Duty and Delusion

by Shawna Lewis

  She didn’t need to feign ignorance of the procedures in a betting shop, and timidity added to the authenticity of her story. Usually, the old man’s bets were placed by her brother, she’d say. Adrian, she said, had recently suffered a catastrophic but not fatal climbing accident near Grenoble. (A poster print of that area, displayed in the travel agent’s window near the library, had attracted Belinda throughout the winter.) The other punters were only too eager to help this poor lass, who’d brought her dad away to ease his worry, despite her own, and was doing her best to keep his spirits up. And she weren’t a bad looker, either.

  By the fourth establishment, Bel was gaining confidence. There were plenty of nags named for geographical connections: River Eden, Seastrider and Brummy Strumpet attracted her money, among others. She moved between the betting shops, in villages heard of but never visited.

  Against all expectations, a few of her choices made good, Brummy Strumpet coming from nowhere to romp home at 33:1 in the 2.30 at Doncaster. This was not what she’d hoped for. By the end of the afternoon she had considerably more cash than she started with, but felt exhilarated. There was no harm in it, Bel concluded. It was just a bit of fun and it filled the loneliness, a little.

  Stopping off at the supermarket for some bread, her attention was caught by the gaudy billboards and posters promoting lotteries and scratch cards. She’d never taken any notice of them before, but quickly identified another, even simpler, way to ease her burden. She spent another £100 on various opportunities, including £50 worth of National Lottery tickets. She’d have to watch the Saturday night TV programme to see if she’d won; that would be a new experience. The silver paint was easily scratched off the numbers and symbols. Deflated, she handed six cards back to the cashier, leaving the store with a small profit on the exchange and fifty lottery chances still to play.

  Belinda was not normally a woman to fantasise, but sinking into sleep, Bel played with the notion of spending the money herself. That night, she dreamt once again of the ruined cottage, deep in a Welsh wood, and of a dark-eyed foreigner who dwelt therein.

  *

  Behind spiked railings along the main road on the edge of Denswick stood a compound full of motorhomes and campervans for sale or hire. Doug and Belinda had sometimes craned their necks as they drove past, speculating on prices and where they would take the family if they could afford to buy.

  Next day, the librarian set off for work an hour early and, for the first time, drove through the open gate between the railings. Thirty or forty imposing, bus-sized vehicles were on display, diagonally fanned out in a semi-circle on the broken tarmac. Under a grey sky, the window of a green-doored Portakabin glowed dimly with yellow light. Inside, the Managing Director of PD RoamerHomes Ltd, Phil Dunne, sat twiddling his thumbs as he acknowledged the folly of pretending that this was a viable business. The winter had been dreary, with no money around for high-priced holiday homes, mobile or static. A couple of the rental models were hired out for three months to elderly couples off to travel overland in search of sunshine in the Middle East or North Africa, but the way things were politically, he had low hopes of ever seeing the motors again. Even families planning to holiday in Britain were holding back.

  Now that his brother Tyson was banged up, Phil could no longer rely on backhanders or dodgy dealing to keep the bills paid and the loan sharks off his back. Phil needed a sale, and he needed it soon.

  When a knocking disturbed his thoughts, he ignored it. Kids who ought to be at school, he thought. At the second knock, he rose and unlocked the door. A shortish woman in her forties looked up at him. He raised his eyebrows but did not smile. No pound signs revolved in his mind’s eye.

  “Are you the person to speak to about the motorhomes?” Belinda asked uncertainly.

  “Aye. What d’you want to know?”

  “I’d like to have a look at some, please.”

  “Buy or rent?”

  “Ummm… well… not sure. It all depends…”

  “Depends on what?” Phil wasn’t going to waste time trudging round in the cold with this woman if he could help it. She was wearing a wedding ring. Why wasn’t she with her husband? Phil was a traditionalist; he liked a woman who knew her place, and that place was firmly under a man’s thumb. (This conviction was largely theoretical, Philip having rarely glimpsed daylight from under his wife’s very large, red-taloned Pollux since their nuptials some eleven years earlier.)

  “On whether I like what I see.” Bel was a woman of substance. No jumped-up salesman in a Portakabin was going to talk down to her. Shooting him a steely glance, she stood her ground.

  Phil recognised defeat when he saw it, tore himself away from the fan heater hidden beneath the desk, slid on his jacket and collected some keys from a locked cabinet.

  “You’ll be wanting the lower end of the price range, I expect.”

  “Not necessarily.” Her response was tart. “I’d like to look inside several, consider the features and arrange a test drive.”

  Phil opined silently that this woman’s husband wasn’t giving her enough ironing and hoovering to do. Test drive indeed! It was nippy out, so he took her to the nearest van, a Happilarks Wandalonga model, with its domed frontal lobe accommodating a full-sized double bunk above the cab. After a few desultory gestures, he sat himself down on a tweed-covered banquette and let the woman organise her own viewing.

  She was less than impressed. Her £41,000 had already increased by a few hundred pounds and who knew where it would end when the lottery was drawn at the weekend? She’d buy tickets from most outlets within a five-mile radius of Sallby. Surely one of them would come up. Bel wanted something better than the Wandalonga. It was only a bit of fun, anyway. She deserved a bit of that, after the year she’d had.

  Being pressed on price, Phil quoted £32,490, although he was anxious to explain the benefits of easy monthly payments. He did not, of course, mention the APR of 11.9%.

  “It would be cash,” said Bel, “but I was thinking of something more luxurious than this one.”

  Phil trudged back to the office to pick up the keys for a Nomad Libertine, though he had no faith in this woman’s authenticity. She was a time-waster, if ever he’d seen one.

  Leaving the compound with five minutes to spare, Bel had a fair idea of which motorhome she would choose to buy if this were real, and had a bagful of promotional literature with which to while away her lonely hours. It’s only a bit of fun, she reminded herself again.

  At work, she logged onto the council’s employee intranet as usual, expecting a few routine emails and instructions. Blaring red from the screen, a special notice for all Library Service staff spelt out proposals to transfer the buildings and contents to a private trust over the next few months. Early discussions suggested that the new trust would reduce staffing by ninety percent but in return, and in the new spirit of localism and the Big Society, offer unlimited opportunities for volunteering and unpaid work placements, helping the jobless to gain skills which would lead to useful paid careers in a range of public and private sectors. It was a win-win situation! The existing workforce would be granted opportunity to take voluntary redundancy or apply for work with the new organisation. The trust would have the exciting chance to reshape the library service with an emphasis on paperless provision of reading material focused on job skills, economic regeneration and online self-led research facilities for other areas of interest. Acres of forests would be saved and the pollution caused by paper manufacture reduced. Almost as an afterthought, the communiqué mentioned that it would also save the council £900,000 per annum (plus another possible £185,000 if the mobile library service was also axed) and help to balance its budget.

  The email was accompanied by several attachments for librarians to print and display. There would, of course, be full public consultation online and public meetings to be held in the city at 4pm on the following two Fridays, venue details
TBA.

  So this was it: the end of her career and the end of the library. OK, she was no high flier, but she took pride in what she did. The thrill of yesterday and the anticipation of the test drive were wiped out.

  With a heavy heart she printed and displayed the notices, as instructed.

  The news was soon out: most users had some family connection with council employment in one form or other; Twitter and Facebook carried the news from work to home in seconds. People who had never been inside the building made it their destination that morning, and moaned to Belinda about loss of services and the exorbitant imposition of council tax as if it was all her fault. Few commiserated about the loss of her job.

  No one said, “Ooh, yes. Put my name down for a couple of shifts without pay.”

  People were cross, very cross. But they all knew that apathy was what the council relied on, and that, in the end, apathy would triumph. It was a done deal.

  That evening, Melanie did not extend the courtesy of leaving her temporary bedroom during her mother’s visit. Subdued, Belinda explained the situation to her parents, who took the news as further evidence that the world as they knew it was coming to an end. There had always been libraries. But they did not make a profit, and this avaricious new world was sending them to the dogs.

  Their granddaughter’s fleeting presence, whilst not exactly a burden, was causing them a degree of disquiet they could well do without. Her extended school hours demonstrated laudable diligence on the part of her teachers, but Gran and Granddad were fearful that the child was not getting as much sleep as a growing girl needed. They were loath to speak of this to Belinda, whom to Melanie was anathema.

  Belinda had planned to entertain her parents by recounting her visit to the motorhome forecourt, but had lost all interest. Local TV news carried a feature on the library closure. There was no getting away from it. Using expected calls from Doug and Aidan as an excuse, she escaped as soon as she could, to nurse yet more wounds in private.

  24

  Dragomir Duric had been quite happy lodging in the loft and enjoying the tender ministrations of the older woman. Life with his cousin was more cramped and boring, though between shifts at the car wash Drago did earn a few extra pounds cleaning windows. Dave Simmons would soon be back at work, and the pair worked all daylight hours to maximise their income while they could.

  To some extent, exhaustion numbed the hurt Drago felt at his sweetheart’s conduct, which he could not begin to fathom. He had decided it was only fair to confront Samantha and give her chance to explain, so he waited for the minister’s wife to arrange a meeting.

  Samantha had taken some persuading to join the clientele of the Artificial Insemination by Donor clinic at Sallby Village Hall, and only went along with it to support her sister-in-law, who Samantha’s brother had abandoned for life on a North Sea gas platform. Messages to the family made it apparent that he had no intention of returning home in the foreseeable future.

  With some relief, within a fortnight of their visit to Sallsby, both Samantha and her sister-in-law knew they had not conceived. Despite paying for two AID sessions, Samantha was not sure she’d bother turning up next time, yearning as she was for her hairy-handed lover.

  *

  Reverend Michael had completed his twenty-week course of one-to-one swimming instruction and each Wednesday joined the lunchtime public swims although (as he explained to his wife over breakfast) they did not ‘float his boat’ in the way the hands-on instruction had done. Instead, he joined twenty or thirty of the ‘retired or redundant’ persuasion ploughing shallow furrows up and down, up and down. As Michael’s fitness improved, he learnt to circumnavigate the pairs and trios of gossiping women who oozed through the chlorine solution and kept their hair dry. Not one of them recognised the minister; without his dog collar and wearing goggles which concealed his wandering eye, he felt invisible. Sometimes it was Samantha’s turn to sit on the tall lifeguard’s chair watching over the swimmers. He would smile and wave, just the once, and experience that warm glow of admiration. Now it was Marina’s turn for lessons, though never having been inside a swimming pool before her marriage, she was a reluctant student. Nevertheless, she went along with her husband’s wishes and kitted herself out with a subdued little line in swimwear from the supermarket. Michael had put her name down for classes with Samantha and this would be her fourth week.

  She was not comfortable in the water but persisted. The lessons were all part of her journey from the margins of society to full community membership. Marina wanted to be one of the crowd, to join the dry-haired women, the flabby and the bony, as they chatted through their weekly thirty lengths, but for now she floundered the widths with the instructress’s support and encouragement. This day, as the lesson drew to a close, she delivered the message that Samantha had been longing to hear.

  “My window-cleaner asked me to let you know that his cousin’s back.”

  At the news, tears overflowed from the soft blue eyes.

  “Does he want to see me?”

  “I believe so, but Stevan said something about finding a private place to meet up.”

  The full lips trembled.

  “If you like, I could open up the chapel for half an hour in the morning without anyone knowing. Shall I tell him eight o’clock?”

  Relief and grief merged with guilt for losing faith in her lover’s loyalty, but a meeting had been arranged. Samantha nodded. She would be there.

  *

  Many of the flats in Bath House Court had been snapped up by members of the travelling community which, dealing solely in cash, had been less affected by the economic crisis than other sectors of local society.

  Every vacant field, every demolition site within a ten-mile radius of the town, was purchased by the travellers within days of going on the market, if not before. They were either developed with gypsy cash or left to bloom with burdock and willow herb. The council certainly couldn’t afford to make use of them.

  With the demise of the National Coal Board and the disappearance of its successor from common sight, until the bottom fell out of the nation’s finances no-one had got round to selling off the piece of land where the pithead baths once stood. Cleaning up contaminated land, whilst laudable in theory, was expensive.

  The entrepreneurial gypsies and travellers had their own code of conduct. Never slow to exploit an opportunity, when the land came on the market they put in the first and only sealed bid. This bid arrived in the council’s Asset Management Department in an envelope embossed with the company address of a famous London law firm, well known to the council from the various appeals against rejected planning applications. Money was no object. Further bids were discouraged as a defence against allegations of discrimination.

  Drawings were quickly prepared, corners cut, and the development erected in record time. Soon the travellers had acquired a near-monopoly of short- and medium-term rental accommodation in the little town.

  Standing in one day for her husband at a meeting of the Denswick Organisation for Community and Interfaith Local Enterprise (known as DOCILE), Marina made it her business to identify the key players among the caravan dwellers. Before the round-the-table introductions were made, she addressed the chairman in person.

  “Please bear with me. I’m new to this,” she said demurely. “Would you advise me, please, on the correct way to refer to the different sections of the community? The last thing I want to do is offend anyone.”

  The chairman was fiddling with his hearing aid and missed the request. An unsmiling, broad man with straight eyebrows and scarred knuckles assured her that she’d find out as the meeting progressed.

  The chairman retrieved his hearing device from the carpet and tweaked out bits of fluff as he called the meeting to order. Introductions were made too fast to remember, but she did catch the word gypsy when the unsmiling man spoke.

  “You prefer to be
called gypsies rather than travellers – is that right?” Marina assumed an earnest demeanour.

  “Depends on who you ask. I represent the gypsy community – but some call themselves gypsies when really they’re only travellers. It depends which family you’re talking about… there are some trouble-makers among the travellers but most true gypsies are honest, law-abiding folk like anyone else, struggling with discrimination and poor facilities, trying to live in peace with their families.”

  There was a shuffling of feet at this, but no comment. The minister’s wife thanked the man with a sweet smile.

  A portly, red-faced chap in a black dress and hat, who had introduced himself as Father Dermot O’Hanlon, incumbent of Our Lady of Sorrows Roman Catholic Church, leant forward.

  “Very good church members, the gypsy community,” he chipped in. “Very generous. The travellers too,” he added as an afterthought. “They’re all God’s children and they’re all welcome at our Lady of Sorrows.” Father Dermot was wary lest news of his interjection leaked out as far as the smaller, unauthorised sites that had sprung up on the green belt around the town. He was too old to tangle with a baseball bat.

  Much of the priest’s spare time was spent settling squabbles over who owed what to whom, which trailer was allowed on which site, and whose traveller son had tried to take advantage of whose gypsy sister or daughter. Outright internecine warfare was sometimes tricky to avert and he was quite familiar with the visiting hall at the local prison.

  Over the years, this had taken a heavy toll on Father O’Hanlon, who, it must be said, was no stranger to the bottle. A life of celibacy and drink had not contributed to Dermot’s happiness nor deepened his spirituality, but he stayed true to his vows and away from choirboys.

  He was happy to count the gypsies and travellers among his flock. Indeed, on the rare Sundays that they did actually travel, his congregation shrank to a mere handful of devotees. They had a true and generous faith in Dermot’s Lord, and without their contributions, Our Lady of Sorrows’ finances would have been in a pickle. Father O’Hanlon and local gypsy king Patrick Kevin McVeigh (known as Pakamac behind his back and Mr McVeigh to his face) had an effective pastoral relationship: the priest listened to Pakamac’s confessions and Mr McVeigh negotiated the terms of any atonement he was prepared to make.