Vampires Overhead (27 page)

‘What’s the matter with you?’ Bingen asked at last fiercely. ‘Why don’t you let the girl enjoy herself if she can, instead of coming the pilgrim father over her? The drink wouldn’t hurt her.’

‘Better to knock around like a pilgrim father than a blasted Mormon kid snatcher. Sorry, Bingen, I didn’t mean that. Don’t mind me, I’m worried about her, you see.’

‘Worried about her is right. If you ask me, you’ve fallen for her worse than I have. Why don’t you be a man and own up to it, instead of trying to keep me off the grass with threats of looking after her. You want her, and that’s why you don’t like me trying my hand. Isn’t that it?’

I lit another cigarette.

Bingen had a habit of saying things I knew were not true, and yet knew to be full of truth. I wished I could straighten out this tangle which threatened to overwhelm us. Janet herself came along to straighten out everything, and complicate everything manifold. Bingen saw her first. I turned at his gasp of surprise.

‘Strewth!’ Bingen muttered. ‘Will you look at that!’

Janet had gone into that store, slim in shorts and blue jersey, boyish for all her dark eyes and curls, with an element about her of comradeship, of a child playing adventures, and she came out . . . how? Bingen stared at her with his soul glinting out of his eyes. I watched him before turning to see Janet.

She stood poised sophisticatedly by the shop entrance. I looked at her, and my heart rose into my throat, sank back into my stomach. This was the ‘kid’ I had treated in such a cavalier manner, the child whom I had spanked as she climbed a fence, the girl who had laughed and slid skilfully from Bingen’s caressing arm. She stood there for us to see, spun on a high heel like a mannequin that we might see the whole of her. Bingen and I watched dumbfoundedly.

A great drooping hat of the style called, I think, a picture-hat, covered her curls, lipstick deepened the scarlet of her mouth, skirts swirled about her ankles, and I saw the sheen of silk stockings. Her dress, of some gaily patterned material, swung like an opening flower as she pirouetted.

‘Well! What do you think of this?’ she called, and as we stared, came with an exaggerated mincing tread daintily towards us. ‘How d’you like me now?
Don’t
you like me? Neither of you seem very pleased with me.’

She pouted with annoyance.

‘You’d better go and take those clothes off,’ I said shakily, when at last I could speak.

‘What the hell,’ Bingen shouted gleefully. ‘Take ’em off. I should say not.’

‘She’ll go and take them off at once. Savvy!’ Fierceness left my voice, and I tried dismally to make a joke of it. ‘Janet, you can’t wear those clothes, Bingen and I would be fighting over you in two shakes.’

‘Would you really?’ Janet twinkled at me mischievously. ‘Don’t you think I ought to wear them, Bingen?’

‘Wear them! Wear them.’ Bingen swore. ‘If you ever wear anything else when I’m around, there’ll be a war.’

‘There, Bingen likes me, even if you don’t,’ Janet said to me. ‘He likes me in these things.’

‘And I do,’ I answered desperately, scowling at Bingen. ‘I do like you in them, Janet. But you can’t wear them. Supposing . . . supposing another Dusty Rhodes turned up!’ I continued quickly, sure that her twinkling eyes mocked me. ‘Besides, you couldn’t run in those skirts, couldn’t in those shoes either. You can’t wear things like that here. Please, Janet.’

‘What’s the matter with you?’ Bingen asked crossly. ‘Why can’t you let us enjoy ourselves? If the girl wants to wear those things, why not let her! Why, Heaven above, man, you ought to go down on your knees and ask her to wear them.’

Bingen flung his hands up in a grinning gesture of abject admiration, and then stepped close to Janet. For a while he smiled at her, then slid an arm about her. They stood laughing at me, until Bingen, with a sudden unexpected movement, pulled her roughly to him. Kissed her full on the mouth.

Janet struggled fruitlessly, and I was too stricken to go to her aid. When she was free her arm described an outraged arc to leave scarlet finger-marks on Bingen’s cheek.

‘Bingen!’ Janet’s eyes flashed, tears sprang to them, and her voice shook. ‘You’ve always been nice ’til now. Why did you spoil things? Oh, why did you?’

‘You damned fool! What the hell did you do that for! Another crack from you like that, and you’re for it.’ I scowled at Bingen’s furious anger, and turned to Janet. After all, she had asked for it, and I wasn’t sure but what, given Bingen’s confidence with women, I wouldn’t have done it myself. I told her angrily, ‘You go and get out of those things at once, before you make me kiss you.
g
o and get them off before I make a fool of myself, too.’

‘Before you make a fool of yourself,’ Janet said haughtily, and tried to stare me out of countenance. She shrugged her shoulders, flirted with her skirts. ‘Oh, don’t you worry.
You’ll
never make a fool of yourself.’

She turned slowly, went back again to the store, and Bingen and I stared at each other balefully, while I wondered why the devil she had placed such a peculiar emphasis on the word ‘you’ when she told me I would never make a fool of myself.

‘Forget she’s a woman,’ Bingen jeered, and retreated hastily as I strode forward. ‘Oh, all right! Keep you shirt on, Garry. Don’t lose your temper and make a bigger fool of yourself than you have done already. Why couldn’t you let things go? Appreciated her, instead of kicking up a dust.’

‘Kicking up a dust! From the marks on your face, you kicked up a bit of dust.’

‘Well, if she did kiss me, instead of you.’

‘Kiss you! Why, you . . . Bingen, haven’t you got the sense to see I won’t stand for anything like this. Not while we three are here together, alone.’

‘Don’t you worry. There’ll only  be two of us if you carry on this way, Garry. And the two of us will be,’ Bingen grinned and stroked his cheek, ‘the two of us will be me and the bird of paradise you’ve just sent in there to change into knickerbockers. Knickerbockers! Hell!’

We eyed each other belligerently until there came from the store a shrill little scream which jumped us across the road. Janet came running from the door, still dressed in all her finery, panic-stricken. And it was to me she ran, ignoring Bingen. Into my arms she ran for shelter. Her soft form nestling there made my heart beat and breath quicken so that I could hardly ask what scared her.

‘Matter? Oh, matter!’ she said softly at last, whispering the word from my shoulder, and I could have sworn that she giggled. ‘Matter! Oh, Garry, I . . . I . . . I thought I . . .’

‘You thought you what?’ I lifted her chin to see what was the matter with her, and she gazed at me seriously. ‘What did you think?’

‘I thought I . . .’ She looked up at me without a twinkle in her eyes, resting there on my breast. ‘I thought I saw a mouse.’

‘Mouse! Janet!’

A mouse amid that holocaust! In spite of myself, I laughed and shook her.

‘Janet, you just made that up so that you could come out again with these clothes on. Confess.’ I held her at arm’s length and smiled at her. Let her go. ‘Janet, be a sport and go and take these glad rags off. You know it wouldn’t be fair to us to have you knocking around in them. Go and take them off and be our kid in knickerbockers again. And don’t come running out with any more idiotic excuses so that you can stay like this.’

‘I didn’t make that excuse just to keep these clothes on,’ she whispered, moving backwards with a peculiar expression in her big eyes.

‘Why did you, then?’

‘Oh, you wouldn’t understand. You never do. Oh, all right! I’ll go and take them off again.’ Then in a whisper so soft I was not sure I heard the words aright, she said as she turned away: ‘When I do look nice, the one I don’t want to kisses me, and the one I do want to, just tells me to run along and get into those old rags again.’

I started forward hesitating, not certain I heard her correctly, but as she ignored me, dared not, for the life of me, ask her what she had said.

With Janet in her boyish rig, and pals again with Bingen, we pedalled away up the road home after searching the ruins and loading our bikes with such things that she wanted to take back. I dragged behind them as they cycled ahead, went slowly pondering like a fool over the words I knew I had heard, and yet was scared to be certain, admit to myself that I had heard. For some distance I pedalled like a man in a dream, until a sudden flash of comprehension dismounted me to squat by the roadside and smoke musingly. Had I left those two together too much? Janet undoubtedly seemed to prefer Bingen, and yet as I mused, little curious, unexplainable episodes danced into my mind. To me she clung in times of real danger, not to Bingen; treated me in a fashion she never treated him. Gradually it came to me that undoubtedly she did not prefer Bingen, and I sprang upon the bike to race away up the slope after them, intending that very evening to ascertain for certain which of us two she did prefer.

Leaving the bike at the hilltop I scrambled down into the valley to discover Janet and Bingen busily unpacking the loads they had brought from our tour. I slung my packages beside them to find Janet unexpectedly treating me with a hauteur which chilled all my determination to find out which of us two she liked best. Bingen grinned at me round his shoulder as he bent over the table beside her, and I went lounging about outside, listening to their laughing chatter, sure now who Janet desired, if indeed she did indeed desire one of us at all.

The next morning found me early astir, deciding that I wanted action to banish brooding thoughts about the tangle which had arisen. Breakfast over, I left them, and mounted the bike, cycling away towards Croydon with a rather foolish idea of looting jewellers’ shops to garner enough treasure against the remote likelihood of the world returning to its old order. I even think now that I also had an insane plan of finding some valuable ring and presenting it to Bingen and Janet with congratulations! Anyway, it would pass away another day. Free-wheeling down the slope away from the valley I heard Janet call. I ignored her shout, and cycled on as though I had not heard it.

Croydon, after a while as I rummaged among the ruins, banished thoughts of both Janet and Bingen. I went from shop to shop, coughing in the cloud of fine ash rising under my feet, pulling fallen beams aside, poking amongst burned goods interestedly. It was surprising the amount of stuff untouched. A shop here and there was completely gutted with nothing worth the salvage inside, but even in places which had burned fiercely, some goods piled on shelves and stacked in cupboards had escaped material damage. I left my cycle at the beginning of the town and proceeded on foot, zigzagging from pavement to pavement, entering some shops, climbing through broken windows, or stepping over burned door-lintels. Soon I was grey from head to foot, covered with grey floating dust. It made me thirsty, and I scrambled over a pile of debris into a hotel. In the bar I swigged whisky and soda comfortably, until by a rear-door found several corpses, and then I left. Feeling cheery, I searched until I found a jeweller’s shop close to the east centre of the town.

A little shop it was—I had ignored the great multiple jewellers’ premises in the High Street—with barred windows and a strong door still intact. I set to work on it with a pick from where road-menders had been at work. The bodies of two policemen and an old man lay by an overturned watchman’s hut, and under the eyes of the shrunken dead policeman I burgled the jeweller’s.

Inside, roof timbers tangled about the counter. I took another sip at the whisky bottle I carried, placed it safely where it would not be knocked over, and started work. In the windows and on the floor below, where shelves had been, melted and twisted oddments of gold and silver, cups, trophies, ornaments, jewellery lay. It was the valuable stuff I was after, and probing under the fallen roof at the rear of the shop I found a safe. Jewels I had gathered in my search I heaped in a little pile upon an unburned portion of the counter. Diamonds, rubies, sapphires, but curiously enough, no pearls. Pearls perhaps would not stand the heat of fire. With the ash from the shop raked through until I was satisfied nothing else of value remained undiscovered, I turned my attention to the safe. I sweated over it, but heat had buckled the steel door and broken the hinges, so that the pick soon opened it for me to see black, white, and blue cases, lined with charred silks. Here was treasure.