The Friendly Ones. Philip Hensher

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      Tresco took his branch – a two-foot club – and poked Josh hard. Josh stumbled upright so as not to fall into the mud. ‘Go on,’ Tresco said. ‘Just go and wave at them or something. No one expects you to do anything intensely dramatic.’

      Tamara and Thomas started laughing. Josh felt tearful; he had forgotten that, sooner or later, the cousins would move on from being vile to him to being vile about Mummy.

      ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ Tamara said. ‘If you don’t come up here now, this second, I’m going to come and drag you out.’

      It would not work, Josh was sure; all he had to do was go and stand at the wall and be ignored in the same way that the proles were ignoring his cousins. It was as easy as that, and then the cousins would get bored and go and find something else to do. He stood up properly, and went to the wall where Tamara and Thomas had been dancing. Tamara, a firm look on her face, took him with a solid grip and pushed him forward. She raised her arm and pointed at him, grinning like a mud-spattered loon in a ball-gown. By their side, Thomas continued to caper.

      ‘Do you know what Josh does?’ Tresco said. He was talking half to Tamara and Thomas, and half for Josh’s benefit. Over their heads, the music of disdain in what Tresco was saying floated, across the Wreck, to be caught by the proles. ‘Josh touches things. He’s always touching things. Have you seen that? When he comes into a room, he can’t stop and sit down, like a Christian, until he’s been right round, picking up this and that, putting his hand on the Staffordshire dogs and the photos on the piano. Do you reckon he does that at home? Or is it just when he’s taken out? Do you think it’s a Brighton thing? They can’t stand it, the seniors. They bite their lips. They try not to say anything about Josh having to touch everything. I saw him once bend down and touch the tassels on the Turkey carpet in the drawing room. I bet they think he’s bringing his Brighton ways into the house.’

      ‘Stand there,’ Tamara said to Josh. ‘Just like that.’ She took Thomas by the hand, firmly, and walked back a few paces. The proles were standing now. They had seen Josh. One of them shouted something, and then the biggest of them was sprinting towards the wood, maddened, leading a ragged troop. They had endured and accepted Tamara in her ball-gown, Thomas prancing in his Faunties, but the sight of Josh, dressed just as they were, standing behind the stone wall within the purchased woodland acres, had been too much to bear. Their howls were terrible.

      ‘Run,’ Tresco said. ‘Fucking run!’

      They ran, Josh jumping after Tamara, her skirts clutched in her fists. She was going towards the end of the woods where the Pit was. Thomas was already far ahead of them; Tresco had not moved an inch. The proles were over the stone wall now, and their howls within the estate. Somewhere behind them, through the trees, there was a confusion of movement and stumbling; somewhere behind that was Tresco. He must have armed himself somehow because quite suddenly there were shrieks of alarm within the roar of rage – a pitchfork, a gun? Josh stumbled, was grabbed by Tamara. He had almost fallen into the Pit. And here came the proles, with Tresco behind; he had smeared his face with mud, was clutching a terrible weapon; a glint of metal on the end of a pole, a kitchen knife. The littlest of the proles turned as he ran, placating with his hands, screaming, and one of the others seized him – was it the child’s sister? She tripped, stumbled, and two, three of them fell exactly as Tresco had wanted them to, into the mud and shit and filth of the Pit. As if nothing at all had happened, Tresco slowed to a walk, hoicked the pole underneath his arm and turned away. At the same moment, Josh found himself seized from behind, by Tamara. She had a plan for him. It was Thomas who started to bind his wrists; Josh surrendered himself to it. It would be easier. The morning’s task was over. Behind them, as they started to make their way to the house, the sound of some prole puking, or so Tamara jauntily observed. It was the sight of Josh they couldn’t stand, in the end.

      7.

      ‘You won’t believe this,’ Blossom’s voice called from the great hall.

      She was trying to find out where Catherine was, and Catherine called back, ‘Yes?’ from where she had removed herself to, the dining room. She had worked out that nobody came here in the mornings. It had a pleasant view out towards the woods that divided the house’s grounds from the village.

      ‘You won’t believe this,’ Blossom said, coming in, papers in one hand, her glasses in the other. ‘I’ve been tracking down my brother. He’s definitely in Sheffield. In the meantime, the arrangement about meeting you and poor little Josh – he’d never heard of it. But listen. When I tracked him down in Sheffield he was full of such alarming news I really think I’m going to hotfoot it up there. I could perfectly well take Josh with me.’

      ‘It’s not your mother, is it?’

      ‘It’s always Mummy,’ Blossom said briefly. ‘She’s not dying, or not imminently. Gracious heavens, what on earth have those awful children of mine been up to?’

      A scene of apocalypse was approaching the house across the lawn. Their faces were smeared with mud and filth; their clothes, once party clothes, wedding uniforms, pageboy and miniature princess, were torn and smeared with earth or worse. They wore expressions of sheer joy, waving sticks that might have been meant for spears in a celebratory greeting. It was not directed at them, but at someone fifty feet to the left. Stephen must have seen them and opened the study window to call to them. Only at the back, trailing in his ordinary clothes, was there a dissentient presence; behind Thomas Josh came, his shoulders shrunk and beaten. Catherine saw with a shock that he was being pulled by the others; his wrists were bound together and he was being dragged along by a rope, or perhaps merely a thick string.

      ‘How adorable,’ Blossom said. ‘They’ve been playing captives, and Josh is on the losing side. He’ll be the pirate king or something. Conquered by the imperial forces, or by savage natives, one of the two. It’ll be his turn to rule and conquer next.’

      ‘Poor old Josh,’ Catherine said, attempting lightness in her tone. But something in the way she said it made Blossom turn to her, a half-smile of amused dismissal quickly forming. Poor old Josh, she was clearly thinking. A little bit less of that, a little bit less encouragement of Josh to stick in his ways and run from ordinary little-man savage pursuits that any child, surely, would like.

      ‘I have no idea,’ Blossom said, with dry amusement, ‘how – or if it’s even possible – to get mud and blood out of pale-blue velvet Faunties. I could simply kill Thomas for putting it on to romp around in the woods. They were for the Atwood wedding, those Faunties. They very sweetly asked Thomas if he’d be a pageboy.’

      Across the lawn, like a cavalcade of shame, misery and death, came the children, panting, filthy and prancing. Their teeth glittered like those of carnivores, fresh from a pile of flesh and blood. They waved to the man upstairs, the father of three of them. He was yowling into the end of the morning over the lawns, lands, woods and gardens he had made the money to possess, singing his children home from a triumph, somewhere out there in the shadows of the woods.

       MUMMY’S TIME WITH LEO

      This would have been in 1969, or maybe 1970. It was just a bag – that was all it was – and ten shillings. What was it then that kept rattling around his head years later, occupying brain cells that could have been used for preserving other facts instilled at school, how to draw a box with perspective and what the chemical symbol for beryllium was and how the passive went in German – the consequences of the playground event that kept him in dread for weeks, just sitting there like a useful lesson for survival learnt at school? It must СКАЧАТЬ