by David Mathew
‘I can imagine.’
‘No you can’t.’
‘You see, I thought he was your ex.’
‘As I say… he’s done worse than take mucky pictures of me.’
Yasser’s back straightened. ‘Are you serious, Maggie? Hand on heart time.’
Maggie put her right hand on her heart. Her eyes were wide open she fixed Yasser with an earnest stare. ‘But not recently. When we were younger.’
‘Jesus. He should be in prison.’
‘Nice try. Not if your da won’t believe a word you say,’ Maggie answered; ‘or if he believes, doesn’t really give much of a toss. Don’t forget, we have… we have different rules on the land. Different from you.’
‘But it’s incest! It’s a crime!’
‘It doesn’t happen anymore, Yasser.’
‘You’re missing the point.’
‘No I’m not. I’m trying to tell you a story.’
‘Christ,’ Yasser interrupted. ‘Was it your father as well? I mean, if he’s aware of the filming…’
‘Aware of it? He sells it.’
‘…I feel sick.’
‘That’ll be me tea. Shall I go on?’
Yasser sighed. ‘You’d better, I suppose.’
8.
‘You’ll probably notice, there’s not a lot left behind to steal – we were burgled a couple of weeks ago,’ said Chris. And he watched Shyleen carefully, conscious that the comment might be offensive.
Shyleen took it well enough, however. ‘I’m not here to steal anything,’ she told him.
‘I take it, though, you and the Asian lad I spoke to are in it together.’
‘In a manner of speaking.’
‘So what’s going on then, if you’ll forgive my nosiness? Is he your what? – your boyfriend? Your brother?’
‘Cousin,’ Shyleen answered. ‘Sometimes boyfriend,’ she added. ‘Maybe we should get him in here, assuming he hasn’t gone home.’
‘Yeah why not?’ Chris chuckled. ‘Invite the whole street, why don’t you.’
With the sex tour of house having taken in only the ground floor, the two of them had made it into the lounge for Chris to finish on Shyleen’s face. That had been twenty minutes earlier – since then they’d been talking – and now Chris stood up from the sofa.
‘Would you like a drink?’ he asked.
‘Do you have any Baileys?’
‘No. I’ve got vodka and some grass. A smoke’s always nice with a Bloody Mary.’
‘Sure. What don’t kill you makes you stronger,’ Shyleen told him, and she watched dimples form on his buttocks as he slouched from the room.
What had she hoped to find here? Or more to the point, what had Yasser hoped she would find here? As Chris had pointed out, the electrical appliances had been taken from the room; the TV stand seemed naked without its wide screen, the CDs on a rack above the fireplace an almost surreal touch in the absence of a player… Every bit as naked as Chris was, Shyleen crossed the room in her birthday suit, in order to see what music he shared with his absent partner. As she skimread the sides of the boxes – jazz, acid house, Madness, ska – she absentmindedly chipped at a beauty mark of dessicated semen on her left nostril with a painted fingernail.
Chris returned carrying a tray. They sat on the carpet, in the middle of the floor, with Shyleen wondering how late Yasser would wait, and Chris rolling two thin joints with equal measures of tobacco and marijuana.
‘This is French,’ he said. ‘You’ve probably had stronger.’
‘I probably haven’t.’
‘But it’s a mellow enough smoke for this hour of the morning.’
The lighter flared.
A minute or so later, Shyleen repeated her opinion that Yasser should be present. After what she and Chris had done together, it could not have been fear of the man that made her want this. Indeed, in her new lover’s company she felt assured, confident – she felt good. The fuck had invigorated her mind and cleared her system; but if she’d hoped that he would spill the beans as comprehensively as he’d spilled his sperm, she was out of luck. Orgasm had made the man no more trustful; no more open. Perhaps he had nothing to tell; perhaps he’d been telling Yasser the whole truth when they’d talked at the front door. Perhaps Chris had nothing to do with anything at all.
‘You’ve gone quiet,’ he said.
‘Thinking.’
‘Do you know what I think? I’m wondering why you didn’t let him into the house when you had the chance.’
‘And what chance was that?’
‘When I was asleep.’
‘I didn’t know you were asleep. I must’ve fallen asleep myself.’
Chris laughed and exhaled smoke. ‘You occasionally read stories about people like you,’ he said. ‘Burglars who get so pissed in the family’s wine cellar they forget what they’re there for, and then the pigs arrive with the sirens flashing.’
‘I told you: we’re not burglars. So I didn’t let him into the house.’
‘Then what are you? Apart from feisty.’
Shyleen sipped her Bloody Mary. During the period of consideration she shifted her position, so that she sat cross-legged, her question mark curling down to her cock-swollen lips. Sensing her agitation, Chris asked if the question had made her uncomfortable; she shook her head. ‘No it’s not that. Angry, is the answer.’
‘Ah! Was that why we…?’
‘Why we what?’
‘Why we – why you were happy for me –‘
‘Spit it out. Don’t be coy.’ And she laughed. ‘You think it was a revenge shag, don’t you?’
Chris had inhaled and was holding it down. Shyleen had to wait for his answer, which she did gladly – she was enjoying the company, the careless guilt-free nudity, the stripped-down room. She was comfortable. Although she remained angry (no sense in denying that; why not embrace it? she wondered), she was comfy; she felt at home.
‘The thought had crossed my mind, I must admit,’ said Chris.
‘Well it wasn’t. But you’re right to… to um… to what’s the word I’m, fucking. Christ my memory. Where the fuck – something’s stolen my fucking brain.’
Chris giggled. His laughter had changed pitch suddenly.
‘I’m not sure I should smoke any more,’ Shyleen slurred.
‘Fair enough, but trust me. The booze and the grass are jibbing. Your cranium is the casserole dish. And you wouldn’t fear a lamb casserole, would you?’
‘No.’
‘Then wait it out. You are either getting,’ Chris taught slowly, ‘or you have already got – high. Let your brain sort it through.’
‘ASSUME!’ Shyleen shouted, remembering the word that she’d struggled for. ‘You are right to assume my kissing cousin has spread his seed.’ She lifted her half-emptied glass. ‘And with a Pikey bird no less! A filthy – fucking – Gypsy Fucking Rose Lee. Beautiful! Oh it makes me feel so special. The cunt.’
Chris was nodding his head. The nod said I understand, I understand. The nod said Smoke and drink, sweetheart – I don’t need your war stories.
Or so Shyleen inferred – in her altered psychic state. She handed Chris the remains of the joint; she’d had enough of it, she was starting to feel sick. She did not need to say as much.
What she said instead was more shocking.
‘Besides, I’m dying.’
The words expanded.
‘…How come?’ Chris asked at length, nubbing the joint out on the inside of his glass.
‘Growths. Downstairs,’ Shyleen explained, nodding perfunctorily at her vagina.
‘Nothing catching, I hope.’
‘No. Nothing catching… About inviting Yasser in.’
‘Go on. Call him.’
‘Thank you.’
‘But aren’t you going t
o dress first?’
Shyleen shrugged. ‘He’s seen me naked.’
‘Well, he hasn’t seen me naked,’ Chris said; ‘and blokes don’t show each other their cocks.’
Shyleen grinned. ‘Not even in a threeway?’ she asked.
9.
Together with Max and a handful of vigilantes from the camp, Tommy the Brazilian and Maggie’s father went in search of Ali, the delivery driver who had impregnated Maggie; but as soon as the reluctant father had been informed, he had been on his toes, abandoning his job in the process.
The lynch mob couldn’t find him.
The search was hindered, of course, by the fact that he’d delivered fresh veg and frying oil to a police station: it was not as though anyone could wait in a van outside a cop shop without attracting suspicion; not make enquiries – with or without menace – of the uniforms who worked therein, for that matter. And owing to the Asian lad’s reticence to take Maggie anywhere close to home (what with racism being rich, with so many suits to wear), the paramours romantic entanglements had taken place at The Charity, a nudge-nudge-ask-no-questions flophouse B&B near the A6. (Cash payments encouraged. Rooms available by the hour.) However, the stakeout in The Charity’s car park had not lasted long. While Tommy had expressed confidence that the cunt would be back with another bird to giblet, the bearded fuckpad owner (with his physical resemblance to the wrestler Giant Haystacks) had expressed a similar confidence that the man parked outside for the last three nights in his blue van was peddling pills: and this he expressed to the local constabulary. Max, on watch that night, was lucky to escape, wheels spitting mud from the wrecked path up to the building, without a caution – not so much as a conversation.
They couldn’t find him.
But one day they would: this was a pledge that Tommy made at the time, and Tommy was not a man to swear pledges aimlessly: so he proclaimed.
The baby was delivered on the camp by Bridget, Maggie’s cousin – the woman who owned a dog-grooming parlour in Hockliffe. Even at that time, she was already a horny veteran of the washing-up bowl of scalding water, the oven-fresh steaming wet towels. She had already delivered twenty-three babies in the name of family favours, for sixty quid a pop.
‘And then one day… he wasn’t there anymore,’ said Maggie to Yasser.
‘Yes, you’ve said.’
‘No. I mean more than just simply not present physically. I don’t care if this sounds fruit loops, but ever since he went away… I could glimpse him every now and then. Not in dreams – or not only in dreams. I’m talking about a sense of him. A chuckle, a bubble of snot from a nostril, the touch of his fingers, maybe – so much that… I didn’t really think of him as properly gone. Not really. I might’ve been alone n my bed and I could feel him, wriggling on me breasts, draining me to sacks.
‘It was like he was with me and not with me – at one and the same time.’
Maggie stopped talking. She rose to her slippered feet again and heavy-stepped it to the bedroom. ‘I’m gonna fetch something stronger.’
‘I can’t drink. I’m driving.’
‘All the more for yours truly, then.’
Maggie slipped away, and Yasser felt the pull of the phone in his pocket. The time he refused to fight it: he checked his texts. But before he did so, he turned away from the direction of the bedroom door and showed his back to it.
There was nothing from Shyleen.
Why not?
What could have happened to have stopped her answering his U OK? What might have possessed her attention to such a degree that a simple OK was disadvantageously time-consuming?
Once more Yasser was worried. It was time to leave, by the love of God – it was surely time. Hearing Maggie on her reapproach, Yasser pocketed the mobile and twisted to face his hostess. She was carrying a bottle of colourless liquid.
‘Bootleg,’ she announced. ‘There are no coppers here anyway. Fuck em. Have a drink. Only a few months before Christmas.’
Although the mood swing was obvious, its reason was not so apparent; and Yasser was baffled. Was this the result of the unburdening of a secret? If so, he himself should unburden the breast more often.
‘The coppers are not the point,’ said Yasser. ‘You were telling me about…’
‘He disappeared. I know, I know.’ Standing near the sink, Maggie used her teeth and pulled the cork jammed between the lips of the bottle; with a violent toss of her locks, she spat the cork in the direction of the bathroom door, and giggled. ‘Patience. Or do you have somewhere else you need to be, I should be asking?’
Perhaps some honesty of his own would not go amiss at this point, Yasser thought. ‘As a matter of fact, Maggie,’ he said, ‘there is somewhere I should be getting to.’
‘Oh. Another hot date?’
‘Are you teasing me again?’
‘Would you love me any other way?’ Maggie poured generous – if not gluttonous – measures of the moonshine into two plastic beakers, one pink, one yellow. ‘Is it your kissing cousin again waiting for you with a hot water bottle on her breasts to keep herself warm for you?’
‘In a manner of speaking,’ Yasser admitted.
‘Well, in a manner of speaking, you’re going nowhere until you’ve had a shot with me. Take it.’ Maggie was holding out the yellow beaker, swirling the liquid within with a curl of her wrist, like a wine connoisseur releasing the aroma.
Yasser took it. Placed his nose at the rim and thought: Surely there’s been a mistake. She must have taken a couple of inches from the petrol can in the car. This wasn’t a drink; it was a fuel. People powered mopeds on lower specific gravities.
Maggie sipped and sat down. ‘That’ll put hairs on your chest.’
‘I’ve already got hairs on my chest.’
‘Not many. Put hairs on my chest then. Where were we?’
‘The disappearance. Your punishment,’ said Yasser.
Maggie nodded – and Yasser sipped his hairshirt cocktail. Predictably vile.
‘They blamed me, naturally: I shouldn’t have been surprised and I wasn’t,’ Maggie said. ‘But when he went away completely – out of range, you might say – I felt a mother’s hollow rage… the like of which I dare say you won’t have encountered in any of your twenty innocent years. And it was then I realised – wherever it is the kidnapped children go… not physically, where their souls go, you might say… it has slipped away. And not only for me: Bridget had been spying him at his various ages as well, which I didn’t tell you before. Others too, more than likely. So Da hatched the plan I would steal the kid from High Town – the one you caught on film. To redress the balance was how he put it. He was deadly serious. I know. It sounds like a madness now: a group whadyamacallit. A group delusion. The madness of crowds… and all that guff.’
This was ground that Yasser and Maggie had covered before; ground that spoke to Yasser, though no psychoanalyst he, of a deep-seated psychosis – of problems still festering from the father’s own childhood. More than a sense that the world owed him a living: a sense of fear of imbalance. Do unto him, etcetera. Tit for tat. What goes around comes around… The man was sick. Clearly and inoperably malfunctioning. And now that Yasser knew that Tommy had sprung from the same identical loins, it was no surprise that the offspring shared a portion of the same demented chromosomes and characteristics.
But what of Maggie? Was she entirely right in the head? Yasser wondered as he managed another sip of the masochistic brew (the fumes twanged his nostril hairs; he almost sneezed).
Was anybody? Am I?
Having drained her beaker, Maggie stood up and returned to the draining board to pour a refill. Yasser guessed that her need to drink was symptomatic: she was reaching the hard part, he surmised. But what if she’s still lying? Though one obvious diagnosis remained that his storyteller needed booze to get to the heart of the tale – some food for the jour
ney – he could not shake the clammy sweats that he had committed to the laptop’s camera two evenings earlier (in lieu of penning his notions in a journal), at which time he had used phrases like: I’m just a game to play for them… I think I’m their new sport.
Yasser wished that he could tell when people fibbed to him. It would make life a damned sight easier.
‘Where’s your dad now, Maggie?’ Yasser asked. ‘How come he’s never home when I call? He can’t be working all hours?’
‘He’s not working at all.’
‘You told me…’
‘Not working in the sense you mean,’ Maggie clarified, returning to her seat. ‘I suppose it is work though – he certainly comes home tired enough, so he does. He’s out travelling.’ And she took another bolt of the mad dog liquor.
Out travelling? What on earth was that supposed to mean?
‘You see, Yasser, you might call us Gypsies, you might call us Pikeys.’
‘I don’t.’
‘Not you personally. One might call us those names, and quite frankly I’ve never had a problem with those descriptions. Some of us don’t like “Pikeys” but me,’ said Maggie, ‘I’ve never given much of a fuck about it. Bigger fish to fry… I know we don’t help ourselves when it comes to community relations sometimes, but if you understand our culture…’
‘Your culture of flytipping and spitting in pubs, would that be?’
Maggie smiled; she knew that she was being teased. ‘That’s the culture I mean. Then you get some… primitive comprehension. Of us. At least.’
‘Well, you can’t say I haven’t tried, Mags. I’ve even gone for interbreeding.’
Fortunately for Yasser, Maggie took this in the comic spirit in which it had been intended. She smiled again. ‘As have I,’ she replied. ‘The gifts we give to the gene pool – I don’t know. But why do you think we prefer the term Travellers, as a general rule?’
‘No idea. You never go anywhere,’ Yasser answered. ‘Your caravans don’t have wheels!’
‘Some of them do, but I take your point… You not drinking yours?’