The Changeover (17 page)

Sorry turned back to her. "You've got to end him, close him off, haven't you? I don't think you're faced with any real person, just a — I don't know — a collection of appetities, say, that have managed to stay on out of their time and place. He's a sort of virus of the emotions, just managing to hold himself together."

"Maybe if I tell him very firmly..." Laura hesitated.

"Try it!" Sorry agreed. "Tell him he's already dead. Tell him in a completely confident voice. You know how. You can be really severe when you want to. But be quick or he might just wriggle away."

"He can't. I've got him!" Laura cried.

"He thought he had Jacko," Sorry pointed out.

"I'll try then," said Laura and began to walk away.

"Chant!" Sorry called after her. "I took that poster down."

She hesitated, but did not look back again.

After school Laura did not go home the usual way. There was no reason why she should. Mrs Fangboner's house had no Jacko in it. Mrs Fangboner herself had sent grapes to the hospital (and very expensive ones, too) and had telephoned to find out how Jacko was getting on. Kate and Laura had eaten her grapes and now Laura felt she was not entitled to make fun of her any more. In the Mall the bookshop was still open, but the assistant behind the counter was Chris Holly, and from Wednesday he would be replaced by a cousin of Mr Bradley. It was strange to think that, if for any reason she and Kate vanished, the Gardendale Shopping Complex would barely notice their absence. Instead of turning towards this familiar area, which

Laura sometimes felt to be an extended back yard of the house in Kingsford Drive, she turned towards the Gardendale Reserve.

She was not thinking of Mr Braque directly but about Stephen and Julia, Kate and Chris, letting them tumble over and over in her mind, as if she were watching them through the round, glass window found in the doors of certain washing machines. She thought about the tendency the world had to form pairs and then shake every one up like dice and encourage them to fall into new arrangements. She thought about love and sex and wondered which one came first and if there was much difference between them in the long run. Were they separate but interchangeable, or did they run into each other? Many people spoke of sex as if it were rather unfortunate but could not be avoided. Some people, like Mrs Fangboner, complete with a husband and children, never mentioned sex, but did not hesitate to discuss her digestion and its troubles which seemed every bit as personal. Kate believed in true love which Laura should wait to attain, yet true love had brought Kate unhappiness, and she herself had turned to a man she had known for only two days for consolation and escape. Somewhere, she thought, there must be a single, unifying principle that would make sense of all this rich variety, and would explain, too, why suddenly the sight of Sorry standing at the school gate that morning had filled her with a soft electricity, exciting but not totally amiable. Laura clasped her arms across her breast as she walked, but whether she was protecting herself, rehearsing an embrace, or holding some memory close to her, she could not tell. Reluctantly she must now think of Mr Braque whose car stood outside the Reserve gates.

He was out of it before she came up to him, holding out his hand. He snarled at her like a cat confronted with a particularly unnatural dog, but when he spoke it was to beg.

"Please ..." he said. "Please . .."

Laura, who had started the day highly elated, now found she could feel very little. It was as if all the tension had gone out of her feeling. The thought of behaving wickedly to Carmody Braque had had its own excitement, but now her heart was full of nothing but insubstantial ghosts of horror, hope, love, fear and hatred, all grown thin, with no power to move her. She knew, as she looked at him, that Carmody Braque was horrifying but she could not be horrified. His ancient substance was breached and he could not heal himself. Terrified and furious, he was seeping into extinction and all she could feel was a weary almost absent- minded distaste, nothing like the shrinking horror his first and less desperate appearance had aroused in her. He could not seal as Jacko had sealed. One of the dark patches on his face had burst into bubbling sores.

His clothes, bought perhaps in the pleasant expectation of a continued, virile existence, hung on him, loose and dirty, his teeth had become a neglected goblin cemetery. Catching her eye, his smile stretched itself wide with anxiety. Behind him the Gardendale Reserve stood with its rather grimly determined commitment to recreation. It was land which had been held in the original subdivision and bulldozed flat for tennis courts, grounds for netball, cricket, rugby and soccer. There was a track around it where people went jogging. But from the gateway a short, paved path led to a memorial for a civic-minded councillor who had died while the Reserve was being bulldozed, and it was for this that Laura headed, with Mr Braque sidling and querulous, coming behind, alternately abusing her and supplicating. In the distance a man on a mowing- machine looked strangely archaic, as if he were driving some sort of mechanical chariot, and a team of minis- cule marching girls stepped in fairly straight lines, moving and gesturing to blasts of their instructor's whistle. Laura turned at last to face Carmody Braque.

"Go back!" she said abruptly.

"Go back?" he cried. "Go back? You've made me walk all this way and now you tell me ..."

"Listen," said Laura. "You're already dead. Admit it. You're just left-over bits and not the best bits either." She made her voice as severe as she could. "Stop pretending to be human. Be what you truly are."

"Oh, no!" screamed Mr Braque. "No ... I was invited ... I was called in ..."

"I'm uninviting you," Laura said. "You've overstayed your welcome. OK? I was going to punish you slowly, but Sorry Carlisle says it might not be good for me. So go back and let's get it over and done with."

As if her words had an immediate force, running like a disintegrating shock through the figure so barely held together, stretched thin by many, many years of ignoble survival, something horrifying began to happen to Carmody Braque. His voice was raised in shrill, whining expostulation.

"Oh, don't make me — if only you knew — if only you knew ... I fell in love with the idea of human sensation, you see. I couldn't, no I couldn't give it up. And, you can't imagine, you take it all for granted — it's yours by right so you never think: the pleasures of touch and taste. Your skin alone — your skin affords you such — rapture!" cried Mr Braque, clawing at her. What remained of his face twitched all over, a tiny, violent quivering as if he had just been killed. "To eat a peach, picked straight from the tree and warmed by the autumn sun, to bite a crisp apple— the first juice— a revelation — or to feel the sun on bare skin. Salt! Salt!" cried Mr Braque writhing, "Salt on a fresh-laid egg, boiled for four minutes, or to lick fresh, human sweat." His face was slipping to bits, the right side rather more quickly than the left. His voice wavered, as if it were being played at the wrong speed.

"Go back!" Laura whispered, trying to look away. "You're not going to do to anyone again what you did to Jacko — never!" But she could not take her eyes from her victim. She forced her gaze into ruthlessness and used it as a goad to drive Mr Braque back toward his beginning, murmuring his despairing catalogue of sensual pleasures. His face changed and changed again and bits of many faces looked out of it— men, women and little children, all of whom had taken various pleasures in being alive, and had fallen victim to the ravenous spirit pleading before her.

"Let me feel — let me go on feeling..." Mr Braque pleaded. His voice grew more bubbling. "Let me ..." he said, and choked. His protruding tongue was now quite black and round, a parrot's tongue in a man's mouth. His mouth did not close properly again, as if the jaw had begun to dislocate, and his voice squealed on, increasingly incoherent. "To feel... to feeeel..."

But Laura had feelings as part of her human right and did not need to steal other people's. "Feel..." said the hateful voice grown thick and churning, and Laura could only tell what was said because of what had been said before, and he continued to change back through the centuries of stolen life until his clothes collapsed around what at first appeared to be a rotting, heaving mass which lay still, at last, and was nothing but dead leaves.

Mr Braque's clothes, which had recently looked grubby and limp on him, looked immaculate again when folded around the leaves— extended more or less in the shape of a man, a little damp, smelling of melancholy, but in the end not in the least horrible. Laura sat down beside them. She looked up at the sky which had nothing to say to her ... it just went on being blue in its implacable fashion.

She thought she would never move again but would sit there until she turned to stone and became part of the monument. Jacko was saved. Her enemy was gone. She had come to a stop at last. Laura felt wet all over and looked up with surprise although she knew the sky overhead was clear and there was no rain. She was dripping with perspiration, and very cold inside her head. A moment later she realized that the cold actually belonged to the stone against which her head was leaning. She was grateful for the discomfort which brought her back to life. A school shoe came into her line of vision.

"There, you see..." said Sorry's voice. "I couldn't keep away. Forget him and come away with me. It's nothing horrible, is it? Only dead leaves!" As he spoke he was feeling gingerly in the pocket of the jacket on the ground.

"What are you looking for?" Laura asked.

"Car keys!" he said. "If I leave the keys in his car there's a good chance that someone will steal it and drive it away. It's not impossible, and the more confused things are, the better for us. Why did you come here, of all places? It's so public you could have sold tickets."

"But it's the loneliest place I know," Laura said at last, in a puzzled voice. "On week days there's great spaces and nowhere for anyone to creep up behind you." The marching girls in the distance formed fours and saluted an imaginary dignitary. The mowing- machine clattered savagely.

"It's certainly surrealistic," Sorry said, beginning to move back towards the road.

"Don't let anyone see you at the car," Laura warned him.

"School prefect arrested for car conversion," sighed Sorry, turning it into a newspaper headline. He walked across the grass to the bushes and trees that had been planted around the Reserve. Laura watched him and then blinked as he vanished. Five minutes later he reappeared, laughing. "The marching girls might think I went in there for a pee if they happen to be glancing this way," he said. "There's an old bloke in there with a bottle of wine — two bottles, I think. When I reappeared he said to one of his bottles, 'Don't worry, Dorothy. It's just the good witch of the North.' Who'd have thought that any one who'd read The Wizard of Oz would wind up as a wino in the Gardendale Reserve!"

"Perhaps he just saw the picture," Laura said, and Sorry laughed.

"It's over, Chant!" he said. Laura nodded, but did not move. Sorry squatted down in front of her.

"Chant?" he said. "Didn't your mother ever tell you you get piles from sitting on cold concrete? Don't go all limp now! Get up. Be a man!"

"I can be just as good not being one," Laura said, but she was glad to have an order to follow at that moment. She stood up beside him.

"It's over," he repeated. "All over!" and stared down at the shoes, worn to match particular feet and a particular way of walking and now filled with dead leaves. For the second time that day he looked as if his true name was Sorrow. Then he laughed, hooked her arm through his and led her down the narrow path back towards the road.

"Come back to my place," he tempted her. "I'll show you that space on my wall and make you a cup of — I don't know ..." He looked around vaguely. "Of cocoa, perhaps. That sounds homely and comforting. Don't look so deadly. You've won. Jacko's getting better, the bad spirits are flown and I think you've got beautiful legs. What more could you ask for?"

Laura began to cry. She was puzzled by her own tears, for she was not feeling unhappy. Still, it seemed she had been saving them up for a long time and had to spend them freely at last. Once begun they would not stop coming. She trembled as if she was cold with a chill or burning with a fever. Her tears fell on and on like warm rain. Sorry looked at her with dismay.

"Here, no crying!" he said. "I can't stand crying."

"I know!" Laura agreed, weeping generously. "All the disadvantages of being married and ..."

But Sorry turned on her abruptly. "Shut up, will you?" he exclaimed. "I say stupid things at times. Don't bother remembering them! It's just that tears are catching."

They were almost on the road, crossing the narrow belt of shrubs and trees that ran around the recreation ground.

"Come in here for a moment!" he said. "Not that side! The old wino's in there." In the shadow of the summer leaves he began to kiss first her wet cheeks and then her mouth so that she tasted her own salt tears on him. "Go on— put you arms around me," he told her. "There — you hold me tight and I'll do the same for you. Forget Mr Braque — forget Jacko even — just think about this, Laura ... Laura ..."

"I wasn't even sure you knew my first name," Laura said at last.

"I save it for best," he told her, looking thoughtfully around the narrow, green room of leaves within which they stood. "We'd better go, though. Don't get me wrong, but I think you should go to bed for a little bit and sleep everything off."