The German Numbers Woman. Alan Sillitoe

this morning, after a wonderful night of making love. She had even got his breakfast of coffee and rolls, butter and jam, and no one could have done it better.

      ‘The police called yesterday,’ she said.

      The jam turned sour. ‘What the fuck for?’

      ‘Don’t swear, darling.’

      Why not? It was too early for fear not to hit him. ‘Sorry. What did they want?’

      ‘It was about the football field at the end of the lane. Some vandals had sawn through the goalposts with an electric saw, and they wondered whether we’d heard or seen any of them driving away.’

      ‘I didn’t.’ His head had been down on more important matters. The jam tasted halfway good again. ‘Didn’t hear a thing.’

      ‘Neither did I.’

      ‘If I had, I’d have killed the bastards. They should be shot on sight.’

      She poured coffee for them both. He wished she could be like this all the time, but knew he had to earn such brief interludes of care and attention. ‘I do wish you wouldn’t use violent language, though,’ she said.

      ‘I know. Sorry about it. But vandalism like that gets my goat. I hate it. The kids in the village play there a lot. I really would have liked to have caught them.’ He would, except they might have been the ones who did it. They’d have thought lightning had struck. His fists itched. They always itched, from knuckles to wrists, but the knuckles especially, though he resisted scratching. They had got at him personally, whoever had done it. Such destruction was purposeless, sheer spite, enjoyment of the lowest sort, done out of hatred against everyone and everything.

      Apart from that, it put the shits up him to know that the police had called at the house. Maybe they had another reason altogether. ‘What else did they say?’

      ‘Nothing. They were very nice and polite. I almost fancied one of them.’

      ‘You bitch.’

      She was in his arms. ‘But I fancy you most of all.’

      He tuned in, and the signals came through loud and clear, right on cue. Sometimes you had to wait, or search endlessly through the megacycles, because they changed frequency often, maybe to catch you out. It was like watching for fish, but this morning the messages smiled through, every bright sing-song of morse a pound coin dropping into his greedy palm.

       FIVE

      Laura knew when the east wind cometh, when it was close, when it was blathering and grating in the here and now. It meant torment for Howard, but he tried to laugh off its advent, regarding it as inexorable, though devilish while it lasted.

      ‘When the wind is in the east a blind man dances with the beast,’ he said, and probably everyone else did as well, though in a minor key because they could see it coming by the writhing of leaves, as well as dust and rubbish peppering along the streets, while he only got advanced warning from Portishead.

      ‘The beast is on its way,’ he’d say, switching off the wireless, ‘but I’ll try not to let it get at me.’ Sometimes he lost all sense of equilibrium, felt that because he couldn’t see anyone no one else could see him. A gremlin turned the town plan around, making his morning walk as if through treacle, so he stayed at home. ‘Navigation all to cock,’ he would say. At the worst of times she heard him knocking his head against the wall. He thought she couldn’t hear, his door being closed and the morse loud, or everything drowned by the worst of static. But sound carried. There were vibrations, and they passed right through her. He wandered around like old blind Pugh in Treasure Island.

      In one of his worst bouts she had driven him over a hundred miles to an air show at Duxford near Cambridge. He forgot the nagging wind on climbing into a bomber sat in during the war, and hearing a Wellington and a Harvard. She felt a shiver from his hand at the throaty roar of their engines. He looked up, no doubt saw the picture clear in every detail. Good to know there were things no wind could spoil. By the time they got back the dreaded easterly had veered or dropped.

      Well, she couldn’t do such a trip every month, nor would he let her, half ashamed at having put her to the trouble, the other part consumed by his pleasure at exorcising two devils at the same time. Walking up the steps of home he said: ‘There are times when I can’t get under the make-up of the blind man to the real me underneath. It’s a horrible feeling. But today I could, and it’ll last a long while, thanks to you, my love.’

      ‘We must go again, in a year or two,’ she said. ‘I quite enjoyed it, as well.’

      But this morning he had knocked two of her precious Yuan breakfast cups off the table. Such crockery came in sets, and a gap had to be made good, otherwise it was not only a slight to the eyes as they lay in the cupboard, but a disturbance was felt, as if a splinter of herself was missing, an opening for unwelcome thoughts to come through.

      After coffee she made sandwiches for him to eat at lunch, set him at the wireless to get what solace he could, and walked down the steps to the car. At the China Parade shop near the edge of town she could buy replacements for the cups. She wondered why he had stumbled. Always careful, he must be even more upset than an east wind warranted. Was he getting worse? Losing his sharpness and care now that he was sixty? After the cups were wrapped and boxed she drove ten miles to Bracebridge and collected a replacement for the parlour stove. Her nerves weren’t at their best, either, from the buffeting wind, because she hit the kerb in the village and, hearing bumps under a front tyre, knew it was a puncture, the first since buying the car five years ago. A lay-by was close, and she trundled in to change the wheel.

      

      A twin-tailed squarish combat plane in camouflage colours came low along the river. Two jet engines were centred on the fuselage between the greenhouse cockpit, either low flying practice or had they rumbled him and were trying to find out what stations he listened to? He didn’t think they had the technology, in spite of what Peter Wright claimed in Spycatcher.

      Rain splashed the windscreen but the pint had been good, safe inside, and not to be got at. Two would have been better, three even more, but to be pulled up and breath tested would draw the eyes of the law on him, and should he be over the level, the misdemeanour might lead towards something bigger. Take care of the small, and no one would rumble anything worse. Anonymity was the rule, to be a fish in water.

      He managed a cigarette without taking both hands from the wheel. An east wind was usually dry but this one had turned the trees jungle green, drizzle from Russia with love. Halfway along the straight he slowed on seeing a car in a lay-by, where a woman was trying to fix a wheel. Well, she had the jack in her hands, turned away, wondering what to do next, not imagining golden boy was homing in.

      She would be alarmed, fear he was a predator with a rape-knife and unbreakable stranglehold. A hundred yards to walk, the view from behind was good, shapely legs, dark brown hair down to her neck, signs promising well for looks and, if not, certainly a presence. He had sometimes followed a woman with the most gorgeous hair, walking rapidly ahead then turning back as if he’d forgotten something, only to find a face like the back end of a tram smash, which phrase his father had often used. An article in the paper said that if you saw a woman walking down the street at dusk or in the dark you should reassure her by crossing to the other side. Give her a wide berth. He wasn’t that much of a gentleman, though neither did he feel himself a villain. He would talk his way in, and put her at ease.

      ‘I’m sorry to intrude. You seem to be in trouble with that wheel.’ Not many marks from Amanda for that, but she had gone to London, and he was his own man today. ‘It won’t take five minutes to change, and then we can both be on our way.’

      This tall woman, seemingly in her forties, turned, put the carjack on the bonnet, a wheel hub by her feet. ‘I’m quite capable. I just can’t quite find the place to put the jack under the body.’

      ‘My