Opposite Sides (15 page)

“
You
awake?”

The whispering was only a
few feet away but the thickness within his brain prevented Hans
from recognising it. With no windows in the barn, and the lantern
extinguished, the interior was as pitch black.

“
Is . . . you
. . . Robert?”

“
Um, er am
I?” came the voice in the dark. “Is that you . . .
Dicky?”

A voice that sounded like
his tried to answer but the noises wouldn’t come out of his mouth.
He tried to concentrate. Finally, his wobbly lips which had as much
feeling as if he’d just had a tooth extraction managed to form some
words.

“
No. It’s . .
.” There was a long pause while Hans tried to think of his own
name. He finally gave up because it hurt every cell in his brain to
think at all. “Me,” he replied.

“
I’m me too,”
said the other voice.

This was becoming
difficult. ‘Me’ could not be ‘Me’. There were too many of them.
Hans was now totally confused by the haze in his mind.

“
Robert?”

“
D . . .
don’t think so. Don’t f . . . feel like Robert. Do you?”

“
No!
Scheisse
, my head hurts.
Must have been hit by . . . ”

“
You too?”
asked another voice from the dark. “I’ve spent most of the night
pissin’ my way through.”

The strange conversation
continued another few minutes. Someone got up and opened one of the
doors. A shape appeared standing near to where Hans thought his
feet were. He squinted but his eyes refused to focus properly and
the shape remained ghostlike, yet solid. Then it spoke.

“
Come on,
Hans. Rouse yourself. It’s the effects of all that
wine.”

“
Am I?” He
couldn’t think of the word he wanted.

Drunk? Yes. We all are in
varying degrees.” A long thin arm held something out towards him.
“Here, drink this. It’ll make you feel a lot better.”

Hans took the
mug and tried to direct it towards his mouth.
Funny
, he thought,
I’ve forgotten exactly where my mouth
is
. His wobbly, misdirected movements
slowly produced the result he needed and the rim of the mug finally
came into contact with his lips.

“
One gulp,”
another advised, another voice coming closer through the fog.
“Swill it down. Don’t wait. One. Two. Three. Go!”

Hans gulped. The stuff
tasted awful but it rushed down his gullet as quickly as a flood
down a drainpipe. He sat pulling faces, almost gagging from the
taste. An unmoving shape at the end of his feet and a much taller,
leaner one by his shoulder. Slowly Hans’ eyeballs settled back into
his head and his bewilderment began to evaporate. He could now
focus.

“
Ah, Loppy.
It’s you.”

“
Glad to have
you back with us, old boy. You and Phil had it bad. Your first?”
Hans nodded and his head wobbled as it nearly fell off. Loppy
laughed at his misery. “Your first is always the worst.”

“
Ooh!” Hans
held his head which was still refusing to stay square on to his
neck and shoulders. “How long do I feel like this?”

He tried to massage his
temples but they still throbbed. Slowly his body was recovering and
he could see further around himself. Those boys who were mobile
were tidying up. There was Gerald over the far side picking up the
binge night evidence and pushing empty glass bottles into a black
bag. When he noticed Hans was with them again, he went
over.

“
Should be
sobering up by the time we head back.” he tapped Hans lightly on
his shin. “Don’t worry. My Dad’s never noticed anything strange
yet.”

“
What? You’ve
done this before?”

“
Hundreds of
times, haven’t we Loppy?”

Loppy picked up his bag
and stuffed his things inside until the bag was so swollen it
couldn’t hold any more. He was not prepared to incriminate
himself.

“
Well, lads,
I’m off !”

Loppy gave a wave high in
the air and slipped away between the barn doors that had been
cracked open just wide enough to allow his slender body to slip
through. Hans could now see that it was daylight, probably well
into the morning hours.

Time for all
of us to
go, he thought as he got up on
legs as wobbly as a new born foal.

He staggered around the
side of Miss Turner’s house. Even now his legs felt uncoordinated
and the ground was too far below his shoes. He hoped to reach the
safety of his his room before anyone else noticed how ungainly he
was walking. He rounded the back corner and focused on the large
glass panels of the back porch. It would be a short trip from there
through the kitchen and a longer trip down the hallway to the
stairs but there were several doorways he could duck into if anyone
else appeared. So far, so good.

He hesitated at the
bottom of the stairs, knowing that to run up them would most
certainly cause him to lose his footing. He listened. Nothing. The
house was silent.

Good
, he thought.
Here goes
.

Hans had almost reached
the first small landing where the stairs now turned to the left,
when he heard a door below him open and footsteps sound in the
hallway. He lowered his bag to the ground between his feet, stopped
breathing, and listened. The steps began to come closer towards the
bottom of the stairs but in the next second, turned and receded. A
door opened, then closed. The muffled voice of one of the servants
was snuffed out by the door shutting. Hans bent over and picked up
the bag, one hand steadying himself against the wall. Only eight
more steps to climb.

Each step up seemed to be
growing higher; each step narrower. He cursed his senses for
playing tricks on him, distorting reality and teasing his legs so
that he had trouble placing each foot down firmly and precisely on
each step ahead. He counted:

“
. . .
three, f, fr . . . five . . . ”

“
Watch what
you’re doing!” A pause. Then the voice changed to one of suppressed
laughter. “You’re drunk!”

Immediately in front of
him, only two steps higher, stood Jan Turner. She had expected him
to have moved over and let him pass but his manner of moving and
the way in which he hugged the wall told her that things were not
normal. Hans had been unaware of her approach for all his
concentration had been centred on getting his legs to behave and
not falling backwards back down the stairs.

“
What drunk?
Not!” His words still sounded slurred, enough to alert Jan that
Hans Resmel was behaving like men she had seen stagger out of ‘The
Cook’s Arms’ on a Saturday evening as she and her friends had come
out of the cinema when they were allowed to go to this new
entertainment.

“
You are!
Wait ‘till I tell my aunt! What do you say to that, Mr Drunky?
Drunky Resmel.” She held out her arms wide so that he had no way of
avoiding her.

“
Many boys
drink. Not only . . . me!”

“
Who else?
Not Gerald Brookfield-Smith!” She shook her head at him and made
clicking noises, just like he had heard her aunt do. “You know that
that much is not good for you?”

Hans raised his head and
tried to focus on her but he began to feel a bit dizzy and thought
that if he did not get past her soon, he would fall over backwards
and go crashing back down the stairwell.

“
Let me pass,
damn you!”

“
I might.
Then, I might not.” she was in command. “Only if you promise me
something.”

She stood firm. It was a
battle of wits and his wits were not intact. She eyed him carefully
from toe to head, waiting for him to react to her request. She took
off her glasses and with utmost slowness wiped the lenses several
times extremely carefully before setting them back on her face. She
flicked her head back and then just stood there, blocking his way
up the stairs.

“
All right!
Anything! Just . . . let . . . let me pass!” The words squeezed out
between his clenched teeth as if they had been through a
press.

“
Promise.
Promise. You’ve got to promise, first!”

“
Ich
schwöre
!”

“
Cross your
heart and hope to die!”

“
Anything.
Tell me quickly before I do die here on the stairs. Then you’d have
a body to deal with.”

Jan cleared her throat
and gripped the top of the bannister but still there was no room
for him.

“
I’ve been
invited over to a friend’s place but I need to get there, somehow.
Aunt would never let me go there alone. So, you can either go with
me on the bus or . . . ” She lowered her voice so that only he
could hear what she next had to say. “I could borrow a bicycle but
don’t you dare tell aunt. You can piggy me over. I’ve seen others
hitch a ride on the bar. You pedal, I ride. See?”

“
I’m not that
good on a bike. Don’t have one.”

“
You’ll have
to practice!” She lowered her arms and leaned against the bannister
this time to give him room. “I’ll get the bike and we can try it
tomorrow round the back of the school. No one will see us.
Everyone’s on holiday.” As Hans stumbled by, she hissed her
warning. “If you don’t, I’ll tell my aunt you’re drunk.” Then, with
a light, triumphant smile and with glee in her voice, she trilled,
“See you tomorrow, Hans. Don’t forget!”

With those words, she
danced brightly past him and down the stairs.

The school year began
again in September. The days were becoming shorter and early fogs
crept across the fields, rolling in from the sea and lingering
until the students were already sitting at their lessons. Miss
Turner kept her word and Jan had become much more pleasant, even
sharing the odd joke with him during the weekends.

November 4th and the
Prime Minister together with his Labour-led government resigned. It
was emblazoned in thick black headlines all over the front page of
Tuesday morning’s newspaper. Ellen had taken it into Miss Turner
and the shocked look that had been on Ellen’s face told Hans that
something awful had happened. He was about to enter the front room
but decided to backtrack and keep well out of Miss Turner’s way. It
was not until dinner time just after one that afternoon that Hans
learnt the truth.

“
What happens
now, Aunt?” asked Jan as they sat waiting for Mary to bring the
meat pie to the table.

“
We’ll have
to wait for Parliament to decide. My guess is that Mr Baldwin will
most likely be our next Prime Minister.”

Jan pulled
her
I don’t know or care
f
ace and glared at Hans
on the opposite side of the table. He pretended to ignore her and
cast his gaze over the serving dishes arranged around the
table.

Two weeks later, Miss
Turner decided that the school house in which she lived needed some
repairs done as well as a few small alterations before the really
wet and cold weather set in. She had made the decision to engage
the very handy man who was employed to do jobs like that around the
college buildings. That morning, Freddy Knox arrived, together with
hammer and metal toolbox and immediately began chipping out the
soft rotten wood that had turned up in the corners of several
windows and cutting out parts of the window ledges that also needed
repairing. He had set up his work-horse and was just bringing in a
heavy piece of timber ready for sawing when a young girl in a long
grey overcoat and carrying a suitcase that was almost too large and
heavy for her, struggled up the back steps and tentatively knocked
on the open door.

“ ‘
ello,
lass!” Freddy came up behind with the timber tucked under one arm.
“Can I be ‘elpin’ yer?”

“
I come. Miss
Turner to help,” she said with a very strong non-English
accent.

“
Right-e-o,
miss.” Freddy put his timber down and stepped past the young
visitor into the kitchen. “Nobody around?” he asked her.

“
Nobody?”

“
That’s fine.
I’ll find ‘er for yer. ‘ang on. I’ll just give a call through that
‘all door.” Freddy began walking over towards the hall door but
just before he pushed down on the latch, he turned and again spoke
to the girl on the outside step. “ ‘oo did yer say yer was?” The
girl did not understand but he was flattered by her smile. “Yer
name, luv?”

“
Ah?”

“
Name? Yer
name?”

“
Friedl.
Fräulein
Friedl.

The young girl looked
rustic and strong, just the kind of lass he would like for a wife,
if he did not have one already. He was amused by the way she had
tilted her round fawn-coloured hat on the side of her head so that
its long feather flicked and bobbed each time she moved. When she
removed her hat, she shook her head which seemed relieved at the
freedom, for she had pulled her hat down very firmly until it had
almost covered every strand of her light-brown hair. It was not
short after all but had been wound in two pinwheels either side of
her head. Freddy thought that altogether, the girl looked friendly
and homely.