What do you know about that?'
To go on with what he'd pianned with care.
Somewhere from further down the enclosure he heard a laugh, a female laugh, mellow and confident, perhaps the polony who'd put a pony on Fred's horse. He turned on Spicer with secret venom, cruelty straightening his body like lust.
'Yes,' he said, putting his arm round Spacer's shoulder, 'you'd better collect now.'
They moved together towards Tate's stand. A young man with oiled hair stood on a wooden step paying out money. Tate himself was away in the ten-shilling enclosure, but they both knew Samuel. Spicer called out to him quite jovially as he advanced: 'Well, Sammy, now the pay-off.'
Samuel watched them, Spicer and the Boy, come across the shallow threadbare turf, arm in arm like very old friends. Half a dozen men collected and stood round, waiting; the last creditor slipped away; they waited in silence; a little man holding an account book put out a tip of tongue and licked a sore lip.
'You're in luck, Spicer,' the Boy said, squeezing his arm. 'Have a good time with your tenner.'
'You aren't saying good-bye yet, are you?' Spicer said.
'I'm not waiting for the four-thirty. I won't be seeing you again.'
'What about Colleoni?' Spicer said. 'Aren't you and I...?' The horses cantered by for another start; the odds were going up; the crowd moved in towards the tote and left them a clear lane. At the end of the lane the little group waited.
'I've changed my mind,' the Boy said. 'I'll see Colleoni at his hotel. You get your money.' A hatless tout delayed them: 'A tip for the next race. Only a shilling. I've tipped two winners today.' His toes showed through his shoes. 'Tip yourself off,' the Boy said. Spicer didn't like good-byes: he was a sentimental soul} he shifted on his corn-sore feet. 'Why,' he said, looking down the lane to the fence, 'Tate's lot haven't written up the odds yet.'
'Tate always was slow. Slow in paying out too. Better get your money.' He urged him nearer, his hand on Spicer's elbow.
'There's not anything wrong, is there?' Spicer said.
He looked at the waiting men; they stared through him.
'Well, this is good-bye,' the Boy said.
'You remember the address,' Spicer said .'The Blue Anchor, you remember, Union Street. Send me any news. I don't suppose there'll be any for me to send.'
The Boy put his hand up as if to pat Spicer on the back and let it fall again: the group of men stood in a bunch waiting. ' Maybe ' the Boy said; he looked round: there wasn't any end to what he had begun. A passion of cruelty stirred in his belly. He put up his hand again and patted Spicer on the back .4< Good luck to you,' he said in a high broken adolescent voice, and patted him again.
The men with one accord came round them. He heard Spicer scream: ' Pinkie!' and saw him fall; a boot with heavy nails was lifted, and then he felt pain run like blood down his own neck.
The surprise at first was far worse than the pain (a nettle could sting as badly) .'You fools,' he said, 'it's not me, it's him you want,' and turned and saw Semitic faces ringing him all round. They grinned back at him: every man had his razor out; and he remembered for the first time Colleoni laughing up the telephone wire. The crowd had scattered at the first sign of trouble; he heard Spicer call out: 'Pinkie. For Christ's sake'; an obscure struggle reached its climax out of his sight. He had other things to watch: the long cut-throat razors which the sun caught slanting low down over the downs from Shoreham. He put his hand to his pocket to get his blade, and the man immediately facing him leant across and slashed his knuckles. Pain happened to him; and he was filled with horror and astonishment as if one of the bullied brats at school had stabbed first with the dividers.
They made no attempt to come in and finish him.
He sobbed at them: 'I'll get Colleoni for this.' He shouted 'Spicer' twice before he remembered that Spicer couldn't answer. The mob were enjoying themselves, just as he had always enjoyed himself. One of them leant forward to cut his cheek and when he put up his hand to shield himself they slashed his knuckles again. He began to weep, as the four-thirty went by in a drumbeat of hoofs beyond the rail.
Then somebody from the stand shouted: 'Bogies,' and they all moved together, coming quickly at him in a bunch. Somebody kicked him on the thigh, he clutched a razor in his hand and was cut to the bone.
Then they scattered as the police ran up the edge of the course, slow in their heavy boots, and he broke through them. A few followed him, out of the wire gate and straight down the side of the down towards the houses and the sea. He wept as he ran, lame in one leg, from the kick; he even tried to pray. You could be saved between the stirrup and the ground, but you couldn't be saved if you didn't repent, and he hadn't time, scrambling down the chalk down, to feel the least remorse. He ran awkwardly, tripping, bleeding down his face and from both hands.
Only two men followed him now, and they followed him for the fun of it, shooing him as they might shoo a cat. He reached the first houses in the bottom, but there was no one about. The races had emptied every house: nothing but crazy paving and little lawns, stained-glass doors and a lawn mower abandoned on a gravel path. He didn't dare to take refuge in a house while he rang and waited they would reach him. He had his razor blade out now, but he had never yet used it on an armed enemy. He had to hide, but he left a track of blood along the road.
The two men were out of breath: they had wasted it on laughter, and he had young lungs. He gained on them; he wrapped his hand in a handkerchief and held his head back so that the blood ran down his clothes; he turned a corner and was into an empty garage before they had reached it. There he stood, in the dusky interior, with his razor out, trying to repent. He thought: 'Spicer,'
'Fred,' but his thoughts would carry him no further than the corner where his pursuers might reappear; he discovered that he hadn't the energy to repent.
And when a long while later the danger seemed to be over, and there was a long dusk on his hands, it wasn't eternity he thought about but his own humiliation. He had wept, begged, run: Dallow and Cubitt would hear of it. What would happen to Kite's mob now? He tried to think of Spicer, but the world held [154] BRIGHTON HOCK him. He couldn't order his thoughts. He stood with weak knees against the concrete wall with the blade advanced and watched the corner. A few people passed,, the faintest sound of music from the Palace Pier bit, like an abscess, into his brain, the lights came out in the neat barren bourgeois road.
The garage had never been used for a garage; it had become a kind of potting shed; little green shoots crept, like caterpillars, out of shallow boxes of earth--a spade, a rusty lawn mower, and all the junk the owner had no room for in the tiny house: an old rocking horse, a pram which had been converted into a wheelbarrow, a pile of ancient records: 'Alexander's Rag Time Band,'
'Pack Up Your Troubles,'
'If You Were the Only Girl'; they lay with the trowels, what was left of the crazy paving, a doll with one glass eye and a dress soiled with mould. He took it all in with quick glances, his razor blade ready, the blood clotting on his neck, dripping from his hand, where the handkerchief had slipped. Whatever jackdaw owned this house would have that much added to his possessions: the little drying stain on the concrete floor.
Whoever the owner was, he had come a long way to land up here. The pram-wheelbarrow was covered with labels the marks of innumerable train journeys: Doncaster, Lichfield, Clacton (that must have been a summer holiday), Ipswich, Northampton roughly torn off for the next journey they left, in the litter which remained, an unmistakable trail. And this, the small villa under the racecourse, was the best finish he could manage. You couldn't have any doubt that this was the end, the mortgaged home in the bottom j like the untidy tidemark on a beach, the junk was piled up here and would never go further.
And the Boy hated him. He was nameless, faceless, but the Boy hated him. The doll, the pram, the broken rocking horse. The small pricked-out plants irritated him like ignorance. He felt hungry and faint and shaken. He had known pain and fear.
Now, of course, was the time, while darkness drained into the bottom, for him to make his peace. Between the stirrup and the ground there wasn't time: you couldn't break in a moment the habit of thought: habit held you closely while you died, and he remembered Kite, after they'd got him at St. Pancras, passing out in the waiting room, while a porter poured coal dust on the dead grate, talking all the time about someone's tits.
But 'Spicer,' the Boy's thoughts came inevitably back with a sense of relief. 'They've got Spicer.' It was impossible to repent of something which made him safe. The nosy woman hadn't got a witness now, except for Rose, and he could deal with Rose j and then when he was thoroughly secure, he could begin to think of making
