But Friday had been a near-disaster, too. There was a house-party not far from where he lived, and Garry had been invited. He’d declined, but he was there anyway—in the garden of the house opposite, whose people weren’t at home. And when this really stacked piece had left the party on her own about midnight, Garry had jumped her. But just when he’d knocked her cold and was getting her out of her clothes, then the owners of the house turned up and saw him in the garden. He’d had to cut and run like the wind then, and even now it made his guts churn when he thought about it.
So he’d kept it quiet for a couple of weeks before starting again, and then he’d finally found his Thursday girl. A really shy thing getting off a late-night tube, who he’d carried into a parking lot and had for a couple of hours straight. And she hadn’t said a word, just panted a lot and been sick. It turned out she was dumb—and Garry chuckled when he read that. No wonder she’d been so quiet. Maybe he should look for a blind one next time…
A week later, Friday, he’d gone out again, but it was a failure; he couldn’t find anyone. And so the very next night he’d taken his Saturday girl—a middle-aged baglady! So what the Hell!—a rape is a rape is a rape, right? He gave her a bottle of some good stuff first, which put her away nicely, then gave her a Hell of a lot of bad stuff in as many ways as he knew how. She probably didn’t even feel it, wouldn’t even remember it, so afterwards he’d banged her face on the pavement a couple of times so that when she woke up at least she’d know something had happened! Except she hadn’t woken up. Well, at least that way she wouldn’t be talking about it. And by now he knew they’d have his semen type on record, and that they’d also have him if he just once slipped up. But he didn’t intend to.
Sunday’s girl was a lady taxi driver with a figure that was a real stopper! Garry hired her to take him out of town, directed her to a big house in the country and stopped her at the bottom of the drive. Then he hit her on the head, ripped her radio out, drove into a wood and had her in the back of the cab. He’d really made a meal of it, especially after she woke up; but as he was finishing she got a bit too active and raked his face—which was something he didn’t much like. He had a nice face, Garry, and was very fond of it. So almost before he’d known that he was doing it, he’d gutted the whore!
But the next day in the papers the police were talking about skin under her fingernails, and now he knew they had his blood-group but definitely, too. And his face was marked; not badly, but enough. So it had been time to take a holiday.
Luckily he’d just had a big win on the gee-gees; he phoned the bookie’s and said he wasn’t up to it—couldn’t see the numbers too clearly—he was taking time off. With an eye-patch and a bandage to cover the damage, he’d headed North and finally holed up in Chichester.
But all of that had been twelve days ago, and he was fine now, and he still had to find his girl-Friday. And today was Friday, so…Garry reckoned he’d rested up long enough.
This morning he’d read about a Friday night dance at a place called Athelsford, a hick village just a bus-ride away. Well, and he had nothing against country bumpkins, did he? So Athelsford it would have to be…
It was the middle of the long hot summer of ’76. The weather forecasters were all agreed for once that this one would drag on and on, and reserves of water all over the country were already beginning to suffer. This was that summer when there would be shock reports of the Thames flowing backwards, when rainmakers would be called in from the USA to dance and caper, and when a certain Government Ministry would beg householders to put bricks in their WC cisterns and thus consume less of precious water.
The southern beaches were choked morning to night with kids on their school holidays, sun-blackened treasure hunters with knotted hankies on their heads and metal detectors in their hands, and frustrated fishermen with their crates of beer, boxes of sandwiches, and plastic bags of smelly bait. The pubs were filled all through opening hours with customers trying to drown their thirsts or themselves, and the resorts had never had it so good. The nights were balmy for lovers from Land’s End to John o’ Groat’s, and nowhere balmier than in the country lanes of the Southern Counties.
Athelsford Estate in Hampshire, one of the few suburban housing projects of the Sixties to realize a measure of success (in that its houses were good, its people relatively happy, and—after the last bulldozer had clanked away—its countryside comparatively unspoiled) suffered or enjoyed the heatwave no more or less than anywhere else. It was just another small centre of life and twentieth-century civilization, and apart from the fact that Athelsford was ‘rather select’ there was little as yet to distinguish it from a hundred other estates and small villages in the country triangle of Salisbury, Reading, and Brighton.
Tonight being Friday night, there was to be dancing at The Barn. As its name implied, the place had been a half-brick, half-timber barn; but the Athelsfordians being an enterprising lot, three of their more affluent members had bought the great vault of a place, done it up with internal balconies, tables, and chairs, built a modest car park to one side—an extension of the village pub’s car park—and now it was a dance hall, occasionally used for weddings and other private functions. On Wednesday nights the younger folk had it for their discotheques (mainly teenage affairs, in return for which they kept it in good repair), but on Friday nights the Barn became the focal point of the entire estate. The Barn and The Old Stage.
The Old Stage was the village pub, its sign a coach with rearing horses confronted by a highwayman in tricorn hat. Joe McGovern, a widower, owned and ran the pub, and many of his customers jokingly associated him with the highwayman on his sign. But while Joe was and always would be a canny Scot, he was also a fair man and down to earth. So were his prices. Ten years ago when the estate was new, the steady custom of the people had saved The Old Stage and kept it a free house. Now Joe’s trade was flourishing, and he had plenty to be thankful for.
So, too, Joe’s somewhat surly son Gavin. Things to be thankful for, and others he could well do without. Gavin was, for example, extremely thankful for The Barn, whose bar he ran on Wednesday and Friday nights, using stock from The Old Stage. The profits very nicely supplemented the wage he earned as a county council labourer working on the new road. The wage he had earned, anyway, before he’d quit. That had only been this morning but already he sort of missed the work, and he was sure he was going to miss the money. But…oh, he’d find other work. There was always work for good strong hands. He had that to be thankful for, too: his health and strength.
But he was not thankful for his kid sister, Eileen: her ‘scrapes and narrow escapes’ (as he saw her small handful of as yet entirely innocent friendships with the local lads), and her natural, almost astonishing beauty, which drew them like butterflies to bright flowers. It was that, in large part, which made him surly; for he knew that in fact she wasn’t just a ‘kid’ sister any more, and that sooner or later she…
Oh, Gavin loved his sister, all right—indeed he had transferred to her all of his affection and protection when their mother died three years ago—but having lost his mother he wasn’t going to lose Eileen, too, not if he could help it.
Gavin was twenty-two, Eileen seventeen. He was over six feet tall, narrow-hipped, wide in the shoulders: a tapering wedge of muscle with a bullet-head to top it off. Most of the village lads looked at Eileen, then looked at Gavin, and didn’t look at Eileen again. But those of them who looked at her twice reckoned she was worth it.