This short story was first published in a small print magazine ‘Delivered’, March 2009 edition. Unfortunately, in common with many of the smaller literary journals, this magazine is no longer published.
Enjoy, though it’s possible you may shed a tear at one point.
JACK
Jack stands just within the doorway he’s opened and plucks off his hat. He flicks it across the shop floor and over the counter to land on faded blue carpet squares at the feet of the man behind the counter. ‘Wanna fight?’
Brendon, the shop owner, raises a shoe over the dormant trilby. Holds it a threatening fraction above the hat and waits.
Jack labours to shake off his heavy coat, preparing for his invited fisticuffs. ‘Dare you, Spudpuddin’.’
Brendon swoops to the floor, sweeps up the hat, and slings it back to the old man in one easy flow. Jack catches his shield, plonks it over his unruly grey hair, and shrugs his bulk back into his coat, mock relief lending a grin to his rugged features.
‘Kettle’s on, Jack.’
His eyes, oddly soft for blue steel, brighten. ‘Get the biscuits, shall I?’ He goes before the shop owner makes the refusal he knows Jack won’t accept.
Over the years, Brendon’s learnt the old man is so lonely he’ll do almost anything to keep the favour of those who tolerate him. He buys occasional goods to gain unrestricted admission. The biscuits are his daily unrequired fee. No refusal will stop him.
Mornings, as Brendon sweeps last night’s litter from the shop front, Jack is often waiting to exchange a greeting. Sometimes he offers to fight, and Brendon plays the game. Jack always backs down, faking terror and sometimes canvassing the unnecessary aid of a startled passer-by.
Trade is good that summer and Brendon hires a new assistant. Pretty, lively and quick, Becky gets the job because, inexplicably, from the moment she steps through the door he can’t imagine life without her. He doesn’t tell her this. How she feels is a secret she keeps.
Even with an assistant, Brendon sweeps the pavement. ‘Mornin’, Jack. Stick the kettle on, eh? Three cups, one for Becky.’
The old man enters the shop in front of Brendon and invites him to fight as soon as he sees how the pretty girl surreptitiously glances admiration at her boss. ‘Outside.’
Brendon shrugs off his jacket.
Jack replaces his and backs to the door, pretending terror for Becky’s benefit. ‘He means it!’
Becky, prepared by her employer, is quick to catch on. She leaves the counter and hugs the harmless old man protectively. Brendon shows an unexpected pang of jealousy before he manages concealment. Becky lets him know she’s seen and responds enigmatically. He chooses to believe his age makes her treat him as a risk whereas the ancient Jack is no threat.
Triumphant, unaware of their exchange, Jack lumbers through the open doorway behind the counter and into the stock room where he makes coffee.
In the old man’s absence, Becky judges him. ‘He’s barmy.’
‘Lonely and eccentric.’ Brendon explains. ‘It’s a mask he wears for self-protection.’
This generosity of spirit makes Becky smile at him in the most open and rewarding way yet.
Jack emerges from the stockroom and presents her with her mug as he would a bouquet offered in admiration. He thrusts the other at the owner. ‘‘Ere. Spat in yours.’
Brendon moves to his place behind the glass counter with its display of toys for men boys and rests his drink on the scratched surface. Jack faces him across this barrier. His stance and attitude make it clear he understands that certain spaces confer rank on those who occupy them. Brendon loathes this superiority but knows he can’t alter it.
Jack slurps his coffee. ‘I want a pair of binoculars.’
‘Why?’
‘Why? Look, I’m a paying customer and I can ‘ave what I bloody-well like, Spudpuddin’.’
‘First, have you sugared my coffee?’
‘Arsenic. Spat in it. Twice!’
‘As always.’ He sips and finds it as he prefers.
Jack slurps again and sends a sidelong smirk at Becky who, learning the game, grins back at him.
‘Second, you bought a pair a month and a half ago. Never used them. You told me.’
‘You just watch it! I want a pair of binoculars. A bloody good pair. The best. Right?’
Brendon takes the second most expensive pair from the shelf behind him, where these attractive goods reside away from the envious hands of those who deeply desire but lack the means to pay.
Jack points at the most expensive pair. ‘Them.’
‘I thought you wanted the best?’
‘They’re the bloody dearest.’
‘But these are the best.’
He squints at the shop owner, assessing him. Satisfied he’s telling the truth, he picks them up, places his specs on the broad bridge of his nose and puts the binoculars to his eyes. ‘Can’t see a ruddy…’
Brendon removes the black plastic lens caps from the front of the device.
Jack points them directly at the man and immediately plonks them back on the counter, dropping his specs back to their normal lodging place on his comfortable belly. ‘Still can’t see owt. These the best you’ve got?’
Brendon leans forward and lifts the old man’s glasses from his pot on their gold chain. Asks for them. Reluctantly, Jack hands him spectacles covered in spots of dried soup and gravy spilt from meals eaten at the café over the road.
Cleaned to sparkling with specialist fluid and soft cloth, he hands them back.
Jack sits them on the bridge of his nose. Looks at Brendon. Staggers back as though taking a blow. ‘Bugger me; you’re an ugly sod!’
He turns to Becky who is laughing at this insult and shaking her head in denial whilst finding it an acceptable joke.
‘By ‘eck, you’re a pretty wench.’
She gives him the look she uses on Brendon on those occasions he dares mention her appearance.
Jack peers through the binoculars again. ‘Bloody useless.’
‘Go outside and look down the street.’
He turns with the intention to do as invited.
‘One moment, sir.’
He glares at Brendon’s use of the formal title.
‘Put the strap round your neck. Drop those and I’ve lost a week’s takings. Oh, and leave your hat, as security.’
Jack looks suitably insulted and thrusts the binoculars back at Brendon. ‘Keep the ruddy things!’
Pleased his ruse has worked, Brendon smiles his victory too openly at Becky and is caught in the act by Jack.
‘You’re a cunning sod. But it won’t work on me. Give ‘em back ‘ere. I’ll leave me ‘at.’ He takes it off and places it with care on the counter, then walks slowly across to the door and stands just outside it, looking down the hill. He returns and sits the binoculars lightly on the counter. ‘Crap.’
Brendon turns with them, secretly wipes away the smears he placed on the lenses with his thumbs, and puts the binoculars back on the shelf, keeping his smile to himself this time.
* * *
Afternoons, Jack talks; repeating anecdotes and stories, which he acts out for Brendon and Becky, making them laugh. Tales of days spent fishing, walking: short walks because of his asthma. He talks of his girlfriend.
Edith is the middle-aged, married stewardess of a local workingmen’s club and gives him a hot meal sometimes. Against her will, she must eject him when the club closes mid-afternoon.
Jack wanders the streets, visiting other shops where he’s tolerated for his custom or, more rarely, welcomed for his entertainment. The last hour, after the shops close but before his landlady allows him in, is worst for him. She provides his frugal meal at the kitchen table before he goes to his room to watch his portable TV, with the volume down so he won’t disturb the other residents.
Sundays, he’s allowed to stay home.
Brendon visits him, once. Jack greets him on the pavement and Brendon knows he’s haunted his window, waiting.
The landlady lurks. ‘Visitors out by teatime, Jack.’
The room is crammed with things he’s bought; many still in boxes never opened. Brendon is ashamed to count the items from his own shop amongst these tickets that have bought brief periods of comfort to make the old man’s days tolerable. After his visit, he refuses to sell Jack another thing.
On a wooden chair beside the window sits his colour TV, only friend of endless lonely nights. Fishing rods perch upright behind the door. Radios lie silent. Hats form a leaning tower beside the bed. Books lie unread in piles: his eyes, memory, and failing concentration denying him that pleasure. Brendon picks up a volume of poetry he’s been meaning to buy for years.
Jacks watches him reading. ‘You can ‘ave that if you like. Never read the stuff meself.’
Brendon nods his thanks but replaces the book on the pile. By the time Jack’s recovered from the stairs, Brendon has absorbed it all. And there, in the old man’s home since retirement some seven years earlier, he begins to know him properly.
Private walls and Brendon’s gift of single malt allow Jack to release his pain and disappointment. No smooth unburdening but a jumbled, half-apologetic, half-joking disposition, interwoven with tales he’s told a hundred times, isolated confessions muttered then denied. Derogatory comments and insults help disguise the bitterness and pain of truth. Brendon pieces the fragments together later.
The girl was beautiful. Not just in Jack’s eyes but as a person. She loved him; told him so a thousand times. Demonstrated with her chaste caress, her innocent embrace. Her name he kept to himself: a memory too precious to share. His career: time-served engineer, was on the rise. Everything was good. In the church, he waited for her; nervous, hopeful, eager. He never found out why she didn’t turn up. He couldn’t ask her.
When he saw her, some time after the empty church, and she wouldn’t even look at him, he made the first attempt. But he only messed the site with blood, unaware he must slice along the vessels of pain rather than across them if he was to end it that way. He was found long before death could release him. Three more attempts failed and forced him to continue living with unresolved hurt that ate his soul and heart.
Against his will, they placed experimental electrodes on his skull. A contemporary treatment using electricity to erase harmful memories but never doing more than harm itself. ECT, they called it, electro convulsive therapy. Lightening surges forced his body arching up against the leather bonds.
‘No anaesthetic. Just thick straps to ‘old you down. I could ‘ear the ones before me, screaming. Them as came after meant nowt.’
All fourteen barbaric treatments failed; did nothing to relieve the deep depression but left him with buzzing ears, a defective memory and headaches that stayed a year.
When they found him bleeding again, they played altruistic butcher. Hacked into his skull and sliced away the guilty portions of his mind, excising blameless thoughts and memories along with bruised and bloodied sensitivity. Pre-frontal leucotomy: the ultimate prophylaxis, they called it.
Depression was banished. But with it went great lumps of past. It was years before they said he’d recovered, though he never did. Even now, more than forty years from that excoriating knife, his memory limps along and backtracks. Fine seams and ridges of mended bone mark his skull. Hence the ubiquitous hat.
His knowledge of the past is clouded, fragmentary, incomplete, but his engineering skills remained unaffected. Life became work: diesel engines to power ocean liners, tankers, bulk carriers of freight. And he was so good they sent him on his own across the globe to solve impossible conundrums.
Travel isolated him. Made him rootless. Denied friends, he had no chance to find another to fill the void of troubled partial recollection. He came home from one trip to his newly widowed mother lost in grief. A month later, he unlocked the door on loneliness at three in the morning. The local police gave him the bad belated news and told him where they’d laid her to eternal rest.
Home, in flatland Fens, held too many memories. The job base moved and took him south. The last thirty years of his life, he lived a lodger.
‘Moved in ‘ere when I retired.’
Jack’s life: darkness and twilight; alone inside his crowded room, daylight visits to shops where he’s tolerated, lunches at Edith’s club or the bus station café. But he has days in pleasure on the heath, watching birds through his well-worn binoculars. Often alone, catching the bus and walking that last slow half-mile. Sometimes Edith goes, her husband taking and collecting them.
‘One o’ these days he’ll catch us at it. He’ll kill me.’
His flights of erotic fancy are rare, and Brendon is convinced the old man’s never known the joy a woman brings. Now, he never will.
But the shop owner knows he might make the old man’s life less empty, could give him other pleasures: Sunday lunch, a drink at the pub, an outing in the car. Inertia and the certainty he’ll always be there leave his promises unkept, in spite of Becky’s prompting him to act when he suggests his plans to her.
A Monday comes when Jack doesn’t appear. By Wednesday, Brendon is alarmed enough to visit, at Becky’s mild insistence. The landlady fails to recognise him.
‘I’m here to see Jack. He’s not been …’
She stares, indifferent. ‘Stupid old sod’s dead.’
The door is closing as the words impact. He stops it. ‘When?’
‘Two days ago.’
‘How? What happened?’
She sighs: the effort more trouble than the old man’s worth. ‘Heart. Always said ‘e were too fat. Wouldn’t listen to me, though. Men.’
Jack is dead.
‘I wonder, if it’s not too much trouble…? There was something in his room he wanted me to have…’
Hostility ousts her indifference. ‘Don’t know about that…’ Her manner makes him suspicious and he barges past her, up the stairs.
‘You can’t go in…’
They’ve stripped it of every sign of Jack. He scrutinises the landlady. She flees downstairs.
There’s no trace of Jack up here in this anonymous, empty, small room. Nothing to say he ever inhabited this indifferent space.
Brendon traces the woman to the kitchen and finds her husband hunched over the table, bullying his evening meal. He stands, threatening. ‘Look, the old sod’s dead and we got shot of his stuff, that’s all. What’s it to you?’
It’s not about the book Jack wanted him to have: Brendon just wants to fulfil a promise, have a keepsake. They don’t care enough to know the facts of his disposal and the deed is done before Brendon’s able to discover them. Jack is scattered: blackened fragments tossed anonymously round the roses of the crematorium. Nothing now exists to mark his life.
In the shop, he explains to Becky, watches sadness dim and cloud those startling eyes and wants so much to comfort her.
The door admits the landlady’s brute who flings a hat across the space to bounce and land at Becky’s feet. She picks it up, examines it.
‘Wife says it were Jack’s. You can ave it, if you like.’ He stands, pugnacious, challenging, ready for a fight; everything Jack could never be. When no one threatens him, he leaves, sneering.
Becky sheds a silent tear, the hat, an isolated link to an old man she’d grown fond of, in her hand. She falls, willing, into Brendon’s comforting embrace. He feels her trembling body next to his, her arms encircling him, and hopes the best they might do for one another and for Jack is to remember him together, always.
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Stuart Aken 