Making Connections

FINN

FAT LADY’S SONGS

It’s a button pick! Large buttons, everybody!

Hell! Snipping all those little stalks! Grading! Couldn’t do ten baskets an hour now. Fiddling about with damn little piddling mushrooms! All thumbs and pesky rubber gloves! The old man scratched his nose with one truculent finger and dumped his bucket, and rack filled with boxes, by the wall at the far end of the row. He was also at the far end of the shed. There was less and less light, like a tunnel. Bloody moles!

He stood in a space barely two feet wide, perhaps twenty feet long. Above him on either side reared stacks of wooden trestles like dining tables with sawed down legs, piled on top of each other to a height of perhaps eleven feet. Mushrooms swarmed over every one of them:--the buttons, clumped like arthritic fists, the big ones, huddled in their coolie hats, and the smooth, white, best cups that reminded him of smug little nuns.

Twenty-four trestles to a row. Thirty rows to a shed. Stalag bloody mushroom!

Radio One blared out suddenly, further up the shed. . . . of Sutton Coldfield! And . . here’s a wacky one for you!, the DJ’s voice effused in triumph. Somebody’s offering a vasectomy as a raffle prize, folks! Can you believe that? Worth all of three hundred pounds. Well, better than a bouncing seven and a half, I’d say! Keep the calls coming. Aaaand . . . his voice dropped cosily, stay on the . . er . . ball! He chortled. "Don’t go away now! And as I . . . er . . . peter out . . . Music thrummed up. Any more wacky stories and we want to know. The beat pounded. Back soon." A splatter of drums finally knocked him into oblivion.

The old man ground his teeth and spat in the direction of a crushed bit of mushroom on the concrete floor. Missed! He clambered his way up to the top trestle, his feet braced evenly between the two rows pot-holer fashion, hooked his bucket and his boxes’ rack over the side of the upper bed, and sneezed. Bloody spores! He picked up his knife and reached for a cluster of buttons. Stalks pelted into the bucket, mushrooms lobbed into a box with the casual ease of habit.

Two women in neighbouring rows, unable to see each other, discussed Doris’s husband, mean devil! who’d just cleared off with Josie Potter, nothing but a tart, and left two kids and a baby on his wife’s hands.

Pity ‘e didn’t ‘ave a vasectomy! I know what I’d like to do if I was Doris! She brandished the knife. What? said her companion, unable to see the gesture. Her tone, however, suggested prurient anticipation. The old man heard muttering, followed by triumphant laughter.

On his other side, a fifteen-year-old youth, off from school for the holidays, discussed the latest Test Match debacle with a similarly invisible companion. The adolescent voices had a harsh edge, a tone that lacked modulation, suggesting an as yet unaccustomed masculinity, like tight new shoes. Their words raced with fervour, shot up the scale, erupted in guffaws, or mimicked the radio beat.

One of the women climbed to the top trestle, her bucket clanking, and came abruptly face to face with the old man. Her plain, maternal face smiled goodnaturedly. He glared at her in silence. All right, are you? Her tone coaxed at him as if he were a recalcitrant child. Still he said nothing. She smiled at him, undaunted. Where you livin’ now, Al?

He grabbed at a clump of mushrooms. Cemetery!

That would shut her up. Nosey old biddy!

Oh well, that’s all right, then. She continued to smile, unperturbed, and bent to her half of the mushroom bed.

Yet he had spoken no less than the truth. Always puts ‘em off the scent! He was dossing out in an uncultivated corner of a cemetery. Custodians and vicars often turned a blind eye. He’d be all right for a while, if he didn’t catch the attention of some sanctimonious windbag or wittering lady councillor. In any case, he left at sunrise to get a couple of hours in on his Project before turning up at the mushroom farm at 8:00 a.m. Can’t finish Projects without dosh. Need caboodle!

Al liked cemeteries. They were cities he knew and understood. He had made the acquaintance of hundreds of their inhabitants over the years. They were, of course, too polite to bother him unless he sought them out; and he had plenty of choice. Somehow they made him feel one up. Definitively one up! Which is more than you could say in Bristol or Derby. For in the midst of the great democracy of the dead, his own pumping heart and gusting breath seemed to confer upon him the sceptre of royalty. Only his Projects, of course, could confer a crown.

Now take this graveyard here. Under the birches in the Eastern corner, by a comfortable old wall, lay Jenny Postlethwaite: ‘Born May 20, 1817; Received into the Heavenly Kingdom February 5, 1841’. Consumption, probably, or the arrival of her fifth child. It didn’t say ‘Beloved wife of . . .’, so he had to guess. Hello, Jen. How’s it going? A bit blowy today.

Then there was Sarah and Joseph Hamilton. In fact, there were two Joseph Hamiltons, and Jonathan, Emilia and Phoebe as well. The family sarcophagus, dauntingly large and white, dominated the cemetery as they had no doubt dominated the community in life. A black chain fence flounced gracefully around it, paralleled by a rosy slab path, separating it from the vulgar encroachment of other people’s daisies. An angel, frozen in unctuous gesture, bestowed Everlasting Love upon their heads.

No time to bother with you today, Joseph One. I’m off to have a gab with Jenny, and Francis Higson next door. Poor old Higson. ‘Scholar.’ That’s all it said. Died at forty. Al spat. Don’t we bloody all! He cleared his throat as unsettling memories stirred. The grave was shabby, apologetic. Head in the clouds, died a pauper, no doubt about that."

Then there was Gilbert Ernest Simpkin, who had ‘Passed on without an Angel’s warning’, aged 20, in 1932. Motorcycle accident, probably. ‘Pray For Me’, said the headstone, a smooth granite affair. Said one for yer today, Gil. He stopped and scratched his head, ’Course, it could have been a drowning.

He would potter back and forth, arranging his newspapers, his enamel mug, his tins of sardines. Occasionally he would pat a large, lidded mushroom basket affectionately. Two placid frogs had inhabited it for a fortnight. He exercised the little creatures several times a day on a generous length of twine secured at the ankle. He would release them, just like all the others, in a week or so, or whenever he moved on. Whichever came first. There was sure to be a stray cat further on, or a pigeon, or even a mouse.

Dogs you couldn’t abandon. So the old man never sought them out, though he shared many a meal with an inquisitive mutt. But never more than one meal. Can’t have you tagging along, old fella. What you need is vittels and a fireside, not an old codger like me.

Still, there was a marble effigy of a little dog in this particular cemetery, sitting proudly at the headstone of an eighty-year-old woman named Lucy May Henderson. It gave him a wistful sensation whenever he passed.

Al flourished a bottle defiantly, as he rounded the end of the Hamilton extravaganza. Up yours, Joseph, old son! He cackled genially. ’Ow’s yer father?

The habit of insult, however, was not confined to puncturing the supposed vanity of phantoms. It had proved a disconcerting attention-getter among the living. For one thing, he deplored women with immense bottoms, who always seemed to be stuffing their faces with ice cream or chips. It’s . . . it’s . . . unaesthetic! He rolled the word around his mouth like a choice wine. He approached, glared. Don’t you think you’ve eaten enough of those already, for God’s sake, woman?

She gazed at him in bovine amazement, a chip halfway to her mouth. What? Her features reformed in an expression of wild-eyed outrage. Mind your own business, you cheeky old devil!

In that case, his gravelly voice rose to take in any immediate passers-by, I just wonder how many lavatory seats you must have broke, that’s what I wonder! He spat for effect. When you can get your arse through the door, that is! And off he would shamble, leaving the hapless victim crimson with embarrassment, surrounded by the usual gaping bystanders.

If he met a screaming child having a tantrum in the street, he would approach at once and bawl in its face: Shut up, you little brat! leaving the child openmouthed with astonishment—and silent—and the mother white with anger. Probably, he thought in the final analysis, because he had achieved what she couldn’t!

Beer bellies revolted him. He would saunter purposefully up to his target and wait until the man returned his gaze. Must be years since you’ve seen it, mate!

A startled pause. Narrowed eyes. What?

What, he says! God, it’s been so long, he’s forgotten to look for it! You look bloody disgusting, man. Why don’t you do something about it?

Al had discovered that it was best to be quick on his feet after this sort of sally. He had found himself in a brawl after only his second attempt to tilt at this particular windmill.

He wondered if it did any good. He supposed not. But you never knew. Anyhow, it was a kind of revenge.

Another fulfilling moment came whenever he caught sight of a parked sports car. The driver always seemed to be an alarmingly vigorous young man with gelled hair and a tan.

Jumped up little pricks! He would choose his moment, sidle up to the car, glance around surreptitiously, then give the bloody thing a good bash with his foot.

Passers-by would see a sunburned old chap crabbing his way down the street in some haste, cackling with delight and slapping his thigh. Occasionally limping. More often than not, he would be clutching a large, cloudy bottle. A casual observer might have assumed it to be some evil mix. Vodka, perhaps. But it was only barley water. Keeps me ticking over nicely.

He also hated solicitors, rice (‘Burma Road’), litter, banks, telephone kiosks, mobile phones (antisocial twerps), horses (‘all nose and bum’), football, ferrets, bananas . . .The list went on. In fact, it was part of Al’s philosophy, indeed one of his proverbs, that ‘Life is knowing what you don’t want!’ He felt it could give a sense of purpose to a lot of lives.

Not that his own was aimless. Not in the least. But there were plenty of poor sods out there who didn’t know what the hell they wanted. Only that they weren’t happy. If you could start by finding out what you didn’t want, sometimes you found out what you did. That’s how it had happened for him. And now he had his special work. His Projects.

He beamed a broken-toothed grin of satisfaction at the thought. The current Project was almost complete. As soon as this bloody mushroom pick was over at half three, he’d be off and beavering at it until sunset.

He built towers. It was a consuming passion. It was a calling. They were unique, rising twenty feet into the air, miniature Towers of Babel, modern ziggurats, suggesting both a sculpture and a ‘folly’; eluding classification. He never used scaffolding. Ledges and platforms were an integral part of the construction, so that he could build ever inwards and upwards.

He had been anxious about Britain. But he’d managed two towers so far, nonetheless. One on a remote escarpment of Dartmoor; the other rearing primevally on a lonely Scottish isle. You couldn’t have people standing around gawping, asking daft questions. They could gawp all they liked after it was finished and he’d sodded off. But one whiff of curiosity and he skedaddled, toute bloody suite.

He’d sleep well tonight, knowing the final touches were in sight. An absolutely bloody blissful, silent sleep, with the wholehearted approval of his quiet companions under the stars. No need of the Salvation Army yet. Not in this weather. In fact—he cackled to himself—he’d sleep the sleep of the dead. Nobody to find fault. Nobody nagging. He shivered involuntarily, as an old, relentless fist began to pummel at the gates of memory.

It had been decades. But he could still feel his soul diminish like a sponge clenched dry at the sound of her remembered voice. It wrenched at your entrails. It droned. It clawed you into tatters. It sucked your lifeblood like a vampire, until even the will to live had dwindled to a barely flickering spark. But she never seemed to grasp the destruction.

He’d tried to be a good husband. ‘I, Allardice James Anthony, take thee, Alice Joanna. That was in ’58, and he had started on the railway the same year. He was content. So was Alice, at first. Then Theresa arrived, his little Tera. Alice had turned out to be a good mother. The local station was peaceful, easy-going. It had a picket fence, and flower beds bursting with geraniums, and sweet peas and gillyflowers.

His eyelids flickered, felt damp. Those scents still had him clawing backward, longingly, into the swirling reaches of the long ago.