This, briefly, silences everyone. “I don’t know how we’re going to handle this if we’re all turned out in the streets,” Cecily quavers.
George says, “There has to be something we can sell.”
Randall laughs.
It would be unbearable to listen to all of this, but Mr Levanter-Sleet is there.
It is going to have to be a very big spell, Morgane thinks. It is going to take a lot of work to make everything better.
THEY WALK THROUGH Wylmere Woods together in the dark, Morgane and Mr Levanter-Sleet. She turns on her torch and breaks off a stick of beechwood from a sapling as she goes and the things flutter nervously and shrink back into the wet trees. The earthworks have begun in earnest, Morgane skids down a loose bank of sidecast soil onto the flat bed of the A3012.
The earth is damp and raw beneath her, they have laid nothing new down yet. And she has the space she needs to work.
She digs the point of the beech staff into the earth and draws a line as long as she’s tall, then, as she pulls it into a sharp curve, scatters blood from the back of her hand on the bend. She works the pattern along fifty yards of road, and she focuses different desires into different parts of it (diamonds, mandalas) and seals them with blood and flames, and then she tries to knit them all together.
Not to be sent anywhere terrible. Money for Randall and Cecily. To stay the same. To be left alone.
But it gets harder and sometimes she realises she’s just stumbling through the mud, sore and shivering and half-asleep, unable to focus on anything more elaborate than Everything to be better.
And at last it’s done, the pattern, but the spell isn’t, it still needs something more.
“Be very small, Mr Levanter-Sleet,” she whispers. “Be so small nothing can see you.”
Mr Levanter-Sleet obliges at once. Even she can’t feel him at her side, for the first time in months. The loneliness of it weakens her knees and she has to lean on the beech staff. And there isn’t limitless time, dawn is coming and the rain is getting heavier; it will wash away her lines, in the end.
Gradually, the things re-emerge from what remains of the woods. But they’re not like the things in the house, they’re not so vicious, so half-human.
But she needs one to approach.
She is sick of hurting herself, but she grits her teeth, pokes the little knife from the kitchen into her arm again and draws in blood on the palm of her own hand. And this time instead of desire or intent, she loads the pattern full of the pain it cost to make. She fills it with loneliness and defencelessness and hurt.
And still it takes so long that when it finally happens, she looks up to see something ragged and green inches from her face, peering at her, and realises she was crouched on the ground, barely propped upright on the staff, asleep.
(It’s possible, she has to admit later, that the thing didn’t want to hurt her. It’s possible it was only curious, like Mr Levanter-Sleet was at the beginning.)
Mr Levanter-Sleet explodes out of nothingness. The thing has only time to emit a thin shriek as he stabs it and drags it down into the labyrinth Morgane has made. The ground beneath Morgane rocks as he surges through its passageways and turns. Then he erupts out, the force of it knocking her onto her knees, roaring like a black geyser into the air, and goes streaming away towards Wylmere Hall.
Morgane stumbles after him, through woods that are utterly silent around her. She climbs the dark and silent stairs to her room, and falls asleep. Mr Levanter-Sleet is not there to bring her sweet dreams, but nothing else comes near her, and for once she sleeps heavily. She doesn’t hear the sirens.
THE INQUEST INTO George’s death fails to reach any very satisfactory conclusion on what he was doing down at the construction site at five in the morning. As he was barefoot and still wearing pyjamas, sleepwalking seems the only answer.
But one of the last protesters, cold and wakeful in the upper branches of an oak, claims to have seen a man running away from Wylmere Hall, shouting for help, scrambling over roots and sawn-off stumps in the first glimmer of dawn.
“Like he was being chased,” he insisted. “As if the devil was after him.”
But whatever brought George there, he was not responsible for the Highways Agency’s contractors failing to follow proper procedure before finishing work for the night. All heavy machinery should have been left securely parked and firmly turned off, keys should have been in key safes. It should have been thoroughly impossible for the excavator to trundle down a slope of loose earth and topple over.
The construction firm, with surprising alacrity, offers Cecily and Randall two million pounds. They accept at once.
There would be plenty of money to send Morgane to the Emmitsburg Prayer Warriors now, but somehow no one gets round to it.
Cecily cries in her room a lot and Randall broods in the library or the drawing room. But they both did that anyway and now they do it with the lights on and the refitted central heating comfortably blazing.
She asked for everything to be better, Morgane supposes, not for everything to be perfect.
“I DIDN’T ASK you to kill anyone,” she tells Mr Levanter-Sleet in her bedroom. On one of her midnight walks around the house, she found a trunk in an attic and inside it a beautiful oyster-coloured flapper dress. She’s repairing some patches where beads are missing; no one tends to burst into her room and interrupt her, these days.
She feels she has to say this. She should be devastated, eviscerated with remorse.
Though when she imagines George stricken with guilt or grief over her, she doesn’t get very far.
“He was a human being,” she tries. It sounds rather flat.
Mr Levanter-Sleet, bunched in inky cumuli on her bed, just stares at her. He does not seem to feel any need to defend himself.
She stares back.
She says, “Well, try not to do it again.”
SHE WALKS AMONG the skinny saplings on the banks of the A3012, planted in waist-high, beige plastic tubes, to replace the seven thousand trees felled.
“Save our trees,” Amber had shouted.
“Actually,” George would have said. “They’re our trees.”
No one has mentioned it, but she supposes she’s the heir to the whole estate now. Morgane Sacheverell-Lytton of Wylmere Hall. She has to admit to herself, she likes the way it sounds.
But not enough.
Mr Levanter-Sleet nudges her attention towards something shining in the grass. She bends and picks it up. It’s the art deco hair slide, it’s silver grey and tarnished, but the mother-of-pearl is still gleaming. It has waited for her, lovely and intact, while the landscape transformed around it.
The A3012 was completed just before she turned fourteen. She wanted to wait that long, to be sure. And she isn’t a millimetre taller or broader, there is not one additional hair on her skin, not a note in her voice has changed. “I’d have thought you’d have had a growing spurt by now,” said Cecily drearily.
In her backpack, there’s a change of clothes (and the beaded dress), a toothbrush, her sewing things, a packet of Jaffa Cakes, and twenty thousand pounds in cash. She has emptied a Delchester cash machine with Cecily’s credit card and the assistance of Mr Levanter-Sleet. She thinks, in the circumstances, that’s fair.
Her hair is still very short, but she jams the slide into it anyway. She skids down onto the hard shoulder, and sticks out her thumb. Children are warned not to do this, she knows, especially girls (my mother said I never should play with the gypsies in the wood). But she is in no danger at all. And she has already done a small spell, which she thinks will discourage any one from following her.
It doesn’t take long at all to flag down a car, and then (she times it by the dashboard clock) it only takes six minutes and twenty four seconds to drive the length of the A3012, through what remains of Wylmere Woods. They charge towards London, Mr Levanter-Sleet churning in the air above a green Ford Fiesta, like a plume of black smoke.
I was up on his ba
ck and away with a crack
Sally, tell my mother that I shan’t come back.
“Eruga!” whispers Morgane.
BINGO
S. L. GREY
You never know who you are going to meet on the road at night, who is behind the wheel of that car or bike in front of you, whether or not a momentary lack of judgement on their part will lead to you being involved in an accident. That potential for catastrophe and violent death is explored in the following story – an incredibly bleak but powerful tale by a writing duo who are fast proving themselves one of the most interesting voices in the genre.
4 A.M. THE only time the N2 highway ever sleeps. He coasts to the inside lane, leans the bike in, then rolls on the throttle as he comes out of the corner. He should be careful – with the roadblocks packed up for the night, this is the time the coked-up kids drive home from the clubs – but he’s irritated, restless; the night hasn’t gone as he’d planned.
The road is his. He pushes the Ducati to two hundred and imagines the city disappearing behind him: all of it – his work, the years he’s invested in trying to fit in, the Bingo Club, this latest girl. He can’t remember her name, and that bugs him. In the six months he’s been playing the game, he’s always tried to keep it civilised. It’s been a means to an end: finish his card and he’ll be in with the inner circle at the brokerage; he’d be a made man, offered all the massive accounts. This is what they told him, and he believes it – he’s seen it happen. James de Wet, Phil Malope were kids from nowhere like him, and they skipped a few rungs on the ladder to the big leagues. Now they’ve got flats in Camps Bay and Bugattis in the garage.
It was a squalling winter evening when he first heard about the club, so unlike the dry heat of tonight. He was standing outside the office building, smoking, trying to figure out an imbalance in one of the pension schemes, one of those cut-fee, low-risk packages for ex-schoolteachers who were hoping to get enough back to stay in cat food until they died. This is what a scholarship boy out of government school and with no contacts has to handle at Levine Botha: twenty-hour days, for barely any commission. The boys from the Bingo Club – he didn’t know it was called that then, just knew they were the rich kids – came out of the lobby elevator, already drunk. He was surprised to see de Wet and Malope among them.
“Willems! Pulling another all-nighter?”
He shrugged, sighed out the smoke.
“There’s another way, brother,” Malope said.
Eventually he got an audience, doesn’t like to think about the humiliation, but back then anything seemed better than being stuck in a dead end at the company forever. Then he was put on trial – that’s what they called it: not initiation, not probation. Just fill the card and he’d be in.
So for the last six months he’s been checking the boxes, different types of women: a geekishly obsessive list of races and sizes, hair colour and physical attributes. It seemed quite simple at the time: bed them, take a picture for proof, and get out.
There’s a wink of a single red tail light far ahead of him, then a double flash as the driver touches the brakes. He slows the bike just a little. The last couple of months, he’s been wondering about the Bingo Club, why they do it. He’s been wondering whether it will actually get him into the inner circle after all, or if it’s just a bunch of kids playing a practical joke. The doubt, the idea that he’s just been played for a fool, the fact that he’s still dealing with cut-rate savings schemes, has made him frustrated, has made him angry; and last night, he supposes, it sort of came to a head.
He’s come up fast now behind the car – a black Beemer – with the broken tail light. As he overtakes it on the left, it drifts across his lane. He instinctively leans left, correcting immediately to stay on the road. He barely avoids going off onto the hard shoulder.
Shaky, flushed with adrenalin, he pulls to the side of the highway, where the concrete barrier is scarred with red paint (it’s always red, as if red cars are the only ones that ever collide) and drops the stand. If it wasn’t for the ABS, he’d be fucked. He flips up his visor, breathes in fuel-tinged air, flexes his fingers to stop his hands from shaking. He’s been in bike accidents before; he knows only too well how the time slows in the moment just before impact. How details come into sharp focus.
He replays the moment as the clutch on his heart loosens. He was way too close to the Beemer for that frozen second. He sees a still of the back of her head as she bent to fiddle with the radio or fish something off the passenger seat, oblivious that he was even there. And the snapshot reminds him of how he left the woman less than an hour ago, faced pressed down and crying into her pillow.
He’s got three more slots on the bingo card, but he doesn’t know if he can finish. He doesn’t know if he should finish. It’s only making him feel smaller. He doesn’t believe them anymore, that after the game it will be done, and he’ll have earned their respect.
That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? Respect. And the bitch in the Beemer didn’t even fucking see him. He’s shunted by a shaft of fury, peels the bike with a scream back onto the highway. He’s not sure what he’s going to do if he catches the car – let the bitch know that she nearly wiped him out, maybe. Make her see him. He speeds up, hoping that she hasn’t exited somewhere up ahead.
No – he sees pale tail lights ahead, just past the airport turn-off.
Then, as if he’s done it with his mind, the car swerves, its back spins out, clips the middle barrier, and then it flips over once, twice, landing right-side up, its front crashing into the concrete wall that bolsters the hard shoulder.
He slows to a chug, then pulls up, the anger shocked away, sober. A silver sedan screams past, its horn blaring.
He considers driving on. Someone else will help, surely.
But he knows no one’s going to stop. Not on this dodgy road: the barbed-wire fence doesn’t keep the hijackers and vultures off the highway.
The car has come to rest perfectly within the bounds of the hard shoulder, neatly behind the yellow line, the front caved in, the windows smashed and spider-webbed. It’s an old off-white Toyota, not the black BMW. He’s not sure whether this makes it more or less of his business. The wreck already looks like one of the orphaned vehicles that clutter up the side of the highway, their owners unable to afford the cash for a tow truck. He takes off his helmet, rests it on the seat.
He approaches the car cautiously. Another vehicle whooshes past. When the sound of it dies, he hears a snatch of music floating out of the wreck, some millionaire wanker crooning, “You’re beautiful.” The music cuts out. The engine tick-ticks. The tyres are flat, twisted to a broken angle.
He tells himself he isn’t squeamish. You don’t travel South African roads without experiencing carnage. He’s seen bodies flung across the highway like toys. Once, a torso like a bin bag dumped on a dark road.
The street lights bathe the scene in a yellow glow, turning the car’s dirty white exterior a muddy gold. He crunches over glass. The bodywork is patched with old putty and scratches and dents. The bonnet is folded in half like a paper castle. On the back seat there’s an empty baby seat, encrusted with filth.
He doesn’t want to look in the front seat, doesn’t want to see what he’s going to see. It’s been a long night already, too long. He can just go. The night started with so much promise. The woman seemed genuinely interested in him, out on the prowl, just like him, on a Friday night. Why can’t he remember her name? The cocktails were working; she was feeling him up on the sofa. If it weren’t for this bloody game... It could have been a perfectly pleasant night, but when she took him up to her place, he couldn’t get the image out of his head, of the boys of the Bingo Club leering over them as he tried to fuck her. Saunders snapping his braces, watching too closely with his moist stare. He couldn’t manage; he pushed his softening dick against her. She laughed at him.
The blare of a truck going by, then silence, then a whimper draws his attention to the wreck. The driver’s side windo
w is smashed, and as he bends to look into it, he catches a whiff of something. Smoke? He sniffs. An acrid electrical smell.
“Help me,” the driver whispers. There’s a diamond of glass embedded below her eye. She’s twisting her body, writhing. No air bag – it’s not that kind of car. The steering wheel is practically in her lap; he tries not to look too closely at that, concentrates on her face. He thought she’d be younger; the car made him imagine a student, but she’s older than he is – way past her sell-by. Flabby, sweat-shirted, he can see the lines on her face even in the flattering light. He wonders what she’s doing on the road alone at this hour.
He yanks the door handle – it doesn’t budge. She’s locked herself in. “Ug,” she says. “Legs. Can’t...” She wriggles again. “Hot,” she says. “Hot.”
The acrid stink is getting stronger. There’s a loud crack on the car roof. Something breaking? Someone lobbing stones from the slum over the fence? Her eyes swivel, panicked.
“Oh God please help me I don’t wanna die I don’t wanna die.”
She tries to tug herself from the seat, but she can’t move. As she thrashes her head around, he can see her left cheek is masked with blood.
He should say something like: “It’s fine. I’ll get you out of here.” But his instincts are screaming at him to step away, just leave. Something’s telling him not to use his iPhone to call for help. They can trace calls, can’t they? “Do you have a phone?” he hears himself say.
“Uh. Bag.”
He knocks out the last bits of jagged glass in the driver’s side window. He can’t get to the other side, the car is concertinaed against the crash barrier. He has to reach across her, feels the soft mush of her body against his. Rubbish is scattered everywhere. Old McDonalds bags, coffee cups. “Ah,” she moans. “Ah, hurts.” Another vehicle rushes past, doesn’t even slow.
End of the Road Page 19
