Life's Lottery (8 page)

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S
ometimes, you step off the path, through the cobweb curtain, into the shade. This is where you meet me. This is where I live. Most people step off the path at one time or another. If you press them, they’ll tell you their stories. But not willingly. It’s private. Between me and them. You’d be surprised how many people you know who’ve stepped off the path and met me. That, though you don’t quite realise it yet, is what’s just happened to you. Can you feel the scuttling caress of tiny spider-legs on your hackles? Have you noticed time has changed, slowed to a tortoise-crawl or speeded up to a cheetah-run? The air in your nostrils and the water in your mouth taste different. There’s an electric tang, a supple thickness, a kind of a rush. If you come through the shade whole, you’ll want to scurry back to the light, back to the path. Most people have an amazing ability to pretend things didn’t happen, to wish so fervently that things were otherwise they can make them so, unpicking elements from their past and forgetting them so thoroughly – at least, while they’re awake – that they literally have not happened. All of you can affect the warp of the universe, just by wishing. But to wish, you need motivation. What has just happened might be motivation enough. At first, you won’t be able to stop thinking about it, asking what has
actually
happened, looking for a comforting ‘explanation’. Maybe it was mirrors, maybe you were given drugs, maybe aliens abducted you. Who knows? Maybe you’re right. I don’t know everything. From time to time, you run into me – sometimes because you get itchy and stray, sometimes by accident. From time to time, I like to catch up with you. I like to catch up with all my friends, Keith. For now, you’re shaken. Perhaps you can’t believe you’re alive and sane. Perhaps you aren’t. Whatever the case, you must put the shade behind you. For the moment. We’ll meet again. Before you know it, you’ll pass through the cobweb curtain and be back. Years may pass between your detours, but when you step off the path again those years will be as seconds. Maybe life is only truly lived in the shade. Well, enough deep thought for the moment. Get on with things. Try to pretend there is no shade. I’ll see you soon.

Go on.

I
n 1982, the week after your father’s funeral, you are in town, early in a spring evening, going for a drink in the Lime Kiln with your brother.

Laraine has stayed home with Mum, but you both feel the need to get out of the memory-permeated house. James went into the army at sixteen and you haven’t seen much of him in the last few years. You remember him as the kid who wet himself while you were being beaten up by Robert and Reg; now he’s a Marine, newly promoted to sergeant, trained to kill. It’s likely that he will be sent to the Falklands.

The Lime Kiln is full, packed with drinkers whose fathers are still alive or have been dead for so long that it doesn’t matter. You and James share a feeling that now you have to be grown-up, that the job of Man of the Family must be split between you. At least James has a direction in life; you’re still not sure if you’ve been making the right decisions. Dad’s death, from a cerebral haemorrhage no one was expecting, has made you think. In your mind, you’ve been going back, reassessing, wondering if you could have chosen better, if you could have changed things.

As you force your way through to the bar, a cheer goes up. You wonder why, then remember James is in uniform. There’s a drunken wave of patriotism going on in the aftermath of the invasion of the Falkland Islands, a frenzy of kill-the-Argies war-hunger. The barman is Max Lewis, with whom you were at school though he was never a special friend. James orders a couple of pints of bitter. A man claps him on the shoulder and offers to pay for the drinks.

James, flinching from the touch, turns to accept… and freezes. Pressed close to James by the crowd, you sense the tension which draws your brother tight as a bowstring an instant before you recognise the man with the money.

It’s Robert Hackwill, grown up.

The Ash Grove School Bully has done well for himself. He wears a sheepskin coat and a trilby hat. His property business is flourishing and he is in line for a council seat. He has a flash car, a Jag. His smile splits the world horizontally in half.

Hackwill repeats his offer.

You look around for Jessup, never far from Hackwill, and spot him in a corner. Reg’s smirk is still there, shaped by the fat in his face. He’s still a sidekick.

What will James do? It’s fifteen years later and Hackwill is off his guard. James has been trained to kill. You know your brother must be thinking of breaking a glass in the grown-up bully’s face.

You remember that day. When James wet himself while being given the worst Chinese burn in history and Robert and Reg, astonished that you had come into the copse to rescue your brother, took great delight in beating you up. They knocked you down and kicked you until your sides were black and blue under your filthy clothes. You never explained your bruises to your parents or a teacher. Telling on Robert Hackwill was an invitation to pain.

You have never talked about it with James. But you’ve been close ever since, sharing a hidden purpose, a hidden hurt. You’ve known you could always count on your brother and he on you.

Max puts two pints on the bar. James picks his up carefully, getting a good grip.

You can
see
the pint smashing against Hackwill’s smile, glass exploding, blood and froth drenching him.

But James just takes a deep draught of the beer and swallows. Hackwill, smile fixed, eyes hardening, repeats his offer, as if James had not heard him over the din. Somehow, the noise of the pub dies down. You know everyone is paying attention.

‘You can fuck right off, Hackwill,’ James tells him, verbally slapping the generous grin from his face. ‘I’d rather have a drink on General Galtieri than you.’

Hackwill plainly doesn’t recognise or remember either of you, the Marion brothers. For a moment, he looks shocked, as though he – the bully – is about to cry. Everyone in the pub notices and laughs a little louder, talks a little more raucously. They are all delighted to see the squaddie see off Robert Bloody Jaguar Hackwill. Everybody remembers their school bully. No one ever forgives.

You clap your arm round James and try to pay for your pints. Max, emboldened, refuses to accept the money and says the drinks are on the house for you both.

Hackwill is still there, smile frozen.

‘And Reg,’ you shout across the pub, ‘you can fuck right off too, fat boy.’

Everybody cheers.

Hackwill and Jessup drink up fast and hurry out. Neither you nor James has to buy a drink all night.

* * *

In the Falklands, James, practically on consecutive days, gets close to a Victoria Cross – only this isn’t a declared war, so they aren’t handing them out – and a dishonourable discharge. On one day, he fights on while cut off from his own unit and brings in three wounded men. Later in the week, he trains a rifle on an officer he claims is about to summarily execute a sixteen-year-old Argie who is surrendering. These actions, officially processed simultaneously, cancel each other out. James has to take an early bath, removed from active duty even before the brief conflict is over. You wonder if you taught him (by example) his have-a-go foolhardiness. This possibly dangerous streak makes him, in a real sense you aren’t ashamed of, a hero.

* * *

You live in London with Chris, your girlfriend since university. When you got together, you were accused of cradle-snatching but the difference between eighteen and twenty-three is different (legally, apart from anything else) from that between fourteen and nineteen.

You supervise adventure holidays for deprived and not-so-deprived kids. You yomp around Dartmoor or the Highlands of Scotland with spooked inner-city teenagers. The lack of streetlamps at night freaks them. To give the week-long courses shape, you construct them as treasure hunts, burying prizes and giving teams treasure maps full of puzzles to solve. After a few days’ resistance, most kids fall in and enjoy using their minds and limbs. When the first ‘treasure’ is discovered to be a cache of beer, even the most recalcitrant come round.

One day, you’d like to take your treasure hunts overseas, preferably to Tortuga. You’ve sailed since university and you and Chris get out on the water most weekends. Chris calls you ‘Captain Blood’ or ‘Seaman Staines’; you call her ‘Mr Smee’ or ‘Anne Bonney’. It’s not really appropriate to fly the Jolly Roger from a Mirror dinghy, but you do. You name your boat
Hispaniola
, after the one in
Treasure Island
.

You try to spend as little time as possible under roofs.

Chris gets her first degree, in history, and starts postgraduate work on a forgotten Irish turn-of-the-century feminist writer, Katie Reed. She plans to turn her thesis into a biography and is often in Dublin, delving in the records and libraries, while you’re out and about, climbing trees and rocks and braving the elements.

You get scars but aren’t seriously hurt. You have a few accidents – the odd snapped bone or bruised bonce – but never a fatality. Whenever anyone so much as trips up, you recite your mantra of ‘Haven’t lost a kid yet.’

Chris falls pregnant but loses the baby. This makes you both think. You decide that, after another six months, you’ll either split up or get married.

* * *

Meanwhile, James knocks about the world a bit, coming home to Sedgwater to roost every few months. He takes international courier jobs and you twit him about becoming a mercenary or a pirate. He helps out on one or two expeditions into jungles or deserts, and an amateur interest in archaeology leads him to attach himself to the odd dig, where his survival skills and outdoor capabilities come in handy. He even joins you on a few of your rougher adventures.

Chris comments that she could do with a Marine to help her get through those Irish archives. You point out that her heroine would probably have been in favour of assassinating James, which leads her to recount at length Katie Reed’s actual position on armed rebellion and her war journalism. Like a lot of your ‘disputes’, this one ends in bed.

Mum remarries, to a bloke called Phil Parslowe, an antiques dealer. Laraine gets divorced from someone called Fred whom you never liked and floats around, a brittle thirty with a too-frequent sour expression.

The big upheaval in the Marion family is a road-widening scheme. In 1989, Mum receives a compulsory purchase order for the family home. It’s an end-of-the-row house, the only one in the street scheduled for demolition. You and James converge on the old home to give support. Phil has got hold of maps and plans and shows you exactly what will be done. The planned extra lane on the Achelzoy road will cut through your living-room and completely demolish the garden.

Will the workmen find those marbles? Phones the cat, in his grave under the forsythia bush, will be disturbed by the spread of the road on which he was tragically run over in 1972.

You can’t understand why the road is to be widened on your side. Across the way is a scrap of parkland hardly worth keeping. There was a swing there when you were kids; now it’s a hollow where rubbish collects. The council claims it is favouring community resources over individual ones.

You and James agree there’s something bent about this. It turns out that behind it all is Robert Hackwill, district councillor, chairman of the Planning Committee. The road-widening is supposed to cope with the extra flow of traffic anticipated when Hackwill Properties finally gets its Discount Development – a major, controversial project – finished.

‘He has a long memory,’ you say.

‘Well, we have too,’ James replies.

* * *

As part of the on-going re-evaluation of your relationship, Chris insists you have monthly truth-telling sessions. This sounds to you like an infants’ kissing game, but it turns out to be her way of admitting to you that on one of her trips to Dublin she has had an affair with another graduate student, someone her own age. It is over, she insists. She says she loves you. You almost wish you had an infidelity to match hers – there have been crush-struck jailbait temptresses on your courses, but you’ve stayed away from them – but all you can talk about in the sessions is Sedgwater. As you are explaining about James and Hackwill, she bursts into tears. You end up in bed, but you are still not sure which way you’ll vote. If anything, the truth-telling has made you less certain how you feel.

* * *

James is staying with you in London for a few days. You’re going through the action plan. Chris doesn’t understand.

‘You think this Hackwill is knocking down your mum’s house because you wouldn’t let him buy you a pint?’

‘Essentially, yes,’ you say.

James nods.

‘That’s silly,’ she protests.

You and James remember the copse.

And all the other times. All through school, Hackwill was there. After the copse, it was less concerted, but if either of the Marion brothers got a boot in the back or a thump on the head, Hackwill was there.

After primary school, he didn’t even do it himself. He had his sidekick Reg Jessup for that, and a coterie of hangers-on: Mack McEwan, Pete Gompers, Shane Bush.

‘He was the school bully,’ you say.

‘And you two were heroes. You stood up to him. Good for you.’ Chris is being sarky.

‘We just looked out for each other, Chris. Tried not to take any stick.’

‘Has it ever occurred to you that you ought to be grateful to him?’

This is hideous heresy. You and James both blurt out, ‘What?’

‘If you hadn’t learned to take care of yourselves, Jimmy’d have been killed in the Falklands, and you’d have broken your neck hauling some kid out of a well. Your bully forced you to become the macho, outdoors, competent, capable Super Marion Brothers you are.’

‘Fuck off, Chris,’ you say.

‘Them’s fighting words.’

She biffs you with a cushion. James laughs and she batters him too. By now, you’re all a bit drunk.

* * *

Weeks dribble away. You’re so caught up in appeals and turn-downs on the house – which you still think of as home – that you worry less about Chris and the Marriage thing. James sets up camp in Somerset and sends reports about organised resistance.