Life's Lottery (37 page)

He is wrong.

All the evils in the world flow from quite different sources.

‘I saw Eastment.’

‘Does he remember you?’

‘He remembers Scary Mary.’ Your wife is quite proud of her old nickname.

‘He was a misfit,’ you say. ‘Too clever to keep quiet.’

‘He hasn’t changed.’

‘No one does.’

‘No.’

Mary sits at her dressing-table. She pulls back her hair and ties it in a knot, then begins applying her make-up. A black base with green stripes.

You get into your weekend clothes. Jeans that have been ground in dirt and flogged against stone walls. A dark, loose shirt. Heavy work-boots. A greatcoat, leaking at the shoulders, with most of its buttons gone. A wig: long, straggly black hair, held in place by a Rambo band.

Mary’s weekend outfit is similar. Her afghan coat is brown and ancient enough to disappear in the dark. She wears a black balaclava that fits perfectly round the camouflage mask she has made of her face. Only her large eyes, clear and strong, show a light.

‘I love you,’ you say.

Kissing her, you taste make-up. She hooks her hands into the stringy scraggle of your wig.

‘I love you too,’ she says back.

Then you go downstairs and outside, creeping out of the house into the dark. No one is around to see you cut across the fields. No moon shows through the cloud. This is your favourite type of night.

* * *

Saturday morning. Valentine’s Day. You have bought each other large, manufactured cards, the same as last year and all the years before.

As you slob around the house, Roy Canning calls by. Not recognising the concept of off-duty, he thinks of Mary as his personal policewoman. Mary makes him instant coffee – you keep the real stuff for yourselves – and listens to his complaints.

‘They’m animals, Mary, girl. Last night were worst yet.’

‘But you don’t know it was the travellers.’

‘Who else could it be?’ you put in.

‘Animals. When I got up this morning, it were the first thing I saw… what they did. Animals. I tell ‘ee. They’m got to be shifted.’

‘You should make an official charge.’

‘That’s what I’s doing.’

‘Mary’s off for the weekend, Roy,’ you point out evenly, good-humoured. ‘You should see Inspector Draper, in town. Maybe he’ll stage a dawn raid.’

‘If I’d caught ’en, Keith… I don’t know what I’d have done.’ He shakes his head, mulling over the hurt.

‘For God’s sake,’ you purr, ‘don’t say anything Mary might have to remember in court.’

Mary smiles. Roy, shocked, calms himself.

If he ever thought about it, Roy would realise he doesn’t like you. But he won’t think about it. It doesn’t matter anyway. Apart from Mary, people only ever know your weekday self. The one that doesn’t count.

You can’t help smiling at the thought. If Roy doesn’t like the weekday Keith, what would he think of the weekend Keith? It is a temptation. You’d like to show yourself to someone sometime. The circumstances would have to be right. You’d have to choose carefully, someone who’d never be in a position to tell.

‘It’d be nothing personal,’ you say. ‘But the law is the law.’

‘They don’t recognise laws of God or man,’ Roy says. ‘They should be shot, like sheep-worriers.’

While Roy talks to you, Mary makes him another cup of coffee. After she spoons in the Nescafé, she hawks quietly and spits on to the brown powder, then pours in hot water and milk.

‘It’s two sugars, isn’t it?’

* * *

Saturday evening. After dark, Saturdays have been just between the two of you since before you were married. This is the real time, when your marriage – your partnership – is at its most intense, at its most pure. This is the time when you and Mary can really work on your special projects.

Some projects, you have been working on for many years. Some are thought of, executed and over within the space of an afternoon and evening. Sometimes, you have a plan which you stick to rigorously; sometimes, you act on impulse, improvising giddily. Sometimes, personal feelings are involved, carried over from the weekday world, allowing you to correct imbalances, to pay back debtors beyond the reach of bank or law. Sometimes, you pursue a project mechanically, to see how far you can take something without the impetus of conviction, just to see what happens. On occasion, to preserve your edge, you act against your own interests, pursuing a project though it inconveniences people you’re fond of.

You’re not a monster: you do genuinely like some people. Though you remember Eastment as a rival and a disturbing loose cannon at school, you rather admire him now. He has sacrificed comfort for a principle you could never embrace. It’s because you can feel empathy for some and antipathy for others that your weekend work is so satisfying, offering such a rich variety of emotional stimuli.

At first, you were appeasing the shadow-spiders. Gradually, over the years, you have become the darkness. You and Mary have grown together, passionately. You used to plot and plan, arguing over methods and campaigns. Now you know instinctively what to do, where to push, how to manipulate. When to strike, and when to refrain from striking.

Every project reaches a point where it can continue without you. If people are nudged to a certain point, inertia carries them on. Some people are heavier or lighter than you expect, but you’re both patient, adaptable, good-humoured.

Tonight, alive in the dark, you cross the fields again, making your way from Sutton Mallet to Achelzoy. You know all the rhynes and fords from years of study.

You and Mary.

Your weekday selves are perfectly placed to know things, to see cracks that can be worked into chasms. But only your weekend selves count.

You’ve known the travellers would be a project ever since Mary heard Robert Hackwill, chairman of the council, was scouting around for a community well outside his ward which might host unwelcome visitors. You and Mary have felt little thrills as the players – Hackwill, Canning, Eastment, Draper – moved into their places, each with his attendant followers. It was almost as if they were under your influence, even before you devoted any time to the project.

Sometimes, you have to do very little.

The travellers’ site is away from the main road – Hackwill was careful it couldn’t be seen from the highway – and fairly exposed. It’s little more than a circle of battered caravans. The scents of chemical toilets and incense waft on the sharp winter breeze. As you creep nearer the field, you see the flicker of fires through thin hedge. Music throbs, loud enough to shake fillings. Lights are strung up in the circle, making a pyramid of illumination on the dark quilt of the moor.

Mary stands up. You follow suit.

You are the dark. You can’t be seen.

From her Friday recce, Mary knows exactly where the generator is. The caravans have electricity. Some have portable TVs and microwave ovens. All the kids sleep under electric blankets.

You take the crowbar out of your backpack.

* * *

Sunday morning. As always, you lounge with the papers spread out over the big bed. There’s never anything interesting to read and you often whine about it, but Mary looks at interior decoration articles and you dutifully trudge through the sport section. You listen together to the omnibus edition of
The Archers.

Throughout your life, you have only ever listened to the radio (as opposed to having it on in the background) on Sundays.
Two-Way Family Favourites
and
Round the Home
and
The Clitheroe Kid. Down Your Way
and
Sing Something Simple
and
Gardeners’ Question Time.
This is your idea of British heritage. The culture that binds you to your society. The telly never goes on until well after the God slot.

You were in bed just after dawn. At the weekends, you need less sleep. Often, you and Mary make love in the small hours of Sunday, after getting back from an excursion. It’s your private time, after you have served your project of the moment.

When you were first married, while your projects were mainly around the house, you used to have Sunday lunch with your parents or, more often, Mary’s. That seems to have fallen by the wayside. You don’t really miss the heavy food, the smell of cooking cabbage, the ritual conversations, Mary’s dad’s story about seeing a flying saucer while cycling his beat, Mary’s little cousin Beth’s horse drawings.

The weekends are just for you and Mary. That’s as it should be.

* * *

Sunday afternoon. You work up in the Batcave. The materials for your projects have to be assembled carefully, so they can’t be traced or if they can not back to you. Many special items have to be made more or less from scratch. You and Mary have taught yourself skills. Not every task can be accomplished with something as simple as last night’s crowbar.

On a hot-plate, Mary cooks up a mixture of horse manure – supplied by Beth’s pony and supposedly for the vegetable garden – and glue, stirring in liquid to get the proper texture. You’ve both contributed your own shit to the mixture, just for luck. The smell is vile, so you have the extractor fan on full blast. For your part, you’ve been collecting milk bottles – not so easy to find in these days of cartons – and making tight-fitting stoppers. You don’t want any leakage.

As you work, you play tapes of Andrew Lloyd-Webber musicals, singing along to favourite tracks.

Carefully, you half-fill the bottles with the mixture you call Sticky Shit and top up with a layer of pink paraffin. Then you get them stoppered and lay them down next to the elderflower wine.

* * *

‘What’s that smell?’ someone asks.

‘Tomato preserve,’ says Mary. ‘I think this year’s batch is off.’

You have a visitor, Inspector Draper. Mary’s boss, you suppose. You both like and feel sorry for him. Many of your projects seem to give him grief, quite incidental to your intentions. Mary tries to make up for it by looking after him on the job. Whenever interesting ingestible drugs are confiscated, she takes a pinch and crumbles it into his PG Tips.

Draper has found you in the garden, enjoying the dusk. You have locked up the Batcave.

‘What brings you out this way?’ you ask.

Draper nods towards Achelzoy.

‘Roy Canning and the travellers?’ you hazard.

‘You must be psychic, Keith.’

‘Not really. It’s all anybody talks about round here these days. Roy was over yesterday. I suppose you’re following up on his complaint.’

‘Which one?’

‘The latest.’

‘It’s gone a bit beyond complaints. Canning’s apparently been playing silly buggers. Fancies himself as a commando.’

Mary looks concerned.

‘He’s not in any trouble, is he? Yesterday, he was wound up tight. Making all kinds of accusations and threats.’

‘He must have accomplices.’

‘Has Eastment called you in?’ you ask Draper. ‘That’s a turn-up. A hippie calling the “pigs”!’

Draper snorts. ‘Eastment’s in hospital.’

‘Sounds like a range war,’ you comment, ironically. ‘Wild West stuff.’

‘I’m sick of being sheriff in this town,’ Draper says.

Mary hugs him. ‘Don’t worry. We love you. Would you like a jar of the tomato goo?’

* * *

Sunday evening. After Draper has gone, without knowing why, you both can’t stop giggling.

As it gets dark, you don’t turn on the lights in the house. You and Mary sit on your sofa in your lounge, holding each other, as much a couple as the day you were married. The shadows grow inside, seeping across the floor and up the walls, boxing in the last squares of light and cutting them down to slivers then wiping them out. You will always be a team.

You and Mary. And the dark.

And so on.

Y
ou pause in the shade, which suddenly seems bristling with threat, and look back. Will comes to the door, leading Mary. Her hair is undone and she is buttoning a cardigan. Mildly impatient, she looks out of the door but doesn’t see you. You press yourself into the shrinking dark.

She looks around, humouring her son. Clearly, she doesn’t believe in the man who came to the door. She can’t have heard your knock.

She takes Will inside, and shuts the door.

You straighten and step out of the shade. For the first time, you’re unsure of yourself. This is way off your patch. People dressed like you do not wander around this estate and expect to walk away with their watches and credit cards.

Until now, you thought of yourself as a predator. Now you are a victim.

Older kids, who should be in school, cluster behind a windbreak garage wall, lighting up cigarettes. People are all around, going to work.

The night is almost gone.

* * *

You wander away, without purpose. It is as if the day has been called off and you are free. You have no appointments, no commitments.

The last thing that seems clear in your mind is something absurd, trivial and long-gone. The seatbelt in Mary’s dad’s car, and the trouble you had with it.

That would be 197when? Rag Day?

Jubilee year. 1977.

The day you went to Sutton Mallet.

* * *

Later that morning, you drive out to Sutton Mallet. The turn-off is still there. The road is paved now. There are a few more houses, new homes for commuters.

You park the car and get out.

It’s cold, but clear. You feel nothing. There’s nothing unexceptional or strange about this place.

Is this what made you run?

You find the field. The one where you ran, where you were chased. It’s just a field, grass crisp where the frost has not gone.

You shout at the shadow-spiders. ‘Come out, come and get me.’

Nothing.

* * *

For the first time, you feel free. You thought you might be afraid, but you aren’t. You almost feel excited.

There are things you want to change. Things you want to get out of, patterns you want to break.

Fear will come, you know. But so will other things.

You can do anything. The future is yours, to make of what you will.

You walk away from Sutton Mallet.