The Death of William Posters by Alan Sillitoe

to roll down limp at the feet of the exulting posse.
    A brick caught him weakly on the shoulder. He hurled two, clearing the space of backyards. The earth swayed again, his shoes moving slightly on the slates, several bricks cascading from the parapet between his legs. Are any of them bastards pushing at the walls? No, they couldn’t, otherwise he would have seen them. He stood under the clear sky, fighting for his balance, a horse on all fours, then straight and uneasy, ready at any second or footweave to use his hands again. He hurled his last brick through a window that still had glass, and at the force of his swinging arms the whole line of lavatories swayed like a slate-blue wave of the mid-ocean sea. His attackers drew back terrified into the house, as if running for their lives from some huge towering scar-faced monster high in the sky behind that Frank could not see.
    He heard them falling over each other (trod on that poor bloody rat again) scrambling back through the house to the comparative safety of the street as if the whole district might crumble, only too glad to go laughing in to their snug pub at the poetic justice of that young bogger up to his neck in ruins and bruises.
    When the collapse began under his feet, Frank slid pell-mell down the slates and onto hard asphalt of another backyard. The lavatories collapsed as if dynamited, like a bit of war from a silent film of long ago, ending in a mass cave-in of bricks and splintering wood, a rising grey stench of bug-ridden slatedust settling over the lot as he made his way out of it, back towards the car, and hoping the same fate would be soon in store for the pub from which he had been so discourteously thrown.
    She came back with a laden tray, set it on a low table somehow missed on his crazy zig-zag across the room. He was drunk no longer, yet she needed to shake him as if he were, back into the immediate environs of love and care at the heart of Lincolnshire: ‘If you want to drink and not suffer you should eat a slice of bread first, with butter half an inch thick. Or drink a glass of water between each glass of whisky – or whatever it is you drink.’
    He waved his hand. ‘What’s the use getting drunk if you prepare for it in such a scientific way?’ Pills and Alka Seltzer were on the tray. ‘Knowing so much would stop me enjoying it.’
    â€˜If knowing stopped you enjoying life, then you wouldn’t be much of a person. Come on, love, eat. Drink.’
    His eyes were fully open. ‘Would you marry me?’
    She looked, all laughter gone. ‘As far as I’m concerned, we are married. Why do you ask?’
    â€˜I suppose we are. You don’t need to answer. I’m in love for the first time in my life.’ He found it impossible to say why he loved her, had been so busy in his life that she was the first woman he had thought to ask this question about, frightened into it because early on in his stay he would sometimes wake up in the morning and be unable for a few moments to think of her name. Such a thing proved how completely she had altered his life, and you could only be in love with a woman who had done that to you. She had become a midwife indeed, getting him out into some new lit-up world still beyond the touch of his hand and brain to reach.

6
    Furrow-lines refused to break as he walked over them. Frost made the earth hard as steel, coated the ridges that bent the arches of his feet. A copse on the opposite hill was bare, sky visible through upright posts. A dead bird seemed a piece of hoar-shaded soil until he was right up to it. There was no wind: winter had brought a biting lacquer of frost that numbed his face and half-closed his eyes. At two in the afternoon the land was silent, all doors locked against it.
    He had walked since morning in a great circle, down the valley-path and across the old railway, cutting over the speckled leprous surface of a frozen stream and heading between