on its shelf. He flicked the pages. No, their fluttering couldn’t infect him. Craig. Craig, R. There were several – but only one at the address in Aigburth Drive.
He drew himself up straight, and dialled. Police cameras were posted all over the city centre, spying. They had no reason to watch him, they wouldn’t even notice him among the crowds. They certainly wouldn’t be able to see what he was dialling. Could their vision be so sharp? He wished people wouldn’t keep passing so near him.
As soon as he’d finished dialling, Craig’s phone rang. Then – far too quickly, as if to take him off guard – the pay tone began.
Instinct convulsed his hand, which thrust in the coin. The shrill chattering was interrupted momentarily, then went on. Perhaps he’d been too hasty, and had wasted the coin. The tone stopped; the earpiece filled with silence. Was anyone there? Was somebody listening to him, stealthy as a hunter?
In a moment he heard the breathing. It was slow and heavy, but he knew it was only pretending to doze: no trapped beast could be more alert. Deep in it was a faint asthmatic wheeze. It seemed too wary to speak. Only after what felt like minutes, during which the breathing pressed close to Horridge’s ear, did the voice say “Yes?”
When speaking to the policemen, it had been deeper. Horridge bit his lip gleefully: Craig must be growing nervous. He oughtn’t to speak. Craig knew that somebody was listening to him; silence would be more disturbing.
He was rationalising his hesitation. He had found he couldn’t speak; disgust had gagged him. Craig’s breathing must have pressed as close to the young men as he had – Horridge stared out of the box, at people feeding pigeons from the benches in the square, at a little girl chasing an apple that had rolled from the barrow. He was desperate for reassurance.
The plastic clung to him; Craig breathed in his ear. “Craig speaking,” the voice said a little higher, a little less sure of itself.
Horridge’s lips twitched. His tongue forced them apart. He was preparing to say “Had any good boys lately?” when Craig put down the phone.
He grimaced at the dead receiver, then he hurried out into the crowd. The side streets leading from the square were crowded as conveyor belts. He wandered, gazing at lifeless clothes in windows, enjoying the memory of Craig’s unsureness. But he was growing frustrated. He hadn’t done enough.
He must phone again, and speak. He couldn’t do so here; Craig might have called his friends in the police, they might be searching for him. He sensed the presence of the cameras, perched somewhere overhead like hidden vultures. He needed to call from a place where he couldn’t be watched, and with which he had no connection.
He climbed to the walkway and strolled towards the outward bus stop. Beneath him the swarming crowd looked as small as their minds, their purposes. Buses roared and squealed under the walkway. On the side of one a long notice said 70 INTO ONE WILL GO, and showed a long queue boarding a bus. There were only a few people in the queue, duplicated over and over again. They wouldn’t make him into a duplicate.
At first the bus home wasn’t crowded, except with shopping that sat next to passengers. Horridge watched the driver in the mirror. The man’s lips moved as though he was talking to himself. He bared his teeth, licking them. Good God, was he mad? Perhaps he was simply trying to dislodge fragments of toffee.
As the bus bullied its way out of town, it grew full. Each time it slowed, it vibrated; the driver’s face quivered as though the mirror were a pool. Wasn’t that dangerous? People tramped upstairs, cigarettes panting in their mouths. The driver let a friend ride without paying. No wonder the company kept putting up fares!
The bus laboured up Brunswick Road, beside which a few lonely street corners defended their territory amid a waste of mud and billboards. The woman who had just boarded the bus stood in the aisle, scowling at the bag that dangled from her elbow and thumped her hipbone.
Horridge stood up. “Excuse me, would you like to sit down?”
She stared, as though he were mad. That was Women’s Lib for you. How many of these women knew that to lib meant to castrate? She sat down readily enough, for all that she appeared to resent his courtesy.
At once the driver said “No standing. Seats upstairs.”
Whom was he addressing? Horridge glanced at the woman, but she avoided his look. At last he stared at the driver’s reflected stare. “Of course there’s standing,” he said, and pointed at the sign.
“ No standing.” The man sounded indifferent as a machine. As soon as he’d driven past the traffic lights on top of the hill, he halted the bus. “I’ve told you, no standing. This bus doesn’t move until you go upstairs.”
Horridge felt everyone staring at him. He had been made a scapegoat, blamed for the delay. His skin felt as though they were sticking pins into him. As he clambered upstairs, his limp had never been heavier.
The triumphant jerk of the bus made him almost lose his footing. His foot dangled in mid-air. He remembered the ladder, the violent lurch, his father dragging him down, his leg thumping the ground like a hammer composed of flesh and fragile bone. That moment had made sure he would never reach the top.
And now he was trudging upstairs at the whim of this petty employee who thought his uniform made him all-powerful. He wouldn’t do it. He descended the stairs loudly and declared “I’m not sitting in all that smoke.”
Some of the passengers groaned, as though he were a villain making a stage entrance. “Then you can get off my bus,” the driver said.
A bus stop which Horridge recognised was approaching. Rage stiffened his face; he felt like a ventriloquist forced to imitate his dummy. He managed to open his twitching lips, and to say “That will be a pleasure. Just let me off here and be quick about it.”
As the bus stopped, the driver’s face shivered. Horridge should have challenged him with that – he wasn’t fit to drive, he didn’t even check his mirror – but he wanted to be free of the suffocating disapproval of the crowd. He wrenched at the folding doors. Was the driver retarding them deliberately, to make a fool of him?
He gripped the pole of the bus stop. He wished he could have torn it out of the pavement, for a weapon. Nearby on a hoarding, a tobacco pipe larger than a man glowed and exhaled real smoke. Beside the hoarding stood a telephone box. His fury, and a sense of imminent release, rushed him to the phone. He dialled and shoved the coin against the barrier, impatient for the pay tone.
“ Yes?” the voice said warily before it was interrupted by the peeping.
Horridge bent over the receiver so that passers-by wouldn’t be able to spy on him, and masked the mouthpiece with his birth certificate. “Roy Craig,” he said. Though his voice was thick with disgust, he was savouring a sense of power.
“ Yes, this is he.”
Uncertainty made the voice rise, which excited Horridge: he would have it squealing before he’d finished. “You think you’re quite safe tucked away in your flat, don’t you?” he said. “We’ll soon have you out in the open where everyone can see you.”
Silence: not even the sound of breathing. Craig must have frozen like a trapped beast, hoping the hunter would think he wasn’t there. A faint wheeze betrayed him. “The police may prefer to ignore what you’re up to,” Horridge said at once. “But I know.”
The pitch of Craig’s voice wavered; it sounded like a dizzy man on the edge of a fall. “What are you talking about?”
“ Are you out of your depth? Am I confusing you? Oh dear.” Relinquishing sarcasm, he said harshly “Just remember that someone knows what you do to young boys – all of what you do to them.”
“ I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.”
“ Haven’t you? Shall I tell you?” Enraged, Horridge said “You tie them up, and then -” He couldn’t go on. “You filth. You obscene animal. You’re not fit to live among human beings,” he said.
He was losing control. His hand clenched on the receiver until the plastic creaked. He slammed the receiver into its cradle and shouldered his way out of the box, which had turned suffocating. A breeze cooled his burning face.
He’d achieved something. Craig was becoming more nervous. They were supposed to be so sensitive, these homosexuals. Horridge meant to nag at that sensitivity until it betrayed Craig – until Craig said too much to someone. Perhaps he would betray himself to one of the people in the house on Aigburth Drive. Surely they couldn’t all be corrupt.
He stood at the bus stop. In the old days he would alight here from the homeward bus from town. He gazed
