Dreams of Leaving (70 page)

Pelting Day – a village custom, supposedly dating back to the Middle Ages. Every year, at the beginning of December, the police of New Egypt held a lottery to determine which of them were to be subjected to the rigours of pelting. Only the Chief Inspector could claim exemption. Three days before Christmas the three officers who had drawn the unlucky numbers were marched down the hill to the village green. Tradition demanded that they looked impeccable: full dress uniform, combed hair, boots polished to a high gloss. A jeering crowd assembled at the foot of the hill to greet them. Children capered around in masks, chanting rhymes. Then the serious business of the day began. A fourth policeman secured his three colleagues in the stocks. And there they remained for at least an hour while they were pelted with ripe tomatoes, raw eggs, rotten fruit, anything that came to hand, provided, of course, that it was soft and unpleasant.

During his lifetime Peach had seen various people abuse the spirit of Pelting Day. Tommy Dane, for one. Teeth vengefully pinned to his bottom
lip, arm springy as a whip, Tommy had pelted PC Bonefield with hard-boiled eggs, light-bulbs and lumps of coal. ‘You little devil,' Peach could still hear Bonefield screaming, ‘I'll get you.' ‘Come on then,' Tommy had said, cool as you please. And let fly with a handful of manure. Poor Bonefield had trailed home that evening with two black eyes and a chipped incisor (for which he was reimbursed from the New Egypt Police Fund). As always, Tommy Dane had taken things a little too far. In recent years, however, things had gone to the other extreme. Pelting Day had lost its appeal, its popularity. Hardly anyone bothered to come any more. 1979 had been a fiasco. When the three chosen policemen had arrived at the bottom of the hill they found the place deserted. No jeering crowd. Nobody at all, in fact. They were placed in the stocks as usual. And then they waited. After a while two small boys appeared. One of them had an orange in his hand but, instead of hurling it at a policeman, he peeled it and ate it. ‘I don't like that game,' the boy had told the inquisitive Peach. ‘It's boring.' Shortly afterwards they left.

1980 could well be just as laughable. With Dinwoodie dead (he had always pelted with extraordinary vigour), Highness still confined to his bed and Mustoe an alcoholic, the village had shrunk further into itself. The members of the younger generation, from whom a little spunk might have been expected, seemed even more listless than their parents. They watched TV. They slept a lot. They behaved like old people. The eighties promised nothing but bleakness.

Now Peach disliked Pelting Day intensely – the whole idea of an organised and legitimate assault on police dignity was offensive to him – and he longed to abolish it but, at the same time, he understood its value. It allowed the villagers to let off steam in a relatively harmless way. It helped to create order in the community. And it was good PR. He couldn't afford to let the tradition die out. So, this year, he found himself in the curious and uncomfortable position of having to breathe life into something that he would much rather have seen dead.

He proposed two innovations: firstly, that one of the three policemen to be pelted would now be selected by a special committee of people from the village, and secondly, that Pelting Day would become the setting for a winter fair with the ritual of pelting as its jewel. He set up a sort of think-tank to generate ideas. It comprised PC Wilmott, Brenda Gunn, Joel Mustoe Junior and, of course, himself. The meetings went surprisingly well considering. In part this may have stemmed from Peach's preoccupation with other matters (he wasn't his usual acid domineering self, he was too busy trying to think of ways to kill Moses). In part, too, this may simply have reflected the wisdom and judgment he had shown in
selecting the members of the committee. The only moments of friction occurred during the third meeting. Not, as you might expect, between the police and the villagers, but between Mustoe and Brenda Gunn. Mustoe had challenged Brenda's suggestion that the police should finance the mulled-wine stall.

Mustoe said, ‘Why should the police pay for it?'

‘Why shouldn't they?' Brenda snapped. ‘Pelting Day is organised by the police. It's a police tradition. It's obvious they should pay for it,' each point accompanied by a brisk emphatic slap on the table.

Peach could only hear them dimly. There was a chainsaw in his mind. A deafening howl as it bit into the black side-door of The Bunker.

‘Exactly,' Mustoe was saying.
‘They
organise it. They've
done
their bit. Now it's our turn.'

‘Oh, don't be a ninny.'

‘They organise it,' Mustoe went on, ‘because we can't. Or won't. Nobody here does anything except complain, get drunk and kill themselves. Sometimes this village really makes me sick.'

‘Welcome to the club,' Brenda sneered.

‘And that includes you, Mrs Gunn. Why don't you kill yourself too? Might as well, really, mightn't you?'

Brenda leaned back, hands flat on the table. ‘Strikes me,' she said, ‘that we've got three police officers sitting at this table.'

Mustoe bridled. ‘What do you mean by that?'

‘I mean that you, Mr bloody Mustoe Junior, are behaving like a bloody policeman.'

‘Brenda,' PC Wilmott was attempting conciliation, ‘I don't think you're being very constructive.'

‘
Constructive?
Who the hell're you to talk? All you've been doing all week is polishing Peach's boots with your face.' Brenda leaned over the table on her man's forearms – solid marble pillars resting on the twin plinths of her fists.

Wilmott's shiny face reddened.

Up until that point Peach had been plunged deep into a world of nightclubs and murder. He had been doodling on his notepad. Sketches of nooses, knives, garottes, guillotines, machine-guns. A rack here, a bazooka there (if only he could get hold of one of those!). Injunctions printed in hostile black block capitals: KILL, THROTTLE, GAS, ANNIHILATE And several onomatopoeic representations of the noises people make when they're dying. AAAARRRRGGGGHHHH, for instance. MMMPPPFFFF And GLOPGLOPGLOPGLOPGLOP (blood pumping out of a slashed throat). But, despite the carnage going on in his mind, he had
been listening with one ear. When Brenda turned on Wilmott, he heaved himself into the fray.

‘The police will pay for the mulled wine,' he declared. (At that moment he couldn't have cared less who paid for the bloody mulled wine. If this year was anything like last year it wouldn't cost much anyway. How much mulled wine could half a dozen New Egyptians drink?) ‘Happy, Brenda?'

Brenda was breathing hard through her nostrils. Still glaring at Wilmott, she sat down.

The meeting concluded with a discussion of the feasibility of donkey-rides. Peach returned to his own rather more violent speculations.

By the end of the first week in December they had come up with a sufficient number of ideas. Peach disbanded the committee. Brenda Gunn and Mustoe Junior, working in conjunction with Sergeant Dolphin and a handful of constables, were put in charge of implementation.

‘Leave it to me, sir,' Dolphin said. ‘There'll be no fiasco this year, I promise you.'

‘That,' Peach sighed, ‘remains to be seen.'

*

‘Are you ready, dear?'

The gilt mirror on the hall wall showed Hilda in the foreground tying her headscarf and Peach waiting in the shadows by the front door, where the coats hung.

‘I'm ready,' he said.

She dabbed her nose, her cheeks, her chin – final nervous touches with the powder-puff – then snapped her compact shut. She was wearing the wool suit she kept for special occasions. A muted shade of burgundy. It brings my colour out, she was fond of saying.

They walked down Magnolia Close towards the village green.

‘Pelting Day,' she sighed. ‘It only seems like yesterday – ' Since the last one, she meant.

He murmured agreement.

When they reached the grass, he gave her his arm. He looked about him. A cool clear afternoon. A bone-china sky, the most fragile of blues. Wood-smoke in the air. The damp turf blackening the tips of Hilda's shoes. She held herself very upright as she walked, braced almost, as if she was facing into a stiff breeze, as if she expected life to jostle her. But it wasn't that, Peach knew. It was anticipation.

‘Oh, look,' she cried. ‘A bonfire.'

He had told her nothing of the plans for Pelting Day this year. Had he
wanted to surprise her, or had he simply not bothered? He so rarely surprised her with anything these days. He could blame it on his age or the pressures of work. Other men did. But he knew that wasn't it. If he was honest he had to admit that it was pure negligence. A scaling down of gifts and attention. And Hilda's expectations falling too, settling. Like dust after a building's been razed to the ground. He turned to look at her. His vision dissected her. He saw wide eyes, a parted mouth, the struts in her neck. An almost girlish excitement. A brittle pitiful delight. He thought her reactions exaggerated, and felt guilty for thinking so. Once it would have seemed natural. Now it bordered on the grotesque. His fault, really. He did so little for her. He
felt
so little. At times he had to cajole himself into feeling anything at all. His love for her seemed to have fallen to bits like one of those joke cars. Touch the door and the door drops off. Whoops, there goes a wheel. Ha ha ha. He wanted suddenly to reassemble it. But that would take time. Time spent together. After he had killed Moses, perhaps he would retire.

A child scuttled out of the shadows, scattered his thoughts. The child wore a mask. An old man's wrinkled face, a bald head, wisps of stiff white hair. Young eyes glittering beneath. This travesty pointed a finger at him and chanted:

Peach, Peach,

Down to the beach
,

Drown in the sea
,

Then we'll be free.

Then ran away sniggering.

Peach stood still. His lower lip moved in and out.

‘You mustn't take it so seriously, dear,' Hilda said. ‘It's only Pelting Day.'

Her voice, intended as a balm, had no effect.

The bonfire threw great pleading arms into the darkening sky. The damp wood hawked and spat. Strapped to a chair on the peak of the fire sat the effigy of a policeman. One of the old APRs. They watched the straw face catch. It blazed, turned black. They moved on.

The area between the fire and the eastern edge of the green bustled with stalls and sideshows. There were coconut-shies (the coconuts wore tiny blue helmets), bran tubs, dart-throwing contests, donkey-rides, hoop-la (very difficult to ring the policemen on account of the size of their boots), trestle-tables loaded with homemade pickles and preserves, a mulled-wine tent (run by Mustoe Junior), a GUESS THE WEIGHT OF THE CHIEF
INSPECTOR AND WIN A SURPRISE GIFT competition (‘Thirty-five stone,' Peach heard somebody say as he went by. Very funny), and a palm-reader (Mrs Latter from the post office, her face caked in lurid make-up).

‘It's marvellous,' Hilda cried. ‘You
have
done well, darling.'

He nodded. The unstable orange light of the fire made everyone look predatory, fiendish, medieval. The laughter, the smoke, the gaiety, exhausted him. He hated surrendering control like this.

They had reached the clearing in front of the pub. The stocks stood there as they had stood for centuries. Lanterns hung from poles. Garlands of coloured bulbs had been draped around the trees. The Pelting Day Illuminations.

‘So who's in for it this year?' Hilda asked in a whisper.

He had no time to answer. A roar went up. Somebody had glimpsed a movement on the hill. A suggestion of blue in the darkness. A wink of a silver button.

‘
They're coming! They're coming!'

People pressed towards the stocks from all directions. The Peaches were jostled, pinned from behind by the expanding crowd. Three policemen, accompanied by Sergeant Caution, arrived in the lit arena. Wolf-whistles, cat-calls, applause. Marlpit had drawn one of the unlucky numbers. Poor Marlpit. His eyes twitched in their sockets and dribble glistened on his quivering chin. Wragge trailed behind him, skin white like the inside of potatoes. Peach was rather glad that Wragge was going to be pelted; the boy needed taking down a peg or two. When invited to choose a third policeman, the villagers had settled on Sergeant Hazard. Unanimous decision, apparently. And a popular one, too. Everybody feared and hated Sergeant Hazard. He had terrorised the village for years. Only a month ago he had carried out another of his infamous (and unauthorised) dawn raids, this time on Mr Cawthorne, the postman.

Peach remembered Hazard's report, delivered with brutal frankness and meticulous attention to detail in the privacy of Peach's office:

‘I kicked Cawthorne's door down at precisely five a.m. on the morning of November 19th,' Hazard began. ‘Cawthorne appeared at the top of the stairs in his dressing-gown and slippers. He seemed frightened. “Who's that?” he called out. “Come down here and find out,” I replied.' Hazard chuckled, scratched the side of his great dented face. He enjoyed his work, no question of that. ‘I stamped on his radiogram, just to hurry him up a bit. Cawthorne shuffled downstairs. His face was greenish-grey, the colour of guilt, if you know what I mean, sir. “What are you doing in my house?” he asked me. I hit him in the mouth. Then, on second thoughts, I felled him with a chopped right hand to the kidneys.' Hazard repeated the punch
for Peach's benefit. The air gasped. ‘I watched him groaning for a while. He had resoled his slippers with pieces of green carpet, I noticed. The cheap bastard. I went and stood over him. I pointed at him. “I suspect you,” I shouted, “of harbouring plans to escape.” “On what grounds?” the bastard said. “On what grounds?” I said. “I'll give you on what grounds.” I stepped on his hand and twisted my boot. Like I was crushing out a cigarette, sir. He screamed. “That's
confidential,”
I said, “isn't it, Mr Cawthorne?” “Yes,” he whimpered. “That's better,” I said. “Now then, I think I'll just have a quick look round, if you don't mind.”' The ‘quick look round' had lasted almost two hours, resulting in further damage both to the postman and to the postman's house.