The Quarry (18 page)

Alison stops, half turns and smiles a big smile at me, tipping her head to one side, letting her neat blonde hair fall half across her face and sort of flicking it back a little as she says, in a subtly different, slightly lower, softer voice, ‘Just do this for me, Kit; come on. Please?’

I have a suspicion this is what is called coquettishness. I believe I’m immune to it; in fact I’m so immune to it I did once think I might be gay, even though I’m pretty sure I’m not (better than ninety-nine per cent sure).

‘Anyway, there’s no light up in the attic,’ I tell her. ‘We’d need torches.’

‘You must have torches,’ she says, still smiling.

‘I have a torch,’ I tell her. ‘It’s small, though.’

Actually we have a ruggedised, plug-in, portable, five-hundred-watt, halogen work light on a long curly lead in the garage, which we could fetch and which would illuminate the whole loft, but frankly I’m trying to put her off so there’s no need to mention it.

‘Great.’ She claps her hands, all business again. ‘We’ve got some multi-squillion candle-power thing in the car. I’ll get that.’

‘Okay,’ I say. ‘You look up there, I’ll look down here.’

‘O— what?’ This has thrown her too, as it was kind of meant to. ‘No. We need to do this together, Kit,’ she says.

‘No we don’t.’

‘But yes we do. You’re the local knowledge; we need your expertise up there.’

‘But my local knowledge is telling me the tape isn’t up there in the first place.’

‘Ah,’ she says, and smiles tightly and shakes her head, eyelids fluttering briefly closed. I think she means to look confident but in reality she looks like she’s having to stall while she extemporises an answer to this. ‘That’s mistaking strategic knowledge for tactical knowledge,’ she says (which is quite quick, I suppose). ‘Leave the strategy to me, Kit; that’s what I’m good at. That’s my job. That’s what they pay me for. Trust me.’

‘Well anyway,’ I say – breezily, I hope, because, although I’ve become a bit hot during our little exchange, I’ve also thoroughly enjoyed it – ‘thanks for the offer of help, Ali.’ (I don’t think I’ve ever called her ‘Ali’ before.) ‘I’m going to look in the room above yours. There’s a stepladder behind the door of the last room on this side if you want to get up into the attic.’

Me and my working bulb head off to the room above her and Rob.

I think I hear her mutter ‘Prick’ in the darkness, but I’m not sure.

After a couple of minutes I hear her dragging the stepladder noisily along the hall into position under the loft trapdoor and banging it open, then clumping around above my head. It sounds like she’s just letting the boxes fall to the floor up there, but they don’t actually make much impact because, like I said, they’re empty, or as good as.

Hol comes up after another couple of minutes and we get through the boxes in two of the old servants’ rooms twice as fast, mostly in a companionable silence, save for the clumping.

‘Dunder-headed, wart-raddled, slug-case of bilious turgidity.’

‘Mollocking, mince-witted slack-jaw.’

‘Gruel-brained, unlanced-boil-visaged, sense-prolapsed haemorrhoid-suckler.’

‘Eew. Yuck.’

‘Auto-stuprated, faecal-faced excrementiphage.’

‘Binary-dumbfounded, synapse-deficient femtowit.’

‘Why, you scrotum-faced, pillous-featured fartle-butt.’

‘While you, sir, are a wit-wrecked, scurvy-tongued, mucus-palmed, cretinous pinprick.’

‘Ooooh!’

‘Well, you’re a gangrenously, tripe-bollocked waste of flatulence.’

‘Oh! Harsh.’

‘You blunder-brained, coprophageous, cortex-curdled slap-basket.’

‘Scrofulous, addle-pated geezertwat!’

‘How dare you, you blither-wattled, sump-gargling breeze-blockhead.’

‘Ham-brained, hair-fisted, cess-slathered pus-scuttle!’

‘Scheech!’

‘Space-wasting, worm-infested, bilge-veined, Hideometer-deforming scartle-dunce!’

‘Did you say “Hideometer”?’

‘That’s what it says here.’

‘What’s a Hideometer?’

‘Measures hideousness, obviously. Right, Kit?’

‘That was the idea.’

‘All right, but “
scartle
-dunce”? What’s a scartle-dunce?’

‘
I’ve
no idea. What’s a “scartle”, for that matter?’

‘Kit?’

I shrug. My face is burning but I’m also smiling. ‘I made that one up,’ I confess. ‘I needed something for the rhythm of it and “scartle” just fitted. I was going to replace it with something better but in the end I didn’t. I suppose I was kind of trying to see what I could get away with.’

‘Quite a lot,’ Paul says, ‘by the look of it.’

He and Pris and Hol have been reading out some of my HeroSpace insults.

‘These are brilliant, Kit!’ Pris says. ‘You’re a fucking genius of insulting! And you actually win battles like this?’

‘Well, not exactly battles, but there’s a sort of game-engine-remuned subculture of insult trading, and providing you get the vote from your fellow gamers, there will be a victor and a vanquished, and so you can earn points, yeah. It’s quite democratic, really.’

‘You literally trade insults?’ Paul says. He nods. ‘That’s quite cool.’

‘Yeah, also,’ Hol says, looking at Rob and Alison, sitting across from her, ‘have you been tutoring the lad in your ludicrous management guru-speak?’ Rob grins, Ali frowns. Hol looks at me. ‘“Game-engine-remuned”, Kit?’ Her eyes narrow. ‘Actually, just “remuned”?’

‘Leave him alone, Hol,’ Haze says. ‘Don’t pick him up on every word.’

‘No,’ I say, ‘it’s fair; “remuned” is just a word that’s used in the game to mean an activity or … a creation that’s worth points. I don’t think it’s in the dictionaries. Well, not yet.’

We’re in the sitting room after dinner. (I took a bunch of curries out of the freezer: a general thumbs-up, though a couple of dishes were judged ‘a bit hot’ and Haze gargled milk at one point. I think he was just trying to show off. I believe Dad was about to complain about them being too hot until other people did.) Now Hol, folded cross-legged on the couch, has her laptop balanced on her knees, plugged into HeroSpace. She has an account, an avatar – everything. I had no idea. She just likes to watch, she says. (That got an ‘Ooooh!’ from Haze, too.)

You can do that, in the game; providing you never try to accumulate points, you can just wander around most Territories, NearSpaces, Adjoinalities and Adjunctions without ever getting harmed. You’re a bit like a ghost. Quite a lot of people do this, so they can follow a preferred player on their quests and campaigns – a travelling fan base – or just tour the scenery and the architecture; tourists, ogling, basically. Either way they get called Voys, but it’s not too much of an insult. Not any more than, say, ‘newbie’ is – just a description. The game is so vast, so famous and so complex these days that a lot of people thinking of joining in as full-on, points-collecting Players like to spend some time as a Voy first, just to see if they think they’re going to like it and fit in, and to start learning the rules and ropes by observation rather than bitter experience.

So Hol’s a Voy, and she’s followed me for over a year. I’m not sure how to feel about this: a little flattered, I guess, but also a little like my privacy has been invaded. She logged in to let the others hear some of my choicer insults from the last couple of seasons of the tavern-based, Pro Insult-Trading series. Now Paul and Pris are leaning over the couch behind her, one over each shoulder, watching her screen as she scrolls down the list of Previously Victorious Disparagements, which presents as gold-leaf-tooled gothic script on polished teak boards, a bit like the list of former mayors that hangs above the grand central staircase in Bewford city hall or the roll-call of vice-chancellors in one of the university’s older colleges.

Paul points at the screen. ‘Carbuncle-strewn, slump-buttocked denizen of the outer latriniverse!’ he declaims.

‘Limp-tooled, spunk-deficient, sputum-defiled, turd-stuffed crass basket!’ Pris yells back. ‘Ha ha ha.’

‘Can we fucking go back to something resembling normal fucking English?’ Guy says, pulling on a stunted rolly. ‘This bollocks is doing me head in.’

‘Nah, this is a laugh,’ Haze tells him. He’s rolling a joint. Ali has insisted on opening a window to let the smoke out; I had to fetch a blanket to cover Guy, who had immediately complained about the cold.

‘Suppurating, brochette-brained chump-head,’ Hol says. Possibly at Guy.

‘Incompetence-redefining ignoramax!’ Paul replies.

‘“Ignoramax”?’ Rob says. ‘That another made-up one, Kit?’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Also, earlier? I shouldn’t really have got away with “breeze-blockhead”, because that particular one was in a Dark Ages TymeShift Adjoinality, where breeze-blocks have yet to be invented.’ I frown, thinking about this. ‘I could still lose points, if somebody spots that.’ They’re all looking at me. ‘I think it’s because most Players are still American and they call breeze-blocks “cinder blocks”, so they haven’t noticed it.’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ Guy says. ‘We get the point. You’re so fucking clever, Kit.’ He snorts. ‘When you’re finished blowing your own trumpet, don’t forget to empty the spit-trap.’

‘No,’ Hol says, smiling at him. ‘This is something different, Guy. It’s called self-deprecation. It’s more like sucking your own trumpet. You wouldn’t understand.’

‘Fuck off.’

‘Yeah, you …’ Pris has taken out her contact lenses for the evening and is wearing small rimless glasses (she’s still very pretty). She has to lean further over Hol’s left shoulder to peer at the screen and read the words. ‘You syphilivered, sense-redacted, bipedal tumour!’ she says to Guy, and the last word is out before she realises.

Then her face falls and she sort of compresses her lips until they almost disappear, biting them. ‘Oh,’ she says, shrinking down, putting her chin on her forearms on the back of the couch.

‘Yeah, that’s maybe enough,’ Hol says quietly, closing the laptop. She lifts her wineglass, drinks.

We’re all looking at Guy, who’s up-ending another John Smith’s can to empty it. He smacks his lips and sticks the folded-up butt of the rolly into the can, then glances round at us.

‘Yeah, I heard,’ he says, wheezing. ‘Sticks and fucking stones, ya bunch of wimps. You should hear the names I call me tumours. Makes that lot’ – he nods at the closed laptop on Hol’s knees. Handily for Guy, I am in line with him and the laptop so he’s nodding at me too – ‘sound like Jane Austen characters at their most excruciatingly fucking polite.’

‘Yeah, well …’ Haze says.

Pris keeps her head down and in a small voice as she looks at Guy says, ‘Still; sorry, dude.’

‘And I’ll thank you not to “dude” me, either,’ Guy says, though he doesn’t sound upset. He looks at Haze. ‘You rolling that fucking joint or growing it?’

‘Nearly done,’ Haze says, licking at a cigarette paper. ‘Skilled job, this, isn’t it? Can’t hurry perfection.’

‘There’s your problem,’ Guy says. ‘Doesn’t have to be perfect; just has to deliver.’

‘Yeah, well,’ Haze says, ‘I take pride in my work, don’t I?’

Pris snorts. Haze stiffens, hesitates, but then continues as though he hasn’t heard.

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake,’ Ali says. ‘Do you two have to smoke at all?’

‘It’s my hobby,’ Guy tells her. ‘That and drinking.’ He looks at me. ‘More fucking wholesome than making up bollocks round-the-fucking-houses ways of insulting saddo losers in the cyberverse that you never really meet anyway and probably wouldn’t want to even if you did have the chance.’

‘Can’t you at least smoke
proper
cigarettes?’ Alison says. ‘You know; the neat, undeformed ones you don’t have to roll yourself?’

‘Nah,’ Guy says. ‘Full of additives to keep them looking nice and stay lit, those are. You don’t want to go pulling that shit into your lungs; might catch something.’ He grins at Ali, who shudders, looks away.

‘Cheaper, too,’ Haze says. ‘I get my baccy from a guy on the cross-Channel ferries. Cheap as chips.’

‘Yeah, what language
is
that?’ Paul says, coming to sit back where he was, beside Haze, and lifting up the packet of tobacco he’s using. He inspects the small print, frowning.

Haze glances, shrugs. ‘Dunno. Balkan, or Egyptian or something.’

‘“Balkan”?’ Hol says. ‘That a new state I haven’t heard of, Haze?’

‘’Spect so,’ Haze says, sitting back as he lights up. He glances at me, grins. ‘Kit makes things up, and so do I.’ He pulls hard on the joint.

I tried smoking once but it didn’t seem to agree with my throat. I was never going to take it up because of the whole good-chance-of-killing-you thing, but I thought I’d see what all the fuss was about. After I’d stopped coughing I felt a bit dizzy. Though that might just have been the coughing. Either way, it didn’t seem like much. Definitely one of those moments when I’ve thought,
I am never going to understand people
.

‘Hey, Humphrey?’ Guy says to Haze.

‘Just getting it drawing nicely,’ Haze tells him. He hands the joint over. ‘There you go, mate.’

‘Ta.’ Guy draws deeply, holds it in, then exhales a big cloud of smoke towards the ceiling, wheezing, then coughing. ‘Heard a lot of crashing around upstairs earlier,’ he says. ‘Looking for the notorious tape, were we?’

‘We’ve instigated a proper search,’ Ali says. ‘So far the attic is definitely clear.’ She glances at me.

‘Could have told you that,’ Guy says. ‘Nothing up there but mice, cardboard and expanded polystyrene.’

‘There were no mice,’ Ali says.

‘Stands to reason,’ Guy says, and coughs resonantly. ‘Rats and sinking ships and that.’

‘Kit and I are looking through the second-floor rooms,’ Hol says. ‘Still a few more to go.’

‘I checked one of the outbuildings earlier,’ Paul says. This comes as a surprise; I didn’t know he had. The others look like they didn’t know this either. Paul shrugs. ‘Just started; there’s a lot of junk in there. I could get into only one of them; there’s a couple still locked. Plus there’s the garage, of course. And the shed.’

‘Our Kit is the keeper of the keys,’ Guy says. ‘Apply to him.’

‘Just let me know,’ I tell Paul, who nods. Most of the house keys are on a single big loop that lives in the old electricity meter cupboard near the back door.