On the third day of the carnival there was an ox roast on the prom. A beast from a nearby farm had been slaughtered and roasted on a massive medieval spit. It was set up on a pole resting between two trestles. The strong meaty fragrance drifted across the piers and through the streets, rumbling stomachs and suggesting to the whole of Morecambe that just around every corner was a gorgeous oven-warmed dinner. It was high season and the crowds thronged about the town, queuing for almost a mile to buy their ox sandwiches. Reeda Parks and her son had been helping the butcher carve and distribute the fare all day with the help of two other ladies. It was up to Cy to wrestle as best he could with the monstrous bottle of HP sauce, getting as little as possible on each sandwich — though it was a tad like riding a bicycle downhill without a handle-bar for steering or brakes for stopping — before one of the women whipped the bread together and handed it out to the next in line. Lomax, the butcher, a striped-aproned giant who seemed completely suitable for the task of slicing up such a carcass, was carving furiously and great portions of shredded brown flesh fell into the catch tray below, where Reeda and the others would retrieve it in accordance with the customers’ preferred tastes, lean or gristle or crackling. The butcher’s patter never tired, and never altered.
— Lancashire or Yorkshire, sir? Meat or fat? Lancashire or Yorkshire, madam? Meat or fat? Lancashire or Yorkshire sir? Meat or fat?
By the end of the afternoon if Cy never saw an ox sandwich again before departing the earth for more clement climes, or gruelling, furnace-like ones — he still had not ruled out that possibility — it would be entirely too soon.
The boys were cutting down an effigy of Kaiser Bill from the flagpole hook in Pedder Street ready to burn him that evening before the dance when Cy first got a whiff of what was to become, later on, his profession of choice. Though at the time, had this been revealed to him in Alva’s crystal ball or via some other tarot table, it would have seemed pure madness, he would have scoffed and laughed and asked for his carny-thieved jiggery-pokeried pennies back. But that was all to come.
Pedder Street was narrow and winding, one of the older parts of town, with moss on its walls, three churches nestled into its corners and a length of small, sunken-windowed, three-storeyed dwellings with sooty chimneys. It also contained some houses and businesses of ill-reputation, the Professor and Madame Johnson for example, spiritualists with the capability to reunite you with the souls of deceased loved ones and occasionally the departed infamous — communing, it seemed, was a bit like an open telephone line, you never quite knew who you might find on the other end — something Cy’s mother was vehemently against, and there were also houses where it was understood that many women lived at once and many gentlemen visited. From this end of town Cy could just about hear the clank and boom of rust-dead trawlers and German U-boats and submarines being dismantled at Ward’s Ship-Breakers and the strains of mendicant music being played by the blind fiddler at the old harbour. There was no political choice for stringing up the Kaiser in this particular street other than a convenient metal crooking from which to play out his demise and ridicule by hanging. Being still the tallest of the three, and therefore having the extra reach, Cy had climbed up the nearest building with a pair of garden shears to hack the villain loose. It was a question of balance and stretch, out-manoeuvring gravity, wielding the shears while slumped up the crumbling bricks, bandy-legged like a frog. Inelegantly, he held his arms out and with a quick snip removed the Kaiser’s bulging nose.
— Take that you daft little Prussian.
— No time for that now, Cy. It’s a shilling per hundred candles lit along the prom if we hurry.
— All right. Hold your horses.
There was a funny noise coming from the window on whose sill his foot was resting. The sash was cracked open a fraction and Cy could hear a buzzing like that generated inside a beehive when the workers are about to swarm. But it was less of a bumbling, husking animal effect and more the uniform drone of man-made apparatus, like a dentist’s drill. The sound was captivating. There were voices also, men’s voices, one of which was substantially louder and more commanding than the other. He leaned against the wall and tried to listen in to what was being said, while the boys below him waited, shuffling their feet.
— Get on with it, would you, you great string bean?
— We haven’t got all night, nosey-Parker.
Such was the strain of his eavesdropping that Cy was having trouble balancing. He adjusted himself clumsily on the sill. It was at about that point in the proceedings when there was a telltale tinkle of glass pane being broken and the buzzing ceased and the cracked window suddenly slid up. A careless boot-toe, he had over-stepped the platform! A woollen-capped head arrived at the level of Cy’s foot. Two hands with colourfully stained fingers then came out on to the window ledge, one of them grasped Cy’s boot firmly, as if snaring a hare, and the man in the wool cap turned to look up. His eyes were a guttering glacial blue and unrelenting. They were as pale and transparent and fire-cold as a flame leaping out of a mineral-grained log in a grate. Eyes that you wouldn’t want to have to out-stare in an argument, thought Cy, that would make you feel like quarry in a dispute even before a word or curse was spoken, and he returned their gaze, spellbound. The vessels were large and round, containing bad emotion and amusement at once, indications of a personality that would travel the length and breadth of its own deficiencies as well as its redeeming traits, though the former seemed much more likely. And as the eyes observed him upwardly, there was something else to them too: not exactly shock, for here was a man probably not put into such conditions easily, Cy read of him, but soft-surprised cognition. Cy felt a strange perception also. As if some mutual knowledge of the other was casting itself about them. As if both their graves were simultaneously being trodden over. Cy remained perfectly still, partly in sympathetic curiosity, and partly because there did not seem to be another course of action which would not involve an untidy jump from a fair height with the open shearing blades, perhaps leaving one incarcerated leg behind on the sill, and uncomfortably stretching recently evolved and endeared parts of himself he wasn’t willing to stretch before he could wrestle free. Then there might be running and quite possibly a sound leathering from the pursuer if he was caught. After a few quiet, canny moments the eyes waned, the stained hand let go of his ankle, tapped his boot three times, and disappeared. The head retreated and the window sash banged shut, dislodging the remainder of the fractured glass pane. Jonty loud-whispered up to Cy, his hands cupped about his mouth.
— Get down. Get Kaiser Bill down. Hurry up, we can’t stop here. He’s a left-footer and a gype.
— Who’s a left-footer?
— Shhhhh! Mr Riley.
Above Cy another window suddenly opened and the figure of a man leaned out. He had a knife. Cy peered up as best he could without becoming dizzy and losing his footing. It was the same man as before, though he now seemed annoyed. There were keen gestures from his arms and irritation stacked along the veins in his neck. Moving swiftly he sawed through the roping of the Kaiser’s gallows and the doll slumped to the ground. The potty Hohenzollern helmet rattled and spun on the street and rag intestines burst out through the grey uniform. Without a word the window shut, slicing down with a final shucking sound like that of a guillotine. The boys hastily departed Pedder Street.