by Weldon, Fay
But then I remember that a sense of omnipotence can be a symptom of mental illness, and put the notion from my mind. I live in fear of going mad, just to add to my other troubles.
Look at it like this: on the day I summoned Driver out of the flat East Anglian landscape, set him uniformed and gaitered and bright-blue-eyed at the wheel of a black BMW, flickered hell fire through the evening sky to scare the crows, created Bernard Bellamy as both the tempter and the tempted, I did it in response to Carmen, Laura and Annie’s desire just to get out of here. I was being helpful, honestly. Creating a window of opportunity for them to leap out of.
‘But how do we get out of here?’ asked Laura, before they parted. (Driver being a long way off, ill temper just evaporated.) ‘Out of Dullsville, Tennessee? How does a girl ever get out?’
‘You can work your way out, you can sleep your way out,’ replied Carmen. ‘You can sell your soul to the Devil.’
‘Bags I work,’ said Annie, who always believed that if it hurt it was good for you.
‘Bags I sleep,’ said Laura, but she kept her fingers crossed while she spoke. She believed in love, romance and fidelity, but hardly liked to say so.
‘That leaves me,’ said Carmen sadly, ‘to sell my soul to the Devil.’
And they went into their respective homes, to face whatever there was to face.
Laura’s fate waited for her outside the front gate. He was seventeen and had zits; he leaned against his motor scooter. He wore a leather jacket and he had soulful brown eyes and a dogged demeanour. Laura ignored him. She walked straight past him and into her house and Carmen and Annie watched and giggled, and Woodie pretended not to hear them.
Now although Laura accepted her fate she meant to fight it off as long as she could, at least until Woodie had grown out of his zits, had calmed down and could earn an honest living. He was studying technical drawing and carpentry at a college in Norwich, but could think only of Laura. He’d taken her outside at an end-of-term disco and kissed her under the moon, and some kind of yellowy light had pierced through to the marrow of his bones, so now, as he put it, ‘She’s in my system, for good or bad,’ but alas he wasn’t in hers, not yet. He knew he would be, one day.
Audrey, Laura’s mother, opened the window and spoke to Woodie. She wore a flowered cotton dress, and her arms and her face were thin, but her voice was strong. Laura took after her father Kim, both of them being on the fleshy side, and soft-voiced.
‘Woodie,’ she said, ‘do go away. It’s unsettling.’
‘I like to be near her,’ he said.
‘Woodie,’ said Audrey, ‘the way to get girls to run after you is to run away from them.’
Once she’d run away from Kim, who’d run after and made her pregnant with Laura, and when his divorce was through he’d married her, and moved into the house she’d shared with her mother, until the Town Hall tore it down and housed them here in Landsfield Crescent. She’d had asthma ever since. The climate didn’t agree with her: the constant wind deranged her: she always had a pain here, an ache there: she, an inland person by nature, lived in fear that the tide would forget one day how to ebb and would simply rise and rise and drown them all in their beds. After Laura her stomach and bosom had drooped: Landsfield Crescent was not lucky for her. She taught General Science part-time in the local Further Education College. Her husband Kim taught English Literature and Business Studies, full-time, likewise. His classroom and his home smelt sweetly of marijuana, or perhaps it was herbal cigarettes. He had a beard, and wore sandals at the weekend for the health of his feet. He was an energetic lover.
‘I don’t like playing games,’ said Woodie to Audrey. ‘Laura either loves me or she doesn’t.’
‘Then she doesn’t,’ said Audrey briskly. It is not easy, even for the most sensible and sensitive of mothers, to accept that their daughters are now of an age to receive love, and offer it. ‘She’s too young. She has to concentrate on her school work. She wants to go to college. She has to pass exams.’
‘I don’t care whether she passes her exams or not,’ said Woodie. ‘It makes no difference to me.’
He spoke with the lordliness of Alexander, Prince of Persia, for all he was seventeen and had zits, and it was at that moment that Audrey perceived that her daughter’s fate was indeed to marry Woodie and have his children and there was no saving it. You give up your life for them, she thought, and they’re never grateful, they take it all for granted, and then they grow up to give away their lives as well, in just the same way. Where’s the point? This depressing thought, which she believed singular to herself, gave her a pain in her stomach, or perhaps it was the other way round and the pain led to the thought. Whatever it was, the pain never thereafter quite went away, nor the sadness.
‘Woodie,’ said Audrey, ‘she’s passing exams for her sake, not yours. If you can’t understand that what can you understand? Go away.’
And still he stood there, leaning against his scooter, chewing a fingernail. He didn’t believe a word of it, until Laura appeared at the front door, in her short white shorts and blue and white striped top.
‘Woodie,’ she said, ‘this is getting embarrassing. Go away.’
So Woodie went away, at least for a time. And Laura went back to her room and stared at her homework. One year to her exams. And shouldn’t her father be home from college by now? He was having an affair with a girl no older than her, and Laura knew and Audrey didn’t, and should she tell or should she not? She thought perhaps she should but she didn’t have the courage.
The moment that Woodie revved up and drove off was the moment that Count Capinski entered Annie’s mother’s head and took up his fitful residence there. Annie’s mother Mavis Horner, you must understand, was a clairvoyant, and her husband Alan Horner a preacher in the Fenedge spiritualist church, so the event, which to others might seem strange, was well within Mavis and Alan’s field of comprehension. Spirits of the departed, figments of the other world, flitted in and out of Mavis’s head at the best of times; what was unusual was that on this occasion this one not only arrived unsummoned but stayed. Perhaps – to use the Horners’ rather Victorian terminology — the ordinary borderlines between this vale of tears and the spirit world were breached by the shock of Driver’s appearance in the neighbourhood, to take up residence in his Fenedge safe house, and Capinski managed to slip through and find a tenancy in Mavis’s head. At any rate, there he was. This was how it happened.
Annie was upstairs in her small back bedroom doing her homework. Mavis and Alan Horner were inspecting the garage which Carmen’s father Andy Wedmore had built for Alan, at no little cost. Alan, who worked for the local ambulance service, occasionally found it convenient to stop off with his ambulance at home on his way back from a call, just to recover from the trauma of his work. His was an accident vehicle; a particularly bad section of motorway ran nearby.
‘He’s made a bodge job of this,’ said Alan, running a finger over a window ledge, getting a splinter as a result. ‘I could have done it better myself.’ The first part of this statement was true enough, and could be said of all work undertaken by Andy; the second not so.
‘You don’t have the time for DIY,’ said Mavis. ‘Each to his own. The cook to his wooden spoon, the bootmaker to his last.’
They eased their way round the side of the ambulance, between metal and concrete, noting a loose piece of wiring here, a wrongly placed shelf there, the general air of flung-together. Alan wore a suit which wrinkled round the crotch and under his arms, but a nice blue shirt and yellow tie, and Mavis wore a blue dress and a yellow cardy. They liked to echo one another in every way they could. They felt very close. She had the puffy face, stolid body and puzzled eyes of the habitual clairvoyant. Too much contact with the other world is bad for the appearance. It muddies the outlines of the self as it appears to the real world. Fudge and fuzz: half one thing, half another.
‘What are those two funny black bags?’ asked Mavis. ‘On the shelf over there? Rolled up
carpet, or what?’
‘They’re not important,’ said Alan. ‘I’ll have them out by the morning. The morgue’s taken to closing down at four. I never like to knock the staff up, when they’re tired. It’s easier for everyone to face nasty work in the morning.’
‘You mean they’re body bags?’ asked Mavis. ‘And they’re full?’
‘Full as I could manage,’ said Alan. ‘I hope I got them both properly sorted out.’
And Mavis started to moan, for all the world like someone in childbirth.
‘It’s only till morning,’ said Alan. ‘They’ll be okay. It’s not a warm night.’ But it was, of course.
Mavis’s moaning stopped and a particular look came over her face, one Alan was accustomed to seeing only on Sundays, and which alarmed him even more than the sound of her evident distress.
On Tuesday and Thursday evenings Mavis conducted private séances (eighteen pounds a head, minimum number of participants four plus medium) and on these occasions, exhausted after a day in her surgery, made do with the tricks of the trade while in conversation with the recently dead. (That is to say, most people of a certain generation – and her clients were mostly elderly – know a Harry or have bad backs, or were known to the ambulance service and, besides, Mavis kept extensive files on local residents and had notice of who was coming along.) But sometimes on Sunday afternoon at the Spiritualist Church service, when she was rested, she would be conscious of what she called the real thing. The fuzz and fudge of her normal appearance would sharpen and harden: her neck would seem longer, her cheeks more hollow, and when her mouth opened she spoke with someone else’s voice. He could see her now begin to change.
‘Oh my God,’ said Mavis. ‘It’s much too strong. Make him go away.’
‘It can’t be coming from the body bags,’ said Alan, ‘because they were both female.’
Next time Mavis spoke it was in a guttural male voice with an Eastern European accent.
‘Dear lady,’ said the Count/Mavis, ‘I am charmed to make your acquaintance at last. I am deeply indebted for your hospitality. May I introduce myself? Count Capinski at your service. And so this is your husband?’
‘Shake hands with the Count, Alan,’ said Mavis, stretching out a surprisingly male hand, which Alan, taken unawares, accepted and shook.
And that was how, by all accounts, Capinski arrived in Mavis’s head, where he stayed on and off for some years. Since his alternative dwelling was a little dungeon in Cracow in the fourteenth century, where he was, or so he claimed, starving to death, Landsfield Crescent must have seemed agreeable enough while he waited for possible rescue in his own time.
Annie came down from her little back bedroom in search of a cup of tea and found her mother devouring an entire sliced loaf and the week’s ration of cheese, and the hot water supply switched on, which was unusual mid-week. Everyone has their favourite economies, and Mavis’s was not to waste hot water. But today she planned on a bath.
‘So this,’ said Count Capinski, from Mavis’s bread-filled mouth, ‘is your little daughter. But isn’t she of an age to be married?’
‘She’s still at school,’ explained Mavis, in her own voice, swallowing.
‘But not for long,’ observed the Count/Mavis. ‘Soon she will meet a tall dark stranger from overseas, who will sweep her off her feet and carry her off to paradise. She will travel to the ends of the earth and back again. It will not be all happiness. I, Count Capinski, prophesy.’
‘It’s too bad,’ said Annie. ‘Your own mother ill-wishing you,’ and, outraged, she went over with her homework to Laura’s and knocked on the door.
‘Please can I do my homework here?’ asked Annie.
‘Is there something the matter at home?’ asked Audrey.
‘No more than usual,’ said Annie.
‘You might as well go on up, since Carmen is there already. But try to concentrate on your homework,’ said Audrey, who often talked like the back page of a women’s magazine, ‘and forget your personal problems.’
Annie went up to Laura’s room, which had been especially decorated to Laura’s taste in pink and white, not like her own room, which was so full of steel filing cabinets and card indexes she could scarcely find her way to bed.
‘What now?’ asked Laura of Annie.
‘There’s a strange man in my mother’s head,’ said Annie.
Carmen said, ‘Will your father sue for divorce?’ and Annie said, ‘No such luck. It will turn him on.’
Now Carmen too had run into trouble on reaching home. Observing how often any one of the three girls, on returning from school, would stay home only briefly, to reconvene the group in either Laura or Carmen’s house after a spat of door-slamming, I would comfort myself with the notion that though not to have children is a terrible fate, to have them can be worse.
Carmen came from a family of slobs. Everyone knew it, no one denied it, not even Carmen. The general belief was that she had been switched at birth. She had a fineness of feature which her alleged parents did not; a composure and a sense of wrong and right altogether alien to them, which they interpreted as the putting on of airs. Andy, Carmen’s father, had a reputation throughout Fenedge as a bad if cheerful builder. His extensions fell down: his damp courses never worked: if he painted your window frames you could be sure those windows would never open again. It was nothing to him that his final bills would outstrip his estimates by more than a hundred per cent: his wife Raelene seldom dared answer the phone for fear of outraged and impatient clients; yet enough work came his way to keep him going. At least he sang, not swore, on top of his ladder, and if you failed to move the furniture before he arrived to paint the ceiling he would not pull a face but simply get on with the painting, and charge you extra for non-drip paint. He would take on work other builders would scorn to – the tarting up of premises between one tenant and the next: bodge jobs specifically asked for. His large beer belly flopped over his belt; he had little piggy jolly eyes, and on hot days he seldom left home with a shirt. His wife Raelene ate for comfort and suffered from depression: her chin and her neck were as one: she had once been on a shoplifting charge. Stephen, Carmen’s younger brother, had been on two drug charges (though only for marijuana) by the time he was fourteen. They were not a hard or criminal family; on the contrary, Andy would stop whatever he was doing to mend your burst pipes in an emergency, and Raelene would feed the neighbour’s cat if required. They were just slobs and everyone knew it, and pitied Carmen for being one of their number, and Carmen hated to be pitied. Who doesn’t? At least anyone you care to talk to.
On this particular afternoon when Carmen let herself in, she found her father and her brother eating fish and chips for their tea, which Raelene had just finished cooking. The chips were dripping with oil, the way the family liked them: no tales of the desirability of polyunsaturated fats had come their way so far. Stephen was reading the morning’s edition of the nation’s favourite tabloid, The Sun. He always opened Page 3 first. In those days the nude girls always appeared towards the front of the newspaper; later, for some reason to do with I don’t know what, except perhaps the fact that the owners of the most fabulous tits failed to live up to expectations of equally spectacular and lascivious lifestyle, they had drifted towards the back and become more to do with the sports pages than home news.
Carmen stood in the doorway to the kitchen and raised her eyebrows, as she was well accustomed to doing. The cat’s food hardened, maggoty, in a saucer uncleaned for days; dirty dishes piled in the sink; the smell of frying fish lingered in the air; little dusty yellow globules of fat spotted the ceiling above the cooker. Raelene, her own plate of fish and chips keeping warm in the oven, attempted to save the cooking oil for reuse by pouring it through too small a sieve, so that it slopped over the draining board. Now, hopelessly, she squirted detergent into the slops. She had pretty little hands, which Carmen had inherited, but they were lost in the whole of her.
‘So,’ said Andy to Carmen, ‘Madam hono
urs us with her presence. Too late to help her mother with the tea.’
He wore no shirt. Stephen wore a T-shirt made of his nation’s flag. Carmen raised her eyebrows further.
Raelene said, ‘Carmen, will you put the garbage out? I’ve only got two hands,’ and Carmen replied, ‘Why did you call me Carmen if you only wanted me as a beast of burden?’ But they all looked at her blankly, so she said, ‘After tea, mum,’ and took her plate from the warming oven and sat down at the table, carefully brushing the chair before she did so.
‘No chips,’ she said, and pushed them to one side of her plate, and picked away at the fish, carefully removing the burnt batter to reach the almost raw white flesh inside.
‘Carmen,’ said her father, ‘I don’t know what it is with you. You’re the great wet blanket of all times.’
And Stephen turned to the photograph of Peachey Penelope, whose bare bosom upthrust not just all over Page 3, but whose nipples extended back into Page 2, as a special exercise in energetic typographical ingenuity.
‘Coo, Dad, look at that,’ said Stephen. ‘How about those?’
Raelene complained from the sink, where spilt oil and bargain-price detergent had just formed a kind of foamy cake, ‘Don’t look at it, Dad, I don’t like it.’
Andy looked at Penelope’s likeness and said to Raelene, ‘Don’t be such a prude. Everyone’s got them.’
Carmen said, ‘Men don’t, only women,’ and both Raelene and Andy said, ‘No one asked your opinion, Car,’ and Carmen said, ‘Why did you call me Carmen if you meant to call me Car?’
Stephen said, ‘How’d you like a handful of that, Dad?’ and Andy, looking more closely, said, ‘I don’t know so much. I reckon that’s silicone, not flesh.’
