Ventriloquists (6 page)

Behind her, Chris snuffled in his sleep. Bernadette turned to watch him, to calm him; she believed that a loving unbroken gaze could soothe him when he suffered the nightfears, and on this occasion it worked too. If Chris had been worming his way up out of cover, Bernadette’s patient attention – her bedside manner no less – coaxed him back down again. Simultaneously his mouth and his rectum emitted proximate noises. Then he settled, and Bernadette returned to the scene on the road below.

Then Chelsea started barking downstairs.

Then the doorbell rang.

Chris lifted his head from the pillow. ‘What’s going on?’

‘I’ll get it.’ Bernadette wanted this first hand, not reported back to her. She’d be safe enough: Chelsea had always been a good guard dog. Hadn’t tonight’s events, and Chelsea’s performance therein, proved as much?

All the same, Bernadette took the phone from the charger cradle on the bedside table. She thumbed 999. All it would take was a thumb on the green button to send the alarm. With the phone in her hand she pulled on her dressing gown as Chris sat up in bed.

‘Hell’s
that
at this time of night?’ Chris demanded, his voice slurred with half-dissolved sleep.

‘It’s nothing. Probably someone lost.’ Bernadette stepped onto the landing (the floorboards creaked reliably) and skipped down the flight, to where she saw Chelsea fronting up to the door. ‘It’s all right, girl.’

The dog turned. This was better, the eyes seemed to say as they watched Mistress descend. The bark altered: something friendlier now; something less territorial.

Aware that Chris was behind her – at the top of the stairs, in his dressing gown – Bernadette took a breath and opened the door.

8.

A matter of minutes later, and Dorman and Connors were on their way down the road to Number 11. ‘That weren’t too tricky,’ Connors conceded.

‘Told you. Now comes the hard part. They might be back from the funeral by now.’

‘In which case...’

‘In which case we might need to rethink. But let’s look on the bright side, eh?’

‘There’s a bright side?’ Connors asked.

Aside from some differences in external decorative styles, Number 11 appeared much the same as Number 77. There were no lights on inside.

‘Did you notice,’ the younger man continued, ‘she didn’t even seem flustered. She’s had her home broken into and you’re showing her a bite on your bum – and she’s not lifted an eyebrow.’

‘Your point being?’ Dorman enquired.

‘They’re hiding something.’

‘Well I know
that
. Stands to reason, mate! But what they do in the privacy of their own house is none of our business tonight. Are you focused?’

‘Course I’m focused.’

‘Good.’ Dorman opened his jacket: the tools of his trade were neatly contained in a strap that he wore aslant his chest. He removed a set of picks on a ring. ‘Round the back again,’ he decided, and he set off across the front lawn to address the gate that would lead to the garden at the rear. The gate was made of wrought iron, the pieces in floral shapes. A padlock held the gate in place, and wordlessly Dorman set to the padlock with one of the picks. Just as Connors was about to tell him that it would be simplicity itself to climb over the gate, the lock sprung and Dorman pushed the gate wide. The two of them followed the path; it was bordered with brown pots of various flowers that meant nothing to either man. The back garden was tidy and trimmed. The homeowners had left the lawnmower out (Connors wondered parenthetically if
this
could be what Massimo was so desperate to receive, and what might be the best way to move it quietly back down the street to the van without its rattling waking up all of the neighbours) but Dorman paid it no mind. ‘Conservatory,’ he muttered; ‘nice job.’ With which he started work with a different sized pick.

Connors leaned towards the conservatory’s glass. Not
too
close, of course – he had heard of burglars being convicted on the basis of a nose-print on glass, and although he didn’t
know
this to be true he was not willing to take any chances – but close enough to see what was inside. The conservatory was obviously a chill-out area. An upright piano; some up-market loungers; a small bookcase filled with volumes whose titles Connors could not read in the darkness and which would have meant little to him, even if he had been able to see them clearly.

Dorman swore under his breath. ‘New locks,’ he explained elliptically. The more modern the door, it seemed, the more difficult life was for honest professionals in the burgling game. Why, Dorman thought from time to time, it was almost as if no one
wanted
to be burgled anymore! What was the bloody world coming to?

‘...Hell’s that noise?’ Connors asked quietly.

‘Ssshhh.’ Dorman removed his glass-cutter from the same belt, taking care to replace the picks in their original place.

‘Seriously, Dorman. Can’t you hear it? It’s inside...’

Either prompted by the questions or because the information had filtered through his determination and work ethic anyway, Dorman said, his voice similarly low, ‘Sounds like water.’

Indeed it did: like water, not merely running (it was no babbling brook somewhere close, the acoustics distorted by the pristine silence of the early hours) but
surging
. Water
pounding
. But against what? And from where?

Connors said, ‘I don’t like this...’

Dorman didn’t like it either, but he didn’t like the notion of failing Massimo even more. By applying the glass-cutter to the area around the conservatory door lock he hoped to blot out what the two of them could hear. Then something unignorable caught his eye. He looked up.

The two of them watched spellbound and speechless as the wave approached them. The conservatory was a vast TV screen, but this show would only be a few seconds long.

The wave had smashed through the house and was now going to tear its way through the conservatory. Dorman stared into the glass as if it had just asked him to dance.

Connors started to back away, stumbling deeper into the garden. ‘Dorman,
move
!’ he shouted as the tsunami inside the house –
inside the house
! – made contact with the front of the glass shell, pushing out with tons of force. Dorman was hypnotised; he was skewered to his spot on the patio paving, a glass-cutter in his hand and something imbecilic on his face.

The noise was astounding. As the wave smashed through the glass, the sound was close to deafening; on currents of sound shards and sheets of the broken glass exploded outwards.

Moving in a mixed choreography of backward stomping and crab-walk, Connors had made it to a spot nearly ten metres away before he dared to look again past the forearm he was using to shield his face instinctively. Although his brain registered the presence of flying glass in the air, his full attention was claimed by his work partner. Dorman hadn’t shifted his position one iota: but he did now. No choice in the matter: the ceiling-high wall of water had caught him full frontal; he was lifted off his feet in time for his face to meet the hypotenuse of a perfectly right-angled slice of glass, approximately the size of a trumpet. Through the water Connors was able to see the glass slice into Dorman’s face. The top of the man’s head was sheared off as neatly as the top of a boiled egg, and his scalp, forehead, eyes and the bridge of his nose landed in a wet red parcel in a raised bed of courgettes that were being grown. Dorman’s body sailed the sea for a few more metres, then crashed down in a lump.

Connors kept moving towards the rear of the property.

Then something hit him powerfully from behind.

9.

‘I’m still not sure about this,’ Bernadette said softly, in one of those voices that she would use more normally to ask
Are you awake, Chris?
A voice soft but not
too
close to silent; at which point he would either say nothing at all (if he was asleep), or he would mumble something about
wanting
to be asleep; or, as he did right now, he would surprise her ever so slightly with a fully conscious response.

As clear as a bell Chris now said, ‘No, I’m not sure about this either, babe.’

Bernadette sat up and flicked on the table lamp. She took a second to think things through, but either as a result of fatigue or touched nerves, she found it all-but impossible to stick to the facts. Her unconscious insisted on feeding her lines that seemed not only from other occasions, but from other
lives
.

The fact that Chris had been unable to sleep on it either did not help calm Bernadette down. Even though the two visitors had only left a few minutes earlier, Chris could sleep on the edge of a cliff and dream the sweet dreams of the righteous and the safe. If the conversation was bothering
him
...

A glutton for punishment, Bernadette returned to the window. ‘I don’t like any of this,’ she admitted. ‘What if they’ve found us?’

Chris sighed heavily. Twisting his upper body, he opened the drawer on his nightstand and retrieved a box of cigarettes.

‘Not in here, Chris,’ said Bernadette, irritably.

‘I wasn’t going to.’ While Bernie kept her watch on the road a storey down, Chris pulled on the dressing gown that always lived on top of the bed and under which he slept by way of it being an extra blanket. ‘I’ll go out the back with Chelsea. Poor girl’ll be wondering what the fuck.’

‘She’s not the only one. I’ll come with you.’

Dressed for bed, then, the two of them stepped downstairs, the cords of their dressing gown flapping like tails. When they entered the kitchen, Chelsea watched them from where she lay but decided not to move to greet them. It had been a busy night already; Chelsea’s jaws remained still on her forepaws, only her eyes shifting.

‘She’s probably confused with the dark as well,’ said Bernadette. ‘Thinks it’s getting-up time. But it’s dark, she’s thinking, so how
can
it be, eh girl?’

Chris unlocked the door to the garden. ‘We often walk her when it’s dark,’ he said.

‘Yeah, after she’s been
asleep
.’

‘I won’t be a second,’ he continued, abandoning any attempt at debate. It was too deep into the small hours for them all, not only Chelsea... Wielding but a lighter and a smoke, he took the step down into the small back garden, leaving Bernie behind to fuss the dog for a few minutes – or to make a brew, or to do whatever it was that she thought it best to do in these insomniac hours.

Chris was only halfway through his cigarette, but he tasted that he’d had enough. Taking care to extinguish it in the dish of water that stayed on the windowsill for just such a purpose, Chris was about to step back into the relative warmth of the kitchen when he heard a noise that held him to the spot, with one slippered foot on the doorstep and one on the ground.

The roar of water. The din of glass smashing.

Housewarming

1.

The driveway was a quarter of a mile long. It felt longer. As though in awe of the spectacle, the bewhiskered chauffeur had maintained a purring crawl since giving his passenger’s name into the voicebox at the gate and being granted entry onto the estate. Or perhaps (the passenger considered) the slow speed of progress was for the passenger’s benefit – a chance for him to savour the full autumnal spread of all that he now owned. It didn’t matter. The passenger was in no hurry to reach the house, and so new to him was the notion that this was
his
that he didn’t wish to miss a thing anyway. Furthermore, he had yet to decide on the level of superiority to assume when addressing his chauffeur. He didn’t know if it was proper to instruct the man to speed up: never before had he employed staff.

‘Here we are, sir.’

‘Thank you, Curtis.’

They had pulled up near the front door, gravel crackling like crossed wires beneath them. The passenger felt it might be dangerous to tear his eyesight away from the tall, wide front doors – as though attempting to take in the full picture would be too much for his mind – although he’d seen the place twice before purchase.

‘Allow me to get your door, sir,’ said Curtis, opening his own.

‘No need.’ No need,
mate
, was what he’d almost said. He had already admonished himself for blokey language: it was names all the way from hereon in.

He angled himself free of the Jag.

The house doors opened, and Dorota threw wide her arms at the top of the shallow flight of bleached stone steps. She descended nimbly; her face was a picture of happy magic. Like the man she was shortly to embrace, she could not really believe her luck either.

Wordlessly Curtis had removed a small piece of travel-battered luggage from the Jag’s boot. Now he stood, grey-suited, sombre, stoic, a respectful two metres from the embrace, which now broke with a short duet of laughter.

‘Eastlight’s here already,’ Dorota said. ‘He’s in the snooker room. The
snooker room
!’

They laughed again.

‘I’ll take that, Curtis,’ the new squire of the manor said. He held his arm out to take charge of the suitcase.

‘It’s no trouble, sir.’

‘Not for me either.’

‘As you wish, sir.’ The suitcase changed hands, and the one in receipt added, to either or both of his interlocutors (or perhaps to himself):

‘It’s a moment. It’s
me
taking
my
belongings into
my
new house… That sounds absurd.’

‘No it doesn’t, Vig,’ Dorota told him. ‘There’ll be plenty of other chances for people to carry your bags. Now you’re
rich
.’

Followed by Curtis they moved to the foot of the steps, Dorota saying, ‘Or are you going to give me the one about not forgetting your roots again?’

‘No.’

‘Good. They’re not slaves, Vig: you’re paying them to do a job.’

‘I can carry a
bag
, darling…’

‘If you want to – yes.’ Dorota stepped into the hallway. ‘But not because you have no other choice.’ She turned and grinned. ‘Come on, step over the threshold – like a vampire. I invite thee.’

When he did so Vig felt small and not big; humbled, not proud. ‘It’s going to take me longer to get used to this than it is for you, Dol,’ he said to the back of Dorota’s shoulders, which shrugged. Without turning her head as she led the way down the hallway that smelled of polish and chrysanthemums, she called:

‘I already have.’

2.

Eastlight was in the snooker room, as Dorota had explained. When the party of three entered, he stepped away from his caressing of the green baize, a wistful expression on his face.

‘Viggy-loo, Viggy-lay!’ he bellowed by way of greeting.

‘
How are you, Charlie?’ Vig replied in a more sedate fashion.

The two men hugged but it was an awkward exhibition: like rugby players in a scrum. They clapped one another on the back and separated – not a second too soon for anyone present.

‘How am I, the man asks!’ Eastlight said, beaming. ‘Well it’s a dark day, obviously! How do you
think
I am, Viggy? This is the single most exciting thing I’ve ever been party to!’

‘You should get out more,’ Vig told him.

‘Well I will! Now that you’re out in the country, with the weevils and the voles and all that nonsense. But listen, Vig –‘

‘Sir?’ said Curtis.

Although Eastlight now treated the driver to a torrential surge of immediate contempt, Vig himself was in too good a mood to chastise the man for his interruption.

‘Anywhere in particular, sir?’ Curtis asked, once more holding up the suitcase.

Vig sipped the air, an action which made the decision seem to be of more import to him than it actually was. However, there was a reason for this: it was at this very instant that Vig understood that from now on he would be responsible for a good many more such decisions than had ever been the case up to now.
Put it anywhere
, he almost replied; but he divined that Curtis was the sort of man who appreciated an unambiguous command – an order.

‘On the chair, please, Curtis.’

Dorota had moved towards an old-fashioned hostess trolley which had been either parked or abandoned near the vast uncurtained window. On top of the trolley were a few bottles in varying states of depletion.

‘We should toast,’ she announced. ‘Your new home. Your new life!’

‘
Our
new home,’ Vig corrected her. ‘What do we have?’

Dorota began twisting the bottles for a better look at the labels. ‘Vodka, gin…’

Eastlight spoke up quickly. ‘Guys. Would you mind if we waited till Don joined us? Be nice if we were all together, to wet the baby’s head as it were… Well you know what I mean.’

‘What time did you say to him?’ Vig asked.

‘He knows you’re here. Doing something disgusting with insects that frankly I had no stomach to hear the end of.’

Dorota teased him, deliberately ironically. ‘Oh you city boy you,’ she said.

‘From the girl from Gdansk!’

‘He’s got a point,’ Vig said. ‘We’re all in this together, after all… Who’s for a game of doubles?’ And he indicated the snooker table.

3.

Don Bridges finished feeding the birds and then loitered longer than he needed to in the case that housed the Hyacinth Macows. His narrow ex-jockey buttocks perched on the edge of a waist-high ornamental waterfall; and as he rolled a thin cigarette he watched Larry, the plump and elderly lizard that he had raised from as early as the egg, as he scuttled from rock to rock, tasting the nicotine infringement to the natural air. Not for the first time Don anthropomorphized the reptile: he read stately wisdom in those somehow
academic
facial features. A professorial quality that often made Don clutch at his own elbows, bowed once again by the presence of one of the several billion creatures on the planet that exhibited more intelligence than he did himself. And not for the first time, Don wanted to crush it dead.

Standing up to the crackling applause of creaky knees, he managed to scatter birds from perch to perch. In this one aviary cage alone there were thirteen, and there were seven more cages, each similarly stocked with life. It was Don’s jobs to take care of them all (no one else could). It wasn’t only where he worked, and had worked for many years: it was where he loved to be – where he
needed
to be. It was the
only
place. However (sighing now as he locked the cage behind him) he had been summoned to the house by that ball-sack Eastlight; if no other reason than to start on the right foot, he’d better go. He was
expected.
That was the word Eastlight had used:
expected.
Well; they could have ten or fifteen minutes of his time – he supposed he owed the new owner this much – but if anyone had had a strange dream that he’d be changing his clothes for the occasion then that was that silly bugger’s lookout, wasn’t it now? They would take him or leave him, welly boots and poacher’s pockets and all.

Don sighed again. Strange to be in the main house again, he thought. It had been a good few months: in fact, he had only been back a couple of times since his lordship had moved out six months previous (on grounds of ill-health and impending penury). There hadn’t been much point. The birds were all that concerned him now. Or nearly all.

Custom and good manners obliged Don to scrape his boots at the kitchen door. Although he hoped to find the door locked, he was not lucky; it opened to its familiar whine that Don had vowed to oil right on a number of occasions but had never got around to doing. The kitchen was empty. Marion the cook had left with the rest of them; no saucepans rattled ably on the roof of the Aga; no stews belched out flavoursome perfumes; the puppies were not present to beg for bacon rind... Surprisingly (but briefly) nostalgic for those times, Don closed the door behind him and strode through the room to the hallway. The voices he could hear sounded happy: that was one thing at least. He followed the voices across the ground floor, arriving at the snooker room in a slightly better mood: one of trepidation.

Introductions ensued, with Eastlight the master of ceremonies.

‘Hartvig Klossen – this is Donald Bridges. Don Bridges – this is the man with a heart so big he’s allowed you to keep your job, when the done thing would’ve been to move the hell out with the rest of the staff force...’

‘Charlie,’ Vig interrupted. ‘Please. Delighted to meet you, Don – finally.’ He extended a hand, and the hand it met was as rough as pork rind, tanned to the hue of tobacco spit.

‘Viggy-loo,’ said Eastlight calmly. ‘Don knows I’m dicking, don’t you, Don?’ He clapped his hands in a wringing motion. ‘Now about that drink...’

‘
Delighted to meet you, sir,’ said Don, averting his eyes to peruse a roadmap of shrub-scratches on the inside of his right arm.

Having skipped back over to the hostess trolley, Dorota called out for drinks orders.

For Don the offer led to no lessening of tension; on the contrary, the notion of social interaction alerted a taste of capers and vanilla ice-cream to his tongue. Not a man who drew breath knew the pleasure of a glass or two of brandy better than Don, but it was supposed to be a solitary activity.

‘Thank you, not for me,’ he replied. ‘Very kind of you, but I’d best be getting back–‘

‘To the birds?’ cried Eastlight. ‘Don’t forget what you
owe
Mr Klossen.’

Vig shook his head. ‘If he wants to go, Charlie...’

Don imagined himself being pulled in the middle. Through his mind flashed an image of Larry the lizard, a wellyboot heel stomping down on the scales of its backbone. As far as Don was concerned, the creature was already posthumous.

‘It’s all right, sir,’ he said. ‘I’m just not a one for the drink. It’s not that I’m ungrateful...’ He dipped a shallow bow. ‘I just need to do a feed, sir.’

‘Another one?’ called Eastlight. ‘You fed em not half an hour ago, Don!’ He gulped at his glass of port. Crinkled cuts of barely suppressed mirth twitched at the corners of his eyes. ‘We need some music! I wanna
dance
!’

‘Do you dance, Don?’ Dorota asked, pouring port into two other mismatched glasses.

Don laughed. ‘A long time ago, maybe, madam. Bit of a jitterbug boy I was, back then.’

‘Well show us your shapes, birdkeeper!’ Eastlight shouted.

‘I don’t think so, sir. I don’t think me knees could stand the strain.’

‘Oh go on, Don! Teach us to boogie!’ Eastlight persisted.

‘
Leave it, Charlie,’ said Vig. ‘Don’t be getting boisterous on me.’

‘Oh he doesn’t
mind
, Vig – do you, Don?’

‘No, sir. But I have to be on my toes. I’m up early in the morning, rain or shine.’

‘It was nice to meet you, Don,’ Vig told him. ‘Catch up soon, yeah?’

Again, Don bowed. Leaving the room he heard Vig whisper
For God’s sake, Charlie,
and he knew that the encounter had gone worse than anticipated. For reasons that he could only put down to stubbornness – his own, the fact that he’d refused to move out – he seemed to have made a rival in Charles Eastlight. An enemy, even. And if there was one thing he didn’t need it was a competitor for the affections of Hartvig and Dorota. Not when so much rested on Don maintaining his position.

With the sounds of laughter receding in his ears, Don left the house by the kitchen door. Air as fresh as creek rain brushed the bristles bearding from his caramel-coloured nostrils. As he scratched his left cheek his jowls dappled and wobbled. One-handed he rolled a cigarette, pinching from a pouch of tobacco in his poacher’s pocket. The one-handed ministration was an old party trick from his days in the saddle and not even the wind could put him off his stride as he crossed the yard, stones rattling underheel. From the aviary to his right, hidden by a buffer of seven-foot hedges, came the sounds of birds calling.

His cabin was a five-minute walk away, due west into the melting chocolate of the autumn afternoon sky. The front door gave onto the lounge and its welcoming kissy breath of stale Drum tobacco. The concepts of relief and being home were interchangeable. Don sighed and locked the door – he locked them both in – and with aching shoulders he removed his coat and draped it over the arm of a prodigiously overstuffed chair. He took the four steps required to transfer himself into the square kitchen. Sweat traced the W of his greyed hairline.

Bending at the waist, Don whipped back a plum-coloured rug that was frayed at the edges and corners. What the rug had hidden was a wooden door; it lay flush to the dirt floor – the floorboards themselves had long since been removed. (And burnt: Don had put the boards on the barbecue a month earlier and smoked a couple of kippers and a few pork chops.) It didn’t matter to Don. No one came here; they’d never know.