Voice of the Fire by Alan Moore (essential reading txt) 📕

If I should think, I’ll have her bring me up a quarter pound of Menthol Eucalyptus sweets to see if they can ease my throat a bit. All of this giving evidence is making it play up. If I’m not careful I shall have no voice at all before they’re done with me, and then where should I be? There’s a great many people think me quite the best amateur baritone to sing down at the Friern Barnet Social Club in Finchley, where my ‘Trumpeter What Are You Sounding Now’ always goes down a treat. I’ve got a very decent set of pipes on me and shouldn’t want a thing like this to muck them up. I know that men in general often take against a chap who has the lighter type of voice, but ladies by and large seem to prefer it. Wouldn’t do to talk myself hoarse in the dock and spoil all that now, would it?

He was thrashing like a mackerel, banging on the windshield of my Morris. Not at all a pleasant thing to look at I can tell you, and the noise. You talk about a scalded cat. You’d think he’d be out cold and not know anything about it, but it was the fire. It woke him up. I’ll be quite honest, I can hear it now. It wasn’t even any words you’d take for English it was such an awful racket. Once he kicked the side door open and I thought, ‘Well, that’s it, Alf. You’ve been and gone and done it now.’ Only by then of course the smoke and flames were down him and he’d had his lot. He fell down forward over the front seat with one leg out the car, and that was it. Of course, Joe Soap here stood downwind and didn’t have the sense to move until my eyes were streaming. What a sight we must have been, the pair of us.

I saw the picture of my Morris Minor that they printed in the Daily Sketch and could have wept. Baby saloon it was, and not that old. I had the thing insured for one hundred and fifty pounds but don’t expect to see a big return from it, things being what they are. Judging from what it looked like in the photograph there wasn’t much left of the blessed thing. The mud-guards were all thrown about like ribs and you could see where all the rubber had poured off the wheels to leave the rims bare. If I ever catch them chaps that stole it, but then no, hang on, that wasn’t true, was it? I made that up. It’s such a job sometimes, just keeping track of everything.

That was the worst thing about keeping up two wives at once, apart from all the cost involved. It was a strain remembering my story sometimes, I can tell you. All the fiddling little details. Which one I’d told what. With Lillian it wasn’t quite so bad because she’s rather vague by nature and not so inclined to notice if I should slip up, but Ivy now, well. That’s a different matter. It’s not six months since I married her and she’s already quick to pounce upon the smallest thing.

I married Lil November 1914, so that’s more than sixteen year back now. In all that time, if she’s had a suspicious thought she’s kept it to herself. Even when evidence was put in front of her, such as when I brought her mine and little Helen’s baby to look after — not the one that died, the second one, our little Arthur — even then she took it quieter than a mouse and said that she’d forgive me when I hadn’t even asked her to. Young Arthur’s nearly six now and I’ll say this for our Lillian, she’s brought him up as if he were her own. She’s never shown him any side, not to my knowledge. Like I say, head over heels for me, she is. No questions asked. Hard to believe it’s sixteen years. I missed our anniversary this last November what with all the set-to that we had. I’ll have one of the coppers pop and get her something, if I happen to remember. Better late than never, that’s what I say.

As for Ivy, I don’t know if it will last for sixteen months, let alone sixteen years. It seemed a good idea when we were wed in June at Gellygaer, though when I say a good idea I mean that she was four months up the spout by then and showing large already, as the skinny ones so often do. God, though, the tits they get on them. It’s almost worth it, having one more mouth to feed so long as you get lovely tits like that to stuff in yours. There now, you see? Another laugh. It’s like I say with laughter, it’s the best thing that there is to break the ice. Everyone feels that much more comfortable.

But to be serious, with Ivy something told me I was making a mistake from the word go. Not that there’s anything about her I don’t like, but just that you could tell somehow there’d be a lot of fuss involved. You take the last time that I saw her, when I went across to Wales that night directly after my ‘funny five minutes’ out at Hardingstone. Now, as you might imagine, I was in a dreadful tizzy, having lost the car. I’d come out of Hardingstone Lane and stood faffing about there by the end and peering back along the path to watch the two men who had seen me leave the field. I couldn’t spot them in the dark, although my Morris was still blazing, out across the hedgerows.

You know how it is at times like that. You feel that everything you do must look suspicious, although half the time you’ll find nobody notices.