Joe finished some minutes after the whistle was blown and all the others had left the pool. The superintendent, the team trainer, had suggested he build up his stamina and so he allowed him to complete the eighty-eight lengths in the twenty yard pool. The boy hauled himself out of the shallow end steeped in glowing weariness. It was always good to swim a mile.
He ambled to his cubicle and locked the door carefully before he took off his trunks and wrung them out. He hated being seen naked. Then he dried himself, not too effectively, and pulled on clothes damp already from the moisture in the baths, further dampened by his water-filmed body. By the time he was ready the last cubicle door had long banged shut and the lights were going out. He walked to the reception area vaguely scrubbing his sodden hair with the thin sodden towel. The cocoa machine was broken.
A penny bought a bright white squirt of Brylcreem, which he kneaded into his soaking head before taking out the tooth-gapped comb. He could linger for a few minutes. The superintendent would be checking the boiler and the slipper baths. Joe knew the routine well. He was a regular. The winter season ticket, which had been bought for his birthday, was already near earning its keep after just two weeks.
The boy stepped back through the swing doors and looked at the pool, now almost still, a mysterious blue-green translucence under the single remaining light, empty of bounced shouts and splash. He shivered. He had raced its lengths, illicitly gone up to the balcony and swung across one of the rafters to drop into the deep end, played endless games of tiggy on long holiday mornings with the pool in possession of no more than half a dozen of them. He loved the sense of speed from the crawl, the thrash of the blind backstroke, the swanning neck of the breaststroke. But more than anything he loved long solitary swimming, length after length, the water cradling him, bearing him up, helping him through, the buoyancy allowing him to sink into something like a trance, self-hypnotised by the lap and stroke and watery ease. He would come out of those aimless reveries as slowly as if he were coming out of an anaesthetic.
His bike was propped around the corner of the small neat sandstone building given to the people of Wigton by its greatest benefactor Mr Banks, whom his uncle Leonard always said had been bankrupted and driven to an early death by the greedy tradespeople. He had to decide which way to go home. Past mid-September, not full dark even though it was almost eight o’clock, but dark enough for the lights to be on along the low track that led past Vinegar Hill. The shorter way, the high road up an unlit hill and down past the gasometer had become a challenge: Joe did not know why. Lately he had begun to duck it and he did so again.
Even on the lit track he was glad when he got to Vinegar Hill and saw people. He knew them. The men came in the pub.
When he got to the Blackamoor he lifted the bike, which was rather too big for him, and carried it up the steps, through the inner door with its stained-glass picture of the little black boy, through the passage and into the back yard where he parked it under the open shed. There was a small outhouse, which used to serve but was now being converted into a ladies’. Way overdue, his mother had said, never reconciled to the flock of female bladders bursting up the stairs and into her bathroom. Joe no less pleased. There was no knowing when they would turn up. When he was having a bath he had not to lock the door. They would come right in, some of them, and just whip up their dresses, tug down their knickers, do their business, chat away, sometimes smoke a full cigarette.
The pub was filling up. Joe was now an expert on the tides of its trade. Friday night had become more popular. Jack Ack filled the Singing Room.
Ellen came out of the bar to get his supper. The boy said he would take it upstairs. Sometimes there was no one in the kitchen who wanted to talk to him. Potato pie, slice of apple cake, cup of cocoa. She would come up later if she could manage it. There was an air about her, a lightness, the smile: it was the dance later that night, Joe remembered, the big dance. They walked from the larder through the kitchen together and somebody said he could be her boyfriend. She laughed at that. He was as tall as Ellen now. He tried to put the dance out of his mind.
The narrow bedroom was cold. He put on his specs and wrapped the heavy dressing-gown over his pyjamas. He puffed up the pillow to make a back rest. Diddler had traded in a maroon and cream plastic battery wireless, which Sam had handed on to him and he found Radio Luxembourg to catch Ma and Pa Kettle and with luck his latest favourite singers: Johnny Ray, Mario Lanza and Frankie Laine, Guy Mitchell, Jo Stafford, Doris Day. He was halfway through ‘The Fifth Form At St Dominic’s’ but he did not want to rush it. He had missed the library earlier in the evening and he had nothing to go on to.
His mother managed to find time to come up to say goodnight but she did not tell him to turn off the light. He was allowed to be later on a Friday. She did tell him that a mixed group had come in from Carlisle - ‘a bit boozy’ - and she warned him that if he had not been to the bathroom and brushed his teeth then the sooner the better. She still had that excited look, which made him jealous. He had nosed into their bedroom. Her long red dance dress was hanging up behind the door and on the bed were her long gloves and the shiny little black bag. The dresses of the two women who helped in the pub were hanging behind the bathroom door.
Joe read and listened to the wireless and alerted himself more deeply to downstairs. As the ten o’clock curfew began to speed towards the drinkers, the noise thickened, to cram it all in, let loose the hound of alcohol, crush the flying moments into a fist of pleasure. Joe had seen the Milburns in the Darts Room. They had not caused trouble for more than a year, since they had last been banned and given a final chance. But who could tell? Sam had barred only five men permanently - too lenient, some thought: some of the others barred for a limited period had sulked off to other pubs; the dog-men kept their trouble elsewhere, needing the buses to the trails.
Joe was worried about the Carlisle party. It was always a gamble when people came from another town. He went out and stood on the small landing when Joseph Gilbert, who really could sing, started his Frankie Laine routine with ‘Jezebel'. The boy looked down at the milling in the narrow corridor, the flitting from room to room, and tried to work out patterns of eruption depending on who went where, what expressions Margaret and Alfreida, the waitresses, were wearing, whether a voice was raised raw and sudden and unmissable in its baying violence. Everybody said his dad had cleaned up the place, fine pub now, but that had made it much busier and then you never knew, Colin said.
‘Time, gentlemen, please. Time, please. Time, ladies and gentlemen, please.’
With remarkable dispatch, the pub’s customers decanted into the dark chill street and Joe went down. Sometimes he was allowed to help with the checking up. Ellen, generous through her own impending treat, nodded Joe through the gate at the bottom of the stairs and he went behind the bar where Sam was at the till. The others were skimming away the worst and most obvious damage - the full cleanup was in the mornings - with extra speed, full focused on the dance.
How could he tell them? Could he say he was ill? That was not true. There was no other excuse that would do.
Sam let him pile up the pennies in little towers of twelve, the halfpennies also - twenty-four was too unstable. Shillings and sixpences and florins in tens, threepences and half-crowns in eights. It was a good bet at weekends that you would find a silver farthing palmed off as a sixpence or an Irish two-bob bit. Joe got much satisfaction from this counting up. He liked to see the towers grow, many and orderly. He liked the feel of importance, all this money, this wealth of coins, commanded into numbers and additions by his fingers. He liked the praise for the speed and accuracy he brought to it.
Sam did the notes, checked the cigarettes and tobacco, and when all was counted and bagged up, he did the books. He entered the takings every night, and every night compared them with previous weeks and months and years. It was a story of getting better. Joe looked on, earnestly impressed at these columns of pounds, shillings and pence, and was warmed by his father’s satisfaction that the pub was thriving.
‘You can come to the bank with me tomorrow morning,’ Sam said, ‘before the matinee.’
Joe nodded, needing the favour.
I’d better put my glad rags on or your mother’ll be on the warpath.’
This time the smile was conspiratorial. He put the blue accounts book into the drawer beside the till. For a few moments Joe was alone in the bar, behind the counter where the men, only men, stood. Even though he was in the over-large dressing-gown his aunt Grace had bought for him through the club, he felt goose-pimply. The excitement of the preparations for the dance agitated him. The poster was on the wall, next to the poster advertising the films at the Wigton Palace. ‘Don’t Miss the Grand BATTLE OF BRITAIN DANCE', it read, ‘in the Market Hall, Wigton on Friday 19 September. Dancing 9 p.m. to 1 a.m. to the Penrith Melody Makers. Tickets 3/6 each (Strictly Limited).’ He knew about the Battle of Britain: the new history teacher had been a pilot in the war.
He went upstairs where the women were transforming themselves. The traffic on the little landing, between the bathroom and his mammy’s bedroom, was urgent and he was called on - zips to be slashed shut, stockings judged straight for seams, perfume dabbed, sniffed, dabbed more, fasten the buckle on my shoe, where’s my purse, we’ll miss the buffet, off we go, off we go, and then there was only his mammy and how could he tell her?
‘How do I look, then?’
She sensed he wanted something but her own preoccupation could give him only this gesture - a mark of equals, even collaborators. Joe saw his mother: long black hair, long red sheath dress, long gloves, lips red, eyes shining dark, smiling, smiling so radiantly …
‘Like a film star.’
‘Don’t be silly, Joe.’ Her tone was firm, even chiding.
But she was. And how could he even begin to understand what he wanted to say? Stay, he wanted to say. Why, though? Why that? Stay, he ached to say. How could a thirteen-year-old boy say that? Please don’t leave me alone, he wanted to say. Please. He shivered.
‘Bed for you,’ she said, and shouted downstairs that she would just be a minute and took him into the bedroom. But her appetite for this grand dance - very few she could get to since the pub - was so keen that she could not stay through his prayers and after a quick hug she floated down the stairs. He switched off the light and went to his window, which looked out over Market Hill. As they tippled out on to the pavement they shouted, ‘Bye, Joe,’ ‘Night, Joe,’ but the shouts went into the pub. They did not look up. He watched until they were well out of sight and then he went across the dark room and put on the light.
Next to his bedroom was an equal room to which entry could be gained only by going through Joe’s room. Colin had taken that, but after a few weeks Ellen had yielded to Sam’s sullen objection and levered him back across the hill to a fatalistic Grace, an openly disgruntled Leonard. Colin’s consolation had been the run of the upper half of the old stables in which he bred budgerigars. Now and then in the early days they had experimented with a paying lodger, but although the money had been welcome, Ellen had never settled to it and Sam’s jealousy, never well concealed, had aborted that. So, like the parlour, it was clean and neat and unoccupied.
Joe had a compulsion to look in. He tried to resist. He knew it was silly. Nobody could have slipped in unnoticed. But the instant the compulsion reared, he knew he had to follow.
He opened the door quietly and felt around the corner to put on the light before he walked in. Narrow bed like his own. Small wardrobe. Rug on lino red and yellow squares. Bare chair next to bed. A big cardboard box in which there were the old curtains that might come in handy. He stared carefully and then, as if sleepwalking, went across and looked under the bed.
He went through the same procedure in the parlour, in his parents’ bedroom and finally the bathroom. He stood on the landing and listened hard but no sound came from the pub below nor any from the yard. He stood until the silence and the cold together penetrated him and then he went to kneel beside the bed and say his prayers.
‘Our Father’ always began them, the words deep grooved in his mind, the clench of the prayer which Our Saviour Christ had taught us was used to comfort, but this time the sound interfered. His speaking aloud of the words disturbed the meaning of it. Perhaps he might forget them. ‘For ever and ever, Amen’ was gasped. ‘Lighten our darkness we beseech thee O Lord and by Thy great mercy defend us from all the perils and dangers …’ The words were bruised by the silence. The silence rejected them. The silence closed in. ‘Please bless …’ The list was galloped in a whisper. Light off. Bed. Burrowed. Eyes tight shut. Knees up like in gym: ‘Make yourself as small as possible.’ Sleep would rescue.
If parallel lines met only in infinity, where was that? He saw the black universe, small stars set like miniature peep-holes, those two tracks, white railway lines speeding past the indifferent stars, on and on and on. But where was infinity? If he kept watching them travel through the pinprick-flecked blackness he would fall asleep. It had helped before.
God had infinite mercy. God had infinite patience. God had infinite love for all men. Even sinners. Even fibbers like him. God had infinite wisdom. The lines sped through the darkness but they would not converge.
He tried the fortress. It was in a desert in a Western. He built it three walls deep. There were no rocks so the walls had to be wood. There was a wide ditch ringing the outer wall, full of sharpened stakes, razored to slice off limbs. Between the outer stockade and the middle stockade was an even wider, deeper ditch crossed only by planks easily hoisted up like so many slices of a drawbridge. The final wall was the highest, the strongest, impossible to scale. Fire arrows were one of the big dangers. A well had been sunk in the middle of the fort. The fort had been built around the well. From there, a system of buckets on a ceaselessly moving chain would carry the saving water to wherever it was needed. Sufficient ammunition was another problem … It was not working. The details were in place but there was that agitation in his mind, which did not allow him to believe in them.
He began to do multiplication tables beyond twelve.
There was dread.
He heard his breath and was alarmed by it.
They would be dancing now. He had won a competition with his mother in the Market Hall. In a Dance For All The Family on the early evening before the carnival. They had won the quickstep and been runners-up in the valeta. Ellen had not entered for any more. She would have liked him to learn to play popular tunes and dance music, but Miss Snaith was strict and pointed out that dance music did not get you through exams.
Colin would be dancing with Sadie. He whirled her about the floor, he swung her and rhythmed her. Ellen half proud, half fearful that Colin and Sadie might get themselves talked about. Sometimes Colin would get Joe in the back yard and teach him his own fancy steps, which he said he had patented.
Joe had seen Sam and Ellen dancing in the kitchen at Christmas when, instead of Christmas dinner with just the three of them, people had stayed on after two thirty closing time and it had ended up with dancing. His daddy was not as good as Colin but at the same time he was better, Joe thought.
They would be dancing now. He concentrated. He could see them. They would be doing a slow foxtrot. Being close together. What was a slow foxtrot tune? Didn’t matter. He could see them clearly. He pushed his legs down the bed. It was cold. He folded them back into his chest. They were clapping the band. The dance had finished. They were walking to the chairs along the wall. Everybody was leaving the dance floor. Everybody was leaving. Seventeen times seventeen. Parallel. Fire arrows. Everybody was leaving and, and, he heard a whisper, maybe his: and, and …
There was nothing.
Was he breathing?
In the corner at the far edge of the window he saw a small dim blotch of light, somewhere between white and grey, trembling just a little, hovering, waiting? It was him, the light was him. He knew it for truth and his mind ebbed all away. Everything left it. There was no him in the bed. The light looked on what remained and saw just a thing. The light was him. If it went away he would be, no, he would not be, be no more, be left a thing. He looked at it. His mouth opened. Short, quiet, most quiet, sighs of air came into his mouth and soundlessly, secretively, he pushed them back out.
He had to get the light back into himself. He just had to. But it stayed there and he, transfixed by it, lay there. Such a terror clouded over him but he held his look at it. It had to come back into him. He was only fear. Where would the light go?
What happened he did not know. He could not cry out. He waited. He just waited as the terror froze him. He was a silent terrified scream in the dark.
He found that he had rolled out of bed and dropped on to the floor. He crawled to the door; a hand reached up and opened it.
On the landing, his mouth wide open. Down the first flight of seven steps he crawled, a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn. Eleven steps to the gate. He pulled his body up and like a very old and ailing man he worked his way down them and into the pub, the floor cold on his feet, some light in the bar and the Darts Room from the street-light on Market Hill. He stood beside the inner door. There was the picture of the little black boy. He heard his screams but could not join in.
In the Darts Room he knelt on a chair and looked through the window at Market Hill, so much of the territory of his short life. He saw nothing but the blackness beyond the weak yellow single streetlight glow and no one went by. He was cold now. His head felt so strange, so unlike him, unlike anything, only fear, nothing else, fear, fear, but he could not cry.
When he heard them coming home, he moved, though sluggishly, up the stairs, stayed on the landing.
The door opened, bringing back life, and the boy slumped. He wanted to run down but what could he say? What could he tell them? Their voices were unafraid. He dare not lean forward in case they saw him but their voices were so warm that he wanted to cry but you didn’t.
When he heard his mammy say that she was going straight to bed he turned and made himself go back into his bedroom. He did not look in the corner. He waited for her to come in, and when she did, he pretended that he was fast asleep. She looked at him for a moment or two. He was too old to kiss.