Listening in the Dusk Page 11

  “Fucking marvellous!” they’d hissed generously in sotto voce approbation, even though they had all — except Steve, that is — got themselves well beyond step nine. They knew it was harder for the white boys, they somehow bashed up more easily, there was some knack they hadn’t quite got. The proud possessors of this knack could obviously afford to be generous.

  “C’mon, Silly!” There was nothing insulting about the nickname, it just seemed more friendly than ‘Cyril’. “C’mon, Silly, ’s your go! Ten, you’re on. Hey, watch, Silly’s on ten. C’mon, Silly …”

  The previous incumbent — Errol as it happened — handed over the Bike even before dusting himself down from his unfortunate spill between steps four and five, and Cyril clutched the handlebars as if they were straws and he drowning. His hands were sweaty, his knees jumping with nerves and happiness, as he slowly mounted the steps, the voices chanting behind him in whispered unison: “One … Two … Three … Ten. There y’are, Silly. Ten.”

  It was important to let go of the rail at the exact moment when you felt the bicycle steady into exact equilibrium beneath you; a moment’s delay, and the equilibrium would be lost, not to mention losing points in the most disgraceful way possible, by hanging on too long. He took a deep breath, felt the machine right itself at its perilous angle, and … let go …

  It was like a thunderstorm in your spine. It was like an untamed stallion trying to throw you, and of course it did throw him, because after all this was his first go from ten. Still, he didn’t come off till between two and three — jolly good, really, and his friends evidently thought so too — jolly good for a white boy, anyway, and they jumped up and down and hugged him with congratulatory squeals.

  Chapter 15

  Alice was delighted by the new arrangement that Cyril should come to her for his lessons instead of her going to his home. Not only would this save her the longish walk, of which she had had quite enough lately, but she would also be relieved of the vague miasma of anxious disapproval which was liable to bedevil the sessions in the Bensons’ drawing-room.

  “It’ll be Christmas, you see,” Mrs Benson had explained, in vague apology for this welcome change, “visitors and so on.”

  Fair enough; but Alice couldn’t help wondering whether the carefully non-brainwashed Sophy might have something to do with the decision. The child’s evident propensity for raising single-handed the ugly head of sexism under the very eyes of any random outsider was maybe a risk not to be taken more than necessary. Who could guarantee that the next time Alice arrived she would not find Tracty sitting up at table with a bib on, having raisins fed into his carburettor?

  Anyway, whatever the motive, it left Alice feeling lucky as well as rich. Buoyant with sudden extravagance engendered by the feel of just-earned cash actually in her purse, she turned her steps towards the main shopping street, where she plunged recklessly into purchases for the party that she and Brian had so impulsively thought up. Candles: blue, yellow and red. Weird packets of edibles called things like Snack-Bits and King Pops. Decorations, too. Crazy, really, but the day they had fixed on was the Saturday before Christmas. Before that, Brian had explained, he would be tied up with pupils and with playing the piano for end-of-term dance displays, carol concerts, Open Days, and fifth-form productions of Oliver. This was the Ego-Trip season, he told her, for parents and children alike, and it extended from about December 9th to December 21st; then stopping as suddenly as it had begun, as if wiped out by a mighty hand.

  “It’s almost enough to make you actually believe in Peace on Earth,” he said. “Quite suddenly, you wake up one morning and find that nothing is happening. Total peace. No one crying about costumes not being finished; no one loosing off about their kid being only a Shepherd and not Joseph. No one screaming hysterically down the phone about the pianist having flu and can I fill in for them, thumping my way through a vast and varied repertoire ranging from ‘Dear Little Buttercup’ to ‘Hark the Herald Angels’ … So you see,” he’d concluded, “a party is just what I’ll need,” and he’d gone on to offer every possible kind of help with the preparations, but not yet.

  Meantime, Alice could be getting on with the task of making the room look as festive and as up-beat as its many shortcomings allowed. Party or no, this was essential, for who knew when Rodney might be turning up again, unannounced. And inevitably, sooner or later, driven by an all-consuming curiosity, Ivy would be coming with him, all agog to cast her sharp Other-Womanly eyes over Alice’s set-up, hungry for signs of squalor. Underclothes left on chairs. Dirty crockery. Dust, cigarette-ends. Smears, stains, spider-webs. All the familiar indications of a woman who has Let Herself Go.

  Mind you, she would find some of the clues difficult to assess. Does a gaudily-painted motor bike in a small bed-sitter indicate that the occupant has let herself go? Or that she hasn’t? With a certain glee, Alice pictured her rival staring at it, planted on her stout legs in the centre of the room, and wondering what she ought to think.

  Well, what ought she? Looking round at her now almost cosy domain, burgeoning with colour in every direction, Alice could not but feel a certain pride in her achievement. The new candles were in place now, cunningly disposed among the shadows, all ready to turn clutter and muddle into a dancing mystery of interlacing light. No one could describe this as the room of someone who has ‘Let Herself Go’. An eccentric, perhaps? An impractical fool? Maybe; but at least no one visiting here would be able to go away and talk about “Poor Alice!”

  A daring thought occurred to her. It would be fun — or wouldn’t it? — to invite Rodney and Ivy to this projected party. Show them that in barely three weeks Alice had contrived to start a new life, to amass a whole lot of new, amusing friends, and to have recovered the kind of self-confidence needed for giving a party. No longer a Poor Thing, by any stretch of the imagination. Poor Things don’t give parties. Not even unsuccessful parties if that, unfortunately, was how it should turn out.

  And anyway, why should it be unsuccessful? She couldn’t, it must be admitted, envisage Rodney — or, indeed, Ivy — getting on particularly well with the members of this oddly assorted household; but then, you never knew. Maybe they would? Maybe Ivy and Miss Dorinda would turn out to be soul-mates at some deep, hair-tinting sort of level? Maybe Rodney and Brian would engage in a man-to-man conversation on some innocuous topic like motorway pile-ups or nuclear fall-out? Though actually Rodney would be better employed — would he not? — in flirting mildly with poor Mary, on whose account (Alice now recollected) the whole project had first been mooted. Maybe a little male attention would do Mary good, and with any luck it would annoy Ivy at the same time.

  Anyway, there was still much to be done. The kaleidoscope of clashing colours and eye-catching distractions only distracted just so far, and indeed served in a way to make the neglected bits of the room look even more neglected.

  Pictures. Posters. Photos from glossy magazines. These were what she needed now. Only a few days ago, she’d come across a whole box of that sort of thing …

  It was fun, and took quite a while, to pick out the brightest, most exciting pictures and to cut them out ready for their camouflage job on the grimy walls. Blu-Tack of course, was the next desideratum. Brian would be sure to have some …

  Unfortunately, Brian didn’t; or, rather, didn’t want to search through all the places it might be just when he was trying to make fair copies of some of his compositions for a man who just might be able to get another man interested in them: but he’d only be interested if six copies could be made available by nine o’clock tomorrow morning before this other man — or was it the man? — boarded his plane to New York.

  Or something to that effect.

  “Later on, Alice love, it’s got to be somewhere,” he assured her distractedly, looking, now that his deadline was upon him, more than ever like a real musician.

  But “later on” wasn’t good enough for Alice. Having cut out all these pictures, and started to visualise them in positio
n, she was consumed by impatience. She hurried on down to Hetty’s domain where, sure enough, two half-used packets of Blu-Tack lay handily behind the bread-bin, in company with a packet of dried yeast and Hengist’s supply of worm pills. Pointing out how similar all these packets were to one another (a brave attempt to instil some logic into the system of categorisation), Hetty found herself suddenly and forcibly reminded of Hengist’s current problem. Would Alice … Could she possibly …? He should have had his second one on Tuesday, really, but it was difficult, you see, if, like Hetty, you only had two hands. One to hold him down, one to force his mouth open, and then … Well, there you were, you see, with nothing with which to put the pill on the back of his tongue. Alice did see, didn’t she?

  Indeed she did: and since there seemed to be no acceptable way out of it, she resigned herself to her role, though with some reluctance. Hengist didn’t like her much anyway, except when she was actually pouring out milk for him; at other times, he was inclined to walk out of the room with a nasty little twitch of the end of his tail as soon as she walked in. This was going to do nothing to improve the relationship.

  Holding him on her lap with all her strength, one hand pressing down on his haunches and the other clutching the scruff of his neck, she thought, not about England, but about her own inability to say No to things, or at least to say it quickly enough. Or was it not so much her own inadequacy in this respect as Hetty’s outstanding skills in so manipulating a situation as to make almost anything sound reasonable?

  It was over at last, after three tries; and, as Hetty sadly pointed out, it was lucky in a way that Horsa wasn’t still with them; with which sentiment Alice could only agree, from the bottom of her heart.

  The episode ended in a necessary consolation prize for Hengist in the form of cream off the top of Alice’s new bottle of Gold Top, which he lapped up greedily, though twitching his tail the while to show that he was still annoyed.

  Hetty’s thanks for assistance, and Alice’s thanks for the Blu-Tack, criss-crossed amiably for a minute, and culminated in Hetty’s ploughing her way upstairs in Alice’s wake in order to admire Alice’s transformation of the lumber room.

  Her admiration — as Alice had anticipated — was enthusiastic.

  “My! Oh my! My goodness gracious!” fell from her lips in flattering profusion.

  The only thing she wasn’t sure whether to admire or not was the motor bike; nothing in her experience or background rendered it easy for her to decide with any certainty whether it was quite nice to have a motor bike so flaunted as part of the décor of a bed-sitting-room. Mightn’t it have been more, well, you know, to have draped something decorously over the naked mechanism? An old curtain, or something?

  The argument was short and quite without rancour, Hetty’s deep-seated amiability, reinforced by the obvious bothersomeness of doing anything, soon won the day, and she settled herself on what was left of the improvised settee — the box of magazines being still in the middle of the floor, spilling its contents in all directions — to watch Alice blu-tacking her pictures to every available space on the grimy walls; after which the two of them repaired to the kitchen for a late-night cup of tea — which seemed to be something of a ritual in this household. They were joined on this occasion by Miss Dorinda, complaining bitterly about the lateness of the hour. She liked to be in bed by ten, she pointed out — though it was unclear who was preventing this — and also what about the geyser, which was in one of its moods again; water not merely tepid, but jerking out in a funny sort of way with nasty brown streaks in it, and a horrid popping sound somewhere up in the pipes.

  The subject proved a fruitful one, branching out into a far-flung discussion of burst pipes, errant plumbers, and geysers of yesteryear; which was how it came about that Mary had all the time in the world to creep upstairs to the attic and find out what they had been doing. For some time now she had been listening, in silent dread, to the noises which had come to her through the ceiling; thumpings, and bumpings, and a non-stop murmur of voices, though there was no way she could make out what they’d been saying, and could only guess what they’d been doing.

  Not that she needed all the time in the world. Staring her in the face as she walked into the room was the picture of Flittermouse Hill as it had been in the golden days now blacked out for ever; and gaping open on the floor, the whole of her dark secret spilling horribly out of it, lay the box containing her brother’s relics. “The Monster of Medley Green”, as one headline had described him; “The Midnight Madman”; “The Fiend of Flittermouse Hell”, as one sparky journalist had seen fit to mis-spell the magic haunt of her childhood. The Devil Incarnate, who during one long hot summer had gunned down half a dozen innocent passers-by, and whose arrest and trial had filled the TV screens for weeks.

  The Madman. The Monster. The Fiend. Julian.

  Chapter 16

  In the past Alice had sometimes vaguely wondered, reading of some terrible crime in the papers, what it must be like to be a close relative of the criminal? A mother? A sister? A wife? Utterly innocent, and yet irrevocably involved?

  Now she had her answer. Hour after hour of it, punctuated by distant clocks chiming the hours and the half-hours all through the night. So dreadful were the revelations that there were moments when she felt that she ought not to be listening, that there was something wicked about even hearing such things; as if she was eavesdropping at the keyhole of Hell.

  Eavesdropping, anyway. She was hearing these revelations on false pretences, for had it not been for Mary’s instantaneous assumption, at the sight of the ransacked box, that all had been discovered, then Alice would never have heard the story at all.

  Or would she? During that long night of despairing tears and agonised reminiscence, Alice more and more got the impression that the girl had, by now, worked herself up to such a pitch of terror and anguish that confession to someone, somehow, had become a necessity. Alice’s accidental and wholly innocent discovery of the fatal box had maybe been little more than a trigger.

  It had started as soon as Alice returned from the kitchen to her attic room. As soon as she set foot through the door, she was greeted by violent, hysterical accusations from the hunched and frantic figure on the floor; and at first she could not make out what she was being accused of. What was so special about a box of old colour supplements? Oh, and right at the bottom, someone’s amateurish attempt at a detective novel, absurdly melodramatic, with afresh murder every few pages …?

  Well, it wasn’t a novel, that was what was so special. It was a diary, a real-life account of real-life killings. That’s why there were so many murders; it was because there were so many murders: not a failure in artistic judgement at all.

  At first, Mary seemed unable to take in Alice’s assurances of having known nothing. Her suspicion that Alice had planted herself here — or had been planted — with the express purpose of finding and exposing the damning document had grown over the days to such obsessional proportions that at first she simply couldn’t envisage any innocent motive for the ransacking of the box that hid the incriminating papers.

  Incriminating because they were — look! — in Julian’s own handwriting.

  “Can’t you see?” she cried, and it was in this utterly irrational appeal (because how could Alice possibly know anything about Julian’s handwriting?) that Alice recognised the first hint of the change in her own role from arch-enemy to desperately needed confidante.

  Julian’s own handwriting. Incontrovertible evidence not only of his guilt, but of his calculating awareness of what he was doing: evidence which Mary had desperately kept from the police all through the months leading up to the trial, not so much as a coherent attempt to protect her brother from justice as in the wild irrational hope that if they couldn’t prove he had done it, then somehow he wouldn’t have. As if by sheer will-power she could make it not have happened, could beat the facts into pulp with her bare hands, and thus bring back into existence the happy companion of her childhood
whom the media were so grotesquely changing, hour by hour, into a monster, a fiend, a devil, a creature of headlines, of late night horror, not a reality at all.

  But the facts had won in the end, as they were bound to do. Her tiny, struggling fantasy had been no match for their sledgehammer power and she had to face at last the knowledge that her beloved brother was indeed a monstrous and horrific killer. And even this was not the final twist of the knife: the truly intolerable thing was that she, Mary, was the sister of a monstrous and horrific killer. And for her there could be no reprieve; no remission for good behaviour. She would be the sister of a murderer for ever. No judge however compassionate, no jury however biased in her favour would ever be able to reduce by a single hour her life-sentence. The sister of a murderer. For life.

  Looking back, it was hard for her to pinpoint the moment of full realisation. It had come upon her slowly, a little bit at a time, like the symptoms of a terminal illness; good days and bad days; small remissions burgeoning into monstrous, short-lived hopes; fantasies of finding, one day, that none of it had happened; that she was miraculously well again.

  *

  She had been at college, working hard for exams, when the thing first hit the headlines. At that stage, the police had no clue as to the identity of the attacker; and so, apart from the natural sense of shock at learning that these things had been happening quite near her home, she had given the matter only the attention normally accorded to suchlike horrific news items; disasters that pertain only to other people, outside one’s personal horizon.