Get Carter by Ted Lewis

should go to the trouble of playing cops and robbers just to find out who I worked for.”
    “I told him,” I said. “Gerald and Les asked me to give him their regards. I’d been told where to find him. Following you was incidental.”
    I grinned at the way Eric looked at me. Then he turned away and started to walk back up the stairs.
    “Tell Kinnear I’ll be leaving as soon as I’ve cleared up Frank’s affairs,” I said.
    Eric turned round and looked at me.
    “Goodnight, Eric,” I said.

    I drove down the narrow road that led away from The Casino. The dark, close trees came to an end and I was back bathing in the rateable value of the yellow street lights. There was nobody about. The California-style houses were still and silent, tucked away beyond the yards and yards of civic style lawn. Where a house showed signs of life naturally the curtains were drawn well back to inform the neighbours of the riches smugly placed within. Well-placed conifers stood sentry over the suburbs’ snug and wealthy taxpayers.
    I remembered this place when it was called Back Hill.
    Back Hill. The woods used to seem to stretch up to the sky. Except for the patches of red-brown earth that showed through here and there. You could see the hill from the end of Jackson Street. And although the hill was a natural place for kids to play, there were never very many kids up there when Frank and I used to roam about. We used to go up there on a Saturday morning and it seemed as though we’d wander for bloody miles. There were all kinds of secret places that were Frank’s and my private property. When we were older, getting on for sixteen, we’d stroll about taking turns carrying the shotgun, placing it in the crook of the arm, just so, like cowboys, Wellingtons making that good slopping sound, lumber jacket collars turned up, taking things slow, occasionally stopping in a hidden hollow, squatting down on our haunches, just looking around, cold breath curling up to the grey sky, not talking, feeling just right. Of course that was before I met Albert Swift. Before the fight between me and my dad. Before the driving. Before Ansley School. Before a lot of things. But it used to be a great place to be. You could walk to the top (and there was a top, a small flat plateau covered in grass that whipped about in the wind) and you wouldn’t turn round until you got to this plateau and then you’d look down and over the tops of the trees and you’d see the town lying there, just as though it had been chucked down in handfuls: the ring of steelworks, the wolds ten miles awayto the right rising up from the river plain, the river itself eight miles away dead ahead, a gleaming broadness, and more wolds, even higher, receding beyond it. And above it all, the broad sky, wider than any other sky could be, soaring and sweeping, pushed along by the north winds.
    This place, the plateau, was where we’d spend most of our time on Back Hill. In March, we’d huddle under the one bush that grew right on the edge, and we’d be just below the edge, on a sandy ridge, out of the wind, and we’d watch the March wind beat up the white horses on the river. In August, we’d lie on our backs and look up at the blue sky with its pink flecks on our eyes and a tall blade of grass would occasionally incline into my vision and Frank would talk really more to himself than to me about what he liked and what he’d like to do. Jack, he’d say, those seventy-eights I got yesterday in Arcade, don’t you reckon that that one by the Benny Goodman Sextet “Don’t Be That Way,” was the best? That drumming by Gene Krupa. Hell! Wouldn’t it be great to be able to do that? But if you could, you couldn’t do it in this hole. Nobody’s interested. They’d say it was a row. You can do things like that in America. They encourage you because they think jazz is dead good. America. That’d be the place, though, wouldn’t it? Imagine. Those cars with all those springs that rock