Binscombe Tales - The Complete Series (12 page)

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‘Look out, he’s here again!’

‘Avoid his eye and keep talking.’

‘Too late—he’s seen me.’

‘It’s another late night for us then.’

‘Don’t bet on it.’

‘Here he is.’

‘Mr Disvan and Mr Oakley, how are you?’

‘Very well thank you, Bob.’

‘Would you like a drink, gentlemen?’

‘Not if it obliges us to chaperon you home again, thank you all the same.’

My pre-conceived, perhaps somewhat harsh response earned me one of Disvan’s rare full-face stares. His expression was, as ever, inscrutable and the meaning of these admonitions or questions or whatever they were had to be guessed from the context of the occasion. In present circumstances I took it to signify some surprise on his part at my uncharacteristic lack of charity.

I’d observed before the surprising power of these visual shots across-the-bow upon the locals but was even more surprised to find an urgent desire to appease evoked in myself by the same means. Did this imply that I, a foreigner in their terms, and an ‘educated’ man to boot, was becoming subject to the tribal mores of Binscombe?.

‘I’m sorry, that wasn’t really called for. It’s just that... well, I don’t want to be late home tonight.’

‘That’s all right, I understand,’ he said in a voice that was indeed full of sad understanding. ‘Mind if I join you?’

‘No, please do.’

He sat down and toyed absently with one of the empty beer bottles on the table.

‘Of course,’ he then said abruptly, ‘Mr Disvan says I’m a fool to live in such fear but then again, with all respect, he’s not had to suffer what I’ve suffered.’

‘I think that that’s irrelevant,’ said Disvan.

‘Many things in this world are irrelevant or illogical but are still powerful forces nevertheless.’

An attempt at profundity was the last thing I was expecting from a man of such surpassing anonymity, and I felt a spark of revived interest in what he was obviously bursting to tell.

‘That’s very true,’ I said.

Springer perhaps mistook interest for sympathy and turned to me as if to an ally.

‘Mr Disvan says that, having been caught once, I’m in no further danger, but that’s easy for him to say and besides, how can he be sure?’

‘Now, now, Bob,’ said the man in question, ‘you know me better than that. I don’t say things for effect and I wouldn’t state things of which I’m not sure.’

‘No doubt what you say is true, Mr Disvan, but I can’t help my fear.’

Successfully hooked at last I could not forbear to indulge my curiosity. ‘Fear of whom?’

Springer looked at Disvan in a querying manner and he, by way of reply, merely shrugged. This seemed to answer whatever doubt held him back and the old man could then unload his burden.

‘Fear of the person or thing that took forty years of my life.’

‘Who was that?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You mean someone took forty years of your life but you don’t know their name?’

‘No, he never told me it—not in all that time. His name’s not all that important.’

‘No?’

‘No, not really.’

‘Well, how were all those years stolen from you, then?’

‘By holding me captive so that the active years of my life passed me by and were wasted in nothingness.’

‘That’s very serious. Who was responsible, then? The state?’

‘Certainly not, I’ve never ever been in trouble with the law.’

‘Some person, then...’

‘In a manner of speaking.’

I sighed, being somewhat exasperated, and tried another approach. ‘Well, where were you held prisoner then?’

‘At the bus stop.’

My initial response was one of anger at being so obviously taken for a fool but this was soon overridden by the transparent sincerity of the old man’s face. Nevertheless my response was still rich with sarcasm. ‘You were imprisoned for forty years at a bus stop, were you?’

‘Not any bus stop; the bus stop on the way to my house. But essentially, yes, that’s correct.’

‘If that’s so, I ask once again: who by?’

‘By the creature that waits there.’

‘And that’s the reason you won’t pass by it on your own?’

‘Exactly. He might see me and make me wait with him again.’

‘But if you’re with other people that can’t happen?’

‘I’m not sure but it seems a lot less likely.’

‘Explain this to me.’

‘What’s to tell? I’ve told you it all.’

‘It’s not much of a tale for an event of forty years duration.’

‘Time itself means very little. What is there to say of an accountant’s life even if he lives to be a hundred? Nothing very much happened to me in those forty years so there’s nothing much to recount.’

‘Go on, Bob,’ said Disvan, ‘you ought to tell him the full story.’

Springer took this in and then turned to address me. ‘Do you want that?  Do you genuinely want to understand why I am as I am?’

‘Yes,’ I replied in all truthfulness. ‘Tell me how you were deprived of the days of your youth.’

‘My youth?’ He chewed upon that bitter notion before continuing. ‘Yes, that’s what I lost, I suppose—and my young manhood and early middle age as well. I was only in my twenties when I was captured, you see.’

‘How did it occur?’

‘On a ordinary day, or evening to be more precise. I was going to get a bus into Goldenford to see a movie; on my own as usual. It was about sevenish. I was done up to the nines and I can remember very clearly that the sun was almost down and it was drizzling. The shelter wasn’t there in those days, just the stop and the bench set back from the road, and I recall getting quite wet and feeling miserable.

‘Then, just a few moments before the bus would arrive—for you could trust the timetables then—I heard a voice call me by name. That surprised me because I’d thought I was alone but when I turned round I could see that there was an old man sitting on the seat and he was beckoning me. There didn’t seem to be anything really amiss although I felt sure there’d been no-one on the seat when I’d arrived. Even so I put that out of my mind for I very often travelled from that stop and consequently felt pretty much at ease there.

‘ “How can I help you?” I said, going up close to the person who’d spoken to me. It was nearly dark by that time, you see, and all I could make out was the outline of the old boy.

‘ “You can wait with me,” he said back.

‘Well, I didn’t like his tone at all. It sounded very bitter, vicious almost, but I was an obliging sort of young man, very reluctant to give offence (more fool me) and so I said, “Very well,” and sat down beside him.

‘ “Do I know you?” I enquired, for he’d approached me by name.

‘ “No,” he said, “but I know you.”

‘ “How so?”

‘ “Because I’ve often seen you here.”

‘Well, he sounded so nasty and unfriendly that I let it go at that and we waited on in silence.’

‘Till when?’

‘Till the bus arrived, Mr Oakley. Then by the light the bus gave out I saw that it was no man I was sitting alongside, leastways it may have been a man once but no longer. Horrible it was, pink and shrivelled and hairless and the skin on its face was taut and shiny. I could see its bared teeth and empty eye-sockets and it said:

‘ “You can wait with me.”

‘As you might imagine, I screamed and went to make a run for it but found I couldn’t. No noise came from my lips and I remained rooted to my seat next to that… thing.’

‘What about the bus?’

‘That was almost the worst bit. The buses always stopped you see, just to check there was no-one waiting on the bench which was usually in shadow. I stared straight at the driver and, as I thought, he looked straight back at me. I even, in my distress, waved my arms at him but then he just turned his head and drove off. I realised then that, the Lord have mercy on me, I was no longer visible to the world of men.

‘I watched, with a yearning I can’t convey to you, the lights of the bus go off into the distance and the thing beside me chuckled—the sort of laugh cruel children make. And that’s when it all began.’

‘For forty solid years?’

‘Almost, but not quite, to the day. Buses came and went—with decreasing frequency as the years went by I might add. Queues formed and then boarded, day succeeded day and season succeeded season, but still I was held there.’

‘But what about food and drink, what about winter weather, cramp and things of that nature?’

‘I never seemed to be hungry or thirsty, the cold and wind passed around me and whatever happened in the real world appeared not to be applicable to me. All I was allowed to do was wait. Wait with that foul creature.’

‘That’s appalling!’

‘You can’t imagine how appalling. Please don’t get the impression that I didn’t try to save myself because for the first few weeks I did little else. Every bus that arrived I begged and pleaded to be allowed to board it and every queue that formed I shouted and waved at but, all in all, I might just as well as saved my breath. People I’d grown up with waited just a few feet away, some even sat on the seat with us, but none of them could see or hear me.

‘Once my dear mother, God rest her soul, came there and waited for a bus and I nearly went berserk trying to catch her attention. She seemed to realise something was wrong for she got fidgety and uneasy and kept looking round for whatever it was that was disturbing her, but when she did she looked straight through me.

‘Eventually her bus came and she got on and once she was sitting down she stared at the bench as if she knew her son was sitting there and she continued to look as the bus drew away.

‘That was very bitter. I never saw her again, for I later found out that she died soon after.

‘How that creature laughed to see my tears that day and his every laugh sounded like the death of a baby on Christmas Eve. In my fury and horror I struck him but his flesh burned like acid and where I’d touched him my skin smoked. Look, the scars still show.’

It was true. A wide band of skin across each of his knuckles was brownish, twisted and quite dead.

‘After that experience it was hard to imagine anything worse happening and so, after a fashion, I resigned myself to my fate. Still I asked to board each bus that came but the creature would just snap ‘No!’ in its nasty voice and that was that.

‘With the passing of the years I grew to be almost philosophical about my predicament and took pleasure in watching the leaves on the trees change colour and all the other slow annual mutations in the rest of nature, for that was something I’d never had the time for up to then. Bit by bit I observed different buses come into service, all efficient and new, and then see them pass through their working lives till their engines were crotchety and their livery battleworn. Watching the changes in people’s fashions was interesting too, spring clothes, winter clothes and then back to spring again and new styles kept appearing as well. Quite fascinating really, if you’ve got nothing else to do.