'Twas a Rough Night

Phil Carradice

The old building reared tall and dark against the night sky. There were no lights but, here and there, frenzied trees bent almost double by the gale, stood out in darker profile against the building’s bulk. Like a looming mountain it hung above the, path, dwarfing Chris and I as we slouched along towards it.

“I hear our Tony was playing up again last night,” Chris shouted.

The wind tugged at his words, carried them away over the trees and fields. Yet I was able to catch at least the gist of his sentence and nodded, grunted to myself.

“Apparently so. Old Archie was out half the night chasing him about.”

Chris laughed but there was no humour to the sound. Tony was a problem too close, too real, for comfort. Only three nights ago he had taken a swing at Karen, one of our social workers. She had been bruised and shaken, frightened by the experience and the fact that the assault was unprovoked. It had been Tony’s fourth attack on staff since he came to us and we were all getting rather jumpy.

We arrived at the back door of the house and gratefully fell inside. All was quiet apart from the roar of wind gusting around the corners of the old building. I looked at my watch “fairly early, I thought, the boys would still be watching television.
“Best use the front stairs,” said Chris. “I nearly broke my bloody neck using the back ones last week. Came back from the pub and fell over thirty bleeding milk bottles Archie’d put there. Called it his own patent absconder alarm!”

Archie, Night Watchman in the Main House Unit was nearly sixty years old. Tall and thin, he was as much a part of the old building as the very bricks and mortar. Nobody knew quite how long he had worked there, but rumour had it he was already in residence when it first opened as a Remand Home back in the early fifties. He was always at the hub of life at Bracken House. He ran the unit swindle “the football pool “and invariably organised the end of term parties and Christmas dinners. Night after night, year after year, Archie turned up for duty, face dominated by protruding teeth and a cherrywood pipe stuck firmly in the corner of his mouth. You never thought of Archie without his pipe, just as you never thought of Bracken House without Archie.

Chris and I went carefully up the stairs and found the Common Room empty. The television set was dead, there was not a soul to be seen and yet the building simmered with hostility. There should have been twenty boys in the room but only empty chairs gaped vacantly at US.

“Strange,” Chris mused. “Where the hell is everybody?”

As we stood there, puzzled and wondering what had happened, old Archie ghosted out from one of the bedrooms.

“Bloody kids!” he snarled. “I’ve just put them all to bed. Wouldn’t sit still, wouldn’t watch the telly, just wanted to piss about. If they can’t play the game, sod “em!”

I knew how much Archie enjoyed his Friday nights. With many boys home for the weekend and no school the following day, he invariably let them stay up for the late film on television. It meant company and boy contact for him. Yet, tonight something seemed to have gone wrong.

“It’s that bloody Tony behind it all,” Archie stormed as we went into the office. “Always pushing his luck, stirring trouble. Mark my words, there’s going to be bother tonight.”

I sighed. Typical “my weekend on duty, muggins on call!

“I’d better take a look,” I said. “See how the land lies.”

The senior boys” bedroom was a fairly large, well ventilated room with five beds arranged around the walls. Numerous screens and wardrobes were positioned across the room to give at least some degree of privacy. When I went in through the open doorway five boys loitered sullenly at the far end of the room. At the centre of the group was Tony, as I knew he would be.

“You lot are supposed to be in bed,” I said, standing with my hand against the door. “I suggest you get there. Now.”

They trudged unwillingly back to their bed spaces. The wind gusted suddenly and windows rattled like kettle drums against their frames. Tony, tall and arrogant, stared at me for a long while, then slammed into his bed, muttering darkly to himself.

“Something wrong with you?” I asked.

He glared at me, eyes full of ill concealed dislike.

“Not a thing! Not a bloody thing.”

I went out, closing the door quietly behind me. Faintly, I heard Tony’s voice, addressing the other lads.

“I'll have that bastard. You f---ing wait!”

I had been threatened before, many times, but at that moment in the echoing old building, winter storm buffeting its walls, I felt an icy hand grip my stomach. Terror, pure and simple, of what would come.

When I got back to the office Archie had made tea.

“Sorry I haven’t got anything stronger,” he smiled, lighting his pipe.

We sat, Chris, Archie and I, and considered the situation. It was ripe for trouble, that was sure. Tony was spoiling for a fight and one of us was the prime target. I hung around for half an hour, nervously waiting until most of the boys had fallen asleep. Twice I almost went into Tony’s room, my mind half full of the idea that I should start the trouble now, get it out of the way, face him on my terms. In the end experience overcame instinct and I did nothing. Around midnight I decided to go home.

“First sign of trouble, give me a call,” I said. “Don’t take any chances.”

I trudged wearily back home, battered by wind and rain. Somehow I didn’t notice. I was nervous, wary of anything which moved, my stomach a huge, empty pit in the middle of my body. I would have given anything to be somewhere else “on leave, off duty, anywhere. I knew, as surely as salvation, that Tony would be looking for me when the trouble came.
I lay for hours in bed, twisting and turning, knotting the sheets into a solid rock beneath my body. All the time I lay with one ear for the telephone, twitching and jumping at every creak or groan of the sleeping house. Finally, around 2.00 a.m., I fell asleep.

It must have been two hours later that the “phone rang. When the harsh jarring of the bell smashed me from my uneasy slumber I was instantly awake and sweating. This was it! I picked up the receiver.

“Phil?”

Archie’s voice was high and trembling in the silent room. He sounded breathless and on edge.

“What’s wrong? What is it?”

There was a pause and I heard him moving urgently at the far end of the line.

“It’s your money for the pools syndicate,” he said. “You still owe me “1.50.”