Veil of Darkness (15 page)

‘There is no need to take that attitude, Avril. I can’t imagine what’s going on down there, but every time I speak to you you seem more distant, harder somehow, not like my Avril at all.’

‘And I wish you wouldn’t ring Mrs Stokes up behind my back,’ Avril decides to add while she’s at it. ‘Apart from being unnecessary, not to mention shaming if any of the other members of staff found out, it’s time you stopped checking up on me.’

Mrs Stott’s voice takes on a manipulative wobble. ‘
But, Avril, I do these things because I care
. I wouldn’t be a proper mother if I didn’t care.’

‘So what happened with Graham?’ Avril would rather switch to this subject, repetitive though it might be, than paddle around in the slush of her mother’s emotional turmoil.

‘He looked just the same.’ That hard edge is back in her voice. ‘Prison hasn’t changed him. Came here thinking he could just move back in and start using his father and I again. Huh! He must think we’re daft, and his language is still as bad—cursing and swearing in my own kitchen.’

‘So you sent him on his way, did you, Mother?’

‘Don’t take that bored tone with me, Avril.
What has got into you lately
? You of all people know how much I suffered over all those years with your brother in the house and his dishonest, coarse, aggressive ways.’

‘Well, I’m sure you did the best thing by turning him away.’

‘As you know, I’m a bag of nerves as a result of those dreadful times, I sleep badly, my blood pressure’s up and Dr Hunt says I must take things easy. But there’s your father to look after, poor Fluffy and this house, and then, on top of all that, Graham comes along as cocky as you please. They should have warned me. The shock could have killed me. I mean, there he was on my doorstep like the proverbial bad penny.’

Now, since
Magdalene
, Avril can put words to her pain, lyrics to her childhood song. And, what is more, she can share it with friends who understand and support her.

Graham, Graham, Graham
. When she was younger, before his name was banned from use in her mother’s house, Graham was the standard by which Avril was judged. ‘Don’t be like Graham, Avril. Please, do something with this untidy room.’

‘If Graham won’t help me I know Avril will.’

‘Just because Graham will only eat chips, doesn’t mean that you should copy him.’

‘Never take money from my purse without asking’—as if Avril would dream of doing that—‘If you need anything, Avril, just say.’

She did say. But she didn’t get it.

And Graham getting away with murder, Graham bringing his friends to the house and teasing fat Avril until she cried and hid herself away when she heard them coming through the front door. Graham hiding in the cupboard in the bathroom while she was on the loo. Graham springing out on her, Graham nicking her savings by smashing that lovely pink china pig, Graham’s little blackmailing scams, Graham twisting her arm in a Chinese burn till she screamed.

And so on and so forth…

Poor Avril grew up terrified of Graham. Why couldn’t they make him behave? Just because he was a boy? If she’d ever behaved like him her punishments would have been grim. And why wasn’t he taken away and locked up? Why did the police bring him home over and over and over again, more secure and triumphant in his wickedness than ever?

Avril must be polite and biddable.

‘Look, our Avril’s a lovely girl, nothing at all like Graham.’

And Avril, in her white socks and shorts, would stand there fatly, smiling.

Was there something in Mother’s psyche that welcomed Graham’s rebellious streak, something connected with a sense of vengeance towards her weak-natured husband?

‘Goodness knows where your brother is now,’ Mother continues painfully. ‘He even had the nerve to pay your father a visit at work, cadging money off him, as usual.’

‘Poor Father.’

‘Poor Father? Poor me more like. It’s always me who has picked up the pieces, tried to smooth the troubled waters. If I’d left anything to your father, goodness knows where we would be now. I dread to think. I really do.’

‘Well, let’s hope that was Graham’s last visit. At last, perhaps, he will leave you alone.’

‘I doubt we’ve heard the last of him,’ says Mrs Stott darkly.

Avril’s small amount of self-esteem has been given a mighty boost just lately by the sudden attentions of Ed Board, the Burleston golf professional. Her unusually cryptic response to her mother might partly be due to this turn of fortune. Add the punch of her two close friends, mix these with the force of
Magdalene
and it makes a pretty heady concoction.

Ed Board, thirty-eight, with red hair, a paunch and a stiff moustache that she tries to ignore, began his courtship by inviting Avril for a free lesson on the practice ground. ‘You look like a golfer in the making,’ he told her, slapping her soundly on the back.

‘He fancies you,’ said Bernie immediately when Avril shared this odd experience.

‘But he’s thirty-eight.’

‘So? There’s nothing wrong with thirty-eight.’

‘But I don’t know if I like him.’

‘
Get on
,’ laughed Bernie. ‘Give it a chance.’

So, in the still, warm peace of the following evening, Avril set out with the blessings of her friends. She made her way over the springy turf and puffed through the bramble and long grasses. On Kirsty’s advice she wore a long skirt and a loose, baggy T-shirt. Her shoes were solid and sensible.

‘Hi there!’ called Ed Board sportily; head down, he was chipping away from a transparent tube full of balls.

‘I don’t know a thing about golf,’ said Avril. ‘But I’m willing to learn.’

Before Avril knew it he was behind her, so close she could feel the shape of his paunch, busily positioning her arms. Unaware that she, herself, is an invader of space, she worried that he might be deliberately rubbing himself against her. Was he taking advantage? Bernie would know, so why didn’t she? ‘Head down,’ he ordered, ‘now swing!’

Avril swung, missed and giggled.

‘Don’t worry, that’s bound to happen,’ said Ed gamely. ‘Here we go, try again.’

She was not disturbed by his proximity, in fact she was quite enjoying it, so perhaps that was a clue to his motives. Avril did not feel uneasy in the way the police had warned them as children if you feel uneasy about it, follow your instincts, they are usually right. So Avril did not dissuade Ed Board, and gradually she made progress until she was hitting one ball in three.

How could anyone in their right mind take a game like this seriously, let alone teach it?

‘Jolly good!’ said Ed, encouragingly, now wrapping and unwrapping her hands round the club head until she was holding it correctly. Avril’s guilty feelings made her compare the rubbery head of the club to the staff of an erect penis. Was Ed having similar dirty thoughts? Was he getting a kick out of this? Just as she was beginning to think she was allowing him far too much feely-leeway, he suggested a drink at the bar. ‘It’s a lovely evening still. We could sit outside. I could murder a beer, I don’t know about you.’

‘Well, perhaps not a beer,’ said Avril, relieved. ‘But I wouldn’t turn down a tomato juice.’

‘With a tickle of vodka, no doubt?’ And Ed nudged her rather uncouthly. He meant no harm, he was just one of those ‘touching’ people, probably because of his job.

The sun was setting over the sea by the time they reached the hotel bar and took up positions on the patio overlooking the bay. The fairy lights made chains of bright spangles. The white wrought-iron tables set with flowers added scents to the summer magic. A piano was playing behind them—something from
South Pacific,
thought Avril ‘Younger Than Springtime’.

‘I’m enjoying this,’ said Ed, nodding and humming along to the tune with a line of foam on his moustache.

‘So am I,’ said Avril.

‘We must do this again.’

‘That would be nice,’ she told him, and he took her left hand and pressed it.

‘You really must understand, Miss Stott, that to receive personal faxes on the hotel machines and in office hours could well be construed as petty pilfering from the company.’

‘Nonsense,’ says the new, vital Avril, turning a flaming puce face towards Mr Derek’s contemptuous one. ‘I fully intend to pay for these two sheets of fax paper, and I’m prepared to work one minute overtime for nothing to make sure you are not in any way affected.’

‘The point is,’ says a nonplussed Mr Derek, taking one squeaky step backwards, ‘that some important message might have been coming through.’

‘Don’t be silly,’ Avril follows up, sounding far too much like Mother for comfort, ‘anyone finding the number engaged will simply try later.’

‘I do not like your attitude, young lady.’

‘And you have always been rude to me; right from the beginning your treatment of me has been very unkind.’ Avril is shaking like a blancmange. Behind her back the stubby fingers of one hand are clutched tightly in the other, but she is determined to see this through. ‘And unfair.’

Instant dismissal?

She will now be sacked for insolence and have to slope back home in a cloud of shame. She will unpack in her little bedroom again, ‘The little window where the sun came peeping in at morn’, lie her pyjama case on her bed and have to be down for breakfast at eight. Mother will boil her egg for four minutes, just as she likes it. She will catch up with all the soaps, of which Mother is a reluctant addict, until these simplistic programmes become more exciting than real life itself; the stars her friends, their highs Avril’s highs, their lows her lows. Eventually Mother will find her an appropriate job, nearer to home this time because, in her eyes, Avril will have been tainted by her first taste of freedom. The first sign of the family disease will be diagnosed and treated.

‘Well, please don’t let this happen again,’ Mr Derek is saying, regarding her with curious new eyes before disappearing into his office.

‘G-g-gosh!’ exclaims Miss Pudsey with open-mouthed admiration.

‘Good on you,’ says lazy Rhoda. ‘You put that nerd in his place.’

But Avril is so shocked that she nearly forgets the offending fax, and when she does remember she discovers that her hands are still wet and trembling.

‘A
S I WAS GOING TO
St Ives…’

Besotted Belinda from Bath does not sound like a problem-page contributor for nothing. When blond-haired, blue-eyed Belinda scans the cards of congratulations sent to her heroic partner, she stops short when she reaches the one from Bernadette Gallagher.

‘Who the hell is Bernadette Gallagher?’

‘Some girl.’

‘She sounds like more than that, Dom. She sounds like something dead serious.’

‘It was ages ago,
don’t go on
.’

‘She’s working down here, at the Burleston Hotel. Why would she come down here?’

‘She probably followed me. She had the hots for me, if I remember rightly.’

‘Well? Are you going to see her?’

Dominic rolls over in the large lumpy bed in a ground-floor room at the guest house that is his home until September. He strokes Belinda’s forehead and bites his lips; there is a teasing gleam in his eye. ‘I might do. What’s it to you?’

Belinda pouts. ‘I wish you wouldn’t act like this, Dom. I don’t think you realize how much you hurt people. You and I are sharing something now that is very, very special and it’s really sick to talk that way…’

‘Shut up and turn over.’

Embroidered with flowers like a tapestry cottage, Dominic’s little guest house—four fishermen’s cottages knocked into one—is huddled in a cobbled street leading down to a paint-by-numbers harbour. Where have all the fishermen gone, a stranger might well ask. The mullioned windows let in the scents of wild wisteria and window boxes, fish, chips, burgers and garbage strung around every alley by viciously marauding seagulls.

Against these alluring backdrops the godlike Dominic has posed for photographs, given interviews and received all the accolades he so richly deserves. Even the mother of the rescued Melanie, while grieving over the death of her husband, can be comforted by remembering him as a valiant hero who died attempting to save their baby.

‘It’s a bugger,’ said Justin Mellor, the surfer deep in his cups during one of the many glowing, long-lingering celebratory nights. Belinda leaned over to listen, the juke box was too loud for conversation in this pub. You had to shout to be heard. ‘It’s a bugger, the poor sod died well in his depth. If only he’d put his legs down.’

‘Well, why did he die, then?’ slurred Belinda, not too sober herself, ‘if he was in his depth?’

‘Could’ve been Dom’s karate chop. Could’ve been cramp.’ Justin belched and closed his eyes against his own hazy smoke. ‘Could’ve been that the poor bastard’s lungs were already filled up with water.’

Justin Mellor, whose one aim in life is attaining world fame as a surfboard champion, has since departed to Aussie land, there to take part in a competition, all costs covered by some private sponsorship.

Since then, Belinda once asked Dom casually, ‘Did you take karate at school?’

‘Yep. But I gave it up. I was just too good at it.’ And he gave her a gentle high-kick to the ribs.

In the comforting dark of his whitewashed room, behind the drawn gingham curtains, when the moon-kissed sea whispers softly and the drunks have all gone home—at around about four in the morning—Dominic has been known to weep, held safely in Belinda’s arms. ‘Jesus Christ, if I hadn’t been drinking I might have been able to save them both.’

‘Don’t, Dom,’ comforts Belinda in her most motherly fashion. ‘Don’t do this to yourself. You saved another human being, a little girl, a baby, you have achieved more in your life than most people achieve in the whole of theirs. And the father was a fully grown man, and drowning; he could have killed you both. You had to leave him and go for the child, you know you did. Everyone knows you did.’

‘I know that,’ sniffs Dominic. ‘But I’ll never forget that poor man’s face and the way I had to fend him off. I’d had two lagers, two cans of wine—that’s the equivalent of half a bottle—and before that, at lunchtime, I had a Tequila some Yank insisted on buying me.’