“I used to bring food for an old man who sat on a doorstep,” she said. “He only had one leg, which is why he hadn’t gone away. He told me that quite a lot of people further down this road had stayed too, and now they’d got very sick and if you went near them you might catch their sickness. It was the sort of sickness you die of, he said. He said that they crawled out into the street, like rats coming into the open when they’ve eaten poison, but some of them danced and staggered about before they fell down. He made me promise not to go this way if he wasn’t on his doorstep, because that would be the sign that the sickness had come up the street as far as where he lived. He wasn’t here when I came to look for him twelve days ago, and he hasn’t come back. That’s where he used to sit, down there, opposite the church.”
The group was still no longer, but wavering and rustling. Suddenly the starling clamor of voices broke out, all of them seeming to speak at the same time. The women drew their children close to them, and the men’s hands began to gesture in several directions. A younger man with a very glossy beard spoke directly to Nicky, in English.
"Cholera, perhaps,” he said. “Or plague.”
He sounded interested, as though he’d have liked to explore further up the road and see which guess was right.
The big man who pushed the old woman’s cart had pulled a red book from under the cushions and was peering at it amid the clamor; two of the other men, still arguing at the tops of their voices, craned over his shoulders. The old woman held up her arms suddenly and screeched like a wild animal, and the shouting stopped. She asked a short question, and was answered by a mild-faced young woman in a blue dress. The old woman nodded, pointed south, and spoke again. The crowd murmured agreement. The big man ran his finger down a page of the book, flipped over some more pages, and ran his finger on — he must be tracing a road on a map. Then the whole group picked up all they had been carrying; the pram pushers and cart pushers circled around; the old woman screeched and they all started back toward the Green. They filed around Nicky as though she were a rock in the road.
She stood, running her thumb back and forward under her satchel strap, and let them trail past. Nobody said a word, and only one or two of the smallest children stared. When the last four, the stave carriers, had gone she followed behind. One of them glanced over his shoulder and spoke to the man who had led her into the group. He glanced back too, said something, shrugged and walked on. Nicky trudged behind.
They turned right at the Green, south. Their pace was a dreary dawdle as they went down Shepherd’s Bush Road, which Nicky had so often scampered along. Carefully she didn’t look up the side street to where her note was pinned to the pink door, but studied instead a gang of scrawny cats which watched from a garden wall on the other side of the road; already they were as wild as squirrels.
Yes, she thought, I am right to go now. If I stay any longer I will become like those cats. She remembered how neat the strange children had seemed, even while they were playing their game of “touch,” and wondered how she herself looked. You can’t wash much in soda water.
At Hammersmith Broadway there had been either an accident or a battle, for two buses lay on their sides and a vegetable lorry had charged into the ruin, scattering crates of lettuce about. The wreckage stank and the procession edged well clear of it. A minute or two later they were on Hammersmith Bridge.
Here the whole group stopped and the adults broke into their cackle of many-voiced argument while the children crowded to the railings and gazed at the still and shining water. Small brown arms pointed at floating gulls or bits of waterlogged driftwood, ignoring the wrangle that raged behind them. Nicky wondered how they ever could decide anything if they were all allowed to speak at the same time. The big man found a sheet of paper under the cushions, a real map with many folds, and this was pored over until, once more, the harsh creak of the old woman decided the question. Mothers called their children to them; burdens were hefted; the march dawdled on.
They went so slowly that Nicky decided she could afford a few minutes more on the bridge; she would be able to catch them without hurrying. The river was beautiful, full from bank to bank as high tide began to ebb unhurriedly towards the sea. A sailing dinghy fidgeted around at its moorings as the water changed direction. Something about the river’s calm and shining orderliness washed away all Nicky’s resolution — the river ran to the sea, and over the sea lay France, and that’s where Mummy and Daddy were, and a little boat like that couldn’t be hard to sail. She could swim out to it and row it ashore, and then stock it up with crisps and lemonade and sail down the river, round the coast and over the Channel. And then it would be only a matter of finding them, among all the millions of strangers. They must have left a message, somewhere. Sailing would be nice — alone, but going to meet the people who were waiting for you, who would kiss you and not ask questions and show you the room they had kept ready for you . . .
Nicky’s whole skeleton was shaken by a tearing shudder, like the jerk of nerves that sometimes shock the body wide awake just as it is melting into sleep, only this shudder went on and on. Nicky knew it well. It had shaken her all that first nightmare morning, and once or twice since. It was a sign that somewhere a hellish machine was working.
She looked wildly about for a few seconds, not feeling how her mouth and lips were pulling themselves into a hard snarl like a dog’s, nor how her legs were running down the street called Castelnau faster than they’d ever run when she’d asked them, nor how her hand was groping in her satchel for the hunting knife.
A bus towered in the road; the strange people crowded round it, chattering again. Nicky jostled between them and hurled herself at the young man who stood smiling beside the vile engine which churned its sick stink and noise into the air. Her knife was held for killing. The young man was the only person looking in her direction. He shouted before she was quite through the crowd, and started to back away round the bus. A hard thing rammed into her ear and cheekbone, jarring her head so that for an instant she could not see. In fact she could not remember falling, but now she was on her hands and knees groping dazedly for the dropped knife, not finding it, then crawling towards the drumming engine and feeling again in her satchel for a bottle to hit with.
The world seemed to be shouting. Tough hands gripped her arms and hoisted her up. She struggled toward the bus, but the hands held her, hard as rope. The young man was climbing again through the door of the bus. She lunged at the hands with her teeth, but the men who held her did so in such a way that she couldn’t reach.
All at once the foul drumming stopped, and only the stink of it hung between the houses. A voice croaked an order. They all moved on, up Castelnau.
Slowly, like the panic of nightmare dying as you lie in the half-dark and work out that you really are in your own bed between safe walls, the lust of hatred ebbed. She felt her neck muscles unlock. Her hands and knees, where she had fallen, stung with sudden pain. She was so tired that she would have dropped but for the hands that gripped her. She let her head droop.
It might have been a signal for the others to stop, and for the clatter of arguing voices to break out again. Most of the voices were men’s, but sometimes a woman joined in. At last something was settled. “Are you all right now, miss?” said a man.
Nicky nodded.
“Why did you do that?” said the man.
“Do what?”
“Try to kill Kewal?”
“He made the thing go,” she said. “He mustn’t. I had to stop him.”