“Where are we going?” Harriet demands.
“It’s your convent,” Edie replies.
“This goes to… the kitchen garden.”
“That’s what I thought, yes.”
“There’s no way out. The garden is walled off, and there’s no gate.”
“There will be shortly.”
“What?”
Edie Banister doesn’t answer—she just cocks her head in a way which states eloquently that answers are a luxury and time is pressing, and nuns are supposed to be a bit more placid and a bit less lippy.
Harriet nods. Joe has never seen her cave in so quickly, and suspects that in Edie Banister he is in the presence of a master. Mind you, the eyeless dog is an unfair advantage; the potty-old-bat equivalent of a nuclear bomb.
That his mother’s acquiescence might have something to do with the danger he personally is in, or that this must be weirdly familiar to her from half a dozen heady escapes with his father back in the day, occurs to him only as they reach the foot of the stairs.
The garden door is a bit rotted and decrepit. A large selection of wellington boots, in various sizes for assorted nuns, stands arrayed along the wall. Bastion whiffles curiously at the enticing smell, and there is a noise behind them like a hydraulic press: a very soft, very powerful sound of escaping air.
There is a Ruskinite one flight up. He has jumped or fallen from the fourth floor and landed on his feet. His arms are spread as if ready to grasp something, and his head is rocking to and fro on his shoulders as if he is sniffing. A second later, Joe actually sees another one slump ungracefully through the air like an empty sack and land next to the first. It seems to hit the ground all at once, as if it is just a bundle of clothes with sticks inside, but seconds later it’s upright, rolling its shoulders and briefly touching the first one in a strange, physical recognition. Not a human gesture at all; arachnoid, or lizardy. Then both of them spread their arms in that same wrestler’s crouch, and their heads turn towards him. In unison, they lurch for the stairs.
Edie Banister grasps Joe by the hand and hauls him bodily out into the garden. Harriet is a few steps ahead, but going slowly even at full stretch. He lifts her as he catches up, and is nearly rewarded with a bony elbow in the eye for his trouble before she realises who he is. Edie nods approvingly and skitters past, spry as a sheepdog. Joe glances back and sees the Ruskinites coming out of the door, virtually on top of one another. They stop still, and a moment later are joined by a third. They touch again, that same strange spiderhug and bob, and then spring forward, fast, strong, and eerily silent. He jerks Harriet up onto his chest and runs like hell.
The garden at Samson At The Temple is a retreat within a retreat, a twisting, mazelike place of concealed meditation spots and beds of roses, dead ends and alcoves. It’s a place where a girl can get away from all the noise of a dozen Trappists playing ping-pong and appreciate the wonder of the creation. Edie Banister ducks down into a sunken garden, through and out the other side, doubles back along an avenue of laurel and then through a narrow gap behind a greenhouse and in front of a potting shed. Always, always, she is heading for the outer wall. Always, she puts turns and forks between them and their pursuers, forces the enemy to guess, to hesitate. When Joe pauses to catch his breath and look over his shoulder, she grabs him again, draws him on up another laurel path, this one winding and wild, and suddenly they’re hard against the back wall, high red brick topped with unchristian spikes, three-pointed stars on an axle, sharp-edged and aggressively private.
She hands the dog to Harriet and dips her hand into her bag, then slaps a small Tupperware box against the wall. It sticks.
“Come on,” she says, ducking behind a small stone chapel, and when Joe hesitates, she slaps him on the back of his head to get his attention and takes advantage of his utter amazement to get him where she wants him. As he ducks, he sees with horror the Ruskinite hunters surge through the laurel bushes, huge black shapes swooping and lunging, appallingly boneless. They wheel around one another, then jointly focus their attention on the chapel. The nearest one takes a loping step forward. Edie pulls Joe down and sticks her fingers in her ears.
The world is a bass drum, and the conductor has just given the percussionist the biggest nod of his career.
The sky is white.
Joe’s nose is bleeding. There’s dust in his eyes.
When he looks around the corner, the outer wall is gone. So are the Ruskinites. In their place, a crater, black and charred, and the smell of phosphorus and saltpetre, Guy Fawkes Night come early.
“Home-made,” Edie Banister says happily, a soon-to-be-novagenarian with a bad attitude and a fine knowledge of exothermic reactions. “I think I may have over-egged the nitro and gone a bit heavy on the toluene. However, nothing succeeds like excess, ey?”
The garden of Samson At The Temple is breached.
They make it as far as the car Edie Banister has stolen. Team Spork—Harriet and Joe and their new friend—are making the escape of the decade, a corker in the annals of derring-do with added points for age, infirmity and spontaneity. Edie considers the thing something of a masterclass, and hopes someone, somewhere, will take note and teach it to the young. Classics in survival, evasion, resistance and escape: the Banister Exemplar.
And then, from nowhere, the street is filled with skittering, scuttling figures, ragged in their shrouding black, like a plague of spiders. They pour through the doors of surrounding houses and out of parked cars, five, ten, twenty, a myriad bobbing heads and grasping hands. Joe Spork stares at them, takes a step forward in front of Harriet and Edie, and sees them all, every last one, turn their eyes to him. He freezes under their gaze. He can feel the spotlights and the great salvo of bullets, the awful splink as his heart ruptures. He sways. The Ruskinites rush forward.
The first wave tries to grab Harriet, but Edie Banister menaces them with her trusty side arm and they fade away, parting in the line of fire. The second wave approaches from the north and seeks to cut them off from the car, a ghostly interdictory line. Joe recovers himself enough to raise his arms to a sort of fighting posture and forces them to reckon with him. They hesitate and draw back, but before he can be pleasantly surprised, wave three cuts across perpendicular to wave two and sweeps him up and away, iron-banded fingers and corded muscle clamping down on his limbs and lifting him into the back of a van. Behind him, he can see his mother’s placid face turn rapidly to something like a figure from a nightmare, a sudden flash of fury such as he has never seen on her, and she hurtles forward and clutches at the van, screaming like a banshee and demanding him back, give him back, he’s not yours, he’s my son.
Joe Spork struggles, like Gulliver beset by tiny men. They have him in a grip at every corner, and all he can manage now is a sort of billowing. On the other hand, if he can get a hand free he can do some damage. He twists, and feels the grip on one wrist slacken. It hurts, but he does it again, and again, and the vise skids over his arteries, tearing away some skin, and that hand is free.
What’s soft?
Eyes are soft. Throats. Noses and lips. Genitals, too, but many layers of linen make them hard to find, and men and women both learn early to move those parts fast.
He rips at someone’s face, feels flesh and eyes under the cowl, hears a cry, feels them reel away, sees someone guided forward, wide-shouldered and heavy on his feet. A blind wrestler? He rips again at this new enemy, and the Ruskinite slaps at his hand, hard. It hurts, the way it hurts to bang your shin on a glass table. He doesn’t care, reaches again. Come on, then! Let’s go! Let’s do this. Come on, you bastard. He is clinging to the man now, feeling huge, solid limbs, his fingers seeking soft parts, vulnerable flesh. A black linen mask tears free, and he shouts with fierce delight, then feels the war cry freeze in his mouth.