Players at the Game of People Read online

  Calm, Godwin assessed his chances, surveying the piles of rubble. The odds were bad but not prohibitive. Decision reached, he darted forward with the erratic, jinking run of a rugby three-quarter, treating the obstacles as though they were only opposing players. And the wall to the left, and then the wall to the right, began to buckle, dislodging bricks clunk, clunk .

  "Stop!" howled the warden following Godwin. And, invoking the most powerful charm he knew: "Stop, sir !"

  Godwin paid no heed. His leg was hurting worse at every step, but it would last long enough. Greer rushed toward him. He seized her in both arms, spun around and fled back the way he had come, carrying her as lightly as a mere football. Only twenty yards to the corner . . . ten . . .

  The shock of yet another bomb, falling a street or so away, was too much for the wall of the burning tenement. It opened brick-dribbling jaws at first-floor level, sliding, grinding, settling in a torrent of sparks, a wave of flames.

  "Hurry!" the warden screamed, and Godwin lunged forward as though hurling his body across a goal line, the child thrust out before him at full stretch. He was not quite fast enough to save himself. A chunk of masonry hit him on the right arm, and he heard as much as felt the bones snap. But before pain wiped away consciousness he was able to register that he had saved the little girl, who could, he now realized, be no older than ten. She was staring at him by the flamelight with huge, dark, somehow hungry eyes, as though to eat the very image of her rescuer.

  She was there also, with her mother and sisters and baby brother, in the crowd that lined the pavement to watch heroes arriving for the following week's royal investiture. The high iron railings before the palace yard had been taken away to build fighters, but loyal citizens would not have dreamed of venturing uninvited into the grounds.

  It was curious, Godwin thought as he marched smartly forward at the calling of his name and gave an awkward salute with his left arm because the right was in a sling -- it was curious and also somehow a little disappointing that this king was not majestically tall as children would have wished, but only of average height, and that his queen should be of such a comfortable housewifely plumpness . . . But it was a moment to be treasured forever when those thin, uncertain fingers lifted the George Medal -- named after a saint, and himself -- from the red velvet cushion on which it was proffered by an equerry and pinned it below the wings which he himself did not display, even though he wore the uniform of a Marshal of the Royal Air Force.

  "Congratulations, Squadron Leader," he said. The promotion had been gazetted while Godwin lay in the hospital. "By the way, yours is an unusual name. Irish, one presumes?"

  "Yes, Your Majesty." A little dryly, a little deprecatingly. "I've always been told -- excuse me -- we were descended from the High Kings of Erin."

  That provoked a wan smile. "An older house than mine! Whose members had the good sense to go out of business before they invented modern warfare."

  It was known that there was a miniature factory in the palace, where bombs and shells were made by royal hands.

  "I understand you lost your parents in a recent raid," the king continued after a brief hesitation.

  "Yes, sir."

  "I'm very sorry."

  Pause. There were others waiting. Time to take a pace backward and again give the wrong-handed salute. It was returned, but distractedly. Another medal was on the red velvet pad; another name was being announced. It was over.

  But of course he had to make it seem much more dramatic for Mrs. Gallon and her children and all the strangers who came swarming around him as he regained the street. The little girls were dressed in their best, and it was pitiful, but they had at least been thoroughly scrubbed and their well-washed hair shone in the sunlight and they shared a waiflike prettiness which, if one looked hard, might be discerned also behind the tired mask of their mother's features. He told them all about the ceremony, with a garnish of invented detail because truly he had not paid much attention to the furnishings or decorations of the room he had been in; he had looked only at the king and queen.

  Finally he said he had to go, and saluted Mrs. Gallon, who giggled and blushed, and rumpled the hair of each of the girls, leaving Greer to last. But she was not content to be patted on the head. She seized his hand as it approached and pulled him down and put her other arm behind his neck and astonished him with her precocity by kissing him open-mouthed, thrusting her tiny tongue between his teeth.

  "Greer!" her mother said in horror. "You mustn't do that to the gentleman! I'm sorry, sir -- she's a real terror, that one, a proper caution! I'm sure I don't know where she gets it from!"

  But the last thing Godwin wanted was for her to stop. The contact was incredibly erotic; sensation lanced down his spine like electric current, triggering every reflex on its way.

  Must, though. Must! He visualized headlines about indecent assault in broad daylight. Never mind that she committed it.

  Contenting himself with one answering passage of his tongue against hers, which conveniently trapped a trace of saliva that might otherwise have glistened on his chin -- and irrelevantly remembering that he had expected to have a mustache -- he hoisted Greer off her feet for a one-armed hug and grinned as he lowered her again.

  Thinking of infection, and countless thousands of girls of this generation who would be given complete sets of false teeth for a twenty-first birthday present.

  "Not to worry, Mrs. Gallon!" he said in the heartiest tone he could conjure up. "I'm sure it's kindly meant. You take care of yourself, young Greer, and one day you'll make some man extremely happy, I'm convinced of it. And now" -- he glanced around -- "I really must go. There's my bus!"

  Everybody knew buses were too precious to miss, these days. It was the right excuse. He went away.

  Returning home, he landed his Fouga Magistère -- his current favorite of the available two-seater jet aircraft -- at Stag Lane aerodrome and drove into central London in his Lamiborghini Urraco. There was a reggae program playing on Capital Radio which served to distract him during the occasional traffic snarl-ups, but as ever he made excellent time; even the cowboys seemed reluctant to dice with a machine wearing that much horsepower. He dropped it off for a tuneup, wash, and polish at the usual garage and completed his journey on foot, raising the collar of his coat against a gray drizzle, carefully shielding his medal and the newspaper cutting which authenticated it.

  So far nobody, he noted as he turned the corner of his home street, had turned up to collect the Jaguar Mark X which had been pushed into the curb when it ran out of petrol . . . how long ago? Long enough for piles of rubbish -- ice-lolly wrappers, fish-and-chip paper, empty soft-drink cans -- to have accumulated against its wheels. Its windscreen wipers and wing mirrors had been pilfered and kids had tried to start a spectacular fire by setting a match to cardboard piled under its tank, but by then it had been too dry to yield the hoped-for pyrotechnics; they had only managed to blister some of the paint.

  Shame about that.

  The rain was penetrating and the wind was chilly. As soon as he reached the upper floor of the house where he rented a room, he realized that what he needed was some bright warm sunshine. Carefully closing the door behind him -- not that, in fact, even the old woman who owned the house and was overfond of gin and could be heard, until he shut the door, laughing her silly head off at some nondescript television comedy show, could have interrupted him without invitation . . . because that was one of the conditions -- he peeled off his Dunn's tweed hat and his Gannex raincoat (as patronized by a recent prime minister), and then his sweater and jeans and boots and socks and helped himself to a generous measure of José Cuervo tequila, complete with salt and lemon, en route to a refreshing shower. When he came out, sweating just enough not to want to don clothing again for the moment, he felt hungry. He lay down in sunshine, but with his head in shade, and ate a slice or two of smoked salmon with crisp fresh salad, washed down with a foaming mug of pilsner. Satisfied, he lit an El Rey del Mundo petit coron
a and debated where in his souvenir cabinet to put the George Medal and the accompanying scrap of newspaper dated 20th September 1940, two columns under a common headline saying LOCAL HEROES HONOURED AT PALACE; the left column gave a description of the award ceremony and a list of names, while the right one contained four passport-style photographs, the second of which was captioned Sqn. Ldr. G. Harpinshield, G.M. It was an excellent likeness. The photographer had gone to much trouble to capture the contrast between his pale, chiseled features and his dark eyes and hair.

  Eventually he concluded the medal would look best next to the Schneider Cup and hung it there, intending to pin the cutting alongside.

  Curiously enough, however, he found himself unable to rid his mind, every time he looked at it, of the memory of that scrawny little blond girl who had kissed him with a skill beyond her years. Indeed, the erotic associations were so fierce, he found his hand straying toward his crotch.

  Before he reached a decision, however, concerning either where to put the press cutting or whether to masturbate, he was startled by a yawn. And also a little dismayed. It was not ordinary to be overcome in this fashion quite so soon after one of his rewards.

  Still, there was no point in trying to resist -- or he assumed there wasn't; he had never made the attempt, and most likely never would. A little leeway was always permitted, and this time he used it to fold the press cutting carefully, slip it into an envelope, and pocket it. But that was all the margin he was given. Resigned, he switched off the room.

  Surrounded now by stained and faded wallpaper, with cobwebs in the corners and a layer of grease coating the sink which doubled as a washbasin, he lay down on the unmade, creaky, narrow single bed and closed his eyes.

  Time to pay.

  Both of that was mostly Thursdays, but it was obviously Saturday when came to himself again, his right calf aching in a manner that made him think of falling bombs and a child with fluffy fair hair, and his mouth and belly sour with a sensation forty-eight foul hours of self-indulgence deep, compound of overeating and overdrinking and far too many cigars. Without even bothering to activate the room again, he made for the sink and emptied his bladder and scrubbed his teeth so hard he made his gums sore, then gulped down a cup of powdered coffee and began to feel halfway normal, apart from the usual strains and bruises.

  Catching sight of himself in the room's one fly-specked mirror, he grimaced. He looked more like fifty than his chosen thirty-two. A visit to Irma, therefore. No appointment necessary. His arrival would be taken for granted, as he took for granted the need for it. It was never pleasant, having her work him over, but awareness was burgeoning in his mind that tonight he had a task to perform: one of the tasks he was so superbly good at. He would far rather have taken time out -- gone to Bermuda or the Caribbean for a while, to recover from what had been done to his body -- but he did, after all, have his George Medal.

  Fair do's.

  Turning the room back on, he went to the wardrobe and found appropriate clothes: a white bomber jacket with gold stripes, new black trousers, black boots with thick elastic soles. Also on the table beside the enormous circular waterbed were dark glasses and the key to a room at the Global Hotel in Park Lane. Although he had never to his recollection been there, he knew he would be recognized when he arrived; it was part of the pattern.

  The room automatically shut itself down as he left. Outside, he found the early-evening weather overcast and damp. A bunch of kids, two black and four white, had taken over the Mark X Jaguar as a playhouse, someone having forced its doors. Oh, well . . .

  Only at the end of the street did he realize he had omitted to shave. But there must be a reason for that: style, trendiness . . .

  There was always a reason for everything he did, whether or not he understood it.

  At one of Bond Street's most fashionable addresses there was not -- naturally! -- a sign to tell the world that here was where the Beautiful People spent most money on being made so. Word of mouth served infinitely better to support Irma's cherished, and fulfilled, ambition.

  It being the day it was, nobody but one of her oldest acquaintances (friends? Somehow the concept rang false, but there it was, to be put up with) could have walked in and stated his, or her, requirements. She was, though, awaiting Godwin; they had known each other for quite a while.

  It was preferable not to put a number to the years.

  She looked him over in the high-ceilinged room, lit with pitiless fluorescents, where she plied her trade. She was a handsome, square-faced, ash-blond woman who had decided to appear forty and lay claim to fifty because of Signe Hasso in L'Éternel Retour . . . which, in fact, was the name of her shop. Her hobby, which dated back to the time when she was reading biology at university, was the raising of exotic plants. Currently she had a species which glowed with a rich deep sheen whenever it decided to cross the floor in search of a new location. She had half a dozen trays of earth set out, and electronic gear which provoked the response, and when Godwin came in, three of the things -- plump, luscious, like cacti but luminous and far more graceful -- were under way from one to another rooting site. The first was ruby-red, the next yellow, and the third shone with a vibrant blue.

  "Perfect timing!" Irma crowed as Godwin entered. "Aren't they darling? Are they not perfectly and entirely darling?"

  She spoke with especial fervor. Almost all her clients -- for obvious reasons -- were forbidden to see and admire her treasures, and a visit from someone who was allowed to witness her achievement was to be exploited to the full.

  Godwin, though, was aching from head to toe. Whatever his body had had to put up with recently, it had taken a gigantic toll of his resources. As he stripped off his clothes and prepared to lie down under the apparatus which Irma was marshaling, he could only say curtly, "Yes -- very pretty! But what happened to the Regulan plants you had before?"

  "Rigelian!" she corrected sharply, pushing him with a firm hand into the right position on the table, which was broad and white and cold, and very hard. "Yes, they were all very well in their way, but they couldn't stand the nitrogen . . . or was it the carbon monoxide? No, that was the ones I had before . . . Oh, never mind!" -- with a sketch for a laugh. "They are lovely, these, aren't they?"

  "Gorgeous!" he said with feigned enthusiasm, shutting his eyes. "Where are they from?"

  "Oh, I don't know! Somewhere interesting, I think . . . What have you been doing to yourself?" -- as she probed and tested his body tissue. "I hope you've allowed plenty of time, because you don't look in the least like you ought to at your age."

  That was a gibe, and he resigned himself to it; it was deserved. It was Irma's talent to correct him so that every time he came back he would always leave here looking precisely as someone of thirty-two ought currently to look.

  And not, of course, him alone.

  Her mood improved as soon as she set about her work, as always. While she was removing his surplus fat she began to hum, and by the time she got around to erasing his wrinkles -- not just from his face, but from every inch of his skin -- she was cheerful enough to start boasting.

  "Say, know who I had in here yesterday? Bruce Bastard-Bitch of the Claimjumpers! You know! This Aussie sick-rock group they're all talking about now! Was he a mess ! I swear, I don't know what they get up to down under to ruin their bodies in such short order. Of course if they had" -- archly -- " guidance . . . !"

  Meantime she was readjusting his hairline to correspond with the present fashion and dehydrating him of a kilo of superfluous fluid. He could feel the tingling sensation as it flowed out through his pores, taking with it the fatigue products accumulated around his strains and bruises. He relaxed, and despite the discomfort began to feel quite sympathetic toward her. Almost, indeed, affectionate.

  "I suppose you do have to keep up that level of 17-ketosteroids, but it sure plays hell with your follicles," she sighed as she checked his hormone count. It was one of her minor abilities, to be able to sigh at such length. But he tolerated
it, just as he did her belief in being guided. It was, after all, one way of putting it . . .

  "Now let's do something about the accommodation of that right eye of yours," she continued, shuffling her machines around and bringing to bear one which focused a dim green light on his retina. " Oh, yes. Still a bit lazy, just as I thought. Won't take a moment, though . . . What's new with you, by the way?"

  "Oh, nothing much . . ." But it was scarcely worth the doing unless there were people he could tell, and there were so few of them. He came out with it directly.

  "I won the George Medal for rescuing a kid during the Blitz. I saved her life."