Chain Reaction

by Gillian White

  The leaflet said—Redundancy? Opportunity!

  All is gloom and doom.

  Oh, if only they hadn’t decided to start that business… but their hopes had been dazzling then. If only they had just given up trying and invested the money instead, sold the house around the end of the eighties and moved into a smaller one. Seven years ago, the investments would have doubled by now. Still, you just can’t stop and give up like that, somehow it’s not right. You have to go on. You have to give it a whirl. And it wasn’t as if they dived into it cold, either. Oh no, they went on the appropriate courses, did the necessary market research, sent flyers round, advertised in the local papers. And Joy gave up work in the dress shop to keep the books, man the telephone and do the secretarial work. She sent out the bills, too—bills that were seldom paid.

  Oh, it’s all a great big con. Oh, truly the world is a cruel place and life is nothing but a treacherous bog.

  Poor Joy. Waste not want not. Joy will finish the food on her plate. Cauliflower cheese, such a tired idea, sums up her present mood to perfection.

  THREE

  Penmore House, Ribblestone Close, Preston, Lancs

  IF ONLY THEY COULD take time back she would deal with her children so differently. Ah, but it’s too late, far too late for that now. ‘You don’t think she recognised us, do you, Lenny?’

  Anyone would think his beleaguered wife had a villainous look about her.

  Lenny Middleton inwardly groans, concentrates on the road ahead. The traffic is heavy. It’s always heavy these days, too many cars, too many people. ‘Now why on earth would they recognise us? Come on now, Babs, get with it. We’re three hundred miles away from home, nobody’s heard of us round here, or of Jody. Come on, pet. This just won’t do!’

  But Babs cannot relax, instead she plays nervously with her hands on her lap. A tiny, muscular woman with almost a twitch to her lips, she stares through the drizzle, wanting to believe him, wanting so badly to believe him, but her eyes are not focused on anything real; she stares out, but sees nothing. ‘I know, love,’ she mutters. ‘I know I’m daft. It’s just that these days I always feel people know who I am and despise me…’

  ‘You can never get your mind onto anything else, that’s your trouble.’ This time her husband is moved to take one hand from the wheel and try to pat her calm with it. ‘Don’t worry. It’s going to be okay. A fresh start, Babs, like we said. A fresh start for all of us. No looking back, pet, not now.’

  Babs smiles, but faintly. ‘It was just the way that woman looked down her nose at us. As if we’re not good enough for her house.’

  ‘She was nothing but a jumped-up snob. What a lot of pretentious nonsense. Glossy white horses with flowing manes—the kind of pictures they hang on the wall in Boots. But the house was grand though. What did you think?’

  ‘I don’t really care where we live any more, Len, quite frankly.’

  The two girls in the back of the car exchange tired glances before staring blandly out in silence once again. These are uneasy children. They have heard this discussion so many times of late they don’t bother to listen any more. This intense absorption of their parents for one another has turned them into virtual strangers to their kids. Cindy and Dawn Middleton don’t care what happens now as long as they escape from Preston, as long as there is a change in their world. Maybe then these endless traumas will cease, and people will stop talking about their brother Jody for once and for all.

  I mean. These past few weeks they haven’t even been able to go to school. This trip has been a real relief, the chance to get away from it all viewing houses down south. Perhaps, when they get back, there’ll be some positive news about their own house. A couple are already interested even though it is only just on the market.

  It’s not as though they want to move. The fact is, they’ve been driven out.

  ‘We must try and believe that this hell is nothing but a passage, a pathway we must travel along before we reach something better.’

  High-minded, huh. It’s fine for Dad to talk like that, he doesn’t have to suffer the way they do, because he’s a man. And kids are so cruel. At least some adults pretend, the men more so than the women.

  Some women seem to thrive on unkindness. Even neighbours, those they’d known since childhood, started shouting obscenities at them. Some shouted, some jeered and some stayed silent. These were the worst. Those silences grew into piercing hisses.

  Since the rape they have watched their mother quietly disintegrate before their eyes. She hadn’t shouted and sworn like their father had at first, in angry denial. When Jody was arrested it seemed like a kind of death. The house went hushed and gloomy and full of whispers. Even the stairs, normally a space for cheerful communications, turned into the twisting stone steps of a castle, echoing to the whispers of sad ghosts. Nothing good meanders up them any more. It would have been easier for everyone if Jody had merely died, crashed his bike as everyone predicted he would.

  Cool to the point of crazy.

  RAPE. There’s no gentle way of saying it, no way of discriminating between a vicious, violent attack by a stranger in some dark and nightmare alley, and a mistake made by a confused boy and a young woman who is half-witted anyway, according to reports.

  ‘She led him on,’ said their father with a little too much emphasis. ‘She must have done.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Mum, eyes red from nights of crying, her small features pinched in her triangle face. Her voice was strengthened by a wild despair, trying to distance herself from her child and even her cardigan was buttoned up wrongly, for Jody was her first love. ‘Oh yes, they’re going to believe that, Len, aren’t they? She led him on and then he thoughtfully left her in an hysterical state in the woods beside the reservoir.’

  Real pain. Real pain remembered in the back of a car.

  After they heard the unbelievable news of Jody’s arrest Dawn sat on the edge of her bed and dialled Alex’s number. Alex would help her. Alex would understand. Alex had already heard the news which must have moved like a fuse through the gardens and parks and suburban avenues, ‘Oh Alex, we’re shattered, nobody knows what to do to help. I left everyone sitting downstairs, Mum is crying, won’t you come round?’

  ‘I can’t, not just now, actually, Dawn. I’ve got this essay to do…’

  ‘Oh Alex, please. If you only knew…’ She still didn’t get it.

  ‘I’m really sorry, Dawn. There’s just no way I can—’

  ‘Jody didn’t do it, you know!’

  And then she was suddenly, suffocatingly aware that Alex, Jody’s lifelong mate and her boyfriend for six months, was trying to extricate himself from everything that had been between them. Too proud to beg, she forced herself to chat on about other, petty things, and finally put down the phone with tears in her eyes and a cheerful, defensive, ‘Good night.’

  Real pain. Real pain remembered in the back of a car.

  On her way to school the following day, how eagerly Cindy had approached her friends. There was Ruth, Martha, Jennie, Carol, all on the corner beside the shop going in for fags and Mini Eggs. ‘Hi!’ Her step hadn’t even faltered. She needed them badly today. She needed their support, their comforting reassurance.

  ‘Hi, Cindy.’ A pale response to this, once the most popular member. Nobody’s eyes met hers, she saw them flick round with knowing, and lips were bitten and heads went down.

  She stopped dead, hands on hips, satchel hanging from her elbow. ‘He didn’t do it, you know!’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘He really did not do it.’

  Not one sincere response, from girls who used to fancy him. And the group formed in a ring which was impenetrable. There was a hole in the middle where she ought to be and, for the first time in her whole life, the popular Cindy Middleton walked on to school alone.

  It’s going to be a long drive back to Preston, mostly through the night. When they were little and going on holi
day they used to drive through the night. When they stopped at the Little Chef for breakfast they knew they’d arrived in Cornwall. All silver and dancing ripples awash with colour and images and an oily, salty tang in the air.

  Their hearts were so light and happy then, cruising like the seagulls.

  Now, as far as Dawn and Cindy are concerned, the future can only be seen as some vague dread.

  A homemaker, that’s Babs.

  And a mother. Three kids. For twenty-seven months of her life, her body was not hers, and for years after that her breasts used to tingle whenever a baby cried.

  Some people say it’s to do with diet, some say it’s a wayward gene, but if that’s the case, how come her two girls are so normal while Jody was always hyper-active, up to his tricks, one of the lads, a clown, a lovable, stupid clown. Skiving off school, scrumping apples, writing rude remarks in the church visitors’ book and signing them with his own name and address. I ask you. They’ve been brought up exactly the same, Babs knows that.

  She’d been easy on him—too easy? Afraid that too much discipline might knock the stuffing out of this rumbustious, funny and popular kid. Can you blame her? A super character, everyone said, a one-off. Her baby, Jody… the first word he spoke, the feel of his lashes against her cheek, the rubbery back of his neck with its talcum-powdery smell.

  RAPE.

  She liked the house, Joyvern, better than the rest they’d seen. She liked the empty smell of it and the possibilities of putting something new in its place, and when they sit down to talk about it the following day, back in the stifling Close in Preston, Lenny agrees with her.

  And it’s reasonably priced, too. They will easily be able to manage it.

  Can it be that things are working but at last?

  ‘So what must we do next?’ Babs asks in dead tones.

  She’d never have asked that way once. Lenny tries to hide his irritation, calming her as if she’s a jittery horse, as he knows she can’t help this new dependency thing. She’s so uncertain of everything now she seems to need to ask someone before she gets up out of her chair. Every single thing in her house feels unfamiliar, either that, or, in another minute, full of an overwhelming sense of the past. They have taken her child away unweaned and it’s all too late.

  ‘I’ll go in tomorrow, love,’ says Len. ‘Tell them we’ve decided.’

  ‘You don’t think we ought to look at some more? After all, it’s a buyers’ market.’

  ‘No, Babs, there’s no point. We both like that one. That house will suit us fine.’

  ‘If only the Smedleys buy this one. If only they keep their word.’

  ‘She sounded certain when I spoke to her on the phone. We can’t ask for more than that. But everything depends on theirs being sold.’

  ‘So should we accept their offer?’

  Len would gladly accept any offer, providing it meant they could move out of here. One lucky star shines for them all in this very long and dark night—the company’s offer of a job down south, a straight transfer, managing the brand new superstore. ‘We’ll make an offer for Joyvern first, and if that’s accepted, we’ll go with the Smedleys.’

  ‘It’ll be accepted all right,’ says Babs. ‘They’re desperate.’

  Len turns to his wife, surprised at the sudden certainty. ‘And how d’you know that?’

  Babs gives an ironic smile. ‘I don’t know, I’m just guessing.’ But that is a lie. She knows desperation when she sees it. There’s a contact between the desperate in life, like the crackle of electricity passing between two fingers, so how come Len is immune to it?

  She knows that her resentment is unfair, but it hasn’t been quite so hard for him. He’s had his work for a start, every morning somewhere to go and some other subject to concentrate on, people to talk to. People around him who don’t know. Whereas she resigned her part-time job the minute the monster raised its head. Well, she could hardly continue manning the surgery dealing with local people who viewed her as if she had grown two horns, could she? The doctors didn’t ask her to go, but she had to do the decent thing and take the plunge into isolation. Because everyone knows, when these things happen, it is the mother who is to blame. Sometimes, Babs Middleton longs to run away, just pack a carrier bag and disappear.

  ‘I’ll make some tea, love, if you like. Shall I, Len, are you hungry? A mushroom omelette, perhaps?’ She cracks eggs into the bowl and envies the mixture which has more energy about it than her. She’s had quite enough of emotion just lately. What she really wants is never to feel another thing. But this will pass, Babs tells herself. Time will pass and one day I will wake up again.

  Why didn’t he say? If he was innocent, he would have said he’d been with her, wouldn’t he?

  The awful part was the three-day search for Janice Plunket. That’s how it started. And naturally everyone was involved. A vulnerable girl aged twenty-three from a special unit gone suddenly missing like that. Her parents appealed on the local TV, there were posters stuck on lamp-posts. You couldn’t miss it. You couldn’t not know. They searched the river rushes, under boulders where the water whirled deep brown in places, they scoured through the bracken on the hills, the smallest twig, stone, tussock and curled leaf, nothing remained unturned. Naturally it was the talk of the town.

  Their dire premonitions buzzed together, formed a cloud overhead.

  ‘She’ll be dead by now, poor bairn, mark my words.’

  ‘What a world when a poor little maid like that…’

  ‘I’m glad I’m not a mother today. They say it’s no different but things aren’t the same…’

  ‘They’ll catch the bastard and he’ll get six months.’

  ‘They say she’s wandered off before. She’s a bit, you know, a bit lardy.’

  ‘But they found her safe that time, didn’t they, sitting at the back of the Regal. Apparently she’d been locked in there all night.’

  ‘They should cut their balls off, these men.’

  Round and round it went like a dance, a hive of bees buzzing and dancing and Babs joined in, well, of course she did.

  ‘Someone must know who he is,’ the police said darkly, and in that small community everyone felt vaguely guilty. ‘Someone must know.’

  And so it went on like that, for three whole days and nights. It seems detached now, like a dream. And there was Jody sitting beside her at times as calm as you like, not batting an eyelid, chewing an apple and watching telly. Sometimes having a game of Scrabble and cheating outrageously before he lost.

  Should Babs have suspected? Why? What the hell should she have suspected?

  And then came the day when Janice Plunket blundered out of the undergrowth beside the reservoir with her lips stained blue with berries, her legs scratched with brambles and wire, and cuckoo spit was not the only frothy white substance stuck to her skirt. An innocent, marching to a different drum. A passing motorist recognised her, picked her up and took her to the police station where they gave her a cup of sweet tea and a couple of custard creams. Her desperate parents rushed to her side. She stuffed her hands down her knickers and sniffed. The flat planes of her fleshy face gave nothing further away. On her father’s request the police did an examination, an internal examination.

  RAPE, went up the cry!

  ‘We knew it,’ came the satisfied public response. ‘You can’t have a maid missing for three days without her being interfered with.’

  ‘Who did it?’ howled the angry chorus. But Janice Plunket did not enlighten them. She turned away, smiled smugly, and fatly crossed her legs upon her secret.

  ‘Why didn’t he say?’ Tell everyone where he had left her? If he was innocent?

  And Babs Middleton feels her breasts ache now for the eighteen-year-old child in the cell, but the beads of her milk, if any there be outside her own imagination, run uselessly away.

  FOUR

  The Grange, Dunsop, Nr Clitheroe, Lancs

  AN INTERESTING FACT THIS, and one that most of his fans don’t kno
w, but Jacy Smedley originally intended to be known as JC, Son of God. When he first contacted his agent, the letter that arrived back enclosing that first master tape was addressed to JACY. He studied this for a while, worrying about his image which was, in those early excitements, to include such weird manifestations as stigmata, before deciding that ‘Jacy’ looked quite nice actually, and was probably less likely to rub the establishment up the wrong way. No matter how wild you intend to be, it is wiser not to upset the establishment. However, in subsequent meetings that same agent advised him to drop the name Smedley altogether, and so it came about that three years later, Colin Smedley found world renown under the single title of Jacy, lead singer for ‘Sugarshack’.

  His fall from grace he compares with that of Lady Thatcher, for it was around about the same time that he realised things were not as they should be and had not been so for some months. Since that first awful glimpse of reality things have gone downhill fast. But at least Belle is still with him.

  Must he really leave his beautiful country house and take up residence in a Close? The double glazing alone had cost him a fortune; he’d replaced all those silly leaded windows, and they’ll not recoup that money in a hurry.

  Belle, with rings in her nipples, her navel, her nose and another more private place, says yes, he must, he has no choice. It’s either that or follow in the steps of some other members of the group she could name, all pride gone, dirty, unshaven, thieving for the dosh they require to fund the habit they all took up when money sprayed over their heads like water, record companies vied for their signatures and women queued up to do virtually anything in order to say they’d been screwed by some Godlike member of Sugarshack.

  Colin Smedley was, in fact, to his millions of followers, Jesus Christ incarnate. So much so that he once terrified security by administering Holy Communion to 30,000 fans from the stage at Wembley.

  But now. Week after week, and the phone doesn’t ring. Nobody wants him, nothing happens, time moves so painfully slowly. Sometimes, even, he wants to die. Now he has become a nocturnal creature, preferring to come out at night with three bottles of wine for comfort, alone in the darkness.