Chain Reaction

by Gillian White

  He sat down between two boulders overlooking the lake. Thinking. The wind rippled the water below and sent shivers all the way down his spine as if the two were connected. The soft ground squelched and water bubbled up over his boots. He heard her puffing and groaning beside him as she started to sit down. He said nothing, just looked away over the water pretending that he was all on his own.

  He wondered what her skin felt like and realised she would let him find out if he wanted. She would let him do anything he wanted, she wouldn’t stop him. He was surprised and curious when he felt his erection, that sharp ache between his thighs and his breath caught in his chest.

  He was getting excited. It was daft, but he had to speak. ‘I could kiss you if I wanted.’

  She turned her face upwards and moved with her lips towards him. She puckered her newly painted mouth and edged her great body closer, abandoning all decency, heavy, sprawling and available. With a look of half-frightened desperation he lunged forward and kissed her, and then he was kissing her seriously and hard, his tongue parting her lips, his chest and his hips straining against her.

  She was harder bodied than he’d imagined, and better muscled too.

  Janice Plunket made a start. She began to take off her clothes. She took off her knickers and her old woman’s bra and she was eventually lying there like a pink blancmange in that kind of broken Christmas-tree shape; she was lying there with her legs apart, ready for him.

  Now he stared at her with confusion. Janice Plunket… why? Half of him wanted to laugh but the other half felt sad for her lying there, waiting for him, and he had started it all off with his casual remarks. He was responsible for this. Her boobs were huge and dangly and he touched her flanks and her hips, moving his hand up her thighs and parting the warmth and wetness there. Janice thrust up from the ground, ready and willing, offering him all she’d got. Raw feelings of power engulfed him. Ashamed of his feelings, he thought this must be what incest felt like, when you knew you shouldn’t, when you knew what other people would say. She allowed him to touch her all over her body and inspect every part of it, something he had wanted to do with lots of the girls he screwed but had felt silly about asking.

  He did not feel the sword of destiny poised over his life. He had no premonition that this was an action he was going to remember for ever. He no longer felt disgust or guilt or a sense of immorality. Jody felt none of these things.

  Not then.

  Because she was a girl and he was a boy.

  He climbed on top of her, grasping her hard, mumbling, whispering, ‘Are you sure?’

  It didn’t take long and he rolled off her abruptly, gradually easing himself further away, not wanting to stay with her or be part of her any longer. Feelings of guilt began to return, as if he had done something vaguely bad, and he put them down to her being different. He was suddenly overcome with the urge to cry, to have a shower, but Jody often felt this way after sex. He stood up, arms dangling uselessly at his side, unsure what to do next. Still on the ground and naked, not even attempting to cover her nakedness, Janice stared up at him blankly but neither of them spoke a word as he zipped up his jeans and left her, resolutely starting off up the hill.

  She wanted more but he couldn’t give it. She wanted him to stay and love her but he didn’t know how.

  He called out a vague, ‘Come on,’ but she didn’t answer and he wanted, very badly, to leave her. ‘Come on, Janice, or I’ll leave you behind and you’ll have to walk!’

  RAPE.

  It’s not fair! It did not occur to Jody that Janice would be unable to find her way home. Any crime there was, he considers angrily, lay in that disgusted rejection and now look—here he is, confused and cold, and Mum and Dad are doing exactly the same thing to him.

  NINE

  The Grange, Dunsop, Nr Clitheroe, Lancs

  IT DOESN’T SEEM THAT long ago, certainly not six years. Together they watched the fall of Thatcher with a morbid fascination, thrilling to the horror of every toe-curling moment, the sense of a gang of powerful men meeting in posh London Squares, an icon brought low by secret revolution, an institution ground underfoot when it became too downright embarrassing for its own good.

  Total mortification. If only the woman would acknowledge defeat, just go away and lick her wounds. If only she would stop fighting.

  And Belle would have liked to remind Jacy of that when the messages started to seep through. His buddy and his agent, Curt Wendel, came to the hotel for a chat and Jacy, so totally self-absorbed, didn’t get the message, but straight away Belle noticed the change in the fat man’s attitude.

  ‘Trouble,’ wheezed Curt, coughing, following the route of his long cigar and taking the leather swing chair, unconsciously placing himself on a higher level than the group members who were sprawling over the sofa and chairs in the altogether, re-playing the video of the gig last night.

  Jip the drummer was still in the clinic, right out of his head, they said on the phone. So that left five plus Belle; you couldn’t count the groupies who came and went to order like the bottles of champagne in the ice buckets.

  ‘Shuddup and have a drink,’ slurred Rab, the keyboard player, still guzzling beer, his boozed eyes sliding back to the giant screen on the wall. ‘Gedda look at this.’

  But contrary to tradition Curt declined the drink and only Belle bothered to notice, and the tired look he had, like a pair of frameless shades round his gimlet eyes.

  Continuing with the video, they came to the hilarious part where Jacy fell off the stage to the joy of the crowd and the guys carried on without him, Deek stepping forward and taking his place at the microphone, plugging in his own guitar. The pace of the thing took off from that moment. The very ground of the Superbowl began to shake.

  Something was wrong. Curt wasn’t bothering to watch. He concentrated on his ash instead, rolling it round the glass ashtray, prodding it till it broke. You could tell where you were in the film because of the screaming punters. ‘You behaved like an arsehole last night, Jacy. You could’ve scuppered the whole darn thing.’

  ‘Get lost, Curt.’ And Jacy, his sleek black hair pulled back into a pony tail, reached out a lazy hand to pat the kid asleep on the floor below him. He moved like a diffident prince. On his stomach were balanced french fries and a tub of coleslaw. Belle stayed in the background; with Jacy it was a choice between having something or nothing. She had no desire to be pissed or high like the others. While they were touring the States Belle made sure to pay for herself, sometimes earning thousands of dollars for a day’s work, just posing for photographs. She sometimes acted as social worker to the runaways, the waifs and strays and under-age kids who prised themselves into their idols’ beds. Some were upset, broken-hearted to find themselves on the pavement in the morning along with the trash; some even tearfully begged her for reasons.

  She sipped a small glass of cognac and watched, her blue eyes passing over those in the room. She wished she could care less for him, wished she could simply dismiss Jacy from her mind and get on with her own life. Her friends called her crazy. But she was used to living like this by now, all the upheavals, physical and emotional. If she’d left him he wouldn’t have cared.

  ‘You could’ve got yourself killed. Torn to pieces by the mob. What is it you want, boy, immortality?’

  Jacy was dangerously tired as usual. Belle was scared for him. He lived in another world these days, he thought he was invincible and that his fame and fortune would last for ever no matter what he did. But recently his outlandish behaviour was causing all sorts of problems. He wasn’t even amusing although he believed that he was, making an ass of himself on talk shows, pretending to drop off to sleep and last time pissing at the camera. People were getting cheesed off with it. He’d made it, for Christsake, he didn’t need to do that kind of shit any more. People were saying he’d lost it. Even the real, dedicated fans, Belle sensed a change in their passion; it had sour edges about it now like cream beginning to turn. The group’s last album
never made it past six in the charts, unheard of for Sugarshack and Jacy just laughed when he discovered Deek had been tempted by an offer from Elektra to do an informal session at the studios as lead singer. Jacy’s name didn’t feature. Rumours had it they’d been advised to dump him.

  He would not discuss his work with anyone, he refused adamantly to do so. The press had called him a genius and he’d taken that to heart years ago. Nobody tells a genius what to do. Jacy was immensely powerful and recklessly arrogant. Composer and lead singer, yeah, Jacy was up there flashing in all the bright lights with the gods.

  Like lottery winners and film stars Jacy had lost his ability to judge other people, surrounding himself with scroungers and flatterers who were clearly only after what they could get. He was into compulsive spending. A crack-head now, like the rest of them, it was up to Belle to protect him; he’d never have lasted so long without her to bail him out of scrape after scrape. In the last small disaster Jacy had flown over the heads of his financial advisers as usual and allowed his name to be used by some textile company in exchange for a massive sum. They were later revealed to be part of an unscrupulous child-slave racket, and to keep his name out of the limelight cost him thousands. Belle hung on in there, reserved and careful, answering his calls when he was in no condition to do so, reassuring him always by making out she was softer and simpler than she was.

  Jacy was a gambler, too. He loved the horses and the roulette tables.

  And so it went on… and on… He studiously ignored all the warnings.

  Curt snapped his fingers and said, ‘We’ve got to talk, Jacy.’

  But Jacy waved a disinterested hand.

  ‘And I mean soon, son.’

  ‘Don’t call me son, Fatman, I don’t need this hassle.’

  Success and acclaim were not enough for him any more. Spoiled rotten, it seemed that Jacy needed to push to the outer limits in order to feel anything at all. He ignored Curt altogether, still believing the guy wouldn’t dare upset the lead singer of Sugarshack. No matter how big or influential, no agency could risk losing a hot property like them.

  Curt groaned. Knowing otherwise.

  When Belle tried to warn Jacy, he would curse and swear and glare at her. He was looking awful these days; the pace of life was telling on his beauty. ‘And you, don’t be so judgmental. Get a life, why don’t you? The earth could blow up tomorrow; we could all die on the nearest freeway.’

  It featured in a magazine and Belle fell in love with it at once.

  It was Belle who persuaded him to buy the Grange. Property prices were still rising and it seemed you couldn’t go wrong with an investment like that. She loved the permanent look of the place, the sunny rooms and the elegance. She could see it filled with baking smells, children, dogs, everybody home. Dream on. Carefully, as only she could, she steered Jacy away from the ranch in Texas, the partnership in the Vegas casino, the Hydro complex in California and the cable station in Virginia.

  Mostly she just listened to him with a passionate, honed attention and gave him whatever he seemed to want. He had got to thinking she would put up with anything regardless. But this time she ventured much further, into what could have been dangerous waters. She broached the subject with some apprehension. ‘What you really need is a base, somewhere you could go to recharge your batteries every so often, somewhere which is just yours and yours alone.’

  ‘Stables…’

  Belle nodded wearily but she must follow his lead. ‘Well yes, stables certainly, if that’s what you think.’

  ‘Honey, I could turn the place into the best goddamn racing stables…’

  ‘Of course you could, Jacy. Of course you could.’

  ‘I could hire interior decorators, dump most of the crap.’

  It took time, but Belle was quietly persistent and finally got him back home for a week and it wasn’t long after that that the bid for the Grange was accepted and of course the press, the local press in particular, were in their element, interviewing all the old crusties who had lived around Dunsop all their lives.

  Even in those days Belle rarely read the papers and in this particular case the quotes were so predictable as they clicked and clacked their sour disapproval:

  ‘It’ll be AIDS next, mark my words.’

  ‘It’s all those raves that worry me.’

  ‘The drugs, think of the effect of those drugs on our local youngsters.’

  ‘How sad that a grand house like the Grange has ended up in such circumstances. He’ll ruin it, a man like that. He will ruin that poor house.’

  ‘This young man does not sound like a suitable addition to our little community. Dunsop has always been such a quiet, respectable place.’

  The locals decided to protest, led by a neighbour, Mrs Julia Farquhar—a tall, tweedy northern woman with fierce bosoms and a ferret’s face who made dainty sandwiches and put out bowls of nuts for the meetings. A petition bearing 500 names was handed in to the Council but what could they do? The Grange was on the open market. Preventing a pop star from making his home there was way beyond their remit.

  Belle found it all rather amusing, but to her surprise Jacy was furious. How dare they? It made him all the more determined to fulfil the locals’ every fear, if he could.

  He did. He surpassed himself. Because he was so hurt.

  And now, after six dreadful years here, it is up to Belle to persuade Jacy to move again.

  ‘So you are happy to let me phone the agents with a firm offer this afternoon?’

  ‘Suit yourself…’ he started to say.

  ‘Now I don’t want you coming on strong afterwards and backing out and saying you knew nothing about it and it was all my idea.’

  Jacy stares at her warily. The silence between them stretches taut and hums like a live wire. ‘But it is your idea, Belle, nothing to do with me.’

  She is only just back from the launderette, a good six miles there and back, biting her lips all the way in case the bright red Jeep, the only vehicle they have left, failed to get her there and back, and in no mood to put up with his sulks. Of course there is a large industrial machine in the basement but that doesn’t work and nobody seems to be willing to mend it. It is obsolete, apparently, gone out of production since Jacy bought it. And what’s he been doing while she’s been away? There is one simple answer to that—nothing! Or drinking wine.

  Belle turns on Jacy, the golden ringlets piled up on her head bobbing about with righteous rage. Before she speaks she makes an attempt to control her voice. She’d love to slap that smirk off his face because there’s nothing that suits Jacy more these days than riling Belle, and she knows it.

  ‘You’re a middle-aged man, dammit, going grey, with the start of a paunch and you behave like a bloody great spoilt kid and wonder why everyone laughs at you…’

  ‘You’re sick.’

  But Belle can’t stop. She has reached breaking point. ‘There’s not a madly excited market out there ready to pay the kinds of prices you’re expecting, dickhead. We’ll be lucky if this solicitor guy follows through on behalf of his mysterious clients who seem so interested in this…’

  ‘I thought you understood my needs.’

  Her voice, so carefully modulated for so long, rises to a manic scream. ‘Your needs, Jacy! Your boring needs! Don’t talk to me about your needs, I’m up to here with them, I’ve had years of them and they’re boring, BORING, BORING! I am sick of hearing you pouring out your anguish, blaming everyone else for your own miserable plight, waiting for some belated apology from a world that isn’t even out there any more! You’re a broken has-been, Jacy. Since you, life has moved on!’

  ‘For God’s sake, Belle.’ His voice is thick and urgent and his mouth twists in a sour grimace.

  All she ever wanted to do was get married and live happily ever after. Is that too much to ask? She could have had anyone and yet she hung around waiting for this pitiful bastard. All those years. Belle begins to shake, like her voice, hardly coherent. ‘OK, you we
nt to all the great parties and head waiters called you by name. Money grew on trees, then—you only had to click your fingers and women prostrated themselves at your feet. But you messed up, didn’t you, Jacy, and how! And it’s a real downer. Real life is hell, it’s bloody hell for most of us but we don’t just sit on our arses boozing ourselves to death, you gutless bastard!’

  ‘You hysterical slag! Get out!’

  ‘Make me!’

  He has to silence her somehow, or break down at her feet and cry. Short and quick, Jacy charges forwards and grabs hold of her shoulders hard so her neck whips back. His eyes are bulging, his lips drawn thin and white when he slaps her across the face with the bony back of his hand. She takes the full force of the blow and falls against the wall. Belle tastes blood. Disbelief, fear and anger chase each other across her face; she cannot believe he is capable of this! She crouches down on the floor, crawling crab-like towards the door.

  ‘Get out, you whore! Before I kill you!’

  ‘You’re mad!’ she whispers so he can only just hear her. ‘My God, Jacy, you have finally lost your mind completely!’

  With his eyes fixed firmly on her he approaches maliciously once again and his grin is horrible. Reduced to all fours now, Belle scuttles across the slippery wooden floor in the hall. His voice is a snarl between his teeth. ‘If it hadn’t been for you…’

  ‘For me?’ Even in her red-hot pain Belle can feel astonishment. She can hardly recognise his face any more it is so transfixed with rage. ‘For me?’

  ‘Yes—you! You resented the fact that I was the star, making millions while all you could do was strip in sordid basements for grubby magazines.’

  ‘But Jacy…’

  ‘Oh, don’t think I didn’t know!’ He hates to hurt her, he hates to hurt her. He shakes his head like an animal attacked, as if attempting to clear some buzzing sounds from his ears. ‘Don’t think I wasn’t aware of your nasty little game! Screwing with everyone else, you bitch! Between you all you pulled me down, you deliberately conspired to bring me to this!’