trader.
‘Best quality, dozen in the box!’
‘Quieten down, for the love of Christ!’
He bowed his head in seeming contrition, meekly closed the lid, handed the box over to Mary’s keeping, and then signalled for the lamp.
‘I’ll do it,’ said Mary.
‘Give it me.’
‘You’re no’ in control.’
‘Give it me!!’
There was a drunken evil glare in his eye that frightened her. Mother or not, she sometimes wondered if, one sweet day, her darling son would split the maternal skull with his big fine hammer.
She handed over the lamp and he snuffed out the wick, leaving them both in complete darkness. Then he swung the vessel round to release the oil, which spattered over the heap of shavings and wood; laughing wildly as some of the fluid landed and slid like mucus all down his front.
‘A wee lick here, a wee lick there, ach the whole damn thing!’
There was a crash of breaking metal and glass as he hurled the lamp to shatter on the sharp edge of the crates.
‘Watch your body now!’ Mary called out in the pitch-black surrounding her, an edge of panic in her tone. She had a superstitious terror of the dark, and always slept with a candle by the bed lest night-demons came to steal her soul for his Satanic Majesty.
Daniel fumbled in his pocket for a lucifer, which was struck up to illuminate his sweaty distorted face, eyes bulging in the sudden light.
‘This place will fire like a tinder-box,’ she warned, moving back to safe distance while she could still see.
‘And I’m just the boy tae do it,’ said Daniel with pride. But as he moved towards the pile, his boot crunched on a shard of glass and he staggered slightly.
‘For Christ’s good sake guard yerself!’ Mary hissed, shoving the box that he had given her inside the deep pocket of her old coat, a souvenir from the time when she had once been a shoplifter of high repute.
‘Ach, it’s my bad foot Mammy,’ came the derisive, muffled response.
Daniel bent over, cupping the lucifer in hand, now it was time, now would see his fear go up in smoke. He crooned some more of the song, giving the words a sinister lilt.
‘Tirling at the window, crying at the lock,
Are the weans in their bed, for now it’s ten o’clock?’
For a moment time stood still, then tragedy which had been biding its occasion in the shadows, made a dire and purposeful entrance.
As Daniel dropped the lucifer on the shavings, they flared into life, leaping up like a tiger from ambush and found a sympathetic response from the oil spilled on his trousers and coat. He howled in pain, lost his footing and fell forward on to a blaze of his own creation as the rest of the dry tinder exultantly joined the conflagration.
In a matter of seconds, a wall of flame had formed a barrier between the horrified Mary and her combustible son.
She could hear his screams and reached out her arms helplessly to call his name as he burned like a pillar of fire.
But he led no tribe towards the Promised Land. The fear that had always haunted him had been well founded. The fire had claimed him, embraced him like a loving father and was teaching its child the secrets of white heat.
His shrieks of agony rang in Mary’s ears as the flames leapt towards her, seeking another convert to the cause.
3
Like pilgrims to th’appointed place we tend;
The world’s an inn, and death the journey’s end.
JOHN DRYDEN,
Margaret Bouch watched on, as her husband’s coffin was lowered into the ground. The ropes held and it went smoothly enough into the appointed slot. She blinked a little as the icy, slanting November rain which had swept across Dean Cemetery from the moment the pitifully small cortege had entered the gates, stung her face through the black veil in retribution for tears unshed.
She recollected that as a child, funerals had always provoked in her a perverse desire to cock a snoot, to whirl a mad cartwheel, heels in the air, petticoats a’flying, to scandalise the moon faces of the mourners with flesh and bone.
What if she did so now, she pondered to herself?
What if she ripped the dripping bonnet from her recently widowed head, flipped it neatly to join the lumps of earth already falling on the coffin lid as the ropes were hauled out of the grave, and called aloud, ‘I’ll dance the hornpipe with the sailor boys tonight, how does that recommend itself unto you, Sir Thomas, my darling one?’
Perhaps not, was her decision. Save it for another day.
Margaret looked across to where their three children, all grown now, huddled together under a weeping umbrella.
Her son’s pale face was set in stone and manly forbearance.
Everyone thought him an absolute brick, and who was she to disagree? He had accompanied them every day to the Court of Inquiry and they had both watched as his father’s proud facade cracked like the very bridge itself.
Every day she had observed Sir Thomas ignore her and lean more and more heavily upon the filial arm as the clouds of shame and disgrace gathered above his head.
And then they had burst.
As she brought this to mind, another squall of rain hit her through the veil, the sudden violence driving some of the mourners back from the edge of the grave.
But Margaret Bouch stood firm. She was the widow after all. Widows don’t give an inch.
The minister droned on, something about the Kingdom of Heaven and how to get there, surely better to quote from the Psalm? ‘Praise the Lord upon earth: ye dragons, and all deeps; Fire and Hail, snow and vapours; Wind and storm, fulfilling his word.’
Praise the Lord indeed, was her unhallowed thought. He had shown no mercy that dreadful night towards the last year’s end, nor, in Margaret’s experience, had he ever demonstrated much inclination towards clemency upon earth.
The Reverend Jeremiah Sneddon of the Episcopalian Church of Scotland, a man in her opinion who more than lived up to his name, had insisted upon being bare-headed and his wispy white hair, plastered to his skull, left him to look like a monkey caught out in the rain.
Margaret had a quick glance round to make sure no one was aware of these profane contemplations but she was safe behind the veil. What a dreadful woman she was to be sure. Last night had she not drunk of strong whisky? And more than one glass. In the morning she had noticed her fingers tremble as she donned the widow’s weeds.
She fumbled for her handkerchief, slyly raised her hand under the damp veil as if touching the cloth to her face, breathed out and sniffed. No. Not a trace. A faint redolence only of violets, from the lozenges sucked so assiduously after her toilette that very morning.
