Bert fastened his waistcoat buttons. ‘I don’t do things like that, shag.’
Jacko was convinced by his hard look. ‘Well, somebody has, and no mistake.’
Only one person could have taken a secret drink, unless Jacko, who maybe was still shell-shocked, had sleepwalked it down his gorge. ‘Too much like piss for me,’ Bert said.
‘Piss, you say?’ Jacko poured halfway up his Navy-issue mug. ‘Let’s drink most of it between us before any more goes.’ He held it out. ‘I’m sorry I asked if it was you, shipmate, but I had to make sure.’
Unsociable to refuse, it went down like a rat on roller skates. Jacko drank enough to leave a quarter in the bottle. ‘It’ll help us to enjoy that stuff she puts on the table. What’s it called?’
‘Shepherd’s pie.’
‘Yes, I wouldn’t like to know what part of the poor fucking shepherd it was ripped out of. She must be Sweeney Todd’s widow.’ He had the saddest face Herbert had seen, and he had passed a few on the street these last few months. In Jacko’s case such an expression could turn mean rather than easy-going, as was proved when he put the catch on the door and with his back to it slowly undid his trouser buttons, keeping the bottle in his other hand. A glaze came over his eyes at such a malicious notion of justice. ‘There’s only one way to deal with this situation.’
Herbert assumed that was how rum-poachers were dealt with in the marines, which made him glad he intended going in the army, as he watched Jacko piss the level of the bottle back to halfway before setting it again, none the worse for colour, in its place.
Yet Herbert, being the age he was, had never seen anything so funny. He opened the window and let out such a bellow of laughter over the backyards that a turbaned woman pushing a kid in its cot stared as if he had gone clean off his rocker. The kid began yelling, and she hurried along in case the madman at the window decided to jump overboard and splash her flipflops with his life’s blood.
He drew his head in and thought maybe it wasn’t funny at all, as Jacko the Beast calmly laid all items of his kit out on the bed as if the CO would pat him on the back when he came marching through.
To warn Mrs Denman of her peril could be to accuse her prematurely, because it may not have been her at all, though if not, who else? He wanted to describe the intriguing problem in a letter, but didn’t know who would be interested. His father, certainly not, nor his mother. They’d be disgusted, and who wouldn’t? Yet Barney the English master used to say that a sense of humour was the first sign of intelligence, and he should know, because nobody had ever seen him laugh.
Herbert couldn’t pen the Sherry Saga to Dominic Jones either, without blowing the gaff on his town of refuge. If he’d still been at school he could have concocted a moral issue out of the case, though Barney might not have liked such an essay, saying he had made the yarn up, and that if he hadn’t it was not a fit topic for a composition, though the boys would have laughed over it for a few days.
Feeling it a shame to waste such material he sat in Mrs Denman’s parlour on Sunday afternoon while she was in bed with Frank, and wrote a letter to himself, no less a story than when the head and tail had suffered the fate of Procrustes’ bed. He called Mrs Denman Mrs Penman, and related how he had seen Jacko, now Mungo, go through his motions with the bottle, as if to make the alcoholic whizzbang stronger, or maybe even to take care of some ailment he’d got. All he had to do now was put the story aside and wait for the real-life ending.
Another way of keeping contact with the hidden part of himself was to call on Isaac, shed some of the person he had become in the factory with each step up the wooden staircase.
He carried a loaf and two pounds of potatoes, a tin of condensed milk and a few apples from a corner shop, as well as a twenty-packet of Senior Service which Isaac liked. A bag of sugar for five bob came from one of the viewers whose father worked at the refining factory near Colwick.
‘Your accent’s changed,’ Isaac said, though not disapprovingly.
Herbert found it comforting to use rough speech, while knowing he could go from the hot tap of the local argot to the cold faucet of his school any day of the week. ‘It ’ad to, in the factory.’
‘As long as you don’t. At least not radically.’
He forked up his chips, knife held too close to the blade. ‘I can’t do that.’
Isaac put on an ironic smile. ‘Your table manners have altered, as well.’
‘You do as others do.’
‘I know all about that. But keep yourself intact, all the same. Your own soul, I’m talking about.’
‘I can’t do owt else, can I?’
Isaac put tea on the table, and they lit cigarettes. ‘You’ve taken to that factory like a duck to water, Herbert Thurgarton-Strang. Or should I say Bert Gedling to a quart of Shipstone’s ale? It shows you’ve got character. I expect your parents have, too.’
‘Don’t mention them.’
‘Still like that, is it?’
He felt no need to be on his guard with Isaac. ‘Nar. I want the credit for myself.’
‘Nothing wrong with that, I suppose, but you’ve got to think of people’s feelings, and write them a letter now and again.’
He’d sent one since arriving in Nottingham, telling them he was working in Stoke on Trent. Archie had dropped it in a box when he’d gone there to see a girl. ‘Anyway,’ Isaac said, ‘thanks for the sugar. Mine went days ago, with my sweet tooth.’
Herbert, drained for words due to the intensity of his life, or that’s how he put it to himself, sometimes liked sitting in idleness and silence, and though he did not much care who he really was — whether Bert or Herbert — it brought a sense of peace that was vitally needed if he was to carry on any life at all.
Isaac took down one of his strangely scripted volumes and read with head going faintly back and forth as if wanting to sing the rhythms, while Herbert in his chair faded around the edges of sleep, visions fastening on to him brought about by Isaac’s mutterings. Maybe Isaac was saying a form of prayer, not the sort they were drummed into mouthing at school, but one which put him into a trance, and brought dreams for Herbert of being back in India and walking behind an elephant, huge plates of grey excrement flopping from between its rear legs, his mother and father laughing from their chairs on the veranda of the bungalow. Where did that come from? The same place as the meteorite nightmare above the jagged skyline of mountains, split in half by a scimitar of lightning. Back at school he was running along a lane in vest and shorts, coming into the gate after a cross-country run. The runner, who was somebody he didn’t know, turned out to be an old man, drooling and dying as he fell into the bracken. You needed a dirk to pin such fuzzy pictures down, because when he tried to re-run them on waking they slipped away like mercury.
‘You’re looking a bit serious for a chap of seventeen.’ Isaac broke into his exhaustion. ‘Let me send you back to your digs with a drop of whisky. I’ve got a secret bottle, for times like this.’ He took wet glasses from the sink. ‘I think you must have had a hard week.’
‘I suppose they all are in the factory. But I’m used to it by now.’ Nothing easier. An hour or two could go by at his machine and he marvelled that work got done with no variation in the measurements. Had it been sleep? Cleft in two, part of him dreamed, part of him worked. He lived as different a life in those lost periods as he had just now in Isaac’s room, and would never know what was pumped into him because it was impossible to understand. Not that he cared to, for you didn’t poke your nose where it had no use being, and where nothing of interest could be explained even if you took the trouble to wonder.