Provender Gleed (40 page)

'I'm,' Damien said, and a fresh wave of pain hit him and he winced. 'I'm,' he said again, 'going to do humanity a favour. Fuck the money. Fuck Needle Grove. You' - a clench of teeth, a gasp - 'are going to pay for everything you've done. Everything your Family has done. All the Families have done. And I'm going to be a hero. The nation will thank me, the world will thank me. It starts now. The British Uprising. This is the first blow. Freedom begins today.'

The knife came up, quivering. Damien poised himself to attack. Provender knew he needed to run, or defend himself somehow, but he was overcome with the terrible certainty that it wouldn't make any difference. Whether he fled, whether he stood and fought, he would not win. The man had a knife. The man had vowed to kill him. The man was going to let nothing get in the way of achieving that goal. Provender had arrived at the last moments of his life, and he wished there wasn't this sense of impotence, of inevitability. He wished fear had not rendered him so pathetically helpless.

Then Damien let out yet another sharp yelp of pain, his face briefly creasing up. A look of curiosity crept over him, closely followed by a look of bewilderment. He half turned, groping behind his back with his empty hand, the bitten one. Fumbling exploration located something near the base of his spine, in the muscle above his hip. He plucked the foreign object out. His hand came round and it was holding a small transparent plastic tube, needle-tipped, empty. Damien peered at the tube, perplexed, trying to make sense of it. A hypodermic syringe. What was
that
doing stuck into his back?

The answer came to him at much the same time that it came to Provender.

'Is,' said Provender.

'Is?' said Damien.

Is was behind Damien, just out of his immediate reach. Her arm was still extended with the fingers of her hand loosely configured for depressing the syringe plunger, thumb behind middle and index. Her face showed fear, regret, determination, defiance, all at once.

'Shouldn't talk so much, Damien,' she said hoarsely. 'That's your trouble. Too much in love with the sound of your own voice.'

'Bitch!' Damien yelled, and turned and charged at her.

Provender, at the same time, charged at
him
.

Whether Damien would actually have reached Is was a moot point. Already the Comaphase was racing around his system, shutting faculties down like a janitor switching off lights in an office block. His legs were sluggish, his thoughts were slurred, and his blood was moving like molasses in his veins. After only one step he teetered, and then Provender collided with him in a rugby tackle and Damien fell. Floorboards rushed up to greet him. The last sensation he was aware of was his face smacking into wood and his nose breaking. He did not even feel Provender on top of him. There was a skull-shivering crunch, a burst of agony, and then the emptiness of the void - pure, pain-free, weightless oblivion.

Provender, for his part, felt it wise to remain on Damien's back, pressing him down, until he was 100% certain that the drug had taken effect. He had the presence of mind to bat the knife away from Damien's limp hand, sending it slithering across the floor. Thereafter, simply lying atop his fallen enemy was about all he could do. Even if he had wanted to get up, his trembling body didn't seem ready yet to accept the command to do so.

Finally he mustered the strength to raise his head. He looked for Is. He wanted to see her acknowledge what he had done, see her smile at him. When the threat had been to himself he had been paralysed, incapable of reacting, but the moment Is had been in danger he had known exactly what to do.

Just as his eyes met hers, however, an angry figure stepped in the way, obstructing his view.

'Provender?' exclaimed Arthur, glaring down, fists on hips. 'What in hell's name are you doing here?'

60

'Nonsense.' The denial was punctuated with a head-shake and a snort. 'I can't possibly be in league with that man. I've never seen him before in my life.'

'Never
seen
him, maybe, but you've talked with him on the phone.'

'Not that either.' Arthur nodded emphatically to where the prone, unconscious form of Damien Scrase lay in the wings. Two burly stagehands had wrapped Scrase up in gaffer tape, all but mummifying him, and were standing watch over him self-consciously, like a pair of bit-part players - First and Second Guard. The hand Provender had bitten was wrapped in a towel, through which blood was already starting to seep darkly. 'I do not know him. I have no idea who he is. And as to conspiring with him to kidnap you, Provender... Now we're in the realm of utter bonkersness. Why, for God's sake? What could I hope to gain?'

'Disruption of my life, of my Family, which you could take advantage of. An opportunity to, well, upstage me. Usurp me. Who knows, it could be you even planned to come to my "rescue" at some point, finding out where I was and dramatically freeing me from my captors. The whole thing was an elaborate set-up designed so that you could play the hero and raise your standing in my Family's eyes.'

'Pah!'

'He said "Pah!",' Is said sidelong to Moore. 'I didn't know people actually said "Pah!".'

'Apparently they do,' Moore replied.

'Do you have any idea how far-fetched this sounds?' Arthur went on. 'As if I'd want to upset my relatives. Especially not Aunt Cynthia - who's worried sick about you, by the way.'

'I believe you'd risk upsetting them for a short while if it meant you could be saviour of the day later on. In fact, they more upset they were, the better it'd be for you. They'd be so relieved when you brought me back, they'd give you anything you asked. Your own room at Dashlands, even.'

'I don't want a room at Dashlands. All right, I'd take one if it was offered, but I don't want it
that
badly. And yes, I wouldn't mind a bit more acceptance from you lot, but I'd never go about getting it through something as contrived as a kidnap plot. That's too much like ... I was going to say hard work but that's not what I mean. Too much like ... a real thing. A thing that might happen.'

'I thought if it was all a sham, a pretend kidnap, that'd be right up your street. Like this.' Provender waved, indicating the stage set. By this point the house lights were up and the play's cast had gathered in the auditorium to view the unscripted events that were unfolding up there on the boards. The interruption to the performance had brought everyone out from the greenroom, so that now there was an inversion of the usual order of things, an audience of actors watching a group of people being themselves onstage. Nobody was quite sure what Arthur and Provender were arguing about or who the two supporting characters with them were, or for that matter who the unconscious man in the wings was. It was all, nevertheless, fascinating stuff and, like the best kind of entertainment, had them glued to their seats.

'This?' said Arthur. 'This is a whole different matter.'

'Is it?' said Provender. 'What is it anyway? What's it all for? Some kind of joke, I can see. But what's the point of it?'

Arthur scratched an itch beneath his velvety skullcap abstractly. Most of his fellow-troupers had been in on the game: Arthur, with this production, was gently guying his own Family. Few of them had realised, however, how explicitly his Hamlet parodied a certain member of the Gleeds till now, as Arthur and his cousin faced each other, dressed similarly, hairstyled alike. Arthur, they saw, had borrowed heavily from Provender for his rendition of the lead role and it was clear that this to no small extent accounted for Provender's unhappy mood.

'The point...' Arthur said. 'Are you accepting, first of all, that I wasn't responsible for your kidnapping? I wasn't the evil-genius mastermind behind it?'

'No, I'm not.'

'Because I cannot stress enough that I wasn't. Apart from anything else, for the past three months I've been busy as hell putting this damn play together. I haven't had a moment's spare time, so there's no way I could have organised anything as complex as a kidnapping. No way.'

'For what it's worth,' Moore whispered to Is, 'I believe him.'

'Me too. I think Provender's beginning to as well, but if I know him he'll take his time admitting it.'

'And,' said Arthur, with a flicker of irritation, 'don't you see? Can't you tell? This play - that's why I was so keen for all of you to come and see it.'

'So we could watch you laughing at us.'

'No. I wanted you to watch yourselves. I wanted to "hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature". I was trying, in my way, to get the Gleeds to look outside themselves for once, see themselves as others see them.'

'With a play.'

'"The play's the thing",' Arthur said, '"Wherein I'll catch the conscience of my kin."'

'He's practised that line,' Is muttered.

Moore concurred. 'Hours of work to come up with that misquotation.'

Arthur rounded on them and snapped, 'Would you two please stop with the asides! We're trying to settle some important stuff here and it's not easy with you two yammering on in the background. Why don't you go and do something useful? Has anyone called the police, for example? That flat-on-his-face person just tried to kill a Gleed. I think he should be put under arrest, don't you?'

Is and Moore exchanged looks, then Moore shrugged. 'I'll go and find a phone. Provender? May I just say, the PLAY-ACTOR seems like he's being authentically PLACATORY. You might want to consider his innocence.'

'I'll be the judge of that,' came the frosty reply.

'Just saying.' Hands patting the air, Moore exited stage left.

'And you?' Arthur said to Is.

'What about me?'

'Can you find something to do?'

'I'm staying put. You can't order me around.'

'I can.'

'No, you can't.' Is plumped herself down on a suede-sheathed ottoman that sat at an angle, close to the proscenium arch. 'Carry on.'

Arthur glared at her, then sighed and turned back to Provender. 'So, yes, I staged this
Hamlet
for your benefit. I didn't realise at first that there were parallels. All I knew was I wanted to play the Dane because every actor does. It's the peak, the Everest of theatrical roles. I had to do it, a challenge to myself, to prove I had what it takes, I had the chops. Once we began rehearsing, though, and I got more and more familiar with the text, I began to see that the play was about a powerful family, a Family, with all sorts of tensions within, and that Hamlet himself bore similarities to, well...'

'Me.'

'You. He doesn't quite know what to do with himself. He can't quite commit to any course of action. He procrastinates. He prevaricates.'

'You don't know me that well. I'm not like that at all.'

'Perhaps not, but that's how you appear. That's how you appeared to me when I first came south, when I was more of an outsider to the Family than I am now. I thought you a particularly ungrateful, snobbish sort of person.'

'Oh thanks.'

'Because you have so much going for you, Provender. You're privileged, fortunate beyond most people's wildest dreams, and what do you do with yourself? Nothing. You're miserable. You gloom around all day, your own private storm cloud hanging over your head. You can't even manage the one simple duty that's expected of you: finding a wife, carrying on the line.'

'It may seem simple to you.'

'It
is
. Others have done it. Your mother plonks these perfectly agreeable girls in front of you and you turn them down without even considering them. You claim you want to find someone under your own steam but you can't even be bothered to do that. You never make a decision, Provender. You live in your own world. You can't step out of it and engage with anyone else. It's just ridiculous!'

'And so you had me kidnapped --'

'No!' Arthur exclaimed, stamping his foot in exasperation. 'No, I told you, I staged a fucking play! I made it this way, I arranged it to be highly reminiscent of the Gleeds, I reorganised the whole production with one specific aim: so that you would see it. I hoped the Family would see it too and that they would understand what I was getting at even if a dunderhead like you couldn't. This was all, basically, for you, Provender. I was...' His voice lowered. 'In my way I was trying to help. To tell you a few home truths. To show you
you
.'

Provender was stalwartly keeping up a sceptical front but his eyes had begun to betray him. They had softened, no longer hard and angry and righteous. They were the eyes of someone who, in spite of himself, was starting to acknowledge that he might have been wrong.

'And why shouldn't I?' his cousin said. 'It's not as if you and I are close or anything. I'd have nothing to lose by being the one who got you to finally face up to your responsibilities. We could hardly fall out if we'd never been
in
to be begin with. Really, it couldn't be anyone but me. My duty as a Gleed was to make you accept
your
duty as a Gleed, and I was doing that how I thought best. Maybe if you'd seen the play the whole way through... Hamlet's pretty dynamic in the final scene when he's lobbing "envenom'd" swords around. Maybe if you'd seen that bit you'd realise I was trying to be fair.'

'As I recall, Hamlet dies at the end.'

'So? Everyone dies at the end. It's a tragedy.'

'He also goes mad.'

'No, Ophelia goes mad, Hamlet only pretends to. Look, it wasn't intended to be some kind of direct metaphor. The resemblance isn't perfect. After all, Shakespeare didn't look into a crystal ball and see the Gleeds four centuries in the future and write a play that was exactly about them. I took a play that was written four centuries ago and saw how I could adapt it to fit what I wanted to say about you. A reasonably close match but not an absolute one.'

'Fine, but...'

'But what, Prov? I shouldn't have? How dare I? How could I have the nerve? Come on, out with it. I'm barely even proper Family, isn't that right? Wrong side of the blanket, possibly illegitimate. Only proper Family can criticise Family.' He shook his head. 'That wouldn't seem to work, though, would it? Not with the Gleeds. No one in your immediate Family is prepared to confront anyone about anything. Oh, you bicker, there are sideswipes across the dinner table, you think you're sorting things out, but you're not. All you're doing is dusting off a problem before sticking it into the back of the wardrobe again.'