4 Bones Sleeping (Small Town Trilogy)

by Gerald Wixey

  I said, ‘There’s a couple of books indoors.’

  And he poured over them like an ecclesiastical scholar scouring some ancient biblical text. I never bothered to remind him that we’d probably be gone before the fruits of his labour could peep through his painstakingly cultivated soil. What was the point? He’d found his therapy and once I’d survived the dread of another night, I watched him and found mine too.

  They both accepted my mantra, heads down, stay here until the New Year. Four months the mortgage needed to pay for anonymity. Wyn got a telephone installed, wrote letters, looked for his hotel and took up cooking. Pined for Shirley, wrote a couple of letters to her and it turned out that she never even opened either of them. He took this badly, although he would be too conceited to admit it. Once I mentioned her, something like have you heard from Shirley? All I got was the habitual shrug, a cant of his head and a frown.

  He said, ‘I don’t know what’s going on, just that she doesn’t want me in her life anymore.’

  Then I got the look. His heavy eyelids, bruised and expressive hooded the soft brownness of his eyes. Usually they beamed like a soft torchlight, now they looked cold and disbelieving. His intention always to convey self-assurance went as flat as his voice.

  We won’t mention her again.

  Instead Wyn got us a housekeeper. A woman just a little older than himself, she had a tangled mass of curls and a ready laugh and one who called herself Daphne. He helped her around the house, watched her as she prepared our meals. He made Daphne’s coffee and spent a long time folding the sheets back with her. Whilst Harry and me lived the lives of friars, it seemed that for Wyn, life had become more complete than ours.

  *****

  Just before the end of October, I felt strong enough to leave the nest. Destination other than a pub, I needed work. Not the physical efforts Harry had put in all of his working life. Not the slippery social skills Wyn put to good use on his climb. I’d seen the advert in the local paper. Seen it in the office window of the North Berks Herald as well. Walked by it three or four times a day, unable to pluck up the courage. If I’d had two hours in the pub, then bravery wouldn’t be an issue. Reeking of strong ale might however. So I walked backwards and forwards past the small newspaper office. Like one of those ornamental sentries outside the Kremlin.

  Enough!

  The round, polished, brass door handle slipped in my grasp. Is this how low I’d sunk, so feeble that I couldn’t open a door? Not quite, it worked in an anti-clockwise rotation. You see determinist logic has its disadvantages. A soft metallic bell announced my entrance, although in my case, the febrile twisting of the door handle had already announced my landing.

  I stared across at the oldest man that I’d ever seen. Delicate and with sloping and rounded shoulders. Ash coloured hair, too long in places, missing totally in others. Sunken eyes with panda like rings around both. White skin tinged yellow, coloured like parchment, textured similar to the Dead Sea scrolls you felt. A tobacco coloured cardigan with leather buttons. The sleeves hang loosely at his wrists, his fingers and the backs of his hands are splattered with printer’s ink.

  His face is all nose and chin, bony and developed to probe the local community for any scrap of news. Local football results, stored in his head. Last week’s magistrates court, all down in a battered notebook. Gossip, filed away in another drawer of his mind. His sunken cheeks hadn’t seen a razor for a couple of weeks and like the top of his head, the outcrops of hair were patchy. Lush in parts, barren in others.

  His whole demeanour one of exhaustion. He fixed me with his dark and deep set eyes. An aged kestrel’s eyes had retained just a hint of former glories as they probed me for weaknesses.

  ‘You after a job?’ A sombre voice, striking and resonant. Shut your eyes and he could be a world service announcer on the radio. He tipped his head a touch, the hawk eyes getting a sharper focus. ‘Or do you have some news for me?’

  He scratched his stubbly chin and fumbled around on his expansive desk, found his cigarettes and with a hand that creaked and shook like a one hinged barn door in a gale, he lit up. His chest movements so shallow I thought of him a case for imminent collapse. I glanced around the small office.

  Where do you keep the oxygen mask?

  I said, ‘The job you’re advertising.’ Horrified that my voice had betrayed the confidence I meant to display. Sat there in my finest, spick and span, standing out like a counterfeit passport. Self-belief holed below the water line as I waited for the certain knock-back.

  ‘Do you have a C.V?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘References?’

  I nodded, ‘I can get then sent down from my last employer.’ Those references would be from the Daily Mirror and not a certain Major Wyn Watkins. Although, rest assured he would provide a glowing reference. I tried not to smile, ‘I can give you a contact name now if you want to talk to him.’

  Xenophobic and pleasantly racist, he seemed to find pleasure in the rich anger that spewed from his cracked lips. His profile highlighting his beak nose, as he rambled on. You wait and see, win a bloody war maybe, lose the peace. Lose our Empire, bloody socialist government, nationalise bloody everything. Then he blinked a couple of times and his beak twitched around to point at me once again.

  ‘Why would you want to leave a national newspaper and come and work in this backwater?’

  I’d expected this one and launched into a zealot’s exposition. London had become too hot for me. I wanted to play some cricket, watch some local football. Assimilate into a community that, eventually, I could call mine. Somewhere where I knew everyone and everyone knew me. Work somewhere that I could call my own. Make a difference to…

  He held up a transparent talon.

  That’s enough.

  ‘Do you still have your union card?’

  I nodded and pulled it from my inside pocket, along with my press card. He held one in each hand and scanned the two. Back and across, across and back. He dragged his notebook towards him and said. ‘Give me you ex bosses name and a number.’

  His Schaefer fountain pen scratched away onto a small area of untouched notepad. He liked writing lists by the look of it, I imagined columns of English prime ministers, Saxon kings, chronological lists of rivers with their respective lengths alongside, all enclosed in brackets of course. Names from magistrate’s courts, reports from local football matches, phone numbers. None of which he needed, everything would be locked away in his head. All the petty criminals, corrupt councillors, serial adulterers, shop lifters, shirt lifters, choir masters with nasty little tendencies. All filed away in the library of his mind.

  A racist, a fascist, probably a homophobe and certainly a xenophobe. I liked him from the beginning. He stared at me, an old falcon viewing a three legged mouse. Finally he said, ‘The Oxford Mail, the Reading Mercury, both want to buy me out. The Oxford Mail offered to do all my printing on a sub-contractual basis of course. Printers work out the back, they fleece me of course. But I won’t sell; I want someone to take it on for the good of the town. But who would have the time or the money to invest in this little circus?’

  I might be able to help you on that one.

  *****

  I walked away from the phone box feeling two stones lighter. The overweight rucksack of despair had been discarded. Michael Parlane had been his normal effusive self. Of course, if he rings I’ll tell him what an incisive and perceptive and hardworking chap you are. I had convinced myself that the job was mine. Not only mine, but the chance to buy the old boy out before he has one cigarette too many and expires with a fag burning away in his mouth.

  Time for a drink and not one forced on me as a medicant. A celebration, the future stretched away far into the distance for a change. Not the usual two yards from cliff edge that night time brought. I gazed at the head on my beer, slowly raised it towards my lips when a tap on my shoulder interrupted its smooth progress. I lowered it back onto the counter and turned around.

 
Ronny, Shirley’s rat faced husband stared at me. Empty glass in one hand, stub of a smouldering Woodbine in the other. Like the worst of schoolboy actors, he affected surprise to see me. His confidence plainly the product of a few pints. Oversensitive at the best of times, a person who puts insults and slights against him, into the vault of his memory. Locked away until the chance for a sneaky revenge presented itself. The ferret’s eyes darting around the half empty bar.

  ‘Buy me a pint queer boy.’

  Those six words summed him up, a distasteful, spiteful little rat of a man.

  With all the insincerity I could muster, I said. ‘Ronny, what a pleasure.’

  ‘I’ve seen you in here a few times. You were too pissed to notice me of course. Why you around this way then, not much for your sort here.’ He pushed the empty glass closer, the stub of Woodbine back in the corner of his mouth. One eye shut as the smoke climbed vertically up the cliff face of his cheek and into the affected organ.

  I took a drink and the beer tasted sour, poisoned by the man close to me. Ronny had tipped some concentrated nitric acid down the well. He would find sifting through the pockets of the dead stimulating and fulfilling. Dragging the dead from the plague into mass graves, singing as he went about his business. He dropped his cigarette onto the floor and ground it out with his heavy working boot.

  There’s a carpet on the floor and ash trays everywhere.

  But I said nothing.

  ‘Where are the other two then? I know that their not dead.’

  ‘Perished in a fire.’

  ‘Don’t give me that rubbish.’

  I lit a cigarette and said, ‘What do you want?’

  He snorted, stuck a finger in my face. ‘I’ve read the letters you know, that’s more than Shirley has. Tell the Major that one. Always meet the postman on my way to work, he always hands me all the letters. Very touching tell him, very nice. I’m in a camp in Poland and he’s poking my wife. Buy me a drink then, I’m sure we can let bygones be bygones.’

  He laughed and scratches away at his stubbled chin. The implied effect of this action one of deep thought, a considered and fair man. Ronny pulled his packet of cigarettes out. ‘Sorry Jack last one.’

  He lit up, Ronny was one of those that always had two packets of cigarettes on him. One a near full one and the other always had a solitary cigarette left. Just for occasions such as this. Mean in both spirit and deed.

  He pointed at me again. ‘Shirley’s – we’re having a baby, how about that one then.’

  A smug rat stared my way, I said. ‘Good for you, give Shirley my congratulations.’

  Now my mind raced, she was a couple of months pregnant when Ronny landed back on these shores. Surely he didn’t believe he was the father. I suddenly felt better, we all need secrets and I knew one about Ronny. Not that I’d ever tell him of course, just the knowledge would sustain and nourish me whenever I had the misfortune to be in his company.

  ‘I’ve got to dash, always a pleasure to see you.’ I drank up and turned to go.

  Ronny stopped me with a hand on my shoulder. ‘Tell the Major that he’s got a big surprise coming his way. Perhaps he should move away – right now if he’s got any sense.’

  Threats tumbled from Ronny’s mouth like coins from a generous fruit machine.

  ‘They say it takes a sour man to make good bear – you should’ve been a brewer Ronny.’

  I liked that one, stared at him and waited. He tried for the abstract contempt reserved for people like me. That didn’t work, so Ronny smiled to show me that he didn’t think me at all funny, like I said, no sense of either humour or irony. I waited and followed him out; the wind had got up and from the north. Autumn began the slide towards winter that afternoon.

  Ronny hunched his shoulders, no jacket and defenceless against the cold. He scurried away from me, his breath snorting out in short sharp plumes that twisted up and away. I walked home thinking of Ronny puncturing my brief balloon of optimism. Wondering all the way if I should warn Wyn I decided to say nothing.

  The next day, a knock on the door and four red capped men. Tall and broad shouldered, escorted Wyn away. Military policemen looking for deserters and those that had never signed up in the first place. They were deferential and polite.

  He was a Major after all.

  *****

  To find out what happens to the obnoxious Ronny, read “Salt of Their Blood” by this author.

  Teddy - 1945

  Two months in a cellar, beat thirty years in a cell he thought. Or the short walk to the scaffold, it beat that all right. Two months in a cellar, slipping out at night for a shit in amongst the rubble that was the street he lived on for most of his life. Shitting amongst the broken window frames and shattered doors. Watching all the time, never seeing a soul. Once when he was heaving away, a cat crept alongside, meowed to announce his arrival.

  Teddy, well… shit himself.

  Goodbye to all that, the cellar and the broken homes. A cabin that was smaller than his cellar. Smaller than his cell even. Getting a berth on this floating heap of bilge was risky. They spoke Spanish and no English which was diametrically opposite to his own linguistic abilities. The captain understood cash though; he even gave Teddy a key to the cabin door.

  Followed by the mimed instruction to keep the door locked, miming the counting of money and then most terrifying mime of the lot. A knife drawn under the throat with the implication that his crew were a bunch of cut-throats who imagined a fortune in Teddy’s suitcase.

  He never washed, shit and pissed in the bucket. His worst fears confirmed halfway across the Bay of Biscay as the bucket slid around the floor as easily as an ice hockey puck across polished ice. Not even a port hole to see the waves. Just the battering, booming noise as they hit the starboard side. Stretching rivets and twisting bulkheads and pounding his head and stomach.

  Daylight in Santander.

  After four days of blind purgatory. He must have smelt like a two legged cess-pit. That’s the impression the concierge gave anyway. Holding the room key at arm’s length and ushering him down the hall and far away.

  Por favor – Mierda – Servicio.

  Spoken as you do when sponging something awful from off your shoes.

  He took the train a week later, down to Murcia. Uncle Jim had lived there for the last… Teddy scratched his head. Sometime between the Spanish civil war ending and the war beginning. He’d got himself a Spanish wife; she was a refugee from the communists. Well off bit of stuff, even if she did look a bit like a race horse whinnying. Jim was in trouble by this time anyway, so they took a ferry back home. Well to her home that is, last thing Jim said to him as he left. If you’re ever in any trouble Teddy …

  ‘Hello Teddy, what the fuck are you doing here?’

  ‘Hello Jim, Carmen.’ Where’s her fucking nose bag? Teddy smiled, ‘Just a few weeks.’

  ‘A few weeks – c’mon in my son. Put your feet up, you look like a fucking tramp, what’s happened? Trouble back home? Shame about your old man and my sister.’ Jim with his clean fingernails and dirty little habits.

  ‘How did you get here?’ Jim studies him like he’s a fucking transcript from a dusty old book.

  The never-ending circuit for his insomnia looped around and around inside his head. Teddy’s throat chokes up, eyes burned with the tears of failure. He had expected Carmen to turn him away, an angel’s finger pointing Teddy and Eve away from the Garden of Eden.

  When it never came he choked up.

  20

  Jack -1980

  I walked into the market square with Don’s sudden interest in our collective past jolting around in my consciousness. His leering, heavy lipped features drifted in and out of my dreams most of the night. So bumping into Carol made me jump even more. I smiled at her and had to admit it. No matter what Carol’s frame of mind, or whether the particular phase of Don’s extra-curricular activity was waxing or waning. The children never saw her as anything other than cheerful and bright.
/>   She swung her eyes across to me, ‘Are you all right?’

  I nodded, ‘I should be asking you that question.’

  ‘I’m used to it Jack, see him when I see him.’

  ‘He’s busy, lots of things on at the moment.’

  Why did I defend him? I couldn’t get it out of my head; the thought of Don with someone else had been trapped deep within me for the last few days. I knew Don used his own jealous fears as justification for hammering many a nail into the coffin lid of their marriage.

  I stared at Carol, she must have read my mind, her eyes fluttered down, a broken sparrow down towards the two children, ‘C’mon – let’s get you across to your Nan’s.’

  Twenty minutes later and walking back towards the office, I stumbled upon them. Whispered conversations anywhere always interested me. In public places they got the gossip hound in me going like a beagle after a fox. Two heads together, constant glances around. He had some bruising around the eyes and a fat lip. She touched his lip. Gently, like you touch a new-born baby’s face. Then they both glanced around.

  Who’s looking?

  Carol placed a calming hand on the man’s wrist. An attractive couple, wrapped up in each other, perhaps they wanted to kiss. Anywhere else and I was sure that they would. I watched them, her fingers brushed the bruising on his cheeks, just the tips – so intimate. He smiled, eroticism fired across, back and forth between them. Telepathy perfectly in tune.

  I watched on and on as they maintained eye contact and still smiling.

  Enough.

  I wheeled away and went back down to the office and sat at my desk. Stuart stared my way. We’d spent the night. No I’d spent most of the night telling my tale. He’d drunk most of my beer and we shared a good bottle of scotch. He appeared to have slept the sleep of an angel, I looked like I’d been under interrogation all night. In a way, I suppose I had. Layers of lead had been peeled away as the time marched on. My burden passed across, down to a generation that could cope with the pressure.