Ian Kennedy Williams
Call Polly Longstockings

 

The Lizard

That final week before they were due to return to Australia Russell and Jenna drove down to the Lizard and stayed in Godfrey's cottage. It was April, light rain was falling, melting the last vagrant patches of snow on the high ground. After the turmoil of London the towns to the west were quiet, the traffic surprisingly light. They began to breathe more easily.
      It was midday before the rain cleared; Jenna was driving, they were crossing the moors. They pulled into a lay-by to eat the lunch Godfrey had packed earlier. Russell bit into a hard green apple, Jenna opened the flask: neither of them had much to say. Russell wanted to take a photograph of the moor, vast, undulating and empty apart from some pens or enclosures in the middle distance, a rambling network of loose stone walls. Stepping out of the car the freezing wind took his breath away.
      They arrived at Helston about four o'clock and stopped at a store to get some food and a local newspaper. The front page news was all of London with pictures of cars burning after the weekend riots. Jenna bought some cream for her lips which were chapped from the cold wind. They also bought some paraffin in case there was no power at the cottage. Godfrey had warned them that even in spring the amenities could seem rather primitive.
      Russell didn't know how they found the place in the dark. It might have been wiser to stay at an hotel overnight but they were so close and Godfrey had given such explicit directions. What he had not prepared them for were the narrow lanes and the high hedgerows: on a black moonless night, it was like driving through a long winding tunnel, expecting at any moment to shoot out into the bright sunlight, the flash of the sea in their eyes. Once they took a wrong turning, ending at a padlocked gate, and twice, Russell swore, they passed through the same gloomy crossroads, the regular gibbet-like signpost indicating the same dark unmapped places.
      A farmhand pushing a bicycle up a steep hill finally put them on the right track. He was elderly, about sixty, helpful in a practical sort of way, but largely indifferent to their plight. Afterwards Jenna said with something of her old humour she thought he would have directed them straight into the sea if they'd asked him to.
      It was still early when they found the cottage though the hour or so spent searching for the place in the dark had tired them more than the drive down from London. They took the suitcases inside and the bread and tinned food they'd bought but left the bedding in the car. The cottage was small, like a doll's house, Jenna said, though there was nothing enchanting about it. It was clean but spare of all but a few basic pieces of furniture, one tiny room upstairs, two even smaller down, and a bare cheerless scullery at the back. The power remarkably was still connected and there was kindling in the grate to start a fire.
      Jenna made some tea and they opened cans of steak and onions, new potatoes and peas and finished with a bottle of cheap Romanian wine Russell had bought out of curiosity. It tasted better than he'd expected. The only sounds were the sea breaking on the shore somewhere below and the measured faraway blast of a foghorn.
      In the tiny upstairs room they undressed in silence, separated by the high bed. Russell drew back the loose covers and the eiderdown that smelt of camphor. They were too tired to fetch the clean sheets from the car but once they were in bed it was impossible to sleep and Jenna wanted to make love. After so long it seemed strange, the cup of her familiar breast in his hand, the smells, the half-forgotten rituals: there was a sense of remoteness about it, the suggestion of illicit sex which made him clumsy and unresponsive.
      Afterwards neither of them felt inclined to talk. Jenna had turned on her side, facing the wall. He ran his fingers over her shoulders and under her breast, caressing the small soft nipple with his thumb. The sound of the wind rising again made him feel warm and oddly secure.
      In the morning everything seemed different. Jenna was awake early. He could hear her moving around downstairs talking crossly with herself. Outside, the wind had dropped. Jenna had pushed back the curtains and the room was filled with a still fluorescent light. He got out of the bed and dressed quickly. The floor was so cold he thought his toes would freeze.
      Jenna was making breakfast. There was the smell of burnt toast and fried eggs and tomatoes which made him realise how hungry he was. In daylight the cottage seemed even more spartan than before. The furniture was old and threadbare, the curtains faded, speckled with mould. Jenna said they'd fall apart with a rinse. There was only one picture, in the back room, a painting of Drake playing bowls on the Hoe at Plymouth. Everywhere, the overwhelming odour of damp.
      They ate in silence. Russell kept seeing the look on Godfrey's face when he gave them the key to the cottage. He was worried about Jenna. She was moody, she had been like it for days, hating the country, hating the climate. The newspapers were full of the marches and the manned barricades, the clashes with policemen on horses. Godfrey had suggested the cottage to give them a break before they had to fly home. As he handed over the key Russell could see the uncertainty in his eyes.
      It was still early when they finished breakfast, a little after nine. Russell warmed his hands for a moment over an electric bar heater. Every few seconds there was a pop and the smell of burning dust as a little blue flame ran along the element. Jenna rinsed the dishes under the cold water tap and made some coffee. She had hardly spoken since he'd come downstairs but that wasn't unusual; they weren't the kind to chatter across the breakfast table. Catching her eye, he remarked, 'You were up early. I didn't hear you get out of bed.'
      'I needed a pee.'
      The toilet was at the far end of the scullery. There was no bath, just a shower and a stained enamel basin that rocked precariously on loose mountings. Before they arrived he had this idea of filling a great galvanised iron tub with hot water from a copper and soaping himself in front of an open fire. The dripping shower with its rudimentary plumbing made him shudder. Jenna said it reminded her of holidays in seedy coastal caravan parks when she was small. 'At least,' she said drily, 'the toilet flushes.'
      About mid morning a fine drizzling rain began to move in off the sea. They had walked the half kilometre or so down to the harbour to buy some postcards but nothing was open, not even the little store where Godfrey had told them they could get stamps. An off licence next door was closed till six and a cafe at the end of the quay had its windows boarded up. There was no one about apart from a fisherman mending lobster pots who gave them a surly look as they passed.
      He told Jenna they might as well go back to the cottage and read or write letters. The rain was settling in, a heavy driving drizzle that soaked them to the skin. As they climbed the steep coastal path, overgrown with bramble and nettles, he remembered the papers Godfrey had given him just before they left London, letters written by Russell's great-great-grandfather William Dyson to his brother Marcus. He was telling Jenna that Godfrey wished him to donate them to an Australian library or some institution interested in early colonial correspondence when she stopped suddenly in her tracks. 'What's the matter?' he asked. She shook her head and turned her face into the rain so that he couldn't see that she was crying. He waited at the side of the path, not looking at her, not even wanting to think about her, because he knew there was nothing he could do. When she was ready they resumed their walk in silence.


The cottage was set on a small block at the end of a narrow lane. A profusion of dense blackberry bushes and wild climbing roses took up most of the garden though there was an incongruously neat square of lawn outside the back door which caught the afternoon sun. The nearest neighbour was a retired coastguard officer, Sam Kedgwick, who lived alone in a bungalow at the top of the lane. Godfrey had said they were to call on him if they were in trouble or if they needed fresh eggs or cream.
      Returning to the cottage that first morning they passed Mr Kedgwick's garden which backed onto the coastal path. Jenna, who was walking a little in front, stopped at the gate and pointed out a sign that they had missed earlier. 'Not his wife, surely,' she said with a short laugh. Russell looked from her wet shining face to the sign at the gate. It was the name of the bungalow, 'Daphne'.
      According to Godfrey, there was a story told about Mr Kedgwick; that he had been married once but that his wife had left him for a French trawlerman who was later convicted of carrying contraband. 'I expect,' Russell said, improvising, 'Daphne was the name of his favourite ketch, the one he sailed to the South Seas to forget her.'
      Jenna laughed again, with a little more warmth, and took his arm. 'You sound like cousin Godfrey,' she said, 'full of charming bullshit.'
      Back at the cottage she heated some milk for hot chocolate. They drank it slowly, sitting in front of the bar heater, pressing their hands against the sides of the large chipped mugs for extra warmth. Jenna had showered, her face was still flushed as if she had just stepped out of a steaming bath. Russell wanted to make love to her; last night had seemed so careless and incidental. He began kissing the nape of her neck, breathing the clean soapy smell of her hair. She moaned a little, let her head roll forward and then suddenly snapped it back as if she'd been struck from behind.
      'I'm sorry,' he said, withdrawing.
      She gave him a quizzical look. 'What for?'
      He shrugged. 'You know.'
      'No I don't.'
      He didn't say anything further. He collected the mugs from the grate and took them into the scullery. The dishes from breakfast were still in the sink, soaking in a few inches of greasy water. He remembered Jenna's remark, only half joking, as they were leaving Godfrey's flat.
      'Mind if we take your dishwasher?'
      Godfrey had thought she was highly strung. It seemed an odd expression to use about Jenna, everyone thought she was so level-headed, so reasonable. 'Jenna's got strong convictions,' Russell told him, 'but they never make her argumentative.' He could see Godfrey was unconvinced so he explained about the Christie business. Godfrey was making cocoa. It was late at night, Jenna was in bed.
      'Jenna saw this guy knifed outside a pharmacy one night,' Russell said. 'It seemed so random and senseless. The guy nearly died. Jenna identified the assailant.'
      He paused for a moment, sipping his cocoa, unsure whether to go on. He felt he was being indiscreet.
      They'd never met Godfrey before they came to England. He was an affable, urban creature, much older than Russell, a distant cousin on his father's side. They'd stayed in his North London flat for three weeks and were comfortable and amused by his company. His friends were all young men in their twenties and thirties who called on him to talk about their love affairs or to borrow money. Godfrey told Russell after they arrived how much he missed his father's interesting letters. The piquancy of the remark made Russell stammer but Jenna was delighted. Russell's father had detested homosexuals. His interest had been genealogy and Godfrey was one of his discoveries.
      That evening in North London Godfrey's interest was in Jenna. He was waiting for Russell to continue.
      'The case comes up in September when the Supreme Court sits,' Russell told him. 'Jenna's been brooding over it, losing a lot of sleep. She gets these weeping fits, it's just nerves. She had some leave due, we just thought...'
He tailed off, feeling he'd said enough. Godfrey had lowered his head, fiddling with something in his lap, a loose thread or a button. There was a little bald patch where his hair parted that Russell hadn't noticed before. He fixed his mind on it, that tiny moon of bare scalp illuminated by the light of the side lamp. When Godfrey looked up Russell was struck by the intensity of his gaze. He was curious about the thug whose face Jenna had picked from photographs the police showed her. He might have thought there was something Russell wasn't telling.
      'He's just a local hoodlum,' Russell said with a slight shrug. 'A black. A black with white skin.'


Not like Clara. There was no mistaking Clara.
      Russell ran a small printing business. He worked it largely alone these days though it had begun as a partnership with a friend, a business associate named Leon Bork. Their trade was mostly small beer; sales catalogues, flyers, business cards, a television guide. His associate had wanted to expand but Russell was content with the trade they had. They made a comfortable living. Eventually the partnership collapsed and Russell continued the business on his own.
      He had hired Clara because she had seemed quiet and studious. In the beginning there had been too much paperwork for the men. Clara came to them fresh out of secretarial college. She told Russell she lived on the south side with an aunt and two cousins.
      Leon didn't like blacks much, he thought they were idle and feckless. He made an exception of Clara because he liked her name. It had been his grandmother's. Despite his hard business head, Russell found his associate sentimental at the core.
      Clara stayed four or five months. They couldn't fault her work but she was a poor timekeeper. Some mornings she wouldn't turn up before eleven. Russell spoke to her about it, a number of times, but it didn't make much difference. She always had the same excuse; her aunt wasn't well. He never met her aunt but one of her cousins came into the shop once looking for her. He was tall and bearded, not as dark as Clara. Russell didn't catch his name. Clara was across the street buying some lunch. The cousin sat in the corner of the shop, waiting for her, drumming his fingers nervously on his knee. Clara seemed embarrassed to find him there. They went outside and talked heatedly in low voices for about five minutes. When she came in Russell called her over and asked if there was anything he could do. She was nineteen; he felt he had a proprietary interest in her well-being. She didn't answer him but stuck her finger insolently in the air.
      Jenna laughed when he told her about it later.
      'Serves you right,' she said.
      A few weeks before she left Clara had a birthday. Leon suggested they take her out to lunch. They drove to a popular fish bar a few miles downriver, fed her pink lobster and made her giggly on champagne. Clara said she had never been in such a glitzy restaurant before. Russell wondered afterwards who got the greater buzz, Clara being dined on her birthday, or his associate, playing the maverick, taking a young black woman into an expensive eatery. Leon relished the curious and envious looks that were thrown in their direction. Clara was very pretty.
      They arrived back at the shop about three but Clara was in no mood to do any work. Russell told her to go home. She was late, as usual, in the morning. She said her head ached, she was prickly to speak to. She sat at her desk most of the day and did nothing. Before she went home she gave Russell a note to read from her aunt:
Dear Mr Dyson, my niece Clara came home drunk yesterday afternoon. She told me you and your friend took her to a pub for her birthday. I think you should know Clara doesn't drink. Please don't make her do it again. Yours sincerely, Eve Burney.
      'An abo who doesn't drink,' Leon said, 'don't make me laugh.'
      He was stung by the criticism implicit in Mrs Burney's note that they had made Clara do something against her wishes. He didn't blame Clara but he was noticeably cool towards her afterwards. A short while later he took some time off and went to the coast for a few days to fish. By the time he returned Clara was gone.
      For a long time Russell felt bad about Clara's leaving. He hadn't dismissed her but he didn't argue when she said she wanted to go. He knew they'd feel more comfortable without her. Before she left he gave her a small bonus for her honesty and good work and a reference which she didn't bother to read. He watched her walk out of the shop and across the street to a waiting car. She didn't look back once.
      They were prosperous times and good secretarial staff were hard to find. They survived for a while on temps and part-timers. Russell wanted Jenna to come and work for them but she wouldn't even consider it. She had a full-time job as a records clerk with the City Council. She thought they'd been insensitive taking Clara out to lunch. She said they'd humiliated her, made a spectacle of her. They were showing off, taking her to a bar where the smart set hung out, pretending they didn't care what people thought. Russell kept thinking, all this fuss because she's black. Jenna was shaking with emotion. He didn't dare show her Mrs Burney's note.
      One day he read in the paper that Clara had drowned in the river after a boating accident. He let his eyes skim over the article twice, perhaps three times, without really taking it in. Curiously, it was exactly one year after his father's death and he was smelling his panatellas everywhere. Otherwise, the day passed without notice.

* * *

He thought after Clara left he had finished with the Burney family. Apart from at the funeral he didn't hear the name again until Jenna recognised Dr Christie's assailant from police photographs. Vince Burney was one of Clara's cousins.
      It was August the previous year. Jenna had been to the cinema with a friend from work and was walking home alone. It was just on eleven; she remembered hearing the post office clock strike. She told Russell what happened later that night, after he'd picked her up from the police station. Her self-control was remarkable after what she'd witnessed, though her voice sounded oddly muted as if she had simply memorised the statement she had given to the police.
      'The street was empty,' she told him. 'It was dark except for the light from Roe's Pharmacy. I didn't realise it was still open. There were two men standing in the entrance to the arcade next door, huddled together. I didn't take much notice of them because I thought it was just a couple of drunks hanging around after the pubs had turned out. I was walking quite quickly but they wouldn't have heard me coming because I was wearing runners. Just as I passed them - I had my head down - I heard one of them say, "Look!" I knew he wasn't talking to me, but it was automatic, I just turned and looked. One of them, the older guy I think, was doubling up. I thought he'd been punched. The other guy seemed to spring back. I didn't see a knife. He had his back against Roe's window, but he saw me then and... sort of half turned, and I got a good look at his face.
      'I was still walking - I felt as if I should have been half way up the street - but it all happened in the second or two it took me to pass the arcade. I wouldn't have stopped but the guy who threw the punch took off down the arcade and the other fellow, who was bent over on the ground, let out the most horrible moan. So I went back. He was clutching at his stomach and I could see blood oozing through his fingers. I didn't touch him, I just went into Roe's and got the woman there to call an ambulance.
      'When the police came I described the guy who'd run off and they took me to the station to look at some photographs. I think they knew who it was. I picked him straight away. The police sergeant just nodded and said, "Yeah, Burney. That black bastard." I looked at the photograph again, more closely. I felt wretched, I hadn't realised. Then I thought, Burney - that was poor Clara's surname. I kept looking at the photograph, wishing it was someone else. The sergeant must have thought I was having doubts. He said, "Are you sure?" And I said, "Yes. I'm sure."'


He didn't say anything for a while. It was early in the morning, a little after two. They were sitting at the kitchen table, drinking hot chocolate. What struck him, what he kept coming back to, was the one word Jenna had heard a second before the attack. A few months before, someone had been scrawling that same word - sometimes in paint, more often in chalk - right across the city. You would step out of the supermarket or the hairdresser and a bold LOOK on the sidewalk would draw your eye. Once it even appeared in the Personal column of the local newspaper. Sometimes the double-O was elaborately decorated: a pair of clear eyes under translucent lids or spectacles perched on an unseen nose. Russell saw it first painted in bright vermilion on a boarded-up shop front.
      It only lasted about a month, and then, as mysteriously as they had first appeared, the signs vanished. Which of the two men had spoken the word? he wondered. Was it a plea for caution? Or a threat? He rinsed the cups and stood them on the drainer. Jenna was watching him, her lips pursed in an odd little moue as if his prolonged silence had offended her. He said, 'If it goes to court - which it almost certainly will - you'll have to give evidence.'
      'I know,' she said.
      'Is it a problem?'
      'Should it be?'
      'I mean, the fellow, Clara's cousin, being black.'
      'It's not a problem for me. I'm just surprised I didn't see it sooner.'
      Her sang froid couldn't quite hide the note of self-disgust. Jenna had grown up with Aborigines. Her father had been a pastor for many years in a small Tablelands town. Half his congregation were the descendants of Greek and Italian migrants who had mined gold and copper at the turn of the century. The other half were blacks from the fringe camps.
      'I wonder if it was the same guy who came into the shop looking for Clara that time,' Russell said.
      'What was he like?'
      He shrugged. 'Well... not so dark...'
      'But you knew he was aboriginal.'
      'I guess so. I don't know. He was Clara's cousin, that's all I remember.' (It was Clara he remembered, hissing and pushing, a nervous backward glance as she bundled her cousin out of the shop; the man was a shadow.)
      Jenna kept silent.
      'Anyway,' he said, 'we don't know for sure this guy you saw tonight is one of Clara's cousins.'
      'He is. I know he is.'
      'Now you're being irrational,' he contended. 'You don't know anything of the sort.'
      'Must you be so literal?' She gave him an exasperated look. 'Call it an educated guess, the law of probability, anything you like. Are we going to argue about it?'
      'Of course not.' He stood behind her and began gently massaging her shoulders. She was trembling.
      'You're cold.'
      'A little.'
      'It's shock.'
      'No I'm all right.' Without warning, she stood up, knocking the leg of the table with her knee. The plates and cereal bowls that had been set out for the morning took a precarious leap towards the edge.
      'I'll have to tell Adrian when he comes down,' Jenna said. 'Don't you say anything. I want him to hear it from me first.'
      'Why?' He was curious about this sudden fear for their son. Adrian was fifteen. 'I can tell him just as well,' he said. 'It might be better coming from me anyway, less direct.'
      She looked at him, almost scornfully, and gave a snort of laughter. 'Less direct!' She switched off the kitchen lights and checked the window catch while he waited for her in the hall.
      'You just want your moment of notoriety,' he said peevishly. It was a cheap remark and he regretted it at once. Jenna didn't seem to notice. She passed and started up the stairs.
      'I want Adrian to hear what I saw,' she was saying, keeping her voice low, 'not what you imagine I saw.'
      He didn't say anything. Jenna went to the bathroom while he undressed, folding first his trousers, then his underwear neatly on the chair. When Jenna returned he padded across the landing, shivering a little in the cold. He thought of the fellow she had seen knifed earlier and felt a tremor of unease but it passed almost at once. It was an abstraction, a little drama played out in his imagination.


Jenna was still awake when he returned. The magazine she'd been reading was on the floor beside the bed. She watched as he moved around the room, checking the curtains, closing a window a little to cut off a cold draught.
      'Is something bothering you?' she asked as he slipped back the covers. He was going to slide up against her, begin to caress her, but the strident note in her voice cautioned him against it. He lay back and considered the question.
      'You seem so much in control,' he said presently.
      She looked puzzled. 'Shouldn't I be? Is it because I'm a woman?'
      He kept his voice even. 'The way you describe what happened, it all seems so matter-of-fact. I'm not allowed to tell Adrian because I wasn't there. You were there yet what you tell me sounds as immediate as... a coroner's report. The emotion's missing.'
      'You want me to be emotional?'
      'I expect you to be... moved. What do you feel now? Excitement, outrage? Fear? Relief?'
      She sighed, with some exasperation. 'Look, I can't say what I feel. Perhaps it hasn't sunk in yet. All those things, outrage, fear, they're just reactions. How do you want me to react?'
      He was silent for a while. He was thinking of how he'd found her at the police station, pale, shaken, but in no way diminished. The desk sergeant was clearly impressed. 'Tough little girlie, your missus,' he'd said when Russell arrived. He didn't repeat the remark to Jenna.
      'Weren't you afraid?' he said suddenly. 'When it happened, you must have been scared,'
      'No I wasn't. Not particularly.'
      'When he turned and looked at you, weren't you afraid then?'
      'No. I don't know what I felt, but it wasn't fear. Of course, that was before I realised what he'd done.'
      'He could have knifed you too,' Russell said mildly.
      'I know. But I didn't think about it at the time.'
      'When you realised..?'
      'He'd already gone, hadn't he, taken off. I never felt threatened at all.'
      He was aware of an odd sense of defeat. He wasn't trying to establish a case, but he found her off-handedness a little disturbing. Neither of them was particularly sentimental (their friends often remarked on it) but those most basic of emotions - joy, sadness, terror - were not easy to hide. Not that he was convinced Jenna was trying to hide anything: it may have been as she had said, that the sheer horror of what she had witnessed, with all its possible consequences, had simply yet to strike home.
      All the same, he was nagged by a feeling of unease. He remembered how wretched she had felt when she realised that the man who had wielded the knife was a black. And the certainty that the man's family was known to her - however remotely. Though that shouldn't have made any difference, he was beginning to understand her reluctance to involve herself emotionally. He had an aunt once who used to say, 'What the head elucidates, the heart confounds.' She was the straight, no-nonsense type, firm in her convictions. Jenna always seemed like that. It gave her her strength. But it made her vulnerable too.


In the morning Russell looked for it in the newspaper. He found the item tucked at the bottom of page three under the heading Late Report.

MAN ATTACKED IN CITY ARCADE

A North Hill doctor, Stephen Clyde Christie, 38, was viciously stabbed outside a city pharmacy late last night. No motive was given for the attack which occurred around 11pm at the corner of City Arcade and Market Street. Dr Christie is reported to be in a serious but stable condition at the Base Hospital. Although the assailant was still at large, a police spokeswoman said they were following several leads and were confident of an early arrest.

* * *

After lunch they drove back into Helston to buy some bread and milk and a few vegetables. Jenna became irritated when Russell returned with a newspaper. She bought a piece of serpentine stone for his mother and sent one last card to Adrian, grumbling that they'd probably be home before he received it. Russell rang Godfrey to see if there were any messages but there was no answer.
      Driving back to the cottage he stopped to photograph the tracking station on Goonhilly Downs. Jenna wouldn't get out of the car, she was moody, still sulking over the newspaper. He walked about half a kilometre back along the highway to take in the great silence of the place. He framed his picture; the heathland, the solitary car and the vast radio dishes that made him think of the ancient stone carvings on Easter Island.
      The weather had changed again since the morning, the sky cleared, a warm sea breeze brought a breath of the Mediterranean. They lay for an hour or so before tea on the tiny patch of lawn at the rear of the cottage, sunning themselves. Russell had his eyes closed, dreaming of the regular squeak and bang of a screen door. Beside him, Jenna moved suddenly; her shadow fell across his face. He thought she was going to suggest some tea or a walk, she had seemed restless earlier. Her fingers brushed against his arm.
      'Russell, look!'
      He opened his eyes and followed the direction of her gaze. Just a few metres away a pair of plump dun-coloured ducks was leading its straggling brood across a piece of open ground. The ducklings - there were five of them - seemed about half grown but were probably no more than a few weeks old. He watched them with a warm sense of pleasure. Despite the uncommon markings they could have been birds foraging their own wildly overgrown garden at home, a short block back from the river. He heard again, more clearly, the bang of the screen door and recognised a deep longing for the familiar.
      Neither of them saw the hawk strike. It was simply there, its great wings spread as if it were still in flight. It had some fur-like ball pinned to the ground beneath its talons.
      The speed of his reaction surprised him. He shouted, sprang to his feet, his arms flailing. Jenna was sobbing. Everything else seemed so still, the air, the shrubs. The ducks had vanished, scattered into the undergrowth. As he began to run, the hawk raised its head and turned its startled eyes on him. It took flight at once, its talons mercifully empty. He stopped and watched as it rose almost lazily through the air, disappearing into the sun.
      Jenna caught his arm. They approached the chick cautiously. As they drew near it began fluttering helplessly in the stringy grass. The force of the striking hawk had broken its legs.
      'What should we do?' Jenna asked. She was quite calm now, holding the struggling bird gingerly in her hands. Russell looked across the wind-flattened gorse to Sam Kedgwick's bungalow at the top of the lane.
      'I'll get a box.'


He went alone. He'd not yet met Mr Kedgwick but their neighbour knew who he was. 'Better come in,' he said. He was a tall, stooped man, going to fat. The bungalow was small and neat. He told Russell later a woman came in once a week and tidied for him. He asked how Jenna was finding the cottage. Russell noticed a telephone in the hall and thought that Godfrey must have rung and told him they were coming.
      Mr Kedgwick carried the box through to the kitchen and placed it on the drainer. 'I thought you might know someone...' Russell said. He smiled. He wanted it remembered that he was a stranger there, that if he'd known his way around he'd have dealt with the matter himself. Mr Kedgwick flipped back the lid. The chick's eyes were open but it looked sleepy, half dead. It lay awkwardly on a folded newspaper, the newspaper he'd bought that morning, the crumbs of bread Jenna had offered it untouched. One or two small soft pellets of shit were pressed into its downy feathers.
      Mr Kedgwick picked the chick up, rather roughly, and in one swift movement deftly twisted its neck. Russell looked horrified.
      'Nothing else for it. It'd die anyway.'
      Russell nodded. Mr Kedgwick dropped the bird back into the box and rinsed his hands under the tap.
      'Will you take a glass of beer with me?'
      'Thank you.'
      Russell sat at the kitchen table. Mr Kedgwick took a bottle of lager from a cupboard, and two glasses. Russell watched his hands as he poured. He felt quite numbed.
      'Sorry to bother you with that,' he said.
      'Should've left well alone. Don't pay to interfere.'
      'I didn't think about it,' Russell explained. 'I just jumped. It's like when you're driving and a dog runs out on the road. Common sense tells you to hit it rather than swerve and risk an accident. But you swerve anyway. You can't help it.'
      'True enough.'
      He took a sip of the pale bitter lager. 'I know what you're getting at. You intervene, you involve yourself and you make yourself responsible.'
      Mr Kedgwick nodded.
      'I suppose,' Russell said, looking at the box on the sink, 'I should've done it myself, not brought my dirty work to you.'
      'Don't worry about it. I shan't lose no sleep.'
      'My wife was upset. Women get emotional about these things.'
      'Men too,' Mr Kedgwick said.
      They were silent for a while. Mr Kedgwick topped up the glasses and put the empty bottle on the sink. They continued their drinking in silence. Russell noticed he had the Daily Mail open on the table. He asked if he'd been reading about the disturbances in London over the weekend. 'You don't expect that,' Russell said, 'coming to this country. You don't expect to see people rioting in the streets.'
      'Happens most places, I guess. Sometime or other.'
      'But the English always seem such a sedate race!'
      Mr Kedgwick looked at him. He seemed amused.
      'The English?' he said. 'Wouldn't know about them.'
      When Russell returned to the cottage Jenna was washing and chopping salad vegetables for tea. The evening was drawing in, the air turning chilly. He'd collected some twigs in the lane for kindling. He took his time laying the fire and then sauntered into the scullery. There was a step down from the narrow hall that always caught him by surprise. Jenna was at the sink. She didn't look up. He kept his eyes on her fingers as she finely sliced a small ripe English tomato.
      'What happened?' she asked.
      'It's dead.'
      'He killed it.'
      'It was dead when I got there... shock.'
      She didn't say anything. She pushed the slices of tomato to one side and started to peel an onion. He stood for a moment and watched her. He could feel the cold coming down as the light faded. It was like entering the coolroom of a supermarket. If he closed his eyes he could see milk cartons with familiar blue labels, fresh seafood, racks of smallgoods...
      'What's the matter?'
      Jenna's anxious tone startled him.
      'Nothing.'
      'You looked as though you were about to faint.'
      'I was thinking about next week... home...'
      She smiled suddenly. 'Me too.'
      He went upstairs to fetch a sweater.

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The Lizard | Panatellas | A View of the Mechanics Institute | Disinterested Bystanders | The Finding of Solitude | Unfinished Business | Table of Contents