by Robert Edric
Devlin wondered if she practised saying all this when no one was listening. He began to wonder why he’d even come.
He told her about Duggan and left out more than he made up.
‘Does Duggan work for the Drainage Board?’ she said. She’d hardly listened to a word of it.
‘Something like that.’
‘Morris says he’ll be running his own department by the time he’s thirty-five.’
Two years. ‘I’m surprised he’s not there already.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘All I meant—’
‘Don’t,’ she said, turning to look across those three empty miles towards the invisible sea. ‘I know what you meant. This is what you do. This is what you always do.’
‘I only meant that if anybody was going to make it in this world, then it would be Morris. He’s got his head screwed on, that’s all I’m saying. He knows what’s what and how to get it.’ He hated himself more with every lie, every concession to the man. But it was what she wanted to hear, and besides, it was only like stroking someone’s dog when you couldn’t stand the fucking things.
‘Cambridge,’ she said eventually, having allowed herself to be convinced by him. ‘We thought Cambridge. More opportunities than either Peterborough or Norwich, see?’
Devlin had spent a long cold night on Cambridge station waiting for a train to Colchester that had finally pulled in four hours late.
‘Nice spot,’ he said. ‘Know it well. You’ve got everything you’d ever want in Cambridge.’
‘One of Morris’s colleagues has a brother who teaches there.’
Of course he does. ‘Nice little number.’
‘Or perhaps he lectures, not teaches. That’s it – he lectures there.’
‘Better still.’
‘It’s the kind of place you can make the most of yourself.’
‘I can imagine. I can see the pair of you there,’ he said. ‘No, honestly, I can.’
She lifted a hand to her throat. ‘That’s what Morris said – that he could see us living there and fitting right in.’
‘There you go, then.’
‘He said it was time to try and put the past behind us and to move on, to get on with our lives.’
Not in a million years.
‘He’s right. You’ve had enough on your plate already to last a lifetime.’
‘He says we’d meet a lot of new people there.’
‘Of course you would.’ And people not the remotest bit like the people round here: savages standing up to their knees in muck and shit and water for half the year and forever talking about things that had happened twenty years ago as though it were yesterday. ‘You ought to meet Duggan’s wife,’ he said. ‘You and her got a lot in common. Duggan’s father was once the mayor of Lynn.’
‘The mayor?’
Big lies, small lies; it mattered.
‘And Duggan himself is a big noise in the funny-handshake mob.’
‘You shouldn’t call them that,’ she said sharply. ‘Morris says they do a lot of good work, that they’re’ – she closed her eyes for a moment in an effort of remembering – ‘community spirited.’
‘Thinking of joining up himself, is he?’
She was reluctant to answer him.
And just when they’d started to get on so well, see eye to eye on things.
‘He says it’s all about like-minded people giving each other a helping hand. Fellow men and all that.’
‘That’s exactly what Duggan says. Perhaps I should get him to invite the pair of you over.’ Christ, perhaps there were some things you shouldn’t even think about, let alone actually say. How many lies was that?
‘I’m not sure,’ she said.
Devlin caught the sudden tremor of her fingers on the cup and saucer. Besides, suppose Morris was what that distant uncle had suggested. Were they even allowed into that particular little world?
‘Perhaps not,’ he said. ‘I know Duggan likes to keep that side of things on the q.t., if you catch my drift.’ He even tapped the side of his nose as he said it.
‘Exactly,’ she said. She put down the cup and saucer and locked her fingers together.
For four years she’d kept a brand-new cot and a brand-new pram in the house, in the small second bedroom, under sheets. Tempting fate, some would have said. Common sense, Morris said. Ghosts.
After an hour, Devlin said he ought to be going. He was going to tell her that he’d arranged to meet up with some of his own colleagues, associates, really, men from the Board – engineers, planners, architects, men like that – to discuss the coming work now that the summer was practically over, but he let it pass. Instead, he told her he’d try to come again. Perhaps Morris would be there next time. It all depended on where he was sent to work next. You never knew in that line of business. The sea had risen and come beyond Terrington last winter, but she had been spared.
‘It sounds like you’ve finally found the right line,’ she said.
‘They tell me I’ve got a feel for it.’
‘Aptitude,’ she said, and for the first time she actually smiled at him.
‘Tell Morris I’m sorry to have missed him.’
‘I’ll do that.’
Not very likely. First thing she’d do, she’d go back into the kitchen and wash the cups and saucers, rinse out the teapot and slide the chairs back beneath the Formica table. Then she’d sniff the air and check the floor for dirt from his shoes.
‘How about you?’ he asked her when they were back at the door.
‘How about me, what?’
‘Got much on?’
‘Not really. Get things ready for when Morris comes home.’
‘Real lady of leisure.’
‘Chance would be a fine thing.’
He wondered again about holding out his arms to her. ‘I suppose that’s all any of us ever really needs – a chance in life,’ he said.
He went ahead of her through the door and stood under the small porch. The lane stretched away on either side of him, as straight and as empty as when he’d arrived.
He’d been keeping an eye on the time. Half an hour to walk the long mile to the bus.
‘I won’t come out,’ she said.
‘Very wise. Rain later.’
The door was closed and locked on him before he’d even started walking.
12
TWO DAYS LATER, as he walked the last mile to work, Devlin saw the fairground trailers, lorries and dismantled machines parked beyond the Gosberton road. He left the path he was following and went to them. Other smaller vehicles and pieces of machinery were scattered in the field beyond.
At his approach, a chained dog ran barking towards him, straining to reach him at the end of its tether. A caravan door opened and a woman came out.
‘What you want?’ she called to him. ‘You got no good reason to be here.’
‘I was just looking,’ Devlin shouted back.
She shouted at the dog, which paid her no attention. It was only a few feet from Devlin, snarling and jumping in the air in an effort to reach him.
‘I was looking for the McGuires,’ Devlin said. ‘I’ve got some business with them.’
‘At this hour?’ After a moment, the woman pointed to a nearby caravan. ‘They won’t thank you,’ she said. ‘Sun’s hardly up.’
‘Been up an hour at least,’ Devlin said.
She shook her head at this and went back inside.
Devlin walked in a wide curve around the dog and went to the caravan.
He knocked and heard the sound repeat inside the tin box. After a minute, someone shouted to ask who was there.
‘It’s me, Devlin,’ Devlin shouted, wondering if this meant anything whatsoever to the men.
Several more minutes passed before Patrick finally opened the door. He was naked from the waist up and rubbed his arms against the cold. He told Devlin to come inside.
‘Duggan send you, did he?’
Devlin look
ed around the crowded interior. The space was divided by a blanket hanging from the curved roof. A sheet and pillow lay on the floor beside one of the benches.
‘I saw you parked up,’ Devlin said. ‘That’s all.’
‘A social call, then? What time is it?’
Devlin told him and Patrick swore.
‘I was on my way to work,’ Devlin said.
‘Heard they were moving you all on.’
It was the start of October. Devlin had been kept on at the Welland Channel. The workforce there had been cut by half. Further reductions were imminent. He was starting to wish he’d gone to Sutton Bridge, where the work would at least last into the spring.
‘They shift everybody around,’ Devlin said. ‘That’s all, whatever’s required.’
Patrick laughed. ‘They get rid of you, is what they do. Hire and fire, that’s the name of that little game.’
Devlin sat on a narrow seat beneath the curtained window while Patrick searched for a shirt. Any delay would make him late for the morning’s roll call. With so few of them still employed at the channel, it was getting harder to go unnoticed. Two and a half months he’d stuck at the work. It seemed more like two and a half years.
‘You and Duggan fallen out yet?’ Patrick said.
‘Why would we?’
‘Give it time. I bet he hardly gives you ten per cent of what he makes.’
Patrick searched amid the clutter of bottles and cans until he found something to drink. He poured the flat beer into two cups.
Devlin cleared a space on the table.
‘I keep telling her to clear the place up’ – Patrick nodded at the hanging blanket – ‘but she says what’s the point?’
‘Your sister?’
‘Who else?’
And as though summoned by the remark, Maria’s face appeared at the edge of the blanket. ‘What’s he want?’ she said. Her black hair fell in disarray across her face and she pushed it back. Then she rubbed at her teeth with a finger.
‘Not said yet.’ Patrick went to the stove and struck match after match, trying to light it.
‘No gas,’ Maria said. ‘Ran out last night.’ She went back behind the blanket for a few minutes, dressed and then returned to them, pulling down the blanket as she came to reveal her makeshift bed beneath the caravan’s solitary large window. She was bare-legged and had nothing on her feet. She sat beside Devlin and pressed herself close to him, putting her arm around his shoulders. ‘He came to see me,’ she said, her mouth close to his ear. ‘That’s right, isn’t it, lover boy?’
Devlin looked at Patrick and wondered what to say.
‘Look, he’s gone all red,’ Maria said. She withdrew her arm. ‘Got anything to eat?’
Devlin took out the sandwiches he had made. Unbuttered bread, cheese and onion. And seeing these, Patrick came back to the table.
‘Why are you here?’ Devlin asked him. ‘Setting up?’
‘Like I said at the airfield,’ Patrick said, ‘we’re here for the winter. Most of the heavier stuff’s gone off to Nottingham and Lincoln. We got a few local bookings with the smaller shies and stalls, but the rest of the gear gets parked up here until March, Easter time. Maintenance, repairs, painting, that sort of thing. We used to take most of the stuff up to Hull, but we knocked that on the head a few years back. Hardly worth the effort these days.’
‘And you stay here all winter?’
‘A few bits and pieces here and there, but mostly we sit tight and wait to see what turns up.’
‘In the shape of Duggan?’
‘And others. He’s not all he likes to think he is, tends to get stuck in his ways. He’s an old man compared to some of them these days.’
‘Do the animals come?’ Devlin said.
‘Some. The horses go to the stables over Surfleet way. Every year there are new rules and regulations. That’s who I thought you were – the police. The minute we show up they come knocking and shouting the odds to let us know what’s what. We show them our licences and leases and everything, but they still like to show up and give us all the usual warnings.’
Maria took the last of the sandwiches, picked out the onion and ate what remained. Patrick picked the onion off the table and ate that.
‘It’s all a bit hand-to-mouth, this time of year,’ he said.
‘Is there much to do – with the rides and stalls?’
Patrick shrugged. ‘We strip down the generators and overhaul the rides. Everything turns to rust and rot at the drop of a hat in this neck of the woods.’
‘You still at Duggan’s?’ Maria asked him.
‘It’s only temporary. Until something better turns up.’ When work on the Welland Channel ended, he would be miles away from the nearest drainage work. He’d wait and see.
‘Always something better round the next corner,’ Patrick said. ‘And then the corner after that.’
‘You got anything saved?’ Maria asked him.
‘Not really. A bit.’
‘Enough to see you through?’
Devlin had nothing. Everything he’d earned in those two and a half months, he’d spent. He paid Duggan his rent, and then the rest just blew away on the wind. Some of it blew back during his excursions with Duggan, but then even that blew away eventually.
Most of the new work had been dreamed up by the Ministry of Transport. And their rates of pay were lower than those of the Drainage Board. And some said that the Ministry wouldn’t even look at you until you’d filled in at least a dozen forms. Taxes, pension contributions, National Insurance, everything. Cash in hand? No chance. So you could forget it with that mob.
Maria put her hand on Devlin’s arm.
‘You want to get yourself a caravan and come and stay here for the winter,’ she said.
With her?
‘I suppose I could,’ he said. Ten a penny, caravans. Death traps hauled off the holiday camps up around Skegness every year and sold mostly for scrap or chicken houses. Duggan had always done a good trade in caravans. Perhaps he would even sell him one cheap.
‘What you got to lose?’ Maria said.
‘I suppose.’
Patrick attracted his attention. ‘You tell Duggan we only got half what he told us we’d get for those cisterns.’ It wasn’t a genuine complaint, more a reflex.
‘None of my business,’ Devlin said. Sold on and sold on and sold on. Where did it all end?
‘You tell him, all the same. Tell him we’re not happy. Times are going to get hard over the coming months. We don’t need rubbish from Duggan to make things even harder.’
In the distance, beyond the road, Devlin heard the machine whistles calling the remaining workers to their labours.
‘You ought to get moving,’ Maria said to him, but making no move to release him from where he sat in the tight seat.
‘Might give it a miss,’ he said, surprising himself.
‘They’ll dock you.’
‘So? What’s the point if they’re just waiting to lay us off anyway?’
‘You ought to stick at it as long as it’s there,’ Patrick said. Duggan had already told him the same.
What difference would half a day make? He could always think of some excuse. And the water certainly wasn’t getting any warmer.
‘Ignore him,’ Maria said to him, her face back close to his own. ‘Perhaps you’ve got hidden talents. What else are you good at?’
He tried hard to think. ‘This and that,’ he said.
Patrick laughed. ‘We’re all good at that.’
Devlin knew she was playing with him, passing a few minutes of another empty day, an empty month, perhaps, and he understood that. But it was something. Everything came apart in the end, everything floated adrift and everything was eventually carried away on that same cold and uncaring wind which took his money.
At the pumping station, a second whistle sounded. He would be an hour late, that’s all.
Patrick found another half-filled bottle of beer and poured it out. ‘It’s
not a bad life,’ he said, ‘if you don’t weaken.’ He held his cup towards Devlin and Devlin tapped it with his own.
13
HE LEFT THE culvert where he’d been hidden with Sullivan for the past few hours and made his way towards the others. At the same time, the borstal boys came back to the bus and Sullivan counted them off as they climbed aboard. The field drain on which they’d started work twenty days earlier was still only half cleared, and Sullivan shouted his complaints and accusations at each of the boys as they passed him in the doorway. As elsewhere on the site, now that its workforce was depleted, there was little urgency.
Devlin handed in the shovel he carried, which he had pushed for the first time into the mud of the culvert as he’d risen to return. Despite his late arrival a week earlier, no action had been taken against him and he had been kept on as part of the workforce. Most of the men he had become acquainted with over the summer had been sent to work elsewhere, and as a result he’d spent more of his time with Sullivan.
A horn sounded in the distance, and Devlin saw Duggan’s lorry on the hard-standing beside the pumping station.
‘I’ve got a lift,’ he said to Sullivan, who had taken to diverting the borstal bus to give Devlin a ride home.
‘Good for you.’
Devlin left the gathering boys and went to Duggan.
‘This where you’re working then, is it?’ Duggan sat with his arm outside the cab, his fingers drumming a tune on the door. He’d known exactly where Devlin was working. Sizing up his opportunities, as usual. ‘You got some good stuff just lying about over there.’
‘Don’t even think of it,’ Devlin said.
Duggan laughed at him. ‘Don’t look so serious. You know me – I never shit in my own back yard. I was just passing, that’s all. Thought I’d do the decent thing and give you a lift home.’
‘And the rest,’ Devlin said. He climbed up and sat beside Duggan.
‘They borstal boys?’ Duggan said, shielding his eyes. ‘From the camp?’
They both watched as the bus came towards them and then passed them on the narrow road. Sullivan raised his hand from the wheel and Devlin returned the gesture.
‘You don’t want to be tying yourself in with that little lot,’ Duggan said. He watched the departing bus in his wing mirror. ‘Evil little runts. Beats me why the Drainage Board lets them anywhere near.’