New and Collected Stories (24 page)

They fitted but, being the wrong colour, were hurled out with the other misfits. The room was scattered with shoes, looked as if one of them Yank cyclones – Mabel or Edna or whatever you call them – had been hatched there, or as if a meeting of cripples and one-legs had been suddenly broken up by news of the four-minute warning. She still hadn't found the right pair, so went on looking as if she lived there, ordering shop-assistant me about, though I didn't mind because it seemed like a game we were playing. ‘Why don't you find a pair for yourself?' she said.

‘No, we'll get you fixed. I'm always well shod.'

I knew that we were no longer safe in that shop and sprang to switch off the lights. ‘You silly fool,' she cried.

Darkness put us into another world, the real one we were used to, or that I was anyway because it was hard to tell which sort of world Doris felt at home in. All she wanted, I sometimes thought, was a world with kicks, but I didn't fancy being for long at the mercy of a world in pitboots. Maybe it wore carpet slippers when dealing with her – though I shouldn't get like that now that it's been over for so long.

‘Why did you switch off the light?' she yelled.

‘Come on, let's get outside.'

We were in the yard, Doris without any pair of shoes except those she'd come out in that evening. The skyline for me ended at the top of the gate, for a copper was coming over it, a blue-black tree trunk bending towards us about twenty yards away. Doris was frozen like a rabbit. I pushed her towards some back sheds so that she was hidden between two of them before the copper, now in the yard, spotted the commotion.

He saw me, though. I dodged to another space, then ricochetted to the safe end of the yard, and when he ran at me, stinking of fags and beer, I made a nip out of his long arms and was on the gate saddle before he could reach me.

‘Stop, you little bogger,' he called, ‘I've got you.'

But all he had was one of my feet, and after a bit of tugging I left my shoe in the copper's hand. As I was racing clippitty-clop, hop-skip-and-a-jump up the street, I heard his boots rattling the boards of the gate as he got over – not, thank God, having twigged that Doris was in there and could now skip free.

I was a machine, legs fastened to my body like nuts and bolts, arms pulling me along as I ran down that empty street. I turned each corner like a flashing tadpole, heart in my head as I rattled the pavement so fast that I went from the eye of lamp-post in what seemed like no seconds at all. There was no worry in my head except the need to put a mile of zig-zags between that copper and me. I'd stopped hearing him only a few yards from the shoe shop gate, but it seemed that half an hour passed before I had to give up running in case I blew to pieces from the heavy bombs now getting harder all over me.

Making noises like a crazy elephant, I walked, only realizing now that one of my shoes was missing. The night had fallen apart, split me and Doris from each other, and I hoped she'd made a getaway before the copper gave me up and went back to check on what I'd nicked.

I threw my other shoe over the wall of an old chapel and went home barefoot, meaning to buy myself some more next day with the fifty quid still stuck in my pocket. The shoe landed on a heap of cinders and rusting cans, and the softness of my feet on the pavement was more than made up for by the solid ringing curses my brain and heart played ping-pong with. I kept telling myself this was the end, and though I knew it was, another voice kept urging me to hope for the best and look on the bright side – like some mad deceiving parson on the telly.

I was so sure of the end that before turning into our street I dropped the fifty pound bundle through somebody's letter box and hoped that when they found it they'd not say a word to anybody about such good luck. This in fact was what happened, and by the time I was safe for a three-year lap in Borstal the old woman who lived there had had an unexpected good time on the money that was, so she said, sent to her by a grateful and everloving nephew in Sheffield.

Next morning two cops came to our door, and I knew it was no good lying because they looked at me hard, as if they'd seen me on last night's television reading the news. One of them held my shoes in his hand: ‘Do these fit you?'

A short while before my capture Doris said, when we were kissing good night outside her front door: ‘I've learnt a lot since meeting you. I'm not the same person any more.' Before I had time to find out what she'd learnt I was down at the cop shop and more than half-way to Borstal. It was a joke, and I laughed on my way there. They never knew about Doris, so she went scot-free, riding her horse whenever she felt like it. I had that to be glad about at least. As a picture it made a stove in my guts those first black months, and as a joke I laughed over and over again, because it would never go stale on me. I'd learned a lot as well since meeting Doris, though to be honest I even now can't explain what it is. But what I learned is still in me, feeding my quieter life with energy almost without my noticing it.

I wrote to Doris from Borstal but never received an answer, and even my mother couldn't tell me anything about her, or maybe wouldn't, because plenty happened to Doris that all the district knew of. Myself though, I was kept three years in the dark, suffering and going off my head at something that without this love and worry I'd have sailed through laughing. Twenty of the lads would jump on me when I raved at night, and gradually I became low and brainless and without breath like a beetle and almost stopped thinking of her, hoping that maybe she'd be waiting for me when I came out and that we'd be able to get married.

That was the hope of story books, of television and BBC; didn't belong at all to me and life and somebody like Doris. For three solid years my brain wouldn't leave me alone, came at me each night and rolled over me like a wheel of fire, so that I still sweat blood at the thought of that torture, waiting, without news, like a dwarf locked in the dark. No Borstal could take the credit for such punishment as this.

On coming out I pieced everything together. Doris had been pregnant when I was sent down, and three months later married a garage mechanic who had a reputation for flying around on motorbikes like a dangerous loon. Maybe that was how she prolonged the bout of kicks that had started with me, but this time it didn't turn out so well. The baby was a boy, and she named it after me. When it was two months old she went out at Christmas Eve with her husband. They were going to a dance at Derby on the motorbike and, tonning around a frosty bend, met a petrol bowser side on. Frost, darkness, and large red letters spelling
PETROL
were the last things she saw, and I wondered what was in her mind at that moment. Not much, because she was dead when the bowser man found her, and so was her husband. She couldn't have been much over eighteen.

‘It just about killed her dad as well,' my mother said, ‘broke his heart. I talked to him once on the street, and he said he'd allus wanted to send her to the university, she was so clever. Still, the baby went back to him.'

And I went back to jail, for six months, because I opened a car door and took out a transistor radio. I don't know why I did it. The wireless was no good to me and I didn't need it. I wasn't even short of money. I just opened the car door and took the radio and, here's what still mystifies me, I switched it on straightaway and listened to some music as I walked down the street, so that the bloke who owned the car heard it and chased after me.

But that was the last time I was in the nick – touch wood – and maybe I had to go in, because when I came out I was able to face things again, walk the streets without falling under a bus or smashing a jeweller's window for the relief of getting caught.

I got work at a sawmill, keeping the machines free of dust and wood splinters. The screaming engine noise ripping through trunks and planks was even fiercer than the battle-shindig in myself, which was a good thing during the first months I was free. I rode there each morning on a new-bought bike, to work hard before eating my dinner sandwiches under a spreading chestnut tree. The smell of fresh leaves on the one hand, and newly flying sawdust on the other, cleared my head and made me feel part of the world again. I liked it so much I thought it was the best job I'd ever had – even though the hours were long and the wages rotten.

One day I saw an elderly man walking through the wood, followed by a little boy who ran in and out of the bushes whacking flowers with his stick. The kid was about four, dressed in cowboy suit and hat, the other hand firing off his six-shooter that made midget sharp cracks splitting like invisible twigs between the trees. He was pink-faced with grey eyes, the terror of cats and birds, a pest for the ice-cream man, the sort of kid half stunned by an avalanche of toys at Christmas, spoiled beyond recall by people with money. You could see it in his face.

I got a goz at the man, had to stare a bit before I saw it was Doris's father, the scrap merchant who'd not so long back been the menace of the street in his overdriven car. He was grey and wax in the face, well wrapped in topcoat and hat and scarf and treading carefully along the woodpath. ‘Come on,' he said to the kid. ‘Come on, Tony, or you'll get lost.'

I watched him run towards the old man, take his hand and say: ‘Are we going home now, grandad?' I had an impulse, which makes me blush to remember it, and that was to go up to Doris's ragman father and say – what I've already said in most of this story, to say that in a way he was my father as well, to say: ‘Hey up, dad. You don't know much, do you?' But I didn't, because I couldn't, leaned against a tree, feeling as if I'd done a week's work without stop, feeling a hundred years older than that old man who was walking off with my kid.

My last real sight of Doris was of her inside the shoe shop trying on shoes, and after that, when I switched off the light because I sensed danger, we both went into the dark, and never came out. But there's another and final picture of her that haunts me like a vision in my waking dreams. I see her coming down the street, all clean and golden-haired on that shining horse, riding it slowly towards our house to call on me, as she did for a long time. And she was known to men standing by the bookie's as Lady Luck.

That's a long while ago, and I even see Doris's kid, a big lad now, running home from school. I can watch him without wanting to put my head in the gas oven, watch him and laugh to myself because I was happy to see him at all. He's in good hands and prospering. I'm going straight as well, working in the warehouse where they store butter and cheese. I eat like a fighting cock, and take home so much that my wife and two kids don't do bad on it either.

The Other John Peel

When the world was asleep one Sunday morning Bob slid away from the warm aura of his wife and padded downstairs – boots in hand – to fix up a flask and some bacon sandwiches.

Electric light gave the living-room an ageless air, only different from last night in that it was empty – of people. He looked around at the house full of furniture: television set, washing machine glinting white from the scullery, even a car on the street – the lot, and it belonged to him. Eric and Freda also slept, and he'd promised to take them up the Trent and hire a rowing-boat this afternoon if they were good. Wearing his second-best suit, knapsack all set, he remembered Freda's plea a few days ago: ‘Will you bring me one o' them tails, our dad?' He had to laugh, the fawce little bogger, as he combed his dark wavy hair at the mirror and put on his glasses. I must tell her not to blab it to her pals though.

He opened the cellar door for his guns and pouches, put them under his arm to keep them low – having a licence for the twelve-bore, but not the .303 service rifle – and went out into the backyard. The world was a cemetery on short lease to the night, dead quiet except for the whine of factory generators: a row of upstairs windows were closed tight to hold in the breath of sleep. A pale grey saloon stood by the kerb, the best of several left out on the cobbles, and Bob stowed his guns well down behind the back seat before lighting a cigarette.

The streets were yours at six on a Sunday morning, flying through the cradle of a deadbeat world with nothing to stop you getting what fun and excitement you wanted. The one drawback to the .303 was that out of fifty bullets from the army he'd but twenty left, though if he rationed himself to a shot every Sunday there'd still be six months' sport for the taking. And you never knew: maybe he could tap his cousin in the Terriers for a belt of souvenirs.

He bounded through the traffic lights, between church and pub, climbing the smooth tarmac up Mansfield Road, then pouring his headlights into the dip and heading north under a sky of stars. Houses fell endlessly back on either side, a gauntlet trying to cup him but getting nowhere. The wireless had forecast a fine day and looked like being right for a change, which was the least they could do for you. It was good to get out after a week cooped-up, to be a long-range hunter in a car that blended with the lanes. He was doing well for himself: wife and kids, a good toolsetting job, and a four-roomed house at fifteen bob a week. Fine. And most Sunday mornings he ranged from Yorkshire to Linconshire, and Staffordshire to Leicestershire, every map-point a sitting duck for his coolly sighted guns.

On the dot of six-thirty he saw Ernie by the Valley Road picture house. ‘Hey up,' Ernie said as he pulled in. ‘That was well timed.' Almost a foot taller than Bob, he loomed over the car dressed in an old mac.

‘It's going to be fine,' Bob said, ‘according to the radio.'

Ernie let himself in. ‘The wireless's allus wrong. Spouts nowt but lies. I got welloes on in case it rains.'

They scooted up the dual carriageway. ‘Is this the best you can do?' Ernie asked. ‘You can fetch ninety out of this, I'm sure. 'Ark at that engine: purring like a she-cat on the batter.'