Jago (15 page)

Their first week, she’d started at 9.00 sharp, barely took time off for coffee (11.00 a.m.), lunch (1.00 to 1.40 p.m., back to the wheel in time for
The Archers),
or tea (3.30 p.m.), and worked into the evening. After a waning of initial enthusiasm, and a few delicate complaints about how hungry he got waiting for her to be available for supper, she’d decided to stick to a knocking-off time of 6.00 p.m. That advanced to 5.00 and lunch expanded to an hour so she could take advantage of the sun. In retrospect, it sounded like creeping indolence, but actually she was diligent. Until now, she’d always kept to her preset rules, weighing each revision carefully before putting it on the statutes.

He couldn’t work while Hazel was off in the woods. After an hour or so, he was getting concerned. This was the real country, not the Sussex Downs. She’d had to keep getting up in the night to check the kiln. The cycle took about thirteen hours. She had cut it off early this morning, but the bricks and the pots wouldn’t be cool enough for her to unpack until late afternoon. It must be like opening a pyramid, to find treasures or grave robbers’ leavings. Maybe she needed the break before she could face her handiwork. He had just come from the kiln shed. It was like an oven in there, and he could hear little tinkling and shifting noises from inside the kiln as the temperature came down.

The bell in the showroom rang and Paul straightened up, feeling the strain in his knees. He brushed a bush that overhung the pond, and noticed a strange fruit hanging from a grey branch. Looking closer, he saw it was a dead goldfish, bloated and still wet. He plucked it, feeling the suckerlike stem break, and dropped it into the brackish water. The fish sank, raising a cloud of mud as it touched bottom.

The bell jangled again. Paul looked around the shed, seeing the garden dark through his sunglasses. There was someone in the shop, and a girl by his desk, coming across the dead lawn towards him.

‘Hi,’ he said, walking to meet her. ‘Can I help you?’

She had waist-length dark-brown hair. With the sun behind her and through his dark glasses, she had an eyeholed shadow for a face. Her eyes shone like those of an M. R. James ghost, liquid and unhealthy.

‘It’s Allison,’ she said, accent instantly marking her as local. ‘From next door.’

The way she said it sounded like the name of a tacky brand of chocolates,
nest d’or.

Allison Conway. Mr Friendly’s dark and usually silent daughter. She was often about, haunting the village like a junior spook. They had not spoken before. He guessed she was slightly retarded, or bright enough to pretend to be.

‘Hi, Allison. What can we do for you?’

She half turned, brushing her hair out of her face. Sunlight fell on pale skin. She had adult lips, thick and sensual.

‘Just looking, Paul. If that’s okay?’

He felt uneasy at the use of his name, as if shed stolen part of his soul. ‘Sure’ he said, trying to sound normal. ‘Do you get a discount?’

She smiled, pouting just a little. ‘Never have before.’ Safe behind his shades, Paul looked at her. Allison was between seventeen and twenty, and thin. Not thin: lean, agile, a feral child. Her filthy jeans had burst, not trendily, at the knees. She wore sturdy boots that could be registered as offensive weapons, and a fringed, worn-ragged Shane jacket a size too big. Not exactly a Thomas Hardy heroine.

She was examining him too, not bothering to be subtle about it. Suddenly she looked away, up toward the orchard. ‘Youm got hippies up the hill,’ she said, ‘they come last night.’

‘It’s not my hill.’

‘Just thought you’m want to know.’

Behind Allison, Paul could make out someone in the pottery, moving between the tables. He was far enough back to be indistinct. It must be a boy, he guessed, wearing a shabby leather jacket.

‘Sometimes hippies take things, chickens and that. Dad says they’m a menace.’

‘We don’t have any chickens. Just pots. And books.’

‘Ah.’ She smiled with a hint of malice.
‘Books.’

She picked up
The World Set Free
from a pile of volumes on the desk, and handled it strangely. Her wrist did not work properly as far as holding a book was concerned. Surely, she must be able to read. She made a face at the cover and put the Wells down again.

‘Not much use in books, if you ask me,’ she said. ‘Well, if things get bad you can eat them.’

She grinned, her teeth not good. ‘That’s true enough.’ He couldn’t tell if Allison was trying to flirt or pick a fight. Neither appealed. She took a strand of her hair and chewed it. It could have been Lolitaishly sexy, but her busy eyes made her seem the stereotype yokel strawsucker. She heaved her shoulders like Cagney, hitching her jacket open in front. Underneath, she wore only a black bra, the skin over her sternum dotted with blackheads. Madonna had a lot to answer for, he thought.

‘Who’s your friend?’ he asked.

She turned to the pottery and, for a moment, he thought she was going to claim not to see anyone. It was an M. R. James day, he decided. He had a maggoty writhing under his shirt, a mix of goose flesh and sweat.

‘That’s Ben,’ she said, after consideration. ‘He’s just come up.’

‘Oh, for the festival.’

‘Arr, that as well.’

He had the idea that Allison was teasing him. ‘As well as what?’

‘Other things,’ she said with a secretive smirk.

There was no sexiness in Allison’s pose now. If anything, there was menace. Paul wished her away, and started examining papers on his desk.

She got the message. ‘Must be going now,’ she said, trying to drop her accent and enunciate every syllable like Princess Di. ‘So delightful to have this little chat and all that, haw-haw. TTFN.’

She shrugged and walked away, rolling her hips, swinging her hair. He considered his quietly threatening typewriter. Glancing up, he saw Allison and Ben disappearing towards the road. He only got a glimpse of the boy’s face, and he had wild hair and large goggles to cover most of it. But one quarter-look was enough to give a lasting impression. Whether through birth, accident or design, Ben’s face was melted and set. That, he thought, was one ugly bastard.

T
he Maskell farm had survived bovine spongiform encephalopathy, ‘mad cow disease’, in 1990, through a savings lump that tided the business over the dip in the price of beef. Maskell could remember the Major, his father, battling foot-and-mouth in the 1960s, hard-facedly supervising the destruction of a fortune in cattle, his quirt dangling from his wrist. Even thirty years later, he couldn’t hear wind-carried gunfire without remembering that mass execution. After defeating plagues, it hurt to see the farm crippled not by an agricultural disaster but by a conglomeration of nothings in particular.

Figures scrolled up on his computer as he tried to hedge his way around the economic crunch. The dead cows, six so far, had collapsed with differing symptoms. Malnutrition, festering bites, dehydration, heat prostration, mystery bugs. Mainly, the cattle just upped stumps to get out of the sun. Fancy, Sue-Clare’s horse, was down with some weakening ailment, too. And Jethro, the Maskell dog, had taken to sleeping most of the time, hiding under a blanket in his basket. Jeremy blamed it on the Evil Dwarf.

And here he was, indoors, staring at a screen, struggling with the books. There was nothing he could do outside. The rump of his workforce were trying to limit damage, clearing the way for the Agapemone people to move in over the next few days. After that, he might as well take a holiday and wait it out. Eventually, it must rain. Then, maybe, he could start all over, scratching the land.

He had all electric fans on, but they were not helping. His face was hot and damp, his shirt stuck to his back. He had drunk an entire bottle of Perrier water and not needed to use the toilet.

The summer was a write-off. New diseases kept cropping up. Whole herds were being slaughtered in neighbouring counties. The price of British beef was at an all-time low, worse than in 1990. Because a few kids in Northampton had developed a new allergy, British milk was suspect, too. People up and down the country were nervous about eating anything with ‘Produce of Britain’ printed on it. The minister of agriculture tried to show his confidence in British foods by demonstrating he could feed his extended family on an all-British menu for a traditional Sunday dinner. The farming industry reeled when the Sunday newspapers ran pictures of the minister’s twelve-year-old daughter sicking up British milk pudding down her best photo-opportunity frock.

His only hope for survival was the Agapemone, no matter what Danny Keough might say. In previous years, he’d remained neutral on the festival, fence-sitting while Danny got up his petitions and the outsiders rushed in. Sue-Clare and some of her New Age friends had dragged him along last year, and it had not been so bad. Not all the music was godawful shite. And Douggie Calver, the cider king, swore by the profits he could reap over the week. Before throwing in with the festival, Maskell had a long talk with Douggie. He’d been astonished, and a little appalled, to realize how much money floated around in ragged jeans pockets. Some of it might as well come his way, even if it meant Danny never spoke to him again. That wasn’t much of a loss. The old soldier was getting ever more cranky, and was bound to burst a blood vessel soon.

In the corner of the office, a pyramid space that had once been a hayloft, Jeremy sat with a book, uncharacteristically quiet. Sue-Clare was off in Taunton with her crystal therapist. Since it was the long school holidays, Maskell was stuck with the kids. Hannah was no trouble at all. Stick her in front of the video with
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2
and she was content on her own. But Jeremy, who became bored with deadly ease, was working up to trouble. Now he was fine, but Maskell sensed harassment coming. His son had a concentration problem. Then again, he himself could hardly keep his mind on his home computer’s columns of figures. In this weather, it was hard to think about one thing for any length of time.

At first, the heat had been pleasant. He had gone about with his shirt off, and Sue-Clare complimented him on his tan. Unlike some of his labourers, who had permanently bark-textured brown necks and fishbelly-white backs and chests, he did not burn. They ate long, picniclike meals in the open, and stayed outside late into the evenings. Sue-Clare enjoyed herself, browning her stomach and sipping cooled white wine or riding across the moors on Fancy, and patiently shushed his dark grumbles about the weather not being good for the farm. One day, everything had gone beyond ripe and started to rot. Since then, it had been Hell.

Maskell exited one file and entered another, checking running totals. The shortfall between expected and actual income was dangerous.

Jeremy sighed and put down
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
Officially, he was a gifted child, but somehow that wound up being an affliction. He had a relationship problem, which meant other kids at his school did not like him. Two or three times a week, they formed a circle around him in the playground and jeered at him until he cried. Lisa Steyning, the angelic tyrant who owned the dinner break, was the ringleader. Maskell couldn’t remember much of his own primary-school days, but was certain he had never been such a drip. If anything, he’d have been in the ring, linking arms with the others, chanting ‘Jerm, Jerm, Jerm, Swallowing Sperm’ at the cry-baby twerp.

Jeremy zigzagged slowly across the room, fiddling with things. Maskell knew he was about to need attention. He tried to stop himself getting angry before the boy had done anything. Jeremy was demanding more and more adult attention. Sue-Clare was dropping the phrase ‘special school, but Maskell thought Jeremy’s inability to make friends with kids his own age was not just a matter of differing levels of intelligence. In many ways, he seemed a lot
less
intelligent than the rest of them. He was so clever he had to do really stupid things to keep up. Like the time he smeared garlic on his windows to keep away the Evil Dwarf.

Jeremy was behind him, visible dimly as a reflection in the screen.

There was the concentration problem. The relationship problem. The night-time bladder-control problem. The coordination problem. The bad-dream problem. And the Evil Dwarf problem. The Evil Dwarf was Jeremy’s bogeyman, a creeping malevolence who sucked out the minds of little boys, turning them into human sheep. It was hard to tackle the things that scared Jeremy. Controlling his reading and viewing didn’t help, because Jeremy could take it into his head to be scared of almost anything. When they took the kids to see
Snow White,
Maskell had predicted trouble with the Wicked Queen but Jeremy had taken it into his head to be afraid of Dopey. Maskell could not remember now whether the Evil Dwarf had showed up before or after Dopey, but they were now the same monster. No wonder the other kids, including five-year-old Hannah, gave him a hard time. Anyone afraid of Dopey had a serious chicken streak.

When he was a boy, they’d had
really
scary monsters, like the Quatermass Experiment and the Trollenberg Terror. And he’d never shown his fear of them before his father. If he’d refused to go alone to bed in the dark, the Major would have given him a memorable quirting and banned him from the television.

Maskell was struggling anyway. Since the books had gone from paper to disc, things supposed to be simple had become complicated. He trawled around in the accounts, trying to find enough to meet the tax bill. He was required to pay for last year’s profits while the farm was in its worst-ever slump, but he had been digging for two months into the set-aside tax money to keep up with the wage bills. Losing Budge and Gilpin helped—although their union rep had already left a curt message on his answering machine—but not much. He had no casual labour left to trim from the budget. Gilpin and Budge hadn’t been fat, they’d been meat; and their loss left a bloody hole.

To top it off, his accountant of eighteen years had retired, and Maskell resented and mistrusted the ponytailed youth who inherited his business. He did not like the way he looked at Sue-Clare’s chest and constantly flexed his fingers, and could not understand the manual that came with the software the sharpfaced creep had lent him.