A dozen miles away a pair of fog-horns put out the doleful news. Winter had come early this year and you could see your breath in it. By night fog would spill off the Goodwins and be all over the town. Thomas had been pedalling hard and was heaving when he arrived. Dumping his bike he walked to the front door and was surprised when he couldn’t get in. He had another go at the handle, rang the bell, and looked through the letter box. A middle-aged Dobermann called Maximus was at the end of the hall looking back at him. Nothing else happening except the beat of a grandfather clock. He stood up and looked at his watch; strange they were all out, but he was early. Maybe they’d taken his grandfather to the specialist? As he passed the garage a glance confirmed it, it was without its usual blue Ford.
He disappeared around the back of the house, up an alley where it was always raining, even when it wasn’t (some sort of ball-cock stuck in the attic, no one had bothered with it for years). The back door was also locked; he peered through a window and could smell the meat. Newspapers were piled everywhere, at the side of the fridge and on top of it. Max was back in his basket by the Aga, plus there were two other baskets containing Jack Russells. The one with the cataract looked up but didn’t seem to recognise him, didn’t consider him worth barking at either.
A chunk of birds took off, ravens in elms older than the house. Thomas looked around with a slight feeling of unease. He didn’t like this locked-door and letter-box business, it was too reminiscent of a fear he had, half a lifetime ago. He put it out of his mind, and deciding to wait in his workshop, set off through a vegetable garden policed by grapefruit domes on the ends of sticks.
A long time ago, he thought it must have been a long time ago, this isolated building was brewery to the house. He pushed at a door with rusted hinges, full of woodworm and key-holes. Inside was a deep stench of must, flagstones and beams, and walls with some good-quality moulds. Here and there strands of lost ivy came in through the roof and hung down looking anaemic. They made beer in here and maybe it was the ancient yeast spores you could smell? Thomas adored this decrepit utility and had taken advantage of his grandfather’s illness to acquire it, gradually extirpating the gardening tools and moving his equipment in by a process of stealth. Although there was electricity he preferred a more traditional illumination, and he struck a match and the brewery warmed in the glow of a paraffin lamp.
You got a better look at it now and everywhere you looked there was stuff. An enormous bench occupied one wall, a vice either end and an astonishing clutter in between. Wires, batteries, components, pieces of pipe, jars spilling bolts, tubs of grease, oil cans, hacksaw blades, rat-tailed files, flat files, and other files of other lengths. There were washers and screws and dozens of keys, old keys, useless keys, a key clenched in the smaller of the vices and presently halfway through getting filed.
At the end of the bench and in contrast to this confusion was a tall glass-fronted cupboard whose contents were displayed in good order. Furnished with jars and flasks, a pestle and mortar and bottles of soluble aspirin, it looked like someone enjoyed the fantasy of pharmaceuticals, except the chemicals in these pots were real. Crystals of potassium chlorate, potassium nitrate, manganese dioxide, bright yellow flowers of sulphur, charcoal raw, and charcoal already ground – they all shared a characteristic that wasn’t immediately apparent – they were all potentially unstable and in the right conditions could be made to explode.
He adjusted the lamp and shadows reorganised as he moved to the back of the building. It was here he located his prized possession, oiled and immaculate; it stood on a table of its own looking like the insides of a peculiar clock. An engine of steel, with gleaming cog wheels, and cotton-covered wires feeding the word into a pair of beautiful electromagnets. He wound it once a week with a fat key, relishing the name stamped into its base plate: ‘Tishman/Bracknell, Electrical & Telegraphic Manuft. Co. Springfield, Illinois, 1863.’ This thing was ninety years old but could have been made yesterday. It was beautiful. And what it did was record Morse code.
The Tishman was given to him by his grandfather who had stored it in a cupboard for forty years. When the old man saw the transformation in the brewery he liked it almost as much as Thomas and offered to wire him up. There was now telegraphic communication between here and Walter’s office, copper wires pyloned off a bay tree. Both ends could send, only this end receive. Transmission from the out-station (Walter) activated the clockwork driving a half-inch paper tape, any tape (Thomas made it himself), and as it went through, the magnets worked a bronze punch stamping the dots and dashes. Watching it chatter was joy (oh, the joy of that first day). It could record as fast as Walter could transmit, ten times faster if necessary. The only thing missing was its glass dome. Apparently they were meant to have domes.
Thomas checked the tape. Nothing on it. But wait a minute, what’s this?
–... .–.. ..–. . –... . .–.. .–.. ...
‘Bluebells’? What bluebells?
His fingers were poised on the transmission key to ask, but he didn’t bother. Firstly, because he knew the out-station wasn’t there, and second because it was probably some kind of code. Sometimes Walter transmitted in double-code, sometimes back-slang (it was another vernacular altogether), but like Morse, Thomas was fluent in both from the age of ten.
He was thinking about Enright again and that fucking stick. There had to be a way of avoiding it. Illness seemed to be the only exit; would Enright attack an asthmatic? He momentarily had an image of himself in an oxygen-tent, but decided it wouldn’t make any difference. There was no way out. Best just to get in there, beg a bit and take it. Plus there was a certain upside to a caning, gave you a sort of status in the place, a distinction amongst one’s peers …
The fog-horns were still bleating; it would be dark in less than an hour. He moved the lamp back to the bench and lit a candle to go with it. His eyes settled on the work in progress, a length of brass tube about the diameter of a ten-gauge shotgun. This was an ‘experimental’ scheduled for use on deep-water crabs. Hauling it up, he unscrewed the end and peered into it like a telescope. Midway down was a metal bulkhead with holes in it and electrical contacts soldered into place. He shoved it at the candle and got two pinpricks of light. This thing was an innovation, the first time he’d attempted to construct this type of bomb. It was easy enough with external batteries – anyone could do that – what he wanted was an ‘integral unit’, neat as a flashlight, with the power-source actually inside.
The pipe clattered back to the bench with problems left to solve. Munitions fascinated him, or more accurately, explosives fascinated him and he was capable of building some serious devices – not all that pimply bullshit with fireworks. These were proper petards; get these bastards wrong and you’re dead.
His speciality was underwater work and he thought he might as well use the time to knock up an aquatic fuse or two. These were standard detonators, simple electrical switches utilising soluble aspirin for service in rock pools. They could be timed to trigger anywhere between ten and sixty seconds depending on how thin you shaved the aspirin. Once in water they effervesced; once used, the spring from a cheap pen snapped contacts in a waterproof tube, six volts slammed into a resistor and a hot fuse glowed in the heart of Thomas’s primary mixture. At a fathom the explosion was considerable. But these things were tiresome to make and you broke more than you got.
Opening the pharmacy he shook out a few tablets preparing to drill holes in them. It required a 1/32nd-inch watchmaker’s drill almost as fragile as the aspirin itself.
‘What are you doing?’ He heard himself ask the question at least twice before it stopped him drilling. ‘What are you doing in here, drilling a hole in a fucking pill?’
Focus on the question had the effect of an awakening. What he was doing of course was throwing time away, and wasn’t this precisely the time he’d been waiting for? All previous attempts had been thwarted by the eyes – they were always watching him – maybe this was the best opportunity he was ever going to get? If he could get into the house he’d have the freedom of it; maybe today was the day he was destined to find the key?
A rush of excitement made him careless; he was already halfway out the door. Just keep it calm, will you? Keep it calm and you won’t make mistakes. Retracing steps he killed the candle and retrieved the key from the vice. Its number was known by heart, Yale 0500, a configuration that for many months had been his not insignificant obsession.
He hurried back through the cabbage stalks and made a fast circuit of the house. Nothing on the south side. Up the alley in the rain he saw a window, half open and the only way in. Immediate problems. Although accessible via the ‘office’ roof, it was his father’s bedroom and he never went in there, not ever, even through the door …
If he thought about it a moment longer he’d have junked it, but he didn’t think about it and fifteen seconds later he was up the wall and on the tiles moving north. This part of the building featured an ugly Victorian castellation, but the windowsills were wide, and feet first through the battlements it wasn’t difficult to slide down and obtain a perch.
He could feel the oppression of the room from even out here. It smelt of war and rugby balls – hyperbole of course – but that’s how he thought of his father, a brute rushing the enemy in a sporting shirt. Unlike Thomas, his father had gone to a toff public school, Rugby as a matter of fact, and the disadvantages were apparent. His attitude towards almost everything was superior and aggressive. Like Walter, he fought the Germans, but paradoxically always said, ‘The Germans had the right idea.’ Thomas didn’t know what the idea was, but if his father liked it, it was almost certain to be a bad one.
He climbed in and stood there in the awful gloom. What if he opened the door and ‘Robbie’ was out there waiting? He’d run his head up the corridor like a fucking medicine-ball. The consideration was irrational and he knew it. But his discomfort in here put out those kind of thoughts. This wasn’t an attractive room. A monstrous wardrobe dominated all. Two sets of oars were stacked in a corner, signed by muscular contemporaries (Rob had rowed at Henley), and in another corner a small basin sported a nail brush and shaving tools. There was a black eiderdown on a single bed. And next to it on a table, the vague graphite-like sheen of a .32 calibre Beretta automatic.
Thomas crossed the carpet on toes trying not to leave prints. For as long as he could remember his parents had slept at opposite ends of the property, he in here, and her far down the other end with no explanations given.
He stepped out into the corridor quietly sealing the door. Just enough light left in the windows to see where he was going. He felt like a stranger in a strange house. Sounds he never bothered with flourished in the silence. He could hear water hissing in the attic and at least four different alarm clocks. Left to itself, the house seemed to have reorganised its priorities. Cigarettes were no longer part of the general atmospheric ingredient, they were the ingredient. There was as much nicotine in the air as meat and dog meat and dog.
Passing his mother’s room there was a variation of carpet, blue into green, and he turned off into a thin passageway with no lampshade leading to his grandfather’s office. Three stairs up to the door, he hardly dared expectation to meet the challenge. For months he’d been working at different keys, creeping along here with fistfuls of butchered Yales, had swivel on a few, but there was always that final obstructive tumbler. Fumbling in his pocket he produced the freshly engineered key, repeatedly in and out of the vice – he had high hopes for this one, last attempt it twisted midnight through six. All he needed now were maybe three more elusive little hours.
He stuck it in and when the fucker made ten he stood there with an assembly of unexpected feelings that added up to something approaching disappointment. Getting this far was little more than a re-establishment of the distance yet to go. He pushed at the door and it creaked open. Deep shadows and gone-out cigars. Outside fog spilled over the garden wall. He could just about make out shapes on the desk, the typewriter, Morse key, and a lamp with a green glass shade. Although he didn’t really want the light he had to turn it on for the search, and as he did any residual anti-climax evaporated as quickly as it had come.
There was the prize, or rather promise of the prize, a pair of old oak filing cabinets stuffed with every secret his grandfather possessed. It was pointless trying them, they were always locked, pushed-in Unions at the top right-hand corner, 6631 and 8658 respectively. Once, for one astonishing minute, he’d had access to those drawers. He couldn’t remember why he was in the room or why his grandfather had left it. But he got into one of the files. It was pale green, melon-coloured, how could he forget, and inside were about two hundred women with their genitals. Tits the size of buckets. Black women with bums. There was a nude black with old-fashioned boots and her arse in the air, wearing a feathered hat. There were women in here bending over settees and all you could see was their harris and their hat. Almost all these pictures were hand-coloured, Edwardian kind of stuff and the most remarkable photographs Thomas had ever seen. He was barely eleven at the time, and though he realised they were amazing, to be perfectly frank they didn’t actually make a lot of sense. It wasn’t until a year or two later, after discussions with Maurice, that he understood what this was. This was pornography, the most wonderful of secrets, unbelievably forbidden photographs that he would have swapped for God.
By now he’d completed a frenzied search of the desk and got nothing. His thoughts were blowing about like leaves. If it wasn’t in here, where was it? The question was as daft as its answer. Of course it wasn’t in here. People take important keys with them. If it was anywhere it was going to be on the same ring that his grandfather used to lock the door. He was on his way instantly, back up the corridor, stairs in twos, heading for his grandfather’s bedroom. Since Walter’d got sick he’d slept up here, a room with no carpet and a gigantic iron bed …
Thomas barged into the darkness without thinking, made a dash across the boards and stopped so suddenly it hurt his feet. His grandfather was on his back on the bed, fully dressed with hands folded across his chest and looking quite seriously dead. Had they ‘laid him out’ already? Is that why they’d gone out, to talk to an undertaker? The room was so dark it was difficult to see. He crept forward and leant over the bed, peering hard through the dozen inches that separated their faces. Fucking hell, he was dead all right, one eye open and a face the colour of slush. Hair leapt all over the pillow exposing his dome like a yid’s hat. Thomas could hardly breathe. Nothing in the room was moving except the wheels inside an alarm clock. It was half-past five and his grandfather was dead. He continued staring, wondering what he was supposed to do. Then, to his horror, the right eyelid slid down over the ball as though he were winking. That broke the spell. Thomas lunged back, paralysed with terror. This was the most horrible thing he’d ever seen in his life. For an instant he felt like shouting – flee the room shouting all the way out into the fucking fog. He knew that corpses are capable of extraordinary feats. His best friend, Maurice Potts and a vicar’s son, said they’d been known to fart in transit, blow off as they entered the ovens. He’d even heard you have to shave some of them, but he’d never heard of one winking before. As the shock settled he said a prayer. He said, ‘Lord accept him into your court with praise.’ He couldn’t think of anything else, couldn’t weep uncontrollably either, which surprised him. But he did feel sad, sad mostly for his mother. After all this was her only dad.
When he got off his knees he noticed coins on the table, also a key. He picked it up, it was steel, not the one he wanted, but it looked familiar. What was this? Still wondering he stuck it in his pocket, his pupils now adjusted to the darkness.
One of Walter’s eyelids was half up; they weren’t supposed to do that. Shuffling the coins he selected a pair of pennies (large copper discs in those days) and leaning in he carefully positioned them in the old man’s eye sockets. Fuck me, he looked twice as dead now, didn’t he? Fucking horrible. Should he still search the room? No, and he shook his head in agreement. He couldn’t do it, not with his grandfather so recently died, and he retreated backwards into the silence preparing himself for what might be the next best thing. If this was its key, already back in his hand, he’d hit the sideboard and get into that ebony box. There were keys in there, he’d seen them less than a year ago, maybe even duplicate keys to the cabinets?
Were it not for his grandfather’s death his good fortune would have meant elation. Since Christmas he’d been after another go at the living room, but until now a thorough search had been impractical. He was watched all the time. He knew they were watching even when they pretended not to. They were concerned with his obsession for prying. ‘Why can’t you keep out of other people’s things?’ they said. But he could not, nor would not stop.
He was back at the outskirts of his mother’s bedroom with no previous, but the prospect looked too good to waste. He’d just have a quick frisk of the dressing table, put a time limit on it, and with this in mind he made an entrance.
This was the oldest and most ruptured part of the house, floorboards so warped the back end of the room was almost uphill. A double bed fought the tilt with bricks under its downside feet – that’s how she kept it level. But you couldn’t see the bricks. Everything was covered in rose candlewick.
The dressing table was Victorian mahogany, big as a shed, with filigree handles and enough mirror for a roomful to get their face in. As he opened the drawer he caught himself in it, the mirror, that is, and for an instant he looked like his mother. Resemblance was principally in the eyes and eyebrows, dark crescents and deep green. He never really thought about it before but perhaps once she’d been beautiful? A hint of her past wafted up from the drawer. Is that what all these empty bottles were about, once being beautiful? He extracted a stopper and sniffed it. It contained dead perfumes, sediments of forgotten days. Is that why she kept them, to remind herself perhaps that even she was once young and desired? Pushing deeper he found more bottles, and in another drawer, instruments of manicure, and some birthday cards stuck to the wood with nail varnish. The leaking bottle was blood red, called ‘Coty’. It had a dried-out brush and he sniffed that too. It didn’t smell of anything. Did his mother really wear red nail varnish and this cerise-coloured lipstick? The lipstick still smelt of his childhood, like a wonderful kind of soap they put kisses in. He could remember little of them now. He had a photograph of his mother sequestrated from somewhere on a previous search. She was dressed in shorts, about twenty years old, sitting on a rock with round sunglasses, white as icing-sugar. On the back it said: ‘Bournemouth, Summer, 1938’, seven years before Thomas was born. He wondered what she was thinking at the moment that picture was taken, what the sweet smile was for. He couldn’t imagine. One of the curiosities of his mother was that she had no history – nothing of her past was up for discussion. She never talked about how things happened, how she met Rob, for example, or why she would have married a maniac like that. It was a different time, and she was a different woman from the girl in the photograph, that’s for sure. Yes, she was beautiful then – hope in that smile – but in recent years she’d put on some girth, more necks, her expansion particularly noticeable since the controversy of the driving lessons.
Previous to petrol, she’d motored around on a bicycle, kept herself taut on a Raleigh with a basket on the front. But now the bike was shoved in the garage with flat tyres, barely used if at all. Last time she’d gone on it – and he couldn’t remember why – the saddle practically vanished, a phenomenon that didn’t go unnoticed by his father. ‘Look at that saddle,’ he said. ‘Up her arse like a fucking suppository.’ It was evident he didn’t think much of her, said appalling things right in her face, like the earful she got when discarding this bicycle. ‘You never get any exercise,’ he said. ‘Look at you, you’re like a mountain now.’
It bounced off. She bought a Ford Anglia.
Rob didn’t actually care about her arse, what he didn’t like was her having a car. Virtually all communication was conducted thus, as though deep into argument, irrespective of whether they were arguing or not. (As a matter of fact, it was impossible for them to have an argument, neither would have noticed.) It seemed to Thomas that this reciprocal animosity was the gel that bonded them; if she couldn’t have his love, she could at least have his rage, a tirade about the best she could get. And that’s probably why she encouraged him to shout. Communists, students, and the unions were the commonest detonators. She planted them like cues in a crap theatrical. Plus the Labour Party. The Labour Party could bring him to his feet at the dinner table in a foaming apoplexy of mustard and cold beef. ‘Let me tell you something about the fucking Labour Party,’ he said. And he told you, and you listened. And if you dared tell him he’d already told you, he’d tell you again.
Mabs, for so she was called, had initiated and absorbed so much aggression over the years she was immune. The crust had thickened. Nothing got through. But you can’t prune off bits and pieces of emotions you don’t like and expect the rest to survive. Emotion covers all, that’s the deal. Denial of certain unpleasant realities denies everything, and more than anything, the truth. This was constant war, and truth was the first casualty.
But ain’t that life for everyone? Stuck in bullshit, talking the tosh like a TV? It certainly seemed so to Thomas, and either way, he was too much part of the picture to see anything else. In reality he never gave his domestic arrangements a second thought. This was the house he lived in, and they were the parents he lived with, and that was that.
He was looking at himself in the mirror again and couldn’t help inventing another prayer. ‘Lord, O Lord, receive him into your house with joy.’ Still staring, he rose into a kind of religious ether, indulging the melancholy, allowing morbid thoughts to develop, and develop they did but in a most disturbing way. With Walter gone, who would be guardian of the pornography? His grandmother wouldn’t want it. Neither would his mother. What would they do with it? Sure as hell they weren’t going to give it to him. They’d probably sling it out like so much junk. What an awful thought. The prospect was actually alarming. Maybe today really was the day he would have to find the key. So what was he doing, lurking around in here, sniffing a dressing table?
Suddenly he wasn’t in there any more.
Embers were still glowing in the grate but it was cold downstairs. He added coal from a copper scuttle and carefully locked the living-room door. A sixty-watt bulb got wasted by its altitude: this was a dull room with an oil by someone who couldn’t paint over the fireplace. Everything else was a zoo of reproduction furniture. For some reason his mother couldn’t take antiques, they were disappearing all over the house. Genuine walnut would get replaced with a genuine-walnut finish, a modern copy of the furniture she already had. It was as inexplicable as it was despicable, it was also the reason Thomas could hardly get into his bedroom. Anything that got the Mark from Mabs, he’d do his best to haul up.
One of the few original pieces left was the sideboard in here, its intrinsic mediocrity guaranteeing its permanence. Plus it belonged to Walter, and he liked it, probably because he made it. Thomas went for it with the key, and as hoped for it twisted. Within seconds he had the ebony box out and up on the nearest table. Walter had won prizes for carpentry and this was another example of his handiwork. Two feet by two feet by one foot with a brass plate on the top. He read its hieroglyphic: ‘Walter Furseman, 14th London Signals, 1914.’ Walter had made this box just before he’d taken off for France. Thomas eased the lid; it was better than he remembered, everything in tight little boxes and tobacco tins, everything fitted like a jigsaw.
He worked quickly, top layer out, tins opened, tipped into their lids. Such a cornucopia of objects appeared his hands began to shake. There were eight cigarette lighters in one tin alone. There were penknives, there were watches, wrist and pocket, tie pins and hat pins and here come some keys, quite useless, like a tiny bunch of musical notes. In bundles of fifty, there was every cigarette card W.D. & H.O. Wills ever issued: Big Ships and Cricketers and Moths. A wad of photographs came out, names he’d heard of were suddenly given faces: Ernie and Hilda Halfpenny; Uncle Stan in Togo Land with a fern behind his helmet (who would subsequently go into the toilet with cancer of the entire head). A photograph of Bob Knowles. Blocks of invitation cards, and foreign money, Belgian francs. And now medals, medals from the war on fragile rainbows, propelling pencils, pens the size of chisels, a box of wishbones, and a fifty-year-old silver tin containing a pellet of marzipan.
But no key.
The items continued to mass in front of him, so much it was difficult to classify objects of importance, those out or those that were coming out. By the time he reached the final layer he was opening boxes and operating cigarette lighters with the same hand.
The stratum he was now into evidently hadn’t been touched for years. It had a good smell of old ink about it, a single big envelope and pair of tins covering the floor. First out was a lozenge-shaped container bearing Walter’s initials and engraved with oak leaves, ‘The Mystic Order Of The Veiled Prophets’ completing the inscription. This was a high-quality item, you could tell as you touched it. Black velvet upholstered its interior, and inset, like presentation pieces, were two pairs of dividers and a gold ball-bearing. It was a weird-looking set whose function wasn’t obvious: what was the relationship between these mathematical instruments and the gleaming ball?
He extracted it, it was substantial, big as an owl’s egg and apparently solid gold. As he studied his reflection the ball suddenly leapt in the air, clattered to the table, and reassembled itself into a crucifix with a diamond at its hub. Its mutation was awesome, like some shocker out of the Bible. For an instant Thomas thought he was having a miracle. The jewel glistened like the Ruthless Eye, and he put distance on it, stood gaping in a state of dread. What if he’d let something out, unleashed the vapours of his grandfather? Was he now a servant of the Prophets? The only one he could think of was Amos; was this his Orb? He stared, waiting for something else to happen. What happened was a fog-horn. Persuading himself at last that the cross meant no immediate evil, he picked it up again between thumb and some other finger. An examination of hinges and pliant arms drove out the holy phantoms. What this was, at least what he thought it was, was some kind of religious training ball. What it was actually for he didn’t know, and was now too fascinated by its ingenuity to care. Somewhere behind the diamond was a mechanism of spring-loaded cams designed to trigger at the slightest pressure. It was a masterpiece of ecclesiastical engineering and he worked it several times. It had a satisfying click. Finally crushing it, he vacillated over keeping it, but a gnat of annoying conscience intervened and he reluctantly put it back in its box.
Next box out was waxed cardboard, full of used cartridge cases, .303 and 7.63 Mauser. All dated 1913. These may well be useful, and seeing as no one else wanted them he emptied the lot into his pocket.
No hope of the key, and nothing left now but the envelope. He approached this last item with a wane of enthusiasm, concerned about the tedium of packing it all in again. But the stamps were interesting, so was the postmark, good-quality 1931 stuff. It was addressed to his grandfather, who at that time lived in London EC2.
Thomas wasn’t ready for this. Feet first, she came out in a pair of socks, wild veins and tattoos on her thighs. One thing can’t be overstated here, this was an enormous woman, legs like people, she was gargantuan, look at those tits, her nipples were the size of tits, and stuck out of her arse was the head of a live duck.
This picture was entitled The Temptress.
Thomas couldn’t believe it, of course, it couldn’t be real. It had to be just the head of a duck, stuffed, on a stick? Yet in the next photograph she’d managed to get up a tree and the duck was still in there looking down with its beak open like it didn’t like heights.
Eve and the Forbidden Apple.
The apple didn’t actually appear until the next and last picture, clamped in its beak and offered by the duck. Reaching up into the tree for it was a thin man, age about the same as the postmark, hair ironed flat to his head with an unguent and a not entirely convincing grin. But no one was looking at that. He was animal-rigged, huge balls needing a tidy scrotum, and this one hung like a sporran.
The picture was entitled Adam Takes Her Sin, and the man in it was unquestionably his grandfather.
A kaleidoscope of questions, not least of which, what happened to the duck? He went back to the envelope, no more photographs, but a wad of papers. Typed in black, and occasionally red with lots of revisions and crossings-out, this seemed to be part of a manuscript, twenty pages held together with rusty staples …
‘Chapter One’ (and that’s all this was), ‘Jonnie Thomas’s School Days’. This boy, Jonnie Thomas, arrived with his trunk at a railway station in the middle of nowhere, winter rooks over the farms, wondering what his new school was to be like, and who would pick him up. It was 1912, and he was fourteen …
Car?
Thomas got the freeze and listened and he was right. A car was coming up the drive, sounded like the Ford and he leapt up and killed the light instantly. It wasn’t a long wait for a key in the front door and coats off in the hall. His grandmother, mother and sister arrived. Nothing said, but he knew it was them; he didn’t need their voices but got them anyway as a second later the dogs arrived in a ritual explosion of joy.
Leaping and licking he could hear that Jack Russell, levitating in sycophancy, yapping the glad tidings, its entire body wriggling in airborne ecstasy. It was his mother’s favourite and Thomas loathed it. It was useless, lick anything. It spent most of its day licking her feet, and when these weren’t available, hours licking walls.
Coal light the only light in the room now. He waited with eyes on the door knob, knew it would twist, and here come the footsteps and it did. His mother rattled the door, no luck, and she knocked at it.
‘Dad? Is that you in there?’
Thomas shook his head. He knew they’d all come up and have a go, all ask the same question, and all have to go away.
‘Wally?’
This was the name his grandmother used for his grandfather. Her name was Ethel. Sometimes she called him Wol.
‘Wol? Is that you in there?’
More swivelling of the knob followed by a brief exchange of possibilities. (a) He was in there, and the door was locked from that side, (b) He wasn’t in there, and the door was locked from this? They fixed on the latter as most likely, although they couldn’t understand why he’d done it. And neither could Thomas, he thought they were stupid.
‘I’ll go and look upstairs,’ said Bel. She was Thomas’s sister, she was sixteen. But first she needed a pee.
They vanished up the hall and Thomas had to move like a demon. No time to repack the box in any decent sequence – speed was the order, he literally threw it in. The lid wouldn’t shut but that didn’t matter: now he had the sideboard key he could take care of that later. Creeping back to the door he stuck an ear on it and listened. Nothing. A plan was formulating and he was already in it. He unlocked the door and was about to travel when he remembered, Christ Almighty! the photographs were still out.
A relock. Gathering the lot, including the manuscript, they returned to the envelope and then down the front of his trousers. Back to the door and the key took another twisting. He opened it no more than an inch.
A wireless had gone on in the kitchen. Radio Newsreel. The coast seemed favourable. He followed a foot into the hall and as he did there was a horrible scream upstairs. Before its resonance was absorbed he was again in the living room assisting the door with a silent slam. The scream repeated, more of a yell, he realised his sister had found the corpse. Simultaneously, there was action out of the kitchen, scuttling feet as his mother and grandmother hit the stairs. It couldn’t have been better for Thomas, part one of the plan was up and running, and so was he, up the hall and out through the front door.
Fog had thickened around the house, cold and glum. He made a yard or two and looked up at his grandfather’s room. A light had gone on and you could hear the conflab from out here. His sister was screeching, Thomas didn’t get it. No one loved his grandfather as much as he, no one else could read Morse, so what was the fuss about? He waited a while and looked through the letter box (that same feeling), they were already coming downstairs. As soon as his mother arrived he put on his cycle-clips, rang the door bell, and started panting. It was two miles, eight hundred and fifty yards from his school.
She didn’t believe one of them.
‘What have you done?’ she demanded, lividly opening the door. And if such an action wasn’t possible then neither was Thomas’s expression. He walked in, making sure they saw the cycle-clips, overdoing it a bit on the breathing. There was quite a lot of emotion about, weeping up the hall. He looked quizzically at his sister.
‘Is something the matter?’ he asked, balancing innocence with concern and failing at both.
‘Don’t pretend you don’t know,’ said his mother.
‘What?’ said Thomas, and two paces towards his sister, he again asked, ‘What?’
‘He sat up with coins in his eyes,’ she howled. ‘You put coins in his eyes.’
‘Me?’
‘It was you in there, wasn’t it?’ said his grandmother. ‘In where?’ said Thomas.
‘In the living room. Why were you in there? Why did you lock the door?’
‘I’ve just come home from school,’ he said, taking off his hat to prove it. ‘Science Club.’
‘The boy’s a liar,’ said his grandmother.
‘He sat up,’ wailed Bel.
‘Is something the matter with Grandad?’
His mother responded with an angry shake of her head.
‘He’s alive, is he?’ said Thomas, genuinely surprised.
‘Of course he’s alive, he’s had his pill.’
‘What on earth do you think you were doing in there?’ said his grandmother.
‘I haven’t been in anywhere,’ said Thomas.
‘Don’t lie,’ said Bel, still crying. ‘We saw your bike.’
That blew it. He opened his mouth to say something but said something else.
‘I have to admit, I was here briefly,’ he said. ‘But I couldn’t get in.’
‘The boy’s a liar,’ his grandmother said again.
‘I might be a lot of things,’ said Thomas, moving about with affront, ‘but a liar, I am not.’
No one bothered to listen. They’d had their go and attention returned to Bel. She was escorted into the kitchen to be fed tea and Ethel and the dogs went with her.
Thomas was poised to follow when he noticed a business card on the hall table. He was trained to read at a distance: ‘J.T. Brackett, Private Investigator (thirty years in the Met).’ His mother saw him looking and snatched it away together with a blue handbag.
‘Where have you been?’ said Thomas.
‘Nowhere,’ she said, disappearing into the kitchen. ‘Nowhere.’
The grandfather clock struck seven. Thomas tramped after her looking at his watch. It was six. Even the clock tells lies in this house.