The Year of the Ladybird

by Graham Joyce

  I was close to telling her everything. I wasn’t in love with Terri but I felt responsible for her. I couldn’t see how I could spill the beans on any of this without seeming like I’d made it all happen. ‘I’m just not sleeping. That rabbit hutch doesn’t help.’

  Of Colin or Terri there was neither sight nor sound. A new cleaner had been drafted in to take care of the theatre. I got her to switch off her noisy hoover so that I could ask her about Terri. She didn’t know anything. She said that all she knew was that she’d been taken off Block B where she was happy and put on the theatre where she didn’t know a soul.

  In blistering heat we judged the competitions around the swimming pool. The heat and the lack of sleep exhausted me. Nikki wanted me to go to the canteen with her for lunch but my need to sleep was overwhelming. Images from the previous evening’s escape were washing over me and the dreaming part of my brain was flooding my waking mind. I went back to my room and was relieved to find no sign of Nobby. I locked the door, flung myself on my cot and instantly fell into a deep sleep.

  Though it seemed like only seconds, it was maybe a couple of hours later when I was roused by a hammering on the door and a woman’s voice calling my name. It was Nikki.

  I got to my feet and opened the door.

  ‘You’re supposed to be preparing for the farewell show,’ she said. She peered round me into my room, as if to see if I’d got anyone with me.

  I felt drugged. I was like a zombie. ‘Need a shower,’ I slurred.

  ‘You haven’t got time. They’re all there. Only you missing.’

  I ignored her and in a stupor I shuffled to the shower room, stepped out of my clothes and ran the shower cold over my head. I stood under the icy water for a moment and began to revive. When I opened my eyes Nikki was there, shamelessly watching me. Her arms were folded. She was holding one of my towels. She flapped it at me. ‘You’ll need this.’

  We hurried over to the theatre where the preparation for the farewell performance and prize-giving ahead of the Friday Review was already underway. Tony and the others were already onstage, setting up. As I came in he asked me to go backstage to wheel out the sword casket and his fez in readiness for his Abdul-Shazam routine.

  It was the first time I’d been alone backstage since it had all kicked off. Before then I’d made sure there were others around, people I could talk to, just so that I didn’t have to confront the loaded silence of the place. Backstage in the theatre is awash with ghosts. It is a memory bank for every cue missed by an actor; every gag that died; each muffed line and dance routine gone awry; each dropped catch, muddle, mix-up and mistake: the tragic moment that turns to farce. For all of this there is a dark audience perched and waiting.

  The sword casket was covered with props and stage junk. I was thinking about Nikki, who would be called upon to get into the box as I took all the junk off the box and unlatched the lid. When I opened the lid and looked inside I let the lid slam down and I toppled backwards.

  There was a woman in the casket.

  I sat back on the bare boards, paralysed, staring at the glittering box. The truth is I was waiting for the lid to open.

  It didn’t.

  I knew it must be a trick of the light. But even in the dimly lit recess of the props chamber the image of a woman stuck in that coffin of a magic box had been vivid. Slowly, and on my hands and knees, I crawled over to the casket and lifted the lid again.

  It was Terri. She was jammed in the casket, her feet drawn up beneath her and wedged into the dividers. She wore just her bra and pants. I could only see one side of her face, and that was in darkness. Her skin looked grey. Her nose and mouth were squashed up against the padded sides of the box. Her eyes were closed. A trickle of liquid had dribbled from her mouth and across her chin, leaving a snail-trail. A rope was tangled around her legs.

  Her eye opened. In the light and shadow of the back stage her eye glimmered briefly in a way that made me think of the phosphorescence of the waves. She was trying look back at me, but her head was trapped, firmly lodged, and she couldn’t move it. She stuck her tongue out of the side of her mouth and licked her parched lips. ‘Get me out,’ she said in a faint rasp. ‘There’s a good lad.’

  I grabbed at the plastic dividers, trying to give her some room to move. One of the dividers broke in my hands but it wasn’t enough to give Terri any relief. She was still horribly compressed. So grey were her features in the shadows I honestly thought she was near to death. Her breathing was shallow. Still trying to break her free I grabbed another of the dividers and it cracked noisily in my fingers, cutting the side of my hand.

  The sound of the plastic splitting in my hands seemed to have shattered a spell. I was left with a shard of broken plastic in my hand, staring down at an empty box. There was no Terri inside it, compressed or otherwise.

  The casket was empty.

  I clawed at the velvet padding at the base of the box, just to see if I was the victim of some illusion. There was nothing. Just the hollow casket with its now cracked and broken dividers.

  I let the lid fall and stared at the casket for some time. The hallucination had been so strong that I couldn’t figure out what had happened. I’d seen Terri in the casket. I’d smelled her yeasty sweat. I’d heard her raspy voice.

  I went back out front. Tony was laughing about something with Nikki and Gail, the dancer with whom I’d run the Treasure Hunt. ‘Where’s the kit?’ he said to me when I got to the ballroom.

  I had no time to compose myself. ‘It’s been damaged,’ I said. ‘You’d better come and look.’

  Tony knitted his eyebrows. He spun on his heels and marched ahead of me to where I’d just come from. I’d already decided that I would be there when he opened the casket. I followed Tony backstage and into the props chamber.

  ‘What a fucking state, this place,’ he said, pulling the casket out of its corner. He flipped open the lid and then he stepped back, just as I had done. His eyes bulged. ‘Jesus Christ!’ he said. ‘What the fuck?’

  I advanced up to his elbow and peered into the casket.

  ‘Who’s done that?’ Tony shouted. ‘It’s smashed to fuck!’

  He turned to me with an accusing look. I shook my head.

  ‘It’s that fucking Nobby,’ he said. ‘He brings women down here.’

  ‘What?’ I said. I was still reeling from what I’d seen – what I thought I’d seen – in the box.

  ‘Fucking gets ’em playing around in the box, shows ’em how it’s done to impress ’em. I’ll swing for the little bastard.’

  ‘How do you know it’s him?’ I said reasonably.

  ‘How do I know? How do I know anything?’ He kicked the casket, as if he wanted to break it some more. ‘We can’t use that now. That’s fucked that for this afternoon.’

  He was furious. I pressed past him and peered into the casket. I stooped down and ran my hands over the broken trammels, not for any other reason than to check for warmth, or blood or any other evidence that the box had contained a body less than three minutes ago.

  ‘Leave it,’ Tony said. ‘You can’t fix it. We’ll do the plate-spinning, for fuck’s sake. Sort it, will you?’

  He stormed away. I was left standing over the empty sword casket. There in that place of shabby conjuring tricks, it occurred to me for the first time that someone might be messing with me. It was impossible that there could be someone in the casket one moment and then not the next; but then it was also impossible to get a woman to climb into a casket and to stick swords into her only to have her pop out of the casket unharmed moments later.

  My heart hammered and my brain was like a nest of spitting snakes. I was in a kind of fever and my head was boiling with notions. I needed to see Terri, to speak to her, to see if she was all right, to find out what was happening.

  I practised deep breathing and my heart-rate started to come back to normal. I collected the gear for the plate-spinning routine. The set of plates spinning on poles have deep dimples under the
m so that they can easily be set spinning; meanwhile you invite an idiot from the audience to try his hand and you give him a fragile, similar-looking plate with no dimple that, of course, crashes to the floor and splinters, all to the cruel merriment of the audience. It began to seem like all the conjuring was a cheap deception rather than the noble art I’d first taken it to be.

  I hauled the plate-spinning gear over to the ballroom. Nikki and Gail were still there. Tony had gone.

  ‘He’s not best pleased,’ Nikki said.

  ‘Wouldn’t like to be in Nobby’s shoes,’ Gail said.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  Nikki took some of the plates from me. ‘Come on, let’s set up.’

  The farewell show passed without event. I say without event: plates crashed to the floor but that’s what they were supposed to do. Winners were announced and prizes were given. After the show, a little girl, who had a habit of following me around, tapped me on the hand and gave me a cigar in a tube. No doubt her parents thought this a nice gesture, and I did, too, even though I don’t smoke. In fact, when I looked into the sparkly innocence of the child’s eyes it almost made my own eyes water.

  In the Golden Wheel nightclub I operated the lights for Luca. The show was the same and the song was the same. Amid the lyrical references to summer kisses and sunburned hands I improvised a few touches with rotating gels for ‘Autumn Leaves’. After his performance, Luca didn’t hang round to talk. He made a little salute in my direction before leaving.

  With Luca’s song playing in a nightmarish loop in my head I made a point of finding some company with whom to walk back to my quarters in the dark. I was a bag of nerves, scanning the shadows. Once again I locked the door behind me and closed the curtains. I lay down on my pallet bed and eventually fell into a bewildering sleep.

  I was back on the pier again, standing before the smashed glass case of the mechanical fortune-teller. I put a coin in the box and instead of Zora the manikin, there was the boy, screaming. His head was shaved to the skullbone. He covered his head with hands as he screamed and his forearms were tattooed. The tattoos were all red and black ladybirds. The boy’s mouth was wide open and his ear-splitting cry faded slowly, as did the boy, leaving scraps of himself hovering in the air. Eventually I reached out a hand to where the afterimages floated. The scraps stirred as if I’d put my hand in water to disturb them, and finally faded altogether.

  In the dream a card was spat from the machine. It read, Wait for the card.

  15

  Will no-one fix the malfunctioning strip light

  Some movement awoke me in the early hours. I opened my eyes and in the darkness I could see Nobby sitting on his bed. There wasn’t enough light to see his face but he sat with his hands on his knees, staring at me.

  ‘You all right, Nobby?’ I said.

  ‘Tain’t Nobby. It’s me.’

  The gravel voice was unmistakable and it did two things. It iced my blood and it sent me scuttling up from my bed and against the window, to the nearest point of escape.

  ‘Calm your nerves, son. It’s Colin.’

  I knew perfectly well who it was.

  As I forced my back up against the window the curtain rucked to admit a thin ray of moonlight to fall on Colin’s angular face. In that light his eyes shone like the carapaces of shiny black beetles. If I tried to speak, my mouth was too dry. I was paralysed with fright. I couldn’t move again if I wanted to.

  ‘What the fuck are you doin’? It’s Colin,’ he said again. He laughed. ‘Look at you!’

  ‘How did you get in?’ I managed to say.

  ‘Are you joking? Have you seen these locks? Get dressed. I need some help.’

  He stood up and moved towards the door as if to give me room. Slowly my heart rate came back to normal. My legs trembled. I felt I had no choice but to do exactly what he said. I pulled on my jeans and my denim shirt and my trainers. Colin flicked his head in the direction of the door and went out. I followed. I looked down at the lock to my door and it was hanging off its fittings.

  ‘Fix that later,’ he said.

  A malfunctioning strip light fizzed at the end of the corridor. No one else was around. The whole unit snoozed. I wanted to bang on someone’s door and shout for help, but I couldn’t. Colin stopped under the light and turned to me. ‘I’m not allowed on the camp so this was the only way to get to you.’

  ‘Right,’ I said. It was all so normalised. I felt like I was being marched to the electric chair by someone whose job it was to throw the switch at the end of the walk.

  We passed through the shadows between the chalets and he led me to a low wire fence behind a privet hedge. It was a way into the camp I’d never even seen before. He cocked a leg over the fence without looking back to see if I followed. A path between the camp and a caravan park led out onto the road and there Colin’s Hillman Imp was parked.

  Without a word he unlocked the driver door and got in. It didn’t seem to have occurred to him that I might bolt. Everything was telling me to run, but another voice in my head was asking me to stay calm. I thought that if Colin was going to attack me he would have done so in my room. After a couple of seconds Colin leaned across the seats to pop the button lock on the passenger door. This was my last moment to make a run for it.

  I opened the passenger door and I got in. Colin started up the engine and pulled away from the kerb. The car didn’t smell good. Something was ‘off’.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘You’ll see.’

  It was after one a.m. and the roads were deserted. We drove in complete silence. After we got out of town Colin said, ‘Open the glove compartment.’

  I popped open the glove compartment. In it was a folded map. ‘You can navigate,’ he said. ‘There’s a torch.’

  I got the torch out of the glove compartment and I unfolded the map. A clumsy X had been marked on the map with black biro. It was a place just across the Lincolnshire border into Nottinghamshire, near a town or village called Barlston. ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  ‘We stay on the A158 for a while. Keep your eyes peeled.’

  Progress was slow. The road was single carriageway pretty much all of the route to Lincoln. More than once oncoming drivers blared their horns at Colin, angry that he hadn’t dimmed his headlights for them. Even in the dark some of the route looked familiar to me, and just before we reached Horncastle we approached a pub that I knew. It had a thatched roof and there wasn’t a breath of wind to stir the union jack on its smartly painted pole. It was The Fighting Cocks.

  I said nothing. I thought: this is it; he’s brought me here so that he and his National Front cronies can have some fun with me.

  But the car swished by without Colin even acknowledging the place.

  It was a long journey in silence and the car still smelled bad. It was a smell that seemed familiar yet I couldn’t identify it. Eventually, Colin alerted me to look for a turn-off. We found Barlston easy enough. It was a Nottinghamshire mining village.

  ‘We’re looking for a place called Black Bank,’ Colin said.

  We’d been driving for maybe an hour and after crawling through the village we found Black Bank. About half a mile from the village a field on the embankment of a hill had an area fenced off with steel mesh wire. A sign hung lop-sided from a single screw: Danger Deep Shaft No Admittance. Colin parked up and switched off the car lights.

  ‘What is this place?’

  ‘Old coal mine. They’re capping it over. If anyone comes,’ he said, ‘we just pretend we’re queers.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘There’s two bags in the back behind you. And there’s another three bags in the boot.’

  ‘What’s in the bags?’

  ‘We’re slinging ’em down that shaft.’

  ‘Why?’

  He looked at me like I was simple, a half-smile on his face. ‘Jus’ fuckin’ do it, all right?’ He opened his door and got out.

  My mouth was dry. I got out of the car and looked out
across the field. Someone had already peeled back the steel wire mesh to get to the shaft. I don’t know what had been dumped down the shaft but there was a pile of hardcore rubble outside the protected area, and a lot of building materials – sand and gravel – plus industrial drums inside the fence. There was a five-bar farmer’s gate leading onto the land. Colin went up to the gate and gave it a shake. It was padlocked.

  ‘We have to carry it. I’ll help you wiv it over the gate. If anyone comes while you’re up there I’ll drive away, turn around and come back. You just keep low.’

  Colin went back to the car and opened the back door. He started wrestling with a black bin liner that was in the foot-well. It looked heavy. ‘Come on.’

  I went over to help him. The bin-liner was tied at the top so I couldn’t see what was in it, but I could smell it. It was the source of the odour that had been bothering me. I noticed he was still wearing his driving gloves. When we got the first heavy bin liner out I knew what was inside. ‘Look, what’s in it?’ I said again, pointedly.

  ‘Condemned meat,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘We’re dumping it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Questions fuckin’ questions. Get it over the gate.’

  The bags were heavy. We dumped two from the back of the car over the gate, and then we carried the other three from the boot, and dropped those over the gate.

  ‘You’re gonna have to take them up there and drop ’em over the edge. I’ll sit ’ere.’

  ‘Why can’t you help me?’

  ‘Told you. I’ll drive away if anyone comes. Get on with it.’

  Carrying the bags on my own was difficult. I started shaking again and the strength drained out of me. But I half-dragged the first bag along the parched and baked clay, stirring up dust. I managed to manoeuvre it through the broken fence and right up to the edge of the shaft.