Alan Judd - A Breed of Heroes

‘ They want me?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Well, I’m not going. How do they know me anyway?’

Van Horne smiled patiently. ‘No sir, not them. The soldiers, sir. Our side. Down by the telephone box — look.’

Some thirty yards away between the Army and the mob there stood a telephone box. Some soldiers were crouched behind cars and low walls nearby. They were a snatch squad deployed to keep the mob back out of stone-throwing range. One of them was beckoning to Charles and pointing at the telephone box. ‘What does he want?’

‘Maybe someone’s telephoning you, sir.’

There was no trace of a smile on Van Horne’s face. ‘You can come with me,’ said Charles. There was no great danger in reaching the telephone box, as the occasional brick could be easily avoided, but it was against Charles’s principle of minimum involvement. Running, with so little obvious need and in front of so many people, would have appeared unofficer-like, and so he was obliged to walk in the normal officer fashion, his hands behind his back. Van Horne mysteriously got there ahead of him and crouched on the pavement behind the box because something had provoked the mob suddenly to bombard it with stones. Charles joined him, having run the last few yards despite his feelings about appearance. One of the soldiers lying in a garden nearby said that there was a journalist in the telephone box who wanted to speak to him. Charles did not need to ask who it was. Propped up against the back of the box, he carefully poked his head round the side and then withdrew it sharply as a lump of iron whistled past. ‘Beazely!’ he shouted. There was a pause and then he heard Beazely’s voice shouting something indecipherable. ‘What are you doing in there?’ Charles shouted again.

‘I can’t get out. Every time I open the door they stone me.’ Beazely sounded frightened and distressed.

Charles leant back against the box, safe from the stones. The nearby soldiers laughed. ‘Ring for the police!’ Charles shouted.

‘Bloody funny, ha ha. Now what about getting me out?’

‘Make a dash for it and come round here.’

‘I can’t. There’s some kids behind the houses just waiting. They’ll get me.’

‘Try it.’ Charles poked his head carefully round the other side. Like all telephone boxes in the area, and like most throughout Belfast, this one lacked glass and a telephone. He could just see Beazely’s baggy trousers and dirty sheepskin jacket. ‘Come on, try it!’

Beazely began to edge open the door with his foot and immediately a shower of stones and debris came crashing down. Some very small children, less than twelve years old, were throwing them and laughing before running back behind a house. Beazely let the door close. Charles again withdrew his head as a stone made sparks on the road a few inches from his eyebrow.

‘Want us to move up and take ’em out, sir?’ called the soldier from the garden.

‘No. The CO’s going to move up on the barricades in a couple of minutes.’ Beazely was shouting something again. ‘Speak up!’ shouted Charles.

‘I said, is anyone coming to rescue me?’

‘In a couple of minutes. We’re just organising it. Hold your ground.’

‘For Christ’s sake.’ Beazely sounded desperate.

There was a pause while nothing seemed to be happening anywhere. It was impossible not to relish Beazely’s predicament. Charles raised his voice again. ‘How old do you think I am?’

‘What’s that got to do with it?’ The reply was muffled, as though Beazely had pulled his jacket over his head.

‘You said I was forty-one in your paper.’

‘I didn’t.’

‘You did.’

‘Slip of the pen. Sub-editor. Jesus Christ, Charles, get me out of here, can’t you? They’re going to kill me soon.’

Charles could see that the Pigs were about to move. ‘I’m just about to get it rolling.’

‘Speed it up. Please. Before they get me. Look, we can do a deal. I’ve been thinking about it.’

‘What kind of deal?’

Beazely’s reply was drowned by the roar of the oncoming Pigs. Two abreast, they rumbled down the street and ploughed into the flimsy barricade with a great rending of metal. The mob fled like minnows before a perch. With their engines revving high so as to give an impression of much greater speed than they had attained, the Pigs nosed and shrugged the cars aside. The CO and his party walked down the road behind them, chatting amicably. A few more stones came from behind the houses but they were no more than a parting gesture. The trouble was over.

Charles walked round to the front of the telephone box and opened the door for Beazely. Seeing Charles he straightened himself, touched his glasses nervously and stepped out. ‘I’ve never been so glad to see anyone in my life,’ he said. ‘I thought I’d had it in there. It would only take one of those lumps of metal on the head and that’d be it. Look at it all. Don’t know where they find it all from.’

Charles looked at the debris around the telephone box. It wouldn’t have been difficult for Beazely to have been killed or seriously injured. ‘Just as well we came when we did,’ he said. He felt slightly guilty at having made fun of Beazely now. ‘You sure you’re all right?’ he asked.

Beazely smiled a grateful smile. ‘Shaken and stirred but still in me glass,’ he said. He blew his nose and then looked at the bent cars askew across the pavements. ‘I’d better take some piccies of this lot.’

‘I’ll do it for you if you lend me your camera,’ offered Van Horne. ‘That all right, sir?’

Charles nodded. Beazely was only too pleased. ‘That was a great picture of Charles they used in this morning’s. Blood and thunder. Fear and danger. You could see it all.’ He gave his camera to Van Horne, who went off and happily clicked away. He pulled a crumpled packet of cigarettes from his pocket. ‘I thought I’d had my lot then, I really did. Very impressive rescue operation you laid on there, Charles, very impressive.’ Beazely was obviously beginning to feel he could cope again with the world. Charles decided he preferred him when he was frightened. He was more likeable and natural. ‘Little bastards,’ Beazely continued. ‘They had me in there for about twenty minutes, you know. Every time I poked my nose out they chucked half a house at me. Killing themselves laughing too. I’d kill ’em, I tell you, kids or not, if I had your job. ’Course, it would’ve been different if I’d had a gun.’ He pulled on his cigarette, his confidence returning with each puff. ‘Listen, about this deal. What do you say to fifty-fifty?’

‘Fifty what?’

‘Don’t be thick, it doesn’t suit you. Fifty-fifty. We’ll go halves. Half my salary while I’m out here for you and your oppo with the camera. I can live on expenses, see, no trouble. In return for which you and him do my reports. Nothing I wouldn’t be reporting anyway, nothing confidential, just what everyone else is writing about except that you’re there and they’re there and I’m not. I can sit in my hotel snug as a bug. You know what all this aggro does to me. I just can’t do it, I can’t function. But you’ve got to be there anyway, haven’t you? You’ve got no choice, so you might as well do my job at the same time and get paid for it. And you hear about things that happen in other areas so you can tell me about those. See, you’re in the thick of it in a place like this. This is what you like, isn’t it? What you join for. I don’t, see. It’s not what I joined for. And if you don’t know something you can ring the PROs in other areas and get the story from them. See what I mean, Charlie?’ He tapped on Charles’s flak jacket with the two fingers that held his cigarette, his confidential saloon-bar manner now fully in order. ‘You could do it, you know. That stuff you and Van what’s-it told me last night, it was bloody good. Crisp, to the point, an eye for detail, I didn’t have to add much to it. Superb. You could both be great journalists, you know. In fact, this could be good practice. And it don’t matter if it’s not always like that. So long as I can get the bones of it I can hack the meat about, see. I just stay in the hotel and you ring in when you’ve got something. Fifty-fifty. What d’you reckon? Couldn’t be fairer.’