Injury Time Read Free

the taxi man away. Binny dragged the hoover from under the stairs and threw it down the back steps into the yard. It wouldn’t do to let Alma know that she herself wanted to use the machine. It would arouse suspicion. Binny rarely hoovered. If she admitted that guests were coming for the evening, Alma would expect to be invited. She was having husband trouble and needed taking out of herself.
    On the draining-board glittered four cooking apples, stuffed with raisins and wrapped in silver foil. Hastily bundling them into a carrier bag, Binny dropped them behind the fridge. Alma returned. She took from the pocket of her camel coat a quarter bottle of whisky and approached the cupboard where the glasses were kept.
    ‘I can’t allow it,’ said Binny. Defiantly she barred the way.
    ‘Whatever’s the matter?’ cried Alma, astonished at her attitude. ‘We could do with a little swiggie, darling. It’s awfully cold out.’ Alma was a great believer in swiggies, whatever the temperature.
    Binny stood her ground and adopted a crucified position against the mahogany wall cupboard. She gazed seriously at Alma and after a pause added the words ‘Not now’, holding aloft a pink sponge with which she had rinsed the woodwork; lukewarm water trickled down her arm. Impressed, Alma stepped back and put away the bottle. Binny said she had shopping to do. She tied a scarf over her newly washed hair and pushed Alma out of the house, striding ahead along the alleyway toward the High Street. Behind the wire netting of the play centre, children crawled along concrete pipes, screaming.
    ‘Have I said anything out of turn?’ asked Alma, teetering over the cobblestones in her high-heeled boots.
    Binny was feeling terribly emotional. She wished she hadn’t spoken so harshly to Edward on the telephone and regretted she’d been unkind about his friend, old Woodford. It wasn’t very nice, the government taking his money off him like that. She wouldn’t like it. It was the way Edward hadn’t said Hello that had put a damper on things. She’d been in perfectly good spirits when dialling his number. She’d scrubbed the bath, hung clean towels over the edge and done all that raisin business with the apples. Then quite suddenly, on hearing his clipped and well-bred voice, she had dropped into somewhere dark and confined – she was shut inside a box beneath a river. She felt he wouldn’t be able to hear her even if she shouted. This feeling of being locked away from him had something to do with visualising Edward, on the other end of the telephone, leaning against a desk polished by somebody he had never met, blotting the corners of his mouth to remove traces of a meal he hadn’t cooked, with a handkerchief that came fresh and laundered out of his breast pocket as if by magic. It was the privileged style in which the man lived that silenced her.
    When she’d first seen him, stepping through the doorway of the outer office in Chalk Farm, he’d reminded her of various portly relatives glimpsed only in the pages of photograph albums. He wore galoshes and held, either in his hand or teeth, the stem of a small and blackened pipe. His face, which was pale and fair, had a curious swelling between the eyebrows as though he had been stung by an insect. Bitten by life, she thought, watching his mouth open and close behind a drift of tobacco smoke. The way he told it, there wasn’t much point to his existence. He had always done the right thing, supported his wife, educated his son, made sure the garden was tidy. There had been that trouble years ago – here he waved his hand rather vaguely in the air as if turning the handle of a gramophone – but he had learned to live with it. Binny pretended at first she was still married, to avoid complications. But later in the evening, rather charmed by those galoshes and the manner in which he constantly puffed, sucked and fooled over his pipe, she allowed him to see her home. He kept looking at himself in