[Brenda & Effie 01] - Never the Bride

by Paul Magrs

  Frank shook his head. ‘That village is your only world. You’re coming back with me. Tonight.’ He glanced from side to side, puzzled. ‘Where’s the girl? Where’s Susan?’

  Ted and Katherine exchanged a glance. ‘We don’t know,’ said Ted, truthfully. ‘She went out without permission.’

  ‘What kind of father are you? You can’t control any of them,’ Frank said, disgusted.

  ‘I don’t want to control my family,’ Ted said.

  Hurray for him, I thought.

  ‘That girl is necessary,’ said Frank. ‘Her name is down for the breeding programme. That girl,’ he laughed nastily, ‘is promised to me.’

  Katherine shrugged. ‘Well, she’s not here just now. There’s nothing we can do about that.’

  All this while Effie had been standing beside me. She nudged my arm, caught my attention, and raised her eyebrows in mute apology. Effie wasn’t proud or stupid. She knew when she was wrong. And now, suddenly, she had realised I’d been right all along, especially in protecting the Greens’ secrecy. This man chasing them was a nightmare.

  Now Effie was edging closer to the table. Her hands, trembling but sure of their purpose, were reaching out for the heavy tureen that held the last of the potatoes. She was standing behind Frank. He had let her out of his sights. Suddenly I knew what she was proposing to do.

  Just in time I darted forward.

  Effie had grasped the tureen and hurled it into the air, hoping to brain Frank. But her aim wasn’t so hot. Instantly on the alert, Frank twisted round, gun at the ready, and fired off a livid green laser charge. In my dining room! I flung myself in front of Effie and caught the beam full blast.

  I’ve been hit by worse. It knocked me down and gave me a raging headache for a few hours, but I’m a pretty tough old bird. Of course, it would have sizzled Effie on the spot.

  Ted took this as his cue: as soon as Frank fired his gun, he flung himself bodily at the man. They fell heavily to the floor, grappling and grunting. Effie, Katherine and Gerald surrounded them as they rolled around.

  I was phasing in and out of consciousness, still absorbing the green laser fire, feeling nauseous.

  Effie and the Greens soon had Frank flattened and exhausted, pinned to the carpet. Katherine’s hair was awry and her voice shrill, as she told him, ‘You’ll leave us alone. You won’t come after us any more. You’ll let us live our lives in peace.’

  Frank was bleeding from his nose and panting raggedly. He laughed up at her. ‘I’ll never let you go free. Why should I? What’s so special about you four? Why should you be allowed to leave the village? Why should the rest of us have to stay?’

  ‘We could all leave,’ Katherine suggested. ‘Why should any of us stay? What for?’

  ‘They will come back,’ Frank said, hushed, reverent, ‘one day. And we must be waiting for them.’

  ‘No,’ said Katherine, ‘they won’t. And - even if they did, what would they want with us? We’re human, Frank. Earthlings. We don’t belong to them. We never did.’

  Frank’s face twisted in confusion and hatred. ‘You will not be free - not ever. Even if you kill me now. The Elders will send others after you. You will be hunted down. You will come back in the end.’

  Later, Susan tried to explain what had made her return to my establishment when she did.

  ‘It was pure instinct,’ she said. ‘Intuition, I suppose. A hangover from when we were all of one mind. Back in the old days. But . . . I was just going round the little fairground, starting to enjoy myself, when I knew my family was in danger. I had to come back here immediately.

  ‘Oh, I thought of resisting the impulse - I was fed up with them. I was sick of being a fugitive, all smiles, pretending we were having a lovely holiday when actually we were as jumpy as hell. I was tempted to ignore the alarm bells that were ringing like mad inside me and just stay down at the fair . . . where the lights had come on, all lurid and gaudy now it was dark, and the cheap music was pumping out. And other teenagers were hanging around. Ordinary boys and girls, eyeing each other up, eating chips out of cartons, smoking fags and being dead cool. I wanted in. I wanted to belong to them. That was the world I wanted to live in.

  ‘I went swishing through the fair in my old-fashioned dress and I knew they were staring at me. I stood out a mile, even though I tried not to. All our family does. We’re conspicuous and out of step. I hugged my arms to me, hidden inside my cardigan, and tried to ignore the warnings in my head.

  ‘But how could I? I had to give in. They’re my flesh and blood. I know when they’re in danger. So I walked away from the fair and back through the town. The streets were thronging with locals and visitors, everyone coming out for a good time. I wove through the crowd. It was the first time I’d ever been out alone in the world. What an adventure! I felt so sophisticated, so grand.

  ‘And then I came here. To that disastrous scene. Everything was more or less as I knew I’d find it. You lot frozen in dramatic postures, stuck in some kind of impasse, with Frank on the floor, helpless yet still ranting, still making his threats.

  ‘He still had the power, and you all knew it. We would never be free of him. Through him, our hateful family was speaking - and will continue to speak. Through him we could hear the Old Man cursing us. Condemning us to a lifetime of waiting.

  ‘You all looked at me when I let myself into the dining room, quietly so as not to disturb you. Your heads whipped round. You weren’t expecting me to come back. Perhaps you thought - maybe you even hoped - that I’d already made good my escape. But no, I came back.

  ‘Frank looked up from the floor. Dirty old Uncle Frank, playing detective. He had the nerve to call me “dear” and “darling”. He welcomed me back into the fold. My beloved. My betrothed. Did he tell you that, Brenda? That I was promised to him? I was meant to breed with him.

  ‘And that was why I strangled him. Better that than bear his vile babies. Your faces! You were all so horrified, but what else could I do? I whipped off my cardigan. And that was a shock to you, too, wasn’t it, Brenda? To you and Effie, your friend. You’d been used to me covering my arms with my cardie. You weren’t expecting to see tentacles.

  ‘I made you all back away from Frank. I even told my dad what to do and he complied, which was a first. I must have looked very determined - or mad. Well, I was. And I was furious. I advanced on Frank, flexing my spectacular limbs.

  ‘We all watched the colour drain out of his face, didn’t we? That was a sight to see. It was revenge enough, really, to watch him realise I had no compunction, no fear. That I would do anything to protect my family.

  ‘Dear Brenda, I’m sorry for the bother, the upheaval. My parents are sorry, too. We’re sorry to leave you with the mess. Are you sure you don’t mind disposing of the body? You know, you’ve gone above and beyond the duties of a bed-and-breakfast lady this week. You have been a marvel. And so have you, Effie. I heard you had a real go with the tureen. Thank you, ladies, on behalf of my family.

  ‘But we can’t stick around here, I’m afraid. We really have to go.

  ‘Soon the people at home will realise Frank isn’t sending messages and they’ll know something’s wrong. Maybe they’ll send others after us. More determined, more deadly. I don’t know. But I do know that we can’t stay still. Not yet.

  ‘Where will we go? I don’t know.

  ‘Thank you, Brenda. Without you this would have been the end of our escape. We would be going back now to the village at the back of beyond. You’ve set us free on the world.’

  Susan Green said some of this at the time, as the family were preparing to leave. The parents were subdued - shell-shocked, almost. Susan had taken over: she was the responsible adult now. The rest came in the form of a letter, a few days later; the postmark was smudged, but we thought it read Scotland. That letter arrived at my house after Effie and I had disposed of Frank’s body, deep under my rockery, after everything had died down and I’d had a chance to clean my B-and-B once more, in preparation for
the next visitors.

  Chapter Three:

  Manifest Yourself!

  That night - the night before the TV people arrived on my doorstep and encouraged all hell to break loose - I dreamed that my husband came back to me. I still call him that, though we fell short of consummation. Sometimes when I pull my gorgeous silk and satin bedclothes over my head I get too hot and have the most lurid dreams. Of course he isn’t coming back to me: after all this time it simply isn’t possible. He has to be dead.

  Anyway, he would scarcely recognise me now.

  In my dream, he sailed back into my life across the sea from the extreme north. In Whitby it was the depths of a blue winter. He came frozen in the most beautifully clear iceberg, which had detached itself neatly - so neatly - from the mother berg somewhere in the Arctic. Prostrate, beseeching, suspended within, like Prometheus, he floated back to my shore, as if seeking me out.

  I found him on a shingle beach, washed up and melting slowly in the weak November sunshine. Just a man. A well-built man. He was nothing to fear, surely. He wasn’t the monster that everyone had made him out to be. At least, in my dream I didn’t think so. His skin wasn’t green. And his joints weren’t bolted. He was no kind of primitive creature. Although I had barely seen him before, had spent hardly any time in his company, I would have recognised him anywhere. We were meant for each other. Were made for each other.

  That was my dream.

  As I gave the place a last tidy, and prepared myself to allow new people - strangers - into my home, my mind was filled with thoughts of the husband I was meant to have. He was supposed to share eternity with me.

  Fat chance.

  Perhaps, even after all this time, he is still out there somewhere, testing his limits in the ice and tundra. That was the last place anyone saw him. He found it necessary to go everywhere and do everything. Explore the world. He wanted to - whatchacallit? - carpe diem: seize the day. Well, I never saw the point in that. ‘Live within your resources,’ I say. ‘I am an imperfect woman. The only woman on earth not made by God. He was an imperfect man. Don’t rock the boat.’

  I was born in the Orkneys.

  My father lived for a little while in a castle there. He was obsessed with his work. His successes drove him - it is fair to say that he was in the unshakeable grip of past success.

  I had no mother.

  What a terrible thing.

  I can remember the moment my eyes first opened. I had language immediately. I had the gift of tongues. I saw Herr Doktor looming above me and knew he was my father. Curiously, my organs and limbs felt natural and lived-in. I saw my husband grinning in at me through that high window and was ashamed of my nakedness.

  My father, Herr Doktor, balked at his creation. He saw that I was an abomination. I was nothing spectacular to look at, it’s true, but did I deserve what happened next? My father attempted to murder me, only minutes after he had completed delivering - that’s not the correct word. Only minutes after he had completed orchestrating me.

  Already mad, he left me for dead, to fend for myself, while he was pursued by demons of his own, actual or otherwise. My father and husband ran off to chase each other, leaving me to do what any woman has to do at one time or another. I picked myself up, pulled myself together and decided I would have to look after myself.

  I travelled through Scotland. I explored a little of this half-familiar, sometimes hostile world. It was a vagabond existence that I followed for many years, knowing that I didn’t belong to this race of men, women and children. Even the animals I encountered - and killed to eat - were more at home on this earth than I. I’ve never been one for fitting in.

  But I did try. I moved around. I tried to keep a low profile. I settled here and there, in villages and towns. I explored hills and valleys, set myself up in big cities. Sometimes I was hounded out. Folk would cotton on to my oddity, especially in the early years. Later I would discover how not to unnerve them. I didn’t want them chasing me into the night with blazing torches. I did moonlight flits, changed my disguise and started again somewhere else, far away.

  Decades passed and I realised I wasn’t growing any older. At least, not at the rate that humans do. My strength was unsapped; I was untouched by disease and decay. At first I revelled in my longevity. I marvelled at my unnaturalness. I lived a dozen lifetimes, one after another. I was a pauper, a princess and many things between. At one stage I loved pretending to be all the things I wasn’t. And I drew fascinated stares. I drew intrigue. I cloaked myself in mystery and found that adventure was my forte. I could tell you some tales about those years! They were my wilderness years and my glory years. Through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries . . . Well, I barely stopped.

  But even super-humans grow weary.

  I started to hanker for somewhere quiet, somewhere to rest my old bones and settle to ordinary, everyday tasks.

  I made my way here, towards the fresh air. Something like a siren voice called me. I knew this was the town for me.

  And at last I settled by the sea.

  Effie was carrying on as if nothing had happened. I was amazed. The woman has hidden depths, I’m sure. We had buried a man in my back garden, under cover of night and Effie was behaving as if nothing was out of the ordinary.

  I met her in the shop on Monday morning and we chatted with Leena, who asked after the nice little family staying with me. I told her they had gone, that they stayed a little longer than they had planned but now they were back on the road, destination unknown. Yes, they were pleasant, weren’t they? Effie was standing there with her basket of rolls, apples and porridge oats, nodding and agreeing over how nice the Greens had seemed, how quiet and ordinary. She didn’t nudge me with her bony elbow, or turn to raise an eyebrow ironically. Perhaps she wasn’t even lying awake at night, thinking about those tentacles, like glossy, deadly eels, coiling and tightening round Frank the detective’s throat. Perhaps she wasn’t thinking about Susan throttling him right in front of us on my Axminster carpet.

  So, a new week was starting. All of last week’s excitements were over. Like Effie, I was stocking up on a few essentials. That afternoon my new people were arriving.

  ‘Though really, they’re your people, aren’t they, Effie?’ I asked her. We dawdled out of the shop into the sharp, spangling sunlight.

  ‘My people?’ She frowned, doing her absent-minded act.

  ‘You invited them.’ I hadn’t asked her about this yet. There hadn’t been many quiet moments recently. ‘The cable-television people.’

  She looked genuinely surprised. ‘Oh, my Lord,’ she gasped. ‘I’ll never get a hair appointment in time. I shall have to dash round Rini’s. I’d completely forgotten about it, Brenda. When do they turn up? When does it all start?’

  She was gabbling, all in a flap. She went back to her house, still muttering to herself. It served her right, I thought. Fancy inviting people round to hunt ghosts and contact the dead in your home. Letting them film and broadcast all your business. It was asking for trouble. Effie was usually so careful about how she presented herself to the world. I had a feeling she had consented now to let chaos and randomness into her house. Well, it was all her own doing.

  I wasn’t certain yet whether I had quite forgiven her for all the goings-on of the past week. She had gossiped and speculated about me with Robert and Jessie in Cod Almighty. And there was the matter of her mistrust and what amounted to her betrayal of the Greens. She had come through in the end, of course, and done the right thing: she had put her life on the line to save them. At the last moment Effie had seen what a mistake she had made and attempted clumsily to redeem herself. But as yet I wasn’t fully mollified. She hadn’t liked the Greens at first, and had suspected them of all sorts of things. She hadn’t trusted my judgement that they were - are - good, decent people.

  The conclusion I drew was that Effie didn’t trust me, either. Not deep down. She thought that I, too, was shady, duplicitous, freakish.

  Effie has a small-town me
ntality.

  So, that Monday morning I didn’t leap into action - as I normally would - to offer to help tidy Effie’s place and get everything in readiness for the advent of the TV-show people.

  No. I had work of my own to do.

  They brought so much equipment with them that I was afraid there wouldn’t be room for it all in my little house. They weren’t even the technical people, with their cameras and lights - they were up at the Miramar, and they were already setting up their machinery, laying miles of cables, in Effie’s house next door.

  The stars of the show were staying with me. They had brought enough of their own paraphernalia with them, even without cameras. The presenter, Eunice, and her entourage dragged in case after case of outfits, makeup and hairstyling gear. I wondered, as I watched them, what all the glamour stuff had to do with ghost-hunting, but I didn’t say anything. I simply welcomed them, introduced them to the rules of my establishment and let them get on with it.

  Eunice had my best room. Rather, she took it. She was a tall blonde with huge, unnaturally shaped breasts and pumped-up lips, condescending - and nervous, I thought. She was followed in by her hairdresser, a plump girl called Lisa Turmoil, who was a bit more friendly. She joined me in the kitchen for a pot of spicy tea, while Eunice settled in upstairs.

  ‘Who is the third room for, then?’ I asked. Lisa was pursing her lips and examining my wig from where she sat at the breakfast bar. I was wearing the smartest, the one with the gorgeous streaks. I thought it very sophisticated.

  ‘Ah,’ she smiled, ‘that’s for Brian. He always arrives after the others, every location we go to. He’s the psychic and - besides the spirits - the real star of the show.’ She beamed at me. There was something immediately engaging about Lisa, I thought. She didn’t take any of this stuff, or herself, too seriously. ‘I could reshape that wig for you, if you liked. Give it a more contemporary feel.’