‘Two ten-shilling notes, that’s one pound,’ said Mr Daunders thoughtfully, smoothing the notes on his desk. ‘Well, I still think it’s a lot of money for a boy like you to be carrying about. Especially when you’re not very sure how you come to have so much.’
He stared hard at the ragged dirty urchin and shook his head in defeat. A brief smile jerked at Noddy’s frog-like mouth. He was thinking of the daftness of all this fuss about a couple of half-notes when he had hundreds of pounds in fivers and singles stowed away safely to buy a piano when his mother got a new house in the scheme. It would be a rare surprise for her. But he couldn’t buy a piano so long as they were living in a single end. He kept his hoard in a waterproof bag inside the cistern in the stairhead lavatory, and his mother thought he was suffering from diarrhoea, he went to the closet so often, but he was only making sure his piano-money was still safe. He loved counting it.
Mr Daunders recognized that the twist in Noddy’s enormous mouth was a smile, and he frowned severely.
‘There’s nothing funny about it, you know,’ he said. ‘You were crying earlier on. I don’t see why you should be smiling now. I’m going to keep this money and I’m going to send for your mother, and I’ll get to the bottom of this yet.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
Mr Daunders called in Noddy’s mother right away. She was a cleaner in the school, so he had no trouble getting in touch with her. He waited on after four o’clock till she came in for her evening’s chores. But it didn’t get him anywhere. She stood in his little room, a timid foot and no more inside the door, with her working-overall on and scarf round her head in royal fashion, a big-bosomed, enormous-hipped, thick-ankled woman. That this hulk of womanhood should be the old block of a skelf like Noddy made Mr Daunders think of the mountain that gave birth to a mouse, and as he remembered the phrase he sighed at the destiny that had condemned him to be a headmaster in a small primary school in one of Glasgow’s wild-life reservations, a pocket of vandalism, a pool of iniquity. He had a painful stab of longing to have done with backward and delinquent children and be a retired headmaster living his own life, following his own interests. He had an elegant eighteenth century edition of Horace with the mad Christopher Smart’s prose translation facing the Latin. He always took it with him when he went on holiday, but somehow he never found time to open it. Now he couldn’t even remember where it was that Horace had spoken of the mountain in labour giving birth to a mouse. ‘I must read Horace again when I retire,’ he thought, even as he was talking severely to Mrs Mann.
Mrs Mann had her own distracting thoughts. According to the book of words only widows were supposed to be employed as cleaners in Corporation schools, and she wasn’t technically a widow though she passed for one in so far as she didn’t have the support of a husband. A husband in jail for robbery with violence wasn’t a resident head of the house. She felt entitled to her job, but she was afraid Mr Daunders was going to tell her she was sacked. When she understood he was talking about her son she felt quite happy and smiled encouragingly to the headmaster. Mr Daunders frowned at her. He knew quite well she was no widow, he knew where her husband was. He had hoped his knowledge might be used as a lever to extract information from her. But she had no information for him. Yet she was the only person who gained from the interview.
She challenged Noddy that night.
‘I was hearing you was found wi’ more money than you’re supposed to have,’ she said, slapping his face to begin the discussion on the proper terms. ‘Two ten-shilling notes, eh? Now where the hell did you get two ten- shilling notes?’
Noddy said he had found them in a midgie in Ossian Street. There was a bank at the close. The bank must have thrown them out by mistake. They were in an envelope.
‘Ha-ha, a likely story!’ said Mrs Mann her fingers splayed on her hips. She didn’t think of asking for the envelope as Mr Daunders would certainly have done. ‘And what did you never think of telling me you found them for if that was how you got them?’
‘Ah never goat a chance,’ Noddy mumbled, crouched in a corner of the kitchen near the sink, his right hand over his ear. Mrs Mann darted swiftly and smacked his left ear and Noddy changed guard.
‘Ye hid nae intentions o’ tellin’ me, ye little bugger!’ she screamed, and then smacked his right ear. Noddy put both hands up.
‘Ah hud,’ he said. ‘Ah’ve never saw you since Ah fun them. Ah only fun them this moarning.’
‘And whit wur ye gaun tae dae wi’ them?’ said Mrs Mann, pursuing her beloved seventh son as he edged round the kitchen past the dresser and the coal-bunker, along the valance of the recess-bed, up to the fireplace, and behind the ruptured armchair that flanked it.
‘Ah wis gaun tae gie ye hauf,’ said Noddy, willing to give up one of the bits of paper for the sake of peace.
‘Oh, ye wis, wis ye?’ said Mrs Mann sceptically. ‘Well, come on then! Let’s see ye hauf it!’
‘Ah canny, he’s goat them both,’ Noddy wept in vexation.
‘Oh, the bastard! So he hus!’ cried Mrs Mann, and shook her fists at the whitewashed ceiling above the pulley where her shift and a pair of bloomers were drying, her head thrown back and her bleary eyes staring wildly.
And just as Mr Daunders had waited for her at four o’clock she waited for him at nine o’clock the next morning after she had finished her morning chores. She was humble, garrulous, apologetic, over-explanatory and nervous, but quite firm. Noddy had taken the money from her purse. It was a terrible thing to have a son that would steal from his own mother who had always done the best she could for him, but he was only a boy and he wasn’t very bright, he just liked to play with bits of coloured paper, so if she could have her money back, she paused and leered in expectant servility.
Mr Daunders knew when he was beaten. He gave her the two ten-shilling notes, and since she was an honest woman and a good mother she didn’t keep them both. She gave one to Noddy.
‘There y’are, ma son,’ she said tenderly, and threw him across the kitchen in the excess of her affection. ‘There’s your share like you promised me. And the next time you find anything jist you let me know and don’t go causing a lot of bother keeping things tae yersel. Ye’ve goat tae let yer mammy know. Yer mammy’s yer best friend.’
Noddy took the note silently. He didn’t know what he wanted to do with it, but it was good to have it in his pocket again.
‘Ah ye’re a guid wee boy,’ his mother grinned, and she rumpled his long uncombed hair. Noddy jerked his head away and scowled. Any show of affection distressed him.
He was even more upset to find he was in the bad books of the Brotherhood. The news of his interrogation had spread with the speed of foot and mouth disease, and he was brought on his knees before Percy at the next Friday Night Service. Percy was frightened. First the stranger and now Noddy’s two ten-shilling notes. He saw them as two straws that suggested there was a wind rising somewhere, but he didn’t know where to look for it.
‘I gave you a pound note,’ he said severely to Noddy. ‘How did you come to be caught with a couple of ten-bob notes? Tell me that.’
‘I changed the note you gave me,’ Noddy declared, primed in advance by Savage. He tried to rub one of his knees as he was forced to remain on them by Specky and Skinny while the Regent Supreme examined him. It was a most uncomfortable position. He wasn’t used to it. Looking at the squalid urchin Percy had an idea. He must get them all to kneel during the Friday Night Service.
‘What did you go and get it changed for?’ he demanded with