Peter said bitterly, ‘I’ve got false teeth, and I wear them twenty-four hours a day, except for cleaning them.’
‘Is that so? I wouldn’t have noticed,’ Ray said politely. ‘They sure look natural to me.’
Cheryl said, ‘Some people have things you can’t just take off or put on as you feel like it,’ and flapped her hand in Ray’s face.
‘Hear, hear,’ said Simon, while Ann pulled up the roll-neck of her sweater, and looked appealingly at Harry, mutely asking him to intervene.
He said, ‘Change the subject, hey? This is getting a bit morbid in my humble opinion. I’ve got forty years, and as our newest and temporary loyal young friend would point out, you can’t take them off and put ’em on again at will. So let us pass on to happier things.’
Ray said, ‘No. Not yet.’
‘Are you questioning my judgment, young chap?’ Harry said in astonishment.
‘No. Just hear me out.’
Ray moved close to Cheryl, enfolding the hand in one of his.
He said quietly, ‘Don’t you get it? You have been made more beautiful because of this. If you didn’t have it you’d still be lovely, sure; but with it, much more — oh, so much more.’
Cheryl was both embarrassed and thrilled by the physical contact, so unexpected, and by Ray’s words. Then he began to stroke her cheek. The others watched. Linda was thinking how percipient this young man was, and how unforced and easy his handling of the situation; but Harry’s face turned bright red beneath his tan.
‘Stop that!’ he said, in a high bleat.
Ray stopped stroking Cheryl’s cheek, let go her hand and turned, perfectly nonchalant.
‘You really don’t understand, do you?’ he said gently.
Furious, Harry said, ‘You’re the one who doesn’t understand, going on like that. Didn’t you hear me tell you to change the subject? I didn’t ask you to make things worse, did I? Well, that’s what you’re doing. Now drop it, once and for all.’
Ray paused. He thought, Not so cool after all, man, so lay off before you blow his mind.
He said, ‘Sure, why not? No offence meant, Harry. Can I ask you to make allowances?’
Mollified, Harry said, ‘All right, then. But get it clear: we don’t talk about these things. Now let’s get all this stuff shipshape before we bed down for the night.’
*
Harry snored; Simon and Peter slept peacefully; and Ray lay wakeful, wondering whether there would be any action. He could hear a subdued murmur coming from the Kombi where the girls were, so plainly they were not yet asleep. Three chicks in a VW. What would happen if he were to inch over there and then slip inside? He concluded eventually that total panic would ensue. But it was a thought. It certainly was a thought.
‘I think he’s lovely,’ Cheryl said drowsily.
‘That long hair. It really suits him,’ said Ann. ‘I’m going to see if I can get Peter to grow his a bit more.’
Linda said, ‘I thought Harry was going to blow his top. When I think of it…’
Cheryl sighed.
‘When he got hold of me and stroked my cheek,’ she said. ‘Just like that, in front of everybody. Well, it felt funny to begin with, but then I liked it. He’s a dream-boat, is Ray.’
Linda said, ‘He’d no right to get across Harry like that.’
‘I wonder,’ Ann said. ‘At first I thought I was going to die when Ray started — you know. I kind of gave Harry the nod to put his oar in. But when Ray said that about you being more beautiful, Cherry…do you think there’s anything in it? Do you think we are?’
‘Harry’s right,’ Linda said with assurance. ‘It’s best not to keep harping on these things. Accept them, yes, but don’t dwell on them like Ray was doing.’
‘It’s all very well for you,’ Ann told her. ‘You’re all right as you are, but we’re not.’
Cheryl had lain silent and musing, recalling the delicate fingers that had run along the smooth curve of her cheek, cool and reassuring; the words of revelation: ‘You have been made more beautiful because of this.’
She said, ‘Ann?’
‘Mm?’
‘Believe me, love, I feel sort of different now. I don’t expect it’ll last, but it might. I mean, I felt really attractive.’
Linda said, ‘Silly, you are attractive!’
‘That’s what everybody keeps saying, but it isn’t any good unless you feel it in your bones. And I never have done; not until then. Then I really felt it in my bones. Don’t you see? They say blind people have it made up to them by their hearing growing sharper. Well, what of Ann and me and so on…what if we’d had it made up to us in some way like that? It makes more sense somehow. It makes things seem fairer. And I really did feel it was true when Ray said it.’
Ann said, ‘I’d like to think it is. But then, if it is, what then?’
‘Well, it’s nice to feel wanted. You know, desirable.’
Linda said, ‘Harry would do his nut all over again if he could hear you two. Remember what it would be like without him and the LYF. I think this is a horrid conversation, and I don’t want any more of it.’
‘Oh, all right,’ said Cheryl. ‘I’m going to bye-byes. Good night.’
The others murmured in reply. Cheryl turned on her side, feeling diffusely amorous, pleasantly sleepy, and much more content than she had been for a long time, the image of Ray flickering in her mind’s eye, interspersed with other events of the day. And she thought what the LYF would be like without Harry, and that Harry had a vested interest in keeping them all as they were: as they were, they contributed to his totality, and without them he would be diminished.
*
A thousand feet above, and two miles away, Egan groaned in the igloo tent, tortured by Genius’s left elbow and the smell of Lumpy’s farts. The three of them were packed together in the little tent. How Egan would ever get to sleep, he didn’t know. His nose was cold and he hadn’t an unbruised bone in his body. Lumpy kept on and on, in an endlessly stinking petomania which disgusted Egan beyond measure. The only small consolation — and it wasn’t so small, come to think of it — was that if next day’s experiment went well, they’d be in business. Devon the week after, then Yorkshire, then the Cheviots, the Highlands… They’d have it made.
4
Harry woke early, with a feeling of huge well-being. He slid out of his sleeping bag and the tent, got the kettle going on the camping gas stove, then went to relieve himself in the latrine tent. Afterwards he washed, then burrowed in the tent for his battery shaver, standing in the early sunlight which slanted down a stunted avenue of scrub oak. The buzz of the shaver loud in his ears, he heard nothing else, but a shadow fell across his feet, and he turned to see Ray coming down the path, carrying a feathery corpse and smiling. Harry switched off the shaver.
‘What the hell’s that?’ he said.
‘Good morning, Harry. It’s a grouse: a present for you all. Hang it up for a day or two before you cook it. Here.’
He handed over the grouse to Harry, who cradled it after putting his shaver away: the bird was still warm. A few droplets of blood glistened among the feathers, and Harry hastily put down the grouse in the bushes.
‘How the devil did you get it?’ he asked.
Ray pulled something from his pocket, a fork of metal with long rubber straps meeting at a soft leather pouch.
‘Slingshot,’ he said.
‘A catapult, we call it. But you mean to say you can bring down a grouse with a pebble? You must be a fantastic shot.’
‘Not a pebble,’ Ray said. ‘I use a little load of shot, around as much as you’d use in a shotgun shell. It spreads out in a pattern. A pebble’s no good except with a big target.’
‘Well, well,’ Harry said. ‘We live and learn. Thanks very much, Ray.’
‘You’re most entirely welcome,’ Ray said, on his best behaviour, as he put away the catapult. ‘It sure is a beautiful morning.’
‘And it’s going to be a beautiful da
y. We’re lucky with the weather, and that’s a big bonus.’
Harry looked earnestly at Ray, then touched his arm and said, ‘Ray, I’m sorry if I spoke to you a bit sharp last night. I think getting this grouse was a fine thought. Some people might say you’d poached it, but never mind that. A fine thought.’
‘Well, that’s okay then,’ Ray said. This man had a talent for making him feel uptight and resentful, qualifying what had begun as an apology and an expression of thanks. He started to turn away, but the touch on his arm became a grip, and he was slowly but forcefully pulled round to face Harry.
‘Ray, do you believe in God? In Jesus?’
‘Before breakfast?’ Ray said. Then he decided he had better treat the question seriously, and went on, ‘Well, now. I believe the world’s split into two kinds of folks: the ones who want to hurt other people, and the ones who don’t. That’s the basic division.’
Harry nodded and released his hold, smiling.
He said, ‘The right lines. I think you’re on the right lines, Ray lad. I’ve got real hopes of you. Now let’s get the others out of bed.’
*
The route up to the plateau from where the Kombi was parked lay beside the bed of a stream, which tumbled at times almost vertically down the hillside. They toiled up, burdened with the tents and supplies, the stove, the gas cylinder, and the metal detector, taking it in turns to carry the last three items. The going was so steep that they had to make frequent halts, cooling their wrists in icy pools and taking mouthfuls of the pure water, painfully cold and slightly peaty. Somewhere a raven croaked and a pipit sang; and in one of the deeper pools a dipper walked on the bottom, hurrying out of the water and taking flight on their arrival. They climbed up through bilberry bushes and tormentil, walking on matgrass in the flatter places, puffing hard but enjoying themselves.
And then the stream turned pink.
‘Look! The stream — it’s changing colour,’ Peter said.
It was first of all no more than a faint flush in the water, pink gin colour, but then it deepened moment by moment until it was the colour of a fairly full vin rosé. The water remained like that for half a minute or so, then paled again gradually to the pink gin, and clear water.
‘What was it, do you think?’ Ann asked.
‘Waiter, bring me a pink river!’ Simon said. ‘Talk about pink elephants.’
Harry said, ‘It must have been some metal stuff. What do they call it? Oxides, I think. That must have been what it was.’
‘No,’ Ray said. ‘I think that was blood.’
They looked at him variously, with astonishment, derision, incredulity.
‘I mean that,’ he said. ‘I was on a river back home, in a canoe, when the water did just that. You know what happened? A horse fell off a ledge into an ore-crusher. Man, that’s a kingsize grinder. They had to clean it out into the river, and that’s how the water looked. Boy, I remember it like it was yesterday.’
‘Ugh,’ Linda shuddered. ‘How could it be blood?’
‘Your guess is as good as mine.’
Harry said, ‘I heard they were boring for minerals, but I don’t think it was up here. They might just have got over here, though. You know, there could have been an accident with a drilling rig, something like that.’
‘Some accident,’ Ray said. ‘Let’s go on up and find out.’
Harry said firmly, ‘No. You think I’m going to take these girls up to what might be something to haunt them for the rest of their lives? A fine start to the holiday that’d be! We’ll turn off from this stream now, and work our way up and across. If anything nasty’s happened, we can read about it when we get home again. A bad accident… they’d have a radio. If it is something like that, then there’ll be a chopper over here before we get up to the top; all the rescue services will be out. My duty is to you lot, and that duty’s to keep you away from that kind of thing.’
Simon said, ‘You don’t think we should leave the girls to have a picnic, then go up and see if we can do anything?’
‘What, you?’ Harry said quietly. ‘You don’t know what that could bring on, do you? I think you’ve got all the guts in the world, Simon, but you’ve got to think of yourself.’
Ray said, ‘I hate violence, mayhem, accidents, blood. I say we keep out of it.’
‘Good,’ said Harry, warmly. ‘I’m glad you see it that way. Now does anybody else want to say anything?’
No one did, except Cheryl, who was giggling.
‘Men,’ she said. ‘Blood! It could have been anything at all. I think you’re just putting it on to frighten us. Well, I’m not frightened, because I don’t think it was blood at all. I don’t know what it was, but it must have been something else, it stands to reason.’
*
It mas blood. Nothing all that dramatic: just sheep’s blood, but blood all the same — a lot of it.
A couple of miles upwind from the stream, and on the edge of one of the vast patches of bog which had engulfed that Roman legion all those centuries ago, Lumpy was shooting sheep, and doing very well at it. He shot his forty-sixth in a little less than thirty-five minutes, lying comfortably in a patch of heather and grass. He was using a .22 Remington with a scopesight which had been sighted in at a hundred and fifty yards, and was firing high velocity hollowpoint ammunition, which made very little noise. Lumpy went constantly for head-shots, and so avoided the risk of spoiling the meat by bone fragmentation in the body. He stopped shooting and shifted his position, lighting a cigarette and having a break. Genius would be some time catching up with that lot.
Genius was buzzing round on the ToteGote, trailing a chain and shackle, bucking and leaping on the little rough-country bike till he reached a sheep. His job was to drag the sheep to Egan, who stood by a rock table which formed the lip of a basin where the stream emptied out of the boggy ground. Immediately behind him the ropeway led downhill from an abandoned mineshaft. Egan had no idea how deep it was, beyond the fact that it seemed to be deep enough for his purposes. He was butchering the sheep ready to send them down the ropeway, which Genius had put in order during his reconnaissance trips. First Egan turned the carcass on its side on the rock with its head over the basin’s lip. Then he thrust with his knife right through the neck, located the slippery cable of the jugular with a finger, and slit the vein, bleeding the sheep into the basin. Next, he hung the carcass up by its hind legs at the head of the ropeway. A series of swift incisions and cuts followed, and then he peeled off the fleece and threw it down the mine-shaft, since an untanned fleece was not worth the storage space it would have taken up. He slit the body from loin to breastbone, cut briefly, and extracted the viscera in one, tossing them down the shaft after the fleece in a flash of red and silver and blue.
Lumpy decided that Genius could well take the best part of half an hour to catch up, so he stood and stretched, then made his way over to Egan, still carrying the rifle. Egan’s knife glinted at the neck of a sheep, and he let the head drop at the lip of the basin. He sighed happily.
The blood and water — more blood than water at this point — built up in volume, sending a sudden gush downstream.
‘All diluted to nothing by the time it gets down to the road,’ Egan said. ‘I’ve got to hand it to you, Lump. What’s the score?’
‘Forty-six.’
‘We’ll knock up a hundred, then, and another hundred tomorrow. That way we won’t have to go too far afield. I mean, I know sheep are stupid, but this is a piece of cake.’
‘They don’t know what’s hitting them,’ Lumpy said. ‘See what I mean, when we got them first few? The rest’d have been off if we hadn’t stopped ole Genius bluebottling around.’
‘A hundred’ll be a lot to get down the ropeway,’ Egan said in sudden doubt. ‘You think we can manage it today?’
‘Yeh, easy. It’s money for old fucking rope.’
Egan straightened up, blood dripping from the knife and from his right hand and wrist. Lumpy licked his lips in sudden fear, his eye
s downcast.
Egan said, ‘I’ve told you before, and I’m not telling you again, Lumpy. I am not having that language while you’re working for me. I am not having it.’
Lumpy said, ‘I try and try, but you can’t break the habits of a lifetime.’
‘Your lifetime’s got too many habits in it that want breaking,’ Egan said. ‘And I’m the feller to do it. You step out of line one more time, and see what happens to you.’
‘Tint fair,’ Lumpy said. ‘I’m trying. You never give me any credit for trying.’
‘Trying doesn’t interest me,’ Egan said. ‘Succeeding does. You succeed now, Lumpy. I’m very patient with you, but it won’t last for ever.’
Goaded, Lumpy said, ‘What’s so special about you? You might stop a bullet — accidental. You might just run straight into one if you don’t watch out. Ever thought of that, eh?’
‘What did you say?’ Egan said. ‘Are you threatening to do me in, you great big soft git? Get this into your head, if there’s any room in it amongst all the sand, cement and aggregate. We are in business, and you are my employee. You’re not in Belfast picking off Irishmen, or whatever it was they taught you to shoot for. You are part of my business assets, get that? I have a market for as many of these baa-lambs as I can supply, and that is what I am going to do. And I’m going to do it without foul language and without tantrums from anybody, and particularly without threats. You threaten me and you’ll become a wasting asset, Lumpy, and what is more I will get Genius to have half an hour with you.’
Genius was coming towards them on the ToteGote, dragging a couple of sheep, able to handle two at a time now that he had got the hang of the process. Lumpy watched him coming closer.
He said, ‘Keep Genius off my back, Egan. I’m sorry I said anything.’
‘All right then,’ Egan said curtly. ‘You get back to your position. Stay in line, and we’ll say no more.’
‘Right, Egan.’
He went slowly back to his place among the grass and heather, cowed and scared, holding the gun with which he could have put a bullet through a man’s left or right eye at will, at two hundred yards.
Harry Doing Good Page 4
