Human Croquet (17 page)

‘Oh, his mother’s been taken ill,’ Eunice says, without a trace of emotion. ‘Cancer, or something.’

‘And what’s he doing with
her
?’

‘Apparently they’re going out together, have been for some time.’ Is there nothing that Eunice doesn’t know?

When she’s talking to boys, Hilary has a way of holding her head on one side and half-closing her unnaturally blue eyes, a position that for some reason has the effect of raising testosterone levels in a radius of ten feet. She’s undoubtedly pretty. ‘Pretty awful,’ Eunice says.

‘That’s it then, I’m going to have to kill her.’

‘Good idea,’ Eunice says reasonably.

Somewhere over on Sycamore Street an owl hoots softly, a ghostly
hoohoohoooo
that floats like a feather on the silent air, but Mr Rice has disappeared.

Mr Rice opens his eyes uneasily and sees double. His head feels thick and heavy, the result no doubt of too much brandy and Babycham in the Tap and Spile last night. He opens his eyes again. He isn’t seeing double, his vision seems to have multiplied into a hundred honeycombed images. Mr Rice moves a leg and sees something thin and black and hairy waving in front of him. His legs were never very manly – but not that bad, surely? He tries the other leg, to the same effect. And then his four other legs.

Mr Rice screams, but it is a silent scream – all he can hear is an almighty buzzing in his head. He catches a hundred glimpses of himself in the mirror, oh no … it can’t be … this is another nightmare from which he will wake very soon. Surely?

He tries to move. His centre of gravity has shifted to somewhere else. It’s impossible to co-ordinate so many arms and legs, or maybe they’re just …
legs
. He decides to try and jump off the bed. He concentrates on all of his legs, one-two-three jump! and finds himself on the window-sill. The window is open, it is just possible, Mr Rice thinks, that he could squeeze through that space. The smell of Mrs Baxter’s apple sauce cooking and a pile of dog excrement down in the garden are like a siren song to Mr Rice as buzzzbuzzzz-buzzzzzzzzzzz he pushes his big body through the gap and unfolds his iridescent wings …

I puzzle at what to say to Mr Rice over the breakfast bacon, but find I am saved from this nicety of etiquette as he doesn’t appear at the breakfast table, never appears again in fact.

Vinny burns Mr Rice’s magazine collection on a bonfire, holding each item with the wooden tongs that the Widow used to retrieve washing from the copper with. Mr Rice’s magazines are an altogether more dirty kind of laundry than that which Vinny or Debbie are used to dealing with. We are baffled by Mr Rice’s literary tastes. ‘Why would anyone want to look at pictures of people in macs and gas-masks?’ Debbie asks. I can’t imagine. ‘Poor old Auntie V,’ Debbie laughs, not very nicely.

‘Disappeared?’ Charles asks eagerly, but Gordon assures him that Mr Rice has not vanished into the crowded air because he’s had the foresight to take his suit and his suitcases of samples with him. Perhaps what I saw last night was some kind of valedictory salute.

‘The bloody bastard bugger,’ Vinny says, throwing his clothes on the bonfire. ‘A real insect,’ Debbie summarizes.

Audrey sighs deeply as if in empathy. Despite being wrapped in a shapeless old coat of Mrs Baxter’s, she seems to be losing her skinny child’s frame and beginning to bloom, like a very late flower. This new womanhood doesn’t seem to be a result of her eating any more though, in fact, if it’s possible she eats even less, little-bird portions that she pecks dutifully at when someone’s watching her.

Mrs Baxter’s face has blossomed with an enormous bruise, like a gorgeous truncated rainbow – violet, indigo and blackberry-blue. ‘Silly me,’ Mrs Baxter says when she catches sight of me looking at it, ‘I tripped over the cat and hit myself on the sideboard.’ The Baxters’ neat tortoiseshell tabby sits indifferently on the window-sill, gazing at the birds feeding at the bird-table in the garden. The kitchen door stands open to let in the bright blue October day outside. Sithean would be such a lovely place if it wasn’t for Mr Baxter.

Mr Baxter is taking early retirement at the end of the Christmas term, although not through choice. There has been some heavily suppressed scandal at Rowan Street Primary to do with a small boy who had to be hospitalized after one of Mr Baxter’s routine punishment sessions. Mr Baxter is like an overheated boiler that Mrs Baxter spends a lot of time trying to damp down.

On cue, he storms into the kitchen, destroying the peace, asking Mrs Baxter what the bloody hell she’s done with his pipe and knocking the colander of blackberries all over the kitchen floor and I make a hasty exit in case he’s about to blow up.

Vinny sits at the kitchen table eating a biscuit at the same time as she smokes a cigarette, contemplating a huge, bloody ox heart sitting on a white enamel plate in the middle of the kitchen table like the results of an Aztec sacrifice (I could swear I can see it still pumping). I presume this is our tea for tonight and not the remains of Mr Rice. It doesn’t seem to be Vinny’s heart – it’s too big and anyway her scrawny chest looks intact.

One of Vinny’s subjects – Pyewacket, a gentlemanly black tom with white bib and tucker and spats – is delicately licking the heart in a way that looks oddly affectionate.

The cat does not attempt to drink from the saucer of milk which is also on the table, which is just as well as the milk is full of chopped-up fly agaric. ‘Kills the bluebottles,’ Vinny says by way of explanation and drags hard on a roll-up and lets smoke stream out through her nose, so that she looks like a dragon letting off a head of steam.

The Dog lays its head on Vinny’s knee and starts to drool gently onto her skirt, its expression suggesting it’s giving up its soul to Vinny (whereas in fact it’s wondering if she’ll drop any biscuit crumbs).

Debbie is too preoccupied to notice any of these assaults on kitchen hygiene. She’s standing at the sink washing her hands over and over again as if she personally had just removed the heart. She is obviously mad. Yesterday I found her trapped in the living-room, watching the mantelpiece to see if anything had moved, quite unable to move herself. ‘If I turn my back for one second they’ll be off,’ she said.

‘They?’

‘Those candlesticks.’

‘Do you see that dog?’ she says to me now and I follow her gaze to Gigi who is ripping an old slipper to shreds in a particularly psychopathic way.

‘Yes, I see it.’

‘It looks like Gigi, doesn’t it?’

‘Very like,’ I agree. ‘Identical, in fact.’

Debbie drops her voice to a whisper and looks around the room in a paranoid way. ‘Well, it
isn’t.’

‘No?’

‘No,’ she says, and gives my sleeve an urgent tug to move me out of Gigi’s earshot. She moves her little piggy snout nearer my ear. ‘It’s a robot!’

Vinny snorts contemptuously and Gigi responds by snarling, retracting her upper lip to reveal a row of tiny discoloured shark teeth. Pyewacket looks up from his adoration of the ox heart and regards this stand-off with some interest. Chaos, I suspect, is about to break out in the kitchen again.

‘A robot? Gigi’s been replaced by a robot?’

‘Yes.’ What a bampot, as Mrs Baxter would say, but what can you expect from a woman sharing her one brain cell with a poodle on a turnabout basis. Whose turn it is today is anybody’s guess. I take hold of the Dog’s collar and present it to her like a dog show judge. ‘And what about this Dog, is this the same Dog – or has it also been replaced by a robot?’ To help her guess, the Dog runs through its limited range of facial expressions (sad, sadder, tragic) but she refuses to respond.

‘Have you talked to Gordon about all this?’

‘Gordon?’ she repeats, giving me one of her mad looks. (Oh no, not him as well.) ‘Yes, Gordon.’ Debbie’s eyes narrow (if that’s possible) and she looks away, chewing her lip and finally says, ‘The person pretending to be Gordon, you mean.’