The Italians at Cleat's Corner Store by Jo Riccioni Page A

at her hip.
    â€˜Don’t you dare turn your back on me when I’m talking of Christ.’
    â€˜You weren’t talking of Christ. You were talking about sin and my mother, remember?’ Connie breathed in the thick scent of the evening, gathering her patience. ‘I’m going for a bike ride. I think Christ will be OK with it.’
    â€˜You be back before dark,’ Aunty Bea said. She caught hold of the saddle as Connie pushed past, and lowered her voice to a hiss: ‘Or don’t you bother coming back at all.’
    It was an empty threat, Connie knew, but one that had never been spoken before, and the challenge it held made her breathless before she had even started to cycle down the lane. It was always talk of her mother, or the avoidance of it, that reduced Aunty Bea to her meanest self. Connie had grown up straining her ear to the rumours, of which there was never any lack in Leyton. There were whispers of dance halls in the West End and clubs in Soho, of GIs and disappointments. And one night, when she was supposed to be asleep, she had heard Aunty Bea telling Uncle Jack of the bag of bones she had visited in a bombed-out bedsit, where ten or so people lived sharing that evil muck . By then she knew that Aunty Bea wasn’t talking about animal manure. Connie didn’t need every detail, but as she got older, not being offered any at all became even more crushing. It was as if Aunty Bea believed the flawed blueprint of her sister had to be firmly kept under lock and key, for fear Connie would trace in it her own intrinsic nature. And Connie needed to be protected from herself at all costs.
    She gripped at the handlebars, her mind so full that the bike seemed to carry her of its own accord, following its usual route. And so she found herself freewheeling down Bythorn Rise in the syrupy light, her arms clutched behind her head, the wet flick of insects on her skin. Her heart raced with the speed and the dare of not touching the handlebars; with the danger of falling, of hitting a stone in the road, of a puncture — anything to feel alive, to make something happen that might nudge at the endless coil of her days and nights, wound tight as a cocked spring.
    At Repton’s, the Burrell engine was still droning. Mr Rose and his threshing team were finishing the western acres, and as she swung round the bend at the bottom of the rise, she spotted the line of steam rising behind the ridge. She left her bike at the gate, fetched her book from the basket, and climbed the bridle path towards the Big House. As she walked, she picked out the familiar beat of the threshing drum, a sound that had always stirred mixed emotions in her: the excitement of the harvest and the sadness of summer’s end.
    She missed being part of the bringing in. Even as a six-year-old she’d helped with the harvest at Repton’s; most village children did. She remembered whole gangs of them chasing the great beast of the Burrell as it thundered down the laneways, or darting behind the tractor and binder with sticks to beat the rats and rabbits as they broke cover of the mown wheat. By the time the war was underway, she was old enough to help the land girls with the stooking or with sewing grain sacks. Sometimes, in the early evenings, they’d stop to trace the planes as they rose sleek and pink-tinged from Molesworth, counting them aloud above the drone of the thresher. They would all be quiet after that, especially the women, their faces closed with thought. On those evenings, when everyone had gone home and she was waiting for Aunty Bea to emerge from the Big House, Mr Rose would let her climb onto the drum with him to sweep it clean of the loose grain, the chaff and the haulms. She’d listen to the last hum, hum, hum of the beaters, and the staccato of the final grains jitterbugging crazily in the open drum. ‘Listen, girl … you hear?’ Mr Rose would say.