2003 - A Jarful of Angels (10 page)

S
till boiling.

The Merediths’ back door was open on to the bailey. It was always open even when it rained.

At four o’clock it was as hot as ever.

Three doors away, the Tranters’ door was shut tight. It was always shut even when it was hot. The Tranters only pulled back the bolts when someone wanted to leave or get back into the house.

Iffy crossed the bailey, ducking and diving between the washing on the lines. She knocked hard on Bessie’s door until her knuckles hurt. The Tranters’ door was painted with thick green paint, the colour of shiny cucumbers.

She hoped Bessie would answer and not her mam or dad. She never knew what to say to them. Bessie’s mam and dad were really old, nearly as old as her nan and grancha.

Mrs Tranter cleaned the doctor’s surgery and the doctor’s house. She made felt toys and crocheted and knitted patchwork blankets for black babies. She never smiled.

The Tranters were chapel. Carmel.

The Merediths were Catholic.

Mrs Tranter played the organ and the harmonium.

In the infants, Fatty had made up a dirty song about organ players.

Fanny Morgan plays the organ and she plays it very well

But her sisters all have blisters in the middle of their

Fanny Morgan plays the organ and she plays it very well…

Bessie had got mad, had her hair off as they said. She had sobbed and stamped her shiny patent shoes up and down on the playground floor.

Chapel people were different to Catholics. They didn’t drink or bet on the horses but they ate meat on Fridays and God didn’t give them so many babies.

Bessie grunted noisily as she pulled back the bolts. Bessie was famous for her grunting. The door was dragged open and the smell of polish and disinfectant came over the step in a rush that brought tears to Iffy’s eyes.

Bessie blinked her small eyes in the bright sunlight.

Iffy thought that Bessie had eyes like a pig but not so intelligent.

Her cheeks had been scrubbed until they shone, and below her hemline her bony pink knees were polished to shining. Her fat, glossy ringlets dripped down onto her shoulders. She smelled of talcum powder and the cod liver oil that she took for her chest. Bessie had a chest that rattled like an abacus when she wasn’t rattling from all the pills she took. Her mam gave her medicine for everything.

Medicine to make her pwp regular.

To get the wax out of her ears.

And the badness from her blood.

The worms from her bum.

But she never looked healthy.

“Hello, Iffy,” Bessie said, in a voice that sounded as though it had been washed in vinegar and put through the mangle twice.

“Hiya, Bessie.”

Bessie closed the door carefully behind her and the bolts were drawn back across from the inside. They walked across the bailey of Inkerman towards the broken steps at the end of the row that led up to the rutted road. Bessie walked carefully so as not to stand on any cracked stones and get mud all up her socks, even though it hadn’t rained for weeks. She hated having dirty socks.

Bessie was Iffy’s best friend but only because she couldn’t find a better one. Bessie was spoilt rotten. She was the youngest. She had two brothers who were in the army. Derek and Brian. There were framed photographs of them on the harmonium in the parlour. Mrs Tranter polished them every day, twice. They had heads the shape of swedes and were dead ugly. When they came home on leave they brought Bessie dolls in foreign costumes: Dutch, French, Spanish, Irish. Iffy liked the French one the best. It had red lipstick and no knickers. Just like Bessie’s sister. Dolores.

Dolores had white hair and two babies who ran about half naked, but no husband. Bessie’s mam had no truck with Dolores.

Iffy liked the name Dolores, just saying it made her shiver.

Dolores’s real name was Hilary and they called her Lurry for short. She changed it when she ran away from home.

D O L O R E Z.

Bessie said her hair was really ginger but she put peroxide and toilet cleaner on it. One day it would all fall out, or, if she was lucky, it would just turn green.

Mrs Meredith told Mrs Bunting that Hilary Lurry Dolores was hot in the knickers, but Iffy couldn’t ask what she meant because she was hiding under the kitchen table and shouldn’t have been.

Fatty was waiting for them down by the Dentist’s Stone at the bottom of the hill.

Fatty sat cross-legged, busily shaving a lolly stick into an arrowhead with a penknife. He was dead lucky! Gladys Baker who kept the gown shop in town had given it to him as a present. Iffy was dying for a penknife. She wasn’t allowed one in case she had her bloody fingers off.

Fatty looked up as the girls approached. “Wotcha, girls!”

Bessie checked over her shoulder in case her mam or dad were anywhere about. She’d have a lambasting if she got seen with Fatty, but she never did because her mam and dad hardly ever came out, only to shop or go to chapel.

Bessie’s mam had said that the last time Fatty had had a wash was off the midwife. Iffy didn’t like her for saying that.

Fatty’s mam used to be a midwife but she got drunk and dropped a baby head first into a bucket. Probably Bessie, thought Iffy. Midwifes caught babies in buckets when they shot out of women’s bums. They washed the pwp off and wrapped them in shawls. If they didn’t breathe they smacked their arses, or their faces by mistake if they were ugly. Midwifes made tea and sent someone to get the dads from the pub.

“Where’s Billy?” Iffy asked Fatty.

“Down under the bridge. I’ll call him in a minute. There’s hardly any river left.”

“P’raps it’s a sign from God like Bridgie said,” said Bessie.

“Bridgie Thomas is bloody twp,” said Fatty.

Bessie sniffed and looked down at her feet.

The three of them walked down towards the humpbacked bridge. A pile of horse manure steamed in the middle of the road. Bessie wrinkled up her nose and looked the other way in disgust. They clambered up onto the bridge and sat dangling their feet over the edge.

Billy came scrabbling over the bank.

“Hiya, Billy.”

Fatty gave Billy a leg up onto the bridge. Billy was the same age as the rest of them but he was little for his age. Too short to cut cabbage, Fatty said.

Billy never said a word. Not a peep. Not even when Mervyn Prosser got him behind the sheds and jabbed him in the dicky with a cocktail stick.

His mam had taken him to see doctors up near England and a woman in Cardiff who heard voices from under her armpit, but still he never said a word.

No one ever talked about what had happened to Billy’s brother in case they had nightmares and peed the bed leaking. It had happened in another valley before Billy moved to their town. Over the hills and far away in a place they had never been to and couldn’t yet spell the name of.

And Billy never spoke after. Not once. Not a boo, bah, kiss your arse or nothing.

“What’s he been doing under the bridge?” Bessie said.

“He’s been looking for fairies,” said Fatty.

Bessie rolled her eyes up towards the sky.

“Speaking of fairies,” hissed Fatty, “look who’s coming.”

Dai Full Pelt came towards them on his way home from the Mechanics. He was a lunatic. A dangerous one.

“Let’s go,” Bessie whimpered.

“Stay put,” Fatty said. “Don’t run away from the likes of him. Don’t let him see you’re afraid.”

Dai staggered up the lane towards them.

They got down off the bridge in case he pushed one of them over the edge and into the river. Lunatics did things like that for no reason.

Bessie kept her head well down. She was terrified of Dai.

They all were, even Fatty a bit, only he wouldn’t show it.

Dai Full Pelt was really Dai Gittins. He was called Dai Full Pelt because he worked on the buses and drove them too fast – full pelt, hell for leather, breaking the bones and teeth of his passengers as he went. Dai was horrible. He was a monster of a man, with the ugliest mug on him you ever saw.

He had a huge head as big as a pumpkin. His hair was like the tumbleweed that blew down the streets in cowboy films: Roy Rogers, Tonto, the Lone Ranger. He had ears big as saucers and pale-blue bulgy eyes the colour of sucked gobstoppers. A nose, red and swollen and pitted with blackheads. Black bristly hairs stuck out of his nostrils, nostrils as wide as arches. His mouth was the very worst bit of him. It was a great black dirty hole where one yellow fang hung by a sticky thread.

He was married to Ruby Gittins who had been married before. And before that. She was as rough as a badger’s arse. The children weren’t allowed to go near the Gittins’s house. Except Fatty. Fatty could go where he liked.

Ruby Gittins only changed her knickers when the moon was full. They weren’t the sensible type of knickers that mams and nans wore. Not cotton double gusset, white aertex and room to breathe. They were red and black with frills on. Some had no gusset at all and needed darning.

She hung them on the washing line for all the valley to see.

“No shame at all,” said Bridgie Thomas.

“Dis bloody gustin’,” said Iffy’s nan.

“Dirty stinking old cow,” said Mrs Bunting.

They watched Dai out of the sides of their eyes. He stopped quite close to them, poked a fat slug of a finger against one hairy nostril and blew out a stringy ribbon of green snot from the other.

“Ugh!” said Bessie.

Dai changed nostrils and blew more snot.

Bessie held onto her dinner but only just.

Fatty leant close to Iffy and whispered, “Once he had a cat and it stole his dinner so he cooked it alive in the oven and then ate it. It was called Lucky.”

“Shut up, Fatty.”

“He did. Honest! He peeled off the fur and ate it with brown sauce and pickled eggs.”

“Stop it, Fatty.”

“He’s nothing but a big fat gobby git,” Fatty muttered under his breath.

“Hush up!” Bessie said. “He might hear you.”

Dai staggered on towards them until he was close enough for them to smell the beer on his breath. There was a wet patch of wee on the front of his trousers.

He glared at Bessie first. She squeaked with fright and Fatty swore he heard her tonsils hit her ribs and bounce back up.

“What you bloody gawking at, Bessie Big Drawers?”

Bessie gasped, and pulled her bunny-wool bolero up over her head.

“What you staring at?” he asked the headless Bessie.

Silence.

“What you staring at, eh?”

No answer from Bessie, just wheezing rasping noises that came from the depths of the bolero.

Dai turned on Billy. “Cat got your tongue, eh?”

Billy looked up at Dai, his eyes wide with fear, softly damp round the lashes. A lump moved up and down in his neck.

Fatty stiffened next to Iffy. She felt for his hand and took hold of it tightly.

“Just ignore him,” she said through clenched teeth.

It was her turn next.

“Got something to say have you, Sambo?”

Iffy looked down at her daps.

Sambo wasn’t a nice thing to say. He said it because she was dark. The sun never burned her no matter how hot it was.

“Damn, you’re an ugly-looking little bugger, Iffy Meredith. Can’t blame your mam for taking one look at you and running.”

Hot tears pricked at the back of her eyes, and her heart rattled in the space behind her heaving ribs. A wobble started in her lips, her throat grew tight.

It wasn’t true. Her mammy died when she was born. Nan said. Everybody knew that.

Fatty squeezed her hand tightly.

She bit her tongue, kept her trap shut.

Dai turned to Fatty. “Who are you looking at, fat guts?”

Iffy held her breath and squeezed Fatty’s sticky fingers. She prayed. Hard. Please God, don’t let him say anything.

“Don’t know. A pile of shit, I think,” Fatty muttered.

Iffy jabbed him hard with her elbow. Dai wasn’t safe to give cheek to.

“What you say?” Dai growled.

There was brown spit in both corners of his mouth and yellow crystallised bogies in his left nostril.

“I said it’s a nice day, Mr Gittins,” Fatty said, dead cool.

“Ay, well, I don’t take no bloody lip off the likes of you, Fatty Bevan. I could paste the living daylights out of you.”

“Go on then.”

Iffy held on to him like grim death.

Dai stumbled, belched loudly and the stink of rotten teeth, slimy gums, beer and tobacco wafted over them. He glared at them with his gobstopper eyes, lost interest, spat a big glob of frothy spit over the bridge and then reeled off up the hill.

“Fat-faced fart!” Fatty shouted out loud to his back.

“Haisht!” said Bessie coming up for air. She was scared he’d come back and belt them. So were they all.

Dai swayed and staggered away up the hill. If their eyes had been bullets he would have been a dead man.

The sun disappeared behind a cloud for the first time in weeks. The sky grew dark. They heard the first bashing together of thunderclouds away in the next valley, where all the men had one extra long finger so that they could pick pockets dead easy.

The mountains went from green to plum to damson. Growling clouds rolled above the valley. Lightning forked over Old Man Morgan’s hill farm.

Barny the bulldog howled. Thunder clapped and shook the valley, rattling the stones in the river bed.

Then the rain came. Fat warm splodges of rain at first. Then thinner, faster and cooler. Until down it came. Bucketing. Tamping.

Shrieking, they raced for the cover of the tree that overhung the Dentist’s Stone. Standing beneath it and watching the rain bounce off the road, they listened as it made tunes on the tin roofs of sheds and on all the upturned buckets.

Water gushed down the hill until the gutters were torrents of liquorice-black water. Lollipop sticks, sheep shit and dog ends rode the rapids until the drains were spouts and the wonky steps that led to the terraced houses were waterfalls.

And then it happened. Just like Bridgie Thomas had said it would.

It was magic. It was a curse, or a miracle. It was great. It was terrifying. They came dropping out of the dark August sky. Raindrops with legs on. Raindrops with eyes. Mad eyes, bright in the sudden afternoon gloom. Millions of them.