“That’s a terrible story, Mrs. McGibbet. Didn’t they get the police?”
“The police? Them? They’d be laughed out of the place. The police are the king of boxes. It is well known in every nation that people who trouble them disappear.”
“That’s true,” Alison said. “You’ve only to watch the news.”
“I would help you out,” the little lady said, “with your memorizing and all, but I’m sure the topic of MacArthur’s eye is not a topic for decent people. I’m sure I wasn’t looking, though I do recall the man MacArthur lying drunk as a lord on your mammy’s couch, for though I might have shifted his head to see if Brendan was under the cushion, if he then fell back into his stupor I barely recall. And if the man they call Capstick was incapable too, lying with his head under the table, I’m sure I was too busy to notice. I can’t recall at all you stooping over them vermin and patting their pockets, hoping for a shilling to roll out, for I wouldn’t know where the minimart was or what sort of sweeties you were fond of spending on. Now one or the other might have roared ‘bleeding thief,’ but then it could have been ‘bleeding Keith’ for I can’t claim I was paying attention—and you wouldn’t mention to them, would you, that it was me, McGibbet, that told you nothing at all about it, for I’m in mortal fear of those fiends? I’m sure I wasn’t seeing a little girl with a pair of scissors in her hand, snipping about a man’s private parts. I’m sure I was too busy about my own business to notice whether that was a fork you were carrying, or that was a knife, and whether you had a spoon in your pocket, or whether your mouth was bristling with pins. I’m sure I wouldn’t have known if you were carrying a knitting needle, for there were several on the premises, but I’m sure I was too busy seeking my boy Brendan to know whether you had opened the drawer and took one out. And I wouldn’t say I saw you go down the garden to feed the dogs, neither. If I hadn’t been peeping under the furniture as was my habit, I might have seen a smile on your face and a bowl in your hand, and a trickle of blood running down each arm. But your age I couldn’t swear to, it was no more than eight years, nine or ten. And I never saw the fella called Capstick run out and collapse on the ground at the side of the house, shouting Ambulance, ambulance ! Nor did I see Morris God-curse-him Warren and the other bloody bleeder come up at the trot, his name I don’t suppose would be Aitkenside. I didn’t notice them haul up Capstick by his oxters and dump him in the bath that was kept out on the road in front of your mother’s premises. There was a deal of shouting then, but it was that sort of neighbourhood, so I couldn’t say he was crying out to the whole street, where’s my bollocks, find the fuckers for they can stitch them back on, beg your pardon but that’s the exact truth of what he might have said at the time, if I had been able to hear above the racket. And Morris Warren said something back to him, I dare say, but I wouldn’t like to quote you his words, which were too late I regret my son, for your bollocks are all eaten by the dogs, they cannot sew them back when they are swallered, not to my way of thinking, and to my way of thinking they are swallered good and proper and the dogs have cleaned their bowls. And he, Morris Warren, it’s possible he could not forbear to laugh, for he had told Capstick he should not interfere with your good self without paying money for it, and now you get paid out, he said, and now you get what’s coming to you, the little girl herself pays you out for being a dirty bugger.”
I paid him, Alison thought. At least one of the bastards is paid out. Or did I pay out two? “Mrs. McGibbet,” she urged, “go on.”
“I’m sure,” said Mrs. McGibbet, “I never heard the moment Morris Warren ceased to laugh. I never looked in the dogs’ bowls, curious to see what they were eating, for if you came near them they’d bite your leg off. And therefore I couldn’t have noticed MacArthur’s eye plop off a spoon and fall into a dish—surely I must have dreamed it, for such a thing could never be. And if your little self, no more than eight, nine, ten years old, were to have cried out, ‘Now wink at me, can you, you bloody bastard?’ I wouldn’t have known it because I was searching down the back of a cupboard for Brendan. And if Mr. Donald Aitkenside ran down the road in a panic, I wouldn’t have seen him. Still less the fella they call Pikey Pete jump in his van and drive screaming in all directions at once.”
Al walks down the road. She is eight, nine, ten. Once again she hasn’t got her swimming kit or her gym shoes or anything else she should have for school. Lee and Tehera are just behind her, then comes Catherine Tattersall; she looks back for Catherine, who is lagging, and there on the pavement she sees MacArthur’s eye, rolling along. “Look,” she says, and they say, “What?” She points, “Look at that,” she says, “at that.” Catherine steps right on MacArthur’s eye, and squashes it into the ground. “Yeachh!” Al says, and turns aside. “What’s up wiv you, Al?” Catherine says. When Al looks back, the jelly has bounced back again, to a perfect orb, and MacArthur’s eye continues to roll along.
It followed her to school one day, it was against the rule:
It made the children laugh and play, to see an eye at school.
It is evening. She is coming home from school. At the street corner, the half-crippled little bloke called Morris Warren leans against the wall. Eff off, she says under her breath. As she approaches, she expects him to reach out and make a grab at her breasts, as this is his usual habit. She prepares to swerve; that is her usual habit, too.
But today he doesn’t grab. He just looks at her, and as he looks, he almost falls over. It seems as if his crooked legs won’t support him; he grabs the wall for support, and when he speaks, his tone is amazed. He says, “Take off his bollocks, yes! But take out a cove’s eye? I’ve never heard of it before.”
She bangs into the house, casting a glance down into the stained bathtub, thinking, I better get something and scour that out, it looks bad. Emmie comes at her as soon as she gets in the door: “I saw MacArthur’s eye on a spoon, I saw MacArthur’s eye on a fork.”
“Which?”
“I saw you standing there with a knitting needle in your hand, young lady. He didn’t deserve that. He was only doing what men do. You was all over Capstick when he pulled the dog off you, but then you was all over MacArthur when he bought you sweeties. So what was he to think? He used to say, Emmie, what have you bred there? She’ll do anything for a bag of chocolate raisins.”
Al sits in her kitchen, her kitchen at Admiral Drive. Older now, suddenly wiser, she asks the empty air, “Mum, who’s my dad?”
Emmie says, “Leave off, will you!”
She says, “I cannot rest, till I know. And when I know, then possibly I still cannot rest.”
“Then you have to ask yourself what’s the use,” Emmie says. “I dunno, girl. I would help you, if I could. It could be any one of ’em, or it could be six other fellas. You don’t see who it is, because they always put a blanket over your head.”
Back, back, go back. She is at Aldershot. Darkness is falling, darkness is falling fast. The men are moving a bundle of something. They are passing it between them. It is limp, doll-sized, swaddled. She pulls the blanket aside with her own hand, and in its folds, dead-white, waxy, eyes closed tightly, she sees her own face. And now back she goes, back and back, till she is smaller and smaller, before she can walk, before she can talk: to the first wail, the first gasp: to the knitting needle pricking her skull and letting in the light.
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