A line of men crept past and over me. One boot squelched an inch from my hand. I swear it. The guilty thought came that a true friend would behave like a Roman goose and cackle the alarm. Not me. As soon as the silent line of assaulters had passed I rose and moved tangentially right. No more than forty slunk paces and I came against a giant wagon. I felt my way along its flank. My heart was throbbing. I’d not breathed for a week.
The wagon’s side seemed to go on forever and I cursed Sidoli for a lying swine. He’d represented Bissolotti’s as a small vulgar outfit. If they could afford massive new transformer-generators like this supersize it was no cardboard cutout job. And the chug of new Bissolotti arrivals in the next street showed that enemy reinforcements were at hand.
Smoke. Cigarette smoke. And nearby. Somebody was probably cupping the fag into his palm the way convicts and soldiers do. I’d nearly eeled into them in my fright. I edged beneath the enormous generator wagon and crawled out under the other side. Even then I nearly brained myself by standing up. My shoulder caught on the cab’s open door.
“How much longer?” a man’s voice muttered.
“Five minutes. Then we shout the rest up.”
Hellfire, I thought. There must have been thirty or so in that assault line. Plus those vehicles I’d heard nearby. Sidoli’s fair—not to mention me—was caught between two aggressive mobs. A classic pincer movement. I almost moaned in terror. As soon as the rumble started, Bissolotti’s would switch on every light they possessed. I’d be spotlighted like a prisoner against a wall. That explained the Bissolotti tactic, of lining his wagons facing down the slope towards our pitch.
This wasn’t for me. I lay down and wriggled under the vehicle’s vast bulk. The next wagon was smaller, probably a slab carrier, to transport the wooden facades. I heard two more men muttering by the tailboards, found the driver’s cab of the slabber, and lifted myself up. Somebody said, “What’s that?” as I slipped the gear lever into neutral and the handbrake off. I dropped and crept behind my transformer wagon’s quadrupled rear wheels and wormed towards the front. The slab lorry creaked. Its bulk drifted past.
“Christ. It’s moving.” Somebody ran past, grunting with exertion as he tried to swing into the cab. A man shouted for a torch. Two men cursed. “Over here! Over here!”
I was up and into the transformer’s cabin. A flashlight jumped the gloom. The slab lorry was trundling slowly down the slope, three blokes clinging to its sides and one man already in the cab struggling with the wheel.
Headlights sprang. The green showed brilliantly. I snicked my wagon’s gear and the handbrake, then saw there were no bloody keys. As my vast wagon began to glide down the slope I fumbled desperately with the dashboard, failed to find the wires, crouched and fiddled. The sodding vehicle went faster. I fiddled faster. Somebody yelled. Boots clashed on the door. I dived, clobbered a bloke’s face and he fell off.
Something clanged on the truck. Glass shattered. Men were yelling, running, throwing.
I finally shorted the wires with my teeth as the giant vehicle shuddered and careered down the slope. The engine boomed. I struggled up, cast the headlights, and gave an appalled moan.
It was like a battlefield. The slab carrier had caught some of Bissolotti’s assault men on the green. Two lay strewn. A third was pinned against the Caterpillar’s gearing where the lorry’s front had nuzzled itself to rest. Blokes were tearing about here, there, everywhere. I gunned the engine. Two strange faces appeared, one on the windscreen, I yelled at him in terror, drove crazily to shake him off. They vanished. I jolted round the field, slammed back through the Bissolotti convoy and glimpsed a street lamp in the distance.
Putting the big wagon at the narrow street took courage, or terror. I remember bawling in panic as the wagon thundered through and out into a brightly peaceful main road. A line of waiting fairground lorries to my right, so swing left to traffic lights, green—so on through, to anywhere. Behind was death in that ludicrous war zone.
It’s hard suddenly pretending everything is normal, but I did my best, stuck up in that tall cab and trying to look like I knew what I was driving, where I was going. It was an interminable cruise in a puzzled Edinburgh, until I found a road that finally promised north by following the arrows. I was forty miles away before I stopped shaking.
Telling myself I’d done it, I relaxed and let the road decide what happened next, meekly following the headlights to my fate.
Quiet old life, antiques.
« ^ »
—— 10 ——
Before I invented sex, when the world was flat and weather constant, I had all sorts of ideas. Cycling round the entire country in a record-breaking week; going for gold in mountaineering; discovering uncharted continents; rescuing damsels. A lad does a lot of this daft imagining, never grows out of his dreams. Girls do, but don’t ever realize that the male is often miles away in his silly head, being anointed king of a lost tribe in the Andes or what- not. Women never learn to see us blokes as we actually are, namely incurable dream-spinning romantics, because early in what passes for development women trade perception for appearances. The bird learns that her bloke could only go for Olympic gold in flower arranging. She starts assuming he’s only what he seems—a portly geezer wheezing when tying his shoe. The point I’m making is that people aren’t merely things. Never mind what politicians say. You can gaze at stones and tarmac, rivers and fence posts with complete dispassion if you want. They’re no big deal. But you have to think when you look at people. You have to. If you don’t, you become a robot.
One of my old dreams was knowing every town in the Kingdom, so that if some stranger mentioned a tiny village in, say, the Shetlands, I would casually say, “Ah, yes.
Population eighty-one. Stands on the tributary of…” I failed geography at school.
Dubneath was therefore a mystery.
The big transformer wagon’s petrol ran dangerously low in Clackmannan, though when I got out and inspected its container drums, they showed half full. Perhaps you had to switch to reserve? Anyhow I decided to ditch it, before daylight revealed me in all my glory as the non-secret thief of the known world’s largest fairground transformer-generator. I entered Fife, and drove across Kinross in a stealthy manner in the least inconspicuous of vehicles, with BISSOLOTTI THE FAIRGROUND FOR THE WORLD gaudy on its side. I started admiring myself. After all, it takes skill to nick a thing this big.
Ten miles outside Perth my brain had another megarhythm. Mentally shelving a niggling reminder that my
