Borderliners (9 page)

‘You will be punished’.

Cheeks burning, I crossed the hallway to my little kitchen and flicked on a gas ring into which I dipped the piece of paper. In the darkness I watched detachedly as it burned slowly, at first, with a blue light which was quickly overcome by a burning orange flame. Taking the paper by the remaining tip I held it over the sink and waited until it burned right up to my fingertips. Then I dropped it into the deep porcelain bowl beneath.

As the smoke from the smouldering ash crept upwards, I bent over the sink, deep in thought. Nobody else would be punished. I would see to it personally.

I’d been a member of the village council for about nine months after one of the doctors at the surgery had suggested I join - to get more integrated into village life. The group, made up of a small selection of influential villagers, met once a month in a tatty old miners’ pub on the outskirts of town. Today, as usual, the pub’s front entrance was wedged open to allow a heavy scent of sawdust to escape its crumbling walls. On the pavement outside stood the landlady, a middle-aged woman with spiky black hair and tattooed arms with an Alsatian by her side. The dirty brown of her hair was the same colour as the deep and hostile furrows in her brow. She was taking long drags on her cigarette, her bare arms brazening the plummeting temperatures as she stared at nothing in particular. I edged past her.

‘Sorry,’ I mumbled but she didn't acknowledge me. The Alsatian wagged its tail a little.

Edging further through the dark entrance, I threw a glance at the bar where some of the council members had already congregated, no doubt to discuss their common love of football or fast cars. I felt my hackles go up, bristling against the bravado and banter which hung in the air. It was a barrier which was adept at both attracting and repelling, carefully calculated to ensure self-protection whichever side of it you fell. This evening - as on all other occasions - a sea of testosterone washed over me from their direction. Ignoring the usual loud joshing, I noticed someone was offering me a drink, which I accepted whilst making a pretence of looking through my notes and non-existent text messages on my phone. As I took my place at the meeting table, I caught sight of familiar green eyes on the other side.

The meeting began as normal. Turgid, detailed, claustrophobic. There was only one other woman, Val, on the council with me. She was the village busybody and a woman everybody viewed as a necessary evil, such was the effort she put into keeping various projects running - the donkey work, I thought wryly. I was glad of her. As the meeting was opened and discussions begun, my mind returned often to my new acquaintance, Tony. Thoughts of him gave rise to a vague sense of anxiety and as I stared at the agenda in front of me, I fancied I could see his face floating around beneath my papers. I could just about make out opaque features beneath an ebony surface, blue eyes which became detached from his face and embedded within a lake of darkness. Mournful, the eyes were fixed on me but they were impassive so that I couldn’t make out their implicit message. This image repeated itself in my thoughts, but as I grasped for a meaning, it remained out of reach. I was acutely aware of a sense of entrapment; of a feeling of being engulfed in a half-life between death and dreams.

I didn’t know how long I’d been drifting for, when I was brought back from my thoughts by a familiar feeling which crept over me. Looking straight over at Vince, I met his stare with a questioning look. For once, his expression was not unfriendly, although a strand of his chin length hair obscured one of his eyes, making it harder to tell. Although I was accustomed to dealing with intimidation, there was something about his gaze which gave me the feeling he was one step ahead.

'What do you think, Elena?’ Paul was saying from across the table.

‘She’s half asleep. Morning!’ a fake-bored voice said from the far side of the room.

‘Sorry. Late duty at the surgery,’ I muttered. I tried to smile around at the assembled council members, but only Vince and Paul were still looking my way. Paul shook his head amiably and looked down at his agenda whilst Vince held my gaze steady for a couple more seconds without signalling anything. I looked away, tired of these games.

‘Now that everyone’s here, I just wanted to say - and I think I echo how everyone is feeling - how sorry I am about the death of Joan,’ said Val, from the head of the table. Heads nodded in unison and I sighed. The news had obviously broken and found its way round the village.

‘Elena, I believe it happened down at the surgery and that you and your colleagues did all you could to save her.’

I nodded, feeling like I didn’t have the strength to comment. Catching a glimpse of my pallid reflection in the screen of my phone, I wondered if I would ever be able to cope with working in such a small community. After a brief discussion about when the funeral was expected to be held, a respectful silence ensued. Then a rustling of paper shivered around the room indicating it was time to move on with the meeting at hand.

The main point on the agenda was the up and coming village ball, which was an annual fundraiser for various local regeneration projects. I hadn’t ever been to this event before, but I planned to this year. Val explained there was still lot to do in the final run up to the event, ‘like every year’, and many of the council members laughed. I got the feeling our workload was about to increase exponentially. Why hadn’t I seen this coming? It was my first year on the council and clearly I was still a bit wet behind the ears. Sitting forward to listen more carefully to the proceedings I noted Paul’s rueful jokes about how much it was going to cost him in terms of his wife’s dress, shoes and accessories. I couldn’t help thinking it was a shame such a nice guy had ended up with a wife like that.

The date of 31 October had been set a long time ago and now it was only three weeks away, the council was brittle and tense as it discussed the list of outstanding tasks. I couldn’t remember the reasoning for coinciding a ball with Halloween - October was so far away from the usual summer party season and the idea of it made me uncomfortable. I’d heard somewhere the date was the same every year and the Charismatics always attended in large numbers. For some reason, the thought of this crept softly down my spine. Looking around the table I stole a wary glance at the people I thought were members. There were only a couple of them but it occurred to me they were the ones I felt most uneasy around. I kicked myself for not paying more attention to them earlier, for not having made this connection until now. Had I been walking around in a dream for the first twelve months of my residence in the village?

Voices droned and my mind began to wander again as I thought about the party, of the photo with its biblical slogan, used as a warning or a weapon. And I pondered how easy it was to use a quote from the Bible to convey the opposite of its original meaning. A cunning individual could twist the words of others round to any purpose they wanted. To influence and impose their will. I had always hoped people in positions of leadership were those best placed to be there, but of course I knew this was rarely the case. Sometimes it was worse than that. Sometimes there were self-appointed leaders whose canny ability to wield power over others was like an addiction they had to feed. And like all addictions, it grew over time into a great beast which required feeding ever more often.

Three suicides before Joan and still I’d sat quietly, my hands in my lap, my notebook by my side, with a neutral smile, just waiting for her to come up with her own answers, to see if she could find the strength and answers within to break free of the bounds of depression. The bomb had been ticking all along, loud and clear. I’d even been warned, not once but twice. But it seemed a card prediction and a dream diary weren’t enough. That the warnings hidden on photos and talismans, whispered between the villagers with their lowered glances and unspoken understandings, weren’t yet clear enough for me to take action. What was I thinking? I’d waited for Joan to die, like a dummy. I’d just watched and waited, knowing she was falling, hoping she’d pick herself up again, when really I should have saved her.

After the formal part of the meeting had finished, I sat at the bar with Val, Paul and Bob, who pulled up a stool to join us as we were being served our drinks. At the sight of him, my heart sank a little. He was an uninteresting individual who was known for being difficult to shake off and tonight his prey was clearly me.

‘So Elena, tell us more about what happened to Joan,’ he began. ‘I don’t understand how you can be all happy and jolly and skipping about one minute, and dead the next.’

I said nothing, waiting for Bob to continue.

‘I mean, what did she die of? I heard it was suicide.’

‘I can’t comment I’m afraid.’ I remarked, ‘Patient confidentiality forbids it.’

‘Dead patient confidentiality?’ replied Bob with a dour expression, looking round for support from the others.

‘And the family is a consideration. She hasn’t even been buried yet, has she?’ I snapped. My headache had started hammering behind my temples again and I paused to massage my forehead before looking up.

Vince, who was standing just behind me, cut in. ‘Leave the poor girl alone.’

I didn’t turn my head to look at him but sat very still, bristling slightly.

‘She’s a poor girl now is she?’ Bob sneered, an unpleasant smirk on his face.

I could feel the weight of Vince’s disapproval just behind my shoulders. The others started shifting on their stools.

‘OK, I get it. Why don’t you get off your high horse once in a while?’ Bob said, turning to the bar to demand where his drink had got to. Glad of the diversion, Paul offered Vince a beer and he drew up a stool.

‘Thanks Vince,’ I muttered.

He leaned over his beer to take a sip, appearing not to hear me. Bob continued to sit at the other side of the circle, propping himself up by the elbows at the bar. Stale odours of beer and sweat assailed my nostrils as I sat listening to the group. The usual banter started flowing around me again and my own silence elongated as I drank. Eventually I finished my drink but my grip on the glass proved helpful. It gave me something to hold on to, to prevent me from fiddling with my hands and revealing my anxiety. Images haunted me: I remembered running, the large waiting room window, the small crowd, the faces outside. Memories came to me in stills and I couldn’t join them up into something more fluid. When I tried, the pressing headache jabbed even harder into my temples and the front of my skull.

My pager buzzed and I took leave of the group to check it, wondering which of my patients was so critical I needed alerting at this time of the evening. I flicked my left hand over to check my watch. It was already 9:30pm. The pager directed me to check the voicemail on my phone. The first two messages were innocuous. One was from my landlord about some repairs he needed to do, and the second was from Dan. As the third voicemail kicked in, a cold sensation spread itself across me in fine, icy tendrils. I hugged myself as I tapped #1 on the touchscreen to listen again.

A voice, made alien by a crude voice changer of the kind which came with kid’s Halloween masks, spoke into my handset.

‘Whoever is not for us, is against us…’ it rasped. ‘Just remember that-’ It cut off there. I tapped #1 again, squinting as I listened for any recognisable features in the voice. It seemed to slow down. ‘Just. Remember. That.’

I clutched the handset, desperate to hit #3 to delete the message. I closed my eyes, desperate to erase the last twelve months of my life too. Unclenching my white knuckles from around the phone, I saved the message before dropping the phone back into my bag. I would have to have a word with my service provider about the types of voicemail which triggered pager alerts.

When I re-joined the group, I noticed Bob and his sidekicks had left and the conversation had taken a sudden turn to the subject of the ball. The air was close and doubly stale and there was something about the hunched backs of the men sitting round on their bar stools which didn’t seem quite normal. One of them, an older man called Giles, was talking whilst all the others listened, an oddity in this world of male banter and light-hearted joking about. I slid back onto my stool.

‘Bob and the others have gone but what about Terry?’ he asked

‘He’s gone as well,’ replied Vince, alert.

‘Now, we all know about the reputation the ball used to have, years ago,’ continued Giles in a hushed tone, his head bent inwards towards the rest of the group. Their nodding heads compounded my confusion and aroused my curiosity. There was no use in trying to appear uninterested within such a select group of people.

‘Well we need to keep an eye out for any odd behaviour. We don’t want the event to be jeopardised by a bunch of crackpots,’ Giles was saying.

My reappearance had changed the dynamic, no matter how hard I tried to make myself appear insignificant. I cursed my profession, gender and class, which conspired to make me stand out more than I could bear. There was a pause, but I gestured that they should continue.

‘Don’t mind me,’ I said. ‘I’d like to hear this, anyway.’

A few pairs of eyes swivelled round to rest on me. The pause lengthened as Giles appeared to consider this for a moment, before he continued. ‘Elena, you’re new to this, but you should know something important. However, what we’re about to tell you stays between these four walls.’

‘OK,’ I shrugged, realising I appeared non-committal. ‘OK,’ I repeated more firmly, nodding my head.

What followed was not quite what I had been expecting. Giles ran through the background: there had been several unexplained and untoward events at past balls. There were several accounts of unsettling noises in the woods which people had reported hearing from the gardens of the stately home where the ball was held. There were tales of groups of people disappearing from their tables, only to reappear much later on, dishevelled and confused.

‘Maybe they’d had a bit too much to drink?’ I asked.