South of the Lights Read online

  ‘Do you remember, Henry, love? You in your uniform and I said take off your cap before you do anything like that to me.’

  Her incessant jabbering drowned the birdsong – she drained the woods of all their peace. Lately, Henry had given up. He went for no more walks. He had grown fatter, slower, with resignation. He anticipated no excitements or changes before his death, and accepted the realisation as quite bearable. It was therefore with some surprise that he had found himself enjoying this afternoon more than he had enjoyed an afternoon for many a year. It was with even more surprise that he had discovered precisely what had caused the pleasure.

  As it was a Tuesday he had gone to the Star for his usual pint at lunchtime. He had taken his drink to his accustomed table and was looking about him, in his quiet way, thinking they’d have to invest in a new carpet soon, judging by the fraying at his feet, when a woman came into the pub. This was not an unusual event: women in the pub caused no comment in spite of Rosie’s beliefs – but this was a strange woman, one Henry had not seen before. She was not an old woman, nor a young one, and yet the term middle-aged, with all its implications, seemed most unsuited to her. She wore a fur coat, extravagantly dotted with leopard spots, and gripped round her small waist by a broad leather belt. Her short hair was blonde and curly and she had a freshness about her, a confident gaiety that caught the attention of everyone in the room. At her entrance the clink of glasses, the small sounds of low talk and shifting feet, seemed to diminish. Everyone could hear her order. A double Dubonnet with a twist of lemon, please, she said. Bill, the landlord, apologised, but he had run out of lemons. In response she turned away from him. Her eye fell upon Henry and she smiled an uncontainable smile, as if something within her could be withheld no longer.

  ‘No lemon? How about that?’ she said.

  Henry, feeling her direct address to him must have been a mistake, hurriedly covered his face with his beer mug and drank too fast, making himself hiccough loudly. The woman turned back to the bar, drank her lemon-less Dubonnet, and paid for it all in a moment. Then she left in a hurry, smiling round the room as she went. Henry, his confusion still upon him, glanced at his fellow drinkers. He perceived that each one of them, behind his gesture of apparent indifference, was likewise a little shaken. Although an intangible thing, impossible to discuss, the strange lady’s brief visitation seemed in some way to have ungrounded the secure, unexciting structure of an ordinary Tuesday. Henry could tell by the flush on the landlord’s cheeks, and the way that old Jo let his moustache become confused with the froth of his beer – a thing that would never normally happen. For his own part, Henry felt unusual weakness in his knees. He walked home carefully, wondering. He tried to place the feeling: something long past, almost forgotten. Then, at the elm trees, very bright in the sun, it came to him. The storm. All those years ago, landing in Spain when the waves had subsided, realising he was both alive and safe, the combined sensations of exhilaration and weakness had struck him: and here they were again. Henry paused, letting his eyes wander up through the great blur of leaves, and he sighed with great contentment. Incredulous, he felt. Almost forty unfluttering years, and here was some new irrational flame, some pretty hope. He might never re-encounter the nymph in the leopard coat who had caused it, but that was no matter. He would feed upon what she had left behind for his own private pleasure: he would eke out the goodness, and when the bloom wilted at the end of some season, he would remember with gladness.

  ‘Henry! You’re back early. That’s lovely. I’ll be dishing up in just a moment!’ Rosie was calling to him from the front door. Rosie was always bloody calling to him in her cheerful voice, but he was doubly protected from her beneficence now.

  On his own, in the afternoon, Henry put aside his Daily Mirror as soon as his wife had gone. Legs stretched out before him, the warmth of the fire gentle upon his shins, he let the smile of the strange lady return to him. It was very bright in his mind. In fact, he could almost imagine her sitting there opposite him, smiling away, the afternoon light through the small window making her hair greenish, like a plant. Of course, in real life she’d be most uncomfortable, in her smart coat, on the old leather chair. Her polished shoes would skitter about on the tiled floor, and perhaps she would smoke, and need an ashtray, and there were no ashtrays in the room. On the other hand, she might just be the sort to curl up, knees under her, and listen.

  If she would care to listen then Henry would like to tell her things, he thought. He would like to tell her how cumbersome he found his retirement, and with what nostalgia he looked back upon his working days. He had been a loader at the brick fields. In thirty years some hundreds of thousands – perhaps even millions – of bricks had passed through his hands. He knew the feel of them as well as he knew the feel of any part of his own body: the weight, the texture, the even dip of their spines, their raw reddish colour that looked quite sore on bright days, but mellowed under cloud. Henry could load up a lorry of bricks quicker than anyone: over the years he became known for his agility, his precision in stacking, his strength and tirelessness. What he never displayed was the pleasure a well-loaded lorry gave him. The satisfaction of the neatly piled structure – to last merely for the journey, then to be demolished by less loving hands – never decreased. He was offered many other jobs in the works, and he tried some of them, but always returned to loading. Indeed, as an unsurpassable loader he became something of a legend. (For all his modesty he was prepared to admit this.) The day of his retirement he had a friendly talk with Mr Dingley, the young manager, in the small office awash with all the paperwork of the business. Mr Dingley said Henry was the kind of man England needed to get industry back on its feet, and he would be sorry to see him go. Then he gave him an inscribed watch. Rosie had said it would be a gold, after thirty years. In fact it was silver, with a soft stretchy strap that felt comfortable on Henry’s wrist. His mates had bought him more beers than he could drink that night, and slapped him on the back and said they hoped he’d come back to see them often – make sure they were doing things right. Henry said of course he would. But he never returned: he meant to, one day, but so far he had not been able to bring himself to do so. Besides the watch, he also took home a single brick. (He did not ask Mr Dingley’s permission but felt that, in the circumstances, it would not be considered stealing.) The brick sat on the window sill in the kitchen. Gathering dust, Rosie said. But Henry refused to move it. Sometimes, alone, he would hold it in his hands, feeling its familiar weight, reminding himself.

  If the lady with the gay smile was here now and asked him about the brick, and she cared to listen, he would tell her the truth. He would tell her that most people in these parts resented the brick fields, scooped as they were out of the countryside, ugly, clustered with rail-tracks for the trucks, and the humped buildings where the bricks were baked. But Henry liked them. He liked the vast chimneys that speared the sky like masts, the sour sulphury smell their smoke sent into the murky clouds. Henry supposed he must have known hundreds of sunny times at the brickworks, but in retrospect the days he pictured were the ones he liked best: yellowish skies dappled with cloud. It may have been his imagination, but small clouds often seemed to gather round the chimneys in a busy, protective way. Sometimes there was a whole cluster of them over the brick fields, while not far away the sky was quite clear.

  Winter was the time Henry liked best of all. Fraw, sullen, the bricks themselves the only bright things, gusts of warmth from the baking ovens as you walked past, the sulphur smell very keen on a frosty morning, stirred by an east wind. One year Henry had volunteered to guard the works on Christmas Day. He told Rosie and the Boy it was his turn: they had believed him, and sympathised. He arrived at the watchman’s small office at five in the morning to relieve the man on night-duty. He stoked up the fire, boiled the black kettle and made himself a cup of tea. He walked round the works once or twice, checking all was well; but most of the day he sat in that small office drinking tea, listening to music on the radio
, studying the picture of the Queen on the wall calendar, very demure in all her jewels. And when he listened to her speech in the afternoon he felt it as if it was to him alone she spoke, from the dingy wall. Impressed, he stood up and saluted her. Then he ate his cold mince pies, looked out at the high chimneys and their everlasting puffs of dun smoke, and felt glad not to be round the Christmas tree with Rosie’s relations. It grew cold in spite of the fire, and was quite dark at four. He left much later, bicycling slowly through the night frost, past lighted trees in small windows, and was happy to be outside it all. At home, Rosie welcomed him with hot cherry brandy and much sympathy and concern. But he had needed no one’s sympathy: it had been the best Christmas Day he could remember, though he could not tell them that. Pity: because he would have liked to have explained about it to just one person before he died, and the lady with the curly hair, he had a strange feeling, might have been a little interested. Something in the lively way she had said, ‘A double Dubonnet with a twist of lemon, please.’ Silly of Bill to have run out of lemon.

  ‘Henry? Here I am back again. Sorry to have been so long.’ The clatter of Rosie coming through the front door. ‘Hope you haven’t been missing me, love . . . Now, what can I get you for your tea?’

  She might have learnt by now Henry never answered such questions. Tea, more than ever this afternoon, held no interest for him. He gathered up his paper.

  Brenda sat on an upturned box in the chicken house smoking the last of her Woodbines. She had fed the hens and there was nothing further for her to do. It was the time of day she liked best: evening sun coming quite sharply through the high cobwebby skylights – which it never managed to do earlier in the day – the smell of chickens, sweet and fusty. When she came in at eight-thirty in the morning, after a night of messing, the smell was more pungent, almost stifling. By midday she had grown accustomed to it and by evening, as now, it filled all her senses with well-being.

  Brenda was worried about Elizabeth. Elizabeth’s eyes had settled into an unbroken stare during the afternoon and the lashless yellow lids, shaped like small petals but rough with pimples, drooped almost to closing. Elizabeth was queen of the shed – Brenda had made her so – and she was going to die. This time tomorrow she might well be dead. Brenda wondered who should succeed her: Clarissa, by rights. Clarissa was an old bird who laid more and bigger eggs than any of the others. She emitted terrible squawks of triumph each time she did so and the other birds, judging by their clucking protests, resented her boastfulness. Besides, she was not glamorous. Roberta had pecked great lumps out of the left-hand side of her neck, and no new feathers seemed likely to sprout over the patch of raw pink skin. She was a bird of strength, but no dignity, not ideally suited to be queen. Marilyn (after Monroe) would perhaps be better. Marilyn, had fate made her a free-range bird, would have been sex-mad, taxing the most virile cock with her demands. As it was, from the confines of her cooped-up life, she brooded with particular frustration. Brenda could tell from the sad, coquettish way she bent her head against the bars, murmuring to herself in a husky voice. Perhaps, though, she was more of a sex queen than a real queen and Daisy, a duller, more upright bird, would be a better leader. Daisy’s comb was certainly the brightest in the shed: upstanding, a fiery red, a real crown. Daisy it would have to be, though the appointment would cause terrible jealousy in Floribunda’s heart. But Floribunda, for all her fine show of feathers, was ailing. One of her legs seemed to be paralysed. She would probably die soon, too, and Brenda wished to be practical. No point in changing queens every few weeks.

  Her cigarette finished, Brenda began to fold and unfold the piece of foil paper from out of the carton. She dreaded Elizabeth’s death. Well, she wouldn’t be there. Wilberforce could deal with the whole thing. She’d go out. Where? Anywhere. Walk about, walk about fast in the fields trying not to think of Wilberforce’s hands round Elizabeth’s neck. She knew what a man’s hands looked like on a chicken’s neck, twisting. That time Uncle Jim had killed Hen – she would never forget that. She wasn’t supposed to be around, but she had peeped out of her bedroom window and seen the whole thing. It was the afternoon she had bought her new green shoes, the ones with high heels and bows on the front. Uncle Sam had given her the money for them on condition she promised not to mention to Uncle Jim he’d been visiting her mother. Of course she wouldn’t have mentioned any of the uncles to any of the other uncles. For a start there were so many of them she got them confused. Uncle Sam must have been daft to think she’d tell on him. She took the money gladly. She didn’t care what any of them did so long as they didn’t bother her. The only one who bothered her up till now was Uncle Ernest, whose whisky breath smelt right down the street. He beat up her Mum once so she had a black eye for weeks. And then Mum got the sack from the café as the stinking old manager said he couldn’t have a waitress looking as if she’d been through a mangle, it was bad for business. She and Mum had eaten bread and cheese and tinned soup for a week. She didn’t mind for herself: food didn’t matter to her. But Mum got a thin greenish look around her mouth, and her headaches came on so bad she hadn’t got the energy to go and look for another job. It was then that Uncle Jim, who had been around for a few weeks, suggested he kill Hen, and make her into a nice chicken casserole. Brenda had cried: broken down right there, banging her head against the kitchen table, till her own sobs and screams became a cloudy dome about her head from which she could see no escape. Then she heard Mum shouting to her to stop making such a bloody racket. She stopped at once, a sudden silence: and in the quiet she saw Mum’s own eyes were skinned with tears.

  ‘No use being sentimental,’ Uncle Jim had said, cramming sliced cheese into his mouth. He was always eating sliced cheese, letting tongues of it hang out of his mouth, waiting for the inner bits to melt before sucking up the rest. At least he bought his own, but it was one of his habits that Mum said drove her mad. She said she doubted she could live with a man who had such a thing about sliced cheese, although Uncle Jim seemed pretty well installed already.

  ‘It’s no use being sentimental,’ said Uncle Jim again, who believed repetition made for greater truth, ‘the fucking bird hasn’t laid for a year, and she doesn’t have much of a fucking life in the backyard, does she?’

  Brenda didn’t answer. It was true, Hen hadn’t laid for a year and some of her old vitality – her very thorough pecking for scraps in the concrete strip of backyard – seemed to have dwindled. But Uncle Jim hadn’t seen her as a chick mewling in a cardboard box in the kitchen. Uncle Jim hadn’t eaten dozens of her speckled eggs and been lulled by the sound of her clucking, lonely evenings, while Brenda sat in the kitchen waiting for her mother to come home.

  ‘Uncle Jim’s right, of course,’ Mum said, who was afraid of the man. Brenda saw a look pass between them and she knew the hours were closing in on Hen.

  ‘I hate you, that’s all,’ she said quietly to Uncle Jim, and ran out of the house. It was down the road she met Uncle Sam who had given her the money for her shoes, and tweaked the skin of her arm under the elbow. She ran straight on down to the shop, not caring about the mess she looked, dried tears blotching her face, and bought the shoes right away. They had been in the window for weeks. They fitted perfectly. She looked in the mirror a long time, incredulous. They were hers. Her first pair of grown-up shoes. The bows made her ankles look skinnier than ever, but they were so pretty. Her friend Lindy Badger, who had tons of money for shoes, would be right jealous. She ran home wearing them, ran straight up to her room to have another look in her own mirror. Then she heard the squawking, the bird screams of fear. She rushed to the window. Uncle Jim’s hands were round Hen’s neck. They gave a small sharp twist. Hen’s head flopped over his wrist, beak opened mid-cry. He turned to the kitchen, walked towards it, swinging her limp body.

  ‘That’s finished the fucker,’ Brenda heard him shout to Mum. Brenda expected to cry again, but she felt no tears. She sat down, took off the green shoes, put them in their box and shoved it under the bed
. She would never wear them, now.

  Brenda did not discover whether or not Mum made a casserole of Hen. If she did, then she and Uncle Jim must have eaten it at dinner-time, while she was still at school, and hidden the bones. A few days later Mum got a job cleaning up at the local cinema, and they ate better again, though every time there was frozen chicken Brenda refused it. She thought she could probably never eat chicken again.

  A year later Uncle Jim was still living with them, though sometimes, when he was on night shift, other Uncles would come round for a while, and without being asked Brenda would go up to her room. On those occasions Mum would dab behind her ears with a bit of Essence of Gardenia (which Uncle Fred brought from Manchester) that she kept hidden behind the tinned food in the kitchen cupboard. She would brush her hair and take off her apron and undo two buttons of her dress, and look quite pretty, for all the mottled tiredness of her face. On those occasions Brenda would think that if only Mum had had the chance she could have made something of her life, and they could have had a nice house in the country, perhaps, instead of years in bloody Birmingham. But Mum hadn’t had the chance, and she hadn’t the strength to make one. Everything had gone against her, in spite of her generosity. Men, she said, were all shits with magic wands, and once they’d shoved their wands up you all the magic went, and off they’d go to try their tricks elsewhere. She said this quite often; she’d been saying it for as long as Brenda could remember – long before she knew what it meant, and she could see that Mum believed it. But one day, Mum said, you might find a man who wanted to keep all his magic for you, if you were lucky. But that was a chance in a million and meantime, well, you had to keep believing, trying out new magic, just in case. When Mum said things like that she looked so sad Brenda felt an ache go all through her own body, and she didn’t know what to do or say. But Mum was very brave: that was the wonderful thing about her. The next moment she’d be laughing – some silly thing she’d seen on one of the films up at the cinema – and telling Brenda to snap out of it and get on with her homework.