The Rabbit Read online

  THE RABBIT

  Ted Lewis

  SYNDICATE BOOKS

  NEW YORK

  Copyright

  This edition published in 2015 by Syndicate Books

  www.syndicatebooks.com

  Copyright © 2015 The Estate of Edward Lewis

  eISBN 978-0-9842125-6-9

  Other Books by Ted Lewis

  The Jack Carter Trilogy

  Get Carter

  Jack Carter’s Law

  Jack Carter and the Mafia Pigeon

  Crime Novels

  Plender

  Billy Rags

  Boldt

  GBH

  Other Novels

  All the Way Home and All the Night Through

  About the Author

  Born in Manchester, England, Ted Lewis (1940-1982) spent most of his youth in Barton-upon-Humber in the north of England. After graduating from Hull Art School, Lewis moved to London and first worked in advertising before becoming an animation specialist, working on the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine. His novels are the product of his lifelong fascination with the criminal lifestyle of London’s Soho district and the down-and-out lifestyle of the English factory town. Lewis’s novels pioneered the British noir school. He authored nine novels, the second of which was famously adapted in 1971 as the now iconic Get Carter, which stars Michael Caine.

  for Harry Lewis

  THE RABBIT

  Waking.

  The single sheet tightened as I wrapped it more snugly round my body, then the sheet slipped away a little and my bare shoulder caught the cool still morning air as it sidled through the summer window. My position changed, the sheet slid back, dreams began knitting themselves together, but then the voice was back.

  The voice said:

  “It’s half-past eight, our Victor.”

  The sheet filtered the voice so that it sounded like a command out of a shortwave radio.

  I know it’s half-past, Mother. Go away.

  The voice remained.

  I screwed up my eyes, describing my brief hatred, homi¬cidal almost, for my mother. I sensed the clarity of the day beyond the window but it wasn’t going to make any difference to me. My eyes were going to stay tight shut till the ultimate second.

  “Victor, your father’s nearly ready, you know.”

  Bloody lies. Only a minute ago he’d been making chicken noises in the bathroom. I countered this with a lie of my own. I rolled to the edge of my bed and picked up a shoe and banged it on the bedroom floor.

  “It’s all right, Mother. I’m up.”

  For a moment her unbelieving silence hung at the bottom of the stairs. Then there was the sound of her heels on the tiled hall floor. The kitchen door closed.

  The effort of banging the shoe had waken me com¬pletely. But still I couldn’t get out of bed. It always had to be at the last minute. As with everything else. As my parents were always pointing out. Perhaps that was why I did it. Then we all got satisfaction. They in the living proof of their theories; myself, in the predictability of their response.

  I rolled onto my back and looked out of the window. Above the evergreens across the road away from the sun, the uniformly blue sky was poised in still expectation of the day’s heat. The quarry would be boiling by ten o’clock. Yesterday, midday, we’d had 107° on the face.

  The kitchen door opened again. Guilt jack-knifed me out of bed. I rattled open the bedroom door.

  “Victor!”

  “I’m up, Mother. I’m up. I’ve told you.”

  “Well just hurry up, then.”

  The kitchen door closed. I pulled on my jeans. My art school folder was sticking out from under the bed. I pushed it out of sight with my foot as I wriggled into my jeans. I didn’t want any mute reminders of how much holiday work I’d got to do. Not at that time of day. There were enough vocal ones downstairs.

  I went out of the bedroom, past my grandma’s room, past the quiet attic stairs, along the landing, down three steps, through the spare room and into the sunshine of the bath¬room. I looked out of the window. Under the pear tree a cat was dreaming softly, hiding its thoughts in tall grass, sniffing the summer air, eyes closed against the sun. Beyond the orchard, fields stretched down to the river, the river’s pale aspect interrupted by the sporadic chimneys of the tile works. Three miles away, on the river’s opposite bank, came a faraway, murmuring buzzing, felt rather than heard, an amalgam of the sounds of back yards and lorries, children, chickens, north-bound trains and gliding tankers.

  I washed and went down into the kitchen.

  My father was eating porridge and reading the Express. The Express rustled as I went through the door.

  My mother had her back to me, dishing up the porridge. Grandma was sitting on the stool next to the Cook’n’Heat, my packed knapsack resting on her broad lap, her rheumy fingers clutching at the straps. She winked at me.

  I winked back.

  I sat down at the table. My father nodded, more or less in my direction. At breakfast, in our house, the law was that no one spoke unless they had to. Even when Grandma would ask my mother something like whether or not we’d all like a fresh pot of tea made, there’d be a rustle from my father, together with an angled glance directed at a point some¬where between the speaker’s feet and her waist. At that time of day, in our house, there was always a shortness of temper.

  Porridge was given to me and my tea was poured out. The back door swung open an inch or two inwards and the cat came into the kitchen.

  “Now, Billy,” my mother said, “who’s a beautiful boy then?”

  Cats were an exception. It was okay to talk to them.

  My father stood up and walked round the table and picked up the cat and held it above his head and began to sing: “Hello my little man, hello my little man,” over and over. The other side of his personality.

  “I hope you don’t sing like that when the men can hear you,” my mother said.

  My father continued his chanting. I stood up and took my sketchbook and some pencils off the kitchen shelf. Show willing, I thought, even though it was nothing but a gesture.

  “You taking those with you?” said my father.

  “Thought I might do some at dinner-time.”

  “I doubt if you’ll feel much like it by then.”

  “Can’t win, can I? Only last night you were moaning about how much work I’d got to do.”

  “You should have done it all by now. You’ve had four clear weeks.”

  “Yeah, well in my line of work you can’t always do it to order, you know. Or didn’t you know that?”

  “You spend too much time down at the George,” said my mother. “I can’t understand what you see—”

  “Oh, give over, mother.”

  “I know I’m only an ignorant quarry manager—”

  “Hearts and Flowers.”

  Rheumy hands twitched nervously.

  “—but if I’d had your opportunities when I was a lad—”

  “—you’d be doing something other than managing a quarry. I know. We’ll be getting the trial for Manchester United that you had to turn down because you had to work on the canal to support your mam in a minute.”

  “Victor. That’s your father you’re talking to.”

  “I was wondering when we were going to be introduced.”

  “Here’s your sandwiches, Victor,” Grandma said, offering me my old school satchel I was to use as a knapsack.

  “Ta, Nana.”

  My father turned away and took his jacket off the hook and settled his lime-dusty trilby
on his head.

  “Did you get any lemonade, mother?” I said.

  “Oh, Victor, I forgot.”

  “Hellfire. I’ll die of thirst.”

  My father extracted his revenge.

  “You’ll manage,” he said. “When I was your age I worked a fourteen-hour day and I managed all right.”

  I gritted my teeth and walked to the back door. I looked at my father.

  He was grinning.

  “Come on, then,” I said. “I thought we were supposed to be late?”

  The cat jumped up on to my chair and stretched its neck towards the porridge bowl.

  “Right,” said my father. “We’re off.”

  “See you later,” said my mother.

  “Take it easy, our Victor,” said Grandma.

  The “take it easy” was a reference back to the rheumatic fever I’d had when I was nine. I’d been in bed for the best part of a year and the experience was supposed to have left me with a weak heart. Doctor Church had written a note that excused me from all games, and I took it with me on my first day at the Grammar School. But the reaction from staff and pupils to the sight of myself mooning round the edge of the football field soon made me approach the Games Master and tell him that I was now fit for games, a story he was quite prepared to accept, having suspected that malinger¬ing would have been a more accurate description of my condition. Later, because of the embarrassment my lack of fitness caused me on the field, I’d begun to regret my lie.

  I frowned when my grandmother advised me to take it easy; I hated any kind of reminder of fitness. At the same time I’d once used the so-called weak heart as an excuse for being beaten in a fight at school, after John Stocks, my opponent, had reduced me to tears.

  I said:

  “Don’t worry, Nana, I’ll make sure of that. He doesn’t expect me to work for a living so I’d hate to shatter his illusions.”

  My father kept his car in Johnsons’ woodyard opposite the bakery, down a bit from Winship Flags. Chickens clucked in the bright sunshine. My father unlocked his door and got in and leant across and opened mine. The door released a powerful smell of limestone. I got in and my father backed the A40 into the High Street. The street was empty. I rolled my window down. The smell of baking bread drifted in.

  We drove up the hill, past the old school. I twisted my neck and scanned the silent buildings, remembering every¬thing at once, re-living feelings that seemed more important than today’s. Then past the park. Empty swings shone beyond the dark gates. Again the memories. The park shed, the fight with Billy Hanson over Janice Marshbanks.

  “Cig?” asked my father.

  “Ta,” I said.

  He took one out for himself, then handed over the packet. After we’d lit up he said:

  “So how does it feel today, now that you’ve got into the swing of things?”

  “All right. Bit boring. But I’m quite enjoying it.”

  He grinned his private grin.

  “When you’ve been going there as long as I have,” he said, “you’ll know whether it’s boring or not.”

  He moved the car to the centre of the road to avoid a racing pheasant.

  “Is it harder than you thought?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Anyway, go easy. Don’t knock yourself out. You’re not used to it. You know what I mean.”

  “I’ll get used to it. A month won’t kill me.”

  “Well, just take it easy. You’re not in competition with the men. They’ve been swinging hammers for donkeys’ years.”

  “I’ll do what I have to.”

  There was silence for about half a mile. Half-gold corn blanketed the top of the wolds.

  My father rolled down his window and threw his cigarette out.

  “I think I’ll put you down at the station for the rest of the week,” he said. “On the wagons.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “There’s a lot of wagons to be got out this week. I want somebody on them full time. We’re behind.”

  “Easier than the quarry, is it?”

  “It’s easier, but not easy.”

  “I mean, why don’t you just come out with it? Why not just say I’m not up to it?”

  “Because that’s not what I mean.”

  Another silence.

  “What will I be doing on the wagons?”

  “Flinting.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Sorting flints from the rest of the stone. You’ll see when we get there.” He took out another cigarette and lit up. “It’ll probably bore you to death.”

  My father drove the car to the middle of the quarry floor. We got out. The enormous whiteness was tinted with cool blues hanging about at the bottom of the face, leftovers from the dawn. The atmosphere was one of inactivity, but that was only because the twelve men who worked the quarry were strung apart by its vastness.

  We walked over to the lorry that was currently loaded up. Next to it, the excavator was silent. Beyond the ex¬cavator Maurice Tofts was drilling for blasting. On top of the face, at the rim, a man was levering away some loose stones with an iron bar. My father stopped walking and called up to him.

  “Herbert, I want you down here a minute.”

  Herbert’s voice floated down into the quarry bottom.

  “Right, Mr Graves.”

  Herbert Wheatley, the foreman, disappeared from the edge. My father took out a cigarette and lit up.

  On top of the loaded-up lorry, Eric West was throwing out the flints. Occasionally he would find one still embedded in a piece of stone. Then he would take his fourteen-pound hammer and crack the stone so hard that the bits flew like bullets and rattled on the sides of the lorry.

  My father said to him:

  “Clacker, I want you down on the wagons today. Finish that load and you can come down with me.”

  Clacker straightened up and looked at my father, smiling to signify message understood, tight lips drawing back over brilliant white teeth, no warmth in the smile, just a sneering reflection of my father’s words, his eyes not on my father, but on me, eyes hard and bright as a stoat’s, his black hair in a grease-ridged tumble over his forehead, streamlined back into a D.A. behind his ears, black jeans grey with lime¬stone, identity bracelet jangling in unison with the cross round his neck, tattoos rippling up and down the muscles of his arms. Clacker was the name he was known by round the villages. I knew him outside of the quarry, but only by sight, from opposite sides of singing rooms. He and his mates lived out of the town, in one of the villages, but they used the town pubs, especially on Saturday nights. They were a rough lot, always on the lookout for trouble, but Clacker was usually the provoker in a punch-up, always smiling, the smile staying with him right up to the first punch.

  I nodded and looked away. Herbert Wheatley slithered to the bottom of one of the screes and the momentum carried him trotting over to us. Then Herbert’s neat strong body slowed to a stop and he raised an arm, coloured flat ochre, and pushed his cap from his forehead.

  “Have steelworks been on yet, Herbert?” my father said.

  “No, they ain’t been on yet, Mr Graves. They don’t want to be either.” He fished in his waistcoat pocket for the makings of a roll-up. “No, we don’t want any extra today. We want a few extra loads for the crusher if we can.”

  “We still want them, extra loads or not, Herbert,” my father said. He turned to the lorry. “Are you ready, Clacker?”

  Clacker threw a couple of flints into the rusty barrow by the lorry’s rear wheel. The sound echoed the insolence of his movements. He picked his jacket up from the top of the cab and jumped down. My father and I turned round and began to walk back towards the car. Herbert and Clacker fell in step behind us. I heard Herbert say:

  “There’s yo
ur new mate, Clacker.”

  The car wound down the woody hill towards the kilns. I could see the kilns below us, black and perpendicular against the gold of the wheatfields. Herbert was sitting in the front seat of the car, next to my father. Clacker and I were sitting together in the back. Clacker’s working jacket covered his knees. The Racing World stuck out of one of the pockets. Resting on my knees was my sketchbook. It seemed to loom large in the back of the car, a comment on the seriousness of my attitude to the job, and I felt uncomfortable. But Clacker wasn’t aware of anything but the bushes as they rushed past the window on his side of the car.

  Herbert turned round in his seat.

  “How do you think you’ll be liking it at sidings then, Victor?” he said.

  “I don’t know, Mr Wheatley,” I said. “I’ll be able to tell you better tonight. It’ll make a change, though.”

  “Aye, I can see as how it would. But do you know though, Victor, I’ve been in the same job sin’ I was fifteen, not in the same quarry, like, but in same work. ’Appen I wouldn’t like owt else. I farmed for three years, but that were afore I took up quarryin’, so I suppose I was too young to tell whether I would have suited or not.”

  I caught sight of my father’s eyes in the driver’s mirror, and he winked.

  We reached the station and drove past the station master’s house and up a slight incline, surfaced with flint and lime¬stone. At one side of the platform were the limestone wagons, just reaching up to the platform’s lip. Altogether, there were about twenty wagons. Some were full of limestone, the rest empty. Beyond this row of wagons was a coal siding, then the main line flanked by two more opened platforms and a couple of station signs that said ELSHAM.

  At the far end of our platform there was a chute that took the limestone for burning. All you could see was its rust-iron sides as it disappeared over the edge and fell away to the lower reaches of the kilns, where the loading pans were shunting about. To my right, on the other side of the plat¬form, there was a tarpaulin draped over some stacked oil drums, forming a shelter just big enough for a couple of people to huddle in if it were to rain. Next to the shelter was the flint tip, spilling down the overgrown incline that was the unused side of the platform, and encroaching into the edge of the enormous flat expanse of wheatfield that stretched endlessly away to the foot of the wolds.