A car came one way, a bus advanced with calm assurance from another, but he ran between them to the dark side of the road, back among the safe high hedges of allotment gardens, then into a ghost-ridden funereal zone of pathways that he wouldn’t otherwise have taken. Mud splashed him, thorn bushes scraped his face and pointed a way to drier land by the railway.
A goods train went slowly by and he watched the blaze from its engine cab, feeling more comfort with the dynamic unknowable monster than with the ordinary overalled men wielding shovels within. It went under the bridge to the colliery, leaving him wishing for a ride even though it was heading back for the pub. He kept its sound in his ears as long as possible, until it slid into a murmur, swallowed and killed by the bigger and all-embracing fog-dragon of night.
A voice replaced it, coming from paths he had traversed, rose gruffly and stayed high for a second, then tapered off. Blackness won a further round, voice dead as well as train gone. A hand tingled as if biting-ants were running over and, holding it up, he saw two jar handles firmly fixed into his middle fingers. With the other hand he forced them open, pulled off the glass and threw it as far as the blackness would allow.
The voice lifted again, nearer this time: “Brie-ie-e-errrn!” He sucked blood from his cuts and stayed quiet, listening for footsteps to back up the voice but hearing only frogs leaping in a nearby stream. “Brian, where are yer?” the gruff voice called from nearby. They weren’t chasing him, because it was only Bert. Why weren’t they? He’d smashed two glasses, hadn’t he?
He answered: “I’m over here,” gripped a blackened handkerchief in his teeth, held the other corner with his good hand and bound it around the cuts.
“Are yer orright?” Bert asked, by his side. “’Ere y’are, I’ll tie it up”—snapping it so tight that no blood could leak. “Why did you run away?”
Brian was surprised at the question. “I broke two glasses. Didn’t yer see me?”
“It didn’t matter,” Bert said. “Nobody said owt.”
“I thought they would. And I couldn’t pay for ’em.”
“Glasses often get broke.” By the railway embankment he gave Brian three pennies. “Your wages. The publican handed me a tanner for what we’d done.” In the streets of Sodom it was late, most doors closed and few people about, the dandelion-and-burdock lorry gone. Brian wanted to get home quickly. “I’ll see yer tomorrow night,” he said, outside Bert’s front door. “Is the Count o’ Monte Cristo on your wireless?”
“No, it’s nex’ Tuesday, I think. We’ll listen to it then, because mam likes it as well. Let’s go on t’tips tomorrer, eh?”
“O.K. So long.”
“Abyssinia.”
CHAPTER 8
Mr. Jones was a gett, a four-eyed twopenn’orth o’ coppers, a sludge-bumping bastard who thumped Brian six times across the shoulder with a hard knotty fist because he didn’t open a book quickly enough. “The Merch-chant of Venn-niss,” he screamed, each syllable a synchronized crash of pain on Brian’s bones. “Got it?” he demanded. “Got it, you oaf? When I order you to open your book, don’t spend five minutes over it.”
A parting bat on the tab for good measure left him more or less in peace, staring at a coloured picture on which his searching had stopped. A man called Shylock it was, tall and with a beard, a knife in one hand holding them at bay and a pair of taunting scales in the other, grey eyes set hard on a pack of getts like Mr. Jones, the same puffed-up bastards after a poor old man that were after Brian — and all because he wanted some money back he’d lent them. Old Jones was against Shylock — you could tell from the way he read the story — and Shylock was good then because of it, a poor old — Jew was it? — holding the world’s scorn from him, standing there with his knife and scales — as though he’d just stepped out of the Bible like that other bloke going to carve up his son because God told him to — while some posh whore in the court talked about rain and mercy. (Jones liked her; you could tell from the way he read that, too.) Shylock was clever and brave, an old man who in the end lost money, pound of flesh, daughter, while Jones and his side got everything and went on thumping and being sarcastic and batting tabs with nobody to say a word to ’em. Only Shylock had defied these cock-sucking persecutors, these getts and clap-rags. When Jones made them sing hymns about all things being bright and beautiful/I vow to thee my country/green hill far away, Brian and Jim Skelton turned every word to a curse. Brian knew that if he had to choose between Jones and his copper’s narks who had recently sent Bert’s elder brother to approved school after knocking the living daylights out of him so’s he’d tell them where he’d hid the gas-meter money, and poor done-down sods like Shylock, then he knew whose side he was on and who would be on his side if he could suddenly come to life and step out of the printed book before him.
Mr. Jones was enemy number one, a white-haired tod who stalked the corridors during school hours, peeped his white moustache and purple face over the glass partition that he could reach only by standing on tiptoe. His steel-grey eyes looked in at the class, moving left and right to make sure the teacher had the boys well-controlled. Signs of slack discipline would bring him bursting in, arms flying at unlucky heads as he marched between rows of desks, a navy-blue pinstriped suit sagging as he got thinner and thinner through summer and winter so that soon, everybody hoped, he would kick the bucket in some horrible way. If Brian were lucky enough not to feel the stab of his random fist, he could tell by his jumping nerves when Jones was coming close, and when he had passed, Brian glimpsed his white collar and putty-coloured spats over his shoes: “If I had old Shylock’s knife,” he thought, “I’d bury it in his bony back.” He laughed to himself: “I’d get my pound o’ flesh, half a stone in fact, and no posh whore would stop me.”
Headmaster Jones was never without a ball of plasticine, an all-year everyday possession rolled between thumb and finger, furiously moving yet keeping shape as he bashed the drum of somebody’s back with his free hand. Once, the plasticine rolled under a desk to unhoped-for liberty, so he stopped hitting the boy and walked up and down to make sure the rest were still “paying attention” to the teacher’s droning lesson but actually fixing his eagle eyes on the floor, hoping to see his precious ball of plasticine, which was, as it turned out, squashed and held under the boot of a raging boy he had recently thumped.
His tigerish walks were a nerve-wracking gamble for the class. Brian had a game. Listening to the soft padding of his footsteps approaching behind, he said to himself: Will he stop and hit me? I’ll bet he does. I bet a bloody quid he does. There, what did I tell you? The bastard. That’s a quid somebody owes me.
Even the teachers disliked him, Brian saw, always on the watch for him peering into the room, and when he did come in they immediately relinquished all power over the class and handed it to him — seemingly in the hope that something would go wrong. But nothing ever did that could not be solved by an erratic scattering of fists among the gangways.
Mr. Jones’s mouth turned down at the edges, and it was agreed in the class that he could not have been a very pretty baby, some sixty-odd years ago. Brian tried to imagine him as a boy even younger than himself so that he could look back on the age and see him more clearly — to fix an image of a youngster in his mind, visualize him walking over a field with hands in pockets, whistling and heaving a stone now and again at birds. Impossible. Even as a boy Brian saw him a blank-faced nonentity, face gradually becoming more shrivelled until a moustache appeared and the mouth below bent at the side, and the short trousers turned into those of a blue pinstriped suit, and the head of fair hair burst through starkly into white, and the meadow across which he had been walking lost its greenness and became the polished wax-smelling floor of a classroom, and then there was the actual awful figure beside you and you knew that whatever Jones had been like as a little boy it didn’t matter a bogger because Jones was what Jones was now and all you had to do was keep your eyes skinned for him and learn to bend your head right forward on feeling the first smack of his folded hand on your backbone.