Plender (10 page)

A minute later it was open. The body was still there. Which was as I’d expected. I closed the lid very quietly.

I walked round to the side of the car and went to work again. When I’d finished I opened the door and released the hand brake and then I manoeuvred myself out and put my shoulder to the door jamb and began to push.

KNOTT

“You make me sick,” said my wife. “Sick. You disgust me.”

I lay on my back and stared into the blackness.

“You’re wrong,” I said.

“Shut up.”

“Wrong.”

“You don’t even respect me enough to admit it.”

“It’s not true.”

“Either that or you just haven’t got the guts.”

“I told you. I was tired.”

“You bloody liar. You’ve been screwing somebody.”

“It’s just that I’ve had a hard day.”

“Since when has screwing been hard for you?”

“It’s not true.”

“You must think I’m a bloody fool. Actually that’s the worst part; you still think I’m the stupid little fool you screwed into marrying you.”

“Leave it,” I said. “For Christ’s sake.”

“God, I really was a stupid little bitch. All starry-eyed at having my first lover. Imagining that it was going to be like that for the next eight hundred years.”

I said nothing.

“Well I soon learned, didn’t I? You were a good teacher. Practical. Start as we mean to go on sort of thing.”

I tried not to listen.

“Who was it anyway? Heather? Jean? Or was it the one with the . . .”

“Listen. I’ve told you. You’re wrong.”

She swung herself round to face me in the darkness and the next thing I knew she’d brought her clenched fist down on my face with all her force, hitting me in the eye. The darkness exploded into jagged brilliance and she hit me again, this time catching me on the jaw. I managed to get hold of her by her wrist and she struggled for a while until she went limp at the onset of the inevitable tears. I relaxed my grip and scrambled my fingers about on the surface of the bedside table and found a cigarette, then the table lighter. I clicked on the flame and the walls leapt forward briefly and then disappeared.

Kate’s sobbing finally subsided. There was silence for a while and then Kate flung herself out of bed and crashed through the darkness and out of the room. A few minutes later I could hear her making up the bed in the guest room. Then there was a click and some muffled rustling and then silence. I lay there for half an hour, listening, and at the end of it there was still silence. I sat up and got out of bed and went out of the room and listened at Kate’s door. It was slightly ajar and I could hear her breathing. She was asleep.

I went back into my bedroom and put on some clothes and went down the corridor towards the hall. I wasn’t intending to move Eileen now. It was too late. If I was seen then, there could be no reasonable explanation at a later date. I had to wait till the morning.

It was just that, during the last half hour, while I’d been lying on my back in the darkness, I’d been taken with an enormous desire to go down to the garage and open the boot and look at what I’d done.

PLENDER

It took me two hours to drive round the river. When I got close to Brumby I was tempted to stay on the main road and drive into town and do a tour round and out again. Instead I drove on to the narrow track that wound down the lee of the wolds towards the river and the quarry.

The Cortina lurched and shuddered down the rutted road and in front of me across the river I could see the vast complex of the city pegged out in the night by countless street lights. One of those lights was the light at the end of Peter Knott’s street and I wondered what he was doing, was he lying in bed sweating, waiting for the daylight to come, waiting for the moment when he could decently leave the house and get on with his plan, or had he been unable to wait, had he panicked and already rushed down to the garage, propelled by fear and sickness? I smiled. That would be nothing to the fear and sickness he’d feel when he opened the garage door.

I reached the entrance to the quarry and swung the car into the leafy entrance and crawled it along the narrow track. Elderberry branches snapped at the windscreen and scrabbled on the roof. I came to the end of the track and switched off the engine.

In front of me was the great white moonlit expanse of the quarry, its screes and hillocks undulating away into the darkness. I knew every slope, every hollow, every track. We’d come here almost every weekend when we were kids. The perfect playground, for the games we played. I looked upwards, slightly to the left, trying to make out the wood at the quarry’s rim. We used to play in there too.

Warm autumn sunshine flashed through the trees. Peter and I slowly crackled our way through the wood, not saying anything, just dawdling the morning away. I was quiet because I was happy and I was happy because Peter and I were on our own, away from his other friends and when he was away from them he was different, sometimes he seemed even as if he really liked me a lot.

After a while we came to the fallen tree trunk where we always stopped and sat for a while.

Nothing was said. I swung my legs, trying to dislodge a peeling piece of bark. Peter seemed wrapped up in his own thoughts. Eventually he slid his hand in his lumberjacket and pulled out a small rolled-up magazine.

“Male Horsfall in 3L gave me this,” he said, passing it to me. “Him and Johnno bought it on the school trip to Paris.”

I unrolled it and looked at the cover. It was called Paris Minuit. On the cover was a drawing of a woman bending over and looking over her shoulder. She was wearing a big hat and you could see up her skirt to her underwear. She was wearing black stockings and high heeled shoes. I opened the book and thumbed through it. There were photographs of women in their underwear, most of them in similar positions to the woman on the cover. Lots of them wearing hats and long black gloves, one even had a fur coat on. There were some jokes about women in their underwear as well. There was one where one girl was stretched out on the grass looking all puffed out with her knickers round her ankles and another girl who was dressed like a man standing next to a tree trunk carving a heart with an arrow through it and initials at the top and the bottom, below a number of other, similar hearts. There were stories, which judging from the accompanying drawings seemed to be about French gangsters beating up their girlfriends. I’d never seen anything like it before.

As I progressed through the book I began to feel hot and excited but with Peter sitting next to me I felt embarrassed at my feelings, in case I showed him how I felt. So when I’d finished I pushed the book back at him as though it hadn’t had any effect at all.

“What do you think of it?” said Peter.

“S’all right,” I said.

“Didn’t it give you the Horn?”

I shrugged.

“Did me,” said Peter, unbuttoning his trousers. “Look.”

I looked and blushed and sort of smiled.

“Let’s see yours, then,” he said.

“Now,” I said, as though it was unimportant.

“Didn’t you get one, then?”

“Yes.”

“Bet you didn’t. Bet you can’t get one yet.”

“I can.”

“Bet you can’t fetch.”

I didn’t say anything.

“I can,” said Peter. “I can shoot three feet. Even Glegger in 4M can’t shoot that far.”

“How do you know?”

“How do I know?” he said scornfully. “They have a Wanking Club behind the pavilion, fourth formers. Haven’t you seen them?”

I shook my head.

“Every dinnertime,” he said. “They have competitions. Sometimes Beryl Marshbanks and Janet Smith do it for them.”

I was shocked and I was excited. Beryl Marshbanks and Janet Smith.

“I’m off to do it now,” said Peter. “Are you?”

I shrugged again and shifted my position on the log.

“You can’t, can you?”

“Yes.”

“Show us, then.”

I had no choice. I unbuttoned my trousers. He looked at me. I was still soft.

“Go on, then.”

I began to do it. Peter sniggered.

“Is that how you do it?”

I blushed even more deeply and I began to feel sick.

“No wonder you can’t fetch,” he said. “Look. Watch me.”

I watched him and then started again.

“You’re useless,” he said.

He leant over and pushed my hand away and took hold of me and began to do it. I didn’t dare try and stop him in case he told his friends I was useless.

Then a feeling started that I’d never had before. As he kept doing it we slid off the log, down on to the crisp leaves. He put his arm round my shoulders and our heads banged together. The feeling grew and grew and then when I thought it couldn’t get any better it did. And then it was over, but nothing happened to show Peter that it was over.

Immediately I felt sicker and dirtier than I’d ever felt in my life.

“Now you’ve got to do it to me,” he said.

KNOTT

I stood by the garage door and grasped the handle. A cloud passed from the face of the moon and suddenly my shadow appeared on the garage door and the night was almost as clear as day. Then I knew I wasn’t going to be able to turn the handle.

I swung round and lurched away from the garage, down the gravel drive towards the gate, moaning and crying as I went. The faint wind rushed into my ears and flung my noise and my tears out behind me. When I reached the gate I grasped the handles and sank to my knees and pressed my wet face against the woodwork.

Later, when I’d finished, I began to feel a new fear.

The thing that brought it on was my realisation that the wind had dropped completely. There was dead silence. Nothing was moving. All the clouds had gone from the sky and the moon black shadows of the trees were rigid and still. I turned my head and looked towards the house; the night was bright enough to reflect the trees in the windows.

The fear that came on me now was the fear of Eileen. Rather, fear of my mind, what it might conjure up in its present state. Whether reality or hallucination, it didn’t matter which; even a mind’s-eye apparition would be enough to make any temporary madness become my final mental condition.

Slowly I forced myself up from the gravel. I turned round to face the house and opened my eyes as wide as possible so no flickering eyelash could cause confusion. I began to walk towards the house, keeping to the centre of the drive, keeping my eyes off the garage, avoiding any glance to right or left. When I got to the hallway’s glass facing, my reflected shape caused me to stop and stare at myself as if I were some shambling doppelganger.

I went into the house and the shadow disappeared.

PLENDER

I bumped the Cortina to the right and drove towards the limestone chute and the old engine houses. The narrow-gauge lines were still as they used to be, lazily curving away into the quarry basin, and there were still some panniers, long since prised off their wheelbases and overturned, lying face down on the quarry floor.

I stopped the car and got out and walked round to the boot, lifted out the body and took it over to one of the panniers that lay behind the engine house, where the shade fell all day long.

The pannier stood at the bottom of the limestone chute on the artificial scree made by years of tipping. I bent down and dug away a few stones at the base of the upturned pannier and put my hands under the lip and began to lift. It was even heavier than I’d thought it would be, but that was fine, the heavier the better. I gave a final heave and the pannier tottered over on to its side. Then I went to work on the surface of the stones that had been underneath the pannier until I’d pulled enough away to form a shallow trench. When I’d done that I picked up the body and laid it down in the trench and put the stones back until the body was covered. Then I walked round the pannier and lifted again until I’d pushed and levered it up on to its lip. I gave a final heave and the pannier toppled over back to its original position, sealing off the trench and the body. There was a slight whump as the air rushed out from under the pannier as it hit the stones.

KNOTT

Sunlight wafted on to my face. I opened my eyes. I turned my head and wondered where my wife was. I looked at my watch. It was quarter past seven. Then I remembered.

Amazingly I’d slept.

I closed my eyes again and tried to shut out the reality but it wouldn’t go. I had the same suicidal desperation that is usually caused by a champagne hangover. I didn’t want to move ever again.

But somehow I jerked myself out of bed and dressed and went out of the bedroom and down the corridor and across the hall and out of the house.

The day was bright and sunny but behind the trees heavy grey clouds were beginning to build up and fill the sky. I hurried across the gravel to the garage, trying not to think so that what I was going to do would be easier.

I lifted the handle and slid the garage door open.

PLENDER

I sat on my bed and played the electric razor over my face and listened to the tape recorder.

The dialing tone stopped and there was the click and a pause and then Froy’s voice said,

“This is Mr. Brown speaking. I’m phoning to report that the operation has reached a successful conclusion.”

The man on the other end of the phone said, “Thank you. I had no doubt that it wouldn’t.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“The Movement is fortunate to have such competent operatives in its employ, an event for which you have largely been responsible.”

Froy made some more thank you noises.

“As Leader,” said the other voice, “I shall see that you shall not go unrewarded.”

Froy was almost screaming by now. There was a pause and then Froy ventured, “I have had Gorton’s speech written for the Leeds conference.”