The Quickening Maze - Adam Foulds [30]
He refolded the rag and placed it back in the drawer.
He swung his arms around, pivoting his body left-right, right-left at the hips. He windmilled his arms over and over to fill them with blood, his hands feeling heavier, more useful, once he had finished.
He neatened his jacket, tugged at his sleeves. Unlike the inmates, he wore his clothes with precision, correctly fastened and at the proper angles to his body.
He picked up his heavy ring of keys and went out. He locked his door behind him.
Hannah sat in front of her mirror and brushed her hair. It hung in two drapes either side of a neat parting of white scalp that she thought too wide because of her hair’s regrettable fineness. She brushed down from the top, fifty times on each side, until it was glossy and fluent, and, floating, followed her brush up as she lifted it away.When she was done the light set around it an even garland of shine.
With adept quick fingers she divided it again and wove two plaits with their roots at her temples. She left them hanging there while she swept the rest back over her ears and pinned it, then rolled the length that hung down her back into a rope and pinned it to her crown.Then she looped the two plaits under her ears, pinning them behind so that her ears were framed: delicate, white, sculptural.
She regarded herself, wearing the careful expression she maintained before mirrors - her lips pressed together and lowered, her eyes looking appealingly upwards, her face devoid of movement. She turned this frozen face from side to side and looked. Good enough. Unlikely to be better. Today she would make something happen. The situation was clear: there he was; here she was. It simply needed to begin.
John heard the gate swing shut, its lock grinding round again, and swift footsteps behind him. He moved from the path and hid behind a wide, wet trunk. Chewing on the hunk of bread that he struggled to moisten with sufficient saliva to swallow, he saw the right-angled figure of William Stockdale set off on his way, presumably, to the mythically worse place, Leopard’s Hill Lodge. John leaned. A damp twig cracked softly under his boot. William Stockdale stopped. John ducked his head and pressed himself against the cold slime of the tree trunk. Again a fragment of the same twig split under his weight. He heard William Stockdale walk back the way he’d gone. He must have caught sight of John because there were a few quicker paces that scuffed through the leaves, then a thump on John’s shoulder. He was pulled from behind the tree, almost lifted like a cat by its loose collar of skin as Stockdale wrenched with a strong grip on John’s coat.
‘I have a key,’ John said. ‘I have a key.’
‘Then why are you hiding, you fool?’
‘Look. Look.’ John pulled the key from his pocket, dangled it in front of Stockdale on its frayed string.
‘So why are you hiding?’William Stockdale let him go and brushed at his own jacket.
‘I don’t know.’
‘I thought you were someone trying to make an escape.’
‘No, I’m not.’
‘Well, then. Just playing the fool.’ He patted him harshly on the cheek.
Stockdale strode away again and John bent down to pick up his bread, brushing crumbs of broken leaf and earth from it and biting. He panted and cursed, struggling to swallow.
For hours as he walked, he re-enacted the incident with much more satisfying and violent conclusions. He could have unleashed his strength. He could have given Stockdale a lick of boxer John, and that would have shown him. Repeatedly Stockdale staggered away, apologetic and impressed, feeling his face, blinking at the blood on his fingertips. John was magnanimous, feeling that as long as the blackguard had learned his lesson, they would say no more about it. Or he didn’t, and John carried on until the man lay knocked out on the ground, breathing through