LITMIR.BIZ

       Chapter One

      Once it had been Henry and Stanley, Stanley and Henry. Stanley was the card, not Henry. Stanley was a caution, Henry wasn’t, Henry was cautious. Stanley was his da’s boy – all chat, and then some, such a tongue in his mouth. Henry’s tongue was fixed in the prison of his teeth whose incisor accretions, plaque, molar holes and food coves were his friendly familiars. You chum up with those ravines and contours if you’re tongue-tied. You go in for interior potholing. You have friends inside, three dozen of them, each with its tidemark of salts from forgotten meals, from grazes taken with Stanley, from wads shared on the way to school, from midnight feasts when they stayed over at each other’s.

      It was always Henry and Stanley. Stanley was such a one. It was always the two of them together, Stanley taking the lead, Henry gingering along behind whilst Stanley got into scrapes and scrumped and larked about and scaled the old Victoria plum tree which Mr Fowler called ‘Her Majesty’. Mr Fowler watched in trepidation as Henry clambered about the lower boughs (Stanley was already at the top, his head poking through the leaves). He feared that his precious son might tumble and crack his crown and so be taken from him and Mrs Fowler – though, heaven knows, it was Stanley’s da who had more cause to harbour such a fear for he and Mrs Croney had lost an infant girl to diphtheria the winter before the war ended. Stanley was the hasty replacement, born less than a year after Wendy, poor mite, had perished.

      Mr and Mrs Fowler were paranoiacally protective of Henry who reciprocated with a dutiful obedience which masked his timidity: he never ventured out of his depth, he never ran across the road, he was a responsible cyclist. Henry was irreplaceable.

      In their family they were, all three of them, fans of Charlie Drake, the squeaky knockabout comic. Knockabout! He surely put himself through it. His weekly television show was a self-inflicted assault course. They howled with laughter in the curtained room lit by cathode blue. Mr Fowler with his Saturday bottle of Bass, Mrs Fowler with her fifty-two-weeks-a-year Christmas knitting, Henry in his raglan and pressed flannels, the three of them wondering what the irrepressible little trouper would get up to next. He tumbled, our Charlie fell. He crashed through walls. He went A over T into porridge vats. He’d better watch out for himself – Mr Fowler said as much. ‘Ooh he’s going to come a cropper Mother!’

      Then he added, he always added, he put down his tankard and added gravely: ‘Don’t ever – don’t you ever – you listening Henry my boy – don’t you ever think of trying that. Don’t you ever.’

      Pearl one, stitch one, take one in. ‘And don’t,’ Mrs Fowler joined in, ‘ever do what Stanley was doing up Her Majesty either. I don’t know …’

      Henry Fowler didn’t require such warnings. He was a watcher. He anticipated the worst. He observed Stanley’s clinging limbs as he did Charlie Drake’s flying ones. He observed them with contained blood-lust – the ability to put the limbs together again, nicely, for the relatives, was, after all, the family trade. When Charlie Drake crashed about Henry rocked to and fro on the settee, with his tongue in his teeth, rooting out the rotten holes, laughing with his mouth shut. He got eager, he got agitated. He willed injury on Charlie who lived nearby in Lawrie Park Road – he dreamed of being the one who would make Charlie, our Charlie, look more like Charlie, in death, than he had ever looked in life, so like Charlie that his kith’n’kin would hardly notice he’d passed over. He wanted Charlie to hurt himself that badly so that he might practise the trade passed down to him by his father and his father’s father who had founded the business in 1901 when he was just a young undertaker and Her Majesty the Queen and Empress Victoria had only lately died. He dreamed too that Stanley might one day be thrown from weak, ungrippable branches by a high gust and so leave the tree for the ground. The sky would be dazzling lactic grey.

      Stanley was his friend, he was such a friend he was a brother – he implored his parents to give him a real brother but they disobliged. Stanley was so much a brother he loved him, he loved him so

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