Last Orders (5 page)

It wasn’t that it was a trade to be ashamed of: scrap-metal merchant. He wasn’t no rag-and-bone man. He didn’t sit on that cart bellowing himself hoarse, couldn’t have done anyway, what with his chest. He didn’t tout, he did work by arrangement, contract. All the same.

So I got the job at the insurance house. He was proud of me being an office boy. And him his own boss. Boss of the scrap-heap. Then the war came and scrap metal was a full-swing industry and he could’ve done with my extra pair of
hands, but I had to swap being an office boy for being a soldier. He said, ‘A titch like you, they’ll pass you over.’ But they didn’t. He said, ‘Well, anyhow, it’ll be easier for you to keep your head down. That’s my advice to you, keep your head down.’ I did. And after the war it wasn’t me who wasn’t there any more, it was him. It wasn’t a bomb, it was his chest. But I went back to the office anyway. After camping out in the desert with Jack Dodds I went back to an office in Blackfriars. I had the yard and the two-up-two-down, no war damage. I was drawing rent on the one, from Charlie Dixon, to keep up the payments on the other. A man of property, you might say, but I went to work every day as a clerk. It was partly that I knew then that it didn’t make no difference, what a man does and how he lives in his head are two different things. But it was partly the memory of him, as if he was watching.

He used to let me muck out and feed Duke and he used to let me sit beside him on that cart sometimes. But I wasn’t to lift scrap. Clip-clop, clip-clop. The day came when he said I could take the reins and I took ’em and learnt the knack of driving a cart-horse. He said, ‘Don’t pull ’em, twitch ’em, and click your tongue more like you mean it.’ And I never said to him, there’s this job that little fellers can do, little fellers only. It’s to do with horses.

This is Bermondsey Ray boy. Where d’you think it is – Ascot?

I expect it was sitting there beside him, looking at Duke’s backside, that I had my first dirty thoughts about women. It was what I had to go on. I suppose women might as well have been another kind of animal, for all the know-how I had of them. But it didn’t work as a basis for proceeding, and when I took Daisy Dixon round to see Duke one Sunday, knowing that Duke wasn’t there because the old
man was on a special job, the smell of horse dung and horse piss didn’t seem to rouse her animal nature. It didn’t seem to have the desired effect. I’d put down clean straw specially. I said, ‘Place all to ourselves.’ And she says, going all short and shirty on me, ‘So what am I going to do with these sugar lumps?’

Then ten years later, after Dad was long gone, along comes her younger sister Carol, wanting to know if I had it in mind to sell the yard, only her dad was worried, not knowing if he should buy that lorry, without the security of premises. I think, So why can’t Charlie ask me this himself? And I think, Does she know I always fancied Daisy? What did Daisy tell her? I think, as she bends over to turn up the gas on the fire, She’s got a good arse on her.

It was a horse-world, that’s what it was. When I think of him sitting beside me up there on the cart I don’t think of scrap metal, brass, copper, lead, cast-iron. I think of Duke. I think of the life of carters and pedlars. I see him lean forward, elbows on knees, after I’ve taken up the reins, and start to look around him as if he hadn’t noticed the world passing by. I see him scratch his neck and reset his cap. I see him light up a snout, dicky chest or no dicky chest, and breathe out the first drag, bottom lip jutting, then rub his chin with the tip of his thumb, cigarette between his fingers, then run the ball of his thumb across his forehead, and I know I do all those things, without helping it, the same gestures, the same motions.

I should never have let Vince have that yard.

Sunday outings in the meat van, as if I don’t remember.

As if I don’t remember them dropping our Sally off – half asleep she’d be sometimes – and my Joan saying, ‘Won’t you come in for a cuppa?’ And Amy saying, ‘Best not, we’d better get Vince home to bed.’ As if I don’t remember the sand between Sally’s toes and that toy bucket full of shells and bits of seaweed and dead crabs, and the smell of the seaside on her, in her hair, in her clothes, and the pints of calamine lotion Joan and I got through for her sunburn.

We’d have taken her ourselves, only we didn’t have the train fare, and we didn’t have no motor, of course. No motor, no shop, no house to speak of, scratching a bleeding living, that’s what we was doing. I was better off in the Army if you ask me. And I remember that look Amy’d give – but maybe I imagined it, it don’t do credit to a woman like Amy – when she said, no, they wouldn’t come in. Like it was because we lived in a prefab and they lived in bricks and mortar. Like Amy was getting above herself. She and Jack had been to the sea for the day and me and Joan had been to feed the ducks in Southwark Park.

Amy’d be standing there still holding on to Sally’s hand and stroking her hair and stooping down to give her a kiss, so I’d feel like saying, ‘That’s one thing we’ve got that you aint got.’ But I didn’t. I just watched Amy kissing my daughter, and Joan would suck in her breath.

Well it wasn’t our fault the bombs fell where they did. It wasn’t my fault that all the old man left was three-and-six in the Post Office and a barrow in the Borough Market.
And you had to remember that Jack and Amy had their hard luck too, and little Vince, of course, poor little pillock There’s luck and there’s luck. So maybe I did imagine it, maybe it was me just thinking: Amy looks pretty good on a day out and some sea air, she looks pretty good. She still looks a cracker, Jack.

Jack would say, ‘Come on then, Ame.’ And Vincey would be sitting up there in the front of the van, ready for being carted off to bed, but he wouldn’t look so sleepy because he’d be watching Amy and Sally too while they hung around on our doorstep, hoping like hell Sally was going to turn round and wave goodbye to him.

We could have done with a day out ourselves. I said the last beach I paddled on was at Salerno, I aint so keen on beaches, but we could have done with a day out. I could have done with seeing Amy in her bathing-suit. But that’s what parenthood is, I reckon, it’s drawing the short straw deliberate. There wasn’t no room for us too in the front of that van, it’s a wonder the four of them managed to squeeze in. So it was all for Sally’s sake. And for Jack and Amy’s, of course, specially Amy. As if we didn’t get the message.

Joan says, ‘Them two kids are getting just like brother and sister, aren’t they?’

But one day Sally comes in from school and says how they’re starting to say things in the playground about Vince. How he aint all there in his head. Same as his
big sister.
How he ought to be in a Home too, a Barnardo’s Home. Though when you think about it, it had to be one or the other, either the orphanage or the bin. She says Vince is getting into fight after fight and she don’t know where she stands herself.

So we tell her. She must have been about ten years old. We tell her not to tell a living soul we’ve told her, but we
tell her. It sounded half like a fairy-tale, after all, half like what you’d make up to tell a kid.

How years ago when they first got married Uncle Jack and Auntie Amy, who weren’t her real aunt and uncle, of course, but she knew that, had this little baby girl called June. But it wasn’t a proper baby, it wasn’t born right, it had to be looked after special. It happens sometimes, not so often, hardly ever, but it happens. And Auntie Amy knew she couldn’t have another baby, at least not without running the same risk, so she wasn’t a happy woman. Jack wasn’t too chuffed either.

Then there was the war. Bombs dropping on Bermondsey and one of ’em drops on your ma and pa’s old home, but that’s a different story, because there’s another bomb which drops on the house where the Pritchett family has just had a new arrival, called Vince. Vincent Ian Pritchett, if you want to know: V.I.P. Blame his parents. This was in Powell Road, where the flats are now, just round the corner from Wheeler Street where Auntie Amy lived then. It was June ’44 – a flying-bomb. Another week and Mrs Pritchett and Vince would have been evacuated – taken somewhere safe. And it was five years to the month since June was born. That’s how she got
her
name. Mr Pritchett was home on leave, which was bad luck, or perhaps not, depending how you look at it. And your dad and Uncle Jack were both away fighting Germans, though we hadn’t even set eyes on each other then.

Well, there aint much left of the Pritchett family. Except Vince, who, being a little bouncy baby, bounces clear away without a scratch. And, if you haven’t worked it out, it was Amy who took Vince in and looked after him and started to bring him up just like her own baby. Maybe you can
work it out too, or you will one day, that she had more than one reason.

There’s rules, there’s laws about how you should bring up an orphaned baby, but this was wartime, remember, when rules get forgotten. So when the war’s over a year or so later and Uncle Jack comes home, no one argues over the fact that he and Amy have got themselves an adopted child and Vince has found himself a new mum and dad. So you could say it all ended up neat and happy ever after. Except there’s still June, who shouldn’t be a baby any more but she is. You still following this? And Amy’d always wanted, she’d specially wanted, a girl.

‘You aint to breathe a word of this,’ we say.

But it was only a little while after that she tells us they’ll be off again to Margate next Sunday but they don’t want her to come with them. Joan says, ‘What you gone and said?’ getting all in a panic. And Sally says she aint said nothing, only it was getting to be a tight fit in that van, even with Vince travelling now in the back. I say, ‘They put Vince in the back?’ She says, ‘Yes.’ And a little while after that she comes home from school, tears in her eyes, and says that Vince knew now, anyway. They’d gone and told him themselves.

Well it had to happen sooner or later, and search me how you pick your time.

So now Vince has got some real beef to chew. He says to Sally so now he knew what they said in the playground was true, and she says it didn’t matter, he was still Vince, she’d stick by him. So Vince goes and knocks her down.

I reckon every generation wants the next one to make it all come better, to make it seem like there’s a second chance.
I should have known she was the type to get more trampled on the keener she got. Fact is, she was soft on Vincey, sweet as sugar, and I reckon she’d have made a good wife for him, it wasn’t every woman would have taken him on, knowing the score. She could’ve done worse, too, than hitch up to Dodds and Son, all things being as they were. You could say it wasn’t much to set your sights on, a butcher’s shop, but when all your old man had was a fruit-and-veg stall, it was a notch up. Except Vince had his own ideas about Dodds and Son, like not having nothing to do with it, and I suppose if I’d have known how he’d turn out in the end, I might have said, ‘Get your hooks in deeper, girl.’ Or I might have said, ‘Back off him, he aint for you.’

But then it was my dream too once, it was every poor bleeder’s dream. A flash suit, a flash tie, a flash car, a wad of oncers always in your pocket. When I went down to Scobie’s gym every evening, that was the promise. And all the crackling you could ask. The war put paid to that. A boxer, eh, a fighter? Good show, good man. Though I never saw how having a good left hook helped you dig a recoil pit.

And look who got in there first. Little Miss Mandy. Fucking lassie from Lancashire.

I reckon every generation makes a fool of itself for the next one. Vince had his own ideas about Dodds and Son, but it was stretching it, even so, to do what he did, to sign up for five years just to keep out of Jack’s reach, just at the time when every kid his age was thanking sweet Jesus there wasn’t no call-up any more. I reckon a tour in the Middle East was a hard price to pay for not being a butcher’s apprentice and for learning how to fix a jeep. Lad might even have had his arse shot off. I wouldn’t have minded if he had.

And don’t give me that tosh, my girl, about how he’d come back and see you right. About how he’d run off to join the Foreign Legion to make a better man of himself.

I said, ‘Well, Jack, you can’t say he aint following in your footsteps. You were a soldier once, as well as a butcher.’

He looks at me like he’s saying, I aint in no mood for jokes.

He says, ‘I was a butcher by choice.’

But I knew a bit of conscripting had gone on there too. Like I’d been having a few private chats with Raysy.

He says, ‘Soldier – bleeding defaulter I’d call him. Bleeding deserter. That’s what I’d call him.’

I think, And you’d be right.

I say, ‘It wasn’t the only reason. What you think was his reason – it wasn’t his only reason.’

But he doesn’t listen. Hears me but he doesn’t listen. Like there’s only one reason in the world and that’s Jack Dodds, family butcher.

I say, ‘You don’t own him, Jack. We don’t own ’em, do we?’

He says, ‘Talk sense.’

He looks at me and I think, You ought to be glad you don’t own him, when you finally listen to what I’m saying, because you may be a big feller and it may be fifteen years since I stepped into a ring, but.

I say, ‘We don’t own ’em, do we? Even when we own ’em, we don’t own ’em.’

He says, ‘You’re talking bollocks.’

So I say, ‘The other reason was Sally. He left her a little leaving present. I’d say she’s going to have to get rid of it.’

Lenny says, ‘So how’s your Kath?’

Vince don’t answer for a long time. It’s as though he hasn’t heard or he’s concentrating on the road. I see him looking in the mirror.

‘Still working for you at the garage?’ Lenny says.

Lenny knows she isn’t, and Lenny knows Vince doesn’t like ‘garage’. It’s ‘showroom’ these days. It was Lenny who said one night in the Coach, ‘Showroom, he calls it, well we all know what’s on show.’

‘No,’ Vince says. ‘Packed it in, didn’t she?’

Lenny says, ‘Aint out of a job, I hope.’

Vince don’t answer.

Lenny says, answering for him, ‘No, I heard she aint out of a job.’