Make Death Love Me (5 page)

‘Been living it up today, have you, Grandpop? Been taking Mrs Rogers round the boozer? You'll get yourself talked about, you will. You know what they're like round here, yak-yak-yak all day long.' Pop was a teetotaller, and his acquaintance with Mrs Rogers extended to no more than having once chatted with her in the street about the political situation, an encounter witnessed by his grandson. ‘She's got a husband, you know, and a copper at that,' said Christopher, all smiles. ‘What are you going to say when he finds out you've been feeling her up behind the village hall? Officer, I had drink taken and the woman tempted me.'

‘You want to wash your filthy mouth out with soap,' Pop shouted.

Christopher said sorrowfully, smiling no more, that it was a pity some people couldn't take a joke and he hoped he wouldn't lose his sense of humour no matter how old he got.

‘Are you going to let your son insult me, Pamela?'

‘I think that's quite enough, Chris,' said Pam.

Pam washed the dishes and Alan dried them. It was for some reason understood that neither Christopher nor Pop should ever wash or dry dishes. They were in the living room, watching a girl rock singer on television. The volume was turned up to its fullest extent because Wilfred Summitt was slightly deaf. He hated rock and indeed all music except Vera Lynn and ballads like ‘Blue Room' and ‘Tip-toe Through the Tulips', and he said the girl was an indecent trollop who wanted her behind smacked, but when the television was on he wanted to hear it just the same. He had a large colour set of his own, brand new, in his own room, but it was plain that tonight he intended to sit with them and watch theirs.

‘The next programme's unsuitable for children, it says here,' said Christopher. ‘Unsuitable for people in their first or second childhoods. You'd better go off beddy-byes, Grandpop.'

‘I'm not demeaning myself to reply to you, pig. I'm not lowering myself.'

‘Only my fun,' said Christopher.

When the film had begun Alan quietly opened his book. The only chance he got to read was while they were watching television because Pam and Pop said it was unsociable to read in company. The television was on every evening all the evening, so he got plenty of chances. The book was Yeats:
The Winding Stair and Other Poems
.

Jillian Groombridge hung around for nearly two hours outside an amusement arcade in Clacton, waiting for John Purford to turn up. When it got to eight and he hadn't come, she had to get the train back to Stantwich and then the Stoke Mill bus. John, who had a souped-up aged Singer, would have driven her home, and she was more annoyed at having to spend her pocket money on fares than at being stood up.

They had met only once before and that had been on the previous Sunday. Jillian had picked him up by a fruit machine. She got him starting to drive her back at nine because she had to be in by half-past ten, and this made him think there wouldn't be anything doing. He was wrong. Jillian being Jillian, there was plenty doing: the whole thing in fact on the back seat of the Singer down a quiet pitch-dark country lane. Afterwards he had been quite surprised and not a little discomfited to hear from her that she was the daughter of a bank manager and lived at Fitton's Piece. He said, for he was the son of a farm labourer, that she was a cut above him, and she said it was only a tin-pot little bank sub-branch, the Anglian-Victoria in Childon. They kept no more than seven thousand in the safe, and there was only her dad there and a girl, and they even closed for lunch, which would show him how tin-pot it was.

John had dropped her off at Stoke Mill at the point where Tudor Way debouched from the village street, and said maybe they could see each other again and how about Wednesday? But when he had left her and was on his way back to his parents' home outside Colchester, he began having second thoughts. She was pretty enough, but she was a bit too easy for his taste, and he doubted whether she was the seventeen she said she was. Very likely she was under the age of consent. That amused him, that term, because if anyone had done any consenting it was he. So when Tuesday came and his mother said, if he hadn't got anything planned for the next evening she and his father would like to go round to his Aunt Elsie's if he'd sit in with his little brother, aged eight, he said yes and saw it as a let-out.

On the morning of the day he was supposed to have his date with Jillian he drove a truckload of bookcases and record-player tables up to London, and he was having a cup of tea and a sandwich in a café off the North Circular Road when Marty Foster came in. John hadn't seen Marty Foster since nine years ago when they had both left their Colchester primary school, and he wouldn't have known him under all that beard and fuzzy hair. But Marty knew him. He sat down at his table, and with him was a tall fair-haired guy Marty said was called Nigel.

‘What's with you then,' said Marty, ‘after all these years?'

John said how he had this friend who was a cabinet-maker and they had gone into business together and were doing nicely, thank you, mustn't grumble, better than they'd hoped, as a matter of fact. Hard work, though, it was all go, and he'd be glad of a break next week. This motoring mag he took was running a trip, chartering a plane and all, to Daytona for the International Motor-cycle Racing, with a sight-seeing tour to follow. Three weeks in sunny Florida wouldn't do him any harm, he reckoned, though it was a bit pricey.

‘I should be so lucky,' said Marty, and it turned out he hadn't had a job for six months, and he and Nigel were living on the Social Security. ‘If you can call it living,' said Marty, and Nigel said, ‘There's no point in working, anyway. They take it all off you in tax and whatever. I guess those guys who did the bank in Glasgow got the right idea.'

‘Right,' said Marty.

‘No tax on that sort of bread,' said Nigel. ‘No goddamned superann. and NHI.'

John shrugged. ‘It wouldn't be worth going inside for,' he said. ‘Those Glasgow blokes, they only got away with twenty thousand and there were four of them. Take that branch of the Anglian-Victoria in Childon – you know Childon, Marty – they don't keep any more than seven thou, in the safe there. If a couple of villains broke in there, they'd only get three-and-a-half apiece
and
they'd have to deal with the manager and the girl.'

‘You seem to know a lot about it.'

He had impressed them, he knew, with his job and his comparative affluence. Now he couldn't resist impressing them further. ‘I know the manager's daughter, we're pretty close, as a matter of fact. Jillian Groombridge, she's called, lives in one of those modern houses at Stoke Mill.'

Marty did look impressed, though Nigel didn't. Marty said, ‘Pity banks don't close for lunch. You take a branch like that one, and Groombridge or the girl went off to eat, well, you'd be laughing then, it'd be in the bag.'

‘Be your age,' said Nigel. ‘If they left the doors open and the safe unlocked, you'd be laughing. If they said, Come in and welcome, your need is greater than ours, you'd be laughing. The point is, banks don't close for lunch.'

John couldn't help laughing himself. ‘The Childon one does,' he said, and then he thought all this had gone far enough. Speculating about what might be, and if only, and if this happened and that and the other, was a sort of disease that kept people like Marty and Nigel where they were, while not doing it had got him where he was. Better find honest work, he thought, though he didn't, of course, say this aloud. Instead he got on to asking Marty about this one and that one they had been at school with, and told Marty what news he had of their old schoolfellows, until his second cup of tea was drunk up and it was time to start the drive back.

The hypothetical couple of villains John had referred to had been facing him across the table.

Marty Foster also was the son of an agricultural labourer. For a year after he left school he worked in a paintbrush factory. Then his mother left his father and went off with a lorry driver. Things got so uncomfortable at home that Marty too moved out and got a room in Stantwich. He got a job driving a van for a cut-price electrical goods shop and then a job trundling trolleys full of peat and pot plants about in a garden centre. It was the same one that supplied Fitton's Piece with its pampas grass. When he was sacked from that for telling a customer who complained because the garden centre wouldn't deliver horse manure, that if he wanted his shit he could fetch it himself, he moved up to London and into a squat in Kilburn Park. While employed in packing up parcels for an Oxford Street store, he met Nigel Thaxby. By then he was renting a room with a kitchen in a back street in Cricklewood, his aim being to stop working and go on the Social Security.

Nigel Thaxby, like Marty, was twenty-one. He was the son and only child of a doctor who was in general practice in Elstree. Nigel had been to a very minor public school because his father wanted him brought up as a gentleman but didn't want to pay high fees. The staff had third-class honours or pass degrees and generally no teachers' training certificates, and the classroom furniture was blackened and broken and, in fact, straight Dotheboys Hall. In spite of living from term to term on scrag-end stew and rotten potatoes and mushed peas and white bread, Nigel grew up tall and handsome. By the time excessive cramming and his father's threats and his mother's tears had squeezed him into the University of Kent, he was over six feet tall with blond hair and blue eyes and the features of Michelangelo's David. At Canterbury something snapped in Nigel. He did no work. He got it into his head that if he did do any work and eventually got a degree, the chances were he wouldn't get a job. And if he did get one all that would come out of it was a house like his parents' and a marriage like his parents' and a new car every four years and maybe a child to cram full of useless knowledge and pointless aspirations. So he walked out of the university before the authorities could ask his father to take him away.

Nigel came to London and lived in a sort of commune. The house had some years before been allocated by the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea to a quartet of young people on the grounds that it was being used as a centre for group therapy. So it had been for some time, but the young people quarrelled with each other and split up, leaving behind various hangers-on who took the padding off the walls of the therapy room and gave up the vegetarian regime, and brought in boy friends and girl friends and sometimes children they had had by previous marriages or liaisons. There was continuous coming and going, people drifted in for a week or a month and out again, contributing to the rent or not, as the case might be. Nigel got in on it because he knew someone who lived there and who was also a reject of the University of Kent.

At first he wasn't well up in the workings of the Social Security system and he thought he had to have a job. So he also packed up parcels. Marty Foster put him wise to a lot of useful things, though Nigel knew he was cleverer than Marty. One of the things Marty put him wise to was that it was foolish to pack up parcels when one could get one's rent paid and a bit left over for doing nothing. At the time they met John Purford in Neasden, Marty was living in Cricklewood and Nigel was sometimes living in Cricklewood with Marty and sometimes in the Kensington commune, and they were both vaguely and sporadically considering a life of crime.

‘Like your friend said, it wouldn't be worth the hassle,' said Nigel. ‘Not for seven grand.'

‘Yeah, but look at it this way, you've got to begin on a small scale,' said Marty. ‘It'd be a sort of way of learning. All we got to do is rip off a vehicle. I can do that easy. I got keys that'll fit any Ford Escort, you know that.'

Nigel thought about it.

‘Can you get a shooter?' he said.

‘I got one.' Marty enjoyed the expression of astonishment on Nigel's face. It was seldom that he could impress him. But he was shrewd enough to put prudence before vanity, and he said carefully, ‘Even an expert wouldn't know the difference.'

‘You mean it's not for real?'

‘A gun's a gun, isn't it?' And Marty added with, for him, rare philosophical insight, ‘It's not what it does, it's what people'll think it'll do that matters.'

Slowly Nigel nodded his head. ‘It can't be bad. Look, if you're really into this, there's no grief in going up this Childon dump tomorrow and casing the joint.'

Nigel had a curious manner of speech. It was the result of careful study in an attempt to be different. His accent was mid-Atlantic, rather like that of a commercial radio announcer. People who didn't know any better sometimes took him for an American. He had rejected, when he remembered to do so, the cultured English of his youth and adopted speech patterns which were a mixture of the slang spoken by the superannuated hippies, now hopelessly out of date, in the commune, and catch phrases picked up from old films seen on TV. Nigel wasn't at all sophisticated really, though Marty thought he was. Marty's father talked Suffolk, but his mother had been a cockney. Mostly he talked cockney himself, with the flat vowels of East Anglia creeping in, and sometimes he had that distinctive Suffolk habit of using the demonstrative pronoun ‘that' for ‘it'.

Seeing that Marty was serious or ‘really into' an attempt on the Childon bank, Nigel went off to Elstree, making sure to choose a time when his father was in his surgery, and got a loan of twenty pounds off his mother. Mrs Thaxby cried and said he was breaking his parents' hearts, but he persuaded her into the belief that the money was for his train fare to Newcastle where he had a job in line. An hour later – it was Thursday and the last day of February – he and Marty caught the train to Stantwich and then the bus to Childon which got them there by noon.