glimpsed a flickering. A passage led the walk past his outer wall and beneath the bridging upper floor. The torchlight was in that passage.
He limped rapidly yet stealthily to the end of his wall. The man was sticking a notice to the wall of the passage. Horridge gripped the handle in his pocket. “What are you doing?” he said loudly.
The man whirled; his hand dragged the notice awry. The torch-beam poked at Horridge’s face, dazzling him. Then the man relaxed, or decided not to be intimidated. “You aren’t blind, are you?” he demanded and gestured at the notice with the light.
Above a caricature of a Negro family, the notice said SAY NO TO A BLACK BRITAIN! As Horridge squinted at him, the man’s face emerged from the dazzle: eyes swollen out of proportion by thick spectacles, a withdrawn chin. He’d seen this man sometimes, reading the newspapers in Cantril Farm Library.
The man must have observed his approval of the notice, for he said “Don’t you think we should get rid of all these foreigners?”
Horridge nodded curtly. It wasn’t the man’s place to interrogate him. But the man continued “Don’t you think we ought to do something about all these layabouts sponging on the welfare state?”
Horridge didn’t quite trust him. It was like brainwashing, this rapid stream of questions that demanded only agreement. They didn’t sound like the man’s own questions; Horridge suspected he’d learned them by rote. He couldn’t think for himself.
A cold breeze made the cuffs of Horridge’s pyjama trousers shiver. All this was getting him nowhere. Why couldn’t the fellow stand up and say what he knew was right, instead of skulking about under cover of darkness? Before the man could interrogate him further, Horridge demanded “And what about homosexuals?”
The man’s enormous eyes fluttered in their glass bowls, like startled fish. “I don’t like them,” he said.
Horridge pointed at the notice. “How is that sort of thing going to get rid of them?”
“ Have you got a better way?”
Horridge had trapped himself. Though the man’s triumphant stare enraged him, he couldn’t reply. The man said “Shall I take your name and address for some of our literature?”
“ No, thank you. I’m quite capable of thinking for myself.”
He stared until the man moved away. The torch-beam wavered on mud spiky with grass; it grew vague, and vanished. No, Horridge didn’t want their pamphlets drawing attention to him – not while he had to decide what to do about Craig.
He locked himself into his flat. He knew of the movement which printed the notices. He might have joined that movement, if he had believed in belonging to groups – although he didn’t care for the way they marched through areas where immigrants lived, to insult them: that was behaving like militant students. Militant! That meant to be like a soldier, but soldiers were on the side of law and order – not at all like students. Still, you couldn’t blame the movement for marching: they wouldn’t need to if people stayed in their own countries and behaved themselves instead of indulging in filthy practices in public lavatories.
There wouldn’t have been a Hitler if there had been fewer Jews in Germany. The movement ought to get itself into the government, as he had.
He lay in bed, imagining the man with his light and his notices groping through the concrete maze. What could he hope to achieve by such furtiveness? Yet Horridge felt a little guilty. At least the man was trying to do something positive.
Chapter VII
When he woke, Horridge knew what he ought to do.
As he washed, he stared at himself in the mirror. He simply didn’t look capable of carrying out such a plan. Sometimes when he looked in the mirror, he felt as though he couldn’t recognise himself. Except for his slightly protruding ears, he would pass himself by unrecognised in a crowd. He flapped deodorant away from his face, afraid of inhaling the chemical.
He must buy milk. The bottle in the bucket of cold water beneath the sink was empty. He walked towards the shops near the bus terminus. Everywhere were fences, head-height, ankle-height, as though nobody knew how to behave unless they were made to. Maybe the fences had been put up for vandals to scribble on with paint; the world was mad enough. Amid one tangle of graffiti he read KILLER.
Like his flat, the shopping street was L-shaped. Hardly a path in Cantril Farm ran visibly straight for more than a few yards; the walks sank into concrete valleys, or plunged straight through the hearts of tenements. The whole place reminded him of the mazes with which scientists tormented rats.
Above the shops three tiers of flats were stacked, a layer cake of concrete. Over the heavy metal mesh that protected the windows of the Trustee Savings Bank, iron bars were set – not so trusting, he thought wryly. A child was parked in the doorway of a betting shop, beside a sign LEADERS IN LEISURE. Puddles gathered litter in depressions in the concrete walk.
The walk was loud with shoppers. Let them babble if it did them any good. They’d rather chatter like monkeys than do anything constructive. But could he do more?
Yes, by God. He wouldn’t be dragged down by Cantril Farm. He’d proved that he could act so long as he didn’t hesitate. He felt dwindled by the tenements, but that wouldn’t sap him.
Dull music trickled through the supermarket. Let it mumble – it wouldn’t lull him. He bought a tin of corned beef to replace the one he’d used up for his Christmas dinner. You couldn’t trust many foods now, not with all this experimenting with chemicals, all these amino acids he’d heard they put in foods. God only knew what foreign foods contained.
He hurried towards his flat. KILLER. There it was again, in a different place. No doubt they thought it clever to write such things. Television had a lot to answer for. But at the same time the word seemed addressed to him, urging him to act.
He drowned the bottle of milk in the bucket, and went out. For once he didn’t fear losing his way; most of the walks led eventually to bus stops. Cantril Farm was constructed to herd people in the directions the planners wanted them to follow.
He waited opposite a post-box inscribed savagely as a totem pole. Above the tower blocks, the sky was featureless as whitewash. Nearby was a phone box – but he mustn’t use one so close to home; they might trace him. Craig and the police didn’t yet know where he lived; otherwise, why had they done nothing since trying to scare him outside Craig’s house?
The bus was stuffed with a Saturday crowd. Among shopping bags on their parents’ laps, children struggled like reluctant purchases. He had to stand; he refused to go upstairs into the stale smoke. Whenever the bus turned a corner, it threw his weight on his bad leg. Whenever the bus lurched, the low ceiling thumped his skull.
Please let the bus move faster, before he lost his nerve. But the driver was herding on more passengers, shouting “Move further down the bus.” The advancing crowd forced Horridge back. He had to sway when they did; he felt suffocated by bodies and the wails of children. Let the bus dawdle as long as it liked. By God, they wouldn’t weaken him.
The bus turned out of Lime Street and rushed down the curve to the shoppers’ stop. Those who had been seated joined the crowd in the aisle, hindering him. He was the tail end of the shuffling queue – just one of the crowd.
No, he was not, by God. He pushed his way out of the throng, ignoring the mutters of a knot of gossips. Beyond the boxed-in walkways that lowered over Williamson Square, two telephone boxes guarded each other’s backs. In the square, people bought fruit from a barrow, set balloons adrift to draw attention to the plight of someone or other, sang folk songs beside a hat scattered with coins. He headed for the unoccupied box.
But a woman was bearing down on it, driving a poodle before her like a tartan shopping basket. He mustn’t be made to wait, to falter! He ran lopsidedly, and grabbed the door. He met her glare, though his heart laboured irregularly, until she stalked off in search of another phone.
Suppose there were no directory? Mightn’t that mean that his purpose was mistaken? But the directory was
