Injury Time - Beryl Bainbridge [31]
How he hated telling too many lies; it brought his face out in blotches. He could have strangled Simpson, dithering there at the sink with a dish towel in his hand and his naked toes exposed. The man was a sissy messing about with dirty plates. He seemed to have forgotten entirely the lateness of the hour. Of course, his wife wasn’t sitting at home, waiting to hear his excuses.
Edward looked in the mirror and saw, reflected behind his uncombed head, Jesus on the wall, surrounded by his disciples. It was all right for some, he thought – those who knew the precise moment of their martyrdom. For himself, life stretched ahead, unplanned, full of accidental alarms. The pallor of his face in the glass dismayed him. He recalled the verse of a poem he’d memorised as a boy: ‘And there lay the rider distorted and pale, With the dew on his brow and the rust on his mail; And the tents were all silent, the banners alone, The lances uplifted, the trumpets unblown . . .’
From somewhere beyond the window he heard the distant clamour of an ambulance. Alma, slumbering within the stifling folds of her khaki duffle coat, whimpered and kicked a cushion to the floor.
Outside the house, still clutching her newspaper package, Muriel stood motionless. The taxi appeared again at the top of the street. The woman stopped running and swivelled the pram sickeningly in a half circle on the wet pavement. The hedge shook. Rain drops slid through the glittering leaves. Dragging the pram behind her, the woman began to mount the steps of Binny’s house. The taxi skidded to a halt; men leapt desperately into the road. Muriel moved then and in a dream bent and caught hold of the rubber tyres and helped to lift the pram over the top step and into the hall. She was flung bodily toward the stairs. A bicycle rode ahead of her along the carpet and crashed against the bannisters. Hands tore at the hood of the pram; something white, intricate as a paper doily and patterned with light, drifted through the air. She clawed her way back down the hall to where the creeper swayed in the wind. In slow motion, it seemed, she saw an infant, entangled in a crocheted shawl, bounce upon the railings. She screamed. A dimpled knee shone for an instant as a beam of light hurtled across the step. Scooping the limp bundle to her breast, she was seized by the hair and dragged brutally backwards. Falling with arched spine over the hood of the pram, she lost her balance and rolled to the floor; she lay with her cheek pressed to the dark skirting board and the silent baby stuffed within her arms. The front door slammed shut.
To those inside the kitchen, discounting the sleeping woman on the sofa, the sounds from the hall were so sudden and so violent that for several seconds they stood frozen in their tracks. Binny stared at Edward. Her raised hand, arrested between sink and dish rack, gripped a saucer bubbling with soap suds. I love you, she thought. Help me.
Then the door burst inwards.
9
Two men, one dark, one red-headed, held shot guns. A third man, unarmed, was gripping a thin woman by the throat and throttling her.
‘The window, Harry,’ shouted the man with red hair.
Harry ran to the shutters and punched the metal bar with his fist. Turning, he swung his gun in the air like a cricket bat and clouted the yellow lampshade that hung above the table. The parchment split, the shade pitched wildly; shadows went bouncing up and down the floor. Edward, seeing the man’s arm rise, ducked instinctively. For one solitary moment he clung to the illusion that the pandemonium about him was an elaborate and outrageous joke, perpetrated by Binny to annoy him. Scuttling under the table, he crouched on all fours, watching the man’s feet prance upon the carpet.
The third man, having flung his woman victim to the floor,