The Overlooker

by Fay Sampson

  ‘Someone’s gone a bit mad with the graffiti on this one,’ Millie observed. ‘It’s not exactly a Banksy artwork, is it?’

  The dark wall of the mill overlooking the canal had been daubed with letters in black and red a metre high. Nick read one message aloud.

  ‘They called to the mountains and rocks, “Fall on us and hide us from the wrath of the Lord.”’

  ‘Cheerful,’ said Millie. ‘How about this one? He shall drink the wine of God’s wrath, poured unmixed into the cup of his anger, and he shall be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels. It’s enough to put you off religion altogether, isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s from the Book of Revelation,’ Suzie said. ‘The last book of the bible. Written when the Church was undergoing martyrdom. John wrote it after he fled to the island of Patmos in fear of his life. He had this vision of the Roman Empire being overthrown and terrible happenings before the end of the world. Like that one up there. Their torture was like the torture of a scorpion.’ I guess he was dreaming of seeing his persecutors persecuted.’

  ‘Gross,’ said Millie. ‘I thought Christianity was all about loving people who did nasty things to you.’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Anyway, whoever did this is wasting his time. He’d have done better painting it in the middle of town. Who’s going to see it out here, with just a lot of empty mills?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. There’ll be plenty of people like us who walk along this towpath.’

  Even as she spoke, a man with a dog overtook them, squeezing past on the narrow path.

  As the Fewings passed underneath the mill, with its louring messages, Millie ran her hand along the brickwork. Her fingers twanged the metal grilles guarding the windows.

  Nick and Suzie walked on. Not far ahead, Nick could see a bridge. He was fairly sure that was where Canal Street crossed the waterway. They would need to leave the towpath there to find his grandparents’ old home in Hugh Street.

  A voice called from some distance behind them.

  ‘I don’t think this one is going to keep people out.’

  Millie had stopped. She was pulling at the grille over the window beside her. It was red with rust. As she tugged, a corner sprang away from the wall.

  ‘Millie!’ Suzie exclaimed as she turned. ‘I don’t think you should be doing that. It may be empty, but this mill belongs to someone.’

  Millie had prised a second corner free. A side of the grille swung away from the wall. There was no glass in the window behind it. Two boards had been nailed crookedly across the gap. But they were rotting away. There was a gap big enough for Millie to put her head through.

  ‘It’s a bit like that museum, except it’s all covered in dirt.’ She wriggled sideways to see better. ‘Some of the machines have gone, but there’s still rows of them.’

  Nick strode back to join her. ‘Let’s have a look.’

  Millie stood back to let her father peer through the hole. As he put his weight against it, a section of board broke off.

  ‘Nick!’ Suzie exploded. ‘You’re as bad as Millie. What if someone comes along and finds you breaking and entering?’

  ‘I admit to the breaking. But we haven’t entered yet.’ He withdrew his head and grinned at Millie. ‘Are you up for it? I got a bit frustrated back at the museum, with a metal screen between us and the looms. I know they have to have it for safety reasons, but I’d love to stand in front of one, just like my gran did. Even if it’s not working.’

  A little boy’s curiosity had got the better of Nick. He squeezed himself between the loosened grille and the window space and swung a long leg over the sill.

  He dropped down on to the dusty mill floor. His heart beat faster with recognition. There were rows of disused looms, stretching away down the long dusty room. Diagonal leather belts still connected drive wheels at the side of each to a pulley overhead. It did not take much imagination to picture the threads of the warp stretched over the rollers. You would only have to set those leather belts in motion for the warp threads to lift and fall and the shuttle to fly across at twice a second.

  Millie had followed him through the window. She was prowling around, her blonde head under the tall windows misted by the dust Nick had raised.

  He wandered along the line of machines, picturing in his mind his grandmother in her calico-print apron, casting a sharp eye over her five looms.

  He stopped short beside one, with a sudden flutter of excitement in his heart.

  ‘Look at this! Somebody’s cleaned this one up.’

  Millie ran to join him. Together they studied the gleam of the newly cleaned iron frame, the signs of oil on the leather belt and the wheel it drove, the wooden shuttle lying as if ready to use.

  ‘Mum! Come and look! Somebody’s getting this one working.’ Millie cried.

  ‘All the more reason to stay outside,’ Suzie’s voice from the towpath scolded them, ‘if somebody’s trying to restore them.’

  But Nick and Millie were eagerly examining the loom.

  ‘Do you think someone’s planning to start weaving here again?’ Millie asked. ‘Why else would they clean it up?’

  ‘Perhaps they’re going to turn it into another textile museum.’ Suzie had reluctantly joined them. She was brushing at a smear of rust on her jeans.

  ‘The whole town will be a museum soon,’ Millie retorted.

  ‘It makes money and it gives people work. Besides, we’re not the only people who love to see history brought to life. School parties, dressing up and pretending to be Victorian children. Your father was in his element this morning, imagining all his forebears who worked in mills like that.’

  ‘They’d better clear all those graffiti off the wall, then,’ Millie laughed. ‘Tourists aren’t exactly going to want to come here, with all those threats of hellfire outside.’

  ‘Yes, it’s a bit like Geoffrey Banks last night,’ Suzie mused. ‘From what Thelma said, he thinks the present world is under the power of Satan.’

  ‘Creepy.’

  Nick was studying the renovated loom.

  ‘I wonder how they’d power it? There can’t be another steam engine like the one at Thorncliffe Mill Museum going spare. They said it was the last one operating looms anywhere in the world. I expect it would have to be electricity for this one.’

  He wandered away to the far end of the vast room. A cry of discovery burst from him.

  ‘Yes! Right here. There’s a bank of switches. And it’s not covered in dust, either. I bet if you threw one of these, those looms would jump into life. Or at least, the one that’s been cleaned.’

  ‘No, Nick!’ Suzie’s shout of alarm rang down the weaving shed. ‘Don’t touch it! You’re positively not to switch any of them on. We’ve no idea what would happen.’

  Nick looked regretfully at the bank of switches in front of him. It would be such a feeling of power to move one of them and send those leather belts spinning, just the way they had in Thorncliffe Mill. Even if only one loom here was connected up, the air would be alive with the dancing of all the other belts.

  But Suzie was right. Once he threw that switch, he had no idea what would it would do. What crucial stage of renovation might the new occupant of this mill have reached? Was the cleaned-up loom even working yet?

  Reluctantly, he stepped away and walked back to join the others.

  He walked around the freshly oiled loom and bent down to inspect the narrow space beneath. He grimaced.

  ‘How do you fancy it? Being a scavenger under here? Just imagine when the loom was working. You remember the speed they went, back at the museum?’

  Millie’s hand went instinctively to her short-cropped hair. ‘And I remember what she said about getting scalped, or having your clothes caught and losing an arm. Gross!’

  ‘The girls had to pin theirs up in a tight bun.’ Suzie said. ‘They only wore it loose at the weekend. That’s what they meant by “letting their hair down”.’ She raised a thoughtful han
d to her own long brown hair.

  Millie shivered. ‘No, Dad. I am definitely not crawling under there. Even when it’s not working. It would give me nightmares.’

  ‘Coward. Here!’ He slipped off his leather jacket and handed it to her.

  It was a tight squeeze. And it was indeed rather frightening to be lying underneath that silent metal beast. He could imagine all too terrifyingly what it must have been like when the wheels were turning and the iron jaws were chomping, as the threads of the warp shot up and down and the shuttle flew between them.

  In a sudden panic, he slid out on his back and stood up.

  ‘Nick! Your shirt!’ Suzie’s voice betrayed her tension.

  ‘Why do you think I took my jacket off? The shirt will wash. No harm done.’

  He was glad to have a diversion from the unreasonable fear he had felt in that confined space.

  Millie held out his leather jacket, draped over her arm. There was a rattle as several things fell out of the upside-down pockets.

  ‘Thanks very much!’ said Nick.

  They scrabbled around chasing a pen that had rolled away, scattered business cards and his mobile phone. Millie reached a reluctant arm under the loom and retrieved his diary.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said, stuffing them back into the inside pocket.

  She plucked at the dustballs on her sleeve. Then she nodded further along the room. ‘I noticed something when I was down on the floor. Someone’s been here recently. There are footsteps in the dust.’

  ‘Of course they have,’ Suzie said. ‘This loom didn’t clean and oil itself, did it?’

  ‘They lead to that door over there and back.’

  Nick looked back along the way he had come from the switchboard. He had been too intent on his discovery to notice it. But it was true. There was another double line of prints beside his own. He prowled down the long room again. Millie’s sharp eyes were right. The trail of footsteps led past the power switches to a door in the end wall. He tried it.

  ‘It’s locked.’

  ‘Of course it is,’ Suzie called. ‘Whoever is using this will have a key. They’ll have got in by the door, not the window. We shouldn’t be here. It’s obviously not as derelict as it looks from outside. We ought to go.’

  Nick looked down at the line of footprints Millie had indicated. Large ones. Shoes? Probably trainers. The excitement of his schoolboy adventure had faded. He began to share Suzie’s unease.

  ‘Come on. Let’s make ourselves scarce. I wanted to know what it felt like be a scavenger, like Millicent Bootle. Now I know. At least, I know what it’s like under that loom when it’s not working. It scares me to think what it must have been like for a nineteenth-century child, when this whole room was clattering with lethal machinery.’ He gave a brief smile at Millie. ‘Your namesake. Working here at eight years old.’

  ‘Don’t!’ she said. ‘I don’t like thinking about it. Let’s go.’

  Nick put his head out of the window to check that no one was in sight on the towpath. He drew a sharp breath. A couple of teenagers had passed the window without remarking on the broken grille. He watched them walk under the railway bridge and disappear.

  ‘All clear,’ he hissed.

  The three of them squeezed through and dropped back on to the path. Nick and Millie pressed the rusty grille back into position as best they could.

  ‘Vandals,’ said Suzie.

  ‘It was worth it, wasn’t it?’ Millie said. ‘You’re the one who’s always on about bringing family history to life.’

  FOUR

  ‘Dad,’ Millie said, in the patient tone of one explaining a simple fact to the obtuse, ‘the further we walk away from the car, the longer we have to walk back.’

  ‘It’s not far now . . . I think. See that bridge? We can get up on to the road there. If I remember rightly, that’s Canal Street. Hugh Street’s just a short way up.’

  ‘Says you.’ Millie hunched her shoulders against a spatter of rain.

  Suzie hesitated about opening her umbrella, then put it away again.

  Steps led up from the canalside. They emerged on to the road. At once, they were in a different, noisier world. Cars flashed past. Nick led them uphill.

  ‘I’m right! There’s the Woolpack.’ He pointed to a pub sign at the top of the rise. ‘Hugh Street should be more or less opposite there. If it’s still standing.’

  Millie stopped dead on the pavement. ‘Dad! You’re not going to tell me you’ve dragged us all this way for a house that may not even be there?’

  ‘Thelma said they have plans to demolish that area. But as far as she knows they haven’t got to Hugh Street yet.’

  ‘They’d better not have, is all I can say.’

  ‘Look out, you two.’

  Suzie shepherded them against the wall. A woman was hurrying down the pavement, almost dragging a small boy. She wore a brown cardigan and turquoise tunic over loose beige trousers. An indigo scarf swathed her head, but did not hide her features. In the first startled glance, Nick could see that her face was contorted, her eyes brimming with tears. The little boy, who looked no more than four, was whining and protesting as she gripped his arm and hurried him along.

  ‘Is something wrong?’ Suzie asked, as the pair drew level and the two women were momentarily close to each other. ‘Can we help?’

  The woman shot them a look that Nick could only construe as terror. ‘No, no!’

  She said something rapidly to the little boy in a language Nick could not understand, as she hauled him on down the road.

  Suzie stood looking uncomfortable as she watched them go. ‘What was that about? She didn’t just look upset; she looked frightened. But I can’t think what can have happened to her on a busy street in the middle of the day.’

  She looked up the road in the direction the woman and child had come from.

  Nick followed her gaze. ‘Looks like there’s a nursery school up there. Lots of mums and toddlers just coming out. Come to think of it, my dad said he went to one back in the forties, when he was evacuated to his grandparents here. I can’t believe it’s still functioning seventy years on!’

  ‘Nick, we’re not in your family past now. That woman’s the present. And she looked terrified of something.’

  ‘That’s rich from you, Mum!’ Millie snorted. ‘For years, it’s been you who’s been living in the past, up to your eyebrows in family history. Now Dad gets to make one trip to relive his roots, and you’re scolding him.’

  ‘Well, I know. But that poor woman . . . It shook me, the way she looked at me. I wish there had been something I could do.’

  Millie shrugged. ‘You tried. It’s a free country. If she didn’t want your help, that’s her choice. Forget it.’

  Nick turned to look back down Canal Street. The hurrying woman dragging the child had almost reached the bridge.

  ‘Look! She’s meeting someone.’

  The man was too far away for his features to be distinguished. From the brimless cap he wore, Nick guessed he was a Muslim. The woman was gesticulating violently.

  ‘Looks like some kind of argument’s going on,’ observed Millie.

  ‘Nick,’ Suzie said urgently. ‘Do you think we should go back and see if she needs help? What if he’s her husband and he’s abusing her?’

  ‘He’s hardly likely to attack her in the street in broad daylight.’ Nick shared Suzie’s unease, but it was a big step to confront a couple they did not know, in public, and attempt to defuse a situation whose origins they knew nothing about.

  ‘I think it’s all right,’ Suzie said with relief. ‘She’s handing the boy over.’

  They watched the man and the boy walk away. The pair lingered on the bridge. The man lifted the boy up. For a horrified moment, Nick wondered whether he was going to drop the child in the canal. Instead, it was the boy who was leaning over and seemed to be dropping something into the water.

  ‘They’re playing Pooh Sticks,’ said Millie. ‘I used to love that. Except that t
hey can hardly dash across the traffic to see it come out on the other side. Whatever. Doesn’t seem particularly violent to me.’

  ‘It was the woman I was worried about,’ Suzie said. ‘Where is she?’

  ‘She’s coming back up the hill.’ Nick watched her weaving her hurried way through other pedestrians back up from the bridge. ‘No. She’s turned off down that side street.’

  ‘She saw us watching her,’ Millie said. ‘Didn’t you notice? She was coming straight up the hill. Then she stopped dead. I’m sure it was because she didn’t want to pass us. She thinks you’re going to stop her again, Mum. Interfering do-gooder.’

  Suzie’s cheeks flushed. ‘I’m not! I just couldn’t let a woman walk past me in tears and not offer to help.’

  ‘I mean, that’s what she thinks you are. Whatever’s up, she doesn’t want to have to explain it to you.’

  ‘She’s gone now,’ Nick told them. ‘We might as well go on.’

  They walked on up the hill. More mothers, white and Asian, were scattering from the gates of the nursery school with their children. Nick sensed, from the way Suzie turned her head to examine their faces, that she was not finding it easy to put that encounter out of her head.

  Opposite the Woolpack, Nick took a deep breath and turned. Disappointment engulfed him. Instead of line after line of neat rows of millworkers’ cottages, there was a vast open space. Even the rubble had been cleared away. Where the nearest terrace of houses had stood, there was a rectangle of grass.

  ‘It’s gone,’ he said helplessly. ‘We’re too late.’

  ‘Told you,’ Millie said. ‘And you’ve dragged us all this way for nothing.’

  Suzie slipped her arm through his and squeezed it. ‘I’m sorry. But we can see what it used to be like. Look, there are other streets still standing. Let’s go and have a look. They were all pretty much the same, weren’t they? We can get the idea.’

  Disconsolately, Nick let her lead him past the patch of grass. It did not look big enough to have contained some twenty houses.

  As they neared the terraces still standing, something quickened in him. He began to walk faster.