ROBERT LESLIE FIELDING
Be kind to everyone you meet.
You may never see them again.
Write to be read - be better than you need to be!
Lit
Lit
by
Robert L Fielding
A book of verse, once opened, leads me through a life that is half over. Innocent and hearty, I read Lewis Carroll, wondering if I would ever see the Jabberwock with eyes aflame on my way home from school on those winter evenings when ice and darkness enveloped my path up the hill to the dancing fire and the roasting smell of my mother's cooking.
Later, standing in rows, our neckties strangling us, we sang,
'Who is Sylvia, what is she?
without wondering in the slightest who Sylvia was, or what she was. We just presumed she was a girl and left it at that. Singing by rote, high and straining to reach Mrs. Smith playing the piano, her face grimacing at our reckless rendering of her favourite song.
And later, listening to 'I wandered lonely as a cloud', we started to hear the words and see the daffodils waving beneath us. All was forgotten though, when, as pupils in pride of place in Miss Schofield's English class, we had to read the words out loud to the whole class, listening and giggling till it was their turn.
With Dot Squash, and later with
Fez, Donald Radcliffe, Mr. Radcliffe to our parents, Sir to us who even adoring him and his booming voice, were petrified when we had somehow annoyed him, Fez made Weatherbury live, made Gabriel Oak a real person to us, and Bathsheba Everdene a real woman, vivacious with a mind of her own, headstrong, some said foolish, and passionate.
Dot Squash, Dorothy Schofield, Miss to us, apples of her scolding eye. She led us, walking alongside Tess to her doom, stopped us from berating Angel Clare for his purity and his foolish, pious pride, remonstrated with us for asking the question, "Miss, didn't Thomas Hardy ever write happy stories?" What did we know of Greek tragedy, or any other kind of tragedy, save one of our number running under the wheels of a car one afternoon after school.
Years later, still reading, though with a more alert eye, enjoying less for not being taken in as much, but still enjoying, I traversed a purple moor, stepped through heather and ling, waist deep bracken to a little house on the edge of Egdon Heath, whistling Holst's tune of the same name, I came to Clym and Eustacia's house in the woods. Admiring it through the lens of my Minolta, shutter clattering up and down gaily in the late summer sunshine, a little head poked through a bedroom window, and apologizing for intruding, was invited in to see for myself, Alderworth, the house where the newly weds dwelt before everything started going wrong, Eustacia finally and tragically realizing she had fallen in love with a man who did not exist, the native returned to his heath, but now, after his wandering days were done, content to practise the work of a furze cutter, and the beautiful but willful Eustacia, her raven haired, proud head leaning into the wind coming off the English Channel, dreaming of lands she would never see.
Working up to examinations, looking at university entrance, Shakespeare in hand, the Scottish play, which, not being in the acting profession, we can call by name, 'Macbeth'. Selling petrol at weekends to stay at 'Tech' till I passed, memorizing the 'dagger soliloquy between cars, for Mrs. Christou, who encouraged us with her enthusiasm and her joie de vivre, and her laughing face.
Mr. McCann, a Scot, who did the Guardian Cryptic Crossword everyday whilst eating his sandwiches, leading us slowly through Burns' 'Tam o' Shanter', the words, the accent, the meaning, coming in his rich, ringing tones beneath his bristling moustache.
Discovering Kipling, Wordsworth, and Robert Service in the hushed, warm stillness of the Municipal Library, the monologues of 'Nosmo King', Stanley Holloway breathed out on cold mornings cycling to work, each word visible as if I had been exhaling smoke.
The trustees from the toolroom where I worked, wondering about a turner who read poetry in his breaktimes, instead of The soaraway Sun. Struggling with Thomas Mann, wondering if I should even be trying. A different perspective has its distractions and its detractors, all around me it seemed at times till my sister, Gill, reassured me that what I wanted to do was worth doing.
And now, writing words of my own, the long journey still not half done, thank God, retracing my steps through Central Asia, recalled to life, Sultan Sancar, and the love of his life, Yasemin, mourning her father, newly buried beneath the hard ground of Mary, across the wastes of Turkoman country, to the land of Anatolia, high, stony, beautiful Anatolia, and to Nazan.
Robert L Fielding
Dracula's birthplace
"Sure, this is no sort of place for you to live, let alone write a book. I mean," he went on, "the place is full of gloom and I don't know what else." He bunched his shoulders against an imagined cold blast of air. "It gives me the creeps, I can tell you." It was my turn to gesture with my shoulders. I shrugged them, to say, "What do I care about how you feel, I'm living here, not you." "I mean," he continued, "what sort of stuff are you going to be writing in a place like this ?" I shrugged again by way of answer. I knew exactly what kind of stuff I was going to write, but I wasn't just ready to tell him. My friend left me alone. He left me to get on with what I had to get on with. Several days later I bumped into him again, just round the corner from my totally unsuitable abode.
"And haven't you moved yet ?" he asked me. I shook my head, it was true, I hadn't. I had no intention of moving. I told him so too.
"This is the place for me," I told him, "this is the place I'm going to write."
"Soft in the head is what you are," he said, and left, walking down the street, shaking his head. He didn't look back.
Getting back to Number 2, I brewed up and settled into my routine. That's what you've got to have. I found out quickly that I had to have a routine if I was going to write a novel. None of your dilettante stuff for me, I thought. I'm going to get on with this and finish it. After all I owe it to myself. I'm making my way. I need something more than blether to back up my claims, or that's all they'll be, claims and nothing else.
And so, for the next month I did very little but write. The ideas, the words, the sentences, the letters, they drove me on, and if I'm honest with myself, they, the words and the ideas, all that, they took over my life, till all I could do when I lifted my head off the pillow in the morning was write. After my ablutions, I wrote and wrote, never caring for anything. What did I care for sustenance, especially of the mind. I had my words, at back and in front. The words I had already put down, somewhat laboriously, for I'm no scribe, the words I had already written were like so many stepping stones across the widest river I ever wished to even think to try to cross. But once in mid-stream, so to speak, I had to go on. I did. I had to go on. No stopping, not for any thing. And from those stones behind me, and from the one I was standing on at any time, I could see other stones lying waiting for me further out in the water. My path, for it was a path, across that river, wasn't there till I came to cross at that particular point. I furthered the crossing every time I wrote a word. After every word I would see a chance to make it, leap to another stone I hadn't been aware of until that last word went down. That's how I wrote the book. I wrote daily, hourly journals. I made myself Harker, and I became him, let me tell you. And that was no trick, what I'm telling you. I truly became him. I felt the coldness of that man he had gone to do business with, and the blackness and the evil of that castle. Evil overtook me. I forgot, almost, what he had gone there to complete. I forgot the transaction, his place in it. I never forgot his great love, waiting for him, writing anxious letters, losing sleep for the lack of him. I never forgot her, thank God, and I never forgot God, through all that blackness, that stony silence, and that face. Dear God, how could anyone forget that face, the power and the evil behind it.
Walking around Clontarf for a breather, I came to realise that something was happening to me. Here I was, writing sometimes day and night about a young man entering a Count's castle somewhere out in the Carpathian Mountains. A castle owned by none other than Count Dracula, whom I had made the epitome of evil. But what did I know of such things, of such places, of such men ? What did I know of the forces of evil, the forces of darkness, I mean what did I really know about all that ? Well, I thought I knew nothing, but in writing I found that I knew a lot more than I had imagined I would. That act of putting words down on a blank page, just that, the act of writing, allowed me to find somewhere in my head I didn't know existed. Clontarf, and my house on The Crescent grew misty before me as I contemplated what I had started. I stopped, had to lean against a wall for a second or two. The question I was now asking myself was whether I was being actually taken over by those same forces of darkness I was so eagerly writing about. That knocked the stuffing out of me, and my legs buckled imperceptibly. Someone noticed it though.
"You all right, Mister ?" A woman carrying some shopping in a pram was facing me, looking into my eyes. I didn't answer. I couldn't. My power of speech had deserted me. I nodded, but she wasn't having any. She took my arm and beckoned to a gate, and a footpath up to a front door. I was standing in the Crescent, but this wasn't my own door, not Number 2. This was somebody else's door. I faltered crossing the threshold of this home, inhabited by someone I didn't know. I thought of Harker being driven through Bergau Pass, a dark defile, full of the portents of evil. I thought of the huge man driving the carriage speeding Harker to he knew not what. I thought of Harker entering the Count's castle, entering that house of evil. Heaven knows, this was no castle, but in my fear and dread of being taken captive by evil my fear and trepidation upon entering gripped me, and I stumbled headlong into a room full of children, their little upturned faces blanched with fear. I had stumbled in amongst their play. I was an intruder, despite being invited. Again I thought how Harker must have felt, invited but feeling unwelcome. I thought of it dawning on him that the huge man and Count Dracula were possibly one and the same man, that there was nobody he could turn to in this strange, dark land among the mountains of Transylvania.
Thanking the woman for her kindness, and stepping back into the road, I felt the strength returning to my legs. I was well again, but those thoughts had shaken me, visibly shaken me.
The room I did my writing in was dark and uninviting. I turned from it and stepped into the kitchen. I made myself busy. I didn't feel hungry, but I made myself something to eat. That act of doing something, something that needed little thought, got me back on track.
I ate, took the things to the sink for rinsing, and returned to my room. It was still dark, but had lost some of its sinister atmosphere. The sweetness of raspberry jam on my lips kept me in the realm of the living, it saved me from going back into that lair, for that is how I had come to think of the Count's castle now, an animal's lair, from which Harker had to escape. The Count I had brutalised into something less than human, but something more than human too in the sense of his prodigious strength, and, ironically, in the pronouns I used to refer to him. He was still a man, but had the strength of a bear, the cunning of a fox, the sight and hearing of a bird of prey, and, I thought, the heartlessness of a wolf, or a pack of wolves, to be nearer to the way I had come to think and feel about him. I had come to live his life, in my head, of course, for how could I write about him without doing so. He was my own creation. Oh, he was based on historical characters who walked the Earth, but this single man, this apparition, this evil, I had created, upon the page, and worst of all, in my head. He had entered my head, had been there all the time, had needed only the Trojan Horse of an inquiring mind like mine to find my gates open, my senses susceptible to his presence. He was me, and I was him. Where was I to go, what was I to do, how was I to exorcise him from me ? I knew of only one way. I sat down and wrote, and wrote, and wrote until I had destroyed him, removed him utterly from the face of God's Earth.
I had to destroy this evil, but I was his author, into my brain came his birth, and into my thoughts came his own inviolate existence. I had made him into a man who it was impossible to destroy, but I had given him an Achilles heel, and I rejoiced, for in that were the seeds of his own destruction. In the wise mind of Van Helsing I implanted these seeds, and gave that same man a goodness and a belief not usual in mere mortals. That man, Van Helsing, also a person I alone had created, that man, with the help of others with whom I peopled the story, would effect the evil one's undoing and eventual destruction. In that destruction lay my own salvation, my own redemption, and my own extrication from the jaws of Hell. And indeed, that is how I had come to think, that I was being gripped, albeit almost imperceptibly at times, by the forces of evil. With that knowledge in my head, that I, the author, was being gripped by the very evil I had bent myself to illustrate in Count Dracula, with that knowledge I thought I knew how this story of mine would come to be received by the public when the time came for it to be read. I knew I would be cursed by some, misunderstood by others, and yet adored and revered by still more. And I believe that that is the fate of authors of works of fiction in general; that the words once being in print and readily available to the reading public at large, that the interpretation is theirs and theirs alone, that if they think it allegorical, then it is so, if they think not, then so is it not. In the writing, and in the thinking on what I was writing, what I had already written, and on what I was about to write, I came to understand this dialectic relationship between the reader and the words on the page, and between me, the writer, and the words I set down to be read later. I understood the import of what I said, but now understood too, the import of what I had omitted to say in words, that the reader would become involved in the act of creating, and that the ultimate meaning, or I should better say meanings, would reside, not in the book I had written, but in the minds of those who had read it.
This thought was somehow a burden to me, for I imagined myself to be the author of a brand of original sin, which, being first shown the light by me in words, would come to flourish and bloom afterwards, without any further necessity of having to put pen to paper, and becoming so, would be an immutable force that would tarnish everyone who came in contact with it.
I was creating a devil, and it was that thought that was constantly a burden to my soul.
From you who in later years will sit under electric lamps burning far into the night, reading my work in possibly the millenium to come, from you I ask forgiveness and forbearance as you are also taken in, enveloped in this evil, even with the death of Count Dracula at the hands of Van Helsing and the others, you who have been unwillingly, mentally coerced and deceived into your own undoing in waking nightmares that will never cease, from you I ask forgiveness, even though I am fully aware you are unable to give what I most desire, being as you most assuredly are, complicit in the machinations of the undead.
I wrote this story in response to two things: the fact that my friend was brought up in the very house that Bram Stoker was living in when he wrote his famous novel, 'Dracula', and my recent rereading of the novel, and although that is ostensibly what the story is about, I also wrote it to examine some issues connected with writing, and with reading too.
Robert L Fielding
Many a slip
Many a slip !
by
Robert L Fielding
He wandered down the mountain grade
Beyond the speed assigned-
A youth whom justice often stayed
And generally fined.
Rudyard Kipling
It was a nuisance, his obsession with operatic arias, sung night and day at the top of his voice. Walking to work through the Botanical Gardens, frightening the birds and the bees, startling the couples in their early displays of courtship, before lessons began at 9.
In silence in committees, mouthing 'O, terra, addio; addio valle di pianti!'
In the library ?
Never ! But always in his car, a pink 1928 Lagonda convertible, with the top down, in traffic, or at speed, singing 'Numei pieta' to treetops and telegraph poles flashing by. It would be the death of them.
And speed, his other obsession, they said, would be the death of him, sooner rather than later, but it wasn't.
Coming through at 70mph, spinning dozing security guards off balance, sitting outside their little hut in the afternoon sunshine at the gates.
That had earned him a ticking off, a flea in his ear, from the Security Chief whose English left something to be desired, as Oswald put it.
This is last time. I tell you no more. Go slow, no fast. Is danger, very danger, for you more than any. I tell you before. You no remember, no ?
Of course I remember, old boy.
Then why you still go like bat out of Hell ? And I am not 'old boy'.
Remember please, nutty professor. Old boy, pah ! But he never remembered. If anything, he went faster past the guards at the gate. They jumped up and waved furiously at him, but their gesticulations were futile. He never looked back. When he returned he couldn't understand why they railed at him. They threw their hands up in resignation and frustration and let him through.
The whole college knew him, knew his car, heard him singing in the cool evenings, felt the rush of air unkempt their hair as his car passed. He was invariably cursed, albeit amiably.
What do you expect? He's an Englishman, said one who wasn't.
But it wasn't right, it wasn't right to endanger life, especially with a song on your lips while you were doing it.
He must be stopped, someone said.
He'll stop himself if he keeps driving the way he does, said someone else.
And they waited, but did nothing, only cursed silently to Verdi and Mozart, secretly wishing for a piece entitled, 'Requiem for an English history professor', by an unknown composer, to be sung by the entire staff of the college, but sadly by most.
And travel, his greatest obsession, came last but certainly not least. Oswald liked to travel. He was always talking about travelling, when he wasn't singing or driving.
I love to travel, he would say, I love to see what this world of ours has to offer.
Did I ever tell you…? he would begin. He had as many stories as he had freckles. As he spoke, his eyes lit up more than was usual, even for him. His eyebrows were raised intermittently, and his pupils dilated till anyone listening became transfixed by his oscillating eyebrows and an articulate flow of words. He threw his head back and laughed, a loud and infectious laugh.
Did I ever tell you about the time I walked in the footsteps of Alexander the Great ? He hadn't, so I listened eagerly. Oswald's tales were always worth listening to.
I had driven, he said, down through the
I locked the car up, put the top up, and left it in that dreadful hold, reeking of petrol fumes and excrement. With the top up, and the radiator gleaming, which I fancied, to be a surly mouth, half open, showing not white, but black teeth, it looked crestfallen, downcast and dispirited. It would soon be otherwise, I thought, as the sail up the
In the event I was right, we docked at
The road I took swung me straight out of that stinking morass of human flotsam and jetsam that is
Heading for Cairo was not unpleasant, passing native women bent double in the green fields of this mighty plain, the road turning every now and then over the channels through which the Nile is finally and irrevocably tamed before it drifts listlessly, its force spent and broken, into the warm waters of the Mediterranean, in an inverted bowl of coast stretching from the teeming streets of Alexandria, to the filthy docks of Port Said, past lazy sandbars full of gleaming white birds, ibis and stork, pelican and flamingo.
I never saw the coast of
I hoped to sojourn in Siwah for it was to that unlikely locale that Alexander bent his steps before returning to conquer the known world, that upstart youth, riding his 'Ox-head', 'Beucaphalus' by name, tamed by him in his yet younger days before setting out forever from his beloved Macedonia
.
Go find another land, his father Philip had said to him after he had brought the wild stallion to boot, this land of ours is not big enough for one such as you, which is, in essence, how I feel looking out from the grey shores of England sometimes.
I had all but reached the end of the black strip of road that crosses from a former, mighty civilization to a wilderness, from the fertile banks of the
I had noticed that the car was not going as well as usual. Who could fault it. The engine was overheated, churning relentlessly on in 40 degrees of heat, pushing pistons up and down long tubes of honed steel with only a film of lubricant and a thousandth of an inch to give them play. Who wouldn't be overheated, I said to myself as we finally came to a halt at a small way station.
Wiping the salt from my brow, for there was little moisture left for anything but essential lubrication (man and machine are not so very different after all, it seems) I got out of the car and surveyed what kind of end-of-the-world place I had arrived at.
Wadi Shab was not, probably had never been, a place one would willingly stop at, were it not out of some dire necessity, invariably associated with temperature and H20, or I should say, the lack of it. As I stepped up to the hut that seemed to be central to the functioning of the place, a tall, emaciated ruffian came towards me, bowing and scraping like some sycophantic backslider.
Effendi, he said, still bent double, tugging at his wispy grey hair as though I were Alexander, come to acquaint him with his fate.
Ingilizi. I took that to be a question and nodded, Yes, I said, English.
He straightened to his full height, which was more than mine. Hello, I thought, this man has never seen red-coated infantry coming his way to cajole him to
I must be on my metal, I thought, or he will deceive me and trick me out of my birthright. Such is sometimes the unholy xenophobic sentiment of the Englishman abroad, even from a seasoned one like me.
To while away the time while this creature, for I could think of him in no other terms, searched under the bonnet for the most probable cause of the suffering, I sang 'Celeste Aida', my favourite aria from that, my favourite opera. This was appropriate, I thought, wholly appropriate, having just travelled up the
I lit a cigarette, one of the last in my last packet, and turned to observe man examining the innards of my car.
Thees car, she is very beautiful. I nodded. Yes, she, er it is. The man poked around while I finished my smoke, and then suddenly produced a ragged thing I thought he had been using to stop his decrepit trousers from falling down. It turned out, he told me, to be the source of my troubles with overheating, a perished fan-belt, rotten and broken.
How did it get like that ? I asked. He shook his head and grinned showing me a mouthful of blackened and broken teeth.
She is no look after, he said. You not good owner of thees beautiful car.
He was right, I thought, I am essentially an academic, not at all a practical man. I nodded my head in some species of agreement. He was right. The question now was what was I going to be able to do about it, out here in the middle of nowhere. Had it been a Ford or an Austin everything would have been fine, but a Lagonda, I ask you. The man sensed my despair.
Is no problem, he said, I will send for one. Is easy. And with that he strolled back to his hut as if fixing the broken fan-belts of 1928 Lagondas were an everyday occurrence.
I threw down the butt of my cigarette and followed him into the hut.
You sit down, he said, pointing to a green oildrum. I declined. You want chai, he said, tea ?
Yes, I said, tea would be nice.
You have to wait for Ahmet to come, and he poured some water out of a disgusting looking jug into a blackened kettle.
Who is Ahmet? I asked. I had not seen another soul since arriving.
Ahmet is man who go fetch things for you foreign. You give him money, he fetch.
But where from ? I spotted the fan-belt on an oil stained table. It looked as if it had been twisted and broken.
Did you break the belt, I said, lifting it up and showing him what I meant. He turned back to his tea.
You crazy, you Ingiliz. How you think I get it off without I twist a little?
But you probably broke it getting it off. I was angry with him and he could sense it in my voice. He turned around, still holding the jug of water.
The belt, she is rotten. He spat upon the floor. Look, he said, see for yourself. He took it from me and twisted it about in his hands. Something like tar or oil appeared on its surface. It was indeed rotten. I nodded in resignation. He spat on the floor again.
Ahmet, he will fetch. You no worry, just give him money when he ask you.
How will he know how much?
Ahmet, he know everything, he know, don't worry. He handed me a cup of tea. The cup was dirty black on the outside, but the rim was clean enough and the tea tasted well enough. I drank the tea and waited. But Ahmet didn't come. I waited and waited, but he didn't come.
Two cigarettes later, and a walk round the back of the hut to stretch my legs, I saw an extraordinary sight. Another Lagonda, a more recent modal admittedly, was approaching. Its livery was of a much more sober hue than my own means of transport. This was black, sober, shiny black. It pulled up gently at my side and an aging man got slowly out. He carried a black stick, which he now used to point to the ruffian with the tea and the fan-belt.
What is the meaning of this? He shouted at the ruffian. Why have you not told me that someone is here and in some difficulty? He was pointing at me now. I scratched my head, trying to think where I had met him, or even if I had ever met him before. He turned to face me. His impassive face cracked into an expansive smile.
Welcome, my friend, he said warmly, welcome to my share of the desert. I must have appeared puzzled.
Do not look like you have seen a ghost, my friend. You have, on the contrary, met a real friend. Come! Opening the passenger door of his black automobile, he bid me enter and sit in the shiny leather seats. Quickly, he leapt around to the driver's side and we roared away.
Where are we going? I asked.
He was smiling profusely. I looked at the side of his head as he kept his eyes on the track we were following.
You are wondering who on Earth is taking you hostage in a black Lagonda, are you not?
It was true, I was. His smile, his whole bearing towards me was one of benevolence, kindness and friendship. I didn't trust him an inch.
Allow me to now introduce myself, he said in a rather grand manner, I am Mr. Sadiq. That is all you need to know. That is all I have ever been called. Just that, Mr. Sadiq. I have no other names because I have never had a father after whom to be named. I am..was, what you English used to call a foundling, orphaned almost before birth, though that is impossible, he laughed gaily, well, half impossible at least, if you see what I mean. He looked at me, turning his head from the road.
And you, my friend, what is your name? In the same manner, I said, Mr. Oswald, I am Mr. Oswald.
And what brings you to such a place as this, Mr Oswald ? He was facing the front again.
Siwah, I said, I have come to see Siwah.
And the great Iskender, no doubt. He laughed slightly.
But your car, she has finally let you down, has she not, he observed.
Yes, it has, I answered.
It is no matter, he said calmly, Ahmet will do whatever is necessary, but you must be patient. I take you to my house where you can rest, drink water and smoke your cigarettes. I remember wondering at this point where on Earth his house was, out here in the middle of nowhere. There was nothing in sight but sand dunes. We drove along for about what must have been ten minutes, though we had not gone very far really. It is difficult to go anywhere in sand. The thing to remember is to keep moving at all costs, that and let some air out of your tyres first, of course.
Surmounting a fairly high bharkan dune, we came right up to the front of a spectacular house. Why it had ever been built here was a complete mystery to me. I could see no reason for its existence. It was not on a road, or even on what passed for a road in this wilderness. It was not near any site or antiquity that I could see or was aware of. Its very singular appearance, however, was the strangest thing of all. It was a white, circular, single storey structure with a circular wall surrounding it some ten or twelve yards from the main building, and concentric to it.
The inner building I was son to learn, was, in essence, a sort of chimney flue. A great fire was lit at the bottom of the chimney, and the smoke observed, both as it passed up the main flue and again as it flurried out into the starry and cloudless night.
I asked Mr. Sadiq what it was, what significance was attached to drifting smoke, what it all meant. His taciturnity was complete. He smiled at me in the way indigenous people smile indulgently at foreign guests, forgiving them for their ignorance and for their impatience, especially for their impatience.
I was bidden to collect wood, not like a servant was bidden, but in a friendly manner, the import of which was not lost in the amiable request by which I was invited. I gathered a good armful of wood from a pile I found between the central tower and the perimeter wall. Indeed, sticks and combustible materials were to be found almost everywhere outside the chamber in which ignition was to take place.
Bringing my armful into the middle of the central tower, I happened to cut myself on a jagged end of one of the sticks I was carrying. Mr. Sadiq spoke out, almost violently.
It is a sign, he shouted, and with a ripping of his own raiment he covered my finger.
It is a sign, and it is not a good one either, and then as if to calm me for I must have appeared alarmed, which indeed I was, he said, But it is soon covered and therefore not too calamitous. Here he muttered some imprecation, which I could not follow, yet I comprehended it was such from the venom with which he spat his words out onto the hearth awaiting the fuel I had thrown down.
At this point, as I was thinking that he would set alight what I had fetched, I realised that a fire was largely superfluous, the early evening being fresh but not unduly so.
Must we have a fire, I asked. The violent manner in which he nodded his assent assured me that we did indeed need combustion. Whether it would be much colder in the night, or whether the desert produced a dew that froze one as one slept, I could not ascertain, but I acquiesced and he went about his business with a will that seemed laden with a duty I could only guess at.
Now you must lay wood on the hearth to light. I wondered why he hadn't done it, he had been so eager to get a fire going.
Why? I asked, slightly irritated now. My irritation was mirrored in a little of his own which flitted quickly across his brow. You must place fuel, he began, or otherwise how will it be known who and what you are, what you will become and to what end your life will be. I hadn't at all expected such an answer.
As I placed the branches and scraps of wood on the hearth, I noticed what looked and indeed smelt like lime whitewash. There were spots of it on the dusty, black floor of the hearth, and several new spots on a few of the branches newly laid down. Getting more and more accustomed to the dull light of the hearth, I came to realise that the walls of the chimney had been but only recently painted white, obscuring older curling patters of smoke from other fires long past extinct. Mr. Sadiq saw me staring up the chimney.
It is made new for you, our guest, he smiled benignly, evidently having recovered his composure, the patters on the walls are for you to make. Then he added, not you, of course, for no one is thinking of setting you on fire, but the pile of fire you make, and the smoke that rises will be something of yours, for it is you who has laid out the ordering of what piece is to burn, when, and in what manner. I puzzled over this last information. He continued. How do you think the oracle can tell you anything unless you give it something to work on, something to go by, as you English say. You chose which to be burned and which to be spared for another time, and it was you and you alone, was it not, who settled forever the order and manner of burning, of leaving the earth in one form and of returning in another. I nodded. Yes, I said, me.
Then, he will come to read, he said, moving away from my pile of twigs and branches, roots and knots, remainders of ageless trees that I had laid down on the hearth to burn. I looked around, and caught his back.
Who will come? I shouted, but got no reply, or at least none that I could discern.
I stood up, surveying my work. What was there to see, I asked myself. How can anything be read from that chaos of wood, and how could marks made by smoke foretell anything. That, I wanted to know. That, I had to see, and that, I would have to wait for.
Outside a howling gale, the haboub, had blown up. The sky had changed from its normal bright azure to a dirty brown melange mirroring the whirling earth below, to left and right, east and west. It was as if great Aeolian forces were conjuring up the sand to
confound and confuse all who dared to wandered abroad and witness the power they could command.
Not a night for fires, I fear. Mr. Sadiq was standing at my elbow, observing the veiled Heavens. What is it your great Shakespeare said? I swivelled round, surprised to hear this man utter that name.
Stars hide your fires, he paused, adding to the whole effect, for me at any rate, effect, let not night see my deep and dark desires.
Mac.. , I began. He placed his hand on my arm.
The Scottish play, I believe it must be referred to as, he said grinning, as I must have looked transfixed.
Come, he said, we go to eat, and to sleep, perchance to dream. But I did not dream, and nor did I sleep either. The great howling ceased aloft and a calm was restored to the whole scene. Leaning up on my elbows I regarded Mr. Sadiq coming towards me in something of a hurry.
Ah, you are awake, he said, beckoning me to follow him, it is well you are not tired.
You are not tired, are you? He said with some little apprehension. You must be in full command of yourself for this to happen. I got up lightly and followed him back to the hearth, the whitened chimney and the stack of firewood lying waiting for a match.
He is come, but I could see no one.
How do you know? I asked looking round the hearth.
Look, Sadiq pointed to the ground. There were several small prints hither and thither, in a flurry of activity and movement.
But these are too small to be a man's, I said, giving the prints a second inspection, Yes, definitely too small. Sadiq laughed.
Not too small for him, he said gaily. I heard a sort of shuffling noise and there in front of me, tiny feet either side of the kindling stood what I can only describe as a midget.
Sadiq was the first to speak. You see, he said, still laughing, he is here. The midget jumped twice up and down in agreement.
He is small, is he not, he said, seeing my amazement.
Yes, I said, he is small. This imp-like figure, more chimp than man, more adult than boy, had evidently climbed down the chimney to the point where he now stood astride the site of the fire.
Lightee, lightee, he screeched like some ape from aloft a baobab tree. Sadiq drew a taper from somewhere within his voluminous jelebiya, lit it from something else, and knealt to set fire to the bundle. He crouched lower to blow the flame in its utter reluctance to glow.
Shouldn't I do that, I said, remembering that the ritual was for my purposes, or so I had been given to believe. He leapt up just as quickly as he had knealt.
Of course, he said and handed me the taper. It is for you, not me, and he looked somewhat ruefully at me as if he would have had the operation performed for him. The thought occurred to me that he must have had ample time to do this, and yet envied me, I was sure. As if to reassure me, he spoke quietly,
It is not given to everybody, and then, sounding a little in awe of me he said, few are chosen.
I in my turn knealt to put a light to the bundle before me. The match flared into life. Immediately, flickering forms danced on the whitened wall of the chimney. The kindling took hold and soon a merry blaze danced in the hearth. I stood up and stepped back to watch the flames. They danced and smiled. A whisp of smoke trailed up the chimney, leaving a permanent shadow on the white walls, like a man who reaches evening and finds he must again shave before going out to dine. The shadows grew darker and leapt up the walls, curling shapes swept upwards as I watched mesmerized.
Quickly, and before I could do or say anything, the midget leapt at the fire, dancing above it and clinging to the smoky wall. Up he went, finding adequate footholds on the very slightest protuberances of the unevenly laid stones that made up the chimney wall.
Reaching just above my head, almost choking now in the smoke that curled around and around him, he shouted something down to Sadiq. To my utter amazement, Sadiq picked up a pale full of water from some corner, of which there was none in this circular place, and threw it across the still infant fire, sending smoke and steam blasting up to the heels of the midget. There was a great whoosh as the water hit the fire, a scattering of fuel and a spluttering of flames, and then the blaze was extinguished. The midget retraced his climb, back down to the floor of the hearth. His tiny feet seemed to instinctively know their way back down to the next bump without any need for him to look back.
He know it like back of his hand, said Sadiq as he saw me marveling at his rapid descent.
The midget was excited, he was jumping up and down on the blackened and still steaming wet twigs. He put out his hand and pulled me into the centre of the hearth with him.
You lookee mister, he said pointing up at the darkened wall. I looked but could see nothing. The darkness of the walls was intensified by the light from the opening high above us.
Again he cried out, Lookee, mister, lookee ! I stared up, and as my eyes gradually grew accustomed to the half light, I began to discern a sort of pattern that somehow seemed familiar to me. I took the matches and lit one, holding it up to illuminate the reaches of the chimney. What I had only seen as some sort of vague patterns now appeared as regular, and distinct. Right around the walls of the chimney, some three or four feet above me, was what appeared to be cuneiform legends, the writing of the Sumerians. I peered harder, Surely I was mistaken, I thought. The shapes were wedge-like. It was cuneiform writing. It was Sumerian. The midget tugged at my shirt as I peered up.
What sayee, what sayee? He shouted. Sadiq quietened him, tapping him on his small shoulders, but kindly.
It says, I put up the fingers of my left hand to focus my gaze. It says, I paused again. This was nothing like reading under a table lamp with the shapes flat in front of me on my desk. This was real language, but written by a smoking fire. It says, it demands the reader to recall the time before birth, I paused again, the time remnants of the new mind can hold for only a fleeting moment. Sadiq spoke out.
But what does it mean, are you certain ? I looked round at him again.
Well, no, I said, I'm not absolutely sure, but it's the best I can do. I mean, this must have sounded stupid now, but I said it anyway, if I could lay it out flat, I would be able to..
The midget was up, he had jumped up, stood for a second on my thigh and launched himself up at the forms I had just been trying to decipher. With one broad sweep he erased all I had read. He dropped and fled from the hearth.
What does this mean? Sadiq could only stand open-mouthed. I recalled again the message. Had I been dreaming? Could a message in Babylonic cuneiform have been written by wisps of smoke rising from what was little more than a camp-fire? Sadiq caught my expression right.
This is the oracle, Mr. Oswald. This can do anything, say anything, in any form it desires to say it, to whoever picks the fuel and places it on the hearth, whoever lights that bundle, whoever it is addressed to, it can do all that, and it never errs.
But what can it mean, and why does it use that form to say what it desires? Sadiq now looked firmly at me.
That is for you to know, you and you alone. It is for you, and only for you, in a form you can understand, and, he measured his words more carefully now, you did understand them, is it not true? I nodded, it was.
Then, the oracle has expressed itself well. It is your task to unwind the riddle of the curling smoke, it is your enigma, your life in a few words.
My life?
Your life, all your lives.
All my lives, I have only this life.
You have had many, we all have, these are to all yours, to one of them.
But not this one?
Not necessary to be this one, and then more slowly, How can be this one? You not Sumerian man, you Englishman. Now, you Englishman. This life you Englishman.
The Bennetts
Chapter One
Robert Leslie Fielding
The Bennets had always seemed a strange lot, from the time they first appeared in the district, to their leaving the two farms, and returning to nearby
Although the two brothers, George and Thomas worked hard at tending the livestock, mostly beef cattle, and managed the land on either side of the little river that ran helter-skelter down off the higher hills a few miles north, none of their children seemed to have the slightest inclination to become farmers. They behaved like their cousins in Swansea, and did what they were told to do, and no more.
Eventually, Tom Bennet, George and Glynis's eldest, from Tal-y-bont, left the hills, and his family, and went to London to become an actor. The locals were not impressed by young Tom's adventurous nature.
-He'll like as not drink himself to death with any money he earns.
-Sweeping the bloody stage is all he'll ever do, were typical of the comments of the folk who met in the village pub of an evening, when their work could be left. There opinions and their talk though, was more indicative of their own failings and missed opportunities, than anything Tom Bennet may or may not be capable of doing in London or anywhere else.
Actually, Tom did become an actor, and appeared regularly in productions in the many theatres just off the West End. His lean looks and his rich vowels (he had been told to drop his Welsh accent, but could not) suited the parts he had to play.
Going home nightly to his neat, but small, furnished flat just off Amen Corner, he never failed to see his name on the posters lining the sides of the elevators on the tube. He had the feeling that, although not in the eyes of the folks back in the hills and villages of South Wales, he had started, he was on his way to achieving something he had only dreamed about in Tal-y-bont. He remained in London, only coming to Wales very occasionally to visit his mother and father.
George and Thomas Bennet had had the good sense to haul themselves out of that morass of human flotsam and jetsam that was then Swansea by their wits and a bit of hard work, and had married sisters, both raven-haired beauties from somewhere up in the Marches.
For a long time it looked as if Glynis, the younger of the two sisters, had really taken to her new life on the farm. She could always be seen scurrying back and forth between the outbuildings, carrying feed for the young bullocks that had as yet, hardly spent any time at all out of doors.
In the village, when Glynis was shopping for the week, she could be heard in noisy, sometimes heated discussions with the other farmers' wives about the outrageously low subsidies the hill farmers were getting, particularly when compared with the farmers of say, Hereford, over the border, when it was well known that those loafers were making a nice living, thank you very much, from putting their fine broad acres under nothing but fallow.
Glynis worked long and hard at being a farmer, as well as working hard at being a good wife to a farmer, and for the first five years of their time at the farm at Tal y bont, she was perfectly happy. She felt she knew how the pioneers who had left the green valleys of
While the children were at school, all was well, but young Tom had had his head filled with strange and wonderful notions, and his talk was infused with the poetry of Thomas Hardy and William Wordsworth; the poetry of love, most of it unrequited, among the hills and dales of Dorset, ‘Wessex’, Tom said to call it, and the pastoral longings of the couple from Dove Cottage among the untrodden ways of Westmoreland. His mother would often hear him telling the words to the wind, and she would stand as near to him as possible without him seeing her, and catch the words that thrilled her, and little by little she grew to love the poetry she heard her son reciting. She seemed almost to grow more distant from her family, particularly from her husband, George, who had no time for such stuff as poetry.
After the day's work was done, or if she had a moment, she would stand on a grassy knoll above the house. From here she could see the opal and the sapphire of the distant sea, and the wild cliffs of Pembrokeshire. She stood, head erect, breathing the sweet air that was full of wild honeysuckle and lilac, but which also had the salty tang of the sea in its teeth.
She thought of a young man setting out for Lyonesse, a hundred miles away, coming up past beacon tops down to the starlit shore, to be with her.
He did not come, so she went out to search for him. She went out, striding purposefully across the sedgy foothills, not really aware of her feelings, or her motives, but rather following her blood and her ancestry, bold and passionate, caring less and less for the animals in her care, fired only by half heard songs from her eldest son, who was unwittingly sewing the seeds of a heroin's fall.
The words of Hardy, Wordsworth were far more effective for their only being half heard on the wind. Glynis dreaming, filled those spaces with her own poetry, unconsciously, and all the more enduring and ardent for that.
The new man in Glynis's life, the new, imaginary man, was tall and strong, but more than that, he was quiet and gentle, and had long sensitive fingers. He was a poet after all.
The real man in her life, the only one, was anything but quiet and gentle, and daily now she noticed his manner. Thomas, her husband, still had the energy, and the build of a man half his age, the farm demanded it, but the hard work, unrelenting and repetitive, had brutalised him. Glynis had noticed how he threw the empty, galvanised feed buckets down onto the stone yard in his temper, and his tiredness. She noticed how he swore (he never used to) at the animals, and she noticed how clumsy and heavy he was about the house. He seemed to be forever knocking things over, the blue and white striped milk jug in the middle of the table.
-Heaven only knows how he knocked it over in the middle, she said to herself, mopping up the milk, and leaving some for Ginger to lap up, purring lovely under the table.
The hats and coats piled on the hat-stand by the back door was the next thing to topple, and there on the kitchen floor it had looked as if it would never stand up again under its weight of forgotten coats straining all the brass hooks almost to breaking point.
-You never wear this, she said to him, picking up a tweed jacket from the pile that had actually broken off one of the hooks. He had looked so grand in it when they had first bought it, and he had worn those new cavalry twills, and looked handsome, but he never wore it. He grumbled roughly. She would give it to the jumble, she would.
There were a thousand things about him that irritated her now, and though she complained to herself that she was being trivial, she could never ignore his clumsiness and the heavy way he carried himself about the farm.
The news that a reservoir was to be constructed in the valley below the two farms run by the Bennet brothers, caused a lot of worry in both Bennet households, and neither George nor Thomas could talk about anything else for months.
Thomas knew someone in the Town Planning Office in Swansea. They had played rugby together years ago, and were still friends, even though their lives were now very different.
Eric Blake, one of the town planners had told Thomas all about the plans to sacrifice the valley, or at least part of it, to the overwhelming need, he said, for more and more town water.
Swansea was getting bigger, its population was growing almost monthly now; the need was great.
He would come up and explain everything to his old pal from the back of the scrum. There was nothing to be done about it. The compen would have to be sorted out, Thomas had said, so it was fixed for Eric to come up to the farm one evening, hopefully before dark. He would show Thomas the lines of the new construction, how far it would encroach on his water meadows in the bottom, and which way the lane would have to be re-routed, all the details before the papers got hold of it, and blew it all up.
Glynis's worried about the dam that was being planned, the noise, and the dirt, the commotion, she called it.
She could well imagine heavy yellow machinery roaring long into the night, under dazzling mercury arc lamps, the constant din that drowned everything. What mostly worried her was that the main, the only solace in her life, her evening reveries stimulated by her longings for a love to come and overwhelm her heart, would be trampled down by noise and dirt.
She wandered along the banks of the river, where the cattle had trampled a way to a muddy pool to drink. She passed little limestone weirs, and she thought of plunging her arms in the icy waters, for a glass that had slipped down into the little abyss from the long slender hands of her lover, as they had sipped wine from the one glass, a constant reminder of their love, persistently sung by the water as it gurgled over the smoothed stones of the weir.
She lingered by the stream until the cool breezes of evening brought her back into the house, wondering how much longer her solitude and her thoughts would remain undisturbed.
The river would soon be dammed, and would be trapped forever, culverted and contained, and Glynis, standing cold, alone with her thoughts, feared a similar fate. She looked at the water slowly swirling in the pools that the bulls had made, and imagined her own life on the hillside farm, tied to the land, the house, to Thomas, who mattered less and less now.
He carried on with his work, grumbling more and more to himself as he toiled. He had come to hate and detest his work on the farm. He had perhaps noticed a change in his wife, when he noticed her at all, but being constantly bound up in the mandates of animal husbandry, he had little time to dwell on her. He ignored her behaviour, had no real idea what was happening, if anything was, or how to react to something he hardly understood. He continued to bludgeon his way through his work, his life, and the lives of Glynis and Tom.
The tensions between them revealed themselves in various ways, all of them significant events for Glynis, and the love that was waning unnoticed by Thomas.
Poetry, the language of emotion, and the images that were conjured up in Tom's young, impressionable head, affected the daily routines of his life.
He knew his chores, and carried them out uncomplaining, almost glad to do something that would contribute to the life he was planning to abandon. He saw to the hens that strutted and pecked about the yard. He threw down the corn for them, and filled the long boxes in front of the two hen-cotes. He filled them full of mash that he had prepared just outside the kitchen. He fetched warm water from the stove. He broke up the cake and mashed it in the red plastic tubs, ready for the wooden troughs, which his father had knocked together when they had thought of selling eggs as well as the bit of milk that they sold to the dairy out in the village.
One morning, shortly before his departure for
His head was full of
He threw the dampened cake to the clucking, pecking Leghorns, and he remembered another caster of crumbs, and spoke the words that echoed the hungry robin. He cast the food broadly, making sure that the birds at the very edges of the yard got something. He threw the cake wider and wider, lost in his remembering. He twirled around throwing the birds their mash.
-Around the house. The flakes fly..he flung another handful just as his father was rounding the corner to wash his hands before eating himself..faster. The handful of soft mash caught him full in the face.
Glynis was washing the breakfast things, watching her son treading his imaginary boards, delivering a speech or something, flinging the mash in broad sweeps across the yard. She only half caught what he was saying, through the window, but she saw the calamity.
Thomas let out a yell as the wet mash hit him. He was surprised, and not a little afraid. His cry had something ferociously craven about it.
Furious, he flew at Tom, knocking the plastic bucket out of his hand. Tom was frightened of his father, who was a much stronger man. He crouched like an animal in front of his son, fists clenched, and up together for a fight, in an almost bestial lunge. He snarled at him, his nose and his mouth bunched and ugly.
-Yer doin' yer poems are yuh, he skipped around Tom who was white with fear and rage, I'll give yuh poems, and he made to hit the boy.
The yell, and the animal like crouching had shocked Tom into a sort of scared apoplexy, and he too was ready to fight. His knuckles were white, and his mouth was open, like a cornered tiger. Thomas was still jumping, mad with a temper that would make the top of his head hurt later.
-Ah'll give yer poetry, he said spitting, and he set himself ready to spring, lifting his fists, one behind the other. The veins in his bull neck were standing out like fountain pens, and his eyes were bulging mad out of his head. Glynis saw that she must act, and she hurled the basin of dirty water, which still had a few teaspoons in it, out of the window at her husband. It missed him, but brought him up sharp. He swung his head round, and rushed at the window.
-Yer all together in this, are ye, he roared through the house. Glynis had flown; the very act of throwing the water had been like the desperate pulling of a trigger in her heart, and she rushed upstairs in uncontrollable cries of despair.
The Red Bantam
THE RED BANTAM
by
ROBERT LESLIE FLIELDING
Holly Grove Farm stretched down to the canal that ran like a steel band the length of the valley. The grass in these lower fields had been eaten down by the cows that were only brought in for milking. Under a leaden sky they could be seen lying down several yards apart, Roman senators after the feast, silent and immobile.
Above the farm the land was altogether rougher, not used for anything in particular, and old motorcycles, rusting tractors and broken ploughs punctuated the ground instead of ruminating cows.
Steve was out early, not below the soot-blackened walls of the barn and the house, but above, wandering up to the old ZB34 he remembered his Dad chugging around on. He had a bag slung over his shoulder, an oily, black thing he kept in one of the outhouses. It contained his spanners and screwdrivers, Allen keys and monkey wrenches, his feeler-gauges and his hammer, all the stuff he had collected, bought from the hardware store down in the village, or been given to him by Eric Stott. Eric was the man Steve looked to for advice on anything that burnt fuel, spewed out black smoke and moved without someone laying a stick to it.
The bike lay where it had drawn its last breath, where its exhaust had huffed the last plume of blue smoke into the cool air of the hillside. Its paintwork had been bleached nearly white by the weathering it got high above the villages and the trees of the ribbon of valley below. Its bare aluminium alloy single cylinder was shoddy and black. The gear-shift had things growing out of it, half of the front wheel had been grown over by the rough grey-green wire that passed for grass in this part of the farm.
Steve reached the machine, put down his bag of tools and looked round. Someone was moving round by the front of the barn, too far to be recognized by a stranger. Steve knew it was his younger step-brother, Thomas. He knew his height, even from this distance, knew it wasn't his other step-brother, Peter, saw Thomas' slight limp, knew who it was, what he was up to, where he was going. Thomas disappeared round the corner of the barn. Steve looked at the old machine at his side.
Three screws half undone from the last time, and the large aluminium cover was sliding down to his feet. A slow leak of brown oil connected the cover to the heather that bounced beneath Steve's knees.
With the cover gone the gearbox displayed some of its vitality, its vigour and its newness that had always thrilled Steve. His eyes sparkled when he saw the gleaming cogs and lay-shafts coated with a veneer of lubricant.
This was what Steve dreamed about, what he tried to visualize, and how he came to see connections that had to be seen if anything useful was to be done. Eric had pointed them out on another BSA, a newer model, down by his own shed that served as a workshop.
Steve already knew how the gears lined up and how the shift worked. He didn't like to say so in front of the men who always hung around Eric's shed. They knew nothing, but nodded knowingly when Eric pronounced his diagnosis on the shining innards of someone's Norton Dominator or Triumph Thunderbird with the cylinder head off and five or six men looking down into the engine with its head uncovered.
Steve worked steadily, dismantling the BSA's gearbox, not in the way a breaker might do it, to get at the aluminium shell housing, but carefully, laying out the gears in a line on the ground next to him, in order so that he could put them back.
He undid nuts that were castle-like and had split pins though them to ensure they didn't come loose. He took out his circlip-pliers and carefully put the sharp ends into the two holes of the circlip, and squeezed the thin pliers until the circlip slid out of its groove into his waiting hands.
He came to understand the pressures that had to be exerted, no more, no less, if the gears and the shafts that carried them were to be extracted from the grey casing. He knew not to over-tighten nuts without a torque-wrench to tell him exactly how many pounds he was exerting. He began to feel the weightings, not in his head, but in the ligaments of his wrist as he forced the spanner clockwise.
He began to know instinctively that he was holding a ten thou feeler rather than the fifteen thou. He felt it in his fingers and his thumbs, and he remembered something that wasn't either words or numbers. Here on the cold grey hillside with skylarks singing a hundred feet above his head, with the kestrel hovering above field-mice and voles, dropping like a stone to its prey.
Here he began to acquire the sensation of accuracy and precision, and contrasted it to the exactitude of the natural world around him. The world of thousandths of an inch play between a shaft and bushed gear, between a bearing and the circlip that confined it to its place in the orderly arrangement that was a gearbox, this world replaced and replicated the natural world, between talon and prey, between the eye of the kestrel and the object of its stoop.
With the gears and their bushed shafts laid out on the ground, with the bearings and their circlips placed at the end of each shaft they supported, with everything in place in the order it had to be replaced, Steve had completed half of his morning's work.
The sun had not reached that point on Lark Hill that he knew signalled his time to go down and wash up ready for the food put before him. It was still not up to the last of the high meadow walls. He still had time to reassemble his array of shining machined parts, and so he worked on.
He was slow, not rushing, not missing anything, not letting any notch in a wheel go unnoticed. He worked on steadily till the soiled patch of ground was free again. Every part was back in its place, the gears turned freely, the layshaft clicked everything back and forth like so many wheels inside a precision timepiece.
Looking back over his shoulder he saw the sun climbing to the spur of Lark Hill. He waited for the noise of the triangle his mother always used to bring the boys off the hill, out of the outbuildings and in from the fields to eat.
He waited, feeling a gnawing in his stomach. He was hungry, and glad the sun had done its climbing. Quickly and easily replacing the cover and the three screws that held the casing, he threw his tools into his bag, folded the feelers gingerly so as not to bend them, put them carefully into his jacket pocket and walked down to the house.
Kicking his boots off in the small yard at the back of the door, he could hear the two boys fighting just inside. Thomas was hitting his younger brother, not hard, but in a tormenting way that made Peter cry tears of rage.
Suddenly, their father appeared and before either of the boys could move, the heavy man had slapped them both across their silly heads.
-Now get in here, he pointed to the door leading into the kitchen. Your mother's got food waiting. Both boys replied as one.
-Yes, Dad. The father, Steve's step-father, turned to look at Steve, huffed, shrugged his shoulders and followed the two boys into the house.
Steve needed to wash his hands. He stepped gingerly up to the kitchen sink, and finding the tap, turned it on to flush the grime off his hands. They were still blackened after though, but he went into the room where the big table stood.
The interior of the house was as you would expect a farm-house to be, untidy and slightly dinghy. There was something on every shelf, every space was full, there wasn't room enough for so much as even a box of matches anywhere.
The table in the centre of the room had all manner of half empty sauce bottles, salt cellars and pickle jars crowded into its middle, looking like the central business district of a modern city from the plains that surrounded it. The rest of the table was covered with comparatively low level developments, plates, a gravy boat, and the cutlery in one heap at the side of one of the floral dinner plates.
Tommy sat down heavily and waited to be fed. He held his knife and fork in his two bunched fists, both implements pointing skyward, as though he was a convict threatening malice until his plate had been piled up with food.
Steve felt uncomfortable. The two younger boys smirked at each other and kicked each other's ankles under the table. He knew that once they got fed up of goading each other they would start on him. It seemed to amuse his step-father, who never did anything to stop them once they started to taunt their older step-brother.
Thomas looked up from his brother's side and spoke.
-Whatcha been doin' lardy face ? Tommy, his father, smirked, as though he was about to be given a treat before his meal. Steve said nothing. Tommy frowned.
-Your brother asked you a question, boy. It was Thomas and Peter's turn to smirk. Steve said nothing.
-You hard o' hearing, boy ? Now Tommy's voice had real malice in it. Steve remained silent.
Margaret, the boys' mother, Tommy's wife, his second wife, hurried in with a steaming pot of stew. She looked round and immediately sensed what was happening.
-What have you been a doing, Stephen ? she asked gently. Steve moved his mouth.
-Speak up lad, us can't hear you. Both boys laughed.
-Workin', was all Steve could say to his mother.
-I should say you have an' all, she said laughing gaily, just look at the colour of your hands, my boy. That was enough for Tommy Hibbert.
-My boy, my boy, he mimicked his wife. Thomas and Peter laughed quickly, but shut up as quickly as their mother threw them a withering glance. She spoke again.
-Workin' at what, son ? Again her husband mimicked her.
-Son! He parodied her intonation, feigning affection. It was crude. Margaret turned on her husband.
-Will you let well alone for once, she scolded. Tommy cowered. Thomas and Peter sniggered quietly.
-And you two, she snapped, eat your dinner and get back to what you was doin'. The boys started to jolt the potatoes in huge forkfulls, staring down at their plates so as not to see their mother's wrath.
-Son ? she said gently again, looking for any sign of insolence from her husband or her two youngest. There was no sign. All were eating what she had put down in front of them.
Steve spoke up, quietly at first, but when he saw that his mother was smiling at him proudly, he spoke more confidently.
-I been lookin' at the gears on that old Beezer, he said, and then as if he had been encouraged, he continued, I wanted to see if I could figure out how they worked, an' if I could take it down an' put it back same as it was when I found it. His mother beamed.
_And did you, son, did you find out how it all worked an' how to take it down an' put it back together again ?
_Yes, ma, I did. Tommy fumed silently. The boys by now were lookin' slightly in awe at their step-brother. He was five years older than Thomas, seven older than Peter, and whenever he spoke to their mother about something about which they knew very little, which was most of the time, they were mesmerized and slightly jealous. They would get him back for that, and they knew their own father would help them to do it, but it had to be out of the house, away from their mother's eyes and ears.
The meal continued in silence, punctuated only by the chewing and slurping of food and drink of the family. When he had cleared his plate, Tommy belched loudly and pushed his plate nearer to the centre of the table for his wife to clear. He opened his moth and picked his teeth with the corner of his thumbnail. Margaret stood up.
-Tommy, she said sharply, if you don't mind, we'll have none of that here. Save your dirty habits for the barn and the field. Tommy grunted, stood up and moved away from the table. He was rattled now and turned to his step-son.
-Don't you be all day, he said, and then parroting his wife, he finished with, son, long and drawn out, full of sonorous tone, sarcastic and sickening.
Outside in the sunshine, Tommy was taking a wheel off his pick-up. He had had a puncture, a bit of iron, maybe from another vehicle, had ripped into the side of his rear tyre. He had the levers on it as it lay cumbersome on top of the low wall that separated the two halves of the farm, the more productive and greener bottom fields from the brown wastes of the upper.
The thick rubber had got the better of him before food was ready, and he had been glad of any interruption. The two boys could have helped, but they were still not strong enough to pull back the levers. One time when he had made them help they had catapulted back from the wheel as the unyielding rubber walls refused to give way. He had wiped his mouth with his arm and had a tigerish expression that went well with his ill humour. He stood against the tyre and once more pulled on the levers. He just needed a start, the rest was easy, but it wouldn't come. It was too new and the walls still rigid as the day they had sprung hot from the rubber press. He stopped and swore at the tyre. At this moment Steve was moving quietly out of the door of the house, not wishing to disturb his step-father's attention. He knew how difficult tyres could be, and this thought made him halt and ask if he could help.
-You all right, Dad, he said. Tommy swung round.
-Does it look like it, he cursed. Steve drew nearer to the wall. Tommy was still wrestling with the lever. He pulled it and then suddenly, in a fit of temper, let go. The lever swung out off the rim of the wheel, spun through the air and caught Steve a glancing blow on the side of his face.
Steve staggered back and fell. He didn't see stars, he didn't see anything. Margaret rushed out to her son. She had just been coming out of the kitchen to shake the tablecloth of its bits of food and crumbs of bread to give the two or three hens a treat. They scurried round as they saw her come out of the door with the brightly coloured cloth in her arms, just prior to spreading it in the wind that had blown up. She saw the brown lever spinning and glinting in the sun as it spun, saw it hit Steve, saw him reel and fall, heard herself screaming, all as if in a sort of slow-motion daze, unreal.
Almost before he hit the ground she was there, cushioning his fall, stopping his head from a fatal blow on the cobbled yard. His eyes were closed, and she cried out again.
-My son, she shouted, my son. Tommy was also quickly there but now that his wife had got to her son before him, he played it all down as if it was an everyday thing to get struck down by a tyre lever spinning out of control. He saw a thin trickle of blood on the side of Steve's face and felt guilty, felt ashamed that he had let the lever go. He should have held it, forced it back. What kind of a man was he, was he a man, a father, a step-father ?
-These things happen when you're doin' summat, he almost spat out at his wife who wasn't listening.
-Warn't my fault, yer know. She looked up in wonder at her husband's apparent concern for his own skin rather than the boy whose eyes gently flittered open, the whites showing him still in the throes of semi-consciousness.
_Who said it was, she uttered and taking her apron to her mouth spat on it and rubbed the blood off of her boy's face.
Thomas and Peter stood awed by the sight of their step-brother lying on the ground. They looked at their father, saw it was not time to take up his cudgels and sulked.
-Bring some water. It was their mother, whose voice they were more used to hearing indoors than out here in the yard. For a second they could hardly recognize it as anyone's voice, thinking it the call of a bird or the cat on one of the low roofs of the farm buildings. She shouted at them again, and Tommy, their father came to her assistance, if only in this vocal way he could easily emulate. He was a man of action, and more, he was a man given to snap decisions, like the fire of automatic weapons, bullets issuing from its rifling without any thought required from its internal workings, immediate.
-You heard yer mother, he barked, get some water, and then again, another bullet, look sharp.
Thomas returned with a green plastic bowl full of tepid water. There had been a bit left in the kettle from the tea they had drunk to finish off their
As she dabbed, Tommy felt his awkwardness, felt it too much and tried to edge round his wife's skirt, just to get away, to do something, anything rather than this awful guilt he was feeling. The boys smirked at their father. They knew his expression and what it signified, knew he was afraid of their mother. They had the best of it, siding with their father against that soft arse Steve, and then against him once it was clear to them that their mother was on the warpath. Mother and father rarely united to condemn the behaviour of the two boys, never against Steve. Margaret could always feel the injustices that were meted out to her oldest boy and she was ready to stop anything that smacked of bullying, either from the two boys or from her brutish husband.
Steve began to open his eyes. His mother dabbed his temples continually to soothe him. As his eyes gradually opened it became clear to her that he was not focused on anything. He looked blank and without any sense of where he was, or what he was looking at. His gaze was glassy. She could see that he could not see her. She moved a corner of her floral patterned pinny across his field of view. His pupils did not follow the reds and greens across from left to right. She held up her hand and waved it across, purposefully blotting out the sun from his face, the better to see his reaction. There was none.
This wouldn't do, she thought, her son catching cold on a dirty stone yard and she gathered him up like so many aprons off the close line that swung in the wind from one corner of an outhouse to another. Up she gathered him in her arms and fled into the house with him.
Tommy and his sons looked askance at one another. Their complicity did not have any experience of this kind of thing, a sort of catastrophe. They averted their eyes from one another lest they would begin to feel connected with the guilt he still felt. He lost something in his son's eyes that day. They felt his selfishness and shied away from it. It was as if their getting at Steve under their father's nose had only been a game, that they didn't really hate him, but now they could see that it wasn't at all a game. That their own father meant everything he made them do or put them up to against their step-brother.
The doctor was sent for. Margaret skivvied round the house, setting the boys to work moving things off armchairs, to make way for something bigger than a box of matches. He would have to put his leather bag down somewhere, if not on the floor. He would have to sit down and take some tea, and she would have to sit and listen to what he had to say. The boys worked furiously. Steve wandered in and out of consciousness under a blanket Tommy had fetched from their bedroom.
The sound of a car coming down the lane alerted everybody. Tommy smoothed back his unruly hair. Thomas and Peter turned the corner to watch the car slither to a stop in the greasy yard, its left wheel running over the tyre lever bending it slightly.
Dr. Waite stepped out of his black Morris Minor, looked down at what he was about to put his foot in, sidestepped it and moved carefully across the yard and onto the threshold. He looked to wipe his feet but there was nothing that looked anything like a doormat. He made to take of his shoes. Margaret saw what he was doing and spoke out in earnest.
-No, please, Doctor, she said deferentially. Waite was used to the ways of these small hill farmers and took them off anyway. He knew she would have been flying around the house clearing things away. He knew she would not look him in the face as he saw how they lived. He had seen how they all lived up here above the line of the canal. Nothing surprised him, and he gave her a look of warmth and concern. She caught his expression and the full import of it and felt easier, smiled and beckoned him into where the boy lay.
Kneeling over the boy, the doctor felt the boy's pulse, holding his thin wrist gently and looking at the Ingersoll watch on his own. He touched the boy's forehead, eased his hand around over the bruised area at the front of his temples.
Deftly, he flicked one eyelid up and saw the eyeball up in the top quadrant of the boy's eye. He let it go and it slipped back slowly, covering the white of the eye. Still he was not conscious, was more than asleep. Both mother and step-father felt that. Even Tommy felt that and shuddered involuntarily. The doctor saw him and looked up.
-How did this happen, he said. Margaret was ready with an answer, but it was too earnest to be taken without some slight suspicion.
-It was an accident, doctor, honest it were, and she breathed in deeply as if she had somehow thought of herself as entering into some sort of deception.
Doctor Waite returned his gaze to the injured boy. His breathing was regular, that was something.
-When did it happen, how long ago. Margaret looked up at the clock on the mantelpiece.
-I should say two hours ago, doctor. The doctor frowned.
-This should have cleared up by now, he said and felt the pulse again.
-Let him rest now, give him some peace and quiet. He knew these hill folk for their noise and their rough movements but he also knew Margaret Hibbert was a careful woman where her children were concerned, and particularly where Stephen was concerned.
Steve slept for days. Everyone tiptoed around the house. Margaret was adamant he shouldn't be disturbed. The boys were quieter, but it was difficult for Tommy. He was a heavy man, flat-footed, not at all light on his feet and used to banging about the place like a bull that was tethered in a barn. He tried. He did. He knew it was important to Margaret that Steve got better as quickly as possible. It mattered little to him that the boy had lost his sight. Dr. Waite had said it would return, hadn't he, and it would, soon enough. What was the use in worrying, so he didn't. Like every responsibility he shunned, he shut this one out to, made excuses for himself. He wasn't a doctor, what could he do ? It wasn't his fault the lever had slipped. Who was to know where it would end up ? And who should be blamed, not him, never him.
He went about his work sullenly. The two boys had nobody to bait except each other, and that was no fun to watch, two kids ragging each other. With Steve it was different. The boys could provoke him where if he did it, it would be altogether more serious, more likely to get back to Margaret, and more likely to get him into her bad books. He didn't want to be in her bad books, least no more than usual.
It was easy to get the wrong side of Margaret, he did it regular and often. He tramped into the house with his boots on, he swore at the television, he swore at the two boys, he swore at Steve, he even swore at her. But she always made him pay for it. That look she gave him was enough. He hadn't noticed it when they started going out together, to dances and socials. Maybe she hadn't wanted him to see that side of her, maybe that was it. Women could do that, he knew. And Margaret had experience of dealing with men, with husbands, with her first husband, with Kenneth.
And that was another thing, Kenneth, he disliked the name since he first heard her talk about him. He was in the ground, up yonder, but she spoke about him, less and less these days, but she mentioned his name from time to time.
Steve perked up at the mention of his father's name, and asked about his Dad. Tommy pretended not to hear what they said, tried not to listen, went out on some pretext whenever that name was uttered, fastened his shoe-laces, bent down to hide his expression, anything so's he wouldn't have to pay any attention to what was being said.
They didn’t really know each other. Tommy knew of him. He knew of Tommy and that's as far as it went. Kenneth had been under the ground longer than that when Tommy first met Margaret. And now Tommy didn't want to know, he had been a good man, always been in work, didn't drink, but a lot of men in the valley were that way, chapel men, Tommy thought and winced.
Best thing was to forget him, get on with things, keep busy, make money, make brass. Tommy put him out of his mind, forgot his dirty boots all the time, cursed Kenneth's name for being better than he could ever be, in her eyes, in the eyes of her son. That made him resent his step-son, made him enjoy his own to taunting the boy, enjoyed watching something he couldn't get away with. They were his sons, weren't they ? He had something to be proud of, something to smile about, something to be pleased with, hadn't he ?
As the days went on, Tommy began to wonder, even in spite of himself, how the boy was doing, whether he was recovering, if he was getting better. He didn't like to ask Margaret, though she would have like him to have asked her, at least once, only once, but he never did. Instead, he preferred to listen to his own sons questions. They asked their mother how their step-brother was getting on, even in spite of themselves. They didn't like him, didn't think of him as a brother, he wasn't their real brother after all, was he, just a step-brother, what was that, nothing that they had ever heard of before.
He was getting slowly better, his mother said over dinner. He could see the window, he knew when it was bright outside and when it was dark and overcast. He could tell when it was drawing close to evening, but that might have been because of the different sounds coming from outside of his closed door. He could hear the sound of the boys taking off their boots, scraping them across the four inch strip he had made from an the blade of an old threshing machine. He could hear their voices, hear them asking for food. They were always hungry, like the crows that perched on the telephone wire, musical notes on a score of sky, black commas on a line of writing paper that was cloudy instead of pure white.
The doctor came up less and less now. The little Morris Minor flew past the top of the lane but they hardly ever heard it slowing up, the doctor changing down through the rattling gears before turning into their lane, bouncing down into their yard.
Today he called in, but they hadn't heard the scraping of gears, nothing. He had walked down from the road at the top, had left his car half way up a banking, out of the way of the tractors that passed, the milk vans collecting from the places further up.
He wrapped on the door and stepped into the house. Margaret had been baking and was full of flour. No hands were shook, just a nod of polite recognition. Thanks in that nod, enough.
-And how are we today, my lad, Waite asked of the boy who had sat up and had suffered his mother to smart his hair down, and to unruffle the candlewick bedspread. She had thrown the army great-coat off earlier when Steve complained he was too hot. Margaret kicked it under the bed, hadn't time to do anything else before he was in and sitting at the boy's side.
Steve was making up an answer that took too long. His mother answered for him.
_He's fine, Doctor, she said as gaily as she felt, he's a lot better, and then to her son, aren't you, Stephen ? The boy nodded. Waite leaned forward and flicked his left eyelid up. The brown eyeball moved towards his own. He felt his gaze and let the lid slide back.
-He's seeing a lot more now, is he not ?
-A lot more, Doctor, a lot more, and then as if hopefully, almost back to normal, wouldn't you say ?
-Yes, I would, but keep him warm and resting for another week yet, I think. Margaret frowned. The Doctor saw it and raised his hand to placate her.
-He'll soon be right as rain, soon be up and about, but keep him out of that wet grass, bring that old B34 down from the hill if you must, but keep him dry. Even the doctor knew of the boy's passion for that old bike his dad had once blazed around the village on, everybody in the village knew.
-Tell Tommy and those two strapping lads of his to bring that old thing further down the hill, lean it against a wall somewhere down here, somewhere you can keep an eye on him, call him in when it starts to rain, and then, smiling at the recollection he had of the boy's earnestness in things mechanical, stop him from working on even when its coming down in stair-rods.
_I'll see to it, doctor, she said and wondered how Tommy would take having to move Kenneth's old bike nearer to the house, nearer his line of vision as he went about his work round the farm. At least up there it was out of the way, out of sight. She knew how much he disliked anything that reminded him of her dead husband, even though he was dead and buried.
She knew how much Steve looked like his Dad, how she was constantly reminded of him whenever he looked at her, the way Kenneth had. It drove Tommy to despair. It drove him to get his own boys, her own boys, to goad Steve. She couldn't stop it. He made sure it was all done outside, away from her, away from the lash of her tongue that stung her man and his two boys into silence.
She would do it though, she would. Tommy would have to bring the old rusted thing down from the hill, even though he would grumble like a child, even though he would make his two sons get the better of Kenneth's son. But she would do it.
She felt a tenacity, a determination where her son Steve was concerned that she never felt when she thought of her two other sons. They had their Dad to look after them. Who did Steve have if not his own mother. She would do it, whatever it took for her son to become something, and she could see that he was doing something, he was learning about something that had been near to her own dear Kenneth's heart. He had lived for her, and for Steve, but he had always lived for his bike, for the wind rushing through his hair, for the sound his machine made when it was running well, and it always ran well, Kenneth's bike.
Doctor Waite stood up and made to leave the room. As he stood, he turned to the boy's mother.
-He is going to get better, he said. She nodded placidly. He's had a knock on the head, that's all, he finished, and left the room.
She knew in that instant, by those words and the way he had said them that that wasn't all, that a knock on the head, a good enough one, would always be a problem, something to haunt her, to keep her awake at night, to worry her into a somber mood that sent her husband further away from him, further away from Steve. She knew it was going to be that way. What the doctor said confirmed it.
The days came and went, the light got stronger, the days longer and still Steve was not right, still he stayed indoors, still his mother took care to shade him from direct sunlight, though she would have loved to flood the room where he lay with brilliant sunshine.
Tommy and the two younger boys came in for their meals, shook off their boots at the door and padded in, ate their food quickly and silently and moved outside again. Without Steve's presence they felt at a loss. It was strange, but they missed him.
Tommy grumbled under his breath, his wife caught a word and frowned.
-'Bout time he was up, i'nt it ? She frowned at him and he ate his food noisily. The boys said nothing, kicked each other less and less, grew bored with only each other to bait, where was the fun in that, eh ?
-We brought that heap o' scrap iron down like you said, he said to his wife as she doled out the boiled potatoes.
-Mm. She seemed not to be bothered.
-What he'll do with it down here, God alone knows, he muttered to himself. All she caught were the last three words. She snapped at him with his mouth full of potato now.
-That'll do. He sulked and finished his meal, went out and kicked at the air, spat onto the dark stones of the yard.
When she saw where they had left the old bike she groaned. They could of left it a bit nearer, he would be able to see it from his bed if he looked.
Moving it again made Tommy good and angry.
_I haven't got enough to do, I haven't, he shot out as the bike jolted over stones in front of its flat tyres. He leant the bike where she'd said, flinging it back onto the low wall, and then looking round to see if she was watching. She wasn't, he decided and kicked the front wheel with his steel toed boots.
-See, my love, she held him up on his pillow, there, see. He looked but could see nothing, not in the light that flew into the room, arrow rays holding dust , a poor man's starlight, a
dust- laden beam of light that picked out his black shoes in the far corner of the room.
-What is it, he said, what is there ? She pushed him higher, held him while he looked again. Surely he could see it now, surely he could, surely.
-Something on the wall.
-Yes. It was something, she thought. He could see something against the wall, it was something.
-Can you get up, love, she spoke quietly into his ear. He nodded. He swung his pale legs out of the bed, stood up, wobbled and sat back down.
-Try again, she whispered, and gave him some encouragement, her hand in the middle of his back, her shoulder to lean on. He stood up and looked.
-Now do you see it ? He was smiling. She looked at her son's face. He was smiling. He could see what she could see.
-Who.. He struggled to form words, a question.
-Your Dad and the boys brought it down for you, forgetting their mood as they had struggled with the ungainly thing, the front wheel stuck with a lump of turf under the black mudguard.
Steve looked again, and this time he saw something.
-It looks like..he hesitated. His mother helped him.
-Yes, son, what does it look like ?
-It looks like the ZB from up.. again he hesitated. Again his mother urged him, almost willed him. -From up there, yes, it does. He screwed up his eyes to make out what he thought he had seen.
-It is, it's me bike from up there. But, he looked at his mother, who..
-Yer fa..Tommy and the boys, they brought it down for you.
-But why, he said confused now.
-Why do you think ?
-I don't know, and then again he repeated himself, but why ?
-They did it for you, so's you wouldn't have to go up there to work on it. Steve's brow straightened and a smile creased his cheeks, showing his dimples either side of his mouth.
The ZB stood leaned against the wall in all weathers, battered by rain and wind. If anything it looked more of a write off than it had when it had lain half submerged in rough grass and heather. Now the full extent of the ruin that time and the elements had wrought on its frame and its engine, on its wheels and its solid suspension. It was a Trials model Kenneth had bought with some money he'd had left him. An aunt on his mother's side had died and left all her nephews and nieces something. It wasn't a fortune, but it had been enough to pay for the machine outright, although it was second hand. Still, a machine that had been used on the International Six-Day Trial, the ISDT, that was something and young men from all over the valley had come up the hill to Kenneth's Mum's place to take a look. Some of them had even ridden it, across the deep gully that cut her land in two.
Standing in full view now, it looked somehow forlorn, crestfallen, despite its pedigree, the forerunner to the Gold Star, the Clubman's pride. Looking at it with her son, Margaret could see that it had seen better days, that it now looked at its worst, a wreck of a machine at best, so much scrap iron at worst.
Later that afternoon, after she had baked, after she had put their tea in the oven and read her paper, she went out round that side of the house with a wire brush and a wallpaper scraper and set to. She brushed away the lumps of dirt and grass that still clung to the frame and clogged the rear suspension up, she wiped the alloy push rod cover and found to her surprise and her joy that the cover still bore the crest, the three crossed rifles, the Birmingham Small Arms motif, and the letters, BSA underneath. On the other side, above the grey chaincase she picked out the stamped number of the machine..ZB34. The scraper rasped across the aluminium and brought out the shapes in sharp relief. Two of the screw holding the front casing of the gear-box looked as if they would fall and be lost in the grass against this part of the wall, so she quickly went inside and got a screwdriver from a drawer.
Not knowing which way to turn the screws, she undid the first one she tried and the casing swung off the remaining screw that held. She let out a little moan as the casing swung clear, but what she saw made her gasp.
The outward appearance of the bike stopped any thought that there was anything of value in it. She only suffered it to be left on the hillside because Steve seemed interested in it. To her it was a constant reminder of Kenneth, and she chose to look at it less and less these days. Tommy seemed almost to despise it, despise Steve for finding anything worth looking at it within its rusted frame.
Under this outer cover was something wonderful, parts that looked brand new, parts that looked as if they had been made yesterday instead of 40 years ago. She felt the ends of
shafts and turned them, not knowing what they did or even if she should turn them, but turn them she did. They clicked around beautifully, and although she was completely nonplussed as to what they did or how they functioned, she could nevertheless marvel at their symmetry, at their exactness and precision, although it was only the shape of the cogs that really impressed her and the contrast, the absolute contrast they made with the rough and damaged exterior of the machine.
Now she could see something of what Steve saw, less, of course, their real precision in fitting together like verbs in a sentence, like letters in a word, for that was how Steve saw them, not as a sundry collection of pieces of metal, but as a poem in steel, an essay in shafts and cogs, a sentence of gears and their bushes, bearings and their circlips. She looked at the innards in an absolutely illiterate way, but she saw something of the design of everything that fitted together in an eggshell of aluminium alloy, the yoke of a beautiful bird's egg that would hatch into the image of its maker. That sight, the sight that had Steve catching his breath when he found that all was not lost with the old Zedbee, that sight drew her closer to her son, made her more determined for him to make something of himself, to drag himself out and up from the morass that Tommy seemed to revel in, that the two boys were inevitably headed for, like father, like sons.
The sun shone in through the window, flooding the room where Steve lay. He had barely opened his eyes when his mother almost burst in. Steve wasn't alarmed by her urgency. She was like this more and more these days, as though she couldn't wait to help him up to the window to look out over the fields. But today she wanted something more. He sensed it in her gait, in her smile, even in her head as it turned this way and that, first to look at him, then to look out of the window, then at the door, and back to him again. She was frenetic, but her purpose in being so was to enthuse him with some of her energy. He felt it and it lifted him up out of bed and up to the window with only the minimum of assistance from his mother. She felt the spring in his rising, something she hadn't felt for such a long time, had never felt in him since he had first lain down on the bed that had been stood in the corner of this normally quietest of rooms, reserved for guests who never came or if they did never stayed long enough to warm the place up. Perhaps that was the problem, the musty room hardly said welcome to anyone. More likely it spoke of the work that had gone into preparing the room, the work of keeping it so clean that a speck of dust would have been welcome, a sign that the room was a part of a happy family, had toys left on armchairs, plates on the table, a brown ring where a beaker of tea had been left overnight. It spelt disinfectant, cold and emptiness. It hardly spelt anything like a welcome. And it was yet typical of sitting rooms all over the villages, through the hill farms and the tied cottages next to dinghy mills down in the valley.
By the time they reached the bike the sun had gone behind a cloud. It even started to look like it would rain, but Margaret was in too gay a mood to let a cloud get in her way. They stood together in front of the old Zedbee. She bent to the side of the machine and moved a bit of grass that obscured the trade mark engraved in the alloy casing.
-See, she said, and he bent to look, you wouldn't believe it, would you but it's still there, and look, she took the handlebars of the bike and pulled it from the wall. Steve knew what she wanted him to see.
-The engine number, he said and looked down at the scraped casing showing the two letters and two numbers.
'34' means it's a 500, the 350s were '33s', he said. She nodded, not really understanding what she had been told.
-500 ? He caught the question in her tone.
-500 cc, he said. She nodded again.
-Oh, I see, and 350 cc, is that it. It was his turn to nod, and he smiled. He knew she was only interested because he was and it warmed him and gave him courage and encouragement.
-I've seen her innards too, she almost shouted at her son. He looked disbelieving at her.
_How, he wanted to ask her how she had seen anything but the shabby frame. She pointed down at the gear-box cover. She had replaced it and tightened the screws again.
-I took it off, she said and then laughed, well, it came off in my hand, she said still smiling.
-It's like new, she said and he nodded.
-Yes, like new inside, but how did it get like this ? his question was a good one. The bike was old and rusted, both tyres were flat, the wheel rims blackened, with dirt probably. Margaret began to remember, a solitary tear flowed down her cheek. Steve saw it and was surprised by it, then he was sorry he had asked her.
-It was when your Dad, she began, when Kenneth took ill. She looked up at the clouds still hiding the sun. He couldn't use it, it were too heavy for him, he couldn't kick it over, couldn't start it, an' her were too weak to be able to run it and jump on when it started. The cloud still blackened out the sun.
_I couldn't help him, he wouldn't hear of it anyway. She looked at the bike and remembered the day he had left it out on the hill. It was the last time he rode it, she said, her voice faint now and getting weaker, he fell off it up there, wanted to kick himself for being so stupid to try riding it across that rough bit up yonder, she looked back up the hill to where the bike had lain ever since that day.
-And then, she halted, her words failed and she cried quickly, instantly recovering her composure. Tommy wouldn't lift a finger, an' they wasn't ever interested, you know ? He nodded. He knew.
-So there it's been since he fell off it. He took to his bed an', her voice tailed off into the wind. She didn't want to say the words, she wouldn't say them, not here, not while they were looking at his bike, not outside where all and sundry could hear, even though there wasn't a soul about the place. Steve put his hand on his mother's shoulder. She smiled, links were re-forged, links that had never broken, never been likely to break were nevertheless renewed. It was good.
-Anyroad, she said bending to the bike, enough of that, do you think you can do anything with it ? He knew he could and nodded vigorously.
-Look, he said, kneeling down beside her. It's only muck, and looking hard at the rim he scratched it with his thumbnail. Again he spoke.
-It's only dirt, that's all. The scratch across the dirt revealed a surface that shone. The brightness hurt his eyes and he looked away, at his mother.
-See, he repeated scratching more and more of the dirt from the surface of the rim, but still looking at his mother rather than at the bright chrome he was slowly uncovering as he scratched.. It's as good as new, and then, my Dad knew what to do, didn't he? She nodded eagerly.
-He did, she said and helped him scratch the rest of the wheel rim. After five minutes the whole shone in a sort of dull way. Free of the grease and the soil and dust that that congealed on the grease, the chrome rim shone out, wanting only some thinners to be free of the grime that had encased it over the years. But it was still difficult for Steve to look at the rims that reflected the light.
-But the dirt has been protecting it, he frowned, now what'll happen?
His mother detected uncertainty in his voice, could tell he was on the point of reacting in ways that he had developed since his father had died, denying himself, denying his thoughts, his fears and his ambitions lest his step-father and his two sons should pounce on anything he said and turn it against him, make fun of it, ridicule him until he himself wondered if what he had dreamed of had been such a good idea after all. She wasn't going to let him return to that way, to their way, and she remembered how Kenneth had encouraged Steve in anything he was interested in, even if he himself wasn't. It warmed her, this memory, and she touched his shoulder.
-We'll keep it clean, she thought about that, and then stood up and back to look at what they had already accomplished with little more than their bare hands. _
_
Music
MUSIC
By
Robert Leslie Fielding
Gustav sat down on the little wooden chair. He could hear the soft tinkling of cow bells high in the meadows above the shimmering waters of Gunterzee. He breathed in deeply. Up here the air was pure, and it filled his lungs with the cold, icy freshness of the mountains. He felt the air flowing through him. He looked at a piece of paper on the table. It was as white as the snow on the icefields he had seen when his father had taken him up to the Kleine Scheidegge.
"If I were up there, Papa," he said looking up at the face of the mountain frowning over the bright meadows, "I would take the white snow, and I would make snowballs and throw them at the moon, and they would turn into stars in the sky." Gustav's father smiled at his son. He wondered at his imagination, and hoped he would do something in his life, and not just become a tramdriver or a ticket collector in the town below.
"He will be an architect, or an artist," he paused to think, "a painter or a sculptor." He thought of the people of the town standing marvelling at his sculpture that would stand in the square, admired by artists from all over the world.
"But will he become an artist," he wondered.
Gustav liked to wander in the forest, by the lake where the air was clear and sharp.
"What if he falls and hurts himself?" his mother, Gretchen asked her husband.
"I will send the maid up there with him, and I will have a hut built for him to rest in when he becomes tired." And he had a hut built, with a bed for Gustav to rest, and a table and a chair for him to sit and draw pictures.
-00000-
Dagmar sat while the young boy rested. She always watched him as his father had asked her, and now she sat and watched his even breathing as he slept. She too wondered what he would become, wandering, wandering, always wandering. She followed him through the forest. She saw him pick up the little cones that had fallen in the wind. He put them up to his face, and felt them with his fingers. If they were open he smiled. Winter was nearly over. Birds were returning, singing round his head. He loved listening to them.
"Dagmar, Dagmar," he cried, and held her hand, "listen, the nightingale has come back." She listened to the bird singing proudly in the tops of the tall trees.
"She is singing because she is happy she has returned to us," he said, and turned his eyes to the bird as it sang.
Everyday, now that spring had finally arrived, after the forests and the mountains had been unlocked from winter's icy grip, Gustav and Dagmar walked up the path from the edge of the town where he lived, to the hut beside the lake. Gustav was young, and he was able to run through the forest without hurting himself. He seemed to almost know instinctively where all the boulders lay, and where the roots of the tall trees came close to the surface. He ran up the path, leaving Dagmar, who was no longer young, to walk up slowly. She did try to hurry, but her legs just wouldn't carry her any quicker. Gustav ran on, but Dagmar could see him. He loved Dagmar, and didn't want her to worry. He knew how far he could run on into the forest, and he slowed down when he came to a turn in the path or went past a big rock. He knew Dagmar would start worrying so he stopped to listen to the birds singing around him.
Listening to the birds in the trees, he could hear his own heart pounding from the running, the breeze rustling through the branches, and the birds singing. He listened, and the sound he heard was music to him. But this day there was another sound. He held his breath to hear the other sound. It was coming from just a little higher up the rock strewn path, and he moved up slowly to see what was making this new sound. He moved upward guided by the it. He stepped over a boulder, and there on the ground in front of him lay a young girl, crying softly. He knealt by the girl. He leant forward to where she lay, and put out his hand to touch her. His fingers touched her soft hair. She was quite still.
As his hand moved over her head, he felt a strange dampness in her auburn hair. It was sticky, and Gustav immediately realised that the girl was bleeding. She must have fallen. He stood up quickly, just as Dagmar approached. He called out to her. She was looking down at the stony path, picking her way up through the boulders.
"Dagmar, look," he cried out. Dagmar couldn't see the girl lying at his feet, and thought he had just heard another nightingale. When she saw that a girl had fallen and hurt herself, she knealt and dabbed her head with a corner of her dress. She stroked her head, and looked at her face. The girl was unconscious, and obviously hurt.
"You must go down and bring someone." Gustav sprang at the path and danced between the boulders, sure footed and quick. His heart was panting furiously by the time he reached his own door, and he struck it just as his father was opening it.
"Gustav," he cried, "where is Dagmar? You know you shouldn't come down without her."
"Father, father, come quickly," he stammered, "she is hurt, she is hurt." Monseur Flambeau clutched at his coat and together they left the house.
"Dagmar is hurt, you say," as he caught up with the boy.
"No, not Dagmar." Gustav continued to climb. His father gasped for breath trying to keep up with his son.
"Then who?" he shouted, and stopped to catch his breath, leaning against a fir tree.
"Come on, come on," cried Gustav, "she is hurt." Gustav's father stopped in the road, and repeated his question.
"Who is it that is hurt, Gustav ?" Gustav turned on his heels and faced his father.
"I do not know who she is father, but she is hurt." He started running again.
When they reached the girl she had opened her eyes, but she was obviously suffering. Gustav's father knealt down at her side, and touched her forehead.
"Do not be afraid," he said, "you are going to be well," and then, looking at Dagmar and his son, "we are going to help you. We will take you down."
He looked at her again. He noticed that her left ankle was red and swollen.
He touched it gently, but it made the girl wince in pain. He took hold of her foot and moved it round. Again she winced, making a soft groan as she closed her eyes and returned to oblivion.
Gustav started up. "Father, father, she has gone, she has.." Gustav's father looked at his son, and picked the girl up.
"She has fainted, that is all. She feels nothing now." Gustav started again.
"But, but.." He was afraid for the girl, and Dagmar patted him on the shoulder.
"Your father knows what to do," and she put her arm round his shoulder to comfort him.
The three stepped down the path, back to the place where Gustav's father could give her the attention she needed. He too was a little afraid for her, but he was a sensible, confidant man, and soon they were at their door.
The girl lay peacefully in the man's arms. Her breathing was deep and even. She had felt nothing, and a little colour had returned to her cheeks. Gustav saw this, and thought how beautiful she was. Her face was immobile. She looked like a statue. She was grey, but now, as he looked, a trace of colour brought her to life, so that he quickly realised that she was not a statue, but a living person, who needed help. He ran up the steps and opened the door. His father passed sideways, so as not to catch the girl's feet on the brown, wooden frame of the door.
"In here," and he beckoned to Dagmar to open the door to the study.
"There is a couch, we can lay her on it." His own breath was rasping out of him, and he looked pale too. Dagmar opened the cream door and quickly smoothed out the cover on the couch.
Gustav's father sat down and rested from the exertion, but he was quickly on his feet again and attending to the girl. She appeared to be peaceful, although it was impossible to tell if she was still in pain.
"I will give her something to ease her discomfort," said Monseur Flambeau, and he tok down a stone jar from a shelf above his head.
"Dagmar," he said motioning to the maid, "a little water, if you please."
Dagmar scurried out of the room, and reappeared with a glass of water.
"Now, raise her," he said holding the glass for her to sip the water.
"But she cannot," cried Gustav with concern in his voice.
"Quiet, Gustav, or she will become afraid," and then as if to placate his son, he said, She is only slightly unconscious, and may hear everything that we say. Ssh," and he put the glass to her lips.
"Now that she can swallow, I will give her a little of this mixture," and he poured a little of the pink liquid into the water.
"She only needs a little," he said, and returned the glass to her mouth.
Most of the liquid, the water and the mixture, oozed around her lips, dribbling down her face, but a little seeped into her mouth.
"That will do." He put the glass on the table at the side of the couch, and returned the jar to its place high on a shelf.
Watching his son watching him put the jar back, he looked him straight in the face, and in a serious tone he said, "Never be tempted to take that down from its place." Gustav nodded, sensing the gravity of his father's voice, and knew that he meant what he had said.
"I will not, father," said the boy with equal gravity.
"And now we must prepare a bed in the spare room for her." Dagmar scurried away to take linen from the airing cupboard.
"She will sleep long now, and deeply too." Gustav looked at her. She was peaceful, unmoving in a deep, deep sleep.
She slept and slept. Dagmar looked in every so often to check that she was still resting, but the girl had not even turned over, so deep and strong was her sleep. One the third day, Gustav heard a brief scuffling noise through the door of the spare room where the girl had been left to sleep.
He rushed to Dagmar, who was preparing lunch in the kitchen.
"Dagmar, Dagmar, come quickly." Dagmar left her table and the salad she was cutting, and followed the boy to the room.
"Listen," and he put his ear to the door. Dagmar brushed him aside sharply.
"You must never do that, it is only course people who invade privacy in that way." Gustav bowed his head and moved away from the door. No sound escaped through the wooden door, but Dagmar looked in to see if the girl had woke.
"She is still asleep," she said.
"But there was a sound. She was moving, she was..."
"That is enough for now boy," she said with some severity in her voice. Then she added softly, "But you were right to tell me," and touched his shoulder for she did not like to sound hard to her charge.
The girl slept through her sickness. Dagmar constantly attended her, in case she might wake and become frightened, and every day Gustav came and asked if she had woken.
"Is she.." Dagmar cut him short.
"She has not woken yet child." And this was the answer he received on the second day, and on the third day. On the morning of the fourth day Gustav appeared to ask his everlasting question with a deal of anxiety on his face.
Dagmar shook her head before he could get the words of the question out.
"But this is four days, how can she sleep for four days," and then, "she cannot be so tired." Dagmar smiled inwardly, and patted the boy to reassure him, and because she was fond of him.
"She is not sleeping because she is tired, child."
"Then why," Gustav almost blurted out.
"Because of her illness. Do you not know of the value of sleep, child?" He did not understand.
"You only sleep because you are tired," he said quickly.
"In life's great feast," she said gently, so as not to wake the girl, "it is our chief nourisher." Gustav wanted to cry out. Dagmar motioned to him to be quiet.
"But that is the worth of food," he whispered.
"And," she continued, "it is also the balm of hurt minds," and she led him away to the door.
"Now go," she said opening the door and letting him pass. "No more of your inquiries and your interrogations." She closed the door quietly and looked at the girl. She was still asleep, but she had turned, and her breathing was light. She was ascending from the depths of her illness, and she looked only half asleep now.
As Dagmar moved towards the bed, the girl slowly opened her eyes. The sleep still in them holding down her eyelids at the edges, and matted eyelashes made the process a long one. She again closed her eyes, and then, like a butterfly unfreeing a wing from its enclosing pupa, her eyelashes flickered and her eyes opened wide. The full light of day was embraced by the lace fabric of the curtains that hung to the floor in front of her. She blinked in the light, for after the respite of now four days, even the dull light of the room was too much for her. She closed her eyes again, and opened them for a little longer, closed them, opened for a little longer, until she was strong enough to admit the half light without closing her eyes completely. As with a stare at the sun burning in the sky at midday, the light from the window burnt into the retina and she saw nothing, her position, the room she was in, Dagmar standing close at hand, nothing.
Slowly growing accustomed to the light, the furniture, only a dresser at one side, and a small table at the other, the paintings that hung on the creamy coloured walls, the door in the corner, and the draped window in front of her, all grew slowly in her developing sight and equanimity. Instead of melting into a fading light for her, they had the appearance of gaining solidity from what had appeared to her to be only liquid.
When she had moved to right and left, and had weighed her surroundings, Dagmar merged with the furniture, the door, the paintings hung on the creamy wall, and the window in front of her, became part of the girl's still solidifying senses of strange shapes in a world she did not comprehend. Dagmar appeared to the girl, just as one of the paintings appeared, and so she was not frightened or alarmed. Everything was strange to her, and Dagmar was one more piece of the jigsaw her mind was putting together from the gelling fragments before her eyes.
The door opened gently and Gustav stood in the opening, half afraid, but wanting to come to the girl, to see if she was alive, to speak to her. He tread towards her softly. Dagmar had heard the door creaking slightly, as all the doors did in this rambling doctor's house. She turned and saw Gustav tiptoeing. She half laughed, but stopped herself before he reached her side. His look was one of amazement, his eyes and his mouth were wide open. Dagmar nudged him as he came to her, not wishing to speak, but wanting him to look less alarmed. The girl's unclear gaze fell on Gustav, still gawping. She frowned, and Dagmar, quick to notice anything about the girl that might give a clue to her wellbeing, smiled at the girl, and stroked her gently.
Gustav, feeling Dagmar's arm in his side, knew he had been told something, and in trying to think what it was she could want, closed his mouth, and focused his eyes a little more so that Dagmar achieved what she wanted by default.
"Stand back, boy," said Gustav in a low voice that the girl could not detect. He was pressing forward to get a better look at the girl. She was pretty, and Gustav found that he liked looking at her very much. He wanted to look at her without wanting to speak to her. She was like a beautiful pot doll lying on the bed. If she had spoken, Gustav's trance would have been broken. For that is what had happened to him. He was impressionable, had a vivid and highly mobile imagination, and as he looked at her all manner of dreams and fancies came flooding into his mind. As visions flooded his mind, so did sound, the sound of the wind rustling the leaves and branches of the tall trees he passed everyday on his way to Gunterzee. He heard the song of the nightingale, and he heard the soft crying of the girl as she lay where she had fallen. He heard all this and looking at the girl, a single tear rolled down his cheek till it reached the corner of his mouth. Its salty tang made him start, and he moved his lips instinctively to remove the taste of his tears.
Dagmar had seen his tears, glinting, even in this faint light, and she held out her arm round Gustav to comfort him.
"He WILL be an artist," she thought, "with his sensitive nature flowing out of him." She smiled at the boy, and seeing her smile cheered him and made him remember how much he loved Dagmar, and how much he loved to look at the girl who had come into the house in his own father's arms.
Thinking one thing made him think of another, and his mind's eye moved from the image of his father carrying the girl into the house. It moved to another image, less distinct, but quite clear. It moved to the image of his father carrying another child into the house. That child was himself, and although he had only ever been told that his father had born him in his arms into the place that had become his home, he felt he could see himself in his own father's arms.
This vision held Gustav mesmerized, for he knew who it was being carried into the house, and his seeing himself left Gustav with the feeling that he was special. Even in his youthful fantasies, he could tell that something was not as it was with other children, knew that such visions, such noises were not given to all children.
From that time on, whenever he looked at the girl's face, he found music in his head, the music of the forest, of the lake, and of the birds.
He knew what the forest told him, what the birds told him, and what life told him. They told him in sounds, and these sounds were always there, summoned by a girl's face.
Grimble
THE ‘GRIMBLE’ STORIES
By
Robert L Fielding
1. Grimble, half asleep, dirty, half drunk, stumbles along and into a gang of hoodlums robbing an old women of her belongings, which happen to be a bag of vegetables she has picked up from the marketground.
2. After helping the old woman, Grimble wanders on aimlessly, and again by chance, happens to be passing the steps up to a bank as a robber is escaping. He chases one of the men and disarms him just as the police arrive on the scene. The owner of the bank thanks Grimble by taking him back to his home and letting Grimble use his home; to get cleaned up, to eat, and then by providing him with some decent clothes to wear.
3. The owner of the bank quickly realises that Grimble is both trustworthy and intelligent, and decides to give him a job. The job is a menial one; cleaning the offices and premises of the bank. Things pass uneventfully until Grimble happens to overhear someone plotting to remove a large some of money.
4. Using his intelligence and his native cunning, as well as his chameleon like qualities of looking unimportant, and hence being overlooked, Grimble traces the men as they burrow into the vaults of the bank and attempt to remove a substantial amount of used currency, which is untraceable.
5. Grimble again foils this daring attempt, at some risk to his own life, and in fact gets shot during the proceeds. However, before he passes out, he manages to stop the men from leaving the building by locking their only way out, before collapsing unconscious.
6. Grimble is discovered hurt, taken to hospital, where he recovers slowly, and where he spends his time in a sort of half conscious sleep brought on by the serious nature of the operation to remove the bullet from his leg, and the anaesthetic going slightly wrong. He wakes up slowly, and finds that he is again a national hero, this time by seeing his employer talking about him on TV. He finally leaves hospital, as cameramen and journalists mob him on his way out. His boss's heavies guard him against the rush, and the public get a glimpse of the man who has been talked about across the nation. Advertising companies, quick to cash in on anything or anybody consrtued by the public as a winner, market his image, and his limp to their benefit. Grimble becomes public property, gets imitated on shows and talked about on
chat show.
7. Grimble, aided by his boss, denounces all the razzamatazz, and the hype, by telling his own story in one of the national newspapers. Immediately, the public take up his story as their own, and a new image emerges in the media, that of the little man with the big heart, the man from nowhere who achieves the American dream, a drream that many had thought was a thing of the past. Grimble shows those like he used to be, the down and outs of the cities of America, that all is not lost, that even a poor, filthy man can have dignity and can regain his own self-esteem through keeping some inner faith.
Grimble gets top award.
Grimble meets the President.
Grimble goes on the air.
THE ANTI-HERO
1. Grimble, half asleep, dirty, half drunk, stumbles along and into a gang of hoodlums robbing an old women of her belongings, which happen to be a bag of vegetables she has picked up from the marketground.
-1-
He was rough. His tattered clothes were rough, and his worn out shoes were rough. But roughest of all was his tongue. He spat and swore at everything and everybody. People crossed the street to avoid getting near him. As soon as they spotted him, lurking on the disreputable corners of the city, even the shabby crossed over the street, and ran in front of speeding cars, to avoid being near him. Grimble, his name, was an evil looking man, and even the police steered clear of his evil mouth as he chewed tobacco, and spat out dark patches onto the already blackened earth. He was going somewhere, he was slouching along, his rounded shoulders hunched against the biting wind, biting even though it was only September. The loose soles of his shoes flapped as he moved, for he didn't walk. His shifting along suggested a slow animal of the river, and he moved along clearing the street as he went.
Round a dismal corner, eyeing a liquor store with its tall bottles of coloured liquid, he cursed to himself. He had no money in the holed linings of his pockets, and he wanted drink. He wanted to stupify himself and shut out the life he lived. He wanted to wander into bright halls, he wanted to lie down on satin sheets, and above all he wanted to sleep. He kept on moving, and as he rounded the corner, he saw in front of him a group of youths attacking a poor woman. She had been out for something to eat, and was carrying potatoes and cabbages, the cheapest, poorest potatoes and cabbages. They wanted even these miserable things. They did not want them to eat. Their bellies were full. They wanted them because she had them. That was the only reason, and because she was old and bent, and could hardly lift a finger to defend herself, they had fallen on her as she trudged home to eat.
She could scream though, and she pierced the air with her cries as the youths tore at her ragged clothing, taunted her with their cheers, and slapped at her as she tried to cover the bag from them.
Grimble saw all this, and sprang at the boys. Anyone seeing him would have been surprised at his agility, and within seconds he had scattered the boys, who ran shreiking away. The old woman stood up straight and examined her vegetables hurriedly. She was still in a tangle, and stood upright to collect herself for another assault. She looked at the man, if he was a man, at the thing that had helped her.
It happened that their ways coincided, and along they trudged, Grimble carrying the poor bag bulging with rotten potatoes and cabbages. At the parting corner, he handed the bag to the old woman.
"Thanks son", she said as he left her.
"Any time, Ma," he replied, and remembered a younger woman who had nursed him. He felt proud, and he felt ashamed. He felt proud to have been able to help an aging mother, and he felt ashamed of himself in his rough clothing, living in a city where old women had to risk everything to eat rotten potatoes and mouldy cabbages.
2. After helping the old woman, Grimble wanders on aimlessly, and again by chance, happens to be passing the steps up to a bank as a robber is escaping. He chases one of the men and disarms him just as the police arrive on the scene. The owner of the bank thanks Grimble by taking him back to his home and letting Grimble use his home; to get cleaned up, to eat, and then by providing him with some decent clothes to wear.
-2-
He pulled at his rags to keep the cold wind out. At an intersection, he turned left, and rambled along a polluted canyon. The street was lined with tenements, only liquor stores punctuated the grey buildings left and right. He shuffled past these without really looking, he stared down at the stone beneath his feet. He turned again, and shuffled on as before, never looking up.
A gunshot made him look up from his worn shoes, and the dreary grey of the sidewalk. It was a muffled crack. It was near, and he crouched without a thought. The sound of gunshots was nothing to him, but this one was near. He was afraid, and crouched lower. There might be others. Then the doors above him smashed open. There was a shout, and two more shots.
Grimble stayed down, clutching his knees to his chest. Two men sprang from the door, jumped the steps, tore the air with their shouts, and the breath wheezing out of them in their panic. Grimble felt a sharp pain in his back, and then another, and the two men were sprawling over him, clawing at stone, watching their guns slide from their fists.
Grimble saw a blue-grey glint, and leapt at the steel flashing past him. He stood up. He had one of the guns, and now he was looking down at the two men. One had knocked himself out piling into a fire hydrant. The other looked at him, half threatening, half imploring. He wanted to kill Grimble. He wanted to beat his head. He hated him.
Grimble spoke.
"Get up."
The other man, half dead on a spike of the red hydrant heard nothing. The other pulled himself up. Grimble spoke again, but his voice was drowned out by the shouts from the door. Men, young men were shouting something. Their shouts hurt his head, and he turned to the shouting people. That instant, that turning was enough for the man. He dashed at the street, and he was gone. Grimble flew after him. He caught him on the shoulder, it was a glancing blow, not enough to stop him, but it knocked him off balance, and he fell. Grimble was running and falling.
He grabbed the man's legs as he fell. Both fell together, right in front of screeching wheels. A cop got out, and Grimble felt a hard pain in his side. The cop had a gun too.
Two policemen stood over the men lying on the ground. Grimble was still holding the other man's legs. The cop pointing the gun spoke first.
"Get up, but slow, real slow." Grimble let go of the man's legs, and both men stood up. Grimble handed the gun to the policeman, who passed it to the other policeman. He turned it over and over, and looked at it carefully. He checked the bullets. There were three, three missing.
"Over against the car," he said as he put the gun into a plastic bag.
"Now," the other shouted, "move", and pushed Grimble to the side of the car. The young men, who had come out of the building were still shouting, but now they were shouting something different, and their voices were less urgent,there was less alarm in their voices. One of them walked over to where the two men were spread against the police car, their hands and their legs outstretched, while one cop checked if they had other weapons, guns or knives, anything at all. The man who had fallen against the fire hydrant was still unconscious, or he was dead. Nobody knew for sure. He looked dead, but nobody wanted to go near him to check, nobody wanted to look at the blood seeping from behind his ear into a trickle on the stone. One older man picked up the bags the robbers had dropped as they fell over Grimble. They were full of money, bank-notes. He went back through the door, but one of the policemen shouted to him to stop. He walked over. Nobody was going anywhere right now, he told him sharply, and took the bags from him. He threw them in the car and called for help over the radio. Within seconds another police-car, siren wailing and piercing the air, screamed to a halt behind. A crowd of people was coming over to see what was going on. The sound of gunshots had scared them, but now they were brave, and wanted to know what all the noise was about.
A policeman got out of the car, and told everybody to stop right there. Bewildered by the shooting, the pain in his back, running after the bankrobber, and the gun being forced into his side, Grimble felt his knees buckle under him, and he swayed dizzily. His hunger, the excitement,and running across the street, had all been too much for him. His normal pace, which he never seemed to alter, meant that he was weak and unfit.
Eating throw aways and garbage off the street, drinking rough liquor, when he could, made him a walking scarecrow. He swayed twice, and slid down the door of the policecar.
The policemen watched him slide to the ground, but they did nothing. As he slumped into a pile at the side of the black and white policecar, a tall man, who had just crossed the street from where the two men had fled, knelt to see if Grimble was still alive. He felt his wrist, and he put his hand inside Grimble's dirty shirt, and felt his heart and his breathing. Grimble was alive. His pulse was racing, and his breath was uneven, but he wasn't going to die. The man stood up, still looking down at Grimble. One of the policemen spoke to him.
"You a doctor?" he asked. The tall man shook his head.
"No", he replied, "I'm not."
"Then why.." The tall man interrupted the policeman. He motioned down at Grimble.
"He saved my life, that's why."
"So he was in the building when the two.." The tall man interrupted again.
"No, he wasn't. He never came into the building." The cop looked puzzled.
"So how did he save your life?"
"He saved that", he said, pointing to the bag in the back seat of the policecar.
"He saved my money", then he added, smiling,
"And now I'm going to save him." Grimble's eyes were open, but he looked half asleep.
"Where...?"
The tall man and the cop watched the other man being taken away. He had been handcuffed, and his arms were held halfway up his back by a young policeman. They turned back to look at Grimble. He had slipped back into a heap on the floor, and his eyes were closed. He looked half dead.
"Help me", sad the tall man bending down again.
"Let's get him off the street." The cop caught hold of Grimble under his armpits, and lifted onto his feet, as though he was a toy doll.
"A good meal wouldn't do him any harm", said the cop still holding the half conscious man.
"Here", said the man, "bring him over to my car", and he beckoned to a younger man standing by a large black car on the other side of the street. Within seconds the big, black car was beside them, and they bundled Grimble into the back seat.
"Take us home", the man said to the driver.
"Home ?" The driver sounded surprised.
"You heard the man", said the cop, "take him somewhere, or we'll take him to the
"Anything you say, boss."
"Well let's get to it man", yelled the boss getting in beside the driver. He wound the window down, and looked up at the policeman.
"There's nothing else, is there?"
"Just come into the station to claim your money, that's all." The window zoomed down, and the long car purred away like a panther, quiet but swift.
Grimble woke late. He had slept well, but something was different. He wasn't itching, and he didn't want to scatch himself. He opened his eyes. Then he opened them wide. He was lying on satin sheets, on a huge bed, in the middle of a marble hall. He looked up at the ceiling. It was magnificent. He shook his head, and pinched his side to see if he was still asleep, or dead. No, he wasn't asleep, he wasn't dreaming, and he certainly wasn't dead. So where was he? He looked around for clues, something to give him an idea where he was. There was nothing but marble and satin. He looked down at himself. He was wearing a white robe of the purest silk. Perhaps he was dead after all. Perhaps he had come back as someone else.
Perhaps he was in Heaven. Perhaps God had seen him helping the old lady, and had seen his shame, and had taken pity on him.
A bell rang somewhere, and a tall man entered. He stood in front of the bed.
"How are we this morning?" Grimble looked around.
"We..erm, I'm fine", and then nervously, "thanks".
The tall man looked at his watch.
"We really ought to be going. Do you feel able to walk?" He motioned towards a door that Grimble hadn't seen.
"Please, take a shower, have a bath, anything". And he left without saying anything else. Grimble had heard the offer, but couldn't believe what he had heard. A bath, a shower, these were things Grimble had long since forgotten, or ceased to think about.
He opened the door, and stepped into a bathroom so white and shining that it looked as if it had been carved out of a block of ice.
As he stepped through the door, he heard the sound of running water. He took one more step, and he was wet through from head to foot.
The shower had been beautiful, and he felt refreshed, and now a little hungry. Even as he started to think about the food he had only dreamed about, he began to sniff hard. A delicious smell was percolating the room. It was a smell of hot coffee, of slices of meat, of eggs gently frying. His mouth grew wet, and he started to dribble saliva at both corners of his mouth. He followed the scrumptious smell, closing his eyes to savour the dream he wanted to go on and on. It was no dream though, and he opened his eyes just in time to stop himself from banging into a table, and knocking plates of food onto the ground. That would have been a waste. He was glad he had opened his eyes, and he was even more glad he wasn't dreaming. At least, he didn't think he was dreaming.
He sat down and heaped food onto the plate in front of him. For the first time he could remember, he ate and ate until he couldn't eat another thing. His stomach felt as if it was going to burst, and a warm glow seeped through his bones.
"So this is how it is in Heaven", he thought to himself, and closed his eyes to continue his ecstasy.
"Now we really must be going". It was the tall man again. He was standing over Grimble, and he felt slightly uneasy. But when he looked up at the man's face, he saw that he was smiling.
Grimble sat in the car and waited. It was a superb car, long and black, with the finest upholstery he had ever seen. The window at his side zoomed down. He looked out. The tall man was saying something to him.
"All set ?" he said, and got in the front seat. The driver turned the key and the car purred off, slowly at first, then gently picking up speed until they were travelling very fast indeed. Grimble felt his head being pulled back onto the backrest. They were shooting along a broad freeway. It was in a part of the city Grimble had never seen. He wasn't even sure if they were still in the city. Perhaps they were in
"Where are we going?" Grimble asked after a while. He had been dozing. The slight shiver of the Cadillac's engine had lulled him to sleep again. But now they were slowing for the lights at an intersection of the highway. They were turning and turning, and now they had stopped.
In front of him Grimble saw a large expanse of stone, and above it, a wall of glass that shone in the light of a bright sunny day. The reflection dazzled Grimble. He blinked, and rubbed his eyes as if he'd been in a dark place then let into the sunlight.
"We're here," said the driver.
3. The owner of the bank quickly realises that Grimble is both trustworthy and intelligent, and decides to give him a job. The job is a menial one; cleaning the offices and premises of the bank. Things pass uneventfully until Grimble happens to overhear someone plotting to remove a large some of money.
-3-
Grimble got out of the car slowly and stared up at the front of the building. It was big and impressive looking.
“Come on, let’s go,” said the driver to Gimble, who was still staring skyward.
“I don’t want any of that sort of talk to him,” snapped the boss. The driver looked sheepishly at Grimble. Grimble wore a neutral expression that could not be interpreted by the driver, and so all three went up the steps to the large door. It opened as they got within a foot of it, and Grimble looked around to see who had been waiting for them. There was nobody there, but as soon as the boss entered a handful of men quickly surrounded him. They all seemed to want to talk to him at once, and were only silent when the boss lifted his hand to them. He turned to Grimble.
“Tom,” he motioned towards Grimble, “I want you to show, erm..” he flushed slightly, “say we don’t even know your name friend,” said the boss warmly. One or two of the younger men grinned at each other, as if the boss should be interested in this man who had appeared from nowhere.
Grimble looked around himself quickly, and then at the boss, Tim, my name’s Tim,” he said quietly.
“OK, Tim,”said the boss again warmly, “Tom here is going to show you were you can take it easy for a while till I get through with these guys,” he looked quickly around at the men surrounding him. They all straightened visibly as each one in turn came in for a split second of scrutiny from the boss. Grimble caught the men standing up a little straighter than before, and noted it.
“I’ll catch you later, er, Tim,” said the boss, clapping Grimble on the shoulder as he moved off.
“Right then,” said the man in front of Grimble, “my name’s Tom, and I’m going to take you to your office.” Grimble looked puzzled.
A good question
A GOOD QUESTION
By
Robert Leslie Fielding
"I don't understand. Why do we have to...?" The boy turned, not finishing his question.
"What is this, why, why, why all the time? Always the same question. Go to sleep, we must be up before the sun tomorrow. Sleep."
"But you did not tell me why. Why do they all have to be...?"
"Ach." The big man rolled over roughly.
"I told you, stop asking why. That is not for you or me to know."
"But we are not donkeys, or sheep,we must know why."
"And I tell you I don't know," the big man answered angrily.
"I do not know why, that is all. Sleep."
The young boy straightened his arms, and lay flat again. He breathed out heavily through pursed lips. The fabric of the makeshift tent flapped in the icy wind and tried to drown the noise of the big man's snores.
The first light of morning began to grow rather than appear, and the pace of the two figures stumbling over the uneven ground became steadier, and more rapid.
At his feet, the earth still looked dark and cheerless, but Ferhat's eyebrows lifted slightly as he raised his head to the faint yellow of the horizon. It was nearly day. The grey ribbon of road seemed to be not too far off, but he knew the strange and frustrating foreshortening of distances in the half light of these bitterly cold mornings. A fire would have warmed cold fingers, but he had been knocked to the ground for lighting a few twigs, so he suffered the cold, and the distance in silence and hunger.
The boy slowed his pace as he thought and remembered.
"Get on. You are slower than a woman." The bent shape was still stumbling heavily, and Ferhat rushed a few steps, not wishing to incur the quick wrath of the man in front of him.
As Ferhat caught up with him he remembered the questions he had asked before sleep had numbed his thoughts.
I must always be asking why, he thought. The roughness of the way they were going made him abandon his thoughts, and he followed his leader half blindly. In the folds of the land there was still darkness. The light was not yet enough to help them. They continued to stumble and lose their way, and the big man continued to swear to himself.
After what seemed like two or three hours, but had only been a little more than one, the two figures reached the road. They continued along the ditch at the road's edge. When Ferhat moved onto the smooth tarmac, the man swiped at him from behind until he returned to the muddy ditch, which was strewn with lumps of stone and black pitch.
Their progress would have been quicker along the road, but the man forbade it.
"Don't ask me why again, or I will beat the answer into you. It is not our road. It was not built by us," he paused to step over a boulder in his way.
"It was built by.." and he spat on the grey tarmac.
This part of their journey was particularly difficult for Ferhat, and he agonised over every stone. He loved the road, though he told nobody. He loved it's even surface, although he knew that after a few kilometres the soles of his feet hurt, and the thin material of his poor boots did not protect his feet against the hard surface,which gave him blisters and made him walk in the ditch as he had been told to do.
Perhaps the man was right. The government road looked easy, and at first, was indeed the easier way, but after only a few kilometres, this easy looking way became hard and painful.
The boy thought hard. Perhaps the feet of the people who lived in the city were harder. There were after all, no paths in the city, that was well known..but then everybody had a car to go to work in. Work must be easier in the city, he thought. You didn't have to walk anywhere, and in any case, there was the electric light at night to help you and.. He felt a sharp stabbing pain in his left ear, and another in between his shoulderblades. He had wandered back onto the tarmac and the man had nearly lifted him off his feet with the flat of his hard, calloused hand.
It wasn't easy to be like the others, like he was supposed to be. It wasn't easy to keep in the ditch for no better reason than that he was told to, and hit hard if he didn't. It wasn't easy, and the question why returned to his mind. He did as he was told, and the two stumbled along in the growing light.
They were heading for the outskirts of a small town, which was hidden by the foothills of the mountainous place from which they had come. The town was of no special importance except for the fact that all the buses and coaches going further east, had to pass through it. There was no other way. The jagged hills allowed no easy route, and the road twisted and turned on it's way upwards and eastwards.
As the two approached the town, the rising sun seemed tinged a different hue, and plumes of brown smoke were already rising from it's quiet rooftops, which could now be seen above the slopes.
The man threw down the bundle he had been carrying, and slumped on the ground. The last few kilometres along the side of the road had tired him out, and his face was ashen pale.
"We stop here," he said gruffly, "and wait." The boy stood looking down at the face of the man. It was colourless, and stangely contorted as if he was in pain. One side of his face seemed to hang limply, without any tissue or muscle to give it an expression. His breathing was heavy, and uneven.
"Go to.." He held out a scrap of paper to the boy. It had some letters scrawled on it, a name. The boy looked down at the man. He pointed in the direction of the smoke.
"Go," he repeated, and slumped down until the dewy grass touched his grey lips.
At first Ferhat did not understand. He looked into the man's glazed eyes. His face was somehow frozen and expressionless, and his frame seemed to slump further into the ground. The boy became frightened, and ran towards the source of the smoke, and help.
He ran and ran towards the smoke, which was still rising. Quickly, and suddenly, his way was blocked by two large men. They had come from nowhere, had just appeared to stop him in his tracks. Ferhat was panting hard, and he was frightened. The two men spoke in a language he could not understand. It was not his own tongue, nor yet the language he had been taught at the school he had gone to until his teacher had been taken away. This language was unknown to him, and it's heavy guttural tones made every word sound cruel and angry. One of the men pulled him by his collar until his face was close to the bearded chin of the foreigner. Ferhat could hardly move, but managed to clutch the scrap of paper from his pocket. The other man, who had seen the movement, twisted the paper from his grip. The man glanced at the note, and handed it to the other man, who had released his grip on Ferhat's coat collar. Nothing was said. The men rose, sending the boy backwards into the ditch.
