The Complete Pratt (2 page)

Ezra lit a Gold Flake. It had never occurred to him to ask to be present at the birth. Such a thing would have been unnatural. He had carried his obligations quite far enough by announcing his unavailability for the dominoes match at the Navigation Inn. Sid Lowson was substituting. (Don’t bother to remember the name
Sid
Lowson. Substituting for Ezra at the dominoes is the nearest he will come to the centre of our stage. He will acquit himself with credit, incidentally, sixing it up with aplomb at a vital moment.)

Cousin Hilda popped her head round the door.

‘She’s started,’ she said.

‘Aye, I’ve heard,’ said Ezra.

‘Bugger off,’ said the parrot

Cousin Hilda sniffed. Her nose looked as if it disapproved of her mouth, and her mouth looked as if it disapproved of her nose, and probably they both did, since Cousin Hilda was known to disapprove of orifices of every kind.

‘I don’t blame t’ parrot,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t know owt different. I blame Henderson. That sort of thing comes from t’ top. Look at Germany. Pet shop? Sodom and Gomorrah more like. Every animal from that shop’s the same. Foul-mouthed.’

‘They can’t all talk,’ protested Ezra. ‘Fair dos, our Hilda. Tha’s not suggesting Archie Halliday’s goldfish swears, is tha?’

‘It would if it could,’ said Cousin Hilda, with another sniff. ‘Have you seen the look in its eye? Foul-mouthed. I don’t know why you didn’t complain. Your Ada spends good money on a parrot guaranteed to be an expert in the Yorkshire dialect, and what does she get?’

‘Bugger off,’ said the parrot.

‘Exactly,’ said Cousin Hilda. ‘That’s modern shops for you. Craftsmanship? They don’t know the meaning of the word. Any road, she’s doing just fine, so don’t worry yoursen.’

Cousin Hilda returned upstairs. Ada cried out. Sid Lowson played a crafty domino (the double five). A tram screeched furiously round the corner by Saxton’s the newsagent. The parrot, perhaps mistaking it for a mating call, shrieked back. And Ezra worried.

He tried to concentrate on the paper. ‘Air service opened – Doncaster to Croydon in 95 minutes’, ‘Razor Affray on Ship’.

‘In your garden,’ read Ezra, who had no garden, not even a back yard. ‘When overhauling mowing machines it should be noted…’

Ada gave another, louder, sharper cry.

‘Begonias must not be overwatered,’ read Ezra desperately.
‘Venizelos
flees to Italian island. Greek rebel fleet surrenders.’

‘Come on. Come on, Ada,’ he implored. ‘Get it over with.’

He went to the sink in the corner of the room, filled the kettle, and put it on the hob.

Big Ben began to strike nine on the wireless at number 21. They only had the wireless on once a day, for the news, so as not to wear it out, but they made up for it by having it on very loud, so that all the neighbours could hear.

The ninth stroke died away, and then came a tenth, a shriek of shocking physical agony that tore into Ezra’s heart. He sank into his chair, stunned. His hands shook.

The parrot cocked its head to one side, listening intently.

There was another shriek from Ada. Ezra looked up at the ceiling, and shook his head slowly, as if reproving his maker for not coming up with a better way of bringing people into the world.

There was silence. He made the tea. Another tram clanked past.

‘There’s nowt so queer as folk,’ said the parrot.

Ezra stared at the bright green bird in amazement. It twinkled maliciously in its cage above the sideboard.

He longed for Ada’s agony to be over, so that he could bring her the glad tidings about her pet, so that she would know that the long hours of tuition had not been entirely in vain.

‘Fifty-four years ago a postcard addressed to a Norwich firm was posted in London,’ he read. ‘It was delivered this week.’

‘Please God,’ he prayed. ‘Let our child be delivered quicker than that.’

Ezra Pratt was twenty-nine years old, a thin man, a frail man, a shy man.

Her Mother came downstairs next, a big woman, a strong woman, not a shy woman.

‘It’s a right difficult one,’ she said encouragingly ‘Our firsts allus are on our side. I had t’ devil’s own job wi’ our Arnold.’

He closed his eyes. Arnold had been killed at Mons. He couldn’t be doing with it just then.

‘Was it worth it,’ she said, ‘in view of what happened?’

She went outside, to the lavatory, which was two doors away, in the yard.

He turned to the
Thurmarsh Evening Argus
. ‘Youths Daub House with Treacle’, ‘Speed Limit of Thirty Miles an Hour in Built-up Areas from Monday’, ‘Headless Corpse could be Missing Thurmarsh Draper’.

Her Mother returned, shaking her sad, carved head.

‘She hasn’t scoured it out or owt,’ she said.

They shared the lavatory with number 25, and they were supposed to take turns at cleaning it. It was a constant bone of contention.

He longed for her to go upstairs. He wanted to be alone with his tension.

Ada cried out again.

‘Tha wouldn’t think it’d be such a to-do,’ said Her Mother. ‘She’s big enough.’

She managed to make it sound like a criticism of his smallness.

‘We haven’t heard owt from our Doris, then,’ she said.

Ada’s sister Doris was a social climber. She had married another social climber. Roped together, they were taking on the North Face of Life. They had, as yet, no children. Her Mother probed, hinted, joked that pregnancy was catching. ‘Tha wants to be careful, Doris,’ she’d said. ‘It’s smittling, tha knows.’ It seemed that Doris had been careful.

She gave Ezra an assessing look. Was it just his imagination, or was it one of surprise that he had managed to sire the infant who was so reluctant to enter this world?

‘It wouldn’t surprise me if it’s not born while Friday,’ she said, and with this encouraging shot she was gone, and he was alone again with the parrot and his thoughts.

The Navigation Inn closed its doors. The peripheral Sid Lowson went home and out of this tale. The trams grew fewer, and Ada’s screams more frequent. They were the shamed, reluctant screams of a dour woman who had been brought up never to make a fuss. The parrot listened intently. A thick film spread over Ezra’s forgotten third cup of strong sweet tea.

On Wednesday, March 13th, 1935 Hitler had announced air parity with Britain, Golden Miller had won the Cheltenham Gold Cup for the fourth time and the Duke of Norfolk had shot a rhino. Now, at last, at three and a half minutes before midnight, Ezra
heard
the healthy protest of outraged young lungs, asking, ‘What
is
this? Am I to be constantly ejected from warm, dark places into cold, light ones? Is this what life is?’

He leapt from his chair.

‘Hey up, our parrot,’ he said. ‘I’m a father.’

‘Bugger off,’ said the parrot.

Ezra Pratt stared down at the pink, podgy, wrinkled infant. Everything seemed normal, blue eyes, wet mouth, snotty little nose, bald pate, chubby arms, wet podgy hands, fingers and thumbs like tiny sausages, little red stomach distended as a wind-sock in a gale, then a portion discreetly veiled from the world in a nappy. Below the nappy, there were two plump little legs with puffy knees. The legs ended in hideous but apparently normal feet, and ten absurd, angular toes.

‘It’s a boy,’ said the midwife.

Ezra was aware that speech was expected of him, but no speech came.

He clutched Ada’s arm.

‘Ee, Ada,’ he said at last.

She smiled wearily, proudly.

‘Ee, Ada,’ he repeated.

He glanced at Cousin Hilda, his eyes asking her to come downstairs.

She came downstairs, and stood by the door while he sought reassurance from the rhythmic movement of the rocking chair.

‘Under t’ nappy,’ he began, and stopped.

‘Well?’ said Cousin Hilda, who had never helped a man in her life, and was too old to start now.

‘I didn’t like to ask in front of Her Mother and t’ midwife,’ said Ezra.

‘Get on with it, man,’ said Cousin Hilda, investing the last word with a goodly measure of disgust.

‘Well…I could see t’ nipper were all right as regards what I could see. Features, like. Extremities, like. What I could see,’ said Ezra.

‘So?’ said Cousin Hilda.

‘Under t’ nappy,’ said Ezra awkwardly. ‘There’s nowt wrong wi’
’im
under t’ nappy, like, is there?’

Cousin Hilda sniffed.

‘It’s all there,’ she said, as if blaming the father for the presence of genitalia in the offspring.

‘Aye,’ said Ezra, clenching his fingers round his long-forgotten mug of cold tea. ‘Aye…but…I mean…is it all normal?’

‘I didn’t examine it in close detail,’ said Cousin Hilda. ‘Such things don’t interest me.’

‘Aye,’ said Ezra, ‘but I mean…’

‘I wouldn’t have owt to compare it with, would I?’ said Cousin Hilda.

‘Aye…but…’ persisted Ezra, ‘is that safety pin all right?’

Cousin Hilda stared at him blankly.

‘T’ safety pin. On t’ nappy. Is it correctly positioned?’

‘Ask the midwife. She did it,’ said Cousin Hilda, hand on the sneck of the door, eager for escape.

‘Aye,’ said Ezra, ‘that’s all very well, but I wouldn’t like his little willie to get scratched.’

Cousin Hilda uttered a hoarse cry and then, with one last sniff, she was gone.

At eight minutes past five, on the morning of Thursday March 14th, shortly after the first tram had rolled down the deserted road towards Thurmarsh, there came a shriek of shocking physical agony which made Ezra sit bolt upright in bed, and sent the sweat streaming from his every pore. Poor Ada was having another baby.

Such a thing couldn’t be. So why had she cried out? He reached over and gently patted the amplitude of her buttocks. She was asleep.

He swung out of the bed, fumbled for his shoes with his feet, tightened the cord of his thick, striped pyjamas, faintly clammy with sweat, and lit the candle at his bedside.

Another cry of agony rent the air, longer and rising to a crescendo. It was Ada, yet it could not be, for she still slept. She stirred, moaned tensely, but did not wake. The baby in his simple cot gave a cry that was half-gurgle, half-alarm, half-human, half-animal.

A hob-nailed boot rang out on the main road.

He peeped into the tiny front room, where Her Mother slept, snoring loudly, but certainly not shrieking in agony.

Another cry shattered the night. It came from downstairs, and the truth dawned on Ezra.

He hurried to the top of the stairs, the candle protesting at his speed. He crept down the bare, narrow staircase. A startled rat scampered off. The seventh stair creaked. The ninth groaned. The house smelt of soot and damp.

He entered the little room which served as kitchen, dining room, living room, bathroom and parrot house. It was warm from the heat of the range. The walls sweated gently with condensation.

He lit the gas mantle. The parrot’s eyes shone wickedly. His cup of cold tea still lay on the dresser.

The parrot’s eyes challenged the world. It screamed. It was Ada to a tee, and Ezra realised that the bird intended to reproduce faithfully the whole of her agony, scream by scream.

He grabbed the bird by the throat. It gave a dreadful scream which began as Ada’s agony, became a brief squawk of outrage, then a choking almost-human gurgle, and finally a parrot’s death rattle. Then silence.

He continued to strangle the parrot long after it was dead.

Grey, unshaven dawn found a still tableau in a terrace house in south Yorkshire. A polished range. A thin man with a grey face, rocking slowly in a chair. In his hands, a dead parrot.

Her Mother found him there. At first she thought that they were both dead.

Later, when he had dressed, Ezra wrapped the dead bird in the women’s page of the
Thurmarsh Evening Argus
– headline: ‘Cami-Knickers – Are They Here to Stay?’ He took it along the road and up the alley into the yard, and tossed it into the midden.

Later still, he tried to talk to Ada about it.

He tried to say: ‘I love thee, Ada. No creature has the right to mock thy suffering and live. I killed the parrot for love of thee, my darling.’

What he actually said was: ‘It were a dead loss, Ada. All it ever said were “Bugger off”.’

He hadn’t the heart to tell her that it had also said: ‘There’s nowt so queer as folk.’

THREE DAYS AFTER
Henry was born, Hitler introduced conscription. Twenty-five days after Henry was born, his Auntie Doris bought a genuine crocodile handbag for a pound at Cockayne’s Hand Bag Event in Sheffield. Eighty-six days after Henry was born, Baldwin became Prime Minister. Slowly the shadows of war grew darker. Slowly Britain rearmed. Henry remembered none of this.

Away to the south-west lay Sheffield and cutlery country. To the east was pit country. The road north led to textiles country. Thurmarsh and its immediate environs were steel country.