Last Friends (Old Filth Trilogy) (5 page)

No other mother came to the station. When the children were smaller the other mothers used to shout ‘’ere Florrie. Can you look to him? Or her?’ Very occasionally at the beginning Florrie would find herself near one or other licking a handkerchief and scrubbing at faces, straightening the slippery scrap of a tiny green and yellow rayon tie. Never Terry’s.

Every morning then, for five years, Florrie would heave herself off the railing and back down the road again to No. 9 Muriel Street, so close she could have waved him off at the front door. And from the very start he’d got home again from the station alone. He had crossed over the iron footbridge out of the alley and into some bushes. Everyone, including Florrie, seemed vague about the home train’s time of arrival and as he got older he began to make small differentials to his front door, preferring the back door in the paved grey alley where there were sheds and a cart house and black stains of blood. The blood was ingrained into the dip around the central soak-away where for years the butcher had slaughtered a beast every Thursday morning. The back street stank of salt. Then he ran round home and in at the front.

When he grew to be eight or nine he told them at home that his day at school was longer now and he would be late, then he began to take off regularly down Station Road, past the chip shop and the corn-store to the band-stand on the promenade looking towards the sea. He clambered about on the flaky iron lace-work and the peeling iron pillars that supported its dainty roof. He stayed there maybe half an hour doing somersaults on the railings, or dancing about or just staring at the grey sea. Herringfleet had once had a brass band that played airs from
The Merry Widow
or Gilbert and Sullivan to people in hats and gloves who sat out on deck chairs on the promenade but Terry knew nothing about that. He didn’t know the meaning of ‘band-stand’. He’d slide away home through the back streets again and come in at the front door as if he’d just got off the train.

Inside the tiny house the scene was unchanging and he scarcely registered it. His father lay on the high bed facing the street door, beside him a commode covered with a clean cloth. An iron kettle hung from a chain over the fire, puffing and clattering its lid and the window over the sink was misted over with steam. Occasionally, on good days, his father might be in a chair, but usually, summer and winter, the long, tense figure lay on its back, coughing and coughing and sometimes swearing in Russian ‘or whatever they speak in Odessa,’ as Nurse Watkins down the street said. She would have left a minute or so before Terry got home from school, and a tray put out on the kitchen table with big, white tea-cups with a gold trefoil on the side and a broad gold rim. There’d be a plate of bread and butter with another plate on top of it. Nurse Watkins came in every day and was paid half-a-crown now and then because the families were in some way connected. She would wash out the Odessan’s long flannels in Lux flakes and put him in clean ones, rub his joints, shake the bit of sheep-skin someone had once brought down from Long Hall on the moors, which still smelled of sheep-dip. It prevented bed-sores.

Nurse Watkins didn’t seem to have had any training anywhere but there was nothing she didn’t know. She was midwife to the town and she laid everyone out at death and told lascivious corpse-stories. She had Gypsy eyes and earrings and had been briefly at school with Florrie but had left at twelve. Over the years she had looked long at the Odessan whilst he had looked only at the ceiling. She stroked back his bright hair on the pillow and shaved him with a cut-throat razor when he would allow it. Florrie did the toe-nails but not well.

‘Train late again then?’ his father said to Terry. ‘Gets later.’ He spoke in Russian.

‘Yes. Late,’ said Terry, in Russian. ‘She’ll be late in, too. Winter coming. Getting dark.’

Terry made tea in the brown pot and let it stand on the hob until it was brewed.

‘Are there no biscuits, Dad,’ and then in English ‘Why’s there never a biscuit, then?’ and his father roared back in Russian about his grammar.

‘Dist wan’ a biscuit then, Dad?’

‘
Do you want
,’ said his father.

‘Or there’s bread.’

Sometimes his father lifted up a hand, which meant yes.

Then Florrie would be back with them, telling Terry in broad Teesside patois where to find biscuits (in her bag to stop Nurse Watkins). She would refill the kettle and swing it back over the fire for the next brew. All three knew how tired she was.

* * *

All that day she had been unrecognisable, black as a Negro, a man’s thick tweed cap pulled over her hair, back to front. A man’s thick coat, made thicker by years of grime, had been tied with rope round her middle. All day she’d been perched up high on a bench across the coal-cart that she kept in the alley alongside the shed of the scrawny little horse and the coal store. The butcher’s men often gave her a hand, if they were there.

Three days a week she clopped round the town on the cart through all the back streets, shouting ‘COAL’ in a resounding voice. The lungs of a diva. ‘Coal today,’ she shouted and from the better houses of the iron-masters’ in Kirkleatham Street the maids ran out in white cap and apron, twittering like starlings. ‘Three bags now Florrie,’ ‘Four bags,’ and watched her heave herself down off the dray, turn her back, claw down one sack after another with black gloves stiff as wood. She balanced them along into coal-houses or holes in stable yards showering out coals and coal-dust. She took the money and dropped it inside a flat leather pouch on the rope belt around her stomach. She adored her work.

‘Cuppa tea, Florrie?’

‘No time, no time.’

A long slow sexy laugh, then back on the dray. Street after street. The horse knew where to stop. Trade was steady. Her call was tuneful, rather like the rag-and-bone man but richer. Almost a song. Fifty years on, Sir Terence Veneering QC, sitting in the Colonial Club, happened to mention to someone in the Sultanate that he had been born in Herringfleet, was told that there had been a northern woman, larger than life, who had delivered coals. Or so it was said. In the poverty-stricken North-East—in the middle of the Thirties.

Once home Florrie drove the dray round to the back. She took the horse to the shed and fed it, rubbed it down and if there was no-one about to help her she dragged the dray into the cart-house. There was a communal bath-house for Muriel Street and she paid a penny to have it to herself on coal days. She poured hot water from the brick tub all over herself with a tin can. She washed her hair and feet and hands and then her body with a block of transparent green Fairy Soap. Then she dried herself on a brown towel, rough as heather.

* * *

Above the crooked, unpainted doors of the cart-house hung a hand-painted, wooden sign in green and gold saying Vanetski Coal Merchant and the exotic flourish to it was the register, the signature, the stamp of proof of Florrie’s past happiness.

The sign-painter was the foreign acrobat and dancer who had arrived in the town over ten years ago with a circus troupe who put up a Big Top on the waste ground by the gasworks for ‘One Week Only’. The tent had sprung up overnight like a gigantic mushroom, with none of the glitter and coat-tails of Bertram Mills but an old, threadbare thing, grey and rather frightening, an image from the plains of Ilium. And how it stank!

‘They’re called Cossacks,’ said the cognoscenti of Herringfleet. ‘They can dance and kick right down to their ankles with their bottoms on the floor. They shout out and yell and make bazooka music, like the Old Testament Jericho Russian.’

‘What they doing ’ere?’

‘It’s since they murdered the Tsar. They want the world to see them. It’s a sort of mix of animal and angel. Russia’s not a rational country.’

He doesn’t go in much for angels—the man selling tickets. Long, miserable face. They killed the Tsar years ago!

But young Florrie Benson saw an angel that night. She had taken money from her mother’s purse to buy a ticket for the show and was at once translated. She heard a new music, a new fierce rapture. She watched the superhuman contortions of the exciting male bodies. Her skin prickled all over at their wild cries. In a way she recognised them.

There was one dancer she couldn’t take her eyes off. Her friend next to her was sniggering into a handkerchief (‘For men it’s right daft’) and the next day she stole more money and went to the Cossacks alone. She went every night that week and the final night she was up beside him on the platform when he fell from a rope. She was ordering a doctor, roaring out in her lion’s voice. People seemed to think she must be his woman. She never left his side.

* * *

The rest of the Cossacks melted away and they and their tent were gone by morning in their shabby truck. Florrie, the English schoolgirl, stayed with him at the hospital and wouldn’t be shifted. Doctors examined him and said his back was probably not broken but time would tell. Someone said, ‘He’s a foreigner. Speaks nowt but heathen stuff! He’ll have to be reported.’

Yet nobody seemed to know where. Or seemed interested. The local clergyman who was on the Town Council went to see him, and then the Roman Catholic priest who tried Latin and the Cossack’s lips moved. Each thought the other had reported him to the authorities, without quite knowing what these were.

‘They’ll no doubt be in touch any day from Russia to get him back.’ They waited.

‘There was a couple of Russians died of food-poisoning last year off a ship anchored in Newcastle. Meat pies. The Russians was in touch right away for body-parts. Suspected sabotage.’

But nobody seemed to want the body-parts of the Cossack who lay in the cottage-hospital with his eyes shut. He talked to himself in his own language and spat out all the hospital food. And only the school-girl beside him.

‘Back’s gone,’ they told her. ‘Snapped through. He’ll never walk again.’

The following week he was found standing straight at the window, six-foot-four and looking eastward toward the dawn and the Transporter Bridge at Middlesbrough, an engineering triumph. It seemed to interest him. When the nurses screamed at him he screamed back at them and began to throw the beds about and they couldn’t get near to him with a needle. Someone called the police and somebody else ran round to find Florence.

She was taken out of school and to the hospital in a police car, no explanations; and when she was let into his isolation ward she looked every bit woman and shouted, ‘You. You come ’ome wi’ me.
Away
!’ ‘
Away
’ is a word up there that can mean anything but is chiefly a command.

She left her address at the hospital and commanded an ambulance. The ward sister was drinking tea with her feet up so Florrie got him from the ambulance herself, half on her back. She had a bed made ready. The aged parents, never bright, shook their heads and drowsed on. ‘Eh, Florence! Eh, Florrie Benson—whatever next?’

The dancer stayed. He lay, staring above him now. Nobody came. Florrie went to the public library in Middlesbrough to find out about Cossacks. She came back and stood looking at his curious eyes. She imagined they were seeing great plains of snow spread out before him. Multitudinous mountains. The endless Steppe. She got out some library books and tried to show him the photographs but they didn’t seem to mean anything to him.

She gave up school. She was sixteen, anyway. Her old parents went whimpering about the house, faded and both were dead within the year.

Florence was pregnant, and even so, nobody was interested in the Cossack. Neighbours came round but she was daunting. If she had been a boy it would all have been different. Serious enquiries. But, even pregnant, nothing was done for Florence.

After a time the man began to walk again, just to the window or the door on the street. Or into the ghastly back alley.

One day Florrie came home from buying fish to find him gone.

It was for her the empty tomb. The terror and the disbelief were a revelation. She ran every-where to look for him, and, in the end, it was she—out of half the parish—who found him, on the sand-dunes staring out over what was still being called the German Ocean. The North Sea.

She brought him limping and swearing home and, at last, being well-acquainted now with the Christian Cross that lay in the warm golden hair on his chest, she went to the Catholic priest, leaving Nurse Watkins in charge for two shillings and four pence. There were very few half-crowns left now.

The priest lived in a shuttered little brick house beside his ugly church beside the breakwater. Nobody went there except the Irish navvies in the steel-works. ‘Russian?’ asked Father Griesepert. ‘Communist you say?’

‘No. He’s definitely Catholic.’

‘How do you know?’

‘He doesn’t believe in taking precautions.’

Father Griesepert said that he would call. He said that, actually, he had already been thinking about it.

‘Name?’ Father Griesepert shouted.

Nobody had actually asked the Cossack’s name. The Catholic priest bullied the sick man in a loud voice. He tried a bit of German (on account of his own strange name which was one of the reasons for his isolation here).

‘Address? Home address?’

The man looked scornful.

‘Name of circus?’

Silence. Then ‘Piccadilly’ and a great laugh.

Suddenly, in good English, the Cossack said, ‘My name is Anton’ (‘Anton,’ whispered Florence, listening to it).

‘Very unlikely he’s a Cossack. I’d guess he comes from Odessa,’ said the priest. He rubbed his hands over his face as if he were washing it. ‘This woman,’ he said in loud English to the man, ‘Is with child.’

Anton understood.

‘You must be married before the birth.’

Anton looked at Florence as if he had never seen her before.

Florence went to get the priest his whisky.

They all said prayers together then, and Griesepert named the wedding date. ‘We must, of course, inform the authorities.’ He was met by two pairs of staring eyes.