Brian could, or most of them, and those he couldn’t think of were supplied by Albert. When at school, he’d been surprised to see in a world gazetteer a reference to the nearby village of Wollaton, and from then on he hunted up maps of Nottingham, eager for larger and larger scales, hungry to find clearer marks of his geographical existence. Later he looked at maps in the headmaster’s office, pleased at seeing for the first time in his life that the streets he ran about in were important enough to be marked on maps that someone as far away as London could easily be gazing at. Then in a down-town bookshop he saw manuals of street-fighting for sale to such as Home Guards — meaning that every street was also marked and no doubt studied because of its military importance now. One such manual was mouldering away in the bookcase at home — forgotten after his first intense study of it.
The geography game didn’t quite last the mile, so Albert broke out into his undulating wail of “The Song of the Steppes,” and when Brian joined in — nothing else to do with such a noise so close — it sounded as if the Red Army was swooping from Matlock Bath and making for Nottingham’s centre, where the rich spoils lay. Brian wondered how it seemed to those already in bed. The song was long and continuous, coming from nowhere and going into an even darker nowhere, strong only because it was never-ending — like the Red Army columns that had paralyzed the Germans at Stalingrad. Brian was out of breath, but barrel-chested Albert went on and on, enjoying the power of his worldless song, staring dead-ahead as he walked and wailed as if the sounds automatically hypnotized his brain to make him continue. Brian had known Albert a few months, met him at Edgeworth’s Engineering Ltd. in Sneinton, which was his next job after the cardboard factory. Albert there had shown him how to work a capstan lathe, simple when you knew how; later taught him to set one up, which was more difficult; then to sharpen tools, an art Brian hadn’t mastered yet. Albert went to night school to learn engineering and math, wasn’t exactly an apprentice but had been promised a good and permanent job by Mr. Edgeworth if he showed himself as willing a scholar as a machine-operator. Albert had a flair for setting up a miller, lathe, or drill; could shape metal to any blueprint design, and his skill was always to be relied on; unlike Brian’s, which occasionally let him down by a sudden flooding-in of carelessness.
Albert, almost from birth, had been the handyman in his mother’s house, had learned how to mend lamps and fuses after only one shock, how to fix supports into the garden fence to stop it falling, put in a pane of glass or whitewash the attic — because his father had died when he was three. Albert told Brian the same night his mother divulged the secret to him, couldn’t wait to get it out, he was so excited. They went into the Wheatsheaf at Bobbers Mill and ordered two pints of mild. “Sit down, Brian. Mam’s just towd me summat I’d never known before. I allus thought dad had died of a bad heart when I was three, but you see, by Christ, you know what did happen?” The previous story had been of Albert’s poor dad digging away at his prize allotment garden for all he was worth, shifting heavy clods of spud-soil near beds of multicoloured chrysanths that stood high in the sun like white and yellow pom-pom hats. The picture was that Mr. Lomax, having foolishly overdone it when he should have known better, had folded up from a stab in the heart and died on the spot; but it was now revealed to Albert that his dad had really got fed up with life and cut his throat, altering the picture to one of a tormented corpse twisted among the support sticks of his collapsing chrysanthemums. Albert got more pints and drank to it again: “Just think, the old man committed suicide! I don’t know anybody else whose old man committed suicide! I don’t know anybody else whose old man killed himself, do you? I wish mam ’ud told me sooner. Fancy leaving it till now.” Brian was glad to see him so happy, and went to get the next round. It explained a lot about Albert’s cleverness, and the vivid light in his brown eyes, as if the life that had been forced out of his father had joined with his and made him so much stronger.
Albert sang himself up the slope and over the railway bridge — out of nothing, into nothing — the noise of his primeval voice drowned for a while by the hoot of a pit whistle, but emerging strongly (as if he hadn’t heard it) when the hooting stopped as cleanly as if an invisible knife had slewed down it through the black air. He turned off for Radford. “See yer’t wok tomorrer then,” he called to Albert.
No wonder Pauline packed me up, Brian thought, after I cracked her one like that — and me thinking I’d never hit a woman in my life after seeing the way dad knocked mam about when I was a kid and remembering how I hated to see it. I don’t know. It’s rotten to do owt like that. But if you come to think on it, though, dad hit mam for nothing at all, just because she cursed him or said he was a numbskull for not being able to read and write, but Pauline gave me a big whack first, before I hit her, and that’s a fact. Maybe I shouldn’t have hit her anyway, but I’m still not as bad as dad used to be. Anyway, maybe it’s a lot worse to call someone a numbskull who can’t read and write than it is to give a bloke a crack across the gob for nothing. It’s anybody’s toss-up which comes keener; but I still wish I hadn’t bumped her.
Bert came home on weekend pass and Brian went out with him Saturday night to see what they could pick up. Tracks led by nine o’clock to the Langham, Bert lacquered up in khaki battle-dress and Shippoe’s ale, small for his seventeen years but also drunk by the success of his lies that had joined him up a long while before his time. “I can’t be bothered to desert like Dave and Colin,” he confessed to Brian, a chip on his shoulder at having to justify such action to his disapproving family. Bert had a mind of his own, had the same surviving face as when he was a kid, and Brian didn’t think for a second that any Jerry bomb or bullet could put Bert’s light out. He was a good shot and adept with foxhole and slit trench, wouldn’t starve because he knew how to live off the land, could sleep standing up, march forty miles a day, make a fire in three feet of snow, leap off a lorry with full kit and rifle at thirty miles an hour. “That’s how they train the infantry,” he said. “You’ve got to be tough to beat the Jerries, and if you can’t beat the Jerries you can’t help the Reds, can you? Can you, though, eh? We was doing street fighting in Newcastle, and you know how you get from house to house? You don’t go out of one door and into another — like a rent man — you use grenades and blow out the fireplace, then creep through the hole. I enjoyed that. We might be doing it in Berlin soon; you never know, though, do you, eh? I hate the cold, though, I do. I can stand it, but I hate it. We was on a scheme last January in Yorkshire and had to sleep out, dig holes in the snow to sleep in. Christ, I’m not kidding when I tell you, our Brian, I was so cold I was pissing mysen all night. Couldn’t stop. Couldn’t hold it. I hate the cold.”
The Langham was crowded but they pushed a way through to the bar: Brian was good at that. “I can’t see her,” Bert said. “But she swore blind she’d be here at nine. I asked her to bring a pal as well, for yo’. I hope she does.” Brian was jammed front and back, kept his pint at face level above other shoulders, and was able gradually to tilt the jar up so that a wall of ale slid into his mouth. “How’s that tart o’ yourn?” Bert asked when Brian shunted a second pint across. “See much on her lately?” Brian admitted he’d chucked her. “Looking for somebody else then?” The pub was packed, generating a noise even louder than the machine shop he worked in. It was impossible to hear: “What?” he bawled, seeing but not hearing the second question. The loudest voice was that of the piano, beating its pathways above smoke and din, where nothing could reach to compete with it. A jaggle of colliers in the corner crashed out into laughter over the antics of their dominoes, a sound like the sudden splintering downfall of a wooden fence.