The tall leathery-faced man replaced by Sailor had given no hint of his departure, such birds of passage being soon forgotten, until one morning Sailor stood by the gate in dark blue dungarees as if it had been his post for years.
Short white hair came to a line at the back of his neck, and his face was of such pinkness from being scrubbed every morning that the features had little time to settle into place until the afternoon. Prominent lips didn’t go much towards handsome, they all agreed, and there was little definite shape to his nose, but the lit up blue of his eyes suggested absolute ease with himself, and confidence in getting unlimited trust from others.
Such eyes shone as if he would like to own any woman who looked at him, though most saw him as no more than an amenity for which they were grateful. Some regarded his smile as too facile, a turn of unhappiness to the underlip noted by those whose lives hadn’t been of the calmest.
Kids took to him because his authority gave them a frisson of fear, which brought obedience. The previous caretaker, with his permanently worried face, saw them as grains of sand slipping through his fingers into danger before he could get them safely across the pavement, but Sailor let them know he was their shepherd, his smouldering briar indicating the lollipop woman at the roadside: ‘They’re all yours, Madame! Take ’em away!’ Out of his orbit, they spread alone or with whoever met them into the various drives and crescents of the estate.
Ann noticed him on her way to get fags and a paper from the little Pakistani supermarket on the main road, even before she had agreed to look after Teddy Jones while his mam and dad went on a ten-day bargain holiday to Turkey. The job wasn’t as easy as she’d thought. Six-year-old Teddy was a cheeky little swine, and she had only to go into the garden to shake crumbs for the birds to come back and find him opening cupboards and pulling doilies all over the floor.
If you wanted the house to stay neat you couldn’t let him out of sight for a second. While she was vacuuming the bedrooms he hauled her dictionary off the shelf and scrawled its pages with a biro, for which he got a slap across the face. He could tell Bill and Edna what he liked, because after they had gone she heard that other neighbours had turned them down flat when asked to take charge of him.
On the second afternoon Teddy ran from the school gate like a limb of Satan and headed straight for the road. Mrs Grant the lollipop woman, about to step out and halt the traffic, was touching her glasses into their proper focus when a black low-slung hatchback came at such a rate that, everyone agreed, if kids had been on the crossing the school would have commemorated a day of tragedy for ever and ever.
Teddy was blank of mind, and nobody could guess the paradise he was running to. Nor had they time to think of him as a goner, because like everything that happened too quick it had already happened.
Nor could anyone swear they saw Sailor move. For someone close to sixty he made lightning look slow. If Teddy survived to be an adult he would probably never recall the not ungentle arm holding him inches from speeding bumper. Maybe he thought it was a game, even when Sailor, once they were clear, put the biggest fist he had seen to his face and said: ‘Run like that again, lad, and you’ll get this for your dinner. And not with custard on it, either!’
Something must have got through, because Teddy’s smile didn’t reach full growth, though he squirmed free to strut by the lollipop woman, who was still too shocked to give him the guidance he obviously needed to keep him in the land of the living.
Ann saw it all, and got hold of his arm for the sort of shaking that would send him into the middle of next week and back again without him knowing where he had been, but it turned short and feeble because there didn’t seem much in his young head to rattle. ‘You stupid little thing. Didn’t you see that car?’
‘What car?’
‘I got his number.’ Mrs Grant, as good as her word, wrote it on a pad. ‘There was four young lads inside, so you can bet it was nicked.’
Sailor tapped his pipe against the wall and put a boot on the dottle. ‘They’ll get away with it, though. Nobody cares enough to put ’em inside for five years.’ He went back to his stand at the gate. ‘I’d hang the buggers. I’d let ’em know life’s a battlefield.’
Teddy gripped her hand for comfort, called her auntie on the way home, and wanted to know what was for tea. She blamed herself, thinking that if she had been at the gate two minutes earlier he would have run to her instead of going like a newborn bull across the pavement. Bill and Edna would have screamed blue murder with grief if he had been killed or injured, so it was thanks to God he hadn’t. Only on opening the front gate did she realise the caretaker hadn’t been properly thanked.
She tucked Teddy into bed and told him a story about a family who lived in a copse on the edge of the estate, of how the favourite came running out of school and got killed by a car. When he began to cry she read nursery rhymes till his head fell sideways, then eased him snugly into the sheets.
In the living room she switched on the telly. ‘You’d do better reading a book. Or why don’t you knit me a scarf? Better still, come out with me for a walk.’ Sidney had wanted her to talk. He always said she didn’t talk enough, and now he was three years dead she regretted the time wasted on silence.
He had been chief clerk in government offices downtown, and when he laid his head on the desk, one afternoon, its weight was such as to stay there till he was put lifeless onto a stretcher. The placid black tom called Midnight brushed her ankles, and for months after Sidney’s death had roamed the house looking for him. Still not one for talking to people, she conversed in silence with herself, as if it were her only means of thought. The cat slept on the hearth, the black hump suggesting it hoped to see Sidney on waking up, which was more than she could say for herself. All the same, she imagined the smell of Sidney’s tobacco, and recalled two unopened tins she hadn’t had the heart to take from the cupboard upstairs.
‘That was good, what you did yesterday.’
She had come early so as to thank him properly. In mid-April it was impossible to tell whether the wind was blowing blossoms or it was about to snow. ‘I never saw anything so quick.’
He stood away from the pillar, as if her compliment came from an officer of the watch. ‘He was lucky.’ He boomed at Teddy: ‘Weren’t you? Nearly had to carry you home in a plastic bag, didn’t we? People would have thought you was a goldfish pulled out of a pile-up on the motorway!’
He squirmed from Sailor’s grip, and Ann fastened his coat, sending him along the asphalt path towards the school door. ‘You saved his life, and that’s a fact.’
‘They teach you to look sharp in the Navy.’ His blue eyes burned her, and she turned away, yet didn’t want to leave. Other women would soon be at the gate with their children. ‘I was in from a boy, and ended up master artificer. If you weren’t quick you were dead. It was a harder school than this one.’
Half a bottle of whisky, or maybe rum, would have made a fair present, but it only occurred to her now. ‘Do you like being a caretaker?’
He plaited his fingers and pressed so that every knuckle cracked, signalling embarrassment at her interest. ‘It’s a doddle, but don’t tell anybody, or they’ll kick me out and hire a robot. I was made for it. I have a cold sluice at six, and start at seven to fix the heating. Then I make sure everything’s shipshape before the kids swarm in. I knock off at eleven, and don’t go on again till they come out. There’s a bit more to do when they’ve gone home, but it suits me.’