Anyhow, Tosher strapped his tool haversack on his back, slung one end of the pulley system over his shoulder, and stepped out onto the upper story of the doomed building. I climbed out the back of my cab into the helicart platform and set up the other end of the pulley tackle. By that means, we transfer the booty into our flying pantechnicon.
Then I sat back, lit a mescahale, and waited for Tosher to reconnoiter and do his stuff. I forgot to tell you why we call him Tosher Ten-Toes.
It started as a joke. The war had hardly begun, nine years ago, when Tosher appeared near my house in a dazed condition. Nothing on but pants and vest and half a shirt; barefoot. Speechless. Total amnesia. There were a lot of poor devils about like that when the raids started. I was short of hands in the yard at the time; my missus and I took Tosher in and looked after him. Tosher Ten-Toes was what the kids called him. You know what kids are: they think it’s funny to see a man walk barefoot down Portobello Street.
Tosher began to get better. I got busier as the raids increased. In no time, he was off the yard and working second man in the helicarts. Now for the last four years he was my right-hand man. He might not have had a lot to say, but I wouldn’t have changed him for all the you-know-what in China. He still did not know who he was, but that began to trouble him less and less. Nothing of the old days had come back to him, except the memory of Judy. Not that Tosher knew who Judy was, it was just that he used to wake up in the night crying her name. He was faithful to her name, wouldn’t look at another woman, not even at Kate, who often looked at him.
Fixing up his end of the pulley, he stood and surveyed the ruined jigsaw. It was in a poor way. Half of it had been sliced into dust, and the foundations were undermined. Spreading his legs, Tosher began to rock from side to side; as he gained momentum, the building began to rock from side to side with him. He killed the motion at once. “Thank heaven there’s no wind about,” he said to himself.
He was standing in what had been till a few hours ago an attic box-room. Against the inner wall, four empty trunks were piled. Without bothering to use the pulley system, he threw them over into the hold of the helicart. Nobody had the raw materials to waste on making trunks now; they were scarce and would be worth about six hundred apiece.
Without wasting any time, but moving cautiously, he went to the door and opened it. Outside were stairs, winding down to the floor below. A quarter way down, just past the first bend, the outer wall had been blasted away, leaving the stairs sagging over emptiness. Stepping carefully on the inside of the treads, Tosher came down onto the next floor.
All the walls on the landing were intact—curtains undisturbed round the landing window, just a little white dust over the ornament on the sill. No doubt Tosher felt that feeling you always feel, that you’ve no right to be there, that you’re an intruder, or a burglar, or perhaps a vulture, or a ghost.
Ahead of him, a notice on a door said “Flat 26.” The door was locked. Tosher brought out a bunch of skeleton keys, undid it, and went in.
He was in a living room. Everything was perfectly intact. It was the usual sort of middle-class flat; we deal with them by the dozen. Tosher made a rapid inventory of the salable items: stove, TV, tape player, carpet, newish suite, clock, nice little china figure. The rest of the stuff, the paperbacks, yesterday’s newspaper, the pictures on the wall, a big golliwog slumped over the arm of a chair, would tumble with the jigsaw when the demolition men took over. Later, maybe, kids would crawl over the rubble and pull a comic or a little toy out of it.
“Something like twenty-five thousand credits here,” Tosher estimated, jotting the figure down and opening the next door.
He was in the bathroom. It was a nice, roomy bathroom with green tiles all round it and a deep ebony bath and pink and yellow towels on towel rails and a great big airing cupboard. You know. A bit Ritzy. The sort of place that makes you hanker after a bath yourself. One wall had entirely fallen away. Tosher walked to the edge of the precipice and looked down. The bathroom protruded over space, with only the breezes for support. Obviously, he need not waste much time there.
And then, the way I see it, something came over Tosher. Perhaps he suddenly saw in that bathroom the complete futility of war. He thought of everyone who had been killed, from Vic Shepherd, the great comedian, to the lowliest unknown; he thought even of Norton Sykes, the minister they called The Man Who Started It All, whose hideout had ironically been the first to be destroyed in the war he began —perhaps even of my sister Kate, who at one time set out in a practical way to get Judy out of Tosher’s mind and later was killed by a Winged Wallaby, so-called.
Tosher must have seen it all in that bathroom: the way in war you’re busy doing something ordinary one minute and the next—bingo!—you’re in Kingdom Come. Norton Sykes crouching over his battle plans or my sister Kate hanging out her smalls—when the time comes, they all go like that. That’s how it had been in the bathroom too. A nice place and a nice life spoilt forever.
The little glass shelf over the wash basin was cluttered with powder tins, shaving tackle, tooth brushes, and other paraphernalia. On the stool next to the black bath were a child’s pajamas. There was water in the bath; on the water floated a becalmed yacht and two rubber ducks.
It all told its own story. Death comes at bedtime—it sounds like the title of a cheap novel. Everything there looked perfectly in order, except that the big airing-cup-board door was partly open and a woolly bath towel had fallen out; and a tooth glass had teetered off the shelf and shattered in the wash basin. But with the outer wall gone, all those indoor objects looked unreal in the outdoor lighting, as if they were something on a tele or a movie set.
Then Tosher saw another detail. On the edge of the lino, by the sheer drop, was a bloody hand print. The fingers pointed into the room. The print was smudged where the hand had slid over the edge and into the gulf. It had been just a small hand. “My God!” Tosher said.
You could picture it all. Mother about to bath son. Water in the bath and everything. “I think I’d better wash your hair tonight, dear.” Then the Depressors pulling out of their two-hundred-mile dive and screeching off, leaving their suitcases behind. The detonation, and the wall whipped away like a curtain. Blast probably sucked mother out with the wall. Son was bowled to the brink of the ninety-foot drop. He was injured. For a minute he clung there, body dangling in air, perhaps not even struggling to get back to safety.
He hung there and looked at the old order, the soft, warm towels, his little pajamas, the steam rising from the tub. Then he had to let go.
Tosher turned wildly. He began cursing aloud. He cursed the war that killed the kid and blotted out Judy and his own past; he cursed Norton Sykes, who started the war; he cursed the generals who continued the war; he even cursed me, who made a profit out of the war. Then he cursed himself most of all.
He wrenched a crowbar out of his kit and smashed the mirror on the wall so that he could no longer see his own distorted face. He flicked the plug out of the bath; the water gurgled out, splashing over a piano standing forlornly on a ledge which had once been the floor below. Then he hurled the crowbar away.
He watched the metal glint as it fell lazily over and over, finally to strike the pavement far below; and when he turned back, the towel by the cupboard door was moving.
For a minute Tosher did not understand. Then the towel was dragged aside. A woman was there on the floor, on her hands and knees. Clutching the door, she stood up. She was in her early forties, disheveled, still with a waterproof apron tied round her middle. It was the boy’s mother. The blast, flinging her into the airing cupboard, had knocked her senseless, and there she had lain till the row Tosher made had roused her.