‘Mmm,’ Miranda mumbled over her coffee. ‘Keep it down. I don’t want to be obvious.’
‘Oh gosh, yes, sorry.’
Out came Miranda’s palm again, and into it went notes. Smoked salmon. Apples. Game pies. Women, C2?, 25-34. Men, AB, 45-54. Tourists. All sorts, just like she says. Browsing. Tasting. Carrying purchases. Parking?
‘Oh. My. God,’ said Dido.
‘Mmm?’
‘Oh. My. God. Look over there.’
‘What? Where?’ Miranda could see nothing but food: hams, huge glowing masses of meat, dangling indecently from the nearest stall. Beyond them she could see biscuits, simpering wickedly, half-veiled in transparent plastic. Opposite was the goddamned bread that had got them into this mess, great billowing floury crusty loaves flagrantly lolling about in baskets. If Dido was going to fall for food, Miranda felt she would be in real trouble.
‘Next to the bread,’ Dido said. ‘Isn’t he gorgeous?’
She knew that languishing tone. It was a man. Panic over. Where was he? Next to the bread. Next to the bread was a really hideous stall, done up with curly fake ironwork and a painted sign in faux-copperplate reading Château Saxwold. For heaven’s sake.
Behind the stall was a man who, she saw with foreboding, was exactly Dido’s type. Pretty. Messy. Probably mad. Long bronze hair in a ponytail. Freckles, the poor sod. Great big Bambi eyes. Wrapped in a navy blue apron on which was printed a facsimile wine label that also read: Château Saxwold.
In the blink of an eye. Dido was at the stall, not even trying to look interested in the pyramids of wooden boxes and their gleaming glass contents.
‘Hello,’ said the man.
‘Hello yourself,’ said Dido.
Miranda hurried after her friend. It was her role in these episodes to give Dido as little as possible to feel embarrassed about afterwards. The two of them were standing in helpless silence, trying to think of something to say.
‘So …’ Miranda scrambled for a good conversation starter. ‘You make your wine in England.’
‘I have a domaine in Suffolk.’
That word – domaine – was so exotic it made Dido hiccup. Fortunately only once. It was an immensely appealing event, making her curls waft around her face as if stirred by the same zephyrs that are forever blowing flowers on Botticelli’s new-born Venus.
‘My vines are grafted on Pinot roots from Italy. Some of them, anyway.’ He was speaking as if suddenly short of breath, his eyes a little large and a little fixed, well and truly held in that trance which all Dido’s passions fell into more or less the moment they met her.
‘Do they like living in Suffolk?’ prompted Miranda. He wouldn’t snap out of it. They never snapped out of it until Dido moved into their homes. Then snapping took place within hours, although the parting usually took a bit longer. At least, Miranda predicted, she would have her place to herself for a couple of weeks.
‘Oh yes. Our slopes face south and are sheltered from the east, so it’s ideal. We work according to biodynamic principles, which means managing natural forces to maximise the health of the plant. It was the Romans who brought vines to Britain originally.’
‘What,’ murmured Dido, ‘have the Romans ever done for us?’
‘Exactly,’ he said.
An angel passed. A couple more angels passed. A damn squadron of angels flew by in formation, trailing pink love smoke in their slipstreams.
Miranda, desperate, said, ‘Do you do tastings?’
‘Oh, heavens, yes.’ The man almost snapped out of his enchantment. He flourished a corkscrew, selected a bottle from a half-barrel of ice water beside him, and opened it. The wine was the flaring yellow of high-visibility jackets. He poured three splashes into short-stemmed glasses.
‘Pinot grapes have red skin but clear juice, so you can make red or white wine with them. This is something I’m trying at the moment, quite a complex blend.’ He picked up his glass, held it by the foot, swirled the liquid and sipped.
Miranda copied him. A jot of liquid shrivelled her tongue. This must be how oysters felt when lemon juice was squeezed on them. Oysters: harmless. Lemon juice: good. In the wine, the dominant note seemed to be screenwash, with a strong aftertaste of cat’s pee.
Dido picked up her glass by the foot, giggled, raised the glass, stumbled on a perfectly flat pavement and splashed most of the wine over herself, in the region of her right nipple.
‘Oh dear!’ the man cried, as if she had crumpled before him in a dead faint. ‘How awful of me! Your sweater! And it’s so cold! Here, let me help you!’ And in another blink of an eye he was standing in front of his stall, in front of Dido, dabbing the spill tenderly with a perfectly clean tea towel emblazoned with the legend: Château Saxwold. She held her hair aside for him. And his free hand and her free hand were drifting irresistibly together, they were touching, they were nestling, and entwining, and drawing closer …
‘Here he is,’ said someone outside the magic boy-girl bubble. Miranda turned to see a dark woman with a to-die-for shearling jacket, bearing down on them with – no, it couldn’t be. Yes, it could. Yes, it was. The ears. The nose. The apologetic stoop, the hands behind the back. Prince Charles was beside her. ‘This is our famous new wine-maker,’ the dark woman said; her voice as rich as espresso truffles. And the man disengaged from Dido, stepped forward and bowed as if he’d been taught how to do it at school. Which, in fact, he had.
Confusion broke out, and the boy-girl bubble burst, and Dido was actually rubbing her eyes in surprise while the proprietor of Château Saxwold bustled about answering royal questions, finding glasses, flicking his cloth about and pouring more wine.
‘Come on,’ said Miranda, pulling gently at her friend’s damp sleeve. ‘We’ve got to go.’
‘But …’ Dido was still looking around in bewilderment, as if the spell had only moved away a few yards, and if she could find it and step into it the bubble would enclose her again.
‘Let me give you this,’ said the man, suddenly snatching a few seconds’break from his well-drilled fawning while the royal one sniffed earnestly at his glass. He pressed his tea towel into Dido’s hands, which were clasped at bosom height in the pose of a pre-Raphaelite princess. ‘You might need it. And if you aren’t totally put off …’
Dido squeaked in distress.
‘Perhaps I could invite you to one of our tastings?’ A card was plucked from the back of the stall and pressed on her after the tea towel. ‘They’re quite informal. I’d love you to come. Do come. Won’t you? Look, there’s a map on the back …’
The royal one had swallowed his wine and appeared to be in some distress.
‘The Angevine just adds that lovely fresh finish that people expect of an English wine,’ the man said, turning back without missing a beat. ‘In this year particularly, when we had a late spring, the Pinot grapes were a little on the pale side …’
‘Come on,’ urged Miranda, and Dido agreed to be led away in the direction of a taxi.
After two hours of sleepwalking around the art gallery, answering in dreamy monosyllables if Miranda tried to hold a conversation, she suddenly came back to earth, grabbed Miranda’s hands, and said, ‘What did you think? Isn’t he divine?’
‘Yes.’
‘What do you mean, yes? Just yes?’
‘I mean yes. What do you want from me? Yes, he is divine.’
‘You don’t really think so. You’re just saying that.’
‘Yes.’
‘What does that yes mean?’
‘It means yes, you’re right, and no I don’t really think so, and yes I am just saying yes.’
‘But how can you not think he’s divine? Did you see his eyelashes?’
‘Yes.’ Miranda was wary, ‘I saw his eyelashes. Look, does it matter what I think? He obviously thinks you’re divine. That’s what matters, isn’t it? He invited you to taste some more of that filthy wine.’
‘God, it was filthy, wasn’t it?’
Miranda whistled
with a relief. ‘So you’re not completely out of your mind.’
‘Oh, but I am,’ Dido assured her, shutting her eyes in bliss.
4. Hi. Goth. Ick.
Sleepily, the warden of the Kensal Rise Urban Farm snapped on the lights in her office, then hurried through to the reception area and turned on the lights there. The clock on the wall showed that it was nearly 2am. Her hand was almost shaking with sympathetic anxiety. How long had the poor animals been kept in fear?
Carole pushed up the sleeves of her over-large sweater. In the examination room, she wiped down the table with antibacterial cleanser and turned up the heating. Then she went back to her desk to wait, leafing through the Farm’s record book to pass the time and comfort herself with her past achievements. Injured pigeons sent to the Blue Cross, orphaned hedgehogs homed, the donkey saved from a funfair.
Occasionally, she had pasted in a press cutting and occasionally a photograph showed her. At these pictures, she turned the page quickly, covering up her lined face and her spidery limbs. Her mission was to protect animals now. What she looked like didn’t matter any more.
Once, Carole had been photographed for a living. Crazy days. A top model, living on Marlboro Lights and cocaine. Her name was still well-enough known to get her a newspaper headline when she needed one. Her face, deeply lined and never made-up, was a ruined travesty of the face that had fronted million-dollar cosmetics campaigns.
She kept one of her old photos in a frame on the wall; it served to get her respect from strangers. Since those days, year by year, everything except the animals had disappeared from her life. Friends didn’t understand that the animals came first. Men just took advantage. People she worked for wanted their pound of flesh.
Her hair was still long and blonde, but there was no life in it, and her eyes were still big and blue, but they saw the world through thick spectacles because who could be bothered fiddling with contact lenses when there were animals suffering? Vanity was such a terrible waste of time. Her voice could still be soft and low, but she got so angry with the world that it was often strident.
Blue lights flashed outside the office window. The buzzer at the door sounded and she got up to let the police in. The sight of the foxes, cowering in their cage, was almost too much for her. ‘Oh, aren’t they just beeyoootiful! Hello! Hello, there! Oo-so-cute! Oo-so-sweet! What gorgeous brown eyes you’ve got! What a great big fluffy-wuffy tail you’ve got! And who’s this? Is it your great big fluffy-wuffy sleepy-weepy bruvver?’
Frantically, Todd scratched at the bars of his cage, in his terror treading on Sweeney, who lay beside him, still groggy from the effects of the tranquilliser dart.
‘Bring them through here,’ she said, opening the door to the examination room. ‘They’ll be fine here until the vet arrives.’ Two policemen, wearing thick leather gloves, carried the cage through the door and put it on the table.
‘Careful now. Take it easy,’ she wasted a few words on the constables before turning back to the foxes. ‘There, there,’ she soothed them. ‘There, there. All over now. All safe. We’ll give you a nice dinner and then …’
‘No food until the vet’s seen them,’ one of the police ordered. ‘This is a forensic. We’ll be wanting them …’ He found he couldn’t use the word ‘destroyed’to this babbling ninny. ‘Put to sleep,’ he finished, in a confidential tone.
‘Why?’ she demanded, angry in an instant.
‘They attacked a baby, that’s why,’ said the second policeman, defensive in the thickening atmosphere of sentimentality. ‘Little mite’ll be scarred for life. The doctors said she might lose a leg, even. We’re going to need rabies, stomach contents, everything. Our vet’s on his way now.’
‘They didn’t mean to,’ Carole argued. ‘Foxes in their natural habitat never approach humans. They’ve been driven mad by urban living, that’s all.’
‘Whatever,’ the second policeman said. ‘Tell that to the kid’s parents.’
Carole turned her back on him and gave the fox her full attention. ‘Poor foxy-baby,’ she crooned. ‘Poor little thing. Don’t be scared, little one. Don’t be frightened. Who’s a handsome boy, then, with his lovely white whiskers? Who’s a bit gorgeous, with his sexy black socks? Oozy-woozy-snoozy-cutie-whiskerchops!’
The policemen looked at each other and turned to leave. Then the second constable had a thought. ‘I’ll need a receipt,’ he told her. ‘And watch out they don’t escape. Crafty, foxes are.’
‘Highly intelligent animals.’ She rummaged reluctantly for a suitable piece of paper. ‘That’s why they adapt so well to urban living.’
‘Yeah, well,’ the second policeman responded. She created the document in round, childish handwriting with four-petalled flowers instead of dots on the ‘i’s. The police took it and made for the door and the fresh air of the street.
‘Don’t you worry, snootie-cutie-soxy-woxy-whiskerchops,’ Carole said to it, wiggling her fingers at him through the bars of the cage. ‘We’ll have the Urban Wildlife Protection Act on’em in the morning.’
At a less stressful time, the fox might have found her fingers, bony as they were, quite appetising.
When Toni Lumpkin arrived in Suffolk, and found that she was hundreds of miles away from her friends, who immediately deleted her from their speed-dials and never bothered calling again, she ran away and took the first coach back to London.
Back in Putney, her friends grudgingly offered her the use of their bedroom floors, but she had to keep moving on before their parents tumbled. She had no address, and nobody would give her a job without one, and she was afraid of going to the dole office because they would find out that she was under eighteen, and send her home, and anyway she had no address for the benefits, so she had no money. Very quickly, her friends got twitchy, then frosty, then impossible to find. Eventually, she called the Old Farmhouse and suffered the humiliation of being collected by Oliver and driven home.
She spent the first few weeks crying, sleeping and putting on a lot of weight. Came the autumn, and she was forced by her cruel stepmother to walk half an hour down a muddy lane to the bus stop, then take a one-hour bus ride to college in a poxy little turnip-head town every day. Life was bleak for Toni. But then she found Goth.
Goth was there on the Internet. An idle browse at 3am, when the goddamn owls (or whatever they were, probably they were rats but her stepmother was too stupid to realise) were flopping about in the attic above her head driving her crazy and Goth just popped into her thoughts, so she looked for it, and found sites all over set up by Goths who had kindly posted reports of all their activities, and pictures of themselves in their wonderful gear, just to give a kick to somebody like her.
Goth saved her life. There was music to download, fabulous stuff that howled in her headphones as if the people who played it knew all about not having any proper parents left and being stuck in the muddy freezing backside of Suffolk and having to get a bus and go to college. She dyed her hair black, shoplifted fishnet tights and found some wicked crochet gloves and a couple of lary old crucifixes in a junk shop. Going into college in her first outfit was an excellent experience. The rest came naturally.
‘She needs a father figure,’ wailed Bel to Oliver, feeling that it was somehow judgement on her lifestyle that Toni had sprayed ‘Goth 4 Ever’on the wall of the Sports Hall in the neighbouring village of Yattenham St Mary. ‘Someone to set boundaries for her.’
‘Don’t look at me,’ Oliver protested. ‘I’m not about to be anyone’s father.’
‘She’s in that pub every night – could you at least have a word?’ his mother implored him. ‘They must know you in there.’
‘I can’t ban her,’ protested the landlord of The Pigeon & Pipkin, when Oliver made the request. ‘That sister of yours is literally my profit margin for the month. I haven’t done so well since foot and mouth when we had all them slaughtermen and Army types come in. Your sister’s keeping me in business. Her and her friends.’ Oliver’s follow-up argumen
t, that Toni was underage, withered on his lips.
Heaven knew where the friends had come from. No sooner had Bel congratulated herself on saving Toni from the bad influences of London than the bad influences of Suffolk had flocked to her side, drawn to the glamour of Goth like moths to a flame. The tawdry calm of The Pigeon & Pipkin was shattered by stocky girls whose calves bulged above the tops of their fetish boots and etiolated youths with bolts through their eyebrows and black nail varnish.
The landlord put down a floor in a lean-to at the back of the bar, installed a Western-style saloon door and imported a pool table. Half the bored youth of the county was soon to be found in there of an evening, striking menacing poses and glowering at the other customers, who thought they added a nice bohemian touch to the ambience. Especially that girl with the skintight lace shirt that showed her bra. And most of what was inside it. And the one with the black leather skirt, she wasn’t bad either.
Toni had a gift for leadership. The Saxwold Sukkubi, as she decided they should be, soon spawned imitators, and her moped became a style icon, so swarms of black-clad rural youth soon buzzed around the lanes on weekend nights, visiting each other about their Gothly business, which was mostly finding delight in each other’s company and hoping to discomfort anyone without a visible piercing. This was a tough assignment, for tolerance had taken root in those parts, and was doing better than the potatoes.
Toni’s first graffiti on the Sports Hall was soon joined by other messages: Batz From Hell, Goth Will Never Die, Kabbalah Kannibals, decorated with pentagrams and obscene sentiments written in runic. Delighted, a new lecturer at the nearby art college obtained funding for a module in graffiti art, and sent his students out to copy this manifestation of street culture.
The days lengthened, the holidays began, her stepmother was always on her case about getting a job and the summer evenings went on for ever. ‘We’ll have a graveyard party,’ she announced to the Sukkubi. ‘Get candles and some bottles and stuff.’
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