The Blackpool Highflyer

I ordered a Ramsden's for myself, a lemonade for Paul, and a tanner's worth of gin, which I dashed quickly into the lemonade. The concoction was surging up as Paul came back and threatening to overflow the glass, but he didn't seem to pay any mind, and just drunk the stuff down at once as he had done before.

'You've been to York, then?' I said.

'No,' said Paul, and he smiled.

I thought: damn, the drink's taken him the wrong way.

'Why Piccadilly Circus?' I said. 'Why was Alan Cowan speaking at Piccadilly Circus?'

'It's one of the usual propaganda patches,' said Paul. Then: 'You laid hands on your train wrecker yet?'

'No,' I said. 'The whole of the company's on the look-out for the culprits,' I continued, 'and there's a retired army officer leading an investigation.'

Paul gave a snort: 'Let me guess. Stumped, is he? We have plans for his sort, I can tell you…' He looked at his empty glass, maybe with a bit of curiosity. 'We mean to make very short work of that class of gentry, and the coppers, and all the upholders of law without order.'

'But they have the guns,' I said.

The smile once more. 'Oh we have available to us certain chemicals and clever mechanics, certain lead patterns for the manufacture of certain items.'

'Did you pitch the stone through the excursion-office window?'

He turned away from me to look through the door of the pub, which had been propped open on account of the heat.

'We'll make a bonfire of this place' he said, looking out at Halifax; then he picked up his portmanteau. 'Take my advice,' he said, 'and leave the railway slavery. It'll be worse for you if you don't.'

'What's your game exactly, mate?' I said.

'Propaganda,' he said, already turning away. 'Propaganda by deed.'

A tram came clattering past the door of the Evening Star, and the fellow was out and on it with bag in hand, all in a moment.

Chapter Thirteen

It was the following Monday, but only just, it being three o'clock in the morning. George had been moving about upstairs in the night. I'd already been awake, and the wife had stirred after a while, saying: 'What about him. Do you think he's flitting?'

'I wouldn't think so,' I said.

'He was late with his first week's rent.'

'But he did pay it?'

'He did.'

'Well then.'

We talked for a while about a subject first raised the evening before: about how she might compose a letter to the Crossley Porter Orphanage asking whether I could see the boy, Arnold Dyson, to return his book.

'It'll be neat enough,' she said. 'As to the wording, we have a book of letter forms at the mill, but it doesn't include writing to an orphanage about the child of a dead employee.'

'No,' I said.

'It should do' she went on, 'with the number of folk put into an early grave by the work.'

Then she said, rather slowly and carefully: 'Mr Robinson, who took me on at the mill, has been stood down.'

'The one who asked you about worsted?'

She nodded.

'Why?'

'Over a new line of suiting. At first I thought he was on leave, but he's definitely left. It's all solicitors' letters now.'

'Just out of interest,' I said, 'was he on the excursion?'

'I don't know.'

'So you're now at the mercy of Hind, father and son?'

The wife sighed: 'Looks like it.'

'How are you going along with old Hind?'

'Do you mean old Hind or really old Hind?'

'Really old Hind, I mean.'

'Old Hind barely moves, let alone speaks to the likes of me. The other one's all right, though I don't like the way he carries on with some of the lasses.'

'How do you mean?'

'I'm not saying.'

At this, the wife rolled over and gave me a kiss.

'The next excursion,' she said, 'the Wakes one… It's all fixed. It goes on the Sunday of Wakes, comes back on the Friday. The mill starts up again on the Monday.'

'You're not aiming to go on it yourself though, are you?'

'The office must keep going, so I'm to work that week,' she said.

'Good,' I said.

'But I do have the Sunday off, so I'll make a day trip of it. I'll go with the lot of them on the train, and come back by myself in the evening.'

'You bloody won't,' I said.

'Why ever shouldn't I?'

'You're itching to see a train wreck at close quarters, are you?'

'There won't be another outrage,' she said. 'That's why they're called outrages, you know, because they don't come along so often.'

The wife then went downstairs for a cup of water.

It was two weeks 'til Wakes. But I had a Blackpool excursion before then – an evening go, coming up in just about fourteen hours' time. Paul had smashed the windows of the excursion office, of that I was sure. He was out to get the excursions. That was his mission, which he called socialism. He was a nutcase, him and Alan Cowan both, but just because they were crackers, it didn't mean they weren't dab hands at killing.

When the wife returned she was fretting about the Standard typewriter, which she had at the mill but which they wouldn't give to another office girl, which she thought was unfair. 'The Standard is a very superior typewriter' she said, climbing back into bed.

'Then they should call it the Superior' I said. 'What is the advantage of it?'

'The keys go down quicker, so it's much faster.'

'Well then' I said, 'it's only making you do more work.'

The wife thought about that for a while.

I said: 'Would this other office girl be so worried on your account if you were the one without it?'

'I don't know,' said the wife. 'And what's that got to do with it anyway?'

She then asked me why the Co-operative Society should not be allowed to use the royal crest. I said 'Why would you want to?' and she said 'We jolly well don't want to.'

I put a stop to this subject by starting a bit of love-making, after which she went off again: this time to do something I knew to be connected with a little booklet she had called How to Check Family Increase. At first this had stayed at the bottom of the wooden box at the foot of our bed, and I'd thought it was being held in reserve, because doesn't there have to be an increase before an increase can be checked? But since she'd started at Hind's I'd seen it half hidden in several places about the house, and guessed it was being read. The wife had passed on no instructions to me concerning checking family increase, and it was an embarrassing matter to speak of, so I had carried on as normal.

When she came back, I wondered whether to tell her about George Ogden being on the fly, but it would only bother her. Instead, I said: 'George told me something I never knew: all railway tickets come in runs of ten thousand, they all carry four digits only, so you can guess the number of the first one in a run.'

'One,' said the wife, sighing.

'No' I said, 'nought, or rather four noughts in a row.'

Her interest was not picking up.

'Can you imagine why it's nought?'

'I'm sure there's some perfectly good railway reason which is perfectly idiotic' she said.

'It's because if you started with number one you'd get to number ten thousand.'

'So what?'

'Well, ten thousand is five digits, isn't it?'

Talk of railway tickets sent the wife drifting off to sleep, but I lay awake fretting. Blackpool was a dangerous place. It was just because it was such fun. There was no reason for Blackpool except fun.

I don't recall whether I then slept for a little while, but I know that I was awake at four and staring at the bedroom window as the hour chimes floated up from the parish church. It was a second after the fourth one that the stone came bursting through the window and, as if kept in the air by the wife's scream, sailed over the bed and crashed directly into the mirror on the opposite wall.