Enchantment (12 page)

Tim would have to invite Helen up here soon, for the look of it, but he was not sure whether he wanted to see her again. Without Julian, she was passable, he supposed, although she was about six years older than him, and looked it. He thought about Julian a lot, with fascination, but also with fear. It had been terrifying to realize how easily he could have hit him – hard.

Tim puzzled about the strange child.

‘Can't do make-believe,' Helen had said. What must that be like? ‘He probably can't imagine the past or the future,' she had told Tim.

He sat down and cleared his mind and tried to live in the present moment, to see what it would feel like. It couldn't be done. Images from yesterday, last year, this morning, words, people, thronged at the edges of the mind and spilled over into it. Thoughts raced ahead. Tomorrow's Thursday, stock-taking. Next week,
Private Lives
starts at the Boathouse. Only principals. Craig won't have a part. I wonder if he'll be doing front of the house. Must think of a joke for him in case I see him. Two days ago, I had that lovely steak and kidney pie. The gravy bubbled up through the crust. When I've finished this nonsense, I'm going to have some bread and cheese.

Five minutes without imagination? It was impossible. Helen must be wrong about Julian, just repeating some rubbish the doctors had told her. There must be dreams and memories behind that princely brow, and Tim could unlock them if he chose. But after the supermarket, he was not sure that he did choose.

He watched the dress rehearsal of
Private Lives
with the other ushers and staff families, and afterwards he found Craig on the grass bank by the river, throwing bread at the ducks and swans.

The ducks were vulgar opportunists, but Tim loved the swans.

‘Royal birds.' He sat on the grass and admired Craig's agreeable looks in the sun. The swans carried their beauty above the surface, sailing magically. Below, the dark water hid the ungainly angled legs and splayed feet that propelled them. Tim stretched up his neck to try to imagine how it would be, and turned his head stiffly, blinking his eyes.

‘
I
was a swan in a former life,' he told Craig.

‘How do you know?'

‘Oh I – just know.'

‘I was only a lump of ooze. Are you psychic?'

‘Oh yes.' Tim would say anything to get Craig's attention.

‘I'll pay you in May,' he had promised Harold. ‘Cross my heart.' He did pay off some of the debt, and decided to put the rest out of his head until he could save some more, or sell something. Sell the television? He couldn't see himself going downstairs to ask Brian and Jack if he could watch the late films. They went to bed at ten, because they got up early to have a jog round the park in orange track suits. Once, walking early after a nightmare, Tim had seen the girl friend going out at dawn with Brian in the same colour suit. Perhaps she had borrowed Jack's.

As May got warmer, there were more boats on the river and people strolling on the streets with open faces, instead of pinched and hurrying. Tourists came to the town to look at the cathedral and its close and water garden.

If visitors looked lost, frowning over maps, Tim might offer help, and even go a short way with them, enjoying the brief contact with strangers, liking to be seen as a knowledgeable native. At this time of year, he sometimes went into the hushed, aloof cathedral and knelt down, pretending to pray, as a bit of local colour for the tourists. Their voices became quiet, their steps softer, impressed with the
devoutness
of this place.

There were printed guides to the cathedral, but they cost two pounds, so most people just wandered round and looked at random.
If they were lucky, they met Tim, ready to invent for them the saga of Sir Leonard and Lady Margaret, inviting them to feel how the stone of the garments was worn away, like the toe of St Peter in Rome, by the hands of bygone generations who believed this would cure arthritis.

Or they could find him on the bench opposite the pitted wooden crucifix, moving down to the end so that they could sit down with him and contemplate the sorrowing figure of ancient days.

He might ask Americans if they had heard the legend.

‘Why no.' They pricked up their ears like dogs for a biscuit.

‘It's been said – it's only a legend, mind (in case they bought a guide or asked a verger) – that a sixteenth-century monk, after intense meditation here, was seen with blood on his hands and feet.'

‘Gee.'

‘Some people believe that's still possible.'

Tim's hands were clenched on his knees, so they could remember that afterwards, and wonder …

At the end of May, Harold was waiting in the brick-paved alley at the back of Webster's. Tim came out of the staff door with Gail. They were going to walk to the card shop and get a card for Fred's birthday.

Harold walked with them. Tim kept himself between Harold and Gail.

‘All right, come on.' Harold clicked his fingers. ‘Let's have it.'

‘I told you, by the end of the month.'

‘It is the end of the month.'

‘I meant next month.'

‘Sod that,' said Harold, and Gail poked her head forward across Tim and giggled. ‘I'll beat you up. I'll murder you.'

‘Are you –' Tim stopped and faced him. ‘Are you threat-threatening me?'

‘What do you think?' Harold's eyes were fiery boiled eggs. ‘I'll cook your kidneys.'

‘I could report you,' Tim said. ‘Uttering mena-menaces – there's my bus!'

He broke away and ran across the street through the traffic and hopped on a bus going in the wrong direction.

Next day at work, Gail told him, ‘Timothy Kendall, you're getting quite weird. What are you up to? Who was that man?'

‘Nobody. He's always trying to borrow money off me.'

‘He's got a hope. Ugly-looking customer, though. I nipped into the arcade till he'd gone. I got the card, no thanks to you.'

It was a huge birthday card with gold borders and a raised pink-satin heart. They all signed it, even Mr D., and put it in Fred's drawer.

He had a little weep when he found it, his lumpy blue lips trembling.

‘Getting past it,' Lilian said, meaning Mr D. to hear.

Tim pushed her against a stand of heavy leatherette.

‘Do you
mind?
' Being broad-based, she didn't topple. She righted herself by clutching at Tim's sleeve, pulling his jacket half off.

Tim was quite shaken by the ambush at the staff door. If Harold was going to stalk him, life would not be worth living.

‘If I had a gun, I'd blast the whole lot,' he had said that time in the flat, when he had revealed his secret dreams and rages. Would the next thing be a chunk of concrete dropped on Buttercup's roof from a bridge over the road, or a bullet pinging through the gabled window of the flat?

When the papers for his next turn at
Domain of the Undead
arrived, Tim was even more uneasy. Blch and his daring raggle-taggle army, who had taken possession of the settlement at the very foot of the hill fortress, which might or might not hold the swift zoetic rapier, had been overwhelmed by a sudden influx of new and powerful characters attacking them brutally from the rear. Vrage, Vrevolta, Gorescalp – where had they come from? Some player had poured a lot of money into the game to buy the forms to create and control all these new ghastlies. Someone very vindictive and cunning. One of the new ravagers was called DeAth.

Tim wrote to Harold. ‘This is a letter because my phone is out of order.' He had been leaving it off the hook a lot of the time
when he was at home. ‘I'm the victim of a dastardly plot. Are Vrage and Gorescalp all yours?'

In return, the small card's tiny writing, so unlikely from the large hod-carrying fist, told it all.

‘Got it in I. Blch & co is doomed. Y not give up?'

Tim sold his television set to Jack, who wanted an extra one for his bedroom.

‘How will you get along without it, being on your own?' Jack asked.

Tim shrugged. ‘Mostly it's rubbish.' Implying: some people lie in bed and watch that crap through their toes. ‘I'm studying.'

‘What for?'

‘To better myself.'

‘Good for you.' Jack was such a nice fellow. He had a wide, comfortable smile and good spirits in his eyes. ‘So am I. Tough, isn't it? There's a management training programme in the Accounts Department at Webster's, you know. Do you want me to –'

‘I've talked to them.'

‘Who did you see?'

Panic. ‘Mr – Mr Wood.'

‘He left last year.'

‘That's when I talked to him.'

Jack wrote a cheque. Tim cashed it and took the eighty-five pounds to ‘Marbella', Brentwood Close, and gave it to the woman with the high bottom and violet lips.

He was furious with Harold. True, he owed the money, but he was angry about the threats and dirty tricks. Little Hitler had droned to him in the shed, over the drone of the lathe, ‘Never borrow, never lend. Borrowers end up hating the lender.'

Dead right, Dad, as usual. Ever been wrong? But if a person could never be humble, he could never be humiliated.

Tim did not go to the Boathouse that week. They had an influx of interloping drama students, and did not need him.

One evening, as he sat on his low window-sill and picked off the
unheeding cars – ping, ping, ping, with an air rifle disguised as a toilet plunger, the nine o'clock news came on the radio. Tim was not listening. He was in a dazed dream, hypnotized by keeping aim at the cars, but, as the news reader plunged dramatically into the lead story, he lowered the plunger.

‘Reports are coming in of a sniper terrorizing the Green Ponds housing estate near Heathrow Airport. Two children and three adults are known to be dead, and several other people have been rushed to hospital with severe injuries.'

A sniper … and I was playing at guns through the window. Or was I playing? What are they talking about? Tim shook his head to try to clear it. What's happening? Are they talking about me?

‘… and the man, in his twenties or thirties according to eye witnesses, and carrying a sub-machine-gun, appears to have escaped. Police are on the scene. Details are still confused. We'll keep you up to date as more information comes in.'

Tim sat thinking about it for a long time, with the plunger across his lap.

Next day, the senseless, horrible crime was on everybody's lips. Four people had been cut down in the street, and one more had died in hospital. Three were wounded. One was in a critical condition. The man, a local resident, who had tried to escape in a red car, had crashed into a police roadblock and was dead. His name was Barry McCarthy. He was unemployed, a loner. No one knew anything about him. As they would say about Tim.

‘Makes your flesh creep.' Gail and Lilian were excited and jumpy. They jabbered together, instead of getting dustsheets pulled off and folded.

‘I might have been there,' Gail said. ‘That's not far from where my cousin lives. Suppose I'd been there? Look at his picture, those staring eyes.' They were ordinary eyes, and the picture, taken some years ago, was blurred.

‘He does look a bit familiar, though,' Tim said, in the casual voice he used for inventing. ‘I could swear I've seen him. Here, perhaps, in the store.'

Gail squealed, and Lilian said, ‘Knock it off, Tim.'

Tim prowled the aisles between the tables and the racks of cloth rolls and hanging samples, brooding on the terrible event. Two children walking home with their mother – all shot outright. A man with his dog (the dog had survived: they had its picture). What sort of maniac would do a thing like this?

A sort of maniac like – wait a minute, suppose Harold had … No, of course not. They knew the man, Barry McCarthy, and he was dead.

But if it had been Harold, Tim would have been a star witness.

Tim decided to go down to the Boathouse anyway, and he had a beer and a bit of a chat about the crime with the barman during the first act. He felt out of it, not having a job to do, being only a customer.

Sheila, the front-of-house manager, came through the foyer. ‘Didn't expect to see you, Tim.'

‘Just thought I'd come down to see if you needed a hand.'

‘Can't stay away, can you?'

In the interval, he hung about on the boarded terrace between the theatre and the river where the audience walked about with drinks and discussed the play. Tonight he heard many of them talking about Barry McCarthy. One of the wounded had been discharged from hospital. One was worse. Tim sneaked into an empty seat in the gallery for the second act, and stayed on to count the ice-cream and coffee money for Sheila. He went through into the theatre to look for lost property. Craig was at the side of the stage, checking a music tape that had not cued in at the right point.

While Tim went forward along the rows, they talked back and forth, about the play, and about Barry McCarthy and the Uzi gun. Everyone was talking about Barry McCarthy and Green Ponds.

‘Good thing he's dead,' Tim said.

‘Not really,' Craig said from the stage. ‘The psychologists could have had a field day, trying to find out what makes a quiet man suddenly do a random, violent thing like that. Now they'll never know. Nobody seems to know anything about him.'

‘I do,' Tim said suddenly.

‘
You?
' Craig looked down at him as if it were a joke.

‘Well, yes, I do, as a matter of fact. But it's nothing. Not important. I'll keep it to myself.'

‘No you don't.' Craig jumped down from the low stage and pulled Tim upright as he was bending under the third row to pick up a lipstick.

‘Well … one of the things I do (as if he had innumerable pursuits) is a sort of, you know, sort of role-playing adventure that you play by mail. Carrier Pigeon Games, they call it.'