The Night Watch

'I've got plenty of belts and things like that. I've got plenty of ties.'

'A tie would do it.'

'Shall I go and get one? What kind do you want?'

Alec frowned. 'A black one, I suppose.-No! The one with the blue and gold stripe. That looks like a university tie.'

'What difference does that make?'

'There might be photographs. It'll make more of an impression.'

'All right,' said Duncan reluctantly-for, as it happened, he felt about that particular tie more or less as he'd felt about his fountain pen: that it was a good one, and belonged to him; and what was the point of using one like that, when an ordinary one would do? But he wouldn't argue about it now. He went quietly back through the parlour and hall, into the bedroom, and got the tie out. He could hear his father, still snoring, and he stood for a second in the darkness, with the tie in his hand-half wanting to go in and give his father a kicking, to scream and yell into his face. You bloody old fool! I'm going to kill myself! I'm going to go out to the kitchen and actually do it! Wake up, can't you?

His father snored on. Duncan went softly back out to Alec. 'My old man sounds like a bloody Hurricane now!' he said, as he closed the kitchen door.

But Alec didn't answer. He'd put the dressing-gown cord down and was standing at the sink, half-turned away. He'd picked something up from beside the taps.

' Duncan,' he said, in a queer, low voice. 'Look at this.'

He had Duncan 's father's old-fashioned razor in his hand. He'd drawn out the blade, and was gazing at it as if mesmerized-as if he had to tear his eyes away from it to look at Duncan. He said, 'I'm going to use this. That's what I'm going to do. You can hang yourself if you like. But I'm going to use this. It's better than a rope. It's quicker, and cleaner. I'm going to cut my throat.'

'Your throat?' said Duncan. He looked at Alec's slender white neck-at the cords in it, and the Adam's apple, that seemed hard, not soft like something you could slice through…

'It's sharp, isn't it?' Alec put his finger to the blade-then quickly drew the finger back and sucked it. 'God!' He laughed. 'It's sharp as anything. It won't hurt at all, if we do it quick enough.'

'Are you sure?'

'Of course I'm sure. It's how they kill animals, isn't it? I'm going to do it, right now. You'll have to go second. Will you mind? There might be a bit of mess, I'm afraid. The best thing will be, not to look too hard. If only we had two of them! Then we could do it at the same time… Look.' He gestured with the razor to the bit of paper he'd written their letter on. 'Be a good chap and pin that letter to the wall. Somewhere they'll see it.'

Duncan picked up the letter and the pin; but glanced anxiously at the razor. He said, 'Don't do it while my back's turned, will you?' He was afraid to look away… He gazed quickly about for a place, and ended up fixing the note to the door of a cupboard. 'Is that all right?'

Alec nodded. 'Yes, that's good.'

He'd begun to grow breathless. He was still holding the open razor as if simply madly admiring it; but now, as Duncan watched, he grasped its handle more firmly in his two hands, lifted the blade and put it tight against his throat. He put it just below the bend of his right jaw, where the skin was quivering because of the pulse.

Duncan took an involuntary step towards him. He said nervously, 'You're not going to do it straight away?'

Alec's eyelids fluttered. 'I'm going to do it in just a minute.'

'How does it feel?'

'It feels OK.'

'Are you scared?'

'A bit,' said Alec. 'How about you? You've gone white as a sheet! Don't faint, before it's your turn.' He changed his grip on the handle of the razor. He closed his eyes, and stood still… Then, with his eyes shut tight, and in a slightly different voice from before, he said, 'What will you miss, Duncan?'

Duncan bit his lip. 'I don't know. Nothing! No, I'll miss Viv… What about you?'

'I'll miss books,' said Alec, 'and music and art, and fine buildings'-so that Duncan wished that he'd said that too, instead of his sister. 'But those things are all gone, anyway. A year from now, people will start to forget that there ever were those things.'

He opened his eyes, and swallowed, then changed his hold again. Duncan could see that his fingers were sweating; he could see the marks they left on the razor's tortoiseshell handle. He didn't want Alec to do it, now. The whole thing had raced forward too quickly. Again he almost wished that his father would wake up, come out, and stop them. What was the point of having a father, if he let you do things like this? He said-as a way of keeping Alec talking; as a way of stringing everything out-'What do you think will happen to us, Alec, after we die?'

Alec thought about it, with the blade still close to his throat. Then, 'Nothing,' he said quietly. 'We'll just go out, like lights do. There can't be anything else. There can't be a God. A God would've stopped the war! There can't be a heaven or a hell or anything like that. This is hell, where we are… And if there is a place, then we'll be there together, anyway.' He held Duncan's gaze, with his blazing red-rimmed eyes. 'That would be the worst thing, wouldn't it?' he said simply. 'To be there on your own?'

Duncan nodded. 'Yes,' he said. 'Yes, that would be awful.'

Alec drew in his breath. The pulse in his neck began to beat more quickly, to almost jump against the blade. But when he spoke, he spoke as if casually, so that Duncan thought he was joking, and almost laughed. He said, 'See you then, Duncan.' And he tightened his grip and raised his elbows, as if about to swing a bat; and then he cut.

'It's this way,' the warden was saying. Kay and Mickey followed him, carefully, over the rubble.

The rubble, until very recently, had been a four-storey terraced Pimlico house. The house appeared, in the almost-darkness, to have been neatly plucked from its socket. A woman had been killed outright by the blast; her body had already been removed, by another driver. But a girl was still caught by her legs in the rubble; the Rescue and Demolition workers were planning to set up a hoist to lift the beams that were pinning her. They couldn't do that, however, until they'd brought out another woman and a boy who were thought to be trapped in the basement.

'We've sent for lights,' the warden said, 'but the fellows have been digging for half an hour. One's managed to get himself pretty badly cut.'

'How long,' Kay asked, 'before they get to the basement?'

'I'd say, an hour. Maybe two.'

'And the girl who's caught?'

'Yes, take a look at her, will you? She seems all right, but that might be shock, I don't know. She's over there. One of the men is with her, keeping her spirits up.'

He showed Kay where to walk. She left Mickey to see to the man who'd got cut, and began to pick her way to the back of the site. Her steps broke glass; once a board gave way beneath her and she sank into a mess of plaster and wood almost to the thigh. The crack of the board as it snapped was a sharp one, and she heard a girl cry out at the sound.

'It's all right,' said someone, softly. Kay flipped up her torch and made out the figure of a man, squatting on the rubble twenty feet away. He had his arms on his knees, his ARP helmet pushed matily back; he saw Kay coming, and lifted his hand. 'Ambulance? We're here. Watch out for the doo-dah, look.' He gestured to an object in her path: pale, gleaming, queerly shaped. It took her a moment to realise that it was a lavatory. 'Been blown clean out of its moorings,' said the man, straightening up. 'Lost its seat, though.'

He reached forward, to help guide Kay over the last stretch of chaos; and as she drew nearer to him she noticed something at his feet. She took it to be a heap of curtains or bedclothes, at first; but now, as she watched, the bedclothes seemed to billow or bulge, as if inflated from beneath; and an arm and a white face showed-showed as palely, almost, as the displaced lavatory. It was the girl who was trapped. She was covered in a film of plaster, and buried to the waist by a mess of beams and bricks. She was pushing herself up by her arms, to look at Kay. Kay went to her side and squatted, as the man had.