The Gift (10 page)

But this was someone else, a little man with large eyes and a pale, wrinkled face. His nose had been broken. He looked amusing, but not quite human, in his enveloping waterproof. Davy knew him at once.

“What is it?” said Mr. Venn.

“Sent up to drive your big digger, guvnor,” said the man. “Lost your old driver, dincher?”

“That's right,” said Mr. Venn, making a tick on a list in front of him and then standing up to move a green peg on the complicated work-flow board behind his desk. “It's a Miller five-fifty. Okay?”

“I druv a four-forty all last year, guv. I'll get the hang of it quick enough.”

“Hell!” said Mr. Venn, reaching for one of his telephones. “What are they playing at down there? They must have half a dozen five-fifty drivers in the pool.”

“Sorry, guv. I was the only one. Donchew worry—aren't expecting to dig in this, are you? I'll have her doing conjuring tricks for you by the time this lets up.”

He nodded toward the steamed windows, against which the rain was now thudding in a driving downpour. Mr. Venn sighed and put the telephone down.

“Okay,” he said. “Give it a go. Your foreman's Mr. Reynolds—blue hat, two white bands. He'll have the keys.”

“Right, guv,” said the man. “Hope you don't mind me asking, but what happened to the other bloke?”

“Uh?”

“The bloke who drove the digger before. I don't want to go the same way—learn by the mistakes of others, that's my mo'o.”

There was something about the way he said this that sounded odd, almost teasing, to Davy, but Mr. Venn only noticed the joky tone and laughed his big, easy laugh.

“Not much use to you,” he said. “We had a bloody strong oaf of a laborer down there, and somehow he managed to hit him on the leg with a shovel. Don't ask me how he did it, but he almost cut his foot off.”

“Okay, guv,” said the man, laughing, too. “I'll stay in my cab. So long.”

Davy wiped the window for the tenth time and watched him cross the site; he passed a couple of drenched workmen but didn't stop to ask for directions. In fact he seemed to know his way already, making directly for one of the small huts near the opposite fence. He came out almost at once and ran to the big yellow excavator that had been standing idle all morning. His climb up to the cab was just as Davy would have expected, rapid as a monkey's despite the clinging waterproof.

Few of the other machines were running, so Davy could hear the deep thud and knock as the big diesel started, and see how its cold cylinders puffed out foul smoke which the rain washed clean. After a longish pause the caterpillar tracks jerked in the mud; the excavator slurped back a couple of feet, stopped, and slurped forward; its cab swung slowly from side to side; its long digging arm gestured this way and that. The man was only testing the controls, making sure he knew how to handle the machine; as he scooped at the weightless air, the digger looked like a great gawky insect going through its clumsy mating dance in the rain.

“Well, that's something,” said Mr. Venn, who had been watching through the clear patch on Davy's window. “I can't tell just from that, of course. There's a lot of skill driving a digger like that—grabbing a full load out of the bottom of a twelve-foot trench each go, not wasting machine-hours by bringing it up in driblets. Blast this rain.”

He went back to his desk, too busy to watch the Friday morning ritual of the security van hissing past with its police escort. Even on a morning like this, one or two shoppers stopped to see the procession, stirred, like Davy, by the mere notion of all that money. That would make Dad daydream all right.

“Let's call him Monkey,” said Penny. “That makes sense if the other one's called Wolf. You're sure it's the same man?”

Davy stuffed the sports pages of yesterday's
Sun
into the toe of his left shoe and put both shoes, slippery with inner wetness, into the airing cupboard.

“I'm sure it's the man who was with Mr. Black Hat when Dad saw his wallet. I'm pretty sure it's the same man who was watching Mum—you remember, she said he was little and he had a wrinkled face and a broken nose? But I can't be quite sure.”

“Okay. What's your theory?”

“He wanted the job driving the digger, I suppose, so he got Wolf to lay out the other driver with a shovel.”

“Even so he couldn't be sure he'd get it.”

“He could if Dad sent him up.”

“Whatever for?”

“Money. Look, everybody wants jobs—they're always on about unemployment in the papers. Suppose Mr. Black Hat is working a racket getting people jobs, taking a cut himself—I mean a week's wages off every bloke he places, something like that. If there isn't a job going, he gets someone like Wolf to lay a bloke out, and then he gives Dad a cut to give the job to the right man.”

Penny thought while she spooned Nescafe into her mug.

“Not enough money in it,” she said.

“I don't know. Dad's isn't the only big firm in Spenser Mills. Suppose he's got a slightly bent bloke in all the other firms and they each get somebody a couple of jobs a week—that's about two hundred quid a week, say. Even if Dad and the others get half of it, Black Hat finishes up with five thousand a year, tax free. Not bad.”

“Yes, but …”

“Hold it!”

The back door rattled. A Martian staggered dripping into the kitchen.

“You oughtn't to put your head in a plastic bag, Mum,” said Davy. “They're always warning you about that on the telly.”

Mum raised trembling hands to the bag, then hesitated.

“How'm I going to get this off without it dripping on me?” she grumbled.

“Hang on. I'll dry it,” said Davy, reaching for a tea towel.

“No!” screamed Mum. “You'll push me out of shape!”

“Okay, then, I'll roll it up from outside. That'll make a sort of gutter all around. I'll give you a penny for every drop that drips. Hold it. I'm going to stand on a chair.”

“I left my new umbrella on the bus,” complained Mum. “And then, coming back—I don't know where all the taxis
go
, Fridays.”

They could tell from her tone that she had come home in a dodgy temper, but finding an audience waiting just inside the door was soothing her down. The plastic bag was opaque with rain, but up close Davy could see that there was something of an unusual color underneath it; he eased it off Mum's head as delicately as a girl in a flower shop taking an orchid out of its cellophane.

Mum's hair was naturally nondescript, so the children were used to color changes; this time it was piled above her like a breaking wave and dyed pale pink.

“Oh, Mum, you are brave!” said Davy.

“Brave?” said Mum on a rising note.

“I think it's smashing,” said Penny quickly. “What are you going to wear?”

This was the right question. Friday night was wages night, so the pubs were gay, and even families which got their money in monthly salaries, as Dad did now, dressed up to the nines.

“I thought I'd try that fawn outfit I got for Minorca,” said Mum in jet-set tones, then added anxiously, “You really think it's all right? It was a new girl, an Australian, so I thought I'd give her a go, poor thing.”

“The fawn'd be okay,” said Penny. “Or what about your white suede? Why don't you go and try a few things out? I'll bring you up a cup of tea and judge the beauty contest.”

“Lovely,” said Mum, placid as a cow now. “Just help me off with my boots. I daren't bend down.”

At last she padded out in her stockings, holding her neck very stiff as though her hairdo were a pitcher full of liquid which she was trying not to spill.

“Australians have a wicked sense of humor,” whispered Davy.

“Shut up,” said Penny. “D'you want another cup of coffee?”

“I suppose so. D'you think I'm right about Mr. Black Hat?”

Penny watched the water run into the kettle as though it were important to fill it correctly to the nearest thousandth of an inch.

“No good,” she said as she flicked the switch down. “There's too much doesn't fit. Wolf got sacked, didn't he? Dad's not flush enough with cash to be working a racket yet—and even he's not going to think he'll get rich enough to buy yachts your way.”

“That mayn't be what the picture meant. You can't tell.”

“Okay, what about all this following Mum around, and watching the house? And Black Hat giving Monkey the money to buy drinks with, and making Wolf wait for him by his car—that's not how he'd go on if they were just, you know
clients
. I mean, when he'd got them their jobs that'd be that. They're acting far more like they're all part of some
gang.
”

“What for?”

“And Dad wouldn't be as jumpy as he is if he was only helping in that sort of racket. Is Mum on or off sugar?”

“Off, last I heard.”

“I'll put some in and tell her I forgot. That'll keep her happy both ways. Are there enough men on your site for it to be worth their while pulling a wages snatch?”

“A hundred and forty-eight this week. Mr. Venn says it'll be nearly eight hundred when the job's really going.”

“How much do they take home?”

“He says a bit over forty quid a week, average.”

“Six thousand quid—it sounds a lot, but it isn't really enough for a whole gang to be working on, is it? Or to buy yachts with.”

“I suppose it might be the wages van,” said Davy slowly. “That goes past, Fridays, taking wages to all the company's sites. It starts from the bank just behind our site, but it leaves us till the last, so I suppose it'd be pretty well empty by the time it got there. So there'd be no point in putting a couple of men on the site and then letting one of them get sacked.”

“How do you know it was only a couple?”

“I hadn't thought of that. What d'you think we ought to do?”

“Nothing,” said Penny decisively. “If you aren't going to tell Dad about your gift, then we've got nothing to tackle him with—nothing that adds up, I mean. And even if we
knew
, I don't know it'd be any of our business—squealing on Dad to the police, or getting him to squeal on his pals … Oh, he's such a fool! That's what bugs
me
!”

“You wouldn't rather he was a law-abiding citizen?”

“Course I would. But you've got to live with what you're landed with, haven't you?”

“I suppose so—unless you do an Ian.”

“Look, Dave, all you can do is hang on and hope for a fluke that'll tell you what's up. Then we'll know what to do.”

“Let's just hope we're wrong about the whole thing. Your kettle's boiling.”

“What d'you mean,
my
kettle? All right, all right, I'll make your coffee for you, my lord.”

“You're pretty cool about it all, Pen.”

She sighed as she watched the steam rise from the cups.

“That's what you think,” she said in a low, toneless voice. “I tell myself I've been brought up to live like the Japanese, in paper houses because of earthquakes—it's stupid to try for solid buildings. But I want to go on living here. Here. Going to the same school every term. Seeing Mum happy. Not having scribbles on my bedroom wall made by some other kid. I want to be somewhere where we belong—like Gran and Dadda do.”

She looked through the swishing rain at the raw houses opposite.

“I'll give it four hundred years,” she said. The mockery was a way of closing the lid on her feelings.

The fluke happened, but not in the way they'd hoped.

By Wednesday week Davy had the fidgets almost as badly as Dad. Term would soon be over, and that last week is always a restless time. And Dad's tense jauntiness was steadily growing more marked, worse than it had ever been, even at their most disastrous times, suggesting that whatever was going to happen was coming to its climax soon. Moreover, Mum was getting ready for Christmas, which was always a difficult period for everyone else.

Mum had a fetish about Christmas. Everybody had to give the others proper presents, and they had all to be complete surprises when they were opened around the little twinkling tree at precisely ten
A
.
M
. The wrapping paper had to be a secret, too—there had been one terrible year when Mum and Davy had both chosen the same pattern at Smiths, and another when Ian had insisted on wrapping his in newspaper. Even in their brokest years an extra quid or two had always crept into their pocket money by mid-December. Christmas, in Mum's view, was serious. In the children's view it was doom-laden. Mum was an appalling chooser of presents, always giving something too expensive that would suit the person she thought the recipient ought to be, rather than what that person actually was. And for months afterward she would take note whether Penny was wearing her new sweater honorably often, and whether Ian (some years before) was using the chest expander she'd found.

These pressures—from Dad and Mum and inside himself, though this was one of Dad's late evenings home—drove Davy out that Wednesday into a dry but muggy night. He told Mum he was going over to help Ted Kauffman with the BSA, but in fact he spent an hour simply biking around the whole network of new roads, sometimes dawdling, sometimes forcing his legs into an exasperated sprint. He rode in no special direction and at about seven o'clock found himself freewheeling down a curving avenue of slightly posher houses than their own. He knew where he was. This would bring him out on the main road opposite The Painted Lady, Dad's old pub, which he'd now gone off.

The pub was floodlit on the outside, so Davy, thirty yards short of the junction, could quite clearly see the brisk little man who came to the door. It was Monkey.

Davy braked without thought, but Monkey was only peering up and down the main road, as though on the lookout for someone; then he turned and disappeared inside the bar. Davy swung his bike in behind a parked car, settled it against the curb, and knelt to fiddle with the adjustment of his dynamo. He was in the deeper shadow between the last two lamps of the side street, and the mailbox near the corner gave him some cover, but he could see the door of the pub.