Key to the Door (11 page)

Agger worked nearby, cleverly wrapped up and more impervious to cold because he had been on the tips longer than anyone else—straight from Flanders at twenty, he said. The useless slaughter of employable sinews had crushed his faith in guidance from men “above” him, so that he preferred the tips even when there had been a choice. Sometimes he'd gaze into the quiet glass-like water of the nearby canal and sing to himself—a gay up-and-down tune without words—punctuating his neanderthal quatrains with a handful of stones by aiming one with some viciousness into the water, watching the rings of its impact collide and disappear at the bank before breaking out again into another verse that came from some unexplored part of him. Born of a breaking-point, his loneliness was a brain-flash at the boundary of his earthly stress. Still young-looking, though lacking the jauntiness of youth, perhaps out of weakness he had seen the end too near the beginning, had grafted his body and soul into a long life on the tips even before his youth was finished. The impasse he lived in had compensations, however, was the sort that made friends easily and even gave him a certain power over them.

Brian broke wood into small pieces and filled his sack, stuffing each bundle far down. “How are yer going to carry it?” Agger asked.

“On my back.”

“It'll be too' eavy.”

“I'll drag it a bit then.” After a pause for scraping, Agger wondered: “Do you sell it?”

“Sometimes.”

“How much do you want for that lot?” Brian reckoned up: we've got plenty at home. I wain't mek much if I traipse it from door to door. “A tanner.”

“I'll buy it,” Agger said. “I know somebody as wants a bit o' wood. I'll gi' yer the sack back tomorrow.” Brian took the sixpence just as: “Tip,” someone screamed towards a corporation sewer-tank veering for the far side of the plateau. Agger ran quickly and Brian followed, more for sport since his only sack-bag rested by Agger's pram.

He scrambled down the precipice to watch the back open above like a round oven door, a foul liquid stink pouring out. Then the body uptilted and a mass of black grate-and-sewer rubbish eased slowly towards the bank, coming out like an enormous sausage, quicker by the second, until it dropped all in a rush and splayed over the grass at the bottom. “Watch your boots,” Agger snouted as he began scraping through it. “This stuff'll burn 'em off.” He turned to Brian: “Don't come near this 'eap, nipper. You'll get fever and die if you do.”

Brian stood back as half a lavatory bowl cartwheeled down from a lorry-load of house-rammel. “Tek a piss in that, Agger,” the bowler shouted. It settled among petrol drums and Brian amused himself by throwing housebricks at it until both sides caved in. One of the men uncovered a length of army webbing: “Here's some o' your equipment from France, Agger”—throwing it like a snake at his feet.

Agger held it on the end of an inferior rake. “It ain't mine, mate. I chucked all my equipment in the water on my way back”—put his foot on it and continued scraping. The stench made Brian heave: he ran up the bank holding his nose, and stopped to breathe from fifty yards off.

At twelve they straggled to the fire for a warm. All swore it looked like rain, some loading their sacks to go home, though Agger and most of the others stayed through the afternoon. Brian took out his bread, and Agger passed him a swig of cold tea. Jack Bird lay back to read a piece of newspaper: “Now's your chance, Agger,” he said, lighting a lunch-time Woodbine. “What about joinin' up for this war in Abyssinia?”

Agger reclined on a heap of shavings. “You on'y join up when they stop the dole and chuck us off these bleeding premises—when there's nowt left to do but clamb.”

“They'll never stop the dole,” Jack Bird said. “It's more than they dare do.”

“It wouldn't bother me, mate,” Agger rejoined, “because there'll allus be tips, just like there'll allus be an England. You can bet on that.”

Brian emptied pebbles from his left boot, shook the sock, and put it on again. Holes were visible, and when he pulled to tuck them under at the toe the gaps ripped wider. He doubled the long tongue of superfluous wool underfoot to keep stones from his flesh, careful at the same time to leave enough sock above the boot-rims to stop them chafing his ankles. It was a successful reshuffle of wool and leather, he found on standing to walk a few yards, bumpy underfoot, but there wasn't far to go.

An empty tipscape stretched to the motorworks. Lorries wouldn't be back till two, and he swivelled his head to view the building at the opposite far end of the tip, where corporation carts unloaded dustbin stuff into furnaces. Its high chimney sent up smoke as thick as an old tree trunk, a forest giant whose foliage flattened and dispersed against low cloud. The red-bricked edifice was far enough off to be slightly sinister in appearance, an impression added to by its name, the Sanitation Department, or Sann-eye, as the scrapers called it. A miniature railway had been laid towards the tip, where men wearing thick gloves worked all day pushing wagons of still hot cinders along its embankment, emptying them into the marsh on either side and forming another tongue of land which would eventually join up with that made by the lorries.

“Then they'll make an aerodrome,” Brian speculated, “to bomb old houses like ourn was on Albion Yard.”

“To flatten the Germans, you mean,” a scrapper put in.

“They'll build a factory,” Agger argued. “Or a jail. I'm not sure which they'll need most by then.”

Along the high embankment by Sann-eye Brian saw his cousin Bert. Was it? He shaded his eyes and looked again. Yes, it was—walking towards the tippers' camp—a long way off and coming slowly with hands in pockets, kicking the occasional half-burnt tin into the too-easy goal of waterpools below.

To meet him meant crossing the swamp by stepping-stones of grassy islands, and tin drums that had rolled from high levels. Brian's feet were pushed well forward as he went through spongy grass towards the opposite ash bank, surprised that such a varicoloured collection of mildewed junk could meet in one place: half-submerged bedticks and 'steads, spokeless bicycle wheels without tyres sticking like rising suns out of black oily water, old boxes rotting away, a dinted uninhabited birdcage in front like a buoy at sea. Farther in the canal direction lay a dog-carcass sprawled half out of the water, its scabby grey pelt smoothed down by wind and rain. I'll bet there's rats whizzing round here at night, he thought, big rats with red eyes, and maybe cats with green 'uns. The pervading stench was of rotting diesel oil, as if countless foul dish-rags were soaked in suffocation and held under the surface. Patches lay on the surface like maps of gently rounded coasts, making whorls of blue and purple and greyish Inland, beautiful patterns that he now and again pelted with stones to see if they were real enough to stand explosions, but they merely let the stones through, and re-formed to a slightly different design.

He walked on, excited at swamp-roving, zigzagging from what he sensed were deeper scoops and gullies. His no-man's-land was small, for he could still hear the sharp-voiced scrapers on the tip behind, and at the same time see Bert almost above him on the grey wall in front, a ragged-arsed sparrow calling out:

“Don't come up: I'm coming down. I've got some chocolate 'ere”—patting his back pocket, walking to different parts of the slope before deciding which was freest of hot cinders. He waded through a pile of blue-shining burnt-out tins, stepped over ragged clinkers (like a cat on hot bricks, Brian thought), holding into the steep slope in case he should keel over and begin rolling. “Who gen yer the chocolate?”

Without looking up, Bert answered: “Nobody. I got it from a shop.” He disturbed a mass of tins and ash: “Never known anybody to gi' me owt, 'ave yer?”—and an avalanche rolled into water, drops splashing against Brian: “Where did you get the dough from then?”

“Pinched it, if you want to know.” He walked to Brian and sat on a petrol drum: “I pinched this as well, from Doddoe's pocket,” he added boastfully, drawing out a whole cigarette. “He'll think our Dave done it, and paste 'im. And it'll serve 'im right, because our Dave batted my tab last night, for nowt.”

Sandy-haired and pint-sized, one of the many kids broadcast from Doddoe's loins, Bert's fever-eyes and white face marked him a born survivor. He wore long trousers, a baggy cut-down pair of Dave's. Like Brian, he had first lived in the bitter snows of March, was suckled under the white roof of a pullulating kitchen, then set free from everyone's care because another kid was queuing up for air and milk behind. He pulled a match sharply against the drum and helped its flame to life in the cup of his dirt-worn adult hands. “I like a smoke now and again. It meks me feel good. I had a whole packet once all to myself and I stayed in the woods smoking 'em.”

“I tried it, but it nearly made me 'eave.”

“Not me. I'm nearly ten, see?” He drew a half-pound bar of chocolate from his back pocket: “Tek a bit. And break me a piece off as well.”

Brian ripped the blue paper away: “How did you pinch it?”

“Easy. A shop door was open. I stood outside to mek sure it was empty, then jumped across the doormat-bell, and slived my hand over the counter.” Brian passed him a double square: “Anybody see yer?”

“No. I was dead quiet. Had my slippers on. Look”—he held up his foot to show the rubber and canvas rags of what had once been one-and-fourpenny plimsolls, now like the relics of some long and fabulous retreat: “Quiet as a mouse. So don't say a word to a livin' soul. Not that I think you bleddy-well would,” he said, checking himself quickly. “You're my best pal as well as my cousin, and I know I can trust yo' more than anybody else in the world.”

“Did yer nick owt else?” Brian asked. (“Yer want ter stay away from that Bert,” his father said when the Doddoes had left to live up Sodom. “He's a bleddy thief, and if yo' get caught thievin' wi' 'im yer'll get sent on board ship. So watch it, my lad, and 'ave nowt to do wi' 'im.”)

“I don't allus pinch stuff, yer know,” Bert said resentfully, as if he also had seen the pictures in Brian's mind. “So don't think I do.” He skimmed a piece of slate across the water: it ducked-and-draked and took his annoyance with it under the surface. “Want a puff? No? All the more for them as does then. I just saw this bar o' chocolate, see, and went in to get it. That ain't pinchin', so don't tell me it is. Break me a piece off then,” he asked, flipping his nub-end into a pool of water and laughing at the crack-shot sizzle. “We'll scoff it up and see'f we can find owt on the tips.”

He led the way: “Watch that there; if you tread on it you'll goo under. A pal o' mine once got blood poisoning: cut his foot on an old tin can and they kept 'im in 'ospital six weeks. Wish it'd a bin me. He got marvellous grub. Ever bin inside Sann-eye?” he called back.

“No,” Brian admitted, “I ain't.” He turned for a snapshot look: the massive building still in the distance, a row of windows top and bottom, less smoke travelling from its chimney.

“We'll go in then later on, about five o'clock, when the men's knocked off.” He pulled a bicycle wheel from the water and bowled it along with a piece of stick.

Brian asked questions: What about the nightwatchman? because he couldn't imagine Sann-eye without one. He visualized the burning fires, oven-doors like a row of monsters' mouths filled with flames instead of teeth, able to draw you in for devouring if you stood near too long. “That's 'ospital,” said the voice of a girl who had taken him for walks not long after he had learned to walk.

“Nobody's there. Fires is nearly cold by five. I went in last week with our Dave, up through the big winders. I'll show yer.” The wheel swerved off the path and disappeared under a nest of bubbles. Bert threw the stick after to keep it company. It floated. They were almost at the escarpment. “I bet a good tip'll come this afternoon,” he prophesied.

“We could do wi' it,” Brian said. “But there ain't much on tips today. I bin scraping since nine, and I on'y got a sack o' wood.” Bert wanted to know where it was. “I sode it to Agger for a tanner.” Both were on hands and knees, making slow progress up the bank. “Yer got robbed,” Bert said. “He should a gen yer a shillin'.”

Brian was being called a fool: “It saved me carryin' it 'ome. We've got plenty o' wood anyway.” Bert relented, went on climbing: “Well, as long as you get your sack back.”

“Course I will,” Brian said. “What are you going to go for a rake, though?”

“Mek one. Flatten a piece o' steel wi' a brick.”

“It'll break.”

“I s'll look for summat else then.”

“I'd like a good rake,” Brian said. “I 'ave to mek a new 'un every day, as it is. After about six scrapes they break.”

“You need a steel 'un,” Bert told him.

“I know I do. I ain't got one, though. The best rake I've seen is Agger's. It's got a proper 'andle. Most o' the time he don't use it an' all.”

Bert reached out for what he thought was a piece of iron: slung it away when he saw it wasn't. “Why?”

“It's too good. He on'y uses it on loads where he might find good stuff. Most o' the time he keeps it in his pram.”

“A rake's no good if it ain't used,” Bert reflected, as they came up on to the solid tips. He found a sack without too many holes, in which he put scraps deemed useful enough for home: an old kettle worn thin underneath that Dave would mend with a washer, a cup with no handle, dummy bars of chocolate for the kids to play with, a coagulated mass of boiled sweets to wash under the tap and eat, and a few choice pieces of fresh-smelling wood for the washday copper.

The scrapers were leaving the tips under a misty silence: a scuffle of boots could be heard kicking the fire out, and the tin shed—put up when it had looked like rain—fell with a satisfying clatter against the stones. “The rats don't come out till it's dark,” Bert said, which Brian was glad to hear. They walked without speaking, treading quietly through sedge, water seeping into all four shoes if they didn't go forward quickly enough. Topping the precipice of tins and clinkers, Sann-eye looked empty and locked up for the night, its chimney cold and unsmoking, frail almost against heavy clouds, as if it had to bear an unfair weight and couldn't for much longer.