Ventriloquists (15 page)

‘As crystal,’ Phyllie told him, a blush surging north, up from her chest to her face.

Alistair entered his office and slammed the door.

4.

Dorota was waiting at the head of the steps leading up to her front door. She gave Roger a crisp wave as he drove closer; Roger waved back and a few seconds later shushed the engine. Stretching out of the Saab, he thanked her for letting him in.

‘Vig’s off shooting with Curtis,’ she informed him.

‘Shooting? With a gun?’

‘Presumably. I can’t think of a better instrument, can you?’

The thought of a gun appealed to Roger. It wasn’t so much that he wanted to use one, or even that he knew how (he did not); it was more that if Don cut up rough, the presence of a firearm might take some of the wind from the man’s sails.

‘You have guns?’ Roger wanted to clarify.

‘Not yet; I think Vig’ll get one eventually. They’re at Broomfields – the shooting club… Roger, what’s this all about?’

As mindful as possible of any sense of loyalty that Dorota might have towards Don, Roger explained the reason for his visit, there outside the house, with a turbid sky scaly with clouds overhead – a cosmos-sized fish that had evolved to speak one word:
rain
.

‘Let’s go,’ Dorota decided. ‘Right now.’

‘…You don’t want to wait for Vig?’

‘Why? Don Bridges is an old man – between the two of us? He won’t know how many different
ways
his arse has been kicked. And Vig might be hours: he only left at two. And if there
is
a girl in there – Jiminy Christmas! He might be starving her!’ Dorota took off at a fair clip. Calling over her shoulder she added: ‘Besides, it might be pissing down in twenty minutes and I’m a girl who doesn’t like to get her hair wet.’

For a split-split-second, Roger’s heart hastened; he wondered if he might be in love. As Dorota galloped away from him, Roger locked in a memory of her (for future masturbatory material) – her buttocks mounted and muscular in a pair of tight white jeans; the bagginess of a lumberjack shirt (probably Vig’s originally); the rippling zigzags of her strawberry blonde hair – and then he was in, if not exactly hot, then at least lukewarm pursuit. He wanted to stay behind her to watch her Khyber.

They entered the woods, and immediately the quality of sound was different: pressed, harried, anxious. The light too: something squinty, horrid and ancient. Or such, at least, were Roger’s initial impressions. And in truth he was far from comfortable. The ground underfoot was springy; it made him think (absurdly, surely) of the misdemeanour of squashing frogs. With every single step he was pulverising a rotund amphibian – into the ground. The thought was hideous; it made Roger grin. He pressed his muscles on, picking up the pace in Dorota’s slipstream.

The cabin was small, weather-whipped and incongruous (Roger thought) – out of place among all these spruce and poplars, the elevated bonnets of which sponged up what existed of the afternoon’s sun. For the first time it occurred to Roger that Don might not be inside, and he had no appetite for kicking down the man’s door or breaking a window. ‘Innocent until proven guilty’ was literal, beanshoot-eating anorak-wearing bullshit, as everyone knew, but Roger had no intention of bruising a shoulder or earning himself so much as a hangnail. He’d go home. If Don wasn’t home,
he’d
go home.

Don was home.

Dorota knocked: small pale fist to brown-painted wood (streaked with white wormy lengths of bird poop): and Don opened the door, something quizzical and perturbed on his face.

Declining the opportunity to sweeten the pill by one granule, Dorota asked, ‘Do you have a child in there?’

Don blinked. ‘A
child,
Miss?’

‘A child. Do you have one?’

‘Well no, Miss. The wife and I weren’t offered the Lord’s grace on that score, though it would’ve been a blessing, sure and true… May I ask what you and Mr Billie would be referring to?’

Impressed that the birdkeeper had remembered his name, Roger said, ‘A couple of kids the other night – they heard crying from in here. A child.’

When Don smiled, his face cracked into a twoscore of isosceles triangles. ‘I heard about the twins’ spirit of adventure, sir. I can assure you it was nothing in here, but you’d be welcome to take a look if it would soothe the itch on your skin. It wouldn’t take long.’ As a gesture of goodwill Don stepped aside from the doorway. ‘A small lounge, a small bedroom, a small khazi, a small kitchen: take you all of forty seconds to explore my domain, it would, sir.’

‘That won’t be ness –‘ Roger began.

‘Thank you, Don,’ said Dorota, stepping over the threshold and wiping her heels on a mat that read IT AIN’T MUCH BUT IT’S HOME TO ME.

The estimate of forty seconds proved conservative. The inspection conducted by Dorota and Roger took half that. And was fruitless. Less than two minutes after arriving, the two of them were back on their way through the woods, towards the house, their tails not wagging, their voices muted.

5.

‘I think some things were said that we didn’t mean.’

‘Not by me, sir.’

‘Well, allow me to refresh you memory, Don. You said, quote unquote, if I called you Donald Duck again you would shatter my knees.’

‘I did indeed.’

‘You
did
say that? You remember?’

‘Sir, it wasn’t me who was drunk that evening. I remember everything.’

‘… Well, this is a turn-up, I must say. I had it in mind that you’d be grovelling for an apology.’

‘To a cunt like you, sir? You must be drunk again. There’s not a chance.’

‘All right then… Donald Duck.’

Don sprang up out of his favourite chair and grabbed the mallet from the table. He bounded into the kitchen and swung the mallet at Eastlight’s knees.

The effect was remarkable. Not only did the bones in his victim’s left knee disintegrate,
the entire leg exploded.

Blood, bone and remnants of trousers formed a blizzard in Don’s home.

Don swung again, this time at Eastlight’s head. The head was knocked clean off the shoulders. Then the torso caught fire – and Don woke up.

‘Bloody hellfire,’ he muttered; and the dream’s sticky burrs stayed with his brain as he unlocked the back door and barefooted it bollock naked across the clearing to his spot to piss.

Looking up as he peed, he saw the moon in tortured fragments, cracked open by branches that were still in a rare absence of breeze. Sometimes he fancied that he could hear the moon: he could hear it as it sang, as it wept. Tonight, however (or this morning, to be accurate) it was as silent as a tomb; it was keeping mum.

Don had thought of telling Vig and Dorota what he’d said to Charlie Eastlight at the barbecue – the threat he’d made. Such was the guilt he felt at having made the threat, and at not apologising in the aftermath, that his sleep was being affected. Not badly; but a bit. (He had never been a talented sleeper, not since his stable boy days – and certainly not since the halcyon days of his first big wins in the saddle.) Days later, would a full confession be helpful, or would it rake up old ground? If Eastlight had intended to retaliate, wouldn’t he have done so by now?

No, Don answered himself; not if his style of retaliation went further than a ratting phone call to Vig and Dorota. And Don couldn’t help thinking that a grassing-up was not Charlie’s style.

Don could not remember if he had thought Eastlight capable of wrongdoing from the
very first
second he’d met him, but it wasn’t long afterwards, if not.

It takes one to know one, Don thought, slipping back into the cabin for the purpose of dressing. It didn’t matter that the luminous hands on his alarm clock said 3:25: the Devil made work for idle hands; there was always something productive to do.

6.

Don closed his eyes and lifted the little girl out of the emergency hideyhole: not her regular hole under the rug in the kitchen, but the hole that enveloped the septic tank. He had sensed their approach. After all these years, if he didn’t know the woods, what
did
he know? Their arrival had silenced birds; it had created its own sounds, its own energies. So Don had removed her from the kitchen, taken her outside. For the little girl, perhaps it was a day out. Don might hide her with the septic tank more often, even though he remained confident that no one else would come to pry.

Night Pursuit

1.

Pretending that he was working on another assignment for college, Yasser had spent every available minute on the internet, researching how to be a private detective. Was he worried? Worried wasn’t the word: Yasser was terrified. He thought it ironic that he had driven into a travellers’ camp and taken a baby away with him, suffering held-in-check but nonetheless minor discomfort; yet the thought of handing Maggie back her financial retainer broke him out in the night sweats. And not just because he’d already spent it: Yasser was frightened of the sense of failure, true, but in an acknowledgement of a rare racial slur, he was also frightened of being looked down on by a people over whom he felt ethnically and morally superior.

The very real problem, however, was that he didn’t have a clue how to proceed. Aware that sulking in his bedroom wouldn’t cut it, Yasser had spent time and petrol (and chewed-up, spat-out fingernails) on interviewing people around the camp, fishing with the least nutritious of bait, against Maggie’s explicit wishes and advice. She told him he’d learn fuck all there: and he had! He had learned a great big handsome
pile
of fuck all.

In addition he had interviewed people in Hockliffe – or he’d tried to. At least the residents of the camp had got wind of the fact that Yasser was present for a good reason, and had more or less cooperated with a suitable expression on their faces. (A message about not stealing his hubcaps, letting down his tyres, scratching his paintwork, or setting fire to his vehicle seemed to have gone around as well.) The residents of Hockliffe were of a different stripe. Suspicious, for one thing: wary that this Asian lad would want to know anything more than directions to one of the pubs – or even to Woburn, to Milton Keynes. For another thing, they were largely clueless about the abduction anyway. While standing outside the CostShop, in the rain, willing neighbours to have an inkling of what he was talking about (and urging himself to formulate a better interviewee selection process), Yasser thought that there must be more to life than this. More than several times he had almost phoned Maggie: to tell her to sod it, she could have back the wonga: it wasn’t worth catching his death of cold for.

Capping each of these moments of doubt, however, had been a picture in Yasser’s mind: an image so clear that he might well have seen it in a photograph sometime. A baby in a dimly-lit room, was what he saw. The baby cried. Hungry, dirtied and visibly ill, Maggie’s child had been stolen and then – apparently – abandoned, the deed completed, the action performed. Left to weep alone.

He had to find Maggie’s child. It had stopped being anything to do with choice.

As Yasser closed down the machine, there was a knock on his bedroom door. The caller could only be one person (because Mum rarely knocked, and Dad never climbed the stairs, he just bellowed out Yasser’s name from the front door when he needed him). Yasser said, ‘
Entrez-vous
’ and one of his cousins, Shyleen, opened the door.

‘Not interrupting anything, I hope,’ she said.

‘I was working,’ Yasser told her.

‘At least you kept your trousers on.’ She sat on the edge of Yasser’s narrow bed – the very same bed on which they had undressed one another during Ramadam two years earlier. Shyleen was the second cousin who had helped Yasser with Maggie’s address when he gave her the licence plate number of the truck belonging to Maggie’s father.

Yasser resisted the urge to argue with Shyleen, as they had as children and even as adolescents. A petty argument was what had led to the removal of one another’s clothes, and to the subsequent pregnancy scare that had turned to smoke but which had felt real enough –
dangerously
real enough – at the time. ‘How’s it going down there?’ Yasser asked her. ‘Am I wanted?’

‘Only by me… Oh your
face
.’ Shyleen laughed. ‘I’m teasing. They didn’t send me to fetch you, Yass, don’t worry. I just couldn’t deal with any more
sympathy
. It’s like too much chocolate.’

‘Yeah. About that…’ Yasser started.

‘Don’t. I know.’ The young woman held up her hands but she was not looking at her cousin.

Yasser nodded. He was grateful that she had turned away. He had never been good with news of the illness of others; and he was no more competent now than he had been, two evenings earlier, when Shyleen’s mother had phoned to inform the family that her daughter had been diagnosed with an ovarine tumour of a polysyllabic name. Hearing that Shyleen had already sickened of sympathy made Yasser feel guilty but relieved.

Directly after dinner, when his mother had asked the girl’s parents a question involving the word
prognosis
, Yasser had excused himself from the table, saying that he had homework to complete in his room.

‘Is there any other topic of conversation?’ he asked. ‘Or are they…’

‘It’s all me.’ Shyleen laughed again.

‘
…So what do you wanna do, while they’re otherwise
engaged?’

‘You wouldn’t dare!’

‘You reckon? You wouldn’t
believe
what I’ve done in the last fortnight.’

‘Is that a boast, Yass?’ Shyleen asked, turning to face him with a distant smile on his face.

Yasser considered the question.
Was
he boasting? Certainly it didn’t feel that way; but it
did
feel as it had felt while talking to Tim Branston in one of the college’s cafes – as though he would be glad to unburden himself of the story so far, to find a new witness; and as though, once he’d reached a particular point in the telling, he would become frightened to finish what he’d started. The weight of that untold would crush his chest; it would spill his innards everywhere.

So he told her.

2.

And something nagged at Yasser while he told her. Something plucked at Yasser’s consciousness, time after time, as sentence followed sentence.

Tommy.

Tommy the so-called Brazilian.

Yasser could not shake the opinion that Tommy was involved – was, in fact, knee-deep in shit when it came to this project and its prospects – and when at last, a fortnight having elapsed, he confessed this suspicion to Shyleen on the phone, his cousin’s predictable and refreshing resourcefulness arrived like a cool breeze on a pig farm.

‘Why don’t you follow him around?’ she suggested. ‘Hey, I’ll come with you! When I’m not at work, of course… We’ll have a bit of fun on our stakeout!’

‘…Every night?’

‘Or every day. Depending on our busy social schedules.’

‘But he’ll see us!’

Shyleen sighed into Yasser’s ear. ‘Oh
do
grow a pair of balls, Yass,’ she concluded.

3.

Were it not for Shyleen’s illness, the confession might not have happened; but by spraying a jet of Yasser’s anti-perspirant into her face, she managed to acquire two red eyes that gave her parents (and Yasser’s parents) the impression that she had been crying. When she announced that she and Yasser were going out for a drive, she was not so much as asked where. If the children had something to discuss, they deserved a bit of privacy with which to do so. ‘But no pubs!’ was Shyleen’s father’s parting shot – his only word of counsel.

‘Are you sure you don’t want to go in mine?’ Yasser asked her, on the pavement.

‘What good would that do?’ Shyleen replied. ‘They
know
your car.’

‘Who do?’

‘The gyppos!’ She got in the driver’s side and gunned the engine.

Yasser got in on the passenger’s side.

‘Belt up, boy! Clunk click for every trip innit!’ Shyleen barked at him in an impersonation of his own mother’s heavily-accented English. Then she laughed. And accelerated.

‘Slow down, Shy!’

Shyleen was doing fifty by the end of the road.

‘Oh
grow
a pair for fuck’s sake,’ Shyleen told him. Without checking for oncoming traffic, she pulled them out onto the main vein through Bury Park (a late bus honked its horn). ‘Or I’ll turn my lights off as well. That’ll shit you up!’

She laughed as she ran a red light.

4.

Nor did appeals to common sense or rationality find a favourable ear.

‘They’ll expect us back,’ Yasser tried, having lost faith in his own courage for the moment. ‘We haven’t got time, Shy.’

‘Oh
we
haven’t got time!’ Shyleen chuckled. ‘
I’m
the one with fanny rot!
I’m
the one going under the knife! They’ll allow us a moonlight flit.’

‘It’s not a moonlit night,’ Yasser countered, sounding grumpy.

‘And don’t sulk. Or you won’t see it again, boy, or wiggle your wand…’

‘Not in my mum’s voice. Please!’

Shyleen laughed once more, and she gunned her car towards the roundabout. ‘Dunstable or Houghton Regis?’ she asked. ‘Which is faster?’

‘Same difference.’ Yasser sighed. ‘But there are speed traps going into Dunstable.’

‘Houghton Regis it is!’

Earning a beep from another driver, Shyleen lanced over into the other lane and indicated right (a rare courteous touch for the road’s other users); with the speedo showing seventy, she barrelled the two of them down Poynters Road. Then she turned on the CD player. Shaggy was halfway through ‘Mr Boombastic’ and Shyleen joined him on the chorus.

5.

‘Now what?’ Yasser asked her.

‘Are you still sulking?’

‘No… I wasn’t
sulking
.’

‘You’re sulking
now.
’

‘I am not sulking now,’ Yasser retorted. ‘I happen to be a worried man.’

Shyleen snorted. ‘
You’re
worried!’

‘I know. But we shouldn’t be here, Shy, it’s not safe.’

She turned to him in the car and widened her eyes in mock-horror. ‘Do those cows get a
bloodlust after dark
?’

‘Yeah they do, actually. It’s like
Dawn of the Fucking Dead
around here. Except with cows.’

When Shyleen laughed, this time Yasser joined her; he couldn’t help himself. Joking aside, the road outside the camp was eerie by night, but this was a fact that his laughter suppressed for a few seconds.

‘Do you think they’d be welcoming,’ Shyleen asked, ‘if we went in?’

‘A moot point,’ Yasser told her, ‘because we’re not
going
in. They’ll all be asleep anyway, just like we should be.’

‘Do you have work to do tomorrow?’

‘No.’

‘Or college?’

‘No.’

‘Then cultivate a growth of
cajones
, ho. We’ve only just got here.’

‘Please, Shy – not the voice. Let’s go back, eh? I mean… what’s in it for you? Sitting in a layby in the middle of nowhere…’

‘With no one to watch us, eh Yass? Does that put any thoughts in your head?’

‘Christ… Well we’d have to be quick.’

‘Now don’t start getting sentimental on a poor girl…’

Yasser looked to the left and right. The empty road was black as soot; there was no one and there was nothing, and that was all.

Nevertheless, Yasser remained cautiously nervous. ‘They’ll know,’ he said.

‘Our parents or the gyppos?’

‘Our parents. Please don’t call em gyppos.’

‘Oh sorry, I forgot all the
friendships
you’ve made.’ Shyleen leaned towards him. ‘Tell me, Yasser,’ she whispered. ‘Are my words of sarcasm getting you motivated?’

Yasser smiled. ‘They are, a bit,’ he admitted. He lowered his jeans zip. When he produced it, he was about halfway hard; and this was good enough for his kissing cousin. She lowered her mouth onto him, to see what she could do about the shortfall.

But then Yasser saw Tommy the Brazilian’s truck.

6.

The vehicle turned out of the camp, its headlights bleaching the plants and hedges until it had straightened up. Now it approached Shyleen’s car, and the lovers within. Yasser tensed. Shyleen wouldn’t be seen – her head was below the windscreen – but Yasser’s face was in the Brazilian’s spotlights. With no better option available, Yasser ducked slightly and raised his hands to cover his features.

The Brazilian drove past.

Yasser relaxed.

‘What is it, Yass?’ Shyleen enquired from his lap.

‘That was Tommy.’

‘Hurrah for Tommy.’

‘Well, where’s he
going
at this time of night?’

Shyleen sounded indignant. ‘Maybe he’s going to get a blowjob. You
could
pay me some attention, you know, Yass.’

‘Sorry.’ But he felt his erection dwindle.

Shyleen sat up straight. ‘You’ve lost that loving feeling,’ she announced.

Tucking his slim pickings back into his jeans, Yasser said, ‘The pub? A pub somewhere?’

‘Us or him?’ Shyleen was angry. She started the car and began an accurate three-point turn, not speaking for a few seconds.

‘Well, this was kinda your idea,’ Yasser told her.

‘Can’t believe I lost out to a pikey thug,’ Shyleen muttered.

‘
What?
’

‘I’ll follow him,’ she continued.

7.

If the journey out of Luton this evening had been marked (for Yasser) by a fear of the maniacal travelling velocity (and the shadowing terrors of car crash and speeding ticket), the journey back in the direction they’d come, trailing Tommy, was marked by alternative slabs of disquiet. Stay too far behind and they’d lose him. Get too close and he’d know that he was being followed. For Yasser, the perfect trailing distance (a wholly unknown quality) kept changing in his mind; he was a mile past being surprised that Shyleen could drive at a sensible velocity, and the nerves were playing havoc with his gut, with his groin.