Perhaps it is shock that has jerked Avril out of her old lethargy, that has slimmed her down a good stone in weight, that has energized her and forced her out of her humble, obsequious ways.
She no longer takes any crap from her mother.
She has taken up smoking. She drinks too much for her own good.
Avril’s parents, having taken refuge at the Happy Stay—Richard has taken a month off from his gentlemen’s outfitters on compassionate grounds—are now talking of returning to Huyton to face the flak on their home ground.
But when Avril returns from her grand shopping spree, she turns to Kirsty for her opinion. Thank God the kids are still at school: children are so painfully honest.
Her short, spiky hair is an unmellow yellow. She twirls round the caravan patting it, peering into the two small mirrors each time she passes. Her eyebrows have been plucked and replaced by fine brown lines of surprise. Her dolly mouth is a vicious red, which fattens her lips and makes her pout.
‘Well? D’you like it?’
Her finger nails are painted luminous green.
‘Wow, Avril! It’ll take a while to get used to. But, yes, it’s quite dramatic and arty. Now you could be a drama student.’
‘I’d get chucked out of business studies.’
The first item Avril models is a black leather outfit—a jacket with chains and epaulettes, a skirt, black tights and knee-length boots. She must have ventured into an S&M shop by mistake. She looks like a concentration-camp guard, one of those hard-faced, blond-haired dykes, all she needs is a whip in one hand and a couple of Rottweilers on leads in the other.
What can one say?
One doesn’t want to be unkind and, anyway, what does it matter?
‘It’s angry-looking,’ says Kirsty, and then, more positively, ‘but confident.’
‘Well, I am angry, and confident,’ says Avril, striding round. ‘That’s just what I am.’
The tight leopard-skin-patterned trousers, made in some kind of stretchy silk, do nothing to demonstrate Avril’s weight loss. Especially when she wears that short, loose chainmail top with the tassels. She looks like she works the pavements of every Union Street in the land. ‘That’ll turn all eyes,’ says Kirsty.
‘But it does suit me, doesn’t it?’ Avril asks.
‘It does, in a funny kind of way,’ Kirsty lies.
‘I’m no longer ashamed of my body,’ says Avril, ‘and from now on I’m going to flaunt it.’
‘Why not?’ says Kirsty weakly. ‘But don’t let your mother see any of these.’
‘I don’t intend to,’ says Avril, ‘but if she sees she sees. It’s my life, she can burn in hell for all I care.’
From then on things get seriously kinky and Kirsty wonders which shop Avril went in to find some of that underwear.
Nothing about Avril’s new wardrobe is plain, good and made to last, in direct flagrance of her mother’s teaching. Frankly, Avril looks cheap and common in every single garment she models, and the thought of this ungodly woman buying a house next door to Kirsty does nothing for her peace of mind.
She’s got the kids to consider.
Perhaps it’s a good thing that her mother kept such strict control over this outrageously overexposed new Avril. Perhaps Mrs Stott suspected something nobody else could guess at.
Good news from London, however, with an extraordinary change in Bernie’s humour. No-one expected this new scenario. Bernie is engaged to her agent—she says. Her agent will help her with future scripts, Kirsty need worry no further. Clementine is satisfied with Magdalene and the final proofs are on their way.
But what is this new wonderman like?
Is Bernie safe? Or, in her silly impetuosity, has she succumbed yet again to another unhealthy obsession?
But Bernie is in jubilant spirits. ‘Mother of God, you wait till you see him.’
‘He sounds amazing.’
‘More than that, he’s a dream. And his house, Kirsty, and his vintage car. He has a butler and walk-in fridge…’
‘Maybe you should give up your share—’
‘No way. I want my independence. Don’t you?’
What can a man like that want with Bernie? OK, she is ravishing, and rich men go for beautiful birds, but Bernie is an empty vessel, inflammable and skittish—he must be awed by her literary talents but he sounds like a useful aid for the cause. Bernie must be encouraged to keep him, if only she can behave herself.
‘So someone helped out with Magdalene?’
‘They should have done that at the beginning. What you did was a waste of time. I expected better than that. But the real bugger is they already want more.’
‘Well, they’ll have to want then, won’t they?’
But Bernie goes on, elated. ‘There’s more dosh on its way. Much more. Only a few weeks to wait and I’ll pay it straight into your banks. It’s all much easier now I’m with Rory. And there’s a world tour planned for the spring, me and Rory are going off together to do signings and talks and promotion interviews.’
What a gullible halfwit she is. She and Avril both watched the quiz show with tears of laughter rolling down their cheeks. She obviously hasn’t learnt a thing. They had to turn it off in the end, they were laughing so hard they woke the kids. ‘How are you going to cope?’
‘Oh, it’s all different now. Rory will help me. He can deal with anything.’
‘You’d better hang on to him then. It sounds as if we’re going to need him.’
For once Bernie sounds truly happy.
‘Pray for me.’
Now then.
Down to work.
Which biscuits should Kirsty choose to take to her hostage in the mine?
Chocolate-chip cookies, gingers, digestives? Or perhaps she should stick to plain cream crackers.
Twenty-Six
AVRIL WATCHES ENVIOUSLY WHILE Kirsty plays with her kids in the evenings. Jake and Gemma have all the best gear—jeans, sweaters, trainers—not for them the excruciating embarrassment of skirts and cardigans and sensible shoes. They are fed their favourite food; they don’t have to come home at teatime and face cold meat and sago, boiled fish, prunes and lumpy custard. And Gemma, who wears cheap jewellery, ladybird tattoos on her face and silver spray in her hair, whose favourite sandals are plastic and sparkly, who has her own Walkman and her own selection of Spice Girls tapes, has a short, fluffy hairstyle, stylishly cut, not pulled back from her forehead in two fat plaits.
They watch endless cartoons on TV.
There are no regular punishments, the kids have no respect for their mother.
They take Mars bars with their packed lunches.
Kirsty hides little notes in the sandwiches which say she loves them.
Why was Avril’s childhood so grey? Why did she spend her formative years as a fat and lonely lost soul, under constant watchfulness and the subjection of her will?
What was Mother trying to do to her?
And how about Father, who allowed this to happen to his precious little girl?
Oh yes, thinks Avril, with a festering anger, Father abused her all right, but in his own special way.
Mother is letting it be known that she has decided to go back to Huyton. Avril suspects that Mrs Gilcrest, the owner of the site, is fed up to the teeth of the press attention and has kicked the Stotts out, no messing. Since Avril’s vile accusations of sexual abuse by Father, Mother has cut her dead, and Father, obedient as ever, has followed her lead. It’s highly unlikely that Mother has confided the truth to Father, sexual matters being taboo, and certainly such unmentionable, unsavoury matters as incest. Mother has probably persuaded Father that she can’t forgive Avril for denouncing Graham when she could, for the sake of the family, have kept her big mouth shut.
Poor Graham has now been formally charged with the murder of Edward Board, and the police are still searching for that elusive number four wood.
All is quiet on the night that Mr and Mrs Stott sleep their last sleep in the neat littl
e bunks in the Bluebird caravan. The caravan mats are airing on the clothes horse in the garden.
The day was taken up with spring-cleaning. Every shelf and cupboard was polished and disinfected in readiness for the journey home. Boxes were packed and stacked in the boot of the family’s green Ford Sierra. The garden furniture, hardly used in the unforeseen circumstances, was strapped up and lodged securely underneath the caravan table. Avril’s mother washed her hair and went to bed with her curlers in and Avril’s father’s last job of the evening was to clean the caravan windows. He polished them till they shone.
The pot plants are lodged on the back seat already, sturdily held upright with bamboo canes.
Fluffy’s bed and blankets are sadly laid out beside them, still hairy.
They have not given her up for good, oh no. They informed the police of her disappearance and put adverts in the local papers. She could turn up, who knows? Miracles do happen. Fluffy is very important now they have lost both son and daughter.
On the caravan table beside the bed is the AA route map home, the car keys, the caravan keys, a disposable lighter in case Mrs Stott wakes up and needs to light her Wright’s vaporizer, an empty flask ready for filling, turkey sandwiches wrapped in greaseproof, two half-blackened bananas and the final bill from Mrs Gilcrest.
And thus they prepared for their final journey.
Do it now, Avril, do it.
Avril’s malevolent urges, as she sits reading ten doors away, grow massive and overwhelming. Her red gingham curtains are drawn, beyond them the darkness is total. She reads Magdalene under the small plastic light stuck to the wall above her bed. She has her own room in the mobile home, more like a broom cupboard but sufficient for her immediate needs. Kirsty has a similar room and the children share a double bed in what Mrs Gilcrest so grandly describes as the master bedroom.
A tawny owl hoots from a stand of trees and the whispering of the sea in the distance sounds like the shushing voice of an overanxious mother.
The night air that slips through the gaps in the rivets seems to revive all Avril’s grievances and she sits there on the hard foam mattress, unable to concentrate on the book that normally commands all her attention. Her resentments drain her energy and appear to split her head.
‘Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts,’ is the last sentence she reads before she gets up and stares out at the night. A few dim lights peep between the curtains of some of the caravan windows, although most of the holidaymakers have gone and only the few long-term tenants remain. A fierce white glare of exultation begins to fill Avril’s head as, suddenly, she knows what she must do. Have courage! Who dares wins.
What now?
Why wait?
Face the future not the past. You are free, you are rich, you are secure, all doubts and anxieties are wiped away. Graham will be imprisoned for life—a just revenge for his evil ways—and when she thinks about this the harmonious pattern that forms in her head brings Avril serenity and calm.
There is no mutiny of emotions. Avril’s conscience is as lucid and clear as it was when she visited Graham in gaol. The Bluebird caravan is just over there. With a thumping heart she opens her door and creeps towards the kitchen. She stands on the top step of their van with the door open, staring out in a kind of ghoulish catalepsy. Furtiveness moves inside her as she glances round to make sure no-one’s watching. Something devilish drives Avril on.
Whispers surround her.
Do this and your future will be exquisitely lovely.
They have to be punished, as you were punished.
They have to atone for their sins.
If they won’t own up she will own up for them.
Avril bends low under the darkness and scuttles across the grass to the Bluebird. Her large body pushes pinkly against the black of her sheer silk nightdress. The grass is icy cold on her feet. Her breath makes patterns on the night. There is a sulphurous taste in her mouth, a foretaste of the cleansing fire. She knows one window will be open. Mother believes if she sleeps with them closed she will suffocate in the night. As the dark clouds scud above her, Avril discovers a window ajar; she stands on the portable step and leans in.
‘Yessss. Do it now, Avril, do it now!’ A hiss of a whisper splits the night. Avril jumps half out of her skin and presses a finger to her lips. Dear God, Kirsty will wake them up if she does that again.
Avril, still half hypnotized, shoots back to her own caravan where Kirsty waits at the door with a trancelike look on her face. There are beads of sweat on her forehead. Her breath comes in rasps.
‘Avril. Go back. Don’t stop. This might be your last chance. They have to atone for their sins in the furnaces of hell; there is no comfort like Calvary.’
Avril’s bare feet are wet and frozen. Those whispers she heard, they came from Kirsty through the thin partition walls, Kirsty chanting encouragement with the thin rage of a stiletto. But how did she guess Avril’s intentions, or is she just finely tuned to the natural processes of nature?
‘I can’t,’ Avril stutters, ‘not now.’ But her voice is guttural, deep, nothing at all like her own.
‘You have to, there can be no going back.’ Kirsty’s face is bleared and creased, and her voice is calculated and chilling. She quotes from Magdalene. ‘Be careful or you will die in your sins. How will you escape if you neglect so great a salvation?’
And Avril feels herself sucked into Kirsty, cell for cell, blood for blood she feels herself going into her, her soul losing its hold on the world, everything unfocused and ill-defined.
But the shocking sight of Kirsty convulsing—foam edging the corners of her mouth, eyes so violently dilated the pupils appear to be black and her clenched fists raw and purpling—is so repellent, so overwhelming, that Avril, waking from the deepest of sleeps, finds reality quite impenetrable. She pitches forward and hangs onto the door frame, tasting horror on her tongue where her teeth grind and join with saliva to clear a gush of green bile. The stench of her own breath is fetid. What hellish compulsion had driven her on to contemplate the murder by fire of her parents?
With a mighty effort of will Avril draws herself upright; still shaking, she finds and lights a cigarette with all the clumsiness of a non-smoker. The acrid smoke is cleansing, she pulls it down deep into her lungs before puffing it into the quiet night air, turning her back on Kirsty. Who is she to condemn or denounce? Was she, too, metamorphosed into a slathering demon when she had gone creeping across the grass? Was her face a mask of perspiring hatred, bared teeth, demented eyes? Something else is asserting itself, coming on the scene to call the tune and pull the strings.
She still dare not look round to face Kirsty. She doesn’t want to see, but the sound of Kirsty’s breathing gradually calms to a strangled groan and the sound of silence and sanity slowly re-enters the caravan. All Avril wants to do now is get into bed and sleep.
But if Avril hadn’t been interrupted she would have turned on the cooker controls by reaching through the half-opened window, she would have turned on the gas, a thousand punishing sentences rehearsed and ready in her head, mind and body craving an opiate, temples beating, limbs shaking. Filled with the passionate anger of a child, Avril would have dropped to the ground and crawled beneath the caravan, obeying specific directions which reverberated in her brain as automatically as school poetry. With the spanner attached to the big gas bottle she would have twisted the valve to open, wiped the spanner on the edge of her nightdress, and with heart racing and body weak she would have gone back to bed.
As if all this had already been written.
But she hadn’t done that. Thank God, she hadn’t.
The fiery explosion shoots through her, waking her from the deepest slumber with a piercing scream from Kirsty, ‘Get the kids out… quick. What’s happened? There must have been a bomb!’
Figures stumble about in the night, dashing around like cartoon mice chased by cats with choppers. Crazy torchlights span the confusion. Voices call, and over it all flames
the funeral pyre of the Stotts. Parts of the Bluebird spit out of the furnace, wrinkled and black and shooting across the grass like faggots at a public burning.
Which is what this undoubtedly is.
Burn the witch! Burn the warlock! The exultation in Kirsty’s eyes makes up for the lack of the chant.
So, they had merely to will it.
‘My God, is there anyone in there?’
‘Has anyone rung the fire brigade?’
‘Poor bastards.’
‘You can’t get near it for the heat.’
People are beating it off with their arms, even though they stand yards away, and everybody turns red with the glow, or black with the mounting embers.
‘It’s gonna get the car—stand back.’
Kirsty, like any normal mother, gathers up her children and dashes towards the reception building that is joined to the Gilcrests’ bungalow. She doesn’t pause to find Avril, Avril notices, watching her go. She doesn’t stop to think about Avril, and Kirsty’s supposed to be her friend.
The flames start licking the green Ford Sierra, the pride of Father’s life. All those Sunday mornings spent cleaning his car while Avril wandered back from Sunday school, the only girl in the street made to go, even in summer when beaches and picnics and barbecues in the garden beckoned. He would smile at her over his foamy bucket, stand back and regard his work with pride as trickles of water ran down the road and into the nearest gutter.
Mother would be inside, cooking the all-weather joint. The joint that would do them for the rest of the week, if she eked it out carefully enough.
Veil of Darkness Page 26
