by Fay Weldon
‘Geegee,’ pleads Lola. It is her childhood name for Beverley, short for great-grandmother. ‘Please come, I can’t get through to anyone. Please, quickly. I’m frightened.’
Last chance saloon, thinks Beverley, that’s me. In the background she can hear discordant music – ‘post-technobitch’, she supposes; confined to her bed as she has been, she has been much charmed and educated by YouTube – and desultory singing and shouting in the background. At least Lola is with people. Lola’s voice, as she croaks to be heard, is both slurred and over-modulated; God knows what Lola has been taking, to pull her down or perk her up or both at the same time, or quite what level of existence she is inhabiting. There is so much on the market. Whatever it is, thinks Beverley, it can kill you. Pray God it is legal so someone will call an ambulance.
‘Where exactly are you?’ she asks.
‘Down the steps,’ says Lola, ‘you know where. I keep passing out and my hands have gone funny. Look.’
‘I can’t see your hands,’ says Beverley. ‘You’re on the phone. Pull yourself together and call an ambulance.’
‘I can’t do that, they’ll kill me,’ says Lola.
Beverley hears the clatter as Lola’s mobile falls to the floor and then there is only the sound of the music and random shouts and squeals, which could be pleasure or rage or both. And then there is no more speech from Lola.
Now as it happens Beverley does know what Lola means by ‘down the steps’, though Lola is pushing it to suppose that Beverley would. Beverley fund-raises for a charity called Young Sympathy, whose mission is to train young people in empathy for unfortunates. To this end school parties set up stalls in deprived areas to hand out advice leaflets, cups of tea and slices of cake to anyone in need of help. Lola’s school, as a result of a certain amount of string-pulling by both Beverley and Cynara, supported the initiative: in return participating pupils received certificates which could be mentioned in CVs.
Beverley, coming to visit with a PR team to take photographs for the Young Sympathy newsletter, and finding Lola slicing cake and pouring cups of tea for those who seemed to be her friends, stayed on to help. The street friends were young and excitable, dressed eccentrically, colourfully and barely decently, à la Lady Gaga. Their gender was indeterminate, but those who had breasts showed them. Lack of money did not seem to be their problem, but they clearly liked the cake. Lola’s charitable school friends, a well-behaved and virtuous lot, were evidently much impressed by Lola and her social circle.
Lola found the presence of her great-grandmother embarrassing, to the extent of introducing Beverley as her grandmother (‘I used to call her Gee for Gran,’ she went as far as saying), though she was polite enough and allowed herself to be helped pouring tea. Beverley asked her if her friends lived in a commune, and Lola nodded to a basement café called Down the Steps. The streets had once been residential but were now a curious mix of bazaars, shops, houses, tattoo parlours, travel agencies for less familiar foreign parts, and banks of unknown provenance.
‘Live and partly live,’ Lola said. ‘Let’s just say we hang out down there.’
And she went back to cutting slices of chocolate cake. Beverley had wondered at the time if she should say something to Cynara and decided there was little point. She would only lose what scraps of good opinion Lola had for her. She knew at the time it was a betrayal of principle, that what renders the old ineffective is their desire for the good opinion of the young, but she remained quiet.
Now here she was at an advanced age, barely able to walk and faced with Lola in evident need of rescue. Nor was there any time for thought, or time to ask for help. No time to direct an ambulance to a street she knew by sight but not by name, no will to ask the police: her past had put her outside the normal law-abiding community. In this Lola was her kith and kin. No matter how dire the circumstances, the theory ran, never trust the police. The kehua were in her ears, loud and imperative. Run, Beverley, run. Beverley ran. She pulled her clothes back on, found her purse and ran. Had she not done this a dozen times in her extreme youth, in the Jesus days she hoped she had forgotten. Pulled her clothes back on, grabbed her purse and run, from whatever danger threatened, sometimes less than she supposed, no doubt, sometimes more. Death, pain, humiliation of one kind of another. Girls were so trusting now for all they were so easy.
She found running easier than she thought. It hurt, but it worked. The body did what you told it to. She had been too protective of it, she could see. She got down to the crossroads and saw the yellow light of a taxi coming. She hailed it. It stopped. She directed it to Lola’s school. The driver was local; she was lucky: he knew where the school was. He knew where the high street she described was. She took him to the corner and paid him off and waited until he disappeared. It was precious minutes wasted but she did not want to be traced. She was not sure why, but she remembered the lessons of the revolutionary days. Leave no trail. Not that anyone else ever remembered. And look where it had led Marcus. To a drunken death stumbling down a railway line. And where had her longer life led her? Standing outside the closed door of some low-life slum café with voices in her head, having to go in to face whatever her family, fate and the new society thrust at her? Was she not she too old for this kind of thing? Was there no one left capable of taking over?
She went down the three concrete steps which led to the front door. Light seeped from cracks beneath it and around it. She could hear the same nerve-grating music that had come through on Lola’s mobile. Why were the young so desperate that only unmelodic music appealed? She stopped to recover. She had managed to hop out of the cab onto one leg okay, but when she was going down the steps she could not work out which of her legs was the burden-carrying one, made a mistake and paid for it in pain. She hoped she was doing it no permanent damage but oddly enough thought she probably was not.
The door was made of reinforced glass and looked as if it belonged to a warehouse, not a café. It appeared locked but when she pushed it opened. There was a rushing smell of alcohol, piss and smoke mixed, which took her aback. And then a mob of young people barged her aside to get up the steps and away. They seemed anxious to be off. They were very noisy, and gave little yelps of panic and confusion, which seemed to add up to ‘Let’s get out of here.’ There was a flurry of young skinny limbs, bright colours, strange clothes, thigh-high boots, feather boas, pale faces, mad eyes and platinum hair tortured into strange peaked heights. When they had gone Beverley went on into what seemed as much a barn as a café or a bar. Such light as there was came from candles still fluttering on the tables. There seemed no one in charge – there is usually someone who safely extinguishes flames when everyone else has gone – but no. There was a lot of litter and broken glass and spilled drink on the ground; and the odd used condom and broken syringe. Whatever had happened had frightened even a clientèle accustomed to this kind of thing.
There were two people in the room. One was Lola, lying slumped over a table, semi-naked; a little form which seemed to have so little substance she could have been painted and not in real life at all. Too thin, too pale arms; little pathetic breasts. It was odd, Beverley thought, to think how much destructive energy could emanate from so small an entity. She was not dead, as Beverley had at first feared; she was making little snoring moans.
Beverley sat Lola up – she was half conscious – opened her mouth and thrust her fingers down her throat. Lola retched and vomited over Beverley. Not enough, but it would help. The other person in the room was unconscious, lying on the floor next to where Lola sat. He too was making little moaning sounds, little plaintive demands on the world. He was in his mid-forties, solid, saturnine, prosperous and thuggishly good-looking. His nails were well manicured, his shirt and suit expensive, his shoes handmade, and he was naked between socks and shirt. Beverley thought the socks were probably cashmere. His parts were large. Erect and in action they would have been impressive, but now lay limply. They seemed almost too large for Lola, and though she could not see
Lola as an innocent victim, Beverley felt a maternal jab of rage on her behalf. Misbegotten though Lola might be, living evidence of Beverley’s failure to be a proper person, a proper mother, she was family.
The man lay in a welter of £20 notes, which had fallen from his hand as he lost consciousness. Beverley kicked him with her sensible shoe, forgetting the pain it would cause her, and, feeling it, blamed him for inflicting it. She felt thoroughly disengaged from what she was seeing and doing. She seemed to have no context for her thoughts and actions. There were urgent voices in her head but she had no idea what they were saying. The mass of feather boas which had brushed by her face as the crowd left seemed to have some sort of repetitive quality: she kept seeing them when they weren’t there. Her thoughts seemed to be coming in sequence; first this, then that, quite orderly though without an underlay of emotion, as she realised her thoughts normally were.
The man had clearly collapsed suddenly, and it was perhaps his collapse that had triggered the departure of the other guests. More was going on than they had bargained for. Perhaps he was the drug supplier. He was dressed as one. Only dealers did not usually take drugs themselves; they were too sensible. Perhaps the drugs supplied had been doctored, perhaps he had simply taken too much. OD’d, like Lola. Perhaps the fumes of whatever was in the air were affecting her. The music changed; a flapping sound mixed with the beat: the lyrics seemed to be directed at her. Kill, Beverley kill. This was what song lyrics were all about these days, kill, fuck, rape, steal, rejoice: the Devil’s song.
Lola’s BlackBerry lay on the floor. So did a rather old-fashioned real glass syringe full of a colourless liquid. Whatever it was it would do no one any good. One obvious thing to do was to use the BlackBerry to call an ambulance. Help would come. The other thing to do was use the syringe to jab in the raised vein in the calf of the semi-naked man where his bare leg lay fallen to one side, and kill him, and take Lola out of Down the Steps, in the hope that she would never go back there or anywhere like it, ever again. No one would know. This time she would make a better job of it than cutting the brakes; it had taken her a long time to get round to it.
She had forgotten so much. She supposed you had to, the better to survive. She felt anger ebbing away as she pushed in the syringe. Metal went more easily into flesh than you supposed, seeming almost to welcome death in, eager for it. She remembered Arthur saying as much, long ago and far away, when he was joking about killing her mother. She plunged it in for Rita who should have done it to Arthur. She thought perhaps she was doing it for women everywhere, to save them from having to. She did it to the punters who had taken pictures of her and Dionne when she was a girl: to all the men she had fled from, grabbing her purse and running downstairs: to the men who had loved her and left, to the men she had wept over, to the men who shouted and bullied to drown her out, to Winter for having sold her, to Harry who insulted her by preferring men, to Marcus who had robbed her mind, to Gerry for Fiona.
She killed them all, and as she did so thought she heard kill, kill, kill turn into run, run, run, and by the time the liquid had run out so had her hate. She remembered what she was about, wiped the syringe with her sleeve, dropped it on the ground amongst the banknotes, put the BlackBerry in her pocket, slapped Lola hard on both cheeks, got her to her feet and walking, and steered her out the door. Beverley no longer noticed the pain in her leg.
She looked back and the man lay unmoving on the floor; she felt fairly sure he would not wake. If he did, what would he remember? If he did not, who would care? He had invited death and he had got it. She had got Lola. She would give the matter no more attention.
There was no one about. It was three in the morning. She half pushed, half dragged Lola up the steps. This is the uphill struggle that children always are, she thought. What’s new?
It had started to rain. She stopped supporting Lola when she reached a spot it was unlikely surveillance cameras could observe, and let her fall to the ground, which Lola did quite readily. Beverley was amazed at her own cleverness. Lola was half naked but it couldn’t be helped. Beverley turned and walked away and hailed a taxi. She looked back and already a group of people were clustering around the fallen body. Someone put a coat over her. They would get her to hospital. Lola would have enough nous not to get herself identified. She would be just another anonymous drug victim who accepted treatment and then disappeared into the night. Lola had Winter’s paranoiac blood in her veins, and evidently, and fortunately, more brains than he ever had. Lola would survive. Beverley got the taxi to drop her on the corner and walked to her house: she tried not to limp but her command over her body was fading fast, and by the time she got to Robinsdale she was holding on to fences and hedges for support.
At seven-thirty in the morning the doorbell rings. It takes a long time for Beverley to get to the door. It is Gerry. This is the way things happen within families, she thinks: all coincidence. She sees her fate is settled. Gerry too is a natural claimant to the whanau. He has no one else. He’s soaking wet when he comes in. The rain seemed to come out of nowhere. But then he brings Fiona’s truly damp and dripping kelpie with him. The kelpie will appreciate the stream, the last visible tributary of the River Fleet, and with any luck will take up residence there, harmlessly. Let Beverley not believe she will ever be rid of Fiona.
The kehua is now looking for a good branch somewhere near Jesper’s house to cling to and recuperate. It is exhausted. It had to move on with Lola from the comfortable quarters of Nopasaran but could find only an old branch sticking out of a dustbin in the squat where Lola’s friends lived. Then Lola OD’d in the night, to blunt the remorse which beat about her head like the wings of the Furies, but she got the message run, run, run; or at least the passers-by did, and they got to A&E just in time.
Lola so nearly died she can’t even remember it, but your writer knows how near a thing it was. Now she’s gone to her father’s to recover, and weeping she tells Jesper about her and Louis, while blaming Jesper for abandoning her and making her do it, while he tears his hair out and paces the room. She suddenly pulls herself together and sits up straight, and says, ‘Well, actually, I did it not you. And at least he wasn’t a blood relation.’ She then says she’s decided against going to Haiti. She’s too young and she’s going to be good and go back to college. Or she might stay on a year at school and try for Oxford.
The kehua finds a home under another diseased lime tree which is dropping its sticky stuff all over the parked cars, and folds its wings over its ears and hangs like a bat. It quite fancies Oxford, where at least they know how to look after trees.
The gathering of the kehua
The garden needs children. With Luke’s lot joining, I can see the place might even become a marae in its own right, a rather strange, pakeha version of one in a foreign land, and about as far as you can get from home, but there are more than enough hapu, living, deceased, unborn and undead, from McLeans generations back, clustering around the place to compose a quorum, a new colony for the iwi. The kehua are becoming quite acclimatised; just as flora and fauna disperse from country to country, why shouldn’t they? And Robinsdale’s large garden might just about pass as a urupa, a place of natural beauty that you can come back to from distant places and know that this is where you naturally belong. But there are of course still rituals undone, grievances unsettled, to be attended to before it can possibly happen.
Luke, having reluctantly left Robinsdale the night before, is already back in it, talking – how he talks: whom can he have got that from? No one will know before Alice appears. Cynara has turned up, but not Lola, who to everyone’s relief has rung to say she is staying with her father, back unexpectedly from Dubai. He has ’flu and she must look after him. No one can contact Scarlet, and Louis will not answer his phone. Alice is late. Her flight from Manchester has been delayed and the roadworks on the M1 are disgraceful. How did she keep a baby secret from her family? Why and how did she have it adopted out?
Gerry, who has reckoned
on getting Beverley to himself, sulks at not being the centre of attention, goes to his room – he will have to wait to share Beverley’s – and starts searching the Internet for jobs in London, preferably North London. It has occurred to both Beverley and Cynara that Luke might be Gerry’s son but neither will voice the suspicion for fear it is true. It is fairly clear from his sulks that if it is the case, Gerry has been told nothing about it. Luke is younger than Cynara, older than Scarlet. When did it happen?
Alice at last turns up and embraces Luke. Luke embraces Alice. It is a reunion which goes well. Alice wears the kind of clothes Rita long ago wanted Beverley to wear, decent, tweedy and unadventurous, reassuring to a long-lost son. She tells Luke she had no option but to give him away: her husband Stanley would not accept another man’s child. ‘The other man’, Luke’s father, was a good-looking medical student who abandoned her.
So that is why she went north, thinks Beverley, nothing to do with Harry’s death or the scandal, just that she was pregnant by the wrong man. Sometimes it is difficult to think well of one’s own daughter.
Luke lectures in anthropology at the ANU, Canberra. He tells Alice about the couple who adopted him. His dad is a doctor, his mum a nurse. He had been lucky with his parents. They are a kind and pleasant Kiwi couple (he refers to New Zealanders as Kiwis – which annoys Beverley at first; she thinks of Kiwis as shy, timid, insect-ridden birds, but Luke – like his half-sister Cynara, never one to mince words – says, ‘You have to remember you’re rather old, Gran, and have been away from home a long, long time’). When they were working for NGOs in developing countries, they sent Luke to Thames High School for Boys, where he boarded. And yes, he had gone on school outings to the Auckland Library: why, he asks?
