Tom All Alone (3)

       Russell leapt into Tom's bed in the dark and pulled him down under the covers.

       "This one's a vegetable souper."

       The fart sounded like a sheet being ripped.  The two boys rolled under the covers in a fit of giggles - Russell using his superior strength to hold Tom in place as the cloud engulfed them.

       "Smell the cabbage in it."

       Tom struggled to get out, his laughter now turning to panic at the lack of air.  Finally, Russell threw off the covers again and ran back to his own bed in the opposite corner, jumping into it so hard that it banged against the wall.  Tom pulled the covers up around himself again and found his pillow.

       "You're a smelly pig, Russell."

       "And you're a stone-faced stickleback."

       The name made Tom laugh - a high, hysterical giggle, tailing off before rising again as Russell repeated it, mantra-like:

       "Stone-faced stickleback - stone-faced stickleback - stone-faced stickleback..."

       And then the light exploded in his eyes and nan stood in the doorway like a horror movie monster - her eyes raging behind her glasses, her mouth caved through lack of dentures, her hair flattened around her head by a net.

       "Will you two shut up and get to sleep!  Your mum and dad will be home soon and they'll hear about it."

       "It was his fault, nan," Tom cried.

       "No it wasn't, you liar."

       "Yes it was."

       "Stop it, the pair of you!"  Her voice was like a gunshot, silencing them immediately.  "Now, any more of it and I'll fetch that copper stick."

       Tom dreaded the sight of it.  She kept it under the sink in her scullery, where she used it to stir the washing around in the boiler.  She'd used it once to dye something red, and the stain had soaked into it.  Russell told Tom it was bloodstains from where she beat naughty children.  She always threatened it, holding it up like a policeman's truncheon, but never used it.  The sight of it was enough.

       She switched the light off again and stepped back out of the room, her outline caught briefly in the hallway light - large and shapeless in her dressing gown.  Tom heard her step along the passage, her slippers scuffling against the lino, then the low hum of her wireless as she opened the door of her parlour and went back in.

       A few breaths of silence.

       "You liar," Russell whispered through it.

       Tom kept quiet, though, staring into the darkness - the after-image of the light like a lightning flash across his vision.  He closed his eyes and pushed his fingers against the lids, watching the images in his head twisting and shifting, reshaping themselves, breaking apart and reabsorbing.  He could see pictures forming: indistinct red objects, drifting like leaves in a puddle.  Faces coalesced from random bubbles of luminous purples and scarlets.  Gradually, the sense came to him of staring down through clouds onto red islands in a milky ocean far below.

       Sleep came gently as the light faded in his head.  Some time later, a distant sound drifted into his dreams and he opened his eyes. The curtains were edged with orange sodium light from the street at the back, and the sound became words - dampened across the distance of the night.  The singer at the pub on the corner.  The song he'd heard so many times before - the last of the evening.

       Yippee-i-ayyyyy.... Yippee-i-oooooh...

       Ghost riders in.... the skyyyyy...

       He loved those words - the images they conjured in his mind. Ghostly figures on horseback, racing across the stars like smoke trails.  He listened, still only half-awake, gently humming the chorus to himself as it repeated - this time rising to a higher, longer note before stopping in sudden silence.  Then the clapping and cheering, like the sounds of those horses and riders themselves, thundering behind it.  Later still, the muffled, beery voices in the street.  Someone whistling, shrill as a kettle.  A car coughing into life and driving away, grating through the gear changes as it faded off down the Lower Richmond Road towards the common.  A window being shut somewhere and a catch being set.

       He waited for it to come, counting the moments silently in his head as always.

       The click and twist of the key in the front door.  The fumbling footsteps in the hallway.  The whispered voices as they got to the stairs.

       "Mum."

       They step back down and the door opens.  She is framed in the light from the hall.  Then she is there, sitting on the bed, pushing his hair back with her hand.

       "Shush now.  You'll wake your brother.  Go back to sleep."

       He looks up at her silently - the light behind her catching the glints in her hair, like the glow he's seen on pictures of Jesus.  He can smell her perfume, the spicy sweetness of something else on her breath.  She leans down and kisses his forehead.

       Behind her, dad stands in the doorway, leaning against it looking at him - a dark figure cut from the light.

       "Go sleep, boy," he whispers.  "God bless."

       She gets up and joins him out there.  Then they're gone and the darkness envelopes him again.

       He hears the stairs creak as they go up.

*

       They played out in the road because there was nowhere else to play.  Tom, and Matthew and Stevie from number 3, and Mikey and Bernie from the floor above them, and Patrick from number 1, and Roshina from further up, and Salvatore from next door to her.  Tom was the oldest at nearly five, but not by much, and there were no real leaders - though Salvatore liked to give orders. 

      Games were decided by the numbers who wanted to play, and any that didn't would sit on a wall and do their own thing.  Most joined in, though.  Cowboys and Indians, or He, or Buses and Taxis, or Chinese Village.  The rules were simple and never changed.  In He, you couldn't be 'had' if you touched Salvatore's front wall, but you couldn't touch it for longer than a count to five.  In Buses and Taxis, they all had to stand on the corner of the main road and wait until they saw a bus or taxi coming along from the bridge. The first to spot it would then shout out "Bus!" or "Taxi!" and everyone had to run to the wall by the sweet shop and climb on it, and be sitting to watch as the bus or taxi went past.  If you didn't get on the wall in time, you were 'dead' and out of the game.  Chinese Village wasn't a game so much as a way of passing the time. They always played it on the narrow strip of earth in front of Patrick's house, where the front wall had been knocked down. Everyone was a villager, like Tom had seen in one of Russell's books, and each had their different tasks: digging holes, collecting stones in piles, planting sticks, making little walls of compacted earth and rubble - like sandcastles on a beach.  Russell had said they did those things in China because they were poor and had to grow their own food and build their own houses, instead of the men doing it like in this country.  'The men' was the term they always used when they spoke about those things.  'The men' built houses, and made food, and drove the buses and trains and lorries - like dad.  Tom thought the men must be very clever and important to do these things.  Mum said the men learned to do these things because they went to school - which was why Russell was going, and why he would have to go, too.

 

       Sometimes, they wouldn't play any of the games.  Sometimes, they would just sit on Tom's front wall and talk about whatever came into their heads.

       "Why has your wall got bits of metal sticking out of it, Tom?"

       "My nan said it's where the men took the railings down in the war."

       "Why did they do that?"

       "To make bombs to drop on the Germans."

       Laughter.

       "Did they drop the railings on the Germans, then?"

       "I expect they did."

       "Did it kill them?"

       "It must've done, 'cos England winned it."

       Patrick stood on the coping and edged along towards the end of the wall, like a tightrope walker.

       "My dad knew someone back in Ireland who got killed by railings."

       "Liar!"

       "No, I'm not."

       They all looked at him, interested suddenly.  He reached the end of the wall, then turned around wobble-footed and edged back.

       "He said the man fell out of a window onto the railings and they went through his eye and all his brains came out and everything."

       They listened in horror at the tale.  Bernie put her hands over her ears.

       "Yeuuuchh!"

       Patrick warmed to the subject.  "And his guts came out, too, with all his dinner still in them."

       "What did he have for his dinner?"

       "Eggs and sausages and chips, and they all spilled out on the pavement, so someone ate them to save the waste."

       Bernie shook her head from side to side, still holding her ears.

       "Yaaacccchhh!!  Shut up, Patrick."

       Mikey copied his sister.  In a few moments, they were all shaking their heads, hands over ears, pretending to be sick.

       "Anyway, my dad was in the war and he killed a load of Germans."

       "My dad killed more Germans than your dad."

       "No he didn't."

       "Yes he did, because he told me."

       "Well, my dad told me he killed more Germans than your dad, and he can fight your dad as well."

       "No he can't.  My dad can fight everyone's dad and beat them all."

       "Prove it."

       "I will.  I'll tell him, and he'll come over when he gets home from work and beat your dad up."

       "My dad will beat him up first."

       "But he won't see my dad, because my dad can go invisible."

       "No he can't, stupid."

       "I'll tell my dad you said I was stupid, and he'll beat you up as well."

       "I'll trip your dad over if he comes into my house, and then my dad will jump on him and break all his legs."

       "So then my mum will get your dad."

       "And then my nan will beat your mum with her copper stick."

       "No she won't because she'll already be dead."

       "Buses and Taxis!" Salvatore shouted, jumping down and sprinting off for the corner.  The others leapt down as one and ran after him, yelling like cowboys and indians. 

       Mikey tripped over in the excitement and fell flat, chinning the pavement.  His scream took a long time building - his face shaping up for it - and then broke in a lung-burst through the snot and tears.  Bernie helped him up and took him back over, banging the letter flap until their mother came to the door, her hair in a towel, her feet and legs bare beneath her skirt, and took them in.

(continued)  https://www.abctales.com/story/harryc/tom-tom-turnaround-4