B004M5HK0M EBOK (3 page)

‘Did you build that bonfire?’ she asked Joe.

‘I helped,’ he said.

She pressed on, trying to find a bonfire-related question that didn’t involve a mention of chopping, smoking, lighting fires... she came up with: ‘I hope you checked for hedgehogs this morning, if it’s been there overnight. You know they crawl in there and sleep, if it looks cosy?’

‘Hedgehogs, horses, people. We checked it, don’t worry. When they light it, there’s gonna be a big parade. They’re gonna put a effigy on the fire and burn it. You’re gonna stay and see it?’

‘Oh, yes. And the knife throwing. I want to see that, too.’

‘Yeah? Why?’

‘I heard it was good. Zizi and...’

‘Zizi and Zsa-Zsa. Crazy girls. Yeah, it’s one hell of an act.’

‘What do you do here... Joe?’

‘Joszef. You can call me Joe.’

‘Do you have an act, Joe?’

‘No, Emily. It’s Emily, right?’ She was eating a meatball but she bobbed her chin up and down, acknowledging that he was right. He said, ‘I don’t put on a mask. I make some of the props. The art works – did you see the metal horse upstairs? I made that. I used to be a blacksmith in my home town. So now I do this.’

‘Where’s home?’

‘Hungary. What about you, Emily? You from here?’

‘Yeah, I’m... I’m one of the neighbours. One of the guests. I live in this street. I’m not from London, though. But this is a city of immigrants, isn’t it? Nearly everyone’s moved here from somewhere, including me. Though I only moved from the countryside – no need for a passport.’

‘You OK, Emily?’

‘Do I look miserable? My dog just died.’

‘Oh, that’s a shame.’

‘Well, everyone who has a dog, it dies eventually. I just need to get over it.’

‘That’s OK – it just happened... didn’t it?’

‘Yes. And I’ve been moping about the house the last few days, and I realised I’d been operating for years as one half of a human/dog duo. I need to get used to life without the furrier half. The separation is so real, I can feel it. If you had a diagram of the human body here now, I could point to the place where the wound would run from just beneath my armpit to just above my thigh – as if there was some kind of physical manifestation of the separation from Jessie.’

‘I don’t have a diagram of the human body, Emily.’

‘I don’t have any outward scar.’

‘Oh, OK. I wondered if you were going to ask me whether I wanted to see it.’

Emily thought,
Are you flirting with me, Joe?
She blushed. She looked at his neck where his shirt was open – the only naked part of him that she could see. He had a gold chain around his neck and some dark hairs on the region below the collarbone where his neck officially became his chest. She wondered if he had any scars that he would like her to see.

Joe said, ‘I got to get some props ready for the girls.’

‘The knife-throwing girls?’

‘Uh huh.’ He grinned. He gripped her bicep as if they were two men who’d just shared a pint, and he said, ‘You take care of yourself, Emily.’

He walked off towards the house, leaving behind his plate and plastic cutlery.
You’re not perfect then,
thought Emily. She picked up his plate and hers, so she could tidy up, and she looked at the grease on her hands and under her fingernails. She would have been grateful for one of those individually-wrapped alcohol-soaked hand towels just then, and thinking of it made her look towards Midori, which is how she happened to be watching her friend just when it happened: There were three or four explosions from a neighbouring garden as firework rockets went off, and Emily jumped and thought about gunshots – and then Midori went down. The Japanese girl dropped, as if someone had taken hold of the edges of her and was trying to shake her down like a duvet, and hadn’t held on tightly enough to the corners. It didn’t look as though it was something she was in control of personally. It didn’t look as though she was ducking or dancing or reaching for a record from the case at her feet. It looked as though she had been shot.

Oh my God!
thought Emily.
She’s down!
And her next thought was that she sounded ridiculous. And then she started running towards the DJ booth, hoping that Midori was only looking for something and would pop up again in a minute and carry on. The music continued, of course, because Midori’s job involved changing the records, not cranking a machine to keep them spinning round. Emily got to the booth and Midori was on the floor, apparently unconscious. There was no blood, and she was breathing. The two Aussies, Jake and the other one, whatever his name was – the rude one – had seen what had happened and reached Midori at about the same time.

‘What happened?’ Jake asked Emily.

Emily said, ‘I don’t know. I was watching and she just went down. She hasn’t been shot?’

‘What d’you reckon, Rob?’ Jake said to his friend, and Rob said, ‘She’s fainted, mate. Maybe it was something she ate – a dodgy prawn?’

Rob took hold of Midori under the armpits and hauled her out of the DJ booth, then he shifted her up into his arms, so her chest was on his chest, and carried her with her head on his shoulder towards the house. And meanwhile Jake stepped into Midori’s place, selected the next record to be played, and lined it up and mixed it in seamlessly. The music continued, and nobody who hadn’t witnessed it would have known that anything had happened at all. From the nonchalant way Jake and Rob behaved, it seemed this must be a fairly regular occurrence in the outback or wherever they had grown up, something they had been drilled in, the way children on fault lines are told what to do if there is an earthquake, except that their particular fault line required that they should step in at a moment’s notice to DJ at artistic parties, or carry around unconscious Japanese women in white PVC hotpants.

Emily followed Rob as he carried Midori towards a side entrance to the house, just along from the kitchen. Presumably this entrance had once been a servants’ entrance. It was poorly lit and out of sight from the party, bordered by a herb garden, and what had presumably once been a vegetable patch, though it was now overgrown with weeds.

As they stepped through the mud in the dark, Emily looked over at the brightly lit front door that led directly to the grand hall. Rob must have caught her look: ‘Don’t want to make a fuss, eh?’ he said to Emily, by way of explanation. And it was true that if he had carried Midori through the grand hall in front of all their neighbours, there would have been an awful fuss. But he tried the side door and it wouldn’t open, so then Emily tried it too. As Emily was rattling the handle, without any luck, Midori stirred a little on Rob’s chest, and vomited. But because Rob was pretty quick about setting her down and lying her in the recovery position, and because the vomit had come out in an arc, none of it went on any of them, it just puddled into the grass.

‘She’s pretty crook, eh?’ said Rob.

‘Should I get a doctor?’ said Emily.

‘What about Dr. Muriel?’

Dr. Muriel was a capable woman but she was a doctor of ethics and had no medical training, so far as Emily knew. She might have been the person to ask about whether it was any better to eat a pig than a dog or a toddler, but even if she’d been available to answer the question, this probably wasn’t quite the right time to ask.

‘Midori?’ said Emily. And then again, ‘Midori!’ She said to Rob, ‘I wonder if I should take her to hospital.’

Just then Midori opened her eyes and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and said, ‘Aw. Sorry about that, Rob.’

‘Can you stand up?’ Rob asked her. Midori stood, a little shakily. Rob said,‘This was gonna be your big night.’

‘I know.’

‘Come on, I’ll get you a glass of water and then I’ll walk you home.’

‘Do you want me to come?’ said Emily.

‘No, you’re all right,’ said Rob.

‘It’s OK, Emily,’ Midori said. ‘You stay at the party. I’m gonna go lie down.’

‘What could have made you so ill?’

‘Punch,’ said Midori.

‘You only had two swigs of it.’

‘Well I’m glad I stayed away from it,’ said Rob, ‘because it must be lethal. Mate, it’s really done you in.’

He took his scarf off and put it around Midori’s neck. He took his jacket off and put Midori’s arms into the sleeves as though she was a child who needed help getting ready for school – right arm first, that’s it. Then the left. Midori was shivering. Rob put his arm around her shoulder and steered her towards home.

Emily wandered a little further up around the side of the house, away from the front door. It was quiet here – or at least, though she could hear the music, there was no-one else around – and she was trying to decide whether or not she should go home or stay at the party. She felt she ought to stay and try to enjoy herself now that she didn’t have to go home for Jessie. Dear old Jessie – what would she want Emily to do? Emily heard, then, the sound of a dog whimpering. Now, Emily was an imaginative person but she wasn’t suggestible and she didn’t believe in ghosts. She knew it wasn’t Jessie trying to communicate with her from the afterlife. What was it, then? She decided to investigate.

She stood still and listened for a moment. The sound was coming from a cellar door a little way off to her left. She put her hand on the latch and heard it click open, and she pulled at the door. The sound of a dog in distress got louder. Emily peered in. The cellar space was vast. Clearly it was currently being used as a storage space for all the gaudy accoutrements of the performers at the house because she could see, stacked in the shadows, eight giant painted heads, and other objects whose form and function was less discernible. Half a dozen fireworks exploded in the sky above her, and a little of the light reached down into the darkness and showed Emily a few bars of what seemed like a cage, and she heard the animal whimper again. What sort of brute would do something like this?

‘Don’t open it!’ A man’s voice. She turned. It was Chris.

‘There’s a dog down there – I can hear it whimpering.’

‘So you thought you’d interfere? You didn’t think it might have been put down there on purpose?’

‘Yes but, seriously, why would anyone shut a dog down there in a cage in the darkness on a night like tonight?’

‘You’re a clever girl, Emily,’ he said. ‘You’ll figure it out.’

He went past her – he didn’t push, exactly, but he moved with intention, so that she had to step out of his way – and opened the door and went down into the cellar. Emily stood there for a moment, wondering what to do next. Then she saw Joe walking towards her out of the darkness. There seemed to be a rule tonight, that when she saw one of these two men, she’d shortly afterwards see the other – as if one always needed to be at hand to cancel the other’s actions out.

‘He’s got a dog in there,’ Emily said.

‘Who? Chris?’

‘You
knew
about it?’

‘What can I do? He’s the chief.’

‘Oh my God!’

‘It’s one night only, Emily. It’s OK.’

‘It’s really not.’

‘Come. We can go into the house this way. Maybe you can have a drink.’

Joe walked further up the side of the house and Emily followed him. It was very dark there, there was no path and the only light was from the stars, the occasional firework, and whatever faint illumination reached them from the windows of the house higher up on the first and second floor. Emily stumbled and scratched her leg on some holly leaves and cursed, and Joe took her hand, matter-of-factly, so she wouldn’t fall into the next bush.

She strained her eyes looking into the darkness. Was there someone else here? Up ahead of them, she heard the rustling sound of movement in the bushes. Or maybe it was the wind, or water in a stream. She thought she saw the glint of something silver – a knife? Or a bit of tinsel on a tree? She wanted to say to Joe that being in the dark was like being deep underwater, not being able to hear or turn round quickly enough to see the predator behind you. But then she scratched her leg again and she hissed because it hurt, and then Joe stopped so she stopped right behind him and listened to him breathing, and she didn’t say anything about being underwater or what she thought she had seen.

He opened a door at the side of the house and led her into a corridor that smelled of damp stone. It was completely dark. The blackness in here trumped the blackness outside, which at least had layers and shapes in it. Joe edged forward, and Emily could tell from the way his left arm was moving that he was feeling for something in front of him – a doorway or a light. She put her hand lightly on his back and edged forward with him. ‘Shh,’ he said, though she hadn’t said a word.

He must have reached what he’d been looking for because he stopped. A little bit of light appeared in front of them and she could see that he had pulled at the edge of a very thick, heavy curtain until there was enough of a gap for him to peep round.

‘Ach,’ he said, very quietly. ‘No, we’re too late.’

‘What is it?’

‘The knife throwing.’

‘We’ve missed it?’

‘No, they’re just about to start.’

‘Well, can I see?’