by Kim Newman
Though you keep up with the chat, you’re thinking about Rowena. You’re worried about her and still not sure what the evening will be like.
‘She’ll be fine,’ Victoria says, mind-reading. ‘Just isn’t used to it, poor lamb.’
‘I don’t know about her,’ you say. ‘I don’t know if she’s really interested in me or just wants to get back at Roger.’
This is the first time you’ve ever told anyone about feelings like this. You always thought it would give other people too much power over you if they knew what you really felt.
‘Roger needs a bottle in the face,’ Victoria says.
You are embarrassed. You forgot that Rowena chucked Roger because of Victoria.
‘Don’t mind about that,’ she says. ‘I never said I was sensible or sincere. I’m just a mad slut, remember.’
‘No you’re not.’
‘No, you’re right. I’m not. Thank you for noticing.’
You start talking about the Rag Show this evening. Michael Dixon and his clique have arranged it. They will be performing comic sketches, and Victoria’s band, Flaming Torture, will top the bill.
‘What kind of a name is Flaming Torture?’
‘It’s an episode of a Flash Gordon serial we saw one morning at Graham’s when we were stoned. It won’t last.’
You both laugh.
You feel relaxed but a lot stronger. No matter what happens with Rowena, something as interesting — and maybe a lot rarer — is developing with Victoria. You think she might be turning into your friend.
At the show, you’re insulated by noise. This has been an out-of-time day. All bets are off but everything you do seems to have counted on a deeper level than you yet understand. It’s as if someone is watching you, keeping a score. Victoria said you’d gone up a thousand points. You have a mild anxiety that you might wipe out the bonus with one wrong move, that you could still crawl out of today as a big loser.
You bop about non-committally in the crowd as Flaming Torture perform. You think Victoria is looking at you as she sings, but with the lights in her eyes she probably can’t make out individual faces in the writhing mass of kids.
It occurs to you that, though Flaming Torture is well beyond your usual listening habits, Victoria might be quite good. No matter how she abuses it, her voice works.
You stop thinking, and dance.
Strobe lights make neon strips of white shirt collars and cuffs. Neil Martin, wearing a sheet like a pantomime ghost, shines like a real apparition.
The music washes your brain.
When the show is over, kids pour out into the car park. Victoria, still in her stage gear, offers you a lift out to Michael Dixon’s party at Achelzoy.
You accept.
I’m sorry, was I assuming too much? Of course, you have a choice. You can refuse Victoria’s offer, go home, watch some television with Flaming Torture still ringing in your ears, and get an early night.
Interested?
I thought not. You see, sometimes you’re on rails. There’s no junction. You run on smoothly. You can go off the rails, of course, but there must be something really wrong with you if that’s your choice.
And, despite what you’re learning about yourself, there’s nothing wrong with you. Your default setting is ordinary, typical, usual. Which is not to say that there are spaces in your life labyrinth that aren’t deeply shadowed or brightly lit.
Come on. Get into Victoria’s Mini van.
What happens next is interesting. Believe me.
You don’t need to talk. You watch the red rearlights of Desmond Fewsham’s car, which is packed full of kids on their way to the party. Victoria is driving just you. The back of the van is full of Flaming Torture’s equipment. The instruments of Torture, you realise.
When you first got in, you darted a look over your shoulder as you did up the seatbelt.
Victoria laughed. ‘She’s not still there.’
You were sort of relieved.
‘Ro just needed a rest,’ she says.
Victoria takes a turn-off. Desmond isn’t ahead now.
‘Short cut,’ she says.
The van bumps a little, over pot-holes. This isn’t a well-kept road. It might have wheel-ruts.
‘Via where?’ you ask.
‘Sutton Mallet.’
The van stalls.
‘Shit,’ Victoria says.
You both get out of the van. Featherbreath steams round Victoria’s mouth and nostrils. It is cold and dark. There are buildings around but none of them is lit up.
‘They’re empty,’ she says. ‘Last summer, Graham wanted to squat one of them. I talked him out of it. I told him I had a strange feeling about the place.’
‘You mentioned it earlier.’
The dark façades are unsettling.
‘I knew winter would come. It’s all very well hanging out in a derelict house in August, but getting through the cold without hot water or electric light or proper heating is different.’
‘What now? Is there a Spectrum Pursuit Vehicle stashed in one of the barns?’
She laughs, musically. That’s an expression you’ve heard, but never heard demonstrated.
‘No, Graham left some gear in one of the houses. I think there are tools.’
She takes your arm and drags you towards a dark house.
Her touch is warm. You think of hugging her for the heat.
But you don’t.
Victoria unlatches a door and steps into a house. You follow her. At least you are out of the wind.
She flicks her cigarette lighter. You’re in a kitchen. Plates and cutlery are strewn on the floor. There are cobwebs and shadows.
‘Stay here,’ she says. ‘The stuff is upstairs. I’ll be back in a sec.’
She leaves you.
There is a little moonlight, but not much. Your eyes hold the after-image of Victoria’s lighter flame.
In the dark, you have time to think. Why doesn’t Victoria have a tool-kit in the van? Is she the sort who knows how to fix a broken-down car with a few wrench-twists and a pair of nylons?
She said she’d be back in a sec.
A sec has passed. Several of them.
You’re cold and in the dark. Things had been going well. Throughout the day, you’d felt things improving. But now you’re off the map, in Sutton Mallet. It’s nowhere, a Sargasso where people are sidetracked, becalmed, marooned, forgotten.
You try to listen for small noises. Victoria should be searching, blundering into things, swearing.
Your ears are still ringing.
Nothing is happening. Nothing is going to happen.
Your are in Nothing. You are become Nothing.
There is a noise, now. No, a sound. It might be the wind, whistling through the many broken windows in the house. But it’s more musical, an ululation, a single voice beckoning, a siren’s seduction.
It must be Victoria. But it doesn’t sound like her.
Are you afraid? Or are you excited?
Your toes are ice-bitten and you are hugging yourself against the cold. The dark is all around you, and something in the house is wailing.
You leave the kitchen. You are in a hallway. At one end are the stairs, at the other is an open door.
The sound, louder now, is coming from upstairs. There’s also a faint light, flickering, a suggestion of warmth. Is that a giggle? Victoria, if she’s upstairs, is not alone. The singing might be in harmony, two or more voices.
You could just leave. You could make it to the main road and hitch a lift to Achelzoy or town. There will be cars going back and forth all night. People you know.
Or do you go upstairs?
If you choose the door, go to 62. If you choose the stairs, go to68.
61
Saturday, 14 February 1998. In the back of your Land-Rover, Roy Canning is apoplectic. In the passenger seat, Rowena clucks and tuts. You drive on to the travellers’ site over a cattle grid and through marshy fields. The caravans are drawn into a c
ircle, like wagons in a Western. You understand these people live more like Indians than pioneers. Some of their structures are teepee-like.
‘Think of the filth,’ blusters Roy.
As chair of the Sutton Mallet Residents’ Committee, you are in charge of the negotiations. But Roy Canning was the first to get a bee in his bonnet about the site and he has been nagging at every opportunity.
These people personally offend Roy on some level you don’t understand. You’d be happier with the lot of them resited in someone else’s backyard and assume there’s a fair amount of drug-taking and loud music going on, but it’s not an affront to your very existence.
‘We should take a flame-thrower to thic field.’
‘Look at the babies,’ Ro says, as if you were visiting a wildlife park. ‘They’re so dirty. Poor things.’
Your wife invited herself along out of curiosity. Roy is so vehement about the site that she just wants to have a good look at it. You doubt Ro will be helpful.
Mary Yatman is at the gate, by her police car. In her uniform, she still looks nineteen.
Unlike you and Ro. During your marriage, you have become frankly haggard. At thirty-eight, you’re almost completely grey. Ro has blown up like a balloon. She has trouble with the seatbelt in the Land-Rover. It won’t stretch over her tummy.
You park and get out. You have to help Ro squeeze out of the door and step down into the field.
Mary greets you. ‘Rowena, I didn’t know you were pregnant again,’ she says.
‘I’m not.’
This isn’t the first time someone has made that mistake. You wonder if Mary did it deliberately.
‘How’s the bank?’ Mary asks you. ‘Tried to rob it lately?’
Whenever she sees you, Mary jokes that you should rob your own bank so she can catch you and get a promotion. She wants to be out of uniform.
Suddenly, you want Mary out of uniform too.
‘Ugh!’ Rowena has stepped in a mudpatch.
‘Revoltin’,’ Roy says, automatically.
If everyone who left mud in their fields was driven off the land, there wouldn’t be any farmers in Somerset.
‘Who are we talking with?’ you ask, businesslike.
‘They claim to be a collective and don’t believe in leaders as such. However, they’ve elected a couple of spokespeople who are empowered to negotiate.’
‘Negotiate!’ Roy bursts out. ‘Appeasement don’t work.’
‘Calm down, Roy,’ you say.
This isn’t going to be easy.
‘This is them now,’ Mary announces.
A small procession advances, making Roy hide behind Ro. In the lead are a couple of small children, faces painted like pantomime savages, dressed in adult-sized cardigans cinched in to become robe-like garments. They have flowers for you, the first few feeble snowdrops.
‘For peace,’ an urchin says, presenting a snowdrop to Ro.
Ro takes the flower. ‘What a sweet little girl.’
‘I’m not a girl,’ the kid says.
‘Oh.’
You catch a sideways look from Mary. She has never liked Ro, you remember.
As you have done many times, you wonder if you shouldn’t have asked Mary out in 1977. If you had, you might now be married to a slender blonde in a trim uniform. Not a blubber-bag who ran out of things to say ten years ago and has been repeating herself ever since.
Roads not taken …
‘Blessed be,’ announces a tall man with a long beard and a staff. He has a sheepskin waistcoat dotted with CND and animal-rights badges. He smells faintly musky, but not unpleasant. He looks a lot more like a man of the land than Roy Canning, a set-aside farmer who wears a suit. The traveller spokesman sticks out a knotty hand.
‘This is …’ begins Mary.
‘I know,’ you say, taking his hand. ‘Hello, Gully.’
Gully Eastment looks at you, wondering.
For a moment, you think he won’t recognise you. That would be an embarrassment: if he had registered in your memory, but you hadn’t lodged in his. Maybe his past is full up, insignificant people cleaned out of his mental attic.
‘It’s the Straight Man,’ he says.
He called you that for a while, at college. You’ve forgotten how you got the nickname.
‘Keith Marion,’ you say.
Gully lets go of your hand. He grins, amused by some memory. Now you’re worried he remembers things about you that you’ve forgotten.
‘This is Rowena, my wife. Rowena Douglass, as was.’
Gully plainly doesn’t recognise her. And no wonder. The girl she once was is completely buried in her inflated new body. Gully looks her over — do you detect a trace of sympathy for you in his ironic glance? — and kisses her hand.
‘I remember you,’ he says, eventually. ‘You were sick.’
She laughs, setting her chins in motion.
You’ve lost the place. This means nothing to you.
‘Fancy you remembering that?’ she says. ‘Rag Day 1977, wasn’t it?’
‘How could anyone forget?’ Gully says.
Now you remember. Rowena being sick in an alley. You trying to ignore her. Your first date. The warning you should have taken. She still can’t handle booze.
‘So, the Straight Man got together with the Lady Lush to make babies.’
‘We have two children,’ she admits. ‘Jeffrey and Jasmine.’
‘Love to you,’ Gully says, embracing Ro.
He has to bend down a little and his long arms squeeze her almost spherical torso, lifting rolls of anorak-covered flesh as he embraces her. Ro flutters in his grip, cheeks blotching red, head bobbing like a car toy.
‘Roy, this is Gully Eastment,’ you say. ‘We were at school together, as you’ve probably gathered. All of us.’ You include Mary.
‘I was there when Rowena was sick,’ Mary admits.
‘Oh come now, I was a child,’ Ro says, fed up with this.
Roy is livid. He’s fifteen years older than you all. He seems to regard your previous association with Gully as treason. Suddenly, he thinks of you all as comrades in crime.
‘Straight Man, come to the meeting-lodge.’
Gully lets go of Ro and leads you into the centre of the camp.
The lodge is a well-made windowless hut. You have to bend a little to get in through the door, which is covered by a nailed sheet of clear polythene and, inside, a hanging curtain of beads. The low space is lit by candles. Thick rugs are laid over bare earth. There are no chairs, only cushions. On the walls are tapestries and children’s paintings.
‘No chairs, I’m afraid.’
The wood is impregnated with the smell of marijuana.
You realise what this reminds you of: Graham the hippie’s bedsit. You were there only once. Rag Day 1977. The day Ro was so sick. The day you first went out with your future wife. A significant moment in your past.
Gully offered you a joint.
‘I don’t smoke,’ you said, ‘tobacco.’
Gully found that hilarious, and repeated it in an accent like Bela Lugosi saying, ‘I nevair dreenk … wine!’ All the people crammed into Graham’s bedsit picked it up in their strange, stoned communion and chanted it between choking outbursts of laughter.
That was when Graham started calling you Straight Man.
You’ve forgotten how to sit cross-legged on a cushion, and get your knees mixed up as you squat. Ro is in an even worse state and has to be helped down on to the cushions, lowered like a hippo being given a bath.
Roy bangs his head on the ceiling and squats uncomfortably, unwilling to let his arse be fouled by contact with filthy hippie cushions. Mary slips off her uniform shoes and does a perfect lotus, her black-tights-clad feet neatly tucked into her skirted lap.
‘Welcome, friends,’ says Gully.
He sits by a gigantic affair of glass tubes and bowls. The bong is not in use, which is probably a mercy for Roy’s heart.
‘Are they here?’ says a voice.
‘Yes, my love.’
A pile of cushions moves, as if there were a land-bound squid under it. They part and a woman erupts from them, long arms — tattooed and hung with bangles — snaking out first. She manages to be elegant in her writhing as she slides to Gully’s side and sits by him.
‘Is this a reunion?’ she says.
It’s Victoria Conyer.
Her ears, nose, eyebrow and lip are pierced with rings. She wears a black singlet, cut low on her chest to show flame-coloured tattoos on her breasts. Her black hair is down to her waist, and shot through with a white streak.
‘How’s your head, Straight Man?’
You touch the spot on your forehead where she once broke a glass. You have no scar.
Gully and Mary understand this. Ro, who was after all too busy being sick to notice, doesn’t. Roy thinks he is in the enemy’s camp and that cannibals will take him at any moment.
‘My head’s fine,’ you say.
‘Are you sure?’ Victoria asks. ‘Your aura’s almost violet, as if you’d not purged in months.’
‘This’m all very cosy, but …’
‘This is Mr Canning, VC,’ Gully says, kissing her on the cheek. ‘He writes us the letters.’
‘The formal ones or the anonymous ones?’
‘Both, I should think.’
Canning splutters.
‘If you’re going to send heavy legal letters and cut-out-from-newspaper-headlines death threats, you shouldn’t use identical envelopes and type the addresses on the same machine,’ Gully explains. ‘We may be “drug-addled vermin” but we’re not stupid.’
‘Naughty Mr Canning,’ says Victoria — VC? — wagging a long finger at him. She has a silver skull ring with red jewel eyes that wink at you.
‘Youm scum,’ Roy says, viciously. ‘How dare you?’
‘We don’t threaten your kids,’ Gully says.
‘Youm sell they drugs.’
‘Grass and E, maybe, if they nag us enough — you didn’t hear that, Mary — but no smack, no crack, nothing deadly.’
Mary is impassive, impartial. She’s set this meeting up, but is an observer.
‘So you admit it,’ Roy snarls.
