While standing outside to mull on it, and rooted by another cacophony of animal rage from downstairs, the door snapped open, and Daniel caught her by the arm.
‘Where are you going, without me?’
TWENTY-ONE
Enid took her hands from his wet and languid penis. Strange how it was such a bulltup one minute, and small like a cat’s the next. ‘It sounds like those bikers are killing poor old Fred. I hope so. He asks for it sometimes.’
He thought it nothing less than miraculous that she had given her pale and exquisite body over to his adoration. ‘We can’t let them, then. You stay here, while I go down.’ From thinking he would be able to pass the night in unaccustomed bliss, the noise from below would not let even the most dedicated morphetic sleep.
‘Not likely,’ she said. ‘I want to see.’
A screech could have been man or gale, the pitch-note ending in a thump at the gables, suggesting a body landing after being hurled. ‘Get dressed quickly, then. The central heating system seems to have packed in.’
He kissed her when she pressed against him to ask: ‘Do I still have that job?’
And more, whatever Beryl might say, and she would surely have plenty. Every time he went away she teased him how he would one day come back with a wife. Some hope of that, he had to reassure her pleading grey-green eyes, so deep the attachment between them that she would turn murderous if it happened. Well, the worst always did occur, after you stopped thinking about it, the time never of your own choosing. ‘Yes, you still have the job.’
When they walked hand-in-hand along the corridor, Keith and. his girl friend came level. ‘I suppose you’re on the same expedition?’ Aaron said. ‘We have to do something.’
Sally, never so glad in her life to hear voices halfway sane, broke Daniel’s grip: he slid back into his lair — or that was how she would tell it a few weeks later, which was impossible, since the women she knew were friendly with Stanley, as indeed were their male acquaintances, not the sort to condone her minor though disastrous affair. She followed them downstairs, as another jack-in-the-box scream came up to meet them.
Keith launched himself on a two at a time descent, a flight through the bar which caught his hip on the hard wood, turning him from the joy of action to rage as, after righting himself, he felt the pain and, in order to diminish it, was in the space of a few seconds manifested before Garry whose neck he held in a grip no one could break. ‘You’ll be dead if you don’t drop that poker.’
‘Don’t move’ — Aaron placed himself between them and Wayne — ‘or you’ll have me to reckon with’ — fists raised and pushing him further and further away from the action with blows of his stomach. The threatening but disembodied voice got through, Wayne forced so far back he fell momentarily into an armchair.
Only one button was left to Fred’s waistcoat, but strongly enough sewn by Doris’s loving hand to prevent his shirted belly coming through. A sleeve of his jacket had been scorched by the poker, and hair lay over his forehead like weeds unwatered. He got up from hands and knees, eyes bloodshot with outrage and mortal fear. ‘The lot of you must have been dead from the toe-nails up not to hear what was going on.’
Keith was just audible to Garry. The cold exuberance, after a time which had spent him to the marrow, so cleared his mind that he would indeed have murdered if the weapon hadn’t fallen. He looked around, till it was plain that the horrible smell of burning flesh had been no more than the stink of peacock feathers. When the neck was near to breaking, he let go. ‘Make trouble from now on, and you’ll be the loser.’
Wayne stood up, fists moving apart as if to bracket into oblivion any foolish head that got between. ‘I’ll have him.’
With a madman’s breath at his ear, Garry knew they had met someone who was dangerous, a man serious about killing and not out for fun alone: the instinct to get into a senseless fight had to be crushed. He took Wayne by the elbow, tapped the end of the settle with his boot. ‘We’ll get this back to where it belongs’ — telling himself to keep his dignity, never let anyone think you were hurt, either in mind or body. They should only have dropped into a place like this on a summer’s evening, the bikes primed outside for a quick getaway.
Aaron put chairs and tables upright — those which would stand — Fred gazing moodily at his lounge coming back into some way shipshape. ‘Bring us plenty of coffee,’ Keith said to him. ‘We’ll all need it. Make it double strength. I’ll pay.’
‘Leave it to me,’ Enid said. ‘I’ll brew it as black as the ace of spades. Another day’s wages won’t do me any harm.’ The wrecked room, the approving noise of the blizzard, and the phenomenon of men clumsily putting the place in order, made her employment seem more interesting.
‘Do it, then, while I clean myself up.’ Fred was glad she had altered her notion of leaving. ‘Then I can make an inventory of the damage.’
‘It’ll give him something to do,’ Wayne jeered. ‘I’d like a fag, though. Mine have all gone.’
Keith threw his packet.
‘Still got my Zippo at least.’ He ignited it, and smiled. ‘Thanks, mate.’
Eileen walked across and retrieved the cigarettes so that Keith could offer her one. What a terrible thing they had done, to make such a mess of the place. They probably came from nice homes. Bikers often did, though you could tell from the faces of these, and the way they were dressed, how much they loved causing trouble.
‘How did you manage to get here?’ Keith wanted to know.
‘We had to leave our bikes in a lay-by, about half a mile away,’ Garry said. ‘But we found this van, and set it going. I’ll never know how we got it here.’
‘It belongs to an old schoolteacher of mine,’ Wayne said. ‘He must have made his way on foot. He’s sleeping it off upstairs. Funny van, though. It’s full of weird stuff. None of us could figure it out.’
‘Explosives,’ Sally spoke up. ‘I’ll have a cigarette too, if. I may.’
Keith gave her one. ‘What do you mean?’
‘He told me, upstairs, after I — slept with him. All fused-up and primed to go off at eight in the morning. It’s supposed to be in London by then.’ She felt a pinch of guilt at betraying his secret, but it would mean little if they assumed her to be mad or a liar.
‘You deserve top marks for trying to entertain us through the long evening,’ Aaron said.
‘I’m only telling you what he told me.’ She was arguing with a face that belonged to someone else, rubbing hard across her mouth as if to bring back her own features. ‘And I was convinced.’
‘Were you?’ Keith smiled.
‘I wasn’t for a while. Then he gave the details in such a way that I couldn’t not be. He tried to stop me coming down to tell you. Luckily, you showed up in the corridor, and he had to let me go. He said there was enough explosives in the van to demolish a block of flats, maybe enough material for a whole campaign.’
Aaron, by the tail of the peacock, looked through the window. The wind’s subtle knife found cracks and, rubbing mist from the glass, he cupped hands around his eyes to see heavy flakes of falling snow.
‘It’s in the back courtyard,’ Garry said. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t buried by now.’
‘You mean’ — Keith walked to her table as if in a dream and someone was handing him a prize he had always hoped for, yet which would turn to dust before he could use it — ‘we either sit here waiting to be blasted, or we go out into the blizzard and freeze to death?’