“I tried it, but it nearly made me ’eave.”
“Not me. I’m nearly ten, see?” He drew a half-pound bar of chocolate from his back pocket: “Tek a bit. And break me a piece off as well.”
Brian ripped the blue paper away: “How did you pinch it?”
“Easy. A shop door was open. I stood outside to mek sure it was empty, then jumped across the doormat-bell, and slived my hand over the counter.” Brian passed him a double square: “Anybody see yer?”
“No. I was dead quiet. Had my slippers on. Look”—he held up his foot to show the rubber and canvas rags of what had once been one-and-fourpenny plimsolls, now like the relics of some long and fabulous retreat: “Quiet as a mouse. So don’t say a word to a livin’ soul. Not that I think you bleddy-well would,” he said, checking himself quickly. “You’re my best pal as well as my cousin, and I know I can trust yo’ more than anybody else in the world.”
“Did yer nick owt else?” Brian asked. (“Yer want ter stay away from that Bert,” his father said when the Doddoes had left to live up Sodom. “He’s a bleddy thief, and if yo’ get caught thievin’ wi’ ’im yer’ll get sent on board ship. So watch it, my lad, and ’ave nowt to do wi’ ’im.”)
“I don’t allus pinch stuff, yer know,” Bert said resentfully, as if he also had seen the pictures in Brian’s mind. “So don’t think I do.” He skimmed a piece of slate across the water: it ducked-and-draked and took his annoyance with it under the surface. “Want a puff? No? All the more for them as does then. I just saw this bar o’ chocolate, see, and went in to get it. That ain’t pinchin’, so don’t tell me it is. Break me a piece off then,” he asked, flipping his nub-end into a pool of water and laughing at the crack-shot sizzle. “We’ll scoff it up and see’f we can find owt on the tips.”
He led the way: “Watch that there; if you tread on it you’ll goo under. A pal o’ mine once got blood poisoning: cut his foot on an old tin can and they kept ’im in ’ospital six weeks. Wish it’d a bin me. He got marvellous grub. Ever bin inside Sann-eye?” he called back.
“No,” Brian admitted, “I ain’t.” He turned for a snapshot look: the massive building still in the distance, a row of windows top and bottom, less smoke travelling from its chimney.
“We’ll go in then later on, about five o’clock, when the men’s knocked off.” He pulled a bicycle wheel from the water and bowled it along with a piece of stick.
Brian asked questions: What about the nightwatchman? because he couldn’t imagine Sann-eye without one. He visualized the burning fires, oven-doors like a row of monsters’ mouths filled with flames instead of teeth, able to draw you in for devouring if you stood near too long. “That’s ’ospital,” said the voice of a girl who had taken him for walks not long after he had learned to walk.
“Nobody’s there. Fires is nearly cold by five. I went in last week with our Dave, up through the big winders. I’ll show yer.” The wheel swerved off the path and disappeared under a nest of bubbles. Bert threw the stick after to keep it company. It floated. They were almost at the escarpment. “I bet a good tip’ll come this afternoon,” he prophesied.
“We could do wi’ it,” Brian said. “But there ain’t much on tips today. I bin scraping since nine, and I on’y got a sack o’ wood.” Bert wanted to know where it was. “I sode it to Agger for a tanner.” Both were on hands and knees, making slow progress up the bank. “Yer got robbed,” Bert said. “He should a gen yer a shillin’.”
Brian was being called a fooclass="underline" “It saved me carryin’ it ’ome. We’ve got plenty o’ wood anyway.” Bert relented, went on climbing: “Well, as long as you get your sack back.”
“Course I will,” Brian said. “What are you going to go for a rake, though?”
“Mek one. Flatten a piece o’ steel wi’ a brick.”
“It’ll break.”
“I s’ll look for summat else then.”
“I’d like a good rake,” Brian said. “I ’ave to mek a new ’un every day, as it is. After about six scrapes they break.”
“You need a steel ’un,” Bert told him.
“I know I do. I ain’t got one, though. The best rake I’ve seen is Agger’s. It’s got a proper ’andle. Most o’ the time he don’t use it an’ all.”
Bert reached out for what he thought was a piece of iron: slung it away when he saw it wasn’t. “Why?”
“It’s too good. He on’y uses it on loads where he might find good stuff. Most o’ the time he keeps it in his pram.”
“A rake’s no good if it ain’t used,” Bert reflected, as they came up on to the solid tips. He found a sack without too many holes, in which he put scraps deemed useful enough for home: an old kettle worn thin underneath that Dave would mend with a washer, a cup with no handle, dummy bars of chocolate for the kids to play with, a coagulated mass of boiled sweets to wash under the tap and eat, and a few choice pieces of fresh-smelling wood for the washday copper.
The scrapers were leaving the tips under a misty silence: a scuffle of boots could be heard kicking the fire out, and the tin shed — put up when it had looked like rain — fell with a satisfying clatter against the stones. “The rats don’t come out till it’s dark,” Bert said, which Brian was glad to hear. They walked without speaking, treading quietly through sedge, water seeping into all four shoes if they didn’t go forward quickly enough. Topping the precipice of tins and clinkers, Sann-eye looked empty and locked up for the night, its chimney cold and unsmoking, frail almost against heavy clouds, as if it had to bear an unfair weight and couldn’t for much longer.
Brian noticed Bert limping, remembered him walking with a strange motion ever since leaving the tips. Must have a stone in his shoe — yet it didn’t quite look like that. He’s acting daft, I suppose. Still, he himself had often simulated a painful limp when on Goose Fair, asking people for pennies because he was hungry. It was an old and secret joke between them: “I want some money, missis, because my crutches are in pawnshop and I can’t afford to get ’em out. No, I didn’t pawn ’em. Dad did. He was short for a packet o’ Woodbines. I tried to stop ’im but he knocked me down, and I couldn’t chase him because he’d snatched my crutches. Mam tried to get him as he was going through the yard, but he hit her with one of the crutches as well. So it’s ever so painful to walk without ’em, missis, honest it is. They’re in pawn for a bob, and I only want another twopence to mek it up. Thank you, missis, ever so much.”
And sometimes when that inner urge to beg was far away, they might limp because they felt like it. Brian often did so when alone, to look different from other people due to his uppity-down progress along the pavement, and also to make himself the object of sympathy to passers-by. After a while he’d realize he didn’t know whether or not they felt sorrow because it was never shown, so he changed his antics to a self-made interior tune whistled for his own benefit only. Like sometimes you thought people might at last feel sorry if you died, but you knew you’d never be able to see it, so it wasn’t worth it anyway.
He was going to ask about the limp, when Bert said: “This is where we goo up. I’ll nip first and yo’ can foller.” At the top he gave the sack to Brian, stared hard at the wall for a second. Then the patch of neat cemented bricks turned into an all-powerful magnet, for he shot across the few-foot gap at great speed, and was pressed like a flat frog against its vertical surface. His two hands clawed their way on the window ledge, and with one heave he was up.
Brian saw a distinct hollow in the wall on which to grip, so that he, too, after throwing up the sack, was all of a sudden flattened against the bricks, aware of his boots sixty feet free above the ground. Heavier rainspots tapped coldly against his hands. “You’d better come up quick before you get drowned,” Bert advised.