Laurence was standing close to the door as though ready to make a quick getaway. He was smoking, which was strictly forbidden on the college premises, and wore an expression of the highest disdain as he watched the dancers gyrating in the centre of the room. Their efforts seemed to amuse Laurence. His lips curled delicately at the edges and his large pale blue eyes flickered with contempt. He was dressed in an expensive dark suit with a white shirt and a slim black tie dangling from a loose collar. He was terribly thin, with high cheekbones and a bloodless complexion and looked rather like a young vampire. But to me he seemed glamorous and elegant and I envied his appearance.
I wandered over to him. ‘Simply spiffing party,’ I observed putting on my jokey Bertie Wooster voice.
Laurence gazed at me lazily; smoke obscuring his features for a moment. ‘Have we been introduced?’ His expression was haughty and the voice arrogant, but there were traces of humour in those clear blue eyes.
‘‘Fraid not,’ I replied, still using my Wooster voice, but now uncertain whether this tall boy with the penetrating gaze was being serious or playing along with my charade. I didn’t have to wait long.
‘You’re not Gladys Upme, the defrocked housewife and black pudding hurler from Hampton Wick are you?’ he said with a kind of camp nasal tone used by Kenneth Williams in Round the Horne.
I took the outstretched baton and ran with it. ‘That’s my brother. He’s in Rampton for sheep rustling.’
‘Good job, too. Damned noisy occupation.’
I laughed and he gave me a slow grin.
‘Would you like a little ciggy?’ He offered me the packet. I didn’t smoke but I knew it would be inappropriate to refuse. Besides he looked so good holding the little white cancer stick in his forefingers up by the side of his face that I wanted to look like that as well.
He flicked a lighter and soon I was puffing inexpertly on the ‘little ciggy’.
‘I’m Russell,’ I said.
He raised an arched eyebrow. ‘Not related to the sheep, I hope.’
I grinned and shook my head.
‘Laurence,’ he announced grandly. ‘Good to meet you, a fellow castaway in this shit hole.’ His face hardened, his features were taut with anger. ‘Do you think if we closed our eyes, all this would disappear and we’d find ourselves in hall at Oxford or Cambridge…?’ He stopped suddenly and placed his face close to mine. ‘Are you very bright?’
‘Brighter than most of the losers in this dreary dump but no more.’
‘Ah, well, we’re members of the same club then.’
He smiled and the warmth from that smile charmed me, thrilled me, and soothed me more than I am able to say.
With casual disdain, he dropped his cigarette on to the floor and pressed it into the carpet with his foot. ‘Come on, life is too fucking short to stand here watching a load of spastics trying to dance. There must be a pub around here that’ll sell beer to two bright seventeen year olds.’
Indeed we did find a pub not more than a few streets away: The Sportsman, which became our haunt, our bolthole, for the next two dreary years at college. It was a scruffy little place mainly inhabited by pensioners and grey-faced unemployed loners. The landlord, a thin, pale chap called Alf knew how old we were and where we were from but it didn’t bother him. He was happy to add to his meagre profits by supplying us with alcohol. Often was the afternoon we’d bunk off lessons and escape to Alf’s where Laurence and I would talk and talk.
That first evening in the pub Laurence and I bonded a life-long friendship and in some strange way we knew it. We forged a link that would only be broken by death.
We hated the college; we hated the teachers – second rate losers; and we hated most of the other students – unambitious dullards more interested in the minutiae of their barren lives than in developing their brains. We were good at hating. Despite all that, we both did well in our studies. This was not due to hard work on our part but merely a combination of our natural brilliance and the low expectations of the staff. Well, let’s face it, they were used to dealing with intellectual dwarfs.
We gained a reputation for being aloof – which we were – and that we were gay – which we were not. The trouble with these northern no-brains is that anyone they encounter who is not a clone of their own stupid selves is labelled as a queer, a poofter, a nancy-boy. They can’t bear the idea of anyone being different and, indeed, better than they are; and if you are, you must be some kind of pervert. Laurence and I fancied girls and indeed we talked about sex a lot but I don’t think our libidos had quite kicked in yet. We ogled tarts in magazines like Fiesta and Bounce and one or two of the girls at the college took our fancy in a purely physical way, but at that time we were more concerned about sorting ourselves out, trying to come to terms with life and what we wanted out of it and what it could offer us. There was plenty of time for sex later.
Neither of us wanted to follow the route that our fathers had taken into boring business or stultifying corporate life and the idea of marriage, a ‘nice’ house and two point four children, filled us with dread and loathing. Our boredom threshold was low; we needed some kind of excitement to keep us awake and alert. It was a discussion about this very topic that formed our first watershed moment. We were in Alf’s one Friday afternoon finishing our week’s labours with a drink or two. The pale sunlight struggled through the grimy windows throwing beams of dusty light into the room while we sat at our usual corner more than normally disconsolate with our lot.
‘I want to do something this weekend that will make a mark on the world,’ Laurence suddenly announced grandly. ‘I’m fed up with mooching around on Saturday and Sunday. We do nothing of any consequence. Nothing memorable.’
‘We could indecently expose ourselves in the market place.’ I suggested lightly.
Laurence wrinkled his nose. ‘My dear Russell, I have no desire to have my manly member placed on a police file. Besides it’s a bit nippy for that kind of activity.’
‘Well, it would be memorable.’
‘Steady, big boy! I think you miss my point… or perhaps I didn’t explain myself clearly enough. I’m happy do something outrageous and shocking as long as …’ He paused for dramatic effect and leaned closer to me, a broad grin on his face. ‘As long we are not identified. We have to be the invisible perpetrators. It must be something secret. It’s like farting behind the bushes. We produce the noise and the smell but no one knows who did it. That gives the joke an added frisson. Get it? We can crouch behind the hedge laughing our socks off and no accusing finger can be pointed at us.’
‘I don’t think I’m up for farting behind hedges this weekend.’
‘I had something a little more adventurous in mind. Something more elegant and vicious.’ He positively beamed.
‘You sneaky bastard,’ I grinned. ‘You’ve already got something in mind, haven’t you? You’ve got a plan.’
‘Excellent deduction, mon ami.’ He tugged at his imaginary moustache, slipping into his Hercule Poirot impersonation. ‘The little grey cells are on fine form today. You are quite correct. I have devised a… how shall I say...? a little divertissement for us this weekend.’
‘Tell me more.’
‘Let’s have another drink and I’ll explain.’
Our glasses replenished, Laurence set to his task. ‘Tell me, Russ, who is the most irritating, most pathetic and most despicable member of what is laughingly known as the teaching staff at the Dotheboys Hall we attend…’
‘Which we attend when Alf’s is not open.’
‘Point taken, but answer the bloody question.’
‘Most irritating…?’
‘Despicable, pathetic… loathsome.’
‘There are so many.’
‘The worst. Come on there is only one fucking candidate.’
‘Ooh, oh I don’t know,’ I said, playing with him.
‘Ha ha. Now give me her name.’
‘Oh, her name. It’s a woman is it?’
‘Don�
�t be a prick.’
‘You couldn’t possibly be referring to Miss Irene Black, could you?’
Laurence’s eyes lit up with triumph. ‘The very same. Old Mother Black, she of the floral dresses and curly wig.’
It was true, Old Mother Black, as she was generally known by all the students, wore her hair in the scrunchiest perm I’d ever seen, so tight that the hair did not move, not even on the windiest day. Not only that but its unnatural colour contrasted with the pale, ancient wrinkled features beneath it. If it wasn’t a wig, it looked like one. Granny Black was a dinosaur. She should have given up teaching years ago. She was fussy, incompetent and had no understanding or tolerance of young people. As a relic of a bygone age it was appropriate that she taught history. Laurence and I had a particular dislike for the old bag. We didn’t think she was up to the job. She was easily flustered, ill-prepared and unable to move from her notes. Laurence had a particular talent for bowling her a question from left field just for the pleasure of unsettling her, which he did frequently. She’d flush and dither and shuffle her papers. ‘Not now, Barker,’ she would announce distractedly. ‘We’ll come to that later.’ More shuffling of papers.
Laurence took a sip of his beer before continuing. ‘Wouldn’t you like to upset the old cow? I mean really upset her. Wouldn’t it give you great pleasure to see Old Mother Black reduced to a nervous wreck?’
I laughed out loud. ‘I’d pay for the privilege,’ I said, an image forming in my head of Old Mother Black, wig askew, on her hands and knees, blubbing for all she was worth.
‘I’ll arrange it for free.’
‘Go on then.’
‘Right. Tell me, Russ, what is Old Mother Black’s pwide and joy?
‘Her knitting bag.’
Laurence raised his eyes in mock frustration. ‘And…’
‘Ah, you mean Caesar.’
‘Hail Caesar. Indeed.’
Caesar was an ageing, arthritic West Highland Terrier that old spinster Black brought to college every day. It would sleep in the back of her Mini for most of the time, but she took it for walks around the grounds at lunchtimes and in her free periods. On some occasions she even brought the smelly mutt into the classroom where it would curl up by her desk and fall asleep. She treated the creature like the child she never had, talking to it in cutesy woo-woo language like stupid women do when leaning over prams. The girls quite liked Caesar, while the boys in the class would have taken great delight in booting the dog in the bollocks.
‘What about Caesar?’ I asked.
‘We kidnap the beast. Snatch it from its hearth and home.’
I laughed. I didn’t know whether Laurence was serious or not but the idea tickled me greatly.
‘Can you imagine the histrionics, the floods of tears? The old bag would be reduced to a quivering wreck.’ Laurence now adopted the fluttery, whining voice that closely approximated the tones of Old Mother Black. ‘Oh my Ceasar-weasar has gone. He’s been taken from his mummy. I can’t go on. I just can’t go on.’ With a little shriek, he threw his head down on the table in a comic display of mock sobbing.
One or two of the aged boozers whiling away their afternoon with a glass of mild gave us a puzzled glance before turning back to their geriatric reveries.
I giggled and joined in the improvised drama of Old Mother Black’s kidnapped pooch. I pulled out a handkerchief and dabbed it to my eyes. ‘He was my whole life,’ I sniffled. ‘I loved him like a first born, my little Ceasary – weasary.’
More looks from the pensioners as we collapsed in laughter. Silly, giddy young lads, their disapproving glances seemed to say; they’ve no idea how to behave in a pub.
‘See how much fun the idea is,’ said Laurence suddenly becoming serious. ‘But how much better when we actually do it.’
‘You’re not joking, are you?’
‘Of course not. There’s no real cleverness or thrill in just thinking these things up unless… unless you do them. Put them into practice. That’s where the real enjoyment comes.’
‘Kidnap Old Mother Black’s dog?’
Laurence nodded. ‘Precisely. However, if you’re frightened, a little chicken maybe … then I’ll have to do it on my own.’
‘I’m not chicken.’
‘Well, then, mon brave, are you up for it?’ His eyes sparkled brightly with humour and excitement.
I couldn’t resist such a look. ‘I’m in.’
‘Good man,’ he said with a grin and laughed out loud. ‘Then the game’s on.’
THREE
JOURNAL OF RUSSELL BLAKE 1968-1970
Laurence had done his detective homework in preparation for our adventure. By slipping into the college secretary’s office when she had popped out to the loo, he had rifled through the staff files and located Old Mother Black’s address. So on Saturday morning we caught a bus out to Woodcroft, a tweeville suburb of town where she lived … in a thirties bungalow called The Haven. When we saw the name on the gatepost, Laurence put his fingers down his throat and produced a gagging sound.
‘Well at least it’s not DunRoamin,’ I said.
‘DunTeachin would be better.’
There were frilly net curtains at the windows, a neat, boring lawn and a shiny brass letter box. It was just as we had imagined.
We stood across the road from The Haven, partially shielded from view by the bus shelter. Old Mother Black’s light blue Mini was parked in the drive at the side of the bungalow, but there was no sign of the old biddy herself. Suddenly I began to feel very stupid. What on earth was I doing here wasting my time on this fruitless exploit? How could we grab the bloody dog without being seen? And what would we do if we got it? It all was rather silly.
‘So now we are here, what on earth do we do?’ I said, unable to keep the note of irritation from my voice.
Laurence shrugged. ‘Haven’t got that far. It’s not going to be easy, is it? We have to get the dog away from Old Mother Black without her knowing.’
‘Well, that’s going to be impossible. She has the thing with her where ever she goes. Probably takes the beast to bed with her.’
‘That’s an avenue of thought down which I have no wish to travel… Ah, talk of the devil…’ whispered Laurence, pulling his woolly cap down as far as he could and pointing.
Old Mother Black had emerged from the side door of the bungalow with her precious Caesar on a lead. She unlocked her car and let the creature clamber into the back seat. She said something to the dog. We could not hear the words, but we recognised the simpering tone. Then she got in the car herself and after some moments while she adjusted her seat belt, checked her mirror and turned around to mouth some further soppy comments to the dog, she reversed out of the driveway slowly and set off down the road.
‘That’s our kidnapping plans up the spout,’ I observed pithily.
‘Oh, Brother Russell, you do give up rather too easily. I never said this was going to be a piece of cake. But everything comes to he who waits. It’s Saturday morning. No doubt she’s gone shopping. There are all those doggy biscuits to buy and cans of Woofy meaty chunks.’
‘Or she could have gone off for the day.’
Laurence shook his head. ‘She’d have taken stuff for the dog if she was going to be away that long. Water and its bowl and probably a tin of dog food. Nah, she’ll be back in an hour. You mark my words.’
‘I’d like to mark a part of your anatomy instead. This is a crazy plan.’
‘Of course it’s a fucking crazy plan! Is there any other type you’d like to be involved with? Something safe and predictable perhaps? Nicking Mars bars from Woolworth’s?’
‘Well at least I’d have some Mars bars to show for my efforts.’
Laurence grinned and I couldn’t resist him when he grinned. ‘So you don’t want to be in my gang now then, is that it?’ he said with mock dismay. ‘I’m not keeping you here under duress, y’know. You can bog off anytime you like. But you wait until Monday morning when the news of Old Mother Black�
�s tragedy is the talk of the college – oh, how you’ll wish you’d been part of it then.’
‘I am still part of it – for the moment.’
‘Right, well I suggest that we’re safe to go now and we can come back in say an hour when I predict Old Mother Black will have returned from her shopping trip.’
‘What then?’
‘We play it by ear. We wait and watch.’
‘And I thought you said this was going to be exciting.’
‘Come on, misery guts, I’ll buy you a cup of tea if we can find a café somewhere round here.’
We did find a café about a mile away in a dilapidated row of shops which had once been the hub of the little suburb of Woodcroft. Now the green grocers and shoe shop had closed down and the other premises had clearly seen better days. Obviously the inhabitants were catching buses into town to get cheaper goods in the one stop supermarket there.
Laurence did buy me a cup of tea in the quaint little tea shop which was inhabited solely by visitors from the old lady planet. The place was full of them, as though the café owner had bought a job lot. The whiff of moth balls nearly knocked us out as we entered. Even the waitress was wheelchair fodder and she seemed shocked to have customers of our tender years on the premises. She treated us with suspicion as though we’d escaped from some penal institution. No doubt to her any male under twenty five was a thug.
Eventually, we were served our tea and Laurence lit a cigarette. On witnessing this exhibition of youthful decadence there was a lot of tut-tutting from the throng of geriatric ladies, not unlike the clucking of hens at feeding time. ‘Perhaps I should have lit a moth ball instead,’ grinned my companion before blowing a glorious mouthful of smoke into the air with dramatic aplomb.
As he did so, my attention was caught by a figure passing the window. It was Old Mother Black. ‘Bloody hell!’ I exclaimed rather louder than I intended, confirming again to the aged jury that young people were the work of the devil. In a hurried whisper I relayed the news to Laurence.
Brothers in Blood Page 2
