JOURNEY OUT

View from the “27”

IF THIS WERE an old-fashioned story—the kind you, Morgan, so anathematize—this could be the beginning. The foregoing would be excoriated by the inventor’s pen and omitted finally, or be revamped as flashback, that worn device of the suspense mongers. But this is not one of those old-fashioned stories, is it? Though it is, for me, a kind of beginning. Journeys always are, aren’t they?

The bridge out of town, across the river, allowing passage from County Durham to Yorkshire, humps beneath us, a pleasant undulation, providing glimpse over its grey stone parapet of ling brown Tees, in swirls, urgent, full-bedded, passing beneath.

The Tees is diarrhoeic today: a consequence of spring rains elutriating Pennine bogs and peat. I digress, Morgan, only to entertain your anti-dithyrambic turn of mind.

Why is it I wish Morgan were here now?

To return to the matter in hand. The tantalizing vision not just of a willing but of a lusting Helen. And of a harassed mother and a stricken-prone father. The pursuit of the one inflames in me guilty feelings at my desertion of the others. But without feeling there is no guilt. So my guilty feelings provide proof of my filial affections for those from whom I seek escape.

Ha.

Maybe that is what this journey is really all about? Ineluctable evolution. Proving myself to myself, if to no one else. The strivings of my independent spirit.

Getouthereladandshowthemyoucanstandonyourowntwofeet.

Ffossip.

‘She should have had more sense,’ said the ageing driver-conductor to a rotund passenger of the female gender standing by the open bay of the driver’s cab in flagrant disregard of the bus company’s rule published in a notice posted above her head.

DO NOT STAND ON PLATFORM

WHILE BUS IN MOTION

‘Well,’ said the passenger, ‘there’s many a slip.’

‘Aye,’ said the driver, ‘nor but it’s happened before.’

‘And happen it’ll happen again,’ said the passenger.

‘What ’tis to be young,’ said the driver.

‘Nay,’ said the passenger, ‘nowt like it, is there!’

They laughed; knowing.

LIMBSOME . . . LITHESOME . . . LOVESOME said a neon-glowing advertising panel above a window.

Picture accompanying words: a pair of dismembered legs of the female gender, arranged like pretty boomerangs, dressed in tan-coloured tights.

Intention of advertisement: to sell women’s stocking tights by suggesting that they will transform every wearer’s legs into limbs of the sort pictured. Mine too?

Ha.

He took from his wallet, where he had carefully placed it, Helen’s previously provocative picture, and smiled. She needed no tights.

There was that time when I was about eight when we still lived in the country at One Row, seven or eight anyway, before you really know what it’s all about, Mickey and me were wandering back home down the path through the wood when we saw a gang of older kids ten of them maybe all about ten or eleven as well and all of them crowding round looking at something in the middle of them and they were grinning and nudging and excited but keeping it quiet because, you could tell, they didn’t want to attract the attention of grownups who might be nearby but they didn’t pay Mickey and me any bother and we went up to them and edged our way to the centre and they had a girl there who wasn’t much older than eight herself maybe nine and they’d made her lift her skirt and drop her pants and show them herself . . . None of them touched her they just looked as they would at a new kind of toy in a shop window everybody taking a turn in front of the girl to bend down and look closely so that the crowd was circling slowly and bending and rising like a slow circling wave or an endless queue of courtiers processing round a queen and bowing to her . . . We had a look Mickey and me then went off back into the wood again and sat on a log side by side not saying anything at all just shivering, trembling, giggling at each other . . . When we recovered we wandered down the path home and the crowd had gone and the girl had gone and we had not seen the girl’s face because her skirt had been held up in front of her all the time we were there. And when we got back to our street there was Mickey’s mother and mine standing outside our back gate in their aprons with their arms akimbo watching us come and muttering to each other frosty faced so we knew we were in trouble. We know where you two have been Mickey’s mother said when we got up to them. You nasty little beasts. You get home my lad and don’t you dare do anything like that again. But my mother just looked at me not speaking till after she had given me my tea when she looked at me again for a minute before she said You know they could have crippled that poor girl for life . . . I puzzled over that for days afterwards but couldn’t understand how she could have been crippled just from us looking at her but no one said . . . When Dad was told he just grinned at me when Mother wasn’t looking. And winked.

Ditto beat a retreat from his memory, replacing Helen’s photograph in his pocketed wallet. Richmond was in view.

On Richmond hill there lived a lass

More bright than May day morn

Ho ho

RICHMOND, Yorks. Pop. 46,500. Ec Wed. Md Sat. Situated on hill-top dominated by 11th Cent. castle, now ruined, built cl075, commanding superb view across R. Swale. Walls 11th Cent. but most surviving military structure 12th Cent. Castle originally entered from town through gate-tower, converted late 12th Cent. into base for 100ft high stone keep, still standing. At S.W. corner remains of original hall containing domestic quarters. Legend claims Robin Hood held captive in Robin Hood Tower in N.E. wall; also that King Arthur’s Knights lie sleeping beneath the castle, waiting for the time when a brave man awakens them to save the world from disaster.

Town built round one of the largest and finest market squares in Britain, continental European in feeling. Narrow alleyways lead off; locally called ‘Wynds’. Also: Georgian theatre, in use, dating from 1788. Green Howards’ Regimental Museum in crypt of Holy Trinity Church standing in centre of market square, unique example of church with shops beneath. Baden-Powell, founder of Boy Scouts, once lived in tower in S.W. corner of castle.

Apart from historical and legendary associations, this attractive little town possesses considerable architectural beauty and great scenic beauty. Visit recommended.

Bus Stop

Ditto descended into the market square. The bus journey had been an experience. Insignificant, commonplace, undramatic perhaps, but an experience: his reason for journeying.

And what was the nature of this experience, this bus journey? He contemplated the question quarter-mindedly as, hitching his pack on to his shoulders, arranging straps and frame comfortably, he plodded off, boots cobblestone-ringing, into Walter Willson’s, there to buy a can of McEwan’s Export pale ale, before making for the castle, where he proposed finding a sunny, sheltered corner which offered a view up the river. There he could sit and enjoy his meal.

Nature of bus experience¹: consoling, comforting, contenting. Vehicle warm. Motion tranquillizing. Moving view—seen from his snug seat—of passingly pretty interest despite having seen it many times before. The whole provocative of piquant thoughts and sensational images. Unhurried, unworried. Cocooned irresponsibility.

Is that why so many people like travelling?

Maybe, he supposed, his mind turning to thought of his mother’s always perfectly made (just moistly right) tomato and egg sandwiches and wedge of apple pie. And the McEwan’s, for which his thirsting tastebuds goosepimpled. One thing about a bus trip, it coated your mouth with dehydrated diesel oil.

He sought out his favourite spot in the castle, where the southwest wall breaks from Scolland’s Hall into a tumbling defile, a rift in the defences that slips dizzily to the road and river a hundred feet and maybe more below. There is a ledge wide enough to sit on and stick out your feet, where you are hidden from treading tourists unless they brave the edge. There today the sun shone uncooled by a breeze, and from there the broad sweep of the river and its vee-shaped valley can be seen stretching away up the dale. So there he sat, bum cushioned on folloped groundsheet, back pillowed by pack placed against Scotland’s ruined stones.

Sandwiches, pie and beer he set safely firm on the ground, in reach of his right hand.

Quiet.

But a quiet made of surging Swale, fast, full from rain in the hills; a lark ascended, singing; wind soughing in trees furring valley sides, new green blinking in the breeze, sun-flashed. Blue sky. White flock clouds islanded. Grey stone.

An active peace.

Suntillating

No sooner had I enjoyed my small repast and had settled myself to a sunbathed repose than I was discovered by a youth perhaps a year or maybe two older than myself.

Description of intruder: Tall, well-built, mongrel-handsome. Dressed in regulation jeans, dungaree shirt washed to faded pale blue, open to fourth button, revealing hairless tanned chest, muscled. Hair brown, thick, long, tending to curls, casually (but carefully) arranged. Eyes blue, alert; nose narrow, straight; mouth thick-lipped, wide, smiling. Teeth white, sound, attractively irregular. Donkey jacket slung over shoulder perhaps a touch too self-consciously nonchalant. No other portables.

‘Watcher,’ he said, sitting himself crosslegged at my in-castle side with athletic, look-no-hands smoothness.

Nature of remark: Friendly, inviting conversation, in Geordie (i.e. Tyneside) accent.

For an irritated moment, I resented this disruption of my cosy, somnolent pleasure. But I reminded myself of my resolve, of the very purpose of my adventure. Here was an opportunity of precisely the kind I wanted, an opportunity for new experience, for something to happen, and it was being offered to me unlooked for.

I shifted my slumping torso into a more welcomingly attentive, upsitting posture.

‘Watcher,’ I replied, assuming as nearly as I could my new companion’s tone and inflexion, as a deliberate means of ingratiation.

‘You haven’t seen my mate, have you?’ he said. His eyes were searching me out.

‘Who’s your mate?’ I asked.

‘You don’t know my mate?’ he said, surprised. ‘I thowt everybody knew my mate.’

‘I’m not from Richmond,’ I said, apologetic.

He regarded my cushioning backpack. ‘No, ’course. Sorry,’ he said without sorrow.

(I remarked to myself again how not knowing what people without reason expect you to know at once lowers your stature in their eyes. Lowers their interest in you anyway.)

‘Mind you,’ I said, unable to prevent myself attempting further ingratiation, ‘I can’t see much from here and there’s been nobody in sight while I’ve been here. And I’ve been here about half an hour.’

‘He’s not been then,’ said my companion. ‘Just like him. “Meet me in the Castle about twelve,” he says when I saw him this morning. “We’ll go for a drink.” We never go into the Castle for a drink so naturally I come here. But he’ll be there already, propping up the bar. Impatient swine.’

He laughed.

Nature of laugh: Indulgent chortle, not irritated.

Comment seemed inappropriate; I smiled to show willing.

‘I don’t know why I bother with him,’ he went on. ‘Take last night for instance. Meet him half-seven at the billiards, he tells me. “We’ll have a bit of a game and a bit of a giggle with the lads,” he says. I get there at quarter to eight—I knew he wouldn’t be there before then no matter what—and I wait around like a spare part till nine. Then he strolls in, grinning like a ninny, and I can see straightaway that the smile is all show. Really he’s got a right beat on, so I don’t say owt to upset him, and he just picks up a cue and knocks hell out of the balls for twenty minutes before he says a word. And then he doesn’t say much more than “Buy us a pint, kiddo.” I could have thumped him.’

He repeated his former laugh.

This time a remark seemed necessary to maintain the conversation.

‘Then why didn’t you?’ I asked, affecting genuine interest.

‘I have before now, I can tell you,’ he said, giving me a glance.

Nature of glance: Collusive, implying that this confession was just between ourselves and that I would understand what others might not.

‘I had a go at him just a few nights back. He’d messed me about all day. We ended up in a pub in Catterick. I was in a right mood by then and he started playing up. Having a go at me, you know, in front of a gang of soldier boys that were boozing in there. He gets ower big for his boots at times like that, shows off a bit. So he’s giving me some stick, taking the piss like. Well, I’ve had enough like, and a pint or two, and all of a sudden me stomach hits me eyes and I grabs him and waltzes him out the back into the car park and gives him a right leathering. He’s smaller and thinner than me so he didn’t stand much chance with me losing me rag, you know, I’m pretty bloody when I’m in a paddy, but by god he still managed to bend me nose about and make me pant. He’s game all right. I think he wanted a fight, mind, and he knew I’d not damage him too bad, us being mates, you know, so he went prodding on till I lost me blob. He knew I would. He knows my limits, like. Same as I know his. And if you can’t have a good scrap with your best mate who can you have one with? You know what I mean, I expect.’

Morgan.

‘Yes, I know,’ I said.

‘It’s a grand day for the race,’ he said.

‘Which race?’ I said.

‘The human race,’ he said, and laughed.

‘It is,’ I said, smiling through his mockery. ‘So why didn’t you thump him last night?’

‘Wouldn’t have been right.’

‘Why not?’

‘Well, he has this father, you know. Anywhere for a big apple he is, a right crawler. They don’t get on. Always rowing. And I could tell they’d had a set-to last night before he came to the billiards. So I laid off. But I was still fed-up with him all the same.’

‘Why didn’t you go and join him in the pub then, if you know that’s where he’ll be?’

‘No fear! Last night was last night. This morning’s different. You can’t be giving in all the time. He can stew in there. After a bit he’ll feel guilty and come looking, all apologetic and smarmy and trying to make out it’s all my fault. “Why, Jacky,” he’ll say, surprise surprise. “What you doing here? I thought we said we’d meet in the pub, man. I’ve been waiting half an hour, till I got worried about you and thought I’d better look for you out here. I’m sorry, mate.” Like that, you know. But he doesn’t fool me.’

‘You known him long?’

‘About six months. He picked me up one day when I was hitching from Scotch Corner toward Brough. I was making for Liverpool, as a matter of fact. But he brought me here and we hit it off that well we started knocking about together. I stayed on here, got a job labouring for a builder doing some work round Easby Abbey, down the river, you know.’

‘You got digs to stay in or what?’

‘No, no. I’ve got a room at my mate’s house.’

He seemed surprised I had not understood his domestic arrangements without asking. At which my courage failed me to inquire further. Nor could I have done. For at that moment a shadow fell across us. There standing in the eye of the sun on the wall behind us was a youth who could be no other than Jacky’s mate.

Description of Jacky’s mate: Please enter below your preferences for Jacky’s mate’s appearance and features. Note well: he must, of course, be handsome (in your eyes if in no one else’s) and he must for the sake of this narrative be about eighteen. Jacky has also said that his mate is shorter than he; but then Jacky is over six feet tall and heavyish, so there is plenty of room left for your own imagination and predilections:

Proposal

‘I’m sorry, mate. I’ve been waiting for half an hour, till I got worried about you and thought I’d better look you out. I thought we said we’d meet in the pub, man? What are you doing hiding here?’

‘What did I tell you?’ said Jacky to me but squinting up at his mate, his eyes dazzled by the haloing sun.

‘Like that, is it?’ said Jacky’s mate, smiling.

Nature of smile: Acidly competitive, inviting tart rejoinder.

He jumped down from the wall and sat on the sloping bank facing us, his hands bracing his body upright. A puff of wind, it seemed, might send him scudding down into the valley deep at our feet, like a child skidding down a helter-skelter.

‘This is my mate Robby,’ said Jack to me, but still looking at his friend. ‘The one I was telling you about.’

‘Been telling you about me, has he?’ said Robby, glancing at each of us in turn like a cat eyeing two neatly cornered mice.

‘The purr you hear,’ said Jack, looking at me this time, ‘is not Robby’s laugh. He has a laugh like a ball of wool.’

‘What fun! A new friend!’ said Robby with monotone sarcasm.

‘You had a bad night,’ said Jack.

‘And a worse morning,’ said Robby. ‘But entertain me. Tell me about your—cough cough—friend. What’s his name? Introduce me, social moron.’

There was at this point within me an irresistible rise of gall with the attendant side-effect of spontaneous anger. At such moments I have no courage nor any restraint. I merely react. Is that what wins V.C.s? Unthinking, unwishing, I said:

‘Why don’t you get stuffed.’

There was between my two companions that satisfyingly shocked hiatus which succeeds such unexpected outbursts from an apparently mild-tempered and disadvantaged stranger.

Then Robby rolled on to his side, beat upon the turf with an excited fist, giggled with unnecessary exaggeration, and gasped:

‘Great! Marvellous! Terrific! Isn’t he beautiful! Hasn’t he just drummed us, Jacky!’

While this demonstration was in stagey progress, Jack, grinning but not smiling, leaned towards me and muttered:

‘Go steady, kiddo.’

‘I’m going nowhere,’ I said in matching reply, ‘till I’m ready.’

‘Here, I say, you two,’ said Robby, pushing himself up and climbing across us into the eye of the sun again. ‘Let’s go to the pub. We’ll have a pint. I’ll treat you. How about it, drummer boy? You game?’

‘If your mate is,’ I said.

‘Sure he is, aren’t you, Jacky? Nobody ever heard Jacky Thompson turn down a free pint.’

Jack stood up, as smoothly as he had sat down, Arab-fashion, and somehow unexpectedly graceful given his size and solidity.

‘Aye,’ he said, ‘come on, kiddo.’

Pubtalk

‘Politics,’ said Robby when the pints were ringing a table in the corner of the Bishop Blaize, ‘now there’s a subject to keep off in a pub. Sex and religion being the other two.’

‘Nowt much else to talk about,’ said Jack, raising his glass.

‘Sport maybe, if you like that sort of thing. But you’re not going to start on all that again, are you?’

‘I’ve a question to put to our new friend.’

‘Look out, kiddo. Trouble.’

‘Kiddo can look after himself all right,’ said Robby. ‘So much is known.’

Jack sucked at his beer. ‘A nice drop that Camerons,’ he said. ‘Good enough to curl your toenails.’

‘I take it you’re on the right side,’ said Robby, ignoring Jack. ‘Roughly anyway.’

‘Is there ever a right side?’ I said. ‘Rough or otherwise.’

‘An intellectual!’ said Robby and honked a laugh that drew staring glances from other parts of the room.

‘Listen who’s talking,’ said Jack. ‘Karl Marx resurrected.’ He stood, drained his glass, belched. ‘My round,’ he said and went, casual, to the bar.

‘No more for me,’ I called to his back.

He flapped a dismissive hand.

‘Of course there’s right sides and wrong sides,’ said Robby in an indivisible tone.

Indivisible: Because earnest, unwilling to banter, arrogantly assuming authority.

But then, I thought, he’s been like that all the time, despite appearances to the contrary. There’s a manic note in his emotional coloratura. A result of his running battles with his father? And does like always attract like so surely as this? If so, then Jacky is in the deep end with his father too! Must find out.

‘You can’t opt out of commitment,’ Robby was saying. ‘Either you’re for or against. There are no fences left to sit on. Not any more.’

‘Only slogans to rant?’

‘You have terminal apathy and gangrenous cynicism.’

‘Don’t mistake healthy scepticism for pusillanimous indifference.’

‘Nor your epigrams for truth.’

‘I wish they had Newcastle Exhibition here,’ said Jacky returning triple-glass-handed. ‘Right nectar that stuff is.’

He sat down, shaking slopped beer from his hand.

‘Unlike this beer,’ said Robby, sipping delicately from his brimming pint, ‘kiddo here is all head.’

‘O, aye?’ said Jack, ‘a bit frothy, is he? And how should he be?’

‘You know the trouble with intellectuals?’ asked Robby.

‘You tell me, clever lad,’ said Jack.

‘They are so busy sorting out all sides of the argument they never get round to doing anything.’

Jack raised his glass to me in salutation, winked, lifted his eyebrows, and sank his pint in one unbreathing swallow.

‘Consider Jack the dripper,’ said Robby. ‘He doesn’t think too much, but he knows where he stands. Knows what it’s all about. Don’t you?’

‘If you say so,’ said Jack putting down his glass. He belched again without restraint, wiped his mouth with the flat of his hand and said, ‘I could go a nice pork pie, I know that. How about you?’

‘See what I mean?’ said Robby. He tossed a fifty pence piece among the beer glasses and swill. ‘Here, I’ll stand you.’

‘Not for me, thanks,’ I said. ‘I had something in the castle.’

‘Not our Jack, I hope,’ said Robby.

‘Lay off, eh?’ said Jack, and went off to the bar again.

‘How did you meet him?’ I asked.

Robby eyed me in sharp, askance amusement for a moment.

‘He got fed-up of home,’ he said, ‘and decided to have a breather for a while. See some places, you know. His dad gives him hell. Always nagging at him . . .’

Bingo.

‘. . . Used to thump him about till Jack got too big and might thump him back. His mother tried to interfere once and he gave her a going over as well. Very pretty. You’d think Jack would be the aggressive sort after all that, but he isn’t. As placid as flat beer, aren’t you, Thompson?’

Jack returned with two cylinders of pork pie clasped in one hand and a brimming pint in the other. ‘Talking about me behind my back, are you?’ he said, sitting.

‘He’s telling me about your father,’ I said. ‘Fathers interest me.’

‘Nowt much to tell. He’s all right really, the old sod.’

‘See?’ said Robby to me. ‘He’s not just placid, he knows where he stands. His father brings him up by hand and our hero, here, leaves home to taste the delights of travel. Ah, you might think, a classic case of filial rejection. But you’d be wrong. Our hero has every intention of returning, actually and metaphorically, to the familial hearth, there to resume his hard-won place. As soon as he’s bored with the pleasures of the wide world, home he’ll scarper and take up life where it left him off. He’s just having a holiday, aren’t you, Jacky lad? All this is just excursion. Knows his roots, does our Jacky, and he’ll be happy enough to go back to the ground where he was planted.’

‘You could be right about that,’ said Jack, his pint once again raised to help on its way the pie he had consumed in two bites.

‘Do you want yours?’

Robby pushed his pie towards his friend. ‘No, take it. Your need is greater than mine. We can’t have you losing your figure.’

‘Ha ha,’ said Jack, and consumed the second inadequate refection.

Robby drained his glass, placed it on the table and stared at me with that kind of brass-faced grin that means ‘your turn’.

‘You’d like another?’ I said.

‘Thanks, kiddo,’ said Jack.

When I sat down again, wet-handed, Robby and Jack were finishing a muttered conversation all too obviously about myself.

‘On a hike?’ asked Robby nodding at my pack lying by my stool.

‘A few days.’

‘On your own?’ asked Jack.

‘Till tomorrow.’

Robbie: ‘Meeting someone?’

‘A friend.’

Jack’s scatological laugh.

Robby: ‘A girl, eh?’

‘Once aboard the lugger and the girl is mine,’ Jack sang, the beer fomenting a tune and an uninhibited performance. ‘I’ll bet you’re a bit of a horizontal champion in your quiet way, bonny lad.’ He guffawed and wagged a prim finger. ‘Be careful, kiddo, or you’ll dip your wick once too often.’ He reprised his bawdy outburst.

‘Looks like you missed out,’ said Robby to Jack.

‘O, aye?’ said Jack, draining his glass. ‘That depends on what I wanted in the first place, doesn’t it, Sunshine?’

‘Idiot,’ said Robby and laughed.

Neither laugh nor conversation included me.

‘All right now then are we?’ said Jack.

‘Champion, man,’ said Robby, mock-Jack. ‘Much relieved.

And it’s time you were making tracks.’

Jack looked at his wrist watch. ‘It is an’ all. Are you going to have a word with kiddo here?’

‘I’ll see to that. You get to work.’

‘See you.’

‘So long.’

Jack said to me as he stood up, ‘Maybe we’ll get together later on. So I’ll just say tarra. Thanks for the pint.’

I had suspected for the past few minutes that I was becoming inane. Suspicion now was confirmed. To Jack’s goodbye I could do no better than smirk and wave a collapsing hand. It was at that very second I realized the cause of my disintegration: the same as my urging desire to visit the lavatory. With some surprise I heard my voice speaking my ponderous thoughts to Jack’s retreating figure: ‘I’ve had five pints.’

Jack turned at the door. ‘Down but not out,’ he said and was gone.

‘He’s a nice bloke,’ I was saying to Robby. ‘I like him.’

‘I’m glad,’ said Robby, tolerant as a barmaid. ‘I think he likes you too.’

His tone was sobering.

‘You’re extracting,’ I said, but with careful effort.

‘Never!’ said Robby. ‘But listen. What are you doing tonight?’

‘Dunno.’

‘I’ve got something to do this afternoon.’

‘I think I’ll have a sleep.’

‘But tonight, after six, Jack and me have an amusement planned. Would you like to join in?’

‘What you going to do?’

‘Come and find out. Don’t want to spoil things by telling. It’ll be a surprise. How about it? You game?’

‘It’ll all be experience, won’t it?’ I said.

‘It will for sure,’ said Robby smiling.

‘Where’ll I meet you?’

‘Let’s say here at six-thirty. Okay?’

‘Okay, but listen, I’ve nothing else to wear but what I’ve got on.’

‘You’ll do just fine. Just beautiful.’

‘I really have to go out the back.’

‘Enjoy a good splash. I’ll see you tonight.’

‘Half-six. Here.’

‘You’ve got it. And one thing I will tell you. I bet afterwards you’ll really know where you stand.’

‘Nigmatic.’

‘And irresistible!’

Robby went through the street door. I went through the door labelled

Graffiti

Ponderoso

Beer has made me tired plus getting up early and being in open air so much     not used to all that     I’ll have a kip in the sun in the castle just where I was before just here     out of the way     nice     out of the wind too     but can see up the valley nice     pretty     ah

Don’t know what to make of them two, those two, are they? Dunno. Interesting. What do they do? if?

Skylark. Pretty view. Thought that before. But still true. Skylark. All that energy, larking about in the sky, all that work, flying like demented, like in love.     Ah. Sex more like. Larking in the sexy sky.

I can’t even sing, never mind fly. What hope for me with sex?

England: lark, liquid, above a hill, verdant, blue sky dazzled with pillows of clouds. Wordsworth and Vaughan Williams, though I prefer Benji-the-jazzman Britten myself, who is English enough too thank the lord.

And what’s this they’re up to tonight? Getting brave aren’t I, accepting such uncertain invitations from complete strangers. What would Morgan say! Ah, Morgan, thou shouldst be with us at this hour. Crap. He’d say I was a timid sod. Mayhap he’d be right. How do you get like that? The prisoner is of a nervous disposition, m’lud, and when attacked by five armed warders cowed in a corner of his cell in a cow hardly way. Man’s a fool. Yes, m’lud. I sentence you to eternal anxiety and don’t let me hear from you again. Or is it learned? Mother always worrying. Was she worrying when I was born? Was she at that mystic moment wondering whether Dad had remembered to leave a message for the milkman? Two pints today, please, we have an extra mouth to feed. Was she, even, Shandy-like, unnerved by some mundane distraction at the climactic moment of my conception? Or maybe Dad’s right: that I know nowt except from books, am a pseud. Wonder how the old bloke is, poor chap. Always loathed being ill. Incapable. Like a hobbled animal. Raging against the indignity, the frustration, the loss of control. Rage, rage against the dying of the light, old man. With nowhere else to live except in his body what else do you expect? But that’s an insult. To say he can’t think. He can think. But he thinks by feeling and knows what he thinks by seeing what he does. Me, I know what I think by seeing what I say, like the poet said. Is that the difference, the real difference between us? Is that why I can’t understand him and he can’t understand me? Not the generation gap—crap that is—but the education gap? The thinking gap. Is that why he can’t explain him to me and I can’t explain me to him? He wants me to show him what I am, I suppose. Wants to see I’m like him by acting like him. Is that it? God knows. And He isn’t too chatty. Is that why I’m here now doing all this? To try and show him? To try and convince myself I am more than he says? Could be all he wants, if I want? And are Robby and Jack what he wants? Jack reminds me of him a bit, as he was before his illness, as he must have been, judging from photographs, at my age. Good boozer, hard worker, one of the lads, a bit of a joker, good looking. A handsome feller, they say my dad was when he was young. They say that about Jack, I don’t doubt. But there he is having a hard time with his dad, so what’s his dad want of him? And Jack says Robby is always rowing with his father. Though in his case it sounds like he wants his father to be something different from what he is instead of t’other way about. A flipping father trio. Morgan doesn’t have

Salutation

‘A penny for them.’

Helen. In full flesh bloom. Better than the photograph. I could hardly look at her but in snatched glances. Shyness is an illness and ought to be medically treated.

‘Hey! What . . .?’

‘Meeting you, chump.’

‘But I thought . . .’

‘To get here I had to tangle a web. Officially, by which I mean parentally speaking, I’m here on a three-day state visit to my father’s brother, otherwise known as my uncle, and his family who live in Gunnerside. I told you I’d find a way.’

‘Very convincing.’

‘In one hour I embark on United’s three-o service going forward to Reeth, where I shall be picked up by father’s brother’s wife, a child-weary mother of eight, one more being imminent, a prolific breeding record I regard as more suitable to rabbits than human beings. On arrival and after a suitable time has passed, I shall casually mention to my bucolic uncle that I met by chance here in Richmond, as indeed I have, an old friend, verily a school pal from my Darlington years, who invited me to a social evening (ahem ahem) . . . well, go on, invite me . . .’

‘O, of course, please join me for an ahem social evening tomorrow.’

‘Thank you kindly, kind sir. Tomorrow it shall be. And, I shall continue, I would appreciate it if they would allow me to accept and keep the appointment. They, of course, only too glad to be spared an evening of my stay without my adolescent presence, will say yes, but be careful. And I shall meet you where’er you will. Okay?’

‘Do you really have to strain the truth so brazenly?’

‘Did you?’

‘Touché.’

‘Maybe I should go out and come in again?’

‘Sorry.’

He had had a picture in his mind of how this meeting would go and it was not like this. She talking so much, he tongue tied. He hated being taken by surprise, unprepared. Surprises always turned him sulky. He did not know why but called it shyness.

Helen knelt at his side, bent down, and kissed him. A gentle caress; unmistakably inviting.

‘I haven’t come sixty miles for a discussion about morality,’ she said. ‘And you’ve been boozing. I can smell it. And taste it now.’

‘Further apologies. I met a couple of blokes and had to keep my end up in the pub.’

‘Masculine crap. And that wasn’t exactly the end I thought you’d come here to keep up.’

‘Thank you for your confidence in my abilities.’

They laughed at last.

‘Why is it always so difficult to be natural when you’re meeting someone again after a long gap?’ she said, settling herself at his side.

‘Any prizes for the answer?’ he said, shifting on to his side so that he could keep her reclining figure in view.

‘You never know your luck.’

‘Try fear.’

‘Silly! I’m not scared of you.’

‘O, yes, you are. Just as I’m scared of you.’

‘How?’

‘In case you’ve changed. Not what I remembered. Or expected.’

‘And?’

‘Better than.’

‘Thanks, kind sir.’

Castle-gazing tourists ambled by, pretending the two recumbent figures they had surprised themselves by discovering were not there. They looked pointedly at the view.

‘Are you over your fear yet?’ she asked, her eyes closed to the sun.

‘I’m recovering fast.’

‘Good.’

‘Are you okay here or do you want to go somewhere else?’

‘The sun is warm, we’re out of the wind and nearly out of sight. The grass is soft enough. Why move?’

‘There are people about.’

‘My, what a private soul you’ve got.’

She sat up, supporting her body with her arms, her head hanging back full-face to the sun. Beautiful. Provocative. Unknowing? or coy design?

‘No,’ she said. ‘I really do have to get to my uncle’s. Mother knows my e.t.a. and will telephone to be sure I’ve arrived.’

‘I know the feeling.’

‘Cloy cloy.’

She sat cross-legged; plucked at the turf between her knees. ‘Why must they?’

‘Yours always seemed pretty easy-going to me.’

‘A front. In public they affect a liberal nonchalance.’

‘At home?’

‘They have three different locks on each of the outside doors, burglar-proof catches on all the windows, and they keep a chromium-plated fire extinguisher under their bed.’

‘The latter necessary to douse the ardour of your father’s passions.’

‘Which explains, no doubt, why the extinguisher has never been used.’

They laughed.

‘So they’re running scared,’ he said.

‘For them life is an obstacle course littered with booby traps.’

‘And their little girl is always in danger.’

‘That’s how it used to be. I was ten before they stopped worrying about baby-snatchers.’

‘And now they worry that you’ll get raped.’

‘Wrong. They could almost cope with that. I’d be the injured party, you see. All their expectations about life would be confirmed and they’d have me at home to nurse and coddle all day.’

‘So what’s the problem?’

‘They think I’ll do the raping. They don’t say so in as many words, naturally. That’s the infuriating thing. They pretend to be concerned, and warn me about men who are after only one thing, as they put it. But they can’t hide what they are really thinking, that I’ll go out and lay any man who takes my fancy.’

‘And get yourself pregnant.’

‘No, no. You still don’t understand. That’s just what a man would think.’

‘So I’m a man!’

‘And cute with it. I’m sorry. It’s just that I’m all stewed up about them at the moment.’

‘Join the club.’

‘There was a row, you see, about my coming away.’

‘So what should I know that men never do? Tell me, I’m truly interested.’

‘Sure? I don’t want to bore you. We both came here for some fun, remember.’

‘Which is just what you’re telling me your parents are worried about, isn’t it?’

‘You’re getting warm, I’ll give you that!’

‘Fun and games. Hanky-panky. And actually I’m boiling with frustrated passion.’

‘I should have brought the aforesaid extinguisher. Actually, they use phrases like that: hanky-panky and fun-and-games. Would you believe? You see, if I got preggers that would confirm their beliefs about life. Another of the traps. And if I liked the bloke and married him that would make it all right. I’d be properly trapped, paying for my mistakes, taking the consequences of my actions—all that guff. And I’d be there, lumbered, for them to cluck over still, giving advice, and, what’s best, with a baby for them to feel sentimental about.’

‘And all forgiven.’

‘Of course.’

‘But if you had fun, played hanky-panky and didn’t get with child?’

‘I’d be a loose woman. I’d be promiscuous and, worst of all, I’d be enjoying it. I’d be an unpaid whore, a happy hooker, a woman of easy virtue. Etcetera. That’s what bothers them most.’

‘Ugly words.’

‘Ugly sentiments.’

‘But never said straight out?’

‘O, no. That’s what makes it so horrible. I don’t think I’d mind if they came straight out and said what they think. Trouble is, I suspect they don’t even know that they think it. So it all comes out in innuendo, by implication. And somehow, that makes everything worse. Dirties everything.’

Ditto thought of his father; their rows; their straight words. And of his mother, with whom he rarely discussed or argued about anything. (He had promised to telephone home this evening and must not forget; he owed them that, and was glad to discover he wanted to keep his promise.)

‘The other way can be as bad sometimes, you know,’ he said. ‘People say wounding things in anger. And words said can’t be unsaid.’

‘I’d take my chances.’ She stood up. ‘My bus leaves in a few minutes.’

He stood up too and leaned back against the wall. He felt an impulsive desire to probe her presence with him now, to hear her reason it. He knew before he spoke that his question was a mistimed curiosity. But could not help himself.

‘Just tell me one thing before you go.’

She looked at him, her face still betraying the feelings their conversation had revived. But he could not hold back.

‘Why did you send that letter and your photograph?’

‘Ask no questions and you’ll get no lies,’ she said. ‘But if it bothers you—’

She turned and all but ran from the castle.

‘Helen!’ he called.

But she did not stop; and he did not follow.

He pressed his back against the wall. Hard. Bruising stone on brittle bone. Till it hurt. Sharp, clean pain.

His eyes guarded the castle gate against her return. (She must return.) While his mind picked himself to pieces.

Fool. Idiot. Clod. There is about you an instinct to disruption. I have noticed it before, often. I could list a number of such occasions but it would be tiresome. Cloth-head. Why don’t you just shut up sometimes. You like to get something going nicely and then upset it. You have few talents but your skill in this is consummate. Like a small child building sandcastles and then smashing them down because the sea might get them. You pole-axed or something. What chance again. Stupy. Why. To stop anything coming too close. Is that it. Afraid to be known. To be vulnerable. It’s so. Admit. Foolarse. Afraid what you’ll learn about yourself. True. It is. Pity ’tis. Twit.

Unthought conclusions sent him sprinting from the castle, belongings left abandoned by the wall.

In the market place he stopped. The Reeth bus was there by the cross, its engine running.

He reached it, panting, searched the windows in panicky haste for Helen’s face. He found her in the middle of the farther side, sitting on the inner seat, a solid farmwife between her and the window. She was staring straight ahead, her face impassive, but tears coursing her cheeks. He knew she knew he was there, agitated in the road. He reached up and placed both hands flat against the window. ‘Helen!’ he called and slapped the glass with his hands. The farmwife turned a fierce, embarrassed face to him. ‘Helen!’ he called again. But she would not look. The bus door closed, the engine revved, pumping exhaust about his feet. He scrabbled in his anorak pocket, found a ballpoint pen, the slip of paper they had given him at Walter Willson’s checkout. The bus’s brakes blew off; he heard, as he scribbled, the gear engage. Licked the slip of paper across his writing, slapped it on to the window just as the bus accelerated away.

He had scrawled one word.

Interlude

I’ve had enough for a while. Am in need of light relief. Anyway, there is now a passage of time between Helen’s departure and my next encounter. I did nothing after she left but mope about the place, mentally and emotionally flagellating myself. I have no intention of going through all that again here. It is so embarrassing. So please take it that this space covers the intervening three hours. Use your own imagination to fill in the details. Why do I have to do all the work!

Telephone Call

Hello?

Hi, Mum, it’s me.

Hello, love.

How is he?

Not so hot, love. How are you?

I’m fine. Is he worse?

I don’t know. They don’t tell you anything.

They must say something, Ma.

O, they say don’t worry and he’s as well as can be expected. But what does that mean to anybody?

Should I try and telephone him?

I shouldn’t, dear.

Why not?

It would only upset him.

Why? How could it upset him? I’d have thought he’d be pleased to hear me.

He’d be pleased to see you.

But he can’t, can he? He can talk to me though.

That’s just it, dear. Your dad thinks you should have stayed at home with me, you know. It would upset him to talk to you on the phone. And that would only make him worse.

He might get another attack.

Another attack would kill him.

Do you want me to come home now?

I’ll manage, it’s all right.

But do you want me to come home?

You’re there now, love, you might as well do what you went to do.

I’ll come if you want.

Ring in the morning. He’s low but he’s not on the danger list. He’ll be all right.

Goodnight, love.

Goodnight, Ma.

Downer

Six-fifteen: Ditto is in the public bar of the Bishop Blaize. By six-thirty he has downed two pints of best bitter and is staring at his half-consumed third. Never in his life has he consumed so much alcohol so quickly. A sharp-pained headache is brewing across the left side of his skull. With fierce concentration he tries to deal with a confusion of conflicting emotions.

He feels guilty at leaving his father and mother for a less than necessary purpose. He is annoyed at himself for feeling guilty, an annoyance compounded by anger at allowing guilt to oppress him. Helen’s rupturing departure adds anxiety to this recipe for depression; and frustration. If she maintains her disaffection, his journey is wasted and his desertion of home and parents a squandered ordeal.

Of course, this self-scourging is accompanied by a chorus of conditional justifications. If his father had not been so provocative, he would never have suffered his heart attack in the first place. But, Ditto knew, whatever the cause of the trouble, a break would have happened between them sometime anyway. After all, he had to gain his independence somehow. Etc., etc.

The concatenation is universally scripted from an early age; why torture us all by rehearsing it again here?

What disturbs Ditto most of all as he glowers at his beer through inexperienced boozer’s wet eyes, is an undercurrent to his storming emotions, the meaning of which he cannot yet be certain about. In that calm centre where our sanity takes refuge at such times, he wonders if it is fear that his father will die while he, Ditto, is nefariously absent from the family hearth that gives him greatest distress? Or is it something less reprehensible?

(In his present self-abnegatory mood, he will not acknowledge himself able to feel anything honest and noble. But between mental brackets he toys for a moment with the prospect that this gripping undercurrent, the real engine of his turbulent feelings, is a grieving love for the man who lies now drugged to unconsciousness in a starched hospital bed attached to bottled life by plastic tubes. But the thought is unbearable and he slams closing brackets across the words.)

At which moment, six-fifty-three precisely, enter in high-stepping temper the awaited pals.

‘Kiddo has turned to drink,’ says Jacky.

‘So we can down him,’ says Robby. ‘I’m glad you smirk, drummer boy, and glad to find you raring at the ready for our evening’s adventure.’

‘We’ll just have a pint or two before we go,’ says Jack.

‘If we must,’ says Robby. ‘Though kiddo looks as if he’s had enough already.’

‘Get stuffed,’ says Ditto, sour from his thoughts and his beer.

‘I just have,’ says Robby, ‘and even I need time to revitalize my vitals, as it were.’

He sits at Ditto’s side, patting his arm, which Ditto draws away.

‘Fear not,’ says Robby, ‘there is no danger.’

They wait, silent, till Jack has placed three pints on the table and sat down facing them.

‘Our friend,’ says Robby to Jack, ‘is on a downer. I recognize the symptoms. And know the remedy.’

‘A good stiff drink is what he needs,’ says Jack.

‘No, no. Adrenalin. That’s what he needs. The smack we manufacture for ourselves without aid from doctors and other pill pushers.’

‘Stop nattering and sup your beer,’ says Jack.

‘One last word, executioner. I’ll lay you both a bet—nay, will lay you both if you like—our adventure tonight will revive kiddo’s flagging spirits a treat. You still game?’

The question is unavoidable.

‘Maybe,’ says Ditto, not without difficulty. ‘Depends what you want to do.’

‘Don’t toy with your glass then,’ says Robby, ‘and look at me when I’m speaking to you.’

Ditto cannot help an involuntary glance and an unwilling smile.

‘Ah, so it’s the old gags you like best! We have vays of making you vile,’ says Robby, his laughter infectious. ‘As for this evening, dear friends: we begin with a public meeting, after which—doubt it not—you will be only too happy to engage in the titillatious romp I have in mind, a mystery escapade, an assault upon the bastion of boredom, an attack on high-toned hypocrisy, an antic night of convention breaking.’

‘You’re a right windbag when you try,’ says Jack, drains his glass and stands. ‘Come on then, Sunshine, one more before the fray, then we’ll be off.’

Party: Political

Seven twenty-six. The market hall. Stale with aftertaste of festering vegetables. A cavernous hangar with concrete floor, windows high under iron-strutted roof-without-ceiling. An assortment of stackable chairs laid out in melancholy rows. A gaggle of forty-or-so people scattered about, leaving the first two rows and six ranks at the back yawningly empty. Down one wall, three trestle tables, scarred and bruised from their more usual market duties, bearing cups on saucers, plates of plain biscuits, bottles of milk, bowls of sugar, and a tea urn, all attended by a balloon-bosomed daleslady in blue print dress. At the front, another trestle table, this time its market-worn skeleton shrouded in a motheaten green velvet covering. Two chairs behind. Pinned, botchily, to the front of the covering a poster, wrinkled with crumple-creases: GET GOING WITH LABOUR.

Enter the three escapaders.

‘I hope you are going to behave yourself tonight, young man,’ says a voice from behind. A cockerel of a fellow peers at Robby, a knotty, tweed-jacketed, open-neck shirted man with a toothbrush moustache. A man with a mission, a belligerent in the Great Battle.

‘Why, comrade,’ says Robby in mocking astonishment, ‘we can assure you categorically that at this time we have no intention of disruptin’ the deliberations, though I must take this opportunity to warn you that we reserve our constitutional right to engage in legitimate dissent if we feel it necessary and any attempt to prevent us exercisin’ our democratic rights will effect consequences for which we cannot be ’eld responsible.’

‘Look, laddie,’ says the man, ‘don’t get cheeky with me. I don’t give a damn who your father is, if you start messing about, out you’ll go—along with your poncey pals.’

He pushes our three friends aside and parades down the aisle to a seat in the first occupied row, where with nods and thumb-jabbings and animated mutterings, head turnings and hitchings of his body-bulging jacket, he indicates to his companions the presence of (and, no doubt, his recent exchange with) Robby, who, during this pantomime, seats himself in the empty back row, Jacky on his one side, Ditto on the other.

As soon as I sat down I knew I was not normal. Since leaving the pub I had felt like an arthritic marionette. Stiff but unable to stand unaided. My headache, during the two-minute walk supported on either side by my companions from the pub to the market hall, had gone from volcanic eruption to flushing soda-syphon. In my inside, I wanted to be sick; on my outside, I was uncannily aware, my face wore a popeyed grin. I did not know where I was being taken, nor by now did I care.

‘Why are you fetching me to the dungeons?’ I said as we entered the hall, for so it seemed.

An exchange took place between Robby and a cantankerous custodian. I listened and understood their conversation entirely.

‘We must behave ourselves and damn our fathers or he will mess us about,’ I said earnestly to Robby when we were seated and I had recovered from not having to stand up.

‘That’s about it, kiddo,’ he said and patted my knee.

I considered the room carefully.

‘Why are we attending a prayer meeting?’ I asked.

But received no reply.

‘Or is everybody sleeping?’

‘Dreaming,’ said Robby. ‘Wakers asleep. No more.’

‘Someone should tell them,’ I said.

‘I doubt if they’d listen.’

‘He’s never that tight on five pints,’ said Jack.

‘Who?’ I asked, leaning across Robby to hear Jack’s reply.

‘Never mind, Sunshine,’ he said. ‘We’ll look after you.’

Robby pushed me back up straight in my chair.

Two men appeared at the table in front of the serried rows. One sat. The other stood. The seated one disturbed me. I felt I knew him. The face: features of it instantly recognizable, other parts unknown. A disturbing visual cacophony.

‘Comrades,’ the standing man said in a gravel voice. Tall, balding, mush-faced, prunesqualler. ‘Our guest this evening needs no introduction. We all know of his many achievements and of his commitment to the working class struggle.’

I watched and listened and sawheard in minddazzle.

Went on the standingman, ‘government people solidarity people people party people policy party left people party-strugglesocialistwelcome’

A waterfall of fryingpan exploding lightbulbs.

The standingman sat, the sittingman stood.

And spoke; an eloquent precision.

The sittingstanding talking man sat.

Fryingpan exploding lightbulbs waterfalled again.

‘That was a load of elephant’s,’ yelled Jack through the cascade.

‘All balloon,’ said grin-grimacing Ditto.

Robby was Vesuvius before Pompeii got its historic comeuppance.

The hall silence. The standingsittingman stood again.

‘stimulating honest peoplecomrade grateful socialist questions’

The again standing standingsittingman sat again.

Robby suddenly was standing at Ditto’s sittingside, leaning forward, hands white-knuckled grasping the green tubular steel frame of the infront canvas-covered chair.

‘I would like to ask our speaker when, if ever, he intends to demonstrate his solidarity with the working class by putting his considerable income where his not inconsiderable mouth is?’

‘Furthermore, does our speaker condemn absolutely the hypocrisy of those who live by preaching the doctrine of socialist change, let’s not use the dirty word revolution,’

‘while they themselves hold shares and directorships in important capitalist firms,’

‘not to mention their willingness to compromise on such matters as nationalization, the public schools, the maintenance of the House of Lords,’

‘and the careful use of backhanders, sinecure jobs, personal gifts and spurious business deals to sweeten local party officials’

‘When will you sleepers wake!’ yelled Robby as the surge engulfed him.

Ditto panned for Jacky; could not find him.

‘Don’t potter, Thompson,’ he yelled, ablaze and hurling himself at the trembling surge breaking over Robby.

Chairs atomized.

A table subsided beneath assaulting bodies, spraying coruscating china in smithereens.

Trip in regain dodge balance fling forward to rescue and combat support, did Ditto.

An advancing bonewall.

Party: Paean

When he woke to consciousness, he wondered if it was really him lying there.

Sound of water.

Sound of trees.

Sound of breeze in trees.

Sound of water.

Feel of stone.

Hard feel of hard stone.

Feel of breeze, cool.

Smell of green.

Smell of brown.

Smell of breeze over water.

Smell of sick.

Beer-vomit.

He retched. Jack-knifed up, sitting, doubled, turned, threw up. Was clinging to an edge of stone and heaving into a flow of water inches from his obeisant face.

‘Back in the land of the living at last, kiddo,’ said Robby. ‘We thought for a while we had lost you for good.’

The spasm remitted. He swilled a hand in the refreshing river. Performed with his palm a reviving baptism. Carefully lifted himself from the brink and took his bearings.

Late evening; a sunglow in the low sky, enough to pick out warmly the familiar lines of Easby Abbey poking from the trees above a bend in the river, upstream. There was opaque squint and sparkle on the wrinkling backwater pool at his feet, further out a grassy little knot of an island all but reached by humping boulders, the river curling into frothy little rapids between. On the bank, across, trees cushioned upwards, a fringe to the bellying field uprising beyond to the arching blue sky sweeping dome above the cave of trees under which he and Robby and Jack were.

Robby and Jack stretched out in luxurious ease on either side of where he must have lain, each with open cans of beer in their hands, their evening-paled faces regarding him with amusement.

‘That was better out than in,’ said Robby. ‘Sit down before you fall down.’

‘I’m okay, I feel better.’

‘Have a swallow,’ said Jack, holding out to him his beer can.

He sat between them.

‘Seeing I’ve just unloaded the last lot, I doubt I should.’

‘Hair of the mongrel,’ Jack said. ‘Make you feel on top again.’

He took the proffered can.

‘How did I get here?’ he asked.

‘Brought you in my car, then carried you the few yards down here to this Elysian waterhole,’ said Robby.

‘I must have been knocked out.’

‘Either by the thug who rammed his fist into your face or by the floor you fell upon. No one bothered much with the finer details.’

He drank a tentative mouthful of the beer. Surprised: he enjoyed both taste and swallow. Then, reminded of the blow to his chin, he prodded and gently manipulated his jaw. No damage, but a sore bruise.

‘I have to tell you,’ said Robby, chuckling, ‘that that was not the only time you spewed this evening.’

‘O, god, not in your car?’

‘Nothing so ungracious.’

‘Where then?’

‘Shall I tell him?’ Robby said to Jack.

‘You will anyway,’ said Jack.

‘You must understand,’ said Robby, snuggling his back into the bankside, ‘that after you were so rudely despatched, the fracas came to a sudden stop. Which is just as well, considering you were prone in the path of the stampede. Our venerable chairperson—you remember him?’

‘Vaguely. The standingsitting man.’

‘Eh?’

‘Never mind. Go on.’

‘Well, he steps forward, our brave captain, folds you masterfully fully over his shoulder—he’s learned all the fireman’s lifts, has our Hector—and marches down the hall. Just as he reaches the door you decide—or rather, your stomach decides . . .’ Robby tries to restrain the laughter welling in him, ‘. . . decides . . . it has had enough of Hector’s . . . of Hector’s . . . Hector’s shoulder stuck in it . . . and you . . .’

‘O, no!’

‘O, yes . . . threw up. All down his back.’

Ditto too is laughing now. ‘Like a waterfall,’ he gasps out.

‘Just like!’

‘Out, out, out!’

‘Right out and down the back of Hector’s best blue Sunday suit!’

‘O, glory!’

‘You’re a daft pair,’ says Jack, but he is holding his sides too.

‘It was great,’ says Robby. ‘I’ve never seen a crowd lose interest in anybody so fast. Our Hector dumped you like a bag of garbage on the pavement, and disappeared double quick into the bog. I was hustled out after you by my friends and neighbours. The doors were slammed behind our backs, and presto! All was over!’

‘No more than you wanted, I’ll bet,’ said Jack, recovered and able to drink his beer again.

‘Could never have hoped for such a magnificent finale, bonny lad. Pure delight.’

Laughing so much made Ditto feel ill again. Vaguely, not specifically. The river at their feet swirlgurgled, sounding cool and clean and of melancholy purity.

‘I feel filthy,’ he said unexpectedly.

‘And sound solemn,’ said Robby. ‘We can’t have that. What you need is a good bath. That would work wonders. We’ve no bath, but we have plenty of water. Take a swim.’

‘Leave him alone,’ said Jack. ‘You always have to be messing folk about.’

‘I’ll settle with you later, deserter,’ said Robby, and stood, grabbed Ditto’s feet, heaved on them, swinging him at the same time so that he was lying along the edge of the river bank.

‘No, gerroff,’ he shouted, clawing at the ground to save himself from the water.

But Robby was laughing again; giggling rather.

‘Strip him!’ Robby yelled at Jack.

Jack did not move. ‘Do your own dirty work.’

‘No no!’ Ditto shouted.

‘Yes yes!’ Robby replied, lunging for Ditto’s trouser belt.

‘Off! Off!’ screamed Ditto, grabbing Robby’s clawing hands and with desperate effort trying to turn himself and his assailant away from the water and his trousers.

Jack sprang to his feet to save himself from the rolling, struggling pair.

‘Grab him, Jack,’ Robby called.

Jack climbed higher up the bank and sat on a mossy boulder, vantage for the fray.

Suddenly it was essential to Ditto that he be free. No longer a game. His frivolous dissipate energy at once focused bleakly to that end. Firmly, he took grip of Robby’s wrists, twisted body and arms, pulled, lunged, leaped, hurled himself in clean rhythm.

Robby was carried, surfing, upon the wave of Ditto’s determined bore. Clasped together like lovers they rose from the scuffled ground.

‘Submit, fool!’ Robby cried.

Each pushed the other away; but each held to the other. Their push-pull upset the poised balance of Ditto’s determined rise.

They hit the water like felled trees with snared branches, at the same instant.

Robby rose from the shallow depths first, like a jack from its box.

‘Victory!’ he crowed, and danced a plodgy jig in the churning pool.

Firemuse

They made a fire of flotsam and dead branches, stood by it, sat by it, lay by it, and dried. Jack did not help, but sat on and on on his boulder, drinking his way through a six-pack of Newcastle Brown, saying nothing.

Night came, starry, still. The wetness steamed from their clinging clothes in the glowheat of the fire. Activity left them now happier to be cosy and unmoving, with nothing to say, each more comfortably comforted by his secret thoughts.

Ditto was remembering another fire, another chilly night, hardly more than two years ago before his father’s illness prevented them living a normal life.

Together he and his father had been fishing up the Tees on some private water. They had lashed the river all the warm sun day but with little luck. Nothing to show, in fact, but one or two middling-sized dace, nothing special, no trout which they would most like to have landed and had hoped to catch when they had set off that morning almost at dawn in a sharp clean sun, the country washed by rain overnight, the air frostdew bright. A glisten. A sparkle. A kind of carnival in birdsong silence. A good day all day, a companionable day. They had not talked much, a few words now and then about bait or pools promising to cast upon. Nothing dissentient. They did not row then; that came later. Over lunch—coffee from a flask, mother’s meat pie, cake, an apple each—they had twitted one another and joked, his father in good form, anecdotal, as he always was at his best and when happiest, but not frenetic as he could be when he had had a drink or two in the evening. Relaxed. Ditto had liked him then, loved him, felt proud in a way he could not explain to himself or to anyone else. But he knew now, thinking, that it was the man’s simple delight in his day of freedom from work, in the beauty about him, his absorption to the point of obsession with his fishing: these were the things which gave him his self and were attractive and made Ditto proud. And Ditto knew at once then, that evening as they sat by their makeshift fire his father and he, that he was not as this man. Knew that he fished to please him by pretending absorption, not living it as his father did. He had spent the day like this to please his father not because it gave himself the kind of pleasure his father took from it. And did that matter? He did not know, could not decide, knew only that finally he did not want to do anything simply to please this man his father. Wanted to please him of course, but not to please him by pretence. He wished to do what was of himself, his own-him. And he wondered if his father knew this.

Whether his father did or not, from that day Ditto found he could not quite, ever, please his father again. No matter how much he tried, no matter how he acted out the pretence or how fervently he wished to recapture the closeness of that day, the last day of so many that had gone before, he could not. It was as if knowing he had pretended made it impossible ever to pretend again, whether he wanted to or not. His father always seemed to sense the lie. And it was from that time that the arguments, the disagreements, the fractured days began.

From that time, too, his father’s illness took hold. Was that coincidence? Or consequence?

He did not know that either. And groaned aloud in the firelight, as people do when they want to push guilt and fear from their thoughts.

‘Sounds like you’re ready for some more excitement,’ said Robby, rousing from his own reverie.

Fireplan

Soon after midnight Robby proposed that we now set out on the second part of his plan for the evening’s escapade. I asked what he intended. He said he planned for us to burgle the home of that evening’s guest speaker at the public meeting from which we had been so unceremoniously ejected.

Jack was against this.

JACK: You’re an idiot, man. Leave well alone. You’re just getting your own back.

ROBBY: I’m not asking you, deserter. I’m telling. Either join in or push off.

JACK: You never give up, do you!

ROBBY: Look, you copped out once tonight. Do it again and that’s it. Okay?

JACK: So it’s a test for me now as well, is it?

ROBBY: You treat it how you like. You know the score.

Their animosity was undisguised. I was not able then to untangle all that lay behind the exchange; this only became clear later, as you will discover in due time.

I was not, of course, myself happy about the proposal. When I voiced my unease, Robby delivered a somewhat lengthy diatribe, of which the following is an abridged version, reproduced as accurately as memory allows in Robby’s own words:

‘Look, this man is a socialist, right? And supposed to be a champion of the working class, at least that’s what he’s always claiming. He goes on endlessly about equality and the capitalist oppression and about a fairer distribution of wealth. He shouts about workers’ control, nationalization of all the means of production and the institutions of business. You know the kind of stuff, you hear it every day. I believe it, as it happens. Not the slogany side of it, not the bandwaggoneers. I can’t stand them any more than that collection of time-servers you saw tonight. But do you know how this paragon of socialist action lives? Eh? He has a house worth upwards of sixty thousand quid, he’s got shares in half-a-dozen well-heeled companies and the last thing he’d want is for any happy band of workers to tell him what he’s got to do. In other words, he’s like all the rest, all he wants is a big slice of whatever there is going. He’s a manipulator, that’s all, and he mouths socialist doctrine because that’s what he knows he has to do to get where he wants to be. It’s the fashionable philosophy. You know how he got where he is? Good degree from respectable university. Into a trade union. Organized a nice little strike that he managed to keep going long enough to get sympathetic publicity but not so long that he lost it. From that straight into the national office as a blue-eyed boy. Then a quick side-step into the political corridors at Westminster and bingo, before you know it he’s on TV all the time, he’s advising unions about companies and employers about trade unions, he’s all set for Parliament and is doing all right thank you out of fees, journalism, union support, sinecure salaries and kick-backs. Four hundred years ago he’d have gone into the church, written a classy book on ecclesiastical authority or burned a few heretics and been made a bishop in double-quick time. Bit of sex on the side, not mattering which sort, good food, nice house, secure job. And power. That as much as anything. Status, influence, authority, money. That’s the name of the game. Always was, still is. His politics aren’t a philosophy and they aren’t a mission. And he’s not crackers. His politics are a business, a career that gets him what he wants—being one of the elect of the earth.’

As this monologue went on, Robby showed many of the signs of stress which you, Morgan, as a budding M.D. would have been interested to note. He began trembling with anger, his voice became proclamatory as if he were addressing a public meeting. He broke into a sweat, beads of perspiration winked on his forehead, reflecting the firelight. By the end I knew I was watching a fanatic promoting his cause. If the sittingstanding talking man would have done well as a corrupt bishop, Robby would have matched him as a ruthless officer in the department of the inquisition. It was the kind of outburst you cannot reply to; and you cannot politely dismiss or change the subject afterwards.

There was a pause. Robby recovered his composure. (I realized then, watching him, that the thing I had felt vaguely about him all day and had not been able to pin down was that all the time he was on the edge of hysteria, that somehow this was part of both his attractiveness and unattractiveness. Like watching a bomb to see when it might explode. There was rumbling violence always just under the surface of his skin. And I could not tell just at that moment what caused it. I was soon to discover.)

I said, as calmly and as amenably as I could—as though humouring a madman!—that though what he had said was no doubt true, I could not understand why he wanted to burgle the man’s house.

I had, he replied, entirely missed the point. Words were no longer enough. Actions were what counted. Only actions revealed intentions truthfully. This man said he was a socialist but acted like any other grabber. This showed his true beliefs. He claimed to believe in equality, in fair distribution of wealth, and to be against greed and privilege. Okay, let him live by that. And as he had so much more than most people let us take some of his unequal wealth and redistribute it. Obviously he would not willingly allow us to do this, so it must be done by a people’s tax, by an act on behalf of the people which we, representatives of the people, would execute.

DITTO: I agree with your theory. But not with the action you want to take.

ROBBY: You’re a fool, then.

DITTO: Talk sense or not at all.

ROBBY: Okay. You’re naive. You’ve swallowed all that junk they serve up at school about being a good citizen. You’re allowing your upbringing to condition you to the morality of the status quo. Just what the cruds want.

DITTO: Crap. I’m saying that if you go around burgling people’s houses, however you justify it, it won’t be long before everybody is at it whenever they feel like getting something for nothing. And that means nobody comes off best. Certainly not the ordinary bloke, who always comes off worst anyway.

ROBBY: You’ve no proof that that will happen.

DITTO: Don’t talk stupid. It’s human nature.

ROBBY: Human nature isn’t absolute. It can be changed. And it is changed by conditions.

DITTO: And when your Great Socialist Society finally dawns, there’ll be no need to burgle, I suppose.

ROBBY: That’s right. Need makes burglars. And there’ll be no need.

DITTO: Meanwhile, mayhem on the way to the Great Day.

ROBBY: If necessary, yes.

DITTO: And hard luck on the innocent victims.

ROBBY: To start with, no one is innocent in this fight. Second off, you can’t make a cake without smashing eggs. Third off, there’s no gain without sacrifice, no healing of this sick man without deep surgery. Fourth off, I’m fed up with all this bloody chat. Are you coming or aren’t you? Or are you like the rest of them, all hot air?

You will have noticed, Morgan, that one of the difficulties of attempting to set down such an account as I am here engaged upon is to reveal simultaneous thoughts and feelings, with concurrent words and actions in such a way that you, dear reader, accept them as being at one, in the moment. Paralleling, as it were, the conversational exchange set down opposite I experienced an interior monologue of influential effect on my decision regarding Robby’s criminal suggestion. What he proposed touched, not my mind, but my emotions. My nerves not my thoughts. You know, Morgan, how often we have inveighed against the narrow restrictions of our education. How we have attacked, between ourselves and to our teachers, the false assumptions made about what we must do in life, how we shall—indeed must—live. How we have discussed the possible ways of breaking from that strait-jacket and of reforming it so that others who follow after are not subjected to similar pressures. (Robby was not alone in possessing hotly held ideals!)

I thought, at the same time, of my father, whose whole life has been lived by an honest regard for, a belief in the very system that makes it so that now he lies ill and has for two years suffered for simple want of the means of ease, want of the kind of attention that would alleviate him.

Solemn thoughts; telling emotions. But I have to admit that most persuasive of all was an irrational desire to chance my arm. I wanted to commit a dangerous act, wanted to know what excitements were to be had in crime, wanted for a night to play the outlaw. Had I not set out to take indiscriminately what life offered? Could I turn away because it offered something that might offend a delicate sensibility? Of course not. And I knew then what a ghastly tyranny both causes and logic can be.

I said, ‘Let’s get cracking.’

Jack said, ‘You’re mad, both of you.’

Robby said, ‘Who asked? And who cares whether you come or not?’

Jack said, ‘I’m coming, but just to see the kid gets into no trouble.’

Robby said, ‘How touching! Or have you yet?’

I said, ‘Look, pack it in, you two. If we’re going to do it let’s go now before I change my crazy mind.’

Robby said, ‘We’re about a quarter of a mile from the house. We’ll leave the car where it is and walk. All we pinch is a few things, valuable, small, resaleable and light. I know just the stuff and I know where it is, so leave the selection to me.’

Scenes From a Burglary

I need hardly remind you, Morgan, that I am not exactly accustomed to burgling houses. True, when climbing up and down my ladder during my Saturday stints of window-cleaning, I have sometimes imagined what burgling a house at night might be like, how I might do it, with what stealth and cunning I would execute the operation—never of course being caught or leaving behind one tell-tale clue to betray my identity. I would even vary my modus operandi, thereby foxing the police, whose routine minds would fruitlessly look for a pattern in case after unsolved case.

But such idle fantasy was no more than pastime speculation, self-hero daydreaming, a hedge against the boredom of polishing vertical glass hour on hour.

This was to be the real thing.

As we walked up the dark lane away from the river, sweat rashed my body.

I am a fool, I thought. What am I doing here?

Was this a dream? A sleeping fantasy too really felt? A nightmare? I had had a hard day, an unusual day; I was not myself; was sleeping without rest.

But I knew it was not so. I had felt similar symptoms before. While going to the dentist to have a broken tooth pulled. While walking to school for examinations. Most recent and vividly of all, while in the ambulance with my father.

Not a dream. Just fear.

I was scared.

My body did not move as it normally does. An act of will was required. I had to make myself walk. Had to monitor myself, as an engineer monitors a faulty engine, making certain I walked toward this unknown house with apparently normal ease, revealing none of my alarm to my accomplices.

But fear itself is a heady excitement.

*

When we reached the house, large glooming in the nightlight dark, solid (how much more solid than in daylight!), forbidding, Robby put up a hand to stop us in our stride as if he were a marine commando in some wartime raid behind enemy lines.

Fear is also a stimulating fantasist.

*

‘Round the back there is an unlocked window that lets into the kitchen,’ Robby whispered, we huddled head-to-head.

‘How do you know?’ I asked.

‘I drummed the place today,’ Robby said.

‘O, god!’ Jack said, derisive, and muffled an unrepentant guffaw.

*

Gravel crunches like boiled sweets when you crush them in your mouth with senseless regard for your teeth. And the noise abraded a sleeping world.

‘Keep on the grass, fool!’ puled Robby.

*

A house about to be burgled is like an animal being hunted. As you stalk closer, you expect its eyes to open and discover your malign purpose and you, its mouth to growl a warning. You wait for it to stand up and charge away. Or, worse, to charge at you. That a house does none of these things makes it all the more menacing.

‘Bloody silly this is, kiddo,’ whispered Jack into my face as we stumbled into each other.

*

‘Nobody ever pinches me,’ said the burglar’s wife to her husband.

*

We reached the cliff face of the house itself, fleas clinging against an elephant.

‘The window is to our left,’ Robby murmured. ‘Edge that way slowly.’

My feet trod soft soil.

‘We’re in a flowerbed,’ I said. ‘Leaving footprints!’

‘Shut it!’ Robby said. ‘Who cares?’

‘The police will care, that’s who.’

Jack’s mouth to my ear, lips tickling as he said, ‘There’ll be no police, Sunshine.’

‘Optimist,’ I whispered.

*

The soles of my feet were tingling in an electrically shocking way. My legs were freeze-dried jelly.

I had felt this before only in one kind of place: when looking down a deep, steep drop, like a precipice or over the edge of a high tower.

*

I needed to urinate. Urgently.

*

‘This is it,’ said Robby, drawing the other two of us close to him, his arms gripping our shoulders. ‘This is the window. It’s pretty narrow, and high up. But I reckon if Jack bends down and you, kiddo, stand on his back you’ll just be able to reach your arm through the ventilator window, open the catch of the window itself, get in, and then open the back door for us.’

[And now, for the first time Oliver, well-nigh mad with grief and terror, saw that housebreaking and robbery, if not murder, were the objects of the expedition. He clasped his hands together, and involuntarily uttered a subdued exclamation of horror. A mist came before his eyes; the cold sweat stood upon his ashy face; his limbs failed him; and he sank upon his knees.

‘Get up!’ murmured Sikes, trembling with rage, and drawing the pistol from his pocket; ‘Get up, or I’ll strew your brains upon the grass.’

‘O! for God’s sake let me go!’ cried Oliver; ‘let me run away and die in the fields. I will never come near London; never, never! O! pray have mercy on me, and do not make me steal. For the love of all bright Angels that rest in Heaven, have mercy upon me!’

The man to whom this appeal was made, swore a dreadful oath, and had cocked his pistol, when Toby, striking it from his grasp, placed his hand upon the boy’s mouth, and dragged him to the house.

‘Hush!’ cried the man; ‘it won’t answer here. Say another word, and I’ll do your business myself with a crack on the head. That makes no noise, and is quite as certain, and more genteel. Here, Bill, wrench the shutter open. He’s game enough now, I’ll engage. I’ve seen older hands of his age took the same way, for a minute or two, on a cold night.’

Sikes, invoking terrific imprecations upon Fagin’s head for sending Oliver on such an errand, plied the crowbar vigorously, but with little noise.]

‘Are you listening?’

‘You mean, I’ve got to go in first?’ I said.

‘That’s it.’

‘Now look, Robby,’ Jack said.

‘Knock it off!’ Robby snapped. A threat, no doubt of it. Then, temperate, ‘He’ll manage. Won’t you, kiddo? All experience, eh?’

‘I’m out of my tiny mind,’ I said.

‘Isn’t everybody?’ Robby said.

*

Q. What did the burglar give his wife for Christmas?

A. A stole.

*

‘Why don’t you go first? You said you’d looked the place over.’

‘Know it like the back of my hand. But I can’t reach the window catch. My arm isn’t long enough. There’s a door just to the left of the window. Open it. One bolt and a Yale. All you do is slip them quietly and we’re in.’

‘I won’t be able to see a damn thing in there. What if I knock over something in the dark? What if there’s a dog?’

‘There’s no dog, and I’ve got a torch. Just by chance! Here.’

*

There was a poore man on a tyme, the whiche vnto theues, that brake into his house on nyght, he sayde on this wyse: syrs, I maruayle, that ye thynke to fynde any thyng here by nyght: for I ensure you I can fynd nothing, whan it is brode day.

By this tale appereth playnly

That pouerte is a welthy mysery.

*

Other people’s houses exude their own smell. House odour. This one smelt of my own armpit fear. My entrance into it was a violation.

*

‘The stuff we want is through here,’ Robby said, taking the torch from me as he came through the door, and leading the way with alarming lack of caution.

*

A comfortable room. Thick-pile carpet. Big, enfolding chairs. High-polished dark oak antique furniture. A wall of books. Ornaments, knick-knacks, many, the kind you do not touch without feeling the depth of your ignorance and the shallowness of your pocket.

I wanted more than anything to cry out, to shout, ‘You are being done!’

*

‘Grab this,’ said Robby, plunging into my involuntary hands a book, leather bound.

‘What is it?’

‘A book.’

‘Fool. What book?’

‘Das Kapital.’

‘Karl Marx.’

‘Educated creep.’

‘Why?’

‘English edition, 1887. Rare. Worth nearly two hundred quid. Maybe more. Not traceable to present owner. Savvy?’

‘Very symbolic!’

‘That too.’

‘Stop arsing about,’ Jack said. ‘Get on with it.’

‘The trouble with you, Jack,’ said Robby, ‘is that you’ve no imagination.’

*

Robby’s hand, cadaverous in the torchlight, reached for a luxury china vase, splendid on the high oak mantel of the fireplace, picked it up. Held it.

slipped/dropped

on to the stone flags of the firehearth

like chippings on a grave

A blaze of shiversound.

*

‘You dropped that flaming thing on purpose!’ Jack said out of the shock.

‘Rubbish!’ Robby said.

There was a scuffle-movement: Jack and Robby together.

The torch dived to the floor. Extinguished.

‘You want to be caught! That’s it, isn’t it!’

‘Sod off!’

Jack said, ‘Where are you, kid?’

‘Here,’ I said, the word all but choked.

Jack said, ‘We’re getting out, quick.’

Stumbling, furniture-blocked steps towards the door.

When the door opened.

Room lights arrested us.

He stood, framed in the doorway, the sittingstanding talking man. At once, sober now, I knew why I had felt I had seen him before.

!! Zap !!

We were burgling Robby’s own father.

We were burgling Robby’s home.

I’d been a fool.

Again.

And fooled.

Meet the twentieth century’s Olympic champion dumdum. The world’s prize turniphead.

The light dawned. Pow!

Too late.

GazZamWamZap.

Pappatalk

‘And what, may I ask, have we here?’ Mr Hode said. ‘What little party game is this? May I join in?’

We none of us replied, but stood like small boys caught scrumping. As we were. Robby’s mouth was bleeding at a corner. Had Jack hit him?

Hode looked at each of us in turn. Robby. Jack. Myself. His eyes brooked no brazen stare. He came to me. Took the book from my unresisting hands, examined it as if for damage.

‘Herr Marx,’ he said. ‘More talked about than read. What was your intention, young man?’

He gave me no time to answer, even had I been able to find my voice.

‘Never mind. The question is purely rhetorical since you cannot stay.’

I glanced at Jack, who nodded peremptorily towards the door.

Robby was still unmoving, his face an agony of anger frustrated by filial embarrassment. I recognized that look at once, I had felt it so often myself. But was this really how one appeared at such times? So peevishly crushed, so lacking in control? So ugly? Just as I recognized the look on Robby’s face, the whole gripped-in stance of his tense body, so I knew too that inside he was a seething confusion of feelings and thoughts: resentment and self-pity and a desperate but ineffective desire to hurt, yet, at the calm centre of his being, also wishing that none of this were so. Wanting, longing even, for it to end. Regretful that his father and himself had come to such a pass. Had Jack been right? Had the accident with the vase been a Freudian slip, or a deliberate act? Whichever, it had a necessary purpose: to get Robby (and us too?) caught.

All along Robby had known how this would end, had willed it to end this way, no matter how he might try to convince himself, as he would, that it had not been so. I knew because I had done the same, and had now to admit it to myself. Standing there in the sullen silence of that unfamiliar room I could admit it to myself, if yet to no one else. Looking at the tortured figure by the cold fireplace made any further self-deception impossible . . . Undesirable.

(It might seem strange to you, reading this, that these thoughts should strike me at that moment. It seems strange to me now too, writing them down. But they did, though as a flash of insight rather than in the linear logic of printed words in neat procession across a page.)

All day I had felt drawn to Robby. I had not been able to resist that underskin of violent energy, that blush of fanatic charm. But in this same instant of insight, fascination vanished as mysteriously and as rapidly as it had seized me. In that second Robby had shown me myself.

Was it cruel selfishness, an ugly weakness in me (another?!) that at this same second I lost all interest in him? Whether it was so or not, I must confess that I did. I knew him, you see, what he was and why he was. All sorts of jigsaw moments from our day together fell now into place, and I knew him. Besides, too much of what I now understood spoke to me about myself, reflected me as if I were looking in a mirror. Perhaps my abrupt loss of interest was an act of self-defence as much as of selfishness? I acted to save myself while there was still time; I could not help but sense that Robby was already lost.

‘You can find your own way out, I take it?’ said Mr Hode. He turned to Jack. ‘I think you too had better leave, Jack. I’m sure you would not want to overstay your welcome. Do call and pick up your things another day, if you’d rather.’

‘Turn him out and I go as well. For good,’ said Robby, clench-mouthed and still unmoving.

His father did not take his eyes from Jack. ‘I think Robby and I ought to discuss matters in private, if you wouldn’t mind, Jack.’

‘You heard me,’ said Robby.

There was a moment’s silence. Tense. A fulcrum. Whatever was to be done had to be done now. Afterwards would be too late. A private war and a private peace turned on this point in time.

Jack sighed. ‘I’m going, Robby,’ he said. ‘It’s best. There’s nowt now, you know that.’

‘I’m glad you’re being sensible,’ said Hode.

‘Sensible!’ shouted Robby. ‘O, Christ!’ He turned and sat, hunched, in a chair that flanked the fire, dabbing a hand at his bleeding mouth.

‘Well?’ said Hode to Jack and myself.

Our final cue to leave. But despite my loss of interest in Robby, I felt a twinge of guilt at leaving him to such defeat. Not he himself, but he anyone.

‘Perhaps we should talk all this over together?’ I said with pale conviction.

Hode rounded on me. ‘Young man,’ he said, ‘I do not know who you are, nor why you are here. But I saw the trouble you helped cause tonight, and that is enough for me. As far as I am concerned you have no business in this house, nor is there anything I wish to discuss with you. You may leave now, or I shall call the police and have you charged with breaking and entering. Which shall it be?’

One of the worst things about being our age is the way an adult like Hode can beat you down with words—or me anyway; I expect you, Morgan, would have withstood him. Your only answer—mine anyway—is either to stand there flabbergasted or to lash out in uncontrolled anger and make an idiot of yourself. This time I was reduced to an angry flabbergast. From which Jack rescued me.

‘How-way, kiddo,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’

Nightcap

Outside the night was frosty. I realized I was lathed in sweat, was flushed.

We paused in the road, the moon shining through the leaves of overhanging trees, brindling the surface.

‘What now?’ I said, feeling suddenly lost. Abandoned. Empty. Shock, I suppose, after the excitements.

‘I’m going to doss down in the shed at work,’ Jack said. ‘It’s just down the road a bit. There’s some sacks and we could brew up on the stove. Want to come?’

I had heard him; but my mind was still catching up.

‘What gets me,’ I said sullensick, ‘is that all the time he was just using me.’

Jack laughed, a sound like the call of a preying night bird. ‘O, aye?’ he said.

‘Well, wasn’t he?’ I said, defiant.

‘Aye, I suppose he was.’

‘You know he was. He was planning it with you all along, from when we were in the pub at lunch time.’

‘Yes. I didn’t know all the details. But I knew the kind of thing it was likely to be.’

‘And you didn’t warn me.’

Jack said nothing; gazed at me in the moongloom.

‘All right,’ I said, ‘so he was your mate.’

‘And you were like a rabbit spelled by a fox. Even if I’d told you, you’d still have done what he wanted.’

He was right, I knew.

‘Maybe. But it was the way he used me that gets my gut.’

‘So he used you, Sunshine. What were you doing?’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘He used you, sure. But you must have been using him. And me an’all.’

Experience. It’s all experience.

‘How do you know what I was doing?’

That bird of prey laugh again.

‘Because everybody is using everybody else all the time, kiddo. We’re all users. That’s what people are.’

Why did I laugh? For I did. And felt myself again. Almost refreshed, even if tired. Very tired.

‘You’re a cynic, Jack, you know that?’

‘I know I’m nowt of the sort. Now are you coming with me or not?’

It would have been another experience; but I could not. It was too much. Like everything else, it seems, you can have too much experience for one day.

‘No thanks, Jack, not tonight.’

‘I can promise you a good time.’

‘I’ll see you around, eh?’

‘I hope, bonny lad.’

‘What’ll you do now?’

‘Hang about Richmond for a day or two, just in case Robby . . . But he won’t. It’s done.’

‘And if it is?’

‘I’ll move on somewhere. Dunno where. Doesn’t matter. There’s always sommat wherever you go.’ That laugh again.

‘So long then.’

‘So long. Take care. Sunshine.’

He turned and walked away up the moonspeckled road, a slight figure in that chequered light, despite his bulk. His feet made no sound. He might have been a ghost.

When he was out of sight, I walked back down the lane towards the river and Robby’s car where I had left my pack. I thought of spending the night there, where we had sat earlier.

As I turned to go, there came from the Hodes’ house the sound of voices raised in argument. I could not make out what was being said, only the hard, brutal clash of anger. Nor could I distinguish son’s voice from father’s. They were as one sound, one voice, like a man battling against himself.

1 All right, all right, I admit it! I got this idea for telling my tale from At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O’Brien (which I have been reading recently with, I might add, often puzzled pleasure). But then, to be fair, I expect he pinched it from somebody else. (Nothing is safe these days.) But from whom? James Joyce I’ll bet. I’ve discovered that almost all the interesting things contemporary writers do they get from his Ulysses. Which I have never managed to read beyond see here. (I’ve only tried twice, I confess. But Midge says everybody talks about Ulysses and how it is the greatest novel of the twentieth century but that few people have actually ever read it right through to the end. So I don’t feel that guilty. I’ve a few years left to try it again.) But working on the principle that there is nothing new in this world, where did Joyce get the idea from? I asked Midge. He said, ‘Good question. Probably from Duns Scotus, or one of those forgotten Jesuit theologians Joyce was brought up knowing about at his ghastly school. It sounds to me like the kind of way Jesuits would argue. But go and find out for yourself, lad. Why expect me to know and do all your work?’ Typical Midge!