The Runaways (5 page)

Ethel and her husband, Albert, were at this moment in the sitting room of their little villa in Fishponds having cocoa before going to bed. It was a small neat room, everything shining and brushed, and polished and dusted. Albert had his slippers on. He was never allowed in the room without them. Albert was much easier going than Ethel, though he would never have dared to break any of her rules in the house. He was master only in his own workshop.

Ethel said, ‘That boy's always been a trouble and always will be. He's got a wild, stubborn streak in him – and I wouldn't know where it came from.'

Albert knew that everybody had streaks of some kind in them. You just had to make the most of the streak you were handed out with as – he had no doubt – Smiler would do with his one day. He liked Smiler.

He said, ‘My opinion is he run away from that place because he knew be didn't ought to have been there in the first instance.'

Ethel put her cocoa mug down precisely in the middle of a little table mat and said, ‘He went there because he was a bad one. Knocking an old lady over and taking her bag. And before that always lifting and taking things. Bad company makes bad habits.'

Albert sighed gently. ‘He was light-fingered, yes. But I'm not sure he was any more than that. Not violent. Not Smiler. He wouldn't harm a fly, let alone an old lady. All right, at the time it looked black against him and I thought he had done it. But now, on due and full consideration, I don't think he did. Not Smiler.'

‘He was always nicking things and getting into scrapes. The way you start is the way you go on, and you go on nicking bigger things and getting into bigger scrapes. And that's what happened. Although he's my own brother, I have to say it.'

Albert put his mug down on the polished table top, discovered his mistake and moved it to his little table mat, and said reflectively, ‘It's all a matter of what they call psychology.'

‘Whatever are you talking about?'

‘Psychology. How the mind works. Smiler was what they call compensating for his home life – or rather for the home life he wasn't getting. No mother and his dad off to sea nine months out of twelve and only us to come to when he was on his own –'

‘And what's wrong with us? We give him as good a home as anyone could.'

‘That's just it. As good as we could. But it weren't good enough, Ethel. He never knew his Mum and he missed his Dad. We couldn't do anything about that. But he, unconsciously, you understand, tried to. That's why he went out and about nicking things and getting into scrapes. He was what they call making his protest against what society was doing to him.'

Ethel sniffed loudly. ‘Well, I must say, that's the fanciest notion I've ever heard. And anyway, conscious or unconscious, he did that old lady and she stood right up in the juvenile court and identified him.'

Albert rose. His cocoa was finished and now he meant to go out to his workshop and smoke his goodnight cigarette. He liked to sit on his bench and puff away while he dreamed impossible dreams – sometimes like being able to smoke in the parlour and the bedroom, to flick ash on the floor, to put his feet up on anything he chose and, perhaps now and then, to have a bottle of beer instead of cocoa for a bedtime drink.

He said pungently: ‘That old lady was as blind as a bat! She couldn't have recognized her own reflection in a mirror! And I don't believe she ever had twenty pounds in her handbag. Smiler had only ten on him when they nabbed him five minutes later.' He moved to the door and added, ‘Well, I hope the lad's found a fair billet for tonight. It's freezing out.'

‘That poor boy,' said Ethel. ‘His father'll raise the roof when he comes home.'

‘When,' said Albert and went out.

Albert was right. It was freezing. It froze hard all night. When the first light began to come up over the easterly ridge of the river valley it was to reveal a world laced and festooned with a delicate tracery of frost. The frost ribboned the bare trees and hung from the thin branches in loops and spangles. It had carpeted the grass with a crisp layer of brittle icing, and had frozen the water splashings under the old stone bridge so that they hung in fanglike stalactites, and had coated the small pools and puddles with a black sheeting of ice. It was a rime- and hoar- and ice-covered world made suddenly dazzlingly beautiful as the first lip of the sun showed to strike gleams of white, gold and blue fire from every branch and twig and every hanging icicle.

The brightening crack of light under the barn door woke Yarra. She rolled over and sat up on her haunches. She tightened the muscles of her long forelegs to ease the night's laziness from them. She sat, sphinx-fashion in the gloom like an ancient Egyptian cat goddess, her liquid amber eyes watching the light under the door. Although the door was closed, and had not been the previous night, it did not seem strange to her. The door of her hut at Longleat was always closed during the night and the warden opened it early in the morning. She sat waiting for the sound of his feet outside. Sometimes he was early and sometimes late.

Half an hour passed and the warden did not come. Yarra rose to her feet, walked to the door and sniffed at it. Then she turned back along the far wall. Her restlessness was coming back fast. She walked back to her straw, scraped at it, working her shoulder muscles, and then went to the door again. She wanted to be outside, where the world was full of sounds, blackbirds and sparrows calling, the beat of a car's engine passing down the narrow road and the low, mocking caws of rooks moving from their night roosts to forage on the iron-hard field furrows.

Annoyed now, she raised herself on her hind feet and scraped against the shut door, rattling and banging it impatiently.

The scraping, rattling and banging from down below eventually woke Smiler. He lay on his hay bed, still a little muzzy with sleep, listening to it. It took him a minute or two to remember where he was. When he did, he jumped quickly to his feet and stood above the trapdoor. Somebody was down below! With the thought his heart began to thump with alarm. He knelt down and cautiously lifted the lid of the loft trap an inch and peered through. His eyes, dazed from the sunlight which was streaming in through his loft window, could make out nothing in the gloom below. Then, as his eyes slowly adjusted themselves, he saw the movement at the barn door. For a moment or two he watched, his mouth open in amazement. Then – with a swift, panic reaction – he slammed the trapdoor and shot across the holding bolt which was fastened to the top of it. He dropped back to a sitting position on the hay, clapped a hand to his forehead, and said out loud, ‘Blimey O'Reilly!'

As Smiler sat there considering the situation the skin of his scalp crept with a slow shiver of fear as he realized what a narrow escape he had had. Not this morning – but last night! When he had come back from throwing the rubbish away he had closed the barn door and
that thing
had already been in the barn! He had closed the door and climbed the ladder and
that thing
must have been watching him! And now
that thing
was down there and he was up here!

What on earth was he going to do? To help his thoughts he swigged off what remained of the orange juice. Then, because no helpful thoughts came, he drew back the bolt of the loft trap and raised it a few inches cautiously. Down below Yarra was padding restlessly up and down. She caught the slight movement of the loft trap out of the corner of her eye and swung round. She backed away a little, raised her head, and made an angry movement of her jaws.

Smiler could see her clearly now. He saw the wrinkling of her face mask, the white shine of her teeth, the restless switching of the long tail, the tensing of the high powerful shoulders, and the long, lean length of her forelegs and body. He dropped the loft trap back into place and bolted it.

Smiler was no fool. He could put two and two together faster than many young lads. ‘Samuel M.,' he said to himself, the problem on his hands now overcoming his shock and fright, ‘ what you have got down there is that escaped cheetah! Yarra. That's right. And what you are stuck with right now is that you can't get out until you get her out. That's Thing Number One without any question.'

He got up and went to the barn window, scratching his head. He looked out. It was still very early in the morning. The sun was only just half clear of the valley ridge. He took a good look at the window for the first time, and he saw that it was not fixed in its frame. There was a hook catch at one side. He pushed this up, opened the window and looked out. Six feet below him and a little to his left was the top of the barn door. Two-thirds of the way up the door and on the side closest to him was the door latch. It was a curved handgrip with a thumb press latch above it that had to be pushed down to lift the small cross lever on the inside of the door free from its notch so that the door would swing open. The door, he remembered, was awkwardly hung. Once the catch was free the door would swing inwards of its own weight.

With his head stuck out of the window he considered his plan of campaign. The window was big enough for him to get through. He could hang on to the sill and drop to the ground. It was a fair drop but not so far that it worried him. Once in the yard all he had to do was … Well, what? Press the thumb latch down, give the door a push and then run for his life while that animal came through the opening after him like a streak of gold light? Not so-and-so likely he told himself. All right then, what? Just drop to the ground, and then go off and tell the police or someone that he had found the cheetah and it was shut in the barn? Not so-and-so likely! He'd never get away with that one. It would be giving himself up and they'd have him back in reform school before you could say knife. No – there was only one way. He had to get the door open from up here and let Yarra go off on her own. Then, when she was well away, he could go down himself.

He turned back into the loft. What he wanted was a long stick with which to reach down and press the thumb catch. The loft ran well back beyond the bales of hay he had been using for a bed. When he had first come up he had made a careful inspection of the place. At the back of the loft he found a long-handled hayfork with the head broken off. It was about four feet long and would not reach the door. But in one of the corners of the loft he found a disused hutch for hens. The floor was made of long narrow strips of wood. Smiler pulled one of the slats free. Because he enjoyed problems like this, he was soon all set to try to open the door. The hay bales were all bound by lengths of binder twine. He took a couple of lengths of twine from the hay bales and lashed the hutch slat to the end of the broken hayfork. He had no trouble with making a proper lashing. His father, though a ship's cook, was also a seaman and Smiler had had a thorough grounding in tying knots. He spliced the two lengths of wood together, finishing off the whipbinding, neat and tight, so that he had a firm join. The rest was easy.

He took another look down through the loft trap at Yarra just in time to see her raise herself against the door and begin to tear at it with her forepaws. She saw his face through the hatch and turned at once and came in a swift bound to the foot of the ladder.

Smiler dropped the hatch with a bang and shot the bolt across. He went to the window quickly. Yarra was getting angry at being shut in. He pushed his home-made pole through the window and after a couple of attempts managed to bang down the thumb catch. The door slowly began to swing open.

Before he could get his pole back through the window Yarra was out. She came out slowly, stopped a yard from the open door, and then looked up at Smiler. She gave him a quick snapping hiss and then loped away around the corner of the barn. Seeing her only for a few moments in the full sunlight, Smiler was awed by her beauty. Her picture remained in his mind long after she was gone. He only had to shut his eyes and he could see the tawny gold pelt with its close-spaced black spots, the blunt, short-eared head with the long bracketing black face markings, the amber eyes and the graceful droop and upturned tuft of her tail and, most of all, the slow muscle flow of shoulders and haunches as she moved away.

Yarra passed that day in the same area. The restlessness in her she was used to now and, since she had her freedom, the habit was strong in her to want to come back to her barn shelter at night.

She went up the river and stopped to drink just above the barn where a small carrier stream came into the main stream over a low waterfall. In the woods higher up the river she marked the movement of a cock pheasant foraging among the dead leaves. She covered twenty yards of ground before the bird saw her. It took off too late and was brought down in a burst of feathers by one sweep of her taloned right forepaw. She ate. While she did so she heard the sound of children laughing and playing away across the river, heard the whine of cars on the not too distant main road running from Warminster down to Mere. She was outside, by at least a mile, of the triangle of roads joining Frome, Warminster and Mere. That afternoon, late, she ran down another hare on the downland above the river woods.

The frost had held all day and as the winter sun began to drop and the air turned even colder Yarra came off the downland. She was passing through a thicket of trees, studded here and there by tall, rank growths of wild rhododendrons, when a keeper, shotgun under his arm, stepped out on to the path ten yards ahead. Man and beast saw each other at the same time. Startled, Yarra backed away, lowering head and shoulders threateningly, and gave a slow snarl. The keeper, seeing her threatening stance, acted instinctively. He swung his shotgun to his shoulder and fired.

The swift movement of the gun, although she had never been fired at before, was warning enough for Yarra. Sudden movement marked something you either hunted or avoided. This was a large human, not something she hunted. She leaped sidewards into the cover of a patch of young birch. The keeper fired, first one barrel and then the other as Yarra disappeared into the gloom of the birches. The gunshots echoed through the wood. A few pellets from the spread of shot that rattled against tree trunks and the hard ground caught Yarra on the left flank, stinging and biting into her. Then she was gone at top speed through the woods.