‘I had Mike Riordan in my platoon. You remember Mike? I didn’t know him either. Only in his case it was the face that was missing.’
‘It isn’t a competition, Billy.’
‘No. You’re right.’
She touched his sleeve. ‘I wish we were on the same side.’
‘Well, as far as your mam’s concerned we are. You surely don’t think I’m on Spragge’s side?’
Her expression changed. ‘Oh, that man. Do you know, I met him once, just for a couple minutes, and I knew there was something wrong with him.’
‘You didn’t know about the poison?’
‘No, she kept all that from me. I wish she hadn’t, I’d’ve told her she was daft to trust him. And that smirking bastard at the Old Bailey. It was awful, Billy. You’re stood in that dock and you feel guilty, even though you know you haven’t done it. For months afterwards I felt people could look straight through me.’ She stopped. ‘Here, drink your tea. It’ll get cold.’
‘How are you managing?’
‘I survive. Your dad brings me a bit of meat now and then. Don’t look so surprised, Billy.’ A pause. ‘I tell you who’s been good. Mrs Riley. Every time she bakes she brings something round. You know mebbe just half a dozen rock buns, but every bit helps. I’ve nothing to thank the others for, except a few bricks through the window. What gets me you know is the way they used to cut me mam dead in the street, they’d just look through her. But let them be in trouble, or their daughters be in trouble, and there they were, banging on the back door. I says, “You’re a fool, Mam. Why should you risk prison for them?” But it was, “Oh, well, she had to have instruments last time,” or “Poor bairn, she’s only seventeen.” And she’d do it for them. And it all came out at the trial. You know, killing a baby when its mother’s two months gone, that’s a terrible crime. But wait twenty years and blow the same kid’s head off, that’s all right.’
Prior winced, thinking how strange it was that such words should come so easily from her mouth, that she should have so little conception of what memories they conjured up for him.
‘What about Mac? Do you ever see him?’
Her face became guarded. ‘No.’
‘Never?’
‘You know bloody well, Billy, he wouldn’t dare come here.’
Prior sat back in his chair. ‘I know he couldn’t stay away.’ He waited. ‘I thought I heard somebody just now.’
Her eyes went to the scullery door.
‘Walking up and down.’
‘It’s a restless house. You’ve got to remember me mam held seances here. In this room.’
‘You don’t believe in that.’
‘I know me mam wasn’t a fraud. Something happened. Whether it was just the force of people’s need or not, I don’t know, but there used to be nights when this table was shaking. It changes a place. I sit here on me own some nights and I hear footsteps going round and round the table.’
He had a dreadfully clear perception of what her life must be like, alone in this house, with the empty chairs and the boarded-up windows. It didn’t surprise him that she heard footsteps going round the table.
‘Talking of Mac,’ he said, and felt her stiffen. ‘I thought I’d go round and see his mam. I don’t suppose he still sees her, does he?’
‘That’s a good idea, Billy. I’d willingly go, but I doubt if she’d thank me for it. In fact, I doubt if she’d invite me in.’
‘No, she’s a great patriot, Lizzie.’ He was smiling to himself. ‘You know the last time I was home I bumped into her. Well.’ He laughed. ‘Fell over her. You know the alley behind the Rose and Crown? “Just resting,” she says. I got her on her feet and she took one look at the uniform and she says, “Thank God for an honest man.” And out it all came. Apparently on the day war broke out she did seven men for free because they’d just come back from the recruiting office. They said. “And do you know,” she says. “Five of them were still walking round in civvies a year after.” She says she had a go at Wally Smith about it. And he says, “Well they wouldn’t let me in because of me teeth.” And Lizzie says, “What the fuck do they want you to do? Bite the buggers?” ‘
Hettie was looking very uncomfortable. Since she was far from prudish he could only suppose the story of Lizzie and her August 4th burst of generosity was likely to be painful to the person on the other side of the scullery door. He thought of saying, ‘Oh, come on, Mac, stop arsing about,’ but he didn’t dare risk it. Better make his plea first, then leave them alone to talk about it.
‘I’d like to see Mac, Hettie.’
‘So would I,’ she flashed. ‘Fat chance.’
‘No, I mean I really do need to see him. If I’m going to do anything for your mam, I’ve got to talk to him first. He —’
‘He didn’t know anything about it.’
‘No, but he knew Spragge. Spragge was with him the night before he came here. He gave Spragge the address.’
‘Do you think he doesn’t know that? Spragge took in an awful lot of people, Billy. He had letters’
‘I know. I’m not… I’m not blaming Mac. I just want to talk to him. He might remember something that would help. You see, if we could prove Spragge acted as an agent provocateur with somebody else – or even tried to – that would help to discredit his evidence in your mam’s case.’
She glanced at the scullery door. ‘I know somebody who bumps into Mac now and then. I’ll see if I can get a message through.’
‘That’s all I ask.’ He stood up. ‘And now I’d better be off.’
She didn’t try to detain him. At the door he paused and said loudly, ‘I thought I’d go for a walk by the cattle pens. I thought I’d go there now.’
She looked up at him. ‘Goodnight, Billy.’
NINE
It was not quite dusk when Prior reached the cattle pens, empty at this time of the week and therefore unguarded. Mac, if he came at all, would wait till dark, so there was time to kill. He lit a cigarette and strolled up and down, remembering the taste of his first cigarette – given to him by Mac – and the valiant efforts he’d made not to be sick.
He stood for a while, his hands gripping the cold metal of one of the pens. He was recalling a time when he’d been ill – one of the many – and he’d gone out and wandered the streets, not well enough yet to go back to school but bored with being in the house. It had been a hot day, and he was muffled up, a prickly scarf round his neck, a poultice bound to his chest. The heat beat up into his face from the pavements as he dragged himself along, stick-thin, white, bed-bound legs moving in front of him, the smell of Wintergreen rising into his nostrils. The name made him think of pine trees, snow-covered hills and the way the sheets felt when you thrust your hot legs into a cool part, away from the sticky damp.
He heard their hoofs before he saw them and, like everybody else, stopped to watch as the main street filled with cattle being driven to the slaughterhouse. A smell of hot shit. Dust rising all round, getting into his lungs, making him cough and bring up sticky green phlegm. He backed away from the noise and commotion, ran up a back alley between the high dark walls, then realized that, as in a nightmare, a cow was following him, with slithering feet and staring eyes, and men chasing after her. More men came running from the other end of the alley. They cornered her, closing in from both sides, and the terrified animal slipped in her own green shit and fell, and they threw heavy black nets around her and dragged her back to the herd, while all along the alley housewives whose clean washing had been swept aside erupted from their backyards, shouting and waving their arms.
At the moment the nets landed Prior had looked across the heaving backs and seen a boy, about his own age, standing pressed back against the wall, his white, still face half hidden by a mass of cottery black hair. Mac.
The sight of the cow in the net stayed with him. Many a night he dreamt about her and woke to lie staring into the swirling darkness. Sometimes when he woke it was already light, and then, afraid to go back to
sleep, he would creep downstairs, open the door quietly and slip out into the empty, dawn-smelling streets. The only other person about at that hour was the knocker-up, an old woman with bent back and wisps of white hair escaping from a black woollen shawl, who went from house to house, tapping on the upper windows with her long pole, waiting for the drowsy or bad-tempered answer, and moving on. Drifting along behind her, he’d found his way to the cattle pens, and to the deepest friendship of his childhood.
He left the pens now and walked into the high shed, which was as vast as a cathedral, and echoing. He walked up and down, dwarfed by the height, imagining the place as it used to be and presumably still was, if you came at the right time of week. He remembered the rattle of rain on the corrugated iron roof, imagined it pouring down as it had on the night he first stayed here with Mac. He looked round, and the empty stalls filled with terrified cattle, huge shadows of tossing horns leapt across the ceiling as the guards moved up and down with lanterns, checking that the overcrowded animals were not suffocating to death. If they suffocated before they could be slaughtered, their meat was unfit for human consumption, though it found its way on to the market as ‘braxy’, in shops patronized only by the very poor. There was no profit to be had from braxy, so if an animal was distressed and appeared to be near death the guards would rouse the slaughterman to come and dispatch it. These guards were supposed to be on duty all night, but since they’d been away for long stretches on the drovers’ road they naturally wanted to sleep with their wives or girlfriends, and that was where Mac came in. The job was subcontracted to him at a penny a night, and he was good at it. He could calm a cow, even a cow who’d already scented blood, to the point where she would yield milk into a lemonade bottle. Prior could almost see him now, wedged into a wall of sweating flesh, slithering on the green shit that always had about it the smell of terror, coaxing, whispering, stroking, burrowing his head into the cow’s side, and then coming back in triumph with the warm milk. They’d swigged it from the bottle, sitting side by side on the bales of straw that stood in one corner of the shed, and then, slowly and luxuriously, like businessmen savouring particularly fine cigars, they smoked the tab ends Mac had picked up from the streets.
Prior wandered across to the bales of straw and sat down, his cigarette a small planet shining in the darkness, for the night was closing in fast. He could just see the nail in the wall which had always been their target in peeing competitions, and from the nail he moved in imagination to the school playground. He had a lot of playground memories of Mac, and classroom memories too, though few of these were happy. Mac was dirty and his hair was lousy. He wore men’s shoes, and a jacket whose sleeves came to the tips of his fingers, and he was always being beaten. As children do, Prior supposed, he’d started by assuming that Mac was beaten more often than anybody else because he was naughtier than anybody else. He was inclined to believe now that the only valuable part of his education at that abysmal school had been learning that this was not true. Lizzie’s profession was well known. On the one occasion she’d come to school, her speech had been slurred and she’d raised her voice in the corridor; they’d all watched her through the classroom windows, every varied pitch of her indignation expressed in the jiggling of the feather on her hat. No doubt she’d come down to protest because they’d beaten Mac too hard. If so, the visit did no good: he was beaten again as soon as she left. Prior remembered those beatings. He remembered the painful pressure of emotions he’d felt: fear, pity, anger, excitement, pleasure. He wondered now whether the pleasure could possibly have been as sexual as he remembered it. Probably not.
After one such occasion Prior had sat with his back to the railings that divided the boys’ playground from the girls’, munching a sandwich and watching Mac. Mac was running up and down the playground with Joe Smailes on his back, staggering beneath the weight, his grubby hands with their scabbed knuckles clasping Joe Smailes’s podgy pink thighs. Mac was a bread horse: he gave other boys rides on his back in exchange for the crust from their bread or the core of their apple. Lizzie had not been poor, as the neighbourhood understood poverty, but she was too disorganized by drink to provide regular meals. What disturbed Prior this time, what ensured that his eyes never left Mac’s face as he staggered up and down, was the knowledge that he’d deserved a beating every bit as much as Mac, but because he was clean, tidy, well turned out, likely to win a scholarship and bring desperately needed credit to the school, he’d been spared. He bit into his second sandwich, thought, munched, choked. Suddenly he ran across the playground, thrust what was left of the sandwich into Mac’s hands, burst into tears, and ran away.
Who needed Marx when they had Tite Street Board School, Prior thought, stubbing out his cigarette carefully between strips of golden straw. Still absorbed in memories of the past, he got to his feet and started to walk up and down. The moon had risen; its light was bright enough to cast his shadow across the floor. His-first awareness of Mac was of a shadow growing beside his own, then the touch of a hand on his shoulder, and a light amused voice asking, ‘Am I to understand you’ve been up my mother?’
Prior turned. ‘What makes you say that?’
‘All that stuff about “Thank God for an honest man”, I don’t know what else it could mean.’
‘Now would I do that?’
‘I don’t know. Before the war you’d’ve fucked a cow in a field if you could’ve found one to stand still for you.’
And the bull. ‘Mac, I swear —’
‘Aw, forget it. If I was sensitive about that I’d’ve croaked years ago.’ Mac was smiling. This was almost, but not quite, a joke.
Prior said, ‘Shall we sit down?’
They sat on bales of straw a few feet apart, united and divided by the rush of memory. They could see clearly enough, by moonlight and the intermittent glow of cigarettes, to be able to judge each other’s expression.
‘It was you in the kitchen, then,’ Prior said. ‘I thought it was.’
‘Why, who’d you think it might be?’
Prior hesitated. ‘I was afraid it might be some poor frightened little sod of a deserter, I was afraid he’d –’
‘What would you have done?’
‘Turned him in.’
Mac looked at him curiously. ‘Even though he’s “a poor frightened little sod”?’
‘Yes. What about the poor frightened little sods who don’t desert?’
‘Well, at least we know where we stand.’
‘I don’t want to start by telling you a pack of lies.’
Mac laughed. ‘You told Hettie a few. That girl in the filing department, the one who got you the files, my God, Billy, you must be ringing her bell.’
‘Say it, Mac.’
‘All right, I’ll say it. It strikes me you’d be a bloody good recruit, for them. You with your commission and your posh accent, and your…’ With a kind of mock delicacy, Mac touched his own chest. ‘Low friends. Officers’ mess one night, back streets of Salford the next. Equally at home or…’ He smiled, relishing the intimacy of his capacity to wound. ‘Equally not at home, in both.’
‘Whereas you of course are firmly embedded in the bosom of a loving proletariat? Well, let me tell you, Mac, the part of the proletariat I’ve been fighting with – the vast majority – they’d string you up from the nearest fucking lamp-post and not think twice about it. And as for your striking munition workers…’ Prior swept the shed with a burst of machine-gun fire.
There was a moment’s shocked silence, as if the childish gesture had indeed produced carnage.
‘And don’t think they wouldn’t do it, they would. I know them.’
Mac said, ‘I’m surprised you feel quite so much pleasure at the idea of the workers shooting each other.’
‘No pleasure, Mac. Just facing reality.’ Prior produced a flask from his tunic pocket and handed it over. ‘Here, wash it down.’
Mac unscrewed the cap, drank, blinked as his eyes watered, then passed the flask back, its neck
unwiped. After a moment’s hesitation Prior drank, thinking, as he did so, that the sacramental gesture was hollow. Milk in unwiped lemonade bottles was a lifetime away.
‘You still haven’t explained,’ Mac said.
‘About the files? I work in the Intelligence Unit.’
Mac made a slight, involuntary movement.
‘They’d’ve been here by now.’
Mac smiled. ‘Must be quite nice, really. A foot on each side of the fence. Long as you don’t mind what it’s doing to your balls.’
‘They’re all right, Mac. Worry about your own.’
‘Oh, I see. I wondered when that was coming. Men fight, is that it?’
‘No. I can see it takes courage to be a pacifist. At least, I suppose it does. You see, my trouble is I don’t know what courage means. The only time I’ve ever done anything even slightly brave, I couldn’t remember a bloody thing about it. Bit like those men who bash the wife’s head in with a poker. “Everything went black, m’lud.”’
Mac nodded. ‘Well, since you’re being honest, I think a load of fucking rubbish’s talked about how much courage it takes to be a pacifist. When I was deported from the Clyde, they came for me in the middle of the night. One minute I was dreaming about a blonde with lovely big tits and the next minute I was looking up at six policemen with lovely big truncheons. Anyway, they got me off to the station and they started pushing me around, one to the other, you know, flat-of-the-hand stuff, and they were all grinning, sort of nervous grins, and I knew what was coming, I knew they were working themselves up. It’s surprising how much working up the average man needs before he’ll do anything really violent. Well, you’d know all about that.’
‘Yes,’ Prior said expressionlessly.
‘I was shitting meself. And then I thought, well. They’re not going to blind you. They’re not going to shove dirty great pieces of hot metal in your spine, they’re not going to blow the top of your head off, they’re not going to amputate your arms and legs without an anaesthetic, so what the fuck are you worried about? If you were in France you’d be facing all that. And of course there’s always the unanswered question. Could you face it? Could you pass the test? But where I think we differ, Billy, is that you think that’s a Very Important Question, and I think it’s fucking trivial.’