He balanced the carton of videocassettes in the crook of one arm as he let himself into the house. When he carried the carton into the front room he saw a guidebook to Crete lying face down on Laura's chair. It looked forlorn, like a bird which couldn't fly. "You will," he promised Laura silently, and set the carton down.
On an impulse he counted the videocassettes. Thirty-three had survived. That was a good omen, he thought, and all the more welcome inasmuch as it reminded him that he didn't need that kind of reassurance. No need to mention it to Julia and Laura; it would take too much explaining.
They were in the kitchen, and he sensed that they'd stayed together while they tried to come to terms with the apparent disaster. Laura was painstakingly scraping potatoes, Julia was emptying grounds out of the wedding-present percolator. "I hope those aren't grounds for divorce," he said, and noticing the turkey pie in the cold oven, "Looks as if Christmas has come early."
Laura gave him a wistful smile. "Come on, you two," he said, "we'll go out for a walk."
"You can see we've things to do, Jack."
"We'll all do them later. It's been too long since the three of us went out together, what with Laura's homework and the shop."
He was waiting for them to get ready when the phone rang. It was a woman in Hoylake, the other seaward corner of the peninsula, wanting to know if he still offered home deliveries of films. "I can only deliver laughs at the moment, but
"I'm about to extend my range," he said, and jotted down her name and phone number.
Bidston Hill was in Birkenhead, twenty minutes' drive away through suburban streets which were briefly interrupted by the innermost dock and its rearing cranes. Jack swung the van around a roundabout which harboured a steepled church and drove past the vandalised graveyard of a defunct church to the track which led to the common. A few cars were parked at the top of the rubbly track. Dogs were barking among the trees, but the only people in sight on the grass between the car park and the woods were three teenagers sitting on a picnic table, their feet on the attached bench—heroin addicts, Jack guessed from the way they tried to seem not to be waiting. He took Julia and Laura by the hand and led them through the woods where nuts dropped by grey squirrels rattled through the branches. Beyond the remains of a low brick wall, slabs of sandstone patched with gorse and heather stepped up towards a windmill in chains. A bridge led across a dell occupied by a road, and on the far side the Orchards climbed a jagged natural stairway to the windmill.
It stood at one end of the sandstone ridge, the far end of which housed an observatory. The ridge appeared to be composed of giant misshapen paving stones cemented by soil overgrown with turf. Frowns that sketched the processes of weathering were incised in the sandstone, deep puddles glittered in depressions in the rock. From the exposed spine the bay beyond the peninsula was visible, while to the left the mountains of Wales massed like layers of cloud above fields misted by the River Dee, and to the right the towers and clocks and red-brick terraces of Birkenhead seemed to lead straight to the warehouses and stately offices of Liverpool, a trick of perspective having done away with the Mersey. Jack drew a breath which felt like a taste of the clear blue sky. "Well, ladies, what do you see that you like?"
"You know I like coming up here," Laura said.
"What about living somewhere with this kind of a view?"
"Jack," Julia said.
"You've got to stop me babbling, Laura, or at least tell me what you're afraid of. Do you think we'll have to cancel Crete, is that it? Switch off the sun and turn off the wave machine and send all the actors home?"
"Won't we have to?"
"Won't it cost more to keep thousands of Greeks on the dole?" He glimpsed a smile which almost surfaced, and said "Laura, we'd go if it killed me, but we don't need to make any sacrifices."
"I don't understand."
"You know the shop wasn't doing as well as we hoped. Maybe I should have carried more popular titles, not trash but popular. If I'd sold the films I was beginning to have doubts about I wouldn't have got anything like I'd paid for them, but they're insured for the full replacement value, and of course the shop is too. There could be quite a sum left over when I've rethought the business. No wonder people turn to arson."
"Dad."
He thought her shock was mostly feigned; certainly she was enjoying it. "Desperate people, I mean," he said, digging in his pocket for the chain letter. "People who might credit this kind of nonsense."
He sat on the wall above the woods in the shadow of the observatory dome and read the letter aloud, lowering his voice when she glanced at passers-by and shushed him. "Turn ill luck into good... Make thirteen copies of this letter... Do not break the chain... A woman in Nevada broke the chain and her husband was diagnosed as having a brain tumour, but when she sent the letters the doctors were able to operate. Presumably," Jack commented, "if he'd died in the meantime he would have risen from the dead."
"Why would anyone make up a letter like that? To frighten people?"
"No other point to it, is there?" Jack looked around vainly for a waste-bin and shoved the letter into his pocket. He yawned and stretched, feeling relaxed at last, then he shoved himself to his feet, dislodging a chunk of the wall, which rumbled down the slope and thumped a tree-trunk. "Better head for home. I'd forgotten someone's supposed to be looking at the house," he said, and thought for a moment that he'd forgotten something else far more important. It would come to him.
SIX
In the morning Jack's cold was spectacularly worse. He lost count of the number of times he had to blow his nose before he felt able to breathe. His cumbersome half-melted legs had little zeal for transporting the rest of him, which seemed to have been separated from them during the night and inexpertly restored. He felt so hot in bed that he imagined yesterday's fire had stayed with him. When Julia laid her cool hand on his forehead, however, she couldn't find much of a temperature. She stirred two paracetamol tablets into a glass of hot lemon juice and advised him to stay in bed, and it wasn't until he was listening to the echoes of the slam of the front door reverberating back and forth across his cavernous brittle cranium that he realised he should have asked her to phone the insurance company. He piloted himself down the stairs, feeling as if he had to balance his head to prevent it from floating away, and attempted to croak his claim into the telephone, but gave up after saying his name thrice without communicating. He wrote a letter to the company and stumbled to the post-box with it, all the way aware of how his fingers gripping the envelope were plugged into his hand which was hinged to his forearm which was composed of bones which preserved a constant length and muscles which did not.... With so much machinery to operate it seemed miraculous that he reached the post-box and posted the letter.
By the time he reconquered the lock of the front door he was more than ready for bed. He restrained himself from kicking off the covers as soon as he'd crawled under them. If he had a fever, he wished that the two women whom he'd met on returning home yesterday could have been a fever dream. But the wind had indeed lifted the elder woman's blossoming purple trilby and deposited it beneath the right front wheel of the van, and Jack had felt as if he was handing her a trampled patch of an artificial flower-bed, and when he'd parked the van and found the women waiting on the doorstep he'd thought she meant to demand a new hat until he'd grasped that they were there to view the house.
Perhaps he shouldn't have offered to replace the hat. As Julia had conducted the women through the house he'd tried surreptitiously to get her and then Laura to add to the cash in his pocket. Eventually he'd written a cheque, only for the woman to refuse to give him her name, waving away the cheque with more impatience than grace. As she'd marched away arm in arm with her companion, who might or might not have been her daughter, the younger woman had started what was clearly destined to be a protracted argument "Ridiculous, wearing a hat in a place like this' and Jack saw that he'd seen the last of them.
There would be other house-hunters, a
nd just now he was home if they called. For the first two days, however, whenever the phone rang or he dreamed that it did, he felt too watery to crawl out of bed. He lay in a dream which drifted in and out of sleep, and when he was closest to waking he played with numbers in his head. The value of Jack Orchard was eleven: if you numbered each letter with its position in the alphabet, their sum was ninety-two, and nine and two added up to eleven; what else did? "Videos' and "Bidston' and "Laura Julia'. Julia had never quite understood his eagerness to add her name to Laura's, but she'd been touched and had given in to him. He'd thought it might bring Laura luck, that was all; it wasn't as though he let numerology make his choices for him, the way his parents had let it make theirs, though he had to admit that surprisingly often it had seemed to work in their favour. Sometimes he thought that his father had only been humouring Jack's mother that he'd juggled numbers until they came out right, though Jack had never been able to see how he did it. When Jack had been as old as Laura his father had teased his brain with mathematical puzzles, and as he lay in bed they came back to him. Twelve metal balls look identical, but one of them is either heavier or lighter than any of the others; using scales to weigh the balls against one another, how do you determine which is the odd one out and whether it is heavier or lighter in just three weighings? "Balls," Jack mumbled eventually and dozed, feeling childlike, safe in bed and eager for tomorrow.
Wednesday brought a phone call from a couple who wanted to view the house, and Thursday brought the couple themselves. The woman kept sniffing at a lingering trace of the smell of the damp course, and Jack found himself emitting sniffs as if in sympathy, which caused her husband to scowl as though Jack were mimicking her. Jack refrained from pointing out that they both smelled so pungently of what must be a pack of dogs that even his clogged nose noticed. Given the noncommittal mutterings with which they took their leave of him he couldn't regard the day as having been especially productive. At least on Friday he felt well enough to drive to Liverpool.
Once he was out of the tunnel under the river he headed south on the dock road. The shipping offices of the Pier Head gave way to warehouses, blocks of which had acquired new identities: boutiques, restaurants, purveyors of Liverpudlian nostalgia, a Tate Gallery, yuppie apartments. Further up from the river the warehouses were unimproved, and there were few people in the largely windowless streets. An old Chinese couple whose resolute toothlessness seemed designed to aid their grimacing hobbled uphill towards Chinatown, and a girl of about Laura's age wheeled a pram, the contents of which Jack couldn't distinguish, across his path as he steered the van into the entrance to a court of warehouses. Buildings like secrecy embodied in forty-foot walls of red brick surrounded him at once, cutting off the mumble of the city and grudgingly returning him an echo of the slam of his door as he stepped down.
Apart from the van, the only vehicle parked in the court was an uncabbed lorry trailer at least as capacious as the Orchards' house. Most of the stout doors in the hefty walls were unidentified by signs, but a slightly askew bright-red plaque was screwed above the wicket in the door nearest the van. V1CS VIDS, the plaque announced in white letters, most of which belonged to the same font. Above the plaque a camera which had recently been assailed with litter swivelled rustily to watch Jack, and in front of the wicket a dog began to growl.
If it hadn't, he might almost have taken it for a carpet which someone had dumped. As he pressed the bell push next to the door, the animal pricked up one threadbare ear and the chewed remains of the other, and bared teeth so eroded that the sight made Jack's teeth ache. It looked as though an Alsatian and several other breeds, all of them ready to fight, had been involved in its birth. The dog was continuing to growl, keeping it low in order to prolong the threat without drawing breath, when the grille above the bell push cleared itself of a gob of static and said "Give it a kick."
Jack leaned one hand on the door frame and pirouetting gingerly, delivered a kick to the wicket above the old rope of the dog's tail. The door didn't budge, but the dog raised its head from between its paws and began to foam at the mouth while its growl doubled in vehemence. "Not the door, you fool," the grille protested, "the dog."
"Kick your own dog," Jack said, almost falling on top of the animal in his haste to back out of reach.
The grille expelled a burst of static like a hiss of reproof, and Jack was awaiting a more positive response when the wicket crashed open and the dog leapt up, straight at him. He froze, telling himself not to show fear, and at the last moment the dog swerved and fled into the road, causing a Jaguar driven by a huge Jamaican to screech and veer. "I wouldn't have stood in his way, la," the pony-tailed youth who had opened the door advised Jack. "He's not our dog."
"I felt lucky," Jack said like the kind of film he thought the youth might watch.
The youth, who wore an earring and a T-shirt printed with a hero as muscular as he himself was scrawny, seemed unimpressed. "Whir you from?"
"Over the water," Jack said, wondering why this provoked a stare which bordered on the hostile. "My business, you mean? Fine Films."
"Never heard of them."
"That's some admission," Jack said, and when the stare didn't waver: "You sent me a catalogue."
"We sent lots this month," the youth said accusingly. He craned back through the wicket and shouted "Says he's Fine Films."
"Let him in," a woman responded.
The youth shrugged and ducked through the wicket. "Gorra be curful," he muttered, which apparently implied a request, because Jack had scarcely crossed the threshold when the youth said as if he was repeating it "Shut the door."
Jack did so, and looked around. Beneath the brick ceiling, metal shelves standing a foot taller than he were attached to the bare brick walls; others stood back to back on the brick floor, leaving just enough space for two people to pass in the aisles. Unsurprisingly, the enormous room smelled of brick. One entire wall was of Horror, while the opposite wall displayed second-hand cassettes, growing cheaper and dustier as they progressed towards the dimmest corner of the room. Jack collected a supermarket trolley from beside the cash-desk, behind which a perspiring pudgy woman who looked as if she might be the youth's mother was using a hand-held device to stick price tags onto cassette boxes, and headed for the ex-rental cassettes. Even here Horror seemed to be the norm; more than half the boxes offered screaming women. "Why do people want this sort of thing?" he wondered aloud.
The woman threw an armful of priced boxes into a trolley for the youth to distribute on the shelves. "Worse than that is happening to someone somewhere in the world right now."
Jack couldn't tell whether she intended that as an explanation or a defence. "I wasn't attacking you personally."
'I should hope not," she said loudly to the youth.
Perhaps Jack should be guided by the critics. He began to look for boxes which quoted reviews of the films. He hadn't realised there were so many magazines; he'd never heard of at least half of them. He tried reading some of the comments aloud while the woman and the youth competed at how ostentatiously they could ignore him. On the boxes he chose, none of the sources—The Face, For Him, Q, Empire, Blitz—had a name worth eleven. Of course it didn't matter, though he told himself playfully that he would buy anything which quoted a review from the Telegraph.
Two hours later, when the last shelf brought him back to the cash-desk, he'd found none. The trolley was piled high, mostly with discounted tapes. The youth, who had taken over at the desk while the woman conversed in a back room with two broad men in pinstriped suits, gave the trolley an unwelcoming glance and pulled a pad of receipts towards him. "Name," he said.
"Jack Orchard. Fine Films."
"Jack..."
"Orchard."
The youth wrote "Awchard' with such industriousness that Jack didn't like to contradict him. "Fine," Jack said, "Films," and was already beginning to have had enough. "Do you think we should wait for your mother?"
The youth raised his head but not his ga
ze. "She won't be out till next year."
"Surely," Jack blurted, and realised his blunder. "I meant, no, you carry on. With good behaviour," he babbled, and succeeded in sneezing so as to interrupt himself.
He made another tour of the shelves while the youth slowly and inventively misspelled the titles of the films. One of the pinstriped men, who Jack had assumed were officials of some kind, frowned at him and closed the door of the back room as Jack glimpsed a bank of at least a dozen video-recorders in operation and a pile of cassettes in unmarked boxes which the other man was loading into a carton. Jack feigned interest in the shelves furthest from the room, though they held comedies featuring teenagers so vacuous he could imagine wishing a serial murderer on them, until the youth at the desk began to sum up the purchases with a calculator. Jack returned to the desk in time to watch him writing the total at the foot of the receipt. "Actually, I think you may have miscalculated," Jack said. "You might want to tot them up again."
The youth held up the calculator like a magician displaying a card. "I see what it says, but it's wrong," Jack assured him. "Did you enter some amounts more than once, do you think?"
The youth craned his head back towards the inner room, protruding his Adam's apple at Jack. "Mrs. Vickers," he shouted at the ceiling.
The woman waddled to the desk, demanding "Aren't you done yet?" As she peered at the receipt she must have noticed Jack's address, because she told him "There's an auction by you."
"It's been there for years."
She stared at him. "Five hundred used titles."
"Video, you mean? I may have a look. Just now we've a disagreement over thirty-nine pounds or so."
She glanced at the foot of the receipt and then at the figures in the window of the calculator. "I know they tally," Jack protested, but she had already cleared the window and was stabbing at the keys with one stubby finger. When she'd finished she shook the calculator at him. "Will that do you?"
The Count of Eleven Page 5