“Haven’t the faintest, I’m sorry to say. We don’t feel the need for a car. We only met you tonight because we took the first bus we saw.”
“I hope it won’t be too cold in the car.” Barbara pulled at Douglas” hand.
“You’re joking! We must spend the night on the hill.”
“Well, my God,” Ken muttered.
“Poor Ken,” said Maureen. “I know we could be safe in bed. Never mind, we must take advantage of the atmosphere, at least for a while.”
As they climbed Barbara looked for a ring on Maureen’s finger; there was none. She realized Maureen didn’t care about appearances, even flaunted them; it seemed cheap, somehow. She’d changed her own ring over for the weekend. If she saw a car approaching she’d run to it for help. With the engine, she meant. It couldn’t be long before they’d be back in Exham. Her thoughts returned there; she’d thought her embroidery was sewn upon her mind, but the threads had pulled free; she couldn’t blot out the approaching silent figures, nor Maureen’s voice: “What’s happened to my radio?”
Although they were close now, the music was no louder. They reached the crest of the hill, and the music vanished with the light from within. For a moment the radio stood mute, an absurd crown. Then something moved; it must have been the wind. The radio toppled to the turf.
“Well, that is annoying. It really is. I’m sure I haven’t used up all that battery,” Maureen said.
The car and radio were dead; the gate was swallowed. The moon poured vitality into the Sentinels; they seemed closer now, threateningly still against the surrounding restless woods. Barbara urged Douglas away from the figures. “I’m cold,” she told him. “Please, Doug. Let’s stay in the car.”
But Douglas was otherwise alert, to something like the soughing of the trees, yet not. Voices whispering. A chorused hiss: consonants which spat hostility, forming words which he could almost understand. He whirled. It was the radio. Before the others could turn, he had smashed the radio with his heel.
“Doug!” Barbara cried. He saw her hand flash. His cheek blazed, hot as crimson. His fist clenched, then slackened. While she’d thought she was preserving sanity she had lashed out at her own fears. She met his eyes. “I’m sorry,” she said. She clutched his hand; he didn’t respond.
“It’s all right.” But it wasn’t: once his mother had slapped his face when he’d shrieked at an autumn leaf which had leapt on his coverlet like a spider. In those days she’d made him sell his magazines as soon as he’d filled a shelf — just as Barbara might, he thought. He didn’t want a mother or a nurse.
“It’s damn well not all right,” Ken said. “Eleven quid that cost. There wasn’t eleven quid’s worth of bloody static in that radio.”
“I’ll pay, don’t worry.”
“Never mind, Ken, it was a lovely present,” Maureen interrupted. “We can always get another. Don’t let’s quarrel.” She crossed to Douglas. “Where was that stone you didn’t know whether to count?”
“Over here.” Barbara stood near the edge of the circle, biting her lip, staring at the turf. Ken followed them.
“Oh, yes. There’s another one opposite, I think.” Maureen turned back to Ken. “Talk to Barb,” she called. “Doug and I are telling ghost stories.”
“Well, if that’s the way it goes, I’ll look after Barb,” Ken said, kicking the radio, which had drawn electricity from the moon.
“I don’t need looking after!” But Barbara didn’t move away. Behind her a shape held up its hands.
“I didn’t really want to show you anything,” Maureen whispered. The head at her elbow seemed intent. “I didn’t want your friend to overhear. I know why you smashed the radio. I felt it too.”
“We’ll be all right,” Douglas whispered back. “There’s four of us. Listen, if you feel this way, maybe we really should stay in the car.”
“You were waiting for me?” A smile fluttered across Maureen’s mouth. She moved to place ^him against the wind, which had begun to flap more strongly about them. “Don’t you realize I’m terrified to death? I couldn’t show it either. Doug — I keep seeing something running round the edge of the circle.”
“What?” He’d raised his voice; he stared at each figure.
“Not now,” she hissed. “It’s never there when I look at it directly.”
“Listen,” he said intensely, “I’ve read about this sort of thing. It might be safer to stay within the circle.”
“Oh, God, I don’t know. I don’t know.” Her eyes roamed. “Look!” she cried.
Something pale had moved; he had thought it was a tree.
The branches had now almost grasped the sinking moon. He peered about the circle. It was still; only the trees between swayed as if possessed. “There is something,” he whispered, wanting not to tell Maureen, to protect her. Tm sure one of the figures has gone. It’s the one I had trouble with counting.”
Before he could stop her, she was shouting against the hectic wind: “You two, quick! Is the circle complete?” She twisted on her axis. The countryside tossed as if in the throes of a nightmare. Ken was yelling: “One, damn it, two, damn it — ” Then Barbara shrieked: “No!”
Maureen hid her face on Douglas’ chest. “I’ know what she’s seen,” she mumbled. “I don’t know which it was. One of the figures isn’t stone.” She was trembling. Douglas put his arm about her shoulders.
Ken saw them; his face darkened. He pulled Barbara to him. She thrust him away and backed to the edge of the circle, her fists high. Behind her she was mimicked. Then she saw Maureen and Douglas. She cried out wordlessly and turned. Before they realized, she was stumbling down the hill toward the car.
“She’s made it,” Douglas said in Maureen’s ear, stroking her hair, trying to caress courage into her. “If we can follow — ” But she was still shaking. He knew what was wrong; they had to pass between the Sentinels, and he didn’t dare to search for what she had seen. The trees were leaping for the moon; the wind was thrusting him toward the Sentinels. He glanced about wildly for Ken. Ken was stooping by the radio, standing up with what he’d found: a razor-sharp fragment of metal.
Then the car started.
Maureen’s head turned. Together they ran to the edge of the circle. “We must make it,” he told her. “Close your eyes and cling to me.” But she hadn’t closed them when she screamed.
In the road below, the car had conjured forth the gate like an image of escape. They could see Barbara, tiny in the window from which light streamed forth like mist, intent on the dashboard, too intent to notice through the other window the figure squatting like a watchdog.
“The face,” Maureen sobbed, clutching Douglas.
Douglas hurled her away, to Ken, who’d dropped the shard of metal. “What face?” Ken muttered. “I can’t see.”
“Oh God,” Douglas shouted. “Barbara!” The car whipped about, losing the gate, and skidded into the road. A tunnel of trees sprang forth, into which it plunged. The figure ran alongside, skipping high.
Douglas slithered down the grass, ran panting up the road, falling on stones, running onward. Ahead the tunnel of light dwindled; Barbara had gone. Only the last light of the car and, as it turned a corner, the shape which leapt easily onto the roof.
The others found Douglas kneeling in the road. When they spoke he met their eyes, and they were silent. Together they stared ahead into the night, waiting for the sound.
THE GUY
You can’t hide from Guy Fawkes’ Night. This year as usual I played Beethoven’s Fifth to blot out sound and memory, turned it loud and tried to read, fought back faces from the past as they appeared. In September and October the echoes of lone fireworks, the protests of distant startled dogs, the flopping faceless figures propped at bus-stops or wheeled in prams by children, had jarred into focus scenes I’d thought I had erased. Finally, as always, I stood up and succumbed. Walking, I saw memories, fading like the exploding molten clays upon the sky. On waste ground at the edge of Lower Br
ichester a gutted bonfire smouldered. Children stood about it, shaking sparklers as a dog shakes a rat. Then wood spat fire and flared; a man dragged off his boy to bed. Defined by flame, the child’s face fell in upon itself like a pumpkin wizening from last week’s Halloween. He sobbed and gasped, but no words came. And I remembered.
A papier-mache hand, a burning fuse, a scream that never came — But the memory was framed by the day’s events; the houses of the past, my own and Joe Turner’s, were overlaid by the picture I’d built up from behind my desk that morning, the imagined home of the boy who’d stood before me accused of setting fireworks in a car’s exhaust pipe: drunken father, weak wife, back-garden lavatory, all the trimmings — I could see it clearly without having seen it. My parents hadn’t liked my change of ambition from banker to probation officer; faced with the choice, I’d left them. “Don’t you know they all carry razors these days?” my father had protested round his pipe. “Get yourself a little security. Then you can help them if you must. Look at your mother — don’t you think the clothes she gives away mean anything?” Referred to, my mother had joined in: “If you deal with such people all day, Denis, you’ll become like them.” The same prejudices at which I’d squirmed when I was at school: when the Turners moved into our road.
Joe Turner was in the class next door to me; he’d started there that term when the Turners had come up from Lower Brichester. Sometimes, walking past their house, I’d heard arguments, the crash of china, a man’s voice shouting: “Just because we’ve moved in with the toffs, don’t go turning my house into Buckingham Palace!” That was Mr Turner. One night I’d seen him staggering home, leaning on our gate and swearing; my father had been ready to go out to him, but my mother had restrained him: “Stay in, don’t lower yourself.” She was disgusted because Mr Turner was drunk; I’d realized that but couldn’t see how this was different from the parties at our house, the Martini bottles, the man who’d fallen into my bedroom one night and apologized, then been loudly sick on the landing. I was sorry for Mr Turner because my parents had instantly disliked him. “I don’t object to them as people. I don’t know them, not that I want to,” my father had said. “It’s simply that they’ll bring down the property values for the entire street if they’re not watched.” “Have you seen their back garden?” my mother responded. “Already they’ve dumped an old dresser out there.” “Perhaps they’re getting ready for a bonfire,” I suggested. “Well, remember you’ve to stay away,” my mother warned. “You’re not to mix with such people.” I was fourteen, ready to resent such prohibitions. And of course I was to have no bonfire; it might dull the house’s paint or raze the garden. Instead, a Beethoven symphony for the collection I didn’t then appreciate. “Why not?” I complained. “I go to school with him.” “You may,” my father agreed, “but just because the school sees fit to lower its standards doesn’t mean we have to fall in with the crowd.” “I don’t see what’s wrong with Joe,” I said. A look spoke between my parents. “Someday,” said my mother, “when you’re older — ”
There was always something about Joe they wouldn’t specify. I thought I knew what they found objectionable; the acts schoolboys admire are usually deplored by their parents. Joe Turner’s exploits had taken on the stature of legend for us. For example, the day he’d sworn at a teacher who’d caned him, paying interest on his words. “Some night I’ll get him,” Joe told me walking home, spitting further than I ever could. Or the magazines he showed us, stolen from his father as he said: he told terrifying stories of his father’s buckled belt. I Kept the US Army Going, by a Fraulein; my vocabulary grew enormously in two months, until the only time my father ever hit me. I felt enriched by Joe; soon it was him and me against the teachers, running from the lavatories, hiding sticks of chalk. Joe knew things; the tales of Lower Brichester he told me as we walked home were real, not like the jokes the others told, sniggering in corners; Joe didn’t have to creep into a corner to talk. In the two months since he’d run after me and parodied my suburban accent until we’d fought and become inseparable, he showed me sides of life I never knew existed. All of which helped me to understand the people who appear before my desk. Even the seat behind my desk belongs to Joe as much as to me; it was Joe who showed me injustice.
It was late October, two weeks before the bonfire, that fragments of the picture began to fit together. From my window, writing homework, I’d watched early rockets spit a last star and fall far off; once I’d found a cardboard cylinder trodden into the pavement. That was magic: not the Beethoven. So that when Joe said: T bet you won’t be coming to my bonfire,” I flared up readily. “Why shouldn’t I?” I attacked him, throwing a stone into someone’s garden.
“Because your parents don’t like us.” He threw a stone and cracked mine open.
“We’re us,” I said loyally. “I’ll be coming. What’s the matter, don’t you like it up here in Brichester?”
“It’s all right. My father didn’t want to move. I couldn’t care less, really. It was my mother. She was scared.”
I imagined I knew what he meant: stones through the front windows, boys backing girls into alleys, knives and bottles outside the pubs; I’d probably have been as scared. But he continued: “She didn’t want to live where my brother was.”
We ran from a stretched rain and stood beneath an inscribed bus-shelter; two housewives disapproved of us and brought umbrellas down like shields. “Where’s your brother now? In the Army?” In those days that was my idea of heroism.
“He was younger than me. He’s dead.” The umbrellas lifted a little, then determinedly came down.
“Hell.” I wasn’t equipped to deal with such things. “What happened?” I asked, curiosity intermixed with sympathy.
“Of course only ill-brought-up boys try to impress with made-up stories,” came from beneath the umbrellas.
Joe made a sign at them in which I hurriedly joined. We went out into the thinning lines of drizzle. I didn’t like to ask again; I waited for Joe to take me into his trust. But he was silent until he reached our road, suburban villas pronged with tv aerials, curtains drawn back to display front-room riches. “You won’t really come to my bonfire,” he repeated suddenly: his eyes gleamed like the murderer’s in the film we’d surreptitiously seen last Saturday, luring the girl towards his camera with its built-in spike.
“See if I don’t.”
“Well, I’d better say goodbye now. You won’t want to be seen near your house with me.”
“You watch this!” I shouted angrily, and strode with him arm in arm to his door. Joe beat on the knocker, which hung by a screw. “You’re not coming in, are you?” he asked.
“If you’ve no objection.” The door opened and Joe’s mother appeared, patched jumper, encircled eyes and curlers: she saw me and frowned. “I’m Joe’s friend,” I tried to ingratiate myself.
“I didn’t know he had any up this end.” But she closed the door behind us. “Your father’s not feeling well,” she told Joe.
“Who’s that?” a man’s voice roared beyond the hall, the ancient coat-stand where an overcoat hung by a ragged tag, the banister wrenched dangerously by some unsteady passage. “Is that Joe just come in? Have you been spilling paraffin round the house, you little bastard?”
Joe’s mother glanced at him and winced, then hurried with Joe toward the voice. Left alone, I followed. Vests hung in the kitchen; Mr Turner sat in vest and braces at the table with his feet up, spitting into the sink, a Guinness at his side. “Of course he hasn’t, Fred,” she intervened unevenly.
“Then it’s you,” her husband shouted at her. “You’ve got that trunk hidden somewhere. I’ll find it and fix it for good, my girl, don’t you worry. I heard them moving round in there last night.”
“Oh my God,” Mrs Turner muttered. “Shut up, will you, shut up, shut up…”
Her husband snarled at her, tried to stand up, raised a foot and thumped it on the table. “You watch out, my girl,” he threatened. Then he noticed me in the
doorway. “Who the bloody hell’s that?” he yelled.
“A friend of Joe’s. I’ll make some tea,” she told me, trying to ignore her husband’s mumbling.
“I’ll do it,” Joe said: he seemed anxious to please.
“No, it’s all right. You go and talk to your friend.”
“I’ll help you carry it in.”
“Don’t bother. I can manage.” She looked at Joe strangely, I couldn’t tell why: I know she was scared.
“How much bloody tea do you think we’ve got in this house?” Mr Turner bawled. “Every little bastard Joe brings home gets a free meal, is that what you think?” I’d become the victim and I didn’t like it; I looked at Joe, and his mother in turn, attempting to convey my regret for having been a witness, for my incomprehension, for fleeing, for everything. Then I escaped from the misshapen house.
In the next week our walks home were jagged with silence, the unspoken. I said no more about Joe’s brother; nor did he. The bonfire approached, and I waited to be invited again; I felt that my experience in Joe’s house had rendered our friendship unstable. Meanwhile, each night as I worked in my bedroom, hissing trails of sparks explored the sky; distant shots resounded like warfare. One night, a week before Guy Fawkes”, I abandoned my history homework in the middle of a sentence, stared round my room, at my father’s inherited Children’s Encyclopaedia beneath my Army posters, and stood up to gaze from the window. Three gardens from mine I could see the Turners’; during the day they had built their bonfire. The moon was up; it gleamed in a greenhouse like eyes. On top of the bonfire, above a toilet seat and piled planks like a gutted roof, stood the guy. Its arms were crucified across its wooden body; it swayed in a breeze. Its head turned back and forth beneath the moon; its paper face lifted to me. There was something horrible about that featureless grey expanse, as if eyes which should have been watching me were not. I drew back from the window and opened my door, for downstairs I’d heard my father say “ — paraffin.”
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