Swords and Crowns and Rings (6 page)

‘What you light the gas for, Jack?'

Jackie pushed himself farther into the bedroom. ‘To keep me company. What are you doing, Dad? You sick?'

The Nun said, ‘A man's a cur. I oughta be down at the Princess saying something to the old piper.'

‘He's not down at the pub, Dad,' said the boy, eager to help.

‘Sure he is. Bellowing boozed. Where else would he be after hearing what he heard today?'

‘I seen him go past, Dad,' said Jackie, ‘A long time ago. On the steamroller.'

The Nun sat up like a shot. ‘Heading which way?'

Jackie pointed. ‘There were lots of people running along behind.' He caught his stepfather's arm, ‘I can go with you, can't I, Dad?'

The Nun was hastening into his oilskin. ‘You rug up then, and leave the light on for your mother.'

He limped out, leaving the backdoor swinging. The two of them bored through the gale.

Jackie tugged the edge of the oilskin. ‘I hear something funny,' he shouted. The stravaiging wind brought extraordinary sounds down the main street, a fearful stridulation, pierced intermittently by a grinding crash. Looking through the swimming air towards the park, the Nun could see little but a group of people trickling about some central point, breaking up, coalescing, flying apart. The steamroller's calliope uttered an exultant shriek.

‘Holy God!' said Jerry. ‘What's he up to?'

John Nicolson had learnt his trade at a Clydeside engineering works, and twenty years before he had begun work in Kingsland as borough engineer. But his long drinking-bouts had driven him farther and farther down the ladder until now, loyally retained by a council comprised mostly of his old friends, he worked spasmodically driving the steamroller.

Drenched and hatless, he sat on the grotesque vehicle like a mahout, rain spilling into his untied boots and out again. It streamed down his skull so that his thin ginger hair was invisible; his face was purple with drink and cold. To the little boy, staring up at this towering, silent figure, it seemed that the eyes were as red as blood, like a dragon's eyes.

‘Chris'sake, what's he up to?' shouted the Nun.

‘He's run amuck,' answered someone, thrilled to death. ‘He's gone and demolished the cottage where him and the boy lived, and now he's got it in for the Gallipoli memorial. Man's a nut case.'

‘Ooo-ahh!' gasped a child's voice in Jackie's ear. ‘He's smashing up the new monument!' it said, now becoming the voice of Cushie Moy, who stood beside him in a crimson coat, holding the hand of her furred mother.

‘Come away at once!' said Mrs Moy sharply. ‘The man's mental, he's dangerous!'

But Cushie, mad to see this astonishing spectacle, whined and yelped, pulling against her mother's gloved grasp, and straining all the time to see the reef of white marble rubble, and the obelisk, cracked as though lightning had struck it, standing lop-sidedly on its concrete platform.

A man near by sobbed angrily. ‘No respect for the dead...our poor boys...Baillie wasn't the only one...my young brother died in France, didn't he?...wants to get his own back, he says...why doesn't he go and flatten Dr Zimmermann's surgery then...dirty Heinie...why don't he?'

‘Hypocrites! Damned bloody hypocrites!' howled Nicolson suddenly, and the steamroller squealed into movement.

‘Is he,' demanded Mrs Moy in a stricken voice, ‘talking about
our side
?'

As the steamroller trundled dinosaur-like towards the monument, the sobbing man scrambled up over the rear, and snatched John Nicolson around the neck, clawing and shouting. With one sweep of his iron arm, Nicolson tossed him backwards into the crowd. The front roller collided violently with the shattered marble, grinding over the fragments and jerking back and forth across the wreckage. The noise was so great that no one could hear the stream of imprecation or blasphemy spouting from the driver's mouth.

Alarmed and embarrassed by this rare drama, Mrs Moy seized Cushie by the back of the coat and switched her away, willynilly taking Jackie as well, for Cushie had hooked herself to Jackie's arm.

‘Can't you get some sense into him, Jerry?' bawled someone.

Clumsily swinging his game leg, the Nun dragged himself up on the juddering vehicle.

‘Put an end to it, you old galoot,' he begged. ‘Come on, chum, turn it up and we'll have a grog and talk it over.'

Piper Nicolson heard. He turned his red eyes on the Nun. ‘I lost my lad, did you hear, Jerry?' he said. ‘My grand lad.'

He shoved the lever, and the monster moved forward with catatonic slowness, nuzzling the face of the monument with an abrasive shriek. With a groan the obelisk came out of the ground like an uprooted tree. Majestically the steamroller tilted forward and buried its bow in the hole.

The children's desire to see this wonder was overwhelming. They dragged away from Mrs Moy and rushed towards it. Cushie goggled at the wreck in horror and delight.

‘They'll never, never get it out,' she said.

‘We can have that for a war memorial instead,' said Jackie, and they screamed with laughter.

The sound drew the attention of Piper Nicolson, sitting amidst restraining hands, dazed and glowering.

‘Would you look at it,' he bawled, ‘running around on its bit legs, alive and kicking, and my boy Baillie dead and rotten. My lad that was a cricketer and a runner, and saved the day in the Shield match for the shire last year. Dead and rotten, and that deformed wee turd of a creature still above ground. What justice is that?'

A hush fell over the crowd, though mostly they were farm workmen, not sensitive or used to stepping delicately around other folks' feelings.

Cushie felt the silence, and remembered her shock and panic at her uncle's death.

Jackie, who had not understood the drunkard's words, still looked up into the wet, corned-beef face with fascinated expectation of more excitement.

It was Jerry MacNunn who said calmly. ‘I've never yet belted a man silly with the drink, nor one who's had the news you've had this day. But me and you are finished, John.'

The piper began to blubber. Cushie and Jackie, appalled at adult emotion, turned their eyes away.

The Nun drew Jackie away. ‘Come home, boy, your Mum'll be wondering where we've got to.'

Jackie looked round for Cushie, but her mother was hurrying her down to the park gates. The rain began again and blotted out the crimson coat.

‘What was the matter with Mr Nicolson, Dad?'

‘His boy Baillie is dead and his heart's broke.'

‘If I went to the war and I was shot, would your heart be broke?'

‘Yeah,' said the Nun. ‘Now shut up.'

The next school day, Cushie Moy, full of indignation and sympathy, blurted out to Jackie what her mother had told her the drunken piper had meant. He was certain that Cushie's mother must have made a mistake, and hastened to his mother and step-father for reassurance. As soon as he saw his mother's angry eyes he knew that Mrs Moy had translated accurately.

He asked, trembling, ‘Was that what he meant, Dad?'

His mother made a movement towards him, but the Nun checked her abruptly.

‘Yes, that was what he meant. But you got to remember he was talking out of a bottle.'

The boy, bewildered, baffled, said, ‘Did he mean that I don't deserve to be alive because I'm not as big as Baillie Nicolson? What's deformed mean, Mum? Cushie Moy didn't know.'

‘Cushie Moy ought to keep her little gob shut!' said his mother fiercely. ‘And that goes for her Lady Muck of a mother, too. Talking to a child about such a thing!'

‘Am I deformed?' muttered the boy. ‘Is it awful?'

Mrs MacNunn made a cat-like sound, and the Nun shot her the hardest look she had ever had from him.

‘I'd like a cup of tea,' he commanded, ‘and so would the old Jack, after a long cold day at school.'

‘Why did you send Mum away?' asked Jackie. ‘Isn't she to know what's wrong with me?'

‘I sent her away because I'm going to say some nice things about her and I don't want her with a big swollen head,' explained the Nun. ‘Because then it wouldn't fit that funny new blue hat, would it?'

‘No,' said Jackie with a glimmer of a smile. He felt that if his stepfather could make jokes things weren't so bad.

‘Piper Nicolson said a bad thing to you,' admitted the Nun. ‘A lying thing, too, and one he'd cut his tongue out rather than say when he was sober.'

‘Why'd he say it then?'

‘You remember Father Link's big cattle dog when she was run over, and he was trying to help her, and she chewed his arm and wouldn't let go? It was like that with the old piper. He was hurt bad because of Baillie, so he pushed over his cottage and then he pushed over the War Memorial—and then he said a cruel thing to you.'

‘What did he mean though, about me being alive when I shouldn't?'

The Nun had been thinking through the night. He had had more thoughts about life than he had ever had before. Now he gave the child his conclusions.

‘How old are you, Jackie? Eight years old, is that right? Then it's eight years since your Mum gave you your life. She didn't take it away from anyone to give it to you. She didn't take it from Baillie Nicolson. She didn't ask you to pay for it. She gave it to you to keep until you don't want it no more.'

‘Sister Peter says...'

‘Never mind what Sister Peter says. What's that egg-bound old chook know? I'm giving you the drum. Mum gave your life to you. Nothing anyone says, nothing Piper Nicolson or anyone else says, alters that. It's your life and you've got to get every last ounce out of it and enjoy it like hell. But at the same time you've got to be as decent a bloke as you can. See?'

The child nodded doubtfully. The Nun felt helplessly that he hadn't got through, but he had no more philosophy to give.

Jackie did not again refer to the incident. But before he went to sleep that night he felt that his stomach was full of stones. A tiny crack in life had opened, showing him equivocal things he had not even guessed existed. He had become aware of the adult world and wary of those in it.

Of course he had always known they were there, abstracted giants lurching about on the periphery of the real world. But now a massive shift in perception had taken place in his brain. He understood that those ambiguous beings, who were both servants and masters of the children, observed and judged him. There was no guarantee that they would do either aright.

Still,
he
knew what he was. Their judgment, though it might hurt, as Piper Nicolson's had hurt, could not alter that. Nevertheless, Jackie was changed. The ruthless confidence of his infancy had been eroded.

Through some deep instinct he avoided Cushie Moy. At school he saw her watching him wistfully and anxiously, turning away quickly when she thought herself observed. For a long time he missed her, in his turn spying on her from the treehouse, a lonely little girl skipping on the path in her big garden, or playing solitarily at houses amongst the dripping trees.

The piper got twelve months in prison for wilful destruction of private and public property. The magistrate, apparently personally injured by the profane and inexplicable attack on a public monument, observed that he might have imposed a sterner sentence but that he had taken into account the unsettling nature of the news received by the accused that day. He added that it was not the British way to react to bad news in such a manner, or where would we all be? Recommending the prisoner to bite the bullet like a man, he called for the next case.

Thus everyone came out of the death of Baillie Nicolson a little different.

Shortly after her eighth birthday, Cushie Moy was sent away to boarding-school. When the final arrangements were made for Cushie to attend the Mount Rosa Academy for Young Gentlewomen, Mrs Moy was smitten with the strangest pang. Emotions she had forgotten flooded her heart. Her hand quivered as she laid it upon the tumbled hair of her daughter, helpless with terror and tears.

‘Cushie...Dorothy...'

At the sound of her christened name, which she would be forced to adopt as an alias in the alien surroundings of the Academy, Cushie hiccuped with anguish. She was a messy weeper, grunting, snorting, and in no time at all grimy with the tumult of her woe. Half of her mother's will inclined towards shaking her severely; the other half, melting under the force of her confused feelings, impelled her to take the child into her arms. Cushie, who was never embraced because ‘ladies do not behave like kitchenmaids', was overcome by the sweet odour of her mother's person, clung like a limpet, and wept patches of sticky wetness into Mrs Moy's silk blouse. Suddenly, like a sideslip in time, Mrs Moy recalled doing the same thing to her mother, when Papa had volcanically forbidden his headstrong youngest daughter any more clandestine meetings with the gloriously handsome young man in his accounting department. Mrs Moy could, for a moment, actually feel the whalebone in her mother's long corset, sense once again on her cheek the slippery texture of the taffeta bodice.

‘I adore him, Mama. I'll die if Papa won't consent. I
will
marry him, Mama!' she said imperiously.

And so she had, eloping on her twenty-first birthday, and ruining her life. But, ah, she remembered the turbulence of that passion!

Becoming for a little while that twenty-year-old Belle Jackaman, Mrs Moy touched Cushie's hair tenderly, saying, ‘You must be educated and taught to be a lady. Your grandfather is a wealthy man, and some day you too may be required to take your place in society, so you must become accustomed to the company of young ladies of your own class.'

‘I want to stay home,' snuffled Cushie. ‘I like it here!'

‘If by here you mean this village, this repository of clods and peasants,' said her mother, ‘you are well out of it; and before you're six months older you'll thank me for sending you away.'