Limbo 56 - Mike Morris (if you give a mouse a cookie read aloud TXT) 📗

Mike Morris
82 Main St
Peapack
NJ 07931


L I M B O 5 6 * *
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by MICHAEL MORRIS


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Approx. 88,786 words First American
Fiction Serial Rights offered

Limbo56 - Table of Contents

Table of Contents
Chapter 1 – A Distant Rumor 3
Chapter 2 – Limbo 7
Chapter 3 – Settling the Score 11
Chapter 4 – The Real World 17
Chapter 5 – Settling down 19
Chapter 6 – Tunnel Rats 23
Chapter 7 - Shadrach in the Wilderness 36
Chapter 8 – The Asylum at Dury 42
Chapter 9 – A Better Class of Limbo 46
Chapter 10 – Perils of Pauline 51
Chapter 11 – Bobby Boy 55
Chapter 12 – The Pilot 59
Chapter 13 – A Chicken in every Pot 70
Chapter 14 – Soap Opera Stories 72
Chapter 15 – False Start 76
Chapter 16 – NTBW 78
Chapter 17 – A Pact with the Devil 80
Chapter 18 – The Recruiter 85
Chapter 19 – A Blast from the Past 87
Chapter 20 – Closing Time in the Garden of Eden 92
Chapter 21 – The Solid Gold Ashtray 96
Chapter 22 – Sin City 102
Chapter 23 - Interview with a Terrorist 105
Chapter 24 – Aftermath 111
Chapter 25 – The Election 113
Chapter 26 – Campaigning 116
Chapter 27 – Dirty Politics 121
Chapter 28 – The Money Man 132
Chapter 29 – Talent Search 139
Chapter 30 - The Halfway Housekeeper 141
Chapter 31 – Days of Beer and Roses 144


 
Chapter 1 – A Distant Rumor
Like the town he lived in, Arthur Mossop was battered and grimy. A scrawny foundry worker with slightly stooped shoulders, he looked weak, until you noticed the leathery hands and wooden-hard arms, and strangers, shaking hands before the start of a ‘friendly’ darts match nursed aching knuckles and watched glumly as Arthur racked up the score. Like his workmates, Arthur drank vast quantities of beer, which kept most of the sand and bone-dust out of his lungs, and he played the occasional game of Sunday soccer, which kept those abused organs pumping. At the age of twenty-nine years, he considered himself in his prime of life, and he looked forward, if not to fame and fortune, at least to many years of hard living and hard drinking. His grandfather, who had lived an astonishing ninety and two years, used to say to anyone who would listen that rumours of his death had been greatly exaggerated, and to Arthur, his own death was a distant rumour in the year of 1878.

He treasured Sundays, when he only had to show up in the gloom of the foundry for four hours of unenergetic cleaning and maintenance. He awoke on a particular Sunday morning, groaned, scratched his sandpaper chin, and decided not to shave. Content, he dozed off for ten minutes, before elbowing his little wife to get up and fix breakfast. A few minutes later, he was stumbling downstairs in his dirty overalls, having splashed cold water in his face. Sopping up greasy eggs and bacon with a chunk of bread, he grunted to his wife that, after work, he was going to stop over at Joe’s place. “Might stay the night,” he muttered unconvincingly. “Some of the lads are getting together to play cards after work.” Recently, he had been working diligently, and had amassed some spare cash, which he augmented by betting on the horses. He nursed his guilty secret, smiling to himself as he shoveled the final morsels of food into his mouth. Then, slightly ashamed, he withdrew a couple of notes from his tattered wallet and laid them on the table. “Here’s a bit extra, keep these for the house,” he said, giving the little woman a perfunctory kiss. “I wouldn’t want to gamble all of our money away.”

Arthur did not consider himself a bad person. He was no worse than the mates who worked beside him in the alternately searing and freezing gloom of the foundry. He lived on a diet of bone dust, beer, and cheese and onion sandwiches, and saw his wife only often enough to grab a cooked Sunday dinner and get her pregnant every year or so. He shouted, but never hit her when they argued, which grew less and less as she grew more mousy and submissive. He always gave her half his money, and he occasionally patted his children absent-mindedly on the head. Most working days he walked resolutely through the sooty streets of his old Black Country town, a town smelling of wet concrete, and soot washed out of the air by the rain. Work was easier in the morning when the pubs were closed. After lunch was different – he didn’t always return to his place at the conveyor belt, so despite the fact that he was a good worker, he had not yet been promoted to foreman.

This Sunday morning went quickly, and he emerged at noon, blinking in the watery sunlight. He had no intention of seeing Joe until the evening when the busy pub would be full of good cheer – and Gladys would be serving frothy pints. He needed some time to plan the evening assignation with the well-endowed barmaid and work out an alibi with Joe. He reckoned he could spare a few days away before seriously damaging his work or compromising his domestic prospects.

His old fishing rod tied to his cycle, he rolled down the street humming, sliding over to the canal bank and coming to rest on the pebbly towpath. He let his bike fall on the grassy bank and unscrewed the rusty front basket, a perfect seat for his bony frame. Settling down in the summer sunshine, he sighed and casually cast his line at the oily water. It sank into the depths, and he settled back, half asleep, to think about Gladys. Nothing much lived in the oxygen-starved waters of the canal. Coal barges ploughed through the waters every day and the bargemen used the canal as a free dumping ground and occasional toilet. The odd fish that did survive was inedible, only to be caught for a bit of gentle sport and tossed back again to battle the many dangers of the industrial waterway.

Arthur remembered playing here when he was a small boy. It was a favorite place for all the small boys, growing up to become gaunt foundry workers like their fathers and uncles and big brothers before them. It was possible in those days to see the canal and the few scrubby fields that still struggled against the urban wilderness as a refuge from the harsh realities of iron and soot and back-breaking hard work. He had dreamt then of breaking the bonds that held him and all of his friends in an iron grip. He dreamt of becoming an engineer, or an architect, building clean little houses, separated by small green lawns, untouched by the oily black smoke from the factories and foundries around. The dream had died, along with his father who had coughed and spat up his last mouthful of black blood and turned over and died.

Arthur sighed and contemplated his ragged blue overalls, daydreaming about Gladys. She was attracted to men with a bit of spare cash, quite ready to borrow a married man for a few days, her philosophy being that a wife who could not keep her man occupied was delinquent in her job, and deserved all that was coming. In her own way, she was kind, joshing the foundry workers, always cheerful and supportive, full of energy. Arthur, behind closed lids, explored the contours of her body, smiling slightly at the possibilities likely to be presented in the next few days. A barge slid by without disturbing his gently drifting line. It ploughed majestically into a small hill of submerged cycle frames that an over-zealous cleaner had dumped from the factory that stood next door to the foundry. Arthur regarded the rusting frames lazily, idly wondering what the bargemen might do if the waterway became impassable one day.

The long afternoon wore on, shadows creeping darkly across the walls of the industrial wasteland that, a hundred years earlier, had crept across the fresh green fields, squeezing the life out of everything in its steady line of advance. Arthur yawned, opened his eyes and waved to a dozing fellow angler a hundred yards down the towpath. He closed his eyes again, but the contentment was ebbing away. Something seen out of the corner of his eye was irritating him like a grain of sand. He blinked and looked across the water. The other angler had disappeared, but as Arthur scanned the canal, he noticed on the high narrow bridge that spanned from one bank to the other, a man leaning on the iron rail, gazing down at him.

The image that had disturbed Arthur was not that of a fellow worker in cloth cap and overalls, or even one of the Iron Bosses in fancy clothes and a top hat. This man was an anomaly, a stranger, perched on the bridge as if he owned it and the countryside around. He was flashy without being elegant, tough looking but unhardened by hard work. His loud clothes bespoke of a foreigner, which, in Arthur’s lexicon was anyone from out of town. He noticed Arthur staring up and casually, with a certain amount of insolence, tipped his hat. Arthur blinked again and the man was gone. He closed his eyes again and tried to think of Gladys, but the spell was broken. He stood up, cracking his knuckles, grunting at the first twinges of arthritis that affected everyone of his age in his small circle of friends.

He arrived a little earlier than expected at Joe’s small row house, perched at the end of a long line of identical grimy boxes, in time to bump into Joe’s mother. Joe was unmarried, and one reason was the looming presence of Mrs. Baker, a hulking widow who intimidated younger females within five miles of the house. Lately, though, she had acquired what Joe called a ‘roving eye’ and had taken to staying away from the untidy house, sometimes for days. She told Joe when she acquired her roving eye that she would be looking for a man, or men. Indeed, more than once, her eye had roved over Arthur’s spare frame, causing him some anxiety. “See you again, Arthur,” she squawked coyly. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t.”

“Old bag,” Joe said glumly, watching her ample buttocks disappear around the corner. “Got a boyfriend in the next street that’s even older than she is.” Joe was a morose little man who only cheered up in Arthur’s company after several pints of beer.

“Better for us,” Arthur told him with more cheer than he really felt. Something about the afternoon had sobered him; maybe, he thought, the odd-looking man on the bridge.

“Yeah,” Joe said, brightening. He disappeared into the tiny kitchen, reappearing with a pail of beer. “Still cool”, he said. “They ‘ad a good bit of beer down at the new Off-license, and I thought I’d save us some.”

“I’ve got to save some money for Gladys,” Arthur told him. “I think maybe I can squeeze three, four days before going back to work.”

“You and Gladys,” Joe said half-enviously. “What about your wife?”

Arthur frowned. His wife was someone he had been studiously trying not to think about. He took a big swallow of beer and licked his lips. “A man’s got to ‘ave some pleasure, sometime,” he said.

A couple of coughing