Dark Sister (13 page)

"Don't be silly, Alex."

"You look a bit flushed.
Whyzat
?"
His head fell forward. "A good evening's fucking?"

"Alex, I—"

"You've got some nerve.
Accusing me."
He drained his tumbler and let it fall
on the floor. It bounced harmlessly on the deep-pile carpet.

"Stupid thing to do."

"Stupid," Alex mimicked heavily.
A high,
mincing voice.

"Alex, I want to tell ..."

But she wasn't allowed to finish.
Alex drew back his fist and his first blow broke Maggie's nose. She reeled back
into the wall. Next he crashed his fist into her eye and Maggie saw stars, not
like in the cartoons, but white hot needles of light at the back of her vision.
He had to pick her up off the floor to strike a third blow, and by the time he
split her lip, her eye had already swollen shut.

Alex left her sprawled on the floor
snuffling snot and blood, and went upstairs to bed.

TWENTY-TWO

"I
wish you'd come to me first. If you'd been here the morning
after he hit you I'd have
had an injunction slapped on him that day, to keep away from both you and the
house."

Alison Montague didn't look like Maggie's
idea of a solicitor. She was pretty, under thirty, and she dressed in a suit so
sharp you could have sliced your finger on it. She wore silver battle-axe
earrings and she worked for Sedge and Sedge. Her room didn't look like Maggie's
idea of a solicitor's office, either. It had floral curtains and a play area in
the corner complete with toys, to amuse clients' children.

"As it is," Ms Montague arched
her eyebrows, "you walked out on them, and that sets you at a disadvantage."

"I wasn't thinking about the
consequences. I just wanted to get away."

Maggie's broken nose didn't look too bad,
though the bruises round her eyes had changed hue from lavender to a dirty
yellow. It was a matter of some relief that her loosened canines hadn't shown
any sign of falling out, and the swelling had gone from her lips.

"I understand that. No woman
should have to put up with domestic violence. How's this bed-sit working
out?"

Maggie shrugged.  “It’s not
the house I want.  It’s the children.”

“And you say he’s asked you to go
back?”

“Practically on
his knees.”

The morning following the
violence, Maggie had slipped out of the house before Alex got up.  She’d
had no intention of facing him.  She knew exactly what she was going to
do.

After all, Alex had hit her. 
Struck her! 
The man who had never previously so much as
raised his fist in anger.
  It had shocked her to the white
root.  She thought she knew the man she’d been living with for seven
years.  Where had he suddenly found this depth of violence?  It was
as if she’d slipped into a parallel universe, where the man she was living with
was like Alex in every detail except this.

She was not so naïve about the
world as to be surprised by the notion of marital violence.  A kick, a
slap, and a punch was as common a feature of many a marriage as the Sunday
roast. 
But not theirs.
  That wasn’t how
they lived their lives.  But now he’d placed the argument beyond
her.   When Alex had struck her, he’d punched a hole in the fabric of
her idea of who she was in the world.

He’d hit her, but she knew how to
punish him. 
Even if it meant suffering herself.
 
She had to make a stand.  Not for her new way of life-that was suddenly
all secondary, mere detail at the periphery of the violent event-but for her
integrity. 
For her sense of wholeness.

She would suffer over the
children.  But, she resolved Alex wouldn’t hit her again.

She had spent the morning in the
casualty ward at the hospital, before returning to study postcard adverts in
the post office and local newsagents’ windows.  Alex had indeed broken her
nose, but the small fracture on the upper septum didn’t require her nose to be
reset.  In any event, keeping her good looks was the last thing on her mind. 
She’d looked and felt terrible, shivering and wiping her painful nose with the
back of her hand and squinting through a closing eye. But by afternoon she'd
found a bed-sit in the New Markets area of town, two miles from home. It wasn't
particularly cheap, the room smelled damp, and the heating was coin-regulated
by a ferociously hungry gas meter. The kitchen and toilet were shared with two
other bed-sits on the same floor, and the shared bathroom came complete with a
toadstool growing in the corner.

But it was better than getting smashed in the face.

After telephoning to check no one was
home, Maggie went back to collect a few essential belongings and then installed
herself in her bed-sit like someone preparing for a siege. She spent two nights
there before calling Alex.

He begged her to come home. She
refused. For one thing her face still looked like a Halloween pumpkin, and she
didn't want the children to see her that way. Of course she could lie, but she
had an idea they'd know. It wasn't possible they could have slept through the
crashing violence. She also refused to tell him where she was living.

She spent a long time on the phone
talking to Amy and Sam, and promised to phone again the following evening.

Alex had woken from one nightmare into another.
That morning he didn't open his eyes to some slow realization of what he'd
done; he woke up to an instant
self-loathing,
and a
taste like wet sand in his mouth. He crept downstairs to look for Maggie,
searching the house in vain.

He desperately wanted to cry, but he couldn't.

The implications of her absence hit him as soon as the
children got out of bed. He readied Amy for school and dropped her off outside
the gates. Then he returned to the house with Sam, stupidly hoping Maggie
might have appeared. He was already late for work when he decided to take Sam
with him. It would be a nuisance, but he could keep Sam close by while
supervising the dig.

So he believed. Initially Sam thought it wonderful to
be at Daddy's place of work. Alex carried him on his shoulders, and Sam
regarded
this a
wonderful game. For five minutes. Then
he wanted to get down. Some of the diggers made a fuss of him for a while,
incurring Alex's pleasure; then, realizing what a brat Sam could be, their
interest cooled and they got on with their work. Sam demanded total attention
from his father: the more complex and sophisticated Alex's instructions to or
discussions with individuals on his team needed to be, the more desperately
Sam wanted to disrupt them; the closer the supervision Alex needed to offer,
the more Sam screamed to be included.

He yelled. He kicked. He cried. He spat.

After a fraught half-hour, Sam started pulling up
carefully laid depth markers, and wailed when they were snatched from his
hands. Later, while Alex was showing someone how to shore up a wall, Sam
tumbled into a ditch containing a foot of clay-coloured water.

Alex felt his anger
swelling, that
Maggie could leave him with these problems. Then he remembered what he'd done
to create this situation. Sam, wet and howling, now had to be taken home for a
drying out. Tania offered to help, and Alex was pathetically grateful.

On the fourth night Maggie agreed to have dinner with
Alex. He wanted to book a table at the Grey Gables, but Maggie didn't want
sweet wine and cut-glass. She stipulated the Pizza Palace and opted for mineral
water. He was late because his babysitter was late. Maggie had covered her
bruises with makeup, to spare his feelings.

"Come back. I'm desperately sorry."

"No. I'm not ready."

"Please, Maggie."

"I said no and I meant it. If you ask me again,
I'll get up and walk out."

"But what do you want?"

"I just want to see the children."

"Who's stopping you? See them any time!"

"I mean without you.
When
you're not there."

"Anything.
I'll make it
easy for you."

A girl in a baseball cap and with a hole in her tights
came to take their order, pencil poised.
"Sharing or
separate?"
"Separate," said Maggie.

Alex muddled through the first few days. He was able to make
arrangements here and there. Anita
Suzman
helped out,
and Tania took an afternoon off from the site to look after Sam at home. One
session with Sam, however, proved more than enough for most, and Alex had to
revise his arrangements with the child-minder.

"How long is it going to go on
for?" Tania asked him at the site.

"No idea. We're like a weather house
couple. She comes to the house in the evening and I have to go out to the pub.
She's very civil and all that, but as soon as I get back, she has to
leave."

"Seems like she's
having it all her way at the moment."
Alex looked at her.
"Well, she doesn't have to take any responsibility for the kids, but she
hasn't lost the emotional contact."

"I hadn't thought of it like
that. Maybe I should start making some conditions."

"No," said Tania. "That'd
just be using the children for barter."

"Hey! Alex!" It was Richard calling him.
He'd been working solidly on the Maggie dig. "Come over here!"

Alex let it run for a few nights before putting his foot
down. He told Maggie that the present arrangement was causing too much
distress. He told her the only way he would allow her to see the children was
if she'd move back in with them

.Maggie went away furious. She felt tricked. She was
supposed to be the one laying down the conditions, not Alex. Now that
he'dseen
how desperately she wanted to be with Sam and Amy,
he'd called her bluff.

She wasn't frightened for her children, she knew they
were in no danger, Alex's outburst notwithstanding; but the idea of not seeing
them drove her to distraction. She found herself running through the events of
the past weeks, wondering if she was asking too much, wanting to capitulate,
talking herself out of it, then changing her mind over and over again in
gymnastic flips.

She cried a lot. She felt she was disintegrating. But
she refused to return on Alex's terms, and sought legal advice, looking for
custody of the children.

"What I'll aim for," said Ms. Montague,
eyes lustrous and earrings a-dangle, "and I'm not saying we'll get it
automatically, is an injunction to get him out of the house and a residence
order so that you have the children." She had a habit of inclining her
head to one side as she spoke.

"It suddenly seems a bit unfair to Alex,"
said Maggie.

"Unfair?"

"I mean, I'm the one who started messing him
around. I can see how it might have looked to him, me slipping off at night...
I feel like I'm the one who started the trouble, and he'll end up without the
house and without the kids."

"Sod that! He shouldn't be so ready with his
fists!"

Maggie was startled. Ms. Montague's earrings were
waggling a mite enthusiastically. "He's never done it before, you
know."

"I'm more concerned he doesn't do it again. If
you want me to make an application for a residence order, be ready to go to
court some time in the next two weeks. Meanwhile I'll prepare an affidavit as
to his behaviour, which you'll have to swear is true."

"What happens to that?"

"You sign it and I have it filed at court."

Affidavits.
Injunctions.
Sworn truths filed at court. It all seemed so
ritualistic and incantatory; so grave, and so monumental. Maggie nodded
agreement.

She walked home from the offices of Sedge
and Sedge to her depressing bed-sit in New Markets. It was the last day in
November, it was cold and damp, and it was already dark at five in the
afternoon.

The house she'd found was three storeys
high and her room was on the middle floor. Someone kept a motorbike, leaking
oil from its crankcase, in the downstairs hallway. Another resident on the ground
floor played solid thrash at volume from two P.M., presumably when they got out
of bed, to two A.M., presumably when they went to bed. It was playing when
Maggie turned the key to the front door.

In her room she switched on the gas fire
and pushed coins into her meter. It was like having a pet; it needed feeding
often. Unable to visit Amy and Sam, she faced another barren evening.

Making coffee in the shared kitchen facility was Kate,
who occupied the next room. Kate looked like a figure from an Aubrey Beardsley
drawing and wore the kind of makeup other people would only use for a pageant.
She described herself as "late gothic," but she was really a
friendly, chatty domestic Cleopatra in black denim, and though there were ten
years between them, Maggie felt as if Kate was the elder of the two.

"Is he always like this?" asked
Maggie, referring to the noise from downstairs.

"Never stops. I'm gonna firebomb his room one of these days."

"Don't. I'm directly above it."

"Perhaps I won't. Doing anything this evening?"

"No one to do anything with."
Maggie
smiled at her.

"Me neither," said Kate. "Fancy going somewhere?"

TWENTY-THREE

Richard had discovered a fourth dagger
at the Maggie dig, ceremonial,
bronze, identical to the others but snapped
at the hilt.
It was rather obvious from its position where a fifth might
appear.

"It's not a triangle at
all," said Tania. "Another dagger over there would make a circle. They've
been placed in a ring."

Alex called in another couple of
volunteers. They all worked through their lunch break, and within a couple of
hours the fifth blade came to light. They marked out the exact location of the
blades with wooden stakes.

"Could there be more?" someone asked.

"I doubt it," said Alex.
Everyone stood round the circle, hands on hips, staring down at the wooden
stakes.

"Why not?"
Tania wanted to know.

Alex rubbed his chin. "I
dunno
. I just
doubt it."

"What if—" said Richard,
stepping over the stakes and removing the original triangle of white marker
tape "—what if it isn't a circle at all?"

He took a new length of marker tape, wound it round
one of the stakes and carried it across the diameter of the circle to a second
stake.
Thence across the circle again to the stake adjacent
to his starting point, making two sides of a larger triangle.
Instead of
closing the triangle, he crossed the circle again to the fourth point, then to
the fifth, and back to his starting point.

He'd marked out a five-pointed star.

It was a good game. "What if
you're both right?" said Alex, taking the tape from Richard's hands. He
inserted a short stake between each of the dagger positions before unwinding
the tape to complete a circle round the five-pointed star. Now they were all
staring down at a classic pentagram.

"I think we'd better keep this quite
for the time being," said Alex. "We don't want people to get stupid
ideas."

Everyone nodded sagely. None of
them wanted people to get stupid ideas.

But Alex found he had a problem
keeping those self-same stupid ideas out of his head. He was thinking about
Maggie, and about how she might have known where he should dig. He was still
convinced you could pick almost anywhere on this site and unearth something,
but the extraordinary nature of the discovery complicated things. He could deny
it no longer.

He was trying to relate this
discovery to other things about Maggie's recent behaviour. He'd read enough of
the diary to form a rough understanding of its contents. He could stop guessing
about the other items he'd found alongside the diary, and about the sphere of
her new interests. If she didn't have a lover (and he'd concluded after all
that he'd been wrong, and she probably didn't) then what was it she'd been up
to at ungodly hours of the night?

For the first time, he felt a nagging fear about the
safety of his children. For the first time a question was raised in his mind
about the stability of their mother. Because the stupid ideas just wouldn't go
away.

Maggie was having a good time. She was having to shout
to make herself heard above the band, and was throwing back a dirty concoction
of lager and blackcurrant juice, a drink to which Kate had introduced her. It
was standing room only at the Seven Stars. Gutbucket blues at maximum decibels
and a fug of sweating bodies, writhing cigarette smoke and beery,
frothblowing
chatter. They were
being corralled against the bar by two youths in black leather.

"What's he say?" Maggie shouted in Kate's
ear.

"He says do we want a drink."

"I don't know. What do you think?"

Both youths held a pint glass in one hand and a crash
helmet in the other. Kate beckoned to one and shouted in his ear, "Two
lagers and black, but you won't get
a shag
out of
it."

Maggie's lager went up her nose. The boy grinned
stupidly and went obediently to the bar. Maggie felt some of Kate's carefree
youth rubbing off on her. Kate had lent Maggie a leather jacket after telling
her she looked too prim for where they were going. She was learning a lot from
Kate. Like the fact that if you take the piss out of men they come back for
more of the same treatment.

"Thanks. Now get back on your
Lambretta
,"
she said to the youth when he handed her a red lager.

"I ain't
gorra
Lambretta
. I've
gorra
Norton."

"That makes all the difference. That makes you a
person with a Norton."

"A Norton?" said Maggie. "Isn't that a
two-stroke?"

"Here Derek.
She thinks
a Norton is a two-stroke."

"This is great conversation,
boys. I could talk about motorbikes all night."

"Here! Are you trying to take
the piss?"

"Get back on your
Lambretta
."

Several red lagers later Maggie and
Kate were on the back of the two motorbikes speeding through the freezing
November night. They were heading toward
Wigstone
Heath at Maggie's insistence. Maggie was on the pillion of the lead bike.
They'd taken a cross-country lane, and she was hugging her motorcyclist out of
fear and exhilaration rather than any desire for intimacy.

It was cold on the bike, icy. But wrapped
in her borrowed leathers she exulted in it. It was loud, deafening even; she
relished the deep, throaty roar of the Norton as it climbed through the gears,
and the lash of the wind in her face. Her arms clenched the waist of the
stranger controlling the machine and her thighs gripped the vibrating saddle.
She wanted a bike!

The rider turned his head and shouted,
"Where now?" She heard his muffled words through the crash helmet.

"Keep going! Keep going!"

She turned to see the second bike and
caught a wave from Kate. Maggie was highly aroused, even though she knew she
was just using these boys for their engines, their machines. She could fold
herself across them and they would take her where she wanted to go. The bike
hit top gear as they found a flat stretch of road. Maggie sensed a change of
gear inside herself as they neared
Wigstone
Heath.

She felt a growing awareness as they
approached the heath. There were things in the passing shadows which began to
take on a faint, shimmering luminosity.
A boulder.
A road sign.
A twisted shrub.
She
was sure she saw a hare crouched in the hedgerow. She looked over her shoulder,
and these things seemed to hold the light from the headlamps long after the
bikes had passed. She felt strange. There was a growing disquiet as they got
nearer to the heath. The initial giddy excitement of the ride was deserting
her.

This began to seem less than a good
idea. What were they going to do when they got there? It was wrong. She was
playing with these boys. It was not for her to take them there. It was an abuse
of privilege.

It gave her a bad feeling.

But she didn't know how to stop it.
The bikes were cruising toward the heath, locked into a trajectory, moving
forward in a steady drone. Then at a bend the motorcyclist dropped down through
his gears and slowed to take a sharp corner, leaning the bike into the road.
Maggie saw a huge black shadow step out of the hedgerow in front of them, and
the next thing she knew she was sailing through the air.

Then Kate was picking her out of
the hedgerow. "Maggie! Maggie!"

She was winded and scratched, but
she was all right. Dazed, she got to her feet. The injured Norton lay on its
side in the hedge, engine still squealing, back wheel spinning. Its rider
staggered over to her. His leathers had been sliced open and there was a bloody
gash on his forearm. His friend Derek silenced the squealing bike.

"There was something in the
road! There was something there!"

"I saw it, too," said
Maggie. But she was more interested in what she had grasped in her clenched
fist. It was a branch of belladonna, deadly nightshade, black berries clustered
and gleaming with a dull light. She looked up at the stars in the clear, cold
sky. They were brilliant. "It's incredible!
Dwale
!
Deadly nightshade! She's everywhere!
Speaking to me!"

"What?" said
Kate.

"She's amazing!"

"That girl's concussed,"
said Derek.

"Don't talk rot," said
Maggie sharply.

He held up two fingers in front of
her eyes.
" '
Ow
many
fingers do you see?"

"Get away,
you stupid sod.
I'm as clear as a bell."

The evening finished there. After
that, no one was in the mood for completing the journey. The front forks were
twisted on the Norton. It was barely roadworthy. They returned at a steadier
pace, and the boys said good-night and dropped them off back at the house.

Music thumped from the ground-floor
room. Maggie made coffee, and she and Kate sat in her room. "That cut on
his arm," she said fretfully. "If I had my stuff here I could have
helped him. Really I could."

"What stuff?"

"Oh, herbs and stuff.
Never mind. I'll
sort it out. It was just a warning, you know. She didn't want me to take those
lads up there."

Kate looked at her strangely, as if she
might be concussed after all. "You know what you are, Maggie?
Witchy
."

"Yes," said Maggie. "And I'm sick of that fucking
music."

The branch of deadly nightshade was still
in her pocket. She took it out and handed the leather jacket back to Kate. Then
she found a length of cotton and a pin.

"What are you doing?" said Kate.

"She gave me a warning tonight. I
have a feeling, a feeling she might balance it with a gift."

"What are you on about? Where are you going?"

Maggie didn't answer. Kate followed
her downstairs, to the door vibrating from the thrash music. Maggie pinned the
cotton to the cross frame over the door so that the branch of deadly nightshade
hung at roughly eye level. Then she hammered on the door, and without waiting
for an answer, returned upstairs to her own room.

"What are you doing?" hissed Kate.

"I don't know, Kate. Sometimes I just feel guided."

"Guided by what?"

"I don't know. I honestly don't know. Listen."

They listened. After a few moments the music was silenced.

"It's stopped!" said Kate.

"Exactly."