Free Dangerous Games by Sally Spencer

so many times before that they couldn’t even be bothered to raise a groan.
    â€˜Ball bearings! On a roll! Get it!’ Smothers asked.
    â€˜Yes, I thought it was very funny,’ Beresford told him. He turned to the rest of the men. ‘So you all worked with Terry Pugh, did you?’
    The men nodded.
    â€˜What was he like?’ Beresford ploughed on. ‘Would you say he was a popular feller?’
    â€˜He wasn’t exactly popular, but he wasn’t exactly unpopular, either,’ one of the men said.
    â€˜He pretty much kept himself to himself,’ another supplied. ‘Pleasant enough with everybody, but not exactly talkative.’
    â€˜He never came on company outings to Blackpool,’ a third said, almost as if he considered such a refusal little less than a grievous sin. ‘Wouldn’t join the darts team, either, even when we were a man short.’
    â€˜Didn’t seem very interested in women, either,’ contributed a fourth. ‘Which was odd, because he wasn’t a bad-looking lad, an’ several of the girls in the typin’ pool were definitely interested in him.’
    â€˜Well, he wouldn’t have been interested, would he?’ Beresford asked. ‘After all, he
was
married.’
    The men sitting around the table thought this was a far funnier joke than the one Smothers had made about ball bearings, and a couple of them were almost doubled up with laughter.
    â€˜Are you a virgin or somethin’?’ Bob Smothers asked, when the laugher had subsided.
    â€˜No, of course not!’ said Beresford – who was.
    â€˜Then you shouldn’t be surprised that when a man gets an opportunity to dip his wick, he doesn’t normally think twice about it. Most of the lads in this factory will bang anythin’ that moves. An’ there’s a few sittin’ round this table,’ Smothers grinned and looked at each of the men in turn, ‘that will bang it even if it
doesn’t
move. It’s a hotbed of sin, this place. Must come from workin’ with balls all day – if you see what I mean.’
    â€˜I used to think old Terry was a bit of a homo,’ another man said, ‘but then I heard that he put his missus up the duff, so I must have been wrong about that, mustn’t I?’
    The man at the far end of the table, who looked to be round about Terry Pugh’s age, had kept silent so far, but now he said, ‘It was his National Service that changed him.’
    â€˜What’s your name, sir?’ Beresford asked.
    There were several cries of, ‘Oooh,
sir
!’ from the other workers, and Bob Smothers said, ‘You never told me you been knighted, Albert!’
    â€˜The name’s Albert Knox,’ the man told Beresford.
    â€˜In what way did his National Service seem to change Terry Pugh?’ Beresford asked.
    â€˜I knew Terry before he got his call-up papers, which is more than any of the other buggers around this table can say,’ Albert Knox told him. ‘He was a bit of a lad, in them days. You know what I mean, don’t you?’
    â€˜A heavy drinker?’ Beresford guessed.
    â€˜Oh, he was some boozer, all right – a ten-pint-a-night man, when he could afford it. But there was more to it than that. He was never exactly on the lookout for trouble, but if it came his way, he’d get stuck in without a second’s thought. An’ if a shift worker was puttin’ in a bit of overtime at the factory, he was always more than willing to put in a bit of overtime with the shift worker’s wife.’
    â€˜But the army changed all that?’
    â€˜Like you’d never have thought possible. When he came out, he’d quietened down
a lot
.’
    â€˜That’s what two years in the army does for you,’ Bob Smothers said. ‘Teaches you a bit of self-discipline. Makes a man of you. The worst thing the government ever did was to abolish National