On a summer weekend, resplendent in burgundy braces, lemon shirt, and sun reflecting brogues, Alb polished to the metal his Vauxhall Victor FB Deluxe Estate Wagon, wood panelling and sumptuous bosom leather seats as standard.
A car that rarely moved from a perfectly ordered garage, where tools were efficiently racked and carefully catalogued, except, when roads were absent of salt and potholes and crowds gathered to watch the ocean-going liner launch the short but steep distance to the road where it remained ‘on show,’ until dusk.
Only those who hadn’t bagged school or been threatened with having ‘their dirty mouth washed out with a bar of soap,’ were permitted to sit, albeit briefly, in the driver’s seat as delight and envy were dispensed on a short voyage around the block.
Alb’s monopoly on motor vehicle ownership was temporarily broken by the scrap metal man who blew grand national winnings on an unglamorous mud brown Bedford van, with frog eyed headlamps and a horn that woke the dead. A purchase regretted months later, when the frog fell off a makeshift brick jack, crushing the metal man’s heart, and leaving nine children without a father, a wife without a husband, and their bodies free of bruises.
As far as anyone knows anything, Uncle Alb had neither niece nor nephew.
Infrequent visitors to his house were welcomed by a garden full of roses with the look and scent of old European varieties and a gleaming red front door unlike any other in the street.
Doris, an egg on legs uncultivated ignorant woman whose favourite pastime was vilifying foreigners, said that Alb’s long-gone wife, “A bit of a tart with red hair and redder lips,” insisted the door match her dancing shoes.
Few believed Doris’s tittle-tattle because she suffered from a disinclination to wash, the stench of urine hanging on her like perfume, and often stopped strangers in the street to ask where she was going.
Was Mrs Alb imagined?
There was no trace of her amongst several black and white photographs uncharacteristically unordered with minimal categorisation or explanation in a coffee-stained album kept under his bed.
According to Phyllis who cleaned twice a week, Mrs. had run off with the milkman.
George the coalman, drunk in the Lion and Swan, swore that Alb on an early return home from a night shift in the railway works had “strangled the life out of her, before dismembering, then disposing of her body by burning,” after finding her as George diplomatically put it “engaged in intercourse,” with the Butcher’s apprentice.
A few pints later George told anyone who could be bothered to listen, that Alb’s award-winning roses were, “proof,” of the unnatural act, and its resultant natural and extremely effective fertiliser, “better than horse shit.”
Gossipy theories though ghoulishly attractive, were intolerably problematic when subjected to rudimentary analysis.
Any suggestion that Uncle Alb had been ‘trained to kill’ with his bare hands during the war, seemed without foundation. The milkman had disappeared overnight, but that wasn’t uncommon if rent or gambling debts were owed.
Yes, Bigsy the Butcher, his blood-spattered apron bursting at the seams, blushed and changed the subject at the mention of his absent apprentice, but anything beyond that was surely idle gossip, mere speculations.
Anyhow, Alb was exempt from working vulgar night shifts of drudge and labour.
Mid-morning in D shop, as dusty overalled men played catch with balls of blue asbestos, Alb the boss with a steady hand, held a Bone China cup manufactured by Spode of Stoke on Trent, as Anna his Polish secretary poured.
Alb was kind, he shared fruit and veg with undeserving neighbours, made ice lollies for kids and repaired their go-karts. Paintings hung from his emulsioned walls, he played the piano, read books and listened to foreign radio programmes.
If he knew that those dusty men would spread death like electricity amongst their loved ones, he surely would have warned them.
If Mrs Alb had existed, the house had forgotten her.
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