Crazy Paving Read Free Page B

Dilapidations she was typing. The vehemence of Raymond’s opinions irritated her even when she agreed with him, and in this case she did not.
    Joan picked up the phone. It would not have occurred to her to ring Alun, but seeing Annette so considerate about her mother, she wondered if her husband might be concerned.
    Alun was on shifts that week so he was at home. ‘Hello?’
    ‘Oh hello Alun, it’s only me. I just thought I would tell you, a bomb’s gone off.’
    ‘Oh.’
    ‘But I’m alright. I’m fine in fact. I’m in the office. I’m at work.’
    ‘Yes I know.’ Hearing his irritation made Joan feel stupid. She often felt stupid when she spoke to her husband.
    Richard had emerged and was conferring with Raymond. He too thought that bombers should be hanged. Then he went back to his office.
    ‘There’s no excuse for it,’ pronounced Raymond to Joan and Annette, ‘no excuse for it at all.’ Having no audience for his opinions never bothered Raymond, any more
than he would worry if nobody was listening to his jokes. If no one thought them funny, he was more than happy to provide the laughter on his own. If no one agreed with him that those who planted
bombs should be strung up, then he was perfectly content to agree with himself.
    ‘Oh dear,’ said Joan as she put down the phone. ‘I suppose they’ll close all the stations. The traffic will be terrible.’
    ‘It’ll be alright by tonight,’ said Annette, without looking up from her work.
    ‘There was a bus crash up my way last week,’ said Joan. ‘A bus went over on its side going round a corner. It ended up leaning up against a lamp-post. Imagine sitting on a bus
that was leaning up a lamp-post.’
    Annette kept her head down. ‘I suppose you would slope rather a lot.’
    ‘I mean,’ Joan continued amiably, ‘if you get a train you crash, if you get a bus you end up sloping. If you walk down the street a litter bin blows up.’
    Raymond had turned to go but turned back and rounded on Joan. ‘It’s not the same thing!’ he exploded furiously. ‘Honestly Joan, how can you say that!’
    Annette looked up. Raymond was usually polite to Joan. She was fifty-four and Raymond regarded himself as a gentleman.
    He continued. ‘It’s just that kind of immorality that lets the IRA get away with this sort of thing.’
    Joan was looking at him. She blinked.
    Raymond sighed. ‘A bomb exploding in the street,’ he explained patiently, ‘is not the same as a car crash or a train derailment. It is not an accident. It is something that
someone has done deliberately. It is not something to be merely regretted. We need to take action!’ He concluded this speech by thumping the air with his fist, turning smartly on his heel and
striding off down the office. Joan looked at Annette.
    ‘Raymond doesn’t have a member of the IRA handy,’ said Annette, ‘so it looks as though you’re the next best thing.’
    ‘But I didn’t mean it like that,’ said Joan.
    ‘I know,’ said Annette with a sigh. One of these days, she thought, I am going to push something unpleasant up Raymond’s left nostril.
    Joan stood and went to the filing cabinet. ‘Actually,’ she said as she returned to her desk, ‘I think maybe I did mean it like that.’
    Annette looked up again.
    Joan plonked the day file on her lap and unclipped it. She picked up a handful of papers from her in-tray and began to sort them into date order. ‘The fact is,’ she continued,
‘as far as we’re concerned, it might as well be like a bus crash. We have no control over it. It could happen any time. We just have to think about statistics and cross our fingers.
    ‘Someone might have died in that bomb we just heard,’ she added as she began to insert the pages into the file. ‘And as far as he or she is concerned, the important thing was
that they walked down that street at that time, instead of stopping to buy a newspaper or taking another route. They went past the bomb. The bomb