The True Story of Spit MacPhee by James Aldridge Page A

her, because there was nothing else like it in the town of St Helen. The inside walls of the boiler were painted yellow, and though rust from the rivets had streaked the sides, the whole interior had its own painted designs – not the wavy line of the outside walls but a black fish, a lily-like flower with a green stem, something that looked like a firework bursting, and a red tomato. She had never seen anything like it. Spit’s narrow, wooden bunk with an old quilt on it was at one end under a cut-out window, and at the other end she could see a table painted bright red, and on it a bundle of old books, mussel shells, lines, and the bits and pieces of clocks and watches. She could not take it all in at a glance, but afterwards she remembered a flower pot with a fern in it, an old acetylene bike lamp, and a painted kerosene tin which had been cut into curls and twists around the top. It was full of old wire and pieces of wood and horseshoes and dried crayfish claws.
    ‘It’s fantastic,’ Sadie said. ‘It’s great, Spit. It’s absolutely great.’
    ‘Don’t say anything about it,’ he said. ‘That’s all.’
    ‘No, I won’t. I swear.’
    It seemed quite simple thereafter for Sadie to sit in the extension, which was where Spit had his own bench and where she could watch him shape the little pine messenger boats, make sinkers for his fishing lines out of lead slugs, and (another of his secrets) fit spokes into a rusty bicycle wheel which he would eventually add to the rest of a half-built old bike which still needed a front wheel, handlebars, two pedals and a seat.
    ‘But where did you get it from?’ she asked him.
    ‘I got this and that from the back of Sykes’ bike shop, and some at the blacksmith’s, and here and there and everywhere.’
    Spit almost forgot her sometimes as she sat on a small three-legged stool; and when his grandfather shouted at him, ‘Ye maun put the potatoes on, or ye won’t be eating supper,’ she moved with him into the small kitchen at the end of old Fyfe’s workroom where she helped him peel the potatoes. Spit was a quick impatient peeler of potatoes, and he filled a cooking pot from a bucket of river water on the floor. He put it on the wood stove, which he poked fiercely, and then shouted at his grandfather, ‘You didn’t put any wood on the fire.’
    ‘Well put it on now.’
    ‘That’s what I am doing.’
    Sadie listened to them and whispered to Spit, ‘Why are you always so angry with each other?’
    Spit didn’t lower his voice but said indignantly, ‘We’re not angry with each other.’
    ‘But that’s how it sounds, Spit. Everybody thinks …’
    ‘They don’t know anything about it,’ Spit said, and he was putting two mutton chops in a wire folder to grill them when he said, ‘Do you want a chop?’
    ‘No, thanks. I’ll have to go home in a minute for tea.’
    She left reluctantly, but thereafter she would come and go to the little house without any difficulty. Old Fyfe had looked quizzically at her once and said with a sort of grim laugh, ‘How are ye dressed, Jean Armour, aye sae clean and neat.’
    Sadie, in her own advice to herself, had always been frightened of old Fyfe, but in the little house with Spit she lost all her fear of him, and though she didn’t understand what he said to her most of the time, she always smiled at him and one day said to him, ‘Can I watch you mend the clocks?’
    The old man’s face, grey as it was and grizzled as it was, and so often pained, ground itself into a smile. He stared at her for a moment. ‘Stand there,’ he said.
    ‘Give her the glass,’ Spit said to his grandfather.
    ‘You be quiet, ye cairn …’
    ‘I was only trying to help,’ Spit shouted back.
    Sadie listened and watched, unafraid, and the old man pointed to the clock he was working on and said, ‘Ye don’t need the glass. It’s the clock of Mrs Andrews, and if ye look at the coggies there ye’ll see all her powder, pink and dirty, and