Maxwell’s House

by M. J. Trow

She nodded, closed her eyes and kissed him. It was a long, lingering kiss, the type that Barbara Cartland writes about. And it was a long time since anyone had kissed Mad Max like that. ‘But you didn’t,’ she said brightly.

  ‘So that means I’m not a child molester?’ he asked.

  She laughed. ‘No, but it does mean you’re a decent man who won’t take advantage of an available girl when she’s offered to you on a plate.’

  ‘That’s encouraging.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t suppose it’d impress anybody else – not Diamond or Jenkins et al. But it convinces me, if I needed convincing.’

  ‘I don’t like the sound of that if, Sally,’ he scolded.

  ‘Then there’s your basic intelligence,’ she said, returning to her drink.

  ‘Oh.’ He looked down at the carpet and hugged himself, swaying from side to side. ‘That little ol’ thing.’

  ‘If you won’t play along with me in the privacy of your own home, you’re certainly not going to risk all by trying to grope a girl in your office in the middle of Leighford High with the best part of fifteen hundred kids and staff dashing hither and yon.’

  ‘Ah,’ Maxwell wagged a finger at her, ‘but what if I was overcome with lust?’ he asked her. ‘If the sight of her little cleavage and daring hemline didn’t drive me into a frenzy? Sorry, do I sound a little Mills and Boon?’

  ‘Just a tad,’ she nodded. ‘Of course, it’s possible. But in that case I can’t help wondering why you haven’t been driven into a frenzy before, say at any time over the last twenty years?’

  ‘Compliant girls,’ Maxwell shrugged, ‘who kept their mouths shut.’

  ‘You’re not making this easy, Max,’ Sally told him.

  ‘And I don’t suppose my Inquisitors at the hearing will either, Sally,’ he said.

  ‘What actually happened in your office when you talked to Anne Spencer?’

  He got up and wandered to the window. In the darkened street below he saw the arc light shine on the polished roof of Sally’s car. ‘I didn’t know you drove one of those,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t.’ She quaffed her Southern Comfort, ‘it’s Alan’s. He jogs to the club these evenings. Stop changing the subject.’

  ‘The subject?’ He frowned to help him remember it. ‘Oh, yes. I was asking Anne if she knew where Jenny Hyde had got to in the days she’d gone missing – the days before she died. She got snotty and ran out screaming. As God is my judge, I didn’t lay a finger on that girl.’

  ‘Just as well,’ she said, ‘I don’t suppose her old man’s very likely to believe it, mind. Nor Maz.’

  It was as though someone had just dropped an icicle down Peter Maxwell’s back. ‘What?’ he asked.

  ‘I said, “It’s just as well …”’

  ‘No, no.’ He’d crossed to the girl. ‘Maz. You said Maz.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Who the hell’s that?’

  ‘I don’t know. He’s just Maz. All the kids know him – the sirens of Years 10 and 11. He hangs out at the Dam.’

  ‘Is he tall? Fair-haired?’ Maxwell bellowed. ‘Acne?’

  ‘I don’t know, Max,’ she shouted back. ‘What’s the matter, all of a sudden?’

  He broke away, confused, bewildered. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘It’s a name that Tim Grey mentioned.’

  ‘Tim?’ Sally frowned. ‘I wouldn’t have thought that was Tim’s scene at all.’

  ‘A tall, fair-haired boy who hangs out at the Dam,’ Maxwell was pacing the floor, talking to himself, to the furniture, to the cat, ‘is the boy they’re looking for. On Crimewatch.’

  ‘“Sleep well,”’ Sally quoted Nick Ross. ‘“Don’t have nightmares.”’

  ‘But that’s exactly what this is, Sally.’ Maxwell was facing her again, his eyes bright. ‘How do you know about this Maz?’

  ‘Special Needs,’ she said proudly. ‘You know the sort of kids we get down there. I’m going to write a book one day.’

  ‘What do they say about him? Your kids?’

  ‘About Maz? Well, he’s not one of ours. That’s for certain. He’s in a squat somewhere, Barlichway way … that’s not easy to say, by the way.’

  ‘Sally,’ he was gripping her arms, shaking her, ‘this is important.’

  ‘OK, Max.’ She shook herself free. ‘I get the message. It’s all right. He’s …’ She scratched her frizzy head, searching for the words, summoning up all the jumble of gossip the kids threw at her. ‘He’s a sort of Svengali figure, or Rasputin; I don’t know. If this was London – or Brighton, even – he’d be a pimp or a pusher – I don’t know which.’

  ‘So the police must know him?’

  She shrugged. ‘I suppose so,’ she said. ‘Except that the sort of kids he goes with aren’t likely to be into Neighbourhood Watch.’

  ‘Let’s get this straight.’ Maxwell blinked, trying to think it through. ‘This Maz shacks up with under-age girls.’

  ‘Under-age. Over-age. I don’t think he’s all that choosy.’

  ‘And he’s running around the place like bloody Chanticleer with his brood of hens and I’m out of a job because I raised my voice to a girl?’

  Sally nodded. ‘Welcome to teaching, Max,’ she said sadly.

  ‘Bollocks,’ he growled. ‘I’m not taking any of this lying down.’

  ‘Of course you’re not,’ she smiled, eyes shining. ‘You’re Mad Max – Beyond the Hippodrome!’ and she brandished an invisible something in the air.

  ‘Where can I find him?’

  ‘Maz? I dunno.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Sally,’ he pleaded. ‘Do I have to stuff fivers down your brassiere?’

  ‘Maybe I was wrong about you,’ she said wistfully. ‘Maybe you are an old pervert.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I really don’t know,’ she assured him. ‘Why not try Humphrey’s or Little Willie’s? That’s where most of our riff-raff end up.’

  ‘Right.’ He had to concentrate to remember where these places were. ‘Right.’ And he kissed her hard on the forehead. ‘Thank you, Sally Greenhow,’ he said, wrapping his scarf around his neck and hunting for his jacket. ‘Thank you for what you’ve been.’

  ‘Max, you’re not going there? Not now?’

  ‘Why not?’ He frowned at her. Then he crouched and swivelled his hips. ‘I can still do the Twist, you know.’ He suddenly winced and straightened. ‘Just.’

  ‘Oh, God.’ Sally closed her eyes.

  ‘And,’ he plopped his hat on his head and trailed her down the stairs to the newly repaired front door, ‘they say the late Rudolph Nureyev had never seen a Mashed Potato like mine.’

  And he waltzed her into the night.

  ‘Give me a lift in your husband’s automobile, you vixen. And I’ll see you in court next week.’

  Big Willie’s it had been called in the ’80s, when Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister and people still wore open-necked shirts and medallions bounced on hairy chests. In the rather more self-effacing ’90s, what with the culmination of the AIDs scare and the arrival, from nowhere, of John Major at Number Ten, they’d changed the name to Little Willie’s. Well, size wasn’t everything.

  Peter Maxwell had only ever crossed those hallowed portals once. One of the ‘characters’ of the sixth form you never seemed to get any more had held a ‘Vicars and Tarts’ party there a few years back. Maxwell, in his quaint and schizophrenic way, had gone as a Tarty Vicar, that being a slightly more likely persona than the other way around. The place was darker than he remembered, more claustrophobic.

  ‘Be careful,’ Sally Greenhow had warned him as he tumbled out of the Peugeot. He’d kissed her hand and gone inside. On his last visit the haunting ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ had filled the night. Now it all seemed to be no tune known to man. He ordered a double Southern Comfort from the spotty lad who ran the bar and found a seat in the corner.

  How long he stayed there, he didn’t know. People came and went, girls with bums encased in tight, short skirts, lads in
trainers or Doc Martens. Some he recognized from Leighford High, all of them looking rather older than they actually were and most of them under the legal age for drinking. The lad on the bar didn’t give a damn. If they showed him folding stuff, he served them.

  A few of them recognized Mad Max too and veered away. Only some thick shit he’d taught in Year 11, perhaps three years ago, hailed him.

  ‘All right, sir?’ and he raised his pint in Maxwell’s direction.

  Maxwell raised his third Southern Comfort in retaliation. It was usually the way. They couldn’t stand you in school, made your life one long hell, but outside, on the street, in the pub, in the dark of Little Willie’s, it was all mates together. Maxwell couldn’t even remember the thick shit’s name.

  He’d been watching all night for a tall, fair-haired youth who attracted girls. He’d asked the barman, on his second drink, if Maz ever came in. ‘Who wants to know?’ had been the response. When Maxwell told him he did, the barman didn’t know any Maz. He knew a Baz. But Baz was doing three years in Maidstone. He wouldn’t be in tonight.

  Maxwell had had enough Southern Comfort. The room was beyond that vague wobble – it was positively swimming. He’d had enough of the noise too. It was hammering through his head like a pneumatic drill. He downed the last of his glass and grabbed his hat. A totally pointless evening.

  ‘Oi, watch it, Grandad.’ He collided with a blonde girl in a mock leather jacket, almost as passé as he was.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said.

  ‘’Ere, it’s Mr Maxwell, ain’t it?’

  ‘Um?’ For the life of him, Maxwell couldn’t place the name. The face he knew certainly, the full mouth, the rows of ear-rings glittering in both lobes. He’d never seen the cleavage before, either, but that would have developed after she’d left school. She’d never joined the sixth form; that much was certain.

  ‘It’s Janice,’ she jogged his memory. ‘Janice Dodds. I’ve got a kid now.’

  ‘Well, well.’ Glancing at her frontage, Maxwell was surprised she didn’t have several. ‘Congratulations.’

  ‘Wot you doin’ ’ere, then?’ she asked him, hauling him down beside her. ‘After a bit of skirt?’ and she winked and drove her elbow into his ribs. She crossed her legs without an inch of suavity and he couldn’t help glancing down as men will. Perhaps that was the bit of skirt Janice had in mind? There certainly didn’t seem to be much of it.

  ‘No,’ he smiled, ‘I was just having a quiet drink.’

  ‘That’s a laugh round ’ere,’ she bellowed over the din. The lights flashed red and blue and green, casting lurid shadows on the dancers who gyrated in the centre of the floor. ‘I thought you was after a bit. Old blokes come in ’ere all the time.’

  ‘Do they?’

  ‘Oh, yeah. One the other night had his tadger out under the table. Laugh!’ and she did, rather like a donkey in labour. Not that Maxwell had ever heard a donkey in labour.

  ‘Are you here with your husband?’ he asked the girl.

  She snorted and blew bubbles in her drink. ‘You must be jokin’,’ she told him. ‘Nah, I’m ‘ere wiv Kay.’

  ‘Kay’s your friend?’

  ‘Yeah.’ She looked at him oddly. ‘Yeah, that’s right. ’E’s just ’avin’ a slash. ’E’ll be ’ere in a minute.’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ Maxwell said. ‘Kay’s a man.’

  ‘Of course he’s a man. I ain’t come ’ere wiv another girl since I was fourteen. ’E’s a proper gent is Kay.’

  ‘Oh, yes.’ Maxwell’s eyes focused on the figure who suddenly stood before them, beer in hand, staring at him. ‘Yes, indeed. Keith Miller is a proper gent.’

  ‘We’re going.’ Miller was talking to the girl.

  ‘They call you K?’ Maxwell was with them, batting people aside as all three of them made for the exit.

  ‘Piss off, Max,’ he heard Miller grunt and Maxwell collided with a column, his concentration broken, his quarry gone. Frantically he looked around him. There. On the steps. By the door. Janice was being dragged by the wrist, teetering on her ludicrous platform soles, glancing back to see where Maxwell was. He launched himself at the steps, bounding up two at a time, jostling past a couple necking at the top. Then he was out in the night and the tarmac glistened at his feet.

  ‘Keith!’ He could see them running across the car-park, could hear the girl’s heels clattering like some demented typewriter. It had been a long time since Peter Maxwell had run like this, a long time since his sprinting days at Jesus. Still, some things you didn’t forget. Like falling off a bike really. His hand gripped Miller’s sleeve and he spun him round. ‘Just a word, Keith,’ Maxwell gasped.

  ‘Let go of me, Max.’ Miller’s eyes flashed in the darkness. ‘I don’t want to hurt you.’

  ‘Hurt me?’ Maxwell watched his breath snake out on the damp air. ‘Why would you want to do that, Keith?’

  ‘Just leave well alone!’ Miller barked and fumbled with his keys in the lock.

  ‘How well did you know Jenny Hyde?’ Maxwell asked him.

  ‘Shit!’ Miller’s key had slipped from the lock.

  ‘Keith,’ Maxwell spun him round, ‘I have to know.’

  It had been a long time since Peter Maxwell had had a fist fight too. In his day there were vague rules and some misguided knight-errantry within him had told him never to throw the first punch. So it was now. He felt the breath leave his body as Miller’s fist came from nowhere and caught him in the pit of his stomach. He felt his knees hit the tarmac and his lungs hit his chin. His reaction was faster, however, than Miller had expected and Maxwell threw himself forward so that his head thudded into Miller’s groin.

  ‘Bastard!’ the younger man hissed, reeling away from the car and clutching his crotch.

  Maxwell was back on his feet by the time Miller was able to straighten.

  ‘What’s the matter, Keith?’ he rasped, fighting to regain his breath, through the shock and the winding he had received. ‘Guilty conscience?’

  ‘Come on, you two!’ Janice Dodds’s shrill tones tried to break the tension of the moment.

  There were shouts from the neon-lit forecourt of Little Willie’s as punters realized a punch-up had started and hurried over to watch or join in, as they saw fit. Maxwell was ready for the next one. Clearly, Keith Miller had been misjudged by Janice Dodds. He wasn’t a proper gent, after all, and he proved it by lashing out with his right boot. Maxwell caught it with his left hand and wrenched to the right, throwing the younger man heavily against his car. Then he broke all the rules he’d ever lived by and drove his elbow into the man’s kidneys. Miller slumped forward over the bonnet.

  ‘Bloody right!’ someone shouted. ‘Good on yer, granddad.’

  Janice was reaching down, trying to peel Keith Miller off the car, to see how badly he was hurt. She was knocked sideways as he hauled himself up and caught Maxwell high in the ribs with both fists clasped together. Then the boot came up again, once, twice, three times in quick succession and Maxwell went down. He felt Miller’s boot hit his head, his back, his head again. Then there was a scraping of boots on tarmac and he heard Janice screaming at her proper gent, ‘Fuckin’ leave ’im alone. You’re fuckin’ killin’ ’im.’

  Miller pushed her away and scrabbled for his keys again. Then he was in the car and was gone. A pair of hands cradled Maxwell’s head. He felt cold, old, finished. ‘Well, then,’ he coughed in the wake of the car’s rear lights, ‘we’ll call it a draw, shall we?’ He could just make out the contorted face of Janice Dodds peering into his own. ‘It’s a line’, he managed, ‘from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.’ He didn’t remember any more.

  15

  ‘Do you give your cat milk or what?’

  Peter Maxwell recognized the words but the voice was alien at first.

  ‘Can you hear me?’ It got louder.

  He realized he was lying on his own settee, blinking up at the over-made-up face of Janice Dodds. ‘Yes. Yes,’ he replied to her questions.

 
; ‘Do you give your cat milk?’ she asked again.

  ‘Yes,’ Maxwell repeated.

  ‘Wassisname?’ she asked.

  ‘Metternich.’ He tried to straighten.

  ‘Now, come on,’ she steadied him, ‘you’ve got a great big lump on your ’ead. You don’t wanna to be jumping about for a while.’

  ‘Janice.’ Maxwell felt his temple. She was right. A great big lump. And his jaw wasn’t working too chipperly either. ‘How did I get here?’

  ‘In a taxi, darlin’,’ she said. ‘The fare was two pound twenty-five. I found it in your pocket. ’Ope you don’t mind.’

  ‘Er … no.’ Maxwell couldn’t even focus on his living-room, much less the small change that may or may not have been in his jacket pocket. ‘The cab-driver didn’t think it odd, my bleeding over his plastic?’

  ‘Nah, ’e thought you was pissed. Anyhow ’e was too busy coppin’ the view up my skirt to notice you.’

  Maxwell groaned as the pain hit him in the side.

  ‘Oh,’ she put her arm around his neck, ‘an’ I reckon Kay broke one or two o’ your ribs an’ all.’

  ‘I reckon you’re right,’ Maxwell winced.

  ‘Why?’ She looked him in the eyes. ‘Why did you ’ave a go at ‘im?’

  ‘I thought you said he was a proper gent.’

  ‘Did I?’ She dropped her arm and shrugged. ‘Well, nobody’s perfect. ’E’s got a bloody terrible temper, ’as Kay. An’ ’e’s gotta be twenty years younger than you.’

  ‘Well, perhaps ten.’ Maxwell had a bruised ego somewhere, as well as a bruised body. ‘How did you know where I lived?’

  She reached to her left and wagged his wallet at him. ‘I may not have done very good in GCSEs but I can fuckin’ read like the next one.’ She pulled out a card. ‘Peter Maxwell, Thirty-eight, Columbine Avenue, Leighford, West Sussex, Haitch Ell One Five, Two Eff Oh. Who’s this?’

  Maxwell forced his eyes to focus on the faded, crumpled photograph in the girl’s hand. For an instant, he wanted to reach out, snatch it from her. But he didn’t have the strength. And he didn’t have the will.

  ‘My wife,’ he said. ‘My wife and daughter.’

  ‘I didn’t know you was married,’ she said. ‘At school we all thought you was gay.’