The Blackpool Highflyer (31 page)

When Cicely saw us, she shouted: 'Oh do come on, or else I shall finish all this chocolate cake!'

'She seems quite herself again,' said the wife.

'The dancing starts shortly,' said Cicely when we reached the table. 'And there's a programme.'

'Do they run to a waltz?' asked the wife.

She passed over a piece of paper. The wife read it and, sit­ting down, said to Cicely: 'The two of us shall have a waltz, dear.'

The wife was a good dancer.

In short order, the floor was full of people waiting for someone to walk over to the piano. I looked up at the roof. Brackets that had held machinery were still stuck out from the tops of the walls like gibbets, and there were flowers jammed in at odd places. When I looked down again there was a man at the piano.

The waltz began, and, as Cicely and the wife walked hand in hand to the dance floor, I decided to take a turn outside. It was raining more heavily, but the sun was out once again. Two minutes later, I was walking in the woods in the rain and the sun, when I heard a crashing noise that shouldn't have been made by any picnicker. I stood still, and the noise was followed by a crack and a shout.

Down below, the stream was racing on as before. I heard another cry. Walking smartly towards the sound, I struck a rock that had been broken in two by a tree that had been growing up through the middle but was now dead, and itself broken, and, beyond these, making up the complete set, was a broken man.

I knew him, even without his gold coat: it was Martin Lowther, the ticket inspector. He lived in Hebden Bridge. His head was half beard, half blood. He was in shirtsleeves, with cuffs undone and no gold on his clothes to protect him. With­out his coat he looked like a tortoise without its shell. And both his legs were in the wrong positions, as if they'd swapped sides. It was the impossible before my own eyes; the sun and the rain together; engine number 1418 half off the tracks.

As I crashed down through the bracken towards Lowther, I saw a long, thin man down at the beck. He was running hard along its banks, leaping the water as clear flat grass for running came up on either side: long feet, big strides, like Little Titch in flight, with legs as wings, and head going back­wards and forwards like a pump. It looked as if he was racing the water itself. He was nobody that I knew.

Letting my coat slide off my shoulders, I tumbled down the little mountain and fell in behind him.

The long fellow scarpered up a bank and struck the valley road, Lees Road. But as I went up the bank to follow, a thorn scraped through my bandage and touched my burn. I stopped for a moment to stare as the red line came alive with blood; then, smearing the bandage back round as best I could, I set off again.

There were not many on the road, just a few half-hearted stragglers: tardy sorts, and now they were all in my way. They'd seen one man running, now they saw another. They didn't connect us - at least no one called out any encourage­ment.

The trees seemed to be rolling in a light wind. This was blowing the rain away, and the sun was coming out with a violent force. It had got a taste for shining that summer, and was out to cause a sensation. I forced myself on like a human hammer, boot segs clattering on the stony road. I could not see the killer but when the road twisted in the right way, I'd see the oncoming crowds part and come together, as if some­one was going through them at a lick. Ahead of me, shaking in my line of sight at the bottom of the valley, was Hebden again. A rainbow was over the top of the town, and beyond that was a second rainbow, fainter but bigger - for Mytholm- royd further along the valley.

I came into Hebden, and the sound of my boots changed to a ringing echo in the streets.

The place was full of happy excursionists: the skylarking, drink-taking sort who didn't fancy the hike up to the Crags. They roved between the pubs, or stood crowding pavements near the jug-and-bottle doors. I skidded into half a dozen streets about the main square, seeing nothing, and came to rest in front of the town chapel. But the sound of one desperate fel­low's boots clattering continued. The runner, with his jerking head, was five hundred yards off, the only man on Burnley Road, and he was going hard for the right turn that'd take him over the canal and river, and into the railway station.

He was on the bridge as I came onto Burnley Road. As I hit the bridge, the railway station swallowed him up. I shot past the booking office and onto the down platform. The light changed, got brighter and darker all in a moment. Light rain was coming down all around the station, but I was under the canopy. I could see the rain but it was not real to me. I was far too hot for anything, and the platform did not seem to be quite level.

I turned and turned. There was a porter standing next to me on the down. A clerk was coming out of the General Room. There were four passengers on the down, more in the waiting room. All my thoughts were of the down. A train came in, blurring everything. Very short train, three rattlers on. The porter shouted 'Rochdale train!' The four on the plat­form looked at him and got on, as if they were obeying him. The engine began to blow off steam - bad driving - and as the steam turned to rain there was another noise from beyond and behind. I turned and saw the finger-pointing sign to the footbridge and the 'up'. In my mind the sign was saying, Hurry up to the up! There was another train in - already in and waiting on the up. I was over the bridge, and onto the platform and into the train.

A bloody rattler. No corridor. The last of the doors was slammed and I heard the tail end of the guard's shout of 'Manchester train!' As we moved out of the station and began shaking through fields, I threw off my waistcoat, but the sun soon found my compartment and ran alongside the train, roasting me all the same. I could not cool down in the com­partment, which I had to myself. I sat on the seat, and a lot of dust came slowly up, sucking the breath from my lungs. There was no longer any possibility of any more rain ever. I was on the same train as the running killer, and we were going towards Manchester, the London of the North, the city where the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway had sprouted from.

I stayed sitting, leaning forwards on my seat, which some­how seemed the best way of coping with the burning, falling feeling. We came to some little station on the Lanky that I'd never been in: I caught the name as we went through slowly: Littleboro. One proud stationmaster in shirtsleeves, viewing miniature trees in tubs. More hot, lonely fields came up, sheep moving away with short, bumpy runs - couldn't be bothered to do more. We rolled into Smithy Bridge station, going slowly along the length of a poster showing a row of happy faces: it was an advertisement for Blackpool. But our three-carriage train did not stop, and we were into fields again, smaller ones, rising and falling beside us like waves. I could not picture in my mind the route from Hebden Bridge to Manchester that I was now following, and I could not remember the direction, could not move my thoughts.

I got to my feet in the carriage and turned a slow circle to help me get my bearings. I then recalled that I had boarded the train on the up. The direction we were moving in was south. I wanted to put my head out of the window to see whether the killer was looking out from his own compart­ment, but I could not rise.

I knew that a big town lay between Hebden Bridge and Manchester, but could not remember its name, was too hot to remember its name. Directly we stopped, I would put my hands on the other fellow, then shout for the nearest consta­ble. But why? I clean forgot for a moment. It came back to me in a blue flash, like electricity. He had killed Lowther, the ticket inspector. He had done it for some reason to do with the stone on the line.

What would be the first stop? Looking up, I saw a mighty advertisement for Victory V lozenges go rocking past. I heard the friendly echoing of a station, and I knew this was Rochdale, but I also knew I had brain fever from the heat. I grasped the window strap to pull myself up, but our driver was proving very tardy in shutting off steam. If he doesn't push that regulator to the home position in a minute, I thought, there'll be no station left. But the exhaust beats con­tinued, steady as the ticking of a clock. Our train may have been short, but it was very determined. I sat back down with the notion that if we weren't going to stop at Rochdale, we weren't going to stop anywhere until the end of the line.

I fancy that I may have slept before Manchester. I do not recall approaching the station: Manchester Victoria.

When we arrived, I stumbled out of the compartment, and saw the illuminated display revolving in the hot dirty air:
'visit the Ardennes
'; Visit. . . somewhere else; '
visit the ardennes
' again. I turned to look at the platform gates, and there was the long thin man going through fast, leaving money in the hand of the ticket collector.

I broke into a run, but it came out wrong, all wobbly, like, and I knew I was being marvelled at by a lot of people com­ing down off a train that had pulled up on the opposite plat­form. I had my waistcoat in my hand, but no jacket and no pocket book. I had left them behind in Little Switzerland, England's Alps.

The ticket collector was coming up to me - 'Where's your ticket, mate?' but he didn't say it, I was only imagining him saying it. There seemed to be some difficulty in my head as to what was happening, and what I thought was happening, for although they were mostly the same, they were sometimes not.

I got past the ticket collector because he'd seen somebody he knew. Somebody was walking towards the fellow and putting his hand to his cap, ready to raise it and say 'Now then'. So the collector forgot his business for a moment, and I was through the gates and in the clear. But there was another revolving sign that delayed me: '
England' ... 'continent' . .. 'England' ... 'continent
'. I dragged my eyes away. I was in the great hall of Manchester Victoria station, which was all white tiles, like a giant washroom. The offices of the Lanky were hard by, I knew, tacked on to the station.

There was no air. Close to the entrance was a refreshment room, where a man was drinking a glass of water. I saw the silver sparkle of it, and that delayed me too, but the drinking of water was something that went on in another world.

I stepped out of the station. The cathedral might have been carved from coal, and there was a river smell floating up around it. In the mystery of Manchester, I was keeping my eye out for anyone moving away fast from the station, but there were dozens doing that, even though it was early evening on Saturday. All along the steaming wet roads they went, for it had lately rained; under the hot orange sky they went, under the mighty gas lamps, the size and shape of diamonds.

On all sides enormous words were being carried across streets by viaducts and bridges: '
gramophones below cost', 'umbrellas re-covered
'. It seemed to be a city of policemen with slowly turning heads, and everybody a winner or a loser and nothing in between. There were great statues in the streets, controlling the people, and the trams were like moving spiral staircases, everybody walking towards them full of mean thoughts, not really walking but pushing on grimly. It was hard to credit that only one train could bring a fellow from Little Switzerland to here.

The sun was sinking, but still I could not get cool. I thought I might raise a breeze by walking fast so tried that for a while. It didn't work, so I sat down in a coal yard near the cathedral. There was a grindstone there, and a fellow lifting sacks of coal onto a cart. I stared at the grindstone, and the coalman looked at me for a longer time after every heave, until I walked over the road to a pub which turned out to be tiny - just a dark, tiny box of hot air, with dusty pictures of soldiers all around the walls. I bought a glass of beer, handing over what I realised, too late, was my last shilling. Then I bought another because the damage was done. Besides the barman, there was one other fellow in the pub. He was smoking a clay pipe. He was one of those old men with eyes that are fright­ening because too young and lively: the kind that haven't done enough in life.

'I saw you,' he said, 'sleeping in a coal yard.'

'Was not,' I said. I might have been five years old.

'Hard on, you were. You're barely awake now.'

'It's not a crime is it?' I said.

'So you admit it? You'd better watch him,' he said to the barman; 'turn your back for a minute, he'll be out like a light.'

He turned to me again as I tried to tuck my hand bandage back into place. 'What are you up to?' he said.

'Looking out for a murderer,' I said.

The old boy just muttered something very quietly to him­self at that, and went back to his pipe, disgusted that there was somebody even stranger than himself about the place.

I came out of the pub and immediately saw a very promis­ing sign reading '
ice station
'. But then a tram moved and it was '
police station
'. I thought about walking in and saying I believed a man who had done a murder at Hebden Bridge was now at large in Manchester. It would be like saying that I believed him to be 'in the world'.

I decided to do it, though.

As I walked into the copper shop, it was hot, but in a dif­ferent way again, which turned my head. I realised that my bandage was dangling down from my wrist like a dog lead with no dog on the end.

I started to tell my story at the long desk, and a man who was something between a policeman and a clerk said the smart thing would be for me to sit down on a bench. He talked to somebody else about me, and the only words I heard were 'no effects', which he said with a laugh. But it was all songs and whistling in the copper shop because a man was fitting an electrical fan into the ceiling.