Play Dead

by Peter Dickinson

  The counting ended and the gavel banged again. This time the silence was almost attentive. A moment of mini-crisis had come. Would the numbers tally?

  ‘We have a discrepancy of one,’ said Mr Meakin.

  A sigh of failed hope. An hour of tedium while the snark was hunted.

  ‘However,’ said Mr Meakin with no change of voice, ‘Charlie Grubier who was in charge of the stewards at the entrance informs me that one person did enter without proving a valid twelve-month membership. There was a disturbance at the door, apparently intentional, during which a man pushed past without showing his card. Charlie Grubier followed him into the hall and observed where he sat. It was you, sir, there. Yes, you. Will you please stand?’

  Heads craned. Poppy turned with the others to see the man, thirtyish, cockily defiant. She heard a faint groan of bored recognition.

  ‘Sure, that was me,’ he said. ‘And sure, nobody bothered to check my card. I’m a member all right, and you know I am, but if I got in without proving it it shows there’s others as aren’t members could do the same. You’re going to have to check everyone against that list again, Alasdair mate, no matter what.’

  Mr Meakin gestured towards the young Asian on his left.

  ‘This is Mr Simeon Kumar,’ he said. ‘He is ARO—Assistant Regional Organiser—and is here to supervise the ballot and see that party procedure is correctly followed. Mr Kumar?’

  Mr Kumar put his fingertips judicially together and spoke in so soft a voice that people at the back shouted ‘Can’t hear!’

  He tried again.

  ‘I observed the procedures at the entrance. I am satisfied that the discrepancy of one is accounted for by the gentleman who has just spoken, and that there are no other discrepancies.’

  ‘All right,’ said Mr Meakin. ‘So will you please show your credentials to the stewards. I will accept no further points based on discrepancy of numbers. We will now take other points of order, including challenges to rights to vote. Copies of the register of members, with names of those attending this evening marked, are available at the back of the hall for inspection. I will allow half an hour for points of order, including challenges, and accept no more after that. I will accept only particular challenges of named individuals.’

  More points of order from various parts of the hall, dull and confusing statements repetitively challenging the chair’s right to make the ruling, all ruled out of order and confirmed with a nod from Mr Kumar. Poppy did her best not to become angry, but her mind’s eye was filled with the scenes she’d been watching on television, the will of a people expressed directly on the streets, honourable and glorious, despite the risk of getting truncheoned or shot or flattened by a tank. These people, these protesters, were on the other side, the side of the tanks and the truncheons, or in their case the lies and the manipulations. They had all the insolence of autocracy, in their own petty way, in the obvious wasting of time, in the not caring whether anyone believed what they were saying because they didn’t either, until the half-hour was almost gone and then they’d start to produce whatever genuine objections they might have, trying to force the chair either to weaken its authority by extending the deadline or risk the validity of the vote by accepting challengeable memberships.

  It was twenty minutes before an actual name was mentioned, something to do with an unpaid subscription, an actually genuine case apparently, as after a brief consultation with Mr Kumar the chair ruled that the offender, a baffled-looking old man, could remain at the meeting but must not vote. Then …

  ‘What about Jones’s ma-in-law?’ called a woman’s voice.

  ‘Is that a challenge?’ asked the chair.

  ‘Jones put her ma-in-law on. She pays her to mind the baby. Told her to come and vote. Or else.’

  ‘For a challenge I must have a name.’

  Poppy was on her feet, barely able to control her voice for fury.

  ‘My name is Poppy Tasker. It is true that I am Ms Jones’s mother-in-law and look after her son. I joined the party fifteen months ago out of my own free will and paid the subscription myself. I renewed it this August. I showed my card at the door.’

  Poppy sat down. It wasn’t just the insult, it was the hidden irrational threat that somehow Toby was going to be dragged into this filthy rigmarole of public exposure. Nell was looking at her.

  ‘Did you tell them?’ Poppy muttered.

  ‘You never told me,’ said Nell, equally accusingly.

  ‘I didn’t tell anyone. I didn’t want Mrs Capstone finding out from Peony.’

  Nell thought about it and nodded. In the different, decent world of the play centre it was an acceptable reason.

  ‘She’s your daughter-in-law? Jones?’

  ‘That’s right. It doesn’t …’

  ‘Shh!’ from behind, and a warning tap on the shoulder. Someone was making another tedious and jargon-ridden general objection. Poppy’s anger subsided, leaving her shaky and sad. She looked at Nell, who was sitting tense in her chair, unapproachable. How had they known, if Nell hadn’t told them? And Nell hadn’t known about Janet. Had she been lying? Why should she? And her reaction to Poppy’s explanation—if she’d been lying, surely … How had they known?

  A bang from the gavel.

  ‘Out of order,’ said Mr Meakin. ‘I will take one more point. Yes?’

  ‘You’ve got a Simon Venable of 40 Sabina Road down as come in tonight. Can’t be him. He’s dead.’

  The man’s voice was confident, with street-cred vowels, but precise. Unlike earlier challenges it carried the sense that here was something real, something that was expected to have a concrete effect, more than irritation and time-wasting. For the first time Mr Meakin seemed off balance.

  ‘Er … the secretary will check the list,’ he said, and bent to confer with Mr Kumar, and then to look at a page which one of the officials passed to him, with a finger pointing at an entry.

  ‘Is Mr Venable in the room?’ he asked. ‘Mr Simon Venable of 40 Sabina Road?’

  ‘No S,’ said the challenger. ‘Just Venable.’

  Poppy could see him now. He was fortyish, balding, with a clipped fringe of grey beard and outdoor complexion. Either he was a concerned and earnest citizen or he knew how to seem one.

  Silence. Poppy made a mental picture of Sabina Road. She knew the name because that was where the squat had been which the Council had at last managed to close, but it was beyond her usual lonely-stroll range, south-west of the park in Ormiston, and she couldn’t place it exactly. One of those streets of large, late-nineteenth-century houses, she thought, elaborately stuccoed, looking as if they’d never, even when new, attracted the frock-coated bankers and surgeons for whom they’d been built, and so from the first had tended to look a little seedy. Then their paint began to peel and stucco to crumble, and gardens to fill with split mattresses and upturned wheel-less prams among the willow-herb and brambles.

  ‘I tell you he can’t be here,’ said the challenger. ‘He’s dead. You’ve all read about him. It was him they found in the kiddies’ place in the park last week.’

  Poppy felt her mouth fall open. Instantly, without thought, she turned to Nell. Unlike almost everyone else in the hall, Nell hadn’t turned to look at the challenger and was still facing the platform, apparently barely interested until this moment in what was being said. But now the neat, determined face had gone white, the mouth was an O, the eyes wide with shock. The tremor must have communicated itself to Nelson, who woke as if from a nightmare, screwed up his eyes and wailed. At once Nell had him up on her shoulder and was rocking to and fro, murmuring comforts for both of them. She had known something was going to happen, Poppy realised, but not this, not this.

  Nelson’s dwindling wail was drowned in the general gasp and uproar. Mr Meakin was banging his gavel and shouting for order. Two women, evidently reporters, one with a notebook and one with a microp
hone, were struggling towards the challenger from opposite ends of the row where he sat. The others in the row were obstructing their passage, deliberately it seemed. Elsewhere in the hall people were on their feet, shouting comments and questions. Janet might have thought that her side had the meeting all sewn up, but now an unlikely seam was unravelling fast.

  Nell had coaxed Nelson back to sleep, but was still rocking to and fro, staring at nothing, her face pale and hard.

  ‘Are you all right?’ whispered Poppy.

  Nell nodded. She looked as if she might faint. The event was shocking, horrible, but even to Poppy, who had actually seen the body, it didn’t seem quite of that order. If you’d known the man, though, if you’d recognised him that first time he’d come to the play centre … Poppy remembered how Nell had left that day, her anger as strong as the others’ but different, her furious determined stride. She’d been going somewhere, to do something definite. She could do that because she knew who he was. They both lived in Sabina Road …

  And Laura had known him too! That extraordinary outburst of grief as she and Poppy had been pushing across the sodden park, the day after his death. His death. Grief for him, someone known and loved … And if Laura had known him, she could have told him about Poppy and Janet, because Poppy had told her, and he could have passed it to these sinister manipulators …

  She didn’t want to think about it. She pushed the whole horrible business out of her mind and concentrated on Mr Meakin belting the table with his gavel and bellowing for order. At last he had some effect. The uproar dwindled. The reporters had been forced back to the edges of the hall, where they stood poised for another try. The challenger was still standing patiently in his place, unruffled. A tense, inquisitive silence settled on the hall.

  ‘You have not been to the police with this information?’ asked Mr Meakin.

  ‘Some of us haven’t been that lucky in our doings with the police,’ said the man. ‘I don’t see it signifies for these proceedings. Just you’ve got someone here personating a dead man. If there’s one, could be others.’

  ‘May we have your name and address, please?’

  ‘Mark Giraldi. You’ll have Sabina Road as my address, but that’s been shut down.’

  The man sat and the reporters started to struggle towards him again. This time their attempts were even more actively resisted by those around him. The one with the notebook had it snatched away and thrown across the room. As the stewards closed in towards the disturbance they too were resisted. The scuffles escalated to fighting. Everyone in the hall, except Nell, seemed to be standing now and Poppy couldn’t see what was happening. A rhythmic chant of ‘Meakin out! Meakin out!’ arose. Mr Meakin was shouting for order. At the end of her row, Poppy glimpsed several tough-looking men moving towards the back of the hall. Nell at last rose.

  ‘I’ve got to go now,’ she said.

  ‘You’re not going to stay and vote?

  ‘What’s the point? It’s all fixed.’

  ‘Listen. I’ve got to talk to you. About the young man who died. Please.’

  Nell looked at her and shook her head.

  ‘I’ve got to go,’ she said again.

  ‘Hadn’t you better wait till …’

  ‘It’s all right. They’re going. See you soon.’

  She pushed past with Nelson inert on her shoulder. Poppy realised that the uproar at the back of the hall had changed its nature, becoming organised into a chant of ‘Out! Out! Out!’, and was at the same time receding. Elsewhere people, not very many, were shoving their way along rows and making for the exit. The shouts, clatter and stampings dwindled into the street and died almost to silence when the doors were closed. An angry calm settled on the hall as chairs were put straight and places found for some of those who before had been standing, though there still weren’t enough to go round, which showed how few in number the disrupters must have been. A woman and a man were attending to one of the reporters, who had a nosebleed. It was like the programmed gathering of healing corpuscles round a wound in the body, Poppy thought, the way all those remaining, even when they could do nothing much to help, at least willed the re-establishment of order. Mr Meakin waited for silence and then merely tapped the gavel down.

  ‘You aren’t going on, Alasdair, surely?’ said the woman Poppy thought was called Lucy. Her voice was a disdainful twitter, like a Harrods customer complaining at a street-market stall.

  ‘I see no reason not to,’ said Mr Meakin.

  ‘A substantial group of perfectly valid electors has been forcibly ejected by your stewards after making well-supported allegations of electoral fraud.’

  Her tone managed to condescend in three different modes at once, implying that Mr Meakin lacked the manners, intelligence and moral sense to behave correctly. Something, at any rate, stung him out of his hard-won monotony of delivery.

  ‘Lucy, that’s a bloody libel!’ he snapped.

  ‘It’s not even a slander, Alasdair, but if you expect me to co-operate any further in this travesty of democracy you are mistaken. Trevor?’

  She rose and tittupped off the platform with prissy little steps, loose areas of flab wobbling at each movement. Trevor Evans, who had watched the whole disturbance with his fingertips pressed together in front of his mouth, gave a start. Poppy saw Janet glance sideways at him and smile. His thought processes must be transparent to everyone in the hall. The Lucy woman had clearly known what was going to happen, but he’d been taken by surprise. He coughed, half rose, sat again, and finally stood and cleared his throat.

  ‘Brothers and sisters in our great movement,’ he said. ‘You all know me. You all know I’m not one to refuse a fight. No doubt there’s some here would like to see Trevor Evans running off with his tail between his legs, so they can fix everything up nice and quiet, how they want it. All I can say is, they don’t know Trevor Evans. Trevor Evans is going to tough this one out.’

  There was a surprising number of cheers, not, as far as Poppy could tell, ironic. It made you almost despair of democracy, Poppy thought, that anybody could bring themselves to support such a creature, such blatant, smarmy, calculating self-interest. He had a wife and three daughters, according to the Echo, so somebody had gone to bed with him, kissed and been kissed, made love … even that was somehow more imaginable than bringing oneself to go into a polling booth and put a cross opposite his name.

  Mr Meakin explained the procedure again, and the candidates drew lots for who should speak first. It was Trevor Evans. He was less dreadful than he might have been, though he thumped out clichés and kept referring to himself in the third person, like a footballer. He didn’t mention the episode just finished. He used his big voice with practised timing and variation of tone, and got a lot of perhaps rather forced applause when he sat down.

  Janet rose next, to a shout of ‘Pink Thatcher!’ from the back of the hall. Immediately her head went back and her eyes flashed with the joy of battle.

  ‘The only thing I have in common with Thatcher is that I am determined to see my party running this country,’ she cried. ‘Unlike the self-destructive idiots whose antics we’ve just had to put up with, I believe we can and will win the election, and that I can and will win this constituency for Labour!’

  She went into her prepared speech, making it sound just as impromptu, saying all the right things as if she meant them—though Poppy, knowing her so well, didn’t find her totally convincing when she spoke of Labour being the party that cared. She finished to applause, too, plenty of robust cheers as well as good old bourgeois claps and murmurs.

  Bob Stavoli was drab-voiced and earnest. He said straight out that he was a homosexual, and that he trusted people to accept that it didn’t matter any more than did Janet being a woman or Trevor a man. Other­wise he said much the same as Janet—the poll tax, Europe, schools, the National Health Service, Labour’s great chance, need for unity and pragmati
sm, etc.—but making it all so grey and parochial that he might, Poppy thought, have been a woodlouse addressing a convention of woodlice and affiliated beetles and millipedes about the dilapidated state of the bark they lived under. He was clearly a nice man, though. It was a secret ballot and she was tempted to vote for him, telling herself he must be a conscientious worker and very good on committees, but really for the secret joy of voting against Janet. Pink Thatcher? Not bad, not bad at all. The intelligence, the arrogance, the drive and ruthlessness, the indefinable sense of values somewhere deeply, and perhaps badly wrong, the surface fire, the coldness at the heart …

  Dutifully, however, she put a 1 against Janet’s name and a 2 against Bob Stavoli’s. While the ballots were being collected the hall became like any other gathering during a lull between excitements: chat, scraping of chairs, coughs, a queue for the inadequate loo. Poppy thought about the dead man. There was something about his face which reminded her of someone else; not a family likeness, more a sort of style, the vulnerability and need. At first the memory file wouldn’t function, but then, as Mr Kumar gathered and checked the ballot papers and sealed them into an envelope, and Mr Meakin rose to bang his gavel yet again, the image leapt clear: little Nick with his sun-bleached hair patting sand into a bucket; Laura gazing at him; ‘That’s the pity of it, Mrs Tasker. That’s just the pity of it.’