England's Lane

by Joseph Connolly

  “Good morning, Jim. How goes it? You’re very well off in here, I do assure you, because it isn’t a good morning at all, as it happens. The weather is exceedingly unkind.”

  “Yeh? I ain’t been out. Cold, is it?”

  “Raw, Jim: raw. Soon there’ll be rain, or worse, mark my words.”

  “Don’t never do nothing else, do it? Always bleeding raining …”

  “Take heart, dear man—spring is just around the corner. Buckets, Jim—that’s what I’m here for, as is my custom. I think I might take three upon this occasion, if you can run to it.”

  “You’re one of the few what still have the galvanized off of me. Women round here, they can’t get enough of all the plastic doings. Even your dustpan and brush. It’s all plastic now.”

  “No use for my needs. Sturdy and durable, that’s what I’m after.”

  “Yeh but what I’m saying is it’s the way of the world.”

  So I’ll rattle out a couple of metal buckets from the stack just by the door, here—and then I’ll clank me up another for this stuck-up bleeding bastard butcher. Normally I got them hanging up on hooks outside, along with them bales of twine, a couple of washboards, me brooms, the same old tin bath and all the clothes pegs. But this Barton bugger, he so bleeding early I ain’t even had a chance to get them out there. Ain’t even finished me tea. Ain’t yet had a proper word with Cyril. Like I says to the man, I ain’t been out. And why my Pauly likes to play about with that daughter of his—well I’ll never understand it. That Amanda. She’s as bleeding stuck-up as her dad. But then Pauly, he’s only the bleeding same. Well there’s my answer, I suppose. Two stuck-up little girls together. Mill’s all for it, but then she would be. It’s only me—I’m the only pig about, up to his neck in shit.

  “Good. So how much do I owe you? Don’t suppose you can open up a window in here, can you really …? Except for conceivably the fanlight, there. Mean one hell of a draft, I suppose … but still it might clear a bit of the … it’s the paraffin largely, I think. Not sure I could tolerate it, for my part. Fiona, she’s rather wanting one of those, um … what are they called, in fact, those heaters … Aladdin, is it …? For the upper back room.”

  “Aladdin, yeh. Nice line. Move a few of them, I does.”

  “Mm. But I won’t have it. I’m quite firm with her on that score. Rather freeze, quite frankly. Tend to render me drowsy, you know. Somewhat queasy. You’re never queasy, then? No? Doesn’t affect you?”

  Jim just shrugged.

  “I’d be the same in your place, I daresay. What with the blood. Horses for courses, ain’t it really? Now then, so what are we now … three at eight-and-eleven … that’ll be twenty-six-and nine then sir, if you’ll be so good. Call it twenty-six bob, hey?”

  “Kind of you, Jim—thank you. But blood, you know—there’s no smell to blood. It’s more of a … chilling purity that rather sort of surrounds you. Is the best way I can put it. It’s truly very … clean. Really it is.”

  Jim nodded.

  “If you say so. And four shillings in change, I thank you.”

  “Right-o—extremely grateful. Well—back out into the elements, I suppose. Thank God I’m nearby. Anyway, Jim—let you get on. There’s always so terribly much to see to, isn’t there? First thing. I never understand quite why this should be so, but nevertheless—it’s always the way.”

  And nor do I understand, thought Jonathan Barton, clanging shut the shop door behind him and swinging from their handles the three new silver buckets as he hurried in a flurry of sleet to his butcher’s shop just three doors along … quite why I ever bother frittering even the merest time of day with that thoroughly loathsome and boorish creature—crouched like an animal, uncouth and uncombed, in his dark and fetid lair. He never seems to manage to shave the whole of his face—it’s as if he does it in the night, or something. There’s often even the hard and rind-like traces of lather in the creases of his jowls. Sometimes a dab of lavatory paper, I can hardly believe it, adhering to a cut. And if one presumes to affect a mustache, well surely then one is duty bound, in the name of simple manners, to nurture, trim and shape it, no? Such a thing requires a degree of attention, as I can attest with a degree of authority. Below this oik’s rudimentary nose, however, there lurks but a patch of scrubland, a treacherous fen of which he stays well clear. What we have here is not so much a mustache, as a flagrant oversight. Never wears a tie. Christ, he never wears a collar. Shows a lack of respect, I think. A distinct and blatant lack of respect for your customer. And of course I understand why he has to wear that tobacco-colored work coat, but God Almighty it’s always so utterly filthy! Doubt he’s changed it in all the years I’ve been here. And biro markings all down the pocket. But then amid all that seemingly charred and umbrous wooden shelving, the dust and dim lighting, the rotting chalked-upon boxes, skimmed with grime and retching their mystifying contents … that man has surely found his place. Le vrai milieu. And the gut-crawling, head-spinning stench in there, it’s amazing he isn’t dead. Breathing it down, day in day out. I think one of the reasons, you know, I do still go in there is in order to demonstrate—to deliver unto me a salutary reminder—that things really could be much blacker. Blacker even than being reduced to no more than a common butcher, in so humdrum and faceless a street as this. That, and for the buckets, of course. Which I now shall fill with the blood of an illicitly murdered pig. It takes more than three, naturally, but sometimes the chum who comes to collect them in that rusted and derelict lorry of his—sometimes he remembers to return all the old ones (other times not, of course—which is why I keep having to line the foul Stammer’s pockets by buying yet more of the things). And then in the fullness of time, said chum returns in said rusted and derelict lorry with great glistening truncheons of black pudding which I sell in the shop at a suitably indecent profit. There is still a surprisingly thriving market for it. Among the nostalgics, not to say the poor. The Irish, of course, to boil with their damned potatoes. As well as, rather intriguingly, our recent influx of coloreds over yonder in the timber yard. The niggers in the woodpile. Maybe reminds them of pot-roasted missionary, who is to say? Also avid buyers, of course, are those endless threadbare tribes of widowed old biddies who ask me for bones for their dog. They have no dog: the bones they scrape and mix what they can glean with the fatty detritus and scraps of gullet and genital which I also wrap up tidily and drop with a wink into their wicker baskets, so tight clenched in the crook of their arms. For their cat. Another creature they do not possess. And so the pig, he may not be said to have died in vain—while the chops and fillet, of course, are very much sought after by the better off around here (and I am rather partial myself—Fiona, she has a way of broiling them, you know, that seems to bring out all of the flavor). I have another good chum—a doctor who must now be so very careful, helping young ladies in the manner he is forced to, following on as I suppose an inevitability from that unfortunate run-in with the Medical Council. He must now be so very careful, you see. He remains a very good fellow, though—and so often useful to me. In this instance, he anesthetizes the pig—which is delivered to me under dead of night by yet one more good fellow, who has a smallholding in Middlesex. The pig knows no pain, then, when I slit its throat—such bloody silence denying the motley of my generally very vulgar neighbors the sanctimonious delight of summoning the constabulary, as surely they would do if the squealing of a pig mid-slaughter were ever to alert them to just this one single and pretty paltry element of all it is that I get up to.

  I enjoy … yes, enjoy, I do enjoy it: I suppose I ought to be honest about this thing. I enjoy the order of the shop, during the hazy quiet and just before the hurly-burly of the day. The fresh drifts of white sawdust which I acquire from the blackies, softly surrounding my toecaps. The little mahogany stall in the corner, its big brass till, and next to it, those tight little colored and stiff paper bags of coppers, threepenny bits and silver, weighed by the bank and slid across the counter, like so much chunky loot.
The quarter carcasses hoisted up on to hooks by Billy, the boy here. Though never will I have them outside—oh dear me no. What? A row of unskinned rabbit? Half-plucked poultry, hanging by the neck? Irredeemably low, in my opinion. Not a cornucopia, not munificence this, as is the common perception, but merely a trite and showy display. In the manner of an ironmonger. My knives too, they give me pleasure, newly honed and laid out in order of diminishing size. The ax, the cleaver, and all of the saws. The vast and scrubbed wooden block, concave and cross-hatched with so much bladework and thudding, where I dismember and gut. And then the white marble slab, for more delicate work. A woman … I have always rather thought I should like to take a woman, brutishly, across that slab. When still it runs with blood, right into the gullies. And she, an apple-cheeked stranger, in a fresh spring frock. It is all about the pink, and wetness—a splay of thighs, but of course. Here is an English daydream—quite distinct from the deep dark velvet of the affair of my life, which still is to come. My love will be a black-eyed and voluptuous Italian … conceivably a contessa. We will squirrel ourselves away upon a houseboat—moored in Chelsea, but with the bobbing potential of anywhere at all in the whole wide world. And there we shall reinvent fire. Yes. Fire, though … what a word. Will it be kindled this evening, I wonder, when the full-throated intention is to insinuate myself upon this newest and I don’t for one moment imagine unsuspecting docile, sweet and powdered fragrant woman of my choosing? Well we shall see. For my part I shall of course be assiduous in applying the spark to the tinder, as is the way, and so I think I can feel safe in presuming upon at the very minimum an eventual wisp of smoke, oh yes that—the coaxing of embers, and so to a degree of warming, surely? But still this will be as nothing, for of course what I actually at root very earnestly require is to find myself once more toppled over into love. It is, like the throb of blood, most necessary to me: I crave again that glamorous agony.

  Dear God, though … reveries aside: how, actually, has it all come to this? How am I fallen? How can these two fine hands of mine be as red and raw as the meat I cleave? And seemingly growing—ever longer and broader, day by day: a veritable phenomenon, I swear it. How can it be that Fiona, my beautiful if distant, wellborn and sensitive helpmeet, now resides above a butcher’s shop along with our dearest and blameless daughter, Amanda? And why, further, must that child—given the spread of this mighty and eternal city—be so gallingly friendly with that bloody Paul child, the vacuous and chinless little Stammer boy …? Or nephew, as I gather he is. We earnestly trust on the wife’s side, poor long-suffering woman that she so evidently is, and has been now for how long …? Maybe then the brat has none of that idiot Stammer’s genes and inclinations. Yes … I ask myself these things constantly—but of course I do know. The answer why. Why we all of us are come to this. For here is the result of my sin, and I am in the midst of enacting an optimistic evasion. An elaborate deflection in the simple and pious hope that the past will leave me alone—that the swine who hounds me might get sick of the scent, lose it even, go off chasing someone else entirely. All it ever can be is hope, though—and one that is almost certainly forlorn. But for now, at least, still my luck is holding.

  I did mean it, though—I really meant what I said about the blood. I do always find that there is about it this chilling purity that rather sort of surrounds me. Is the best way I can put it. It’s truly very … clean. Really it is.

  CHAPTER THREE

  That’s the Way it Goes

  Stanley Miller the sweetshop owner was not looking forward to today—no sir I am not, he would easily confide in you: not at all looking forward to today, not at all, not one little bit. It’s hardly as if, though, something very bad is slated to happen to me: no terrible storm is known to be breaking. It’s only just the thought that it might do, that’s all. Just the thought of it, you see … more than enough to lay me down low. An impending whatever they call that thing—cloud, if you like. Raincloud, sort of style. No—it’s more than that, more than even the blackest raincloud. Maybe the Sword of whoever it was who had a bloody great sword dangling away above him, poor little bastard. In the legend. Not Tantalus, was it …? No, don’t reckon so. Not Sisyphus either. They were just another pair of unlucky old sods, saddled with other agonies. Sadistic swine though, weren’t they really? The buggers who made them up, wrote them down, all these myths and legends. You don’t seem to get many happy ones, do you? Labors of Hercules? Not too happy, is it? No laughs there, I wouldn’t have said. Makes me sweat just thinking about it. Anyway—that’s the way of it, the way it’s always been. But it’s what definitely is going to happen today, though—that, knowing that, that’s what gets me down as well. Because what is definitely going to happen today, you see, is the same old thing. The same old thing that will just keep on coming around. What makes it the same old thing. And that’s all my every day is now, really—coping with the same old thing, best way I can, and hoping to God that my terror of something else, something unspecific but truly bloody awful, doesn’t actually crack open on the top of it all. Or not today, at least. Get past today, and then of course I’ll still be dreading this thing, whatever it is, but not till tomorrow, you see? Whatever it might be. And that’s how it works. That’s the way it goes. With me, anyway. Eternal, is the word. Relentless. Never ending. Until, of course, it does end. Which it will. Sooner or later and one way or another, an end of course will come.

  But for now it’s a case of climbing the thirteen steps up to Janey’s dark and fusty bedroom (she won’t even let me draw the curtains, let alone open the window) and bringing her up her tea. Touching her shoulder when I set down the cup, and she just stirring and turning around to look at me. I know the face, the expression. It never alters. Isn’t an expression, that’s the point. Just blank is all she is. Just staring at me like I’m not even there at all. And she does look old, now. Much older than me, she looks, and she isn’t, you know. Five months younger, point of fact. Sometimes in her face I’m aware of a bit of confusion—little pinpoints of worry at the back of her eyes. Sort of dancing up and down there. Time to time there’s a little glimmering of fear—and I well know what that looks like because I see it in the mirror every bloody morning—but even then, only barely: the very tiniest glimmering, really. Won’t talk, of course. Won’t say anything to me about it, so you’re just left to wonder. Hardly speaks at all, now. Days can pass without a single word. Wearing, after a while. Very. Then later, when I’ve seen to Anthony and all of his doings—and that’s a day’s work in itself, believe you me—and once young Paul comes to fetch him and they both go off to school (and I thank the Lord for him, young Paul, I bless his head) … well then I bring her up another cup of tea, don’t I? Take away the old one, which she won’t have touched because she never ever does, and put down the fresh one in its place. And yes I did try, didn’t I? Of course I did. I did try not taking up the first of them—waste of money, waste of effort—but Christ Alive, you should’ve seen the state she got herself into. Agitation, that’s the word. Fingers all stiff and trembling, and up to her lips. Head going this way and that. So I went back to taking her up her early morning tea, and she went back to staring right at me, like I wasn’t even there at all.

  It’s just as well for Anthony that I’ve got this little confectioner’s. If I had, I don’t know—the ironmonger’s instead, Stammer’s say, then I don’t honestly reckon anyone at Anthony’s school would talk to him at all. Apart from Paul, I mean. He’s a good boy, Paul—really goes out of his way for our Anthony—and it’s uncommon in a lad, that is. Healthy young lad. Thinking of others. Because my Anthony, well … he’s got to slow him down, hasn’t he? Clunking along behind him in those blessed metal calipers that every morning I have to strap him tight into. Like he’s one of those poor little devils in a legend, or something—some young innocent, minding his own business, not doing any harm to a living soul, and here he is—trapped in a daily struggle, locked into a nightly torture. Not fair, is it? Not fair at all. And eternal.
Relentless. Never ending. Until, of course, it does end. So no—it’s hardly fair, hardly fair at all. But then who ever said it would be? Life isn’t, is it? Famously. Ever fair. It’s a cheat, that’s what it is: a lying cheat. And being the sweetshop owner’s boy, Anthony, he’s heard all of the jokes: “Ah—Polio. The mint with the hole.” Yeh. Not so funny after the first few hundred times. It’s his life that’s got the hole. Right through the bloody middle. It’s his life that’s got the hole. Jesus wept. Lovely lad, though. Doesn’t complain. Love him so much. Asks me, time to time, when he’ll be better. Don’t know son, I say to him. Soon, I hope. I daresay soon. You keep up with all the exercises and what have you and you’ll be breaking the four-minute mile. Once he came home from school and he said that all the boys were going to get vaccinated. So if I get vaccinated, Dad—will it all go away? Not sure son, I say to him. Not sure that’s how it works. Not too sure that’s the way it goes. And he’s the only one in his year who’s cursed with the damn thing, you know, and that’s against all the odds. So why was it me then, Dad? Don’t know son, I say to him. Just the way of it, I suppose. How it all falls out. Lovely lad, though. Doesn’t complain. Love him so much … Anyway.