Stranded

by Val McDermid

  Of course, the jungle drums had been beating. Oswaldtwistle is a small town, after all. Strange to think that’s what drew Derek and me here all those years ago, willing refugees from the inner-city problems of Manchester. Anyway, Mrs Fletcher greeted me with, ‘I hear he’s gone off.’

  Shamefaced, I nodded. ‘He did finish building the bonfire before he left,’ I added timidly.

  ‘She’s always been no better than she should be, that Janice Duckworth. Of course, your Derek’s not the first she’s led astray. Though she’s never actually gone off with any of them before. That does surprise me. Always liked having her cake and eating it, has Janice.’

  I tried to ignore Mrs Fletcher’s remarks, but they burned inside me like the scarlet and yellow flames of the makeshift bonfire I’d already passed on the churned-up mud of the rec at the end of her street. I grabbed the toffee ungraciously, and got out as soon as I could.

  I drove through the narrow terraced streets rather too fast, something I’m not particularly given to. All around me, the crump and flash of fireworks gave a shocking life to the evening. Rocket trails showered their sparks across the sky like a sudden rash of comets, all predicting the end of the world. Except that the end of my world had come the night before.

  Constructing the bonfire had always taken a lot of Derek’s time in the weeks leading up to the cricket-club fireworks party. As a civil engineer, he prided himself on its elaborate design and execution. The secret, he told me so often I could recite it from memory, the secret is to build from the middle outwards.

  To achieve the perfect bonfire, according to Derek, it was necessary first to construct what looked like a little hut at the heart of the fire. Derek usually made this from planks the thickness of floorboards. The first couple of years I accompanied him, so I speak from the experience of having seen it as well as having heard the lecture on countless occasions. To me, Derek’s central structure looked like nothing so much as a primitive outside lavatory.

  Round the ‘hut’, Derek would then build an elaborate construction of wood, cardboard, chipboard, old furniture and anything else that seemed combustible. But the key to his success was that he left a tunnel through the shell of the bonfire that led to the hut.

  The night before the bonfire was lit, late in the evening, after all the local hooligans could reasonably be expected to be abed, Derek would enter the tunnel, crawl to the heart of his construction and fill the hut with a mixture of old newspapers and petrol-soaked rags in plastic bags.

  Then he would crawl out, back-filling the tunnel behind him with more highly flammable materials. The point at which the tunnel ended, on the perimeter of the bonfire, was where it had to be lit for maximum effect, burning high and bright for hours.

  There are doubtless those who think it highly irresponsible to leave the bonfire in so vulnerable a condition overnight, but the cricket club is pretty secure, with a high fence that no one would dream of trying to scale, since it’s overlooked by the police station. Besides, because the bonfire was the responsibility of adults, it never became a target for the kind of childish gang rivalry that leads to bonfires being set alight in advance of the scheduled event.

  Anyway, this year as usual, Derek went off the night before the fireworks party to put the finishing touches to his monument, carrying the flask of hot coffee laced with brandy which I always provided to help combat the raw November weather. When he hadn’t come home by midnight, naturally I was concerned. My first thought was that he’d had some sort of problem with the bonfire. Perhaps a heavy piece of wood had fallen on him, pinning him to the ground. I drove down to the cricket ground, but it was deserted. The bonfire was finished, though. I checked.

  I went home and paced the floor for a while, then I rang the police. Sergeant Mills was very sympathetic, understanding that Derek was not a man to stay out till the small hours except when attending one of those masculine events that involve consuming huge amounts of alcohol and telling the sort of stories we women are supposed to be too sensitive to hear. If he’d been invited back to a fellow member of the fireworks party committee’s home for a nightcap, he would have rung me to let me know. He knows how I worry if he’s more than a few minutes later than he’s told me he’d be. But of course, there was nothing the police could do. Derek is a grown man, after all, and the law allows grown men to stay out all night, if they so desire.

  I called Sergeant Mills again the following morning, explaining that there seemed to be no reason to worry, at least not for the police, since, on searching Derek’s office for clues, I had uncovered several notes from Janice Duckworth, indicating that they were having an affair and that she wanted them to run away together. It appeared that Derek had been using the bonfire-building as an excuse for seeing more of Janice. I had rung Janice’s home, and ascertained from her husband Vic that she too had not returned home from an evening out, supposedly with the girls.

  The case seemed cut and dried, as far as Sergeant Mills was concerned. It was humiliating and galling for me, of course, but these things do happen, especially, the sergeant seemed to hint, where middle-aged men and younger blondes are concerned.

  I sold out more quickly than usual this year. I suspect the nosey parkers were seeking me out ‘to see how I was taking it’ rather than waiting for me to come round to them. Seven o’clock rolled round, and the bonfire was duly lit. It was a particularly spectacular effort this year. Though I grudge admitting it, no one built a bonfire quite like Derek.

  I don’t suppose he thought when he was building this year’s that it would be a funeral pyre for him and Janice Duckworth. He really should have thought of somewhere more romantic for their assignations than a makeshift wooden hut in the middle of a bonfire.

  Four Calling Birds

  NOREEN

  You want to know who to blame for what happened last Wednesday night down at the Roxette? Margaret Thatcher, that’s who. Never mind the ones that actually did it. If the finger points at anybody, it should point straight at the Iron Lady. Even though her own body’s turned against her now and silenced her, nobody should let pity stand in the way of holding her to account. She made whole communities despair, and when the weak are desperate, sometimes crime seems the easiest way out. Our Dickson says that’s an argument that would never stand up in a court of law. But given how useless the police round here are, it’s not likely to come to that.

  You want to know why what happened last Wednesday night at the Roxette happened at all? You have to go back twenty years. To the miners’ strike. They teach it to the bairns now as history, but I lived through it and it’s as sharp in my memory as yesterday. After she beat the Argies in the Falklands, Thatcher fell in love with the taste of victory, and the miners were her number-one target. She was determined to break us, and she didn’t care what it took. Arthur Scargill, the miners’ leader, was as bloody-minded as she was, and when he called his men out on strike, my Alan walked out along with every other miner in his pit.

  We all thought it would be over in a matter of weeks at the most. But no bugger would give an inch. Weeks turned into months, the seasons slipped from spring through summer and autumn into winter. We had four bairns to feed and not a penny coming in. Our savings went; then our insurance policies; and finally, my jewellery. We’d go to bed hungry and wake up the same way, our bellies rumbling like the slow grumble of the armoured police vans that regularly rolled round the streets of our town to remind us who we were fighting. Sometimes they’d taunt us by sitting in their vans flaunting their takeaways, even throwing halfeaten fish suppers out on the pavements as they drove by. Anything to rub our noses in the overtime they were coining by keeping us in our places.

  We were desperate. I heard tell that some of the wives even went on the game, taking a bus down to the big cities for the day. But nobody from round our way sank that low. Or not that I know of. But lives changed forever during that long hellish year
, mine among them.

  It’s a measure of how low we all sank that when I heard Mattie Barnard had taken a heart attack and died, my first thought wasn’t for his widow. It was for his job. I think I got down the Roxette faster than the Co-op Funeral Service got to Mattie’s. Tyson Herbert, the manager, hadn’t even heard the news. But I didn’t let that stop me. ‘I want Mattie’s job,’ I told him straight out while he was still reeling from the shock.

  ‘Now hang on a minute, Noreen,’ he said warily. He was always cautious, was Tyson Herbert. You could lose the will to live waiting for him to turn right at a junction. ‘You know as well as I do that bingo calling is a man’s job. It’s always been that way. A touch of authority. Dickie bow and dinner jacket. The BBC might have let their standards slip, but here at the Roxette, we do things the right way.’ Ponderous as a bloody elephant.

  ‘That’s against the law nowadays, Tyson,’ I said. ‘You cannot have rules like that any more. Only if you’re a lavatory cleaner or something. And as far as I’m aware, cleaning the gents wasn’t part of Mattie’s job.’

  Well, we had a bit of a to and fro, but in the end, Tyson Herbert gave in. He didn’t have a lot of choice. The first session of the day was due to start in half an hour, and he needed somebody up there doing two fat ladies and Maggie’s den. Even if the person in question was wearing a blue nylon overall instead of a tuxedo.

  And that was the start of it all. Now, nobody’s ever accused me of being greedy, and besides, I still had a house to run as well as doing my share on the picket line with the other miners’ wives. So within a couple of weeks, I’d persuaded Tyson Herbert that he needed to move with the times and make mine a jobshare. By the end of the month, I was splitting my shifts with Kathy, Liz and Jackie. The four calling birds, my Alan christened us. Morning, afternoon and evening, one or other of us would be up on the stage, mike in one hand, plucking balls out of the air with the other and keeping the flow of patter going. More importantly, we kept our four families going. We kept our kids on the straight and narrow.

  It made a bit of a splash locally. There had never been women bingo callers in the North-East before. It had been as much a man’s job as cutting coal. The local paper wrote an article about us, then the BBC turned up and did an interview with us for Woman’s Hour. I suppose they were desperate for a story from up our way that wasn’t all doom, gloom and picket lines. You should have seen Tyson Herbert preening himself, like he’d single-handedly burned every bra in the North-East.

  The fuss soon died down, though the novelty value did bring in a lot of business. Women would come in mini-buses from all around the area just to see the four calling birds. And we carried on with two little ducks and the key to the door like it was second nature. The years trickled past. The bairns grew up and found jobs, which was hard on Alan’s pride. He’s never worked since they closed the pit the year after the strike. There’s no words for what it does to a man when he’s dependent on his wife and bairns for the roof over his head and the food on his table.

  To tell you the God’s honest truth, there were days when it was a relief to get down the Roxette and get to work. We always had a laugh, even in the hardest of times. And there were hard times. When the doctors told Kathy the lump in her breast was going to kill her, we all felt the blow. But when she got too ill to work, we offered her shifts to her Julie. Tyson Herbert made some crack about hereditary peerages, but I told him to keep his nose out and count the takings.

  All in all, nobody had any reason for complaint. That is, until Tyson Herbert decided it was time to retire. The bosses at head office didn’t consult us about his replacement. Come to that, they didn’t consult Tyson either. If they had, we’d never have ended up with Keith Corbett. Keith Cobra, as Julie rechristened him two days into his reign at the Roxette after he tried to grope her at the end of her evening shift. The nickname suited him. He was a poisonous reptile.

  He even looked like a snake, with his narrow wedge of a face and his little dark eyes glittering. When his tongue flicked out to lick his thin lips, you expected it to have a fork at the end. On the third morning, he summoned the four of us to his office like he was God and it was Judgement Day. ‘You’ve had a good run, ladies,’ he began, without so much as a cup of tea and a digestive biscuit. ‘But things are going to be changing round here. The Roxette is going to be the premier bingo outlet in the area, and that will be reflected in our public image. I’m giving you formal notice of redundancy.’

  We were gobsmacked. It was Liz who found her voice first. ‘You cannot do that,’ she said. ‘We’ve given no grounds for complaint.’

  ‘And how can we be redundant?’ I chipped in. ‘Somebody has to call the numbers.’

  Cobra gave a sly little smile. ‘You’re being replaced by new technology. A fully automated system. Like on the national lottery. The numbers will go up on a big screen and the computer will announce them.’

  We couldn’t believe our ears. Replacing us with a machine? ‘The customers won’t like it,’ Julie said.

  The Cobra shook his head. ‘As long as they get their prizes, they wouldn’t care if a talking monkey did the calling. Enjoy your last couple of weeks, ladies.’ He turned away from us and started fiddling with his computer.

  ‘You’ll regret this,’ Liz said defiantly.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ he said, a sneer on his face. ‘Oh, and another thing. This Children in Need night you’re planning on Friday? Forget it. The Roxette is a business, not a charity. Friday night will be just like every other night.’

  Well, that did it. We were even more outraged than we were on our own behalf. We’d been doing the Children in Need benefit night for nine years. All the winners donated their prizes, and Tyson Herbert donated a third of the night’s takings. It was a big sacrifice all round, but we knew what hardship was, and we all wanted to do our bit.

  ‘You bastard,’ Julie said.

  The Cobra swung round and glared at her. ‘Would you rather be fired for gross misconduct, Julie? Walk out the door with no money and no reference? Because that’s exactly what’ll happen if you don’t keep a civil tongue in your head.’

  We hustled Julie out before she could make things worse. We were all fit to be tied, but we couldn’t see any way of stopping the Cobra. I broke the news to Alan that teatime. Our Dickson had dropped in too – he’s an actor now, he’s got a part in one of the soaps, and they’d been doing some location filming locally. I don’t know who was more angry, Alan or Dickson. After their tea, the two of them went down to the club full of fighting talk. But I knew it was just talk. There was nothing we could do against the likes of the Cobra.

  I was as surprised as anybody when I heard about the armed robbery.

  KEITH

  I don’t know why I took this job. Everybody knows the Roxette’s nothing but trouble. It’s never turned the profit it should. And those bloody women. They made Tyson Herbert a laughing stock. But managers’ jobs don’t come up that often. Plus Head Office said they wanted the Roxette to become one of their flagship venues. And they wanted me to turn it around. Plus Margo’s always on at me about Darren needing new this, new that, new the next thing. So how could I say no?

  I knew as soon as I walked through the door it was going to be an uphill struggle. There was no sign of the new promo displays that Head Office was pushing throughout the chain. I eventually found them, still in their wrappers, in a cupboard in that pillock Herbert’s office. I ask you, how can you drag a business into the twentyfirst century if you’re dealing with dinosaurs?

  And the women. Everywhere, the women. You have to wonder what was going on in Herbert’s head. It can’t have been that he was dipping his wick, because they were all dogs. Apart from Julie. She was about the only one in the joint who didn’t need surgical stockings. Not to mention plastic surgery. I might have considered keeping her on for a bit of light relief between houses.
But she made it clear from the off that she had no fucking idea which side her bread was buttered. So she was for the chop like the rest of them.

  I didn’t hang about. I was right in there, making it clear who was in charge. I got the promo displays up on day one. Then I organised the delivery of the new computerised calling system. And that meant I could give the four calling birds the bullet sooner rather than later. That and knock their stupid charity stunt on the head. I ask you, who throws their profits down the drain like that in this day and age?

  By the end of the first week, I was confident that I was all set. I had the decorators booked to bring the Roxette in line with the rest of the chain. Margo was pleased with the extra money in my wage packet, and even Darren had stopped whingeing.

  I should have known better. I should have known it was all going too sweet. But not even in my wildest fucking nightmares could I have imagined how bad it could get.

  By week two, I had my routines worked out. While the last house was in full swing, I’d do a cash collection from the front of house, the bar and the café. I’d bag it up in the office, ready for the bank in the morning, then put it in the safe overnight. And that’s what I was doing on Wednesday night when the office door slammed open.

  I looked up sharpish. I admit, I thought it was one of those bloody women come to do my head in. But it wasn’t. At first, all I could take in was the barrel of a sawnoff shotgun, pointing straight at me. I nearly pissed myself. Instinctively I reached for the phone but the big fucker behind the gun just growled, ‘Fucking leave it.’ Then he kicked the door shut.

  I dragged my eyes away from the gun and tried to get a look at him. But there wasn’t much to see. Big black puffa jacket, jeans, black work boots. Baseball cap pulled down over his eyes, and a ski mask over the rest of his face. ‘Keep your fucking mouth shut,’ he said. He threw a black sports holdall towards me. ‘Fill it up with the cash,’ he said.