Injury Time (13 page)

‘What’s up?’ said Ginger, ‘What’s Harry want?’

‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘He’s asleep by the stove. What have you done to the gentlemen? What’s happened to Edward?’

‘Is he the one that pissed hisself?’ he asked. The large table had been dragged across the room and laid on its side to form a barricade. Ginger crouched behind it. The tip of his gun glittered like a spear in the moonlight.

‘He wasn’t scared,’ defended Binny. ‘He couldn’t hold on any longer. Where is he?’

‘In the bathroom. They’re all right.’

‘Someone’s bleeding,’ she accused. ‘There’s blood on the carpet.’

‘The bald bloke hurt his ankle,’ Ginger said. ‘It had nothing to do with us.’

Binny advanced further into the room. She noticed a pane of glass had been broken in the bottom half of the window. She looked curiously into the street. It was empty of cars, of people; lights burned on the stairwells of the flats and along the deserted balconies. At the corner, by a plane tree turned to silver under the blazing moon, a solitary furniture van was parked. ‘What would you have done,’ she wanted to know, ‘if the children had been here? My children?’

He shrugged.

‘They’d have been frightened.’

‘They’d have been asleep,’ he said sullenly. ‘Wouldn’t they?’

‘Alison watches late-night films sometimes. She could have been up.’

He said nothing. He was like her son Gregory when she started to tell him how tired she felt; his mind switched off.

‘You shouldn’t involve other people. It’s none of my business what you’ve been doing, but you shouldn’t have brought it here. You don’t know how inconvenient it is.’

‘Shut up,’ he said. ‘I never asked to be here.’

‘Alison would have been frightened out of her wits. Smashing the pictures in the hall, fusing the lights—’

‘We never fused them.’

‘Beating that woman—’

‘You know nothing about it,’ he muttered. ‘It’s not what you think.’

‘Children are very impressionable. It’s like food – we are what we eat. They can be influenced for life. It doesn’t matter to us . . . we’ve had our lives.’

He stared at her. She couldn’t see his expression.

‘Well,’ she amended. ‘You haven’t, of course. You’re only young. You won’t remember that film, will you, when the heroine walked into the ocean playing her violin? She said more or less the same thing. That’s why she did it.’

She didn’t worry whether Ginger thought the strain of the last few hours had unhinged her; she was choosing her words with care. Far away, like a distant gust of wind, she heard those fornicating cats, thinly screaming. She was ready at the slightest hint of irritation on his part to change her attitude, to moderate her tone of voice. She would never have spoken in this fanciful way to Harry or the violent man in the bathroom. They were not the same as Ginger. For many years, in the privacy of her own home, she had been a voyeur of murder, arson and war. Sitting passively on her sofa she had followed in the wake of tanks and ships and planes. She had seen shells burst in the night like fireworks, flame-throwers curling like rainbows above the earth. She had watched little bombs falling, wobbling like harmless darts through fluffy clouds. Between placing the kettle on the gas and the water coming to the boil, whole cities disintegrated, populations burned. A thousand deaths, real and fictional, had been enacted before her eyes. Once, in real life, she’d been an innocent bystander when a woman was attacked with an axe. Head elongated, wearing a bloody rag of a towel like an Indian turban, the victim was helped from the house. Binny found the moans simulated, the suffering unconvincing; the scene lacked reality, the woman lacked star quality. Ginger’s voice, and that bowed head theatrically lit by moonlight, were familiar to her. She could believe in him. He was the wayward young man in westerns and gangster movies and war films who at the end, sickened by his less stylish companions, proved to have a heart of gold.

‘I don’t want to know the details,’ she continued. ‘What you’ve done, you’ve done. That’s your affair. But you ought to tell us what you’re going to do next. After all we’re on your side whether we like it or not. Why on earth did you have to break this window?’ She bent down fussily and inspected the fragments of glass on the dusty floor.

‘I kept dozing off,’ he explained. ‘It wouldn’t open. I needed air.’

‘Yes, well,’ she said. ‘That’s one way of getting it, I suppose. The paint’s stuck. There’s so much to do in a house this size. I can’t be expected to do everything.’ She gazed, consumed with self-pity, into the street below. ‘They’ve left us alone,’ she lamented. ‘Not one single bobby. They don’t care what happens to us.’

‘Don’t you believe it,’ Ginger said. He pointed at the van on the corner. ‘That’s their H.Q. And there’s men up there.’

‘Where?’ she asked. She squatted beside him and peered intently over the edge of the table. ‘Those are birds, surely?’

‘There,’ he said impatiently. He held her chin and tilted it in the right direction.

His fingers were thin and strong; she could feel his breath upon her cheek. She wasn’t worried by his proximity. It wasn’t only that he regarded her as eligible for the old age pension; she’d enough knowledge of men to know he couldn’t fancy her. ‘Oh yes,’ she cried, ‘I see’, though all she saw on the slopes of the moon-flooded roof were pigeons perched in sleep.

‘I keep thinking of steak,’ said Ginger. ‘I thought I heard it spitting under the grill a moment ago.’

‘We haven’t got any steak,’ she said.

‘It’s those leaves on the balcony,’ he told her. ‘That ivy, flickering against the railings.’

‘There’s some sausages in the fridge. You’re very welcome.’

He made a face. ‘Muck,’ he said contemptuously.

She hoped he was referring to sausages in general. After Harry’s disparaging remarks about cleanliness she was unduly sensitive. She looked at him. There were creases at the side of his mouth. He wasn’t as young as she’d first taken him to be – perhaps prison life had aged him. ‘Was it awful inside?’ she asked.

They stayed like two monkeys on the floor, balanced on haunches, hands swinging loosely between their knees.

He stared at her blankly. ‘Inside where?’

‘Well, prison.’

‘How should I know?’ he said. ‘I’ve never been there.’

‘No, of course not,’ she agreed. ‘I was just curious.’ He had a surprised kind of face, the eyebrows so pale as to be unnoticeable. His lips couldn’t quite close over his teeth. He looked good-tempered and expectant, as though waiting for some joke to be told. ‘I’ve visited me brother, though. In Walton.’

‘Is that a prison?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It’s a good few years ago now.’

‘It must be terrible to be shut away. It must finish a man.’

‘Get off,’ he scoffed. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. Our Billy never looked fitter in his life. When I went to see him you’d have mistaken the blokes inside for the visitors. It was me and me sister looked half-dead.’

‘That’s interesting,’ said Binny.

‘Stands to reason, doesn’t it? They put him to bed at eight o’clock and he had a bath three times a week. He got into music and foreign languages. He sat up half the night with his earphones.’

‘How amazing,’ said Binny.

‘You ask our Billy anything about Mahler and Stravinsky and he’ll tell you. Anything at all. He knows them backwards.’

She was resentful. She recalled the times she’d tried to listen to Vera Lynn on the gramophone and Sybil Evans’s curtailing her with a knock on the bedroom wall.

‘It’s another world,’ she said. ‘I can’t pretend to understand.’ She couldn’t think what else to say. She didn’t like to ask him what he was doing in her house if he hadn’t escaped from prison. It wouldn’t do to irritate him, not when they were getting on so well. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘Why don’t I go downstairs and make us all something to eat? There’s brown bread and some nice cheese. That would do you good. It’s wholemeal bread. Then you could tell us what’s happening . . . you know . . . put us in the picture. Edward’s awfully upset.’ She hesitated, wondering how much to tell him.

‘Your hubby?’ Ginger said. ‘The fat bloke?’

‘He’s not that fat,’ she protested. ‘It’s only his stomach. He eats a lot and sits down all day.’ Ginger was watching the street, the roof opposite, the furniture van on the corner. ‘You see he’s not really supposed to be here. He’s a kind man, a good man. He is, really. I know he sounds pompous and he’s a bit crippled by being educated at that posh school, but he’d never let anybody down. He’s got values. I haven’t got values.’ She could feel her lip beginning to quiver. ‘That’s why the children take no notice of me. I don’t give them a lead. Alison takes notice of me – she gives me cuddles, but then she’s only a baby. Edward’s different from me. He’s got a wonderful sense of responsibility. It weighs him down. And he’s awfully brave. Why, when he went for the gun—’

‘What gun?’ asked Ginger.

‘When he was little,’ she improvised. ‘He had this nanny who kept pushing her babies in the mud. Though he was only a boy he got his gun out and stopped her. It was very brave.’

‘What mud?’ Ginger asked.

‘In the country. It rained all the time. Of course, it was his background. He has this thing about playing the game and keeping a stiff upper lip.’

‘He didn’t have a stiff upper anything a couple of hours ago,’ Ginger said cruelly.

‘Don’t,’ she pleaded. ‘You shouldn’t make fun of him. I can’t see why you don’t let him go. He’s like a fish out of water. You could just shove him through the front door. He won’t give away any information, not if he gives you his word. He’s like that.’

‘No,’ Ginger said.

‘What difference would it make?’

‘I’ll say this for you,’ remarked Ginger. ‘You’re loyal. You stand by your bloke.’

‘He’s married,’ she confessed. ‘He’s got a wife.’

‘It’s bloody disgusting,’ said Ginger. He didn’t alter the reasonable tone of his voice, nor did he look at her. He’d placed his hands on the edge of the table as if to steady himself.

She stood up and moved regretfully to the door. ‘I egged him on,’ she insisted. ‘It wasn’t his fault. He was the innocent party.’ She didn’t wait for Ginger to reply. She realised she’d made a mistake telling him about Edward and herself – he was far too narrow in his outlook to make allowances.

The woman in the hall was awake and massaging her ribs. By her side lay a large celluloid doll without clothes. ‘You,’ she called. ‘If Ginger’s finished with you, make us a drink. I’m parched.’ She was grinning.

‘I’m just about to put the kettle on,’ said Binny. She went through into the kitchen. She didn’t feel at all sorry for the woman and was puzzled by this lack of compassion. She stepped over the still slumbering Harry and put the kettle on the stove. She took cups and a bottle of milk to the table. Alma sat hunched in a corner of the sofa, knees drawn up to her chin. Muriel lay face downwards, large legs thrust beyond Alma’s shoulders, feet braced against the wall. ‘You’re awake,’ said Binny.

‘No,’ snapped Alma. ‘I always sleep with my eyes open.’ She was now perfectly sober and feeling belligerent.

‘I’ve been upstairs talking to Ginger,’ Binny told her. ‘He’s not at all menacing once you get through to him. I was terrified they’d done something to Edward. I learnt quite a lot. He’s going to tell us what he intends to do.’

‘You always were a rotten judge of character,’ said Alma. ‘He’s weird. I wouldn’t touch him with a barge pole.’

‘He’s not weird,’ protested Binny. ‘He’s not at all like Harry or that swine Widnes—’

Alma said she was being absurd. Widnes had acted in a brutal manner because he thought he’d been double-crossed. The woman asked for everything she got.

‘You’d passed out,’ said Binny crossly. ‘He tried to strangle her.’

‘Well, he was annoyed, pet. You’d have done the same. There’s nothing wrong with a bit of healthy anger. And Harry’s harmless enough. He’s a bit slow—’

‘He wasn’t slow smashing my lampshade,’ cried Binny. It was just like Alma to get the wrong end of the stick. It was useless discussing anything with her. ‘I ticked Ginger off about breaking the window,’ she said. ‘He was quite apologetic. I tried to get him to release Edward.’

‘You are funny,’ said Alma. ‘You worry over Teddy, but when you’re together you never stop goading the poor man. The way you sulked when he mentioned buying aspirins for his wife. If looks could kill—’

Binny attempted to straighten the tablecloth but gave up. She couldn’t trip backwards and forwards across the sleeping gunman on the floor. She wished Alma hadn’t referred to Helen as ‘his wife’ – it was illogical of her, she knew, but the possessive pronoun hurt. She said tearfully, ‘What will she do when she learns about Edward and me? She’s bound to find out now, isn’t she?’

‘She knows already, darling. You and I would. Why do you keep thinking she’s any different?’

‘She doesn’t know. Edward says—’

‘Rubbish,’ snapped Alma. ‘She’s probably been trailing him for months.’ She smiled suddenly. ‘Do you remember that time I thought Frank was carrying on with a girl at the office? You were useless. You kept saying please God don’t let’s find him.’

‘I know,’ said Binny. She hadn’t enjoyed the incident – following Frank all over London in the passenger seat of Alma’s little car, shooting through traffic lights, Alma driving with one hand and swigging whisky out of a bottle with the other. People looked down on them from buses. Binny was terrified they might actually spot Frank and he would hurl himself across the bonnet of the car. He had a very nasty temper. Alma made her wear a wig from Woolworths and sunglasses. They went into the most unlikely places in search of him – the crypt of St Paul’s, under the arches of the embankment. ‘For God’s sake,’ Binny had argued, clutching her horrendous wig in the wind and standing ankle deep in filth, ‘he’s supposed to be courting, not doing away with her.’ In the end they sat for three hours outside the house of Frank’s auntie in Battersea, in case he was using the place as a rendezvous.