“How do you bloody well know?” he snarled, making her back away. “Did you mark my question on the Doppler effect? Do you even know what the Doppler effect is?”
Of course she did not, so she went up to her hot attic room and prayed for him. “Please, God, let John go to Oxford. It doesn’t matter what happens to me. You can make me a cripple if you like; I really don’t mind. In fact, I would probably get fussed over more if I was in a wheelchair.” Then she regretted thinking the last bit, as it made her becoming a cripple not so much of a sacrifice.
She prayed each day until his results came. When John won his place at Oxford all four of them were, for once, united in celebration. Dad took them out to dinner at Axendale Golf Club. They ate beef Wellington washed down with real champagne. During the meal they made bets about where John’s brilliant future might take him. No one dared suggest he take over the family business. As a verified intellectual, he couldn’t be expected to concern himself with things so mundane as nylon mesh, rayon, and twill. Mother decided John would become a politician, maybe chancellor of the exchequer, because he was good with numbers. Dad disagreed, politicians were a bunch of crooks and liars, he should become a scientist and make some great discovery.
“Find a cure for the common cold, that’s what people want, or, better still, for baldness,” announced Dad, picking beef Wellington out of his teeth with a toothpick, then pointing it at his audience for emphasis. “I’d invest money in a scheme like that.”
Marion hoped whatever he did, her brother would become famous. She saw him traveling all over the world meeting presidents and kings of exotic lands. People would write books about him and perhaps even ask her what it was like to be the sister of a great man. One day he would be knighted by the queen. Sir John Zetland. No one ever suggested what Marion might become, her future was of no importance whatsoever, but she was more than happy to let her brother have the limelight.
Marion drank two full glasses of champagne during the dinner; then, as they were about to leave, she felt horribly sick. She clasped her hands to her mouth, but a small amount of yellowy broth slipped through her fingers and dripped onto the regal-red carpet of the clubhouse foyer.
While she emptied the remaining contents of her treacherous stomach in the ladies’ toilets, Mother stood guard outside the door.
“You had to ruin his day, didn’t you?” she muttered. This seemed to be addressed not to Marion, but herself, as if in fact she were at fault by giving birth to a daughter who would eventually grow up to spoil a superior child’s success by vomiting.
• • •
JUST BEFORE THE beginning of his first term at Oxford, John took his sister to the Dish of the Day on the promenade. It was rare for John to take her out for a treat like this, and as they walked into the café together and asked for a table, Marion felt tipsy with happiness.
The waitress came to take their order. John knew right away that he wanted steak pudding, chips, gravy, and peas, but Marion couldn’t decide between fish and chips or chicken in the basket; she liked both yet it was vital to choose the perfect meal to accompany the precious time she was spending with her brother.
“Marion, just decide what you want, or you get nothing,” said John, snatching the large plastic menu from her hand.
“Scampi,” said Marion.
As the waitress walked away, Marion almost cried out that she had changed her mind, she wanted the chicken instead, but if she did, John would get mad at her. How perfect chicken in the basket would have been, so golden and tasty nestled in its sweet little wicker basket. Why had she said scampi? She hated scampi, those nasty chewy fishy things. The funny little word had just jumped out of her mouth like a frog before she could stop it. Then her spirits crumbled entirely when John got out a book from his jacket pocket. On the cover was printed a title that Marion didn’t know how to pronounce and a picture of a man standing on top of a mountain. She would have swapped any meal for him to pay her just a little bit of attention. Didn’t he know how much it would mean for him to talk to her instead of reading?
You should be satisfied a brilliant person like your brother has been nice enough to waste his time taking a dummy like you out to lunch, said Mother’s voice in her head. So she made do with sitting there, looking around the café, trying to enjoy just being out and in his company.
Even though it was a warm day, her brother was wearing a tweed jacket and his brand-new college scarf. Marion thought he looked very much like an Oxford student already. Perhaps when he was living in college, he would invite her to stay with him from time to time. She might even be introduced to some of his brilliant friends. Marion imagined him having a friend called something like Toby or Peter. He would have thick blond hair swept to one side and speak with an upper-class accent like Anthony Andrews, the star of Brideshead Revisited, her favorite television show. He would wear those beige slacks with a nice blue shirt open at the collar or navy blazer for more formal occasions.
She imagined meeting Toby/Peter for the first time in John’s rooms. They would be in some old stone building overlooking one of those courtyards with funny names. Quadrangles; that was what they were called. Everyone would be drinking sherry, she might be sat in a window seat, perhaps John had forgotten to introduce her to his friends because John could be forgetful like that sometimes, and Toby/Peter would ask who she was. “That’s just Marion, my silly little sister,” John would say.
But Toby/Peter would be intrigued by the thoughtful way she looked out at the quadrangle and the “mysterious air” that Marion felt sure she had become expert at assuming. He would ask her out to go punting followed by a picnic. She would be his partner at the end-of-term college ball, then one day John would be best man at their wedding.
Her daydream was interrupted by the waitress bringing their order. With a glistening plate of gravy-covered food before him, John put his book down on the Formica tabletop.
“Freederick Neetchee. Is it any good?” said the waitress, twisting her neck to read the title of the book.
“Nietzsche says that God is dead, and it’s okay to murder people if you feel like it,” John said, shaking the vinegar bottle vigorously over his chips.
“I like Harold Robbins myself,” said the waitress, then drifted away to serve another table.
Marion cut into a piece of scampi. The yellow crust fell away, leaving a slimy gray thing, like a blind eyeball, staring up at her from the plate.
“What do you mean by that, John? That it’s all right to murder people?” asked Marion.
“This bloke Nietzsche says that there isn’t a god, so there aren’t any rules about morality and stuff, you have to make them up for yourself, and then you become like superman.”
He took a slurp of Coke up through his blue-and-white-striped straw and followed it with a burp.
After their meal, John wanted to see the Museum of Wax. When Marion visited it with Aunt Agnes, she felt the waxworks were staring at her and became convinced they moved around when no one was looking. But she didn’t tell John she thought the place was creepy; the important thing was that they were spending time together. At the entrance of the museum was a wizened little old man in a red gilt-trimmed uniform, who Marion thought looked like one of those toy monkeys that play the cymbals. When John paid the money, the monkey man put his cigarette behind his ear to count out the change.
They went inside and came face-to-face with the queen and Prince Philip, both looking outraged to find themselves in the lobby of such a scruffy museum with its flyblown chandelier and threadbare red carpet. Next to the royals were the prime minister and someone who John said was the American president from twenty years ago. On the other side of the room stood the Beatles, Mick Jagger, and an Elvis who appeared to be screaming in pain.
The next room contained scenes from history, including the first man on the moon and the death of Nelson. The one after that had scenes from famous films, Marilyn Monroe getting her skirt blown in the air and a bald King Kong,
whose fur had been almost completely devoured by hordes of hungry moths.
Marion and John were the only visitors that day in the Museum of Wax. Perhaps because no one else was there, John started fooling around in a way that was out of character. He stuck his head right up Marilyn’s skirt and then swapped Churchill’s cigar for a piece of the rock they had bought on the pier. Though she was happy that he was having a good time, this behavior made Marion nervous, and she wished he would stop before someone came in and caught him messing about.
At the end of the tour they came to a curtained doorway. Above it was a sign that said Dungeon of Fear, the letters written as if they were carved into stone. Just the thought of what might lie behind that thin green curtain made her shudder.
“Come on, Mar, let’s have a look in there,” said John.
“It says you have to be eighteen or over, John, and I’m only seventeen. We’ll get in trouble.”
“Oh, don’t be such a baby.”
He grabbed her hand in his; though well cushioned with flesh, his grip was as powerful as a strongman’s, and she had no choice but to let herself be pulled through the curtain. Inside the Dungeon of Fear there was a smell of pine disinfectant that didn’t quite hide the gloomy stench of drains. It was much colder than the rest of the museum. The lights were a dim greenish color, and the creepy singing of ancient monks echoed around the bare brick walls.
They stopped next to a stark-naked woman with red lips and long black nylon hair. She was tied to a stake that stood in the middle of glowing embers; ribbons of yellow and orange celluloid covered her pubic hair and bottom. The sound of crackling flames and screams played from a speaker.
Marion studied the sign in front of the display:
Witchcraft was common in 16th- and 17th-century Europe. Disciples, most often women, would celebrate the “Witches’ Sabbath” in order to worship the devil and gain demonic powers that could be used against their enemies. Since the Catholic Church had deemed the use of witchcraft heretical, around 200,000 witches were tried, tortured, and burnt at the stake. According to folklore, once a pact was made with Satan a mark would appear on the witch’s skin; if you look carefully you can see that the witch in our display has a mark above her right breast.
Marion saw the red claw mark on her chest; around it the “skin” had been applied in crude greenish-pink strokes, and little bubbles had formed beneath the paint so it looked like she had goose bumps.
John pointed at the witch.
“What do you think of those tits, Marion?”
“It’s horrible, John, I don’t like this,” Marion said, putting her hands over her eyes.
John sniggered. Marion almost wanted to cry when she realized part of his enjoyment was coming from the fact that she hated this place.
“The nips look like a pair of dried figs,” he said, and then he grabbed her arm and pulled her along to the next display. A murder victim was lying on the cobbles of a Victorian alley, guts spilled out like tinned spaghetti, while a caped man stood over her, wielding a knife.
Marion read the display:
Jack the Ripper was a serial killer active in London in 1888. Murders attributed to Jack the Ripper involved prostitutes who lived and worked in the slums of Whitechapel. The women’s throats were cut prior to evisceration and the skill evident in these crimes gave rise to the theory that the killer was a doctor.
Next they came to a man with a mustache standing over a woman lying in a bathtub. The woman’s head was completely submerged. Flowing brown hair veiled her face and her long pale legs stretched straight out of the water, feet resting on the edge of the tub.
George Joseph Smith murdered his three “brides” between 1912 and 1914. Bessie Williams, Alice Burnham, and Margaret Elizabeth Lofty were all found dead in the bath.
The final display was called the Prisoners in the Cellar. At the end of the dungeon there was an area surrounded by bare brick walls. Three women, dirty and emaciated, were lying on filthy mattresses, their arms and legs chained to the wall. This part of the museum was even gloomier than the rest, and Marion had to squint to read the description:
In the 1960s a German man called Otto Benz snatched three young girls off the streets of Hamburg, then kept them prisoner in his cellar for ten years. His wife, who lived with him in the house above, claimed to have no knowledge of the women. The bodies of the three victims were only discovered by a building worker years after Benz died from liver cancer; it was presumed they succumbed to starvation after their kidnapper was hospitalized.
Looking at the display, John’s face got shiny and red like when dad let him drink a bottle of brown ale.
The smell, the strange lighting, and the sight of those poor girls chained to the cellar wall, their sticklike bodies, rotten teeth, and thin straggling hair made Marion feel woozy. She tried to turn away from the scene, but John held on to her arms from behind, forcing her to look.
“I want to go, John, I don’t like it in here,” she said.
“Don’t be such a bloody wimp, Mar. They’re not real, they’re only wax models.”
“But, John, it’s horrible.”
Suddenly everything before her eyes went cloudy-white as if the room had filled with smoke. As she slumped against John’s body she felt something hard brush against her buttocks and lower back. It was as if some swollen, sluggy parasite had attached itself to her brother and was now attempting to attack her.
When she came to, she was sitting on a stool by the entrance with the attendant standing over her. He was wound up to the limit of his clockwork fury, yammering on at John for taking her into the exhibit. “She must have had a nervous fit. That’s what it can do to you. There’s a reason it says eighteen or over—you two are lucky I don’t call the police.”
“What if he tells Dad?” Marion had asked as they walked home down Northport High Street.
“Don’t be daft,” he growled at her, “the old bugger won’t tell, he would get in shit for letting us sneak in.”
Marion was mortified with herself for fainting. Now she was sure John would never invite her to visit him in Oxford, and she wouldn’t be going to any balls with Toby/Peter. John spent the next few weeks shut up in his room, even eating his meals there. Mother said he must be preparing for university, studying hard so he would have a head start on the other students, but Marion knew the real reason. It was because of what had happened at the wax museum. He had revealed some hidden part of himself to her, and now he felt angry and ashamed.
A WARNING
Thursday afternoon at 2 p.m. Marion turned on the TV, straight after the advert for Safemore’s Stairlifts. Gentle piano notes played over the image of Brendan O’Brian, dark haired and handsome, leaving a white cottage and walking through woodland by the banks of a stream and finally arriving at a cliff top. The camera closed in on Brendan’s face as he gazed at the sunset, jaw tilted upwards, eyes filled with love and compassion. Then the title in green-and-gold Celtic lettering appeared on the screen: Beyond with Brendan O’Brian.
Brendan appeared in his pastel-decorated studio before his rapt audience of mostly middle-aged or elderly women, his hand pressed to his forehead, waiting for the first communication “from beyond.”
Suddenly he opened his eyes and inquired in his charming Irish brogue if anyone knew a J, someone whose name began with J, he was unsure if this was the first or last name? A forest of hands went up. The J left too soon, apparently, leaving a whole heap of money troubles behind. A lady in a blush-colored blouse waved her arm furiously, it seemed she knew precisely such a J. Brendan moved closer and placed a hand on her shoulder.
Holding the microphone near the woman’s grief-stained face, Brendan asked: “Was it James? No, then Jack?” The woman shook her head and whispered, “Jerry.” Jerry, Jerry, of course, repeated Brendan. Jerry wanted her to know that he was awfully sorry for all the trouble she had had over the will, but he was doing fine, his psoriasis had cleared up almost completely on the other side, and he h
ad just passed his pilot’s licence.
The woman’s eyes brightened.
“Yes, Jerry did have psoriasis—he had suffered from it since he was a boy, and I remember once when we were sitting in an airport together he remarked how impressive one of the pilots looked, leading his crew across the concourse in his smart uniform—”
“Well, my dear, you will be happy to know that his greatest ambition has been fulfilled,” said Brendan triumphantly while the audience clapped.
“I’m leaving his love with you.” Then Brendan made a gesture as if he were handing the woman an invisible present.
It struck Marion as a little odd that pilots would even be required “on the other side,” but it was uplifting to see the poor woman’s grief eased by Brendan’s message.
Then Brendan asked if anyone knew a K who liked to dance the foxtrot. One of the few men in the audience, a bald chap with a chubby face, put up his hand.
“Yes, that will be my sister Karen.”
Brendan took his hand from his forehead and made a gesture as if throwing an invisible ball at the man.
A flutter of admiring “ooh”s went around the studio.
“When did she pass, sir?” asked Brendan.
“A year ago. She was knocked over by a drunk driver. Only thirty-one.”
A collective gasp of empathy came from the audience.
“Karen has something to say to you.” Then Brendan closed his eyes and once again pressed his hand to his forehead. His face scrunched up as if he was concentrating on something hard.
“She says keep practicing the cricket with young Thomas. One day he’ll play for England.”
The man nodded in recognition and the audience clapped.
“And something else: Have you been having a bit of trouble with your tummy, sir?”
After glancing around self-consciously, the man nodded.
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