Whirligig (19 page)

‘The Three of Swords. I can't think that has any great significance, but you never know.'

She placed another card on the table.

‘The Hanged Man. Another trump card, so we'll put that to one side. And, what have we here? Ah!' She sighed with deep satisfaction. ‘The Fool. That's the best
card you can get. The Fool – the forerunner of the Joker – is the most mysterious, and some say the luckiest, card in the pack.'

She picked the cards up with reverence and put them side by side. She turned and smiled at Claypole.

‘What does it…? Brr. What's it mean?'

‘Why don't you give me your interpretation, and I'll tell you whether I think you're correct.'

Claypole squinted sceptically. He had seen this before. As with astrology, the mind fills in the gaps in an attempt to locate meaning and attaches significance to images and words where there may be none, pulling together meaningless scraps of information to form a comfortable coherence. He could even feel himself doing it. In this atmosphere his sense of paranoia was building. He could see himself as the Fool, naturally. And whatever Bonnie said about the Three of Swords being insignificant, the image on the card was of violence, and he felt foreboding. But who was the Hanged Man? The image on the card was of a man with a twisted smile tied upside down to a tree by his leg.

Pah. It was nonsense, he told himself quickly, and he must not allow the charlatan Bonnie Straughan the satisfaction of him doing her work for her. Like a con artist or a poor psychoanalyst, she must be waiting for him to let his inadequacies and preoccupations show. Then she would reinforce them with her 'interpretation', making him feel as if this absurd charade had some meaning and she some dominion. She might even make a judgement or a prediction based on what she thought he wanted to hear – or possibly on what he least wanted to hear. He decided to sabotage the process by making something up about his feelings
about the cards that was nowhere near what he was really thinking. If she told him he was right, he would get the private satisfaction of knowing she was a fraud.

‘Well, I suppose I am the Hanged Man, and I think Coky is probably the Empress. And maybe Peregrine is the Fool.'

‘Hm,' said Bonnie. She seemed doubtful. ‘I don't…' She hesitated as if looking for inspiration. ‘No. I'm not sure that's right. Although… the Hanged Man can mean a person on the horns of a dilemma. It doesn't have to be someone doomed, and it rarely means death. Are you in the throes of indecision about something?'

Claypole shrugged.

‘I don't know that any of these other cards represent anyone specific,' she continued. ‘You see, the presence of the Fool can confuse any interpretation. It rather depends what we turn up next. If it's the Ten of Coins, I think we can confidently predict riches. If it's the Seven of Cups, it might be a party. But the presence of the Fool can turn all that on its head. Do you see?'

‘Pff.' Claypole was openly scoffing now. Bonnie's expression, irritatingly for Claypole, was one of infinite patience.

‘Shall we see what the next card is?'

‘Go on then.' Claypole looked at his watch.

Bonnie closed her eyes as if in a trance and lightly stroked the top of the deck with a long fingernail. Claypole took the opportunity while she could not see his expression to mouth the word ‘idiot', but his eyes were drawn to the deck of cards nonetheless.

The top card was turned over slowly, and in Bonnie's direction so that she would see it first. She opened her eyes flickeringly. Then she stared at the card for some moments before saying abruptly, ‘It's late,' and
gathering the cards together.

Claypole's eyes were still fixed on the card on the top of the deck. Bonnie had seen it, and he had not. He did not want to give her the satisfaction of knowing that he was interested.

‘OK, then. I'd better be going. Brr. Any chance of a glass of water?'

As soon as she was out of sight, Claypole darted forward out of the sofa and went to the Tarot pack. His hand hesitated above the deck as he listened nervously for Bonnie. Hearing nothing, he whipped the top card over. The picture on the card was shock enough: a grinning skeleton in a cardinal's cloak and hat, with one hand beckoning, the other carrying a short scythe. But below it was a single, simple word. ‘Death‘. He heard Bonnie's footsteps in the hall, whipped the card onto its back again, hiding it from his bulging eyes, and leapt towards one of the photographs on the wall. He made as if to study it. Then he
really
studied it. Then he picked it off the wall.

As far as Bonnie was concerned, Claypole was just looking at a photograph when she came back into the room holding a glass of water. Had she bothered to examine him more closely, or the photograph, she would have seen a lot more.

The photograph itself was nothing special. A group shot, clip-framed, it was fading. The colours were washed yellow, and the faces slightly fuzzy. But Claypole could see exactly who it was. For there, tucked underneath his father's arm, was Claypole himself. Aged ten or so, he was scowling. Claypole's mother was also in the group, as was his grandmother, and a few assorted others. The personnel had drawn his attention naturally enough, but what had frozen
him to the spot was that next to his father, on the other side to himself, was Bonnie Straughan. Her cascading curly hair was jet black, and her smile broad. And around her hip, just visible, was Geoffrey Claypole's fat, cheating hand.

‘I said, shall I call you a taxi?'

Claypole snapped to and nodded, but did not look at his host. Bonnie Straughan left the room.

By another door, so did Claypole, leaving the framed photograph on a sofa.

Claypole shut the front door of Bonnie Straughan's house as quietly as he could and wobbled across the darkening farmyard as fast as his jelly legs would take him. Beyond the soft fizz of the electricity lines strung over the yard, there was eerily little noise, and no movement save for a few twinkling stars. But Claypole's head was raging with noise. His head and heart pounding, he only gathered his thoughts halfway up the hill. He fished out his phone. One bar of reception. He dialled Henderson's Taxis.

‘Hello,' said Claypole, breathless.

‘Evening,' said Henderson.

‘It's Barry Macbeth here. You dropped me off at the end of the drive of Bainhead House. Has a taxi been ordered to take me to Garvachhead?'

‘Ah. Yes, sir.'

There was something sarcastic about the tone. Perhaps it was just Henderson's Yorkshire ways, thought Claypole, and he continued in a businesslike fashion.

‘Great. I've set off walking from the house, and I'll meet you where you dropped me off in half an hour.'

‘Certainly, sir. Would you like me to tell you how much it will be?'

Claypole assumed it would be roughly the twenty pounds he had paid for the outward journey, but he would not object if it were three times that amount. ‘Sure,' he said.

‘That will be £7,025.'

Claypole stopped walking. He knew what was coming, but his jaw dropped open anyway.

‘Twenty-five pounds to get you to Garvachhead, you see,
Mr Claypole
… and seven grand for my car…' Henderson was now shouting. ‘That you fucking
wrote off
and abandoned in a
ditch
without so much as a –'

Bip. Claypole had pressed the off switch.

‘Bollocks,' said Claypole quietly. He sat on the verge, watching the silent house in the semi-darkness. Then he saw the light over the front door come on.

‘Oh shit,' he whispered to himself, and for no good reason except instinct, lay on the ground. ‘She's coming for me. With Zeus.'

The notion was unlikely, he realised. He had only been out of her company for two minutes, and she would still be assuming he had gone to the toilet. But when he looked back at the house, with a lurch of horror he saw that the front door was opening, and Bonnie was emerging from the house – with her vast dog on a lead, straining and barking madly into the night air. She actually did want him dead. This wicked witch – Peregrine could not have been more right – with her Tarot cards, her evil thoughts and her seduction of married men, wanted to hunt him down and kill him. With real fear now, Claypole looked for an escape route.

The road was not an option. Zeus would catch him up in a matter of moments. Could he run over the fields, and join the road further up the hill? It was nearly dark, after all.
No. That was madness. If ‘fields' were not the obstacle in the idea, then ‘run' definitely was. Anyway, Zeus might hunt him down by scent even if he were out of sight. He found himself looking down the hill towards the shore, just a hundred or so yards away. He saw a small concrete jetty. Floating gently next to an orange buoy was a small rowing boat.

Claypole had not been in a boat since he was sixteen. At least, not one without a foghorn, lights, male and female toilets and parking for at least twenty cars. He had been sent by his mother on a sailing course on Lake Windermere for two weeks while she conducted an abortive relationship with a loss adjuster called Marvin. Claypole had hated every minute and feigned injuries and infections of all kinds in order to stay on dry land as much as possible. He had not learned to sail, but he had learned to row. Now, he figured, he had a choice. Conquer his fear of boats – or rather, of drowning or being eaten as a result of capsizing a boat – or die horribly under torture. And at her hands.
Her!
It must have been her. Claypole's mother had talked, long after his father's death, of an incident in Scotland, and a raven-haired temptress. It must have been Bonnie who had caused his parents to split up.

‘Come on,' Claypole exhorted himself as he half rose from his crouched position on the side of the hill and waddle-crept along a fence in the direction of the jetty. The boat was uncomplicatedly moored, and he did not take long to untie the painter and jump in, his bulky frame and unaccustomed shoes conspiring to make him tumble into the craft rather than perform the neat leap he had imagined. The little wooden boat drifted unsteadily into the loch. With much scuffling, bruising and cursing, Claypole found the oars and placed them
in the rusting metal rowlocks and sat heavily on the thwart. As he was taking the first pull on the oars, he looked back at the shore. He heard a car door slam and an engine start. He took three quick pulls on the oars to create some clear water between hunter and hunted. But when he and the little boat were some way out into the loch, he observed the eerie phosphorescence on the water disturbed by the action of the oars and visible in the stern wake. The blackness of the sea, and the bright green tinge to the disturbed surface made it all so horribly alien. He reminded himself that he was being chased, and he looked back to the shore again.

As he watched Bonnie's estate car, with Zeus squeezed into the boot, winding its way up the drive and away from the house, the thought occurred to Claypole that it was possible she did not want to kill him. It was, he had to acknowledge, just feasible that she was coming to offer him a lift. Or weirder, to apologise. It was a prospect even more dreadful than death that he might be forced – the thought filled his tightening throat to choking point – to forgive her. She might plead for forgiveness, explain some mitigating circumstances, and possibly even try to lay some blame for the incident at the feet of his father. He would have to swallow his pride and his loathing. For Coky's sake, if not his own. Then again, if her motives were innocent, why had she taken the dog with her? She must indeed, he concluded, require Zeus in order to rid the world of evidence that Claypole had ever existed. Claypole would be eaten by the hound, and she would thus get rid not only of a man who hated her, but the spokesman for a wind farm she objected to. That, he thought as he dug the oars into the water once again and pulled hard for the opposite shore, was the only
realistic conclusion. All notions of turning back, small-voiced as they had been, were silenced.

The moon was behind a thin cloud, but he could see enough to estimate the distance to the opposite shore to be half a mile. What any of this would mean in terms of rowing time he had no idea, and as the sea became choppier the further out into the loch he went, he was reminded that this loch was not a lake in the English sense. This wasn't glassy, tame Windermere. There might be currents of hideous strength to take him directly out to sea. To his right was the mouth of the loch, which led eventually to some of the islands of the Inner Hebrides. He stared at the horizon. It looked particularly black and forbidding. Just beyond those islands, which one could miss as easily as a black cat on a dark street, was the Irish Sea. And should he have the misfortune to miss the coast of Northern Ireland some way to the south-west, there was 3,000 miles of nothing but chilly Atlantic Ocean until Canada.

He saw the lights of Bonnie's car coming back down her drive to the house. Then, with a lurch of panic, he saw that her car was not turning into the courtyard of her house, but was instead making its way down to the shore. His puny arms pulled on the oars again. As her car headed for the jetty, he wondered whether she could direct Zeus to swim out to him. If so, it would be a brief chase before Claypole's now wildly thrumming heart gave out. The massive dog would chew his boat to pieces, then to devour him with red-eyed cerberean slaverings. Now at the jetty's edge, Bonnie got out of the car and shouted something. She was angry, no doubt. But he could not make out her words. No dog was plunging into the sea, and Bonnie merely turned and got back into her car.

With a sigh, Claypole settled again to the task of rowing himself to freedom or to death, feeling the sinews of his chest tested in ways they were ill-suited to withstand. He thought momentarily of his heart pills, still in their bottle in his rucksack at the Loch Garvach Hotel. And after that, his thoughts turned, not without reason, to the day of his mother's funeral.