2003 - A Jarful of Angels (22 page)
Read 2003 - A Jarful of Angels Online
Authors: Babs Horton
“Ch-Charlie’s.”
“Ay, damn I can see that now, round the eyes. Wicked boy, he was. He give me a kiss one New Year’s Eve in the Mechanics. Good-hearted he was, mind. He give me a pound note once, bless him…down under the bridge. Sad about him. Not the sort you’d have thought would do himself…Now, this’ll get it going!”
She waved a bottle at Iffy. A bottle full of pink-coloured water. She popped the cork. An evil smell rose from the bottle. Iffy swallowed hard. It was probably deadly poison and she was going to force her to drink it.
Iffy shut her mouth tight. Dulcie chucked a great slosh of the pink stuff over the coals in the range.
Iffy managed to light a match. She pushed it gingerly towards the papers and the few lumps of coal in the grate.
Whoosh!
A roaring and rushing noise filled the room. Wax flew out of her ears. Wee escaped from her bladder. Her screams hit the rafters, so did her eyebrows. She was out of there in a flash.
She heard Dulcie the lunatic laughing somewhere behind her in a cloud of smoke.
Iffy ran and, as she ran, she thought angrily that her dad would never have kissed an ugly old thing like Dulcie Davies.
She reached the end of Iron Row panting and sweating, her face as hot as hell. She ran and ran as if the devil himself was behind her.
Bessie was waiting halfway down the next road.
“Why didn’t you help me?” Iffy sobbed. “It was all your fault. If you hadn’t stared at those two girls…”
Bessie didn’t answer, but screamed and then gawped with her mouth wide open.
“Why didn’t you help me? She could have killed me.”
Bessie started crying. “Your face is all black and there’s bits of you missing!” she said.
Iffy left her there catching flies in her mouth. She ran all the way home without stopping. She wouldn’t wait for Bessie, who couldn’t keep up on her lucky-not-to-snap legs.
Nan looked up as she hurtled into the kitchen.
“Jeevrey fathers! What in God’s name have you been up to, girl!”
Iffy told her.
Nan gave her murder. “What the hell were you thinking of, going in there in the first place! Dulcie Davies is a bloody lunatic, mun. I’ve told you often enough! You’re lucky you didn’t get killed.”
She wiped the grime from Iffy’s face with a warm flannel and trimmed her singed fringe with nail scissors.
“It’ll take weeks to grow back. You look a bloody sight! Dopey ‘aporth! I told you to keep out of there! Don’t listen, that’s your trouble!”
She put cream where Iffy’s eyebrows used to be. And she kissed her after she’d stopped being angry.
But she kept her in all the next day.
Will stood outside the Big House looking through the rusting gates. There was a padlocked chain-to keep the gates shut, but the chain was long and with a little bit of jiggling Will was able to squeeze through into the garden.
The house was derelict, the roof cracked open, blackened beams exposed to the sky. The high arched windows were nailed across with wooden slats.
The once well-tended lawns had long since disappeared. The grass was coarse and waist high. Dandelions and nettles grew in abundance.
Organ music drifted up from Carmel Chapel.
“Shit!”
Brambles.
He bent down gingerly, feeling the scratches on his flesh. He winced, the pain between his shoulders was more acute than usual.
Something caught his eye in the grass. He pulled back the layers of overgrown weeds and saw the nose first, then the sightless eyes, then an open mouth. A head severed from the body.
“And what the fuck do you think you’re up to!”
Will jumped with fright, his heart raced and as he struggled to his feet his spectacles slipped from his nose.
A man stood in the long grass staring at him. A man with his arms around the neck of a girl…a naked girl.
“Can’t you read?” the man said. “Keep out. Can’t make it much plainer than that, can I?”
Will kept silent.
He had a terrible urge to laugh at the absurdity of the situation. Just for a moment, without his spectacles he had thought the girl was real.
The man looked brazenly at him, a glint of challenge in his eyes. He took his arms from around the statue and let her fall with a heavy thud into the long grass.
Will, his glasses back in place, stared back at a thick-set handsome man, with a large red splash across one cheek, a strawberry birthmark.
“Little beauty, isn’t she? Now what do you want?”
“I’m sorry for trespassing. I was just hoping to take a look for old times’ sake.”
“Not from round here, are you?”
“No, not any more, but I spent a fair bit of time here in the past. I didn’t mean to cause any offence, old policemen never die.”
The man’s eyes narrowed.
“In the force, are you?”
“Not any more. Retired.”
“So what’s so fascinating about this old place?”
“I came here once, years ago. Sat just over there.” He pointed across the jungle of garden towards the dilapidated house. “I remembered the statues and wanted to take a look.”
“Some proper beauties. The old doctor had a fondness for statues, naked ones mainly…bit of a dirty old sod, by all accounts.”
“The gardens were beautiful when I was here last.”
“Well, they will be again in a few years time…a bit different though. I’ve bought the place, I start work in a few weeks. Mervyn Prosser, builder.”
The man held out his hand to Will. Will shook the hand and felt the enormous strength of the fellow.
“Going to build a pool here for the kids. They’re grown up a bit now, grandchildren in a few years, no doubt. I’m gonna dig up that ugly old fishpond, get rid of these bloody old statues. First thing my wife said to me, “Get shot of them spooky old things, Mervyn.””
Will cringed silently.
“Got big plans for the house, double glazing, weights room, Jacuzzi, pine kitchen…”
It occurred to Will that this man would be about the same age as the lost child.
“My wife…she didn’t really want me to buy it, but she came round when I showed her the plans. I told her, I said, you won’t know the place when I’ve finished with it.” He cocked his head in the direction of Carmel Chapel. “That’s my wife you can hear playing the organ over in the chapel. Practises every day. Very talented lady.”
“I can hear that,” Will said.
“Tell you what, call in and see her one morning. I’ll tell her to expect you. Come round for some tea.”
“Really, I don’t want to put you to any trouble.”
“Tell you the truth, I’d be glad if you did. You could tell her how beautiful the Big House used to be, might make her a bit more keen about things.”
“Thanks,” Will said, but he felt less than enthusiastic.
Iffy was up at the kitchen table rubbing lard into where her eyebrows had been because Fatty had told her it would make them grow back quicker. Grancha was drinking tea behind the
Argus
. He always got behind the newspaper when Winnie Jones came in. He couldn’t bear her. She lived further down Inkerman, near Bessie. She had a husband who kept pigeons and a son who had gone to Australia and never ever wrote. She was always on the cadge. Cups of sugar, a couple of slices of bread, fags, holy water.
Nan poured tea for Winnie Jones. Fussell’s milk. Four sugars.
“Someone broke into Mrs Clancy’s parlour and pinched her budgerigar,” said Winnie taking out her top teeth and slipping them into the pocket in her apron. Iffy looked away in disgust.
“There’s a funny thing to pinch,” said Nan, banging down the teapot on the oilcloth.
“Ay, wouldn’t make much of a meal for a family would it?” Grancha said, his breath rustling the newspaper.
Iffy peeped at him over the paper to see if he was joking. His face was like a poker.
“Mr Meredith, you are a one!” lisped Winnie, her mouth puckered up with sweet tea.
“Take no notice of him, Iffy!”
“There’s been a spate of it,” said Winnie helping herself to a fifth spoon of sugar.
“Pinching budgies?” Iffy asked.
“No. Breaking into people’s houses and stealing. They took Mrs Edwards’s rib of beef from the pantry and the clock off the mantelpiece!” Winnie said.
“Never to God,” Nan said into her cup.
“And Mrs Tudge had her knickers pinched off the washing line last week.”
Grancha laughed. “Must have been desperate!”
“Oy!” Nan threw him a dirty look.
“Mind, you could clothe a family from Mrs Tudge’s knickers if you was handy with a needle.”
“Oy!” said Nan again.
“When Mrs Tudge hangs her knickers on the line you’d think they’d put the clocks back.”
“Pack it in,” Nan said and tried to sound cross, but Iffy knew she wanted to laugh.
Iffy thought her grancha was very funny.
Sometimes Iffy made jokes without knowing it. Once when Nan was talking about Mrs Tranter, she said, “Whatever anyone says about Mrs Tranter being a funny old cow, she’s spotless. You could eat your dinner off her floor,” and Iffy had said, “Why? Haven’t they got any plates?” Grancha had fallen off his chair laughing and kept saying over and over, “Haven’t they got any plates?” like the needle had got stuck on the gramophone. Iffy still didn’t get what was so funny.
“Poor Mrs Tudge,” said Winnie. “She’ve had her fair share of hardship this last few months what with Lally and that lazy arsed son of hers.”
“What’s up with Lally?” Grancha said.
“Your eyesight wants testing I fancy,” said Nan pouring more tea.
“I haven’t seen much of Lally lately.”
“No, she’s been away for a bit.”
Nan looked hard at Grancha, nodding towards Iffy who pretended she wasn’t interested.
“Where’s she been?”
Nan coughed. “A bun in the oven.”
“Never to God! Poor little dab. Who the hell done that to the little gel?”
“Your guess is as good as mine, but the talk is it was the same one as put a bun in Hilary Tranter’s oven all them years ago.”
“The dirty old bas – ”
“Not in front of Iffy!”
Grown-ups talked arse backwards sometimes. So what if someone had put a bun in Lally Tudge’s oven. It was quite nice of them, Iffy thought, especially after having to give her baby away and all that.
“Guess what?” said Winnie, helping herself to more tea without being asked. “Mrs Tudor Yabsley has gone.”
“Gone where?”
“Well, that’s just it. Upped and gone. Packed her bags in the night and when Mr Tudor Yabsley woke up – no sign of her. Talk is she’ve run off with that Mikey Muscles from Merthyr. Bit of a wrestler he’s supposed to be.”
“Well, well,” said Nan. “She always was one for the men. Talk of the town she was in the war, dirty, fausty old cow.”
Grancha snorted over the top of his paper. “Mikey Muscles is all of four foot six.”
“Well, like they say, little dogs have big tails.”
Iffy didn’t get that. Jack Look Up’s little dog hadn’t got a tail at all.
“She was supposed to be a pillar of the chapel,” said Grancha. “I thought she was quiet.”
“Quiet my arse! You know what they say, quiet sows sup the most swill!”
“Been funny ever since she went off meat.” Winnie sighed.
“AH them vegetables can’t do you any good, it’s not natural, mun, that’s why we got teeth to chew a bit of steak.”
Nan didn’t have any teeth. “Poor Mr Tudor Yabsley,”
Iffy went out in the end. Grown-ups talked dead daft most of the time.
Days had passed after the child’s clothes had been found and still there was no sign of a body, alive or dead. The local men had turned out in force and joined the police officers in the search. Gangs of them had scoured the river banks, searched sheds and outhouses, checked the deep pools, but there was nothing to be found.
Up on the mountain the top ponds were dragged and six ancient skeletons were dredged from the mud: two dogs, three sheep and a headless donkey. It was all to no avail.
The photograph taken outside the Limp was reprinted in the form of a thousand posters.
MISSING
Have you seen this child?
Later, the posters had been pasted up all over the valleys. Then later still, as far away as Bristol and even London. Until they finally peeled away after many months when hope had died.
Iffy’s eyebrows grew back slowly. Nan had pencilled some in for her but her hand shook while she was doing it and that made Iffy look worse, as if she was surprised all the time. Nan plastered Iffy’s curls down over where the eyebrows should have been, wetting them with spit and rubbing them flat with a flannel.
Iffy saw hardly anything of Fatty for days. He was so bothered about the stupid head and the puppies down at the Big House that he didn’t have time for anyone else.
Nan was upstairs, Grancha at work, the kitchen was empty so Iffy slipped under the kitchen table, and then everyone in the world came visiting, so she couldn’t get out. Winnie Jones came in first on the cadge for gravy browning. Then Mrs Bunting for her daily chat with Nan.
They didn’t talk about anything interesting, just went on about pickling onions and Mrs Bunting’s waterworks playing up and a woman down the valley who died when the toilet cistern fell on her head. It was all boring stuff but it livened up a bit after Mrs Bunting left.
Iffy was listening to Mrs Bunting’s wooden leg squeaking as she crossed the bailey, when she heard a familiar voice. She could tell that voice a mile off: Auntie Mary Meredith. She had a voice that sounded as if she was dragging wet words over big boulders. It took her ages to get things out and sometimes people got bored and finished her sentences for her, which got her hopping mad. Auntie Mary Meredith was funny. She was a bit like a kid and said things she shouldn’t.
“Auntie Mary had a canary up the leg of her drawers.
When she farted how it started! Shot out the leg of her drawers!”
Auntie Mary Meredith lived down the valley and was a bit twp.
Once, she trod on a frog in the outside lav. She was so fat the frog made a farting noise when the air came out of it and she fainted. She had a son called Norman who had shellshock from the war. He was nice but a bit scary. If he heard a bang he began to shake, threw himself on the ground and covered his head with his hands. People laughed at him, but he couldn’t help it.
