Enchantment (18 page)

‘That looks good.' Norman came along with one of the ropes from the tent trailing round his foot. ‘Can I have that?'

‘Eat your own.'

‘I'll have wind.'

‘Not in my tent, you won't.'

Norman sniffed and snuffled. He could not breathe properly through his crooked nose. That was why his fat slug lip hung open. The thought of spending the night with him tempted Tim to wish Norman was still stuck in the caves. Give him something to sniffle about. I ought to have put a mage's evil spell on you, not bust my muscles dragging you out.

After he had messed about with his shepherd's pie, which Tim had to cook up for him, Norman belched loudly several times –
‘Wolves howling tonight!' from the next tent – and crawled under the shelter. When he took off his boots, Tim wished he hadn't. Norman lay down in the middle of the tiny tent, forced his long awkward body into his sleeping-bag with groans and an occasional sob, and turned his face to the poncho wall.

Other couples had lit camp fires. Tim prowled about in the wood, moving close to a fire, if invited. Eddie and Chip were having a smutty conversation about a girl Chip had met on a war game weekend. ‘Randy as hell, I was. Nothing like shooting people to get you going. Shoot 'em with paint pellets,' he told Tim. ‘It's fantastic. Kill! Kill! You'd love it.'

A few people were sitting round the big fire that Steve and Don had built efficiently, listening to stories about other Enterprise weekends. What will they say about me and Norman when we're gone? Tim sat on a log at the edge of the group.

‘Done well, you have, Julian.' Steve instantly flashed his way on to Tim's list of specials. ‘Like it so far?'

‘It's all right.' Tim meant, I love it.

‘Coming again?'

‘I might.'

‘You come again, get to know the ropes, you could give me and Don a hand, with bigger groups, help some of the beginners.'

‘All right.' I'd
love
to!

When Tim went back to his poncho home, the most clumsy and rickety of all the shelters, Norman, rolled in his sleeping-bag like a maggot in a cocoon, was still awake.

‘Where were you? It's scary in this forest. I heard animals prowling.'

Norman was lying on both the vinyl mats, but Tim said nothing. He did not want to talk.

Norman did. ‘Julian,' he said. ‘I say, Julian.'

Tim curled up on leaves and bracken, away from him. The shelter was so small that their bodies touched through the sleeping-bags.

‘Julian, listen. In that awful cave – why did you tell me to look at your eyes?'

‘To give you strength.' Tim turned back to him. ‘To calm you down, sort of, and, like, pull you out by magnetism.'

‘You a hypnotist, then?'

Why not? Tim could be if he wanted. It was true, he had charmed Norman out of the caves.

‘Yes,' he said. ‘I am.'

Next morning, after a lecture on berries and nuts and living at one with nature, it was another long tramp to the abseiling cliff.

They came round a corner in an overgrown abandoned quarry, and, God! there it was. A sheer rock face, miles high, thousands of feet high, a hundred and thirty feet high.

‘Not going up there,' said Norman.

‘That's not the problem,' Chip said. ‘It's coming down it.'

Steve had brought abseiling harness and ropes in the van: beautiful, slender, silky ropes, that he uncoiled lovingly, and wound round himself to demonstrate how they could tie a bowline knot one-handed in mid-air. ‘Let's see you all do it.'

‘Why would we want to?' Bob could not do it.

‘If you were in trouble and needed an extra rope thrown down.'

‘One rope isn't strong enough, then?'

‘Sure. The breaking strain point is six and a half tons. No one's as heavy as that.'

‘You should see my Mum,' Eddie offered.

They practised abseiling on the nursery slope, a smaller rock only about thirty feet high. The worst part was stepping backwards into space. Tim dithered on the edge.

‘Go on.' Steve was beside him on another rope. ‘You'll love it.'

‘I want to, but I don't want to.' Tim licked his dry lips. His stomach had already risen up.

‘Fear and desire are friends.'

‘I don't –' Tim began to say, but Steve said, ‘Go!' at the same time, so Tim went.

Sitting in the webbing harness with the rope passing through the clip on the front of the belt, Tim dropped easily down the rock,
checked himself by raising the lower part of the rope in his right hand, and pushed off from the rock face to jump the last few feet.

‘Nothing to it.'

Janice floated down like a fat pigeon. Even Norman managed fairly well, shouting, ‘I don't like it!', but picked himself up at the bottom, and walked off with a silly grin, to brew up, wagging his thatched head.

Teddy Bear was the last to go down. He stood for a long time at the top, asking questions, fiddling with the harness, turning to look down. ‘Don't look down!' from Janice and Tim at the bottom. The rope that was tied to a tree with Steve's bowlines had been passed through the clip. Steve showed Bob how to lean back to take the strain. He had one foot over the edge.

‘Come
on
,' Janice whispered. The foot went back up. ‘Oh, God, if he doesn't do it, he'll be a wreck. He'll hate himself, that's what he's like. Dear God, please make him come over the top.' Janice clutched Tim's arm. ‘Please, God, push him or something, you've got to. Make him do it,' she pleaded, and Tim found that he was praying with her.

‘Help him, Lord,' breathed Janice, and Teddy Bear was over the edge, hanging like a German sausage on a string, twisting sideways, pulled straight by Steve, dropping down (‘Thank
God!')
, landing bumpily and staggering into a bush – but landing.

‘We prayed for you,' Janice told him, ‘me and Julian.'

It had worked. Perhaps Tim could take up praying, as well as hypnotism.

When Steve said that they were all to abseil down the soaring, sheer rock face, Janice said to Bob, ‘Let's not test God too far.' He stayed below and practised bowlines, while she climbed up the rough slope at the back of the cliff, with the others.

‘Don't want to do it.' Norman puffed and snuffled and panted at the top of the hill.

‘Yes you do.' Hadn't Tim got him out of the caves? Hadn't he prayed Bob down? He could get Norman down the cliff.

‘I can't.' Norman shook his head, looking down, horribly far
down. Below them, emerging from a fissure high up in the rock, a bird took wing and soared away, to show them it was easy.

‘You can do it,' Tim insisted. ‘Look at me.' Norman turned his head.

Tim narrowed his eyes and glinted them hypnotically.

‘Oh –' Norman swayed about. ‘You give me confidence. Perhaps I will.' He hung his lip. ‘Perhaps I won't.'

He wanted everyone else to go first. Terrified, Tim leaned back in the harness, heard Steve say, ‘Go!', thought, I am going to die, pushed off from the edge, dropped, found the rock with the flat of his feet, and bounced himself off to sail out and down like a bird in a great dizzy swoop. I can fly!

I can fly. He kept on the belt and leg harness and started up the hill again, light-headed, not feeling the effort of the climb, ecstatic.

‘Can I go again?'

‘Sure.' Steve grinned. ‘Just let Norman have his turn.'

Norman was at the edge of the cliff, as dead white as if he really were going to be pushed off, uncontrolled, into space.

Go on, you bugger, Tim thought. You've got this far, and snored all night, and your feet smell, and I've paid for you and all. ‘Get going, Norm.'

‘Leave him alone,' Steve said. ‘He's all right.'

He wasn't. On the rim of the precipice, Norman's long wobbly legs buckled. He knelt there, clutching the taut rope in front of him.

‘Get on your feet,' Steve said steadily. ‘Lean
back
.'

Norman gibbered. Standing in front of him, Tim tried to force the energy again.

‘You
can
, Norman, you can. You can fly like a bird. Lift your head and look at me – you can fly!'

Norman looked up, and reached his arms forward to Tim.

‘Lean
back!
' shouted Steve, but Norman's feet dragged over the edge, and his face bumped and scraped against the rock as he went over.

He landed in a heap, covered in blood, and the ant people at the bottom of the quarry ran towards him.

‘What the hell?' Steve turned furiously to Tim. ‘What the hell were you trying to do? “Look at me – you can fly.” You must be crazy.'

‘It wasn't my fault.'

‘He'd have been fine if you hadn't interfered.' Steve put the second rope through the clip on his belt and disappeared over the edge without looking at Tim again.

Tim went slowly back down the hill the way he had climbed up it. Norman was being cleaned and patched up. Steve was angry and tired. Don would have to drive Norman home, because he could not go by train.

‘What happened?' everyone was asking. Norman didn't know, and Steve did not say.

But the general opinion was: Norm should not have been here. So even that was Tim's fault, as well as everything else.

‘How did the weekend go?' Brian asked.

‘Amazing.' Tim could not tell him about the disaster of Norman, so he boasted a bit about the caving and the abseiling, and the rigours of a night in the small copse that Norman had thought was a forest. ‘It was fabulous.'

But the dream of Enterprise was finished and faded like a dawn waking. Back to my real self. Tim hunched gloomily on the window-sill in his flat, and contemplated reality.

Back to Harold.

Tim had not been home more than an hour or two before he heard the heavy tread on the bottom of the stairs. He knew Brian was at home, so he could not refuse to open the door and risk Harold going berserk on the steps.

‘Hello – er, hello, friend.'

Steve had lectured them, ‘Treat everybody as a friend and they'll be friendly to you.' Might be worth trying.

‘Don't give me that.' Harold came in. ‘You're no friend of mine, after what you done. Really eats into me, it does, like a cancer, and I won't never be able to forgive you, not in the rest of your life.'

Why hadn't he said, ‘Not in the rest of
my
life'? The suggestion that Tim, although younger, was going to die before him was very unsettling.

‘I've got some lemonade.' (‘Don't give up on anyone.') ‘Would you like some?'

‘Yer.'

‘Something to eat?'

‘Yer.'

Harold sat down with his knees apart and his arms on the table, as if he had a knife and fork in his fist, ready to bang the handles for service.

Tim gave him lemonade and some stale bread and the last of the cheese. He was too nervous to eat or drink anything himself.

The situation was horrible. Two days of escape, and then the handcuffs were on again. How was he ever going to break free? Threatening again to report Harold for menace might make him angrier. Actually reporting him might send him right over the top.

And what could Tim really tell the police?

This friend of mine keeps turning up – well, he was a friend, but now I'm afraid of him.

Why is that, Mr Kendall?

He said I'd die before him.

Well, you may have a pink face from two days in the great outdoors, but other than that, you don't look in the best of shape.

It's the eyes, isn't it, constable? Haunted-looking.

When Harold had gone, Tim looked for a long time at his face in the mirror.

Haunted eyes. No wonder he was starting to make mistakes at work. Three times, Mr D. had caught him standing about daydreaming when customers needed help.

He had read a price ticket wrong on Purbeck moiré, and it had got into the customer's account, and when she came in later for an extra couple of metres, she spotted the mistake and raised hell with Mr D.

‘I took full responsibility,' he said stiffly to Tim, ‘because it's not my policy to reveal the shortcomings of the staff.'

‘Thank, er, thank you, Mr D.'

‘Not to protect you.' He stood by the desk with his knuckles on its tidy surface. ‘To protect the department. I just want you to know, it's very painful for me.'

‘I'm sorry.'

‘Sorry is neither here nor there. You want to remain with us, I take it?'

Tim nodded, and stared at the floor.

‘Well, then.'

Tim had hardly heard what he said. Sometimes he thought he might be going deaf.

‘What are you waiting for, young man? Clear out of here. Clear out and do your duty out there on the floor.'

‘Fantastic,' Chip had said to Tim, about the war games. ‘Kill! Kill! You'd love it.'

Well, what did Tim have to lose? He could never go back to the survival course, and Warfare sounded much easier. You didn't have to learn anything. You just ran about, going, ‘Bang, bang, you're dead,' which would be as good as recapturing childhood. He deserved that. He really deserved a break away from what Val called stress, and he called the jitters.

Stress was fashionable. He had it.

‘What do people do for stress, Val?'

‘Take a break, if they've got any sense. Let themselves relax. Stop driving themselves.'

‘That's something you'll never have to worry about anyway, Timothy,' Colin said. He was getting as nasty as Val. He'd better watch out.

Enterprise had ended up in anticlimax and disappointment because of Norman, but also because there had been no one to tell the tale about the adventures to when he came home. What would it be like if he came back splattered with paint from a day at the war games? No beer in the flat and a tepid shower, because Brian and Jack kept the water temperature low in the summer. He might
go home and tell his mother. She would love it, but she would call out, ‘Come in here, Wallace, and listen to this,' and Little Hitler would make a meal of it.