The Heroes' Welcome (16 page)

And this is London! How’s the rest of the country?

*

He went up to Wigan for a couple of days to visit Sybil Ainsworth and the family. Right across from the station stood the Swan & Railway, where he’d popped one at the barman.
Shameful. But understandable. You had a reason, but that’s no excuse.
He found he was smiling. It sounded like one of Jack’s phrases. He let the memory of the man and his kindness wash over him a little, and just stood there, not fighting it, not resisting it or willing it away.
Jack Ainsworth. Good man. Glad I knew you. Wish I’d known you longer.

A gang of ragged children had seeped out of the alleys and surrounded him now, crying, ‘Carry yer bag for a copper!’ followed briskly by ‘Eeeyuugh! Look at ’is face!’

‘Thanks, you little maggots,’ he said, and they squinted at him and ran away. Almost a rank of young men with old eyes were lined up on the cobbles: an arm missing, a peg leg, overcoats shiny, and a tray of matches or pencils hanging across their chests. Next to medals. He didn’t look at them direct. A conspiracy of circumstance had robbed one of them of a limb, another of a face, another of his wife, another of his job. They needed something, all of them, but they didn’t need to go looking at each other, comparing or pitying.

Riley set his two legs walking, and headed for Poolstock, where his friend’s widow and fatherless children lived.

‘You’re just in time,’ Sybil said laconically when he arrived. ‘We’ve the bakers and the miners out on strike. The demobbed fellas are banned from the union so they’re not getting strike pay. You could go over to Liverpool if you were feeling brave, i.e. foolish. They’ve brought in the troops.’

I should go over there
, he thought.
I should see what’s going on.

‘You’re not going,’ she said. ‘I know your type. Too bloody good for this world. You’re not going. It’s not safe.’

It’s true, I’m not.
He wondered how he would feel in a crowd with the smell of violence and the fear and the anger. He gave a tiny snort of bitter laughter.
I don’t know what I’d do. Would I cry in public? Want to go home, please? Or would I batter everyone I could get my hands on?

‘Ah, well, Mrs Ainsworth,’ he said. ‘It’s just not safe anyway, is it?’

She gave him a look, and she sighed.

‘Call me Sybil,’ she said.
‘You daft article.’ He was pleased to be with them, to help out, take a couple of good long walks on the moor, to listen to Annie’s piano practice, to chat, much better than he did on his previous visit. The passage of time, and the family’s comments, demonstrated to him how much he was improved. But he remained jumpy. He slept badly on his last night, and was woken first by the knocker-upper, tapping the long pole at bedroom windows along the street, then by the fluttery clatter of clogs along the road as the millworkers headed in for the day. Later, as he walked to the station, the dank canal on one side of the road and the river on the other, he stopped at the bridge and looked over, expecting the usual, clear water or dirty water – and saw red, bright red. For a moment it was something tremendous: blood, the coats of dead Frenchmen, early on … and then Ainsworth’s voice came back to him, telling him how the Douglas – the Dougie, he called it – runs a different colour every day of the week, depending what colour they were dying the cotton upstream.
You could tell the day of the week by the colour of the river. You could make slides in the ice with your clogs, and skid along, playing the Mucky Daddy. You’d get a black mask if you walked through a pea-souper with a scarf round your mouth. Your dad would take you up to Wallgate or Northwestern to see the trains; he’d call it admiring the locomotives, and you did admire them, because your dad built them. Railway men. Ainsworth, Ainsworth’s dad, Riley’s own dad.

He walked on, his two good legs, good grateful legs, walking himself into a strange nostalgia, one not even his own.

It was a sunny morning, and he left his scarf hanging loose. The buildings tall and handsome, the shops with their display windows not empty but hardly full. There were too many men on the street for the time of day, and that same look of frustration and confusion as he passed by. Outside the pubs as he reached Wallgate a handful of men in caps were playing pitch and toss in the thin northern sunlight. He stopped in at the Swan just as he heard the dinnertime whistles blow all across the town. He bought a half, and eavesdropped … ‘They’re bringing the troops in against the looters and a fella was killed … the police are going on strike … all hell’s let loose over there; robbing and fighting, and even the children running mad in the chewing-gum factory.’ Riley let it wash over him; the rhythms of Ainsworth’s accent, the nervy threat of the words. Himself an outsider, yet again. ‘There’s a battleship in the Mersey, down from Scapa Flow, and tanks on St George’s Plateau. English tanks, against English men. After all we’ve been through. They’re saying the coppers’ll all be sacked, and the soldiers get their jobs. Which is at least a bit of work. For some.’

Would he go along to a pithead to see the strikers, to see what was happening? Something said to him no, go away. He felt troublesome. He wanted no trouble here in Wigan. But the trouble in the air called to him.

Up the road some men were running. The men outside the pubs turned and looked and started to hurry up there. After only the very shortest of hesitations, Riley was with them. Round a corner he heard shouting – he followed it. Summer day that it was, he put his scarf up round his mouth and chin.

When they came to the crowd of men, bustling, jostling, shouting, facing off some enemy invisible down the road, they all just entered it, seamlessly, and became part of it. Riley melted in at the back and became one with the thin overcoats and greasy caps, his boots among their boots, his shoulders among their shoulders: comforting, brotherly. He smelt sweat and tobacco, damp cloth and those industrial smells, engine oil, coal dust, iron filings. An overlapping smell of his father and of war. In the heart of the crowd ill humour had its own smell and its own voice. The jostling was angry, the movement was frustration. Angry scared men were throwing themselves up against an immovable barrier. Bodies crushed him before and aft, and he let them. The shouting was harsh and violent. Riley smiled under his scarf and closed his eyes for a moment.
Familiar
.

He wormed his way through to the front, as far as he could get. There were more men than he’d thought, and the mood was bad. A barricade blocked the road, backed with other angry scared men, these ones in police uniform, truncheons raised, faces twisted. Some were striking out, flailing at the crowd before them. Beyond them, an important person went up and down on a horse, stamping, nervous. There came the unmistakable crack of weapon on flesh and bone – and then the noise was extreme: shouts, cries of pain and fury. Stones flew – and he felt a warm and familiar rush, beautiful to him in its way, scarlet in his eyes, blood and fury in his heart. The roar of it filled him; he felt entire, hopeless, helpless, familiar …

When the metal barrier collapsed, Riley was one of the first over, one of the first to the man on the horse, grabbing his leg, howling, not giving a damn why, revelling …

Crack of wood on bone and the bone is his, and he is down. Boots and legs –
uh-oh
. Then he’s being dragged – carried. Someone’s got his shoulders and someone has his feet.
Just like the old days
, he thinks, half conscious, and he half laughs. ‘Glad you’re amused,’ says a sneery voice, and he’s propped up against a wall, cobbles rough beneath him. Someone pulls his scarf down, says, ‘Jesus, fook,’ pours some whisky down his mouth, and says, ‘Who the fook are you?’

Riley just waved his hand.

The men stared at him. One snorted and dashed off again. The other said: ‘Y’all right? That were a crack an ’alf.’

Riley treated him to a twisted smile. ‘I’m all right,’ he said, though he wasn’t. He could feel his eye and cheek beginning to swell.

‘Where you from?’ said the man, at the sound of Riley’s voice. His left nostril was going up in a look of disbelief. Ainsworth used to do that.
Erectile northern nostril. What the fuck am I doing here?

‘London,’ Riley said. ‘Just on my way back.’

‘I recommend that,’ the man said, glancing over his shoulder. ‘Station’s thataway. Here—’ He proffered a handkerchief. ‘Scarf up, cap down, this underneath, and don’t pass out till yer on the train.’

Riley grinned again, like an idiot.

The man – pale eyes, big nose, face like a piece of granite – looked at Riley, made a decision, swore again, hoicked Riley up, and lugged him down a side street, Riley’s arm up over his shoulder. The station wasn’t far. The man dumped him on a bench, and said to a guard, ‘Put ’im on the train to London, Stan.’ Before he left, he glanced at Riley again, and said, ‘Where did you get that face?’

Riley pulled his scarf down. He said, ‘Where d’you think?’

The man lifted his right arm: a sort of mittened stump sat there. Taking the fabric elegantly between the fingers of his other hand, and raising his eyebrows in a somehow saucy manner, he pulled the mitten off. A broad, scarred palm. No fingers. He reached across and patted Riley’s cheek with it. ‘Chin up, old pal,’ he murmured, and turned, and went.

*

All the way back to Paddington Riley could feel the bruises growing, and alongside them the awareness of what he had risked. He touched the tender bruises. Inches from his remaining bits of original jawbone, and from the wire and flesh holding the artificial one in place. He bit his strange lower lip with his surviving upper teeth, thinking,
You utter utter fool. You fool.

His head was throbbing.

He was ashamed to go home and face Nadine. Embarrassed like a fool of a boy. No – like a man. To have risked so much after she had invested so much.

He considered lying to her about how it happened.

At Euston he looked in the window of a barber’s shop and saw the black eye emerging, and the dried blood from the cut on his cheekbone. He was rubbing at it with the stranger’s handkerchief when a barber came out, saying, ‘Would you like me to help you with that, sir?’ The barber – short, glossy, aproned – led him in and cleaned him up, giving a little commentary as he did on the history of barber-surgeons, and how he’d been an orderly himself, and that was a nice bit of work had been done on his face, if he didn’t mind him saying so, and after a while Riley found he was weeping, and the barber had the boy bring him a cup of tea.

Riley looked at it, and sighed, and reached for his brass straw.

*

She
was
furious. She cried and she wouldn’t look at him. She refused to tend the wound, then she tended it roughly, and muttered, ‘I just don’t understand. I do not understand how you would let this happen.’ She said all kinds of things.

He said, ‘Well, you wouldn’t,’ because he was thinking of it as a thing about men, that men are obliged to keep from women, for women’s own sakes. But it made her angrier.

She said, ‘You want more pain? You haven’t had enough? Do you miss it, is that it?’

For a while he took her righteous anger quietly, as he had done before, and perhaps would have to again. Then he said, ‘Perhaps I do. I don’t know. I got angry. It was stupid.’

She said, ‘That you take it all so lightly that you’d – risk— It makes me want to hit you.’ Then she was so angry she couldn’t speak.

He said, ‘That’s how stupid it is.’

Much later she said to him, ‘I know it wasn’t anger that got you into this. You don’t have that kind of anger. What could you be so angry about?’

He couldn’t tell her about the fighting feeling, about the demon of battle bursting out again in him, so unexpectedly, so unwelcomely. He was just too ashamed. It was like when he wrote to her from the front line that he didn’t exist. Even now, he didn’t want her to know the worst things about him.

In the days afterward, he found himself thinking about Peter, wondering what precisely it was that Peter was resisting.
Does Peter get the heat under the skin? That flush of violence, as strong as sex, as delicious, but hideous? Is he holding that off?

That was not something he felt he could bring up.

I can’t change much
,
he thought.
Perhaps I can change one or two small things. I must keep out of big groups of men. It might happen again.

*

The chap teaching the English language course was a former school teacher, about forty, who couldn’t for his own reasons bear to go back to a world of small boys after a war spent with the Navy in the Eastern Mediterranean. Riley and he went to the pub together once or twice; a pint of bitter and a little mild masculine conversation. The teacher – his name was Alan Hinchcliffe – had fallen for an Australian girl in Cairo, and been dumped when she chose to go home. He had no family to speak of, and lived in a room in Brixton where his landlady brought him a pie in the evenings. His moustache was depressing and his tweed jacket smelt slightly, but his mind was sharp and precise and his grammar was perfect.

‘Let’s do something,’ Riley said, restless.

‘All right,’ said Hinchcliffe, which made Riley smile. ‘What?’

‘Men like me need to be able to write good letters,’ Riley said. ‘Let’s prepare a pamphlet.’

‘Bloody good idea,’ said Hinchcliffe. ‘How to write letters and fill in forms, that sort of thing? The college uses a printing firm, you know.’

Riley did know. He went down there with Hinchcliffe and they persuaded the owner-manager, a stout man named Owen, to print their pamphlet cheaply as a one-off, with a view to further projects.

‘Further projects?’ murmured Hinchcliffe, raising his brows.

‘Of course,’ said Riley. ‘The other pamphlets. Of the series. And the – books.’

‘Of course,’ said Hinchcliffe.

Mostly, Hinchcliffe did the talking. Riley just said: ‘Improved literacy is good for the printing trade,’ and Owen agreed.

*

Riley stopped going to cafés and applying for jobs he didn’t want. Instead, he and Hinchcliffe sat down together and wrote the first pamphlet –
How to Write Good English
– and delivered it to Owen. They chose a generic layout, cheap paper and a plain soft cover, and watched as Ermleigh, who had the look of a depressed fish and had been gassed, started to slot the little metal bits of type into their wooden niches. He creaked when lifting rolls of paper. They wanted to stay for the printing, but Ermleigh, coughing gently, shooed them off. He couldn’t work if he was being looked at, he said. They were back the next day, and nearly smudged the wet ink in their hurry to get the booklets folded and sewn.