The Likes of Us (34 page)

The Assailants

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The ten-tonner with the man working under it by the glow of the wire-caged inspection light stood, parked pretty, on the almost empty patch of waste ground.

Brian had left Aberdeen late yesterday, after a half-day's search for a return load, and limped into here in the small hours, to spend what was left of the night in searching for the fault in his engine and repairing it as best he could with the tools to hand. Now he was done. He pulled himself out with a grunt and stood upright, wiping his hands on a piece of rag. The sky had lightened quite quickly while he was under the vehicle and he glanced about him at the shabby streets of silent houses and wondered whether he should break the quiet with a trial start of the engine.

He decided against it. Let them have the rest of their sleep till the early traffic began. The engine would get him home. He was good with engines and he would never have left the motor repair shop had his boss, Nevinson, not driven him beyond the limit of his good nature and Joyce, in temper, persuaded him to stick up for his rights. The lorries were something that came his way almost immediately and Joyce had got him to take them as a temporary measure while he looked round for another place. But he'd been driving for a couple of years now; he was a steady man and he didn't like to chop and change.

There was a raw dampness in the air and it chilled him as, the concentration and effort of his task over, he stood there beside the lorry, thinking about what he ought to do, the rag working in the almost unconscious movements of his hands. Finally he closed the cowling over the engine and took his donkey jacket out of the cab before locking the door and walking with steady strides, a big man, out of the park. The sodium lights on their tall, bird's-neck standards of concrete were switching off in batches all the way down the long main road into the city, the pink glow of the fading filaments lingering against the pallid dawn sky. Brian crossed over towards a house next to a small general shop. He had his hand on the doorknob when an approaching motor bike cleaved the quiet he had been reluctant to disturb with a bandsaw rasp of brutal unsilenced sound. He stood for a moment and watched it go by, the black-clad rider crouched low over short swept-back handlebars, and his mouth moved with mild derision to frame the one word ‘cowboy' before he opened the door and went into the house.

 

The sound of the door brought Mrs Sugden out of the bathroom and down onto the half-landing, a thick blue dressing gown over her nightclothes.

‘Good heavens, it's you, Brian. I thought you were in bed and asleep hours since. Have you been out there all this time?'

‘It took longer than I expected.'

‘I should think so. And me lying up there half the night with the door unlocked for anybody to walk in that fancied.'

‘I was only across the street.'

‘With your head stuck in that engine and taking no notice of anything else.'

She came down and passed him to go into the kitchen. He followed and watched her move the draught regulator on the coke-burning stove in the fireplace.

‘I shouldn't ha' thought you'd be so timid,' he said. ‘I mean, all the fellers 'at sleep here…'

‘I can size them up before I let 'em in,' Mrs Sugden said. ‘But I can't do owt about somebody who walks in off the street in the middle of the night.'

Brian's lips moved in a faint smile. He didn't take her complaint seriously. He knew she was more concerned that he should have spent all that time across there in the cold when he could have been in a warm bed. She was like that with him; she thought that his nature saddled him with more inconvenience and discomfort than was necessary.

‘Sit yourself down and get warm. I'll cook you some breakfast as soon as I've got dressed.'

He moved across the room and sank into a fireside chair, which had a loosely draped shroud-like cover over it to protect the upholstery from greasy overalls, and stretched out his legs towards the stove as Mrs Sugden left the room and went back upstairs. His presence in the kitchen made him the privileged of the privileged; for Mrs Sugden gave food and shelter with care, selecting only those she liked the look of, and most of the men she took in ate in the bare dining-room across the hall, with its formica-topped tables and easily scrubbed lino-covered floor. She had to be careful: he understood that. There were loudmouths in any pull-in, ready to brag about the extra comforts to be found along the road, and as a widow still, in her forties, handsome and well set-up, her motive in offering beds to men here today and gone tomorrow would, to some of them, appear more than the simple one of augmenting the living she made from the little general shop next door.

You had, indeed, Brian found, to be careful yourself as you moved about the country. Some men courted trouble in their readiness to accept casual pleasure. There was the place in Liverpool where that simple-faced teenaged girl rubbed her breasts against any man she could get close to, going with some of them behind the vehicles in the lorry park when she had a few minutes free from waiting on tables. He'd an idea she was younger than her well-developed body and the sly carnality of her glance suggested. Sooner or later somebody would knock her up, or the police move in and start asking questions. So Brian had taken warning and not gone back. Then there were the birds you met along the road, hanging about the caf
é
s waiting for lifts. Brian left them to the men who liked the possibility of a bit on the side in exchange for a ride, or the others whose only motive in helping them on their way was good nature. Singly or two together, they were all potential trouble and he kept clear of them.

His eyelids drooped in the rising heat from the stove and he woke some time later to the sizzle and smell of bacon frying on the cooker. Mrs Sugden was looking at him.

‘Now then. You've just saved me from having to wake you. Your breakfast's nearly ready.'

‘How long have I been asleep?'

‘Oh, three-quarters of an hour, maybe. I did think at one time of leaving you; but when you've got some breakfast into you you can get off up into a comfortable bed.'

He sat up and knuckled his eyelids.

‘I've just been thinking. I'll have me breakfast and get on me way.'

She stared at him. ‘But you've had no sleep, man.'

‘It's all right. I'll make it up later.'

‘They're poor employers 'at won't allow a man some leeway when he's had a breakdown. It's not your fault you had trouble with your lorry, is it? Now you're going to drive all that way with no more than a cat-nap. You're not safe on the road, man.'

‘I shall be all right. I was thinking, y'see. It just occurred to me, if I set off now I can cut across and drop me load in Carlisle and get back down home before Joyce goes out tonight. Then Gloria won't have to go next door to Mrs Miles's.'

Mrs Sugden's head tilted back so that she seemed to aim the disapproval of her glance along her nose.

‘Oh, that's it. She's still messing about with the Houdini feller, is she?'

‘Leonardo, he calls himself,' Brian said. ‘That's his stage name. His real name's Leonard. Leonard Draper.'

Mrs Sugden turned to the cooker and spoke over her shoulder: ‘Leonardo, Houdini, or Uncle Tom Cobleigh. I don't know as his name makes any difference.'

‘She enjoys it. It gets her out and meeting people. What with me being away so much.'

‘Aye, with that bairn pushed from pillar to post, and when you are at home you've got to sit on your own while she's out cavorting on a stage with a conjuror... You'd better get your hands washed. It's ready.'

He got up and went to the sink, standing next to her as he ran water, and fingered grease-remover out of the tin she kept there. ‘He's a hypnotist mainly. That's his big thing.'

‘He seems to have hypnotized your wife all right. All I can say is, some women are lucky to have husbands 'at'll stand for it. My Norman wouldn't have had it. He thought a woman's place was in the home and I was content to abide by that. We were never lucky enough to have any kiddies, and I didn't take boarders in in them days, either; but I'd plenty to keep me occupied in making a nice home for him.'

He moved his shoulders in embarrassment. He regretted having told her about Joyce and Draper in that quiet conversation some months ago. It was from this that she had made her quick summing-up of him, fixing him immediately as a man who could be put upon. And, that lesson learned, he should have held his tongue just now and left without giving her more ammunition to fire at the wife she'd never met in her self-appointed role of defender of him, who was too soft for his own good. For she didn't understand, couldn't know. She was, in her own way, like some of the drivers he heard talking, men who were always bragging about some point scored, some small victory won over the missus; as though marriage were a never-ending battle in which any concession was a weakness to be exploited. It wasn't like that with him and Joyce.

‘Anyway,' Mrs Sugden said, ‘I'd 've thought she'd see enough people working in the shop all day.'

‘That's not the same thing. She likes being on the stage. It's... it's glamorous to her.'

‘I'd give her glamorous. Showing herself off in front of all manner of folk. Her with a husband and a growing bairn.'

‘Aw, you're old fashioned, Mrs Sugden. You think everybody should be like you.'

‘Aye, I talk like your mother might, don't I? When there's less than ten years between us.' She put the plate of bacon and eggs on the table and clamped the fingers of one hand onto a loaf of bread, the knife poised in the other. ‘Still, I like to think I've picked up a bit of sense over the years.'

‘I suppose you'd have me stop her going out to work as well wouldn't you?'

‘Why not? It'd make sense. Working for that feller during the day and going all manner of places with him at night. She must see ten times more of him than she does you.'

‘It's not every night. And you can't be suggesting there's
–
'

‘I'm suggesting nothing. I'm just seeing a carry-on that isn't all it should be. Come on, get it down before it goes cold.'

‘Maybe I'm not all I should be,' Brian said.

‘You what?' Her gaze came directly onto him again, the knife arrested this time halfway in its cut through the bread.

‘Well, if I can't earn enough to keep us in all we want, and I'm only at home half the time, can you wonder she has to go out to work and wants a bit of... of excitement in her life?'

‘Why, there's many a woman 'ud…' She stopped, as though on the verge of saying too much, and severed the slice from the loaf with two heavy strokes of the knife. ‘What are you always underselling yourself for, you big daft lump?' Her voice fell as she turned away, and what she said came in a dismissive mutter, as if to end the conversation: ‘You must be a daft lump or you'd have told me to mind my own business by now.'

Yes, he would have to do that – or stop coming here. Which would be a pity, because it was a fine place, the best he knew. He glanced at her back briefly but she said nothing more. He took the slice of bread and dipped a corner of it into the soft yolk of the egg on his plate and began to eat.

 

‘You'll be all right, then, Gloria, now your daddy's here.'

The little girl sat up close to Brian on the sofa, her eyes fixed on the bluish square of the television screen. A sudden loud burst of music made the picture tremble, the figures on it wavering as though seen through disturbed water.

‘Oh, it's always doing that,' Gloria said. ‘It spoils all the best parts. Can't you twiddle a knob or something, Daddy?'

‘I've adjusted it all I can,' Brian said. ‘It must be the aerial.'

‘It's the set that's clapped out,' Joyce put in. ‘It's time we had a new one.' She was looking distractedly round the room. ‘Where did I put my hairbrush? You haven't had it, have you, Gloria? I'm talking to you, Gloria.'

‘No, Mummy.'

Joyce began moving cushions. ‘Here it is.' She stood on the hearthrug and brushed her hair in the glass over the fireplace. Among the pale gold were some strands that shone like silver as the light caught them. They were the lingering tints of childhood, not a sign of advancing years, but she was self-conscious about them and sometimes spoke of dyeing the whole to a uniform blonde. Brian was against it.

‘I can't see, Mummy.'

‘You'll have to do without for a minute. I'm late as it is.'

‘Where is it tonight?' Brian asked.

‘Forest Green Club.'

‘Have they a good audience?'

‘I don't know. If
it's like most of the other workingmen's clubs all they want is singers and comedians.'

‘Can I look at your costume, Mummy?' Gloria said.

‘Oh, Gloria. It's every time I go out. You've seen it many a time, and I'm late, love.'

‘Oh, come on, Mummy, just let me see it.'

‘Well, if I do you'll promise to be good and not give your daddy any trouble about going to bed?'

‘She's never any trouble. Are you, poppet?'

Joyce slipped off her skirt to reveal the glitter-finish stage costume, cut high up each groin to display the full length of her splendid legs in nylon mesh tights. She put one hand on her hip, throwing up the other one and turning slightly on one foot. ‘Ta-rah!' At the same time she shot a quick sideways glance at Brian's face as though to detect any sign of disapproval. It was odd how the costume always seemed more excessive here in the confines of the house than it ever did on stage, making her self-conscious about this private display of limbs which, later, she would show without qualms to an audience of strangers.