The Year of the Ladybird (17 page)

I lay awake, listening. Footsteps in the corridor, doors opening and closing. Each individual returning from the bars was going to be Colin. I heard someone outside my window
and I thought Colin might be planning to break his way through the glass; but it was one of the waiters trying to get a kiss and a cuddle in the dark from a girl who kept protesting that she would
but she was afraid her father would find out.

When I finally did drift off to sleep I had dreams. I was on the pier standing before the mechanised fortuneteller. The glass case had been smashed and the manikin leaned forward out of the
broken face. Her tongue lolled from her painted mouth. It was an absurdly long, fat, moist and lascivious tongue and she seemed to produce from her throat one of the prediction cards. In the dream
I took the card but I couldn’t read what was on it because the printed letters changed before my eyes, now Greek, now Chinese. It was a matter of great torment to me that I couldn’t
read what was written on the card.

I felt so anxious about not being able to read the card that I woke up. In the dark someone was sitting on the end of my bed. But I couldn’t sit up. My chest was

compressed. It was like I had a claw wrapped round my lungs. I could hear myself trying to breath. I was so frightened I tried to shout out but I couldn’t get my breath. It was the man in
the blue suit. He was sitting on the end of my bed regarding me steadily.

But his eyes were pure glass. Clear glass, no pupil. They reflected the light and shadow of the room; and even though his eyes were clear glass I could see he was looking down at me. But because
his eyes were clear glass I couldn’t see if he wanted to hurt me. I tried to sit up but couldn’t because of the weight on my lungs. I thought he must have a hand pressing on my
chest.

With a superhuman effort I forced myself upright, and as I did I woke up. I’d had a dream within a dream. I’d woken up only to wake a second time. I got up to put the light on. The
man on the edge of my bed had gone. I prowled my tiny room, lifting things and setting them down again: my clock, a newspaper, a shoe. I was scared of waking up again.

Finally I went back to bed. I left the light on. I lay awake for a long time, blinking at the ceiling. I must have fallen asleep again because I overslept. I was already a few minutes late when
I threw on my Greencoat outfit and hurried over to the theatre. There was a smell of burning accelerant in the air. The ladybird patrol was up and about, fuel tanks strapped to their backs,
sweeping dead ladybirds into piles and incinerating them. You would hear the spit and brief dull roar of the incinerator and a little black puff of smoke would ball in the air.

Pinky’s morning briefing was already well underway when I got to the theatre. Nikki gave me a look of maternal disapproval. Nobby, slumped in a chair, winked at me as if I’d done
something good. I looked for signs of Terri performing her cleaning duties but there was no sign of her. I sat through the briefing, rubbing my eyes and trying not to yawn.

‘Are you with us then, son?’ It was Pinky.

I realised he had just asked me a question. ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I had a night from hell.’

‘Not letting that Nobby have a bad influence on you, are you? Not going to turn out like him?’

‘That’s fucking nice, that is,’ Nobby spluttered. ‘Charming. Fucking nice, that.’

Pinky ignored him. ‘Sandcastles with Nikki then?’

Nikki had one eyebrow raised, waiting for an answer.

‘Sure.’

‘Go easy on the sticks of rock,’ Pinky said as we got up to leave. ‘It has to last all season.’ I looked up at the stage again, expecting Terri to emerge from behind the
flats and wiping her mop this way and that as on so many other occasions during our briefing. Normally, the hoover and other equipment would be around as she worked. Not this morning.

‘Are you all right?’ Nikki asked me when we got outside.

‘Yes. Why do you I ask?’

‘Nothing. I thought you looked a bit . . .’

‘A bit what?’

‘I worry about you, for some reason. God knows why. But I wondered if Nobby had been up to his tricks. Getting you involved.’

‘You’re speaking in riddles, Nikki.’

Nikki brought her hand to her mouth and made a quick back-and-forth smoking gesture. ‘He’s a doper,’ she said. Then, as an afterthought, she said, ‘And a dope.’

Gosh, I wanted to say to her, I wish it was as innocent as smoking pot. Instead I said, ‘No. Nothing like that. I don’t even like the stuff. I tried it once at college but it made me
throw up.’

‘Me neither,’ she said as we passed through the beach wall tunnel and emerged onto the sand. ‘I prefer fresh air and sex for entertainment.’ She looked at me pointedly.
‘Right, let’s get cracking. You do the over-sevens and I’ll do the tiddly-pots.’

My only salvation was to fling myself into the work. It was a way of shoving aside all thoughts of either Terri or Colin, even though they were like demons barking at either ear. I got down on
my knees with the children and exhorted them to dig. I helped them to make models of horses and of boats, trains and planes. One little girl even complained that I’d snatched away her blue
plastic spade in my fervour. I was manic.

I’d already decided that Colin would just have to come and do his worst. I would fight him. I would go down fighting. As I worked the sand and flipped shiny plastic buckets amongst them,
the innocence of the children almost made me want to cry. I very nearly did.

Nikki stooped beside me and whispered in my ear, ‘You’re putting me to shame.’

I looked at her. The sun was up hot and I was sweating. I must have been wild-eyed.

‘It’s okay,’ she said sweetly. She lifted my hair out of my eyes and parked it behind my ear. Then she went back and lay down.

I thought some of the parents were looking at me oddly so I left the kids to their sand designs and went to sit next to Nikki. She was stretched back on the sand with her hands behind her head
and her eyes closed. I tried to copy her, but as soon as I put my head back and closed my eyes I saw Colin standing over me. I sat up. There was no Colin. ‘I’m really sorry about that
thing,’ I said.

‘Without opening her eyes she said, ‘What thing?

‘That meeting. They’re not my kind of people.’

‘Oh forget it.’

‘I didn’t know what I was getting into. I just went along for the ride. Literally. I mean I was invited to get into a car without knowing where it was taking me. Next thing I know
I’m up to my jaw in flags and regalia and spearheads and all this about the commies and the unions and the Jews and the blacks and—’

‘Look, we’ve been through all this. I’ve forgotten it. Why don’t you?’

‘I would never have gone if I’d realised.’

‘Realised what?’

‘Who they were. How it would offend you. All that.’ Now she opened her eyes and sat up.

‘I mean to say, what if those people ever got into power?’

‘They won’t,’ she said.

‘How do you know?’

‘They’re a hate club. Most people are decent, you know.’

‘You say that. But it has happened. In history.’

‘What do you think we should do?’

‘Well. Organise.’

‘Organise? Right! This afternoon. We’ll go after them with an iron bar and a cricket bat. You and me.’ She closed her eyes again.

I vented a deep sigh. I know I sat there for a while pinching a loose bit of skin above the bridge of my nose. At least it was better than forcing small children into making over-complicated
sandcastles.

Eventually Nikki got to her feet. ‘Come on. Put on a happy face. I’ll pick the winners while you give everyone a stick of rock. Sod it, give them two sticks apiece.’

More than ever I needed to find Terri, to re-establish
terra firma
, to stop my world from spinning out of control. But I couldn’t locate her anywhere. A
sweet-natured grey-haired woman called Elsie supervised all the cleaning staff. I tracked her down and asked where I could find Terri.

Elsie wore a pair of plastic-framed spectacles patched together with clear Sellotape. Metal hairgrips pinned back her hair and she was weighed down by an enormous silver ring of keys dangling
from a leather belt looped round her thin waist. She seemed too frail to be carrying such a bunch of keys. ‘What do you want her for, duck?’

‘She left some stuff in the theatre. I want to take it to her.’

‘Give it here. I’ll see she gets it.’

‘No problem. I’ll return it to her myself.’

‘Please yourself, duck. Only she hasn’t been in today.’

‘Oh?’

‘Happen she’ll be back tomorrow, eh?’

‘Happen,’ I said. I don’t know why. I never say
hap- pen
.

I thought briefly of home. I don’t know if these are the sort of things young men discuss with their fathers or their stepfathers or not at all, but I was in serious need of someone to
talk to. Though the idea of me telling all this to Ken seemed ridiculous. I’d always kept him at arm’s length as if, through no fault of his own, he wasn’t to be trusted with
intimacies. As I passed by the palmist’s little white caravan I couldn’t help glancing through the door. Tony was in there, laughing and sipping tea from a china tea-cup, his feet
crossed at the ankles. I couldn’t actually see Madame Rosa, but I could hear her talking in animated fashion

No, I didn’t think that she could see my future, or that she could see into my past. But a kind of desperation made me look towards the caravan. Not that I was ever going to give her the
chance: I’d found out that Madame Rosa charged four pounds fifty for a reading. That seemed to me to be an astonishing amount of money: the equivalent of about fifteen pints of beer. I
didn’t need a palmist to tell me that I was serious danger of getting my head kicked in, and that it was all of my own doing.

Nikki had a direct way of speaking. ‘You don’t look happy and you don’t look well,’ she said.

‘I’m not sleeping well.’

Nikki sighed. ‘This place. It can really get to you. That’s why your predecessor left. He just couldn’t stand it. Long hours of the happy face. It’s dangerous. Doing a
happy face when you really want to scream. Is anything else bothering you?’ She looked at me with dark eyes full of intuition.

I was close to telling her everything. I wasn’t in love with Terri but I felt responsible for her. I couldn’t see how I could spill the beans on any of this without seeming like
I’d made it all happen. ‘I’m just not sleeping. That rabbit hutch doesn’t help.’

Of Colin or Terri there was neither sight nor sound. A new cleaner had been drafted in to take care of the theatre. I got her to switch off her noisy hoover so that I could ask
her about Terri. She didn’t know anything. She said that all she knew was that she’d been taken off Block B where she was happy and put on the theatre where she didn’t know a
soul.

In blistering heat we judged the competitions around the swimming pool. The heat and the lack of sleep exhausted me. Nikki wanted me to go to the canteen with her for lunch but my need to sleep
was overwhelming. Images from the previous evening’s escape were washing over me and the dreaming part of my brain was flooding my waking mind. I went back to my room and was relieved to find
no sign of Nobby. I locked the door, flung myself on my cot and instantly fell into a deep sleep.

Though it seemed like only seconds, it was maybe a couple of hours later when I was roused by a hammering on the door and a woman’s voice calling my name. It was Nikki.

I got to my feet and opened the door.

‘You’re supposed to be preparing for the farewell show,’ she said. She peered round me into my room, as if to see if I’d got anyone with me.

I felt drugged. I was like a zombie. ‘Need a shower,’ I slurred.

‘You haven’t got time. They’re all there. Only you missing.’

I ignored her and in a stupor I shuffled to the shower room, stepped out of my clothes and ran the shower cold over my head. I stood under the icy water for a moment and began to revive. When I
opened my eyes Nikki was there, shamelessly watching me. Her arms were folded. She was holding one of my towels. She flapped it at me. ‘You’ll need this.’

We hurried over to the theatre where the preparation for the farewell performance and prize-giving ahead of the Friday Review was already underway. Tony and the others were already onstage,
setting up. As I came in he asked me to go backstage to wheel out the sword casket and his fez in readiness for his
Abdul-Shazam
routine.

It was the first time I’d been alone backstage since it had all kicked off. Before then I’d made sure there were others around, people I could talk to, just so that I didn’t
have to confront the loaded silence of the place. Backstage in the theatre is awash with ghosts. It is a memory bank for every cue missed by an actor; every gag that died; each muffed line and
dance routine gone awry; each dropped catch, muddle, mix-up and mistake: the tragic moment that turns to farce. For all of this there is a dark audience perched and waiting.

The sword casket was covered with props and stage junk. I was thinking about Nikki, who would be called upon to get into the box as I took all the junk off the box and unlatched the lid. When I
opened the lid and looked inside I let the lid slam down and I toppled backwards.

There was a woman in the casket.

I sat back on the bare boards, paralysed, staring at the glittering box. The truth is I was waiting for the lid to open.

It didn’t.

I knew it must be a trick of the light. But even in the dimly lit recess of the props chamber the image of a woman stuck in that coffin of a magic box had been vivid. Slowly, and on my hands and
knees, I crawled over to the casket and lifted the lid again.

It was Terri. She was jammed in the casket, her feet drawn up beneath her and wedged into the dividers. She wore just her bra and pants. I could only see one side of her face, and that was in
darkness. Her skin looked grey. Her nose and mouth were squashed up against the padded sides of the box. Her eyes were closed. A trickle of liquid had dribbled from her mouth and across her chin,
leaving a snail-trail. A rope was tangled around her legs.