Ticker and Sticks

“I’ve come into some money,” my mother said. She carried on slicing onions on the kitchen counter without looking up at me.

“That’s nice,” I said, looking at the oven dish full of carrots and celery that she had already prepared. A tin of tomato soup stood beside it. I guessed it would be beef stew and dumplings that night. She knew it was my favourite, and she always prepared it when I came home. The meat and the dumplings would already be in the fridge. The tin of tomato soup was her short cut, a cheat, but it gave the stew a flavour like no other stew I’d ever tasted. “Is it much?”

“Quite a bit.” The knife came down again, crunching through the onion and thudding into the scarred wooden chopping block she always used. I think that chopping block was older than me.

“How much is ‘quite a bit’ – if you don’t mind me asking?”

“Twenty thousand pounds,” she said in that same casual tone of voice, still chopping, still not looking up at me.

I stood there silently for a few moments, trying to work out if what I thought I had heard was what I had actually heard. “Twenty thousand pounds? What was it – premium bonds? Don’t tell me you’ve been putting money on the horses. Although if you had it’s obviously money well spent.” I was babbling and I knew it, so I stopped.

“Nothing like that,” she said. She paused in her chopping. I wasn’t sure if she was thinking about what to say or just making a judgement about where to make the next cut. “You know I don’t gamble, and I can’t even remember if we’ve got any premium bonds, it’s been so long. If we do, they’re in an envelope somewhere. I should dig them out. No, I was left the money in somebody’s will.”

“Oh,” I said. “Someone you know died? I’m sorry.”

“Someone I knew. A long time ago.”

I looked past her, through the window of the kitchen door and out into the garden, where my father was planting herbs. Even though he was kneeling on the lawn and digging in the dirt with a trowel he wore a decent pair of trousers and a jacket over a business shirt. My dad did nothing casually. He always looked like he was just about to chair a board meeting, although the elasticated knee pads would have raised some eyebrows. “Have you decided what you’re going to do with the money? I’m guessing a holiday – maybe that cruise you’ve been talking about for years?”

“I haven’t told your father yet,” she said, still holding the knife poised above the onion. “I will, but just not yet. He’ll ask all kinds of questions about who died and why they would leave me that much. You know how he can be.”

“Yes.” Out in the garden, dad was easing a parsley plant into the hole he had dug for it. He had a row of them already, in front of a row of coriander and beside a row of rosemary. Everything ordered and in its place. “So, do you mind me asking? If you don’t want to talk about it, that’s fine.”

“No, it’s okay.” She brought the knife down, but hesitated before it touched the onion. “It was someone I knew a long time ago. During the war.” Finally she made the cut. “I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned him to you before.”

“Is this when you were evacuated?”

She shook her head. “No, before. When I was living with my mum, your gran, in Southwark. When my dad was off fighting in France, before he was captured by the Germans.” She paused. I got the impression she was doing with the conversation what she’d just done with the onion: seeking the best way to approach it. Abruptly she put the knife down, glanced briefly, almost apologetically at me, then out into the garden. “Even though it was South London, and a really poor part of it, I’d been accepted by the local Girls’ Grammar School. I had a really nice uniform with a skirt and a scarf and everything, and I used to walk to school proudly every day and back again afterwards.” She paused, remembering. “You probably don’t remember that street – you were very young when we took you there, and it was bulldozed years ago to make way for a block of fancy flats – but the street where we lived was a dead end coming off the corner of a square with a little park in the middle. The only other way out of the street was a narrow alley that went off at right angles on the side opposite the house where we had rooms and a few doors up.”

“I think I remember,” I said. “Didn’t that alley turn left and right, going along the sides of the houses, before it came out on the main road?”

“That’s it.” She nodded, still looking out into the garden. “I remember there was a man who used to stand in our street, just where the alley joined it. His name was Sticks.” She half-shrugged: just a ripple of her shoulders. “That wasn’t really his name: it was just what everyone called him because he had two crutches that he used to walk with. I don’t know if he’d been in an accident, or whether it was polio or something, but his legs were half-paralysed.”

She turned back, her head lowered. I think she might have been smiling, but her hair hung in front of her face and I couldn’t be sure.

“He was a funny little man,” she went on; “scruffy and hunched over, with uncombed hair, and he scowled all the time. And he had his son with him most of the time. He was called Ticker, and he kept a little black notebook in his pocket. He was a few years older than me, and quite, you know… good-looking, I suppose, in a rough kind of way. All day every day they used to stand there, alternately looking into the square and into the alley. They’d picked the perfect position, although I didn’t understand why at the time. It was only later that I realised they were looking for the police. Whatever direction the police came at them from, they could get away in the other. At least, Ticker could get away. But then, he was the one with the notebook.”

“What was in the notebook?” I asked, although I thought I already knew.

“Bets,” she said simply. “They used to take bets. Unofficial bets. Illegal, I suppose, although it was a freer time back then. People worried less about the law. Men used to come up to them for what I thought was a chat – women too. Obviously now I know they were either placing bets, taking their winnings or letting them know what the results of the races were. Ticker used to write it all down meticulously with a pencil he kept over his ear.”

“That’s very colourful,” I said when the ensuing silence went on for long enough to make me feel slightly uncomfortable. “And quite a contrast to you and your grammar school. Did anybody else from the area go to your school?”

She shook her head. “Just me.” I heard her laugh: just a single laugh, almost sounding like a hiccup. “They always scared me, standing there, watching. I don’t know why – just silliness I suppose. I think I knew that they were doing something wrong, even then, although I didn’t know what it was. As I was walking back from school I used to worry endlessly about which route to take – the square or the alley – although both routes meant them seeing me, and watching me as I got closer and closer. I could feel myself shaking, and I could never meet their eyes in case they said something. I worried that they thought that I thought I was better than them just because I went to the grammar school and I had a smart uniform. I used to try to get past them as fast as I could without running, hearing the clack, clack, clack sound that my shoes made on the cobbles.”

Past her, out in the garden, my father was leaning back and examining his handiwork. He waved his trowel at the herbs as if he was addressing them, but he was probably thinking through where to put the next lot. They were never going to use that many herbs, I thought randomly. It was a rare Sunday when mum even put any rosemary with the lamb. That wasn’t the point, I supposed. He loved the organising, and the regular shapes the plants made in the garden.

“And then once,” she said, “just as I was passing them by, my head bowed and my eyes fixed on the cobbles, I heard Sticks say, very quietly, “That’s a nice scarf, that is, luv.” And suddenly I knew what I should have known all along – that he was proud of me, proud that someone from the street had made it out into the wider world.”

“That’s lovely,” I said. I was smiling, but I suddenly realised that my mum wasn’t. There were tears on her cheeks. She didn’t seem to realise.

“Sticks died when I was evacuated,” she said, and I could hear the faintest tremor in her voice, “and when I came back, when the war was over, Ticker wasn’t there. Maybe he’d moved, or maybe he’d been arrested. I never saw him again.”

“But it was Ticker who died recently?” I guessed.

“I got a letter a week or so back, from a solicitor. He told me about the will, and how much Ticker had left me.” Her voice suddenly got louder and quicker. “I didn’t even know his name, but he’d remembered me for all this time. He must have done well for himself. And there was something else too. His notebook – or one of them, anyway. I suppose he got through quite a few of them. But he’d left instructions in his will that this notebook should be sent to me. I took it out of the envelope and I held it, remembering all that time ago when I’d seen him scribbling in it. And I opened it up, not sure why he had wanted me to have it, expecting just to see lists of numbers, and the names of people, horses and greyhounds. Those things were there, of course, along with lots of ticks and crosses to indicate who had won and who had lost, but there were also drawings – little sketches really – of me. Me in my school uniform, walking. Some of me in the distance, and some just of my face, close-up. He was a really good artist.”

She had her back to me now, staring out into the garden or staring back in time: I wasn’t sure which. She was hugging herself: arms wrapped around her and shoulders hunched.

“Don’t tell your father,” she whispered. “Please. He just wouldn’t understand.”

I look at him, marshalling his rows of plants, and I knew she was right.

“You know I said I don’t gamble?” she asked eventually, letting go of herself.

“Yes?”

“That’s not quite true. I took twenty-five pounds out of my account and I went to the greyhound track. I don’t know why. Maybe just to be closer to him – to Ticker. And would you believe it, one of the greyhounds was actually called Ticker! Well, actually I think it was Tickerboy. What were the chances of that, do you think? He was the outsider, at a hundred-to-one odds. So I bet all the money on him, and waited to see him run.”

“Did he win?” I asked breathlessly.

“Of course not,” she said, laughing. “He came in second-from-last.”