Saville by David Storey Page B

father worked mornings now and got up like Mr Shaw next door, though an hour sooner because of the ride. Sometimes when he came home from school he found his motherin bed, white-faced, her cheeks sunken, his father busy in the kitchen with a brush, or washing-up.
    ‘It’s all this getting up at night to feed him,’ he would say. ‘She’ll be all right once he settles.’
    ‘Can I go out?’ he would ask him.
    ‘Yes,’ he’d say. ‘Just clear this bit up first.’
    In the hut, when Batty wasn’t there, he usually found Stringer. He was Batty’s deputy: he was small and squat with black hair, and whenever they were alone he would sit in the armchair normally reserved for Batty and bite his nails, gazing with an abstracted look at the glow of an old oil lamp, which stood on a table immediately inside the door and, on hearing the slightest noise outside, rushing for his gun which he always brought with him.
    It was an air-gun Batty himself had given him and which, once he was in the hut, he fired at anything that moved. One night by mistake he had fired at his own father, who had come to fetch him, a man as squat and as black as Stringer himself. Mr Stringer had taken the gun from his son, bent it in two, first one way then the other, then finally wrenched the halves apart. The next day, however, Batty had provided Stringer with another. ‘I’m glad he broke it,’ Stringer said. ‘That o’d ’un wasn’t any good.’ Outside the door he would hang up the birds he had shot, their feet strung up to a rafter, the blood collecting in beads around their beaks and eyes.
    Stringer didn’t like the hut a great deal. But for Batty he would gladly have moved it to another spot. There was always the smell of the gasworks lying there, mingling with the smell of the sewage pens. ‘The pong’s all right,’ Batty told him whenever he complained. ‘I picked it because of that. It’s a good defence.’ Beyond the sewage pens were the swamps. Tall reeds obliterated the view in every direction. If anyone entered they had to walk on the piles of bricks and sods of earth that at some time in the past Batty had placed there. Amongst the bulrushes were still, brown pools about which Batty had invented stories. Into them bodies had fallen never to be retrieved. They had no bottoms. They opened out directly into the centre of the earth. It was here that Stringer hunted for rats, hanging them up by their tails along with the birds he had shot.
    Once or twice, when Stringer was busy elsewhere, Colin would be left on his own in the hut. He would light the lamp and sit in Batty’s chair, the door barred, one of the windows which were normally shuttered open so that he could see anyone approaching along the path.
    There was a small stove in the hut on which Batty made cocoa or cooked chips in a broken pan. On the walls hung bows and arrows, the arrows tipped with rusty wire. There was also a cupboard which Batty kept locked and inside which he kept his secret possessions – a rope with a noose on the end, a tin called his ‘In-it’ tin, for no one knew what was inside, and a hammer.
    It gave Colin a dull ache to sit alone in the hut, looking round at the wooden walls and the weapons, listening anxiously for any sound or signal from outside. Often he was glad even to see Stringer.
    ‘What do you come down here for?’ Stringer would ask him: there were two or three years difference between their ages.
    ‘To look after it,’ he would tell him.
    ‘I mean,’ Stringer would say, ‘why do you come so much?’
    ‘I don’t mind,’ he said.
    ‘Not even the pong?’
    ‘No,’ he said.
    Sometimes he would add, ‘In any case, there might be an attack.’
    ‘Aye,’ Stringer would say, looking at him slyly.
    An attack was what Batty most longed for. It was in anticipation of an attack that all his weapons and the various booby traps outside had been prepared. The latter were a series of deep holes covered by grass that they had to