Turquoiselle (17 page)

As
he returned, tramping in along the gravel drive for a last scan of the sea from
the promenade-terrace, he heard a furiously whirring mechanical sound. Carver
stepped back against the wall of the building as a bicycling Charlie came
buffeting past, turgid and erratic, his legs, in their too-tight-but-floppy
jeans, labouring like a pair of whipped epic-film slaves hauling rocks. The
gravel sprayed up, the split wave of a shallow pool. Some hit the outer glass
of the blinded ground floor windows.

Carver
did not believe that Charlie saw him. Maybe Charlie could see nothing beyond
the weird and possibly ill-advised goal of driving the bicycle on and on at
the topmost speed he could conjure, which was about three miles an hour.
Charlie’s face was dense red again, and angrily fixed. He rained sweat.

His
eyes were filmed and blind as the windows.

Midnight. Carver
knew, since the small screen he could access behind a panel in the wall, (the
helpful food-bringing girl had shown him) gave him the hour, along with a
selection of concurrent hours in other time-zones. It was 7 p.m. in New York,
around 4 p.m. in San Francisco. No clues there to anything much. He would know
without looking. As for it’s being 5.20 of the following morning in Cesczeghan,
he had never heard of it, though it must lie considerably farther east than
Britain.

Carver
opened the door of his room and went into the corridor. The blurred amber
light that automatically came on there after sunset, reminded him of the sort
of stormy gloaming paraphrased in some old paintings. It gave sufficient
illumination to find the walls and doors, and just too much to let the unblinded
windows keep their views all clear. Carver pressed close to a pane, (a child
looking out at the wide world), shading his eyes in against the glass. Now he
could see a sable landscape beyond. Black blocked on black, taking a muted
glint from the building’s lights.

On
its hill, the shed was glowing like a torch.

The
colour was vivid, not needing any enhancement. (He must have been aware of it
before
shading out the
corridor light. And, as before, his
imagination
had mitigated, dismissed the
glow. Now nothing but sightlessness could.)

Turquoise.
Alert Level low, between Blue and Green.

Even
so, a Level of Alert.

There
were just seven objects in there, of five categories, unimportant, mundane,
adrift in the middle of a wooden table. On a rise in a group of trees, a
quarter mile off.

Burning
bright.

A
loud noise, and Carver stepped back from the window. (It was true, like this,
the glow faded, was minimised, might even pass as some security lamp, if your
mind was on other matters.)

Into
the corridor, from the direction of the stairs, rolled Ball and boiler-suited
Fiddy, and then Van Sedden. Then Charlie, even from the stairs pink, if not
scarlet, and in a plain black T-shirt over another pair of equally unequal
jeans. Anjeela did not appear. Why would she?

“Car,
Car,” cried Ball, with a drunken happy musicality. “Come join our revel!”

He
theatrically bore an uncorked bottle of red wine, one third full. Van Sedden
had a bottle of greenishwhite, two thirds full. Fiddy carried a bottle of
scotch. This was three thirds full, but open. Charlie had a tall glass of what
looked like Coke, fizzing. He and Fiddy did not seem pissed, as the other two
did, but even so, ‘merry’, as Sara had been used to say. Car, at bay, stared at
them. But there would be surveillance out here too. “Sure,” said Car, and let
Fiddy hand him the whisky.

Fifteen

“Pass
the port.”

“There
is no port, you arsehole. ‘Swhisky.”

“Whisky
and wine–”

“Rich
and fine–”

“Fucking
the fuck shut up and pass the fucking booze, you arrant bloody cunt.”

“Pour
it out,” expanded Fiddy, (this piece of conversation was between him and Ball),
“and stick it in.”

“Stick
it somewhere,” grumbled Van Sedden resentfully.

His
own white wine was consumed. He had said he did not like whisky. And the
red
wine – Ball’s –
had gone down Ball’s throat to the last drop, Ball balancing the bottle-neck in
his mouth, his head tipped right back, a kind of
divertissement,
(as Sedden had
remarked), based on a performing seal.

“Shoulda
got more,” observed Ball. He could drink, he claimed, “anything”. He and Fiddy
therefore were by now two thirds down the whisky bottle. Carver –
considerately? – had only taken a couple of mouthfuls from it. (The exchange of
probable germs did not especially concern Carver. Immunisation was a matter of
course at Mantik. And, you assumed, here at this place, too.)

“Fucking
bollock they don’t keep the bar fucking open after twelve,” said Sedden to the
terrace pavement.

“True,
fucking true, dear swine,” (Ball), “though maybe they rightly think guys like
you, my prince, need to stop after two bottles of Pinot Grigio and one of
Sauvignon Blanc. Eh? D’you suppose?”

Charlie
giggled. It transpired his Coke had also contained a double vodka, his fourth
double. But he had eked it out.

“Shut
the fuck up,” suggested Sedden.

And
for a while silence dropped.

The
five men sat on three of the griffin-armed benches, on the terrace above the
cliff-end and the stretching, glinting, now moonless ink of the sea. Stars in
the sky were pale as grains of rice, since some dim light still leaked from the
building to dilute them. Though none from the shut main doors.

Carver
was bored and restless, both these states under firm control. There had been
sessions like this at the teenage college. He had swiftly managed to avoid
them. Two hours, he estimated, had tonight dragged themselves through and away
from the drinking party. In a short while, Carver could take himself also away
to his room.

“
You
don’t say much,”
said Ball, waving from the adjacent bench. About a metre separated them.

Carver
smiled, noncommittal.

“Why’s
that?” said Fiddy, “why’s he so quiet?”

“What,”
said Carver mildly, “do you want me to say?”

“Oh,
tell us a bit about yourself,” said Ball.

“You
first,” said Carver, amiable.

“Oh,
me,” said Ball. “Don’t get me started.”

“No,
for fuck’s fucking fuck’s sake don’t get
him
started,” muttered Sedden.

Fiddy
said, “Go on, Car. We all wanna know about
you
. You’re the big star, here.”

“Where?”
said Carver, gentle. “
Where
am I the star?”

“Up
there!” roared Ball abruptly. “Dazzling!” He waved the whisky at the sky over
the sea, and Charlie sprang up with curious agility from the third bench and
grabbed the bottle from him. “You’ll spill it all!”

Then
Charlie, standing reasonably steady, tilted the whisky into his own mouth, and
gulped two, three, four singles on a breath.

“You’re
all a pack of cunts,” decided Sedden. He too stood up, tottered, held to the
back of the stone bench. “I’m go’ff to bed.”

“Bye-bye,”
said Ball. “No loss.”

Sedden
hauled himself, using the bench as a prop, tottered over and, fetching up in
front of Ball, smashed him across the face with his fist.

Ball
reeled back. A jet of blood, looking much blacker and wetter than the sea, shot
into the air.

“Oops,”
said Fiddy. He got up in turn and carefully walked some distance along the
terrace. There he sat down on the pavement, resting his back on the prongs of
the rail, looking at the building’s facade, not the sea-view. He seemed soon to
fall asleep.

Van
Sedden and Ball, however, were now fighting. They staggered about, grunting and
moaning, aiming meaty blows that mostly did not connect. Until, lunging to
deliver another of these, Sedden fell over. From his knees, and averting his
face, he spat out a curtailed string of vomit, then bounded up again and
launched himself in encore at Ball. Ball’s lower face was a mask of murky
blood. His fists struck now, but constantly missing Sedden’s head, landing too
low on ribcage, shoulders. Sedden swerved at every impact, but did not go down.

From
his bench, Carver watched them. If surveillance cameras operated out here, as
surely they must, then either the monitors were asleep, or had skived off on
some personal errand.

Or
else, was that procedure here? Observe always, with no interference. Enough
rope for each to hang himself. Or did it make no difference?

It
was Ball who fell next. Sedden deliberately dropped down beside him. He sized
Ball’s head and neck and pulled Ball in that way towards him, as if to kiss his
bloodied lips, or lick them. Ball said, slurred and ridiculous, “You’ve bust my
Rolex.”

Carver
saw Charlie was standing up as well. He appeared steady, if in a rather
lopsided way. In total contrast to himself, he was white, and his face shone –
not with sweat, you realised. Tears were running out of both his eyes, more
urgently than the blood from Ball’s nostrils.

“Think
I’ll have a turn on the old girl,” he said, in a choked yet formal voice, the
polite little boy in the playground, frightened, but having had it drilled into
him he must always do, say, the Right Thing. “Bit of a cycle about. Bloody
good.”

Carver
found he in turn had got up. (Only Fiddy remained on the ground against the
railing, snoring sotto voce, as if also trying to be as well-mannered as he
could.)

Then
Charlie broke the spell – and the whisky bottle, which he dropped with a sharp-dull,
smashed-sugar crash on the paving. And without a pause he ran, faster than he
had seemed capable of before, along the gravel and  toward the far east side
of the building.

Van
Sedden was dedicatedly banging Ball’s head against the pavement.

Carver
went over, heaved Sedden up and off and cracked him hard on the jaw. Let go,
Sedden sat down on the stone. Lacking the support of bench or railing he then
curled slowly over, and lay on his left side, mindlessly gazing at Carver,
without interest. Ball was now throwing up. (Carver thought of Iain Cox and E-bone,
after Heavy had pushed them. Irrelevant.)

He
would go inside, Carver decided. Wake someone and get them out here to clear
up.

Before
he could take another step, he heard Charlie’s bicycle, noisy in the quiet,
tinnily whirring and scratching and pumping, furious and laden, back over the
gravel. It must have been stationed not so far off, by one of the more recessed
frontages, unseen. And look at it now. Coming back along the drive so very
fast, faster for sure than it had been ridden earlier, just as Charlie had run
so much faster. Whisky or adrenalin.

No
holds barred.

In
the moments before it happened Carver understood. Carver was not drunk, in no
way affected by the double mouthful of whisky. But he stayed immobile and
unspeaking, and watched with the other two who had kept the vestiges of
consciousness; Ball coughing and spitting, squinting, Van Sedden shivering,
focus, it seemed, partially restored to his vision.

The
bicycle erupted to within a few paces of them, then veered straight out across
the short edge of gravel, missing all the rose-pots, and onto the stone paving.
Charlie was astride the machine, flying easy as a bird, not breathing either
very fast. His legs beat up and down rhythmically. His eyes were huge, and dry.
Not afraid. He looked – determined. That was it. A striker about to score the
winning penalty, a bomb-happy pilot about to release the bomb-hatch above the
darkened, semi-sleeping town.

As
Carver already knew they would, man and bike burst on, missing the benches now,
and the men, over the pavement, that abbreviated border between earth and water
– and air.

They
hit the barrier of the rail, Charlie and the bicycle, full on, going in this
case at quite a speed.

The
bicycle seemed to implode, buckling, condensing.

Charlie
though lifted like a gull, up, up, over the top of the railing, up there in the
sky of void and stars, the wings of his arms spread wide. Then drifting in an
arc, not flapping now as when he floundered down the hill, but caught,
appropriately gull-like, as if on some supportive current of the night air. In
perceived yet unreal slow-motion once more, but graceful at last and self-possessed,
he curved across and downward, to the unseen rocks and shore below. Gone.

Sixteen

Gelatinously
cold, the lights painted the room and its twelve occupants.

It
was otherwise hot, the windows shut behind their blinds. (Looking out on all
sides at private grounds or open water, why were such blinds necessarily always
down, at least on the ground floors?)

Carver
sat on the comfortable but businesslike chairs with the other three men who had
survived the night: Van Sedden, Ball, Fiddy.

Even
the damaged squashed bicycle had been brought in. It lay on the space of wood-plank
floor between the four chairs and the sidelong desk. A fifth witness?

Behind
the desk, the other eight; six men, two women. Each wore a dark suit; the women’s
suits also, visible during their group processional entry from behind the desk,
had trousers. One of the women was fat, if not as fat as Charlie had been,
though he would be losing weight now, of course.

The
other woman was noticeably thin.

As
if to make identification – or comparison – between them easy.

The
men were all weights, all kinds, and of four clear racial types.

The
entire composite ranged from around the age of twenty-five-seven, (the thin
woman), to late fifties, early sixties (the tall slim black man in the Oxbridge
tie).

It
reminded Carver of job interviews he had sometimes, years ago, attended on
errands to do with Mantik. Or panels on TV – except for the amount of
interviewers in proportion to the – what were they, in fact –
candidates
?

Candidates
then for
what
?

Punishment
?

There
had been excessive alcohol and a punch-up.

A
man had ridden his bicycle at, and himself over, the brink of a cliff.

(Night
and flight, soaring, arcing down. Seconds of utter release – terror – mesmeric
unknowing. After which the hard floor of the world.)

Van
Sedden had muttered, as they waited here twenty minutes or so for the
interviewing panel to arrive, “Ride come comes before a fall.”

And
Ball had whispered, “Can it, cunt.”

And
Sedden had put his head in his hands and wept. And Ball had got up, sat down,
put his arm round Sedden, sat there staring into nowhere as Sedden cried on his
shoulder, and Fiddy grunted, and once or twice belched from hangover and bad
nerves.

After
the panel came in, everyone was pulled together, stiff-upper-lipped, yet
quiescent. Soldiers, Carver thought, who would get a beating, (another one), if
they did not shine up their gear, stand to attention, wear the masks of
discipline, of violence, under total subjugation.

What
did
he
look like then, he, Andreas Cava, child of psychopath moron and
crazy fool. He who had let the fight go on until its sheer futility had caused
him to intervene. And, as the bicycle ran, too late. Poised there, foreseeing
what came next, not attempting– Useless. It was not the drugs that had slowed
him down. Not the drink, which he had only reluctantly sipped.

He
was removed, was Carver.
Always
stood a little aside, a step or two
back. Uninvolved. Not wanting involvement. The lizard on the wall. The errand
boy. The cool partner. The quiet one. The watcher. A spy-machine.

Even if well-hidden,
the surveillance cameras and audio-relay had obviously picked up the scene on
the terrace. That nobody had hastened from the building in time to prevent a
tragedy was due to – it was suggested – an unforeseen glitch in wiring. (Or perhaps,
unrevealed laxity on someone’s part?)

They
had, nevertheless, been on the spot some two minutes after Charlie descended
from view. A ruffled company of men in shirts and jeans, not overtly armed, but
unmistakably Security. They had not c
ome
from the closed
main door.

Everyone
present on the terrace, including, till woken, the still-snoring Fiddy, had
been ‘escorted’ inside.

They
were shut in a narrow side room, that luckily (or logistically) had access to a
lavatory, and here Sedden went to vomit, and then Fiddy, and then around and
around again,
one
by one, both
politely taking their turns, waiting, gagging in tissues, until the other
staggered out from each bout.

Ball
had, it seemed, got rid of everything he needed to that way. He sat on the
floor – the room had only one chair, and democratically none of them used it.

Whoever
was there, aside from seeking and exiting the toilet, kept static and silent.
The only noises issued from the lavatory.

(Carver
had thought briefly of his father’s aggressive, expressive vomitings. Pushed
the memory away.)

About
an hour after, all of them were ushered to yet another area, a sort of
dormitory with ten bunks, and another adjacent wash-room.

Carver
lay down, and watched the darkness, which was only a darker light. (None of
this was like the period when this ‘place’ had first taken him.) He drifted asleep
once or twice, once woken by one more bout of strenuous puking in the washroom.
Donna came to mind now, at the house.

In
the first light – dawn presumably – how long had they been here, it seemed more
hours than maybe dawn would take to return – five o’clock? Six? – Carver was
spoken to quietly by one of the jeaned security men. No names were awarded
either way. “Get up, please. I’ll take you up.” And one more of this labyrinthine
warren’s steel lifts, and then another succession of corridors, and after these
the opening sky in windows, yellowish overcast today, and a view of trees, and
surely – the sheds – And then his own allotted room, with its sea view and time-panel.

“Be
ready for 10 a.m., please,” said the man. “Somebody will be up to take you.”

“Where?”
said Carver.

The
man said nothing. The door was shut behind him. But not locked.

Carver
did as he was told, naturally.

By
10 a.m., unbreakfasted, but clean, dressed and ‘ready’, two men entered who
waved him out, and down, and around, (lifts, corridors, annexes, blinded
windows), to the hot room with the wooden floor, and the three others and the
bicycle and the judging panel. (And
Any Judge’s Main Verdict
would be what?)

The thin woman
with the slight Italian accent said, “Well, we have listened to you all. From
what has been recorded by Security – aside from the interruptive glitching,
when sight and sound were lost – your accounts seem to tally with our own.”

She
was – was she? – a little like Silvia. Silvia Dusa.

Who
was dead. Also dead. But no. Too thin. Yet the hair, eyes – that circling
gesture of her right hand, expressive and non-English despite the inevitable probability
both she, and at least one of her parents, had been born in Britain –

The
interrogation/interview/trial had lasted three hours. During the first hour
they had been told, over and over, in varying forms, and as if they had not
been present, the facts of Charlie (Charles Michael Slade Hemel)’s final
bicycle ride. After that a recess was called. The panel walked out of the door
behind the desk, three skirt-suited women entered, and Sedden, Ball, Fiddy and
Carver were offered by them water, tea, coffee, crisps and sandwiches. Only
Carver and Fiddy accepted. Carver ate a little. Fiddy, made more capacious it
transpired by barfing, ate three sandwiches and drank a large bottle of
Perrier, only then going off decorously to crap and or pee, returning hale and
hearty, so Van Sedden cursed him, before being shushed by Ball. (
This
lavatory lay
just outside the hot room. You had to knock on the hot room’s outer door,
explain your mission, and were then let through and subsequently back in. Fiddy
had done all without shame. Practiced?)

The
next one hour and forty-four minutes, (there was a clock on the wall), entailed
each of the four men being told to speak, and speaking, saying what he
personally had seen and done, generally prompted, asked to elaborate, or tripped
up by the presiding bench of eight-person desk. They all asked questions or
broke in with side-long thrusts – “But if you were fighting/ being sick/asleep
at that point, how can you be quite certain?”

The
man who seemed to be Chinese, and spoke with a soft Mancunian accent, had
picked remorselessly on Ball. But Ball seemed, though uneasy and utterly
drained, to recognise it all as a gambit. He answered with leaden pragmatism
each time. The red-haired Celt, conversely, had it in for Sedden.

Why
did they – these people, this ‘Place’, “Us” – need to act out so much? It
decidedly was like a caricature drama of a courtroom, once more on TV. Or a
game of charades in a pub.

The
fat woman picked on Sedden as well. She drove him mad. In the end he slumped
down in his chair and seemed on the verge of fainting. That was when they had
the second break, which lasted six minutes.

Carver
they neither questioned (interrupted) nor psychologically pawed at.

They
let him speak. Listened. Said “thank you”, and moved on.

He
had, as conceivably they grasped, not been drunk, ill, in a rage or a fight or
asleep. But why trust him, why not subject him to the twiddling, needling
process the rest had to put up with? They (the ‘Place’, “Us”) knew it all any
way. They had the visuals and the sound records. Unless, maybe, there truly had
been a major glitch. It seemed unlikely.

When
the three hours of hearing and breaks was over, the panel withdrew again. Would
they pace back and pass sentence? It seemed not. A woman in a short dress, and
a boyish 1940’s US crew-cut, danced in and said they could all get over to
their ‘Work’ now. And the outer door was left wide. No Security stood there in
its un-Charlie-ish well-tailored jeans.

The
bicycle did not get up to follow them out. Nobody had referred to it.

Outside
none of them spoke to the others. Not even Sedden to Ball. They wandered off
along the corridor beyond the hot room, and the corridor was breathing through
a high up open window, showing leaves stitched on a cloudy windless mauve sky.

“Storm,”
announced Fiddy, portentously.

That
was all.

Charles
Michael Slade Hemel. C.M.S.H. Something flicked through Carver’s thoughts,
like a hare through long grass. You knew what it was, but could not see.

He
had no idea where the corridor led, but followed it round. No need to make
plans. Another young woman, blonde in a completely un-Donna way, stood waiting.
She too wore a dress, but carried a clipboard.

“Oh,
Mr Carver. Here you are. Just follow me. Mr Croft is waiting.”

Croft sat
against the blinded, lighted window, and was in silhouette. An old trick, clichéd
– exactly how he had played it the last time. The first time.

“Please
sit down, Car,” he said. “The nicer chair.”

The
window behind him, though, today was less luminous, the sun in cloud... His
silhouette had faded, and drew less significance. Carver had seen its face anyway.

Carver’s
eyes, now, did not water.

“Nasty
business,” said Croft pleasantly.

“Yes.”

“What
did you make of it?”

“I
don’t know.”

“Charlie
always had this thing about cycling. Kept a bicycle, but hardly ever got on the
machine. They’ll have to investigate all the background rubbish, of course.
Some emotional problem perhaps.”

Carver
did not speak. He wondered if they had yet recovered the body from the
shoreline below. They must have done. They would be testing it, what was
useable, for substances, irregularities, giving
it
the third degree as
it was now impossible to give that to Charlie.

Croft
shifted. His profile appeared, the large nose and jaw, the heavy-lidded eye
that today in the gloom did not glint.

Croft
rose. “Why not we go outside, have a stroll. Probably be a downpour later. What
do you say?”

As
before, Carver went after him to the doorway, the corridor, lift etc.

Not
long after they were again sitting on the bench on the rise, where they had sat
the first time. The mood of the weather had changed everything. There was no hint
of a breeze, nothing moved. The sky had thickly darkened, and the trees had
loosely darkened, out of shade into a premature twilight. The world, or this
piece of it, seemed to have stopped.

Sara
had been frightened of storms. That got worse as the years went on. Carver
recalled how once she had run in screaming from the street, seeming to bring
the pursuit of lightning and thunder inside with her. She had flown into her
bedroom and ripped shut the ineffectual curtains before slamming the door to
keep her in. But he had stayed in the outer room, watching at the window.