Kiss Kiss (26 page)

J. W. CRUMP
, it said.
KESTON FLOUR MILLS, LONDON, S.W
.17.
      
“You don’t think that bastard with the brown teeth is watching
us this very moment from behind a tree?”
      
“There’s no chance of that,” Claud said. “He’s down at the
filling-station like I told you, waiting for us to come home.”
      
We started loading the pheasants into the sacks. They were
soft and floppy-necked and the skin underneath the feathers
was still warm.
      
“There’ll be a taxi waiting for us in the lane,” Claud said.
      
“What?”
      
“I always go back in a taxi, Gordon, didn’t you know that?”
      
I told him I didn’t.
      
“A taxi is anonymous,” Claud said. “Nobody knows who’s
inside a taxi except the driver. My dad taught me that.”
      
“Which driver?”
      
“Charlie Kinch. He’s only too glad to oblige.”
      
We finished loading the pheasants, and I tried to hump my
bulging sack on to my shoulder. My sack had about sixty
birds inside it, and it must have weighed a hundredweight and
a half, at least. “I can’t carry this,” I said. “We’ll have to leave
some of them behind.”
      
“Drag it,” Claud said. “Just pull it behind you.”
      
We started off through the pitch-black woods, pulling the
pheasants behind us. “We’ll never make it all the way back to
the village like this,” I said.
      
“Charlie’s never let me down yet,” Claud said.
      
We came to the margin of the wood and peered through
the hedge into the lane. Claud said, “Charlie boy” very softly
and the old man behind the wheel of the taxi not five yards
away poked his head out into the moonlight and gave us a sly
toothless grin. We slid through the hedge, dragging the sacks
after us along the ground.
      
“Hullo!” Charlie said. “What’s this?”
      
“It’s cabbages,” Claud told him. “Open the door.”
      
Two minutes later we were safely inside the taxi, cruising
slowly down the hill towards the village.
      
It was all over now bar the shouting. Claud was triumphant,
bursting with pride and excitement, and he kept leaning
forward and tapping Charlie Kinch on the shoulder and saying,
“How about it, Charlie? How about this for a haul?” and
Charlie kept glancing back popeyed at the huge bulging sacks
lying on the floor between us and saying, “Jesus Christ, man,
how did you do it?”
      
“There’s six brace of them for you, Charlie,” Claud said.
And Charlie said, “I reckon pheasants is going to be a bit
scarce up at Mr Victor Hazel’s opening-day shoot this year,”
and Claud said, “I imagine they are, Charlie, I imagine they
are.”
      
“What in God’s name are you going to do with a hundred
and twenty pheasants?” I asked.
      
“Put them in cold storage for the winter,” Claud said. “Put
them in with the dogmeat in the deep-freeze at the
filling-station.”
      
“Not tonight, I trust?”
      
“No, Gordon, not tonight. We leave them at Bessie’s house
tonight.”
      
“Bessie who?”
      
“Bessie Organ.”
      
“Bessie
Organ
!”
      
“Bessie always delivers my game, didn’t you know that?”
      
“I don’t know anything,” I said. I was completely stunned.
Mrs Organ was the wife of the Reverend Jack Organ, the local
vicar.
      
“Always choose a respectable woman to deliver your game,”
Claud announced. “That’s correct, Charlie, isn’t it?”
      
“Bessie’s a right smart girl,” Charlie said.
      
We were driving through the village now and the street-lamps
were still on and the men were wandering home from
the pubs. I saw Will Prattley letting himself in quietly by the
side door of his fishmonger’s shop and Mrs Prattley’s head was
sticking out of the window just above him, but he didn’t know
it.
      
“The vicar is very partial to roasted pheasant,” Claud said.
      
“He hangs it eighteen days,” Charlie said, “then he gives it a
couple of good shakes and all the feathers drop off.”
      
The taxi turned left and swung in through the gates of the
vicarage. There were no lights on in the house and nobody
met us. Claud and I dumped the pheasants in the coal shed at
the rear, and then we said good-bye to Charlie Kinch and
walked back in the moonlight to the filling-station, empty-handed.
Whether or not Mr Rabbetts was watching us as we
went in, I do not know. We saw no sign of him.

“Here she comes,” Claud said to me the next morning.
      
“Who?”
      
“Bessie—Bessie Organ.” He spoke the name proudly and with
a slight proprietory air, as though he were a general referring
to his bravest officer.
      
I followed him outside.
      
“Down there,” he said, pointing.
      
Far away down the road I could see a small female figure
advancing towards us.
      
“What’s she pushing?” I asked.
      
Claud gave me a sly look.
      
“There’s only one safe way of delivering game,” he announced,
“and that’s under a baby.”
      
“Yes,” I murmured, “yes, of course.”
      
“That’ll be young Christopher Organ in there, aged one and
a half. He’s a lovely child, Gordon.”
      
I could just make out the small dot of a baby sitting high up
in the pram, which had its hood folded down.
      
“There’s sixty or seventy pheasants at least under that little
nipper,” Claud said happily. “You just imagine that.”
      
“You can’t put sixty or seventy pheasants in a pram.”
      
“You can if it’s got a good deep well underneath it, and if
you take out the mattress and pack them in tight, right up to
the top. All you need then is a sheet. You’ll be surprised how
little room a pheasant takes up when it’s limp.”
      
We stood beside the pumps waiting for Bessie Organ to
arrive. It was one of those warm windless September mornings
with a darkening sky and a smell of thunder in the air.
      
“Right through the village bold as brass,” Claud said, “Good
old Bessie.”
      
“She seems in rather a hurry to me.”
      
Claud lit a new cigarette from the stub of the old one.
“Bessie is never in a hurry,” he said.
      
“She certainly isn’t walking normal,” I told him. “You look.”
      
He squinted at her through the smoke of his cigarette. Then
he took the cigarette out of his mouth and looked again.
      
“Well?” I said.
      
“She does seem to be going a tiny bit quick, doesn’t she?”
he said carefully.
      
“She’s going damn quick.”
      
There was a pause. Claud was beginning to stare very hard
at the approaching woman.
      
“Perhaps she doesn’t want to be caught in the rain, Gordon.
I’ll bet that’s exactly what it is, she thinks it’s going to rain
and she don’t want the baby to get wet.”
      
“Why doesn’t she put the hood up?”
      
He didn’t answer this.
      
“She’s
running
!” I cried. “Look!” Bessie had suddenly broken
into a full sprint.
      
Claud stood very still, watching the woman; and in the
silence that followed I fancied I could hear a baby screaming.
      
“What’s up?”
      
He didn’t answer.
      
“There’s something wrong with that baby,” I said. “Listen.”
      
At this point, Bessie was about two hundred yards away
from us but closing fast.
      
“Can you hear him now?” I said.
      
“Yes.”
      
“He’s yelling his head off.”
      
The small shrill voice in the distance was growing louder
every second, frantic, piercing, nonstop, almost hysterical.
      
“He’s having a fit,” Claud announced.
      
“I think he must be.”
      
“That’s why she’s running, Gordon. She wants to get him
in here quick and put him under a cold tap.”
      
“I’m sure you’re right,” I said. “In fact I know you’re right.
Just listen to that noise.”
      
“If it isn’t a fit, you can bet your life it’s something like it.”
      
“I quite agree.”
      
Claud shifted his feet uneasily on the gravel of the
driveway. “There’s a thousand and one different things keep
happening every day to little babies like that,” he said.
      
“Of course.”
      
“I knew a baby once who caught his fingers in the spokes
of the pram wheel. He lost the lot. It cut them clean off.”
      
“Yes.”
      
“Whatever it is,” Claud said, “I wish to Christ she’d stop
running.”
      
A long truck loaded with bricks came up behind Bessie and
the driver slowed down and poked his head out the window
to stare. Bessie ignored him and flew on, and she was so close
now I could see her big red face with the mouth wide open,
panting for breath. I noticed she was wearing white gloves on
her hands, very prim and dainty, and there was a funny little
white hat to match perched right on the top of her head, like
a mushroom.
      
Suddenly, out of the pram, straight up into the air, flew an
enormous pheasant!
      
Claud let out a cry of horror.
      
The fool in the truck going along beside Bessie started roaring
with laughter.
      
The pheasant flapped around drunkenly for a few seconds,
then it lost height and landed in the grass by the side of the
road.
      
A grocer’s van came up behind the truck and began hooting
to get by. Bessie kept running.
      
Then—
whoosh!
—a second pheasant flew up out of the
pram.
      
Then a third, and a fourth. Then a fifth.
      
“My God!” I said. “It’s the pills! They’re wearing off!”
      
Claud didn’t say anything.
      
Bessie covered the last fifty yards at a tremendous pace, and
she came swinging into the driveway of the filling-station
with birds flying up out of the pram in all directions.
      
“What the hell’s going on?” she cried.
      
“Go round the back!” I shouted. “Go round the back!” But
she pulled up sharp against the first pump in the line, and before
we could reach her she had seized the screaming infant in her
arms and dragged him clear.
      
“No! No!” Claud cried, racing towards her. “Don’t lift the
baby! Put him back! Hold down the sheet!” But she wasn’t
even listening, and with the weight of the child suddenly
lifted away, a great cloud of pheasants rose up out of the
pram, fifty or sixty of them, at least, and the whole sky above
us was filled with huge brown birds flapping their wings
furiously to gain height.
      
Claud and I started running up and down the driveway
waving our arms to frighten them off the premises. “Go away!”
we shouted. “Shoo! Go away!” But they were too dopey still
to take any notice of us and within half a minute down they
came again and settled themselves like a swarm of locusts all
over the front of my filling-station. The place was covered
with them. They sat wing to wing along the edges of the roof
and on the concrete canopy that came out over the pumps,
and a dozen at least were clinging to the sill of the office
window. Some had flown down on to the rack that held the
bottles of lubricating-oil, and others were sliding about on the
bonnets of my second-hand cars. One cockbird with a fine tail
was perched superbly on top of a petrol pump, and quite a
number, those that were too drunk to stay aloft, simply
squatted in the driveway at our feet, fluffing their feathers and
blinking their small eyes.
      
Across the road, a line of cars had already started forming
behind the brick-lorry and the grocery-van, and people were
opening their doors and getting out and beginning to cross
over to have a closer look. I glanced at my watch. It was
twenty to nine. Any moment now, I thought, a large black
car is going to come streaking along the road from the
direction of the village, and the car will be a Rolls, and the
face behind the wheel will be the great glistening brewer’s
face of Mr Victor Hazel.
      
“They near pecked him to pieces!” Bessie was shouting,
clasping the screaming baby to her bosom.
      
“You go on home, Bessie,” Claud said, white in the face.
      
“Lock up,” I said. “Put out the sign. We’ve gone for the day.”