Life's Lottery (22 page)

The first day back in college after the holidays, you see Mary in the common room. You don’t make a show of it but find somewhere else to be.

That night is there. Sutton Mallet. Between you.

But it’s there
only
between you. If you’re apart, it need not have happened. Like a chemical reaction that takes place only if the two components are in proximity.

After a few weeks, you don’t even have to think about it. You and Mary move on different paths, never intersecting. Once, you wonder if she’s doing the same thing.

Whatever happened to you, happened to you through her. She was a part of it. Maybe she has finished. Maybe it has finished with you.

Is she… haunted?

It’s not an expression you can afford to get comfortable with. You’re not
haunted.
You’re not obsessed. You’ve survived, put Sutton Mallet behind you. It need trouble you no more, need not shape your whole life.

To concentrate on avoiding Mary would be to admit the importance of Sutton Mallet. It must come low on your agenda, taken care of but at a constant ticking-over level. You have other things to cope with. Your A Levels this summer. University applications, if you are to stay in eduction. Interviews, for places or – if you want to take time off before university or not go on at all – for jobs.

You still run, though not competitively. College has no organised sport. There is no one to compete with. At weekends, you take long, solitary runs. You go to the empty college site and rack up lap after lap. Running is still an essential.

You’ve learned to keep your eyes on the course. You stay in lane. You don’t tire.

You cut down on wasteful effort. At home, you speak only when necessary to accommodate or negotiate with your parents and siblings. You never venture a comment, never initiate a conversation. You’re not sullen, you just don’t waste effort.

You read only books for your courses. You rarely watch television or listen to the wireless. You never go to the cinema. You attend college discos because it is expected, but tolerate them as you tolerate your classes. Your eyes are on the track.

Your parents aren’t worried about you. Why should they be? There’s nothing wrong. You’re coping with everything. You’re not wearing yourself down with worry, like half your peers. You’re not causing the problems Laraine did when she was your age. You’re not out all the time, like James. You are exactly what any parent would want.

So why do you detect disappointment? The last time your parents seemed pleased with you was when Mary came to pick you up on Rag Day. Then, they were all secret smiles and suppressed excitement. Later, when you had to have X-rays and Mary’s policeman dad came round to get a statement for the insurance, they were less thrilled. But still, there was a sense of admiration. Dad, particularly, was chuckling ‘hidden depths’ at you through the aftermath of the accident. It occurs to you that your parents find you rather boring. Dad – the
bank manager
– thinks you’re dull.

What, you ask rhetorically, does he know? What does anybody know? They weren’t there. They don’t know what waits at Sutton Mallet.

Neither, of course, do you.

* * *

At college, you survive. You’re more than adequate in all three of your subjects: French, German and history. Each of your classes has at least two stars, flamboyant geniuses who occupy three-quarters of your lecturers’ time and invariably take the lead in discussions. You’re not of their number. But they mean your lecturers don’t have to think too much about you beyond giving you your usual 65–75 per cent marks.

Between classes, you work in the library or sit in the common room. Everyone is used to you, but no one notices you. You’re building invisible armour.

Sutton Mallet can never happen again.

The common room is like an eighteenth-century coffee house. Michael Dixon is the Johnsonian figure, with his cadre – they call themselves the Quorum, for no reason you can understand – of satirists and wits.

Some people really hate the Quorum, deeming them decadent wasters. Others are entertained by them, or envious of their private language, the way they can spin inventions out in chat, tossing them back and forth, elaborating routines.

You have no opinion. Those people don’t impinge on you.

One day in the chill of March, you’re in the common room, reading up on the Interregnum. Michael presides over a group, lolling about in a quilted smoking-jacket and puffing on a ciggy in a holder, while Neil Martin takes notes and Mark Amphlett concentrates seriously, feeding Michael straight lines. Penny Gaye, Michael’s girlfriend, is there, slyly observed by Victoria, who seems removed from their in-group but is included because she is willing to go farther than most. Victoria’s velvet dress is held together by safety pins.

This is the year in which everyone has an eighteenth birthday – yours passed last October, noticed only by your family, who took you out for a restaurant meal and gave you an expensive set of luggage ‘for when you go away’ – and therefore there will be a crowded social calendar of important birthday parties. Michael plans to hold a major celebration over the Easter holidays, absorbing the birthdays of several lesser lights into his own.

The Quorum run through their guest list.

Your name – alphabetically right in the middle of the roll-call – comes up.

‘Keith Marion,’ says Neil. You can’t help hearing your name and what he says next. For a moment, you think Neil, with whom you’ve shared classes for five years, doesn’t know who you are. Then he says, ‘Funny thing about Marion. When he’s there, you don’t mind him. When he’s not, you don’t miss him.’

That sums you up and they’re on to the next name.

The common room is crowded. Neil might or might not know you’re there. But what he said is how everyone feels about you.

* * *

You always run in the daylight. As the days get longer in spring, you can run before college.

You run out in the open.

No shadows. No spiders.

As you run, you think about not being minded and not being missed.

It’s a distraction. It’s not something on the course, not something that affects you really. You don’t care about Neil or Michael or Victoria or any of them.

They don’t know what you know. Their car didn’t pause at the Sutton Mallet turn-off. They don’t know what waits in the shadows.

Neither do you. Not really. But…

You run faster, harder. A cloud covers the sun, spreading gloom over the track. You’re cold, despite your exertion. The afternoon is getting on, towards sunset.

A spurt of speed comes.

The shadow-spiders are at your heels; as they were that night. The race that got serious at Sutton Mallet is still being run.

How far ahead are you?

* * *

You’re coping with the shadow-spiders. On your own: You only have yourself. But something is missing.

You’re a non-stick personality, speeding along the track, unencumbered, uninterrupted, unnoticed. Those closest to you, if they think about it, don’t know you. You are unexceptional, acceptable, affectless.

If it were not for the shadow-spiders, you might as well be running on the spot.

The shadow-spiders are pacing you now. You aren’t ahead. They’re on either side of you. If you stop, they’ll surge around you, wrapping you in the dark.

Eventually, you will stop. Everyone gets tired, everyone gets old, everyone slows. You are not exempt.

* * *

You go to Michael’s party. It’s an open invite.

It’s the Easter weekend, and the party is at Michael’s grandmother’s house in Achelzoy. By going, completing the interrupted journey, you think you can get beyond Sutton Mallet in your mind, surge away from the shadows, leave them behind.

You cycle out to Achelzoy by an elaborate route that means you don’t pass the Sutton Mallet turn-off. You wonder if that is a mistake.

The party starts in the afternoon and is due to last a full twenty-four hours. Nothing less than a record-breaker is good enough for Michael. So you get out to Achelzoy in daylight. You might have chanced the Sutton Mallet route. But you didn’t.

When you arrive, Michael is getting a barbecue started. Already, dozens of kids are around. A crowd big enough to get lost in.

A circle of drug-smokers is closeted in a converted coal shed, the Somerset equivalent of an American Indian sweat lodge. Neil and Desmond fiddle with the stereo speakers, trying to fix them up in trees.

Penny Gaye dispenses her fruit punch from an open kitchen window. You get a paper cup full of crimson liquid, with chunks of fruit floating in it. You sip the sweet stuff, nostrils stinging from unidentified liquor.

You are calm, a zen warrior.

Mary isn’t here. There will be no shadow-spiders.

Rowena Douglass talks to you. Her chatter is tiresome but gives you a thrill of power. She is more interested in you than you are in her. That could be useful. She notices you when you’re there, and misses you when you’re not.

‘Are you a Martian?’ she asks.

You have to pay attention to that.

It’s an effort to pretend. You used to have the trick. It was part of the system that kept you on the track, like a cow-catcher ploughing obstacles out of the way.

You pretend not to understand.

‘What is it, Keith? You’re so…’

Rowena, thank God, is seventeen years old. She hasn’t been into the shade. She hasn’t got the mental reach or the vocabulary to comprehend what reality is. Mary might, but she
is
the shade. And Victoria, you sense, would know but not care. Poor blind Rowena, not stupid but not aware, can’t even think of what you are so…

You construct a smile.

At once, you realise you have become the shade. It is your strength. You have run through night and into the dawn. In you, the darkness grows. A comforting, empowering, warm dark.

Nothing you can do will rid you of the dark.

But what will you make of it?

Rowena ladles you some more punch. You didn’t realise you’d finished your first cup.

You work on the smile. You can make it good enough to pass.

Rowena is transparent, shifting from side to side to put her chest on show, looking up at you without trying to seem eager, coaxing out of you sentences upon which she can hang.

You can bring her into the shade. Probably, she will come whether you want her to or not. Tonight, at this party, you can have her. But afterwards, do you stay with her? Or move on, always running? It’s getting dark already.

* * *

You finish your punch again. A natural gap comes in Rowena’s chatter. She draws breath. You fill the gap by kissing her. She responds.

If you take Rowena as a steady girlfriend, go to 67. If you get the business of losing your virginity out of the way with her but refuse to repeat the experiment, go to 74.

Y
our parents don’t ask why you’ve come home hours earlier than expected and choose to spend the evening of the big party at home. While walking back from town, you got soaked when it started to drizzle.

You remember Victoria’s verdict.

You can’t help feeling you really are pathetic.

You come down with a severe cold, which means you spend most of the next week – including Christmas Day – in bed, eating your meals on a tray, sniffling into tissues, feeling sorry for yourself.

This gives you time to think.

Looking on the bright side, you’re now an adult, fully initiated into the mysteries of sex. That’s a difficult interpretation, but just about possible.

Rowena is upset not with you but with herself. It’s Roger’s fault. Sometime in the New Year, you should give Roger a right belting.

You are running a fever. You think a lot about Rowena.

Yes, you realise, you’re in love with Rowena Douglass.

That makes you feel better. You can still make things right between you. It will be a project for 1978. If you can win Rowena round, you will be a whole person.

Until now, you’ve just been going through the motions, an exam-passing zombie. All that isn’t worth much if you can’t have Rowena.

And you can have Rowena.

After all, you already have. Right? Right.

* * *

You put off telephoning Rowena until after your cold has receded. It’s a good idea to give her time to get over her hysteria, over her anger with Roger, over whatever it was that made her throw you out of Victoria’s van.

Between Christmas and New Year, you decide to call. The 27th seems a good date, one holiday over, the other not started. You can ask Rowena out on New Year’s Eve.

This time, you’ll be alone with her, not surrounded by distracting people. You’re sure now that the problem with Rag Day was Roger and Victoria and Gully and the others.

On the morning of the 27th, you look at the telephone. You have Rowena’s number memorised, though you’ve only dialled it the once, to ask her out last time.

What if she’s still upset?

Your heart pounds as if you’d run a half-mile. This is silly. You’re only going to make a phone call, not invade France. And you’ve already slept with Rowena – if you can call it sleeping – so there’s nothing really to be nervous about. You’re in there. Well in there. You’re Rowena’s only option. If she makes it up with you, she can redeem her embarrassing public behaviour on Rag Day.

Yes, it’s time to phone.

Laraine, home from university, gets in the way. She asks you if you’re going to use the phone. You aren’t able to tell her and she makes a call to her boyfriend, some bloke called Fred she’s been seeing in Norwich.

Your sister and her boyfriend chat and giggle. Hearing only Laraine’s half of the conversation, as you pretend to read the holiday double issue of the
Radio Times
, you imagine Fred’s suave, coaxing words. Laraine is thoroughly charmed, but also completely relaxed.

That’s what you want to be like.

Your cold has gone, but you still feel as if you’re in a fever. All these years, you’ve listened to songs go on about ‘heartache’ and ‘love-sickness’. You assumed ‘tender’ meant ‘gentle’, not ‘easy to hurt’.