by Derek Beaven
‘You’ve left me no choice,’ Clarice said. ‘No choice at all.’ Her voice was icy, but the secret yearning sprang up in triumph. ‘What time do you have to drive Mrs Yakub home?’
‘Oh, in a little while. Finish your drink. Put another record on, why don’t you.’
She did as she was told.
But when they found Mrs Yakub in the dining-room she was already dead. She was slumped at the table, her head right against the wood. An arm dangled uselessly beside her chair, and the weight seemed to drag at her neck, stretching the skin and blurring the features lopsidedly into a gap-toothed mask. The head, at its awkward angle, had its hair partially wrapped over again, where the scarf had fallen forward. Scattered about it, there were pages torn from an opened account book. In the centre of them all, close to a fold in the fabric, lay the empty whisky bottle and the remains of the practice’s digitalin supply. The keys to the drug cabinet lay in the hand that reached across the table – as if to say, by way of note, Here you are, Tuan Doktor. I’ve put everything in order.
DECEMBER. IN BARKING, in the flat, their breath was like smoke. His father sniffed at the piece of haddock on the larder shelf. Then he lit a match and touched it to the top of the old gas cooker. There was a small dull sound under the brown saucepan; but Jack was alert to his mother. He ran to watch her singing in the bedroom as she changed her clothes. She’d seen three ships come sailing in. On Christmas Day, on Christmas Day.
Then she whispered something, and the words confused him. One light bulb hung from the ceiling, and the yellow altered her skin. The bulb filled the wall with her outline.
She put on her girdle, and then a slip; only then did she shoo him away for looking. He listened outside her door. Her stockings brushed, one against the other, her dress faintly slithered. The knock on the boards was her heels as she turned herself about in front of the mirror, and when the handle rattled he stepped back against the banisters. She came out tense; he could feel the fierceness in her body. She spoke to his father in the kitchen, demanding his attention, until there was another flare-up and suddenly she was leaving again.
Down in the shop the dusty display of weighing scales was lit only from the stairs. The faces of the machines were like shadowy fish eyes. In the dark his mother kept her hand on the catch and the door was half open. Jack was cold for a long time even though he was four, now. When they all came back up, the kitchen was full of steam and the potatoes had boiled dry. His father laughed as he always did, and made a joke; but at last there was the sound of a motor bike outside in the street, and Jack remembered the words she’d used: Tony Rice was taking his father up Waltham to do the job.
Tony wore a belted mac with the collar raised. He carried his goggles in his hand as he came up the stairs. Behind him there was another man, fat and red-faced, who was unslinging the large satchel he had over his shoulder. Jack knew his name; it was Arthur Figgis.
‘Don’t mind if I bring Figgsy, do you?’
Arthur Figgis winked. Jack hated him. He tried to hide. His mother held him.
‘All right, Tony.’
‘Like a bad penny.’ Tony laughed. ‘All right, sonny? You’re up late. What’s the score? Couldn’t wait?’ He laughed at his rhyme. His smooth cheek hurt Jack in a way his father’s rough one didn’t. ‘You coming with us, Jacky boy? Eh? Coming to screw a bit of swag with your old man and his old mate?’
‘Tony. Keep it shut in front of the boy.’
‘What’s the matter, Phylly?’
But his father spoke. ‘Tony! I wasn’t expecting … It’s been so long. I thought …’
‘Thought I’d forgotten, did you, Rabbit?’
‘No, I … Well, yes, as a matter of fact. It can wait, can’t it? I’d no idea. Tonight of all nights. Of all the bad times.’
‘No time like the present. Eh, Figgsy?’
His father said, ‘Tony, I …’
‘Yes?’
Arthur Figgis said, ‘Deary me.’ He took his hand out of his coat. It had three heavy rings on it. Jack saw his father’s face was pale. His eyes had opened wide. He’d become smaller. Tony Rice always made his father look as though he were someone else, as though Jack too should call him Vic, or Warren, or Rabbit. Tony Rice had a glitter about him, like a decoration, with his wit and sharp voice.
‘Figgsy’s walking home, Vic. You’re coming with me.’
Jack’s father was a grown man wearing his apron at the stove and holding a fish-slice. His wife’s face had the faintest of smiles.
‘Are you coming, or what? Eh, Rabbit. I’m talking to you.’
‘Yes, Tony. I’m coming.’
‘Attaboy.’
Jack saw Vic Warren put a hand in his trouser pocket and give some coins to his mother. He saw him get his raincoat from the stand and go meekly out of the house behind the other two men. When Jack ran into the front room, past the decorated tree, his shoes clumped upon the floorboards. He watched the men from the window. Vic Warren on the back of the bike was hugging Tony Rice. It was the same person doubled. The motor bike roared, and the streak appeared from the headlight, a white finger pointing the way between the lightless gas lamps on either side of Ripple Road. Vic Warren had the large bag strung over his shoulder. Gone to fetch a rabbit skin. To wrap the baby bunting in.
The bike swung and roared until he lost all sense of where they were, or how long they’d been going. In every corner the back wheel threatened to go away from under him, and all Vic could think of was that his fingers would be frostbitten and useless when he hit the ground. Then, though the road was unlit, he recognised the fringes of Epping Forest. Old crookbeams rose up on either side of them. Their bare branch tops hooked and clawed at the streaked cloud. He clung to Tony Rice’s greatcoated body, sheltered his eyes from the iced and blinding wind behind the nape of Tony Rice’s neck. The band of the goggles made a blank strip in Tony Rice’s neat, clipped hair. The bike roared on.
They cornered sharply, leaning over together, and there were houses again, sedate black shapes, in the rushing air. Tony pointed a gauntletted hand at one of them, in a spacious row set back. It was large, detached; the bike’s exhaust note rattled at its moon-glazed windows. They passed some villas, timbered and countrified. Then round in a side road, they came to a halt. Tony killed the engine. They turned the bike and left it ready, kick-start cocked.
Vic’s guts churned. The side road ended in deeper darkness topped over by the shapes of trees. Tony led him into a path through the murk. Rime had formed on the iron kissing gate; it glistened. They scouted along, the two of them half crouched, feeling the leaf mould and fallen twigs through the soles of their shoes, picking their way by the flash of a torch beam. A branch creaked overhead in the trifling wind. Tony sniggered.
The way was overgrown. So long since the Coal Hole, one part of Vic had counted on Tony forgetting the deal. But another had prepared for this moment all along, dreading it, knowing with certainty that it would come to pass. It had lain between him and his wife. She’d sung at the club while he’d remained uninvited. Cash had appeared; he had no work. Though the cabin was finished he had little energy, for the child would wake in the night, twice, three times, and he would get up to calm him, or sit up with him. He and Phyllis camped out in the wastes of marriage – when she was at home. Nothing else would shift. There was only the continued ritual of her threats.
In the freezing glitter the forest hinted at its past. Twisted, silhouetted limbs took on a desperate, sardonic nature. The two men came to a fence. Five feet high, the larch strake tops wobbled underfoot. Vic landed in a vegetable patch. Among sturdy brassica stalks he stood ashamed. The tilth crunched minutely as his shoes broke the forming crust, and there rose a smell of cabbage rot. He caught the sweaty whiff of his own coat, heard his own heart. His stomach cramped him. He looked ahead and saw the black bulk of Tony ten paces further on, his breath steaming.
Vic was amazed at himself. His life was a fairy-tale. Only the bombs, when they came, would ma
ke sense of it. Who’d stolen him and brought him here – the apprentice boy, hoicked out of his grammar-school place at fourteen because of his dad’s lungs? That boy had once ridden off each morning wearing his too-manly flat cap, his jacket, waistcoat and clipped-up long trousers – as his dad had gone before him along the marsh track. Who’d picked him out – pedalling over the Roding at the Abbey Works, and then down the River Lane to the wharf to earn the family living?
As a young man he’d made cross-London voyages night after night on buses and tubes in hope of some engineering degree. He’d attended cheap concert halls, libraries, public lectures. Who had crippled his almost superhuman effort to lift himself out of the dockside backstreets?
His marriage had put a stop to it. Between lust and marriage there’d been Clarice. But he’d done the decent thing. And then Jack had been born. So why couldn’t Vic Warren be left alone to make his way, bring up his family? He reminded himself that it was because of the child he was here. It was Jack who was at stake. Phyllis couldn’t help herself. Nor was it the threats of violence from Tony, or Figgsy. Not really. It was what would happen to Jack, his son, if he didn’t go along with her.
My father wasn’t deluded. Phyllis had grown up the plaything of criminals. Now, unless Vic acted, the same fate would befall Jack. It was almost inevitable. The only chance he had of bringing Jack and even his wife out of it was to take all the guilt of the situation upon himself. The predicament was real; the trap – like all such traps – was cunning.
Therefore Tony led the way. The moon’s edge slipped into a cloud, and then out again. Before them roofs, copings and chimney stacks showed up sharp against the streaked, star-pocked sky. A path cut through the garden; it led under a trellis arch and then across the lawn. There was a shed and an outbuilding. Listening for the first shake of a chain, listening for the interrupted snort of canine breathing, they stood completely still, waiting a full minute. A snuffling sound from next door made them both start.
‘Nothing. Couple of hedgehogs at it, most likely.’ Tony shook his head and laughed under his breath. ‘Spiky fuckers. Supposed to be asleep, aren’t they?’
A cat screamed in the next garden, electrically loud. Vic jumped again. Again Tony shook his head. ‘Not scared, are you? Don’t you worry about a thing, mate. You’ve got your Uncle Tone to look after you.’ They carried on. The french windows were right in front of them ‘All right. Give me the doings.’
Vic had the brown paper and glue; he fished for them in the bag he’d taken over from Figgsy. The moonlight caught the fine teeth in Tony’s elegant smile. He was grinning, holding the glass cutter. ‘Nice, eh?’ He indicated the house. ‘Hope they’ve all hung up their stockings.’
There came the gritty score of the cutting wheel on the pane. Vic looked up at the dark building and nodded. He stood back a step, even as Tony was easing the glass. He held the two torches, ready. It was only a second or two’s work to get the door open.
STRAIGHT AWAY, TO the right of him, Vic’s torch beam picked out the smoked-gold frame of a painting that hung from the picture rail. Then the light sweep opened up the interior. There were several more pictures along the wall – large canvases, and some smaller. The place was lined with a distinction quite unexpected. Between and around the pictures the flickering, searchlit wallpaper showed up a drab floral blue; but a great polished table was dressed with silver furnishings. It had carved upright chairs tucked beneath, and it filled much of the centre space, though there were smaller tables and a sideboard in the distance. All the surfaces were cluttered with objects, many of them glittering, cut glass, silver. There were no Christmas decorations.
Embers glowed in the grate. The torch showed the chimney breast with a poor brick fireplace, yet over the mantelshelf an astonishing high gilt mirror was mounted. Vic looked up from the eerie reflection. The ceiling had plain mouldings, but from the central rose hung a vast glass chandelier. The signs of wealth reminded him of the time when a kindly foreign professor had invited the external students to Prince’s Gate for drinks. A tang of cigar smoke drifted in the air.
Chest high under the pictures ran shelves of books, so many in the torch’s beam. He moved closer. The spines showed old-fashioned letter shapes which he couldn’t read. Tony, gone ahead once more, was already about his own concerns.
‘Come on then, brains. Finger out. No use standing here gawping. See that clock. And this bloody sideboard.’
Vic tiptoed to the far end of the room, and made himself lift the old gilded clock from its shelf. But the light from his torch was fading – the batteries must have been dud. With one hand he unhooked the long pendulum and tried to wriggle it free. The lever flicked back and forth like a live thing. He silenced it. The torch went out. He shook it back to life. A wonderful engraved bowl lay on its own tray on the sideboard. On either side of it, among the rest of the silver, stood two fine twisted candlesticks. They felt weighted by more than metal, clanking wretchedly against the clock. He imagined Tony’s laugh. Ten quid, maybe. Even twenty, the lot. Something told him what he knew already – that, financially, Tony had no need of this job, or his help. A sound of ripping filled the dark beside him.
The sideboard drawers hung open, revealing cutlery in disorder. Now Tony’s shape, the torch gripped under his chin, stood at a small bureau in the corner. ‘Get me your light on this lot,’ he whispered.
Vic shone his weakening beam on to a riffle of letters and bills. There were storage envelopes too, and a wadge of personal papers, with a passport, nipped up in a bulldog clip. Tony shook out the envelopes and snatched at the papers. ‘Not this, you bastard. Where’s your bloody ill-gotten? Come on.’ He flung the documents on to the floor and snickered. ‘Who knows, eh?’
Vic felt a movement behind him, and smelt a trace of hair oil. His torch beam suddenly caught Tony, slipping his fingers around the edge of a long drape. The door behind it gave a moaning swish. ‘Tony!’ But Tony had disappeared from view, and Vic stood rooted to the soft rug by the sideboard.
Character, Perce had so often said, was about not cracking up. Vic’s father had seen men crack up: men who couldn’t move – either towards the enemy, or back. Those buggers, Perce had said, were sitting ducks. A picture by the tapestried door hanging was caught in the beam. From it a man of property in sober seventeenth-century dress stared dimly back at Vic. There was reproach in the painted eye. Beside the figure were brown water scenes with boats and houses.
He heard noises in the hall beyond, as if Tony were trying to prise something away. ‘Tony!’ He turned and, in the dark, inadvertently swung his own bag against the back of one of the dining chairs. The rattle was deafening. Now his torch came to rest on the large canvas above the sideboard he’d just looted. Bold smears of red might be lips, or nipples; and there were eyes, gilded, female eyes, pale, laquered skin.
It was slashed, and the hardened paint near the bottom had come off in chunks, revealing the canvas. Below the cut Vic caught a signature in the bottom corner which he couldn’t read. It was as though he’d brushed up against Clarice’s naked body, there in the room. He stretched to feel for the table and began backing towards the french window.
‘Tony!’ His nerve failed. ‘Tony. I’m going back to the bike.’
‘That’s what you want, isn’t it, Vic.’ Like a tinkling whisper, out of nowhere.
He plunged after Tony into the hall where the wrenching sound had come from. A floorboard creaked above him. Across a vast chequerwork of tiles, he could just make out a front door and a large newel post at the foot of the staircase.
His torch went out and he groped for the banisters. And then holding fast on to them, he stepped sideways, several paces, still feeling for the woodwork. Above, in the stairwell, there was the faintest of gleams, the merest sense of outlines, no more.
Then a thump, and a woman’s scream and footfalls overhead. Vic panicked, his arms outstretched. He heard a man’s gruff voice upstairs and the sound of a door handle being turned. S
omething on the landing went over with a crash and there were footsteps on the stairs. Tony rushed past him in the hall and Vic turned back to follow. In the dining-room he clattered into the heavy chairs, and fell against a small table, dashing the glassware.
He was at the french windows. As he burst his wrist through a pane, a light switched on. He heard a run behind him, felt a blow to the back of his head and he swivelled, enraged, hitting out at the pyjamaed figure, raining and pummelling blows with his strong fists against the righteous protective arms, the plump sides, the grunting, wet, tobacco-smelling face, feeling the glass of spectacles against his bare knuckles, and its give.
He was escaping down the garden, his ludicrous sack bouncing and jingling on his back. A low wall tripped him. He crashed through stalks, was whipped by branches. He scrambled at the fence. Next he was paralysed and the forest was a sightless chaos. His chest was scraped and his foot hurt. A motor bike in the distance kicked into life: once, twice and then the roar. He inched his way towards the trace of its sound, shuffling with his feet for the path, feeling for tree trunks with his hands, but there was only the unexpected ditch, the unremembered scrub, the wicked bramble thorns. The back of his head ached with a dull, throbbing pain and he put his knuckles in his mouth, tasting blood.
Someone was shouting. He attempted to retrace his steps. But he could find no fence, no house. The ground was dropping away and frosted spines rose up and stung his hands. He straggled back again. Then he plunged in a different direction, and again.
He was relieved when they arrested him. His nails were torn and his shins were barked, but the blood on his hands showed up quite dry in the flash beams, only ten yards or so from the back of the burgled house.
Jack wasn’t dreaming when he heard the motor bike. He was in his bed, listening, waiting. He recognised the sound of it and knew how it stood revving in the street at the front of the shop. Then it stopped. He got out of bed and went into the front room. His mother and someone else were coming up the stairs. He heard their voices.