Streaking

by Brian Stableford

  “Where did he get this stuff about us?” Canny asked, slightly bewildered by the unexpected turn of events.

  “From me, of course,” Alice said. “He hadn’t had the chance to talk to everyone else—not even Mum and Dad, let alone the anthropologist’s traditional ideal informant, the oldest inhabitant. Look Canny—I wanted to say that I’m really sorry.”

  “About what?” Canny said, mystified by the change of tack.

  “About all the things I said yesterday. That lord of the manor crack, the patronizing bastard remark—all of it. I treated you like some kind of adversary, when all you were trying to do was help. I was upset, angry...I shouldn’t have taken it out on you. That was silly, as well as wrong. It really was good of you to help—and Ellen told me that it really was your idea, and that she never even thought of asking you to fetch me. I’m really sorry.”

  “No problem,” Canny said, dismissively. “I was babbling like an insensitive idiot myself, because I was too embarrassed by the situation to keep my mouth shut. Can I assume from this that you and Martin wanted to move to Cockayne because you both wanted to do research into my family history?”

  Alice seemed to be startled by the question, or perhaps by the earnest tone in which he’d phrased it. “It wasn’t our main reason,” she said. “As I told you, we wanted to start a family. I thought Cockayne was the right place to do it. My project was just an excuse, really—something I could put to the village elders. When I thought about it, I realized that it really would be an interesting bit of history to write up and that I really might be able to get access to some interesting sources here at the house, but it wasn’t a priority. Martin only put you into his book because you seemed to fit—when I told him about all the local legends about the Kilcannon luck, he was delighted. He really was looking forward to talking to you, though—in fact, he nearly told you when we talked after the funeral, but I cut him off. I got embarrassed about having told him all those stories, and you not knowing that I’d done it. He did want to follow it up, but only as an example of his grand theory. It would make a nice case study, he said—as you’ve probably guessed, this was supposed to be a more popular book than the others, appealing to general readers as well as academics. He needed anecdotal material—anything you could give him by way of interesting documentation—but it wouldn’t have been any big deal. It wouldn’t have been prying, and he certainly wouldn’t have published anything without your approval. He couldn’t believe his luck when you told him you were interested in his subject—I think he wanted to bounce some ideas off you.”

  Canny felt slightly numb. The Kilcannons had always hidden their secret in plain view; they had always joked about their luck, always admitting to it in a jocular fashion. That was one custom he’d followed almost unthinkingly—but times changed. Henri Meurdon had used a computer to analyze his betting patterns. Lissa Lo had seen the streak that had accompanied the wrench of probability that had made his last bet on zero a winner. And Martin Ellison, respected scholar in the field of psychological probability, had married one of the Proffitt girls, who had a rich fund of listener-friendly folklore concerning the Lucky Kilcannons. Suddenly, hiding in plain view looked like a strategy past its sell-by date. People were getting close—perhaps too close—to an awareness of exactly how lucky the Kilcannons really had been.

  Martin Ellison had been desperately unlucky to be killed in such a futile fashion—but now Canny had to tell himself, sternly, that it couldn’t possibly have had anything to do with the Kilcannon streak. Since his father had died, the streak had become dormant, inoperative, impotent.

  Or had it?

  Wasn’t his luck tangled up, now, with Lissa Lo’s streak? Wasn’t he seriously considering the possibility of taking that entanglement to a new level? Hadn’t he already ventured into uncharted waters, unprecedented situations? If his interaction with Lissa Lo was already making things freaky, what would happen if and when...?

  He became aware that Alice was staring at him. “Are you all right, Canny?” she said. “I honestly didn’t think you’d mind. If I’d thought it would upset you, I wouldn’t have mentioned it, let alone brought the damned book to show you...but I thought you’d be interested. You said....”

  “I am interested,” Canny said, trying to sound soothing. “Sorry, Alice, it just...took me a little aback, I suppose.”

  “You don’t really have a deal with the devil, do you?” she said, heroically trying to make a joke of it.

  “Of course we do,” he told her, automatically. “We have to sacrifice a virgin every full moon to keep the family fortunes rolling in.”

  “I’m no good to you, then,” Alice said. “I guess all three of us were lucky to survive the cull, for we’re safe enough now. Marie too, if appearances can be trusted.”

  Canny shook his head, dazedly. “I shouldn’t have said that. I don’t know why I did. Daddy’s dead, and Martin...and I’m making jokes about sacrificing virgins. It just slipped out. Sorry.”

  “I fed you the line,” she pointed out, “and I ran with the joke. I’m the one to blame. I came here to say sorry for letting my mouth run way with me yesterday, and off it goes again. It was the same at your Dad’s funeral. You must think I’m terrible—a typical third child, no self-control at all. The brat of the family, just as you said.”

  “No, it’s okay,” Canny said. “There’s only one of me, so I don’t have any excuse. I’m a self-made brat—always have been. I’m trying to give it up, but...well, I guess I’ll just have to try a little harder.”

  “Me too,” she said. “Doesn’t go with the widow’s weeds, does it? Do you know what I wish?”

  “No.”

  “I wish Martin and I hadn’t fucked around with all the family planning, all the waiting until we were in the right place to bring up a child. Because now...we won’t ever have one, will we? We tried to control the future, to organize it...and it spat in our faces. Is that a sort of Oedipus Effect? I can’t even ask him any more, can I? Who’s going to answer all my questions now? My Mum? My big sister? Not the same, is it? Not the same at all.”

  “No, it’s not,” Canny said, ruefully. “I had a whole lifetime to ask Daddy questions—questions that needed to be asked—and I never got around to making a start till he was on his deathbed. Now, there’s no one who can tell me the answers. He’d have been wrong about almost everything, of course—he always was—but that’s not the point, is it? They’d have been his answers, and now they’re lost forever. I thought I was alone before, but now I really am alone. I’ve got Mummy, of course, and Bentley...but as you say, it’s really not the same.”

  Half a minute passed in awkward silence before Alice took on the responsibility of changing the subject. “Your friends are all over the papers,” she said, flicking a negligent forefinger at the Sunday Times. “The tabloids, anyway. They reckon that Stevie Larkin’s agent’s trying to make a deal with an English club to bring him home, so the thing with Lissa Lo’s even more newsy than it would be otherwise. Photos taken at your Dad’s funeral are all over the place, even now, but they’ve sort of airbrushed the funeral out so as to conceal the fact that the pictures aren’t fresh—no gravestones, no mourners...just the happy couple, at an anonymous social function.”

  “I can’t say I’m sorry,” Canny said.

  “About what?”

  Something in her tone made him look at her sharply. “About the fact that they’ve left out the funeral,” he said. “What else?”

  “Even when the pictures were fresh and you were in them too,” she observed, “not one of the pieces I read mentioned that they didn’t leave together. You said they weren’t an item, didn’t you?”

  “I don’t think they are” Canny said, mildly. “If the papers can’t get any new shots to update the story, that rather suggests that they’re not, doesn’t it? Does it matter?”

  “Not in the least,” she said. “But Ellen says that Lissa Lo didn’t leave the house till much later than everyone else. Y
ou were on your own when you came into the chip shop, of course—but you did seem a little strange. I thought at the time that you looked the way you did because you’d just buried your Dad—but you’d just said goodbye to Lissa Lo, hadn’t you?”

  “Jesus, Alice,” Canny complained.

  “I thought we were confiding in one another,” she said, disingenuously, “and not bothering overmuch about being insensitive. Actually, though, I am being sensitive. I figured that if you’d just been dumped by a supermodel as well as burying your Dad, I might be a more useful confidante than your mother or you butler—just as you might be more use to me than Mum or Ellen.”

  Canny wondered whether Alice had some sort of agenda in mind, or whether she was babbling to cover up her own feelings. He decided that the latter was more probable.

  “I’m not sure this is the sort of conversation people are supposed to have at nine o’clock on a Sunday morning while they’re stone cold sober,” Canny said. “Would it be any business of yours if I did have some sort of relationship with Lissa Lo—unlikely as that might seem?”

  “You’re probably right,” Alice admitted. “And no, it wouldn’t. I just thought you’d like to know what kind of gossip’s buzzing around the town. Not our Ellen, mind—she’s telling everyone that you’re a not a playboy at all, and that you and Lissa Lo are just good friends.”

  “Thank her for that,” Canny said. “Tell her that Stevie Larkin and I are just good friends too, and that I’ve no idea who’s likely to buy him. On second thoughts, tell them all that he’s a cert to join Leeds United. It’s not true, but it might help stop them speculating about the reasons why Lissa Lo left the funeral so late.”

  “There is a rumor, apparently, about the three of you—Lissa Lo, Stevie Larkin and you, that is—bringing off some kind of betting cup in Monte Carlo. Nearly half a million Euros, it’s said.”

  “Shit,” Canny muttered. “I told you yesterday—I was mugged the moment I got back to my hotel. It was forty-seven thousand, not four hundred and seventy thousand. Lissa and Stevie won less than half as much. It wasn’t exactly a coincidence—they bet the number because I did—but it wasn’t any kind of coup. This is how those stupid stories about the Kilcannon luck get started—and blown out of all proportion. It’s just silly folklore, Alice—you know that.”

  “Yes,” she said, humbly. “I know. Sorry—I should have kept quiet about it. I just thought you might like to know what’s being said. I’m being selfish, I suppose. If I go back home—to Mum’s, I mean—there’s no way at all I can avoid my own problems, and church would be even worse. If I let them drag me to eleven o’clock mass, every eye in the place will be on me and Father Quimper’s bound to ask them all to pray for me. I just thought it might help if I could talk about you for a bit. More misery loves company than a problem shared, I’m afraid. You said I could, remember? I thought you’d understand—far better than anyone else, at any rate, because of your Dad. I’ll stop it now.”

  “I did say you could and I do understand,” Canny said. “You don’t have to stop. Straightforward insults are easier to take, though—the sort you used to hurl at me when you were thirteen.”

  “Witty remarks,” she reminded him. “I just wanted to be the court jester. The position’s still unfilled, I suppose.”

  “You obviously don’t know Bentley,” Canny said. “He does the best impression of an English butler I’ve ever seen. He’ll make a fortune in Hollywood if they ever find out about him. Mummy and he are probably thinking of working up a double act, now that Daddy’s dead, but they’re keeping it a secret from me so I won’t feel left out.”

  Alice smiled, dutifully. “Do you want to go for a walk on the ridge?” she asked. “I’m getting restless legs just sitting here. With a mouth like mine, I shouldn’t be suffering pent-up anguish, but I guess the well’s too powerful to cap.”

  Canny felt guilty, although he wasn’t sure why.

  “Yes, if you like,” he said, coming to his feet. “It’s Sunday, after all. There’ll be time for you to get back for mass, if you want to.”

  “I already told you that I don’t,” she said, as she preceded him towards the door. “I haven’t been for years, Martin was an atheist—not even a Catholic atheist.”

  “Even so...” Canny said.

  “People will expect me. It’ll give them a chance to let me know they’re on my side, and it’ll give me an opportunity to make my peace with God. I’ve heard it all, Canny—don’t you join in as well. You’re on the other side, remember?”

  “No, I’m not,” Canny said, quietly. He paused in the hallway to tell the expectant Bentley where he was going, and that he would be back in an hour.

  The butler nodded, without the least hint of disapproval, and promised to inform Lady Credesdale.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  As Canny and Alice made their way through the grounds at the back of the house, heading for the path up to the ridge, the Great Skull loomed over them with a recently-reinforced symbolism that Stevie Larkin would have been only too eager to point out.

  “A couple of well-placed sticks of dynamite would do wonders for that thing, Canny,” Alice told him.

  “It’s not so bad, if you look at it in the right ironic light,” Canny said, insincerely. His ancestors had always tolerated the baleful visage because the family rules included stern warnings about the extreme unwisdom of any interference with its grim aspect, but he had always harbored a faint hope that one of the Langsgill boys, armed with a can of white aerosol paint, might pluck up the courage to modify it with a few deftly-placed graffiti.

  “Well, September sunshine doesn’t work. I suppose you could hire an ambitious local artist to turn it into Yorkshire’s answer to Mount Rushmore.”

  “Whose face did you have in mind?” Canny asked. “Geoff Boycott? Richard the Third? Arthur Scargill?”

  “You’re right,” she agreed. “It’s probably friendlier the way it is. Are you going to tell me what went on between you and the supermodel now?”

  “I thought we’d exhausted that topic of conversation,” Canny said, frostily.

  “Really? I thought you were just playing for time in case the butler was eavesdropping. If it’s too painful to talk about, that’s okay. I’ve been dumped in my time, difficult though it is to believe—and rejected too.”

  “She didn’t reject me, let alone dump me,” Canny said, defensively. “We were just having a conversation. We have...interests in common.”

  “She’s a probability freak too, then?”

  For a moment, Canny almost panicked. His stomach lurched, much as it did after a particularly jagged streak, and he wondered momentarily whether there had actually been a rift in the pattern of causality. Then he realized that it was just another joke—a reflexive witticism as utterly innocent as all the rest, offered in the spirit of an amateur court jester. Even so, he paused on the slope, breathing deeply, and looked back down at the house. The Great Skull looked sideways at him, as if it were leering contemptuously. The dynamite, he thought, might not be such a bad idea after all—and now that he was the earl, there was no reason why he had to tolerate its rudeness if he didn’t want to.

  “More than you know,” he said, eventually. He said it soberly, not simply out of habit. “Are you fishing for gossip, Alice, or is this strictly between the two of us?”

  “I won’t tell a soul,” she said. “Not even Ellen. Especially not Ellen.”

  “Okay,” Canny said, carefully assuming the lightest tone he could contrive, so that she wouldn’t be able to believe a word of what he said even if she suspected that he might be serious. “She wants to have my love-child, in order to cut her slice of the Kilcannon luck, but she won’t marry me. She doesn’t want to get too involved; she reckons that the pregnancy will take enough time out of her busy schedule without any further complications. I’m feeling a trifle insulted by the prospect of being so casually and callously used—but she is one of the most beautiful women in the w
orld, and I have the same hormones as the next man.”

  Alice looked at him in a mock-admiring fashion. He assumed—but couldn’t be absolutely sure—that what she was pretending so conspicuously to admire was his skill as a liar.

  “Don’t take this the wrong way, Canny,” she said, “but if I looked like Lissa Lo and wanted a stud to father the perfect baby, I’d want a slightly better-looking peer of the realm. I don’t think luck’s hereditary, although superstition might be.”

  “There aren’t that many of us peers around,” Canny told her. “We’re all lucky of course, but very few of us are even as good-looking as me. Once you’d set your heart on a genuine English earl, you wouldn’t settle for a common-or-garden French Comte or American billionaire, would you? If you were Lissa Lo, that is.”

  Alice had to think about that for a minute or so. When she’d finally formulated her answer she tried to garnish it with a broad grin—but she couldn’t quite do it justice. “I think I can figure out the full story now,” she said. “The pride of Vanity Fair plans to use all the benefits of modern biotechnology to fabricate the perfect child. She’s shopping around for the perfect sperm, and she thinks she might get it if she can only splice the genes for Stevie Larkin’s looks and athletic ability into your blue-blooded base. And the reason you’re so pissed off, being a Yorkshireman, is that she wants to splice you with a footballer instead of a cricketer.”

  “That’s about the size of it,” Canny agreed, readily.

  “Bit of a sickener if the biotech wizards cocked it up, though,” Alice went on. “Although I suppose a sperm with your lack of grace and athletic ability would never...oh shit, I said I wouldn’t do that any more, didn’t I? I’m sorry, Canny. I didn’t....”

  “It’s okay,” Canny assured her. “I said you didn’t have to stop. Call me all the names under the sun. Insult me. Hate me. Pretend I’m the universe. I honestly don’t mind—and you’re quite right about nobody else understanding. I’ll take it as a compliment that you came to me.”