Great tapped out dash-dot-dash-dash, dot, dot-dot-dot. YES.
'BOY NEEDED TO GET OFF... I'm not translating that word. AND DO SOMETHING.'
'Me?' said Provender.
'YES,' said Moore. 'USELESS LAZY... I'm sorry, could you run through that one again please?'
Dash-dot-dash-dot, dot-dot-dash, dash-dot, dash.
'SO-AND-SO.' This was not, strictly speaking, the term Great had used, but Moore had no wish to offend anyone by repeating the actual profanity.
'THEREFORE KIDNAP. RUDE AWAKENING. BRING TO SENSES. GLEEDS MUST SURVIVE.'
'A bit extreme, don't you think?' said Provender.
'DESPERATE TIMES DESPERATE MEASURES. IN MY DAY WAR MADE MAN OF YOU. FACE FOE FACE SELF. LEARN COURAGE AND DUTY. NO WAR NOW THEREFORE OTHER CHALLENGE NECESSARY.'
'Only there nearly was a war. You didn't count on that, did you?'
'GOOD IF BOY TURNED SOLDIER.'
'Yes, like that was going to happen. And Mum. Another little drawback to your scheme, Great.'
'SAD. WRONG. CYNTHIA ONLY DECENT GLEED. PROSPER UNGRATEFUL... No, I won't say it.'
Great banged the word out again, forcefully, and Moore relented.
'All right. UNGRATEFUL BASTARD. I apologise, Mr Gleed, those aren't my sentiments of course. I'm simply the messenger.'
Prosper waved it aside, looking as if he knew he deserved the censure.
'And if I'd been killed?' said Provender to Great. 'Believe me, I came close. That would've scuppered you, wouldn't it? Talk about an own goal.'
'ACCEPTABLE RISK.'
'Oh, thanks.'
'CARVER MONITORING SITUATION.'
'Obviously not that closely.'
'ACCEPTABLE RISK,' Great reiterated, via Moore.
Provender sighed. 'You're quite mad, aren't you? I'm not saying I don't understand why. Sitting in that chair all day. Stuck inside your own body. Stewing in your own thoughts. Staring out at a world you can't directly affect. Year after year of that - it's not surprising a few of your marbles have gone astray. But that's no excuse for what you did. To me. To all of us. Do you regret it now? Do you feel even the slightest remorse?'
Great's hand stayed in his lap for almost a minute, until with solemn, precise emphasis it sounded out two letters: dash-dot, dash-dash-dash.
Translation was superfluous.
'Thought not,' said Provender.
'ACTED FOR FAMILY. DOING BEST FOR FAMILY. GETTING HOUSE IN ORDER. FAMILY EVERYTHING. FAMILY MUST NOT FADE. GLEEDS MUST SURVIVE. GLEEDS MUST ... again, SURVIVE. GLEEDS. GLEEDS.' Moore listened as Great continued to tap out the same sequence over and over. In the end the Anagrammatic Detective shrugged. 'That's it. GLEEDS, GLEEDS, ad infinitum.'
The tapping quickened and grew louder. It was all Great had to say now. His gaze scanned left to right and back again, taking in each and all of his relatives. The pattern of dashes and dots became insistent, hypnotic, like a peal of church bells, a phrase from a song, a complex tomtom polyrhythm, dinning itself into every skull in the room, until eventually Provender snapped to his feet, strode over, grabbed Great's hand and wrested off the signet ring. The ring came free with surprising ease, a little too large for the bony finger it encircled. Provender tossed it upwards and snatched it from the air at the start of its downward arc, stealing it from sight.
Great resumed tapping the wheelchair frame, but with his bare knuckle the sound was nowhere near as sharp and attention-getting. All he could manage was a dull, scarcely audible thud which the Gleeds could ignore without too much difficulty, and did. In a demonstration of contempt they began talking amongst themselves, huddling close, literally turning their backs on Great. Provender was asked to provide an account of his adventures of the past three days, and he duly fleshed out the sketchy details the others already knew and filled in some blanks. There were questions, prompts, interjections, and the volume of the conversation mounted until, quite deliberately, it was so loud that Great hadn't a hope of making himself heard above it. He soon gave up trying. His hand fell limply into his lap and all he could do was sit and glower, a picture of impotence and thwarted fury.
For Moore, it was hard to reconcile the frail-looking figure in the wheelchair with the force and recklessness of the scheme he had hatched, yet some clue as to the vigour of the mind trapped within that useless body lay in Great's eyes - their blue blaze radiated manic energy. Mad? Quite possibly. Bad? Not by his own reckoning. Great had been trying to save his Family. For him there was no nobler objective.
With his right-hand man gone, Great had lost his one sure link with the rest of the world, the conduit through which he channelled his wishes and desires. Moore felt little sorrow over Carver's demise, horrible though it had been. Carver would have happily visited the same fate on him, indeed had been trying to. Natural justice had in this instance been poetic justice too. Still, Great was bereft of his lifelong companion now, and it looked unlikely that the other Gleeds were going to forgive him any time soon for what he had done. If Cynthia Gleed did not recover, they might never forgive him. Moore predicted a long and frosty ostracism for the Family's senior-most member, a future in which he would be made to atone for his actions as surely as any prisoner in solitary confinement. His paralysed body would be his cell.
You could almost, Moore thought, pity the old brute.
Almost.
73
The pearl-white Dagenham Seraph stood in the driveway, V8 engine susurrating. With its high wheelbase and pinpoint suspension the car seemed perpetually to be floating; whether in motion or stationary, its tyres seemed only just in contact the earth. Gravity-defying, it was a limousine that appeared to weigh less than a saloon car.
In the driving seat a chauffeur sat with his gloved hands resting on the steering wheel and a look of perfect impassivity on his face, professionally patient. In the back, Romeo Moore was luxuriating, stretching out his legs, swimming on the calfskin upholstery, relishing every cubic inch of limo spaciousness. One of the rear doors was open, inviting Is to join him inside. She was ready to go, but first there was a farewell to be negotiated, the awkward moment she had forgotten she had been dreading, till now.
There was still a faint glow in the sky, star-clusters pinned to a backdrop of indigo rather than pure black. Clouds of moths hovered around lawn lights, like miniature solar systems, planets orbiting suns. The Seraph's fine-tuned purr was so soft that chirruping insects in the vicinity had no trouble competing with it.
Provender waited. Provender had much to say and no idea how to begin saying it.
'So,' said Is. She raised her hands and let them fall haplessly. 'It's been ... something, hasn't it.'
Numbly Provender nodded. 'It has.'
'Who'd have thought... I mean... I don't know what I mean. Look, it's better if I just go, I think. Get into the car and get whisked away.'
'You don't have to --'
She held up a finger and darted it towards his mouth. 'I have to. For one thing, they're expecting me back at work tomorrow.' A small lie. The day after tomorrow. 'Early shift. I've a whole life I have to pick back up. Things I have to start doing again. Back to the everyday, the routine. I need that. I need to pretend as if...'
'As if nothing ever happened?'
'Don't you think that's for the best?'
'Obviously what I think doesn't count. But do you think that's for the best? Did nothing happen?'
She knew in what sense he meant the question but she answered as if she didn't. 'Fights and dangling off balconies and wrangling a psychopathic ex-boyfriend and mixing with the Gleeds - I wouldn't call that nothing. But it's not my life. Not what I am. And I'm not sure I'd want to go back and think about it too much. It's just too out of the ordinary. I'm a very ordinary person, Provender. I like normal life, normal things. If I can just somehow push past all of it...'
'Erase it? Forget it?'
'Move on. You understand?'
His nod said yes. His eyes said no.
'I'm not saying I'm going
to be the same from here on,' she added. 'I could hardly expect to be. But I don't want to be that different, if you see what I'm getting at.'
Is's instinct, the bluntness with which she naturally dealt with life, was urging her to come right out and say it, spell it out to Provender, leave him in no doubt. But she was trying to spare his feelings. Or was she trying to spare her own? Either way, dancing around the subject seemed preferable to tackling it head-on. She couldn't bear to hurt him, but more than that, she couldn't bear to have to see him hurt and know that she was the cause.
'I hope your mother will be all right,' she offered, lamely.
'Yes.'
'I think her chances are good.'
'If you say so.'
That was it. She really could not think of anything else. It was time to leave.
She turned, then turned again and went to Provender and embraced him. Contact. Body on body. Warmth to warmth. His chin against her neck, his breath briefly in her ear. She squeezed. He squeezed back with that tiniest bit more pressure. He straightened away from her, and for a moment their faces were close, nose to nose, mirroring.
'Isn't there anything I could --' he began.
Is looked down, away. Let go of him. Headed for the car, trying not to appear to be hurrying. Stepped in. Shut the door. Did not once look round.
The chauffeur engaged gear and the Seraph glided down the drive, away from Dashlands House into the grounds of the estate, away from light into the boundless warm blue summer dark.
74
Provender watched the car go.
The parting with Is had not gone as he might have wished. Its finality crushed him. Was that it? Was it all over? Just like that?
Peering at the Seraph's dwindling taillights, he had to fight the urge to sprint after the limo - a mad dash to catch up. He knew he would never make it, and even if he did, what would he achieve? Nothing except make himself look desperate and foolish.
He thought he had proved to Is that he was not just a Gleed; that he was so much less and at the same time so much more. He should just have come out and said it, but, tongue-tied at the crucial moment, he had fumbled and failed.
So, what now?
At the back of his mind there lurked the idea of another book, a follow-up to The Meritocrats, possibly a sequel. He had been considering this for a while anyway, and perhaps if he wrote another novel, got it out into the world, spread the Family-sabotaging message a little bit further, Is would be impressed. She would see that he meant everything he said, that he sincerely wanted a better, fairer world, a world where the Families no longer held sway. This grand gesture would surely win her over.
Wouldn't it?
The flaws in the plan were many. Principally, Is hated The Meritocrats. It galled Provender to remember this but it was true. She couldn't stand the book, and therefore a second book might not be the ideal way to go about gaining her attention. Besides, it would take him at least a year to write, and then it would probably take another year to percolate fully through the public consciousness. Too long, too slow.
Moreover, Provender no longer believed, as he once had, that a book could change everything, or indeed anything, for the better. This view was based in part on his experiences at the hands of Damien Scrase, which was a case of the law of unintended consequences if ever there was one. Were it not for The Meritocrats, would Damien have become quite the fanatic he did? Perhaps he would have, but the book had certainly added fuel to that particular fire.
Also, more relevantly, Provender surprised himself by realising that he didn't resent his Family quite as much as he used to. Was it because he was worried about his mother? Was it because he had faced the threat posed by Great (and Carver) and survived? Was it because he was simply glad to be back with them?
Maybe with time, if his mother's condition improved and he had a chance to gain perspective on things, he would lapse back into his sullen revulsion for all things Familial.
Maybe.
But he thought not.
Great was correct about one thing, at any rate. BOY NEEDED TO DO SOMETHING.
Boy had, with The Meritocrats. But it wasn't enough; it wasn't the best way forward.
Boy had also achieved a breakthrough with Stanislaw Kuczinski. That was a good sign for the future.
Yet, for all that, boy knew he still needed to do something else, something different, something immediate and concrete.
The Seraph turned a corner, its taillights winking out of sight. Beyond the aura of the house lights there was nothing now but a blank silhouette of trees and hillside braced against the starry sky. Provender shivered, feeling a small, lonely chill, a foretaste of night.
But he felt, too, a sudden glimmering within. A twinkling amid darkness. The precursor of an idea. A seed of thought, just starting to shoot.
Yes...
PART VII
75
Routine was good. At St Fiacre's there was no such thing as an average day, each day was different, each came with its own particular freight of chaos and unpredictability. At the start of a shift you had no idea what lay ahead and for the next eight hours you simply went along for the ride, dealing equally with the longueurs of boredom and the sudden frantic spurts of activity. Nevertheless, in total, one day after another, it amounted to a routine. You got up, did your shift, collapsed into bed. Is welcomed it. It was what she needed. Like the tidal beating of the waves it wore away at the memory of her time with Provender until eventually, perhaps eight or nine weeks later, she could look back on the whole episode without rancour or self-recrimination. She could safely say that it no longer meant anything to her. It was old, done with, tidied away, out of sight.
She slipped back into the swirl of life at the hospital with scarcely a ripple. Several colleagues congratulated her on having the foresight to take a week's leave just when the shit hit the fan. The day war nearly broke out had been the busiest in living memory. By noon the wards were full of panic attacks and attempted suicides, people whose fragile personalities had cracked under the strain. Then, come evening, when it became clear that peace was going to reign, Accident and Emergency had to cope with a huge influx of alcohol-related cases. The whole of London, it seemed, had gone on a bender, and St Fiacre's was where they ended up to have their stomachs pumped and their lamppost-collision wounds sutured and their brawl bruises daubed with iodine.
Everyone - nurses, interns, residents, registrars - had their war-day reminiscences and wanted to share them with Is. Those of them, however, who got round to asking her what she had been doing during those tense hours, were invariably disappointed by her reply. 'Oh, not much' was hardly a fair repayment for the fraught frontline tales they had regaled her with. But she could not be pushed to say any more, and the assumption was that Is was jealous. She felt left out. She wished she could have been there to grapple with the crazies and the inebriates. Everybody else was part of a remarkable shared experience, bonded by adversity, and she was not.
During the post-Provender period, the long slow process of forgetting, Is did keep an eye on the newspapers and the TV, and every so often a reminder would pop up, some report or article that briefly brought the whole episode back. There was, for instance, a short piece in one of the Familial columns that mentioned Cynthia Gleed's recovery from a mystery illness. Though still weak, Mrs Gleed was apparently faring well and should be back to full strength in no time. The article gave no clue as to what the illness might have been, although one of the more scurrilous gossip columnists speculated that the Gleed matriarch was most likely going through the Change. A week later, photos appeared in a number of national dailies depicting a wan but smiling Cynthia accompanying her husband at some public function or other. Prosper Gleed had a solicitous hand on his wife's elbow, an arm around her waist. Every inch the caring, attentive spouse. If you knew what to look for, as Is did, you would have noticed how his eyes shone as he gazed on her. What had dwindled to embers had now been rekindled into a blaze.
Then there were the headlines that appeared when information about Damien was finally released to the press. He had been arraigned before a judge on two counts of murder and one of threat to endanger life. Is was not aware, till then, that Damien had killed anyone. All she knew about was his attempt on Provender's life. But it turned out that he had knifed to death a doorman at the Shortborn and also that a body had been discovered at his flat - the corpse of someone called Milner, likewise knifed to death. Milner, it turned out, was a private investigator. In fact, he was an associate of Romeo Moore, a fellow Anagrammatic Detective.
Her horror was great and so, too, was her fear that her involvement in the kidnapping meant she would be regarded as an accessory to murder. For several days she went around on tenterhooks, waiting for the police to come. Whenever her name was called out over the hospital's public address system, her heart would start to pound and her palms would become slick with sweat. At the back of her mind was the thought that Provender, for all his claims that he would protect her, might in a fit of pique do the exact opposite. She had rejected him. He might have no qualms about getting his own back by throwing her to the proverbial wolves. Never mind a woman scorned, what about a man?
In the event, he appeared to stay true to his word. The police did not call on Is. If anyone in officialdom connected her with Damien Scrase, for whatever reason the connection was not followed up. Gleed influence kept her in the clear. She was relieved about this, naturally, but she also felt furtively guilty. It wasn't right that she should be so utterly exonerated. It felt a bit like cheating.
A couple of her nurse friends, who knew of her one-time relationship with Damien, remarked to her about his arrest. He had always struck them as a borderline case, they said, violence lurking below the surface. In fact, they opined, they were surprised nothing like this had happened sooner. At any rate, it was a good thing Is had dumped him when she did. She was well shot of him.
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