“No. It’s only a bilious bout.”
Brian curled into a ball, half-slept in a colourful incomprehensible world under the blankets. His tightly closed eyelids held in flickering lights of orange and red, and while he wanted to open his eyes in the hope of driving them away — they attacked him like bluebottles that stung — he did not want to lose the sense of repose that closed eyes gave. He fought this problem for a while, until he was forced to push his head above blankets and look at the flowered wallpaper beyond the bed because open eyes steadied the equilibrium of his stomach and saved him from being sick at that moment. The dance of the flowers slowed down; the swaying ceased and eventually he eased his eyelids together and fell back into less dangerous rest.
On Christmas morning there was a train set on his bed, and its silver lines were held like a horseshoe as Merton’s heavy tread sounded on the stairs.
“Hello, Nimrod, is that bilious bout about gone?”
“I feel all right now.” He was in the middle of the wide bed, looking beyond brass posts at wiry tree arms outside that the teeth of winter had picked clean. Merton pulled the window open. “I think we’ll get yer up later.”
The railway line circled an uneven terrain of blanket. “Gran’ma said I couldn’t yet.” A wind blew sunlight into the room, the damp breeze sharp as smelling-salts after the sick odours of three days’ breath. “Ay, ’appen she did, but yer’ll never get better stayin’ in bed. Yer want a bit o’ fresh air round yer now.” He closed the window, stood at the end of the bed. “What yer got there, you young bogger? I suppose Santa Claus brought it for yer?”
“No, yo’ did, and gran’ma and the others. You all put to and brought it me from Nottingham.”
Merton laughed. “There’s a little sharpshit for yer. Don’t believe in Santa Claus any more. I don’t know. But yer believe in Sent George and the Wagon, though, don’t yer?”
Brian laughed, stood the train lines up like a child’s drawing of the Big Wheel at Goose Fair. He let it fall. “No, I don’t.”
Merton took the lines: “Let’s see’f we can’t get this contraption going.” He set them on the floor and turned the engine key until it came against the stop. Brian leaned over the edge of the bed: Merton lined the carriages behind the engine, stopped whistling when the caravan set off. “There,” he said, “nowt to it.” After a dozen times round he set an empty cup on the track, and they stared down on the whirring colourful train going by the counterpane that hung to the floor, then circling to Merton, then towards the washstand legs, finally turning with a clack into the cup, knocking it aside and going round and wearing itself to a standstill.
“Put a shoe on now, gran’dad.”
“Why, you destructive little bogger,” he said, feeling under the bed for one. It jerked the train sideways, sent it trundling at an angle: Brian heard a hollow thump as its snout smacked at the skirting board. “That did it,” Merton said, satisfied at Brian’s laughter. “Now yer know how to break it, I’ll leave yer. Though I expect yer’d a found out soon enough on yer own.”
He went down for Christmas dinner, and later found himself alone in the kitchen, the others either out or in bed. He was sitting on the rug, dressed, torn between a book on shipwrecks and the mountainous red shapes licking above the firebars. The book didn’t hold, except that it was new, another present. He tried a page: everyone stood on the deck and sang “God Save the King,” while the boat descended into a sea of sharks. Why didn’t they shoot the sharks, make boats, drink ale perhaps? It was nothing to sing about. When he was totally interested in a song, book, a picture, his face went dead, his pale snubbed features carved in wood, life only coming into his face when he didn’t understand something and was trying to. Like now, with the men singing “God Save the King” and sharks waiting to snap them up.
A grey and mustard cat purred in a hump by his knees. Merton would have booted it out of the way for being too near the fire. Brian prodded it, but went back to his book to read the end of the story over again. The cat’s paws flattened along the rug, its green full-empty eyes staring. Men were struggling in the sea: no more singing. The women were far away in rowing boats, wailing at the terrible grey sea that melted like mountains and then shot up again. The cat looked at him and he offered it a piece of mincepie from his plate. The next story was about a steamship with funnels — with ten times the number of people on board. The cat came eagerly forward to take the pie: put its claws on his bare knee, sniffed the pastry, and put out its pink tongue. Everybody said the ship couldn’t sink. Well, let’s see how it does. The cat went back to its half-sleep, unable to understand why Brian was eating with such enjoyment something it found uneatable, suspecting that what Brian ate changed from meat to dull flour by the time the cat got to it. An iceberg ripped the bottom out. There was a complete silence both in and outside the cottage. Even the dogs slept, gorged for once on scraps and bones.
Brian returned to school and snow, which fell so deep that gangs made barricades across the pavements and fought like revolutionaries in Les Misérables. White cannonballs spun through the air, soft and harmless as they collided with coat or neck, carrying cold instead of fire. After an hour contestants would melt away to nurse hot-aches, tired and jangled after charge and countercharge. The enemies of winter were snow and ’flu, and Brian was a reluctant casualty of the latter. He was in bed for a week, fed on rice-pudding, toast and margarine, and hot drinks of Oxo. Elbows on the window-ledge, fingers pressing against his cheekbones, he watched it snowing, protected from the outside world of cold and wet by the glass pane that nevertheless smelled of the wintry desolation when his nose went to within an inch of it. A jersey over his shirt, socks on for warmth, he singled out a particular snowflake, determined to keep it in view among the hundreds around, slowly bringing his eyes lower, as if it were a white butterfly pinned within his control by hypnosis and taken as a special privilege out of its secret den in the sky for safe conduct to earth and a better life.
Flat, triangular, an ordinary shape (yet different because it was the one he’d fixed on) — changing to oblong — others had decided to come with it, not wanting to be left back there alone. They were all pals, except that there were too many of them and they got in each other’s way. So he lost it, but looked on down into snow just the same, where it would by now have fallen. It was near evening. Snow along the street had been trammelled into ruts by passing traffic, but the pavement was still thick and inviolate, a long smooth bed of untroubled snow. Until a man-shadow rounded the corner, and went off towards home, hooked out of sight by another corner, only footsteps left behind, plain and deep.
The opposite rooftops were covered by snow-blankets made to measure. He thought of the Nook: saw larger snowflakes through the immediate curtain of his eyes burying doors and pigsties and even the house chimneys; then saw the chimneys without smoke and the dogs gone, the doors firm but guarding emptiness. Street lamps one at a time came on.
Undaunted at losing the first, he lifted his eyes to single out another snowflake. The storm thickened in silence. Crowds and crowds of soundless snowflakes elbowed and bullied each other out of the way in their hurry to escape from something in the sky that was terrifying them. He looked up, but couldn’t see what it was, again losing the chosen snowflake.
He went back to bed, still seeing a sky full of white butterflies when he closed his eyes.
CHAPTER 12
Singing in the rain and walking up Alfreton Road one Saturday morning, Brian and his cousin Dave whistled the actual song that came from a wide-open radio shop as they stopped at a big window to wonder what they could buy. Dave carried the money because he was seventeen and, so he claimed, could therefore look after it better than Brian, and this was all right by Brian because if it hadn’t been for clever Dave he wouldn’t be staring in a pawnshop window with a half-share in eighteenpence, a fortune earned by searching for take-backable beer bottles on the tips and collecting a penny on each after washing them well in the tadpoled cut.