Twice Shy

'Very funny. The days of the big fat slob are over. What you see is the start of the big fat distinguished innkeeper.' He took a large spoonful of ice cream and drank some of the liquid as a chaser, wiping the resulting white moustache off on the back of his hand.

He wore his usual working clothes: open-necked shirt, creaseless grey flannels, old tennis shoes. Thinning dark hair scattered his scalp haphazardly, with one straight lock falling over an ear, and as Frisby in the evenings wasn't all that different from Frisby in the mornings I couldn't see a beard transforming the image. Particularly not, I thought interestedly, while it grew.

'Can you spare a tomato or two?' I said. Those Italian ones?'

'For your lunch?'

'Yeah.'

'Cassie doesn't feed you.'

'It's not her job.'

He shook his head over the waywardness of our domestic arrangements, but if he had had a wife I wondered which one of them would have cooked. I paid for the beer and the tomatoes, promised to bring Cassie to admire the whiskers, and drove home.

Life for me was good, as I'd told Cassie. Life at that moment was a long way from Bananas' world of horrors.

I parked in front of the cottage and walked up the path juggling radio, beer and tomatoes in one hand and fishing for keys with the other.

One doesn't expect people to leap out of nowhere waving baseball bats. I had merely a swift glimpse of him, turning my head towards the noise of his approach, seeing the solid figure, the savagery, the raised arm. I hadn't even the time to think incredulously that he was going to hit me before he did it.

The crashing blow on my moving head sent me dazed and headlong, shedding radio, beer cans, tomatoes on the way. I fell half on the path and half on a bed of pansies and lay in a pulsating semi-consciousness in which I could smell the earth but couldn't think.

Rough fingers twined themselves into my hair and pulled my head up from its face-down position. As if from a great distance away from my closed eyes a harsh deep voice spoke nonsensical words.

'You're not-' he said. 'Fuck it.'

He dropped my head suddenly and the second small knock finished the job. I wasn't aware of it. In my conscious mind, things simply stopped happening.

The next thing that impinged was that someone was trying to lift me up, and that I was trying to stop him.

'All right, lie there,' said a voice. 'If that's how you feel.'

How I felt was like a shapeless form spinning in a lot of outer space. He tried again to pick me up and things inside the skull suddenly shook back into order.

'Bananas,' I said weakly, recognising him.

'Who else? What happened?'

I tried to stand up and staggered a bit, trampling a few more long-suffering pansies.

'Here,' Bananas said, catching me by the arm, 'come into the house.' He semi-supported me, and found the door was locked.

'Keys,' I mumbled.

'Where are they?'

I waved a vague arm, and he let go of me to look for them. I leant against the doorpost and throbbed. Bananas found the keys and came towards me and said in anxiety. 'You're covered in blood.'

I looked down at my red-stained shirt. Fingered the cloth. 'That blood's got pips in.' I said.

Bananas peered at my chest. 'Your lunch.' He sounded relieved. 'Come on.'

We went into the cottage where I collapsed into a chair and began to sympathise with migraine sufferers. Bananas searched in random cupboards and asked plaintively for the brandy.

'Can't you wait until you get home?' I said without criticism.

'It's for you.'

'None left.'

He didn't press it. He may have remembered that it had been he, a week ago, who'd emptied the bottle.

'Can you make tea?' I said.

He said resignedly, 'I suppose so,' and did.

While I drank the resulting nectar, he told me that he'd seen a car driving away from the direction of the cottage at about eighty miles an hour down the country road. It was the car, he said, of the man who'd asked for me earlier. He had been at first puzzled and then disquieted, and had finally decided to amble down to see if everything was all right.

'And there you were,' he said, 'looking like a pole-axed giraffe.'

'He hit me,' I said.

'You don't say.'

'With a baseball bat.'

'So you saw him,' Bananas said.

'Yeah. Just for a second.'

'Who was he?'

'No idea.' I drank some tea. 'Mugger.'

'How much did he take?'

I put down the tea and patted the hip pocket in which I carried a small notecase. The wallet was still there. I pulled out and looked inside. Nothing much in there, but also nothing missing.

'Pointless,' I said. 'What did he want?'

'He asked for you,' Bananas said.

'So he did.' I shook my head which wasn't a good idea as it sent little daggers in all cranial directions. 'What exactly did he say?'

Bananas gave it some thought. 'As far as I can remember, he said, "Where does Derry live?"'

'Would you know him again?' I asked.

He pensively shook his head. 'I shouldn't think so. I mean, I've a general impression- not young, not old, roughish accent- but I was busy, I didn't pay all that much attention.'

Oddly enough, though I'd seen him for only a fraction of the time Bananas had, I had a much clearer recollection of my attacker. A freeze view, like a snapshot, standing framed in my mind. A thick-set man with yellowish skin, greyish about the head, intent eyes darkly shadowed. The blur on the edge of the snapshot was the downward slash of his arm. Whether the memory was reliable, or whether I'd know him again, I couldn't tell.

Bananas said, 'Are you all right to leave?'

'Sure.'

'Betty will finish those grapes and stare into space,' he said. 'The old cow's working to rule. That's what she says. Working to rule, I ask you. She doesn't belong to a union. She's invented her own bloody rules. At the moment rule number one is that she doesn't do anything I don't directly tell her to.'

'Why not?'

'More pay. She wants to buy a pony to ride on the Heath. She can't ride, and she's damn near sixty.'

'Go on back,' I said smiling. I'm OK.'

He semi-apologetically made for the door. 'There's always the doctor, if you're pushed.'

'I guess so.'

He opened the door and peered out into the garden. 'There are beer cans in your pansies.'

He went out saying he would pick them up, and I shoved myself off the chair and followed him. When I got to the door he was standing on the path holding three beer cans and a tomato and staring intently at the purple and yellow flowers.

'What is it?' I said.

'Your radio.'

'I've just had it fixed.'

He looked up at me. 'Too bad.'

Something in his tone made me totter down the path for a look. Sure enough, my radio lay in the pansies: what was left of it. Casing, dials, circuits, speaker, all had been comprehensively smashed.

'That's nasty,' Bananas said.

'Spite,' I agreed. 'And a baseball bat.'

'I think,' I said slowly, 'that maybe he thought I was someone else. After he'd hit me, he seemed surprised. I remember him swearing.'

'Violent temper,' said Bananas, looking at the radio.

'Mm.'

'Tell the police,' he said.

'Yeah.'

I took the beer from him and sketched a wave as he walked briskly up the road. Then I stared for a while at the shattered radio thinking slightly disturbing thoughts: like what would my head have looked like if he hadn't stopped after one swipe.

With a mental shiver, I went back indoors and applied my concussion to writing up my weekly report sheet for Luke Houston.

CHAPTER 13

I never did get around to consulting the doctor or calling the police. I couldn't see anything productive coming from spending the time.

Cassie took the whole affair philosophically but said that my skull must be cracked if I didn't want to make love.

'Double ration tomorrow,' I said.

'You'll be lucky.'