The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner

He answered me sharp: ‘No, it bloody well ain’t.’ Coppers always lose their tempers as quick as this, and more often than not they gain nothing by it. ‘Then I don’t know it,’ I told him, saved by the bell.

He slid his big boot round and round the doorstep. ‘Where were you last Friday night?’ Back in the ring, but this was worse than a boxing match.

I didn’t like him trying to accuse me of something he wasn’t sure I’d done. ‘Was I at the baker’s you mentioned? Or in the pub next door?’

‘You’ll get five years in Borstal if you don’t give me a straight answer,’ he said, unbuttoning his mac even though it was cold where he was standing.

‘I was glued to the telly, like mam says,’ I swore blind. But he went on and on with his looney questions: ‘Have you got a television?’

The things he asked wouldn’t have taken in a kid of two, and what else could I say to the last one except: ‘Has the aerial fell down? Or would you like to come in and see it?’

He was liking me even less for saying that. ‘We know you weren’t listening to the television set last Friday, and so do you, don’t you?’

‘P’raps not, but I was looking at it, because sometimes we turn the sound down for a bit of fun.’ I could hear mam laughing from the kitchen, and I hoped Mike’s mam was doing the same if the cops had gone to him as well.

‘We know you weren’t in the house,’ he said, starting up again, cranking himself with the handle. They always say ‘We’ ‘We’, never ‘I’ ‘I’ – as if they feel braver and righter knowing there’s a lot of them against only one.

‘I’ve got witnesses,’ I said to him. ‘Mam for one. Her fancy-man, for two. Ain’t that enough? I can get you a dozen more, or thirteen altogether, if it was a baker’s that got robbed.’

‘I don’t want no lies,’ he said, not catching on about the baker’s dozen. Where do they scrape cops up from anyway? ‘All I want is to get from you where you put that money.’

Don’t get mad, I kept saying to myself, don’t get mad – hearing mam setting out cups and saucers and putting the pan on the stove for bacon. I stood back and waved him inside like I was the butler. ‘Come and search the house. If you’ve got a warrant.’

‘Listen, my lad,’ he said, like the dirty bullying jumped-up bastard he was, ‘I don’t want too much of your lip, because if we get you down to the Guildhall you’ll get a few bruises and black-eyes for your trouble.’ And I knew he wasn’t kidding either, because I’d heard about all them sort of tricks. I hoped one day though that him and all his pals would be the ones to get the black-eyes and kicks, you never knew. It might come sooner than anybody thinks, like in Hungary. ‘Tell me where the money is, and I’ll get you off with probation.’

‘What money?’ I asked him, because I’d heard that one before as well.

‘You know what money.’

‘Do I look as though I’d know owt about money?’ I said pushing my fist through a hole in my shirt.

‘The money that was pinched, that you know all about,’ he said. ‘You can’t trick me, so it’s no use trying.’

‘Was it three-and-eightpence ha’penny?’ I asked.

‘You thieving young bastard. We’ll teach you to steal money that doesn’t belong to you.’

I turned my head around: ‘Mam,’ I called out, ‘get my lawyer on the blower, will you?’

‘Clever, aren’t you?’ he said in an unfriendly way, ‘but we won’t rest until we clear all this up.’

‘Look,’ I pleaded, as if about to sob my socks off because he’d got me wrong, ‘it’s all very well us talking like this, it’s like a game almost, but I wish you’d tell me what it’s all about, because honest-to-God I’ve just got out of bed and here you are at the door talking about me having pinched a lot of money, money that I don’t know anything about.’

He swung around now as if he’d trapped me, though I couldn’t see why he might think so. ‘Who said anything about money? I didn’t. What made you bring money into this little talk we’re having?’

‘It’s you,’ I answered, thinking he was going barmy, and about to start foaming at the chops, ‘you’ve got money on the brain, like all policemen. Baker’s shops as well.’

He screwed his face up. ‘I want an answer from you: where’s that money?’

But I was getting fed-up with all this. ‘I’ll do a deal.’

Judging by his flash-bulb face he thought he was suddenly onto a good thing. ‘What sort of a deal?’

So I told him: ‘I’ll give you all the money I’ve got, one and fourpence ha’penny, if you stop this third-degree and let me go in and get my breakfast. Honest, I’m clambed to death. I ain’t had a bite since yesterday. Can’t you hear my guts rollin’?’

His jaw dropped, but on he went, pumping me for another half hour. A routine check-up they say on the pictures. But I knew I was winning on points.

Then he left, but came back in the afternoon to search the house. He didn’t find a thing, not a French farthing. He asked me questions again and I didn’t tell him anything except lies, lies, lies, because I can go on doing that forever without batting an eyelid. He’d got nothing on me and we both of us knew it, otherwise I’d have been down the Guildhall in no time, but he kept on keeping on because I’d been in a Remand Home for a high-wall job before; and Mike was put through the same mill because all the local cops knew he was my best pal.

When it got dark me and Mike were in our parlour with a low light on and the telly off, Mike taking it easy in the rocking chair and me slouched out on the settee, both of us puffing a packet of Woods. With the door bolted and curtains drawn we talked about the dough we’d crammed up the drainpipe. Mike thought we should take it out and both of us do a bunk to Skegness or Cleethorpes for a good time in the arcades, living like lords in a boarding house near the pier, then at least we’d both have had a big beano before getting sent down.

‘Listen, you daft bleeder,’ I said, ‘we aren’t going to get caught at all, and we’ll have a good time, later.’ We were so clever we didn’t even go out to the pictures, though we wanted to.

In the morning old Hitler-face questioned me again, with one of his pals this time, and the next day they came, trying as hard as they could to get something out of me, but I didn’t budge an inch. I know I’m showing off when I say this, but in me he’d met his match, and I’d never give in to questions no matter how long it was kept up. They searched the house a couple of times as well, which made me think they thought they really had something to go by, but I know now that they hadn’t, and that it was all buckshee speculation. They turned the house upside down and inside out like an old sock, went from top to bottom and front to back but naturally didn’t find a thing. The copper even poked his face up the front-room chimney (that hadn’t been used or swept for years) and came down looking like Al Jolson so that he had to swill himself clean at the scullery sink. They kept tapping and pottering around the big aspidistra plant that grandma had left to mam, lifting it up from the table to look under the cloth, putting it aside so’s they could move the table and get at the boards under the rug – but the big headed stupid ignorant bastards never once thought of emptying the soil out of the plant pot, where they’d have found the crumpled-up money-box that we’d buried the night we did the job. I suppose it’s still there now I think about it, and I suppose mam wonders now and again why the plant don’t prosper like it used to – as if it could with a fistful of thick black tin lapped around its guts.

The last time he knocked at our door was one wet morning at five minutes to nine and I was sleep-logged in my crumby bed as usual. Mam had gone to work for the day so I shouted for him to hold on a bit, and then went down to see who it was. There he stood, six-feet tall and sopping wet, and for the first time in my life I did a spiteful thing I’ll never forgive myself for: I didn’t ask him to come in out of the rain, because I wanted him to get double pneumonia and die. I suppose he could have pushed by me and come in if he’d wanted, but maybe he’d got used to asking questions on the doorstep and didn’t want to be put off by changing his ground even though it was raining. Not that I don’t like being spiteful because of any barmy principle I’ve got, but this bit of spite, as it turned out, did me no good at all. I should have treated him as a brother I hadn’t seen for twenty years and dragged him in for a cup of tea and a fag, told him about the picture I hadn’t seen the night before, asking him how his wife was after her operation and whether they’d shaved her moustache off to make it, and then sent him happy and satisfied out by the front door. But no, I thought, let’s see what he’s got to say for himself now.

He stood a little to the side of the door, either because it was less wet there, or because he wanted to see me from a different angle, perhaps having found it monotonous to watch a bloke’s face always telling lies from the same side. ‘You’ve been identified,’ he said, twitching raindrops from his tash. ‘A woman saw you and your mate yesterday and she swears blind you are the same chaps she saw going into that bakery.’

I was dead sure he was still bluffing, because Mike and I hadn’t even seen each other the day before, but I looked worried. ‘She’s a menace then to innocent people, whoever she is, because the only bakery I’ve been in lately is the one up our street to get some cut-bread on tick for mam.’

He didn’t bite on this. ‘So now I want to know where the money is’ – as if I hadn’t answered him at all.

‘I think mam took it to work this morning to get herself some tea in the canteen.’ Rain was splashing down so hard I thought he’d get washed away if he didn’t come inside. But I wasn’t much bothered, and went on: ‘I remember I put it in the telly-vase last night – it was my only one-and-three and I was saving it for a packet of tips this morning – and I nearly had a jibbering black fit just now when I saw it had gone. I was reckoning on it for getting me through today because I don’t think life’s worth living without a fag, do you?’

I was getting into my stride and began to feel good, twigging that this would be my last pack of lies, and that if I kept it up for long enough this time I’d have the bastards beat: Mike and me would be off to the coast in a few weeks time having the fun of our lives, playing at penny football and latching on to a couple of tarts that would give us all they were good for. ‘And this weather’s no good for picking-up fag-ends in the street,’ I said, ‘because they’d be sopping wet. Course, I know you could dry ’em out near the fire, but it don’t taste the same you know, all said and done. Rainwater does summat to ’em that don’t bear thinkin’ about: it turns ’em back into hoss-tods without the taste though.’

I began to wonder, at the back of my brainless eyes, why old copper-lugs didn’t pull me up sharp and say he hadn’t got time to listen to all this, but he wasn’t looking at me anymore, and all my thoughts about Skegness went bursting to smithereens in my sludgy loaf. I could have dropped into the earth when I saw what he’d fixed his eyes on.

He was looking at it, an ever-loving fiver, and I could only jabber: ‘The one thing is to have some real fags because new hoss-tods is always better than stuff that’s been rained on and dried, and I know how you feel about not being able to find money because one-and-three’s one-and-three in anybody’s pocket, and naturally if I see it knocking around I’ll get you on the blower tomorrow straightaway and tell you where you can find it.’

I thought I’d go down in a fit: three green-backs as well had been washed down by the water, and more were following, lying flat at first after their fall, then getting tilted at the corners by wind and rainspots as if they were alive and wanted to get back into the dry snug drainpipe out of the terrible weather, and you can’t imagine how I wished they’d be able to. Old Hitler-face didn’t know what to make of it but just kept staring down and down, and I thought I’d better keep on talking, though I knew it wasn’t much good now.

‘It’s a fact, I know, that money’s hard to come by and half-crowns don’t get found on bus seats or in dustbins, and I didn’t see any in bed last night because I’d ’ave known about it, wouldn’t I? You can’t sleep with things like that in the bed because they’re too hard, and anyway at first they’re. …’ It took Hitler-boy a long time to catch on; they were beginning to spread over the yard a bit, reinforced by the third colour of a ten-bob note, before his hand clamped itself on to my shoulder.

III

The pop-eyed potbellied governor said to a pop-eyed potbellied Member of Parliament who sat next to his pop-eyed potbellied whore of a wife that I was his only hope for getting the Borstal Blue Ribbon Prize Cup For Long Distance Cross Country Running (All England), which I was, and it set me laughing to myself inside, and I didn’t say a word to any potbellied pop-eyed bastard that might give them real hope, though I knew the governor anyway took my quietness to mean he’d got that cup already stuck on the bookshelf in his office among the few other mildewed trophies.

‘He might take up running in a sort of professional way when he gets out,’ and it wasn’t until he’d said this and I’d heard it with my own flap-tabs that I realized it might be possible to do such a thing, run for money, trot for wages on piece work at a bob a puff rising bit by bit to a guinea a gasp and retiring through old age at thirty-two because of lace-curtain lungs, a football heart, and legs like varicose beanstalks. But I’d have a wife and car and get my grinning long-distance clock in the papers and have a smashing secretary to answer piles of letters sent by tarts who’d mob me when they saw who I was as I pushed my way into Woolworth’s for a packet of razor blades and a cup of tea. It was something to think about all right, and sure enough the governor knew he’d got me when he said, turning to me as if I would at any rate have to be consulted about it all: ‘How does this matter strike you, then, Smith, my lad?’

A line of potbellied pop-eyes gleamed at me and a row of goldfish mouths opened and wiggled gold teeth at me, so I gave them the answer they wanted because I’d hold my trump card until later. ‘It’d suit me fine, sir,’ I said.

‘Good lad. Good show. Right spirit. Splendid.’

‘Well,’ the governor said, ‘get that cup for us today and I’ll do all I can for you. I’ll get you trained so that you whack every man in the Free World.’ And I had a picture in my brain of me running and beating everybody in the world, leaving them all behind until only I was trot-trotting across a big wide moor alone, doing a marvellous speed as I ripped between boulders and reed-clumps, when suddenly: CRACK! CRACK! – bullets that can go faster than any man running, coming from a copper’s rifle planted in a tree, winged me and split my gizzard in spite of my perfect running, and down I fell.

The potbellies expected me to say something else. ‘Thank you, sir,’ I said.