The Runaways

Lightning Strikes Twice -1

It had been raining all night, and all the morning; raining hard all over Lusaka. It was a cold February rain, filling the ditches, swelling the rivers, and stripping the few dead leaves that still clung to the trees. It made quagmires of the cow treads at field gates, spouted over blocked gutters, and flooded the low-lying roads so that passing cars sent up bow waves of spray and soaked unlucky passers-by. Now, at half-past eleven, precisely, as PJ was being driven in a police car under the escort of two burly patrol men, the father and mother of a thunder and lightning storm was brewing overhead. At first, it was a few little murmurs, slowly rising to a full-scale roll and rumble of heavy thunder. Suddenly, there came a great stabbing, downward sword thrust of lightning that turned the whole world into a blue and yellow dazzle of light.

PJ jumped in his seat and cried, "Holy moley!"

The policeman alongside him smiled. He said, "Nothing to be scared of, son. Just think - if we hadn't picked you up, you'd be out in it soaked even more." He glanced at PJ's pile of wet clothes on the floor of the car and then at the blanket- wrapped figure.

It was a red, yellow, and green striped blanket, and all that could be seen of PJ was his head sticking out of the top, his hair still wet. PJ - real name Paul Jeremiah Anderson - was fourteen years and five months old. He had escaped two weeks before from an approved school, and had been picked up that morning by the police. He had been caught because of a tip from a farmer in whose barn he had been hiding (and whose hens' eggs he had been eating, sucking them raw).

PJ wasn't scared. The lightning had just made him jump. That was all. It took quite a lot to make PJ scared. PJ could look after himself. He was tallish and well-built with a friendly, roundish face, a pressed-in smudge of a nose, and a pair of angelic blue eyes that, when he put on his special smile, made him look as though butter wouldn't melt in his mouth. But if PJ didn't scare easily, there were also a lot of things PJ didn't like.

PJ didn't like school, for instance. Particularly, he didn't like approved school, and he had run away from it after exactly thirteen days' and four hours' residence. PJ didn't much care for the farm either, not because it scared him or he felt out of place there (PJ could always make himself at home in new surroundings). He just preferred towns and cities where there were more opportunities for picking up the odds and ends of things that made living tolerable.

After all, when you were mostly on your own, you had to eat and drink, have a bit of money in your pocket and be able to go to the cinema now and then and treat yourself to a Coke in a café when you felt like company.

Most of all, he didn't like the long periods when his mother went off on work trips. Then, instead of living in lodgings with his mother and having a wonderful time, he was always dumped with his grandparents, Moddy and Alick. PJ didn't like living with his grandparents. Not because he didn't like them. They were all right except when they were fussy about their house and their furniture and grumbled because his hands always marked the paintwork. Also, PJ didn't like being idle. He liked doing things. He liked to be busy. The trouble was that people made such a fuss about some of the things he did. Well, like pinching a bottle of milk from the fridge if he was thirsty or nicking a comic book from grandpa Alick's library if he felt like reading.

The driver, eyeing PJ's reflection in the interior mirror, smiled and said, "You look like a red Indian in that blanket. Little Chief Sitting Bull."

At that moment, two hundred yards ahead of the car, a streak of lightning flared earthwards. It seared itself into the top branches of a tree at the roadside, wreathed its way down the trunk, and hit the ground with a crack that made the whole earth shake. A great branch was split from the top of the tree and crashed across the road, blocking it. The police car braked and skidded to a halt twenty yards from the obstruction. A small car coming in the opposite direction was not so lucky. The branch fell a few yards in front of the car. The driver braked hard, and the car slewed sideways into the block.

The two policemen, alert as all good policemen should be in an emergency, jumped out of the patrol car and dashed through the rain to give assistance to the driver of the other car who, as a matter of fact, was more shaken and shocked than injured. It took the two policemen a good three or four minutes to climb over the obstruction and to assure themselves that the driver was in no great distress. It took the driver of the patrol car another few minutes to get back to the car so that he could send out a call to headquarters reporting the road blockage and summoning assistance.

As he sent out the radio call, he knew that the moment he had finished he would have to add another reporting to the escape again from custody of one Paul Jeremiah Anderson. In the car mirror, as he sent his report, the policeman could see the back seat. The only evidence that PJ had ever sat there was a damp patch on the leather. PJ had gone, his pile of clothes had gone, and so had the blanket!

PJ at that moment was three hundred yards away running barefooted along the side of a ploughed field, pelting up the slight slope to a crest of wood- land which he could just glimpse through the driving sheets of rain. He ran, holding his hands round the tucked up edges of the blanket, his naked legs and thighs mud, and rain splattered. All his clothes and his shoes were gathered in front of him in the blanket.

As PJ kept running, he was smiling to himself because he was free. This time - because there were some lessons, he only had to be given once to remember he meant to stay free. Just what he would do with his freedom, he didn't know except that he was going to enjoy it until his mother got back from work South African.When his mother returned, he knew he would quickly clear up the whole mess and mis- understanding that had sent him off to reform school. And heaven alone knew where his mother was at this moment, somewhere in Africa, working.

As PJ disappeared into the rain-shrouded roadside, the second policeman returned to the car, took one look at the back seat, and said, "He's hopped it!"

"Gone," said the other. "With our blanket. Do we go after him?"

"In this weather? And with this mess on the road? Not likely. Anyway, he won't get far when the call goes out for him." The policeman smiled said jokingly, "Wanted, Little Chief Sitting Bull. Height five feet two inches, short dread locks, blue-eyed, age fourteen plus, wearing a red, green and yellow blanket or wet blue jeans, brown shirt, and brown jacket. Approach with caution. This man is dangerous."

As the two policemen went back to the road block to try and clear it, PJ reached the cover of the woods at the top of the hill. He crashed into the undergrowth like a rocket and put up a couple of pheasants that flew away, honking and screeching with alarm. The noise so startled PJ that he slipped and fell flat on his face. Because of the effort of his clumsy running and the loss of the little wind he had left from the fall, he lay there panting like a stranded fish. For the few moments while he rested, getting his breath back, PJ gave himself a talking-to. He was a great one for talking to himself in moments of crisis. He lectured himself now, face close to the wet, leaf-littered ground.

"Paul Jeremiah Anderson.," he said (PJ was other people's name for him, and he didn't care much for it. It was a silly kind of punning joke on his name. He preferred Paul, J Anderson, because that was what his mother called him.), "you got to think this out. You're wet and muddy and half naked. Your clothes are all soaked, and your belly's rumbling a bit now and then because all you've had in the last two days is them eggs just raw and nothing to write home about. You are wanted by the police. Like a real criminal, which you aren't. It was never you that took the old lady's handbag. Thing Number One, then. Them cops down there won't follow you, not in this weather with that accident to look after. Good. Thing Number Two. You got to get warmed up, fed, and into hiding. You have to look for a safe and sheltered anchorage where you can get everything stowed shipshape and work out a new course. And, Thing Number Three is, you'd better get them wet clothes on. Just wearing a coloured blanket is going to make you stand out like a catherine wheel against a tarred fence."

So PJ got to his feet. Stark naked under the leaden, rain-deluging sky, he began to pull on his wet blue jeans. As he struggled with them, hissing with effort through his teeth at their awkwardness, there was a massive bellow of thunder from away to the west and the whole sky was lit with another blaze of lightning, slashing earthwards. This time, though PJ could not know it, the lightning was doing exactly the same for another prisoner as the previous bolt from the blue had done for him.