Trick or Treat Read Online Free

broad beans, even peas perhaps for an early crop. He rubs his hands together pleasurably. That’s the beauty of working on the allotment – there’s always something to do, something to draw you through the seasons, through the years.
    Olive snorts and jerks. Her teeth have slipped. He helps her sit up. ‘All right, me duck?’ he asks.
    â€˜It’s these blessed caramels,’ she replies, sleepily.
    â€˜Let’s get you upstairs then.’
    Arthur helps her to her feet and then to the bottom of the stairs. ‘You get yourself up and ready and I’ll bring up your cocoa in a bit,’ Arthur says. He watches her climbing the stairs, slowly, pausing on each step for a moment with both feet, and panting with the effort. The seat of her skirt is stretched out of shape by her huge backside. A memory flickers just for a moment, the image of her young bottom bobbing up the stairs. Oh she used to run about starkers, and he loved to see her – big, soft breasts and all the rest of her muscular, tight and rippling, buttocks round as stones. Now she blots out the light with her hugeness.
    Half-way up she stops. ‘Arthur!’ she calls, and looks down at him. ‘Arthur, you never got me any tea tonight.’
    â€˜I did, Ollie. We had toasted cheese. We had a nice bit of toasted cheese and an Eccles cake.’
    â€˜Oh … oh did we?’ Olive continues her climb. Arthur watches her bulky back for a moment more, shaking his head, and then he goes out to give Kropotkin a last turn around the block. It will be half an hour before she’s ready for her cocoa.

Two
    Olive hollows the mattress in a great snoring scoop and Arthur has to strain not to be engulfed. A grey wash illuminates the room and all its contents. He lies for a moment looking at the scraps of their lives pinned upon the walls and arranged on the mantelpiece of the old cast-iron fireplace, and on the window-sill. There are pamphlets, and newspaper cuttings, reports of an anti-Fascist rally that they had helped to organise. That was what brought them together, the common enemy. They had marched before the danger was widely realised, they had marched full of determination, and in the curling clippings they march still. In one of the photographs, the young Olive, faded now but still vital, waves her arm angrily. Her hair is flying out and her mouth is open in a shout. She had such red lips then, such black black hair. Beside her there is her mother’s splashy painting of Mount Etna erupting. And there are fiddly things – presents, china bits of this and that, artificial flowers, things she never really cared about, things he’s been the one to dust over the years.
    Mount Etna glows now as the light catches the glass and Arthur clambers up out of Olive’s warmth and out of bed. He sleeps in old yellowish long johns and a long-sleeved vest and, shivering, he piles his other clothes on top. He wears his favourite trousers since he’s off to the allotment – dark brown corduroy, furrowed like the earth. He puts his hand into the pocket and feels the godstone there. It is a white glassy pebble, smooth and faintly warm to the touch. The stone has been his for well-nigh fifty years. He remembers the first time he held it in his palm, warm and precious as an egg, comforting, fitting the hollow of his hand as if it had been moulded there. ‘That’s a precious stone,’ his mate, Bill, had said. ‘Not money-precious, nothing so common as that.’ Bill is dead now, long, long dead. But the stone is warm in Arthur’s hand. ‘That must be passed on,’ Bill had said, ‘and I think you’re the one to have it. To keep it safe, until you’re done with it.’ They had been standing together on the dense fertile earth with the first tips of green all around them, and the sky a flapping sheet, and the wind had blown tears into Bill’s eyes before he turned away.