Human Croquet (7 page)

What’s happened to the moon? Has its orbit moved closer to the earth overnight? I can feel the moon’s gravity pulling the tide of my blood. This must be a miracle of some kind, surely – a change in the very laws of physics? I’m relieved that someone else is sharing the lunacy with me – I can feel Audrey clinging on to my arm so hard that she’s pinching my skin through the fabric of my coat.

A moment longer and we will be running for the woods, bows and arrows in our hands, hounds at our heels, converts to Diana, but then sensible Eunice pipes up, ‘We’re only experiencing the moon illusion – it’s an illustration of the way the brain is capable of misinterpreting the phenomenal world.’

‘What?’

‘The moon illusion,’ she repeats patiently. ‘It’s because you’ve got all these points of reference –’ she waves her arms around like a mad scientist, ‘aerials, chimney pots, rooftops, trees – they give us the wrong ideas of size and proportion. Look,’ she says and turns round and suddenly bends over like a rag doll, ‘look at it between your legs.’

‘See!’ Eunice says triumphantly when we finally obey her ridiculous command. ‘It doesn’t look big any more, does it?’ No, we agree sadly, it doesn’t.

‘You lost those points of reference, you see,’ she carries on pedantically, and Audrey surprises me by saying, ‘Oh shut up, Eunice,’ and I point helpfully back down the street and say, ‘You live back there in case you’ve forgotten, Eunice,’ and we walk quickly on, leaving her to go home on her own. The moon carries on bowling up into the sky, growing smaller.

I lie in bed and look at my window full of moon. I see the moon and the moon sees me. It’s high in the sky, shrunk back to its normal size, free and unfettered from the earth. A perfectly normal moon – not a blood moon, nor a blue moon – it isn’t an old moon with a new one in its arms, just a normal April moon. God bless the moon. And God bless me. Faraway, in the distance somewhere, a dog howls.

The eyelids of the head were closed, giving it a passing resemblance to Keats’ death-mask, but then the lids suddenly flew open and the head began to speak, its nerveless lips moving slowly – and I recognized the Roman nose, the dark curls, the long lashes – it was the head of Malcolm Lovat. It was more like the toppled head of a statue than a real severed head – the break was clean and even, no blood vessels or frayed sinews floating like tentacles in the bucket.

The head emitted the most tremendous sigh and fixing me with its dead gaze beseeched, ‘Help me.’

‘Help you?’ I said. ‘How?’ but the rope slipped out of my hand and the bucket clattered back down the well. I peered down. I could still see the pale face glimmering through the water, eyes closed once more and the words ‘help me’ echoing like ripples on the water before fading away.

Carmen, the only one of us to have studied the subject in any depth, reports that a plucked turkey and its giblets are the nearest she can get to describing it, but then Carmen’s attitude to sex is surrounded with such an air of ennui that trainspotting seems positively dangerous in comparison. ‘Well, it’s one way of spending time,’ she says indifferently. (If you spend time what do you buy? ‘Less time,’ Mrs Baxter says sadly.)

‘For the neighbours,’ she says optimistically as she scrutinizes a tray of pale bloodless sausages. ‘I’m going to put them in buns with ketchup,’ she adds. ‘What do you think?’ She could turn them back into a pig for all I care but I mutter something encouraging because she has a wild kind of look in her eye as if someone’s overwound the key in her back and she’s going too fast. She starts wiping steaks tenderly with a cloth as if they were the butchered bloody cheeks of small children and says, ‘I think it’ll be nice. It’ll certainly be
something.’
(Although you could say that about a lot of things.)

She turns her attention back to the sausages and stares at them fixedly then looks at me and asks, in a suspicious voice, ‘Do you think they’ve moved?’

‘What?’

‘Those sausages.’

‘Moved?’

‘Yes,’ she says more doubtfully now, ‘I thought they’d moved.’

‘Moved?’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ she says quickly. No wonder Gordon’s worried about Debbie. He’s said as much to me on several occasions, ‘I’m a bit worried about Debs, she seems a bit … you know?’

I think he means mad.

I am saved from further discussion about the relocating sausages by a screech from the hallway that indicates Vinny wants attention.

Vinny’s on her way out to the chiropodist. Vinny rarely leaves the house so when she does it’s an occasion of some importance to her. She spends a lot of time looking forward to a glimpse of the outside world and then, when she returns, even more time complaining about the state of it.

‘I’m a shadow of my former self,’ she announces, peering through the misty patina of the rust-spotted hall mirror that Debbie has long ago given up trying to clean. Vinny was a shadow to begin with, now she’s a shadow of a shadow. Her bones have turned to polished yellow ivory, her skin to shagreen. Shagreen enamelled with imperial-purple veins. Warts grow on the backs of her hands like lichen. Her breath is as full of sighs as a bagpipe.

She takes a compact out of her ancient mausoleum of a handbag and rubs her cheeks vigorously with face-powder that looks like flour and, scrutinizing the result intently, says, ‘My chilblains are killing me,’ as if they’re to be found on her face rather than on her feet. She’s dressed for the outside world – a brown gabardine coat and a grey felt hat that’s a strange battered shape, like old dough that’s been punched. Vinny’s hat has an incongruous pheasant feather poking out of the top, expressing a jauntiness somehow at odds with the woman underneath. She takes her pearl-headed hatpin and sticks it into her hat, although from where I’m standing – loitering by the hallstand – it looks as if she’s just stuck it through her head.

‘Don’t smirk,’ Vinny says, catching sight of my face in the mirror. ‘If the wind changes you’ll stay like that.’ I loll my head on one side and make a face that Charles would be proud of. ‘You look like the Hunchback of Notre Dame,’ Vinny says, ‘only a lot taller,’ and deflates on to the hard little chair next to the telephone table. ‘My chilblains are killing me,’ she adds with feeling.

‘You said that already.’

‘Well, I’m saying it again.’ Vinny creaks forward and strokes one of her shoes consolingly. They’re new black lace-ups – witch’s shoes, that Mr Rice has presented to her with a flourish as a ‘token of his esteem’.

‘I’ll have to wear something more comfortable,’ Vinny says. ‘Go and get me my brown brogues, they’re under my bed. Go on – what are you waiting for?’