The Collected Short Fiction of Ramsey Campbell Part 91

The policeman who'd addressed him brushed a thumb and forefinger over his moustache, and Barry had a nervous urge to giggle at the notion that the man was checking the hair hadn't come unglued. He stared at Barry as if suspicious of his thoughts before growling 'You go other place. No trouble.'

'Thanks,' Barry said, though his unpopularity was as clear from the policeman's face as from every other he risked observing. To retreat uphill to take refuge with his friends he would have had to struggle through hostility that looked capable of growing yet more solid. He swung around faster than his parched unstable skull appreciated to dodge and sidle and excuse himself down to the next bend, where he saw light through a shop. Once he was out of the back entrance he should be able to find his way to the rear of the Summit Apartments.

He launched himself between two stalls piled with footwear and into the building, only to waver to a halt as darkness pressed itself like coins onto his eyes. Outlines had only started to grow visible as he headed for the daylight, so that he was halfway through the interior before he realized where he was: not in a shop but in somebody's home. Nevertheless the contents of the trestle tables were unquestionably for sale, a jumble of bedclothes, icons, cutlery, a religious tome with dislocated pages, dresses, spanners and other tools, toys including a life-size baby that the dimness rendered indistinguishable from a real one... He couldn't judge how many people were crouched in gloomy corners of the single room; of the one face he managed to discern, he saw only eyes and teeth. Their dull hungry gleam prompted him to fumble the topmost note off his wad and plant it between the baby's restless feet as he made for the open at a stumbling run. He barely glimpsed all the denizens of the room flinging themselves at the cash.

He'd emerged into more of the market. Only the s.p.a.ce just outside the door was clear. Stall-holders and their few potential customers swivelled their heads on scrawny necks to watch him. They looked as uninviting as the tables, which were strewn with goods like a rummage sale. Here were clothes he and his friends might have packed to slouch in, here were the contents of several bathrooms - shaving kits, deodorants, even unwrapped bars of soap. The stares he was receiving didn't encourage him to dawdle. He set off as fast up the narrow tortuous dusty street as his hung-over legs would bear.

He hoped any rear entrance to the Summit Apartments would be both accessible and open. Though there were alleys between the streets, all were blocked by stalls or vans or refuse. He kept catching sight of the crowd, not including anyone who'd witnessed his difference with the youth. He might have considered dodging through a house to reach his street, but the old people dressed like shadows who were sitting in every open doorway looked worse than inhospitable. At least there weren't many more stalls ahead.

The next offered an a.s.sortment of electrical goods: cameras, camcorders and battery chargers, a couple of personal stereos, whose rhythmic whispers reminded him that before he'd gone to university and after he'd left it as well, his parents had often complained the stereos weren't personal enough. Suddenly he yearned to be home and starting work at the computer warehouse, the best job he'd been able to sell himself to, or even not having come away on holiday with his old friends from school. He glanced past the stall into an alley and saw them.

'Paul,' he shouted, 'Derek,' as their heads bobbed downhill, borne by the sluggish crowd. They'd looked preoccupied, perhaps with finding him. He would have used the alley if the bulk of a van hadn't been parked mere inches short of both walls. 'I'm here,' he yelled, digging the heels of his hands into his chin and his fingertips into the bridge of his nose. 'Over here,' he pleaded at the top of his voice, and Paul turned towards him.

He would have seen Barry if he'd raised his eyes. Having surveyed the crowd between himself and the alley, he said something to Derek that caused him to glance about before vanis.h.i.+ng downhill. The next moment, as Barry sucked in a breath that almost blinded him with the whiteness of the houses, Paul had gone too.

Barry bellowed their names and waved until his finger sprinkled the wall with a Morse phrase in blood. None of this was any use. Members of the crowd scowled along the alley at him while the vendors around him glared at him as if he was somehow giving them away. As he fell silent, the personal stereos renewed their bid for audibility. Wasn't the one at the front of the stall playing his favourite alb.u.m? He could have taken it for the stereo he'd left in the apartment. He reached for the headphones, but the stall-holder, whose leathery face seemed to have been shrivelled in the course of producing an unkempt greyish beard, tapped his arm with a jagged fingernail. 'Buy, you listen,' he said.

Barry had no idea what he was being told, and suddenly no wish to linger. He might have enough of a problem at the apartments, since he hadn't brought a key with him. Best to save his energy in case he needed to persuade the owner to admit him to his room, he thought as he toiled past the final stall. It was heaped with suitcases, three of which reminded him of his and Paul's and Derek's. Of course there must be many like them, which was why he'd wrapped the handle of his case in bright green tape. Indeed, a greenish fragment adhered to the handle of the case that resembled his so much.

As he leaned forward to confirm what he could hardly believe, the stall-holder stepped in front of him. He wore a sack-like garment that hid none of the muscles and veins of his arms. His small dark thoroughly hairy face appeared to have been sun-dried almost to the bone, revealing a few haphazard blackened teeth. His eyes weren't much less pale and cracked and blank than the wall behind him. 'You want?' he said.

'Where'd you get these?'

'Very cheap. Not much use.'

The man was staring so hard at him he could have intended to deny Barry had spoken. Barry was about to repeat himself louder when he heard a faint sound above the awning, and raised his unsteady head to see the owner of the Summit Apartments watching him with a loose lopsided smile from an upper window. 'What do you know about it?' Barry shouted.

If the man responded, it wasn't to him. He addressed at least a sentence to the stall-holder, whose gaze remained fixed on Barry while growing even blanker. Barry was about to retreat downhill in search of his friends when he noticed that the vendors he'd encountered in the lesser market had been drawn by the argument or, to judge by their purposeful lack of expression, by whatever the man at the window had said. 'All right. Forget it. I will,' Barry lied and moved away from them.

At first he only walked. He'd reached the first alley that led to the topmost section of the main market when the owner of the Summit Apartments blocked the far end. Sandalled footsteps clattered after Barry, who almost lost the remains of his balance as he twisted to see the vendors filling the width of the street. An understated trail of blood led through the dust to him. He sprinted then, but so did his pursuers with a clacking of their sandals, and the owner of the apartments managed to arrive at the next alley as he did. Above it there were only houses that scarcely looked ent.i.tled to the name, with rubbish piled against their closed doors, their windows either shuttered or boarded up. A few dizzy panting hundred yards took him beyond them to the top of the hill.

Two policemen were smoking on it. Though he saw nothing to hold their attention, they had their backs to him. Beyond the hill there was very little to the landscape, as if it had put all its effort into the tourist area. It was the colour of sun-bleached bone, and scattered with rubble and the occasional building, more like a chunk of rock with holes in. A few trees seemed hardly to have found the energy to raise themselves, let alone grow green. Closer to the hill, several goats waited to be fed or slaughtered. Barry was vaguely aware of all this as he hurried to the policemen. 'Can you help?' he gasped.

They turned to bristle their moustaches at him. It didn't matter that they were the policemen he'd encountered earlier, he told himself, nor did their sharing a fat amateur cigarette. 'All my stuff is in the market,' he said. 'I know who took it, and not just mine either.'

The officer who'd previously spoken to him held up one large weathered palm. Barry kept going, since the gesture was directed at his pursuers. 'You come,' the man urged him.

Barry had almost reached him when the policemen moved apart, revealing a stout post, a larger version of those to which the goats were tethered. He saw the other officer nod at the small crowd - more than Barry had noticed were behind him. As the realization swung him around, his hands were captured, handcuffed against his spine and hauled up so that the chain could be attached to a rusty hook on the post. 'What are you doing?' Barry felt incredulous enough to waste time asking before he began to shout, partly in the hope that there were tourists close enough to hear him. 'Not me. I haven't done anything. It was him from the Summit. It was them. Don't let them get away.'

The stall-holders from the cheapest region of the market were wandering downhill, leaving the owner of the apartments together with three other people as huge and glistening. The only woman looked pained by Barry's protests or at least the noise of them. The policemen deftly emptied his pockets, and while the man who'd spoken to him in the market pocketed his cash, the other folded the traveller's cheques in half and stuffed them in Barry's mouth. Barry could emit no more than a choked gurgle past the taste of cardboard as the Summit man waddled up to squeeze his chest in both hands and tweak his nipples. 'You nice,' he told Barry as he made way for the others to palpate Barry's shrinking genitals and in the woman's case to emit a motherly sound at his injured finger before sucking it so hard he felt the nail pull away from the quick. All this done, the four began to wave obese wads of money at the policemen and at one another. Barry was struggling both to spit out the gag and to disbelieve what was taking place when he saw three girls appear where the houses gave way to rubble.

The girl in the middle was Janet. Presumably she hadn't been to bed, since she was wearing the same clothes and supporting or being supported by her friends, or both. They looked as if they couldn't quite make out the events on top of the hill. Barry threw himself from side to side and did his utmost to produce a noise that would sound like an appeal for help, but succeeded only in further gagging himself. He saw Janet blink and let go of one of her friends in order to shade her eyes. For an instant she seemed to recognize him. Then she stumbled backwards and grabbed at her companions. The three of them staggered around as one and swayed giggling downhill.

If he could believe anything now, he wanted to think she hadn't really seen him or had failed to understand. He watched the bidding come to an end, and felt as though it concerned someone other than himself or who had ceased to be. The woman plodded to scrutinize him afresh, pinching his face between a fat clammy finger and thumb that drove the gag deeper into his mouth. 'Will do,' she said, separating her wad into halves that the policemen stuffed into their pockets.

While she lumbered downhill the owner of the apartments handed Barry's pa.s.sport to the policeman who had never spoken to him, and who clanked open a hulk of a lighter to melt it. The last flaming sc.r.a.p curled up in the dust as the woman reappeared in a dilapidated truck. The policemen lifted Barry off the post and slung him into the back of the vehicle and slammed the tailgate.

The last he saw of them was their ironic dual salute as the truck jolted away. Sweat and insects swarmed over him while the animal smell of his predecessor occupied his nostrils and the traveller's cheques turned to pulp in his mouth as he was driven into the pitiless voracious land.

No End Of Fun (2002)

You don't mind, do you, Uncle Lionel? I've given you mother's old room."

"Why should I mind anything to do with Dorothy?"

"I expect you've got happy memories like us. Is it all right if Helen sees you up? Only we've got paying guests arriving any minute."

"You really ought to let me pay something towards my keep."

"You mustn't think I meant that. Mother never let you and I'm not about to start. Just keep Helen amused like always and that'll be more than enough. Helen, don't let my uncle lug that case."

"Are you helping with the luggage now, Helen? Will that be a bit much for you?"

"I've done bigger ones."

"That sounds a bit cheeky, doesn't it, Carol? The sort of thing the comics used to say at the Imperial. Is that old place still alive? That can be one of your treats then, Helen."

"Say thank you. Helen, and will you please take up that case. Here are the boarders now."

When the thirteen-year-old thrust her fingers through the handle, Lionel let it go. "You're a treasure," he murmured, but she was apparently too intent on stumping upstairs to give him his usual smile. Remarking "She's a credit to you" brought him no more than a straight-lipped nod from her mother. He had to admit to himself that Helen's new image-all her curls cropped into auburn turf, denim overalls so oversized he would have a.s.sumed they'd been handed down if she'd had an older sibling-had rather startled him. "So how have you been progressing at school?" he said as he caught up with her, and in an attempt to sound less dusty, "You can call me Lionel if you like."

"Mum wouldn't let me."

"Better make it uncle, then, even if it's not quite right. Great-uncle is a mouthful, isn't it, though you liked it one year, didn't you? You said I was the greatest one you had, not that there was any compet.i.tion."

All this, uttered slowly and with pauses inviting but obtaining no responses, brought them to the third floor, where he held onto the banister and regained his breath while Helen preceded him into the room. Dorothy's sheets had been replaced by a duvet as innocently white, but otherwise the place seemed hardly to have changed since her girlhood, when children weren't expected to personalize their rooms: the same hulking oaken wardrobe and chest of drawers she'd inherited at Helen's age along with Dorothy's grandmother's room, the view of boarding-houses boasting of their fullness, the only mirror her grandmother's on the windows!!!. As he stepped into the July sunlight that had gathered like an insubstantial faintly lavender-scented weight in the room, he thought he saw Dorothy in the mirror.

It was Helen, of course. She resembled Dorothy more than Carol ever had- elfin ears, full lower lip, nose as emphatic as an exclamation mark, eyes deep with secrets. As she dumped Lionel's suitcase by the bed, the mirror wobbled with the impact. The oval gla.s.s was supported by two pairs of marble hands, each brace joined at the wrists; the lower of the left hands was missing its little finger. He lurched forward to steady the mirror, and his arm brushed the front of Helen's overalls. He expected the material to yield, and the presence of two plump mounds of flesh came as more than a shock.

She twisted away from him, and her face reappeared in the mirror, grimacing. For a moment it exactly fitted the oval. The sight set his heart racing as though a knot of memories had squeezed it. "Sorry," he mumbled, and "I'll see you at dinner" as she slouched out of the room.

Laying his socks and underwear in Dorothy's chest of drawers and dressing her padded hangers in his s.h.i.+rts and suits made him wonder if that was more intimate than she would have liked. By the time he'd finished he was oppressively hot. He donned the bathrobe that was waiting for him every year and hurried to the attic bathroom, to be confronted by a crowd of Carol's and Helen's tights pegged to a clothesline over the bath as though to demonstrate two stages of growth. Not caring to touch them, he retreated to his room and transferred the mirror to the chest of drawers so as to raise the sash as high as it would wobble. Hours of sunlight had left the marble hands not much less warm than flesh.

He might have imagined he heard the screams of people drowning if he hadn't recognized the waves as the swoops of a roller coaster. Soon he was able to hear the drowsing of the sea. Its long, slow breaths were soothing him when he saw a pa.s.serby remove her topmost head. She'd lifted her small daughter from her shoulders, but the realization came too late to prevent Lionel from remembering a figure that had parted into prancing segments. He lay down hastily and made himself breathe in time with the sea until the summons of the dinner gong resounded through the house.

Even in their early teens he and his cousin had squabbled over who sounded the gong, until Dorothy's mother had kept the task for herself. While it was meant to call only the guests, it reminded him that he didn't know when he was expected for dinner. He was changing, having resprayed his armpits, when a rap at the door arrested him with trousers halfway up his greying thighs. "Would you mind taking dinner with the others?" Carol called. "We're not as organized as mother yet."

"I'd be happy to wait till you have yours."

"We eat on the trot at the moment. You'd be helping."

In the dining room a table in the corner farthest from the window was set for one. All his fellow diners were married couples at least his age. A few bade him a wary good evening, but otherwise none of the muted conversations came anywhere near him. He felt like a teacher attempting to ignore a murmurous cla.s.sroom, not that he ever would have. As soon as he'd finished dinner-thin soup, cold ham and salad, brown bread and b.u.t.ter, a rotund teapot harboring a single bag, a pair of cakes on a stand, everything Dorothy used to serve-he followed Helen into the kitchen. "Would you be terribly upset if we didn't go anywhere tonight?" he said.

"Don't suppose."

"Only driving up from London isn't the picnic it was."

"She wouldn't have been joining you anyway. It's dirty sheet night," Carol said, wrinkling her nose.

He did all the was.h.i.+ng-up he could grab, and would have helped Helen trudge to the machine in the bas.e.m.e.nt with armfuls of bedclothes if Carol hadn't urged him to tell her his news. Now that he'd retired from teaching there wasn't much besides the occasional encounter with an ex-pupil, and so he encouraged Carol to talk. When her patient responses betrayed that she regarded his advice about the mult.i.tude of petty problems she'd inherited with the boarding-house as at best uninformed, he pleaded tiredness and withdrew to his room.

At first exhaustion wouldn't let him sleep. Though he left the window open, the heat insisted on sharing his bed, Dorothy's ever since she was Helen's age. He found himself wis.h.i.+ng he hadn't arrived for the funeral last December too late to see her. "We never said goodbye," he whispered into the pillow and wrapped his arms around himself., covering his flaccid hairy dugs.

He wakened in the middle of the night and also of the heat with the notion that Dorothy had grown an unreasonable number of legs. He raised himself on his elbows to peer sleepily about, and realized she was staring at him. Of course it was her oval photograph, except that there was no picture of her in the room. As he jerked upright he saw her face balanced on the marble hands, crammed into the mirror. She looked outraged, unable to believe her fate.

Lionel s.n.a.t.c.hed at the overhead cord to drag light into the room. The mirror was deserted apart from a patch of wallpaper whose barely discernible pattern gave him the impression of gazing straight through the frame at the wall. When the illusion refused to be dispelled he turned the light off, trying not to feel he'd used it to drive Dorothy into the dark. She was gone wherever everyone would end up, that was all; how could dreaming summon her back? Nevertheless he felt as guilty as the only other time he'd seen her in the mirror.

It had been the year when she'd kept being late for dinner. One evening her mother had sent him to fetch her. He'd swaggered into Dorothy's room without knocking; they'd never knocked at each other's doors. Although it wasn't dark the curtains had been drawn, and at first he'd been unsure what he saw- Dorothy stooping to watch her face in the oval mirror as she'd squeezed her budding b.r.e.a.s.t.s. While she hadn't been naked, her white slip had let the muted light glow between her legs. The smile of pride and quiet astonishment she had been sharing with herself had transformed itself into an accusing glare as she'd caught sight of him in the mirror. "Go away," she'd cried, "this is my room.," as Lionel fled, his entire body pounding like an exposed heart. He hadn't dared venture downstairs until he'd heard her precede him.

The breakfast gong quieted his memories at last. In the bathroom he was relieved to find the tights had flown. He showered away most of his coating of mugginess. and thought he was ready for the day until he opened the kitchen door to hear Carol tell Helen "You're not to go anywhere near him, is that understood?"

Surely she couldn't mean Lionel, but he would have been tempted to sidle out of reach of the idea if she hadn't given him a wink behind Helen's eloquently sulky back. "A boyfriend she's too young to have," she said. "Do you mind sitting where you did again?"

Lionel had hoped they could have breakfast together, but tried to seem happy to head for the dining room. "Morning all," he declared, and when that stirred no more than muted echoes "I'm her uncle, should anyone be wondering."

Did explaining his presence only render it more questionable or suggest he thought it was? He restrained himself from explaining that Carol had divorced her husband once she'd resolved to move in with her aging mother. He made rather shorter work of his breakfast than his innards found ideal so that he could escape to the kitchen. "Are we going for a roam?" he asked Helen as he set about was.h.i.+ng up.

"Too many rooms to change," Carol said at once. "Maybe we can let her out this evening if you can think how to occupy her."

He strolled up to the elongated Victorian garden that was the promenade and clambered down a set of thick hot stone steps to the beach. The sand was beginning to sprout turrets around families who'd staked out their territories with buckets and spades the colors of lollipops. He paced alongside the subdued withdrawn waves until screams rose from the amus.e.m.e.nt park ahead, and then he labored up another block of steps to the Imperial.

The theater was displaying posters for the kind of summer show it always had: comedians, singers, dancers, a magician. It took the mostly blonde girl in the ticket booth some moments to pause her chewing gum and see off a section of her handful of paperback, which was proportionately almost as stout as its reader. When she said "Can I help you?" she sounded close to refusing in advance.

"Could you tell me whether there are any, you won't take offense if I call them dwarfs?"

She met that with a grimace she supplemented by bulging her cheek with her tongue. "Any..."

"Small performers. You know, a troupe of d.i.n.ky fellows. They used to perform here when I was a child. I don't know if you'd have anything like them these days." When she only tongued her cheek more fiercely he grew desperate. "Tiny Tumblers, one lot were called," he insisted. "Squat little chaps."

"The only little people we've got are Miss Merritt's Moppets."

"That's fine, then," Lionel said with an alacrity she appeared to find suspicious. "Any chance of a pair of your best seats for tomorrow night?"

"Best for what?"

For persuading Carol to give Helen an evening off. he hoped: she was working the child harder than Dorothy had ever worked her. "For watching, I should think," he said.

From the theater he wandered inland. Behind the large hotels facing the sea a parallel row of bed and breakfast houses kept to themselves. Victorian shopping arcades led between them to the main street, which was clinging to its elegance. Among the tea shops and extravagant department stores, not a pub nor an amus.e.m.e.nt arcade was to be seen. Crowds of the superannuated were taking all the time they could to progress from one end of the street to the other, while those that were wheeling or being wheeled traversed the wide pavements more slowly still. When Lionel discovered that matching the speed of the walkers made him feel prematurely old, or perhaps not so prematurely, he turned aside into the park that stretched opposite half the shops.

Folding chairs could be hired from a spindly lugubrious youth decorated with a moustache like two transplanted eyebrows. Lionel plumped himself and the swelling that was breakfast onto a chair close to the bandstand. The afternoon concert was preceded by an open-air theater of toddlers on the lawns and secretaries with lunch-boxes, a spectacle he found soporific. By the time the elderly musicians in their dinner jackets a.s.sembled on the bandstand, he was dozing off.

A medley of Viennese waltzes failed to rouse him, as did portions of Mozart and Mendelssohn. He was past being able to raise his head when the orchestra struck up a piece he would have thought too brash to win the applause, much of it gloved, of the pensioned audience. Though he couldn't name the opera responsible, he recognized the music. It was the Dance of the Tumblers. Far from wakening him, it let a memory at him.

A few days after he'd seen Dorothy at the mirror, her mother had taken her and Lionel to the Imperial. She'd made them sit together as if that might crush whatever had come between them, but Dorothy had sat aside from him, knees protruding into the aisle. She had seemed to take half the evening to eat a tub of ice cream, until the sc.r.a.ping of the wooden spoon had started to grate on his nerves. As she'd lifted yet another delicate mouthful to her lips, the master of ceremonies had announced the Tiny Tumblers, and then her spoon had halted in mid-air. Two giant women had waddled onstage from the wings.

He'd never known if Dorothy had cowered against her seat because of their size or from guessing what was imminent. The long-haired square-faced figures had swayed to the footlights before the flowered ankle-length dresses had split open, each of them disgorging a totem-pole composed of three dwarfs in babies' frilly outfits. The dwarfs had sprung from one another's shoulders, leaving the dresses to collapse under the weight of the wigs, and piled down the stairs that flanked the stage. "Who's coming for a tumble?" they'd croaked.

Lionel had felt Dorothy flinch away from the aisle, pressing against him. If she'd asked he would have changed places with her, but he'd thought he sensed how loath she was to touch him after his glimpse in her room. As two dwarfs had scurried towards her, swivelling their blocky heads and widening their eyes, he'd dealt her a covert shove. Her lurch and her squeak had attracted the attention of the foremost dwarf, who'd shambled fast at her. She'd jumped up, spilling ice cream over the lap of her skirt, and fled to the sanctuary of the Ladies'. Her mother had needed to ask Lionel more than once to let her past to follow, he remembered with dismay. Part of him had wanted to find out what would happen if the dwarfs caught his cousin.

He came back to himself before the thought could reach deeper. He'd grown unaware of the music in the park, and now there was only clapping. He was awakened less by the discreet peal than by a sense that his body was about to expel some element it was no longer able to contain. His midriff strained itself up from the chair as the secret escaped him-a protracted vibrant belch that the applause faded just in time to isolate.

He excused himself as quickly and as blindly as he could-he had a childish half-awake notion that if he didn't see he wouldn't be seen either-but not before he glimpsed couples staring as if he'd strayed from the Imperial, which they barely tolerated for its appeal to tourists. Several pensioners on the main street frowned at his excessively boisterous progress, but he was anxious to take refuge in his room. Since Carol and Helen were busy in the kitchen, only shortness of breath delayed him on the stairs. He manhandled the door open and slumped against it, but took just one step towards the bed.

Whoever had tidied up had returned the mirror to the windowsill. It must be himself he could see in the oval gla.s.s, even if the face appeared to recede faster than he stumbled forward. Presumably his having rushed back to the hotel made him see the face dwindle beyond sight, carried helplessly into a blackness that had no basis in the room. He rubbed his eyes hard, and once the fog cleared he saw nothing in the mirror except his own confused face.

The marble hands had stored up warmth. They brought back the touch of flesh, which he'd avoided since losing his parents, not that he'd encountered much of it while they were alive. He planted the hands on the chest of drawers and turned the gla.s.s to the wall, then lay on top of the duvet, trying harder and more unsuccessfully to relax than he ever had after a day's teaching, until the gong sent its vibrations through his nerves.

He didn't eat much. Besides being wary of conjuring another belch, he felt though someone who knew more about him than he realized was observing him. When he took the last of his plates into the kitchen, Carol gave him a hara.s.sed disappointed blink. "Dinner was excellent," he a.s.sured her, though it had been something of a repeat performance of last night's, with cold beef understudying ham. "I'm just not very peckish. I expect I'm too excited at the prospect of a date with my favorite young lady."

"Do you still want to go out with my uncle tonight?"

Helen had kept her back to his comment, but turned with a quick bright smile. "Yes please, Uncle Lionel."

That was more like the girl he remembered. It lasted as far as the street, where he said "Shall we just go for an amble?"

"To the rides."

"Best save those till I've been to the bank."

"I've got some money. If we aren't going to the rides I don't want to go."

He felt as if she knew he'd manufactured his excuse. "It's your treat," he said.

All the way along the promenade he had to remind himself that the screams from the tracks etched high on the gla.s.sy sunset expressed pleasure. The sight beyond the entrance to the amus.e.m.e.nt park of painted horses bobbing like flotsam on an ebb tide provided some relief. He halted by the old roundabout to regain his breath. "Shall we," he said, and "go on here?"

Helen squashed her lower lip flat with its twin. "That's for babies."

He might have retorted that she hadn't seemed to think so last year, but said "What shall it be, then?"

"The Cannonball."

"I thought you didn't care for roller coasters any more than I do."

"That was when I was little. I like it now, and the Plunge of Peril, and Annihilation."

"Will you be awfully offended if I watch?"

"No." The starkness of the word appeared to rouse her pity for him, since she added "You can win me something, Uncle Lionel."

He felt obliged to see her safely onto the roller coaster. Once she was installed in the middle carriage, next to a boy with an increasingly red face and the barest vestige of hair, Lionel headed for the sideshows. Too many of the prizes were composed of puffed-up rubber for his taste-he remembered a pink horse whose midriff had burst between his adolescent legs, dumping him in the sea-but they were out of reach of his skill. He had yet to ring a single bell or cast a quoit onto a hook when Helen indicated she was bound for the Plunge of Peril.