Terroir

by Graham Mort

  Solomon cut the bag and poured the fish awkwardly into the tank where they darted and swirled, golden ricochets flashing with fire and life. His eyes could hardly follow them or know which was which. Then they were still, breathing calmly, their fins and tails swaying, nosing at the gravel or the strands of artificial weed. Solomon hoped they had already forgotten everything that had happened to them: their own surprise and terror, that sudden blast of light. They would be satisfied with the passing moment. What had been meant nothing to them. They were what was, pure and simple. They feared nothing except what the present turned into. Their eyes were wide, watchful and indifferent. They swam to unknown territories, nudging gravel or air bubbles that rose to the water’s surface, moving on to what was endlessly new. Solomon pressed his hands against the glass of the tank, feeling it cold and smooth. The fish watched him with open mouths, their gills working. They flickered away, a shower of golden meteorites. Then he called his mother to wake her.

  WHERE STORIES GO

  Night-time shadows touching me. Big yellow moon at the window, low on the hill. Little Puck’s there, staring, bleating. A lost lamb in a striped shirt, face turned up under his trilby hat. Hands atremble like leaves in a windy wood. Like trees at home behind the house. Me and Rufus in bed with dirty knees taking turns to listen to the crystal set. Wind in the trees like voices. Moon lemon cut with a knife. Voices from the BBC telling us news in whispers. Voices in the next room and Rufus holding my hand. Before bedtime on Friday, Mum stoking the fire to make the boiler work, a bucket of coal wet from rain. Me and Rufus in the zinc bath with Mum scrubbing us, dragging the nit comb through our hair. Rufus crying because it hurts, because his hair curls. Dad coming home from the pub with bottles in his pockets, his boots banging on the yard stones. Then Mum getting into the bath with her blue veins sticking out and Dad pulling off a Guinness cap with his teeth and laughing. Now here, awake, all these years later. Awake now and Puck looking up through the window. Those ghosts tumbling at the glass.

  That night we went to Easter Fair, me and Dad, his arm around me on the ghost ride, smelling of armpits and beer and oil from the mill. His face all bristly when he kissed me. Laughing. Aiming for ducks on the rifle range. Phat! Phat! He held my arms and let me shoot for a goldfish that went fluffy white and died belly up in a pickle jar in the backyard. We had candy floss on a stick and toffee apples and a twist of paper with hot peas and vinegar and a wooden fork we licked and kept in our pockets just in case. Coloured light bulbs and the smell of everything mixed up and my mouth burnt. Mum not there. But another woman with red lips and black hair and a glittery headscarf and a gold tooth laughing, holding onto Dad’s arm. I didn’t know her. Dad shushing me with a wink, the woman laughing on the rides, her blue skirt flapping in the wind, showing her legs. Mavis from work.

  There was a hurdy-gurdy man and a big nigger man in a white vest boxing in a ring for shillings. Watching him knock the skinny lads down, noses all snot and blood. Silly bastards. The fat man in a black suit counting backwards. Too much ale and no sense. A gypsy fortune-teller with a pack of cards and silver rings in her ears. She scared me. Dad laughing and the woman kissing goodbye and hugging me like Mum, but smelling of ciggies. I had to pee in the fields on the way home, wetting my legs, and Dad still laughing and saying don’t tell Mum he’d given me a taste of beer. Don’t tell Mum about Mavis. And I never did, dreaming of the gypsy woman, the ghost ride, dizzy all night, the carriage rocking and Dad close by, kissing my hair, wiping sick off my cardie with his fingers.

  Bed sheet’s wet now. Warm on my legs then cold. Bad smell. Back ache. Pissing blood when it’s bad. I’m thirsty. Nothing to drink until breakfast. Try to tell them, sometimes, tell the nurses, but words won’t. Stuck in my mouth, not my head. Words like dust or feather bits in my throat. Dumby. Larry the dumby can’t talk. But he can if he tries, can’t you, Larry? Little Puck can’t talk, never could, bleating, humming. Moving foot to foot. Shivering at moon’s big yellow face.

  Night-shift Jack laughing with the others. In the office where the electric light is. Laughing with the Scotch one. Alice. Her tits against my face. Her soft bottom, her smoky breath like Dad’s. Like Mavis from the mill. Slack Alice. What’s up Larry, can you smell her fanny? No it’s flower perfume like Mum had on. The ward full of breathing beds now. Full of sleepy-time dust and body smell. It’s where we rest, where we wake, dream we wake. I bet you’d like to give her one, eh, Larry? Up the shitter, eh? Alice is too nice for them.

  When I wake I’ll know O’Donnell is dead. I had to wait a long time. All those years here. A nurse. Now dead and gone to hell. Gone before. O’Donnell whispering behind. You’re a goner, Larry. Going to the morgue. Going to the cooler like your bum-chum, Henry. The doctor cut him open to find what he died of. Put his fucking brain in a bucket. Larry, you’re going too, you crippled cunt. That was before. Long ago. Sometimes sleep makes me forget he’s dead, makes it like now. Like today. Tonight. Past midnight. Moon at the window and Little Puck calling to it. Now every day it’s good to wake up. To know O’Donnell’s dead. Like something happy happened.

  Night-Shift Jack putting Little Puck to bed. Fucking stay there, or you’ll catch it. Are you fucking listening? Little Puck can’t listen, can’t talk more than lamb sounds. Baa, baa, black sheep. Loving the moon. When I sleep, O’Donnell comes: white coat, black shoes, black tooth, hairy face whispering bad-breath things. Bernard the porter said he was a twisted Irish cunt, wanted to hit him once when I fell on hot pipes and he left me to burn. You’re toasting there, Larry, aren’t you? Is it nice? Is it, you fucking spastic? O’Donnell laughs and laughs in my sleep with red eyes. Dead rabbit eyes. Dad shot them on Sundays. Would have shot O’Donnell too, hung him up in the shed, hooks through his feet. I don’t like to sleep in those dreams.

  Waking is good. Remembering he’s gone away. Gone to his sin. Gone before. Like at Sunday school before the green car with fins hit me. A big car like a green fish. Trying to pick up a ciggy card. Heroes of test cricket. I needed Harold Larwood. Before fits and Mum crying because I was useless. My dad smelling of beer and oil, spitting out blood from pub fighting because someone called me a name. Ellen, let them take the lad. It’ll be better for him there. They’ll tend to him. We can visit. But only Mum did. Mum and Rufus. Then Rufus stopped and Mum kept coming in her black coat with the velvet collar, bringing comics, bringing stripy sweets in a paper bag. I’m getting to be an old lady, Larry, what are we going to do? Then stopped coming. Once a man came. A stranger. Larry your brother’s come to see you. I didn’t believe them. Rufus wouldn’t leave me here. And it wasn’t Rufus, it was a man with dark hair who looked like someone else. He told me Dad had passed away, not Mum. Where is she? Not understanding my voice. Kept wanting to see her again. Wouldn’t look at the man, his voice remembering things not true.

  Morning tastes of night. Sour medicine smells. Piss-wet bed. Night-shift Jack gone to let Sal in to change sheets and dry and dress me, put me into the wheelchair for another day with the clock and TV and sun rising at the window. I used to watch TV, but eyes are bad now. Kept breaking my specs. Sun’s hot face at the window all day on the day ward. Sleeping with nothing to do but think on things. Round and round. Who that man was. How once upon a time we all die. Like stories that get told, then they’re over. Now here’s little Puck, standing over me in the moonshine waterfall, touching my face, smiling, touching me like flowers. Like Mum did when my story began.

  Living in the railway cottage up a lane on the edge of town, Dad working as a mill spinner, trains going past all day with yellow smoke and coal in the tenders and the drivers waving at me where I watched from the end of the garden, holding little Rufus by the hand so he wouldn’t run away. Little brother. All blond and sleepy and too small to look after himself. Mum in the kitchen, working in a blue dress, pushing her hair back, crying at the sink and I didn’t know why. Her kissing when she put us to bed, me and Rufus in one big bed and the town all lit up below the window and the
mill chimneys smoking and Dad coming home late and sitting on the bed smelling of work and beer, his face all bristles. Then Mum’s voice hard and angry and Dad’s voice low like a saw going though damp wood. Then silence and the wind in the wires like owls and rain at the window pattering and Rufus curling into me and dreaming, the way Terry our Jack Russell dreamed, twitching and kicking like he was going down a dark hole after rabbits. After O’Donnell. O’Donnell hiding in the dark from Dad who’d snap his neck and kill him easy as rabbits.

  Dad up early filling the coal scuttles and whistling and Mum calling upstairs for us to go to school and struggling into cold shoes that had stood on the flags all night, soaking up cold. They should’ve used headstones, it’d have been warmer. Then he was gone to work singing and Mum tutting and washing us with cold water and a flannel then walking us down the lane for the school bus that bandy Jimmy Dodgson drove who Dad said couldn’t stop a pig in a ginnel. All hail the Mattinson boys! We climb aboard, Rufus dropping his bag and Jimmy’s wire-haired little dog staring at us from the seat where he lay out on a stinky towel. Then the drive to school into town over potholes and cobbles, past black iron railings and coal carts and the cemetery, the sound of the mills whirring and turning like big clocks and shadows moving at the windows, all lit up. All that time melts together now into pictures. Pictures still happening when I wake and the night’s there, hunching at the window. A beast from the hills. Being dead goes on a long while, live for today.

  Dad had an allotment, taking me along at weekend to help him dig the vegetables and tie up bean canes and hunt for rats. There was a wooden shed with a tarpaulin roof where you could light a rusty stove with newspapers and watch the rain and sit in saggy armchairs with a mushroom smell. Clay plant pots stacked together and magazines to look at. Spades and a fork and Dad’s old clogs by the door and his gardening jacket that he’d worn in the war, somewhere far away, before I was born, and Rufus. Somewhere hot, where he’d been a prisoner. Not for doing something wrong, but because of the war. Prisoner of war. Like the war was a prison, but it was in Burma and he was in it. He was there in the army and the Japs caught him and marched him to prison to make a railway. Going quiet sometimes then, stamping on a wooden apple box to light the stove with curls of wood looking up when rain came at the window. Snug as bugs in a rug, Larry, snug as bugs. We’d watch the spiders in the corners and the flames starting up from a Swan Vesta and a feather of smoke from the chimney pipe where it leaked before we set to work pulling up cabbages and spuds and putting them in a sack for Mum.

  Once Dad wasn’t working because of short time at the mill and I went down to get him for dinner. There were pigeons in the next-door shed making that noise in their throats like a cat purring. The spade and fork were sticking in the ground and there was a robin on the fork twisting its head like it was laughing at me then shitting and flying off. The fairground lady from the mill was there. Not the fortune-teller, but her with the gold tooth. She was putting on stockings in Dad’s shed. When I looked through cobwebby glass she smiled and put her finger to her lips. Larry sweetheart, I was just smartening myself up, and Dad looked at me his eyes very blue and shook his head meaning Nothing to your mum, say nothing. I knew it was a secret then, like things in the war. She was Mavis from the mill.

  Dad took me into town, Whit Sunday. I was eight. Rufus at home with Mum because he was too frightened of the crowds. Too much a baby, when I was a big lad now and could reckon with it. We waited at the edge of the road. I could hear the big drum beating under my ribs like sick coming up and going down again. Excitement in all the faces. Then the church procession came down Mytholmroyd Street and the May Queen with spots on her face in a white frock with long ribbons and bridesmaids and a band marching with brass trumpets and trombones and a man banging the drum so that you could feel it in your heart. Feel it in the nights still, when the dark’s quiet. Dad’s hand on my shoulder, laughing with me. Then Mavis was there behind him and I saw her hand touching his hand. Oh, hello, love, fancy seeing you here! Mavis laughing with a gold tooth and another tooth missing at the side. Oh, I know, I’m a bad penny, I am.

  The procession went past and Mavis leaning down and putting a kiss on my cheek with lipstick and Dad wiping it off with his hand. Lipstick and spit and I said Uugh! and they both were laughing. Come on Larry, smartly does it! And Dad taking me away to a long street where there was a pub with its doors open and a white lion on the sign and a seat outside and a beery smell wafting like breath that Dad had sometimes when he came home and sat on the bed to tell a story. Not about the war because that’s all done with and gone and good riddance. Life has to go on. Dad and Mavis inside with their wet whistles and me sat on the bench with a shilling in my pocket and Dad bringing me lemonade and crisps in a packet with salt in a twist of blue paper. And I sat and waited and knew I couldn’t tell anybody because Dad touched the side of his nose and Mavis’ eyes had gone all wide. Big brown eyes like toffees. Are you sure? Are you sure? Dad laughing deep laughs, all stiff like a soldier with her. Larry’s a good lad, he knows what’s what, he’s … then another man was pushing past in a black suit and I couldn’t hear. Then I was waiting outside, hearing the big drum get fainter like a heart fading away as the Whit walks went across town.

  Finishing the lemonade, bubbles all up my nose. Too hot for a jacket so I took it off and rolled up my shirtsleeves like Dad. Cracking on with it. Putting the glass on the bench, all sticky, careful not to break it, like Mum said. Then pouring the last crunchy bits into my mouth when I saw the man across the street. A long coat on like a Teddy Boy and a quiff combed back and big shoes that had soft soles and a rude name Dad told me, but not why it was rude. Mavis laughing then and a bit of pork pie coming from her mouth, wiping her eyes. Oh excuse me love, I’m three sheets gone already. The man taking a packet of ciggies from his pocket and opened it, throwing the silver bit and the picture card away into the road. Lighting one like a film star does at the flicks and walking off, looking back at me. Winking like he knew what I wanted all the time. Harold Larwood for a full set. Then standing up and pulling my socks straight. Right left and right again. There was a green car with big fins and lights like goggle eyes but I didn’t see it moving when I bent down. Something banging hard, pushing me on the road into all the wet stuff that was coming out of me and Dad kneeling down crying, the pint still in his hand, all white froth. Fucking hell! Fucking hell, Larry! I was only gone five minutes.

  Then I was on a bed with Dettol smells and Mum was white in the face and angry and a doctor was pushing a needle into my arse and I could hear Dad’s voice, at the edge of the room and Rufus holding Mum’s hand, swinging his legs. Mum was angry because I was run over. I was frightened and didn’t want her to be cross, her mouth small and hard where the words had got stuck and couldn’t come out. After the needle my left arm and leg never worked. I got a purple scar on my head and then fits. So I was put on a special bus to special school. Spacker school with spacker kids. The other alright kids on Jimmy’s bus laughing and Rufus frightened again and Jimmy’s wire-haired dog jumping down to sniff at me where I stood with Mum, then getting back onto the towel, licking itself between the legs and Jimmy letting off the brake and Rufus waving goodbye.

  Wondering when I’d ever get better. Leg irons with leather straps so I could walk. A special brace on my arm. Larry, you crippled cunt. Then the fits getting worse like being struck by lightning. That smell of burning like walking through a wood with no shadows and every tree on fire and crackling out bright light and heat. Everything white and screaming and falling down and hurting myself. Things going blank so I could never remember. Just all spit and words mixed up when I was trying to talk. I had a leather helmet like a boxer and had to wear that in case. Sometimes I saw Dad looking at me. Then Mum. Look what you did Ted, look what you did. Are you proud of yourself now? Are you? You and that painted tart. On and on, until he lifted his hand to her and whipped her across the face and she sat, not crying, but angry to her soul she
said, holding Rufus, holding me, red finger marks on her cheeks. After that, things got too hard for me to do any more.

  They brought me here in winter in a blue van with seats that smelled of plastic and petrol. Dad came with me because Mum couldn’t bear the betrayal, the shame, her own flesh and blood abandoned, and he sat next to me smoking and pointing at things outside the window as they went by. Dirty snow in all the side roads and the driver going slowly, taking the wide road out of town and into the countryside. Old stone houses, ice frozen to trees, a waterfall, red horses in a field, their breath like steam from the mill. Dad smiling and huddling into his big coat because it was an adventure to leave home, like going for a soldier when he went into the army to build a railway in Burma far from here, where snow was sliding away from the rooftops and the van went down a hill into a little town with smoke coming from all the chimneys and then here to the hospital with tall iron gates. To keep me safe Dad said. To keep the world away. All windows and black stone and O’Donnell waiting for us in his white jacket and grey moustache, shaking Dad’s hand and winking at me like Jimmy in the school van, just waiting to be on his own with me to show me what was what. The right way and the wrong way. That’s all over now, you little twat. Welcome to paradise. Dad kissing me and his face wet again like when he sat in the hospital watching me, breaking his heart to see me suffer because of that stupid bitch and not being able to keep his cock in his trousers.

  Mum came to see me after that. Came on the long bus ride. Sundays usually. Rufus, too sometimes. Getting bigger and not knowing anything to say. Dumby. I couldn’t look after him any more with fits and leg irons and days and years staring out of the windows, watching time go by in the clouds, in the sun and stars and moon rising and falling into the hills. Nurses coming and going home, then work, then home again. Day shift and night shift. Then Rufus stopped and Mum stopped and they told me she’d passed away. Then that man coming saying about Dad, looking like someone with a red mouth. All the time, O’Donnell tormenting us in the showers, in the dorm, in the toilet block where no one could see. Until the day the princess came. Lady Di who died in a crash on the news. She came to the village in a long car and walked to the hospital through a crowd, all painted and smelling now, and the staff meeting her on the lawn and giving her flowers. She came to help us in a long frock and flowers in her hair, smiling for everyone.