Friday was a bad day, Enright caned him. Saturday was worse. On Saturday he had to get up and meet the newspaper train. Rob came around the door at 5 a.m. He wore a surgical-collar and shades – 5 a.m. I’m telling you – he came into the bedroom with cream-coloured hair and brown bifocals, and when the light went on you sat up and saw your shock in them.
Why Rob wore sunglasses in the middle of the night wasn’t questioned. Rob was six foot and combed, formerly blond but greying now. He had enormously developed arms from lifting newspapers, and it was newspapers that shagged his neck. His head came out of the collar with a curious resignation, like he’d been born with it. He was deft, but it impacted his movements, gave him a weird gait. If he wanted to look anywhere but straight ahead, his whole body was required to turn.
Thomas descended into the kitchen and his father boiled the milk. Rob always took his tea with boiled milk – it was a habit he’d acquired in India. Thomas drank the tea with a hot feeling travelling down from his head; it was bilious, a fist in the gut. He hated newspapers, and he hated this – even the fucking Dobermann was still asleep. Rob went out to fire up the Wolsey and two minutes later they were in it, flat-out through the silent town and heading for the railway station.
Neither had spoken yet.
Drizzle around street lights in last night’s fog. A row of gas lights and a Morris van parked in the station yard with ‘Furseman’s Wholesale Newsagents’ painted on its side. It was dawn, and a cold wind was coming down the track from Ramsgate.
Twenty minutes to six.
‘Rob’s boys’ were already on the platform, barrows ready. The only thing that ever dared to be late around here was the train. Rob’s boys were in fact Bill Bing, thirty, sucking a Woodbine, and Arthur, sixty, half dead.
He said good morning to Rob and got no answer.
If the train was late, and this morning it was, Rob would get on the wristwatch. Anger was instant and woe betide any railway worker in the vicinity. He’d give them what he called a ‘hammering’, get into a strut offering ‘hammerings’ up and down the platform, sometimes to passengers who had nothing to do with it. It was probably quite unnerving if you saw him coming – a muscular man in dark glasses and a surgical collar – claiming the property and telling you off before dawn. (The reason the train was late was the laziness of everybody on earth, drivers, coalmen, guards, but above all those indolent bastards at Margate. They took ten minutes to unload a wagon – Robbie could do it in two).
You heard it in the rails before it arrived; the train came in dragging its weather. The Maid of Kent, choking on coal-fat and enormous asthma, sparks heaving out of its chimney and a face in the driver’s cab catching an earful from Robbie as he went past. Trucks the size of houses followed, thirty-eight-tonners with wooden doors. The name of every town in North Kent was written on their sides – Bromley, Chesterfield and Swalecliff, Herne Bay – they kept on coming, and kept on going, Rob started shouting, and everyone had to run after Broadstairs.
The driver had purposefully overshot his brake-line. This happened not infrequently and it was done to annoy Rob.
When the train stopped and the doors opened, Rob rushed the wagon like he was leading a boarding party. Bundles of Telegraph, Mirror, Financial Times, sixty pounds apiece, trussed with sisal, on fire with their weight in your hands. Thomas could barely drag the bastards to the barrows. Rob came out with one at the end of each arm, sometimes with a ‘spare’ in his armpit, totalling a hundred and eighty pounds of newsprint. Arthur was at the other end of it with a face the colour of a Stilton rind, buckling under the onslaught – how could he survive another morning of this? Rob plunged deeper into the wagon, arms going like cranes, moving at the velocity of an armed robber. He was out-sweating them, out-lifting them, out-loading them, his personal quest to be the single greatest unloader on earth.
Meanwhile, Bill Bing had been ferrying barrows to and from the waiting room. The last load was now loaded and Rob was back on the platform, hauling up and off. It took clenched teeth and every ounce of Thomas’s body weight to get his barrow on its wheels. Fighting it up, with a foot on its axle, was an effort equivalent to digging a hole in one with an enormous shovel. Sometimes it threw him into the air.
Pulling, rather than pushing it, he went after Rob like a dwarf in a rickshaw, speed was of the essence, size was no excuse. The temperature rocketed as Thomas laboured into the waiting room; a potbellied stove stuffed with brimstone put out the heat. The premises were tall and gas-lit, wooden benches either side, and a parquet floor filling the rest of it that no one had polished for fifty years. Christ forbid anyone should be sitting on the benches. From eight minutes past six, to forty-five minutes past the same hour, these benches belonged to Rob.
And so did the floor.
The bundles were split. Rob used a razor-sharp carpet shiv with a blade like an eagle’s beak – severing fast, just below the knot, and ripping out the string that was to be used again.
There were about a dozen titles, some in huge numbers like the Telegraph and Express, and some just a few, like Lloyd’s List and the Manchester Guardian. The counting started now. There was a board with the names of sixteen newsagents, and columns of numbers designating who got what. By now one or two of the local retailers had probably turned up – Tucker, a squat bloke with a pointed head and nothing much in his mouth but a pair of front teeth, and Eric Stopper, whose shop was opposite the station …
Rob was counting and no one spoke. They stood at the sidelines terrified he’d make a mistake, and then they’d have to tell him, ‘I’m sorry, Rob, I’m two Sketch short.’ And he’d rear in disbelief, and they’d get wrath, and on one occasion, the Bunny got knuckle, and that’s why they were silent and let him count.
The piles were growing on the benches and it was Thomas’s job to knot the recycled strings. At three yards each they hung over the arm of a bench. The next and most loathsome process in this most loathsome of mornings was to begin.
They were going to tie these fuckers up.
Walter had taught Thomas the ‘packer’s knot’. Its mechanics were special, known only to the newspaper trade. Like a garrotte it couldn’t slip, only get tighter and tighter. Thomas could tie a parcel so tight you couldn’t get a fingernail under the string. But the problem with the packer’s knot was the hatred in the sisal. To do it right would all but cut your hand in half. Bing and Arthur put on the glove. And so did Thomas. The only one to shun protection was Rob. His right hand was like a hoof. Years of packing had created a six-inch callus down the karate edge, split like concrete, and the colour of a cockerel’s foot. Any tissue still living had escaped round the back of the bone.
A last wrench on the final knot and Rob led the charge into the station yard. Sudden cold, harsh in the lungs, and half a ton of prints crushing the Wolsey’s suspension. Boot slammed, and doors slammed, and a hair-raising race with the dawn to a dozen different newsagent’s shops.
Rob’s maniacal pace made little sense to Thomas. This was a commuter town, and in half an hour’s time people in bowler hats would buy these papers and take them all the way back to London. What was the point of that? Why couldn’t they buy them when they got there, or sell them the fucking things on the train? It was a question Thomas never asked. They had to get to these shops before the commuters did and that’s about all there was to that. Arthur and Bill went round the town in the van. Rob and Thomas made the ‘country run’.
They still hadn’t spoken yet.
It wasn’t until the last delivery was made about a mile from North Foreland lighthouse that Rob might light a cigarette and talk. If he did it was most likely to be about something he’d seen headlined in one of the morning’s newspapers – Archbishop Makarios, for example. Rob’s neckwear precluded any eye contact, which suited Thomas because he knew what was coming, had heard it before and wanted to go to sleep. No chance. Rob hit the Rothman’s and put out the smoke. Apparently there was some murderous Greek on the loose in Cyprus called Archbishop Makarios and Rob wanted him hanged. Makarios led a group of anti-British terrorists on the island called EOKA and he wanted all of them hanged too. In Rob’s view there was little social, economic, or political problem that couldn’t be solved with the rope … hang the bastard … hang the Irish … he could solve the Irish problem overnight … get into Dublin and string up some Micks …
‘They wanna get tough?’ he said. ‘Well, let-me-tell-you-something, I wanna get tough. And I’m just the boy.’
In Rob’s lexicon of jurisprudence capital offences were myriad: you could get hanged for almost anything, hanged for vegetarianism. Endless streams tramped to Rob’s scaffold, Communists, trade unionists, the Labour Party – he hanged the lot of them, and it wasn’t even 7 a.m.
‘I’d like to see that fucking idiot bishop Makarios hang.’ A fist came off the steering wheel for a thumb to peck at his chest. ‘And if they want someone to do it, I’m the boy.’
Rob was the boy all right, sixty up the Margate Road heading back into town. First light on the slates and an awful sick feeling in Thomas’s gut. Fresh newspaper has a sickening aroma, stuff of the night, and to Thomas it smelt of insomnia realised.
‘Out of the fucking way!’ A milkman got full horn. ‘Lazy cunt, he’s home by eight, I work all the hours God sends.’
And it was true, Robbie did put in the hours. Up at five seven days a week, even Sundays when he didn’t have to. He had nothing else in his life but this business, no holidays, and no friends. His management of Furseman’s happened suddenly some years ago when Wol first got ill. Rob turned up out of the blue – or rather South Wales, or Fulham in London – Thomas wasn’t sure which. ‘He’s not driving my car,’ said Walter. But Walter had no choice and they all moved into the big house and Rob drove the Wolsey. That didn’t mean to say that Walter had to talk to Rob, or even acknowledge his existence, and he never did.
Thomas wished they were going home, breakfast and bed, but first there was some business at the depot. Fursesman’s was situated at the dark end of a yard around the back of the high street. Its entrance was piled with SOR (sale or return newspapers), hundreds upon hundreds of bundles reaching to the roof of a corrugated-iron porch. It was a sort of cellar without stairs; even so you had a feeling of descending as you went into it. It stank of magazines and sisal, there were no windows, and not once since its construction had it known daylight. Three other businesses operated in its precincts. There was a greengrocer above who kept out of the way (Rob wouldn’t let him use the toilet), a bicycle seller and repairman called Monkton, who had lock-ups, and opposite him at the other side of the yard, underground, a fortune teller called Madame Olanda.
Olanda worked her Ball in a shack on the seafront next door to a fish-fryer and it cost five shillings to get in. She had a picture of the All-Seeing Eye in the window and a photograph of a celebrity who had visited Thanet. She wore a turban and drank too much and her face was the colour of a brick. It was only in summer months, when some tourist might wheeze by for a reading, that she sat in her hut. But this time of the year she was in her vaults, underground, and here she resided alone, spending most of her life in darkness, like a tongue.
Madame Olanda thought her dead husband lived on in a pigeon, at least, his spirit lived in one. Her problem (and everybody else’s) was which one? So she attracted them all and that’s why she put bread on everybody’s roof. There was bread on top of Monkton’s garages, and this pissed the bicycle repairman off because the pigeons shat on his bikes. On any day there were hundreds of husbands in the yard, but complaint was futile. To communicate you had to go and shout down her grid …
‘For Christ’s sake, there’s bread everywhere. They can’t eat it,’ said Monkton, and he was right. There was so much bread on his roof grass grew out of it. It would have taken every pigeon in Kent to clear his loaves, and they didn’t want it. She’d built up bread outside the foyer of her subterranean hovel. There were abutments of bread, thousands of decaying grey-green crusts stacked a foot high like a wall.
Because of the threat to her husband, Olanda hated cats and put curses on them. And it was said (when she could) she’d catch them in hessian bags and throw them off the jetty. Local cats were often missing and on occasion someone might call the police. But they couldn’t nail her, couldn’t prove it and couldn’t get her out. She was always in her psychic hole.
Pigeons took off as Rob turned the Wolsey into the yard, headlights on although there was just enough daylight around to see. Suddenly he hit the brakes, tore at the door and exploded out with the engine left running.
It was still night under the depot’s awning. Madame Olanda was partially concealed behind the SORs. She wore a wool kaftan, high-heeled slippers and a turban the colour of methylated spirits, and what she was doing was spraying down the newspapers with a hosepipe. It wasn’t the first time she’d done it, but it was the first time she’d been caught. She did it because she didn’t like Rob. When Walter ran the business he used to give her free back-numbers and went down her basement and possibly had some kind of awful relationship with her. As soon as Rob arrived – irrespective of what else she was getting – she no longer got the magazines.
She heard him coming and spun around and started hosing him like the bundles. This wasn’t a good idea, and she realised it and ran with her water spouting. This wasn’t wise either. She should have dropped it but foolishly didn’t and didn’t get very far. Rob seized the pipe, and hauled her back, all but had her off her feet. She said he was a cunt and aimed a stream of water into his face with a thumb on the nozzle to increase pressure. There was a brief but frantic contest for the end of the pipe. The advantage was quickly Rob’s, and he was now hosing her with his lower teeth exposed in a horrible malice of pleasure, saturating the bitch, how do you like it? She didn’t, and got a knee up, missed his balls and he knocked her turban off. To Thomas’s astonishment she was totally bald. Howling mad, she went in again, grabbed him by the surgical-collar and somehow got on his back, kneeling there, like a rucksack.
‘You fucking witch.’
And they spun around with water spraying out of their conflict, centrifugal-force finally throwing her feet out. His rigid neck and the pressure on it seemed to impede him; he was trying to punch her off but it was difficult to land one on something that high up. But then he caught her, and she flew backwards clutching her tit. She went down; he’d winded her with a shattering right hook. Shades askance and heaving, he stepped back, and for a moment Thomas thought he was going to put the boot in. He re-hosed her instead, and laughing loud and hysterically, drove her up the yard like litter. Wailing imprecations, she got back on her feet and made off through the sodden loaves.
‘You’ll die in the month you were born,’ she screamed.
‘Not as dead as you,’ said Rob. ‘I’ll dance on your fucking grave.’ And he did a little dance on his toes there and then in demonstration.
‘Beware of November,’ she shouted.
‘Wrong month,’ retorted Rob. ‘Get back in your hole.’
Clutching her turban like a crash helmet, Olanda retired to her basement without looking back. Rob killed the tap; whipped out his blade and severed the hose, launching half of it after her like a dead snake. He was grinning maniacally but said nothing, returned to the depot and went about the locks. As he got a key into the second, Olanda reappeared from her hovel with her hat back on. She was carrying a large chunk of concrete which she elevated above the turban before slinging it through the windscreen of the fucking Wolsey.
It took out the lot.
Suddenly there was no windscreen and no Olanda either. Rob went after her like there was a murder coming up, but the barricades had already gone into place. He pummelled her door but, like everyone else, was soon on his knees and forced to shout down her grid. Her appearance under the bars at the bottom of it inflamed him more, and this obviously was her intention.
‘Beware of July,’ she said, pointing a finger at his face.
‘You half-witted fucking gypsy,’ hollered Rob.
‘The third Sunday,’ she croaked with some pleasure, and disappeared.
‘You ugly bastard witch,’ he bellowed. ‘Granite cunt! You’ll have to come out sooner or later, and when you do, I’ll be waiting for you!’
Threat delivered he returned to the car and pulled out the offending rock. It must have weighed twenty pounds. Backing off, he took the measure of it, and then rushed violently up the yard, bowling it like an enormous cricket ball at her front door.
It landed on the door bell which rang in curious anti-climax, but the frame shook, and the concrete shattered, and Rob motored away looking reasonably satisfied.
Thomas was still watching in amazement. As he turned to follow his father into the depot he noticed someone was watching him. There was a weaselish-looking geezer at the mouth of the yard, about sixty years old. He wore a mackintosh and a tweed hat, and trousers tucked into his socks. Thomas didn’t know why but he was immediately suspicious of him. He looked right into the boy’s eyes before pedalling away.
It started to drizzle, quite hard.
Thirty minutes later they were hunched in the rain doing sixty up Pyson’s Road. Thomas thought loss of the windscreen might have slowed Rob down, but it had little effect. This was open farmland with feeding gulls and it felt like sitting with them on a cliff. It was easier for the driver, he was behind shades, but Thomas could hardly see. As he drove, Rob cursed the mystic; he had plans for that bitch. You could tell what he was thinking, his thoughts were in his fist, clenching spontaneously as he relived that difficult backward punch. It was Olanda’s lucky day. If she’d taken full force of the same thing from the front she’d never have got up again …
Black fields turned into clumps of abandoned woodland and the road divided into a choice of towns. What happened now was half expected. Rob’s gigantic thumb hit the indicator. He pulled over, telling Thomas he was taking the Ramsgate Road and he could walk home from here. This had happened before, always at this junction. What was his father’s business at seven o’clock in the morning in Ramsgate?
‘I’ve got to get this windscreen fixed.’
Maybe he did, but it wasn’t broken last week, nor the week before that, so where was he going? Thomas didn’t ask and got out and realised it was hardly raining.
‘Did you shit in someone’s hat?’
No pause.
‘No.’
Rob was staring although you couldn’t see his eyes, and a second or two later the Wolsey belched away. So, the school had spoken, and he was suspected; how much of a problem was that? Not much of one, he concluded, they had no proof. Even in the fullness of his rage Enright had made no accusation. His biggest problem was Thomas in the female toilet. Arseholes to it.
He was a mile from home and started walking. Hadn’t made a dozen yards when a man with a bicycle broke cover rapidly from the trees, mounted his machine and rode off.
Thomas stared after him as he disappeared, travelling in the same direction as Rob. It was him, the weaselish-looking man with suspicious eyes he’d seen outside the yard. This time he hadn’t looked at Thomas, but cycled off without a glance. Obviously caught unawares, he was forced to pedal towards Ramsgate pretending he wasn’t interested – it was the oldest trick in the book.
But what did he want, who was he, and why was he following Thomas? The answer came almost before he’d asked the question. He was the ‘Investigator’. Thomas couldn’t remember the name on the card, but based on ‘thirty years in the Met’, had already assembled the implications. (a) They watched him all the time in the house, and (b) They were now having him followed outside of it by a professional.
But why?
What did they think he was going to do?