Human Croquet

by Kate Atkinson

  Up and running again, I make for the far end of the garden, thinking there might be a gate out onto the street somewhere. Glancing behind, I see two of them racing across the grass after me. Why is this happening to me? I’m supposed to be waltzing rapturously in Malcolm Lovat’s handsome arms not running for my virtue.

  I’m running now over a smooth, flat piece of lawn and only realize that it’s not an ordinary lawn when I trip over a croquet hoop and thud heavily to the ground. (Maybe this is what The Home Entertainer means by Human Croquet.) One of the boys is on me now, hanging on to me round the waist as I struggle to get up. I wrench myself free and hear something rip. Maybe it’s his head coming off.

  I set off again at a gallop, the two boys hallooing and tantivying behind me. I notice a big silver birch growing by a perimeter wall and veer over to it thinking that I might be able to scramble up it and on to the wall but when I get to it I discover that its branches are too high to reach. ‘Gotcha, Ding-Dong!’ one of the boys shouts.

  I’m done for. All I can do is stand and try and get my breath back, I feel sick from exertion and can’t raise a scream no matter how hard I try. It’s like being trapped in a nightmare. I lean against the trunk of the silver birch gasping for air like a dying fish and send up a small silent plea for help. Why do I have no protector in this world, someone watching over me?

  I can’t even move, my legs feel as though they’re full of lead shot and my feet are rooted to the ground. One of the boys, Geoff, I think, runs straight up to me and stops, the mad Dionysian light in his eyes turning to confusion. He seems to look right through me. The other one, Clive, runs up to join him, and then bends over double to get his breath. ‘Where’d she go?’ he asks, panting. ‘This way, somewhere,’ Clive says, looking around everywhere except at me. ‘Fucking little prick-teaser,’ he adds and puts his hand out on to my left shoulder and leans his weight against it as if I’m just part of the tree.

  But when I glance down at his hand, I see that where my left shoulder should be, where my right shoulder should be – where my entire body should be, in fact – is the silvery, papery bark of the birch. My arms are stiff branches sticking out from my sides, my previously bifurcated legs have turned to one solid tree trunk. I would scream now, but my mouth won’t open. Call me Daphne.

  Everything begins to grow dim and blurred at the edges and the next thing I know I’m sitting on the cold ground, underneath the tree, with no sign of any of the boys, and Hilary marching across the lawn towards me. ‘What on earth are you doing out here, Isobel? You haven’t seen Malcolm, have you? I can’t find him anywhere.’

  I trail back into the house on Hilary’s heels. There seems little point in telling her that I’ve just recently turned into a tree. I am not what I am. I am a tree therefore I am mad, a mad person subject to massive delusions and hallucinations. ‘Having a nice time?’ Hilary asks dutifully, her eyes already scanning the kitchen for someone else to talk to other than me. ‘Oh yes, absolutely,’ I reply, taking a cocktail sausage from a Prima cabbage that’s stuck all over with sausages on sticks so that it looks like it’s just come from outer space.

  I go up to the first-floor bathroom to try and clean myself up a bit. There are twigs and dead leaves in my hair, my stockings are laddered to shreds and my stiff net petticoat is in tatters. This must be what ripped during my ordeal out in the back garden. The pink dress is no longer the colour of sugar and spice, it is now the pink of pigs and embarrassment and tinned salmon.

  I remove the ragged petticoat from the dress with one final rip. A couple of dead leaves are caught in the holes of the net. I look around for a bin but there isn’t one so in the end I stuff the petticoat behind the hot-water tank in the airing cupboard. The tank isn’t lagged and is giving off an incredible amount of heat, bubbling away like a particularly perverted medieval torture instrument. It’s huge, Hilary would fit inside exactly.

  When I come out of the bathroom I almost trip over Hilary, who’s now locked in a swooning embrace with Paul Jackson, the captain of the football team. She seems to move around the house at a rapid speed, perhaps she has a doppelgänger, a kind of body-double standing in for her during the more tedious moments. Not that her clinch with Paul Jackson looks exactly tedious – his hand’s thrust up her skirt and his knee is pushing her legs apart. I wonder what Mr and Mrs Walsh would say if they could see her now. Had they any idea how much (if any) alcohol was going to be consumed on their premises? Or how much debauchery was going to be unleashed the minute their backs were turned? I doubt it very much somehow. Still, it’s encouraging to see Hilary being unfaithful to Malcolm, she seems indeed to have forgotten all about him. She looks as though she’s about to throw up and when she comes up for air reveals a vivid love-bite across her windpipe, I almost expect to see blood on Paul Jackson’s teeth. ‘Isobel,’ she slurs, trying to focus on me and going cross-eyed with the effort. If only Malcolm could see us side by side now – it would be only too obvious who was the right girl for him. (Me.)

  ‘Isobel,’ she repeats with some effort, ‘have you seen Graham?’

  ‘Graham?’

  ‘Graham, my brother,’ her head lolls forward on to Paul Jackson’s shoulder, ‘insisted you were invited.’

  ‘Did he? What as – the entertainment?’ I ask her indignantly, there’s only one reason he wanted me and that was because of the lies Richard has told to get his own back on me. I start explaining this to her but she’s dropped off to sleep and is snoring pig-like and Paul Jackson is already twanging her suspenders again. He catches my eye and says, ‘Sod off.’ So I do.

  I head down to the living-room again. Out in the hall, a big grandfather clock strikes the half-hour – half-past eleven – where has all the time gone? (Where does it go? Is there some great time sump at the bottom of the world?) My sojourn as a silver birch must have disposed of hours of it.

  A lot of changes have taken place in the living-room since I was last in it. Gone are the innocent Shadows, the bright overhead lights, the junior cocktail party chit-chat. Now it resembles nothing so much as an inner circle of hell – the dark writhing shapes, the tortured moaning noises of people in extremis – and it takes several seconds for the dark shapes to resolve themselves into necking couples – standing, sitting, lying – all fumbling at each other with orgiastic enthusiasm.

  In the hallway someone’s being sick, and Dorothy, also ravaged by drink by now but still immensely practical, gets the vacuum cleaner out and starts hoovering up the vomit. I debate with myself whether I should tell her what a bad idea this is but decide to keep my meagre housekeeping tips to myself when she hoovers in my direction and snarls, ‘You’re really a bit of a tart, aren’t you, Isobel? And keep your hands off my brother, you’re not his type.’

  Graham is on the stairs behind Dorothy, pumping up and down on top of a big-frocked girl, who presumably is his type, and I push my way past their intertwined bodies and run up the stairs to try and have one last attempt at finding Malcolm Lovat.

  The first door I try appears to open into Mr and Mrs Walsh’s bedroom, huge twin beds like barges dominate a room heavy with brocade. The next room reeks of Dorothy. It’s frilly and girly and organized on lines of military precision – a shelf of science books, fiction in alphabetical order and toiletries laid out on the dressing-table with mathematical regularity. If a single Q-Tip moved in this room she would know about it.

  I go up to the next floor and try another door. This bedroom is frilly and girly too but sporty as well – tennis rackets, sportswear and riding-hats everywhere – this must be Hilary’s room. On the bedside table there’s a photograph, head-and-shoulders, of a horse and on the bed a huge assortment of dolls – dolls with baby faces, dolls in full Highland regalia, dolls in flamenco dress, moppety rag dolls and antique dolls with yellowing ringlets and astonished expressions.

  And there, incongruous amongst the dolls, lies the much bigger body of a supine Malcolm Lovat. He greets me cheerfully, and drunkenly, waving a h
alf-empty bottle of gin in his hand. ‘Hello, Izzie.’

  ‘I didn’t think you were here.’ I take a swig of neat gin from the green bottle, slugging in a cavalier fashion, and I’m quite pleased with myself for not choking to death. ‘Smell that,’ Malcolm says, suddenly rolling over and plunging his face into the pillow, ‘essence of horse!’ How we laugh!

  He pats the space next to him on Hilary’s (almost certainly) virginal divan and I squash myself into the space. ‘That’s a big dress,’ he says pleasantly and puts his arm round my shoulder and we lie there quite companionably, drinking gin and assigning imaginary personalities to Hilary’s dolls, most of which are extensions of her own character.

  We’re approaching the bottom of the gin bottle now. The inside lining of my body feels as if someone’s set a match to it, a not entirely unpleasant sensation, and the distracted globe of my brain has turned into porridge. Most of Hilary’s poor dolls have been kicked to the floor by now. Or have jumped to safety.

  I think I drift in and out of consciousness a few times. Time seems to have become slower, more viscous somehow, as if the molecules of time are indeed capable of changing state and are no longer an invisible gas but a flowing liquid (perhaps that’s the Heraclitean flow). ‘Kiss me,’ I mumble suddenly, emboldened by gin and the strange fluidity of time. Malcolm opens his eyes, I think he’s been asleep, and hauls himself up into a cobra position on his elbows and gazes at me. ‘Please,’ I add, in case he thinks I’m being impolite. He frowns deeply at one of the few remaining dolls – a baby-doll about the size of ‘our’ baby – and says, ‘Isobel,’ very seriously.

  This must be it then – he’s realized the cosmic links that bind us, he’s about to kiss me and open the seals on our love – we will be transported to some transcendent place where the music is by the spheres and the lighting by Turner – I hope I don’t turn into a tree before this can happen, or go flying through time again. I close my eyes hopefully. And pass out cold.

  When I open my eyes again the room is dark and someone has covered me up with Hilary’s eiderdown. Someone has also been busy gluing my brain to the inside of my skull and when I try and sit up it does its best to wrench itself free in a way that’s quite, quite horrible. For extra effect, the fibres of my brain have been soldered together. The bedroom door opens and I close my eyes against the shock of the light.

  When I force them open a slit I can see a furious Hilary, mascara and lipstick smudged, hair a haystack, skin deathly pale (presumably because Paul Jackson has drained all the blood out of her body by now) staring at me in repulsion. ‘What are you doing on my bed, Isobel?’ I make an attempt at sitting up and break out in a cold, clammy sweat. Feebly, I try to wave a warning at Hilary with my hand because I know she isn’t going to want to see what’s about to happen.

  But too late – I clutch my forehead in a vain attempt to staunch the throbbing and lean over the side of the bed and empty what remains in my stomach (bits of gin-soaked cocktail sausage mainly) all over Hilary’s startled dolls.

  Hilary starts screaming at me, a torrent of ladylike invective that pours from her mouth in a tumbling stream of toads and ashes.

  ‘Drop dead,’ I moan at her.

  Mr and Mrs Walsh come home not long after (‘What’s happened to the Hoover, Dotty?’) and turf out the remnants of the party in disgust, including me, especially me. ‘Get out,’ Mr Walsh hisses nastily. ‘God only knows what else you were doing in my daughter’s bedroom. I can tell your sort, you’re nothing but a whore.’ How unkind. There’s no sign of Malcolm Lovat, which isn’t entirely a bad thing, because at least that means he isn’t in Hilary’s arms.

  My foxes are waiting for me on the hall table and I pick them up and stagger out into the night – a night glazed with frost and freezing cold, so that I almost expect Mr Walsh to shout, ‘And never darken my door again, young lady!’

  ‘And I don’t want to see your face in my house again, you little tart!’ he shouts, in character. I get as far as the wrought-iron gates before being overtaken by the most overwhelming lethargy. I am indeed a fallen woman, or at any rate, a fallen girl – fallen by a huge laurel bush by the wrought-iron gates, fallen and crawled under and curled up and snoring as quietly as a hedgehog, determined to hibernate. Snow begins to dust my face like cold icing-sugar.

  * * *

  I’m rudely awoken by Malcolm Lovat trying to stuff me into the passenger seat of his car and muttering, less charitably this time, about ‘what a bloody big dress’ I’m wearing. ‘That’s how people die, you know,’ he says crossly, starting up the engine and backing away from the Walshes’ driveway. My brain is no longer glued to the inside of my skull, now it has shrunk to a hard, gin-pickled walnut and is rattling around, bouncing off bone, unanchored by membrane.

  ‘Hypothermia,’ Malcolm says, as if he’s having a stab at naming our abandoned baby. We provide the perfect cautionary tale against alcohol as we weave a delicate drunken path along the icy road. ‘Bloody hell,’ Malcolm exclaims grimly as we occasionally skate across the road and pirouette and spin as if the car’s turned into a tipsy Sonja Henie.

  I have several attempts at lighting up a cigarette and on the fourth, successful, attempt drop a lighted match on my dress and a large pink patch of it instantly melts and I narrowly avoid turning into a human torch. How shall I die? Fire or ice?

  Somehow or other we end up at the top of Lover’s Leap once again but Loving and Leaping are the last things on our minds, wading through blood up to my knees would be easier and we both fall asleep the second the engine is turned off. When I wake up it’s cold. A drizzle of saliva seems to have turned to ice on my chin and my eyes are crusted with sleep. I root around hopelessly in the glove compartment and am surprised to find half a packet of stale custard creams which I fall on like an animal. After a while I nudge Malcolm awake and offer him one. It’s such a shame that I’m in no fit state (my head’s about to fall off) to sit and appreciate his beautiful profile, the curve of his lip, the black kiss curl that loops around his ear. I open the car door and throw up on the ground.

  We set off again on another seemingly endless journey. The streets of Glebelands are deserted, everyone is in bed waiting for the rising of the sun and the running of the deer. Our odyssey takes us once more past the street where the Walshes live, but here, unlike the rest of town, is the most extraordinary activity. I suppose if we hadn’t been asleep on Lover’s Leap we might have seen, from our vantage point, the fire engines racing across town, seen the flickering flames burning up the Walshes’ house down in the little model town at our feet, heard perhaps the ringing bells of the desperate ambulances trying to save the occupants.

  The street is choked with fire engines and ambulances and policemen. We stumble out of the car and hang around the wrought-iron gates like sightseers. The red ribbons on the holly wreath hang limp in the still air. There is ash and soot in the air, the smell of charred frocks and canapés. I remember suddenly the net petticoat stuffed so carelessly behind the boiling water tank, imagine it catching and spreading to the neat stacks of sheets and towels, and eventually engulfing the entire house. Everyone has safely escaped the inferno it seems, except –

  ‘Richard and Hilary,’ Malcolm says, his voice blank with disbelief.

  As we approach the streets of trees it begins to snow properly. At first the little fluttery flakes stick to the windscreen, crystallize and melt and are washed away by the windscreen wipers, but soon the flurry of snowflakes grows bigger and they begin to cling to passing objects, aerials, chimney pots, rooftops, trees.

  Instead of turning into Chestnut Avenue, Malcolm drives up Holly Tree Lane. We’re both so numb with shock at the sudden demise of Hilary and Richard that I don’t think we really know where we’re going. (Drop dead – did I really say that to both of them?)

  The snow is now swirling around in the darkness in a menacing kind of way. We are driving past Boscrambe Woods, the trees an inky black mass at the side of the road. Abruptly, Malco
lm swings the car into one of the entrances to the woods and parks in front of a row of fire-beating brooms that poke up towards the stars. They’re in the wrong place. There could be no fire in these woods tonight. The ground is hard as iron, the waters in the streams turned to stone. When Malcolm turns the engine off it’s quieter than anything I’ve ever heard.

  ‘Come on,’ Malcolm says, opening the car door, even though the snow is now blowing a blizzard. Reluctantly I tramp into the wood behind him. In the wood there is no blizzard, everything is still. The snow must have been falling for hours longer in the wood than outside the wood (how could that be?), for snow is piled up everywhere – Christmas-card snow, winter-wonderland snow, crisp and virginal. The bare branches of the deciduous trees, rimmed with snow, spring and arc overhead like the vaulted roof of a great cathedral. It is like being in church, hushed and reverent, but more spiritual.

  The wood is full of evergreens too, firs have gathered from all over the world – the Norway spruces (abies picea) and lodgepole pines (pinus contorta), alpine firs (abies lasiocarpa) and European silver firs (abies alba), the balsam fir (abies balsamea) and the beautiful noble firs (abies procera) crowd together under their snowcoats like an eternal Christmas waiting to happen.

  We plod along, silent in the silence. It’s like being the last two people in the world. Perhaps we are, perhaps we’ve entered a time warp that’s propelled us forward to the last, cold days. Only in the wood can you truly lose track of time. A rabbit bounces across the snow in front of us.

  Ahead of me, Malcolm stops suddenly and, turning to me, puts his fingers to his lips. A red deer, a female, is standing ahead of us on the path, sniffing the air for us, knowing we are here but not quite seeing us. Then, in one startled leap, she’s gone, crashing through the frozen branches so that the sound of snapping twigs echoes noisily in the cold silence around us.