Piranha to Scurfy (8 page)

In the morning he looked through the yellow pages and found a firm of tree fellers, operating locally. Would they send someone to cut down all the shrubs in his garden? They would, but not before Monday. On Monday morning they would be with him by nine. In the broad daylight he asked himself again what had come through the kitchen window, come in and taken That Book out of the waste bin and, sane again, wondered if it might have been Glenys Next-door’s fox.The sun was shining, the grass gleaming wet after the rain. He fetched a spade from the shed and advanced upon the wide flower bed. Not the right-hand side, not there, avoid that at all costs. He selected a spot on the extreme left, close by the fence dividing his garden from that of Sandra On-the-other-side. While he dug he wondered if it was a commonplace with people, this burying of unwanted or hated or threatening objects in their back gardens. Maybe all the gardens in Leytonstone, in the London suburbs, in the United Kingdom, in the world, were full of such concealed things, hidden in the earth, waiting ...

He laid
Demogorgon
inside. The wet earth went back over the top of it, covering it, and Ribbon stamped the surface down viciously. If whatever it was came back and dug The Book out, he thought he would die.

Things were better now that Demogorgon was gone. He wrote to Clara Jenkins at her home address—for some unaccountable reason she was in
Who’s Who—
pointing out that in chapter 1 of
Tales My Lover Told Me
Humphry Nemo had blue eyes and in chapter 21 brown eyes; Thekla Pattison wore a wedding ring on page 20 but denied, on page 201, that she had ever possessed one; and on page 245 Justin Armstrong was taking part in an athletics contest, in spite of having broken his leg on page 223, a mere five days before. But Ribbon wrote with a new gentleness, as if she had caused him pain rather than rage.

Nothing had come from Dillon’s. He wondered bitterly why he had troubled to congratulate them on their service if his accolade was to go unappreciated. And more to the point, nothing had come from Kingston Marle by Friday. He had the letter of apology—he must have, otherwise he wouldn’t have altered the ending of
Demogorgon
back to the original plotline. But that hardly meant he had recovered from all his anger. He might still have other revenges in store. And, moreover, he might intend never to answer Ribbon at all.

The shrubs seemed to be back in their normal places. It would be a good idea to have a plan of the garden with the bushes all accurately positioned so that he could tell if they moved. He decided to make one. The evening was mild and sunny, though damp, and of course, at not long past midsummer, still broad daylight at eight. A deck chair was called for, a sheet of paper, and, better than a pen, a soft lead pencil. The deck chairs might be up in the loft or down here, he couldn’t remember, though he had been in the shed on Wednesday evening to find a spade. He looked through the window. In the far corner, curled up, was a small dark shape.

Ribbon was too frightened to cry out. A pain seized him in the chest, ran up his left arm, held him in its grip before it slackened and released him.The black shape opened its eyes and looked at him, just as the demon in The Book looked at Charles Ambrose. Ribbon hunched his back and closed his eyes. When he opened them and looked again he saw Tinks Next-door get up, stretch, arch its back, and begin to walk in leisurely fashion toward the door. Ribbon flung it open.

“Scat! Get out! Go home!” he screamed.

Tinks fled. Had the wretched thing slunk in there when he’d opened the door to get the spade? Probably. He took out a deck chair and sat on it, but all heart had gone out of him for drawing a plan of the garden. In more ways than one, he thought, the pain receding and leaving only a dull ache. You could have mild heart attacks from which you recovered and were none the worse. Mummy said she had had several, some of them brought on—he sadly recalled—by his own defections from her standards. It could be hereditary. He must take things easy for the next few days, not
worry,
try to put stress behind him.

Kingston Marle had signed all the books she sent him and returned them with a covering letter. Of course she had sent postage and packing as well and had put in a very polite little note, repeating how much she loved his work and what a great pleasure meeting him in Blackwell’s had been. But still she had hardly expected such a lovely long letter from him, nor one of quite that nature. Marle wrote how very different she was from the common run of fans, not only in intellect but in appearance too. He hoped she wouldn’t take it amiss when he told her he had been struck by her beauty and elegance among that dowdy crowd.

It was a long time since any man had paid Susan such a compliment. She read and reread the letter, sighed a little, laughed, and showed it to Frank.

“I don’t suppose he writes his own letters,” said Frank, put out. “Some secretary will do it for him.”

“Well, hardly.”

“If you say so. When are you seeing him again?”

“Oh, don’t be silly,” said Susan.

She covered each individual book Kingston Marle had signed for her with plastic wrap and put them all away in a glass-fronted bookcase, from which, to make room, she first removed Frank’s
Complete Works of
Shakespeare,
Tennyson’s
Poems, The Poems of Robert Browning,
and
Kobbe’s
Complete Opera Book.
Frank appeared not to notice. Admiring through the glass, indeed gloating over, her wonderful collection of Marle’s works with the secret inscriptions hidden from all eyes, Susan wondered if she should respond to the author. On the one hand a letter would keep her in the forefront of his mind, but on the other it would be in direct contravention of the playing-hard-to-get principle. Not that Susan had any intention of being “got,” of course not, but she was not averse to inspiring thoughts about her in Kingston Marle’s mind or even a measure of regret that he was unable to know her better.

Several times in the next few days she surreptitiously took one of the books out and looked at the inscription. Each had something different in it. In
Wickedness in High Places
Marle had written, “To Susan, met on a fine morning in Oxford” and in
The Necromancer’s Bride,
“To Susan, with kindest of regards,” but on the title page of
Evil Incarnate
appeared the inscription Susan liked best: “She was a lady sweet and kind, ne’er a face so pleased my mind—Ever yours, Kingston Marle.”

Perhaps he would write again, even if she didn’t reply. Perhaps he would be
more likely
to write if she didn’t reply.

On Monday morning the post came early, just after eight, delivering only one item. The computer-generated address on the envelope made Ribbon think for one wild moment that it might be from Kingston Marle. But it was from Clara Jenkins, and it was an angry, indignant letter, though containing no threats. Didn’t he understand her novel was fiction? You couldn’t say things were true or false in fiction, for things were as the author, who was all-powerful, wanted them to be. In a magic-realism novel, such as
Tales My Lover Told Me,
only an ignorant fool would expect facts (and these included spelling, punctuation, and grammar) to be as they were in the dreary reality he inhabited. Ribbon took it into the kitchen, screwed it up, and dropped it in the waste bin.

He was waiting for the tree fellers, who were due at nine. Half past nine went by; ten went by. At ten past the front doorbell rang. It was Glenys Next-door.

“Tinks turned up,” she said. “I was so pleased to see him I gave him a whole can of red sockeye salmon.” She appeared to have forgiven Ribbon for his “attitude.” “Now don’t say what a wicked waste, I can see you were going to. I’ve got to go and see my mother—she’s fallen over, broken her arm, and bashed her face—so would you be an angel and let the washing-machine man in?”

“I suppose so.” The woman had a mother! She must be getting on for seventy herself.

“You’re a star. Here’s the key, and you can leave it on the hall table when he’s been. Just tell him it’s full of pillowcases and water and the door won’t open.”

The tree fellers came at eleven-thirty.The older one, a joker, said, “I’m a funny feller and he’s a nice feller, right?”

“Come this way,” Ribbon said frostily.

“What d’you want them lovely leylandiis down for, then? Not to mention that lovely flowering currant?”

“Them currants smell of cat’s pee, Damian,” said the young one. “Whether there’s been cats peeing on them or not.”

“Is that right? The things he knows, guv. He’s wasted in this job, ought to be fiddling with computers.”

Ribbon went indoors. The computer and printer were downstairs now, in the dining room. He wrote first to Natalya Dreadnought, author of
Tick,
pointing out in a mild way that “eponymous” applies to a character or object which gives a work its name, not to the name derived from the character. Therefore it was the large, blood-sucking mite of the order Acarina that was eponymous, not her title. The letter he wrote to Raymond Kobbo would correct just two mistakes in
The Nomad’s Smile,
but for both Ribbon needed to consult the
Piranha
to
Scurfy
volume. He was pretty sure the Libyan caravan center should be spelt “Sabha,” not “Sebha,” and he was even more certain that “qalam,” meaning a reed pen used in Arabic calligraphy, should start with a
k.
He went upstairs and lifted the heavy tome off the shelf. Finding that Kobbo had been right in both instances—“Sabha” and “Sebha” were optional spellings and “qalam” perfectly correct—unsettled him. Mummy would have known; Mummy would have set him right in her positive, no-nonsense way, before he had set foot on the bottom stair. He asked himself if he could live without her and could have sworn he heard her sharp voice say, “You should have thought of that before.”

Before what? That day in February when she had come up here to— well, oversee him, supervise him. She frequently did so, and in later years he hadn’t been as grateful to her as he should have been. By the desk here she had stood and told him it was time he earned some money by his work, by a man’s fifty-second year it was time. She had made up her mind to leave Daddy’s royalties to the lifeboat people. But it wasn’t this that finished things for him, or triggered things off, however you liked to put it. It was the sneering tone in which she told him, her right index finger pointing at his chest, that he was no good, he had failed. She had kept him in comfort and luxury for decade after decade, she had instructed him, taught him everything he knew, yet in spite of this, his literary criticism had not had the slightest effect on authors’ standards or effected the least improvement in fiction. He had wasted his time and his life through cowardice and pusillanimity, through mousiness instead of manliness.

It was the word “mousiness” that did it. His hands moved across the table to rest on
Piranha
to
Scurfy;
he lifted it in both hands and brought it down as hard as he could on her head. Once, twice, again and again. The first time she screamed, but not again after that. She staggered and sank to her knees and he beat her to the ground with volume 8 of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica.
She was an old woman: she put up no struggle; she died quickly. He very much wanted not to get blood on the book— she had taught him books were sacred—but there was no blood. What was shed was shed inside her.

Regret came immediately. Remorse followed. But she was dead. He buried her in the wide flower bed at the end of the garden that night, in the dark without a flashlight. The widows on either side slept soundly— no one saw a thing. The ivies grew back and the flowerless plants that liked shade. All summer he had watched them slowly growing. He told only two people she was dead, Glenys Next-door and his cousin Frank. Neither showed any inclination to come to the “funeral,” so when the day he had appointed came he left the house at ten in the morning, wearing the new dark suit he had bought, a black tie that had been Daddy’s, and carrying a bunch of spring flowers. Sandra On-the-other-side spotted him from her front-room window and, approving, nodded somberly while giving him a sad smile. Ribbon smiled sadly back. He put the flowers on someone else’s grave and strolled round the cemetery for half an hour.

From a material point of view, living was easy. He had more money now than Mummy had ever let him have. Daddy’s royalties were paid into her bank account twice a year and would continue to be paid in. Ribbon drew out what he wanted on her direct-debit card, his handwriting being so like hers that no one could tell the difference. He had been collecting her retirement pension for years, and he went on doing so. It occurred to him that the Department of Social Security might expect her to die sometime and the bank might expect it too, but she had been very young when he was born and might in any case have been expected to outlive him. He could go on doing this until what would have been her hundredth birthday and even beyond. But could he live without her? He had “made it up to her” by keeping her bedroom as a shrine, keeping her clothes as if one day she would come back and wear them again. Still, he was a lost soul, only half a man, a prey to doubts and fears and self-questioning and a nervous restlessness.

Looking down at the floor, he half-expected to see some mark where her small slight body had lain. There was nothing, any more than there was a mark on volume 8 of
Britannica.
He went downstairs and stared out into the garden. The cypress he had associated with her, had been near to seeing as containing her spirit, was down, was lying on the grass, its frondy branches already wilting in the heat. One of the two fat shrubs was down too. Damian and the young one were sitting
on Mummy’s grave,
drinking something out of a vacuum flask and smoking cigarettes. Mummy would have had something to say about that, but he lacked the heart. He thought again how strange it was, how horrible and somehow wrong, that the small child’s name for its mother was the same as that for an embalmed Egyptian corpse.