The Peppered Moth (42 page)

The thought of having a baby with Seb is repulsive to her. His DNA is cold and unperpetuating. And yet he clings and clambers up her as she turns towards the light.

Sebastian Jones is the son of a defrocked clergyman. ‘Defrocked’ is perhaps too strong a word for the once reverend Jones, but it is the punitive epithet that Sebastian himself favours. Sebastian’s father had been seduced by one of his middle-aged widowed parishioners and the resulting scandal had enforced his retirement from his pastoral duties. Sebastian affects to find this story bitterly entertaining and can be witty in the telling of it, but anyone can see that he has been damaged by it. Seb has long been an unbeliever—he can hardly recall the distant tracts of his hymn-singing childhood—but he does not like the treachery implicit in his father’s behaviour nor the mockery that it has elicited in the press. The once reverend Jones had betrayed his wife and his God and his Redeemer for the bosomy twelve-stone henna-haired manageress of a dry-cleaning shop in a small town in Somerset. He had forsaken Mrs Jones and his flock for the plump settee and then for the double bed of a woman with dark red talons of nails with which she had rattled tunes upon the till as he collected his clerical garb. The episode was more ridiculous than heroic. It had turned Sebastian and his brothers very queer.

Sebastian, thinks Faro, could easily have been a clergyman himself. Not a modern, healthy, broad-minded, Thought-for-the-Day clergyman, but a dusty old-fashioned one, haunting damp cloisters and parish registers and dark graveyards. The robes would have suited him well. She is sure that it is his family history that has attracted him to the genre of the Gothic, to cadavers and body parts and body piercing. He is an expert in Horror. Faro knows it is fashionable to be interested in that kind of rubbish, but she hates it, and she thinks that Sebastian’s interest oversteps the mark. He takes it all too seriously and does not seem to realize that even for its practitioners it is only a game. Nothing real is real for Sebastian. He lives in a maze of corridors and echoes and reflections. She is the only real thing in his life. Faro doesn’t suppose that Seb practises necrophilia, and she wishes he wouldn’t write stories about it. Some of his stories have been published in horror magazines, of which there seem to be many. Does Sebastian want to murder Faro and copulate with her corpse? The DNA of a necrophiliac is not promising material. Who would want the black-bat baby of such a creature?

And Sebastian has had the audacity to accuse Faro herself of perverse and morbid longings, of an interest in transplants and cloning and spare body parts. Well, she has to be interested in that kind of thing, it’s her job, isn’t it? It’s science, isn’t it? How dare he tell her that her problem is that she wants to live for ever? Faro breathes deeply and indignantly, and expels angry air, as she puts her foot sharply down on the brake to avoid piling into the slowing London-bound motorway traffic ahead,
KEEP TWO CHEVRONS APART,
instructs the Ml, just in time to prevent carnage and crumpled bumpers. No, says Faro to herself, she must be firm. She must peel off his white fingers and prise out his little bindweed roots.

The traffic lurches forward again, and as it does so Faro’s mind lurches, and bumps into a recognition. Suddenly, she knows that Seb is ill. He has always looked unhealthy, but over the last two months it has turned into something else. Seb is dying. Faro squeezes her foot down gently, eases forward a few inches, then another few yards, then is brought to a halt again. She had sometimes wondered, but now she thinks she knows. She must have been in denial. She must have known for months.

What is it? Cancer? Consumption? He looks consumptive, but people don’t have consumption these days, except in the Third World or inner Manchester. He smokes and has a smoker’s cough. It could be his lungs. Or is it his liver? He drinks, though not as much as some of his friends, and not as much as the older Gauldens. Or has he got AIDS? The thought of an HIV-positive Sebastian makes Faro’s skin prickle. Surely he would have been gentleman enough to tell her if he were? She starts to try to work out how long it is since she had any kind of risky sex with Sebastian, and realizes that despite the miles of newsprint she has read and indeed written upon the topic she is not quite clear about what constitutes risk. Will semen do it, or does there have to be blood and abrasion, blood and punctures? Anyway, it’s irrelevant. The virus can lurk in the body for years, like CJD.

Perhaps Sebastian has got CJD? And if so, is that communicable? Faro hates herself for this selfish train of thought, and tries to keep her eyes on the slow-moving car ahead of her, in which a small spotted dog is bouncing about in frenzied excitement on the back seat. In rabid excitement. Shit, says Faro to herself. Shut up, says Faro to herself. And as she slows down once more to a standstill, she feels a sickening crunching shattering thud as the vehicle behind her slams into hei back bumper with considerable force. Faro is thrown forward and then back again. Shit, shit, shit, says Faro aloud. She shuts her eyes. She does not want to look into the driving mirror to see the idiot that has driven into her backside. Is she all right? Yes, she thinks she’s all right, but what about her poor car?

Everything behind her has come to a halt. Pitying glances are cast towards her from cars creeping slowly past her on the off-side and the near-side lanes. Faro is in the middle lane, the worst possible place to break down, or so it seems to her in the moment of stasis before she pulls herself together to see what is to be done. Slightly dazed, she starts to unbuckle her seat belt, but as she does so a face appears at her open car window, a face distorted with fury, yelling obscenities. ‘You fucking cunt! You fucking woman driver cunt of a cunt!’ is what she hears. ‘What the fucking hell do you think you’re doing? When did you pass your fucking test, you prat?’

Keep calm, Faro says to herself. You have witnesses. But the spotted dog has driven away, still leaping.

A youngish man with short fair hair and a red face made redder by rage is yelling at her. Faro switches off her car engine and says nothing. She knows this incident is not her fault, for she had been stationary when this idiot slammed into her, and although distracted by night thoughts she had been driving with daytime caution. It is his fault. Shall she say so? Shall she shout back? He is trying to wrench open her car door. She pushes down the lock button. He seems to be beside himself. Will nobody come to her rescue? Cars behind are hooting and honking. Shall she just drive on? Faro looks in her driving mirror and sees a long pile-up behind her. Other cars have crunched into one another in her wake.

So far she has said nothing to the young man, who goes on yelling at her like a fiend possessed, his face distorted with wrath. His language is appalling, and he is accusing her of crimes unrelated to a driving misdemeanour. Faro is no innocent, but she is shocked. She starts to shut her car window, but he shoves his arm in to stop her. She continues to press the electronic switch, but stops before it traps him. She does not want to be accused of assault.

Thank God, somebody from one of the cars behind them is approaching on foot. Please God, says Faro, shutting her eyes, let it be a reasonable person. And it is a reasonable person. It is a middle-aged Indian, a family man, serious and sober. He takes on the mad shouter. ‘Calm down, sir,’ he says diplomatically. The young man looks as though he is about to hit the Indian, but the Indian has an air of authority which deters him. ‘Switch off your engine, sir, switch off your engine,’ says the Indian to the madman. ‘Mind your own fucking business!’ yells the madman. ‘Your car is leaking, sir,’ says the Indian. Faro knows that although she is still trembling, this line will one day amuse her. The madman goes to switch off his ignition, and the Indian gentleman leans through Faro’s open window and asks if she is all right.

‘I don’t know,’ says Faro.

‘The world is full of crazy people,’ says the Indian philosophically.

Faro nods agreement. She is beginning to recover. She finishes unbuckling her seat belt and opens her car door. This sensible chap will defend her. A road-rager cannot murder her in broad daylight on a three-lane highway—well, he could, but if he does she will be very unlucky. She gets out, protected by the Indian’s presence, and surveys the scene. Her own car is quite badly damaged, the bumper crushed, the rear lights in splinters, the bodywork crumpled. It had been a serious impact. Yellow and white and red glass scatters the road. The madman’s car, a not-very-new Vauxhall, has come off even worse. No wonder he is a bit upset. It doesn’t look as though he will be able to drive it away very easily. How can he have got up enough speed in such slow traffic to slam into her with such force?

The madman, having switched off his engine, returns to the attack. By now Faro has pulled herself together sufficiently to be able to say to him, ‘I think the most sensible thing to do now would be to exchange our insurance details.’ She says this in one of her many speech options, in a priggish middle-class voice which she judges suitable for the occasion, but the madman does not like it at all. His large face is still hot and glaring. ‘I’ll make you pay for this, you stupid cow!’ he yells. He seems to be running out of language. ‘Please, sir,’ says the Indian, who is immediately dismissed as a black bastard. The wail of a police siren approaches, a sound that Faro has never before been glad to hear. It seems to drive the madman into a worse frenzy. Perhaps he really is mad, quite mad? Some people are. Faro is beginning to hope that she will soon be able to drive away from this mess, this metal, these refracting shards of glass. Her engine must be OK, unlike his. A dark fluid is seeping from his onto the roadway. She hopes it will not burst into flames.

Clearly he is in no state to exchange insurance details. Yet she feels obliged to mention the matter once more, for she knows her rights and her duties as a citizen-driver. But the subject of insurance inflames him yet further. He advances towards her, breathing hotly into her face, and suddenly leans down, past her, and into her car, and grabs her car keys. ‘Hey, give those back,’ yells Faro, but the red man, his features distorted and melted like something in a trick mirror, like a character from a medieval fresco of hell, starts waving them in the air, taunting her, and then, suddenly, with a wild gesture and considerable strength, he hurls them high over the roadway, in a glittering arc, over the stationary traffic, and into the green verge beyond. ‘You bastard!’ shrieks Faro. ‘You stupid fucking bastard!’

‘Don’t you use language like that at me,’ yells the madman, dripping with sweat, shining with anger.

Faro is beside herself with rage at the loss of the keys to her freedom, and fears moreover that she is about to burst into retrograde womanly weeping. Her face is hot, her eyes are hot, and her tight blue shirt is damp. Where are the police? The siren still sounds, more frantically, but the police car is not much nearer: it is stuck in the snarl-up. Other vehicles, trying to get out of its way, have created a barricade, and all lanes but the slow lane have come to a halt. And it is the slow lane that separates Faro from the verge and from her keys. Will she ever find them? Is she stuck here for ever?

A police officer at last approaches on foot. Faro is too wise in the ways of the world to expect much sympathy, but she knows she must look more credible as a driver than this man of wrath, this parody of a thug, who has surely committed a serious offence by chucking away her car keys? And damnit, her flat key, her office key, her key to Queen’s Norton, and the key which lets her in to feed Peter Bantam’s cat? They’d all been on the same ring.

Half an hour later, Faro is still on her hands and knees, crawling through the filthy grass of the verge. Her car has been towed to safety, the red man has been cautioned and his car removed, and the chivalrous Indian has gone home to Crouch End. But Faro has refused to leave without her keys, although the police officer has assured her he can fix her car so she can drive it home. Why, he tells her, he once drove himself all the way down from Glasgow with a screwdriver in his ignition, and he can do better than that for Faro with his box of tricks. Faro thinks the officer is getting frisky and taking advantage. Stubbornly, she insists that she wants to find her keys. She doesn’t want them lying there for anyone to find. They must be there. She saw them fall.

The texture and composition of the verge prove weirdly compelling, and the debris that has collected there would make a fine art installation. Faro, trying to be methodical and to impose a grid system upon her search, notes a variety of vegetation and a rich sampling of the wind-borne and window-chucked litter of a late-twentieth-century summer. Plastic bags, cigarette ends, orange peel, broken sunglasses, sweet wrappings. Garbage and waste, Rose & Rose. She thinks of their sweetly stinking and belching little landscaped hummocks of muck that Steve Nieman had pointed out to her on their route back to Northam. Where there’s muck there’s money, had been the old adage, and it seems it still rings true.

The police are getting impatient with Faro. They’ve twice been back to buzz her from the soft shoulder, to tell her she can’t scrabble around there all evening. Faro has tried to argue that there’s no reason why she shouldn’t look for them all night if she wants, it can’t be illegal, but they disagree. It
is
illegal. She’s not really allowed on that verge at all. It’s nice of them to let her be there. That’s the line they seem to be taking.

Faro irritably reexamines a nastily familiar, nastily repeating patch of plantain and dandelion and dirty Kleenex. And, suddenly, her keys flash up at her. There they are, all of them, safe on their darling little gold key ring, safely attached to her Darwin Society medallion. Her little enamelled bird, her keys and her burglar alarm, all intact. All is well, and all shall be well. She wipes the medallion on her trousers, thanks her keys for coming back to her, and thanks St Antony of Padua, and sits on the bank, happy now, waiting for the police to swoop by once more to collect her and take her back to her car, in which, stupidly, she has left her mobile phone.