The Facts of Life and Death Read online

  David Leather put up his hand and asked if he could write about his milk-bottle collection and Shawn Loosemore asked if he could write about smashing up David Leather’s milk-bottle collection, and everyone laughed – apart from David and Miss Sharpe, who had to clap her hands to make them all be quiet.

  ‘Of course, David. Hobbies, or what you did at the weekend, or what you want for your birthday, or your pets. It will be like Facebook, but just for 5B. Then,’ she said, ‘those who want to can read their diaries out in class, and we’ll be able learn about each other’s—’

  The bell rang and Miss Sharpe had to raise her voice over the scraping chairs.

  ‘—everyday lives! Have a lovely weekend everybody!’

  Ruby stuffed My Dairy into her plush pony-shaped backpack, then trailed out of the classroom behind the others.

  The other kids had no interest in her or her everyday life.

  Writing it down wouldn’t make any difference.

  Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Cowboy.

  Cowboy Night was the best night of the week.

  On Cowboy afternoons, Ruby would get off the bus and go into the shop to spend her pocket money under the suspicious eye of Mr Preece. She didn’t like Mr Preece, who had hair curling from his ears, and eyes that looked too big behind thick glasses. She took an age every Friday to buy the same two things: a Mars bar and a copy of Pony & Rider, which were her treats for the week.

  By the time she reached the little chapel, she’d always eaten the Mars bar.

  Pony & Rider lasted longer, and Ruby ambled down the hill, envying the pretty girls with their long legs wrapped around immaculate ponies, and looking for good pictures to cut out and stick over her bed, until it became difficult to see by the miserly light that the forest allowed. Then she hurried the rest of the way to Limeburn, letting gravity speed her home.

  Daddy sucked spaghetti into his mouth in long strings that were still attached to his plate, and Ruby did the same, but Mummy said ‘Ruby!’ and made her stop. She wound her spaghetti around her fork so that it was like putting a knot of wet wool in your mouth. It wasn’t half the fun.

  ‘Mmm,’ said Daddy, ‘that was great, thanks.’ He leaned back and played the drums on his tummy. Sometimes Ruby had to guess what song.

  ‘More?’ asked Mummy.

  ‘Please.’ He made the most of a burp and Ruby giggled. Daddy could say ‘Bulawayo’ before finishing a burp. He laughed too; Daddy was always in a good mood on Cowboy Nights.

  Mummy got up and crossed to the stove. Daddy watched her all the way. When she got back with the second plateful, he said, ‘What’s the occasion?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘New shoes.’

  Mummy looked down as if they were a surprise to her too.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, pushing her hair behind her ear.

  Ruby leaned off her chair to see the shoes. Mummy always wore flat ones because she was too tall. These were far from flat, and had lots of thin straps. They looked like the shoes models wore in magazines.

  ‘Mum gave me some money for my birthday,’ said Mummy. ‘You remember.’

  ‘That was months ago.’

  ‘I haven’t had time to go shoe shopping.’

  ‘Bit high, aren’t they?’ said Daddy.

  Mummy looked under the table at her feet. ‘They are a bit higher than they felt in the shop. I just thought it would be nice to have one good pair just in case …’ She tailed off.

  ‘In case of what?’ said Ruby.

  ‘Just in case we went out somewhere,’ she shrugged.

  Daddy sucked up the new spaghetti.

  ‘Can I have some more spaghetti too?’ said Ruby.

  ‘What’s the magic word?’ said Mummy.

  ‘Please.’

  ‘Are you still hungry?’ said Mummy. ‘That was a big bowl for a little girl.’

  ‘Let her eat if she’s hungry,’ said Daddy.

  ‘I am hungry,’ said Ruby.

  ‘See?’

  Mummy pursed her lips and Ruby felt cross, because faces like that made her remember that she was fat. Not fat like David Leather, whose legs rubbed together so hard that there were threadbare patches on his school trousers, but fat enough to hate a waistband and a mirror. Daddy said it was puppy fat and it was cute, but Ruby knew it wasn’t.

  Mummy got up and brought the pan over and draped a little more spaghetti into Ruby’s bowl. She didn’t sit down again; she stood, watching the clock.

  ‘So,’ said Daddy, glancing at the clock. ‘What’s the occasion?’

  ‘No occasion,’ said Mummy. ‘Just thought I’d wear them tonight to show Mum what her money bought, that’s all.’

  Ruby wound the spaghetti around her fork against the bottom of her bowl. ‘They’re too high, Mummy,’ she said. ‘You’ll fall over on the cobbles.’

  ‘Break an ankle,’ agreed Daddy.

  Mummy stared at her feet and bit her thumbnail. The nail was already ragged, and when she went to work every day she put a fresh blue plaster on it.

  Daddy pushed his chair back from the table and Ruby sucked up her last mouthful of spaghetti, then rushed upstairs after him, to watch him change.

  Ruby loved Daddy every day, but on Cowboy Night she loved him even more, with his black clothes and black hat and the fake brass bullets glinting at his waist.

  Cowboys was the best game she played in the woods, even though she didn’t have a hat or boots or a gunbelt. She had sticks that were shaped like guns, stuck into the pockets of her jeans as if they were in holsters.

  Daddy adjusted his black Stetson so that it was low over his eyes, then opened the bottom drawer. Ruby craned to see what was coming out of it, because she wasn’t allowed to open the drawer herself. She wasn’t allowed to mess with Daddy’s cowboy things.

  It was the Texas string tie, with a blue stone cattle skull and pointed silver tips to the laces. Daddy stood in front of the pitted mirror that hung on the back of the bedroom door, and looped it over his head, then replaced his hat – making sure it was just right in the mirror.

  ‘Wow!’ said Ruby.

  He grinned and tipped his brim in her direction.

  ‘Why, thank you, Miss Ruby,’ he drawled, making her giggle.

  He sat on the bed and pulled on his cowboy boots. Black with fancy white stitching. Mummy had found them in a charity shop, but they fitted like gloves.

  ‘You need spurs,’ Ruby said.

  ‘You think so?’

  Of course she did; she’d heard him say so often enough.

  ‘Mummy has new shoes,’ she pointed out.

  ‘Well,’ shrugged Daddy, but didn’t go on.

  Her father never said it in so many words, but they both understood that if her mother’s work weren’t so seasonal they would all have things that they wanted. In the season she worked almost every night and some days. In the winter she only did weekends, and they ate so much fish that Ruby could smell it on her pillow.

  Daddy pulled open the drawer once again and took out the black leather gunbelt. He hitched it loosely, so that the holster hung low on his hip.

  ‘Can I tie the string?’ said Ruby, kneeling up beside his leg.

  The leather thong was difficult to wrestle into a knot and turned into a loose half a bow.

  ‘Nice tyin’, young ’un.’

  Ruby beamed at up him. ‘Sure, JT.’ She tried the accent, but it wound itself around her tongue like a cat and came out in a miaow.

  Daddy used to have a gun in his gunbelt. Not a real one, but that didn’t matter – the government had made all the Gunslingers hand in their guns just because one stupid man shot some people miles away. And the man wasn’t even a cowboy, so it was really unfair.

  But even without a gun, something about Daddy’s hat and his cowboy voice and his unshaven jaw always excited Ruby in a way she couldn’t put into words. He looked like a film star. Even the pale scars that curved through his eyebrow and across his right cheek looked good on Cowboy Night. In
Ruby’s eyes they almost made him better. More dangerous.

  ‘John?’ her mother called up the stairs. ‘It’s quarter past.’

  Daddy rolled his eyes at Ruby, and Ruby rolled them back. Nanna and Granpa came at half past. Granpa made her sit on his lap, and Nanna’s idea of sweets was fruit.

  ‘Can I come with you?’ It burst out of Ruby. She’d learned not to ask often, but she hadn’t asked for ages.

  Daddy stopped adjusting his belt, and made a face in the mirror that looked like consideration. She held her breath.

  ‘Not this time, Rubes,’ he said.

  ‘When?’ she said, emboldened by the pause.

  ‘When you’re older.’ He always said the same thing.

  ‘I’m older now. I’m getting older all the time.’

  There was a silent moment when Ruby thought she’d gone too far. But then he turned towards her and grinned.

  ‘No, you’re not!’ he said, and started to tickle her. ‘You’re not getting older!’

  She giggled and rolled. He’d forgotten his cowboy accent, and the only burr in his voice was a West Country one, as he made her suffer with joy.

  ‘You’re my little cowboy,’ he said as she shrieked. ‘You’ll always be my little cowboy.’

  ‘John? They’ll be here any minute.’

  Daddy stopped tickling and sighed, and Ruby flopped on to the bed, wheezing and still giggling on the out-breaths.

  ‘Big Nose and Ping Pong are on the warpath,’ Daddy whispered, and Ruby laughed. They called them that – just between themselves – because Granpa’s nose was big, and Nanna’s eyes were as poppy as ping-pong balls.

  He straightened up. ‘I guess I’ll be headin’ out then,’ he said, back in character. ‘You have fun now, y’hear?’

  Ruby made a face. ‘How old must I be before I can come with you?’

  Daddy adjusted his belt for a long time, and when he spoke, it wasn’t in his cowboy voice.

  ‘Don’t rush to grow up, Rubes,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing good waiting for you there.’

  He tilted his hat so it was low over his eyes. Then he got his accent back. ‘You stay home, Miss Ruby. Stay out of trouble.’

  At the door, Daddy spun on his heel like a gunslinger, and drew on Ruby.

  ‘Pow! Pow-pow!’

  Instead of a six-shooter he pulled a Mars bar from his holster and lobbed it gently to her. She gasped with delight – then shushed as he raised a secretive finger to his lips.

  ‘Don’t tell Mummy,’ he said.

  Then he tipped his hat to her one last time and jig-jogged down the stairs, whistling ‘Red River Valley’, because it was her favourite song.

  Ruby’s smile faded with the tune.

  How could Daddy say she shouldn’t rush to grow up? It was all right for him to say! He’d probably forgotten what it was even like to be little, with all the fatness and the bullies and the homework.

  She thought of all the good stuff waiting for her when she got older. The first thing she would do was buy a pony so that when she got a job she could ride it to work and to the shops and hitch it up outside so she could see it from the window. And with the money she made from doing . . . something… she’d buy her own custard creams and not have to search every time for where Mummy had hidden theirs. She’d live in a warm house in a sunny field, miles from trees, where mould didn’t blacken the walls and where the wind never squealed through the windows.

  Daddy must be wrong about growing up.

  She couldn’t wait to get there.

  4

  LEGEND HAS IT that in AD 878, Vikings under the leadership of Hubba the Dane landed thirty-three ships right here, at the broad mouth of the River Torridge, and headed up the steep hill to launch an assault on Kenwith Castle. They barely got a mile before they met the English defenders coming the other way. The king’s men had the high ground and the raiders were repelled, but not before the battle claimed the lives of thousands of winners and losers alike.

  The dead victors were carried back to Kenwith under the first Eagle standard ever captured, while the Danes were buried where they fell – in mass graves dug easily in earth so softened by carnage that it is known to this day as Bloody Corner.

  Since then, not much had happened in Appledore.

  For nearly twelve hundred years, the little village serried its way up that same hill like a much slower, more respectful invasion. The first row of cottages rose straight from the muddy estuary, and the tide lapped against painted walls and seeped into basements on a twice-daily basis.

  Appledore had a post office, three churches and six pubs: the usual ratio. In summer, little galleries and gift shops opened in people’s front rooms, selling handmade and home-made gifts, although the hands and homes were mostly Chinese. Not like the Hocking’s ice cream, which was made right here in the village from great golden mountains of real butter, and sold from a fleet of vanilla vans.

  And not like the ships.

  Appledore folk had been building boats for generations, and at its peak Appledore Shipbuilders had employed over two thousand men: so many that one village alone could not satisfy the demand, and men had come from miles around, working shifts around the clock, and riding to the yard on cheap old step-through scooters that cut through sleep like 4am buzz-saws. For half a century the huge iron shed had dominated the river and made bonsais of the trees. Great warships slid from it and into the river, causing passing yachts to bob and pitch like toys. The dry dock had once been the biggest in Europe, and it had seemed that the good times would never end.

  But everything ends – especially good times.

  And when they ended in Appledore, fifteen hundred men lost their jobs.

  Overnight.

  Fifteen hundred breadwinners. Fifteen hundred skilled welders and fitters and carpenters and machinists, suddenly unemployed in a place where the job centre only regularly offered bar work, labouring and babysitting.

  Many of the men never worked again. Not legally, anyway. They missed the work and the money, of course, but more than that, they missed their mates and the way men could be when they were with other men – which was not the same way they had to be when they were with women.

  So they found other places to meet. Some of them met in the bookmaker’s, some in the pubs, some in the snooker halls.

  And some of them joined the Gunslingers.

  The Gunslingers were a loose group of maybe twenty men who, once a week, dressed up as cowboys and met at the George in Appledore – just as the Shootists did at the Bell in Parkham and the Outlaws did at the Coach and Horses in Barnstaple.

  North Devon had its fair share of cowboys, that was for sure. All week they worked in banks or did odd jobs, but Cowboy Nights transported them for just a few hours to the Wild West, where men were men, women were buxom, and jails were made of wood.

  When the Gunslingers had first appeared, the residents of Appledore had been a little nervous of the men in boots and black hats who swaggered down the narrow canyon of Irsha Street every Friday night. But after a while the net curtains stopped twitching every time a cowpoke passed through the little fishing village on his way to the pub, and it was left only to small gangs of teenaged boys to laugh and shout insults.

  From a safe distance.

  Once at the George, the Gunslingers got drunk and showed off and flirted with the barmaids, and talked in a cowboy way about cowboy things.

  Like fashion.

  They fell on any new item of cowboy clothing or equipment like Beverly Hills housewives – poring over it for style and authenticity. Funds and geography dictated that items usually failed on both counts. Nellie Wilson’s holster was from army surplus, Scratch Mumford’s poncho had been crocheted by his mother, and Blacky Blackmore’s cowboy hat had a Pixar logo under the brim.

  The Gunslingers’ most authentic asset came when Frank ‘Whippy’ Hocking would ride his hairy skewbald, Tonto, through the village and tie him up outside the George. There, tourists took picture
s, and small children fed him sugar and ketchup and any other pub condiments that were free. ‘No mustard,’ Whippy always told them. When he left, the worse for wear, the other Gunslingers would come outside and help to push Whippy up into the tooled leather saddle. It always took at least three of them to heave him upright, because Whippy was one of the ice-cream clan, and quality control was his life.

  When they weren’t peacocking, the Gunslingers played a casual game of poker for pennies and bickered back and forth about old TV Westerns – wavering between Bonanza and The High Chaparral and The Virginian. Between them they had pirated all the box sets. In the films they were split between Clint Eastwood or Gary Cooper; John Wayne or Jimmy Stewart. Their jury was always out on Kevin Costner, who promised so much and so often – then somehow always managed to ruin things with gills or a bad haircut.

  If a man joined the Gunslingers – and if he were not thoroughly unpopular – he’d be given a cowboy name. Whether he liked it or not. Mostly these names were bestowed for low reasons that barely troubled the imagination. Blacky Blackmore delivered coal, Hick Trick lived in the sticks, while Daisy Yeo mooed loudly and randomly, in a sort of agricultural Tourette’s; in the supermarket you could hear him aisles away.

  Some men tried to join up with their cowboy name all ready to go, but the Gunslingers had no truck with that. Indeed, they were apt to punish such presumption, which was why Len ‘Pussy’ Willows’ membership had been short and fractious, ending in a brawl that had memorably spilled out of the George and all the way down Irsha Street.

  Just like real cowboys.

  It had happened six months ago, and they still worked it into at least one conversation a week.

  As the night and the beer ran down, the Gunslingers would get reflective on how much better life would be if only North Devon were open of range and filled with cattle – preferably ones which needed driving from one end of the county to the other on a regular basis. They’d put Willie and Johnny on the jukebox in a mournful loop, and sigh into their empty glasses and empty holsters, and long for the good old days before varmints started shooting small children and everyone got so damned jumpy – even about replicas.