The Lime Twig

3

The cigarette burned in a saucer next to the brilliantine, and there was steam at the open lavatory door and sunlight at the raised window. Larry washed down to the muscles of his neck and arms, but the tips of his fingernails were black. He was whistling. Again he held the brushes in two hands, applied them simultaneously to the shine of his hair.

It was one o’clock, the racing crowd was at the Damps, and only the constable took a standing ale in the hotel’s taproom while the wireless reported the condition of the horses. The foam was high on his tankard.

Larry whistled again, opened the bottom drawer, and from between layers of tissue lifted a vest of linked steel, shiny, weighing about five pounds. It fit over the undervest like silk. He turned sideways to adjust the ties. Then he carried a moist towel to the bathroom, finished his tea — it was bitter after the mouthwash and paste, and cleaner — and sat in the horsehair rocker in the sun by the window. He raised his black shoes to a footstool mauve and fringed with tassels, the sun began to glow against the steel beneath his shirt. He had changed the water in the flower vase first thing, so that was done; the pistol was loaded; he smelled fish frying in the kitchen next to the Tap. A small biplane was dragging a sign across the air in the direction of the spirited crowds: Win with Wally. He glanced at the yellow petals, a comer of his pillow, at Sparrow who was stretched on the bed. Then he nodded down at his black shoes, thick and perfect as parade boots.

“Put a little spit on them, Sparrow,” he said, and watched the other climb off the bed, kneel, begin to polish.

Sparrow caught up with Larry near the Booter’s. They walked by the steam baths — it had a marble front and, waist-high, two protruding and flaking iron pipes — walked by red petrol tanks, the beef posters, the hedgerow upon which the birds were hopping, a novelty shop with a rubber bride and groom in the window. On a low wooden door the single word Jazz was chalked and beside the door stood a pot of drying violets. Sparrow walked with the perspiration coming out on his chin; the sun flashed from his mother’s wedding band on his pinky. Larry whistled and there was hardly a movement of the pale lips.

All about them was the stillness of the village: this watering place of cocaine and scent, beer and feather mattresses and the transient rooms of menservants, all deserted by sports and gypsies and platinum girls. Deserted except for the constable, themselves, and the captive in the white building. The small bets now — on a kiss, for show, for the cost of lunch, the small and foolish bets for fun — were being placed elsewhere along with the serious wagers for a sick wife, burial of an aged woman, relief from debt, a trip to the beach, and there were few risks in the village now except those taken by the telephone operator who made small business with anyone owning an instrument. The widow who had held Michael Banks’ face in her hands at breakfast was sleeping when Larry and Sparrow started their day; the constable’s lips were salty; the girl who had screamed was crying herself into dreams on the floor. But Larry and Sparrow were walking through the odor of old trees, through the village diaphanous and silent, walking now in search of Thick and Little Dora.

On the stair, carpeted with rubber held firm by tacks, smelling of varnish and the rubber, a dark stair yet safe, the two men stopped to light up thin cigarettes; then Larry went first and Sparrow followed. From the end of the second-floor hall came the sound of a flushing toilet, the sudden swift plash of water in pipes, and a moment later the tinkling of a key. Nothing more. The hall, tinted green, was without decoration, without furniture except for a steamer trunk with lid half-raised on ancient petticoats and a bottle of silver-coated pills.

When he pulled open the door the little girl darted past, but Sparrow snatched at her arm — she smelled of Paradise Shore, had her hair full of pins — and twisted her round to the room again. He could feel the sweet pith of her arm, the ordinary thinness of flesh without ruffles. Under his fingers was a vaccination still bandaged and the spot was warm, a bit of radiance on the skin which, since her day in the clinic, she had attempted to hide under her short sleeve.

“Where’s Sybilline?” asked the child, but Sparrow said nothing, letting his hand touch the hair that made him shiver just to feel it, to feel the pins which the girl had found and a few which Little Dora had stuck into it from a cardboard for her amusement. He put his hand in his pocket.

“Syb wouldn’t want you running off,” he murmured.

Everyone stared at Larry: Sparrow and the child now, and the two women. Little Dora with her shadow of mustache, steel spectacles, purple hat in place, and the captive Margaret whom they had dressed only in a white shapeless gown tied behind with cords. And two men. Thick with his ear close to a portable radio, listening to the sounds of sport — if not of horses then dogs or cars or motorcycles — and on the opposite side of the room from him, suit dusty and smelling of straw, the trainer Cowles, enormous and seated on an upended valise, shirt unfastened and his hair raised into a nasty crust. All of them stared, and there was no dirt on Larry’s collar. Now Larry was in the room, and even when drunk he could comport himself. But he was not drunk, was at the other extreme from the full bottle, cognac preferred, which it took to make him laugh. Stood straight as he did when predicting, Larry who was an angel if any angel ever had eyes like his or flesh like his.

“My God,” said Little Dora, “you’ve been bathing again.” Her chin twitched.

“Afternoon, Cowles,” said Larry over her head, “afternoon, Miss. Are you comfortable?” And he nodded to Thick, who turned off the radio. “Well,” after a moment, “there’s something sweet in the air. Wouldn’t you say so, Sparrow?”

But he was looking at Margaret, at the bare feet, the whiteness of the charity gown, the shoulders sloping in the big armchair. “Well, Miss, you haven’t answered my question.” He waited, and she was deprived of everything, stripped as for some dangerous surgery.

“I’m comfortable,” she said, and leaned forward in the chair.

“You’re not wanting then.”

“No. They tell me I can’t see Michael…”

“That’s true, Miss. You can’t see Mr. Banks. Right, Cowles?”

“He’s engaged,” said the trainer and laughed, face and neck still damp with a horse’s drinking water.

Margaret’s brown skirt, the shoes, the stockings had been burned and it was Thick who had returned with the playing cards and white gown. Little Dora had held it for her—“You won’t be going into public in this rig, it’s open behind!”—then fastened the ties. Once they had cut into her cousin’s abdomen and she recognized the gown: whenever Thick had the chance, he whispered how he had attended his mother in Guy’s Hospital in order to see the young women on the wards. Now she was herself attended and was ashamed to move. Thick had burned her things, identification card and all.

Suddenly she looked at Cowles: “Do what you want with me. But leave Michael alone. …”

“Don’t listen to him,” said the child Monica, and pushed the little table in front of Margaret, sat opposite and dealt the cards. “Just play with me,” she said, turning up a golden queen, “we’re friends.” She was wearing a bright-green dress, too short, and she drummed on one of her pointed knees while staring at the figure on the card. Monica had the redness of her mother’s hair at the back of her neck. “I bet I’ve got a jack under here.”

Sparrow’s own knees were aching. After being ground beneath the treads of an armored vehicle, the bones and ligaments of his legs had shrunk, in casts had become dry and grafted together. His knee caps were of silver and it was the metal itself, he claimed, that hurt. Now at either corner of his mouth the skin turned suddenly white and Larry took a step, held him up by the arm. Then under the shoulders, under the knees, Larry lifted him — Sparrow dropped the beret — and carried him to the bed where the small man lay whimpering.

“Take off his shoes, Cowles. Carefully, if you please.”

Cowles did as he was told, the dark coat flapping down over his hands at the laces, while the others — the radio was on the floor, a chair scraped — moved all together toward the bed. Sparrow, at such moments, was in the habit of shutting his eyes, whether instantly crippled in a picture palace, the Majesty, or in the Men’s, whether caught in Daphne’s Row or in the room with tables and dirty silverware. He was closing the lids now. They lowered, one or two lashes in each, slowly obliterating the eyes, which were white and without tears. A single lick of black hair lay on his forehead.

They were all at the bed, Thick and Larry on either side of the pillow with Little Dora and Cowles — he was still holding the empty shoes — and their expressions were unchanged even by Sparrow’s moans. Margaret and the little girl came also, stood in the vicinity of Sparrow’s heart and lungs.

From his great height, drawing back his coat flaps and lapels so that the gun and the gun’s girdle — the holster, straps, strings — were visible, slowly putting his hands in his pockets, Larry spoke the name, Larry who had been the first to carry him the night he screamed, who had sipped tea out of a tin cup while watching them give preliminary treatment to the broken legs, and who had known immediately upon sight of the buttocks tiny and gnarled that the injured man was a rider: “Sparrow.” And Larry, who had greased his hair even in battle, was still compassionate. “Sparrow,” he said again and the moaning stopped, the perspiration appeared, the slit eyes began suddenly to tighten and grow shrewd.

“Dead and dying,” came Sparrow’s answering whisper at last, and the wrists twisted in the enormous cuffs.

“Now then, Thick,” said Larry, “roll up his sleeve.”

Sparrow grimaced and all the while kept the round vague outline of Margaret’s face in his filmy sight. Larry took the tin packet from inside his coat, from just beneath the armpit’s holster, and opened it. He fitted the needle to the syringe, broke the neck of the ampule, drew back the plunger until the scale on the glass measured the centimeters correctly. The tip of the needle dribbled a bit. He had tended to Sparrow in alleys, bathhouses with crabs and starfish dead on the floors, in doorways, in the Majesty, and the back of horsedrawn wagons on stormy nights. He had jabbed Sparrow in the depths of a barroom and upright in the booth of a phone; once on rough water with the rain beating down, once in a railway coach with his ministrations hidden from the old ladies behind a paper. Once too in the dark of a prison night, and many times, on leave, with some strange fat girl wearing rolled stockings, or with a tall girl carrying her underclothes in a respirator bag, standing idly by and swinging the bag, pulling the rolled elastic, watching. As often as Sparrow fainted, Larry revived him. Whenever Sparrow could stand on his feet no longer, whenever he went down in the crooked swoon, helpless as when he had first screamed from his bloody blankets — he had won a fiver from the kid of the battalion only that sundown — Larry the angel, the shoulder man, who later drowned the operator of the half-track in a shell hole filled with stagnant water and urine of the troops, took him up in his arms as carefully and coolly as a woman of long service. And with the needle and morphic fluid calmed him, standing then in suspect shadow, smoking, until Sparrow should rise, muttering, “Shivers and shakes,” and proceed with his drugged and jittery step to a brief meal or to the job.

“This ought to do it,” he said, and leaned forward, pinched as much of the flesh on Sparrow’s arm as he could into a chilly blister. Then he punctured it, slid the needle beneath Sparrow’s skin, gently pushed down the plunger. For a moment he could see the fluid lying like a pea just under the skin, then suddenly it dropped into a duct or into the mouth of a vein and was gone. He withdrew the needle and there was a tiny heart of blood on the tip of it. He watched, and in the middle of the tattoo — a headstone with “Flander’s Field” in scroll beneath it — his pinch marks and the nick of the needle were still visible. He was casting a long shadow across Sparrow’s torso, and the substance of his own head, the lines of his shoulders — constructed to catch a man’s love for master tailoring — these lay lightly on the man in his agony. Then he looked across to Thick, who was stooping also and hiding his mouth behind a hand, keeping an eye on the bare needle. Thick’s own forehead was trickling.

“He ain’t going to need a transfusion … is he now, Larry?”

“Cover him with a sheet, for God’s sake, and let’s go,” said Little Dora, and dug with mannish fingers into her stuffed side.

“Michael was sick once,” whispered Margaret, and she was kneeling.

But this was not Sparrow’s worst. Nor was it Daphne’s Row or escaping in the manure wagon or trying to fix the needle behind the newspapers that time on the rocking train that had caused Larry himself to sweat and think of summoning the doctor who was bald and unlicensed and the best in the business for a man who had been stabbed or shot in the groin. None of these, but the time in the hock and antique shop — when the black cars passed up and down in front of the cluttered window and Sparrow had collapsed on a scabrous tiger skin, pulling a tea set with him and falling with his mouth jammed into the heel of a brass boot and he, Larry, had tried to squat beside and reach for him through a pile of bone and silken fans. His knee had crushed an old bellows and dust fell all about them, while paper weights rolled against the tiger’s head. He had crouched there over Sparrow and had torn the tin packet. And a parrot in the back of the shop kept screaming, “Piss in his eye, piss in his eye!” from a great fortress-shaped wire cage. And while the cars hunted them up and down the street, while the parrot shrieked, he had freed Sparrow’s arm from the cloth and had been too hasty, then, withdrawing the point, so that the needle broke, and the skin immediately turned blue. But even that day he had managed, watched Sparrow’s cheekbones recede under a little color, helped him to crawl through the tunnel of Spanish shawls and so to escape, and had killed the parrot by stuffing his handkerchief into its shocked and gloomy face. Dragging Sparrow away he had heard the cage still swinging.

“That will do, I imagine,” he said, and straightened. But no one else moved. First one, then by twos and threes the playing cards blew off the table and swished to the floor or landed on edge with tiny clacking noises, all face down except the queen. Thick wet his lips; Little Dora lifted back her veil; Cowles was biting his nails. Monica blinked her green and fearful eyes and Sparrow from the bed was sighing.

“Better now, Sparrow? Come along then. …”

“Wait!” said Little Dora. “You don’t mean you’re going without me, Larry! You wouldn’t leave Little Dora behind! Not another day in the Roost. And I thought I’d be out today and have a throw and a lunch at the Pavilion. Ain’t I going to get a finger in the Golden Bowl at least? Or at least a look at the Bumpy Girl? What the hell, I’m no matron. …”

But Larry opened the door a crack. “She wants watching, Dora.” And, bracing Sparrow, raising his head slightly: “Use the ropes if you need to. Thick.”

The door closed and Margaret remained kneeling at the empty bed. Little Dora tore off her gloves. Thick began to laugh.

There was a railing and Michael Banks took hold of it, then stared down into the darkness of five broad swinging doors. He was quite alone when he pushed through one of them. Underneath the grandstand and at the bottom of the steps he found ahead of him the empty reaches of the public lavatory — low ceiling, fifty feet wide and of concrete painted black and tiny brick cubes washed with a light-green color. There were a few bulbs in cages waist high between the urinals and toilet bowls. It was the rank darkness of the empty Tube; a man could hide even at the base of one of those toilets if he crouched low enough, made himself small.

He started to whistle softly and the sound coming from his own lips — he was not often a whistler, a smiler — made the words “barrels of fun” go round in his head. Slowly he unbuttoned his coat and listened. He was standing, he noticed, near a toilet that had no seat, one badly defaced in the row of urinals. Once he had seen a man die on a toilet — from fear — then had found a notice of the death in the papers. “Why are you always reading obituaries?” He remembered that ugly voice. “Who do you expect to find on the lists?” He couldn’t say.

Now he peered ahead at a row of pipes with great brass valves — he had never been able to turn taps beneath a sink, could not bring himself to touch the copper ball, slime-covered, gently breathing, that lay in the bottom of a toilet tank — thinking that it wouldn’t do at all to walk down there.

Then he heard the footsteps. They were none he knew, not those of Lovely, Cowles, or the jockey, who had a light and bitter tread. These were the sounds of a measured step, the left foot heavier than the right, the dragging of shoe nails against the stones. And Banks saw a movement, a mere breaking of shadow, at the end of the tunnel by which he himself had entered. He turned, starting toward the opposite end where the pipes loomed, but there too he saw the flickering of a white hand, fragments of darkness about to become the shape of a man. So he wheeled close against the nearest urinal and clutched at his clothing.

The man was beside him. A man smaller than Banks, humped over, with feet large as boxes and a slate strapped across his chest. The name of a horse was on the slate: Rock Castle.

Banks kept his eyes forward, said nothing. But down the tunnel’s opposite length, climbing from behind the pipes themselves, the shape of the second man became complete. And at his side, in silent metamorphosis, appeared the third. The hanging slate of the first man banged against Banks’ hip, and that of the second — all these carried the little boards, buckles and leather, wood frames splintered, pieces of slate chalk-dusted — caught him on the opposite side under the ribs. And the second man’s nearest rubber, several sizes too large, smacked in the latrine water, moved again and lay beside his own wet shoe. Banks held tightly to his clothes, heard them shuffle, breathe, splash loudly. They were just the three to stand beside him in the Men’s — he knew it was inevitable with the first echo of the footsteps — just the sort to gang up on a lone man underground. But he also knew them for another kind: in the glare above, all along the track’s inner rail, great numbers of these were posted, swiftly chalking, communicating with the crowd. Dressed in rags, lean, fast as birds. These were the men who sat on the rails with knees drawn up and scraps of paper fastened to their lapels, soothsayers with craftiness and eyes that never stopped. Very methodical. For days he had seen them, the jaws unshaved, the looks of intelligence, the slates slung like accordions from the worn-out straps. They were a system—“eunuchs,” Cowles called them, “the mathematicians”—but while clacking within arm’s length of the hoof-cut turf, each one sat in his astrological island, shabby, each figuring for himself with twitching cheek muscles and numbers scratched on the slate. “The bad-luck fellows,” Cowles said of them.

Now Banks knew it to be so. The weight of the hands on the urinal, the thickly rubbered foot, the hat in the band of which was a photograph of a nude woman, the slates — the name Rock Castle was scrawled also on the other two — all this said as much.

And he was helpless now.

The first to come was whispering. Banks glanced quickly and saw a scar hanging down from the eye like a hair, saw spectacles and a loose soft collar partly tom at the seam. He tried to look away, but the man went on with his whispering.

“I’ve got a word for you: Sybilline’s in the Pavilion. Do you understand? Sybilline’s in the Pavilion. …”

Down and back the length of the latrine it was a false and cheerful sound. And behind the spectacles the man had watering eyes, eyes nearly awash in the sockets, and he did not blink. On either side of his nose — bookish — were grains of blood and scratches. When he whispered, the saliva behind his lips, between his teeth, was tinted pink with blood constantly trickling into the throat. The water round the eyes was clear. And his limpid sight, the smile, his whispering, the signs of struggle, the poverty of the cloth, his pink and golden gleam, the slate — these suggested unnatural occupation, the change in character: a man good for certain kinds of hire.

“Don’t move now, Mr. Banks, not a move if you please.”

There was no smile, only the single flaw, the perversion, the staring eyes and all round him the rank gloom, the chill, the burning of the rusty lights.

“It’s three to one now, Banks. Don’t take it into your head to run off in a scare.”

This whisperer was on his right; the second to come stood patiently on his left; Polka-dots — there was a neckerchief round his throat — had moved up close behind him. It was the triangle of his dreams, the situation he dreaded at the sound of sirens. He wanted composure when the whisperer touched his arm, saying, “You won’t dart then. That’s sensible. Why look here, Banks,” smiling again, reaching into a pocket behind the slate, “What do you make of these?” And in his palm, suddenly, he held two small black balls, sovereign-sized in diameter and perfectly round. They appeared soft, made of tar perhaps, and left an oily dark stain on the skin as the man shifted them in his hand. “Ever seen one of these before? Pellet bombs. Quite a charge in them, Banks. Not enormous of course, but good enough to take a foot or a hand or eye without any question. Should you scare, Banks, and be so fancy as to skip on us, I’d throw one at you. And it would bring you to the flagging. But here,” guiding him by the arm, “we don’t need to risk a blasting. You won’t be likely to run if you’re sitting down. Now will you?”

They stopped at the broken toilet and Banks sat on it as best he could. They were standing close to his knees, making wet sounds with their boots and rubbers beside him, and it was worse than the crowds. Even the constable could help, he thought.

“Wait,” he was squatting, staring up, could hardly see their faces, “what do you want?”

And the whisperer: “We could bash your brains,” sucking sharply, feet trampling his own, huddling round him. “But,” more easily, “that’s not it for now. Later perhaps. Larry said to keep an eye on you all right. But Banks,” catching him by the throat, pressing down upon him and smiling, “just take my word for it: Sybilline’s in the Pavilion. She wants you to know, Mr. Banks, she thinks you’ll understand. …”

And these three dropped back with their hands ready, arms hooked out defensively, and like boys flashing in an empty courtyard turned suddenly and — far apart, shoes scraping and slates caught close — raced off swiftly and with terrible clatter in the direction of the swinging doors.

He sat bent over in the quietness he had been looking for. It was a green world and he heard no echoes; they did not toss back any of their pellet bombs after all. He remained there on the piece of battered lavatory equipment for an endless time, and his eyes were half-shut.