The One Safe Place (17 page)

His eyes flickered, and she saw he was deciding whether answering would help his film. He glanced down at the inspector, who had remained at the foot of the stairs, presumably in case any of the family made a bid for freedom. "One of your students," the director murmured, and seemed about to leave it at that, but instead lowered his voice further, "has been selling copies of banned videos."

"What has that to do with us?"

He blinked slowly at her as though he was squeezing the disbelief out of his eyes, and Susanne thought that if any of the unwelcome visitors gave her one more look she didn't care for—"Read a lot, do you, son?" an avuncular officer was saying, which enraged her too. Then the policeman with the plump scrubbed face leaned over the highest banister. "We've found them, Inspector."

Susanne felt her legs sending her upstairs as if they were thinking for her. The inspector appeared to be in no hurry to climb, and so she had time to tone down her rage at the spectacle of policemen removing dozens of cassettes from the shelves. As soon as he reached the top landing she said, "I want you to know that none of these videos has ever been out of our control."

"Is that so, Mrs. Travis?"

"I'm trying to tell you I've played them on a machine at the University to show them to my students, and on the player downstairs, and that's all."

"I'll note you said so."

"You can't copy these tapes into your British standard from either player. The signal can only be picked up by a suitable monitor, otherwise all you get is garbage."

"Really."

His very expressionlessness was infuriating, and so was the sight of the police pretending not to listen as they denuded the shelves. "Do you intend to leave me any tapes at all?" she said.

He raised his eyebrows slightly, producing another line in his forehead. "Refusing to cooperate won't help your case."

"I'd like to know how you define cooperation," she said, and saw plump Desmond turning a cassette of
Casablanca
over in his hands. "I don't suppose you'll be impounding Bogey, will you? I guess even the British appreciate a weep."

"It doesn't have a British censor's certificate, Inspector."

"Better add it to the pile."

Susanne felt as if darkness was invading the room, clinging to the light-bulb and the inside of her cranium. "You have to be kidding."

"It is illegal to sell or rent or exhibit any videocassette in this country which has not been given a British censor's certificate," the inspector said.

"In that case you may as well save yourselves a whole lot of trouble and take all of them," Susanne said, reflecting that the police would look pretty stupid if they tried to bring
Singin' in the Rain
and all the Astaire-Rogers musicals into court. The notion that a sense of absurdity might catch up with them in time to persuade them to drop the case was beginning to appeal to her when Marshall trailed upstairs after Don and the policeman who had been in Marshall's room. "That's mine," the boy protested.

The policeman whose plumpness and eagerness increasingly reminded Susanne of a schoolboy—the kind of teacher's pet all his classmates would loathe—was examining
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
"The PG rating on this isn't British, Inspector."

"Good work, Desmond."

Susanne saw Marshall's teeth squeeze his closed lips together as the policeman dropped the cassette on top of the nearest pile. "You call that good work, do you," she demanded, "taking away a child's entertainment?"

"Perhaps he'll turn to something healthier. I don't care what certificate it has," the inspector said, "I wouldn't let my ten-year-old watch that kind of violence."

"I'm twelve," Marshall said, his mouth twisting.

"Ten or twelve, it makes no odds. If there were a few more responsible parents there'd be a few less young thugs for us to have to deal with."

"If we're discussing responsibility," Don said in a thin voice, "maybe you ought to remember my wife uses these tapes to educate people in criticising what they watch."

"I'm not here to argue with you, Mr. Travis."

"Then I suggest you keep your eructating opinions to yourself."

The inspector's lips stiffened, perhaps because he didn't understand the adjective, and then Marshall intervened. "Never mind, dad, mom. Pippy can tape it for me next time it's on satellite."

The inspector looked as though he might object to that too. Susanne was waiting for him to interfere, and saying, "Don't worry, honey, things can't be as bad as they seem," when a policeman came in from the study. "Inspector, this could be something."

He'd found a printout of the defence of her course which Clement had asked Susanne to write. No doubt her opening sentence had caught his eye: "Recent developments in electronic media have rendered the concept of local film censorship redundant." The inspector seemed pleased as soon as he began reading; she could almost see his face grow heavier. "I should like to take a copy of this, Mrs. Travis."

"Go ahead, take that one. It's meant for dissemination."

He appeared to suspect that of being a dirty word too, and she didn't suppose that, or his feeling patronised by their vocabulary, was going to improve the situation. Her awareness of the film crew jabbed her, and she rounded on them. "Maybe I should read it to the camera."

The cameraman grimaced. She mustn't be reacting as he thought the subject of a police raid should react, or perhaps her movement had undermined the image he was filming. If she could do nothing else for the moment, she could do her best to ensure that he took away no more footage that the director would want to use. She was walking toward the lens, and saying, "Let's consider how an image is constructed" in a voice which she struggled to render conversational, when plump scrubbed Desmond said, "I think that's everything, Inspector."

Susanne stepped closer to the camera so as to block more of its view as she turned her back on it. Every single cassette was piled on the floor "You aren't kidding," she said, higher and less controllably than ever.

"I'll bring up some boxes, shall I?" another of the mass of policemen said.

"If you're seriously proposing to take all those away," Susanne said, her tone sharper than she would ever have used to a student, "you'll need to store them horizontally. Stacking tapes vertically can ruin the soundtrack."

"Corrupts it, does it?" the inspector said with an air of having proved himself a master of wordplay. "Count them if you would, Desmond, and make out a receipt."

"You'll need to do more than count any you propose to remove," Don said at once. "We'll want them listed by title."

"Don..."

"That way there can't be any disagreement about which tapes are ours."

There shouldn't be in any case, since the Travises marked with a T the label of every cassette they bought, and she was about to try again to dissuade him from making unnecessary difficulties when she recalled that
I Spit on Your Grave
wouldn't be so marked. A dormant headache which had apparently been waiting for her to realise this darted twin spikes behind her eyes. She wheeled a chair to the doorway of the study and sat watching while policemen brought cartons which they filled with the cassettes Desmond, resembling a schoolboy kept in after class now, had to list on a sheaf of receipts he rested on Susanne's copy of
How to Read a Film.
She felt emotionless as a camera. The sun was crawling above the roofs by the time the last cassette was stuffed into a carton and the inspector laid the receipts on the study desk. "If you'll read through these and sign them."

The movies were only movies, Susanne told herself, and it was surely inconceivable that most of them wouldn't be returned. Her gaze tumbled down the protracted flights of steps that were the titles, until it snagged painfully on two listings of
Scarface,
both versions of which she'd been planning to run for her students that week. The question of what she could show them began to throb behind her eyes as she signed the receipts. The inspector examined her signature and then, as though some quality of her handwriting had prompted the query, said, "Are you British citizens?"

"That's one aspect of your hospitality we haven't enjoyed."

Several new lines sketched themselves on his forehead, and she wondered if he might seize her passport for the crime of sarcasm, or obstructing the police, or whatever he might call it. He only said, "You aren't planning to leave the country in the near future, are you, Mrs. Travis?"

"What reason could I have?"

He tore off copies of the receipts and spread them like an unbeatable hand of cards across the desk, and stooped so close to her that she could smell his mouthwash and see half an inch of a chest hair poking through the middle buttonhole of his shirt. "Please inform us if you intend to leave the area."

"Am I supposed to get dressed now?"

He looked almost amused, and she clenched her fists. "Am I supposed to accompany you?"

"You'll be hearing from us in due course."

His troops were bearing their cartons of booty downstairs, and he turned to follow them. The cameraman panned from them to the empty shelves and then switched off the camera, and Susanne's anger flew out of her mouth. "You've finished with us, have you? Got everything you wanted?"

"Susanne, I don't think it's their—"

"Their business, were you going to say, Don? Or their problem, how they're going to make us look?" She saw the cameraman's hand creep toward the switch, and lurched at him. "Go ahead, switch it on and I'll give you something real to film."

The inspector was lingering at the top of the stairs. Maybe he would arrest her for threatening behaviour, for disturbing the peace in her own house. In that case she would give him a reason, and she opened her fists into claws and went for the cameraman faster than he was backing away. She heard Marshall suck in a breath, and was dismayed by the way her rage had blotted out her awareness of him. "All right," she said, her hands dropping. "That's all, folks. Please leave."

She grabbed a jar of aspirin from the bathroom cabinet and swallowed two with a handful of water as she followed the police and the film crew downstairs. She watched from the front door while the cartons were loaded into the police cars beneath streetlamps which stayed doggedly alight against the brightening sky. Were any of the neighbours observing her from their lit houses or from those which stayed suspiciously dark?

Though the notion made her stance in the doorway feel staged and self-conscious, she didn't move until the cars veered away around the corner of the street, reddening their brake lights. Unsure when he had come to stand beside her, she let go of Don's waist and blundered past him to sit on the stairs with her eyes shut. He closed the door so gently that it almost didn't hurt and said, "I'll make us some coffee, shall I, and then maybe I'll think I'm awake. How about you, Marshall?"

"Can I put on the radio?"

"Well, you see your mother's got a headache. Do you have to?"

"I want to hear if we're on the news."

Susanne pressed one hand against her eyes, adding meaningless light as fierce as a spotlight to the ache. "Can't you bear to miss our fifteen minutes of fame?"

"Mom, I just want to know if they're talking about us."

He wanted to be prepared in case his friends heard about the raid, she thought, and felt ashamed all the way down to the pit of her stomach for having assumed anything else. "I'm sorry, honey, I wasn't thinking. Go ahead, only try not to play it too loud, okay?"

She heard his and Don's footsteps pad in unison to the kitchen, and then a string quartet slashed the air, the volume lessening immediately as Marshall turned it down before racing through the channels, leaping from chunks of pop music to station identification jingles to early-morning voices bright as cartoons. He reached a local station just as the news began.

"—eadlines this morning. Customs officers say heroin discovered in a returning famine relief lorry is the biggest seizure ever. The driver of a vehicle intercepted at the scene dies in a high-speed car chase. Trading Standards officers and police say they have smashed a nationwide ring dealing in horror videos in a series of dawn raids code named Operation Nasty..."

Susanne pressed both hands against her eyes. Lights and pains seemed to be exploding throughout her skull. She smelled the sweat of her palms and felt its clamminess on her face. The onslaught of sensations overwhelmed her hearing, shutting out the meaning of the newsreader's unctuous voice. Then a name dug itself into her awareness, and Don shouted, "Susanne, are you hearing this?"

She was now. "Police report that the car overturned when it tried to leave the motorway at a speed in excess of one hundred miles per hour. 
The driver James Fancy died before an ambulance could reach him. Police are waiting to question his brother Brad, who was thrown clear of the car and whose condition is described as stable..."

"It's them," Don said, "or rather, it's one less of them." He'd come along the hall to her, and she groped for his hand. "At least now they'll have something to take their minds off us," she said, and let the sight of him into her eyes, and glimpsed on his face an expression she wasn't at all sure of. Then it was gone, and she wondered what he'd thought in that instant, and found she didn't want to know.

The car with Darren in it was the first to arrive at the Dog & Gun. As soon as Barry had sprawled it across two marked spaces of the pub car park Darren got out, leaving behind the smells of Bernard's cigar and of the perfume his mother had spilled over herself each time she'd gone in the bathroom that morning. He swallowed a breath of air which tasted as stark as the stretch of concrete that surrounded the bungalow of the pub, and thought he mightn't throw up after all. Barry, who had the least hair of any of his relatives and the most spectacular scar on his face, gave Bernard a wink and a handful of notes and said "Buy Jim's bit a few drinks" before speeding off to something more important than the wake. Darren fumbled for his headphones, then remembered the family had ganged up on him to stop him bringing his Walkman to the funeral. He ground his knuckles into his ribs all the way down and glared around him.