Elmet Page 2

  This is what it was about for Daddy too, of course. We were not travellers so the feuds meant nothing to us. He fought at bouts that were arranged for money, where travellers or gypsies, rough farmers, criminals from the towns, owners of underground nightclubs and bars, drug dealers and thugs, or just men who saw their worth resting in their fists, met together and brought their money in the hope of winning more. Daddy arrived in a pair of blue jeans and a buttoned-up bomber jacket. He was given the time and place over the phone by a fixer or else just picked up by the travellers or by someone else. He waited quietly among his admirers. Daddy rarely talked more than he could help. He allowed very few men to meet his eyes. He turned away and paced calmly by himself while the men made their bargains and agreed their rates.

  Daddy started the fight. He peeled off his jacket and jumper and stood in a white vest, revealing not the lean, stratiform muscles of an athlete but the kind of biceps that could be soft tight pillows if they were not made from long chains of snap-rubber. There was little hair on his arms. Surprisingly little. Black hair reached up his back and stomach to his chest and the back of his neck and head to meet a full black beard and head of hair, but his arms were bare. He stepped towards the appointed ground and the other man fell into place. Daddy saw his opponent for the first time. He was unmoved. He did not hate this man. He walked towards him and boxed him and when it was over he heard measured applause and was taken over to a blue Peugeot behind the crowds and given from its boot a zipped duffle bag full of dirty cash.

  Those men must have been satisfied by something they saw there. The gambling obscured the real pleasure. The cash had to be present, of course, to make it safe. To make it about business. To underpin the spectacle with something serious. To justify the performance. But if it was money they wanted there were other ways to get it and if it were a matter of business the fight would not have been with bare hands.

  Yes, it was during this summer in the woods, before the new house was built, that Daddy told us these stories, confided in us, and Cathy and I listened like we were receiving precious heirlooms. Daddy’s eyes became wide when he spoke to us, flecked, light blue, like worn denim, and he would lean in and open them generously then pinch them closed ever so slightly when he reached for a memory that was not quite clear. He sat forward in his chair with his long, thick legs apart, his elbows resting above his knees and his cavernous chest bearing broad, weighted shoulders.

  I supposed that was how we made our money. From Daddy’s fighting. But for months there would be no fights and Daddy would find other work. He mentioned this other work but there were fewer stories. The men he worked with on these jobs were sometimes travellers but more often they were from further away.

  On one Thursday evening in our first September Cathy and I were sitting alone in our kitchen in the new home. It had been a windy afternoon and it was a windier evening. The foundations and joints of the house were tested for the first time and they creaked and groaned as they do in any building that has not yet set. The house was finding its position in the landscape, sitting down and relaxing into its trough, and we felt it sigh and moan for hours.

  Daddy had been away since the afternoon before and we had not expected to see him again for days. We were surprised, then, when he came home that next morning just after dawn, while we were playing cards and drinking mugs of tea. We heard his car arrive outside, rolling then braking gently atop the leaf litter, and his familiar footsteps coming to us. I ran out to the hall to open the door for him, unbolting it at the top and bottom then turning the key. I pulled it in and stood aside to let my Daddy past. He walked to the kitchen table, alert but exhausted, and sat on one of the three wooden chairs that bent under his weight.

  He pressed Cathy for a cup of tea and she got up and shifted the kettle back onto the stove. Daddy stretched his legs under the table then pulled them back in towards himself to make a start on tightly knotted bootlaces. Cathy rolled him a cigarette while waiting on the water and when she handed it to him I saw that her face was suddenly awake, like his, like he had brought something bright and alive home for us to devour. This night, as at other times, I saw that she was truly his daughter.

  He had been called up by a lad, he said. Somebody he knew from here and there. Peter had lived in the village since he was nine or ten when his mother had moved from Doncaster to work at the chip shop, taking the customers’ money then wrapping up the fish that the men fried. Peter had asked, through a friend of course, if Daddy could go over there to see him. He had heard that we had moved in nearby. That is to say, he had heard of Daddy’s reputation. Amongst certain types in the Yorkshire ridings and in Lincolnshire and in the counties around there were few who had not.

  Peter had worked as a labourer on and off for the building companies in the area. Most had pulled back their work now and if it was not entirely dead then it was at least tethered. For two or more years Peter did not have much, Daddy told us. He had come through though. He had started to work for himself, privately, hiring himself out to anyone around who still had money. He built extensions, saw to bits of plumbing and knocked through sash windows. That sort of thing. Work that Daddy could have done but chose not to. Peter had been good at it, Daddy said. He had known how to manage his time and his money, which is half of anything. People spoke to their friends about him and he got more than enough work. For a time he did more than just live. There was pride, or something like it, and that was an almost-forgotten feeling in these parts. There became such things as futures and pasts and Peter began to take his place between them.

  Two winters ago, he had taken a job at one of the big farms. He was building an extension to one of the outhouses when a fat dairy cow with two calves in her belly pulled her teats from the mechanical milking vice, kicked herself free from her trusses and galloped out the barn door. She knocked the ladder from beneath Peter’s feet and he fell down beneath her hooves. She felt her grounding change as a hind leg found the soft lower back of the fallen man and she struck out against the outhouse wall then against Peter’s head and neck. He was knocked out and lay bleeding on the filthy, wet cement.

  Farms can be lonely places. They can be lonely places to have skin torn and bones crushed. They can be lonely places to die. But not for Peter that day. One of the permanent hands found him and his broken body and wrapped him in his coat and took him to Doncaster hospital in the back of a horse box.

  Peter no longer had use of his legs. He had to spend most of his time in a wheelchair. He could no longer work. He stopped going to the pub of an evening. He stayed in his house, waiting for visitors. Old friends still dropped by but he had disappeared from view so all but the best began to forget him. The council did a bit and so did the church. Peter had an elderly neighbour who helped him with the garden. She cut branches from the trees and bushes at the right times of year and swept the fallen petals and the fallen leaves and made sure the water was able to run down the drains after it rained. He had an aunt that he had come to know since his mother died and she brought cakes and newspapers and changed his bed sheets every other Sunday.

  Things were all right but they could have been better. After his accident, Peter had had to call in the money he was owed for jobs from the previous year and for materials he had supplied. He had not needed immediate payment before because things were good for him. His situation was steady. He had trusted that he would be paid like he trusted his own body and resolve. He had not considered that he might be cheated because he had never understood weakness. Our world was about muscle, Daddy always said, and for the first time in his life Peter did not have it. He had called round and half had paid straight away or had begun to pay in instalments. He had called again and half of the rest had come through too. The remaining debtors paid up with a bit of persistence and some harsh words from other men, from friends of Peter’s from his childhood or working life. One debtor remained. He was a greasy bastard, said Daddy, from one of the big detached houses in the nicer part of Doncaster th
at had windows on both sides of the front door and a drive laid over with stones not concrete. He was not a good man, Daddy told us, and though he had got his money in plain sight of the law, he had not won it cleanly, nor had he worn it well. Not fairly nor honestly. He had not earned it by himself and with his wits and graft but with a league of other men, conspiring together to squeeze the remaining blood from their home town. This man had bought and sold other men’s labour and owned dark clubs down dark alleys where women took off their clothes and danced. His money came from other people’s bodies, Daddy told us, men’s muscles and women’s skin.

  Peter had built a conservatory for him. It was a beautiful thing, by all accounts. It had taken weeks and cost a fortune and Peter was still owed nearly five thousand pounds and a set of precision power tools he had left on site. He had called and written and shouted from the street but the man had felt no need to respond. And so, after months, and after the rapid onset of poverty, Peter had asked around, and a friend of a friend of a friend had told him about the bearded giant that lived in the woods with his little son and hawkish daughter.

  ‘I went up to see him yesterday afternoon,’ said Daddy. ‘He still lives in his mother’s house, which I knew from years back when I used to live round there and mowed all lawns on that street. He told me all this. Gave me details. Put forward his case, so to speak. Well, he put it in such a way I were persuaded. You two know better than any I don’t fight for nowt. And I’m not talking about money or prizes here. With this sort of fight there has to be a reason, and Pete had one. This Mr Coxswain owed him properly, and you know I don’t like to see it. A man in Pete’s position taken advantage of like that, brought lower when he’s already low. I’m not a thug, I won’t have you thinking that but by God it makes me angry. Pete told me where Coxswain would be and when. Most nights he drinks and plays cards at a back-room casino on edge of town. It’s owned by an old colleague of his and pair of them set place up to make money for their lot. Coxswain takes home thousands some nights from desperate fools who don’t understand they’re fated to lose. I went then, on that same night when I knew he’d be there because I knew he’d have money on him. There’d be no point in going and doing all that I needed to do and at end of it coming away without Pete’s cash. It’s only half justice, you see. Other half is living. Getting done what needs to be done.’

  Daddy had drunk his tea before it had cooled.

  ‘So I borrowed Pete’s car. He said to do that and he were right to. If car was seen it would be linked to him but nobody would think he could have done owt like what I were about to do. Pete can’t even drive it any more, poor man. But nobody were going to see anyway. I parked ten minutes away and went to casino near two o’clock that morning and waited until after four, until after most of men had left, careful not to be seen, standing in cover of some plane trees. Well, Coxswain were one of last to leave. Tired but not drunk. Too alert for that. And too set on winning game. He came out to his car, which were parked near me. I’d have liked to have said I planned it that way – I should have – but I admit I were lucky. I were slow though. He opened boot and put his bag inside and I only got to him as he were closing it. He of course turned round, of course wondering who I were, guessing rightly that I were trouble for him, but not understanding why. Not then. He squared up but I started with a question first. Asked him if he were who I thought he were. He should have said no but he said that he were. Brave. A small amount of respect crept in. But then he messed up. Showed his true self. I asked for money he owed Pete. I asked for exact amount – I’m no thief. I said I’d take it to him. Made it clear I’d be taking it that evening and that I knew he had money on him. At first I thought he were doing all right. He said he were getting it from boot, and he went to open it. Men other than me might have been more suspicious, but I don’t have time for that. I don’t need to be suspicious. Suspicion comes from fear, see. If he’d pulled out a gun or knife I’d have known how to handle it. I’m not fussed. He opened up boot as if to get his bag of cash, but instead brought out a golf club. He lifted it. He tried to take it to me, but …’

  Daddy looked down at the scrubbed oak table. A slight smile shifted his wet lips. Then he raised his blue eyes to Cathy. She had listened to the story but seemed unmoved. Her expression was mute, her eyes were clear.

  ‘Well. It dindt matter,’ he said. Cathy’s irises widened then narrowed like the bobbing designs on an old spinning top.

  Daddy told us what he had done next. He recounted how he had put up his arm to catch the club. How he had bent it in half with his two bare hands. How Mr Coxswain had ended up sprawled and choking on the tarmac, beaten so badly he should have been unconscious. But Daddy was expert in the consequences of time. He knew how to lengthen an engagement. He knew how to make a man suffer.

  He detailed it all. Told us everything. Until it seemed like tears were coming to my eyes.

  Then he stopped. Stopped suddenly. He rose from his chair and wrapped me in his arms, said he was sorry and that he should not have told us anything.

  ‘You got Peter’s money, then?’ Cathy asked.

  He turned back to her and sat down, still gripping my hand.

  ‘I did,’ he said. ‘I did and I gave it back to him. All of it. And I’ll show you what he gave me in return.’

  Daddy raised himself onto his feet and slipped through the front door. He returned cradling two black puppies in his huge, bloodied hands. Two lurchers. Greyhounds crossed with border collies. We named them Jess and Becky that morning and made a snug den for them in the hallway. No floor had yet been laid in that room so it would be like outside and inside at the same time. Daddy said that would suit them.

  Chapter Two

  Daddy let us drink and smoke and after the shell of the house was built we spent long evenings sipping mugs of warm cider and puffing on the cigarettes that Cathy rolled. We listened to the radio and read to Daddy. Cathy in particular, in her deep steady voice that picked out the words and sentences that most needed hearing. When we were younger we had begged him for a television but Daddy said we were better off without it.

  That was before we moved to the wood. It was before that summer of camping and before the new house was built. We lived further to the north, then, on the outskirts of a small town on the North Sea coast in a house that had been built amongst others of its kind in the 1930s. It was a semi-detached, of sorts. It could have been a row of back-to-back terraces in any other town but these houses were built like suburban three-beds, only smaller and with little care given to the gardens. Our older neighbours had planted purple and yellow pansies in thin borders between their lawns and the paths and privet hedges that cut them up, but most of the gardens on our street were patchy and muddy, held in place by dandelions and thistles.

  Garden furniture was scarce but children’s toys littered the ground every few houses along. I remember well a small plastic dolly with blonde curls lying face down in the mud of the front garden of the house on the corner, her pink cotton frock hitched up around her ears. I remember her lying there, untouched, for years while the rain and soil stained her body.

  Some of the houses were coated in pebble-dash. Cathy and I liked these. We used to reach out and pick the sharp little stones from the cement as we scraped past, down the alley in between two houses and out into the fields beyond. The pock marks on the walls accumulated but most people did not look to see them and Cathy and I never concentrated on a single patch but released stones from here and there, careful not to form patterns with our picking. Our house in this estate was not covered with pebble-dash. You could see the bricks from which it was made, those dark bloody-brown bricks. Our garden was neither untidy nor decorated. The grass was longer than the grass on other lawns and a darker green, but it was not wild. The concrete path led to a concrete step then the door, which was at first painted a royal blue then later a royal green which then, in turn, began to chip and reveal the blue, once more, beneath.

  The hall presented a
dark red carpet whose faded gold design took the eye from right to left, creeping over the worn middle to the plump edges and back again. It was like a vine or a climbing plant, its roots just outside the front door, had crept inside and up the stairs. When I was very small I pretended the pattern was a network of roads and I would trace my finger along it.

  After the stairs, at the far end of the hall, the springy red carpet gave way to linoleum and a chipped MDF kitchen. We cooked with gas then, and Daddy used to light his cigarettes from the blue hissing flame and take them out into the back garden to finish. Off the hall also came a single living room that stretched the length of the house and there were three bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs.

  In all, I lived there for fourteen years.

  Back then, Daddy was with us sometimes but at other times he was not. We lived with Granny Morley. She loved us well, cooked for us and washed our clothes. There were always two varieties of vegetable with our dinner and she used enough washing powder to make our clothes clean but not so much that it clung to the cotton and made us itch. While we were at school she hoovered the carpets and dusted the shelves and went down to the high street to Mr Evans’ butcher shop, the Costcutter, the greengrocer’s and Margaret’s Hair Salon, where she met her friends every Thursday afternoon.

  On the weekends or after school Granny Morley made sure we played outside in the garden or in the fields behind the house. Sometimes we went down to the beach and played in the caves and rock pools. She was a loving woman, our Granny, but she was distant. Sometimes she looked right through us. Sometimes she seemed to catch onto sounds in the next room or outside when we tried to speak to her, like she could hear something we could not. She raised her head and tilted it and as she did she lifted a hand to the arm of her chair or the sofa.