The explosion and fire at number 13A Bohemia Way destroyed more than secrets. The house did not burn down. One of the lean-to conservatory windows cracked and part of a lead piping overflow tube warped. Patches of the never cut lawn were scorched where burning debris had landed. The dress that Bearded Iris (aka Gentile Jesus, aka Christopher Proctor) had been wearing had holes in three places where incendiary nails had pierced it. He continued to wear it for weeks afterwards using the scorch marks as a kind of stigmata. The dress, Nathaniel discovered, had been donated to Iris by the delectable Deborah, a revelation that would have seared into Nathaniel’s soul were it not for the fact that he had been emotionally redeemed by Cloakroom Christine.
There were legal ramifications. The police and fire brigade presence uncovered multiple breaches of the law. These chiefly concerned banned substances. Jamaican Joel, Bearded Iris, Deborah and four others faced fines. Mother Eartha was investigated in connection with housing regulations but charges were dropped because she did not own the property, or even live there, and she refused to tell anyone what her real name was.
Much to Nathaniel’s surprise it transpired that Mother Eartha actually lived in the basement of number sixteen, next door, as a ‘guest’ of a retired watchmaker and long-time former employer of Telescopic Titus. Ernest Chronstein had been at the party when the brazier blew up but left immediately to make sure his chicken coop had not cooked.
Rumours emerged that Mother Eartha was also warned for driving without a licence. Nothing could be proved as she was not caught in the act. She continued to have lessons with Nobby Smyles when nobody was looking. It was said she paid him with U.S. dollars.
Nudge told Nathaniel that she’d raked through the ashes of the brazier but nothing recognizable had been uncovered. All the secret notes, trinkets and keepsakes had been incinerated. There were a few coin-sized ingots of metal that may have been jewellery, or bottle tops.
“Or keys,” remarked Nathaniel.
“Oh – and there was one concrete cast of the inside of a secret box.”
“Solid?”
“Rock solid. Whatever that person wanted to keep secret is still in there.”
Nathaniel remembered the punctured sack of concrete in Nudge’s mum’s garden shed, but said nothing.
The inquiries and prosecutions cast a shadow over 13A and while the regular visitors ostensibly shrugged off the uncool inconvenience, they also sought out alternative iniquitous dens. The fines were imposed and somehow settled, and Jamaican Joel only escaped jail by the skin of his missing tooth. Word spread that he went back to Kingston. He did. He went back to Kingston upon Hull.
Deborah and Nudge set out on the road with the drop-out formerly known as Christopher-promising-potential-civil-engineer-Proctor. They acquired a horse-drawn gypsy caravan and a horse that refused to draw it unless a human led the way. They toured the folk-clubs and campsites with a trio of guitars billed as Bearded Iris and the Hair Belles with songs such as Crew Cut for a Cornfield; Bouffant Belfry; Our Centre Parting Keeps Us Close; and their favourite: Telescopic Titus Was Longer Than You Think.
It turned out that Telescopic Titus had left Nathaniel ten pounds. It might not seem much, but in 1970 ten pounds was more than just a passing thought. Titus did not leave the bequest in his will, which was just as well because his will had been in one of the boxes that Mother Eartha had thrown onto the end-of-Titus’ time fire. No solicitor could produce a copy, which caused lengthy legal wrangles as the Land Registry confirmed Titus had a half-share in the house. The other half, it was said, belonged to someone in Jamaica.
The ten pounds that Titus gave to Nathaniel arrived in the post in the middle of March. Quite why it took so long was a puzzle. It arrived second class and was franked just three days earlier. The address was in Titus’ hand as proved by the short note within:
Nathaniel,
I would like you to have this in gratitude for the message you didn’t know you brought me. Always note: the most valuable messages we convey are the ones that we do not know we give.
Yours extendedly,
Titus.
Deirdre McBudge, Nudge’s mother, played Hibernian bloody hell, not because her daughter had absconded from college in favour of folk-singing, but because she claimed that she was the sole beneficiary of Titus’ estate, a claim for which she offered no evidence other than “the bruises on the innermost walls of my heart.”
Nathaniel and Christine made a mostly contented couple. They had their tiffs, but saw each other every single day. He could not believe how he had seen her at the local dances so much but not considered her worth considering. She was just the cloakroom girl. He had failed to see that behind all the cloaks there was nothing being hidden.
Christine had left school at sixteen and gone to work in Betty’s Boutique, a fashion shop in town. She was always one stitch ahead of trend but never in a flamboyant way. Nathaniel liked that. She was cool, confidently reserved, and much wider read than he was. She liked Bolan and Bowie, but also Motown and Soul. She drank lager and black, rum and coke, and strong cider in the summer months. She smoked Embassy filtered cigarettes and could make a mean lemon meringue pie. She didn’t need bohemia; she had brushstrokes in her brain.
Nathaniel’s dad got yet another job, and worked even more away, while his stepmother got yet another man and stayed mostly at his place. Hence Christine moved in with Nathaniel, which to more eyes than you might think in the wake of the skinny-dipping sixties, was unquestionably a matter of living in sin. They found that sin to be a great blessing.
It was she who quietly convinced Nathaniel that he did not need the indulgences of 13A Bohemia Way. Instead, he could enjoy sufficient excess in Newcastle Brown, Wishbone Ash, and Christine’s cloakroom. He continued to make mediocre but satisfactory progress with his studies. He took an extra O level in Ancient History in June and was awarded Grade 5 (or V) in August, a month during which he and his chic Aphrodite undertook weekly walks down Cluck Lane verbally fabricating future nests and years of clutches. They knew they were painting a fantasy but Christine said the canvas was the possibility of a reality.
When the second sixth-form year started in September, Nudge returned to college. She looked very different, with her hair now down to her bum, her fingers two shades of nicotine, and glasses the size of sunflowers which she removed in order to read. She was told she must repeat the year she’d abandoned, and was never seen in school again. Christine later spotted her in a photo in a music magazine. “She’s calling herself Erin’s Orphan.”
“Good luck to her,” said Nathan.
“She won’t need it,” said Christine. “Good fortune is a state of mind.”
Nathaniel loved those kinds of phrases and Christine produced them all the time. He marvelled at how the girl next-door-but-seven, who had led such an apparently sheltered life, could be so rich in wisdom.
“Wisdom,” said Christine, “is knowing what not to think.”
He thought less and less about 13A. It still lay empty by October. They passed by it from time to time but never thought to venture up the path. Then one day he got a note saying there was something for him there. It was not delivered by the postman, but just pushed through the letter box during the late afternoon. It was a Sunday.
“Whose handwriting is that?” Christine asked.
“Don’t know,” he said. “It’s not Deborah’s.”
They had boiled ham sandwiches for tea, then as the dusk was deepening, took a walk along Bohemia Way and stopped by the gate of 13A. Everything was even more overgrown than it had been the previous year and the garden foliage was folding back under the weight of autumn.
They leaned on the gate, thoughtfully closed by the postman who occasionally increased the pile of unopened mail behind the now permanently locked door.
“You can see the telescope,” said Christine.
Nathan looked up at the attic window. “I hadn’t noticed that before,” he said. I’m sure it wasn’t there the last time I looked.”
The gate squeaked as they pushed through, and all along the path, tufts of grass cuffed at their shoes. No lights were on, and after five minutes of knocking no one came.
Nathan shrugged. “Some pillock playing games, no doubt,” he doubted.
Christine took his arm in hers and they set off down the path. They laughed at the memories, especially of the box burning night. She pulled the gate shut, then held it.
“What’s up?” asked Nathaniel.
“The telescope has gone.”
He looked. It had. Then Nathaniel’s face turned ashen.
“What date is it?”
Christine considered, and then double checked her estimation before she slowly spoke. “October eleventh.”
That was the date on which, over a year earlier, Mother Eartha had forecast Nathaniel’s life would end. It was something they’d stopped discussing way back in the spring. Christine saw her boyfriend’s distress and used all her resources to lighten the mood, getting him to tell her once again how he’d spent this day the previous year, shivering in Nudge McBudge’s mum’s garden shed not daring to move until midnight. She playfully shook him, kissed him and teased until she made him laugh. They laughed their way to the off-licence where they bought a bottle of her favourite cider. They drank it on a bench in the park, in the deepening dark, then with half the bottle downed began kicking their way through the fallen leaves, laughing all the more.
They left the park and walked into the far end of Bohemia Way, where the road was more rural and not as efficiently lit. Now the subject of their hilarity was the false promises of the portal to what was really number fourteen. Nathaniel mused on what he’d gained from his visits to 13A.
“What did you learn?” asked Christine.
“Nothing, nothing at all,” he said. “Except…”
“Except what?”
“You can’t escape your future.” He kissed her very softly and added, “And I don’t want to.” He twirled himself around, arms outstretched, peeling away from her and spinning into the centre of the road, just as a car, with unlit headlights came purring around the corner.
He recognised the car as the Austin that belonged to Nobby Smyles and, as the car accelerated towards him, he recognised the face of the driver.
It was a face focussed on his destiny.
It belonged to Mother Eartha.
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Former drama teacher, fringe theatre producer and director, and author of novels, short stories and some non-fiction work. I now hawk my output under the moniker of uneasybooks.
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