He could get someone to do it for him, too. Plant an idea here and there, steer someone in the right direction, and that would be that. The events would be set in motion. He’d had eight centuries to learn manipulation. That would be long enough to get the hang of it.
If he found a couple of hapless pawns, he could use them. He could use their children. He’d be from the time when curses went like that: a curse on you, and on your children, and on their children after them, and so on.
Nearly eight centuries ago he’d left Dudley with his apprentices. Now he’d popped back to renew his magic, and with that sorted he’d be off again. I didn’t know who he was. I didn’t know why he’d chosen me. I didn’t think any good fortune would be coming my way.
I didn’t need my name any more. In twenty years, Sam Haines was going to be a bad name to have. It would be on the news, in the newspapers.
I wondered what Samantha would look like in her twenties. There will be pictures in the newspapers, if they still have newspapers. Perhaps by then Tony will have relented. You can only stay angry for so long. Perhaps by then I’ll be able to go home.
I tried to think of another name. I looked at my scarred hands. I felt the itch of my healing face. I thought of all that pain, and got the name.
Mickey Payne.
I’m going to leave Dudley. I always said I would. I always said I wouldn’t waste my whole life here.
I tried the new name out. Mickey Payne. It seemed to fit. It seemed apt.
I gathered my bags in the front room. I was ready to go. Whatever was going to happen could happen without me. My part was over.
I was wrong.
Someone knocked on the door.
PART TEN
Sam, aged twenty-five
Chapter Nineteen
I
It wasn’t a parchment. I admit it. I lied about that. It looked like one, yellowed and crumbly, but it wasn’t a parchment at all.
It was a cutting from the Pensnett Herald, and it was twenty years old. It was the confession of someone called Jack Ives. He claimed he’d killed five people, and buried parts of them at the end of the old railway lines. He claimed he’d been led to do it by another man, Sam Haines. My uncle. Mickey Payne, by another name. I’d often wondered whether the name had any significance. It was my name, after all. Samantha Haines; that was me.
Twenty years ago, there was a false confession. I knew what it meant. It meant that the magic was true. Someone else had tried to do it. I read about the ritual somewhere. I knew there had once been a wizard in the town. That wizard from the umpteenth century, he was the first. It was his ritual. We were only copying it.
In the next issue of the Pensnett Herald – the one after the issue my cutting was from – there was an apology in very small print, attributed to Eddie Finch, a reporter. I tried to track Eddie down, but he overdid the drinking and his liver gave out three years ago. They say that when he died, his liver accounted for half his body weight, and at the autopsy they dragged it out of him lobe by lobe, piling it onto the scales dish. Some versions claim a bell rang, others that it made the record books.
It made no difference. Eddie was dead. I couldn’t trace the names. Sam Haines might have been a relative. My father told me he didn’t know him. My mother went upstairs in tears.
She was forever going upstairs in tears. Everything turned into a little melodrama. I mean, I get emotional myself. I do. But not like that. Not to excess. Not in a mainland European way.
So, it wasn’t a parchment. It was a newspaper cutting. And it was false, except that they found bones. That was in a later edition. They found bones that were eight hundred years old.
There you were, then. The proof. The ritual happened eight hundred years ago, in Dudley.
I’d guess that’s the reason Dudley is the way it is. I mean, I can’t see any other explanation. You can’t blame everything on the recession. The recession ended years ago. All other towns are boomtowns.
Dudley is sinking into the mines.
The ground is honeycombed. Dudley never managed to get away from the past. It squatted in the dark ages and refused to budge, and now the old mine workings are giving way. Every day the local papers have pictures of houses leaning over chasms. Owners claim they won’t move.
They will move. If they don’t move in any other direction, they’ll move downwards.
In ten more years, there will be the castle standing over a blasted landscape, all black holes and soot. The buildings will have been swallowed.
You don’t get anything for free, in magic. I think I told you that. If you get to live for centuries, something else pays for it.
A whole town, perhaps. My town, I think. My town died for eight centuries.
Good riddance, I say.
II
Oh yes, and there’s something else. I may have misled you. Unintentionally, of course. I was doing my best to run through the facts, but some of them wouldn’t behave. Some of them didn’t fit where they really should have done, and they got moved about.
My friend Jack Ives isn’t called Jack, for example. That’s not his name at all. When we were young, I used to call everyone Jack. I called my mother Jack, and my father Jack, and everyone else Jack. All because I had an Uncle Jack, who I don’t remember. He was my favourite.
‘Best sort of uncle,’ my father once said. ‘Not related to you at all. He was a friend of your real uncle.’
All of this is before my time, in any real sense. I don’t remember it. It’s become a family legend. It’s become one of those things we talk about to avoid talking about anything.
It only had one lasting effect. I had a friend, whose name wasn’t Jack. I started to call him Jack, and the name stuck. Names do. Jack was his nickname, not his real name.
His real name is Liam Ives. But come on, if you were called Liam, you wouldn’t want it getting about either.
Almost everything else is true.
III
Bad times come from nowhere, and they don’t always make a fuss when they arrive. It isn’t always a hurricane that flattens the town, or the outbreak of a spectacular new plague. Sometimes bad times turn up in the form of a television broadcast.
After the police showed my picture to all of the viewers of the local news, the conclusion was foregone. They would catch me. They would track me down. They’d catch Jack too, thankfully, and that’d put paid to his get-rich-quick schemes. As a bonus, it would render his blackmail threats harmless. There’s no point pulling the pin if the grenade has already gone off.
My father retreated upstairs as soon as the broadcast finished. I had the feeling he was not going to be approachable. I thought he might be after my mother, for solace.
Family things, as I’ve said.
The telephone rang. It was Jack. He was frantic.
I told him I’d already confessed. I told him I had no choice, what with his veiled threats and all. Kick them while they’re down, I say.
I put the phone down before he’d stopped whining. There were possibilities in the situation. Things were bad, but there were possibilities.
I’ve learned this from magic; sometimes you need to suffer to get somewhere. Sometimes suffering is the only way forward.
I dialled the number for the operator and asked the robot for the number of the newspapers.
Which ones?
All of them.
IV
Being arrested is dull and procedural, in England. In America SWAT teams swing in through windows, igniting flash bombs. A fat sheriff makes you place your hands on top of the vehicle. A bored cop with an Irish surname pops a bullet in your shoulder.
In England, you mainly fill in forms.
Some things won’t help you. Here are some phrases that will get you nowhere:
The right to remain silent.
Innocent until proven guilty.
Call my lawyer.
And here are some phrases that will do you the world of good:
My exclusive
story.
Percentage of the gross.
Call my agent.
V
The police turned up soon after. I was allowed to walk from my house. The first of the camera jockeys were already there, no more than ten minutes after I called them. I went to prison.
The court case isn’t important. There was only one likely verdict. My brief played on the sympathies of the jury, pointed out inconsistencies in the police case, played with words. I pleaded guilty, and that shut him up.
Women’s prisons, incidentally, aren’t as cosy as men’s. They can’t afford to be. We’re not like men. We have cycles, like history. In close proximity, our cycles coincide. In prison, there would be one week each month when the warders patrolled in groups of nine or ten, with hands full of tear gas canisters and polished batons. It wasn’t necessary. Mostly we cried and thought that we looked too fat.
Jack – Liam, as they called him when he was sentenced – got it easy. That was down to me. I said that it was all my fault, and I’d forced him into it with my feminine wiles. I didn’t want him getting any of the bad – i.e. good – press. Things are going well enough. In another five years I’ll be out, home free.
Jack still writes to me. He sends unsolicited photographs of himself. He got a few prison tattoos while he was in his minimum-security, crying-to-the-warders holiday camp. After he got out he went in for body modifications. He also had a favourite uncle, apparently. Also called Jack. His favourite uncle was into body modifications. Jack got out and went back in time, as I understand it. He got out and turned into someone he used to know. He didn’t know where to go, so he stayed where he was and turned into someone else.
I’m not sure who I’ll be by the time I get out. I know how much I’ll be worth. More than you’re worth. You’re in the wrong line of business. I’m on more than football money. I’m on prison money.
My story is everywhere now: tabloids, books, films. A miniseries.
I’m worth a fortune.
And I’ll tell you something else. I won’t be going back to Dudley.
PART ELEVEN
Sam, aged thirty
Chapter Twenty
I
I opened the door. A large white van was parked outside. It wasn’t well parked. It was blocking the pavement, and the road. A familiar trio emerged from it.
‘Put the kettle on,’ said Darren. ‘We’re parched. Been a busy couple of years, I tell you that for nothing. Been a right pain. Come on in then.’
Mr Link and Spin followed him into my front room. The three of them occupied my sofa.
‘You’re still bloody lazy,’ said Mr Link. ‘And what have you done to your face? Is that the fashion these days? Bloody students.’
‘Ex-students,’ I said automatically.
‘Do pardon me, ex-students. Now, are you going to put the kettle on?’
I went to the kitchen and put the kettle on. I hadn’t bothered packing the kettle, or any groceries. I thought there’d be groceries wherever I was going to. I still had coffee and some milk that was partially liquid. I decanted the top part of it into four mugs, added coffee, and added water after the kettle huffily boiled. I took them through and handed three of them out.
Darren and Mr Link thanked me. Spin gestured.
I got it then. In the woodcut, the misshapen apprentice had not been obviously misshapen. In the thirteenth century, a black man in England would have been a strange thing. He’d have been a freak. He’d have seemed misshapen.
If he was also a mute, that would be enough. Political correctness was centuries away. They were there before it, and they’d be there after it had gone.
You couldn’t depict muteness in a picture. In a woodcut, you couldn’t show colours.
Spin was the misshapen apprentice. Darren was the other one, and Mr Link was the warlock; all three of them were eight hundred years old.
The three of them sat on my sofa as though they owned the place. Mind you, they’d been there eight hundred years ago. For all I knew they did own the place. For all I knew they owned Dudley.
‘Finally got it, have you?’ asked Mr Link, studying my face. ‘Penny dropped? I tell you what, you’re slow but you get there. I mean, we needed someone feeble-minded to work with. You and your friend Jack have done very well, considering your obvious disadvantages. Your young relatives will do our work for us, and then we’ll be off.’
‘It’s got a half-life,’ said Darren, running a hand through his black hair. ‘In four hundred years we’ll have to come back and do it all over again.’
‘Not that that’ll be bothering you,’ said Mr Link. ‘In four hundred years you’ll be long gone. If there’s still a headstone we’ll pay our respects. As you’ve done so much for us.’
‘Cheers,’ said Darren. Spin gave me a thumbs-up. The three of them sipped coffee in unison. I tried to imagine how their lives had been, what they’d have seen in their lifetimes. I couldn’t do it. I snipe at the narrow minds of the people around me, but compared to those three I’d been nowhere.
I imagined them in the future, with the ozone gone and the sea level rising. One day Dudley would be by the sea. Perhaps they’d come back and sail around it. They couldn’t live forever. Darren had confirmed that for me. They had extended their lives, but not indefinitely. There were limits. There was a half-life. Four hundred years, the next time. Then two hundred, one hundred, shrinking intervals until they’d be carrying out the ritual twice daily. Perhaps by then they’d have had enough.
I doubt it. No matter how much life you get, you could do with more. There’s never enough. That’s what dragged me through my depressions; there was more life to be had. When my own life wasn’t enough, I borrowed from other people, from Caroline and from Jack, from everyone else I knew.
‘Been a laugh, hasn’t it?’ asked Mr Link. ‘Of course, we’ll be leaving the building trade now. We only started that so we could do some digging without arousing suspicion.’
‘We couldn’t remember where we buried them,’ said Darren. ‘We had to dig around a bit to get our bearings. See the lie of the land. Dudley’s changed in the last couple of centuries.’
‘Apart from the people,’ said Mr Link. ‘So we took on some local lads to help us, and lo and behold we get a joker in our midst,’ said Mr Link. ‘No place for jokes on the building site, I always thought. Jokes on the building site lead to weakened structures. There’s a need for solidity in buildings.’
‘He’s never got over them wrecking our castle,’ explained Darren. ‘It’s been a bit of a thing with him since then. He doesn’t like doors or windows.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I remember that.’
‘Not as bad as him,’ said Mr Link, indicating Darren. ‘Him and his hair. He went grey during the ritual. It was a bit of a nervy one, to tell the truth. So there he’s been, grey hair for eight hundred years. It’s a very sore point with him. So when you tried to play that prank on him, I had to intervene. And then I thought, fair enough, he’s played a joke on us, we’ll play one on him.’
‘A joke?’ I said.
‘Oh yes. We own most of this town, you know. We were here a long time ago and we set things in motion, made sure things would be fine, kept the right families influential. It’s nice to have somewhere to go back to.’
‘Even when it’s Dudley,’ said Darren.
‘So it was easy to get you a job with the council,’ said Mr Link. ‘Seeing as how we own them. And even easier to get Darren one with you, so that he could look after the rumours and make sure they got around. Then we got Spin a job on the television, so that we could get that documentary on and trigger off your friend. I put a few thoughts in his head, and there we were. It’s been a laugh, hasn’t it? I bloody hope it has, we put enough effort into it. I had to cast thoughts into your friend’s head, not an easy thing to do. Magic doesn’t get on properly these days. It feels out of place. It’s not sure to work. Very much like yourself, back when you worked for us.
‘Darren
had to look into the future to make sure things would turn out the way we wanted them. That’s all turned out well. Your daughter will be famous, you know. Not for very good reasons and not for very long, but still. Darren did that because I never got the hang of looking forward. I can cast thoughts into people, but looking forward is difficult. That’s the way of it with magic. We only get one trick each. It’s good the first time you see it, and then the effect fades each time.’
I thought of them destroying my life, Jack’s life, the lives of our families. I thought of Judy, driven out of my life. She might still be upset.
‘What did Spin do?’ I asked. ‘If your trick is filling people’s heads with thoughts and his is seeing the future, what does Spin do?’
‘He’s got a good one,’ said Darren admiringly. Mr Link nodded.
‘Came in useful during this little campaign,’ said Mr Link. ‘Go on then, Spin old son. Show him what he’s been missing.’
Spin began to gesture. He was still apart from his arms and hands. His wrists seemed liquid, the hands flopping around him. He twirled them around his face and his face ran, pouring down onto the blouse he was suddenly wearing. I looked at his sharp fringe, that black hair, those bright features.
It was a good trick, I have to say that. I’d seen the end result before. I’d been going out with it for months. I’d been going out with a warlock in disguise.
‘Still haven’t tidied this place up, I see,’ said Judy; and then she darkened, grew, became Spin again.
‘Good one, isn’t it?’ asked Mr Link. I nodded. They put their mugs on the floor and stood. ‘Got to be going,’ said Mr Link. ‘Be nice to stay and have a chat about old times, but let’s face it, your old times are a few minutes ago compared to ours. We’ll be coming back, but you’ll have gone by then. So long, then.’
Seeing the Wires Page 25
