Going Loco (27 page)

‘Lucky George! That was Lucky George! I want to kill him, too!’ exclaimed the bush now, in excited tones. ‘Shh, Ingrid,’
it also reminded itself, in a male voice. ‘Look, your friend isn’t mad, is she?’ it whispered, a bit worried. ‘Certainly not,’ it replied.

‘Did you see anything odd out there?’ asked Stefan quietly, as he accepted Jago’s bottle of wine.

‘No. Why?’

Viv had gone to find Linda.

‘Ingrid’s been here,’ Stefan whispered. He crouched to peer through the letter-box, then straightened up. ‘Linda doesn’t know.’

‘Jesus!’ said Jago. ‘She escaped?’

‘I’ve got a terrible feeling about tonight, Jago.’

‘I’m not surprised. Let’s go out. In fact, let’s run away to Tashkent.’

‘Did you see that bush move?’ asked Maggie. Half-way up the garden path, she had stopped and shuddered.

Leon looked around the garden. ‘No.’

‘I’m sure it did.’

Leon had another look, and obligingly, the bush shivered, bounced and rocked. Since Noel was physically wrestling with a highly agitated Ingrid at the time, however, the movement in the bush was relatively modest.

‘You’re right,’ said Leon. ‘Sorry.’

He approached the bush, which shook violently and commenced shouting words like ‘Bitch!’ and ‘Why, you—!’, then abruptly became still. He returned to Maggie. ‘Do you want the good news or the bad news?’ he asked.

‘The good news.’

‘The good news is, there’s a perfectly rational explanation. The bad news is that my brother has just punched Ingrid Johansson on the jaw, and knocked her cold. It was a right upper cut, if you’re interested.’

Looking back on it later, Stefan always regretted carrying the unconscious (and armed) Ingrid into the house and leaving her in the Johansson master bedroom with just Birgit and the assiduous Leon for company. It was such an obvious mistake if you didn’t want blood everywhere. However, persuaded by Leon, that’s exactly what he did. Leon had a soft spot for Ingrid, and wanted to protect her. Meanwhile Stefan wasn’t thinking straight, exactly. Because at the time he made that fateful decision, his primary concern was for Linda’s worrying state of mind. ‘She’s in the attic with a syringe,’ reported Viv, breathlessly. ‘She’s got a syringe, and she’s threatening to use it.’

So Stefan climbed to the attic, and sat down with Linda. Obviously he was neglecting other, noisier matters. But while downstairs Maggie shrieked, ‘You!’ at Noel in the dining room, and Jago physically slugged the despicable Tanner (‘You!’) on his arrival at the house, and Belinda and Viv hugged each other in forgiveness (‘You!’ ‘You!’) in the kitchen, and Ingrid stirred with an animal groan on the comfy double bed (‘Du?’), Stefan begged Linda not to hurt herself; not to abandon him; not to abandon Belinda.

‘You’re too close to this,’ she said, determinedly swabbing her arm. ‘You don’t understand. I’ve got to go. You’ve got to let me go. To other people it will always look as though I’ve exploited you and entrapped you, stolen your lives from you. Look how ecstatic Belinda is now I’ve stopped making her successful and popular and well paid. It’s as though I’ve released her from a hundred years’ sleep. I gave her exactly what I thought she wanted, did everything for her, and she turned out like
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?’

‘There’s got to be a way forward for all of us. Belinda appreciates everything you did. We both do. You’re such a good person.’

‘But now it’s over, isn’t it?’

‘It can’t be. What about the baby?’

‘I know.’ Linda sighed. Tears came to her eyes as she put down the syringe.

‘This isn’t what should have happened,’ she said. ‘This isn’t how it should have turned out. I’ll get my things from our room and go.’ And those were her last words before she ran to the loft-ladder, and disappeared from view.

Stefan was stunned with sadness as he heard her make her way downstairs. ‘Linda, please. I love you,’ he said to himself. ‘I love Belinda too.’ And then he remembered something rather important, concerning the master bedroom. ‘Linda! Oh, my God. Don’t go down there! Ingrid—’ he yelled.

At which point, as Stefan always remembered it, a bloodcurdling cry interrupted him from the floor below.

‘AAAAAAghhhh!’ came the female shriek.

‘AAAAArrgh!’ it shrieked again, and then came a loud thump as a person (or persons) hit the floor.

‘My God,’ said Stefan, sinking to his knees. ‘My God. Ingrid’s got her!’

As Stefan descended the ladder at speed, the other men raced upstairs, so that all converged on the landing. It was easy to spot the cinéastes among them, incidentally: those who remembered details from
Psycho
took care not to place themselves at the top of the stairs.

‘Ingrid?’ said Stefan, to the closed bedroom door. ‘What have you done?’ He tried to push open the door with his foot. Either Belinda or Linda could be hurt or dead in there! Possibly both! His wives! His darling wives!

But Leon stepped out, and solemnly closed the door behind him. He looked shaken. ‘Don’t go in there,’ he said, running a hand through his hair.

‘I must!’

‘Don’t go in, Stefan. Your wife—’

Everyone drew a sharp breath and looked at Leon expectantly,
rather keen for more details.
Come on, Leon. Come on.
Nearly all the women in the house were Stefan’s wife, in one way or another.

Leon did not understand, however. ‘I’m ever so sorry, Stefan,’ he said, with a gulp. ‘I tried to stop her. But the truth is, I think your wife’s dead.’

Jago lost patience. ‘For God’s sake,’ he yelled, leaping up to seize Leon by the throat. ‘Which one?’

‘What?’ Leon fought him off, confused.

‘Which. Fucking. Wife?’

‘Oh. Sorry,’ said Leon. ‘Ingrid.’

At which Birgit opened the door to reveal the lifeless Ingrid on the carpet. She was wearing Stefan’s moose-hat and – strange to relate – she was smiling.

Ingrid. Ingrid was dead. Stefan sank to the floor and, for the first time in his five-year ordeal, started to cry. How strange to see her there. No longer unhappy! And in fact, if there is any justice in the spiritual cosmos, already reunited in the vivisectionist quarter of paradise with her own dear Stefan, to experiment on unwilling living tissue for the rest of all eternity.

‘How did it happen?’ asked Stefan. ‘She didn’t kill herself?’ Belinda and Linda had now arrived at the scene, and between them held him tightly.

Birgit pulled a face of horror. ‘I did it. I had to do it. She tried to kill this nice man who helped her in Malmö!’ she said. ‘Yust because his nasty brother hit her on face!’ She put down the knife that she’d wrested from her friend. To her credit, she seemed pretty glum about committing murder. ‘You told me she was mad, but I did not believe. Everyone tells me. But she was mad,
ja.
I had to do it. She was mad, this Ingrid, after all.’

In the ensuing month, many of the Johanssons’ problems sorted themselves out pretty neatly. For a start, Ingrid was cremated at Belinda’s funeral, to everyone’s immense relief. Both Linda and Belinda watched from the attic as the cars drew up at the house, took the coffin and left. It was quite thrilling, in a macabre sort of way. It was also rather a privilege. Between the two of them, Belinda and Linda calculated they added up to nobody, yet all sorts of famous people came to bid them a joint farewell.

It was true that Belinda no longer wanted to work on literary doubles. She’d had more than enough of all that. But while the funeral was in progress, Belinda read aloud Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Shadow’, and both Belindas enjoyed it while agreeing it was a bit simplistic. At the end of ‘The Shadow’, the poor scholar doesn’t hear the sound of the shadow’s wedding, because by then the shadow has ‘taken his life’ – a nicely ambiguous phrase. Belinda said the story might have turned out better if the shadow and the scholar had become friends and enjoyed their own
faux
funeral together, laughing and making cups of tea. Linda said it might lack dramatic force that way. Belinda just said, ‘Mm.’

Linda, of course, could not appear at the funeral tea. So she prepared it beautifully and then retired upstairs so that Belinda could serve it, in the guise of the new cleaning lady. She took the name ‘Mrs Golyadkin’ for the occasion, and pretended to be Russian, on the grounds that if you can’t have a laugh at your own funeral, when
can
you have a laugh? Eavesdropping at your own funeral offers certain emotional risks, of course, but as she mingled with plates of finger food, Belinda mostly had a marvellous time, hearing herself described in glowing posthumous terms. She gave extra bits of cake to people who said nice things, and was particularly overwhelmed to meet a couple from
EastEnders,
who appeared to have gatecrashed.

Meanwhile Stefan carried off the whole event extremely
well, and looked fabulous in black. He told the Archbishop of Canterbury (another fan of ‘Up the Duff’) that he would never grieve in a morbid way for Belinda, because in a very real sense she was still with him; he assured his guests in general that, much as they might have admired Belinda, she was in fact twice the person they knew. And then, when everyone had gone home, they sat together, all three, on the sofa and watched
The Return of Martin Guerre,
laughing hysterically.

Stefan never mentioned Malmö again. He made a little bonfire of his moose-hat and his books of English idiom, then took Belinda and Linda on a tour of Kent in the Ferrari, revisiting the scenes of his childhood. Birgit offered to nurse the baby when it was born, but the Johanssons declined. Somehow it did not seem entirely fitting to have her back in the house, despite the good deed she had done them. Anyone who could misjudge Ingrid so badly, or call herself Anni-Frid for the purpose of disguise when she looked like a Smurf, might be more trouble than she was worth. Besides, it was time for the Johanssons to cope alone with their domestic affairs, without outside help. Surely three jobless, officially dead people ought to be able to manage with one little baby? Especially three jobless, officially dead people whose lives could now never be extricated from one another’s, as long as they all still lived.

Their friends were relatively content, too. Viv ditched the ghastly Dermot, but not before getting him to find Jago a better job. Maggie decided Stefan was a bit too weird for her tastes, removed his picture from her fairy-light frame, and settled at last for the wholehearted devotions of Leon. Her experience with Noel had taught her many things, but mainly it taught her to marvel at what a nice chap Leon was. Sometimes their divergence of interests caused a problem, as when they argued whether Zola was better known as a footballer or a novelist, and Leon got confused thinking that he did both. Or as when Maggie bought him a modern classic American novel called
The Sportswriter
and Leon chucked it away in disgust because it was so unclear how the protagonist filed his copy. ‘Does he have a laptop or what?’ he asked, quite reasonably. Six months into their relationship, however, Leon discovered independently that Rembrandt was a rather good painter as well as a toothpaste, which brought him closer to his beloved, in a small but important way.

Professionally, things were pretty straightforward. Tanner did not prosper long at the
Effort
but was picked up, of course, by the
Telegraph.
Jago, in his new job as deputy editor of the Effort, re-employed Leon to ‘ghost’ Jericho Jones’s weekly column, which led to a commission to ghost his autobiography too. Maggie’s success in
Three Sisters
was marred only by the subsequent approach from the Royal Shakespeare Company – the offer of a role in
The Comedy of Errors
, which she was obliged to refuse on emotional grounds, because of all the twins.

Meanwhile Viv started making curtains as a business, and Mrs Holdsworth (what a dark horse) wrote books. She sent a copy of the first one –
I Am a Vacuum Cleaner
– to her ex-employers, who were very impressed. Mrs Holdsworth turned out to have a robust style of writing and a gritty carpet’s-eye view of the world, which elicited comparisons universally with Irvine Welsh.

Linda found it hard to put her feet up, so the others allowed her to do the majority of stuff around the house. As Stefan explained from his rudimentary genetic knowledge, Linda was predisposed to housework while he and Belinda were predisposed to admiring it and enjoying its benefits. Belinda finally admitted that she loathed fish, which caused less consternation than she had feared. In fact, the Burial of the Fish Kettle was a stupendous moment, which they decided to mark annually with songs and a maypole. It turned out that Stefan didn’t like fish much either. In Sweden, fish had been the bane of his life for twenty years.

Against this background of domestic harmony, Belinda and Linda sometimes discussed doubles literature and professed themselves amazed by the amounts of contention and murder to be found there – so much mutual turfing of rivals out of the nest. So much winner-takes-it-all; so much uncomplicated ‘him or me’.

‘Written by men,’ Linda surmised, controversially. ‘They are so insecure, aren’t they? I mean, the life-or-death tussle on the loft-ladder – who needs it?’

As for Belinda, she continued to dream about the washing-machine for a while, but it was like the last few revolves of the drum after the spin has finished. Finally there was the faintest of clicks and the cycle was over, the door lock was released. Every day, she woke up in a house with Stefan and Linda – and she loved it. Her days as a Super Trouper were over. She had finally discovered the answer to the problem of work and life, which was to give up the former and share the latter with as many people as possible.

Neville was back, of course, but this was a good thing. Because turning her attention fully to her furry friend, she discovered that she had in fact been pregnant since Christmas. Los Rodentos had been a cunning biological disguise for foetal gestation! Within three months of the death of Ingrid, the household welcomed identical twin boys, whom they named Benny and Björn without a moment’s hesitation.

No one was more surprised than Belinda. She was astonished. All that time she’d been imagining spotlights and spangles and adoring crowds, and it was not acrobatic rats at all.