Injury Time

by Beryl Bainbridge

Binny wrenched her arms from his neck and glared at him. ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘He should tell her about his money problems, shouldn’t he? He ought to worry her silly over the bills and the mortgage, but he should keep his extramarital affairs to himself. Share his burdens but not his pleasures. You make me sick.’ She sprang to her feet and flounced through to the kitchen.

  Ginger was leaning against the draining board. She shoved him out of the way and began noisily to slide the dishes into the sink.

  18

  Ginger switched on the wireless at midday to listen to the news.

  ‘Don’t touch it,’ warned Binny. ‘It won’t go at all if you move it.’ The wireless was old and there was a lot of interference. Alma said it was like being in the underground, crowding round an illegal transmitter, waiting to hear Churchill’s voice.

  ‘Illegal?’ questioned Edward. ‘In the tube station?’

  ‘Shh,’ said Simpson, endeavouring to listen with one ear.

  There was a report of an air disaster somewhere in Latin America and a fire in New York. Nearer home an MP had died and the two grandchildren of a bank manager in Camden had been held to ransom for seven hours while thieves coolly cashed cheques totalling thousands of pounds.

  ‘Why do they always say “coolly”?’ said Alma. ‘It’s so silly. I bet they don’t feel cool at all.’

  ‘I can’t hear,’ complained Simpson. It was giving him a headache trying to make sense of the newsreader’s words. He wandered irritably up and down the room.

  When the news was over Edward said they were obviously being very cagey. Rightly so.

  ‘Who are?’ demanded Simpson.

  ‘The authorities,’ said Edward. ‘Didn’t you listen?’

  ‘I don’t wear this for show,’ cried Simpson, touching the bandage wound about his head.

  Ashamed of his stupidity, Edward repeated the news announcer’s report. Armed men had entered a house in North London and were holding an unspecified number of women and children as hostages. No names were available as yet.

  ‘I don’t call that cagey,’ Simpson said crossly. ‘It’s damned inaccurate.’

  ‘Fancy going in and out of a bank all day,’ said Binny, ‘cashing cheques. I do think it’s clever. Every time anyone queried the amounts I expect the poor manager just nodded his head.’

  ‘There’s no sodding food,’ Harry said. He swung the fridge door violently on its hinges.

  Apart from the half-pound of sausages there wasn’t anything to eat. No bread, butter or eggs. There weren’t any tins of baked beans in the cupboard.

  ‘I don’t hold with bulk buying,’ Binny said defensively. ‘Take fruit. If I buy several pounds of fruit, the children give it to their friends. So I buy three oranges and three apples fresh every day and dole them out. It’s more economical.’

  ‘There’s no need to apologise,’ said Edward. ‘You’re not running a cafeteria. If necessary we can ask for supplies. I believe it’s quite usual.’ He began to write a list in the margin of his newspaper.

  ‘My ear hurts,’ Simpson said peevishly. He waited for his wife to respond. She was mute. He couldn’t imagine what was going on in her head. Not once had she mentioned the children.

  He rose from the table and went to stand beside her. ‘Muriel,’ he said loudly. He prodded her leg with his bare toes. ‘Muriel—’

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘The girls?’ he asked. ‘They’ll be worried, won’t they?’

  She wouldn’t answer.

  ‘Did you tell them where we were going?’

  ‘I may have,’ she said. ‘But they wouldn’t have listened.’

  ‘Did you turn the kitchen light off?’

  ‘Go away,’ she said.

  He seized hold of her arm and shook her. He couldn’t prove it, but he knew she was being deliberately provocative – it had nothing to do with their present situation. ‘It may be of little interest to you,’ he told her, ‘but I pay the electricity bills.’

  ‘You should see what they’ve done to your car,’ she said. ‘You’ll need a new wing and a door.’

  He opened the shutters wider and stared into the little garden. The sun was shining on the privet hedge. He fetched a chair from the table and climbing upon it tried to see over the hedge into the street. ‘There’s no cars out there,’ he said.

  ‘Get away from that window,’ shouted Harry. He raised his fist threateningly.

  Simpson closed the shutters and remained standing on the chair. ‘My car,’ he complained. ‘What’s happened to my car?’

  ‘They moved them all,’ said Ginger. ‘In the night. They’ve roped off the block.’

  ‘They rammed yours, George,’ Muriel said. ‘With a taxi. I saw them.’

  Simpson stepped down from the chair and leaned sluggishly against the fireplace; he yawned repeatedly. His wife sat a million miles from him, playing with a thread of cotton at the torn hem of her frock. He had always imagined that this sort of experience drew people closer together, made them nobler and more sensitive. He’d seen photographs of survivors of such dramas, and it had seemed to him that their eyes were tranquil with communal suffering. He glanced in the mirror and was unmoved by the frayed bandage tied in a small bow at the top of his balding head. He watched Ginger go to the kitchen door and turn to beckon Muriel.

  ‘You,’ Ginger said. ‘I want a word with you.’

  Muriel tugged the thread from her dress and, rising, followed him into the hall.

  ‘Oh God,’ said Binny.

  Edward was struggling to compose a shopping list. He had pencilled the word ‘tobacco’ several times along the edge of the newspaper. He couldn’t think of anything else; he found it difficult to concentrate. He had always left the shopping to Helen. He hadn’t thought of her for over two hours – he hadn’t thought of anything save his need for tobacco. His father too had smoked a pipe. When he’d gone to bed at night he’d left it under a cushion for safety. During the war, when tobacco was rationed, he’d stuffed wood shavings into the bowl and smoked those.

  Edward was just considering whether bread crumbs could be utilised when he was ordered by Harry to go through to the bathroom. At the door he tried to pat Binny’s shoulder, but she wouldn’t let him. It appeared she was still put out by his earlier conversation, though he’d supposed her reaction would have been one of joy. He thought he’d offered to leave his wife. He certainly remembered saying it would be fun. He kept seeing his father holding a leather pouch on his lap, dabbling with his fingers in the moist shreds of tobacco.

  ‘I don’t know why he puts up with you,’ said Alma. ‘You’ll be wearing jack-boots next and trampling all over him.’

  ‘Be quiet,’ said Binny. ‘It’s nothing to do with Edward.’ She was waiting to hear Muriel scream. She looked at Harry and wondered if she dare confide in him – but then, if Alma was right and he was a bit slow, he wouldn’t understand what she meant until it was too late.

  Ginger came back into the room and told her she was needed upstairs. She stared at him as though he had spoken in a foreign language. He hadn’t been absent for more than five minutes.

  ‘Piss off,’ he ordered.

  When she’d gone he took hold of Simpson by the slack of his ruined shirt and warned him not to go near the shutters or the back window. ‘We’ll only be in the passage,’ he said. ‘And this time we won’t hit the bleeding wall.’

  Weakly, Simpson nodded. He blinked his eyes rapidly to hide his tears; he hadn’t been bullied since kindergarten.

  The men wheeled the pram into the hall and left Simpson alone with Alma. He clenched his fists, waiting for her inane chatter to begin. She remained in the kitchen for a moment pouring the last of the sherry into a glass. He couldn’t really blame her for wanting a drink. Marcia could put away a fair amount of booze. She was probably thinking his failure to telephone her this morning was due to pique – women always thought of themselves first.

  Alma came to the table, sat down, and placed the glass a
t his elbow. Simpson looked at her. She had a small thin mouth and large eyes brimming with friendliness. She nodded encouragingly. Reduced again to tears, he was forced to turn his head away. Struggling to control his voice, he said with difficulty, ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Would you mind if we didn’t talk?’ said Alma. ‘I’d like to read the newspaper.’

  19

  Climbing the stairs, Binny imagined Ginger intended to abuse both Muriel and herself: either one after the other, or together, if that was possible. She couldn’t bear the idea of seeing Muriel without her stockings. This time, she thought, I shall protest. He’ll have to shoot me. It was easier to be brave in daylight.

  Muriel was bent over the divan, straightening the rumpled bedclothes. The injured woman lay on her side, stripped to the waist, face turned to the wall. The soles of her feet were black with dirt.

  ‘We need something to bind her ribs with,’ Muriel said. ‘She’s in pain. Do you have any more sheets?’

  ‘Yes,’ lied Binny. ‘But they’re at the laundry.’

  ‘We’ll use these,’ Muriel decided. She slipped the pillows from beneath the woman’s shoulder and took them to the ping-pong table. Discarding the pillows, she began to rip the frail cotton covers with her teeth.

  ‘Were you ever a nurse?’ asked Binny. She herself was hopeless in the sick room. The slightest cough or clearing of the patient’s throat convinced her that the grim reaper was at hand.

  Muriel said she’d done a first aid course at the Institute, two or three years ago. ‘I only did it to get out of the house,’ she explained. ‘Then later I used it as an excuse.’

  ‘I don’t much like going out of the house,’ said Binny. ‘I do sometimes when Edward takes me to dinner, but not otherwise.’ She wondered if this was the moment to ask Muriel what she thought of Helen. She didn’t think the two women were terribly friendly – Muriel hadn’t once mentioned Helen during dinner – though perhaps she was just being tactful. Binny longed to hear that Helen was overweight or common or needed to wear a wig. ‘I didn’t mean to interfere in their marriage,’ she said. ‘If he hadn’t come to dinner she would never have known. I’d have given him up in the end.’

  ‘The third week,’ Muriel said, laying the strips of cotton in neat rows upon the green table, ‘we stopped sitting in front of the blackboard and did practical work. A man had fallen off a ladder and we attended to him.’

  ‘I’d have run the other way,’ admitted Binny. ‘I couldn’t have gone near him.’

  ‘He hadn’t really fallen off a ladder,’ Muriel said. ‘There were possible internal injuries and multiple fractures on both legs—’

  ‘Good Heavens.’

  ‘I was given his right leg. I put on splints. The following week he treated me for burns. We met secretly for twelve months.’

  After a moment’s silence, Binny asked: ‘What happened? Did Simpson find out?’

  ‘We wanted somewhere to go. Once we went into a field, but it wasn’t very satisfactory. I asked a woman friend of mine if we could use her house one afternoon. We’d been at school together. She’d met X and she said he was a fine man – we could have the house any time we wanted. We were always good chums at school. She even offered to have a key cut for me. Her husband was dead, you see, and she went out to work.’

  ‘What a nice woman,’ said Binny. She sensed some tragedy was about to be disclosed.

  ‘When I told X he was delighted. It was Thursday and I’d been to the hairdresser. It rained and rained. We’d decided beforehand that it would be more exciting if I arrived first and waited for him like a wife . . . I’d let him in. It would be more like our own home—’

  ‘Actually,’ objected Binny, ‘he’d have his key if it was home.’ She could have bitten her tongue for putting her thoughts into words. Muriel had closed her eyes and was gripping the edge of the table.

  She said: ‘I waited for hours. He didn’t come. I never heard from him again.’

  Binny picked up the rags of cotton and wound them round her wrist; they weren’t long enough to bind anybody’s chest. ‘Perhaps he was run over,’ she said finally. She prayed he had been. How Muriel had suffered – waiting at a window for the kiss of life and recalling, while listening for the sound of Mr X’s footsteps squelching up the path, those nursing nights they’d swabbed and cleaned and tended imaginary wounds.

  ‘I wore this dress,’ said Muriel.

  Binny looked out into the street and saw a large crowd gathered behind a barrier on the corner; she almost waved. A television camera, angled on the roof of a van, was pointing directly at the house. She hoped the eggshells wouldn’t show up in the bedraggled hedge. As she watched, craning for a glimpse of Lucy or Gregory, a door opened in the flats opposite. Draped in a travelling rug, Mrs Papastavrou advanced to the balcony railings. One long high-pitched wail echoed along the street before several policemen leapt from other doorways and hustled her inside.

  She’s made a mistake, thought Binny. It can’t be half-past six.

  Behind her, the injured woman groaned. Leaving Muriel lost in nightmares at the table, Binny took a pillow to the divan; she was bending down to slip it into place when the woman groaned again, and uncurling herself from that foetal position against the wall lay flat on her back in the bed. She was a man.

  20

  They didn’t see the house or the street on television after all. Something had gone wrong with the set.

  ‘You do have trouble with your plugs, pet,’ said Alma, disappointed. She was hoping that Frank might have been interviewed and that he would have said what a wonderful wife and mother she was. It wasn’t very likely, but then appearing on television did peculiar things to people.

  Edward was brought from the bathroom at seven o’clock. He couldn’t help remembering the night before when they’d eaten bread and cheese by candlelight. Binny said it was today, but he found it hard to believe. He had gone twelve hours without tobacco and was feeling both edgy and depressed. Simpson told him that his name hadn’t actually been mentioned on the radio, but he’d been referred to as a prominent accountant.

  ‘They mentioned Simpson’s name,’ Alma told him. ‘They’d appealed for any information, and a woman came forward and said he’d telephoned her earlier in the evening.’ She beamed at Simpson proudly; she felt he was something of a celebrity.

  ‘It’s all nonsense,’ Simpson said wearily. ‘They get everything wrong.’ He didn’t know why he was bothering to deny it – they could have said he was a notorious mass-murderer and Muriel wouldn’t have noticed.

  Ginger informed them that they were moving out before midnight. He’d taken a suitcase from the upstairs room and now sat with it firmly gripped between his knees. ‘Everybody hold on,’ he said. ‘And do as you’re told.’

  ‘Moving out?’ asked Edward, bewildered. ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Not you, Fatso,’ said Ginger. ‘Us and one of the women. Maybe two of them.’

  Edward didn’t believe him; they were obviously bluffing. ‘I haven’t written my letter,’ he told Simpson.

  ‘When we go,’ Ginger said. ‘You and Curly Tops here will help Geoff into the cab. We’ll follow with the women.’

  ‘Geoff?’ said Edward. He noticed there was a packet of American cigarettes in the top pocket of Ginger’s leather jacket. He was too proud to ask for one.

  ‘That suitcase,’ whispered Simpson. ‘They must have stolen things from various parts of the house.’

  ‘There’s nothing worth stealing,’ Edward said.

  He roamed the kitchen, searching feverishly in the cupboard and the fridge for something to eat. The sausages had disappeared. He could make little sense of Binny’s ramblings about the man upstairs being a woman. There were three potatoes in the vegetable rack, but he knew that if he cooked them they’d have to be shared out.

  ‘She isn’t a woman,’ said Binny. ‘She’s a man. She’s got hairs on her chest. Why don’t you listen?’

  ‘I’m so damned hung
ry,’ he complained miserably. ‘Can’t you think where you put that pudding you lost?’

  ‘It’s in a carrier bag,’ said Binny. ‘That’s all I know.’ She stared at him accusingly. ‘You’re not worried about them taking me with them, are you? You couldn’t care less.’

  ‘They’re not going anywhere,’ said Edward distractedly. ‘Why don’t you have a store cupboard?’

  ‘She was in the bank this afternoon. Yesterday. She smiled at me and I just knew there was something odd. She was looking me up and down like a man.’

  ‘Out of my way,’ said Edward. Binny was holding on to his arm and hampering his search. ‘Please stop getting under my feet.’

  She let go of him and stepped backwards to the sink.

  ‘Don’t,’ he pleaded, irritated by her pathetic expression. ‘Please forgive me. I’m so hungry.’ He put his arms round her and patted her back. Over her bowed head his eyes restlessly sought the carrier bag.

  Binny said: ‘You promised we’d be together. Did you mean it?’

  ‘Well,’ he said awkwardly. ‘I may have spoken out of turn. One does, you know.’

  ‘Does one?’ she said contemptuously. Still, she remained in his embrace. ‘I thought you didn’t care about the roses . . . you just wanted me.’

  ‘I do, I do,’ he murmured inadequately. ‘But not at this moment. I really can’t think of anything, feeling the way I do.’ He propped her against the sink and peered in the corner beside the fridge. ‘It’s all right for you,’ he grumbled. ‘You’re not used to four-course lunches every day.’ He was disgusted to see small insects crawling in the cracks between the floorboards and the wall. ‘You really should clean this up. It’s dreadfully unhygienic.’ He was shifting the fridge on its base, eager to uncover some verminous nest. He saw a plastic bag wedged against the skirting board. ‘I’ve found it,’ he cried delightedly. He was astonished at the weight of the pudding. Parting the handles, he lifted out the silver balls. He set them on the window ledge. ‘I thought you meant a pie,’ he said. He could have wept with disappointment.