Читать книгу The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner - Alan Sillitoe - Страница 6

I don’t say to myself: ‘You shouldn’t have done the job and then you’d have stayed away from Borstal’; no, what I ram into my runner-brain is that my luck had no right to scram just when I was on my way to making the coppers think I hadn’t done the job after all. The time was autumn and the night foggy enough to set me and my mate Mike roaming the streets when we should have been rooted in front of the telly or stuck into a plush posh seat at the pictures, but I was restless after six weeks away from any sort of work, and well you might ask me why I’d been bone-idle for so long because normally I sweated my thin guts out on a milling-machine with the rest of them, but you see, my dad died from cancer of the throat, and mam collected a cool five hundred in insurance and benefits from the factory where he’d worked, ‘for your bereavement’, they said, or words like that.

Now I believe, and my mam must have thought the same, that a wad of crisp blue-back fivers ain’t a sight of good to a living soul unless they’re flying out of your hand into some shopkeeper’s till, and the shopkeeper is passing you tip-top things in exchange over the counter, so as soon as she got the money, mam took me and my five brothers and sisters out to town and got us dolled-up in new clothes. Then she ordered a twenty-one-inch telly, a new carpet because the old one was covered with blood from dad’s dying and wouldn’t wash out, and took a taxi home with bags of grub and a new fur coat. And do you know – you wain’t believe me when I tell you – she’d still near three hundred left in her bulging handbag the next day, so how could any of us go to work after that? Poor old dad, he didn’t get a look in, and he was the one who’d done the suffering and dying for such a lot of lolly.

Night after night we sat in front of the telly with a ham sandwich in one hand, a bar of chocolate in the other, and a bottle of lemonade between our boots, while mam was with some fancy-man upstairs on the new bed she’d ordered, and I’d never known a family as happy as ours was in that couple of months when we’d got all the money we needed. And when the dough ran out I didn’t think about anything much, but just roamed the streets – looking for another job, I told mam – hoping to get my hands on another five hundred nicker so’s the nice life we’d got used to could go on and on for ever. Because it’s surprising how quick you can get used to a different life. To begin with, the adverts on the telly had shown us how much more there was in the world to buy than we’d ever dreamed of when we’d looked into shop windows but hadn’t seen all there was to see because we didn’t have the money to buy it with anyway. And the telly made all these things seem twenty times better than we’d ever thought they were. Even adverts at the cinema were cool and tame, because now we were seeing them in private at home. We used to cock our noses up at things in shops that didn’t move, but suddenly we saw their real value because they jumped and glittered around the screen and had some pasty-faced tart going head over heels to get her nail-polished grabbers on to them or her lipstick lips over them, not like the crumby adverts you saw on posters or in newspapers as dead as doornails; these were flickering around loose, half-open packets and tins, making you think that all you had to do was finish opening them before they were yours, like seeing an unlocked safe through a shop window with the man gone away for a cup of tea without thinking to guard his lolly. The films they showed were good as well, in that way, because we couldn’t get our eyes unglued from the cops chasing the robbers who had satchel-bags crammed with cash and looked like getting away to spend it – until the last moment. I always hoped they would end up free to blow the lot, and could never stop wanting to put my hand out, smash into the screen (it only looked a bit of rag-screen like at the pictures) and get the copper in a half-nelson so’s he’d stop following the bloke with the money-bags. Even when he’d knocked off a couple of bank clerks I hoped he wouldn’t get nabbed. In fact then I wished more than ever he wouldn’t because it meant the hot-chair if he did, and I wouldn’t wish that on anybody no matter what they’d done, because I’d read in a book where the hot-chair worn’t a quick death at all, but that you just sat there scorching to death until you were dead. And it was when these cops were chasing the crooks that we played some good tricks with the telly, because when one of them opened his big gob to spout about getting their man I’d turn the sound down and see his mouth move like a goldfish or mackerel or a minnow mimicking what they were supposed to be acting – it was so funny the whole family nearly went into fits on the brand-new carpet that hadn’t yet found it’s way to the bedroom. It was the best of all though when we did it to some Tory telling us about how good his government was going to be if we kept on voting for them – their slack chops rolling, opening and bumbling, hands lifting to twitch moustaches and touching their buttonholes to make sure the flower hadn’t wilted, so that you could see they didn’t mean a word they said, especially with not a murmur coming out because we’d cut off the sound. When the governor of the Borstal first talked to me I was reminded of those times so much that I nearly killed myself trying not to laugh. Yes, we played so many good stunts on the box of tricks that mam used to call us the Telly Boys, we got so clever at it.

My pal Mike got let off with probation because it was his first job – anyway the first they ever knew about – and because they said he would never have done it if it hadn’t been for me talking him into it. They said I was a menace to honest lads like Mike – hands in his pockets so that they looked stone empty, head bent forward as if looking for half-crowns to fill ’em with, a ripped jersey on and his hair falling into his eyes so that he could go up to women and ask them for a shilling because he was hungry – and that I was the brains behind the job, the guiding light when it came to making up anybody’s mind, but I swear to God I worn’t owt like that because really I ain’t got no more brains than a gnat after hiding the money in the place I did. And I – being cranky like I am – got sent to Borstal because to tell you the honest truth I’d been to Remand Homes before – though that’s another story and I suppose if I ever tell it it’ll be just as boring as this one is. I was glad though that Mike got away with it, and I only hope he always will, not like silly bastard me.

So on this foggy night we tore ourselves away from the telly and slammed the front door behind us, setting off up our wide street like slow tugs on a river that’d broken their hooters, for we didn’t know where the housefronts began what with the perishing cold mist all around. I was snatched to death without an overcoat: mam had forgotten to buy me one in the scrummage of shopping, and by the time I thought to remind her of it the dough was all gone. So we whistled ‘The Teddy Boys Picnic’ to keep us warm, and I told myself that I’d get a coat soon if it was the last thing I did. Mike said he thought the same about himself, adding that he’d also get some brandnew glasses with gold rims, to wear instead of the wire frames they’d given him at the school clinic years ago. He didn’t twig it was foggy at first and cleaned his glasses every time I pulled him back from a lamppost or car, but when he saw the lights on Alfreton Road looking like octopus eyes he put them in his pocket and didn’t wear them again until we did the job. We hadn’t got two ha’pennies between us, and though we weren’t hungry we wished we’d got a bob or two when we passed the fish and chip shops because the delicious sniffs of salt and vinegar and frying fat made our mouths water. I don’t mind telling you we walked the town from one end to the other and if our eyes worn’t glued to the ground looking for lost wallets and watches they was swivelling around house windows and shop doors in case we saw something easy and worth nipping into.

Neither of us said as much as this to each other, but I know for a fact that that was what we was thinking. What I don’t know – and as sure as I sit here I know I’ll never know – is which of us was the first bastard to latch his peepers on to that baker’s backyard. Oh yes, it’s all right me telling myself it was me, but the truth is that I’ve never known whether it was Mike or not, because I do know that I didn’t see the open window until he stabbed me in the ribs and pointed it out. ‘See it?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I told him, ‘so let’s get cracking.’

‘But what about the wall though?’ he whispered, looking a bit closer.

On your shoulders,’ I chipped in.

His eyes were already up there: ‘Will you be able to reach?’ 11 was the only time he ever showed any life.

‘Leave it to me,’ I said, ever-ready. ‘I can reach anywhere from your ham-hock shoulders.’

Mike was a nipper compared to me, but underneath the scruffy draught-board jersey he wore were muscles as hard as iron, and you wouldn’t think to see him walking down the street with glasses on and hands in pockets that he’d harm a fly, but I never liked to get on the wrong side of him in a fight because he’s the sort that don’t say a word for weeks on end – sits plugged in front of the telly, or reads a cowboy book, or just sleeps – when suddenly BIFF – half kills somebody for almost nothing at all, such as beating him in a race for the last Football Post on a Saturday night, pushing in before him at a bus stop, or bumping into him when he was day-dreaming about Dolly-on-the-Tub next door. I saw him set on a bloke once for no more than fixing him in a funny way with his eyes, and it turned out that the bloke was cock-eyed but nobody knew it because he’d just that day come to live in our street. At other times none of these things would matter a bit, and I suppose the only reason why I was pals with him was because I didn’t say much from one month’s end to another either.

He puts his hands up in the air like he was being covered with a Gatling-Gun, and moved to the wall like he was going to be mowed down, and I climbed up him like he was a stile or step-ladder, and there he stood, the palms of his upshot maulers flat and turned out so’s I could step on ’em like they was the adjustable jack-spanner under a car, not a sound of a breath nor the shiver of a flinch coming from him. I lost no time in any case, took my coat from between my teeth, chucked it up to the glass-topped wall (where the glass worn’t too sharp because the jags had been worn down by years of accidental stones) and was sitting astraddle before I knew where I was. Then down the other side, with my legs rammed up into my throat when I hit the ground, the crack coming about as hard as when you fall after a high parachute drop, that one of my mates told me was like jumping off a twelve-foot wall, which this must have been. Then I picked up my bits and pieces and opened the gate for Mike, who was still grinning and full of life because the hardest part of the job was already done. ‘I came, I broke, I entered,’ like that cleverdick Borstal song.

I didn’t think about anything at all, as usual, because I never do when I’m busy, when I’m draining pipes, looting sacks, yaling locks, lifting latches, forcing my bony hands and lanky legs into making something move, hardly feeling my lungs going in-whiff and out-whaff, not realizing whether my mouth is clamped tight or gaping, whether I’m hungry, itching from scabies, or whether my flies are open and flashing dirty words like muck and spit into the late-night final fog. And when I don’t know anything about all this then how can I honest-to-God say I think of anything at such times? When I’m wondering what’s the best way to get a window open or how to force a door, how can I be thinking or have anything on my mind? That’s what the four-eyed white-smocked bloke with the notebook couldn’t understand when he asked me questions for days and days after I got to Borstal; and I couldn’t explain it to him then like I’m writing it down now; and even if I’d been able to maybe he still wouldn’t have caught on because I don’t know whether I can understand it myself even at this moment, though I’m doing my best you can bet.

So before I knew where I was I was inside the baker’s office watching Mike picking up that cash box after he’d struck a match to see where it was, wearing a tailor-made fifty-shilling grin on his square crew-cut nut as his paws closed over the box like he’d squash it to nothing. ‘Out,’ he suddenly said, shaking it so’s it rattled. ‘Let’s scram.’

‘Maybe there’s some more,’ I said, pulling half a dozen drawers out of a rollertop desk.

‘No,’ he said, like he’d already been twenty years in the game, ‘this is the lot,’ patting his tin box, ‘this is it.’

I pulled out another few drawers, full of bills, books and letters. ‘How do you know, you loony sod?’

He barged past me like a bull at a gate. ‘Because I do.’

Right or wrong, we’d both got to stick together and do the same thing. I looked at an ever-loving babe of a brand-new typewriter, but knew it was too traceable, so blew it a kiss, and went out after him. ‘Hang on,’ I said, pulling the door to, ‘we’re in no hurry.’

‘Not much we aren’t,’ he says over his shoulder.

‘We’ve got months to splash the lolly,’ I whispered as we crossed the yard, ‘only don’t let that gate creak too much or you’ll have the narks tuning-in.’

‘You think I’m barmy?’ he said, creaking the gate so that the whole street heard.

I don’t know about Mike, but now I started to think, of how we’d get back safe through the streets with that money-box up my jumper. Because he’d clapped it into my hand as soon as we’d got to the main road, which might have meant that he’d started thinking as well, which only goes to show how you don’t know what’s in anybody else’s mind unless you think about things yourself. But as far as my thinking went at that moment it wasn’t up to much, only a bit of fright that wouldn’t budge not even with a hot blow-lamp, about what we’d say if a copper asked us where we were off to with that hump in my guts.

‘What is it?’ he’d ask, and I’d say: ‘A growth.’ ‘What do you mean, a growth, my lad?’ he’d say back, narky like. I’d cough and clutch myself like I was in the most tripe-twisting pain in the world, and screw my eyes up like I was on my way to the hospital, and Mike would take my arm like he was the best pal I’d got. ‘Cancer,’ I’d manage to say to Narker, which would make his slow punch-drunk brain suspect a thing or two. ‘A lad of your age?’ So I’d groan again, and hope to make him feel a real bully of a bastard, which would be impossible, but anyway: ‘It’s in the family, Dad died of it last month, and I’ll die of it next month by the feel of it.’ ‘What, did he have it in the guts?’ ‘No, in the throat. But it’s got me in the stomach.’ Groan and cough. ‘Well, you shouldn’t be out like this if you’ve got cancer, you should be in the hospital.’ I’d get ratty now: ‘That’s where I’m trying to go if only you’d let me and stop asking so many questions. Aren’t I, Mike?’ Grunt from Mike as he slung his cosh. Then just in time the copper would tell us to get on our way, kind and considerate all of a sudden, saying that the outpatient department of the hospital closes at twelve, so hadn’t he better call a taxi? He would if we liked, he says, and he’d pay for it as well. But we tell him not to bother, that he’s a good bloke even if he is a copper, that we know a short cut anyway. Then just as we’re turning a corner he gets it into his big batchy head that we’re going the opposite way to the hospital, and calls us back. So we’d start to run ... if you can call all that thinking.

Up in my room Mike rips open the money-box with a hammer and chisel, and before we know where we are we’ve got seventy-eight pounds fifteen and fourpence ha’penny each lying all over my bed like tea spread out on Christmas Day: cake and trifle, salad and sandwiches, jam tarts and bars of chocolate: all shared alike between Mike and me because we believed in equal work and equal pay, just like the comrades my dad was in until he couldn’t do a stroke anymore and had no breath left to argue with. I thought how good it was that blokes like that poor baker didn’t stash all his cash in one of the big marble-fronted banks that take up every corner of the town, how lucky for us that he didn’t trust them no matter how many millions of tons of concrete or how many iron bars and boxes they were made of, or how many coppers kept their blue pop-eyed peepers glued on to them, how smashing it was that he believed in money-boxes when so many shopkeepers thought it old-fashioned and tried to be modern by using a bank, which wouldn’t give a couple of sincere, honest, hardworking, conscientious blokes like Mike and me a chance.

Now you’d think, and I’d think, and anybody with a bit of imagination would think, that we’d done as clean a job as could ever be done, that, with the baker’s shop being at least a mile from where we lived, and with not a soul having seen us, and what with the fog and the fact that we weren’t more than five minutes in the place, that the coppers should never have been able to trace us. But then, you’d be wrong. I’d be wrong, and everybody else would be wrong, no matter how much imagination was diced out between us.

Even so, Mike and I didn’t splash the money about, because that would have made people think straightaway that we’d latched on to something that didn’t belong to us. Which wouldn’t do at all, because even in a street like ours there are people who love to do a good turn for the coppers, though I never know why they do. Some people are so mean-gutted that even if they’ve only got tuppence more than you and they think you’re the sort that would take it if you have half the chance, they’d get you put inside if they saw you ripping lead out of a lavatory, even if it weren’t their lavatory – just to keep their tuppence out of your reach. And so we didn’t do anything to let on about how rich we were, nothing like going down town and coming back dressed in brand-new Teddy boy suits and carrying a set of skiffle-drums like another pal of ours, who’d done a factory office about six months before. No, we took the odd bobs and pennies out and folded the notes into bundles and stuffed them up the drainpipe outside the door in the backyard. ‘Nobody’ll ever think of looking for it there,’ I said to Mike. ‘We’ll keep it doggo for a week or two, then take a few quid a week out till it’s all gone. We might be thieving bastards, but we’re not green.’

Some days later a plain-clothes dick knocked at the door. And asked for me. I was still in bed, at eleven o’clock, and had to unroll myself from the comfortable black sheets when I heard mam calling me. ‘A man to see you,’ she said. ‘Hurry up, or he’ll be gone.’

I could hear her keeping him at the back door, nattering about how fine it had been and how it looked like rain since early this morning – and he didn’t answer her except to snap out a snotty yes or no. I scrambled into my trousers and wondered why he’d come – knowing it was a copper because ‘a man to see you’ always meant just that in our house – and if I’d had any idea that one had gone to Mike’s house as well at the same time I’d have twigged it to be because of that hundred and fifty quid’s worth of paper stuffed up the drainpipe outside the back door about ten inches away from the plain-clothed copper’s boot, where mam still talked to him thinking she was doing me a favour, and I wishing to God she’d ask him in, though on second thoughts realizing that that would seem more suspicious than keeping him outside, because they know we hate their guts and smell a rat if they think we’re trying to be nice to them. Mam wasn’t born yesterday, I thought, thumping my way down the creaking stairs.

I’d seen him before: Borstal Bernard in nicky-hat, Remand Home Ronald in rowing-boat boots, Probation Pete in a pitprop mackintosh, three months clink in collar and tie (all this out of a Borstal skiffle-ballad that my new mate made up, and I’d tell you it in full but it doesn’t belong in this story), a ’tec who’d never had as much in his pockets as that drainpipe had up its jackses. He was like Hitler in the face, right down to the paint-brush tash, except that being six-foot tall made him seem worse. But I straightened my shoulders to look into his illiterate blue eyes – like I always do with any copper.

Then he started asking me questions, and my mother from behind said: ‘He’s never left that television set for the last three months, so you’ve nowt on him, mate. You might as well look for somebody else, because you’re wasting the rates you get out of my rent and the income-tax that comes out of my pay-packet standing there like that’ – which was a laugh because she’d never paid either to my knowledge, and never would, I hoped.

‘Well, you know where Papplewick Street is, don’t you?’ the copper asked me, taking no notice of mam.

‘Ain’t it off Alfreton Road?’ I asked him back, helpful and bright.

‘You know there’s a baker’s half-way down on the left-hand side, don’t you?’

‘Ain’t it next door to a pub, then?’ I wanted to know.

He answered me sharp: ‘No, it bloody well ain’t.’ Coppers always lose their tempers as quick as this, and more often than not they gain nothing by it. ‘Then I don’t know it,’ I told him, saved by the bell.

He slid his big boot round and round the doorstep. ‘Where were you last Friday night?’ Back in the ring, but this was worse than a boxing match.

I didn’t like him trying to accuse me of something he wasn’t sure I’d done. ‘Was I at the baker’s you mentioned? Or in the pub next door?’

‘You’ll get five years in Borstal if you don’t give me a straight answer,’ he said, unbuttoning his mac even though it was cold where he was standing.

‘I was glued to the telly, like mam says,’ I swore blind. But he went on and on with his looney questions: ‘Have you got a television?’

The things he asked wouldn’t have taken in a kid of two, and what else could I say to the last one except: ‘Has the aerial fell down? Or would you like to come in and see it?’

He was liking me even less for saying that. ‘We know you weren’t listening to the television set last Friday, and so do you, don’t you?’

‘P’raps not, but I was looking at it, because sometimes we turn the sound down for a bit of fun.’ I could hear mam laughing from the kitchen, and I hoped Mike’s mam was doing the same if the cops had gone to him as well.

‘We know you weren’t in the house,’ he said, starting up again, cranking himself with the handle. They always say ‘We’ ‘We’, never ‘I’ ‘I’ – as if they feel braver and righter knowing there’s a lot of them against only one.

‘I’ve got witnesses,’ I said to him. ‘Mam for one. Her fancy-man, for two. Ain’t that enough? I can get you a dozen more, or thirteen altogether, if it was a baker’s that got robbed.’

‘I don’t want no lies,’ he said, not catching on about the baker’s dozen. Where do they scrape cops up from anyway? ‘All I want is to get from you where you put that money.’

Don’t get mad, I kept saying to myself, don’t get mad – hearing mam setting out cups and saucers and putting the pan on the stove for bacon. I stood back and waved him inside like I was the butler. ‘Come and search the house. If you’ve got a warrant.’

‘Listen, my lad,’ he said, like the dirty bullying jumped-up bastard he was, ‘I don’t want too much of your lip, because if we get you down to the Guildhall you’ll get a few bruises and black-eyes for your trouble.’ And I knew he wasn’t kidding either, because I’d heard about all them sort of tricks. I hoped one day though that him and all his pals would be the ones to get the black-eyes and kicks, you never knew. It might come sooner than anybody thinks, like in Hungary. ‘Tell me where the money is, and I’ll get you off with probation.’

‘What money?’ I asked him, because I’d heard that one before as well.

‘You know what money.’

‘Do I look as though I’d know owt about money?’ I said pushing my fist through a hole in my shirt.

‘The money that was pinched, that you know all about,’ he said. ‘You can’t trick me, so it’s no use trying.’

‘Was it three-and-eightpence ha’penny?’ I asked.

‘You thieving young bastard. We’ll teach you to steal money that doesn’t belong to you.’

I turned my head around: ‘Mam,’ I called out, ‘get my lawyer on the blower, will you?’

‘Clever, aren’t you?’ he said in an unfriendly way, ‘but we won’t rest until we clear all this up.’

‘Look,’ I pleaded, as if about to sob my socks off because he’d got me wrong, ‘it’s all very well us talking like this, it’s like a game almost, but I wish you’d tell me what it’s all about, because honest-to-God I’ve just got out of bed and here you are at the door talking about me having pinched a lot of money, money that I don’t know anything about.’

He swung around now as if he’d trapped me, though I couldn’t see why he might think so. ‘Who said anything about money? I didn’t. What made you bring money into this little talk we’re having?’

‘It’s you,’ I answered, thinking he was going barmy, and about to start foaming at the chops, ‘you’ve got money on the brain, like all policemen. Baker’s shops as well.’

He screwed his face up. ‘I want an answer from you: where’s that money?’

But I was getting fed-up with all this. ‘I’ll do a deal.’

Judging by his flash-bulb face he thought he was suddenly onto a good thing. ‘What sort of a deal?’

So I told him: ‘I’ll give you all the money I’ve got, one and fourpence ha’penny, if you stop this third-degree and let me go in and get my breakfast. Honest, I’m clambed to death. I ain’t had a bite since yesterday. Can’t you hear my guts rollin’?’

His jaw dropped, but on he went, pumping me for another half hour. A routine check-up they say on the pictures. But I knew I was winning on points.

Then he left, but came back in the afternoon to search the house. He didn’t find a thing, not a French farthing. He asked me questions again and I didn’t tell him anything except lies, lies, lies, because I can go on doing that forever without batting an eyelid. He’d got nothing on me and we both of us knew it, otherwise I’d have been down the Guildhall in no time, but he kept on keeping on because I’d been in a Remand Home for a high-wall job before; and Mike was put through the same mill because all the local cops knew he was my best pal.

When it got dark me and Mike were in our parlour with a low light on and the telly off, Mike taking it easy in the rocking chair and me slouched out on the settee, both of us puffing a packet of Woods. With the door bolted and curtains drawn we talked about the dough we’d crammed up the drainpipe. Mike thought we should take it out and both of us do a bunk to Skegness or Cleethorpes for a good time in the arcades, living like lords in a boarding house near the pier, then at least we’d both have had a big beano before getting sent down.

‘Listen, you daft bleeder,’ I said, ‘we aren’t going to get caught at all, and we’ll have a good time, later.’ We were so clever we didn’t even go out to the pictures, though we wanted to.

In the morning old Hitler-face questioned me again, with one of his pals this time, and the next day they came, trying as hard as they could to get something out of me, but I didn’t budge an inch. I know I’m showing off when I say this, but in me he’d met his match, and I’d never give in to questions no matter how long it was kept up. They searched the house a couple of times as well, which made me think they thought they really had something to go by, but I know now that they hadn’t, and that it was all buckshee speculation. They turned the house upside down and inside out like an old sock, went from top to bottom and front to back but naturally didn’t find a thing. The copper even poked his face up the front-room chimney (that hadn’t been used or swept for years) and came down looking like Al Jolson so that he had to swill himself clean at the scullery sink. They kept tapping and pottering around the big aspidistra plant that grandma had left to mam, lifting it up from the table to look under the cloth, putting it aside so’s they could move the table and get at the boards under the rug – but the big headed stupid ignorant bastards never once thought of emptying the soil out of the plant pot, where they’d have found the crumpled-up money-box that we’d buried the night we did the job. I suppose it’s still there now I think about it, and I suppose mam wonders now and again why the plant don’t prosper like it used to – as if it could with a fistful of thick black tin lapped around its guts.

The last time he knocked at our door was one wet morning at five minutes to nine and I was sleep-logged in my crumby bed as usual. Mam had gone to work for the day so I shouted for him to hold on a bit, and then went down to see who it was. There he stood, six-feet tall and sopping wet, and for the first time in my life I did a spiteful thing I’ll never forgive myself for: I didn’t ask him to come in out of the rain, because I wanted him to get double pneumonia and die. I suppose he could have pushed by me and come in if he’d wanted, but maybe he’d got used to asking questions on the doorstep and didn’t want to be put off by changing his ground even though it was raining. Not that I don’t like being spiteful because of any barmy principle I’ve got, but this bit of spite, as it turned out, did me no good at all. I should have treated him as a brother I hadn’t seen for twenty years and dragged him in for a cup of tea and a fag, told him about the picture I hadn’t seen the night before, asking him how his wife was after her operation and whether they’d shaved her moustache off to make it, and then sent him happy and satisfied out by the front door. But no, I thought, let’s see what he’s got to say for himself now.

He stood a little to the side of the door, either because it was less wet there, or because he wanted to see me from a different angle, perhaps having found it monotonous to watch a bloke’s face always telling lies from the same side. ‘You’ve been identified,’ he said, twitching raindrops from his tash. ‘A woman saw you and your mate yesterday and she swears blind you are the same chaps she saw going into that bakery.’

I was dead sure he was still bluffing, because Mike and I hadn’t even seen each other the day before, but I looked worried. ‘She’s a menace then to innocent people, whoever she is, because the only bakery I’ve been in lately is the one up our street to get some cut-bread on tick for mam.’

He didn’t bite on this. ‘So now I want to know where the money is’ – as if I hadn’t answered him at all.

‘I think mam took it to work this morning to get herself some tea in the canteen.’ Rain was splashing down so hard I thought he’d get washed away if he didn’t come inside. But I wasn’t much bothered, and went on: ‘I remember I put it in the telly-vase last night – it was my only one-and-three and I was saving it for a packet of tips this morning – and I nearly had a jibbering black fit just now when I saw it had gone. I was reckoning on it for getting me through today because I don’t think life’s worth living without a fag, do you?’

I was getting into my stride and began to feel good, twigging that this would be my last pack of lies, and that if I kept it up for long enough this time I’d have the bastards beat: Mike and me would be off to the coast in a few weeks time having the fun of our lives, playing at penny football and latching on to a couple of tarts that would give us all they were good for. ‘And this weather’s no good for picking-up fag-ends in the street,’ I said, ‘because they’d be sopping wet. Course, I know you could dry ’em out near the fire, but it don’t taste the same you know, all said and done. Rainwater does summat to ’em that don’t bear thinkin’ about: it turns ’em back into hoss-tods without the taste though.’

I began to wonder, at the back of my brainless eyes, why old copper-lugs didn’t pull me up sharp and say he hadn’t got time to listen to all this, but he wasn’t looking at me anymore, and all my thoughts about Skegness went bursting to smithereens in my sludgy loaf. I could have dropped into the earth when I saw what he’d fixed his eyes on.

He was looking at it, an ever-loving fiver, and I could only jabber: ‘The one thing is to have some real fags because new hoss-tods is always better than stuff that’s been rained on and dried, and I know how you feel about not being able to find money because one-and-three’s one-and-three in anybody’s pocket, and naturally if I see it knocking around I’ll get you on the blower tomorrow straightaway and tell you where you can find it.’

I thought I’d go down in a fit: three green-backs as well had been washed down by the water, and more were following, lying flat at first after their fall, then getting tilted at the corners by wind and rainspots as if they were alive and wanted to get back into the dry snug drainpipe out of the terrible weather, and you can’t imagine how I wished they’d be able to. Old Hitler-face didn’t know what to make of it but just kept staring down and down, and I thought I’d better keep on talking, though I knew it wasn’t much good now.

‘It’s a fact, I know, that money’s hard to come by and half-crowns don’t get found on bus seats or in dustbins, and I didn’t see any in bed last night because I’d ’ave known about it, wouldn’t I? You can’t sleep with things like that in the bed because they’re too hard, and anyway at first they’re. …’ It took Hitler-boy a long time to catch on; they were beginning to spread over the yard a bit, reinforced by the third colour of a ten-bob note, before his hand clamped itself on to my shoulder.