For a long time he would not allow himself to believe it. But at last he let a short breath escape from his earth-pressed lips.
But he scarcely dared to move even a finger. Time passed. He became increasingly conscious of the pain from the deep bruises all the way down his left side. Occasionally he heard sounds from Brian Parkinson, suppressed moans. And at last after a long while he detected in the distance the noise of people evidently returning to their homes, exchanges of good-nights, a laugh or two. It would be the end of the old folk’s film show, he thought. Lights Out is at 8 p.m. in Winter. He felt less fear now. It was pretty unlikely that anyone anxious to get indoors would come poking about in the hedge.
A door was unlocked not far away, somewhere on the other angle of the courtyard, and then closed with a slam.
Still Brian Parkinson lay without movement. Keeping equally still, in line with him, he waited. The cold came seeping further and further into him. His face where the first club blow had landed ached with a regular axe-sharp throbbing.
‘Should be safe now.’
Brian Parkinson’s murmur sent a start of shock through him. It took him some moments to collect up energy enough to reply.
‘You’re sure?’
‘It’s been dead quiet for one hour. Can’t see my watch, but I’ve been counting.’
He marvelled at the man’s determination.
‘Listen,’ he was whispering on, ‘I’ve been hit in the leg. It’s been bleeding a fair amount and it hurts like hell. I don’t know if I’ll be able to get about, but if I can we’ll have to find another way out. There’s bound to be more than one.’
‘Yes,’ Mark answered.
But he did not feel that any such ideas really concerned him.
‘So this is what we’ll do. We’ll go and get ourselves a faithful guide. Penny.’
He actually failed to understand at first. Then he realised what the will-driven man lying at his head had proposed: to go back to the very heart of the Estate so as to free Penny from the cell-block and then to go with her probably as far again or further through enemy territory to whatever other way-out there might be. It was mad.
‘Look,’ he hissed back, ‘couldn’t we hunt about ourselves and see if we can find somewhere to get out? We can’t be very far from Hampstead Road here. Or – or, as you have been wounded, shouldn’t we give ourselves up? We’d get more punishment, I suppose, but they wouldn’t shoot us.’
‘Give in? You can, chum. If you’re that spineless. But I’m going to get hold of Penny and get out of this place.’
He began heaving himself upright. There was a single gasp of pain as he put his weight on the leg torn by the shotgun pellets. But he remained standing and in a few moments swung round and blundered away into the darkness.
Mark hurried to catch him up. He felt ashamed, and he felt furious that he was ashamed.
Everywhere seemed deserted in the darkness – thank goodness for the Rev’s lights-out rule – and they were able to go at a reasonably good pace. There was no moon but the clouded sky was pale enough for it to be quite easy to find their way, using the outlines of the flats blocks as guides.
And, Mark soon realised, they were back on the route they had taken in that wild run from the execution place. He once more was flooded with admiration for the man limping and lurching just ahead.
Once, in the far distance, they heard the sound of a small party of marching men. But Brian Parkinson paid it no more attention than a momentary lift of the head.
And then they had the fuel-store prison under their eyes again, a low dark shape against the pale yellow brick of the nearest block. But, against that deeper darkness, a whitish blur stood out at head height and close to the door of Penny’s cell. At head height: a head. A guard.
So Penny would not have been able to make her own escape by continuing to work on the hole they had begun to make at the back of her cell. But neither could they get to her now.
Brian Parkinson motioned him back round the corner they had just passed.
‘Saw the glint of a gun,’ he whispered. ‘Have to clobber him.’
‘No. It’ll be impossible.’
But already he was lurching away, going the other way round the building that sheltered them.
He followed.
‘No, go back and watch him from where we were.’
Leaden with the belief that once more their necks were being run into a noose, he stationed himself where he could just make out some thirty yards distant the white blur of the guard’s face. Against his own cheeks where he stood close to the wall the bricks were harsh-surfaced as pumice-stone.
Ten full minutes went by. Had Brian Parkinson, heaving and limping, simply fallen down somewhere and lain where he was, unable to move?
But then there was a quick flurry of movement, a single muffled exclamation and the thud of two bodies falling heavily together. And silence again.
He ventured forward, peering into the dark till he was sore-eyed, careless of whether that tiny outbreak of noises had attracted attention elsewhere.
He was still unable to make out what the situation was in the confused huddle down on the ground by the cell door when he heard a blessedly familiar voice.
‘Got him with the old karate chop in the end. But I rather did for my leg.’
And, as he came up, Brian Parkinson pushed himself to his feet using the wall of the cell-block to rest against. Beside him the guard lay still and slumped.
‘Is he dead?’ Mark asked, abruptly and violently not wanting another victim to set beside Dr Satpathi.
‘No,’ Brian Parkinson answered, with a touch of scorn. ‘He won’t be worse than k.o.’d. Look, get Penny out, will you, and talk to her? I’m a bit dazed.’
Mark peered at him. His head was drooping and his injured leg hung uselessly. Would he be able to go on? No point in trying to answer that now.
He turned to the door of Penny’s cell and began wrestling with its bolts.
She was marvellously quick, once he had got the door open, to grasp what was happening and to take in Brian Parkinson’s plan.
‘Super,’ she whispered. ‘And it shouldn’t be too tricky, not with a bit of luck. There’s a wall you can get over. Just along there.’
‘A wall to get over?’
He looked at Brian Parkinson, still leaning where he was and taking no part in their talk.
‘It’s not very high or anything. It’s the way the lads get out when they want a bit of fun over Soho way. Peter Lillimass showed it me.’
‘Well, let’s try. If Brian can make it.’
‘I’ll make it.’
But it looked as if he would not. They had to stand either side of him with his arms over their shoulders and swing him along between them. It was a business that seemed to be terribly noisy. Mark felt his heart thumping as if it was trying to force its way out of his chest and his throat was so dry he had to keep his mouth wide open to get enough air.
Yet everywhere round stayed quiet as if there was no one at all living on the Estate. Nowhere was there a glimmer of light to be seen.
And what Penny had told him about how near the escape place was turned out to be no exaggeration. When she pointed to it, a wall not much more than five feet high at the end of a short alley between two empty blocks with a sprawling coil of barbed wire just visible on top, he felt that after all they might do it. There was such a splendid irony in Penny knowing about the place because Mr Lillimass’s son, whose insistence on courting her had turned her into a rebel, had broken Rule No. 1 Tenants are not to leave the bounds of the Estate, that he felt the plan had to work out.
It did.
‘You just lift that wire clear,’ Penny whispered.
They propped Brian Parkinson against a wall and did just that. Penny scrambled up and between them they managed to heave the bulky weight of the crusader soldier up and then over. No sudden dazzling searchlight beam blazed out. No shots came. No shouts.
In not much more
than two minutes they were all three standing on the far side. Ahead once more lay the way to Wimbledon. To Jasmine, dying but still within reach.
He took in a great breath of the night air.
Part Seven
The high silhouetted skeleton of the old Post Office Tower – it was not leaning as much out of true as the Tower of Pisa – which they had first seen in the morning not long before Penny had made her attempted break-out was just visible against the clouded sky to their left. Using it as a guide, Mark calculated they must be in a side-street leading down towards the wide east-west running Euston Road. In effect, he reckoned, he had gone off at a wide angle from his previous southward route and was now well to the west of it.
But it would make little difference. To get to Wimbledon and Jasmine – Jasmine lying, of course, of course, in the rather short bed with the flower-painted headboard of her childhood room, a bed on which once in their early days when Mrs Brilling had left to call in on her shop in Kingston they had made rapid and furtive love – to get to Jasmine lying in pain, Jasmine dying, Jasmine still alive buoyed up by Tommy’s medicine, the Thames had to be got over somewhere and to reach it crossing Oxford Street then going through Mayfair would be just as good as going more to the east through Soho. Probably it: would be better, he thought. What Penny had said about Peter Lillimass substantiated the rumours he had been brought by a particularly knowing boy, son of Murray Shilton, once owner of a North London chain of saunas, that, even despite the fighting, nearby Soho had never ceased to be a village of brothels and those displays of intercourse they had called ‘voys’.
Yes, there would be a good deal of sense in avoiding an area like that.
But what time was it? Time had got even more lost since that instant when those self-hypnotised killers had put their three reverberating shots into Dr Satpathi. Mild, sudden-sun smiling Dr Satpathi.
It must, by long-ago standards, be evening still. Late evening. A whole procession of dark hours lay ahead. But, yes, moonrise would be around four in the morning, and that should make travelling easier even if it stayed clouded over.
So, make a guess, it must be now about nine or nine-thirty by old clock-time. So till noon tomorrow meant fourteen or fifteen hours for Jasmine. It should be easy enough. Still easy enough.
‘Come on. We’d best get well clear.’
It was Penny, plainly elated with tongue-tip tasted freedom.
Together they got their shoulders under Brian Parkinson’s arms again and staggered with him down towards the faintly lighter sky over Euston Road. For a minute or two they waited there in a doorway at the corner, looking each way along what once had been the pounding traffic artery, the cars and buses of over-pressured London such a distant memory that it was almost hard to conceive what the deserted, still smooth stretch of tarmac had existed for. But there was no one in sight, just in the distance the outlines of a wrecked car-transporter and one or two other mouldering vehicles, and they humped their burden over towards the far side near what had been Great Portland Street Underground station.
‘Look, we’ll have to rest up,’ Penny said as soon as they reached the far pavement. ‘They won’t ever come looking this far for us, and he’s nearly out, Brian, you can feel it.’
It was true. His weight had grown heavier and deader with every step. There could be no question of going further with him.
He looked round. One of the corrugated sheets hammered over the window of a small shop a little further along had been ripped right away. The place had been a pharmacy, to judge by the battered banner along the top of its façade saying ‘Free Colour Films’, and chemists’ had always been prime targets for looters.
‘Have a look in there,’ he said to Penny. ‘But take care.’
He shifted his stance till he was able to take Brian Parkinson’s full weight and then stood in crouching silence in the chill while Penny made her exploration.
It did not take her long.
‘Dry and empty,’ she reported. ‘We could rest up in it for days.’
‘No.’
She looked at him.
‘I can’t stay,’ he explained. ‘I never got a chance to tell you, but I was on my way to Wimbledon. My wife’s there. She’s – I’m afraid she’s dying. She’ll be dead, I was told, by tomorrow afternoon.’
Penny’s reaction was quick. ‘And you got stuck in the Estate because of me? You might’ve been kept months.’
‘No, not because of you, if we’re to tell the truth. Because of Brian here.’
The deadweight body he was supporting made no protest, though he suspected that the wounded crusader could still hear them.
‘He got me into it,’ he added. ‘Even though it was the same thing in him that got both of us out.’
Then for a considerable time neither of them spoke again, too occupied with manoeuvring that slumped body into the shelter of the wrecked shop and with finding in the thick dark there the most comfortable place they could. But at last it was done.
‘Look, you must go now,’ Penny said.
In the blackness it was impossible to see anything of her.
‘Yes. Yes, I must. You’re sure you’ll be okay?’
‘I can look after myself.’
‘Yes. If anyone can, you can. Well, goodbye. And – and thank you.’
‘I should be thanking you. Free of that place. It was all right for some, fine for them. Safe. My mum and dad liked it, and they’re not evil. But …’
‘But you couldn’t have stood it, any more than I could have, even if there’d been no question of them shooting Dr Satpathi,’ he said, discovering it as the words came. ‘I’m more like Brian than I thought. You’ll be okay with him? He’s breathing perfectly well.’
‘Yes. Yes, I will. And now, go.’
‘Yes, yes. Well, goodbye.’
‘Goodbye.’
In the dark he groped for her hand, found her arm, pressed it, deriving a spurt of encouragement from the mere feel of the resilient flesh under her jersey, turned and felt his way out into the cold and the dim light.
Penny would be all right. She had the spring in her. But Jasmine would not be all right. In fourteen hours’ time she would be on the point of death.
‘Wife, wife, bane of my life.’
It had been a mutter out loud this time.
From his memories of the streets in the area he decided his quickest course would be to go along Marylebone Road as far as the little crescent at the top of Portland Place and then go down that till he came to Oxford Circus. It had the advantage of being a route he knew well, or had known. He had walked it often in the old days when walking was unfashionable, visiting the Schools Broadcasting department of the B.B.C. for whom he had once done some writing. Even in this light – there was no sign of a break in the cloud layer – he ought to be able to make reasonably fast progress that way. Fast enough, surely.
But what would be best of all would be a bicycle. A bicycle left carelessly for him to steal.
He smiled. Inhibitions which he had retained in all the years up at Highgate, in that little insulated world inside which he had succeeded in hiding himself, had vanished. He had become resourceful. Like the hare who had discovered in himself enough wiliness to trick the jackal in Dr Satpathi’s story.
Sack-slumped dead Dr Satpathi.
Who had left his legacy.
He walked steadily along, keeping his left foot close against the kerb so as not to stray in the darkness.
And soon, just as his foot told him that the turn into the crescent was opening up, he recognised against the sky the magnificent sweep of the tall colonnaded Nash buildings. He remembered them being restored a long time ago, well before the First Riots. Had all that effort been worth it, seen in the light of today’s jungle life? And the cost? There had been money to spare then, or so it had seemed. An excess of money, an excess of energy, a creaming of civilisation. But all that had gone. Been eroded and then completely swept away, here at least. Would it ever return?
Perhaps it would, with the years. But should it return? That was another question. Hadn’t it really been too rich? Too ambitious? Shouldn’t cream be mixed into the milk?
He grinned to himself at the neatness of the metaphor. But recognised that neat metaphor-making was a way of avoiding a proper answer. Perhaps he would find that, when he was less tired, if ever he was less tired.
At least the crescent was intact, so far as he could see. The area supposedly blasted by the rocket and artillery battle in Oxford Street – if that had happened at all – must not have extended this far north.
Perhaps then at some distant day these houses would be properly inhabited again. Not so many grandiloquent headquarters for grandiloquent public and industrial bodies, but proper houses. Perhaps.
He stopped short.
In the dark mass of vegetation that had once been the semicircular, railing-protected garden in the bowl of the crescent something had stirred in the silence. He stood where he was. Listening. It had sounded like an animal, an animal scuffling in the close-matted grass and bushes. A dog? Probably a dog. Or even two or three.
At last, when the sounds appeared completely to have died away, he moved on. But how many halts, trivial halts of this sort, could he afford now? There was still a long way to go. And not a lot of time to spare.
Another two or three minutes of cautious forward movement, slow but not to be improved on, and he located the start of Portland Place at the bottom of the crescent, leading down to Broadcasting House on the left and twisting into Upper Regent Street then, with Oxford Circus only some hundred yards – had it been only a hundred yards? – further on.
He went, careful half-step by careful half-step in the darkness, out into the middle of the roadway, finding that he could now judge his position by the blacker shapes of the tall buildings on either side – one of them further on had been the Chinese Embassy once – and then he set off forwards again, cursing his slowness at every ineffective pace but unable under the cloud canopy to go any faster.
Almost at once he got into trouble. His thrusting right foot encountered a sharp hard edge at shin level and he tumbled straight over. The obstacle had seemed to be about kerb-high, and when he had sat himself up and had had time to feel about he realised that a kerb was exactly what it was. A kerb in the middle of the roadway. There must be some sort of narrow island all down the centre of the wide street. He had forgotten its existence, if he had ever really noticed it in the days when the roadway had been full of cars, taxis and vans.
A Long Walk to Wimbledon Page 11