CHAPTER TWO

I poked at that bell of number five Edenhurst Grove for the umpteenth time, rucksack and sportsbag perched on the steps of Vera Jones' house - my childhood home next door at number three.

The Bartons' chimes were running out of juice. Peal a note or two off-key. My heart pounded and - like the skewed tune in my ears - was sour with apprehension.

"Yoo-hoo!" I sing-sang.

The car factory - still called Austin by locals - laboured away at my back, its paintshop fumes drifting through the jerry-built housing hereabouts. When the wind was right, I remembered, you caught the drilling of iron and steel on assembly lines; noo-o-oozshk, cloo-o-oozshk, bynk-ga; and in the dead of night too, like competing knells. Noo-o-oozshk- Massive smithy-craft in the rainshadow of Lickey Hills. Birmingham - 'The Working City' as Elmdon airport had it. Central England's dole-queue hub - as the advertisements had not.

Longbridge. Cars and trucks heaved upon the world. Ninety- four years of them. Factory hooter at 5pm. Men and youths in windbreakers, boiler-suits, scuffed shoes - racing past guarded gates into Bristol Road and Longbridge Lane chockablock with flight. Ninety-four years of that too. This was my dad Frank Jones' industry; and Graham Dagg's life - stepfather - after him.

And my history. Painted by numbers; smudging a finish.

Today though - May 1, 1999 - is more about denuding Vera's house.

And the getaway.

Waiting for a reply at the Bartons, I took a good gander around. Clouds as perturbed as the hurrying workers below them; sun-speckled, brooding. West Midlands' spring alright, last of the century. But mostly you didn't notice that kind of thing in these parts. Nor young daffodils bordering the Bartons' path; the sloping lawn neatly trimmed. Roses fastened to attention - plant ‚em, spit and polish. Front steps glistening with ruddy good health. Nor this dishevelled, all too unfamiliar son at a neighbour's bell. You looked straight ahead.

Behind a Woolworth's netting.

Rat-a-tat-tat. Wouldn't those Bartons even come to the door?

I'd been travelling overnight from Toronto - alongside a delirious Burberry-wardrobed American couple, both retired high- school principals, on their way to Shakespeare's Warwickshire and the swans at Stratford. A twenty mile pilgrimage south of this doorstep. I'd encouraged them to visit Cadbury World and the chimney-stippled plain a stone's throw north of Avon's famous theatre. The other Warwickshire. And the Black Country - source of the industrial revolution, bellows to the defunct Empire. I went on a bit. The sort of claptrap retired educators savour as they begin to develop again.

Catch up for the slowed up.

The Bard would have re-written ‚The Tempest' if he'd seen Birmingham, I confided in them. ‚Longbridge, especially. Now there's a wizard's beauty-spot.' The Americans' eyes lit up as though they'd unearthed a priceless Folio as my own eyes closed down on Madonna - or someone like her on the headset - after a fourth and hugely silencing Bloody Mary. 'It's a mysterious island,' I continued, trying to sound like Caliban. 'Longbridge. Exile territory. River Rae running through it!' But I must have dozed off in mid-misrepresentation. And oddly, the two pedagogues had disappeared when I awoke to the landfall ding-dong.

Would the Bartons break down and give me Vera's key? I'm only Vera Jones's son after all.

Across the road a dog began to bark.

i€Mrs. Barton!l_ I yapped through the letterbox.

At last a silhouette appeared at the top of the door's frosted glass: Nelly one-lung Barton - chainsmoker extraordinaire - Vera's neighbour of nearly thirty years, friend and I suppose of late, bedside confidante.

I didn't have a chance.

Nelly - four changes of Marks and Spencer clothes a day, according to Vera - made it downstairs and opened the door. At the end of the hallway her husband, Ted - lofty and bowed, mute to the last drop - ambled away to the seed packets in his back garden. He had once or twice spoken to me, when we arrived on Edenhurst in 1971. Just before I was sent away to Blanchland House reform school in north-east England. 'Join the Merchant Navy, lad,' he had said. (He was an Austin security guard) ‚It'll make a man of you yet.' Yet? That would have taken some doing. I had ignored the armchair Captain Nemo; factory-gate watcher. 'Uncle' Ted was always just this; a buzzed haircut disappearing from view in the nick of time. Periscope up.

"Oh ah," said Nelly, recalling a not unpleasant chore. She was wearing a green nylon housecoat and a tangerine blouse. Underneath, a pleated floral skirt that betrayed a slip. Nelly moved colourfully - a stately and unwilling mid-sixties - in stockings and determined peach-tone pumps. Mutton dressed as lamb, as Vera always put it when Nelly had done a favour or shared a tea and one biscuit.

I waited in the gloaming of spic and span tornadoes in the Bartons' fitted carpet: a lemon, black and red convulsion. I refocussed, then came to terms with the gleaming white and yellow- ochre banister that steadied the couple as they moved about their pallette.

An inter-city train - the Bristol to Birmingham - hurtled past Longbridge station on its way to the city centre.

And I waited.

Nelly, in a timeless ash-blonde perm that nearly matched the skirting-board, returned at last from her through-lounge much celebrated in its day for being, amongst other things, the privilege of homeowners - rather than council tenants - to smash down a drywall and shake hands with Paradise. She offered Vera's house keys and the gravest of expressions to go with them.

Close up, Nelly seemed enervated. Her lips - or was it lipstick? - mauve-rimmed, cheeks drawn beneath the powder and blush. Sixty years or more were seeping through. And Vera's demands would have hastened the damp. I wondered whether she and Ted had trailed Vera's hearse in the funeral limousine my mother had arranged for herself. Or had it followed empty?

Nelly leaned against the door and sighed. Layers of clothing pressed against the glass like upturned flowers in a vase.

I began to speak - the first person I'd met, apart from the cabbie, since landing at Elmdon that morning. Had she been at Vera's side through the final ordeal? Months, weeks? It looked like it. Supervised the cremation? Wake? I assumed so. And began to thank her. But Nelly pushed the door to. "Your mum left a shoe- repair box on the pouffe in the front room, Enoch," she said too quickly, pop-popping. "Nigger black."

"Beg your pardon?" I said, pressing my foot against the door- jamb.

"On the pouffe," she repeated irritably.

Where Vera kicked her heels. Eighty-two years of them.

But Nelly was making a point.

Click.

Nelly Barton had had her word. Exit with a flourish. Unpursued by a bear. I guarantee the Burberry Americans hadn't seen anything like this in Stratford. Amongst those swans. No pouffe or nigger blacks in that crowd.

Like Aladdin, I watched the frosted glass as Nelly shrank away like a genie-with-second-thoughts into the brilliant white kitchen as meticulously scrubbed, no doubt, as Nelly and number five ever were. Ted crossed her path. Shadows fusing.

Vanished.

Down the Grove on Longbridge Lane, an empty transporter air-braked to tackle the zebra crossing off Sunbury Road opposite the 41 bus terminus; and those unsteady pensioners fresh from the post office; another week's bingo and rent in hand.

"To the pouffe then, Mrs. Barton!" I said, somewhere between a toast and repeating directions. I glanced up Edenhurst Grove - one or two faces behind the mesh - and sensed the verdict on Enoch Jones.

I wasn't surprised.

Down on Longbridge Lane, the transporter rattled into gear and off over the bridge past the Austin apprentices' clubhouse. File of vehicles behind. Just like swans, really.

I'd broken every conceivable rule in the neighborhood book. I'd say it over and over again. Without remorse I'd avoided my elderly, widowed mother's funeral. Her one child a no-show. What tragedy, that procession at St John the Baptist; and to Lodge Hill Cemetery. Sinister, that Enoch. Always said he was a street arab. Waste. Rotten to the core.

Know where he ended up, don't you?

All that remained of Vera Jones was simple. A breeze: emptying the house; paying final bills and handing over the rent book to a 'City Council Neighborhood Office' on Central Avenue. Key through the letterbox. Call it springtime clean.

Who better to take up a broom than the sashaying devil himself?

Royston Tester grew up in Birmingham, the English Midlands. Before emigrating to Canada in 1978, he spent time in London, Barcelona, and Melbourne. A Canadian citizen, he is a fellow of the Hawthornden writers’ retreat in Scotland, the Valparaiso Foundation in Spain, and is a frequent Leighton Studio artist-resident at The Banff Centre. He was educated in English and European Literature at Essex University in the U.K. and in Modern British Literature at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. He has published short fiction in numerous Canadian literary journals, including Descant, The New Quarterly, The Antigonish Review, and The Malahat Review; his work has been anthologized in Rip-Rap and Intersections (Banff Centre Press) and the Quickies series (Arsenal Pulp Press); in 2003 he was shortlisted for Pagitica’s International Literary Competition. In the U.S. his stories have appeared in online publications such as Blithe House Quarterly, Lodestar, and the anthology Everything I Have Is Blue (Suspect Thoughts Press); and in 2002 he was a finalist in the U.S. New Century Writer Awards. His first collection of linked stories Summat Else (Porcupine's Quill, 2004) is followed by a second, You Turn Your Back (2005). Currently working on a novel, For The English To See, Tester lives in the Little Italy area of Toronto.

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