tossing the boy back and forth between them, but instead of catching him, they’d stuck out their knees or elbows or fists or stood aside at the last moment and let him hit the floor or the wall before kicking him to his feet again. His helplessness had excited them and they went about their work with grunts and squeals, like when they were labouring over Tracy late at night.
The worst of it had been their silence. Steve had expected angry questions which he would somehow satisfy, making up versions of the truth good enough for people who could hardly remember their own names half the time. But they hadn’t asked any questions. They had just hurled him about until he lost all sense of time and place, of who he was and who they were and why this was happening. Once the stotters got started on something, fucking or fighting or whatever it might be, it was almost impossible for them to stop unless someone came along and switched them off. That was normally Steve’s task, but now he had fallen into the machine himself, and it was slowly but surely beating him to a pulp. There was nothing personal about it. That was the whole problem. Dave and Alex couldn’t have stopped even if they’d wanted to. They wouldn’t have known how.
In the end he had been saved, though, and by Tracy, which almost made it worthwhile. After screaming at the two men in vain for some time, she’d eventually thrown herself on Steve, wrestling him to the ground and daring Dave and Alex to come and take him back. But they didn’t even try. They just stood looking about them with bewildered expressions, like children whose favourite toy has been snatched away. Then Alex turned on the television, Dave cracked open another can of lager and a few minutes later they had forgotten all about it.
But Steve didn’t forget, and during the week that followed he decided that the time had come to celebrate his feelings for Tracy publicly. If it hadn’t been for her he would have left, taken his chances sleeping rough again, or perhaps even asked the old man if he could stay there. But he felt that he had to stand by Tracy, ready to protect her as she had protected him, deflecting the stotters’ moods, playing them off against each other, managing them without their being aware of it. Steve saw it as a bond between them, and although they had never spoken about it, he was sure Tracy considered him her friend and ally.
Sometimes, despite his caution, she caught him looking at her, and then the look she gave him was so dense and heady, so charged with meaning, that it seemed to make words both impossible and unnecessary. So the following week Steve added a felt-tipped pen to his shopping list, and on the way back to Grafton Avenue he stopped at the lavatory to share his feelings about the person he loved. He didn’t yet know what he was going to say, although he knew that it would be different from the other stories on those closely covered walls. Steve was not interested in Tracy’s underwear or shoes, and there was certainly no point in imagining her carrying on like the women in the other stories: he saw all that at home just about every evening. In any case, that had nothing to do with love, so he’d just skip it, the way the other writers skipped the bits that didn’t interest them, and get straight to the point: the warmth, the tenderness, the cuddles, the love that grew stronger and stronger until it could hold the whole world at bay.
The moment he passed through the doorless portal, Steve knew that something strange and sinister had occurred. The building was bare, stripped and featureless. Even the familiar smells had been usurped by an alien odour. As for the walls, the change was almost too much to take in at first. The stories were gone! All those tightly organized patches and clusters of writing had been brutally erased, all that concentrated passion and pain diluted by powerful industrial solvents to a thin grey film smeared over the basic beige. Steve groped his way to the cubicle with the broken window and collapsed, his head in his hands and tears running down his cheeks. How could they do such a thing? Those stories were like friends to him, as reassuring and predictable as the doors he’d got to know on his newspaper round; individual and interesting, yet perfectly safe. Any time he happened to be passing he could drop in and visit them. And now some faceless fucker in a wanker’s uniform had come along and said they had no right to be there! It was too cruel, worse than any pain the stotters had been able to think up. It made everything meaningless.
Several minutes passed before the boy noticed that a few words had miraculously escaped. They had formed part of the story about taking a schoolgirl out to eat. This had been a late addition to the collection, and so the writer had been forced to fit his story into the space left empty by those who had come before him. As a result, four of the lines had been pushed so far to the right that the final word had spilt over on to the doorframe and thus escaped the solvent. Steve read the words over and over, trying to remember how they had fitted into the rest of the story, and exactly what it had been about. But it was no good. He hadn’t even understood it at the time.
His plans to write about Tracy were forgotten. That expanse of blank wall terrified him. He had hoped to scribble a few words of homage that would have been lost among all the other stories, but to start again from scratch, to found a new tradition for others to follow, that was beyond him. Nevertheless, there was something that he
Steve approached the house with particular caution that day. The old man had made it clear the week before that today he would finish his long story, and the boy was worried that Hazchem might try and intervene to stop this happening. The fact that he didn’t believe in the story made no difference. The old man’s fear was real enough, and until that was explained it was only sensible for Steve to be frightened too.
‘Now then, lad, let’s see if you’re still as clever at remembering what I told you.’
They had finished their tea and eggs and buttered bread, and Ernest Matthews had settled in his armchair to load and light his pipe. Steve duly recited the story of the moonlit vigil on the roof of the Hall, the footprints in the dew, Maurice’s disappearance and the discovery of his body in the wood.
‘Very good!’ Matthews nodded. ‘But I wonder if you’re clever enough to guess what I thought when I heard all this, hundreds of miles away in a foreign land, on the eve of the great battle that was to be my baptism of fire? First of all, though, let me tell you exactly what it was that I heard. When Maurice’s body was discovered, the police were informed and a doctor fetched to examine the corpse. He reported that death had occurred about two years before, as the result of a fall. The police immediately rounded up the forest dwellers I told you about earlier, and sure enough, they admitted burying Maurice’s body. They said they had come upon it by chance one morning, and knowing that they would be turned out and made homeless a second time if it should be found there, they had dragged the body into the wood and concealed it where it might have remained undiscovered for ever if the trees had not been felled and the ground ploughed up once the war came. This much they confessed, but nothing would make them admit to the murder itself, and since there was no further evidence against them, the case remained a mystery. For my part, I was thinking of what the surgeon had said about the time of Maurice’s death. It had been almost exactly two years earlier that I had watched Maurice leave the Hall one night in pursuit of a female will-o’- the-wisp. Now, there had been two sets of tracks leading away from the Hall, remember. My idea at the time had been that Maurice had gone out and then returned, but supposing he hadn’t, what then?’
Steve raised his eyes to the old man’s face.
‘Someone followed him.’
‘Good. But who?’
‘His brother.’
The old man gaped.
‘How … how did you know?’
Steve shrugged. The videos that the stotters hired often had a story of this kind as a pretext for the scenes of mayhem and carnage, and having seen a lot of them by now Steve had got quite sharp at spotting the clues.
‘You said the footprints split up,’ he explained. ‘One lot came from the front door and the other …’
‘From the east wing, yes. And that should have told me that they couldn’t have been made by Maurice returning to the house, because all the doors save the one he’d come out of would have been bolted on the inside.’
‘And his brother slept there, didn’t he? And he hated him and everything.’
The old man nodded curtly. He seemed rather put out at having his thunder stolen.
‘Quite so. But the question was, what was I to do? I thought of telling one of the officers, but how could I explain it all to a stranger, who didn’t know the place or the people? Then I had what seemed at the time like a stroke of luck. As I said, fresh troops were constantly arriving in preparation for the attack, and one day as I was
