The old house is due for demolition tomorrow.
‘Tomorrow? The Lewis place?’ Frank pushes his palms into the bar, dishcloth squeezed between his fingers. He leans towards Jake. ‘Sure?’
‘Yup.’ Jake sets his beer on the bar, missing the mat. It’ll leave a ring, but Frank can’t care. Not at this moment. ‘Heard it from the horse’s mouth,’ Jake says, defiance in his squinting eyes. ‘Not five minutes ago.’ He tilts his head in the direction of two hefty lads sitting by the window, hard hats on the ledge, half-drunk beers on the table. ‘Them,’ Jake says, ‘Bill’s boys.’
‘Bill shitting himself?’ Frank asks, pretty sure he knows the answer.
‘Yup.’
‘What we gonna do?’ Frank feels a little shitty himself.
Jake shrugs. ‘You reckon it’s still there? After all this time?’
‘Some of it, of course.’
Silence, as each remembers the night. Early twenties, out for a lark which hadn’t ended up as a lark. Driving the country road too fast, yellow eyes in the headlights, screech of brakes, the dull thud.
Frank was driving, and he hadn’t been drinking. Growing up a landlord’s son meant some things were drummed into you from birth. He pulled up, car engine ticking over with relief at the rest.
‘What was that?’ Jake spoke first.
‘Squirrel?’ Bill was hopeful.
‘Yeah, but didn’t look like real squirrel-shape,’ Frank confessed. ‘Better look.’
They all got out of the car, and stepped, hesitantly, to the front.
‘Oh, gawd.’ Jake recognised it first. ‘Mrs Hales’ prize Abyssinian cat. What’s it doing out here this time of night?’
‘Looking to have some fun, tracking down prey.’ Bill was almost jovial. ‘Like us,’ he joked.
Frank considered the joke in poor taste to this day. Perhaps especially this day.
‘No fun for it now.’ Jake was doleful, not seeing the joke, good on him.
‘Reckon we should give it a proper burial,’ Frank said.
‘Got a shovel handy then?’
‘Got a better idea.’ Bill was confident. ‘The old Lewis place, they’re doing some renovations. There’s a coal cellar, with a dodgy wall. Saw it yesterday when I was helping out.’
So they scraped the cat, heavy it was too, Frank remembered, off the road, and wrapped it in the towel he found in the boot. It wasn’t far to the old Lewis place, and Bill was right about the wall. They yanked out some stones, squeezed the cat in and afterwards they bricked up the wall, helping themselves to the builder’s materials lying around, trying to put things back where they found them.
Mrs Hale made a mighty fuss over that cat, saying it must have been stolen, being a prize winner and worth a lot of money. Frank reckoned she was still upset, because, forty years later, she still brought it up, his wife told him – she was a nurse at the care home where Mrs Hale was living out her days.
Frank returns his attention to Jake. ‘If they do find it, you realise they’ll know what it was, right?’
‘Yeah.’ Jake sighs. ‘Should’ve thought about taking the collar off, ditching it somewhere.’
‘Yeah,’ Frank echoes. ‘And Bill never did find the engraved watch his dad gave him for his 21st.’ He looks up as a pale-faced Bill strides towards them. ‘That he lost that very night.’
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Do you think anyone will really mind about Mrs Hale’s cat after 40 years? LOL
My contribution:
AFTERWARDS THEY BRICKED UP THE WALL
It was more like a stockade than a wall – the sharpened pieces of timber meant to deter people from climbing over it, particularly invading hordes from the north.
Horval knew it probably wouldn’t hold if an army of thousands, or even hundreds, was determined to enter the compound where he lived with his family and the rest of the villagers.
However, what could he do? The community certainly did not have sufficient funds to afford anything more – so the array of sharpened saplings arranged in a giant circle would have to do, at least for the time being.
News of the Scots and Picts on the move south had reached all the villages in the area and, despite a rapidly convened war council, each of the elders reluctantly agreed there was little they could do to help each other.
Manpower was the basic problem. There were just not enough able-bodied young men to distribute among all the villages to keep each one safe.
And, although Horval knew that the English folk possessed a superior advantage because of their development of the long bow, sheer weight of enemy numbers might well be decisive in any battle.
Deep in thought, Horval walked the village battlements. If only they had something stronger, sturdier, like bricks with which to build higher ramparts, they might actually stand a chance.
However, despite the local brickworks being within a short cart ride of the village, their product was expensive and the council had decided against using it.
This might come back to bite us, thought Horval, as he surveyed the far hills for any sign of the enemy.
Was that a mirage, or the sun shining off weaponry? Horval found it hard to tell.
However, just to be on the safe side, he sounded the alarm as the villagers poured from their homes in response.
“They might be near,” Horval bellowed. “Man your battle stations.”
Immediately, men and women of all ages lined the stockade walls – weapons at the ready.
Sure enough, it soon became apparent that the glistening reflection Horval thought he saw turned out to a raggedy, unwashed bunch of Scots and Picts charging towards them.
Even if the villagers hadn’t seen them, the enemy’s smell was enough to give away their position.
Try as they might, though, they were unable to breach the stockade wall as the villagers fought desperately to repel them – aided in no small measure by the flaming buckets of hot tar they poured on their heads from their higher vantage points.
The battle had probably been going for little more than half an hour when, unexpectedly, several cartloads of bricks surreptitiously made their way into the village through a secret back entrance.
“Here, use these to throw at those bastards,” the brickworks supervisor said to Horval. “Mightn’t kill ‘em but it will give them something else to think about.”
Quickly organising a working chain, Horval and the villagers unloaded the bricks and passed them to the men and women manning the stockade walls.
Already demoralised from the buckets of flaming tar, a shower of bricks was the last straw for the invading Scots and Picts who fled in absolute panic to the hills.
The villagers cheered loudly as the last of the enemy disappeared over the horizon. Fortunately, they had virtually escaped unscathed with few wounds to worry about.
A working party then gathered up all the bricks they had flung at the enemy and afterwards, with the approval of all the council members, Horval and his army bricked up the stockade wall.
An original and colourful interpretation!