Out of the back door and leave it on the latch. Unlock the padlock and tug at the bar until it eventually slides free, then open the large wooden gate.
She slips out, the money clenched inside her sweaty hand. The 2ps and the 1ps will leave faint turquoise marks on her skin where the copper alloy has reacted with the salts in her sweat. She clutches the money tightly and runs down the backs, careful not to trip and fall on this uneven gravelled track, with its lumps of discarded brick mixed in with the mud and the grit. Her mum fell in these backs once and cut her knee so badly she had to have stitches, and the gravel got in so deeply that the doctor had to scrub her knee with a brush. Now she has a scar like an eye on her knee, her mum, pale and silver and faintly blue where the vein lies beneath the fragile skin.
She runs down and turns right, out onto the road, and pauses between the kerbs, just opposite the shop that the parents of her brother’s friend, the one who was killed in an accident on his bike, used to own. Now it belongs to next-door-but-one, the man in his thirties, who seems old to her, who seems dangerous and sinister, but she doesn’t know why.
Her grey blue eyes flick from side to side, watching for a break in the traffic, so she can cross and achieve her goal. A white paper bag full of Arrow chews, Refreshers, Mojos and Fruit Salads. No Black Jacks, though. Maybe a Drumstick. Maybe some Parma Violets, though she doesn’t really like them. Flying Saucers weren’t so good, either.
A break in the traffic and this ten year old runs across he road, up the steps and into the shop.
“Hello, Trouble,” he says, that man she doesn’t quite trust. Overfamiliar, and he doesn’t really know her, because if he did, he’d know that she’s good, not trouble. She pays attention, she minds her manners, brought up to show respect. She doesn’t respect him, but she’d never let him know.
She stands at the counter and looks at the penny chews, laid out in a wooden tray, divided into boxes. The shop owner is serving Mrs. Costello. He’s slicing ham on his electric slicer. It makes a searing noise, metallic and shivering, and she imagines the sound of a saw cutting through bone. She waits patiently. She watches as slice after slice of glistening pink ham flops down onto the sheet of greaseproof paper that lies on the flat of the machine. The ham is wrapped in a string net, like a hair net, and its crust is an orange colour. She watches and imagines the shop owner slicing up someone’s head. She looks up at him. He’s concentrating on slicing the ham. She wouldn’t put it past him to slice up someone’s head.
“Just a quarter is it?” he says to Mrs. Costello, slapping the greaseproof paper and the ham onto his electronic scales and punching in a code. “Just under,” he says, reading the glowing red numbers from the display. He looks up at Mrs. Costello. “That alright?” he asks. He’s looking from underneath his eyebrows, as if to say that it had better be alright, and Mrs. Costello had better not cause any trouble, or else.
Or else he’ll slice her head on his electric machine.
Mrs. Costello does the wise thing, and agrees. She’s wearing a sundress, the kind that has two straps that fasten in bows at the shoulder and that hangs down like a smock. It’s a yellow dress with small white flowers on it. Mrs. Costello is dark. The girl likes to think that Mrs. Costello might be Brazilian, even though she knows that she’s Irish. Being from
Mrs. Costello’s eyes are such a dark brown that they’re almost black. Her skin has a yellow tone to it. She lives over the way, so that her children go to the other school, but the girl knows them from Scouts and Guides. They are twins and a year or two older than her. They are dark, too, and their skin has that same hint of yellow to it.
Mrs. Costello pays and puts her ham and her loaf and her milk into her shopping bag. She smiles at the girl as she leaves the shop.
“Bye, Mrs. Costello,” says the girl.
“Bye, love,” says Mrs. Costello.
Now it is just the two of them. The girl and the man she doesn’t trust. Her older sister, who falls midway in age between her and this man, owner of the shop she’s standing in, laughs about the shop owner. She says he fancies himself. She laughs because he still lives with his mother. He reminds the girl of Brian Tyldesley off
“What’s it to be, then?” he asks her. His mother appears in the doorway to the back room. The girl tries not to look at her, waits until she retreats again, like one of those wooden women on a weather machine, popping in and out of her door in response to changes in pressure.
She makes her selection, keeping a careful tally against the money she still has grasped in her hot ten year old hand, and the shop owner drops each choice into a white paper bag that he spins around and twists at one corner when her choice is done. She hands over her money and he checks it before dropping it, coin by coin, into the designated places in the plastic tray inside the cash register. She takes up the bag of sweets and leaves the shop quickly.
She has to get back to the house because today is the Royal Wedding, and she is going to help her dad at work. Everyone else is at home, watching as that nursery nurse in her meringue of a dress emerges from her fairytale carriage and makes her crumpled way up the aisle.
She waits on the kerb and makes sure the road is clear before she runs across and back up to the house. She pushes open the gate and makes her mum jump. She’s pegging out the washing in the back yard, the peg bag slung over her shoulder like a handbag, the washing basket balanced against the opposite hip. The girl whips and weaves between the clothes props and back into the house, where her dad and brother are waiting for her.
“What did you get, our kid?” Her brother’s hand darts out towards her bag of sweets, and she snatches it away just in time. They squabble their way down the drive at the front of the house to the car, and then squabble some more over who will sit in the front seat.
“But I get car sick!” she wails, as her brother pushes her into the back of the car and pushes the seat back down before she can even think about struggling her way back out again. Her dad drives them the short distance from home to the factory where he works, and she consoles herself with a Fruit Salad, enjoying the sweet-sour tartness and the way it makes her mouth water.
She gazes out of the back window at the houses at the top of the street, just far enough away from home for them not to contain friends. Just beyond reach for playing out after school.
Her dad parks up outside the office block and goes inside to turn off the alarm.
“Give us one of your sweets,” her brother says, leaning round in his seat and trying again to grab the bag from her hand.
She snatches it out of his reach and looks inside.
“What do you want?” she asks him.
“Refresher,” he says.
She giggles and hands one of the blue and yellow wrapped sweets to him, knowing what he’s going to do.
Instead of putting the sweet in his mouth when he unwraps it, her brother holds one end to his nose and sniffs the sherbet powder up into his nostrils, one at a time. He pauses and grins at his little sister, sitting giggling in the back seat of their dad’s beige Escort estate, then he blows foaming snot bubbles out of his nose.
She’s almost sick, she’s laughing so much.
Their dad comes back. He’s unlocked the gates at the side of the office block. He opens the car door and looks at his son, her brother, and the remnants of sherbet snot under his nose. He says nothing but, “Come on, then. Work to do.”
Her brother gets out of the car, and her dad holds back his seat for her to climb through from the back. She skips on ahead of them, familiar with the factory layout from the evening walks she and her dad take the guard dog on each night.
She runs down the alleyway between the main office block and the shopfloor toilets and shower block and swings to the left. She comes to a dead halt next to a large yellow skip and waits for her dad and brother catch her up.
The factory is quiet. No production today, this union stronghold at a standstill in celebration of the wedding of the heir to the throne. Her dad leads them up the outer wooden stairs into the old store room at the back of the offices. He’s taken overtime to clear out the store room before it’s pulled down. Her brother has come along as another pair of strong arms, to help their dad.
Father and son work their way through the shelves, throwing out boxes and bags and piles of papers, samples, redundant adding machines, down into the skip outside.
She has been given the task of finding blank notebooks and paper that can be salvaged and taken home. She wants to save the banks and banks of punched cards that were used for some unknown industrial process because they are pretty colours. She puts some into her bag of paper, unsure what she will use them for, but certain they will be useful for something.
Her dad finds a couple of adding machines that still work, and an old bakelite telephone that he salvages with an eye to making it work again, too.
The late July day is a hot one and the store room isn’t ventilated. The shelves are littered with the exoskeletons of spiders, blanched and made papery by exposure to the sun. There’s a film of dust over the window, which has been painted shut, and the dust filters the sunlight, softening it.
Her t-shirt and shorts are filthy by the end of the day, but the room is cleared and she has a stash of paper to fill with words and with pictures over the rest of the summer holidays.
Her white paper bag of sweets is empty and thrown with the rest of the rubbish into the skip. They carry their spoils between them back to the car, and her dad drives them back home.
The royal wedding is over, almost as though it hadn’t happened. Almost but not quite, because there’s no avoiding the endless repetitions of the selected highlights on the news, on all three channels.
© J R Hargreaves July 2006
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