Breaktime (10 page)

‘Vaguely. The standingsitting man.’

‘Eh?’

‘Never mind. Go on.’

‘Well, he steps forward, our brave captain, folds you masterfully
fully
over his shoulder—he’s learned all the fireman’s lifts, has our Hector—and marches down the hall. Just as he reaches the door you decide—or rather, your stomach decides . . .’ Robby tries to restrain the laughter welling in him, ‘. . . decides . . . it has had enough of Hector’s . . . of Hector’s . . . Hector’s shoulder stuck in it . . . and you . . .’

‘O, no!’

‘O, yes . . . threw up. All down his back.’

Ditto too is laughing now. ‘Like a waterfall,’ he gasps out.

‘Just like!’

‘Out, out, out!’

‘Right out and down the back of Hector’s best blue Sunday suit!’

‘O, glory!’

‘You’re a daft pair,’ says Jack, but he is holding his sides too.

‘It was great,’ says Robby. ‘I’ve never seen a crowd lose interest in anybody so fast. Our Hector dumped you like a bag of garbage on the pavement, and disappeared double quick into the bog. I was hustled out after you by my friends and neighbours. The doors were slammed behind our backs, and presto! All was over!’

‘No more than you wanted, I’ll bet,’ said Jack, recovered and able to drink his beer again.

‘Could never have hoped for such a magnificent finale, bonny lad. Pure delight.’

Laughing so much made Ditto feel ill again. Vaguely, not specifically. The river at their feet swirlgurgled, sounding cool and clean and of melancholy purity.

‘I feel filthy,’ he said unexpectedly.

‘And sound solemn,’ said Robby. ‘We can’t have that. What you need is a good bath. That would work wonders. We’ve no bath, but we have plenty of water. Take a swim.’

‘Leave him alone,’ said Jack. ‘You always have to be messing folk about.’

‘I’ll settle with you later, deserter,’ said Robby, and stood, grabbed Ditto’s feet, heaved on them, swinging him at the same
time
so that he was lying along the edge of the river bank.

‘No, gerroff,’ he shouted, clawing at the ground to save himself from the water.

But Robby was laughing again; giggling rather.

‘Strip him!’ Robby yelled at Jack.

Jack did not move. ‘Do your own dirty work.’

‘No no!’ Ditto shouted.

‘Yes yes!’ Robby replied, lunging for Ditto’s trouser belt.

‘Off! Off!’ screamed Ditto, grabbing Robby’s clawing hands and with desperate effort trying to turn himself and his assailant away from the water and his trousers.

Jack sprang to his feet to save himself from the rolling, struggling pair.

‘Grab him, Jack,’ Robby called.

Jack climbed higher up the bank and sat on a mossy boulder, vantage for the fray.

Suddenly it was essential to Ditto that he be free. No longer a game. His frivolous dissipate energy at once focused bleakly to that end. Firmly, he took grip of Robby’s wrists, twisted body and arms, pulled, lunged, leaped, hurled himself in clean rhythm.

Robby was carried, surfing, upon the wave of Ditto’s determined bore. Clasped together like lovers they rose from the scuffled ground.

‘Submit, fool!’ Robby cried.

Each pushed the other away; but each held to the other. Their push-pull upset the poised balance of Ditto’s determined rise.

They hit the water like felled trees with snared branches, at the same instant.

Robby rose from the shallow depths first, like a jack from its box.

‘Victory!’ he crowed, and danced a plodgy jig in the churning pool.

Firemuse

They made a fire of flotsam and dead branches, stood by it, sat by it, lay by it, and dried. Jack did not help, but sat on and on on his boulder, drinking his way through a six-pack of Newcastle Brown, saying nothing.

Night came, starry, still. The wetness steamed from their clinging clothes in the glowheat of the fire. Activity left them now happier to be cosy and unmoving, with nothing to say, each more comfortably comforted by his secret thoughts.

Ditto was remembering another fire, another chilly night, hardly more than two years ago before his father’s illness prevented them living a normal life.

Together he and his father had been fishing up the Tees on some private water. They had lashed the river all the warm sun day but with little luck. Nothing to show, in fact, but one or two middling-sized dace, nothing special, no trout which they would most like to have landed and had hoped to catch when they had set off that morning almost at dawn in a sharp clean sun, the country washed by rain overnight, the air frostdew bright. A glisten. A sparkle. A kind of carnival in birdsong silence. A good day all day, a companionable day. They had not talked much, a few words now and then about bait or pools promising to cast upon. Nothing dissentient. They did not row then; that came later. Over lunch—coffee from a flask, mother’s meat pie, cake, an apple each—they had twitted one another and joked, his father in good form, anecdotal, as he always was at his best and when happiest, but not frenetic as he could be when he had had a drink or two in the evening. Relaxed. Ditto had liked him then, loved him, felt proud in a way he could not explain to himself or to anyone else. But he knew now, thinking, that it was the man’s simple delight in his day of freedom from work, in the beauty about him, his absorption to the point of obsession with his fishing: these were the things which gave him his self and were attractive and made Ditto proud. And Ditto knew at once then,
that
evening as they sat by their makeshift fire his father and he, that he was not as this man. Knew that he fished to please him by pretending absorption, not living it as his father did. He had spent the day like this to please his father not because it gave himself the kind of pleasure his father took from it. And did that matter? He did not know, could not decide, knew only that finally he did not want to do anything simply to please this man his father. Wanted to please him of course, but not to please him by pretence. He wished to do what was of himself, his own-him. And he wondered if his father knew this.

Whether his father did or not, from that day Ditto found he could not quite, ever, please his father again. No matter how much he tried, no matter how he acted out the pretence or how fervently he wished to recapture the closeness of that day, the last day of so many that had gone before, he could not. It was as if knowing he had pretended made it impossible ever to pretend again, whether he wanted to or not. His father always seemed to sense the lie. And it was from that time that the arguments, the disagreements, the fractured days began.

From that time, too, his father’s illness took hold. Was that coincidence? Or consequence?

He did not know that either. And groaned aloud in the firelight, as people do when they want to push guilt and fear from their thoughts.

‘Sounds like you’re ready for some more excitement,’ said Robby, rousing from his own reverie.

Fireplan

Soon after midnight Robby proposed that we now set out on the second part of his plan for the evening’s escapade. I asked what he intended. He said he planned for us to burgle the home of that evening’s guest speaker at the public meeting from which we had been so unceremoniously ejected.

Jack was against this.

JACK
: You’re an idiot, man. Leave well alone. You’re just getting your own back.

ROBBY
: I’m not asking you, deserter. I’m telling. Either join in or push off.

JACK
: You never give up, do you!

ROBBY
: Look, you copped out once tonight. Do it again and that’s it. Okay?

JACK
: So it’s a test for me now as well, is it?

ROBBY
: You treat it how you like. You know the score.

Their animosity was undisguised. I was not able then to untangle all that lay behind the exchange; this only became clear later, as you will discover in due time.

I was not, of course, myself happy about the proposal. When I voiced my unease, Robby delivered a somewhat lengthy diatribe, of which the following is an abridged version, reproduced as accurately as memory allows in Robby’s own words:

‘Look, this man is a socialist, right? And supposed to be a champion of the working class, at least that’s what he’s always claiming. He goes on endlessly about equality and the capitalist oppression and about a fairer distribution of wealth. He shouts about workers’ control, nationalization of all the means of production and the institutions of business. You know the kind of stuff, you hear it every day. I believe it, as it happens. Not the slogany side of it, not the bandwaggoneers. I can’t stand them any more than that collection of time-servers you saw tonight. But do you know how this paragon of socialist action lives? Eh? He has a house worth upwards of sixty thousand quid, he’s got shares in half-a-dozen well-heeled companies and the last thing he’d want is for any happy band of workers to tell him what he’s got to do. In other words, he’s like all the rest, all he wants is a big slice of whatever there is going. He’s a manipulator, that’s all, and he mouths socialist doctrine because that’s what he knows he has to do to get where he wants to be. It’s the fashionable philosophy. You know how he got where he is? Good degree from respectable university. Into a trade union. Organized a nice little strike that he managed to keep going long
enough
to get sympathetic publicity but not so long that he lost it. From that straight into the national office as a blue-eyed boy. Then a quick side-step into the political corridors at Westminster and bingo, before you know it he’s on TV all the time, he’s advising unions about companies and employers about trade unions, he’s all set for Parliament and is doing all right thank you out of fees, journalism, union support, sinecure salaries and kick-backs. Four hundred years ago he’d have gone into the church, written a classy book on ecclesiastical authority or burned a few heretics and been made a bishop in double-quick time. Bit of sex on the side, not mattering which sort, good food, nice house, secure job. And power. That as much as anything. Status, influence, authority, money. That’s the name of the game. Always was, still is. His politics aren’t a philosophy and they aren’t a mission. And he’s not crackers. His politics are a business, a career that gets him what he wants—being one of the elect of the earth.’

As this monologue went on, Robby showed many of the signs of stress which you, Morgan, as a budding M.D. would have been interested to note. He began trembling with anger, his voice became proclamatory as if he were addressing a public meeting. He broke into a sweat, beads of perspiration winked on his forehead, reflecting the firelight. By the end I knew I was watching a fanatic promoting his cause. If the sittingstanding talking man would have done well as a corrupt bishop, Robby would have matched him as a ruthless officer in the department of the inquisition. It was the kind of outburst you cannot reply to; and you cannot politely dismiss or change the subject afterwards.

There was a pause. Robby recovered his composure. (I realized then, watching him, that the thing I had felt vaguely about him all day and had not been able to pin down was that all the time he was on the edge of hysteria, that somehow this was part of both his attractiveness and unattractiveness. Like watching a bomb to see when it might explode. There was rumbling violence always just under the surface of his skin. And I could not
tell
just at that moment what caused it. I was soon to discover.)

I said, as calmly and as amenably as I could—as though humouring a madman!—that though what he had said was no doubt true, I could not understand why he wanted to burgle the man’s house.

I had, he replied, entirely missed the point. Words were no longer enough. Actions were what counted. Only actions revealed intentions truthfully. This man said he was a socialist but acted like any other grabber. This showed his true beliefs. He claimed to believe in equality, in fair distribution of wealth, and to be against greed and privilege. Okay, let him live by that. And as he had so much more than most people let us take some of his unequal wealth and redistribute it. Obviously he would not willingly allow us to do this, so it must be done by a people’s tax, by an act on behalf of the people which we, representatives of the people, would execute.

DITTO
: I agree with your theory. But not with the action you want to take.

ROBBY
: You’re a fool, then.

DITTO
: Talk sense or not at all.

ROBBY
: Okay. You’re naive. You’ve swallowed all that junk they serve up at school about being a good citizen. You’re allowing your upbringing to condition you to the morality of the status quo. Just what the cruds want.

DITTO
: Crap. I’m saying that if you go around burgling people’s houses, however you justify it, it won’t be long before everybody is at it whenever they feel like getting something for nothing. And that means nobody comes off best. Certainly not the ordinary bloke, who always comes off worst anyway.

ROBBY
: You’ve no proof that that will happen.

DITTO
: Don’t talk stupid. It’s human nature.

ROBBY
: Human nature isn’t absolute. It can be changed. And it is changed by conditions.

DITTO
: And when your Great Socialist Society finally dawns, there’ll be no need to burgle, I suppose.

ROBBY
: That’s right. Need makes burglars. And there’ll be no need.

DITTO
: Meanwhile, mayhem on the way to the Great Day.

ROBBY
: If necessary, yes.

DITTO
: And hard luck on the innocent victims.

ROBBY
: To start with, no one is innocent in this fight. Second off, you can’t make a cake without smashing eggs. Third off, there’s no gain without sacrifice, no healing of this sick man without deep surgery. Fourth off, I’m fed up with all this bloody chat. Are you coming or aren’t you? Or are you like the rest of them, all hot air?