Nick slipped on the wet grass, it hurt like hell but he was up again, and running as fast as he could to get out of sight into the trees, following Davey’s pale figure limping rapidly in and out of the bushes, slipping and slithering on the wet grass, falling, getting up, going down again. There was mud and water in his eyes; he couldn't see a thing, had no idea where he was.
Suddenly Davey was flung backwards onto the grass. He'd hit the fence in the dark and bounced back. Nick jumped up and clawed onto it. Davey thudded beside him, gripping the wire as well as they hauled themselves up. They paused at the top to look behind them and held their breaths to hear what was going on.
The world went suddenly still. Their pounding hearts were surrounded by the quiet of the night, but back at the house someone was banging. It was the prefects, Julian and Andrews and the others, still inside, banging at the doors. They lacked the heart to chase the lads out through the window and across the field of broken glass they’d left behind on the roof and were waiting for Toms to come with a key to let them out the easy way. For once, the locked doors were serving the boys.
The wind blew; it began to rain again. They were alone in the refuge of the desperate prisoner - foul weather.
They dropped down, already safe, and ran. Within a few yards, they could hear traffic. They were back in the world - the cold, dark, wet, rainy world. The only question was - whereabouts?
‘No idea, mate,’ said Davey.
A few minutes later, they were hiding behind a bush, looking out at a road. Every now and then a car went past. Opposite them was a row of houses, all in darkness apart from a couple of outside lights, illuminating the rain. Both of them had cut their feet on the glass on Toms’ roof and Nick had a nasty cut on his backside. It was still bleeding as he crouched in the bushes, and, despite the cold, it was beginning to hurt badly.
They were cold, soaked to the skin, with nothing on them against the wind and chilled rain except their thin charity pyjamas.
Which way to go?
Both of them were from north Manchester. This was south. Their hope was to slip away out of sight, creeping along the back streets and through the parks, till they found some way of working out where they were and how to get home. In the middle of the city. In the dark. Dressed in their pyjamas ...
It had seemed like a good idea at the time.
‘We can’t stay out in this, no way,’ said Davey. ‘We’re going to catch our deaths.’
They glanced at each other and hissed with laughter at the phrase. How often had they heard it before? It was always nonsense, but not anymore. Their body temperatures were steadily dropping. The cold was creeping into their core. Already they were moving slowly, like old men or worn-out insects. They had nothing waterproof, nothing warm, nothing dry.
Was it possible to die of exposure in the middle of Manchester? In summer?
‘Look at all those houses,’ groaned Davey. ‘All warm on the inside
‘And all freezing cold on the outside,’ chattered Nick, his teeth going like a snare drum. If they didn’t find a way out of the rain and into something warm, they could die like kittens left out in the rain.
They had a whispered conference. They might as well have been on a mountain in a blizzard as Manchester in the middle of July. Their feet were bleeding, Nick’s backside was bleeding - he couldn’t feel a thing again but that was only because he was so cold. They had no cover, no shelter, and they were getting colder and colder and colder. They’d been free less than an hour and they were desperate already.
The rain, which had slowed down for a while, started up again. The wind blew. They were literally turning blue.
‘We gotta break in somewhere,’ said Nick. ‘Nick some clothes or something. Anything!’
But which house? They were all asleep, but the boys knew how little it would take to wake them up.
They gave up and ran on, just for something to do. Then at last, they spotted a church. Just the thing - at least they’d get shelter there. They ran across the road towards it, through the tall wooden gate and up the path, to the high arched door - which was locked. They shook the lock and ran around trying to find a way in, but the place was totally secure against anyone who needed shelter. All they could do was take cover from the wind and the rain in the porch.
‘Thanks, God,’ growled Davey. He leaned against a wall, wrapped his arms around himself and shook his head like a dog in an effort to get some heat into his bones. He nodded at the graves lying in the grass in front of them. ‘They’re warm enough down there, eh?’ he said.
‘Yeah, well, if we don’t get warm soon, we’ll be finding out for ourselves. Come on.’ Nick pushed himself off the wall, but Davey held back.
‘Wait a bit, I need to rest,’ he moaned. ‘It’s out the wind anyway.’
‘This is no good. We have to get warm.’ Nick rubbed the back of his hand. It was going numb with cold.
He was getting scared.
They wandered out through the dripping graveyard and found themselves on a main road, although there was little traffic about at this time of night, in this weather. There was a row of shops - a fish and chip shop, a hairdresser, a newsagent, a Spar. They decided to try and break into one of them, and hid themselves in the shadow of the churchyard wall, while they cased the shops and tried to decide which one offered the best chance of getting in.
‘And which one has the best chance of some grub once we get in,’ said Davey.
At first, they thought maybe the chippy. They were so cold their brains weren’t working, and it took them a minute or so to realise that there wouldn’t be any fish and chips at this time of night.
‘Unless you want raw fish and potatoes,’ said Nick.
They were deciding between the Spar and a newsagent, when a taxi pulled up outside the shops. The light came on inside. A couple sitting in the back paid off the cab, jumped out into the rain, hauled some cases out of the back and dashed into a door among the shop fronts. A moment later, a light went on in one of the flats above the shops. Behind them, the driver just sat there, staring at the rain, doing nothing.
The boys were trapped. If they left the shadows under the wall, they’d be spotted.
‘What’s going on? Why doesn’t he go?’ demanded Davey. They couldn’t do anything while he was there. They hunkered back against the wall and waited for him to leave. As they watched, the rain began to beat down harder than ever, sheets of it blowing across the road, bouncing back off the ground in a fog of spray.
The driver had dropped off a fare back late from the airport, and now he was stuck for what to do. There weren’t going to be many fares wandering about at this time of night. It was two in the morning - Friday night, but not many were going to be out looking for a taxi in this rain. He was thinking about going home. He sat in the cab and pulled out his takings. Not a lot. He sighed. It was either back to the airport and sit in the queue with every other driver who had the same idea, or he might as well call it a day and go back home to bed.
He tapped the wheel and stared out into the rain. His wife would be disappointed with the little bit of money he’d made. So was he. He put the radio on and leaned back in his seat. Maybe the rain would stop. He’d wait for the downpour to lessen at least, and see what he felt like then.
Across the road, Nick and Davey squatted down in dead leaves under the privet hedge and argued it out.
‘We could ask him to take us to my mum’s,’ Davey was saying. ‘She’ll pay at the other end. She can’t say no, can she?’
‘He’ll say no.’
‘We can ask.’
‘He’ll report us, they’ll know where we are.’
‘They know we’re around here anyway. We can leg it if he says no.’
Nick looked across at the taxi. It wasn’t a very good idea, he knew that. But what else could they do? The taxi driver didn’t look as if he was going anywhere in a hurry. If they ran he’d see them anyway. It looked warm in there - nice bright light. The drive
r was just sitting there. It was so tempting.
He was so cold his teeth had even stopped chattering. They had to do something.
‘Go on, then,’ he said.
Davey stood up and led the way onto the road.
The taxi driver saw something out of the corner of his eye, looked up and squeaked in surprise and fright. A pale figure was floating across the road towards him in the pouring rain - literally floating, its feet a few inches off the ground. And - oh my God - it was coming straight out of the churchyard! A ghost? An angel from the Lord? What was it? Another one appeared out of the bushes behind the first one. They were both bearing down on him...
Mary Mother of Jesus. Oh. My. God.
He crossed himself - something he hadn’t done in the fifteen years since he left school - and fumbled at the ignition. He was on the verge of driving off, when he
realised that they weren’t apparitions at all; they were boys in their pyjamas. Bloody hell! That was almost as bad. Boys, dressed in their pyjamas, floating across the road in the middle of the downpour? He peered down at their feet suspiciously. The rain was spattering off the road so hard, it bounced back up and formed a dense mist. In the dim lamplight, with their pale, drenched faces and hair, and their pale drenched clothes, they really did look like a pair of ghosts.
Suddenly, he laughed.
‘Bugger me!’
They were wetter than anyone in pyjamas he’d ever seen. Drenched. They were turning blue with cold, just like corpses. One of them, the smaller one, made it to the car, leaned down and peered hopefully in through the window. He looked like a drowned rat. No, decided the driver - not a rat. A pig. He was an ugly little beast.
He wound down the window.
A moment later the two boys were squeezing in the back. The driver had put down some magazines to try to keep his seats dry, and clean - he’d noticed the blood down Nick’s backside, not to mention the bits of stick, dead leaves, mud and other debris stuck to their feet and pyjama bottoms from running about in this lot. The world outside was made of mud, and these two seemed to have most of it sticking to them.
‘I was on me way back anyhow, I might as well. You’re on the run, I can see that. Don’t blame yer, don’t blame yer - me brother was in one of them places, he’d have done a runner if he could, but he had a twisted foot, he was lame, see, couldn’t get away. His mates did, some of ’em. All ended up back inside, though.’
‘Th-th-thanks,’ stuttered Nick. The driver had turned up the heater, and waves of warm air were rushing past them. Now that they were reheating they were starting to shiver again.
The driver laughed at his chattering teeth. ‘Thought you were a pair of bloody angels come to tell me to change my ways. Christ, that’s a relief. Mind you, you’d have been ghosts before long if you hadn’t met me, eh? What a night to do a runner! Here - keep those seats clean, all right? My customers don’t pay for a dirty arse. So - your mum’ll pay, you reckon? Well, why not. Not that she’ll be pleased to see you, eh? You have to be a right pair of scoundrels or you wouldn’t be in there in the first place, would you? But she’ll see yer, anyway. Family, innit? Right then - where to? Hello - what’s this?’
A car had pulled up alongside. Someone got out, turned up their collar against the rain and ran through the puddles over to the waiting taxi.
Nick and Davey peered anxiously through the window, but in the dark, through the wet glass and the rain, they couldn’t make out who it was.
The figure tapped on the window. The driver opened it and a brown face with a combed red beard peered inside.
Their hearts sank.
‘Oh dear. Caught red-handed,’ said the man. He looked at the taxi driver. ‘I’m afraid you’ve got a pair of runners here, driver.’
‘Well I never,’ said the driver. He looked over his shoulder, pulled a face at Nick and Davey and shrugged.
It was Alex Jones, the local scoutmaster. He ran a group at Meadow Hill once a week. Nick and Davey weren’t in it - they weren’t well behaved enough. Mr Jones wouldn’t have known the two boys by sight, but he recognised the pyjamas.
It was the most ridiculous bad luck for Nick and Davey. Jones had been driving back late after visiting his father in Sheffield; filthy weather over the Snake Pass, he got held up for hours by an overturned truck. He was only a mile or so from home when he saw the two boys getting into the taxi dressed in their pyjamas.
Alex was a decent enough man. He knew Meadow Hill fell short, although he had no idea just how short. If he had, he would have been helping them rather than catching them. As it was, he had only one option - to take them straight back.
The captured boys stared at him as if he was some kind of beast smiling at them through the window, but they made no attempt to get away. They were freezing cold -when he touched one of them on the shoulder it was scary how cold they were. They could catch pneumonia like that. They were both bleeding, as well. They looked like escapees from Broadmoor, rather than a pair of kids trying to get out of the local Children’s Home.
‘Look at the state of you!’ He nodded his head at his car, parked up just across the road. ‘Come one, boys, I’ll take you back. Not really the night for an escape bid, is it?’ He smiled at them as kindly as he could, opened the door and waited for them to get out.
He felt even more sorry for them when he got them back. They’d had to break a window to get out and Gerald Toms didn’t seem at all happy to be knocked up out of bed to get them sorted. No doubt they’d get the flogging of their lives for it. Well, maybe they deserved it, but it was hard to see them dripping and shivering, blue with cold, bleeding, in the grip of Mr Toms, who, as Alex well knew, had all the compassion of a pair of tweezers.
‘Don’t be too hard on them,’ he said. ‘They’ve been through enough already by the looks of them. They need a hot bath before anything else, or they’ll catch their deaths.'
‘Oh, they’ll get a bath all right,’ replied Mr Toms. He stood with his hands placed protectively on their shoulders as he watched Mr Jones get into his car and drive off. He squeezed until they both winced.
‘You little bastards,’ he murmured, as he turned them round and led them into the house. ‘You’re going to suffer for this,’ he added.
‘We’d already worked that one out,’ said Nick, and he was felled with a blow to the ear.
Mr Toms was a man of limited intelligence and imagination - in fact, he was a man of limited pretty well everything, except an abundance of cruelty. He’d never have thought of such a clever idea on his own if Mr Jones hadn’t put it into his head for him, nor would he have carried it out at that time of night himself - he had a warm bed with a warm wife in it waiting for him just metres away. He gave the orders to Andrews and Julian to carry it out. And he was confident they would carry it out in the spirit in which he intended it, too, since it was going to keep them from their beds half the night themselves. They were already in trouble for letting these two get away. You could bet they weren’t going to be soft on them for that.
Mr Toms did as Alex Jones had suggested - gave the boys a bath. He stayed long enough to supervise the running water, watched them strip and get in. He went to bed feeling very pleased with himself. Funny! Clever, too! So clever and so funny, it gave him a warm glow as he snuggled up to his large, soft, warm wife, and chuckled to himself as he dozed off.
To say that Nick and Davey were cold would be an understatement. The cold had gone through their skin, into the muscle and through to their livers, their stomachs, their hearts and their bones. When Mr Toms ran the baths, they were both amazed, and so overwhelmed with gratitude that they’d thanked him pitifully. It only slowly dawned on them what he was doing when Andrews had tried to turn on the other tap.
‘Turn it off,’ ordered Toms. That was the hot tap. They were getting a bath all right - but it was freezing cold.
Mr Toms stood and watched them get in before he left.
‘You’re very welcome, boys,’ he said, as the water cl
osed around them like the cold hand of death. They both immediately began shivering violently. Toms went off to bed leaving Andrews and Julian sitting on the edge of the baths watching them turn first red, then blue, then pale blue, then white.
‘It’s like watching sunrise over the Arctic,’ said Julian. At one point Davey tried to get out, flapping slowly like a dying fish with no strength at all in him, but they just pushed his head under till he gave up. They left them in there for fifteen minutes, and when the time came to get them out, they had to help them stand up.
Once they were out, the two prefects amused themselves by flicking wet towels at their bare bodies. The boys tried to twist and turn to get out of the way, but they were too cold to move properly and soon they were covered in bright red marks. At least they didn’t hurt so bad, their skins were so chilled. They were refused pyjamas, but thrown towels, and then sent off to bed before they were properly dry and had to curl up naked under the thin covers, still half wet.
They lay there for ages, huddling the blankets around them, trying to get warm. Very, very slowly the heat seeped back into their icy flesh and chilled bones. Gradually the violent shivers that wracked them died away.
Nick felt a sneeze coming on. Only to be expected really. He sneezed three times, like a cat, and fell asleep.
When he awoke again it was still dark, and he was still cold. He looked around in alarm - what was going on?
It was Andrews prodding him awake.
‘Up you get,’ he growled.
‘What?’
‘Up.’
Across the dorm, Julian was hauling Davey out of bed, too.
‘What’s up?’
‘You are. Get up, go on, hurry.’
Nick crawled miserably out of bed, stiff and exhausted. The prefects marched them down the corridor back to the bathroom, where the baths stood full of water. Davey looked at Julian, appalled.
Nicholas Dane Page 15