The Stranger Came

by Frederic Lindsay

  He sat opposite her, spilling over the edges of a little two-seater couch. 'They wasn't anything to do with us – not with Pax,' he explained. 'Some of them were just in having a quiet drink, but everyone round that way hates niggers. And Kite knew, Kite always knows when it matters, that Team would be boozing in there tonight. And they were, just as well they were, or the darkies would have had us, murdering bastards, them's the ones with swords.’

  At the time, however, when the van pulled to a stop, she still imagined she was being taken to some kind of political meeting. Behind an iron fence and a surround of tired grass, there was a squat one-storey structure with its windows lit and outer doors lying open. She had attended Free Church services in buildings very much like that. Neither of the men gave any sign of moving. The fancy came to her that if a window was wound down, she might hear the sound of hymn-singing.

  'If I wasn't here,' the fat man said, 'two lovebirds, you'd be enjoying yourself, wouldn't you, darling?'

  'She's not –' Nick trailed off.

  'Not?' He leaned across her and took the boy by the shoulder. 'Not bloody what?'

  'She came to the shop tonight.’

  The suffocating weight of him moved off her as he sat back. It was as if he was looking at her for the first time. ‘You from a paper?'

  By instinct, Anne moved back from the note of menace. 'She's a friend of Jock the Hat,' the boy said, not sounding at all sure.

  'Allander? He talking about Fraser Allander?'

  'Not a friend,' Anne said. 'He's one of my patients.’

  'That's the first I've heard of it, Georgie!'

  'You hold your noise,' the fat man said. ‘Looks like we're too early. Go over to the boozer and check with Kite.’

  They sat in silence watching the boy jerk his way across the street like an ill-hung puppet. The pavement glistened in the light from the public house.

  ‘Jock The Hat.’

  'Fraser Allander,' Arne said. 'In to dry out, was he?'

  'He was being treated for alcoholism.’

  'Where would that be?'

  Anne didn't answer. She eased herself across on to the seat the boy had left.

  'Did he tell you he was a gunman? He liked to tell people that.’

  'Not to me,' Anne said.

  'Handing a shooter to a falling-down drunk. You wouldn't want to believe everything he told you – anything, really.’

  'He told me about Pax Britannica.’

  'And you came from – all the way from – wherever you came from. He must have made it sound good.’

  One moment the street was empty, the next with heart­stopping suddenness a knot of men burst from the vestibule of the church-like building. In a rear guard action they were driven across the grass and out stumbling and cursing through the gates.

  'At last,' the fat man said.

  Even in shock, her mind worked sorting out what she was seeing. The group that was being driven back consisted of perhaps a dozen, certainly not more than twenty, white men. They kept close together and they were being attacked by a larger group, twice as many, dark men in turbans, turbans. Wasn't that Sikhs?

  'Animals, animals,' the fat man was saying, 'Cowardly bastards.’

  Just in front of the van an elderly man in a green turban was shouting and pulling at them, yes, mostly they were young, trying to get them to stop. And yet despite the uproar and the heavy surge of men, she was cool enough to see that it was mostly a matter of threatening, shoving, waving fists, nothing so very bad was happening after all.

  The retreat milled to a stop in the middle of the road. Mostly now they seemed to be arguing rather than striking out. On the edge of the group a car inched its way through, hooting derisively as it accelerated clear.

  'There's Kite,' the fat man said.

  He stood on the other side of the road outside the pub, the boy Nick a head taller behind him . Even at that distance he gave an impression of being dapper and contained, the long tight-fitting black coat only emphasising the slightness of him. At his neck there was the white gleam of a shirt and, all her senses heightened, she knew its expense as if fingering folds unfolding of soft heaviness. He stood with his hands by his sides, relaxed, but it wasn't as if he was still. He seemed to give off energy, he vibrated with energy. His face was only an impression to her, wide and big-nosed. It was the stillness of his energy, the energy of that stillness.

  And then he stepped forward. Like pulling a cork from the mouth of a jug, men poured from the pub. Dozens of them, young. Wearing their youth like a uniform. Cropped heads. Scarves like banners . Tumblers swinging like clubs, breaking, slicing like razors. Now there was hurt. And still she couldn't stop, observing, recording. She saw the first group of white men, a moment ago being attacked, rushing to get between the Sikhs and the gate to trap them to their enemies in the open street. She saw the Sikhs understanding suddenly too, trying to fight their way back. She saw the crowd fall on them.

  And then she smelled the fat man beside her. He leant forward panting, sweat ran in floods down his cheeks. His hand was between his legs clutching himself. 'Yes,' he cried, 'yes, yes.’ In front of them the man in the green turban was tripped and went down. After the first blows he got up on hands and knees. She saw the long pull back of a boot and the swing of it into his face, and again and again. His body lifted to kicks. She knew how vulnerable the brain was in its fragile case of bone.

  And then it was over. Only the injured left behind; men scattering.

  The door beside her hung open. The fat man was outside. 'No, no,' she heard a voice choked with weeping and it was her own. She had to stop him. No more hurting. But when she got to him the fat man was as attentive as a student bent over a book, looking down at the man in the green turban who lay on his back with eyes open, legs trembling spasmodically.

  As she knelt at the man's side, a hand gripped her arm and pulled her upright. It was the boy Nick, 'Come on! Move it! Move it!' He was hysterical with excitement, and when she tried to pull free took a tighter convulsive grip that hurt her. 'Don't mess about stupid cow you want to be here do you?' He dragged her with him to the van, threw her in and followed her into the passenger's side.

  'We was almost too late!' The pustule on his nose had burst, and she thought that'll give him relief, and wondered at the oddness of that occurring to her. 'God, if I'd missed it!' In the light from the street she saw there was a smear of blood on her sleeve from his hand. She swallowed and drew a breath against being sick.

  With a yell the fat man heaved up into the driver's seat. The door shut and they were moving backwards very fast, reversing round the corner and then forward again, turning right and racing back the way they had come. She was conscious of hands on the wheel, big hands with swollen fingers, and then of his legs filling all the space thrusting against the cloth of his trousers. Their voices echoed, the succulent wheeze of the fat man's mixing with Nick's, making sense to her in fragments. Magic!

  Left them for dead! Everything went

  You see Kite

  Dead

  Magic

  See Kite standing there

  Magic

  Did for one anyway me no problem

  Like a bleeding general standing there

  Smooth as silk

  Magic

  Kite! See Kite!

  Be proud of us

  'You think we couldn't run the country? Give Kite the chance! Not that it's likely. We know. We're not stupid. But, listen, you have any idea how many votes Hitler got in elections? Peanuts that's how many – until the Depression came along that is. Or what about Lenin? People in the caff in Switzerland would have laughed in your face, Kite says, if you'd told them, see that little bald geezer in the corner there? He's going to be the new Czar of Russia. Ha, ha, bleeding hang about till 1914 comes along, laugh then. We're not stupid. "We English are a wonderful people" you know who said that? Mrs Thatcher, that's who. Said that to the Young Conservatives she did. A wonderful people that's us.’ The two-seater
couch creaked as he rocked back and forward, smoothing the sweat off his forehead, down each cheek in turn.

  'Nick told me you lot were good at making speeches,' she said.

  'That's politics, isn't it?'

  'You call what happened tonight politics?'

  Talking all the time on a high of excitement, he had brought her and she had gone along not sure what would happen if she refused. She had thought this quiet house was the garage owner's home, but when she said that to him going in the fat man had grinned, 'My wife and daughter will be watching the telly. Wouldn't be fair to disturb them, doctor.’

  ‘Course you could call it politics,’ he said, the couch groaning as he shifted from one ham to the other. 'What else I been explaining? But you don't listen. Why? Because you don't care. But I'm supposed to credit you're here because Fraser Allander shot off his mouth about the Pax. So what do you call you turning up here then? A house call?'

  His head jerked round at the sound of the door opening. The girl stopped in surprise. She was wearing only white G-string briefs and a bra that looked in need of a wash. Her thighs were long and pale.

  'Sorry,' she said.

  'I told Doreen we'd be in here,' the fat man said.

  'Oh…sorry.’

  'The dinosaur had a brain in its tail. Like this one,' he said to Anne. 'It takes a while for the message to reach up top.’

  Anne hated the casualness of that contempt. She smiled at the girl, who frowned in response and shut the door behind her with as much of a bang as she dared.

  'She wants to mind her manners,' the fat man said. 'So you know who I am. Georgie Clarke, I run a garage. And you're Anne, Doctor Anne, right?'

  'With a patient called Fraser Allander. Who told me he was a member of Pax Britannica.’

  'In good standing – when he could stand. Anyway we've been through that.’

  'He came to me because he'd recognised one of the visitors to the hospital. Monty Norman?' deliberately making a question of it.

  The fat man went very still. 'I knew a Monty. Different second name though.’ Nodding at her, he rubbed his hand on his chest, cupping the fat of it like a woman's breast. 'The Monty I knew, well, he was like your patient Fraser, he took off. One night he was in his usual haunts as the law says, next morning he wasn't. Definitely not. It wasn't that people didn't look for him. Some of them looked hard. Some people really wanted a word. He wasn't around anymore.’

  'Why did he disappear?'

  'End of last year. Don't tell me – that's when.’

  'You're not interested in why?'

  'Where maybe…Fraser Allander was sure it was him? Why would he tell you?'

  'I told you he was a patient of mine.’

  'Fill his prescription, did you? What are you here for?'

  She was so tired there was a moment's temptation just to say to him: ‘I'm here because Fraser said the man was able to hypnotise people. And if that is so, then the things on Lucy's tape are not just sick imaginings.’

  And if he asked again: ‘I'm here because I'm in love.’ Wasn't that the truth?

  'Don't tell me,' the fat man broke into her thoughts. 'It's always love.’ And as she stared at him in fright, went on, 'Are you the wife? '

  Bewildered she said, 'Monty Norman has a wife?'

  His mouth turned down like a disappointed child. 'Monty wasn't the marrying kind. Fraser was shit – but some women like shit. Don't tell me, darling, has to be a man, and always is.’

  He jerked and heaved to his feet. For an endless second she thought he was going to attack her.

  'Stay there! Don't even bleeding think about moving!'

  The door slammed shut behind him. It seemed unlikely he would have given her a chance to escape without getting someone to stand watch. She had no idea even which district this house was in. Deliberately, she took one slow breath and then another, making it as long as she could manage. House of ill repute she thought, give a thing its name. So much had happened; exhaustion made her light­ headed; it was the way she imagined being drunk must feel. When the fat man came back, the woman who accompanied him was thin. The respectable grey skirt hung from the bones of her hips and the blouse showed hollows in her neck and throat. Jack Sprat, Anne thought, and his Mrs come to lick the platter clean. She bit the inside of her lip, blinking at the pair of them.

  'Ask Doreen,' the fat man said.

  'I'm sorry?'

  'You want to know what your husband came here for, ask Doreen.’

  'I'm not married.’ She tasted the saltiness of blood on her tongue.

  'He comes here because he likes to hurt people,' Doreen said. As she spoke, her upper lip hardly moved. Anne's mother would have called it a refined voice, an attempt at refinement.

  'Women,' the fat man said, correcting the definition. 'He likes to hurt women. But I expect you know about that.’

  'Who? Who in the world are you talking about?'

  He nodded to the woman, who said, 'Mr Rintoul, of course.’

  She shook her head. She didn't feel like laughing any more.

  'Coming here men'll give you any kind of name – except their own.’ It was Doreen's first trace of animation. Most people enjoyed the shop talk of their trade. That was something Anne had noticed. 'Been coming here for, I don't know, three years anyway. He didn't ask for it right out, not the first time, but he knew what he wanted, all right. When little Tracey had to leave, didn't we wonder if he'd be back?'

  Doreen turned to the fat man, but he stared fiercely back as if defying her to ask for guidance. It was that, rather than the woman's appeal to him, which put it into Anne's head that he might have money in the place. Perhaps he had set Doreen up in business. There was something in her tone which suggested that as a possibility. 'He was here,' she said, 'well, it wasn't regular, three or four times a year. It was the last time he came I saw him talking to Monty. Out in the hall there. I didn't even know they knew one another.’

  'But they used the same girl,' the fat man cried. 'Rintoul and Monty used the same girl. How could I have been such a fool as not to think of that?'

  Remembering afterwards, Anne was never sure how real the danger had been. At the time, she was in no doubt. Later she changed her mind one way and the other. Certainly, he had been desperate to find out where Monty Norman could be found. He kept wiping at the sweat on his face, and it burst out, shining along the line of his upper lip as she had seen it in a man recovering from a heart attack. She was in a house where women were hurt, he told her that. And the girl, that happened, Doreen bringing her in; the weals on her. In the toilet, sick, Anne about to sit down stopped to spread paper around the rim under her. The mirror showed her face white, but in her hurry she had left her bag behind and had no make-up to repair her defences. She splashed water on her eyes; then could not bring herself to use the towel. The place was diseased.

  Quite soon after that, however, she was being driven back to her hotel. That it was still night disoriented her, so long a time seemed to have passed. 'There we are again,' the fat man said, nodding out of the window. Rain hissed across the forecourt and its hunch-shouldered pumps. 'Monty would come to the garage for me and we'd go on to the meetings together. We were best mates.’ He bent his head to squint up at the boiling darkness of the sky. 'He told me the moon was made of ice more likely than not, though the scientists wouldn't ever admit it. And that there had been moons before that one we have now. Six of them, I think it was. One of those old moons came too near and that was when the dinosaurs got so big. All the seas gathered up in a bunch round the equator. Drawn by the moon, you know, just like now. And when it crashed down, well that was what finished off the dinosaurs, wasn't it? And Atlantis as well – or maybe that was one of the moons before that one. You're an educated woman, you'd have been able to go into it with him.’

  'If you were such friends –' she began, and stopped in fright. She had no doubt the man beside her was the same one Lucy had described under hypnosis for Doctor Cadell. She had been abo
ut to ask how he had escaped the punishment Monty Norman had run from. Had he promised if they spared him he would find his friend for them?

  'Some of the best nights of my life talking to Monty.’ He sounded wistful, meaty hands clamped on the wheel, thighs sprawling. Then with a change of tone, swinging his head to look at her, 'Your sort don't know it all. Hitler used to talk about the ice between the planets and how the Aryans was led out of Atlantis into Asia – when he was with friends, Monty told me, when he was comfortable like among friends. And Hitler read the books, Monty said. Same books Monty read. He wouldn't talk to Kite about it, Kite would just laugh. I'm not saying I believed it all. But I miss Monty. I'll always miss Monty.’

  It struck her he was speaking as if of a man already dead.

  In the sanctuary of her hotel room, she lay down on the bed and fell asleep. When she woke, she had no idea where she was. Angling her arm up to check the time, she had to pull back the sleeve of her jacket and realised then she was still fully dressed. It was early, just after seven. She had slept only for a few hours, but slept so deeply her neck cramped when she tried to move. The night before the woman Doreen had said, 'Men come here for what they can't get at home. Mr Rintoul wouldn't have got much from you . You don't like men, do you?' Shop talk again. Experience's half-truth; the whore's rationalisation about the faults of wives; should the good wife kneeling hand the sadist the whip? Keep your husband happy, like a save-your-marriage article in a woman's magazine, Cosmopolitan or one with knitting patterns all the same, women were such fools, and prostitutes as fooled as any it seemed. But could see into you, what you wanted, experience did that for them, every woman to her own trade. 'You're not much interested in men, are you?'

  The minute hand on the watch jerked forward. She stretched her arms by her sides and letting her eyes close lay still.

  There was a panic when she couldn't find her bag, money, return flight tickets, but it had been handed in at reception. Going through the station to get the train for Heathrow, she held it tight under her arm. It wasn't to be opened to give to the woman begging in the lavatory; or the boy squatted at the foot of the Tube stairs all corners like a creature disjointed, stretching up his hand and startling her with the mechanical croak of his pleading. Hitler had been no older straying out of a Viennese dosshouse to scrounge a copy of a völkisch-occult magazine where he would read of the World Ice Theory and the purity of the Aryan. She found the sight of the boy unendurable. Nothing less than gathering him up in her arms and caring for him would meet his case. She hurried past without opening her purse.