The Various by Steve Augarde

by herself, and she had no way of lifting the machine. It was as heavy as a car. And nobody could lift . . . she suddenly remembered the bottle jack.
    Midge knew what it was, and what it was for. She had once earned two pounds just for watching someone use one. The bottle jack, the bottle jack. She stood and looked at it, trying to remember what she had seen.
    Her mum had left for rehearsals one morning, and then had run back into the flat two minutes later. ‘Damn!’ she said, slamming the front door. ‘Got a flat tyre.’
    ‘Can’t you fix it?’ said Midge.
    ‘Got no thingamajig.’ said her mum. ‘No jack. The idiot who sold me the car forgot to give it to me.’
    ‘Phone the AA then.’
    ‘No time for that. They could take ages – it’s hardly an emergency. I’m supposed to be at rehearsal in twenty minutes. Rats! I’m going to have to ask Colin Bond. Aaaaaaghhh!’ she screamed.
    Colin Bond lived two floors up, and her mum could never get away from him. She reckoned he fancied her. He was a pest. But he could fix things.
    ‘Listen,’ she said, ‘if I ask Colin to come and change the wheel, then you’ve
got
to come with me. I’ll give you a pound,
two
pounds, to stay with me until it’s done.’
    ‘OK,’ said Midge, who would have watched anyway. And so Colin had come down, delighted to be needed, and he had brought his bottle jack with him. ‘Bottle jack,’ he had said to Midge, though she hadn’t asked. It was a silvery-blue thing. Mum had hovered around the car, subjected to Colin’s dull running commentary, and continually glancing at her watch. Midge had sat on the garden wall watching – and earning herself two pounds for being Mum’s chaperone.
    The car was a Citroen, small but quite high up off the ground, and Colin had to find a brick to put under the jack so that it would reach. Midge had hung around, dutifully, but vaguely interested nevertheless.
    ‘Screw in this little knob here, see, shove this handle in here, see, and pump it up and down. And . . .
up
she rises – easy peasy.’ He had changed the wheel and then said, ‘Course, when you’re ready, and you want ’er to come back down again, you just
un
screw yer little knob, see, and
down
she blows.’ The whole thing sounded quite nautical.
    ‘Thanks, Colin,’ her mum had said. ‘You’re brilliant.’ She glanced at Midge and raised her eyebrows slightly. ‘My hero.’
    So Midge looked at the bottle jack, much bigger than the one Colin had used, and knew what it was for. But where was the handle? She found it, eventually, under the front axle of the tractor – which was probably where the jack would have been last used, the front tyre being flat. She worked out how the handle fitted into the jack, and tested it out. This time she would
think
before acting. No more stupid mistakes. She pumped the handle up and down, noting with satisfaction how the centre of the jack rose up. The freshly exposed metal tube, that slowly appeared as she worked the handle, was shiny and clean – in contrast to the blackened greasy outer casing of the object. It
was
a bit like a bottle, she supposed. She saw that by twisting the little tap-shaped thing on the side of the casing, the central tube could be slowly pushed back down again. And she blessed Colin Bond for that piece of information. She doubted that she would have figured it out for herself. Satisfied, then, that she knew how the thing worked, she dragged the heavy object over to the raking machine, and paused to consider where best to put it.
    It wasn’t going to be easy – but after walking around the machine a couple of times, she thought that she could see which part of the frame the jack should be placed under in order to rise the spiky wheels. She had to make a platform out of concrete blocks for the jack to stand on, and it was a struggle to then lift the heavy object and manoeuvre it into place – but she got it there somehow in the end, and found that it now just