'Music talks, talks of our love, The west wind on our walks talks, talks of our love, The nightingale singing, The postman ringing, Electric drill groaning, Office telephoning, Talk of our love.'
The Boy stared at the spotlight; music, love, nightingale, postman: the words stirred in his brain like poetry; one hand caressed the vitriol bottle in his pocket, the other touched Rose's wrist. The inhuman voice whistled round the gallery and the Boy sat silent. It was he this time who was being warned; life held the vitriol bottle and warned him: I'll spoil your looks. It spoke to him in the music, and when he protested that he for one would never get mixed up, the music had his own retort at hand: 'You can't always help it. It kind of comes that way.'
'The watchdog on our walks talks, talks of our love.'
The crowd stood at attention six deep behind the tables (there wasn't enough room on the floor for so many). They were dead quiet. It was like the anthem on Armistice Day when the King has deposited his wreath, the hats off, and the troops turned to stone. It was love of a kind, music of a kind, truth of a kind they listened to.
'Oracle Fields funning, The gangsters gunning, Talk of our love.'
The music pealed on under the Chinese lanterns and the pink spotlight featured the crooner with the microphone close to his starched shirt. 'You been in love?' the Boy asked sharply and uneasily.
'Oh, yes,' Rose said.
The Boy retorted with sudden venom: 'You would have been. You're green. You don't know what people do.' The music came to an end and in the silence he laughed aloud. 'You're innocent.' People turned in their chairs and looked at them; a girl giggled. His fingers pinched her wrist. 'You're green,' he said again.
He was working himself into a little sensual rage, as he had done with the soft kids at the council school.
'You don't know anything,' he said, with contempt in his nails.
'Oh, no,' she protested. 'I know a lot.'
The Boy grinned at her. 'Not a thing' pinching the skin of her wrist until his nails nearly met. 'You'd like me for your boy, eh? We'll keep company?'
'Oh,' she said, 'I'd love it.' Tears of pride and pain pricked behind her lids. 'If you like doing that,' she said, 'go on.'
The Boy let go. 'Don't be soft,' he said. 'Why should I like it? You think you know too much,' he complained. He sat there, anger like a live coal in his belly, as the music came on again; all the good times he'd had in the old days with nails and splinters, the tricks he'd learnt later with a razor blade: what would be the fun if people didn't squeal? He said furiously: 'We'll be going. I can't stand this place,' and obediently Rose began to pack her handbag, putting back her Woolworth compact and her handkerchief. 'What's that?' the Boy said when something clinked in her bag; she showed him the end of a string of beads.
'You a Catholic?' the Boy said.
'Yes,' Rose said.
'I'm one too,' the Boy said. He gripped her arm and pushed her out into the dark dripping street. He turned up the collar of his jacket and ran as the lightning flapped and the thunder filled the air. They ran from doorway to doorway until they were back on the parade in one of the empty glass shelters. They had it to themselves in the noisy stifling night. 'Why, I was in a choir once,' the Boy confided, and suddenly he began to sing softly in his spoilt boy's voice: 'Agnus dei qui tollis peccata mundi, dona nobis pacem.' In his voice a whole lost world moved--the lighted corner below the organ, the smell of incense and laundered surplices, and the music. Music, it didn't matter what music 'Agnus dei,'
'lovely to look at, beautiful to hold,'
'the starling on our walks,'
'credo in unum Dominum' any music moved him, speaking of things he didn't understand.
'Do you go to Mass?' he said.
'Sometimes,' Rose said. 'It depends on work. Most weeks I wouldn't get much sleep if I went to Mass.'
'I don't care what you do,' the Boy said sharply. 'I don't go to Mass.'
'But you believe, don't you,' Rose implored him, 'you think it's true?'
'Of course it's true,' the Boy said. 'What else could there be?' he went scornfully on. 'Why,' he said, 'it's the only thing that fits. These atheists, they don't know nothing. Of course there's Hell. Flames and damnation,' he said with his eyes on the dark shifting water and the lightning and the lamps going out above the black struts of the Palace Pier, 'torments.'
'And Heaven too,' Rose said with anxiety, while the rain fell interminably on.
'Oh, maybe,' the Boy said, 'maybe.'
Wet to the skin, the trousers sticking to his thin legs, the Boy went up the long unmatted flight to his bedroom at Billy's. The bannister shook under his hand, and when he opened the door and found the mob there, sitting on his brass bedstead smoking, he said furiously: 'When's that bannister going to be mended? It's not safe. Someone'll take a fall one day.' The curtain wasn't drawn, the window was open, and the last lightning flapped across the grey roofs stretching to the sea. The Boy went to his bed and swept off the crumbs of Cubitt's sausage roll. 'What's this,' he said, 'a meeting?'
'There's trouble about the subscriptions, Pinkie,'
Cubitt said. 'There's two not come in. Brewer and Tate. They say now Kite's dead '
'Do we carve 'em up, Pinkie?' Dallow said. Spicer stood at the window watching the storm. He said nothing, staring out at the flames and chasms of the sky.
'Ask Spicer,' the Boy said. 'He's been doing a lot of thinking lately.' They all turned and watched Spicer.
Spicer said: 'Maybe we ought to lay off awhile. You know a lot of the boys cleared out when Kite got killed.'
'Go on,' the Boy said. 'Listen to him. He's what they call a philosopher.'
'Well,' Spicer said angrily, 'there's free speech in this mob, ain't there? Those that cleared out, they didn't see how a kid could run this show.'
The Boy sat on the bed watching him with his hands in his damp pockets. He shivered once.
'I was always against murder,' Spicer said. 'I don't care who knows it. What good's revenge? It's sentiment.'
'Sour and milky,' the Boy said.
Spicer came into the middle of the room. 'Listen, Pinkie,' he said. 'Be reasonable.' He appealed to them all: 'Be reasonable.'
'There's things in what he says,' Cubitt suddenly put in. 'We had a lucky break. We don't want to draw attention to ourselves. We'd better let Brewer and Tate be for a while.'
The Boy got up. A few crumbs stuck to his wet suit.
'You ready, Dallow?' he said.
'What you say, Pinkie,' Dallow said, grinning like a large friendly dog.
'Where you going, Pinkie?' Spicer said.
'I'm going to see Brewer.'
Cubitt said: 'You act as if it was last year we killed Hale, not last week. We got to be cautious.'
'That's over and done,' the Boy said. 'You heard the verdict. Natural causes,' he said, looking out at the dying storm.
'You forget that girl in Snow's. She could hang us.'
'I'm looking after the girl. She won't talk.'
'You're marrying her, aren't you?' Cubitt said.
Dallow laughed.
The Boy's hands came out of his pockets, the knuckles clenched white. He said: 'Who told you I was marrying her?'
'Spicer,' Cubitt said.
Spicer backed away from the Boy. He said: 'Listen, Pinkie. I only said as it would make her safe. A wife can't give evidence....'
'I don't need to marry a squirt to make her safe.
How do we make you safe, Spicer?' His tongue came out between his teeth, licking the edges of his dry cracked lips. 'If carving'd do it...'
