Life's Lottery (26 page)

‘Haven’t you noticed? Sean can be pretty bloody stupid.’

‘He’s not doing so badly.’

Vanda is thinking about something. You wonder if you should have lied.

‘Ro thinks he is. Having an affair.’

You have nothing to say.

‘We can’t afford to break the Syndicate.’

You’re surprised Vanda has thought it through.

‘By the way, Keith…’

‘Yes?’

‘You’re not fucking Candy, are you?’

‘Good Lord, no.’

‘Just asking.’

She comes to the desk and looks at the figures you have been studying. A strand of her hair falls down over your cheek. She nods, gently, approving.

You slip a hand into her dressing-gown, resting it on her bum. Since she’s been going to exercise class, her body is better toned than since before Jason.

She wriggles a little, her code for seeing you off. You take back your hand. ‘Keith,’ she says, pausing.

‘Yes?’

‘We’re rich, aren’t we?’

You nod. She smiles tightly, briefly grips your shoulder, and goes to bed. You savour the after-smell of her hair, and can’t think of anything but the money.

Go to 72.

B
lit blurt…

* * *

Shadow-spiders have been among us for years, observing humankind, preparing the takeover, spinning webs.

In your town, there are several major Arachnoids, spiders crammed into human-suits. Mrs Fudge, the Ash Grove Primary dinner lady, has fed successive generations with her mind-warping abdominal secretions. School custard, as you always knew, was at once poisonous and addictive. It has stayed in the systems of all children who went to Ash Grove – except you! – and reshaped their perception of the real world, making all but the most blatant signs of the invasion invisible. For a while, when you were alone in seeing the shadow-spiders, you were treated as a madman.

Councillor Robert Hackwill is another Arachnoid. Since school, he has been challenging and testing everyone, drawing up lists of potential rebels for transfer to the extermination webs in Wales. You and your whole family are on the Hackwill death-list. He has been covertly working against you for decades, striking against your relatives, your house, your pets. Many of his associates – like Reg Jessup – aren’t even spiders, but human traitors he has lured through his cobweb curtain and promised high positions on the food chain once the takeover is complete.

The shadow-spiders are behind everything bad in your life. You have always known there was a disparity between the way you saw spiders and the way everyone else did. Your parents, even your brother, never understood your terror of spiders when you were a kid. They were impatient with your insistence someone come upstairs with you and turn on all the lights, checking under your bed, before you went to sleep.

You remember Mum telling you, when you moved to the country, that there were no poisonous spiders in Britain, that none of the monsters you glimpsed crawling all around you could do any harm. Dad let the truth slip, though, in warning you away from his shed, telling you that was where the poisonous spiders – the ones that didn’t exist in Britain – lived.

To most people, spiders were the tiny dots they showed on TV nature programmes or in books. Only you saw monsters the size of a big man’s hand, black heads bristling with red eyes, each filthy pipe-cleaner limb tipped with a venomous barb, complex and never-still mouth like a meat-eating plant.

Now, everyone knows you were right.

Those were the real spiders. The shadow-spiders.

Of course, it’s too late.

They’re here, and they’re taking over.

* * *

…
blit blurt.

Y
ou kiss Rowena on the forehead and pull back, getting out of the van, promising to come back.

Her eyes show disappointment, but something else.

‘Tonight,’ you say. You shut the van door.

Your erection hurts like a bastard. You can’t help feeling a complete pillock.

Victoria is astonished. ‘Keith, you’ve just shot up about a thousand points.’

You wish she wouldn’t talk about things shooting up. It’s a sore point. Not sore, throbbing. You shake your head and lean on the van, bending in the middle to ease the pressure.

‘There are rules,’ you say, instantly regretting it. You sound a pompous ass.

‘Not many blokes recognise that,’ says Victoria. She’s impressed. ‘In this town, I’d have said there were approximately no blokes who could have backed off from a sure thing like that poor soused baby.’

You don’t want to explain. It means too much to you.

Victoria kisses you chastely. It’s still torture.

‘Let’s go to Brink’s Café. I’ll buy you some coffee. Call it a reward.’

This feels grown-up.

In Brink’s, the nearest thing the town has to a hang-out, you drink weak black coffee and eat a Danish pastry. In the strip-lit, orange-wood environment, Victoria looks like a grown-up rather than an alien.

She still dresses like a freak but you remember how clever she is. You talk about the next year. When you all finish college. You’ve been asked to take the Oxford entrance exam, which your parents think is a great opportunity. Now you talk about it, you aren’t so sure. You’re surprised to learn that Victoria, for all her punk tearaway carrying-on, still plans to go to university, to get away from Sedgwater. Just because she dresses the way she wants and hangs around with people her parents can’t stand doesn’t mean she wants to throw everything away. She’s well aware of the shortcomings of the kind of waster hippie life Graham lives.

‘He wanted us to squat a house in Sutton Mallet,’ she says. ‘No hot water, no electric light. One day, he’ll wake up and realise the summer of ’67 is over.’

Though you keep up with the chat, you’re thinking about Rowena. You’re worried about her and still not sure what the evening will be like.

‘She’ll be fine,’ Victoria says, mind-reading. ‘Just isn’t used to it, poor lamb.’

‘I don’t know about her,’ you say. ‘I don’t know if she’s really interested in me or just wants to get back at Roger.’

This is the first time you’ve ever told anyone about feelings like this. You always thought it would give other people too much power over you if they knew what you really felt.

‘Roger needs a bottle in the face,’ Victoria says.

You are embarrassed. You forgot that Rowena chucked Roger because of Victoria.

‘Don’t mind about that,’ she says. ‘I never said I was sensible or sincere. I’m just a mad slut, remember.’

‘No you’re not.’

‘No, you’re right. I’m not. Thank you for noticing.’

You start talking about the Rag Show this evening. Michael Dixon and his clique have arranged it. They will be performing comic sketches, and Victoria’s band, Flaming Torture, will top the bill.

‘What kind of a name is Flaming Torture?’

‘It’s an episode of a
Flash Gordon
serial we saw one morning at Graham’s when we were stoned. It won’t last.’

You both laugh.

You feel relaxed but a lot stronger. No matter what happens with Rowena, something as interesting – and maybe a lot rarer – is developing with Victoria. You think she might be turning into your friend.

* * *

At the show, you’re insulated by noise. This has been an out-of-time day. All bets are off but everything you do seems to have counted on a deeper level than you yet understand. It’s as if someone is watching you, keeping a score. Victoria said you’d gone up a thousand points. You have a mild anxiety that you might wipe out the bonus with one wrong move, that you could still crawl out of today as a big loser.

You bop about non-committally in the crowd as Flaming Torture perform. You think Victoria is looking at you as she sings, but with the lights in her eyes she probably can’t make out individual faces in the writhing mass of kids.

It occurs to you that, though Flaming Torture is well beyond your usual listening habits, Victoria might be quite good. No matter how she abuses it, her voice works.

You stop thinking, and dance.

Strobe lights make neon strips of white shirt collars and cuffs. Neil Martin, wearing a sheet like a pantomime ghost, shines like a real apparition.

The-music washes your brain.

* * *

When the show is over, kids pour out into the car park. Victoria, still in her stage gear, offers you a lift out to Michael Dixon’s party at Achelzoy.

You accept.

I’m sorry, was I assuming too much? Of course, you have a choice. You can refuse Victoria’s offer, go home, watch some television with Flaming Torture still ringing in your ears, and get an early night. Interested?

I thought not. You see, sometimes you’re on rails. There’s no junction. You run on smoothly. You can go off the rails, of course, but there must be something really wrong with you if that’s your choice.

And, despite what you’re learning about yourself, there’s nothing wrong with you. Your default setting is ordinary, typical, usual. Which is not to say that there are spaces in your life labyrinth that aren’t deeply shadowed or brightly lit.

Come on. Get into Victoria’s Mini van.

What happens next is interesting. Believe me.

* * *

You don’t need to talk. You watch the red rear lights of Desmond Fewsham’s car, which is packed full of kids on their way to the party. Victoria is driving just you. The back of the van is full of Flaming Torture’s equipment. The instruments of Torture, you realise.

When you first got in, you darted a look over your shoulder as you did up the seatbelt.

Victoria laughed. ‘She’s not still there.’

You were sort of relieved.

‘Ro just needed a rest,’ she said.

Victoria takes a turn-off. Desmond isn’t ahead now.

‘Short cut,’ she says.

The van bumps a little, over pot-holes. This isn’t a well-kept road. It might have wheel-ruts.

‘Via where?’ you ask.

‘Sutton Mallet.’

The van stalls.

‘Shit,’ Victoria says.

* * *

You both get out of the van. Featherbreath steams round Victoria’s mouth and nostrils. It is cold and dark. There are buildings around but none of them is lit up.

‘They’re empty,’ she says. ‘Last summer, Graham wanted to squat one of them. I talked him out of it. I told him I had a strange feeling about the place.’

‘You mentioned it earlier.’

The dark façades are unsettling.

‘I knew winter would come. It’s all very well hanging out in a derelict house in August, but getting through the cold without hot water or electric light or proper heating is different.’

‘What now? Is there a Spectrum Pursuit Vehicle stashed in one of the barns?’

She laughs, musically. That’s an expression you’ve heard, but never heard demonstrated.

‘No, Graham left some gear in one of the houses. I think there are tools.’

She takes your arm and drags you towards a dark house.

Her touch is warm. You think of hugging her for the heat.

But you don’t.

* * *

Victoria unlatches a door and steps into a house. You follow her. At least you are out of the wind.

She flicks her cigarette lighter. You’re in a kitchen. Plates and cutlery are strewn on the floor. There are cobwebs and shadows.

‘Stay here,’ she says. ‘The stuff is upstairs. I’ll be back in a sec.’

She leaves you.

There is a little moonlight, but not much. Your eyes hold the afterimage of Victoria’s lighter flame.

In the dark, you have time to think. Why doesn’t Victoria have a tool-kit in the van? Is she the sort who knows how to fix a broken-down car with a few wrench-twists and a pair of nylons?

She said she’d be back in a sec.

A sec has passed. Several of them.

You’re cold and in the dark. Things had been going well. Throughout the day, you’d felt things improving. But now you’re off the map, in Sutton Mallet. It’s nowhere, a Sargasso where people are sidetracked, becalmed, marooned, forgotten.

You try to listen for small noises. Victoria should be searching, blundering into things, swearing.

Your ears are still ringing.

Nothing is happening. Nothing is going to happen.

Your are in Nothing. You are become Nothing.

There is a noise, now. No, a sound. It might be the wind, whistling through the many broken windows in the house. But it’s more musical, an ululation, a single voice beckoning, a siren’s seduction.

It must be Victoria. But it doesn’t sound like her.

Are you afraid? Or are you excited?

Your toes are ice-bitten and you are hugging yourself against the cold. The dark is all around you, and something in the house is wailing.

You leave the kitchen. You are in a hallway. At one end are the stairs, at the other is an open door.

The sound, louder now, is coming from upstairs. There’s also a faint light, flickering, a suggestion of warmth. Is that a giggle? Victoria, if she’s upstairs, is not alone. The singing might be in harmony, two or more voices.

You could just leave. You could make it to the main road and hitch a lift to Achelzoy or to town. There will be cars going back and forth all night. People you know.

Or do you go upstairs?

If you choose the door, go to 62. If you choose the stairs, go to 68.

S
aturday, 14 February 1998. In the back of your Land Rover, Roy Canning is apoplectic. In the passenger seat, Rowena clucks and tuts. You drive on to the travellers’ site over a cattle grid and through marshy fields. The caravans are drawn into a circle, like wagons in a Western. You understand these people live more like Indians than pioneers. Some of their structures are teepee-like.

‘Think of the filth,’ blusters Roy.

As chair of the Sutton Mallet Residents’ Committee, you are in charge of the negotiations. But Roy Canning was the first to get a bee in his bonnet about the site and he has been nagging at every opportunity.

These people personally offend Roy on some level you don’t understand. You’d be happier with the lot of them resited in someone else’s backyard and assume there’s a fair amount of drug-taking and loud music going on, but it’s not an affront to your very existence.