Ventriloquists (51 page)

‘Fancy meeting you here,’ said Vig.

‘Small world.’

‘Literally… So what happens next?’

‘I’m trying to get out of school,’ Phyllie replied. ‘I’ve walked all the way round – there’s no door and no gate.’

The fence was also (Vig estimated) ten metres or so high.

‘And you don’t fancy a climb, I suppose,’ Vig suggested.

‘In these shoes?’

Vig tested the strength of the chainlink with one hand; he squeezed to see if it would break – perhaps it was rustier than it appeared… No, it wasn’t.

‘What’s in there?’ he asked.

‘I told you. A school.
My
school.’

‘I thought you were joking. I met Don and Charlie. I told them they had to work together. I sent them off to do my bidding.’

Phyllie smiled. ‘Bet they loved that. Doing what?’

‘Spreading the word. That all of this is an experiment; it’s not real.’ Vig shrugged. ‘If we can sow a few doubts, that can hardly be a bad thing.’

‘And what if no one believes them?’

Vig shrugged again. ‘Negative news spreads as fast as positive. Faster, probably.’

Phyllie leaned against the fence and gripped a couple of links. ‘Come on, this is like
A Letter to Brezhnev.
Get me out of here, Vig.’ And she sang the first bar of ‘Rescue Me’.

‘Benny said this was all ours to control, right? So why don’t we abuse the responsibility we’ve been handed?’ He cleared his throat. ‘Listen to me, fence,’ he said in his best English accent (he sounded like the actor Trevor Eve). ‘
You do not exist
. I unmake you. Go…’

Vig even flexed a karate chop at the fence – hey presto! – for extra panache and
shazam.

Nothing happened.

Bursting out laughing, Phyllie managed to say, ‘Oh your
face
, Vig.
Bless.
’

‘Why didn’t that work?’

‘You look crestfallen…’ Phyllie was still chuckling. ‘You didn’t think I might’ve tried that then? Thanks for the vote of support.’ But she wasn’t offended, in fact she found the whole situation very close to hysterically funny. ‘You look like you’ve knocked your tennis ball into the neighbour’s garden. And there’s a nasty little yapping dog playing with it.’

Somewhat sulkily Vig replied, ‘The situations are not a million miles apart, in case you haven’t noticed, Phyl.’

‘Am I the dog or the tennis ball?’ Phyllie started laughing afresh.

‘I could always walk away, you know.’

‘Oh don’t whinge.’

‘Seriously. I don’t know why that didn’t work.’

‘You didn’t make it,’ Phyllie guessed. ‘Maybe it’s mine to dispose of… only that didn’t work either.’

‘If I wanted to conjure up a shovel, would I be able to?’

‘A shovel? Are you planning to
dig
me out?’

‘Or a pair of shears then! What am I, some sort of expert!’

‘Well what am
I,
Vig? You’re treating me like an old hand.’

‘…Sorry.’

‘Where are they, by the way? Charlie and Don: where did they go?’

‘The road not taken,’ Vig answered. ‘We hit a crossroads a mile or so back. I told them to go left and I turned right… They’re to find me at a place I want them to find me: that’s the challenge I set them… I don’t know if that’s metaphysical or just vague and woolly.’

‘It’s the Overlap,’ said Phyllie. ‘My daughter told me about it. Sort of.’

‘Your daughter…’

‘Yes, I have a daughter. It’s complicated. Another time, Vig. I think I need to get out of here.’

‘Or I have to get in.’

‘To my school?’

‘No you’re right. Start climbing, Phyl. And that’s an order.’

‘Ooh. I love it when you talk dirty.’

8.

They walked over hill and dale, where the winds had colours but the animals and plant life did not. Rabbit-shaped absences of colour hopped in front of their footfalls; bird-shaped absences of colour swooped over their aching heads.

But were they getting anywhere? It was hard to tell if they had made any progress, the sky remained cloud-covered for a mile after mile, the cumulonimbus a gorgeous aquamarine hue against the dirty cream sky. Besides which, neither of them wanted to question the assumption of progress being made (by placing one foot in front of the other, surely they were moving towards an end-up point somewhere); for both of them, a walk was anyway a welcome break, a way of spending the poison-induced hangovers that they surely must be nursing, back in the real world. A walk was a way to discuss their home lives.

Vig admitted that he and Dorota were at a standstill, developmentally and emotionally speaking. ‘And Don didn’t help much, I must say.’

‘No. No I don’t suppose he did.’

‘…How’s it going with you?’

Never in living memory had Phyllie stepped so close to blurting out the truth: that she was frightened of her time at home. A host of conflicting fears troubled her, here, sufficiently far away from that existence that she could view it, stripped of any inevitable proximate passion, with objectivity. Contemplating Vig’s question, Phyllie sighed and wondered where to begin. Not only was she frightened of Roger’s escalations of libido, and the new and
outré
acts that they would share together to quench it, she was frightened that one day (soon) he would stop wanting to achieve these sexual complicities. That one day he would cease fancying her, either for the duration of her pregnancy or longer. That he would move on to person new (not necessarily women either). That the baby inside her had brought their love life to an end, and not with a bang but with a whimper.

‘Roger has a theory,’ said Phyllie, ‘all women eventually marry their fathers.’

‘With respect, I think Freud might’ve come up with something along those lines first.’

‘Well he was right, whoever it was. I married my father when I married Roger. They’ve even got the same name! That should’ve been a clue, don’t you think? I’ve been punishing myself for something ever since.’

Vig spent a few seconds tiptoeing through his thoughts.

‘Was your dad a psychologist too?’

‘No. He sold used office furniture and dreamed of winning the Pools… He was in
The Sun
the other year.’

‘I didn’t realise the Pools were still going.’

‘Not for that… I have no idea. He was a regional slimmer of the year for East Sussex. Lost fourteen stone in eight months… He’d ballooned up to twenty-nine stone after Mum died. Lived on four pizzas and a bottle of brandy a day. Eighty-a-day on the snouts.’

‘Wow.’

‘…I think it’d be fair to say it was more than a cry for help. He wanted it over and done with.’

‘So what changed?’ asked Vig.

‘I will never know – he won’t tell me. I’ve stopped asking, to be honest: it gets embarrassing after a while.’

Vig made the mental adjustments that needed to be made. Up until this point he had assumed Phyllie’s father to be deceased. Fortunately he had not asked Phyllie if she missed him terribly.

‘Saul Bellow wrote that it’s a rare man indeed who isn’t affected evermore by the sexual advice of his father… or words to that effect.’

Phyllie sniggered. ‘And where does that leave girls?’

‘I have no idea… I can’t help questioning whether I think it would be better or worse to meet some other people, on the trail as it were – the trail of the lonesome pine.’

‘Worse, would be my vote. I’m actually enjoying myself – I’m sure that’s not supposed to be how it works.’

Vig smiled as a butterfly-shaped absence of colour floated past. It was almost too cartoonish to be true.

‘Only one thing would make it perfect,’ Phyllie suggested. ‘Do you think we can turn the world’s lights off?’

Vig said nothing.

‘It’s been a while since I had you alone, after all. And technically… it’s not cheating if we’re actually not here. We’re in a room somewhere, not even touching.’

‘As far as you know.’

Phyllie laughed. ‘As far as
we
know.’

She stopped walking. The wind blew through her hair in streaks of orange and gold. She felt pained – she felt threatened – by the chance of rejection. Uxoriousness was one of Vig’s more regrettable traits. She waited.’

‘
Al fresco?
’

‘As if there’s a choice.’ Phyllie started to unbutton her blouse.

‘No, let me,’ said Vig. ‘We’ve waited long enough. I don’t want to rush it now.’

‘We won’t rush… Let’s try to make some stars,’ said Phyllie.

‘You mean real ones? In the sky?’

‘We’ll decide as we go along.’

Group Activity

1.

Barely sentences into an excavation, a dig for a particular lode of memories, senses and impressions, Connors stopped in the middle of a word (the word was
reservoir
) and let the dash that bisected its syllable stand for the whole, unwilling and impotent to strike deeper, and not possessing the correct tools to do so anyway.

It was Bernadette who provided him with an implement. She did so by completing the thought that Connors couldn’t manage.

‘Your brother died in the reservoir,’ she said softly. ‘That’s what you’re telling us, isn’t it.’

Connors nodded his head.

Bernadette, Massimo and Tommy watched him closely, each individually wondering what emotion the man would be led to explore. For the moment, no emotion was obvious: Connors was still alternating his shovel and his pick, dig-dig-digging in the mine.

‘We think so,’ Connors continued. ‘The problem was, he was never found. They never found his body.’

‘In a reservoir?’ asked Bernadette.

‘They searched for a week, I found out later. Me, my mum and my mum’s fella – we all watched him fucking about at the rail and fall in. But he didn’t even bob up, struggling-like. Spitting and coughing. Nothing. A big splash… and it was like he was never there. Goodnight, Vienna. We never saw the cunt again. He left this world, like… or
that
world I should say. A whole seven days to declare the poor cunt dead.’

‘It’s like you never knew him at all,’ said Tommy (surprising everyone). ‘Like you made him up or something.’

‘Sort of.’

‘…And do you think you’re going to find him here?’ Tommy went on, his tone interrogatory but not unkind.

Once again, Connors nodded; then he shrugged. ‘I have no idea. But here’s as good a place as any. Looking on the bright side.’

And he was about to resume the story of his brother’s drowning – when there was a knock on the door through which they had entered Tommy’s house on Benny Hill.

Tommy stood up and walked over. On opening the door wide, the party was able to see two visitors: one fat and one thin, short and old. Both of them looked too weary to be awake.

‘Sorry to bother you,’ said the younger of the two – the fat man – ‘but we have a message you need to hear… None of this – absolutely none of it – is real. We are all being held in a cellar somewhere.’

‘Any questions?’ added the small old man.

And Massimo said, ‘
Charlie?
’

2.

Tommy invited the two men into the house.

The fat man, wearing a frayed and soil-spotted suit that he had stolen from a man they’d found dead in a ditch, walked with a limp so pronounced that it was more a matter of humane courtesy than of English manners that lifted Massimo, Bernadette and Connors to their feet in order that they might offer the visitor a seat.

‘Thank you,’ said Charlie Eastlight, spoilt for choice and selecting the chair that Connors had vacated.

It was only once he had sat down that the group paid any attention to the bloody state of Eastlight’s lower limbs and the shredded strips of his trousers.

‘What the hell happened to you?’ asked Massimo, giving voice to what everyone was thinking… but his voice was all but breathless. He meant more than his partner’s damaged legs.

Eastlight grimaced. ‘It was this cunt,’ he answered, gesturing towards Don Bridges (who was seating himself in Bernadette’s vacated chair with a nod of thanks). ‘Fed me to the foxes, didn’t he, the wanker.’

‘You bloody drama queen! It was only
one
fox,’ Don protested for the benefit of the group. ‘Christ that feels better to sit down.’

‘Oh that’s all right then,’ Eastlight continued sarcastically. ‘It was only
one
fox, everyone, who fed on me. This murderer threw a fox into the trap where he had me!’

A momentary silence ensued. Bernadette felt the sort of sorry embarrassment that she had used to experience when her parents argued upstairs… Tommy, meanwhile, gave no indication that he had a clue what was going on, his expression flitted between confusion and fury.

It was only Massimo who seemed willing to move the two men out of their verbal deadlock. He bent at the waist and kissed Eastlight on the cheek. Only seconds had passed since Connors’s story had been interrupted (to his relief but also to his consternation) but it seemed as though Massimo and Eastlight had been afraid of acknowledging one another with an appropriate sign of fondness. The kiss served to remind them of one another, the good and the bad events blurring, transforming…

‘So how are things back home?’ Massimo asked, unable to keep a grin away from his lips.

‘Oh, so-so.’ Eastlight looked away, taking in Bernadette with a nod. ‘The kids left home.’ And he laughed.

And he laughed some more. There was something deranged and uncontrolled – uncontrollable – about this laughter.

Frowning ever so slightly, Massimo explained: ‘This is Charlie. My boyfriend. Partner. Whatever you want to call it.’

‘You’s benders?’ asked Tommy, also frowning, but frowning a good deal more urgently than ever so slightly.

Massimo faced him. ‘Yes. To make sure we’re all clear on this, Charlie and I are homosexuals with violent streaks.’ Charlie’s appearance had made him bold and loose-lipped. ‘We had a couple of teenagers as hostages until recently. We were planning to kill them.’

Bernadette flinched. Massimo shot her a glance that he hoped would express an apology.

‘Now now, Mass,’ said Eastlight; ‘no bean-spilling at the party until we’ve all been introduced.’

Ignoring this, Massimo turned to the old man.

‘You fed him to a fox?’ he demanded.

Don nodded. ‘I did. After I smacked his legs with a spade. For the trouble he’s caused me.’

Massimo shook his head. ‘I’m surprised you’re still alive. Charlie, why haven’t you –‘

‘I’m not,’ Don replied.

‘…You’re not what?’

‘Alive. I strung meself up from a tree in the woods. Suicide: the best way, all things considered. Wouldn’t you say, Eastlight?’

Eastlight had stopped laughing. ‘Fuck you, Donald Duck.’ Noticing Massimo again, he added, ‘Yeah. Me as well. Sorry, Mass. Dead as a doornail. He buried me in a trap in the woods.’

‘You don’t look very dead,’ said Tommy.

As surreptitiously as she could manage, Bernadette inched closer to the door. The mention of a plan to kill teenagers was what had done it, what had broken the emotional glue. No less than she had ever wanted anything in her life, she now wanted
out of this building. Away from these murderers, away from
Benny Hill…

Home.

Bernadette wanted to go home.

‘Are you suggesting, sir,’ Don went on, ‘that Eastlight could’ve killed
me?
’

‘That’s exactly what I’m suggesting. No offence.’

‘None taken, sir.’

‘You don’t know what I’m going to say yet,’ said Massimo.

‘Oh I think I do, sir. You see an old man with ruined knees…’

‘Not as ruined as mine!’ Eastlight interjected.

‘…and you think he must be weak.’ Don grinned. ‘Believe me, sir - whatever harm you’ve done to man, woman, child or beast… I’ve done worse. That’s a promise.’

Tommy moved away from the door. ‘But why are the two of you together, that’s what I want to know.’

The door had been left ajar, Bernadette noted. A matter of a few steps… and out. How tired were her legs? Could she run? Maybe not; or maybe not far, or maybe not fast… but she couldn’t stay in here, no – not with these animals.

But.

Abandoning Benny Hill would mean abandoning any hope of an answer. Any chance of progress.

Should I?

Images of Massimo and Charlie kicked in hard, completely made-up images; horror film, constructions. The torture of teens. (She couldn’t help it.) She helped them roll flesh away from sinew on a victim’s thighs… By picturing it – she knew – she was guilty, she was present. No longer a healer, she was its obverse.

‘Vig told us to tell you,’ Don explained, replying to Tommy’s question. ‘We’re no more content about it than you are… but there you go.’

‘Tell us what?’ asked Connors.

‘Tell you this,’ Don answered, cutting in before Eastlight’s open mouth. ‘The world you see is false, ladies and gentlemen. It’s a world of your own creation. And a world for you – a world for you to obliterate.’

Bernadette decided to stay.