Whispers Through a Megaphone (13 page)

Beverley wonders what time it is. Have they slept through half the morning? And what’s
that
on her arm? One word, written in black pen: ACQUIESCENCE. She tries to rub it off but the letters stay in place. Did she write it herself with some kind of permanent marker? Did Sadie write it? She can’t remember this or anything else from the night before. Maybe they got drunk and collapsed. They must have undressed first, probably squealing like teenagers, laughing at their nakedness.

Sadie stirs beside her. Beverley pulls the duvet up to her chin, waits for Sadie’s eyes to open, says well fancy waking up here of all places, how much did we drink, do you think it’s finally stopped raining?

T
wo men, watching and listening, whispering words like
you
and
when
and
maybe
and
dunno
. The men are in their twenties. Their hairstyles are heavily worked, excessively gelled affairs, swishing this way and that way like hair sculptures, super-thin matches leaning left and right, glued to impress, intended to remain in place until head hits pillow and the sculpture flattens into a dusty chaos. One man is wearing white Adidas trainers with three blue stripes, skinny red chinos, a royal-blue jumper. The other is in black jeans, a white long-sleeved T-shirt, an olive-green gilet. They are young and tense and impatient. They are
livid
.

“Do you think they’ve nicked them?”

“Bloody hope not.”

“How do we play this?”

“Depends what they’re like. Can’t pre-plan it.”

“Bloody hell.”

“I know.”

“This is your fault.”

“Bollocks is it. You left them here.”

“Not on purpose.”

“Do you reckon they’re having an affair or what?”

Miriam’s fire is dwindling. Ralph is too busy talking to notice. Dying light, tiredness setting in, it can only mean one thing—time for bed. But
which
bed? Miriam’s thoughts turn to practicalities and bodies and terrifying awkwardness. A man, a woman, a wooden floor. Oh dear God!

Ralph is still talking about his son, Arthur, who takes after Sadie in so many ways, what with his temper and discontentment. Miriam is saying right, oh right, he sounds a bit
difficult
. She thinks about running, but heading through the woods in the dark is not an inviting prospect. Who knows what’s out there? Once again there is nowhere to turn. It feels horribly familiar but it also feels different—a tiny bit exciting. Miriam can’t contain excitement, she isn’t used to it, it races all over her, makes her arms and feet itch.

“Stan’s more like me, I think,” he says, rubbing his hands together. “He’s easier to please.”

Seriously, Ralph? You think you’re easy to please? All you and Stan have in common is tidiness and excellent personal hygiene. Try harder, Ralph. Keep looking for yourself.

He glances at the sky. When he was a boy, his mother told him that every star made a different sound and when the moon was full, if you listened carefully, you could hear a big band, a raucous symphony, a love song. Brenda was drunk when she said this, drunk on Babycham (the happiest drink in the world, it says so on the label), and Frank had listened with amusement after six pints of Guinness and two packets of pork scratchings. They were celebrating again. It was their anniversary. They were checking on their son after an evening in the Bell. The stars were playing cellos and violins, piccolos
and harps, an oboe and a double bass—all for the moon,
the
swooning moon
.

“Swooning moon?” Frank said later, as he snuggled up to his wife beneath their new feather duvet, bought from Tilly’s bedding stall at the market. (“This new duvet’s my pride and joy,” Brenda had said, feeling like she’d made it to the top of a small mountain from which everything looked brighter and less daunting. “Tilly says it contains the feathers of more than five hundred ducks. Can you feel how heavy it is? Feel it, Frank.
Feel it
.”)

“I came over all fanciful,” she slurred, stroking his stubbly cheek.

“You’re a poet.”

“Don’t I know it.”

“You always show it.”

Brenda tried to think of another line, but it’s hard to come up with poetry when your husband has lifted up your nightie, your brand-new nightie, Cadbury purple, made of silk, bought in the BHS sale especially for your anniversary.

“Well
Mr Swoon
,” she said.

“Swoon by name, Swoon by nature,” he said, kissing her neck.

Ralph could hear them in the night, talking and laughing and making other kinds of noises. He looked out of his bedroom window and pictured a star playing the drums like Animal from
The Muppets
. It sounded good. He picked up two pencils and played along with Animal on the windowsill until his mother burst in, rosy and dishevelled, and took the pencils away. When she had gone, he got back into bed and pulled the duvet over his head. He could still hear them laughing. Their great romance, always on show. He found it embarrassing. It made him blush. His friends’ parents were irritable and tired,
which was easier to be around—he could do his own thing, he didn’t have to be happy.

(The hefty shadows of other people.)

(A boy who just wanted to plant seeds.)

Tonight, in the woods, Ralph leans back and props himself up on his elbows. He looks at the silhouette of branches against the night sky.

Then he sees two figures.

Two figures coming through the trees.

Walking towards them.

Throwing torchlight all over his face and body.

Throwing torchlight all over Miriam.

Bastards.

How dare they?

Ralph and Miriam are torchlit.

Trapped.

Fuck.

Miriam gasps.

“It’s all right,” Ralph says, standing up. “It’s all right.”

Is it?

Careless words. Automatic. Placatory.

The figures are men. This much is obvious in the light of the gas lamps and the full moon. Ralph’s own torch is a few metres away. He can see it on the floor (small, silver, out of reach).
The Road
by Cormac McCarthy, Ralph’s favourite book, flashes through his mind. He thinks of the father and the boy, listening out for strangers in the night, strangers who want to steal their food and cut the stringy meat from their bones.

“Hey there,” says one of the men, the one in red trousers (let’s call him Red).

“How are you doing?” says the other, the one in the green gilet (let’s call him Green).

“All right,” Ralph says, trying to sound confident.

Miriam just stands there, stiff as an exclamation mark.

“Don’t worry, we’re not staying,” Red says.

“We think you might have some stuff that belongs to us,” Green says.

“What stuff?”

“Three little tins.”

“We left them in the cabin.”

The cabin? Ralph hasn’t been thinking of it as a
cabin
. It’s more of a hut really. A flimsy old shed. A cabin sounds too purposeful, too inhabitable.

The men walk over to it and open the door. They disappear inside, bouncing torchlight around the walls and the floor. Ralph and Miriam wait. They listen to the mumbling and the restlessness, a two-man chorus of disgruntlement. Red and Green (
should never be seen
) are not happy.

“Do you have the tins?” Miriam whispers.

Ralph shakes his head. “I remember seeing them.”

“Where are they?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did you put them somewhere?”

He tries to think. Yes, there were three tins. They were on the floor when he arrived. Small, faded, probably quite old, the kind of thing Sadie would buy online from a website specializing in “retro & vintage”—modern reproductions of household objects from the Fifties and Sixties, expensive tat. Come on, Ralph, what did you do with the tins?
I picked them up while tidying the place—that’s what I did. Just before feeding Treacle for the first time
. Are you sure?
Yes, I’m sure, I can remember doing it
. So they must still be in there, right?

Wrong.

Oh Ralph!

Red and Green emerge from the shed, swinging their big-man torches (shock-proof, rain-resistant—truncheons with bulbs, basically, and much
manlier
than their old torches, which were palm-sized, wind-up, shaped like penguins). They stole the torches from their local camping shop last week, because why spend money when you can get it for free? This is their motto, their mantra, and sometimes Green turns it into a little ditty, sings it like it’s a slogan in an advert about small crime (harmless) and real crime (capitalism).

“We have a problem,” Red says, shining his torch into Ralph’s eyes.

“No tins,” Green says.

“So where are they?”

After all the wine this evening, Miriam’s bladder feels like it’s about to burst. But this is not the time to go, and it’s not the time to cry either, she knows it’s not, so she stands up straight and looks into the light.

“I’m not too sure,” Ralph says.

“You’re
not too sure?
” Red says, mocking Ralph’s voice. He looks at Green, who knows what the look means. They’ve been friends long enough to read the signal for
let’s do this, let’s have some fun.

“You two an item or what?” Green says.

“I don’t think that’s any of your business,” Ralph says.

“Oh really? You don’t feel inclined to answer a polite question, is that what you’re saying?”

“Well, I—”

Red looks Ralph up and down. “I don’t like you very much,” he says, taking a step closer, then another.

“Stop,” Miriam whispers.

“What?”

“He hasn’t taken your tins.”

Green looks bemused. “What’s wrong with
her
?” he says. “Why’s she speaking funny?”

“She said I haven’t taken them.”

Red belches. They all look at him. Miriam looks at the floor. She feels Green’s words climbing into her ears, tiny word-worms—
what’s wrong with her what’s wrong with her
—slithering along, oily. She forgets about her bladder. She forgets that she is afraid. A wild fury rises against Green’s words, washing them out of her ears. She clenches her fists.

“I’m crazy,” she whispers.

Ralph catches her eye.

“You’re fucking creepy,” Green says.

“Do you know what we’re doing out here?” Miriam whispers. “We’re hiding. Because of what we did.”

Red and Green exchange glances. Maybe these freaks are more trouble than they’re worth. They just want their tins. Or, to be precise, what’s
inside
the tins: six bags of pills and an engagement ring.

“Just give us the tins,” Red says, staring at Miriam.

“I’ll need to look for them,” Ralph says.

“So you
have
seen them?”

“I remember seeing them, but I had a bit of a tidy-up.”

Red grimaces. What kind of man has a tidy-up in the woods? This guy needs messing up, would probably do him good. Better be quick though, there’s a party to get to, goods to deliver, a woman to propose to with a stolen ring. The woman’s name is Janie. She is Welsh. She earns good honest money from squeezing women’s breasts into a machine that takes a photograph of their internal worlds.
What’s the bloody word for it?
Red grits his teeth.
Come on, you’ve said it a thousand times
. The effort of thinking makes him belch again, which seems to release the word from its hiding place. (Imagine what would happen
if neuroscientists discovered a connection between semantic memory and burping. The sales of carbonated drinks would rocket. People with murky minds would rub one another’s backs until every trapped word burst up and out.) “Mammogram,” Red announces. Why can he never retain that word? It drives Janie mad. She slapped him once when he couldn’t remember. She slapped his face and called him stunted.

“You got Tourette’s?” Green says to his friend.

“I’ll just grab my torch,” Ralph says, edging forwards. He picks up the torch and switches it on. It’s not a big-man torch. It’s not a truncheon with a bulb.

Red rolls his eyes. “Here, use this.” He holds out his torch.

“This one’s fine,” Ralph says, with a supercilious smirk. (Why choose a 4x4 when you have a perfectly sufficient Volkswagen Polo?)

Red didn’t like that. He didn’t like the smirk. If Janie stuffed it into the mammography machine (
woohoo! How’s that for a memory, eh, Janie? No link between cannabis and memory loss at all, see? I hate to say I told you so
) and took a photograph of its internal world, she would find it jam-packed with condescension, and if she squeezed it, really tightened the machine’s grip, it would all come oozing out—lashings of condescension jam.

Snooty fucker, turning down my supertastic torch.

“I’ll help,” Miriam says, picking up the gas lamp.

“No, you can stay here.”

“She’s got better eyesight than me,” Ralph says.

“It’s not like you’re looking for a needle in a haystack.”

“How quickly do you want to find these tins?”

Green sighs. “Fine.”

Inside the shed, Miriam whispers her plan into Ralph’s ear. “If we don’t find the tins, I’ll freak out, okay? I’ll howl like
a banshee. I’ll turn feral. They won’t stick around. No man wants his eyes scratched out.”

He isn’t sure how to respond to this.

They pick things up and look underneath them. Nothing under the sleeping bag. Nothing on the floor or buried in the pile of sheets. Ralph checks the pockets of his rucksack, which feels completely pointless, because he would never have put the tins in his bag, especially without opening them to see what was inside.

“Oh, hold on,” he says, flinching as he straightens his back. Sleeping on a hard floor for three nights has taken its toll. “The bucket.”

“The toilet bucket?” (Miriam has already familiarized herself with the blue plastic toilet.)

“No, there’s another one. I tidied some stuff into it, mainly bits and bobs. I like things to be in one place,” he says, as though she has demanded an explanation.

Now he is outside again, with Miriam close behind, with Red and Green watching as he picks up a bucket and empties its contents onto the floor: matches, travel tissues, food wrappers, disposable coffee cups, plastic cutlery, a guitar pick, a pair of headphones, four screwed-up carrier bags, a biro, three metal tins.

“Hallefuckinlujah,” Red says.

“Check inside them before you say that,” Green says.

“Good point.”

“All present and correct?” Green asks, as Red opens the tins one by one.

“All good.”

“Well, I’d like to say it’s been a pleasure,” Green says, pushing his hands deep inside the pockets of his jeans, “but it’s been a royal pain in the arse.” He turns to go. “Come on,” he says.

But Red isn’t moving. He is glaring at Ralph. “Hold on,” he says.