by David Mark
‘I’ve not become encyclopaedic, no,’ I said, and immediately heard myself sounding like a snooty cow. I softened my face and tone. ‘I’m interested, though.’
‘There’s books and stuff. People remember. Some of the prisoners even stayed. Married local girls. To be honest, Fairfax would have been the one to talk to, if you do want to know.’
I looked down at the varnished bar. Drew a stick man in some spilled beer. It looked twisted, like it had fallen from the sky.
‘Here’s to Fairfax,’ said Stubbs, who had pulled himself a pint of muddy brown ale. The other drinkers joined him in a salute and they spent the next few minutes talking about what a menace he had been with his questions and his jokes and the pride he had taken in a car he had bought which so ill-suited the local roads.
Hearing about the dead man’s life only made me regret his death all the more. I sipped at the next drink. Took off my coat and hung it over the open hatch that led behind the bar.
‘We don’t get many ladies in on weeknights,’ said Stubbs. ‘Nice to have a pretty face instead of these ugly mugs.’ He gestured at his regulars, who obliged him with harmless scowls. ‘You were in before, weren’t you? You and some lass dressed like a daffodil. Busy night, that one. Sorry if you didn’t get to see the place at its best. Not everybody’s so forward-thinking.’
There was a sharp laugh from the man with the black hair.
‘Aye, there’s a couple of cavemen, right enough. Couple who reckon a lass should be home and not in here with the likes of us.’
He turned to me as he said it but there was nothing unpleasant in the way he looked at me.
‘Changing times,’ I said.
‘Pike doesn’t think so.’
Stubbs pursed his lips and blew out a lungful. Took a cigarette from the packet in his shirt pocket and lit it, blowing out a lungful of smoke and resting his elbows on the bar as if settling in to tell a story.
‘You know Pike?’
I shook my head. I may have heard the name but couldn’t be sure.
‘Lives next to that church you like. Scruffy place.’
My memory filled with pictures of the tumbledown cottage with the holes in the roof and the sheets at the windows; the peeling paint and rusting machinery on the scrap of lawn.
‘Lives there with his old mum. Reckon they built that house around them and when it falls down he’ll still be inside. Bit of a terror is Pike, if you don’t know how to take him. Banned him from here a dozen times though it’s never good for trade. He just tells the regulars what’ll happen if they come in drinking when he’s not allowed. I always end up inviting him back.’
‘I don’t think I’ve seen him.’
‘He’ll have seen you, love. Always got his eye on a pretty lass, if you’ll forgive me saying it. Got himself in bother as a younger man. Too young to fight in the real war but he was in Korea. Came back a bit damaged. Told us one night that the ladies over there weighed no more than a kiddie. Couldn’t do a damn thing to stop you – even those who tried to.’ He raised his hands, aware that this was probably no topic for my company. ‘Sorry love, mouth running away with me. Don’t be worrying, you’re a married woman, which means you’re not his type. And if you ask me he prefers fighting to courting. Had a couple of fiancées but he’ll never go up the aisle. Wouldn’t get past the wedding guests without seeing somebody who needed a punch. We had some of the Irish in a few months back. Good lads. Maybe a bit full of themselves but no harm. Their accents upset Pike. He asked one of them to keep it down and they apologized. Then the volume started going back up again. Pike doesn’t ask twice. Took the stick he uses for killing trout and clubbed Paddy on the back of the neck so hard it’s a miracle his skull didn’t break. Tore through the lad’s mates like they were dolls. He’s a devil when his temper’s up. Chivers would have needed a vanload of coppers to take him in and even then I think he’d have been too scared to try.’
‘What happened?’ I asked and in my mind I started counting the number of steps from Pike’s front door to the site of the broken crypt.
‘Nowt happened, love. Paddy went home with a bandage on. We sent a bottle of whisky to the house he was staying in with his mates. Sent the Heron to have a little word with Pike.’
‘The Heron?’ I asked, confused.
He smiled at me. ‘You don’t know anybody do you? Heron’s what we call Trevor Halpin. Used to be a gilly at the castle, looking after his lordship’s lakes. Big lad. Didn’t take to being talked down to. Not an ounce of anger in him but has a good sense of right and wrong and knows when a person deserves a thump. Probably the only person who can keep Pike from being Pike, though if I were the Heron I wouldn’t sleep well, knowing that mad bastard were holding a grudge. He lives where he pleases. Old barns and empty cottages you wouldn’t keep pigs in. Helps himself to his lordship’s salmon and takes it personally if any bugger kills a deer with owt other than a clean shot. And he can tek Pike.’
‘That’s why you call him the Heron.’
Stubbs grinned. ‘Can tell you’ve been to university.’
I stayed for two more drinks. Bought a round for the other drinkers. My coat was almost dry by the time I slipped back into it.
‘I can walk you home,’ said the dark-haired drinker, who had admitted to the name of Ray. ‘I doubt Chivers will be in now. Probably found himself somewhere dry or followed the smell of chips and got a feed. We’ll send him up to you. I’ll walk you back.’
‘I’ll be fine.’
‘Lot of people passing through,’ he said, seriously. ‘You must hear the roar of the rocket.’
‘From the base? Sometimes.’ I had a flash of memory and smiled at it. ‘I used to tell Stefan it was a dragon.’
‘Aye, maybe. They don’t drink in here so I can’t say what sort of lads they are. But I don’t like the thought of you going back out in that rain. Not on your own.’
‘I’ve been here two years. You’ve never worried before.’
They looked at me like I was mad. ‘You’ve never been in here before, love. Never been ours to worry about.’
‘And now?’
He shrugged, as if the answer was obvious. But I didn’t let him walk me home. I didn’t feel the rain as I smiled in the darkness and trudged through the downpour up the hill. My head was full of mysteries and questions.
The air base.
Pike.
A writer’s father, dead on the Spadeadam road.
I slept soundly that night. I didn’t wake. Didn’t hear anybody lift the latch on the back door and move through my house. Didn’t feel the eyes of an intruder, staring upon me with the intensity of sunlight through glass.
That knowledge came later, when I looked at the muddy footprints I had left on my route through the house and saw them overlaid with boot prints that dwarfed my own.
FELICITY
Transcript 0003, recorded October 29, 2010
… My friend Janet came with me to sort out Fairfax’s things. John had offered but he would have been more hindrance than help. It’s not a job for a man, that sort of thing. They get sentimental. Start telling you that this and that has got to stay and before you know it you haven’t so much got rid of the rubbish as rearranged it. And Fairfax had plenty rubbish to rearrange.
‘Bloody pigsty,’ muttered Janet, looking around the living room and pulling that face she used to use when the farmers were spreading slurry on the fields.
‘It’s clean,’ I said, sticking up for him. ‘Just cluttered.’
‘Aye,’ she goes. ‘Cluttered with muck.’
It were hard to argue. It looked like somebody had left a window open during a hurricane. If I hadn’t known him I’d have thought it the house of somebody not right in the head. It was like he’d been stealing other people’s rubbish just so his own had company. Empty cans, papers, post, dirty mugs, plates that looked like those things artists hold while they’re painting. Books and newspapers and folders that spilled their sheafs of writing pape
r onto the mucky carpet like a lorry shedding its load. The unit by the wall that used to display little figurines and thimbles was now a dump for notebooks, all brimming over with pots of pens and brown cardboard tubes stacked like logs. There was a pair of women’s shoes on the windowsill. And the dust! I could have run my finger through the air and it would have turned black. I were embarrassed for him, truth be told. Sad he’d let it get like this. He’d always looked smart enough when he popped in. Maybe a bit crumpled but his socks matched and he didn’t smell bad. If I’d known he were living like that I’d have offered to give him a hand. Poor old soul. Was that why he kept popping to my house? Had he been escaping from the mess? Hoping I’d take pity on him and offer to show him how to live right? I felt tears pricking me eyes at that. I thought I’d cried them all out the night he died. Cried for him, and for Cordelia’s baby, and for those poor sad bones and scraps of clothes in the churchyard. Cried for myself too. Cried for telling lies.
‘You don’t think he’s been robbed, do you?’ asked Janet, all dramatic and loving it.
‘What would they take?’ I asked. ‘There’s no gaps in the mess, is what I mean. It’s not like anything seems to be missing.’
‘He must have had money. That car …’
‘He spent all he had on that car,’ I said, shaking my head and feeling bad about every bloody thing. ‘He said as much to our John. Bloody silly thing to buy.’
‘Well …’ she goes, ‘he’s paid the price right enough.’
I had to turn away before she saw me bawling. Found myself getting all upset again and remembering the house as it had been when I were a girl. Before the war. Fairfax’s son, Christopher, ten years older than me, sitting at the dinner table, leaning his head on his arm as he scribbled furiously onto page after page of lined paper. Fairfax kept throwing him proud little glances. His mam worked around him, putting out plates and dishing up meat and veg and talking to me mam and dad as if it were the most normal thing in the world to have a nigh-on grown man sitting writing stories at the table on Christmas Day. I always wanted to ask what he was writing but Dad had told me not to bother him. I never did. Never found out what he saw in his imagination. That was the bit I cried for when we heard he’d died. Never getting the chance to ask.
‘Did you know it were getting like this?’ asked Janet, looking around her at the mess, and I thought it sounded a bit harsh, the way she said it.
‘No,’ I said, and I had me dander up enough for it to come out in me voice. ‘’Course not.’
I hadn’t been in Fairfax’s place in an age and I hadn’t been in the living room since I was a girl. His wife were still alive then. Enid. Big bull of a woman who walked like a man and only had two fingers on her right hand. We always wanted to know whether it had been an accident or if she’d been born like that, but it felt wrong to ask. Dad once joked that she’d been born giving a V-sign to the world but Mam told him off for that. She told him off for a lot. Enid died in ’51. Not much of an age. Didn’t look like herself any more neither. Had shrunk a little. There were a lot like that, back in the forties. People who just withered and folded inwards. Got smaller, as though they were moving away from you. It were loss that did it. Loss of something precious. Christopher, in her case. Hit her hard when her boy didn’t come back from the war. Went grey in the space of a week, and I don’t just mean her hair. Something went wrong with her insides. She was buried in the same plot as her son.
‘I don’t know where to start,’ said Janet, hands on her hips. She looked like a teapot in a cosy. ‘Where would he keep it?’
‘I never asked,’ I said, and got one of her nasty looks as reward.
It was common practice in those days to keep an envelope full of your important bits and pieces somewhere safe – just in case you suddenly upped and died. It was just manners, really, and a way of ensuring nobody went through your things after you’d gone and made snidey remarks about the dust on the top of the wardrobe. It never contained very much, as a rule. Maybe an insurance policy, if you had one. A copy of your will. Deeds to your house, if you owned it, and Fairfax did. Maybe even a letter, if you’d had the courage to write one. Always seemed a bit ghoulish to me, that. How would you even start it? The devil in me always thought it would be fun to leave a note just saying: ‘Dear Snooper – I’m standing right behind you’, though I never told anybody that as they would have thought me awful.
Anyways, Janet was moaning. Wittering on. Mumbling about not having the time for this and how she were never that fond of the nosy old bugger anyway. Janet had a good soul but there were limits to how long her acts of charity would last. She had a habit of losing patience without any prior warning. One wet Sunday she’d thrown a carving fork at her eldest son while washing the dishes, just because he’d asked her one too many times whether she knew where something was. It had stuck in the wall beside his head, juddering like a terrier’s tail. Then she’d gone back to cleaning the pots. The holes were still in the kitchen wall. She wouldn’t paper over them. Liked them to serve as a reminder to her husband and bairns that their mam could only be pushed so far.
We worked in silence for a couple of hours or more. We heard wind and rain battering the windows and the roof. It had been damn ugly as we crossed the road. Sky was grey and purple. Put me in a mind of trout just out the freezer; stiff and sad and dead.
‘Church will need a new warden,’ said Janet, while she pushed stuff about half-heartedly and watched me work. Never was subtle, our Janet. Even at school she had a way of asking questions that made you feel like she had you in thumbscrews.
‘Don’t think there were much wardening involved,’ I said, on my knees by the sofa, sifting through a great stack of crinkly yellow copies of the Hexham Courant.
‘Title’s important though,’ said Janet. ‘You think your John might like it?’
‘He’s busy enough,’ I said. ‘Not really a one for church anyways. And it’s a job for somebody from Denton. Gilsland at a push. He’s Brampton.’
Janet accepted that. There was only nine or ten miles distance between our house in Denton and his family place in Brampton but they were miles that mattered. It would be years before John was thought of by the blokes in Gilsland as anything other than an outsider. They even gave me a bit of grumble for moving from Gilsland to Denton when I got wed, and that were under a mile. Always seemed odd to Cordelia, all that stuff. She couldn’t understand why boundaries mattered, especially in a place twisted around a 2000-year-old wall and then split into different counties by civil servants.
‘You never got me told,’ said Janet. ‘Fairfax. I heard tell he’d been at yours, though there were nowt unusual with that. Did I hear right? Went to go and inspect the churchyard in the middle of a storm and shot off in his car like a bullet from a gun. Poor old soul. You think his head was going a bit?’
I felt a bit funny at that. Nervous, like – as if I were being interrogated. We’d been friends since before we could talk. Our mams were close as sisters and they raised us the same way, though if I’m honest, I don’t know if I would have picked her as a best friend if there had been more to choose from. Knowing she was my age always made me feel like I was getting old because, God love her, Janet was never a looker. She was short and round and looked to me like a clay sculpture that had been sat on just before it went in the oven. She had the manners of a tinker, too; forever sniffing back snot or ramming a finger in her ear and rummaging about. She were a burpy person too, and I’d never liked that. Always seemed to be fighting a battle with a bit of trapped wind. Even belched during her wedding vows. I blushed for her but she thought it were funny and at least the man she were marrying could see what he was letting himself in for. I rarely lost my temper with her, though sometimes I would give her one of my looks and she’d know she was going too far. John says I have an impressive ‘look’. Reckons if I glared at a plucked chicken for long enough it would be ready to eat.
‘He’d come to see if I was all right,’ I said,
and realized I was talking to her backside. She was bent over, pulling the tops off the tubes from the dresser and fiddling about with the contents.
‘Got caught in the storm, had you?’ she asked, over the swell of her bum. It was like talking to a bloody armchair.
‘Been to Mam’s grave,’ said I, matter-of-fact about it. ‘Met the lady from up the hill. Mrs Winslow’s old place.’
She turned at that. Flared her nostrils.
‘That snooty thing? Married to the great fat man?’
‘You know who I’m talking about,’ I said, in no mood for her games.
‘Spent a fortune on that place and she doesn’t deserve any of it,’ sniffed Janet, and her head went further into the rubbery folds of her neck. ‘You seen the old orchard? Like a jungle. And there were a decent enough turnip field came with it. Just left it to rot, she did. Could have offered it out if she didn’t want it. But that would mean speaking to the likes of us.’
I found myself offended on Cordelia’s behalf. ‘She doesn’t know farming, Janet. And her husband works in London. She’s all alone up there. And she’s had her grief.’
Janet softened a little at that. ‘Aye, were a tragedy. Where did she bury him? Family church, was it?’
I said nowt. Didn’t want to tell her she’d had her son cremated and scattered among the headstones like confetti at a wedding.
‘What was she like?’ asked Janet, standing up. She was holding a map and squinting at it.
‘Like?’ I asked.
‘Snooty, was she? Bet she was.’
‘She was fine,’ I said. ‘Bit stand-offish but she’s been through a lot. She’s lonely, I think, though she doesn’t know it. She’s been to university, y’know. Got a good head on her shoulders.’
Janet gave a shake of her head, like a dog trying to dry off. She wasn’t impressed.
‘Tree came down near you, I heard.’
I felt it in my chest. A tightening, like somebody was pulling at the straps of my bra.