Half-Sick of Shadows (31 page)

I kissed Sophia on the forehead, avoiding her floury hands, and left by the back door. I saw a light on in an outhouse and went to investigate. Gregory, mottled black with oil, tightened the bolts on his
baby
’s rear wheel as it lay on its side. ‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

‘Having sex with a prostitute. What’s it look like?’

‘It looks like you’re screwing your nuts.’

Gregory, like Father, had no sense of humour. It was so obvious I’d never noticed it before. ‘What do you want?’ He looked up at me. ‘Going somewhere?’

‘Would you lend me your bike for the evening?’

‘No! Piss off!’

‘Would you rent me your bike, then?’

‘I said, no.’

‘I’ll pay you as soon as I get some money.’

‘I won’t live that long.’

I removed one of Farmer Barry’s notes – a generous denomination – from my pocket and tempted him with it. Wiping his hands on a rag, he took an interest. ‘It’ll take more than that. Nobody rides the Wasp but me.’

‘The Wasp?’

‘Yes. The Wasp.’

‘Wasps are fast.’

‘Your point being?’

‘It’s all I have,’ I lied.

He thought about it. My brother wanted to say no, not at any price, but temptation got the better of him. He snatched the note. ‘Bring it back exactly as you see it. One scratch, one tiny scratch, and you’re dead meat.’

‘Yeah, yeah.’

‘I mean it. Scratch it and you’re next for the cemetery.’

‘Yeah, yeah.’ Actually, I feared I might indeed be next for the cemetery. But not at Gregory’s hands. I’d never ridden a moped before. I picked it up and sat on it.

‘It’ll need petrol,’ Gregory warned.

‘Do I need a key or something?’

‘It’s already in it.’

‘Oh. Right. Where’s the steering wheel?’

He showed me how to change gear and threatened to kill me again. I turned the key and an earthquake of noise almost brought down the outhouse.

I started out with extreme caution. Whereas some fool advised: live fast and die young, Edward Pike advised: live slowly and don’t die.

‘Watch the potholes!’ called Gregory as I shot across the courtyard a little faster than walking speed. I soon realized that going faster made balancing the machine between my legs easier. Vroom-vroom! Up to the speed of a battery-powered wheelchair.

Borrowing his moped had been a lot easier than I expected. He knew that I knew he’d murdered Father, although nothing had been said. Maybe he was afraid that I’d go to the police. I was aware that he might try to eradicate that threat with a second murder. Mine.

I saw what Gregory meant about the potholes. The headlight blinked out once or twice. Getting to Garagh took twenty minutes, and I encountered no other vehicles on the way. The closer I got to town, the more certain I grew that Alf was there.

The town was neither large nor exciting. It shut at five o’clock. One hotel graced the main street, McGibbon’s, a bar-restaurant really, with guest rooms upstairs. There were a couple of bed and breakfasts, but I didn’t see Alf as a bed and breakfast kind of guy.

I parked Gregory’s bike in the small car park and hoped there were no moped thieves around, since I’d no way of immobilizing it. There wasn’t much happening inside, no one at the reception desk and a few locals supping beer in the bar. I rang the bell, and a flushed-looking woman came from an anteroom fixing her hair and blouse.

‘I’m looking for Mr Lord; I believe he’s staying here.’

‘Oh, he’s in room five,’ she said without hesitation. He might have been the only guest. ‘He arrived this afternoon. Friend of his?’

‘University colleagues,’ I said, and wished I hadn’t. Lying had never been my strong point. I nodded at the stairs, ‘May I?’

‘By all means, dear. You go right ahead.’

When I had one foot on the bottom step, she said, ‘My name’s Laura, by the way.’ What does one do in such a situation? I lacked experience. Do hotel receptionists introduce themselves? Do barmaids? I thought, not usually. ‘It used to be Leslie. But I changed it to Laura.’

I said um, ah, or possibly er, and followed it with, ‘I’m Edward. Pleased to meet you, Laura.’

‘Lola!’

‘Sorry?’

‘Hasn’t he mentioned me? I’m Lola.’

‘Sorry. I thought you said Laura.’

‘I did, but my friends call me Lola. C. O. L. A. cola.’

‘Right.’

‘Friends,’ she emphasized. ‘My friends call me Lola.’ Lola sang, ‘See my friends, sailing down the river,’ and then spoke, ‘You can be my friend if you want. Any friend of Mr Lord’s is a friend of mine.’

‘Right. No problem.’ I fired a forefinger-arrow at her. Got it! And hurried up the stairs, clueless as to what to think. I only made it halfway. Lola, at the bottom, fists on hips, called after me, ‘He didn’t mention a university colleague.’ What could I say?

‘How well do you know him?’ I asked. My amusement with Lola was beginning to turn to frustration.

‘It’s a long story, dear. I could tell it to you over drinkies if you’ve got the time. There’s more comfortable spots than halfway up the stairs.’

As I reached the top … Leslie! Maud’s weird son, Leslie!

Lola was Leslie!

Leslie simply vanished off the planet. An ancient memory stirred. Someone – probably Mother – said Maud’s boy’s head went and they took him away, though I might have been muddling my memory of Leslie with them taking Edgar away. Whatever state my memories were in, Leslie would be in his early thirties now. Lola was about that age. I knew a transvestite. Good grief! Had he had a sex-change – his
parts
removed and what remained tampered with? I briefly thought of Nurse in junior school with the fiddling, prodding fingers. Were sex-change people still called transvestites? I didn’t know. The stair carpet smelled of stale beer. So did the walls and ceiling. The door handle looked sticky. So did the door, but I knocked it none the less – with an erection in my underpants that I half hoped Alf wouldn’t notice.

While the other half of me hoped that he would.

The door opened.

‘Surprise, supplies!’

Alf should have been surprised to see me, but looked anything but. ‘What’s the matter?’ He stood aside and I entered a typical pub guest room: mattress three and a half feet off the floor and furniture from the French Revolution.

I sat on the mattress and sank, springs going off all around. Alf was wearing his coat and boots. ‘Are you going out?’

‘I’ve just returned,’ he said.

‘By broomstick, no doubt.’

‘You shouldn’t be here – although I knew you would be.’

‘Well, I’m overjoyed that you’re so pleased to see me.’

‘I’m always pleased to see you, Edward; it’s not that.’

‘What is it, then?’

‘It’s not yet time.’

‘Time for what?’

‘I can’t tell you that. But I can tell you that you must return to the Manse. You have a destiny to fulfil.’

‘Wow! A destiny! Is this one of your time travel stories? Are you in some kind of role-playing syndicate?’

‘Yes, yes, something like that,’ he snapped, making me angry and hurt that he seemed to take me for an idiot, a pawn in his game.

I brushed off his insult. ‘Look, Alf, why don’t you come back to the Manse and get to know Sophia better? You can stay there for free instead of paying for here … Is there something going on between
you
and the receptionist? She’s a man, you know. At least Sophia’s a real woman. You’ve only met her once and I know you like her. She likes you too.’

‘There must be mystique,’ he replied. ‘I want to be, and I am, her knight in shining armour. Sophia can know me, but only from a distance. It’s magic. If you see the trick close up, you spoil it.’

‘I know what you’re saying. But you have to get close to her some time, or let her get close to you. Is that what you’re hoping: that because you’re here, in town, she’ll be tempted to break a promise she seems to have forgotten and come to you?’

Alf said, ‘Let the poem play out and reveal the ending.’

Let the poem play out and reveal the ending. I liked that.

And I found myself falling in a kind of love with Alf, who had kissed me, and who had fallen for my sister. I wished he was a woman, and felt perfectly content with my wishing.

‘Let’s go down to the bar and talk about poetry,’ I said.

‘Return to the Manse. You’re needed.’

‘I’m not. Honest. Do you know who the receptionist is? Come down to the bar and I’ll tell you.’

‘Go home, Edward. Now.’

Through the trees, she saw a light. Salvation. The star of Bethlehem. An angel. And that angel, so long as it didn’t move off, provided Mrs Wipple with the straight line she should have been walking all along. The trees became less densely packed.

‘I’m saved!’ cried Mrs Wipple. Having climbed over bracken that tore her legs, and waded through a stream that stung her fissures, she found herself on some kind of farm track. The light that saved her was maybe a mile away. It was no angel, but an electric light in a room with a window. She had no option but to head for the light. And in a straight line too, for Heaven knew where this farm lane led to or from – not the light, so far as she could tell.

Mrs Wipple yelped as rusty barbed wire tore into her inner thigh
as
she straddled it. From here to the light was like walking on air in comparison to her struggle through the wood. Occasionally, the moon peeped out. The star of Bethlehem came from an upper window in a large rectangular house. ‘Hang about,’ said Mrs Wipple. ‘This is …’ the place she came to years ago … ‘the woman with the hair … and the little boy who looked like an angel.’

A second before Mrs Wipple reached for the big, black knocker on the door, she thought to take a look through the nearest window. One never knows what one is letting oneself in for, does one? Although the curtains were closed, they had a wide gap at the side closest to the door, which Mrs Wipple peered through.

What she saw came as a shock, and instantly made her change her mind about knocking on the door. There was a healthy open fire dancing on the far wall and, silhouetted before it, what looked like, unless she was very much mistaken, a thin man standing rather bent at the knees masturbating, or … Mrs Wipple couldn’t see; the curtains were in the way. Was there someone else in the room, and were they …? She was a woman of the world. She’d given birth and become familiar with body fluids. Mr Wipple had been a sailor!

Well … whatever people do in the privacy of their own homes is entirely up to them, but while they’re doing it you don’t knock on the door and ask to use the telephone. If you interrupt a man mid-sexual excitement there’s no telling what the impulses that drive men might drive him to do. When Mr Wipple got that way it hardly mattered if one was in the cornflake aisle at the supermarket. Through the window, he, or they, were taking an awfully long time over it. Was that normal? Mr Wipple was in and out before one got one’s knees settled … Suddenly, Mrs Wipple needed badly to urinate, and she wrenched her gaze from the window.

Rather than return to the wilderness for relief, where someone might see her from an upstairs window – and a lady peeing in the open is so unladylike – she looked for a suitable wall or something similar to drop her ruined tights and crouch beside. Feeling most
definitely
unlike a lady, she saw, noticeably askew, a rectangular erection standing on end, which she knew to be an outdoor convenience. What else? Some of these old places still had them. She was old enough to have used one herself as a child, at her grandmother’s house in the country, a plank with a hole in it, and her feet dangling.

Even if they’ve taken out the pot, this will do, she thought as she hobbled towards the inconveniently located convenience, removed the rusty lock, touched the handle, turned it and opened the door.

‘Sorry! So sorry,’ said Mrs Wipple, smiling stupidly despite the stench, and shut the toilet door. What had that woman eaten? The occupant was a woman, wasn’t it? God, what horrid, hard lives these rural people lived. She turned round, and shrieked. The wanker!

The Dark and the Cold were there. And me. And a moped in an outhouse where I’d left it beside a cigarette butt.

Brave of me: I’d seen a shape – not Gregory’s, an intruder’s shape. I’d stamped out my cigarette, taken the ice-cracking pole that Mother broke years ago and gone to investigate.

And Mrs Wipple was there too, whom I recognized, and whose name I had never forgotten. And the leaning tower of toilet had always been there, with the rotting corpse inside.

‘I, a, that is, there’s. I needed to, you see. It’s engaged,’ said Mrs Wipple. Although she remained conscious throughout the seconds that followed, her legs gave way and she crumpled in a heap.

I helped her to stand.

Mrs Wipple said many words and bits of words, but not one sentence, and made hardly any sense. She defended herself – against possible rape? – swiping a fist at my head from too far out to hit.

‘I hope you came, you beast!’ she cried.

‘Steady on,’ I replied. ‘I don’t want to hurt you.’

‘Just try it! Just you try it! If I’m trespassing, that’s all very well, but
you
shouldn’t … I’ve a black belt in Jakarta. My husband’s a sailor. I’m a policeman. Woman. Goodbye.’

She took off across the field.

‘Where are you going? Don’t go that way. There’s nothing that way for miles.’

‘I have a bus to cat—’ Mrs Wipple stepped in the Hole and went under with a splash.

Oh Lord! My instinct was to save her. But she was big and heavy. And under water. And had seen the body in the bog. I might have been able to save her. At least, I might have tried. But I didn’t. What a mess. What does one do with a mess? One cleans it up, of course. With the broken pole, I prodded into the freezing, muddy water, detected the Wipple-bulk, and ensured it stayed under.

Having dispatched the woman, I realized that I felt, and had felt for some time – maybe an hour – much as I had felt here and there during my adolescence, serendipitously tipsier than intended, comfortably out of myself and prone to weighty, convoluted sentences. My mind transcended the limitations that flesh and bones imposed upon my being. I had achieved, without trying, enlightenment – of a sort.