Dark Dance (16 page)

She forced herself on, downwards.

Their witch-like voices came up to her abruptly, and she paused again, gripping the cliff, her feet at angles.

What were they doing?

For a moment the scene swayed and bloomed out like a sail in the wind.

Rachaela held the cliff and drew in three long breaths.

She could go down no further. She opened her eyes and saw the small figures moving busily like ants in sugar.

On the rocks of the cove the drunken figurehead of the merman leaned, waiting for Camillo. Carlo and Michael climbed towards it.

The body of Sylvian lay directly below, flat on the strip of sand as it had lain on the chequered floor. The Scarabae came in to it and went away, bringing it things from the shore.

She must get nearer.

Rachaela tried four more steps and froze once more. The moon had made the stair more slippery, like a dousing of water. She would after all, have to get up again, ahead of them.

She eased her body over and managed to find some respite from the cliff. Her whole frame shook and her mouth was dry.

She could see and hear them, but they were small and foreshortened and no words came clear.

Round Sylvian now the offerings were piled. Cheta, Jack and George were placing things from a sack, and by the side of it a black rectangle stood upright with a smear of the moon on its top.

Meanwhile Carlo and Michael had reached the merman. They crawled about it, took a grasp on it. Like workmen or loggers they began to manhandle it down towards the beach. They could not quite manage. Rachaela heard Carlo give a warning shout.

The merman tumbled and rolled over the rocks, bouncing down as Sylvian’s corpse had done, on to the beach.

Carlo leapt after it, and Michael hurried at his back.

The figurehead came to rest on the beach. The two men came up with it and began to drag it on towards the corpse. They hauled it level with the body, laying it out beside Sylvian.

Would they tie Sylvian to the trunk of the merman, set them afloat together at the lip of the sea, to attend on the returning tide?

The Scarabae pleated in again.

She anticipated some quavering chant, some hymn of wildness to rise from them, but there was no sound.

Far out the sea made white flounces.

A tangerine flower budded in Carlo’s hands. It was a match. The soft moist wind guttered it out.

Rachaela saw Michael lift up the black rectangle, unscrew its cap and pour the libation over Sylvian and all the driftwood they had packed about him, and the little logs.

‘They’re going to burn him,’ she said aloud.

Without a prayer or a song, like old clothes or refuse, so they would cremate their dead at the rim of the sea.

A second flare woke in Carlo’s hands. It flew down upon the pyre. For a few moments, nothing, and then a great wash of blue and fulvous flame going up from the petrol.

Some of the Scarabae stepped back a little way. Some stretched out cold hands to the fire. Warmed by death.

Rachaela smelled the true smoke, and with it the awful smell of burning human flesh. She turned her face into the cliff and gagged. But the wind blew the smell away. It was too cold for it to linger in the nostrils.

One of them, Eric, had gone off a few steps, and came back now with another gift. Heavy and white, a dead gull hung from his hand, picked up from the shore.

He cast it down into Sylvian’s bonfire. A rage of sparks sprighted up. And then some of the feathers, caught in a whirlwind of the heat, fluttered up on fire into the air. Quill pens for the crossing out of the books of flame and night.

When the fire had consumed him, they would come away, and leave the slender bones of Sylvian for the tide to take. The ocean would have them, polishing them for ever, changing them to corals...

The merman cracked and the fire gouted from his tail and belly.

She must go back up the rock.

Rachaela stood against the cliff, the bonfire of the dead reflecting neon yellow in her eyes.

Morning described Cheta cabbage-green. She was stowing the heavy canvas bags, much folded, in her coat pockets. Carlo stood by, and behind him the gas cooker shone in the cabbage-sea windowlight.

‘You’ll be coming with us again, Miss Rachaela.’

Rachaela nodded. ‘Yes.’

Maybe she slowed them down, Too bad.

They set out along the path, and went away from the place where the evil steps led to the cove and the remains of Sylvian in the water.

It was a hard, sunny, icy morning, the mufflers and sunglasses did not look so incongruous on them.

Crystallized bars of sunlight hit the landscape. Birds sang in the bushes as before. The heath was the same, lit and bleak. The prospect of the long walk enervated Rachaela and at the same time eels of tension slithered in her stomach. She carried the black shoulder bag casually. It weighed on her.

They passed through the dragon areas and came to the empty road. As before Carlo and Cheta walked at its centre. There would be plenty of time to hear anything coming, but nothing ever came. Some type of thistle was bursting out of the asphalt.

They went between the hedges. Rachaela longed for the landmark of the gutted farm, but it did not come for an age. Her whole body ached as if she had not walked for weeks.

Finally, at last, the road ran over and the valley opened like a dirty green basin. There were the rusted cars, sunken fields and stony houses.

Cheta and Carlo, as previously, had not spoken.

Rachaela could not help herself. She said, ‘The van will be here today?’

‘Oh yes. This is the day he always comes.’

And Rachaela realized that in her cunning struggle to keep hold of time, its minutes and hours, afternoons and mornings, she had lost the days. What day was it? If she asked Cheta, would Cheta say? Rachaela could not bring herself to try.

They walked down the street and passed the dismal pub with the creaky sign.

On the slope of open ground the blue van sat just as before. And in the background, unmended, the vandalized phone box.

No one else was there, as usual.

In the back of the van the fat man was reading a paper. He seemed definitely to be waiting for Cheta and Carlo.

The skinny woman was knitting something pink and fluffy.

Rachaela took particular notice of them on this occasion. She saw the wedding ring among the chilblains and that the woman’s eyes were a faded-jeans blue. Hairs poked from the man’s nose and under his anorak he wore a jumper, perhaps knitted by his wife.

‘Here you are,’ said the man, as he had before. ‘Almost given you up today. What can we do you for?’

Cheta handed over the list. ‘And the lady will want some things.’

‘No,’ said Rachaela, ‘I don’t need anything today.’ She smiled stiffly at the man, who looked surprised. ‘Many more stops for you after this one?’

‘This is the last,’ said the man. ‘Then back to town and put me feet up.’

The skinny woman sniffed. ‘And that’s when
my
work starts.’

‘A woman’s work is never done,’ said the van driver, clearly pleased at this adage which shored up years of male indolence and buck-passing.

The cans of oil were coming out for Carlo, and some petrol. Of course, they had used up a lot of petrol on Sylvian.

Seeing Carlo tote the cans, Rachaela recollected him hoisting the merman off the rocks, lugging it over the beach.

Cheta, her bags loaded with soap and soda, dettol, oatmeal, said, ‘Did you bring the brandy?’

‘Could only get one bottle. Just a tick.’

The man squeezed into the back of the van, slightly displacing his knitting wife like a stack of cornflakes, and returned with the black bottle.

Stephan’s drink. Doubtless the abstemious consolation of some of the others. The Scarabae were not great drinkers, but they liked their little comforts.

‘Couple of books too, for the missus,’ added the driver, giving to the preposterously laden Cheta a parcel tied, old-fashionedly, by string.

Cheta produced the roll of brown notes.

Rachaela thought of the envelope of brown and turquoise notes in her own bag.

‘Any chance you could give me a lift into town?’ said Rachaela, bright, innocent, an offhand request.

At her side Cheta altered, it was impossible to be certain how—astonishment, alarm or menace.

‘Well... It’s a small van, this one.’

‘I’d be happy to pay.’

As she had expected, easy money tempted him.

‘What do you say, Rene? Shall we help the girl out?’

Rene folded up her knitting. ‘It’s all one to me.’

‘I’ll see you later,’ Rachaela said, lying, brightly, innocently, to Cheta.

Cheta and Carlo stood on the slope, saying nothing, doing nothing, their blank faces and bloomed-over eyes quite fixed. She had gambled they would not make a scene before the van driver and his spouse, and she had been right.

The facility of her escape went to Rachaela’s head. She got in at the front next to Rene, who was instructed to ‘squash up’ on the long seat. The van man shut the van and came around to fill up the cab.

It would not be a comfortable journey, but she had never thought it would be.

‘Longish drive,’ said the van man. ‘Have to ask you for a fiver. It’s the extra weight and the petrol,’ he explained rather sheepishly, bulging Rene and Rachaela almost off the seat.

Rachaela looked back from the open window as the van started. She saw Carlo, the great cans in both hands, bowed and leaning forward, staring after her as she was borne away. Growing smaller.

The van man and his wife talked incessantly during the drive. Rene asked Rachaela to close the window, and the van became hot and stuffy, dense with the smell of groceries and washing powder. Behind them things bumped and shifted like ogres balancing in the back.

‘There go those Knight’s Castile. I told you they wasn’t properly secure,’ said Rene.

Their accents were not local, but London, like a signpost, perhaps.

Rachaela tried to keep her mind set on what she was doing, but the flight had made her queasy and excited, and the constant chat and questions distracted and wore her out.

‘And I could just fancy a nice bit of silverside for dinner,’ said the van man, at intervals.

‘It’s fishfingers or go without,’ snapped Rene each time. ‘You don’t mind me saying,’ she said to Rachaela, ‘but they must be a funny old lot at that house. You working there?’

‘That’s right,’ said Rachaela.

‘Must be a real pain, stuck off up there. What do you do, then?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘I mean what work they got you doing?’

‘I’m typing a book,’ said Rachaela, at random.

‘Oh God, you don’t mean to say they do books.’

‘Memoires.’

‘Oh, memoires.’

How much did they know of the house? Not much.

‘Odd to see servants, i’nt it? This day and age. Who’d do a job like that? Demeaning. Just two or three old ducks and them servants running round.’

A cow passed in a field, only one, and not a house in sight.

‘See that cow? I could just fancy a bit of silverside.’

‘It’s fishfingers or go without.’

Eventually the desolation of the countryside was filled by villages, not derelict and malign like the place of dead cars, but quite pretty, with gardens and ivy in baskets, washing, here and there a swing or a child on a lawn playing with a dog.

The fields were sown, neat and kempt, with windbreaks of tall trees. Hedgerows lined the road which had changed to something broader. After an hour, now and then a car passed them, and once a country bus.

At length a broad highway received them. Houses followed the road, stone, but also plaster and pebbledash, bright red front doors, driveways with motorbikes.

‘What road do you want?’ asked the van driver.

‘Just the town centre.’

‘We don’t go there,’ said Rene quickly.

‘I’ll let you off at Market Street,’ said the van man, ‘it’s simple enough from there.’

She paid them their fiver and the van pulled up in a wide, ordinary street, dominated at one end by a high, brown cathedral tower.

‘Just go towards the church,’ said the van man, whom Rene had never liked enough to name aloud. ‘Glad to get a bit of time to yourself. See some new faces.’

‘Yes.’

Rachaela got out, her heavy bag, holding all necessities, on her shoulder. She stood bewildered in the street as the blue van closed like a clam and made off up the road. ‘Well she was a funny one.’

‘Not much to say for herself.’

‘Close-mouthed bit.’

‘I could just eat a bit of silverside.’

‘Fishfingers.’

The plan was straightforward. To reach this town, and from here to retreat to London. There was nothing to stay for, everything to avoid. It was true that London posed problems, for nothing was secure there, no flat, no job, money in a state of levitation. But it was what she knew. It was away from the Scarabae.

She had been crazy to come anywhere near them.

And the first part of the plan had worked better than hoped for. For the van driver might have refused her, or Cheta and Carlo seized her like warders.