A Long Walk to Wimbledon

by H. R. F. Keating

  At his belt he had a pistol on a lanyard and in his right hand was a club made of all things from an old cricket bat wrapped with two or three layers of what must have been roofing lead.

  ‘Who are you?’ Mark demanded. ‘What do you want?’

  Was this another madman like the window-cleaner?

  And Dr Satpathi, had he got into hiding somewhere? He dared not look to see.

  ‘Name of Parkinson. Brian Parkinson. Don’t want anything really. As I say, I just saw you and thought I’d give you a bit of a fright.’

  He grinned.

  It showed the schoolboy just underneath the ruddy-faced adult.

  ‘Let me get you on your feet again,’ he added, extending a beefy red hand.

  Mark took it. There seemed to be no reason not to. The fellow looked friendly enough.

  As he came upright he saw that Dr Satpathi – silly fool – had not even moved.

  ‘Yes, well,’ said Brian Parkinson, ‘I just wander around, you know. Seeing what goes on. Poking my nose in a bit. Keeping chaps in their place sometimes. But what was all that crawling about for?’

  Mark felt a prickle of resentment.

  ‘There’s some trouble down there at the crossroads, by the Mother Red Cap,’ he said. ‘Arrack mania. My friend and I are trying to get to South London and they’re in the way.’

  The soldier-like Brian Parkinson gave a sudden guffaw.

  ‘Funny way of getting past,’ he said, ‘going in the opposite bloody direction.’

  ‘It wasn’t the opposite direction,’ Mark answered tartly. ‘And anyhow, what would you have done? Gone right through them?’

  His sharpness only produced once again the boyish grin.

  ‘Exactly, old chum. Go right through them, only way with rabble like that.’

  ‘Rabble who looked more than capable of battering us both to the ground?’

  ‘Kick ‘em in the balls first, old boy. That’s my motto. Kick the other bugger’s balls before he kicks yours. Only way to get by in this world today.’

  His grin shot out yet again and the intense blue eyes shone yet bluer.

  ‘Though actually it’s not such a bad world now, you know. Find it rather agreeable really. Lot better than before all this began. Know what I was then?’

  He seemed to expect an answer.

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ Mark said, beginning to think how he could get away.

  ‘Bloody stockbroker, old boy. Spent half my time buying shares worth nothing and selling them when I’d put the price up, me and my like. Had a wife and two kids out in Barnet, did a bit of hang-gliding at summer weekends. Bored to tears.’

  But while he had been giving his account, with more than a touch of pride in his having so completely abandoned his old life, Mark’s attiude to him underwent a rapid change. No, he would not try to get away: he would use this madman to help them.

  ‘Look,’ he said.

  And he told him about their problem. How he himself needed to get to Wimbledon as quickly as he could to see his wife who was very ill – no need to mention that she was no longer his wife – and how he had encountered Dr Satpathi, ‘a distinguished academic before’, who wanted to get to friends in Balham. ‘So, well, if you really are just wandering where your fancy takes you, would it be possible for you to come with us?’

  ‘Can do,’ Brian Parkinson said.

  He glanced at the watch on his wrist. Mark saw that it was a thick elaborate one, no doubt with all sorts of refinements.

  The time, he thought. A man who, somehow, still knows the time.

  He felt a jab of unexpected envy.

  ‘Well,’ Brian Parkinson said, ‘pretty well oh-nine hundred hours now. We’d better get a bit of a push on.’

  Oh-nine hundred hours. Nine in the morning. So his calculations had not been far out. If Mrs Brilling had rung at mid-day yesterday he had used up a good deal less than half those forty-eight hours. And now, with this ally, resourceful and apparently without fear, they need not worry about delays on the way. Yes, Wimbledon, by, say, four o’clock in the afternoon. It should be easily possible.

  Brian Parkinson had turned and waved up Dr Satpathi. He told him in brief military terms what had been agreed and then swung sharply round and marched off in the direction of the Mother Red Cap.

  ‘Wait,’ Mark called. ‘Look, shouldn’t we really go round? Now that we’re clear of them anyhow?’

  ‘Tommyrot, old boy. Bash trouble, it’s the only way. Come on.’

  He turned again and advanced down towards the intersection. Mark decided there was nothing for it but to follow.

  ‘Fact is,’ Brian Parkinson threw out over his shoulder, ‘the watch stopped once, about eighteen months ago. Never been quite sure since whether I’ve got the exact time.’

  ‘No,’ Mark said, experiencing a swift sense of deflation.

  And, if the fellow was wrong about the time, was his ration of hours much shorter than he had worked out? But, no. He could not be all that much out. The fall of the light told him that.

  They tramped down Camden Road, broad and straight, each pace bringing the arrack drunks more clearly into sight. The round dance that had been going on when they had first spotted them had come to an end, but even their smallest movements now, sluggish, sweeping and vague, showed how far under the influence of the crude spirit they all were.

  A flurry of quarrelling broke out. Two big fellows with great broad faces so red they were almost purple had squared up to each other and were beginning to fling wild lumpen blows.

  Mark contrived to put himself more directly behind Brian Parkinson. With that extraordinary club of his, let alone the pistol at his belt, he ought surely to be able to ward off any attack.

  Twenty yards to go before the nearest of them. No one seemed to have noticed them at all, despite the way Brian Parkinson’s nailed boots were ringing out on the wooden surface of the road.

  Ten yards. A whiff of arrack reached Mark’s nostrils. Harsh and spiritous. A man with a great swag of a belly, yet formidable enough to look at, was almost directly in their path. Brian Parkinson strode on, head high, as if there was no one else in the world.

  Down just by the front of the Mother Red Cap there was a woman lying on her face. A woman, from her figure, of fifty or so. Her skirt was half rucked up showing a large flabby white buttock.

  They reached the swag-bellied drunk. He plainly took in their presence. For a moment he glared. Then he turned and lurched away.

  There was another odour now. The sharp mean smell of vomit.

  Inside the pub – one of its double doors hung crazily wide – half a dozen drinkers were lounging across the marble-topped bar, dipping cups and bright plastic mugs into tubs of the raw spirit, jostling and laughing. Behind the bar the oil painting purporting to be the beruffed presiding genius of the place, moved by someone from its old position, surveyed the scene crookedly. A hole had been poked in the top of its canvas.

  Brian Parkinson, at the precise mathematical centre of the junction, wheeled smartly to the left in the direction of Camden High Street, running southwards, and marched on at the same cracking pace.

  Mark wheeled in his turn. Dr Satpathi, terrier close at his heels, followed. In a few moments the road ahead lay empty before them.

  They were through.

  Mark’s mind turned back to the Highgate tanker and the weeks of damage the gang there had done. Would they have been rendered harmless if there had been a Brian Parkinson to tackle them with similar breezy contempt? He found the question hard to answer. Too hard.

  On their right, its window boards stripped away by looters, was the Black Cap pub, once famed as the Mother Red Cap’s rival. Mark read the words ‘Nightly Entertainment’ still visible above one of its doors in gold letters. The rush to enjoyment. Jasmine had been avid for it. It had seemed to her a right that transcended almost anything else. Or had it even been everything else?

  Had he been wrong not to have stood out against that sooner than he
had done, that one last row and parting? Yet could he have done? Perhaps it was possible only in the light of the London he was walking through now to see what had really been happening then.

  Wife, wife, bane of my life.

  There on the left was a big high painted wall-sign – what a pace Brian Parkinson was going at – saying ‘Trill’s for Typewriters’. Well, there was nothing to type now. Would there ever be again?

  Abruptly into his head floated the memory of an occasion, years and years before, when he had had for some reason now lost in the sands to visit County Hall, the London government headquarters. As he had stood in the huge blank forecourt wondering which way to go, his attention had been caught by an odd sound, something between a murmur and a chattering. For some time he had been unable to pin it down. Then he had got it. It was the noise of the typewriters inside, scores and scores of typewriters churning out letters and memos and reports, vouchers and dockets, schedules and accounts, copies in triplicate, the minutes of the meeting of the ad hoc committee of the subcommittee.

  And where were they all now?

  They neared the end of the High Street with the old Mornington Crescent Underground station coming up at the meeting of two forking streets. And here, once more, there were people. But sober folk this time, it was easy to see. Evidently this was the meeting place for the inhabitants of one of the populated pockets in the great drained city. Men and women were moving here and there across the wide roadways with an air of everydayness. Several had buckets in their hands, no doubt going to fetch water from some pumping-engine. Others had boxes or bags of goods to barter. There were children too, being led off down a turning to the left, perhaps to where some hedge schoolmaster like himself taught reading, writing, arithmetic.

  But were even these worth acquiring still?

  A young couple, teenagers, were walking down the centre of the roadway hand in hand. They came to an old woman plodding towards them, a water container made out of a battered two-kilo fruit can clutched in front of her, and as one they raised their arms high to make a pointed arch and skipped her through it. A look crossed her face that was a tiny battlefield beween settled disapproval and a sudden unquenchable spring of pleasure.

  Mark grinned.

  Le cœur a ses raisons. Another of his old tags rose up. No doubt such reasonless reasons were still adding to the population every day.

  Brian Parkinson was certainly showing no sign of caution in going into the little crowd. But, then, he was right. These were ordinary human beings, eking out what existence they could. No need to fear them, no point in fearing them.

  ‘I thought we’d take the right fork here,’ he puffed out. ‘Down, I think it’s Hampstead Road.’

  ‘As you say, old boy.’

  The striding soldier-figure swerved a little to the right and went on through the crowd. None of the wan apathetic faces took much interest in them. Only a young woman sitting underneath the small time-worn statue of Cobden there – doughty fighter against the price-raising Corn Laws, he had been another mini-lecture subject; but there had never been any minilectures about the big casino that had stood just opposite – called out to them in a half-hearted way. She had an ancient basket half-full of potatoes beside her and wanted to barter them some.

  Then, soon after they were past the gathering, Brian Parkinson stopped short and stood head cocked like a hunting dog’s.

  ‘Don’t much like that screaming,’ he said.

  Mark acknowledged then that there had been screams coming distantly from somewhere in the dilapidated, once elegant row of tall terrace houses of Mornington Crescent itself. Almost continuous screams. He had heard them, but he had thrust the sound aside as being a warning of danger which now that Brian Parkinson was with them could be disregarded.

  ‘Think I’ll just have a dekko.’

  He wanted for an instant to tell him not to go. People screamed – this sounded like a child now that he was listening to it – because they were being hurt or were afraid and that meant that there was someone hurting them or putting fear into them. So, almost always he had contrived not to hear, or to find reasons why he should do nothing, or, as he had done when he had seen Dr Satpathi attacked by the window-cleaner, reasons why he should delay. There had been many, many people like him and he had got into the way of it. But now Brian Parkinson was simply going straight to investigate.

  He swung round and hurried after the swiftly striding battle-bloused figure. Dr Satpathi trotted along in the rear.

  The screaming, which scarcely once slackened, appeared to be coming from the third house along in the broken-down crescent. The place no longer had a front door and showed every sign of having been long deserted.

  Brian Parkinson simply went up its cracked front steps and entered. Mark thought he was taking deplorably few precautions, but he went in behind him.

  The whole house smelt so strongly of decaying matter that it almost made him cough. The floorboards of the narrow hallway were almost all missing so that it was necessary to stride rapidly from joist to joist. A short flight of stairs, their banisters all jagged stumps, led down to the back where there was a glimpse of daylight. The screams were coming from somewhere just beyond.

  Brian Parkinson went down at a rapid trot, to all appearances careless of what or who he might find, except that he loosened a little the pistol at the end of its lanyard in his belt.

  Another doorless doorway led out to the back. Brian Parkinson went straight through. Mark followed.

  It was at once clear what the cause of the screaming was. A girl of perhaps nine or ten in a dirty pinkish smock of a dress, hair matted, face streaming with snot, was standing, mouth open to its fullest stretch, up against the high back wall of the yard. And snarling and snapping at her arms, one of which was already bloodily torn open, was a large dog, emaciated and mangy, something like an Airedale.

  Brian Parkinson plunged forward, swinging up his cricket-bat club. It descended to the dog’s head. There was a wet crack. The animal fell to the ground, its body jerking.

  ‘You get a lot of dogs like that,’ Brian Parkinson said cheerfully. ‘Hunger crazed, you know.’

  It was Dr Satpathi who managed to calm the girl enough to find out where she came from. His wheedling story-telling voice, though he told her no story, worked more quickly than Mark could have imagined possible. And in less than ten minutes the three of them were escorting the child round to the house where she had said her mother was.

  When they had left her Brian Parkinson carefully wiped the lead sheathing of his bat on a tussock of grass growing between two paving stones.

  ‘Should have used the pistol,’ he said, ‘only I haven’t got all that much ammo.’

  He made no other comment, and soon he was leading them once more, at his familiar testing pace, along Hampstead Road on their route south. Yet Mark found he was not altogether happy. The crusader-soldier’s rescue operation had been justified a hundred times over, and it had delayed his own journey by little more than twenty minutes. But what if there were other sounds and sights that distracted him, less worthy ones? After all, the fellow had gone out of his way to do no more than play a joke on him himself. How many other trivialities would he hare after?

  But at least they were covering the ground now. His legs had begun to ache with a little painful dart at the side of the thigh at every pace. Would he have to ask to go more slowly? He looked at Dr Satpathi beside him. He too was obviously finding the going tough. But his face, for all that it glistened with perspiration, was stamped with a look of almost comic determination. Well, if he could keep it up …

  Ahead now the old Post Office Tower had become visible on the skyline, all in a single shade of deep grey in the mistiness, a gaunt skeleton leaning a little out of true. Beside it against the sky, though in fact nearer to them, was the tall block of the Euston Tower office building, much of its green glass still intact in the upper ten or more floors. Directly to their right, as they walked, the long-fronted
ugly creamish coloured building that had been a local government beehive loured emptily. Across a whole section of it at some stage someone had painted in huge spidery blood-red capitals ‘Cars Kill’. Years of beating rain had not blotted out the shrieked protest, infantile if true.

  Their united steps drummed out an irregular tattoo on the potholed road surface, Brian Parkinson’s ringing stride, his own flapping walk in his tyre-shod brogues – the stitching was beginning to come undone – and Dr Satpathi’s quick trot. Here and there under their feet the white centre line of the road still showed up.

  They crossed the flat bridge over the railway tracks coming out of Euston Station in a deep cutting on the left. What was happening there? Was it a vast empty echoing barn? Or a gathering place for refugees, the Kentish Town baths on a bigger scale with hundreds of people huddled here and there under its huge roof? And once long ago trains had departed punctually. Then no longer punctually. And then occasionally.

  Ahead now to the right were the long apartment blocks of what had been the Regent’s Park Estate, a sprawling council-owned complex built bit by bit in the years after the 1939-45 War. Its buildings looked at this distance to be in a pretty good state of preservation even though this seemed to be one of the areas totally abandoned at the time of the Flight. Certainly, as they got nearer, no one was to be seen in any of the blocks beside the road.

  They trudged along past one then another.

  Then, suddenly, from what had looked as deserted a block as any a figure ran out of the low entrance archway some thirty or forty yards ahead. There was an abrupt startlingness about the apparition which before they had joined up with Brian Parkinson would have sent him into a state of real fright. It was a young man, beardless or scarcely bearded, or possibly an athletic-looking girl – it was impossible to be sure at the distance – and no sooner had he or she emerged than at the sound of a sharp shout from somewhere high up above he halted as if jerked at the end of a long noose, then turned, and pelted back through the archway into shelter.

  Brian Parkinson had stopped and once again had taken up the questing stance that reminded Mark of a hunting animal.