Gall

Abstract

Gall Ben Fergusson (bio) The Lawrences were so scared of their father that none of them screamed when he parked their Volvo on the track between Kidlington and Yarnton. He drove like an idiot—everyone knew that. He was so cruel when any of the children dared cry out at a bend taken too fast that they sat stoic and silent when the barriers came down on the level crossing and only began to panic when they saw the train coming. That’s how their mother, Gerry, told it. Their father was called Tracey. That had always been the joke about the Lawrences before he parked the kids in front of the train: that the dad had a girl’s name, and the mother had a boy’s name. But the accident killed the joke. We did make new jokes. Nasty jokes it makes me sad to recall. Jokes that we used to whisper to each other through the rough velour gaps between the seats of the school bus. Jokes that were barely jokes. Jokes that put us and our friends and our enemies into those car seats. It was the same for my friends at school, I’m sure, though we never talked about it: the bell at the level crossing would ring, the barriers would begin to come down, I would listen to the grasshoppers in the cow parsley that foamed at the edge of the railway verge and watch my mother’s hands on the wheel, wondering whether the car was going to lurch forward. When someone new joined the school, awkward in their pristine uniform with their odd rucksack, bought to follow the rules of some other school in some other town, we would all try and chivvy along the conversation to the Lawrences. The story had such power that everyone wanted to be the first to gift it to this alien. It was the ur-myth of our town. Someone else would tell the story of Kelly’s mum having a stroke at twenty-nine—she’d gone back on the pill—or Miss Glazer shutting her finger in the door and her red-painted fingernail sticking in the hinge for a week before the caretaker found it. But the new kid would just nod at those stories, feign interest with appropriately wide eyes and a whispered “Fuck,” all the time imagining themselves strapped into the back seat of that car, pawing at the child-locked doors. [End Page 51] Every time my mother saw one of the Lawrence children, she would say, “It’s a miracle that any of them survived.” It was a miracle. Tracey had parked the car at a slight angle, and the train had spun it back onto the road, smashing his leg and his pelvis, but not killing him, leaving the children trapped in bent metal, sprayed with shimmering glass, but unhurt. My mother would stare at the Lawrence children over the Tesco car-park, Gerry ushering them to a new car. Mum would worry her lower lip with the tip of her car key and say, “How could she have bought another Volvo?” “Maybe she just likes driving them.” “It’s like a coffin on wheels.” In school, we also stared at the Lawrence children from a distance. We had not really thought about them as a threesome before the accident. They blended into their respective classes. But they kept together after their father was jailed, huddled at the edge of the playground, at the edge of the canteen. Mary Lawrence, the eldest, began to carry an Uno deck with her and they played in silence, never having to notice the children watching them from the dinner queue, their gray plastic lunch trays clutched to their chests. I didn’t share a word with any of the Lawrences for years after the accident. Not until the school was rehearsing a production of The Tempest, and I climbed the lighting rig in the sports hall to find David Lawrence trying to peel a scarlet gel off the front of an ancient lantern. “You doing lighting this year?” I said. He shrugged, only looking up briefly to identify me. “Mr...