‘Though I think now that she might have been disoriented,’ Ralph had said in the witness box, ‘and maybe quite scared, in the dark with her dog all tied up like that, and I don’t think she meant to hurt me so badly.’ She had looked at the woman in the dock then, had felt real pity for her, and not a little shame. ‘So even though I’m going to have to live with my injuries for life, I’m prepared to try and forgive her.’
Miller’s word against Ralph’s. Ralph the injured, but generous party.
The cleaner was found guilty, her sentence suspended.
Ralph’s life had been altered forever, not just physically. She had committed perjury, had irrevocably committed herself to the group. Had almost certainly lost any remaining chance of having her own children – her injuries aside, no bloke would want her even if she was interested in him, which she wouldn’t be.
Only one chance of motherhood, really, once upon a time, created and wiped out by her father.
Her own poor mother still alive then.
‘If you tell her, it’ll kill her,’ he had said.
So she had kept silent about what he was doing to her.
And then she had kept silent, too, about the baby he’d slipped into her.
Then had taken out of her.
‘If you have it, it’ll kill her.’
Only then her mother had died anyway, of her embolism.
He had stopped after that, but too late for her.
And no more chances after Miller, just these children.
She was nothing without them.
Linked to them, then, for life.
She had continued, as the years passed, Challow Hall receding further into her past, to maintain the journal, recording the children’s progress and her responses.
Not children any more.
Roger – based in Reading – has become the actress we predicted, doing well in radio plays and voice-overs, though she hasn’t broken into telly. She says she prefers radio and likes having time for her other work as an official prison visitor. She receives no payment for this, but listens to these people’s troubles and provides a kind of friendship, and I feel very proud of her – even if she does claim there’s a prurient element to her good deeds, has told me she experiences a sexual thrill when the prison gates shut and she’s free to walk through those dreadful places. Though nothing, she tells me, compares with the thrill of the games we still play.
Simon is a teaching assistant at an Oxford primary school, which suits her sweet, soft nature. She has an urge to make a difference – like me, she said once, which made me so proud – but is still burdened by bouts of depression. Like Roger and Pig, Simon remains single. She confided in me long ago that Roger told her Pig was in love with her, which makes our girl extra gentle with Pig to make up for the fact that she can’t reciprocate. I believe she is afraid of intimate involvement – most of all terrified of pregnancy, in case she is a bad mother. I find this deeply sad. I think Simon would make a wonderful mother.
Pig is a BT engineer in Swindon, and doing very well at it, though nothing much eases his abiding sense of inferiority, which is one reason, I believe, for his refusal to attempt to contact his sister. Better off without him, I once heard Pig say. It made me sad for him too. It’s true that he is in love with Simon, and perfectly aware that she does not feel the same. Of all of them, I believe that if Pig had the good fortune to meet a nice woman and allow himself a good relationship, he could transform his life. But only by leaving the rest of us behind. Which will not happen in the foreseeable future, since he needs the group as much as ever.
Jack is, in a way, the most straightforward. Living in Newbury, married with two children, kind to the boy and girl but awful, he says (even cruel, I suspect) to his poor wife. He makes a good living as a burglar, spends much of his profit at the bookies. No hint of shame in Jack, no obvious complex behind his decision to make stealing his career. He feels superior to those who work for their living, appears to have no conscience about it. If they’re stupid enough to make it easy for him to enter their homes, he says, that’s their lookout. He claims he could turn his back on the group any time he chose. I don’t believe that. I think he likes being needed by the others as their hard man.
I need them all. I accepted that a long time ago. Analysing my relationship with them has never been easy for me; my feelings for Jack are perhaps the hardest to try to reconcile with what I used to hope was my fundamental decency. He is the closest to bad of them, yet we all love him. I certainly do.
No doubt about one thing now. If Jack is bad, I am worse.
Her life remained full enough, despite Rose Miller. Ralph had always found ways and means to earn money, had even tried her hand at telephone counselling, thought she had helped a handful of people; but even after all those years, the highest points in her life came through her continuing leadership of the group.
The games, as they had evolved, appalled and thrilled her in equal measure. They occurred infrequently now, their magnetism all the more powerful for that.
What had begun in innocence – Ralph still believed that to be true – had long since transmuted into wickedness.
For which she, of all of them, was most definitely responsible.
If she were ever to have confided in a counsellor or therapist, Ralph knew that they would have told her to stop.
The truth was, that if anyone was to try to cut her off from her children now, Ralph thought that she might want to kill them.
Kate
Back on the road again, Kate felt a little more content than she had before the accident, on better terms, at least, with her father, if no one else.
She was glad, all things considered, that she’d suppressed her urge to speak to Rob, felt it was wiser, certainly less selfish, not to interrupt his time with Emmie. Much better to drink in the solitary pleasures of Caisleán and rest up, maybe write a really decent Short-Fuse for the first time in some weeks, then head back early Monday more equipped to mend fences with Rob, Bel and Fireman.
A creature – perhaps a fox, though it was too inky dark to be sure – ran across the road ahead of her, forcing Kate to slam on the brakes, and she managed to miss it and was thankful of that, but the new small shock had set her heart pounding again, her eyes darting to the rear-view mirror, relieved to see only blackness behind her, unable to face another pile-up.
Arrival and a large glass of red could not come soon enough.
The Game
Over the last several years, the four had each brought one Beast to their new, more daring arena. Their aim now, where possible, was to have their target held responsible for some misdeed of the group’s own making, though they had come to realize that getting their victims actually prosecuted was seldom going to be as successful as it had been in the case of Rose Miller.
‘That’s just the nature of the game,’ Simon had said at one of their meetings. ‘There’s only so much we can do.’
They had come together on that occasion in the Boathouse in Wallingford. The pubs they tended to choose these days woefully lacked the mystique of the Smithy, but were more practical in every other way. Sometimes they booked a room, other times they sat outside and, if they were out of earshot – and on that particular chilly November afternoon they had been entirely alone at their table near the river – they placed a mobile phone on the table and spoke to Ralph via its speaker.
‘You don’t mind them not getting done,’ Jack told Simon, ‘cos you’re a wimp.’
‘Sy’s just nicer than the rest of us,’ Pig had defended her.
‘Kiss-arse,’ Jack had scoffed, fondly.
Between game plan meetings they lived in separate worlds, not communicating with each other, but if one of them uncovered a Beast, they contacted Ralph to consult her about their possible candidate for a new game, making her feel fully alive again because they still needed her to take charge. She listened, conducted her own research, considered, then summoned them all to a meeting.
She
seldom attended now in person, Rose Miller having put paid to so much for her, but she arranged the location and chaired the meetings via a telephone connection.
Still the Chief.
‘We could not –’ they had all told her – ‘do it without you.’
Special dispensation, splendid isolation.
Loneliness.
She told them, once, how much she missed seeing them.
‘You love us,’ Jack said, ‘cos we’re a bunch of fucked-up weirdos.’
‘Can’t argue with that,’ she said, and smiled.
She had tried to instil in them her belief in simplicity and minimal risk-taking, though the two adventurers of the group, Jack and Roger, sometimes objected when she turned down their more ambitious projects.
‘Simple means safe,’ Ralph told them once, after an argument. ‘That way we get to keep on playing.’
She knew, even as she said it, that it would not always stay that way.
That it had never, in truth, been either simple or safe.
When, almost three years ago, Pig had telephoned her about a new Beast, Ralph had heard a level of distress and anger in his voice that she had never detected before. His parents had both been out of prison for some years, and Pig had learned that they had remained apart, but neither had tried to contact their son. Recently though, he had received a phone call from his mother’s neighbour, a woman named June Norton, informing him that his mother was seriously ill and wanted to see him.
‘No,’ Pig had said. ‘I don’t think so.’
‘But she’s dying,’ the woman had told Pig. ‘She really needs you.’
It had taken considerable strength of will to go through with the visit, his motives for agreeing to go unclear in his own mind. Pig knew it was not for his mother’s sake – he felt nothing but loathing for the woman who had so badly abused him and his baby sister – but he wondered if his visit was simply for closure, or if, perhaps, he wanted to see his mother suffer.
He had driven from Swindon on a Saturday afternoon to the address in Wokingham, had walked rather shakily into a drab flat off the high road and been let in by June Norton, a large bosomed, middle-aged, cloyingly perfumed blonde.
‘She’s through here,’ Norton said, showing him into the dimly lit bedroom in which his mother lay.
The room smelt rancid. Of illness, or perhaps dying, blended with the other woman’s perfume.
Pig felt sick.
His mother was so shrunken that she was unrecognizable.
‘How are you?’ he asked at last, feeling obliged to speak.
‘Finished,’ she said.
He compelled himself to look into her emaciated face and still found no point of recognition, not even in the fading eyes which once had glinted brightly enough to inspire terror in her small son. The hands that had slapped and punched him and his baby sister, that had stubbed out her Silk Cut cigarettes on his thighs, were withered and bruised-looking, fingering an unclean sheet.
‘I’m glad to see you at last,’ she said.
‘Are you?’ said Pig, with irony.
The visit had been mercifully brief. At no point had Pig’s mother told him that she was sorry for the past, nor had she asked him for forgiveness, as he had expected she might. June Norton had not offered him tea, had appeared reluctant to leave them alone, standing vigil in the doorway as if she thought either that Pig might try to escape, or that the ailing woman needed protection from him.
‘My life has been very hard,’ his mother had said, in a voice that was weak and as unfamiliar as the rest of her. ‘I wanted to see you before I died, to know that you’re all right.’
‘I am,’ Pig had told her. ‘All things considered.’
‘Do you want to ask me anything?’ his mother asked.
‘No, thank you,’ Pig had answered.
There was no point asking her what had made her so wicked, or what two little children had done to merit such evil from both their parents.
‘Not even about your dad?’ she said.
‘Is he still alive?’ Pig asked.
‘Far as I know,’ she said.
Pity, he thought, but did not lower himself to say it.
When the moment came for him to leave, she startled him by holding out both her spindly arms as if she wanted to embrace him, and Pig took a step back, knowing he could not bear to be touched by her.
‘I’ll see you out.’ June Norton’s lips were taut with disapproval.
‘Thank you,’ Pig said, almost inarticulate with his longing to be gone.
She opened the door, and he stepped quickly over the threshold.
‘I don’t know –’ she followed him out on to the landing, speaking quietly – ‘how you could be so cruel.’
Pig turned around, shaken, saw accusation in hard blue eyes.
‘To refuse to kiss her,’ the woman said.
‘You know nothing,’ Pig said softly.
‘She’s your mother,’ June Norton said. ‘And she’s dying.’
As if her death, or even the misery of her life, were Pig’s fault.
‘You should be ashamed,’ she said.
And then she had gathered saliva in her mouth and spat on him.
‘I just can’t seem to get over that,’ he had told Ralph after he’d phoned her to nominate June Norton as his Beast. ‘Or to forgive it.’
‘No wonder.’ Ralph had wished she was with him, could hold him.
‘I know it wasn’t her who did those things to me and my sister, but I mean –’ Pig’s voice had trembled – ‘spitting on me like that.’
There was no question, Ralph had said, that Norton qualified more than most as a target, and had summoned the others to a meeting.
‘I’d like to bash the bitch,’ Jack had said.
Ralph said no.
‘Why not?’ Jack asked. ‘Bashing is simple.’
‘Things go wrong when there’s blood,’ Ralph had said.
They had all remembered her falling against the tree on Bartlet Down, and had given way to her greater wisdom.
Norton, Ralph had learned, worked for an insurance company in Bracknell, which was pleasing in itself, Ralph decided, since it seemed more likely that if their plan worked, Mrs Norton would at least lose her job.
She placed Jack in charge of surveillance, and having observed her shopping habits for a fortnight, he’d followed Norton one day during her lunch break to a small chemist’s shop with no CCTV, but with an alarm system and a sign in the window declaring: ALL SHOPLIFTERS WILL BE PROSECUTED.
It was the simplest, most basic of strategies. While Simon – her appearance subtly disguised, like the others, in case of witnesses or hidden cameras – occupied the sales assistant and pharmacist with questions about the side effects of a pain relief tablet, Roger attracted the Beast’s attention for long enough to allow Jack to steal some lavender toilet water – its package tagged with an alarm activator – and slip it into her shopping bag.
Moments later, out in the street, they’d all watched as Norton passed through the detectors at the exit, setting off the alarm, and seconds later, the sales assistant and pharmacist had rushed out and nabbed her.
‘This is outrageous,’ Simon heard Norton protest as the toilet water was retrieved from her bag. ‘I don’t even use that rubbish.’
She’d gone on to object violently as they’d escorted her back inside, had even kicked at the pharmacist’s legs, adding a possible assault charge, the group had decided hopefully, though they’d all realized that a halfway decent brief might get her off, if charges were actually brought.
They’d hung around until the police had arrived.
‘Better than a poke in the eye,’ Pig had said afterwards.
‘I don’t think so,’ said Jack.
Roger had brought them the next candidate: a male officer at Hurstpark, a women’s prison in Gloucestershire that was on her voluntary visiting list – a man with a reputation among inmates for cruelty to pregnant prisoners.
‘This isn’t personal, like Pig’s bitch,’ she’d said, proposing the screw to Ralph. ‘But he seems to be what the game’s supposed to be about these days, don’t you agree?’
Ralph had. They all had.
Given his expert skills, Jack could probably have carried out their plan for the prison officer single-handed, but having them all involved, whenever possible, had always been part of the game. So one evening while the new Beast and his wife were out at their local in Dursley, Pig had cut off the phones at the screw’s house and at his next-door-neighbour’s, before Roger (wearing a cropped wig and blue contacts) had rung the neighbour’s front door bell.
I’m from the Dursley Residents’ Association,’ she began. ‘We’re getting up a petition because of this plan to buy up houses in your road for a drug rehab centre.’
‘You’re joking,’ the other woman said.
‘I wish,’ Roger said.
Which conversation kept them both occupied while Simon sat in her car outside, keeping watch and ready to act as getaway driver, and Jack entered the back of the house, removing a VCR, Play Station and silver framed photograph, before departing again, leaving no trace of his entry or exit.
Right after which he’d gone, smooth as silk, into the screw’s house and planted the stolen items in his upstairs spare room. Pig had reconnected the phones soon after, and next morning Roger had made an anonymous call to the victim of the burglary to tip her off about her tea-leaf screw neighbour.
Still simple.
Still bloodless.
Laurie
‘I’m going to bed,’ Laurie had told her parents an hour ago. She had reminded them that she would be leaving early, had wished them luck with the clearing up, said she’d be back as soon as she could manage tomorrow evening and would help all she could then.
‘After the worst is over,’ her father had said.
Her mother had said nothing at all.
Laurie knew she probably wouldn’t sleep. Excitement did that to her every time, and the only reason it mattered was because she wanted to be feeling bright and energetic in order to give her son the best possible day out.
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