2003 - A Jarful of Angels Page 16

  “She’s pretty, ent she?” said Fatty.

  Iffy threw a handful of shale into the river, looked down at the head and sniffed. “She’s all right, I s’pose,”

  Iffy was bored with the head. As far as she could see it was just a dirty old broken statue’s head and there was nothing that interesting about it. It had staring eyes, a chipped nose, a ghoulish green-lipped smile and a small bird’s feather stuck fast to the chin.

  “She is though, ent she, Iffy?”

  Iffy turned away from him and began to break off daisies’ heads.

  “S’pose,” she said without much interest.

  “I got to get something to clean it up properly. What d’you reckon?”

  “Soap?”

  “Where can I get some from?”

  “Your house?”

  He shook his head.

  “I could get some off the washing board at home.”

  “Shh. Somebody’s coming.”

  Fatty put the head back into the box and disappeared into the bushes. Iffy raised her eyebrows. She couldn’t see what was such a secret about a silly old head and yet he’d made her swear not to tell anyone that he had it.

  Lally Tudge came waddling along the river bank. She was carrying a baby in a shawl, rocking it gently from side to side, her puckered lips crooning down at the covered head.

  “Hey you!” she called out.

  Iffy looked behind her but there was no one there. She didn’t want to speak to Lally on her own.

  “Want to see my baby?” Lally asked.

  Iffy hoped Fatty wouldn’t be long.

  She stood up and peeped nervously into the shawl. It wasn’t a baby, it was a doll. An old battered doll that had pen marks on its face from where it had been jabbed, and holes in its head where its hair had been pulled out by the roots.

  “He’s ever so good,” said Lally, smiling down at the doll.

  Iffy wondered if Lally’d remembered to put her knickers on today.

  “You can watch me feed him if you like.”

  She began to unbutton the front of her blouse. Iffy looked away quickly.

  “Oh, he’s still sleeping I’ll wait a bit.”

  Iffy sneaked a look. The buttons were done up again. No titties hanging out.

  Close up Lally smelled of over-boiled cabbage and burned fat.

  “He’s called Zachariah and he’s a month old.”

  She rocked the doll from side to side in her dimpled arms.

  Iffy had never been so close to Lally before and she took a good long look at her. Lally’s hair hung down to her shoulders, straggly hair the colour of parched grass. The fringe was greasy and fell into her eyes so that she blinked a lot. Beneath the fringe her eyes were large and round, green speckled with brown and grey. Iffy thought that they were quite nice eyes.

  “Rock a bye baby on the treetop, When the wind blows the cradle will rock, When the bough breaks-the cradle will fall, Down will come cradle, baby and all.”

  Iffy hated that song. It was scary. How could a baby sleep at night thinking it might crash out of the trees at any minute?

  Lally finished her song and smiled at Iffy with her honeycomb teeth.

  “Go on, hold him,” she said pushing the doll towards Iffy.

  Iffy didn’t want to hold it or pretend that it was a baby. It was only a doll. Besides, Lally was too old to play make-believe with. Lally Tudge was twp but not nasty twp.

  Nan said pity for her and God help. Poor cow.

  Iffy took the doll from her reluctantly. It was wrapped up in a grubby knitted dishcloth.

  “You’ll have to rock him else he’ll wake up.”

  Iffy rocked the doll.

  “Take him for a walk if you want to. I’ve got to get the dinner on for my old man.”

  Lally didn’t have an old man.

  “I got to go,” Iffy said. “Here’s your baby.”

  She held the doll out for her to take.

  Lally stared at her with wide speckled eyes, eyes narrowing from circles to slits.

  “What you say?”

  “Here’s your baby,” Iffy said.

  She held the pretend baby towards Lally again and smiled.

  Lally bared her rotten teeth.

  “I never had no baby! Don’t you go saying I had no baby!”

  Her eyes were bulging and her cheeks grew crimson with anger. Just as Iffy was afraid that Lally was about to fly at her, Lally began to cry, great shiny teardrops plopped onto her fat cheeks and slid down her big quivering face.

  “Don’t you go telling I had a fuckin’ baby. I’m a good girl, I am!”

  Iffy held on to the doll wondering what she’d done to upset Lally.

  “Don’t you go telling I been with men. Laity’s kept her hand on her ha’penny, Lally has.”

  Iffy was bewildered, she’d never said anything to her about being with men or about ha’pennies.

  “You want pasting, you do! Saying things like that!”

  Lally stopped crying. She put her fists up in front of her wet face. Iffy stepped back out of the way. Lally was fat enough to hit hard, but fat enough not to be able to run fast.

  “I’ll give you what for for saying I done those dirty things!” she yelled.

  She dropped one fist and snatched at the doll. Its head came away in Lally’s hands. A bald holey head, the bright-blue eyes rolling back into their sockets.

  “Mama. Mama. Mama,” cried the doll.

  Iffy jumped in alarm, dropping the rest of doll, and watched in dismay as it rolled out of the dishcloth and fell onto the grass.

  Fatty stepped out from the bushes.

  “It’s all right, Lally,” his voice was quiet, soft. “Iffy didn’t mean nothin’. I ‘spect you’re just feeling sad because they took your baby.”

  Lally dropped the head of the doll. It bounced once and came to rest in the grass.

  “Look what you done. You killed it!”

  Her hands hung limply by her sides as she stared at the broken doll and her huge body shook, from her feet to her head. Great tears welled up again in her eyes and splashed onto her cheeks.

  Iffy looked at Fatty.

  He bent down and picked up the doll’s head and twisted it back onto the body.

  “There,” he said. “It’s all better now.” He winked at Iffy.

  “No. It’s dead now,” said Lally. “I don’t want it any more.”

  “We better bury it proper then,” said Fatty.

  Lally smiled at him, blinking away her tears. And then she was off, waddling away up the river bank without looking back once.

  “God, she frightened me then. I thought she was going to hit me,” said Iffy, breathing hard.

  “Pity for her, Iffy.”

  “Pity for me if she’d hit me! She’s mad, Fatty. She said I said she’d been with men and she swore!”

  “You don’t know, do you?”

  “Know what?”

  “She had a baby.”

  “No, she never.”

  “She did, Iffy, a couple of weeks ago, that’s why she’s been away.”

  “But she’s not married.”

  “She was down the home for bad girls.”

  “Where’s the baby?”

  “They took it off her and that’s why she’s pretending the doll is her baby.”

  “Oh.”

  “You mustn’t tell anyone, Iffy. Ifs a secret.”

  “How do you know, then?”

  He tapped the side of his nose twice. Iffy hated it when he did that.

  The grass in the graveyard was carefully mown, the early evening sunset bathed the crooked headstones in a pink wash.

  The lights burned brightly behind the windows of Carmel Chapel. From inside came the mournful strains of a hymn, “The day Thou gavest. Lord, is ended, the darkness falls at Thy behest…” And darkness fell around the graveyard, creeping up from the river like bonfire smoke.

  Will wondered to himself if there was any point in carrying on trying to solve
the mystery. It had probably been a straightforward drowning accident and it was just a quirk that the body had never been found. If it had been murder, sooner or later the body would have been discovered.

  He lingered for a while, reading the headstones of the graves.

  DOLORES TRANTER. AGED 28.

  The grave was one of the few untended in the graveyard. Whoever she had been, she had no one to mourn her.

  Will shivered. It didn’t seem right to read the names of the young on headstones.

  Suddenly, he became aware that there was someone close by. He stood quite still and listened. Nothing. He wandered over towards the walls of the chapel. Again, he heard a sound, the fall of a heavy footstep in the damp grass. The graveyard was full of shadows and somewhere in the grounds of the Big House an owl called. He turned around quickly and thought he saw someone move behind a grave. The hairs on his neck lifted in trepidation.

  A figure appeared and shuffled towards him. A large middle-aged woman holding a baby wrapped in a shawl, softly crooning to herself. As she got closer, she smiled at him revealing a mouthful of rotten brown teeth. Her lank grey hair hung about her white face, tears trailed from her eyes smudging her dirty cheeks. Then, without warning she thrust the baby towards Will, but he didn’t react quickly enough and he watched in horror as the shawl spilled open and the baby dropped towards the ground.

  “Jesus!”

  Will bent down towards the baby.

  “Mama! Mama!”

  A grimy doll lay in the grass. Its lifeless eyes were an unnatural blue in the gloom of the graveyard. He picked it up, and looked up, but already the woman was a moving shadow among the graves.

  An owl flew low, just above his head, its eyes bright in the growing dark, and the soft whispering of its wings like a shiver in the darkness. He laid the doll down gently in the grass.

  He pulled his jacket closer and left the graveyard. The moon was high above the hill, and a cold wind blew through the tall trees in the gardens of the Big House.

  Bessie refused to go: she wasn’t going anywhere near Lally Tudge.

  “Up your arse then!” Fatty called out.

  “I’m telling my mam on you,” she said, head up in the air, ringlets bouncing. But she wouldn’t have. She’d never have said arse to her mam.

  Iffy and Billy sat together in the long grass with Lally and made daisy chains, miles of them, while Fatty bent twigs this way and that and whittled away with his penknife. He built a small cradle and filled it with corks to make it float. Then he picked up the doll and handed it to Iffy, who bound it round and round with daisy chains. Lally watched intently as Iffy worked. Iffy handed the doll to her.

  “Iss lovely,” Lally said, and smiled at Iffy. She lifted the doll up to her face and kissed it very gently.

  “Maaama! Maaama!”

  She handed the doll back to Iffy. Iffy kissed the doll on the cheek. Billy took the doll next, made the sign of the cross on its forehead and handed it to Fatty.

  Fatty laid the doll gently on the cradle and secured it with some cord and white wool that Iffy’d pinched from her, nan’s sewing box. He left a long enough piece of cord to hold on to and then slowly lowered the cradle into the river.

  The doll looked quite beautiful in its daisy shroud as it bobbed on the moving waters.

  “Hold the cord for me, Billy.”

  Billy stood up very straight and took hold of the cord.

  “Now, we all sing,” said Fatty.

  “What shall we sing?” Iffy whispered.

  “My old man’s a dustman,” said Lally.

  “Iffy?”

  Something from church, she thought, something sad. She stood up, clasped her hands in front of her and cleared her throat.

  “O salutaris hostia

  Quae caeli pandis ostium”

  Her voice rose high and clear above the sound of the rushing waters.

  Fatty took out his penknife.

  “Qui vitam sine termino”

  The cradle bobbed dangerously.

  “Nobis donet in patria.”

  The doll’s eyes opened, blinked up at the blue skies above, then closed softly.

  Fatty cut the cord.

  The doll sailed away down the river gently at first, then gathering speed and shedding daisies as it went.

  They watched until it turned the bend in the river and headed off down the valley to the faraway sea. When they looked around, there was no sign of Lalry. Just the imprints of her big daft feet in the damp grass.

  Earwigging was a difficult game to play, but one of Iffy’s favourites. First she had to check that the kitchen was clear, then crawl underneath the kitchen table, resting her back against the wall with the oilcloth tablecloth as cover. She had to remember to shut the cat in her bedroom so it couldn’t give her away. Then she had to steady her breathing and wait, and wait…

  At last, Nan came shuffling into the kitchen from the back parlour. She lifted the kettle from the hob, swilled out the teapot with boiling water and tipped it into the bosh.

  Although Iffy couldn’t see her, she knew that she would be scooping out tea from the tea caddy which had a picture of an old king on the front. She heard the hot water splashing onto the leaves and smelled sweet fresh tea.

  She kept very still, her knees tucked up tight to her chin, not daring to move an inch because Nan’s feet were almost touching her own. One move, sneeze or giggle and she’d be a dead girl.

  Quietly she sniffed up all the secret under-table smells: cracked old linoleum, ancient cat hairs, disinfectant, woodworm dust, Fairy soap and lavender coming from Nan’s skin.

  Iffy kept her eyes on Nan’s slippers in case she stretched out her legs and discovered Iffy. They were prickly tartan slippers, with pom poms and beady-eye buttons, which she had bought in Briggs’ shoe shop in town. Even in the summer Nan wore thick brown stockings, wrinkled round the knees and coiled like sleeping snakes round her ankles.

  Iffy’d seen Nan undressing lots of times, down to her vest and drawers, but never naked. She’d never seen a naked grown-up. Bessie had only ever seen her mam in her dressing gown and once, by accident, in her petticoat.

  Nan didn’t wear suspender belts like other women and her stockings only reached her knees and were held up by thick elastic garters. From the knees up there was a small gap of lily-white leg that stuck out of her salmon-pink knickers. Knickers as big as bedsprerads. Knickers knackers, Christmas crackers! The crotch of the knickers sagged down almost to Nan’s knees. Iffy thought that if she ever fell or got pushed off a high bridge, the knickers would work like parachutes.

  Sometimes Nan hid money up her knickers. Once Iffy had seen a ten-bob note tucked in them, but next time she’d looked it was gone.

  The queen of England’s face was on bank notes. Fatty had shown her how to fold the paper to make a bum out of the creases in the queen’s face. Bessie wouldn’t look.

  Fatty had sung, “In nineteen fifty-four the queen dropped her drawers, she licked her bum and said, ‘Yum yum’, in nineteen fifty-four!”

  Bessie had called him a dirty filthy pig and had run home crying.

  Bessie’s mam had a picture of the queen above the mantelpiece in their back parlour. The Merediths had one of Napoleon. He was French and a dwarf, but a very clever dwarf.

  Mrs Bunting came huffing and puffing through the doorway, dragging her wooden leg up over the step. The chair groaned as she sat down. Iffy stared hard at Mrs Bunting’s legs, trying to remember which was the wooden one. The right one facing her, she thought.

  Up above the table, Nan poured tea. Cow’s milk and no sugar for Mrs Bunting, she had die-or-beat-us, so she couldn’t eat sweets or sugar. It made her leg go bad and she’d had to have it cut off. Fatty said they tied her to the kitchen table and did it with a rusty saw and stuffed up her mouth with old rags so she couldn’t scream. She said she still felt the false leg itching and in damp weather it squeaked.

  Mrs Bunting was nice. She lived a few doors down from If
fy and she kept coconut biscuits in a wooden biscuit barrel, and she gave Iffy five at a time. She wore a hat even when she was indoors and in bed in the winter. She smelled funny. Nan said it was because she kept moth balls in her drawers but you couldn’t hear them rattling when she walked. Iffy’d followed her once, all the way across the bailey and listened.

  “She’s got another one on the way, by the look of her,” Mrs Bunting said.

  “Good God,” said Nan. “Twelve now, is it?”

  They were talking about the woman who made babies. She was called Mrs Watkins and lived in Mafeking Terrace and didn’t have the sense she was born with.

  “Don’t know how he knocks them out! There’s nothing of him.”

  “AH skin and bone. You’d think if he had a hard-on he’d fall over!”

  That must have been a joke, because they laughed and spat tea.

  “Make a baby a year they do.”

  “Wants to tie a bloody knot in it.”

  “Mind you, she’ve stood by her kids, I’ll give her that. Not like some people we know,” said Nan with a tut.

  “Duw,” said Mrs Bunting. “Never got over that. Never seemed the type to leave a child like that. Them foreigners are supposed to be mad about kids.”

  Iffy grinned under the table. When she was little and didn’t know anything she’d thought Mrs Watkins made the babies with her hands, out of clay. She’d imagined her rolling out arms and legs, making bottoms, belly buttons and dimples. Putting an extra bit of floppy clay for the boys’ bits or making a neat little mark with a palette knife for the girls’. She’d pictured Mrs Watkins holding up the babies she had made, turning them over and admiring them, then putting them to dry on a huge Welsh dresser with millions of babies on it the way other people had Toby jugs. Iffy had wondered if she made them for other people and sold them like Mrs Williams who was famous for pickled onions and gherkins.

  Iffy knew all about babies now.

  Nan poured more tea. Iffy smelt the butter melting into freshly baked Welsh cakes. Her belly rumbled and her mouth filled up with spit.

  The talk changed tack.

  “There’s a state on that Mrs Bevan. God, she’s looking bad. I seen her coming out of the Punch – eight sheets to the wind she was – went white when she seen me, must of thought I was someone else. Said it wasn’t right what she done – ranting on nineteen to the bloody dozen.”