by Martyn Winters
Laurence was just fourteen years old. Though tall enough for his dark, bushy curls to brush against the lintel across the worn, wooden swing doors of the Bird in Hand public house on Bromsgrove Street, and broad shouldered enough to pass for a man in the right company, he was not going to fool anyone in the Bird, not on a Friday night.
He felt a tightness in his chest he couldn’t quite name: neither fear nor shame, but a heavy awareness he didn’t belong here, not yet, and perhaps never would. He acted as a silent postboy, carrying messages between adults, yet no one ever asked how he felt about their contents.
Always seeing more than he revealed, he noticed the cracks in voices and how grown men stared into their drinks, as if fearful they might respond. He remembered smells, sounds, and silences, storing them like relics in the corners of his mind. He learned to read rooms long before mastering his multiplication tables. Being young didn’t equate to blindness, nor did it mean he was unaware of himself.
Standing in the autumn drizzle for what felt like an eternity, he gathered the courage to step inside. He knew his father would be at the bar, nursing the tar-black ale favoured by the railway workers of Grangetown, while abjuring the endless Cribbage game with caustic, dismissive words, his big, dirty hands gripping his dimpled pot, and his eyes far away in the better life he didn’t know how to reach.
Laurence loathed the Bird. The stink of sweat and beer; the way the men fell silent when he passed, as if children had no place among ghosts. Still, the drizzle was soaking through his jumper, and going back without delivering his message wasn’t an option.
On payday, the men of the tracks would pour through the corrugated iron gates at the foot of the embankment running alongside the narrow, litter-strewn lane at the rear of the Edwardian terraces of Clive Street, in a grey-faced snake of weary bodies, wrapped in sweat-stained, stone-blackened overalls, knotted scarves, and flat caps. As one, they would make their way to the Bird in Hand, drawn not by its reputation as the best pub in the area, but by its convenient proximity to their work gates.
Under the bus-shelter across from the pub, a few trackmen lingered, illuminated by a triangle of light spilling from the slightly ajar door of Stan Pearce’s bookies. They listened intently to a crackling commentary from above the teller’s window, hope glimmering in their eyes but desperation gnawing at their hearts, knowing that Lloydie-the-moneylender’s brutish collectors would arrive in the morning. Stan kept the shop open late on wages night, opportunistically accepting bets on the Australian track. Rumour had it that his brother provided the commentary from an alcove in the cash office, crafting results to maximise Stan’s earnings. Nevertheless, the trackmen continued to come, hoping Stan junior would slip up or favour their bets with a win.
But most would take their seats in the Bird, one-shilling pints already on the long dark-wood bar, crib boards and card decks distributed amongst the round, copper-topped tables, and Molly Slater waiting in the snug with an offer somebody would not refuse.
The lights in the police station at the corner of Clive and Bromsgrove streets flickered out, marking the clearest signal he would get. Laurence wiped the raindrops trickling into his bright blue eyes, steeled himself, and, taking a hesitant stride forward over the cracked, barrel-broken paving slabs, he stepped into the dimly lit alcove concealing the door. Pushing against the brass doorplate, worn smooth by countless hands, he stumbled into a world that was entirely different from his own.
Cigarette smoke and the head-filling aroma of warm beer enveloped him. The walls, yellowed with decades of smoke, bore framed photographs of steam engines and rugby teams long gone. Tired voices of tantalisingly inaudible conversations flitted between the thud of darts striking the board and the background rhythm of Cilla Black on the home service coming from a radio high to the left of the bar. A wet dog lay curled beneath the radio, its head resting at the feet of an old man in a black greatcoat, snoring gently into his half-finished pint.
Molly Slater glanced up from the snug at Laurence, their eyes catching in an embrace of future promise. “Not yet,” she seemed to say. “But you will come to me one day. Perhaps sooner than you think.” Her lips curved in a knowing smile before returning to her gin, breaking the spell. Laurence wondered if he would stay in Grangetown long enough for her to realise how mistaken she was.
He scanned the lined faces, half hidden behind pint pots, until his eyes rested on his father’s. Striding as confidently as his years would allow, he cut through the throng of hard-muscled trackmen until he stood before him.
“Dad,” he said, conscious his voice was too coltish to hold a position among the rasping baritones around him. “Sorry to interrupt your leisure time.”
“Laurence,” his father answered in hard Cardiff vowels without looking up from his pink football paper. “This isn’t leisure, son. It’s a necessity.”
“Mum sent me,” Laurence felt a quaver enter his voice. Blaming the messenger was common currency in this blunt-nosed, unforgiving company.
“What does SHE want?” Laurence’s father growled.
“It’s Uncle Johnny,” Laurence stammered. Memories flitted through his mind. His dad’s younger brother singing old war songs when he got too drunk, voice slurring into nonsense. Visits to the fair when Johnny lifted him onto his shoulders, calling him ‘General’, as if it meant something. Letting him sip beer when his mother wasn’t looking, he’d then throw an arm around her shoulders and squeeze her breasts, thinking Laurence wouldn’t notice. And later, too often, sprawled on their settee, shoes off, singing the same cracked verse until Mum turned up the wireless to drown it out. Still, he had been kind. Once.
“He’s dead,” he said at last, his mouth and eyes narrowing as if to stifle a howl. He cherished the bonds he formed with Johnny, yet regretted them as well, just as he mourned the lack of connection with his father.
His father lifted his big, angular, but expressionless face. “Call the bloody doctor then.”
Laurence’s chest tightened. He wished, for once, his father would say something different, something that didn’t jangle like rusted iron.
“The thing is,” Laurence sensed his stomach churn as he said his prepared words. “He’s at our house. In your bed.”
The bar silenced. Laurence felt the air thicken, eyes prickling as every pint paused mid-air. Even the dog stirred. He hated this, the scrutiny, the expectation of stoicism. He stood very still, fighting the urge to bolt. His voice had been steady, but inside, he was shaking like a wet leaf in the wind.
His father stood slowly, his eyes never leaving Laurence’s, his mental gears visibly grinding. “I told him he could only sleep in there until five. Looks like I’m going to have to move him myself.”
Laurence nodded, but a part of him was still frozen in the hallway at home, where the air was thick with the sour smell of sweat and gin and something heavier. His mother had covered Johnny’s body with a coat, her hands trembling as she lit another cigarette. No one had spoken. Not even the clock.
His father marched out of the bar, with Laurence right behind him, weaving through the crowd of sagaciously nodding heads. They stepped back into the rain, drops needling the back of Laurence’s neck. Shucking up his collar and tapering his eyes, he felt older than fourteen, and his shoes seemed heavier as he widened his step, trudging through the rain in his father’s wake.
Nothing would be said, of course, because trackmen never gossiped, but Laurence’s father would stoop a little more, the dim light in his grey-blue eyes would all but extinguish, and his hard, calloused hands would not touch Laurence, his mother, or any of them ever again.
They didn’t speak as they walked. Laurence watched his father’s shoulders sway; broad, broken, and hunched like sacks of coal. The rain wasn’t heavy, but it was cold, and it carried the curious Grangetown scent of iron and rot. They didn’t touch or speak, yet something passed between them in the rhythm of their steps and the steam of their breath rising together into the light rain, and off into the cold night. Laurence wished they could remain like this, simply walking and sharing the weight without naming it. Perhaps this was as close as they would ever get, but maybe it was enough.
Something was ending. Something else beginning. And Laurence wasn’t sure what. Only that it had settled inside him like a stone dropped in a still pond.
The ripple of that night would carry forward, through school, through work, through whatever came next. He wouldn’t forget the way the rain tasted, or how a boy aged in a single step.
Sometimes, when the rain softened the city’s edges and the smell of coal smoke thinned, Laurence imagined living somewhere else: somewhere nobody asked why you walked a certain way or spoke gently. Somewhere, you didn’t have to choose silence to be safe, a somewhere he kept packed away in his internal wish list, a dream or a fantasy that wasn’t ready to be realised yet. Not now, anyway.
As they turned into Clive Street, Laurence caught his reflection in a puddle. The boy staring back looked older, his eyes shadowed, his mouth set in a line he didn’t recognise.
He blinked, and the puddle rippled too. The boy was gone.
The man was coming.
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