Spend Game

by Jonathan Gash

‘Your Norman mints are cheaper an London,’ I was saying cheerfully, hoping to nark Chris.

  ‘Lovejoy. I’ve a message.’ Helen.

  ‘Mine are finer,’ Chris shot back, successfully narked, to my delight.

  ‘Lovejoy.’ Helen pulled me away an inch. ‘I said I’ve a message for you.’

  I let Chris off the hook a second, still smiling. ‘Who from, love?’ Helen put her lovely mouth against my ear to whisper. ‘From Leckie,’ she said.

  ‘Who?’ My face tightened. I felt my scalp prickle and could swear the room turned full circle.

  ‘I tried to give it to you last night.’

  Cain Cooper saw us talking and deliberately barged us apart, his idea of fun. He’s a big puppy, all action and no sense.

  ‘Stop that, you two,’ he yelled. General laughter, with people looking our way and nudging and grinning. ‘Lovejoy’s at it again, folks.’

  I managed a grin, with some effort. I was damned near fainting.

  ‘Don’t mind Cain,’ I told Helen loudly. ‘It’s time for his tablet.’ More laughs as I pulled Helen aside. Nobody more casual than Lovejoy, as Cain returned to his collection of paintings – some even genuine – and we drifted over to see Alfred Duggins, commercial as ever under his bowler.

  ‘I’ve some good prints, Lovejoy.’

  ‘Lend me one, then, Alf.’ Keeping up the wisecracks was giving me a headache. The room seemed suddenly unbearable, stifling. A message from Leckie, when Leckie’s dead?

  ‘Let’s get out of here, Helen.’

  ‘I tried to phone you all evening.’

  ‘I’d gone to earth.’

  Jill bore down on us with her poodle outstretched like a figurehead. It licked me while she tried to interest me in some loose portabilia.

  ‘See you in the bar in ten minutes,’ I lied, shamming interest in the set of household gadgetry. Women used to carry them around the house in a small handbag.

  ‘Lovejoy, you’re an angel,’ she carolled. ‘Take good care of him, Helen. Come along, Charles.’

  Charles looked knackered. He’s one of the vannies. He trailed her back into ihe smoky oblivion while Helen and I slipped out. Jean Plunkett was still being propositioned by Big Frank from Suffolk in the foyer. We passed them just as Black Fergus arrived, complete with the luscious bird, with a thin cadaverous bloke in tow, incongruous in a bright check suit. I’d seen him before somewhere. Helen and I got out of their way by stepping aside to examine the books. They always set up a bookstall in the downstairs lobby, new collectors’ publications and suchlike. Fergus passed us like a carnival and added to the hullabaloo inside. The blonde woman now had an elderly Wedgwood cameo, her scarab earrings presumably back in the family vault. Her eyes had flicked at me, again with that same startled air, before she gave Helen a cool once-over, the typical critical hatred of any two women passing each other. Women don’t like other women. Ever noticed that? When we got outside Helen still had her lips thinned out, recovering from having given the blonde tit for tat.

  We crossed the road, dicing with death among the traffic. I bought two ice creams at the entrance to Castle Park, Helen laughing and shaking her head. ‘You’re like a big kid.’

  ‘Here.’ I collared a spot on the low wall near the rose garden. People were milling here and there.

  ‘This is hardly my scene, Lovejoy.’ She examined the wall distastefully. I can’t see what’s wrong with sitting on a wall.

  ‘Don’t muck about, love.’ Women get me down when they go all frosty. ‘The message.’

  ‘Couldn’t we go into the Volunteer?’ There was a bonny breeze blowing, which always makes a woman think of firesides.

  ‘The message.’

  She sighed, nodding and perching reluctantly on the wall beside me.

  ‘He gave it me just as I left the sally.’ Dealers’ slang for auction.

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘“Give it Lovejoy,” he told me. “Nobody else, Helen.” It’s written down.’ She rummaged in her handbag while I held both ice creams. ‘Here.’

  An envelope, and the words In case written on in pencil. I felt sick because I’d seen the words before and in the same handwriting.

  ‘Was he okay?’

  ‘A bit preoccupied.’ She put her hand on my arm. ‘I’m sorry. You look so shocked. But I did try to get you all last night, and I told Tinker –’

  ‘It’s all right.’ I remembered now. Tinker had said Helen wanted a word with me in the White Hart. But that was before they’d known Leckie was dead.

  ‘Aren’t you going to read it?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  I made Helen describe what happened at Medham. She’d been among the last to leave Virgil’s auction warehouse, hoping to do a cash-adjusted swap with Cain Cooper. He’d got a Pembroke table and she had a Regency snuffbox. It came to nothing. Cain roared off in his Aston-Martin while Helen settled up for the two little Georgian watercolours she’d bid for. Leckie had come over and given her the letter.

  ‘Did you see Leckie leave?’

  ‘No. He just stopped to have a word with the whizzers.’ They are the lumber men who set out the items for auction.

  ‘Here. You Lovejoy?’ This lad was leaning on the wall, his eyes all over Helen’s legs. He wore the clobber of the modern trainee psychopath – studded leather, wedge-heeled boots and a faint sneer between pimples.

  I gave him the bent eye. ‘Yes.’

  ‘What a crummy name.’ He snickered. Two of his mates snickered behind him. I looked them all up and down.

  ‘Your gear’s out of date, lads.’ I watched the consternation show for a second before he turned sulky and cut his losses.

  ‘Clever, clever. Val says call.’ They melted among the people going into the Park gates. Helen gazed at me.

  ‘Word is, Val banished Lovejoy from her cran,’ she murmured. Despite my worries I couldn’t take my eyes off her tongue as it took the ice cream in lick by lick.

  ‘Word’s right.’ So now what makes Val change her mind, I wondered.

  ‘I’m dying to know what’s going on, Lovejoy.’

  ‘Me too, love.’ I gave her a peck on the cheek and dropped down. She moaned away about gallantry, reminding me to come back and lift her down. I wasted more time waiting while she brushed imaginary contamination from her skirt, though Helen even looks good doing that.

  ‘Here, love,’ I said. ‘Got any change? I could ring Val now.’ There’s a phone booth near the path to the High Street. She lent me some and I rushed off. I find borrowing’s cheaper.

  ‘Val? It’s Lovejoy.’ A pause at the other end. ‘This lad –’

  ‘I sent him.’ She sounded world-weary. ‘Young Henry from next door. He’s a good boy. Going through one of these phases.’

  ‘What is it, love?’

  ‘Oh.’ She summoned nerve and rushed the words out. ‘Leckie’s cousin Moll phoned. She’s got a cupboard. Leckie dropped it off last night.’

  Now Val can’t tell an escritoire from a circus tent. They are all cupboards to her. I got her to tell me Moll’s address. We then rang off, full of hesitations and politeness. It was Val’s way of making up. I find that conversations with women are crammed full of significant pauses. It’s a hell of a strain sometimes. I was shivering despite the watery sunshine, and the envelope in my pocket weighed a ton.

  I sat in Woody’s nosh bar, remembering.

  The letter was brief, a few words on a crumpled invoice, the sort of paper that accumulates in pockets in spite of good intentions to clear it out. Leckie’s hand had scrawled on it hastily:

  Lovejoy, Take care. The side walls are even worse this time, older but of course they couldn’t be as deep. No running, though. Keep faith, Leckie.

  I struggled not to understand, but I knew right enough what he was referring to. I sat staring sightlessly over my tea out at the crowded pavements. The whole lot vanished. I was in a hot, sweaty, hilly land and frightened out of my skin.

  Leckie had been an explosi
ves man in the army. Though I was a gunner – so they told me – I was put on a job with him and four other soldiers.

  A railway ran perilously high across this plateau, over two gorges, on spindly trellis bridges made of bamboo. Even to think of it now gives me heartburn. We climbed on to the ridge among the vegetation. It had taken us four days to reach. From there we could see the first gorge and the rickety bridge swooping into the tunnel opposite. We saw a hoop of distant light in the blackness where the railway emerged from the hill on the far side. I’d never been so scared in all my life, but Leckie just gave one glance at the scene and stood up, not even using his field-glasses. ‘Should be all right, chaps,’ he said, and strolled down.

  That was Leckie all over. With my scalp prickling I stumbled after him. The corporal carrying the radio transmitter was immediately behind, the three yokels to the rear making more bloody racket than a football match. At least I was always quiet in the jungle, more from terror than training. I never did find out how Leckie’s sixth sense worked. Other times he’d give the same quick glance, then signal for us to lay low. I’d never even see the sniper till our riflemen got going. This time he was right again, of course. He strolled across the creaking bridge into the tunnel, while I tried not to look down at the river gorge a trillion miles below.

  ‘We blow the tunnel, chaps,’ Leckie informed us as if announcing a rather dull menu. We hadn’t known till then.

  This we tried to do, only the side walls had some concealed internal buttresses made of concrete. We only saw them after our first small explosive charge revealed them among the settling dust. It was a clear mistake, probably unavoidable, but Leckie felt bad about it, especially as he knew we were all petrified. The echoes were still reverberating round the chasm, and the bridge behind us was creaking like an old floorboard.

  ‘Sorry about that, chaps.’ Leckie was casual as ever, always casual. ‘It needs a second go.’

  We looked at each other. Leckie was amused.

  ‘My turn,’ he said apologetically. ‘Sorry, but I insist.’

  It should have been me, but I could hardly stand upright from fright. I’d have run like hell except they’d have shot me for desertion.

  That’s when the tunnel began its noises. Our first explosion must have weakened the mountain’s innards. Have you ever been under a mountain, especially one that has half a mind to crumple? It complains, whines, groans, even hums and hisses, full of noises. I’d heard one old geezer from our street talk about it when I was a kid. He’d got out of the Pretoria pit disaster as a young miner. Luckily his dad, also a miner, had told him how to listen to the rock on his first day and he’d made it back to the surface. ‘The sound of the rock’s breathing changed,’ this geezer explained to me years later. I’d always thought him daft. Until our first explosion the tunnel had seemed empty, quiet. Now it crackled and twanged as the mountain above shifted uneasily. The lads began to back off, but Leckie only struck a match to light a cigarette. His sudden action made me jump a mile.

  ‘Er, isn’t it going to cave in, er, anyway?’ I croaked, my voice an octave higher than normal.

  ‘Possibly.’ Leckie smiled. ‘But possibly is also possibly not.’

  We got his point. If the tunnel didn’t crumple, a few of their side’s diehards could clear the debris and shore it up in a few hours. Risky, but simple.

  ‘What about blowing the bridge instead?’ I suggested helpfully. Leckie laughed and wagged a finger.

  ‘That’s a different game, Lovejoy.’ He was telling me our orders were the tunnel, so the tunnel it had to be.

  He sent two of the lads, both riflemen, back to the ridge to hold it for us. The corporal was to wait just below them and to radio independently as soon as the tunnel blew. The spare rifleman was to stay on the safe end of the bridge, watching with Leckie’s glasses, to report back should things go awry. I helped Leckie. He wouldn’t let me come into the tunnel while he laid the charge up.

  ‘Some other time, perhaps,’ he joked, smiling. I’d tried to smile confidently back, but my teeth chattered and he finally had to untangle the wires for me. Thank Christ the other lads hadn’t seen my hands shake.

  By now the mountain was making incessant noises. It sounded like a distant orchestra tuning up. Cymbals crashed and instruments ravaged scales. Once the rock actually screamed, a real living scream which chilled my spine. Even Leckie looked down the tunnel as that terrible scream echoed and echoed. ‘My word,’ he murmured. ‘Do you think it knows what we’re up to?’ I was pouring sweat. My fingers were too slippery to be any use. Leckie did it all, occasionally sussing out the surrounding hillsides with a rapid glance. As I scooped the instruments into my pack I dropped the pliers. They hurtled into the void below. For the life of me I couldn’t take my horrified eyes off them – until Leckie pulled my arm and jerked me back.

  ‘Off you go, Lovejoy,’ he said amicably, as if nothing had happened. ‘All set. Oh’. He pulled out a sealed envelope. ‘Could you hold this for me?’

  I stuffed it into my battledress.

  ‘Er, am I not supposed to stay?’ It took three swallows to get the words out. It’s the hardest sentence I’ve ever said in my life.

  ‘Not just now, Lovejoy.’ He nodded towards the far side of the bridge. ‘Scoot over there. We might need a third go and you’ll have to do it.’

  There’d be no chance of a third go. We both knew that. I nodded anyway and crossed over, drenched with sweat, trying to walk like Leckie, but all the wrong muscles kept going tight. The blast came as I crouched beside the bridge’s five splayed holding struts where our first rifleman was lying beside a small overgrown outcrop of rock.

  You could see nothing over there except dust. The narrow-gauge railway lines ran into a haze of suspended dust where the tunnel mouth had been. Leckie’s end of the bridge was obscured by a brownish cloud. Rocks tumbled and crashed in the gorge below. The bridge was switching from side to side like a twitched rope under the impact of the blast. To my horror I found myself running and stumbling along between the iron rails across the bridge towards the tunnel, several times having to scramble upright from catching my boots on the sleepers. I must have had some daft idea about seeing what had happened to Leckie, maybe helping him back. Small rocks spattered about me as I ran. It couldn’t have taken more than a few seconds. As I reached the cloud, Leckie came hurtling out of the dust at me, choking and spluttering as he came. His white eyes peered from his blackened face.

  ‘Get back, Lovejoy!’ he yelled, floundering towards me. ‘Get back. The bridge is going!’

  I dithered for a split second, abruptly realized where I was and the lunatic thing I was doing, and tore back the way I had just come, wondering what the hell I was playing at. Leckie was on the safe mountainside nearly as quickly as I was.

  ‘Come on, you two,’ he said, waving us. ‘Run.’ The rifleman was off like a Derby starter, scrabbling up the hillside ahead of me. Leckie brought up the rear. We made the ridge, where the radio man waited with the other pair, having done his stuff. I halted and looked back then. The bridge hadn’t gone after all but the tunnel was filled solid and part of the mountain face to one side of it had been stripped clean away in a miniature landslide.

  ‘Settle down, chaps,’ Leckie told us, hardly out of breath. ‘Let’s wait a bit and see what happens. Fag?’ He offered them round, and we stretched out on the ridge, watching.

  It was an hour later that the bridge wobbled and tottered finally into the gorge. It hit the bottom with hardly a sound. I went quietly off into the undergrowth and was spectacularly sick at the senseless risk I’d taken, running back over the bridge just to get Leckie like that. Sometimes I think I’m off my stupid head.

  It was on the trek back that Leckie reminded me. ‘One thing, Lovejoy,’ he said casually over his shoulder. ‘Got that envelope?’

  ‘Eh? Oh, here.’ I found it and passed it forward. We were moving in single file.

  ‘Good of you, Lovejoy. Coming back like that, I m
ean.’ He gave me a grin, turning on the narrow track. I can see him now, doing it, as I write. ‘Always good to meet a chap who’ll keep faith.’

  I mumbled something. We got to our base about eight o’clock one morning four days after, only Leckie always called time something hundred hours. And Leckie never mentioned the tunnel or the envelope again. That was the last real soldiering I did, and if I have any say at all it’s the last I’ll ever do. The reason I’ve told you all this is that, as I’d passed Leckie his envelope back, I’d noticed the two words scribbled on the front of it. They were In Case, same as on the scribble Helen had given me.

  I didn’t need to be told in case of what.

  ‘Lovejoy.’ Tinker Dill was sitting opposite me, already halfway through a revolting mound of egg and chips. ‘Why you saying nuffink?’

  ‘Eh? Oh, wotcher, Tinker.’ I put the note away. ‘Sorry. Miles away.’

  ‘Sauce.’

  I passed him the sauce. He cascaded it over his grub. It’s not a lovely sight. I wish he’d take his filthy mittens off while he eats. I’d wish the same about his tatty greatcoat and his greasy cap, but God knows what sights lurk underneath. He tore a chunk off a bread roll, one of Woody’s special cobbles, and slopped it through his tea. A bit never made it. It plopped into the sauce, but Tinker just scooped it up with his stained fingers and rammed it into his mouth.

  ‘I found out where Leckie’s stuff is, Lovejoy,’ he said.

  ‘So have I.’

  You can see the door of the King George from Woody’s. I watched idly through the window. Fergus, the blonde and their thin pal were emerging, chatting and obviously in a festive mood, He must have done a good deal. I guessed Cain Cooper’s paintings.

  ‘Here, Tinker. That thin bloke.’

  ‘Him? Jake Pelman. Clacton. Silver and Continental porcelain.’ He ate noisily on. ‘Just gone partners with Nodge, word is.’

  I’d not heard that before.

  ‘Any reason?’

  Tinker shrugged. ‘Why not?’ I realized that Pelman was the bloke I’d seen chatting to Margaret in the White Hart the night before.

  A sudden thought struck me. ‘One thing. How did you know Leckie left his stuff at his cousin Moll’s?’ I hadn’t even known he’d got a cousin living locally.