Six Against the Yard

I’d forgotten it; that’s what frightened me. I had meant to bring it and it had gone clean out of my mind. I wondered what else I’d forgotten.

He went off, padding down the stairs in his stockinged feet, and came back very pleased with himself. I wondered if he hadn’t taken an extra dram. He said something uncomplimentary about my little girl and I guessed she’d given him something to go on with.

I started talking about the Pollinis and, as I hoped, the memory of old Ma Pollini laughing at him made him furious. He told me the Pollinis were a lot of stiffs. Wops and stiffs, he called them. He said they hadn’t got a trick between them that any man couldn’t do if he had his wits about him, and told me what he could do as a child.

I was getting him where I wanted him. I went into the other room where the gas stove was and opened the window when I’d taken the cloth off the table. Then I went back to the bedroom and shook it out of there, so that the crumbs would miss Ma Pollini’s balcony.

My heart was beating noisily and I was so long about it that I thought he’d notice something. Finally I did what I meant to do and the cloth slipped out of my hand and landed on the edge of the parapet.

It was very neatly thought out, because, as I forgot to tell you, the window in the bedroom was stuck. It wouldn’t open more than six inches at the top. I had to stand up on the sill, push the cloth through and shake it with one hand.

I went back to the other room, where he was sitting up on the end of the sofa again.

‘What are you looking at me like that for, Polly?’ he said.

I pulled myself together. I couldn’t tell him that I saw him in bright colours, just like I’d seen Louie go out of the gate. I saw him in crude colours, like the printing in a twopenny comic. His shirt was bright blue and his head was smudged red.

‘I want a broom,’ I said. ‘I’ve dropped the tablecloth out of the window and it’s stuck on the parapet. Now if you were a Pollini …’

He didn’t hear me, or didn’t seem to, and I was afraid I’d been too quick. But he was interested, as he always was in silly little incidental things that happened. He went to the other window and looked out. He could see the cloth about fifteen feet along.

‘How are you going to get it?’ he said.

‘I’m going to get a broom and fish it up through the window in the other room,’ I said. ‘Or get a Pollini kid to come and walk along the parapet and bring it in for me.’

‘Let me try with a broom,’ he said.

I looked about for a broom, though it was the last thing I wanted.

‘You’ll break my window,’ I said.

He grinned at me. ‘I’ll buy you fifty windows when I come back from Manchester.’

I leant out of the window. The parapet sticks up about a foot over the glass and the windows are built out of the roof, dormer fashion.

‘I’ll get a broom,’ I said. My courage was going. I thought I’d have to try some other way. It wasn’t working out as I thought it was going to.

I suppose I must have been silent for nearly three minutes, for then he said quite suddenly:

‘I suppose one of your Pollini pals would just trot along there and pick it up?’

‘I believe even old Ma Pollini could,’ I said.

That did it. He swept me out of the way.

‘I’ll do it,’ he said. ‘I’ll get your damned tablecloth. I can do anything a Pollini can.’

He scrambled up on the sill and I saw that he was waiting for me to pull him back. I did. That was the extraordinary thing: I did.

‘Don’t you dare,’ I said. ‘You’ll break your neck. You haven’t got the courage.’

He thrust his little red face into mine. ‘I’ll show you,’ he said.

I watched him out upon the sill and saw him climb shakily on to the parapet, which was nearly a foot wide, holding his arms out like a tight-rope walker.

‘Don’t you dare,’ I said. ‘Don’t you dare.’ Now I’d got him there I panicked. I lost my head I screamed. I ran to the top of the stairs.

‘Bring a broom! ‘I shouted to nobody in particular and rushed back again.

There was no sign of him, only the big bare room with the stove and the window open at the bottom, and far away the tops of the trees.

I ran over to the window and looked out. He was coming towards me, holding the cloth in his arms. I screamed. I screamed and screamed.

‘Be careful!’ I said. ‘Be careful!’

He came to the window and stood there swaying, holding the cloth, his little bulk blotting out most of the light. I saw his short trousers and his shoeless feet in their grey army socks standing on the slippery stucco. He put down his hand to catch the top of the window and at that moment I leant out and caught him round the ankles.

I can hear my own voice now shouting hoarsely:

‘Be careful! Be careful!’

I heard him shout and I realised that I could make up my mind there and then.

I pushed.

He threw his weight against the top of the window and a shower of glass fell in over me. I was still pushing, pushing with my head, my arms round his ankles.

I felt him go. I heard his scream. Just for a moment I saw his body swing past me and then there was silence until far below in the little stone yard that we call a garden there was another sound, a sound I can’t get out of my mind.

I stepped back from the window and from that moment my mind was clear. There was a noise on the stairs and I ran towards it, screaming, but intentionally this time, knowing what I was doing.

It was Ma Pollini. I tried to tell her but she’d only talk in Italian and finally I pushed her out of the way and hurried on down the stairs.

Everybody in the house was running out into the street and I remember coming out under the porch and standing there in the bright sunlight.

I didn’t see him. There was a crowd round him and one of the Denver boys, who had the ground floor rooms, came and put his arm round me.

‘Don’t look, Ma,’ he said, ‘don’t look.’

I told the young policeman exactly what happened right up to the moment when I caught Frank by the feet. Then I said I was so frightened that I just hung there until he overbalanced and went out, jerking his ankles out of my arms.

He was very kind to me, I remember.

Then the other men came and I told them the same thing and they said there’d have to be an inquest. And all the time he was lying out there in the yard, with a sheet off the Denver boys’ bed over him.

They’d just finished with me when Louie came back. The other Denver boy had told her over the ’phone what had happened.

I shall never forget her as she sat in my kitchen with the police there and listened while I told my story yet another time. She didn’t break down and when I saw the calm in her face, the extraordinary repose and dignity, I felt it was worth it.