Breaktime (8 page)

He stood up too and leaned back against the wall. He felt an impulsive desire to probe her presence with him now, to hear her reason it. He knew before he spoke that his question was a mistimed curiosity. But could not help himself.

‘Just tell me one thing before you go.’

She looked at him, her face still betraying the feelings their conversation had revived. But he could not hold back.

‘Why did you send that letter and your photograph?’

‘Ask no questions and you’ll get no lies,’ she said. ‘But if it bothers you—’

She turned and all but ran from the castle.

‘Helen!’ he called.

But she did not stop; and he did not follow.

He pressed his back against the wall. Hard. Bruising stone on brittle bone. Till it hurt. Sharp, clean pain.

His eyes guarded the castle gate against her return. (She
must
return.) While his mind picked himself to pieces.

Fool. Idiot. Clod. There is about you an instinct to disruption. I have noticed it before, often. I could list a number of such occasions but it would be tiresome. Cloth-head. Why don’t you just shut up sometimes. You like to get something going nicely
and
then upset it. You have few talents but your skill in this is consummate. Like a small child building sandcastles and then smashing them down because the sea might get them. You pole-axed or something. What chance again. Stupy. Why. To stop anything coming too close. Is that it. Afraid to be known. To be vulnerable. It’s so. Admit. Foolarse. Afraid what you’ll learn about yourself. True. It is. Pity ’tis. Twit.

Unthought conclusions sent him sprinting from the castle, belongings left abandoned by the wall.

In the market place he stopped. The Reeth bus was there by the cross, its engine running.

He reached it, panting, searched the windows in panicky haste for Helen’s face. He found her in the middle of the farther side, sitting on the inner seat, a solid farmwife between her and the window. She was staring straight ahead, her face impassive, but tears coursing her cheeks. He knew she knew he was there, agitated in the road. He reached up and placed both hands flat against the window. ‘Helen!’ he called and slapped the glass with his hands. The farmwife turned a fierce, embarrassed face to him. ‘Helen!’ he called again. But she would not look. The bus door closed, the engine revved, pumping exhaust about his feet. He scrabbled in his anorak pocket, found a ballpoint pen, the slip of paper they had given him at Walter Willson’s checkout. The bus’s brakes blew off; he heard, as he scribbled, the gear engage. Licked the slip of paper across his writing, slapped it on to the window just as the bus accelerated away.

He had scrawled one word.

Interlude

I’ve had enough for a while. Am in need of light relief. Anyway, there is now a passage of time between Helen’s departure and my next encounter. I did nothing after she left but mope about the place, mentally and emotionally flagellating myself. I have no intention of going through all that again here. It is so embarrassing. So please take it that this space covers the intervening three hours. Use your own imagination to fill in the details. Why do I have to do all the work!

Telephone Call

Hello?

Hi, Mum, it’s me.

Hello, love
.

How is he?

Not so hot, love. How are you?

I’m fine. Is he worse?

I don’t know. They don’t tell you anything
.

They must say something, Ma.

O, they say don’t worry and he’s as well as can be expected. But what does that mean to anybody?

Should I try and telephone him?

I shouldn’t, dear
.

Why not?

It would only upset him
.

Why? How could it upset him? I’d have thought he’d be pleased to hear me.

He’d be pleased to see you
.

But he can’t, can he? He can talk to me though.

That’s just it, dear. Your dad thinks you should have stayed at home with me, you know. It would upset him to talk to you on the phone. And that would only make him worse
.

He might get another attack
.

Another attack would kill him
.

Do you want me to come home now?

I’ll manage, it’s all right
.

But do you want me to come home?

You’re there now, love, you might as well do what you went to do
.

I’ll come if you want.

Ring in the morning. He’s low but he’s not on the danger list. He’ll be all right
.

Goodnight, love
.

Goodnight, Ma.

Downer

Six-fifteen: Ditto is in the public bar of the Bishop Blaize. By six-thirty he has downed two pints of best bitter and is staring at his half-consumed third. Never in his life has he consumed so much alcohol so quickly. A sharp-pained headache is brewing across the left side of his skull. With fierce concentration he tries to deal with a confusion of conflicting emotions.

He feels guilty at leaving his father and mother for a less than necessary purpose. He is annoyed at himself for feeling guilty, an annoyance compounded by anger at allowing guilt to oppress him. Helen’s rupturing departure adds anxiety to this recipe for depression; and frustration. If she maintains her disaffection, his journey is wasted and his desertion of home and parents a squandered ordeal.

Of course, this self-scourging is accompanied by a chorus of conditional justifications.
If
his father had not been so provocative, he would never have suffered his heart attack in the first place. But, Ditto knew, whatever the cause of the trouble, a break would have happened between them sometime anyway. After all, he had to gain his independence somehow. Etc., etc.

The concatenation is universally scripted from an early age; why torture us all by rehearsing it again here?

What disturbs Ditto most of all as he glowers at his beer through inexperienced boozer’s wet eyes, is an undercurrent to his storming emotions, the meaning of which he cannot yet be certain about. In that calm centre where our sanity takes refuge at such times, he wonders if it is fear that his father will die while he, Ditto, is nefariously absent from the family hearth that gives him greatest distress? Or is it something less reprehensible?

(In his present self-abnegatory mood, he will not acknowledge himself able to feel anything honest and noble. But between mental brackets he toys for a moment with the prospect that this gripping undercurrent, the real engine of his turbulent feelings, is a grieving love for the man who lies now drugged to unconsciousness in a starched hospital bed attached to bottled life by plastic tubes. But the thought is unbearable and he slams closing brackets across the words.)

At which moment, six-fifty-three precisely, enter in high-stepping temper the awaited pals.

‘Kiddo has turned to drink,’ says Jacky.

‘So we can down him,’ says Robby. ‘I’m glad you smirk, drummer boy, and glad to find you raring at the ready for our evening’s adventure.’

‘We’ll just have a pint or two before we go,’ says Jack.

‘If we must,’ says Robby. ‘Though kiddo looks as if he’s had enough already.’

‘Get stuffed,’ says Ditto, sour from his thoughts and his beer.

‘I just have,’ says Robby, ‘and even I need time to revitalize my vitals, as it were.’

He sits at Ditto’s side, patting his arm, which Ditto draws away.

‘Fear not,’ says Robby, ‘there is no danger.’

They wait, silent, till Jack has placed three pints on the table and sat down facing them.

‘Our friend,’ says Robby to Jack, ‘is on a downer. I recognize the symptoms. And know the remedy.’

‘A good stiff drink is what he needs,’ says Jack.

‘No, no. Adrenalin. That’s what he needs. The smack we manufacture for ourselves without aid from doctors and other pill pushers.’

‘Stop nattering and sup your beer,’ says Jack.

‘One last word, executioner. I’ll lay you both a bet—nay, will lay you both if you like—our adventure tonight will revive kiddo’s flagging spirits a treat. You still game?’

The question is unavoidable.

‘Maybe,’ says Ditto, not without difficulty. ‘Depends what you want to do.’

‘Don’t toy with your glass then,’ says Robby, ‘and look at me when I’m speaking to you.’

Ditto cannot help an involuntary glance and an unwilling smile.

‘Ah, so it’s the old gags you like best! We have vays of making you vile,’ says Robby, his laughter infectious. ‘As for this evening, dear friends: we begin with a public meeting, after which—doubt it not—you will be only too happy to engage in the titillatious romp I have in mind, a mystery escapade, an assault upon the bastion of boredom, an attack on high-toned hypocrisy, an antic night of convention breaking.’

‘You’re a right windbag when you try,’ says Jack, drains his glass and stands. ‘Come on then, Sunshine, one more before the fray, then we’ll be off.’

Party: Political

Seven twenty-six. The market hall. Stale with aftertaste of festering vegetables. A cavernous hangar with concrete floor, windows high under iron-strutted roof-without-ceiling. An assortment of stackable chairs laid out in melancholy rows. A gaggle of forty-or-so people scattered about, leaving the first two rows and six ranks at the back yawningly empty. Down one wall, three trestle tables, scarred and bruised from their more usual market duties, bearing cups on saucers, plates of plain
biscuits,
bottles of milk, bowls of sugar, and a tea urn, all attended by a balloon-bosomed daleslady in blue print dress. At the front, another trestle table, this time its market-worn skeleton shrouded in a motheaten green velvet covering. Two chairs behind. Pinned, botchily, to the front of the covering a poster, wrinkled with crumple-creases:
GET GOING WITH LABOUR
.

Enter the three escapaders.

‘I hope you are going to behave yourself tonight, young man,’ says a voice from behind. A cockerel of a fellow peers at Robby, a knotty, tweed-jacketed, open-neck shirted man with a toothbrush moustache. A man with a mission, a belligerent in the Great Battle.

‘Why, comrade,’ says Robby in mocking astonishment, ‘we can assure you categorically that at this time we have no intention of disruptin’ the deliberations, though I must take this opportunity to warn you that we reserve our constitutional right to engage in legitimate dissent if we feel it necessary and any attempt to prevent us exercisin’ our democratic rights will effect consequences for which we cannot be ’eld responsible.’

‘Look, laddie,’ says the man, ‘don’t get cheeky with me. I don’t give a damn who your father is, if you start messing about, out you’ll go—along with your poncey pals.’

He pushes our three friends aside and parades down the aisle to a seat in the first occupied row, where with nods and thumb-jabbings and animated mutterings, head turnings and hitchings of his body-bulging jacket, he indicates to his companions the presence of (and, no doubt, his recent exchange with) Robby, who, during this pantomime, seats himself in the empty back row, Jacky on his one side, Ditto on the other.

As soon as I sat down I knew I was not normal. Since leaving the pub I had felt like an arthritic marionette. Stiff but unable to stand unaided. My headache, during the two-minute walk supported on either side by my companions from the pub to the market hall, had gone from volcanic eruption to flushing soda-syphon. In my inside, I wanted to be sick; on my outside, I was
uncannily
aware, my face wore a popeyed grin. I did not know where I was being taken, nor by now did I care.

‘Why are you fetching me to the dungeons?’ I said as we entered the hall, for so it seemed.

An exchange took place between Robby and a cantankerous custodian. I listened and understood their conversation entirely.

‘We must behave ourselves and damn our fathers or he will mess us about,’ I said earnestly to Robby when we were seated and I had recovered from not having to stand up.

‘That’s about it, kiddo,’ he said and patted my knee.

I considered the room carefully.

‘Why are we attending a prayer meeting?’ I asked.

But received no reply.

‘Or is everybody sleeping?’

‘Dreaming,’ said Robby. ‘Wakers asleep. No more.’

‘Someone should tell them,’ I said.

‘I doubt if they’d listen.’

‘He’s never that tight on five pints,’ said Jack.

‘Who?’ I asked, leaning across Robby to hear Jack’s reply.

‘Never mind, Sunshine,’ he said. ‘We’ll look after you.’

Robby pushed me back up straight in my chair.

Two men appeared at the table in front of the serried rows. One sat. The other stood. The seated one disturbed me. I felt I knew him. The face: features of it instantly recognizable, other parts unknown. A disturbing visual cacophony.

‘Comrades,’ the standing man said in a gravel voice. Tall, balding, mush-faced, prunesqualler. ‘Our guest this evening needs no introduction. We all know of his many achievements and of his commitment to the working class struggle.’