by Unknown
“What does he say?” asked Sarah. She was thirsty for it. She’d heard it before but she wanted more of it. She was like an addict. She was like a vampire feeding on her dead son. Tim was suddenly disgusted. He had a vision of himself standing up and running away; a dying, drug-befuddled man in hospital who has a moment of lucidity, pulls the catheters and cannulas from his body and escapes, to die free, with dignity. And then he was sorry. They were all dying. Why not die this way, slowly, leaking life, his wife beside him? They didn’t have dignity or certainty. They weren’t free. But at least they had each other.
“Joseph,” said Tim. “What’s he saying?”
“He says you’re doing the right thing.”
“Liam?”
“Yes, it’s Liam.”
Sarah broke the circle and collapsed back into the cushions of the green settee, eyes closed, hands covering her face. She looked upset, but Tim knew it gave her comfort. Liam had talked more to her in the twelve months since he had died than he had in the twelve months before that.
“Liam agrees that we should go to Torquay?”
Joseph nodded, eyes still closed. But he didn’t look happy about the message.
If only there was someone other than Liam he could consult about this. Tim couldn’t remember having asked Liam’s opinion about even such a little thing as what film he should watch on TV on a Sunday night, or what tie he should wear to work, never mind consulting him about this scheme of Sarah’s. Wasn’t it bound to end disastrously?
“Can you ask him—” Tim began.
But Joseph Seppardi shook his head.
Liam was gone.
CHAPTER THREE
THE COLONEL, TRINA AND HILARY
The Seaview Motel in Torquay was to be home to the Colonel, Trina and Hilary for the next few days. It was called the Seaview Motel even though there was no view of the sea. The Colonel was known as the Colonel even though he had never seen service with the military. This was what life would be like for Trina from now on. She didn’t even question it.
The Colonel and Hilary were members of an obscure religious cult, of which, until Hilary had recruited Trina, they had been the only two members.
Hilary had explained that they planned to spend the summer touring the seaside resorts of England. Trina had thought of fun fairs and hot dogs. It sounded exciting! The Colonel and Hilary had spent the winter in Croydon, not far from London. Trina had spent one night on the couch in their lodgings before they set off on the long trip from there to Torquay in a campervan. They had spent more than five hours on the road, with Trina in the back feeling sick. She was pretty sure she wouldn’t have got sick if she’d traveled facing forward, eyes on the road ahead. But only the Colonel and Hilary, it seemed, were allowed to fix their eyes on the road ahead. Hilary had picked the destination, planned the route and booked the room. The Colonel was the leader of their small ensemble, though he led, like many great military men before him, from a comfortable position just behind his second in command, Hilary. Trina wasn’t even third in command. She was a trainee.
“What d’you need me for, anyway?” Trina asked now, not for the first time.
“That remains to be seen,” Hilary admitted. “We have to try on many coats before we find one that will fit. But you’ll be a valuable part of our mission. We’re offering you an opportunity. If you stick with us you might learn something that’ll turn your life around.” She didn’t say what.
Trina had never been considered valuable by anyone before and she had learned precious little in her life so far, except how to beg and steal, and she hadn’t been particularly good at either of those. They had met when Hilary knocked over a paper cup that Trina had been using to collect coins from passersby. She had been sitting on a filthy blanket in the pedestrian tunnel that led from the Royal Festival Hall in London to Waterloo. The paper cup had been on the blanket in front of her. Hilary had been hurrying past on her way to the train station. She’d knelt to pick up the scattered coins but there hadn’t been that many to recover. Whatever had motivated Hilary to offer Trina something to eat and a place to stay, it wasn’t admiration for the way she worked the crowds. She was keeping her reasons to herself for now. But why had Trina said yes to the offer?
It was the matter-of-factness. Hilary just seemed to assume that Trina would get up and go with her, as if the decision had already been made. There was no sympathy. She didn’t seem repelled. She wasn’t angry. Drunken do-gooders and post-theater commuters usually expressed one or more of those emotions at the sight of a grubby, pale girl begging in a tunnel in one of the richest cities in Europe. But most people just walked by without taking any notice.
“I was meant to find you,” Hilary had said.
And Trina, tired and sick of it all, had looked at Hilary’s plain, slightly earnest face, and she had agreed. She wasn’t a mystical person, but Hilary had found her at the right time. She couldn’t have endured that life much longer. She’d run out of choices.
So now Trina had joined the mission. She was going to learn something. Maybe after this she would be able to get a job? It was something to celebrate. There hadn’t been much else to celebrate when they checked into their new temporary home in Torquay. The orange candlewick bedspreads on the twin beds in Trina and Hilary’s room would have looked drab even in the 1970s when they had been purchased, though presumably they would have smelled fresher. There was a damp, unaired feel to the room. There was a little bit of mold on the seal around the bath. There was limescale on the ceramic bowl of the toilet. It was the sort of place Trina would have expected to wake up in after being plied with cheap vodka by a married pedophile. It wasn’t the sort of place she’d ever imagine visiting voluntarily, unless to do harm or be harmed. If it had been booked for any other purpose, most people would want their money back. Not Hilary, of course. Because Hilary didn’t care about money. She just cared about the mission.
The Colonel’s room adjoined theirs. The three of them would share the bathroom at the Seaview. They’d be washing their underpants and hanging them up every evening, saving money on laundry. It was an ascetic lifestyle but it was better than living on the streets, begging for coins. What was strange for Trina was having a male presence now in her life. She didn’t take much notice of the news and she never read a newspaper, but even Trina knew that absentee fathers were blamed for many things that were wrong with society, as if the lingering smell first thing in the morning in the lavatory, the razor on the bathroom shelf, the damp towel on the floor, as if any of these things could improve society. Trina didn’t get it.
Hilary struggled into the room like some passion play reenactment of a crucifixion, with two narrow pieces of wood about five feet long laid across her back, and a bag of nails. “We’ll take first shift outside the Hotel Majestic together,” she said.
Trina trembled. When you’re sitting in a gloomy subway begging, you’re almost invisible. Standing in front of the hotel in bright daylight would be different. The thought of it made her curl up like a photograph in a fire.
Hilary put the wood and nails on the floor. She went out to the campervan and presently came back in with two rectangles of stiff cardboard. She had a slight frame but she was wiry and strong, and Trina hadn’t been brought up to say please or write thank-you letters or open doors for people, so she didn’t offer to help, she just watched. Hilary put the rectangles on the floor, adjusted the angle of one of them with her toe, then took a black marker pen from her pocket and handed it over. “Make yourself a placard and you can hide behind that.”
Writing wasn’t one of Trina’s strong points; she had barely attended school since the age of ten. She was quite artistic when it came to applying mascara and eyeliner, both of which she applied heavily enough to last a couple of days at a time. She was good with drawing. Not so good with words.
She took the cap off the pen and knelt in front of the blank rectangle. “What do I write?”
“Have you heard of Edmund Zenon?”
/> “No.”
“He’s a magician. He’s here to practice blasphemy—on Easter weekend! So we need to do something about that.”
“Blasphemy?” Trina twiddled the pen until the forefinger of her right hand was stained with black ink. She would be marked for twenty-four hours, like an illiterate voter in a country whose elections are rife with corruption. Blasphemy! She had no idea what it was or how to spell it. What did it matter anyway? If he was here to practice then it meant he wasn’t any good at it yet, so where was the harm? But she was prepared to humor Hilary, who so far had been kind to her.
“Like what? What you gonna do?”
“There are a number of options. The Colonel would like to get him down to the beach and put his head under the waves.”
The Colonel was going to drown Edmund Zenon? Whoa! Was that why Hilary had brought her here? The Colonel was going to train her to be an assassin! Trina sat open-mouthed, trying to visualize the Colonel fighting the magician with her at his side, nimble and brave. The Colonel was a big man, powerfully built. With his close-cropped white hair, his bright blue eyes and his handsome face, he resembled the Welsh actor Anthony Hopkins. But he must be nearly sixty…and Trina had never been in a fight before—her whole life had involved trying to avoid them or, worst case, crouching down with her head covered, taking a beating. She’d never used her fists, let alone a sword or whatever you needed to defeat someone who was magic. So unless Edmund Zenon was really puny, how could they win? And even if he was puny, couldn’t he use magic to defeat them? Trina imagined Edmund dressed in a wizard’s robes, zapping the Colonel with a wand as the Colonel tried to drown him.
“Trina!”
“What?”
“We want to save his soul.”
“Oh.” Trina couldn’t hide her disappointment. “So why not do that, then? Instead of the placard?”
“Because I’m not sure if Edmund Zenon has a soul that can be saved.”
Poor Edmund Zenon. Trina wrote a piece of advice on her placard that she would follow herself, if she could: GO HOME! The magician might not have a soul but Trina was willing to bet he had a home to go to. She’d have traded one for the other if she knew how to do it.
CHAPTER FOUR
MADAME NOVA
Madame Nova earned a little money telling fortunes for tourists in Torquay. She used tarot cards, but would read palms at a push, if that’s what the punters wanted. She also had a costume shop, A Little of What You Fancy, the name taken from a bawdy song Marie Lloyd used to sing in the musical hall at Hackney in East London back in the late nineteenth century.
She loved her dressing-up shop: wigs, moustaches, face paints, wings, silvery knitted chainmail armor, helmets, false ears, false teeth, false legs…Well, of course everything in it was false, mocked up to look more elaborate and expensive than it was, created to serve some individual’s fantasy for one evening. Madame Nova catered mostly for the boozy prenuptial celebrations of hen nights and stag nights, and Halloween of course. The shop was overstocked but still she couldn’t resist the occasional foray up to town—to London—to buy unwanted items from the National Theatre or the Royal Opera House that she saw advertised in The Stage, the weekly newspaper for actors and craftspeople involved in the profession. The wigs! Each one was a work of art and, quite frankly, wasted on the silly girls in Torquay who wanted to wear them to go drinking and pick up fishermen in town, ending the night puking their cut-price cocktails into the gutter with their boobs hanging over their ankles. If asked by one of these vulgar creatures, Madame Nova usually put the price for one of her wigs at a hundred pounds for one night’s hire: something silly to deter casual use. It wasn’t good business sense but it made sense to Madame Nova. Not much else did.
She remembered some famous trickster—was it Harry Houdini?—who had wanted to be buried with a telephone in case he woke up, realized he hadn’t died, and needed to communicate with friends above ground to tell them to come and dig him out. Madame Nova had a phone in the flat where she lived above the shop. But she rarely made calls on it and it rarely rang, except with the occasional automated message telling her she could be entitled to compensation for a car accident—she didn’t drive—or that she had won the lottery in Liechtenstein and she should call back with her bank account details to claim her winnings. It hadn’t provided her with any useful communication since she had moved to Torquay, so if she needed to persuade anyone that she was alive after she had died, she would probably choose some instrument other than the telephone to be buried with.
Madame Nova had been living here in the shadowlands—or, to give it its proper name, Torquay—for more years than she would wish to remember, retired from the bright lights and cultural excitements of London, away from old friends and old lovers, away from the acting profession—though the training came in useful, of course, with the fortune-telling. She was good at interpreting nonvisual cues. She had a memory for tricky little bits of information murmured during the course of casual conversation, and, most important of all, she could deliver a line as though the listener’s life depended on it. And perhaps, this weekend, someone’s life might depend on taking note of what she had to say. Because Madame Nova was about to depart from her usual script, and what she had to say was significant.
A mob of silly girls came into the shop, their business as obvious as if they had carried in front of them a big banner proclaiming HEN NIGHT! They spent some time choosing wings and tiaras and a cheap wedding veil made out of old net curtain for the bride. They tested the light-up wands and waved them around, imagining chasing fit young men up the High Street with them, and then being chased back down again for a kiss. Then one of them asked if Madame Nova would read the palm of the bride-to-be.
Madame Nova, with her big, baggy careworn eyes and her mouth looking as if it would chew itself off if anyone tried to chase her down the High Street and give her a kiss, took the girl’s hand solemnly and said she would give her a reading for free.
“Your marriage will be blessed with two healthy boys,” she said.
“Two more or two in total?” asked Jackie Churchill, the bride-to-be.
“I see two boys in your hand.”
“Phew! That’s a relief! Two’s enough, I reckon.”
“Your Tyrone’s about to start nursery, isn’t he?” said the girl next to Jackie. It was Mandy Miller, one of the receptionists up at the Hotel Majestic.
“Already started, Mandy. So, OK, they’re not babies. But she’s bang on with the number.” Jackie blushed with pride. “And I do feel blessed with my boys.”
Madame Nova inclined her head, to show that she was not surprised that she had been proved right. She had no intention of saying that she had passed by McDonald’s a few times and seen Jackie inside with her sons, and that was where she’d got her information, not in the creases of Jackie’s palm. Now, where was she likely to go on honeymoon? Was the boyfriend employed? She thought he was.
“You’ve a nice holiday coming up somewhere…Thailand? The Maldives?”
“Ooh!” said the bridesmaids-to-be. “Clever!”
Jackie nodded, impressed. “We’re booked to go to the Maldives.”
Two of the younger women giggled and nudged each other. “Anyone going to meet their husband at Jackie’s wedding?”
A girl at the back of the group called out, “How about the hen night tomorrow? Any luck for any of us finding a fella?” She was making the battery run down on a lighted wand by turning it on and waving it, and turning it off again; turning it on and waving it, turning it off again. Dawn Miller, Mandy’s sister. Dawn was as daft as Mandy was sensible. Never mind. Madame Nova wasn’t going to get upset about a battery in a cheap wand. They’d already paid for the hire of it.
She turned her eyes on the group, the future bride’s hand still in hers. Madame Nova had played Ophelia but she had never played Lady Macbeth, though she’d have been good in the role. The tragic witterings of the cast-off Danish would-be bride had always irritated
her, and she called on her contempt for Ophelia now to deliver her next line. Any passing casting director would surely have admired the performance and whisked her off to London to star as Lady M in “the Scottish Play.” But there never were any casting directors passing Madame Nova’s shop, which was one of the many reasons why she had moved here. Still, she gave it her all.
“You girls had better be careful this weekend.” She frowned as she examined Jackie’s palm.
“What you on about?” Jackie tried to pull her hand away.
“No. I had better not say any more. It will just worry you.”
“Not the kids? Not Dave?” That was all Jackie needed—something bad happening less than a month before her wedding day! She wasn’t even sure she wanted to get married. She’d said yes when Dave had proposed. But she’d been drunk at the time and so had he. They’d each been expecting the other to wriggle out of it but here they were, the registry office booked for next weekend, a wedding gift list chosen at Debenhams, and a reception with disco and cash bar at the Hotel Majestic for family, work colleagues and friends.
A laugh and a joke was one thing. Having her fortune told was a bit of fun. She’d taken it with a pinch of salt. They were going to the Maldives for their honeymoon, as it happened. But didn’t everyone? Bad news was different. You had to respect bad news. You had to fear it, to make sure it didn’t happen. She looked at Madame Nova with as much fear and respect as if the fortune-teller had knocked on her front door wearing a police uniform.
“No,” said Madame Nova. “Not your family. Not you, either. You’ll be fine.”
“What, then?”
Dawn Miller called from the back. “C’mon. Let’s get out of here.”
“Shut up, Dawn,” said Jackie. “I want to hear what she has to say.”
“You’re familiar with Oscar Wilde?” Madame Nova asked Dawn. “A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight—”
