Tommy Glover's Sketch of Heaven (6 page)

There are many stealthy sorrows in Sheepcote. There are those you just chance upon, like George, who drives an imaginary Spitfire down the road and makes the sound of an engine. He is a six-footer with the build of a warrior, but his little head hangs apologetically from his monstrous shoulders, and when the village girls tease him – “D'you wanna go out with us then, George?” – his eyes light up and he nods so credulously it would break your heart.

Then there are those you'd never guess at, hidden behind the little lace curtains and the stoic Sheepcote faces, sorrows and secrets that only an invisible person at the knitting group can uncover.

There is Mrs Marsh with the small moustache, whose husband delivers the milk and who's taken in the evacuee, Babs Sedgemoor. She's lost two of her three sons in the war, one by a U-boat and one shot down over France, and she's had no bodies to bury. Her gloves and mittens are perfect, with not a stitch out of place, not a fault in the neat four-ply. Then there's Mrs Glass with the very fat arse, the butcher's wife. She can hardly look Mrs Marsh in the eye with two strapping lads, still too young to join up, and lucky as Larry to be safe on Gloucestershire soil and not lifeless on some strange field far from the smell of home. She is so guilty for it you wouldn't know she forgot to put cold water in the tub some years back and immersed her first-born in a bath of freshly boiled water. The fatal baptism killed her only daughter, and left a furrow on her brow which everyone understands and no one speaks of, at least not while she's there. “I'm a lucky woman,” she says eagerly, and with a note of apology for her two healthy boys, safer than they should be in the midst of war; but no one really knows what ‘lucky' is any more.

But what of Aunty Joyce? I listen eagerly for snippets about her. Often, on a Thursday, she'll pack me off to the village hall and stay in with Uncle Jack if his shift means he's home. At least, that's what she tells Aggie and the others, but I can't see them having much fun together.

These are good times for me though, because I've learnt that whenever someone is absent, they become the unofficial topic of conversation.

“See our Joyce is busy again,” starts Mrs Chudd. “Got work up at the farm, 'ave she?”

“Just spending some time with Uncle Jack, I think.”

“Oooh?” A mewling of surprise from Mrs Chudd.

A moment of silence, but Mrs Chudd will not let this one go. “She's such a pretty thing. I wonder she doesn't wear make-up any more. Have you noticed? She could look like a film star with a bit of rouge.”

“It's Jack as stops her,” says Aggie Tugwell.

“No!”

“He does. I heard that ever since … you know … he won't let her touch the stuff.”

“Get away!”

“Tiz true.”

“Well, that don't make no sense, do it? Tiz like he's punishing her.”

“Twuz hardly
her
fault.”

“Makes no sense at all.”

Clicking of needles. Things are hotting up. I put my nose down and knit furiously.

“These things make people behave in strange ways,” says Miss Lavish, generously. “I should think it can tear a couple apart.”

“It takes its toll for certain,” says Aggie.

“It do that,” says Mrs Marsh, her moustache unmoved.

“But tiz no one's
fault
…”

“Well …”

“They do say that lad Tommy –”

“No!”

“Well, there was
something
fishy going on,” says Mrs Chudd, pulling decisively at her ball of wool to unravel another yard.

“Tommy would never do a thing like that. I'm sure of it,” says Miss Lavish.

“Well … that's not how she sees it. I don't know how she puts up with it. Seeing him around.”

“She's a saint is Joyce.”

“She is that.”

Then all faces suddenly freeze as Aunty Joyce turns up with my cardigan and decides to stay till the end. We talk about Gregory Peck and Betty Chudd's amazing arithmetic, and I am left yet again with this notion that Tommy has done something too dreadful to speak of, and also with the more curious notion that Aunty Joyce is, of all things, a ‘saint'.

When we get back it's still light, but time for my bed. I go out the back to the lav, and try hard not to think of the many-legged creatures scuttling around the wooden seat and in the murky corners. After I've flushed I go round the back of the shed to the kittens, but they're not in the box. I look under the wooden crates and in the bushes and over the wall. At last I see Kemble and she comes to rub up against my legs.

“Where are those naughty kittens?” She continues to rub up against me, but makes strange mewling noises. “Have you lost them? Let's help you find them.”

I search behind the hen coop, in the cinder pile and between the rows of beans. Then I lift the lid of a pail, which is sitting by the shed, and see a pile of wet fur with pink flesh visible underneath.

I drop the lid and it clatters off down between the runner beans. Kemble comes up and sniffs the pail, miaowing pathetically. I take them out one by one and lay them on the grass, but Boomer I pick up in my arms. I hold his little soggy body close to mine. His head rolls right back and I support it in my hand, catching my breath as giant angry sobs build up like a tidal wave.

“NO!” I scream. “No! No! No!” I run indoors, Boomer's little head flopping backwards as I trundle into the parlour.

Uncle Jack covers his face with his hand, but not in shock, more as though he saw it coming. I plant myself in front of Aunty Joyce, face burning with tears and nose running over my lips, ready to rebuff all her excuses.

She looks at me unmoved. It is not the look of a saint.

Once again the solace of touch is taken away as I awake. There was a human warmth surrounding me and now it has gone with the sunlight on the curtains.

Yesterday's horror steals over me. I remember my wakefulness for hours and lean out of bed to reach for the bundle I have left hidden beneath it. I unwrap Boomer from my cardigan and stroke his dried fur gently.

I am a bag of nerves and sorrow and anger. I will run away. I will kill myself. I will kill Aunty Joyce, smash this house to pieces, scream in church, stab Miss Didbury, swear in Sunday school, facky, facky, facky Nell! And facky Jesus and facky jelly ghost!

Instead I pound the eiderdown with my fists, grit my teeth, and go straight out of the house without any breakfast, leaving Aunty Joyce standing by the range with a pot full of porridge.

I go to the only grown-up I can think of who might understand my grief. He is still busy milking, but he stops when he sees me with my bundle and my rumpled face. “Look, Heinrich! Look what she's done!”

He stands up, and then immediately crouches down to comfort me.

“He is dead?” He takes Boomer and strokes him affectionately. “And the others also?”

I nod, blotchy-faced, folding my lips as tightly shut as I can, but then erupt into ferocious sobs: “She did it! Aunty Joyce! She drowned them all in a bucket! She's a cruel witch! She's a witch!”

Heinrich puts his arm around me and pulls me in close. I can smell the reassuring cow odours of his jacket and the musty woody smell of his neck and hair, and suddenly everything feels a little bit all right. This is the consolation I need, the rescuing warmth of an embrace, the fragrant comfort of human skin.

“Don't cry, Liebling. Don't cry.”

I gulp in the balsamic wafts from his closeness, unwilling to let go. He strokes my hair. “I sink Joyce she is a gentle woman. I sink she will not hurt any creature without a good reason.”

And I realize, looking up from my burrow, that she is standing there – behind me – and he is looking at her as he speaks. She is blushing.

There is a silence as they look at each other, and I start to feel sick. I pull away, but Heinrich says, “Come with me.”

I am grateful to get out of her presence. We go off together to a neighbouring barn and pick up some wood, leaving her standing in the cow barn.

He makes me a cross with ‘Boomer' carved on it. Even working at speed, he is deft with his knife on the wood.

“I will make a more important one later,” he smiles. “You bury him now.”

Aunty Joyce is going round with her tray, and I catch her looking at us as I dash off with my tombstone and corpse. Maybe she is sorry now. Maybe I'll get into trouble later. Either way, I don't care.

*    *    *  

Tommy is horrified, of course, and we shoot off across the fields towards the lanes and then down to the stile and our special meadow. The cowslips have all but gone, and tall thistles take their place. We run and run as if the very force of our movements will burn up our anger. Over the next gate, and the next, until we're looking right across the valley.

“All this …” he pants, sweeping his arm across the panorama, “… all this will be ours one day.”

“How d'you mean?”

“After the war … everything'll be shared up, as it should be.”

I look out at the green and golden fields as they rise up the slopes beyond the stream, the pretty hamlet perched near the top and the sheep grazing sleepily on the hillside.

“This'll be our bit,” he says, decisively. “And this is where Boomer would've roamed. So this is where we should bury him.” We will have to bury the other kittens later.

He breaks off a piece of branch and starts to dig under a beech tree, while I try to take in the heady news that I have a future with Tommy.

It is a long, mucky job, but when we've finished we sing ‘The day thou gavest Lord has ended', which is what is always sung in church when one of our lads is shot down. Then, since drowning was the cause of death, we throw in ‘For those in peril on the sea' for good measure.

We slump down for a rest after the service, and he pulls out his sketchpad.

“You're good at drawing,” I say. “I wish I could draw.”

“You can.”

“No, I can't. I'm crap.”

“You draw a picture just being there.You
are
a work of art.”

If he is taking the mickey there is also a look of tenderness, which unnerves me, and makes me rub my nose in my sleeve and ask, “What's that then? A worker fart?”

He smiles and lies back in the grass. “You're funny.”

I am pleased. Being funny is the best thing that has happened to me lately. “Are you going to be an artist?”

“One day. First I'm going to be a fighter pilot. I'm going to join the RAF as soon as I leave school, remember?”

“I'm sure you'll have to wait a bit, even if you lie about your age.”

“I told you. I got a
way in
.”

I pluck sulkily at the grass. I don't want Tommy to die. If I feel like this about Boomer, how will I feel about Tommy?

“D'you believe in heaven?” I ask.

“Dunno … s'pose …” Then, seeing my downcast face, he says kindly, “Actually, yes. I'm sure Boomer's in heaven, look.”

I lie back in the grass. It is only here in Gloucestershire that I have ever been able to lie in a field and feast on the complete dome of a changing sky: the giant clouds fleeting across the blue above, but the distant ones stretched around the horizon like elastic bands. The hills have become covered in a thick-piled blanket of green, as trees emerge from nowhere and puff out their soft plumage. I can feel the warm earth beneath me and I can see the shape of it: the horizon goes all the way round in a giant circle.

“I wonder what it looks like – heaven.”

Tommy blows out his cheeks and turns over a new page in his pad.

“You live in Heaven House,” I add. “You should know.”

He cackles and begins to draw. His bitter laugh startles me a bit.

“What's so funny?”

He says nothing, but carries on drawing.

“What you drawing?”

“Heaven,” he says, and I close my eyes against the sun as it comes out from a cloud. I suppose I ought to feel unsafe with him, after all the things I've heard, but I don't. I feel perfectly at ease. I run my fingers through vetch and clover and trefoils. I hear the gentle friction of his pencil on the paper, the chirruping of two blackbirds who seem to be singing “You say potaytoes and I say potartoes,” and I feel this is where I want to be right at this moment.

“Why did she do it, then?” I ask.

“Bitter, I reckon.”

“What about?”

“Search me.”

I open one eye as if I might just do that.

“Summut wrong, anyway,” he says, continuing to draw.

“Why don't they like you, then?”

“Did they say that?”

“No, you did.”

“Well … it's complicated. I don't really know. You'd better ask her.”

“All right, I will.” Fat lot of good that does me, though.

“On second thoughts,” he says, “perhaps you'd better not … I dunno … “

“Stop saying that! I want you to tell me now! Please, Tommy.”

He draws furiously. “Look, I can't say, really. She thinks I done a bad thing … there was rumours … an' she believed them. She used to like me, see. She liked me a
lot
. I mean, she was going to adopt me an' all.”

“
Adopt
you?”

“Well … yes.”

“Oh God, that's awful! I mean, for her to like you so much and then … it's awful!”

He nods and scratches his forehead, frowning at me.

“What changed her mind?”

“Like I said … dunno really …” He shrugs. Then he looks up and into the middle distance. “It was brilliant. It was like … I had a family of my own. Uncle Jack – he liked me too …” Then he looks at me again, but at my neck, not my face.

I know how much it hurts to be away from my family. I know the real nausea of homesickness. I flinch to think of his loneliness, to think that he has never had a family, that he has come close to feeling what it was like only to have it whisked away from him. Tears come easily today, and my eyes begin to well up.

“What happened to your own mum and dad?” I ask.

“Mr Fairly said they left me there soon as I was born. Didn't like the look of me, he says. Says I'm not a very lovable person.”

I sit up indignantly. “Well, that's
rubbish
! He's talking through his
bum
!”

Tommy breathes a laugh.

“
I'll
be your sister,” I say. He studies my face anxiously, tenderly.

“I
will
,” I say, and then, “What's that sound?”

“Stay absolutely still. Don't move a muscle.”

I freeze. The sound is getting louder, and it is coming from behind me. It is almost like footsteps on gravel, but hollower, more muffled. Louder it comes, and louder.

“Now turn around,” he says, smiling.

There, at my shoulder, are the hot wet nostrils of a cow, who is chomping at the very grass I'm sitting on. The head sways up and down, and I can feel the breath warm on my neck. What a sound!

I beam at him, and he knows it has given me pleasure. “There you go!” he smiles, tearing off the sheet from his pad.

“Hey, I thought you were drawing a picture of heaven.”

“Oh … well.” He gets to his feet and turns away from me awkwardly.

I pick it up and open my mouth. Then I shut it again. “Crumbs.”

There is something incomplete about it, with more white paper than tentative pencil marks, but there is no doubting what it is. It is a portrait of me.