by David Nobbs
Then the smells came. The burning of rubber. Rubber doves, rubber eggs, rubber coat-hangers, rubber ears. The burning of plastic billiard balls and wobbly cheese. And, over and above it all, the stench of the stink bombs.
The roof slowly caved in. The chimney crumbled. The vanishing cigars vanished. The vanishing ink vanished. For its last and greatest trick, the shop itself vanished. There was a gaping hole, beside Timpley and Nephews where, a minute before, the Thurmarsh Joke Emporium and Magic Shop had stood.
The hard-pressed firemen donned breathing apparatus, to protect them from the stench of blocked drains and rotting greens unleashed by the stink bombs. They trod on farting cushions as they fought to quell the blaze. Hoses shook, sending water zig-zagging through the sky, as men sneezed violently, scratched desperately, or ducked to avoid being hit by false noses.
Henry ducked to avoid a flying, melting dog turd, which struck George Timpley full in the face. Helen approached him, still immaculate. Suddenly her dignity was assailed from all sides. She was racked by a fit of violent sneezing. She slipped on a plastic fried egg which her watery eyes couldn’t see. She fell over, backwards. She subsided, still sneezing, her superb legs swinging in the air, her tempting thighs visible to a world that wasn’t interested, onto a pile of top hats, seamless sacks and whoopie cushions, which gave off a gentle volley of soft, mournful farts. And Henry laughed. He laughed and laughed and laughed. He laughed for a dozen Young Conservatives. Hysteria had him in its grip.
Derek Parsonage approached. His face was white. He said ‘Oh my God’ so often and so fervently that Henry almost didn’t believe he meant it. He tried desperately not to laugh. It was incredibly childish, but each sneeze, each fart set him off again. His cheeks ran with tears.
‘Where’s Uncle Teddy?’ he managed to say. ‘Didn’t he go off with you?’
Can water freeze in a furnace? It felt to Henry that his tears of laughter froze on his face, there in front of the burning Cap Ferrat, as Derek Parsonage said, ‘No. He went back in. He said he’d forgotten some papers.’
All fires stop somewhere, and this fire stopped at the Thurmarsh Joke Emporium and Magic Shop. Even in his sorrow at the probable death of Uncle Teddy, Henry felt happy for George Timpley, who was led away, crying helplessly from relief.
The Mandarin Fish Bar had also gone, and the wreck of the Cap Ferrat still smouldered sullenly. The sensation-seekers dispersed reluctantly.
Henry walked slowly home, through the early morning streets, with Ginny Fenwick. The first buses and trams and doomed trolley-buses were running, with a few grey-faced passengers. Milkmen were about, and a yellow municipal lorry was washing a cobbled street. The tension and the grief had made Henry feel extremely sexy. He placed his right hand on Ginny’s large left buttock, and cradled its slow, rhythmic movements as she trudged wearily homewards. She smiled at him, rather sadly. At the door of his room his eyes asked an optimistic question and she said, ‘No. Sorry.’ They snatched a couple of hours of restless sleep in their separate flats.
10 Hard Man Henry
IT WAS A sunny Monday morning in spring. In the gardens of the substantial houses on Winstanley Road, the daffodils were in bloom and the tulips were budding up nicely. The bleak countryside between the towns and pit villages was briefly touched by beauty. Hedges became an astonishing pale green. Trees grew brown and furry with buds. Song-thrushes sent messages of joy across the rusting cars and vans in Bill Holliday’s dump.
The sap was rising all over the northern hemisphere. On the lake, in the Alderman Chandler Memorial Park, the mallard and teal were frisky, performing their elaborate displays with relish, entering into their absurdly brief copulations with spirit. In the gloomy animal cages, a moth-eaten marmot looked vaguely puzzled at the absence of moth-eaten marmot mates.
Upstairs, Gordon Carstairs’s sap was rising with a stamina to make mallards green with envy. His family were away for a week, and he was making the most of it.
And what of Henry, alone in the flat below, with no outlet for his rising sap? Was he green with envy? No. He had no more time for negative emotions. He was an ambitious young journalist. He was Hard Man Henry.
He had first felt that new strength of his on the night of the fire. It had been severely tested in the days that followed.
Hard Man Henry it had been who’d telephoned Auntie Doris, after the body of Uncle Teddy had been found in the Cap Ferrat, burnt beyond recognition. Analysis had shown that he’d been clutching a fire extinguisher at the moment of death. Henry had said, directly and simply, ‘I’m afraid I have very bad news. Uncle Teddy is dead.’ Auntie Doris had cried. So had Henry. Hard men don’t need to feel ashamed of tears.
Hard Man Henry it had been who’d trudged across the gravel to the front door of number 66, Park View Road, who’d refused to be baited when Cousin Hilda had said, ‘Ah! A stranger!’, who’d told her, ‘I’m afraid I have bad news. Uncle Teddy is dead.’ Cousin Hilda had sniffed. ‘As they live, so shall they perish,’ her mordant sniff had said.
Hard Man Henry it had been who’d written up the death of his uncle. ‘Don’t do it if it distresses you,’ Terry Skipton had said. ‘It’s my job,’ Henry had replied.
Hard Man Henry it had been who’d cancelled his twenty-first birthday party, made the funeral arrangements and given the vicar the salient facts for his oration.
Hard Man Henry it had been who’d sat, calmly, between two sniffing women, one sniffing with sorrow, the other with disbelief, as the vicar’s tributes had rolled round the magnificent, sparsely filled, Perpendicular parish church of St Peter’s. ‘Ill health prevented him serving his country during the War, but he was tireless and active “on the home front” … After the War, his import-export business contributed vastly to the revival of his nation … In recent years he worked in Rangoon in, it can now be told, a secret capacity, but he never lost his love of Thurmarsh.’
Hard Man Henry it had been who, after the service, had said, ‘Cousin Hilda. I don’t think you’ve met Geoffrey Porringer’ and had left them to it, while he took the opportunity of a brief chat with Auntie Doris, in the tiny churchyard, surrounded by the clothes shops and shoe shops of central Thurmarsh. ‘I spoke to him a couple of days before he died,’ he’d said. ‘He said he was going to invite you for a champagne dinner. He said everything was going to be all right. I think he died in peace, looking forward to better things.’ Auntie Doris, a stricken ship yawing in a sea of emotion, had clutched him and gulped helplessly. Henry had held her firmly. ‘Geoffrey’s all I have now,’ she had said. ‘I’m really sorry now that I said what I said,’ he had said. ‘I’m not,’ Auntie Doris had said. ‘I know where I stand now. I know how to deal with him.’ She’d kissed him, covering him in mascara and salt tears. ‘Thank you, son,’ she had said. Henry had remained dry-eyed. If he hadn’t, Auntie Doris might have drowned in her own tears.
The United States had sent 1,700 marines to the Mediterranean, to try to prevent hostilities between Egypt and Israel. Britain had deported Archbishop Makarios to the Seychelles. French troops had killed 61 Algerian rebels after a mutiny. Mr Krushchev had denounced Stalin, throwing Russia into ferment. A bomb had been found in the bed of the Governor of Cyprus.
Henry’s career had continued to be dogged by misprints – ‘She lives alone. Her hubby is underwater fishing,’ in an interview with a local athlete; ‘The repeated flooding is a source of continual irrigation to him,’ in a story about an angry farmer; ‘The compensation is dripping down the walls,’ in a story about bad housing. But hard men rise above such things. And it was a keen, jaunty Henry Pratt who strode to the tram stop, hungry for a new week’s work, that sunny Monday morning in spring.
On the tram, he glanced through the morning’s Thurmarsh Chronicle. Colonel Nasser was accepting aid from Russia, and was no longer seen as the West’s great hope in the Middle East. In the Grand National, the Queen Mother’s horse, Devon Loch, ridden by Dick Francis, had inexplicably slipped 55 yards from the fini
shing post, when leading comfortably. The Thurmarsh trams were to be scrapped. A council official scoffed at warnings of a possible fuel crisis.
The tram rattled perkily along Winstanley Road, unaware of its impending doom. Henry smiled warmly at Gordon and Ginny. Hard men are above self-pity.
That morning, sitting beside the representatives of the Rawlaston Gazette and the Splutt Advertiser, in Thurmarsh Juvenile Court, Hard Man Henry gave a hard look at two would-be hard youths who had burnt pet rabbits with candles. He fought desperately against feeling embarrassed as a ten-year-old girl told how her father had put his Peter in her Mary. She was taken into care. His fellow reporters didn’t take this story down. In the 1950s, the problems of incest and sexual abuse of children were rarely reported.
‘We can’t print mucky stories about incest,’ said Terry Skipton, when Henry complained about the omission of his story. ‘What do you think we are?’
‘Presenters of the truth about the society we live in,’ said Henry. Hard men don’t mind sounding naïve.
Robert Newton died of a heart attack. The government agreed to the integration of Malta, with three Maltese MPs sitting at Westminster. Henry attended number two magistrates’ court, and listened, in that sombre panelled room, to a case in which a 34 year-old builder, of no fixed abode, was accused of stealing lead off a church roof. The reporters predicted, on the basis of his sartorial inadequacy, that he’d get six months. As they dress, so shall they reap. The chairman was elderly, with yellowing skin, sunken cheeks and a deaf-aid. As the police described how they chased the accused’s lorry, stopped it in Hortensia Road, Rawlaston, and found it to contain the lead missing from the roof of St Michael’s Church, Crambolton-on-Rundle, Henry sensed that the chairman was having difficulty in hearing, and this surmise proved correct for, in sentencing the man to six months’ imprisonment, he commented sternly, ‘If you are going to continue to be a road user, you are going to have to drive much more carefully in future.’
Two things about the story that appeared in the paper upset Henry. The gremlins had struck again. His intro began: ‘A Thurmarsh builder who was caught red-handed with a sorry load of dead taken from a Rundle Valley church …’ And the comment of the chairman of the magistrates had been omitted.
He approached the news desk fearlessly. Behind him, in the sunlit afternoon newsroom, elderly typewriters clacked at varying speeds. In front of him, sore-eyed sub-editors in shirt-sleeves were thinking up pithy headlines and crossing out offensive copy. Henry had eyes only for Terry Skipton, hunched and staring, like a wounded eagle.
‘Two complaints, Mr Skipton. There’s another deliberate misprint. “A sorry load of dead.” It sounds as if somebody’s been desecrating the graveyard.’
‘If somebody was deliberately desecrating your stories, Mr Pratt, they’d hardly do it in a way that made them sound more interesting.’
‘Mr Skipton? Are you saying all my misprints are natural mistakes?’
‘No, I’m not, Mr Pratt. It’s all a bit rum. I’m keeping my eyes skinned, actually.’
This took Henry aback. It had crossed his mind that the culprit might be Terry Skipton. Though he didn’t think so. He thought he knew who it was. He glanced round, and saw his suspect watching him. The suspect looked away, hurriedly. Suspicion began to harden into certainty.
‘And the second complaint?’ said Terry Skipton.
‘The magistrate’s comment has been left out.’
‘Complain to the editor if you’re not satisfied.’
‘I just might,’ said Henry. ‘I just might.’ He didn’t want to complain. It’d be much easier to give up. But hard men don’t do what’s easy.
‘It appeared to belong to a different case, a traffic incident,’ said Mr Andrew Redrobe.
‘That was the whole point,’ said Henry. ‘The magistrate’s as deaf as a post. He thought it was a traffic case. But we can’t have our authorities looking ridiculous, can we, or the whole system might collapse?’
Sunlight was falling onto the editor’s green-topped desk. Specks of dust churned lazily in its rays.
‘I think I ought to tell you that he’s a personal friend of mine,’ said the editor.
Hard Man Henry gulped. But he wouldn’t back down.
‘I’m sure he is, sir,’ he said. He didn’t mind that ‘sir’. He was prepared to make tactical withdrawals in order to take the main ground. ‘Deafness is no bar to friendship. But surely it is to being a magistrate?’
‘I agree. Perhaps I should drop a word in the relevant ear.’
‘Not a deaf one, I hope.’
Mr Andrew Redrobe gave Henry a long, hard look. Henry just managed to force himself to return it.
‘We pride ourselves on having a good relationship with the courts,’ said the editor.
‘You seem to pride yourselves on having a good relationship with everybody,’ said Henry.
‘We do. A local paper has to work in the community. If the community clams up against it, how could it ever get good stories?’
‘Are you saying that if you ever got a chance to expose something rotten in the community you wouldn’t do so because that could kill your chances of getting the stories you need to expose something rotten in the community?’
There was a long silence. The editor tapped on his desk with a silver pencil. Henry knew that he’d gone too far.
‘Your exaggerated comments do reflect a real dilemma,’ said Mr Andrew Redrobe. ‘It’s a question of degree. Find me a major scandal, which I think it my duty to print, and I’ll print it fearlessly. But not stories about deaf magistrates. Good. I’m glad we’ve had this little chat. I’m grateful for your invaluable advice on how to run my newspaper. Let’s hope you stay here long enough to be able to continue to give me the benefit of it. Goodbye, Henry.’
Little did Henry dream that one day he would be in a position to put the editor’s sincerity on this question to the test. Indeed, if he’d had a more suspicious nature and a more highly developed news sense, he’d have been on the trail of that major scandal already.
‘Name all the winners of the FA Cup between the wars,’ said Ben Watkinson, at their corner table in the back bar of the Lord Nelson.
‘Life’s too short,’ said Henry. The pub’s familiar smell of intrigue and carbolic didn’t charm him that evening.
‘Hard Man Henry,’ said Gordon Carstairs, who was sitting beside Ginny in shared satiety.
My god, thought Henry. Can he see into my head?
‘Windows,’ said Gordon.
‘Windows?’ said Henry.
‘Windows in your head,’ said Gordon.
Colin Edgeley returned from the toilets, looking grim.
‘Mick Tunstall’s back,’ he said. ‘He’s in the other bar.’
‘He didn’t do anything last time,’ said Henry.
‘I hadn’t danced with Angela Groyne then.’
‘What’s that got to do with it?’ asked Henry.
‘Mick Tunstall works for Bill Holliday.’
All this irritated Henry. Real hard men don’t advertise their hardness.
He bought a round, and looked back to see Ted and Helen laughing over a page of the Argus. He didn’t need to ask what they were laughing at. A sorry load of dead. All doubt was removed. They’d be sorry. They’d wish they were dead.
He handed the drinks round, banging Ted’s glass on the table.
‘Are we permitted to share the joke?’ he said.
Ted looked at him in astonishment.
‘It’s you, isn’t it?’ said Henry.
‘What’s me?’ said Ted.
‘Putting misprints in my stories. Trying to ruin my career. Come outside.’
‘What?’
‘A fair fight. Or are you scared?’
‘I don’t want to fight you,’ said Ted wearily.
‘Stop it, Henry,’ implored Ginny.
‘Other way, ref!’ said Gordon.
‘Give over, kid,’ said Colin.
‘
Stop calling me kid,’ said Henry. ‘Are you coming, Ted, or not?’
‘No.’
Henry poured Ted’s glass of bitter over his head. Ted sat there in astonishment, dripping with beer. Helen’s eyes flashed.
‘All right,’ said Ted. ‘No little pipsqueak pours beer over me and tells me I’m destroying his career.’
Well, you’ve got what you wanted, Henry Pratt. A fight, with Ted Plunkett, outside a town centre pub. ‘Brawling journalists were a disgrace,’ says barrister. ‘If you are going to continue to be a road user, you will have to drive better than this,’ says deaf magistrate. ‘Goodbye, Henry,’ says Mr Andrew Redrobe.
‘This is stupid,’ said Ginny.
Yes.
The seven journalists went outside, into the fading light. In Leatherbottlers’ Row it was already almost dark. Ted took off his beer-soaked coat. Henry removed his curry-spattered jacket. Denzil Ackerman turned the corner into the alley at a brisk limp. He stopped, his mouth open in exaggerated astonishment, until he realized how inelegant it looked.
‘Come on, you two. Call it off,’ said Ben, the pacifist.
There was a pause.
‘No,’ said Ted.
There was another pause.
‘No,’ said Henry.
The two reporters circled round each other, warily. Then Henry attempted a blow, which missed easily. Ted retaliated with a punch that missed almost as easily. Henry hit Ted on the side of the head. Ted launched a rain of blows, some of which found the target. Henry hung onto Ted and managed to punch him in the stomach. Ted gasped and almost collapsed on him, pushing him back into the wall. Henry pushed the gasping Ted off him, stumbled forward wearily, landed a punch on Ted’s face and moved in to finish the job. He aimed a huge punch. When it missed, he fell over. Ted leapt at him, and pummelled his ribs, then grabbed him by the hair and yanked him agonizingly to his feet. Henry kicked Ted’s shins and butted him. Their heads clashed, and they both reeled away. Ted recovered first, and into that inept and inelegant struggle he managed to inject one good punch. It sent Henry crashing into the wall. He subsided in a crumpled heap, blood gushing from his nose. He passed out.