Injury Time - Beryl Bainbridge [42]
‘I don’t want to know the details,’ she continued. ‘What you’ve done, you’ve done. That’s your affair. But you ought to tell us what you’re going to do next. After all we’re on your side whether we like it or not. Why on earth did you have to break this window?’ She bent down fussily and inspected the fragments of glass on the dusty floor.
‘I kept dozing off,’ he explained. ‘It wouldn’t open. I needed air.’
‘Yes, well,’ she said. ‘That’s one way of getting it, I suppose. The paint’s stuck. There’s so much to do in a house this size. I can’t be expected to do everything.’ She gazed, consumed with self-pity, into the street below. ‘They’ve left us alone,’ she lamented. ‘Not one single bobby. They don’t care what happens to us.’
‘Don’t you believe it,’ Ginger said. He pointed at the van on the corner. ‘That’s their H.Q. And there’s men up there.’
‘Where?’ she asked. She squatted beside him and peered intently over the edge of the table. ‘Those are birds, surely?’
‘There,’ he said impatiently. He held her chin and tilted it in the right direction.
His fingers were thin and strong; she could feel his breath upon her cheek. She wasn’t worried by his proximity. It wasn’t only that he regarded her as eligible for the old age pension; she’d enough knowledge of men to know he couldn’t fancy her. ‘Oh yes,’ she cried, ‘I see’, though all she saw on the slopes of the moon-flooded roof were pigeons perched in sleep.
‘I keep thinking of steak,’ said Ginger. ‘I thought I heard it spitting under the grill a moment ago.’
‘We haven’t got any steak,’ she said.
‘It’s those leaves on the balcony,’ he told her. ‘That ivy, flickering against the railings.’
‘There’s some sausages in the fridge. You’re very welcome.’
He made a face. ‘Muck,’ he said contemptuously.
She hoped he was referring to sausages in general. After Harry’s disparaging remarks about cleanliness she was unduly sensitive. She looked at him. There were creases at the side of his mouth. He wasn’t as young as she’d first taken him to be – perhaps prison life had aged him. ‘Was it awful inside?’ she asked.
They stayed like two monkeys on the floor, balanced on haunches, hands swinging loosely between their knees.
He stared at her blankly. ‘Inside where?’
‘Well, prison.’
‘How should I know?’ he said. ‘I’ve never been there.’
‘No, of course not,’ she agreed. ‘I was just curious.’ He had a surprised kind of face, the eyebrows so pale as to be unnoticeable. His lips couldn’t quite close over his teeth. He looked good-tempered and expectant, as though waiting for some joke to be told. ‘I’ve visited me brother, though. In Walton.’
‘Is that a prison?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It’s a good few years ago now.’
‘It must be terrible to be shut away. It must finish a man.’
‘Get off,’ he scoffed. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. Our Billy never looked fitter in his life. When I went to see him you’d have mistaken the blokes inside for the visitors. It was me and me sister looked half-dead.’
‘That’s interesting,’ said Binny.
‘Stands to reason, doesn’t it? They put him to bed at eight o’clock and he had a bath three times a week. He got into music and foreign languages. He sat up half the night with his earphones.’
‘How amazing,