‘Right! Warm-up time, you lot,’ cried Brian in a rushy, foolish voice. He started running on the spot, shaking his arms and legs about and rolling his head.
Denzil stood in front of Edie Carter, straddled his legs and mimed playing a guitar, rhythmically thrusting his pelvis into her face. Sluggishly two of the others got up. Collar, so called because he could not bear anything touching his neck, started shadow boxing. Little Boreham, weedily hopeless but dressed like an Olympic athlete, did a few shallow and uncertain press-ups.
Edie and her brother continued to sit, back to back, like a pair of exquisitely carved, beautifully decorated bookends. In profile their faces appeared almost identical (they were born on the same day) but Tom’s jaw was a little more prominent and heavier. They had long, thick, curling hair the colour of marmalade, exquisitely shaped noses and high, marbly-white foreheads like the children in Tudor paintings.
Brian looked forward eagerly each day to his first sighting of the Carter twins, for they constantly re-styled and re-invented themselves and never looked the same twice. Their dazzling skins, thick and smooth like cream, seemed, like blank canvases, to be crying out for decoration. They dressed, as small children would if left to themselves, in an assortment of unrelated finery. Today Edie wore a foamy scarlet RaRa topped with shreds of silk and lace and a banana-coloured sweat shirt full of holes. Tom was in jeans resembling pale blue shredded wheat and an American Repro jacket stencilled with midnight hags and burning cities and comic-book expletives.
‘Come on you two,’ called Brian.
Edie parted her rich carnation lips, flickered out her tongue, drew it in again. And smiled. Brian turned quickly away and began shadow boxing with Collar, much to the latter’s resentment.
When the group had first been formed Brian, very heavily into non-verbal communication, had encouraged everyone to sit around in a circle holding hands with their eyes closed. Next had come various physical exercises leading to a full class workout. These had been discontinued when Brian, wrestling on the floor with Collar, had accidentally touched his neck, receiving in return a clout across the ear that had made his head fizz for a week.
‘OK. Gather round, earthlings.’
Brian sat down in a single but rapidly accelerating movement. The twins turned towards him and smiled. Brian, faint with excitement and desire, smiled back. He could never decide which was the more beautiful, for he was equally besotted with them both.
‘Now,’ he said briskly, ‘where had we got to last week?’
No one remembered. Brian held the pause, nodding interrogatively at them all in turn for all the world, as Collar said afterwards, like the daft dog in the back of his mum’s Escort.
‘Was it ...’ Boreham puckered his brow, ‘the bit where Denzil went down the Social and got in that fight with a Paki?’
‘No,’ said Brian shortly. He was keenly aware of the ethnic imbalance in his group and had tried in vain to remedy the matter. No non-white person was interested in joining, possibly because of Denzil, who could be seen every Saturday in Causton High Street enthusiastically selling the British Nationalist Magazine on behalf of the BNP.
‘That were good. We could do that one again.’
‘No, we couldn’t.’ Brian was beginning to feel depressed. All the improvisations, no matter how pacific their inception, quickly became confrontational. Everyone it seemed loved rows and while there was no doubt that they were good theatre even Brian, inexperienced director/devisor that he was, could see that each violent highlight needed to be cushioned by a tranquil low light if the whole thing wasn’t going to explode in everyone’s faces.
‘I remember.’ Edie swivelled to face him, legs apart, elbows resting on her knees. ‘My bit I mean. From last week.’
‘She remembers, Bri,’ said Tom, taking pride. He winked, lowering an eyelid brilliantly adorned with red and blue flowers. Brian had long been agitatedly concerned over Tom’s eyelids. As far as he could see the pattern never varied by as much as a petal’s fall. The vivid colours were never smudged. The thought had struck him once that the lids might be tattooed, that this was some test of high machismo that only the greatly brave essayed. He’d never had the nerve to ask.
‘Excellent. So what was the situation? Listen everyone.’ Brian clapped his hands.
‘I were this woman that got really mad at her husband.’
‘And do you remember why, Edie?’
‘Yeah. ’Cause he were married to me and knocking somebody else about.’
‘Ah.’
‘So I go: “Eat shit, scumbag. Piss off to the fat old slag. See if I care. And take your stinking dog with you.” He had this pit bull, y’see.’
‘Bor could be the dog,’ said Collar.
‘Bloody ain’t.’ The royal-blue track suit rolled into a tight ball, like a hedgehog.
‘He’s little enough,’ Denzil grinned. ‘Trouble is, he’d never bite anybody. ’Cause he’s chicken - aincha, Bor?’
‘No!’ Boreham screwed up his eyes and folded his arms around his head.
‘Chicken ... chicken. Kwaa ... kwaa ...’ Denzil and Collar began to walk around, arms winged, moving in sharp, quick little jerks. Cast down glances darted everywhere. Feet, booted and sneakered, were slowly lifted and put down again with splayed out, finicky precision. It was very funny and, considering their sole experience of the real thing had been via Iceland’s frozen-food cabinet, amazingly accurate.
Brian hugged himself, rocking backwards and forwards on his non-existent bottom at these inventive and exuberant ad hoc measures. Then Denzil pecked Collar, who flapped his arms wildly in response and started to run about in all directions, squawking loudly.
Brian climbed wearily to his feet. Clapping his hands yet again and with much the same effect, he called: ‘OK. Kill the impro. That’s enough.’
Plainly it was not. The fowl play continued. Boreham, seeing his teasing compatriots were safely engaged elsewhere, decided after all to occupy the role of pit bull. He ran on all fours to where Brian was standing and started savaging his trousers.
‘Stop that, Boreham.’ Then, thinking a jovial note might restore the status quo, ‘Down boy!’ Little Bor lifted his leg.
Tom and Edie sat, unnaturally still and self-contained, watching. There was something about the quality of their attention, as they took in Brian’s dilemma, that disturbed him. He sensed both pity and relish, in which he was half right.
‘Everyone? Listen ...’ He put a friendly chuckle into the words. Bor, encouraged, gave an extra matey nudge and Brian crashed to the floor.
At this point the swing door was pushed open and Miss Panter, the head’s secretary, showed in two men. One, tall and heavily built, wore a tweed overcoat. The second, slim as a whip, was wrapped in black leather. Only Brian did not recognise the intruders immediately for what they were.
‘Mr Clapton?’
‘Yes.’
The older man came over and showed Brian a card with a photograph on. ‘Chief Inspector Barnaby, Causton CID. We’d like a word, please.’
‘Of course.’ Brian scrambled up awkwardly. ‘What about?’
‘In private.’
The younger man held the door open and Brian followed them out, unaware that his stock had just zoomed from rock bottom to something approaching gilt-edged.
They walked briskly towards the headmaster’s office, Brian, who happened to be in the middle, with the air of a squaddie being escorted to the jail house.