Lost in the Flames Read online

  ‘Jacob, why were you so horrid to that woman?’ said Vera, as they trailed back along West Street. ‘You and Rose are always the same. I don’t know what gets into you.’

  ‘She deserved it,’ said Jacob. ‘Rose told me she was rude to her once. And she was rude to me too, didn’t believe it, that I’ll be a pilot one day.’

  ‘Well maybe she’s right. Maybe you won’t.’

  ‘Of course I will.’

  Norman Miller clipped by again on his pony and trap.

  ‘Hey, mister!’ called Jacob. ‘My sister thinks you’re …’

  But Vera cut him short with a swift clip to the head as Norman glanced back and disappeared around the bend. Vera gave Jacob a kick up the backside and chased him down the dirt path that led to the terraced stone cottage next to the orchard where fat porkers belched the day away beneath black-branched apple trees. Alfred Arbuckle was in the back alley that ran along behind the cottages, dragging a knife along a stone step in the snow, keening its edge.

  ‘Hello father,’ said Vera as she skipped down the steps past the grating blade.

  ‘Hello father,’ echoed Jacob.

  ‘Pork for Sunday dinner,’ said Alfred, gesturing his children towards the out-house door opposite the kitchen.

  They poked their noses inside and sniffed. A carcass hung from a beam, split from chin to groin, dripping blood from its nose onto the floor.

  ‘You’ve killed Chamberlain?’ whispered Jacob, aghast. ‘He was my favourite.’

  Alfred Arbuckle was in the habit of naming his pigs after British Prime Ministers before electing which of them would be next for the chop.

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘One man, one pig, one vote. And anyway, that’s Gladstone. Chamberlain’s not nearly fat enough yet. We’ll have some of the leg tomorrow and then I’ll do some sausages and we’ll sell the rest. Vera, there’s some potatoes in the kitchen that need peeling.’

  He thrust out the knife and she took it and went inside. Jacob was in the out-house now, peering into the cage where he kept Eric and Penelope. He cooed at them and they cooed back, Eric fluffing up his feathers in that way he always did.

  ‘Hello, Eric,’ said Jacob. ‘Hello, Penelope. Good day to you both, my dears.’

  Jacob loved his pigeons. He thought they probably loved him too, in whatever way pigeons do.

  ‘Jacob!’ came his father’s voice again. ‘Go help William dig some more spuds out of the vegetable patch. They’ve been in the ground far too long already, should have been out weeks ago.’

  He handed Jacob a garden fork.

  ‘And make sure you get the big ones, nothing smaller than your fist,’ he said, holding his fist up to the boy’s face, and the boy held up his own little fist in return.

  ‘See you later, you two,’ said Jacob as he drew his face away from the cage.

  He went round to the front of the house where the potatoes grew in a patch at the end of the garden, overlooking the valley and the road that led up the hill towards Stow and then on towards Cheltenham and Worcester and down which he watched the sheep travel to the market on Wednesdays and the cattle on Saturdays.

  ‘Where the bloody hell have you been, Jacob?’ a voice called out as Jacob approached down the path to the vegetable patch. William was thirteen, a couple of years older than his brother, and considered this differential in age sufficient justification for superiority of familial rank, despite his silent recognition that Jacob was better endowed in what their mother Elizabeth always referred to as ‘the intellectual department’. William knew that at their age brawn would usually overcome brain. Jacob knew it too, but pretended he didn’t.

  He ignored William’s question.

  ‘I said where the bloody hell have you been?’ William repeated, a notch louder and half an octave higher.

  ‘Sod off,’ said Jacob. ‘I’ve got to dig some spuds.’

  ‘I said where have you been?’ said William, grabbing Jacob by the ear and wrenching it, watching his knuckles go white as the ear went red.

  ‘In town, buying wool,’ said Jacob. ‘You sod.’

  William let him go.

  ‘What kind of wool?’

  ‘What do you mean what kind of wool? From a bloody sheep, of course.’

  ‘I meant what colour.’

  ‘Well why didn’t you say that, then?’

  ‘Do you want me to break your bloody nose again?’

  ‘Fuck off, William.’

  William grabbed a potato, the biggest he could see, and chucked it at Jacob. It caught him on the nose. Jacob chucked it back. When Alfred came round to find out what was causing the commotion, potatoes were strewn around the vegetable patch and Jacob’s nose was running with blood.

  ‘Come on William, help me cut up Gladstone. Go round to the out-house. I’ll be there shortly.’

  Alfred took his handkerchief from his pocket, specked with Gladstone’s blood, and passed it to Jacob.

  ‘Wipe your nose, Jacob, there’s a good lad. No harm done.’

  He patted him on the head and left him to his digging. Jacob heaved up more worms than potatoes, dabbing away the blood as he dug, and he lobbed the wriggling creatures to the robin that hopped around his feet. When he had filled the bucket with spuds, he trailed back round to the kitchen and tipped them into the sink for Vera to wash and peel. Then he went out into the out-house. His heart sank and his blood rose. The cage door was open.

  ‘William!’ he screamed, tearing outside again to where his brother sat on the stone steps, humming.

  ‘It was you, wasn’t it?’ Jacob yelled.

  William smiled back.

  ‘You bloody sod! Where are they?’

  William glanced upwards and Jacob followed his gaze into the branches of the elm that hung above their heads. Eric and Penelope sat side by side on one of the upper limbs. Eric cooed and Jacob cooed back. Eric puffed up his feathers.

  ‘They’re never going to come back now, are they?’ said William. ‘Up into the blue forever. It’s bloody cruel anyway, keeping the poor buggers in a cage all the time.’

  ‘No, it’s not. They like it here. I’m like their dad, I am.’

  ‘Course you are. Birdbrain.’

  ‘You’re the bloody numbskull, William …’

  But William was gone, leaving Jacob with his nose still running with blood, calling his birds’ names up into the tree.

  In the house, Vera was hacking at the potatoes with her knife. Her mother Elizabeth was struggling to light the fire. Once the kindling had taken light and started to crack and spark, she placed the fireguard carefully around the grate and went out to see why her sons had been yelling at each other again. Alfred heard the popping sparks and rushed in and touched the fireguard again and again, adjusting its position in the way he had always done since ‘the incident’. This unnamed conflagration, too awful even at a distance of several years to be referred to directly among the family, would forever cast its long shadow across Alfred’s demeanour and distort the lens through which he had previously seen the world. The family had been living at the time in a larger cottage on the main street in Over Norton, next to a pair of old chestnut trees from which the blackbirds sang away their hearts each morning. Alfred’s three older boys, James, John and Ernest, had always slept in the top room in a double bed among the spinning wheels and the wool-pile that Elizabeth turned into rough garments and blankets for the mill. The night of the incident had been freezing cold, thick snow muffling the world outside, a roaring fire warming the front room. The family had sat in the grudging light of oil lamps and orange flames until the dying fire and the creeping cold forced them to their beds. A spark leapt from the near-dead coals downstairs. The conflagration woke Alfred first, smoke and flames climbing the stairs as the edge of the steps glowed orange. Alfred roared the family into wakefulness. Vera snatched Jacob and ran with him under her arm down the stairs through the flames, smacking his head on the banister, breaking his nose and knocking him nearly senseless. Elizabeth hurried d
own with William while Alfred went panic-stricken and bellowing to the top room where the rising poisonous smoke hung thickest and James, John and Ernest lay utterly still in the big bed beneath the wool-pile. Alfred carried them out and laid them on the ground as the snow slid off the hot roof in sheets and Jacob looked on, his nose streaming with blood, and William buried his head in his mother’s folds. The coroner arrived the next morning and within the week James, John and Ernest were gone for good, at rest in the grounds of St Mary’s Church a mile down the road in Chipping Norton. Alfred found the family a cottage down the hill off West Street where he now hung his porcine prime ministers from the out-house beam and his two remaining sons flung potatoes at each other in the patch of mud in the garden and his daughter Vera considered just how large she should make her sparrow-brown gloves for Norman Miller.

  ***

  The next day Jacob was in the out-house when he heard William’s footsteps and then a pause at the door. His heart beat quicker as he waited for what he knew would come next.

  ‘What the bloody hell are you doing?’ William sneered, his usual greeting.

  Jacob halted his two-word response as it was forming in his mouth. He was too busy for a violent argument now.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Jacob, lifting his head from the sack into which he had been peering.

  ‘Nothing?’ said William. ‘That sack doesn’t look like nothing to me.’

  ‘What sack?’

  ‘That one, knob-head. The one you’re holding. And why did you tell Rose I’d let the birds out? She gave me a right doing over. Like she hated me or something.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have done it, then, should you?’

  ‘Why the bloody hell not? I told you it’s cruel, keeping them in there.’

  ‘No, it’s not. They came back, didn’t they?’

  ‘Must be bloody stupid, just like you.’

  Jacob turned his back and looked at Eric. Eric looked at him and rolled an eye.

  ‘Let’s have a look in the sack, then, birdbrain,’ said William, tugging at the thing.

  ‘Sod off, William.’

  William pushed Jacob away and grabbed the sack and pulled it open, sending a flurry of feathers into the air.

  ‘What are all these doing in here? Planning to make an eiderdown, are you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well what then?’

  He grabbed Jacob’s ear and twisted, felt something twisting inside of him too.

  ‘Get off me, William.’

  ‘Tell me, or else.’

  He twisted the ear some more and Jacob’s face went red.

  ‘Some wings.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘I’m going to make myself some wings. And then I’m going to jump out of the window.’

  ‘Stupid sod. You’ll kill yourself.’

  ‘No, I won’t.’

  ‘I’ll tell father.’

  ‘Don’t you dare.’

  ‘Suit yourself …’

  And William left Jacob to it.

  Jacob took the garden canes that he had cut to the right length, and the light cloth he had filched over time from his mother’s pile in the top room, and he set about weaving them together with twine, then coated the cloth with cow glue and edged the wings with long pheasant feathers and layered the rest with the ones from the chickens that he had plucked for Alfred. Then he fixed the leather straps that would go round his arms and hid the wings away behind the tool cupboard to dry. The next day he came back and closed the out-house door and winked at Eric and Penelope and took out the wings and slipped his arms into the straps and stood and flapped his arms and pressed his cheek into the feathers and looked up and grinned at his birds.

  ‘What do you think, Eric?’ he said. ‘Will they work?’

  Eric stared at him and cooed. Jacob cooed back.

  ‘Good, then,’ said Jacob. ‘I’ll let you know how I get on.’

  He crept out of the out-house and in through the kitchen door and up the stairs to the top room where the dormer window was. He hurried over to the window and pushed it open.

  ‘Jacob, bloody hell, don’t jump! I thought you were joking.’

  William had been sitting unseen, reading a book about tractors, looking at the pictures mainly.

  ‘Course I wasn’t joking,’ said Jacob. ‘Look at my wings. I’m going to fly.’

  And he began to squeeze himself out of the window. William rushed across and grabbed his arm and dragged him back in.

  ‘Get off my wing, you idiot! You’ll break it!’

  ‘Don’t be a fool, Jacob. Those wings are useless. You’ll drop like a stone.’

  ‘Get off me, they’re not useless, they’re bloody beautiful.’

  ‘Please Jacob,’ said William. Jacob had never heard his brother say please before. It caused him to pause. ‘Well at least don’t jump from the top floor. Try it from the room below. Please …’

  ‘All right then,’ said Jacob.

  He hurried off downstairs and heard his brother’s footsteps hurrying after him. Jacob perched on the sill and flapped his wings and cooed and cried out, ‘Look at me fly!’

  He flung himself out into space just as Alfred looked up from the orchard. Jacob felt the wind rush past him as the wings folded beneath his weight and he crashed down into the rose-bed where he lay impaled on the thorns and could see William’s little face looking down on him from the window above, a hand held against his brow, and as Jacob felt the pain in his ankle and the blood on his face, he saw Alfred towering over him with a face fluttering somewhere between admiration and rage.

  ‘You bloody little fool,’ he said at last as he hauled his son from the thorns and went to call the doctor to cast the broken ankle in plaster.

  ‘How’s the ankle, little Icarus?’ Rose asked when she saw Jacob later.

  ‘Broken,’ he said. ‘Almost snapped in two.’

  ‘The shell must break before the bird can fly …’

  ‘Is that Chesterton again?’

  ‘No, that one’s anonymous. Does it hurt very much?’

  ‘Course not.’

  ‘Just as I thought,’ she said, and she stroked his hair and he smiled at her.

  ***

  Norman Miller lowered himself into the tepid waters of the cast-iron bath and a faint slick of grime slipped across the surface. With just his head and knees above the waterline, the smell of wet sheep seeped up into Norman’s nostrils and he ducked his head under the water, then out again, and lathered himself a wig of suds from the block of soap he kept in the drip-tray by the taps. He looked around at the damp brick walls and the single window in the far wall, with its Victorian glass and its bubbles and eddies and sand-speck imperfections. During the day it afforded a transparent view across the fields and at night a clear window onto Norman Miller in his bathroom birthday suit, but no one would be out there at this time, just the sheep, and the fox that visited nightly in search of a chicken dinner until Norman shot it later that winter. And Jacob Arbuckle peering through the glass, spying on the newcomer, hatching a plot.

  A single bare bulb hung from the ceiling on a double-twisted wire, illuminating Norman as he rinsed off the soap, towelled down his enormous frame, and retrieved his clothes from the pine rail by the door. He dressed quickly, ordered his hair with a brisk sweep of his hand, called the dogs, and stepped out of the tiny cottage into the farmyard as Jacob melted away into the fields.

  Norman could see the bathroom light in Webster’s twin cottage next door, so he left him to his ablutions and walked wearily across the yard, past the patch where the strawberries grew in June, and crunched up the gravel path to the porch. In the farmhouse kitchen, Mrs Brailes was preparing the farmhands’ evening meal. Norman took his usual seat, nearest the range, a dog each side of his chair.

  ‘Fine weather today, Mrs Brailes,’ he said.

  ‘Indeed.’

  Mrs Brailes was a woman of few words, rarely wasting three syllables when two would do. Mr Brailes, the farm manager, pl
aced a bottle of Hook Norton ale on the table next to Norman, then held out a raw onion that his wife had just peeled.

  ‘No, thank you,’ said Norman. He never accepted anything at the first time of asking and therefore missed out on many of the good things that life had to offer. He did not consider raw onions to be one of them.

  ‘Are you sure, Norman?’ said Brailes. ‘These little buggers are bloody good for you,’ and he took a huge bite out of the onion and chewed on it vigorously. Behind him Norman could hear Mrs Brailes biting enthusiastically into one of her own and when he turned to face her he saw that it had brought tears to her eyes, such were its health-giving properties.

  ‘An apple a day keeps the doctor away,’ elaborated Brailes. ‘But an onion a day, even better! You’d never need a doctor in your whole life, they’d all be bloody redundant!’

  ‘Never been ill in all my life anyway,’ said Norman.

  ‘How was the horse today?’ Brailes asked, his voice rebounding off the low ceiling as if he were talking to the hard of hearing.

  ‘The horse is grand,’ said Norman. ‘It’s a good thing we got that nail out when we did or he’d have been lame by now.’

  ‘Excellent!’ boomed Brailes.

  Norman assumed that this habitual volume went some way to explaining Mrs Brailes’ verbal reticence – no word could be got in, edgeways or otherwise, when Brailes was in full flow. Norman and Webster referred to him as The Bellows, their private joke being that if they should find it difficult one night to light their fires, it would be sufficient to have him in the room for a brief conversation and there would be a roaring blaze in no time.

  Mrs Brailes placed a steaming bowl in front of each of the men.

  ‘Soup,’ she said.

  ‘Swede?’ bellowed Brailes.

  ‘Parsnip.’

  Norman ladled in a spoonful, then took a swig of beer. The door opened and Webster shuffled in. He sat down next to Norman, yawned elaborately, and only when finished remembered to cover his mouth. He smiled guiltily, then leaned a careless, weary elbow on the table and sent his spoon clattering onto the flagstones and set the dogs off barking.