by Claire North
No one slept that night, and every now and then a helicopter passed in the distance, and Corn hissed that they should have brought foil sheets or painted themselves in mud, and Theo wasn’t sure what difference these things would have made, but it seemed important to Corn, so he didn’t argue.
In the morning they shuffled down the shallow hill towards the railway line, light bursting golden white off the clinging frost on the stiff green grass. A few pigeons fluttered in the trees; something larger rustled away into the undergrowth. For a moment the land below them was radiant ivory snow, branch-grey and grassy green where the sun was beginning to drive back the frost. The station was a timber canopy, the perfect place for potted plants and a stationmaster who knew the locals by name; the station café sold sausage rolls, pork pies and clotted cream, and smoke rose from the mansions tucked between the drooping oaks. The memory of a great forest had shaped the land, and still lingered in ancient beech trees and scars of ivy cut through by roads and roundabouts.
They met a white van on the edge of Ascot, parked by a gate to an empty field overgrown with long, spined grass. The man at the back of the van stood arms folded, smoking a tiny brown cigarette, eyeing them up as they approached, nodded just once at Corn as they slowed.
“Yeah,” he muttered and, looking again from top to toe, nodded once more and added, “Yeah. Okay.”
He opened the back door of the van. A smell of mothballs and mildew rolled out in a cloud of fine, floating particles, and as Theo’s eyes adjusted to the gloom he saw clothes, piled on the floor and drooping out of stained cardboard boxes pressed to the side. For ten minutes they shuffled around in the back of the van, breath steaming and fingers blue-white as they fumbled with furs and velvets, Helen muttering, “Of course the code is less stringent for the jump season …”
In the end Theo found a black suit that didn’t look too ridiculous. Corn dressed in corduroy and looked remarkably like a man born to hunt, only missing a shotgun under one arm. Bea found blue silk and a fur stole; Helen clucked and exclaimed how wonderful she was, and Bea blushed, and Corn very deliberately and carefully didn’t look at her, and grunted something about how yeah, you know, it was like, good yeah.
Helen rolled her eyes and chose a more conservative dress suit of chequered black and grey.
They took turns to change in the darkness of the van, doors closed, Corn and Theo, Bea and Helen, hunched over double, slipping and sliding through a sea of shirt and sock, trouser and skirt, squinting in the gloom. When they were done, Corn held out money to the man with the van, who tutted and shook his head.
“Blessed are her hands,” he grunted, throwing the words at the notes in Corn’s fist, a condemnation as well as a greeting. “Blessed are the ones who scream, for they have heard the truth and the thunder.”
Corn hesitated, nodded, shoved the money back into his pocket.
The van drove away, and they hid their bags in a yew hedge by a field where the crows hopped over turned-up earth, pecking at straw, and, dressed in their finest, headed towards the races.
Corn muttered, “We’re everywhere of course. We’re everywhere, we’re cleaning the toilets and mending the sewers and driving the buses and …”
“Blessed are her hands,” whispered Bea as they trudged down the hill, coat and skirts hitched high, nose blue, lips white. “Blessed are those who break the silence.”
“Half the people we ask don’t even know if the queen is real, they can’t imagine it, anything changing. But the idea makes them feel better. That maybe they can do this really small thing, like this up yours to the world and maybe it’ll make a difference, maybe they count. That’s all the queen really is. She makes people think stuff they do matters. If you take that away, we’re all just fucked really. Just totally fucked.”
With every step towards the wide grass of the racecourse, the towering central stands, white barriers herding humans like sheep, Helen seemed to grow a little brighter, warmer, louder. As she grew, Corn diminished, words shrinking, shoulders curling. Bea seemed to feed on the older woman’s confidence, slipping in closer and hooking her arm around Helen’s as they neared the gate, happy relations on a wintery adventure.
“These things are seasonal,” explained Helen brightly. “They do flats in summer, jumps in winter, and they also have the shows—the last one I went to with my husband was spectacular. We came away with more trinkets than sense, couldn’t fit everything in the car, but the atmosphere, the people! They come from Dubai, you know, from the UAE, they really love their racing out there, they know their horses, the horses they breed in that part of the world are just magnificent, incredible stock.” She paused, head turning a little to one side, looking back on memories, shifting through time. “Then again, maybe I just remember it that way because it was our last together. Maybe we make these things more important than they were.”
Bea said nothing and shuffled a little closer to Helen, holding her tight. Theo stared at his shoes, tight brown leather, someone else’s, stolen. It was only after he’d chosen his clothes and the van had driven away that he’d found the stain under his left armpit where once someone had bled into the cotton, which bleach and chemicals had managed to fade to a pale purple tideline in the fabric.
As they neared the racecourse, the crowds began to grow, pouring in from car parks and the private train, helicopters and the airstrips. The sound of music drifted over the honking of cars queuing for a place, wintery festivities, a promise of hot wine and wooden market stalls selling amber, silver, home-made candles and winter woollens.
The queue at the entrance gates was a sluggish shuffle, pressing in through a narrow entrance watched by Company security in fluorescent yellow and navy blue. Bea collected four tickets from a woman dressed in grey as they waited, huddled on the edge of cold and warm. Laughter and an indignant cry at an outrageous joke drew Theo’s ear. As his eye swept across the crowd he thought he saw, for a moment, a woman, tall with short light brown hair, familiar in every way, and he wondered if he should make like a heron, and looked again and wasn’t sure he’d seen her at all.
They entered the enclosures of the racecourse, Helen chatting merrily all the way as if she had not a care in the world.
Theo had never been to a countryside fair, let alone a race.
Bodies swayed and spun around each other between aisles of wooden stalls with slanted roofs, yellow bulbs twinkling brightly behind the counters, walls of gingerbread, candles, packets of scented lavender, twee teapots in the shape of penguins, kittens and puppy faces. Sizzling meat straight off the grill, waxed-cotton jackets, hats with duck feathers in them, walking sticks, shooting sticks, an enclosure where you could buy luxury cars, luxury holidays, luxury horses and donkey rides for the kids. The piping bellow of winter music, a merry-go-round where white-painted ponies rose and fell, pink and blue plastic manes rippling in the wind; steaming hot mulled wine and chilled champagne, eight different kinds of hot chocolate and a stall selling Baltic amber and Venetian glass.
A temporary miniature town of ye-olde-timey delights, of money laid out on a whim, shopping that wasn’t spending on trash, not at all, merely innocent delight in necessary things. A monument to another world where you still walked to church across the rolling English hills, dogs lapping at your ankles and the neighbours calling your name. A bubble in time fed on 240 volts had cropped up around the fences and walkways of Ascot, selling a dream that only money could buy.
On the sidelines a few reminders of quaint pleasures for the discerning customer. The duck-herding competition was more enthralling than Theo had expected. The sheep race seemed too peculiar to take seriously, especially for those runners who had teddy-bear jockeys sewn to their bibs.
Corn put a pound on a race, and lost when his sheep refused to budge, and was in a foul mood for an hour.
Helen gossiped with Bea as they entered the stands, and sat away from the most glamorous and beautiful of the crowds, the ones who knew everyone else and thought they wer
e marvellous, just marvellous, in case there were those who knew her, and Theo watched, and waited as those shoppers who liked to be seen to care detached themselves from the wooden stalls and climbed the stairs to the wall of chairs that looked down towards the racetrack. Horses, coats polished to a reflective ebony or pristine autumn brown, tossed their heads and flicked their tails, impatient, ready to run, dwarfing their jockeys as they marched towards the starting line, unfazed by the cheering of the crowd as a favourite entered the lines, or the poles and hedges before them. Theo wondered how they trained the horses not to care about the gaze of the thousands who looked down on them. Maybe at night they played the roaring of crowds at the stables, a cascade of cheering to lull them to sleep?
When Philip Arnslade arrived, it was not subtle.
First, his helicopter came in low and loud across the site, attracting a fair share of glares from those who were claiming to enjoy the white-clad, bell-jangling, stick-clacking circle of morris dancers.
Then his security arrived, faces like breadboards, feet splayed as if struggling to contain their bodies or souls within the confines of their suits. Then Philip, chatting to a someone who is definitely something, perhaps in oil, whispering confidential somethings sure to set the crowd a-tittering.
“Well,” mused Helen as her son drifted and waved his way down to his seat. “He is predictable. Comes here for the sultans, of course, the emirs and the sheikhs. Can’t resist a shiny thing. Always mistook having wealth for being cultivated. Not the same thing at all. Wealth buys a certain culture, it buys a certain …” She realised that Bea was staring at her, silent, frowning, and the older woman smiled and squeezed her arm and muttered, “I suppose these things are fairly arbitrary after all.”
On the grass, the horses ran, the crowds cheered, and the sky threatened more snow, which did not come.
Theo sat on the other side of Helen, and watched her, watching Philip.
She didn’t move, her arm hooked so tight in Bea’s that the younger woman visibly leaned to the side, pulled down towards Helen’s neck and face. Helen’s smile didn’t fade, but locked itself in place, an engraving on a skull, as Philip nodded and smiled, before settling into a seat in the centre of the throng.
Theo looked, and looked again, and saw Seph Atkins moving through the crowd.
Seph wore white. A white coat, hanging sleeves framed with fur, that stopped at her thighs. Tight white leggings, white knee-high boots, white gloves. Helen hadn’t seen her. Helen didn’t know who to look for.
Slowly, a woman in search of another drink, Seph turned through the crowd, and her eyes flickered over Helen, and lingered.
Theo dug his chin a little lower into his stolen, dusty scarf and whispered, “She’s here.”
Helen’s eyebrows flickered, once, the thinnest of movements, and nothing else changed on her face. “Good.”
“You don’t have to …”
“Darling boy, don’t be absurd. I hired the woman, didn’t I?”
“This isn’t …”
“What would your Dani Cumali do?” Theo looked away. “Well there.” She tutted. “That’s settled.”
Helen rose, and began to walk towards Philip. Bea followed a few yards behind, and Theo stayed sitting until they were on the walkway down between the rows of seats, watching Seph.
Corn stood at the front of the stands, waiting for the races, turning now to look back at the crowd as the track lulled. Theo caught his eye and turned his head a little towards the figure of Seph drifting up the stairs towards Helen, Helen descending towards Philip. Corn nodded, began to move through the crowd.
For a moment Theo thought everything was going to fail. That Seph Atkins was too good at her job, too keen to get the work done, that it was all for nothing. Then Helen turned, stepped into a wide row of seats covered with cushions and draped with red blankets to swathe the viewers, pushed past grumbling knees and over leather bags, marched up to the nearest security man, who turned to block her path, and said, “I’d like to talk to my son, please.”
Seph kept climbing, oblivious to anything else in the world, towards the bar. Corn followed her.
“Excuse me!” exclaimed Helen as security did not move, her voice loud enough to catch the ears of listening strangers. “I would like to see my son!”
Her indignation, loud and clear, caught the ear of Philip and his guest. He looked around, and his face at once opened like an evening primrose, before locking back down into a grimace that might have wanted to be a smile.
“Mother … it’s so … Mother.”
Helen stabbed a finger towards him, having to lean past the bulk of the security guard to do it. “You tried to poison me,” she exclaimed, not with rancour but a ringing authority that sang out across the stalls. “You have suppressed evidence of mass murder and abductions on behalf of the Company and that shit of a friend of yours, Simon fucking Fardell. You have in short brought disgrace to your name, and I am thoroughly unimpressed.”
Theo, drifting downwards, put his hand over his mouth to stifle a laugh, an utterly inappropriate, terrible laugh, and realised at the same moment that he genuinely liked Helen Arnslade, that he admired her, that he wished he had more time to know her, valued her friendship, and that her death would be on his hands.
“You should be ashamed of yourself, Philip Arnslade!” added Helen, voice rising in shrill indignation. “You should be ashamed of what you’ve done.”
“Mother,” murmured Philip, slipping past the guard to grasp Helen gently by the elbow. “It’s such a relief to see you. Let me take you inside, let me take you …”
He led her away, while his wife pinned down his guests with a laugh and an anecdote about exfoliation. His security followed, and Theo and Bea followed them, Helen proclaiming all the way, “He sanctions the abduction of innocent people! Patties are held without charge! They are sent to die because they are economic burdens! These are the names of the dead—Kam Akhoon, Robert Ebutt, Ned Hayhurst, Dani Cumali …”
Philip swept his mother through a pair of double doors, cutting off her voice from the outside world, who tried texting their friends about her, and thought the text had sent, and didn’t really understand why they never got a reply.
They took Helen to a private meeting room. The racecourse had plenty, where the grand and the great could organise discreet encounters beneath grey ceilings, while projectors hummed and the coffee machine took for ever to produce something too hot to drink that burned the top of your mouth.
Theo waited with the throng at the edge of the roped-off corridor that led to the room, and utterly failed to drink a glass of overpriced white wine.
Waited.
Bea waited downstairs, watching the front exit.
Corn waited in the car park at the back.
So did Seph Atkins, huddled inside a hired Audi, smoking an e-cigarette with the window open an inch, releasing clouds of thick, blue-grey smoke that rolled upwards like an inverted waterfall through the window, and tasted of peppermint, and burned strangers’ eyes, and drove away anyone within a ten-foot radius.
In the conference rooms, various raised voices, muffled and distant.
“Mother it’s such a—”
“Tried to poison!”
“You’re not stable—she’s not stable—the medicine you were—kidnapped I can only imagine the trauma …”
“Don’t shit me, young man.”
“See you’re not just—she isn’t—it’s not that—”
“How could you do it? How could you do it to all those people? How could you do it to …”
Somewhere in the conversation Helen started to cry. She hadn’t thought she would. She hadn’t cried when her husband died. There had been so much to do. Funerals to organise, wills to read, people to inform. She had duties to perform and she had performed them and crying would have been a ridiculous distraction.
Now she cried, a foolish old woman who no one listened to, and was furious at herself for letting herself cry,
even more angry with herself than she was with her son, and that just made her cry more until she could barely get any words out at all between her pathetic, useless sniffling.
Philip blurted, “Well you see, I mean really! Really, Mother this is all so terribly—and you’re ill—so we’ll take you home now. We’re going to take you home and you can have your medicine and then …”
At the end of the corridor, alone with a white wine and a mobile phone which sometimes he pretended he was using, Theo waited and watched the door.
Once, a security man left, speaking fast and urgent on a mobile phone.
Then he returned.
Then a man in a white suit, carrying a brown leather bag, arrived.
Then he left.
Theo thought he might throw up, and waited, and did not throw up, though the feeling didn’t go away.
Outside, the crowd screamed and the horses thundered and the morris dancers leaped and the ducks quacked and money changed hands and the helicopters came and left and sheep went baaahhhh and the patties washed the toilets where someone had pissed up the wall and in the rooms behind the course a man whispered, “There’s a market for anything. I can get you some very good-looking subjects on extended contract for just …”
And time was …
Theo wasn’t sure what time was, but he knew it was rushing, running, racing forward too fast to perceive, and it was slower than anything he’d ever endured and he was going to close his eyes and wake up six months in the past and nothing would be different and nothing would have mattered.
And he knew that he had probably condemned Helen to die, and it was his fuck-up and his fault and it would all be for nothing, just like everything he’d ever done had been for nothing always and …
After an hour and ten minutes the doors to the conference room opened. Two security men emerged, looked left, looked right, saw no immediate threats. Then Helen, leaning a little on the arm of a third, her face slack, eyes distant. Then two more security men, flanking Philip, taking turns to hold the door so that one always walked in front and one behind.
