by Kim Newman
Gully works his eyebrows.
Victoria starts rolling a cigarette. No, a joint.
‘I think we can have this lot cleared off, then,’ Roy continues. ‘WPC Yatman, make your arrest.’
Victoria lights up and passes the joint to Mary. She takes a polite little toke and gives it to Ro.
‘Think of it as a peace pipe,’ Gully says.
Roy’s eyeballs are on the point of leaving his skull.
‘Thank you very much,’ says Ro. She mimes a draught and exhales through her nostrils.
Gully takes in a deep drag. He feints, as if to hand the joint to you.
‘Of course,’ he says. ‘You don’t smoke … tobacco.’
He looks into your eyes, smiling, and holds the smoking joint out to Roy.
Roy slaps it out of Gully’s hand.
‘Youm to clear off the land,’ he says.
‘And go where? There are people like you everywhere. The council wants us here, well out of town. And there’s something about Sutton Mallet, don’t you think? Something old, something primal.’
‘How much do you want?’
‘Roy,’ you say, ‘I don’t think this is called for.’
‘Come off it, Keith. They’ll shift if’n we pay up. It’s the old game. Well, how bleddy much?’
‘We won’t take Danegeld.’
Your head is spinning. Passive smoking, you suppose. You see faces whirling past you. Mary is wearing her Girls’ Grammar uniform, green blazer and a straw boater. Gully’s beard has gone and he has shrunk inches, become a gangly teenager. Victoria is a punk Morticia Addams, unpierced, untattooed. And Ro is tiny, large-breasted, slim-waisted. Your head aches.
How did you get here from there?
Ro giggles and falls over into the cushions. From one toke? She still can’t take anything.
Veins throb in Roy’s face.
‘Come on,’ he says. ‘Let’s get out of here.’
VC fills her mouth with dope-smoke and french-kisses Mary. Gully strokes their heads, undoing Mary’s hairpins and detaching her uniform hat. Both women eventually choke and splutter, and happily snuggle against Gully.
‘I nevair smoke … tobaacco!’
VC and Mary laugh. Ro rolls over and squirrels towards him, reaching out. He puts the joint in her hand.
‘Keith,’ nags Roy. He has stood up, bent over to avoid the low ceiling, and is by the door.
‘Goodbye, Straight Man,’ says Gully, a little sadly, but with a cruel mockery too.
Should you leave Ro?
Why not?
Mary and VC have their hands inside Gully’s sheepskin, and are nuzzling his beard. Ro, lying on her back, sucks the joint to ashes.
Everything you ever wanted, this man has.
You don’t hate him. You need him. You need someone to show that it was possible. He got here from there. That means you could have too.
That you didn’t was your choice.
Roy takes your arm and pulls you out of the lodge.
You see Ro crawling on to Gully’s lap. Then the bead curtain falls and the polythene flap drops.
You are out in the field, in the cold.
‘Degenerate filth,’ Roy declares. ‘Let’s get away from here. Back to the sane world.’
House, job, kids, DIY, Residents’ Committee, five weeks’ holiday.
Is this a life, or a trap?
‘Yes,’ you say, ‘let’s.’
And so on.
Begin again?
62
You chose the door!
What kind of a man are you?
A situation pregnant with promise, mystery, danger, wonder. And you chose to go home?
Go on, fuck off out of it. I’m not interested in you any more. You might as well join a monastery or the army, or develop an all-consuming interest in Star Trek or real ale.
I can’t believe you chose the door.
Don’t you remember when you were in infants’ school, and you had a craze for piracy? You drew treasure maps and wore a pirate hat with a skull-and-crossbones badge. You had a plastic cutlass, and you were always being told off for scaling the curtains as if they were rigging.
What happened to that?
At six, you were ready for adventure. You’d have waded through blood for treasure and glory. You’d have keelhauled landlubbers and made mutineers walk the plank.
And now a little a cappella is making you scarper.
It’s not too late. You can hesitate as you cross the threshold, your ear caught by something indefinable in that ululation. Your resolve quickened by the memory of Edward ‘Blackbeard’ Teach, you turn and walk back into the house, taking whatever comes.
In which case, go to 68.
You’re still here? You’re still walking out of the door. You fucking chicken. You yellow-livered wimp.
I’m disgusted.
Deep down, underneath it all, you’re nothing. You’re not worth bothering with.
You’ll have something like a life. It’ll drift past quickly. Things will happen. Things won’t. You meet people, lose touch. You grow up, get a job, get married, have kids, grow old, die. And serves you right.
And so on.
Maybe you’ll be haunted by the road not taken.
No, if you leave the house in Sutton Mallet, it’s not a choice or a circumstance. It’s a fundamental lack in you. There was nothing there for you. There’s nothing here for you.
I’m even a little sorry for you.
You won’t even dream of the mystery. You won’t even think of what might have waited upstairs.
If you were to argue that you left the house because you would rather have the mystery in your life than know the answers, I might respect you. That, I might understand. Then, the rest of your life might be subtly illuminated by that one moment, which would come to seem all-important.
You have chosen not to go upstairs because you want the upstairs always to be a promise, a threat, a potential.
But I’m not buying it.
That’s a rationalisation.
You’re just a fucking chicken.
Go on, fuck off.
Go to … who cares where you go to.
Begin again?
63
You roll up at the college auditorium and everyone knows what you did.
‘Well played, that man,’ says Desmond Fewsham.
‘Fuckin’ ace,’ agrees Mickey Yeo.
‘Magic,’ coos a girl called Helena you’ve never noticed before.
Mickey, who’s always steered clear of you on the grounds that you’re a stuck-up git, escorts you through the crowds, and into the theatre. On the stage, Michael Dixon and Penny Gaye are performing some sort of magic act. Mickey finds you a seat.
‘Nothing’s too good for the Man Who Shagged Rowena Douglass,’ he says.
It’s a line from a film. You can’t place it.
Blokes shake you by the hand, clap you on the back, offer you drinks. Girls don’t approach but loiter nearby, giggling. You feel better about yourself.
Rowena isn’t around. Or Roger. And Victoria must be backstage, dressing up.
Desmond matily sits in the seat behind you and leans forward. He wants to ask about Rowena’s tits.
‘When she lies back, do they stand up or slip into her armpits?’
You try to answer.
Some of the show is quite funny. A lot of it is cleverer than it is funny. Bits are just stupid.
You’ve never understood the kids who call themselves the Quorum. They seem to be running on different rails from real people.
Michael produces a rat out of his hat and there’s a black-out, ending the magic act.
The Quorum — Michael, Mickey, Mark and Neil — do this sort of thing a lot. Dress up and play, put on shows, put out magazines. They’ve got this strange ability to get other kids to follow them like lemmings.
The curtains open on a bare stage.
Neil comes out and tries to sell the last of his hot cakes.
People w
ander past him, some in the fancy dress they were wearing earlier. Some people have swapped costumes, and are dressed the way other people were dressed earlier.
Michael has the accordion, and is doing Desmond’s anti-busking act. Desmond laughs.
The people on stage walk back and forth like sped-up silent film characters. They mime drinking and stagger around.
You realise this is a re-run of the day. The Quorum have put everything everyone did on stage. Much of the looning-about is precise.
Looking at the brightly lit crowd, you wonder if anyone is playing you.
Since you just wore jeans and a jumper, you’re hard to dress up as. But Mark Amphlett is kitted out boringly: earlier, he was in a sharp suit with a skinny jazzman’s tie. Yes, Mark is playing you.
Mickey, a pair of footballs down his chest, wig askew on his head, lipstick over half his face, lies down on the stage and mimes being extremely sick. He is doing Rowena.
Desmond laughs like a drain. You’re not sure how funny this is.
Penny, in a long black shawl, is Victoria, fluttering around dramatically. Stephen Adlard wears a Zorro mask, as Roger.
Mickey is sick for a long time, milking the laughs. He heaves and writhes as if undergoing shock therapy. The others stand around, appalled.
Penny and Mark pick him up. One of his breasts has slipped to his stomach. He hangs limp and knock-kneed.
Mickey drapes himself round Mark, licking his face with a foot-long tongue. Mark Grouchos his eyebrows and mimes a lecherous response.
Desmond is killing himself.
You’ve gone cold. Somewhere, this stopped being funny.
You look around, uncomfortable. Everyone is laughing. Except, at the back of the auditorium, standing by the door, still looking deathly sick, Rowena.
Your heart is a stone.
Mickey and Mark climb on to a divan and mime ridiculous sex. They wriggle out of several layers of underwear they are wearing over their own clothes.
Rowena dashes out. Doors bang behind her.
You’re trapped in the middle of a row. People all round are applauding.
Penny, as Victoria, takes a magician’s assistant bow. Mickey and Mark are still at it, grinding away like steam engines.
Michael plays an accompaniment on the accordion.
At the back of the stage, face spotlit but body in darkness, Stephen Adlard stands, eyes staring through his Zorro mask. Somehow, his glare conveys hatred.
Did that happen? Was Roger watching you and Rowena in the van? You’ve no way of knowing.
Mickey mock-faints from exhaustion and his footballs roll up to his chin. Mark staggers off him, face disfigured by a big grin.
The audience applauds.
The actors take bows. The audience whistles and stamps. The actors bow to each other. The applause continues. The actors make that ‘for the orchestra’ gesture and point at you. The applause goes wild.
‘Stand up, man,’ urges Desmond.
Regretting it, you rise, slowly. You’re showered with applause. Long-stemmed roses are thrown at you. Penny winks and blows you a kiss.
Mickey shouts, ‘Take me, big boy, take me!’
Stephen carves a Z in the air with Roger’s sword.
The ovation extends.
You feel as if you’re in the middle of a lynch mob. One wrong move and they’ll turn on you. In the seventeenth century, sheep-stealers were hanged on the Corn Exchange. You might be carried down there and strung up.
The applause slowly dies as you extricate yourself from the row. People insist on shaking your hand as you squash past them. Helena kisses you, wriggly little tongue pressed into your mouth. You make it to the aisle just as Flaming Torture come on stage and take up their instruments.
‘This first song’s for someone special,’ Victoria shrills through a microphone. ‘He’ll know who he is.’
A clash of guitar chords rocks the auditorium. Your teeth are set on edge.
Victoria sings a song called ‘You’re a Bastard!’.
You back towards the exit doors.
The audience joins in the chorus. It’s not hard to learn: ‘Bastard! Bastard! Bastard! Bastard! Lower than vermin, filthier than shit! Do us all a favour, fuck off you bastard git!’
As she sings, shrieking every word, Victoria stabs the air with her accusing finger, pointing directly at you.
So does everyone else.
‘Bastard! Bastard! Bastard! Bastard!’
Two hundred angry forefingers stab at you.
You barge through the exit doors, barrel down a corridor, and shove out into the night.
‘Bastard! Bastard! Bastard! Bastard!’
A few people mill around in the college car park. In one of the cars, a couple are snogging violently. Someone sits on the front steps, holding his head, smelling of cider, an empty litre bottle beside him.
How do you feel about this? Celebrity?
The cider-drinker — it’s Shane Bush, still hanging about, crashing a college event — looks up at you, smiles blearily, and shoots you a thumbs-up. Then he goes back to holding his head and moaning.
Where did Rowena go?
‘Shane, have you seen …?’
Shane points towards the side of the building, the path to the playing-field.
‘Thanks.’
You walk quickly. It’s cold. You want to settle this. It’s already out of hand.
‘Bastard! Bastard! Bastard! Bastard!’
The playing-field is dark. No windows spill light out on to it. There’s supposed to be a lamp but it’s been broken. You feel your way along the edge of the building.
You might be able to hear sniffles.
‘Rowena?’ you ask.
You can hear sniffles.
‘Ro?’ You want to apologise, make it right. You don’t know how.
Suddenly, there’s a spotlight. Shadow figures come at you. You are punched in the stomach, hard, several times.
It’s your turn to be sick.
As you spew over your knees, a hand takes your hair. You are pulled upright. You are hit in the face.
‘Bastard! Bastard! Bastard! Bastard!’
‘Roger, stop,’ you say.
But it’s not Roger. He’s there, still in his mask and hat, with a tiny, huddled Rowena. They have the searchlight torch that blinded you.
You are knocked down and kicked in the ribs.
Her face expressionless, her movements precise, Mary Yatman beats you up. She is a force of nature, equalising things. This has nothing to do with her monster.
You sense justice.
If you spread yourself wide and take your punishment, go to 69. If you curl up in a ball and try to protect yourself, go to 76.
64
Tuesday, 24, February 1998. You don’t like to be away from Sutton Mallet for more than a few hours but sometimes have no choice. There are still meetings you have to take in London. Because Vic can’t handle some things — many things — herself, you have to. Despite everything, including the way you dress, you’ve become a suit.
When you drive home from Sedgwater Halt, it’s well after dark. You’re familiar enough with the route to do it on autopilot, swerving to avoid the permanent pot-hole.
You’ve had a couple of hours in a first-class railway seat to think over the label’s requests. The indie outfit Vic was signed with during the period of her creative output has been absorbed into the corporate colossus that is Derek Leech International. Oddly, they’ve become easier to deal with. The new execs don’t try to wheedle around you with we-woz-all-punks-togevva mateyness and why-are-you-being-such-a-breadhead-man? guilt-trippery. Their contracts may be sinister and loaded with trap clauses, but at least they live up to them. The hand-to-mouth, fuck-the-majors boyos systematically robbed Vic of royalties for years.
There’s an offer on the table to buy up the Vic Conyer catalogue for a pretty unimaginable lump sum. Heather Wilde, Leech’s sharp-suited hatchet-woman, tells you DLI are better placed to take advantage
of the resource than you are, much less Vic. After all, it is unlikely that she’ll be producing new material. You dutifully protest, but Heather Wilde knows as well as you that the studio in Sutton Mallet is cobwebby from disuse and that Vic’s one album of the ’90s was a critical and commercial disaster (you hated it as much as anyone else). DLI’s music division already controls several other profitable backlists. In addition to the cash payment, DLI will even pay a (much-reduced) royalty that might well exceed that creeping in under the haphazard current system.
Downstairs, a new band, which Heather Wilde swears is about to break big, wants to do an entire album of Vic Conyer covers. Vic stands to make more from that than she did during her whole performing career (1979-83), not to mention her considerably longer, considerably less successful, recording career (1980-93).
You will have to recommend that Vic sign the deal.
That’s going to be the difficult part.
When you walk into the house, Kate — euphemistically Vic’s ‘assistant’ — is in the kitchen, nervously chewing a strand of her hair and looking up at the ceiling as if expecting bloodstains to spread through the plaster. Missy, the dog, cringes in the corner. From the animal’s mood, you can tell what the day has been like.
‘How’s she been?’ you ask.
Always, Vic comes first. You and Kate think of her emotional state before your own. If there’s room left over in your lives, you have your own problems.
Kate’s non-verbal answer — a tiny jump and a sideways look, to make sure you’re alone in the kitchen — is more eloquent than her ‘Pretty okay’.
Nothing seems broken.
‘What did she do all day?’ you ask.
‘Not much.’
‘Did she get out of bed?’
‘Oh yes. She watched videos. Fast forward.’
Vic always watches on fast forward. She claims her mind shifted into fast forward when video was invented and that it’s the only way she can perceive things.
‘She likes children’s shows. I’ve been taping them.’
One thing Vic has never lost is her humour. She can do an impersonation of the Teletubbies on fast forward that always has you in stitches. Sometimes, she shifts into FF for days on end, speaking only in a high-pitched, whining rush, zooming about the house in a jerky, hyperactive blur. She can keep it up longer than you’d think possible.
