Injury Time (11 page)

‘Can I sit with them, dear?’ said Alma. ‘I feel a bit out of it over here.’

The woman didn’t reply. Keeping a wary eye on the shot gun, Alma moved from the sofa to sit at the table. She was still wearing the duffle coat with its hood pulled over her head. She looked like an under-sized monk, the tip of her nose showing and her hands lost in a welter of sleeves.

Overhead footsteps sounded on the wooden floor. Furniture was being dragged across the room.

‘I don’t suppose this will go on for very long,’ said Edward. ‘They’ve got procedures worked out for this sort of situation. There’s been so much of it lately.’

Alma was anxious to know what sort of situation it was. Having been asleep at the time, somewhat under the weather as she freely admitted, she wasn’t absolutely sure what had occurred. Like a bird, eyes bright, beaked nose dipping above the tablecloth, she peeped from the hood of the duffle coat.

‘Hostages,’ explained Edward. ‘It’s obvious. They’ve escaped from somewhere. Some jail. It happens all the time.

‘But how can they be hostages, darling?’

‘Lower your voice,’ snapped Simpson. ‘Not them. Us.’

Alma looked at him. ‘You were horrid to me before,’ she said. ‘Yes you were, pet, don’t deny it.’ She waggled her sleeve at him flirtatiously.

Edward spoke in low undertones of a decaying society, the gradual breaking down of law and order, overcrowded prisons, lack of money. There was no doubt about it, they were living in decadent times. He was conscious that no one followed his train of thought. ‘Why, only last week,’ he confessed, ‘I was undercharged at the chemists. Helen had a twinge of neuralgia and I went to buy aspirins. I don’t hold with aspirins myself. Do you know, I pocketed the surplus change without a word. I’m not proud of my action, but I did.’

‘Why couldn’t she buy her own aspirins?’ asked Binny. She would have liked to move from Edward’s knee, but there was nowhere else to sit.

‘They can’t have been in much of a hurry to get away,’ said Simpson. ‘I’ve seen one of them before. Hours ago when I went to fetch the wine from the car.’

They sat hunched over the table, talking softly, pushing knives and forks across the cloth and playing with small crumbs of bread. Those initial minutes of violence receding into the past, they were like travellers previously lost in a blizzard who found themselves safe for the moment beside the fire. Muriel alone crouched silent in her chair; now and then her eyes strayed to the blue pram in the kitchen. Alma was incensed, on Binny’s behalf, at the broken window and the mutilated lampshade. In her view such vandalism was quite unnecessary. She had run away from her own home earlier in the evening because her husband, unable to find any clean socks for the morning, had called her a slut and thrown the milk jug at her. She was willing to admit she’d been remiss – though they weren’t her socks and he hadn’t as far as she knew an allergy to soap – but he’d given her no time before taking aim.

‘I’ve a good mind to have a word with that Harry man,’ she said. ‘It was very naughty of him. Men never think of the mess they make.’

‘Good Lord, don’t,’ warned Edward, full of misgivings. ‘It’s quite the wrong attitude to take. We have to strike up a rapport . . . It’s a question of psychology . . . We’re all in it together. At the same time we must strive to achieve a certain delicate balance between abject cooperation and some degree of firmness. There must be no aggravation, but on the other hand we shouldn’t crawl . . . if you follow me. We should endeavour to show them what’s what—’

Alma smiled.

‘I’ve read about it,’ he said defensively. ‘It’s vital not to seem hostile.’

‘Don’t be silly, Ted darling. They’re no different from you and me. They’ve just got caught up in an everyday problem that’s gone a teeny bit wrong.’

Edward began to bluster. He found Alma infuriating, quite apart from the way she addressed him. He jiggled Binny up and down on his agitated knees. ‘It may be an everyday problem to you, but personally I’m not used to being hijacked in my own home by armed thugs.’

‘Here, here,’ said Simpson.

‘They’re alien to us,’ insisted Edward. ‘It’s a different breed, a different culture.’

Binny put her lips to his temple. His hair smelt of tobacco. She knew he had made a slip, thinking this was home, but all the same it was nice of him. At the back of her mind she thought she was making a fuss of him for somebody else’s benefit. To gain attention.

Edward jerked his head away; he was trembling. Surely it was perfectly natural to go for aspirins if one’s wife was feeling groggy. One would do it for the dog. None of them knew each other well enough, that was the difficulty. They were all behaving in an unreal manner. He couldn’t count on their reactions under stress. One of them was potentially dangerous – it might even be himself.

Simpson said, ‘Mussolini used to say, whenever I hear the word culture I reach for my gun.’

‘Exactly,’ cried Alma, though she didn’t know what he meant.

‘Be quiet,’ said Muriel. She was staring into the kitchen.

They stopped breathing and looked fearfully at the woman by the sink. She had ceased to roll the pram and was now hunched over the shot gun, nursing her ribs.

Binny felt she was taking part in some sort of documentary – one of those programmes that used members of the public and portrayed ordinary lives from a melancholy point of view. She realised she’d been in it right from the moment she went shopping with Alma. Those old ladies posed on the bed down the alleyway . . . the waitress in the Wimpy Bar so reluctant to serve them. The woman in the chair was the character who’d left her pram outside the bank. She wasn’t instantly recognisable because her face was altered by that scene in which she’d been battered; her stockings were a different colour. They’d been shooting her from various camera angles in the National Westminster, that’s why she kept moving from queue to queue at the counter. The black man with his neck in plaster also fitted in somewhere.

‘Why has she changed sides?’ Simpson whispered. He thought the woman must be incredibly fit. Had he been treated half as brutally he was sure he would have succumbed from shock. He recalled his mother who had taken to her bed every afternoon, prostrate from a fatiguing morning spent attending to the furniture with a feather duster. His aunts had been the same – fragile, languid. He thought of Marcia living with two men, and Muriel quite capable of pushing the car single-handed round the block, when it was a cold morning and the engine wouldn’t start. It was a generation of Amazons.

‘She hasn’t changed sides,’ hissed Binny. ‘She’s the same side but she’s double-crossed them or something. She was on the wrong route. She tried to explain it to them but they wouldn’t listen. They were looking for her.’

‘They don’t have mixed prisons,’ Alma said. ‘She must be an outside contact. She probably had a change of clothing for them in the pram.’

Edward had come to the conclusion that the guns couldn’t be loaded; they were purely for intimidation purposes. That particular type of weapon, with the barrel sawn off, was surely more suited to gang warfare than for going over the wall.

‘He’s awfully sweet,’ Alma said into Binny’s ear. ‘You shouldn’t be so cross with him, darling. It’s quite natural to go to the chemist.’

Ginger and Harry entered the room. Edward caught himself nodding. It was like growing familiar with people on the television – actors, celebrities – and then seeing them on the tube or in a restaurant. One imagined one knew them socially.

Harry was holding his hands distastefully in front of him. ‘It’s bloody disgusting up there, missus,’ he said. ‘Don’t you believe in cleaning?’ He went to the sink and turned the tap full on.

Despite his rudeness Binny wondered if she should offer to make a cup of tea. It wouldn’t be a fawning gesture – more of a cooperative one, in line with Edward’s suggestion.

Ginger murmured something into the woman’s ear. She put the gun down on the draining board and attempted to pull herself upright.

‘You’re breaking my heart,’ cried Ginger. ‘Stop playing silly buggers.’

Kicking off her high-heeled shoes and wincing with pain, the woman succeeded in standing.

‘What about them?’ asked Harry.

‘Christ,’ Ginger said. ‘They’re all past it. We’ve landed in an old people’s club.’ He looked scornfully at the group around the table. ‘Stay exactly where you are,’ he told them, ‘and you won’t get hurt.’ He followed Harry and the woman into the hall and shut the door.

‘Of course, it’s dark,’ observed Alma, after a moment’s silence. ‘And I’ve got this dreadful coat on.’ She struggled with the toggles at the front. ‘What on earth possessed you to wrap me in this thing, darling?’

‘You’d been sick over everything else,’ Binny said. She was trying to hold in her stomach muscles. She had never pretended to be younger than she was. There was hardly any grey in her hair and sometimes in the warm weather, in a summery outfit, people remarked how juvenile she looked. She glanced at Muriel. She was somewhat thick about the waist and her make-up was elderly – powdered cheeks and pencilled brows – but she wasn’t decrepit by any means. Ginger was probably referring to Simpson and Edward, with their beer bellies and their old men’s suits.

‘I’m frantic to spend a penny,’ said Edward. He squirmed in his seat and the rickety chair swayed under him. He remembered a newspaper report he’d read about people being locked up in a vault for several days. The article hadn’t spelt it out in so many words, but reading between the lines it was obvious everyone peed into a communal bucket. Some men, he realised, rather went for that sort of carry on – women squatting, tinkling into chamber pots and so forth. He himself grew faint with nausea at the prospect.

‘We ought,’ said Simpson, looking directly at Edward, ‘to be thinking of a way out of this mess. Just in case your cooperation theory doesn’t work. I’d like to have an alternative plan up my sleeve.’

‘I never suggested total cooperation—’

‘It’s true,’ said Binny loyally. ‘He did mention firmness as well.’

‘I don’t altogether care for being firm,’ said Simpson. ‘Not when I’m under armed guard. What I propose is that we try to create some kind of diversion and then one of us should make a break for it.’

Edward stared at him appalled. ‘I don’t really see what good that would do. It would have to be me or you and that would leave the women with very little protection.’

‘Any minute,’ said Simpson, stabbing the tablecloth with his finger, ‘they could start separating us. Taking away our sense of unity. You upstairs, Binny in the bathroom, the rest of us scattered elsewhere, bound and gagged.’

‘Do stop it,’ protested Edward. ‘Can’t you see you’re alarming the girls?’

‘What sort of diversion?’ asked Alma with interest. She was thinking of a film she’d seen in which prisoners of war gave a concert party while under the stage a tunnel was being dug.

‘There’s a back door,’ Binny said helpfully. ‘It leads into the garden.’

‘It’s quite impossible,’ cried Edward. ‘There’s broken glass on one wall and a wicked rose on the other. You wouldn’t stand a chance.’

‘He might have meant you,’ said Binny. ‘You could go.’ She didn’t really mean it and would much rather have Simpson take any risk that was called for, but it was like those rare occasions when she visited relatives with the children and they refused to help with the washing-up or to talk about O levels. One was forced to show them up.

‘Out there,’ said Edward, ‘the police are watching our every move.’ He pointed dramatically at the shuttered windows. ‘They know everything that’s going on. They have manpower, resources, know-how. The most sophisticated areas of psychology and technology are being explored and utilised. They don’t need us to throw a spanner in the works. They can probably hear every word we say.’

The women looked at him, impressed. Aware that he had their full attention, he struggled upright. Dumping Binny on her feet, he strode to the fireplace and tapped the wall authoritatively; he felt like a military instructor pinpointing the danger spots on the globe. ‘Behind there they are taping our conversations. Every sentence we utter. We don’t need to endanger our lives to pass on information, we have merely to speak to the wall.’

‘I don’t believe it,’ said Simpson sceptically. ‘They’d need to push wires through the bricks. We’d have heard noises.’ He wished to God Freeman would stop playing head boy. It was bloody irritating under the circumstances.

‘The sort of device I’m thinking of is far more advanced than that,’ Edward informed him severely. ‘You’ll have to take my word for it. We really mustn’t have any more foolish talk about diversions, and mock heroics in the backyard.’ It was imperative, he thought, to nip Simpson’s ridiculous bid for escape in the bud. The man was itching for glory and only thinking of himself. While he was gallivanting over walls, others would be left to cope with his wife.

Alma tiptoed to the hearth. She leaned against the flowered wallpaper and whispered urgently to a leaf, ‘Hallo, hallo. Are you there? Over and out.’ She waited. ‘Is it similar to that thing at the doctor’s?’ she asked Edward. ‘When he listens to your chest?’

‘Same principle,’ he agreed. He returned to the table and like a conscientious mother scooped Binny once more on to his knee. ‘I feel so damned uncomfortable,’ he confided miserably, nuzzling into the dark curls on her neck. Deep down he was thinking that no technological breakthrough on earth was going to remove the pressure on his bladder, or make Helen understand what he was doing in a house she’d never heard of when he’d implied he was going to Simpson’s office. Part of him, now that midnight had passed, welcomed an extended imprisonment. The longer he remained captive the better; it would give Helen time to come full circle from anger to relief. With any luck she’d be so grateful finally at his release, that she wouldn’t insist on divorce. I’ve been a fool, he heard himself telling her. But by God I’ve paid for it.