Ralph’s Children (8 page)

Few things, of course, except doing that with Rob.

‘So stupid,’ she said to herself, regretting yet again her own idiotic temper.

Missing him more than ever.

Darkness was already straining her eyes and creasing her forehead, though traffic was unusually light for a Friday afternoon as Kate, still on the A329 nearing Streatley,
allowed her concentration to wander into a swift fantasy in which Rob arrived at Caisleán determined to win her back.

‘Grow up,’ she told herself sharply.

Even if Rob did want to see her, it wouldn’t be possible this weekend, because he’d told her that Penny had asked him to have Emily, and that hadn’t happened in a long time,
and since there was, quite rightly, no one more important to Rob than Emmie, Kate would not dream of disturbing their—

The bang as her car’s front offside tyre burst was as loud as a gunshot.

‘Jesus!’

The Mini veered lethally into the oncoming lane, terrifying the driver of the small Mercedes coming the other way, then zigzagging for what felt to Kate like hundreds of yards, and the steering
wheel seemed to be juddering in her hands, and she only just avoided a van looming out of a narrow road to the left, and she was conscious of flashing lights and furious hooting from somewhere
behind her, but finally, mercifully, the little car came to a halt on the edge of the grass verge.

‘Jesus,’ Kate said again, blood roaring in her ears.

And then another bang, almost an
explosion
of sounds, reverberated through her as two – no, three – cars behind her skidded and collided with each other.

Time passed as Kate sat, shaking.

Too afraid to turn around and see the havoc she had caused.

Praying silently for no one to be hurt.

Please.

‘G
ame on.’

The word had gone out within minutes.

Jack’s wife was used to being dumped with their kids at a moment’s notice.

Pig was ready to call in sick.

Neither Simon nor Roger had anyone to answer to.

‘Take care,’ Ralph had told them all.

She had never felt more bereft than now at being left behind.

T
he day before she visited Sam always brought a mix of happiness and fear to Laurie because she so longed to see him but was desperately afraid that
something might happen to prevent her from going. And heaven knew there’d been no shortage of times when her parents had done their best to achieve that, though not even Shelly’s flu
last summer and Pete’s broken wrist the previous winter had prevented Laurie from arriving at Rudolf Mann House on the dot of 8 a.m. on Saturday morning.

Not that her anxieties ended there.

Would Sam be happy to see her? Would he look fit and well? Would he enjoy their time together? How would he be when they had to part?

Laurie knew how she would be.

She remembered one visit that had begun badly because Sam had been taken ill at breakfast time, but Laurie had spent the day sitting with him, and in a way, it had turned into one of her
happiest memories because Sam had really needed a mother that day and she had actually
been
there for him, aware that there were others at the home who could have helped him just as well,
probably better, than she could, amateur that she was.

But they were not his mother.

The bitch had been there that day, had almost managed to sour it for her.

‘Enjoyed that, didn’t you?’ she said to Laurie as she was leaving.

‘I certainly didn’t enjoy my son being ill,’ Laurie had said, managing to find the right words, ‘but yes, I’m glad I’ve been able to be here with
him.’

And the bitch had just smiled, given a shrug, and turned away.

Only thirteen hours and fifty minutes to go till she saw him.

Dinner time soon in the Moon house.

The atmosphere between them the evening before visiting days was always strained. No questions were asked about Laurie’s plans for the weekend. More than eight years since Sam’s
birth and they were still the same.

At some levels, Laurie still loved her parents, but on these particular Friday evenings, she hated them as much as the bitch. More so, if she was honest about it.

Thirteen and three-quarter hours to go.

R
alph sat in her winter garden, decaying leaves whirling around her, circling and enclosing her, whipped up by a sudden squall. Seen from a distance,
she might have been at the core of a vortex, the base of a small tornado, but she was utterly still.

Thinking about them.

About the new game.

About that other, early game that had kept her from being with them –
fully
– ever again.

Some of the leaves landed on her head, stalks catching in her hair. The wind dropped and they remained there, like a twisty golden crown.

The Chief.

It had happened during their third year together, when the children had been about thirteen and she had been thirty-three.

The games had long since ceased to be childlike, their edges too razor sharp for that. They still took turns to nominate a Beast and punish him or her, but whenever possible, they no longer
role-played the Beast, but used the
real
targets instead.

It had been Roger’s idea to move the game up that notch.

‘It’s too dangerous,’ had been Pig’s reaction.

‘We might get caught,’ Simon had agreed.

‘We won’t,’ Roger had said.

‘Not if we plan it right,’ Jack had backed her up.

Planning it
right
, they decided, meant isolating the Beast from outsiders, playing under cover of darkness and using war paint – as the children had in the novel that had first
inspired them – faces smeared with black and layers of brilliant colour to confuse and alarm their target and, most important, to make them unrecognizable.

They were wary of getting caught, though it was not authority of which they were wary, but the awful spectre of being split up.

‘I couldn’t bear it,’ Pig had said.

‘It would be rough,’ the girl called Roger agreed.

‘It would be piss-horrible,’ Jack said.

‘We mustn’t let it happen,’ said the girl called Simon, ‘not ever.’

‘We won’t,’ Jack said. ‘Not with Ralph to help us.’

‘If she will,’ Pig said.

‘She always does,’ Roger said.

It was true. Ralph knew that somewhere along the way she had become their creature, rather than simply their protector. And if her relationship with them had begun out of fascination, it had
long since become something of an addiction.

‘I’m not sure,’ she had said, when they’d first broached the new idea – knowing that by not stamping wholeheartedly on it, she had as good as given it her
blessing.

‘Whoever we punish,’ Simon said earnestly, ‘would have to be a true Beast.’

‘Obviously,’ Jack said.

‘We’re not brutes,’ Pig said.

There was no shortage of potential Beasts, but the children were practical, realistic about degrees of risk. If they were to take action against, say, one of the more detested
teachers at school, they knew they’d be unlikely to get away with it; and the same could be said for the skinny old battleaxe who ran the Bartlet village shop, and who mistrusted every kid
who stepped out of Challow Hall.

They had fewer misgivings about the cleaner.

Rose Miller, a pinch-faced woman with meaty arms, worked five days a week in the home, lived in a terraced cottage just outside the village, was always loving to the smelly mongrel dog she
called Billy, but was a nasty piece of work when it came to her little girl and boy, always yelling at and smacking them in the shops and in the road.
Real
slaps, too, not just taps on the
bum or arm, bestowed with a force that left the kids in little doubt of what probably went on once she got them indoors.

And since
nothing
was worse, in their eyes, than mothers who were cruel to their children, the group had unanimously agreed that Rose Miller deserved whatever they could manage to give
her.

Intimidation, mostly.

‘And pain,’ Jack had urged one evening at Wayland’s Smithy.

‘Not pain,’ Ralph had intervened. ‘I won’t be a party to thuggery.’

‘Not even if it’s deserved?’ Pig asked.

Ralph had heard longing in his tone, aware that while Pig was in most ways a gentle soul, his own parents’ savagery had made child abuse anathema to him.

‘Not even then,’ she had answered firmly.

‘So what’s the point,’ Jack had wanted to know, ‘if we can’t hurt the cow?’

‘We can make her afraid,’ Roger said. ‘Show her that if she can’t take better care of her kids, she’ll pay for it.’

They’d all looked back at Ralph, waiting to see if she objected to that.

It would, she knew, have been the moment to call a halt, but she was too fascinated to know how the new game might unfold, and so she had said neither no nor yes, and knew that she might as well
have given them an A for effort.

They were all quiet for a minute.

‘What if it goes wrong?’ Simon had asked. ‘What if she recognizes us and tells?’

‘She won’t,’ Roger said. ‘And if she does . . .’

‘Worst comes to worst,’ Jack said with a shrug, ‘they’ll lock us up.’

‘Separately,’ Pig said, grimly.

‘They might not believe her,’ Ralph said, quietly, and explained that she thought Rose Miller might be fiddling social security, because she’d been keeping an eye on the
cleaner herself, had tracked her as she went to jobs in three other villages in the district, had even stood behind her in the post office in Ashbury one afternoon when she’d been collecting
her benefit.

‘So we could blackmail her,’ Jack had said with relish.

‘No,’ Ralph said. ‘But if worst did come to worst, she might not be believed.’

‘I wish,’ she had said to them, on the morning itself, ‘you wouldn’t do this.’

They were not in the Smithy at that hour, but in the former vegetable garden at Challow Hall, plenty of kids around, Ralph having walked past the four carrying her battered attaché case,
casually stooping to pick up the dented football they’d been kicking aimlessly around.

‘You’re not going to tell, are you?’ Pig had asked her anxiously.

‘Of course not,’ she’d said. ‘I just want you to think about it one more time.’

‘We’ve thought about it,’ Roger said.

‘You need to understand –’ Ralph spoke quietly – ‘that however rotten she is, it doesn’t make what you’re planning to do right.’

Right and wrong, good and evil, still separated in her mind back then.

‘We,’ Roger said, quite sharply. ‘You’ve helped us, remember.’

‘Of course,’ Ralph said, and saw Simon glance uneasily around.

‘Are you going to stop us?’ Jack asked.

‘Without reporting you,’ Ralph answered him, ‘I don’t see how I can.’

She bounced the football, caught it, scanned the garden, saw that no one was remotely interested in her or them, and handed the ball to Jack.

Simon looked at the others. ‘I’m not quite sure about it.’

‘I am,’ Roger said. ‘I’m looking forward to it.’

‘You just want to do the acting,’ Simon said.

‘It’s not,’ Jack said, ‘as if we’re going to really hurt her.’

Ralph looked from one to the other, all in their uniform grey, and felt a pang of something like loss.

‘You do remember,’ she said, ‘that I can’t join in this one at all, don’t you?’

‘We know,’ Roger said. ‘You’ve said.’

‘Just as long as you don’t shop us,’ Jack said.

Ralph felt the threat underlying his words, and was suddenly afraid, not for herself, but for him, the boy-thug.

‘She never would,’ said Simon, tenderly.

No active participation, but she had been there nonetheless, could not keep away.

Had to watch from a distance, just in case.

Their Chief, after all. Guardian, more like.

It had started well enough, according to plan.

They took the cleaner’s dog, which was called Billy, while his mistress was at one of her jobs and the children were at school – and there was no husband or live-in boyfriend, which
had made things less complicated – and after dusk, Roger had made an anonymous call from a public phone to say that the dog had been spotted tied to a fence on Bartlet Down.

‘Who is this?’ Rose Miller asked, but Roger had already hung up.

She came, as they’d expected, though they were all relieved she came alone, had been afraid she might have brought the children, but it was cold and dark and she had done just what Simon
had guessed she would; left the kids on their own and walked up towards Bartlet Down, bundled up in an anorak and woolly hat, shining a torch in front of her.

The dog was there all right, its muzzle tied with a scarf – a long green woollen thing pinched by Jack out of a woman’s shopping basket on the bus – to stop it barking, though
his whines were more than piercing enough, and there was no time to lose.

‘Billy boy,’ Miller said, shock in her voice. ‘My poor—’

She began to stoop, and they were all on her.

Ralph, hidden behind a tree but close enough to see the action, felt suddenly and violently sick, because Miller’s torch and the half-moon lit up the children’s monstrous war paint
and the cleaner’s face, and her terror in those first moments were a part of what made Ralph nauseous.

She
had done this.

She clapped a hand over her mouth, afraid she might vomit.

And right away, saw it begin to go wrong.

‘You bastards!’

Miller’s fear seemed to fill her, transformed swiftly into a fury, endowing her with a strength none of them had bargained on.

‘You
shits
!’ she screamed when Jack seized hold of her thick arms, fought back, kicking and striking out with her gloved hands, while Billy whined piteously into the night
air.

Do something.

If she didn’t intervene now, Ralph realized, something worse would happen.

Her mind shot through one scenario even as she moved. If she was quick, then Miller might believe she’d come to help her, and the group could get away while . . .