“And you wain’t, neether,” said Vera, setting up a line of cups and mugs for tea; “the men like to see ’em too much.”
“Yo’ll see enough o’ women some day, Brian,” Seaton said with a laugh.
As Vera drew curtains across the window, the urgent voice of a vendor shouting “Special” electrified the room. They could hear people buying papers, and the clink of money given in change when the newsman stopped under the window. Brian was afraid, feeling the blowing-up of bombs and black death and screams of gun-and-bayonet war, whenever he heard anyone shouting “Special,” because his mother once told him that Specials meant war. Vera broke the silence: “Shall I go and get one?”
“I shouldn’t bother,” Seaton answered. “I expect it’s on’y summat about Spain, and we’ll get it on the wireless soon.” When the man’s voice had gone Brian said: “A man came round to gran’ma’s sellin’ Old Moore’s Almanacks for tuppence, and when she bought one off ’im I read in that there’d be a big war soon.”
“There wain’t,” his mother scoffed, spreading more bread, “don’t yo’ bother. An’ if there is, yo’ wain’t be called up.”
“I ’ope not: I’m frightened o’ wars.”
Seaton grunted: it was a difficult sound to tolerate — an employment of bitter sarcasm while everyone knew him to be feeling fine. “It’s no worse in a war than it is now. You get boggered from pillar to post and get nowt to eat, just the same.” He pulled Margaret on to his knee with a laugh, a revolution in mood: “Come on, my curly-headed baby, tell me some more about what was on the pictures, then I’ll let you sup some o’ my tea.”
They looked into the deep black canyon between the canal locks, a fan-down shine of water fitfully seen by cloud-belaboured moonlight, like a coal-hole dug so deep that water had filled it, glinting like boot-polish. A few yards away, up and over the bridge parapet, cars and buses roared into the city from a wilderness of fields and woods, and headlit javelins of opposite desires left the huge illuminated rag-patch of town for Brian knew not where.
They were alone, sidetracked beyond lights and out of notice. Bert kicked the pram: “I’d like to chuck that in as well, but I’d get a pasting if I went ’ome without it. Our Midge is on’y four and mam pushes her up to t’ clinic every week to get her leg seen to.” He flashed his torch, a flat model for one-and-fourpence bought from money cajoled with the Guy in town. His fingers gripped it, pressed — and light came again from the one eye of Polyphemus bulging white out of the top.
Brian drew back from a twelve-foot fall into bottomless water, not only cold but wet as well, heavy on your clothes, and nothing to grip down there but smooth walls when and if you surfaced. “Come on then, let’s get the Guy Fawkes. Yo’ tek one arm; I’ll tek the other; and we’ll let go.” He looked over again: “It wain’t ’alf splash.”
“It’s a crying shame”—Bert shook his head. “It’d burn well if we took it ’ome and saved it for the bonfire.” Brian hated a change of mind. It made him uneasy — because his own unsure mind was inclined to follow every switch. A simple decision often meant hard work, and to break it, an extravagant waste of spirit. The decision to buy torches with the Guy Fawkes money had been easy to make, but both were now guilty at not splitting the three bob between their families for food, and needed to get rid of the Guy to prove, when recriminations flew at their faces, that it had been stolen from them by bigger boys before they could earn a penny. “It might not sink, for all we know,” Brian said. “And when a copper comes along in the morning it’ll look like a man who’s chucked ’issen in. Then the copper’ll sling his hat and coat off and goo in as well.”
That decided it. “P’raps he’ll drown if he does,” Bert said. “Yer never know. Not all coppers can swim.”
“Coppers don’t drown, though,” Brian said with conviction, fastening the Guy’s coat as if it were a paralyzed and much loved brother in danger of catching pneumonia. “If a copper dived in, he’d get out. We wouldn’t, but he would.”
“He might not”—Bert held the agreeable vision for as long as he could make it last — “he might get cramp. It’s cold enough for cramp, if you ask me. Once you get cramp, you’re a gonner. A lad at Poor Boys’ Camp got it in his leg last year, and he went under twice before anybody could get to him. He didn’t die, though.”
Brian caught on to his vision. “Well, if a copper got cramp and I was near, I wouldn’t help him to get out.” The Guy lay between them, flat like some derelict drunk, a sackbag arm across button eyes, as if not wanting to see what the world had in store for him next. One leg was akimbo and Bert kicked it straight. “Even if I’d got a lifebelt I’d chuck ’im a brick. Coppers is bastards. I was down town last week and opened a car door for a bloke. A copper cum up and batted my tab. He said I’d gent sent to borstal if I didn’t clear off. I worn’t bothering nobody.”
Brian flashed his torch, revelled in the magic of it. “Rotten bogger.”
“All coppers are like that.”
“I don’t know why they have coppers,” Brian said. “They’re worse than schoolteachers.”
“No difference,” Bert said, lighting his nub-end in the darkness. “It’s all part of the gov’ment. They’re all conservatives, as well. I know that for a fact, because dad towd me. Conservative”—he was proud of such a posh formidable word — “if ever yer vote conservative, dad said, I’ll smash yer brains out. And ’e showed me ’is big screwed-up fist to prove it. Then on Saturday night I seed him thumping a bloke outside a pub, and I suppose it was because dad ’ad got to know he’d voted conservative. He bashes mam sometimes, though, but I don’t know what for, because she don’t vote conservative.”
“Millionaires vote conservative. John Player and the bloke who owns Raleigh.”
“Well, I wouldn’t. Even if I’d got ten trillion pound notes I’d still vote red for Labour.”
“Me as well,” Brian said. “Shall we chuck the Guy in the locks then, like ’e was a copper?” And an idea came quickly. “Let’s get a couple o’ bricks and fasten ’em inside, so’s he’ll sink right to the bottom.”
“Nobody’ll think it’s somebody drowned,” Bert objected. “It wain’t be seen.”
Brian’s face exploded into a laugh, the force of a decision that took no deciding, happiness giving character to his face unseen in the darkness. “It’ll mek a big splash, though,” he managed to say at last, and Bert, relaxed and disarmed, knew that it would.
Labour, Brian repeated, bending to pull up his share of a huge stone. Labour — the word had a stern ring about it, like the hard labour they gave you in court. Perhaps this was soft labour since everybody voted for it. Or like Manual Labour, the Spaniard fighting in Madrid: cloth-cap, rifle, and a thin cigar. His father was Labour, red Labour, and so was everybody else he knew (except old Jones, the headmaster at schooclass="underline" you could tell a mile off that he wasn’t), though that didn’t make the word and meaning of it more acceptable. The stones were tied and centred into place, and he hooked his fingers around an arm and a leg. “We’ll count three,” Bert said. “Soft, though.”
“Back then,” Brian responded, feeling the straw-like texture of the Guy. Conservative — it was an official word to be distrusted, hated in fact. If a van stopped near you in the street at election time and some fist shot out and thrust into your hand a bunch of blue streamers, you didn’t stop to wonder why you’d been daft enough to accept them but threw them down immediately and kicked them to bits with your shoes — or else. Even being Labour like your father and street and suburb, you risked being battered to the pavement following the eruption of a gang of red streamers like a steam-engine out of the nearest corner. You might hold your breath long enough, though, hang on to the blue streamers and pin them to the door of someone you did not like, someone who had once sent too readily for the police when you played loudly on the nearby cobbles.