Enchantment (19 page)

Helen wouldn't, though. She would listen and nod, with the parallel frown lines between her small careful eyes, and only interrupt to say things like ‘That sounds nice' in rapid little rushes.

‘Hullo, Mrs Dyer. I'm, er, I'm sorry to bother you, but I need to talk to Helen. Could you ask her to ring me?'

‘She's just come in, as a matter of fact. Her helper's here. I'll run up and get her to come down. Hang on.'

Only a minute to think what he was going to say.

‘Tim? Hullo, how nice.' So she was still speaking to him.

‘Yes, I, er – when's Julian going to camp?'

‘Two middle weeks in August. I can hardly wait. No, forget that. I shouldn't have said it.'

‘Yes, you should. Relieves the stress. Talking of that – I say, Helen, I wondered if – suppose you came round to my place then, on a Saturday evening when Julian's away? I could make supper and we could walk across the road and hear the band concert in the park.'

‘
If it doesn't rain
.' They said it together, and laughed.

He told her how to get there. ‘What time? Well, look, I'll be out all day. Something rather special … well – tell you about it when I see you, right?'

‘All right.'

Val, Zara, Gail, Lilian, any of the few women he knew would have said, ‘Tell me
now!
' (And been disappointed with it if he had.)

‘I should be back by six.'

Get a frozen pie, Tim. Thaw it out. Frozen potatoes and peas, thaw them out, cook them quick. Cheese … French bread … wine. Economize later.

Warfare took place about thirty miles away, partly in a wood, partly in open country on a windy hillside. There were about forty
people, some of them women, which Tim had not expected: wives, girl friends, a blonde called Judy with a group from her office, in bright track suits. Some of the men were mates from a pub. They hung about the Army tent and the camp fire, and drank coffee and joked noisily about being hung over and short of sleep from Friday night, looking to see who was impressed.

Derek, who was in charge, kitted everybody out in patchy green and black and brown camouflage overalls. Tim's cammo suit was too big. It bagged and sagged, until the webbing holster belt pulled it in more trimly. He pushed the legs into his white sports socks. When Derek gave him the paint pellet gun and he felt the weight of it, he knew he wouldn't have missed this for anything. The cammo overalls, the heavy black pistol, the thick goggles – he wasn't just Tim, stuffed up stupid with the fourth day of a summer cold. He was anybody he wanted to be, anonymous in the goggled crowd, a soldier.

The staff of Warfare had seemed easy-going, but as soon as they had got everyone out of the tent and out of the little huts labelled MEN and WOMEN, it was different. Now it wasn't Derek with long eyelashes who was in charge. It was Joe, ex-sergeant with laced boots and a tight, strutting bottom and an Army beret flat on his bristled head, and a voice that sobered up the gigglers and hung-overs.

‘Right, now you're mine, you lot. Gawd, what a bloody awful lot.' He paced in front of the line of men and women who had paid twenty pounds to be told, ‘Let's see you stand up straight and knock off the horse shit.'

Tim squared his shoulders under the loose overalls, and added Sergeant Joe to his list of heroes.

‘Right, I've got fifteen minutes to try to teach you what it would take you six weeks to learn in the Army, which is where you'd all be a lot better off now if you had been.'

While he told them the rules of the game and the things they mustn't do and what would happen to them if they did them, they all put on the goggles and the green plastic face mask, which had a
nose shield and mouth slits to breathe through, and did nothing for Tim's cold.

Judy and her friends, straggling out of line and looking at the same time more relaxed and more serious than the men, were chewing gum under the face masks.

Joe showed them how to take off the safety catch and fire the pistols. Unloaded, the CO
₂
charge made a ‘fglop' sound, like a belch. They loaded the paint pellets and fired at a dummy in the middle of the field.

Tim raised his gun, narrowed his eyes behind the goggles and fired – ‘Phut!' like an air gun. He had never fired rifles at fairgrounds. This was the first time he had ever fired anything except the toilet plunger at the window. His heart raced. Had he hit the dummy? It was covered with splotches of red paint. One of them could have been his.

‘Couldn't hit a haystack, most of you men,' Joe jeered. ‘Bull's-eye, all the ladies. Watch 'em. In the woods, every man is a possible rapist. They may aim low.'

Could Tim shoot women? Yes, if they were going to shoot him. Disguised, they didn't look like women now, this lot, except Judy with her froth of bleached hair bursting out above the strap of her goggles.

‘You'll be in two teams for the whole day, so you better like each other. Green guards the green flag and tries to get Yellow's flag. Yellow ditto, in reverse. That clear? Even to you lot? … I said, “That clear?'”

‘Yes, Joe.'

Tim and some others said, ‘Yes, sarge.'

‘Right. Let's have the shoulder flashes, Derek. We'll divide up.'

Here it came. The agony of picking sides, and Tim would be picked last. Or he'd be left out, like he was in the western copse, stuck in a tent with Norman.

Sergeant Joe evened out ‘the ladies' and then – Tim's saviour – simply divided the line in two and gave out the shoulder tabs. The line broke up and several people dashed off again through the
hedge to the little huts. In a real war, did people keep dropping out to have a pee?

Tim's Green group gathered together to plan. Plan what? ‘Pick a leader,' Derek told them. ‘Who's played before?'

‘I have, as a matter of fact.' Before any of the others could finish saying, ‘So have I,' a cocky little chap called Ken had made himself leader and was telling everyone what to do. Some to guard the flag in camp, some to go ahead and attack, some in the middle ground.

Tim was in the middle group, which went off among the trees from their camp in a clearing in the wood.

‘Back up the attackers, watch each other, work as a team,' but as soon as the whistle blew, everyone went off on their own, and Tim didn't know where anybody was, and it was wildy exciting and total chaos.

Shots somewhere to the left. Shots to the right, ahead and behind him. Phut – ow! One very close. He saw a yellow shoulder flash low down in the undergrowth and fired, and immediately, like the echo of his own shot, he was hit in the leg.

The red paint looked like blood on his thigh. It hurt. Derek had said it wouldn't hurt, but it did.

If you were hit, you were dead, and you put on an orange vest to show you were out of that game. The game had hardly begun, and he was out of it, like being first out in musical chairs at a children's party, slinking to the wall as the music started again. A mother had sung out, ‘Poor old Timmy, why is it always you?' He could hear her now.

He put on the orange dead-man's vest and trudged up the path back to his camp. Sarge was there and one of the other staff, and the Green defenders, crouched by a rough wooden barricade, and behind trees and in overgrown hollows.

First hit! No one said that, but they might as well have. Tim kept his face mask down, although it was hard to breathe. Perhaps he should go home. But out of the trees came another orange vest, then another and another, masks pushed up, a hand up to goggles –

‘Goggles down!' from Joe. ‘If I have to tell you again, the gate's up there.'

Goggles down. It was cocky Ken, the leader. He had been shot just after Tim. Cheers.

Now it was all right to be dead. They sat on a bank. ‘How d'you cop it?' ‘Ran right into it.' ‘I got one of theirs, though.'

‘I got two,' Tim said. Who would know?

Behind the low barricade in the defenders' fort, one of the girls lay on her stomach, gun through a gap in the logs, long black hair down her back. A pioneer woman, she looked, tense against the creeping Indians. Or an Indian squaw, tense against the pioneers. She looked dramatically businesslike, but when she raised her head to see who was coming, she got picked off with a splat of paint on the goggles.

Two of the other defenders had got fed up waiting and gone off. Another was re-loading his gun with a tube of pellets when a Yellow man burst out of the trees, grabbed the green flag off a branch and ran back, just as a Green man dodged out into the clearing with the yellow flag, in time to get shot in the back by the defender of his own side who had finished re-loading.

The dead man dropped the flag. ‘You silly sod. Grab the flag!' he yelled to his treacherous murderer, who ran forward, fell over a tree root and was shot by a sniper behind a bush, who picked up the yellow flag and ran.

It was poor old Tubby. His friends from the pub called him that. Moon-faced and cheerful, he had lost his belt as soon as it was given to him, spilled his coffee, fallen in the mud on the way to the camp, and dropped his glasses when he took his goggles off to wipe them. ‘Keep those ruddy goggles on, what have I told you!'

‘Is that it?'

‘Unless one of ours gets the flags back.'

‘How many are left?'

‘Damn.' A double whistle showed the game was up.

Having watched the Green team make fools of themselves, Sergeant Joe decided to help.

‘That was horrible. Who's your leader?' Ken had disappeared. Large steady Dave took over. ‘Work as a team,' Joe said. ‘Three or
four stay in the camp, one go for the flag, and a bunch of others back him up. Cover him. Get killed. One or two try to stay alive to go back with him. He can't do it alone.'

I could, Tim thought. I could run and dodge through the trees like that Yellow bloke did.

‘Who'll run?' Dave asked. ‘Liz, Judy? Girls are faster, because they don't drink beer.' Liz and Judy shook their heads, chewing. ‘Who else is fast?'

Pause, then, ‘I am,' Tim said.

‘OK.' Dave believed him. ‘Give it a go.'

People looked at Tim and smiled and gave him a thumbs up. They were more of a team now, knowing each other's names, beginning to see a dim sort of strategy, all muddy and paint-splashed, all taking it more seriously. Judy tucked her conspicuous hair under a cap. Tim pulled his cammo overalls down over his white socks.

‘Pair off,' Joe said. ‘Work with an oppo.'

Quickly, they paired off. Tim's oppo was Tubby. Of course. But he was a good enough bloke. He bumbled about, and thought Tim knew what to do.

They prowled through the wood together between shooting on both sides, people being killed, heavy breathing, branches snapping, danger everywhere. Tim's eyes stared like a lynx. His skin stood on end like cat fur. Tubby was wheezing and cursing under his breath, but he followed Tim, good old oppo, as they crawled and dodged and pushed their way through brambles and bracken to the hedge that bounded the enemy camp.

The Green people who had started out to cover Tim had disappeared, dead or lost. Now or never. ‘Cover me!' Tim crouched at a gap in the hedge, and ran. Behind him, Tubby fired three wild shots and squealed as he was shot.

Tim ran, weaved, crouched behind a tree, saw the yellow flag on a post, ran out, yelled in a high voice, and got killed within a few yards of his goal, desperate arm flung out.

The Greens improved, and it was two games all at lunchtime:
smoky hamburgers over the oil-drum fire, easy talk, exploits exchanged, jokes, friendly insults. Tim ate three hamburgers. He and Tubby sat together in silence, waiting to get on with the war. Tim had a sinus headache. The frame of Tubby's glasses was broken, where he had jammed the goggles over them crookedly.

Tim hoped to run for the flag again, but after lunch, Mary was chosen, because she had eaten only fruit. Tim and Tubby went with the group that backed her up. They were attacking the camp with the rough log fort. The defence was brilliant. Unseen snipers picked off the Greens one by one, and picked off Mary when she made her dash for the flag.

Tim and Tubby had thrown themselves behind a tree trunk on the bank of a pond. Tubby, goggling through his glasses behind his goggles, took out one of the defenders.

‘Did I get him?' He raised his head to see, and got shot in the side of the neck.

‘They got me, pal.' He slid backwards down the bank to the pond.

My oppo! The emotion was real, and the tense excitement. Tim was on his own. Imperishable Tohubo, alone against the world! He fired two shots in the direction of the shot that had killed his mate, and realized he was almost out of ammunition. No time to re-load. He scrambled over the tree trunk, and ran for the yellow flag. The young skinny girl was behind the low barricade of the fort. Tim rushed at her, brandishing his pistol, and yelled, ‘Drop the gun!'

She did. She lost her nerve. He was too close. Surrender!

With a hoarse cry, Tohubo pulled the flag off the branch, turned, took out the last defender with his last shot, and ran for his own camp as if he had been charging and dodging through woods all his life, his nose and head miraculously cleared, and flung himself, gasping, on the ground by his own flag post.

His team, alive and dead, crowded round him.

‘How did you do it?'

‘One surrendered, one I took out.' Sitting up, he told the tale, breathless, his chest heaving like an Olympic runner's.

‘Good for you,' they said. ‘We're ahead now. Good old Tim.'

Tubby turned up with his orange vest askew, and put an arm round Tim's shoulders. ‘We did it,' he said. ‘I died for you.'

The Warfare games were not finished, but anything else would be an anticlimax. Tim wanted to go home now, in his blood-stained cammo, with his gun: muddy, exhausted, bruised and triumphant conqueror, Tohubo the invincible, Blch the returning hero.