LITMIR.BIZ

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towards a meeting he knew he could arrange to the moment.

      Then there was a hammering at the outside door, rather as if a yeti were paying a call. With a hand on either side of her head, John paused and looked down at her and shook his head masterfully. He was renewing his purpose when the hammering came again and he heard the letter-box being lifted.

      ‘Sally!’

      It sounded as if a Friesian bull had been taking a language course.

      ‘Sally! Ah know ye’re in there!’

      The expression on Sally’s face was like an ice-pack applied to John’s scrotum. It was the kind of look the heroine gives in a horror film when she knows the monster has her trapped.

      ‘Oh shite!’ Sally said.

      ‘Sally! Open this door! If ye don’t want it landin’ in the middle of yer loabby.’

      ‘Ignore him,’ John suggested unconvincingly.

      ‘I can’t, I can’t,’ Sally said.

      John could see her point. It would have been like trying to ignore a hurricane as it blew you away. They had pulled apart from each other now and his penis, treacherous comrade, was already going into hiding. No fun, no me, it seemed to be saying. Suddenly, the atmosphere was that of an air-raid. They stared at each other, paralysed. When they spoke, they found they were whispering.

      ‘Who is he?’ John mouthed, as if they had time for biographical notes.

      ‘Sally!’

      ‘Alec Manson. He’s stone mad.’

      The news didn’t encourage John in the plan he had been vaguely forming – to pull on his trousers and go to the door. It occurred to him that if Alec Manson happened to be shouting through the letter-box at the time John would probably be blown back along the hall. His nakedness felt very naked.

      ‘What does he do!’ John whispered, not sure himself why he was asking. Was he thinking of pulling rank?

      ‘He’s a bouncer in “The Barley Bree Bar”.’

      John’s eyes disappeared briefly under his eyelids. It was roughly equivalent to being told that Alec Manson charged a pack of dingoes protection money. John had only been in ‘The Barley Bree’ twice in his life and he tended to talk of the occasions the way an explorer might talk about the Amazon Basin. It was regarded as being the roughest pub in Graithnock and that made it very rough. ‘If you don’t have ten previous convictions, ye’re barred,’ someone had once told him. But, he told himself, a man’s got to offer to do what a man’s terrified to do.

      ‘You want me to see about this?’ he quavered quietly.

      ‘Ah can see a light in there!’ the voice was announcing to the immediate neighbourhood. ‘There’s somebody in there.’

      ‘Oh my God, no!’

      The panic the thought had engendered in Sally would have been unflattering in another situation. Here, with the guardian of ‘The Barley Bree’ sending his voice along the hall like a flame-thrower, it seemed no more than a perfectly reasonable response, confirmation of the obvious.

      ‘Right! We can do it the easy way or the hard way! With a handle or without a handle! Ah’m countin tae ten! One!’

      It wasn’t the kind of accomplishment you would have expected a voice like that to have but they couldn’t just wait there and see if he got stuck at seven. They scrabbled from the bed, moving in quite a few directions at once. The room became a flurry of movement without progress, as if they were caught in a film being run backwards and forwards at the wrong speed.

      Sally ran naked to the bedroom door and then ran back. John bent down and put on a sock.

      ‘Two!’

      Sally plumped one pillow, dented the other. Some desperate plan seemed to be forming in her mind.

      ‘Three!’

      As John bent down to pick up his clothes, Sally shoved them under the bed with her foot on her way to pick up the Laura Ashley nightdress that was draped across a wickerwork chair.

      ‘Four!’

      ‘Hey!’ John hissed. Sally’s head, emerging from the neck of the nightdress was shaking vigorously as she stared, wild-eyed, at John. ‘No time!’ she screamed silently.

      ‘Five!’

      Sally smoothed down her nightdress, made a couple of meaningless passes at the duvet. She turned to see John whirling in the middle of the floor, as if he had chosen this moment to practise miming a dervish.

      ‘Six!’

      Sally pointed at the Wendy House, pushed John towards it. He looked at her. She opened the cardboard door and jabbed her finger ferociously at the interior several times. He couldn’t believe it.

      ‘Seven!’

      He believed it. He crouched inside while Sally closed the door on him. He heard her sprint across the bedroom and then, at the door, begin to walk along the hall.

      ‘Alec?’

      Her voice sounded so sleepy. The other voice had started to say ‘eight’ and trailed off. To John, huddled in his Wendy House, the blue tinge of the light had taken on a sinister quality, moonscape, jowls of the dead.

      ‘Alec? Is that you, Alec?’

      John could hear the yawn in her voice from where he was. Listening to that expertly feigned sleepiness induced in him an agony of ambivalence. (The door was being opened. Godzilla comes.) He couldn’t believe that his Sally of the gentle eyes and honest smile could be such an actress. There were questions he had to think over, though not now. The other part of the feeling was the fervent hope that she really was as good an actress as she sounded. A lot depended on her performance.

      ‘It took you long enough.’

      ‘I was sleeping, Alec. Here, let me help you.’

      Alec’s feet were thudding all over the hall and there were noises that might have been several bodies hitting off the walls. He sounded like a drunken regiment. An alarming proximity of heavy breathing made John think they had reached the bedroom door. It might have been John’s imagination but he had a suspicion of the presence of foetid breath, as of a carnivore exhaling close at hand.

      ‘You’ve had somebody in here!’

      John was suddenly aware of the fragility of Wendy Houses. A tunnel would have been handy.

      ‘That’s right. Four men.’

      John didn’t see the joke. Pacify, pacify, he was thinking.

      ‘You’ve had somebody in here!’

      ‘I was sleeping!’

      ‘Maybe. Ah’m goin’ to check.’

      There was an amazing amount of noise, which was apparently Alec going through to the living-room. Whatever previous convictions had qualified Alec for admission to ‘The Barley Bree’, burglary wasn’t one of them. He made a small riot of coming back towards the bedroom. Sally was still insisting on helping him. John wondered how you did that. It must have been like guiding a stampede.

      ‘That’s you now,’ she was saying. ‘There we are. Satisfied now?’

      ‘Okay, love. Ah know ye’re tellin’ the truth. When Ah saw that the telly was off.’

      John was relieved that Alec’s deductive powers weren’t in proportion to his imagined bulk. John was holding himself well back from the cut-out windows of the Wendy House. Christine or Sally had stuck cellophane across them and John decided now that the light was like trying to see underwater – the mysteries of the deep. He was aware of Sally’s white nightdress with red flowers eddying uncertainly around the room. A huge dark shape swayed beside her.

      ‘Ah

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