The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More (11 page)

"I think it's absolutely pointless."

"You don't like anything we do, isn't that right?" Raymond said.

Peter didn't answer.

"Well, let me tell you something," Raymond went on. "We don't
like anything you do either."

Peter's arms were beginning to ache. He decided to take a risk. Slowly, he
lowered them to his sides.

"Up!" yelled Ernie. "Get '
em
up!"

"What if I refuse?"

"Blimey! You got a ruddy nerve,
ain't
you?"
Ernie said. "I'm
tellin
' you for the last time,
if you don't stick '
em
up I'll pull the
trigger!"

"That would be a criminal act," Peter said. "It would be a case
for the police."

"And you'd be a case for the '
ospital
!"
Ernie said.

"Go ahead and shoot," Peter said. "Then they'll send you to
Borstal
. That's prison."

He saw Ernie hesitate.

"You're really
askin
' for it,
ain't
you?" Raymond said.

"I'm simply asking to be left alone," Peter said, "I haven't
done you any harm."

"You're a stuck-up little squirt," Ernie said. "That's exactly
what you are, a stuck-up little squirt."

Raymond leaned over and whispered something in Ernie's ear. Ernie listened
intently. Then he slapped his thigh and said, "I like it! It's a great
idea!"

Ernie placed his gun on the ground and advanced upon the small boy. He grabbed
him and threw him to the ground. Raymond took the roll of string from his
pocket and cut
oif
a length of it. Together, they
forced the boy's arms in front of him and tied his wrists together tight.

"Now the legs," Raymond said. Peter struggled and received a punch in
the stomach. That winded him and he lay still. Next, they tied his ankles
together with more string. He was now trussed up like a chicken and completely
helpless.

Ernie picked up his gun, and then, with his other hand, he grabbed one of
Peter's arms. Raymond grabbed the other arm and together they began to drag the
boy over the grass towards the railway lines.

Peter kept absolutely quiet. Whatever it was they were up to, talking to them
wasn't going to help matters.

They dragged their victim down the embankment and on to the railway lines
themselves. Then one took the arms and the other the feet and they lifted him
up and laid him down again lengthwise right between two lines.

"You're mad!" Peter said. "You can't do this!"

" '
Oo
says we can't?
This is just a little lesson we're
teachin
' you not
to be cheeky."

"More string," Ernie said.

Raymond produced the ball of string and the two larger boys now proceeded to
tie the victim down in such a way that he couldn't wriggle away from between
the rails. They did this by looping string around each of his arms and then
threading the string under the rails on either side. They did the same with his
middle body and his ankles. When they had finished, Peter Watson was strung
down helpless and virtually immobile between the rails. The only parts of his
body he could move to any extent were his head and feet.

Ernie and Raymond stepped back to survey their handiwork. "We done a nice
job," Ernie said.

"There's trains every '
alf
'our on this
line," Raymond said. "We
ain't
gonna
'
ave
long to wait."

"This is murder!" cried the small boy lying between the rails.

"No it
ain't
." Raymond told him. "It
ain't
anything of the sort."

"Let me go! Please let me go! I'll be killed if a train comes along!"

"If you
are
killed, sonny
boy," Ernie said, "it'll be your own ruddy fault and I'll tell you
why. Because if you lift your '
ead
up like you're
doin
' now, then you've 'ad it, chum! You keep down flat and
you might just possibly get away with it. On the other 'and, you might not
because I
ain't
exactly sure '
ow
much clearance them
trains've
got underneath.
You '
appen
to know.
Raymond, '
ow
much clearance them trains got underneath?"

"Very little," Raymond said. "They're built ever so close to the
ground."

"Might be enough and it might not," Ernie said.

"Let's put it this way," Raymond said. "It'd probably just about
be enough for an
ordinary
person like
me or you, Ernie. But Mister Watson 'ere I'm not so sure about and I'll tell
you why."

"Tell me," Ernie said, egging him on.

"Mister Watson '
ere's
got an extra big '
ead
, that's why
. '
Ee's
so
flippin
' big-'
eaded
I personally think the bottom bit of the train's
goin
' to scrape '
im
whatever '
appens
. I'm not saying it's
goin
'
to take 'is '
ead
off, mind you. In fact, I'm pretty
sure it
ain't
goin
' to do
that. But it's
goin
' to give 'is face a good old
scrapin
' over. You can be quite sure of that."

"I think you're right," Ernie said.

"It don't do," Raymond said, "to '
ave
a great big swollen '
ead
full of brains if you're
lyin
' on the railway line with a train
comin
'
towards you. That's right,
ain't
it.
Ernie?"

"That's right," Ernie said.

The two bigger boys climbed back up the embankment and sat on the grass behind
some bushes. Ernie produced a pack of cigarettes and they both lit up.

Peter Watson, lying helpless between the rails, realized now that they were not
going to release him. These were dangerous, crazy boys. They lived for the
moment and never considered the consequences. I must try to keep calm and
think, Peter told himself. He lay there, quite still, weighing his chances. His
chances were good. The highest part of his head was his nose. He estimated the
end of his nose was sticking up about four inches above the rails. Was that too
much? He wasn't quite sure what clearance these modern diesels had above the
ground. It certainly wasn't very much. The back of his head was resting upon
loose gravel in between two sleepers. He must try to burrow down a little into
the gravel. So he began to wriggle his head from side to side, pushing the
gravel away and gradually making for himself a small indentation, a hole in the
gravel. In the end, he reckoned he had lowered his head an extra two inches.
That would do for the head.
But what about the feet?
They were sticking up, too. He took care of that by swinging the two
tied-together feet over to one side so they lay almost flat.

He waited for the train to come.

Would the driver see him? It was very unlikely, for this was the main line,
London,
Doncaster
, York, Newcastle and Scotland, and
they used huge long engines in which the driver sat in a cab way back and kept
an eye open only for the signals. Along this stretch of the track trains
travelled
around eighty miles an hour. Peter knew that. He
had sat on the bank many times watching them. When he was younger, he used to
keep a record of their numbers in a little book, and sometimes the engines had
names written on their sides in gold letters.

Either way, he told himself, it was going to be a terrifying business. The
noise would be deafening, and the swish of the eighty-mile-an-hour wind
wouldn't be much fun either. He wondered for a moment whether there would be
any kind of vacuum created underneath the train as it rushed over him, sucking
him upward. There might well be. So whatever happened, he must concentrate
everything upon pressing his entire body against the ground. Don't go limp.
Keep stiff and tense and press down into the ground.

"How're you
doin
', rat-face!" one of them
called out to him from the bushes above. "What's it like
waitin
' for the execution?"

He decided not to answer. He watched the blue sky above his head where a single
cumulus cloud was drifting slowly from left to right. And to keep his mind off
the thing that was going to happen soon, he played a game that his father had
taught him long ago on a hot summer's day when they were lying on their backs
in the grass above the cliffs at
Beachy
Head. The
game was to look for strange faces in the folds and shadows and billows of a cumulus
cloud. If you looked hard enough, his father had said, you would always find a
face of some sort up there. Peter let his eyes travel slowly over the cloud. In
one place, he found a one-eyed man with a beard. In another, there was a
long-chinned laughing witch. An
aeroplane
came across
the cloud
travelling
from east to west. It was a
small high-winged monoplane with a red fuselage. An old Piper Cub, he thought
it was. He watched it until it disappeared.

And then, quite suddenly, he heard a curious little vibrating sound coming from
the rails on either side of him. It was very soft, this sound, scarcely
audible, a tiny little humming, thrumming whisper that seemed to be coming
along the rails from far away.

That's a train, he told himself.

The vibrating along the rails grew louder, then louder still. He raised his
head and looked down the long and absolutely straight railway line that
stretched away for a mile or more into the distance. It was then that he saw
the train. At first it was only a speck, a faraway black dot, but in those few
seconds that he kept his head raised, the dot grew bigger and bigger, and it
began to take shape, and soon it was no longer a dot but the big, square, blunt
front-end of a diesel express. Peter dropped his head and pressed it down hard
into the small hole he had dug for it in the gravel. He swung his feet over to
one side. He shut his eyes tight and tried to sink his body into the ground.

The train came over him like an explosion. It was as though a gun had gone off
in his head. And with the explosion came a tearing, screaming wind that was
like a hurricane blowing down his nostrils and into his lungs. The noise was
shattering. The wind choked him. He felt as if he were being eaten alive and swallowed
up in the belly of a screaming murderous monster.

And then it was over. The train had gone. Peter opened his eyes and saw the
blue sky and the big white cloud still drifting overhead. It was all over now
and he had done it. He had survived.

"It missed '
im
," said a voice.

"What a pity," said another voice.

He glanced sideways and saw the two large louts standing over him.

"Cut '
im
loose," Ernie said.

Raymond cut the strings binding him to the rails on either side.

"Undo 'is feet so '
ee
can walk, but keep 'is
'ands tied," Ernie said.

Raymond cut the strings around his ankles.

"Get up," Ernie said.

Peter got to his feet.

"You're still a prisoner,
matey
," Ernie
said.

"What about them rabbits?" Raymond asked. "I thought we
was
goin
' to try for a few
rabbits?"

"Plenty of time for that," Ernie answered. "I just thought we'd
push the little bleeder into the lake on the way."

"Good," Raymond said. "Cool '
im
down."

"You've had your fun," Peter Watson said. "Why don't you let me
go now?"

"Because you're a prisoner," Ernie said. "And
you
ain't
just no ordinary prisoner neither
.
You're a spy. And you know what '
appens
to spies when
they get
caught,
don't you? They get put up against
the wall and shot."

Peter didn't say any more after that. There was no point at all in provoking
those two. The less he said to them and the less he resisted them, the more
chance he would have of escaping injury. He had no doubt whatsoever that in
their present mood they were capable of doing him quite serious bodily harm. He
knew for a fact that Ernie had once broken little Wally Simpson's arm after
school and Wally's parents had gone to the police. He had also heard Raymond
boasting about what he called "putting the boot in" at the football
matches they went to. This, he understood, meant kicking someone in the face or
body when he was lying on the ground. They were hooligans, these two, and from
what Peter read in his father's newspaper nearly every day, they were not by
any means on their own. It seemed the whole country was full of hooligans. They
wrecked the interiors of trains, they fought pitched battles in the streets
with knives and bicycle chains and metal clubs, they attacked pedestrians,
especially other young boys walking alone, and they smashed up roadside cafés.
Ernie and Raymond, though perhaps not quite yet fully qualified hooligans, were
most definitely on their way.