Written in Blood (46 page)

He knew nothing about his parents’ financial affairs. His father had never discussed such matters. But surely Mr Clapton senior must have some sort of nest-egg? A small emolument to show for the years of drudgery at his boring little clerical job in the city. Or maybe there was an insurance policy that could be realised. Of course Brian would pay them back.

But there would be endless questions. And what reason could he give? Not improvements on the house, for that could be checked-up on, and would be too. Brian’s parents, though timidly hesitant where the wide world was concerned, could be doggedly persistent when it came to the business of their close relations. Still, he could sound them out, perhaps under the guise of concern for their future financial wellbeing.

If all three sources failed he would be left with the bank, who would quite possibly cough up but would demand outrageous interest. But - wait a minute . . .

How about Sue? She was a proper author now. Going to be in print. Didn’t they get given money even before publication? The writers’ group were always going on about it. Jeffrey Archer’s advance. Julie Burchill’s advance. Telephone numbers. Noughts so numerous they ran off the front of the cheque and had to go swanking round the back.

Brian’s breathing quickened. Nerve ends danced and jangled beneath his skin. He told himself not to get carried away. This was, after all, his wife’s first book. She couldn’t expect VIP treatment before they’d seen how successful Hector would turn out to be. Even so, there would be something. And, Christ knew, she owed it to him. Not only had he been keeping her for years but it was entirely her fault he had ended up in Quarry Cottage in the first place.

Brian screwed up his eyes and peered intensely into the fog, trying to discern signs of movement behind the windows. He removed his misted-up glasses and rubbed them on his jacket cuff. His teeth started to chatter and his beard to drip moisture. Then he sneezed.

Immediately the night was rent with the sound of ferocious barking. In an uncannily precise replay of the previous Thursday evening the cottage door swung open and a figure stood in the opening. On this occasion the spillage of light was almost non-existent, for the looming shape filled every inch of vacant space as if it had been inflated. History was repeating itself and, sure enough, the second time as farce. It was the giantess herself. She let out a coarse animal cry:

‘
Whaahferkoodoonaer?
’

Brian immediately retreated quite a long way, covering the distance in a single backward leap of admirably fluid grace. Then he turned and ran blindly up the muddy track, stumbling over stones, slithering over iced-up puddles and occasionally being slashed across the face by whippy twigs.

Now a loudly clamouring bell returned him to a wretched present. It was time to abandon the safety of the staff cloakroom for the terrors of the gymnasium. About to leave, Brian caught sight of himself in the mirror and stared, aghast. Hair sticking out everywhere, eyes bolting, teeth chomping and nibbling at his lower lip. He looked like some weird variety of marsupial in the final stages of delirium tremens.

He bathed his face, patted it dry with a paper towel, smoothed his damp hands over his head and toyed briefly with the idea of not turning up. He could send a message that he was ill, which was no more than the truth. But he simply had to know what was going on, to find out what their plans were.

He forced himself out into the corridor down which he had once skipped so lightly and swallowed hard to keep his gorge from rising. The phrase ‘choked on his own vomit’ came to mind. It had always struck him as singularly silly. Who else’s vomit could one possibly choke on?

Here were the doors already. The top halves were inset with thick, bubbled glass. Opaque but the shape and outline of those within could be seen, especially if they were in motion. Brian brought his face to the glass and squinted. Nothing. It was unnaturally quiet, too. Usually he would hear laughter and coarse shouts of aggro long before he’d reached the place itself. A great wash of relief left him trembling all over. He was reminded that the idea of blackmail was entirely his own. As for sending the photographs, that was probably no more than a malicious joke intended to frighten him. To get their own back for some imagined slight. Whatever the reason, they seemed to have chickened out. Best to make sure though. He pushed open the door.

 

Everyone was there. Down at the far end by the parallel bars. They were sitting cross-legged with stern, carved faces like warrior braves at a council of war.

Brian remembered explaining once that an empty space could be anything the actor cared to make it. Today there was no doubt about its function. It had become an arena.

As he began to make his effortful way over the vast expanse of gleaming parquet Brian’s legs seemed to be attached to lead weights. He marched on and the gap between himself and the others seemed hardly to shrink at all. But finally this mysteriously slow and humiliating journey came to an end. Resisting the craven urge to tuck himself on to the more harmless tip of the semi-circle, in other words next to little Bor, Brian sat down alone and
en face
.

He immediately regretted this realising, just too late, that he had surrendered a great advantage. Namely the opportunity to look down at everyone from a five-foot-six vantage point. Still, he could hardly scramble up again.

Brian took a deep breath and tried to select from the frantic and tumultuous chatter in his head a few pertinent and cutting opening remarks. He still hadn’t looked at anyone, which he recognised as another mistake, for the longer he refused to do so the more silly and cowardly must he appear.

Denzil said, ‘You got here, then?’

‘Yes, oh yes.’ Brian laughed. At least that was his intention. But it was a poor patched shred of a thing. A mere tatter of the old hyuf, hyuf.

He braced himself to meet their collective regard, but at the last moment his nerve failed and his eyes slid across to where Edie sat, close to her brother, her face hidden against his shoulder. They were completely still, but Brian felt their concentrated self-perpetuating energy. They were all the same, waxing fat on group bravado. His mother would have called it ‘egging each other on’.

‘Well you lot,’ began Brian and was shattered at the lack of authority in his voice. He sounded like a querulous child. He gave a little neigh, hoping thereby to release a deeper and more commanding timbre. ‘What’s all this about?’

Then, when no one replied: ‘If it’s some sort of joke I must confess I don’t think it’s very funny.’

‘Joke, Brian?’ Denzil frowned deeply. The movement tugged at the skin on his shaven skull and the spider wriggled. ‘
Joke?
’

‘Seems to me,’ said Collar, ‘there ain’t nothing even remotely funny about raping a fifteen-year-old girl.’

‘Rape!’ Brian nearly fainted. He remained upright only by placing his hands flat on the floor behind him and transferring his weight. There was a roaring in his ears and, though the beginnings of anger kept him conscious, his heart felt as if it was being sucked out of his chest by a vacuum pump.

‘That’s . . . Not . . . True . . .’

‘You seen the evidence ain’cha?’

‘The pitchers.’

He would never stop seeing the pictures. Her anguished triangular face staring directly at the camera. The slender figure crouching submissively on the edge of the settee as if awaiting further punishment. Brian recalled with much bitterness his earlier conclusion that Edie couldn’t act for toffee.

‘Edie? Look at me. Please.’

As if even the sound of his voice was a threat she burrowed even more deeply into the protective crook of her brother’s arm. They sheltered together like orphans.

Brian, consumed with exasperation, cried, ‘There was no rape. It wasn’t like that.’

‘You calling her a liar?’ asked Collar. ‘On top of everything else what you done.’

‘No. Well. Yes, actually.’

‘Oh sweet Jesus.’ Edie began to cry. Soft moany little warbles, like a wounded pigeon. Her brother stroked the fiery floss of her hair, glaring at Brian in disgusted disbelief.

‘
Edie
. . .’

‘Leave her alone,’ said Tom, his glance as cold as charity. ‘We’re looking after her now. I’m only sorry I never saw the need of it before.’

‘We had no warning, Brian, you see,’ said Denzil. ‘No hint that you were like that.’

‘I am not like that!’ The calm contempt in their eyes, their brazen hypocrisy, was driving him mad. When he tried to speak he almost gagged. ‘I would never have . . . She asked me round . . .’

‘You do that, Edie?’

‘Ask him round?’

Her response, though muffled in the folds of Tom’s coat, was perfectly audible. ‘He just turned up.’

‘See? You’re out your cranium, Bri.’

‘You’ll be saying next,’ Denzil spoke through bared teeth, ‘that you’re going to refuse to compensate her for that terrible ordeal.’

Brian saw Edie whipping off her top, rolling down her tights, guiding his tentatively erect member with expert fingers, striking a match against her thumbnail.

‘Too bloody right I am,’ he cried.

‘That’s not very nice,’ said Collar. ‘Swearing.’

‘Funny sort of example for a teacher to set.’

‘Yeah, but he’s a funny sort of teacher.’

‘All them extra-curricular activities.’

‘That he don’t wanna pay for.’

‘’Course it’s entirely up to him.’

‘Absolutely.’

‘If he can handle the consequences.’

‘Now let’s talk about this calmly and with—’

‘He can handle anything.’

‘A natural leader.’

‘A born leader.’

‘Plenty of bottle.’

‘Where it matters.’

‘That’s not the way I heard it.’

‘So. How does five thou strike you, Bri?’

‘Five smackaroonies.’

‘Five grand or all those juicy Awayday piccies turn up on Hargreave’s desk.’

‘He’s fallen over.’

‘I have
not
.’ Brian picked himself up. Lifted his skin-and-bone haunches and adopted a trembly negotiating posture identical, had he but known, to that of the chacma baboon on finding itself up a similar gum tree. ‘Look - can’t we talk this through? Go over the pros and cons, as it were.’

‘Them two words could be seen as highly insulting,’ said Tom. ‘Given the present circs.’

Brian mentally re-ran his last speech. He could see nothing in it to cause offence. Perhaps they were playing with him. Setting out to deliberately mishear or misinterpret everything he said as the secret police in totalitarian states were said to do. He really didn’t think he could bear that.

‘Don’t try trashing us about.’

‘Or pretending you got no money.’

‘’Cause this is serious shit we’re talking here.’

‘I certainly haven’t got that sort of money.’

‘You can raise it.’

‘Your sort always can.’

‘What do you mean - “my sort”?’

‘Middle-class wankers.’

Brian closed his eyes to shut out, if only momentarily, the sight of them. He found it almost impossible to believe that something so unspeakably dreadful was taking place. Brian was not a brave man. He could not even read the word ‘ordeal’ without a symbiotic flutter in his chest. Now as his bowels gave a slow cold churn he squeezed them tight, praying they would not leak. So much for grace under pressure.

‘Now listen, Cuntface,’ Denzil was saying in an easy, conversational manner. Brian assumed an expression of unearthly alertness. ‘See this?’

Denzil clenched his fist and the blue dots in the loose crinkly skin of his knuckles stretched themselves to read ‘GT BTN’.

‘Now you know,’ quavered Brian, ‘violence doesn’t solve anything.’

‘Don’t see how you make that out,’ argued Denzil. ‘You mess with his sister. We screw you to the wall. You leave her alone. Problem solved.’

‘But you can’t live like that,’ cried Brian, who would have been charmed by such disreputable logic had it surfaced in an improvisation.

‘You know a better way?’ asked Collar, with apparently genuine curiosity.

Brian stared around the ring of severe young faces and recognised his cause was hopeless. No point in searching for a flicker of sympathy or a weak link. As a last resort he started to whine.

‘What have I ever done to you?’ Silence. ‘Except to try and open up your pathetic lives a bit.’ The silence became slightly unpleasant. ‘Show you a more glamorous world. Introduce you to—’

Tom cut Brian short by raising his own right hand in a formal and very serious manner. He looked implacable and right and deeply authoritative.

‘There’s nothing else to say. We want half now, by which I mean tomorrow afternoon. And half Friday.’

‘And suppose I get it,’ said Brian, knowing he supposed the impossible.

‘We give you the tape.’

A tape! Of course. That explained the blurred prints and funny paper. Then, understanding this, various other incidents suddenly became significant. Her refusal to put the lights off. The music, which he had thought so romantic, was probably necessary to cover any sound from the camcorder. Oh! Edie of the sweet ginger ruff. Snake of my bosom. Viperette.

Hang about. Brian recalled the day, two terms ago now, when he had brought his brand-new Sanyo along to video rehearsals and it had disappeared. Could this possibly . . . ?

‘What machine did you—’

‘We got a contact in Slough.’ Denzil had a nasty habit of running the tip of his tongue over the palm of his hand then stroking his scalp, repeating the movement over and over again. Brian had often wondered what his hand must taste like at the end of it.

‘He runs a little business.’ Collar took up the story. ‘Educational films.’

They all looked at each other and then at Brian in a way that made it clear the meeting was at an end. Brian got up and prepared once more to travel that vast Sahara of sand-coloured interlocking blocks of wood. He had finally reached the door when Edie called his name.