The Reel Stuff

by Brian M. Thomsen

  "Speak for yourself," somebody piped up, but she ignored them and went on:

  "We're punch-drunk with violence. We don't see it any longer, even when it's in front of our noses."

  "On the screen every night," Archie put in. "Death and disaster in full color."

  "There's nothing very modern about that," Trevor said. "An Elizabethan would have seen death all the time. Public executions were a very popular form of entertainment."

  The table broke up into a cacophony of opinions. After two hours of polite gossip the dinner party had suddenly caught fire. Listening to the debate rage, Helen was sorry she hadn't had time to have the photographs processed and printed; the graffiti would have added further fuel to this exhilarating row. It was Purcell, as usual, who was the last to weigh in with his point of view; and— again, as usual— it was devastating.

  "Of course, Helen, my sweet," he began, that affected weariness in his voice edged with the anticipation of controversy, "your witnesses could all be lying, couldn't they?"

  The talking around the table dwindled, and all heads turned in Purcell's direction. Perversely, he ignored the attention he'd garnered and turned to whisper in the ear of the boy he'd brought— a new passion who would, as in the past, be discarded in a matter of weeks for another pretty urchin.

  "Lying?" Helen said. She could already feel herself bristling at the observation, and Purcell had spoken only a dozen words.

  "Why not?" the other replied, lifting his glass of wine to his lips. "Perhaps they're all weaving some elaborate fiction or other. The story of the spastic's mutilation in the public toilet. The murder of the old man. Even that hook. All quite familiar elements. You must be aware that there's something traditional about these atrocity stories. One used to exchange them all the time; there was a certain frisson in them. Something competitive maybe, in attempting to find a new detail to add to the collective fiction; a fresh twist that would render the tale that little bit more appalling when you passed it on."

  "It may be familiar to you—" Helen said defensively. Purcell was always so poised; it irritated her. Even if there were validity in his argument, which she doubted, she was damned if she'd concede it. "—I've never heard this kind of story before."

  "Haven't you?" said Purcell, as though she were admitting to illiteracy. "What about the lovers and the escaped lunatic, have you heard that one?"

  "I've heard that," Daniel said.

  "The lover is disemboweled— usually by a hook-handed man— and the body left on the top of the car, while the fiancé cowers inside. It's a cautionary tale, warning of the evils of rampant heterosexuality." The joke won a round of laughter from everyone but Helen. "These stories are very common."

  "So you're saying that they're telling me lies," she protested.

  "Not lies, exactly—"

  "You said lies."

  "I was being provocative," Purcell returned, his placatory tone more enraging than ever. "I don't mean to imply there's any serious mischief in it. But you must concede that so far you haven't met a single witness. All these events have happened at some unspecified date to some unspecified person. They are reported at several removes. They occurred at best to the brothers of friends of distant relations. Please consider the possibility that perhaps these events do not exist in the real world at all, but are merely titillation for bored housewives."

  Helen didn't make an argument in return, for the simple reason that she lacked one. Purcell's point about the conspicuous absence of witnesses was perfectly sound; she herself had wondered about it. It was strange, too, the way the women in Ruskin Court had speedily consigned the old man's murder to another estate, as though these atrocities always occurred just out of sight— around the next corner, down the next passageway— but never here.

  "So why?" said Bernadette.

  "Why what?" Archie puzzled.

  "The stories. Why tell these horrible stories if they're not true?"

  "Yes," said Helen, throwing the controversy back into Purcell's ample lap. "Why?"

  Purcell preened himself, aware that his entry into the debate had changed the basic assumption at a stroke. "I don't know," he said, happy to be done with the game now that he'd shown his arm. "You really mustn't take me too seriously, Helen. I try not to." The boy at Purcell's side tittered.

  "Maybe it's simply taboo material," Archie said.

  "Suppressed—" Daniel prompted.

  "Not the way you mean it," Archie retorted. "The whole world isn't politics, Daniel."

  "Such naiveté."

  "What's so taboo about death?" Trevor said. "Bernadette already pointed out: it's in front of us all the time. Television, newspaper."

  "Maybe that's not close enough," Bernadette suggested.

  "Does anyone mind if I smoke?" Purcell broke in. "Dessert seems to have been indefinitely postponed."

  Helen ignored the remark and asked Bernadette what she meant by "not close enough."

  Bernadette shrugged. "I don't know precisely," she confessed, "maybe just that death has to be near; we have to know it's just around the corner. The television's not intimate enough."

  Helen frowned. The observation made some sense to her, but in the clutter of the moment she couldn't root out its significance.

  "Do you think they're stories too?" she asked.

  "Andrew has a point—" Bernadette replied.

  "Most kind," said Purcell. "Has somebody got a match? The boy's pawned my lighter."

  "—about the absence of witnesses."

  "All that proves is that I haven't met anybody who's actually seen anything," Helen encountered, "not that witnesses don't exist."

  "All right," said Purcell. "Find me one. If you can prove to me that your atrocity monger actually lives and breathes, I'll stand everyone dinner at Apollinaire's. How's that? Am I generous to a fault, or do I just know when I can't lose?" He laughed, knocking on the table with his knuckles by way of applause.

  "Sounds good to me," said Trevor. "What do you say, Helen?"

  * * *

  She didn't go back to Spector Street until the following Monday, but all weekend she was there in thought: standing outside the locked toilet, with the wind bringing rain; or in the bedroom, the portrait looming. Thoughts of the estate claimed all her concern. When, late on Saturday afternoon, Trevor found some petty reason for an argument, she let the insults pass, watching him perform the familiar ritual of self-martyrdom without being touched by it in the least. Her indifference only enraged him further. He stormed out in high dudgeon, to visit whichever of his women was in favor this month. She was glad to see the back of him. When he failed to return that night she didn't even think of weeping about it. He was foolish and vacuous. She despaired of ever seeing a haunted look in his dull eyes; and what worth was a man who could not be haunted?

  He did not return Sunday night either, and it crossed her mind the following morning, as she parked the car in the heart of the estate, that nobody even knew she had come, and that she might lose herself for days here and nobody would be any the wiser. Like the old man Anne-Marie had told her about: lying forgotten in his favorite armchair with his eyes hooked out, while the flies feasted and the butter went rancid on the table.

  It was almost Bonfire Night, and over the weekend the small heap of combustibles in Butts's Court had grown to a substantial size. The construction looked unsound, but that didn't prevent a number of boys from clambering over and into it. Much of its bulk was made up of furniture, filched, no doubt, from boarded-up properties. She doubted if it could burn for any time: if it did, it would be chokingly smoky. Four times, on her way across to Anne-Marie's house, she was waylaid by children begging for money to buy fireworks.

  "Penny for the guy," they'd say, though none had a guy to display. She had emptied her pockets of change by the time she reached the front door.

  Anne-Marie was in today, though there was no welcoming smile. She simply stared at her visitor as if mesmerized.

  "I hope you don't mind m
e calling…"

  Anne-Marie made no reply.

  "…I just wanted a word."

  "I'm busy," the woman finally announced. There was no invitation inside, no offer of tea.

  "Oh. Well… it won't take more than a moment."

  The back door was open and a draft blew through the house. Papers were flying about in the backyard. Helen could see them lifting into the air like vast white moths.

  "What do you want?" Anne-Marie asked.

  "Just to ask you about the old man."

  The woman frowned minutely. She looked as if she might be sick. Helen thought her face had the color and texture of stale dough. Her hair was lank and greasy.

  "What old man?"

  "Last time I was here, you told me about an old man who'd been murdered, do you remember?"

  "No."

  "You said he lived in the next court."

  "I don't remember," Anne-Marie said.

  "But you distinctly told me—"

  Something fell to the floor in the kitchen and smashed. Anne-Marie flinched but did not move from the doorstep, her arm barring Helen's way into the house. The hallway was littered with the child's toys, gnawed and battered.

  "Are you all right?"

  Anne-Marie nodded. "I've got work to do," she said.

  "And you don't remember telling me about the old man?"

  "You must have misunderstood," Anne-Marie replied, and then, her voice hushed: "You shouldn't have come. Everybody knows."

  "Knows what?"

  The girl had begun to tremble. "You don't understand, do you? You think people aren't watching?"

  "What does it matter? All I asked was—"

  "I don't know anything," Anne-Marie reiterated. "Whatever I said to you, I lied about it."

  "Well, thank you anyway," Helen said, too perplexed by the confusion of signals from Anne-Marie to press the point any further. Almost as soon as she had turned from the door she heard the lock snap closed behind her.

  * * *

  That conversation was only one of several disappointments that morning brought. Helen went back to the row of shops and visited the supermarket that Josie had spoken of. There she inquired about the lavatories and their recent history. The supermarket had changed hands only in the last month, and the new owner, a taciturn Pakistani, insisted that he knew nothing of when or why the lavatories had been closed. She was aware, as she made her inquiries, of being scrutinized by the other customers in the store; she felt like a pariah. That feeling deepened when, after leaving the supermarket, she saw Josie emerging from the launderette and called after her, only to have the woman pick up her pace and duck away into the maze of corridors. Helen followed but rapidly lost both her quarry and her way.

  Frustrated to the verge of tears, she stood among the overturned rubbish bags and felt a surge of contempt for her foolishness. She didn't belong here, did she? How many times had she criticized others for their presumption in claiming to understand societies they had merely viewed from afar? And here was she, committing the same crime, coming here with her camera and her questions, using the lives (and deaths) of these people as fodder for party conversation. She didn't blame Anne-Marie for turning her back; had she deserved better?

  Tired and chilled, she decided it was time to concede Purcell's point. It was all fiction she had been told. They had played with her— sensing her desire to be fed some horrors— and she, the perfect fool, had fallen for every ridiculous word. It was time to pack up her credulity and go home.

  One call demanded to be made before she returned to the car however: she wanted to look a final time at the painted head. Not as an anthropologist among an alien tribe, but as a confessed ghost train rider: for the thrill of it. Arriving at number 14, however, she faced the last and most crushing disappointment. The maisonette had been sealed up by conscientious council workmen. The door was locked; the front window boarded over.

  She was determined not to be so easily defeated however. She made her way around the back of Butts's Court and located the yard of number 14 by simple mathematics. The gate was wedged closed from the inside, but she pushed hard against it, and with the effort, it opened. A heap of rubbish— rotted carpets, a box of rain-sodden magazines, a denuded Christmas tree— had blocked it.

  She crossed the yard to the boarded-up windows and peered through the slats of wood. It wasn't bright outside, but it was darker still within; it was difficult to catch more than the vaguest hint of the painting on the bedroom wall. She pressed her face close to the wood, eager for a final glimpse.

  A shadow moved across the room, momentarily blocking her view. She stepped back from the window, startled, not certain of what she'd seen. Perhaps merely her own shadow, cast through the window? But then she hadn't moved; it had.

  She approached the window again, more cautiously. The air vibrated; she could hear a muted whine from somewhere, though she couldn't be certain whether it came from inside or out. Again, she put her face to the rough boards, and suddenly, something leaped at the window. This time she let out a cry. There was a scrabbling sound from within as nails raked the wood.

  A dog! And a big one to have jumped so high.

  "Stupid," she told herself aloud. A sudden sweat bathed her.

  The scrabbling had stopped almost as soon as it had started, but she couldn't bring herself to go back to the window. Clearly the workmen who had sealed up the maisonette had failed to check it properly and incarcerated the animal by mistake. It was ravenous, to judge by the slavering she'd heard; she was grateful she hadn't attempted to break in. The dog— hungry, maybe half-mad in the stinking darkness— could have taken out her throat.

  She stared at the boarded-up window. The slits between the boards were barely a half-inch wide, but she sensed that the animal was up on its hind legs on the other side, watching her through the gap. She could hear its panting now that her own breath was regularizing; she could hear its claws raking the sill.

  "Bloody thing…" she said. "Damn well stay in there."

  She backed off toward the gate. Hosts of wood lice and spiders, disturbed from their nests by the moving of the carpets behind the gate, were scurrying underfoot, looking for a fresh darkness to call home.

  She closed the gate behind her and was making her way around the front of the block when she heard the sirens; two ugly spirals of sound that made the hair on the back of her neck tingle. They were approaching. She picked up her speed, and came around into Butts's Court in time to see several policemen crossing the grass behind the bonfire and an ambulance mounting the pavement and driving around to the other side of the quadrangle. People had emerged from their flats and were standing on their balconies, staring down. Others were walking around the court, nakedly curious, to join a gathering congregation. Helen's stomach seemed to drop to her bowels when she realized where the hub of interest lay: at Anne-Marie's doorstep. The police were clearing a path through the throng for the ambulance men. A second police car had followed the route of the ambulance onto the pavement; two plain-clothes officers were getting out.

  She walked to the periphery of the crowd. What little talk there was among the onlookers was conducted in low voices; one or two of the older women were crying. Though she peered over the heads of the spectators she could see nothing. Turning to a bearded man, whose child was perched on his shoulders, she asked what was going on. He didn't know. Somebody dead, he'd heard, but he wasn't certain.

  "Anne-Marie?" she asked.

  A woman in front of her turned and said: "You know her?" almost awed, as if speaking of a loved one.

  "A little," Helen replied hesitantly. "Can you tell me what's happened?"

  The woman involuntarily put her hand to her mouth, as if to stop the words before they came. But here they were nevertheless: "The child—" she said.

  "Kerry?"

  "Somebody got into the house around the back. Slit his throat."

  Helen felt the sweat come again. In her mind's eye the newspapers rose and fell in Ann
e-Marie's yard.

  "No," she said.

  "Just like that."

  She looked at the tragedienne who was trying to sell her this obscenity, and said "No" again. It defied belief; yet her denials could not silence the horrid comprehension she felt.

  She turned her back on the woman and jostled her way out of the crowd. There would be nothing to see, she knew, and even if there had been she had no desire to look. These people— still emerging from their homes as the story spread— were exhibiting an appetite she was disgusted by. She was not one of them; would never be one of them. She wanted to slap every eager face into sense; wanted to say: "It's pain and grief you're going to spy on. Why? Why?" But she had no courage left. Revulsion had drained her of all but the energy to wander away, leaving the crowd to its sport.

  * * *

  Trevor had come home. He did not attempt an explanation of his absence but waited for her to cross-question him. When she failed to do so he sank into an easy bonhomie that was worse than his expectant silence. She was dimly aware that her lack of interest was probably more unsettling for him than the histrionics he had been anticipating. She couldn't have cared less.

  She tuned the radio to the local station and listened for news. It came surely enough, confirming what the woman in the crowd had told her. Kerry Latimer was dead. Person or persons unknown had gained access to the house via the backyard and murdered the child while he played on the kitchen floor. A police spokesman mouthed the usual platitudes, describing Kerry's death as an "unspeakable crime," and the miscreant as "a dangerous and deeply disturbed individual." For once, the rhetoric seemed justified, and the man's voice shook discernibly when he spoke of the scene that had confronted the officers in the kitchen of Anne-Marie's house.

  "Why the radio?" Trevor casually inquired, when Helen had listened for news through three consecutive bulletins. She saw no point in withholding her experience at Spector Street from him; he would find out sooner or later. Coolly, she gave him a bald outline of what had happened at Butts's Court.

  "This Anne-Marie is the woman you first met when you went to the estate. Am I right?"

  She nodded, hoping he wouldn't ask her too many questions. Tears were close, and she had no intention of breaking down in front of him.