by Rob Grant
And there, at the bottom of the lunchbox, was Hayleigh's Lunchtime Nightmare. An apple. A big, red, juicy apple. Fifty-three calories of fruity hell.
You can't just empty out an apple. You can't just cut it up. You have to leave a core with teeth marks in it. She'd tried giving apples away before, but people got suspicious if you followed them around while they ate it, and then scrabbled around in a bin to recover the discarded core. You could get called a loony for that kind of behaviour, if you weren't careful.
There was nothing for it. Best get it over and done with. She sat on the loo, held the bag under her mouth and tried to psych herself up for the unavoidable horror. The smell of the banana was starting to make her feel nauseous. She took the plunge and bit into the apple. A big chunk. She spat it out into the bag immediately and carried on spitting and spitting and spitting. Yuck. Yuck. Yuckety yuck. She bit off another chunk and spat. This time, she really thought she was going to puke. She leapt off the loo seat quickly and spun round so her head was over the bowl, but all she did was some dry heaving.
When she recovered, she sat down again. She was sweating. God, she couldn't go through with this. Maybe that was enough. Maybe the apple looked pretty close to eaten by now. She looked at the apple, but it was still almost intact.
Well, she'd come this far...
In the end, she managed to create a reasonably convincing-looking apple corpse with five more bites. It took her almost twenty minutes.
She put all the remains back in the lunchbox, opened the cubicle door and peered out. She was lucky, there was no one around. She dashed over to the waste bin and dumped the plastic bag, which was, basically, a calorie bomb that could have fed the whole of Ethiopia for fifteen years. Then she took out Chick Chat, removed the cover, took out the dangerous blue letter and dumped the mag and the putrid breakfast remains in the bin. Sorry, Jason.
Then she crossed over to the drinking faucet and washed her mouth out for five minutes, until she could barely taste the apple, and locked herself back in the cubicle.
What a rigmarole! What a stupid rigmarole! If only people didn't stick their bloody noses in her business, she could live a normal bloody life. She could not wait till she was old enough to leave school. Could not wait. To leave home, even. It would be sad, yes, but at least she'd be able to call her life her own.
She opened the envelope. She didn't have to steam it, or anything. If the contents were benign, she could pretend it arrived tomorrow, and she opened it, thinking it was for her; that it was a book token she'd been expecting for house points or something.
It was not benign.
It was from Mrs Mellish, the bitch.
'Dear Mr & Mrs Griffin, I am writing blah de blah daughter Hayleigh blah de blah growing concern yack yack yack fainted in gym class.' What?! She hadn't fainted. She'd felt a bit dizzy, that's all. And sat down on the floor for a bit. Lay down, actually. Quite hard. But that was just to catch her breath, for heaven's sake. That wasn't fainting. But, oh no, old Melon-head wouldn't let it go. She'd wanted her to go to the hospital, as if she was going to die, or something, but Hayleigh was having none of that. The nurse had been called, and she had examined Hayleigh, and taken her pulse and her temperature, when really all she wanted was to sit down on her own and catch her breath. But no, the nurse had to use everything in her silly bag, including that blood pressure armbandy thing that actually hurt a bit when it was fully pumped up.
And then there had been Dark Mutterings between the nurse and the Melon bitch, and Hayleigh was sent to lie down on the nurse's couch and get some rest. In the middle of the morning. Like she was some kind of toddler. Like this was some kind of pre-school Montessori nursery, and she needed a mid-morning nap. She almost asked: 'Where's my little mini bottle of kiddie milk, then?' but she was worried they might actually give her some. She'd lain down for an hour or so, and then returned to her classes, feeling great, and thought that was end of that.
But at the end of the day, there had been That Little Chat, which had involved some very wild accusations and exceedingly strange questions and although Hayleigh fended off absolutely all of the mad rantings calmly and rationally, she had got the feeling this ridiculous problem wasn't going to go away.
And she'd been right. How right had she been? Rightly, rightly right, in case anyone were remotely interested. Right in the subjunctive, in case anyone were interested precisely how right she had been. There could be no righter right than expressing one's Tightness in the correct grammatical mood. All of which Tightness wafted airily above Mrs Mellish's dismal monkey brain. Eee ee eee. Hayleigh went back to the, quite honestly, inarticulate letter. '...fainted in gym class.' Lie. 'Blah de blah nurse expressed concerns yack yack malnourished...' What? Lie, lie, lie. Well, Mrs Mel-bitch, you have so tripped yourself up there. Hayleigh? Malnourished? Yeah, right. Malnourished as a pregnant rhino. Malnourished as a giant walrus in a fish farm. '...malnourished blah diddly blah eating disorder.' Well, there it was. The nub of the thing. People think if you're overweight, you must have an eating disorder. When, in actuality, Hayleigh didn't know anyone else in the entire world who ate more sensibly than her; who kept a better eye on her fat intake; who was more aware of the calorific values of foods. '...disorder quack quack quack sure you have some concerns yourselves...' and more of the same wild, deranged nonsense, on and on and on. 'Please call and arrange a time when you are both available blah de blah some urgency.' Right. Brilliant. What, in fact, was urgent here, Mrs Melon Tart, was that Mrs Melon Nipples got some brain surgery very fast. A total brain transplant, preferably. That was what was urgently required here. A brain transplant from a disturbed chimpanzee might improve her powers of rationality. An urgent total brain transplant with a single-celled pond amoeba would practically transform the dreadful woman into a close approximation of a humanoid.
Well, there was only one place for that letter, and she was sitting on it. She wished she wanted a crap so she could wipe her bum with the hateful thing first, but she didn't. Truthfully, she couldn't remember the last time she'd performed that particular function. She flushed the filthy letter away along with the milk and soggy crisps and the dirty blue envelope.
Thank God she'd intercepted it. All hell would have broken loose at home if it had arrived when she wasn't there. She couldn't even bear to think about the devastation it would have wreaked.
She checked the bowl. Everything had gone. She flushed it again, anyway. Crisis averted. Job done.
SEVENTEEN
Grenville was sitting in an interview room of Hornsey Police Station, waiting for the nice and the nasty cops to turn up. He was waiting with the duty solicitor, who was costing him nothing, and he certainly seemed to be getting his money's worth. He wondered if there might not be some sort of annual competition to select the dickheadedest solicitor of the year. He certainly hoped so. He had two dead certs he knew for sure would absolutely walk it. He would clean the bookmakers out, baby.
This latest candidate was Charles Whitman. Like the poet, he'd said, though Grenville was unaware of any poet named Charles Whitman, and then he'd laughed, to let Gren know it was some kind of joke, which it wasn't, not by any stretch of the imagination, even if there had been a poet named Charles Whitman. Look: if he really did have a poet's name, say his name was 'Thomas Stearns Eliot', and he'd said 'like the poet', in what way could that be construed as comedic? It was like the poet. It was exactly like the poet. Where's the joke? So, right away, Grenville knew he was dealing with an idiot, and he was already beginning to regret not calling in that robbing incompetent leech from Wank, Wanker and Wankstain, Solicitors-at-Law, Est. 1983.
He'd asked for Grenville's version of the events leading to his arrest, but he didn't seem to pay nearly enough attention, interrupting him on no less than four occasions to take phone calls on his mobile, each time holding up his hand, flipping open the phone and saying: 'Sorry, I have to take this one,' then wandering off to the far end of the room. He didn't seem even vaguely interes
ted in the unspeakable behaviour of the Gorgon woman, which was Grenville's only possible mitigation, and seemed to concentrate instead on what he kept insisting on referring to as Grenville's 'rampage' through the car park, no matter how many times Gren corrected him. If he started calling it a 'rampage' in court, the daft bastard, they'd lock Grenville up and throw away the key. It was an unfortunate set of incidents. It was a regrettable overreaction to inhuman provocation. It was foolish, yes. It was irresponsible, undeniably. A rampage it was not.
While he waited for the latest vital phone call to conclude, Grenville picked away at his training shoes, which had been returned to him for the duration of the 'interview', forcing him into further unnecessary painful manoeuvrings. For some reason, they weren't afraid he was going to unthread the laces and fashion them into some sort of garrotte with which he could strangle himself while he was in the interview room, but he was seriously contemplating using them to choke the life out of Charles Whitman, the non-poet namesake. They had not, however, returned his watch, for fear, no doubt, that he would crack it open here and use its base as a mini shovel to dig his way out of the interview room, but there was a clock on the wall, and by now his absence would definitely be causing headaches at the studios. They'd probably assumed he'd been in some kind of accident, which, actually, would be a much better state of affairs than their knowing the truth. He might get someone to put his leg in plaster once he got out of the interview, and feign having been in a crash. Yes, that would be infinitely preferable. He thought he could pull that off. Hobble around in a cast for a couple of weeks. He certainly had the car wreck to back up that little yarn.
The production team were probably phoning around hospital accident and emergency rooms right now. He wondered how The Girl would take the news. Would she be worried for him? Would she be beside herself with grief, imagining the worst? Would her wonderful breast flood with relief every time she found out he wasn't languishing in intensive care in each hospital she phoned?
Whitman finished the latest phone call, doubtless destroying the life of another of his hapless clients in the process, and returned to the table.
'Sorry about that. Couldn't be helped.' And he laughed again. Grenville replayed both sentences a few times in his head, but couldn't dig a joke out of either of them. 'Now,' Whitman consulted his notes, 'at the end of your rampage--'
'It was not a rampage.' Grenville said it quietly, but firmly, hoping that this might be the best way to communicate with this chimp, hoping that might be the technique by which information might penetrate his consciousness. It had better be. The only other option left open to him was to somehow get hold of a hand drill, trepan straight through the dreadful man's skull and tattoo the words directly onto his frontal lobes with his own fountain pen.
'Sorry, I keep saying that, don't I? What should I call it?'
'Do we have to call it anything? I did some things I wish I hadn't. They don't have to be grouped together under a single name. We don't have to call it "Assault on David Lloyd Leisure Centre 13". We don't have to call it "The East Finchley Three-Door-Hatchback Massacre". We don't have to call it anything.'
'Fine. At the end of your... I'm sorry, I keep on wanting to say rampage .
'Resist that urge. I beg you.'
'At the end, you drove through the exit barrier, snapping off the arm.'
'That is correct. Yes.'
'May one ask: why?'
Grenville rubbed his hand over his face. 'It's complicated. I did it because it really shouldn't have been there.'
'It shouldn't have been there?'
'It served no discernable function. It just stopped people from leaving the car park, and nobody knows why.'
'I see...' Whitman said in such a way as to let Grenville know he didn't see, at all.
'You're supposed to punch in a security code, but they let everybody know what the security code is. Does that make any sense to you?'
'Not really. Did you know the code?'
'That was the reason I went back and parked in the parent and toddler space. To find out the code.'
'And you didn't find it out?'
'I did find it out.'
'I see...' Whitman said again, but he didn't, and who could blame him? 'And that was the end of the... of the... can we call it a melee?'
'No.'
'A fracas?'
'Shut up.'
The door to the interview room opened and a woman in a police uniform with man's trousers strode in. She'd been the one who'd taken Grenville's DNA swab earlier. She had one of those asymmetrical hairstyles: short on one side, but with a long lop-sided fringe that tended to flop over her left eye. Quite fetching, in his opinion. Grenville craned round, hoping that she might be the nasty cop, which would be a bit erotic, in his opinion, which perhaps might give an indication of the extreme poverty of his current sex life, but no one else came in behind her.
She smiled at them without humour and said: 'I'm Detective Constable Redmond. I'll be conducting this interview. She put a very, very hefty folder on the desk. Was that just Grenville's case? Surely not. Surely that must be the file on all as yet unsolved cases since the inception of the Bow Street Runners. How had they generated so much paperwork on him in such a short space of time? Good Lord: they couldn't have had that much evidence against Slobodan Milosovic.
'We'll be recording this on tape, and your responses will be admissible. Do you understand?'
Grenville nodded. One detective? How was this going to work, then? Was she going to be nice, or nasty? Or was she going to do both? Was she going to pull some sort of crazy, bipolar manic depressive routine -- slapping him gruffly with one hand, then offering him a cigarette with the other?
She started the tape, said her name, the date and time and named the others in the room, and then opened her folder. She read out the arresting officer's report, which, as Grenville had suspected, made the police out to be shining knights of public service who never took the piss out of anyone, or at any point fell helpless to the floor with derisory laughter. They had received a call that criminal damage was being committed, et cetera. There was a matter-of-fact description of Grenville's arrest, which omitted the entire seatbelt fiasco, but Gren didn't mind that. There then followed some witness statements, including one by a Mrs Curtiz, who turned out to be the crone who'd started it all. The witness statements were more emotionally charged than the police report, and Grenville didn't come off very well at all. He was squirming in his seat by the time Officer Redmond had finished.
She looked up. 'Do you agree those are accurate reports of the events?'
Grenville squirmed again. 'Well... up to a point. There are one or two places where--'
Redmond held up her hand. 'Let me stop you there, Mr Roberts, just for a second.'
Walt Whitman chirped in. 'Detective, I think my client should have an opportunity to explain his rampage. Don't you?'
Brilliant. Grenville shook his head and looked down at his laces. Why could you never put your hands on a good trepanning drill when you really needed one?
'And he will, Mr Whitman,' the detective acknowledged. 'Believe me, I'm doing him a favour. I thought it might be in his best interests if, before he said anything he might regret, we all sat down and watched the CCTV footage first.'
EIGHTEEN
After lunch, Jeremy and Jemma drove around the Well Farm in the golf cart Stone had allocated them, but, frankly, there was very little to see. Just dozens and dozens of the wheel structures, all identical, all with the same central community mall, with the same gym, the same shops...
'Little boxes,' Jemma said glumly, 'made of ticky-tacky.'
Jeremy nodded. 'They are a touch depressing.' It would need a genius photographer to make this place look inviting in the brochures. 'Wait a minute...' He checked through the folder Stone had given him. 'Yes. There's a map. There's a nature walk,' he tapped the map, 'here.'
'Right.' Jemma nodded. 'Now if only we knew where we actually are...'
<
br /> 'Good point. Well, it's north. Head north.' He looked up for the sun, oriented himself and pointed left. 'Thataway. Then left at the first ticky, and right at the next tacky.'
The nature walk, it turned out, was well signposted, and they found it easily. As Jeremy climbed out of the cart, he heard Jemma laugh. He turned. 'What?'
'Brilliant.' She giggled. 'Look at that.' She pointed to a big sign: 'Nature Walk'. And underneath a more temporary sign: 'Under construction'. Jeremy laughed, too.
There was a large map by the entrance, offering a selection of walking trails. Green route for the beginner, blue route for the advanced walker and black route for the more sturdy souls. Jeremy, not a hiker by nature, suggested the green route and, to his relief, Jemma concurred.
It was peaceful in the woods, and they walked quietly at first, listening to the birds. Most of it was, in fact, natural, but they did occasionally happen upon some artificial improvements to nature: a man-made pond, as yet unfilled, with the promise of a small waterfall above it; a freshly cut clearing, its destiny as yet unclear; and Jeremy saw an electrical wire dangling from a tree, which turned out, on inspection, to lead to a cleverly concealed camera.
'Great. The Hills Have Eyes.'
Jemma shivered. 'Does this place bother you at all?'
'What? The woods?'
'No, the whole place. Doesn't it make you feel uncomfortable?'
'Well, it's not designed for comfort, is it? In fact, it's mostly designed for discomfort.'
'That's not what I meant. Well, actually, it is partly what I meant. It's all just a bit too draconian: deliberately designing the eating zones to be unpleasant. No comfy chairs anywhere. TV only if you exercise like mad.'
