Getting the Pea-Shooters
Derek and I crossed the road outside the school and slid sideways through the hole made by the bent railing, our heads just getting through without sticking. Then along the path and up the steps leading past the billiards club. We glanced in. The swing door was open and we saw old Doogie. Doogie put on a pretend scowl and pointed a yellowed finger at us. “You shouldn’t be up here boys. You know that. Off you go now. Don’t be getting into trouble.” But he was smiling.
He had his usual five roll-ups lying like small white pencils along the edge of the desk nearest his right hand. After he’d smoked one he’d immediately light up another and, while smoking it, would roll up another and place it carefully alongside the remaining four. This was a ritual of his – it was as if he could not bear the thought of not having a basic reserve of five at hand at all times.
Derek had once slid in while Doogie was away from his desk and pinched two of the roll-ups, and we’d watched from behind the hedge opposite the door as Doogie frantically searched for the missing pair then, not finding them, had even more frantically rolled up two more and placed them back in line.
We didn’t try to get in – we had other fish to fry – but we knew what was in there. My uncle Duncan, a member not for billiards but for drinking at hours when the pubs were shut, had taken me in once when it had been nearly empty. I’d heard the click-clacking from the green tables under the triangular beams of smoke-filled light and the occasional rumble of a ball running away across the floor between the table legs. I’d smelt the mixture of cigarettes, beer, urine from the open door of the gents (no ladies allowed here) and a soft, sweet hair-oil and aftershave scent mixed with the smell of well-brushed nap.
“Bye, Doogie”, I shouted, waving to the old sentinel, and we kept going up towards our target. At the top of the steps the path was barred by a spiked gate set in a spiked fence. The top of the gate was about chest-height to us. The spikes, about six inches long, stuck up vertically about six inches apart. As usual the gate was locked. Its sign said, in large red letters, ‘NO ENTRY BY ORDER’, though it didn’t specify by order of whom. Underneath was a red exclamation mark. I took hold of the topmost spar of the gate, my hands between the spikes and carefully pulled myself up so that I was resting on rigid arms, my neck a foot or so directly above the spikes. If my hands slipped my head would be impaled through the underside of my chin!
This was no remote possibility – only a few months back a girl who lived in the same tenement as I, climbing over spiked railings in the back-green, had slipped and sat down on a spike. It had entered her ‘back passage’ and held her in place until her mother, alerted by her screams, discovered her and, with the help of a neighbour, lifted her off. By a stroke of almost unbelievable luck, the sharp metal point had not caused any major internal damage and after a short stay in hospital she was declared good as new. But ever after she was known, cruelly, as ‘Spike’.
Seeing no one, I pulled myself up to stand above the spikes with my feet between them (just as ‘Spike’ had done) and then jumped down to roll on the path. Derek followed using the same dangerous gymnastics; then we made a dash for a clump of bushes, slipped into it, and lay still, heaving and panting, more from nervous tension than exertion.
We were only about twenty yards from the nearest beast. It stood huge and dirty black, quivering and snorting. I had never gotten over my fear of them. They were just too powerful, mean-looking and menacing. Their vast energy seemed to be held and contained only by the near bursting tension of a thin black skin. I looked away.
Across the yard were several others, all grunting and sweating. Between them moved their keepers in stained blue dungarees. Occasionally one of the beasts would move, nearly silently, as if sliding like a huge black slug along its slimy track. There was a hammering sound, steel on steel as if some constraining shackles were being broken. And there was a constant wheezing and blowing in modulated bursts.
“There’s one”, whispered Derek, pointing away to the right. I looked. It was smaller than the others with the familiar features I knew to look for. “Ok. Let’s go.” We wriggled along through the stained grass, ignoring assaults to our knees by the sharp stones and pieces of glass and twisted metal. As we got nearer to the target we were relieved to see that there were no keepers at it or near it. It was sleeping. We carefully looked around, then raising ourselves into a crouching position we ran swiftly across and climbed up its side and into it. It ignored us.
I was scared. This was no place to be. It was a haunted evil place, a place for witches, demons, folk who knew things I could never know. A place of power, influence, ritual, and strange forms of half-understood magic. A place to be hurt or even killed in, as sacrifice to a force I only vaguely felt and even more vaguely understood. I knew we had to be quick. At any time, a voice, a knock, a breathing, a rustling might signal a keeper’s approach and, unless quick, we’d be doomed. Or the beast might wake and, oblivious to our presence and careless of our plight, make off with us into the unknown.
We looked around. Everything gleamed of silver and gold. And glass. The particular glass we had come for was in tubes, unscratched and unsmudged, clear and sharp as crystal. Behind the silver and gold, half-hidden against the blacked background were black pipes held in place and held together by black bands. And nozzles, like bath taps, but running hotter and harder fluids, and handles and levers, all black, to start or stop or divert the fluids to make the beast move, or speed up, or slow down.
“There’s two”, whispered Derek, pointing. Just above our heads gleamed a pair of the glass tubes - cylinders about a foot long and half an inch in diameter. Set vertically into the black background, each had beside it a vertical gold plaque onto which some druid had etched lines, each with a number, forming a message of arcane import – a message connected, in some way, to the life-purpose of the beast itself. Inside the cylinders was the beast’s life-fluid. We could see the pronounced menisci at the top of the fluid columns.
I reached up and touched the glass of one. It was cold. So was the other. “It’s ok”, I said. “We can take them if we can get them out”. I reached up with both hands and grasped one of the tubes firmly. With the fingers of my left hand holding the top half and my right hand holding the bottom, I pushed it up and down. It stuck. It kept sticking. Then suddenly it gave.
“Got it”, I whispered to Derek, who was looking out for keepers. The tube came away together with the two black rubber seals that had held it in place; we would leave these on the cylinders, one at each end, to protect them if they were dropped. I handed the prize across to Derek then went back and took out the other one. Water, like black blood and smelling of oil, gurgled from the holes that had once housed the cylinders.
Anxious now, because of the magnitude of the crime we’d committed, and still fearful of being caught by the keepers, we carefully descended from the beast. We retraced our path to the gate and climbed it, this time in even greater peril due to our trembling arms and legs. Then we raced madly down the steps without even glancing at Doogie and ran across to the gang hut in the park.
We had our peashooters. Now all we needed was some dried peas or, even better, some rosehip berries.
Derek and I crossed the road outside the school and slid sideways through the hole made by the bent railing, our heads just getting through without sticking. Then along the path and up the steps leading past the billiards club. We glanced in. The swing door was open and we saw old Doogie. Doogie put on a pretend scowl and pointed a yellowed finger at us. “You shouldn’t be up here boys. You know that. Off you go now. Don’t be getting into trouble.” But he was smiling.
He had his usual five roll-ups lying like small white pencils along the edge of the desk nearest his right hand. After he’d smoked one he’d immediately light up another and, while smoking it, would roll up another and place it carefully alongside the remaining four. This was a ritual of his – it was as if he could not bear the thought of not having a basic reserve of five at hand at all times.
Derek had once slid in while Doogie was away from his desk and pinched two of the roll-ups, and we’d watched from behind the hedge opposite the door as Doogie frantically searched for the missing pair then, not finding them, had even more frantically rolled up two more and placed them back in line.
We didn’t try to get in – we had other fish to fry – but we knew what was in there. My uncle Duncan, a member not for billiards but for drinking at hours when the pubs were shut, had taken me in once when it had been nearly empty. I’d heard the click-clacking from the green tables under the triangular beams of smoke-filled light and the occasional rumble of a ball running away across the floor between the table legs. I’d smelt the mixture of cigarettes, beer, urine from the open door of the gents (no ladies allowed here) and a soft, sweet hair-oil and aftershave scent mixed with the smell of well-brushed nap.
“Bye, Doogie”, I shouted, waving to the old sentinel, and we kept going up towards our target. At the top of the steps the path was barred by a spiked gate set in a spiked fence. The top of the gate was about chest-height to us. The spikes, about six inches long, stuck up vertically about six inches apart. As usual the gate was locked. Its sign said, in large red letters, ‘NO ENTRY BY ORDER’, though it didn’t specify by order of whom. Underneath was a red exclamation mark. I took hold of the topmost spar of the gate, my hands between the spikes and carefully pulled myself up so that I was resting on rigid arms, my neck a foot or so directly above the spikes. If my hands slipped my head would be impaled through the underside of my chin!
This was no remote possibility – only a few months back a girl who lived in the same tenement as I, climbing over spiked railings in the back-green, had slipped and sat down on a spike. It had entered her ‘back passage’ and held her in place until her mother, alerted by her screams, discovered her and, with the help of a neighbour, lifted her off. By a stroke of almost unbelievable luck, the sharp metal point had not caused any major internal damage and after a short stay in hospital she was declared good as new. But ever after she was known, cruelly, as ‘Spike’.
Seeing no one, I pulled myself up to stand above the spikes with my feet between them (just as ‘Spike’ had done) and then jumped down to roll on the path. Derek followed using the same dangerous gymnastics; then we made a dash for a clump of bushes, slipped into it, and lay still, heaving and panting, more from nervous tension than exertion.
We were only about twenty yards from the nearest beast. It stood huge and dirty black, quivering and snorting. I had never gotten over my fear of them. They were just too powerful, mean-looking and menacing. Their vast energy seemed to be held and contained only by the near bursting tension of a thin black skin. I looked away.
Across the yard were several others, all grunting and sweating. Between them moved their keepers in stained blue dungarees. Occasionally one of the beasts would move, nearly silently, as if sliding like a huge black slug along its slimy track. There was a hammering sound, steel on steel as if some constraining shackles were being broken. And there was a constant wheezing and blowing in modulated bursts.
“There’s one”, whispered Derek, pointing away to the right. I looked. It was smaller than the others with the familiar features I knew to look for. “Ok. Let’s go.” We wriggled along through the stained grass, ignoring assaults to our knees by the sharp stones and pieces of glass and twisted metal. As we got nearer to the target we were relieved to see that there were no keepers at it or near it. It was sleeping. We carefully looked around, then raising ourselves into a crouching position we ran swiftly across and climbed up its side and into it. It ignored us.
I was scared. This was no place to be. It was a haunted evil place, a place for witches, demons, folk who knew things I could never know. A place of power, influence, ritual, and strange forms of half-understood magic. A place to be hurt or even killed in, as sacrifice to a force I only vaguely felt and even more vaguely understood. I knew we had to be quick. At any time, a voice, a knock, a breathing, a rustling might signal a keeper’s approach and, unless quick, we’d be doomed. Or the beast might wake and, oblivious to our presence and careless of our plight, make off with us into the unknown.
We looked around. Everything gleamed of silver and gold. And glass. The particular glass we had come for was in tubes, unscratched and unsmudged, clear and sharp as crystal. Behind the silver and gold, half-hidden against the blacked background were black pipes held in place and held together by black bands. And nozzles, like bath taps, but running hotter and harder fluids, and handles and levers, all black, to start or stop or divert the fluids to make the beast move, or speed up, or slow down.
“There’s two”, whispered Derek, pointing. Just above our heads gleamed a pair of the glass tubes - cylinders about a foot long and half an inch in diameter. Set vertically into the black background, each had beside it a vertical gold plaque onto which some druid had etched lines, each with a number, forming a message of arcane import – a message connected, in some way, to the life-purpose of the beast itself. Inside the cylinders was the beast’s life-fluid. We could see the pronounced menisci at the top of the fluid columns.
I reached up and touched the glass of one. It was cold. So was the other. “It’s ok”, I said. “We can take them if we can get them out”. I reached up with both hands and grasped one of the tubes firmly. With the fingers of my left hand holding the top half and my right hand holding the bottom, I pushed it up and down. It stuck. It kept sticking. Then suddenly it gave.
“Got it”, I whispered to Derek, who was looking out for keepers. The tube came away together with the two black rubber seals that had held it in place; we would leave these on the cylinders, one at each end, to protect them if they were dropped. I handed the prize across to Derek then went back and took out the other one. Water, like black blood and smelling of oil, gurgled from the holes that had once housed the cylinders.
Anxious now, because of the magnitude of the crime we’d committed, and still fearful of being caught by the keepers, we carefully descended from the beast. We retraced our path to the gate and climbed it, this time in even greater peril due to our trembling arms and legs. Then we raced madly down the steps without even glancing at Doogie and ran across to the gang hut in the park.
We had our peashooters. Now all we needed was some dried peas or, even better, some rosehip berries.
