 |
 |
     |
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
Qinmeartha and the Girl Child
| |
|
2 Girl Child LoChiIt would be Easter in a couple of weeks. Joanna had had a good drive down from London, and was feeling relaxed rather than tired by it. Slowing down as she came in off the A38 onto Regent Street -- the road that led into Tarburton's centre from the east -- she wondered for the first time how much of what had happened in the past six months she could tell Aunt Jill, how much would have to be censored. Quite a lot, she concluded. There are some things that don't cross the generation gap, however much Aunt Jill is supposed to have been a bit of a goer in her young days. She parked the red Mini in Ham's Lane, just in front of the Crafts Centre, as usual. Climbing out of it, she looked up at the windows of her aunt's flat, just above the Blue Horse. They were blank, like eyelids closed against the sunshine. Aunt Jill would be watching her from there, so she waved cheerfully, then dived into the back seat to fetch out her squashy grey bagful of clothes. Greta appeared at the door of the Crafts Centre, smiling uncertainly. She was of middle age and looked it, despite a lifetime spent eating nothing that came out of a packet or tin. She claimed to cook everything served in the Crafts Centre from raw materials, no shortcuts, but her neat blue designer apron never seemed to show any food-stains. "Hi," said Joanna. "Hello," said Greta slowly. "You'll have come to see your aunt again?" "Yes," Joanna said. It was an obvious question, and for a second it worried her. Greta wasn't exactly a conversational expert, but she wasn't usually as dim as this either. "It's been a while." "Been a while," Greta echoed. She turned and went back into her shop. Joanna hefted the bag onto her shoulder and crossed the road. The Blue Horse was open, even though it was the middle of the afternoon -- Jas must have decided the grockle season had begun -- and Joanna was briefly tempted to push her way in through the swing doors to the cool, friendly darkness. No -- Aunt Jill must have seen her arrive. Later on, perhaps, Joanna would be able to drag her out of the flat for a drink or three. The flat's entrance was through a concrete corridor and up a little flight of stairs at the back. Listening to the bell's ping-pong, Joanna saw that the tiny garden was a mess, with weeds already growing in a tangled mat across the earth. She frowned. Aunt Jill wasn't an enthusiastic gardener, but she was determinedly dutiful. Had she been ill sometime during the winter, and not said anything -- not wanted to bother Joanna? It would be like her. Ping-pong again. Not that Joanna could have done much about it, even if Aunt Jill had told her. There had been too much going on in London, too many emotional quagmires that had to be either navigated or circumnavigated. The things she wasn't going to be able to talk to Aunt Jill about. The symmetry of the situation struck her as she stood waiting on the doorstep. When last she'd been here in Tarburton she'd been aware that there was something Aunt Jill was withholding from her. Now it was the other way around. Splitting up with Mike -- well, that would be OK: Aunt Jill had shown something akin to impatience when Joanna's relationship with Mike had entered its third year, as if Aunt Jill herself, in her youth, would have ditched the man months before, just on principle. Yeah, and it'd be all right to talk about Peter, too -- about most of it. Ping-pong. How long had she been standing here? Couldn't be more than a couple of minutes. Maybe Aunt Jill had gone to the loo after seeing her arrive. Don't worry about things so much, thought Joanna, pulling a battered pack of cigarettes from her handbag. You're getting to be as bad as Aunt Jill. A fussbudget, Peter would call you... Yes, it'd been a bit of a mess with Peter, hadn't it? Three years of Mike had reduced everything to familiarity. Peter had seemed a good option -- although, when Joanna thought about it, she realized angrily that a lot of what had made him seem so glamorous was just that he had a faster car. They'd driven north one day, up almost as far as Manchester, and in between being terrified of police speed-traps Joanna had felt as if she were throwing off the shackles of her staid, quasi-respectable relationship with Mike. Peter had driven away very quickly indeed when she'd told him she was pregnant. Ping-pong. And the odd thing was, she'd hardly blamed him. "Joanna, darling," said a voice at her elbow. She turned to find the door had opened. A pale face looked at her out of the gloom. "Aunt Jill?" she said hesitantly. "Who else would it be?" "Yes, but..." "I've lost a little weight since you were last here, that's all. Come in, child, come in. Don't just hang around there. There's a chilly draught, if you hadn't noticed." Following Aunt Jill up the inside stairs, Joanna found her mind in a turmoil. If she'd met her aunt in the street she wouldn't have recognized her. Aunt Jill couldn't be more than half the weight she'd been last October, and she seemed twenty years older. This was somebody's grandmother who was pointing her into the drawing-room -- somebody's rather old and decrepit grandmother. "Aunt Jill," Joanna began helplessly, "you look so..." "So what?" There was still a strong light in the blue eye that peered up at her. "So ... changed," said Joanna. "I'm six months older, that's all." Aunt Jill settled herself into the yellow armchair, leaving Joanna to sort herself out however she would. "It's been a long six months. I don't suppose you've had too much time to think about your poor old aunt -- not with all the things you young folk get up to in the city." "I'm sorry it's been so long..." "No, don't apologize to me, Joanna." Aunt Jill waved a frail hand in dismissal. The skin between the fingers was pale-yellow parchment. "I was young, too, you keep forgetting. A long time ago." "Not all that long," said Joanna brusquely, dropping the squashy bag and plonking herself down in the window seat. "You're not all that ancient, Aunt Jill." But she looks it. She looks as if she's not far from the grave. She doesn't look sixty ... sixty-three, I think ... or is it -four? "Long enough. Tea? You'll have to make it for us both, if you could. I seem to have been standing half the day." Joanna put the kettle on, scuttled upstairs briefly to the loo, then filled the pot. The kitchen, normally as neat as one of those pictures in the colour supplements, was like the garden out the back: it gave the impression of being overgrown. "What was Peter like, then?" said Aunt Jill as Joanna came back into the room, carrying the tray. "You never told me much about him on the phone." She didn't sound very concerned. In fact, she sounded as if she were finding it an effort to formulate the words, like an actress suddenly thrust into a part without having been given the script, just told to muddle along as best she can. "Not much to tell," said Joanna. And there wasn't. He had been fun to be with, but now it was an effort to conjure up even the image of his face or the sound of his laughter. Their brief fling had been somehow affectless, even at the time. And then, of course, he'd been abruptly out of her life -- business had suddenly, by some astonishing coincidence, necessitated his departure to Glasgow for the next two years. Leaving her, and a fetus developing inside her. And Mike -- except Mike hadn't really come into it. Oh, he'd been there, of course: hanging around like a faithful spaniel, over-eager that they remain best friends, even though they were no longer lovers. She hadn't had the heart to tell him that the child was actually his, not Peter's: he might have offered, in his gallant way, to marry her, or something embarrassing and confining like that. So instead she'd quietly arranged for an abortion. She'd been surprised by how much of an argument the doctors and nurses had put up, pointing out that an abortion was a permanent thing: you couldn't change your mind about it afterwards. And then she'd been surprised by how completely they'd acquiesced as soon as they'd realized that her mind was set. She got the feeling that, even if she'd had second thoughts an hour before the op, they'd have been overridden by those now-impersonal persons. The biggest surprise was the guilt, afterwards. It was as if it was only once the bond between them had been sundered that she could start to recognize the fetus -- the dead fetus, which she wasn't allowed to see -- as a fellow human being. She didn't think of herself as a murderess, not quite; but she did have the haunting sensation, whenever she woke up in the night, that perhaps she'd run someone over in the car and forgotten about it. Which was illogical, silly, a notion not to be entertained. But a notion which, alas, had gate-crashed, and showed no signs of departure. Joanna didn't respond to her aunt's question. The old Aunt Jill would have seen her preoccupation, but the new one -- this grandmother -- didn't even seem to be interested. "I had a good drive down," said Joanna. "The countryside always looks so gorgeous this time of the..." "You're looked after in my will," said Aunt Jill. "As you must have known you'd be. Say no more about it, now. Just so long as you know." "Auntie!" She'd left the sugar in the kitchen. "Whatever brought that up?" "I'm not as young as I used to was." "You're not old." "Amn't I?" Looking at the pale face, with the bones of the cheek and jaw clearly demarcated beneath the wrinkled paper skin, Joanna could find no answer. Yes, whatever had happened in this past half-year, Aunt Jill was now indisputably old. No argument. "I'll get the sugar," she said. "As you wish, child." This time the arm on the worn yellow chair only half-rose, leaving the little dismissive wave uncompleted. When Joanna located the sugar-lumps, tucked away near the back of the cupboard for the cleaning powders and washing-up liquid, she found they were stained and spotted with what she hoped was just old tea. On the spur of the moment she dumped them in the overflowing pedal bin. "You're out of sugar," she said, back in the drawing-room. "I'll get some for you, later." "Oh, don't worry about 'later'. Tell me something about what's been going on." A little of the vitality had returned to the old woman. She'd pulled herself more upright in the chair, and was drinking her tea black and sugarless. "Well, they sacked me." When Joanna had first told her aunt on the phone there had been a shocked sucking-in of breath: in the old days people never got sacked unless it was for some gross breach of conduct. "They called it making me redundant, but it felt just the same as being sacked." She'd been working for a publishing company, Rolfe & Baldwin. Mainly they published glossy novels with lots of pages and lots of sex in different countries and in unorthodox locales and positions that sold hardly at all in hardback but gained big paperback advances. Joanna had been an assistant editor for nearly five years, all the time telling herself that she was wasting her time -- that sooner or later the right job would turn up at OUP or somewhere respectable, and then she'd be on her way. Instead, as Dave Rolfe had told her, the bottom had fallen out of the soft-porn market, and they were having to cut back. She'd got six months' salary and a big bunch of over-ripe red roses. "Well," said Aunt Jill, "you were never very happy there anyway. Not a great loss." All at once Joanna felt an upsurge of fury. The last few months had been hell -- Mike, Peter, the abortion, the redundancy, everything -- and surely it was her entitlement to have some older person she could lean on, someone whose shoulder she could weep into, just like she'd wept into her mother's shoulder as a child. For almost a decade Aunt Jill had been that person: it was her job to be a sort of mother confessor, and she was failing to fulfil it just at the time Joanna most needed her to. I should be sympathetic, she told herself sternly. I shouldn't be thinking about my own interests at all. I shouldn't be being so selfish. Aunt Jill's ill -- she must be, and here am I worrying away about my own trivial concerns. It was good advice, but the anger didn't go away. She watched her hand clenching on her knee. "I'll go and make up my bed," she said. "And then I'll do some shopping. And clean the kitchen. You've been letting things get out of hand, I think. Have you seen a doctor?" Aunt Jill produced a thin imitation of a snort. "Doctor Grasmere? He gave me a prescription. The same prescription he gave me last year for my rheumatism. I think it's a special sort of medicine that's designed to make elderly biddies go away and stop pestering him." It was the nearest to the old Aunt Jill that Joanna had seen since arriving here. She looked for the smile that should have accompanied the remark, but it wasn't there. "I'll go and make up my bed," she repeated.
Aunt Jill was too tired to go out for a drink that evening -- too tired to do anything much except keep her feet up in front of the television, not even clucking over the usual dreadful news about rioting in Kuala Lumpur and further slaughter in the Balkans. Joanna, who had done some shopping, cleaned the worst of the kitchen and concocted a casserole to throw in the oven -- all in a state of righteous fury -- had no choice in the matter: she needed the drink, not for its own sake but just to get away from the funereal flat and its morbid occupant. It's like the baby all over again, she thought as she clattered too noisily down the stairs. I'm already beginning to think of Aunt Jill as someone completely isolated from me, rather than just ... Aunt Jill. The Blue Horse smelt of stale cigarette smoke and spilt beer, just the way it always did -- but there the semblance of normality ended. It wasn't ever a noisy pub -- not like the Customs House in Regent Street, where the yobbos with bikes and leather jackets hung out -- but this evening it was almost silent, as if the air were too thick to carry sound. The lights -- fake gas-lamps that Jas had put in to replace the fluorescents his predecessor had installed -- likewise seemed muted. There were a few other drinkers already there, one or two of whom she recognized enough to exchange nods with, but only Jas himself had any words for her. "Miss Gard, down for the weekend," he said morosely. "Hi, Jas," she replied, perching herself on a stool, trying to make herself cheer up by pretending to. "A pint of ... Royal Oak, if it's on form." "Royal Oak it is," he said, moving to the pump. He, too, had lost weight, she suddenly noticed. It was better disguised, because of the disreputable old suit and waistcoat he affected, but the jacket was loose on his shoulders and there were flaps of flesh around his chin and cheeks. "What's going on?" she said as he put the pint on the towel mat in front of her and took her coins. "Not just here, I mean." "What do you mean?" he said off-handedly. "In Tarburton. It's not the same." She swung her arm to indicate the pub and the rest of the village beyond its walls. "My aunt's different -- like there isn't as much life inside her as there used to be. And..." She stopped. How can you tell someone, face to face, that they're looking bloody terrible? "And everything," she concluded limply. "Not as I've noticed," Jas said. He was polishing his way along the optics with a torn tea-towel. "Have you noticed anything, Rupert?" Rupert, whose job was something Joanna had never discovered but who was generally regarded as a townie because until last autumn he had commuted daily to Newton Abbot, looked up for the first time from his whisky and soda. "Yes," he said indistinctly. "No. Young Joanna Gard, isn't it? Come to visit your aunt, have you? Fine woman, your aunt. Fine figure of a woman, too." He covered a belch with his hand. His fingers were nicotine yellow, like his moustache. "Few years ago I'd have..." Joanna never found out, thank God, what Rupert'd have, because the door opened behind her. She twisted round and saw a couple of young people -- people her own age -- coming in. It was as if someone had opened the windows in a morgue. At first she didn't register them as anything other than blessed interruptions, but as they came closer to the bar she began to see them as individuals rather than symbols. The woman was, on second examination, somewhat younger than Joanna -- she didn't look to be more than twenty, if that. She had long hair, a glossy black, and skin of a colour that looked as if it would become a tan within days of the first arrival of summer. Her lips were full, although her mouth was small. She glanced at Joanna briefly, her dark, nearly black eyes showing no sign of interest. The man was older -- he could even be thirty. He was in jeans and a faded green Marillion T-shirt. He was quite tall, and had the same night-black hair as the woman. It was clear from stray facial resemblances -- the fleshy lips, the smallness of the mouth, the cleft marking the chin -- that the two were brother and sister, not a couple, as she'd at first assumed. Yet, where the woman's face seemed quintessentially feminine, his was almost defiantly masculine. Joanna turned away and stared at her drink. She'd not been much interested in men since the abortion -- not remotely interested in them, if the truth were to be told -- but this stranger was something different. Things were looking up in Tarburton if they could import talent like this, she reflected wryly. She tried to tell herself that there was something lofty and romantic in that original hot flash of attraction she'd felt, but was honest enough to acknowledge there hadn't been a lot of higher emotion involved. "Guinness, Jas." She liked his voice, as well. Not hunkish: not wimpish, either. It had an accent she couldn't for the moment place. "Tony?" "Just a Coke." So the girl's name was Antonia. Probably. What was his? "You're new here?" Joanna said, turning towards the pair. Oh, God, that must have sounded patronizing, she thought. I'm only sort of here on sufferance myself. "You're a strange face as well," said the man, smiling guardedly. "You must be Jill Soames's niece." "Yes. Joanna." News travels fast in Tarburton. "Jas's told us about you, hasn't he, Tony?" He was laughing at her, but not unkindly. His sister didn't join in. "Don't worry, Joanna -- it is Joanna, isn't it? -- he's given us a good report of you." "And you?" She wished she didn't feel so much like a schoolgirl all of a sudden. She remembered when she'd been in the sixth form the school had hired a temporary assistant cook who'd looked like a sort of unraddled Mick Jagger, and how she'd always turned her face away when she passed him in the corridor in case he was telepathic and would find out what she was thinking about him. She felt like that now. "We've been here ... oh, four months now, I guess. Since Christmas. We moved into the big house at the other end of Ham's Lane, down by the playing fields." "Aunt Jill told me Major Hunter had died. Was the house as much of a shambles as everyone thought it would be?" He looked at her gravely and adopted a portentous tone. "Significantly worse." He smiled. "Oh, boy, was it bad! Mother had to call in professionals in the end, just to get all the crap out of it. There was one entire cellar filled with broken glass. Seems he couldn't face putting his bottles out with the dustbins so he just slung them down there. Enough there to keep Coventry Cathedral in replacement windows for the next thousand years, I should think." "It's not funny, Steve," said his sister, touching his arm. "He was a poor, lonely old man, that's all. Lay off him. Let him rest in peace." "OK, OK." He pushed his sister's hand away. "I won't even mention the heaps of girlie maga --" "Steve! There were no such --" "Sorry, sorry." "Do you like it here in Tarburton?" said Joanna. It sounded like the kind of question someone might ask at a school prizegiving -- something that indicated the asker didn't want an answer. She lifted her glass to her lips as if that would make the words sound wittier. "As good as anywhere," said Tony. She started to say something else, but bit it back. You were going to say, thought Joanna for her, that, just like in all these little places around the moor, the people don't take kindly to newcomers. Aunt Jill's been here for over three years, but they still, though they're friendly enough, treat her as if she were a weekend tripper rather than someone who's come here to stay. "We're going to sit down," said Steve in that rich voice of his. "Join us?" He shrugged towards a table near the rear, where the loos were. Tony was already on her way across, holding her Coke out from her side theatrically, as if Jas would throw her out if she spilt any of it. Perhaps he would. Jas seemed to derive dour pleasure from throwing people out of his pub. "Love to," Joanna said. "I don't really know anyone much around here." She followed, amazed all over again by the contrast between these two rather beautiful people and the rest of the folk in the pub. They were bright splashes of acrylic set on the wall alongside twee, cautious watercolours. Greta, too, had had that same washed-outness about her. And Aunt Jill, of course... "I can't stop long," Joanna explained as she sat down. "My aunt -- I've only just arrived -- something in the oven..." Which is the kind of inadvertent double-entendre I could do without, she thought. There's no longer anything in my oven. I slew it. "It's nice to meet you," said Steve forthrightly. He put his hand lightly on hers. "Tarburton's all right, like Tony was saying, but it's a bit -- you know, dead." Except when people like you two are around to breathe life into it. "As you said, I'm Joanna," she muttered. "And you?" "Gilmour. Steve and Tony Gilmour. The idlest layabouts in an idle family, in case you were going to ask us what we do. Funny sort of question, that, now I come to think about it, and yet we're always asking it of each other." For a moment Joanna was lost by him, unable to work out if "we" were Steve and his sister or the human species at large. "As if you could tell more about a person from what they do between nine and five, by what they earn their meals from," Steve was saying, "than from whether they've just helped you out of a hole, or if they like Stockhausen better than the Black Crowes, or..." Tony, who had been so indifferent to Joanna's presence when they'd met, now seemed to have decided she liked her. "You're burbling, Steve," she said. "You'll bore the poor woman before she's properly even met us." "Tishwash, sister!" he said. "I'm sure Joanna here has long ago decided that, the sooner she can get out of this pub and never see us again, the happier she'll be. Am I right, Joanna?" "Not at all," she said, flustered. "Quite the opposite, in fact." And that may sound like just the sort of courtesy you'd expect from me, but it's true, she added mentally. Truer than you could possibly imagine. "But I do have to go." She gulped down half the remains of her beer -- which, now she was paying attention to it, wasn't up to Jas's usual standards. "Yes -- you said." Steve's voice was sympathetic. "You have an aunt and a casserole to attend to." "Something like that." And quite a lot else. I think.
That night, hot although the night itself hadn't seemed to be hot, Joanna dreamed. She was in a place where the sky was always light, a single mass of brightness that arched all the way from one horizon to the other. She knew quite a lot about her situation in this place, but not really enough altogether to explain it. There was a sun somewhere in the dome of radiance, but it was lost in the general brilliance: the sun never set, and it touched the atmosphere of this world into shining with the same unremitting vigour as itself. There was no escape from the light. Here and there rocks stuck up out of the desert, and there were one or two scrubby-looking plants, but they cast no shadows. The radiance was not especially hot, but it was so bright that it burnt her as painfully as red-hot tongs, as if it were flaying away the cornea of the single eye that seemed to be the entirety of her body's upper surface. She slithered. It was the only way she could move. She could extend pseudopodia -- indeed, she didn't even have to think about doing so: it just happened -- and then drag herself a few painful centimetres across the abrasive desert surface, looking for shadows that were not there so that she could hide in them from the light that would not permit her to hide. It was silly to go on searching, she knew that; but she was unable to take the decision just to stop where she was, to give up the hope. It was as if, wherever this hell was, she'd been condemned to spend the rest of eternity hunting for a relief that would never be granted. It was a while before she realized she was not the only one here: although she couldn't see anything out of her single upturned eye except the lurid fire, sometimes shadows moved at the extreme periphery of her vision. Once she'd observed a few of these she realized that she'd always known there were others of her kind. She was of the Wardrobe Folk, as were they; and it was the doom of the Wardrobe Folk to dwell in this arid misery forever. Unless... Unless the Girl Child LoChi could come among them. But Joanna, in her dream, didn't know who the Girl Child LoChi was, and didn't know how she could find out. Lacking that knowledge, she was sapping the strength of her people in their attempts to bring the Girl Child LoChi to their aid. She was at fault -- every extra second that she and the other flat creatures like herself spent here was partly her responsibility. Guilt. Too much of it for her mind to stay here. She woke screaming in a tangle of bedclothes to find light pouring in through the bedroom window. She screamed at that, too, until she realized it was only the morning sunshine, and that she was in her own bedroom in Tarburton-by-the-Moor. A few minutes later she was giggling unconvincedly. Just a nightmare. The Wardrobe Folk -- next it would be the Pantry People or the Cupboard Under The Stairs Collective. But the cold sweat all over her and the sheets and the blankets didn't go away just because her rational mind was taking over its rightful functions once more. She pulled herself out of bed. Later she'd tell Aunt Jill all about this, and the two of them would laugh together at the silliness.
Later, though, when she went to wake up Aunt Jill with a cup of tea, she discovered Aunt Jill was dead.
| |
|
3 Farewells, WelcomesThere was a wind up today, coming from the sea to the south, and it was blowing away most of what the Reverend James "Call Me Jim" Daker was saying. Which was, in Joanna's opinion, an unquestionably good thing. Her aunt had never had much time for ceremonies or for what she called "po-faced eulogies", and the Reverend Call Me Jim's utterances would have had her cringing. She was "a pillar of the community" and a "stalwart on the side of virtue" and all sorts of other things he'd never made much reference to when she'd been alive and trying to mount petitions about the Bloody Bells. Joanna looked glumly across the open wound of the grave. She wasn't certain whether or not Aunt Jill had ever attended services at St Leonard's, and she guessed that the Reverend Daker wasn't, either. Still, these formalities had to be gone through, Joanna concluded. Viewed as formalities, they didn't seem too bad; viewed as anything else, the Reverend Daker's overblown testimonials were somehow poisonous, as if Aunt Jill's spirit were not to be allowed to ascend into the hereafter without taking with it its due quota of earthly hypocrisy. There was a scattering of other mourners. Jas had shut the Blue Horse for the occasion, and he was standing opposite her, his eyes downcast. Out from behind the shield of his bar, he looked even less substantial than he had the other day. She willed him to look up at her, but he obstinately refused. Rupert was there, too, his eyes betraying whatever private wake he'd held for himself the night before. He, too, didn't seem to want to look at her. And there was Greta, and the woman from the post office, and even the chap who organized the Bloody Bell-ringing sessions -- probably telling himself that the Christian humility he was showing in coming to the funeral of his old enemy would serve him well in the life to come, or maybe he was just here to gloat -- and a dozen or so others. All of them elderly people, around Aunt Jill's kind of age or older; Joanna was the only person there under fifty. The fresh spring wind made their clothes flap. Joanna was reminded of a different season -- of autumn trees. Come winter, would this leaping breeze be a gale, and would all of the trees be able to withstand it? She straightened her shoulders and told herself to stop being morbid. The Reverend Daker seemed to be coming to the end of his oration -- or, at least, he was pausing for breath -- and she must brace herself to receive the sympathies of the others. On second thoughts, cemeteries were about the one place in the world it was perfectly permissible to be morbid. And why should she don a cloak of false happiness? They took turns tossing earth down onto the coffin-lid. Joanna wiped off her hands on the sides of her skirt. Surely that was about all they had to do; surely they could all pack off home now, herself included. She'd decided against holding one of those glacial funeral teas people seemed to go in for; there weren't any relations, and the only residents of Tarburton whom Aunt Jill had known at all well were gathered here and looking about as uninterested in protracting proceedings as Joanna herself. She had a bottle of scotch back at the flat -- her flat, now -- and proposed to spend the rest of the afternoon getting as much of it into herself as possible before she passed out. From the look of Rupert, his intentions were very similar. As if at a signal, the rest of the party moved off, leaving her alone at the graveside for a moment with the sexton. "She was a nice woman, your aunt," he said, bending to pick up the first spadeful of earth. "She'll be missed around here." It was a better funeral oration than the Reverend Daker had been able to compose.
The level of whisky in the bottle had gone down by about a third, and she'd given up bothering to mix it with water. The light coming in through the drawing-room window was a golden mellow colour, a paler variation on the liquid in the bottle: in an hour or so it would be sunset. She knew she was really quite a lot drunk, although still not drunk enough. Something had wasted Aunt Jill away, something that had grown inside her, devouring her. In other circumstances Joanna might have guessed cancer, but there hadn't been that funny smell cancer victims usually give off, and Dr Grasmere had sworn to her that her aunt had been in perfect health. "She just died," he'd said. "She was old, you know." "She wasn't yet sixty-five," Joanna had said, and she said it again now, raising her tumbler to the whisky bottle in some sort of tribute. "She shouldn't have died. She wasn't old enough to die. She didn't..." No: saying that people didn't deserve to die was stupid, and somehow uncharitable. No one deserved to die except those who wanted to, and Aunt Jill hadn't wanted to. Well. Maybe not. It was hard to tell what the frail old grandmother who called herself Aunt Jill had actually wanted, or not wanted. Joanna wished she'd come down here to Tarburton more often, or at least more recently. She wished she hadn't spent part of that last evening down in the Blue Horse chatting with Steve and Tony Gilmour. She wished... Right at this moment, she discovered, she wished more than anything else that she didn't have to go and pee. The stairs up to the loo suddenly seemed a challenge. Maybe it was stupid of her to have got this plastered. The irony was that she'd driven down from London intending to ask Aunt Jill if it would be possible for her to come to Tarburton to live for a while. Her redundancy money from Rolfe & Baldwin wasn't going to last forever, not at London rents; and there weren't any very appealing jobs around right now, and ... Well, now the flat was hers. She could come and live here any time she wanted -- and probably would. She'd wait a week or so, and then she'd go up to London and give in notice to her landlord. The few possessions she really wanted to keep, apart from the books, could probably all be jammed into the Mini. Mike -- good-old-faithful-spaniel-Mike -- Mike would bring the books down in the back of his van some time. If she asked him nicely. The loo, woman! Not a second more! She was coming back down the stairs, taking them one at a time and gripping the banister so tightly that her hand would hardly slide, when the doorbell rang. "Shit!" she muttered. "Bloody well-wishers. Bloody vultures." But instead she found Steve and Tony at the door. "Hi. Come in. I'm pissed." Steve laughed, his arm round his sister's shoulders. "Then this is a fine time for us to join you." He moved forward, not exactly pushing her but at the same time giving her no opportunity to refuse admission. "We thought you might be drinking, Tony and I, and we thought you might like some company. Miserable occasions, funerals -- more miserable than the deaths themselves, in some ways." "You have a great experience of deaths, I suppose?" said Joanna, trying to put some acidity into her voice. The result sounded to her as if she were speaking through cotton wool. "More than you might think," he said lightly. He was past her by now, standing at the bottom of the stairs, looking upwards. He wrinkled his nose. "Aunt Jill rather let things go to pieces towards the end, didn't she?" For a moment Joanna couldn't think of anything to say. The effrontery of him! The other evening in the pub she'd found his male vitality, his assuredness, immensely attractive. That had been before she'd seen this oafish, arrogant intruder. "Aunt Jill was my aunt," she said deliberately. "Not yours." "I'm sorry," said Tony quietly beside her. "Would you really rather we went away and let you be?" "No," said Joanna automatically. "No -- no, it's kind of you to come. I'm sure I..." "She told us to call her Aunt Jill," Steve was saying. "Over the last few months she and my mother were seeing a lot of each other, and so it seemed only natural we should come to call her Aunt Jill." "She never told me anything of this," said Joanna thickly as she followed him up the stairs -- her stairs. "I think she would have mentioned..." "It's quite true," said Tony. "Steve exaggerates about a lot of things, but he's telling you the truth about this. Your aunt and our mother did seem to be ... very taken with each other, is how your aunt put it. Afternoon tea the two of them would be over here, morning coffee at our house." "And lunch every day at the Crafts Centre," boomed Steve, looking almost proprietorially around the drawing-room. He'd smuggled in another bottle of scotch somehow, and had placed it on the coffee table beside Joanna's. "That was, until your aunt's health began to get so low. Probably's Greta's wholefoods, I should imagine." He cut another chuckle off short. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said that. What did Aunt Jill die of, by the way? Did that old quack from up the hill tell you?" "Old age, Dr Grasmere said." Joanna crossed and sat down in Aunt Jill's armchair. It must have been obvious to Tony that this wasn't where Joanna had been sitting before, because she said: "Look, are you sure you don't mind us two storming in here? We honestly won't mind if you tell us to go away again." "You're here now," Joanna said with an effort at grandness. "Settle yourselves down. No doubt you know where the glasses are kept." She indicated the kitchen, and Tony slipped quietly out of the room. "I'm surprised my aunt never mentioned your mother to me," said Joanna again, worrying away at the problem. "Even though I didn't see her as often as I should have, we spoke on the telephone most weekends, and she was always filling me in on events in the village. I'd have thought she would have said something about..." "It's a mystery," said Steve with finality, landing with a thump in the chair she'd not long vacated. "That's all. You can ask mother about it when you meet her, which I hope won't be long. Oh, yes, that's right -- I almost forgot. That's one of the main reasons we came across here, Tony and me. My parents would like you to come to dinner one evening soon. In fact, mother was mad keen you should come tonight, but I guess that's ... not possible." She saw her dishevelment reflected in his gaze and laughed. It was the first genuine laugh she'd uttered since finding Aunt Jill dead in her bed. "I've got the glasses," said Tony. She appeared around the wing of the armchair carrying a tray with a couple of mismatched glasses and the aluminium milk-jug. "Water," Tony explained. Steve leapt to his feet and poured for both of them; at the same time he topped up Joanna's tumbler. She waved away his offer of water from the aluminium jug. "I'd like to accept your parents' kind invitation to dinner," said Joanna, forming the words carefully. "Not tonight -- not so soon after my aunt's funeral. But tomorrow, if that would be convenient." "Perfect!" said Steve. "Tuesday evening it shall be. I shall call for you, ma'am, at eight o'clock precisely. We shall have drinks on the veranda beforehand and..." He talked on, and Joanna let the words wash over her. She became much more conscious of Tony, sitting demurely on a chair's edge to her left. It was obvious from the way the girl -- Joanna found it hard to think of anyone younger than herself as a woman -- had her denimed knees so tightly pressed together that she was still nervous about being here, still wishing that her brother would shut up so the two of them could make their polite escapes. It's funny, thought Joanna, the way I was so wrong about both of these two when we met. Tony seemed all haughty and aloof, as if she wouldn't wipe her feet on me, and Steve seemed like the answer to a maiden's dream. Hmmf! Some maiden: some dream. "How old are you?" Joanna suddenly asked the Gilmour girl, cutting Steve's witterings off mid-flow. "I'm ... uh ... I'm nineteen. And Steve -- Steve's twenty-four." "I guessed you about right," Joanna said. "But I thought Steve would be older -- more like thirty." Steve brayed with good humour. "I don't know whether to be complimented or..." he began, but Joanna ignored him. "And yet sometimes," she said to Tony with the slow honesty of drunkenness, "when I look at you more carefully, or when the sun catches your face just so, you seem much older than your brother." Tony flushed under her pale-tea skin, and looked down to where her hands were toying with her whisky glass. "I guess that's a way of looking at it," she mumbled, glancing up suddenly at Steve. Joanna sensed there was something here she ought to know more about, but her mind, slowed by the whisky, wasn't capable of framing the next question. Instead she said: "Where did you live before you came here?" "Oh," answered Steve airily before his sister could say anything, "here and there, you know. The way one does." "Here and there?" said Joanna. "Round and about. We're sort of like gypsies, our family -- we never stop in any one place too long. And you?" "I live -- used to live, I suppose I should say -- in London, in a bit of London called West Hampstead. Pandora Road. Number 48. It's about seven minutes from the tube station. I rent a place. The landlord calls it a flat, but really it's just a glorified bedsit, with its own bathroom. I pay..." And the words kept on tumbling out of her. To her horror she discovered she was pouring out in front of these almost total strangers every detail of her life, of her work at Rolfe & Baldwin and of how that had come to such an abrupt end, of her relationships with Mike and Peter, of the baby that never was -- she remembered to call it a baby, at least, because if she called it just a fetus people might think she was a bit cold-blooded, or something -- and of how it had been Mike's kid when at first she'd thought it was Peter's because she'd got mixed up with her months because being with Peter made for such a lot of turbulence in her life and... All of it. Some bits she'd never properly told herself before, let alone other people. Once or twice during the flood of words she tried to bite her tongue, anything to stop herself blabbing her innermost secrets, but it swivelled easily out of the reach of her teeth. There was darkness outside the window when finally she ground to a halt. She'd lost count of the number of times Steve had quietly leaned forwards and topped up her glass. There was nothing left now of the bottle she'd started on her own, and the level in the second was half-way down the label, and yet she didn't feel nearly as drunk as she had been earlier. Perhaps the adrenalin of confession had burnt away the alcohol. "I'm sorry," she said in a low voice. "I shouldn't have burdened you with all that. I had no right." "You had every right in the world," said Steve boisterously. "That's what friends are for, isn't it, Tony?" Slowly Joanna turned her head to look at the girl. The frame of black hair was lost in the shadows of that corner of the room; through the gloom she could see pale smudges that were Tony's hands and face. Yet she could see enough to know that the girl was profoundly uneasy. "I'm sorry," Joanna repeated in Tony's direction. "No. Nothing to be sorry about. But Steve and I must leave you now. At once. Come on, Steve." Her brother half-rose, then settled back again. "Are you sure you'll be all right?" he said with heavy solicitude. "Have you eaten anything today?" "I'll be OK." Joanna shook her head. She felt angry with him for having been there to hear everything she'd told him, and now all she wanted was for him and his sister to be out of her sight. "Tony's right. Please do go. I don't mean to be rude, but ... but I need some time on my own, right now. I'll see you tomorrow night. I'll be over this by then. But could you...?" "Come on, Steve," Tony said tightly. "Of course, of course," said Steve, and this time, to Joanna's relief, when he got to his feet he stayed there. "Maybe it was wrong of us to come blundering in here but..." "No, but..." said Joanna. Somehow, in a blizzard of apologies from all of them, she got the two Gilmours out the front door. Leaning against the cool wall at the foot of the stairs, she heard them whispering to each other as they tip-tapped down the steps outside. She might have been able to hear what they were saying if she'd strained her ears, but she found she wasn't interested enough. In fact, all she really wanted was some more scotch, a hot bath and bed. Maybe it'd be wiser to alter the order of proceedings a bit: a hot bath while she was still enough in control of herself not to fall asleep or trip and bang her head, then bed with the remains of the scotch to make sure she slept soundly. And, she hoped, for the first time this week to sleep dreamlessly.
| |
|
4 Not the MunstersHer hangover had largely ebbed by the following evening. She'd slipped guiltily down to the strangely subdued Blue Horse at lunchtime to feed it a couple of pints of Royal Oak, keeping her fingers crossed that the two Gilmours wouldn't come stumbling in and catch her in the act. She'd meant to have only the one pint, but Jas had refused to accept any payment for it, so she'd asked for another to settle up the score, as it were, but then he'd refused to take her money for that one, either. She'd have felt better about it if he'd shown her any signs of friendship, but instead he'd made both refusals with a sort of glum resignation that told her he was merely doing his duty. Still, the beer had worked its magic. She'd climbed into this bath mostly cured, and she was feeling fine now that she was climbing out of it. She looked at herself in the mirror, striking a girlie-magazine pose, grinning; then suddenly straightening up as if Aunt Jill could be watching her from out of the walls. She was just an inch or so below medium height, with shoulder-length ungroomable hair that couldn't decide whether it wanted to be dark or fair. Her nose was snub, her eyes blue-grey. Her breasts weren't large enough and her bottom was too big. It was hopeless telling herself that virtually everyone else she knew likewise thought their boobs were too small and their bums too big: she, Joanna Gard, was the one woman who really was big and small in all the wrong places. She found she was grinning again. Well, at least I'm unique in something. She dried herself on the thick pink towel she'd given Aunt Jill for Christmas three or four years ago, enumerating her other failings as she did so. Her ankles probably in fact were -- objectively were -- a bit too thick, and they were looking worse than usual today. Maybe she was suffering a bit of water-retention because of all the stress. Her toenails badly needed cutting, but there was no one going to see them, so it didn't matter. She had a little heat-spot on her waist, still left from where the seat-belt had been chafing against her during the drive down from London -- how long ago? Just over a week, wasn't it? What to wear? She slipped into a pair of pants with pictures of the Gummi Bears on them -- Peter said he'd picked them up in Disneyland the last time he'd been in California and had been waiting to find the right woman to wear them -- and a plain white Marks & Spencers bra: very sensible. But as for the rest? The trouble was, she hadn't a clue what the Gilmours senior were like. She'd kept a watch from the window most of the morning -- it had been something to do while waiting for her head to stop expanding and contracting -- hoping to catch sight of anyone coming up Ham's Lane who might be them, but everyone she'd seen had been depressingly familiar. Rupert on his way to the Blue Horse. Greta popping in and out of the side-door of the Crafts Centre to puff at a cigarette whenever trade slackened off a bit. The Reverend James "Call Me Jim" Daker huffing officiously about his business. The reputed gay who lived up at the far end of West Street and was said to be a writer of some kind; Aunt Jill had introduced them once but Joanna couldn't remember his name. There were a few others, but no one who could have been the Gilmours. Their children seemed casual enough: both of them seemed to live in jeans -- neatly pressed designer jeans that probably cost a fortune, but jeans nevertheless. If their parents were likewise ... But ... Maybe... Joanna swore at herself. It wasn't as if she had much choice. She'd packed a skirt for the weekend, just in case Aunt Jill had company, but it was only the kind of thing you could wear for standing around politely sipping sherry. Her own jeans weren't knife-edged like Steve's and Tony's: they could do with a wash, she realized as she put them to her face. There were some clothes in the wardrobe, left behind other times she'd been here -- maybe there'd be something wearable among those. The Wardrobe Folk. She shook the thought away with an angry jerk of her head. Last night's booze hadn't spared her the nightmare of the world with the sky of unrelieved light. She'd been unbearably thirsty as well -- though whether this had been genuinely part of her dream or her body telling her that all the whisky was dehydrating her was something she didn't know. Probably the latter: the creature who was her in that other world didn't seem to have a mouth, so presumably couldn't feel thirst. But she had discovered something new: there was a certain frisson of excitement among the other creatures who shared her predicament, because somehow they all knew -- herself included -- that the advent of the Girl Child LoChi would not be long, now. Joanna hoped so. Maybe the dreams would stop pestering her then. She found what she was looking for at last. It would have looked hideously quaint in London, but down here in Tarburton it was probably all the rage: a black jumper suit that caught her around the hips and waist so that her bum looked bigger than ever. "Good breeding stock," she said to her reflection in the wardrobe mirror. "A fine figure of a woman. You'll make someone an excellent wife, some day." Mike had always liked her in this, so was probably the subliminal reason she'd left it down here. "A Freudian jumper suit," she said to her reflection, waving her forefinger at it like a schoolmarm. Shoes. Ah, yes. She had some little black sandshoes that would have to do. The end product, she decided, once she'd brushed her hair and her teeth and was back in front of the wardrobe mirror again to practise her smiling, wasn't too bad. She'd lay money she'd be able to turn Rupert's head, anyway. If ever she wanted to. Maybe even Steve's, although after his performance last night she was absolutely certain that she wasn't in any way attracted to him, would never be, and the very thought of him made her feel queasy. Maybe even Tony's... Eh? Where had that thought come from? It didn't seem to belong to her. "Getting more versatile in your old age, hmm, Joanna Gard?" she said to the mirror. She glanced at her watch. Forty minutes until Steve was due to arrive to pick her up. She could put her feet up and maybe, very cautiously, take a little scotch just to make sure the hangover didn't suddenly come back again. She was abruptly very tired. Sitting in the armchair swilling scotch seemed like a much better idea than going out to have supper with the Munsters -- or whoever Steve's and Tony's parents turned out to be. Joanna giggled. Oh, yeah: the Munsters in Tarburton.
They were charming, of course. Ronnie Gilmour was at the door when Joanna and Steve arrived. She proved to be an older version of her daughter, but with some of her son's flamboyance. She drew Joanna to her for a brief, almost contactless hug, then stood back to look at her properly. "Steve warned me you were pretty," Ronnie remarked, clearly unaware that she was saying exactly the wrong thing, "but he obviously didn't warn me enough." Joanna mumbled something embarrassed and allowed Steve to guide her by the arm through the heavy blackened-oak door. At least she was wearing the right sort of thing: Ronnie was in a brightly coloured gypsy dress with a line of faded-blue lace across the bosom -- more or less the uniform of the middle-aged hippie. Her voice had the same fullness as Steve's. Joanna was led into a large room with a fire blazing in an open cast-iron hearth at the far end. The furniture was characterized by its weight rather than by any apparent comfort; what a second-hand dealer might have called "much loved". The walls had been left unplastered, with whitewash over the rough-hewn stones. Here and there were pictures and hangings, an odd mixture -- so far as Joanna's untrained eye could ascertain -- of ancient and modern, fine and garbage. Getting up from one of the overstuffed armchairs gathered around the fire was a man of about fifty whom Joanna guessed must be Gilmour père. "Vic Gilmour," he said, smiling, extending a massive hand towards her. "And you're Jill Soames's niece. We were so devastated to hear of her death. Ronnie took to her bed for a day to get over it." But none of you thought to go to the funeral, Joanna thought resentfully. She was such a good friend of you all that Steve and Tony were supposed to call her Aunt Jill, and yet you didn't walk a hundred yards to see her stuck into the ground. Too shy? Too shy of what the villagers would think? Or didn't you really know her that well? Hmm? "We wanted to come to the funeral," said Vic Gilmour, as if he had heard her thoughts, "but it wouldn't have been right. That was a time for the people of Tarburton to express their grief, not for outsiders like us." "But Aunt Jill was an outsider herself," said Joanna, moving to the chair Vic had indicated. "She wouldn't have ... minded." "A drink?" said Ronnie, coming to the fireside. She'd got a trail of flour on the sleeve of her dress, which was more than Greta of the Crafts Centre ever allowed herself. As the evening progressed Joanna found herself thawing to this family. She'd thought that Vic was merely giving excuses when he'd said that they'd been reluctant to trespass at her aunt's funeral, but soon she came to realize that he'd been perfectly serious: the Gilmours really did feel like interlopers, like gypsies who would naturally be resented by the community among which they'd parked their caravans for a while. Soon Joanna began to recognize that they were seeking in her a kindred spirit, just as presumably they must have sought out Aunt Jill when first they'd come here. Over soup -- which was Unidentifiable Country Vegetable or Country Unidentifiable Vegetable, she couldn't make up her mind -- she wondered if Steve or Tony had told their parents anything of her drunken outpouring last night. If so, there was no trace of the knowledge in the two older people's eyes. Vic and Ronnie seemed concerned to be as frank and open with her as possible, and to make sure she knew this. She wasn't sure she much enjoyed that part of the experience -- it was like a stranger who insists on standing too close to you. The main course was a triumph, and by then the wine they'd been drinking had started to work its relaxing magic. Cutting into a slab of pork that had been marinated in cider and some herbs she didn't recognize, Joanna began to feel more at ease with the world than she had since arriving in Tarburton. The conversation had veered away from her and Aunt Jill and anything to do with current circumstances towards politics, which in a paradoxical way was safer territory. They were all good liberals, of course, as she'd known they would be -- and as she was herself -- and they bemoaned the difficulties of getting hold of the Guardian or the Independent regularly down here in the wilds. Yet as the discussion progressed -- she held herself back any time she felt herself becoming too prescriptive -- she discovered that the Gilmours' knowledge of their subject matter was oddly ... amateurish. They were going through the motions, it seemed: they were saying most of the right words, and in general they were saying them in the right order, but there were gaps. Midway through a mouthful of strawberries and ice cream Ronnie said something about the former Yugoslavia that let Joanna perceive that the woman had the country positioned in the wrong continent -- somewhere to the east of Moscow. And Steve described Nelson Mandela as head of the CIA rather than the ANC without any of the rest of the family seeming to notice the slip. If Joanna had been a little more sober or a little drunker she might have been more concerned by these lapses, but she was too full of her hosts' generosity and wine to give the matter too much thought. She was reminded of a couple of right-wing Sun readers she'd once met in a seaside hotel who'd sombrely told her that Shirley Porter was deputy leader of the Labour Party. It was reasonable for the people at the other end of the political spectrum to be equally vague about such irritations as facts: no one section of society should be allowed a monopoly on ignorance. "How long are you staying down here for?" Vic asked her once they were sitting back around the fire again. He'd poured brandies for them all except Ronnie, who'd pleaded migraine. "Now that the funeral's over, and all." "I thought," said Joanna, shy now she was voicing the idea, "that I might come down and live here for good -- well, for a few years, anyway. My aunt was -- well, not wealthy exactly, but not poor either. The flat's mine, and there's enough money invested to give me three-quarters of an income. I thought I might see if I could drum up some freelance work to make the other quarter." "Tired of London, eh?" said Vic, smiling encouragingly at her. "But obviously not tired of life." The remark threw her. It wasn't something she'd thought about before. The truth was, now she came to confront it head-on, that perhaps she was tired of life, too, in a way. The past six months had given her more of "life" than she could have wanted in a decade. Maybe a large part of her urge to kick the dust and soot of London off her feet was that she wanted to leave that sort of life -- what the Chinese curse calls interesting times -- behind her as well. Once again she had the disconcerting sensation that Vic could tell her thoughts. "That's not what I meant," he said. "I meant tired of living. You have so much vitality locked up inside you, young Joanna Gard, and you seem just to let it out in small, carefully measured doses. Maybe you're wise. You seem to me to have more life inside you than all the rest of us put together." Joanna laughed, embarrassed. "Not true!" she said, throwing up her hands. "Look at your children, Vic. Look at Steve. Look at Tony. Can't you feel the vitality pouring off them?" "No," he said flatly. "Not the same way you have it." She looked up, alarmed. Then she relaxed: at some stage while they'd been talking the two younger Gilmours must have slipped out of the room. "I don't know what you mean by that," she said slowly. "Haven't you noticed anything odd about this village?" "Well -- yes." She took another sip of brandy and rolled it around the inside of her teeth. "Yes. Everything seems to be sort of slowly winding down, as if the people were getting tired, or something. They're still the same people all right -- I'm not talking any Invasion of the Body Snatchers stuff -- but they seem sort of resigned, sort of lethargic. Sort of dying from the inside out, like my aunt did..." What a horrible thought. She'd begun to connect up Aunt Jill's wilting with the quietness in the Blue Horse and the sense of futility she felt clinging to all of the village's foci, but that had been before Aunt Jill's death. The event had shocked her out of any temptation towards introspection; it had made her concentrate on living through the surface layers of each day, unwilling to let her thoughts paddle any more deeply than was necessary to guide her to the next place where she'd be safe from the waves. But talking with Vic was making her stop dodging the waves any longer -- and as she looked up into his brown eyes, which seemed softer than before, she realized he had deliberately guided her to this state. "You think there's something really ... really wrong here, don't you?" she said. Her voice was hardly more than a whisper, barely loud enough for him to have heard it above the crackle of the logs in the hearth. "I wouldn't like to put it as strongly as that," he said, shifting uneasily in his seat. "It just seems ... Well, I've heard of dying villages and ghost towns before, but those have always been just metaphorical terms. Here in Tarburton it's as if the metaphors are being made real -- reified, if that's a word you use." "I'm a publisher's editor," she said archly. "Was." He chuckled. The spell that had seemed to be settling down around them dissipated. "We've both maybe been reading too much creepy fiction," he said. "Watching the wrong sort of movies. Looking at something perfectly innocent and assuming there must be some dark secret lying at the heart of it all." "I wish I could say I agreed with you -- entirely," said Joanna, suddenly serious again. "But there is something creepy here, you know. Take Jas, the landlord of the Blue Horse. I never much liked the old bastard -- his racism is hard to stomach, just for a start -- but you always used to ... to know when he was around, if you like: he was hail-fellow-well-met with a vengeance, telling jokes or losing his temper or something. But now he's like a ghost of himself. He looks like a set of articulated clothes-hangers walking around under cover of a tweed suit, and it's as if his personality were the same. He's there, but he's not there at the same time. He used to be himself: now he's rather like the bar-tender in a grotty old Western movie -- there's an actor in the rôle, but he doesn't actually have to do anything except be the Standard-Issue Bar-Tender." This time when she looked at Vic's eyes she saw pain in them. "We were very fond of your Aunt Jill, you know, Joanna," he said quietly. "Are you two having a nice old heart-to-heart?" said Steve from the door. "We've been doing all the washing up and stopping Mum from whacking into the cooking sherry." Vic grinned. "Liar," he said to his son. "You mean you've been in the kitchen getting in the women's way, more like." "How could you be so cruel?" This, thought Joanna as she turned in her seat, is the man I thought was so goddam attractive when we first met? Bloody hell, but the usually 100% reliable Gard Hormonal Targeting Device sure came a cropper with this one. Though she smiled politely, as if Steve had said something witty, and not too long after that it was time to go home. Alone.
| |
|
5 Night TimesThe squashed-flat creature who was Joanna had managed to manoeuvre herself close to a crumbling earth-column in the desert and was trying to wrap her body around it. The top of the column, less eroded by the sands than the rest, overhung just enough that it might -- it should -- cast a shallow necklace of shadow onto the ground beneath. If she could somehow lever herself up vertically, so that she could make herself like a cuff... No. The rules of this place forbade it. There was nothing she could imagine that could logically stop her from achieving her aim, but she knew almost from the outset that doing so would be impossible. That was the way this particular existence was scripted. It was her lot in life to remain horizontal at all times, with her single eye turned ever towards the sky. Her eye didn't have the capacity to weep, but she imagined it blurring with tears. Even those tears might have provided some respite from the ferocity of the sky's brilliance; doubtless that was why crying was impossible, too. The Girl Child LoChi was coming. That prospect was her only succour. The thoughts of the other creatures like herself drifted in and out of her own, and always there was the same undercurrent: that at last, after all these uncountable millennia, the Girl Child LoChi was coming to bring shadows to the sky. The Joanna-creature slowly, inch by agonizing inch, dragged herself away from the earth-pillar. It was better to be nowhere near it than to see it close by, enticing her with promises of blissful shadow it could not in the event grant her. Some of the others had heard rumours of water -- the first open water that anyone had discovered in living memory -- and they were heading in the direction the rumours dictated. The Joanna-creature knew that the expedition was a waste of time -- that it was every bit as futile as her attempt had been to harvest the shadow of the earth-column -- but she decided to go along with them anyway. Every location in this nightmare place contained the same amount of pain.
There were more stars in the sky than was possible. At least, that was Joanna's first thought when she looked up from the side of the tor at the velvet of the night. The moon, close to the full, had set a couple of hours ago, and the last vestiges of its milky light were gone from the horizon. The tor itself was invisible, although she could feel its bulk near her. She and the two younger Gilmours had taken her bumped red Mini on the spur of the moment, after the pubs had closed, and driven out here onto the moor. Now they were in the middle of an area that seemed of infinite extent and totally devoid of people, except for the distant whisper of the traffic on the A38 and the occasional flash of headlights, somewhere far away, as a farmer headed for home. The darkness made the world featureless. Rather like my recurring dream, thought Joanna as she breathed deeply of the cold air -- it was as if she were inhaling cold, pure starlight. Only there the sky is one single ceiling of fire, and here it's blackness spotted with ice crystals. How jealous my friends there would be if they could see me now. "They say there are ghosts out here," said Steve cheerfully at her side. "You can see why," Tony said. She'd borrowed an old fur coat from her mother -- synthetic fur, of course -- and the fluffy ruff around her neck made her look like an Elizabethan portrait. "I bet the tor is haunted. And there're those funny constructions near the road back towards Tarburton -- rings hollowed out of stone, and little cones. I bet our prehistoric ancestors knew a thing or two about the ghosts around here and built those megaliths to propitiate them." "I bet our prehistoric ancestors are the ghosts around here," said Joanna, and the three of them laughed. She felt what Tony was feeling, though: as if millions of tiny eyes might be peering at them inquisitively from the crevices of the tor. Yet the sensation didn't repel her -- rather the other way around, in fact: it was as if Tarburton were undetectably dying, so that it was preferable to be out here in the presence of the fully dead. Or something. She didn't want to dwell on it for too long. No -- one other realization: there was a taint of something like malice enveloping the village, but that was completely lacking around here. The ghosts of the tor weren't friendly, but on the other hand neither were they malevolent: their existence was too divorced from that of mere human beings, their mentalities too different, for them to bear their mundane counterparts either good or ill will. "Werewolves as well, I should think," said Steve. "And the Beast of Dartmoor." "I thought it was Exmoor that had the Beast," said Joanna. "Oh, I'm sure Dartmoor has one as well," breezed Steve. "In fact, I'm sure that Dartmoor says to Exmoor, 'Huh! Anything you can do I can do better, because I'm bigger than you. You've got the Beast -- well, I'll show you: I'm going to have hundreds of them.'" Joanna giggled at the thought of the squabble. "Hundreds of very small, perfectly formed Beasts?" she suggested. "No, tishwash, woman!" He patted her too roughly between the shoulder-blades. "We're not dealing with any little soft, cuddly, children's-tv-style monsters here. The Beasts of Dartmoor are bound to be enormous, ravening creatures, with their naked fangs dripping luminous goo in the moonlight -- isn't that right, sis?" "If you say so, Steve," said Tony's voice from the darkness. She sounded bored of her brother. "They're like werewolves, only a lot viciouser and a lot less susceptible to reason. That's what I think. Can't you see them, Joanna? Can't you hear them?" He threw his head back and let out a long, vibrating howl. The sound vanished into the night, echoless. "Stop that," said Tony calmly. "You'll have the cops out here to see what's going on." "Piffle! There aren't any plodders within twenty miles of here!" He let out another yell, even louder than before. Joanna felt an edge of ice running up her spine. The ghosts of the tor might be real -- in fact, she was perfectly willing to concede, now, that they were -- but they didn't frighten her half as much as this overgrown youth imitating something much darker, something crueller, something born from the human imagination rather than from the timeless rocks. "Yes, do shut up, Steve," she said, hearing the uncertainty in her own voice. "It's..." She couldn't bring herself to admit out loud that he was scaring her, but it must have been obvious at least to Tony that this was what she'd been trying to say. "Yes, put a fucking sock in it, Steve. We're out here to enjoy ourselves, not to watch you put on the fucking Gang Show." But: "Can't you imagine them, Joanna?" he whispered. She could feel the wind of his breath on her ear. "Can't you see them playing in the moonlight, dancing and fighting and spinning around each other, secure in the knowledge that no one can see them? Doesn't it make your blood sing to think of them doing that, Joanna?" "No." "Not even a little bit?" "No. It just reminds me that I'm cold." She felt him retreat from her. The night seemed to have grown even blacker, because now she could make out nothing at all of her two companions. "Think of them," said Tony -- not Steve this time. "Think of them playing so free under the stars." Tony's voice had taken on extra sibilants. "Stop pissing about, you two." She should have left a light on in the Mini, but she hadn't wanted to spoil the starscape. Now she hadn't a clue where the car was. "Unless you want to have to find your own way home on foot." Steve's response -- she was pretty sure it was Steve -- was yet another of those long ululations. The noise seemed to be travelling away from her, as if he were sprinting across the rough surface of the moor. She could envisage him with his arms thrown out to either side and his head arched back, yelling madly at the sky like an animal. Like a werewolf. "Tony," she said, no longer trying to conceal the nervousness in her voice. "Tony, for God's sake can't you try to get your brother under control?" She tried a good-sport laugh, but it didn't sound very convincing. Tony said nothing, but there was an answering howl from the direction in which Joanna had last seen the girl. "That's synthetic fur you're wearing," she bellowed. "Not the real stuff." There were answering howls on both sides. More than two of them, it seemed. She looked directly upwards at the stars, half-expecting to see strange silhouettes occulting them; but the sky was impassive. "This isn't funny any more!" she screamed. "Stop it! I thought you were my friends!" There were certainly more than two people raising their voices in that long, bestial chorus. Half the moor seemed to be alive with noise. And it wasn't just the howling. Sometimes she could hear heavy, ragged panting, like big dogs make when they've run themselves to exhaustion. The car must be down that way. I'm sure that's how we came up from the road. Just keep your senses together, lass, and you'll find your way out of here. No problem. Think of Dunkirk. Think of getting to the lavs at a rock festival. Think of how brave Aunt Jill would be, in these circumstances. She turned her ankle on a stone and let out a yip of pain as she went down. Her body hammered against the hard, cropped ground, and for a few seconds she was incapable of breathing. The wild cacophony of the werewolves -- she was certain by now they were werewolves -- continued unabated. She rolled over onto her back. Just a couple of minutes ago she'd been bathing appreciatively in the cool disinterest of the stars; now she found it loathsome. "Stop it, you two!" she screamed. "For the love of God, just stop it!" Now she could hear their paws. On the rough grass of the moor itself, cropped short by ponies and sheep, the wolves' feet made a steady swishing noise, like intermittently running water. When they crossed the road, though, their claws skittered like gravel thrown onto a sloping roof. There seemed to be hundreds of the creatures milling around her. But she couldn't see anything. And they were making no apparent move to attack her. The agony from her ankle was subsiding quickly -- she couldn't have hurt it badly. Keep collected, Joanna, she seemed to hear Aunt Jill's voice saying to her. Keep collected and you'll be able to find a way out of this. Pretend it's something you're more accustomed to -- imagine it's an interview for a job you don't much like but have to get ... that your life depends on your getting it! Which was just about the case, thought Joanna dourly. But Aunt Jill's voice wasn't finished with her yet. Think! it urged. Use the evidence of your senses. Think, girl! Think! It was easy enough for Aunt Jill to say that: she was well and truly dead and out of it all. She wasn't lying on her back in the middle of Dartmoor with nothing visible but the stars overhead and just the sound of a million werewolves in her ears. And the beasts were coming closer to her now, as if earlier they'd been afraid of her human-ness but were now learning to conquer their timidity. She felt a hot gust of wind against her cheek, and smelt rotting meat. Oh, all right then: she'd think, just like Aunt Jill told her to. She'd use the evidence of her senses. Sight wasn't going to do her any good, but hearing... The brittle sound the werewolves made as they slid on the hard tarmac of the road. The Mini was parked on the road. She rolled onto her belly and started to writhe forward, serpent-like. The pack knew what she was doing immediately. Interspersed among all the other noises there were now whimpers of doubt, as if none of them had known she could move. She tried snarling herself, just to give the creatures something to think about, but the sound came out thin and pathetic. She pulled herself up onto her hands and knees. Her handbag tangled with her arm, and she coughed with astonishment to discover she hadn't lost the thing somewhere back in the blackness. There were cigarettes in there -- ye gods, but she could do with a cigarette right now. Silly idea. But there was a box of matches nestling alongside the Lambert & Butler's. And wolves were supposed to be terrified of fire -- werewolves maybe likewise, although she was less certain of that. She scrabbled at the catch of the bag, bending one fingernail back, almost tearing it. Suddenly the clasp leapt open, spilling some of her stuff out onto the ground. She patted her free hand around on the grass, feeling for the matches. No, dammit -- that was the little travel box she sometimes used for Tampax. Ah -- there they were. One of the creatures came pounding past, very close to her. She kicked out at it, missed. Now that she had the matchbox in her hand she was beginning to feel more assured. She let out the most ferocious yell she could manage, and this time it was nothing like the forlorn little bleat she'd produced earlier. There was an answering chorus from the wolves, but she persuaded herself that she could detect further signs of uncertainty in their sounds. She fumbled the matchbox open -- the tray was the right way up, for a wonder -- and tugged one of the matches out. She ran her finger along the length of it, feeling for the smooth knob of the head. Gotcha. Letting a smile spread across her face, she deliberately ran the match-head hard along the abrasive strip. Nothing. She felt the match-head erupt beneath her fingertip. She heard the little explosion. She dropped the match as the flame seared her hand. But there was no light.
She awoke to the sound of a doorbell, ringing insistently. She sat up in bed, instinctively gathering the bedclothes around her shoulders. What time was it? She must have had a few too many at the Blue Horse last night, because she couldn't remember putting on her pyjamas and getting into bed. Yet her head wasn't nagging her, the way it had too many mornings these past ten days or so. Whoever was at the door pressed the bell again, a long, long peal. "I'm coming," she said crossly. "Have a bit of patience, can't you?" She fell into her dressing-gown and made for the landing. As she passed her dressing-table she saw the time on the alarm clock there: 11:32 said the red numbers accusingly. She had slept in. She must have needed the rest, that was all she could think: Aunt Jill's death and then the funeral and the way Vic Gilmour had been so amiable and intimate and in the summation so creepy the other night and then... And then there'd been last night, out on the moor. The wolves. The werewolves. The matches that wouldn't light. She didn't know if she wanted to answer the door. If she was going to find Steve Gilmour standing there, his smug smile already in place... On the other hand, it might not be Steve Gilmour, and she desperately needed some human company, someone whose words -- whatever they were talking about -- would wash away the memories of the terror she'd felt out on the moor when she'd realized that not even a burning flame would puncture the darkness. She pattered down the stairs in her bare feet, feeling the friendly roughness of the old carpet. It was Ronnie Gilmour. "Come in," Joanna said. "I'm in a mess, the flat's in a mess, you won't believe the..." Ronnie grinned. "Heard you three had quite a night of it," she said. "Steve was all for coming across here himself to find out if you were all right, but I told him this wasn't any job for a mere man. Besides, I didn't think you'd thank him for seeing you with a hangover." "I don't have a hangover." "Well, you should, if half of what my pair have told me is true. Come on, let me in and I'll make you a cup of coffee." "Yes. I said yes. Do come in. Make yourself at home. I haven't moved things around since my aunt ... since Aunt Jill, you know ... so you shouldn't have any trouble finding things. I'll throw on some clothes and..." "Are you sure you're all right? Tony said it was quite a crack you took on your skull. Maybe you should have Dr Grasmere take a look at it before you go bounding around like this." They were in the kitchen by now, Joanna poised to dash on upstairs to her room. Ronnie did indeed seem to know her way around, filling the kettle with one hand as she reached out with the other for the coffee jar. Joanna had a brief hallucination that it was Aunt Jill standing there, not this woman whom she hardly knew, but then everything returned to normal. Maybe she had taken a bump on the head after all. That was the trouble with concussion: it made you forget the fact that there must have been something that concussed you. "I'll just be a moment," she said weakly. "I'll just throw on my jeans." "Take as long as you like." Ronnie was smiling at her, much as Aunt Jill would have done. Not the Aunt Jill who had died -- the other one, the one she'd known most of her life. "No, I'll be just a minute." It was abruptly very important to Joanna that Ronnie should realize this. "I really won't be more than a minute or two." Ronnie turned back to the kettle. In her bedroom, Joanna stripped out of her pyjamas, then realized she needed to go to the loo. Naked, she darted across the landing. On the way back, walking more casually, she chanced to glance downstairs, and saw Ronnie Gilmour on the lower landing, gazing emotionlessly up at her. She put on a smile and dashed back into her own room. These Gilmours are getting to be a bit much, she thought hotly as she struggled into her blue jeans. (If my bum weren't so big I wouldn't have so much trouble getting into my jeans. Tomorrow I start slimming. Definitely. Cross my heart.) The bloody woman comes charging in here as if she owns the place, then starts peeping-tomming at me. I've a good mind to... Downstairs, she said: "Sorry about that. I forgot to put my dressing-gown on." "It's all right," said Ronnie easily, passing her a mugful of coffee. The mugs were Joanna's innovation since the funeral: she was collecting the naffest she could find. This one welcomed her to Paignton with a picture of a man with his willy sticking out of his y-fronts. "I shouldn't have been looking. But I was just worried about you, you see -- we're all worried about you. All us Gilmours, you know." "I'm not sure how much I do know you Gilmours," said Joanna slowly. She ought to ask Ronnie through to the drawing-room, but for some reason she didn't want to. "Well, of course, it's only been a few days, but I'd begun to hope that..." "What did Steve and Tony say happened to me last night?" Joanna interrupted. "Can't you remember?" "No." Well, put it this way, I'm certainly not going to tell you what I remember. They're your children, after all. "The three of you went out for a drive on the moor after Jas chucked you out of the Blue Horse." "I remember that bit." Joanna took a sip of her coffee. It could have been Coke for all she knew. "And you parked out there by one of the tors, and Steve had a bottle of whisky with him." "And I don't remember that bit." Ronnie coughed. "Well, maybe it's better if you don't remember some of the next bit, either." "No. Go on. I want to know." She tapped the rim of her Paignton mug against the tips of her lower teeth. "I want to know everything." "Well, you all three got a bit ... well, tiddly, don't you know, and -- well, perhaps Steve and Tony are a bit more used to drinking than you are, or maybe they'd had less back in the Blue Horse, but you suddenly were very ill." "Sick, you mean? I puked?" I didn't. If I had there'd still be some of that scummy saltiness in my mouth, no matter how hard I scrubbed my teeth later. "No, not exactly that -- or, at least, I don't know about that. Do you really want me to go on?" "Every last bit of it." "Well, you started ... you know, making up to Steve, making up to him in a very sort of physical sort of way, if you understand my meaning. Don't get me wrong!" Ronnie Gilmour held up her palm to forestall any objection Joanna might make. "I don't make any moral judgements. You and Steve can get up to whatever you want to. But not, I don't think, in front of Tony." Joanna found herself grinning. "Carry on," she said. "Well..." "Do you need to start every sentence with 'well'?" "Well, I ... Are you sure you want me to carry on? I only came here to see you weren't seriously injured, you know." "I'm sorry. It's just that what you're telling me is so radically different from my memories." Ronnie Gilmour paused before continuing. "After Steve had told you that your actions were ... well, inappropriate ... the two of them tried to get you back to the car. But you struggled." Ronnie Gilmour drained her coffee. It was obvious she was nearly at the end of her tale. "You slipped out of their arms and tried to run away, but you fell and hit your head on a stone." "I did? But I don't have a cut or a bump or a bruise." Joanna felt around the back of her head to make sure this was the truth. It was. "I seem to have miraculous powers of recovery." "Well, I'm not going to examine your head, young miss. I'm just going by what Steve and Tony told me this morning. Tony, who seems to have been the only one of the three of you sober enough to know exactly what was going on, drove you both back here and got you into bed. Then she did the same for her brother, at our place." "Steve told you this?" "Yes." That didn't come as a shock, somehow. "And Tony?" "Just the same." And that was something of a surprise. She'd assumed Tony would have more ... integrity. But then Tony had been howling as loudly as her brother, out there in the place where even naked flames couldn't show a light. "Word for word," added Ronnie Gilmour for emphasis. Ah -- that made more sense. Tony had been doing what her brother told her. "I'm afraid that my recollections of what went on last night are still very different from those recounted by your offspring," said Joanna with straining dignity. "And now, if you will excuse me, I have things to do this morning." "Quite," said Ronnie, coldly but without any apparent rancour -- indeed, if anything, she seemed to Joanna to be relieved that she was being let off so lightly. "I have things to do as well. Perhaps we'll be seeing you around." "Perhaps."
Fifteen minutes later, relaxing in her bath, Joanna felt her bruised ankle. That part of it was real, at least -- only, she could just as easily have twisted it when falling out of Steve's arms. Her fingernail, the one she'd twisted back when she was trying to get her bag open -- that was tender, too. But there were a hundred and one other ways she could have done that. She couldn't prove, even to herself, that her own account of events was the true one, and that Steve and Tony Gilmour were lying. Couldn't prove it, even though what had happened was as bizarre, as fantasticated, as any nightmare. The Gilmour children's explanation was a lot easier to accept, unless you happened to be the person who'd lived through the reality. She was certain she was right. It was just then, soaping her knee, that she realized last night was the first for ages that she hadn't had the dream about being in the world where the advent of the Girl Child LoChi was so desperately anticipated.
| |
|
6 Alas, Poor JasJoanna spent the next few days smoking too much, drinking too much and trying to work out the solutions to two riddles: first, what had happened that night on the moor, and why the two young Gilmours had lied so comprehensively about it; and, second, the reason -- if any -- for the symmetry that existed between her experience on the moor and the recurring dream of the light-saturated world. On the moor the sky had been unrelievedly black, save for the stars' pinpoints, and even the flame of the match had shown no light; while in the world of her dreams there was no escape from the sky's radiance, no merciful shadows even in the lee of tall objects. There had been noise on the moor, the cries of large animals and the racket of their rapid movements; while in the desert the sluggish creatures of which she herself seemed to be one made no noise as they slithered from each almost identical site to the next. Had the dreams been some kind of forewarning of the reality, skewed into oppositeness as precognitive dreams so often were? Or was it possible that the reality had, in some way she couldn't properly understand, sparked off the dreams ahead of time? A third possibility, one that she didn't much like to think about, was that in some obscure fashion the dreams might have triggered the reality. But if that were the case then she had to re-examine her whole notion of what the word "reality" meant. She was not prepared to accept that her recollections of events on the moor were illusory, but neither was she able to accommodate mentally the concept of solid, basic, physical reality being sculpted by something as transitory as dreaming -- as soon accept the possibility that someone could dream the world was flat and wake the next morning to discover that indeed it had become so. But, if the events of that bleak black night had been brought into being by the dreams -- as a reaction to them, perhaps: a form of psychological enantiopathy -- and if, at the same time, reality was some kind of tangible, inalterable substrate to the universe, then how could the two be reconciled? Only, she mused, if there were varying degrees of reality, different types of it, different qualities of it. And here her mind rebelled. The whole line of speculation was beginning to lead her into territory that she regarded as mystic claptrap: today pondering the nature of reality, tomorrow signing up as a full-time Hare Krishna zombie -- no sirree! Something else puzzled her, but, because of the amount of scotch she was drinking, she couldn't bring her mind to focus on it. She was fully aware that matters had gone seriously awry in the village of Tarburton-by-the-Moor, and that in the normal way she'd be trying to call the attention of the authorities to what was going on -- or, at the very least, she'd be trying to get away -- but there was something stopping her from doing either of these two things. Something more than just the lethargy induced by the booze, although that was undoubtedly playing its part: when she wasn't reeling from the debilitating effects of last night's excesses she was already half- or entirely pissed from the morning's.
She didn't go out much during those few days, except to fetch further supplies of cigarettes, whisky and food from the International Stores down on the corner of Queen Street and Regent Street. But, even as lacking in alertness as she was, she couldn't help noticing that the little supermarket was like a haunt of its customary self rather than the real thing: the assistants behind the cheese counter and at the check-out were pale and listless, and spent most of their time playing with their nails or chatting dully because of the dearth of customers. She felt obscurely glad, once she'd signed her cheque and loaded up her carrier bags, to be scuttling out of the place and into the fresh air. She kept these excursions as brief as possible, and made no detours: she just went straight down West Street to the junction, crossed over, into the shop, and then back home again, not looking to right or left. If she had had any courage, she kept telling herself, she'd have made a point of confronting the Gilmours rather than avoiding them; but there was always a good reason why it would be better for the moment of confrontation to be put off until tomorrow. Life just ... flowed on, at a very low ebb. She hoped that ghosts didn't exist, because Aunt Jill would be horrified at the kind of existence her solitary niece was leading; but even the image of that erect, vital figure, with her grey hair in its neat curls and her mouth drawn into a featureless tight line of contempt, didn't have the power to drag Joanna out of her laggardly abyss. And she didn't want to be dragged out of it: she was honest enough to recognize this, and accept it. The longer she continued this half-existence, the longer she could delay the moment when she had to accommodate herself to reality -- or reality to herself. And so it was back to the nature of reality again, and from there into conjectures about the wolves on the moor, and from there... The circle was unbroken.
On the Sunday night Mike phoned. "Darling! Is that you?" His voice was distorted on the line, and for a few moments she thought someone must have rung the wrong number. She'd got out of the habit of thinking of herself as anybody's darling. "Who's there?" she said guardedly. "Mike. That is you, isn't it?" "Mike -- Joanna." "Darling, I've been worried about you. No word for nearly a fortnight." "You're not responsible for me any longer," she said, knowing she was being unfair. "We're not an item any longer: we're two individuals." She hunkered down beside the telephone and put her back up against the landing wall. One of Aunt Jill's cacti served as an ashtray. "That's easy enough to say." Mike's voice, even thro |
