But I can’t wait, and these millions of racing spinning wheels are making me nervous. I can’t wait for my new skin. The burned-out wrecks on the highway might be me. I am so tiny next to the trucks and tracks and trekkers. Ocean liners, condominiums, apartment blocks on wheels, flash past my tinted window. There isn’t enough space between them for me to sneak into the fast lane and leave them all behind. I want an empty road ahead and an empty road behind. But the rearview mirror is bursting with cars racing as fast as I am. Everyone is chasing each other with violence and velocity beyond their control. Everyone is chasing me. It is not only the boy who can’t run fast enough. I can’t either. He was caught, but they won’t catch me.
There is not enough conditioned air to breathe and I need my inhaler. At the last moment I see a sign and scream up a slip road, too fast. Too fast to read the signs, too fast to hold the road.
The corner at the top of the incline races forward and rears up. The wheel spins out of my hands.
Flying forward on two wheels, I notice the flash of the spy camera as I rocket over the intersection. The antilocking device grabs, releases, grabs, and then in slo-mo I tip over a green rim and tumble.
The bag inflates with a hiss and a sigh. I recall that I woke up this morning having decided on plastic surgery. As my face hits the air bag I remember that I do not need to protect my head. Amnesia was, in any case, on the menu.
The accident has a cinematic quality: simultaneously as I fly, tumble, and roll, a prisoner of seat belt and air bag, I watch from the stalls. A car dives off a dock, over a cliff, into a ravine, and falls, slowly, an incredible distance until it hits water, beach, rock. The car always explodes into a ball of flame. I expect conflagration. Nothing of the sort occurs.
A good baby is a quiet baby. I have become the baby in the bubble and I do not cry as I lie cradled in straps and trampoline, helpless, hanging. I am not hysterical. Undying, unburned, upside-down, I can feel nothing. There is nothing to feel.
“Wake up,” the boy shouts. He taps on my door. “Wake up.”
A man with a thin, dark face and horse’s hair taps on the window. “Are you awake?” he says. “Are you all right? I’m going to get you out.”
He gets me out. He says, “We called Rescue when we saw you shooting over the bank. But nobody came. Can you walk?”
I can walk, shaking, with help. “Don’t touch me,” I say. I don’t like being touched. I’m not used to it. I walk more, without help. All it takes is control.
The sound of sirens comes from the other side of the bank.
The man says, “A pileup. On the highway. That’s where the emergency services are. There’s not enough to go round.”
We are walking across a field. I don’t like grass. Things hide in grass. The grass boils in the sun.
“Sit down a minute,” the man says.
“No.”
We walk slowly on. The man has horse hair to protect his head and neck from the sun. But I have no hat and my Ray Bans are missing.
The man lives in a bus, in a disused cutting under the highway. His woman makes tea. His children stand, dusty, in the shade, staring. They are ulcerous and brown. Clearly they are allowed to play in the sun. My boy never played in the sun.
The woman gives me tea in a plastic mug. I do not think she has sterilized the mug, but the water was boiled. So I drink the tea. This is a strange world, a world of accidents, incidents, and side dents. It is not my world. I drink the tea. I am prepared for anything.
“Better?” the woman says. “She’s white as a ghost.”
“Call Rescue again,” the man says.
The woman picks up a cracked old portable.
“No,” I say.
The man and the woman exchange looks. The children stare.
“Not yet,” I say. When Rescue comes they will want my name and number. They will want my fingerprint and voiceprint, and, however far these people live from the highway, they will have heard about me or the boy. I do not want a woman with brown and ulcerous children asking me what sort of mother I am.
I search in empty pockets for something to give them.
“What are your names?” I say to compensate for the empty pockets. They suck on dirty fingers without answering.
“What will you do?” the man asks. “Do you want to call someone? We’d give you a ride, but we’ve got no fuel.”
They are stuck, stationary, under the highway. But they can live in their transport. I expect they would call themselves Travelers, but they aren’t going anywhere. I am not a Traveler, far from it, but I have a long way to go.
“What will you do?” I ask, to compensate for the inability to answer his questions.
“Wait,” he says, “until we’ve enough money to fill up and leave.”
“We’re all right here,” the woman says. “We’ve everything we need.”
“What do you do,” I ask, “for money?”
“Betty cleans sometimes,” the man says, “in the town.”
Dirty Betty cleans. Miracle and wonder.
“Al tells fortunes,” Betty says. “He has the gift.”
A fortune is not something you tell; it is something you make. I am in a world of un-reason. I recall that I woke up this morning having decided on plastic surgery. I am on my way to alter my face, my future, my fortune. All it takes is money.
“He can read your hand,” Betty says. “While you wait.”
“No,” I say. I do not want Al to touch my hand. Coarse black hair obscures his features, but I can see his eyes. I have lost my Ray Bans, so I can see that his eyes are deep-set and unreasonable. His hand, when he helped me out of my car, was burning hot. His children are brown and ulcerous and his tea is contaminated. My fortune is not safe from a man like that.
“It’d pass the time,” says Betty. “It won’t cost you much. Aren’t you curious?”
I am not curious. I know where I’m going, what I am going to do. It is Al and Betty who are curious. They will want to know what sort of mother I am. Well, I am the mother of a boy with flawless white skin, and my tea is not contaminated. We are unblemished by fluctuations in the cycle of solar activity.
“It’s the truth,” Betty says. “Al can see the future, and he can see through the window in your heart. It helps, believe me.”
The heart does not have windows; it has chambers. It is a muscular system of pumps and chambers which deliver blood to parts which would otherwise die. A miracle of engineering: it can be replaced.
Al stretches. His sinews are long and impossible. He says, “Don’t bother the lady, love.” His sigh inflates the cutting. It billows around the bus. The grass ripples, the dust swirls.
“Call Rescue again,” Al says to Betty. “We can’t help this lady.”
“No,” I say. “Read my hand.” The impossible, the unreasonable, will, for a while, rescue me from Rescue.
“Now you’re talking,” Betty says. “Give me some money and I’ll take the children into town.”
I pay her, and she takes the children out into the burning sun, out of my sight.
“Give me your hand,” says Al.
I will not. I hold it up for him to see.
“An empty hand,” says Al.
It is not. I am not empty-handed: I have savings and securities. Money is all it takes.
“A clean hand,” Al says, as if I don’t know my own hand.
He says, “Your love line is short but your life line is long. I’m sorry for you.”
“I have no opinion about that,” I say. “It is not a matter for regret.”
“That is why I’m sorry for you,” says Al. “Tour fate line is fractured.”
My fate is in my own hands. The fracture was not mine. If my fate is fractured by a fault line it’s not my fault.
“It’s not my fault,” I say.
“But your fate is in your own hands,” Al says. “Isn’t that what you’ve just been thinking?”
I clench my fist. Al’s eyes are unreasonable, b
ut he knows something.
“Give me the portable,” I say. “I’ll call Rescue now.”
Al laughs and a ripple runs through the grass. “It’ll take more than Rescue to rescue you, lady,” he says. He gives me the portable, but I can’t call.
The boy is in a high-security holding cell but at least he is safe from solar zits. He has returned to his Perspex incubator. When he leaves it he will die. An eye for an eye, a heart for a heart. Solar zits is the only thing he is safe from.
I say to Al, “What have you heard?”
“Nothing,” he says. “Hearing is not what I do. Reading is my forte.”
I am certain he has seen my face on TV, the way everyone else did. I couldn’t hide my face and the camera followed me, spying, and telling tales.
I look but see neither dish nor aerial.
“Where’s your TV?” I ask.
“No TV,” he says. “There’s too much interference here.”
I don’t believe this is so. Everybody saw. Strangers looked and saw my face. From transmitter to aerial, from coast to coast, from satellite to dish to receiver to eye to brain to memory; my face was transported into offices, houses, pubs and clubs, a spectacle to boost ratings: entertainment for strangers.
“Give me your hand again,” Al says.
I do not. I hold it up between my face and his burning eye.
“Yes,” he says. “I can see that someone close to you has caused you pain.”
The boy did not cause me pain. He was a quiet boy, a clean boy. Quiet boys are good boys.
“Can you see what will happen to the boy?” I ask.
“What boy?” Al says. “There’s no boy in your hand.”
“Then what will happen to me?”
Al says, “Pain is no bad thing. Pain can bring wisdom if you will only open yourself to new experiences.”
As if I don’t know my own life.
“I see death in your hand,” says Al.
It is not my death.-It was not my hand. My baby has a foreign heart. It is not my fault. I am not the mother of a monster in spite of what everybody says. The boy’s heart is to blame. The boy’s heart is an orphan.
I get up. I must go. I have an appointment. Time with Al is not time well spent. His children are brown and ulcerous; they have been polluted by dust and dead sun.
“Good-bye,” says Al. “Take care.” He smiles and the dry earth cracks.
I cross the field to my wrecked car, but it is no longer isolated. An official vehicle has drawn up beside it. Two men in uniform are poking around inside and muttering messages into their mobiles.
One of them says, “Is this yours?”
“No,” I say.
I point across the field to the cutting under the highway. If anyone is to blame it might as well be Al. And I woke up this morning having decided on plastic surgery. No one will know me so I might as well not be me, and the car might as well not be mine. It might as well be Al’s.
“Don’t I know you?” says the man in the uniform.
RUTH RENDELL has been writing for the past thirty-one years and has won the Crime Writers Association’s Gold Dagger Award four times. Sixteen of her novels feature Chief Inspector Wexford, the subject of a television series. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of literature and holds honorary degrees from the University of Essex and East Anglia and Bowling Green State University in Ohio. Her latest books are Blood Lines, a collection of short stories, and writing as Barbara Vine, No Night Is Too Long.
The Astronomical Scarf
Ruth Rendell
I t was a very large square, silk in the shade of blue called midnight that is darker than royal and lighter than navy, and the design on it was a map of the heavens. The Milky Way was there and Charles’s Wain, Orion, Cassiopeia and the Seven Daughters of Atlas. A young woman who was James Mullen’s secretary saw it in a shop window in Bond Street, draped across the seal of a (reproduction) Louis Quinze chair with a silver bracelet lying on it and a black picture hat with a dark blue ribbon hiding one of its corners.
Cressida Chilton had been working for James Mullen for just three months when he sent her out to buy a birthday present for his wife. Not jewelry, he had said. Use your own judgment, I can see you’ve got good taste, but not jewelry. She could see which way the wind was blowing there. “Not jewelry” were the fateful words. Elaine Mullen was his second wife and had held that position for five years. Office gossip had it that he was seeing one of the management trainees in Foreign Securities. I wish it was me, thought Cressida, and she went into the shop and bought the scarf—appropriately enough, for an astronomical price—and then, because no one gift-wrapped in those days, into a stationer’s round the corner for a sheet of pink and silver paper and a twist of silver string.
Elaine knew the meaning of the astronomical scarf. She knew who had wrapped it up too and it wasn’t James. She had expected a gold bracelet and she could see the writing on the wall as clearly as if James had turned graffitist and chalked up something to the effect of all good things coming to an end. As for the scarf, didn’t he know she never wore blue? Hadn’t he noticed that her eyes were hazel and her hair light brown? That secretary, the one that was in love with him, had probably bought it out of spite. She gave it to her blue-eyed sister who happened to come round and see it lying on the dressing table on the very day Elaine was served with her divorce papers under the new law, Matrimonial Causes Act, 1973.
Elaine’s sister wore the scarf to a lecture at the Royal Society of Lepidopterists, of which she was a Fellow. Cloakroom arrangements in the premises of learned societies are often somewhat slapdash and here, in a Georgian house in Bloomsbury Square, Fellows, members, and their guests were expected to hang up their coats themselves on a row of hooks in a dark corner of the hall. When all the hooks were in use coats had either to be placed over those already there or else hung up on the floor. Elaine’s sister, arriving rather late, took off her coat, threaded the astronomical scarf through one sleeve—in at the shoulder and out at the cuff—and draped the coat over someone’s very old ocelot.
As soon as the lecture, on the subject of Taxonomy of Genera and Species, was over, one of the guests made an immediate departure. She told the Fellow who had brought her that she had to be at the Savoy by seven-thirty and it was already twenty to eight. Everyone else gathered in the Fellows’ Drawing Room for sherry and biscuits. The guest, whose name was Sadie Williamson, went to collect her coat.
Sadie Williamson was a thief. She stole something nearly every day. The coat she was wearing she had stolen from Harrods and the shoes on her feet from a friend’s clothes cupboard after a party. She was proud to say (to herself) that she had never given anyone a present that she had had to pay for. Now, in the dim and deserted hall, on the walls of which a few eighteenth-century prints of British butterflies were just visible, Sadie searched among the garments for some trifle worth picking up.
An unpleasant smell arose from the clothes. It was compounded of dirty cloth, old sweat, mothballs, cleaning fluid, and something in the nature of wet sheep. Sadie curled up her nose in distaste. She hoped there was a place nearby where she could wash her hands. Not much worth bothering about here, she was thinking, when she saw the hand-rolled and hemstitched corner of a blue scarf protruding from a coat sleeve. Sadie gave it a tug. Rather nice. She tucked it into her coat pocket and because she could hear footsteps coming from the lecture room, left in haste.
Next day she took it round to the cleaners. Most things she stole she had dry-cleaned, even if they were fresh off a hanger in a shop. You never knew who might have tried them on.
“The zodiac,” said the woman in the dry cleaners. “Which sign are you?”
“I don’t believe in it but I’m Cancer.”
“Oh dear,” said the woman, “I never think that sounds very nice, do you?”
Sadie put the scarf into a box which had contained a pair of tights she had stolen from Selfridges, wrapped it up in a piece of paper that had original
ly wrapped a present given to her, and sent it to her godchild for Christmas. The parcel never got there. It was one of those lost in the robbery of a mail train traveling between Norwich and London.
Of the two young men who snatched the mailbags, it was the elder who helped himself to the scarf. He thought it was new, it looked new. He gave it to his girlfriend. She took one look and asked him who he thought she was, her own mother? What was she supposed to do with it, tie it round her head when she went to the races?
She meant to give it to her mother but lost it on the way. She left it in the taxi in which she was traveling from Kilburn to Acton. It was found, along with a pack of two hundred cigarettes, two cans of diet Coke, and a copy of Playboy, the lot in a rather worn Harrods carrier, by the taxi driver’s next fare. She happened to be Cressida Chilton, who was still James Mullen’s secretary, but who failed to recognize the scarf because it was enclosed in the paper originally wrapped round it by Sadie Williamson. Besides, she was still in a state of shock from what she had read in the paper that morning, the announcement of James’s imminent marriage, his third.
“This was on the floor,” she said, handing the bag over with the taxi driver’s tip.
“They go about in a dream,” he said. “You wouldn’t believe the stuff they leave behind. I had a full set of Masonic regalia left in my cab last week and the week before that it was a baby’s pot, no kidding, and a pair of wellies. How am I supposed to know who this stuff belongs to? I mean, I ask you, they’d leave themselves behind only they don’t, thank God. I mean, what is it? Packets of fags and a dirty mag.”
“Yes, well, I hope you find the owner,” said Cressida, and she rushed off through the swing doors and up in the lift to be sure of getting there before James did, to be ready with her congratulations, all smiles.
“Find the owner, my arse,” said the driver to himself.
He drew up at the red light next to another taxi whose driver he knew, and having already seen this copy, passed him Playboy through their open windows. The cigarettes he smoked himself. He gave the Diet Coke and the scarf to his wife. She said it was the most beautiful scarf she had ever seen and she wore it every time she went anywhere that required dressing up.
Women on the Case Page 7