by George Friel
‘A barley, a barley!’ Skinny yelled in distress, and the contestants stood frozen. The assembly murmured against the brawl, condemning the decision that had provoked it. Savage saw he hadn’t the support for an expulsion and tried again quickly.
‘I propose an equal division then. Right here and now. Elect two tellers and share it out without Percy.’
‘Twenty tellers couldn’t count it,’ Garson protested vehemently. ‘And if they could you couldn’t spend it. I said the cops because I saw it was too much for us but when Specky said report it I agreed because he’s a Claviger and I’m not, but I meant report it to Percy, I never meant you, you big ape!’
‘Who’s an ape? You’re an ape,’ said Savage. He had a talent for repartee.
‘I still say you can’t decide without Percy,’ Garson argued. ‘Not on an urgent matter, not without Percy.’
‘Yes, we can,’ Savage overruled him. ‘It’s an urgent matter. You’re just after admitting it. Percy said we had to decide urgent matters for ourselves, it’s important matters we’re supposed to tell him.’
‘But this is important,’ Garson said. ‘That’s what I’m saying.’
‘You’re just after saying it was urgent. Is it urgent or is it important? Make up your mind, you can’t have it both ways.’
Savage grinned in the anticipation of victory and called out to the assembly, confusing them by the phrasing of his command.
‘Hands up those who agree it’s urgent.’
But before he could seize the victory he felt was within his grasp the troops were suddenly paralysed with fear. Someone was coming down the chute from the door in Tulip Place.
‘It’s Percy, it’s Percy!’ Frank Garson yelled in relief as a tall round-shouldered youth slouched into the range of the candlelight.
‘What’s going on here?’ a mournful voice asked, a voice that had only recently been broken and sounded as if it was still being mended. ‘I just thought yous was in here when I couldn’t see a soul anywhere outside.’
Frank Garson rushed at him and clung to him.
‘Help me, Percy! Save me! They’re going to put me out of the Brotherhood. We were all out looking for you. We need you, Percy! We need you! Sheuch’s trying to confuse me because I said it was urgent so he said we could decide it for ourselves but I said it was too important to decide without you, and he said I couldn’t have it both ways, but if it’s urgent it’s important too, isn’t it?’
Percy rocked on his toes and heels at the question and decided not to answer it.
‘What were you putting him out for?’ he asked, scowling round the meeting to remind them he had the seeing eye and they had better tell him the truth.
‘Where’d ye get to?’ Savage asked, boldly facing the seeing eye. ‘We’ve been looking for you all night, so we have.’
‘I was at a concert listening to a choir singing,’ Percy answered in his faraway voice, his sad eyes dreamily focused on the furthest wall where the rats lived. ‘It was rare, so it was. If we could get that piano there tuned I could start a choir with you lads if we could get somebody to play it.’
‘That’s just what I’ve been saying for years,’ Savage agreed insolently.
‘Scottish education, ach!’ Percy snorted in bitterness.
‘Percy, please!’ Frank appealed to him, shaking his arm. But Percy was beyond his reach, mounted on his high horse again.
‘They’re supposed to learn you culture and how to live and they don’t give you anything about philosophy or music. They never learn you how to write music for example. All they hammer into you is sums and spelling. If I could just read music I could form yous into a world- famous choir so I could. See the Vienna Boys’ Choir?’
‘No, where are they?’ Savage asked eagerly, looking round the cellar with dramatic jerks of his head. ‘Are they here the night?’
‘They’re only boys like you except that they speak German,’ Percy explained, snubbing the Chief Claviger. For some time he had regretted ever appointing him. Savage seemed too coarse a type to do his job properly. ‘But they’ve had a chance yous have never had because the Germans have always had a great love for music. The world’s greatest composers are Germans like Batch and Baith-hoven.’
He rocked, toe to heel, heel to toe, dreaming how he would love to be the salvation of these poor neglected urchins by introducing them to the good things of life.
‘Oh, Percy, listen!’ Frank pleaded, clutching him, shaking him.
They were all clamouring at him, everybody shouting at once, demanding attention, trying to explain. He came sadly out of his dream. He gathered there was something worrying them. He submitted wearily to the duty of helping them and dismissed Savage from Miss Elginbrod’s chair with a peremptory gesture and sat there himself. Nobody would ever say he shirked his duty. And he liked to sit where Miss Elginbrod used to sit. It was a kind of mild revenge. He put himself in the pose of Rodin’s ‘Thinker’ as he had seen it on the cover of a book he got for sixpence on the barrows in Ren field Street, and waited patiently till his supreme position got silence. He liked silence even better than he liked music. That was why he didn’t like his mother. She was always nattering.
‘Gi’ me a report,’ he growled.
‘Frank, Frank, Frank!’ the Brotherhood chanted. ‘He’s the one that knows! Let him report!’
Savage huffed away from them, kicked a stack of old examination papers containing, though he didn’t know it, his father’s score of five out of forty in mental arithmetic thirty years ago.
‘A frank report, eh?’ Percy smiled down at them from his throne. ‘Frank is always frank. That’s what you call a pun, lads. I had nobody to tell me these things, that’s why I like to tell you. Shakespeare was very fond of puns, and I like a good pun myself, so I do.’
‘I like a pun too,’ Savage muttered to the dusty sheets. ‘A pun o’ chocolates.’
Frank Garson went back to his place behind the lid of a dual desk, but this time without two warders holding him. He was the only child of a motor-mechanic who worked in the garage at the far end of Bethel Street, an intruder in a gang that respected his intelligence but distrusted his cleanliness. He seemed a cut above them because his father had a good job, and they couldn’t understand why he was so keen to be a member, even ambitious to be a Claviger. It made them suspicious. But they all liked him in the end because he was always straight. His mother had deserted his father for a West Indian bus-driver four years ago, and he could remember her only dimly as a bright-eyed woman with comforting arms and a good kissing mouth. He remembered also a cosy smell, quite different from the smell of chalk that accompanied Miss Elginbrod. But he could never talk of his mother. A boy whose mother had run off with a coloured man inherited a shame, and the fact that he was clever, clean and loyal, and that his father was a non-smoker, non-drinker and churchgoer, merely made him more of an oddity to his mates. Their fathers were drunken, idle and cruel, but they knew their mothers just had to put up with it. What kind of a mother then had Frank Garson that ran away from a good husband? Frank knew she was condemned, and he carried her guilt always with him. Dark-haired, rosy-cheeked, innocent-faced, and well-spoken except when excitement made him stutter a little, he would have suited a choirboy’s collar.
‘The new janny,’ he began, conquering his stutter in the hush that respected his report, ‘he doesn’t know where anything is, so he asked me to help him because the janny in Comely grove asked him for the lend of the gipsy costumes we had in our school concert when your father was the janny because the Comely grove are going to do a gipsy cantata at Christmas in the Bell field Halls and he didn’t know where they were but the janny in Comelygrove knew we had them all right, so the new janny asked me to look for them in the cellar because anything you can’t find must be in the cellar he said. So I asked Jasper, that’s the teacher that came when Miss Elginbrod retired, you’ve seen him, he comes here on a mo’bike and he’s got big bushy eyebrows and a blue chin, that’s what we
call him, that or Bluebeard, but his right name’s Whiffen, and he let me come down here at two o’clock to look for them and I came down through the basement, the janny opened the door for me and then left me, and I found them in the tea-chests over there.’
He stopped, his mouth working. He felt his stammer coming on, and he fought against it.
‘End of Part One,’ Savage called out from the rear. He put on a television advert voice and chanted as he performed a Red Indian war dance round the back and flanks of the assembly. ‘Use the new super duper scientific formula automatic aw-tae-buggery Freezing Point. Never go without a Freezing Point. In a man’s world a girl needs a Freezing Point. Washes whiter than black and prevents flavour blur. Get one now, get one tomorrow, get one last week. The time is out of joint till you get a Freezing Point. And now back to Maverick.’
‘I think you’ve got far too much to say,’ Percy reprimanded him severely. ‘And stand still when the court’s in session.’
‘Well, tell him to get to the point then,’ Savage answered shrilly.
‘That’s the point,’ Frank hammered the desk, hating Savage. ‘I found the c-costumes, Percy, and I found something else too, a lot more, in the tea-chests. I gave the c-costumes to the new janny but I didn’t tell him what else I’d seen. I wasn’t sure if I’d seen right so I told Specky. You see there was a big spider came scuttling down the side of the tea-chest when I took the costumes out and I got a fright.’
‘Feart for a spider!’ Savage commented in disgust. ‘Feart for a spider and he wants to get a key one day! That’s the kind of probationer you get nowadays. Before I could get into the gang at all I had to get the Chinese Rub and I had to break seven windows in the scheme and steal a hundred fags and—’
‘I stopped all that,’ Percy interrupted him, frowning at the mention of the barbarous rites used before he civilized the gang. ‘That’s nothing for boasting about. And I’m still waiting to hear what all the excitement’s about.’
‘I hit it with one of those shovels,’ Frank explained, keeping his own course doggedly, ‘and I knocked it on its end, the tea-chest I mean, and a lot of rubbish fell out, paper hats, you know, and decorations and that wand the fairy princess used and I saw a lot of money.’
‘A spider, a big big spider,’ Savage mimicked Frank’s soprano. ‘Andhe lost the heid. I wonder what he would have done if he’d saw one of the rats from the other end up there.’
‘What do you mean, a lot of money?’ Percy asked anxiously. There seemed no escape from dreams of money and talk of money.
‘Pound notes and five-pound notes,’ said Frank. ‘I told Specky. And bags of silver, paper bags and cloth bags, you couldn’t count it. I told Specky at playtime and we came down here after four by the door in the basement to make sure. I couldn’t believe it, I thought maybe it was stage money, but there was too much of it. You couldn’t spend it in years. You remember Miss Elginbrod put on a play about a millionaire that tried to give all his money away in an Alpine village but nobody would take it because they were happier without money. That’s why I thought it was stage money at first. Then I wanted to tell the cops and Sheuch says I was going to break the law you gave us but I would have shared the reward with everybody here, honest I would, cross my throat and spit!’
He went through the actions in his excitement.
‘But Specky said no, report it here,’ he concluded, exhausted by his ordeal. ‘He’ll tell you that’s how it was, you ask him!’
Specky rose from the coal-scuttle, bowed to Percy, turned and bowed to the Brotherhood and went into the witness-desk as willingly as Frank left it. He was going to enjoy this. He liked speaking. He would show them how a formal report ought to be made.
‘Probationer Garson reported to me at afternoon interval,’ he began benignly, ‘that he had seen millions and millions of pounds under the costumes in the tea-chests. He requested me to accompany him in a further visit to procure verification. Immediately following the dismissal of afternoon school we therefore descended together to our present location via the door in the basement when the janny’s back was turned and I personally inspected the receptacles indicated. I ascertained they contained money and I came to the conclusion that the money was genuine currency. However, I differed from Probationer Garson in my estimate of the amount. According to my calculations there are not millions and millions of pounds there at all. There are only—’
‘I didn’t mean millions and millions as millions,’ Frank interrupted him resentfully, clenching his fists to keep his temper. ‘I meant a lot, that was all.’
‘At a tory estimate,’ Specky proceeded, pleased at the chance to use a long-hoarded synonym, ‘I would say there are only thousands of pounds dispersed in three of the six receptacles referred to.’
‘What’s the game?’ Percy asked, wondering whether to be angry with them for trying to kid him or just laugh it off. ‘What are yous up to now?’
‘It isn’t a game, Regent Supreme, sir,’ Specky replied respectfully. ‘It’s true, I’m afraid. When I had made a provisional count of the contents of the first receptacle and then discovered that there was another two also containing money I abandoned the count and summoned an Extraordinary General Meeting in virtue of the powers vested in me as High Claviger. Chief Claviger Savage proposed immediate equal division of the money but I vetoed that in accordance with the constitution as laid down by the Regent Supreme, that is yourself, sir.’
‘You couldn’t divide it,’ Frank complained direct to Percy, appealing to him with his hands clasped in prayer. ‘And even if you could you couldn’t spend it. We’d be found out, bound to be! We’d all be in trouble. Please, Percy, tell the cops! Please!’
‘I myself told Chief Claviger Savage equal division was out of the question,’ Specky said with condescending calm to belittle Frank’s hysteria, ‘but he wouldn’t agree. He even proposed to expel Probationer Garson for treason but I opposed that too and said it was a matter for the Regent.’
Percy bowed in regal acknowledgement. He was trying to think, and the chattering in front of him only confused him. There seemed to be something ominously true in what Frank and Specky were telling him, and in that case he must take charge and be cool, calm and collected. He mustn’t get excited, and yet he felt his leg tremble under the weight of his elbow as he resumed his thinker’s pose. The chattering became a clamour.
‘Silence!’ he shouted, in a temper with them.
‘Permission to speak, please!’ Skinny called out, his right hand high.
Percy grunted permission. He must keep patient and listen and try to think at the same time. It was difficult for him. Why was it, he wondered, that some folk were born with a quick brain, shrewd customers, fly men; and better folk needed time and privacy to work things out? Where was the justice or equality in that? But he knew enough to know that silence can be mistaken for wisdom and that nothing is so infectious as panic. So he held his tongue and put on an air of indifference.
‘The majority decision of the Clavigers was to refer the matter to you,’ Skinny started, taking Specky’s place behind the desk, ‘because your father had charge of the cellar and you’re your father’s heir, so if the money in those chests belonged to your father then legally it’s yours, and there was nobody else looked after the cellar, so it must have belonged to your father.’
‘Ach, don’t be daft, Skinny!’ Frank shouted. ‘You’ve seen what’s there. Percy’s father never had that kind of money, never, never, never!’
Skinny turned from addressing the chair to argue with his subordinate.
‘How do you know? That’s for Percy to say. Percy knows what his father had, you don’t. Percy’s the boss, it’s no’ you!’
‘Well, I like that!’ Frank screamed. ‘It’s me that’s been arguing Percy’s the boss, and now you try and tell me!’
Percy felt the first throbbings of a headache. It was the frequency of his headaches, beginning just after he left school, that made him suspect he was
an intellectual. They were probably due to the abnormal activity of his brain.
‘You’ve always said you should have had money if you had your rights,’ Skinny turned back to the chair, ‘so maybe this money is your inheritance, maybe that’s why you could never find the money you knew your father ought to have left you if you were to be a great man because that’s where he had hidden it.’
‘Yes, could be,’ said Percy, too overwhelmed to dispute the point. ‘Let me see what yous are all talking about.’
He came clumsily down from Miss Elginbrod’s chair and the Clavigers dragged the three lower tea-chests out of the darkness into the candlelight.
‘That’s how they were, with the three other chests on top of them,’ said Frank ‘and there was all those costumes on top of the money but we put everything back just as it was to keep it hidden.’
Specky, Skinny and Savage pulled out concert costumes, Christmas party decorations and brown paper from the first chest, and Percy stooped over it when they gestured him to look inside. He fumbled out a bundle of notes with an elastic band round them and flipped it through with dumb awe.
‘Those are all fivers,’ said Frank helpfully. ‘But there’s singles as well there, and the bags with the half-crowns and the florins is in the middle one.’
Percy slouched round the other chests and examined them perfunctorily. The money was real. There was no doubt in his mind. And when the three chests were emptied of all the rubbish crammed in them to reveal the money underneath he saw that the bottom of each was covered with notes an inch deep. He felt slightly sick, much as he had felt when an old man in Packing and Dispatch had taken him into a pub and made him drink a pint of beer one night after they had been working late, and there was a quivering and a fluttering in his stomach.
‘Cover it up again,’ he said, stricken with responsibility. ‘Hide it just as it was! And let me think! Let me think!’
‘Oh no, Percy, no!’ Frank whispered in dismay. He had seen the glint of greed, and he was afraid.