Lots of Love
Page 29
Spurs was riding Otto, his long legs wrapped around the speckled pink back with no saddle for support or balance as Otto spun round, boggling at the badly parked Merc and its blaring stereo. Yet Spurs barely moved a muscle as he sat out the hysteria and settled the horse, no longer laughing, his huge eyes pouring molten-silver scorn on to Ellen and Lloyd.
‘Bloody gypsies!’ Lloyd fumed, marching up to face Spurs over the hedge. ‘We’re not buying anything, okay?’ he snapped, then turned back to Ellen. ‘Shall we go inside?’
Ellen was staring at Spurs, her heart crashing. He hadn’t shaved in days, and the dark stubble made him look more wild and beautiful than ever. His faded red T-shirt was ripped at the shoulder so that one brown bicep showed through, and his jeans were coated in dust, as though he’d been sleeping in a barn.
‘Shall we go inside, Ellen?’ Lloyd repeated anxiously, not liking the way Spurs was reining back the big horse.
‘Piss off,’ she snapped.
‘Lovers’ tiff?’ Spurs asked nastily, glaring at her. He looked murderous.
Before she could answer, he and Otto had clattered away towards the bridlepath.
Kylie called after him, entreating him to confide in her.
Ignoring Lloyd, Ellen watched the distant path until she saw a pink streak thundering along it, heading for Broken Back Wood.
‘Go home, Lloyd,’ she said eventually, and turned to go into the house. ‘You’re fired.’
‘You bitch!’ he howled after her. ‘I hope your pain-in-the-arse parents get a pittance for this naff, dingy little rat hole. And I hope their cock-tease daughter gets—’ suddenly his tirade was interrupted by an even louder rant.
‘Move this bleedin’ contraption afore we drive right into the bugger!’ screamed a hoarse voice.
Ellen turned at the door to see Dot Wyck leaning out of the cab of a familiar red pick-up that had pulled up beyond Lloyd’s Merc, engine revving. At its wheel, Saul glowered at Ellen and Lloyd through a dusty, fly-flecked windscreen.
‘You think you own this village, doncha?’ Dot yelled at Ellen, her face turning as red as her grandson’s Arsenal shirt. ‘You and your flash boyfriend!’
Gulping nervously, his big caramel eyes blinking as they took in Fluffy, the sabre-toothed dog mutant, slavering ferociously from the back of the pick-up, Lloyd bolted towards his car.
Ellen watched him go, momentarily grateful to the Wycks for bringing an end to an unpleasant encounter. But then her heart sank as Dot Wyck took advantage of Lloyd’s clumsy manoeuvring to hurl a few more insults for good measure.
‘People like you don’t deserve to live round here, you stuck-up cow!’ she pointed a finger. ‘You go round acting all high and mighty, taking away our livelihoods. You don’t care if the likes of me and Reg starve just so long as you get what you want.’
Ellen marched out onto the lane, temples throbbing. ‘Please don’t shout.’ She stopped a safe distance from Fluffy’s high-rise hackles. ‘I thought we’d been through all this.’ At that moment, Saul leaned on the horn to hurry Lloyd along.
‘You ain’t no better than us!’ Dot carried on shouting above the horn. ‘Everybody knows you’ve been putting it about like a tart already. Your boyfriend know you been knocking round with Spurs Belling?’ she jerked her head towards the Merc, which was now executing a twenty-five point turn as Lloyd crunched the gears in fright.
‘That is none of your business,’ Ellen fumed, refusing to fuel the argument by defending herself.
But Dot seemed to be enjoying herself now, slanging matches clearly a recreational pastime. ‘I ain’t having a cheap tart bad-mouthing my family!’
‘I haven’t bad-mouthed your family,’ Ellen sighed as Saul’s horn-leaning stopped and Lloyd finally drove away in a series of panic-stricken kangaroo-hops.
‘Not what we heard.’ Dot didn’t bother dropping the volume. ‘You bin calling us lazy Pikies and goodfornothing inbreds and all sorts, ain’t she, Saul?’
The blue eyes flashed beside her and Saul nodded, casting Ellen a look that could have frozen hell and carved it into an ice sculpture of Medusa. Dot’s vitriol held no fear, but one look from her broken-toothed grandson made Ellen step back in alarm. Something about Saul was deadly. Then she spotted a gun case in the back with Fluffy and backed away further.
‘Whoever told you that was lying,’ she spluttered. ‘I’ve said nothing about you.’
Dot dropped her voice to a threatening growl, only just audible above Fluffy’s snarling. ‘I think we know who the liar is round here. Sounds like you been lying all the time lately. Most of all, lying with Belling, you little fool.’ She cackled, tugging at the sleeve of Saul’s red football shirt and telling him to drive on.
As the pick-up rattled away, Ellen closed her eyes and thought of Spurs galloping up into the hills on Otto, still seething with misunderstanding about Lloyd. What had he been saying about her?
As an evening downpour started in earnest, Ellen set up her laptop on the kitchen table, plugged the modem into the socket on the wall and waited for Windows to greet her with the sound of a crashing wave, as Richard had programmed it to do.
It was all very well for him to send irate text messages demanding that she read his emails, she thought, but he was the one who had cancelled their service provider. Oddlode was hardly over-subscribed with Internet cafés. It had only just occurred to her to use one of the thirty-day free-trial CD-roms that littered the junkmail which had accumulated during her parents’ absence.
Richard had persuaded her to buy the little computer three years earlier with money left to her by her grandmother. He’d loved the new slimline machine, which travelled with them across Europe, its batteries charged from every conceivable outlet, the three-pin plug inevitably carrying a caterpillar of wonky adaptors like mismatched Lego. He connected to the Net via his mobile, played online backgammon and subscribed to surfing newsgroups; he bought and sold his gear on auction sites; he emailed friends and swapped digital photos of competitions; he spent more time tapping keys than talking. It had been his biggest escape when the relationship went truly stale. In despair, Ellen had been forced to email him and request a real-life conversation. Richard didn’t get the joke.
Then, just before the split, he announced that her laptop was hopelessly out of date and had bought himself an all-singing, all-dancing Sony with the money they had saved for a new van. The new computer played DVDs and received radio stations all over the world and could be used to edit the photographs of Richard surfing to make the waves look bigger and his belly smaller. Looking back now, Ellen should have guessed what was to come – in the same way that she should have read signals into the fact that he started auctioning off almost all his possessions on eBay, updating his palmtop with addresses from her bulging old Filofax, and checking out property values in North Cornwall.
Ellen had barely used her not-very-old reject laptop, except to print out her CV. The picture that greeted her as wallpaper was the one Richard had left there – a photograph of him emerging from the tube of a vast wave near Torquay, a small, wetsuited acolyte in a water-vaulted cathedral. It was a fantastic shot. She hastily slotted the free CD-rom into the sliding drawer. The computer whirred into action and welcomed her to the World’s Favourite Internet Provider.
Five minutes later, she was online and ready to make contact. Pulling up the Outlook Explorer window, she knew that she had to face the music and check her Hotmail account to read the messages Richard kept texting her about.
She typed www.Hot . . . then paused as the scroll bar dropped down to suggest shortcuts to sites recently accessed, which started with ‘Hot’. Richard, it seemed, had liked a lot of hot sites, but he hadn’t checked his mail as often as he’d checked Hotsex, Hot-xxx-action, Hotporn and Hot_teens.
Ellen’s hands slid away from the keyboard, her heart pounding hollowly in her ears along with the rain rattling on the windows.
‘Oh, God, Richard.’ She let out a sad laugh.
&n
bsp; . . . mail.com. She typed the end of the address, logged in with her username and password, then groaned as her inbox cheerfully downloaded with fifty-seven new messages.
They weren’t all from Richard, but he had written almost every day. The first few messages were cheerful and upbeat, deliberately chatty if a little stilted, regaling her with stories about his journey and his first few days in far-north Queensland, including a few digital photographs of sandy beaches and an apartment with palm trees outside its windows.
But his tone soon changed. By the fifth or sixth message, the recriminations began: the angry post-mortem of the thirteen-year-old corpse. It was bitter stuff, full of blame and self-justification, no longer caring to maintain a semblance of friendship. Initially, he’d clearly thought a great deal about what he was writing, carefully constructing his sentences, balancing his argument, trying to see her side – even putting himself down occasionally, a very unRichard thing to do. But it didn’t last.
From the increasingly erratic typing, constant repetitions, contradictions, and appalling spelling, Ellen could tell he’d had a skinful when typing the later emails. He’d made some great friends, he said, was going out on the town every night, the weather was picking up and he didn’t miss her at all. Then he told her what a bitch she was. Then he accused her of throwing away something special. Half a page later, he was writing that they had both wasted the past thirteen years and should never have started going out in the first place. Then he told her he missed her, and hated her, and couldn’t live without her, and never wanted to see her again. He called her a frigid bitch, then accused her of being unfaithful a hundred times over because she ‘couldn’t get enough’. He told her she’d lost her looks; he told her that she was beautiful and that he’d never wanted anyone else in his life. He told her she was too good for him, rotten to the core, intelligent, stupid, reckless and a coward. He said again and again that she was just like her mother.
i bet you’re judging this email like a fucking essay, arent you, he typed, having long since dispensed with punctuation and capitals, you think
But he had written again, unable to stop himself boasting about a one-night stand with an eighteen-year-old called Lali: she said i was the best lay she ever had. see what you are missing, then again
His final email had been written that morning – last thing at night in his time zone – and was a page of non-stop, badly spelled, repeated apologies. He said he was crying. He missed her. He missed the Shack and Snorkel and their friendship. He wished it hadn’t had to end.
Ellen’s head sank into her hands. She felt utterly drained, clueless how to answer or whether even to answer at all, terrified that it would open another can of worms for the worm who’d turned. This was Richard’s way of working it out. She mustn’t screw it up for him.
She trailed to the kitchen to fetch a pint glass of water and stared out at the rain-lashed lawn, wondering what life would have been like had they been brave enough to call it a day five or six years ago. She guessed there would have been more tears, less certainty, yet probably the same overwhelming sense of relief.
Hearing of Richard’s one-night stand had only stirred the smallest spark of edgy jealousy, like a sharp electrostatic shock. She had no reason to feel hurt. That they had stayed faithful to one another until the bitter end was surprising, and she guessed that it was born of fear on both sides. After thirteen years, jumping off a cliff was far easier than jumping into bed with a stranger. Richard hadn’t been a virgin as she had when they’d started going out. He boasted a torrid past: he had had sex twice with Tracy Coal on her parents’ sofa.
Hugging herself, Ellen returned to the laptop and thought about her reply.
She thought about it as she searched Google for cheap flights, looked up accommodation, safety tips and travellers’ tales for her world trip, requested brochures and free guides, ordered several books from Amazon and added useful sites to the favourites file.
She thought about what to reply as she scrolled further down that list of favourites and found yet more porn sites, wondering whether Richard had been deliberately brazen about leaving the evidence of his after-hours Internet passion, or whether he’d just been stupid. That she hadn’t noticed said a lot.
She played with a few opening sentences in her mind as she clicked on the links to his favourite sites, accessing a world she’d never known.
Hi Richard. We’re both to blame here . . .
Hi Richard. I’m to blame here . . .
Hi Richard. You’re to blame here . . .
Hi Richard. No one’s to blame here . . .
Hello Richard. The cat’s gone missing and the neighbour wants to shoot the dog. I think I may have fallen in love. I blame the weather.
She fanned her T-shirt away from her belly as she took in the sites with which Richard was so well acquainted. The World’s Favourite Internet Provider kept warning her that she was entering Over-18 Areas Containing Material of A Sexually Explicit Nature and she clicked the OK box over and over again as she sped past pixillated screens that took for ever to download, boasting cum shots, lesbian shots, anal shots, triple-penetration shots, black-on-white, Asian babes, teen temptresses, big boobs.
‘Jesus wept!’ She tilted her head this way and that to try to work out what was going on, starting to feel hotter and hotter.
Dear Richard. I had no idea porn could be such a turn-on. Why did you never show me this stuff?
But she wasn’t really thinking about Richard. His face was blurring in her mind, to be replaced by another, the face that for the past few nights had stayed with her as she twisted in her sheets unable to sleep.
She fanned her T-shirt again, her nipples suddenly so hard that it felt as though she was clouting them with a cricket bat every time the cotton fabric landed against her hot skin.
OK, she clicked. OK. OK. OK. OK. OK. Her head tilted, tipped back, pushed forward, her eyes like saucers.
There was a clatter just outside the window.
‘Shit!’ Ellen cricked her neck looking over her shoulder, suddenly drenched in the cold sweat of shame. The computer screen was in full view of the window that faced the front garden – anyone coming to the door could have glanced in and seen the hot dot com action she was browsing through. She slammed the lid and waited, holding her breath, but there was no knock on the door.
Jumping up, she rushed through to the bootroom to turn on the outside lights, peering through the windows at the needles of rain jabbing down and catching in the gleam the black shadows of the climbers as they were buffeted by the wind. She scoured the shadows for signs of life, jumping out of her hot, prickling skin.
The gate was ajar, when she had definitely closed it, but it might have been caught by the wind. She could see the poster that she had Sellotaped to it flapping, now secured by only one corner. Something black and white was lying on the bonnet of the jeep, sheltered from the rain by the barn awning.
‘Fins!’ she breathed ecstatically, pulling on some shoes and racing outside.
She slowed as she rounded the corner to the barn, anxious not to frighten him away. Rain whipped her face with huge warm drops, like an Asian monsoon.
Hooking her hair behind her ears, she made the low, cooing noise that always soothed him, chirruping his name: ‘Fins. Here, baby. Prrrrruuuuu. Good boy. Who’s a good boy? Fins.’
Even ten yards away, Ellen knew that he was dead. The matted black and white coat was streaked with dark blood, and the unnatural twist of the body and its rigor-mortis stillness made her cry out in horror. Somebody had left a note under the windscreen wiper behind the sodden corpse, the angled corners of which flapped over it like angel’s wings.
Dropping to her haunches where she stood, she pressed her face into the crook of an elbow, fighting a great wave of nausea. ‘No, no, no!’
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Having scrabbled her way out through the bootroom door, Snorkel blasted alongside Ellen’s crouched body, barking furiously, demented with fear and confusion.
It was several minutes before Ellen was brave enough to move any closer. Even then, she returned inside first, leaving Snorkel howling and barking, to fetch rubber gloves and a cardboard box in which to put the poor warrior cat, feared by all in North Cornwall, the best ratter in Treglin.
It was only when she finally moved out of the rain and under the gloomy roof of the barn, badly lit by a spotlight in one corner, that she realised the dead animal on her car bonnet wasn’t Fins. It wasn’t a cat at all.
It was a badger – huge, bloated in death, its yellow teeth grinning from peeled-back lips. It stank of decay, and the fleas that were drowning in its wet pelt crawled in great armies over the bony shoulders and domed head. Dark blood soaked its twisted, chewed-out throat, which was crawling with maggots.
‘Oh, Jesus.’ Ellen covered her mouth and fought not to retch as she stretched across to pluck the note from the windscreen.
‘ROT IN HELL YOU INTERFERING BITCH!’ read the big black marker-pen capitals.
‘Gosh, you have pissed off a lot of people.’ Pheely’s eyebrows shot up as she refilled Ellen’s whisky glass and then her own. She crossed the Goose Cottage flagstones to peer out of the window and check that the gate was still secure. ‘Well, I really don’t think young Lloyd would be up to such a thing – carrying a dead badger would ruin his expensive designer clothes. And I agree that the Wycks probably have a better knowledge of musteline mammals, but I can hardly see Dot trundling through the village with one slung across her bicycle rack, can you?’
‘What about Reg?’
‘Far too drunk to manage a trick like this.’ Pheely was reading the note again, holding it with her fingertips. ‘Besides which, the poor bugger can’t read or write.’ She held it up. ‘Whoever penned this can spell “interfering”.’
Ellen hated whisky, but she managed another sour mouthful to try to anaesthetise the fear and anger raging within her. It was such a horrible thing to do. She knew that she’d been pretty harsh with both the Wycks and Lloyd, but surely she didn’t deserve this?