And now he was trudging upstairs at the whim of this petty employee who thought his uniform made him all-powerful. He wouldn’t do it. He descended the stairs loudly and declared “I’m not sitting in all that smoke.”
Some of the passengers groaned, as though he were a villain making a stage entrance. “Then you can get off my bus,” the driver said.
A bus stop which Horridge recognised was approaching. Rage stiffened his face; he felt like a ventriloquist forced to imitate his dummy. He managed to open his twitching lips, and to say “That will be a pleasure. Just let me off here and be quick about it.”
As the bus stopped, the driver’s face shivered. Horridge should have challenged him with that – he wasn’t fit to drive, he didn’t even check his mirror – but he wanted to be free of the suffocating disapproval of the crowd. He wrenched at the folding doors. Was the driver retarding them deliberately, to make a fool of him?
He gripped the pole of the bus stop. He wished he could have torn it out of the pavement, for a weapon. Nearby on a hoarding, a tobacco pipe larger than a man glowed and exhaled real smoke. Beside the hoarding stood a telephone box. His fury, and a sense of imminent release, rushed him to the phone. He dialled and shoved the coin against the barrier, impatient for the pay tone.
“ Yes?” the voice said warily before it was interrupted by the peeping.
Horridge bent over the receiver so that passers-by wouldn’t be able to spy on him, and masked the mouthpiece with his birth certificate. “Roy Craig,” he said. Though his voice was thick with disgust, he was savouring a sense of power.
“ Yes, this is he.”
Uncertainty made the voice rise, which excited Horridge: he would have it squealing before he’d finished. “You think you’re quite safe tucked away in your flat, don’t you?” he said. “We’ll soon have you out in the open where everyone can see you.”
Silence: not even the sound of breathing. Craig must have frozen like a trapped beast, hoping the hunter would think he wasn’t there. A faint wheeze betrayed him. “The police may prefer to ignore what you’re up to,” Horridge said at once. “But I know.”
The pitch of Craig’s voice wavered; it sounded like a dizzy man on the edge of a fall. “What are you talking about?”
“ Are you out of your depth? Am I confusing you? Oh dear.” Relinquishing sarcasm, he said harshly “Just remember that someone knows what you do to young boys – all of what you do to them.”
“ I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.”
“ Haven’t you? Shall I tell you?” Enraged, Horridge said “You tie them up, and then -” He couldn’t go on. “You filth. You obscene animal. You’re not fit to live among human beings,” he said.
He was losing control. His hand clenched on the receiver until the plastic creaked. He slammed the receiver into its cradle and shouldered his way out of the box, which had turned suffocating. A breeze cooled his burning face.
He’d achieved something. Craig was becoming more nervous. They were supposed to be so sensitive, these homosexuals. Horridge meant to nag at that sensitivity until it betrayed Craig – until Craig said too much to someone. Perhaps he would betray himself to one of the people in the house on Aigburth Drive. Surely they couldn’t all be corrupt.
He stood at the bus stop. In the old days he would alight here from the homeward bus from town. He gazed across the dual carriageway, towards Boaler Street, beyond which he’d lived. Smouldering houses were heaped on mud, blocking his view.
The place was ruined. That troubled him less deeply than it might have; his sense of triumph was a cocoon. What did his street look like these days? Impulsively he crossed to the opposite pavement, resting his bad leg for a few moments on the central reservation. He wouldn’t use the pedestrian subway. He’d had enough of subways in Cantril Farm.
Where the subway emerged, the Palladium cinema had stood. He remembered the Saturday matinees, the darkness swarming with other children, hair-pulling and fights in the flickering dimness, children sneaking to the exits to let in their friends who couldn’t or didn’t want to pay, the great unison cheer as the film appeared. Once, not long after he’d started school, he had sat dismayed and blushing while everyone else shrieked with laughter at Stan Laurel in a kilt, at the tailor trying to put a hand between his legs.
He made his way to Boaler Street, along a road between untidy pyramids which had been houses. Something drifted towards his face: a spider’s strand? He gestured it away – but it was a telephone wire, hanging from its pole.
The far side of Boaler Street was intact, but the houseless pavement that faced it made the blocks of shops and houses look unguarded. Already some of the shop windows displayed debris. Half of the side of a house was covered by a poster that said TOLKEIN: DISCOVER HIS WORLD. The small butcher’s was still standing: BOALER MEAT MARKET – GIANTS OF THE MEAT TRADE. That made him smile, as it always had.
He walked along his street. A few slates clung to roofs. Curtains swayed behind broken glass, but nobody was peering down at him. Once he had begun to climb the ladders he’d been able to see into all those bedrooms. Mr and Mrs Craven had kept a whip and a tawse behind the bed, Mr Wallace had had Nazi medals in the back bedroom. He’d scrubbed their windows, he’d painted their bricks, and as he’d gazed down from the ladder the street and the people had seemed like his toys.
Here was his house. In the thin rectangle of earth that separated the house from the pavement, the hedge had grown long and spidery.
All the doors were missing; he could see straight through the four empty frames to the jumbled back yard. The front room was bright with a mosaic of paper, tin cans and peel.
What had they done to the end of the street? Beyond the crossroads there had been a similar terrace; he’d used to imagine he was gazing into a mirror. Now there was nothing but mud. He limped to the crossroads. Where four streets had stood, there was an enormous square of desolation, surrounded by derelict houses that looked shrunken by the waste. A sky the colour of watered milk glared through the latticework of their stripped roofs. Smoke wandered over the mud, where puddles shone in ruts left by bulldozers.
He’d once played in these vanished streets. The view made him feel hollow – as hollow as he’d felt after his father’s drunkenness had dragged him down. When his mother had become ill, his father had taken to drink. If Horridge had been given to self-indulgence, his father’s behaviour would have cured him.
His father had grown weak; he’d refused to face up to his duties. “Don’t go out now. Go up and see your mother,” he would say, in order to free himself for the pub. Horridge had sat by the gloomy bed, gazing at the pale collapsed face which he hardly recognised, hoping that she wouldn’t wake, dreading the feeble plaintive plea: “Where’s your father?” He had been his father’s donkey, something on which to pile all the burdens.
After her death, the man had drunk more heavily – out of grief, or because now there was nothing to stop him? He’d begun to talk loosely as an imbecile. One day, searching for him in the pub, Horridge had overheard him. “It was worrying about the boy that killed her. Sometimes I wonder if he’s my son. Maybe they gave us someone else’s baby by mistake. Never in my life before have the police been to my house.”
Horridge had fled unnoticed, but the sense of injustice had clung to him. All the street-corner gossips had fallen silent as he’d approached. Everyone blamed him. But gradually, as he walked, he’d come to the conclusion that his father must have killed her. That was why he was so anxious to shift the blame. Perhaps, in his drunkenness, he’d fed her too much medicine.
He had never told his father that he’d heard. He’d behaved as though nothing had happened – polite but aloof. It had strained his nerves; he’d dreaded hearing his father enter the house, the cue for him to begin pretending. He wasn’t qualified for any other job, and he knew nobody besides his father who would take him on.