He knew what a cottage ought to be: a place where one’s parents retired, somewhere one could retreat from the grime and the clamour. He’d never known what had happened to the cottage after his grandparents had died. He remembered his grandfather, an old tree of a man, strong and quiet and gnarled.
Someone thumped on the window; the glass boomed. Nothing separated the window from the public walk except an unfenced patch of grass. His heart leapt unsteadily before he did. When he dragged the curtains apart, a gang of boys was running away. None of the boys round here was up to any good – nor the girls either. He glanced at the top of the chest of drawers. Just let them take care. He wasn’t defenceless now.
He’d lost the thread of his memories. He would have liked to recall the cottage. He wished he had some photographs of Wales. Still, perhaps it was just as well that he couldn’t see the cottage – no doubt it was overcrowded with young layabouts now, taking drugs and living off the country, as they called it. They lived off the country, right enough, but not in the way they meant the phrase.
He returned the papers to their drawer. Reading further would depress him too profoundly now. He stared through the window. He might as well have stared at the pane itself: out there were small marshes of muddy grass, separated by paths and hemmed in by anonymous walls, but none of that was visible – most of the lamps had been smashed. In the upstairs flat, a record throbbed as though savages were invading.
By the time he had washed himself, scrubbing his face until it blushed, the drums had stopped. The silence didn’t enlarge his rooms, which seemed scarcely larger than interview cubicles, and as featureless. He’d left the walls plain white, thinking they would look clean. Often they made him feel trapped in nothingness.
When the water ceased jerking out of the tap, he heard mumbling somewhere in his flat. Had he left the radio on? No, the receiver was silent – and besides, surely the voice was too monotonous for the radio. It was beyond the bathroom wall. Was it speaking to him – trying to hypnotise him?
Eventually he realised that it was the sound of water in the pipes. It still didn’t sound any less like a voice. Even when he closed his bedroom door he could hear the mumbling, as though an idiot were talking in his sleep.
Over the years he’d learned the source of every sound in his old home. The sounds had been familiar and comforting. He still didn’t know where half the sounds here came from. It would take a damn sight more than that to scare him. As soon as he’d slipped the razor beneath his pillow he felt less vulnerable.
He lay in the dark, which robbed him of all sense of the size of his bedroom. He wished he could afford a new clock; the dark allowed the ticking to grow louder, louder. The sound was a four-beat rocking, too quick and harsh to be a lullaby. Roy Craig, kill-er. Roy Craig, kill-er. Couldn’t it stop, just for a moment? Couldn’t it at least slow down? Wouldn’t it give him even a second of silence during which he might fall asleep?
He had no idea when it stopped: perhaps hours later. He was in the alley, among the stuffed dustbins. The girls surrounded him. As he backed against the wall, the rough stone plucked at his clothes. The bricks were hard and harsh; they felt like his fever dream, when his brain had seemed composed of chunks of rubble that ground together.
“ Make it stand up,” the girls were saying. The icy wall pressed against him. He was shivering; they must think he was afraid – and he was, for once his father had beaten him for handling himself. His body shook and throbbed, at the mercy of his panic. He stood helpless as he was seized by a painful orgasm.
He woke terrified, and pressed himself against the wall through the blankets, recoiling from the stain in the bed. For the love of God, why had that happened? It hadn’t happened in the alley; he had been far too scared to achieve an erection. “Don’t you be going with those girls,” his father had used to say ominously, and Horridge hadn’t wanted to; they had tricked and trapped him. Beyond the alley walls, frost had grown like lichen on the roofs of the outside toilets. “He can’t make it stand up. He must be queer,” the girls had said, and he’d listened appalled while they explained what that meant.
He felt as though he had been possessed in his sleep. He couldn’t be blamed for that – but his bed felt invaded. Only once in his life had he masturbated, alone in his old home after his parents had died, his willpower enfeebled by dozing. The experience had been wholly unpleasant, pumping away as though to make a reluctant toilet work, to achieve the sudden uncontrollable flushing. How could people waste their time wallowing in sex? It wasn’t as though it took much self-control to refrain. After all, one seldom had erections, and then only while asleep.
He was growing calmer, the side of the bed on which he’d taken refuge was beginning to feel safe, sleep was slowing down his thoughts – when, amid the ticking of the clock, he heard another sound.
Though his head was loud with blood, he raised it gently from the pillow. His hand slid directly and silently to grasp the handle of the razor. He managed to hold his body still as he listened.
There was no sound. Nor could he recall exactly what he had heard before. Perhaps it hadn’t been a sound that he had sensed – but something had warned him that an intruder was creeping about nearby. Perhaps that had made him dream that he was helpless.
But he was not, even if Craig had come to silence him. He inched himself free of the blankets. Though his heel touched the stain, chill and slimy in the dark, he succeeded in setting his feet down noiselessly on the carpet. As he stood up, he felt for the blade. It emerged from the handle with a slight click.
He paced stealthily to the door. His fingerprints roamed its cold surface, and found the colder handle, which he turned minutely. It would be just like this place to betray him with an unexpected creak – but the door edged wide silently. He reached into the darkness, holding the blade in his other hand before his face, and twitched the light on.
The light surprised only the empty room. There was nowhere an intruder could hide; his furniture was sparse. He switched off the light at once. He wasn’t satisfied. Somebody was up to no good nearby. He groped his way among the furniture, and peered between the curtains.
Outside, on the walk which passed his apology for a yard, was a light where no light should be. It was feeling its way along the fence on the opposite side of the walk. The figure that carried the torch was patting an object on the fence: a notice, where none had been when Horridge had come home.
What the devil was the fellow doing? What did the notice say? Surely it couldn’t be Craig, not unless he had some mad plan to scare Horridge. But Horridge meant to find out what the man was up to. He felt his way back to the bedroom, and groped into his overcoat and shoes.
He eased open the outer door. His L-shaped flat walled off two sides of his meagre yard: hardly even a yard, more a stray patch of concrete onto which the door opened. Over his door, stone steps led from the yard to the upstairs flat. He couldn’t be brought any lower in the world than living below stairs.
Now, for once, he welcomed the stairs. They concealed him while he peered out. In his pocket he held the razor ajar and ready. He was nervously eager for action.
At first he could see nothing. All around him, concrete made the night massive and claustrophobic. Then he glimpsed a flickering. A passage led the walk past his outer wall and beneath the bridging upper floor. The torchlight was in that passage.
He limped rapidly yet stealthily to the end of his wall. The man was sticking a notice to the wall of the passage. Horridge gripped the handle in his pocket. “What are you doing?” he said loudly.
The man whirled; his hand dragged the notice awry. The torch-beam poked at Horridge’s face, dazzling him. Then the man relaxed, or decided not to be intimidated. “You aren’t blind, are you?” he demanded and gestured at the notice with the light.
Above a caricature of a Negro family, the notice said SAY NO TO A BLACK BRITAIN! As Horridge squinted at him, the man’s face emerged from the dazzle: eyes swollen out of pro
portion by thick spectacles, a withdrawn chin. He’d seen this man sometimes, reading the newspapers in Cantril Farm Library.
The man must have observed his approval of the notice, for he said “Don’t you think we should get rid of all these foreigners?”
Horridge nodded curtly. It wasn’t the man’s place to interrogate him. But the man continued “Don’t you think we ought to do something about all these layabouts sponging on the welfare state?”
Horridge didn’t quite trust him. It was like brainwashing, this rapid stream of questions that demanded only agreement. They didn’t sound like the man’s own questions; Horridge suspected he’d learned them by rote. He couldn’t think for himself.
A cold breeze made the cuffs of Horridge’s pyjama trousers shiver. All this was getting him nowhere. Why couldn’t the fellow stand up and say what he knew was right, instead of skulking about under cover of darkness? Before the man could interrogate him further, Horridge demanded “And what about homosexuals?”
The man’s enormous eyes fluttered in their glass bowls, like startled fish. “I don’t like them,” he said.
Horridge pointed at the notice. “How is that sort of thing going to get rid of them?”
“ Have you got a better way?”
Horridge had trapped himself. Though the man’s triumphant stare enraged him, he couldn’t reply. The man said “Shall I take your name and address for some of our literature?”
“ No, thank you. I’m quite capable of thinking for myself.”
He stared until the man moved away. The torch-beam wavered on mud spiky with grass; it grew vague, and vanished. No, Horridge didn’t want their pamphlets drawing attention to him – not while he had to decide what to do about Craig.
He locked himself into his flat. He knew of the movement which printed the notices. He might have joined that movement, if he had believed in belonging to groups – although he didn’t care for the way they marched through areas where immigrants lived, to insult them: that was behaving like militant students. Militant! That meant to be like a soldier, but soldiers were on the side of law and order – not at all like students. Still, you couldn’t blame the movement for marching: they wouldn’t need to if people stayed in their own countries and behaved themselves instead of indulging in filthy practices in public lavatories.
There wouldn’t have been a Hitler if there had been fewer Jews in Germany. The movement ought to get itself into the government, as he had.
He lay in bed, imagining the man with his light and his notices groping through the concrete maze. What could he hope to achieve by such furtiveness? Yet Horridge felt a little guilty. At least the man was trying to do something positive.
***
Chapter VII
When he woke, Horridge knew what he ought to do.
As he washed, he stared at himself in the mirror. He simply didn’t look capable of carrying out such a plan. Sometimes when he looked in the mirror, he felt as though he couldn’t recognise himself. Except for his slightly protruding ears, he would pass himself by unrecognised in a crowd. He flapped deodorant away from his face, afraid of inhaling the chemical.
He must buy milk. The bottle in the bucket of cold water beneath the sink was empty. He walked towards the shops near the bus terminus. Everywhere were fences, head-height, ankle-height, as though nobody knew how to behave unless they were made to. Maybe the fences had been put up for vandals to scribble on with paint; the world was mad enough. Amid one tangle of graffiti he read KILLER.
Like his flat, the shopping street was L-shaped. Hardly a path in Cantril Farm ran visibly straight for more than a few yards; the walks sank into concrete valleys, or plunged straight through the hearts of tenements. The whole place reminded him of the mazes with which scientists tormented rats.
Above the shops three tiers of flats were stacked, a layer cake of concrete. Over the heavy metal mesh that protected the windows of the Trustee Savings Bank, iron bars were set – not so trusting, he thought wryly. A child was parked in the doorway of a betting shop, beside a sign LEADERS IN LEISURE. Puddles gathered litter in depressions in the concrete walk.
The walk was loud with shoppers. Let them babble if it did them any good. They’d rather chatter like monkeys than do anything constructive. But could he do more?
Yes, by God. He wouldn’t be dragged down by Cantril Farm. He’d proved that he could act so long as he didn’t hesitate. He felt dwindled by the tenements, but that wouldn’t sap him.
Dull music trickled through the supermarket. Let it mumble – it wouldn’t lull him. He bought a tin of corned beef to replace the one he’d used up for his Christmas dinner. You couldn’t trust many foods now, not with all this experimenting with chemicals, all these amino acids he’d heard they put in foods. God only knew what foreign foods contained.
He hurried towards his flat. KILLER. There it was again, in a different place. No doubt they thought it clever to write such things. Television had a lot to answer for. But at the same time the word seemed addressed to him, urging him to act.
He drowned the bottle of milk in the bucket, and went out. For once he didn’t fear losing his way; most of the walks led eventually to bus stops. Cantril Farm was constructed to herd people in the directions the planners wanted them to follow.
He waited opposite a post-box inscribed savagely as a totem pole. Above the tower blocks, the sky was featureless as whitewash. Nearby was a phone box – but he mustn’t use one so close to home; they might trace him. Craig and the police didn’t yet know where he lived; otherwise, why had they done nothing since trying to scare him outside Craig’s house?
The bus was stuffed with a Saturday crowd. Among shopping bags on their parents’ laps, children struggled like reluctant purchases. He had to stand; he refused to go upstairs into the stale smoke. Whenever the bus turned a corner, it threw his weight on his bad leg. Whenever the bus lurched, the low ceiling thumped his skull.
Please let the bus move faster, before he lost his nerve. But the driver was herding on more passengers, shouting “Move further down the bus.” The advancing crowd forced Horridge back. He had to sway when they did; he felt suffocated by bodies and the wails of children. Let the bus dawdle as long as it liked. By God, they wouldn’t weaken him.
The bus turned out of Lime Street and rushed down the curve to the shoppers’ stop. Those who had been seated joined the crowd in the aisle, hindering him. He was the tail end of the shuffling queue – just one of the crowd.
No, he was not, by God. He pushed his way out of the throng, ignoring the mutters of a knot of gossips. Beyond the boxed-in walkways that lowered over Williamson Square, two telephone boxes guarded each other’s backs. In the square, people bought fruit from a barrow, set balloons adrift to draw attention to the plight of someone or other, sang folk songs beside a hat scattered with coins. He headed for the unoccupied box.
But a woman was bearing down on it, driving a poodle before her like a tartan shopping basket. He mustn’t be made to wait, to falter! He ran lopsidedly, and grabbed the door. He met her glare, though his heart laboured irregularly, until she stalked off in search of another phone.
Suppose there were no directory? Mightn’t that mean that his purpose was mistaken? But the directory was on its shelf. He flicked the pages. No, their fluttering couldn’t infect him. Craig. Craig, R. There were several – but only one at the address in Aigburth Drive.
He drew himself up straight, and dialled. Police cameras were posted all over the city centre, spying. They had no reason to watch him, they wouldn’t even notice him among the crowds. They certainly wouldn’t be able to see what he was dialling. Could their vision be so sharp? He wished people wouldn’t keep passing so near him.
As soon as he’d finished dialling, Craig’s phone rang. Then – far too quickly, as if to take him off guard – the pay tone began.
Instinct convulsed his hand, which thrust in the coin. The shrill chattering was interrupted momentarily, then went on. Perhaps he’d been
too hasty, and had wasted the coin. The tone stopped; the earpiece filled with silence. Was anyone there? Was somebody listening to him, stealthy as a hunter?
In a moment he heard the breathing. It was slow and heavy, but he knew it was only pretending to doze: no trapped beast could be more alert. Deep in it was a faint asthmatic wheeze. It seemed too wary to speak. Only after what felt like minutes, during which the breathing pressed close to Horridge’s ear, did the voice say “Yes?”
When speaking to the policemen, it had been deeper. Horridge bit his lip gleefully: Craig must be growing nervous. He oughtn’t to speak. Craig knew that somebody was listening to him; silence would be more disturbing.
He was rationalising his hesitation. He had found he couldn’t speak; disgust had gagged him. Craig’s breathing must have pressed as close to the young men as he had – Horridge stared out of the box, at people feeding pigeons from the benches in the square, at a little girl chasing an apple that had rolled from the barrow. He was desperate for reassurance.
The plastic clung to him; Craig breathed in his ear. “Craig speaking,” the voice said a little higher, a little less sure of itself.
Horridge’s lips twitched. His tongue forced them apart. He was preparing to say “Had any good boys lately?” when Craig put down the phone.
He grimaced at the dead receiver, then he hurried out into the crowd. The side streets leading from the square were crowded as conveyor belts. He wandered, gazing at lifeless clothes in windows, enjoying the memory of Craig’s unsureness. But he was growing frustrated. He hadn’t done enough.
He must phone again, and speak. He couldn’t do so here; Craig might have called his friends in the police, they might be searching for him. He sensed the presence of the cameras, perched somewhere overhead like hidden vultures. He needed to call from a place where he couldn’t be watched, and with which he had no connection.
The Face That Must Die Page 6