2003 - A Jarful of Angels (14 page)

“Discustin’,” said Bessie, wiping dust from her frock.

It was too. It was real dirty. Filthy. It was great, but terrifying.

“Let’s go!”

They went running off down the hill, Lally’s filthy words whizzing past their burning ears like shrapnel, until they reached the bridge where they stood together, panting and blowing.

“Wotcha, girls!”

Fatty came up over the river bank.

“Where’ve you been? We been looking for you everywhere!”

He was dirtier than they’d ever seen him. He stood in front of them grinning, his teeth white against the filthy black of his face, his eyes glistening under eyebrows that trailed cobwebs. His wet clothes were clinging to him, strands of weed wrapped round his bare brown legs.

“Bloody hell, Fatty! What’ve you been doing?”

Bessie sniffed and backed away from him.

“You’ll never guess.”

“Down the pit by the smell of you,” said Bessie holding onto her nose.

“Licking a cow’s arse?” Iffy guessed.

“Iffy!”

“I’ve been in the garden of the Big House.”

They stared at him. Didn’t believe him.

“Liar! Liar! Your bum’s on fire!”

“You wouldn’t dare!”

“Honest to God.”

“Did anyone see you?”

“How did you get in?”

“Remember, Iffy, when Carty Annie said there was a way in? Well, I found it. I got in through the pipe.”

“Where is it?”

“Further up the river, just past the bridge. It’s all overgrown. It took me ages to cut the brambles back and then it was easy.”

Iffy was bursting with admiration. He was one bloody brave bugger.

“Where does the pipe come out?”

“At the bottom of the garden in the bushes.”

“Was it dark in the pipe?” Bessie asked, she hated the dark.

“Ay, pitch black. And there were rats.”

“Ugh!” Bessie hated rats. They carried the plague. They had fleas and went for your throat if you cornered them.

“Did you have a torch?”

“No. Just a candle and matches, the rats kept jumping up to the light.”

Iffy pulled a face. She imagined rats’ claws running up and down her backbone, the feel of their scratchy feet on her skin, the tickle of their busy whiskers.

“Weren’t you scared, Fatty?”

“Nope.”

“What was it like in the garden?”

“I didn’t see much. Just as I got out of the pipe I seen old Mrs Medlicott at the window. I scarpered then…but I’m going in again.”

The town clock bonged the hour. A horse clopped across the bridge above them. Bessie was late. Fatty was getting restless.

“Where the bloody hell is she?”

“I dunno, I told her seven o’clock.”

“I can’t wait much longer.”

Billy, standing next to Iffy, held her hand. She let him when Bessie wasn’t around. With his other hand he took some money out of his trouser pocket and showed it to Iffy. He mimed eating ice cream.

“Here she is!”

Bessie was coming down the hill ever so slowly. She was wearing shiny red wellies and couldn’t walk fast because they were too big and her legs were too skinny to take the weight of them.

“Come on, Bessie, shift your arse!”

Bessie glared at Fatty.

Iffy giggled and gave Billy’s hand a little squeeze, then let go.

“Right. Come on.”

Fatty led the way. They followed him in a crocodile, climbed down over the river bank and went under the dark bridge. It was gloomy there. A fish plopped, making rings in the dark water which spread wider and wider towards the banks. Somewhere a frog croaked. Iffy wondered if it was one of the magic ones that had fallen out of the sky.

They stepped out of the archway on the far side of the bridge into the fading sunlight.

“You lot wait here by the bridge. It’ll take me about ten minutes to get through the pipe.”

They watched Fatty walk away towards the walls of the Big House. A lopsided sign on the wall said, “PRIVATE. KEEP OUT.”

From the high wall was a steep slope leading down to the river bank, which was a thick jungle of weeds and brambles.

Fatty whistled to himself. The words to the tune went:

Hitler has only got one ball,

the other is in the Albert Hall.

His mother pinched the other,

now he ain’t got none at all.

Bessie would have sniffed with disgust if she’d known the words to the tune.

He climbed the slope, whishing at the long grass with a stick. He turned round as he neared the top, and said, “When I get through the pipe I’ll whistle, right?”

They nodded silently. Bessie’s mouth hung open catching gnats.

Billy made the sign of the cross.

“Be careful, Fatty,” Iffy called out quietly and she crossed her fingers behind her back for luck.

“Piece of cake, mun. See you in a bit.”

The three of them stood close together in the long waving grass and watched him go. A dragonfly hovered over the water, its wings beating rainbows. Jackie Long-Legs danced through the jungle grass and Bessie kept her skirts pulled tight around her bony knees.

“Want an aniseed ball?” Bessie said and took a screwed-up paper bag out of her pocket. She gave one to Billy. She gave Iffy two. Bessie smiled, showing her brown teeth. Iffy smiled back.

Fatty had reached the top of the bank and was scrabbling about near a clump of brambles. He bent down and pulled some branches to one side. They could just about make out the pipe, a black hole leading into the bank, hardly big enough for Fatty to get into. He turned around, grinned, and put his thumb up to them. Then he crouched down and moved towards the dark opening. Suddenly he ducked his curly head and crawled into the pipe. Iffy heard the strike of a match against a box. There was a flicker of light as he lit his candle. The last they saw of him was the crack of his bum peeping out of his baggy shorts. Smooth skin, soft and white against the dark brown of his back.

He was a hero all right.

It was so quiet as they stood there in the long grass waiting for him to whistle.

Whisshh! A bird flew up out of the grass nearby and Billy leapt into the air. Bessie squealed. Billy grinned at Iffy and pointed upwards. The bird climbed high into the evening sky, singing madly, dipping and soaring into the blue. Iffy watched it go until she felt giddy from the movement.

No one spoke.

They waited and waited. He must have been gone half an hour at least they thought. Bessie wanted to go home. So did Iffy.

A cool breeze came up the river rustling the long grass that made Iffy’s bare legs itch. Goose pimples pricked her arms and she shivered.

No whistle came from Fatty. He must have been in there by now. He’d been gone for ages.

The town clock bonged eight o’clock.

“Wee ooh wit!” Fatty’s whistle! He was inside the grounds of the Big House.

The whistle came again louder, “Wee ooh wi i i it!”

It was him! They knew his whistle anywhere. He was right there on his own in the grounds of the Big House.

“What if they catch him?” Bessie said.

“They might set the dogs on him.”

“Or the geese.”

“Or shoot him dead.”

“They wouldn’t dare.”

“Would they?”

The sun dropped behind Carmel Chapel and the great arched windows burned with orange fire as if the whole building was alight inside. It looked eerie and frightening as if God had got in there and was playing with matches.

The water glugged and gurgled over the grey boulders of the river and swept on by. Invisible frogs croaked around them in the long grass and Bessie stamped her feet to scare them off. She did the same for snakes when they walked up the mountain. Thump thump, thump she went, in case an adder had his eye on her for a quick bite.

The birds heard the noise before they did. They rose from the grass and the graveyard trees in a black explosion of squawking.

“BANG!”

Gunshot.

Bessie screamed and Billy had to put the flat of his hand over her mouth to shut her trap for her. Rooks and crows flapped and screeched above the burning chapel.

“They’ve kilt him,” Iffy said.

Billy’s eyes were leaking pools of terror.

Bessie’s face was as pale as the dummies in Gladys’s Gowns’ her mouth slack and hanging open behind Billy’s tiny fingers.

Iffy thought of Fatty lying in a pool of crimson blood on the satin-smooth lawn, his guts scattered all over the grass, his lungs spread out to the size of tennis courts like they’d learned in science lessons at school.

“What’U we do?” Bessie said through Billy’s fingers.

“They might come after us if they know we know it was them who shot him.”

Silence all around except for the glug of the river.

A silver fish plopped. Circles in the water grew ever wider. A crow cawed gruffly from a high tree in the graveyard.

They were too afraid to move. Running away meant turning their backs on a gunman.

Billy sobbed silently, his fingers searching out Iffy’s hand.

Iffy’s stomach rumbled noisily. Bessie farted, and coughed at the same time to cover up.

A second gunshot rang out.

They ran hell for leather for the cover of the bridge.

Still no sign of Fatty. He was a gonner. Bang bang you’re dead fifty bullets in your head. Dead meat. They knew it.

Bessie’s teeth chattered. Iffy’s skin was a crawling map of goose pimples. Billy wiped tears from his eyes, fat, plopping tears that came without any noise. Iffy put her arm around his heaving shoulders and felt his bones shaking under his skin. Bessie rolled her eyes at the two of them.

“Haisht, Billy, it’ll be all right.”

Muffled noises came from the pipe. It was someone come to get them.

“Bugger off, will you!…Ow!…Get off,”

Fatty’s voice! He was alive! But someone was after him. He was being chased!

Bessie squealed and ran deeper into the cover of the bridge. Billy and Iffy followed her, peeping out from the archway. They could see the pipe, but if anyone came out behind Fatty they wouldn’t be able to see the three of them. They’d have time to run.

Someone from the Big House was chasing after Fatty with a gun. Mrs Medlicott perhaps, who wasn’t safe where kids were concerned, was following him across the lawns waving a shotgun. She must have missed him when she fired. What if she killed him in front of them? What if she killed them all?

Fatty came out of the pipe like the man they fired from a cannon at the circus, but without the bang. He shot out of the hole at a hundred miles an hour at least. He flew through the air and turned over and over, landing halfway down the bank with a hell of a crack that would have killed a normal boy.

He roly-polied over and over and over down the bank flattening daisies and dandelions as he went. Faster and faster. A blur of faded khaki and washed-out blue. He would have landed in the river if a thick clump of stingies hadn’t broken his fall.

“Ow! Shit! Ow! Shit! Ow! F-fuckinada!”

Bessie spluttered and went puce.

They heard a noise from the pipe. Someone
was
behind Fatty!

It was the maniac Mrs Medlicott for sure. A mad woman with a gun!

They looked up at the pipe in terror. Something peeped out of the blackness.

It wasn’t a maniac. Or an English woman. It had an orange beak, and two beady eyes, a long neck and a fat belly. It was a huge white goose. It glared down at them, looking from side to side. Then it opened its beak and let out one hell of a racket.

“Help me out, will you? I’m getting stung to death, mun,” yelled Fatty from the depths of the stingies.

Billy and Iffy rushed towards him, all the while keeping a careful eye on the goose.

Fatty swore and yelped.

The goose got fed up and waddled back into the pipe.

“Who fired the gun? Did they try to kill you? You was lucky.”

Fatty didn’t answer. He was desperately trying to wriggle out of his T-shirt.

“Get me some dock leaves, quick. I’m fuckin’ pickled.”

Iffy and Billy snatched up armfuls of dock leaves, spat on them, and Fatty stuck them all over his belly. Iffy and Billy did his back for him. Bessie kept her hands firmly in her pockets and looked the other way.

He was covered in lumps and bumps. All over his arms and neck, up his back and round his ankles. Iffy thought it must have hurt like mad, but he didn’t even cry. He was lucky though. It was a wonder he hadn’t broken his neck the way he’d come out of that pipe and catapulted down the bank. He was like a cat with nine lives.

Thank God.

The sound of the ice-cream man’s bell clanged out, getting louder as he came up past Morrissey’s shop. Mr Zeraldo always made his last stop near the bridge, even when it was nearly dark.

Mr Zeraldo was an Italian. He owned a café in town and he was the ice-cream man, too. He had a battered old van painted pink on the bottom half and cream on the top. Strawberry and vanilla. It had a bell, but nobody could tell what the tune was meant to be, it was just an awful racket.

Zeraldo’s was the best ice cream in the world: strawberry, vanilla, chocolate, tutti frutti. Wafers. Oysters. Tubs with wooden spoons that set your teeth on edge. Zeraldo’s ice cream had little slivers of ice in it that prickled the tongue.

Mr Zeraldo had been a prisoner in the war even though he hadn’t done anything except sell ice cream. He had been sent away to pick hops on a farm up near Worcester. Mr Zeraldo’s first name was Mario. He had gold teeth and wore a bracelet. The Italians had the best graves up in the cemetery – all photographs and flying angels.

Mr Zeraldo put raspberry sauce all over the top of a cornet, or choroiafe sauce and nuts. A chocolate flake if you were rich. If you didn’t have enough money Mr Zeraldo would give you a broken-off cornet and a little dollop of ice cream on it.

The sound of the bell came closer. Billy grabbed Iffy’s arm, pulling at her excitedly. He beckoned to Fatty and Bessie to follow.

They hurried back under the bridge and scrabbled up the bank.

Zeraldo was parked up above them on the bridge. The bell faded into an echo, only the soft hum of the engine could be heard.

Mr Zeraldo leant forward through the window of the van. He stared open-mouthed at Fatty. His gold teeth glinted merrily.