by Dave Wallis
At that moment there was a sound of a distant scooter engine and they ran to their bikes and grabbed their weapons.
A solitary rider appeared and dithered to a stop when he came abreast of them. “It’s O.K. chum,” shouted Ernie. “Just so long as you’re not asking us to take on that gang of Kings.”
Charlie watched the scooterist dismount and stroll towards them. He was thinking, “He’s quick, old Ernie. If this bloke is a spy he thinks we don’t want to fight the Kings, if he isn’t he thinks we’re on his side.”
The boy took off his helmet and ran a gauntletted hand through his stiff, blonde curls.
“Well,” said Ernie. “What gives? Where are you off to?”
“Anywhere out of that lot,” said the boy, jerking a thumb behind him. “Once your lot started firing back they really went to town. They shot everyone in range and chased us down the tube tunnels. Then they loaded up all the stuff. We had to help carry it. Then they set fire to all the buildings round there. Look,” he pointed to a column of smoke rising into the sky.
“They going to send out combing parties or patrols?”
“No, I don’t think so. They’ve got their work cut out to load up the market stuff and do up the area and the fire’ll spread. I think they’ll go back now, or later tonight. I got away sharpish because I heard them talk about choosing prisoners to take back for slaves. I just managed it. I wheeled this scooter around and whenever one of them looked at me I said, ‘Please, where do you want this loaded?’ Then I made it down Bute and Luxemburgh Gardens. I don’t think anyone noticed.” He paused. Ernie glanced at Charlie.
“We’re off now,” said Charlie.
The boy stood with both their eyes casually upon him. “Can I join up with your mob, at least for a couple of days?” he asked.
Ernie nodded. “Follow on in the rear,” he said, “inside lane.”
The two leaders called to Robert and made their way to the van for a short conference.
Ernie closed the van door behind them and they sat on the floor with their backs against the sides of the truck.
Charlie said, “I hope you’re not going on with this now?”
Ernie looked at him and began gently, “We’ll decide together. We’ll talk it over now. I’ll begin. I’m in favour of going on. Sure, they’ve got a lot of stuff and guns. But look, they wouldn’t’ve come out at all unless their supplies were running low. Then, another thing, all that guff about ‘we would shoot you if we were oldies’. That wasn’t so we’d think they were nice fellows, what’d they care? It was because they’re short of ammo for those guns of theirs. I think Robert should go and find out more and let us know. Then we can decide.”
“Just so long as you’re not thinking of blinding down there now,” said Charlie.
“What do you mean? We never planned that in any case.”
“You did.”
“We agreed we’d go as far west as this and then see. Well, now we’ve seen. That’s what we’re talking about now.”
“You planned to get us out here and then have a conference and get everyone worked up with some successful combing on the way and then suggest going straight on.”
Ernie lowered his eyes. “Oh, all right,” he said. “Have it your own way.”
An embarrassed silence fell. Robert said, “O.K. if I go now? I’ll dodge round the Kings and make my wwwwww – way www-est somehow, find out what I can and get back.”
They got up and climbed out. Robert Sendell got all his things together and stood at the road-side. “Good luck, Bob,” shouted Ernie. “We’re depending on you.” As if to take off from this phoniness Charlie never looked at him. The column started to move off. At the last minute Kathy turned aside from climbing into the cab and ran up to him. “Good luck, Bob,” she said and his heart kicked sickly to hear the dutiful tinge in her voice. He grinned feebly and started to stammer.
“Must go, by-by,” said Kathy and ran lightly back and clambered up into the van. He watched the last view of her jeans stretched over her soft hips and tyre-firm buttocks and felt bleakly alone. When the convoy had turned the corner he kicked over his bike and set out to explore the threatening territory of the Kings.
8
North of Turnham Green he stopped at a small café selling tea-with-tinned-milk and bowls of tinned soup in exchange for nylons. Dusk was falling and it was chilly. Steam formed and ran down the windows of the café. A thin and limber looking boy in soft, sooty-coloured suede trousers and jacket was leaning moodily on the counter. He glanced at Robert and then out to the street, peering through the channelled steam.
Robert, who was tired, sat at a table and the sooty-camouflaged boy slouched over and sat opposite.
He plainly felt like a gossip. “Rare do over the market today eh?” he said and Robert nodded briefly. “Those Kings as they call themselves are a nasty bunch. I keep out of their way. I work on my own. Don’t believe in gangs. I have a mate for some jobs but mostly I can manage on my own.” He glanced at Robert. “You’re on your own, I see? You in a gang?”
“NNNNN-no,” said Robert.
“Best way, I say. You doing anything tonight?”
“Well,” said Robert.
“Listen, if you like you can join me in trying to pinch some stuff back from the Kings.”
Robert shook his head and grinned, but the black-clad knight went on, “You’re not fooling me. I know you’re one of the boys who make no noise. I knew from the way you looked around before you came in here and from the way you rode that bike and the way you looked at me and then out into the kitchen to see if there was more of us. Well, there’s not. Here’s how I work. Those Kings are not like a proper army of oldies or like some guarded bank in the old days. They’re lazy really. They rely on scaring the hell out of everyone and they do a lot of people in and start a fire to keep the area scared. Then they bed down with any chicks they’ve captured and then they sleep. About four in the morning’s the best time. I put a pair of black nylons over my face, new place for them ain’t it? and I get my getaway all set up. I have a ladder on the roof of some terrace house that don’t end in a blind. Then I go in. No torches, I got cat’s eyes, I have really. It comes from reefers, and I can smell what’s worth taking. I’ve got now so as I can take a blanket from under a sleeping man. My old dad told me once they used to have it done on them when they were soldiers out East and I never believed him but of course it’s easy. Slow and steady does it, no jerks, no noise, no nerves. If one of them so much as stops snoring I stick him.” He brought out a flick-knife and made the true professional left-handed upward thrust, with his thumb on the blade.
“Now, all I want tonight is the nylons because I got plenty of food and don’t use petrol, only for trading. But there’s a lot of these damn Kings and I may need someone to help slit their gizzards with me. You game? There’s nothing to it really, it’s just a matter. . . .” He stopped and stood up quickly and said, “ ’Scuse me chum. Just mind me bag a minute,” and slipped out to the kitchen and was just opening a door, revealing a curve of green-painted stairs, when three Kings burst into the café. Two started after him.
“That’s the one!” They clattered up the stairs and then there was a short gurgling scream and the black suede boy slipped and tumbled down the flight and out onto the kitchen floor like a broken puppet.
Robert stayed with the hand of the third King firmly on his shoulder.
The two others came down the stairs, one wiping a knife on the seat of his trousers, and called for tea.
“You a mate of that tea-leaf,” one of them asked Robert.
“NNNNN-no,” he said.
They all laughed. “No need to be scared sonny.”
“You ever seen him before, Lucy?”
“No,” said the girl behind the counter. “He just came in here tonight.”
The three sat looking at him. “You can go,” said one. “Leave your bike at the curb. If you find any petrol with only a small gang holding it anywhere in W
est London you come and tell us and you’ll get your share. We won’t do you in or even say it was you who told us. See? That’s the way we work, just like the coppers used to in the old days. That’s why everybody trusts us, isn’t it Lucy?”
“Yes,” she said. “That’s why. You brought me any nylons today?”
Robert stood up and made for the door. “You forgot this,” said Lucy and kicked the dead man’s holdall along the floor towards him. “Come back another time,” she said.
Robert picked it up and went out into the street. After a moment he heard what he was expecting and started to run for his life. The café door swung open and a shot banged out and a chip flew off a kerbstone near his feet. He was a free moving target for the Kings, a partridge who could not fly.
He ducked down into a front garden but there was no way round to safety. He heard the sound of running feet.
He dodged round the side entrance to a house and scrambled on to the roof of a shed. From there he was able to hoist himself on to a second storey window-sill and then with the strength of desperation to grab a drainpipe and climb. The gutter rasped his shins and his knees were bruised but he was out of sight.
Far behind him an orange glow showed columns of black smoke still looming over the hospital and the buildings around the Broadway. His pursuers stamped around the yard and then gave up and went back up the street. He waited for some time, growing colder and watching the smoke cloud swell, lit red and orange on its underside. There was, even at this distance, a faint smell of smoke in the air. He commenced to edge along the roof. Every few yards the chimneys gave him a handhold and he could stand and cross to the next house. Once a truck of shouting Kings lurched down the dark street, making their own way back to their castle, and he had to crouch down, balanced on his toes and with finger-tips pressed to the gravelly surface of the bricks. The long-cold chimney smelt of damp soot. Teetering up here alone in the night, as the roar of the party of Kings faded, he suddenly thought of the brick shells beneath his feet. The terrace must be about seventy or eighty years old. At the foot of each of these chimneys were rusty grates around which the generations had once gathered, and mantelpieces for birthday cards. Now the homes were all combed and empty. Perhaps the awareness of the coming sadness among the oldies had helped in itself to bring on the reality. He went automatically through the thought-pattern of all of them when the question of why their elders had left the world from choice entered their heads. Resentment mixed with loss and a contempt even deeper than that they had once felt for the living oldies. The instant the piercing regret for a parent or a lost home was touched off by some smell or sight or incident, the fierce “why did they do it? Why did they leave us?” slammed it down. This habit of thought lay behind the special tone and the flip of the right wrist with which they all dismissed the question before it was properly asked.
He crept on his way and heard ahead of him a strange sound. At every house he crawled over it became louder; the quavering trill of ancient telly commercial chants, sung by a chorus of children, rose from one of the brick boxes below. He crept forward until he was plainly over the house. The singing stopped and a single boy’s voice squeaked in some harangue. Glancing to the garden side on his right, Robert could make out a faint glow penetrating some heavy curtaining and falling on the foot-high grass and tangled rose bushes of a tiny back-yard. He found a stack-pipe and, jamming his shoe-point behind it, lowered himself down, his finger-tips on the rusty unpainted seam of the pipe’s back. He stood on a patch of cement outside a back-yard door and listened. A feral cat, one of the thousands who had reverted to hunting, ran away through the tall grass. He tip-toed round to the windows. It was now possible to make out the boy’s voice. “Then draw quick stranger. Bang! bang! Then the rustler comes up to him and he knows the others are near and ready to ride over the hill on their black horses so he wants to keep Wyatt Earp talking so he says ‘Seems like unfriendly territory hereabouts, right unfriendly. . . .’ ” Children’s voices started to interrupt, “That was later. No it wasn’t. That came in the other one. Shut up! Let him go on and make it up. It’s good. . . .”
Robert crossed to the back door and tried it. It opened with a creak and he entered the damp and dust smelling house. A wavering band of yellow light came from under the lintel of the room on his left and the strange recital of a Western squeaked on. He opened the door.
A single oil lamp flickered and smoked in the centre of a circle of children who sprawled round the walls of the bare room. Their eyes, wide open, were fixed in fear on his face. An enormous television set stood cold and blank in the corner and behind it a single boy, narrator and chorus-master, turned a dark-eyed intelligent head in his direction.
“The Kings said we could,” piped a voice from the shadows. “They came combing here and said we could stay. They said we could keep all what we’d combed south of Waldon St. . . .”
A hissing “sh, shush . . .” brought him to a stop.
“It’s all r, right,” said Robert. “I’ve got my own food. I won’t touch yours. I just heard your T.V. story going on and wondered what it was.” He realised that for some reason he was stammering less than when with the gang, or near Kathy and immediately started to stumble again over “c, c, c, c, can I stop and watch?” His stammer seemed to reassure the tense little mice more than his actual words. They relaxed and at once the actor began again and Robert squatted against the wall and watched. After a time the interruptions started once more and then an argument as to whose turn it was to tell the next story.
The legends were partly accurate reproductions of old T.V. serials but also made up of incidents from local gang fights and combing and flatting raids. Robert watched and thought of ways to tell Kathy about it all when he got back. Devices for avoiding sibilants at the beginning of words and of expletive consonants, came from habit to his mind. “Then this b . . . this youngster stoo . . . held forth,” he thought and Kathy would listen and her eyes meet his and her head held slightly on one side in that way and he would be near enough to smell her. He became, as always when not actually planning or acting, hooked once more to his heartache.
So locked did he become in his familiar pain that he hardly noticed a change coming over the babble around until a child stood up near him, tripped over his feet, steadied himself and began to shout, “Mary’s asleep! MARY’S ASLEEP!”
Other children took up the chant and a pudgy, fair girl with her hair cut like paper streamers by her own hand sat up blinking and looking about her. “I was not,” she said. She looked in resigned terror at the circle of faces. The narrator came from behind the T.V. screen and stood watching her. “Mary was a-slee-eep! Mary was a-slee-eep!” they all chanted and those nearest to her began to thump and kick at her in time. Mary hugged her arms round her own body and rocked to the blows. She started to cry very quietly and hopelessly.
“St . . . st . . . Stop it,” said Robert, but they had lost all fear of him. A boy near him explained casually, “She’s first asleep. Now she has to be mother and say ‘Go to bed’ and we all say ‘No’! You’ll see. It’s smashing.”
The beating of Mary had become more brutal and the shouts reached a continuous throbbing note of hysteria. A circle of stamping boys and skipping girls formed and thudded round the tiny room anti-clockwise. As each marcher passed Mary the boys struck her with their fists and the girls pinched her. She was now huddled with knees tucked up and arms over her head and her cries could not be heard above the screaming chant, “Mary was aslee-eep. . . .”
Robert stood up to his full height, clapped his hands and said “Stop! stop!” They did. A silence fell and Mary looked up timidly and gulped down a sob. A long time went by and the only sound was another sob from her.
“You cruel, naughty children,” said Robert. “Aren’t you ashamed?”
There was silence and then, “Yes, yes,” they all shouted, “We are, we are naughty.” Silence again. The damp bare room, smelling of oil lamp fumes, was still and cold.
A dreadful self-consciousness gripped Robert. “That’s enough,” tripped off his tongue without effort but he tried to follow it with, “Go to be . . . be . . . bbbb . . . be”, switched to, “go to s . . . sss . . . ss . . . sl . . . sl . . .” and came out with, “Upstairs now! lie down! It’s late.”
They were all looking at him again but differently from on the occasion of his first entry to their rites. Quietness once more fell and then the first narrator took a pace forward, shook his dark, lank hair out of his eyes and said, “Tell us properly then. Tell us to go to bed now.”
“Go t,t,t,t . . . bbbbbbed,” said Robert.
“No,” they shouted. “Not like that! Show him Mary. It was your turn anyway. Show him how.”
Mary stood up. “It’s no good now,” she sobbed. “He’s spoilt my turn.” She turned to face Robert and started to speak, at first hesitantly and then in a torrent of words and reproaches.
“You should’ve just sat there quiet. It was none of your business. Now I’ve had all the hits and lost my turn as well. All because of you! I fell asleep first. It was real, wasn’t it?” she demanded of the children. “Yes,” they shouted, “Yes, Mary, of course it was.” They seemed strangely conciliatory and unsure of their attitude towards her and, as she continued her protest to Robert, they gathered closer around her, either in protection, or in a manner seeking it.
“Whoever falls asleep first, really, has to be mother or father,” Mary explained. “Then the others are nasty till they’re tired of it and then whoever it is says, ‘Go to bed,’ and they say ‘no we won’t’ and all that.” A memory of that which she had lost struck her and so she sobbed. The children gathered round her and touched her, gently.
