A PLAN WITH HOLES  By Theresa Ryder

 

The consensus was to get a shorter pole with a blunt end. The five of us stepped back from the hole and began a toe-poking survey of the canal bank, although we knew every inch of its junkyard jetsam. After a few minutes of watching us, Tom was activated.  

‘Come on Ems, we’ll look in the shed,’ he held out his hand but she grabbed hold of the back of his jacket.

‘Go horsey,’ Emmy giggled, tugging the denim waistband.

‘And you can stay home. It’s too late and you’re too little.’ 

‘No Tom! I’m coming back. You can’t make me.’

‘Ma will go mad.’

‘She’ll leave me on my own. I’ll tell on you. I’ll tell everybody,’ Emmy flung the blackmail debris of their particular childhood, her brown eyes glistening with urgency. 

Tom huffed some reply and set off along the canal bank, side ducking the hawthorn. Emmy dragged at his jacket, taking long strides to land in his tracks, silver lights flashing on her shoes. They disappeared through the hole in the chain-link that led to the back yards, their destination visible in the terrace of satellite-scabbed roofs.  

‘Try again?’ Adrian lifted the hook-ended bargepole. Holding it for jousting, he stared me down for approval. 

‘No, we’ll hurt it. Let’s wait.’  

‘Only until Tom gets back,’ Adrian, always agitated, threw down the pole and plucked the scrub grass to stoke up the bonfire. 

A smoke trail rose from the nest. Sharon leaned low to blow the flames into life, her high ponytail jerking with her efforts. This long summer we had become good at making fire. I used the bargepole to drag burnt cider cans from the ashes. Sharon jumped back from the flaking cans with a girl-squeal, brushing embers off her jeans. 

‘Shut up idiot, you’re scaring it,’ Adrian peered into the hole, hands on knees for balance, his long face curtained by a fall of lank hair. 

‘Your face will scare it,’ Sharon scraped a clean seat onto a log and sat to chew nails that held the residue of pale green polish. 

I sat beside her and offered gum, sucking my teeth against the scraping of the slim silver strips as she plucked one out. But it was worth it to see her fold it into her mouth with a curl of pink tongue. As was her habit when settled, she pulled wisps of hair to wind around her fingers in golden bands. 

We sat while the sky split into a flush of red gashed by waning blue. The hues of crying eyes. The lowering sun gave outline to dead branches and shrouded the bruised landscape of gorse and scorched grass. The sun spill reached our seat in a lance of light that exposed a fading stain on her cheek. Stray flecks of eye shadow shimmered like fish scales over the healing skin. 

‘See up there?’ I pointed to higher ground where, beyond our view, big houses banked a spilling river. There the water gushed over the weir and fled, sparkling in snatched light to seek its harbour. It was a place of ducks and herons and shoals of darting life. ‘I go there sometimes. To the river.’

‘So?’ 

‘Saw a pair of otters once, just messing around in the water.’ I had watched them slip from the fern bank to dive and curl with the current, their silken bodies wrapped as one.    

‘They’re just like rats. Plenty of them down here.’ 

But there was no sign of wildlife in this stagnant space where the canal walls curved in a down-mouth maw, its teeth of rotting pilings braced by rusted iron steps. Yet the canal had snared its catch. Half sunk beer cans dredged in on the bloated ballast of a plastic bag, the handles trapping twigs, cigarette stems, a dead pigeon; its broken feathers camouflaged in a prism spill of diesel where it waited out its decay.   

Sharon looked across the flatland where the old distillery squatted over its former empire. A place once alive with barrowmen and barges. Battered tin advertising plaques clung to the blood-fade brick. The dark depths of broken windows cast back her secret stare.

‘Will it die?’ Her question was delivered with practiced indifference. 

 ‘Dunno. Tom will figure it out.’ 

‘We should wrap it up. If we get it out.’

‘Tom will bring a blanket. He’ll know,’ I shifted and my leg brushed hers. I felt her twitch against the touch. 

‘I don’t like this. I’m gonna get ma,’ Sharon stood, rubbing her jeans where mine had met.

‘Don’t be thick,’ Adrian paused in his search for an implement. ‘You’ll give up our camp.’

 ‘You’re thick if you think we can just…,’ she punched her fist toward the hole. 

‘Stop, both of you. We can’t bring anyone here,’ I stood between their sibling squabble with authority. ‘Especially not your ma.’ All of us on the street had been raised under the looming shadow of Angie Kelly’s temper. Her wrath would be ours to share.

‘Yea, listen to your dorky boyfriend,’ Adrian stomped the cindered cans into the ground. ‘Ma finds these you’ll be dead. At least I’m old enough.’

‘Shut up. And he’s not my…,’ Sharon brushed a furious tear and swung away to stand at the canal edge.

I only realised my fists had clenched when I felt them loosen. From his tested arsenal of insults, I could take dorky. Adrian was a head taller but I had more weight, we’d trialled the balance before and found it equal. Aware I was standing down, Adrian threw a last shot at his sister.

‘Moron.’

I joined her keeping a short distance. She kept her head dipped watching the water. Beneath the oily surface dark birds flew in deep green against a backdrop of sunken clouds. Above the water their high cries were joined by a siren’s wail. She looked up and I saw her strength restored in her default expression of defiance. She flicked me a smile that didn’t go beyond her lips. But I took that as a cue to stand closer. 

‘Ignore him.’

‘I do,’ Sharon peered along the canal wall. ‘Ma once put kittens in a binbag. Stuck holes in it and threw them in. Up by the bridge.’

I followed her gaze, leaning to inhale her scent of soap and mint. Struggling kittens commanded my thoughts. ‘That’s horrible.’

‘Not really. Too many kittens, no one to care about them,’ Sharon glanced back at the hole, sucking the gum, chewing her cheek.

‘But drowning?’

‘It’s quick. You can’t save everything.’ 

I felt for her hand. Her fingers clutched around mine, halting my breath for a moment until she let go as Tom and Emmy came into view, this time side by side, both carrying shopping bags. Tom held two with rigid arms, a broom handle tucked between elbow and hip. Emmy’s bag bobbed with her skip. Her free hand worked an ice pop. 

‘What you got?’ Sharon tossed her ponytail with a swift chin tilt.

‘Come see,’ Tom dropped the bags and knelt. Sharon hunkered beside him, her knee tipping his. Neither flinched.

‘Didn’t your ma stop you?’ 

‘Nah, it’s after six, she wouldn’t notice if I took the telly.’ 

‘Ma was crying,’ Emmy declared with a light sway. 

I turned away as she bit into ice. 

‘Hush, Ems,’ said Tom. ‘It wasn’t anything.’

‘She was though. You didn’t see.’

‘What was up with her, Ems?’ said Sharon. ‘Was she angry?’

‘People cry cos they’re sad, silly,’ Emmy gave her attention back to the ice pop.

‘Mams are always crying about something,’ I said, catching Tom’s glare at Emmy. ‘Show us what you got.’

Tom unfolded a rubber mat then pulled out a length of washing line with a magician’s flourish. ‘I made holes for the rope. To lower it down.’   

‘A blanket, great idea,’ Sharon shook out a dog-haired square of tartan. 

I tried to share a knowing smile, but she wouldn’t look up. Adrian was already threading the rope through the mat, humming to himself as he worked. Tom knee-shuffled to the drain and set himself over it on all fours.

‘There’s not much room.’

‘How do we get it onto this?’ Adrian joined him holding the mat.

I left them to the practicalities, ready to pitch in when they worked it out. Tom’s other bag held six cans of cider and a pack of cigarettes. I lit one and offered it to Sharon. She waved it away. 

‘Gimme the lighter,’ she pulled another cigarette and put the filter to her lips. It sat barely balanced at that mid-point where her top lip was tugged by a tiny scar. Eyes deep-lidded, she lit and sucked in smoke. 

‘I remember my Da snorting it out his nose. Like a cartoon bull,’ I tilted my head and failed to do the same, my eyes and nose stinging.

Sharon responded by letting hers out in a sharp puff from the corner of her lip. I saw Angie in that action, their likeness enhanced by the strands of hair drawn over wounded skin. Inflictions that lock us to our kin as securely as DNA. I fought the urge to reach and touch.  

On the log we continued our smoke with silent ceremony, cigarette tips bold against the fading light. The siren drew closer, its route announced by the changing tempo as it navigated from the dual carriageway to the estates. Emmy finished the pop with lizard flicks of raspberry tongue. She pursed her ice-rashed lips imitating our attempts to blow smoke rings. The siren whooped to a stop. Deep blue pulsed over the terrace roofs and captured us in rebound from the canal walls. 

‘Ma WAS crying,’ Emmy slumped between Sharon’s knees, tugging at the arms of her jacket, too short over thin wrists. Sharon tossed the still-burning butt and pulled Emmy’s hair to order, her able fingers plaiting the strands. 

‘You can be a hairdresser when you’re grown-up, Sha,’ said Emmy 

Sharon leaned forward to give Emmy an upside-down smile, their faces washed in pulses of lucid blue. 

‘I am grown-up, dummy.’ 

‘You’re not. You’re still at school.’

‘Maybe. There you go, you’re only gorgeous,’ Sharon patted Emmy’s head and reached for another cigarette. 

‘Look Emmy. North star,’ I pointed up. The lighter flared beside me. ‘Stars are signs of first life in the universe. They tell us when it was born.’

‘It’s just the Space Station,’ Sharon tapped ash. ‘Doesn’t look like much.’

I watched the distant static glow strengthen in the dusk and welcomed the embrace of night air, and the hot waft of her mint-ash breath. From the corner of my eye I saw them haul the plastic mat from the drain hole, caught the flap of tartan. Tom and Adrian cheered, once. Emmy ran to Tom’s side.

‘Go back, Em,’ Tom commanded with raised palm.  

Voices too far behind the chain-link for clarity, rose and swooped like a tuning orchestra. A woman wailed and another distant siren called back. Tom and Adrian argued in stage whispers, ignoring Emmy’s mewling mediation. Over it all I heard the faint cry of raw life. 

‘We should go,’ I kept watch on the star as she squeezed my arm.

‘Where?’

‘Come to the river.’

‘What then?’

‘We can just…drift,’ my heart stammered as my tongue had through childhood. 

‘Like the otters?’

‘Yeah. You’ll come?’

She didn’t speak but her ponytail bobbed in agreement as she turned away to watch Tom. Cradling the tartan bundle, he stumbled back from Adrian’s hissing assault. 

I exhaled, letting go one more word. ‘Now?’

‘Wait.’ She inhaled, giving life to the cigarette and picked up Tom’s discarded bag. She stabbed at it with the glowing end, bursting acrid holes through the thin plastic. The edges curled from the heat then sealed, stronger. I sensed then the surge of change that would end our summer and wrest the last strains of childhood.

​

(From The Waxed Lemon Issue 6)