10-Lb Penalty

by 10-Lb Penalty (v4. 0) (epub)

  Crystal Harley knelt beside me, dabbing bloody trickles with tissues and said worriedly, ‘Do you think I’d better come into work tomorrow?’

  Paul and Isobel Bethune illicitly drove into the pedestrian-only precinct. Emergencies made new rules, the local councillor said, bustling towards my father, presenting a surface of urgent concern, all camaraderie for him and with hail-fellow greetings individually for the firemen.

  Isobel asked me weakly if I were all right.

  ‘Of course he’s not,’ Crystal snapped. ‘He jumped through fire and hit the ground. What do you expect?’

  ‘And… er… his father?’

  ‘His father will win the seat,’ Crystal said.

  God bless politics, I thought.

  ‘Paul was out at a meeting,’ Isobel said. ‘He came home to collect me when he heard about the fire, to see if there was anything I could do to help. It always looks better if I’m with him, he says.’

  Water plumed out of the huge appliance and sizzled on the flames and ran out of the building again, soaking the cobbles. I and my red blanket dripped and chilled.

  Another vast tanker in the car park at the rear raised soaring fountains above the roof so that the two arcs of glittering Niagara met and married and fell together as monstrous rain. Leaflets and junk a fiery furnace; two vulnerable organisms shivering outside.

  The yellow-helmets prodigally aimed their hoses at the still dark buildings next to the blazing shops and, in time, inevitably, the ravaging tongues of fire ran out of fuel and began to diminish, to whisper instead of roar, to give up the struggle and leave the battlefield so that what fell from the sky into the square was no longer sparks but hot clinging ash, and what assaulted the senses wasn’t heat but the acrid after-smell of burning.

  Someone fetched the doctor who had seen to my father’s ankle three days earlier; he peered into my eyes with bright lights and into my ears and felt the bump on my head and bound up blisters in huge padded dressings so that they wouldn’t burst and get infected, and he agreed with my father that all a healthy boy needed was to see him in the morning.

  My father solved the interim by enlisting the sympathy of the manager of the Sleeping Dragon, who gave us a bedroom and whose wife found me some clothes.

  ‘You poor dears… you poor dears…’ She mothered us, kind, but enjoying it, and both she and her husband happily welcomed the reporters from the London dailies who thronged through the doors the next day.

  Usher Rudd’s admittedly brilliant photograph of my father in mid-leap with the flaming window behind him made the front pages, not only of the Hoopwestern Gazette and the next edition of the Quindle Diary (JULIARD JINX) but of every major paper in the land (JULIARD JUMPS) and hot on the heels of the factual news came endless comment and criticism and picking-to-pieces.

  People will always tell you what you should have done. People will tell you what they would have done if they had woken in the night with fire underneath them. People will say that absolutely the first thing to do was call the fire brigade, and no one could be bothered to say how do I call the brigade when the only telephone is downstairs surrounded by flames? How do you call a fire brigade when the telephone line has melted?

  Everyone can think logically afterwards, but in the heat and the smell and the noise and the danger, analytical reasoning is more or less out of the question.

  People tend to think that wildly unreasonable behaviour in terrifying circumstances can be called ‘panic’, and forgiven, but it’s not so much panic, a form of ultimate illogical fear, but a lack of time to think things through.

  Perhaps my father and I would have done differently if we had been presented with the situation as a theoretical exercise with a correct and an incorrect solution.

  Perhaps we should have thrown the mattresses out of the window as a possible way of breaking our fall. Perhaps, if we could have got them through the window. As it was, we both nearly died and, as it was, we both lived, but more by luck than reason.

  Don’t waste time with clothes, they’ll tell you. Better go naked into this world than clothed into the next. But they – ‘they’, whoever they are – haven’t jumped in front of the media’s sharpened lenses.

  I thought afterwards that I should at least have dashed into the burning sitting-room for my jacket and jockey’s helmet, instead of bothering with the taps. Also I should have wrapped towels round my hands and feet before grasping the window frame.

  But I don’t think my father ever regretted the near-to-lethal seconds he spent in putting on his shirt and trousers. He knew in some way, even in that life-or-death split second, that a photograph of him jumping half naked from the flames would haunt his whole career. He knew, even in that fraught moment, that an orderly presentation was everything. Not even the worst that Usher Rudd could dredge up in the future ever showed George Juliard as anything but a fast-thinking headliner who was at his very best – who put his shoes on – in a crisis.

  The police investigation sauntered upwards from Joe, whose mother drove a school bus, to higher ranks at county level, but the firefighters couldn’t swear the two bow-fronts had been torched and no one found a .22 rifle to match the lost-again bullet, and Foster Fordham’s report on wax in the Range Rover’s sump was judged inconclusive.

  George Juliard might have been the target of three attempts on his candidature, if not on his life, but again he might not. There were no obvious suspects.

  In the August doldrums for news, London editors gave the puzzle two full days of wide coverage. George Juliard shone on television nationwide. Every single voter in the Hoopwestern constituency knew who JULIARD was.

  While my father dealt with publicity people and Mervyn Teck drove around like an agitated bluebottle searching for inexpensive substitute headquarters, I spent most of the Sunday sitting in an armchair by the window of our Sleeping Dragon room, letting bruises and grazes heal themselves, and looking across the square at the burnt-out building opposite.

  From somewhere up here, I thought, from somewhere here among the many hanging baskets of geraniums (her Leonard, the nurseryman, had designed them, Mrs Kitchens had told me with pride), from among all these big clusters of scarlet pompoms and little blue flowers whose name I didn’t know, and from among the fluffy white flowers that filled and rounded the bright living displays decorating the whole long frontage of the Sleeping Dragon, from somewhere up here someone had aimed a .22 rifle at my father.

  The marksman probably hadn’t been in this room given to us in the night, which was much further along towards the Town Hall than the main door of the hotel from which we’d walked. A shot from where I sat would have had to take into account that the target wasn’t walking straight ahead but moving sideways. A stalker’s shot; but not a stalker’s gun.

  A ricochet could, of course, take a bullet anywhere, but I thought it unlikely that a ricochet from where I sat would have turned and hit the charity shop.

  At one point, shuffling on the padded blisters, I explored the length of the hotel’s first floor, glimpsing the square through an open doorway or two and coming to a little lounge area furnished with armchairs and small tables that I reckoned lay directly above the front hall and main door, accessible to the world. Straight ahead through the window from there was the unmarked path I’d taken with my father across the cobbles.

  Anyone… anyone… if they had the nerve, could have stood among the floor-length curtains, opened the window, rested the barrel of a .22 on the windowsill and shot through the geraniums and the warm night.

  My father, interested, asked the manager for the names of the people sleeping in the bedrooms on Wednesday night, but although the register was freely opened, no one familiar appeared.

  ‘Nice try, Ben,’ my father sighed; and the police had the same nice try in due course, with similar results.

  By Monday morning Mervyn had rented an empty shop in a side street and borrowed a desk for Crystal and some flip-up chairs. The campaign hiccupped for two days wh
ile he cajoled his friendly neighbourhood printer into replacement leaflet and poster production at grand-prix speed and near-to-cost prices, but by late Tuesday afternoon the indefatigable witches, Faith, Marge and Lavender, had turned the empty shop into a fully working office complete with teapot and mobile phone.

  On Monday and Tuesday George Juliard filled the newspapers, and enlivened some chat shows, and on Wednesday morning a miracle happened.

  Mervyn had sticky-taped a new large-scale map onto the wall and was pointing out to me the roads I should drive along (feet OK by now) for Faith and Lavender to ring as yet untroubled door-bells. In the absence of a megaphone (burned) I would please occasionally toot the horn, just enough to announce our presence but not enough, he lectured me, to anger anyone trying to get a baby to sleep. The mothers of babies (he wagged a finger at me) swayed Xs in the polls like pendulums. Kiss a baby: win a vote. A hundred thousand politicians couldn’t all be historically wrong.

  ‘I’ll kiss every baby in sight,’ I promised recklessly.

  He frowned at me, never one to take a joke. I was reminded of my father’s most recent lesson: ‘Never ever make a joke to the police, they have no sense of humour. Never make a political joke, it will always be considered an insult. Always remember that umbrage can be taken by the lift of an eyebrow. Remember that if offence can possibly be taken, it will be.’

  I’d gazed at my father. ‘Are people that silly?’

  ‘Silly,’ he said with mock severity, ‘isn’t a word you should ever apply to people. They may be totally stupid, in fact, but if you call them silly you’ve lost their vote.’

  ‘And you want silly people to vote for you?’

  He laughed. ‘Don’t make jokes.’

  He had gone to London on Wednesday morning when the miracle happened. There were just Mervyn, Crystal, Faith, Marge, Lavender and me in the makeshift office, just the bunch of us putting the best face possible on the lack of computer (for the totals spent on tea-bags), copier (schedules for volunteers) and fax (reports from distant galaxies like Quindle).

  Orinda walked in.

  All business stopped.

  She wore pale citrus green: trousers, jacket and headband. Gold chains. She carried, beside the black lizard handbag, a substantial roll of papers.

  She looked around the bare room, smiled faintly at Marge and fixed her gaze on me.

  ‘I want to talk to you,’ she said calmly. ‘Outside.’

  I followed where she led. We stood on the pavement in the sun, with shoppers passing by.

  ‘Since Saturday,’ she announced, ‘I have been considering things. On Sunday morning, at half past eight or so, a newspaperman appeared at my house in an invasive procedure I believe is called “door stepping”.’

  She paused. I nodded faintly.

  ‘He asked if I was glad or sorry that you hadn’t been burned to death. You and your father, that is.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘It was the first I’d heard about the fire.’

  ‘I’m surprised no one had phoned you.’

  ‘I unplug the telephone when I sleep. I find it hard to sleep in any case.’

  I said, ‘Oh,’ again, vaguely.

  ‘The journalist wanted to know my opinion of the information he’d been given that close-to-death attacks had been made on George Juliard so that he would have to retire from the candidacy, clearing the way for my return.’

  She paused, studying my face, and continued: ‘I see that that thought isn’t new to you.’

  ‘No, but I don’t think you did it.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘You’re hurt. You’re furious. But you wouldn’t murder.’

  ‘When will you be eighteen?’

  ‘In ten days.’

  ‘Then consider this a coming-of-age present.’ She thrust the roll of papers into my hands. ‘This is for you. It is because of you…’ She stopped abruptly, swallowing. ‘Use it in any way you like.’

  With curiosity I unrolled the stiff sheets, having to hold them wide to prevent them rolling up again. The top one, in very large capital letters, read:

  ORINDA NAGLE SAYS VOTE FOR JULIARD

  My mouth, I know, fell open.

  ‘There are ten of them,’ she said simply. ‘They’re all the same. I had them printed this morning. They’ll print dozens, if you like.’

  ‘Orinda…’ I was all but speechless.

  ‘You showed me… at the races…’ she began, and stopped again. ‘You’re so very young, but you showed me it’s possible to bear an unbearable disappointment. You made me look into myself. Anyway, I will not have people thinking I would set fire to our old headquarters in order to get rid of your father, so I’ll join him. I’ll support him from now on in every way. I should never have listened to all those people who told me he had robbed me. I don’t know, to be really truthful, and the truth is awful… I don’t know that I wasn’t relieved not to be forced to go to Westminster, but I do like working in the constituency and that’s what hurts most… that the people I’ve worked so hard for passed me over for some stranger from outside.’

  She stopped talking and looked at me in a sort of desperation to see if I could possibly understand, and I understood so well that I leaned forward impulsively and kissed her on the cheek.

  A camera flashed.

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ Orinda screeched. ‘He follows me round.’

  Usher Rudd, with the advantage of surprise, was already scuttling away down the street to get lost in bunches of shoppers.

  ‘He follows me, too,’ I said, putting a hand on Orinda’s arm, to deter her trying to catch him. ‘You warned me and I told my father… but unless Usher Rudd breaks the law it seems he can’t be stopped, and the law is still on the side of copy-cat Rudds.’

  ‘But my private life is my own affair!’ She glanced at me as if it were my fault that it wasn’t.

  I said, ‘Drug dealers would be out of business if people didn’t want drugs.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The so-called war on drugs is fought against the wrong people. Lock up the users. Lock up the demand. Lock up human nature.’

  She looked bewildered. ‘What have drugs to do with Usher Rudd?’

  ‘If people didn’t flock to buy his sleaze, he wouldn’t push it.’

  ‘And you mean… they always will?’

  She needed no answer. She followed me into the shop/office and, after delivering her news, enjoyed a hugging session with Mervyn (no photo) and an ambiguous welcome from the three witches, who had with pink arousal transferred their effective allegiance to the new order.

  ‘Where are you canvassing today, Mervyn?’ Orinda asked, and he showed her on the map, with the unexpected result that when I drove the Range Rover round Hoopwestern that morning I had on board Mervyn, Orinda, Faith and Lavender, and all of Orinda’s roll of commitment flattened out as placards.

  As Mervyn had telephoned the editor of the Gazette – gasps of shock at having to U-turn his anti-all-politicians spin – we were greeted in the car park behind the burned shop by a hastily assembled crowd, by the leader-writer of the Gazette (the paper was short of news) and by the cameraman who had besottedly followed Orinda with his loving lens round the reception before the dinner a week earlier at the Sleeping Dragon.

  Orinda flirted again with his lens (or with him – much the same thing) and told everyone prettily through a non-squeaking microphone that George Juliard, undoubtedly on the brink of becoming a nationally acclaimed politician, was the best possible substitute for her beloved husband Dennis, who had dedicated his life to the good citizens of this glorious part of Dorset.

  Applause, applause. She appeared in the sitting-rooms of Hoopwestern on the lunchtime television news against the only slightly orchestrated cheers.

  By the time my father returned on the train from London he’d heard of Orinda’s media conference with mixed feelings – she might be stealing his limelight or she might just be saving his life – but at another church
hall meeting of the faithful that evening he embraced her in a warm hug (reciprocated) that would have been unthinkable a day earlier.

  Not everyone was pleased.

  Orinda’s shadow, Anonymous Lover Wyvern, followed her around like thunder. She, dressed in blackberry-coloured satin and glowing with a sense of generosity and virtue, kept giving him enquiring looks as if unsure of the source of his dudgeon. In her inner release she didn’t seem to realise, as I did, albeit only slowly through the evening, that in dumping her anger at not being selected she had in some way lessened his status. He had been Dennis Nagle’s best friend, but Orinda was leaving her Dennis behind.

  Dearest Polly, to my surprise, positively scowled, even though she had herself delivered Orinda to her change of heart.

  ‘I didn’t count on such a radical about-face,’ Polly complained. ‘She’s cast herself in the ongoing role of constituency wife! There’s no doubt she was good at it, but she isn’t George’s wife and she can’t surely imagine she can go on opening fêtes and things, and I bet that’s what she’s got in mind. Whatever did you say to her at the races?’

  I said, ‘I thought you wanted her on my father’s side.’

  ‘Well, yes, I do. But I don’t want her going around saying all the time that she was the one we should have picked.’

  ‘Get him into Parliament, Polly,’ I said. ‘Put him on the escalator, then he’ll deal with Orinda and everything else.’

  ‘How old did you say you are?’

  ‘Eighteen at the end of next week. And it was you, dearest Polly, who said I look into people’s minds.’

  She asked in some alarm, ‘Do you see into mine?’

  ‘Sort of.’

  She laughed uneasily; but I saw nothing but good.

  One could say the opposite about Leonard Kitchens. I had come to notice that the tilt of his prominent moustache acted like a weather-vane, signalling the direction of his feelings. The upward thrust that evening was combative and self-important, a combination looking for a fight. Bulky Mrs Kitchens (in large pink flowers printed on dark blue) followed her Leonard’s progress round the meeting with anxiety for a while and then made a straight line to my side.