Black Sheep (3 page)

I know very well who's who, Rose wanted to say, I went to school with them all, didn't I? And so did you.

‘I must fly, get this bloomin' soap home before Charlie comes round.'

‘Goodbye then.'

As she was closing the shop door, hand on the latch, Mary said again, ‘You will come, Rose?'

There was something in her voice.

‘I'll try,' Rose said and turned to Mrs Leather to ask for the flour.

She said nothing more, but when she got out of the shop, saw Mary hovering a few yards ahead. She wanted to swish past her, head in the air, but she knew she would never bring off such a gesture, so all she did was walk as if she was not going to stop.

‘Wait, Rosie.'

Rose waited, out of surprise at being called Rosie, the name she had left behind at primary school. But she waited for Mary to do any of the talking.

‘Will you come?'

‘I don't think so.'

‘You'd have a good time. It's fun. We'd look after you.'

‘I don't need you to look after me.'

‘You know what I mean. I'm sorry I haven't seen you lately.'

‘No you're not. You know where I live, I haven't moved.'

They neared the house before either spoke again.

‘You've changed,' Mary said then.

‘No, you have. A pit inspector's son is higher up in the world. You have to wear grander clothes.'

‘Rosie . . .'

‘I'm not Rosie.'

‘I thought it might be all right, I thought you were a real friend. Real friends don't take on just because of who I'm going out with. How can I help what job his dad does?'

‘You can't. But what job does Charlie do? I think he's training up to be the same, isn't he? I don't think he's in the black hole at the bottom of the pit shaft like ours.'

Rose felt ashamed of herself for saying it, but now it was said, she did not know how to take it back, though she saw the look on Mary's face, of hurt and unhappiness.

‘Bye then, Mary.' It was the best she could do. She lifted her hand in a half-wave, as she went in the door. But she didn't look round.

The house was thick with the smell of coal dust and the heat of the men's bodies, the kitchen smaller by half now three of them were back and digging in round the table, with Ted as usual kneeling on the window ledge looking out and Evie banging pans.

‘You been milling that flour or what?'

‘Sorry. I met Mary and she kept me talking.'

‘No one keeps you talking if you don't want to be kept and don't waste your breath on those that act high and mighty.'

‘No, she doesn't. It's not her fault what job he does. Why shouldn't he? Someone's got to be a pit inspector.'

‘I hope your dad didn't hear that.'

‘I heard it.' John rumbled from the table. But he had his mouth full of meat-and-potato pie and was not really roused.

Jimmy would go to bed straight after tea. Arthur was on late shift with his father. Evie and Rose cleaned the boots, put out two fresh shirts, made up the bait tins. The door stood open to let in some air. But summer was worst, Rose thought, banging the brush on the step before starting on the next boot, August when the sun might hammer down on Mount of Zeal for two or three weeks at a time and the houses smelled of sweat and breath and feet and smuts, and every door and window from Lower to Paradise stood open day and night.

‘I dare say Mary will be wed to him,' Evie said now, giving her a sharp look. Rose shrugged. ‘And no reason why not. One way of bettering yourself.'

‘And leaving your old friends behind.'

‘Well, what would you do?'

‘I wouldn't marry Charlie. He squints.'

‘Doesn't make him a bad lad.'

‘It makes him ugly.' Rose set the last boot down on the floor.

‘So who are you picking to get out the pillowcases for?'

Rose was angry, not only for what Evie had said, but for not being able to stop herself flushing up scarlet. She turned away and would have got out of the room, but for Clive sticking his leg in front of her and almost having her on the floor. She heard them all roaring with laughter, saw their faces, mouths open and full of tea and pie, and as well as being red in the face, she was in tears as well, hating to be laughed at.

Only Ted, still looking out of the window, was apart from the scene.

‘Leave the girl,' John Howker said, scraping his plate, ‘let her alone.' But he was good-humoured, and never serious about chastising them where Rose was involved. Rose was fair game.

Husband and wife had precious little time to talk privately. Evie was getting this or that man off to his shift or sorting them out the minute they got back. No one went and came at the same regular time. And so it was not until four days later that she had a chance to talk to him about his mother.

‘How do you mean, “it looks bad”?'

‘Will you hear? She showed it to me. She has a lump on her – her breast, like a gull's egg.'

‘How did she start up a boil there?'

‘Not a boil.'

‘Oh, all right then.' He turned over.

‘Your mother has a cancer.'

‘Now how do you know that?'

‘I saw it, John.'

He was silent. The whole room was full of the silence and the weight of what she had said lay upon it.

‘I don't know what she's to do. I'm taking the washing. Rose'll help me. Reuben's fit for nothing. She hasn't told him a word.'

After a few moments she reached out and touched John's arm and kept her hand there. She felt him, silent, thinking it over, letting what it meant sink down, and then she felt his body fall heavy into sleep.

THAT AUTUMN AND
early winter Alice Howker lay dying and whenever he did not have to be at school Ted was with her. He fetched anything she might want, which was precious little, and otherwise sat quietly on the floor beside the big bed, or stood at the window looking down over the whole of Mount of Zeal, and lights in the terraces from every house, in Paradise, Middle and Lower. It was dark now when the men came up from the five o'clock. Ted saw lights from the pithead and the file of them trudging away from it and home.

‘I shan't see you into double figures,' his grandmother said, out of nowhere, one late afternoon. The oil lamp was on, tallow light falling onto her face, finding out the hollows and making the bones gleam under the yellow skin.

Ted turned from the window. He knew what she meant but could think of nothing to say.

‘You're the best of boys.' The words were barely carried to him on her thin breath. She was tired from morning to night now, though she barely slept. ‘You know what I'm saying?'

Ted nodded.

‘You're . . .' She sighed and closed her eyes. He watched her eyelids flutter occasionally as she dozed and her hand twitch as it rested on the sheet. He went back to the window. The pit winding gear showed like gallows against the last red of the sky.

He heard the back door close, his mother's voice, his grandfather's, the two weaving in and out, bass and descant. Footsteps on the stairs.

‘I'll see to Alice.'

Ted went down.

Reuben was sitting in his chair by the stove, as usual. He rarely moved from it now.

‘I could prod his great idle backside with a pitchfork,' Evie had said.

‘
There was a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job, and that man was perfect and upright and one that feared God and eschewed evil.
'

Ted listened to the words rolling like thunder round the room. He knew these well though they were not his favourites.

He said, ‘
And the Angel of the Lord appeared unto him, in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush, and he looked, and behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed.
'

Reuben looked up. ‘Go on.'

Ted shook his head.

‘Go on . . .'

Ted gathered the words together, knitting them up into the verses gradually. Reuben waited, his finger marking the page in the black Bible.

‘
And Moses said, I will now turn aside, and see this great sight, why the bush is not burnt. And when the Lord saw that he turned aside to see, God called unto him out of the midst of the bush, and said, Moses, Moses. And he said, Here am I.'

In the bedroom, Evie was lifting the dressing off the sore on Alice's breast, which was now like an egg whose shell had broken open. She tried not to turn away from the sight and the smell, knowing how hurtful such a move was, knowing Alice's eyes never left her face but searched for the smallest clue as to how it looked, how much worse it seemed, what Evie was thinking but would never say.

When the dressing was done, and the foul one put into a bag to be carried away, and Alice was as comfortable as she would ever be now, against the freshly plumped pillows, Evie took her hand.

‘I can't go on doing this. It isn't my place, it isn't my job. I'm not the right person.'

Fear widened Alice's eyes and she clutched at Evie.

‘I must send for the doctor, Alice. He'll see what needs to be done.'

‘I'm not going away.'

‘They'd know how to make you comfortable. They know what's needed. I don't.'

‘I'm not going into the infirmary. I'd never come out.'

‘The doctor can get the nurse to come to you. They're very good.'

Alice turned her head away.

Reuben would not consider the doctor coming if Alice didn't agree. He hated strangers in the house, but most of all, he would not accept that his wife was ill in any serious way. ‘She'll be about any day now. She's never been ill in all our years.'

‘That isn't true and how do you have the face to say it?' Alice had been ill with every one of her children, ill before, ill during, at death's door twice after. She had been told by the doctor and the midwife, after her second, that she was risking her life, but she had gone on to five, two of which babies had died. She had been ill with pleurisy, migraine headaches, phlebitis, inflammation of the kidneys. She had struggled with everyday life for so long it had become a matter of habit for the family to help her out, though in the end it had all been left to Evie, to whom it had always been plain that Reuben had vied with his wife for attention and to be put off from work sick. It had not taken him long, and then he had assumed his seat in the front room with the black Bible, for good.

‘If he comes up here he'll be sent away.'

‘Have you looked at her breast, Reuben?'

‘I have not.'

‘Then you do. You look. It's an open suppurating sore and it'll be the death of her. It's eating her flesh away, and it won't be long before it eats to the bone, if she doesn't die first.'

Ted looked across at his mother, shocked at what he had heard, imagining something eating his grandmother ‘to the bone'. He did not understand the nature of it, wondered if it was a worm that burrowed or an insect with mandibles that had somehow gained entrance to her body. On the way down the hill, he asked.

‘You wouldn't want to know.'

‘I do want to know. Ma?'

‘Cancer, the crab,' Evie said between tight lips.

In the coal- and chalk-dust-smelling classroom the following day, he asked again.

‘That's a funny question Ted Howker.' The teacher was good at drawing and in a moment, there was a crab, pincers and shell, on the blackboard.

‘Who has ever seen one of these? Which lucky one of you has been to the seaside?'

A hand went up. ‘But I never saw that.'

‘Do you know any other sea creatures with shells? Which one of you has heard of a lobster?'

Ted sat silent in the third row back, not able to ask again, still left empty of answers as to why his grandmother's illness had set off a board full of odd chalk drawings. He turned it over in his mind all day, all the way home, half the night, over and over, as the sea turns a pebble, but got no nearer to knowing.

‘Take this up to Paradise, and keep it in the basket, it's hot.' Evie wrapped a loaf and a teacake into a clean dishcloth. It was Friday afternoon. The terraces were sprinkled about with boys he knew, leaning against walls. There was a game of fives he could have joined but he had to ask his question and the basket was heavy.

Reuben was in his permanent place. ‘
Behold and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow, which is done unto me.
'

Ted put the basket on the table and would have asked his question then, but there was a sound on the stairs.

He did not know the woman in the blue coat and hat who came in. Reuben fetched up a sigh that Ted thought could have come from the belly of the whale.

‘Better send the boy out. I need to tell you things.'

‘Go up and see your grandmother,' Reuben said.

Ted hesitated. The woman nodded her head to the stairs. ‘But she's not very well, don't you give her any grief.'

He never forgot the sight of walking quietly into the front bedroom and seeing his grandmother in the high brass bed, flat under the sheets and with her head seeming to be smaller, shrunken like an apple left out in the bowl too long, and with the tears running down her cheeks.

He stood still and looked at her, but at first she did not see him, just went on crying silently, unmoving. The voices of the woman and Reuben came murmuring from below.

‘Should I get you something?'

She turned her head on the pillow and looked at him as if she did not know where she was, or who he was, but then her eyes cleared of the confusion and she sighed. ‘What are you doing, our Ted?'

‘They sent me up. To see you. I could go away.'

‘No, no. Come here.' Alice opened her hand and held it palm upwards towards him. Ted went nearer and put his own hand on hers.

‘Is Evie there? Is John?'

He shook his head. ‘I brought bread and a teacake. Should I get you a slice?'