Qinmeartha and the Girl-Child LoChi (2 page)
Read Qinmeartha and the Girl-Child LoChi Online
Authors: John Grant
"Miss Gard, down for the weekend," he said morosely.
"Hi, Jas," she replied, perching herself on a stool, trying to make herself cheer up by pretending to. "A pint of ... Royal Oak, if it's on form."
"Royal Oak it is," he said, moving to the pump. He, too, had lost weight, she suddenly noticed. It was better disguised, because of the disreputable old suit and waistcoat he affected, but the jacket was loose on his shoulders and there were flaps of flesh around his chin and cheeks.
"What's going on?" she said as he put the pint on the towel mat in front of her and took her coins. "Not just here, I mean."
"What
do
you mean?" he said off-handedly.
"In Ashburton. It's not the same." She swung her arm to indicate the pub and the rest of the village beyond its walls. "My aunt's different – like there isn't as much life inside her as there used to be. And ..." She stopped. How can you tell someone, face to face, that they're looking bloody terrible? "And everything," she concluded limply.
"Not as I've noticed," Jas said. He was polishing his way along the optics with a torn tea-towel. "Have you noticed anything, Rupert?"
Rupert, whose job was something Joanna had never discovered but who was generally regarded as a townie because until last autumn he had commuted daily to Newton Abbot, looked up for the first time from his whisky and soda.
"Yes," he said indistinctly. "No. Young Joanna Gard, isn't it? Come to visit your aunt, have you? Fine woman, your aunt. Fine figure of a woman, too." He covered a belch with his hand. His fingers were nicotine yellow, like his moustache. "Few years ago I'd have ..."
Joanna never found out, thank God, what Rupert'd have, because the door opened behind her. She twisted round and saw a couple of young people – people her own age – coming in. It was as if someone had opened the windows in a morgue.
At first she didn't register them as anything other than blessed interruptions, but as they came closer to the bar she began to see them as people. The woman was, on second examination, somewhat younger than Joanna – she didn't look to be more than twenty, if that. She had long hair, a glossy black, and skin of a colour that looked as if it would become a tan within days of the first arrival of summer. Her lips were full, although her mouth was small. She glanced at Joanna briefly, her dark, nearly black eyes showing no sign of interest.
The man was older – he could even be thirty. He was in jeans and a faded green Marillion t-shirt. He was quite tall, and had the same night-black hair as the woman. It was clear from stray facial resemblances – the fleshy lips, the smallness of the mouth, the cleft marking the chin – that the two were brother and sister, not a couple, as she'd at first assumed. Yet, where the woman's face seemed quintessentially feminine, his was almost defiantly masculine.
Joanna turned away and stared at her drink. She'd not been much interested in men since the abortion – not remotely interested in them, if the truth were to be told – but this stranger was something different. Things were looking up in Ashburton if they could import talent like this, she reflected wryly. She tried to tell herself that there was something lofty and romantic in that original hot flash of attraction she'd felt, but was honest enough to acknowledge there hadn't been a lot of higher emotion involved.
"Guinness, Jas." She liked his voice, as well. Not hunkish: not wimpish, either. It had an accent that she couldn't for the moment place. "Tony?"
"Just a coke."
So the girl's name was Antonia. Probably. What was
his
?
"You're new here?" Joanna said, turning towards the pair.
Oh, God, that must have sounded patronizing,
she thought.
I'm only sort of here on sufferance myself.
"You're a strange face as well," said the man, smiling guardedly. "You must be Jill Soames's niece."
"Yes. Joanna."
News travels fast in Ashburton.
"Jas's told us about you, hasn't he, Tony?" He was laughing at her, but not unkindly. His sister didn't join in. "Don't worry, Joanna – it
is
Joanna, isn't it? – he's given us a good report of you."
"And you?" She wished she didn't feel so much like a schoolgirl all of a sudden. She remembered when she'd been in the sixth form the school had hired a temporary assistant cook who'd looked like a sort of unraddled Mick Jagger, and how she'd always turned her face away when she passed him in the corridor in case he was telepathic and would find out what she was thinking about him. She felt like that now.
"We've been here ... oh, four months now, I guess. Since Christmas. We moved into the big house at the other end of Ham's Lane, down by the playing fields."
"Aunt Jill told me Major Hunter had died. Was the house as much of a mess as everyone thought it would be?"
He looked at her gravely and adopted a portentous tone. "Significantly worse." He smiled. "Oh, boy, was it bad! Mother had to call in professionals in the end, just to get all the crap out of it. There was one entire cellar filled with broken glass. Seems he couldn't face putting his bottles out with the dustbins so he just slung them down there. Enough there to keep Coventry Cathedral in replacement windows for the next thousand years, I should think."
"It's not funny, Steve," said his sister, touching his arm. "He was a poor, lonely old man, that's all. Lay off him. Let him rest in peace."
"OK, OK." He pushed his sister's hand away. "I won't even mention the heaps of girlie maga –"
"
Steve!
There were no such –"
"Sorry, sorry."
"Do you like it here in Ashburton?" said Joanna. It sounded like the kind of question someone might ask at a school prizegiving – something that indicated the asker didn't want an answer. She lifted her glass to her lips as if somehow that would make the words sound wittier.
"As good as anywhere," said Tony. She started to say something else, but bit it back.
You were going to say,
thought Joanna for her,
that, just like in all these little places around the moor, the people don't take kindly to newcomers. Aunt Jill's been here for over three years, but they still, though they're friendly enough, treat her as if she were a weekend tripper rather than someone who's come here to stay.
"We're going to sit down," said Steve in that rich voice of his. "Join us?" He shrugged towards a table near the rear, where the loos were. Tony was already on her way across, holding her Coke out from her side theatrically, as if Jas would throw her out if she spilt any of it.
"Love to," Joanna said. "I don't really know anyone much around here."
She followed, amazed all over again by the contrast between these two rather beautiful people and the rest of the folk in the pub. They were bright splashes of acrylic set on the wall alongside twee, cautious watercolours. Greta, too, had had that same washed-outness about her. And Aunt Jill, of course ...
"I can't stop long," Joanna explained as she sat down. "My aunt – I've only just arrived – something in the oven ..."
"It's nice to meet you," said Steve forthrightly. He put his hand lightly on hers. "Ashburton's all right, like Tony was saying, but it's a bit – you know, dead."
Except when people like you two are around to breathe life into it,
she thought. "As you said, I'm Joanna," she muttered. "And you?"
"Gilmour. Steve and Tony Gilmour. The idlest layabouts in an idle family, in case you were going to ask us what we do. Funny sort of question, that, now I come to think about it, and yet we're always asking it of each other."
For a moment Joanna was lost by him, unable to work out if "we" were Steve and his sister or the human species at large.
"As if you could tell more about a person from what they do between nine and five, by what they earn their meals from," Steve was saying, "than from whether they've just helped you out of a hole, or if they like Stockhausen better than the Black Crows, or ..."
Tony, who had been so indifferent to Joanna's presence when they'd met, now seemed to have decided she liked her. "You're burbling, Steve," she said. "You'll bore the poor woman before she's properly even met us."
"Tishwash, sister!" he said. "I'm sure that Joanna here has long ago decided that the sooner she can get out of this pub and never see us again, the happier she'll be. Am I right, Joanna?"
"Not at all," she said, flustered. "Quite the opposite, in fact."
And that may sound like just the sort of courtesy you'd expect from me, but it's true,
she added mentally.
Truer than you could possibly imagine.
"But I do have to go." She gulped down half the remains of her beer – which, now she was paying attention to it, wasn't up to Jas's usual standards.
"Yes – you said." Steve's voice was sympathetic. "You have an aunt and a casserole to attend to."
"Something like that."
And quite a lot else.
I think.
~
That night, hot though the night itself hadn't seemed to be hot, Joanna dreamed.
She was in a place where the sky was always light, a single mass of brightness that arched all the way from one horizon to the other. She knew quite a lot about her situation in this place, but not really enough altogether to explain it. There was a sun somewhere in the dome of radiance, but it was lost in the general brilliance: the sun never set, and it touched the atmosphere of this world into shining with the same unremitting vigour as itself.
There was no escape from the light. Here and there rocks stuck up out of the desert, and there were one or two scrubby-looking plants, but they cast no shadows. The radiance was not especially hot, but it was so bright that it burnt her as painfully as red-hot tongs, seeming to flay away the cornea of the single eye that seemed to be the entirety of her body's upper surface.
She slithered. It was the only way she could move. She could extend pseudopodia – indeed, she didn't even have to think about doing so: it just happened – and then drag herself a few painful centimetres across the abrasive desert surface, looking for shadows that were not there so that she could hide in them from the light that would not permit her to hide. It was silly to go on searching, she knew that; but she was unable to take the decision just to stop where she was, to give up the hope. It was as if, wherever this hell was, she'd been condemned to spend the rest of eternity hunting for a relief that would never be granted.
It was a while before she realized she was not the only one here: although she couldn't see anything out of her single upturned eye except the lurid fire, sometimes shadows moved at the extreme periphery of her vision. Once she'd observed a few of these she realized that she'd
always
known there were others of her kind. She was of the Wardrobe Folk, as were they; and it was the doom of the Wardrobe Folk to dwell in this arid misery forever.
Unless ...
Unless the Girl-Child LoChi could come among them.
But Joanna, in her dream, didn't know who the Girl-Child LoChi was, and didn't know how she could find out. Lacking that knowledge, she was sapping the strength of her people in their attempts to bring the Girl-Child LoChi to their aid. She was at fault – every extra second that she and the other flat creatures like herself spent here was partly her responsibility.
Guilt. Too much of it for her mind to stay here.
She woke screaming in a tangle of bedclothes to find light pouring in through the bedroom window. She screamed at that, too, until she realized it was only the morning sunshine, and that she was in her own bedroom in Ashburton-by-the-Moor.
A few minutes later she was giggling unconvincedly. Just a nightmare. The Wardrobe Folk – next it would be the Pantry People or the Cupboard Under The Stairs Collective.
But the cold sweat all over her and the sheets and the blankets didn't go away just because her rational mind was taking over its rightful functions once more.
She pulled herself out of bed.
Later she'd tell Aunt Jill all about this, and the two of them would laugh together at the silliness.
~
Later, though, when she went to wake up Aunt Jill with a cup of tea, she discovered Aunt Jill was dead.
3: Farewells, Welcomes
There was a wind up today, coming from the sea to the south, and it was blowing away most of what the Reverend James Daker was saying.
Which was, in Joanna's opinion, an unquestionably good thing. Her aunt had never had much time for ceremonies or for what she called "po-faced eulogies", and the Reverend Daker's utterances would have had her cringing. She was "a pillar of the community" and a "stalwart on the side of virtue" and all sorts of other things he'd never made much reference to when she'd been alive and trying to mount petitions about the Bloody Bells.
Joanna looked glumly across the open wound of the grave. She wasn't certain whether or not Aunt Jill had ever attended services at St Leonard's, and she guessed that the Reverend Daker wasn't, either. Still, these formalities had to be gone through, Joanna concluded. Viewed as formalities, they didn't seem too bad; viewed as anything else, the Reverend Daker's overblown testimonials were somehow poisonous, as if Aunt Jill's spirit were not to be allowed to ascend into the hereafter without taking with it its due quota of earthly hypocrisy.
There was a scattering of other mourners. Jas had shut the Blue Horse for the occasion, and he was standing opposite her, his eyes downcast. Out from behind the shield of his bar, he looked even less substantial than he had the other day. She willed him to look up at her, but he obstinately refused. Rupert was there, too, his eyes betraying whatever private wake he'd held for himself the night before. He, too, didn't seem to want to look at her. And there was Greta, and the woman from the post office, and even the chap who organized the Bloody Bell-ringing sessions – probably telling himself that the Christian humility he was showing in coming to the funeral of his old enemy would serve him well in the life to come, or maybe he was just here to gloat – and a dozen or so others. All of them elderly people, around Aunt Jill's kind of age or older; Joanna was the only person there under fifty.
The fresh spring wind made their clothes flap. Joanna was reminded of a different season – of autumn trees. Come winter, would this leaping breeze be a gale, and would all of the trees be able to withstand it?
She straightened her shoulders and told herself to stop being morbid. The Reverend Daker seemed to be coming to the end of his oration – or, at least, he was pausing for breath – and she must brace herself to receive the sympathies of the others. On second thoughts, cemeteries were about the one place in the world it was perfectly permissible to be morbid. And why
should
she don a cloak of false happiness?
They took turns tossing earth down onto the coffin-lid. Joanna wiped off her hands on the sides of her skirt. Surely that was about all they had to do; surely they could all pack off home now, herself included. She'd decided against holding one of those glacial funeral teas people seemed to go in for; there weren't any relations, and the only residents of Ashburton whom Aunt Jill had known at all well were gathered here and looking about as uninterested in protracting proceedings as Joanna herself. She had a bottle of scotch back at the flat –
her
flat, now – and proposed to spend the rest of the afternoon getting as much of it into herself as possible before she passed out. From the look of Rupert, his intentions were very similar.
As if at a signal, the rest of the party moved off, leaving her alone at the graveside for a moment with the sexton.
"She was a nice woman, your aunt," he said, bending to pick up the first spadeful of earth. "She'll be missed around here."
It was a better funeral oration than the Reverend Daker had been able to compose.
~
The level of whisky in the bottle had gone down by about a third, and she'd given up bothering to mix it with water. The light coming in through the drawing-room window was a golden mellow colour, a paler variation on the liquid in the bottle: in an hour or so it would be sunset. She knew she was really quite a lot drunk, although still not drunk enough.
Something had wasted Aunt Jill away, something that had grown inside her, devouring her. In other circumstances Joanna might have guessed cancer, but there hadn't been that funny smell cancer victims usually give off, and Dr Grasmere had sworn to her that her aunt had been in perfect health.
"She just died," he'd said. "She was old, you know."
"She wasn't yet sixty-five," Joanna had said, and she said it again now, raising her tumbler to the whisky bottle in some sort of tribute. "She shouldn't have died. She wasn't old enough to die. She didn't ..." No: saying that people didn't deserve to die was stupid, and somehow uncharitable. No one deserved to die except those who wanted to, and Aunt Jill hadn't wanted to.
Well. Maybe not. It was hard to tell what the frail old grandmother who called herself Aunt Jill had actually wanted, or not wanted. Joanna wished she'd come down here to Ashburton more often, or at least more recently. She wished she hadn't spent part of that last evening down in the Blue Horse chatting with Steve and Tony Gilmour. She wished ...
Right at this moment, she discovered, she wished more than anything else that she didn't have to go and pee. The stairs up to the loo suddenly seemed a challenge. Maybe it was stupid of her to have got this plastered.
The irony was that she'd driven down from London intending to ask Aunt Jill if it would be possible for her to come to Ashburton to live for a while. Her redundancy money from Rolfe and Baldwin wasn't going to last forever, not at London rents; and there weren't any very appealing jobs around right now, and ... Well, now the flat was hers. She could come and live here any time she wanted – and probably would. She'd wait a week or so, and then she'd go up to London and give in notice to her landlord. The few possessions she really wanted to keep, apart from the books, could probably all be jammed into the Mini. Mike – good-old-faithful-spaniel-Mike – Mike would bring the books down in the back of his van some time.
If she asked him nicely.
The loo, woman! Not a second more!
She was coming back down the stairs, taking them one at a time and gripping the banister so tightly that her hand would hardly slide, when the doorbell rang.
"Shit!" she muttered. "Bloody well-wishers. Bloody vultures."
But instead she found Steve and Tony at the door.
"Hi. Come in. I'm pissed."
Steve laughed, his arm round his sister's shoulders. "Then this is a fine time for us to join you." He moved forward, not exactly pushing her but at the same time giving her no opportunity to refuse admission. "We thought you might be drinking, Tony and I, and we thought you might like some company. Miserable occasions, funerals – more miserable than the deaths themselves, in some ways."
"You have a great experience of deaths, I suppose?" said Joanna, trying to put some acidity into her voice. The result sounded to her as if she were speaking through cotton wool.
"More than you might think," he said lightly. He was past her by now, standing at the bottom of the stairs, looking upwards. He wrinkled his nose. "Aunt Jill rather let things go to pieces towards the end, didn't she?"
For a moment Joanna couldn't think of anything to say. The effrontery of him! The other evening in the pub she'd found his male vitality, his assuredness, immensely attractive. That had been before she'd seen this oafish, arrogant intruder.
"Aunt Jill was
my
aunt," she said deliberately. "Not yours."
"I'm sorry," said Tony quietly beside her. "Would you really rather we went away and let you be?"
"No," said Joanna automatically. "No – no, it's kind of you to come. I'm sure I ..."
"She told us to call her Aunt Jill," Steve was saying. "Over the last few months she and my mother were seeing a lot of each other, and so it seemed only natural we should come to call her Aunt Jill."
"She never told me anything of this," said Joanna thickly as she followed him up the stairs –
her
stairs. "I think she would have mentioned ..."
"It's quite true," said Tony. "Steve exaggerates about a lot of things, but he's telling you the truth about this. Your aunt and our mother did seem to be ... very
taken
with each other, is how your aunt put it. Afternoon tea the two of them would be over here, morning coffee at our house."
"And lunch every day at the Crafts Centre," boomed Steve, looking almost proprietarily around the drawing-room. He'd smuggled in a bottle of scotch somehow, and had placed it on the coffee table beside Joanna's. "That was, until your aunt's health began to get so low. Probably's Greta's wholefoods, I should imagine."
He cut another chuckle off short. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said that. What
did
Aunt Jill die of, by the way? Did that old quack from up the hill tell you?"
"Old age, Dr Grasmere said."
Joanna crossed and sat down in Aunt Jill's armchair. It must have been obvious to Tony that this wasn't where Joanna had been sitting before, because she said: "Look, are you
sure
you don't mind us two storming in here? We honestly won't mind if you tell us to go away again."
"You're here now," Joanna said with an effort at grandness. "Settle yourselves down. No doubt you know where the glasses are kept." She indicated the kitchen, and Tony slipped quietly out of the room.
"I'm surprised my aunt never mentioned your mother to me," said Joanna again, worrying away at the problem. "Even though I didn't see her as often as I should have, we spoke on the telephone most weekends, and she was always filling me in on events in the village. I'd have thought she would have said
something
about ..."
"It's a mystery," said Steve with finality, landing with a thump in the chair she'd not long vacated. "That's all. You can ask mother about it when you meet her, which I hope won't be long. Oh, yes, that's right – I almost forgot. That's one of the main reasons we came across here, Tony and I. My parents would like you to come to dinner one evening soon. In fact, mother was mad keen you should come tonight, but I guess that's ... not possible."
She saw her dishevelment reflected in his gaze and laughed. It was the first genuine laugh she'd uttered since finding Aunt Jill dead in her bed.
"I've got the glasses," said Tony.
She appeared around the wing of the armchair carrying a tray with a couple of mismatched glasses and the aluminium milk-jug. "Water," Tony explained.
Steve leapt to his feet and poured for both of them; at the same time he topped up Joanna's tumbler. She waved away his offer of water from the aluminium jug.
"I'd like to accept your parents' kind invitation to dinner," said Joanna, forming the words carefully. "Not tonight – not so soon after my aunt's funeral. But tomorrow, if that would be convenient."
"Perfect!" said Steve. "Tuesday evening it shall be. I shall call for you, ma'am, at eight o'clock precisely. We shall have drinks on the veranda beforehand and ..."
He talked on, and Joanna let the words wash over her. She became much more conscious of Tony, sitting demurely on a chair's edge to her left. It was obvious from the way the girl – Joanna found it hard to think of anyone younger than herself as a woman – had her denimed knees so tightly pressed together that she was still nervous about being here, still wishing that her brother would shut up so the two of them could make their polite escapes.
It's funny,
thought Joanna,
the way I was so wrong about
both
of these two when we met. Tony seemed all haughty and aloof, as if she wouldn't wipe her feet on me, and Steve seemed like the answer to a maiden's dream. Hmmf! Some maiden: some dream.
"How old are you?" Joanna suddenly asked the Gilmour girl, cutting Steve's witterings off mid-flow.
"I'm ... uh ... I'm nineteen. And Steve – Steve's twenty-four."
"I guessed you about right," Joanna said. "But I thought Steve would be older – more like thirty."
Steve brayed with good humour. "I don't know whether to be complimented or ..." he began, but Joanna ignored him.
"And yet sometimes," she said to Tony, "when I look at you more carefully, or when the sun catches your face just
so
, you seem much older than your brother."
Tony flushed under her pale-tea skin, and looked down to where her hands were toying with her whisky glass. "I guess that's a way of looking at it," she mumbled, glancing up suddenly at her brother.
Joanna sensed that there was something here she ought to know more about, but her mind, slowed by the whisky, wasn't capable of framing the next question. Instead she said: "Where did you live before you came here?"
"Oh," answered Steve airily before his sister could say anything, "here and there, you know. The way one does."
"Here and there?" said Joanna.
"Round and about. We're sort of like gypsies, our family – we never stop in any one place too long. And you?"
"I live – used to live, I suppose I should say – in London, in a bit of London called West Hampstead. Pandora Road. Number 48. It's about seven minutes from the tube station. I rent a place. The landlord calls it a flat, but really it's just a glorified bedsit, with its own bathroom. I pay ..."
And the words kept on tumbling out of her. To her horror she discovered she was pouring out in front of these almost total strangers every detail of her life, of her work at Rolfe and Baldwin and of how that had come to such an abrupt end, of her relationships with Mike and Peter, of the baby that never was – she remembered to call it a baby, at least, because if she called it just a fetus people might think she was a bit cold-blooded, or something – and of how it had been Mike's kid when at first she'd thought it was Peter's because she'd got mixed up with her months because being with Peter made for such a lot of turbulence in her life and ...
All of it. Some bits she'd never properly told
herself
before, let alone other people. Once or twice during the flood of words she tried to bite her tongue, anything to stop herself blabbing her innermost secrets, but it swivelled easily out of the reach of her teeth.
There was darkness outside the window when finally she ground to a halt. She'd lost count of the number of times Steve had quietly leaned forwards and topped up her glass. There was nothing left now of the bottle she'd started on her own, and the level in the second was half-way down the label, and yet she didn't feel nearly as drunk as she had been earlier. Perhaps the adrenalin of confession had burnt away the alcohol, or something.