by Mike Pannett
There was a short silence. Then Phil blew his nose, loudly. Christine and Gillian both looked at me, their mouths hanging open. Dad rustled his paper. Mum frowned and put on her concerned look.
‘D’you want me to take your temperature?’ she said. ‘You’re not feverish, are you?’
They all thought that was dead funny. Even I laughed.
‘No,’ I said, ‘just thought I’d be helpful. Like you’re always telling me.’
‘And seeing that we’re letting you go out to your friend’s house,’ Mum said. I thought there would be more, but she let it go at that. She got up from the table and said, ‘Well, come along everybody. We don’t want to get in your brother’s way, do we?’ And out they trooped, all except Phil who lingered a moment, pretending to do his shoelace up.
He waited until he was sure everybody was out of earshot. ‘Okay, what’s going on?’ he asked.
I put the plug in the sink and turned on the hot tap. ‘Nothing. Just being helpful, like I said. I’ve decided to turn over a new leaf.’
‘You? A new leaf? Give over.’
‘No, honest. It was in the sermon on Sunday, about helping other people. It’s worth it in the end. When you die you go to Heaven.’
‘Yeah, as if you ever listen to the sermon. I bet you had your head buried in a comic.’
He stared at me, and I stared back. I was sure my face was going red, but I was determined not to let him in on my secret.
‘Listen,’ he said, pointing his finger at me, ‘I was in the choir, remember? I know what goes on.’ He narrowed his eyes and gave me the hard stare. ‘Don’t you worry, matey,’ he said. ‘I’ll find out, and if it’s some sort of Mischief Night thing, who knows, I might just decide to blackmail you.’
I didn’t answer. I poured the washing-up liquid into the sink and watched the bubbles form. I knew I had nothing to worry about. He’d be at his girlfriend’s house all evening. As he turned to go I scooped up a dollop of suds and flicked it at his back. It landed right between his shoulders and stuck there, wobbling like a jelly as he left the room. That’d show him.
I hurried through the dishes, emptied the sink, then tiptoed out into the hallway. They were all in the front room with the telly on. Tomorrow’s World. They’d be there for the next hour, all except Dad. He loved this programme, but the minute it was over he would be leaving the room. He never stayed around for Top of The Pops. Mum did sometimes, but not Dad. He didn’t reckon much to pop music.
Back in the kitchen, I opened the pantry door. There was the egg-tray, almost full. There must have been a couple of dozen, some smeared with blood or dirt, one or two with feathers sticking to them. I picked out a couple and looked around for a bag but couldn’t find one. Instead I put them down inside my sweater. The question on my mind now was, how many did I dare take? I took two more and placed those carefully with the first pair. Suddenly there seemed to be an awful lot of empty spaces in the tray. Could I take a couple more? I hesitated, then thought better of it. I slipped out, closed the pantry door, then went quietly into the hallway and collected my coat.
‘Bye!’ I shouted. No answer. I could see through the half-open door that they were all glued to the telly. I stood for a moment with my nose pressed against the crack in the door. William Woollard was holding what looked like a shiny plastic round thing. He said it was a compact disc and it was going to revolutionise music. Wouldn’t scratch, didn’t need a needle. I could hear Dad saying, ‘That’s the future for you, girls. Remarkable.’
Outside the wind had dropped, the sky had cleared and frost was sparkling on the pavement. I hurried down to our rendezvous, at the gate that led into the field. Alan was there, shoulders hunched inside his big brother’s parka. It was about three sizes too big and looked more like a tent.
‘Got ’em?’ he asked.
‘Yeah,’ I said, and was about to pat my stomach before I thought better of it. ‘Down me sweater here. Four.’
‘That all?’
‘They’re big ’uns,’ I said. ‘Size of duck’s eggs. Anyway, what have you got?’
Alan unzipped the parka and brought out a long grey egg-box. ‘Dozen,’ he said. ‘Once the others show up we’re off, right?’
They weren’t long. And between them they had another dozen.
‘Armed to the teeth,’ said Martin. ‘Let’s go, shall we?’
‘Okay then.’
‘Where?’ Tim said. ‘Where we gonna start?’
Alan pointed to the large house right across from where we were standing. ‘How about that one there?’
We walked to the front gate. There was a gravelled drive about twenty yards long, leading to the front door. A light was shining in the porch. Otherwise the place was in darkness. To either side of the house were the outlines of dark evergreen bushes. ‘I can’t reach the door from here,’ I said.
‘Course we can’t. We go up the drive, stupid.’
‘But what if we get caught?’
‘We won’t get caught. He’s about a hundred years old. And he’s half-blind.’
‘Aye, we know him,’ Tim said, ‘but old and blind … We can’t do that.’
‘Yeah, that wouldn’t be fair,’ I added.
We moved on to the next driveway. Alan shoved me in the back. ‘Go on. You first.’
I made my way slowly towards the door. The sound of my feet crunching the gravel seemed to echo up and down the street. I stopped about ten yards short of the target. I was sure I could get it from here. I slid my hand down the front of my sweater and closed my fingers on the first egg. I turned to see where the others were. They were still at the gate, urging me on.
‘Hurry up!’ Martin whispered. ‘We’ll keep a look-out.’
I took out the egg, leaned back and took aim.
‘Hey! You two!’ It was a loud, booming, self-assured voice. I couldn’t tell where it came from. It seemed to echo around the darkened end of the street. ‘And just what do you think you’re doing, eh?’
I turned, clutching the egg in my hand. Alan was out in the road, looking up and down. Tim and Martin were cowering behind the gatepost. I wanted to run, but I didn’t know which way. Was this hidden enemy in front of me or behind?
‘Stay right where you are. Both of you.’
I still couldn’t see anybody. But then there came another sound, a hoarse panting, and scrabbling sound a dog makes when it’s tugging at a leash on a gravel drive. A moment later that’s precisely what I saw emerging from the shrubbery, a large black dog, teeth bared, front feet off the ground and straining to reach me.
I didn’t wait to see who, or what, was on the other end of the lead. I turned and ran, flat out, fully expecting to be leapt on any moment by the monster dog. The others were several paces ahead of me, all of them running like the wind. The question now was, should I turn in at our front gate and let our pursuer know where I lived, or keep running and risk him overtaking us and letting the hound loose?
In the end my mind was made up for me. Right outside the house, as I hesitated, my right foot hit a frozen puddle. Down I went, flat on my front. I lay there for a moment, tensing my body against the expected impact of a dog landing on my back. It never came. The only sounds were the pulsing of my heartbeat in my ears and the fading sound of footsteps as the rest of the gang raced for home. It was only as I eased myself upright that I heard the crackle of crushed shells and felt the cold raw eggs trickling down my stomach and into my underpants.
Back in the house I crept slowly past the living room where the others were clustered round the box watching Mud perform Dynamite. I tiptoed upstairs, my legs bowed outward as the eggs slithered down my thighs. In the privacy of the bedroom I took off my coat, dropped it on the floor and started peeling off the sweater. A mixture of white and yolk plopped onto the floor. More of it clung to my T-shirt. I ripped that off, and my trousers, then gathered up the whole lot and ran to the bathroom, where I hurled them in the wash-basin and turned on the hot tap. Then I grabbed a flannel a
nd started to clean myself.
I came down to the living room for the last few minutes of Top Of The Pops trying to act as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.
‘Why you in your dressing gown already?’ Christine asked.
‘’Cos I felt like it.’
‘I thought you were at your friend’s house anyway,’ she said.
‘I was, but I got bored.’
‘Oh.’ She couldn’t have sounded less interested if she’d tried.
It was some time later that Mum went upstairs and discovered my clothes. She shouted from the top of the stairs. ‘Just what is the meaning of this, Michael Pannett?’
I went up to face the music. Yes, I’d messed up my clothes but surely she’d be pleased that I’d put them in to soak. I’d seen her do just that a hundred times with Dad’s oily overalls. She wasn’t pleased. At all. She grabbed my ear and led me to the bathroom.
‘Just how do you explain that?’ she said.
There in the wash-basin I saw my T-shirt, sweater and trousers sitting in a pool of scalding water and poached eggs, lightly scrambled.
I tried to talk my way out of it. It had worked in the past. I told Mum that Alan had got some hens and they had too many eggs and I’d bought some with my pocket money to help out, since Dad was always saying how it cost a fortune to feed a family these days and… My strategy was to keep talking until she couldn’t take any more and begged me to shut up.
I really thought I’d got away with it until next morning when Mum went to the pantry and counted her eggs. There was no point denying it. I’d nicked them, and now I was nicked. The challenge was to stop her banning me from the Guy Fawkes party. As she thought up a suitable punishment I planned a dash to Alan’s house to get replacements from him. Maybe that would settle it. But by some miracle the thought of a ban never seemed to enter Mum’s head. What she wanted was summary justice. And she got it. She took my week’s pocket money from her purse, handed it over and took it straight back. It was a simple case of, ‘You took the eggs, you pay for them.’ A week with no pocket money? It seemed to me I’d got off lightly.
So the Fifth of November dawned under trouble-free skies. There was only one blot on the landscape.
‘How long is it now?’ I asked.
Dad was in the garage, sorting out his collection of old tin cans and filling them with sand. I was loading them onto the wheelbarrow, ready to be taken down to the bonfire site when it got dark. If it ever got dark. When it came to health and safety, Dad was well ahead of the game. He stopped what he was doing and looked at his watch.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘according to my ancient timepiece, I’d say it’s four minutes since you last asked me, making it …’ He paused and did some adding up in his head. ‘Let’s call it six hours and forty minutes.’
I can’t think of another day in the entire calendar that drags like Guy Fawkes day when you’re a child. Waiting for that mound of wood to be lit and the first of the fireworks to soar into the night sky was about as bad as waking up in the pitch dark on Christmas morning. Worse, in fact. At least then you could feel the various shapes in the stocking, listen to the packages rustling and speculate as to what each might contain. But the Fifth of November? It seemed to go on and on and on. How grown-ups could say things like, ‘Doesn’t time fly?’ was beyond me.
Somehow we got through the morning. By the time we went for our dinner at one o’clock I was so wound up I’d almost lost my appetite. The afternoon dragged. The clock in the kitchen seemed to go slower and slower. I watched Dad fetch his hammer, some nails, a few lengths of wood and, finally, the big old biscuit tin in which he stored the fireworks. He sent me to fetch Phil and the girls out. Then he opened the lid for us to peek inside, and there they were: bangers, jumping jacks, rockets, Roman candles, some of those special ones with plastic at the end that you were allowed to hold in your hand, a couple of Catherine wheels and of course a packet of sparklers.
I remember standing there, looking at them in silence, almost reverent. I leaned forward and sniffed, long and hard. There’s nothing quite like the smell of fireworks – although I knew that tomorrow morning I’d be walking round the field picking up the discarded bangers, sniffing the wonderful smell of spent gunpowder and wondering how I was going to get through another twelve months before I could enjoy once more the greatest day of the year.
By the time we came out of the workshop, Dad holding the biscuit tin, us four all following him, the miracle had happened. It had started getting dark. In the kitchen Mum was setting out the food – not for tea but for the feast that awaited us later on. The Avenue Guy Fawkes party wasn’t just about the bonfire and the fireworks; it was about the grub. People brought sausages, pies, potatoes to bake in the embers, all sorts of special grub. Even toffee-apples and flapjacks.
As ever we got a lecture from Dad about safe practice before we left the house. He did it for all the right reasons, but he forgot that we’d had the same lecture at school, several times over. So we listened, and nodded, and agreed that we would not throw fireworks under any circumstances, that we would leave him to set them off, neither would we get too close to him when he was lighting the blue touch-paper, and he made us promise that if a rocket, or any other firework, failed to ignite, we would not approach it.
‘There’s more children burned on this night than any other day of the year,’ he said. ‘And we don’t want any of your names on the list, do we?’
We agreed that we didn’t, and prepared to set off. Between us we had to carry the trays of food, the tins with the sand in, and the bottles of pop – which I pointed out could serve as fire extinguishers in an emergency, especially if you gave them a good shake. The girls had turnip lanterns, and Dad was in charge of the ‘ark of the covenant’ as Phil called it, the precious biscuit tin. We gave Petra a slap-up meal with extra biscuits in it, shut her in the kitchen with the curtains drawn tight, and set off.
All along the Avenue our neighbours were on their way to the field. We formed a sort of procession, and the kids soon formed up into gangs, comparing notes on the food we’d brought, the firework budgets of our respective families, and our various estimates as to the height of the fire
Each year a different father took a turn at lighting the fire. Whoever it was this year had struck lucky. We’d had a dry autumn, and the weather this night was perfect: still, not too cold, and with a half moon visible behind some thin high clouds. But before the fire could be lit the guy had to be hoisted to the top. That was a job for someone with a ladder. Once he was in position the fun could start. Whoever was in charge had obviously decided to take no chances. You could smell the paraffin from miles away, and as soon as the first match was applied, up it went. After that it was organised chaos, with fireworks going off all over the field, and lots of oohs and aahs as the sky filled with star-bursts, drifts of smoke and an occasional boom.
Fireworks never last long enough. It’s a fact of life. No matter how many there are, how expensive they are, how wonderful they are, the show always ends far too soon. But the good part about this was the certainty that, as soon as the show was over and the food had been shared out, the parents would want to get back home to their easy chairs and their tellies. And this night, for the first time in my life, I was allowed to stay behind for an hour or so with Phil and his friends. No sooner had the last adults drifted away than out came Phil’s secret supply of fireworks.
‘Where’d you get them from?’ I asked, as he pulled out a cluster of rockets, a handful of bangers and a tangle of rubber bands.
‘Been collecting,’ he said. ‘For a week or two. Now then, watch this. You’re gonna like it.’
With that he used the rubber bands to strap a pair of bangers to a rocket. His mate produced a bottle and a match, and set everything up. We stood back and waited. Whoosh! went the rocket, and just as it disappeared in the sky the bangers started spewing out orange sparks, exploding at the same time as the mother vessel sent out a cluster of silve
r stars.
‘Wow!’ I shouted. ‘Got any more?’
The lads did indeed, enough for another couple of displays. By now the fire had burned down to a large mound of fierce, red-hot embers, with just the heaviest timbers in the middle still sending out pale orange and blue flames. We popped a couple of foil-wrapped potatoes on the coals. This was living with a capital L. I remembered I still had some sparklers in my pocket, and pulled them out. Phil and his mates called me a big girl, but once I’d lit them at the fire they were happy enough to take one each and draw patterns in the darkness.
Once we’d used them up it was a matter of standing around the fire, waiting for the spuds to cook. Most of the people had gone home, leaving just a few die-hards. Every few minutes we’d reach out with a foot to drag our spuds out of the ashes and see whether they were done. At last it seemed they were, and we rolled them in the grass to cool them off, then blew and blew on them, but we still managed to burn our tongues. Then it was time to make our way home, slowly, reliving the night’s best moments and polishing them every time we retold them. By tomorrow, as we revisited the bonfire site and collected up the spent fireworks, we’d be spinning yarns like old men did.
Blood Brothers
Alan held everything steady while I applied the stuff. We had an old paintbrush we’d found in his dad’s shed, along with the can of caustic. When I say I applied it, I mean I slapped it on, lathered it. Splish splosh, splish splash. I smothered that pink pony, and rapidly obliterated its curly mane, goofy teeth and daft grin, quite oblivious for the moment to the drops of caustic that were landing on the back of my hand.
‘Wow! Look at that!’ The ghastly, smirking beast was already melting away, the paint forming little bubbles and ridges and wrinkles. I dipped the brush into the can of Nitromors and slapped some more on.