by Kim Newman
Missy, the dog, jumps up at you, remembering your smell. Vic and Kay look at each other. They met first — he came to her for advice on restructuring his string of shelving unit outlets — and had already established their relationship before you got involved.
Kay presents the bottle. Vic perfectly fakes delight.
‘Come through, and meet the Man and the Minx.’
‘I need to get a pee first.’
As you climb the stairs, you remember the long-gone objects — plastic comb, picture frame, toothbrush — once placed on each step. You never did find out what that was all about. Without bothering to turn on the landing or bathroom lights, you move easily about. Someone — Rory? — has left the toilet seat up; after peeing, you put it down.
When you come downstairs again, Vic takes your arm and steers you into the dining-room.
Rory, whom you’ve met before, stands up and smiles. He’s fifteen years older than you and Vic, with a full beard and a crushing grip.
‘Griffin,’ he says. ‘Good to see you.’
You deftly avoid shaking his hand by occupying yours in straightening a picture.
‘This is Kay,’ you explain.
Rory and Kay look at each other. There is no etiquette for the situation.
‘So we’re the people they hooked up with when they broke up,’ Kay says. ‘What do you think?’
‘Griffin hooked up with you before we broke up,’ Vic footnotes. ‘Might have had something to do with it.’ She digs you in the ribs.
‘Kay,’ Rory says, ‘this is, uh, Kate.’
Kate is Rory’s daughter. She’s in her late teens, pretty, nervous. To her, adult life must seem like an embarrassing soap opera she’s forced to watch.
Kate and Kay look at each other. You wonder if either will curtsey.
‘What do you think of the hair?’ Vic asks.
You had noticed it at once.
‘No more racing stripe,’ she explains.
The dye is even, darkening her white streaks to match her natural colour. She looks barely five years older than Kate. Kay’s age.
‘Takes years off you,’ you say.
‘Bingo,’ she says, looking at Rory.
‘I liked the white,’ he admits, sheepishly.
Rory, playing host, gets drinks for everybody. Only Kay and Kate pick his wine. You and Rory have French beers. Vic says she has to keep sober and retreats to the kitchen. The rest of you sit at the table. You realise as soon as you’ve sat down that you’re in the place where Rory expected to sit and shift over. He’s allergic to seafood and has an alternate starter in place of the langoustines. You are opposite Kate, who is next to Kay.
Kay and Kate. Kate and Kay. They look a bit alike.
‘They could be twins,’ Vic comments, emerging with Rory’s avocado salad, ‘don’t you think?’
Kate and Kay both cover mild annoyance. Kay doesn’t look particularly faggoty. Then again, neither do you.
Vic sits down, next to you.
‘Get stuck in,’ she says.
You and she start eating at the same time. The others are a beat or so behind you.
‘You were right about Leatherhead,’ you say.
‘Did you doubt it?’ she answers.
‘Not really. Sometimes, you just have to go through with it anyway.’
‘Like the thing we did that time.’
‘Just like that.’
‘What do you do, Kay?’ Rory asks.
‘I have a chain of shelving shops.’
‘Oh.’
‘It’s not boring at all,’ Vic says. ‘Kay has a whole new approach to franchising. It’s applicable to all kinds of retail specialities. We’ve been thinking of cloning his systems and sub-licensing.’
‘Heather Wilde called you,’ you say.
‘She thinks Derek will commit.’
You knew that.
‘Yippee,’ you say, crunching the last crustacean.
‘Did you just make a lot of money?’ Rory asks.
‘Very probably,’ Vic says, dabbing her lips with a napkin. ‘And so did Kay.’
‘I feel left out.’ Rory is a painter.
‘Rory’s a painter,’ Vic tells Kay.
‘What style?’ he asks.
‘House,’ Rory says.
Kay laughs.
‘No, really,’ Rory admits. ‘I trained as an architect, but since the divorce I’ve been at the sharp end of the business. Brush and bucket.’
‘We could use you at the new place,’ you say.
‘I can offer a discount.’
‘You’ll do no such thing,’ Vic cuts in. ‘Griffin can pay full whack. I want a birthday present next year.’
Vic’s birthday is 6 January. She shares it with Sherlock Holmes. Last month, you bought her a pair of antique silver earrings with an eye motif. You knew she’d love them to pieces.
‘When we divorce, will you go to the sharp end?’ Vic asks you.
‘I live at the sharp end.’
She laughs. No one else does.
‘Kay,’ she says, dragooning him, ‘will you help me bring in the main course. It’s bangers and mash.’
You know this means expensive herb-ridden sausages and some elaborate variation on creamed potato. But Kay will think of school dinners.
‘For afters, it’s custard.’
You cringe and laugh. No one else understands.
‘Actually, it’s sorbet. And fruit.’
Vic drags Kay to the kitchen.
Rory ums and smiles. Kate can’t stop looking at you. Maybe you should swish your wrist, to make them feel better.
‘My wife left me because I went bankrupt,’ Rory says. Vic told you that months ago but the man is clearly trying to be honest with you, to reveal enough of himself to compete with all the things you and Vic know about each other.
‘Really? Vic slung me out because I went queer.’
Kay returns, with two plates, which he gives to Kate and Rory.
‘No,’ Vic says, ‘Griffin’s a guest. Serve him before Rory.’
Kay switches plates round. Vic sets down plates for Rory and Kay, and darts back to get her own — which has half as much food on it as anyone else’s.
‘Shouldn’t you have become a lesbian,’ Kate says, boldly, ‘to even things up.’
‘Been there …’ Vic says.
‘… done that,’ you complete.
‘At university, we did everything,’ Vic explains. ‘It was mandatory.’
‘It wasn’t mandatory that you shag that dreadful diesel dike Scratch.’
‘Her real name was Serena. She’s married now.’
‘So are we.’
‘To each other.’
Kate has had several glasses of Kay’s wine. ‘Griffin, did you just, um, wake up gay one morning, or … what?’
Kay looks at you, holding his fork like a dagger. You find your current mouthful needs to be chewed thoroughly.
‘No, go on, Griffin,’ Vic says, laying a hand on your arm. ‘It’s interesting.’
‘Did you ever fancy anyone at school that you didn’t really like?’
You’re remembering Scary Mary. Kate, with a more recent and freshly wounded history, blushes ferociously.
‘I scent a story,’ Vic says. ‘We’ll have it later.’
‘Don’t torture the girl, Bitch Queen,’ you coo. ‘It’s a bit like that. Not that I don’t like Kay. It’s just that, well, I wasn’t supposed to fancy him. He had all the wrong bits. But, after a while, you don’t think of that.’
Kay is almost as scarlet as Kate. Rory cuts a sausage up into very tiny pieces.
‘It doesn’t mean I don’t like Vic.’
‘It does mean we probably shouldn’t be married, though.’
‘Mum and Dad don’t talk to each other,’ Kate says.
‘Please,’ Rory interrupts.
‘But you don’t,’ says Kate. ‘Not like this. Civilised.’
‘This isn’t civil,’ says Kay, crossing his knife
and fork on a clean plate. ‘This is savage.’
‘We’re jungle cats, you know,’ Vic tells Kate. ‘Predators. It’s how we live. We see things and we take them down. Then drag them back to the lair to be rent apart.’
You growl and meow.
Kate laughs. She has a chance of understanding.
‘Rory,’ says Kay, deliberately, ‘would you like to fuck?’
Rory splutters. You and Vic laugh. Kay’s face is hard, furious.
‘Don’t be threatened, dear Kay,’ Vic says. ‘Griffin is yours, to have and to hole. I give up all claim to this man. It’s just that we can’t unpick our past, divvy up our memories the way we went through the record collection.’
‘I took your Never Mind the Bollocks by mistake,’ you admit.
‘And left A Day in Marineville. We’ll exchange them at Checkpoint Charlie.’
Rory, Kay and Kate are either too young or too old to understand why either of those records is significant. You and Vic will always share that.
‘Why do I always feel I’m billed under the title in the Vic and Griffin Show?’
‘You’ve got a spin-off series,’ Vic says, soothing. ‘Kay’s Korner?’
‘No.’ Having thought of it, you can’t not say it. ‘On the Shelf.’
Kate laughs along with Vic and you.
Vic offers you a basket with apples, pears and bananas. ‘Fruit?’
‘We like to call ourselves queer these days.’
She howls with laughter. ‘I should have served faggots.’
You howl back.
The room seems to be dark. The others are in shadow.
‘For ever and always,’ she says.
You are laughing too hard to answer.
‘For ever and always?’
Her fingers spider up and down your arm.
You control your laughter.
She looks up at you. She will not repeat herself again.
‘Always and for ever,’ you admit.
She takes hold of you, fiercely.
And so on.
Begin again?
78
You sub-let your London flat and go back to Sedgwater. You think it’ll take six months to do the book. At first, you move into the family home — which Mum shares with Phil — and stay in your old room. It has been anonymously redecorated and filled with discreet antiques. You’ve no idea where your pirate hat and 1970s NME run have gone, but also find the resonance of the whole house is changed.
James isn’t here.
Mum keeps black-bordered portraits of James (in uniform) and Dad, along with Phil’s first wife Lillian (cancer in her thirties), among photographs of the living. There’s a strange one of you and Clare at a demo, holding a placard, silently shouting, ‘Maggie Maggie Maggie, Out Out Out!’ Laraine and Sean on their wedding day.
You want to talk to Mum about James for the book but she doesn’t like to. You should push but it’ll hurt. Of course, it has to hurt. You’re quite willing to accept your own pain as part of the process. You owe James a great deal of pain. But you aren’t sure about anybody else’s.
You’re not sure if Mum wants you to write about James.
Sources inside the armed forces have got you general stuff on the Falklands, and even specific detail about James. You know how many times he was shot, precisely the damage done him. He was badly wounded but died of exposure.
You remember leaving him in the copse.
It would be easy to blame Rob Hackwill, but he was a force of nature back then. It was your failure, your cowardice. Still, Hackwill needs to be looked at. He’s a part of it. He’d have brought charges about the pub incident if James hadn’t been about to ship out for the Falklands. He’s now a district councillor — Labour, not Tory — and becoming a big wheel in town. Sean knows him quite well, since the bank is involved in local transactions and projects. He says Hackwill isn’t such a bad bloke. You think bullies never change.
Laraine is quieter now, not just settled into married life but almost cowed. She’s become thin and pale, impossibly beautiful. Having lost one sibling, you pay attention to the other.
Sean is matey. You can see how he manages at the bank. He smooths the way. A man like Hackwill would find him useful. As manager, your dad was like a father to the customers, stern but helpful. Sean is a best mate, less judgmental, less serious. If you were in financial deep shit, you’d find it easier dealing with Sean but know deep down that Dad would have done more to help you out. Sean looks after himself first, the bank second and customers a distant third.
Sedgwater is changing in the mid-’80s. An enclave of town becomes prosperous, as funds are channelled in for developments in leisure and consumer areas. But British Synthetics lays off factory-floor staff and is investigated by environmental agencies. Hackwill and Sean are on the up but others slide.
As a journo, you’ve been trained. You see cracks. Not just in the town, in dodgy deals, get-rich-quick schemes and council backhanders, but in the people. Sean smiles just a little too easily, is a bit too free with handshakes and shoulder-grips.
Laraine seems more fragile. Sometimes, she bruises.
You rent a room in town, over a launderette, and keep it spartan. A bed, a desk, a chair, the things you need to write the book. A typewriter, stationery, notebooks. You put the desk against a wall without a window and cover the wall with photos, clippings, maps. Some family things, some general, fixing the background.
Hackwill will not give you an interview. No surprise there.
You talk to men and women in their twenties, three or so years younger than you. James’s school contemporaries, not yours. If you remember them at all, it’s as kids, living remembrances of a childishness you were desperately trying to outgrow. Stick-thin shadow-people are now grown up and filled out; they seem more vivid, more real, than people your own age.
Girls — brats become beauties — tell you how much they fancied James. Or were afraid of him, which doesn’t compute. Young men remember him as a good bloke. But Sean says Hackwill is a good bloke. You wonder what James was like at school. You know he learned to look after himself, but did he keep the terror at bay by making victims of others?
Candy Dixon, whom you remember as James’s girlfriend, also refuses to give you an interview. She tries to tell you why over the phone, but can’t.
WPC Yatman admits the Lime Kiln incident wasn’t the first time James was brought in for questioning and released without charge. While you were away at university, running occupations to protest at cuts in overseas student quotas, James was turning into a serious brawler. Not a drunken scrap-picker, but a purposeful master of violence.
In the Falklands, did James kill anyone?
From the reports you have, you aren’t sure. It seems almost certain, though. Commendations all stress his ‘courage under fire’. That means returning fire. With killing accuracy.
You drink in the Lime Kiln and see people who’ve been out of your life for six years, from college and school. The kids who didn’t go to university or came back immediately afterwards. They don’t seem to have noticed that you’ve been away.
Are you back for good?
You make long, rambling phone calls. Mostly to Anne, because Clare is in a bender well away from phones.
The book, strangely, is coming together.
Anne says you aren’t writing about your brother. You’re writing about yourself.
Your advance runs low. But you have some money, left by your father and yours on your twenty-fifth birthday. You can take as long as you like.
You can get it right.
Eventually, you arrange to sit down with your sister. You’ve never really confided in each other, but she’s the other corner of the triangle you had with James.
And she wants to talk. She has wanted to talk with you ever since you came back. As reticent as Mum is, Laraine wants to be forthcoming.
Since her marriage, Laraine hasn’t worked. She and Sean live out of town, in a house in Sutton Ma
llet, a hamlet on a turn-off from the Achelzoy road.
You drive out in your patched-together VW. The battered Beetle seems an intruder in the converted barn that serves as Sean’s garage.
Laraine welcomes you in to her perfect home. It was once a farmhouse, and lay abandoned for years, but has been completely overhauled. The house smells of new paint and good wood.
As Laraine makes you tea, you realise what the place reminds you of.
‘Do you remember?’
‘That TV play.’
‘The Exorcism.’
‘About the city couple who buy an old farmhouse, and are haunted by the family who once starved to death there.’
That programme went out in 1972, on a Sunday night. Unusually, you and Laraine — everyone else was out — were in the house alone, and watched it together, terrified. It’s stayed with you ever since. Now you realise it was supposed to be making a political point — with amazing foresight, at that — but at the time, you took it as just a ghost story.
Neither of you wanted to go upstairs in the dark. You were thirteen and Laraine fifteen. You both slept downstairs, huddled together on the sofa under blankets, still under the spell of the spookshow.
Afterwards, when the sun came up, the fear went away. You were both ashamed at your funk and never mentioned sleeping on the sofa to Mum and Dad or James, though you did tell them about The Exorcism. You wonder if you’ve never talked about that night because you remember the shampoo smell of your sister’s hair and the warmth of her thin body in a way that seems now even more transgressive than it did then.
‘We slept together,’ Laraine says, ‘on the sofa. God, that was a long time ago.’
‘Half my life,’ you admit. ‘More than half. Not quite half yours.’
‘Thanks for reminding me how decrepit I am.’
Laraine sets out the tea on the Habitat kitchen table with all the formal elegance of a Japanese geisha. You observe her precise movements.
‘Are you dyeing your hair?’
She admits it.
‘It looks good.’
‘Sean doesn’t like it.’
‘So?’
‘Yeah, so?’
You take your mugs of Earl Grey and go into the front room. It is all blond-wood and TV and stereo equipment. Sean has a Betamax. The sofas and chairs are chrome tubes with overstuffed floral-pattern cushions.
