The Nonesuch and Others Read Free Page A

a barmaid he fancied in The Railway—and she was taking all he could give her. Anyway, he was flash, you know? One of the gang lads and a rising star. And a flash car to go with it. Bullet-proof windows, hooded lamps, reinforced panels—the lot. Like a bloody tank, it was. But—” Bill sighed.
    “He used to park it up here, right?”
    He nodded. “Thing was, you couldn’t threaten him, you know what I mean? Some people you can threaten, some you shouldn’t threaten, and some you mustn’t. He was one you mustn’t. Trouble is, so are the thin people.”
    “So what happened?”
    “When they slashed his tyres, he lobbed bricks through their windows. And he had a knowing way with him. He tossed ’em through thin house windows. Then one night he parked down on the corner of Barchington. Next morning—they’d drilled holes right through the plate, all over the car. After that—he didn’t come back for a week or so. When he did come back…well, he must’ve been pretty mad.”
    “What did he do?”
    “Threw something else—something that made a bang! A damn big one! You’ve seen that thin, derelict shell on the corner of Barchington? Oh, it was him, sure enough, and he got it right, too. A thin house. Anybody in there, they were goners. And that did it!”
    “They got him?”
    “They got his car! He parked up one night, went down to The Railway, when the bar closed took his lady-love back to her place, and in the morning—”
    “They’d wrecked it—his car, I mean.”
    “Wrecked it? Oh, yes, they’d done that. They’d folded it!”
    “Come again?”
    “Folded it!” he snapped. “Their funny science. Eighteen inches each way, it was. A cube of folded metal. No broken glass, no split seams, no splintered plastic. Folded all neat and tidy. An eighteen-inch cube.”
    “They’d put it through a crusher, surely?” I was incredulous.
    “Nope—folded.”
    “Impossible!”
    “Not to them. Their funny science.”
    “So what did he do about it?”
    “Eh? Do? He looked at it, and he thought, ‘What if I’d been sitting in the bloody thing?’ Do? He did what I would do, what you would do. He went away. We never did see him again.”
    The half-bottle was empty. We reached for the beers. And after a long pull I said: “You can kip here if you want, on the floor. I’ll toss a blanket over you.”
    “Thanks,” said Barmy Bill, “but no thanks. When the beer’s gone I’m gone. I wouldn’t stay up here to save my soul. Besides, I’ve a bottle of my own back home.”
    “Sly old sod!” I said.
    “Daft young bugger!” he answered without malice. And twenty minutes later I let him out. Then I crossed to the windows and looked out at him, at the street all silver in moonlight.
    He stood at the gate (where it should be) swaying a bit and waving up at me, saying his thanks and farewell. Then he started off down the street.
    It was quiet out there, motionless. One of those nights when even the trees don’t move. Everything frozen, despite the fact that it wasn’t nearly cold. I watched Barmy Bill out of sight, craning my neck to see him go, and—
    Across the road, three lampposts—where there should only be two! The one on the left was OK, and the one to the far right. But the one in the middle? I had never seen that one before. I blinked bleary eyes, gasped, blinked again. Only two lampposts!
    Stinking drunk—drunk as a skunk—utterly boggled!
    I laughed as I tottered from the window, switched off the light, staggered into my bedroom. The barmy old bastard had really had me going. I’d really started to believe. And now the booze was making me see double—or something. Well, just as long as it was lampposts and not pink elephants! Or thin people! And I went to bed laughing.
    …But I wasn’t laughing the next morning.
    Not after they found him, old Barmy Bill of Barrows Hill. Not after they called on me to identify him.
    “Their funny science,” he’d called it. The way they folded things.