Byron Easy (59 page)

‘And I don’t want to hear a peep out of you,’ he snarled.

‘When’s my mum coming back?’ I asked, panicky. The first words I had uttered all evening. I could feel my pulse thundering in my eardrums.

‘Never you bloody mind,’ he snapped, and pushed me towards the front door, which opened as if on command. ‘Now get up those stairs, you little wretch!’

There was an edge of insanity to Delph’s unmediated aggression, with all force utilised at once, and no thoughts of the consequences. I felt I must communicate with someone—anyone—sane, and tell them I was in the care of a lunatic. I badly hoped that there were people still awake in the house. As I took hold of the banister I glanced in at the snug front room and saw old Mr Tongue in his bed beside the fire. The white sheets appeared grimy, tousled, like the aftermath of a torrid afternoon. I could see his beak-like profile, and the pale, death-ready skin of his neck. He resembled a grotesque bird. A cup of tea in a mug commemorating an Ilkley horse show stood on the washstand. He hawked and spat into a handkerchief, examined it, and seemed satisfied. The flames of the fire in the tiny alcove appeared to emit no heat, instead they jumped and rippled among the coals like restless tongues. No, the old man couldn’t help me. I could cry out, but it would be useless. I was among strangers.

‘I said get up them bloody stairs!’

Delph’s voice, deep and ferocious behind me, was followed by a kick in the pants and a push to the shoulder. I went forward onto my nose. Banally, I noted that the carpet on the first two steps of the staircase had been worn away, also that it didn’t extend to the edges but was held in place by antiquated stair-rods. I hoped very much that this wouldn’t be the last thing I ever saw. Something hot like mucus began to run down my chin.

‘I won’t tell thee twice!’

Running now, I gave one last glance towards the old man, but he didn’t stir. I suddenly remembered he was almost totally deaf from tinnitus caused by a mine-shaft explosion. He was doing some horrible movement with his mouth and gums, as if he were trying to rearrange his false teeth. Then another kick, harder, making me stumble.

The dam behind my eyes was beginning to give way. Tears joined the hot substance now flowing into my mouth. Behind me, a force-field of pure malice; a kind of madness in the increasing recklessness of the kicks.
Right from the start, I gave you my heart.

I made the top step but was floored by another great boot to the buttocks.

‘Now get to thy bed, you little bastard!’

The door to the room I shared with Mum and Delph was pushed open by the flat of my future stepfather’s palm. Again, I noticed the huge veins on his hands, big and bulbed like tubers about to burst. He shoved me through and I collapsed on the makeshift bedding. Grabbing me by the shoulder, he turned me around.

‘Wipe thy nose,’ he ordered, and pulled a handkerchief from his pocket. ‘And your eyes while you’re at it, crybaby.’

I took the offering and did as he said. As he went to leave the room, I noticed something triumphant in his eyes: as if he had successfully completed a long overdue mission. I suddenly saw how happy this kicking had made him. A perverse joy fluctuated in the pupils of his intense eyes. He had delighted in this wanton destruction, this furious vengeance. ‘Get to bed right now. I’ll be back in five minutes to check on you.’

Then he was gone.

In a kind of trance I went about the room, shedding my clothes, the bloody handkerchief stuck to my nose. I felt black and blue; dirty, humiliated, destroyed. My chest was rent by huge spasms. Sobs alternated with exhausted panting as adrenalin raced around my system like a motorcycle on the wall of death. The very novelty of the experience was startling—its unreadable newness. Then came trepidation over the immediate future. Would he come back to finish me off? Would I make it through till tomorrow? As I shivered into my pyjamas, their cold material adding to the damp wretchedness of my humiliation, I was at least thankful to be alive.

Then the doorbell froze me in my tracks.

My mother! I stopped to listen by the bedding, desperately attempting to decipher the leaden northern vowels. No—it was a man’s voice. A late caller. Delph’s perfidious baritone was welcoming somebody in. The front door scraped shut. Then the rustling of divested coats. Footsteps. More unrecognisable banter. The sound of the whistle-kettle being filled and its clunk as it made contact with the hob. My heart sank at these sounds, like a stone in a loch.
Honey when you knock on my door, I gave you my key.
Catching my face in the dressing-table mirror I saw eyes that were big and red with bawling. All I could taste in my mouth was the salty tang of tears and blood intermingled.

At once I heard footsteps on the frayed stairs. Unmistakably the heavy tread of Delph. He gained the landing, breathing heavily. One step, two; then his knuckles on the door.

I opened it.

He seemed embarrassed, crimson-eared. ‘There’s a visitor for you, you mithering git,’ he announced flatly, his cleft-chin towering above me. ‘That Postlethwaite fella, who wanted to pick thy brains, remember?’ I recalled the man—a gormless, open-faced enthusiast who once worked with Delph s father down the Rochdale pit. On his last visit he had cornered me by the fire and asked about my hobbies. For want of an answer I blurted out that I liked fishing, thinking that was the sort of boyish pursuit I should enjoy. Although I had once been given a couple of angling magazines, I hadn’t been near a fishing rod or river in my life. And now this man was here, wanting to talk to me, demanding an audience. Me—in the state I was in, at this time of night.

I didn’t know what to say.

‘What’s the matter? Cat got thy tongue?’ There was a dull monotony in Delph’s clichés; the dullness of a man with no interests outside himself. But also an anxiousness: with this unexpected visit there was a distinct danger of exposure. There was much at stake, and we both knew it, though Delph affected nonchalance. Grudgingly, he said, ‘Well, he’s come to look in on our pa, and he wants to talk to thee. So you better wipe your face and come downstairs.’ Then the satyrish look of earlier appeared in his eyes. ‘And not a bloody word about anything, okay, or you know what you can expect.’

So I followed Delph downstairs to endure my humiliation. As I reached the bottom step I peered into the room with dread. Sitting on the opposite side of the fire to the impassive old man was Mike Postlethwaite, erect in a green waxed jacket, his face younger and more convivial than I remembered it. Despite the late hour, he seemed eager to talk. He was slurping tea and expanding loudly on the topic of pit closures, the decrepit miner in the corner nodding occasionally in assent. If there was anything I felt less inclined to do at that moment, it was talk about a subject I knew nothing about to someone I didn’t know; with my eyes all puffy, my heart crushed. A rule in life was presenting itself to my young mind: you always have to endure what you least want at the worst possible moment. It was an infallible rule. But there was no escape. Delph ushered me into the tiny front room and the two men looked up.

‘Here he is,’ said Delph with his Janus chuckle, presenting me to them as if I were a Turkish boy at a seraglio. ‘You just caught him. About to turn in.’

The old man in the corner made no reaction. The sooty ingrained lines on his hands were like seams in the coalface itself: indestructible, compressed. A faint smell of mouldy potatoes and cabbage rose from the unaired pen of his bed. Postlethwaite stood up diffidently and offered his hand. A strange gesture towards a boy of eight. I took it lamely, though I couldn’t meet his eye. I was self-conscious about the crust of blood around my nostrils, the obvious evidence of tears.

‘Hello, little man,’ he beamed.

‘Hello, Mr Postlethwaite,’ I answered weakly, my face averted. His unselfconscious bonhomie was just what I didn’t need.

Delph produced a tiny chair for me and set it next to the fire. My bruised backside stang as I sat. I was close enough to see points of sweat glittering on the man’s forehead. As I turned my face towards the coals I felt the censorious gaze of Delph monitoring me. It was too late: the pantomime had to be gone through.

‘I know it’s almost midnight and that,’ started Postlethwaite in hale and hearty tones, ‘but I thought I’d drop by and check on your granddad. Then I remembered the little lad that were round who wanted to talk tackle.’

I intended to say, he’s not my granddad, but felt Delph’s degrading glare burn the side of my face. The three men were arraigned around me like some hellish tribunal: Minos, Aeacus and Rhadamanthus, with Yorkshire accents. I tried vainly to think of something, anything, to say, but it was as if I were looking at a blank sheet of paper. Instead I found myself unable to do anything other than shrug my shoulders. Undeterred, the bubbling stranger continued. ‘Any road, what rod are you using now?’

‘A green one,’ I offered, stupidly.

‘Aye,’ he said impatiently, ‘but what make?’ He was attempting to crane his head around and make eye contact, but I shifted my face in shame. He had that over-keenness for engagement of those with no talent for children. I had no answer for him. Seconds dripped by like hours. Where was my mother?

‘I—I can’t remember.’

‘That’s not much use to Mr Postlethwaite, is it?’ said Delph sinisterly from the shadows. I could hear the stir of flames among the embers. For a moment I thought the old miner had fallen asleep or even died, but movement in his rheumy eyes confirmed otherwise. My face felt hot, suddenly screened with sweat. A wet sensation under my armpits made my pyjamas feel constricting.

The eager man went on: ‘First one I had was a wonderful split-cane rod made by Hardy’s. Before your time I should think.’

The implausibility of this stalled conversation after the exponential violence of a few minutes ago lay heavy on me, like a leaden hand. The whole charade seemed ludicrous and sad at the same time. I felt soiled, interrogated; useless in my inability to answer his questions. To fill the silence I stammered: ‘I’m only eight.’ Tears, globular and warm, welled up in my eye sockets. I wanted to run from the room.
And nobody told us, ’cos nobody showed us
…

‘Aye, you’re just a nipper. But at your age I had all the gear. Flies. Lures, gaffes and nets, and a Hardy’s reel made in 1890. A real treasure it were. An antique—just like me and your uncle Delph.’

At this he roared with laughter. His hand reached out and touched my arm. I flinched. Delph sat silent, observing me, waiting for the slightest whiff of defiance. He also knew the charade had to be endured. It was a torture for him too, though in a different sense. Postlethwaite leaned forward in his seat at his own soggy wit. He repeated the inert joke. ‘Like me and your uncle! Ha ha!’

The unbearable catechism seemed never-ending. I wanted my mum. I wanted to live on Mount Everest for the rest of my life. I stared at the fire, but instead of amber coals I saw the Vauxhall Viva tearing through the bleak Niflheim of the Wakefield streets, the mysterious woman (his bit on the side?), the flashes of moonlit collieries, the big-veined hand lashing out, the rain of blows to my back as I struggled up the stairs. The song in my head.

‘Oh yes, I had all the tackle at your age. My father’s creels, his otter.’ The man paused conceitedly. ‘I can tell by thy expression that you don’t know what an otter is. Well, we were put on this planet to learn. By otter I don’t mean the little furry animal that lives on the riverbank that they made the film about—Tarquin, I think it were. No, an otter is a contraption you slide down the line to knock your spinner off if it gets stuck.’

He let this pointless fact linger in the room, like a gigantic fart. I wanted to vomit; his mystifying talk was curdling with the shame in my heart. Every note sounded was false, like some awful seventies TV play. He must have seen straight off that I’d been crying but chose to ignore it. Like ignoring the fact that you’ve surprised somebody naked. There was a terrible tension in the room unavoidable to everyone. The mute, tearful boy. The insidious silence of Delph. The desiccated miner. But somehow, this prating fool was blind to it all. Like a man who whistles while his own house burns down, he was inflicting this nonsense on everyone. For a moment Postlethwaite paused for my reaction to this fine nugget of knowledge. I looked into the fire and said, ‘Oh, I didn’t know. That’s—that’s fascinating.’

‘Well, I’m sure—you’re like me—it’s not the bits and bobs that take you to the river. It’s being close to nature that counts.’ He sat back with a self-satisfied sigh. ‘The gentle waters, the solitude. No darkies playing their jungle music at top volume. Then your first catch of t’ day! I remember my first trout when I were out for carp. Heaven!’

I gazed into the flames in an attempt to tune him out. But this must have convinced him that I didn’t believe his statement. I felt all the shame of Rousseau, made to walk before a spit of meat as he went supperless to bed in front of his elders.

He persisted, ‘Honest! I can tell thou thinks I’m fibbing, but it were a beauty …’ I decided as long as I concentrated on the fire he wouldn’t be able to see my appalled crimson face. I was aware he was stretching his arms to demonstrate the size of the trout. But I couldn’t turn. ‘It were this long, ain’t that a fact granddad?’ But ‘granddad’ didn’t respond. He too was conjuring pictures in the coals. ‘That were my split-cane rod’s doing, that were. Amazing, cos that day I had an English lure, but the Yankee ones made by Heddon are the best …’

I could feel the water against the dam again. Insistent, unstoppable. I sniffled to keep the tears in. The man’s voice was a tyrannical dirge. Elton was singing,
Don’t go breaking my heart.
Then Kiki’s confident, trilled reply (how her voice makes one believe her):
I won’t go breaking your heart!

‘Hard as it is to admit that the Yanks do anything better than us, but—’ Postlethwaite paused and examined me candidly. At last the penny had dropped. ‘Is everything all right?’

Too late. A sizeable tear ran down my face and trembled from the bottom of my chin, a bright icicle. I sniffed monstrously to keep in a deluge of snot. At that moment I felt there was a danger of my head imploding.