Life's Lottery (36 page)

Sean is matey. You can see how he
manages
at the bank. He smooths the way. A man like Hackwill would find him useful. As manager, your dad was like a father to the customers, stern but helpful. Sean is a best mate, less judgemental, less serious. If you were in financial deep shit, you’d find it easier dealing with Sean but know deep down that Dad would have done more to help you out. Sean looks after himself first, the bank second and customers a distant third.

Sedgwater is changing in the mid-’80s. An enclave of town becomes prosperous, as funds are channelled in for developments in leisure and consumer areas. But British Synthetics lays off factory-floor staff and is investigated by environmental agencies. Hackwill and Sean are on the up but others slide.

As a journo, you’ve been trained. You see cracks. Not just in the town, in dodgy deals, get-rich-quick schemes and council backhanders, but in the people. Sean smiles just a little too easily, is a bit too free with handshakes and shoulder-grips.

Laraine seems more fragile. Sometimes, she bruises.

* * *

You rent a room in town, over a launderette, and keep it spartan. A bed, a desk, a chair, the things you need to write the book. A typewriter, stationery, notebooks. You put the desk against a wall without a window and cover the wall with photos, clippings, maps. Some family things, some general, fixing the background.

Hackwill will not give you an interview. No surprise there.

You talk to men and women in their twenties, three or so years younger than you. James’s school contemporaries, not yours. If you remember them at all, it’s as kids, living remembrances of a childishness you were desperately trying to outgrow. Stick-thin shadow-people are now grown up and filled out; they seem more vivid, more real, than people your own age.

Girls – brats become beauties – tell you how much they fancied James. Or were afraid of him, which doesn’t compute. Young men remember him as a good bloke. But Sean says Hackwill is a good bloke. You wonder what James was like at school. You know he learned to look after himself, but did he keep the terror at bay by making victims of others?

Candy Dixon, whom you remember as James’s girlfriend, also refuses to give you an interview. She tries to tell you why over the phone, but can’t.

WPC Yatman admits the Lime Kiln incident wasn’t the first time James was brought in for questioning and released without charge. While you were away at university, running occupations to protest at cuts in overseas student quotas, James was turning into a serious brawler. Not a drunken scrap-picker, but a purposeful master of violence.

In the Falklands, did James kill anyone?

From the reports you have, you aren’t sure. It seems almost certain, though. Commendations all stress his ‘courage under fire’. That means returning fire. With killing accuracy.

* * *

You drink in the Lime Kiln and see people who’ve been out of your life for six years, from college and school. The kids who didn’t go to university or came back immediately afterwards. They don’t seem to have noticed that you’ve been away.

Are you back for good?

You make long, rambling phone calls. Mostly to Anne, because Clare is in a bender well away from phones.

The book, strangely, is coming together.

Anne says you aren’t writing about your brother. You’re writing about yourself.

Your advance runs low. But you have some money, left by your father and yours on your twenty-fifth birthday. You can take as long as you like.

You can get it right.

* * *

Eventually, you arrange to sit down with your sister. You’ve never really confided in each other, but she’s the other corner of the triangle you had with James.

And she wants to talk. She has wanted to talk with you ever since you came back. Reticent though Mum is, Laraine wants to be forthcoming.

Since her marriage, Laraine hasn’t worked. She and Sean live out of town, in a house in Sutton Mallet, a hamlet on a turn-off from the Achelzoy road.

You drive out in your patched-together VW. The battered Beetle seems an intruder in the converted barn that serves as Sean’s garage.

Laraine welcomes you into her perfect home. It was once a farmhouse, and lay abandoned for years, but has been completely overhauled. The house smells of new paint and good wood.

As Laraine makes you tea, you realise what the place reminds you of.

‘Do you remember?’

‘That TV play.’

‘
The Exorcism
.’

‘About the city couple who buy an old farmhouse, and are haunted by the family who once starved to death there.’

That programme went out in 1972, on a Sunday night. Unusually, you and Laraine – everyone else was out – were in the house alone, and watched it together, terrified. It’s stayed with you ever since. Now you realise it was supposed to be making a political point – with amazing foresight, at that – but at the time, you took it as just a ghost story.

Neither of you wanted to go upstairs in the dark. You were thirteen and Laraine fifteen. You both slept downstairs, huddled together on the sofa under blankets, still under the spell of the spookshow.

Afterwards, when the sun came up, the fear went away. You were both ashamed at your funk and never mentioned sleeping on the sofa to Mum and Dad or James, though you did tell them about
The Exorcism.
You wonder if you’ve never talked about that night because you remember the shampoo smell of your sister’s hair and the warmth of her thin body in a way that seems now even more transgressive than it did then.

‘We slept together,’ Laraine says, ‘on the sofa. God, that was a long time ago.’

‘Half my life,’ you admit. ‘More than half. Not quite half yours.’

‘Thanks for reminding me how decrepit I am.’

Laraine sets out the tea on the Habitat kitchen table with all the formal elegance of a Japanese geisha. You observe her precise movements.

‘Are you dyeing your hair?’

She admits it.

‘It looks good.’

‘Sean doesn’t like it.’

‘So?’

‘Yeah, so?’

You take your mugs of Earl Grey and go into the front room. It is all blond-wood and TV and stereo equipment. Sean has a Betamax. The sofas and chairs are chrome tubes with overstuffed floral-pattern cushions.

You and Laraine sink into sofas.

‘What happened to us?’ you ask.

Laraine is jittery, afraid to speak.

‘It’s not just James, is it? There’s something else. For both of us.’

Laraine puts her mug down on a glass slab supported by three black spheres, a coffee table disguised as an alien artefact. It leaves a ring. She moves the mug on to the latest
Vogue
and rubs the ring with her sleeve, then tuts over the wrinkled circle eaten into the pouting face on the magazine cover.

You see she is crying.

‘Do you remember…’ she begins.

‘Yes?

‘Do you remember Dad ever hitting Mum?’

The question comes out of nowhere. There were frequent nagging arguments between your parents, some stretching over years, but no blazing rows. You know James’s sudden violence came from somewhere, but think that was your fault not your parents’.

‘I shouldn’t have said anything,’ Laraine says.

You riffle through your whole memory of Mum and Dad. Were there clues? Did you miss something vital, an unseen explosion? Have you been so wrapped up in yourself that you’ve failed to pay attention to the rest of your family, to the rest of the world?

‘Only, they say women marry their dads. And Sean
is
Dad’s successor at the bank.’

Laraine is talking about her own marriage.

‘Sean hits you?’

‘Not often. And not hard. Only when I’ve been bad.’

“‘Been bad?” Larry, you’re not ten years old. How can you be “bad”?’

‘Little things. Distracting him. He’s under a lot of pressure.’

‘He hits you.’

She nods.

‘The bastard, I’ll –’

‘No, don’t. Keith, I shouldn’t have said anything.’ Now, she’s afraid.

‘You have to leave.’

‘It’s not like that. Really, it’s not.’

For once, you wish Clare were here. She’d have Laraine in a shelter for battered women within an hour, bring a civil prosecution against Sean before sunset, have him castrated by a gang of biker diesel dikes by the end of the week. And hum ‘Super Trooper’ all the while.

‘Larry, there are rules. Hitting women is against them. If a man does that, he loses all rights. He doesn’t have to be considered.’

‘You see everything as simple, Keith.’

‘This is simple. Unless it’s stopped, it gets worse.’

You take Laraine in your arms and hold her. She is racked with sobs, soaking your collar with tears. You smell her shampoo – still the same? – and hug her tight. As she cries, you stroke up and down her back. You kiss her temple. The smell gets in your nose. The clean smell.

You feel a flicker of desire: shameful, embarrassing, noticeable. Laraine pushes you back but not away. She looks into your eyes. She has stopped crying.

This is serious.

If you kiss your sister on the mouth, go to 101. If you break the embrace and stand up, go to 115.

‘
R
o, I know how you must feel. I just want you to know that I’m sorry. I acted like a bastard. I…’

You don’t finish your prepared speech.

Ro stares at you, open-mouthed.

You try to hug her.

Go to 86.

F
riday, 13 February 1998. You get home first, just after six. It’s already dark but you’ve resisted turning on the headlamps during the short drive from town. It’s unlikely you’d ever run into anyone on the Sutton Mallet turn-off. You drive into the former barn that serves as a garage and park neatly in your space. You get out and feel a slight tingle. It’s not the cold, it’s the night. Your Fiat clicks as you activate the central locking.

You stand in the garage. Rusted ploughs are fixed to the walls and the place still smells of hay. Though the farmhouse you live in has been converted, you try to preserve the feel of its former function. To you, this is a working environment, not only because you grow your own vegetables and make your own wine. You look up at the low ceiling you had installed in the barn soon after you moved in, making an above-garage work-room you call the Batcave.

Up there, everything is perfectly ordered, each tool in its place, any questionable products stashed out of sight. For your projects, you often need quite esoteric materials. Two padlocks fasten the trapdoor. You and Mary have keys, kept about you at all times. To get into the Batcave, you must each open a lock. Your marriage is about mutual consent, co-operation, agreement.

You can get to the house from the garage, through the kitchen door. But you like the ceremony of going round to your front door and opening up. In your pocket, you have keys for the house, keys for the car, keys for the Batcave, keys for the bank, keys for the locked cabinets in the house and the Batcave, a key for the bank vault (Tristram, the deputy manager, has the other). You don’t need to look to know which is which. You can tell by the feel. The front-door key is the biggest, heaviest, longest. Old, cold metal.

There are four homes in Sutton Mallet now, all converted farmhouses. Two are owned by people who live in London and only appear at the weekends. One of those has been neglected for nine months, since its owner suffered a reversal and has had to put it on the block to finance a desperate stock deal. No takers at the moment.

You don’t have much use for people who think of the world in terms of money and what it can buy. You see them coming into the bank, always hoping to get ahead with what they haven’t got. You and Mary know there are more important ways of keeping the score. Ways that matter.

The bank is behind you, as sealed off in your mind as its locked vault. When you left your office at five-thirty, you repressed all details of any business you were working on. At nine-thirty on Monday morning, it will all be in your mind, clear and ready.

The weekend is sacred. For personal projects.

You strip off your suit as you go upstairs, remembering the long-gone objects – plastic comb, picture frame, toothbrush – once placed on each step. It is a game between you and your wife. Sometimes, when each thinks the other is off guard, you quiz each other. Neither has ever caught the other out.

In the recently fitted master bathroom, you take a shower. Outside, it’s crisply cold. You let hot water pour on to your chest, down your legs, into your eyes. You lobster yourself, scalding away your weekday skin.

While you’re showering, Mary comes home. She comes into the bathroom, having collected your clothes, and disassembles her uniform with precise movements as if stripping and cleaning a gun. When the blue shell of WPC Yatman – she keeps her maiden name in the week – is hung up on its frame, she undoes her hair and combs it out.

You finish your shower and towel yourself.

‘You look like a fire hydrant,’ she comments.

You smile. She has said that before.

‘I was out at the travellers’ site today,’ she says.

Like you, Mary normally lets her weekday work lie inactive at the weekend. But the travellers are weekend work too. Maybe more so than week work. They are your current project.

‘Canning has lodged a fresh battery of complaints. Hygiene, mostly. And noise nuisance. Oh, and drugs. It’s always drugs.’

You take this on board.

You’ve been following the story. The district council, forced by law to make provision for travellers, has sited a small number of them in a field near Achelzoy. The travellers’ spokesperson is Gully Eastment, who was at school with you. He calls himself ‘Gulliver’ now, which makes for predictable headlines about ‘Gulliver’s Travellers’ in the
Sedgwater Herald.
He has become some sort of guru. The locals, led by Roy Canning, a farmer who is friendly with Mary’s parents, are campaigning vigorously to have them removed.

The Achelzoy travellers aren’t Romany, but so-called New Age Travellers: refugees from the cities, unmarried mums on social security, filth-locked crusties with dogs on strings, care-in-the-community headcases, spare-change supplicants. Canning blames them for all the evils of the world, from falling property values to spoiled milk.