Besides swinging the heavy belt in a highly dangerous manner Cowan used an unpredictable skill, not without its own vicious grace, in getting inside the range of Turnbull’s equally heavy belt and endeavouring to kick his opponent in the testicles.
In one of those attempts he lost his balance, the belt arched from his hand, and he fell unarmed to the ground. The recoil of evasive action brought Turnbull over his prostrate foe. Naturally he kicked him. Then things happened so quickly Mr Alfred was never quite sure what he saw.
It appeared that Gerald Provan moved out of the mob behind Turnbull, raised his knee swiftly in a politic nudge, sent Turnbull sprawling beside Cowan. The two fighters scrambled up clinching. They wrestled into the crowd, and the crowd pushed them back into the ring. In that surge and sway Gerald Provan thrust a knife into Cowan’s hand and then shoved him off to continue the duel.
At that point Mr Alfred broke out of his paralysis. Partly he had been curious to see just what the two boys would do, partly he was afraid of raising his voice too soon and not being heard above the howling of the fans. But when it was seen that Cowan had a knife there was a breathless hush in the lane that night and Mr Alfred knew his moment was come. Cowan lunged, Turnbull dodged, and Mr Alfred spoke out loud and clear.
‘Stop that!’
His voice scattered most of the onlookers. They had no wish to be involved. Turnbull froze. Cowan threw the knife away and with coincident speed dissolved into the melting crowd. Provan tried to make a quick getaway by diving behind Mr Alfred. It was a blunder. Mr Alfred caught him on the turn and held him by the collar. Gerald wriggled.
‘Hey, mind ma jacket, you! Ma clothes cost good money, no’ like yours.’
Mr Alfred shook him and threw him away.
‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ he said.
He saw the knife lying on top of a docken on the margin of the arena. He picked it up and put it in his pocket. He thought it was evidence.
CHAPTER EIGHT
It must not be supposed that the boys and girls gathered in the Weavers Lane that night were a fair representation of the pupils attending Collinsburn Comprehensive, the only school in Tordoch for post-primary education. Collinsburn was a local place-name, derived from the legend that a stream once ran through that part of Tordoch formerly owned by a Collins family whose members, like the vanished burn, had long gone underground. As a comprehensive school Collinsburn harboured all kinds and ages (mental and chronological). So while Mr Alfred was shaking Gerald Provan, Graeme Roy was sitting with Martha Weipers in Ianello’s cafe round the corner from the main road. It was a roomy, almost barnlike place, that sold cigarettes and sweets and ices and offered half-a- dozen stalls where the young ones could sit with a coffee or a coke and criticise the world.
Graeme Roy was eighteen, in his last year at school. Martha was a year younger and not as clever as he was. At least, that’s what she thought. She even found pleasure in believing it. They should have gone straight home, but they had got into the habit of using Ianello’s for half-an-hour.
They were under parental orders to stop meeting. Their daily sessions in the cafe after school gave them the satisfaction of at once obeying and ignoring the order. They no longer met in the evenings, so they were obedient. But they still managed to meet for a little while on the way home, so they evaded the full severity of the law.
She was the poor one, the eldest of seven, a bricklayer’s daughter. He was an only son and well-off, a handsome youth. He had a driving licence and a car of his own. He used to take Martha out for a run in the summer evenings after the exams were over. When the quartet of parents found out what was going on they slammed down hard on the pair of them. Graeme’s folks had never thought he was taking a girl out when he used his car, and Martha’s had no idea she had a rich boyfriend. Nasty suspicions were aroused, some accusations were made that hurt and even shocked them, and then the forthright veto was proclaimed. Without collusion, without ever meeting, the two sets of parents reacted in the same way and came to the same conclusion. His parents said only a girl with no self-respect would accept an invitation to go out alone with a boy in his car. Her parents said no decent right-thinking boy would ask a girl to come out alone with him in his car. Unless of course, both sides conceded independently, the boy and girl were engaged. Which would be absurd at their age. Further meetings, with or without the car, were bilaterally banned. It was for their own good their parents said.
‘They try to tell us we’re too young,’ he said.
‘That’s how they see it,’ she said. She was a fairminded girl. ‘They’re so old. My dad’s nearly forty.’
‘But that’s not the real reason,’ he said. ‘It’s my mother. I hate to say it. But she’s an awful snob. She thinks because your father works with his hands I shouldn’t talk to you. I told her a surgeon works with his hands, but she wouldn’t listen.’
‘My dad’s the same,’ she said. ‘He won’t listen. He thinks if folks are well-off they must be on the fiddle. Because your father’s got a car and could buy you one too my dad’s sure he’s a crook.’
‘Oh, my father’s honest enough,’ he said. ‘He wouldn’t cheat anybody.’
‘My dad would cheat anybody for five bob,’ she said. ‘For all his supposed principles. That’s the funny thing.’
‘My dad wouldn’t,’ he said. ‘But then five bob’s nothing to him. It’s my mother’s the trouble. She’s hard. A lot harder than my father. It’s my mother I blame.’
‘My mother doesn’t count in our house,’ she said, and added with a young laugh, ‘and she doesn’t read either.’
He smiled. He was happy. He liked to see her laugh when she was with him. He didn’t like it when he saw her laugh in any other company.
They got on well. They never had any difficulty talking.
There were never any silences. They tore their parents to bits, and put the bits together again with the quick adhesive of filial tolerance. They were two earnest adolescents, able to vary their solemn dialogue with a private joke. They had the same liking for the depreciatory aside, the same bias on current affairs, the same cynical tone when they talked about their teachers. Never before, in all their long experience, had they felt such affinity with anyone else.
The first time she met him he liked her. It was at the inaugural meeting of the Debating Society. Mr Briggs had started it with a view to entering a team in an annual inter- schools debate. There was a big silver cup for the winning school and a plaque for the runners-up, and he thought either would look rather well beside the football trophies in the display cabinet at the Main Entrance. Maisie Munro, a beaming jumbo of a girl with glasses, who lived near Graeme, introduced them. She was a prefect in Martha’s class.
‘This is Graeme,’ she said. ‘You know, the famous Roy.’
He was famous at that time because he had scored a goal that put Collinsburn into the semi-final of the City Cup, but Martha didn’t know that. She had no interest in football.
‘Tell me,’ she said when Maisie left them stuck alone together in a corner, ‘is your name Graham Roy or Roy Graham?’
‘Not Graham,’ he said. ‘Graeme.’
He made one syllable where she made two. Her speech was looser than his. She was more Scotch, he was more anglified. She was apt to say fillim for film, to make no distinction between hire and higher. She could even insert a neutral vowel between the two consonants at the end of warm and learn and such words. It was the way she trilled the r made her do it. Sometimes it offended his ear, but his heart didn’t mind.
‘Graeme,’ he repeated to her stare. ‘Not Graham.’
‘However you say it,’ she retorted, ‘you still haven’t said if it’s your first name or your second.’
She wasn’t put out by his correction. Far from