Injury Time - Beryl Bainbridge [41]
The pipe had gone. She knelt and searched for it on the floor. When she stood up the tips of her fingers were stained with pink. She persuaded herself that it was wine not blood, standing there with her hand extended toward the light of the kitchen as though she were Lady Macbeth. Trembling, she went into the hall. Propped against the front door sat the injured woman, chin on her breast and gun laid across her knee.
Binny climbed the stairs and went into the bedroom. She stopped motionless on the threshold of the door, bewildered by the moon. She had been so long entombed in the dimly lit kitchen that she was unprepared for the sweetness of the air she breathed, the stretch of stormy sky beyond the windows, milky with light, filled with white clouds ballooning high above the roof tops. She felt that the room too was drifting in space, dappled with the shadows of leaves, of railings, and turning, turning . . .
‘What’s up?’ said Ginger, ‘What’s Harry want?’
‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘He’s asleep by the stove. What have you done to the gentlemen? What’s happened to Edward?’
‘Is he the one that pissed hisself?’ he asked. The large table had been dragged across the room and laid on its side to form a barricade. Ginger crouched behind it. The tip of his gun glittered like a spear in the moonlight.
‘He wasn’t scared,’ defended Binny. ‘He couldn’t hold on any longer. Where is he?’
‘In the bathroom. They’re all right.’
‘Someone’s bleeding,’ she accused. ‘There’s blood on the carpet.’
‘The bald bloke hurt his ankle,’ Ginger said. ‘It had nothing to do with us.’
Binny advanced further into the room. She noticed a pane of glass had been broken in the bottom half of the window. She looked curiously into the street. It was empty of cars, of people; lights burned on the stairwells of the flats and along the deserted balconies. At the corner, by a plane tree turned to silver under the blazing moon, a solitary furniture van was parked. ‘What would you have done,’ she wanted to know, ‘if the children had been here? My children?’
He shrugged.
‘They’d have been frightened.’
‘They’d have been asleep,’ he said sullenly. ‘Wouldn’t they?’
‘Alison watches late-night films sometimes. She could have been up.’
He said nothing. He was like her son Gregory when she started to tell him how tired she felt; his mind switched off.
‘You shouldn’t involve other people. It’s none of my business what you’ve been doing, but you shouldn’t have brought it here. You don’t know how inconvenient it is.’
‘Shut up,’ he said. ‘I never asked to be here.’
‘Alison would have been frightened out of her wits. Smashing the pictures in the hall, fusing the lights—’
‘We never fused them.’
‘Beating that woman—’
‘You know nothing about it,’ he muttered. ‘It’s not what you think.’
‘Children are very impressionable. It’s like food – we are what we eat. They can be influenced for life. It doesn’t matter to us . . . we’ve had our lives.’
He stared at her. She couldn’t see his expression.
‘Well,’ she amended. ‘You haven’t, of course. You’re only young. You won’t remember that film, will you, when the heroine walked into the ocean playing her violin? She said more or less the same thing. That’s why she did it.’
She didn’t worry whether Ginger thought the strain of the last few hours had unhinged her; she was choosing her words with care. Far away, like a distant gust of wind, she heard those fornicating cats, thinly screaming. She was ready at the slightest hint of irritation on his part to change her attitude, to moderate her tone of voice. She would never have spoken in this fanciful way to Harry or the violent man in the bathroom. They were not the same as Ginger. For many years, in the privacy of her own home, she had been a voyeur of murder, arson and war. Sitting passively on her sofa she had followed in the wake of tanks and ships and planes. She had seen shells burst in the night like fireworks, flame-throwers curling like rainbows above the earth. She had watched little