One man amongst the labour detail stood aside from his four colleagues, watching as they worked. Alma supposed he was in charge. She noticed that, unlike those of the other men, his gown rose to a cowl so that none of his face was really visible above the nose. His hair was covered, but she somehow felt sure it was dark and shorter than that of his workmates, the neck shorn to suede below the folds of his dove-coloured hood. He was clean-shaven, like the rest of them, ruggedly handsome from those features she could see beneath the inky cowl-cast shade that filled his sockets and concealed his eyes behind a phantom burglar mask. Seeming to feel the child’s attention through the glass, the man in question turned to smile in her direction, lifting one hand casually in greeting, and with an astounded, disbelieving lurch somewhere inside her Alma understood who he must be.
The measured pram-squeak and the ringing cap-gun detonations of her mother’s heels slowed to a stop as Doreen also paused to stare through the illuminated window, in at the nocturnal labourers and their hooded foreman.
“Well, I’ll goo ter ayr ace. Look ’ere, you two, it’s the Frit Burr un ’iz angles.”
Alma thought that ‘angles’ was most likely an expression from the Boroughs meaning carpenters or joiners, but the other term was foreign to her and she frowned up questioningly into Doreen’s gently mocking gaze, as if her mum thought Alma was just being dense and should have known at her age what a ‘Frit Burr’ was.
Doreen gave a mild tut. “Ooh, yer a sample, you are. ’E’s the Frith Borh. The Third Burrer. All the times you’ve ’eard me gooin’ on abayt ’im, un yuh look ut me gone ayt.”
Alma had heard of the Third Borough, or at least it seemed she had. The words were teasingly familiar, and she knew this was a way the person that she’d understood the hooded man to be the moment that he’d waved was known, something that people called him when they wanted to avoid his other name. ‘Third Borough’, if she’d got it right, meant something like a rent-man or policeman, only much more friendly and respected, more magnificent than even the Red Earl, Earl Spencer, swinging on a pub sign she’d once seen. She looked back from her mother to the tableau of the partly reconstructed paper-shop, the figures at their earnest graft there in a flood of brilliance, the newsagent’s with its glass front like a fish tank where the men worked under water that was warm and luminous. The cowled man, the Third Borough, was still smiling out at Doreen and her children, but he wasn’t so much waving now as beckoning, inviting them to come inside.
Mum scraped the pushchair round in a tight quarter-circle on the pavement bordering the hushed, abandoned market, steering Michael and his pram into the shop’s glass entranceway, set back with grubby beige and turquoise chips in a mosaic ramp between the doorframe and the slippery street. With one plump hand still clenched upon the carriage handle and pulled in her mother’s wake, Alma hung back uncertainly, dragging her feet. She’d heard somewhere, or somehow gathered the impression that you only got an audience like this if you were dead, dead being an idea she hadn’t really taken in as yet but knew she wouldn’t like. One of the men with flowing locks, this one with hair so fair that it was white, was setting down his handsaw now and crossing to the door to hold it open for them, genial creases forming at the corners of his eyes. Sensing the girl’s reluctance, Alma’s mother turned and spoke to her encouragingly.
“Gor, you are a soppy date, ayr Alma. ’E ent gunner urcha, un ’e dun’t see people very orften. Goo on in un say ’ello or else ’e’ll think we’re rude.”
With head tipped forward and her brown roller-provided curls concealed beneath the headscarf’s charcoal check, her winter coat’s line falling from the full bust in a prow-like swoop, Doreen had something in her manner that made Alma think of pigeons and their careless calm, their paint-box mottled necks, the ruffling music of their voices. She remembered having had a dream once in which she’d been sitting with her mother in their living room down Andrew’s Road, on the west boundary of the Boroughs. In the dream Doreen was ironing while her daughter knelt there in the armchair, sucking absently upon the threadbare padding of its rear and gazing through the back-yard window out into the twilight. Over next door’s wall there loomed the disused stable with black holes like crossed-out bits in documents, where slates were missing from its roof. Through these the flickering shapes of pigeons lifted and descended, barely visible, pale twists of smoke against the darkness of the school hill rising up beyond. Mum turned to Alma from her ironing board and solemnly explained about the roosting birds.
“They’re where dead people goo.”
The child had woken before she could ask whether this meant that pigeons were all human ghosts, forms that dead people had gone into and become, or whether they somehow existed simultaneously in Heaven, where dead people go, and up amongst the rafters of the derelict barn in the neighbour’s yard at the same time. She had no idea why the dream should come to mind now as she followed Michael and her mother through the door, still patiently held open by the silver-haired and gown-draped carpenter, out of the night into the light-soaked store.
Having one entrance on the market and another round the corner in Drum Lane, the shop’s inside seemed bigger than she’d thought it would be, although Alma realised this was partly due to there not being any paper racks, cash registers or counters; any customers. Filling the room was the perfume of fresh-shaved wood, somewhere between the scents of tinned peach and tobacco, and beneath her feet the new-laid floorboards were as satisfyingly resilient as longbows, sawdust heaping in the unswept corners. Woman, girl and baby having stepped within, the white-haired workman who’d been holding back the door went to his partially cut plank, grinning at Alma and her brother with a gruff wink that included them in some unspoken and yet wonderful conspiracy, before returning to his interrupted task.
Unsure of what to make her face do in response to this, Alma attempted a half-hearted grimace that came out as neither one thing nor the other, then looked round at Michael. He was sitting up enthusiastically out of the pushchair, tugging forward on the chewed straps of his harness — the same one Alma had worn just a few years ago — made of red leather, with the flaking and much picked-at gold leaf outline of a horse’s head gradually disappearing on its front. Michael was chortling in delight, arms raised with fingers opening and closing, trying to grab onto the milky light, the air, the tingling Christmas atmosphere of that peculiar moment at the corner of the eerie midnight square, as if he wanted to take hold of it all, cram it in his mouth and eat it. His large head tipped back upon the jiggling infant body with a profile like the Fairy Soap child, blinking up at everything and gurgling with such enjoyment that his sister privately suspected he was rather shallow for a two-year-old, far too concerned with having fun to take life seriously. Behind him, out through the shop’s window there was only blackness, with the market gone and nothing but their lantern-slide reflections hanging in the dark, as if the news and magazine store was alone and falling through the emptiness of space. Above her, in the adult chatter closer to the paper shop’s high plaster ceiling, Doreen and the hooded man were talking as her mum thanked him for asking them inside and introduced him to her children.