If you were hit, you were dead, and you put on an orange vest to show you were out of that game. The game had hardly begun, and he was out of it, like being first out in musical chairs at a children’s party, slinking to the wall as the music started again. A mother had sung out, ‘Poor old Timmy, why is it always you?’ He could hear her now.
He put on the orange dead-man’s vest and trudged up the path back to his camp. Sarge was there and one of the other staff, and the Green defenders, crouched by a rough wooden barricade, and behind trees and in overgrown hollows.
First hit! No one said that, but they might as well have. Tim kept his face mask down, although it was hard to breathe. Perhaps he should go home. But out of the trees came another orange vest, then another and another, masks pushed up, a hand up to goggles –
‘Goggles down!’ from Joe. ‘If I have to tell you again, the gate’s up there.’
Goggles down. It was cocky Ken, the leader. He had been shot just after Tim. Cheers.
Now it was all right to be dead. They sat on a bank. ‘How d’you cop it?’ ‘Ran right into it.’ ‘I got one of theirs, though.’
‘I got two,’ Tim said. Who would know?
Behind the low barricade in the defenders’ fort, one of the girls lay on her stomach, gun through a gap in the logs, long black hair down her back. A pioneer woman, she looked, tense against the creeping Indians. Or an Indian squaw, tense against the pioneers. She looked dramatically businesslike, but when she raised her head to see who was coming, she got picked off with a splat of paint on the goggles.
Two of the other defenders had got fed up waiting and gone off. Another was re-loading his gun with a tube of pellets when a Yellow man burst out of the trees, grabbed the green flag off a branch and ran back, just as a Green man dodged out into the clearing with the yellow flag, in time to get shot in the back by the defender of his own side who had finished re-loading.
The dead man dropped the flag. ‘You silly sod. Grab the flag!’ he yelled to his treacherous murderer, who ran forward, fell over a tree root and was shot by a sniper behind a bush, who picked up the yellow flag and ran.
It was poor old Tubby. His friends from the pub called him that. Moon-faced and cheerful, he had lost his belt as soon as it was given to him, spilled his coffee, fallen in the mud on the way to the camp, and dropped his glasses when he took his goggles off to wipe them. ‘Keep those ruddy goggles on, what have I told you!’
‘Is that it?’
‘Unless one of ours gets the flags back.’
‘How many are left?’
‘Damn.’ A double whistle showed the game was up.
Having watched the Green team make fools of themselves, Sergeant Joe decided to help.
‘That was horrible. Who’s your leader?’ Ken had disappeared. Large steady Dave took over. ‘Work as a team,’ Joe said. ‘Three or four stay in the camp, one go for the flag, and a bunch of others back him up. Cover him. Get killed. One or two try to stay alive to go back with him. He can’t do it alone.’
I could, Tim thought. I could run and dodge through the trees like that Yellow bloke did.
‘Who’ll run?’ Dave asked. ‘Liz, Judy? Girls are faster, because they don’t drink beer.’ Liz and Judy shook their heads, chewing. ‘Who else is fast?’
Pause, then, ‘I am,’ Tim said.
‘OK.’ Dave believed him. ‘Give it a go.’
People looked at Tim and smiled and gave him a thumbs up. They were more of a team now, knowing each other’s names, beginning to see a dim sort of strategy, all muddy and paint-splashed, all taking it more seriously. Judy tucked her conspicuous hair under a cap. Tim pulled his cammo overalls down over his white socks.
‘Pair off,’ Joe said. ‘Work with an oppo.’
Quickly, they paired off. Tim’s oppo was Tubby. Of course. But he was a good enough bloke. He bumbled about, and thought Tim knew what to do.
They prowled through the wood together between shooting on both sides, people being killed, heavy breathing, branches snapping, danger everywhere. Tim’s eyes stared like a lynx. His skin stood on end like cat fur. Tubby was wheezing and cursing under his breath, but he followed Tim, good old oppo, as they crawled and dodged and pushed their way through brambles and bracken to the hedge that bounded the enemy camp.
The Green people who had started out to cover Tim had disappeared, dead or lost. Now or never. ‘Cover me!’ Tim crouched at a gap in the hedge, and ran. Behind him, Tubby fired three wild shots and squealed as he was shot.
Tim ran, weaved, crouched behind a tree, saw the yellow flag on a post, ran out, yelled in a high voice, and got killed within a few yards of his goal, desperate arm flung out.
The Greens improved, and it was two games all at lunchtime: smoky hamburgers over the oil-drum fire, easy talk, exploits exchanged, jokes, friendly insults. Tim ate three hamburgers. He and Tubby sat together in silence, waiting to get on with the war. Tim had a sinus headache. The frame of Tubby’s glasses was broken, where he had jammed the goggles over them crookedly.
Tim hoped to run for the flag again, but after lunch, Mary was chosen, because she had eaten only fruit. Tim and Tubby went with the group that backed her up. They were attacking the camp with the rough log fort. The defence was brilliant. Unseen snipers picked off the Greens one by one, and picked off Mary when she made her dash for the flag.
Tim and Tubby had thrown themselves behind a tree trunk on the bank of a pond. Tubby, goggling through his glasses behind his goggles, took out one of the defenders.
‘Did I get him?’ He raised his head to see, and got shot in the side of the neck.
‘They got me, pal.’ He slid backwards down the bank to the pond.
My oppo! The emotion was real, and the tense excitement. Tim was on his own. Imperishable Tohubo, alone against the world! He fired two shots in the direction of the shot that had killed his mate, and realized he was almost out of ammunition. No time to re-load. He scrambled over the tree trunk, and ran for the yellow flag. The young skinny girl was behind the low barricade of the fort. Tim rushed at her, brandishing his pistol, and yelled, ‘Drop the gun!’
She did. She lost her nerve. He was too close. Surrender!
With a hoarse cry, Tohubo pulled the flag off the branch, turned, took out the last defender with his last shot, and ran for his own camp as if he had been charging and dodging through woods all his life, his nose and head miraculously cleared, and flung himself, gasping, on the ground by his own flag post.
His team, alive and dead, crowded round him.
‘How did you do it?’
‘One surrendered, one I took out.’ Sitting up, he told the tale, breathless, his chest heaving like an Olympic runner’s.
‘Good for you,’ they said. ‘We’re ahead now. Good old Tim.’
Tubby turned up with his orange vest askew, and put an arm round Tim’s shoulders. ‘We did it,’ he said. ‘I died for you.’
The Warfare games were not finished, but anything else would be an anticlimax. Tim wanted to go home now, in his blood-stained cammo, with his gun: muddy, exhausted, bruised and triumphant conqueror, Tohubo the invincible, Blch the returning hero.
When the others went back to base camp to start the next battle, Tim sneaked off sideways through the trees, crossed a stream and found his way along the side of the wood and through a wire fence to where he had left Buttercup.
At home, he parked the car and got out, hoping Brian or Jack would see him wearing the cammo, disappointed to see through the garage side window that their car was not there. He went slowly up the stairs to give the neighbours a chance, if they were in their garden behind Jack’s vegetable plot.
He felt absolutely marvellous. Normal. Real. Rooted on the earth. Light years away from the compulsive fantasies of the police witness and the haunting lorry driver.
When Helen arrived, he was sitting watching the door, with the CO2 pistol across his lap. She rang the bell. He put the gun under a cushion on the couch bed and opened the
door. Helen gasped, and said, ‘Oh! You look –’
‘War games,’ he said crisply.
‘Are you hurt?’
‘Paint.’
‘Was it fun?’
‘Terrific.’
She wore a rather dowdy sand-coloured dress, full and long – she had lived with those legs long enough to know what to do about them – and the childish sandals she had worn in the boat.
The oven was heating. The wine was opened. Tim had planned to say, ‘Welcome to my place,’ but Blch would not let him. Suddenly, the bold warrior rushed in and took charge, and he pushed Helen on to the bed and undid the front of her dress.
‘Tim, you’re so – wait, you’re hurting me.’
Strong in his cammo armour, spattered with blood-paint, Blch had her skirt up and her pants down, even while she said, ‘Let me –’ and he claimed his rights, as all returning heroes should, and she did not struggle, which was just as well, but let him ravish her.
Afterwards, she stroked the cammo overalls and said comfortably, ‘That was what you needed, then.’
‘You don’t mind?’
‘Everybody needs something. With my husband, I used to have to imagine he was Robert Redford.’
‘Do you mind this?’ Tim pulled the pistol from under the cushion.
‘I would have, if I’d known.’
They put the gun under the pillow when they went back to bed after they had heated and eaten the food. They had drunk the whole bottle of wine, and Tim had told Helen she was his oppo.
‘Do you want to keep this on?’ Helen fingered the cammo.
‘I’d better. Do you think I’m daft?’
‘I had a boy friend once,’ Helen said, ‘who went to bed in a great thick belt he’d bought off a market stall, with the buckle made of motorcycle parts.’
‘Rather painful.’
‘He turned it the other way round.’
She was quite experienced. It was amazing.
This you are not going to believe, Jack would say to Brian. Our life has really been enriched since the day we let the young ’un in upstairs.
Brian had gone off early to see his occasional lover, and Jack was having a late leisurely breakfast outdoors, on the paving at the back. Because Brian was not here, with his stern scruples and cautions, Cindy was sitting outside in a sun dress and dark glasses, large straw hat tied over the blonde hair with a scarf that ran round the crown and through holes in the brim.
Tim’s door opened, she would tell Brian, and out came our likely lad, and behind him – yes, I knew this was a lucky Sunday – a real … live … woman.
Go on, Brian would say.
No, honest. They looked as if they’d just got out of bed.
Tousled?
No, in good nick. They were both at the top of the stairs. Tim looked round a bit furtively, and his eye lighted on the top of my Ibiza hat. So after she’d gone …
No. Better leave the rest of it out.
Tim’s eye alighted on the top of a wide straw hat with Brian’s girl friend underneath it, at ease on a garden chair, with a mug of coffee and a toasted bun on the little table.
Helen would not let him drive her home. She would take the bus to the cathedral and go to the service at ten thirty.
‘Come with me?’
‘I don’t think so.’ Being unofficial tour guide and stigmata expert was one thing. Tim could not sit through a service. ‘I’ll drive you there.’
‘Not if you’re not coming in.’
He walked her down the road and waited with her for the bus. They did not say much. You didn’t need to with Helen, which was a relief when you had nothing to say.
When he came back, the woman in the sun hat was still in the garden. Feeling bold, Tim walked under the stairs and went round behind the house, and said, ‘Lo.’
‘Hello.’ The woman tilted the hat and smiled up at him with large lips that had lipstick on the outer edge, with a line where it met the uncoloured part inside. The smile was wide and cheery.
‘Here – hold on.’ Tim took a step backwards. The woman was Jack.
‘Sit down, Tim. I’ll get you some coffee.’
Speechless, Tim shook his head.
‘Come on, sit down while I get it. It won’t take a moment.’
Once you knew it was Jack, you knew it was Jack, as it were. The first ‘Hello’ from under the hat had sounded merely like a woman with a deep voice. Once you knew, the voice was a dead give-away. But if you didn’t know, if you were not familiar with Jack’s smiling face, you could be taken in.
So if Brian … then they were … hang on a minute, what about Jack’s girl friend Janet Fox in Webster’s Accounts Department?
Having given Tim a short break to recover, Jack came back with a mug of coffee. He walked like a man, his muscular legs in white tights.
‘Thanks for not minding,’ Jack said, disregarding the obvious fact that Tim did mind. ‘I put in two sugars, that’s right, isn’t it? Come on, Tim, take a good look at me, it’s all right. You came out here just now believing I was a woman, didn’t you? That’s really great. And the few times you’ve seen me before, through the window, I passed, didn’t I?’
‘Yeah.’ Tim looked into his coffee, out over the small lawn to the vegetable garden, down at his hands, which had gone white at the fingertips. ‘I thought you were Brian’s girl friend.’
‘Hardly.’ Jack laughed.
‘I know. I mean, when I realized that he – well, it didn’t, sort of, match up.’
‘It wouldn’t.’ Jack crossed a leg high on his knee and rearranged his skirt. The biceps of his smooth brown arms – shaved? – looked a bit weird coming out of the sleeveless dress. Above the light scarf which covered his Adam’s apple, his throat was as sinewy as you would expect. ‘No, Brian and I are friends. I share this house with him because he doesn’t mind me cross-dressing. He understands.’
‘Understands what?’ Tim’s mind was seething with questions, none of which he was able to ask.
‘About me. Not many people do, Tim. That’s why I’m grateful to you for not being shocked.’
I am shocked.
‘How do you like the dress? Marks and Sparks. Very useful, they are, because the sizes don’t vary.’
Jack chatted on, quite casually and naturally, but Tim did not want to hear any more. He finished his coffee and put the mug down in a gesture of departing.
‘Just one thing.’ Under the golden wig which had been all right when Tim thought it was a woman’s hair, but now was grotesque, Jack looked a bit nervous. ‘This is between you and me. Nothing said at Webster’s.’
‘What about’ – Tim had to voice the bewilderment – ‘what about Janet Fox?’
‘She doesn’t know, although we’re close friends. She’s talked about us being married. Bit awkward really.’ Jack stretched his half-painted mouth in the shape of a grin, without life to it. ‘She’d have to get used to me wearing a nightie in bed.’
A nightie. That did it. Tim had been holding down all the objections of his Wallace Kendall heritage, but they came charging up and delivered the word: disgusting.
He got up, mumbled an excuse and escaped to his eyrie.
Disgusting.
Hang on a minute. What about him in bed with the pistol and the cammo?
‘You’ve got some of our stuff.’ Derek rang Tim that evening.
‘I’m sending it back. First post tomorrow.’
‘Why did we lose you?’
‘I had to go. I didn’t feel well.’
‘Come off it. I heard you ran like hell for the flag.’
‘Oh – well, I – yes. Thanks.’ Tim managed a short laugh. ‘Feverish. Thought I was coming down with something.’
‘You sound all right now.’
‘Oh. Yes. I’m all right today.’
Well, not as all right as I was before I had that talk with Jack. He’s kinky. I’m kinky. The whole world is kinky. ‘Five per cent of men in business suits have got women’s u
nderwear on underneath,’ Jack had said.
Come on. Do me a favour.
At work next morning, Tim got some brown paper and tape. He parcelled up the gun wrapped in the cammo overalls with some sadness and a sense of loss, as he saw them go off the post office scales and into the bin behind the counter.
Chapter Eleven
The relatively normal course of Tim’s affairs, which had climaxed with the capture of the flag single-handed and the ravishment of Helen, was only short-lived. Whether the shocking revelation about Jack set it off, or whether it was his biological clock, it was not long before Tim was into one of his far-out phases.
His two weeks’ holiday was coming up in September, and he had no idea what he was going to do with it. The Boathouse was closing. He could never do another Enterprise weekend, because of Norman. He could not go back to Warfare, because Derek had sounded stuffy about the overalls and pistol.
If he was a millionaire, he would go to Australia to see Zara, whose last postcard had sounded a bit low, and ended, ‘Wish you were here with me.’
His parents had been to the Isle of Wight. The damp had got into his father’s chest and they came home two days early. His mother pretended that they had come home because the stairs at the Shanklin Hotel were too much for her. Val and Colin went to the Canaries. Brian climbed a mountain in Scotland with Jack (in camiknickers?). Helen went to stay with her cousin in Hull while Julian was at the camp, also in the Isle of Wight, where he might have come face to face with Wallace Kendall, and spat on his shoe.
Pocket Pickups, chapter 13. ‘FOLLOW UP: You’re on your way. Follow it up with a bang (excuse pun). Don’t give her time to wonder whether to you it was just a one night stand.’
Helen rang up when she got back from Hull. She would have Julian with her now until the end of August. She told Tim that twice, as if to make sure that he got the message, ‘Sex is out’, not knowing that it was probably good news rather than bad, now that the cammo had gone back to Warfare.
‘How is Julian?’ Tim wanted to see him. He wanted to feel the strong skinny arms clutching at his neck as the child fought urgently to climb up him, wanted to see the side of the gold-dusted cheek above which the blue eye stared mysteriously beyond him.
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