Valerie thought quickly. Whether or not Mary gave him what he wanted if she tried, she was taken care of, out of the picture. ‘Would you like me to have a word?’
Anything, Tom thought, anything. ‘Would you?’
‘It might help. I know her a bit. She’s often at ours with Billy.’
‘Would you?’ He thought of everything falling into place, as easily as this, and a rare smile lit his face. What he was smiling about was a vision far back in his mind, but it was Valerie who caught and hoarded it – a smile for her.
The power cuts came regularly now, so when the lights went out as Mary sat alone in the kitchen writing an essay one evening, she wasn’t afraid. Stella was out somewhere, in the shop she had said, doing the books. Mary went to the dresser and fumbled around for candles and matches: once she had got some light, she could find and light the lanterns. The matchbox gave a weak rattle as she picked it up and as she pushed it open, the last match fell to the floor. After ten minutes on her hands and knees, Mary gave up looking for it and made her way upstairs to Stella’s room, where she might find a torch. In the top drawer of Stella’s desk she could make out pens and pencils, scraps of ribbon or material, business cards, paper clips, pebbles. The next drawer was full of paper. The last, deep drawer was untidy. Mary pulled out files but also handkerchiefs, perfume bottles, jewellery boxes, and finally a torch. She switched it on and shone it across the last thing she’d pulled out from above it, an envelope. Her fingers had recognised it already by its weight, shape and wornness. Mary shook the letters out and was taken aback once more by the familiarity of the type-face.
The house you were so eager to get rid of is empty now. Ready to go under like you. I wish you’d died in time to be buried down there. Your precious church, making a show of yourself as a christian woman, bitch. They’re going to seal off the graveyard with concrete, I heard, to stop those old bones floating up to the surface!! If I had my way you’d be sealed off with them, rotting under concrete and water. No one would visit your grave then, would they? Even where they’ve put you now, I’ll never come and see you. I’ll be too busy looking after the people you SMASHED …
Everything’s ready. The whole village has been invited to the pumping station to have it explained. They got someone to come to the hall and give a talk about the wildlife the water will attract. No one says a word about what’s been drowned. AND DO YOU KNOW I DON’T GIVE A FUCK ANY MORE, JUST WANT IT DONE AND OVER!! You’re nothing now, him too, ALL POWERFUL ONCE WEREN’T YOU NOW NOTHING!!!
Today I watched the first water pour into the Dip and I wished you still stuck indoors like you were, wetting yourself in your armchair, stinking and rotting and dying while everyone ran round doing your bidding. Queen Bee. Only this time no one would be there. The water would slosh about your twisted old feet, your claws, you HAG, and rise up your skinny legs, wash away your nappy and your stick and your blanket and you’d be screaming for him, that old woman’s dried-up scream, and he wouldn’t come and save you. The water would suck the clothes off you and who would want your saggy old body now? Not him. He’s COUNTING HIS MONEY…
You’re gone under now. The house too, but no one with it. You forced everyone out, so desperate to please him. What about TOM? He’s out of his skin, in agony, can’t settle. You forced him out, you bitch. DID YOU THINK IT WOULD MAKE HIM BETTER? We’ll all have to prop him up, for you, because of what you’ve done. He could have managed. You gave us years of HELL, your fancies and games. Kept the golden boy twisted round your little finger, so you thought. He’s not here weeping over your grave though is he? No one goes. Weeds already, no flowers and it’s really dark there in that corner. He has fucked off to god knows where but you are paying for it. You are nothing but a vain, evil old woman and I wish you were stuck down there, not dead but DROWNING SLOWLY FOREVER SCREAMING AND SCREAMING AS THE WATER FILLS AND BURSTS YOUR LUNGS NEVER ENDING NEVER …
You KNEW he wouldn’t be able to cope. That boy’s been passed from pillar to post, stuffed with drugs and electricity and NOW HE’S GONE TOO. Is that what you wanted? Thought you’d force him into the real world and smash up a marriage while you were at it? Both your favourites gone now, see, they don’t give a fuck about you, do they? Just me, left to cope as usual. You thought you knew what was best for us all, didn’t you, when it was just an old woman’s SICK FANTASY. You’d been stuck looking after a broken man for too long and wanted some fun, didn’t you? Thought you could interest the architect in your wrinkled old sack? I know, I remember and you forget. You were a mother to him and that’s all he was looking for, a mother (and a mother’s money of course but not her juiceless cunt!!). Couldn’t fix Tom so you’d damn well fix the rest of us. Well guess what, the water’s full up now, settled. Like it’s always been there. You’re forgotten. Like me. OVERLOOKED.
Mary had swept the torch across each letter. She left them on the floor, took the torch into her room, packed a bag and left. She stopped at the phone box, piled up her two pences and rang Daniel’s number. He answered and she burst into tears.
‘Thank god! Oh, Daniel! It’s just so awful!’
‘What’s happened?’
‘I read the letters! Her letters!’ Mary blurted and sobbed.
Daniel hesitated. ‘What letters? What’s happened?’ Mary realised that there had been music playing in the background and that it had just been turned off. She knew the room now as she had stayed at the house twice, sleeping up in the attic with her picture. Daniel slipped downstairs to his bed before morning. His mother, Helen, made scented tea in a big pot and didn’t bother to strain it. His father smoked a pipe in his ‘library’. There was an old Great Dane called Thor and a sister, Rebecca, who phoned from London where she worked in a gallery. Invitations to the private views she arranged were on the mantelpiece, stark abstracts among the curlicued, engraved ‘At Home’ and ‘Drinks’ cards addressed to Professor and Mrs Reinhardt Mort. Daniel’s double-barrelled! Mary had thought excitedly until she realised Reinhardt was his father – Ray, as he had introduced himself.
‘My mother’s letters!’
‘To whom? What’s the big deal?’
‘She’s dead!’
‘Your mother?’
‘No, Iris Hepple. She died and then Daddy went too and Mum got so angry. I didn’t know, she must be sick or something, she says they …’
‘Iris who?’
‘Tom’s mother. Daddy’s mother sort of, but then my Mum says … Oh, Daniel please!’
‘Tom?’
After all, she had told him nothing. But the idea, now, of explaining the whole story left her exhausted. She put down the phone.
Valerie answered the door. ‘Billy’s out. What’s happened?’ She steered Mary into the kitchen, made her a cup of tea and put a plate of flapjack on the counter.
‘I can’t stand it any more!’ Mary whimpered.
‘Boyfriend trouble?’
For a moment Mary was indignant, ‘No!’ Then she collapsed again. ‘The reservoir, my parents, what they did, what they think I did. I didn’t know anything, I just heard and saw and I bloody well wish I hadn’t! How would you feel if your father went round stealing houses and your witch of a mother tormented the dead!’
Valerie was fascinated, but knew that whatever truth lay behind all this, it wouldn’t be so colourful or so simple. She put her hand on Mary’s. ‘Look. I think I can help.’ She meant it, and not just because of Tom. ‘There is one part of all this you can put a stop to.’
Hallowe’en was the last ritual that the children of the village grew out of. They gave up Cubs and Brownies, carol singing and sponsored skips, Youth Club and collecting for charity, but they still enjoyed the plastic fangs and fake blood of Trick or Treating. At dusk, the young ones would rush around, stumbling over their cloaks, bothered by their make-up or too-tight masks. They were given biscuits and apples, sometimes toffee or boiled sweets, and made their threat so timidly that those who answered the door smiled and knelt down to compliment them on their
frightening appearance. When the older children went round, there were some who wouldn’t open the door. A few of the boys carried eggs and flour but weren’t quite brave enough to throw them at anyone except their friends, and at the houses of one or two perpetual and uncomplaining enemies.
This year Hallowe’en fell on a Friday, and Mary was to meet Daniel and go to the Odeon where Flux Promotions was staging a Hallowe’en Horror Show with Mystery Guests. On Monday evening, Mary considered her clothes. Black, she decided, was what really suited her. She was burning candles, practising lining her eyes and playing Velvet Underground songs, the clanking ‘Venus in Furs’, ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’ and ‘Femme Fatale’. Mary had read about kabuki theatre and had bought some white face powder and red lipstick. She had that little dress of Stella’s that she’d worn to the Harvest Festival Disco, but it had got torn when she and Billy came off the bike. Then she remembered the boys in Flux Records and their safety pins. The dress had a jagged tear from waist to hem. Mary rifled through Stella’s sewing box and began to pin it together, loosely, unevenly. She pulled on some tights, remembered Clara’s fishnet stockings (Where on earth did you buy something like that?), and dragged her nails along her shins, making tentative ladders. It would be cold and Mary didn’t want to be waiting at the bus stop in next to nothing (Clara wouldn’t care). What else? Her holey cardigan was the wrong colour. She could ask Stella but she was out, stocktaking or something.
Mary knew there were bags of Matthew’s clothes in the landing cupboard. She pulled out a couple and began to empty them in her room. She picked up a shirt and held it against her. It was familiar – its pattern, texture and shape, the frayed cuffs and floppy collar and above all, its smell of tobacco and ink. Mary rummaged some more and found several old jackets that might even have been her grandfather’s and looked Thirties, just what she wanted; and some more shirts that were wonderfully too big but all the wrong colours, hippy shades of yellow and brown.
At lunchtime on Tuesday, Mary went down into Camptown from school and bought several tins of black dye. Once she had done that she could not wait so skipped her afternoon lessons and caught an early bus home, hoping that Stella would be at the shop. The house was empty and so Mary set to work. She gathered up the shirts and her cardigan, and then decided that while she was at it, she might as well dye a couple of other tops too. She made up the dye in Stella’s ‘cauldron’. The instructions were folded tightly beneath the cellophane on each tin. Mary thought she had read them but when she looked again, they mentioned salt, pounds of it. She dashed out to the Post Office and cleared the remaining packets from Mr Cornice’s dry-goods shelves. It was just enough.
When Stella got home that evening, the acrid smell of the dye had filled the hall. She followed it into the kitchen and found the sink and her preserving pan full of murky water. Several stained wooden spoons were scattered on the floor and the tiles behind the Aga were filmed with what looked like soot. The back door was open and a trail of dark splashes led through it. She found Mary pinning clothes to the washing line in the dark. The spoons were stood in a jug of diluted bleach. Mary was still scrubbing the floor at midnight.
On Wednesday, Mary only pretended to go to school. The dye had got under her nails, and had splashed grimy shadows on her neck and arms. She hung around the Common and when the coast was clear, slipped home the back way knowing Stella wouldn’t have bothered locking the back door. The clothes hung drably in the damp air. They weren’t the pure black she had imagined, but blotched and streaked. Her cardigan was shrunken and matted. Nothing had dried. Mary gathered them up and carried them indoors, where she arranged them on a clothes horse in front of the Aga and waited for them to be dry enough to put away.
On Thursday evening Mary leafed through her pile of old foreign novels with black covers, picking out the wintry ones about grand passions conducted through notes and glances, tuberculosis, long coach journeys, duty and death. She made up her face differently, not attempting to even out her features but exaggerating them instead. She drew right round her wide eyes and whited out her pale face. She loaded her eyelashes with mascara, plucked her eyebrows to a thin line, pencilled them black and painted her big mouth bright red. She backcombed her hair and set it in twisted strands with the last of Stella’s hairspray, which was too expensive to give the rock-hard effect she wanted.
Late afternoon on Friday was misty and damp. Mary put on her dress and tights, and chose her big boots (not like Clara) over high heels. She pulled on her shrunken cardigan and was pleased to see that it looked just right. Her hair and face were just as she wanted them, too. Billy had agreed to lend her his leather jacket, graciously setting aside her old jibes about him looking like a rocker. Mary was about to set off when she caught sight of a group of girls in fancy dress, crossing the Green and heading for the Camptown bus stop. Dawn was among them. Mary slipped back into the house and set off the garden way, thinking that if she hurried along the path and across the Common, she could get to the stop just beyond the Chapel and get on after them, staying downstairs and hopefully out of sight.
As she began to cross the Common, the air was thickening to fog. It caught among the surrounding trees and bushes, and billowed inwards to where the cricket pitch had been reseeded and fenced off. Mary breathed the strange fullness of this condensed air, its wet iron taste on the tongue. She felt strong.
When she reached what she thought was the middle, she looked around for the fence skirting the pitch and realised that she could make out the swings and benches, and that she was in fact almost at the Common’s northern edge. Unnerved, she decided to keep going in a straight line and to get back onto the road. As she drew near the benches, the fog cleared a little and she could make out someone there. Mary screwed up her eyes and peered. She moved a little nearer. A girl, a woman, was sitting on the bench with her head thrown back, eyes shut, her mouth caught somewhere between a smile and a yawn. Her face was framed with blonde curls. Someone, a man, was crouched in front of her, his dark head half buried. Mary misunderstood and was about to shout and run forward when the man raised his head and Mary saw cropped dark hair she recognised. Then he turned a little towards her and she saw that she had been wrong, or at least half wrong: this man’s wet face was full and bearded.
The Odeon in Camptown High Street had a crumbling stucco façade, and an interior of warped veneer and sticky red plush velvet. The manager wore a braided jacket that he was now bursting out of and the two elderly box-office staff doubled up as usherettes, selling icecream and soft drinks in the interval. After the B-movie, these old women would stand trembling in the aisles as the audience rushed to lighten the load of the trays slung round their chests: tubs of strawberry, chocolate or vanilla, that had less taste than the wooden spatulas with which it was eaten; nuts and raisins coated in stale chocolate; and wobbly cartons of over-flavoured bright orange squash. After the main feature, the projectionist played the national anthem and people stood up immediately but did not stay. By the end of the tune, the place was empty and the Icecream Ladies would start to tidy up.
As business was slack, the manager had begun to put on events. When Terry Flux approached him, he was wary, remembering the mods, rockers and Teddy Boys of not so long before. There were still battles at Thende and Crouchness during Bank Holiday weekends – razor blades, cycle chains, Stanley knives. On the other hand, Terry Flux was something of an old friend and offered his assurance and a fair deposit against damages, in addition to the rather high fee.
Even an hour before the show began, it looked as if Terry Flux was going to make more than his money back. Teenagers arrived from all over the county and beyond. They came in from the coast and even from London, drawn by the excitement of a kind of music that had already made its way out of the city and was bubbling up through bedrooms and garages out in the sticks. For the first time, urban boys and girls wished themselves provincial, hopelessly cut off and with an easily shockable audience on hand. Their clothes shops and club
s didn’t matter. There were only one or two decent gigs in London and the bands that had got that far were already being sucked into the machine. What they wanted was what Terry Flux could provide: a string of shambolic unknowns whose acne and rotten teeth were natural. They wanted the pigeon-chested, pale, spotty boy who sneered and gargled into the microphone; and the three girls wearing ripped white school-shirts and skirts made from dustbin liners, especially the fat one with braces on her teeth and a studded dog collar round her neck.
In the packed hall, Mary clung onto Daniel’s hand and tried to be nonchalant about what was happening. Where had all these kids come from? And the bands? The only one she recognised was Gravity, although Terry Flux introduced them as Spit and JonJo had bleached his hair and drawn it out into long spikes that were tipped with pink (cochineal, Mary reckoned). JonJo shouted a lot and whipped up his band to play faster. Everyone played all the time and the more distortion they got from Terry Flux’s weary PA, the better. Because they were playing so fast, each song lasted about ninety seconds instead of the more usual five minutes. The audience loved them, and jumped up and down on the flip-up seats till their ancient springs gave way. The manager had stayed at home but the Icecream Ladies were in the projection room, cut off from the music and wondering what was going on and when the right moment would be to offer their wares. At the end of the evening, out of overpowering habit, they lined up at the doors to wish everyone goodnight. Almost all returned their greeting.
There were others who had come to Camptown that night: the bored young men who by closing time had had enough beer and heard enough talk about the punks, students and queers trashing the Odeon. They gathered in the High Street, drawn by the cacophony coming from inside the cinema. The first one that came out had a half-shaved head and chains from ear to nose. The bored young men looked at one another, ground their right fists in their left palms and smiled. The first boy they got was a green-haired Londoner who heard their taunts and spat. He disappeared under four of them while his girlfriend pummelled the backs of his attackers, tried to drag them off and screamed for help till one swung round and punched her in the face. Another boy came up and tried to intervene. He was turned on by more locals, who chased him into an alley where he was kicked unconscious. The audience were still spilling out of the doors, saying goodnight to the Icecream Ladies and walking straight into the fight.
Mary George of Allnorthover Page 24
