Magnus Mills - All Quiet on the Orient Express

“What?”

“Three pounds of potatoes.”

“Yes,” he said with impatience. “What else?”

“I need some biscuits as well.”

“Yes.”

“What sort have you got?”

“All sorts.”

“Oh, right,” I said. “Two packets of fig rolls, please.”

“No, we haven’t got those.”

“How about custard creams?”

“No.”

“Malted milk?”

Now the pips went again. I put another coin in the slot and heard the same silence as before.

“Hello?” I said.

Silence.

After a long wait I hung up and redialled, but this time he didn’t answer.

♦

Over in the Packhorse they had a new consignment of Topham’s Excelsior Bitter. After the frustrations of my phone call this came as welcome news, although I found it slightly surprising.

“Pint of Ex?” asked Tony, the moment I walked into the bottom bar.

“Please,” I said. “But I thought you weren’t getting any more.”

“We weren’t,” he replied. “There wasn’t enough demand for it.”

“But now there is?”

“Now that you’re back, yes,” he said. “You’ve tipped the balance.”

“Oh well. That’s good.”

Tony had already placed a glass under the tap and begun pulling the handle.

“Only thing is, we’ve had to mark the price up a bit.”

“Have you?”

“Just enough to cover costs.”

“How much do I owe you then?” I enquired.

He finished pulling the beer and placed a completed pint on the counter. “This one’s on the house actually.”

“Thanks,” I smiled. “Any particular reason?”

“We want to enlist you in the darts team as a regular. We were quite impressed by your performance the other night, and so was the visiting captain.”

“Was he?”

“She.”

“She?”

“Yes,” he said. “You know — Lesley.”

“Oh…yeah, right.”

“Very impressed, she was.”

“Well, I was just lucky really. Having a good night.”

“So you’re prepared to sign up with us, are you?”

“If you’d like me to, yes.”

“Of course we’d like you to.”

“Right then,” I said. “I will.”

I had more beer than I planned to on that first night back at the Packhorse, mainly because Tony wouldn’t accept any money. The first pint was ‘on the house’, I knew that, but when I followed it with a second, and then a third, he kept insisting that it was OK to run up a slate. I didn’t want to cause offence by refusing his trust, so I went along with it and ended up having five pints. On my way home later that night I made a mental note not to allow the tally to get out of hand.

♦

The first sound I heard the following morning was the ‘clunk’ of a milk bottle on my doorstep. Peering out of the bedroom window I saw Deakin retreating across the yard towards his truck before driving off. I thought it was a bit cheeky of him to start making deliveries without seeing me first, but I wasn’t bothered really as I was going to ask him anyway. Actually I was grateful he’d woken me up, because otherwise I’d have been too late for breakfast. I got up quickly and went across to the house, where Gail let me in. She seemed quite pleased to see me.

Mr Parker was already at the table when I sat down.

“You’ll be getting started on the boats today, will you?” he asked.

“Hope so,” I said. “Of course, there’ll be quite a bit of preparation to do before any paint goes on.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” he said. “We don’t want any sort of slapdash job.”

“No.”

“There’s an electric sander over there in the big shed if you need it. And a blowlamp.”

“Right.”

“So you’ll be able to get them done by Christmas then?”

“Oh yes. No problem.”

“Good.”

Gail placed my breakfast in front of me before sitting down herself.

“Settling into your new home alright?” continued her father.

“Yes, thanks,” I replied.

“Enough room for you?”

“Oh yes,” I said. “Plenty.”

“That’s good.”

“You’re a bit like the three little pigs,” remarked Gail.

“Am I?” I asked, glancing down at my sausages.

“Yes,” she said. “Your tent was your house of straw. Then you had a caravan, which was your house of sticks. And now you’ve got a house of stone.”

At that moment the Post Office van pulled up in the yard, and the driver went through the same routine as the last time I’d seen him. After bobbing up the steps he again opened the kitchen door by four inches, slipped the post onto the shelf inside, said ‘Thank you’, in a sing-song voice, and was gone again.

Mr Parker glanced across to the shelf. “Ah good,” he said. “Here’s the Gazette .”

He stepped across the kitchen and picked up the only item of mail, a new edition of the Trader’s Gazette , rolled up and specially labelled for postal delivery. He unwrapped it and began studying its pages with interest. In the silence that followed I remembered a question I’d been meaning to ask.

“You know those sheep?” I said.

Mr Parker looked up momentarily. “Which sheep?”

“The ones up on the fell behind here.”

“Oh, yes.”

“Have they got anything to do with you?”

“You mean do I own them?”

“Yes.”

“No.”

“Who does then?”

“They belong to Bryan Webb mostly. He keeps his hay in our loft here.”

“Oh.”

“As a matter of fact he’ll be bringing a lot of ewes through the yard sometime soon, and he may need some help directing them. I’ve told him you’ll be around to lend a hand.”

“Oh, right,” I said. “But you don’t keep sheep yourself?”

“Not any more, no,” he replied. “We lost a flock one winter years ago and decided to give it up.”

“That’s a shame.”

“They’re no longer a safe bet, sheep aren’t, what with man-made fibres and everything.”

“No, suppose not.”

“So we went into buying and selling instead.”

“Yes, I noticed you do a lot of that.”

“Best way to make a living these days.”

“What about the boats?” I asked.

“What about them?”

“Aren’t they a good way to make a living?”

“No,” he said. “Practically a liability, to tell the truth.”

During this conversation Mr Parker had been going through the Gazette with a biro, putting marks and crosses beside certain items. Now he rose from his seat and went into the next room where the telephone was.

After he’d gone Gail said, “What are you like at geography?”

“Well, I know east from west,” I replied. “Why, have you got some more homework?”

She smiled. “Yeah.”

“Alright, bring it over sometime and I’ll have a look at it.”

“You can have it now if you want.” She reached under the table and produced an exercise book from her bag.

I glanced through the questions. “OK. Should be no problem.”

“Could you get a couple wrong this time, please?” she asked.

“Why’s that?”

“Well, you got twenty out of twenty for the geometry, and they might start getting suspicious.”

“Suppose so.”

“By the way,” she added. “Your essay got read out in class.”

“Oh,” I said. “Did it?”

“The teacher said it was the best work I’d ever done. So, thanks.”

“My pleasure.”

She smiled again and looked at the clock on the wall. “I’ve got to go.”

“Yes,” I said, getting up from the table. “I’d better get started too. Thanks for the breakfast.”

I took my leave and went across to the big shed. Someone had already been over and undone the padlock, so I slid the door back and went in, closing it behind me. Then I examined the place that was going to be my workshop for the next few weeks. Several transparent panels in the roof helped make it quite light inside, and I noticed there were a good few electric lamps as well. The sander and blowlamp Mr Parker had mentioned were lying on a shelf to one side, along with some other useful-looking equipment. Despite all the stuff crammed into the building enough space remained between each boat to allow plenty of room to work. There was even a stove and chimney in one of the corners, to keep the shed warm when the weather turned cold. All in all I was quite encouraged by what I saw, and decided I could be quite at-home here. Before I began work I wanted to find out what it was I’d seen glinting over at the back of the shed the first time I came in. This meant clambering over a number of packing cases and scaffolding tubes, and round the back of a large metal frame that seemed to house some kind of weighing apparatus. After a lot of squeezing through gaps I finally saw the object of my curiosity. It was a row of motorcycles. There were half a dozen of them altogether. Some were brand new, preserved in a layer of grease and still bearing the manufacturers’ shipping labels written in Japanese. Others were second hand, vintage models similar to mine, and one of them even had a pre-unit gear box. I was just wondering what Mr Parker planned to do with them all when I heard the shed door being slid back.