The Third Borough was concluding his account to Doreen of how things were going, reassuring Alma’s mother that working with wood had been his family’s business since time immemorial. He was telling her that though the job was long and would break many backs before its finish, all went well and would be done on time. Alma could not explain why this pronouncement filled her with such joy. It was as if nobody had to worry anymore about how things turned out because it would be all right in the end, like when your parents reassured you that the hero wasn’t going to die and would get well before the story finished.
All around her in the glimmer of the shop the carpenters bent conscientiously to their unceasing toil, shouldering planes upslope against the grain, but Alma caught them looking to see if she’d understood what welcome news this was for everyone and smiling with a quiet satisfaction when they saw she had, proud of themselves yet blushing with embarrassment at their own pride. The Porthimoth di Norhan would be built, was in a sense already good as done. She looked around at Michael sitting up alertly in his pram. Even he seemed aware that there was something special going on and eagerly locked gazes with his sister, highlights dancing in his huge blue eyes as he communicated his delight along their private wordless channel, rattling his reins excitedly. Alma could tell that even if her brother wasn’t old enough to give things names yet, he still knew in some way who the hooded foreman really was. You couldn’t meet with him and not know, even if you were a baby. Michael was by nature a contented child but at that moment looked about to burst from all the wonderment inflating him, as if he understood exactly what this grand completion meant to everybody. It occurred to her from nowhere that one day when she and Michael were both old they’d probably sit on a wall together somewhere and have a good laugh about all this.
Doreen was thanking the Third Borough now for having asked them in while at the same time she made ready to depart, checking that Michael was strapped back securely and instructing Alma to do up her mackintosh’s belt. Either the lights inside the shop were getting brighter, Alma thought, or else the darkness of the empty square outside had turned an unknown colour that was worse than black. She wasn’t looking forward to the walk home, not to the vague, muffled dread she sometimes felt in Bath Street nor the night jaws of the entrance to the alleyway, the jitty, where it ran along behind their row of terraced houses down between Spring Lane and Scarletwell Street, but she felt that it would seem ungrateful if she said so. Even if it meant a chilly trudge Alma would not have missed this for the world, although she still wished she could jump through the next twenty windswept minutes of her life to find herself already tucked in bed.
The lights inside the shop were definitely getting brighter, she decided, as she struggled to do up her mac’s all-of-a-sudden awkward belt. In front of her, or possibly above her, there were shiny rectangles of greater whiteness hanging from the air, which Alma realised must be the reflections of the windowpanes behind her as she stood beside the pushchair trying to do up her coat. Except that wasn’t right. You sometimes got a lit-up room reflected in a window, but not windowpanes reflected in the empty spaces of a room, suspended there in nothing, getting whiter and more blinding by the moment. Somewhere near, Doreen was telling her to hurry up with fastening her belt so they could leave the gentlemen to get on with their work. Alma had let go of the buckle-end and lost it down a complicated tuck she hadn’t known was there. The more she tried to extricate the belt the more she found that extra swathes of gabardine unfolded from recesses in her coat that only outfitters would understand and tangled Alma in their shoelace-coloured creases. There above or possibly in front of her the levitating panes of light blazed fiercer. Nearby mum was telling her to get a move on but the situation with her mackintosh was getting worse. Alma was wrestling on her back against endless, engulfing fabric when she noticed that the glowing oblongs floating there before her had a pair of curtains pulled across them. Patterned with grey roses, they were very like the ones in Alma’s bedroom.
That in substance was the dream that Alma Warren, who grew up to be a moderately famous artist, had one February night in 1959 when she was five years old. Within a year her brother Michael choked to death and yet somehow got better and was back from hospital unharmed, at home with them down Andrew’s Road inside a day or two, which neither he nor Alma really mentioned afterwards although it scared them at the time.
Their father Tommy Warren died in 1990, Doreen following a short while later in the sweltering summer heat of 1995. A little under ten years after that Mick Warren had an accident at work, where he was reconditioning steel drums. Rendered unconscious in a slapstick way and only woken by cold jets of water that workmates were using to sluice caustic dust out of his eyes, Mick was returned to life this second time with a variety of troubling thoughts inside his head, strange memories churned up to the surface while he’d been knocked out. Some of the things he thought that he remembered were so odd they couldn’t possibly have happened, and Mick started to become concerned that he was taking on the feared and thus unmentioned trait that simmered in the family blood, that he was going cornery.
When he’d at last worked up the nerve to tell his wife Cath of his fears she’d straight away suggested that he talk to Alma. Cathy’s family, like Mick’s, had been evicted from the grime-fields of the Boroughs, the square mile of dirt down by the railway station, when the council had the final remnants of the area cleared away during the early 1970s. Solid and sensible and yet proud of her eccentricities, Cath had those qualities that Mick recalled the Boroughs women having: the decisiveness and unshakeable faith in intuition, in their own ability to know what it was best to do in any given circumstance, no matter how peculiar.
Cathy and Alma got on like a house on fire despite or possibly because of their vast differences, with Cathy openly regarding Alma as a mad witch who lived in a rubbish tip and Alma scathing in return about her sister-in-law’s fondness for Mick Hucknall out of Simply Red. Nevertheless, the women harboured nothing but respect towards each other in their separate fields of expertise, and when Cath recommended that her husband have a word with Alma if he thought that he was going Radio Rental, Mick knew that this was because his wife believed his older sister to be an authority on having not just lost the plot but having wilfully flushed the entire script down the shitter. Furthermore, he knew that she was more than likely right. He made a date to meet with Alma for a drink the following Saturday and for no reason that he could articulate arranged to see her in the Golden Lion on Castle Street, one of the few surviving pubs out of the dozens that the Boroughs had in its day boasted, and coincidentally where he’d met Cath when she was working there, before he’d lived the dream by marrying the barmaid.