Risk Street7

The old man had two gas rings. One was for the kettle to make tea. The other was for everything else. He could no longer stomach the smell or the taste of food, but the kettle was never off the boil so he didn’t really save much on gas. He’d trudged half-heartedly up and down once a week to the garage on the corner to get a re-fill. When that was shutdown he had taken to pushing a rickety shopping trolley, once a fortnight, two miles along the canal. The camping shop smelt so damned new; of fancy pigskin boots and clothes nobody would wear he sometimes wondered if it had been born fully stocked and not brick-built. Jodie’s Emporium made him want to gag. A gas bottle re-fill was also double the price that the garage charged and the young guys with their floppy hair that looked up from their magazines long enough to serve him laughed at him and made him feel like a sack of shit.

In the old days he’d never have put up with it. He’d have pushed out one of his spare chins and asked to speak to the manger. If that hadn’t worked he’d have put an old fashioned witches’ hex or spell on the store. He was a somebody then- perhaps because he believed in all that kind of stuff -that little things in the store would start to go wrong. A light switch wouldn’t work. The basement would get flooded and stock would have to be written off. Merchandise would go missing on such a regular basis that the shop would begin to look as if it had been visited by a plague of shoplifting locusts. He’d power and knowledge then. And lots of women. More than he could handle, or could handle him. It was as if he had been able to touch an underlying pulse in people’s psyche and just know their dirty little secrets; what they wanted and needed. And he could provide it all for a price, just a little slice of their soul.

Now he just took the coppers he was handed as change by the shop assistant, with pimples on her chin, and put it in his pocket. He didn’t need to look at it. He knew she’d looked up at him through the strands of her lank hair as she went through the till and instead of handing him a 10p coin, a 5p coin, a 2p and a 1p, she’d used up almost all the pennies in the till. He also knew that her boyfriend was cheating on her with her best friend Christine, and he had to force himself not to tell her that in the same robotic voice that he’d heard others using. Dr Fleming had taught him that. He’d called it splitting; the ability to cleave a part of oneself and separate it off from the others. It only worked for so long of course. All dams eventually began to crack and burst their banks. The house at Risk Street was coming apart; all of the dark things that it entombed were escaping and like the shock of Marsh Gas it was bubbling outward. Soon he’d need to kill himself. That was the only safe option.

He’d almost laughed at the two young girls attempts to track him coming back from John Summerville’s funeral. But he didn’t want to spoil their fun. And for a minute, when he looked at them out of the side of his eye he thought he recognised one of them.

‘Do you want to go home?’ Helen patted her friend Angela on the back. The smell was almost enough. She didn’t want to look at her friend being sick in case it made her puke up too.

‘I don’t know.’ Angela straightened up slowly as if she were an arthritic ridden old woman. ‘What do you think?’

Helen looked at Angela’s eyes and smiled as if she was going to ask her to stick out her tongue. ‘I think what you think. I think we should go…’She clasped at her friend’s fingers; their hands briefly touching.

‘I’ve made tea.’ Harry McDonald was standing with the sun glinting off his specs, holding up a white enamel mug as evidence.

The two girls looked at each other and looked at him.

‘Run,’ said Angela.

Helen grasped a handful of her blouse. ‘Wait,’ she said, her words and actions staying her, stopping her from long legs running off like one of the Piebald in one of the fields off Jackson’s Paddock. ‘He didn’t hurt me when I was alone with him that night at the house in Risk Street.’

Angela followed Helen down the worn dirt path to the caravan. Inside it was like a cave. They had to bend like saplings to stop their heads banging against the roof and there was no window. Up close it seemed strange to be frightened of the old man, stirring tea and coughing into his hanky. It felt like playing outside at tents with the strange muted light and the musty old man smell. He coughed again.

‘Sorry,’ he said waving his hands apologetically, ‘it’s the smoking. Not that I smoke now, but I did. And the damp in here…You want tea?’

They weren’t sure; looked from one to another for the answer.

‘Yeh.’ Helen plonked herself on a rickety wooden stool. ‘Two sugars.’

Angela squeezed in beside her. ‘I don’t take sugar.’ She hoped that didn’t sound too snobby. Her voice wasn’t as confident, more of a whisper, but somehow seemed louder in the caravan because of that, as if it hung in the air.

The old man nodded. He’d a couple of different sized mugs hanging up on hooks. He sniffed. ‘I’ve not got… no milk…unless you want that powdered stuff?’ He looked from one to the other, with a teaspoon in his hand.

‘Just give me another sugar.’ Helen’s was looking about her as she spoke at the all the different ornaments, what looked like ancient chess pieces, fairy figures, mirrors and above all books, stacks and stacks of books. ‘What you got in here, a library?’

The old man, however, still had his teaspoon up like a baton, waiting for Angela to decide what kind of tea she wanted.

‘Just black.’

The old man had pulled on an old grey cardigan over his shirt and tie so that he looked less like an aged waiter. He fiddled and fumbled with the cups and the tea bags and the gas stove that the girls felt that he was cooking a four-course meal.

‘Biscuits,’ an agony of indecision after putting the three mugs on a tray and adding, finally, ‘I haven’t go any.’ He took the tray and stepped outside with it, balancing it precariously on a tree stump and sitting on the caravan steps.

Helen stood looking at the caravan, the canal and the fields all around, with her cup of tea clasped in her hand. ‘It’s beautiful.’

‘Yes,’ the old man sucked on his tea, ‘it once was.’ There was a note of regret in his voice, ‘apart from the midges. They make everybody’s life miserable.’ He nudged Angela’s mug towards the centre of the tray, his hand brushing against hers. She pulled her hand away as if he’d burnt her and he tried to catch his cup before it dropped to the ground spilling tea.

‘Sorry. Sorry.’ She scrambled in the grass, picking up his mug and handing it to him.

He grasped at Angela’s wrist, as if he was going to stumble. He could see the panic in her blue eyes. He turned away; a coughing bout separated them. ‘It’s just,’ he sniffed, but couldn’t put it into words, she was clean. Faultless even. The darkness couldn’t find a place in her to gather.

‘What are you here for?’ The other girl, Helen, had the darkness lying; gathering strength in her and it was to her that he directed his question.

‘I don’t know.’

But he knew she was hiding something.

‘I saw your caravan in my dreams.’ Angela spoke slowly, stumbling into her words. ‘And you were inside trying to hide, but the darkness was closing in on you.’

Neither the old man nor Helen seemed to breathe. ‘Anything else?’ he asked gently, reluctant to pull her from her reverie.

‘Yes.’ Her blow puckered up, but she shook her head and he knew it was gone and with it any chance he had of escaping. ‘What does it all mean?’

It was his turn to shake his head and gather in the cups and make things ready in the darkening gloom for nightfall.

Helen’s eyes grew red rimmed. ‘It means Harry McDonald, that your time had come.’

She prowled and her stride seemed to lengthen and there was a crack as if her joints were cracking and her limbs growing. Her movements were jerky, from side to side, like a drunk, then focussed like a spurred cockerel preparing for the ring. She seemed to be looking, or have lost something -her eyes scouring the dirt around her feet.

‘Get into the caravan.’ Harry spoke to Angela out of the side of his mouth.

‘Where have you buried it Harry?’ Her eyes were like red-lit neon streetlights ready to stare him down.

Harry pulled Angela’s arm and bundled her into the caravan.

Helen ready to spring, howled out her fury, unable to follow them inside.

‘I’m not leaving her.’ Angela wrestled herself away from Harry.

‘You’re not leaving her. And I don’t think she’s leaving you.’ Harry spoke in a monotone, looking out.

Angela stood on the threshold of the caravan, looking down at her friend who had began prowling again and kicking at the dirt.

‘You're scaring me Helen.’

Helen howled her reply. And on the wind Angela heard an answer. And in the distance another.