by Kim Newman
You and Laraine sink into sofas.
‘What happened to us?’ you ask.
Laraine is jittery, afraid to speak.
‘It’s not just James, is it? There’s something else. For both of us.’
Laraine puts her mug down on a glass slab supported by three black spheres, a coffee table disguised as an alien artefact. It leaves a ring. She moves the mug on the latest Vogue and rubs the ring with her sleeve, then tuts over the wrinkled circle eaten into the pouting face on the magazine cover.
You see she is crying.
‘Do you remember …’ she begins.
‘Yes?
‘Do you remember Dad ever hitting Mum?’
The question comes out of nowhere. There were frequent nagging arguments between your parents, some stretching over years, but no blazing rows. You know James’s sudden violence came from somewhere, but think that was your fault not your parents’.
‘I shouldn’t have said anything,’ Laraine says.
You riffle through your whole memory of Mum and Dad. Were there clues? Did you miss something vital, an unseen explosion? Have you been so wrapped up in yourself that you’ve failed to pay attention to the rest of your family, to the rest of the world?
‘Only, they say women marry their dads. And Sean is Dad’s successor at the bank.’
Laraine is talking about her own marriage.
‘Sean hits you?’
‘Not often. And not hard. Only when I’ve been bad.’
‘“Been bad?” Larry, you’re not ten years old. How can you “be bad”?’
‘Little things. Distracting him. He’s under a lot of pressure.’
‘He hits you.’
She nods.
‘The bastard, I’ll …’
‘No, don’t. Keith, I shouldn’t have said anything.’ Now, she’s afraid.
‘You have to leave.’
‘It’s not like that. Really, it’s not.’
For once, you wish Clare were here. She’d have Laraine in a shelter for battered women within an hour, bring a civil prosecution against Sean before sunset, have him castrated by a gang of biker diesel dikes by the end of the week. And hum ‘Super Trooper’ all the while.
‘Larry, there are rules. Hitting women is against them. If a man does that, he loses all rights. He doesn’t have to be considered.’
‘You see everything as simple, Keith.’
‘This is simple. Unless it’s stopped, it gets worse.’
You take Laraine in your arms and hold her. She is racked with sobs, soaking your collar with tears. You smell her shampoo — still the same? — and hug her tight. As she cries, you stroke up and down her back. You kiss her temple. The smell gets in your nose. The clean smell.
You feel a flicker of desire: shameful, embarrassing, noticeable. Laraine pushes you back but not away. She looks into your eyes. She has stopped crying.
This is serious.
If you kiss your sister on the mouth, go to 101. If you break the embrace and stand up, go to 115.
79
‘Ro, I know how you must feel. I just want you to know that I’m sorry. I acted like a bastard. I …’
You don’t finish your prepared speech.
Ro stares at you, open-mouthed.
You try to hug her.
Go to 86.
80
Friday, 13, February 1998. You get home first, just after six. It’s already dark but you’ve resisted turning on the headlamps during the short drive from town. It’s unlikely you’d ever run into anyone on the Sutton Mallet turn-off. You drive into the former barn that serves as a garage and park neatly in your space. You get out and feel a slight tingle. It’s not the cold, it’s the night. Your Fiat clicks as you activate the central locking.
You stand in the garage. Rusted ploughs are fixed to the walls and the place still smells of hay. Though the farmhouse you live in has been converted, you try to preserve the feel of its former function. To you, this is a working environment, not only because you grow your own vegetables and make your own wine. You look up at the low ceiling you had installed in the barn soon after you moved in, making an above-garage work-room you call the Batcave.
Up there, everything is perfectly ordered, each tool in its place, any questionable products stashed out of sight. For your projects, you often need quite esoteric materials. Two padlocks fasten the trapdoor. You and Mary have keys, kept about you at all times. To get into the Batcave, you must each open a lock. Your marriage is about mutual consent, co-operation, agreement.
You can get to the house from the garage, through the kitchen door. But you like the ceremony of going round to your front door and opening up. In your pocket, you have keys for the house, keys for the car, keys for the Batcave, keys for the bank, keys for the locked cabinets in the house and the Batcave, a key for the bank vault (Tristram, the deputy manager, has the other). You don’t need to look to know which is which. You can tell by the feel. The front-door key is the biggest, heaviest, longest. Old, cold metal.
There are four homes in Sutton Mallet now, all converted farmhouses. Two are owned by people who live in London and only appear at the weekends. One of those has been neglected for nine months, since its owner suffered a reversal and has had to put it on the block to finance a desperate stock deal. No takers at the moment.
You don’t have much use for people who think of the world in terms of money and what it can buy. You see them coming into the bank, always hoping to get ahead with what they haven’t got. You and Mary know there are more important ways of keeping the score. Ways that matter.
The bank is behind you, as sealed off in your mind as its locked vault. When you left your office at five-thirty, you repressed all details of any business you were working on. At nine-thirty on Monday morning, it will all be in your mind, clear and ready.
The weekend is sacred. For personal projects.
You strip off your suit as you go upstairs, remembering the long-gone objects — plastic comb, picture frame, toothbrush — once placed on each step. It is a game between you and your wife. Sometimes, when each thinks the other is off guard, you quiz each other. Neither has ever caught the other out.
In the recently-fitted master bathroom, you take a shower. Outside, it’s crisply cold. You let hot water pour on to your chest, down your legs, into your eyes. You lobster yourself, scalding away your weekday skin.
While you’re showering, Mary comes home. She comes into the bathroom, having collected your clothes, and disassembles her uniform with precise movements as if stripping and cleaning a gun. When the blue shell of WPC Yatman — she keeps her maiden name in the week — is hung up on its frame, she undoes her hair and combs it out.
You finish your shower and towel yourself.
‘You look like a fire hydrant,’ she comments.
You smile. She has said that before.
‘I was out at the travellers’ site today,’ she says.
Like you, Mary normally lets her weekday work lie inactive at the weekend. But the travellers are weekend work too. Maybe more so than week work. They are your current project.
‘Canning has lodged a fresh battery of complaints. Hygiene, mostly. And noise nuisance. Oh, and drugs. It’s always drugs.’
You take this on board.
You’ve been following the story. The district council, forced by law to make provision for travellers, has sited a small number of them in a field near Achelzoy. The travellers’ spokesperson is Gully Eastment, who was at school with you. He calls himself ‘Gulliver’ now, which makes for predictable headlines about ‘Gulliver’s Travellers’ in the Sedgwater Herald. He has become some sort of guru. The locals, led by Roy Canning, a farmer who is friendly with Mary’s parents, are campaigning vigorously to have them removed.
The Achelzoy travellers aren’t Romany, but so-called New Age Travellers: refugees from the cities, unmarried mums on social security, filth-locked crusties with dogs on strings, care-in-the-community headcases, spare-change
supplicants. Canning blames them for all the evils of the world, from falling property values to spoiled milk.
He is wrong.
All the evils in the world flow from quite different sources.
‘I saw Eastment.’
‘Does he remember you?’
‘He remembers Scary Mary.’ Your wife is quite proud of her old nickname.
‘He was a misfit,’ you say. ‘Too clever to keep quiet.’
‘He hasn’t changed.’
‘No one does.’
‘No.’
Mary sits at her dressing-table. She pulls back her hair and ties it in a knot, then begins applying her make-up. A black base with green stripes.
You get into your weekend clothes. Jeans that have been ground in dirt and flogged against stone walls. A dark, loose shirt. Heavy work-boots. A greatcoat, leaking at the shoulders, with most of its buttons gone. A wig: long, straggly black hair, held in place by a Rambo band.
Mary’s weekend outfit is similar. Her afghan coat is brown and ancient enough to disappear in the dark. She wears a black balaclava that fits perfectly round the camouflage mask she has made of her face. Only her large eyes, clear and strong, show a light.
‘I love you,’ you say.
Kissing her, you taste make-up. She hooks her hands into the stringy scraggle of your wig.
‘I love you too,’ she says back.
Then you go downstairs and outside, creeping out of the house into the dark. No one is around to see you cut across the fields. No moon shows through the cloud. This is your favourite type of night.
Saturday morning. Valentine’s Day. You have bought each other large, manufactured cards, the same as last year and all the years before.
As you slob around the house, Roy Canning calls by. Not recognising the concept of off-duty, he thinks of Mary as his personal policewoman. Mary makes him instant coffee — you keep the real stuff for yourselves — and listens to his complaints.
‘They’m animals, Mary-Girl. Last night were worst yet.’
‘But you don’t know it was the travellers.’
‘Who else could it be?’ you put in.
‘Animals. When I got up this morning, it were the first thing I saw … what they did. Animals. I tell ’ee. They’m got to be shifted.’
‘You should make an official charge.’
‘That’s what I’s doing.’
‘Mary’s off for the weekend, Roy,’ you point out evenly, good-humoured. ‘You should see Inspector Draper, in town. Maybe he’ll stage a dawn raid.’
‘If I’d caught ’en, Keith … I don’t know what I’d have done.’
He shakes his head, mulling over the hurt.
‘For God’s sake,’ you purr, ‘don’t say anything Mary might have to remember in court.’
Mary smiles. Roy, shocked, calms himself.
If he ever thought about it, Roy would realise he doesn’t like you. But he won’t think about it. It doesn’t matter anyway. Apart from Mary, people only ever know your weekday self. The one that doesn’t count.
You can’t help smiling at the thought. If Roy doesn’t like the weekday Keith, what would he think of the weekend Keith? It is a temptation. You’d like to show yourself to someone sometime. The circumstances would have to be right. You’d have to choose carefully, someone who’d never be in a position to tell.
‘It’d be nothing personal,’ you say. ‘But the law is the law.’
‘They don’t recognise laws of God or man,’ Roy says. ‘They should be shot, like sheep-worriers.’
While Roy talks to you, Mary makes him another cup of coffee. After she spoons in the Nescafé, she hawks quietly and spits on to the brown powder, then pours in hot water and milk.
‘It’s two sugars, isn’t it?’
Saturday evening. After dark, Saturdays have been just between the two of you since before you were married. This is the real time, when your marriage — your partnership — is at its most intense, at its most pure. This is the time when you and Mary can really work on your special projects.
Some projects, you have been working on for many years. Some are thought of, executed and over within the space of an afternoon and evening. Sometimes, you have a plan which you stick to rigorously; sometimes, you act on impulse, improvising giddily. Sometimes, personal feelings are involved, carried over from the weekday world, allowing you to correct imbalances, to pay back debtors beyond the reach of bank or law. Sometimes, you pursue a project mechanically, to see how far you can take something without the impetus of conviction, just to see what happens. On occasion, to preserve your edge, you act against your own interests, pursuing a project though it inconveniences people you’re fond of.
You’re not a monster: you do genuinely like some people. Though you remember Eastment as a rival and a disturbing loose cannon at school, you rather admire him now. He has sacrificed comfort for a principle you could never embrace. It’s because you can feel empathy for some and antipathy for others that your weekend work is so satisfying, offering such a rich variety of emotional stimuli.
At first, you were appeasing the shadow-spiders. Gradually, over the years, you have become the darkness. You and Mary have grown together, passionately. You used to plot and plan, arguing over methods and campaigns. Now you know instinctively what to do, where to push, how to manipulate. When to strike, and when to refrain from striking.
Every project reaches a point when it can continue without you. If people are nudged to a certain point, inertia carries them on. Some people are heavier or lighter than you expect, but you’re both patient, adaptable, good-humoured.
Tonight, alive in the dark, you cross the fields again, making your way from Sutton Mallet to Achelzoy. You know all the rhynes and fords from years of study.
You and Mary.
Your weekday selves are perfectly placed to know things, to see cracks that can be worked into chasms. But only your weekend selves count.
You’ve known the travellers would be a project ever since Mary heard Robert Hackwill, chairman of the council, was scouting around for a community well outside his ward which might host unwelcome visitors. You and Mary have felt little thrills as the players — Hackwill, Canning, Eastment, Draper — moved into their places, each with his attendant followers. It was almost as if they were under your influence, even before you devoted any time to the project.
Sometimes, you have to do very little.
The travellers’ site is away from the main road — Hackwill was careful it couldn’t be seen from the highway — and fairly exposed. It’s little more than a circle of battered caravans. The scents of chemical toilets and incense waft on the sharp winter breeze. As you creep nearer the field, you see the flicker of fires through thin hedge. Music throbs, loud enough to shake fillings. Lights are strung up in the circle, making a pyramid of illumination on the dark quilt of the moor.
Mary stands up. You follow suit.
You are the dark. You can’t be seen.
From her Friday recce, Mary knows exactly where the generator is. The caravans have electricity. Some have portable TVs and microwave ovens. All the kids sleep under electric blankets.
You take the crowbar out of your backpack.
Sunday morning. As always, you lounge with the papers spread out over the big bed. There’s never anything interesting to read and you often whine about it, but Mary looks at interior decoration articles and you dutifully trudge through the sport section. You listen together to the omnibus edition of The Archers.
Throughout your life, you have only ever listened to the radio (as opposed to having it on in the background) on Sundays. Two-Way Family Favourites and Round the Horne and The Clitheroe Kid. Down Your Way and Sing Something Simple and Gardeners’ Question Time. This is your idea of British heritage. The culture that binds you to your society. The telly never goes on until well after the God slot.
You were in bed just after dawn. At the weekends, you need less sleep. Often, you and Mary make love in the sm
all hours of Sunday, after getting back from an excursion. It’s your private time, after you have served your project of the moment.
When you were first married, while your projects were mainly around the house, you used to have Sunday lunch with your parents or, more often, Mary’s. That seems to have fallen by the wayside. You don’t really miss the heavy food, the smell of cooking cabbage, the ritual conversations, Mary’s dad’s story about seeing a flying saucer while cycling his beat, Mary’s little cousin Beth’s horse drawings.
The weekends are just for you and Mary. That’s as it should be.
Sunday afternoon. You work up in the Batcave. The materials for your projects have to be assembled carefully, so they can’t be traced or if they can not back to you. Many special items have to be made more or less from scratch. You and Mary have taught yourself skills. Not every task can be accomplished with something as simple as last night’s crowbar.
On a hot-plate, Mary cooks up a mixture of horse manure — supplied by Beth’s pony and supposedly for the vegetable garden — and glue, stirring in liquid to get the proper texture. You’ve both contributed your own shit to the mixture, just for luck. The smell is vile, so you have the extractor fan on full blast. For your part, you’ve been collecting milk bottles — not as easy to find in these days of cartons — and making tight-fitting stoppers. You don’t want any leakage.
As you work, you play tapes of Andrew Lloyd-Webber musicals, singing along to favourite tracks.
Carefully, you half-fill the bottles with the mixture you call Sticky Shit and top up with a layer of pink paraffin. Then you get them stoppered and lay them down next to the elderflower wine.
‘What’s that smell?’ someone asks.
‘Tomato preserve,’ say Mary. ‘I think this year’s batch is off.’
You have a visitor, Inspector Draper. Mary’s boss, you suppose. You both like and feel sorry for him. Many of your projects seem to give him grief, quite incidental to your intentions. Mary tries to make up for it by looking after him on the job. Whenever interesting ingestible drugs are confiscated, she takes a pinch and crumbles it into his PG Tips.