Little Fingers! (9 page)

Who is paying
for them now? They took all the spare cash I had in the drawer as
they left, and they “borrowed” two of my credit cards, but I
blocked both of them after a few days, and the money must have run
out. At least, I have assumed that they took them. Mary and Alice
went missing, the money went missing, and the cards went missing,
all at the same time. I haven't heard a thing from them. I am
beginning to be more worried than angry. Surely, if they could at
least e-mail me. They could find a cyber-café anywhere, although
Mary probably wouldn't.

I am still
hoping that what happened is what I feared would happen. It is a
strange thing to hope that your fears have come true. However, it
is better than any likely alternative. If they have been abducted,
that would be really horrific. I do not wish to imagine it. They
could be held in a cellar in Feyrargues somewhere by outraged,
puritanical villagers, or whatever the Roman Catholic version of
puritans are - possibly Cathars - this is Cathar Country, the
motorway signs proudly proclaim. If so, why am I not there too? It
doesn't make sense, so I doubt it. I think they have simply slid
off, forever, for a month, maybe for a few weeks. Maybe they will
be back when the money, or the lust, or the fascination runs out.
Maybe I will never see them again. There will be a huge gap in my
story which is the future-history of Mary and Alice which I will
never learn.

Three is never
a good number. It has inherent instability. It induces neuroticism,
and I am a neurotic character. I am not afraid of people. I am not
afraid of direct danger. I am afraid of situations and how they can
develop to destroy my life. At base, I have no faith in the
universe, no faith in a generous and protective God, no faith in
people. We are all on our own, watching out for ourselves, making
choices that we believe further our best interests, even when we
describe them in altruistic ways. Human beings are animals. We may
not be the most successful living beings on the planet (I cannot
talk to beetles, mice, dragonflies, birds and crocodiles), but we
are certainly the most aggressive and domineering. You see
something, you take it, and you try to get away with it. Or, if you
are more cunning and calculating, you try to work out the last bit
first.

At this moment
I hate Mary and Alice, I am not sure which more. Alice is a thief,
an amoral twenty year old thief. Mary has betrayed me. I think that
the betrayal is worse. When a thief steals something from you, she
has made no commitments to you. She has just found something of
yours which has sneaked itself loose, and she has seized it. She is
a predator. Mary, on the other hand, committed herself to me and I
to her. She took all my secrets, all my fears, all my hopes, all my
future away with her, leaving only their dark shadows - guilt,
anxiety, and helplessness.

The car is
still there. Everyone has been searching high and low, and no-one
has tracked down a taxi picking them up from here. The nature of my
car is my best alibi. Nobody believes that I could or would
transport two trussed or dead bodies in an open-top Smart Roadster,
and there is no evidence that the police can find that I have hired
a car in the area (I haven't, since before we bought the
Smart).

I have not
written anything here for weeks. I was first wrapped up in our
relationship with Alice, then with their relationship with me, and,
finally with their departure and the hole they left behind. There
were no rows, nor even obvious disagreements, only increasing
tension as Mary and I vied for Alice's affections. I didn't realise
it was serious, that we were strategising to grab Alice and run off
with her. I would never have left Mary for Alice. She is a young
girl, fickle, dangerous, as yet loose in the world. She would never
have been a long term solution to any problem I can think of. Mary
clearly saw things differently, although it may be that she was not
seeing things clearly at all. She is surprisingly naïve sometimes.
She goes with the flow, without due consideration of the
consequences. I find (found) that exceedingly frustrating, even if
we would never have got together at all if she had thought about
it.

I wonder
whether I should phone Frank. “Frank, if you think you have lost
your wife, I have too! She's with you? Oh, thank God for that!” or
“We have been looking everywhere for her. I am sure she will turn
up………….yes, she has been missing two weeks now. I know I should
have called you earlier. I didn't want to panic you. I know. It was
a bad decision. I am sorry. We are doing everything we
can.”

The longer I
do not contact Frank, the more difficult it is to do so. I have
built up a hope that Mary is back with him, another of those hopes
based on a fear. If I phone Frank, I will know one way or the
other, and I don't want to know about either. I don't want to have
lost Mary to Frank, and I don't want to have lost her altogether
from sight. I prefer the anxiety and reassurance of evading the
truth.

Madame Quelque
Chose de Quelque Part (and I no longer find that nickname funny -
it was a shared joke between Mary and me) has gone to the police.
They came round to ask where Alice and Mary are. They are, of
course, minimally concerned with Mary's welfare. It is Alice they
want to get back. Madame QC de QP is ringing everyone she knows, or
has heard of, in the police hierarchy to get some action. They all
keep coming to me demanding to know where Mary and Alice are, have
they contacted me, have I traced their use of my credit cards, what
did they say before they went?

Only Thibault
is staying well away. I suspect that it is now all too much of a
story for his friends, and he no longer wishes to be compromised by
our acquaintance.

A large part
of the speculation is whether I have done them in. Why does death
trail me? I moved to London to get away from the deaths of my
sister and my mother. I fled to France to recover from the death of
a girl, Marianne, I had been living with for two years, and who
died from a drug overdose. You did not know about that? The
overdose wasn't deliberate. She used a medicine-chest of drugs,
many of them obtained on prescription, which made her impossible to
manage or cope with. People on drugs are a hell to those who live
with them, always broke, always moody, either plangently
unreasonable or ridiculously happy. I have met many partners of
drug addicts. We talk, even as we remain isolated in our separate
hells, never daring to find common cause lest we become unwilling
to help those who continuously crucify us. We are loyal dogs. We
have made a terrible mistake, and we foolishly stick with it. Our
drugged-out former loved ones are so vulnerable. We adopt their
survival instinct. We look out for them as they bounce off the
walls seeking the next hit.

I came to
Hanburgh in order to come to terms with death, only to find more of
it. I came here for the same reason, and now Mary and Alice are
missing, progressively assumed dead.

I say that it
has nothing to do with me. Alice was a frequent visitor to the
house, she fell in love with Mary, and they eloped. Don't blame me.
I spend my time writing a book about my life in England. I am not
their keeper. Except that I have blatantly not been writing
anything over the last few weeks, and I was intimately involved in
the events leading up to their disappearance.

Well, Madame
Quelque Chose de Quelque Part, you really have something to click
your teeth over now.

* *
*

My stuff has
arrived. The removal van did not fit into the driveway, so they had
to park it in the street at the bottom of the garden, and carry
everything fifty yards up a narrow, slippery path to the
house.

The removal
people were furious, and moaned and sulked. I was the inconsiderate
enemy. I had bought a house that had no easy access, a sin
compounded by the weight of some of the furniture I had bought over
the years. I am sure that the older, stocky guy is still
muttering.

They took the
furniture and the boxes directly to the allotted rooms, and snorted
whenever I was unsure as to where they should go. Oh to be a man at
times like this.

Two days later
I received a customer satisfaction survey. I filled it out with
some venom. I haven't heard back from the company.

It will take
weeks, months, even years to get everything sorted out. It is not
that I have so much, more that I am physically lazy and cannot be
bothered to work at it for any length of time.

I was
inspecting the photo albums earlier, and decided to sit down and
leaf through them. I suddenly realised that these photos of my
mother's childhood took place in this village. I know that I
deliberately came to live in Hanburgh because my mother was brought
up here, but I had not emotionally connected this village with her
until then.

I desperately
wanted her to walk into the room, to stand there, and to talk to
me, without her habitual sorrow and pain. I would like to hug her,
to welcome her back, to hear the stories of her childhood recounted
with awe not hatred and anger. At least I would like to find
something of hers in this house. Why would I? Her family was poor.
There is no relationship between the Hanburgh she knew and the
house I have bought.

She must have
walked past this house, though, climbing up the hill, reflecting on
the luck of the upper echelons of the village. Did she know anyone
from this house? Were there children? Maybe she played here. I want
to feel something of her here, and I can feel nothing except her
absence.

The time in
this house speeds by. There is everything to do. The carpets
arrived yesterday. I panicked when I suddenly realised that the
carpet people might have to haul several enormous, heavy,
struggling carpets up the garden. However they were able to drive
straight up to the front door.

The previous
owners covered all the floors with cheap plastic laminate. I should
tear it all up, but I cannot face the inevitable necessity of
having to replace all the floors. I shall not be in Hanburgh for
long. I cannot spend my entire stay leaping from joist to
joist.

The garden is
my domain. I stand there and I look around, and I tell myself that
all this is mine, all this is me. It is surrounded by walls, trees
and hedges. They are my natural curtains from behind which I peer
into the village. In fact, I see very few people pass by on foot.
There is always some activity around the beck, but they are usually
strangers.

When I march
down the path the removal men struggled up, and let myself through
the gate into the street, time changes down to a careful pace.
No-one hurries around the village, not even the children. People
enter and leave the shops one at a time. You would think that there
is nothing going on here at all, that nothing has ever happened,
that everyone is dormant here year-in year-out.

And you would
mostly be right. Even the rivalries and the squabbling are small
things, marginally significant to anyone other than the central
players. And yet babies are born here to spend most of their lives
in this village, at least they were. Mobility has reached even this
part of the world.

* *
*

I keep looking
at the floors. I need to get rid of that stuff. It isn't even
modern laminate - it is parquet, old, bobbly and, if anyone trips
over it, they could sue me.

No-one has
really been here yet, except Tom and Mary, and they have not been
for a while. I am embedded in my isolation, in my superfluity of
rooms, and my bars of chocolate, and acres of time. I feel
luxuriant, sleepy, honest. There is nothing to lie about when I am
lying about these rooms.

The fireplace
in this room is tiled. Fifties, I would think. A rather mean
fireplace. An ugly surround. Convenient to clean.

There is a
ring at the door, then a knock. Maybe it is Mary. I jump up and
bound down the stairs to the front door, frightened to miss
her.

It is somebody
I don't know. She smiles at me. “Sam James,” she says. “From next
door. Up the hill.” The “up” appears to have social
significance.

I point
towards the little hallway behind me. “You live there, do you?” It
is a ridiculous statement. No-one lives in my little hallway, among
the coats, in front of the basin, and next to the toilet.
Nonetheless, Sam responds to what I mean.

“
Well, not
any more,” she corrects me and herself. “I used to live up there at
the Hall. I was born there. Now I live up in the dale. Top of the
hill, turn left, one mile on your right.”

“
I
see.”

“
Have you
been there yet?”

“
Yes. There
is a nice view of the river.”

“
That is the
other way. Straight on.”

“
I
know.”

Sam appears
strangely disconcerted, given that she is the local and I am the
intruder. Even more surprisingly, I actually want to unsettle her.
I don't want to speak. There is a power in silence that I often
use, even when I have no purpose for using it.

“
Come
in.”

“
Thank you,”
Sam smiles, “but I must be going. I jut dropped round to say hello,
and to invite you to one of our coffee mornings, well
get-togethers.” My expression must have dipped at the mention of a
coffee morning. “A few of my girlfriends.”