Birthday. Alan Sillitoe

reflecting as he headlighted towards the exit going south that he had come a long way from Basford Crossing, which couldn’t be anything but good.

       THREE

      Passing Basford Crossing was as if you were going to be hanged, because your whole life went by during the time it took to bump over the cobbles and between the railway gates. Like bumps in your life they passed up the spine and into the brain, and Arthur, mulling on how much had changed in his time, couldn’t decide whether it was due to circumstance, or because he was the way he was. He’d often talked about it with Avril, with Derek and Brian and Eileen but, ever suspicious, knew there had to be more to it than a shuffling of cards by blind fate.

      As regards housing, the giant ball and chain mechanisms of the council had gone through one area after another, smashing up dwellings that had been lived in for generations, when bathrooms could have been installed above the scullery and made them comfortable for another fifty years. People had been miserable in them only for lack of money when they were out of work, but bulldozing whole districts and throwing up high-rise hencoops was ordained by those who made enough money from the business never to have to live in them.

      Jenny and her family had a pre-war council house at Broxtowe, and Arthur remembered going there with Brian because her father had given him the unexpected bonus of sixpence, the equivalent of a pound coin in those days. Jenny’s two sisters had the same long dark hair, and even the mother looked like them, though she must have been older. No wonder the father was self-satisfied and full of energy, being surrounded by women.

      Arthur even at thirteen could tell Brian was getting plenty of crumpet, and Jenny’s parents didn’t put a spoke in the wheel as long as she wasn’t knocked up. If he had knocked her up he would have married her, and that would have been that, which was fair enough, if you were daft enough to do it.

      Cousin Bert got a girl in the family way. He’d had dozens of girls so should have known better, but the girl’s fat brute of a father collared him on his way out of work and threatened to squash him like an orange if he didn’t do the right thing. Arthur, who knew he would get out of a similar situation if he didn’t love the woman, told Bert to do a runner, but Bert over his pint in the Peach Tree said that if it wasn’t Maureen it would be somebody else, a surrender to circumstance so bizarre that Arthur could only suggest that they drink up and go for another in the Royal Children. Thus Bert got married, and lived much like everyone else, happily and unhappily ever after.

      When Jenny and Brian stopped going out together, somebody else put a bun in her oven, and her father wasn’t big enough, or fat enough, or maybe even fit enough, or not caring enough, or perhaps she kept it from him until it was too late (he wouldn’t put it past her) but that was no excuse for not chasing the bastard up and kicking the guts out of him. More likely Jenny hadn’t let on as to who the man was, luckily for him, because her father was, after all, a dab hand with pick and shovel at the coal seam.

      Brian would never have got her preggers, and that was a fact, because he cared about such things, and hadn’t fancied living out his time in a Nottingham council house. He got away because he had the brains to do it, and the guts to live for years in a London bedsitter before earning any money. I sometimes wonder though whether he wouldn’t have been happier staying where he had been brought up.

      Basford Crossing as he had known it was a far-off country, and he sometimes found it hard to decide whether he’d actually lived there, or had dreamed it in his working time at the machine, as if lost in the early mist of a summer’s day that lasted till night time, clearing only at moments to let him see the old buildings and crossing gates.

      Reality behind the eyes showed scenery almost too good to be true, yet the ruins of the place were now like those of Pompeii in Italy he had seen on a coach tour with Avril, wrecked, flyblown, empty, resentful at being abandoned, a sudden pull out from the prime of life, as if the RAF had done a thorough job back in the war.

      He hadn’t seen the area for years and then, passing through one day on his way to somewhere else, he noted that death had already taken place, as if a gigantic fist had picked up the locality and given it a good pasting, people fleeing in all directions as they must have done from Pompeii when fire and ash came down, while those who survived the upshake were rattled to the core, had only enough spirit to pick up their tranklements and form their columns of refugees.

      Nowadays there was nobody, no footsteps, no laughter, no joshing voices, no shrieking kids to wave the next train through. A few people walking by in a hurry looked as shifty and guilty as if they’d been responsible for the area getting ruined. Cars going somewhere else were driven by those who in the old days would have walked or taken a tram, and he supposed they hated to be reminded of the place because they’d had no car or television or fridge or washing machine or a mobile phone, maybe only a wireless or radiogram. Far from being happy with all they’d got now, they were dead from the neck up.

      He recalled the girls he had taken to the fields around Top Valley Farm, an area now covered with houses and old folks’ bungalows, in one of which his mother had lived. The girls were fourteen or fifteen (maybe younger: they didn’t tell him and he didn’t ask) but when snuggled up to in a hedge bottom they melted softly into the warmth of each other’s bodies, hardly knowing it would end in going all the way, unable to tell at that age the difference between spunk and cuckoo spit as they strolled lovingly hand in hand back to Basford Crossing. He knew where in the bedroom Brian hid french letters, and helped himself, until Brian twigged some were missing and told him to get his own, since he was already bringing in money from the bike factory.

      He supposed all the girls he had shagged – good looking, passionate, and knowing what they wanted – had got married and had kids, some of them divorced and living as single mothers in flats provided by the council – and good luck to them. Nearly everybody he knew had been divorced, as had he, after Doreen put the kibosh on their ten-year marriage.

      He got home from the factory, knackered after an eight-hour stint, the sweat barely dried, and she came out with it before he was halfway through the doorway: ‘I’m leaving you. I’ve had enough. I can’t stand any more. The life we lead is no good. I’m too fed up for it to go on.’

      Of what she was fed up he didn’t know, because at times he felt a lot more fed up than she could ever know about. He was fed up now, and had been for a long time, though why she suddenly wanted her life to change he couldn’t think, blinded by her unexpected decision. She hadn’t caught him with another woman, because he worked too hard to find time chasing them, much as he might like to.

      But now that she’d spoken he knew that he wanted to split up as well, and though he couldn’t come out with what enough was, it certainly seemed to be so when they went on to argue about why they hadn’t said enough was enough years ago, and wondered why they’d ever got married.

      Smoking a cigarette, he stood by the door, watching her face thinned by the firmness of her stand, though the colour was coming back because she had found it easier to tell him than expected, and to get his agreement. It felt as if the boat was sinking under him, water already soaking his boots, on her saying she needed three days to move out so as to have time to make arrangements and clear things up.

      She’d been thinking about it, and that was a fact, while his fantasies at the machine hadn’t included this one. Maybe she had a boyfriend, a bit of you know what going on with a neighbour or the window-cleaner, but if so he had no interest in finding out. He wasn’t one for trying to save a marriage, deciding to get shut of her and the house as soon as possible in case she changed her mind. ‘You can have all the time you like to pack up,’ he said, unwilling to put up with three days of hatred, ‘because I’ll be going instead. Keep everything. I don’t want any of it.’

      At the beginning of their marriage they had shared a house with her deaf mother, and her boyfriend from India whom they always called Chumley, a middle-aged man who spoke so little it was impossible to tell what was in his mind, which was all right as far as Arthur was concerned because Mrs Greatton loved him, and had no time to