The White Mercedes

by Philip Pullman

  ‘People like me?’

  ‘People with nice houses and jobs and degrees and stuff. That’s not my world, Chris, I’m different. It’s not a class thing, if that’s what you’re thinking.’

  ‘I wasn’t!’

  ‘It’s what you were thinking that I was thinking.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Work it out.’

  He did, and then said, ‘No I wasn’t. I don’t know why it needn’t be your world. If you can play language tricks like that you’re already more at home in it than I am. It’s anybody’s world. And if you’re clever it just seems a waste…’

  She said nothing, and he felt rebuked; but presently they were talking again, lightly this time, and laughing together. As darkness fell they had to hurry to be out of the park before the gates were locked. They wandered down a narrow lane overhung with dark trees and out into the road called St Giles’, immensely wide, with tall dignified houses and old stone college buildings on either side.

  Under the trees at the foot of the great classical buildings of the Ashmolean Museum, a scruffy little kebab van was parked. Chris bought doner kebabs and they sat on the museum steps to eat them, disregarding salmonella; love was proof against food poisoning. How she felt about him he couldn’t tell, though he thought she probably liked him; but he was in love, intoxicated, drunk with it. Everything about her was perfect, mysterious, miraculous, from the beautiful freesia-like scent she was wearing to the white ribbon she’d tied around her hair to the bare brown skin of her delicate feet. His senses were swimming with love; he would have died for her.

  —

  As for Jenny…She didn’t tell him why she’d left home, because she was ashamed. The whole first part of her life was stained with shame and guilt, and yet not a day went past when she didn’t return to it, remaking it in her mind, fruitlessly.

  She had lived with her parents in the Yorkshire town she’d been born in. Her father was a warehouseman, her mother a school cook. When Jenny was six years old her father’s firm closed down, like so many others in the early eighties, and he could find no other work.

  A little while after that, the local council changed the school meal arrangements. Instead of employing their own cooks, the education authority put the service out to tender. Private firms were invited to bid for the contracts. Many women were made redundant, including Jenny’s mother, and although some of them got jobs with the private caterer, many of them didn’t. Jenny’s mother was one of the unlucky ones.

  So for a long time things were bad in the household. After a year, Jenny’s mother found another job, as a hospital cleaner this time, but her father was less lucky. He had nothing to do but stay indoors all day, smoking and watching television. Because her mother had to leave the house early in the morning, it was her father who woke Jenny and made her breakfast, and it was then that he began to abuse her.

  At first it was just a matter of patting her bare arms, her bare legs, so lightly and casually that it might have meant nothing. But this gradually changed. Patting became stroking and stroking became squeezing, and by this time Jenny, who was eight, felt hot when it happened and dirty and unhappy afterwards.

  Then it got worse: foul tobaccoey kisses, hands inside her knickers. And worse still. Jenny tried to tell her mother, but she was tired and impatient and Jenny couldn’t even say it, anyway. She tried to tell her teacher, but the school was suffering such a rapid turnover of staff that Jenny knew none of them long enough to trust.

  After five years of it, desperate, she got a knife and hid it in her bed. She wasn’t sure what she was going to do with it, though she was ready to kill him. When he came to her that morning she jabbed it at him and cut him on the hand, not badly, but enough to make it bleed a lot. The blood made her feel faint, and it frightened him, too, but when he’d seen how trivial the wound was, he hit her. From then on the pattern changed. He carried on touching her, but now he hit her as well—cruel, painful blows in places where it didn’t show. Jenny had given up expecting help by this time. She’d seen that by taking action herself she could change things, though not necessarily in ways that she’d wanted. It was a useful lesson.

  After another year or so her father finally got a job. He had to leave the house early and he had less opportunity to be on his own with his daughter. The abuse slowed down, but that made no difference to Jenny, who’d made her mind up to leave home as soon as she was sixteen. She waited until then because she wanted to be completely, legally, free of any obligation to live at home and go to school.

  So on the morning of her sixteenth birthday she got up before anyone else in the house, had a last breakfast on her own in the little kitchen, and washed the bowl and the spoon before taking her rucksack and walking out. She left a note saying ‘Bye Mum, I’ll be in touch’, and went to the bus station. She caught a coach to the South and left her home town for ever.

  Nothing that had happened since then had wiped out the shame and the fear and the hatred. She had slept with a number of boys, including Piers, and though some were fun and some were kind and some were attractive, she saw her father looking out of their eyes, and when she closed hers, it was to hide. Maybe, one day, she’d tell someone; maybe she’d tell Chris. But not for a long time yet.

  Three

  On the following Monday, Barry Miller asked Chris if he’d help him with a special job. Chris thought it might have been another ball, but it turned out to be less glamorous than that.

  ‘I got this shed,’ Barry said, as they drove up through Oxford in the van with Chris’s bike in the back. ‘Well, more of a chalet, really. On the canal. I want to wire it up and decorate it, use it as a workshop or something. Put a bed in, maybe. Make it comfortable.’

  They went into Kidlington first, two or three miles north of the city, to pick up some bits and pieces from home. Barry lived in a neat little house on a modern estate. They got there at about four o’clock, and Barry’s wife Sue offered to make them a cup of tea.

  She worked as a school secretary, she told him. Their ten-year-old son Sean was playing football outside, and Barry stopped and dribbled the ball about before taking a shot that banged against the garage door, where the goal was. Sue rolled her eyes. She was a pretty woman, blonde and quiet, with an odd air of cheerful common sense shadowed by anxiety, as if someone near to her—her son, perhaps—was better now, but had recently had a serious illness from which he wasn’t quite free. Chris found himself warming to her at once. It was curious that in the van on the way there, Barry had asked him not to mention the shed to Sue; but she seemed to understand her husband, and didn’t ask what job they were on.

  ‘How long have you lived in Oxford, Chris?’ she said, as Barry showed Sean how to bend the ball round a defender.

  ‘All my life. I was born here. D’you come from London?’

  ‘Yeah. We moved here three years ago. We were going to go to Australia, but my parents are getting on, you know how it is…Barry’s happy, anyway. Have you left school? You look too old…’

  ‘I’ve got another year. Then I do my A levels and try for university. Sue, d’you think if a person’s clever enough, they should go to university and use their talent?’

  ‘If they’ve got the chance, yes,’ she said. ‘I’m doing a degree now with the Open University. It’s amazing. It’s the most exciting thing I’ve ever done. I’m learning so much…I’m doing English Literature. Barry thinks I must be really clever, but I keep telling him he’s cleverer than me, he should do a course too. But he’s practical, clever with his hands, really.’

  ‘He’s busy,’ said Chris. ‘The firm’s got a lot of work on.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, nodding, looking out at the neat lawn, their happy son. ‘It’s come on well. It was probably the right thing to do, to come here.’

  They were fond of each other in a way Chris admired enormously. They seemed to like each other, to tease and tolerate and laugh with each other, as well as being close physically. When he came in, Barry had embr
aced her, and she had hugged him back tightly. And he obviously loved his son and was loved in return. There was one moment which Chris saw through the window as he drank his tea: Barry was dribbling the football, and Sean tackled him and surprised them both by winning it. Barry turned deftly and got the ball back from Sean’s feet, and spun and shot in the same movement. It was an excellent shot. It hit the garage with a deafening clang. But in the shooting, Barry lost his balance and sat down with a sudden thump on his backside. It was Sean’s reaction that captivated Chris: his laughing, flushed expression showed him simultaneously admiring his father’s shot, laughing at the comic fall, and concerned in case he’d hurt himself. Somehow in that expression Chris saw a lifetime of love, an image of what a family should be. A look like that on your son’s face would be something to be proud of.

  On their way to the shed by the canal Barry told Chris about Sean.

  ‘He’s the king of the world as far as I’m concerned,’ he said. ‘He takes after his mum in all the good ways. He’s quick and clever, but he’s kind-hearted too, you know what I mean? He’s not soft, I don’t mean that. I mean he’s kind, he’s a kind boy. I worry about him sometimes.’

  ‘Why? He seems really happy.’

  ‘You never know what can happen. I used to know some villains…I’ve seen some bad things, I’ve done some bad things, come to that. Once you look under the surface, kind of thing, you never feel safe, not really.’

  Chris didn’t know what he meant. They turned off the roundabout and down past the motel towards the village of Wolvercote. They went over the steep canal bridge and almost immediately took a right turn along a rough track under the trees.

  ‘I haven’t been along here for years,’ Chris said. ‘I’d forgotten all about it.’

  ‘Good,’ said Barry. ‘The less people know about this place, the better.’

  ‘Why? You going to open a secret casino or something?’

  Barry said nothing till they pulled up, about half a mile along the canal, in a clearing beside a cluster of tumbledown farm buildings.

  ‘No,’ he said finally. ‘Just a place to go to ground in. Keep out of sight for a while.’

  ‘What for?’ said Chris, getting out with him. ‘Is someone after you? I mean, you know, don’t tell me if you don’t want to, but…’

  Barry looked around. In his yellow polo shirt and light trousers he looked young, tough, cool, like an actor playing the hero in a thriller.

  ‘Listen, Chris,’ he said. ‘I’m going to trust you, OK. You’re a bright kind of bloke. I can’t tell Dave or Tony, they haven’t got two brains to rub together, but I gotta tell someone. The thing is, a few years back, I had a run-in with this family, right, three brothers. Name of Carson. They were villains; they were evil. Actually they were worse than villains. They had connections with terrorism. Irish, you know, paramilitaries…They stuck together like the Mafia. Code of honour. Anyway, I had something to do with putting two of ’em behind bars…Straight up, honest. So I gotta be careful. They won’t touch Sue or Sean, that’d be well out of order. But, you know, just in case. That’s why I got this place. You never said anything to her?’

  ‘Not a word.’

  ‘Good lad. She’d only worry. So’—he looked around—‘it’s just a matter of wiring it up, really. Make it habitable, nothing posh, couple of lights, sockets, storage heaters. Day’s work, maybe. Like I said, Dave or Tony’d be talking all over the place, all mouth…Good lads, mind you, fair old workers…Cop hold of this.’

  He handed Chris a roll of heavy cable from the back of the van and took a tool box and various fittings himself, and led the way to a substantial-looking shed half buried in nettles. It was made of pre-cast concrete panels, and the roof was of corrugated iron, and despite the air of decay all around, it was impressively solid. Barry turned a key and they walked in. The concrete floor was unbroken; there was no smell of damp. There was even a working electric light, with a fluorescent tube mounted clumsily on the wooden beams holding up the roof.

  ‘Not bad, eh? Well built, you can say that for it. I’m going to insulate it, put some fibreglass stuff in the roof, panel the walls, do it all decent. There’s water laid on, look…’ He jerked his head at a metal sink in a corner. ‘Could put a shower in, actually, now I think of it. You done any plumbing? Shouldn’t be too hard to put a toilet in, really, should it? Common sense, really. Yeah, little shower room, toilet, kitchenette…Be worth a bit, wouldn’t it, eh? There’s an idea in that, you know. Holiday chalets. Get the design right, and bingo. Property in Europe, now, that’s dirt cheap. Get in quick. That’s a good idea, that…’

  What Chris liked about Barry was his quickness. A minute before he’d been full of dark hints about Mafia-style revenge, and now here he was making a mental fortune by building holiday chalets in Europe.

  However much wishful thinking went into his forward planning, he was practical enough when it came to details. He’d made a wiring design that Chris had no difficulty in understanding, and all the cable, the fittings and the tools were soon out of the van and in a neat pile on the concrete floor.

  ’Course, strictly speaking, I shouldn’t take this out the business, being as it’s a private dwelling. It’s going down as a business expense, though, taxwise. I always pay me taxes. Some blokes don’t, but it’s a mug’s game. It might take ’em years but they get you in the end. Right, Chris. You all right to cope with this?’

  Chris nodded. ‘There’s one thing on this plan…You don’t want a switch by the door? A main switch for the lights?’

  ‘Ah. I knew I’d forgotten something. I’m going to get one of them infra-red detectors, right, so as soon as anyone comes near the shed, the lights come on. It’s going to go here, by the door. So when you come in, the lights are on already, and they stay on till you go to the switch there by the consumer unit to override it and leave ’em on. See?’

  It looked a bit over-complicated to Chris; if the infra-red unit failed, you’d have to fumble about near the floor in the dark before you found the light switch. However, it was easy enough to understand.

  ‘Where’s the infra-red detector?’ he said, looking at the pile on the floor.

  ‘It’s a special one. I had to order it. It ain’t come in yet. Just treat it like a normal switch; put the wire there, like it says in the diagram, and tape it up safely. We’ll put the infra-red switch in when it gets here. OK? Can you get on with it on your own, then, now you know where it is? Take the key, look, I’ll give you the key, I’ve got a spare. I reckon it’ll take a day. That fair?’

  ‘I reckon so,’ said Chris, thinking he could do it in half that. ‘Easily.’

  ‘So I’ll unload your bike now and leave you to it. Start tomorrow, start now, do it when you like. I’ll expect you—what’s today? Monday? I’ll expect you in on Wednesday morning, with the job done. Give us a call if you hit a problem.’

  Chris pocketed the key and watched the van bump away down the shady track under the trees. Soon there was no sound at all but bird song and the perpetual distant drone of traffic on the ring road, but that was so muffled by the leaves that it was hardly there at all. The little group of huts was drenched, drowned in green; ivy was swarming over walls, nettles were crowding at the doors, tall rank grass had obliterated pathways. Chris spent a few minutes looking around the other buildings—a chicken-house, what looked like a milking shed, and something else that had nearly fallen down—before looking for the canal. It was invisible, though he knew it must be less than a stone’s throw away; the encircling green, a burgeoning riot of leaves, twigs, branches, grass, weeds, disoriented him. Finally he saw a gap in the bushes and pushed through it to come out on to the empty towpath.

  The canal was quiet, narrow, and brown. A blue dragonfly skimmed the surface. Some way off to the right a small abandoned cabin-cruiser lay half-sunk, gently sliding into decay, some of its molecules no doubt already blooming triumphantly in the reeds that grew alongside. Chris had watched the canal from the
bridge in Wolvercote. Half a dozen narrow boats a day, if that, passed along, with holiday-makers sunning themselves as they manipulated the lock gates or leant on the tiller. There was no one in sight now, no other creature but the dragonfly and an incurious brown horse in the parched meadow across the canal.

  Chris went back through the bushes to the shed. Or chalet: he could see it vividly as Barry saw it, cedar-clad, with plate-glass windows, a patio with a table under an umbrella, window-boxes cascading brightly coloured flowers, Barry himself and Sue and Sean, perhaps in swimming costumes around a barbecue. It was an illustration from a holiday brochure.

  The reality was less glamorous. It was just a blank space. It could have served equally well as an artist’s studio, a temporary classroom in a crowded school, or a Central American torture-chamber. Alone, happy, apprehensive, Chris began to sort out the tools and the cable for the job, and, as always when he was alone, he let himself daydream. Soon it was not Barry who lived there but himself and Jenny. Her slender ironical presence already filled the clearing like a ghost.

  —

  Barry’s story of the Carson brothers was partly true. It had nothing to do with terrorism, though. Nor had Barry’s name always been Miller.

  He’d been living in south London. His name was Barry Springer, and he had been working as an electrician. He’d become involved in a casual way with two brothers called Frank and Billy Carson, who liked to think of themselves as gang-leaders, like the famous Kray twins. And, like the Krays’ world, that of the Carsons overlapped the fringes of show business. Barry enjoyed the feeling of danger and glamour; he especially liked mixing with half-famous people like snooker players and TV actors, buying them drinks in clubs, being regarded by them as one of the Carson gang.

  In fact, the Carson brothers were Incompetent thugs. They’d carried out a number of robberies from jeweller’s shops, without being caught, but without getting rich, either. They had decided to rob a Securicor van delivering money to a bank, and, with the money from that, to buy their way into a big drugs operation.