by Graham Joyce
“What a shame you have to shut your mouth,” said Sammy the elder Greencoat, adjusting his wig.
“Hey!” went Nobby. “Hey! That’s not nice!”
While all this was going on Tony leaned over to me. “Will you go, David? Someone has to.”
“Yeh, I’ll do it.”
Pinky opened his office and reappeared with a battery-powered megaphone. “Use this if you like. You’ll need to hang around up there for half an hour collecting the stragglers and latecomers. Good lad.”
Off I went with my megaphone, into the ladybug storm.
I didn’t jog. I made my way pretty smartly up to the deserted swimming pool area and switched on the thing. The airborne insects were pinging into the metal funnel as I mouthed a few words about everyone going down to the ballroom to have a great time. The trouble was there was no one there to hear me. Hardly anyone was actually outside in the ladybug storm. I let the megaphone fall at my side. “There’s a magic show waiting for you,” I said to no one, or maybe just to the flying bugs.
The ladybugs seemed attracted to my blazer. Maybe the green stripes had them confused into thinking they were settling on a lush leaf. Thankfully they didn’t seem attracted to my white trousers in the same way, but I wiped about two or three dozen ladybugs off my blazer sleeve alone. Tony had told me to stick around for half an hour, but what with the insects targeting me I didn’t feel like standing still so I went about the chalet blocks, trying to be inventive with what I gabbled into my megaphone. Something unfunny about emergency anti-ladybug legislation. Occasionally a door would open and a bemused family would peer at me, trying to fathom what I was saying.
Ladybugs were crawling inside my collar and in my ear and I’d had enough. I walked past block D mouthing about an all-star magic show with Abdul-Shazam and all the gang when one of the chalet doors opened. It was Terri. She’d been cleaning one of the refurbished chalets. I went over to her.
“Look at you,” she gasped. “Come inside.”
She pulled me in and slammed the door on the cloud of insects.
“Look at you!” she said again, this time pointing at me.
I looked down. The ladybugs had swarmed over my blazer. There was barely a patch of cloth to be seen under them. They were live but motionless, anchored to the colored threads. My blazer was a live garment, like something from a dream. I was shocked.
“Let’s get it off you,” she said. Very gently she reached a finger under each lapel and eased the blazer off my shoulders, like she was determined to lift the thing off me without killing a single ladybug. I felt the thrill of her fingers stroking my collarbone. She stepped in closer to me and delicately slipped the blazer down the length of my arms. I could smell the shampoo in her hair. I could smell something like sunshine on her skin. She was close enough for me to feel her breath on my neck. When she’d lowered the blazer sleeves free of my arms she stepped to one side, holding the blazer in one hand, and then she gently hung it over the back of a chair before stepping back. I don’t think she lost a single ladybug in the process.
For a long time we were motionless, staring at the ladybug-sheathed coat. Then she turned and stepped over to me and pressed her mouth on mine. We were still kissing as she popped the buttons on my shirt and tore it from my back. The shirt cuffs wouldn’t go over my wrists as she tugged the shirt behind me. There was a new, uncovered mattress on the bed and we fell on it. I was still manacled by my shirt as she worked my trousers down. I remember gasping, and looking up, and seeing the live ladybug blazer on the back of the chair, and then closing my eyes.
THE MAGIC SHOW was hitting its stride by the time I got to the ballroom. Tony had some kids on the stage, fumbling for colored handkerchiefs in a soft blue velvet bag. When they pulled out white handkerchiefs instead of colored ones he pretended to be annoyed. Nikki was up there with him in her fetching costume of sequins and fishnet tights. I avoided eye contact with her.
“Thought we’d lost you,” Pinky said drily, eyebrows aloft.
“I swallowed a bug and it stuck in my throat,” I said. “I had to go and get a drink from somewhere.”
“Ha,” said Pinky. He flicked imaginary ash from his unlit cigar. “Haha.”
Tony—or should I say Abdul-Shazam—wrapped up that part of his conjuring act and I saw Nobby and Sammy wheeling the large sword casket onstage, carefully settling it between two chairs. Tony went serious for a moment and changed his microphone style. He asked for quiet because, he said, the next trick was genuinely dangerous and the swords he would be using were sharp. He invited someone to come up and check the swords. He held a piece of ribbon at arm’s length as one of the audience cut through the ribbon with a whisper. He warned us that they had tried to get insurance against any mishaps but no insurance company in the land would offer a premium. And with that, Nikki climbed into the casket.
Tony perspired visibly. I thought he looked anxious. I glanced at Pinky but he was poker-faced. Nobby and Sammy looked pretty serious, too. A hush descended over the audience, broken only by the clink of glasses or the sound of the till opening at the bar. The trick should be perfectly safe, even though I didn’t know how it worked. I just had an awful feeling in my stomach that something was going to go wrong.
At that moment I felt an astonishing surge of protectiveness toward Nikki. I had to grip the sides of my chair to stop myself getting up and interfering with the show. The casket was closed and locked with Nikki in it. There were five swords in all, and after a little bit of strutting onstage as if he was pumping himself up, Tony forced the first sword through the cabinet with rather shocking violence. There was a gasp from the audience as the second and third swords were thumped in swiftly and without ceremony. The last two swords were inserted from the top.
Of course, no one was really surprised when the swords were taken out again, the casket unlocked, and Nikki stepped out prettily in her sequins and fishnets. It seemed to me not that Tony had performed a fabulous illusion but that the audience had given their permission for the illusion to work on them. There was wild applause and more gags from Tony, who pretended to be rather relieved that the trick had worked.
Tony announced that the morning’s entertainment would be concluded with a yard-of-ale competition. Nobby and Sammy were dispatched to the bar to collect the yard glasses while I was asked to clear away the magic props. I started by wheeling the sword casket from the ballroom back to the props cupboard behind the adjacent theater. When I got there I found Nikki backstage behind the scenery flats, wriggling out of her sequined outfit.
“That seemed to go well,” I said. I still hadn’t recovered from my explosive and unexpected sexual encounter with Terri just a short time earlier and I was trying to sound casual. Yet I was so immensely relieved that the magic trick hadn’t harmed Nikki I wanted to hug her.
She beamed at me. Then she frowned and patted the side of her face with her forefinger.
“What?” I asked.
She found a tissue and stepped across to me. She was wearing bra, pants, fishnet tights, and stiletto heels, and her tawny skin had on it a bloom of perspiration. She wet the tissue with her tongue and rubbed something from the side of my mouth, near my lip.
“What is it?”
“Lipstick.”
She opened her mouth to wet the tissue again and I saw those babyish fang-shaped canines in her pink mouth. If I was developing unstoppable feelings for Nikki, it was with scandalous bad timing: With the very opposite of the competence of the stage magician, I’d just made an insane, hopeless, and unspoken kind of promise to another.
“Really?”
“Yes, really. It’s gone. You’re clean.”
I didn’t feel clean. “Must have been one of the punters. You know how they grab you.”
She didn’t blink. She ran her tongue across her top lip and said, “Wow! You smell like a whore’s handbag. Did she throw perfume all over you?”
Tony breezed in, wiping sweat from his brow with a white handkerc
hief. “Funny!” he said loudly. “Funny how I keep catching you two backstage. Put her down, David, and let me explain how all this packs away.”
I could barely pay attention as Tony explained how to stow all the props and demonstrated how to collapse the sword casket. He went to great lengths to show me how the casket worked: There was a frame inside the box in which Nikki had rotated her body into a very precise position with her ankles tucked back. The swords ran in fixed trammels between the backs of both knees, under her armpits, behind her neck, and so on. It was completely safe since the frame molded her body in an inflexible position, and the invading swords were tracked along smooth rails. The sharp demonstrator sword, identical to all the others except for a single identifying bead in the pommel, wasn’t used.
I pretended to be focused on all of this. All through it I was acutely aware of Nikki watching me watching Tony.
“I’m showing you things,” Tony said seriously, “that would get me kicked out of the Magic Circle.”
11
A FINE CASKET BUILT FOR STURDY ILLUSION, NOT SERVICE
I missed lunch. Terri was still working on the refurbished chalets and I returned to her, as I’d said I would. On my way I walked past the palmist’s white caravan. Madame Rosa had the door shut firmly against the bug swarm. She was looking out of the window, directly at me. I averted my eyes. The ladybug storm had subsided a little but it was still unpleasant to be outside. Dead ladybugs crunched underfoot; they lay in piles where they had hit a wall or a window and had fallen back.
Terri had left the door ajar for me. When I stepped inside, the door clicked behind me and she was already unbuttoning her thin nylon overall. She was completely naked underneath and it slipped to the floor with a hiss. “What kept you?”
She didn’t give me a moment to answer because she leaped onto my hips, folding her arms behind my neck and clinging to me with her legs, kissing me. The scent of her mixed with the perfume Nikki had got wind of had me dizzy. Any doubts I had about Terri were dispelled the moment she wrapped herself around me. With her still clinging to my neck I walked her across the room and collapsed onto the bed.
“Wait,” she said. “Not like that.”
She got up and moved across to the table. She shifted a chair aside and bent across the table, spreading her legs and pushing her bottom into the air.
“Spank me.”
I laughed. Wrong.
“Spank me,” she said again.
“What?”
“Do it.”
I moved toward her. It wasn’t something that would ever naturally occur to me. The request seemed more comical than erotic. I lifted my hand and let it fall across her buttocks, but without conviction.
“Harder for Chrissake.”
But I was already losing my erection. I felt ridiculous.
Perhaps she sensed it wasn’t going to happen. “Oh just fuck me, you prat.”
A short time later I managed to slip away from that chalet with some free time before my next duty. I stepped out of the resort with the idea of recovering on the beach for half an hour, but the ladybugs were still swarming, pinging at my face and settling on my clothes. As I turned away from the resort gates I sensed a car cruising alongside me. I knew it was the same car in which I’d been chauffeured to the National Front meeting. It was Colin’s green-and-cream Hillman Minx.
My bowels squeezed as my instincts kicked in and I pretended to be deep in thought. I kept walking. The two-tone Hillman purred alongside, keeping pace. Then the horn sounded.
I had no choice but to turn. The car came to a halt. I faked a startled look, then processed a smile on recognizing Colin at the wheel. His face was expressionless, staring back at me.
I froze as he leaned across the seat to open the passenger door. Everything about his demeanor said to me that he knew. I thought if I got in that car I was finished.
“Get in then, you fucking drip,” he called softly.
In a flash it occurred to me that if he didn’t know, then my hesitation would make him suspicious. I had no choice. I climbed in. The car smelled of leather upholstery and something like gunmetal. He reeked of smoky, fresh sweat as if he’d just been exercising.
Colin put his wipers on to sweep the ladybugs away. “Fuckin’ things. Everywhere.” He released the clutch and we drove off. “What’s a-matter wiv you then?”
I looked back over my shoulder as if we were being followed. “I think they were watching from the gate.”
“Watching for what?”
“Well, they know you’re banned, don’t they.”
“Oh,” he said, threading the big steering wheel through his rough hands as he turned the corner, “they don’t give a monkey’s. Neither do I.” He didn’t go very far, pulling up at a nearby modern brick-and-glass pub called the Dunes. Before we got out of the car he pushed a fiver into my hands. “Get ’em in. I need a slash.”
While he went to the toilet I went up to the bar and ordered two pints of bitter. I was glad he wasn’t there because when I went to carry the pints to a table my hands shook so badly I slopped some of the beer on the carpet. I sat down and took a deep breath. I took a sip of beer and as I lifted the glass to my mouth my fingers reeked of Terri’s sex.
Colin came out of the toilet, sat down opposite me, and lit up a cigarette. Players No 6. He took a deep drag, exhaled, and sat back. His change from the fiver lay on the table. “Well?”
“Good as gold.”
“Yeh?” He looked out of the window and then took a deep gulp from his pint. His Adam’s apple bobbed aggressively as he drank.
“As far as I can tell.”
He snapped his head back away from the window, too quickly. “As far as you can tell. What’s that mean?”
“Well I can’t watch her twenty-four hours a day, can I? I’m trying my best to be where she is or somewhere near her as far as I can. I tried to buy her a coffee a couple of times but she wouldn’t have it.”
He nodded. “Seen her talk to anyone?”
“Only staff about cleaning. She’s been taken off the theater and put on other jobs. Last time I saw her she was down at those reconditioned chalets.”
He blinked at me.
“She seems to have her head down,” I said. “Working hard.”
He blinked again. I lifted the glass to my mouth and once more I could smell Terri on my fingers. It seemed so strong. It seemed impossible that he couldn’t smell his wife on me. My guts squeezed again. I felt like I might throw up. “How long have you been back?” I asked him.
“Just got here today. Sat outside for an hour or two, waiting for you to stick your nose out the door. Tried to call you but that bitch in the office said you wasn’t around.”
That meant that while he was trying to call me, Terri and I were fucking in block D. “I was probably in the canteen,” I said.
“No, it was just after lunch.”
“Dunno,” I said.
“You look fuckin’ knackered, son.”
“I can’t sleep properly here. Dunno why.”
“You sure you ain’t been on the nest?”
I looked him in the eye.
“You ’ave been, ain’cha?” He smiled and lowered his head. It was an evil smile. He drew back his lips but compressed them so that he showed no teeth. “Ain’cha?”
“I should be so lucky.”
He downed the rest of his beer. “Go up the bar and get us another, will ya?”
I didn’t see why he couldn’t take his turn at the bar but I wasn’t going to argue. I got up but he called me back and told me to take it from the change that lay on the table. I got him another pint and a half for myself.
“What’s that then?” He looked at the half-pint glass as if he’d never seen one before, as if it were some silly new marketing idea for ladies.
“I don’t like to be pissed while I’m working around kids,” I said.
He considered this. “That’s fair enough.”
We both took another glug
of beer.
“She’s up to something.”
“Oh?” I said.
“You get so you know.”
I shook my head as if to indicate that I knew nothing about that kind of thing.
“She wasn’t much more than a kid when I found her,” he said. “Don’t look at me like that.”
“Like what?”
“I know what you’re thinking: Why does he keep her on such a tight leash? Well I’ll tell you. She was on the game when I found her.”
“You what?”
He held his hand up to quiet me. “Fourteen, and on the game. Not good. I had to dice up a ponce to get to her, and then another. I looked at that gal and I said if I do one decent thing in my life I’m gonna pull that little gal out of that life. You with me?”
I nodded. This wasn’t quite the same story that Terri had told me.
He went on. “It ain’t easy, though. They get a taste for it. That life, I mean. Know what I’m talking about?” He looked out of the window. “It keeps calling ’em back. Like a drug. Like one of these junkies. It’s like, in ’em. They gotta ’ave it. Cock-happy. It’s there for life, ain’t it?
“So I has to keep pulling ’er back. Why don’t I let her go? I could. I could let her go her own way. But I made this promise. To myself. To her. It’s hard work I tell you. Women are crafty. Very crafty. They’d have you stitched up in seconds. You think you see ’em coming but you don’t. Look around you. Ain’t a woman in this pub you couldn’t have if you set your mind to it. Married, boyfriend, it don’t matter.
“And that’s what I know. As for her, I keep her on the straight and narrow. Served time for her, I have. Protected her. Put up with hardships. Stop her slipping back into it, you understand me?”
I said I did.
“Ha! Look at your face! You don’t know nothin’ about it, do you?” He stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray with a series of rapid, hard jabs and took his wallet out of his pocket. He found two ten-pound notes, folded them, and flicked them across the table to me.
