The Pre-War House and Other Stories

Trees in the Tarmac

Pretty much everything around here is concrete — the secondary school, the pebble-dashed scout hut, the empty working men’s club. Nicola, walking home with her blazer off, steps over the gaps between the paving slabs, over the weeds which sprout there.

She is wishing away the remaining weeks of term, looking forward to the summer holidays. Her granddad says that these will be the happiest days of her life, but she doubts he knows what he is talking about. Nicola, who is almost sixteen, won’t be going back to school in the autumn.

Closer to home, the pavements are tarmacked. Every few metres, there is a tree. The roots have broken through the tarmac, and grass grows in the cracks. The trees must have been planted when the street was new but Nicola can’t help thinking of them as something belonging to the land on which the estate was built. The trees and the grass seem to her like survivors from the buried fields pushing through.

She is not old enough to remember the estate not being here. She can barely imagine the absence of these solid brick houses and the line of shops. The units at either end — not long ago a grocer’s and a newsagent’s which became an off-licence and then a video shop — are standing empty except for the unopened post, mostly junk mail, collecting behind their front doors. In between, her granddad’s sweet shop remains. Her granddad says that he is not going anywhere. Besides, this is where they live.

The paint on the window frames of her granddad’s shop is a sickly red like the liquorice laces and the cherry lips in the jars on the shelves. When the paint peels, her granddad strips it and then repaints it the same colour.

Each afternoon, when Nicola gets in from school, she helps out in the shop. She has only once failed to go straight home after school and she won’t be doing that again.

She goes in through the front. As she opens the door, the bell rings and her granddad looks up from his puzzle book. The locals come in to see her granddad as much as they do to buy sweets. They lean on the counter and chat. The shop is never busy anyway. The primary school used to be nearby and the shop got packed at home time — lots of little hands touching whatever wasn’t in a jar, fingering the two pence sweets displayed in a tray on the counter. But that school has been closed down now and the children go by bus to a bigger one near the new supermarket.

Nicola’s granddad quizzes her about her day and tells her about his before saying, ‘Right then, it’s all yours.’ He leaves her to mind the shop while he goes for a break, which means a cup of tea and a smoke and maybe a nap in his room.

She does think of it as his room now, as opposed to her grandparents’ room, although it is just as it used to be when her grandmother was alive. None of her grandmother’s things have been removed. The mystery she had been reading is still by the bed. Her slippers are still on the floor. Her clothes are still in her drawers and on her side of the wardrobe, spilling over to her granddad’s side, her dresses pressing up against his good, dark suit.

Nicola’s granddad does not allow Nicola to touch her grandmother’s possessions. She does though, while he is sleeping. There are things of her grandmother’s which Nicola would like to have. Amongst the clothes in the wardrobe, on a hanger in the dark, there is a dress from the fifties with a busy ivy pattern. It makes Nicola think of the inside of her granddad’s shed, the ivy growing through the walls and through the roof, through the planks. Nicola covets this dress, and the shoes which go with it. And she would like to be given what her grandmother called her crystal ball but which is really just hollow glass. Her grandmother used her crystal ball to read Nicola’s palm, telling her how many children she would have — the first one, she said, a year after marrying.

The late afternoon heat presses up against the window of the sweet shop, warming the glass and showing up all the little finger marks on the panes. Her granddad told her that glass is fluid, that over time a window will thicken at the base, imperceptibly swelling.

Nicola sits down on her granddad’s stool, slipping off her shoes, letting them fall to the floor, and undoing the button on the waist of her skirt. She feels tired. She would like to put her head down on the sugar-dusted counter and fall asleep. But the door is opening, the bell ringing, a customer entering. Some people are disappointed if they come in and see Nicola and not her granddad behind the counter, but one or two of them, she thinks, come in to see her. This man is one of her regulars.

He looks for a long time at the wall of jars in the window before choosing something off the top shelf. Today, he asks for liquorice. Nicola discreetly refastens her skirt before going to the front of the shop and climbing onto a step stool, reaching for the jar. She knows he is watching her. She can feel his eyes on her, perhaps on the two inches of knee revealed between the top of her knee-high socks and the hem of her skirt, perhaps on the curve of her stomach exposed when her shirt, which she has not tucked into her waistband, rides up as she lifts her arms. He lets her get the jar in both hands before he says, ‘Not those, the other sort.’ She puts the jar of liquorice laces back on the shelf, fetches down the one he wants and takes it to the counter. She weighs out his liquorice, pouring a quarter pound of it into the steel tray. It is the colour of black pudding.

She likes the boiled sweets herself. They are like fragments of stained glass through which the sunlight filters, making blue and yellow and raspberry-red puddles on the floor of the shop.

When the bell rings again, she glances over the shoulder of the liquorice man and sees Jason coming in. He comes to the counter and leans against it as if the liquorice man were not there. He does not even pretend to be there for the sweets. ‘Come for a walk,’ he says.

‘I can’t,’ says Nicola. ‘I’m minding the shop.’

She empties the steel tray into a paper bag which she gives to the man. The bag bulges in his hands, the contents soft and dark and sweet.

Nicola’s grandmother knew all about liquorice. She kept liquorice root in a wooden box in her bedroom and made liquorice tea and pennyroyal tea for the girls who went upstairs to see her. Nicola remembers wandering into her grandparents’ bedroom when one of these girls was visiting. The girl was sitting on the end of the bed, on the handmade bedspread, waiting while Nicola’s grandmother brewed the tea. Her grandmother put the liquorice root back in the box and, seeing Nicola as she closed the lid, said, ‘This is not for you.’ She steered Nicola out of the bedroom, shutting the door behind her.

A girl in Nicola’s year at school was pregnant at fourteen. At the time, Nicola had never even had a boyfriend, and instead followed her teen magazines’ instructions for divining the name of her future husband, combing her hair in front of a candlelit mirror so that she would see his face over her shoulder; eating salt at bedtime so that she would dream of him bringing her water. These things never worked.

‘Come on,’ says Jason. ‘Shut the shop early.’ He looks at the liquorice man, who ought to be leaving now but who is still there. Nicola, looking at Jason, would very much like to lock the door and let Jason take her to the fields, the same field in which she was lying with him on that one occasion when she was late home from school. While her granddad was waiting in the shop, doing his puzzles and expecting a break, Nicola was underneath Jason in the last remaining bit of countryside at the edge of the estate, a burst of green between this spreading estate and the next, flat on her back with her buttons undone and Jason’s head blocking her view of the vast blue sky.

‘My granddad might need me,’ she says, although she hears the floorboards creak overhead as her granddad goes from the bathroom into his bedroom.

‘He won’t,’ says Jason.

Nicola is waiting for the liquorice man to go. He is near the door now but still lingering, and in the end Nicola says it anyway, very quietly to Jason: ‘I think I’m pregnant.’

Jason seems not to have heard. He is looking at the two pence sweets in the tray on the counter. He chooses one and eats it standing there, and then he goes, saying that he has things to do. He leaves the wrapper and a two pence piece behind.

Her granddad will have closed his bedroom curtains. He will have taken off his shoes, and his trousers will be folded on a chair. He will be sleeping heavily in his underwear with Nicola’s grandmother’s handmade quilt pulled up to his chest. He won’t wake up until suppertime.

Soon, Nicola will lock the empty shop and go upstairs. She will go into her granddad’s room and check that he is sleeping soundly before looking through her grandmother’s things, perhaps trying on the slender fifties dress, leaving the zip undone. She will run her hands over the cool glass ball. She will look inside the wooden box containing the liquorice root and the pennyroyal.

In the warm, sugary air, Nicola feels nauseous. She wonders whether she really did say it. Maybe she thought about saying it but nothing came out. Maybe she said it too quietly for Jason to hear.

The jar of liquorice is still out on the counter. She takes a piece for herself and puts it in her mouth. She is not really allowed to do that, to help herself. But she does. She must be careful not to take too much. She will take some to bed with her. She is not allowed to do that either. It stains her tongue and her saliva. When she wakes in the morning, she will first put her hands on her queasy stomach and then she will lift her head and look at her bedding, looking for dark stains.