Chain Reaction

by Gillian White

  ‘But Vernon…’

  ‘It’s just no good.’

  ‘But Vernon, listen to me.’ Her restless hands are washing each other over the cracked and dirty sink. Seeing this makes him want to cry, Joy is so unhappy.

  But he makes himself answer her patiently. ‘I don’t need to listen to you. My own common sense tells me that this sort of property is right out of the question. We couldn’t begin to live like this…’

  ‘Oh, we could, we could! Don’t you see? I could go out to work and you could stay at home all day on the dole and grow things and do the place up…’

  ‘Joy, just listen to me for a change. You can’t even pull the giblets out of a blessed chicken and there’s nowhere for a washing machine. Think about that for a moment. And the plaster is falling off the walls—look.’

  She is pleading with him and he just can’t bear it, walking through this house like walking through her own day dreams. He loves his wife dearly, he loves her little ways, he wants to give her what she wants, he has always enjoyed providing for her up until now. She is scuffing round the garden among the thorns and brambles. She gushes on, ‘And there’s a well somewhere under all this. We could have our own water and generate our own electricity. I read all about it, Vernon, in Take a Break. There was this down-and-out family—’

  ‘Joy! We are not down-and-out!’

  She is losing patience with him now. ‘Well, it feels as if we are, thanks to you,’ she cries bitterly.

  ‘Stop it!’

  ‘When we married I never imagined—’

  ‘I know, Joy.’

  Rage and fear are making her cruel. ‘If my mother could see me now! When I think what that woman sacrificed—’

  ‘Stop it, Joy, please!’

  ‘And now you won’t even try to make things up to me. You never had much imagination, Vern. You were never one to see the possibilities, you always have to be led.’

  But Vernon is on his way back to the car, head bowed and sighing. He has to convince her that he simply cannot undertake another dangerous venture and risk certain failure. These hopes of hers are just a glimpse of old pain, they were energised like this before he started the business. He does not want their happiness to depend on him, ever again. Vernon is exhausted. He knows she will sulk in the car for the rest of the afternoon and automatically dislike anything else they look at.

  Her attitude just isn’t fair! All right, she has suffered, showing people round the house, making excuses to the neighbours, facing a move she never wanted to make. But so has he. Begging for money from this bank and that, made to wait in carpeted foyers, treated like a scrounger, trying to make things right with angry customers. One way and another his humiliation has been complete.

  Joy slams the car door behind her. ‘If you’re going to take this negative attitude towards everything we see then there’s not much point in me coming with you, is there, Vernon?’ she snaps. ‘You might as well just drop me off at home and be done with it.’

  Joy merely shrugs her shoulders when they are shown round the sensible Swallowbridge flat. She is car sick, she says, from having to read the map.

  ‘It is lovely and clean,’ Vernon says to the eager woman who shows them round, a professional person no doubt, carefully made up and in her forties; maybe Joy will be humoured by that but she will despise the net curtains. He finds his wife’s silence embarrassing because there’s not much to say about such a small property and normally Joy would fill in the gaps. But now she merely picks at invisible threads on her sleeve. She might as well have stayed in the car.

  ‘It’s my mother’s flat really,’ says this Mrs Rendell with a warm smile. ‘She has only lived here for two years and now even this is too much for her. Unfortunately she has had to move into a residential home so I am showing people round in her place.’

  ‘Oh?’ says Vernon, unsure how to respond. ‘I do admire your colour scheme.’ He suspects that this daughter has chosen it, blues and whites and pale greens. It is most relaxing.

  The only response that Joy seems prepared to make is that aggravating little noise in her throat.

  ‘Cool in summer and warm in winter. As you see, the double glazing stops the noise from the main road and there’s economy heating. The cooker is built in, and it’s all very cheap and easy to run,’ says Mrs Rendell, a highly competent speaker. Could be a teacher. ‘And yes, that’s a heated towel rail but there’s no airing cupboard, I’m afraid. My mother uses a clothes horse. She stands it round the cistern and finds that just as effective.’

  ‘I’m sure,’ says Vernon uneasily. Ought he to mention that his wife is ill, explain her ill-tempered behaviour?

  ‘And there’s double locks on all the windows. My mother was… is… very safety conscious.’

  ‘You have to be, these days, unfortunately,’ agrees Vernon.

  This is a far more sensible option than any of the other places they have looked at this afternoon. One terrible estate where they hadn’t even stopped, one ugly, tattered house with broken cars in the garden, and one converted flat in a large fifties house, not enough room to swing a cat. But he and Joy could live here very cheaply. It would meet all their basic needs and they might be able to knock the vendor down £5,000 or so, bearing the climate in mind.

  ‘Well, what did you think about that?’ he asks her when they have thanked Mrs Rendell and are back on the noisy pavement again.

  She doesn’t even bother to answer. Joy just stalks off towards the car park, turning her back on Vernon.

  She is clinging on to her old life with her nails and with her teeth. And he is the one who must finally pull her down off the mountain.

  EIGHT

  Penmore House, Ribblestone Close, Preston, Lancs

  JODY MIDDLETON BURIES HIS face in his pillow, perhaps to rediscover the innocent smell of himself, and is amazed, on raising his head, to see the kind of slobber there he associates with childhood sleeping. He thinks of the Turin Shroud; perhaps Jesus was doing this when He made that famous impression… He feels a spurt of yearning for that younger boy he once was, and his freedom, and a longing for that overwhelming sea of the past.

  Look at him now.

  Waiting for rescue.

  British justice, my foot.

  He has already been tried, convicted and condemned. He is only on remand but there’s no one around Preston who doesn’t hate him. His nails are bitten down to the quick. The eyes that stare at him through the slot in the steel grey door are cold eyes, mean eyes, like your own eyes are if you cover the rest of your face and stretch them chinky in the mirror. You can frighten yourself like that. The light is sunk in the ceiling so you can’t hitch yourself up and smash the bulb to use as a weapon against yourself or one of the screws. The brick walls are painted pale grey. He’ll stay in a cell on his own until after the trial, they say, like he can wear his own clothes until then and have visitors and letters every day. He’s allowed to wear his earrings, too. That’s daft—if he wanted to, he could pull them out and carve right through the veins on his wrist.

  He stares at the scratches on the frame of the bed. What other poor kid put them there and where did he come from? Was he just as homesick? Jody thinks of his mum, Babs, and what she must be going through now.

  Everyone hates him and his mum and dad and Dawn and Cindy—that is why they are going away and leaving him here all alone. He can’t imagine what sort of hell their lives must be like now. He wants to call out and stop them from going, to shout, ‘Wait for me!’ and to follow them out into some bright and fantasy afternoon, and be little again.

  But Jody is tainted with the darkness of sin and has no voice any more. He is served pale food, as if anything colourful might excite him to riot or rebellion. White, grey, brown, so as not to bombard the senses. He stares everyone out if he can, trying to be cool, not wanting them to see that he doesn’t dare catch their eyes, that he wishes he could shrink back, backtrack through time out of this excruciating place.

  He f
eels the flush of shame again. The word RAPE disgusts him deeply and will certainly disgust his mates. There’s nothing big or macho about it, and why on earth would anyone choose to do it to poor Janice Plunket? Everyone thinks he’s a sad misfit with something sexually wrong with him, and he has to see the shrink every week so she can get reports together.

  His heart is skittering in his chest. They call him a pervert. But he’s done nothing wrong, nothing really wrong.

  Jody Middleton, aged eighteen and three months, lets out a long sad sigh to the night.

  But the time is going. That’s the good thing about time, it does pass. It will go on passing and one day he will be out of here in a place of real voices and faces.

  It was Mum who broke the news when they visited yesterday. She kept her arms folded as if she was protecting herself. Dad just looked away, embarrassed, and rasped his long hands together.

  ‘You already knew about Dad’s new job and the fact that he was considering it seriously. In the circumstances.’ Mum hesitated and look at him nervously. ‘Well, now we’ve definitely decided to move, Jody, for our sakes as much as for Dawn and Cindy’s. We saw somewhere we liked last week and Dad’s going to make an offer soon. We felt you should know.’

  They say that Dawn and Cindy are not allowed to visit but Jody knows they wouldn’t come if they could. They’re ashamed to have him as a brother, to be related to such an alleged disgusting pervert, and he bets they’re suffering as much as he. Gone is the closeness, the friendship they shared for so long, the laughter and the teasing and the sledge-races on the landing.

  And now it has come to this.

  He has taken up smoking since he has been on remand. It’s something to do, something to bargain with and it depresses the appetite, not that Jody’s got much of one anyway. Jody squeezed out the end of his rollie, burning his fingers deliberately while keeping his face quite calm. Why should he care? He knew they’d been away to look at places down south but Jody could not really believe they’d do anything about it. After all, he was born in the Close, he’s known no other home, no other territory, no other mates and neither have they. Boots in the kitchen, toys all over the floor, jigsaw puzzles and photographs because Mum was always proud of her family, it was always a warm, messy place. He used to be able to wind Mum round his little finger. He knows he is a good-looking boy, tall and slim and athletic, he once had acne but has grown out of that now. But his skin has already taken on that unhealthy prison pallor thanks to bad air, no exercise, bad food and worry. Where will he go when they let him out?

  What Mum said made him want to scream. It made him want to sob like a child. If none of this had happened they’d never have considered moving. Even if Dad had been offered promotion he reckons he would have turned it down because they were all so happy where they were.

  He was struck by a new and sickening feeling, the knowledge that now he was out of control, they were coming together like an army closing ranks against him. For the first time in his life, he is powerless.

  ‘When you come out,’ said Mum, careful not to venture a date—she believes that he’s guilty, too, and likely to face a pretty long stretch—‘when you come out you can come and visit.’

  Not LIVE, you notice, just VISIT. So has he forfeited his home as well as his reputation and freedom?

  How could she do this to him when he’s done nothing wrong?

  She blames herself. She believes she should have been firmer, she believes he would do better away from her influence, that independence would curb his high-spirits.

  Mum went wittering on, anything to avoid talking about the reality of the situation. ‘Dawn and Cindy both think the house is rather small, and compared with the Close I suppose it is.’ She even laughed, though warily, and Jody hasn’t seen her do that for ages. ‘Goodness knows where all our things are going to go.’

  ‘Well, you can chuck out all my stuff,’ said Jody provocatively, seeing himself riding off across a foggy plain all alone. He whined a little as he sat there across the peeling table. ‘My bed, my chest of drawers, my wardrobe, my telly—that’s if you haven’t given them away already. I won’t be needing them again. I won’t have anywhere to put them.’

  ‘Oh Jody love,’ Mum exclaimed as he’d known she would. ‘Don’t talk so soft. You’ll find somewhere, pet—a nice flat. You could share with a friend and maybe one day you’ll find a girl…’ Mum tailed off, embarrassed.

  ‘Give over, Mum.’ He wished he was out of here on a horse riding across the sands through the sea-spray as they had on holiday once. Free. Free. And as light as a bird, almost non-existent, so light had he felt. Or dancing with the music loud, lost in a kindly wave of sensation.

  He considered his mum and dad from this new position of helplessness and found that he had great difficulty in speaking to them from here at all. He could hardly make the words he wanted come out of his mouth. All the blood inside him was rising to his head so his brain felt as if it was bubbling. This sort of rage was new to Jody.

  They’d never asked him if he’d done it. They kind of looked away from the crime like they looked away from him then, wishing they weren’t there visiting at all, wishing he wasn’t their son any more.

  But he deserves to be believed, doesn’t he—by the people who love him, at least! He wanted so badly to be believed but all Mum said was, ‘Why didn’t you tell me you’d been with her during all that time when they were searching? You just sat there and said nothing!’

  What he said sounded so weak. ‘Because I did have sex with her, and I did leave her alone at the reservoir, and I felt guilty about that, but I never imagined they’d call it rape.’ And then the very worst part of all. ‘And I was embarrassed that everyone would know I’d had sex with Janice Plunket. But it wasn’t rape, Mum. Honest to God it was nothing like that.’

  ‘Well, what was it, Jody, with a girl too subnormal to know what she was doing?’

  ‘It wasn’t like that, Mum. It wasn’t like that at all.’ But the more he tried to protest the worse it sounded, so it seemed much better, in the end, to say nothing. A kind of weary fatalism.

  Janice Plunket noticed him, not in the nudging, giggly way of most of the girls round here. Jody has never been short of girlfriends; he is just the kind of exciting boy the girls have always been drawn to; his personality as well as his looks made him one of the lads. Jody lost his virginity at the ripe age of fifteen. He had no need to rape anyone. But Janice was always following him around to his great consternation and the amusement of his mates. She had what they call a crush on him, always staring at him out of those strangely slanty eyes, giving that goofy grin she thought was sexy. If he didn’t watch his back she’d creep up behind him and hug him. Jeez! ‘You’re all right tonight then, Jody.’

  ‘Gross!’

  But they had no need to be as cruel as they were to Janice Plunket. They teased her, specially Kurt and Stew, made her dance to their rap music, gave her E one day for a laugh, took her on a ride on the back of Stew’s bike and didn’t let her off until she was sick. Her dad would have a fit if he knew all the stuff they did.

  Jody never took part in that. He only stood by and watched; if he could, he walked away. He would never do those things for a laugh, not for any reason at all. They were acting like big kids. There was more fun to be had with the real birds outside the arcade. He wished she’d stay away from them and not walk straight into the trap every time, on legs like two hefty pillars. She never seemed to learn! Her head must be like a garden cluttered with weeds and no one knew how to stop them growing.

  Janice Plunket had pale, fuzzy hair like a baby and soft brown eyes. They shouldn’t let her out on her own so much, Jody thought. And that if only they’d get her out of those old women’s clothes and dress her in something decent, she’d even be quite pretty in her own way.

  But Janice was not the innocent child everyone liked to make out she was.

  What Jody did wasn’t half as bad as what Kurt and Stew had done. She�
��d wanted it, too—that was the crazy part. She’d been determined to get it and that’s what the police refused to see, the fact that she was normal enough to enjoy it.

  She was standing there, flatfooted as usual, in the car park, staring at him again so he asked her if she wanted a ride. Well, no one else was about and he wasn’t ready to go home yet. God—what had made him ask her? Jody implores the heavens. If only Jody could take time back. He was standing beside his green Datsun, a present from Mum and Dad for his eighteenth birthday, not much of a car, he supposes, but Jody was over the moon with it and you didn’t need much of a car to impress Janice Plunket. He loved driving, he loved to have a good reason to drive. She fed him roasted peanuts as they, sped out of town towards the moors and the wide open spaces. This, and all the vast loneliness, was where Jody really loved to drive.

  The moors were quite silent apart from a pair of ravens high in the upper sky leaving their hoarse calls behind them. Far away across the valley lay the ribbon of road. They parked on a hill overlooking the reservoir scented by bracken and heather and the car was quite hidden among the sleeping rocks and boulders. He found some seashells in the glove compartment and gave them to Janice who beamed as if they were diamonds.

  ‘Won’t your father be worried about you?’

  ‘Nah,’ said Janice nasally. ‘Anyway, I don’t live at home any more. I live at the Centre. I can do what I like, I can. I’m allowed.’

  He watched her, staring intently, as she tried to behave like a grown-up woman just as he always seemed to be pretending to be a grown-up man, but failing. She brought a lipstick out of her old woman’s bag with the silver clip and pushed it round her mouth, pouting into the passenger mirror. He was surprised—it was a nice ladylike pink shade. She had a nursery-rhyme type of face, the kind you see in old picture books. Little Miss Muffet.

  Jody opened the door and got out, walked past a solitary sheep and made for the wood round the lower slopes. Janice Plunket could do what she liked, he didn’t care. He wasn’t responsible for her; she’d had her bit of excitement and Jody wanted to stretch his legs. He knew she was following because of the heavy treads in the undergrowth behind him, but she could please herself where she went. He would take her back safe and sound in a little while.