Slow Poison - Chapter Nine

Chapter Nine

Bonfire days were best. Crisp October evenings with elder sparks spitting and circling in the frosty air. Fires of brushwood; brush that had been cleared for the new library, a single storied, polyurethane sealed house of stiff, new spines. Familiar faces lit up, eyes shining in the blaze of branches, a full acre of ground cleared of undergrowth and blackberry bushes and later, of every available scrap of litter. ‘Keep the home fires burning.’ they sang. And once, on the cleared ground, just before the library came, a caravan had arrived, trailing cameramen and sound girls and they had all gathered to watch the puppet show and Jim Dale and to be on the telly, faces gleaming in the light of the fire.

“Look! Thur I be. You an’ all. You look stupid.”

The fires began at knocking off time, the contractors heaving and piling the brush, building the pyre, these khaki-trousered sweaty grown ups.

“Hey kid.” 

A whisper.

Fred and Lenny looked across at the grimy labourer.

“Wanna see summat good?”

Summat good could only mean summat bad, and that suited Fred and Lenny.

“Come round here, then. Round the back.”

It was almost dusk, school had finished and groups of other kids were trailing home. Fred and Lenny followed him. They stood out of sight, behind the head-high walls of the unfinished library.

“Have a look at this, then.”

The labourer held before them a dog-eared magazine. The magazine smelled of printer’s chemicals, a heady mixture of solvent and ink; a smell that would be forever linked with the fragile awakenings of their libido.

“Bet you never seen a woman nude before!”

Adorning the pages, fleshy girls in blonde wigs, arms held high above their heads. Monochrome ladies chained to Ivanhoe castle walls. Hooded jailers, whips dormant, stood menacingly before their airbrushed victims. The victims cringed in feigned agony before the cruel eye of the cameraman. The labourer rubbed his crotch suggestively. Fred felt the inklings of movement in his loins. Lenny, wide eyed, felt nothing like that, but he reddened and looked at the labourer’s hand, at his crotch and he couldn’t take his eyes away.

Fred had seen a naked woman before. Lots. Yes, he had. In the pages of the National Geographics that lined the window ledge of Miss Tyler’s glass house classroom. He looked hard. Long and hard. The chains. Something about the chains stirred the sleeping butterflies in the pit of his stomach. The girls had no nipples, no body hair, no scars. Pain airbrushed away. The magazine was called ‘Whiplash’.

“Wank, do ya?”  he whispered to Fred. He was no more than nineteen, twenty. Fred looked blank. Not yet. He would. The labourer made a movement with his hand that puzzled Fred, thrilled Lenny. Then they heard voices from behind the proposed fiction section and Fred and Lenny ran like rabbits through the narrow estate pathways. They were home, upstairs and in the bedroom in minutes. Fred pushed Lenny out on to the landing.

“Bugger off and play outside.”

“It’s dark.”

“Well, put the telly on then.”

Fred lay on his bed and closed his eyes tight shut, trying to remember, trying to summon up each detail of those androgynous prisoners. He rubbed himself like Trim had done and it felt very good. Lenny watched through the keyhole and it felt very good.

Bonfire days were best. There in the flames they could see the visions; Joan of Arc put to the flame, tied and roasting on the faggots. Curling pages, blackened by the voracious fire, charred and flying in the whirling currents, smuts against the starlit sky, flakes of ashen snow, blacker than the night.

Fred grabbed Lenny from behind and carried him so near to the fire that his scuffed boots shone in the heat, the last remaining clots of polish running molten along the seams. His grubby knees grew pink, reddening in the glare.

“Give over, our Fred!”  he squealed. “I’ll tell our Mum!”

With a final twist of his fingers, Fred let him fall. He ran around the fire and chased Lenny with a glowing branch, past the Gibson twins, past the Clutterbucks, and all the others. The chase ended when someone tripped Fred so that he fell heavily, sending sparks flying from his pointed stick.

“Nya na!” Lenny shouted in triumph.

Fred picked himself up and sent his stick spinning into the heart of the fire.

“We could roast a hedgehog in this fire.”

Glyn was at home with his grammar revision, but Fred knew the way.

“Get back home and grab some spuds, our Len! Go on.”

Others heard and scattered off to their homes, to dark coal sheds and larders, to; ‘Is that you? What do you want? It’s nearly your bedtime, you hear me?’ 

And later, they had blackened their mouth with burned potatoes. Someone had Corona. Someone passed it around. Heaven. Dandelion and Burdock. Then someone screamed, running from the fire into the darkness, trailing a bright glow behind her.

“Wos up with Jackie?”

“I dunno.”

Jackie ran from Fred’s cruel sparks; Jackie, whose white ponytail was the envy of everyone from Margaret Close to the Snake Island Girls. She shook her head wildly, tossing the entanglement of sparks and embers, shingled split-ends and sooty tears.

“Her’ll tell her Mum.”

“I don’t care.”

Fred didn’t care. Airbrush the burnt bits away. No scars, no consequences.

The stomach pains began as they finished off the last of the charcoal feast. Someone threw the Corona bottle onto the fire, where it exploded deep in the heart, sending shards and splinters of glass high into the air. The kids ran home, whooping with delight, puffing out the frosty air like their dads’ Number Six’s. Late for bed? Of course. They didn’t care. They could hear others abroad. Big boys. Cherry knockers. Conkerors. Shaggers.

In bedrooms, newly named teenage girls were teasing their hair into candyfloss beehives with bowls of sugar water and pink Woolworth combs. Somewhere along Park Road, Mrs. Tomkin tearfully trimmed five inches of singed white hair onto the towel around Jackie’s shoulders. Mister Tomkin dialled Miss Fletcher’s private number.

“Not really under my jurisdiction, Mister Tomkin. Out of hours, I’m afraid. I’ll do what I can, but you might be better served if you take this matter up with the boy’s parents.”

Oh no! Not the Farthings. The unwashed Farthings, down by the level crossing. This was precisely what Mister Tomkin had hoped to avoid.

“You’ll have to say something, Ronald.”

Jackie sobbed as her scorched hair fell to the newspaper around under the chair, covering the carpet. He hair would grow again, but one year later she persuaded her mother to cut it off, all short and boyish. She would never grow it long again. Her mother kept the flaxen plait wrapped in a silk scarf bordered with horses heads and horseshoes and on her deathbed, thirty years later, she asked the nurse to remove the plait from the drawer and she died fingering the silken strands, weeping silently for lost things.

The Farthing’s house was easy to find. The estate had been started in 1952. Their house was among the first to rise, but the garden had never been spitted, had never been turned. Breeze blocks and sand lay there as a bed for the rusting gaskets and springs. The Housing Manager, Mister Cavell, whilst handing out the prizes for the best-kept garden, held his breath as he passed the Farthing’s gate. Had joked in the Imperial Hotel Lounge many a lunchtime about initiating a prize for the most neglected garden in the district.

“I know who would win hands down.”

Everyone in the bar knew who he meant. They were all there, all the housing department heads. Thornhill was faced each fortnight with the prospect of the futile visits to the Farthings, their rent months in arrears.

“More like the National Debt!”  he joked over his lunchtime shandy. He could picture the house. Had nightmares about it. Fevered dreams about the towel pinned over the broken bathroom window, about the splintered wood holding the front door together, about the complaints from the neighbours.

“They’re not even husband and wife...it’s disgusting.”

Thornhill downed his shandy and looked along the bar at his colleagues.

“God protect us from such as the Farthings!” he said with a sigh.

“I’ll drink to that!” Cavell added.

Maisie Farthing worked at the Brushworks. She set the hard, inflexible reeds into the wooden handfuls. Inelegant witches brooms of things they were. Reg Farthing worked at the Paper Bag Factory. He glued the serrated edged bags together, bleeding his fingers on the deceptively jolly cutting edge. Both factories lay along the canal that ran from Eastington to Brimscombe in those days. They had always worked there, had met along the canal path during hot summer lunch breaks, and had conceived Fred in a derelict outhouse at the back of Maisie’s works.

“Not even husband and wife! Disgusting!”

Mister Tomkin left his complaint with Miss Fletcher, who passed on revenge in the form of academic victimisation.

“No Marling school for you, my boy!”

Bonfire days were best, but summer days were good too; those endless days of blistering sun. No school, Mum and Dad gone the whole day, feasts of chips and Sunblest. Free to roam the range, down the fields, down the Pill Boxes, in the coalhouse, in the shed. Fred and Lenny, Lenny and Fred.

Fred looked around the shed, charred pages of negatives developing at the back of his mind. He looked around for playthings. He found bicycle chains, string, whips and lashes. The shed had an eerie, earthy smell. Oil and weed killer and creosote. Smells that churned his bowels and caused his breaths to come a little faster.

Lenny was snuffling in the gutter with a stick. The sun burned through to the skin on his grimy neck. He poked the dry dust with his stick. The sky was blue and wide. Without warning, the sky seemed to split from end to end with an unheralded crack. Fred rushed out of the shed to look. The sky was wide and blue and still intact. The Catholic kids said that it was The End of The World, that Brother Bernard had said it would come, that the earth would stop turning and everyone would fly off into the sky and Fred hadn’t known that the earth turned at all and the very idea spun his head in dizzying circles.

“Wot was that, our Fred?”

Lenny peered at the sky, shading his eyes from the sun with his hand.

Bigger kids on bikes talked about the sound barrier, the iron curtain, the Yanks and their planes at Staverton. The windows had shaken, the earth had ceased its turning, and the world had ended on July the Twelfth, 1956, but the squeal of Father Bernard’s Bedford van still cut through. Fred watched as the priest entered the house next door, using a key that hung with countless others on his key ring. Fred had heard the exultant rosaries cried out through the party wall. The cup held against the wallpaper was unnecessary. He had heard blasphemous oaths and screams mingling with the wail of the Erinoid hooter.

Fred and Lenny had taken up the idea of staring at the sun. They looked around for glass to smoke. They grubbed in the garden and found several likely pieces. They collected a dozen or so shards and took them into the house, in through the kitchen and into the coalhole. Fred rolled up pages of the Stroud News into hard inky tubes. Lenny picked one up and dealt Fred a smart blow across his legs.

“OW! Give over, you little sod!”

Fred replied with a volley of his own.

“OW! That’s not fair! You got more than me!” Lenny whined, under attack. He cowered in a ball against the mound of poor quality coal that rose up against the far wall. The sharp edges pressed into his knees, leaving little points of black among the street dust on his legs. Fred was soon bored with the one sided game and he turned his attention once more to the task of smoking the glass.

“Come on and give me I a hand.” Fred shouted.

“Don’t you hit I no more, then.” Lenny snivelled.

There was a smell of sulphur and their faces lit up in the flare of England’s Glory. Sooty tears streaked Lenny’s face. Fred’s eyes shone as he ignited the rolled up newspaper.

“Whur’s the glass, our Len?”

Lenny picked up a piece of glass shaped like the sail of a yacht. He held it at arms length and Fred held the burning spill a few inches from it.

“Ow, bloody hell, our Fred. That hurted.”

Lenny dropped the glass, It shattered among the coal dust on the ground.

“You’re bloody useless! I’ll hold it.”

Fred handed the burning spill to Lenny and found another piece of glass. Gloves! Gloves would help. Fred dashed out of the coalhole, letting in brief sunlight that hurt Lenny more that the hot glass. Fred was back in minutes, a pair of old gardening gloves on his hands. But after a few moments of trying, an unpleasant smell of burning rubber mingled with newspaper scorch overpowered them and still the glass was too hot, cracking and falling in smithereens upon the summer coal. They gave up the idea of smoking glass, waving instead the lighted spills around the dark warm coalhole, watching the sparks spinning out like fireflies circling on a bonfire night. Fred still smarted from the thumping he had received from his Dad after the Tomkin incident, tales told by Lenny, sparks in the dark.

The boys soon tired of their game and thought of toast. But toast was always too much trouble. With black fingers they tore open the Sunblest bag and crammed the bitter doughy bubbles into their mouths, spreading charcoal in leering smears. Fred finished first and looked at Lenny with his hamster cheeks. He landed him a low punch to his belly, making him choke on the dry bread, making him cry again, streaking his face with fresh charcoal tears. Fred ran out of the house straight into the wall of sunshine. He stopped and looked at the damage, blinking into the sun, glassless and once more the sky split open and the world stopped turning. The noise was unimaginable, shaking the glass in the steel council window frames, loosening the moss around the chimneys, frightening the woodlice.

The Farmiloe boy sat on the edge of the curb in his khaki shorts and a T-shirt printed with pictures of buses and cars. He was staring at the sky, trying to locate the source of the noise. After a moment or two, he carried on with his game, pushing a Dinky P.G.Tips van around his makeshift dirt track road.

“Wanna see MY Dinkies?”  asked Fred.

“You aint got none!”

“I have. Lots! Hundreds! More than you!” Fred taunted.

A pause for thought. He might.

“Yeah, all right then.” the boy said doubtfully.

A new victim.

“Len.”

The Farmiloe boy followed the brothers into the overpowering heat of the shed. They pushed him against the lawn mower and ran out into the garden, closing the door behind them on the heat and the stench of the shed. The bedroom curtains of his house were drawn across. No one would hear. Fred and Lenny left him to sweat and swelter all afternoon until the Erinoid hooter blew.

Fred rattled the zinc bolt aside and opened the shed door.

“If you tell, we’ll tell Brother Bernard you looked at a girl’s knickers.”

The Farmiloe boy ran home, past their pinches, dark patches drying on his khaki shorts, eyes as red as rhubarb.

Fred and Lenny ran out of their garden and along the cinder path that trailed parallel with the railway line. They could just make it. Up the wooden steps they flew, two at a time, hanging on to the flaky grey painted rails as the Bristol express roared by underneath them, drowning them in the delicious tangy steam they craved. They bellowed out their little songs under cover to the great roar.   

"SAW A WOMAN UP THE ROAD - RED RUBBER BALLS! SAW HER STANDING IN THE NOOD - RED RUBBER BALLS!”

And the Bristol express was gone and Fred was left with a feeling that was less than satisfaction. The roar was no longer the cataclysmic sound, paled in comparison by the sky splitting crack, bright bolts of Armageddon ripping across the wide blue heaven.

Then the torture began.

The Farmiloe boy was sent out into the street. The Bedford van had arrived. The curtains were drawn. He sat with his scuffed tea van at the far end of the gutter, ignoring the taunts of Fred and Lenny. Mrs. Smolyachenko, at home, waiting for the gasman, appeared around the side of her house. She stared pointedly at the brothers, her hands planted firmly on her hips.  The brothers soon understood her point. They scowled at her and gave up the taunting. Mrs. Smolyachenko watched them run off along the cinder track, away from the bridge, fingers fanning from their noses.

Fred and Lenny headed toward Bluebell Wood, high up on the embankment, within pungent distance of the sewage farm, between Stonehouse and The Stanleys. Fred had a scrap of Daily Mirror in his pocket. He stopped running, Lenny too. Under the railway arches, Lenny worried away at some wool that hung impaled on a barbed wire fence. Fred took out his scrap of paper; Jane and her stupid dog, Fritz. Were all women like that? Jane had no nipples either. Never drawn, never there.

They took the steep climb that led them dangerously close to the railway cutting, its crumbled reddish soil barely supporting the grass. They scuffed little landslides down on to the track as they headed for the cool of the wood.

“Let’s play Jerries an’ Frogs!”

They could spend an entire day this way. Up the Wood, or down the Pill Boxes.

“If you was a prisner of war an’ you was sick an’ they said you gotta eat your sick or you’ll be killed but when you eat your sick an’ you’re sick again and you have to keep doin’ it what would you do?”

“You vill tell me all your secrits pigdog or you will be killed verrry verrry slowly.”

And one of them would be tied up somewhere and one of them would be the camp commandant and then the Erinoid hooter would blow and they would run home behind the husband, wondering if Brother Bernard had heeded the warning. If they were lucky, they would arrive breathless in time to catch the last of the blue fumes of the Bedford exhaust that still hung guiltily near the front gate.

Sometimes there was money for the gas meter on top of the kitchen doorframe. Fred could reach it if he stood on a chair. Lenny could reach it too, if Fred helped him. Sharing the blame, spreading the load. Then there would be chips and patties and Corona from Mills. They would eat them in the park, in sight of Glyn’s bungalow, their fingers drenched in vinegar and salt.

“I ate a hedgehog pie, once. The Gippo’s give it I.”

Fred looked guiltily across at the bungalow, hoping that Glyn couldn’t hear the lie, but Glyn was at the coast, recovering.

Sometimes Fred would steal some of Lenny’s chips, running, cheeks stuffed, to the top of the shaky slide. There was no way Lenny could ever catch him. Fred had discovered the perfect crime. If Lenny used the steps, then Fred would use the slide and if Lenny scrambled up the chute, then Fred would bound down the steps two at a time. There was no way for Lenny ever to win.

“I’ll tell our Mum, our Fred.”

“I don’t bloody care.”

She would thrash the both of them for stealing the meter money anyway, so what did it matter.

Thursday. The hooter had blown and Fred and Lenny were in the park with their chips. Fred’s attention was drawn to a pair of girls who had entered from the far stile, near to the Community Centre. Jane Soloman and Diane Fry. Snake Island protégés, blossoming teenagers, Secondary Modern wasters with bulging blouses. Fred felt for change in the pocket of his shorts. He slid down the slide as Lenny reached the top of the steps.

“Wanna earn a tanner?”

They were interested.

“Wot for?”

“Let’s see yer tits.”

The girls giggled and whispered to one another.

“Ow much?”

‘Sixpence!”

‘Shillin’!”

“Haven’t got a shillin’.” said Fred. He gave the matter some thought.

“Sixpence an’ the rest of me chips.”

“All right.”

They crouched in the dip between the park and the Wycliffe paying fields. Here, the hated matchstick caps played their cricket. Fred hated them more than he hated the kids from the Lawn School, more than the kids from the Marling School, more than that.

“Gis the money fust.”

They giggled. They lifted their blouses and Fred saw.

“Here! Nobody said you could have a feel. Dirty bugger!”

And they were off. Giggling across the park, sixpence the richer, chips forgotten. And now Fred knew. Out of the coalhole and into the hard core. Fred was a man.

Lenny joined him in the dip, doomed to live forever at the far side of their rift of experience, on one side or the other.

“Wot wus you doin’ with they girls?”

“Shaggin’  wun I.”

“Wos that?”

How many stitches are there in a cardigan?

Fred and Lenny swung idly to and fro on the clanking swings, scuffing their heels on the rough concrete base.

“I’m still hungry.” Lenny whined.

“Oh, shut up, you little twerp!”

The sky split again with a deep porous roar of an explosion. Both boys looked up eagerly, scanning the swaying sky. They could never quite see the elusive jet. The sound was always somewhere else; a rainbow’s end of a sound. The echo fell behind the gentle backdrop of Doverow Hill. Doverow; perfect sledding in the winter, tea trays and planks, free falling forever; dustbowls and nettled hollows in the summer, lofty views of The Brownings and the High Street and in the plain below, the wastelands of the encroaching Park Estate, its inmates timed with ball-bearing precision by the Erinoid hooter. Another crack followed, cutting through the momentous afternoon.

“Come on, our Len. Race ya!”

And off they flew across the grass and down past the half-built shells of Festival Road, toward the level-crossing gates of home.

Lenny had begun to sweat and shiver in the cold of late December. He wrapped the stinking grey sheets around his shoulder and waited for the man to come. What time was it? Which day? Which year? Where was the man? Lenny watched the room grow darker, lit only by the headlights of the passing cars and the increasing sallow glow of the sodium street lights. After an eternity, the room seemed to stay light for some time. Then the darkness came again. He wished that the man would come too. Lenny slipped into a peaceful comatose sleep, as grey as a fresh corpse, as still as Sleeping Beauty. He lay under the gossamer sheet waiting for the kiss, waiting for the sweet kiss, waiting for the man to come.