‘A long time ago, I bet,’ Peter put in, with annoyance. ‘They’re a bit out of your class, aren’t they?’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Genius said offhandedly.
Already the rain was slackening in intensity; it had been a vicious, short squall. The sky outside was brightening a little, and in the growing light inside the building Simon looked around the group, the spread of sleeping bags and the huddle of camping equipment, knowing that they were being indelibly imprinted on his memory. This was no aura epileptica, but a premonition none the less. He had heard, or read, of people in ancient times who could predict earthquakes, perhaps as a result of sudden and steep changes in barometric pressure. This was a similar experience, possibly caused by the lifting squall: a heightening of the impressions his brain was receiving, and also a feeling of unreality like a slight overcrank into slow motion, accompanied by this certainty that something dreadful was about to take place. Harry was standing and looking at Genius with an air of stolid puzzlement; Ray was leaning against the wall in a studiedly casual attitude; and Peter had taken a step forward, hunched aggressively. Ann and the other two girls drew together, Linda putting an arm round Ann’s shoulders in a protective gesture, though Ann was the taller, and the sight touchingly incongruous.
Genius turned to Harry and said, ‘See that wall behind you? Well, you and your mates can start taking it down. Little bit of exercise, do you the world of good.’
Harry said, ‘Oh, come on, will you? We’ve had enough exercise for one day.’
‘Not in my book. Get working.’
So they began to take down the wall separating the two rooms, lugging the heavy stones into the corner at Genius’s direction and under the point of Lumpy’s rifle. When about two feet of the wall remained, Genius told them to stop work. Breathing hard, they obeyed. Genius was examining the three girls in turn.
Simon thought, My God, I’ll have a fit. I can’t stand this any longer.
Genius absently took the rifle from Lumpy, and during the exchange Peter thought he saw his chance. He jumped forward, fractionally too late, and the butt of the rifle crashed into his solar plexus. Coughing and retching, he staggered backward, Harry and Simon supporting him. Genius fired the rifle three times into the soggy ground at the men’s feet; outdoors the .22 high velocity ammunition made surprisingly little noise, but here in the confines of the little room the shots thundered and reverberated in inexorable command.
‘You three fellers in the corner,’ Genius ordered.
The girls had clung together with cries of dismay and fear. Gasping and wheezing, Peter was helped into the corner by the other two men.
‘That’s it,’ Genius said.
They watched with sick outrage. Peter massaged his stomach, recovering swiftly from the rifle blow, for he was fit and hard, but for the moment sickened and demoralised. Genius handed back the gun to Lumpy and moved to Linda, taking off her anorak, then hauling off her sweater and unzipping her pants, letting them fall to the floor; Linda whimpered and shuddered.
‘See what I mean?’ Genius said to Lumpy as he took off the girl’s bra. ‘Nice little pair. Give us the gun again, Lump. Have a good old feel, boy.’
Genius stood back, holding Lumpy’s gun. Lumpy’s face had assumed a disintegrated quality as he came forward, leaning over Linda with his great hands at her breasts, fumbling and rubbing. Then a hand went briefly to his crotch, and to Linda’s.
He said to Genius, ‘I can’t go on like this.’
It was less of a statement than an appeal.
Genius smiled and said, ‘Why d’you think I made ’em take that wall down? You nip in there with her and have a ball. I’ve got the gun, haven’t I?’
‘Can I?’ Lumpy said, eagerly.
Harry said, ‘You’ll get twenty years for this.’
He felt weak and queasy, drained of strength, his mouth dry.
Genius said to Lumpy, ‘We met this lot, see? What they did, they invited us to share their birds. So we did. It wouldn’t have been polite to refuse.’
Lumpy nodded, and Linda gave a small cry as he dragged her to the doorway, her pants tangled in her feet, then coming free as she was shoved over what was left of the wall.
Simon made no move, staring ahead and listening with the others, hearing Linda shriek, the sound cut off presumably by Lumpy, then the noise of scuffling and heaving and moaning. Genius still kept the gun on the group, but moved over nearer to the doorway and glanced inside from time to time, watching, his mouth tight and the cheerful expression quite gone, submerged under a vicious mask.
Linda was squashed against the wall, passive under Lumpy’s thrusts, disconnectedly aware of what was happening but able to achieve some degree of dissociation from the event, casting her mind fragmentary back to the summer holiday of her twelfth birthday and the pain then. The pain now was scarcely present in the physical sense. So she put up with Lumpy until he had finished, then sagged back on the wall when he detached himself from her; she felt horror and revulsion, but had never expected to feel anything else from this act.
The others saw her emerge, pale and with wounded eyes averted from them; she picked up her pants and then went slowly to the heap of equipment, picked up a polythene bowl and went outside with it, asking no permission of Genius, who let her go. Lumpy appeared in the doorway, zipping his stained flies and then striding over the little barrier, grinning with stupid pride at Genius.
‘Okay, was it, then? One lump gone down at least,’ Genius said.
Lumpy said, ‘I want another one. Please let me have another one.’
‘Well, well,’ said Genius. ‘Don’t you think that’s a bit greedy? You’ve had a good meal, and now you want seconds?’
‘I’ve got to,’ Lumpy said. ‘I’ll go bloody mad if you don’t let me.’
‘All right, then. Take your pick.’
Harry found his voice: not the assured and brazen tones of his normal utterance, but a senile quaver.
‘Let us go,’ he begged. ‘For God’s sake, you’ve done enough. Now let us go. Please.’
Genius said, ‘You’ve got to work tomorrow, remember?’
Ray said, ‘You’ll get no more work out of me, for one.’
‘Well, we’ll have to see about that,’ Genius said.
Lumpy crossed the floor to the other girls, who shrank together.
Cheryl said, ‘Leave us alone… Harry, why don’t you do something? They’re lunatics, Harry, they’ll kill us all!’
Harry shook his head impotently, while Peter thought, If that bastard touches Ann, I’m going to rush him again whatever happens: kick him in the balls and then go for the other one’s eyes. He watched Lumpy, almost willing him to go for Ann, knowing that this choice was the only one which could goad him once more into action, and that it would do so infallibly, no matter what the consequences.
But Lumpy grasped Cheryl’s arm, then said to Genius, ‘This one.’
‘Okay,’ Genius said, as Cheryl screamed and kicked at Lumpy’s shins, trying to scratch his face; he held her away easily as she struggled, crying to Harry for help. Harry took a step forward and Genius hit him across the face with the rifle barrel, a stinging welt over the cheekbone and the nose; Harry staggered backwards, tears streaming.
Lumpy fought Cheryl over to the doorway. With only one good hand, she was still difficult to manage, even for a man of Lumpy’s strength, twisting and kicking, bucking and yelling. Then her powers seemed to desert her, and she went limp in the man’s grasp; he carried her into the next room unresisting. Harry crouched blindly by the wall, rubbing his cheek and nose, finding that the blow had not drawn blood for all the pain it was giving him. Cheryl, he thought. He’s taken Cheryl.
They heard her scream once, at length, the sound followed by a series of high, staccato notes of animal quality which froze them all except for Genius, and which made coherent thought impossible. Simon was dimly aware that Linda had crept back into the room, putting back the bowl on the heap of gear; t
hen she moved to him and he held her hand. The noises in the next room faded a little.
‘What the hell is going on?’
Startled, they all turned, to see Egan framed in the outer doorway. Then he was moving across the room.
He reached Genius, took the gun, looked into the next room.
‘Come out,’ he said quietly.
Harry said, ‘Your lot are going to pay for this,’ but Egan ignored him.
Lumpy came out of the other room, his pants stained red now; and as he towered over Egan and Genius, Egan began to hit him with his free hand, first with the open palm and then with the back, half a dozen times, expelling a grunting breath with every blow. Then he stopped. Lumpy’s face had turned the colour of brawn among the marbles of the cysts.
Egan said, ‘You two come outside,’ and to the others: ‘Stay in here. If one of you shows his face I’ll pick him off myself.’
He went out with Genius and Lumpy. The group left in the room — a group which had been still as a bas-relief on a wall — came into life and motion: Simon hugging Linda, while Ann came to her also; Peter moving tentatively towards the inner room, to be elbowed aside by Harry and Ray, Harry making small and desperate noises in his throat.
Ray said to him, ‘Cool it, Harry,’ but Harry was quite beyond paying attention to anybody or anything except Cheryl. Together the two men found her. She had stopped crying, and was dressing mechanically, her lips bruised and her eyes red. She finished dressing as they reached her, and then began to pat her hair, the movement so abject and yet so feminine that Harry felt himself pierced by a poignant intensity deeper than any emotion he had experienced in his life before.
‘Cheryl,’ he said. ‘Oh, Cheryl, love.’
He and Ray helped her back to the others, who crowded round and commiserated either silently or with the almost meaningless expressions which the occasion diminished even more: ‘Never mind, dear,’…‘You’ll feel better soon,’…and so on. Cheryl sat down on the heap of equipment, registered fleeting pain, and groaned.
‘What can we do?’ Ann said. ‘What can we do?’
Harry said comfortingly, ‘We’ll be all right now. You saw what their boss did to that big one, belted him good and proper.’
‘All right now?’ Linda said. ‘You think I’m all right? And what about Cheryl? Do you think she’s all right?’
Harry shook his head helplessly, and said, ‘I mean nothing else will happen now.’
‘You bloody burk,’ Cheryl said. ‘What else do you expect to happen?’
Harry shook his head again, feeling for the ball bearings in his anorak pocket, grasping them as if clutching the only palpable reality in a world turned all at once to deliquescent nightmare, the three almost perfect spheres a solid trinity among a mass of endlessly coalescing and regrouping, shifting and kaleidoscopic filth.
And Cheryl said to him, ‘You fucking idiot. You got us into this — now get us out. I want to find a doctor, and get a policeman.’
Ray said, ‘She’s right. Psychos. A bunch of psychos. I should have realised as soon as I saw those guys.’
Harry was not listening to him, but staring at Cheryl in numb dismay. Linda sat with her and put an arm round her shoulders; she began to weep and sob uncontrollably. Slowly, as though rehearsing the gesture, Harry extended a hand in her direction, then let it fall to his side, his unvoiced protest overwhelmed by a flood of love and compassion for the two girls, who had plainly been unhinged by events, and might be expected to react violently. Somewhere nearby on the plateau, a grouse was calling insistently: go-back, go-back, go-back.
If only we could, Harry thought. If only we could.
*
Egan led Lumpy and Genius past the flat stone and out of earshot of the building, then halted them.
‘Two more days,’ he said. ‘Two more days, and we’d have been home and dry! I don’t know what to say. You disgust me, Lumpy, you always have disgusted me, but taking advantage of those girls is too much, you rotten raping goat. It is just too much. I feel like shooting you on the spot.’
Genius said, ‘It wasn’t his fault, Neeg, honest.’
‘Not his fault? Not his fault, when I come in there and see him on the job, and you tell me it’s not his fault, the filthy dirty devil.’
‘I mean it was the girl,’ Genius said. ‘Not the one you saw him with. The other one.’
‘The other one?’
Genius said, ‘The little one with the dark hair. You should have seen her, making up to him. She fancied him, all right, telling him how big and strong he was, didn’t she, Lump?’
Lumpy nodded.
‘Yeh,’ he said. ‘That’s right.’
‘She got him going. You know what he’s been like, charfing his tater half the night: she got him going, and once he’d done her, he had to have another one. It’s the way he’s made, see? But if that first one hadn’t started him off, nothing would have happened; I’d have been able to throttle him back, like. It was that bird’s fault. And it was your fault and all.’
‘How could it have been my fault?’ Egan demanded. ‘I’ve been down at the bottom working on that truck.’
‘And if you’d been here, nothing would have happened, would it?’ Genius said, with an air of finality. ‘How was Lumpy to know that second one was a virgin?’
Egan was still, except for his restless eyes. He heard some creature — animal or bird, he didn’t know which, nor did he care at all — quacking away in the background.
‘I wish that thing would shut up when I’m trying to think,’ he said. ‘If you’re right, Genius, I suppose they had it coming to them, in a way, though the whole business fills me with complete disgust, and this is the last job you do for me, Lumpy: I’ll have to start advertising for eunuchs next. But oh, women! Trust one to come along when we’ve got two days to go, and pick on a thing like Lumpy. It turns my stomach just to think of it.’
‘What you going to do, Eego?’ Genius said.
Egan spat on the ground.
‘I would like to expel the lot of them like that. People ought to control themselves. I control myself; why can’t other people? I know what it is: it’s this permissive society. Drugs, sex, it makes me sick.’
‘So what are you going to do? I told them we’d say they’d invited us to share the birds, all mates together.’
Egan said, ‘I can’t think straight with that thing making that horrible racket. Maybe your idea’s best, and if one of them was untapped she might want to hush it up. But I’m going to put a flea in their ear, just for a start. You must be right, Genius. You can’t expect to control somebody like Lumpy, not if a girl goes and chats him up to begin with.’
‘That’s right,’ said Genius.
Egan’s sexual puritanism stemmed from a neglected childhood, loveless among the unbridled activities of his parents, an only child; and his career of theft had its origin there also, had he but known it. But to him theft was business, and sex a sort of foul excretion.
‘A flea in their ear,’ he said. ‘That’s what they need, the whole boiling of ’em.’
He walked off, back to the building. Genius watched him go, then lighted a cigarette.
‘What was all that? What was he on about?’ Lumpy asked, genuinely puzzled.
‘Never you mind,’ Genius told him, and puffed happily. ‘Just thank your lucky stars I’ve got you off the hook. You’d have been in dead trouble if it hadn’t been for me.’
‘Yeh,’ said Lumpy, and brightened. ‘He wasn’t half cross. He was going to do his nut at me.’
‘And if my guess is right, he’s going to do his nut at that lot in there now,’ Genius said.
Lumpy nodded. There was a pause, and then Lumpy cleared his throat in slight embarrassment.
‘Genius?’
‘What is it?’
‘Genius…didn’t you want to have a go? In there, with one of them birds?’
Genius said patiently, ‘Listen, Lumpy, it’s the way people are made. Put t
ogether. Clocks have a different tick. Eaglenog understood when I told him how you was made, right?’
‘That’s right,’ said Lumpy. ‘I got that bit.’
‘Well, it’s how I’m made. I’m an observer, stand above the action. Objectivated. I see all, Lump, and every now and then I’ll just give a little push to help things along. Life can get very humdrum without a little shove here and there.’
‘I see,’ Lumpy said, with total lack of comprehension. ‘One thing, I do feel better now.’
‘That’s right. It’s done you a lot of good,’ Genius said.
*
Simon watched Linda incredulously. She was buttering bread. How could she be buttering bread after what had happened? He felt that she should be exhibiting some outward evidence, have grown somehow different. Different she was, but you wouldn’t think it. And as for himself, was there ever a bigger coward? He had just stood there and let that great bastard drag Linda away, and he’d done nothing, nothing at all except shake with fear and try to stop himself from dropping his gut into his pants.
Linda offered bread-and-butter to Cheryl, who shook her head without speaking: it seemed to Simon that she was behaving much more appropriately than Linda in the circumstances. But when Linda came to him with the bread-and-butter, he felt he should say something, despite her apparently complete recovery. He took a slice and thanked her.
Then he said, ‘Linda… I’m sorry.’
She said, almost briskly, ‘Oh well, it won’t be the first time it’s happened,’ and passed along with the food, leaving him staring.
Ray was watching Cheryl. She was taking her time, getting over things, but she would get over them in the end. Funny, he thought, I could still score with that chick. Kinky. But he knew that there was more to it than that. His original attraction and compassion had deepened. Tender loving care: that was what she needed, and he was the guy to give it to her. Only one division, he recalled, the division between those who want to hurt other folks, and the ones who don’t.
And Harry also was watching Cheryl, hearing the calling grouse in the background as he munched his bread-and-butter, the earlier flood of compassion damned to a trickle now, subdued by other considerations more central to him. He thought, What’s going to happen to us next? All you can do is live through the time. That’s all: like going to the dentist. You worry about it, and then it happens, and the real thing is never as bad as the worry was. They’ll let us go after this. Bound to. But, Lord above help me, whatever am I going to say to those girls’ parents?
Harry Doing Good Page 10
