Author: Angela Clem

Joseph Akinkunmi is a Nigerian writer. He is passionate about movie subtitles and good short story collections. Outside writing, he is concerned about climate change and the effects of anthropogenic stressors on the environment.

---

Zigzags

I do not remember the exact day I first saw Chinedu. It was not dramatic, was not memorable. This, perhaps, is why it was blown like chaff out my memory. The year though, I remember, although with dangling precision. I think it was the year my older cousin attempted physical combat with a witchdoctor’s son and had his short run with sanity squelched. Macpherson was governor then and I, a very young man with clean-shaven head and dreams of going to the new University College in Ibadan to study something, was working under a carpenter in Ota. I did not know what it was I wanted to study, except that I wanted to study. I wanted more than the primary school education my family had struggled to get me. I wanted my English fancy and upper-class-like. I wanted to, as I now hear my grandson, Carl, sing out loud with headphones clamped to his ears, ‘move my family out the projects.’ Chinedu called this dream stupid.

I was sitting in my boss’ workshop one evening, on the large table we did most of our cutting on, sawdust coating the table and my hands. Threads from the edges of my roughly scissored trousers brushed my shin and swayed in the breeze. Some boys were in the workshop listening to me as I talked. My boss was the one who had lit the fire of the conversation, hypothesizing about finding thousands of pounds and how he was going to spend them. He sa on one of the benches, his back against a wooden pole, and his shirt was drawn up to expose his bulging stomach. He smiled as he listened to me speak. I knew he liked me. I was his only apprentice with some kind of formal education and I could speak good English. He liked that and, occasionally, he would speak to me in broken English instead of his usual Yoruba, especially when new customers came in. I think it was his way of declaring to them that he was different, that he was better than the other carpenters who had never seen the walls of any educational institution. He had dropped out halfway through primary school because his parents could not continue funding his education and, although he wanted to go back, they insisted that he learnt a trade to support his family instead. We were comrades in this regard, except that I completed primary school.

I spoke in pidgin juggled with Yoruba. Sometimes I spoke in plain English to confuse the boys who didn’t understand it, to remind them I was better, for the thrill of seeing the pained looks on their faces too. ‘I will go to university with the money,’ I said. ‘The college in Ibadan. After that, na London.’

‘Tunji, won’t you give us some of it?’ my boss asked in Yoruba.

I answered in English. ‘I will give you.’

His response was a grin.

Bayo, the only one of the boys who did not understand any English at all, burst out, ‘What rubbish is this one saying? You were asked a question in Yoruba but you’re speaking English.’

Bayo’s words sparked cackling and laughter, and even I, who initially took offense, let out a chuckle.

I continued in English to piss off Bayo. ‘I will build a house for my parents and share the money with my family and friends.’ Many of the boys struggled to follow. They had to hear first, digest and translate the words to what they understood them to mean in Yoruba, piece them together and then attempt to grasp the whole thing. Maybe it wasn’t this hard for them. ‘But first of all,’ I continued, ‘I will separate the money I will use for school. If I go to school, I will be able to continue taking care of my family and the money will not finish.’

‘That’s just stupid.’

Before Chinedu spoke, I did not realise he was in the room. I did not even know his name. I only knew I had seen him around the workshop a few times, talking to some of the boys.

I stared at him, my eyes steaming with passion. I was enraged, first by his arrogance, then by his disrespect. He was younger than I was, clearly. This was evidenced by the two strands of facial hair glued to my jawline and the fact that his face was bare, smooth as a babe’s butt. He had bushy hair and wide eyes. He matched me in height, and I was quite tall—even if only in my own eyes. I also noticed—a little impressed, a little vexed, a little intimidated—how clean his English sounded. I had to juggle the English I learnt in school with the one I picked sitting by the oil lamp, letting the words in the old dictionary my father got me wear my eyes out, just so I could speak as fluently as I did. And here was a stranger, a small boy, openly challenging my champion status, my monopoly on being the only one who spoke very good English in the neighbourhood.

The thought that Chinedu was more educated annoyed me. But it was not as infuriating as the laughter that splurged and reverberated in the workshop. The boys understood what Chinedu said perfectly. No translation was needed. It was almost culture for us, after all, to master the vulgarities and offensive words in a language first, whether or not we went on to learn the rest. Even if they did not understand, the switch in my countenance was comedy enough.

I jumped off the table. The boys’ eyes followed me and their lips exchanged whispers, which only riled me more. I took swift strides towards Chinedu and pulled him up by the collar of his shirt.

‘Am I your mate?’ I breathed the question into his face.

He did not answer.

Annoyed by his silence, I gave him a whack across his face. His response was a blow that reset the configuration of my jaw. It might have been the reason it took long for my facial hair to develop past those two strands.

One of the boys quickly got between us and pulled us apart. I was grateful for this because I had lost feeling where Chinedu’s hand met my face. But I did not stop trying to wrest myself from my boss’ arms, which were now around my waist, pulling me away from the fight. I gesticulated and yelled at Chinedu, making threats and verbal constructs of the things I would do to him if I got my hands on him. As I made the threats, I secretly prayed my boss would maintain his grip on me and not release me back into the fight. I was not confident I could beat Chinedu, but I had to save face.

∞

Chinedu became my friend a few weeks after that exchange. My boss calmed me down the evening of the fight and gave me a serious tongue-lashing. He spoke to me in Yoruba, not once mixing it with English. He believed messages passed in Yoruba went straight to the heart undiluted.

I spoke to Chinedu when he walked into the workshop the morning after the fight. It was a terse ‘good morning’ I said, my voice cowering behind something within me. My boss had made me promise to apologize. Before Chinedu responded, I muttered ‘I’m sorry’ and marched past him, scurrying out the workshop before anyone else noticed my dearth of toughness.

My friendship with Chinedu was the kind that grew slowly, the strength of our bond thickening and toughening unobtrusively. Our first conversations were greetings and weak passes. We began to make comments and trade one-liners in other people’s conversations until we started to light the flame of our conversations ourselves.

Chinedu was an Igbo boy who spoke an okay Yoruba and good English. I think his Igbo was good too. I did not know for sure—the only Igbo word I knew at the time was bia. He spoke a little too wisely for his age. Sometimes I felt intimidated by these things. I was older and older should have meant wiser, better, but sometimes I felt I was not enough. I spoke good English,
but I did not speak three languages. For a while, before our relationship took root in stone, nearly all my conversations with him slathered on my heart the spirit of competition, some kind of diluted jealousy. I recovered.

It was Chinedu who taught me, in theory, most of what I first knew about sex: I did not always have to be inside; there were other ways to make her squeal from ecstasy. I remember the shock on my face the first time Chinedu suggested we go to a brothel. He had said it so casually—the way he said everything he said.

‘I prefer the girls with big breasts,’ he said. ‘Which one do you like? Big breasts?’

I did not reply immediately. Breasts. The ease with which he said it. I, who had been cultured from birth to speak in euphemisms and half-sentences, could not just forget my home training and reply with the same wantonness he asked his question.

He chuckled when I did not respond. ‘Tunji, have you never?’ He shook his head suggestively. ‘At all?’ At this point his laughter flooded the air. ‘You always remind me you’re older, but I have had more sex than you.’

I was flustered, too scrambled in the head to defend my ego. ‘Who said I haven’t been with a girl before?’

Chinedu only laughed harder. ‘“Been with a girl.” Just say sex. Grown men just say sex.’

‘Isn’t there something better to discuss?’

‘How much do you have?’

‘Why?’

‘Never mind. I know a place and the honeys there don’t charge much.’

‘I’m not going with you.’

‘Don’t be silly. There’s no sweeter feeling than—’

‘I’ve heard.’

‘Then let’s go,’ he said. ‘The girl from last time probably misses my—’

‘I said I’ve heard.’

He laughed.

I got laid that night—Chinedu paid. Her name was Aminat. She had slim fingers and spoke no English. Chinedu had recommended her.

∞

Chinedu apologized for calling my dreams stupid one day. He threw the words out while we were in the middle of an unrelated conversation.

‘Sorry I rubbished the things you said the other day.’ He buried what we were saying quickly and steered the conversation to why he called my dreams stupid. ‘I was offended but I had no right to be. My brother used to talk like that too and it reminded me of him.’

‘What happened?’ I asked him.

‘My parents spent so much money sending him to school. England,’ he said. ‘Maybe he loved school. Or maybe he loved England, but he planned to go back for a Master’s after working for a while. He died on his way to work—his first day. All his big big dreams and my parents’ hopes, flushed into the gutter.’

‘Wow.’ I dragged the sound, stretching it into a natural death. I had never been good at mollifying people with any kind of grief.

‘Life makes no sense, you know?’

I nodded slowly in agreement. I truly did not know. I thought that life made sense and education was all that was necessary to clear the nebulous areas in it.

‘How many brothers and sisters do you have?’ I asked.

‘Had. My parents gave birth to only the two of us.’

I nodded, thinking about my own many siblings and repressed laughter. Chinedu’s parents were rich—they had enough money to send their son to England—but they had only two children. I did not know many rich people with many children. They seemed to give birth on a budget. It was poor people, like my parents, who pumped out litters and stopped only when too
fatigued to go on. My mother churned out six, stopping at me. It seemed to be comedy for the poor, laying children like eggs—just in case tragedy befell one or two, perhaps. Or maybe they hoped that if they pushed out many, at least one would make it in life. Maybe it was insurance that even if none of them really became successful, the stipends each one spared to send home would all come together to be something in their old age—something to warm the pockets, my father called it.

‘My parents withdrew me from school,’ Chinedu said. I opened my mouth to reply but he continued. ‘Actually, I was expelled.’

‘What happened?’

‘Anger issues, truancy, beating up a teacher.’ He sniggered. ‘No. I did not beat up a teacher. I only returned the teacher’s slap—the same way I returned the one you gave me.’

‘When were you expelled?’

‘Three months ago.’

‘What class were you in?’

‘Does it matter?’ he said. ‘It’s reflex, you know? Returning slaps. Anger is hard to control. My parents keep trying to mould me into my brother, trying to replace him with me.’ He looked away, his eyes a little wistful. ‘In this life you have to be free, you know? You have to be yourself. I haven’t discovered who I am, who that myself that I must be is. Even though I don’t
know yet, I don’t want to live another person’s life—my brother’s or my parents’.’ He let out a dry laugh and hissed. ‘My parents…’ His eyes spent some time on his fingers as he flexed them. ‘I could go to England or, as you want to, Ibadan and study whatever it is my parents want me to. I could come out top of the class and die, first day at work like my brother. Or I could die of pancreatic cancer in my first year of univ—‘

‘What is pancreatic cancer?’

‘I’m not sure—a new disease.’

He talked on and I listened, wanting to empathize but finding it difficult to. He told me how, after he got expelled, his parents came to dump him with his uncle here so he could ‘have sense.’ If he saw life differently, they said, maybe he would see how lucky he was.

‘Life is in zigzags,’ he said. ‘It’s disasters camouflaged in egg shells. You tread on them, careful at first, because they break into things—beautiful sometimes. And then you get comfortable and you begin to walk more casually then, suddenly, you break into some tragedy. Sometimes the disasters come early, no matter how careful you are.’

I wanted to ask Chinedu the meaning of ‘camouflaged’ but I did not want to break his flow.

‘My mother likes to say everything is vanity. I don’t know why my parents bother then, since they know everything is vanity. They should let me do what I want. You never know what’s going to happen, so live life on your terms. If I don’t want to go to school, leave me alone. If na harem I wan spend my remaining days, free me.’

I laughed at his words, not so much because they were funny, but because he rarely spoke pidgin. His father was a wealthy businessman and his mother was a big-time trader in Lagos, so they raised him up quite posh.

∞

I saw Chinedu’s mother the day she decided Chinedu had gained enough sense from living with his uncle. Or maybe she reached the decision that he could not have any more sense. In the two years I had known him, I had not really seen any change. His mother did not look as I had imagined she would from Chinedu’s stories. She did not have the heavy air and intimidating presence of rich people I had assumed she would have. When Chinedu introduced me to her, I folded back into my skin at first. But her smile reached her eyes when she asked my name and so I liked her.

Chinedu went back to Lagos with his mother the following week. His father had, through connections or whatever means, lobbied with his school to readmit him. The condition was that he kept a spotless record from re-entry to graduation. Any misconduct, he was out for good. Chinedu had bragged to me that he wouldn’t last a week there: It just wasn’t his life. He would
not be put into a mould. He made some other declarations. When he I saw him again the following year, he was still a student.

Before Chinedu’s mother came to take him back to school, I did not think I would miss him when he left. But he left, and I missed him. He had become the only person I really talked to.

Chinedu came for two holidays at his uncle’s house after returning to school. At the end of the second, his last, he called me outside the workshop to talk.

‘I’m going to Ibadan next year,’ he said. ‘I passed my exams.’

I wanted to laugh at the joke. But he had not said it with his usual dryness and his face was heavy with seriousness, so I knew it was not a joke and I did not laugh.

When I went home that night, I pressed my face against the weaving of my mat and sobbed. I wanted to feel happy for Chinedu, but it was difficult. There was a tightness in my chest I wanted to empty with the tears pooling in my eyes. My eyes dried quickly but the tightness remained. I did not sleep till morning. I lay down, the roof of my house a blurry thing
in front of my eyes. My mother always said she did not like announcing her successes because the small witches around her would try to steal them from her. People did not like to see others progress: it embittered them. As I lay on my back and parted my lips occasionally to let out air, I began to wonder if the small witches my mother talked about had nights like this too, nights their minds got clogged and the news of a friend’s success came and anchored boulders in their hearts, reminding them of their own inadequacies. I felt ashamed of myself because it made sense to me, the jealousy and envy that made people set roadblocks for each other. I had always considered myself different, immune to such diseases of the soul and mind. Schooling in Ibadan was my dream. Chinedu did not even want it, yet life had given it to him served on a fine plate.

∞

A year later, the tightness had not left my chest. It went on long vacations and returned whenever I started thinking I had made peace with the fact that life did not always make sense. It darkened my thoughts and reminded me that while I was working my youth cutting wood and nailing chairs, Chinedu was in some nest in Ibadan receiving lectures and having a future.

‘Life doesn’t always make sense.’ It was something Chinedu said, not me. It had become my mantra though, something I said as an apology to my dreams. I used to think life made sense. Now, I imagined the murky areas of it I thought education could clear laughing and jeering at me, reminding me that even if I was right and education was the key to easing life’s bumpiness, I would never have it. There were times thoughts would flood me and I would panic, afraid I was going to end up like my boss, afraid I was not living my best life, afraid I would fade into a mediocre middle age.

About three years after Chinedu left, I left my boss and started my own workshop. I had made peace with my lot and settled into the life of a carpenter. My beard was now quite defined, and I no longer fantasized about going to university. I was too old to pick up from where I left and begin secondary school. I did not have that many years to give away. And so I worked, pouring my whole being into my vocation, fuelled by the desire to not be average, to not be ordinary. Sometimes when I got home at night, I spent hours with my dictionary, memorising words and their usage with the same diligence I studied them in primary school.

‘You don’t know all the words in that book yet?’ my mother often asked.

Some nights I refused to light the oil lamp to read. I pushed the dictionary aside and slept. Who was I trying to impress with my English?

I still thought of Chinedu from time to time. He had to be done with university or near finishing. I wondered how he was doing, what trail he was blazing with his degree while I made furniture and varnished wood, and sometimes I wished him well.

If I wanted to see Chinedu, it was easy. I had his address and I had made enough money to travel to Lagos and come back, but not enough to match his class. So I did not go. It was the complex of the poor, the thing which held me back. I was afraid he would laugh at me if he saw me again. I was, after all, a mockery of my dreams. We were no longer the boys who befriended each other, a little blind to class. We were adults now and adults were more harbouring of contempt, more likely to evaluate, more willing to relegate people to the gutters of their minds.

---

Readers can reach Joseph on Twitter @iamm_bravo or via his email address, theakinkunmi@gmail.com.

Nigel Jarrett is a former daily-newspaperman and a double prizewinner: the Rhys Davies Award for short fiction and, in 2016, the inaugural Templar Shorts award. Nigel’s first story collection, Funderland (published by Parthian) was praised by the Guardian, the Independent, the Times, and many others, and was long-listed for the Edge Hill Prize. Templar published Nigel’s third story collection, A Gloucester Trilogy, in 2019. The Dublin Chaffinch Press is publishing his fourth collection, Five Go To Switzerland & Other Stories, in Spring 2021. Based in Monmouthshire, Nigel also writes for the Wales Arts Review, Arts Scene in Wales, Slightly Foxed, Acumen, and several others. He is a regular contributor to Jazz Journal. He is represented in the Library of Wales’s two-volume anthology of 20th- and 21st-century short fiction.

---

Incident at Loch Ken

At school we had an English teacher called Punch Evans, who it was said had been some kind of Army boxing champion. We never went into the details, never asked him about it—you simply didn’t—though it must have occurred to us that he would have joined the Forces through choice: by that time, there’d been no National Service for decades. Other things had changed too. Punch was one of the few on the staff to wear a gown in class. It was too big for him, or he’d somehow made himself look smaller, because it kept slipping from his shoulders and he’d have to yank it back. He spent a lot of time at the blackboard, writing down lines of poetry, snatches of dialogue from plays, and expressions such as ‘negative capability’, most of which he knew by heart—and tugging at his gown; he would then turn to face us, each time seeming to do so like a man confronting an accuser. His nose was misshapen, so perhaps that was it: he’d spent ages shielding himself as best he could from public gaze, and this was how he’d at last surmounted his embarrassment. It was a decisive moment, slow and deliberate and endlessly repeated.

Once we’d reached the sixth form, Punch started calling us by our first names. There were eleven of us doing English. Our first term was heavy with leaf fall and dark evenings, as if reminders of the gravity of what we’d undertaken. Our set texts were mountainous in their challenge if not in their height as a pile of books, though that was impressive enough when it included Punch’s extra reading.

On the first day of A-level, by way of introduction, Punch announced that he was a Tolstoyan.

‘Anyone know what I mean?’ he asked. ‘Not you, Roberts.’

We sniggered, Punch smiled. Mike Roberts was related to Punch, some kind of second cousin twice removed—far enough, anyway, to make them virtually strangers to each other. We all knew, and Punch knew that we knew. But Mike had little to say about his far distant relative, perhaps as a result of some tacit agreement between them, and Punch rarely called on Mike by name, first or other. When he required a response from one of us and Mike raised his hand, or did a near enough approximation of hand-raising—in truth, the arm speared upwards like a Nazi salute had, in our graduation to the sixth, reduced to a waving finger—Punch would just nod once in Mike’s direction, his raised eyebrows beckoning an answer. It was probably a conscious move: Mike was by far the brightest among us, later the head boy with a place at Cambridge, and already a contributor of essays to the school magazine. If anyone had known what ‘Tolstoyan’ meant, it would have been Mike. Anyway, the best we others could come up with was the facetious, ‘Someone who likes the works of Tolstoy?’. Mike and Punch grinned at each other. Before Mike could reply with a similar interrogative lift to indicate that he might not be correct, Punch told us himself: ‘My attitude to art is moral’. By art, of course, he meant English literature. Freddie Wilson, the joker in our pack destined to work on the Daily Mirror, said he hadn’t realised Tolstoy was English. (Many of our answers to questions were like this. We were thought of as ‘clever’.)

All of us were studying a couple of other subjects, but the teachers for them encouraged few extra-curricular activities. Punch did. During those two years, he organised something once a term: theatre visits, ‘pilgrimages’ to places enshrined in books—Wordsworth’s Tintern was one—and days out at literary festivals. English was not just study for examinations, though that too; it was what he called ‘a preparation for life’: not an original view, the widely-read Mike confided.

In summer, Punch invited us all to the house where he lived with his elderly father. It happened twice—initially at the end of our first year, the second time twelve months later before our exam results were due. There’d also been ad hoc meetings beyond the school day—in the park at weekends, for example. Punch had been at the school for only three years and we were the first of his A-level pupils (‘students’ now) to be accorded the privilege of a visit. Their house stood on its own in our impoverished Valleys town more notable for its serpentine terraces, which struggled up hills before skedaddling down the other side. It was called The Old Manse. In its way it was a throwback to a time of much wider poverty, when as a symbol of its occupant’s high social rank it loomed much larger. Half its encircling trees had been felled. By our time, according to Punch, it had become part of ‘Snobs Row’, though the locals, perhaps knowing the reduced circumstances of those who once lived there, never made an issue of it. His father, in any case, had been a coal miner, like a lot of other older men in the town. In the fireplace was a Davy Lamp sculpted from a huge chunk of coal, presented to him by his collier pals when he retired. We assumed that funds for the house had been inherited or had come from the mother, whoever she’d been. Mike had told us she was dead. There were photographs of her on the sideboard, a refined-looking woman, almost a beauty, and with half a knowing smile, as though a second after the photograph was taken she had erupted with laughter. There was a picture of a young boy and girl too, Punch and his sister.

On that last summer day at The Old Manse the whole class—the ‘scholarship trio’ of me, Mike and Freddie, and eight others—were invited. Punch and his father had supplied what used to be called ‘strong drink’—bottles of beer and cider—suspecting quite rightly that we were used to its taste. Punch had planned a fish ‘n’ chips supper for us all. Freddie, sitting cross-legged in a chair opposite Punch, casually took a cigarette from a metal case in his pocket, tapped the business end on the lid, and lit up with a Zippo, only offering the re-opened case to Punch and his father after doing so. Both declined.

‘Does our Michael smoke?’ the old man asked, the ‘our’ seeming to suggest the familial connection, a reduction of distance, rarely before acknowledged.

‘Mike’s a paragon,’ Freddie said, and, with a glance at Punch: ‘That’s true, isn’t it, Mr Evans?’

Punch didn’t know what to say, and just shrugged his shoulders.

‘You see, Mr Evans,’ Freddie continued, addressing the older man this time, ‘your son has taught us to live by the book. Or should I say “books”? If a book doesn’t teach us a lesson, a lesson to live by, it ain’t much cop. Mike believes in all that stuff. Frankly, to me it makes every book seem like the Holy Bible.’

The old man just nodded, maybe not understanding, amused or confused perhaps by the way Freddie’s final sentences had slipped into the idiomatic, and Punch looked embarrassed at his father’s ignorance. The other boys were outside on the patio, beyond an open French window whose net curtains billowed now and then, the signal of what would soon be a change in the weather. Once or twice, bottles in hand, they would fall silent and look into the room, seeking proof among those sitting inside of an opinion one of them had expressed, a controversial one maybe, now unfettered by classroom constraints and decorum, by a life once disciplined but now floating freely in the inter-regnum between school and university, adolescence and adulthood.

When it was time to eat, Mike laid the long kitchen table while Punch and I drove in his car to town for the food, the individual orders falling into four separate batches. A few of the others got in the back just for the ride. Punch told me it was lucky there was a big table; it had been included in the house sale with a few other sticks of furniture. I was about to say that it was a huge house for three people but stopped myself because I was assuming that Punch had been an only child and now I remembered the photo on the sideboard.

By the time we got back, it was raining heavily under low cloud. Punch’s father was sitting in the middle of the settee with Mike and Freddie seeming to bear down on him on either side. He’d already switched the oven on to warm up the food. Old man Evans, who looked more of a pugilist than his son, was explaining something, to judge by Mike’s and Freddie’s intent looks. The others, those who’d stayed behind, were in separate groups, having their own conversations. I caught the end of what Evans Sr.  was telling Mike and Freddie:

‘After that we didn’t see much of Tony or his folks. I don’t know why. It wasn’t our fault.’

Freddie and Mike were each clutching a bottle of lager. There were six empty bottles on the coffee table in front of them. Punch’s father had been drinking too.

‘Come and get it!’ Punch called out, as a few of us slid the fish and chips on to plates.

Punch’s father stood up, unsteady on his feet.

‘You OK, Pop?’ Punch asked.

His father gave a comic salute with his forefinger and hobbled towards the kitchen. We’d already been there for two hours and had drunk a fair amount, coaxed by bravado. Well, our school days were over.

We were half way through our meal when I asked: ‘Who was Tony?’

It was what we all did, what Punch had encouraged us to do: ask questions, get the information flowing, draw conclusions, make up our own minds about T.S. Eliot and stuff.

Mike answered: ‘Mr Evans’s school pal. They were all on a camping holiday in Scotland. Isn’t that right, Mr Evans?’ Was Mike’s formality deliberately increasing the gap between himself and those distant relatives? A few of us glanced from one to another. Drink had confused the Evanses in our understanding.

‘That’s right,’ the old man said. ‘Got into a bit of a scrape did Tony and Richard here.’

Richard ‘Punch’ Evans. We knew his real name, of course. But the informality with which Punch had ushered in the two years of A-level by calling us by our first names had not applied to our dealings with him. He was not Richard; he was still Punch, though we never used that name in front of him either; he was Mr Evans, or Sir. I think he quietly balked at the last as a remnant of a lower school deference he now considered irrelevant. He knew his nickname, of course; the other members of staff probably knew theirs too.

You could almost sense what was imminent, that someone from among those who’d only eavesdropped on Mike, Freddie and Punch’s father ten minutes before, would ask the question. I forget who it was.

‘Scrape?’

Our heads were down, our knives and forks clashing with crockery, and bottles were being emptied, our guzzling heads thrown back. The word seemed to creep to the centre of the table unnoticed, rise a couple of feet and hang there, its question mark flashing.

Old Mr Evans was only too willing to explain: ‘Margaret had died, see. Hole in the heart. We never knew. You didn’t then. We had to get away, to forget. Well, not to forget but you know what I mean. Richard here took it bad, even though he was sixteen. We all did. We went camping by a loch. Richard was pally with Anthony—Tony—so he came along too. Didn’t he, Richard?’

All heads except old Mr Evans’s turned towards Punch for an explanation of this telegraphese.

‘Margaret was my thirteen-year-old sister,’ Punch explained. ‘She had atrial septal defect, or ASD.’

He sounded as though he were apologising to us boys for the ugly expression ‘hole in the heart’ and his father’s statement that he had taken his sister’s death ‘bad’.

But the father, seemingly indignant at the son’s trumping of his description with this technical term, butted in, his voice thinly coated with censure:

‘Richard and Tony went off to explore. An hour later, along comes Tony running towards us. His face was white as a sheet. Hobbling behind him about fifty yards away was Richard here with his face covered in blood. His hands were over his face like as if his head was going to fall off, isn’t it? Never seen so much blood on a young ‘un. Tony was shaking. He told us they’d been attacked, by some gang or other.’

Punch swiped his nose with the ball of his thumb. Was it a signal to make the connection between the incident and what we’d thought was the result of successive batterings in the ring? Would a champion have taken much of a beating?

With his comment on this, one of the others made things worse, as it were: ‘Tell us about boxing for the Army, Punch.’

We all stared at each other. None of us had ever called him Punch in his presence. It was drink unlocking doors. Nor had we questioned him, as I said, about the Forces or his sporting prowess, any more than we’d have asked ‘Drag’ Denison, the French master, how he’d come by his limp, sa boiterie.

Punch was about to speak when his father jumped in first. ‘Richard was never in the Army, never been a soldier,’ he said. ‘Where did you get that? And boxing? You must be daft, the lot of you. Books was all he was interested in.’ Like you bunch, he might have added.

There was an edge to his voice, an all-embracing censure or contempt aimed at his son as much as at us, this crowd of smart-alecs who invaded his privacy. Later, much later, we’d see this as Mike expressed it when he referred to education as ‘the Great Divider’. He meant the gulf that learning, books, opened up between us and people like Punch’s father.

‘Yes—where did you get that idea?’ Punch asked. It was hard to believe he hadn’t known. He wasn’t drinking much, we noticed.

We all shrugged, sensing the need to avoid spoiling our evening. But it was too late, the downpour and early darkness outside seeing to that. We could hear the rain drumming on something metallic beyond the window, some lid or roof. Though we’d finished eating, neither Punch nor his father made any attempt to return to the sitting-room. We’d all stopped drinking too; we’d had enough, and we had to get home, those of us being picked up not wanting to embarrass our parents or whoever it was had arranged to drive there. Some of us lived close enough at a stretch to walk, but we didn’t want to stagger. It was an exaggeration to say that Punch wasn’t drinking much: he’d drunk hardly anything.

Evans Sr. opened another bottle, his sixth or seventh. Its cap bounced on the tiled floor. He was beyond offering us more as the perfect host, or the perfect host’s helper; we could please ourselves. Mike tried to change the subject by mentioning an upcoming TV documentary about Seamus Heaney, which he said would include a criticism of the poet by someone called Paul Danziger. Mike must have seen the look of disdain on the face of Evans Sr., who may not have heard of Heaney, let alone Paul Danziger. (Actually, none of us at that moment had heard of Danziger, and that might have included Punch: Mike was avenues ahead of us all.)

Although it was July, we could have done with the lights on. Punch nor his father made the move. The father had more to say about that Highlands episode, something about the police not doing anything, as if dragging it back to the table after he’d seen it tip-toeing away and looking over the shoulder at us in case of needing to make a bolt for it.

‘I didn’t take to Tony—Anthony,’ he said, uttering the longer form of the name with what sounded like scorn. ‘Margaret didn’t too, the wife neither.’ An emboldened Freddie might have asked at that juncture if Punch’s mother didn’t have a name, or why, despite the family’s dislike of Richard’s pal, they’d gone camping to Scotland. We all seemed captive, Punch as well, himself perhaps wanting something to be said as the last word. He placed his knife and fork on the plate neatly in the position of twenty past four; his father’s remained where they had been set either side of the table mat. Go on, Punch appeared to be saying. Get on with it if you’re going to.

‘We never found out why that bunch of Jocks did it—did we, Richard?’ This said without looking at his son.

‘No, we didn’t,’ Punch confirmed, still self-absorbed, head lowered. ‘It was unprovoked.’

‘Aye,’ his father said. ‘No reason for it whatever.’

After the washing-up, we finally strayed into the sitting-room. Evans Sr. had taken up position in front of the TV. There was some quiz show on; we’d heard its low-volume antiphonies of laughter and applause while the last plates were being dried and put away, but now they were louder. The old man had turned the sound up when he realised we were all returning. He’d also pulled his chair closer to the screen, his head craned forwards into its phosphorescent exclusion zone. He’d done with conversation. We could look at him more closely and relate his peculiarities to the bits and bobs in the room, to the huge room itself even, lit only by the TV’s buzzing source of illumination. It silvered the photograph frames and their commemorations: Mrs Evans, about to chuckle at something that had taken her fancy; sickly Margaret, not knowing how close the end was; and Margaret and Punch, the siblings together with all to live for.

Punch did nothing to suggest that his father had not drawn the evening to a close. It was a bit embarrassing really. Draped across chairs or spread out on the floor, we looked at each other and exchanged small talk. Mike, recalling the evening a few years afterwards, said it had reminded him of of two communities, with Punch ‘shadowed’ in the doorway and maybe hoping—though he must have been confident of our success—that we’d be moving away from the life his father had led, further than he had anyway. Mike had seen what we’d seen: a retired coalminer made faintly embittered, even angry, by consumption of alcohol that now served only to reveal his reduced capacity and what Mike referred to, unfairly in my view, as the ‘qualitative’ difference between us. Being charitable might have led us to think that he’d meant ‘quality of life.’ We seemed to be putting the worst complexion on things: that miner’s lamp made from coal, for example, a symbol of a life petrified in its element.

The Old Manse commanded heights before the land behind heaved itself upwards just once more towards afforestation and spoil tips. We never wondered why the trees surrounding it had been chopped down or why their ugly stumps had been left in the ground for so long – to rot away, perhaps. A drive led to one of the top roads and its light traffic. The valley bottom could be seen much further down, its orange street lamps strung out and blinking through sheets of rain and premature darkness. It would be ever thus: ‘no escape from geography apart from anything else,’ Freddie once said.

My older brother picked us up in his car—me, Mike, and Freddie. As we drove away, I could see Punch silhouetted in an upstairs window and below him the TV flickering its distant semaphore.

‘A hole in the heart,’ Mike said. ‘I swear I never knew.’

‘And that Caledonian caper,’ Freddie said, after a pause for reflection. ‘What the fuck was that all about?’

---

More of Nigel’s writing can be found through his website, www.NigelJarrett.wordpress.com.