by Ted Lewis
“And consequently no one would let him in.”
“Well, he was in the group, if you see what I mean, but not in it. He was suffered.”
“The group fool?”
“In a way. The butt of all the jokes. He took it all, though.”
“Just in the hope he’d be accepted.”
“I suppose he pretended the jokes were meant differently.”
“Affectionately.”
“Yes.”
“How bloody awful,” she said flatly.
I nodded and tried to focus my mind on a reason, any reason at all, to get me out of the room.
“What bastards kids can be,” she said.
Something back at the studio. Supposing I said I’d left the printer on. The heat would . . .
Kate stood up.
“How did the session go?” she said.
“The session? Oh, fine.”
“What were you doing?”
“Handbags. The new range.”
“Exciting.”
I stood up, about to tell Kate about the printer.
“How bad is the car?” she said.
“Not too bad,” I said. “They’ll be able to beat it out.”
“I must go and see,” she said and turned to go out of the room.
I tried to call after her, but what could I say? Don’t, whatever you do, open the boot? Instead I found myself following her out into the night. She walked to the back of the car and bent forward and examined the car with that same clinical intensity that women have when they examine a spot or a rash or a cut.
Eventually she pulled a face.
“Nasty,” she said, and tried to open the boot.
I had locked it, hadn’t I? I had locked it?
“Is it jammed?”
“No,” I said. “It’s locked.”
She straightened up and gave a last look at the car, a look faintly touched with a certain amused satisfaction.
“Well,” she said. “They’ll have their work cut out.”
She began to walk back towards the house.
I stayed where I was, not able to do anything at all.
Kate stopped and turned.
“Aren’t you going to put it away?”
I stared at her.
“Hurry up,” she said. “I’ve got something to show you.”
She turned again and carried on into the house.
I got into the car and nudged it into the garage. I had reached a decision by default; it would have to be done in the morning. I’d use Kate’s Hillman. I’d tell Kate I was going down to the sailing club to take the dinghy out before the Sunday crowd got there. I’d get up early, before Kate, and I’d move the . . . I’d put Eileen in the boot of the Hillman and drive down to the brickyards and I’d do what I’d decided earlier to do. After all, I’d be quite safe. Nobody would know she was here.
All I had to do was to go into the house and get into bed and try and pretend that there wasn’t an unalterably dead girl in the boot of my car. I should be able to do that. Provided I didn’t go mad before daylight came. Unless, of course, I was mad already.
I went into the house and up the stairs and into the children’s bedroom.
Kevin, the youngest, was lying face down, the sheets pulled almost completely over his head. All I could see of him was a tuft of fair hair. It was the same every night. We called him the Sprout because of it.
Tears sprang to my eyes and my face twisted and I wanted to shudder and shake and fall to my knees and let it all surge out of me, let it rush out until I was empty and let the emptiness make the evening void.
But Kate came in and stood by me and looked down at the children.
“Aren’t we lucky,” she said, taking my hand in hers.
I nodded, which was all I could trust myself to do. Kate looked at the children for a little longer, then she said, “Come on. I want to show you something.”
She led me into our bedroom. While I’d been downstairs she’d changed into her dressing gown.
“Sit down,” she said. There was an odd look on her face, a mixture of expectation and shy triumph.
I sat down on the edge of the bed. She hooked her thumbs into the belt of her dressing gown and pushed. The dressing gown fell open. She wasn’t wearing her nightdress. Instead she was wearing underwear, new underwear, but the thing was, part of the set was a suspender belt and attached to the suspender belt was a pair of black silk stockings.
I stared at her body showing pink through the soft whiteness of the new things.
“Well?” she said, half embarrassed, half expectant.
I didn’t say anything. She must have taken my silence as meaning what she wanted it to mean.
“I finally managed it,” she said, pushing the dressing gown out behind her and twisting her torso round and arching her back so that she could look at the back of her legs. “It was a devil of a job to find some. It’s hard enough these days to get ordinary stockings, but these are as rare as moondust. And as for the suspender belt . . . I must tell you, in the shops they really thought I was someone out of the ark.”
I said nothing. It was just dawning on me. What she wanted. Now. My own fault. I’d always been on at her about getting stockings, how they turned me on. Today of all days she’d done something about it. She must have been feeling particularly uneasy about me, particularly insecure. So therefore I had to respond. Otherwise she’d be even more suspicious; she’d know I’d had someone else in the last few hours.
She raised a leg and placed her foot on my knee, hands on hips, wobbling slightly on her other leg, the classic pose, the dominant whore, except Kate was the antithesis of the whore. No reason. A girl with exactly the same looks as Kate could have been a whore, but not Kate. It was something other than looks; she was too sensitive, too wrapped up in herself, too much of a brooder, too self-aware, too self-conscious.
“So there,” she said, raising her leg even higher, pressing her silky foot into my chest and gently pushing me back on to the bed. The movement overbalanced her so that she had to let both her arms drop in order to support her as she bent over me, one knee on the bed. Her long black hair fell over her shoulders and tickled my face.
“So there,” she said again.
I stared up at her but instead of Kate all I could see was Eileen’s dead face.
Kate put her hands between my legs and felt me.
“Now that I’ve gone to all this trouble,” she said, “the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Let’s see how much difference it really makes.”
PLENDER
The lights went out at eleven forty-five. I gave them another hour. Cold wind drifted through the branches of the trees opposite Knott’s place. I shivered in sympathy and walked across the road and stood by the gate and looked at the house.
It really was very nice.
A bungalow, really, more than a house. But much more than a bungalow. New. Couldn’t have been up more than three years. Long and low with one upstairs room and plenty of fashionably rough surfaces and acres of floor to ceiling double-glazing. Soft lawns and neat shingle and rows of symmetrical rose bushes and plenty of nice private trellis work.
I had to admit it—the lad had done all right for himself. But he was going to do even better for me.
I opened the gate and walked up the drive. The plan of the house couldn’t have been more helpful for my purposes. The garage was at the top of the sloping drive, set apart from the rest of the house. And the room where the light had been, their bedroom, was at the opposite end of the house, round the side.
I tried the handle to the sliding garage door, turning it forward and back again. Not a sound. Well oiled, like the rest of the house. I turned it back again and gave it a gentle tug. It sighed softly but nothing more. Slowly I pushed it up on its rollers. It shudd
ered slightly but there was hardly a rattle. I stood still for a few minutes. Nothing from the house. I took out my torch and walked into the garage. I splashed the beam on the boot and took out my machinery.
A minute later it was open. The body was still there. Which was as I’d expected. I closed the lid very quietly.
I walked round to the side of the car and went to work again. When I’d finished I opened the door and released the hand brake and then I manoeuvred myself out and put my shoulder to the door jamb and began to push.
KNOTT
“You make me sick,” said my wife. “Sick. You disgust me.”
I lay on my back and stared into the blackness.
“You’re wrong,” I said.
“Shut up.”
“Wrong.”
“You don’t even respect me enough to admit it.”
“It’s not true.”
“Either that or you just haven’t got the guts.”
“I told you. I was tired.”
“You bloody liar. You’ve been screwing somebody.”
“It’s just that I’ve had a hard day.”
“Since when has screwing been hard for you?”
“It’s not true.”
“You must think I’m a bloody fool. Actually that’s the worst part; you still think I’m the stupid little fool you screwed into marrying you.”
“Leave it,” I said. “For Christ’s sake.”
“God, I really was a stupid little bitch. All starry-eyed at having my first lover. Imagining that it was going to be like that for the next eight hundred years.”
I said nothing.
“Well I soon learned, didn’t I? You were a good teacher. Practical. Start as we mean to go on sort of thing.”
I tried not to listen.
“Who was it anyway? Heather? Jean? Or was it the one with the . . .”
“Listen. I’ve told you. You’re wrong.”
She swung herself round to face me in the darkness and the next thing I knew she’d brought her clenched fist down on my face with all her force, hitting me in the eye. The darkness exploded into jagged brilliance and she hit me again, this time catching me on the jaw. I managed to get hold of her by her wrist and she struggled for a while until she went limp at the onset of the inevitable tears. I relaxed my grip and scrambled my fingers about on the surface of the bedside table and found a cigarette, then the table lighter. I clicked on the flame and the walls leapt forward briefly and then disappeared.
Kate’s sobbing finally subsided. There was silence for a while and then Kate flung herself out of bed and crashed through the darkness and out of the room. A few minutes later I could hear her making up the bed in the guest room. Then there was a click and some muffled rustling and then silence. I lay there for half an hour, listening, and at the end of it there was still silence. I sat up and got out of bed and went out of the room and listened at Kate’s door. It was slightly ajar and I could hear her breathing. She was asleep.
I went back into my bedroom and put on some clothes and went down the corridor towards the hall. I wasn’t intending to move Eileen now. It was too late. If I was seen then, there could be no reasonable explanation at a later date. I had to wait till the morning.
It was just that, during the last half hour, while I’d been lying on my back in the darkness, I’d been taken with an enormous desire to go down to the garage and open the boot and look at what I’d done.
PLENDER
It took me two hours to drive round the river. When I got close to Brumby I was tempted to stay on the main road and drive into town and do a tour round and out again. Instead I drove on to the narrow track that wound down the lee of the wolds towards the river and the quarry.
The Cortina lurched and shuddered down the rutted road and in front of me across the river I could see the vast complex of the city pegged out in the night by countless street lights. One of those lights was the light at the end of Peter Knott’s street and I wondered what he was doing, was he lying in bed sweating, waiting for the daylight to come, waiting for the moment when he could decently leave the house and get on with his plan, or had he been unable to wait, had he panicked and already rushed down to the garage, propelled by fear and sickness? I smiled. That would be nothing to the fear and sickness he’d feel when he opened the garage door.
I reached the entrance to the quarry and swung the car into the leafy entrance and crawled it along the narrow track. Elderberry branches snapped at the windscreen and scrabbled on the roof. I came to the end of the track and switched off the engine.
In front of me was the great white moonlit expanse of the quarry, its screes and hillocks undulating away into the darkness. I knew every slope, every hollow, every track. We’d come here almost every weekend when we were kids. The perfect playground, for the games we played. I looked upwards, slightly to the left, trying to make out the wood at the quarry’s rim. We used to play in there too.
Warm autumn sunshine flashed through the trees. Peter and I slowly crackled our way through the wood, not saying anything, just dawdling the morning away. I was quiet because I was happy and I was happy because Peter and I were on our own, away from his other friends and when he was away from them he was different, sometimes he seemed even as if he really liked me a lot.
After a while we came to the fallen tree trunk where we always stopped and sat for a while.
Nothing was said. I swung my legs, trying to dislodge a peeling piece of bark. Peter seemed wrapped up in his own thoughts. Eventually he slid his hand in his lumberjacket and pulled out a small rolled-up magazine.
“Male Horsfall in 3L gave me this,” he said, passing it to me. “Him and Johnno bought it on the school trip to Paris.”
I unrolled it and looked at the cover. It was called Paris Minuit. On the cover was a drawing of a woman bending over and looking over her shoulder. She was wearing a big hat and you could see up her skirt to her underwear. She was wearing black stockings and high heeled shoes. I opened the book and thumbed through it. There were photographs of women in their underwear, most of them in similar positions to the woman on the cover. Lots of them wearing hats and long black gloves, one even had a fur coat on. There were some jokes about women in their underwear as well. There was one where one girl was stretched out on the grass looking all puffed out with her knickers round her ankles and another girl who was dressed like a man standing next to a tree trunk carving a heart with an arrow through it and initials at the top and the bottom, below a number of other, similar hearts. There were stories, which judging from the accompanying drawings seemed to be about French gangsters beating up their girlfriends. I’d never seen anything like it before.
As I progressed through the book I began to feel hot and excited but with Peter sitting next to me I felt embarrassed at my feelings, in case I showed him how I felt. So when I’d finished I pushed the book back at him as though it hadn’t had any effect at all.
“What do you think of it?” said Peter.
“S’all right,” I said.
“Didn’t it give you the Horn?”
I shrugged.
“Did me,” said Peter, unbuttoning his trousers. “Look.”
I looked and blushed and sort of smiled.
“Let’s see yours, then,” he said.
“Now,” I said, as though it was unimportant.
“Didn’t you get one, then?”
“Yes.”
“Bet you didn’t. Bet you can’t get one yet.”
“I can.”
“Bet you can’t fetch.”
I didn’t say anything.
“I can,” said Peter. “I can shoot three feet. Even Glegger in 4M can’t shoot that far.”
“How do you know?”
“How do I know?” he said scornfully. “They have a Wanking Club behind the pavilion, fourth formers. Haven
’t you seen them?”
I shook my head.
“Every dinnertime,” he said. “They have competitions. Sometimes Beryl Marshbanks and Janet Smith do it for them.”
I was shocked and I was excited. Beryl Marshbanks and Janet Smith.
“I’m off to do it now,” said Peter. “Are you?”
I shrugged again and shifted my position on the log.
“You can’t, can you?”
“Yes.”
“Show us, then.”
I had no choice. I unbuttoned my trousers. He looked at me. I was still soft.
“Go on, then.”
I began to do it. Peter sniggered.
“Is that how you do it?”
I blushed even more deeply and I began to feel sick.
“No wonder you can’t fetch,” he said. “Look. Watch me.”
I watched him and then started again.
“You’re useless,” he said.
He leant over and pushed my hand away and took hold of me and began to do it. I didn’t dare try and stop him in case he told his friends I was useless.
Then a feeling started that I’d never had before. As he kept doing it we slid off the log, down on to the crisp leaves. He put his arm round my shoulders and our heads banged together. The feeling grew and grew and then when I thought it couldn’t get any better it did. And then it was over, but nothing happened to show Peter that it was over.
Immediately I felt sicker and dirtier than I’d ever felt in my life.
“Now you’ve got to do it to me,” he said.
KNOTT
I stood by the garage door and grasped the handle. A cloud passed from the face of the moon and suddenly my shadow appeared on the garage door and the night was almost as clear as day. Then I knew I wasn’t going to be able to turn the handle.
I swung round and lurched away from the garage, down the gravel drive towards the gate, moaning and crying as I went. The faint wind rushed into my ears and flung my noise and my tears out behind me. When I reached the gate I grasped the handles and sank to my knees and pressed my wet face against the woodwork.