2003 - A Jarful of Angels (3 page)

It was too dark to see much, moonlight barely reached through the filthy windows, ice was beginning to form on the cobwebbed curtains. He took the cheap torch from his pocket, turned it on, and pointed it into the room. Its weak yellow light picked out an old table that looked as though it had a tablecloth made from clods of earth.

He jumped and nearly dropped the torch. A huge pair of glassy green and yellow eyes glared back at him from within. He steadied the torch and focussed it towards the startled eyes.

He smiled.

A scrawny tabby cat sat on the kitchen dresser, head tilted to one side looking at him curiously.

Curiosity killed the cat.

Miss Riley told them that in school. He didn’t believe it. Curiosity made you learn, made you wary.

He moved the beam of the torch round the room. The cat put up its paw and tried to catch the little arc of moving light. For a few moments Fatty continued with the game, then he shone the beam higher, out of the cat’s reach.

He sucked in his breath- The torch wobbled, and he had to use both hands to steady it.

A large pickling jar stood on the dresser between filthy cracked cups and leery-eyed Toby jugs. Inside the jar was the strangest sight he had ever seen.

“Fuckin’ Ada!” he yelped.

He switched off the torch and fled, racing down past the withered tree, over the stile and away past the Big House without stopping once.

A
gnes Medlicott woke from a deep sleep and realised that she was smiling. She lay quite still in the blissful aftermath of a lovely dream, listening to the distant chiming of the clock on the church of Santa Maria Magdalena.

She had rarely dreamed in the past ten years but tonight she had dreamed that she was back in the Big House in Wales where she had lived for many years.

In the dream she had been standing at the window in the upstairs drawing room looking down towards the humpbacked bridge that spanned the river. It was high summer and bright sunlight came in through the open window and wrapped her in its warmth. Sunlight glinted on the white statues in the garden below and the perfume from the flowers was heady, a glorious fusion of sweet peas, stocks and roses. There were other familiar smells too, the bittersweet aroma of the dark coal-rich soil, the smell of the nettles down near the river.

She could hear the sound of water gurgling lazily in the river; the humming of contented bees and the querulous call of a magpie in the kitchen gardens. Most delightfully she heard the carefree shouts of her girls calling to each other playfully somewhere in the gardens below.

Now, sitting up in bed and fully awake, she thought how happy she had been to dream of the past, how enchanted she had been to find that nothing seemed to have changed about the old house. She thought sadly that she was disappointed to be awake, to find herself in her owrrbed in her small house in Spain where she had moved after her husband’s death.

All around her the room exhaled the familiar fusty night smells that had long been her own: ancient lavender and camphor; beeswax polish and worn linen.

The window shutters were open to the night as they always were in her bedroom. Through the window she could see, above the huddled roofs of the clustered houses that a candle was alight in a window of the Convent of Santa Engracia. A wakeful nun was praying in the darkest hours. She could hear the gentle swish of the waves on the seashore and a soft breeze rattled the window. Moonlight bathed the room in a peaceful light.

Eager to return to her dreams of the past, Agnes slipped back down between the bed covers and closed her eyes, drifting easily and hopefully into sleep.

She awoke a little later in a state of absolute panic from a nightmare. Her whole body was trembling violently and her night clothes clung to her body with perspiration. Her heart was hammering painfully, every sinew in her body was taut with anxiety.

Slowly reality dawned. She told herself that it had just been a dream, a pleasant dream that had somehow evolved into a terrifying nightmare. She reached out a trembling hand for the candle on the bedside table but only succeeded in knocking it to the floor. With increasing panic she pulled back the covers and rose from the bed.

She picked up the fallen candlestick and found the matchbox. Her hands fumbled in an effort to light a match. Candle light pushed at the darkness of the room, shadows leapt, then fell, until the room was washed with an eerie light.

She felt for her spectacles on the bedside table. Hastily, she put them on.

The familiarity of the room soothed her momentarily. It was just as it always was. The rush-backed chair, the small washstand, the blue and yellow jug and bowl, the large crucifix on the flaking, whitewashed wall which loomed black as gangrene.

Her legs shook and the bones between her knees grated as she crossed the worm-chewed floorboards. When she reached the window she saw the reflection of her eyes and their intensity and brightness made her start.

Somewhere outside a dog howled, then another, until all the dogs in the village were joined in a cacophony of primeval yowling.

She heard the cock crow in the gardens of Señor Garcia’s villa and the convent bell calling the nuns to prayer. The wind banged a loose shutter in a nearby house. She tried desperately to banish the memory of the nightmare, but to no avail.

She had slipped back into the first dream and found herself again in the Big House, looking out of the window down towards the river. She had stood there for a long time, so happy to be back. It was all just as she remembered it.

Then, she had turned away from the window and with absolute dismay, saw that the walls of the drawing room were charred and blackened by fire. As she looked upwards she saw that the roof was gone, there remained only fire-ravaged beams exposed to the blue summer sky.

She had turned back again to the window. Outside the sun had disappeared behind darkening clouds. The beautiful garden had, in the space of a few seconds, been transformed into a wilderness and the statues that had stood so proudly and looked so beautiful lay fallen in the overgrown grass.

She had been startled then by the sound of someone digging in the garden. She heard the harsh noise of a spade catching against stones. A figure was over near the lilac bush.

Agnes watched, transfixed with horror. Suddenly, the figure stooped towards the ground and gave a shout of alarm.

She held her breath, her heart hammering painfully. Slowly the figure stood up, turned around and looked up towards the window where she stood. It was a man, his face partially hidden by shadow, a man staring up at her with dark, accusing eyes.

She had wanted to turn away from him but she couldn’t: she was numb with fear, hypnotised by his expression.

Slowly, the man looked back down towards the ground. Agnes followed his gaze.

At his feet in the damp black soil lay a broken skull. A tiny white skull. A long-buried, long-forgotten secret, or so she had thought.

Oh God! Wide awake now she began to sway backwards and forwards, clutching at the window sill for support. Outside the window, the wind had grown wild and the sound of the sea was alarming in its fury.

She knew with a terrible certainty that it was time to return and face up to the truth.

W
inter came to the town. It was the coldest winter they had known. The snow came one November night, billowing up the steep-sided valley in a freezing white mist.

Iffy woke early. She opened her eyes just a crack, then closed them quickly against the myriad coloured lights that seeped through the worn patchwork quilt: rosy pink; blue; bright gingham and dowdy Paisley; polka-dot and check.

Beyond the kaleidoscope of the quilt, the room was still and strangely silent.

Iffy sniffed the world outside the quilt. The air was sharp, freezing on her nose. She burrowed back into the warmth of the bed. Then put one ear out. It buzzed with cold. She tunnelled back into the warm again. Out again, nose first sniffing like a dog.

The smell of bacon fat slipped through the parlour and under the bedroom door, making her mouth water.

One cheek and an ear out now.

Out in the parlour the clock whirred and tinked seven tinks.

A subtle shift of the early morning light pricked at her eyes and she felt at once that somehow the world was different. An intangible difference. A faint fizzing of unexplained excitement stirred in her belly.

She left the comfort of the bed, hop-footed it across the ancient green lino that splintered beneath her small feet like thin ice. She stood shivering by the washstand. In the blue and white striped washbowl a spider was spread-eagled in ice. Milky light seeped mysteriously through the curtains. Jack Frost had worked a doubler during the night.

She pulled back the curtains. They were stiff as boards, pleated with frost, freezing to the touch. The window was frosted with diamonds and doily patterns.

She breathed hard and hot on the thickened glass and scraped furiously with her nails until her fingers turned to indigo and pink and hummed with the cold.

She saw the world through a jagged peephole. A world that had tilted overnight towards the North Pole. It was a soft smudged town now, with no hard black edges, reshaped in the dark secret hours of the night. The roofs of the houses slumbered beneath billowing snow quilts. Soft and smooth and spotless.

The rutted road was gone. In its place an ivory highway led down to the now invisible hump-backed bridge. Crystal spears dripped from the trees and the groaning guttering of the houses. Below in the valley the river was a twist of frosted glass.

She wondered if polar bears and penguins would come sliding over the Sirhowy Mountain and would there be Eskimos walking on snowshoes like tennis racquets, slipping down to the Cop to buy candles for their dinner?

She flew through the lightening parlour and into the kitchen where Nan was stoking the fire as if it were an engine on an uphill climb.

Iffy danced up and down in front of the fire.

“You’ll have to hang on,” Nan said. “You can’t get out to the lav. If 11 be frozen over.”

But she didn’t need to wee. It was excitement that made her hop up and down. A buzzing of excitement that fizzed over the tendons at the back of her knees, like telephone messages on wires.

She drew back the bolts and opened the back door. An eye-aching white bank of snow, reaching up past her head, way up past the latch…

“Shut that bloody door, Iffy. You’ll have the knackers off the cat.”

Sometimes Nan could be very vulgar.

No way out of the back door. There was no going anywhere. Not even to Bessie’s.

No point anyway. Bessie’s mam would keep her indoors for days in case she got lost forever under a snowdrift.

Billy would be snowed up in the baker’s shop where even the huge red-hot ovens would fail to thaw a way out of there.

There was a scrabbling noise outside the back door, then someone cursing loudly. A fist battering at the door.

“Suffering Angels!” Nan said. “Who in God’s name would be out and about on a morning like this!”

Fatty heard his father calling out from his bedroom across the landing. “Give us a hand with these bastard trousers.”

Fatty played with the thought of ignoring the voice and legging it out of bed and away down the stairs and out of the house.

“I know you’re in there. Shift your fuckin’ arse in here, boy.”

Fatty sighed, got up, slipped on his red sandals and crossed the freezing landing. He peeped through the crack in the door. His father, half sat, half lay across the bed, his trousers twisted about his bloated legs. Fatty looked round the room for the belt. It was way over by the window out of harm’s way. A large, brown leather belt with a spiteful buckle. He’d felt the cut of it on his skin many times.

He crept towards the bed, nerves raw. His father opened one red-rimmed eye and glared at him.

“About bastard time too.”

In a flash he’d helped the trousers up over the blue-veined legs, over the stained baggy underwear. He’d held his breath against the stink, piss and worse, beery sweat and stiffened socks.

His father coughed, spluttered, struggled to sitting.

“Give us a fag.”

Fatty picked up the packet of Players from the floor. He slipped one out. His father took it between his wet lips. Fatty flicked back the lighter’s lid. He ran his thumb down the wheel, the wick lit and a warm paraffin smell filled his nostrils. The cigarette glowed in the gloomy room and his father set to with a racking cough, unable to speak.

Fatty flew while the going was good. Down the stairs and out of the door, except that when he opened the door his way was barred by a wall of white snow.

In the living room his mother was sleeping. She was still dressed in last night’s clothes, her green tweed coat and a battered old fur hat. He stood looking down at her. Sleep had softened her face making it almost pretty again, like it used to be when he was little. In the good days when the old man had been away in the army. Away for so long they were able to forget he even existed. Before she drank. He touched her hand gently. It was freezing. For a second, even though she slept, she squeezed his hand, a warm little touch that reminded him of how it had once been. She was a wreck now, but he loved her, couldn’t imagine how life would ever be bearable without her. He took down the heavy old army greatcoat that hung on the back of the scullery door and draped it across her, tucking it in around her body. He couldn’t light a fire because the coal shed had been empty for weeks. Underneath the kitchen sink he found a box full of old clothes. He dressed as best he could and then launched himself into the drift of snow outside the door.

He grew scarlet in the face with the effort of moving through the deep snow from Coronation Row down to the road that led past the Big House. No one else was about. Despite the cold, his body was hot. He felt more alive than ever before.

He was out of the house. He’d escaped! He felt full to his skin with bursting. It was pure pleasure.