by Phil Rickman
‘So what did you tell her?’ Eirion whispered.
‘Everything. What could I tell her?’
Eirion had claimed the only bedroom as yet converted from the attic. It had white walls and the smell of new plaster, and even he could only just stand up in here. But the views towards Porthgain and the old mine workings were incredible.
If would be OK, brilliant even, if it was just Eirion and the views and this amazing moist, translucent feel you got in Pembrokeshire, the mystical otherness of the countryside.
Oh, no, she’d been about to say to Mum, the house is top, it’s the family that’s from hell. But she’d wound up playing that down, in the end, because of the guilt. And the fury.
Eirion stroked Jane’s bare arm. ‘You didn’t tell me about any of this.’
‘What was to tell? All kinds of shit happens at school. You put it behind you, don’t you? And when you get back after the holidays it’s all forgotten and there’s a new kind of shit waiting.’
‘So this Layla… is she a genuine medium?’
‘Dunno. She claims to have psychic powers, gypsy ancestry, all that. And she’s certainly got this… charisma’s not the word, it’s more threatening than that. Can there be like negative charisma? I mean, she lays it on, obviously – she’s clearly found that being threatening, looking brooding, that works… gets you stuff. Even the teachers don’t mess with her – I’ve noticed this. Teachers are very polite to her, especially the men. Arm’s-length situation. They are… kind of scared.’
‘You know what that means, don’t you?’
Jane rolled over. ‘Enlighten me, O Experienced One, Mr Been Around, Mr Done All That.’
‘Yeah, OK,’ Eirion said wearily, ‘you’ve made your point.’
‘So what’s it mean? Half the male staff are shagging Layla Riddock?’
‘It only needs one,’ Eirion said. ‘Or maybe she set one of them up and he was just that bit slow saying, “How dare you, young lady?” They’re only human, aren’t they? And then they start gossiping in the staffroom as well, warn each other of the traps – “Let’s be careful out there”.’
‘She’s certainly got Steve on a string, the groundsman guy.’
‘There you go.’
‘But this kid, this Amy… I didn’t realize how far it went, you know? I mean, how could I? Like, OK, she’s Miss Prim, fourteen going on forty-five-year-old spinster, stiff enough to snap any time.’ Jane turned over, leaned across him and clicked on the bedside table-lamp. ‘And she set me up. She’s scared shitless of Riddock so she set me up. All it was, I just happened to be there… and virtually dragged in anyway. I was nothing to do with it. This Amy’s more or less claiming I organized it! And I told Mum the truth, but all the time I’m thinking, why should she believe me this time?’
‘You should’ve told her in the first place, shouldn’t you? You knew that stuff was right in her ballpark.’
‘Oh, come on, Irene, you don’t, do you? You just bloody don’t. Even if it’s somebody you don’t particularly like, unless it’s life and death, you just don’t grass them up. And now Mum could be in some deep trouble over this.’ She sank back, rolling her head on her bit of pillow. ‘She was really pissed off with me. More than she was saying, because whatever I’d done she wouldn’t want to louse up my holiday – she’s cool that way. But I could tell she thought I was going to say it was all total crap, that I didn’t know a thing about it, that somebody had obviously fitted me up, et cetera. She was like totally shattered to find out there was some truth in it.’
‘Sorry,’ Eirion said. ‘I’m not being very helpful, am I?’
‘It’s not your crisis. Maybe I should have noticed how it was with Amy and Layla Riddock. We’ve all been there, haven’t we?’
‘Bullying? Intimidation?’
‘You ever have days you were so scared to go to school you were faking stupid symptoms? Hasn’t happened to me since I was like really young… eleven, twelve. I was quite small then, for my age. Thought I was going to wind up looking like Mum.’
‘Little and cute?’
‘Little is not cute at school.’
‘Always the ones who are just a bit bigger who go for you, isn’t it?’ Eirion said. ‘The ones who’ve maybe been bullied a bit themselves. They do much worse stuff and they get away with it because nobody suspects them.’
‘And you’re just so scared at the time. Adults are like, “Oh, you should stick up for yourself.” But you know they can do anything to you at school, right under the noses of the staff. Like, even if you die, it’s only going to look like an accident! They’re completely outside the law. Nobody out there realizes how totally evil kids can be. It’s like some false-memory thing sets in with adults, and all kids become cute and need protecting. And that’s how you wind up with teenage psychos like Riddock.’
‘When you’re nine’ – Eirion lay on his back, gazing into the darkness of the room – ‘there are eleven-year-olds who’re like… like Charles Manson.’
‘Who?’
‘This weird American guy who got people to kill for him. Murdered this movie star and all these rich people, just went into their homes and ripped them to pieces. Manson was claiming to be receiving these psychic messages. And the people who killed for him – who included women – they wrote “pigs” and stuff on the wall in the victims’ blood.’
‘You’re right,’ Jane said. ‘You’re really not being very helpful.’
She wondered if he’d grown up thinking of this guy, Manson, as the ultimate bogeyman because his own family was so damn rich.
There was a knock on the bedroom door.
‘Shiiiiiiiiiiiiiit!’ Jane reached up and snapped off the lamp. Did they never, never, never go to sleep?
‘Eirion?’ That hated tripping, lilting, little-girly voice.
‘What?’ Eirion called out hoarsely.
‘Ydy Jane yno?’
‘Er… no,’ Eirion replied.
‘Wel, ble mae Jane?’
‘Probably gone to the shop.’
‘Aw, Eirion… ma’r siop ar gau!’
‘That does it!’ Jane swung her legs off the bed. She was wearing her jeans and her lemon-yellow top. She moved across the bare boards to the door.
Eirion was looking anxious. ‘Look, don’t,’ he whispered. ‘Can’t you just let it go?’
Jane stopped at the door and thought for a moment, then smiled. She crept back and lay on the bed. Eirion was sitting on the side of the bed by now, shoving his bare feet into his trainers.
‘Sioned?’ Jane called out in this foggy, slurry voice.
‘Jane!’
‘Look, would you mind giving us a few more minutes. We’re having sex, OK? Ni’n, er, yn shaggio.’
A wonderfully awed silence.
Eirion kind of crumpled.
‘Again!’ Jane breathed loudly. ‘Harder! Deeper! Oh God…!’
From hell? Oh yeah.
See, most of the ordinary Welsh people she’d met, Jane liked. This might seem like generalized and simplistic, but they seemed kind of classless, no side to them. Contrary to what everybody said, you could have a laugh with them. Look at Gomer Parry.
Look at Eirion, for that matter: chunky, honest, self-deprecating… and this incredible smile that was (as she’d written in a poem she was never going to show him in a million years) like all the birds starting to sing at once on a soft spring morning.
The poor sod. Raised among the crachach.
This was what they were called – the Welsh aristocracy, the top families. A few of them had titles, but most of them were contemptuous of English honours, although – being sharp business people – they were usually incredibly polite to the English people they encountered.
Eirion said his dad, Dafydd Sion Lewis, was some kind of Welsh quango king. He ‘served’ on the Welsh Development Agency, the Welsh Arts Council, the Wales Tourist Board, the Broadcasting Council for Wales. And he was a major executive shareholder in whatever Welsh Water and W
elsh Electricity were calling themselves this week. There was a bunch of them like his dad, Eirion said. The names of the organizations and businesses might change but it was always the same people in control.
Dafydd Sion Lewis was plump and beaming and hearty and, according to Eirion in his darker moments, majorly corrupt.
Gwennan was his second wife, about fifteen years younger. She was a former secondary-school teacher of the Welsh language and now – as a result of being married to the quango king – a key member of the Welsh Language Board, which existed to keep the native tongue alive and thriving.
Not that Jane had a problem with this. She was all for having more languages around: Gaelic, Cornish… anything to keep people different from each other, to create a sense of otherness.
At first, she’d thought that Gwennan, with her two cars and her movie-star wardrobe, was a fairly cool person.
It had taken only one day of the holiday for her to realize what Eirion had already kind of implied: that everything had gone to Gwennan’s head – the wealth, the status, the establishment of the Welsh Assembly. She was now a warrior queen of the New Wales, wielding the language like a spear.
‘Except it isn’t a new Wales at all,’ Eirion had said morosely. ‘It’s the same old place, run by the same old iffy councillors, except they’re now known as Assembly Members, supported by the same old bent financiers, but with this new sense of superiority. Suddenly, they’re looking down on everybody…’
‘Especially the English?’ Jane had suggested.
‘Especially the English because the English don’t have Wales’s unique identity.’
Actually, Eirion said, most of the time he found Gwennan quite amusing. She was essentially superficial and quite naive. And she could be very kind sometimes. When she noticed you.
Unfortunately, Gwennan had come with baggage: Sioned and Lowri, eleven and eight, the little princesses. Bilingual through and through. Pocket evangelists for the language and the culture.
‘No, Jane,’ Sioned would say, wagging her little forefinger until Jane wanted to snap it off. ‘I’ve told you and told you, I’m not doing it unless you ask me yn Cymreig.’
‘You know what I’m really doing here, don’t you?’ Jane said to Eirion when Sioned had gone, presumably to wait for her mother and Dafydd to return to receive the shocking facts. (Was there such a verb as shaggio? They seemed to have converted every other English term coined since about 1750.) ‘You know what I am?’
‘If she says anything, we’ll just simply tell her you were joking,’ Eirion said uncomfortably. ‘Kind of a risqué joke to make to an eleven-year-old, mind, but…’
‘I’m the first English au pair in Wales, that’s what I am. Do you realize that?’
Behind the door in the farmhouse kitchen Gwennan had hung an appointments calendar. Every day this week displayed a lunch date for her and Dafydd. Every evening they went out for dinner in St David’s or Haverfordwest, because several of their friends also had cottages in the area. Because the Pembrokeshire coast was becoming like some kind of Welsh Tuscany.
And who had to look after the bloody kids, meanwhile?
‘It’s exactly like being an au pair,’ Jane said with acidic triumph, ‘because I work my butt off for the privilege of learning the fucking language!’
She began to beat the pillow with her fists.
‘I’m sorry!’ Eirion almost sobbed. ‘I genuinely didn’t realize she’d be quite so…’
‘Opportunistic?’
Eirion was too honest to reply.
It was a big old farmhouse. The first floor had been divided into two sections. There was a separate staircase to Dafydd and Gwennan’s suite; the other staircase led to three small bedrooms: Sioned, Lowri… and Jane in the middle. Most nights the kids fell asleep with their respective boom-boxes still pumping Welsh-language rock through the plasterboard walls either side of Jane’s bed.
Come to think of it, Gwennan and Dafydd were unlikely to be at all put out by the thought of the young master giving one to the English au pair.
Not that he had, yet. The daily and nightly presence of the evil little stepsisters seemed to be intimidating him more than whoever had been his school’s version of Charles Manson.
Stepfamilies: a nightmare.
She’d made the kids’ supper. She’d made them tidy their rooms. She’d made them go to bed at ten p.m. She’d made them go back to bed at ten-fifteen. And in the course of this endlessly crappy evening, she’d been grilled by Mum over the phone and made to feel like shit. At eleven-thirty, probably looking like some totally knackered housewife, she’d followed Eirion up to his attic bedroom and collapsed, fully clothed, onto his bed and poured it all out.
* * *
‘Let’s go over it again,’ Eirion said. ‘This Layla and this…’
‘Kirsty.’ Jane moved closer to him, which wasn’t difficult on a single bed.
‘… Find that by staging little seances, or whatever you want to call them, they can wield enormous power over certain kids.’
‘It’s addictive, I reckon. You keep going back, even though you’re terrified. I mean, I’m not terrified – OK, maybe a little scared – but I’m, like, somebody who’s attracted to all this stuff anyway. As you know.’
‘Yeah,’ Eirion said grimly.
‘But this is a buttoned-up kid from some fiercely Christian household, who’s been taught that spiritualism is, like, firmly in the devil’s domain, and her immortal soul is at risk – and she still keeps going back because something about it has… grabbed her.’ Jane gripped what she thought was going to be Eirion’s arm but turned out to be his thigh. ‘Sorry.’
‘Go… go on.’
‘Kid knows she’s like doomed. She’s totally beyond the pale. I mean, I’ve listened behind the door when Mum’s been counselling individual parishioners – which is, like, her version of confession. You get some people who are really, really scared that they’ve thrown it all away because of some really piffling sin.’
‘Gets blown up out of all proportion.’ Eirion tentatively slid an arm under her waist.
‘You’d think it was only a Catholic thing, or hellfire Nonconformism or something, but I don’t think it’s anything to do with what denomination you are, or even what religion. It’s a psychological condition. A kind of dependency. A terrible fear of getting on the wrong side of God. I mean… no wonder she threw up in church. Holy Communion? The Eucharist? You’re kneeling there with a mouthful of the blood of Christ, knowing you’ve as good as sold your soul to the other guy? It’s all gonna come down on you in a big way, isn’t it?’
‘Layla would have known about this girl’s background?’
‘Oh yeah, Riddock knew exactly what she was doing. Must have been giving her a major buzz, a cruelty high. But you can’t help wondering how shocked she was when it really started to happen. When this Justine started coming through and turned out to be Amy’s real mother.’
‘Would heighten the power trip no end.’
‘Mind-blowing. She wouldn’t want to let Amy go after that.’
Eirion pushed a hand through her hair. ‘You’ve got this pretty well sussed, haven’t you, Jane?’
‘I don’t know. It’s all guesswork, isn’t it?’
‘You tell your mum all this?’
‘Not the theoretical stuff. But she’ll have worked that out for herself by now. She’s not thick.’
Eirion drew her to him, the length of his body the length of hers, toe to toe, faces almost touching. ‘You haven’t told me how it ended.’
Jane closed her eyes, saw the circle of letters, the glass with a mind of its own.
J-U-S-T-I-N-E.
‘How it ended? We got raided, didn’t we? Pretty ludicrous. The shed door just like crashed open and they burst in. The drug squad – the deputy head and the caretaker. All very dramatic. “Nobody move! Hands on the table!” Like one of us might pull a gun. Of course they didn’t expect it would be so dark. Layla just blew out th
e candles, and it was probably Kirsty gathered up the letter-cards. I don’t know where she put them – down her front, I expect; they certainly weren’t there by the time the caretaker found the lights. The glass was knocked off the table and smashed. It was just a glass. They were expecting… I don’t know – Es or worse.’
‘They search you?’
‘Nah. Layla had her cigs out by then. Plain old Rothmans scattered across the table, like she was sharing them out. Smart bitch. You could see the relief on the deputy head’s face, now it was clearly no longer a police matter. “Now, girls, because it’s the end of the term, apart from confiscating these disgusting things, I’m not going to take this any further. However…” ’
‘That was smart of her.’
‘Yeah.’
‘What will she do now, your mum? Go and tell the girl’s parents, try and patch things up?’
‘Dunno.’
‘Or go after this Layla?’
‘Yeah,’ Jane said soberly. ‘I’m afraid that’s exactly what she’s going to do – having not the slightest idea of just how massively evil that bitch can be. And if I try to warn her, it’ll look like there’s something else I don’t want her to find out. I… I’m like… feeling pretty pissed-off, Irene. On every front.’
He kissed her gently on the lips.
‘OK,’ Jane said, ‘except maybe that one?’
She put a hand behind his head, opened her mouth to his tongue and moulded her body into his. One of Eirion’s hands seemed to be trapped against her left breast.
Jane was feeling less and less like a knackered housewife when they heard the doors of Dafydd Lewis’s new Jaguar slamming down in the yard, then laughter. And then something about Eirion, the great lover, Mr Experience, began to kind of shrink.
Soon afterwards, Jane crept back to her own room and lay glowering at the ceiling. She’d been set up; she’d been framed; she’d been used to damage her own mother. She couldn’t live with this.
16
Mafia
LOL GENTLY SHOOK the hand of the vicar’s wife.