by Paul Magrs
Neither of us were great fans of Rosie Twist, but we end up going to the memorial event anyway.
‘It’s just the way things are, here in town,’ Effie says when she calls for me, early Friday evening. ‘If we didn’t go, tongues would certainly wag and, given the mysterious circumstances of that idiot’s death, we don’t want that.’
Once more I bow to Effie’s wisdom and throw on a light cardy.
When we get there we realise that it’s a bigger event than we expected, with some kind of makeshift stage set up on the grass outside the Christmas Hotel, and folding chairs laid out in neat rows. Most of these are already occupied by the great and the good. There are also a great many pensioners from the Christmas Hotel, wearing party hats. I don’t think they even know why they are there. We spot Sheila Manchu floating about in a kaftan-type affair, being treated like some kind of celebrity. She’s there with Robert in his leather flying jacket. He looks like her minder and my heart gives a swift pang of jealousy as we all kiss each other hello.
‘I’m here, much as I hate to attend one of Mrs Claus’s dos,’ Sheila whispers. In the open air and in public, she is a much quieter, more demure person than you would think. She looks insubstantial, somehow, like an old photographic negative that could fade under the strong sunlight. She grasps Effie’s skinny arm. ‘Do you think it could be Mrs Claus writing the letters? Do you? I do. I know everyone says she’s had one herself, but I think she’s bluffing. There’s only her who could do such a thing. Who would know so much . . .’
Robert tries to shush her as a small band on the podium starts to play a soothing medley of golden oldies. This is our signal to take up our places. A troop of elves are marching out of the hotel and bringing with them the gargantuan Mrs Claus in her motorised chair. This is a new chair she’s got, bedecked with holly and ivy. She is wreathed in smiles. She bestows upon us all a ghastly, benevolent grin as the elves accompany her over the road and on to the grass and, at last, up on to the podium. We poor saps are left to applaud her stately progress. Then someone is tugging at my cardigan from behind. I turn and there’s Henry Cleavis. He has squashed himself into the row behind, between two old dears in paper party hats, who are singing along to the memorial medley.
‘Oh, hello,’ I say, sounding less than delighted to see him. He picks up on this immediately.
‘Look, are we going to fall out?’ he barks. ‘Over this Jessie business? I’d rather um. I’d rather not, Brenda. Seems a damn silly thing to fight over.’
I glare at him, and so does Effie, craning round to look at him. ‘Have some respect,’ she hisses. ‘This is a memorial service.’
Cleavis winces. The two old women either side are singing along to ‘Una Paloma Blanca’. I wonder if these songs were all favourites of Rosie Twist’s and, if so, how Mrs Claus knows that.
‘Have you found Jessie?’ I ask Henry. I give him the once-over and imagine that the pockets, sleeves and hidden compartments of his three-piece worsted suit are bulging with what must be his knives and guns and whatnots. It can’t be all that easy to walk about the place all tooled up like that.
‘No luck yet,’ he says grimly. ‘But I’m not giving up, Brenda. She needs to be put an end to. Mercifully.’
I roll my eyes.
‘Don’t look at me like that,’ he snaps, pulling on his silvery moustache. ‘I’m only doing my duty. You remember. That’s what I always do.’
Now this really infuriates me. The music is coming to a gentle climax and the crowd is clapping and purring its approval and I am yelling at Henry: ‘It might be old hat for you, Henry, but as it happens, my memory’s not as good as yours. So I’m very sorry if I’m bothering you.’ And I turn away abruptly, pulling my cardigan tight around me. Effie nudges me and gives me a nod.
Just then Mrs Claus takes the stand and holds up her hands for silence. Now, I can’t stand the sight of the bloated old bag, but I’m glad of the interruption.
Her tribute to Rosie Twist goes on for some time. It’s like watching This Is Your Life. At one point she has the elves singing Whitney Houston a cappella. And then she announces plans for The Willing Spirit in Rosie’s absence. Without her, the newspaper is nothing. An empty organ. (Can she have that metaphor right, I wonder?) And so Mrs Claus, she magnanimously announces, is taking over the local paper herself. She and her private staff will see to it that we get our weekly, free dose of local news, opinion and gossip. There is a huge wave of giddy applause at this. Beside me, Effie, Sheila and Robert aren’t looking quite so pleased. ‘Corruption! ’ Effie mouths at me. ‘Now she controls the press!’
I want to point out that it’s only a free weekly rag, but I don’t say anything.
‘I hope that The Willing Spirit itself will prove to be the best, most fitting, and most durable memorial to Rosie Twist that she could possibly have,’ Mrs Claus is saying in a quavering tone. Her several chins are quivering busily and I know it’s all put on. There’s not a shred of real human feeling in that terrible woman. She’s got this town in the palm of her hand. Effie and the others are right to be concerned.
Then, as the crowd falls silent for a few minutes’ prayer and reflection, I give out the most almighty squawk of horror. I try to stop myself, but it’s out before I can even think about it. Heads up. Cries of alarm. I’m pointing and crying out.
‘Brenda! Control yourself!’ Effie cries, and in this weird, distended moment, I’m aware of Mrs Claus’s head jolting out of her prayer. I’m aware of Henry Cleavis behind me, jumping into action, all prepared to protect me. Most people are watching me freak out, but none of them know yet what I’ve seen.
‘Gloooooooooopppp!’
Jessie has come amongst us.
She is here! She must have clambered, paw by monkey’s paw, up the cliff face and bided her time. She waited till most people were concentrating on their prayers. And then – the womanzee is suddenly here! And she is loping, slavering and gibbering, towards the front of the stage with murderous intent.
‘Aunt Jessie!’ Robert yells out.
‘By Christ!’ barks Cleavis, right in my ear.
‘Gloooooooopp!’
Jessie causes a great Mexican wave of horror to ripple out from the front row. Even Mrs Claus is shrieking over the tannoy at the sight of the womanzee who, if I’m not very much mistaken, is working herself up to go into a rampage. Pensioners begin to scatter. Chairs are overturned. Pandemonium is starting to break out. Someone is shouting for calm, and Mrs Claus doesn’t help matters: ‘Stop her! Shoot her! Arrest her!’
‘Gloooop!’ Jessie bellows back.
And suddenly Robert’s aunt is transfixed by the sight of Mrs Claus: on full, extravagant display up there on the podium. As everyone else turns to flee and I struggle forward, with Effie and the others at my heels, I can see that Jessie’s primitive mind is turning and churning over the sight of this woman before her. Mrs Claus. Her erstwhile employer. Whose hotel Jessie died in, apparently from exhaustion, while she was doing the downstairs dusting. Jessie lets rip a primordial screech.
‘Glooopp! Glooooop! GlooooooOOOOOoooOOOooppp!’
‘Get her away from me!’ howls Mrs Claus, and her terrified elves hasten to help her.
But Jessie is fast. She vaults the rows of folding chairs. She is preternaturally nimble and can cover distances like this in a scant few seconds. We are all seemingly frozen as events spin rapidly out of control.
I dart forward; Effie darts forward; Robert darts forward.
Sheila falls back a bit and, as I find out later, Henry Cleavis has snapped into desperate action. It turns out that he has only one deadly weapon about his portly person. It is a small silver handgun loaded with very special bullets. They are tipped with local jet.
‘Gloooop!’ Jessie screams as she reaches the podium. Her nails slash and sizzle on the air, striking out at the elves as they gather hopelessly around Mrs Claus, who thrashes and bellows for protection.
‘Stop!’ Effie shouts. ‘Jessie, you must stop
this at once!’
For a second I think she might have got through to the beast woman. Some inkling of humanity might have sparked in those deep-set eyes. Jessie pauses, dripping with elf blood. She casts aside her latest victim and even seems to consider Effie’s words.
‘We can help you, Jessie,’ Effie says. ‘Your nephew is here. So is Brenda. We are your friends, Jessie. You don’t need to kill . . .’
But at that moment Mrs Claus gives a faint mew of fear and an expression of sheer animal hatred asserts itself again over Jessie’s ruined features. She prepares to go in for the kill.
And Henry Cleavis – standing on a chair behind us – fires his gun at her.
All I’m aware of is a sudden, dense cloud of something acrid.
Then the sharp, nasty crack.
And then, weirdly, Effie jerks upwards like a puppet. She crumples up instantly on to the grass. And, on the podium, the womanzee takes the special jet-tipped bullet full in the chest.
She leaps backwards and none of us actually sees this at the time, but Mrs Claus later records it for posterity, in her first ever editorial on the front page of The Willing Spirit: Jessie the womanzee struggles to her feet, bleeding copiously. She turns and she staggers towards the cliff edge from which Rosie Twist herself plummeted. Perhaps there is a kind of poetic justice or irony in this, writes Mrs Claus – who clearly wants to pin Rosie’s death on the innocently monstrous Jessie – but, in exactly the same place, the creature flings herself to her death.
Only Mrs Claus is watching as Jessie topples into the nothingness and the booming surf below. None of the rest of us – not even Robert – can see this at the time.
We are gathered around Effie. She is all crooked and sprawled on the grass. The pool of blood around her head seems enormous and horribly thick and dark.
There is an impossible amount of blood, I’m thinking. She’s certainly dead.
Cleavis has slain her!
‘It’s a flesh wound,’ he’s babbling, and I’m wondering what other kind there can be. ‘She’s all right,’ he says. ‘I think she’ll be all right. The bullet just grazed her . . .’
But as we stand there, shocked to the core, waiting for the ambulance and the professionals to come, Effie looks drained of all life and colour. It’s as if she’s been carved out of pale wax. Her bony features are weirdly calm.
And I feel sure that my friend has been inadvertently killed.
Chapter Three
Enter the Smudgelings
I’m not going to the hospital today. I was there all of Friday night. I walked out that way again yesterday. It’s a little way out of town. Quite awkward to get to without a car. And there’s not much to see, even when you’re there.
Effie’s still out cold.
Late Friday night I was at her bedside with Henry. He was grey with remorse. He looked like a beached fish, dead on the slab. He looked worse than Effie did. ‘I never meant, you know I never. I never meant to hurt her. It was a freak. A freak accident.’ He kept muttering away like that. It got on my nerves after a while, if I’m honest. As if the only important thing was to get himself off the hook. I told him to button it, in the end. We stood there in silence, watching Effie. She was looking so serene in that bed. All hooked up with tubes and whatnot. The machines blinking away as though they were keeping her going, and her head massive with pristine bandages.
She looked so tired and tiny, lying there. A proper old woman. You could see just how old and defenceless she really is, as if that wilfulness of hers had fled from her.
We stood guard over Effie, and waited for what would happen next.
Mrs Claus had seen to everything. She had talked to the police. And I saw at once one more manifestation of her power in Whitby. The police gathered about her after the event and she told them – dictated to them – precisely what had gone on. They accepted her version without hesitation. It was an accident that had happened, and that was an end to it. The police obeyed her and went away.
Well, I was pretty stricken myself, but I overheard some of this and I was staggered. Mrs Claus had everyone in her back pocket. She could tell everyone and anyone what to do. I caught her eye, in all the fuss of loading Effie on to the ambulance. Mrs Claus winked at me. A leering, conspiratorial wink that made me shudder. She had made the police go away. We can deal with this ourselves, thank you.
In our haste to get help for Effie, we had all forgotten about Jessie. It was only as Henry and I stood vigil alongside Effie’s bed that I remembered, with a sudden, sharp sob. Robert hadn’t come with us to the hospital. I hadn’t seen him since those terrible few moments. It had all been such a panic, such a blur.
Events have a way of dashing on ahead of me. Sometimes my mind seems slow to catch up.
On Saturday I was standing by Effie’s bed and it came to me in a horrible flash just where I was. A hospital. Amongst all of that awful machinery, all geared towards prolonging and repairing human life. I dashed to the lavvy and thought I was going to throw up. But I hadn’t eaten anything for days. Just a packet of fruit gums out of the waiting room machine. Delayed shock, Cleavis said wisely, rubbing my back, when I returned to him. But it was more than that. Hospitals terrify me. I’ve avoided them all through my long life. I can’t bear to be near doctors and nurses and all the nasty, meticulous things that they do.
I had to go home.
We couldn’t do anything more for Effie. It was just a case of waiting for her to wake up. No one knew how long she would lie like that, unconscious. Her body was repairing itself. She needed rest. We weren’t doing her any good, and we weren’t helping at all, by hanging around and watching her.
Henry walked me back into town early Saturday afternoon. I felt as if I was dressed in rags. I was desperate to get home. It was almost a distateful eagerness to be bathed and changed and in my own place again. Cleavis, too, looked worn out by events. He still looked terribly guilty. The few words I said were to assuage his monstrous guilt. As I watched him trog off up the front path of the Hotel Miramar, though, I was thinking: he shot Effie! Your man friend’s bullet grazed your best friend’s temple! He could have killed her stone dead!
Best not to go over these things too much in your mind.
I stumbled into town, down the long, gentle declivity towards the bay. I really didn’t want to see anyone I knew. The streets were quiet for early spring, and no one on them knew my face. I dashed along at a fair clip, key at the ready. Luckily, there was no Leena and Raf outside their shop. They’d definitely try to hold me up with their questions about Effie.
I hurried up my side passage and unlocked my door.
And there it was.
I blinked down at the welcome mat. The post must have been delivered late this morning, I remember thinking. There wasn’t anything here when I left for the hospital. But I’d been so distracted, dragging myself back and forth to Effie’s bedside, taking her night clothes and whatever else I thought she might need, that I mightn’t have noticed this plain white envelope on my doormat. It might have been there for a day or so. But I doubted it. Gingerly, I picked it up.
As I ripped it open my heart was thudding. Dread was coursing through my veins. I yanked out the single sheet of paper and read the few words that were typed there, on some ancient machine, by the looks of it.
Who the devil do you think you are, woman? You’ve got no one fooled. You ancient trollop. You’re not even a proper woman! You’re not even human! And you dare to think that you blend in so well. You have the gall to think that people accept you! But they don’t. They snigger behind your back. They think you are a freak. And not just an ugly freak. Not just some unfortunate woman with a lumpy old body and one leg fatter than the other. They know your secret. I know your secret. People here know just how freakish and unnatural you are. Monster! Harlot! Spawn of Satan! We’ll get you out of this place, eventually. We’ll have you driven out of town.
And that was it. I read it through quickly, once. My eyes misted up tow
ards the end and I clutched the banister for support. Then I got a grip on myself and read it again.
I had the impulse to destroy it, there and then. I wanted to shred the vile thing into a million pieces. But I reined myself in. It was evidence.
In the twenty-four hours since then, I’ve just about memorised the contents of that letter. I’ve tried to get on with things as best I can. I’ve cleaned my establishment top to bottom. I’ve made everything immaculate, including myself. I’ve whizzed up this delicious soup in the blender, thumped away at my rough puff pastry, and stuffed my chicken with unusual force. All to distract myself, and to rid my thoughts of this awful taint.
I sit in the garden with my glass of wine. I hurry in to fetch the rest of the bottle. The gazpacho is chilling in my biggest tureen and lunch is ready to go. I cool my heels, waiting for Henry. I’m going to show him the letter. I’ve nothing to hide from him.
I’m trying out something new, and I’ve stuffed the chicken with pearl barley and raisins. It’s just as I’m basting the bird with honey and lemon that I start to wonder if it will taste too much like a cough remedy. Never mind. I bang it in the oven. He’ll be grateful for it either way, I’m sure. Henry doesn’t look as if he’s had much home cooking in recent years.
I’m making him a Bakewell pudding for afters. A fat crust of rough puff pastry with a glistening interior of sweet eggy batter and crimson jam. He’s going to love it. He’ll be curling his toes up in pleasure. Those clever old eyes of his will be twinkling away.
It’s even sunny enough for me to set up my picnic table in the secluded back garden. I hoisted out the best chairs and laid everything out just so. I want this to be perfect.
Of course, I’m merely imposing calm on disaster. However organised I’m being in preparing lunch, my mind’s going back and forth like the shuggy boats at the fair. It’s whirling like the prancing horses on the carousels. When most of my preparations are over, I’m half an hour early. We’re starting with gazpacho, so there’s nothing to warm up. I sit everything ready and slosh myself a glass of white burgundy.