Life_ An Exploded Diagram - Mal Peet [20]
“I meant a job going,” George said. “A position.”
The man put the paper down and turned to him. He had blue eyes inside plump little purses of skin. The bald dome of his head rose out of a thicket of graying and unkempt curls. He surveyed George’s demob suit, his collar and tie.
“Ah. Thas right, I do. Sorry. Yer Win Little’s son-in-law, just come home?”
“Yes.”
“So you’d be George, er?”
“George Ackroyd.”
“Bill Ling. Howja do.”
He held out his right hand, which was black and lacked half of its third finger.
“Yer dunt hevter shake ut if yer dunt want to.”
“No,” George said, gripping the other man’s hand. “There’s nowt wrong with axle grease. I’m partial to the smell of it.”
Ling grunted humorously again. He took a tin of tobacco from his overall and rolled a cigarette. George lit it for him with his American lighter.
“So, then. Win tell me you was in the Engineers. That right?”
“For nine years, after I joined up. Then the REME from forty-two — Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers.”
“What was that all about, then?”
“Tanks, mostly. Half-tracks, Bren gun carriers, armored cars. That sort of thing.”
Ling picked a shred of tobacco from his lower lip. “We dunt get a lotta them come in.”
“No,” George said. “I don’t suppose you do.”
“Tractors, reapers, balers, harrers. Go all over the place sortun out threshun machines, things like that. Lot on ut is donkey’s years old. Patch up an bodge. That dunt sound like what yer used to.”
“No. But a machine is a machine. An engine is an engine.”
Ling lifted his eyebrows and nodded as though this were a novel piece of wisdom.
“So yer reckon you might pick ut up, do yer?”
“I should think so.”
Ling looked around the office as though help or advice might materialize from its shadows.
Eventually he said, “Well, I do need a man what know his arse from a gasket. Things hev got busy, this past year. I tell yer what, George. Why dunt we try ut for a month? See if the work suit yer? How do that seem?”
“Sounds fair enough to me. When d’you want me to start?”
“Lessay Mundy.” Ling grinned, displaying a random collection of teeth. “There ent no hurry. I daresay you an Ruth hev still got a bit of catchun up to do, arter all this time.”
George would work for Bill Ling for twelve years. The other men never grew to like him. They never addressed him by his first name; they called him Sarge, and behind his back, they imitated his brisk and upright manner of walking. When there were breaks from work, they would isolate him by retreating inside the slow, thick moat of their impenetrable dialect.
George remounted Ruth’s bike and pedaled the three-quarters of a mile to Borstead. The trees and hedges along his route were misted with the green of early spring. The town was silent. He passed a pub called the Feathers, turned back, and wheeled the bike into an alleyway that led to the rear entrance. There were only three people in the bar: two elderly men, who sat silently in front of their pints, and an elderly woman perched on a bar stool, reading a newspaper aloud to her glass of stout. George took the stool farthest from her and, after several minutes had gone by, took a two-shilling piece from his pocket and tapped the counter with it. A woman with lips painted close to her nose emerged from a curtained doorway and reluctantly drew him a pint of bitter.
Later she drew him another. Drinking it, George felt the absence of joy pierce him like a bayonet.
He did not want to go home — home? — so he rode the bike in the opposite direction. He passed through the dripping gloom under the railway bridge and, on a whim, turned right onto a narrow road he had no memory of. He found himself alongside an extensive playing field, in the middle of which was a pavilion, a gray stone and white-gabled house, like something pictured in a fairy tale. The field was divided into a number of football pitches, and upon three of them, boys in shorts and motley shirts were charging after a ball, massing and hallooing