'Honey Bees (1974)' Excerpt #2

Ronnie Round was the kid who delivered the pop on Friday afternoons. Ronnie brought the bottles of multi-coloured Alpine fizzy pop to the front door and he did it with
panache and style. He had red cropped hair, blue eyes, and an ever present smile irrelevant of the weather and the glum faces that would greet him upon his knock. He was a master of sexual innuendo and there were few women who could resist the quick flirt and there were others; who went a lot further and took him behind the front door. And that that was what Maria did. It was lust and then love. Maria was ten years older than Ronnie but that did not matter. They were as complementary as nicotine and alcohol are to each other and within months, Ronnie had moved into 121B.
It was Sunday, mid-day at 121B and the curtains were still drawn. Deidre stood at the open door to the living room in her baby doll nightdress. The mess was terrible. Pure detritus. Empty brown bottles were strewn all over the floor, ashtrays full of lunar ash, plates patterned with footprints; all over the floor. Someone’s underwear that was caught cold and frigid, crawling down on the back of a dirty chair. Deidre had grown accustomed to this Sunday scene. She picked up a clutch of empty bottles and holding them to her developing breasts, wove a twisted course to the kitchen bin. However, after only one careful step she had to stop. She had trod on something cold and gelatinous. She bent down to look. She had seen one of these before, Ian Fraser had chased her with one on the end of a stick in the park. This one was pink and someone had tied a knot in it. The liquid that had gather in the end looked bad.

Ian Fraser sat on the wall outside of Ashley Burns’s home. Skinny, green eyed with a helmet of Afro hair, he bounced his power ball high into the blue sky and let it land and bounce away down the quiet main road. Then off he ran, with his loping gait zigzagging over the cracked pavement, all the time tracking the bouncing dot that accelerated further into the distance. ‘Fraser, Fraser’, a boy called. He turned to see Ashley Burns jumping up and down. Fraser turned and looked into the distance abandoning his power ball.
‘Ashley, she’s let ya out.’ Fraser laughed.
‘Shut it fuzzy, I do woh a’fucking like.’
‘Na ya white honky, yome mommy’s little helper.’ Fraser laughed again but even harder.
Ashley sniffed up a hay fevery dribble.
‘Lets goo then. Off up the railway’, directed Fraser.
So off they went in perpetual conflict, walking across each other’s paths, attempting to trip each other up as they went, gauging the length of the their journey by the number of lamp posts they passed on the way to the redundant rail track. Having reached their destination they perched on the wall that separated the road from the disused track. Quiet in thought for a minute, and with fizz-bombs effervescent in their mouths, they got ready to alight. They dropped from the wall like frogmen going overboard. And so they fell, down onto the loose dusty shale, their black trainers turning grey, as they tried to brake on their steep descent. They were down at the bottom of the track now, beneath a canopy of thick ivy that covered fields of high bamboo-like weeds that lined the embankment. The kids had done a great job. Tens of little workmen came down every summer. Hacking away at the stalks, they had created a labyrinth of green corridors and anterooms. They played for hours in an underworld of weeds, sheltered from the rain and shaded from the sun. It was only when the first frosts of autumn came and the ivy began to die, that the kids began to surface. The place that they had created would be bare by December and deep in hibernation, ready to rise again next summer.

'Honey Bees' (1974) Excerpt #1

‘Ashley Burns is gud at school. But they say he guz wild when he getz um. Ashley’s in my class at school. That’s class fower of Lyttleton Hall Junior school. Class fowers the one by the taechers car park. On the class wall, yoe can see all the paintings we did of ourselfs last wik. Yoe can see im for yoeself, Ashley Burns’s pretty face. Yoe cor miss his picture, his curly brown hair just like Marc Bolan, and those great big blue eyes. I love Ashley Burns. He plays football for the school .He gets top marks ana prize for best boy every year. His best friend is Ian Fraser, the half-caste kid. I doe like him, he’s alwis anging round Ash. Theers hundreds of Frasers and they always scrappin. Ashley never fights but we know he’s hard. Mrs Tandy our taecher likes Ashley. She’s alwis smiling at im and runnin her fingers throu his hair. Owr Shane took it awt of him but Ash sed, he hated Tandy and all the girls in our school. I doe believe wot owr Shane sez cus he’s a spaz. I noe Ashley likes me. He records the Top Twenty ona Sunday; jus like I do.’

‘It’s going be a hot one today,’ announced Jimmy on the radio.

In the Burns back garden, the family cat rolled on the crazy paving, grey dust streaked its black fur. The plastic cherub at the centre of the ornate fishpond shot high jets of clear water into the heat haze. Bees craned and crawled over the honeysuckle bushes as Mrs. Lena Burns, dressed in a cheese cloth shirt with a butterfly collar and a pair of French-cut trousers gently applied her watering can to the ailing flora. And then he came, dribbling the orange Wembley Trophy ball and shouting, ‘Cruyff out to Neeskens, off the shed an onta Johnny Rep unmarked on the edge of the box. Holland, one-nil. Sepp Maier well beaten.’
‘Look what yove done to mi marigolds. Jus look ya little shit.’ The little man in his orange shirt tilted his head back and looked up into the sun and smiled.
The back door opened.
‘Wot’s gooing on ere. Wot’s he dun this time.’
‘Goo back in John, I’ll deal wi this.’
John Burns, tall and thin in his white string vest, his armpit hair apparent, the Sunday Mercury rolled up in his fist, retreated deferentially into the peace of his living room.
‘Git eya now. How many bloody times av I told you not to play football ‘round the back.’
Ashley stooped down to get his ball from beneath the rose bushes. He examined the ball in his own time, squeezing his cherished possession, waiting for the familiar rush of air that told him that his afternoon would be over. But the ball was intact.
Lena stood in disbelief. Her son’s lack of manners was starting to worry her. She had repeated to Ashley over and over again that ‘good manners cost nothing.’ It was expected that children should give up their seats to adults when on buses. That doors should be held open for women and the elderly. That ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ were the keywords upon which all common decency was built. Lena had drummed her Black Country etiquette into her son, over and over again, to a point when it was as natural to him as eating and drinking.
In total frustration she screamed. ‘Yooooooo little…’She stopped short and Ashley seized his chance and ran past her at top speed, ducking low to avoid his mother’s flick at his head.
He shouted back at her, ‘Ya missed jelly belly.’
Lena sat her size eighteen rump on the backdoor step. She was angry and upset. Her son had hurt her with his stubbornness and his cheek. She felt she was losing him, and that the apron strings, which bound her so tightly to him, were loosening too soon. He was only eleven years old and he was changing by the minute. Lena knew this but could not face it.
The backdoor opened again and John stood over her. She sensed his cowardice in his reluctance to speak. She could hear him swill the cocktail of Tia Maria and coffee around his mouth.
‘I’m worried ‘bout im John. He’s so bloody difficult.’
‘Doe get upset luv. He’ll grow aht of it. He’s okay at the school ay he. He’s gud when is out wi us?’
Lena laughed. Clichés and inactivity. That’s what she thought. That was John.
‘Wot yo tryin to say John. He runs riot at um but that’s okay cus he’s good at school. Christ. Ya never ere. The pub, that’s all ya care about. aye it John.’
John closed the door quietly and disappeared.

Next door to Lena at 121B, lived the Reece family. Lena was quick to remind the neighbours that she lived at number 121A and that A was before B and that her house was the first and the real 121. The B abode was a second class house and the family that occupied it, were also of that ilk. To Lena the B house was for the Bastards, whilst her own house, the A house, was for the Angels.
The Reece family comprised of Maria and her common law husband; Ronnie, and their two children, Robert and Deidre. Ronnie was Maria’s second husband. Her first was Ray, a foundry worker. He was an iron-horse of a man; a mighty shire, who kept on going through the unregulated heat of the furnaces and the deafening strikes of the drop-hammer. Ray’s world was the inferno and the great burning fires. Sparks had rained on him and burnt his flesh. Pieces of cast had fell on his boots and cut his feet. Yet he stayed upright. And if the Unions called ‘out’, he went with them. If management wanted more, he would produce more.
Ray did what he thought was right for everyone. He worked and earned. Maria had the children, so she should rear them. Their relationship was solid and hard. There was no flex in it whatsoever. Their marriage crawled along. The last summer holiday they spent together in South Devon, did not provide Maria with any respite. The children had bickered, Ray drank, and she fretted to a point where she longed to be back home. However, home was soon to become a grave as on one airless evening in late June, Ray lifted a sack of bone meal to feed his roses and suffered a massive heart attack and died instantly.
For two years Maria took widowhood seriously. She was offish and distant. But there was no depth in her grief. She repeatedly questioned whether she had ever loved Ray. She struggled with widowhood. She had the children to care for but they were teenagers and breaking away from her maternity. Robert was sixteen and Deidre was fourteen. Gaps had begun to appear in her life and things were unfolding. She began to live a little more freely. She wore bright clothes and make-up. She looked at men and fantasised about chance meetings that would provide laughter and conversation. And ultimately, sex and love.