Enchantment

by Monica Dickens

  ‘To give you strength.’ Tim turned back to him. ‘To calm you down, sort of, and, like, pull you out by magnetism.’

  ‘You a hypnotist, then?’

  Why not? Tim could be if he wanted. It was true, he had charmed Norman out of the caves.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I am.’

  Next morning, after a lecture on berries and nuts and living at one with nature, it was another long tramp to the abseiling cliff.

  They came round a corner in an overgrown abandoned quarry, and, God! there it was. A sheer rock face, miles high, thousands of feet high, a hundred and thirty feet high.

  ‘Not going up there,’ said Norman.

  ‘That’s not the problem,’ Chip said. ‘It’s coming down it.’

  Steve had brought abseiling harness and ropes in the van: beautiful, slender, silky ropes, that he uncoiled lovingly, and wound round himself to demonstrate how they could tie a bowline knot one-handed in mid-air. ‘Let’s see you all do it.’

  ‘Why would we want to?’ Bob could not do it.

  ‘If you were in trouble and needed an extra rope thrown down.’

  ‘One rope isn’t strong enough, then?’

  ‘Sure. The breaking strain point is six and a half tons. No one’s as heavy as that.’

  ‘You should see my Mum,’ Eddie offered.

  They practised abseiling on the nursery slope, a smaller rock only about thirty feet high. The worst part was stepping backwards into space. Tim dithered on the edge.

  ‘Go on.’ Steve was beside him on another rope. ‘You’ll love it.’

  ‘I want to, but I don’t want to.’ Tim licked his dry lips. His stomach had already risen up.

  ‘Fear and desire are friends.’

  ‘I don’t –’ Tim began to say, but Steve said, ‘Go!’ at the same time, so Tim went.

  Sitting in the webbing harness with the rope passing through the clip on the front of the belt, Tim dropped easily down the rock, checked himself by raising the lower part of the rope in his right hand, and pushed off from the rock face to jump the last few feet.

  ‘Nothing to it.’

  Janice floated down like a fat pigeon. Even Norman managed fairly well, shouting, ‘I don’t like it!’, but picked himself up at the bottom, and walked off with a silly grin, to brew up, wagging his thatched head.

  Teddy Bear was the last to go down. He stood for a long time at the top, asking questions, fiddling with the harness, turning to look down. ‘Don’t look down!’ from Janice and Tim at the bottom. The rope that was tied to a tree with Steve’s bowlines had been passed through the clip. Steve showed Bob how to lean back to take the strain. He had one foot over the edge.

  ‘Come on,’ Janice whispered. The foot went back up. ‘Oh, God, if he doesn’t do it, he’ll be a wreck. He’ll hate himself, that’s what he’s like. Dear God, please make him come over the top.’ Janice clutched Tim’s arm. ‘Please, God, push him or something, you’ve got to. Make him do it,’ she pleaded, and Tim found that he was praying with her.

  ‘Help him, Lord,’ breathed Janice, and Teddy Bear was over the edge, hanging like a German sausage on a string, twisting sideways, pulled straight by Steve, dropping down (‘Thank God!’), landing bumpily and staggering into a bush – but landing.

  ‘We prayed for you,’ Janice told him, ‘me and Julian.’

  It had worked. Perhaps Tim could take up praying, as well as hypnotism.

  When Steve said that they were all to abseil down the soaring, sheer rock face, Janice said to Bob, ‘Let’s not test God too far.’ He stayed below and practised bowlines, while she climbed up the rough slope at the back of the cliff, with the others.

  ‘Don’t want to do it.’ Norman puffed and snuffled and panted at the top of the hill.

  ‘Yes you do.’ Hadn’t Tim got him out of the caves? Hadn’t he prayed Bob down? He could get Norman down the cliff.

  ‘I can’t.’ Norman shook his head, looking down, horribly far down. Below them, emerging from a fissure high up in the rock, a bird took wing and soared away, to show them it was easy.

  ‘You can do it,’ Tim insisted. ‘Look at me.’ Norman turned his head.

  Tim narrowed his eyes and glinted them hypnotically.

  ‘Oh –’ Norman swayed about. ‘You give me confidence. Perhaps I will.’ He hung his lip. ‘Perhaps I won’t.’

  He wanted everyone else to go first. Terrified, Tim leaned back in the harness, heard Steve say, ‘Go!’, thought, I am going to die, pushed off from the edge, dropped, found the rock with the flat of his feet, and bounced himself off to sail out and down like a bird in a great dizzy swoop. I can fly!

  I can fly. He kept on the belt and leg harness and started up the hill again, light-headed, not feeling the effort of the climb, ecstatic.

  ‘Can I go again?’

  ‘Sure.’ Steve grinned. ‘Just let Norman have his turn.’

  Norman was at the edge of the cliff, as dead white as if he really were going to be pushed off, uncontrolled, into space.

  Go on, you bugger, Tim thought. You’ve got this far, and snored all night, and your feet smell, and I’ve paid for you and all. ‘Get going, Norm.’

  ‘Leave him alone,’ Steve said. ‘He’s all right.’

  He wasn’t. On the rim of the precipice, Norman’s long wobbly legs buckled. He knelt there, clutching the taut rope in front of him.

  ‘Get on your feet,’ Steve said steadily. ‘Lean back.’

  Norman gibbered. Standing in front of him, Tim tried to force the energy again.

  ‘You can, Norman, you can. You can fly like a bird. Lift your head and look at me – you can fly!’

  Norman looked up, and reached his arms forward to Tim.

  ‘Lean back!’ shouted Steve, but Norman’s feet dragged over the edge, and his face bumped and scraped against the rock as he went over.

  He landed in a heap, covered in blood, and the ant people at the bottom of the quarry ran towards him.

  ‘What the hell?’ Steve turned furiously to Tim. ‘What the hell were you trying to do? “Look at me – you can fly.” You must be crazy.’

  ‘It wasn’t my fault.’

  ‘He’d have been fine if you hadn’t interfered.’ Steve put the second rope through the clip on his belt and disappeared over the edge without looking at Tim again.

  Tim went slowly back down the hill the way he had climbed up it. Norman was being cleaned and patched up. Steve was angry and tired. Don would have to drive Norman home, because he could not go by train.

  ‘What happened?’ everyone was asking. Norman didn’t know, and Steve did not say.

  But the general opinion was: Norm should not have been here. So even that was Tim’s fault, as well as everything else.

  ‘How did the weekend go?’ Brian asked.

  ‘Amazing.’ Tim could not tell him about the disaster of Norman, so he boasted a bit about the caving and the abseiling, and the rigours of a night in the small copse that Norman had thought was a forest. ‘It was fabulous.’

  But the dream of Enterprise was finished and faded like a dawn waking. Back to my real self. Tim hunched gloomily on the window-sill in his flat, and contemplated reality.

  Back to Harold.

  Tim had not been home more than an hour or two before he heard the heavy tread on the bottom of the stairs. He knew Brian was at home, so he could not refuse to open the door and risk Harold going berserk on the steps.

  ‘Hello – er, hello, friend.’

  Steve had lectured them, ‘Treat everybody as a friend and they’ll be friendly to you.’ Might be worth trying.

  ‘Don’t give me that.’ Harold came in. ‘You’re no friend of mine, after what you done. Really eats into me, it does, like a cancer, and I won’t never be able to forgive you, not in the rest of your life.’

  Why hadn’t he said, ‘Not in the rest of my life’? The suggestion that Tim, although younger, was going to die before him was very unsettling.

  ‘I’ve got some lemonade.’ (
‘Don’t give up on anyone.’) ‘Would you like some?’

  ‘Yer.’

  ‘Something to eat?’

  ‘Yer.’

  Harold sat down with his knees apart and his arms on the table, as if he had a knife and fork in his fist, ready to bang the handles for service.

  Tim gave him lemonade and some stale bread and the last of the cheese. He was too nervous to eat or drink anything himself.

  The situation was horrible. Two days of escape, and then the handcuffs were on again. How was he ever going to break free? Threatening again to report Harold for menace might make him angrier. Actually reporting him might send him right over the top.

  And what could Tim really tell the police?

  This friend of mine keeps turning up – well, he was a friend, but now I’m afraid of him.

  Why is that, Mr Kendall?

  He said I’d die before him.

  Well, you may have a pink face from two days in the great outdoors, but other than that, you don’t look in the best of shape.

  It’s the eyes, isn’t it, constable? Haunted-looking.

  When Harold had gone, Tim looked for a long time at his face in the mirror.

  Haunted eyes. No wonder he was starting to make mistakes at work. Three times, Mr D. had caught him standing about daydreaming when customers needed help.

  He had read a price ticket wrong on Purbeck moiré, and it had got into the customer’s account, and when she came in later for an extra couple of metres, she spotted the mistake and raised hell with Mr D.

  ‘I took full responsibility,’ he said stiffly to Tim, ‘because it’s not my policy to reveal the shortcomings of the staff.’

  ‘Thank, er, thank you, Mr D.’

  ‘Not to protect you.’ He stood by the desk with his knuckles on its tidy surface. ‘To protect the department. I just want you to know, it’s very painful for me.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Sorry is neither here nor there. You want to remain with us, I take it?’

  Tim nodded, and stared at the floor.

  ‘Well, then.’

  Tim had hardly heard what he said. Sometimes he thought he might be going deaf.

  ‘What are you waiting for, young man? Clear out of here. Clear out and do your duty out there on the floor.’

  ‘Fantastic,’ Chip had said to Tim, about the war games. ‘Kill! Kill! You’d love it.’

  Well, what did Tim have to lose? He could never go back to the survival course, and Warfare sounded much easier. You didn’t have to learn anything. You just ran about, going, ‘Bang, bang, you’re dead,’ which would be as good as recapturing childhood. He deserved that. He really deserved a break away from what Val called stress, and he called the jitters.

  Stress was fashionable. He had it.

  ‘What do people do for stress, Val?’

  ‘Take a break, if they’ve got any sense. Let themselves relax. Stop driving themselves.’

  ‘That’s something you’ll never have to worry about anyway, Timothy,’ Colin said. He was getting as nasty as Val. He’d better watch out.

  Enterprise had ended up in anticlimax and disappointment because of Norman, but also because there had been no one to tell the tale about the adventures to when he came home. What would it be like if he came back splattered with paint from a day at the war games? No beer in the flat and a tepid shower, because Brian and Jack kept the water temperature low in the summer. He might go home and tell his mother. She would love it, but she would call out, ‘Come in here, Wallace, and listen to this,’ and Little Hitler would make a meal of it.

  Helen wouldn’t, though. She would listen and nod, with the parallel frown lines between her small careful eyes, and only interrupt to say things like ‘That sounds nice’ in rapid little rushes.

  ‘Hullo, Mrs Dyer. I’m, er, I’m sorry to bother you, but I need to talk to Helen. Could you ask her to ring me?’

  ‘She’s just come in, as a matter of fact. Her helper’s here. I’ll run up and get her to come down. Hang on.’

  Only a minute to think what he was going to say.

  ‘Tim? Hullo, how nice.’ So she was still speaking to him.

  ‘Yes, I, er – when’s Julian going to camp?’

  ‘Two middle weeks in August. I can hardly wait. No, forget that. I shouldn’t have said it.’

  ‘Yes, you should. Relieves the stress. Talking of that – I say, Helen, I wondered if – suppose you came round to my place then, on a Saturday evening when Julian’s away? I could make supper and we could walk across the road and hear the band concert in the park.’

  ‘If it doesn’t rain.’ They said it together, and laughed.

  He told her how to get there. ‘What time? Well, look, I’ll be out all day. Something rather special … well – tell you about it when I see you, right?’

  ‘All right.’

  Val, Zara, Gail, Lilian, any of the few women he knew would have said, ‘Tell me now!’ (And been disappointed with it if he had.)

  ‘I should be back by six.’

  Get a frozen pie, Tim. Thaw it out. Frozen potatoes and peas, thaw them out, cook them quick. Cheese … French bread … wine. Economize later.

  Warfare took place about thirty miles away, partly in a wood, partly in open country on a windy hillside. There were about forty people, some of them women, which Tim had not expected: wives, girl friends, a blonde called Judy with a group from her office, in bright track suits. Some of the men were mates from a pub. They hung about the Army tent and the camp fire, and drank coffee and joked noisily about being hung over and short of sleep from Friday night, looking to see who was impressed.

  Derek, who was in charge, kitted everybody out in patchy green and black and brown camouflage overalls. Tim’s cammo suit was too big. It bagged and sagged, until the webbing holster belt pulled it in more trimly. He pushed the legs into his white sports socks. When Derek gave him the paint pellet gun and he felt the weight of it, he knew he wouldn’t have missed this for anything. The cammo overalls, the heavy black pistol, the thick goggles – he wasn’t just Tim, stuffed up stupid with the fourth day of a summer cold. He was anybody he wanted to be, anonymous in the goggled crowd, a soldier.

  The staff of Warfare had seemed easy-going, but as soon as they had got everyone out of the tent and out of the little huts labelled MEN and WOMEN, it was different. Now it wasn’t Derek with long eyelashes who was in charge. It was Joe, ex-sergeant with laced boots and a tight, strutting bottom and an Army beret flat on his bristled head, and a voice that sobered up the gigglers and hung-overs.

  ‘Right, now you’re mine, you lot. Gawd, what a bloody awful lot.’ He paced in front of the line of men and women who had paid twenty pounds to be told, ‘Let’s see you stand up straight and knock off the horse shit.’

  Tim squared his shoulders under the loose overalls, and added Sergeant Joe to his list of heroes.

  ‘Right, I’ve got fifteen minutes to try to teach you what it would take you six weeks to learn in the Army, which is where you’d all be a lot better off now if you had been.’

  While he told them the rules of the game and the things they mustn’t do and what would happen to them if they did them, they all put on the goggles and the green plastic face mask, which had a nose shield and mouth slits to breathe through, and did nothing for Tim’s cold.

  Judy and her friends, straggling out of line and looking at the same time more relaxed and more serious than the men, were chewing gum under the face masks.

  Joe showed them how to take off the safety catch and fire the pistols. Unloaded, the CO2 charge made a ‘fglop’ sound, like a belch. They loaded the paint pellets and fired at a dummy in the middle of the field.

  Tim raised his gun, narrowed his eyes behind the goggles and fired – ‘Phut!’ like an air gun. He had never fired rifles at fairgrounds. This was the first time he had ever fired anything except the toilet plunger at the window. His heart raced. Had he hit the dummy? It was covered with splotches of red paint. One
of them could have been his.

  ‘Couldn’t hit a haystack, most of you men,’ Joe jeered. ‘Bull’s-eye, all the ladies. Watch ’em. In the woods, every man is a possible rapist. They may aim low.’

  Could Tim shoot women? Yes, if they were going to shoot him. Disguised, they didn’t look like women now, this lot, except Judy with her froth of bleached hair bursting out above the strap of her goggles.

  ‘You’ll be in two teams for the whole day, so you better like each other. Green guards the green flag and tries to get Yellow’s flag. Yellow ditto, in reverse. That clear? Even to you lot? … I said, “That clear?’”

  ‘Yes, Joe.’

  Tim and some others said, ‘Yes, sarge.’

  ‘Right. Let’s have the shoulder flashes, Derek. We’ll divide up.’

  Here it came. The agony of picking sides, and Tim would be picked last. Or he’d be left out, like he was in the western copse, stuck in a tent with Norman.

  Sergeant Joe evened out ‘the ladies’ and then – Tim’s saviour – simply divided the line in two and gave out the shoulder tabs. The line broke up and several people dashed off again through the hedge to the little huts. In a real war, did people keep dropping out to have a pee?

  Tim’s Green group gathered together to plan. Plan what? ‘Pick a leader,’ Derek told them. ‘Who’s played before?’

  ‘I have, as a matter of fact.’ Before any of the others could finish saying, ‘So have I,’ a cocky little chap called Ken had made himself leader and was telling everyone what to do. Some to guard the flag in camp, some to go ahead and attack, some in the middle ground.

  Tim was in the middle group, which went off among the trees from their camp in a clearing in the wood.

  ‘Back up the attackers, watch each other, work as a team,’ but as soon as the whistle blew, everyone went off on their own, and Tim didn’t know where anybody was, and it was wildy exciting and total chaos.

  Shots somewhere to the left. Shots to the right, ahead and behind him. Phut – ow! One very close. He saw a yellow shoulder flash low down in the undergrowth and fired, and immediately, like the echo of his own shot, he was hit in the leg.

  The red paint looked like blood on his thigh. It hurt. Derek had said it wouldn’t hurt, but it did.