Rule of Night by Trevor Hoyle

Lane, the cemetery on their right-hand cold and silent behind its dirty millstone wall, a kind of thin blue haze in the air and people appearing suddenly before them muffled to the ears. They walked arm-in-arm, his thigh against her hip. Janice was proud of his bigness and liked the solid bulk of his arm around her shoulders; she was also frightened of him, of the unexpected, of not knowing him all that well. He had moods she didn’t understand, for instance, which took her by surprise: a total lack of feeling – a vacancy – followed by a vicious spasm of anger which made him act with instinctive brutality, a mindless violence without any apparent justification.
    The first time this happened, as they were walking, she experienced fear and excitement in the self-same instant. Then they were running from the scene of the incident, Kenny telling her to keep up, their chests hammering, and when they finally stopped, breathless, bursting into giggles because they were safe and together and the thought of the silly old man lying on the pavement with his false teeth in the gutter was irresistibly funny. Kenny hadn’t intended to do it, the notion hadn’t entered his head; but for the old man’s dog yapping at their feet, and Kenny landing a kick up its hind-quarters, and the old man calling him a hooligan, and Kenny asking him to repeat it, and the old man being stupid enough to do so – none of it would have happened. Janice was glad somehow that it had happened. For one thing it made her feel closer to Kenny: it was a secret they shared together, and from now on they could refer to it in the company of others as ‘that night near the cemetery’ and nobody would be any the wiser. She liked the feeling that they, the two of them, were all alone in the world.
    She remembered particularly, thinking back on it, the part when they were running hard up the blue misty road, Kenny’s hand clutching hers and almost dragging her, the sound of their footsteps echoing from the high black wall, and the feeling – for the first time in her life – that she was a separate person who could now do as she pleased. She could choose her own way of life, decide for herself what she wanted to be; she was Janice Singleton; the thought beat in her head in time to the steps, and the feel of his hand in her hand made her aware that it had been Kenny who had been the first one to awaken this reponse. Then they were giggling and gasping in the darkness (it was down a dark rutted track where they finally stopped) and her head was pressing against his hard chest and his heart was thumping in her ear. She was in a wonderful dream. She was aware and proud of her small sprouting breasts and knew that this night was one she would remember always. Amawkish pop tune hummed in her mind … ‘young love, first love, filled with true emotion…’, and for the first time it actually meant something. This was young love, first love, this feel of his shirt scraping her cheek and his real body pressing against hers. She was in love with his strength, his big shoulders and warm solid arms.
    Janice never again thought of the old man in any other connection than with the running, the breathlessness, the fear and excitement, and of Kenny’s heart pounding close to her skull. And she thought about the secret they shared, and that feeling – very strong when they were running – of being closer to a human being than she had ever been before. And not only close, but one, indivisible, as though they were joined together and could never again be separated.
    There was a postscript that proved to Janice the significance of the incident. The following Saturday morning her mother noticed an item in the
Rochdale Observer
about an old man who had been beaten up: she remarked on it because Sandy Lane was only a few minutes away down Bury Road, adjoining the cemetery. Janice listened with a