what it meant.
The kitchen was becoming perceptibly darker. Behind the window the sky – a sluggish dirty grey – was an unbroken layer of cloud pregnant with snow. The light over the ash-tips was unreal, like that of a stage set, the undulating horizon glowing whitely under the sameness and drabness of light.
‘Looks like we’re in for it,’ Barbara observed, switching on the single bulb which threw a wash of yellow over everything: sink, stove, coconut matting, the few sticks of furniture. She took a postcard from behind the clock on the mantelpiece. ‘Guess who this is from, Terry …’ Her whole being seemed suddenly, vivaciously alive. ‘Your Uncle Jack!’ The smudgy colour picture was of what looked like a town hall or a railway station.
‘He’s working in Leicester,’ Barabara said, switching from Terry to Mona. ‘You know, Jack tried all over round here, he really did, but couldn’t find a thing …’
Mona unbuttoned her blouse and began breast-feeding the baby. Terry tried to drag his eyes away from the magnetic sight. The baby found the nipple and snuggled onto it with a grunt and a sigh.
‘… cotton trade’s dead as a doornail. You know, I think it’s so unfair on all these fellas who lost out during the war. They came back to what – bugger all.’
‘Does he know where babies come from?’ Mona asked, nodding in Terry’s direction, the cracked voice like a rusty penny whistle.
‘Hah. They think they know everything nowadays,’ his mam said, though the way she said it implied that they didn’t.
‘Have they told you about the facts of life at school?’ Mona said.
Terry hesitated, feeling the stirring of a blush below the line of his collar. He said, ‘No,’ in a gruff voice. It was too soon to make his escape immediately because this would be tantamount to a confession of knowledge, and for them to know he knew would shame him.
‘I’ve certainly never told him,’ Barbara said.
‘You ought to, he’s getting to be a big lad now.’ She beckoned with her free hand. ‘Come on, Terry, look at little Denis having his dinner.’
Terry approached as though he were dragging his sledge, one foot reluctantly in front of the other, curiosity and embarrassment in equal measure. He had never seen a full white breast in a baby’s mouth at such close quarters before. The sight transfixed him so that he stood, the socks around his ankles, his knees burning from the fire, staring with absolute fixedness at the girl, conventionally dressed except for the upper part of her body bared to the air. He knew, as he looked, that it was an image he would never forget: she wasn’t beautiful, he felt no desire, yet the simple act she was performing seemed to him almost miraculous. He had never before realised the true function and purpose of a woman’s breasts.
‘Greedy little bugger,’ Mona said in a reedy affectionate whisper. The baby’s eyes were closed, his round red cheeks like tiny balloons pressing against the breast, and, somewhere between, hidden from view, the eager sucking mouth.
Terry went upstairs to the cold back bedroom. He could have done with a smoke but daren’t risk it, not with his father due home at any moment. He stood at the window looking out at the river sliding blackly between the white banks, overcome by a kind of frenzy – the feeling that his head was unable to contain the thoughts rushing madly within it and the breath in his body compressed to suffocation point. He had never felt so odd in his life.
Without willing it to come, the vision floated up of Shap and Margaret Parry standing in darkness behind the garages. It didn’t matter any more whether it was true or not: the image was lodged permanently in his brain. He fell on the bed, clutching the pillow to him in a passionate embrace, pressing his lips to what became in his imagination Margaret Parry’s lips, the dark recess of her mouth open and vulnerable in a fantastic French kiss.
From the next door backyard he heard Mrs Hartley say, ‘Don’t forget the washing-up, Doreen. And no more than two in the house. Think on now.’
There was the sound of a latch and then the backyard gate banged shut.
During the afternoon he suffered a brainstorm; at any rate he lost possession of his faculties. Had anyone known what he planned they would have thought him deranged, yet everything he did was as a dreamlike trance, not at all real, as though happening to someone else down the far end of a long echoing tunnel.
Even so, he noted and committed to memory every detail of Doreen Hartley’s dress as she opened the door to him with wet hands, a ring of suds clinging to her forearms. The kitchen was as familiar as his own: the wall of tongue-and-groove boards painted green with the stairs door and cellar door
adjacent to each other, the cupboard set in the opposite wall, the black-leaded grate in the corner near the window, the gas-stove with its rack of plates, the big pot sink on cast-iron legs where Doreen stood with her hands immersed in greasy water. Kevin wasn’t in, she said, he’d gone with his Uncle Ted to watch the rugby. Terry stood behind her, unable to speak or move; in the mirror he could see her pale round face surrounded by crinkly brown hair, eyes downcast to the dishes in the sink which she mechanically washed and stacked on the red rubber mat. She hummed something tuneless.
The kitchen was dark, the drab sky seeming to draw what light there was and absorb it like grey blotting paper. Without giving it much thought Doreen said, ‘How did you get on in the practice exams, Terry?’
‘I passed.’
‘Eh?’
‘I passed,’ Terry said, clearing his throat.
‘I didn’t. Mr Reagan said Arithmetic and English let me down. He said if I can improve them two I might have a chance.’ She blew out some air in a sigh of bored restlessness. ‘Just think, another five years in that dump. Drive you potty.’
Terry was sitting on the corner of the kitchen table, the palms of his hands resting on his knees. He thought he must be choking to death. Doreen rinsed the last plate and wiped her hands on the towel hanging on a nail behind the back door. He noticed how the flesh on her upper arms wobbled with the movement: he wanted to feel what it was like, pinch it between his fingers, knead it. She was wearing a blue dress with buttons down the front and the buttons followed the gentle curve of the swelling underneath. All he had to do was stand up. Reach out his hand. Touch her. What could she say? There was nothing to stop him.
Doreen finished wiping her hands. She wasn’t a pretty girl, neither was she plain. Her face was pleasantly rounded, her eyes were round too, and her body obeyed this genetic law of roundness: ample and at the same time unsure what was expected of it, what it might be capable of. As for Terry, he could only marvel that Doreen Hartley had lived next door for eleven years and he had never before understood how desirable she was; he convinced himself that she was very desirable.