On Sunday morning all were punctual except Blackie, even Mike. Mike had
had a stroke of luck. His mother felt ill, his father was tired after Saturday
night, and he was told to go to church alone with many warnings of what
would happen if he strayed. Blackie had had difficulty in smuggling out the
saw, and then in finding the sledgehammer at the back of number 15. He
approached the house from a lane at the rear of the garden, for fear of the
policeman’s beat along the main road. The tired evergreens kept off a stormy
sun: Another wet Bank Holiday was being prepared over the Atlantic,
beginning in swirls of dust under the trees. Blackie climbed the wall into
Misery’s garden.
There was no sign of anybody anywhere. The loo stood like a tomb in a
neglected graveyard. The curtains were drawn. The house slept. Blackie
lumbered nearer with the saw and the sledgehammer. Perhaps after all
nobody had turned up: The plan had been a wild invention: They had woken
wiser. But when he came close to the back door he could hear a confusion of
sound, hardly louder than a hive in swarm: a clickety-clack, a bang bang
bang, a scraping, a creaking, a sudden painful crack. He thought, It’s true,
and whistled.
They opened the back door to him and he came in. He had at once the
impression of organization, very different from the old happy-go-lucky ways
under his leadership. For a while he wandered up and down stairs looking for
T. Nobody addressed him: He had a sense of great urgency, and already he
could begin to see the plan. The interior of the house was being carefully
demolished without touching the outer walls. Summers with hammer and
chisel was ripping out the skirting-boards in the ground floor dining room:
He had already smashed the panels of the door. In the same room Joe was heaving up the parquet blocks, exposing the soft wood floorboards over the
cellar. Coils of wire came out of the damaged skirting and Mike sat happily
on the floor, clipping the wires.
On the curved stairs two of the gang were working hard with an inadequate
child’s saw on the banisters—when they saw Blackie’s big saw they signaled
for it wordlessly. When he next saw them a quarter of the banisters had been
dropped into the hall. He found T. at last in the bathroom—he sat moodily in
the least cared-for room in the house, listening to the sounds coming up from
below.
“You’ve really done it,” Blackie said with awe. “What’s going to happen?”
“We’ve only just begun,” T. said. He looked at the sledgehammer and gave
his instructions. “You stay here and break the bath and the washbasin. Don’t
bother about the pipes. They come later.”
Mike appeared at the door. “I’ve finished the wire, T.,” he said.
“Good. You’ve just got to go wandering round now. The kitchen’s in the
basement. Smash all the china and glass and bottles you can lay hold of.
Don’t turn on the taps—we don’t want a flood—yet. Then go into all the
rooms and turn out drawers. If they are locked get one of the others to break
them open. Tear up any papers you find and smash all the ornaments. Better
take a carving knife with you from the kitchen. The bedroom’s opposite here.
Open the pillows and tear up the sheets. That’s enough for the moment. And
you, Blackie, when you’ve finished in here crack the plaster in the passage up
with your sledgehammer.”
“What are you going to do?” Blackie asked.
“I’m looking for something special,” T. said.
It was nearly lunchtime before Blackie had finished and went in search of T.
Chaos had advanced. The kitchen was a shambles of broken glass and china.
The dining room was stripped of parquet, the skirting was up, the door had
been taken off its hinges, and the destroyers had moved up a floor. Streaks of
light came in through the closed shutters where they worked with the
seriousness of creators—and destruction after all is a form of creation. A kind
of imagination had seen this house as it had now become.
Mike said, “I’ve got to go home for dinner.”
“Who else?” T. asked, but all the others on one excuse or another had brought provisions with them.
They squatted in the ruins of the room and swapped unwanted sandwiches.
Half an hour for lunch and they were at work again. By the time Mike
returned, they were on the top floor, and by six the superficial damage was
completed. The doors were all off, all the skirtings raised, the furniture
pillaged and ripped and smashed—no one could have slept in the house
except on a bed of broken plaster. T. gave his orders—eight o’clock next
morning—and to escape notice they climbed singly over the garden wall, into
the car-park. Only Blackie and T. were left; the light had nearly gone, and
when they touched a switch, nothing worked—Mike had done his job
thoroughly.
“Did you find anything special?” Blackie asked.
T. nodded. “Come over here,” he said, “and look.” Out of both pockets he
drew bundles of pound notes. “Old Misery’s savings,” he said. “Mike ripped
out the mattress, but he missed them.”
“What are you going to do? Share them?”
“We aren’t thieves,” T. said. “Nobody’s going to steal anything from this
house. I kept these for you and me—a celebration.” He knelt down on the
floor and counted them out—there were seventy in all. “We’ll burn them,” he
said, “one by one,” and taking it in turns they held a note upward and lit the
top corner, so that the flame burnt slowly toward their fingers. The gray ash
floated above them and fell on their heads like age. “I’d like to see Old
Misery’s face when we are through,” T. said.
“You hate him a lot?” Blackie asked.
“Of course I don’t hate him,” T. said. “There’d be no fun if I hated him.” The
last burning note illuminated his brooding face. “All this hate and love,” he
said, “it’s soft, it’s hooey. There’s only things, Blackie,” and he looked round
the room crowded with the unfamiliar shadows of half things, broken things,
former things. “I’ll race you home, Blackie,” he said.