Meeting the English (22 page)

21

Juliet the ingenious, Juliet the speedy doer of good deeds, finished her high kicks and went into the sitting room. In the bottom of the china cupboard were the games they never played, bought by Myfanwy when Portobello was still Portobello. Ivory spillikins, glass mah-jong, Scrabble with a mahogany turntable. The Scrabble was what she was after. Her idea was, she could use Dad's hand signals to produce a coded message which would prove that Mr Riley or, even better, Jake, took the cash and the chequebook, thereby getting Struan to stay and her mother staked out in one elegant move. And Celia, too, because Juliet was more than ever positive that Jake was the midnight bone-jumper, and it was about time she realized who she had hooked herself up with.

But when she went into the study, her dad was laid out and clean from the nurse but wearing all the wrong clothes, stuff grabbed from the laundry that was easy to do up: Struan's T-shirt; terrible, unzipped trousers; he looked like the guys she and Jake made for bonfire nights, from Phillip's old clothes, the guy of himself. He opened one eye, looked at her, and closed it. Juliet thought: she had been afraid of her father, all her life, and now she wasn't. Now she was just sorry.

The sun was in the wrong place: in his eyes. Juliet drew the blinds and pulled the little telly into position, switched it on for the two o'clock from Kempton. The telly did its old-fashioned warming-up thing, and Juliet took her father's hand. ‘Shall we watch the racing, then, Dad?' she said, and his little finger moved, yes. ‘Oh,' said Juliet, and the telly came on and the horses crashed from the gates with those terrible ankle-bashing noises they always made, and Juliet thought about her failed GCSEs and the sports day when she was six, and remembered that her dad didn't care, never had cared at all, whether she won the races, only if Jake did, and thought that maybe there was a good side to that, just a small one. Juliet swung her father's hand.

‘Hello, Dad,' she said, ‘whoever you are.'

*   *   *

This was what Struan was discovering about rage and injustice:

Even more than love, it hurt the heart. All his ribs felt bruised, as if he had recently had an operation, the kind where your ribs were raised like a car bonnet.

That, no doubt as a consequence, his circulation was drastically affected. Even though the horrible English heat was turned up high as ever again, even though the sun persisted in beaming down in a shade of foolish, cloudless, celluloid gold, Struan's feet and hands felt thin and chilly. When he looked in the mirror, he could see Scottish Struan back under the English tan – pinched and grey with the freckles standing out.

That it was both flattening and motivating: rather like the Pimm's. If you allowed yourself to lie back and think about, for example, beautiful deceitful heartbreaking foreigners, and if perhaps you were a little prig, then it was pole-axing, like having an iceberg on top of you. But if you focused on your enemies, the agents of your injustice, if for example you thought about the fat Welsh woman who had falsely accused you, or her evil, insinuating seducer of a son, if you focused solidly on them and not at all on beautiful dubious Iranians stabbing into your moral universe with their disturbing stories of jewels and theft and desperation: then it was grand. Then, you could sit up, and warm fists of rage would surge through you. Then, you'd be down in the kitchen eating Pot Noodles before you knew it.

All the Pot Noodles, actually: five packets. And no intention of clearing up. By focusing on Myfanwy, Struan managed not to care about Phillip's suppository. The nurse could do that later. By focusing on Jake, Struan managed to put his feet on the table and read the
Daily Mail
till ten past six. Only the crust of the toasted sandwich, and the trace of Slimfast on the counter, got him up the stairs to the study in the end. None of it was Juliet's fault. She was his wee pal: he couldn't leave her to the commode.

But she was yak-yakking on the phone somewhere; he could hear the ends of the yaks. Her dad was asleep in the study, the telly turned to the news. He wasn't especially smelly. On the table, Juliet had set out a Scrabble set: an old-fashioned one with ivory letters and a board on a turntable. MR RILEY was spelled out on the board, but Phillip could never have done that. The board wasn't in his sightline apart from anything else and the Y was on a triple letter score. Juliet was just arsing about. Struan tipped the letters into the little green baize bag, hoping it was so, and Phillip's brown eyes opened and met his.

‘Christ, Mr Prys,' said Struan, sitting down, ‘I'm awful sorry. I'm awful sorry about all this.' And he took Phillip's hand, which would not be peaceful, but insisted on jerking out the fact that he was alive, like the telegraph tapping out the last messages of the
Titanic,
hours after it had gone down.

‘Mr Prys,' said Struan, desperately, ‘I got fired, OK? I cannae stay on after that, I just cannae. You'll be OK, you'll see.' And then the doorbell rang: the nurse. Struan rushed into the hall, switching on lights as he went. The dusk came so early, in August, in this country.

Struan let the nurse into the study. Then he went into the front room, where Juliet had stopped yakking and was curled on the sofa, and lay flat on the floor beside her.

‘Struan?' said Juliet. ‘If you were going to kill yourself…'

‘I'm no going to top myself, Juliet,' said Struan. ‘I'm just going home to Cuik. Christ, I'll go to Victoria and get the night bus in a minute, so I will. I'm going up to pack right now.'

‘No,' said Juliet, ‘not you, Celia.'

‘Is that who you've been talking to?' said Struan.

‘Yeah,' said Juliet, ‘she's on the Heath, at the Spaniard's. You know, the pub. I rang her back on the pay phone.'

‘There'll be a bill,' said Struan.

‘I had to,' said Juliet, ‘she's says she's going to kill herself.'

‘What, with anorexia?' said Struan, sleepily. ‘That'll take a while.'

‘No,' said Juliet. ‘In the pond. She's always had that as a back-up death plan. She's very keen on Virginia Woolf, you know.'

‘Did she fail her GCSEs and all?' asked Struan.

‘No. It's because of Jake,' said Juliet, and Struan sat up.

‘What's he been up to?' he said, suddenly as fond of distant, uppity Celia as if she had been his own wee sister. ‘Has he been upsetting her?'

‘He's dumped her,' said Juliet. ‘It was him who was shagging her, told you so, and now he's dumped her. Or, anyway, he was flirting with someone, but he said she was flirting, he got off with someone else in fact…'

‘Who?' said Struan.

‘Don't know. Wouldn't say – she keeps crying. Anyway, he got cross at her for nagging, he dumped her, and now she says it was all her own fault, she should let him flirt, and he only did it because she conned him into going out to meet us, he was really cross about that, but I'm telling her no, it can't be, he was going to dump her anyway, right?'

‘Right,' said Struan. ‘But, Juliet, if you think that's true, and Celia'd really do a damage to herself, you should get on to the police, and her mum and dad.'

‘That's just it,' said Juliet, ‘I did. I called them, and I was really organized about it, and I told them about Jake, and Virginia Woolf, and everything.'

‘Then they'll be on their way,' said Struan. ‘You did the right thing. I hope they fucking lock him up.'

‘But,' said Juliet, ‘I've thought of something. I thought I'd done really well, but now I'm thinking, I said the wrong pond. They've gone to the Highgate Ponds. The mixed one. You know, near her house. But Celia wouldn't have gone there, not if she was at Spaniard's, it's too far. She wouldn't have gone there anyway, cos she doesn't like the changing rooms. She'd have gone to the Ladies' Pond.' Struan said:

‘Do you think she'd mind about the changing rooms if she was going to top herself?' And Juliet said:

‘She is nuts, you know.'

Struan stood up. ‘Right then,' he said. ‘We'll just go ourselves and check. It'll be as quick as phoning them. Come on, Juliet.'

Juliet took a pill from a blister pack, swallowed it, then proffered the pack to Struan:

‘Go on,' she said, ‘they just give you a little boost.' Struan took one, and they opened the front door.

‘Look,' said Juliet, bustling across the street. ‘The MG. It's back.' It was, and the cover wasn't on it, either. Struan strode over and touched the bonnet: warm as an animal.

‘Only just back,' he said, and he slung one leg over the door. ‘Come on, Juliet, get in. This'll save us loads of time if we're going to Kenwood.' And he clambered into the driving seat and started unscrewing the ignition panel with his Swiss army knife. Juliet leaned over the other door, alarmed.

‘You can't drive,' she said, accusingly.

‘Aye, I can,' said Struan, still screwing. ‘I got my licence on my birthday. How do you think my gran got her shopping in? Get in.'

And Juliet rolled into the passenger seat. Struan was identifying two wires, and hooking them together. ‘See my gran's car?' he said, as the car growled into life. ‘This is how you start her. Every time. Do up your seat belt, Juliet.'

‘Was it you driving the MG in Cricklewood, then?' asked Juliet, reasonably, as Struan, one hand on the steering wheel, one relaxed on the car door, drove them, at a moderate, assured 40 mph, around the Heath.

‘Nope,' said Struan, ‘that wasnae me. I dinnae touch what disnae belong to me. Except in an emergency.'

‘Then who was it?' said Juliet.

‘It was Jake,' said Struan. ‘Have you no worked it out? Mr Riley saw Jake, and cos it was this car, he thought it was me.'

Juliet looked at Struan, tanned in his singlet, his bleached hair fluffed up with pond water and sweat.

‘Because you look alike!' she burst out, astonished.

‘You catch on quick,' said Struan. ‘Jake and me, we're exactly the same, except he's richer. Here we are.'

In the enshrouding shadows of Kenwood, Struan carefully parked the MG, then leapt out over the locked door like Starsky. It was getting dark, though it was not much past seven. The Pond, if it obeyed the rules of the Men's one, would certainly be closed.

‘Juliet,' he said. ‘Did Celia have a plan of how to get into the Pond to top herself or was she going to do it in daylight hours?' But Juliet was ahead of him already, talking to a couple of short-haired women with damp hair.

‘Here, Struan,' she said. ‘You can get in over here.'

And sure enough, there was a well-worn path through the rhododendrons, and a gap in the iron railings. Juliet squeezed through, thinking of the way Celia always hesitated at the barrier into the Tube, because she believed she would stick, and wondering if she hesitated here, too. Struan followed, hurrying, aware now of the speed in his system, surging through his fingers, constricting his lungs. He thought of Jake Prys and hoped he was in there, by the pond, somewhere where Struan could hit him. He hoped Celia
was
topping herself, he hoped she'd have to be rescued from something high or low, something big, something Struan could fling himself against with maximum velocity.

But there was nothing there: just the silvery plate of the pond, the shadow of the diving board, the fringe of trees.

‘Seal?' called Juliet. ‘Seal, are you here?' and they looked a long time before Struan spotted her, a thin figure in white, perched on the edge of the decking, feet in the water. ‘Celia!' he called, and he ran towards her, flip-flopping along the dry smooth wood, and she turned to face him, that strange little cat face, and smiled, then slid forward into the water, and Struan jumped out of his sandals and dived in after her.

Oh, but it was dark under there, it was a heap of green velvet, it was a pit of mercury, it was black as death. His lungs were burning, and he had no idea where he was, where the deck was, and Juliet called,
Struan, Struan, here!
and he followed her voice, then her pointing hand and went down again, and this time found something white, it was Celia's dress, but it was the wrong end of it, the wrong end of her, the dress was floating round her head, and then he had to grab the rest of her which was lumpy and heavy and strange because she'd tied stones round her waist, the stupid cow, all knotted up in her jeans, brilliant, fantastically thorough fucking job, Celia, absolutely fantastic.

Struan walked out the pond with Celia on his shoulder, and shook and squeezed the water out of her, and laid her flat on her front and squeezed more water of her, and dumped her on her back and started putting air in her, Juliet squealing the while like a stuck smoke alarm.

Struan had had enough dying. He knew you stayed that way. Celia didn't know that: she was doing this whole thing for a put on, for a play, to make a point. He would have to teach her. And so Struan bore down and bore down on Celia's chest, and as there wasn't much to her ribs, he broke two of them, he heard the cracks. He didn't care, though, he pumped some more at her heart and he blew in her mouth and pumped and blew and insisted on her breathing again and sitting up and throwing up pond water and throwing up some more and yelling and fucking well joining the land of the living, whether she liked it or not.

22

It was September, and then it was October. The weather, and the news, continued mild. Ethiopia made peace with Eritrea. Norway agreed to cooperate with Russia. Hungary turned into a democracy. Apartheid began peacefully demolishing itself. In Leipzig, democracy protests were held. In Prague, seven thousand East Germans were allowed to leave for the West. In East Berlin, people began to take day trips across the West, to turn up the Western TV, to walk up to the Wall, the old monster, and give it a slap. And still, no one was shot.