Maxwell’s Ride (2 page)

‘Of course.’ Maxwell smiled at the memory of his brother-in-law. ‘Hitler’s occupation, wasn’t it?’

The girls ignored him. Uncle Max was as mad as a snake. They both knew that. Still, he had brought them here, shelling out the coach fare and the entrance money. True, he’d gone pale both times, but they attributed that to his age.

This was what Whitsun was all about, the little lull in the academic year of a teacher, that meant you hear the birds singing before the bombardment of the exams begins. That little time fragment when English teachers realize they’ve been teaching the wrong texts for the last two years. What Whitsun was not about was what Maxwell saw before him now, a giant rocket blinding white in the late May sunshine, dark doors at its business end thrown scarily back. And into the darkness, a steady stream of chattering people wound its way, following some demonic piper of the park.

He’d already forced down the indescribable elevenses at the Burgermaster fast food outlet where an acne-smothered teenage counter-operative had waited patiently while Tiffany translated the menu for Maxwell. There were no seats, not even a space to lodge your elbows. This was food on the hoof, grub to queue by.

Behind them, a large lady from the West Midlands was doing admirable Jasper Carrott impressions, which were quite droll for the first half an hour. When Maxwell read the sign that told him he still had twenty minutes to wait from this point, he lost the will to live. Lucy’s face was buried in candyfloss, the only thing Maxwell vaguely recognized from his own childhood. Whatever sophistication the little madam affected on a daily basis had vanished at Magicworld. She was a kid again, laughing, joking, splashing in the fountains and pulling faces at her uncle. All that surprised her was that he was pulling them back.

‘Jesus!’ Maxwell felt the iron bars slide down over his shoulders. Several signs had already warned him that anyone with a heart condition shouldn’t really be doing this. He felt his chest thump as the car shuddered into motion. He glanced to left and right. Lucy and Tiffany on one side were nattering together, the woman from the West Midlands was demolishing a toffee apple. Ahead, in the pitch dark, silver points of light were hurtling like small supernovae on a projection screen. Maxwell knew his feet were dangling over the dark void and as the stars burst bigger and louder, the ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ of his fellow cosmonauts increased.

‘Are you holding on, Uncle Max?’ Lucy wanted to know.

‘Yes, darling,’ Maxwell patted her arm. ‘No need to worry about your … Christ!’

The ship shook and juddered as if hit by a broadside. A siren was pounding in his ears, the whole capsule pulsing red. A gaping hole was torn in the rocket’s nose and Maxwell found himself lurching forward, his feet flying up so that his heels hit the seat. A toffee apple flew past his vision and hysteria filled his ears. He was a public schoolboy. Shouldn’t he be taking charge or something? His stomach came up to hit him at the same time that the West Midlands woman perforated his eardrum with a scream. He daren’t let go to protect himself and he knew his knuckles were white on the lion frame.

Lucy and Tiffany were screaming too, their hair flying back in the slipstream. Maxwell couldn’t hear them above the noise he was making and he tried to focus on the neon electronic figures whipping past on his left. It registered, at terrifying speed, the thousands of miles they were falling through the earth s atmosphere, out of space. He tried to clear his mind, to catch his breath, to shut out the suffocating pain in his throat. Films, his first love. Think of that. But all Maxwell could think of was David Bowie in
The Man Who Fell To Earth
. Not much comfort, really. Lights were flashing all around him, hells ringing. A robotic voice screaming ‘Impact! Impact!’

Then it stopped. Ahead the scene was a peaceful, sunbathed earth, the sea silver and safe. He knew his body was the right way up again and that the girls were still there, laughing with the relief of it all. Rigor mortis had set in on the face of the West Midlands woman, her lips peeled back over her teeth. Maxwell was wiping toffee apple off his shirt.

‘Bloody Hell!’ He’d barely glanced ahead again when the rocket ploughed into the sea and a spray of freezing water hit him full in the face.

‘So how come you’re both bone dry?’ Maxwell wanted to know as they tagged onto the end of yet another twisting, chattering, excited line.

‘We’ve done this before, Uncle, dear,’ Tiffany winked at him. ‘Feel up to The Cauldron, then?’

It looked innocuous enough. Walt Disney stuff, really. They were wending their way into a vast black cooking pot resting on massive concrete logs. A green concrete slime was oozing from its rim and Maxwell couldn’t help reciting the mantra ‘Hubble bubble’. Tiffany clapped her hands over her ears and shut her eyes.

‘Macbeth,’ Lucy chirped, ever delighted at her sister’s discomfort. ‘The Scottish play. Tiffs doing it for GCSE.’

‘Not Miss Montague?’ Maxwell checked.

Tiffany had dropped her hands. ‘Do pay attention, Uncle Maxie. Monty’s history. It’s worse,’ she moaned. ‘Ms Frensham.’

‘Ah, Ms.’ Maxwell’s face fell ominously. ‘That says it all, my dear. On the shelf and hideously embarrassed by the fact.’

‘She’s a lesbian,’ Lucy contributed to the conversation.

‘Oh course,’ Maxwell nodded. ‘Oh, God.’

The savage sun had gone and they stood on the edge of Hell. Fires flared here and there and their ears were assailed with groans and cries. He shepherded the girls into a car and moulded restraints slid down over their shoulders. The woman from the West Midlands had gone, probably with the men in white coats, and she’d been replaced on his left by a rather dismal looking man with weasel eyes. He didn’t seem to be with anyone and looked utterly bored by the whole experience. What struck Maxwell as being particularly odd was that the man was wearing a three-piece suit.

‘Now, I’m not going to get wet this time, am I?’ Maxwell checked with the gormless girl who was ushering them into their seats.

‘Not unless somebody chucks up on yer,’ came the reply. She’d obviously graduated from the Liam Gallagher Charm School. An impossibly deep electronic laugh sent shivers up Lucy’s spine. At sub-Paul Robeson levels, it even brought tears to Maxwell’s eyes.

‘Is it me?’ he whispered in the sudden pitch darkness, ‘or are we spiralling upwards?’

Weird howlings and rattlings of chains filled their ears now, and writhing things coiled from the shadows to leer at them, snarling and slavering like demon wolves. Lucy’s eyes were wide in the dim, misty red light and Tiffany, for all her sang froid was leaning as close as she could to her uncle.

Something cold and clammy parted Maxwell’s hair. By the screams, it was happening to other people too. At least, he could still feel his feet on a hard surface this time. Nothing to this one. A little sub-Exorcist head rotation, a few things going bump in the night. Piece, as Maxwell’s 11C would have it, of piss.

It may have been Lucy who screamed first. It may have been Tiffany. Come to think of it, it was Maxwell. The car had stopped, dangling it seemed by the slenderest of spider threads over a yawning precipice. Far, far below, the flames of Hell crackled and roared and sharp-fanged monsters rose from the abyss, snapping at their heels, swinging now over the sheer drop.

‘Oh my …’ But Maxwell hadn’t time to finish his sentence. His head tilted forward, his knees came up, his stomach had an out of body experience. The noise was deafening, the rush of terror in his ears as the car plunged vertically down into the hellfire. None of them would ever be the same again.

It didn’t help that Maxwell could remember when this place was still the home of the Duke of Somebodyorother. It had a great house, now demolished and graceful follies where the said Duke played bezique with his friends and dallied with the maidservants. A boating lake was as racy as it got when Maxwell first moved to Leighford. But Leighford Hall was ruin and the then Duke had death duties and an expensive wife and sons at Harrow. So he’d thrown open his gates to the public and sold hot dogs and burgers and things on sticks. He’d had the Doctor Who exhibition with the BBC corridor faithfully reproduced in the Orangery, the sleek racing cars of yesteryear Brooklands on show in the Old Stables. At least then there’d been a semblance of Old World Charm.

Now it was Magicworld, a cacophony of piped music, shrieks and screams, the smells of the Subcontinent. Maxwell made for the only familiar sight in the whole boiling, a sow roasting on a spit, reminding him of Merrie England by way of Errol Flynn. Pig on the bone. Grand.

Tiff and Lucy of course had other ideas. Clutching their multi-coloured purses, they tottered on their fashionable heels to join the line for the doner kebab house. The grey glistening thing twirling under the striped awning had more to do, Maxwell thought, with the Donner party, but it wasn’t his place to say so. He settled for an appalling coffee apparently made with meths and looked wistfully at the way out.

‘Montezuma’s Revenge, Uncle Maxie!’ Lucy tugged at his sleeve, pointing with all the glee of a five-year-old to the huge, concrete gaping mouth of a particularly vengeful- looking Aztec.

‘Been there,’ Maxwell was drawing a metaphorical line in the sand, ‘done that. Something restful now, I think. Something redolent of Cambridge summers and Grantchester and strawberries and cream. “Stands the church clock at ten to three?’”

Lucy was looking around. ‘I can’t see it, Uncle Maxie,’ she said. ‘I make it half past one.’

His look said it all. ‘Wild Water,’ he said. ‘It may not exactly be punting, but it can’t be as wild as all that.’ He missed the knowing glance between his nieces, failed to catch their momentary smirks. All he saw was the black rubber ring of the car, like a large version of what old men with piles sit on. It had high plastic yellow sides to it to make the public think they were getting value for money. That solitary weasel-eyed man was ahead of them, getting into one all by himself. Lucy slid past the barrier.

No,’ the man said, reaching out to stop her. ‘Get the one behind, will you?’

Lucy frowned, surprised by the request. Tiffany was standing next to her now, both of them staring at him.

‘What’s the trouble?’ Maxwell asked.

The weasel-eyed man was steadying himself against the jetty, clinging on to Lucy’s arm for a moment, ‘No trouble,’ he said and pushed himself off the planking so that his car swept away on the eddying ripples, Number Four gleaming in silver on its sides.

I le obviously wants to be alone,’ Maxwell shrugged, his Greta Garbo utterly lost on the girls. Ah, the callowness of youth. Their bums hit the soft rubber seating simultaneously and the car swirled to the right, spinning away from the slippery planking in its carefully controlled current. They glided around, the craft sliding effortlessly past polystyrene rocks and mock cacti, chaparrals surprisingly high for Hampshire. In the crags concrete cougars crouched for attack, granite grizzlies growled. Maxwell leaned back, his arms spread over the cool black shoulders of the car. In the distance, screams told them that Montezuma’s Revenge had claimed another set of victims, hanging upside down like pupae about to hatch. This was more like it, Maxwell mused. Tranquillity, just him and the girls and the coolness of the water.

He was just leaning forward to say something inconsequential to Tiffany when the first buffet hit. He lurched across the car, missing the girl’s lap by inches.

‘I wouldn’t move about, Uncle Maxie,’ she suggested. ‘It is called Wild Water, you know.’

Maxwell knew. But he’d seen Deliverance, not once but several times. If Jon Voight could do it, he could do it. Besides, his legs were longer than Burt Reynolds’s. And he still had his own hair. The car spun in a sudden vortex, the rocks hurtling past in a blur of grey. ‘Jesus Christ!’ Maxwell felt his face whipped by an instant wind, the G force flattening his features as he did his best to grin reassuringly at Lucy. She was laughing, throwing her head back as the car bucked and jolted, sliding downstream now at an impossible speed. Maxwell grabbed at the craft. There was nothing to grab. Nothing to grip. He slid sideways, crushing Tiffany again and rolling backwards.

Everybody was screaming, laughing, trying to catch their breath, trying to be nonchalant. Only Tiffany was staring ahead, watching the car in front, the end of the ride. Maxwell’s knuckles were white again, rather like his face and his knees came up for the umpteenth time as he tried to steady himself. Water was buffeting the car, soaking him for the second time that day and no one was more delighted than he was as the car slowed to a crawl.

There was pandemonium in front. Maxwell glanced backward to the car behind, where a party of underprivileged schoolchildren were still sliding and shrieking, making life unnecessarily hellish for the poor bastard of a teacher who had given up his holiday, like Maxwell, to do his duty. Faithful unto death.

‘Uncle Max, what’s happening?’ Lucy asked.

‘It’s just the end of the ride, darling,’ Maxwell told her, wondering at the naïveté of the question. But it wasn’t. From nowhere, under the shadow of the jetty, uniformed Magicworld staff were scurrying backwards and forwards, ashen-faced. Maxwell saw one of them turn away quickly and vomit over the side, her heaving shoulders held by the friend who steadied her.

They were converging on the car in front where the weasel-eyed man had been sitting. But the car seemed empty. Maxwell’s craft hit it amidships and bounced away, sending an arm flailing over the side. Then the screaming started. First Tiffany, then Lucy, then several of the park staff.

‘Get out,’ a pale-faced boy in a company coat was jabbering to Maxwell. ‘There’s been an accident. We have to stop the ride. Get out. Please.’

Maxwell hauled his nieces upright and got them onto the water-splashed planking. It was cool here and dark after the May sunshine. He screened the girls from the car in front and the old Toyota advert filled his brain – ‘the car in front is a coffin’. He half turned to see the weasel-eyed man slumped in the watery bottom of his craft, his mouth open, his eyes staring at the rubber seat, as though in disbelief.