‘Should I shingle my hair, darling?’ Her hair was in a loose, greasy bun: she raked it with stiff fingers.
I was used to Mother’s ways but this was too much and I snapped at her now.
‘Must you be so off-hand? He was very kind. Not only did he mend the bucket, he gave me his pie at the Hornes’—’
She wheeled on me, her face contorted by a sudden fury. ‘You went to George Horne’s house? George Horne, who cleans up dog mess for a living. And his daughter a cretin, unable to write her own name.’ She went to the door and jammed her hat on her head. Loops of hair hung down unevenly on either side. I watched her make her way down the path, her shoes slipping off the backs of her feet so that the heels clopped on the stones. Her feet were so thin. Perhaps the hunger had shrunk her brain as well.
In the second week of January Mr Dawes sent Mr Blunden to mend the pipe. He hammered a sleeve of lead around the crack and then lagged it with rags. It thawed enough to give us a trickle of icy water, and froze again. A yellow rime grew around the windows and the sink. I dragged in wet mossy logs, damp sacks of leaves, sticks, swathes of ivy and shards of bark that ran with woodlice. I dried it all as best I could but it still smoked. We sat by the smoke, feet propped on a chest because it was painful to set foot on the icy floor. I found an old sheepskin we’d brought from the Stour House and put it in the bottom drawer of the chest, and then I put my feet in the drawer and wrapped the sheepskin round until I could feel them again. At night we lay in our coats, side by side under a quilt with a carpet laid over the top, a Turkey rug, historically dark red, now brown, saturated with the smell of mice.
One afternoon I came home to find my mother kneeling in front of a sorry little heap of kindling and a dead match, and nothing in the scuttle but a smear of soot.
In the morning I went to Lucy.
‘Lucy, we must have coal.’
Her face was yellow in the winter light, her eyes very dark and blank. She twisted her mouth. ‘Wait for me after school at the top of your lane.’
She appeared out of the dark with a lantern and a sack. ‘Come on.’ She spoke without breaking her stride.
‘Where are we going?’ I fell in behind her.
‘To the sidins.’
‘The sidings?’
‘The say-dings?’ she echoed, mimicking. ‘May dyah. Not only does Ay have to show you where the say-dings are, but tell you what they are. You’re the bitter end, you truly are.’
I kept on following her through the dark. I didn’t care what she said, as long as she led me to the coal.
‘And your ma too. If she’s so good at sewin, why don’t she come down the Hall with Nan and Mrs Broad and sew for George and Emily Rail, that lost the whole back of their house when the rick caught fire? Five children and not a stitch between them. Instead of prancin along the lane with her hat on sideways.’
‘We didn’t know about the fire.’
‘Didn’t know! Didn’t know! The whole bloomin village saw it go up. Lady Brock ran up some nighties. And Mrs Daventry from The Place. They turned up. She don’t even go to church.’ She meant my mother. ‘She don’t do nothin.’
‘No,’ I agreed.
‘And now you’ve got no bloody coal.’
‘No.’
‘You take the biscuit.’
‘I only wish I could.’ I sighed. ‘I’d love a biscuit.’
Lucy stopped, so abruptly that I bumped gently into her back. She turned round, holding the lamp so that it made dark hollows of her eyes. ‘What did you have for your tea?’
‘Tea.’
‘Yes, tea,’ she said impatiently. ‘What did you have?’
‘I just said. We had tea. With milk in.’
‘Holy Christ, Ellen.’
In the dark we slid down over frozen mud and chalk onto the railway line. Above us there was a tangle of branches where the trees closed in and, down at the end of the line, a blockhouse and a square window filled with yellow light. Next to it, a coal truck, silent and black. Lucy doused her lamp. ‘Sam Pearce is in there. We don’t want him to find us. No, we don’t. So you just keep your mouth shut and your head down, and he won’t see us at all.’
Sam Pearce was young and fat with a small stoker’s cap on the back of his head and shaven stubble above his ears. I could see one small eye, oddly thickly lashed and a thick eyelid too, like a pig’s. He turned his head quite regularly, his jowl bulging over his collar. I realized that he was reviewing a spread deck of cards. We were in full darkness, keeping to the bank where our footfalls were soft.
At last we got to the truck. Up close it was a behemoth. I couldn’t see how we were to reach the coal.
Lucy was picking her way down the bank onto the line. The track was bedded on sharp chunks of granite that ground together under her boots, making an electrifying crick-crick-crick. I crouched, paralysed by the noise, and Lucy kept stock-still. Sam Pearce didn’t look up. Lucy was waiting for me to give the all-clear: she couldn’t see the window because the truck shielded her from the blockhouse. I made myself wave, and then crept sideways down the bank and onto the line. My eyes had been dimmed by the strong light from Sam Pearce’s window but now I could see pieces of coal everywhere on the ground, under the truck and beside it. Lucy was already busy filling the sack. We laid each coal in as if it were porcelain.
A sudden, horrifying screech: a door, being forced open over a cindered step. Then the blockhouse light went out. Pitch black, and heavy feet descending. Along the ground, the sweep of a torch beam in time with the same footsteps. Lucy fumbled for my hand and I clutched her fingers.
The beam travelled over the sharp stones and towards the truck. I squeezed my eyelids shut and saw a golden glare which dimmed and flared. But then I heard the scrape of shoe-soles on grit as he turned on his heel. The torch beam swept away. The footsteps receded and the door squealed once more. Lucy’s fingers slid from mine. The blockhouse light came on again and her face was before me, white as a chip of chalk. ‘We’re all right. Let’s get a bit more in.’
‘Oh, no, Lucy, please, let’s go now—’
‘I’m not shittin myself for half a bag of coal.’
We filled the bag and sidled out from under the truck. I wondered how black my hands and face were. The soot seemed sticky; I’d have to get rid of it somehow with our sliver of soap. The door screeched open again, the feet tramped down the steps, and the torch flared over us, over my black hands, over Lucy’s knee and a patch of raw skin the size of a halfpenny. And Sam Pearce a phantom behind the torch beam, laughing.
‘I thought I heard some coal rats. Never thought it’d be you, Lucy Horne, and with such a fair friend and all.’
He had a little rasp of a voice that came from high in his nose. He bent down and put his large, warm hand around my upper arm. His huge fingers and thumb met. An odour came off him far deeper and ranker than any classroom air at Upton School.
‘Get your sweaty paws off her—’ Lucy yelled, throwing herself at him, but he caught her by the collar. The torch fell to the ground. In the gloom he swung us both towards the blockhouse. ‘Pick up the torch, Lucy Horne.’
My voice turned to a high babble. ‘Please don’t please don’t touch me, Mr Pearce, you may take the coal, please—’
‘Not before I’ve had a bit o’ company.’
Lucy picked up the torch and began a shocking refrain. ‘Fuck you, Sam Pearce. Fuck you and your fuckin disgustin ways. You won’t touch that girl, nor will she touch you—’