The Count of Eleven (20 page)

“We could wait for ever at this rate.” He gave Julia an apologetic smile. “Julia can tell him.”

“Whatever you say,” Julia said, willing him to come to the point.

“You remember last time you were at the Experience.”

“It was lovely.”

Are you listening, Laura?” Jody said.

Laura looked up from her Get Well Soon card, which depicted a clown with his leg in traction. “I am now.”

“You remember getting a bill we didn’t want you to pay,” Pete said.

“We would have,” Julia assured him.

Pete shook his head. “Do you remember something else, Laura?”

“What about?”

That night.”

“You telling my dad about the job at our school.”

“You’re right, that was then too. I don’t suppose there’s any such thing as a perfect day,” Pete said to Julia, and seemed about to apologise for reminding her when Laura cried “The competition you said our bill was going in.”

“Yes,” Jody responded at the same pitch.

“You mean we’ve ‘

“You’re the lucky winners,” Pete said. “Your bill was the one that came out of the hat. You’ve won yourselves a holiday in Greece.”

“Crete,” Laura said as though she were dreaming.

“We thought that might be where you’d want to go.”

Julia felt light-headed, almost drunk. “That’s wonderful, Pete. Just what we needed. How many people is it for?”

“All three of you, of course.”

“It was always for three people?”

“It might have been up to four, depending how many there were on the bill. So you’ve saved us some money,” he said with an exaggerated wink.

“I don’t know how we can thank you, Pete.”

“You just did,” he said, nodding at Laura, and stood up. “I really have to go. I’m only sorry I couldn’t see Jack’s face. I’ll be giving you a voucher for the travel agent. Look after yourselves in the meantime.”

Jody lingered until he reminded her she had school homework. As she headed uphill while Pete made for the se afront the Orchards stayed at the gate as if doing so might conjure up Jack. When a wind started the For Sale sign creaking Julia said “Let’s go inside. Better keep warm.”

She couldn’t help wishing she had heard from Pete before Jack had called; then she would have been able to tell him she knew a secret which he had to come home to learn. She didn’t need to tempt him home, there was nowhere else for him. She collected the mugs, and was running hot water into them from the kitchen tap when Laura shouted “Here’s Dad.”

Julia heard the engine die as she turned off the tap. Laura’s footsteps hobbled to the front door. By the time Julia reached the threshold Laura was at the van and pulling at Jack’s door with both hands. “Dad, you’ve got to be happy or we won’t tell you our news.”

He stared at her as though he wasn’t quite sure what he was seeing. He jumped down so suddenly that she almost lost her balance. “Is this happy?” he said, going pop-eyed and sticking his fingers in the corners of his mouth to produce a toothy grin. “How about this?” he said and started prancing around the van, lifting his knees high and slapping them each time they came up. “Am I happy yet? Am I a happy?” he cried, sticking his tongue through his fixed grin and lolling his head from shoulder to shoulder.

Laura giggled and glanced about in case the neighbours saw him. “Dad

…”

Julia caught up with him on the far side of the van from Laura. “Jack, don’t spoil it for her.”

He halted, breathing hard, and leaned against the vehicle. When his eyes returned to normal and his tongue retreated between his lips his face appeared to be collapsing. “Why, is there something to spoil?”

“Let Laura tell you.” As he mopped his forehead Julia said “You’ll be all right, won’t you? Can I help?”

“No, no,” he said, so fast it sounded like stammering, and capered around the van to Laura. “Ready as I’ll ever be.”

“Dad, what do you think? We’re going to Crete.”

“What, now? That’s an idea.”

“Not now, silly. In the summer holidays. We’ve won the competition at the restaurant.”

All three of us, Jack,” Julia said, putting both arms around his waist and resting her chin on his shoulder.

“But we didn’t pay. I don’t see how …” He seemed stunned and confused. He lurched against her, then abruptly straightened up. “When did you hear?”

“Pete and Jody have only this minute gone.”

“Did he say when they made the draw?”

“Sometime today, I imagine. I shouldn’t think they waited long to come and tell us. Does it matter?”

Jack squeezed his eyes shut. “I’m trying to work out when our luck changed,” he said, and swayed against her. “My God, is that what it takes?”

“I know what you mean.”

“What are you doing inside my head?”

He’d straightened again and was staring at her. “All it took was for the Venables to pick us. Try and calm down, Jack,” she said, glimpsing Laura’s disappointed expression as the girl went into the house, and wrinkled her nose. “Do you want to get changed? You smell of where you’ve been.”

He recoiled, flapping his hands at himself, his face twisting into a disgusted grin. “How’s that?”

“Don’t worry, Jack, I can’t smell any fancy woman’s perfume. Just petrol and smoke. Was something on fire?”

He grasped the handle on the driver’s side as if he meant to climb into the van. “My bridges,” he said wildly.

“Jack, if there’s anything you need to tell me you can, whatever it is.”

“I’d never do anything to hurt either of you.”

That’s one thing you don’t need to tell me,” Julia said, and wondered if he had meant it as some kind of answer, his ensuing silence was so protracted. At last he mumbled “But I’d do anything I thought I had to for you.”

“I really don’t think you need to do any more just now except be with us.”

He hadn’t let go of the van. He was staring across the mounds of the Crazy Golf course at smoke bulging from the funnel of a tanker on the bay. Suddenly, dismayingly, she wondered if she knew why he wasn’t looking at her. “Jack, you didn’t go after the Evans boys, did you?”

“No.”

“I wasn’t suggesting you should have. Let the law take care of them and we’ll take care of one another.” She shouldn’t have asked, she thought; reminding him of the Evanses seemed to have made him feel helpless. “If by burning your bridges you meant giving up the shop and going back into libraries, you ought to know I couldn’t be happier. I’m sure it’s best for all of us.”

She let him gaze at the creeping smoke for a few seconds, then she said “Are you going to let Laura see how pleased you are for her?”

He seized on that as if the idea had only just reached him.

“I should,” he said, and blundered up the path, dragging his sweater over his head.

He seemed revived. It wasn’t long before he came downstairs bearing the clothes he’d changed out of and the contents of the washing basket, and he would have stuffed all this indiscriminately into the machine if Julia hadn’t stopped him. “They aren’t that urgent,” she said.

“You know me, Square Eyes Orchard. I’d watch an hour of water if the telly wasn’t working,” he said, gazing expectantly at the machine until she had to laugh and load his smelly clothes in. “That’s great,” he said to Laura. “Really great, going to Crete. Really Crete. Really Greek. I’m chuffed that you’ll be going after all.”

“You’ll be coming too.”

“Will I? There’s always a drawback.” He grinned at her with one side of his face. “Don’t mind me. Just a clown with too much patter. You know clowns aren’t supposed to talk. Tell you what, why don’t we go and say thank you and see what nationality the Venables are now.”

“I’ve already made dinner, Jack,” Julia protested. “We can go and celebrate at the weekend. It’ll wait.”

“Hope so. Where’s your tape?” he asked Laura.

When he calmed down sufficiently to make it clear that he meant Jody’s, she fetched it and her player from her bedroom. As the bouzouki music filled the front room he sat and gazed from the window as if he could see Greece. Only his head moved, turning to watch the occasional car that passed along the darkening street. A car slowed as it approached the house, and Jack rose into a stiff crouch above the chair, but the car was giving way to another vehicle. Their brake lights glared red, and then they were past. “Not for us,” he said, sinking into the chair.

“It’s a bit late for house-hunters,” Julia said.

“Later than you think,” he said, and added quickly “Not than Laura thinks. She thinks it’s time for dinner.”

At first he picked at his food, then he began to eat as though he were miming hunger. Between mouthfuls he announced what was visible in the window of the machine

“Trousers now showing … And now the eight o’clock socks … The sweater wins the marathon … Will the sock find its long-lost twin? Tune in next week’ until he saw that Laura still found laughing painful. Once the machine had churned to a halt he started the Greek tape again, and they sat in the front room, Laura exploring the Cretan guidebook in search of places to visit. Just before nine o’clock he stood up. “There’s an old comedy show I want to hear,” he said. “I’ll listen in the van.”

“It’s all right, Dad, I’ll turn the music off.”

He was already in the hall. “We don’t want you laughing and hurting yourself,” he called back.

Julia could only assume that he found the broadcast disappointing, because less than ten minutes later she heard the slide and slam of the van door. “I don’t think Dad believes it yet,” Laura said.

True enough, as he came up the path Jack looked bemused, as if he didn’t quite dare to trust their luck. “He’ll get used to it,” Julia assured her. “Don’t turn the tape over, love. I think we’ll all be early to bed.”

Laura headed for the bathroom as Jack closed the front door. “Wasn’t it much fun?” Julia asked him.

“What?” he said, so sharply that it sounded like an exclamation.

“The comedy.”

“I don’t think I know what’s funny any more.”

He sounded as if he didn’t know how he felt at all, and so she went to him. “It’s real, that’s what matters,” she said. “What happened is real.”

“I’ll stake my life on that,” he said. “God, what a joke.”

If she was unable to grasp what he was saying, that mightn’t be his fault; the last two days were catching up with her. “Do you feel like going to bed yet?”

“You go ahead. I’ll be here,” he said, sliding past her into the front room.

She took her time over preparing for bed, hoping he might follow, but when she slipped between the chilly sheets he was still downstairs. Sleep began to jumble the jigsaw of her senses and her thoughts and widen the gaps between them. Once she almost wakened, hearing the radio downstairs playing the jingle which heralded the local news, and some time later she felt Jack beside her, sitting up as though to listen for some sound outside the house. Nobody could have been outside, since Julia went back to sleep.

Jack’s snoring wakened her. She might go to the office when he’d slept enough. She eased herself out of bed and had a shower that confirmed she felt refreshed. She was turning it off when the doorbell rang. “Can you see who it is, Laura?” she said from the top of the stairs.

Laura was hesitating between the stairs and the front door. “It’s a policeman,” she said.

For Laura the worst moments had been at the hospital: worse than being dragged off her bicycle by her hair, worse than the punches which had felt like being hit with bricks, worse even than the shame and dismay she’d experienced at the thought that her parents would see the state she was in as she’d lain on the bench. Being accused by the mother of her attackers had been horrible enough, but then Laura had thought that one or both of her own parents had been about to attack the woman, and that would have been worst of all. If they weren’t in control of themselves, if they could turn into people she didn’t know and mightn’t want to know, then nothing was to be trusted; anything could happen to her life.

It seemed strange that her own rage didn’t disturb her half so much. When she’d lashed out at the boys on the promenade her fury had been indistinguishable from panic until one of her kicks had connected, and then her emotions had instantly changed from being uncontrollable into a possible means of taking control. The way the eldest boy had doubled up as her kick had landed between his legs had encouraged her to grab the leader by his crotch, and twist, and keep twisting until he’d let go of her hair. If she hadn’t attempted to climb on her bicycle and ride it away, if she had flung it at them to slow them down, she might have escaped. All the same, the memory of how the boy had screamed as the contents of his scrotum ground together in her fist had gone some way towards compensating her for all the aches and unpredictable sharp pains that had kept her awake in bed.

Now she had the prospect of the holiday in Crete as compensation too, and it was more than enough. Surely it would make up for what had happened to her as far as her parents were concerned, once her father got over the shock of their good luck. Grown-ups weren’t supposed to be at the mercy of their feelings; surely learning not to be was part of growing up. Sometimes she felt at the mercy of hers, but that was meant to be just a phase of her life. Last night she had slept soundly, enveloped in a sense that their win had surrounded her and her parents with good luck, and this morning she was first out of bed.

Her ankle, on which the eldest boy had trampled as a parting shot when she was lying on the tarmac, still hurt if she put her weight on it, but not as much. Her face felt slightly less like a stiff lumpy unfamiliar mask. She limped to the bathroom and saw that the livid colours of her bruises had begun to fade. At least she could open her em purpled eye. She filled the bath and lowered herself carefully into the water, her ribs and arms and legs twingeing, and lay for a while dreaming she was in the Sea of Crete, kicking her uninjured leg gently to create waves. When a chill crept into the water she dried herself and got dressed.

Her parents were asleep. She thought of waking them with a mug of coffee each, but decided to wait until she heard them beginning to stir. She sat in the front room and leafed through Jody’s guidebook. Even the names seemed magical Knossos, Aghios Nikolaos, Heraklion, Minos Tava and she could almost believe that their magic had altered the family’s luck. She heard someone go into the bathroom, and the sound of the shower reminded her of the hoses at her father’s shop. As the sound dwindled, she glimpsed a policeman passing the house. The latch of the gate clicked, and then the doorbell rang.