Mum talked to me.’
A teacher appeared in the doorway and called out: ‘Megan Beckwith. Come here. This instant.’
‘Caught,’ she muttered, and she shook his hand. ‘I’m sorry I was angry with you, Eck,’ she said, using for the first time the name she was always to use.
The teacher, after shepherding Megan into the corridor, asked him: ‘Exempt from exercise are we, Alexander?’
‘No, miss,’ he said, but he returned to the step as soon as she had gone, to sit where Megan had sat.
His mother would take his hand to cross the road and, pointing towards the shops, begin gaily: ‘Now what do we see?’
And he would quickly respond: ‘We see a queue.’
‘So what do we do?’
‘We join it.’
‘And when do we join it?’
‘Straight away.’
‘We join it now, without delay,’ his mother agreed, concluding the singsong exchange that she and Mrs Evans had made up as the three of them walked along the same street on another Saturday morning.
There were always five or six women outside the shop, whichever one they stopped at, and another woman halfway through the doorway, with her foot against the bottom of the door, and a dozen more inside, packed tightly like on the bus. ‘What’s today’s special, girls?’ Mrs Evans might ask as they took their place at the back, and sometimes she would answer herself: ‘Whatever it is, it’ll be worth the wait.’ Once, however, a woman in a black coat with huge buttons turned round and said sharply, ‘I don’t know what you’re so cheerful about. The war’s not over yet.’ Then another woman said, ‘You’re right about that,’ and thus Alexander conceived a dread of the day when the bombers would come back, a fear he kept to himself until the day, five weeks later, on which a dormant mine, excited by the tremors of a nearby demolition, exploded in the garden of a house two streets from where he lived. That night he told his mother what he thought about every night, and he would always remember standing beside the bath that evening, gazing at the ebbing bathwater as his mother explained that he had misunderstood, while rubbing the towel on his hair as if to scrub off his foolishness.
An hour or more they sometimes queued, but Alexander’s patience was constant, because no pleasure could exceed the pleasure of at last entering the shop. Nestled amid coats and skirts, he would breathe in greedily to take hold of the scents that came from the women. An elusive aroma of lemons arose whenever one particular woman stepped forward, a woman with soft white arms and bracelets that clinked when she handed her money over. There was a woman who sometimes had a thin black line down the centre of her bare calves, whose clothes gave off a perfume that was like roses when they begin to wilt. Often she was with a friend called Alice, who had beautiful fingers and a perfume that remained mysterious until the day his father brought home a pomegranate in a stained paper bag.
Every sense was satisfied in these crowded shops, and a dense residue of memories was left in Alexander’s mind by the mornings he spent in them. Forty years later, looking at the maritime souvenirs that filled the window of what had been the grocer’s, he could hear above the traffic’s growl the crunch and chime of the ancient cash till, and he saw again the brass plate on the front of the till, and the comical bulbous faces mirrored in its embossed lettering. He saw the counter of the chemist’s shop, with the dimpled metal strip on its front edge that looked like a frozen waterfall. His fingers touched the window as he remembered how he would stroke the old wooden drawers by the chemist’s counter, sweeping his fingertips slowly across the varnished scars that looked like the script of an unknown language. The scurf of stinking pink sawdust in the butcher’s shop returned to him, and the sun shining off the slanted glass that covered the white trays of kidneys in their little puddles of brown blood. And standing before the Cutty Sark, gazing up through its spars at the coalsack-coloured October sky, he sensed the elation that arose instantly in him one morning, when he arrived at the head of the queue to see, displayed in a wicker basket, a heap of fat oranges that had come from Spain.
Only if his friends took him off to play would Alexander leave his place. ‘Bad news I’m afraid, Mrs MacIndoe,’ Eric Mullins joked, twirling the horns of a phantom moustache as he brought his heels smartly together. ‘We need your son.’ The company behind him – Lionel Griffiths and Gareth Jones and Davy Hennessy, whose leather-trimmed beret would last far longer than any other aspect of his appearance in Alexander’s memory – nodded their regretful confirmation that this was so. ‘Beastly business,’ said Eric, jamming his spectacles tight to the bridge of his nose with a forefinger. ‘Sorry and all that.’
‘Very well. Dismissed,’ his mother replied solemnly, lowering her chin, and they ran around the corner to Mr Mullins’ pub.
Entering by the door marked ‘Private’, below the white plaster unicorn with its scarlet crown, they bounded up the back stairs to the empty top floor, where each of the rooms had no furniture nor any curtains or carpets, but had a washbasin with taps that did not work. The rooms were connected by a corridor that curved like the tunnel under the river, and up and down its lino they would smack a tin of snoek wrapped in a sock, using cricket bats for hockey sticks and aiming for the swing doors that led to the stairs. Or in their stockinged feet they would skate along the lino rink, and their feet would make a hissing noise that Alexander, looking down the corridor at the two blind eyes of the windows in the doors, once imagined as the building’s breathing, an idea that so absorbed and unsettled him that he was startled when Lionel Griffiths, slithering to a stop behind him, shouted in his ear: ‘Wake up, Alex. Park time.’
In the park, at the side of one of the hills, there was a miniature valley in which the grass grew long between untrimmed bushes, and there they would stalk each other, descending the slopes on their bellies. When the others had gone home Alexander would stay for a while in the overgrown gully, and lie unseen within earshot of the path and listen to the talk of the people trudging up the hill towards the Heath. And when there was time he would then go to the place he called the Doodlebug House and continued to call the Doodlebug House even after his father told him it was not a doodlebug that had wrecked it but incendiaries and a broken gas main, many months before the flying bombs arrived.
A flap of corrugated iron, daubed with Danger – Keep Out in wrinkled red paint, was the door to the ruin. The four outer walls still stood to the height of the gutter, framing a square of sky, and within the walls were piles of debris, embedded with fractured joists and floorboards and laths that were like the ribs of a scavenged carcass. Against one of the walls leaned a huge tent of roof tiles, protecting a mantelpiece that had not been damaged at all. A perpetual stink of damp plaster dust and cats and scorched wood filled the Doodlebug House, and silvery ash was in every cranny. Low on the walls were stuck little rags of ash that vanished when he touched them. A book with leaves of ash trembled under the block of the toppled chimney. A skin of ash, pitted by raindrops, covered the door that lay flat in the middle of the house. Lumps of ash like mushrooms lay around the sheltered cradle of broken boards in which Alexander would recline and watch his portion of sky, hearing in his head the doodlebug’s misfiring snarl and then the thrilling moment of silence before it plummeted, a silence that excited him like the moment before he let himself drop from the empty window into the pool of torn bedding and sodden clothes at the back of the Doodlebug House.
Ash as slippery as sleet coated the joist by which Alexander would climb to the window at the side of the house, to sit between the battens that
