Billy Rags

by Ted Lewis

  The street was empty. There were no pavements. Eyeless warehouses butted right up to the cobble-stones. Brighter lights winked at the end of the street. I began to walk towards them.

  I came out into a well-lit motorway feeder. To my right, a roundabout.

  I crossed the road and made for a group of old Victorian office buildings that promised darker back streets. The beginning of the first street I reached was bridged by one of the roundabout feeder roads, and as I walked underneath I could see a bowling alley on the bank above me, its entrance crowded with boys and girls spilling out over the pavement in a twittering flux, unaware how rich they were.

  I carried on down the back street. If I saw anyone approaching me I’d cross over to the opposite side of the road so that they’d have less chance of noticing my stockinged feet.

  After about a mile the buildings began to thin out. I was reaching the edge of the city. Straggling pockets of suburbia twinkled all around me. Then even the semis became fewer and I was in open fields.

  Rain began to drizzle down. Away to my left I heard a train go by, a mile or so away. I decided to make for the track. It would be perfect. A straight road without traffic or pedestrians. I climbed over a gate and began to trot across the fields, avoiding roads and farms as much as possible.

  Then I came up against the poxy river again.

  I stood on the bank and swore. It was narrower here but it was still the poxy river. There was no way round it. If I wanted to make the railway I had to cross the river.

  This time I took my clothes off and wrapped them up into a bundle and walked into the water holding my clothes aloft and began to swim. The river was much swifter here. It might as well have been twice as wide the time it took me.

  In the middle I was tipped by the current. The bundle nearly went under but I trod water and managed to keep the bundle above my head but I was swept quite a way down the river by the swiftness of the current. It took me over twenty minutes before I finally made the other side.

  I climbed up the bank and tore some leaves off the bushes and rubbed myself all over. When I was as dry as I could get I unwrapped the bundle and began to get dressed. Then I realised that I’d lost my socks in the river. It had to be the river. I’d been careful to roll the socks up on the other side. They must have dropped out of the bundle when the current had jolted me. Just the same I ferreted about on my hands and knees in case they’d fallen out on to the ground. But even as I looked I knew I wasn’t going to find them. I punched the ground with my fist and swore at the sky. I didn’t deserve to be out. First the shoe and now the fucking socks. They’d never have let me in the scouts. I stood up. Another train went by on the distant trade. I looked towards the sound. I was only wasting time.

  It must have been nine o’clock when I reached the track. I climbed the bank and began to run at a comfortable pace, making sure I kept to the sleepers. But the pace was the only comfortable thing about that run: the track had been laid on a base of flint, like shingles. A lot of the stones had flowed on to the sleepers. With almost every step a flint cut into the soles of my feet. It was too dark for me to be selective and there was no alternative to running so I had to bear the pain or give up. A typical Cracken situation. The only way I could cover it was to blank the pain out of my mind by thinking of what was waiting for me once I’d made the phone call. I thought of Sheila and the kid and my mates and all that freedom they’d got laid on for me back in the Smoke. I thought of Sheila and Ronnie as they would be right now, wide awake, by the phone just waiting for the call. And the kid, fast asleep in his cot, not knowing he was going to see his Daddy. I kept running and I kept thinking and the pain kept ripping into my feet.

  After four hours or so, I had to stop. My feet couldn’t take any more. What had made things worse for me was having to scramble off the track and down the bank every time a train came along: the relief it gave my feet only increased the pain every time I got back on the track and started to run again.

  I came to a railway arch and sheltered there until dawn. It was no use trying to sleep: the drizzling rain had soaked me just as completely as the river had done.

  I waited for the dawn.

  But, surprisingly, I did sleep. It might only have been for a few minutes, but I slept. I awoke out of a dream that was full of screws dancing round a rope and on the end of the rope was me, trying to drag myself up, to the top of a limitless wall, but my muscles weren’t operating properly, they were stiff and cramped and my body was heavy, waterlogged, and all the screws were laughing because the fall was inevitable, and before falling I looked into each of their faces and each of their faces was Walter’s face. The laughter grew louder and I let go of the rope and I awoke.

  Daylight. Still raining. A train was coming down the track. I ran out of the archway and sprinted along the track, looking for cover. On either side of me were, at the bottom of the banks, hedgeless fields. No cover at all. All I needed was for a car to pass over the arch and for the driver to see this fleeing shoeless madman on the track below him. The train was getting nearer. Was it close enough for the driver to spot me? I veered sharp right and skidded down the bank and kept on running. Ahead of me was a small solitary bush, sprouting crazily next to the never-ending fencing. Pain told me that the sprint had opened the wounds in my feet. Wind rushed in my ears and there was the taste of blood in my throat.

  I reached the bush and dived underneath. There was hardly enough of it to cover me. Then the train roared past and the bush shook and the noise grew fainter and then there was silence.

  I peered out of the bush. I was only about eighty yards from the road. As yet there didn’t seem to be much traffic but if I left the bush only one driver had to spot me and that would be enough. Likewise with the trains. There was nothing I could do but wait for the darkness again.

  The drizzle turned to heavy rain. I was soaking again. My resistance was getting lower and I was feeling the cold now. My feet were swelling and I felt sick with hunger. But all I could do was stay put. I wasn’t going to screw it up just for the sake of a day.

  I’d been there about two hours when a man I guessed to be a young farmer drove a small horse box along a dirt track, stopped, and led a horse into the adjoining field. At first he urged the animal to canter round and round the field, calling to it, whistling at it, generally enjoying the exercise even more than the horse was doing. Then he called the horse to him and gave it some sugar and when he’d done that he took his gear from the horse box and bridled and saddled the horse and rode the horse round the field for the best part of half an hour. The man and the horse made me feel better. I felt some kind of contact with them, as though they were players and I was an audience and the show was entirely for my benefit. There was a security in watching them, a feeling of rightness about their movement.

  But I felt even emptier when the man loaded the animal back into the horse box and started the engine and drove away.

  The rain kept raining. The bush gave me hardly any protection. Raindrops were causing me even more discomfort than the cold. When I’d been moving the rain wasn’t too bad, but just lying there the raindrops gradually began to feel like ice-cold needles jabbing at my skin. I kept thinking that the rain had to stop soon, but it didn’t. Sometimes it would come down even harder, perpendicular, spiteful, but these bursts only lasted a minute or so at a time.

  A tremendous instinctive inertia forced me to stay put, no matter how uncomfortable it was becoming. A thousand times I must have said to myself, fuck it, take a chance, move, but each time I forced myself to stay put. It was like being paralysed: each moment I thought my body would break into flight, but each moment nothing happened.

  But by the afternoon I was too cold. I couldn’t stay there any longer. Although night was a long way away, the rain was causing a false dusk, gloomy enough for me to risk it. Once I’d decided, acted, I was glad. Sod the risk. It was
worth it to be moving again.

  I ran under the arch and along the track for about half a mile. Then I came to a gangers’ hut. I couldn’t believe my luck. Somewhere I could get dry. Somewhere out of the piercing bloody rain.

  I opened the door. Vandals had smashed everything worth smashing and tarred their initials on the walls. But there was a bench that was still intact so I closed the door behind me and sat down and began to strip off my soaking clothes. I happened to glance up at the door. Hanging from a nail was an old greatcoat. I stood up and slowly walked over to the door. I couldn’t believe it. A coat. I reached out and touched it. It was dirty and mouldy and tatty but was a coat. I took it down from the nail and held it in my hands. It was the warmest thing I’d ever felt in my life.

  I went back to the bench and draped the coat over it and took off the rest of my clothes and wrung them out and then I lay down on the coat and watched the steam rise off my chest. If I’d had something to eat or drink I’d have been the happiest man in the country.

  When night came again I set off again down the track. But before I left the hut I’d torn up my winter vest and wrapped the pieces tightly round my feet and ankles. This gave my feet more protection than if I’d just been wearing socks. I took off down the line as fast as I could go.

  After about half an hour I saw that I was running into a small town. A few minutes later I came to a small housing estate which lay to my left; on one of those quiet street corners there would be a telephone kiosk. I left the track and climbed a slatted fence and walked across a patch of wasteground that joined a straggling going nowhere road that led out of the estate.

  The streets were deserted. Light from curtained windows fell warm and cosy on the neat front gardens. Now and again as I passed a house I could hear the muffled telly sounds beyond the curtains. Upstairs lights were on up and down the street; bedtime for the kiddies.

  I turned a corner and straight in front of me, opposite a bus shelter, was a telephone booth. There was no one about. I walked up to the booth and opened the door and went in and dialled the operator. This was it.

  “Number please?”

  “I’d like a transfer charge call, please.” I gave the number and the false name.

  “One moment, sir.”

  The operator went off the line. Wind droned round the phone booth. In a house across the road a light went off.

  The operator came back on.

  “Go ahead please.”

  “Yes?”

  Sheila’s voice.

  “It’s me.”

  She began to say my name, but I had to cut her off in case the operator was still plugged in.

  “Tell Ronnie I’ll see him in the morning.”

  I gave her the phone number, the street and the name of the town. I told her to tell Ronnie to bring the clothes and the money and to pick me up at the phone booth at eight o’clock the next morning. There was no time to tell her anything else. She began to say how she thought I wasn’t going to make it but I had to cut her off again.

  But not before I’d heard, in the background, Timmy’s cry.

  I opened the door of the kiosk. Rain was foiling again. The street was still empty. I walked back towards the railway. I didn’t see a soul. I climbed over the slatted fence and squatted down, my back leaning against the planking. The rain began to come down harder. I thought about Sheila and Timmy and what it would be like tomorrow when I saw them. I stayed like that for about an hour. And got thoroughly soaked. I couldn’t stay there all night. There had to be some shelter somewhere. I followed the line of the fence but there was no cosy railwaymen’s hut along this stretch and I didn’t want to get too far away from where I was going to get picked up: the less open ground I had to cover in daylight the less chance of somebody seeing me and arriving at a brilliant deduction.

  I climbed over the fence and went back into the estate. Still lifeless. Rain raced down the dead streets. I walked to the edge of the estate, but keeping within a good distance of the phone box. Here there was an older street, pre-war suburban, more respectable than the estate it flanked. The very best sort of council estate with dainty little front gardens contained behind neat privet. Some of the houses had garages built on to the side walls. I stopped outside a house that had a double garage. There was a light on in the hall but the bowed front window was black with night. I opened the front gate and walked up the path and round the side of the garage. There was a trellis gate and beyond that the back garden with the dining room light twinkling on the wet grass. I pressed the latch on the gate. The trellis-work shuddered. Beads of rain cascaded down on to the concrete path. I pushed against the gate. Wood scraped on concrete. I stopped pushing. In the next house a toilet flushed and a landing light went on and off. I waited a few minutes and pushed the gate again. It shuddered open enough for me to squeeze through. I went round the back of the garage. There was a small door that led into the garage, right next to the kitchen door. The kitchen was in darkness. I could hear the television beyond the dining room curtains. I tried the garage door. It was unlocked. I opened it and went in.

  A small square window in the garage’s front door let in the light from the street lamp. There was a Hillman Minx and two children’s bikes. There was also a door that led into the house. There were panes of frosted glass in this door. Beyond the panes, darkness.

  I hunted round the garage for a tap. But there was no tap, only a box full of empty bottles stacked by the back door. I took each bottle from the box very carefully, to see if there were any dregs. There were lager bottles and beer bottles and spirit bottles but they were all empty. But at last I came across a lemonade bottle. There was an inch or so of flat liquid in the bottom. I unscrewed the cap and sniffed it, in case it was paraffin or something like that. But it wasn’t. It actually was lemonade. I put the bottle to my lips and drank. It was beautiful. The nearest I’d ever get to the Elixir of Life. I kept the lemonade in my mouth for as long as I could, just so the taste could keep working on my palate. Finally I swallowed the stuff but the taste stayed with me.

  I put the bottles back in the box. Then I went over to the Hillman and tried the doors. All except the nearside rear door were locked. I opened the rear door and got in and lay down on the back seat. It was real penthouse stuff to me, feeling the softness of the upholstery against my body. But even so, I couldn’t sleep. I was too full of excitement at the prospect of the next morning. I just lay there in the warmth of the car, imagining what it would be like in a moving car, belting down the motorway towards the Smoke.

  When daylight came I stayed in the car for another hour. I reckoned that whoever lived in the house wouldn’t be a shift-worker, and that the earliest they’d be up and about would be around half-past-six. I didn’t want to move before I had to, so I lay there in the car trying to pace out the time to around six o’clock. But after about an hour I began to panic. Lack of sleep and food was making me light-headed. I began to want to doze off. One time I actually closed my eyes and almost fell asleep. I jerked myself upright in panic. It was no good. I couldn’t chance it any longer. I had to take my chances in the street. But at least I was warm and dry and in an hour or so I’d be travelling at seventy miles an hour.

  I opened the car door and held it open to let some of the stale air out. Then I noticed some mud on the upholstery so I leant back into the car and wiped the seat. After I’d done that I closed the car door very quietly and went over to the garage door, the one I’d come in by. My fingers closed over the door handle. I took one look over my shoulder just to check that I hadn’t left anything out of place.

  Then a shaft of light spurted through the frosted glass panels of the door that led into the house. Inside, somebody called goodbye. Then footsteps, coming towards the door with the frosted glass panels. The footsteps stopped. A bolt was drawn. Then a key turned.

  I opened the garage door and pulled it to be
hind me but without closing it properly. I heard the other door open and close and then footsteps going over to the Hillman. I looked to my left. The kitchen light was on. I could be seen from the window. I went round to the side of the garage. The neighbouring house was in darkness. I leant against the side of the garage and waited. I heard sounds of more bolts being drawn. Then one of the garage doors was opened. I looked towards the end of the garage. I heard the other door being opened. It swung into view, overlapping the end of the garage wall. I could see the man’s fingers gripping the woodwork and his feet beneath the door. And the door was the one with the window. When the door was completely open he walked back into the garage. I saw his head as he passed the window. Middle-aged, glasses. A trilby. All he would have had to do was turn his head.

  The Hillman started up. It idled for a minute or two, then it crept out of the garage. The car stopped, a door opened. Footsteps back to the garage. The fingers appeared again round the edge of the door. The door was dragged shut. Now I could see the Hillman. The man walked past the car to the gate that opened on to the road. He lifted the latch and swung back the gate. Then he got back in the car and drove the Hillman out into the road. I pressed myself against the garage wall as he walked back from the car to close the gate. All he had to do was to look as he fastened the latch. But he didn’t. He walked back to the Hillman and slammed the door and drove off.

  I waited a few minutes before I made a move. I listened for noises in the street and round the houses. When I was as satisfied as I could be I walked away from the garage to the gate. I felt naked. I lifted the catch but I was shaking so much that I let it drop back again and before I’d realised what I’d done I’d tugged at the gate, making a row that rang up and down the empty street. Whoever was left inside the house must have heard it. I’d made the whole of the fencing rattle. I got the gate open and without bothering to close it I took off down the street. But I stopped running when I saw a milk float whirring round the corner. I couldn’t change direction because that would have looked great, a running man, changing direction, with rags on his feet, haring off the minute a milk float appeared. I kept on walking towards the milk float, playing up the shuffling tramp bit, hands in great-coat pockets, shoulders hunched. The milkman gave me a quick look but it didn’t interfere with his whistling. He opened a garden gate and rattled his crate down on a doorstep and pressed the doorbell. Settling-up time. I was tempted to shamble over to the float and lift myself a pint, but at this stage in the game blowing the whole thing with only an hour or so to go would have been suicidal.