Harry Doing Good

by Canaway, W. H.

  Trapped, Ray said, ‘Okay. Cheryl, you want to come along?’

  We could take out half an hour in that VW, he thought: worth ten thousand feet down and back.

  Harry shook his head.

  ‘Not this time, mate,’ he said. ‘Cheryl’s on supper duty this evening. She’ll have something nice and hot for you when you get back — won’t you, Cheryl?’

  Cherry nodded. She had no particular wish to accompany Ray. They had fixed their early date, and that would be fine for her without any more scrambling on the mountainside, which would also certainly involve lying on scratchy heather and getting bitten by ants, midges and horseflies. Let Ray wait, the impatient old love: what you have to wait for is all the sweeter when you get it. They would take a blanket with them in the morning.

  So she merely said equably, ‘All right, Harry.’

  And Ray went to fetch the spade. When he had vanished on to the mountainside, Harry felt like a man who has carried a heavy sack on his shoulders for a couple of miles, and then set it down: a rising feeling of enormous relief. He could have jumped up and down, shouting in mindless joy and sending echoes reverberating from the purple peaks that lifted at the far end of the plateau. But he calmed himself, breathing deeply and considering carefully. Funny business was on the point of entry. He had a duty to the youngsters, and to their parents. With Harry you knew there’d never be any messing about.

  He said, ‘The wind’s going to change. We’ll shift these tents a bit, make a windbreak with the men’s tents to keep the weather off the girls’ as far as we can. The rain up here comes at you horizontal. Come on, Peter… Simon, let’s get cracking.’

  In half an hour or so they had rearranged the tents, and under the new disposition Ann was two tents away from Peter. She would be sleeping in the same tent as Linda, while Cheryl, who had Ray’s pup tent for her sole use that night — the girls would take turn and turn about to share — was right next to Harry, who was grimly confident in his own ability to nip any funny business in the bud by his own proximity. When Ray got back with that spade, he would find he was sharing with Harry.

  So Harry smiled and shook his head when Simon came up with Linda and asked him to go for a walk with them.

  ‘No, thanks,’ he said happily. ‘I’ll watch Ann and Cherry work, and wait for Ray to get back with the spade, then I’ll make him a cup of tea. You never know, he might be a bit tired by then.’

  Peter was sitting with his back to them, hunched up over a paperback judo manual. He was thinking about Harry. A fast atemi under the nose with a slack hand, then, as he slumps forward, hop in with two feet at once, grab him, down on your back, and swish him over in a tomo-enage, with a bloody great kick in the cobblers just before he lands on his head. He refused abstractedly when Simon and Linda asked him to go for a walk: he preferred to read up on his judo.

  Harry was totally at peace as Simon and Linda walked westward in the golden evening light, high cirrus cloud glinting golden-white in the sun, a buzzard circling far above them yet far below the cloud. You knew where you were with Linda, and with Simon too: no funny business where they were concerned. So he left Peter to read his old judo book, and watched Ann and Cheryl peel potatoes. It wasn’t a bad world when you totted it all up — just as long as you lived according to your lights. It was Saturday next day. They would have a sing-song, and he’d introduce a hymn or two, the sort nobody minded singing and everybody knew. Linda would like that.

  *

  He forgot about my foot! Ray thought viciously, in a most uncool frame of mind as he scrambled down by the side of the tumbling stream. That horse’s ass of a do-gooder; should have told the bastard to go get his own lousy spade; should have brought my gear with me and copped out…except for Cheryl, cherry-ripe.

  He swung and hopped down the mountainside, twists and turns in the route sending the lowering sun blinding into his eyes from time to time: one minute a green gloom, then scintillating water and a lance of dazzle across it, flick-flick, setting him blinking and rubbing his eyes. And now the pool where they had seen the tiny dipper on the way up was a cauldron of lambent streaks and sparks, a small cascade above it sending alternately full sun and fiery prisms of rainbows directly into his vision, as the flow of the water varied. Away beyond he saw fitfully a tracery, a filament and stanchions, momentarily on his horizon, bunched shapes with legs sticking out gliding along the black and sloping ridge which formed that horizon at that point of time; then, as he moved, puzzled and trying to get a better view, all was confusion again, present sense data and retinal memory intermingled and kaleidoscoped, fragmented roman candles of sunlight and water; no sound but the background of hissing, gobbling water.

  He shrugged and moved on down. Those bodies were sheep, or goats or some animal like that. He had no knowledge of Welsh animal husbandry, and the sight struck him as no more than a visual curiosity. He was still sullenly angry with Harry for having forgotten the disability of the foot. Or maybe Harry hadn’t forgotten: maybe this was a sadistic attempt to make him suffer? Well, he wasn’t suffering, but he was hot and getting tired, and knew that by the time he rejoined the others, he would be hotter and more tired still.

  By the Kombi he rested for ten minutes, grateful at first for cool shadow, and then finding it too cool as the sweat dried and the chill of the little hollow struck him; he picked up the spade where it lay beneath the vehicle. He paused a moment. Limeys, he thought. Just leave anything around where anybody could pick it up. He considered whether to fling the spade away into the bushes, and tell Harry that someone must have stolen it, but could not face the idea of returning empty-handed, even to Harry. So he set out on the upward journey. His foot was beginning to hurt.

  *

  Simon and Linda walked slowly along in a corrugation of ground, on firm grass and heather. A wheatear flew along before them for some distance, then veered off to one side.

  Simon said, ‘You know, we ought to have gone down for that spade. It would have been a walk, wouldn’t it?’

  Linda chuckled and said, ‘Too much of a walk, to my way of thinking. Anyway, Harry sent Ray.’

  ‘That’s what I was thinking. Do you think he forgot about Ray’s foot? Or do you think he sent him down on purpose?’

  Linda said slowly, ‘I’d forgotten myself. Oh, Simon… Harry would never do a thing like that. He must have forgotten. If I could forget, so could he, couldn’t he?’

  A small but irritating doubt persisted, a small pustule of suspicion.

  Simon said, ‘He made us change the tents.’

  ‘Because of the weather?’ Linda said, with an interrogative lift to her voice.

  ‘Or to keep Ray away from Cheryl and Peter away from Ann? Did you see Peter sitting there sulking with his judo book?’

  Linda pondered, clear eyes and open face turned to Simon; they had halted.

  ‘You could be right about that,’ she said briskly. ‘Harry doesn’t miss much. It was like electric currents flying all over the place, earlier on.’

  ‘What do you mean, Lin?’

  ‘Sex,’ she said.

  They sat down on a grassy hump of ground. Linda broke off a stalk of heather and began to pull it to pieces.

  Simon said, ‘Peter and Ann. They can’t go on for ever just holding hands and kissing, you know. I mean, you saw how Ray and Cherry got on.’

  Linda was frowning.

  She said, ‘Sex and the LYF don’t mix. Harry knows that. That’s why we’ve had such a good time, as friends. Sex would just mess it all up.’

  They were sitting in sunlight, and Linda took off her green anorak; her canary-yellow sweater showed off her trim breasts, and Simon thought that if she were trying to emphasise the point she had just been making, she had chosen the wrong way to go about it; with lugubrious objectivity he noticed his own reaction.

  He said, ‘Sometimes it all seems so old-fashioned. Harry’s forty, but he goes on like he’s sixty or something. You take your cue from him. Why would sex mess it
up? I’d have thought it could make things a lot more fun.’

  Linda said vehemently, ‘It’s all that Ray! You’d never have said anything like that before he came along, and you ought to be ashamed of yourself as it is.’

  Defensively he said, ‘You’ve got your beliefs. It’s all right for you. I mean, you look after me if I get a fit, and I’m grateful, even though I haven’t had a proper one since we started the LYF. But you never seem to think I may have feelings just like anyone else. — Anyone except you and Harry,’ he added bitterly.

  Linda took his hand.

  ‘Poor old Simon,’ she said. ‘That’s what’s at the back of it. Think: you haven’t had anything wrong since we started the LYF. And why? Because we’ve had peace and quiet, and got this sex-mad world behind us. If we went on like that, there’d be all sorts of things creeping in. I felt it earlier on, before Harry stepped in. You’d have envy, and jealousy — all kinds of bad things. Think what sort of good that’d do you!’

  Simon thought, And what good would it do me if I told her I loved her? She’d be all tender and sympathetic and good friends, Simon dear, and pat me hand and all that, and never even notice what’s standing and quivering under her tilted little nose.

  But he was wrong. She was gazing down at him meditatively, then she looked up into his eyes candidly, her lips slightly parted.

  ‘Simon…’ she said.

  ‘I can’t help it. I told you I’d got feelings like anyone else. They just build up and up.’

  She said, ‘It’s all that horrid tension we were talking about. Oh, Simon, it could be dangerous for you.’

  He nodded mutely.

  She thought, An act of charity? I could grasp him, like those horrid boys I saw behind the shed in the park. This would be different, an easing of stress for him, myself not involved except at the length of my fingers.

  Dark memory. She was on holiday at the seaside. Night. Asleep in the boxroom, then waking to stabbing intolerable pain, suffocating weight grinding down rhythmically, beer fumes, pain, stifling horror, a hand over her mouth, grunting, pain. Her uncle’s voice: Tell your auntie and I’ll screw your neck round for you. The last night of her holiday. And her birthday. Twelfth birthday. What did you get for your birthday, Linda?

  And she said, ‘Silly old Simon. Come on, now, let’s go back. You’ll be more comfortable in a minute.’

  And as they walked she said, ‘Harry knows what’s good for us. You know that, if you think clearly about it. I hope that Ray goes away soon, though.’

  And she said in a little while, demurely and solicitously, ‘There now. You’re all right now, aren’t you, Simon?’

  It could be dangerous, he thought. Ha bloody ha.

  *

  Harry lay in the little tent, his sleeping bag squashed against Ray, who slept in a sort of polythene bag like a transparent condom. Harry listened with satisfaction to the American’s deep and steady breathing. Not a sound anywhere apart from that. Harry had been right after all; and after all, he usually was. Just for a while, things had threatened to get out of hand, but quick decision had averted what might easily have given a nasty tinge to the holiday. You just had to keep your eyes open. Harry closed his. Funny, he thought. That river going pink like that. No helicopter, though. Nothing happened. All serene. Harry slept.

  *

  Egan was counting sheep.

  5

  Ray awoke in the green light of the tent, groaned and yawned. Stretching in his polybag, he winced. His foot was aching — not intolerably, but still it was a little painful. That climb down and back for the spade. He sat up, hit the roof of the tent, then subsided and slewed himself round on an elbow. Harry wasn’t there. Dimly he became aware for the first time of sounds from outside, and looked at his watch. Eight-thirty! Wriggling and heaving, he put on his pants, teeshirt and sweater, worked on his socks and boots, and came out of the tent on all fours to find the others in the middle of breakfast.

  ‘Ho, the sleeper awakens!’ Harry said. ‘Thought we’d better let you lie in a bit. Pete, give him a mug of tea; you’re nearest.’

  ‘Hi,’ Ray said, including everybody in the greeting.

  Cheryl said, ‘Did you have a lovely night’s sleep, then?’

  Ray sipped his tea, then looked at her. Boy, have I screwed up on this, he thought. Five-thirty, six, we had a date to ball in the goddam jolly old heather, what? And what did I do? I went to sleep!

  Harry said, ‘Well, it’s a lovely morning.’

  ‘It wasn’t so good early on,’ Cheryl said pointedly, looking at Ray.

  He said, ‘Uh — well, I didn’t register what the weather was doing, I guess. I was about bushed when I got back last night.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Cheryl said sweetly.

  Harry said generally, ‘Oh well, he’s had a nice rest and that’s the main thing. We’ll put in a good day today, and we’re bound to get results. Yesterday was just a first exploration. We must allow for that. I mean, can we count yesterday?’

  Can we ever, Ray thought.

  ‘No,’ Harry said, answering for them. ‘Today’s the day!’

  He was fiddling in his pocket, Ray noticed, and then saw him bring out some ball bearings, playing with them like worry beads, while his open, honest face was all geniality as he expatiated on what they were likely to find that day, and what good the mountain air was doing them.

  ‘Excuse me, Harry,’ Ray said courteously. ‘What are those things you’re playing with?’

  There was a silence. Harry’s habit of fiddling with the ball bearings was never discussed among the LYF. None of them had ever discussed it, perhaps because each unconsciously had the feeling that here was a crack in Harry’s carapace best left unprobed. Anyway, they never mentioned it. Had not, so far.

  And then Peter said, while Harry frowned and put the ball bearings away, ‘Why, can’t you see? They’re his balls. I mean, his ball bearings.’

  Simon said, ‘That’s right. Harry’s got three balls. Three visible ones, that is to say.’

  ‘For the rest, we make no comments,’ Peter said.

  Linda was flushing.

  Harry said, ‘Now that’s enough, do you hear?’

  ‘No,’ Ann said. ‘What do you mean, Pete: like a pawnbroker?’

  Cheryl said, ‘You don’t see many about nowadays, but they hang three balls outside their shops.’

  ‘That wasn’t quite what I meant,’ Simon said. ‘But now you mention it, you could say that. He lends things out for interest, just like a pawnbroker. Different kind of things, different kind of interest, but there you are.’

  Harry shouted, ‘I said that’s enough.’

  Ray said, ‘But why, Harry? If you have any problems, we should all talk them through: a group talk-in would help you.’

  ‘I don’t need any help,’ Harry said, quietening. ‘Turks have their jitter-beads; Catholics have their rosaries. I’ve got these, and don’t make fun of them. Say what you like about me; I don’t mind. I’ll turn the other cheek. But leave these alone and don’t mock them.’

  Ray said, ‘They have some meaning for you, then? You don’t just use them like worry-beads?’

  Harry said, ‘I don’t think I ought to tell you, not after what Pete and Simon said. I don’t know why they did that, but if it was meant to hurt, well, it did.’

  ‘They didn’t mean anything,’ Linda said. ‘You know, sometimes a joke can get hold of you. That’s all it was.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Ray, and looked at Peter and Simon, who nodded.

  ‘A joke,’ Harry said. ‘Look, I’d better explain. It’ll do you good to understand. I shouldn’t have secrets, not from the LYF. It’s wrong of me. You know a rosary is connected up with prayers? You count the beads off and say the prayers, and do meditation. Well, these are the same in a way.’

  ‘What?’ Ann said.

  Harry took out the three shiny ball bearings and laid them on his palm.

  ‘Have a look,’ he said. ‘Three spheres, corr
ect to within thousandths of a centimetre. Three perfect spheres.’

  They all looked blank, and Harry sighed patiently, all his earlier discomfiture behind him; now he was a schoolmaster trying to illuminate simple minds with truth.

  ‘Rosaries, prayer-wheels,’ he said. ‘What have they got on these? The Holy Trinity.’

  Linda said, ‘The Holy Trinity?’

  ‘That’s right. God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.’

  Holy Cow, Ray thought.

  Harry smiled at them sympathetically.

  ‘You wouldn’t have made remarks like you did if you’d known that, would you? So we’ll forget all about it. But just think: wherever I am, doesn’t matter a bit, I can use these and say a little prayer. Now then, let’s get all these things cleared away and make a start.’

  *

  They trudged over the plateau. Harry had decided they should work from a rather more central point, which might be a little boggy, but for that reason alone would be more worthwhile exploring. After all, you can’t engulf a legion in two inches of peat. So they walked on a diagonal course to that of the previous day, pausing when they reached what looked like suitably swampy ground. Then Harry began to work with the metal detector.

  Cheryl ignored Ray, even though he tried to explain his remissness in sleeping on. When he became importunate she moved close to the others, and he had to keep silent. He noticed that everybody seemed on edge, not only Cheryl and himself. Whereas the day before had been alive with sexual tensions, these had been replaced by an equally palpable disgruntlement, of which Harry seemed determined to take no notice in his forgiving mood.

  Ray wandered along by himself, charting the course of his association with these oddball people. First, there had been only the matter of getting a ride in a generally westward direction, then the business of the LYF, which had intrigued him until he had been told what the initials stood for — a matter for amused derision. But somehow or other they had sucked him in as far as a point of involvement, when he had told Cheryl that she was beautiful; and that had been no more than the truth. But things had started to get screwed up after that, from the time when he had given Harry the grouse, and later on that day had made time with Cheryl. That had led to his trip back to the Kombi and up again; his long night’s sleep, and this final sense of alienation, culture shock, whatever.