by Dave Wallis
“Then we all do go to bed. And whoever it is says ‘Goodnight’ and ‘sleep tight’ and tucks in and then the next day, it’s their turn for the cooking and jobs and they can say, ‘help me do this’ and ‘help me do that’ and ‘be quiet!’ and all that and everyone does whatever you say because it’s your turn to be mother, see? Now I’ve had all the nasty and you’ve spoilt the good bit by interfering.”
“I . . . I . . . I’m sorry,” said Robert. “I d,d,d,d,d, didn’t know.”
“Oldies never do,” said Mary.
“I’m not an oldie. I’m a teen-ager. I’m in a gang, I . . .”
“Have you got a girl-friend?” asked the dark boy.
“Yes,” lied Robert.
“Get her to come here and you and her be mother and father every day. There’s lots of tinned salmon we’ve got hidden and other things.”
“Yes, bring her here and stay,” they all shouted.
“No,” said Robert. “No, I can’t.”
He prepared to shut his ears to further pleas but they seemed to accept it. “Just tell us to go to bed, then,” said Mary.
“Y,y,y,y, you do it with me,” said Robert, seeing a way to put matters right.
“Oh, yes!” said Mary and suddenly he felt a hundred years older than all of them.
They stood side by side. “Go to bed! bedtime!” shouted Mary.
“No,” they all shrieked, “no.”
“Go to bed this minute or I’ll tell your father,” snapped Mary.
“No,” they shouted again and suddenly all eyes were fixed on Robert.
“Off you go,” he ordered, losing all impediment. For a moment he thought they were about to obey at once. They started to drift towards the door; but then one girl, plainly jealous of Mary said, “Come up and tuck me in. Pretend to bring hot milk. There isn’t any really,” she explained in the hurried manner of one suddenly remembering that it was a question of making matters plain to an idiot, “but you just pretend to hand it me and say ‘Have you been a good girl?’ ”
“Then come to me,” said the dark boy who had been the first narrator of Westerns, “Second mattress from the window, say, ‘No reading under the bedclothes with your torch or I’ll take your torch away for good’.”
At once they were about him, pressing at his waist, shouting and trying to catch his eye, jumping up and clutching at his hands and wrists. Each sought to shoot in his or her demand:
“Say, ‘You’ve been naughty. I’ll smack you!’ ”
“Bring up a hot-water bottle.”
“Read a story.”
“Read Rupert Annual.”
“Say about not wetting the bed.”
Their eyes were desperate with desire, their shouts rose higher and shriller. Mary, still trying to play the mother, stamped her foot and screamed at them. Wading through the grubby clutching hands as a bather through seaweed he struggled to the back door.
After a last desperate snatching and clawing at his legs he was outside. He expected a struggle to close the door but, once beyond the doorstep, the clamour ceased as if he had, at a pace, left their world for good.
The cat-stinking grass wrapped his ankles. He realised now that he had no way of reaching the open street but must either try and climb to the roofs again or clamber over the wobbly garden fences. It would have been better to have gone to the front door and out into the street again and taken his chance of dodging Kings’ patrols or bandits, too late now.
A part of his mind was saying, “You see, Kathy, it really shook me all those kids carrying on like that and I just got away anywhere as quickly as I could,” and she would then smile and put out her hand to his. It would be all finished with Ernie by this time, of course, but still all of them friends and Ernie would say, “Glad to have her off my hands, boy, she’s more suited to you, anyway.” Faint noises from the house of children behind him roused him from the pleasant agony of these dreams.
He started to scramble over the fence of the next garden. Briar roses scratched his thighs and his toe caught in the fence top so that he nearly fell. Four yards ahead of him was the next fence and then another. He decided to try and climb to the roofs again or to break through an empty house to the street. At that moment he heard behind him shouts and squeals and the loud voices of youths. He dropped and lay still smelling the damp earth of a neglected flower bed. A voice which he could recognise as Mary’s shrilled, “He isn’t a Kings gang at all. I don’t know what he is. He went out the back. We told him you’d be cross if he stayed here, we told him to go . . .”
“Which way? Did you notice, kids?” asked a youth’s voice calmly. “Tell us and it’ll help us get him.”
Robert wriggled through some long grass, thick with dog-droppings. He went up to the windows of a house and laid his coat across the panes to muffle the noise, then smashed his fist through the glass and clambered into another damp and deserted house.
A strange smell, musty but sickly sweet, filled his nostrils. The fear behind him met a stranger fear before. He chanced a flash of his torch. The beam showed the shape of a man slumped in an armchair at the fireplace. Robert crept closer and shone his torch on what had once been a face. Some oldie had done it and never been found. A silent rubber tube from an empty gas-tap lay stiffly across his sunken lap. Two dark shapes of rats slipped out of the light and rustled down some freshly gnawed hole. The oldie’s fingers had been chewed away, and his nose and one ear. Robert’s torch beam cast shadows over the eye ridges so that the dulled jellies seemed to move for a moment under their brittle dried-out film. Robert felt he ought to do something for him, comb back the grey wisps of hair, adjust the lolling head to some less throttling angle, to help somehow, and to pretend that the smell didn’t make him sick and the sight afraid. At that moment he heard thuds and crashes from the gardens behind and whispered orders. He left the oldie, soaking away into the plush sacking and rusty springs of his own armchair, and started to creep towards the door, his torch switched off.
Once out in the street and he felt better, “Later,” he said to himself, meaning that there was no time now to take in the horror feeling of the encounter with the crumbling oldie.
Keeping as close to the walls as he could he doubled along the street length and at the corner took the left hand road.
He paused and listened. The roaming piquet of Kings had given up and he heard them roaring off two streets away.
He decided to go on a bit and then find a house where he could sleep until dawn. “And one without either living kids or dead oldies this time,” he thought to himself. If he ever put it like that to Kathy she would think he was really tough, like Ernie, and smile at him and . . . “Later” he told himself again, this time meaning when he was safely settled in some secure sleeping place.
He found a furniture shop whose plate-glass windows had been broken and slipped quietly inside. All seemed deserted. There was sure to be some bedding and maybe even a proper bed somewhere in the shop. It was against all scouting practice to spend the night in a shop or warehouse, or anywhere likely to be visited by prowling gangs, but he could not face another house that night.
Probing with his torch reminded him of the putrescent oldie and he seemed to smell the nibbled mummy again. He found a large double bed with a curling price card on a side-table. The bed was apparently ready made-up but when he tried to stick his legs inside the covers these turned out to be dummies laid across in a piece with a faked inviting turndown. He rummaged around and found some blankets. He thought of the gang safely back at the Regal, sorting out the stuff they had pinched, holding a war-council about the strength of the Kings and the dangers of being followed. He was preparing himself for the nightly agony and knew of no way to avoid the compulsion. Charlie would be off into his room with the battery-run record player and some old discs and a new girl. Kathy and Ernie would be in bed together.
Curled in his own damp blankets in a shop whose name he did not even know in a strange district and with the sm
ell of a corpse haunting his whorled sinus, he hugged his familiar pain to him like a teddy-bear and would not let it go until he fell asleep.
In the morning it was bright and chilly and an east wind offered to blow him further west on his mission. The empty streets around Milk Hill Park and Bollo Lane seemed quite free of patrols of Kings. He picked out a scooter from a showroom and wheeled it to an empty corner sweet and newsagents’ shop. All the sweet jars had gone, combed by kids, and the cigarettes long before that. But in a urine-smelling store-room at the back he found what he had been looking for. A crate of bottles of lighter fluid lay untouched among splintered packing-cases.
He filled the tank of the scooter and kicked her over. It would run perhaps three or four miles before overheating so much that it either caught fire or seized up with a cracked piston ring fouling the ports. He had chosen a scooter and not a motor-bike because it was more the sort of thing some lone, timid stooge, without a gang of his own might ride. A new and stiff machine helped him to disguise the fact that he was an experienced rider. If any gang of local bandits or villains or a patrol of Kings stopped him there was nothing worth pinching and one of his cover stories would hold water.
So, avoiding the open stretches of the Great West Road and the Bath Road, he chugged westward with a watery sun warming his shoulder blades along Pope’s Land and north towards Dormer’s Wells.
His plan was to ride boldly into the Windsor area and spin some yarn about wanting to trade tinned crabmeat for petrol and then look around and sniff out all the information he could.
He passed some groups of young kids flatting and then the bulk of the old Hanwell Mental Hospital. Some local jokers had put up a sign scrawled in blue paint, “Come inside, you silly bastards come inside!” But now all was still and weeds grew over the entrance driveway. He thought, “One of the places they built to stop them doing it and cure them. Should’ve built bigger ones obviously.”
Near Iver Heath he ditched the scooter. He found an ordinary cycle in a shop outside George Green. He loaded the saddle bag with a few tins of corned beef and hid two pairs of nylons in an elaborate fashion in the toolbag where they were sure to be discovered. His aim was to make the impression of being an inadequate trader, without even the initiative to travel by motor-bike and get petrol from somewhere.
A casual customs post had been set up by the Kings across the Dutchet Road. The green flag with the inverted crown drooped from bending poles of two car aerials spliced together. Two Kings with tommy-guns under their arms lounged up to him. Three or four girls and some young boys lolled by a booth watching.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
Robert stumbled an explanation, his stammer, for once, an advantage.
The two guards searched him and his pack and found the nylons. They took these.
“Entry tax,” laughed one, looking at him sharply to see how he reacted. For the first time he felt the edge of fear to think that they were not only all strong but quite clever as well.
This nervousness stood him in good stead as had his stammer a few moments before. They let him pass with an easy contempt and only made him sign his name, “Harold Turner”, in a book and one guard said, “When you come next time bring some gen on any gangs that’ve got petrol.”
He cycled in towards the town. The castle could already be seen poking a grey thumb up at a pale blue sky. Near the fields of Boveney and Eton a huge pack of seventy or so dogs streamed yelping across the road and he stopped quite still. Such packs had formed from abandoned pets in the cities and each led by alsatians and other large breeds, roamed farther and farther out, attacking sheep and other packs and rabbits. Unkempt and interbreeding they were now reverting to a mongrel predatory stock. Poodles and pekes and small man-made breeds were the first to starve or to be killed and eaten by larger dogs. Stories of children chased and eaten and of packs attacking even two or three motor-cyclists, hauling them down and mauling them to death, were told in the markets.
However, this enormous pack, led by a black retriever, trotted, yelping across the road without looking at him, intent on their nomad hunting out towards Salt Hill.
Windsor High Street was crowded with people. Not a single surviving oldie was to be seen, nor any children. Most of the boys affected some imitation of the Kings’ uniforms and the girls wore badges showing the inverted crown. Despite the throng there was a lifelessness in the atmosphere. Few loud voices were raised and both girls and boys looked at him indifferently and lowered their eyes again to the pavements. He passed the arcade in which they had all been beaten up by that gang of Windsor boys. It seemed to have taken place in another age, to quite other people. He realised that he could no longer understand Ernie’s desire for revenge on the place.
He came to a café. Tinned soups and beans were being heated on an oil stove at the back. He went in and paid with two lipsticks for a cup of tea, made with tinned milk, and a plate of hot beans. He sat at a table and a dark girl in a golden-yellow jumper and black jeans with her hair hanging straight down to her shoulders, swayed over and sat opposite.
She smiled at Robert. Thinking he might pick up some preliminary gossip from her he smiled back and said, “N, N, N, not very cheerful here today.”
She said, “I knew you were fresh in. Lipsticks are getting short here,” she lowered her voice, “you should’ve got more for them than mouldy tea and beans.” She had ignored his implied question.
“I just came t,t,t, . . . for the purpose of trading,” said Robert.
“You won’t get much change in Windsor,” she commented, shaking her narrow head inside its windbreak of hair.
“What’s the matter here?” he asked returning to his question.
“So, you’ve noticed already. Well, it’s just that everyone’s scared of the Kings and it makes it all, well, I know it sounds a funny thing to say, but it makes it almost like it was when the oldies and squares were running everything.”
He wanted to lead her to talk of the castle and how it was held.
“Why don’t you just float off,” he asked. “They can’t keep you here. You’re not prisoners in the dungeons of the castle, or something?” His stammer returned at this point.
She smiled at him. Probably from habit she pressed her knees against his under the table. He wished it was Kathy.
“I’ll tell you about the castle later. As for running off. I’m better here. Some aren’t though and they have to stay unless the Kings say they can go. They’re not like the slaves really, but they have to stay here. If they run off and get caught the Kings run them through the streets. It’s terrible, all blood and screaming.” She wrinkled her nose in disgust.
“You’re good at explaining things.”
“Not really. You’re a good listener.”
“I,I,I,I, l,l,l the w,w, way you talk, that’s all.”
“I like the way you listen.”
A silence fell. He was thinking that if Kathy could see him now she might be jealous.
“When your stock’s sold I suppose you’re leaving,” she said.
“I just want to find out if I can come back with some other stuff. And if these Kings of yours’ll protect me and let me trade. I don’t want it all pinched and me done up into the bargain.”
“I like the way you say, ‘your Kings’. They’re not mine. Far from it.”
“You seem to like them.”
“I never said I did.”
“You, you, you, said you were better off here than some.”
She looked at him. “Are you asking because you’re interested in me or because you’re interested in the place?”
“Could be bo . . . bo . . . bo . . . , the two, couldn’t it?”
“I suppose so.”
“What do you do?”
“What do you think?”
“I don’t know, maybbbbbe you have a boy and you both trade or pinch stuff like everyone else. You’re not in a gang. I can tell bebebebebebe, on account of there’s only the
Kings here and you’re not one of them.”
“Do you want to know?”
“Yes,” Her knees still pressed against his and he shifted forward in his chair. “Blow her,” he thought, meaning Kathy. He realised that something had happened during his journey over the roof-tops to alter things. “I’m on my own,” he thought. “I always was but only realised it after last night.”
“Penny for them, then,” said the girl, and went on, “If you want to know I’ll tell you.”
“All right, tell me.”
“I’m a whore. Kings deputies and other big boys come and make love to me and give me things.”
“We don’t call it that in our district. We call it ‘selling’.”
“I don’t think things should be called by fancy-names any more, like ‘call-girl’ and all that. That was one of the ways the oldies tried to pretend things weren’t as bad as they really were. And look what happened to them.”
“I don’t see why there’s any market for it,” said Robert. Two could play at talking tough.
“Well! thanks!” she snapped, and for the first time drew her legs away from his.
“I meant that these days we do it if we feel like it and like each other and don’t if we don’t. Selling it and buying is like the oldies did.”
“That’s all you know.” She was still angry. “That’s all you know.” She looked at him again. “There’s something eating you, I’ll bet it’s a girl you can’t have.”
“What if it is?”
“Nothing, only it shows things aren’t so simple as all that now the oldies have all done it.”
“Who said they were?”
“You did. You said . . .”
“I dddddd didn’t say anything. I asked how you could sell it. You dddddon’t have to answer. It’s none of my business. You started this!”
“You’re like all of them. The girl’s got to talk to you and tell you things but you don’t give anything in return, only maybe weep on her shoulder later.”
“I’m not going to weep.”
