Qinmeartha and the Girl-Child LoChi (3 page)

4: Not the Munsters

Her hangover had largely ebbed by the following evening. She'd slipped guiltily down to the strangely subdued Blue Horse at lunchtime to feed it a couple of pints of Royal Oak, keeping her fingers crossed that the two Gilmours wouldn't come stumbling in and catch her in the act. She'd meant to have only the one pint, but Jas had refused to accept any payment for it, so she'd asked for another to settle up the score, as it were, but then he'd refused to take her money for
that
one, either. She'd have felt better about it if he'd shown her any signs of friendship, but instead he'd made both refusals with a sort of glum resignation that told her he was merely doing his duty.

Still, the beer had worked its magic. She'd climbed into this bath mostly cured, and she was feeling fine now that she was climbing out of it.

She looked at herself in the mirror, striking a girlie-magazine pose, grinning; then suddenly straightening up as if Aunt Jill could be watching her from out of the walls. She was just an inch or so below medium height, with shoulder-length ungroomable hair that couldn't decide whether it wanted to be dark or fair. Her nose was snub, her eyes blue grey. Her breasts weren't large enough and her bottom was too big. It was hopeless telling herself that everyone else she knew likewise thought their boobs were too small and their bums too big:
she
, Joanna Gard, was the woman who really
was
big and small in all the wrong places. She found she was grinning again.
Well, at least I'm unique in
some
thing.

She dried herself on the thick pink towel she'd given Aunt Jill for Christmas three or four years ago, enumerating her other failings as she did so. Her ankles probably
were
–
objectively
were – a bit too thick, and they were looking worse than usual today. Maybe she was suffering a bit of water-retention because of all the stress. Her toenails badly needed cutting, but there was no one going to see them, so it didn't matter. She had a little heat-spot on her waist, still left from where the seat-belt had been chafing against her during the drive down from London – how long ago? Just over a week, wasn't it?

What to wear? She slipped into a pair of pants with pictures of the Gummi Bears on them – Peter said he'd picked them up in Disneyland the last time he'd been in California and had been waiting to find the right woman to wear them – and a plain white Marks and Spencers bra: very sensible. But as for the rest? The trouble was, she hadn't a clue what the Gilmours senior were like. She'd kept a watch from the window most of the morning – it had been something to do while waiting for her head to stop expanding and contracting – hoping to catch sight of anyone coming up Ham's Lane who might be them, but everyone she'd seen had been depressingly familiar to her. Rupert on his way to the Blue Horse. Greta popping in and out of the side-door of the Crafts Centre to puff at a cigarette whenever trade slackened off a bit. The Reverend James "Call Me Jim" Daker huffing officiously about his business. The reputed gay who lived up at the far end of West Street and was said to be a writer of some kind; Aunt Jill had introduced them once but Joanna couldn't remember his name. There were a few others, but no one who could have been the Gilmours.

Their children seemed casual enough: both of them seemed to live in jeans – neatly pressed designer jeans that probably cost a fortune, but jeans nevertheless. If their parents were likewise ... But ... Maybe ...

Joanna swore at herself. It wasn't as if she had much choice. She'd packed a skirt for the weekend, just in case Aunt Jill had company, but it was only the kind of thing you could wear for standing around politely sipping sherry. Her own jeans weren't knife-edged like Steve's and Tony's: they could do with a wash, she realized as she put them to her face. There were some clothes in the wardrobe, left behind other times she'd been here – maybe there'd be something wearable among those.

The Wardrobe Folk.

She shook the thought away with an angry jerk of her head. Last night's booze hadn't spared her the nightmare of the world with the sky of unrelieved light. She'd been unbearably thirsty as well – though whether this had been genuinely part of her dream or her body telling her that all the whisky was dehydrating her was something she didn't know. Probably the latter: the creature who was her in that other world didn't seem to have a mouth, so presumably couldn't feel thirst. But she had discovered something new: there was a certain frisson of excitement among the other creatures who shared her predicament, because somehow they all knew – herself included – that the advent of the Girl-Child LoChi would not be long, now.

Joanna hoped so. Maybe the dreams would stop pestering her then.

She found what she was looking for at last. It would have looked hideously quaint in London, but down here in Ashburton it was probably all the rage: a black jumper suit that caught her around the hips and waist so that her bum looked bigger than ever. "Good breeding stock," she said to her reflection in the wardrobe mirror. "You'll make someone a fine wife, some day."

Mike had always liked her in this, but was probably the subliminal reason she'd left it down here. "A Freudian jumper suit," she said to her reflection, waving her forefinger at it like a schoolmarm.

Shoes. Ah, yes. She had some little black sandshoes that would have to do.

The end product, she decided, once she'd brushed her hair and her teeth and was back in front of the wardrobe mirror again to practise her smiling, wasn't too bad. She'd lay money she'd be able to turn Rupert's head, anyway. If ever she wanted to. Maybe even Steve's, although after his performance last night she was absolutely certain that she wasn't in any way attracted to him, would never be, and the very thought of him made her feel queasy.

Maybe even Tony's ...

Eh? Where had that thought come from? It didn't seem to belong to her.

"Getting more versatile in your old age, hmm, Joanna Gard?" she said to the mirror.

She glanced at her watch. Forty minutes until Steve was due to arrive to pick her up. She could put her feet up and maybe, very cautiously, take a little scotch just to make sure the hangover didn't suddenly come back again.

She was suddenly very tired. Sitting in the armchair swilling scotch seemed like a much better idea than going out to have supper with the Munsters – or whoever Steve's and Tony's parents turned out to be.

Joanna giggled. Oh, yeah: the Munsters in Ashburton.

~

They were charming, of course. Ronnie Gilmour was at the door when Joanna and Steve arrived. She proved to be an older version of her daughter, but with some of her son's flamboyance. She drew Joanna to her for a brief, almost contactless hug, then stood back to look at her properly.

"Steve warned me you were pretty," Ronnie remarked, clearly unaware that she was saying exactly the wrong thing, "but he obviously didn't warn me enough."

Joanna mumbled something embarrassed and allowed Steve to guide her by the arm through the heavy blackened-oak door. At least she was wearing the right sort of thing: Ronnie was in a brightly coloured gypsy dress with a line of faded-blue lace across the bosom – more or less the uniform of the middle-aged hippie. Her voice had the same fullness as Steve's.

Joanna was led into a large room with a fire blazing in an open cast-iron hearth at the far end. The furniture was characterized by its weight rather than by any apparent comfortableness; what a second-hand dealer might have called "much loved". The walls had been left unplastered, with whitewash over the rough-hewn stones. Here and there were pictures and hangings, an odd mixture – so far as Joanna's untrained eye could ascertain – of ancient and modern, fine and garbage. Getting up from one of the overstuffed armchairs gathered around the fire was a man of about fifty whom Joanna guessed must be Gilmour père.

"Vic Gilmour," he said, smiling, extending a massive hand towards her. "And you're Jill Soames's niece. We were so devastated to hear of her death. Ronnie took to her bed for a day to get over it."

But none of you thought to go to the funeral,
Joanna thought resentfully.
She was such a good friend of you all that Steve and Tony were supposed to call her Aunt Jill, and yet you didn't walk a hundred yards to see her stuck into the ground. Too shy? Too shy of what the villagers would think? Or didn't you really know her
that
well? Hmm?

"We wanted to come to the funeral," said Vic Gilmour, as if he had heard her thoughts, "but it wouldn't have been right. That was a time for the people of Ashburton to express their grief, not for outsiders like us."

"But Aunt Jill was an outsider herself," said Joanna, moving to the chair Vic had indicated. "She wouldn't have ... minded."

"A drink?" said Ronnie, coming to the fireside. She'd got a trail of flour on the sleeve of her dress, which was more than Greta of the Crafts Centre ever allowed herself.

As the evening progressed Joanna found herself thawing to this family. She'd thought that Vic was merely giving excuses when he'd said that they'd been reluctant to trespass at her aunt's funeral, but soon she came to realize that he'd been perfectly serious: the Gilmours really did feel like interlopers, like gypsies who would naturally be resented by the community among which they'd parked their caravans for a while. Soon Joanna began to recognize that they were seeking in her a kindred spirit, just as presumably they must have sought out Aunt Jill when first they'd come here.

Over soup – which was Unidentifiable Country Vegetable – she wondered if Steve or Tony had told their parents anything of her drunken outburst last night. If so, there was no trace of the knowledge in the two older people's eyes. Vic and Ronnie seemed concerned to be as frank and open with her as possible, and to make sure she knew this. She wasn't sure she much enjoyed the experience.

The main course was a triumph, and by then the wine they'd been drinking had started to work its relaxing magic. Cutting into a slab of pork that had been marinated in cider and some herbs she didn't recognize, Joanna began to feel more at ease with the world than she had since arriving in Ashburton. The conversation had veered away from her and Aunt Jill and anything to do with current circumstances towards politics, which in a paradoxical way was safer territory. They were all good liberals, of course, as she'd known they would be – and as she was herself – and they bemoaned the difficulties of getting hold of the
Guardian
regularly down here in the wilds. Yet as the discussion progressed – she held herself back any time she felt herself becoming too prescriptive – she discovered that the Gilmours' knowledge of their subject matter was oddly ... amateurish. They were going through the motions, it seemed: they were saying most of the right words, and in general they were saying them in the right order, but there were
gaps
. Midway through a mouthful of strawberries and ice cream Ronnie said something about former Yugoslavia that let Joanna perceive that the woman had the country positioned in the wrong continent – somewhere to the east of Moscow. And Steve described Nelson Mandela as head of the CIA rather than the ANC without any of the rest of the family seeming to notice the slip.

If Joanna had been a little more sober or a little drunker she might have been more concerned by these lapses, but she was too full of her hosts' generosity and wine to give the matter too much thought. She was reminded of a couple of
Sun
readers she'd once met in a seaside hotel who'd sombrely told her that Shirley Porter was deputy leader of the Labour Party. It was reasonable for the people at the other end of the political spectrum to be equally vague about such irritations as
facts
: no one section of society should be allowed a monopoly on ignorance.

"How long are you staying down here for?" Vic asked her once they were sitting back around the fire again. He'd poured brandies for them all except Ronnie, who'd pleaded migraine. "Now that the funeral's over, and all."

"I thought," said Joanna, shy now that she was voicing the idea, "that I might come down and live here for good – well, for a few years, anyway. My aunt was – well, not wealthy exactly, but not poor either. The flat's mine, and there's enough money invested to give me three-quarters of an income. I thought I might see if I could drum up some freelance work to make the other quarter."

"Tired of London, eh?" said Vic, smiling encouragingly at her. "But obviously not tired of life."

The remark threw her. It wasn't something she'd thought about before. The truth was, now she came to confront it head-on, that perhaps she
was
tired of life, too, in a way. The past six months had given her more of "life" than she could have wanted in a decade. Maybe a large part of her urge to kick the dust and soot of London off her feet was that she wanted to leave that sort of life – what the Chinese curse called interesting times – behind her as well.

Once again she had that disconcerting sensation that Vic could tell her thoughts.

"That's not what I meant," he said. "I meant tired of
living
. You have so much vitality locked up inside you, young Joanna Gard, and you seem just to let it out in small, carefully measured doses. Maybe you're wise. You seem to me to have more life inside you than all the rest of us put together."

Joanna laughed, embarrassed. "Not true!" she said, throwing up her hands. "Look at your children, Vic. Look at Steve. Look at Tony. Can't you feel the vitality pouring off them?"

"No," he said flatly. "Not the same way you have it."

She looked up, alarmed. Then she relaxed: at some stage while they'd been talking the two younger Gilmours must have slipped out of the room.

"I don't know what you mean by that," she said slowly.

"Haven't you noticed anything odd about this village?"

"Well – yes." She took another sip of brandy and rolled it around the inside of her teeth. "Yes. Everything seems to be sort of slowly winding down, as if the people were getting tired, or something. They're still the same people all right – I'm not talking any
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
stuff – but they seem sort of
resigned
, sort of
lethargic
. Sort of dying from the inside out, like my aunt did ..."