Death of a She Devil

by Fay Weldon

  Today Hermione called by Somerville House at Kingsdean, a mile from St Rumbold’s, just to deliver a small package and collect some money. Somerville House had once been a hotel for posh holiday makers, but since a road had been built between it and the sea it had fallen on hard times and now catered for benefit claimants and a handful of asylum seekers. Hermione stopped the bike in an alley and suggested Tyler stayed with it while she made the delivery.

  ‘No need for you to be involved, Angel-face,’ she said, ‘and better for all of us if you’re not.’ And she stalked off, booted legs long, thin and glorious, thigh gap obvious, into the unknown.

  After ten minutes or so, in which Tyler rolled a joint and puffed on it, he noticed that the petrol tank of the Harley-Davidson was leaking; more than just leaking – fulsomely dribbling its contents from a seam onto the sandy soil of the ground below, where it quickly disappeared leaving nothing but its smell behind. There must be some kind of rational explanation which would eventually become apparent. Perhaps the bumpy ride through the secret tunnel, Tyler wondered idly, had set off some kind of metal fatigue? There seemed little Tyler could do about it.

  Hermione came back without her parcel, looking happy, and Tyler told her about the petrol tank. Hermione said that was totally impossible, it was a brand new machine. They both looked at the tank and there was no leak any more and no smell. He’d been smoking, hadn’t he? It was really strong stuff, she should have warned him, she said. So they set off without more ado, Tyler prepared to accept that what he’d witnessed need not correlate exactly with what had happened. But after they had gone a few hundred yards the engine spluttered and died. The road was long and empty and a cold wind was blowing.

  ‘I could have sworn I filled her up,’ said Hermione, and indeed, on checking the receipt she had stuffed into her pocket, she found she had done just that. Hermione said the world was like this, these days, the oddest things happened but the answer was not to fuss and marvel but just to accept. They pushed the bike half a mile until they reached the Auto Solo Garage outside St Rumbold’s where the man checked the tank, found nothing amiss and filled it up again. They went back along the main road to Hermione’s rose-covered coastguard cottage, with no trouble at all. The wind had got up and was making howling noises. Hermione said when the wind was from the west it tended to do that, she didn’t know why. She microwaved a fish pie, which they shared. She said she’d just paid her mortgage off.

  ‘If you hadn’t been so stupid and gone and got a degree, Tyler, you too could afford a love nest. Now look at you, long-term unemployed, schmoozing up to an old lady in a pink cardigan.’ Miss Swanson had once been Hermione’s supervisor in the days before the Jobcentre had a plus at the end. ‘What have you come to?’

  ‘I rather like her,’ said Tyler. ‘She could be much worse.’

  ‘You’re such an angel-child, Tyler,’ said Hermione, peeling off greasy black and purple garments to reveal an anorexic white body beneath. ‘You’ll forgive anyone anything. Bloody unbelievable!’

  She remarked upon the beauty of his body, and suggested that since he was so hard up it might be a good idea if he did as Swanson had suggested, put on a maid’s uniform and got a job up at the High Tower, but Tyler became quite angry and said he was not a transvestite, he was a man. Had she not just noticed? She said he was all right, but lacked finesse. ‘Lacked finesse?’ He was shocked. He had thought he was all finesse. Nevertheless he handed her the £50 note he’d got from the bank that afternoon – usually she charged four times as much but serviced Tyler as a prix d’ami.

  There was a sudden thud as a tile fell off the roof and landed in the garden. Nothing would do but that Tyler went out into the dark – ‘prove your manhood,’ she said – up a ladder (at least she held the bottom), slipped the tile back into its home and put a nail through it. The rain held off while he did it. Then she said she was expecting ‘a friend’ at midnight but she would give Tyler a lift home. Tyler had rather expected to spend the night but no such luck. Perhaps ‘the friend’ had more ‘finesse’ than he, or more money. The rain had begun again, and Tyler, usually so good-natured and happy, was feeling rather upset and anxious by the time he got home to Sylvan Lodge, as well as being soaked to the skin.

  23

  ‘There Are Bad Times Just Around The Corner There Are Dark Clouds Hurtling Through The Sky...’

  Bobbo scares himself.

  ‘Last night a black gull crashed into my window, broke its bloody neck and fell onto the rocks down below. If that’s not a sodding omen I don’t know what is! But I don’t want to fucking die; I’m not fucking ready. Fetch that doctor! On second thoughts, nurse, don’t bother. I don’t want to set eyes on that old battle-axe, not a hormone left in her. But I look out the window and there’s this poor bird lying flat as a bloody pancake with blooded feathers and a broken neck, and it lifts its head and its face is Mary Fisher’s. With smudged lipstick!’

  ‘It was only a nightmare,’ said Nurse Samantha.

  ‘Only! What do you mean, only? When I bloody looked again it was the She Devil’s face – with snakes instead of hair on her head, writhing and squirming. And she says to me, “You’re going to die.”’

  ‘Your poor old mind’s playing tricks again, Mr Patchett.’ Samantha took his hand. There seemed no end to her kindness.

  ‘Parody of a beautiful woman, her indoors, that wife of mine, a Mrs Frankenstein, all cut about and re-stitched to turn herself into Mary Fisher. All that pain, the money (my money) and all that trouble, and all for love of me. Why couldn’t she have just shut up and waited? I’d have gone right off Mary Fisher in time, conceited, shallow bitch of a woman, and gone back home. But Ruth bloody jumped the gun.’

  ‘Mr Patchett, don’t distress yourself. What is the point of going over and over these things? It’s all so long ago.’

  ‘How could someone like her turn into a beauty like Mary? Ever. It did Ruth no good. Look at her now! Her chin covered with warts, the nose drooping to meet the chin, then the fake bubble breasts burst... God, Mary’s real ones were pretty!’

  ‘Is it Botox that’s sent her left eyebrow higher than the right?’

  ‘How should I know? What a joke! Ruth Patchett’s a fucking joke, an insult to God and man, especially man. How can you bully a man into love?’

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Samantha. ‘You are cross! Couldn’t you both find it in your hearts to forgive each other? Don’t let the sun go down on your anger, that kind of thing? Or life itself go down, come to that.’

  ‘That’s what you think, Miss Pollyanna Bubble Breasts! I’ve got enough anger to keep me going ‘til the end of fucking time. My wife fucked a judge to get me put inside for ten years and that’s not a thing a man easily fucking forgets. Just keep the cow away from my deathbed. Use anything you like – wooden cross, clump of garlic, whatever it takes – just keep her away from my door. And don’t you worry about my hate. It’s love that weakens us. Hate’s what keeps me alive. I’ll sing you a hymn to the death of love, like Ruth did before me. Hate’s catching. Will that satisfy you, cunt? Now just shut up and let me sleep.’

  24

  All Change!

  The new, energised ghost of Mary Fisher.

  Wooo-h, remember me? Yes, you’re right, me again. It never rains but it pours. There have been more convulsions lately on Mount Olympus. A coup. Momus is challenging the role of Zeus, attempting to form a new religion – The GFR: The Great Fictional Religion, in which all men and women must join in worship of Momus, The Great Writer in the Sky, and strive towards happenings and happy endings in which a moral element must be contextualised and normatised, that is to say, the good rewarded and the bad punished in everything printed or viewed. No more moral ambiguity: no more sitting on the fence.

  Suits me! I find I have a little more power to my ghostly elbow, a little more play on my tether. I can travel inland: I can even get to Brighton in the service of the Great Momus. But all this is nothing to do with you, dear reader, just
life after death stuff. Forget it.

  Enough that I was there when Hermione – a girl whose lifestyle I am now obliged to abhor but used rather to admire – came roaring and blaring down the bumpy underground tunnel at the Brighton Dome, startling and terrifying helpless tourists, and careering off with poor Tyler clinging on behind. Such a shocking blast of noise!

  I never had a lot of time for Nicci, Tyler’s mum. She was my stepdaughter for a while – when all was well between me and Bobbo. I tried for his sake to hide my dislike of her, but she was a difficult, unprepossessing, unforgiving child at the best of times – and her mother dumping her on me did not help, I suppose. Overweight, too. She took after her mother in her dependence on cosmetic surgery and got a gastric band – but once a fatty always a fatty, at heart if not in body – and managed to marry a Bronze God: but it didn’t last.

  Her two daughters were plain as pikestaffs. I’d look through the window of their cold little house – she would never turn the heating up, the miserable cow – and entertain myself making howling noises. But Tyler, oh Tyler! The best of my Bobbo and Mr Finch combined – how generous of spirit, how loveable, how beautiful! Bobbo had his nasty streak and that in time won out with him as nasty streaks are inclined to do – listen to poor Bobbo now. But I love Tyler as best I can, unearthly creature that I am, with no fleshly attributes, just an undying spirit – at least so far. Trust me, trust me.

  Hermione roared back home on the A259 with Tyler clinging on behind, and with a little more pressure from me on her left hand than her right I could have steered her straight into a pothole, unseated them, and killed them. But I refrained and so altered the course of history. I am the spirit of love, which however irrational still has its powers.

  The Great Fictional Religion can’t have it all its own way. The bad must be punished, but I couldn’t have my innocent Tyler done to death as along with Hermione. And the Harley-Davidson was such a beautiful machine I must admit I was reluctant to damage it, make it skid along the road driverless and on its side. Some of my happiest memories are of clinging to Bobbo as we roared round the paradise of my young life.

  But I had the strength to prise apart the seam at the bottom of the petrol tank for a short time while she went to indulge in her drug deal and probably a little selling of her skinny female charms to some low bidder. Honestly, Somerville House! How low grade can you get? A truly wretched place. I’m surprised they could afford a cup of pot noodles! And later – though thwarted in my desire to hamper Tyler as he made a fool of himself with Hermione by his sexual thrust, which though enthusiastic and strong, did without doubt, as Hermione described it, lack subtlety – I did at least manage to loosen a tile on the roof and tempt him out of the house to put it back. I helped him adjust the ladder and stopped the wind from simply blowing him off it.

  I stayed around to see if Hermione’s midnight visitor turned up once she was back home, but he did not come. Perhaps she was just tired and wanted a rest and made him up, the slut, or perhaps Tyler had been a little inaccurate in his thrusting; she was too bruised and she called it off.

  Oh wooo-h-ooh to you too. I’m going back to bed. I too am tired. It’s been an exhausting day for a poor little frail thing like me.

  25

  Samantha Tries To Make Things Nice

  ...but Bobbo isn’t having any of it.

  ‘Water, water! I want water, nurse! Where are you? Christ! What are you doing? Now you’ve spilt it, slag, idiot! All over me, all over the sheet. No, I did not move my hand on purpose. Do you think I’m that sort of person? You’re the one who spilt it. Gone back to the old “Care Pathway” to death, have you? Food and water not allowed. I know your tricks. How about a shot of fucking Viagra? I’d soon show you who’s alive, and who isn’t.’

  ‘You won’t bloody react, I give up. Nurse, darling, sweetheart, any way you can get me out of this hell hole and into an NHS nursing home? Anywhere where the rules of common sanity apply? Why am I kept here? I don’t understand it. Dr Lezzer calls, I have an injection, I sign a document shoved under my nose, you take my fingerprints, the Monster herself appears weeping crocodile tears down her travesty of a face, some cunt takes a photograph of her and me together? If they want my signature why don’t they just forge it? What are they trying to prove? That they don’t hate men? That human blood, not bile, runs in their veins? Are they bloody joking?’

  ‘You’re very lively today, Mr Patchett.’

  ‘It’s because I didn’t take my sodding pills. Hid them under my tongue and kept them there while Dr Lezzer pulled my neck up from behind to make me swallow like you do a sick cat.’

  ‘I think you must have imagined that, Mr Patchett, and her name is Dr Simmins, do try and remember that. You’d get on much better with her if you were nice to her. And please try and think nice thoughts about your wife.’

  ‘Oh nice, nice, nice, Miss Pollyanna Big Tits! When I think of my wife all I ever think of is the day she ruined my life.’

  He does, too. Bobbo remembers hammering his fists against a bathroom door long, long ago, and telling Ruth she was a bad mother, a bad cook and a worse wife, how she was not a proper woman, she was the She Devil incarnate. Then she’d pursued him to the High Tower, hunted him down, and that was the beginning of the end. Now the She Devil lives where Mary should still be living by rights, and hellish black bats stream out of its windows, spreading doom and desolation as they fly, to the detriment of man and beast. Ruth’s doing.

  ‘Bats, Mr Patchett?’ He had been mumbling.

  ‘Clap of lightning, roll of thunder and off they go! Flapping black leathery wings. See ‘em stream from the windows,’ he said, or thought he said. ‘Hate and destruction, that’s all they do.’

  She nodded placidly. She was a good girl. He asked if she had noticed how bad the storms were getting? How the very rock on which this Tower was founded quaked and shaked, and she said she had noticed but tried not to give it too much attention. Mr Patchett drifted off to sleep – perhaps he’d forgotten about the pill and ingested it by accident – and Samantha went over to admire the view.

  ‘Only those with a very low IQ believe in ghosts,’ Dr Simmins had said one night, leaving in a hurry before some threatened storm or other broke. She’d tripped on the stone stairs and Samantha had heard her cry out in pain and rage, but when the footsteps soon restarted Samantha resisted the impulse to go and see if the doctor was okay.

  Now lightning aimed for the High Tower; it shook slightly. Something had been hit; perhaps one of the many masts. Well, Security would look after it. Four seconds after the thunder the sheet lightning came, playing along the hills on the far side of the harbour. The wind got up and howled some more and a full moon briefly showed itself from behind racing clouds and made a silver line of the great sweep of the bay. It was a wonderful sight.

  26

  A Thoroughly Sensible, Rational Person

  Dr Simmins grits her teeth.

  Talk of love disgusted Dr Ruby Simmins. She lived alone and liked it. It was thirty years and more since she had been jilted by Stephen, the young student she had braved scandal to live with, and supported from her grant through medical school. On the day of their graduation Stephen had come up to her hand in hand with her best friend Lucy and said he and Lucy had announced their engagement and wanted Ruby’s congratulations. Lucy was very pretty and not very clever: Ruby was very bright and not very pretty. When they picked Ruby up from the floor (literally – she had fainted, her big white knickers showing, and how they had all laughed about that) they were all apologies. Hadn’t she realised? Hadn’t she known? They were both grateful to Ruby for looking after Stephen so well, but it was not as if they had shared a bed. (Ruby could scarcely believe it: didn’t the sofa count?) This thing was greater than they were, and so on and so on.

  Trauma such as this is hard to recover from, and the truth was that Ruby never had. Perhaps she didn’t really want to, and it suited her well enough not to. She could despise the stupid i
n peace for the rest of her life, and be spared the cost and annoyance of courting and creating a family; and just get on with being a doctor: a profession which left one with little time and energy to waste on the useless emotions of youth.

  No, Ruby Simmins did not think well of ‘love’, a word that could be so loosely used, and had been so used such a lot by Stephen and indeed her own mother, who through Ruby’s childhood had been an avid reader of Mary Fisher’s novels. They’d been a familiar sight on the counter of every corner shop in the land at the time, with their cheap pink and gold covers and always Mary Fisher on the jacket with her long hair flowing against a background of foam, rising up as waves broke at the foot of a phallic tower. ‘Love me, love me, love me,’ they had gushed. ‘All you need is devotion, and a hairy tweed jacket to snuggle up against.’ Dr Simmins’ mother had not prepared her daughter for the exigencies of life as a plain girl, and Dr Simmins very much held it against her. The idea of a ghostly Mary Fisher haunting the place where she was fated to work quite agitated Ruby Simmins. Would the past never be over?

  Samantha Travers got on Dr Ruby Simmins’ nerves. Those with the wide-eyed innocence of the over-hopeful always did. Nurse Travers believed she was living in Munchkin Land where the Wizard of Oz was king, in the land over the rainbow where good intentions and a soft heart cured all human woes. Nurse Travers seemed impervious even to her own plight. She spent her days with a mad old man who leaked disgustingly from every orifice, in a lighthouse where if you fell down steep stone stairs you would crack your head and die, and when her baby came – five months, Ruby Simmins reckoned – hubby would soon be down the pub, not by her side. It happened to the over-trusting, the over-empathic.