12
There was talk of tying Edward and Simpson to their chairs with rope. Simpson glanced accusingly at Edward but said nothing. The gunmen were worried that with Widnes in the bathroom and Ginger upstairs, it left only Harry to deal with a possible rebellion in the kitchen. Their injured confederate was unlikely to move fast in an emergency. Binny said she didn’t own any rope.
‘You needn’t worry about us, dears,’ Alma told them. ‘We shan’t be any trouble.’
‘Don’t you have a washing line?’ asked Ginger. ‘Where do you hang your stuff?’
‘I go to the bagwash down the road,’ Binny admitted. ‘There’s a spin-drier. I don’t need to put it in the yard.’ Years ago she had pegged the clothes out to dry in the back, but it was such a business tripping down the steps that she kept forgetting where she’d put the jeans and the pyjamas. When she did remember, they were either wetter than ever or stiff with frost. In the summer the soot from the factory chimney two streets away drifted like pollen across the gardens. She’d stopped bothering.
Harry went upstairs and brought down a sheet from the divan bed. Binny thought he was going to say it was a disgraceful colour, but he made no comment. He tore it into strips and sat Edward under the bulb in the kitchen. Binny felt possibly the government would give her money to buy new linen – there must be some kind of compensation for a situation like this, unless it came under an act of God.
Edward’s legs were tied together at the ankles. He found himself smirking with embarrassment as he helpfully stretched his feet in front of him. There was a moment, he realised, when everything was too late, but he couldn’t be sure which moment it was. It may already have passed. It would be foolish to be beaten insensible for nothing. They tied his wrists behind his back and finally he was tethered to the chair itself with several bands of sheeting.
‘Move about,’ said Ginger.
Edward did as he was told.
‘More,’ Ginger commanded.
Red in the face, Edward lunged obediently backwards and forwards. The chair fell apart. As he jerked his arms involuntarily to save himself from hitting the floor, the cotton bandages gave way.
‘Christ Almighty,’ cried Ginger. His grip tightened on his gun.
Edward wet himself.
13
B inny woke thinking she heard children crying. She remained for several seconds with eyes shut, cheek pressed to the rumpled tablecloth. She identified the sound as that of cats yowling somewhere beyond the back yard. Still, her heart continued to beat fast with terror. She thought of a little girl, in the dark and afraid, standing in ankle socks on brown linoleum, wailing for her Mummy. Tears came to her eyes. When the children were younger and one of them had a feverish temperature, she was reduced to the same state of mind as if the child were already dead. If they were late home from school, dallying at the ice cream van, she imagined them lying in the centre of the road, vanilla cones upended in the dust, stricken down by some heavy vehicle. Sometimes she would torture herself with images of small coffins heaped with flowers and find herself at tea-time standing at the window, staring mesmerised at the bright blue sky, humming fragments of hymns learnt long ago on Sunday afternoons. When in the first years of her marriage she had confided these unhappy thoughts to her husband, he hadn’t understood. It was like wading through mud to reach him. ‘Don’t be silly, love,’ he’d said. ‘Don’t be morbid.’ Finally, worn down by such graphic descriptions of her maternal feelings, he had laughed uneasily and called her a neurotic bitch. She was sure he was right.
Raising her head, she looked emotionally about the room. Alma and Muriel lay upon the sofa, wheezing as they slept. As if hurled from a fast-moving train, they sprawled in grotesque disorder, pale legs entwined, sunk within the hollow of the couch. There was no sign of Edward or Simpson.
Earlier, Ginger had lined them up along the hall and allowed them to go singly into the bathroom. He’d kept the door ajar. Edward, for whom it was too late, had remained in the kitchen. When herded again into the front room, Binny had wanted to lie down on the floor with him and rest, but he’d refused. ‘I stink,’ he’d said forlornly. ‘Leave me alone.’
‘I don’t care,’ she’d cried. ‘You’re fragrant as apple blossom to me.’
‘For God’s sake,’ he’d said, and turning away had sat down beneath the shuttered windows with his back to the radiator and closed his eyes.
After a time Simpson had joined him. They slumped shoulder to shoulder, heads lolling, and drifted into sleep. Edward’s pipe had fallen to his lap. Binny had placed it carefully on the table. She would have liked to hold it to her heart, but its smell affected her.
The pipe had gone. She knelt and searched for it on the floor. When she stood up the tips of her fingers were stained with pink. She persuaded herself that it was wine not blood, standing there with her hand extended toward the light of the kitchen as though she were Lady Macbeth. Trembling, she went into the hall. Propped against the front door sat the injured woman, chin on her breast and gun laid across her knee.
Binny climbed the stairs and went into the bedroom. She stopped motionless on the threshold of the door, bewildered by the moon. She had been so long entombed in the dimly lit kitchen that she was unprepared for the sweetness of the air she breathed, the stretch of stormy sky beyond the windows, milky with light, filled with white clouds ballooning high above the roof tops. She felt that the room too was drifting in space, dappled with the shadows of leaves, of railings, and turning, turning . . .
‘What’s up?’ said Ginger, ‘What’s Harry want?’
‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘He’s asleep by the stove. What have you done to the gentlemen? What’s happened to Edward?’
‘Is he the one that pissed hisself?’ he asked. The large table had been dragged across the room and laid on its side to form a barricade. Ginger crouched behind it. The tip of his gun glittered like a spear in the moonlight.
‘He wasn’t scared,’ defended Binny. ‘He couldn’t hold on any longer. Where is he?’
‘In the bathroom. They’re all right.’
‘Someone’s bleeding,’ she accused. ‘There’s blood on the carpet.’
‘The bald bloke hurt his ankle,’ Ginger said. ‘It had nothing to do with us.’
Binny advanced further into the room. She noticed a pane of glass had been broken in the bottom half of the window. She looked curiously into the street. It was empty of cars, of people; lights burned on the stairwells of the flats and along the deserted balconies. At the corner, by a plane tree turned to silver under the blazing moon, a solitary furniture van was parked. ‘What would you have done,’ she wanted to know, ‘if the children had been here? My children?’
He shrugged.
‘They’d have been frightened.’
‘They’d have been asleep,’ he said sullenly. ‘Wouldn’t they?’
‘Alison watches late-night films sometimes. She could have been up.’
He said nothing. He was like her son Gregory when she started to tell him how tired she felt; his mind switched off.
‘You shouldn’t involve other people. It’s none of my business what you’ve been doing, but you shouldn’t have brought it here. You don’t know how inconvenient it is.’
‘Shut up,’ he said. ‘I never asked to be here.’
‘Alison would have been frightened out of her wits. Smashing the pictures in the hall, fusing the lights—’
‘We never fused them.’
‘Beating that woman—’
‘You know nothing about it,’ he muttered. ‘It’s not what you think.’
‘Children are very impressionable. It’s like food – we are what we eat. They can be influenced for life. It doesn’t matter to us . . . we’ve had our lives.’
He stared at her. She couldn’t see his expression.
‘Well,’ she amended. ‘You haven’t, of course. You’re only young. You won’t remember that film, will you, when the heroine walked into the ocean playi
ng her violin? She said more or less the same thing. That’s why she did it.’
She didn’t worry whether Ginger thought the strain of the last few hours had unhinged her; she was choosing her words with care. Far away, like a distant gust of wind, she heard those fornicating cats, thinly screaming. She was ready at the slightest hint of irritation on his part to change her attitude, to moderate her tone of voice. She would never have spoken in this fanciful way to Harry or the violent man in the bathroom. They were not the same as Ginger. For many years, in the privacy of her own home, she had been a voyeur of murder, arson and war. Sitting passively on her sofa she had followed in the wake of tanks and ships and planes. She had seen shells burst in the night like fireworks, flame-throwers curling like rainbows above the earth. She had watched little bombs falling, wobbling like harmless darts through fluffy clouds. Between placing the kettle on the gas and the water coming to the boil, whole cities disintegrated, populations burned. A thousand deaths, real and fictional, had been enacted before her eyes. Once, in real life, she’d been an innocent bystander when a woman was attacked with an axe. Head elongated, wearing a bloody rag of a towel like an Indian turban, the victim was helped from the house. Binny found the moans simulated, the suffering unconvincing; the scene lacked reality, the woman lacked star quality. Ginger’s voice, and that bowed head theatrically lit by moonlight, were familiar to her. She could believe in him. He was the wayward young man in westerns and gangster movies and war films who at the end, sickened by his less stylish companions, proved to have a heart of gold.
‘I don’t want to know the details,’ she continued. ‘What you’ve done, you’ve done. That’s your affair. But you ought to tell us what you’re going to do next. After all we’re on your side whether we like it or not. Why on earth did you have to break this window?’ She bent down fussily and inspected the fragments of glass on the dusty floor.
‘I kept dozing off,’ he explained. ‘It wouldn’t open. I needed air.’
‘Yes, well,’ she said. ‘That’s one way of getting it, I suppose. The paint’s stuck. There’s so much to do in a house this size. I can’t be expected to do everything.’ She gazed, consumed with self-pity, into the street below. ‘They’ve left us alone,’ she lamented. ‘Not one single bobby. They don’t care what happens to us.’
‘Don’t you believe it,’ Ginger said. He pointed at the van on the corner. ‘That’s their H.Q. And there’s men up there.’
‘Where?’ she asked. She squatted beside him and peered intently over the edge of the table. ‘Those are birds, surely?’
‘There,’ he said impatiently. He held her chin and tilted it in the right direction.
His fingers were thin and strong; she could feel his breath upon her cheek. She wasn’t worried by his proximity. It wasn’t only that he regarded her as eligible for the old age pension; she’d enough knowledge of men to know he couldn’t fancy her. ‘Oh yes,’ she cried, ‘I see’, though all she saw on the slopes of the moon-flooded roof were pigeons perched in sleep.
‘I keep thinking of steak,’ said Ginger. ‘I thought I heard it spitting under the grill a moment ago.’
‘We haven’t got any steak,’ she said.
‘It’s those leaves on the balcony,’ he told her. ‘That ivy, flickering against the railings.’
‘There’s some sausages in the fridge. You’re very welcome.’
He made a face. ‘Muck,’ he said contemptuously.
She hoped he was referring to sausages in general. After Harry’s disparaging remarks about cleanliness she was unduly sensitive. She looked at him. There were creases at the side of his mouth. He wasn’t as young as she’d first taken him to be – perhaps prison life had aged him. ‘Was it awful inside?’ she asked.
They stayed like two monkeys on the floor, balanced on haunches, hands swinging loosely between their knees.
He stared at her blankly. ‘Inside where?’
‘Well, prison.’
‘How should I know?’ he said. ‘I’ve never been there.’
‘No, of course not,’ she agreed. ‘I was just curious.’ He had a surprised kind of face, the eyebrows so pale as to be unnoticeable. His lips couldn’t quite close over his teeth. He looked good-tempered and expectant, as though waiting for some joke to be told. ‘I’ve visited me brother, though. In Walton.’
‘Is that a prison?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It’s a good few years ago now.’
‘It must be terrible to be shut away. It must finish a man.’
‘Get off,’ he scoffed. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. Our Billy never looked fitter in his life. When I went to see him you’d have mistaken the blokes inside for the visitors. It was me and me sister looked half-dead.’
‘That’s interesting,’ said Binny.
‘Stands to reason, doesn’t it? They put him to bed at eight o’clock and he had a bath three times a week. He got into music and foreign languages. He sat up half the night with his earphones.’
‘How amazing,’ said Binny.
‘You ask our Billy anything about Mahler and Stravinsky and he’ll tell you. Anything at all. He knows them backwards.’
She was resentful. She recalled the times she’d tried to listen to Vera Lynn on the gramophone and Sybil Evans’s curtailing her with a knock on the bedroom wall.
‘It’s another world,’ she said. ‘I can’t pretend to understand.’ She couldn’t think what else to say. She didn’t like to ask him what he was doing in her house if he hadn’t escaped from prison. It wouldn’t do to irritate him, not when they were getting on so well. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘Why don’t I go downstairs and make us all something to eat? There’s brown bread and some nice cheese. That would do you good. It’s wholemeal bread. Then you could tell us what’s happening . . . you know . . . put us in the picture. Edward’s awfully upset.’ She hesitated, wondering how much to tell him.
‘Your hubby?’ Ginger said. ‘The fat bloke?’
‘He’s not that fat,’ she protested. ‘It’s only his stomach. He eats a lot and sits down all day.’ Ginger was watching the street, the roof opposite, the furniture van on the corner. ‘You see he’s not really supposed to be here. He’s a kind man, a good man. He is, really. I know he sounds pompous and he’s a bit crippled by being educated at that posh school, but he’d never let anybody down. He’s got values. I haven’t got values.’ She could feel her lip beginning to quiver. ‘That’s why the children take no notice of me. I don’t give them a lead. Alison takes notice of me – she gives me cuddles, but then she’s only a baby. Edward’s different from me. He’s got a wonderful sense of responsibility. It weighs him down. And he’s awfully brave. Why, when he went for the gun—’
‘What gun?’ asked Ginger.
‘When he was little,’ she improvised. ‘He had this nanny who kept pushing her babies in the mud. Though he was only a boy he got his gun out and stopped her. It was very brave.’
‘What mud?’ Ginger asked.
‘In the country. It rained all the time. Of course, it was his background. He has this thing about playing the game and keeping a stiff upper lip.’
‘He didn’t have a stiff upper anything a couple of hours ago,’ Ginger said cruelly.
‘Don’t,’ she pleaded. ‘You shouldn’t make fun of him. I can’t see why you don’t let him go. He’s like a fish out of water. You could just shove him through the front door. He won’t give away any information, not if he gives you his word. He’s like that.’
‘No,’ Ginger said.
‘What difference would it make?’
‘I’ll say this for you,’ remarked Ginger. ‘You’re loyal. You stand by your bloke.’
‘He’s married,’ she confessed. ‘He’s got a wife.’
‘It’s bloody disgusting,’ said Ginger. He didn’t alter the reasonable tone of his voice, nor did he look at her. He’d placed his hands on the edge of the table as if to steady himself.
She stood up and moved re
gretfully to the door. ‘I egged him on,’ she insisted. ‘It wasn’t his fault. He was the innocent party.’ She didn’t wait for Ginger to reply. She realised she’d made a mistake telling him about Edward and herself – he was far too narrow in his outlook to make allowances.
The woman in the hall was awake and massaging her ribs. By her side lay a large celluloid doll without clothes. ‘You,’ she called. ‘If Ginger’s finished with you, make us a drink. I’m parched.’ She was grinning.
‘I’m just about to put the kettle on,’ said Binny. She went through into the kitchen. She didn’t feel at all sorry for the woman and was puzzled by this lack of compassion. She stepped over the still slumbering Harry and put the kettle on the stove. She took cups and a bottle of milk to the table. Alma sat hunched in a corner of the sofa, knees drawn up to her chin. Muriel lay face downwards, large legs thrust beyond Alma’s shoulders, feet braced against the wall. ‘You’re awake,’ said Binny.
‘No,’ snapped Alma. ‘I always sleep with my eyes open.’ She was now perfectly sober and feeling belligerent.
‘I’ve been upstairs talking to Ginger,’ Binny told her. ‘He’s not at all menacing once you get through to him. I was terrified they’d done something to Edward. I learnt quite a lot. He’s going to tell us what he intends to do.’
Injury Time Page 10
