(iii) PRIORITISE END-PRODUCT-RELATED GOALS
The following morning Charlie had yet another early meeting with his solicitor, so he left before anyone else was up. Afterwards he was ambling down Lamsbury High Street back towards his car, worrying about this and that. Worrying mostly, on this occasion, about the council’s announcement that it needed to inspect the Fiddleford water supply (from a private spring. They might choose to declare it illegal), when he was startled by the nearby sound of shattering glass. He looked up to see the greengrocer’s shop window had been smashed and the obvious culprit – a feeble-looking red-headed boy barely in his teens – belting away from the scene of the crime, hurtling blindly along the pavement towards him. Instinctively Charlie stretched out an arm and grabbed him.
‘Fuck you. Leave me a-fuckin’-lone,’ shouted the boy, in a rich West Country accent. He was twisting helplessly. ‘Bloody…fucker! I’ll fuckin’—’
It soon became clear that everybody in Lamsbury knew the boy by name. A crowd very quickly gathered to gloat at his captivity – something, Charlie got the impression, they had been wanting for a long time.
He was standing there holding the boy, wondering what to do next and actually feeling slightly uncomfortable about his role in the proceedings, when a middle-aged man – one of many already mustered around the action
– dashed right through the crowd and skidded to a halt in front of them. ‘Now we’ve got you,’ the man panted happily. ‘And no law here neither.’ At which, and to Charlie’s astonishment, he delivered a fast, efficient thump to the middle of the boy’s face.
The crowd gave a spontaneous cheer.
‘Hey!’ said Charlie. ‘He’s half your size. What the bloody hell do you think you’re doing?’
‘He’s a pain in our backsides and he knows it. Don’t you, Colin Fairwell?’
Next thing Charlie knew, a man from the vandalised greengrocer’s shop had stepped forward to thump the boy again, and once again Lamsbury High Street was voicing its approval.
‘Do that one more time,’ said Charlie, ‘and I’m letting him go.’
‘Anyway I don’t fuckin’ care,’ said Colin Fairwell, smiling defiantly from behind a large bubble of blood. ‘I don’t fuckin’ care about none of you.’ The bubble popped, leaving a scarlet spray across his cheeks and forehead.
‘You’re not allowed down this street, you little bugger. Next time we see you down here, we’re going to belt you ’til there’s not a breath in your puny, pathetic little body, do you hear?’ The man from the greengrocer’s thumped him yet again.
‘Oh no,’ said Charlie sadly, reluctantly doing as he’d promised and letting the boy go. ‘Really. You can’t do that.’
In a flash, before anyone had even thought of recapturing him, the boy had ducked under Charlie’s arm and run for it. They could all hear him laughing as he disappeared around the corner of Market Street, but nobody bothered to go after him. They knew from experience they wouldn’t catch him. Colin Fairwell looked pale and feeble, but he ran very fast.
‘Silly sod!’ shouted a woman with low-slung bosoms. She pulled a can of baked beans out of her shopping trolley and flung it haphazardly after him. But he was long gone. A few people watched as the tin plopped onto the pavement and rolled slowly into the gutter but most of them had already started to wander away. Colin Fairwell’s destructive and apparently motiveless outbursts were a fairly regular feature on Lamsbury High Street. It was his entrapment which had caused so much excitement. By the time the police arrived only Charlie and the greengrocer were left.
‘It’s that bloody Colin Fairwell again,’ said the greengrocer, absently wiping some of Colin’s blood from his thumb knuckle. ‘When’re you goin’ to lock that bugger up and throw away the key?’
The policeman shook his head sympathetically. The boy was a bane on the existence of the entire town. He was forever wandering alone into the shops, randomly knocking over displays and smashing things, and then running away. Nobody knew why he did it.
‘Attention, I shouldn’t wonder,’ said the policeman amiably. ‘’Is mum’s a nutter, in’t she, David? In ’n’ out o’ the nut’ouse, poor ol’ thing. And God knows where ’is dad is.’
‘Bein’ frank with you, Carl, I’m not one of these ones ’oo cares too much why someone’s doin’ somethin’.’
‘I know you aren’t, David.’
‘I’m more interested in gettin’ the little buggers to stop. He should be scared, walking down here. But he’s not, Carl. That’s what’s so strange. The more we ’ave a go at ’im the worse he seems to get. And we all do, mind. We all ’ave a go.’
‘I know you do, David. I know.’
‘We don’t put up with ’im down ’ere. Anyone catches sightin’ on ’im, we’re after ’im. We ’ad Margaret throwin’ her beans at ’im this afternoon.’ David shook his head in bewilderment. ‘But he just gets worse…’
The boy was cowering behind the van next to Charlie’s car when he next encountered him. His face and clothes were covered in blood and across his cheeks his tear tracks were outlined in red. He was sitting on his haunches, scribbling with a stone on the tarmac around his feet and he looked so small, huddled up like that, Charlie wouldn’t have noticed him if it hadn’t been for the muttering.
‘Colin Fairwell?’ said Charlie, looming over him. ‘We meet again.’
Colin Fairwell’s head shot up. ‘How d’you know my name?’
‘Everybody knows your name,’ said Charlie. ‘Everybody in Lamsbury. You heard them. They want to lock you up and throw away the key.’
The boy turned back to the marks he was making on the tarmac. ‘So why d’you let me go then?’
‘I didn’t like the way they were bashing you.’
‘Did you like the way I was bashing the shop window?’
‘Don’t be silly.’ Charlie hesitated. He wasn’t sure what to do next. What he wanted to do was to go back to Fiddleford and set to work on a ruse to keep the water inspectors at bay. He wanted to talk to Mr Gunner about the fishing licences, and, more urgently, he needed to talk to Jo (preferably without Grey or the General present) about how quickly she could rope in more paying guests. But the boy looked so pathetic crouching there: wretched and friendless and bloodstained. With a mother in the nuthouse. And a streetful of angry shopkeepers waiting to beat him up if he ventured out of the car park again. Charlie couldn’t quite bring himself to walk away.
‘Look, er—’ he said irritably, making a point of examining his watch. ‘D’you want a lift somewhere? I’m going out towards Fiddleford, if you know where that is…I can drop you off at your – mother’s. Place. Or something. Is she there? I can drop you off at home if you want. Where do you live?’
‘No thanks,’ Colin said drearily.
‘What’re you going to do then?’
The boy shrugged.
‘Well, come on, buck up,’ said Charlie. ‘What’re you going to do? You can’t sit here muttering to yourself all afternoon. And you certainly can’t go back out that way…’ He indicated the car park’s only exit, which led directly onto the High Street. ‘Shall I drop you off at school, perhaps?’
The boy laughed suddenly, a blast of genuine mirth which took Charlie by surprise. ‘I’m better on Lamsbury High Street, thank you very much,’ he said. ‘But you can take me down Fiddleford if you like.’
‘I don’t like.