Cal, p.6
Cal, page 6
‘That’s an old trick of my father’s.’
She smiled and moved the toe of the boot on the pivot of her heel. Cal explained to her how the second wedge opened the crack further until the first one dropped out.
‘It’s a bit like “Give me a big enough lever and I’ll move the world”. Give me a big enough wedge and I’ll split it.’
She laughed. ‘That’s nice,’ she said. Her teeth were very white. The child began to tug at her skirt, wanting to go. ‘Just a minute, love.’
Cal was sweating from his exertion and his shirt was open to the waist showing his lean, hairless chest. He began to close it. She said.
‘That was my first week back at work. Everything went wrong. I felt that day that the world was out to get me. And then you arrived to help.’
‘The Girl Guides awarded me a gold star.’
The child continued to tug at her mother’s skirt and she had begun to whinge. Marcella hadn’t heard his joke or else she didn’t think it funny. Her face was serious.
‘I must go. All right, all right, Lucy, we’re going now.’ She turned away. ‘Good to see you,’ she said.
Cal watched them stepping through the pocked mud until they disappeared behind the barn. He swung his sledge high over his head and brought it sweeping down. He missed the wedge completely and left what looked like a hoof mark in the white rings of wood. He stopped for a cigarette, fearing that he might fracture his leg if he went on. He sat on the tail-board of the van with his feet on the ground. The match flared and he spun it away from him, hearing it whirr and hiss into a puddle.
In the distance on the main road he watched the box shape of a police Land Rover moving between the hedges. He tensed every time he saw one. It turned into the Mortons’ lane and Cal stood up. It came lurching up the lane towards the house. No one could know he was here. But maybe the old woman had phoned them. Could somebody have recognized him? He set the burning cigarette on the tailboard and moved just out of sight behind the gable-end. He heard the Land Rover stop, heard voices. They were calm voices, laughing. Cal moved back to his cigarette. One R.U.C. man was standing at the door. He wore a canvas-green bullet-proof bib over his black uniform. In the Land Rover Cal could just make out another policeman behind the heavy wire grille on the windscreen. A sickle of light showed the shiny peak of his black cap. Cal felt he was being stared at. He took a drag of his cigarette and set it down again, then swung the hammer, driving in another wedge. He heard Mrs Morton open the door. The voices faded and the door closed. Cal worked on, feeling the eyes of the other R.U.C. man on his neck. He moved out of sight round the gable-end and began stacking the wood. If Mrs Morton’s son had been in the R.U.C. Reserve it was perfectly natural for them to call. A message, business, or maybe a friend of her son’s.
The wood pile was almost complete when he heard voices again. The Land Rover started up and Mrs Morton waved as they drove away. Cal went over to her.
‘I’m nearly finished now.’
‘That’s good. Let me see.’
She came round with him to inspect the job.
‘Very neat,’ she said, ‘How long will it take to dry?’
‘You could leave it a week or so. The tree’s been dead for over a year so really you could use it any time.’
‘Come and I’ll get you your money.’
Cal followed her to the door of the house and hesitated.
‘Would you like a beer?’ she said over her shoulder. Cal nodded. ‘Well, come in then.’
‘My boots are filthy.’ He took them off and left them in the porch. There were no holes in his socks but the heels had gone as thin as muslin. He followed her into the large kitchen and sat down on a stool at the table. She took a can of beer from a cupboard and jerked the ring-pull. She was looking around for a glass.
‘It’ll do in the can,’ said Cal.
But she insisted on pouring it shakily into a glass. The glass was clean but not clean enough. The beer appeared flat and bubbled like lemonade, forming no head. Even so, Cal was glad of it.
‘Do you do this all the time?’ she asked.
‘What?’
‘Work at the blocks?’
‘No, my Dad bought a tree and I’m just helping him out. I’m on the dole.’
‘Like plenty of others.’
To the right of the cooker was a tea-caddy with a picture of the Queen on its side. Mrs Morton took a wallet from her bag and began counting out the money in uncreased notes. She made a fan and handed it to him. Again he noticed the shake in her hand – like a slow shudder – as she reached the money to him.
‘We’ll be lifting potatoes the day after next if you’d like to come along. The money’s not great but it’s better than nothing.’
‘Thanks,’ he said, taking the money. She had given him a fiver extra for the work he’d done. It was not enough but it was not so little that he felt he could complain while drinking her beer.
‘Well?’
‘Yes, that would be O.K.’
‘We start at eight.’
‘There’ll be no complications about the dole or anything?’
‘I shouldn’t think so. That part of it is up to you.’ She stood with her arms folded, waiting for him to finish his beer.
‘A lorry will pick everybody up at half-past seven at the post office corner if you’re interested.’
Cal said he was and stood up to drain his glass. Mrs Morton was seeing him out in the hallway when he heard a terrible bout of coughing coming from the room opposite. Immediately Mrs Morton left him standing and went into the room. With the door open Cal could hear the coughing even more clearly. It sounded wet and bubbling – like death throes – and it went hacking on and on and on, taking no pause for breath. Cal stared at his stockinged feet and felt his gorge rise. Mrs Morton’s voice comforted around the awful noise. It seemed that the person must die or turn inside out if the fit did not stop. He tried to block off his sense of hearing by staring intensely at the wall. They had put on a new wallpaper of blue flowers. He thought of going out himself to get away from the sound, then it stopped. Mrs Morton’s voice was left consoling and crooning on its own. Then she said.
‘I’ll be right back.’
She appeared in the doorway to finish leaving Cal out.
‘My husband was badly injured that time. One got him in the larynx and the other here in the lungs.’ She pointed to her chest and neck to indicate precisely where. She spoke to Cal as if he knew all about it and he found that unnerving. He nodded sympathetically, pausing long enough to put on his boots but not to tie them, and left. By the time he reached the tailboard of the van the laces were gritty with mud and soaking wet. Tying them up left black welts all over his hands.
It was a cold grey morning and Cal nodded sleepily as he joined the others at the post office corner. Some were of his own age but the majority were boys and girls taking the day off school to make some money. In his time Cal himself had done the same thing. Everyone was dressed in shabby clothes and wore wellington boots. There was an air of jokiness and high spirits as they stood on the back of the lorry driving out to the farm. Cal’s hair blew straight out in the wind and some of the younger ones laughed at the sight. Suddenly a police Land Rover with its hee-haw siren blaring swung into the main road behind them with a squeal of tyres. It roared along and overtook them so fast its body tilted at an angle to the chassis.
Someone said, ‘Jesus, they’ll sell no ice-cream going at that speed.’
But as the day wore on the laughter died. A fine drizzle of rain came on, turning the ground from soil to muck. It clogged behind Cal’s guitar nails and continually he had to sweep his wet hair back with his dirty hands so that it and his forehead became dirty too. After a time his fingers became like sausages with the cold. The tractor, driven by Cyril Dunlop, came round, wheeling up the soil and potatoes with an inevitability which he hated. The only colour in the landscape was the red and blue of the plastic baskets they were collecting into. Everything else was the drab hue of potatoes, from their clothes to the field itself with its withered buff potato tops lying flat on the ground. Occasionally he would come across a potato split by the tractor and its whiteness and cleanness was a relief to the eye.
It was a humped field and beyond and above stood the Morton farmhouse. As lunchtime neared the potato gatherers looked up at it more frequently. It seemed that Cyril would never call a halt, but finally he did, by stopping the tractor and whistling with two clean, dry fingers.
Mrs Morton fed them all in the large kitchen with newspapers covering the floor. Cabbage and bacon and mashed potatoes moistened with bacon gravy. In the field there was no pleasure in smoking, his hands were in such a state, and after eating Cal smoked three cigarettes, lighting them from one another. He sat on a stool, his back aching, and it seemed like only five minutes before Cyril called on them to start again. Everyone groaned and protested.
The afternoon crawled through the slow drizzle. Cal found that his mind was going blank for long periods with the repetitiveness of the work, and when he became aware of this he enjoyed it in retrospect. It was not often these days that he could remain switched off for any length of time.
For three days, although he ended up each day physically filthy, work had a cleansing effect on him. It was as if idleness had allowed dirt to accumulate on his soul, to clog his mind, and work moved him through it untouched. At night after a bath he watched in the mirror the progress of his bruises and saw them turn from blue-black to a jaundiced yellow. His plectrum nails were broken and filled with mud. They looked disgusting and he decided to cut them. They fell in black crescent moons on the coverlet and afterwards he gathered up the five of them and threw them out of the window. With the money he earned he could buy finger picks. To be able to keep long nails was one of the few advantages of being unemployed. Work made him tired at night so that he slept immediately he lay down.
And although the work of potato gathering was mindless he liked to be praised. Once or twice over the three days Cyril would shout as he drove past on the tractor.
‘You’re doing a grand job, son.’
Twice a day a big kettle of tea was brought to the field, bouncing on the back of a trailer, and they sat on sacks by the wet ditch, drinking from white enamel cups. Cal talked to Cyril over the tea breaks and found him affable enough for an Orangeman. Then when the job was finished and Mrs Morton was paying them from the big table in the kitchen she asked Cal to wait behind. Saying that they were still short-handed, she offered him a job on the farm.
‘But no dole, if you please.’ She adjusted her glasses by the wing-tip with her shaking finger and thumb. ‘See Cyril Dunlop, my foreman, and he’ll tell you what to do. Can you start on Monday?’
Although he had not thought of it, Cal knew it was what he had been waiting for and accepted immediately.
Three
On Friday afternoon the lorry dropped him at the safer end of the street and he walked the rest, head down, tensed against the cold. He had to wait until after tea for the water to heat sufficiently for a bath. They had finished early and he was in long before his father. When Shamie came through the door Cal had the dinner ready to serve and was singing in the kitchen, drumming on the draining board with two pliable knives. He wanted to keep the good news of his job until they were sitting eating. It would be something to talk about. A children’s programme was turned low as they waited for the news. When they sat down at the table Cal said,
‘I got offered a job.’
‘Good man yourself.’ Shamie clapped him on the shoulder, the only part of Cal he could reach from where he sat. ‘Doing what?’
‘Morton’s farm. Where the potato picking was.’
‘What’s the money like?’
‘I don’t know. But it’s bound to be better than the dole.’
‘Cheers anyway,’ said his father, raising his cup of milk to him. ‘Oh, big Crilly says you’ve to call down after tea.’
Cal paused in the toast. Would that bastard never leave him alone? The mashed potato in his mouth turned to cotton wool and he found difficulty in swallowing it. The news came on. As Shamie stood and bent to turn up the sound Cal lifted his plate and carried it into the kitchen. He scraped the food into the pedal-bin, listening to the calm voice of the news reader giving the headlines of the day’s events. Two hooded bodies had been found on the outskirts of Belfast; bombs had gone off in Strabane and Derry and Newry but no one had been hurt; there was another rise in coal prices; and finally there was the elephant in Belle Vue Zoo that had to have his teeth filed.
‘I’m going to have a bath,’ said Cal. Shamie did not raise his eyes from the screen.
Feeling clean on the outside, with his hair held back in a tail by an elastic band. Cal drove the van to Crilly’s place. Crilly himself came to the door chewing and put him in the front room, switching on one bar of the electric fire. He said he would be with him in a minute. Cal sat slumped in an armchair, looking round him. The muted waves of unreal laughter from some show on the television rose and fell in the next room. There was a picture on the wall of a ragged child with one glistening teardrop standing on his dirty cheek. Beside it was a plaque of wood and burned into it with a needle were the words MADE IN LONG KESH CONCENTRATION CAMP. It had a badly drawn clenched fist surrounded by barbed wire and the words IRELAND UNFREE SHALL NEVER BE AT PEACE.
There was a brass picture hammered out in some way so that the words and the figure were raised up from its surface. The figure was of an old woman sitting sideways wearing a bonnet and beneath her was a poem called ‘A Mother’. It told of all the good things a mother ever did and ended with the line ‘The only bad thing she ever does is to die and leave you’. Cal thought of Crilly’s mother with her sagging breasts and her tight pink jumper the colour of her gums. He thought of his own mother and had to turn away and look at something else. He saw himself in a mirror above the fireplace. The edges of the mirror were laced with red and yellow roses. He turned his lip up in a sneer.
Crilly came in with a cup of tea and a slice of bread and jam. He sat down opposite Cal, folded the bread over and bit a half moon out of it. There were ticks of jam at the corners of his mouth. His voice was muffled with bread.
‘Well?’ he said.
‘Well what?’
‘Are you ready for tonight?’
‘What are we doing?’
‘You’re driving, that’s what. An off-licence in Magherafelt.’
‘Guns?’
‘Protection.’
Crilly finished his bread and jam and threw the hard crust into the empty fire-grate.
‘Don’t worry. Cal. It’ll be easy.’
‘What about a car?’
‘I think I’ve that arranged. You like the Cortinas?’
Cal nodded.
‘But there’s no need to rush. The later we leave it the more takings there’ll be.’
The door opened and Crilly’s mother put her head in. There was something different about her.
‘You never asked Cal if he wanted any tea,’ she said to her son.
‘No thanks, I’m just after some,’ said Cal.
Mrs Crilly came right into the room and did a twirl in the middle of the floor, holding out her dress like a model.
‘Do you like my new teeth?’ she said. Then she smiled as if she was biting through steel. Cal said he thought they were lovely while her son sat and rolled his eyes to the ceiling.
At nine o’clock Crilly and Cal went out. Cal drove the van to an address at the other end of town. He stood with his back to the pebble-dash wall to one side of the door while Crilly rang the bell.
‘Is your Dad in?’
Crilly turned and winked at Cal. A man’s voice said.
‘Oh, it’s you, a chara.’
There was a jingle of keys and Cal saw a hand pass them out.
‘Remember you didn’t notice it gone until after eleven.’
‘O.K.’
‘If you do I’ll break your legs, and if I don’t somebody else will.’
The man laughed and Crilly smiled at him.
When the door was shut Cal moved down the path and got into the van. Crilly led in the white Cortina. Just outside Magherafelt Crilly indicated and turned off the road into a forestry plantation. The trees were black in the red brake lights. Crilly got out and began counting trees, then dodged in between the saplings. Leaning against the white car. Cal lit a cigarette. He held it between his lips as he pulled on a pair of thin leather gloves. His hands were shaking. He could hear the sound of Crilly thrashing and crackling about among the trees. Then he came out with a parcel. Cal slid behind the steering wheel of the Cortina and Crilly got in the other side.
‘One for you and one for me,’ he said.
‘I don’t want one,’ said Cal. ‘I’m driving.’
Crilly loaded his gun by the light coming from the open glove compartment. Cal pushed his aching back into the upholstery and adjusted his seat to suit his leg length.
‘Do you wear stilts when you’re driving?’ he asked.
‘I’ll load yours just in case.’
‘I’d only shoot myself.’
Crilly was wearing stylish driving gloves with holes in the backs of them. Cal wheeled the car round, the headlights probing deep into the dry brown forest floor. On the road there was no talk between them but Crilly hummed and clicked his tongue. Cal felt like screaming at him to stop it. He tried the car out for speed and handling and it responded well. As they drove towards Magherafelt he said.
‘For Christ’s sake. Crilly, don’t use that thing.’
‘It persuades people to hurry up.’
To get to the off-licence they did not need to pass through the security gates which blocked off the town centre. Cal parked on the opposite side of the road and they sat watching. A customer came out carrying a polythene bag in both arms. They could not tell whether the shop was empty or not because of its frosted-glass door.
‘Do you know what it’s like inside?’ Cal asked.
‘I’ve been in twice this week.’
