by Kim Newman
Laraine sits, useless, in a chair at her dressing-table, head in her hands.
Sean is making a mess on the duvet. You didn’t cut off his fingers, so far as you remember.
‘Did you see their faces?’ you ask. ‘There must have been two or more of them.’
She just cries.
What to do with Sean?
There’s still the hole where the compost heap was. You’ve not shovelled it back yet. You order Laraine to help. Meekly, she takes Sean’s stinking feet. You carry the body downstairs and out into the garden, then unceremoniously dump him in the hole.
You shovel in a few spades of earth, then see your mistake.
You and Laraine haven’t killed Sean. Mr Suave and Mr Thug did that, and dumped the body on you. Why should you cover up their crime? Mary has been following the plot. She saw the fingers. She knows you’re innocent. God, you are innocent. You didn’t do this. You might have dreamed up the people who did, but you are guilt-free.
It’s near dawn.
You finish your call to Mary and hang up. The handcuffs clink on your wrist. They make you look guilty but you decide not to try to get them off. They are part of the evidence.
There must be a ton of it.
Mr Thug and Mr Suave. Hackwill’s secretary saw them; and so, presumably, did Hackwill. You and Laraine have heard them on the phone. They’ll have been seen by others. They must have killed Sean somewhere, which will be scattered with gobbets of forensic evidence. And they must have come by car — didn’t you hear an engine when they left? — which someone might have seen.
It is odd that you never saw them. But there was something pressing that pillow to your face.
Mary turns up, not alone. There are several police cars. Inspector Draper, Mary’s boss, has been rousted from bed and isn’t happy.
‘Mr Rye was delivered here and handcuffed to you?’ Draper says.
‘Yes,’ you admit. ‘That’s about the size of it.’
‘So why did you put him in this hole?’
You’ve stepped off a cliff and are looking down. You were going to haul him out and take him upstairs again.
‘Looks like he’s been down here a while,’ a voice says from the hole. Mary climbs out, knees earthy.
‘The fingers,’ you say.
Mary shrugs, having no idea what you are talking about.
‘Keith Oliver Marion,’ Draper says, holding a document, ‘I have here a warrant …’
And so on.
Begin again?
153
‘Them,’ you say.
Chris howls in fury. Mary is surprised.
‘You must be some kind of liquid filth,’ she says.
Shane tears the twins away from Chris, who claws and bites as Grebo grabs her.
You are a zombie. Moving, but dead inside.
‘Do you really mean it?’ Mary asks.
She admires your decision. It makes you like her.
You think about it.
If you really mean it, go to 166. If you don’t, go to 179.
154
Bob Monkhouse makes jokes about VC Conyer’s punk princess days, which the somewhat haggard rehab survivor takes in good part. You realise you were at Sedgwater College with the woman, though you can’t remember ever speaking with her. Clare was scathing about the singer-songwriter’s miserabilism.
An envelope is delivered by Royal Marines who rappel into the studio. Then they go over to the machines, Arthur and Guinevere. The apparatus of oppression.
You know you’ll have achieved something.
As the first number is drawn, a wave of heat and sound and light blasts you.
Go to 0.
155
Sean writes you a cheque for £2500. You took the sum out of the air. He tears the cheque out of the book — he’s with a rival bank, you note — and holds it out. You take hold of the slip of paper, but he doesn’t let go.
‘This is the last of it, Keith,’ he says, looking you in the eye.
‘Of course, Sean.’
He lets go.
During Sean’s leaving do, you take him aside and tell him you’ve thought about it and that he should pay you another £2500.
‘Think of it as a retainer.’
‘Why does blackmail make people talk like that?’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Suddenly, you’re purring out of the side of your mouth. Like George Sanders.’
‘Two and a half grand. Tonight.’
‘And that’s Bob Hoskins.’
‘Fuck you.’
‘No, fuck you.’
‘Okay. But just pay.’ You still have the flimsies. The evidence.
‘Later.’
The mayor wants Sean to make a speech. Sean is reluctantly pulled away and puts up with a lot of embarrassing joshing. As you watch, thrilling to the power you have over him, Ro sidles up.
‘Watch the bastard squirm,’ she says.
Your heart catches. Has Sean told Ro about you?
You are called up to give Sean his leaving present. A bottle of Scotch older than he is. You smile at him. He thanks you, eyes incandescent with rage. This is good for you.
You drink too much and Vanda drives you home in the new car you bought with your ‘windfall’. There will be more luxuries from now on. Whatever Sean makes, you will be on a percentage. It’s a no-risk investment, with a far better yield than anything he could have sorted out. You have the new cheque in your tuxedo pocket.
Vanda parks the car.
‘What is it, darling?’ you ask.
‘Now,’ she says, not to you.
There is a blur. A thin line descends, close to your eyes. Something brushes your nose and chin. A line of pain cuts into your neck. It burns. Someone has a wire noose around your throat.
‘Pull, you bastard,’ Vanda shouts.
The pain cuts deeper. And ends.
Go to 0.
156
You try to phone Anne but get her answerphone. You’d really like to talk this over with her. This is not your field of expertise. You can’t call Mum: she’d be even less able than you to cope.
You go for a pint in the Lime Kiln. It’s a slow Wednesday evening. You and Max Lewis spend an hour or so running over mutual friends from school. Neither of you knows what happened to most of them.
You go back to the flat. Your telephone is ringing.
It’s not Anne; it’s Mum. Laraine is in hospital. Mum says there was an accident, but you know it was Sean.
When you get to Casualty, Sean is in the waiting-room, looking devastated. Mum and Phil are comforting him. You make fists and stride towards Sean. Casualty is a good place to get teeth knocked out.
‘Sean,’ you say.
Someone bars on your path to him. A woman in blue serge. Mary Yatman.
‘Keith,’ she says. ‘There are some questions …’
If you pay attention to Mary, go to 162. If you assault Sean, go to 175.
157
So what are you going to do with this fully-armed, home-made bomb? It’s rigged to explode if anyone tries to dismantle it. The timer is set for a week from now. If nothing goes wrong, it will go off then.
You think. Should you take it somewhere where it would do no harm? Throw it into a culvert in Snowdonia? How much movement will it take to be jarred into detonation? Would it stand a coach-trip to Wales?
You’re giggling. It’s what you always said about nuclear weapons. When you invent something which only has one function, eventually that function will be fulfilled. Only it’s on your living-room table. Your mouth is dry.
The Lottery draw is complete. It’s a roll-over week. No big pay-out. Next week, someone is liable to be a major winner.
The bomb is a cylinder, wrapped in brown paper.
You can’t move. Literally. Your arms and legs are numb and unresponsive. You’re aware you’ve wet yourself.
The parcel just sits there. How much time has passed? Match of the Day has ended. Now, it’
s a film about American cops.
You can nod your head slightly.
What’s special about that parcel? It annoys you. The bloody parcel blocks your view of the telly.
Days pass and you have time to think about your life. That’s what television gives you: time to think. You wish that parcel weren’t there, though. You sleep and wake, wake and sleep. You get very hungry and very thirsty but that goes away. You are surprised how quickly you get used to it.
You can’t quite put together all the pieces. You aren’t sure how and why you’re here.
You hear clocks ticking in the room.
The answerphone takes messages. Mum and Laraine call up to see how you are. Your counsellor wants to know why you’ve missed an appointment. And you might have won a holiday home in the Algarve and isn’t that wonderful?
Life has fled from your body. Only your mind remains.
It’s a cool, calming sensation. They can’t get you in your skull. You’re still free.
You know things will change when Saturday comes round again.
They do.
Go to 0.
158
Ten years pass. Fifteen. Twenty. It starts to seem like a dream you once had. At first, you think not a day will go by that won’t be dominated by thoughts of Laraine and Sean. Your sister’s body and your victim’s. But, like everything else, it fades. You lose touch with Laraine, hearing of her only through Mum. Only rarely do you remember that she’s out there, her secrets festering. She must feel the same about you. She remarries, to a Tom Owen (Mr UN Owen?).
You are married, to Anne, and you have two children, Jared and Joy. You’ve written books. You’ve taught courses. You broadcast often. Sean’s body is like a piece of grit in your oyster, a piece that doesn’t become a pearl. The further away you get in time, the less it matters.
You know joy, sorrow, peace, disturbance. Regular life things.
One day, in your study, you take a phone call.
‘You bastard,’ a man says. ‘You fucking bastard.’ He hangs up.
You stab the trace button, but the caller withheld his number.
You sit there, staring at half a leader article on your computer screen, mind wrenched.
You’re dragged back. You aren’t a respected journalist and public figure, a well-loved husband and father. You’re the guy who fucked his own sister and killed her husband with a poker. You’re the bastard who buried Sean Rye in the compost heap.
You get another call. ‘You’ll pay,’ the man says.
Because of who you are and what you do, your reaction is to write about it. You’ve kept diaries, journals and notebooks for most of your life. Naturally, you left some things out, though you’ve used very private codes to mark exact dates.
The calls continue. The same voice. Hard, threatening, mean.
As soon as you heard the voice, you knew it would all come out. There’ll be a protracted torment first, but it will all come out. The most you can do is limit the damage. You have to have your say, to leave the world your version of what happened. No, to leave the world the truth.
You’ve written about painful things before. Joy died at eighteen, of AIDS. Researching the piece you wrote about it meant you found out things about your daughter’s life that you’d rather you didn’t know. Then you put them in print, so that everyone knew. Anne threatened to leave if you published, but in the end understood why the piece had to be made public. It didn’t make your daughter any less special.
But that was different.
Between taking the taunting, abusive calls, which gradually become more specific — ‘It’s been a long time, but there are still consequences, fuckface’ — you draft and redraft a confession. Where to start? With the murder? With the incest? With Laraine’s marriage? With James’s death?
It becomes a family history. You hope the murder will be seen in context. It wasn’t an aberration, a monstrous moment. It was a natural outgrowth of what had happened. You don’t let yourself off the hook — you accept that it was your fault — but you try to understand yourself, to see some meaning, some ray of redemption.
Anne notices you’re preoccupied. But she’s used to that.
‘How long has it been, fuckface? Twenty-five years.’
The calls are almost incoherent. The caller is working himself up. The crunch will come soon.
‘And you’re the respectable Mr Marion.’
‘Mr Owen,’ you say, ‘I know you’ll find this difficult to believe, but I accept your judgement.’
‘Owen!’
You’re wrong. It’s not Laraine’s husband; it’s someone else. Someone else knows. Who could Laraine have told? Or maybe …
The caller is laughing hard. ‘You don’t even remember, do you? Were there so many? So many broken people?’
Maybe Mary Yatman. She knew. You knew she knew. To what unimaginable person could she have passed the information?
‘You’ll pay, fuckface.’ He hangs up.
You don’t bother with the trace now.
The crisis is coming.
You do a final polish on the file of prose you’ve stopped thinking of as a confession and started to consider a memoir. Then you key in the e-mail addresses of those to whom you need to send it: your agent, of course; the newspaper you mostly work for; your lawyer (who’s really going to be surprised); the Somerset and Avon Constabulary (you have to Search this address); oh, and Laraine, and (at work) Anne.
You feel calm. You’re stronger than the caller. He can’t know you’ll pre-empt any blackmail attempt, any humiliating shot at tabloid exposure. Soon, you’ll have to defend yourself in all sorts of ways. But the memoir will answer all the questions.
The telephone rings. You almost look forward to a final verbal joust with Mr UN Owen.
‘Keith Marion?’ It’s a woman’s voice, hesitant, unfamiliar. ‘My name’s Christina Temple. I need to see you. It’s about the calls.’
A confederate of Mr UNO.
‘Very well.’
‘I’m on the corner. May I come to your home?’
‘Yes.’
You’ll be face to face. You’ll discover how the secret got out. You’ll be able to follow the chain.
Before Ms Temple arrives, you send the memoir into e-limbo. It will be scrolling on screens across London and beyond. You feel light-headed, free of it all. The calm will soon end but you are protected from whatever the Temple woman demands. Should she try blackmail, you can laugh at her.
Christina Temple is about forty. Thin, still hesitant, a little twitchy. Of course, she’s asked herself into a murderer’s home.
‘Keith,’ she says, on the doorstep, assuming the intimacy of your forename.
‘Please come in.’
She shrinks a little in your hallway.
You lead her into the study.
‘I have to apologise for Danny,’ she says. ‘We’ve been having problems. He’s the sort who needs someone to blame.’
UN Owen has a name. Danny.
‘It came out in therapy,’ she says. ‘You weren’t the only one, of course. But since your name is always in the papers and your face is on television, you were the one I remembered. Your name, that is.’
Something is nastily wrong here.
‘You don’t even remember, do you?’
Twenty-five years, Danny said. Not twenty.
You look at your terminal, grey-screened and dead. The memoir is out in the air.
‘I used to call myself Chrissie,’ Ms Temple says. ‘I had purple hair.’
After a while, it comes back. It’s funny, but you don’t laugh. Christina Temple is still trying to apologise when the police arrive.
And so on.
Begin again?
159
You throw a fit. Your worst since childhood. You hate Hackwill, you hate the world, you hate yourself. You hate James, for dying. You hate Mary, for living. You tear at your face, your clothes, your hair. You batter the tarmac, a nearby car, your legs.
You won’t be cuffed. You are twisting and screaming.
The taste of school custard is in your gorge.
Some strange path was taken. Somehow, Shinbone was overlaid on Sedgwater.
Everything unravels.
‘… the point of a gun was the only law that Liberty understood …’
Your ears still ring. Hands are laid on you, trying to keep you down. You bite your tongue and froth at the mouth.
You have wet yourself.
‘… and when it came to shooting straight and fast, he was mighty good.’
You puke up school custard.
And you hear the question again.
‘Who do you like, girl?’ Shane asks, ‘Napoleon Solo or Illya Kuryakin?’
If you like Napoleon Solo, go to 4. If you like Illya Kuryakin, go to 3.
160
It’s a Star Trek day.
You slot in ‘Mirror, Mirror’ — the episode you and Vince were discussing earlier — and fast-forward. Evil Uhura of the parallel universe has a uniform that shows off her bare midriff. You freeze-frame on Nichelle Nichols’s taut tummy.
You lie back on your bed, think back to 1973, and toss off.
You can imagine what the rest of your life is like.
And so on.
Begin again?
161
‘You,’ you say.
It’s the only way out. Sean is dying anyway. He must be. You can sell this as Laraine-Goes-Mad.
Laraine nods. ‘Of course,’ she says, ‘you mean “us”.’
She gives you one barrel in the chest. It’s like being hit with a sledgehammer. You try to suck air into torn-open lungs.
