Mercury Falling

by Robert Edric

  ‘Was he now? Well, in that case …’ He held up his arms in surrender and then laughed at Devlin. ‘Keep your hair on, son. She knows the rules as well as any of them. Besides, when did she or her lot ever pay a fair price for anything?’ He looked back to the horses. ‘Not too bad, I don’t suppose,’ he said. ‘For circus nags. I’ve seen worse.’ He offered her ten pounds less than she’d been expecting and Maria accepted it. The pair of them shook hands.

  ‘He thinks you’re going to butcher them and send the meat to France,’ she said.

  ‘The Frogs? Perhaps I should look into it. I daresay they got enough of their own.’ He turned back to Devlin. ‘Supply and demand, see? That’s what this game’s all about. What anything’s all about, really, when you come to think about it. Supply and demand and all those so-called market forces we keep hearing so much about these days.’ He peeled several notes from the wad he held and gave the rest to Maria. ‘You going to count it?’ he asked her.

  ‘No need,’ she told him. ‘You know who I am and I know where to come looking for you.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ the man said. ‘You going to give me a hand getting them loaded?’

  ‘What do you think?’ Maria said.

  17

  ‘SHOULDN’T THEY AT least be doing something?’ Devlin motioned beyond Sullivan to where the borstal boys sat gathered at the back of the bus.

  ‘No point,’ Sullivan said, unconcerned, his eyes fixed on the paper he was reading. ‘You know it, I know it, and they know it.’ He wiped his hand across the condensation which coated the inside of the window to reveal the falling rain and the dark, sodden fields beyond.

  ‘Nothing’s certain yet,’ Devlin said.

  ‘Who are you kidding? By this time tomorrow nobody will ever know we were even here. All the heavy plant’s being taken off this afternoon and won’t be back until next March. Anything still here this time next month will be stuck fast. Job’s only half done, if that, but that’s how things work where water and the seasons are concerned. Besides, our contract finishes today – you don’t get more certain than that.’ He looked up, wiping his hand on his sleeve. ‘How about you? Off to the new culvert work over at the Washway road?’

  ‘Word is, they’re laying the last of us off for the winter.’

  ‘Makes sense to the money men, I suppose,’ Sullivan said. ‘It’s the machinery gets most of the work done these days.’

  Devlin looked along the line of parked lorries waiting for their final loads of clay. The dredgers had already been pulled away from the new embankment. Men cleared the buckets and treads with shovels.

  Most of the borstal boys played cards or read the pages of a dismantled paper. A few sat apart from the others and looked back along the length of the bus.

  ‘So what will we do?’ Devlin said. ‘Sit here all day?’ He already knew the answer.

  ‘I don’t see why not. Unless you’d prefer to be outside, up to your arse in freezing water. I know where I’d rather be.’

  Devlin considered the day ahead, and the day after that, and the day after that.

  ‘I’ve got wet all over the paper now,’ Sullivan said, pushing it into the seat beside him. ‘We’re set to get a lot more of this sort of contract work over at the camp, and most of it will involve days like this. Repaying their debt to society? Christ, I wouldn’t want any of this little lot anywhere near me or my society, whatever that is when it’s at home. See that little bugger sitting by himself? Messed with his own little sister. Twelve, she was. Half a dozen mothers in the neighbourhood came forward when he was arrested, said he’d tried to do the same to their kids.’

  Devlin looked at the boy. He sat with his eyes closed, his hands twisting in his lap.

  ‘Twelve,’ Sullivan said. ‘Christ. How on earth is he going to repay that particular debt to society?’

  ‘What’ll happen to him?’

  ‘He’s on a Transfer Notice. When he’s old enough he’ll be off to the prison in Lincoln or Norwich. Then he’ll find out all about that debt to society. We’ve got relatives of some of those other girls – brothers, cousins – at the camp. This is the first time I’ve seen the little bastard without a black eye, cut lip or a swollen mouth in a month. Ask me, he gets all he deserves.’

  Devlin looked harder at the boy, who finally opened his eyes and let his hands fall still. He saw Devlin looking at him and stared back, grinning and mouthing something Devlin couldn’t decipher.

  ‘Ignore him,’ Sullivan said. ‘He’s like a wild fucking dog that’s been pushed into a corner. I told them not to put him on the work list. He’s the sort who’ll one day fancy his chances and set off running, and you wouldn’t believe how much trouble and extra work that brings down on all our heads. You can’t do what he did and not have ideas about doing it all again.’

  The boy closed his eyes again and resumed wringing his hands.

  ‘Besides,’ Sullivan went on, ‘you ought to be more concerned about your own prospects now that your number’s nearly up. Last in, first out, is it? Another stupid bloody rule, you ask me.’

  Devlin had been away from the site for the past three days. He had only come today to collect what was owed to him. Others had done the same, looking for alternative work before the queues suddenly got much longer.

  ‘I said it’s a stupid bloody rule,’ Sullivan repeated when Devlin didn’t respond.

  ‘You’re right,’ Devlin said. The man was starting to annoy him.

  ‘’Course I’m right. What good’s a man who sticks at something he’s no good at? You got any prospects?’

  ‘I’m going to ask round the holiday camps,’ Devlin said. In truth, he’d done little and achieved less during the past few days, and the caravan park work was still only a vague idea.

  ‘Need to get your skates on. They’re building a new camp from scratch over Hunstanton way. Young man like you, no family, no commitments, suit you down to the ground. And if all else fails, you might even want to consider this little game.’

  ‘The prison?’

  ‘Don’t sound so surprised. You could do a lot worse. Cushy little number if your face fits and you get your feet under the table. Nowhere near as hard as it looks.’

  Devlin wondered if this was a joke, but suppressed his laughter.

  ‘Look at them,’ Sullivan said, again indicating the boys. ‘Any two or three of them could overpower me and scarper. Do some real damage, some of them. But look at them. They just sit there, throwing me dirty looks and doing nothing. Know why that is?’

  Devlin shook his head. Any one of the boys could probably overpower Sullivan.

  ‘Because they know they’d get what’s coming to them if they so much as lifted a finger to me. Perhaps not straight away, or here, or when they were expecting it, but they’d get it all the same, one way or another, and they all know that. I’m serious. You should look into it. I could put a word in if you like.’

  ‘I don’t think they’d look at me,’ Devlin said. He turned in his seat to look back out of the window. The narrow road stretched ahead of him into the rain and cloud. He could see neither its ending nor the road it eventually joined. A solitary tree rose out of the grey.

  ‘Why’s that, then?’ Sullivan said cautiously.

  ‘I’ve been inside myself.’

  Sullivan considered this. ‘Local?’

  ‘Colchester.’

  Sullivan laughed. ‘Colchester? Military? That won’t count against you. If anything, it might even work in your favour. Half the blokes at the camp are ex-military. And half of them will have been on the dodgy side of things, if you catch my drift. Wartime regulations, was it?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘There you go, then. Wartime. It makes all the difference. They’ll have wiped the slate on whatever you did or didn’t do. And I’m guessing you were only ever charged with half of what you got up to in the first place.’

  ‘Less,’ Devlin said.

  ‘Then on top of everything else, you’ll kn
ow how to look after yourself. You and this lot, you’re out of the same mould. So-called experts are ten a penny in this racket. What we need are men on the ground who know what’s what. I won’t deny you look as though you could do with a bit more meat on your bones and a decent wash and brush up, but you strike me as a man who knows how to look after himself under the circumstances.’

  Everything Sullivan said sounded good to Devlin. It sounded true and right. Honest. ‘I suppose it’s worth thinking about,’ he said.

  ‘’Course it is. In addition to which, most of the men at the camp are sitting on a prison pension the rest of the world can only dream about. Security – that’s what it’s all about these days. Looking ahead, planning for the future. If you don’t plan for things you’re going to end up like this lot here. You’d think they’d learn something after coming to us, but they never do. Not a single one of them. Never. They’ll all be back up to some sort of mischief or other the minute we kick them out of the gates and wave them off.’

  As Devlin watched, the cloud around them grew thicker, swallowing up more of the narrow road and the tree.

  ‘You think about it,’ Sullivan said. ‘That’s all I’m saying, you give it some thought. You know where I am.’

  18

  HE SAW THE figure half a mile ahead of him, coming towards him on the bank above the Lynn Channel. Earlier, he’d watched a Sunderland flying boat moving slowly over the sea, east to west, a few hundred yards offshore. At the start of the war he’d gone with the other boys to watch the planes coming and going from the Wash. North Sea patrols. A series of jetties had been built between Ongar Hill and Admiralty Point, a barracks and a clubhouse. A month after the war’s end, everything had been demolished or dismantled and removed. Now only a few concrete slabs and brick foundations remained. There had been talk of a passenger service using the Sunderlands, but this had come to nothing. He’d watched the plane earlier until it had disappeared over the horizon.

  As the figure came closer he finally recognized the old shepherd he’d encountered three months earlier in the tin chapel. He continued towards the man. The path at his feet was soft and stuck to his boots. Coils of rusted barbed wire trailed down the slope into the water on both sides.

  Eventually, the two men met. Devlin wondered if the old man remembered him.

  ‘You look better than when I last saw you,’ the shepherd said.

  ‘Been doing all right for myself,’ Devlin said. He remembered the man’s name. Samuel.

  ‘I can see that. See the flying boat?’

  ‘Hardly miss it.’

  ‘They scare the sheep.’

  Everything scared sheep. ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘So what you up to? Not still sleeping rough, I imagine.’

  ‘Been staying with a man called Duggan.’ A month had passed since then, and afterwards he’d hardly spent two nights in the same place. He was still hoping to rent one of the empty caravans at the fair’s winter quarters.

  ‘Him?’ Samuel turned away from him and scanned the horizon.

  ‘Just moved on,’ Devlin said.

  ‘Best thing to do where that man’s concerned.’

  Devlin gave him a cigarette and the old man broke it in half and put an inch of it behind his ear. His fingers and nails were brown with smoke.

  Devlin saw that the man stood stiffly, that his legs seemed swollen.

  Samuel saw him looking. ‘Newspapers,’ he said. ‘I push them in for warmth. I embarrass my daughter. She said as much. To my face.’

  ‘Does it work?’ Devlin said.

  ‘Wouldn’t do it otherwise.’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  There was a moment of silence between them.

  ‘They were hare coursing over Sutton way last night,’ Samuel said eventually. ‘Lampers. Some sharp-looking dogs.’

  ‘This time of year?’ He’d done it himself, but mostly in the spring.

  ‘What difference do you think that makes? They come out from Spalding and Holbeach. Anything that moves, they’ll set a dog on it. And when there’s nothing to chase, they’ll set the dogs on each other for a bet.’

  Devlin had heard about the fights, the money supposedly made and lost.

  ‘There was a man up Clenchwarton way,’ Samuel said, ‘fisherman, kept a boat in Lynn, who was cautioned by the Lynn magistrates for killing seals. Took an axe to twenty of them, mothers and pups, back around April time. Said he was defending his livelihood. Thirty others turned up at the court to shout at the magistrate. The police said he’d get Norwich gaol for a few months, but it never came to that. They had a photo in the Gazette of the bodies on the beach. Chopped the heads off some of them.’ He paused. ‘Some people used to swear by seal meat during the war.’

  Devlin wondered where all this was leading. ‘You on your way to the chapel?’ he asked him. The building was at least five miles distant.

  ‘I might take a quick look. Just walking, mostly. You working?’

  ‘Drainage work.’ Which had finally ended ten days ago, after which he’d received only half of what he’d been expecting in his final pay packet.

  ‘Labouring?’

  ‘Mostly.’

  ‘Saw a lorry yesterday piled with Nissen huts over towards the Nene Outfall. All stacked like ridge tiles one atop the other. Temporary accommodation, the driver said. He got caught fast on that sharp bend. The lorries aren’t suited. Will you stick at it, the work?’

  Devlin told him about the lay-offs.

  ‘Done more than my share in that line,’ Samuel said. ‘Thirty years back. It’s a young man’s game. If there’s one thing certain in this neck of the woods, it’s that the water’s always going to be there and either want moving somewhere else or getting rid of completely. What will you do to get through?’

  ‘See what turns up, I suppose.’

  ‘It doesn’t sound like much of a plan,’ Samuel said.

  Another of those evaporated conversations. Passing the time of day, most would call it.

  Devlin wanted to leave the man.

  ‘I ought to be making tracks,’ Samuel said eventually, finishing the half cigarette. He shielded his eyes and looked directly up into the sky above them.

  ‘Me, too,’ Devlin said.

  ‘Right.’

  They moved apart, slowly at first, as though held together by the simple presence of one another in such an empty place, but then Devlin started walking faster. He’d seen the photograph of the decapitated seals and their recently born pups. The men he’d been with at the time said it served the greedy little bastards right, that a seal would take a single bite out of a fish and leave the rest of it to rot. According to them, the only mistake the man who’d killed the animals had made was to have left the bodies and heads out in the open on the mudflats for everybody to see. These days, some people would see the injustice in every little thing. Greedy, thieving little bastards, and vicious with it.

  19

  DEVLIN AND THE McGuire brothers sat in the back room of the Oak at Sutton Bridge. They had been there since noon and it was now close to four. Few other drinkers had come and gone in that time.

  The brothers were there on business, but the man they had been expecting to meet hadn’t shown up. Devlin paid for most of their drinks out of the last of his pay. He’d spent the past three nights in an empty trailer close to the brothers’ own caravan. The drink was a sort of rent. Devlin was hoping for something better, something more permanent. Nothing seemed straightforward any more; there were no proper paths, no squares on a calendar waiting to be crossed off. He was drifting again, weightless, everything beyond his control.

  He’d been as drunk as he’d ever been by two o’clock and the McGuires had laughed at everything he’d said.

  Now, getting to his feet, he immediately lost his balance and fell back to his seat. The two men pushed him from side to side between them. They seldom showed signs of their own drunkenness – even on those days when they did little else but drink – until much
later in the day. Rising before noon was still a rarity for them.

  Patrick pushed a hand into Devlin’s pocket and pulled out the last of his change. He went to the bar and returned with three more glasses. He and Colm drained theirs quickly, but Devlin left his where it sat on the table. He held the edge of his seat. He felt sick.

  An old man came into the room and pulled a stool to the bar, where he sat with his back to them. He ordered a whisky and sat with the glass, hardly sipping at it. Much of the time he folded his arms on the polished wooden surface and sat with his head on them.

  At five, the brothers told Devlin that they were going out for a few minutes and that he was to stay where he was in case the man they’d been expecting showed up late. They described the man to Devlin, but little of what they said registered.

  Alone, Devlin straightened his back, released his grip on the chair and sat with the back of his head against the wall.

  After a minute, the old man at the bar came across to him. He sat opposite Devlin and studied him.

  ‘You’re Jimmy Devlin’s boy,’ he said.

  ‘So?’ It was as much as Devlin could attempt.

  ‘Have it your own way. I know him, that’s all.’

  ‘Good for you.’

  ‘You’re the spit of him when he was younger.’ The man looked around the empty room. ‘Gone, have they, the gyppos?’

  Even in that state, Devlin heard the change of note in the man’s voice.

  ‘Not for long,’ he said. He tasted vomit deep in his throat.

  ‘Everybody round here’s had dealings with that pair. Known, they are.’

  ‘So?’ Devlin took a deep breath. ‘Get lost. Leave me alone.’

  The old man drew back from the table, beyond Devlin’s reach.

  ‘No need to be like that. I was only trying to offer you a piece of friendly advice. He’s a good man, your father.’

  ‘Not to me, he wasn’t.’ Not to anybody.

  ‘Yes, well, there’s still some round here won’t hear a bad word against Jimmy Devlin.’