The Immaculate (31 page)

“Shit!” he shouted, and ran towards his car, a clawed hand taking hold of his intestines and squeezing. When he got closer he saw the debris in the dirt—twisted bits of metal and plastic, shreds of his engine's guts.

“Bastards,” he breathed when he crossed in front of his car and saw what was left of his engine. It looked as though someone had been at it with a sledgehammer. Jack knew next to nothing about cars, but he did know that he was looking at an awful lot of damage. Things were cracked and dented and mangled and ripped out. Though his mind was buzzing with shock, a small calculating part of it wondered whether the damage was reparable or whether he'd have to buy a completely new engine. If so, how much would that cost? Hundreds? Thousands?

“You fucking bastards,” he snarled again. He spun round and shouted, “I'll kill you, you bastards!” But the landscape remained the same, stoically unimpressed. One thing was certain: Jack would not be leaving Beckford today.

Turning furiously from the wreckage, he stormed into the house.

If grudges were plants, Patty Bates would be a fine gardener indeed. He had always nurtured them lovingly, never allowing them to wither and die. Prize bloom in his garden of seething thoughts and dark resentments was the score he would one day settle with Terry Stone. Though it had happened fourteen years ago, Patty had never forgotten the humiliation of that day, and the hatred, the desire for revenge, was as strong now as it had ever been.

The reason why Bates had not already settled the score could be put down to one simple word. He would never have admitted it to anyone, did not even allow the word to form in his mind. But it was there nevertheless, a dull, throbbing, constant pain. The word was
fear.
Patty Bates was
afraid
of Terry Stone. In Stone he had seen a madness, a rage, that eclipsed his own. He had no desire to reawaken that . . . and yet he
would
get his revenge.

There were other ways. Methods in which he could exact retribution without encountering the man himself. Terry Stone, as Patty knew only too well, had a son. When they were kids, even before the incident at the garage, Patty had used Jack Stone as his occasional punching bag. Once, the best time, he had taken him into the woods and made him eat raw eggs. After the episode at the garage, Patty had laid low for a while, nursing his resentment, licking his wounds. Whenever he had seen Jack Stone at school, a dark, sickening fury had come over him, a desire to mash the little fucker's face to a sloppy pulp. But the memory of Jack's father, of the sheer insanity of the man, had held him back. No, Patty would bide his time. There would eventually come a day when he would be old enough and strong enough, and Terry Stone would be too old and too weak.

But when that day finally came, as indeed it did, Jack Stone was gone. According to local gossip, he had left for London after a row with his father and was not coming back. Patty was enraged. He felt cheated out of what was rightfully his. He considered going out to the Stone place, blowing Terry away with his father's shotgun and burning the fucking dump to the ground.

The fantasy gave him succour in his frustration, but that was all it was: a fantasy. In truth, there was no way that Patty would ever confront Terry Stone again. It had been 1989 when Jack had left Beckford. Patty was twenty-one and at the peak of his physical prowess, whereas Terry Stone was rapidly running to seed, ravaged by too much booze and tobacco. He was ravaged, too, by the rage that had been his strength back in '83, but which was now devouring him like a cancer. And yet for all this, despite the fact that Patty
knew
he could now tie Terry Stone in knots like so many pipe cleaners, he still stayed away from Daisy Lane. It was like an animal instinct, a primitive thing: once bitten, twice shy. In some ways it was an almost superstitious fear, as though Terry was some shaman, some dark diabolist, possessed of frightening powers.

Later, after his father had pulled some strings and secured Patty the tenancy of the Seven Stars, he would see Terry regularly, propping up the bar or sitting around a table in the snug with the rest of the old codgers. Terry didn't seem to recognise him, or if he did he didn't say anything. The old sod's brain was probably so alcohol-sodden that he couldn't remember the previous day, never mind fourteen years ago. Sometimes he even smiled and handed Patty his glass and said, “Put another spot o' bitter in there, would you, son?” On these occasions Patty would grit his teeth and resist the urge to wrap his itching fingers round the old bugger's neck. He often considered barring Terry Stone, but on what pretext? The old man nearly always got drunk, but instead of getting rowdy he just slipped into melancholia. It was not his scruples that prevented Patty from barring Stone without a bona fide reason, for Patty didn't really have any scruples. No, it was all part of that superstitious fear, that feeling that if he didn't have a reason, the old sod might well put a curse on him or something.

And so he waited. And he seethed. And he waited. And then one night . . .

Terry Stone bounded into the snug of the Seven Stars, making the old men stir. They were not used to sudden movement, and the breeze created by Terry's unusually buoyant entrance unsettled them. In the centre of the room the pool table stood idle, as it did most nights (Tracey Bates' friends, the bikers who would one day claim this territory as their own, were as yet barely in their teens). Roger Woodnutt, a shapeless Toby Jugg of a man who was never seen without his hat and pipe, raised his weathered face toward the newcomer. “Now then, Terry,” he said in his gravel-throated drawl, “what's up wi' thee? Got ants in your pants?”

Terry Stone had been known to squeeze out the occasional laconic smile in the course of an evening's conversation, but he rarely grinned as he was doing now. Both Alf Dixon and George Blackburn were strangely unsettled by the grin, as they were by the fact that Terry had not only shaved his jowls pink, but was also wearing a tie, albeit a frayed and badly knotted one.

“I'm celebrating,” he said, grinning his yellow-toothed grin through a cloud of Roger's pipe-smoke.

George was instantly suspicious. “Why? Who's died?”

“Nobody's died,” said Terry. “Come on, what're you all drinking? My shout.”

Alf, who saw more than he was given credit for, noticed that Patty Bates, the landlord, was watching the group with a scowl on his face. It was not the first time Alf had noticed that expression, and it was not the first time, either, that he found himself wishing Billy Watson, the old landlord, was still at the helm. Billy had had to pack it in because of his heart. Like many people, Alf had been astonished and disgusted when Bates had got the tenancy. Everyone in the village knew what a bad lot he was, but Joe Bates must have put pressure on Billy to convince the brewery that the sun shone out of Patty's arse. It was apparently because of some favour that Billy owed Joe that Patty had been given a job first as barman, and then as bar manager. Of course, like everyone else, Alf refrained from voicing his objections. He simply kept his head down and supped his ale. Crossing the Bates's was never a good idea, principles or no.

Terry returned from the bar with a tin tray laden with drinks. He distributed them among his compatriots and sat down. “Cheers,” said Roger and took a long draw on his pint, the froth sticking to his upper lip. At last he lowered his glass, released a loud sigh of pleasure, and said, “Now then, Terry. What's all this about?”

“I'll show you,” said Terry. His eyes were alive in a way the old men had never seen before; he looked like a little boy with a secret. He reached into his inside coat pocket and drew out a rectangular parcel in a brown paper bag. Almost reverently he unfolded the bag and pulled out what was inside. “Take a look for yourself,” he said.

It was a book. One of them expensive hardbacks with the shiny covers. Alf found himself reaching for it instinctively, and the book was placed into his hands.

“Careful,” said Terry. “Don't crease the cover. And don't get mucky fingerprints all over it.”

Alf held the book as if it were something fragile and expensive. He looked at the picture on the front—a dove with a smear of blood on its breast superimposed over a woman's face. He read the title—
Bleeding Hearts
—and the author's name: Jack Stone.

He looked up at Terry. “This isn't . . .”

“Aye,” said Terry proudly. “It's our Jackie. He's had a book published.”

The old men around the table exchanged glances.
Our Jackie?
Terry had never referred to his son in such affectionate terms before. If truth be told, he barely referred to him at all. Alf nodded, “Aye, very nice,” and passed the book to George. George gave it a cursory glance and passed it to Roger.

Roger placed his pipe in the glass ashtray in the centre of the table and examined the book closely. He opened the cover and read the blurb on the front flap. “One of these here science-fiction things, is it?” he said when he had done. He turned the book over and examined the photograph on the back.

Alf noticed that Patty Bates was leaning heavily on the bar and surreptitiously examining the photograph, too. Bates caught his eye, scowled and turned away. Alf shivered and gulped at his pint. Bates' curiosity would have been understandable if that was all it was. But there had been more than curiosity on his face. There had been . . . Alf tried to think of an appropriate word. Was
hatred
too strong to apply to that expression? Alf glanced at the landlord, who was now talking to Livvy Taylor. No, he reckoned hatred was just about right.

That night, Alf observed, seemed to mark a turning point in Terry Stone's life, or at least in his attitude to it. Suddenly he was talking about “Our Jackie” as if he and his estranged son were the best of buddies. It was, “Our Jackie was on telly last night,” or, “Our Jackie's new one is in the top twenty bestsellers this week.” No outsider would have guessed that Terry Stone was talking about a son whom he used to beat up regularly, and who had run away to London the best part of a decade ago after leaving his father unconscious with a broken nose.

Unbeknownst to Alf, that night marked a kind of turning point in Patty Bates' life, too. Seeing Jack Stone's book, and particularly the photograph on the back, seemed to give Patty a new impetus, a new direction. Alf Dixon had been right; it
had
been hatred that he had seen on Patty's face. The sight of Jack Stone looking fresh and eager, smiling smugly from the book jacket, awakened a rage in Patty that was like a cog of freezing steel churning in his stomach, twisting his guts. The next day he had driven to Leeds and had bought his own copy of
Bleeding Hearts.
He had to fight an urge to rip the novel to shreds, to slice open Jack Stone's supercilious smile with a razor blade. But Patty resisted his impulses; he had other, more constructive plans. As soon as he arrived back at the pub, he ascended the stairs to the living quarters and strolled along the landing to his ten year old daughter's bedroom, his sweating palm creating an arc of condensation on the laminated book jacket, a patina of mist on Jack Stone's celluloid face.

From beyond the door he could hear the theme tune of
Scooby Doo.
He gave a perfunctory knock and entered. Tracey was sprawled on her bed, staring blankly at the too-loud television, which he and Louise had given her on her eighth birthday. She turned to her father and smiled. “Hello, Daddy.”

Patty was no aesthete, but there were times when his daughter's beauty took his breath away. Now was one of those times. The sun was shining on her golden waist-length hair and the side of her face. She looked almost ethereally perfect; at that moment his nickname for her seemed especially apt. “Hello, Angel,” he said, and sat heavily on the end of her bed.

Tracey sat up, crossing her coltish legs Buddha-fashion. She was only ten but already he had seen boys of fourteen and fifteen mooning over her. He had seen, too, how she played them along, twisted them around her little finger. Sometimes he delighted in her powers of manipulation, sometimes it reminded him depressingly of how Louise behaved.

“Are you watching this?” he asked, nodding at the TV.

“Nah, it's boring.”

“Do you mind if I turn it off then?”

She shrugged, uncoiled her legs, bounded from the bed and turned the TV off herself, her movements fluid, athletic. She pounced back onto the bed and sat beside her father. “Are we going to have a talk?” she said. “Is it about Mummy?”

Louise had finally walked out three months ago after threatening to do so for years. The break up didn't seem to have unduly affected Tracey; she had become a little more withdrawn than usual, perhaps, but that was all as far as Patty could tell.

“No,” he said, “I want to show you something.” He passed the book to her.

She took it without hesitation. It looked big and heavy in her small, slender hands. Unlike many children her age, Tracey didn't ask too many questions. She was sharp and shrewd, she knew when information was forthcoming.

She never wasted her breath on irrelevancies. One or two of the regulars called her the “little ice maiden,” though not when Patty was within earshot.

She looked at the cover of the book, flipped through the pages, turned it over and looked at the photograph on the back. Then she placed the book on her lap and looked expectantly at her father.

Patty found he was breathing hard, rage simmering inside him. He jabbed at the photograph, fingernail leaving a small dent on Jack Stone's forehead, between the eyes. Trying to keep his voice steady, he said, “I want you to look at this man, Tracey. I want you to memorise his face. He's a bad man. Once he did something to me, and one day I'm going to get him back for it. He doesn't live here anymore, he lives in London. But he's going to have to come back sometime—I know he is. And when he does, I'm going to get him. I'm going to pay him back for the terrible thing he did to me. And I want you to help me, Tracey. You will help me, won't you?”