by Kim Newman
Nothing helps. You don’t expect screaming to help. It doesn’t even make you feel better. You exhaust yourself, flailing about.
No one comes. Sedgwater High Street is empty on Sunday.
You throw scales and stools at the wall. You smash the clocks. You toss bundles of notes in the air and let them flutter around you.
You lose your ring finger.
Drained and sobbing, you curl up on the floor. Eventually, the fit peters out.
You have only your middle finger and your thumb left. You snap them off yourself, to get it over with.
It takes a while to gather all the fingers, which have dropped all over the floor. Your ring finger rolled under a desk. As you find your digits, you sweep up the notes, piling them in a heap in the middle of the floor. You drop the fingers into the nest of cash.
From your own office, you fetch a book of matches. The bank is a no-smoking branch, but you keep matches for the sealing wax you have to use on legal documents.
This is a proper sacrifice. You hope it will put an end to the business.
The money burns easily, but the fingers just shrivel and blacken. You squat cross-legged by the fire, a wilderness man warming himself. A stench wisps up. The cash wriggles into hot ash, metal strips curling like magnesium flares.
As the fire dies, you calm down.
You have no fingers on your left hand. It could have been worse, you think. You could have been sent a severed penis.
The next morning, you stay home from the bank. You will soon suffer the consequences of your sacrifice. The children bustle off to school, and Ro is still angry you missed dinner with her parents. Your family avoid looking at your bundled-up left hand. They’ve got used to your craze.
You’re alone in your house when the postman rings the bell, with another package. A whole sheet of Christmas stamps is pasted to it, crowding out your name and home address. The label still calls you ‘OVERDRAFT OFFICER’.
This is bigger than the last one. The box inside could hold a basketball.
It is difficult, with only one set of fingers, to open the parcel. Eventually, steadying the thing with your bandaged hand and sawing with a kitchen knife, you manage it. You lift out unread the covering letter and recognise the face nestled in scrunched-up newspaper. You think, for a moment, you have been sent a mirror.
And so on.
Begin again?
67
Monday, 23, February 1998. If you’d thought it through, you’d have written the note, addressed the parcel and stuck on the stamps before you chopped off your fingers. Since you’re right-handed, you should be able to accomplish these minor tasks without using the fingers of your left hand — now unavailable to you — but you’d somehow not reckoned with the pain.
To write the note, for instance, you don’t just have to put biro to paper and print the letters. You have to hold the paper in place on the table as you write. You instinctively bring your left hand round and press down, getting blood all over the paper, prompting another yelp. You abandon this first attempt.
The fingers are in the box.
That’s done.
But the rest of it. You feel it has to be perfect. The overdraft officer will expect no less, deserves no less.
You sit back and try to make the pain go away. It feels as if all the nails of your left hand are being slowly pulled out with hot pincers. Five individual throbs of pain under the nails, lesser aches in all nine knuckles.
That’s strange. The parts that hurt aren’t connected to you any more. The stumps, which leak quite a lot, aren’t painful. The blood is inconvenient. If you continue working on the parcel, you’ll get blood over everything and ruin the gesture.
You search the kitchen for something to staunch the flow.
It might have been better to just chop off your whole hand. Then you’d only have one big stump to cope with.
You wrap your left hand with a J Cloth, which soaks at once, then jam a rubber washing-up glove over the mess, rolling it over your wrist like a big pink condom. Air is trapped in the fingers of the glove, which fatten and extend.
It still hurts, but won’t bleed on anything else.
You can’t afford to think about how you got here.
There was a time, five years ago, when you were out of the shade. You’d almost got to the point when you could stop thinking of yourself as an estate agent and claim to be a property developer. Through a strategic alliance with Councillor Robert Hackwill and McKinnell the Builder, you were in on the ground floor of the Discount Development, an in-town shopping centre that remains half-built on the site of the old Denbeigh Gardens.
You re-mortgaged your own house to buy into the scheme.
For an estate agent, that’s the equivalent of violating the drug-dealer’s code of ‘Never get high on your own supply.’ But profit was certain. The deal was done. You were a comer, a master, a power.
Rowena never pushed you, but was happy to come along for the ride. She was still buying things for the house, even the week before she left. The kids, Jamie and Jillian, never wanted for anything. They must be resentful now, cooped up in Rowena’s parents’ spare room.
The Discount Development turned out to be an inflated promise. Crucial land purchases and planning permissions were not secured. The month after Tony Blair’s election victory, Labour Central Office sent a hit squad down to Sedgwater and suspended the local party apparatus. Hackwill was replaced on the council, and seems likely to face criminal charges.
You had not lied to the bank deliberately. But you passed on lies told to you. The prospectus, professionally printed and heavy with detailed figures, remained an impressive piece of work.
It had to be your dad’s old bank. And it had to be Sean, Laraine’s old boyfriend. You remember Sean, the overdraft officer, as a toadying teenager, telling you to slow down. Now he’s clamped to your neck, squeezing, sucking.
You’ve been told you’ve been treated generously because of your father’s memory. Anyone else would have been foreclosed many months ago.
Is Sean enjoying this? Of course he is.
He never forgave Laraine for chucking him and going off with that hippie. He has hated the whole Marion family ever since. Even at Dad’s funeral, he was snickering behind his mask of sham grief.
When Jeffrey Archer made a bad investment and found himself cataclysmically in debt, he whipped up a best-selling novel and with one bound was free. You don’t think that’s an option open to you. And it’s unlikely that you could get away with a John Stonehouse-Reggie Perrin disappearing act.
All you can hope for is to appease the Gods of Money with an offering of flesh. It’ll make a nice late valentine for Sean. With love from the Marion Family.
I HOPE THIS SATISFIES YOU, you print. IT’S NOT A POUND OF FLESH, BUT IT’S A START.
The floppy-fingered paw you have made of your left hand is expert now at holding things down. You hold the tennis-ball box against the table, three-quarters projecting over the edge, and wind Sellotape round and round, burying the box in a transparent thickness.
Objectively, it’s quite a neat job.
How many stamps? Normally, with a small package, you’d go down to the post office and have it weighed, paying only the correct postage. Understandably, you can’t be doing with the bother now.
Four first-class stamps. That should do it. The package isn’t especially heavy. There are jolly Christmas stamps in the Useful Things drawer. You use six stamps, just to be on the safe side.
You don’t want to keep Sean, might-have-been brother-in-law, waiting too long. He’s told you he wants this matter settled.
Sean always rubs it in with a few preliminary questions, presuming on his long-ago relationship with your family to ask after Rowena and the kids, after your mother, even after James. The giveaway is that he never, ever, asks after Laraine. If the old wound were healed, he’d be able to ask about her. But he avoids the subject, revealing beyond a shadow of a doubt that his hatred is still
bleeding and fresh.
Then, he comes round to business: the defaulted payments, the overdraft, the interest, the mushrooming debt.
For a long time, you still play the promise game.
You both know the Discount Development is kaput. All the money is gone, the Lord knows where. Maybe it’s been sucked into a black hole. Or maybe Hackwill has planned an out-of-town shopping centre at Sutton Mallet.
It’ll never come right.
You come out of your house. It’s mid-afternoon and other husbands in the street are at work, in offices, on Intercity trains, using mobile phones, making money. Their wives are picking up the kids from school, or on shopping trips to Bristol or London.
People who live in your street would never have shopped at the Discount Development.
There is no one around. Still, you hold your pink-gloved hand under your coat, like Napoleon. Or the mutated scientist in the old version of The Fly.
With the package — which rattles slightly — in your right hand, you stride down to the pillar-box on the corner. It stands red and righteous on a triangular patch of green where there’s a swing for the kids and a bench for the old folks. Neither is used much.
Your hand still hurts. But you’ve learned to live with the hurt. Just as you’ve learned to live with the shade.
The miracle is that you put this off for so long.
All through the 1980s and into the ’90s, you accumulated things to protect you. The degree, the start capital, the inside information, the contacts. Rowena, the kids, the first house, the business, the second house, the position, the plans, the cars. The fridge-freezer, the rowing-machine, the wrought-iron pan-stand, the home computer, the coffee table, the holidays in Mustique. This was all a wall, thrown up between you and the shade, between you and Sutton Mallet.
There are vast, malign, spidery forces in the world.
And you are their focus. Their weight has been gathering, ever since you first trespassed on their territory, gradually accumulating, forcing you into your protected corner, pressing you into the hole.
You stand at the pillar-box.
This is your supplication. You have sacrificed. You are all you have left to give up. Rowena and the kids are gone. The business is gone. You don’t, in any real sense, own the house or anything else.
If this doesn’t work, if the shadow-spiders — and their representative Sean — are not appeased, you will have to give up more of yourself.
How much more can you slice away with your kindling-chopper before you are no longer capable of chopping?
There are deep weals in your kitchen table where the blade bit.
You raise the parcel to the slit. It won’t fit. The box is a good inch too wide to jam through. You try it sideways, but that’s worse.
The world stops.
Then rescue comes. Postman Pat, whistling merrily like a hold-over from those never-were days of before-the-deluge, coming to empty the box.
‘I’ll take that for you, sir,’ she says.
The uniformed saviour is a Postperson Patricia, blonde hair pinned up under her cap.
She opens her sack and you drop the package in, relieved of its burden.
At last, the offering is made.
‘You’re Keith Marion, aren’t you?’ the postwoman says. ‘We were at school together.’
You focus on the woman’s face. She smiles, eyes twinkling like frost at sunrise.
It’s Mary Yatman.
‘You’ve changed,’ she says.
Should the joke become apparent now? Should you understand how you’ve got here? Were there points at which you could have changed things? Could this have been put off indefinitely? Could you have kept all the balls in the air, beating off the shadows with your successes?
‘Didn’t you marry Rowena Thingy?’
You shrug.
Mary seems delighted. You wonder if she is pretending. She has always been part of this. You’ve never seen her on this route before.
‘You know, Keith,’ she says, ‘at college, I really used to fancy you.’
She kisses you on the cheek, and walks away.
You sit by the pillar-box and watch her go.
It is after dark now. The green is turquoised by the bright streetlamp. Residents petitioned for it, after a child in another part of town was attacked on another, more meagre green. Something is wrong with the lamp, which always flickers as if it were a flame rather than a filament.
Mary is gone, into the shade. Her whistling — ‘Nellie the Elephant’, still — fades into the night sound. The sacrifice is made. For you, it is over.
There is a great fizzing noise and the light goes away.
And so on.
Begin again?
68
What made the people who lived here leave?
They left behind more than just furniture. On each of the stairs is placed a small household object — a plastic comb, a picture frame, a toothbrush. What makes a person leave behind their toothbrush when they move house? The arrangement on the stairs is almost ritualistic.
You think Victoria meant what she told Graham. Sutton Mallet is strange.
That sound is more unearthly the nearer you get to the top of the stairs. And there’s a glow, like luminous fungus or Halloween paint.
You stand on the landing.
‘Kei-ei-eith,’ a voice trills.
A door hangs ajar. Flickering light outlines it. The call came from beyond it.
You have an impulse to turn and run, to dash downstairs, to get out of the house.
In which case, go to 62.
But you don’t. You couldn’t. You have to know what’s beyond the door. What comes next.
‘Kei-ei-ei-ei-eith.’
Your name is repeated.
It’s a girl’s voice. But it’s not Victoria’s.
You stand outside the door, your fingertips out, touching the wood. The tiniest push, and you will see. You will be able to go into the room.
You look to either side.
At the end of the landing, Victoria stands, face white. Is she sad or eager?
You don’t ask her what’s happening. It’s too late for that.
She nods.
You push the door.
The room is dotted with candles. Hundreds of them, all burning like flammable stalagmites, dribbling wax on to floorboards or dusty furniture. They are arranged in a vast mandala-like circle around a mattress.
A naked girl lies on the mattress. It is her voice you have heard. Her body glows with candle light, curves burnished and almost reflective. She radiates heat.
She half sits, and beckons with her arms and fingers.
It is Rowena.
She is sober now, wantonness a choice not an impulse. She smiles, aware of the silliness of this set-up but also of its beauty, its innocence.
The room is warm. There’s a fireplace. Some of the candles float in saucers, firelight reflected in ripples.
You join Rowena on the mattress. She helps you out of your clothes. They seem to fall away without struggle.
You kiss.
And it’s magical.
After a very long time, after extensive and varied love-making, the candles begin to wink out, one by one. The fire shrinks to embers, filling the room with a dull red glow.
You and Ro nestle.
This was worth waiting for.
‘It took for ever to light all the candles,’ Ro says.
You don’t want to know. The set-up is irrelevant. You want the effect. The magic.
‘But you’re worth the effort,’ she says, hugging you.
The dawn comes up, filtering gloom-light into the room. The cold creeps back, making you huddle beneath the quilt.
The real world returns.
If you wish hard, work at it unceasingly, make untold sacrifices and ignore the serpents, you can have Sutton Mallet for ever; if you have the strength and the love for that — and you must be certain you have, for failing here leads to unparalleled misery
— go to 82. If you accept that imperfection is the lot of all, but feel you can make a life for yourself in which the memory of Sutton Mallet is always a power source for a vein of magic, go to 93. But if you feel the lesson you have learned tonight is about sex rather than love, and wonder if it can be applied with other women, go to 104.
69
You are a bastard. You admit it.
You lie on the gravel path, arms and legs outstretched, eyes open wide. You need this.
Mary kicks you in the side. It hurts, but not as much. You don’t cry out. You’re almost calm.
She kicks you again.
‘No.’ A tiny voice. ‘Stop.’
Mary kicks you again. You cough up more vomit. You taste blood in your mouth.
‘Roger,’ says Rowena, ‘stop her.’
Mary stands back.
You try to sit up, but can’t.
Roger comes over, hands fists. He kneels down and punches you in the chest.
Mary stops him, grabbing his upper arms and wrestling him away from you.
You hurt too much to follow this.
Mary pulls Roger out of the light. You wipe your mouth on your sleeve. You work yourself up on your elbows. The torch, put on the ground, is still shining in your face. It makes a wedge of the grass seem very green.
Gentle hands help you.
You look up at Ro’s face. She has tear-tracks, and needs to blow her nose. You have lost the place completely. Ro cradles you, and you go limp.
In the darkness, Roger spits disgust. He frees himself from Mary and looks back at you, eyes bright with unfathomable hatred. Mary, turned away from you, holds a hand out, warding Roger off.
This was all Roger’s fault. He turns and stalks off, Zorro cloak swishing.
Again, Ro kisses you. This time, you think, she means it. Your jaw hurts too much for you to kiss back. Aches have set in up and down your ribs.
