Free The Following by Roger McDonald

disintegrated, too soft to mash. It was shameful to spoon them out, blue and broken with their black eyes floating in water. Getting on with the serving, men all waiting for their share, Marcus found his stew skinned black at the bottom of the cast-iron pot. It was because of Pearl pinking his thoughts that he’d let the flames sizzle. If he’d never opened her letter, he reasoned, he still would have burned the stew. The flaming postmark would have been enough.
    A wave of heat came from the oven, where a sugar-crusted, spiced dish of apples was ready, glimpsed through the half-open stove door. Somebody had come in and made ready while Marcus was in the washhouse, scrubbing away at himself. Marcus recognised the style of the arrangement, the way cloves studded the Grannies, as if the space between each was measured with a micrometer. Marcus knew from this vision of perfection who his driver was to be for the week: Ron Kristiansen.
    Marcus chose a seat at a bench table where the shunters sat, spooning up their grub wordlessly and passing around the black billy. He was unlikely to be bothered by conversation there, knowing that the drivers would leave him alone and the shunters would show him their wordless respect. In their chapters of tradition their fathers had spoken of Marcus’s old man, Patrick Friendly. Marcus could well be a shunter himself before too long, passing down the ranks of demotion – from fireman to engine cleaner and then out the loco shed door into the shunting yard. If he survived he would finally be left – a derelict of his former self – scooping butts from station urinals and drying them out on a steam radiator, skulking off in the dark to sleep under a culvert, satisfied just to hear the engines’ bigness as they passed over him.
    If Pearl missed him at the Milburns’ siding, she had written, she would follow him up to Forbes, getting a ride on Les Milburn’s trike on the Saturday when Les went to Forbes for the Rugby Union. There she would get the chance to look Aileen Harris over while Aileen, for her part, was ‘not the sort to admit knowing her’, nor would Aileen ‘ever ask about her, or pry, no matter what anyone said concerning a fettler’s daughter getting ahead of her’.
    When it came to high character, Aileen won hands down, Marcus supposed. When it came to spirit, Pearl had the licence to rule. But do your maths, friends, Marcus argued to himself. He had known Pearl before he knew Aileen. As far as the calendar of the years went, not in the precedence of the older woman’s hopes. Marcus had seen the ring for Aileen, which he could not afford, and prepared the speech for Canon Harris based on the possibility of restoration to his old level of pay. Aileen had coached him that far. That Marcus was a Mick was a fact the parson would take his time to think about. It was a delay tactic built into the situation. But the ring looked dusty in the jeweller’s window. It had intention, not passion, in its glow.
    The day Pearl gambolled up to him after the match against Tottenham had been the day he was overdue to make a surer move towards Aileen. The day was etched in resentful memory in Aileen’s mind, with craving in Marcus’s. Within an hour of Pearl’s murmuring hello into his muddy ear they’d become lovers – Marcus slain by his old-time, wayside attraction to the obvious notice of his friends and Aileen’s friends, and to Aileen’s bitterness. It would be, from now on, political.
    The railway special for the big matches brought supporters to football grounds radiating out more than a hundred miles from Bathurst. Aileen loved those rides in bunting-decorated carriages. After the match and an early tea in a railway hotel, she and her chums would ride home together, she and her crowd, getting back to their beds last thing at night or at rooster-crow, singing and knitting socks and scarves for soldiers and falling asleep in each other’s innocent laps. Marcus wanted what they