Paradise and Elsewhere (10 page)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Saving Grace

 

 

 

 

T
he road sliced across
the map, narrow but determined. There were no junctions, no landmarks, no settlements of any kind until it reached the small eminence upon which was built (supposedly, thought Libby—it seemed the right word for the day) the regional capital, Wantwick. That was their destination. They would know when they got there, or so she hoped. She drove, the other two ominously quiet. Sally had said she would take a turn at the driving, but she kept her eyes shut and seemed to have forgotten about it. On either side of them were large fields planted with some kind of grain which seemed to grow very unevenly, leaving bald patches of stony-looking soil. Above them the huge sky had been scoured clean of cloud by the wind.

“Can't we stop?” said Clark suddenly. “Look. On the left. It says ‘Tea.'” Libby swung the van down the track. Stray ears of corn and clumps of poppies were growing through chalky rubble. There was no evidence that anyone had been there for a very long time.

“Wild goose chase,” said Clark, “the whole thing, I mean. Not just the tea.” Libby glanced at him in the mirror. The corners of his mouth were drooping. He rarely left the city. Another two hours and he would be demanding they went home. He knew he was indispensable. “Nothing could happen in a place like this,” he muttered, “nothing. Scarcity of people is one reason, hideousness is another. And no cell phone service! You know they're asking for independence? Imagine!”

Libby hoped they arrived soon. Somehow, the farther they got from base, the less her seniority seemed to count.

“Even when the Revenue give the place a wide berth. Should've cleared it right up and used it for dumping,” said Sally, adding brightly, ‘It's just the sort of place where you'd go mad, isn't it?”

The track narrowed, grew suddenly muddy, turned sharply to the left, then came to an end between two gates. A rusty estate car was parked facing them. A notice taped to the windscreen said “Tea here,” and behind it a woman sat in the driver's seat, reading, one elbow protruding from the open window. There was a pile of newspapers on the passenger seat. The one the woman was reading, Libby noticed, was parchment-yellow and dated last January.

“I'll need to get past you,” the woman said. In the back of the car she lit a small stove, decanted water carefully from a plastic container and unwrapped some mugs packed with newspaper in a cardboard box. Her face was pretty in a tense, pointed kind of way: almost a city face. Beneath the bulky jacket, Libby guessed, her body would be small, but powerful. She felt a brief stab of guilt that this woman should be immured in her rusty car, day in day out marooned in such an empty tract of land, reading old newspapers, whilst she had her own office, use of an up-to-the-minute van, the services of Clark—despite his sulks, the best cameraman available—and, most important of all, control of a budget. And she'd only had to come here—Clark was right, godforsaken was the only word for it—because something had, for once, happened. Supposedly. There could be nothing worse than selling things to earn your living, she thought, and the more mundane the product, the more tiresome it must be. Buying was far better.

“Do you do much business?” she asked.

“Where're you from?” the woman replied, glaring at the stove.

“We're from NTV,” Libby said—this normally warmed people up—“come to do a feature about a woman in Wantwick. We are on the right road, aren't we?”

“You'll have trouble,” the woman said, pouring water, steaming but far from the boil, into a metal teapot. “Three of you? That'll be nine ninety.”

“That's rather a lot,” said Libby, but she was already reaching for her pocket.

“You get a biscuit with it.”

“How far is it to Wantwick?” asked Libby, humbly.

‘”I can sell you a map if you want,” the woman replied, handing her the mugs. “Don't forget to bring them back.”

 

“
I
'm not drinking this
!” Clark said. Sally bit experimentally into her biscuit, then spat the residue out of the window. It would hardly be possible, Libby thought, to forget about returning the mugs with the woman staring at them like that, as if they were criminals. Neither was it possible to persuade one of the others to take them back: “Too cold,” Sally said, nestling up to Clark.

“I might want to buy the map, but could I see it first?” Libby asked as the woman upended Sally's mug and began to dry it out with newspaper. She gave no sign of having heard. Defeated, Libby returned to the van.

She drove on. Sudden gusts of wind sent the corn flat and could be felt even inside the van, pushing against the steering and sneaking in through the vents. The landscape was as unyielding as a line drawn firm across paper with a ruler and square. Couldn't be much fun—even for the few people that did live there. Supposedly. And no tourist trade, as in the other empty lands to the north and west. Even before the Commission it had never been densely populated, but there must have been towns, villages, and single, unproductive dwellings growing steadily more unreachable as the roads fell into neglect: all flattened now under the hot gale of economic and demographic rationalization that had swept the country—flattened, and then sunk more thoroughly than the ghost towns of other waves of progress, now under reservoirs with their tolling bells and telltale morning mists, or wrapped in lava and preserved for everyone to see.

A turbulent time that must have been: Libby could remember some of the slogans and feeble protests—or were those perhaps her parents' memories, absorbed in the blood? It has been as hard and fierce as the one outside, that wind of change, but now everything was settled, like dust falling softly where it had to rest. People lived where they were needed and all the land was used according to demand. There was no waste. It was a country that led the world.

We could be anywhere, thought Libby. If I couldn't feel the engine running and see the figures creeping up on the clock, I'd almost think we were standing still. And there were those signs of course, not direction signs, but every ten miles or so a small track joined the road, each bearing its handwritten advertisement: “Beans 700 yards,” “Good Rubble,” “Oven-Ready Tame Rabbits,” “Cut Flowers,” “Manure,” and so on. Presumably a rusty car and a surly woman waited at the end of each, like a spider in its web. Behind her, the crew were quiet. Neither of them had wanted to come, and indeed, thought Libby, the journey seemed much longer than she had expected.

“I think we're nearly there,” she announced at last. It was dusk. The other two were both asleep. Spitefully, she opened the window and let in the sharp air. For the first time, a vehicle passed them going the other way, and ahead was a misty cluster of lights on the horizon. “There must be a hotel,” she said.

“Fortunately,” said Clark, “I have a chocolate bar which I am prepared to divide more or less equally among the three of us.”

“For God's sake, stop it,” snapped Libby. They passed a sign which said, in short fat letters without any welcoming messages or traces of civic pride,
Wantwick
.

“He's got a point, Lib,” said Sally. “It's not a place famed for its hospitality. Or anything, come to that.”

“We're here to work, not enjoy hospitality,” said Libby. Her neck ached.

“It better be something special, though, hadn't it?” Sally said sweetly. “This woman better be getting up to something stunningly good, because we can't exactly rely on the glamour of the location. What gave you the idea?”

“George!” snapped Libby.

“Him Himself? You're sure it wasn't one of his little jokes? Look—over there.” Clark's voice was weary. “The orange ‘H' followed by half a ‘T' might be what we want.”

 

T
hey sat in the room
and shared Clark's chocolate and some whisky he had brought as well. Three single beds were ranged against one wall. Periodically the table light went out and had to be fed with coins. There was no television.

“For this money we'd stay in the best place in town,
à
la carte
, movies, piano and dancing thrown in.”

“It's freezing.” Sally climbed under the covers of the bed nearest the door.

Libby kept silent. It wasn't the time to mention the odd juddering that had beset the van after she turned the engine off, nor her suspicions that it would not start in the morning, nor her worry that Sally might well have put her finger on it about George sending her here out of spite. He probably knew she was after his job.

“The bookcase is locked,” reported Clark. “
For reading, apply at reception
.”

 

T
hey arrived at the woman's
house on foot. It was in an old municipal estate, a rarity in the rest of the country but apparently still used here—where fresh investment was scant, and people not as fussy. Libby had to carry the camera. Clark and Sally had slept together, or tried to, and kept Libby awake as well. She didn't think they'd enjoyed it much, but it had probably kept them warm. They hadn't had any breakfast, because none of them could stand the hotel one minute longer.

The house was falling to bits, but the sign outside was better done than most in the street.
The Truth. Here. Cheap, Plus Free Gift!
Clark laughed sardonically. It did look pretty lame.

“Just turn that thing on,” said Libby, “and take some shots. We can jazz it up later.” If I've been sent on a fool's errand, she thought, I'll bloody well turn the tables. Dragging the other two with her, she strode past a queue of about a dozen people, all sandy-haired, short and wrapped in long, oatmeal-coloured coats, who were waiting by the gate, and up to the front door which was ajar. As she reached it, a stone bounced off the frame.

The woman, quite old and shrunken, was wearing a faded plaid dressing gown and sitting on a straight-backed chair in one of the upstairs rooms. The room was other­wise empty but for a corner cupboard and a couple of large empty boxes, animal cages of some kind, with wire mesh stapled across their fronts. She stared at the three of them—obviously city people in their bright coats and scarves. Clark and Sally were sharing one of Clark's jokes—“The Truth is strangely apparell'd”—shaking with laughter as they set out the camera and lights.

“Those two won't get out of Wantwick alive,” the woman said, suddenly but without malice, gesturing at Sally and Clark.

“That's
true
,” a voice sang gaily. It was coming, very obviously, Libby thought, from the cupboard in the corner. You could see a bit of dressing gown, like the old woman's, sticking out under the door.

“Good morning,” Libby said brightly, although her heart was sinking, “we are from NTV.” Sally set the lights on, flooding every corner of the bare room. The woman didn't so much as blink. The camera was up and running.

“You're a fool-girl,” the woman said, matter of fact, without venom, “stumbling in, jumping queues and breaking the rules. Bringing a pair like that with you.”

“Very true,” the voice sang again.

“I do apologize. Your fame has travelled, so to speak. Can we please watch you work?” asked Libby, smiling as hard as she could. “We'll pay,” she added.

“I know that. Stay as long as you like. That won't be long. None of your plans will come to fruit, you'll fail completely.” The woman's baleful stare seemed to enfold them all like a thick, stifling blanket. “You think you're lucky to live in the cities. You think it's kinder there and people are more generous, but that's only because they've got more. You're stupid, and you're deeply mean. You don't like your friends drinking too much of your wine. You count up favours and drop people if they don't pay you back. You're jealous of your sister Phil.” At this, Libby blushed and tried to interrupt. “You're proud of yourself and fuck knows why. Your work's junk. You'll believe any old rubbish so long as it profits you. You'd sell yourself to get the Station Controller's job. You're snobbish, pig ignorant and eventually you'll get cancer. But you do look nice, nicer than us in Wantwick, all three of you do.”

“That's all true.” They didn't sound so stupid now, whoever it was hiding in the cupboard.

“What about the free gift?” Clark's voice was fainter than usual.

“You haven't paid yet,” said the woman without looking at him.

“How much?” Libby was already reaching into her pocket.

“Everything you've got,” the old woman, said, “and then you can get out there and sell the clothes off your back. The others won't need to, theirs'll be ripped off. Your van's gone: you should've had the breakfast. You're spineless.”

“That's true… ”

“Why do you hate me?” said Libby, spilling coins and notes on the floor.

“Come on, Lib,” said Sally, following Clark to the door.

“I don't,” said the woman, “but those two couldn't give a damn. You've no real friends at all.” She dragged Libby to the rotting window and threw it open.

Below, the queue had doubled. As Sally and Clark emerged, struggling with the camera, it gathered itself into a crowd and rushed towards them hurling stones and bottles. By the time it had reached them they were a blue coat and an orange coat lying on the ground, the equipment beside them.