Plender (9 page)

“Yeah, you know. What they’re calling now.”

He looked at the barman, a blank wildness in his eyes. Then the penny dropped but it didn’t really make any difference to his expression.

“About eight,” he said, his voice dipped in madness.

“About eight would be fine.”

Then Knott turned away from me and began to walk out of the snug. He moved like a sleepwalker. I followed close behind. When we were out on the car park I said:

“Is your place far from here?”

He shook his head. The broad river swirled and smacked against the bank away to our right.

“Well, I’ll tag on behind you if that’s all right with you. Just so’s I don’t have to waste half Friday night digging you up. I’ll know which is your place on account of which drive you turn into. Unless you’re on particularly friendly terms with the neighbours.”

All he did was to stare at me. He opened his mouth to say something but the words wouldn’t come. I smiled at him as though he had said something and walked over to my car and got in. I saw him shoot a glance at the boot of his car. No one else would have noticed it, even less the kind of glance it was. I wondered what the glance would be like if he knew what I knew.

KNOTT

I could feel my face setting into a new permanent expression; glazed eyes, slight mad frown, twisted mouth, slack jaw. I was beginning to lose control.

We drove away from the Ferry Boat—a mini-cortège. That was what we were. A funeral procession without a graveyard to go to.

I turned the Mercedes into the road where my house was. It was very quiet but that’s what you paid for. My headlights stroked the street sign. Corella Way. It should have said Street of Dreams. The kind of place I’d always aspired to Residential. My mother loved it.

I looked in the mirror. The Cortina was turning the corner behind me. There was nothing else for it; I had to turn into my driveway. I revved the engine as little as possible and turned the headlamps off so that they wouldn’t sweep the house. If the T.V. was on, there was just a chance my wife wouldn’t hear me. Then I’d be able to slip the handbrake off and slide out again and with a little piece of God’s own luck she’d never know.

But as I made the turn Plender accelerated the Cortina, blaring the horn as he went past, making a klaxon rat-a-tat, a siren Colonel Bogey. I snapped off my engine. Inside the house, a child had started to cry. Nicola. The bastard had woken her up. The Mercedes was facing the hallway. The outside wall of the hallway was made completely of glass. My wife would have to cross it to go to Nicola if the crying persisted. And if Kate came into the hallway there was no way that she could possibly avoid seeing me.

The crying persisted.

A shaft of light cut into the darkness of the hallway and washed over the Mercedes. Kate appeared, black as the mood her movements described. When she saw me she stopped in her tracks. I jumped to some kind of life and opened the door of the car and got out and walked towards the house. Kate turned away and carried on towards the stairs but that didn’t create an alternative for me; I had to go into the house, for the time being, at least. And besides I needed to behave rationally in front of my wife to help stop me going mad.

I opened the glass door and click-clacked across the parquet floor. The soft light from the lounge tickled the delicate jets of the fish fountain. I walked into the lounge and stood in the middle of it, not sitting down, just staring at the night blackness of the picture window. I was beyond any kind of thought.

Eventually I heard Kate cross the hall and come into the lounge. I didn’t turn to look at her. She didn’t sit down either. I could imagine how she would be standing, one arm pressed into her side, the other bent, crossing her breasts her fingers massaging the muscles of her rigid arm.

She waited for me to speak.

“What was all that about?” I said, still not facing her.

“Nicola,” she said. “Some bloody fool blaring his hooter. You must have heard him.”

“Yes,” I said. I turned round. “Actually, it was someone I know.”

“Oh? Who?”

I had to tell her sometime.

“Quite funny really. Quite a coincidence, I mean.”

“Coincidence?”

I told her what had happened. When I’d finished she said, “And we’re to expect him next week?”

“Yes.”

“What for?”

“What?”

“Drinks, dinner, what?”

“Oh . . . I don’t know. Whatever you like.”

“Well, he’s
your
friend. Do you want to give him dinner?”

“He’s not a friend, exactly. I mean, really it’ll be just a one-off thing. Get it out of the way.”

“Well, we’d better give him dinner, then. He’s not likely to reciprocate, is he?”

I shook my head and sat down on the leather settee. Images from the evening slotted into my mind like slides in a projector: Eileen drinking, Eileen in her underwear, Eileen straddled across me, an alcoholic sweat teeming down her face, Eileen staring into my eyes, her own eyes dead, her mouth wet and bloody. I wanted to be sick again.

“I hope his table manners aren’t as bad as his driving manners,” said Kate.

I didn’t say anything. I searched about in my pockets for my cigarettes.

“There’s some in the box,” said Kate, sitting down on the white pouffe, still scratching her arm.

She pushed the box across the glass-topped coffee table. I took a cigarette and lit up and sneaked a glance at my watch. It was almost eleven thirty.

“What’s he like?” she said.

I inhaled, looking everywhere round the room—anywhere except into Kate’s eyes.

“What’s he like?” I said, playing for time, hoping my concentration would somehow miraculously return. “I don’t know, really. I mean, it’s been so long.”

“Yes, but what was he like then?”

For Christ’s sake, I thought, just leave it alone.

“Then? Well, we were only kids. What he was like then and what he’s like now are bound to be two different things.”

“Oh all right. If you don’t want to tell me.”

I couldn’t afford for her to lose her temper with me so I said, “It’s not that. It’s just difficult. Fifteen years is a long time.” I massaged my forehead as though I was trying to think. “Let me see; well, really, he was a bit pathetic. Always on the outside. Of our group, I mean. Of any group. Always on the outside trying to get in. Trying too hard to get in.”

“And consequently no one would let him in.”

“Well, he was
in
the group, if you see what I mean, but
not
in it. He was suffered.”

“The group fool?”

“In a way. The butt of all the jokes. He took it all, though.”

“Just in the hope he’d be accepted.”

“I suppose he pretended the jokes were meant differently.”

“Affectionately.”

“Yes.”

“How bloody awful,” she said flatly.

I nodded and tried to focus my mind on a reason, any reason at all, to get me out of the room.

“What bastards kids can be,” she said.

Something back at the studio. Supposing I said I’d left the printer on. The heat would . . .

Kate stood up.

“How did the session go?” she said.

“The session? Oh, fine.”

“What were you doing?”

“Handbags. The new range.”

“Exciting.”

I stood up, about to tell Kate about the printer.

“How bad is the car?” she said.

“Not too bad,” I said. “They’ll be able to beat it out.”

“I must go and see,” she said and turned to go out of the room.

I tried to call after her, but what could I say? Don’t, whatever you do, open the boot? Instead I found myself following her out into the night. She walked to the back of the car and bent forward and examined the car with that same clinical intensity that women have when they examine a spot or a rash or a cut.

Eventually she pulled a face.

“Nasty,” she said, and tried to open the boot.

I had locked it, hadn’t I? I had locked it?

“Is it jammed?”

“No,” I said. “It’s locked.”

She straightened up and gave a last look at the car, a look faintly touched with a certain amused satisfaction.

“Well,” she said. “They’ll have their work cut out.”

She began to walk back towards the house.

I stayed where I was, not able to do anything at all.

Kate stopped and turned.

“Aren’t you going to put it away?”

I stared at her.

“Hurry up,” she said. “I’ve got something to show you.”

She turned again and carried on into the house.

I got into the car and nudged it into the garage. I had reached a decision by default; it would have to be done in the morning. I’d use Kate’s Hillman. I’d tell Kate I was going down to the sailing club to take the dinghy out before the Sunday crowd got there. I’d get up early, before Kate, and I’d move the . . . I’d put Eileen in the boot of the Hillman and drive down to the brickyards and I’d do what I’d decided earlier to do. After all, I’d be quite safe. Nobody would know she was here.

All I had to do was to go into the house and get into bed and try and pretend that there wasn’t an unalterably dead girl in the boot of my car. I should be able to do that. Provided I didn’t go mad before daylight came. Unless, of course, I was mad already.

I went into the house and up the stairs and into the children’s bedroom.

Kevin, the youngest, was lying face down, the sheets pulled almost completely over his head. All I could see of him was a tuft of fair hair. It was the same every night. We called him the Sprout because of it.

Tears sprang to my eyes and my face twisted and I wanted to shudder and shake and fall to my knees and let it all surge out of me, let it rush out until I was empty and let the emptiness make the evening void.

But Kate came in and stood by me and looked down at the children.

“Aren’t we lucky,” she said, taking my hand in hers.

I nodded, which was all I could trust myself to do. Kate looked at the children for a little longer, then she said, “Come on. I want to show you something.”

She led me into our bedroom. While I’d been downstairs she’d changed into her dressing gown.

“Sit down,” she said. There was an odd look on her face, a mixture of expectation and shy triumph.

I sat down on the edge of the bed. She hooked her thumbs into the belt of her dressing gown and pushed. The dressing gown fell open. She wasn’t wearing her nightdress. Instead she was wearing underwear, new underwear, but the thing was, part of the set was a suspender belt and attached to the suspender belt was a pair of black silk stockings.

I stared at her body showing pink through the soft whiteness of the new things.

“Well?” she said, half embarrassed, half expectant.

I didn’t say anything. She must have taken my silence as meaning what she wanted it to mean.

“I finally managed it,” she said, pushing the dressing gown out behind her and twisting her torso round and arching her back so that she could look at the back of her legs. “It was a devil of a job to find some. It’s hard enough these days to get ordinary stockings, but these are as rare as moondust. And as for the suspender belt . . . I must tell you, in the shops they really thought I was someone out of the ark.”

I said nothing. It was just dawning on me. What she wanted. Now. My own fault. I’d always been on at her about getting stockings, how they turned me on. Today of all days she’d done something about it. She must have been feeling particularly uneasy about me, particularly insecure. So therefore I had to respond. Otherwise she’d be even more suspicious; she’d know I’d had someone else in the last few hours.

She raised a leg and placed her foot on my knee, hands on hips, wobbling slightly on her other leg, the classic pose, the dominant whore, except Kate was the antithesis of the whore. No reason. A girl with exactly the same looks as Kate could have been a whore, but not Kate. It was something other than looks; she was too sensitive, too wrapped up in herself, too much of a brooder, too self-aware, too self-conscious.

“So there,” she said, raising her leg even higher, pressing her silky foot into my chest and gently pushing me back on to the bed. The movement overbalanced her so that she had to let both her arms drop in order to support her as she bent over me, one knee on the bed. Her long black hair fell over her shoulders and tickled my face.

“So there,” she said again.

I stared up at her but instead of Kate all I could see was Eileen’s dead face.

Kate put her hands between my legs and felt me.

“Now that I’ve gone to all this trouble,” she said, “the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Let’s see how much difference it really makes.”

PLENDER

The lights went out at eleven forty-five. I gave them another hour. Cold wind drifted through the branches of the trees opposite Knott’s place. I shivered in sympathy and walked across the road and stood by the gate and looked at the house.

It really was very nice.

A bungalow, really, more than a house. But much more than a bungalow. New. Couldn’t have been up more than three years. Long and low with one upstairs room and plenty of fashionably rough surfaces and acres of floor to ceiling double-glazing. Soft lawns and neat shingle and rows of symmetrical rose bushes and plenty of nice private trellis work.

I had to admit it—the lad had done all right for himself. But he was going to do even better for me.

I opened the gate and walked up the drive. The plan of the house couldn’t have been more helpful for my purposes. The garage was at the top of the sloping drive, set apart from the rest of the house. And the room where the light had been, their bedroom, was at the opposite end of the house, round the side.

I tried the handle to the sliding garage door, turning it forward and back again. Not a sound. Well oiled, like the rest of the house. I turned it back again and gave it a gentle tug. It sighed softly but nothing more. Slowly I pushed it up on its rollers. It shuddered slightly but there was hardly a rattle. I stood still for a few minutes. Nothing from the house. I took out my torch and walked into the garage. I splashed the beam on the boot and took out my machinery.