Ventriloquists (41 page)

‘I’m Yasser’s teacher,’ Branston answered. ‘The one who got a copy of your sex tape.’

Benny was fighting to keep up. ‘
What
sex tape, Maggie? What the hell?’ Then he reorganised his priorities. ‘Where’s the child? What happened to the
child?
’

‘Yasser took him back,’ Branston answered, ‘…back to his parents. She told him…’ He indicated Maggie. ‘…that her dad and a bloke called Tommy made her do it. That’s something… that’s one of the things I didn’t get. Why? But it was for
you,
wasn’t it, Benny? She stole the child for
you
… but what happened?’

Maggie had dipped her head. Her accusers had her in a pincer movement; there was no getting out of her lies.

‘Hey Maggie, I’m talking to you,’ said Branston. ‘Benny’s got a point. Why
didn’t
you hand the child over to him straight away? Why
didn’t
he know about the child’s existence in the first place?’

‘Good question,’ Benny piped in.

‘Did you fall in love with the child, Maggie? Did you start to doubt what you were doing for this man?’

Maggie looked up and fixed Branston with a powerful stare. ‘Why don’t you mind your own business? We’re going inside, aren’t we, Benny.’

‘Not yet we’re not,’ Benny replied. ‘The man’s questions seem sensible, I reckon. I’m not happy, Mags.’

‘Or did you
want
to get caught?’

Maggie frowned. ‘Now what eejit
wants
to get caught?’ she demanded.

Branston shrugged. ‘One with nowhere else to go? One at the end of the road? One prepared to steal a child for the love of a substitute father?’

‘This is bollocks, Benny. And I’m cold. Let’s go in.’

‘Yeah all right,’ Benny replied, but his words were slow and indecisive. You could not have accused him of not taking Branston seriously.

‘It was you, wasn’t it, Maggie?’ Branston took his first step away from the car – he almost remembered what it had been like to toddle. ‘It wasn’t your dad, it wasn’t Tommy: it was
you
who made the sex tape. And you who hand delivered it to my door. Wasn’t it.’

Now, Maggie looked petulant. Did she also appear embarrassed? Branston wondered. She dipped her head; she had stopped in her tracks.

‘Maggie?’ Benny’s voice was soft. ‘Answer the teacher or you’re sleeping out here in the cold, darling. Nothing else to be done about
that
.’

‘Okay, I filmed it,’ Maggie answered. ‘It’s not a crime, believe it or not. I borrowed Tommy’s truck one afternoon when he was sleeping off a late card game. I followed you home. Yasser had told me what you drive.’

Branston examined the evidence, searching for a weakness.
But why bother?
he wondered. There was nothing in it for Maggie. A long shot attempt at getting caught being a manipulative bitch? Unless that’s what you’re into- getting caught. Maybe. Some people are. Some people like the moment of revelation.

Benny and Maggie walked towards the house’s front door.

‘Aren’t you going to invite me in?’ Branston asked.

Once again Benny turned. ‘What subject do you teach?’ he asked.

‘Film.’

‘So you’ve got cameras at your disposal, have you? All the gubbins.’

‘…Yes.’

‘You ever made a documentary?’ Benny continued.

Branston thought about his thwarted ambitions to be a movie director. ‘Nothing but,’ he answered wistfully.

‘Do you want to film us then? Be of use, and all that. How long’ll it take you to fetch a camera? A good one, mind. I want it to look pro.’

Branston remained baffled but he responded anyway. ‘About thirty seconds. It’s on the back seat.’ Very calmly he went through his teaching commitments. He did not have a class to teach tomorrow. He had planned to work out and then mark some student assignments that he had printed off earlier on today.

‘Juicy. Then come in, my boy. Another witness won’t go amiss. Show them intra-rationalists where the new money’s growing.’

Benny smiled.

‘What’s your name again, son?’

‘Tim. Tim Branston.’

‘I’m Benny. Let’s go in. The poor girl’s frozen half to death, ain’tcha, Maggie?’

Maggie nodded her head.

The Canines of Strangers

1.

Jess was fifteen, and although she had known mobile phones all her life, she was nevertheless aware of the existence of phone boxes. She had never used one – she had never needed to use one – but she knew what they did; she understood their function. She was looking forward to using one.

The problem was finding one.

Through a mildly foggy darkness she had already walked (at a brisk pace) for what seemed like half an hour. But it couldn’t have been as long as that, could it? Jess wasn’t certain. After so long with so little exercise, the escape had dunked rivets of cramp deep into her thigh muscles; but this didn’t mean that she’d walked for long – or walked far, for that matter. Try as she would, Jess could not make her legs move faster or stretch further with each stride, and the suspicion that a hand would land on her shoulder any second was like an emotion, as strong as grief.

So keep walking, she demanded of herself.

Where Jess and Nero had been imprisoned was in a village. However, it was not a village in which the next house stood half a mile away: in fact, by the standards of some of the villages that Jess had visited, this one was positively stodgy with occupation. How come no one had heard their shouts and screams? With every footfall Jess thought back on her time in the house; the images were gooey with mist and dream-grease, the memories both real and unreal. Anger prickled in her breasts; nausea swept through her upper body.
No one had heard them!

Jess realised that she was emerging from a pocket of shock. Questions sparked at her synapses –

Where am I?

What’s the name of this place?

How will I show the police where we were?

– and she understood, with a sickening surety, that in her desperation to be away from the house, not only had she failed to register the property’s name or number, she had not so much as looked over her shoulder to commit its façade to memory.

I’ll never recognise it again, she thought. Nero and those other people are fucked…

She stopped walking. More of the mist in her head had cleared; whether or not this would enable her to think better was open to question, but at least she’d found a place – psychologically and geographically – where she
wanted
to think better, rather than passively receive a flood of words and pictures, a torrent of pains. It was a start.

So far on her escape route, Jess had seen nothing but houses, most of them gated properties; a restaurant named Habibi was the first non-residential establishment. Surely it would have a phone that she could use. Surely…

The windows were dark. Standing on tiptoes and peering in with her hands around her eyes to form a mask, Jess could make out tables and white tablecloths, wine glasses inverted on table surfaces. But no people. Where
was
everyone? It was dark! Why weren’t people settling down to eat at their lovely local Indian?

Jess stayed where she was, in exactly the same position, for the better part of a minute. Perhaps by will alone she would be able to summon up a room full of contented diners, all of them willing to assist her.

However, no one materialised during this period of desperate vigilance. And a voice at Jess’s back made her jump.

She was forcing herself to recall if any of the houses she’d passed up to now had had lights on within, when she heard someone say:

‘Place is closed.’

Jess twisted so fast that those pains in her thighs reignited. The nearest streetlamp being some ten or so metres away, it was far from simple to make out her interlocutor in the negligible light… but it was easy enough to see that he was neither Massimo nor Charlie. Considerably older than either of her captors, the man who had spoken wore country tweeds and a flat cap; in one hand he held his walking stick’s knob, in the other the end of a leash, attached to the collar of a tiny black terrier puppy that was sniffing dead leaves in the restaurant’s empty car park.

‘Closed by a two-month,’ the old man explained. ‘People stopped going after the alth scur.’

The what?

Oh,
health.
Health
scare.

‘Rancid kitchen, story run. Positively raaaancid. More rats’n
noives.’

More
what?
Jess’s brain asked.

More rats than knives?

Maybe.

‘You larst, girl?’ the man continued.

Last? As opposed to first?

‘Yes, I’m lost,’ Jess answered, the speed of her translations improving – it was only a matter of thinking back, back before any of this had begun. Indeed, one of her own neighbours had spoken with much the same country burr.

‘So terribly lost,’ Jess finished; then something soft broke inside her face, and tears that had wanted out for some time fulfilled their salty dreams and came running.

2.

Mindful perhaps of all that he’d learned from the news since the 1990s about the repercussions of being perceived to be a child molester (the lynch mobs, the tabloid headlines) – even if one’s intentions were utterly chaste and honourable – the old man with the cap and the terrier did not invite Jess into his home. Indeed, his request that she wait in his front garden arrived curt and gruff. But Jess didn’t mind: curt and gruff was fine by her, as long as it was curt and gruff
and safe
. Feeling chilly, she sat on a stone bench, near a stone birdbath and a stone cross in a flower bed bearing the single engraved word WILMA.

A minute or so after he’d stepped into the house, he re-emerged carrying a blanket in the hand not carrying the walking stick. Wrapping the blanket around her shoulders, Jess was not in the least concerned that it smelled of pipe smoke and something medicinally minty. Quite the reverse: outside in the chill, enveloped in a whiffy blanket, felt to Jess like the best place in the world. Her rescuer produced a bar of chocolate from an inside pocket of his tweed jacket.

‘Always carry one. Blood sugar’s not what it were. Just in case… Now what’s your name again? Jennifer?’

‘Jessica.’

‘Well mine’s Peter.’

‘Thank you. You told me.’ Jess tore at the chocolate bar foil.

‘Did Oi? Did Oi carl a police?’

‘I don’t know, sir. You went in – you weren’t gone long.’

‘Carlem now then, y’say?’

‘Please.’

‘Carlem now then,’ Peter confirmed to himself. Not without a good deal of effort, the old man shuffled around, turned his back on Jess, and stepped back into one of the village’s more modest properties, a slightly run-down cottage leaking warmth from its open front door.

Peter had been absent again less than two minutes when the mauve People Carrier crunched off the road and on to the gravel driveway.

Jess’s body tensed. Had they found her missing so soon? Had they come to fetch her back to the prison house?

No. Or apparently not, anyway. Curling out of the front seat was a woman in her mid-forties, her long greying hair pulled back into a ponytail.

‘You found him?’ the woman said. ‘Thank you so much.’

Even as she delivered her gratitude, however, her face displayed an unmistakeable sign of confusion – made worse when Jess replied, ‘He found me.’

‘Beg pardon?’ The woman approached the stone bench, the stone cross – approached Jess. She wore muddy Wellington boots and second-hand jodhpurs.

‘He found me. He’s calling the police for me,’ Jess said, her voice croaking.

‘What’s going on here?’

The question set Jess’s tears in motion once more, and the new arrival was temporarily lost for words.

‘Dad?’ she then called into the house.

Peter appeared at the door. ‘Hello, Sandra,’ he said.

‘Were you lost again, Dad?’

‘No Oi weren’t! Oi were alpen this young’un. She were eld carptive agin her will!’

‘Oh Dad…’

‘He’s telling the truth,’ Jess interrupted. ‘He got us back here safe and sound – or his dog did, maybe.’

Sandra frowned in the porch light. ‘What does he mean you were held captive?’ she asked, enunciating each word with care.

And Jess started to cry afresh.

Descent

1.

It took them three days to descend the mountain. Although the journey was far from straightforward, the optimistic air that Atchoo created as they trudged – the songs he sang, the conversations he conducted with himself as he led the expedition – was often sufficient to convince the others that they were making good time and reasonable progress. No one questioned his navigation; whether his skill for orienteering was the result of blind luck, or a lifelong exposure to the stories told in the village, or perhaps even something more spiritual or instinctive, he preceded them down slopes that were blessed with neither paths nor landmarks, chanting and laughing, and only raising his voice from time to time when he noticed someone behind him not sticking to the strict single file on which he had insisted at the outset. When a wind dislodged an acre of snow up into the chilled air, Atchoo paid it very little mind; a homing strategy pushed him onwards… even if it happened to be home that he was leaving behind.

The expedition was seven travellers strong. Atchoo had assumed a senior role in the proceedings before they’d left the village that had served as a base camp, single-handedly rounding up three men who spoke little but who seemed willing enough to top and tail the march and shoulder bags of supplies. Each of these men carried a rifle. And as the journey took them down the side of the mountain – a descent on occasion so looped and slalomed that it was hard to imagine much change in elevation had been made in the previous hour, the only sign that progress had been made, in fact, being a half-degree rise in the temperature, and an improvement in the ease of respiration that could not have been faked by even the most resilient sense of self-delusion – the seven pilgrims plodded on through the waves of snow, silently praying for a plateau that might indicate the beginning of foothills.

For long stretches of the march, Massimo and Bernadette kept close together. They talked. The scooped up snow with mittened hands, and drank it at approximately the same time. (A nurse should know when the body needed water, Massimo figured.) When it was time to fill their bellies, the guides from the village boiled water from snow, using a tiny gas stove and a large copper kettle that one of them kept in the bag on his back. They added fistfuls of desiccated ingredients and made a lumpy, sweet porridge that lacked in rich flavour what it gave out in energy. The mealtimes were solemn affairs, and not even Massimo and Bernadette said much to each other after the second of these, concentrating instead on banishing their hunger pangs and wondering why Connors insisted on walking so close behind Atchoo.

2.

At the close of the first day, although light remained in a curiously bronze sky, the guides assembled the tents in which they would spend the night. As ever, they worked to the accompaniment of very little conversation; for the first time in a while, Massimo blessed this silence and sat down on a rug with his legs out.

Bernadette approached and asked, ‘Room for a little one?’

‘Sure.’ Massimo shuffled over a little to allow her some space.

‘Not too far. Share warmth,’ Bernadette explained, sitting down with a pained sigh.

‘How are you feeling?’

‘Well, I know I’ve done some exercise, I’ll tell you that much,’ she answered. ‘Christ. Had no idea I was so unfit. We’re gonna ache like hell tomorrow.’

Massimo nodded. ‘And then we do it all again… Bliss,’ he added, his voice wet with a new coat of irony.

‘I almost did the London Marathon once, a couple of years ago. Four years? I had it all set up. I was gonna do it for breast cancer research. I thought I’d make a few hundred quid if my colleagues sponsored me. Do you what happened?’

‘You didn’t do it.’

‘I didn’t do it. I
couldn’t
do it – I couldn’t even face the bloody tracksuit! Which I’d bought already,
and
some new trainers. Couldn’t so much as
think
about it.’ She paused; she laughed. ‘Ended up feeling so guilty I got a loan from the bank and gave it to the cancer charity anyway. Cost me five hundred quid, that particular example of cowardice. Six if you count the clothes and the power-shakes.’ She laughed again.

‘Well you’re making up for it now,’ Massimo told her. ‘There’s nothing cowardly about
this
feat of madness.’

‘No… but there’s nothing especially dangerous about it either,’ said Bernadette.

‘Not yet. But they’ve got a gun apiece; that’s gotta suggest something.’

‘True. But why do we need
three
of them?’ Bernadette continued. ‘Atchoo says nothing much lives up here. There’s no vegetation.’

‘Nothing
much
is not the same as nothing at all. I was there, remember? He said snow leopards, birds…’

‘And how many of these predators have you seen?’

‘…None. Your point being?’

Massimo had spread his rug some distance – close to ten metres – away from where the guides were erecting the tents and Atchoo was constructing the framework for the forthcoming fire. Connors had taken himself off in another direction, again to a distance of approximately ten metres. He had not spread a rug of his own. He lay on a snow bank, staring up at the ship of bronze sky and its cargo of rum barrel clouds.

Bernadette disregarded Massimo’s question. Nodding in Connors’s general direction, she asked, ‘Do you feel you know him well?’

‘Connors? Less and less.’ Massimo admitted that the change in the man – from the cocksure resident of this new dimension, his feet firmly under the celestial table, to the grumbling, moody prick into which he’d changed since the meeting with Atchoo – had left the atmosphere unsettled. ‘And all because of a boy!’

‘A boy he thinks he met,’ said Bernadette. ‘A boy he thinks he saw killed, let’s not forget.’

Massimo turned. ‘What are you saying? He
imagined
the other boy?’

‘It’s possible, isn’t it?’

‘It’s
possible…
but what about your dog?’

‘What about her?’

Remembering to choose a feminine pronoun out of respect for the dead animal, Massimo answered, ‘She was with him.’

Bernadette shrugged. ‘So he says. How do we know?’

Massimo waited. For an instant he did not know why he felt such an urge to defend Connors; then he remembered why. It was because he’d employed Connors in the first place that they were all here on this fucking Alp. ‘He seemed strong.’

‘Exactly. Now he doesn’t know how to chew his own food… I exaggerate. But you see what I mean.’

‘I’m not sure I do.’

Bernadette leaned over and grabbed a fistful of snow; she stuffed it into her face and mouth with all of the precision that her mittens allowed. ‘Hark at
me
telling people how to eat,’ she remarked, tittering. ‘But who would’ve thought snow would be yummy?’

Massimo watched the guides for a few seconds. They had finished pounding the frames into the snowy ground; now there were unravelling the skins and hides that would act as carapaces. ‘That’s two things you’ve broken off telling me,’ he said.

‘True. The second one first, then. Bereavement. Believe me… I’ve seen it do peculiar things to an otherwise rational mind. When my Aunt Imelda lost her husband – my Uncle Piers – she slept with his trilby on the other pillow for over five years. She said it made him visit her in her dreams, like he was right beside her. And she wasn’t kidding either; she meant it point blank. Imelda believed in an afterlife, and a place where the two existences could overlap – like mixing paints, she would say. And let’s not forget, Connors saw Dorman get his head chopped off by flying glass. You’d expect him to be seeing a bereavement counsellor for two sessions a week for three years. Instead he gets lumbered with
this.
’

Bernadette indicated their surroundings with the sweep of her right hand.

‘Maybe he’s grieving for Dorman, or for someone else who died on the other side. Who knows? I mean… does he have parents, a partner…?’

Massimo shrugged. ‘I couldn’t tell you,’ he admitted. ‘I don’t know anything about the private lives of those I employ. I never ask. It’s none of my business. And I appreciate it if they never ask me either.’

Bernadette smiled. ‘That sounded forceful.’

‘I’m
feeling
forceful. Maybe I need some more mush in me belly.’

‘I’m hungry too…’ Bernadette paused. ‘Would you say that our current situation represents a reason to relax the rules a bit?’

‘The rules about what?’

‘About colleagues asking you personal questions,’ said Bernadette.

‘Yeah. Yeah I would say this qualifies.’ Massimo looked at her. ‘What’s on your mind?’

Bernadette waited a few seconds before replying. Then she said, ‘Do you feel lonely?’

Exhaling loudly, Massimo answered her as simply and honestly as he could.

‘I have never, in all my life, felt lonelier,’ he said.

‘Me too. Are hugs allowed?’

‘Hugs are allowed.’

And awkwardly at first they embraced.

3.

Despite what Bernadette had not-quite-promised, she made no mention of the second matter that she had stopped short of discussing with Massimo, not until the third day of their trek, when they’d descended to the mountain’s foothills, their leg muscles tight and strong, their stomachs clenched.

They had just spent one hell of a night together; all of them had shared and suffered a strenuous strain of the collywobbles that had affected each person with a different severity, but which had meant that no one slept well. Out of nowhere – almost as if it had laboured for its own life on a breeze – a germ had found its way into the system (probably via a meal) and the upshot was a series of panicky sprints away from the party, to where one could expel one’s poisons either through the mouth or the anus - the bug proved to be quite unfussy on the manner of egress.

Ill it was, then – ill and weak and suffering a crapulent hangover that had nothing to do with alcohol – that the party faced its third day of the descent. It went unsaid that everyone looked like death warmed up. Atchoo had gone so far as to cease singing the gee-up ditties that had once seemed fun but which had grown repetitive and dull. The comparative silence was a godsend to all.

The altitude being lower, breathing conditions had altered for the better; a temperature rise of a few degrees meant that the snow appeared threadbare in places, and the sweat on their brows did not chill so quickly… And yet. And yet, despite these improvements, Bernadette was more anxious than ever. Having got used to her new existence on the mountainside, she feared what she did not know – what she could not guess – about what lay ahead.

Was now the right time to confess her worries to Massimo? she wondered. Since the embrace they had shared, was it Bernadette’s imagination or had the man changed a tad? Become ever so slightly more stubborn, more difficult? Shied away from her, perhaps… just a little? No?

He might be embarrassed. Clinging together as they had, only partly for warmth, his erection against her thigh had been unmistakeable; perhaps he regretted his own body’s indiscretion; perhaps it concerned him, the belief that Bernadette would have found the experience offensive – or even uncomfortable. But Bernadette felt none of these things. True enough, just for a second there, she had experienced an embarrassment of her own, stoked by the anxiety that Massimo had misinterpreted her request for a cuddle. (Had he though? Was Bernadette being truthful to herself about her own motives?) However, it had only been a passage of seconds before she had silently thanked Massimo’s honesty. If he wanted her in a way that he had yet to voice, it was surely preferable a state of affairs than his
not
wanting her. After all, she was as far from home as he was… and nurses got lonely as well.

None of this, however, meant that Bernadette was ready to confess her fears. By no means was she certain that she could have found the right words anyway: it sounded absurd. The notion that the guides expected attack up ahead – or worse, that they intended to use the visitors as bait to bag a larger wild beast (a vast lizard, perhaps) was demonstrably preposterous…

Wasn’t it?

Wasn’t
it, Bernie?

No. No it wasn’t a dumb fear at all; not in the slightest. The guides carried rifles for a reason, and no wildlife had been spotted on their way down the mountain, not even a falcon, a deer or a wolf. Nothing. It was only now, as they trudged through aromatic orange heather (it smelt of fudge) and red gorse, that they were able to spot trios or quartets of bats circling, their appearance made all the more wonderful by the brightness of the morning.

‘How are you feeling?’ Massimo called, five or sex metres to Bernadette’s left.

‘Warmer,’ she answered.

‘That’s good.’

‘And like I’ve eaten four plates of mutton
phal
.’

Massimo chuckled. ‘That’s not so good.’

‘No.’

‘Sphincter that glows in the dark.’

‘Something like that.’

‘Red raw, I am.’

‘Yeah all right, Mass, I don’t need the details.’

‘You’re a nurse!’

4.

Midway through the fifth day away from the village, the expedition became aware of the sound of voices, up ahead.

‘Signs of life!’ Connors announced – the first utterance he’d made in twenty-four hours.

The voices were shouts, guttural and low-pitched; it sounded like cheering. A game of sports? An execution?

The guides spoke among themselves as the party trudged on through patches of snow on the hardpacked pink-and-saffron earth. They passed buildings shaped like domes, made of the same earth, which were thought to be homes; and as the voices grew louder, the trekkers’ mood lifted.

A crowd had gathered around a rectilinear piece of land about twenty metres by ten. At either end of this pitch stood a basketball stanchion; and two teams of seven players apiece were engaged in what looked like a game of netball. One team was playing naked; the players were covered in fur from head to foot, and alternated between running on two feet and scampering on all fours. Their chests were protuberant but muscular; no penises were in sight, so the team was possibly female. The other team was dressed in saris made of mirrors; their gender was impossible to determine – they wore mirrors on their faces and heads so that only the three eyes in their foreheads could be seen.