by Kim Newman
Laraine is married for the second time, to Kay Shearer, the discount shelving tycoon, and living in Canada. She has six children, whom you can never keep straight, though Mum can pick them out of a group photograph and rattle off their names and statistics like a football fan listing the goal averages of his team’s players. Jimmy is Major James Marion, stationed with the UN peace-keeping forces in some foreign trouble-spot. He has married a Czech girl, Pavla, and they have two sons. Mum worries that he will be shot by insurgents, but he says he mainly does admin work.
Last Christmas, Mum went to Canada to see Laraine and Kay and the children. Laraine paid for a first-class air ticket. She offered to bring you over too but you didn’t like the idea of flying. Mum made sure the char popped in to see you were all right and telephoned on Christmas Day, only she got the time difference muddled and called up after midnight, on Boxing Day.
It occurs to you that Mum gave you a dressing-gown for Christmas too.
You worry about her.
You have never had a job. You haven’t had a girlfriend since Marie-Laure Quilter.
You weigh sixteen stone. Your usual outfit is corduroy trousers, slightly split at the crotch, and a baggy pullover that has its frayed areas. You shave every third or fourth day. Your hair gets long until Mum gets fed up enough with it to cut it for you. You have a bald patch, and don’t comb your hair over it; probably because you rarely comb your hair.
You find ways of passing the day.
You sleep in the mornings. You follow Australian soaps. Vince comes by some afternoons with videos. He has a shop in the old Discount Development, selling second-hand comics, records and videos. He only opens in the morning.
You have a lot of little things to do; to prevent you dwelling on the big things.
‘It looks lovely,’ comments Mum.
You are wearing your Christmas dressing-gown, not your birthday one.
‘Just your size.’
She still sometimes calls you a growing boy.
Mum makes you cups of tea every two hours and teases — well, nags — you about getting out more with your friends. Her official version is that you stay at home to look after her, and that she doesn’t want you to sacrifice yourself for her.
‘You’re only young once.’
You were only young once.
You go into town once a week, to help Mum with the supermarket shopping. She gets a taxi back and you loiter, putting off going home. You sit in the Outlet, the fast-food place where Brink’s Café used to be, watching the kids hanging out, chattering and moaning. You can’t remember ever being like that.
Sometimes, in the street or the Outlet, you see withered faces that remind you who their wearers used to be. Timmy Gossett, the loony who sits on the Corn Exchange steps mumbling, was at primary school with you. Locked in his own mind, he fills you with dread. You always felt sorry for him, and now you fear he feels sorry for you.
Not a day goes by that you don’t think about Marie-Laure. She doesn’t live in Achelzoy any more. Her mother sold up, and they both moved on. You wonder what she’s doing.
Less often, you think of that woman from the DHSS. Her name usually escapes you, but it was Vanda.
Vince brings you a Doctor Who video as a birthday present. ‘Inferno’, with Jon Pertwee. You spend the afternoon watching it together.
Mum asks if Vince will be staying for your birthday dinner. Vince says he has to be off. He’s taking evening classes. Tonight, it’s sociology. His hobby is evening classes. He has more O Levels than Einstein. Each time he gets one, he picks another course and works on that for a few years.
In the video, Doctor Who slips sideways in time to a parallel world where all his friends — the Brigadier, Liz Shaw of UNIT, Sergeant Benton — are evil.
You and Vince have one of your long conversations, about parallel worlds. They usually turn into arguments, but Vince thinks of a row as a species of performance art.
His contention is that ‘Inferno’ is a radical departure from the usual parallel-world science fiction story. Most are about societies rather than people, and posit worlds in which Germany won the Second World War or President Kennedy wasn’t assassinated or England lost the Cup Final in 1966. The stories demonstrate the effects of these events. When real people, like Winston Churchill or JFK, figure in parallel-world stories, they appear as themselves, and authors suggest how, given their established real-world characters, they’d react in changed circumstances. ‘Inferno’, in which England is a fascist state, goes further and suggests personality itself is defined by social and political circumstance, that a person’s degree of niceness or nastiness is conditioned by the regime under which they live.
You point out that the same thing is done in the Star Trek episode in which Spock has a beard and Kirk succeeded to command of the Enterprise by assassinating the captain played by Jeffrey Hunter in the pilot.
Vince concedes that is true. ‘Think about it, Keith. If the world were different — if Britain had lost the Falklands or Neil Kinnock was elected prime minister — you would be different. Who knows what you’d be?’
You find the idea a bit threatening.
‘I’d still be me. Under any circumstances. If we passed through a time-slip tomorrow and woke up in a world where the Vikings had triumphed and Somerset was an outpost of an Icelandic empire, I’d still be Keith and you’d still be Vince.’
‘But maybe you’d be Evil Keith. Like the Brigadier with an eyepatch or Spock with a beard. You’d have a helmet with horns.’
‘That’s a common fallacy. Viking helms didn’t have horns.’
‘You’d ride out every day in your big Icelandic car, the Volvo Björk, and put Achelzoy to the sword, looting and raping, then come back home in time for tea.’
Sometimes, Vince loses you. You think he’s a bit sad.
At the end of ‘Inferno’, Doctor Who slips back to his proper time and his friends are nice again.
At the end of your birthday — Mum made you your favourite, sausage toad — you go up to your room and put Vince’s present with your other videos.
You have the old TV and video in your room. The new home-entertainment system Kay bought Mum is set up downstairs, filling the front room with speakers and screens and decks like the Borg taking over in Star Trek: The Next Generation.
You undress and put on your birthday dressing-gown.
You are torn between Nichelle Nichols, Lieutenant Uhura in Classic Trek, and Katy Manning, Jo Grant — who took over from Liz Shaw — in Doctor Who.
So, you ask yourself, is it a Doctor Who day, or a Star Trek day?
If Star Trek, go to 160. If Doctor Who, go to 170.
151
When it comes to it, you hesitate. You can’t take it that one step further. You can’t kill.
Sean, on the doorstep, stares at you. ‘Keith,’ he says, astonished.
‘Do it,’ screeches Laraine.
Now Sean is terrified.
‘I’m fucking him, Sean,’ Laraine says.
There’s anger in Sean’s terror. He makes fists.
Headlights in the drive. Hackwill is here.
The gun in your hands is a dead stick. You’re a statue. You can’t go forward and you can’t go back. You begin to unravel.
Laraine takes the gun away from you.
With a snarl, Sean comes for her. The gun goes off and Sean’s shoulder dissolves into red mist. She has fired both barrels.
Your eyes are hurt by the flash. Your ears ring like police sirens.
‘Fuck,’ shouts Hackwill.
‘Shells,’ Laraine demands.
You bring the packet out of your pocket. Laraine snatches it.
Sean is screaming now, rolling on the drive, one arm dead, lower face splattered with blood. Hackwill is fixed by his car, goggling.
Laraine breaks the gun, shucks the used shells, and jams in fresh ones. She is clumsy but manages it eventually and snaps the gun shut.
‘Sorry, Rob,’ she says, and sho
ots Hackwill in the face. Almost in pieces, he lies on his car bonnet, life blasted out of him.
If Laraine had seen Robert Hackwill drag James into the copse, things would have been different. Of course, Laraine seems to be mad.
She can’t reload. Her motor skills are deteriorating. She stands over Sean, fumbling with shells. The packet comes apart and shells patter over Sean’s kicking legs.
Lights go on next door.
Laraine picks up two shells and, concentrating, gets the gun loaded.
‘What do you think, Keith,’ she says. ‘Me, or him?’
If you say ‘You’, go to 161. If you say ‘Him’, go to 174.
152
‘If a man did that to me,’ Mary says. ‘I’d kill him.’
‘Sean was one of those men,’ you say.
‘What do you mean?’
‘One of those men people want to kill.’
‘People?’
This is it. Play this right and you’re home free.
‘I probably shouldn’t say this, Mary. But there’ve been calls. Men, asking for Sean, late at night. Not bank-customer voices. Threateny, somehow. And before he left, Sean burned some papers in the grate. Things are chaos at the bank. They sent someone over to go through his files at home.’ This is true. ‘I think Sean was keeping a lot from us.’
Mary’s face is stone. Then it cracks just a little. ‘We’ve found out some things,’ she admits. ‘Your sister is better off.’
Then she goes.
You want Mary to think Sean is on the run somewhere, pursued by dangerous criminal associates. After a few months, you think it would make sense if his body were to show up in the sea somewhere, identifiable only by dental records.
Laraine doesn’t want to dig him up.
You construct stories, strong enough to believe. You see connections between Councillor Hackwill and his shadowy business partners and organised crime. You imagine deals gone wrong at dead of night, with Sean floundering under blows from a thug’s blunt instrument as a godfather smokes a cigar.
It makes sense. You try to will Mary into parallel thoughts.
Laraine clings, insisting you take the risk of staying with her at night, sharing the bed where she once slept with the man now lying dead under the compost heap. She uses sex to keep you there, making herself desperately available whenever you want to draw away.
You worry about her. She is under strain. If Sean were found and Persons Unknown took the blame, this would all be over.
You go through Sean’s den. There are files on business deals. Most of it is beyond you. You’ve burned a few, just to back up what you told Mary.
How can you make this more incriminating?
Laraine answers the phone one evening and a deep voice asks for Sean. She gasps and hangs up. Wrong attitude.
You try to believe it. In this world, Sean was taken away by the mob, tortured and killed. You and Laraine are innocent bystanders. Maybe you’re in danger. Maybe Sean’s killers didn’t get what they wanted from him and will be coming after you.
You are authentically worried. You tell Mary the calls are continuing. They do. You take a few yourself. The voices — there are more than one — mean nothing to you.
‘Where’s the merchandise, Mr Marion?’
That’s the calmer, suaver voice. You imagine a ’50s face, with a slash of moustache and plenty of hair oil. An astrakhan collar. A cigar.
‘Tell Rye he’s fucked.’
That’s the one you think of as a cross between Arthur Mullard and Moose Malloy. A big bruiser who crushes nuts in his hands and has scars on his face. An ex-wrestler, with tattoos done in jail.
‘Where’s the merch?’
Laraine is going spare. You’re caught between panic and disbelief. Surely, you can’t have willed these callers into existence, to back up your story? It has to be a coincidence.
Sean really was crossing gangsters and you took him out of the circuit. Because he’s dead, he hasn’t made payments or committed crimes. His confederates are getting heavy, assuming he’s hiding out. You could be in real danger.
Mary is reassuring. This is too big for one WPC, you think. A disappearance, she can handle. A murder, she could cope with before the CID showed up. A major case against a crime organisation is way out of her fighting weight. But she is still your preferred police contact.
You think you’re being followed. Cars keep just out of sight. Unmarked vans are parked wherever you go. You imagine the red dots of laser sights playing over your skull.
While you are away, people break into the house and search. Somehow, Laraine doesn’t notice. She’s becoming a zombie. In the evenings, she clings to you, too wrung out to speak.
You wonder if this stage of the affair is through.
An anonymous envelope arrives. It contains blown-up photographs, taken through your bedroom window. You and Laraine. Unmistakably fucking.
Laraine goes white and emits a single sob. You look for a note. For a demand. Nothing.
The next call is from Mr Suave. ‘There’s someone here who’d like to talk to you, Keith.’
Laraine is in the room. You look at her. She’ll be no help.
‘Keith?’ says a small, tired voice.
It’s Sean. The world spins.
‘Is Mrs Rye with you?’ Mr Suave asks.
‘Yes.’
‘Good. You’re unusually close, aren’t you?’
You imagine the sneer of contempt tinged with lechery.
‘Perhaps you’d put her on, Keith. Our friend would like to talk to her.’
‘She’s in no state—’
‘And neither are you. Not to get between man and wife.’
You hold out the phone and look at Laraine’s eyes as she hears the voice.
‘Sean?’ She can’t believe it.
‘Yes … no … yes.’
She hangs up. ‘They want money. Or they’ll kill him.’
You dig up the compost heap. You go down almost to bedrock and find nothing.
It’s a bad time for Mary to call by.
‘Busy work,’ you explain. ‘Just trying to sort things out.’
‘There’s a lot of money missing at the bank. And Councillor Hackwill’s had a domestic incident with a paper guillotine. Four fingers gone.’
‘An accident?’
‘That’s what he’s calling it. Funny thing, though. He claims he was alone, but his secretary says he was in a meeting with two unfamiliar men at the time.’
You are sweaty and filthy, neck-deep in a grave. Mary hunkers down at ground level, looking into the hole.
‘Not a good place to plant,’ she says. ‘The shade from the wall.’
‘Buried treasure,’ you say. ‘I found a pirate map in Sean’s desk.’
Mary smiles.
‘I don’t care what they do to Sean,’ Laraine says. ‘But they have those pictures.’
Your mind isn’t working round this. ‘Laraine, they can’t do anything to Sean. It’s too late, remember?’
‘No, they have Sean.’ She has been able to wipe her memory.
This is your fantasy, though. You can’t impose it on reality.
‘It would be best if they killed him. If they showed him the pictures, he’d kill us. Both.’
Laraine is satisfied with the thought. ‘If we give them what they want,’ she says. ‘They’ll kill him for us.’ She flings her arms round your neck.
‘But what do they want?’ you say.
‘They call it “the merchandise”.’
‘But what’s that?’
You didn’t think your story through in enough detail. You wanted to drop hints, to leave gaps to be filled. As a consequence, you’ve no idea what the people who have Sean mean by ‘the merchandise’. It could be money, drugs, gems, postage stamps, a tin of marbles. You search the house over and over again. If Sean can disappear, the merchandise can appear. If the world has shifted to back up your story, that’d be logical. Is a suitcase full of fissionable material
hidden in the basement? An ancient Aztec sacrificial idol with a hideous curse on it behind the fireplace? Cap’n Kidd’s treasure buried a dozen paces due east of the compost heap?
Laraine spends more and more time in a daze. Her grip on reality is so skewed she is no back-up at all. You have only what you see and feel to go on.
You know the house is being watched. Whoever took the pictures is out there on the wetlands, up a tree pretending to be a bird-watcher. You take to staying out of the sightlines of the windows. Doing as much as you can in the dark.
You receive a package containing four severed human fingers. At first, you think of Hackwill but Laraine recognises Sean’s wedding ring. The fingers seem fresh.
You call Mary. She is amiably baffled and says some explanation will come along.
Mr Thug laughs at you down the phone. ‘Next time, it’s your dick on the chopping block.’
You wake up in the middle of the night, a pillow over your face, pressing down? Is Laraine trying to stifle you? No. You hear her struggling, trying to cry out around a big hand clamped over her mouth.
Your hand is wrenched and a metal cuff clamped around it. This is an arrest. It’s over. You are almost relieved. The pressure is off the pillow. Your nose hurts and you think it might be bleeding.
Laraine sobs.
You expect to be wrestled out of bed. But you aren’t. Doors close.
You tug on your cuffed arm. You’re tethered to something, perhaps the bed. You brush the pillow off your face. A smell of putrefaction assaults your gummy nostrils. You are handcuffed to something indescribably foul.
Laraine turns on the bedside lamp.
You look at the green mess that was Sean’s face.
The hand you are cuffed to has a thumb but no fingers. You work the cuff off the stump and are free, albeit with a dangling charm bracelet.
Sean, as you always knew, is dead. He has been for a while. There are dots on his face you didn’t make. Cigarette burns? But the dent in his skull looks as if it was done with a poker.
