New and Collected Stories (47 page)

She nodded, unbelievingly. ‘You wain't go away?' I said. She shook her head. ‘Everything'll be all right when I come back.' She couldn't answer, was numb inside and out, and had no faith in what I was trying to say. ‘You believe me, don't you? I won't be long. I know where I can get some money.'

I could have smashed my dum-dum head against a wall I felt so useless, but she nodded when I asked her again to wait just half an hour.

The rain had stopped. Nothing and no one – the sky least of all – has a mind of its own.

There were no pictures in the sky, so I looked at the gutters running with brown water, a full spate of production thrusting a straight way between kerb and cobblestones and leaving fresher air in its wake, dragged under further down by sewer grates and carried unwilling to the black and snaky Trent. Whether you fight with all the force in your spring-jack arms to make headway, or roll along like oil and water, you're sucked into the black grates of death just the same.

Thoughts come to me in grey and enclosed places, and in clink I closed my hand over and set them in the warm nest of my brain to stop me going into screaming madness. I remember the pals I had at school and see their lives, how they were mostly married by twenty-one, and an aeroplane flies out of heaven, sky-writing
THE END
across their world. Or they finish with the army and see the same message. But I was in the nick till twenty-four, and the army would never have me, so I'm still on the advance towards new fields and marshes. The two-word telegram can't frighten me, and when I came from the cell and under an archway the plane quickly wrote
THE BEGINNING
and flew away from the chaos that surrounds my life. Hemmed in with my shattered brain I sometimes saw myself as the man who, after hydrogen bombs have splattered the earth, will roar around the emptiness crying out word by word the first chapter of the Bible, because nothing else will be in my head except that, and whoever I meet won't have anything in their heads at all. Sometimes you go mad to stop yourself going mad.

Slab Square's dominating timepiece handed out twelve o'clock like charity. How could I get money for what's-her-name sitting in the tea bar? Print it, mould it, stamp it out like a bloody blacksmith? I zigzagged through the bus station and stood by the market watching people go in and out. She's expecting me back with something borrowed from a barrow-boy pal who happened to be conveniently near, and I thought: if only the world was made like that.

I walked between the stalls with weasel eye and hungry hand set for any chance at all. Above the bustle of women buying supplies for their family fortresses, and old men looking at stuff they were too slow to pinch and too broke to buy I listened to cash-tills ringing in and out like the bells of Hell. Ping! Ping! Here, they were saying, here! Pinging like shots against a barricaded bank, while I stood spellbound in midstream of a strong crowd current, petrified with pleasure at the irregular rhythm and chorus of it, coupled with the call of voices, the clash of pots from crock stalls, breezes of fish and fruit and meat and the low thundering pass of traffic from outside. Money was pouring into pockets and tills, filling baskets and banks, hearts with greed and eyes with incurable blindness. Ping! Ping! And here was I with a poor bit of a rundown woman who was short of a few bob to stand on her feet, while a poster outside told me in dazzling colours I'd never had it so good and would soon have it better.

A sweet old Dolly-on-the-tub swayed by, a head-scarfed hot-slot from Notts with a homely mangel-wurzel face, a dyed army overcoat on her back. A purse lay in the basket between a packet of soapflakes and a wrapped loaf, so I followed the trail of her steamy breath. The place was jammed, and if my life had depended on a clear way through, all trouble would have been finished for good. Near the wide entrance my hand snaked and struck towards the basket, and in my imagination had already opened the purse, cursing my luck as I flung away bus tickets and pawn tags, pension book and worn-out photos, wading through all that to find only eighteen pence, because she'd never had it so good either. She swung towards the fish section, leaving my hand in mid-air and my bent back locked in a terrible lumbago cramp.

The fishmonger lapped paper around her bundle, slapped it on top of the purse. A pal of Dolly's pulled her by the elbow, nearly crushing my toes. ‘Can't abide this weather,' she said, after greetings. ‘I just can't abide it, Mary, my duck.'

Mary couldn't, either, because it brought on her railway-husband's bronchitis. Such talk gave my hand the twitches, for it hovered like a semi-black meaty rare tropical butterfly near the back of my neck and was trying to get down between a butcher's assistant and a bus conductress, then through to the basket and purse that I couldn't even see any more. I had to look as if I were moving without really doing so, appearing cheerful and treadmilly mobile as if on my way to the tea-stall whose cups steamed not far beyond.

‘Aye, it does take some beating, don't it? I wouldn't mind it so much, except that I can never get my washing done, and it stokes my rheumatics up summat wicked.'

A deep sigh came from Mary, and I was close enough to blow in her ear, though still couldn't steer my mauler through. A couple of other women were jammed near. ‘Well,' Mary grumbled, ‘you mustn't grumble. You'll allus find somebody worse off than yourself.' You're looking right at him, I thought, unless I can get my hand on your pal's change-bag.

The way cleared, and I could see through to the basket, and when my hand was getting scratched on the straw I noticed the glassy eyes of the mackerel that had rolled from their paper specially to glare at me: ‘You bring your thieving fingers any closer,' they seemed to say, ‘and we'll scream.' Someone pushed, not heavy enough to be on purpose, but I was a few inches back again. He had difficulty getting through, and the roll of his fat neck came dead-level with me.

My heart crashed in and out like an oxygen bag, and my feet moved from the cloth I was staring at, because I'd seen the colour of that uniform a good few times before: blue-black and ready for that stainless Sheffield flick-blade I'm glad I didn't have or, being so close to falling from the post-penthouse tight-rope I might have buried it between his shoulder-bones and run for my spent life. I made for the exit, the purse out of my mind, and hearing only the quick dying trail of someone swear as I put my foot on theirs without stopping to apologize.

I leaned against the wall outside, my heart and blood signalling far and wide the news of my miraculous escape. Then I remembered the girl in the café who was down on her luck and waiting for me to lope in, my sound pocket stuffed by the wherewithal to do her a lot of good. And in the same crashing breath I hated myself like arsenic because I'd thought of robbing a poor old trot of her short-changed purse, a woman worth ten of me because she'd suffered more and was older, while I hadn't and was still young. I could have smashed my head on a railing spike and ended it all, because if I robbed anyone at all it shouldn't be anybody like her.

A bus drew in at the stop and people got off, stuffing used tickets like good citizens into the slot provided, being as afraid of dirtying the street as they were of shitting their own pants, wanting to keep the roads clean even though their hearts might be black. One four-eyed bowler-hat even put some coins into a little red box for uncollected fares. Luck puts the wind up some people. You've got to pay for everything in this life, old-fashioned church voices whisper from the insides of their hollow skulls, and so they believe it, young and old, clutching a conscience like an extra arm they can't do without, but which is really a rudder steering them through a life they've got used to and never want to change, since they're dead scared of anything new. And you can only change such a system by chopping that arm right off and burying it six feet under like any corpse. I was hungry and bitter, and knew it was wrong to be either, so told myself to stop it, stop it, or I wouldn't be free much longer.

I considered getting on a bus and opening one of those little red boxes, but threw the idea out because even though I might be a robbing bastard I was no fool. Walking towards Hockley I felt sure the girl would wait till I got back, for her present mood was familiar to me, had often nailed my body and soul into the ground and kept it there for countless hours so that I hardly knew time was passing and didn't care whether I died or not.

But now I was a man of action and wondered whether I should go to a bookshop and nick an expensive manual on engineering and sell it secondhand for ten bob or a quid. Useless. I turned from the clothes shops whose fronts were decorated with overalls, cheap suits, and rows of boots. I passed their prices labelled in big creosote figures, then walked between deserted lace factories and tall warehouses, booting a black rat-killing tomcat that ran from under a wooden gate. A few office tarts were strolling around, but I went through them like a ghost, and sat on a stone bench by a churchyard thinking that maybe I ought to go into Woolworth's and sneak my hand up like a cobra to drag down a few fountain pens.

Pacing the green old gravestones I came face to face with a church door, pushed it open and went in. There were rows of empty seats and a deserted altar, as if it were never used even by the rats. I read notices about this and that meeting, or service, or charity, and on a table lay booklets telling of church and parish history. But my eyes moved to a lightly padlocked box on which was painted in white letters:
RESTORATION FUND
.

I was outside in a second, but stopped for some reason on the steps. Feeling rain I had good reason to go back inside, but seeing granite scrolls and marble slabs, caskets with hangdog flowers, railings with heads like barbarian spears, emptiness crossing the narrow streets like an unhurrying copper, an exhausted sky only stopped from falling flat on its guts because of sharp chimneypots and pointed eaves, I had better reasons for staying where I was. Yet something put its hooks in me, and necessity like boiling oil burned away conscience and hesitation. I can't say I stood there reflecting like an honest man on good and evil, because it would be a lie if I did, but it was something to my credit that I stood there at all.

A few minutes later I pushed that oak-stained door once more and stood inside the church before it had time to slide to behind me. A piece of matting lay in front of the padlocked box, as if to encourage people with cold feet to step on it for long enough to part with their lolly, and I hoped it had been successful as I too stood and took a last glance around the church to make sure it was empty.

I looked at that lovely phrase saying
RESTORATION FUND
, which was the right one anyway, for I could think of two people at least who wanted restoring. Gripping the padlock as if about to do a clever judo move and sling the box skyhigh over my shoulder, I gave it a maniacal twist, my other hand pressed down hard on top. The wrench was strengthened by desperate need choking the girl I'd left in the café and it was plain, as the screws gave and the lock buckled, that a tenth of such force would have been sufficient.

I threw the lock on to the matting, and lifted the lid to see at least a pound in coin. It was strange how most of the money had dropped in and rolled to the left side of the box. I couldn't get a grip on the last few with my fingers, took some time getting fingernails under each before flicking them up into my hands where they rattled with a willing heart at freedom, glad like a bunch of prisoners at being in circulation again. An idea of gratitude struck me, of which I was always full, and because I rarely had the opportunity to give it I felt in my pocket for a pencil and wrote plainly under
RESTORATION FUND
: ‘Thank you, dear friends.' I then dropped the cash pell-mell into my pocket and walked out.

People might think I've been in to light a candle for my grandmother's soul, and that I'm pleased she's being warmed at last in stone-cold heaven – I laughed as I went between gravestones into the street, then back towards the bus station café, where the girl no doubt sat looking into an empty teacup, unable to read her fortune because a leafless tea-urn had taken even that kick away.

Calmness left me. The older I was the more scared I got afterwards, not like the old days when I stashed open a post office in a light-hearted devil-may-care way and came out with a cashbox under my coat – and ran straight into the arms of a copper. The old lags had weighed me up right in saying I'd lose my nerve sooner or later. I used to think they were wrong and couldn't tell a cut lip from a black eye no matter how long they looked, but truth was somewhere at the back of it, because my legs would hardly hold as I turned by the market. With my rattling pocket I felt as if fifty sharp-cornered cashboxes hung around me like a Christmas tree at the wrong season. But losing your nerve doesn't matter so much, as long as you keep a tight control over yourself.

I was some way down from the bus station café where I'd left my dark and beautiful stranger, and being so close I dared at last to plunge my hand in and feel those cool shapes of money. A strong and wilful hand fell on my shoulder.

I'd have dropped stone dead on the spot if the life force hadn't thought I was worth saving at the last moment. Bleak terror sent me totally cold – before the voice broke. I was in court, given up as a bad job and put away this time for good, plunged into the cattlepen of no-man's-land for what days were left to me, finished at the turn of a frost-filled iron key. My mouth was full of iodine and sawdust, coal gas and common bird-lime, and it stayed just as strong as ever when I heard the big bluff voice that followed the blow on my shoulder: ‘You thought I was a copper, didn't you, you rogue! Still the same Jack Parker who can't keep his hands to hisself! I'd a known you a mile off, walking along like a hungry jack-rabbit.'

I turned, and who should it be but my old pal Terry Jackson, whom I hadn't seen for three years and wouldn't have known but for his face, for he was dressed like a millionaire in a charcoal-grey suit and striped shirt, a small knotted tie and spick-and-span shoes. He was smoking a long cigarette and looked so well turned out that labels should have been stuck on him saying ‘Fragile' and ‘This Side Up' and ‘Don't Bend', which made him altogether different to the cross-eyed scruff in a shattered coat who'd gone with me into that warehouse. He was well fed, built on meat and solid salad, not so tall as I was, but his fair combed hair smelled of scent and his shaved chops of eau-de-cologne. He hadn't exactly a film star's features, but money had lifted his chin higher and given an extra sparkle to his eyes, seemed to have made sure that wherever he stepped in his tailor-made shoes everything would shift out of his way. Even the pimples had gone without trace, packed up their pus in a hurry and left.