New and Collected Stories (40 page)

As I worked, so high up, there was the sound of aeroplanes passing all day towards the airport, gracefully sloping down between me and the sky, beautiful pieces of machinery that are so much more perfect than men, and more useful. The sight of them inspired me one minute and depressed me the next. If it weren't for the fact that men had made them, I would no longer have wanted to go on living. I was often sad at night when I could no longer see those beautiful machines. Yet I could still hear them as I lay trying to sleep, thinking that aeroplanes had replaced the old romantic noise of trains and train-whistles, and that one could fly a much longer way in them.

Back on earth my escape had been made, out of the swamp I'd landed in but couldn't swim in because there were too many monsters out for my arms and legs. I thought at first I might be brought back for what I did in the psychiatrists' office and for not carrying on my treatment with them. But I heard nothing, touch wood. Perhaps they realized what damage they'd done, and so made it all right for me. If so, it's the least (and most) they could do, and those particular ones are the sort of people a human being can deal with, if he ceases at a lucky and crucial moment to be a human being who is dependent on them – which is the least I can say for such wayward immoral bastards.

I work hard on my job, because at the moment not much else is left, though it will be. Often on my fetching and carrying high above the river I look up into the sky. Clouds are shrouds to wrap the sun in, hustle it away to doom and ruin. But I can look down as well. In my house there are many mansions – with different coloured wallpaper, maybe, and it's a hard house to get out of, especially if you are walking on the roof, and you can look between your feet into every room at once.

I was looking down at the crowds beckoning me back to earth, but, damn them, I would not go till I was ready, not without the safe wings of flying which I felt growing in place of my arms. I would not live among them any more, not in such impersonal chaos. When I go down I might finally end up in the place I'd tried to avoid all my life, though it was true that Caroline has already been there before me without ever actually having said what it was like. I thought that if I went there she would sooner or later join me, and I didn't want that. I imagined it to be a pretty ordered sort of existence, too much so, as I mildly walked towards the edge of the girder and began to climb down for dinner-break.

Life is long, long enough always to start again. The black pitch of energy is inexhaustible in the barrel, the spirit-fire burning underneath to keep it always at the boil and bubble. Nothing can stop it, not in me. And if we ever meet again, maybe we'll meet as equals.

Chicken

One Sunday Dave went to visit a workmate from his foundry who lived in the country near Keyworth. On the way back he pulled up by the laneside to light a fag, wanting some warmth under the leaden and freezing sky. A hen strutted from a gap in the hedge, as proud and unconcerned as if it owned the land for miles around. Dave picked it up without getting off his bike and stuffed it in a sack-like shopping-bag already weighted by a stone of potatoes. He rode off, wobbling slightly, not even time to kill it, preferring in fact the boasting smiles of getting it home alive, in spite of its thumps and noise.

It was nearly teatime. He left his bike by the back door, and walked through the scullery into the kitchen with his struggling sack held high in sudden light. His mother laughed: ‘What have you done, picked up somebody's best cat?'

He took off his clips. ‘It's a live chicken.'

‘Where the hell did you get that?' She was already suspicious.

‘Bought it in Keyworth. A couple of quid. All meat, after you slit its gizzard and peel off the feathers. Make you a nice pillow, mam.'

‘It's probably got fleas,' Bert said.

He took it from the sack, held it by both legs with one hand while he swallowed a cup of tea with the other. It was a fine plump bird, a White Leghorn hen feathered from tail to topnotch. Its eyes were hooded, covered, and it clucked as if about to lay eggs.

‘Well,' she said, ‘we'll have it for dinner sometime next week' – and told him to kill it in the backyard so that there'd be no mess in her clean scullery, but really because she couldn't bear to see it slaughtered. Bert and Colin followed him out to see what sort of job he'd make of it.

He set his cap on the window-sill. ‘Get me a sharp knife, will you, somebody?'

‘Can you manage?' Colin asked.

‘Who are you talking to? Listen, I did it every day when I was in Germany – me and the lads, anyway – whenever we went through a farm. I was good at it. I once killed a pig with a sledge hammer, crept up behind it through all the muck with my boots around my neck, then let smash. It didn't even know what happened. Brained it, first go.' He was so lit up by his own story that the chicken flapped out of his grasp, heading for the gate. Bert, knife in hand, dived from the step and gripped it firm: ‘Here you are, Dave. Get it out of its misery.'

Dave forced the neck on to a half-brick, and cut through neatly, ending a crescendo of noise. Blood swelled over the back of his hand, his nose twitching at the smell of it. Then he looked up, grinning at his pair of brothers: ‘You thought I'd need some help, did you?' He laughed, head back, grizzled wire hair softening in the atmosphere of slowly descending mist: ‘You can come out now, mam. It's all done.' But she stayed wisely by the fire.

Blood seeped between his fingers, making the whole palm sticky, the back of his hand wet and freezing in bitter air. They wanted to get back inside, to the big fruit pie and tea, and the pale blinding fire that gave you spots before the eyes if you gazed at it too long. Dave looked at the twitching rump, his mouth narrow, grey eyes considering, unable to believe it was over so quickly. A feather, minute and beautiful so that he followed it up as far as possible with his eyes, spun and settled on his nose. He didn't fancy knocking it off with the knife-hand. ‘Bert, flick it away, for Christ's sake!'

The chicken humped under his sticky palm and hopped its way to a corner of the yard. ‘Catch it,' Dave called, ‘or it'll fly back home. It's tomorrow's dinner.'

‘I can't,' Bert screamed. He'd done so a minute ago, but it was a different matter now, to catch a hen on the rampage with no head.

It tried to batter a way through the wooden door of the lavatory. Dave's well-studded boots slid along the asphalt, and his bones thumped down hard, laying him flat on his back. Full of strength, spirit and decision, it trotted up his chest and on to his face, scattering geranium petals of blood all over his best white shirt. Bert's quick hands descended, but it launched itself from Dave's forehead and off towards the footscraper near the back door. Colin fell on it, unable to avoid its wings spreading sharply into his eyes before doubling away.

Dave swayed on his feet. ‘Let's get it quick.' But three did not make a circle, and it soared over its own head and the half-brick of its execution, and was off along the pock-marked yard. You never knew which way it would dive or zigzag. It avoided all hands with uncanny skill, fighting harder now for its life than when it still had a head left to fight for and think with: it was as if the head a few feet away was transmitting accurate messages of warning and direction that it never failed to pick up, an unbreakable line of communication while blood still went through its veins and heart. When it ran over a crust of bread Colin almost expected it to bend its neck and peck at it.

‘It'll run down in a bit, like an alarm clock,' Dave said, blood over his trousers, coat torn at the elbow, ‘then we'll get the bleeder.' As it ran along the yard the grey December day was stricken by an almost soundless clucking, only half-hearted, as if from miles away, yet tangible nevertheless, maybe a diminution of its earlier protests.

The door of the next house but one was open, and when Bert saw the hen go inside he was on his feet and after it. Dave ran too, the sudden thought striking him that maybe it would shoot out of the front door as well and get run over by a trolley-bus on Wilford Road. It seemed still to have a brain and mind of its own, determined to elude them after its uncalled-for treatment at their hands. They all entered the house without thinking to knock, hunters in a state of ecstasy at having cornered their prey at last, hardly separated from the tail of the hen.

Kitchen lights were full on, a fire in the contemporary-style grate, with Mr Grady at that moment panning more coal on to it. He was an upright hard-working man who lived out his life in overtime on the building sites, except for the treat of his Sunday tea. His wife was serving food to their three grown kids and a couple of relations. She dropped the plate of salmon and screamed as the headless chicken flew up on to the table, clearly on a last bound of energy, and began to spin crazily over plates and dishes. She stared at the three brothers in the doorway.

‘What is it? Oh dear God, what are you doing? What is it?'

Mr Grady stood, a heavy poker in his hand, couldn't speak while the animal reigned over his table, continually hopping and taking-off, dropping blood and feathers, its webbed feet scratching silently over butter and trifle, the soundless echo of clucking seeming to come from its gaping and discontinued neck.

Dave, Bert and Colin were unable to move, stared as it stamped circle-wise over bread and jelly, custard and cress. Colin was somehow expecting Mr Grady to bring down the poker and end this painful and ludicrous situation – in which the hen looked like beating them at last.

It fell dead in the salad, greenery dwarfed by snowing feathers and flecks of blood. The table was wrecked, and the reality of his ruined, hard-earned tea-party reached Mr Grady's sensitive spot. His big face turned red, after the whiteness of shock and superstitious horror. He fixed his wild eyes on Dave, who drew back, treading into his brothers' ankles:

‘You bastards,' Grady roared, poker still in his hand and watched by all. ‘You bastards, you!'

‘I'd like my chicken back,' Dave said, as calmly as the sight of Grady's face and shattered table allowed.

Bert and Colin said nothing. Dave's impetuous thieving had never brought them anything but trouble, as far as they could remember – now that things had gone wrong. All this trouble out of one chicken.

Grady girded himself for the just answer: ‘It's
my
chicken now,' he said, trying to smile over it.

‘It ain't,' Dave said, obstinate.

‘You sent it in on purpose,' Grady cried, half tearful again, his great chest heaving. ‘I know you lot, by God I do. Anything for devilment.'

‘I'd like it back.'

Grady's eyes narrowed, the poker higher. ‘Get away from my house.'

‘I'm not going till I've got my chicken.'

‘Get out.' He saw Dave's mouth about to open in further argument, but Grady was set on the ultimate word – or at least the last one that mattered, under the circumstances. He brought the poker down on the dead chicken, cracking the salad bowl, a gasp from everyone in the room, including the three brothers. ‘You should keep your animals under control,' he raved. ‘I'm having this. Now put yourselves on the right side of my door-step or I'll split every single head of you.'

That final thump of the poker set the full stop on all of them, as if the deathblow had been Grady's and gave him the last and absolute right over it. They retreated. What else could you do in face of such barbarity? Grady had always had that sort of reputation. It would henceforth stick with him, and he deserved it more than ever. They would treat him accordingly.

Dave couldn't get over his defeat and humiliation – and his loss that was all the more bitter since the hen had come to him so easily. On their way to the back door he was crying: ‘I'll get that fat bleeding navvy. What a trick to play on somebody who lives in the same yard! I'll get the bastard. He'll pay for that chicken. By God he will. He's robbed a man of his dinner. He won't get away with a thing like that.'

But they were really thinking about what they were going to say to their mother, who had stayed in the house, and who would no doubt remind them for the next few weeks that there was some justice left in the world, and that for the time being it was quite rightly on the side of Mr Grady.

Canals

When Dick received the letter saying his father hadn't long to live he put a black tie in his pocket, got leave from the school where he taught, and took the first train up.

In a tunnel his face was reflected clearly, brown eyes shadowed underneath from the pressure of a cold that had been trying to break out but that his will-power still held back. He considered that there had never been a good photograph taken of him, certainly none reflecting the fine image he saw when looking in the mirror of the thin-faced, hard, sensitive man whose ancestors must all have had similar bones and features. But photographs showed him weak, a face that couldn't retain its strength at more than one angle, and that people might look at and not know whether this uncertainty was mere charm or a subtle and conscious form of deception. He had a wide mouth and the middling forehead of a practical man whose highest ambition was, once upon a time, to be a good tool-setter, until he joined the army and discovered that he was intelligent in a more worldly sense. And when he left he knew that he would never go into a factory again.

In his briefcase were a shirt and two handkerchiefs his wife had forced on him at the last moment, as well as a razor, and some magazines scooped up in case he had nothing to think about on the journey.

Sitting in the dining-car for lunch, alone yet surrounded by many people, he remembered his mother saying, when he was leaving home ten years before: ‘Well, you'll always be able to come back. If you can't come home again, where can you go?' But on a visit after four years he walked into the house and, apart from a brief hello, nobody turned from the television set to greet him, though they'd been a close-blooded family, and on and off the best of friends all their lives.