Trick or Treat (3 page)

Olive snorts and jerks. Her teeth have slipped. He helps her sit up. ‘All right, me duck?' he asks.

‘It's these blessed caramels,' she replies, sleepily.

‘Let's get you upstairs then.'

Arthur helps her to her feet and then to the bottom of the stairs. ‘You get yourself up and ready and I'll bring up your cocoa in a bit,' Arthur says. He watches her climbing the stairs, slowly, pausing on each step for a moment with both feet, and panting with the effort. The seat of her skirt is stretched out of shape by her huge backside. A memory flickers just for a moment, the image of her young bottom bobbing up the stairs. Oh she used to run about starkers, and he loved to see her – big, soft breasts and all the rest of her muscular, tight and rippling, buttocks round as stones. Now she blots out the light with her hugeness.

Half-way up she stops. ‘Arthur!' she calls, and looks down at him. ‘Arthur, you never got me any tea tonight.'

‘I did, Ollie. We had toasted cheese. We had a nice bit of toasted cheese and an Eccles cake.'

‘Oh … oh did we?' Olive continues her climb. Arthur watches her bulky back for a moment more, shaking his head, and then he goes out to give Kropotkin a last turn around the block. It will be half an hour before she's ready for her cocoa.

Two

Olive hollows the mattress in a great snoring scoop and Arthur has to strain not to be engulfed. A grey wash illuminates the room and all its contents. He lies for a moment looking at the scraps of their lives pinned upon the walls and arranged on the mantelpiece of the old cast-iron fireplace, and on the window-sill. There are pamphlets, and newspaper cuttings, reports of an anti-Fascist rally that they had helped to organise. That was what brought them together, the common enemy. They had marched before the danger was widely realised, they had marched full of determination, and in the curling clippings they march still. In one of the photographs, the young Olive, faded now but still vital, waves her arm angrily. Her hair is flying out and her mouth is open in a shout. She had such red lips then, such black black hair. Beside her there is her mother's splashy painting of Mount Etna erupting. And there are fiddly things – presents, china bits of this and that, artificial flowers, things she never really cared about, things he's been the one to dust over the years.

Mount Etna glows now as the light catches the glass and Arthur clambers up out of Olive's warmth and out of bed. He sleeps in old yellowish long johns and a long-sleeved vest and, shivering, he piles his other clothes on top. He wears his favourite trousers since he's off to the allotment – dark brown corduroy, furrowed like the earth. He puts his hand into the pocket and feels the godstone there. It is a white glassy pebble, smooth and faintly warm to the touch. The stone has been his for well-nigh fifty years. He remembers the first time he held it in his palm, warm and precious as an egg, comforting, fitting the hollow of his hand as if it had been moulded there. ‘That's a precious stone,' his mate, Bill, had said. ‘Not money-precious, nothing so common as that.' Bill is dead now, long, long dead. But the stone is warm in Arthur's hand. ‘That must be passed on,' Bill had said, ‘and I think you're the one to have it. To keep it safe, until you're done with it.' They had been standing together on the dense fertile earth with the first tips of green all around them, and the sky a flapping sheet, and the wind had blown tears into Bill's eyes before he turned away. With the stone, Bill passed on to Arthur the beginnings of his great knowledge. He taught him to test the temperature of the soil with his skin, to judge the character of the seasons, to watch the phases of the moon and to work within her rhythms. Arthur has treasured the godstone ever since that day and, whether it has any influence or not, everything Arthur plants grows as if charmed. Arthur has green fingers, he has the secrets Bill taught him, and the wisdom of half a century of working with the soil, and even without the godstone his plants would be bound to flourish – but the godstone is Arthur's talisman and now he holds it in his hand for just a moment as he watches the rising, falling form of Olive beneath the bedclothes. He finishes dressing, scoops Chairman Mao from the bed, carries him downstairs and puts him outside. Kropotkin yaps excitedly from the outhouse and Arthur lets him out, old grizzled dog, wagging and smiling and panting with joy.

‘Good dog, good old lad,' Arthur rubs the curls of his neck and the animal groans with pleasure. Chairman Mao, shivering, slinks under a bush where he does his business and arrives back at the door, blue and mottled already although it is not an especially cold morning.

Arthur breathes deeply. ‘It's a grand day,' he declares. ‘I'll get off early and make the best of it.' The sky is pearly pale, innocent, but Arthur is aware that the ripple of cloud in the west might well mean rain.

He takes a cup of tea upstairs to Olive. ‘Morning me duck,' he says. He shakes her shoulder until her snoring shudders and stops and she opens her eyes a fraction. They are bright slits like the eyes of a little girl peeping through a mask. ‘All right now?' he asks, and helps her up, props her with her back against the pillows. She frowns at him. She's never been any good in the mornings, not till she's had her cup of tea and time to separate herself from the unfathomable depths of her sleep. She goes so much deeper than Arthur, who hovers and flickers all night on the line between asleep and awake. He envies Olive her ability to plummet straight through.

Olive fumbles for her teeth and Arthur passes them to her. She puts them in and clamps her jaws until they sit comfortably. They are sticky still, and sweet with the caramel that is jammed in their crevices.

‘Morning,' she croaks, and takes the cup of tea.

‘I thought, Ollie, if it's all right with you, I'd get straight off. Looks like rain. I'll be back soon after dinner.' Olive grunts. ‘There's ham in the fridge for your dinner, you can do yourself a sandwich then I'll do you chips for your tea. Chips and egg, eh?' Olive sips her tea. ‘I'll put your clothes out for you here, and I'll fetch your hat down. Potkins is looking forward to his walk.'

‘If you say so. Where's Mao?'

‘He's downstairs, Ollie. He's been out so he'll be all right till I get back.' Arthur arranges Olive's clothes on the end of the bed. ‘All right, then? Need the lav before I go?' Olive shakes her head. He kisses her, and creaks off downstairs. Olive listens to him whistling. Already his mind is on the allotment, messing with the soil. He doesn't get up there so much now, but still he loves it. Loves it more than anything. More than anything except Olive. She finishes her tea and slides luxuriously back down into the bed. Mao materialises on the pillow beside her just as she hears the door bang downstairs. With a pitiful little cry, a new-baby cry, he snuggles his cold smooth body down inside her nightdress, and curls himself up, vibrating with pleasure, against the warmth of her breasts.

‘Hello Mum.' Rodney comes in through the back door looking taller and more disreputable than ever. ‘How are you?' He hugs her so that her face is squashed against the roughness of his donkey jacket.

‘Oh Rodney!' Nell pulls away from him, pleased and cross, rearranging her hair with her fingers. ‘I expect you're after a cup of tea? Well that's
all
you'll get this morning. I'm all upside-down. Won't get to shops till after dinner if I stop now.' She fills the kettle.

Rodney sits down at the table, starts flicking through the
Mail
.

‘Well take your coat off, our Rodney, if you're staying for a bit,' Nell says. Rodney is her pleasure and her shame. He is her own, her only flesh and blood and he isn't a bad son. Since he's been free he's been coming to see her three or four times a week. He's a good boy like that, not neglectful. And now that Jim has passed on she gets lonely. He is a dutiful boy. But he is not a boy. Perhaps it would be all right if he was, but he is nearing fifty and his hair is grey and thinning on top, and he has no job and never even seems to look. He lives in a hostel, a place for people like him who have been inside. Nell visited once, but only once. She found it a sordid, peeling place. She hardly liked to breathe the stale old-smoky air while she was there, let alone touch anything or sit on the greasy chair that was offered in the reception room. No, far better she stay away and Rodney visit her here where at least it is clean. Fancy Nell having a criminal for a son! She can never get used to the idea. But then that is all behind him now, touch wood. She presses her fingers fervently against the Formica front of the cutlery drawer. It is shameful to have a son with badness in him, and Nell has no illusions about him, no secret hope that none of it was true. She knows he was bad and simply hopes that he has learnt his lesson, that he is bad no more. And anyway, Rodney is God's will, she thinks, puzzled and resigned, putting his cup of tea down in front of him.

‘You didn't call round last night?' she asks. ‘Only I wouldn't have answered.'

‘Oh, what were you up to?'

‘Nothing. I locked the door against … against Hallowe'en. You get all sorts round these days, knocking, begging, so I locked the door. Better safe than sorry I say, only it did occur to me that you might have called.'

‘No. He stayed put last night. Skint. Watched a film on the box, about an ice skater.'

Nell wipes her hands on her apron and sits down opposite him. It annoys her the way he does that, always an alibi on the tip of his tongue, slick as you like.

‘You don't have to explain yourself to me, our Rodney. A grown man.'

Rodney slurps his tea. ‘Anything want doing now he's here?'

‘You can take the bins round the front, save the binmen coming down the passage in their filthy boots. What are you doing later?'

‘He's going up the post office to cash his giro and then he's off to town. He'll read the papers in the library. He'll have a pint for his dinner.'

Nell shakes her head. It seems such a terrible waste. He spends all his days like that since he's been out: sitting in the reference library reading the papers; sitting in the pub; sitting in her kitchen drinking tea; sitting anywhere where he can soak up a bit of warmth for free. And he was such a bright lad, such an adorable boy. Now his face is dull and whiskery. His eyes, once so big and blue that women cooed into his pram and swore he'd be a stealer of hearts, are bloodshot now and shifty, hidden behind the thick and smeary lenses of his black-rimmed spectacles. He has a sour, unhealthy smell. He makes her kitchen reek of his filthy hostel. Hard to remember the milky sweetness of his baby self, and how she used to bury her nose in the soft skin at the back of his neck when he was warm and fragrant from his bath.

‘Well it's all right for some,' she says. ‘I only wish I had time to sit around pleasing myself. Some of us have more … more purpose.'

‘Don't get your knickers in a twist,' Rodney says. ‘He could do with a top-up.'

Nell tips a fierce stream of tea into his cup. ‘However you manage on your own, I don't know,' she grumbles.

‘Funny you should say that,' he grins at her through scummy teeth, ‘only it's getting near time he moved out of the hostel. It's only temporary accommodation, you know, just till he gets himself back on his feet.'

‘And you haven't shown much sign of that, have you? Oh no, I've bailed you out often enough. I'm not as soft as your poor father, God bless his soul.'

‘Not money, you old bag.'

‘Rodney!'

‘He wants to move back here.'

Nell frowns. ‘What do you mean?'

‘He means what he says. He wants to move back home. Wouldn't you like that?'

‘No I
b—
well wouldn't!'

‘Mum …'

‘I've got my own life to live now, Rodney. Independence.'

‘Well he doesn't know what he'll do then.' Rodney looks nonplussed. His big bad man's hands lie limp upon her nice clean table. He looks pleadingly at Nell and she gets up, wipes her hands on her apron, busies herself. ‘He'll get off then,' he says. His voice is flat. He is upset. He goes. She hears the clatter and clank of him moving the bins and then his heavy footsteps thudding away. Her heart is heavy. He is her son, when all's said and done. She wipes the table, very thoroughly, with a J Cloth. There is a drop of tea. There are the invisible prints of his none-too-clean hands.

She rinses the cloth and stands at the sink, gazing sightlessly out of the window. She thinks about Miles, her brother Edwin's son. Miles is an architect with a wife and two children of his own. He is a credit to Edwin, a credit to the whole family. The thought of him sticks like a burr in Nell's throat. She hasn't seen him for years, not Miles, not even Edwin. Last time the families had been together it had been Christmas. Nell gazes at her tiny distorted reflection in the gleaming tap as it comes back to her. It had been an awkward occasion. Jim and Edwin had put on a good show, filling the house with cigar smoke and toasting the Queen, but Daphne, Edwin's wife, and Nell had never hit it off. During a cold Boxing Day tea of wet lettuce and sliced tongue, Rodney had disgraced himself at the table. Quite suddenly, in the middle of a polite silence, he'd said, ‘Buggeration,' belched resoundingly and slithered down under the table. Edwin and Jim had hauled him out and Edwin had pronounced him dead drunk, and Nell had caught the smirk on Daphne's face, and no, Nell couldn't see the funny side, and that was that, Christmas over, the feeble attempt at a festive spirit quenched.

And that was the last they'd seen of Edwin's family. Rodney had left home shortly after that, and then there was the disgrace, and Nell could never stand the thought of the condescension, the pity, the smugness of Daphne and the perfect, polite and brainy Miles, and so she'd rejected Edwin's attempts to help. For what help
was
there? All that is left now between Nell and her brother are Christmas cards: perishing glitter-encrusted landscapes with muffled coachmen and frozen lakes.