King of the Badgers

by Philip Hensher

  The machine began its familiar, grinding, sucking roar. Greg went back to the front end of the lorry, took his heavy gloves off, placing them between his knees. He took a cigarette from a packet on the dashboard, and smoked one, half listening to the industrial noise. You could see the moor from here, and what must be skylarks, dipping and soaring. Probably if you turned the machine off, you would be able to hear them at their song. It wasn’t because of that but because the drainage system was making a peculiar noise that Greg went to the back of the lorry and turned the machine off. It often did this, signifying some sort of blockage; in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, you just needed to turn it off, leave it for thirty seconds, and then switch it on again. Even Greg dreaded that hundredth case. It was incredible what people would put down their toilet outlet.

  After the cheerful, grinding noise of the engine was switched off, the air of the moor sang in his ears. It was so quiet out here. Greg spent his life going between remote and cut-off houses, but this was still more remote than most. In Devon, there was often a distant hum of a motorway, even in quiet retreats, but there was nothing here that was not just as it had been a hundred years ago. On the air, a high long note hovered, floated, urgent and remote. It was surprising how much the song of a bird could sound like someone screaming, thinly. Greg listened again, and then he understood that it was not a bird at all. That was not a bird, singing, and it was not that far off.

  Half turning towards the house, he saw the customer standing at the kitchen window. Whatever happened, he must not turn with suspicion in his face to this man. Greg Lucas was not a heroic person. He had followed his father into his small business; he had never thought of moving away, to go into the world, to test himself against the demands of a new existence. He understood now what bravery was, and what was asked of him. What he had to do was quite clear, and he had to do it now, not go away to ask for help.

  As a rule, those in Greg’s business would never even ask permission to enter a house, but Terry Strutte—that was his name, Terry Strutte—he would not know that. Greg went, a cheerful expression maintained on his face, to the back door. The customer half opened it, warding Greg off; but from here, the intermittent sounds of the child screaming were unmistakable, a thin, muted, but discernible sound. Greg must continue as if there was nothing wrong, nothing at all.

  ‘There’s some sort of blockage there,’ he said. ‘It’s a bit more complicated than I thought. I’m going to need to call my colleague. He’s got the—’ Inspiration failed Greg. There was nothing at all he could think of which his brother Ed might have to hand that he did not. ‘He’s got the oojamaflip.’

  ‘OK,’ the customer said. ‘I’m not going anywhere. It’s my day off from the stables. You call, and we’ll wait.’

  ‘There’s no reception out here,’ Greg said. ‘I need to use your landline, if I may.’ He could see the telephone from where he stood, on a small table by the front door. It was a cottage where nothing much intervened between the back entrance and the front entrance. ‘I’ll take my boots off,’ he offered.

  ‘OK,’ the customer said unwillingly. Greg, sitting on the step, unhooked his sanitary white wellingtons, smeared with mud and worse, and swung himself round into the kitchen. In here, the sound was really unmistakable; a girl, screaming as hard as she was able. It was impossible to ignore. For the first time, Greg looked directly into the customer’s eyes: it was a face of fat weakness, marked with thin, colourless eyebrows and white stubby eyelashes, like a pig’s; his untidy mouse-blond hair, thinning on top, and eyes of pale, mad blue, one careering off to one side evasively. People who lived in the remote fastnesses of Devon sometimes looked like this, the product of cousins marrying each other over generations. But into this weak face, something like a decision came.

  ‘Excuse me,’ the customer said. ‘I’ll just be a minute. Hang on.’ He walked past Greg, into his back garden, and then very quickly across the sodden earth, stepping carefully over the silent waste pipe, and then, more swiftly, through the gate in the garden wall, and on. He was almost running now, without direction or aim, just running away from Greg and the noise, which, Greg could hear, was coming from under the kitchen flags. From under the house. There was nowhere the customer could go. That way was the moor, nothing else. Greg let him go without shouting, without caring. There was a reason why the prison was set in the middle of the moor: because you could not get anywhere on your own, and after a while, you were glad to give yourself up again. That was what his old man had always said.

  The sound had continued unabated, and now there was a hammering, too, as if something was being beaten against the walls, or rather, against some pipes. Greg listened, and in a moment worked out the quarter of the kitchen the sound was coming from, and then the particular flag. It made a hollow sound. He looked about him, and there was an iron pipe with a flattened end, a home-made tool, propped up beside the dresser. Greg had always been handy, and he saw immediately how this would work; he saw the groove in the side of the stone. He pushed it down, and levered, and it came up easily. The screaming filled the air. There was a flight of stone steps leading down into a cellar, into the dark. The screaming stopped as if a stop had been put on it.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘I’m here to help you.’

  There was silence from the cellar.

  ‘Is there any light?’ he said. ‘He’s gone. I need to put some light on.’

  A small voice, a girl’s voice said, ‘Just underneath the trapdoor. There’s a switch.’ It was surprisingly close. He felt underneath the trapdoor, all round, and there was the switch. He put on the light, and walked down a couple of steps.

  ‘He’s gone,’ he said. The girl, in a dirty pink sweatshirt, her hair lank and her face greasy, looked at him with such a look; afterwards, he said to the camera crews, to journalists, and in years to come, those who knew him who would ask him about this moment, he could never tell anyone what that look had meant. You would never want any harm to come to this little girl again, he would say. There was a look in her eyes; it was the wide, focused look of an animal in a corner. Of course he knew exactly who she was. She could not be anyone else.

  ‘You’re China,’ he said.

  ‘How do you know my name?’ she said.

  He was baffled by that. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘You’re all right now.’

  ‘That’s what he said,’ she said. ‘If you come near me, I swear, I’ll kill you, I swear I will.’

  ‘I’m here to get you out of here,’ he said. ‘I’m not going to—’ He couldn’t say it.

  ‘You stand there, at the top of the steps,’ she said. ‘Don’t you come near me. Has he gone?’

  ‘Yes, he’s gone,’ he said. ‘I’m going to phone the police, and they’ll come to get you. It’s all going to be all right.’

  ‘I don’t want the police,’ she said, and then, quite abruptly, she started crying. ‘If you come near me, I’ll kill you.’

  ‘I’m not going to come near you,’ he said. ‘It’s best if I call the police.’

  ‘Who are you?’ she said. ‘You’re not a friend of Marcus’s?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m the poo-man. You’re all right now, China.’

  ‘But how do you know my name?’ she said.

  23.

  Up the hill came a steady flow of families in their best clothes: fathers in suits, or at least a jacket and tie, limping mothers in practical but newish combinations and evidently uncomfortable shoes. The prospective students were, to Miranda’s eyes, disappointingly clean and cheerful-looking. She remembered her own student days, nearly thirty years back at Oxford, how they had scowled and refused to work, and worn the same clothes from one end of term to the next. The idea of pleasing the elders had never, she believed, occurred to any of them. Then, people had been much more independent, too, surely. She vaguely remembered going to open days at universities, but no one would have thought of inviting parents, or involving them in where their ch
ildren were going to go. Didn’t think of them as children, either.

  At some point, the parents had started turning up. They were greeted not with ridicule or amusement by the cooler, less dependent kids, but as a matter of course. Now it was a rare prospective who showed up without one or other of their parents. Miranda, in her tidy office with its ranks of the English poets in alphabetical order, looked out of the window with its pair of spider plants at the cautious, sullen groups failing to mix with each other. She thought like an old fart of how everything had changed. They walked, the lot of them, with the apparent knowledge that someone was watching them closely. From her third-floor window, Miranda watched them closely. She regretted how much things had changed under surveillance and expectation.

  Seven times in the winter and spring, the university at Barnstaple mounted open days for prospective students and their parents, always on a Friday. The students had had their offers, and now merely had to achieve them. Barnstaple was somewhere between the seventy-fourth and eighty-seventh best, or perhaps worst, university in the country. A student with only quite moderate grades could expect to be welcomed here with open arms. But still they came with their nerves visible on their faces, embodying the disappointment or the hopes of their families, and still the faculties of Barnstaple struggled to make them welcome, to put on a little bit of a display.

  The head of the faculty, Little Benjy, had always been less than friendly towards Miranda, but now his coldness had been reinforced by an illusion of being in the right. His muttered greeting had sunk into a curt nod, and now an assessing gaze. Miranda knew about the historically established degrees of snubbing—the Cut Sublime, when you pretended to be very interested in a nearby object, the Cut Indirect, when you pretended not to see the person, and the Cut Direct, when you gazed into someone’s face and ignored their greeting, if any. These days, Little Benjy was performing the Cut Direct, and there was something self-righteous about his interrogating, ignoring gaze. To a direct enquiry, Benjy had replied that the matter of Faisal Khalil being arrested in a lecture hall was now beyond both of them, meaning that it was more important than Miranda, at least. Pressed further, he said curtly that the university was convinced the police had had good reasons for arresting Faisal, whatever they might be. Asked still further whether the police were going to make a habit of entering classrooms without notice to arrest students, Little Benjy said that he was very busy and had no intention of pursuing this matter any further. Miranda replied that that might be his intention, but it was not hers. She was sure he would understand. The era of the Cut Direct, enacted four times daily on staircases and corridors and in the pathways between buildings, now began in earnest.

  The tasks for post-offer open days for prospective students passed between faculty members. Today was Miranda’s turn. The faculty held a talk in a lecture theatre about the work of the university, highlighting what institutional successes could be scraped together and emphasized. Then there was a brief pseudo-lecture, mounted by a junior member of the faculty on some popular work of recent English literature—this year it was going to be on Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, which experience had shown was one of very few books that the parents of any students, prospective or otherwise, might have read. The students themselves, prospective or otherwise, had of course read nothing at all. Then the students were taken off to pseudo-classes and their parents wined and dined, or at any rate given a cup of weak coffee and a glazed yellow Danish pastry and chatted up by members of the staff.

  There were better things for Miranda to be doing on a Friday afternoon, and these talks were generally delegated to members of the faculty who had not yet lost the will to live. In the email that had arrived the week before, telling Miranda it was her turn to give a talk to the parents, Miranda detected the hand of Little Benjy and his tittering cadences. She had not protested; she gathered herself; she prepared some brief notes, which were now on the desk before her in a yellow folder.

  There was a knock at her door. Through the reinforced glass, the White-Queen-like silhouette of Sukie made itself clear. Miranda made no response, and in a moment, another knock came. If she could see Sukie’s outline, then Sukie could see hers. But she made no response.

  ‘Are you there?’ Sukie said, half opening the door. ‘Oh—you are. Are you disturbable?’

  ‘I was making some notes on something,’ Miranda said. ‘But now I’m quite finished, I believe.’

  ‘Well, it was nothing so very important,’ Sukie said. ‘It occurred to me that it’s been an absolute age since we had you and Kenyon over to dinner, and, hey, I thought, let’s go crazy and fix a date.’

  This was untrue: Sukie had now had Miranda and Kenyon over to dinner three times in succession, without Miranda and Kenyon making the slightest effort to invite them back. Miranda believed that the invitations came originally from Sukie’s son—it was Michael, wasn’t it?—who was hanging round a lot with Hettie. There had been three awkward evenings there with the six of them, Michael and Hettie sitting at the far end of the table, contributing nothing. Miranda guessed that this invitation was as near as Sukie could reasonably get to asking Miranda if she and Kenyon were proposing to ask her and her husband Lloyd over any time soon. But Miranda had calculated the cost of having Sukie, Lloyd and silent Michael over to dinner, and found that it could not be done for under two hundred pounds with decency, three courses and some restocking of the drinks cabinet. You could not respectably refuse if someone said ‘I’ll have a gin- [or vodka] -and-tonic,’ before dinner, though you could laugh off a lack of Campari or sherry; you could not admit there was no whisky or brandy in the house after dinner. And there had been no gin, or vodka, or whisky, or brandy in the house for six weeks now. Sam had come round and polished off the last of the Campari ten days before. Miranda had calculated the cost of entertaining the three of them, or anyone else. She had considered that Sukie was actually here only from January to January before she returned to Quincunx College for good. She also remembered that all Americans regarded all English people as sponging, mean and unfriendly, and she didn’t see why she shouldn’t contribute to the stereotype, just a touch. So she now said, ‘Well, that’s very nice of you, Sukie. Whenever suits you, truly.’

  ‘I’ll have a look at my diary, and at Lloyd’s,’ Sukie said, defeated. ‘Are you busy?’

  ‘I am,’ Miranda said. ‘I’m just about to give my standard jollying-along speech to the prospectives and their mums and dads. I’m on in five minutes, actually. Were you going to have a cup of tea?’

  ‘You read my mind,’ Sukie said. ‘Well, another time, then.’

  ‘I might pop along later,’ Miranda lied. ‘After I’ve done my bit. It won’t take all that long.’

  ‘I dare say I’ll still be there in half an hour,’ Sukie said. ‘I’ll walk down with you. How’s Hettie?’

  They left Miranda’s office, and she locked it up carefully. The night before, she had emptied her desk of anything she considered important; she had run along the office shelves for anything she had any emotional attachment to. There had been half a dozen favourite copies of favourite books; she had found a copy of Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Sayings, the book Kenyon had handed over when they had first met. It had been his first gift to her; he had said, at that table at the back of the old Café Pelican on St Martin’s Lane, long and thin as the car showroom it had once been, green and gold as Hammersmith Bridge or Harrods, that it was a book he loved and he hoped she would love it too. It had been after Götterdämmerung at the Coliseum. It must have been 1978, and Miranda was halfway through her PhD. And she had loved the book, and, though it had nothing to do with her work, it had ended up in her office. The night before, she had taken it home, with a few other favourite books, and some vital papers, and this morning, she had tidied her desk like a woman facing execution. She was, she believed, an orderly person.

  She agreed with Sukie, as they walked down the stairs, that Michael and Hettie were goo
d kids; that they were good together; that it was kind of touching to see them together. And all of that was true. Her mind was on the yellow folder under her arm. It contained not only her file copy of the speech she gave on these occasions almost every year, the text much amended by hand, but a series of notes on more recent events. There was an account of what had happened when Faisal Khalil had been hauled out, an honest first-person account including the officers’ names and numbers; it contained all the emails and summaries of the phone calls and meetings she had held since with the university, the police force, with human rights groups, and with the trade unions, both of university teachers and of students. To Miranda’s slight disappointment, the police had charged Faisal Khalil not with terror-related offences—she had been absolutely sure they were going to drag him off to Guantánamo Bay in an unmarked aeroplane. They claimed, instead, that he had been selling horse tranquillizer to his fellow students to help them to obliterate a segment of their Saturday nights. But that hardly mattered. She did not believe it, and if she had believed it, she thought that they could not simply turn up and interrupt the process of education in that way. She took her yellow folder with her, not because she was going to refer to it in the next hour, but because she thought she would need it, quite soon.

  The prospective students and their parents were milling about in the foyer in front of the lecture hall. Miranda was struck by how much the children looked like students already, clean-haired and clean-faced, their only distinction from the enlisted many their expressions of nervousness, of a wish to please or impress, of a concern for what she might think of them. She felt like reassuring them. She would be gone by the time they arrived here.