Life's Lottery (27 page)

‘We should take a flame-thrower to this field.’

‘Look at the babies,’ Ro says, as if you were visiting a wildlife park. ‘They’re so dirty. Poor things.’

Your wife invited herself along out of curiosity. Roy is so vehement about the site that she just wants to have a good look at it. You doubt Ro will be helpful.

Mary Yatman is at the gate, by her police car. In her uniform, she still looks nineteen.

Unlike you and Ro. During your marriage, you have become frankly haggard. At thirty-eight, you’re almost completely grey. Ro has blown up like a balloon. She has trouble with the seatbelt in the Land-Rover. It won’t stretch over her tummy.

You park and get out. You have to help Ro squeeze out of the door and step down into the field.

Mary greets you. ‘Rowena, I didn’t know you were pregnant again,’ she says.

‘I’m not.’

This isn’t the first time someone has made that mistake. You wonder if Mary did it deliberately.

‘How’s the bank?’ Mary asks you. ‘Tried to rob it lately?’

Whenever she sees you, Mary jokes that you should rob your own bank so she can catch you and get a promotion. She wants to be out of uniform.

Suddenly, you want Mary out of uniform too.

‘Ugh!’ Rowena has stepped in a mudpatch.

‘Revoltin’,’ Roy says, automatically.

If everyone who left mud in their fields was driven off the land, there wouldn’t be any farmers in Somerset.

‘Who are we talking with?’ you ask, businesslike.

‘They claim to be a collective and don’t believe in leaders as such. However, they’ve elected a couple of spokespeople who are empowered to negotiate.’

‘Negotiate!’ Roy bursts out. ‘Appeasement don’t work.’

‘Calm down, Roy,’ you say.

This isn’t going to be easy.

‘This is them now,’ Mary announces.

A small procession advances, making Roy hide behind Ro. In the lead are a couple of small children, faces painted like pantomime savages, dressed in adult-sized cardigans cinched in to become robe-like garments. They have flowers for you, the first few feeble snowdrops.

‘For peace,’ an urchin says, presenting a snowdrop to Ro.

Ro takes the flower. ‘What a sweet little girl.’

‘I’m not a girl,’ the kid says.

‘Oh.’

You catch a sideways look from Mary. She has never liked Ro, you remember.

As you have done many times, you wonder if you shouldn’t have asked Mary out in 1977. If you had, you might now be married to a slender blonde in a trim uniform. Not a blubber-bag who ran out of things to say ten years ago and has been repeating herself ever since.

Roads not taken…

‘Blessed be,’ announces a tall man with a long beard and a staff. He has a sheepskin waistcoat dotted with CND and animal-rights badges. He smells faintly musky, but not unpleasant. He looks a lot more like a man of the land than Roy Canning, a set-aside farmer who wears a suit. The traveller spokesman sticks out a knotty hand.

‘This is –’ begins Mary.

‘I know,’ you say, taking his hand. ‘Hello, Gully.’

Gully Eastment looks at you, wondering.

For a moment, you think he won’t recognise you. That would be an embarrassment: if he had registered in your memory, but you hadn’t lodged in his. Maybe his past is full up, insignificant people cleaned out of his mental attic.

‘It’s the Straight Man,’ he says.

He called you that for a while, at college. You’ve forgotten how you got the nickname.

‘Keith Marion,’ you say.

Gully lets go of your hand. He grins, amused by some memory. Now you’re worried he remembers things about you that you’ve forgotten.

‘This is Rowena, my wife. Rowena Douglass, as was.’

Gully plainly doesn’t recognise her. And no wonder. The girl she once was is completely buried in her inflated new body. Gully looks her over – do you detect a trace of sympathy for you in his ironic glance? – and kisses her hand.

‘I remember you,’ he says, eventually. ‘You were sick.’

She laughs, setting her chins in motion:

You’ve lost the place. This means nothing to you.

‘Fancy you remembering that,’ she says. ‘Rag Day 1977, wasn’t it?’

‘How could anyone forget?’ Gully says.

Now you remember. Rowena being sick in an alley. You trying to ignore her. Your first date. The warning you should have taken. She still can’t handle booze.

‘So, the Straight Man got together with the Lady Lush to make babies.’

‘We have two children,’ she admits. ‘Jeffrey and Jasmine.’

‘Love to you,’ Gully says, embracing Ro.

He has to bend down a little and his long arms squeeze her almost spherical torso, lifting rolls of anorak-covered flesh as he embraces her. Ro flutters in his grip, cheeks blotching red, head bobbing like a car toy.

‘Roy, this is Gully Eastment,’ you say. ‘We were at school together, as you’ve probably gathered. All of us.’ You include Mary.

‘I was there when Rowena was sick,’ Mary admits.

‘Oh come now, I was a child,’ Ro says, fed up with this.

Roy is livid. He’s fifteen years older than you all. He seems to regard your previous association with Gully as treason. Suddenly, he thinks of you all as comrades in crime.

‘Straight Man, come to the meeting-lodge.’

Gully lets go of Ro and leads you into the centre of the camp.

* * *

The lodge is a well-made windowless hut. You have to bend a little to get in through the door, which is covered by a nailed sheet of clear polythene and, inside, a hanging curtain of beads. The low space is lit by candles. Thick rugs are laid over bare earth. There are no chairs, only cushions. On the walls are tapestries and children’s paintings.

‘No chairs, I’m afraid.’

The wood is impregnated with the smell of marijuana.

You realise what this reminds you of: Graham the hippie’s bedsit. You were there only once. Rag Day 1977. The day Ro was so sick. The day you first went out with your future wife. A significant moment in your past.

Gully offered you a joint.

‘I don’t smoke,’ you said, ‘tobacco.’

Gully found that hilarious, and repeated it in an accent like Bela Lugosi saying, ‘I nevair dreenk… wine!’ All the people crammed into Graham’s bedsit picked it up in their strange, stoned communion and chanted it between choking outbursts of laughter.

That was when Graham started calling you Straight Man.

You’ve forgotten how to sit cross-legged on a cushion, and get your knees mixed up as you squat. Ro is in an even worse state and has to be helped down on to the cushions, lowered like a hippo being given a bath.

Roy bangs his head on the ceiling and squats uncomfortably, unwilling to let his arse be fouled by contact with filthy hippie cushions. Mary slips off her uniform shoes and does a perfect lotus, her black-tights-clad feet neatly tucked into her skirted lap.

‘Welcome, friends,’ says Gully.

He sits by a gigantic affair of glass tubes and bowls. The bong is not in use, which is probably a mercy for Roy’s heart.

‘Are they here?’ says a voice.

‘Yes, my love.’

A pile of cushions moves, as if there were a land-bound squid under it. They part and a woman erupts from them, long arms – tattooed and hung with bangles – snaking out first. She manages to be elegant in her writhing as she slides to Gully’s side and sits by him.

‘Is this a reunion?’ she says.

It’s Victoria Conyer.

Her ears, nose, eyebrow and lip are pierced with rings. She wears a black singlet, cut low on her chest to show flame-coloured tattoos on her breasts. Her black hair is down to her waist, and shot through with a white streak.

‘How’s your head, Straight Man?’

You touch the spot on your forehead where she once broke a glass. You have no scar.

Gully and Mary understand this. Ro, who was after all too busy being sick to notice, doesn’t. Roy thinks he is in the enemy’s camp and that cannibals will take him at any moment.

‘My head’s fine,’ you say.

‘Are you sure?’ Victoria asks. ‘Your aura’s almost violet, as if you’d not purged in months.’

‘This’m all very cosy, but…’

‘This is Mr Canning, VC,’ Gully says, kissing her on the cheek. ‘He writes us the letters.’

‘The formal ones or the anonymous ones?’

‘Both, I should think.’

Canning splutters.

‘If you’re going to send heavy legal letters and cut-out-from-newspaper-headlines death threats, you shouldn’t use identical envelopes and type the addresses on the same machine,’ Gully explains. ‘We may be “drug-addled vermin” but we’re not stupid.’

‘Naughty Mr Canning,’ says Victoria – VC? – wagging a long finger at him. She has a silver skull ring with red jewel eyes that wink at you.

‘Youm scum,’ Roy says, viciously. ‘How dare you?’

‘We don’t threaten your kids,’ Gully says.

‘Youm sell they drugs.’

‘Grass and E, maybe, if they nag us enough – you didn’t hear that, Mary – but no smack, no crack, nothing deadly.’

Mary is impassive, impartial. She’s set this meeting up, but is an observer.

‘So you admit it,’ Roy snarls.

Gully works his eyebrows.

Victoria starts rolling a cigarette. No, a joint.

‘I think we can have this lot cleared off, then,’ Roy continues. ‘WPC Yatman, make your arrest.’

Victoria lights up and passes the joint to Mary. She takes a polite little toke and gives it to Ro.

‘Think of it as a peace pipe,’ Gully says.

Roy’s eyeballs are on the point of leaving his skull.

‘Thank you very much,’ says Ro. She mimes a draught and exhales through her nostrils.

Gully takes in a deep drag. He feints, as if to hand the joint to you.

‘Of course,’ he says. ‘You don’t smoke… tobacco.’

He looks into your eyes, smiling, and holds the smoking joint out to Roy.

Roy slaps it out of Gully’s hand.

‘Youm to clear off the land,’ he says.

‘And go where? There are people like you everywhere. The council wants us here, well out of town. And there’s something
about
Sutton Mallet, don’t you think? Something old, something primal.’

‘How much do you want?’

‘Roy,’ you say, ‘I don’t think this is called for.’

‘Come off it, Keith. They’ll shift if’n we pay up. It’s the old game. Well, how bleddy much?’

‘We won’t take Danegeld.’

Your head is spinning. Passive smoking, you suppose. You see faces whirling past you. Mary is wearing her Girls’ Grammar uniform, green blazer and a straw boater. Gully’s beard has gone and he has shrunk inches, become a gangly teenager. Victoria is a punk Morticia Addams, unpierced, untattooed. And Ro is tiny, large-breasted, slim-waisted. Your head aches.

How did you get here from there?

Ro giggles and falls over into the cushions. From one toke? She still can’t take anything.

Veins throb in Roy’s face.

‘Come on,’ he says. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

VC fills her mouth with dope-smoke and french-kisses Mary. Gully strokes their heads, undoing Mary’s hairpins and detaching her uniform hat. Both women eventually choke and splutter, and happily snuggle against Gully.

‘I nevair smoke…
tobaacco
!’

VC and Mary laugh. Ro rolls over and squirrels towards him, reaching out. He puts the joint in her hand.

‘Keith,’ nags Roy. He has stood up, bent over to avoid the low ceiling, and is by the door.

‘Goodbye, Straight Man,’ says Gully, a little sadly, but with a cruel mockery too.

Should you leave Ro?

Why not?

Mary and VC have their hands inside Gully’s sheepskin, and are nuzzling his beard. Ro, lying on her back, sucks the joint to ashes.

Everything you ever wanted, this man has.

You don’t hate him. You need him. You need someone to show that it was possible. He got here from there. That means you could have too.

That you didn’t was your choice.

Roy takes your arm and pulls you out of the lodge.

You see Ro crawling on to Gully’s lap. Then the bead curtain falls and the polythene flap drops.

You are out in the field, in the cold.

‘Degenerate filth,’ Roy declares. ‘Let’s get away from here. Back to the sane world.’

House, job, kids, DIY, Residents’ Committee, five weeks’ holiday.

Is this a life, or a trap?

‘Yes,’ you say, ‘let’s.’

And so on.

Y
ou chose the door!

What kind of a man are you?

A situation pregnant with promise, mystery, danger, wonder. And you chose to go home?

Go on, fuck off out of it. I’m not interested in you any more. You might as well join a monastery or the army, or develop an all-consuming interest in
Star Trek
or real ale.

I can’t believe you chose the door.

Don’t you remember when you were in infants’ school, and you had a craze for piracy? You drew treasure maps and wore a pirate hat with a skull-and-crossbones badge. You had a plastic cutlass, and you were always being told off for scaling the curtains as if they were rigging.

What happened to that?

At six, you were ready for adventure. You’d have waded through blood for treasure and glory. You’d have keelhauled landlubbers and made mutineers walk the plank.

And now a little
a cappella
is making you scarper.

It’s not too late. You can hesitate as you cross the threshold, your ear caught by something indefinable in that ululation. Your resolve quickened by the memory of Edward ‘Blackbeard’ Teach, you turn and walk back into the house, taking whatever comes.

In which case, go to 68.

* * *

You’re still here? You’re still walking out of the door. You fucking chicken. You yellow-livered wimp.

I’m disgusted.

Deep down, underneath it all, you’re nothing. You’re not worth bothering with.

You’ll have something like a life. It’ll drift past quickly. Things will happen.

Things won’t. You meet people, lose touch. You grow up, get a job, get married, have kids, grow old, die. And serves you right.

And so on.

* * *

Maybe you’ll be haunted by the road not taken.