by Roger Curtis
‘It’s alright if Ahmed joins us, isn’t it, Father?’
‘It’s a free country,’ Gabriel replied, trying to appear disinterested but inwardly seething. ‘Remember that we need to be going in a moment.’
Ahmed sat between Claire and her father and placed his laptop on the table. Almost immediately there was the jingle of a mobile phone from his pocket. As he answered it he looked closely at his watch. There was a brief exchange in a language Gabriel did not recognise. A smile of immense satisfaction spread across Ahmed’s face. He looked at his watch again, but this time more intently and appearing to follow the movement of the second hand. Then, to Gabriel’s surprise, he handed the older man the mobile. ‘Stupidly I left my reading glasses on the train,’ he said. ‘Would you be so kind as to dial that number for me?’ He pointed to a number typed on a tiny piece of paper stuck to the casing with tape.
Caught unawares, Gabriel took the phone and sat clutching it sheepishly, not knowing what do, or how to give it back without loss of face.
‘Go on Dad, ring it,’ Claire said.
‘Funny number that,’ Gabriel said, perplexed.
‘It’s a mobile number,’ Clare explained, ‘you should know that!’
‘Well, okay then.’ With clumsy fingers Gabriel entered the number and held the mobile to his ear. ‘It doesn’t seem to be ringing,’ he said.
‘That’s not entirely unexpected,’ Ahmed replied.
With a movement of his body indicative of supreme satisfaction Ahmed leaned back in his chair. Without looking at Gabriel he held out his hand for the mobile. There was a finality in this gesture which suggested that something of great moment had been accomplished. He turned to look at Gabriel. ‘You have done me – us – a great service,’ he said. But it was not gratitude that Gabriel saw in the man’s expression, more like revenge. Ahmed looked at his watch again, and to Claire said, ‘It has been the greatest of pleasures meeting you. I feel sure we shall meet again.’ To Gabriel he said nothing. Then he rose, grasped his laptop and left them. ‘I’ve another train to catch,’ he mumbled.
‘Well, what was all that about?’ Gabriel exclaimed.
‘He was nice,’ Claire said.
‘Anyway, he’s gone and we’ve got to get to where you’re going. Come on, young lady.’
They walked out slowly beneath the television screen. As they did so the news item seemed to change. The presenters – a man and a woman – looked concerned in a way that was momentarily personal and somehow unprofessional. A red band appeared with a message that said breaking news. ‘News is coming in,’ the male presenter said, ‘of a major rail accident outside London.’ The camera swung onto his female companion. ‘We are hearing that at about 8.57 a commuter train bound for Liverpool Street…’
‘My God,’ Gabriel said. ‘Another one. What is this country coming to.’
‘We’ll have to find out later, Dad,’ Claire said, pulling at his hand. ‘Otherwise I’ll be late.’
They walked out of the station into the sunlight. Gabriel thought again about the suits he would see in the High Street. It suddenly occurred to him that the father of a model might have responsibilities that were not necessarily negative. He called a taxi and, hearing himself critically for the first time, thought that he might do worse than to take the edge off his Norfolk accent. This new life might have possibilities after all.
‘No luggage, Sir?’ the taxi driver asked casually.
Luggage? The dim remembrance of the impact of his fist upon a blue travelling bag on a luggage rack entered his mind. Well, that might have been coincidence. The man might have put it in left luggage. But then he remembered Ahmed’s anxious glancing at his watch and the sly grin as he handed Gabriel the mobile phone. He saw in his mind the hands of the clock on the cafeteria wall as they left, and calculated backwards through the five minutes to the time just before the young man had left them.
Gabriel felt a sharp burning pain in the tip of his index finger – the finger that had touched the last of the digits. He remembered particularly straining to hear the ring tone that did not come.
He felt his body swaying and clutched wildly at the top of the open taxi door.
The radio in the cab was playing.
‘They’ve really done it his time, the bastards,’ the cabby said. ‘Two trains at once, passing each other apparently.’
Muntjac
Christopher’s morning had not been kind. First it was Alice from the almoner’s office, stepping uninvited into the notional space around the table that was barred to all but himself when an autopsy was in progress. Then there was Bertie, his assistant, clattering about on the second table, saw and chisel in hand, as if he were in a calypso band. Fortunately there were no police today. Time, then, for one more body before lunch with Alice.
Though the instruments were already laid out for him, he rearranged them – unnecessarily, as he always did – in accordance with that tiny manifestation of autism known only to his family. He called for Bertie to help him pull out the drawer and together they manoeuvred the ice-cold cadaver onto the stainless steel table. Then he remembered it was the one with the curious history.
It was clear the man had died through asphyxiation caused by vomit blocking the airways. What had caused that was not immediately apparent. It was a while after he started probing the stomach contents that he found it, the object that would transform his day: a tiny glistening ball hardly larger than a pea that dropped from his forceps and tinkled across the steel surface before coming to rest on what he saw was one of its many faceted surfaces. It first crossed his mind that the object was a perfectly cut diamond, so brightly did it refract the light from the lamp above, but on closer inspection there was no doubt it was metallic. He looked up once to see Alice gesticulating at the partition window, then waved her away and put it from his mind that they had agreed to lunch together.
Under his magnifying lens the object was not just a simple sphere. The colour of each of the many facets was distinctly unique and beneath the surface of each he believed he could see – although sense was probably a better word – tiny oscillations in the refracted light. A cloud began to form before his eyes, followed by a throbbing at each temple. But that was just the beginning.
No-one saw – not even Alice – that when they lifted him from the floor the metal sphere rolled as if propelled by its own energy along the gully and into the drain, from which – although of course no-one looked for it – it was never recovered.
Exactly a week later Christopher – or rather his cadaver – suffered the indignity of being autopsied on the very same table. And then Bertie took Alice for lunch.
The Robinsons had moved to Suffolk in anticipation of their joint retirements. For George it was a logical progression from the chic, but rather dismal, town house in Hackney to a listed farmhouse with three acres where he could bed himself in for retirement. Alma accompanied him reluctantly, not realising that the bane of her life, the urban fox – one of which had threatened their grandson Tommy in his pram – had country cousins with a taste for guinea fowl and chickens. That was minor, though, compared with a new arrival some two years into their translatio in paradisum. There had been odd sightings of the hound-like creature – hardly a deer at all – in the village, but it was only when, one morning, George found his rose-heads decimated and the agapanthus leaves truncated – with characteristic teeth marks – that they knew there was a problem. At first seldom seen, the sand-coloured beasts quickly became less timid. In full view of the house they cropped the lower strata of the laurel bushes, so that the animals lurking in the undergrowth became more visible below the browsing line. And so with the vegetables. The one obvious solution – to fence the garden – failed at the first hurdle when George paced out the quarter-mile perimeter and Alma resolutely refused to forego their holiday in Ibiza to meet the cost. So they fell back on simple
solutions: devices which emitted frequencies that allegedly only deer could hear; talking boxes that only excited curiosity; and, as a last resort, an imitation fox that jumped out of a box to flashing lights when triggered by movement (usually George’s). By the end of the summer the muntjacs – which had now multiplied alarmingly – showed only disdain, while the bird population, to Alma’s dismay, had upped and left. In a last desperate measure George fenced the flower and vegetable beds with wire netting, but admitted defeat when one of the creatures, having jumped the fence, had caught its leg in the netting when chased by George and had to be cut free, to the sound of loud bellows from both parties.
So ended the first skirmishes in the war of attrition. George and Alma spent the winter thinking laterally and seeking help on-line. Following the advice of the Royal Horticultural Society to plant species that muntjacs don’t like (prefer would be a better term), following radical replanting in the spring the garden took on a more homogenous look with the proliferation of thorn-bearing and dull-leaved shrubs. The result was that the browsing line of the specimens that had survived had become higher. ‘They can stand on their back feet,’ Alma exclaimed, realising that the heavily-blossomed branches of the potentially fruit-laden trees would sooner or later come within reach.
‘It’s your mind-set that needs to change,’ Ferdinand, their neighbour, told them. Think of them as an asset, a decorative addition to your estate, to be cherished.’ George thought he saw Ferdinand try to stifle a guffaw of laughter as he turned to walk away, but Alma had grasped the message. ‘They are rather cute, aren’t they George? And have you seen the little ones – they’re so sweet.’
But George had one last ace up his sleeve. ‘They can’t abide male pheromones,’ a guest at one of their dinner parties had told them. ‘They see you as territorial – perhaps even sexual – competitors.’ So while it was still light, and foregoing their desserts (although imbibing an extra glass of beer each), the males, young and old, tramped into the garden, stationed themselves strategically along the flower and vegetable beds, and freely urinated. The following morning George pulled the bedroom curtains apart to reveal two stags locked in combat on the lawn. It was then that he realised outside help was needed.
It came in the form of a master’s degree student from the department of animal behaviour at Avonbridge Polytechnic. Wayne Parfitt was looking for a project for his second year dissertation. ‘One of our brightest stars,’ his tutor had assured George, adding, ‘Something of an oddball, though.’ Against Alma’s better judgement, George invited him to stay. That first morning, over coffee in the kitchen, Wayne expounded his theory of niche adaptation, for which the muntjac deer afforded an unparalleled example. This was partly because the whole population – now expanding rapidly across southern England – was derived from a single escapee from a herd imported from China, known to Wayne and his companions as Fleance. ‘When you eliminate genetic variability,’ Wayne said, ‘the data is so much more robust.’ George could just about see that. Alma was more impressed by Wayne’s apparent affinity with Shakespeare, which to George was at odds with the dreadlocks, rings in the ears and bangles at the wrist. But in spite of that they gave him the room vacated by the couple’s teenage son Tommy, who was at boarding school. Wayne kept himself to himself, at least at the beginning.
Each morning George would watch Wayne from his study in the turret of the west wing, from which the expanse of the encircling lawn was fully visible. He saw Wayne pace a full circuit around the house, following the tracks in the grass made by the muntjacs – bare streaks of exposed earth that had long eluded an explanation. ‘Creatures of habit,’ Wayne said. ‘Same pattern every day.’ ‘And at the same time?’ George asked, not really caring. Before long a map had appeared taped to the refrigerator door alongside a note to the family requesting the addition of the times of sightings. Unlike George, who saw no practical outcome to this exercise, Alma was becoming enthused, which may have had more to do with an infatuation – in a very minor way of course – with Wayne. Daily and religiously she entered her data, and on the fourth day stood back astonished. The entries for the point of vantage of the morning room were identical to within minutes. But what was more surprising, those were the only times when she had been present in the room, to rest her feet and peruse the scandal pages of the daily paper. She, like the muntjacs, was a creature of habit. She offered Wayne a coffee and was slightly put out that he for once gave more attention to his results than to her.
The following day Alma made a small detour to pass by George’s study on her way to the morning room. There he was, head down over his accounts, dead to the rest of the world. She could see beyond him into the garden and held her breath. And sure enough the same creature as before, as if on cue, emerged from the undergrowth and sidled across the lawn. It stopped momentarily, as if an intoxicating perfume had wafted for an instant across its nostrils, and then continued on. Alma moved to the morning room. ‘It showed no interest in your husband?’ Wayne asked. ‘No,’ Alma said.
Outside the morning room window the deer was idly nibbling the grass. As Alma gazed out it raised its head and engaged her in a fixed stare. Alma experienced a moment of elation, as if something of great significance had passed between them.
Then the link was broken as Fleance – for that’s what they now called him – resumed cropping the grass.
‘They do that – just stand and stare,’ Wayne said. Then he thought for a moment. ‘What I’d like to do,’ he continued, ‘is measure the stare time. Would give me data for another table, and you can’t have too many of those.’ He gave Alma a stop-watch and over the next five days she recorded the stare times meticulously. On the sixth day Wayne plotted them on a graph. It showed a consistent, if miniscule, increment one day upon the next. ‘Curiouser and curiouser,’ he said.
The following week George was summoned to the Department of Extra-terrestrial Exploration, where he had been retained as a consultant – and where he and Alma had met while in their thirties. Alma, to some the more gifted of the two, had declined a similar appointment, but in bed every evening they would discuss the affairs of the department. George’s speciality – and what made him an asset – was an overt scepticism to anything that contravened conventional wisdom. So when, years back now, public awareness had been inflamed by reports of alleged extra-terrestrial phenomena – including a few ridiculous accounts of alien landings – George, in his letters to The Times, had scathingly extinguished the issue. But it seemed not quite, and it was surmised that there had been a rash of recent sightings. In all this Alma, the more open-minded of the two, had remained neutral. But, fancying a couple of days in London, she decided to accompany George.
When she returned home ahead of her husband Wayne was waiting at the door. ‘Funny thing,’ he said, ‘when you were gone Fleance showed no interest outside the morning room. He just nibbled the grass a bit and continued on. It will be interesting to see what he does now you are back.’ At this suggestion Alma felt a sudden delicious spurt of anticipation. ‘I’m looking forward to it,’ she said, then chided herself inwardly for being irrational. But, stop-watch in hand, she resumed her former relationship with Fleance. Strangely, the stare times had increased and after each communication – for that was the word that sprang to mind – she’d felt increasingly queasy and had to lie down.
‘I’ve… er… been asking around,’ Wayne said at dinner. ‘Seems you’re not alone in… well… getting their attention. I’ve had some mates do some recordings. There’s a village in Berkshire, same thing, same results, and another in Sussex. Here’s a list. I’m waiting for others to come in.’ Alma’s ears pricked up. ‘Those names ring a bell. Don’t they with you, George? Aren’t they villages that had… well… sightings?’ ‘Just coincidence,’ George said. ‘Nothing more. Get it out of your heads, both of you.’
But Wayne couldn’t get it out of his head, nor could he sleep. So tempting was the
hypothesis that was forming in his brain that he’d managed to persuade his supervisor to allow him to convert his master’s to a PhD. ‘What you’ve got there,’ his supervisor said, ‘is a population ever expanding into the community and increasing their exposure to human behaviour by exploiting conducive habitats and territorial niches.’ And Wayne saw that the very places the muntjacs chose to colonise were precisely those where human intellect – and therefore position in society – was of the highest calibre: big houses in big gardens in affluent areas. Why?
Wayne applied his mind to the problem. He realised there were two contributors to this relationship he was observing. So he took to watching Alma’s response to Fleance’s presence. As the animal appeared in the frame of the window Alma’s eyes glazed over, as if in a trance. Wayne looked from one to the other with increasing rapidity. Something had passed between the two, of that he was sure. And more significant still there was a time-lag – in milliseconds, it is true, but there all the same – between Fleance’s averting his gaze and Alma’s countenance returning to normal. It could mean only one thing: Fleance was in control.
That night, with George still away, Wayne bedded Alma. Her outpourings of affection were peppered with nuggets of pure gold minted from George’s revelations about recent supposed extra-terrestrial happenings. Before even Alma awoke Wayne was at his desk superimposing that map upon another showing the spread of the muntjac population. Surely there was a correlation. He saw in his mind the beaming face of the vice-chancellor as he received his doctorate – and the customers in W H Smith as they flicked through copies of Nature in search of his paper. These were thoughts he had to share; rashly, he shared them with Alma.
George returned to an atmosphere pregnant with expectation. Quietly entering the morning room he observed his wife staring through the window. Wayne was beside her, with an arm around her waist and a stop-watch in his hand. George withdrew silently to his study, removed his shotgun from the wall safe, then had a strong coffee to steady his nerves as he laid his plans.
