‘Hello, Mr Haines,’ said Jane. ‘I’m over here now.’
‘Who authorized that?’ I asked. The new team leader turned round. It was Darren. I should have recognized that hair. It still looked unnaturally black. I still thought that he dyed it. He looked at me with little surprise.
‘I heard you were working here,’ he said. He looked at my tie. I didn’t think I’d knotted it very well. He gave me a friendly punch on the shoulder.
‘I think I’ve poached one of your team. Saw her down by the coffee machine and I thought to myself, there’s a bright girl. So I made enquiries, as you do, and that was that. Hope that’s OK with you, only I’ve not been here long. I need a good team. You’ve been here for ages. I bet you’ve got a cracking team sorted. Anyway, I need pretty girls in my team.’
Jane smiled. If I’d said she was pretty she’d have gone to a tribunal. Some people can get away with anything.
‘Oh, they’re not bad,’ I said. ‘I can do without one or two. Jane’s new to us anyway. I’m sure she’ll do well with you.’
‘It’s a turn-up, isn’t it?’ he said, ‘both of us here. How’s things, then?’
‘Fine,’ I managed. ‘When did you start?’
‘A few weeks ago. I was only moved into this section yesterday, though. I had the interview months ago but it’s the council and they lost the forms and didn’t get back to me and anyway, they’re an equal opportunities employer so I didn’t think I had a chance. I can see why they took you. Low IQ and that. I expect you’re balancing out my high charm and abilities with your low ones.’
He was smiling. I realized that he was pleased to see me. I was pleased to see him, too.
‘Heard from Spin?’ I asked.
‘Not heard from, no. He’s been in touch but you don’t hear from him as such. He did fine in local radio, they liked what he did. He’s moved on now. He’s got a job on the local news, on the telly. I haven’t seen him, but my brother says he’s all right. He got a break. While he was on the radio he got talking to someone, in the way he does. They had some money left over and let him do a TV documentary. He put together this little thing about Dudley. Stupid thing to make a programme about it. I don’t know anyone who saw it.’
‘I did see a programme about Dudley,’ I said, and told him about the one I’d watched at my brother’s house with Jack.
‘Is he the one the rumours are about? I’ve heard loads since I’ve been here. Nice to see you’re making an impression. Spin would be glad to know he’d caused such a stir. Anyway, the television company liked what he did with that documentary, and they gave him a job. He presents the news now.’
‘What? Spin reads the news?’
‘Yep.’
‘Actually reads it out?’
‘Couldn’t say, I haven’t seen him.’
‘I saw it,’ said Jane. ‘I saw it this morning.’
‘What’s happening then?’ I asked, thinking of Eddie Finch and the local newspapers. ‘Summer fete in rain disaster? Local man saves hamster?’
‘No,’ said Jane. ‘Nothing really. There’s an outbreak of scabies in Kingswinford. You were on, obviously. But the police are saying it’s all a misunderstanding and that people shouldn’t burn your house down or anything.’
‘Oh good,’ I said.
Darren gave me another friendly punch. ‘Tell you what,’ he said.
‘If I were you, I’d be thinking about compensation. The press did a false story about you. But I suppose it’s difficult to prove it was false.’
‘You must be able to prove it,’ said Jane. ‘After all, there aren’t any bodies. There would be, if you’d been out killing people.’
‘Bang on,’ said Darren. ‘They didn’t bother looking for any evidence, did they? Not a thing. Just whoomph and the story’s out. If it wasn’t that you work for this lot, you might be out of a job. With the council a criminal record’s probably a bonus. They’ll give you a rise.’
‘They’ll give you a car,’ said Jane.
‘You still on the buses?’ asked Darren. ‘God, you’re aiming low, you know that? You’re a graduate. Peculiar History, he did,’ he told Jane.
‘Historic Peculiarities,’ I said.
‘And that,’ he said. ‘Bright enough, good at digging trenches, good with people. Here he is, a chance to make some money out of the local press. But he’s not the sort to rock the boat. Fair play, I say. Too many people around just go for what they want. Well, I need to be getting on with things,’ said Darren. ‘I’ll see you around. Come on then, trouble, I’ll need you to do the filing.’
He put an arm around Jane and led her away.
I thought about what he’d said. He thought I’d leave things as they were. He thought I’d let things lie. He didn’t think I’d want to rock the boat.
I did want to rock it. I wanted to overturn it. I could live with being less likeable. It might make me more liked.
I was upset by Jane’s attitude. She also thought that I wouldn’t do anything about the story.
I’d prove the pair of them wrong. I’d thought of something else I could do.
That night, I thought, I’d go and do some more detective work.
PART SIX
Sam, aged twenty
Chapter Thirteen
I
A long time ago, I went to the pictures with Jack to see a double bill of superhero films. These were films so bad that they didn’t get to go straight to video. Instead they went straight to celluloid and were banished to a bare handful of dismal cinemas in the smaller and wetter towns of Britain.
The cinema was mostly empty. A parent told an offspring to shut up, repeatedly. An offspring failed to shut up. A group of young teenagers on the far side of the auditorium tried to work up the nerve to say something audible. A drenched, miserable family sat two rows from the screen and didn’t say a word.
On the screen, an actor who couldn’t act played Thunderboy. Thunderboy looked to be about thirty, and not as fit as you might have thought would be necessary for a superhero. We were watching a double bill of Thunderboy movies. I don’t think they made a third one. It was hard to see why they bothered with the first one. I didn’t see the credits, so I don’t know who was to blame. I wasn’t paying attention when the credits rolled. I had to keep asking Jack who was who and what they were up to. By the second film I could manage by myself. The plots weren’t difficult to follow. In the first of the movies – Thunderboy – the titular hero learned of his hidden identity and, after the usual identity crisis, vanquished his arch nemesis. In the second – The Return of Thunderboy – our titular hero did the same things all over again. Inept special effects failed to make him appear to leap into the air and fly. In a trice he could change from his street clothes into his hidden costume. His hidden costume looked as though it had been bought from an Oxfam shop. So did his special effects.
The acting tended to the wooden. The leading lady never led anything else. The first film was so bad that you didn’t think there could be a worse one. The second was worse. We would have left, but it was still raining outside, and it was a small town, and there was nothing else to do. And Jack was managing to enjoy the films.
That was the first inkling I had of his innate masochism.
II
We weren’t in Dudley. We’d gone on a camping holiday to Avebury, where there was nowhere to camp. After trying a few hopeful-looking fields, and being chased off by heated farmers, we’d found a field with only a couple of hundred hippies and druids in it a few miles out of town. There, we pitched our tents and had a day or two of warm weather, when we saw the sights and I lost my head. I’ll come back to that.
Then the rain, which had been missing us, turned up. Compared to Dudley, which is on a hill among other hills, Avebury and its surrounds are flat. The landscape is seven-tenths sky.
From the third day onward, it was seven-tenths rain.
The holiday started in the rain, of course. We left Dudley on a coach – neither of u
s could drive in those days – at six in the morning. Rain drummed on the roof and ran down the windows. Being penetrative Dudley rain, it managed to find ways in through the bodywork.
Half an hour later, we were under clear skies. The coach didn’t stop, all the way to Avebury. It felt a much longer drive than it could have been. There was a toilet on the coach, and it didn’t flush properly. There was a hostess on the coach who came round with a trolley of desperate pies. She winked at Jack. She winked at everyone else.
‘I’m in there,’ said Jack.
‘It’s a twitch,’ I told him. ‘She did it to me.’
He raised his eyebrows.
We were driven across Salisbury Plain. Plain is a good word for it. I don’t think I’ve seen anything less interesting, and I grew up in Dudley. Jack looked out of the window. The armed forces own large expanses of Salisbury Plain. They’d have to. There are only large expanses.
Jack was looking for exciting hardware. ‘There,’ he said, pointing at nothing. ‘An APC.’
‘A what?’
‘Armoured personnel carrier.’
‘It’s a bush.’
‘It’s camouflaged.’
‘It’s fucking good camouflage,’ I told him. The couple in the seats in front turned and looked at us with disapproval. We’d got used to it. The road across Salisbury Plain ran in a straight line for what felt like days. After a couple of hours on the steppe we passed through Salisbury, which was a town made of narrow roads and gift shops. After an hour of Salisbury we emerged onto more of Salisbury Plain.
‘How much of this is there?’ asked Jack. He’d stopped pretending to see military tech. If there was any, he wouldn’t be able to see it. That’s the way it’s designed.
Much later, we arrived at Avebury.
The holiday was my idea. It was easy to talk Jack into it. It was the school holidays, and there was nothing else to do. At that time, I had started thinking about time. I was thinking about the ritual, but I hadn’t told Jack about it. I wanted to see if he was trustworthy. I thought that if we spent some time away from other influences I might get a better idea of his nature. If I went ahead with the ritual, he’d have to help me murder people.
I thought that camping would be cheap and easy, so we borrowed a couple of tents.
‘We could share one,’ Jack had said. I explained some things to him, mostly involving personal hygiene. It wasn’t a discipline he favoured. We each took a small tent, a sleeping bag that would turn out to be too hot to sleep in, and reading matter. He took a few commando novels, and I took an interesting parchment I’d found. I crammed a few tins of beans into my rucksack, and Jack crammed a leaky Gaz stove into his. Neither of us remembered to take matches.
You can get used to cold baked beans.
There were thousands of hippies and travellers in Avebury. They were all over the standing stones and ancient sites, fucking them up for those of us with a genuine interest, dropping roaches and burning things down, tripping too far out and pummelling the stones.
I know what those places were for, and it wasn’t for attracting the loving vibes of the earth goddess or catching the multiple eyes of the guys from Arcturus. Those were bloody places, all of them. There is always an altar. There are bones under every ancient monument. There was no love involved, and, take it from me, there never was an earth goddess.
After pitching the tent we walked the mile or so back into Avebury. The town had a few shops, all selling monument-related bits and bobs. One or two did a sideline in groceries. The first day was frighteningly sunny. The sky was a shocking blue, especially if you came from Dudley. Walking to the stone circle – I had taken us there to go to the circle, and Silbury Hill, and West Kennet, and all of the other sites that have been discovered because any sort of mound can be seen from thirty miles away – we passed clumps of travellers. They had loose clothes and dreadlocks, and they’d be on the road until they turned twenty, when Daddy would get them a plum job at the bank. They sat around in circles playing tin whistles and didgeridoos, handing round thin spliffs and pretending they owned the place.
‘This land belongs to the people,’ one of them droned to her companions, as they gave us evil looks. We weren’t dressed like the people, apparently. We didn’t have the people’s haircut.
‘We’re the people,’ said Jack. ‘We’re the clean people, here to bring you soap.’
‘There’s no need to be confrontational,’ said another.
Of course there was. There was every need. The people who understand ancient sites can’t get near them now, not without forking out for a didgeridoo and a white-boy’s Rasta hairdo. And the travellers have got it all wrong, they are all one hundred per cent wrong. This land doesn’t belong to the people. This land was for the exclusive use of a favoured few. The people should all fuck off home and leave the land in the hands of the powerful.
When we want the people with us, we’ll ask them along. One by one, say, to be gutted at harvest time. Until then, they should get back in their minivans and go home and stop pretending to be anything out of the ordinary.
They saw some of that in my eyes and left us alone. Magic has its uses. Jack followed me to the centre of the circle. It was wide, and the sarsens were flat thin things far taller than ourselves. There’s always a legend with these places: once there were seven sisters, and so on. There would be cautionary tales – no two people would count the stones and arrive at the same total, the stones line up with the stars, and all the rest.
Obviously, stoned people couldn’t count stones. That went without saying. And there are enough stars for hundreds of them to be in line with anything. Those are coincidences, by-products. They’re the sarsen equivalent of Teflon.
This is what the stones were for:
You would be taken there, in the middle of one of the more important nights, by men from the village. You had known them all your life but did not know them now. They were different men by night. Men are like that. They force-fed you a drink that tasted of flowers and then spun you around in the centre of the stone circle. You would be dressed in a white robe, the hem rising and circling you, making a white wheel in the night. The men would stand, with their knives, and they would not be the men you knew at all. And then in they would come, with a whirl of the blades and the blood would be black and from outside the stones would come the howls of something awful and immense, the rational world now shrunk to this one stone circle, everything outside it dread chaos and disorder, the sky rent by the howls of a rapacious and ancient god.
That’s my theory, anyway.
We stood in the circle. Nothing happened. We walked around the circle. I touched one of the stones. I expected a feeling, some connection to the past. It felt like a stone. Jack was looking the way a husband looks when his wife takes him to the shoe shop. We sat in the shadow of a stone.
‘I’m not getting anything,’ I said. I wanted to tell him about the parchment, and the ritual we could use to live forever, but I didn’t think he was ready for it. The sun was warm and we hadn’t got anything to drink. After a while we walked back past the tepees and VW campers.
Tepees, for fuck’s sake. Didgeridoos. As though any dead culture would do. They didn’t know the names of their own gods. They couldn’t play anything as complex as a lute or build the simplest round hut.
Jack managed to convince a shopkeeper he was eighteen, and bought us a two-litre bottle of acidic cider. That night, serenaded by the sounds of far Australia, we drank it. I talked to Jack about my plan to live forever. He said it was a good idea. I said we’d have to kill people. He said that was fine. The cider ran out much later, and we went to our separate tents. Later that night, I heard Jack being sick. He could never take his drink.
III
Properly speaking, The Return of Thunderboy is not the sequel to Thunderboy. It’s a continuation. It’s half of the story, and without it, the first half makes no sense. In the first movie (these aren’t films, not by any stretch of the imaginat
ion) Thunderboy discovers his powers, which include the compulsory ability to fly without mechanical intervention and the taken-for-granted superhuman strength. He also discovers that he can control the weather, up to a point.
His weather powers mainly involve thunder. Much stock footage of black clouds is inserted between shots of inept actors.
In the second movie Thunderboy discovers that he can travel through time. He does this, travels back twenty years, finds himself as an ineffectual teenager, and gives himself the power that will make him Thunderboy.
It’s circular. It’s a single plot, disguised as two films. At first I thought it was an unexpected clever touch. Later I thought it was laziness.
Jack sat and absorbed it all. The mismatched dubbing, the creaking seats, the small-town bad boys frightening no one but themselves; all outside his perception. He saw nothing but the movies.
He found his magic there.
IV
He had to. There was nowhere else to find it. Every site in Avebury was crammed with poncho-wearing crusties, with their organic reek and their communal babies. Silbury Hill was off-limits. A barbed wire fence was coiled around its base. It was a strange little hill, short and conical with a flat top.
It got a flat top because lots of those land-loving free-roaming types used to stand on top of it, sometimes having a bit of a dance and then sitting around for a tune or two on the old tin whistle.
Travellers don’t know any good tunes. They’re all on weed, and weed makes you listen to Hawkwind, or Rush. One of them will have an untuned acoustic guitar and they will play the first two bars of Wish You Were Here cyclically, eternally, because they’re not adept enough to play anything but the rhythm part.
Seeing the Wires Page 18
