‘Well,’ Brian Parkinson said at once, ‘we’ll have to set about getting ourselves out of this little lot.’
Mark felt too dispirited even to point out that it had been him who had got them into it. The smell of the fuel that had once been kept in the store struck his nostrils like sour leather.
‘Look,’ the mock soldier’s voice came again almost at once. ‘There’s a tiny bit of daylight over there. I’m going to find out where it comes from.’
Idiot.
‘Dr Satpathi,’ he asked, in an oblique rebuke, ‘are you all right?’
‘Yes. Or to an extent at least. I have found a wall and I have sat myself down against it. But it is somewhat damp.’
‘I’ll come over if I can,’ he answered.
But before he had set out to grope his way across Brian Parkinson’s cheerful voice came again.
‘Ah ha. Seems to be a bit of a gap in the wall between us and what must be the other half of the building.’
He listened to him blundering about.
‘Yes, here we— Quiet, you two.’
Damn fool.
‘Is that you, my dear? Yes. Yes, it’s us. Are you all right?’ He could not hear the reply. Apparently the girl felt it important to keep her voice down. He stayed still while a longish whispered conversation took place.
At last Brian Parkinson turned away from her.
‘Yes, well,’ he said, speaking a lot more quietly and sounding, too, considerably less confident. ‘Yes. Look, things are a bit dicey actually.’
Mark’s eyes had begun to get used to the dark and in the faint bar of light coming through the gap in the dividing wall he could now just make out the bulky shape of Brian Parkinson’s battle blouse.
But why was the fellow not getting on with it?
‘Look, the fact is that the people here don’t care for intruders much, and— Well, they’re red hot against— Well, tropicals. I mean, the fact is that they— Or, look, the girl here – her name’s Penny by the way, Penny— Well, she says that she’s pretty well sure that our friends will want – will want to shoot Dr – er – Whatshisname.’
‘To shoot?’ Mark asked, all his vague rage over what had happened to them uniting in an instant into one excoriating rocket of fury. ‘You mean, to kill him? Kill him for being what they’re pleased to call a tropical? And just because we came into their precious Estate?’
‘That seems to be it, old boy. They’re apparently likely at this trial affair to sentence the pair of us to what they call the Bikes. That’s driving a whole lot of bicycles they have harnessed to their generators. But, if what Penny says is true, they’ll condemn our friend here to – er – death. She says they’ve shot people before.’
He fell silent.
Mark too felt, after his first rush of incredulous anger, incapable of any other reaction. What he had heard was simply too horrifying.
He tried to imagine what Dr Satpathi must be feeling. There had been no sound from down on the floor. What must he be thinking? What possible response was there for him to have?
‘Dr Satpathi?’
He managed to bring out the words.
‘Yes? Well, yes, my dear friend. It is most unfortunate.’
Guided by the voice, he made his way across to where the little Indian was sitting and slithered down the wall till he was squatting beside him. He had been right: it was damp.
‘Listen,’ he said, ‘it may not be true. I mean, what do we know about this girl, Penny? She may be some sort of a hysteric. Anything. Or they may not go so far this time. I mean, all we did was to …’
He gave up. What he had said about the girl was not, he knew, true. And Dr Satpathi would know it as well as he did. In any case words were useless.
Nor did Dr Satpathi seem to need them. He had taken the news with extraordinary quietness, in enormous contrast with his shrieks and pleas for mercy at the hands of the hulking window-cleaner. But perhaps, as he had indicated himself, he was terrified of pain but not death.
‘Look,’ Brian Parkinson said, with what seemed appalling loudness.
Then he dropped his voice to a burring urgent murmur.
‘We’ve just got to get out of here fast. And we can do it. The place isn’t so jolly well built that we can’t make a hole in it with a bit of effort. The wall between us and Penny’s only one layer thick and on her side there’s some ventilation holes which ought to give us a good start. So, if we all four work hard as we can go, we’ll be out before they come for us.’
‘Yes,’ Mark said.
But he did not believe the wildcat notion. The place would not be used as a prison if you could simply take the bricks from the walls and get out.
But Brian Parkinson was already over at the gap between the two cells and whispering hard to Penny. And it seemed that she was agreeing to help.
What was the use though? They were intended to be kept shut up, and they would be kept shut up. Jasmine would be dead long before he got anywhere near Wimbledon. And Dr Satpathi would be shot. For nothing. For having a black skin that wasn’t even black they would kill him.
He realised that, beside him on the dank floor, the Indian had been quietly talking. He paid attention.
‘… now while times were bad this did not have much importance since all his energies were devoted to the mere problem of keeping going, during the jal-kal, the greatly dreaded scarcity of water, and worse during the trin-kal, the failure of animal fodder, in a year when as they say in Rajasthan there had been rain enough only to wet one horn of the cow.’
It was another story. But why at this of all times? To sit and drool out … Had his mind gone?
But no. No, he saw it in an instant. It must be his only way of dealing with the appalling situation he had been faced with. To transpose it. To find from his store of myth and legend some equivalent which would show him a way of coming to terms with the too brutal fact.
He began to listen with as sharp concentration as if he was hearing a master plan of escape.
… times improved. The next year was good for Ramdeo, and the years that followed even better. Stage by stage he moved from his first wretched hovel into at last a mansion of moderate grandeur. But now his wife, who had patiently endured the bad times, began to feel she deserved a measure of ease and asked him to purchase a horse and carriage. Ramdeo, who thought walking was in any case a pleasant activity, agreed only with reluctance. But his wife was delighted even with unwilling acquiescence. “I shall go for a daily ride,” she said, “and I shall take my mother.” Now this, as is often the way, proved to be the sticking-point for the good Ramdeo’s tendency to unreasonableness which I have already told of. He promptly forbade the presence of his mother-in-law. His wife insisted. A bitter quarrel ensued. At last Ramdeo seized a stick. “If you continue to defy,” he shouted, “I will whip the skin off your back.” The foolish woman nevertheless persisted. Ramdeo struck her, and indeed would perhaps have killed her had not a neighbour intervened. This good fellow, when all was calm again, inquired the cause of the dispute. When he had heard it he said to Ramdeo, with as stern a visage as he could muster – ‘
But here the tale was sharply interrupted.
‘Look,’ Brian Parkinson said, ‘will you take over here? I’m exhausted already and so’s Penny. It’s hellish slow work, and we’re going to have to keep at it like buggery if we’re to do it in time.’
Mark scrambled to his feet. He very much wanted to hear the story to its end. He had been beginning to think he could see why Dr Satpathi had chosen it. It seemed to be saying something, vaguely to be discerned as yet, about the times they were living in and about what could happen if they got better. And the farmer, Ramdeo, with his tendency to unreasonableness, were there not people all too like him waiting for them outside? Would the story eventually put them somehow into their place in the scheme of things? But to sit and listen apparently to a childish tale when Brian Parkinson was working himself to exhaustion to get them out of their terrible situ
ation was not possible. Even if his scheme was thoroughly crackbrained.
If there was the least chance of escaping he must do all he could to take it. He owed that to Jasmine.
He made his way over to the gap between the two cells, Dr Satpathi accompanying him with a hand on his arm.
Brian Parkinson had been working with his belt buckle on the mortar round one of the topmost bricks in the wall. He had succeeded in making a deep slit-like hole but the brick was still firmly in its place.
‘Have you got anything else to work with?’ he asked Mark when he had shown him what he had done.
Mark wondered whether to offer to break the bottle of Pernod, still heavy in his coat pocket. A shard of its thick glass might make an effective tool. But what rebuke would Mrs Brilling find for him if he arrived there empty-handed? If he ever did arrive there.
But he was rescued from his dilemma by Dr Satpathi.
‘I have a small penknife,’ he said. ‘Luckily I am accustomed to keep it in my jacket pocket so the fellow at Archway did not make away with it.’
Together they set to work. Within two or three minutes Mark found the muscles of his forearm had begun to feel achingly tired. But he forced himself not to slacken and in grim silence they worked on and on.
They ended their first spell when the brick they had been tackling at last came free. The work had left him with a sensation of pulling fatigue that stretched right down to his thighs, and Dr Satpathi, as soon as Brian Parkinson said he would take another spell, simply slid down against the wall beside them and seemed at once to fall asleep.
On through the morning they worked in alternate spells, sharing in their rest periods the dry stick-loaf Mark had cooked over his dully smoking fire before he had had any idea of the journey awaiting him – it seemed as if it had been weeks ago – as well as the contents of Brian Parkinson’s large water flask and his own smaller plastic one. According to Penny they would not be given any food by their captors. People in the cells got only one meal, last thing at night.
At intervals, as they gradually widened the gap between the cells, Mark learnt a little about Penny and about the Estate. It seemed her family had been tenants of a flat in one of the blocks even before the Riots. She herself had been still a small child when Mr Lillimass – Mr Litmus she called him because, she said, his face turned from red to blue when he got angry – who was also a tenant and had been a commissionaire at a West End cinema until it had been taken over to show sex films, had started to organise a vigilante group. As times had grown worse this had developed into a force that had eventually fortified the Estate and cut them all off.
‘And it was about then that the Rev came.’
‘The Rev?’
‘That’s what we call him. The Reverend. I think he was a proper clergyman, but I’m not sure. Anyhow, he was always on about prostitutes and perverts and tropicals. Lumped them all together. And there was one West Indian bloke here, big tough feller, who wouldn’t go when all the others were chased out. He had him tried and shot in the end. That’s why –‘
She broke off as she realised that Dr Satpathi was near enough to hear.
It was not until later, some time in the afternoon when they had begun the much more difficult task of making the small grid of inch-wide ventilation holes in the back of Penny’s cell into something big enough to scramble through, that he heard how Penny herself had come into the trouble which had brought them all to where they were.
Soon after the Rev had been made head of the Estate community, it seemed, he had instituted the Rules under which they all now lived. And among them was one which said if any boy wanted to go out with a girl he had to make a formal application. If a couple were seen holding hands, much less kissing, without this permission the boy would be sentenced to so many gruelling hours ‘on the Bikes’, presided over by guards with whips, and the girl to detention and floor-scrubbing, soap-making and other tasks. Old Litmus’s son, Peter, no less, had applied to court Penny, but she, instead of waiting a month and then asking to have the permission annulled as the rules said she must, had refused to have anything to do with him.
‘And once you get on the wrong side of ‘em you can’t never get back. So in the end, just this morning, I decided I’d had enough. Only I suppose I should have planned it more.’
‘Could you have got away if you had?’
‘Yeah, I think so. I know I could.’
She spoke with clear fire.
By now there was room enough for all four of them to work at the same time, and there was light enough coming in for Brian Parkinson to read his watch. But it had not been cheerful news when he had first done so. It was plain that they would be very lucky to have a hole big enough to squeeze through before six in the evening, the time Penny had said trials and similar events always took place, after the Estate’s working day was over.
And that was providing Brian Parkinson’s elaborate watch was approximately right. Clocks on the Estate, Penny said, had been carefully kept going and checked against each other ever since the days when there had been radio time-signals.
As it was, they failed to make it by a wide margin.
The hole was still a great deal too small even to push little Dr Satpathi through when, from the opposite side of the store, they heard sharp shouts of command. They crouched, shocked into stillness, and listened. In a few moments it became all too clear that an escort party was being formed up for them.
‘Quick, back through,’ Brian Parkinson snapped.
The three of them scrambled into their original cell and hastily piled back the bricks they had so laboriously removed.
‘I’ll swear it’s not nowhere near six,’ Brian Parkinson repeatedly muttered. ‘It’s still daylight. How can it be?’
Then the tight bolts outside were squealingly pulled back. They ran across and formed up close to the door so that their escape route was as much hidden as possible. The door swung open. Mr Lillimass was there at the head of the escort.
‘Hurry along, if you please,’ he sang out. ‘Trial’s to begin at 4 p.m. sharp. The Rev says the old folk are not to miss their treat for the likes of you. Come along there, come along.’
They were shoved into a small group surrounded by the escort. Mr Lillimass pushed home one of the bolts of the door and gave the order to march.
At least, Mark thought, the escape route is intact. Perhaps when the trial was over they would be able to use it. Get away before any sentence on Dr Satpathi was carried out. And if they had escaped by, say, six in the evening then he would still have a clear eighteen hours to get to Wimbledon. Time enough, easily.
But what about the trial? Would they get a chance to present a case? After all, on any reasonable view they were simply not guilty of any offence since there had been no warning signs around the Estate. They ought to be released, with apologies.
Yet Penny had been in no doubt at all that Dr Satpathi was going to be shot.
‘Tell me the rest of that story of yours,’ he said to him with sudden urgency.
The little Indian turned with eyes shining. Yes, it was true: he had seen his story as something worth saying aloud, even in the terrible circumstances he was in. A legacy.
‘Well, the tale is not much longer in the telling.’
His voice was very hard to hear. Mark walked alongside him, leaning over to catch the words.
‘Ramdeo’s neighbour, you remember, had prevented him beating his wife to death and had inquired the cause of the quarrel. Now he assumed as stern an expression as he could muster and addressed Ramdeo thus: “So it was your horse that nipped off all my young corn. I shall go to the courts against you instanter” Ramdeo, of course, replied that he had no horse. “If you have no horse,” the neighbour answered, “what is it you harness to your carriage?”’ They were being hustled along towards the Tenants Commonroom as if they were already late. ‘Ramdeo again replied that he had no carriage. “Then tell me this,” the astute neighbour said, “if a carriage you h
ave not got nearly resulted in the unfortunate death of your wife, why cannot a horse you have not got be responsible for the damage to my corn?” And with that poor Ramdeo at last learnt his lesson.’
Dr Satpathi gave him a brief deprecating smile, white teeth gleaming.
And, Mark thought, with a sudden gold-glow of admiration, the almost condemned man had not hesitated by so much as half a breath when he had come to the words ‘nearly resulted in the unfortunate death’. Not by a quarter breath.
Part Six
Hardly had Dr Satpathi finished telling the story of Ramdeo, the unreasonable farmer, than they were being jostled through the two sets of the Commonroom’s double doors again. The big room looked very different from the dingy club-like place of the morning. It was packed to bursting with people sitting on jammed rows of chairs with only a narrow aisle left running up the centre and a clear space at the far end where Mr Lillimass’s desk was.
The three of them were marched up the length of the room – Mark felt every eye in the place bearing on him as if he were being softly prodded by the scores of jelly-like orbs – and ordered to stand in front of three sagging grey canvas stackable chairs that had been placed facing the desk, draped now with a grey blanket on which there rested a water carafe topped by a reversed tumbler and an ornately turned gavel, still-life clear.
Mark stood steadily contemplating the two objects, not daring to look at the buzzing, murmuring mass of hungry spectators. But he was nerve-pluckingly aware of them. Of their odour. Compressed bodies, sweating with illicit pleasure. A damp tangy miasma.
He did not however have to endure it long.
‘Order in court. Be upstanding.’
Mr Lillimass was using his lungs to the full, as perhaps he had done in the days long past to attract sluggish patrons into the cinema outside which he had paraded.
It would be the Rev arriving.
Mark had pledged himself not to turn and look when he came in. But he was able to hold to his promise for only a second or two. The effect of mass attention being transferred at a stroke from himself and his two fellow prisoners to the person who had just entered was almost physical and he could not stop himself following the monster swing of the magnetic needle.
A Long Walk to Wimbledon Page 9