Read 2003 - A Jarful of Angels Online
Authors: Babs Horton
“You bin inna de wars,” Mr Zeraldo said raising his black eyebrows.
Fatty looked a sight, as if he had walked out of a jungle after years of being lost. He was covered in spit-licked dock leaves. His filthy, scratched face was a mass of swelling bumps, black mud was smeared across every bare bit of his body.
“I had a fight with a gorilla, Mr Zeraldo!” Fatty said, grinning. “I look bad but you should see the state of him!”
“It wasn’t a gorilla, it was a goose,” said Bessie.
They ignored her.
Billy scrabbled in his pockets, stretched up on tippy toes and put some money on the counter of the van. He pointed at the board with the faded pictures of lollies, cornets and tubs.
He held up four small fingers.
“Foura ninety nines, eh?”
Billy smiled and nodded.
“You wunna da pools?” Mr Zeraldo asked Billy.
Billy smiled, his face full of dimples, and shook his head from side to side. He held his tiny hands up. Five fingers on one hand and five on the other.
“Data how mucha you won?”
Billy shook his head again.
Then Iffy twigged. “It’s his birthday, Mr Zeraldo. He’s ten today.”
They stood together on the bridge in the growing shadows looking at Billy. A breeze rustled through the graveyard trees, sheep bleated up on the darkening mountain. Far away Barny the bulldog howled and rattled his rusty chains.
“Happy a birthday to you…” sang Mr Zeraldo.
They joined in,
“Squashed a tomatoes and a stew
Bread and a butter in ze gutter
Happy a birthday too oo oo oo yooooo!”
Mr Zeraldo drowned them all out. He had a huge, beautiful voice even though he was only little. His voice hit the windows of Carmel Chapel and’put the last of the orange fire out. His voice bounced back at them. It shook the trees and echoed under the bridge and chased after the river down the valley.
Billy bit his lip shyly. His huge brown eyes were wet and shiny.
Billy’s birthday.
The same day as that awful thing had happened to his brother. The wheel turned…drop off…someone ran for his mam. They carried him away in brown paper bags.
Iffy didn’t want to think about it.
Everyone clapped when they’d finished singing and Mr Zeraldo gave Billy his money back and gave them all free ice creams. He was dead kind.
“You buy yourself some-a-thing nice!”
“Thanks, Mr Zeraldo,” Fatty and Iffy said for Billy.
Mr Zeraldo drove slowly away over the bridge and the clapped-out old van creaked and rattled its way back towards town.
Fatty made them wait until he’d finished his ice cream and licked his lips.
“Bloody hell, I thought I’d had it!”
“We heard the gunshot.”
“Who was it who fired at you?”
“What? Nobody fired at me.”
“But we heard the bang.”
“Oh that! Probably somebody out shooting rabbits or foxes.”
“What happened then?”
“What’s it like in there?”
“Did anybody see you?”
“Hang on, give us a chance.”
“Are there statues, Fatty?”
“Yep.”
“Were they…you know?”
“Naked? Yep.”
“Completely naked?”
“Yep. Starkers. You can see everything.”
“Everything?”
“Bums and titties!”
Bessie looked away, blushed from the knees up.
“And fannies.”
Bessie gasped. So did Iffy.
“And one of them’s got no head.”
“No head?”
“No. Someone must have chopped it off.”
“Did anybody see you?”
“No. I seen her though.”
“You never!”
“She was having dinner. I could see her through the big window. Very posh. Lah di bleeding dah. There was candles in silver sticks.”
“What was she eating?” asked Bessie.
Fatty rolled his eyes.
“Fried liver and kidneys. Human ones.”
“Honest?”
“Don’t be so dull. I couldn’t see what she was eating.”
Fatty was as brave as a lion. Iffy couldn’t imagine not being scared of the rats and the dark and the geese and dogs and the guns.
“Did you see the fishpond?”
“Yep.”
“Could you see to the bottom of it?”
“No, cause all of a sudden that fucking great goose come flying at me – ”
“Fatty Bevan!”
“Sorry, Bessie. I’m going to go in again, though, when the moon is full and I’m gonna see if what they say is true about old Medlicott coming out of the pond!” Stark staring bonkers he was.
Will found his way to the bridge, a small hump-backed bridge spanning the river, a fast-flowing river now after the weeks of heavy rain. He felt strange standing there. He looked down into the water. He felt as if the past had conjured itself up again and wrapped itself about him. He thought that if he shut his eyes and wished, he could be drawn back into that long-gone summer with all its secrets.
He closed his eyes and leant back against the parapet. All around him was birdsong, the yammering of a disconsolate magpie, the querulous caw of a crow. A lone frog croaking down in the long waving grass, the sound of organ music drifted up from Carmel Chapel.
He opened his eyes. Rising up the hill, opposite where he stood were rows of identical red-brick council houses, houses with small uniform gardens and rotary washing lines. There were satellite dishes, television aerials and smokeless chimneys, vertical blinds and double glazing. In bedroom windows there were posters of football stars and rock singers.
The last time he was here there had been terraces of ironworkers’ cottages with whitewashed walls and crumbling chimneys from which smoke curled into the blue skies, even though the weather was hot. There were sash windows that rattled in the wind, faded flowered curtains blowing in a draught, crucifixes and palm crosses in the windows of some of the cottages.
He turned his back on the houses and looked down into the water, absent-mindetly picking at the moss that grew thickly on the side of the bridge. It was soft and spongy, richly green, and came away easily in his hands.
He sighed deeply and was about to move away when something caught his eye. He had uncovered the outline of a letter scratched in the concrete. He pulled away more moss, until he was looking at something he’d missed the last time he’d stood here. Not that it was of any importance but it gave him an eerie feeling just the same.
Lorence Bevan
William Jonh Edwerds
Elizabeth Gwendlin Meredith
Elibazeth Roof Tranter
After all these years the names were still there in the concrete.
The past was encroaching into the future, wrapping itself tightly around him, pulling him back to that distant summer, the hottest on record…
It had been unnaturally hot for weeks, although the weathermen on the wireless were warning of an end to the heat wave and thunderstorms were forecast. As he had sat in his office that afternoon he had hoped that the weathermen were right. The heat was overpowering, sapping the strength. He had been about to leave for home when the telephone had rung.
Sergeant Rodwell had sounded nervous, out of his depth. At first, Will had thought it was just a routine call: a child had gone missing up in one of the valley towns. He’d thought at the time that it was probably some kid who’d had a telling off for breaking a window or been given a pasting for stealing money from their mother’s purse. It would be a frightened kid who had decided to hide away for a bit. Give their parents a scare and you could guarantee that a day’s worry would assure them a warm, tearful homecoming. A storm’ln a teacup that would be cleared up in a few hours, all over by the following morning. But it hadn’t, and thousands of mornings had passed and it still wasn’t over.
Agnes Medlicott tilted her head backwards and sipped her wine and, as she put down her glass, a movement out in the garden caught her eye. A small boy, a very scruffy small boy, was emerging from the bushes at the far end of the garden. A curly haired boy, as brown-skinned as the Spanish boys from the village where she had lived for so long.
He stood still for some seconds, looking around furtively and then tiptoed across the lawn. She was about to ring the bell for Sandicock but thought better of it. The boy stopped in front of one of the statues. Maria Elena. He looked it up and down, taking in the whole of its nakedness with his greedy eyes. She reached again for the bell but once again her hand hovered, unwilling to take her eyes off the boy.
The statue was a good six inches taller than he was, but he reached up and, with one of the gentlest movements she had ever seen, touched the face, a delicate stroke of the cheek with his fingers. Then he stretched up on tiptoes and planted the softest of kisses upon the stone lips. The sleek brown muscles of his calves were taut with effort, the thin ankle bones almost delicate in contrast to the battered sandals. The nape of his neck was swathed with tight curls. She swallowed hard. He wasn’t the child she was looking for, though she would have liked to sculpt this funny, grubby little boy with his sad, sweet gestures. He was a dirty cherubic figure and quite exquisitely beautiful.
The boy stepped back from the statue and crossed the lawn, looking about him, keeping low to the ground. When he got near to the fishpond he knelt down and bent his head to look into the dark, murky waters.
Agnes Medlicott rang the bell.
Iffy kept a check on the moon. A half moon. A three-quarter moon. It grew slowly each night. She stood and watched it from from the upstairs bedroom window.
Down past the bridge, the graves in Carmel graveyard glowed in the moonlight. There were no signs of the graves cracking open yet. There were no skeletons clanking up the hill to find her. No more warnings sent from God. No locusts or famines or boils. No more frogs, leprosy or lightning bolts.
But one day soon when the moon grew to its full size the pond would start to stir and the bones of old Dr Medlicott would begin to rattle, the statues to move…and Fatty was going to crawl through the pipe to see if it was true.
He was mental.
Will stood on the river bank just beneath the bridge. It was damp, and a cold wind swept up the valley. It seemed like such a short time ago that he’d stood in almost the same spot. Then, the sun had been beating down on his head, Rodwell had been standing beside him sweating profusely in his uniform. He remembered that he’d been astounded by the sound of croaking frogs, as if hundreds of them were thronging in the grass. He’d stood looking down at the clothes that had been abandoned. A small pile of clothes laid neatly in the parched grass. He’d picked them up, turned them over in his hands. They were warm from the sun and smelled very faintly of Fairy soap and lavender. A pile of kids’ clothes but, strangely, there was no sign of any shoes.
Rodwell had told him that an old woman had raised the alarm. A Miss Bridget Thomas who’d been on her way home from Mass when she’d spotted the clothes. She’d been in quite a state apparently, ranting on to Sergeant Rodwell about God paying people back. Rodwell had to call a doctor for her, he’d told Will that she was a bit short-changed upstairs.
Now, forty-odd years later Will stood in the long wet grass wondering what could have happened to the child. They’d thought immediately of drowning, of course. Most summers, particularly hot ones, claimed the lives of children tempted into the rivers and the mountain ponds. But the river levels had been very low after the weeks of hot weather, there hadn’t been enough of a current to carry a body any distance downstream, although they’d checked the deeper pools further downriver but there was no sign of a child alive or dead.
There had been no sign of a struggle having taken place on the river bank and if some maniac had attacked or killed the child, God forbid, then surely the attacker wouldn’t have left the tell-tale pile of clothes lying there to be discovered?
Days had passed and they’d been mystified that a child could apparently just disappear into thin air.
News had travelled through the town and three witnesses had come forward. If they were to be believed then they could establish that at between approximately three o’clock and four o’clock on the day in question, the child had most definitely been alive.
Will had interviewed the first witness. A Mr David Gittins, a middle-aged bus driver who lived locally. He stank heavily of sweat and stale beer and there was a peculiar smell of scorched cloth about him. He’d sat down gingerly in a chair and Will had wondered if piles troubled him. Will had thought him a shifty-looking bugger and an incredibly ugly bastard to boot. If Will was right, he probably had a bit of past form did Mr David Gittins.
They’d checked the records. He’d been had up on a couple of charges of burglary when he was a young man, urinating in a public place, handling stolen goods, but nothing other than that.
David Gittins claimed that he’d been driving the bus into town and, as he’d turned the corner by the rec, he’d nearly run over the child. It was about three o’clock, just before or just after, he’d heard the town clock chime the hour.
“Just come out of fuc – flippin’ nowhere…must of jumped over the stile and run right out into the bloody road, not looking right or left, lucky not to have been killed I can tell you.”
It was a Sunday night. Billy, Iffy and Bessie met up on the bridge after Iffy had been to Mass with her grandparents and Bessie had been to evening chapel. Billy always went to early morning Mass. Fatty was dead lucky, he never had to go at all.
Voices drifted up from underneath the bridge. They all stopped still, kept quiet, just in case of ambush. Ambushes were always a worry, especially when Fatty wasn’t around to help out. Sometimes kids from other parts of town hid under the bridge and waited. Then slimy mud bombs might be lobbed up in the air, coming down like fat rain. Any kids unlucky enough to be on top of the bridge would be splattered from head to foot with sticky black mud and weeds. And then there was all hell to be had at home when it wasn’t even their fault.
They listened. Ears cocked. No sound of a lookout’s whistle.