MORNING SERIAL
“HIS girl is that element with the red blouse standing at the foot of that flagpole. She is five square feet of licence and her name is Moira Hallam. A few minutes ago she gave him a laugh that for sheer contempt and coldness would have frozen a seal. Now you tell me, very jocose, that he has some sinister herb under his belt. What is it?”
“A stirring draught for lazy kidneys,” said Caney, very softly.
“Speak up, Caney,” called the voters on the outer fringe of the group, and Caney repeated what he had said, taking off his slouch in case this might be muffling some of the sound.
“How will it take him?” asked Gomer. “This draught, how does it operate?”
“It varies,” said Caney. “Sometimes when it begins its healing work there is a flash of discomfort, and I have known surprised clients come back to me hopping.”
“Hopping? What do you mean, hopping? Let’s have the truth, Caney.”
“One leg seems to leave the ground as if trying to kick the kidneys into a brighter life.”
We all drew more closely around Caney and said very quietly: “Duw, duw, duw!”, which was a way we had of invoking God without committing ourselves unduly.
We turned to the part of the field where the sprint was shortly to begin. Erasmus John was entering into the brutal phase of his life as an official. He was dissatisfied with the rate at which the athletes had been coming out of the pavilion and he was prodding the various runners into position with his gun. He was putting some of them, including Cynlais Coleman, on edge and they were threatening to go home if Erasmus did not point the barrel of his weapon the other way.
“The only boy he isn’t prodding with that flintlock,” said Milton Nicholas, “is his own favourite, Keydrich Cooney, that redthatched, chunky element on the side there, with a scalloped vest and the general bearing of a tamed ape. His speciality used to be cross-country events on muddy terrain and a chance to shove slower rivals into lonely ditches. But he emerged as a runner in sprints when he outpaced two bailiffs who were trying to shove an affiliation writ into Cooney’s pocket.”