by Michel Faber
She stared him straight in the eyes, defiantly at first, then with a slow flush of fear as she glimpsed the impenetrable, steely sureness in him.
‘Please,’ she said then, licking her lips in naked distress. ‘I’ve been done for this twice already. Once more, and they’ll put me away for sure. I just got hungry for something sweet, that’s all. I don’t have much money.’ She gestured limply. ‘It’s hard sometimes.’
He drew a deep breath. How to explain to her that life was tough for everyone, everyone in the whole wide dirty world? A bit of slack in one place resulted in a tightening of the screws further down the line. If he let her go, Mrs Weymouth would probably find out about it, and he’d lose his job. Then before you knew it he’d be no better off than this girl was now. He’d lose his car and everything. Conceivably he and this girl would end up standing next to each other at the Job Centre, looking lost and hopeless. There’d be a position going as a store detective and she’d probably get it, because women got everything nowadays.
‘I’ve got a job to do,’ was how he summed up these com-plexities. ‘Come with me please.’
‘Wait a minute,’ she said, her hands trembling as she stepped closer to him. ‘I– I could let you have sex with me.’
‘What?’ said Lachlan. ‘I beg your pardon?’
Her eyes were shiny, darting back and forth like fish. Against the odds, though, no one had steered into their aisle yet; they were still alone. And she – so close to him that he could see the pores in her skin and the frightened pulse-beat in her pale throat – she raised her whisper loud above the Muzak, deadly serious:
‘I could let you fuck me. In the car park. In your car. I know you’ve got one. I’ve seen you driving around the town. Your sound system must be about two million watts.’
‘Look … ’ he said, his voice hoarse all of a sudden.
‘I could take all my clothes off,’ she hissed urgently. ‘You’d see everything. I’d do whatever you wanted.’
He cleared his throat, blushing hot.
‘I can’t just walk out of the store,’ he said. ‘It’s not allowed.’
‘Jesus, don’t you have tea breaks or something?’ she squeaked, almost hysterical, then got hold of herself. ‘Whenever,’ she assured him. ‘Just come out whenever you can, and I’ll meet you there.’
He gaped at her in disbelief, and she stared back at him imploringly. An old lady trundled round the corner, took one look at them, and passed by, embarrassed. Supermarket life was circling them, waiting for their aisle to be cleared of intimacy and return to normal.
‘You must think I’m stupid,’ said Lachlan.
‘No, look,’ she said in desperation. ‘Look: I’ll give you this …’ She delved a small pink hand into a pocket of her jeans, and pulled out a key-ring with several keys jingling off it.
‘It’s all my keys,’ she assured him breathlessly, holding them up by the plastic Bart Simpson trinket that linked them. ‘The keys to everything … my front door, my back door, everything … this little one’s for my bike – it’s parked just outside – you can see it through the window, there, look!’
With his narrowed eyes he followed where she was pointing, and, sure enough, there was a bicycle blurrily visible through the wall of plate glass, just under the giant affiched letters saying
‘I can’t do without these keys, do you understand?’ she pleaded. ‘I can’t even get home. I have to have them.’ She pressed the keys against his dangling hand, and let them go. Instinctively he grabbed them rather than let them fall to the ground; it was a reflex action.
She put both her soft palms on his right shoulder and lifted herself up on tiptoes to murmur in his ear. ‘You’ve got me right where you want me. I’ll be waiting.’
And she ran off, leaving her trolley behind.
Lachlan steadied himself for a few moments, aware that inside his clothes he was soaked with perspiration. He wiped his forehead and mouth, inspected his sleeve. The news was not good. God knows what the customers would think, seeing him in this state.
The first thing to do was get rid of the Danish – if Mrs Weymouth saw it she would go ballistic. Furtively, heart pounding, he rushed the damp and damaged specimen to the frozen goods section, fearing the old woman’s eyes on him with every step. He hid the Danish under others of its kind, piling the straight and perfect ones on top of it three layers deep.
This done, undetected, he relaxed a little. The light in the supermarket seemed less harsh, the central heating less high. Mrs Weymouth was at the far end of the store, pretending to care about a disabled shopper. The clock above the community noticeboard said six thirty-eight. Another hour-and-a-half and he was a free man.
For the next little while he walked the girl’s trolley around the supermarket, putting items back on the shelves. Spaghetti. Bread. Peanut butter. Sugar Puffs. Milk. Sanitary pads.
This last one made him wonder. He wasn’t sure if he could cope with a vagina that was bleeding, even if it was the only one he’d ever get hold of. It wasn’t clean, somehow.
At eight o’clock, as the last shoppers were being ushered out of the supermarket into the summer dusk, Lachlan was already outside, standing right next to the girl’s bicycle, waiting.
Not born yesterday, he had a sick feeling she wouldn’t show up, but still he hoped she might. He ran his sharp eyes back and forth across all the cars parked in neat rows, in case she was hiding amongst them. He remembered her very well, physically. A single glimpse of her face or her behind would have been enough to identify her, if she’d been anywhere about.
As more and more cars pulled away, there were fewer places where a girl could be hiding. Lachlan consulted the watch on his big bony wrist. Eight minutes had passed in what had felt like twenty seconds. Nothing sexual was going to happen now. Golden rule: Trust No One.
He tried to imagine some way he could get revenge. God, how she must despise him, if she was willing to lose her bike just to avoid a few seconds of unwanted attention. Maybe she was scared of him. That would be tragic, if that was all it was. It could have been a fantastic experience. She would have got her keys back; he would have found out what intercourse was like. She might even have enjoyed it. There was nothing wrong with his sex organs, that was for sure.
What was he going to do with her bike? He could take it away with him, sell it maybe. As long as he didn’t get in trouble with the police. Like all private detectives, he had an uneasy relationship with the boys in blue. One of them had stopped him once, on one of those long sleepless nights when he’d taken the car out for a drive, CDs belting out into the lonely dark. The cop had told him it was a mystery how a moron like Lachlan had ever been judged fit for a car license. That was the sort of crack you didn’t forget in a hurry.
Lachlan looked at the girl’s bicycle again. His car, he suddenly remembered, didn’t have a roof rack. Never mind the bike, then: he could maybe use the chain and the padlock for something. Keep something of his own safe from theft, something he hadn’t thought of yet. Also, without the chain, her bike would most likely get stolen during the night, which would serve her right.
He slipped the smallest of the keys into the bike’s padlock, and twisted. Through his fingers he could sense something wasn’t right. Nothing clicked or fell open.
‘Hey!’ a male voice shouted from not far away. ‘Hey!’
Lachlan tried to pull the key out, but it was gripped tight in the lock. An athletic-looking man with grey hair and paint-spattered training clothes had set two evenly-weighted shopping bags down on the asphalt and began to stride towards Lachlan from the vaulted entrance of the supermarket.
Panicking, Lachlan let the keys go and ran to his own car. It was instantly identifiable by the silver demister strips on the back window, the little Celtic flag on the aerial, and the big warning stickers about what would happen if anyone tried to break in and steal the potent black metallic speakers within. A new addition to the vehicle’s distinguishing features, however, was
one that Lachlan noticed only as he was struggling to unlock the door. All along the driver’s side, gouged deeply into the paintwork with a sharp implement, was the word WANKER.
Finally bursting into the car, he slammed the door behind him and started the motor. With scarcely a second’s pause he began to reverse the car, dizzily relieved to find that the bicycle’s owner had given up the pursuit and was returning to his shopping bags. Not worth it.
Lachlan pulled on the brake and sat tight, loath to be pushed now that the heat was off. The bicycle man cycled away; Lachlan memorised his distinguishing features for future reference.
After a few more minutes the carpark lights, synchronised with the sunset, glowed all around him. Mrs Weymouth and the big boss were locking the supermarket’s entrance inside a big trellis of iron bars. The big boss pointed a device at a hidden alarm and pressed the trigger. Then he and Mrs Weymouth walked to the same car.
When they’d driven off, Lachlan reversed fully into the empty expanse of tarmac. The keys to everything lay discarded near the bike stands, for the girl to retrieve if she was still out there somewhere, spying on the scene, waiting for him to make his move.
Blinking away tears, Lachlan edged his precious injured vehicle towards the exit, conscious that if he allowed his anger and his hurt to get on top of him, he might crash the car in the dangerous traffic beyond the supermarket, and lose more than he’d lost already. In the rear-view mirror, his own face was reflected back at him undisguised, the hare-lip vivid and glistening above his malformed teeth.
Looking right and left, forwards and backwards, he indicated to the world where he was meaning to go. Then, gunning the engine, he followed through and left them all for dead.
A HOLE WITH TWO ENDS
‘It was nice of us to come, wasn’t it?’ said Sandra to Neil, as they were walking back to their car. She kept her voice low, so as not to be overheard by the woman whose horrid little cottage they’d just left.
‘Of course it was,’ sighed Neil. ‘It’s this little anti-English game they play – making you feel like a complete bastard even when you’re bending over backwards for them.’
‘Can one refer to a woman as a “bastard”, I wonder?’ mused Sandra as they stepped up to the Daewo. ‘I mean, in the pejorative sense?’
‘Don’t see why not.’
Neither of them needed to voice what had been obvious to them as soon as they’d arrived for the interview: that this latest candidate for the job was yet another Highlands loser, a waste of their valuable time.
Neil pointed his electronic key at the car and its doors obediently unlocked themselves. As he and Sandra swung into their seats, they got a clear view of the vehicle parked in front of the cottage – a junkheap of uncertain pedigree, speckled with rust. When Sandra, right at the beginning of the interview, had reminded the woman that anyone working at Loch Eye Pottery would need their own transport, the woman had waved her cigarette at her ‘motor’. In fact, she’d pushed for a petrol allowance on top of the wage. Then later she’d admitted that the car ‘needed serviced’ (ugh! illiterate expression!) and in any case it belonged to ‘Hughie’ and Hughie was ‘down the road’ just now and it would surely be easier all round if Neil and Sandra could just bring the pottery here and then pick it up again when it was painted?
That was the problem with making anything entrepreneurial happen up here. Your workforce had to be drawn from people who were stuck in the stagnant shallows of self-deception: the long term unemployed, the nervous-breakdown survivors, counterculture failures, alcoholics, benefit scroungers, small-time dope dealers … a whole countryside full of perpetual losers stranded in decrepit cottages that stank of cigarette smoke and baby shit and booze.
Neil noticed, as he was revving the engine, that the folio of (really quite good) watercolours the woman had originally sent them was still lying on the dashboard.
‘Damn,’ he said. ‘Shall we …?’
‘No, I couldn’t,’ groaned Sandra. ‘We’ll post them back.’
There wasn’t an SAE, of course, but then, equipping the back rooms of Loch Eye Pottery with a few half-way reliable workers had cost them so much hassle already, another 58 pence wouldn’t make much difference.
They pulled out of the farm road, wincing in unison as the potholes rattled the Daewo’s suspension. Between the two strips of crumbling concrete, a furrow of grass had been allowed to grow so thick that it bashed and scraped against the underbelly of the chassis. In their quest for a couple more recruits to copy Sandra’s elegant Loch Eye designs onto bowls and jugs in a serene and beautiful workplace for a very reasonable £3.75 an hour, they might be rewarded with a puncture.
Thankfully, they cruised onto the bitumen road un-scathed. The drive between here and their home in Loandhu would be a smooth, pleasant one now, through drowsy farmlands and forests turning gold and emerald in the late afternoon sun.
‘We shouldn’t have let that blonde girl go – that Alison,’ said Neil, slipping his Ray-Bans on. ‘She was the most talented we had. Reliable too.’
‘Yes,’ murmured Sandra coolly, tidying her fringe in the sunvisor mirror. ‘I know you liked her.’ She frowned as she flicked a stray lock of hair back and forth: perspiration had got to it, and the more she tried to fluff it out the lanker it looked. Her big brown eyes were, she noted, a little bloodshot, and the flesh around them was finely wrinkled. For forty-eight, though, she was in pretty good shape – better than him, if honest truth were told – and her sacred principle never to go to a hairdresser north of Edinburgh was still paying dividends.
‘It has nothing to do with liking her,’ said Neil, accelerat –.’It’s just that she didn’t have the usual drawbacks.’
‘Oh, I’d love to know what those are,’ she volleyed back. ‘Perhaps something to do with—? Look out!’
Her shrill cry focused him on the road ahead, but it was too late. A flash of grey passed in front of the car, and was swept under the wheels with a sickening jolt, a muffled soft collision of steel and rubber with flesh and bone. Sandra spun round in her seat and saw the creature leaping through the scrub at the side of the road, then wriggling frantically through the barbed wire fence of the field beyond.
Neil slowed the car and brought it to a stop as close to the road’s edge as he could manage.
‘It’s dead for sure,’ he cautioned her, as she wrenched her door open and sprang out.
‘It was still running,’ she called over her shoulder.
He hurried to catch up to her, squinting in the fierce sunlight, following her silhouette with its windblown halo of honey-and-grey hair. ‘It’s a nervous system reflex,’ he said. ‘The animal’s had it, but it keeps going for a few seconds. Like a chicken with its head cut off.’
‘We ran over its back legs,’ she said. ‘I saw it dragging them. It’s injured, that’s all.’
Farther back than they thought possible, they found the accident site. An unspectacular smear of blood, lightly garnished with fur, glistened on the grey tar. Sandra was already leaning against the barbed wire, peering into the empty field. It was an unkempt expanse, stubble in parts, churned-up mud in others, engraved with the dried footprints of cows long moved elsewhere. The farmhouse appeared to be half a mile away, barricaded with a phalanx of hay-bales sheathed in black plastic. In the desolate middle distance, nothing moved.
‘We can’t leave it to die,’ she said.
Neil was about to argue, realised he didn’t know what they would be arguing about. ‘What do you think it was?’
‘A wildcat. Scottish wildcat. Rare. Only three thousand left in all of Britain.’ She began to climb over the barbed wire. ‘Hold this down for me.’
He lowered the tense cable of steel as far as he could push it while she swung her legs over. The flesh of her buttocks bulged against the delicate beige cotton of her trousers as she strained to keep a safe channel of vacancy between her crotch and the snarly metal spikes. Coming down on the other side, she yelped, not because sh
e’d been snagged by the barbed wire – she hadn’t – but because there was an unexpected drop through insubstantial scrub.
‘You’ll have to be careful,’ she called up at him, annoying him with her presumption that he’d follow. She was already stretching her arms high, grabbing hold of the barbed wire so she could hang on it with all her weight. Her breasts looked good that way, pressing out through the yellow cashmere of her pullover; her sharply upturned face smoothed the wrinkles out of her bare neck, stripping years off her age. He hesitated, then climbed over the wire himself, landing rather gracelessly beside her.
‘Come on,’ she said. ‘It must be hiding in this verge somewhere. It would hide in the closest available spot.’ Already she was visualising the magic moment of discovery: a shivering, cowering creature yanked rudely out of legend, blinking up at her from a nest of grass. A tabby the size of an ocelot, golden-eyed and panting with fright.
She stumped off, peering into the tangled embankment as she moved along the field’s perimeter. There wasn’t much grass at ground level; most of it was bristling sideways out of the earthy barricade, lushest near the top as if nourished by the fence-stakes. Beneath this furzy mane of vegetation, the bulwark of clay was crumbly and embedded with stones and lumps of concrete. It was also riddled with rabbit holes.
‘It’ll have crawled into one of these,’ decided Sandra. Spot judgements were her forte; in matters of instinct she was rarely wrong.
‘If so,’ said Neil, ‘it’s probably dead by now. Or vicious as hell. What are we supposed to do, call “Here, pussy?”’
‘We ran it down,’ she reminded him. ‘It’s our responsibility.’
Neil breathed deep and counted to three. If any single factor had inhibited the growth of their business, it was Sandra’s occasional attacks of sentimental scruple, which could flare up, like hormonal flushes, at the strangest times.
‘Jesus,’ he said, visualising the wildcat from memories of infra-red pictures he’d seen in newspapers. ‘This isn’t some old lady’s beloved moggy, you know.’