“So what happened?”
“When they slashed his tyres, he lobbed bricks through their windows. And he had a knowing way with him. He tossed ’em through thin house windows. Then one night he parked down on the corner of Barchington. Next morning—they’d drilled holes right through the plate, all over the car. After that—he didn’t come back for a week or so. When he did come back…well, he must’ve been pretty mad.”
“What did he do?”
“Threw something else—something that made a bang! A damn big one! You’ve seen that thin, derelict shell on the corner of Barchington? Oh, it was him, sure enough, and he got it right, too. A thin house. Anybody in there, they were goners. And that did it!”
“They got him?”
“They got his car! He parked up one night, went down to The Railway, when the bar closed took his lady-love back to her place, and in the morning—”
“They’d wrecked it—his car, I mean.”
“Wrecked it? Oh, yes, they’d done that. They’d folded it!”
“Come again?”
“Folded it!” he snapped. “Their funny science. Eighteen inches each way, it was. A cube of folded metal. No broken glass, no split seams, no splintered plastic. Folded all neat and tidy. An eighteen-inch cube.”
“They’d put it through a crusher, surely?” I was incredulous.
“Nope—folded.”
“Impossible!”
“Not to them. Their funny science.”
“So what did he do about it?”
“Eh? Do? He looked at it, and he thought, ‘What if I’d been sitting in the bloody thing?’ Do? He did what I would do, what you would do. He went away. We never did see him again.”
The half-bottle was empty. We reached for the beers. And after a long pull I said: “You can kip here if you want, on the floor. I’ll toss a blanket over you.”
“Thanks,” said Barmy Bill, “but no thanks. When the beer’s gone I’m gone. I wouldn’t stay up here to save my soul. Besides, I’ve a bottle of my own back home.”
“Sly old sod!” I said.
“Daft young bugger!” he answered without malice. And twenty minutes later I let him out. Then I crossed to the windows and looked out at him, at the street all silver in moonlight.
He stood at the gate (where it should be) swaying a bit and waving up at me, saying his thanks and farewell. Then he started off down the street.
It was quiet out there, motionless. One of those nights when even the trees don’t move. Everything frozen, despite the fact that it wasn’t nearly cold. I watched Barmy Bill out of sight, craning my neck to see him go, and—
Across the road, three lampposts—where there should only be two! The one on the left was OK, and the one to the far right. But the one in the middle? I had never seen that one before. I blinked bleary eyes, gasped, blinked again. Only two lampposts!
Stinking drunk—drunk as a skunk—utterly boggled!
I laughed as I tottered from the window, switched off the light, staggered into my bedroom. The barmy old bastard had really had me going. I’d really started to believe. And now the booze was making me see double—or something. Well, just as long as it was lampposts and not pink elephants! Or thin people! And I went to bed laughing.
…But I wasn’t laughing the next morning.
Not after they found him, old Barmy Bill of Barrows Hill. Not after they called on me to identify him.
“Their funny science,” he’d called it. The way they folded things. And Jesus, they’d folded him, too! Right down into an eighteen-inch cube. Ribs and bones and skin and muscles—the lot. Nothing broken, you understand, just folded. No blood or guts or anything nasty—nastier by far because there was nothing.
And they’d dumped him in a garbage-skip at the end of the street. The couple of local youths who found him weren’t even sure what they’d found, until they spotted his face on one side of the cube. But I won’t go into that…
Well, I moved out of there just as soon as I could—do you blame me?—since when I’ve done a lot of thinking about it. Fact is, I haven’t thought of much else.
And I suppose old Bill was right. At least I hope so. Things he’d told me earlier, when I was only half listening. About them being the last of their sort, and Barrows Hill being the place they’ve chosen to sort of fade away in, like a thin person’s ‘elephant’s graveyard,’ you know?
Anyway, there are no thin people here, and no thin houses. Vandals aplenty, and so many cars you can’t count, but nothing out of the ordinary.
Lampposts, yes, and posts to hold up the telephone wires, of course. Lots of them. But they don’t bother me anymore.
See, I know exactly how many lampposts there are. And I know exactly where they are, every last one of them. And God help the man who ever plants a new one without telling me first!
Dear Diary—
Yes, it’s me again…I bet you thought I’d died, right? But no, I just went away for a while; or rather I got away. It was a bad case of GAFIA: Getting Away From It All. Mainly from London, from Barrows Hill and the Thin People.
I thought I had forgotten about the Thin People; I tried to forget about them, putting them down to my temporary addiction, my “penchant” for alcohol. Incidentally, that was why I started corresponding with you, Diary…I thought, maybe if I told it all to you, maybe if I described how well I was getting on, how I was winning over my, er, “urge”—in fact my compulsion—to imbibe almost every-damn-thing from beer to mouthwash to ciggy-lighter fuel, that would be much better than bearing my booze-sodden soul to some tooth-tapping trick-cyclist, some shrunken shrink, some fingernail-munching counsellor, some pallid pack of lying Alcoholics Anonymous groupies, and like that.
In fact—on looking back—it was just such cynicism that kept me from these barely possible remedies; that and the fact that I considered myself “strong,” hated to admit my addiction to anyone other than myself…and to you, of course.
And the thing is I honestly can’t remember whether or not I was in trouble with my drinking before Barrows Hill and the Thin People, or if it came on later. If it was before, then I might be able to say that everything that happened was simply an attack of the dreaded dt’s; might even dismiss the episode entirely. But on the other hand I can’t seem to recall a previous problem. Or maybe that’s just how it catches up with you, by stealth. But if it was after Barrows Hill—
—Well, that’s what worries me.
Okay, Diary, I accept that I was a drinker—in fact some kind of drinking fool—but not until after she’d dumped me.
She, yes…
A little less than three and a half years ago, Diary, you were made up of page after page about her. Until she left and I ripped them out, burned them to ashes, and buried the ashes in the old lady’s garden downstairs, like some kind of grave. And if I hadn’t got out of Barrows Hill…well, who knows? Maybe I’d still be grieving and putting down flowers on that grave even now. But I did get out, because of the Thin People. And because of what happened to Barmy Bill.
The Thin People, who came out of their thin houses at night to do their thing—“tea-leafing,” thieving, as old Barmy Bill of Barrows Hill, the old codger who told me about them, called it. And where’s Barmy Bill now, eh? Either he had the weirdest, most inexplicable and horrible accident of all time—to end up square like that, an eighteen inch cube with his flattened face on one side—or the Thin People did it to him after he talked to me. And at the time, I wasn’t willing to take the chance.