Access Road

by Gee, Maurice

  White pages. Blue lines. A fat biro with the name of Cheryl’s firm printed on the barrel. These and recent memory – recent, although more than a week has passed – jostle together to form a circle. There’s no way out. I can move my hand, I can move my thoughts and lift myself out of the bed, my swampy bed, that I’ve lain in for eight days. Monday makes a new beginning. I’ll close the gates on Access Road.

  I sit at my desk, where Dickie brings me a cup of tea. He frowns to see me writing. I say, ‘Don’t stop me, Dickie. This is for you. When I’m finished I’ll show you everything I’ve written. Now be a dear and go away.’

  He brings me a rose to help me on my way. It’s out of season, a crippled rose, but still beautiful. I look into it deeply. Have you ever noticed that when you peer at something, look long and longer, the ground falls away from under your feet and you can’t tell whether you’re rising or falling? Rising, falling, here or there …

  A red rose, especially a crippled one, looks like blood.

  Now then. On Saturday afternoon eight days ago I was drinking a cup of tea, eating an almond biscuit, reading Faro’s Daughter for forgetfulness, and admiring Deborah Grantham so much – ‘chestnut hair glowing in the candlelight’ – that I made little purring sounds of delight as I turned the pages … when the phone rang.

  ‘Bother,’ I said, then ran to it, out of Deborah’s world into mine, where consequences have no soft edges.

  ‘Hello,’ I said.

  ‘Rowan, is that you?’ Clyde Buckley said.

  I lost control of my bladder – just a squirt – and made a sound of terror that scurried down the wire like a rat.

  ‘Rowan?’ he said. ‘It’s Clyde Buckley here. Look, I’m round at Lionel’s place and he’s not very well. I think he’s passed out. I’ve rung for an ambulance but I think you should get here. This is family stuff and I’ll just be in the way.’

  ‘Roly,’ I gasped. ‘Is Roly there?’

  ‘No, he’s not. I suppose he’s gone shopping. It’s only me. Old Lionel, he looks pretty bad. Can you come?’

  ‘What hospital? Where will they take him?’

  ‘I don’t know. Depends what’s wrong with him, I suppose. If it’s heart … You’d better get here.’

  ‘Yes, I’m coming.’

  He was saying ‘Good’ as I hung up. I had no idea what to do next. Dickie was at his club, where he was introducing Tom Quinney. They were due back mid-afternoon – Dickie is vague about time where the club is concerned – and Cheryl was also coming in. I should have telephoned him but I could not think straight. I scrawled a note: ‘Clyde Buckley rang. Lionel is ill. Please come. R.’ Then I ran into three rooms before I found the car keys where Dickie had left them on the bedside table. I drove to Loomis faster than I’ve ever driven before and was lucky not to have an accident. (The speed camera at Avondale picked me up: I’ve got a ticket.)

  In Access Road I crossed the stream in its concrete bed without a thought of Elizabeth Gillies. Now, though, I wonder if she’s reduced to bones or if the swamp has preserved her like the bog people Dickie and I saw in Denmark. I came across a poem about them several years ago – can’t remember who wrote it. There’s one line, ‘the mild pods of his eyelids’, that stayed in my mind, and when I think of her, Elizabeth Gillies, it’s attached and saves her from Clyde Buckley for a moment – mild pods – before I remember that Buckley’s hands tightened round her throat like the cord that strangled Tollund man.

  I’m trying not to get to him, Clyde Buckley. But here’s Access Road. Lionel’s house, my house.

  There was no VW at the gate. I pulled up and sat for a moment, limp with relief: the ambulance had come, Lionel was safe, Buckley was gone. Then I hurried up the path, thinking Roly might be home from shopping.

  ‘Roly,’ I cried at the back door.

  The house went tick tick like a bomb. I stood with my hand on the door-frame, looking into its ruined insides. It was – oh, give me a word – archaeological. I can, if I wish to, study it for the rest of my life; but at that moment, eight days ago, as I leaned into the kitchen, it flashed like an image on a screen, and the next image was Lionel’s bedroom (how did I get there?); then the bed, with Lionel sleeping open-mouthed; then his face close up and Lionel dead. My brother dead.

  I leaned over him. His wide eyes were fixed neither far off nor near, nor were they looking within. His lips were drawn back and his dry teeth gleamed.

  I must have made an exclamation of shock. I have the memory of an echoless sound in the room.

  Then Clyde Buckley said, ‘Poor old Lionel, eh?’

  He was standing between the wardrobe and the door. At first he was a man shape, hollowed out. Then he took substance: a flannel-shirted belly, a toothy face. He raised an arm and pushed the door, which went halfway (it jams, Lionel’s door, it never closes). The sound it made on the floor was like a rasping cough.

  Clyde Buckley said, ‘It’s good to see you, Rowan, but I miss your pretty hair.’

  I whispered, ‘I’ll scream.’ No rush for the door, no anger about Lionel; nothing but two useless words.

  He replied by taking three steps and grasping my shoulder like a ball. His fingers dug underneath the bones. ‘No you won’t, Rowan, or I’ll hurt you real bad.’

  ‘What …?’ I managed to say; and then, half crying with pain, ‘What do you want?’

  With looser hands, one on each shoulder, long fingers at the back, thumbs in front, he engineered me round, turned me like a craneload, and sat me on the bed, where Lionel’s hip dug into my buttocks.

  ‘But I don’t want to do that. I like you too much.’ He let my shoulders go.

  My hand, bracing me, came down on Lionel’s stomach and I pulled it away with a little screech.

  ‘He can’t hurt you. Lionel’s dead, the poor old bugger,’ Clyde said.

  ‘You did it. You killed him,’ I said.

  ‘Lionel broke his promise. We shook hands on it years ago.’

  ‘That girl. That girl you killed …’

  ‘Yeah, he told you, the silly bugger. I knew that. Old Lionel and me had a talk.’ One of his hands clamped my jaw, the other tapped the bridge of my nose. ‘See, if you cover someone’s mouth and squeeze his nose with your other hand … Can’t talk hard enough after that. All your secrets, eh? Don’t jump around. I’d never do it to you.’

  ‘Let me go.’

  ‘Sure. Sure. See? I wouldn’t hurt you.’

  I kicked myself backwards over Lionel, but by the time I’d done it Clyde had leaned across the bed. He put his hands on me and held me flat.

  ‘Hey, that’s nice, I’ve got you lying down.’

  ‘Don’t you touch me. Don’t you dare.’

  ‘No, I won’t. I had my look a long time ago. Sixpenceworth. Remember that?’

  ‘You killed him, didn’t you? You killed Lionel.’

  ‘Well, I couldn’t let him talk, you can see that. What I’ve got is, you could say, a strong instinct for self-preservation. When it comes down to it –’ he tapped his chest ‘– me first.’

  ‘How? How did you do it?’

  ‘Don’t worry, it didn’t hurt. I wouldn’t make old Lionel suffer. We were mates. Which he forgot, but never mind. I just put a pillow on his face.’

  ‘Smothered him?’

  ‘I guess you could say.’ He pulled me back, half across Lionel, and sat on the bed, jamming his hip against my side. ‘It’s a pretty quick way.’

  ‘And now you’re going to do it to me.’

  Clyde Buckley shook his head. ‘It’ll be quick. I don’t go in for hurting people.’

  ‘You hurt those girls.’

  ‘Sure, a bit. I was pretty young then and I thought … Don’t know what I thought. But sorry, Rowan, we can’t talk any more because old Roly might come home. I’ve got to shut him up as well. He’s a tough little sod.’

  ‘You don’t – Roly doesn’t know. And I won’t tell. I won’t. I promise, Clyde …’

  I confess to pleading. An
yone would plead. But when he reached to free the pillow from under Lionel’s head, I grabbed his arm and bit his hand. He shook me off the way you’d shake a puppy, and held me down.

  ‘They’ll get you for this. They’ll see it’s murder.’

  ‘No, Rowan, there’s going to be a fire. The way this place will go up, it’s better than Guy Fawkes.’

  ‘But three of us …’

  ‘They’ll think it was a suicide pact. Brothers and their sister, eh, all kind of screwy.’

  ‘They’ll see we’re suffocated.’

  ‘Charred corpses, Rowan. No evidence.’

  He stood and pushed me flat, one hand clamping my throat, the other sliding the pillow out, which turned Lionel’s head and made me think he was alive. I thrashed my legs. One of my shoes went flying and banged the wall. I looped my arm around Clyde Buckley’s elbow, trying to pull his hand from my throat – and suddenly it left me, and the pillow hesitated, drooping its ears each side of my face. Clyde Buckley half turned, half rose from his crouch, swivelled his head and seemed to listen with his side-twisted mouth.

  ‘Shit,’ he said.

  Would I have thought of Dickie as I died? Probably not. I don’t think you do. Nor did I think of him arriving in time to stop Clyde Buckley; but now, reconstructing, I give myself licence to put things in – and I knew in my fibres that Dickie would come. It’s of a piece with our lives. I heard feet running on the path. Clyde Buckley made a wolfish bark. His head slewed towards me with red movements in his eyes. He swung his arm and caught me with a back-handed blow on the side of my head, stunning me; so there are things I never saw and I have to sit still and collect myself, reconstruct what Dickie and Roly have told me, put it all together and try not to invent …

  Tom Quinney enjoyed his time at the club but wanted to be at our house when Cheryl arrived. He and Dickie ambled down the street and missed me driving away by a minute or two. Tom’s car was parked at our gate and he fingered the scrape I’d made on his rear mudguard as I left. Dickie was puzzled by the empty garage and open front door. He found my note in our message place, the corner shelf on the landing where he’d bounced into the cactus garden. After reading it he pushed it at Tom, who, I have to say, showed none of the instincts of a policeman. Dickie wasted no time arguing. He borrowed Tom’s car and set off for Access Road. Tom and Cheryl would follow in Cheryl’s car.

  So we drove, my husband and I, with a gap of five minutes between us, and I can’t understand why the speed camera that picked me up didn’t get him. This is what Dickie knew: Clyde Buckley was going to kill me unless he got to Loomis in time. (‘By God, he’s going to murder her,’ he said to Tom, knowledge that came like a voice counting off a fact, and Tom replied, ‘Hey, come on, he’s an old man.’ He gave Dickie his keys reluctantly – I mustn’t let him or Cheryl ever read this.)

  In the hollow in Access Road, Dickie passed Roly with a shopping bag in each hand. He pulled up behind our car, shunting it a little, and hurried up the path in his limping run – which I recognised the instant before Clyde Buckley struck me on the temple. Dickie reached the back door and paused. The house – I see it with his eyes – was a graveyard of dead furniture and light bulbs without shades. It made no sound and nothing moved.

  ‘Rowan,’ he called. ‘Boatie.’

  There was a slipping movement like a subsidence under the piles, and a contraction, a closing in – I think that’s what you mean, Dickie – and I can only put it down to Clyde Buckley stepping to the bedroom door and pulling his readiness around him. A floorboard betrayed him with a BB-gun crack. Dickie moved across the kitchen to the living-room door. ‘Boatie, you there?’ – which I heard from a far distant place.

  Clyde Buckley stepped into the red and green light. He pointed at the bedroom. ‘She’s having a lie-down.’

  ‘What?’ Dickie said, taking a step.

  ‘Snoozing like a baby,’ Buckley said.

  He must have expected Dickie to rush past him. It would have been easy then to grab him from behind. But Dickie, nearly an All Black, thinks on his feet. He walked across the room on the slippery papers and eaten carpet, then changed direction – I’ve seen him do it on the field – and shoulder-charged Buckley – ‘Got him in the belly where he’s soft’ – tumbling him across a nest of tables by the front door, where his head smashed two glass panels out of their frames. For a moment he lay helpless, with his baseball cap tipped across his face.

  ‘I should have grabbed one of those tables and bashed him,’ Dickie says. But he heard me in the silence, whimpering, and ran into the bedroom instead. Blind, dizzy, uncomprehending, I lay across Lionel. Dickie ran to the bedside. He lifted me, then saw what lay underneath. ‘I nearly screamed,’ he says. Blood from my face had dripped into Lionel’s eyes. Dickie thought Buckley had gouged them out, and he pulled me like a grain sack over the body on to the floor, thinking only: Get away. Out of the house. He’d forgotten Buckley, who had freed himself from the smashed door and fallen tables. He met Dickie dragging me backwards into the living room and circled one thick arm around his throat, raising at the same time a banshee scream (banshee is feminine but I’ll leave it in).

  Dickie let me go and Buckley, shaking him left and right, pulled him to the centre of the living room. I crawled back to the bed and jerked the pull-rope of Roly’s bell, which shows that I had kept a fragment of my wits. Then a thumping of heels on the floor turned me back to the living room. I saw what was happening as though through smeary glass – Buckley holding Dickie in a vice, forearm squeezing his throat, squeezing out his life. I got to my feet, and fell; crawled back through the bedroom and over the living-room carpet (felt its texture). I nipped Buckley by his trouser leg. He kicked me aside. At the same time Dickie managed to lift one foot on to the fireplace. He made a push, which threw Buckley off balance. He came down over me, his legs across my chest, with Dickie angled to one side.

  We must have made a strange sight for Roly when he came in. Dickie and Buckley are almost eighty and I’m close behind, and there we lay like children wrestling on the floor. Hearing Buckley’s scream – a kind of ululation – Roly had stopped halfway up the path. When the bell rang, he dropped his bags. He came through the door in time to see Buckley raise his leg and shunt me away, then straddle Dickie and try to dig his thumbs into his throat. Dickie got his arms up, he tangled hands with Buckley; and Buckley’s, he says, were slabs of wood, with fingers that had an extra joint. He admits that he was done for: Buckley would have throttled him in another minute.

  Roly saw it. He turned to the hearth where a loose brick from the fire surround lay in the grate. He picked it up two-handed and brought it down on the back of Buckley’s head. Buckley fell forward and lay with his chest on Dickie’s face. He made some grunting noises – words he could not speak. Then slowly, slowly, he levered himself to his knees, gained his feet and walked out of the house.

  Roly let him go. He knelt beside me.

  I whispered, ‘Lionel’s dead.’

  Dickie came towards me on his knees.

  ‘Lionel’s dead,’ I said.

  ‘I know, Boatie,’ Dickie said. ‘But you’re OK.’ Then he said, ‘Where’d he go?’ and climbed to his feet.

  Banging into one wall, then the other, he followed Buckley out of the house. He says his only thought was that Buckley had gone to find a weapon.

  He found him standing on the back lawn, staring into his cupped hands. His hair was black with blood, and he swayed forwards and back. Dickie ran at him – I mustn’t say ‘ran’, all our movements were at snail’s pace – and tackled him round the waist. They fell to the ground and lay side by side, Buckley on his face as though cropping the grass and Dickie looking at the sky, panting for breath.

  Roly went into Lionel’s bedroom and came out after a moment, pulling the door behind him until it rasped. He swept rubbish from the sofa and helped me lie down. Outside, he lifted Dickie and helped him in. He sat him on the floor beside the sofa so my arm lay over his chest.
Then he rang for an ambulance and the police.

  sixteen

  It’s taken me a long time to write that. I’ve crossed out all sorts of stuff, like the rope of saliva hanging from Buckley’s mouth and – well, I’ve crossed it out. Things about Lionel. And Dickie fighting like James Bond. No need for it.

  I had my stitches out yesterday. I’ll have a scar running along my cheekbone. My bouts of nausea are over, but I must be careful not to get any more bangs on the head. A yellow face for me, faded from purple; and a yellow throat for Dickie, and a croaky voice. He has bruises on his arms and chest and back. It’s a good thing we’ve both been on calcium supplements for the last few years, and eating the acidophilus Dickie loathes, or our bones would have snapped like kindling wood.

  Clyde Buckley is on life support. Roly’s blow broke his skull and pushed edges of bone into his parietal and occipital lobes. He kept a thread of consciousness that drew him out of the house and across the lawn towards the back of the section, where a right of way passes the Catholic school. Buckley had his beetle car parked beyond the gates.

  So far no one has claimed him. Perhaps there are no Buckleys left. There’s no one to say that his life support should be switched off. The doctors will decide. I hope it’s soon, for everyone’s sake.

  We had Roly with us until the police let him move back into Access Road. I’m not sure Lionel left a will, but one way or the other Dickie and I will make sure Roly gets the house. When I mentioned it, he said, ‘But half of it’s yours.’

  ‘We don’t need it,’ I said. ‘We’ll do it up for you. New paint and a new roof, all that stuff.’

  ‘No, no –’

  ‘Yes, Roly. Dickie and I are millionaires.’

  ‘Are you? Good God.’ He retains a 1930s view of the world and doesn’t understand that little millionaires like us are a penny each.

  He’s back in his garden and clearing out truckloads of junk from the house. Dickie and I will drive over when we’re ready and tell him how we think things should be done. Just about everything new, I suppose: wallboard and ceilings, wiring and plumbing and piles. No blue paint on the outside walls, I’ll insist on that. And the rose window must stay, even though it threw its light on Clyde Buckley.