The Northern Clemency

‘I knew there wouldn’t be anywhere,’ John Ball said.

‘Good job you said so, then,’ Keith said. They were sitting disconsolately on the wall outside the house in Sheffield. It was a quarter to eight in the morning. They’d woken up an hour earlier, and Keith had been sent out on a recce for a caff. They’d looked the night before and seen nothing but, as Mr Jolly said, they’d been tired, they’d not looked everywhere. It was hopeless. The house was in a new development in the middle of one suburb after another, not the sort of place where anyone would think of opening a nice caff. Keith had come back shrugging. ‘No joy,’ he said.

‘I knew there wouldn’t be anywhere,’ John Ball said, ‘as soon as I saw where they were moving from. I knew the sort of place they’d be moving to. No caffs, you see.’

‘All right,’ Mr Jolly said. ‘You underestimate your uncle Bill. Get out the emergency supplies, John. You’ll find a Primus stove stowed under the cabin—’

‘That’s not safe—’

‘I dare say, but there it is, and you’ll find some bacon and eggs and a tin of milk too.’

‘How long’s that been there?’

‘Not long enough for you to worry about. So there you are – bacon and eggs and a cup of tea. Get going.’

Mr Jolly lit a cigarette and watched, with satisfaction, the preparations for his pavement breakfast. In a moment John Ball came back, Primus in hand. Behind him, Keith balanced bacon and eggs, a packet of tea and a tin of condensed milk. ‘Where’s the frying pan, Bill?’ he said.

‘Same place,’ Mr Jolly said, an awful doubt rising. ‘Along with the kettle.’

‘There’s no kettle,’ John Ball said. ‘And no frying pan.’

‘We could—’ Keith gestured towards the van.

‘We could what?’ Mr Jolly said.

‘I know where the kitchen box is,’ Keith said. ‘We loaded it last. It’s at the back of the van.’

‘No, Keith,’ Mr Jolly said, and John Ball shook his head in something like sorrow.

Everything seemed confusing in the Glovers’ house. Nobody woke Timothy. He got up on his own, washed his face, dressed himself. Downstairs people were talking, quietly. When he came into the dining room for breakfast, nothing was being made ready. His mother and sister were sitting at the table, without even a cloth on it, both dressed, his brother standing looking out of the window. His sister had her hand on his mother’s. That frightened him a little bit. Then he remembered about his dad.

‘I phoned the police,’ his mother said, as he came in. She seemed to be talking to someone else, not to Timothy. ‘They said they can’t do anything until he’s been gone twenty-four hours at least.’

‘Where is he?’ Timothy said.

‘We don’t know,’ Daniel said, not turning from the window. Outside, there was a van; there was some activity.

‘Daniel,’ his mother said. Timothy knew, really, that his father had gone and no one knew where. He was just being silly.

‘Look at that,’ Daniel said. ‘That’s amazing.’

‘What are you looking at?’ his mother said. ‘Oh, the new people. I’m not—’

‘No,’ Daniel said. ‘Come here.’

As if humouring him, his mother got up and went to the window, followed by Jane. They stood for a moment, watching.

‘Good heavens,’ his mother said.

‘I know,’ Daniel said. ‘That’s so strange.’

The van was in the early stages of unloading: the men had taken out the first of the furniture, some tea-chests, and left them on the pavement. They must have been waiting for someone with a key. There, on the pavement opposite, was the Glovers’ unit. It was exactly the Glovers’ unit, and Timothy did what they all probably wanted to do: he ran out into the hall and made sure that the unit, their unit, was still in the sitting room. It was. He came back into the dining room.

‘That’s extraordinary,’ Katherine said lightly.

‘What is?’ Jane said. ‘What are you all looking at?’

‘That,’ Katherine said. ‘The unit?’

‘What about it?’ Jane said.

Daniel stared at her, astonished, but she seemed genuinely baffled. ‘It’s the same as the one we’ve got,’ he said.

‘Oh,’ Jane said. ‘Oh, yes. I suppose it is quite similar.’

‘It’s exactly the same,’ Katherine said. ‘I hope they take it in soon. I don’t want everyone in the street thinking…’ She tailed off.

Timothy liked the thought of all your furniture outside, arranged, exactly as it was in the house, on a lawn, or maybe on the pavement. ‘Can’t we move?’ he said.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Katherine said. ‘We’re hardly going to move just because the new people over the road have the same unit we have. Did you think Cole Brothers had made it just for us?’

‘No,’ Timothy said. ‘I meant—’ He didn’t know what he meant, and then he remembered he hadn’t said hello to Geoffrey that morning. There didn’t seem to be any breakfast.

He went upstairs cheerfully. His father hadn’t come home, but he expected there was a good reason for that. And maybe later that day the police would come, in a car with the lights flashing on top, and maybe they’d take him for a ride, so that would be OK. He went into his room and shut the door. When you came in, there was a bit of a fishy smell. The books hadn’t said. He supposed his mother would find out about Geoffrey soon, though it had been three days now without discovery. Timothy knelt down, and pulled a square, flat glass container from underneath his bed. Geoffrey raised his head and, looking straight at Timothy, flickered his tongue happily. ‘Sssss,’ Timothy said, though of course Geoffrey hadn’t made a noise and wouldn’t. Timothy knew that Geoffrey, flickering his tongue, was sniffing, tasting the air to see what was around, but he liked to think it was a friendly gesture. Geoffrey liked Timothy, Timothy knew that, and Timothy certainly liked Geoffrey. To buy Geoffrey, the glass container and the small objects in it, Timothy had saved all of his pocket money for three years, two months and one week, ever since he had first started being interested in snakes.

But Geoffrey ought to see the world, Timothy thought. He reached into the case, and took Geoffrey out, one hand by his neck, the other holding his tail. He didn’t put him round his own neck, of course. He had once seen a picture in the newspaper of a lady doing that, a lady with not many clothes on. The snake had been a yellow python, and gazed out of the picture with an expression of great sadness. That was an awful thing to do to a snake. So Timothy just carried Geoffrey out, very gently, opening the door with his elbow, and into Jane’s bedroom, to show him the interesting spectacle of a van being unloaded.

Outside, the men had stopped. They were talking to each other surreptitiously, out of the corners of their mouths. Always in this sort of place, you attracted an audience once you started work. Actually, wherever you were, you got one. It was just that when the house got to a certain size, cost a certain amount, once you got to houses with gardens and trees planted in the street, the audience stayed inside. It didn’t gawp on the street, not even the kids. The most they’d do was come out into the garden, pretend to be pruning. It wasn’t you they were watching, it was the chance, which might be the only one, to have a really good look at what the newcomers had got in the way of furniture.

‘Enjoying it?’ John Ball muttered to Keith, as they carried a sofa out, one at each end.

‘Oh, yeah,’ Keith said. ‘I’m loving it.’

‘Not you,’ John Ball said. ‘I meant them. I hope they’re enjoying it. Look at them.’

And, indeed, there was quite a lot of discreet attention. At the kitchen window next door, a lady in a housecoat was doing the washing up very slowly. A woman who had walked up the road with a chocolate Labrador ten minutes before was now walking back again on the other side of the road; you could see the dog hadn’t expected that, and was looking up at his mistress with a baffled expression. And directly over the road, hardly concealing themselves, a woman and two kids were at the downstairs window, really staring, and upstairs in the same house—

‘What’s that kid got?’ Mr Jolly said.

‘What kid?’ John Ball said.

‘The kid in the house over the road, the one in the upstairs window. He’s holding – it looks like—’

‘Christ,’ Keith said. He was thinking of the girl who’d ridden with them in the van, the way she’d stood in the upstairs window of the house and flashed her little titties at him. He looked back at the kid, and this was, in a way, even more strange. ‘He’s got a snake.’

‘Do you think they know where they’re moving to?’ John Ball said.

‘Give me Streatham, any day of the week,’ Mr Jolly said. ‘Look at them, all of them staring, and not one of them, it wouldn’t occur to one of them to come out and say, for instance, “Oh, I can see you’re hard at work already, I don’t suppose you’d like a cup of coffee to start the day with,” or – the least you could expect – an offer to let you fill your kettle at their kitchen tap. Makes you sick.’

‘We haven’t got a kettle,’ Keith said.

‘They don’t know that,’ Mr Jolly said, shaking his head as he carried on unloading. The pavement was thoroughly blocked with all these possessions; they’d better come soon.

‘You’ve got the coffee-table,’ Keith said, as Mr Jolly put it down on the pavement, just next to the sofa.

‘So we have,’ Mr Jolly said. ‘Cheeky sod. Right. I’m going over there.’

John Ball and Keith put themselves down on the sofa, just as if they’d been hard at it for hours. Mr Jolly, in a good humour, fetched three chipped old mugs from the cab of the lorry, walked up the driveway of the house opposite. The kid in the window upstairs with the snake – it was definitely a snake, there was no doubting that – he drew back into the bedroom with a look of alarm on his face. Maybe the snake wasn’t supposed to come out of its cage; maybe he wasn’t allowed to play with the thing before school. He rang the doorbell.

There was a confused noise inside. People talking, their voices raised and muted at the same time. It was a couple of minutes before anyone came to the door. It was a woman; she was dressed – that hadn’t been the delay, then – but her hair was unkempt. She held the door half open, looking at Mr Jolly with her mouth tense. She might have been expecting him, someone like him; she looked as if she was expecting something bad to happen to her, the next time she opened the front door. She said nothing.

‘I’m sorry to trouble you, madam,’ Mr Jolly. ‘This is a bit cheeky, like, but…’ He explained their predicament. She listened to the end; he grew less and less hopeful of success as he went on, she looked so unencouraging.

But then she surprised him by saying, ‘Yes, of course,’ and then ‘It’s awful to have to start work without a hot drink in the morning,’ and ‘No, I don’t know where you’d find somewhere to serve you breakfast, not without going right down into, I don’t know, Crosspool,’ a name that meant nothing to him.

‘Thanks very much,’ he said, handing over the mugs but not inviting himself in.

‘Who’s that, then?’ A girl’s voice came from the back of the house. ‘It’s not—’

‘No, it’s not,’ the woman said. ‘It’s nobody.’

Mr Jolly overlooked this rudeness, put it down to some kind of distraction as she carried the mugs away, almost at arm’s length. She left the front door open and Mr Jolly standing there.

‘It’s all with milk and two sugars,’ he said, calling into the kitchen where she’d gone, having forgotten to ask him any of this.

‘Sorry, what did you say?’ she said, coming out again, the mugs still in her hand.

‘Milk and two sugars,’ he said. ‘If it’s no trouble.’

‘It’s only instant,’ she said.

‘That’ll be perfect,’ he said, not having expected any other kind.

The conversation was not closed, but he felt foolish standing there. The other two sat on the other side of the road, talking with amusement to each other, watching his suspended embarrassment. Mr Jolly settled for a performance of head-scratching, whistling, inspecting his watch and looking up and down the road in an exaggerated way. He bent down and ran his second and third finger underneath a flower, a fat yellow familiar one, without picking it.

‘Don’t do that,’ a boy said, standing at the open door. It was the boy who’d been watching them from the upstairs window, a snake round his neck. The snake had been disposed of. Made you shiver to think of it. ‘That’s my dad’s flowers.’

‘I was just looking,’ Mr Jolly said. He was no good with children, having none; his sister neither, never wanted them, not that they couldn’t have had them, him and his wife. ‘I wasn’t going to pick.’

‘Just because he’s not here,’ the boy said.

‘Gone to work, has he?’ Mr Jolly said heartily. ‘Me too. We’re moving your new neighbours in, over the road, there. That’ll be nice for you, won’t it? Having new…’ He trailed away. The boy was looking at him, a horrified gaze.

‘That’s right,’ he said, raising his voice. ‘He’s gone to work, definitely.’

‘Good,’ Mr Jolly said. ‘Make a nice early start. I saw you, just then with – you know, your friend—’

‘What friend?’

‘Your special friend, the yellow one,’ Mr Jolly said. ‘At least he looked yellow from where I was standing. You know –’ he made a face ‘– sssssss.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ the boy said. ‘I wouldn’t tell anyone else what you thought you saw only they might think you were mental or something. You wouldn’t want that, so don’t mention it to anyone, what you saw.’

‘Here you are,’ the woman said, bringing out the three mugs, now filled with coffee, on a shamingly clean tray. Amazingly, she’d only gone and put some biscuits on a plate as well. ‘I do hope my son isn’t bothering you.’

‘Thank you very much,’ Mr Jolly said, now rather baffled, and with the door closing firmly, he walked steadily back, balancing the tray carefully.

‘That’s the ticket,’ John Ball said comfortably. ‘Use your charm, did you?’

‘They’re all bonkers round here,’ Mr Jolly said, relieving his feelings a little. ‘Fit for the hatch, they are.’

‘Biscuits, too,’ Keith said. ‘You should have tried for bacon and eggs.’

‘That’s enough,’ Mr Jolly said. ‘And take your hands off those. This fucking job—’

‘That girl, rode with us—’ John Ball said.

‘Mental,’ Mr Jolly said.

‘Glad to get shot of her,’ Keith said.

‘Mental,’ John Ball agreed.

It had been a long night for the Sellerses. They had stayed not in the funded luxury of the Hallam Towers Hotel but in a small family hotel; since the week in the summer, looking for a house, the Electric had ordered a cut-back. Alice had found the Sandown, and apologized for it as soon as they had rolled up there, the night before. She ought to have known. The advertisement, found in a hotel guide, had used an illustration, not a photograph, and a highly fanciful one; you couldn’t have assumed that the hotel in reality would have had a horse-drawn carriage with a jolly coachman drawn up outside, but the false impression of window-boxes and carriage lamps at the door surely went further than excusable exaggeration. But there were few hotels in Sheffield, and it was only for one night; the front door already locked at eight, opened up to them by a fat man in cardigan and slippers, masticating sourly on slowly revolving bread and cheese, the slight marshy suck of the orange-and-black carpet underfoot, and the forty-watt lightbulbs casting their yellowish light over a long-term resident peeling the pages of an ancient Punch in the lobby.

There was naturally no food to be had, and only a shrug when, their bags deposited, Alice asked after nearby restaurants. Still, they found one and, thank Heavens, it had what to the children evidently seemed some quality of fun; an American-style restaurant with flags on the wall and drinks called Fudpucker; they were alone in the restaurant, but it would do to perk up the spirits. Alice wouldn’t say anything about what they had left, she wouldn’t.

It was a restless night. The hotel had once been three Edwardian semis, now joined together, the gap between the second and third filled with dismal grey prefabricated corridors, and the original rooms split with partitions. There seemed to be few people staying, but, perhaps to save the legs of the chambermaids, all of them were apparently squeezed into the same corner of the hotel. Bernie undressed and, without seeming to pause to think about it, pulled out his red pyjamas from the overnight bag, put them on. It was an agreed signal, undisguised, what he did with them at this point; it was kind of him to know how tired she would be, to remember that there could be better reassurances between them on this hard night than sex.

‘Goodnight, love,’ Bernie said, and as he got into bed, swinging his legs up under the cheese-smelling pink candlewick bedspread, rolling into the same central hollow in the mattress she had fallen into, he gripped her hand and kissed her and groaned and laughed all at the same time. She smelt his warmth; and, as ever, even at the end of the day, the warm smell of his body was a sweet one, like toffee. Always had been.

She was reassured for a moment, could have found the hotel and Sheffield funny as Bernie meant her to, but then, through the wall, there came an ugly noise: a human voice, groaning. It was horribly clear.

‘What’s that?’ Alice said.

‘It’s from next door,’ Bernie said, whispering.

‘It’s not the kids, is it?’ Alice said.

‘No, they’re the other side,’ Bernie said. ‘It’s—’ But then the noise resumed, and some kind of wet slapping noise, too; a single voice giving in to a single pleasure, and Alice clenched her jaw and tried not to think of it, tried not to hear it. It went on, the noise, in a way impossible to laugh about. Bernie coughed, sharply, a cough meant to be heard through the partition. But the noise continued, the animal noise of slap and groan, a middle-aged man – it was impossible not to visualise the scene – doing things to himself in the light of a forty-watt bulb, and not much caring whether anyone heard him through the walls or not.

Presently it stopped and, as best she could, Alice unclenched herself. Bernie was tense, pretending to sleep. It was better than trying to find anything to say. The sound of heavy feet padding around the room next door, clearing up – good God, clearing what up? – was concluded with the sharp click of the light switch and, in a startlingly short stretch of time, with the gross rumble of a fat man snoring. Alice lay there against Bernie’s slowly relaxing body, counting up to five hundred, over and over.

In the morning, they dressed and were about to leave the room when she heard the door of their wanking neighbour open and shut.

‘Hang on a second,’ she said to Bernie. ‘I just want to brush my hair before we go down.’

‘You’ve just brushed it,’ he said.

‘I want to brush it again,’ she said. She picked up the brush, and in front of the tiny wonky mirror she brushed her hair again, thirty times, until it was charged with static and flying outwards, until the man, whoever he was, was downstairs and anonymous. But all the same, when the children had been collected and they were all sitting round the table in the ‘breakfast room’, she could not help letting her eye run round the room. Everyone else there was a man on his own, each at his little table, in various positions of respectability, and the four of them talked in near-whispers. It could have been any of them; she rather wanted to know now, to exclude the innocent others.

‘Well,’ Sandra surprisingly said, when they were decanted into the green Simca, the hotel bill grumpily paid, ‘I don’t think we’ll be staying there again.’

‘Well, of course we won’t,’ Bernie said, turning his head. ‘We won’t ever need to.’

‘That’s not really—’ Sandra began.

‘I think the Hallam Towers was a better hotel,’ Francis said. ‘From the point of view of quality.’

‘Yes, of course it’s a better hotel,’ Bernie said. ‘I’m under no illusions there.’

‘If anyone asked you,’ Francis said, ‘Mummy, if anyone asked you to recommend a hotel to stay in in Sheffield—’

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake,’ Alice said, her temper now breaking out for the first time, ‘let’s just shut up about it, and never think about the bloody place ever again. I don’t know why we’ve always got to discuss everything.’

‘Your mother’s quite right,’ Bernie said. ‘Give it a rest, Francis.’ He smiled, amused and released from some of the tension of Alice’s bravely kept-up face.

‘You said “bloody”,’ Sandra said, gleeful and mincing.

‘I know,’ Alice said. ‘It was a bloody hotel. It’s the only word for it.’

‘Bloody awful,’ Bernie said. ‘Bloody awful hotel,’ he went on. ‘Arsehole of the world’s hotels.’

‘That hotel,’ Francis began, ‘was really the most—’

‘That’ll do,’ Alice said. ‘We all agree.’

The thing was that Bernie had taught her to swear, and he liked it, sometimes, when she did. She wasn’t much good at it, she knew that. But she’d grown up in a house where you earned a punishment for saying ‘rotten’; anything much stronger she’d never heard, or heard and never understood. Bernie and his family, they swore; swore at Churchill on the radio (‘Pissed old bugger’), at the neighbours (‘Stupid old bastard’), at any inconvenience or none, at each other, at inanimate objects and, strangest of all, affectionately. His mother, his aunts, even; and she’d tried to join in, but she couldn’t really get it, couldn’t do it; she couldn’t get the rhythm right somehow, couldn’t put the words together right, and it obviously became a subject of fond amusement among the whole clan of them when Bernie’s shy fiancée hesitantly described the Northern Line as a bollocks, whatever bollocks might mean.

It was a fine day. As they drove up the long hill towards their new house, a constant steady incline, three miles long, Bernie hummed; she had sworn and made him cheerful again. For some reason, it was nine o’clock by the time they turned into the road. ‘Here we are,’ Bernie said. ‘There’s the van. Christ, look!’ and, to their surprise, by the removal van, outside one of the houses, on the driveway and spilling out on to the pavement, was most of their furniture. It took a moment to recognize that that was what it was. In the sunshine, it looked so different, arranged in random and undomestic ways, like the sad back lot of a junk shop. The sofa against the dining-table, the dining-chairs against Francis’s bedroom bookshelf, one of the pictures, the pretty eighteenth-century princess hugging a cat, with no wall to be hung on, leaning against a unit. Their beds, too, stripped of sheets and mattresses like the beds of the dead, laid open to the public gaze, shamefully. Their possessions; they seemed at once many and sadly inadequate to fill a house. In the old place, they had stood where they stood for so long that you stopped seeing them. But on the lawn, in the driveway, under the sun, laid out as if for purchasers, you saw it all again. Some of it was nice.

‘There’s the men,’ Bernie said. ‘Well, they’ve made a start, at any rate.’

‘They might have waited,’ Alice said.

‘Look, Sandra,’ Francis said. ‘There’s the men.’

‘I know,’ Sandra said, angrily. The car stopped: they got out.

‘Morning,’ the foreman said.

From his bedroom window, Timothy watched the family get out. There were four of them. He had taken Geoffrey out of his case again, to let him watch the excitement. The father got out of the little turquoise car, like a box, and stretched his shoulders back. Timothy imitated him. And there was a mother too, holding her handbag tightly, a sweet nervous expression. The boy was tall, taller than his mother though Timothy thought someone had said that he and the boy were the same age. Timothy hated him already.

But he was really looking at the girl by now. He had no interest in the others. She stood there in a cloud of frizzed hair, and yawned. As she pulled her arms upwards, her wrist in the other hand’s grip, her T-shirt popped loose of her waistband, pulled tightly against her chest. Even yawning she was lovely; even from here her beauty was defined. ‘Venus,’ Timothy said to himself, and found he was stroking along his snake’s back, pointing Geoffrey’s head towards the lovely girl. The removers had seen him when he had stood here. But the girl did not seem to see him, to pay any attention to him. He wondered why not. He promised himself something about this sight; he knew it was important; he promised himself he would never forget it. He had heard of people seeing each other, and knowing immediately that was the person they were to marry. He filed it away.