It could have been the same Saturday but in fact was several later. Thomas got on his bike and rode over to Potts’ vicarage. It was a stale, leftover sort of day, leaves dragged in clusters by the wind. He pedalled through the deserted streets of St Peter’s, a village named after the church that was almost the only thing in it. Virtually everything else was a cottage, at most a small villa, and almost everything was built of flint. The vicarage was an exception, a tall Victorian dwelling with melancholy windows, privet cutting out the light in downstairs rooms.
Thomas parked his bicycle, walked up the path and put two small taps into the knocker. The reason for his timidity answered the door. Fifty-five years old with violent eyebrows looking over his face: as expected, the Reverend Potts did not seem pleased to see Thomas. He was still chewing a mouthful, like cud, and had harboured a negative attitude towards this boy since he’d shot holes in his rhubarb with an air rifle.
Thomas waited for him to swallow before explaining he had an appointment with Maurice to play dwarfs in the attic.
‘Dwarfs?’
‘I meant, darts, sir,’ said Thomas nervously.
‘He’s having his lunch,’ said Potts.
Thomas said he’d wait outside but got ushered into the hall with all the usual get-thee-behind-me attitude he’d learnt to ignore. He always had a special face for Potts, a sort of daft grin signifying his awareness of suffering. Suffering was Potts’ trade. You couldn’t get a doughnut down without being told about the millions who hadn’t got one. Potts reminded him they were still eating lunch and told Thomas to wait where he was. He got a nod in reply and the Reverend disappeared back into the stench of his kitchen.
If Potts didn’t like Thomas, Thomas didn’t like Potts. He was a typical self-righteous religious prat. Because of the lack of applicants he’d been accepted by the town council and got into speech days at schools. He thought Thomas was a malign influence on his son. But what he didn’t realise was that the influence was the other way around. It was Maurice who taught Thomas to flob – and was trying to teach him to smoke – an expertise he had almost certainly acquired from his father. Nobody could have smoked as much as Vicar Potts, his fingers were tangerine to the knuckles. And he had a hacking cough, like one of those unfortunate dogs who’ve had their bark surgically removed. This house, as was Thomas’s own, was always dense with cigarette smoke, a smell of ashtrays and unwashed things. Soiled items were hidden, no doubt of it. Thomas had a nose for that kind of thing.
He continued to wait, scrutinising the trash Potts had picked up in German East Africa. He’d been a missionary before the war and the natives had given him dried animal heads as symbols of their affection. The hall was decorated with shields and Senegalese crap – the back foot of an elephant filled with umbrellas, and a tusk that may well have come off the same animal. There were horrible elongated voodoo heads hacked out of black wood, a dagger, and a couple of spears. Along the picture rail there was a six-foot snake with stitches up its gut: Thomas couldn’t believe the natives had really cared for him.
The rest of the walls were covered in pictures of religious maniacs in crisis – Ezekiel on the floor, Moses bent double – the blind were opening their eyes and cripples tossing sticks away. There were ten miracles on one wall alone. At the end of the hall there was an impressive print of Jesus knocking on heaven’s gate. It was called Lux Mundi. What was worrying about this picture was the obvious state of neglect of the entrance to paradise. All the hinges were rusted and the path overgrown. More disturbing was the ethic of the painting. It was the Son of God knocking at the door. If he had difficulties getting in, what about the rest of us …
A moment later Mrs Potts came out wearing oven-gloves. She was an ex-nurse and looked like one. She was followed by Maurice, a chubby boy with chewed fingernails and blond hair. Susan Potts was also of some weight, it widened her, a bra-strap showing through her blouse like a girder to keep her shoulder blades apart.
‘We’re having baked jam-roll,’ she said. ‘Would you like some?’
Thomas declined, scratching an ear; no way did he want to sit with the Vicar.
‘I’ve already eaten, thank you.’
She smiled without meaning it, and informing Maurice she was about to serve, turned back with a pause at the door.
‘How’s your grandfather, Thomas?’
Thomas shook his head, didn’t really know.
‘He’s having tests, Mrs Potts. They think he might have to have another operation.’
She absorbed this news nodding slowly and retreated into her kitchen.
‘Come along, Maurice.’
Maurice repeated his mother’s invitation, said it was raspberry. When this got another negative he also said he was going to be ages because they’d probably make him do the washing-up.
‘I’ve got some photographs,’ said Thomas, flashing his envelope and instantly converting both their voices to whispers.
‘What of?’ said Maurice.
‘A woman with a duck.’
‘What?’
‘Up her arse. You won’t believe it.’
He didn’t.
‘Let’s have a look?’
‘Fuck off,’ glared Thomas, teeth clenched and almost inaudible. ‘I’ll show you outside.’
‘Pudding, Maurice,’ ordered a voice from the kitchen, followed by the appearance of Vicar Potts’ head.
‘I’ll wait in the orchard,’ said Thomas, smiling somewhat obsequiously for the benefit of the head. And he edged backwards to the front door, Potts watching until he’d gone through it and it was again closed …
St Peter’s Church was hundreds of years old, perhaps seven hundred, and like the little cottages in its shadow, built of flint.
Thomas walked around it towards Old Moules Orchard, eyes up at the menacing sky and looming tower. He had a feeling he was being watched, but churches always made him feel like that. He didn’t like religion, hadn’t liked it for years, but he adored churches, loved them like old scientific instruments whose time is long past but are nevertheless fascinating and strange.
He tried a side door in the tower but it was locked. It was almost like the door in the picture, he thought, studded oak and rusted hinges and you couldn’t get in …
Turning away, he walked through ancient graves and had another thought. Maybe Susan Potts was interested in his grandfather’s health because it meant business? Maybe they wanted to bury him in here? Thomas didn’t really know what was wrong with him, but he wasn’t well, that’s for sure. He’d been in and out of hospital in the last two or three weeks, and a week ago one of the doctors had made the tactless suggestion that he might have to have another operation. He didn’t like the idea. Suggesting another operation to a man who could hardly get up the stairs because of the last one was understandably upsetting. They’d been inside him already. About a year ago, a specialist from West Kent made an ‘exploratory’ and removed something. But what distressed Ethel was that two years before that an accomplice of the specialist had prescribed pills for anaemia. These pills didn’t work. Despite weight loss and deterioration, these pills that didn’t work were defended by the specialist’s friend with the plea that ‘they should be given the time to work’. In the time they took to give them the time to work, they kept not working, and Walter continued his inexorable decline. By the time the specialist’s friend spotted this Walter was the colour of a banana, but apparently this wasn’t unusual in cases of chronic anaemia. This bloke knew all about it and reiterated his diagnosis. Everyone except Thomas, his grandfather, and the specialist’s friend knew he was dying of cancer.
It started to rain and Maurice was nowhere to be seen. Thomas decided to wait for him in Head of an Angel Hole. Angel Head was a secret meeting place they’d constructed some summers ago at a derelict end of the orchard. It was made of apple boughs with a skip-sail stretched over poles and camouflaged with ivy and brambles. During the past couple of years the undergrowth had grown so thick it had become impossible for anyone to find it who didn’t know it was there. The canvas roof made it waterproof, and despite backing on to Potts’ graveyard – even using a headstone as one of its walls – it was completely invisible from either the church or vicarage. Its existence, they believed, was unknown to Maurice’s parents, and apart from a few selected friends, nobody but he and Thomas ever went near it.
Potts certainly didn’t. To Thomas’s knowledge his forays into the graveyard stopped short at the fresh end where the lawnmowers went. He was uninterested in anything other than modern acquisitions where a few chrysanthemums might turn up on a Sunday. As far as the Reverend was concerned, if you’d gone in before he’d relieved the last incumbent (who incidentally, together with Moules was in the fresh bit) then you had to look after yourself. His concern for the dead depreciated as their monuments collapsed, and when they finally lost care of anyone left living, they lost with it the attention of Potts and his gardeners for ever.
For Thomas and Maurice it was the reverse. As the dates went back the graveyard became more interesting, and by the time they got into the pre-Victorian section, it was sacred. Here was an enchanted wilderness of run-down crosses and headless angels, an estate of tombs. Wild attacks of elder and crooked oaks demolished the paths and desecrated the graves. Faceless saints lurked in holly and seemed to tramp about the place like ghosts, sticking their heads out of the undergrowth in places they swore they’d never been before. They called this domain The Plot of Sycamore Dick, named after Simon Edmond Dick, Dearly Beloved of Rose and (worn away) Dick, who actually had a sycamore tree growing through his slab. He died in 1851, a year after Thomas’s favourite author published Copperfield, and Thomas liked to think Sycamore might have had the chance to read it.
Once, a winter ago, Maurice had a crowbar working on his grave, and for one wonderful, terrifying moment, they thought they’d got up his stomach. Atrophied, Maurice said. But examination with the end of the bar revealed the skull of a granite angel that stood headless at the end of the plot. This noseless Victorian was now kept in Head of an Angel Hole, thus giving their den its name.
Rain battered at the roof as Thomas crawled in. White moths and rain in blackberries tangled as wires. He wiped his face on his sleeve and squatted on the boards. They’d built a platform of fence-slats and no matter how fierce the weather it ran underneath leaving the floor quite dry.
Thomas pulled an apple box to the headstone and took out his cigarettes to wait. Once a week he was a heavy smoker. On Saturday mornings his first stop was Tucker’s where he bought a packet of Park Drive filters for half a crown, blowing his entire wages. Park Drive were not only the cheapest twenty you could get, they were also the strongest. Maurice rated them a ‘fair snout’. He was a better smoker than Thomas, stealing his old man’s Player’s and smoking regularly throughout the week. With a father like Potts it was easy to practise – Thomas found it harder to pinch cigarettes because they were always watching – and not smoking anything like the quantity of the Vicar, his parents noticed their loss.
Six skulls were positioned on a shelf, five adults and a child. They grinned the grin as he struck a match. As yet, Thomas couldn’t inhale properly, had to hold the smoke in his mouth, pumping it down nostrils to simulate penetration. Asthma got in the way, that’s what he told Maurice, who would then demonstrate a full open-mouth drag, keep it down if necessary, then expel it with that kind of furious velocity that can never come from anywhere but deep in the lung. He could also inhale a cigar, and by some fortuitous deformity, blow smoke out of either ear.
An easterly moved on the graveyard, rattling vegetation, playing bramble-ends on the sail like a drum. The belfry joined in with a slow three and Thomas shivered – it was already getting dark in here. He looked at his watch to confirm it, he’d been waiting the best part of an hour. It didn’t look like anyone was coming and was looking like time to leave. He’d give it five more minutes, push off in five, but he didn’t have to wait for one.
Maurice burst into the hole like he’d been shoved from behind. His hair was stuck to his head and half of it seemed to have gone missing in the wind. He wore a brown plastic jacket, like a safari jacket, black jeans with zip pockets, and his school shoes. Dragging a hand backwards through his hair, he slumped on the box opposite, sniffing rain hard into his sinus.
‘Why didn’t you light the fire?’
‘Coz I didn’t think you were coming.’
‘I said I was, didn’t I?’
‘I was talking about today,’ said Thomas, and he said it a bit miffed. Firing a match on the side of the angel’s head he lit a candle stuck in wax on the top of it.
Maurice produced his pipe, cigarettes, and dog-end container, and nodded towards a crude-looking grate made of bricks and a biscuit tin.
‘You wanna light the fire,’ he said. ‘And let’s have a look at those pictures?’
‘What d’you think I am, the fucking butler?’ said Thomas. ‘Why don’t you light it?’
They lit it together. Thomas tore off strips of damp newspaper, rolled them into balls and threw them in the tin. In reality he was in no hurry to get his photographs out – they gave him some currency around here. Maurice had the edge in this relationship. Firstly, because he was six months older, nearly sixteen, and second, he’d been into Piermont Park with Freda Pew and nearly made it, something Thomas was entirely jealous of.
Some twigs and one or two partially cremated potatoes went on and Maurice lit the match.
‘Cold in here,’ he said.
‘What took you so long?’
‘They made me feed the rabbits,’ said Maurice, blowing at the tin and getting smoke.
‘What rabbits?’
‘Norfolks,’ he puffed. ‘My mother’s started to breed Norfolks, there’s five hundred.’
‘Five hundred?’ said Thomas. ‘What does she want five hundred rabbits for?’
‘Table rabbits,’ said Maurice. ‘She’s got an outlet in Margate,’ and at last the twigs flared.
He threw on more sticks and a clutch of leaves and the flames started to poke through. Momentarily they were both engulfed in smoke.
‘How do you snuff ’em?’ said Thomas.
‘Butcher comes round every Thursday, smashes them on the head with a coal hammer.’
‘All of them?’
‘Nahh, fifty, sixty, fuckin’ horrible.’
Dry holly cracked in the flames and a log went on and they sat back on their fruit boxes to watch it burn. Holes in the tin threw light like a lantern, and though their arses were cold their faces were warm and it was a good place to be in a gale.
Maurice flipped the lid of his tobacco tin.
‘Let’s have a look then?’
‘Give us a minute,’ said Thomas, about to have a cigarette and sticking a Drive to his lip to prove it. ‘I’m having a fag.’
Maurice smiled derisively through the smoke, sorting through his butts. Two dozen or more, plus some half-smoked cheroots he kept moist with a cabbage leaf. Selecting his finest dogs, he cracked them open, stuffed them into his pipe, paper wrappings and all.
‘I bet you haven’t got anything.’
Thomas lifted an eyebrow and they both lit up.
‘I thought you said you couldn’t find the key?’ said Maurice.
‘I can’t.’
‘Then where’d you get ’em?’ Thomas smiled through a nice little silence. ‘You’re telling me you’ve got a photograph of a woman with a duck up her arse?’
‘That’s right. A mallard.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘How much d’you wanna bet?’
He didn’t want to bet anything and his eyes returned to the fire. At intervals he tossed out great lungfuls of smoke with unconscious ease. Thomas did his best to copy him, turning the cigarette over in fingers with a sneer. Maurice knew the optimum way to hold one for premium staining. Conventional smoking, with the cigarette held out between forefingers, was useless for stains. Maurice always smoked with the hot end in towards the palm, like a policeman, even with his briar. And although Thomas couldn’t inhale, with the covert technique his knuckles were almost as yellow as Maurice’s and he looked like a proper smoker.
‘You wanna suck it straight down,’ he said.
‘I do,’ said Thomas.
‘Go on then, let’s see you.’
‘I’ve just had a drag,’ said Thomas, rather limply.
Maurice laughed down his nose and the expression of derision was fleetingly back. They sat listening to the logs snapping and brambles scratching harder with every change of the wind. At the end of the tunnel the afternoon had decomposed. Angel Head ejected its smoke close to the ground. Thomas watched it dodge across the orchard, twisting in a riot as the wind grabbed it and raced it invisible through the apple trees.
‘Take that down!’ ordered Maurice.
Thomas had been caught midway through a massive drag that inflated his cheeks like a bassoon player.
‘Go on, take it down! It won’t hurt ya!’
Thomas stared back. There was no escape. Maurice had ‘called’ him and he was going to have to inhale.
He did and suffocation was instant. He stood up and tried to say he couldn’t breathe, but he couldn’t breathe so he couldn’t say it. An arm appeared in front of him, it was his, pointing nowhere in particular. He dropped the cigarette and opened his mouth and the arm started waving. The smoke had entered his lungs and somehow sealed them. Very slowly a sound developed in his throat, like baying. It transformed itself into a rhapsody for two bagpipes, Thomas going it alone with one. He went down blind for the cough and hacked at the slats.
He had exhaled, and collapsed forward gasping for air.
‘That’s it,’ said Maurice. ‘That’s the first time I’ve ever seen you smoke.’
Thomas tried to communicate but couldn’t.
‘Flob,’ said Maurice. ‘Flob in the fire.’
A demonstration plug of sputum left his lips at high velocity and smacked into the side of the tin. Thomas cleared tears and on hands and knees, spat the last part of a cough. Its fruit hung pathetically from his chin and was misinterpreted by Maurice as an attempt to join in the spitting.
‘Nahh,’ he said, launching another sizzler off the side of his tongue. ‘Before you can flob, you gotta suck in, you can only get flob from your lungs, and you can’t get real flob unless you smoke properly.’
A vicious circle.
Humiliation was total with no exits. When he could speak he told Maurice it was asthma. Their eyes contacted but it didn’t wash. Both knew the asthma-angle was bollocks and one of them said so.
‘Just keep practising,’ said Maurice. ‘It takes time.’
And retrieving Thomas’s cigarette he hit the bastard so hard it looked like he was living off the vitamins in it. Tilting his head he dropped a grin, put out a perfect smoke ring, and destroyed it in blue.
‘You’ll get there,’ he said.
Thomas tried to say something useful to himself but his tongue was engaged. Embarrassment had replaced asphyxiation with no change in the colour scheme. He was drowning in shame, felt the blush boiling in his head like paint. His inability to smoke had been confirmed by an expert, and all his previous inhalations publicly demonstrated as fake. Maurice looked at him with the grin still loitering. Tossed the butt in the tin.
‘Yeah, a reasonable smoke.’
Rehabilitation would not come easy. There was but one hope, one ace for Thomas to play in restoration of his dignity.
Was it possible the Bird could redeem him?
‘Maybe it wasn’t all asthma,’ he said. ‘But it was half asthma.’ And he produced his envelope in expectation it would be alibi to a face-saver. In this he was correct. Maurice had eyes on the stash and allowed him to get away with it.
‘I’ll tell you what asthma’s like. Breathe out as far as you can, then try and breathe out some more. That’s what it’s like trying to breathe in with asthma.’
His companion just about nodded and Thomas was halfway off the hook. But when the ‘Temptress’ came out and Maurice got into that, the blush let go and Thomas was mercifully free.
‘Fuck me dead,’ said Maurice.
Fruit boxes were shifted in more favourable aspect to the light. Maurice stared in genuine astonishment, his principal interest of course, the Duck. Its head stuck out looking freaked. Was it real? Yes, it was. Was it alive? Yes, it was …
‘Wait till you see her up the tree, she’s got eyes looking out of her arse.’
‘Fucking Ada!’
Maurice was commenting on the next picture, Eve and Her Apple. Eve up the tree.
‘How the fuck did they get her up there?’
Thomas shook his head.
‘How did they get the duck up?’
‘They oil them,’ said Maurice.
He studied the photographs from many angles with all the fastidiousness of an art-historian examining a work for authenticity. This snap definitely readdressed the balance. They were equals again, and as a matter of fact, possession of the next picture put Thomas somewhat on top.
‘Christ!’ said Maurice. ‘Look at those fucking balls!’
This was Adam Takes Her Sin, featuring Walter, and Maurice repeatedly couldn’t believe the size of the balls. Thomas almost told him it was his grandfather, but decided against. In truth he was surprised and not a little disappointed with his friend’s interest in the man. The testicles stimulated more expletives than the bird and several wild comparisons, notably to a pair of African gourds.
‘Look at the tits on it,’ said Thomas.
Maurice nodded but he’d seen the tits, and to Thomas’s dismay seemed increasingly more occupied in tearing at a fingernail. The photographs had gone off like fireworks, and like fireworks their glory quickly died. Maurice was up for more, but there were no more, and with palpable diminution of enthusiasm he finally went full-time at the nail. He spat it reaching for cigarettes and handed the pictures back.
‘What else you got in there?’
‘Part of a book,’ said Thomas feeling drab. ‘About a boy at a boarding-school, weird stuff with a matron, but I don’t like it.’
‘Let’s have a look.’
‘You don’t wanna read it now.’
‘Why not?’
‘Coz it’s twenty pages with no girls in it. You can read it another time.’
He replaced the pictures and Maurice sniffed, lighting his cigarette. Another magnificent inhalation.
‘I bet your grandfather’s got some fantastic young stuff.’ A probability confirmed by Thomas.
‘That’s what I like,’ said Maurice. ‘I like ’em young, not weird, just rude, underwear and that, and they have to be pretty.’
This led to further discussion of the filing cabinets and Thomas’s inability to find the keys. He further confided his concerns about the pornography, should his grandfather actually die.
‘What’s the matter with him?’
‘Something with his stomach. Maybe something to do with the war.’
‘What war?’
‘First World War, he got hit on the Somme. Unconscious for seventeen days with his guts hanging out. The flies laid eggs in him, bluebottles, and it was the maggots that kept him alive.’
‘Bollocks.’
‘I’m telling you,’ said Thomas, and he was telling him. ‘They ate the gangrene, kept him alive.’
Magic flies.
Maurice didn’t believe it but didn’t bother to say so and they sat in silence until the moment became a minute. Maurice threw another log on and a mass of brilliant sparks leapt in the air like burning confetti.
‘You know what I’d like now?’ he said, without taking his eyes off the fire. ‘A pot of tea on top of that and a shag.’
Thomas agreed.
‘Do you realise it can take up to a year of constant shagging for a girl to achieve orgasm?’
He didn’t, but went along with the prognosis. After all, Maurice had had an experience in the park.
‘You know what my dream is?’ said Maurice, and he sat back, sucking his cigarette, taking time to put it together. ‘A fifteen-year-old girl, with lovely long black hair, and a red dress with buttons, right up the front. And you lay her down in the long grass, have a fag with her, and then you undo the buttons, slowly, starting from the top, and she doesn’t move. And she’s got blue eyes and you take her bra off, and she doesn’t say nothing, and then you give her tits a good feeling-with, and she likes it.’
‘Like Freda Pew?’
Maurice glared like he’d just woken up.
‘Freda Pew hasn’t got black hair, you cunt.’
‘I’m talking about on her thing.’
‘What thing?’
‘Her clump.’
‘Flies!’ snapped Maurice. ‘I was telling you my fucking dream, wasn’t I? Last thing I want in a dream is Freda Pew.’
‘She goes, though?’ said Thomas.
‘She’s a fucking mess. Hannibal. Anybody could do it to her, she’s a dog.’ His vituperation ultimately made him smile. ‘She said, you can do what you like, as long as you don’t kiss me. All right, I said, feeling fucking grateful. Tell you the truth, I couldn’t wait to get out of the house.’
‘House?’ said Thomas. ‘You said it was in the park.’
Maurice swallowed looking a bit shifty, pulled out a fragment of eyebrow and ate it.
‘Yeah … well … it was … first time.’
‘You mean, you’ve had another go?’
‘Yeah.’
‘When?’
‘Week or two ago. We all went back to her house.’
‘What’s all this we? I thought she was alone.’
‘Hard to be alone when you’re that fat,’ sneered Maurice.
‘Was she with someone?’
‘Sort of.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
The question got no answer and the question was repeated.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ said Thomas.
‘Because you like Gwen Hackett.’
‘Gwen Hackett? What’s she gotta do with it?’
‘She’s Fredda’s best friend,’ said Maurice.
‘I know that, what’s she gotta do with it?’
‘You don’t wanna hear.’
‘Don’t I? I fucking well do.’
Maurice considered spitting, but didn’t.
‘I didn’t tell you, coz I know you like Gwen.’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘Yes, you do.’
‘I don’t.’
‘All right then, you won’t mind hearing that Ron Shackles nearly fucked her.’
‘Shackles?’
‘See?’ said Maurice. ‘I said you liked her.’
‘I thought she was going out with Gollick?’ countered Thomas, quite yellow.
‘She is … just that me and Shackles took Freda in the park, and we’re sitting there on this bench, sharing tit, and who rides up on her bicycle, Gwen Hackett? … And we’re all wondering how to get rid of her, when Freda says, let’s go back to my house. … Her mother’s working in a bakery.’
And while the bread was boiled they were in the front room, and the lights were off and Shackles got his hand up Gwen’s skirt …
And worse.
‘She keeps saying, have you got anything?’
‘Who does?’ said Thomas.
‘Gwen.’
‘Anything what?’
‘Condom.’
‘Condom?’
‘All he had was this condom he’d found on the beach. It was three feet long and she didn’t like the look of it and she wouldn’t go.’
Horror pressed at the inside of Thomas’s face.
‘I tell you,’ said Maurice, ‘I wish I’d known then what I know now … Shackles could have had Freda, and I could …’
Thomas managed to go deaf, couldn’t bear to hear the conclusion of this scenario. Shackles could have had Freda? And his best friend Gwen?
It was too painful. Too awful.
‘She’s a goer,’ said Maurice. ‘You should ask her out.’
‘I told you, I don’t like her,’ said Thomas.
There was sufficient animosity in his voice to shut this down. Or maybe Maurice regretted telling him? Either way, neither continued with it. Thomas put out enough silence for them both, stuck eyes at the fire and saw awful visions … what was she wearing, school uniform, or a dress? … whichever was worse was that he saw … it didn’t bear thinking about … but he could think of nothing else …
‘You know what we should do?’ said Maurice.
Thomas hauled himself out of it to look across. Maurice dumped his butt, adjusted the fire with a stick.
‘Get down the rock pools and fuck up some crabs.’
‘I can’t,’ said Thomas.
‘Why not?’
‘I can’t really discuss it. But I’m under surveillance.’
Before Maurice could take the piss, Thomas produced the business card he’d extracted from his mother’s handbag: ‘J.T. Brackett, Private Investigator (thirty years in the Met).’
‘They brought in the professionals,’ said Thomas. ‘I’m watched all the time.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know, but I’ve got to be careful.’
The solemnity of his tone convinced Maurice who handed the card back and listened as Thomas detailed sightings of the detective, six or seven in the last six weeks. Indeed, he’d seen Brackett that very morning, but a long way off, pedalling east on the Ramsgate Road …
‘He’s always there, I think he’s been in my shed. If we hit the beaches, we’ll have to use regular stuff.’
‘Why would they want you followed?’
‘Your guess is as good as mine,’ said Thomas.
There was a silence before Maurice went on to speculate. It was probably the explosives. Maybe they thought he was about to take something out? Bomb a building in the town? Thomas agreed, and that’s why he’d ceased work on the ‘Big One’, the one with the internal battery. He was going to give it some time, possibly relocate, and get back to it after Christmas.
Another silence, and Thomas’s eyes were already gone, staring again at the fire. Seeing as nothing else was happening, Maurice retrieved the manuscript, got some light on to it, and in the next few moments, silently started to read …
The day roared down and it really was getting dark in here. Thomas went back to the disaster. He would never forget this day of rain and misery and leaves … How could she? … At least with Gollick you knew where you stood. He’d come to terms with Gollick, ugly prick that he was … but Shackles? … a lout, pure and simple … prone to boils … red hair … red eyelashes … always disgusting … a huge unleavened chancre on his nose … How could she? … Her eyes, so beautiful … like bluebells … her beautiful hair, drenching the pillow … How could she allow that lout up her clothes? … Did Shackles kiss her? … Did she kiss him? … The thought hurt in his brain … If it hadn’t been for the second-hand rubber he’d found on the tide, she’d have ‘gone’, shagged in the seaweed … anywhere, with anyone … except him … She must be a tart … What could he do? … He was already not looking at her … He wished there was a way of not looking at her even more … What else could he do? … A letter to Gollick, perhaps? ‘Dear Gollick, are you aware that on the 13th instant’ … No … no, forget it … forget her … His darling angel, fouled by that rusted yob … He would never look at her again … never … She was a tart and a prostitute and a slag …
A sudden laugh brought his eyes up and he realised Maurice was reading, his merriment sustained in oblivion to Thomas’s agony.
‘Fuck a pig,’ said Maurice, and he laughed again as he read out loud. ‘“The head of his penis throbbed like a turkey’s heart. She attached the lead at its end, and led the naked boy silently along the chilly corridor …”
‘Yeah, I read it,’ said Thomas dismissively.
‘Who wrote it?’
‘My grandfather,’ at least he supposed he did, he didn’t care, and looked at his watch. ‘I gotta go.’
Climbing into his coat he went about doing exactly that. A bit of a sticky moment followed. Maurice was reluctant to give up the half-read story, and Thomas was reluctant to leave it. On any other day he’d have said no, but he hated today, today had fallen to bits. A solemn promise was made for its safe-keeping, and against his better judgement, Thomas allowed his pal to hang on to it.
‘What about the pictures?’
‘Keep them in the envelope,’ said Thomas. Right now, he didn’t want them, they were just another part of this dreadful afternoon. He finished with his last button, and on hands and knees prepared to crawl up the tunnel.
‘And if you get caught with any of it, it’s yours, right? Nothing to do with me?’
The oath was repeated.
The very ruins of daylight were behind the church and you could just about make out its tower. Rain was already in Thomas’s face. He looked back, realising how harsh the weather and how warm it was in Angel Head Hole.
‘Aren’t you coming?’
‘Nahh, I’ll stay a bit,’ said Maurice. ‘Wait till the fire goes out.’
He poked it with his stick and Thomas was in the gale.