Jago Read online

  ‘I’m a bit carsick. Are we there?’

  ‘Yeah. This is the place okay.’

  She coughed violently, almost retching. She had only been smoking gear for a few months, and wasn’t as happy with it as she pretended to be. After an afternoon straight at the wheel, surrounded by the stuff, he could understand how she felt. Their clothes must be stale with the smell.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, wrenching his slide door open, ‘let’s get a drink. Then we’ll find somewhere to crash.’

  She followed him, slipping across the gap between their seats rather than open the door on her side. She was unsteady and leaned against him. Her hair smelled of dye and tobacco. He gave one of her tits a friendly squeeze. By the time she was twenty or so, Jessica would be fat; now, just the right side of sixteen, she was juicy. For the first time since they’d left London, Ferg remembered what this holiday was supposed to be about.

  So far, Alder wasn’t the magical kingdom of sex ’n’ drugs ’n’ rock ’n’ roll he had been sold on. This was a typical pub car park, with dented litter bins as a reminder of long-gone drink-and-drive merchants, faded white letters that didn’t add up to words stencilled on the tarmac. At this time in the evening, it was nearly empty. The Dormobile was badly parked, taking up a space that could have accommodated two or more cars. But that didn’t matter: one drink, and they’d be out. There would be plenty of drinking time.

  Ferg and Jessica followed the others, arms around each other’s waists, and pushed into the public bar.

  ‘Look at that,’ said someone with an unfamiliar accent. ‘Which d’you reckon’s the girl?’

  ‘Neither,’ said someone else.

  Dolar and Mike were already pressed up against the bar, negotiating a round of drinks with a flustered barmaid. In his electric-blue jump suit, polar-bear shades and panama hat, Mike Toad looked, considering it objectively, the complete prat. And Dolar, embroidered muslin smock, beard and tangled hair, might have time-warped from 1967. Ferg foresaw trouble.

  Two old men with seamed faces, big rubbery guts and elbow-patched jackets were perched like garden gnomes on bar stools, moaning to each other and the smooth, balding barman. They must be the comedy act, Ferg supposed. They radiated unfriendliness and misery. One drink, Ferg promised himself, and out…

  ‘Hey, Ferg boy,’ said Dolar, his eyes alight, ‘have you seen the price of beer out here in the backwoods?’

  ‘It’s twenty pence a pint cheaper than London,’ the Toad gasped, rattling a fistful of pound coins.

  Salim and the girls had taken over a table by a window seat, and were collecting enough stools to go round. With twenty pence a pint off the price of beer, Ferg knew they wouldn’t be looking for a campsite until at least after dark and probably after closing time. He wondered if the Dormobile could sleep seven. Probably, he concluded, but definitely not in comfort. His back, neck and hands ached from the drive, but the rest of the crew were in a boozing mood and his vote, even if he could get Syreeta and Jessica to back him up, wouldn’t count.

  While Dolar got the first round in, Ferg and Jessica squeezed behind the tables. It was good to get proper upholstery against his spine. Mike Toad helped unload the drinks on the tables, and started telling, ‘the one about the farmboy with the eleven-inch cattle prod’.

  By the punch line of Mike Toad’s fourth or fifth ‘animal husbandry’ joke, Ferg could feel hostility in the pub boiling up like coffee in a pot. The bar was crowded now with clones of the two yokels who’d been there before. The combined mutterings of the drab old men were as loud as a constant rumble of thunder. Even if he listened, he couldn’t make out more than the odd word. Their accents were strange, not the mangelwurzel caricature Mike used in his jokes, but something more primitive, more suggestive. It was like Welsh or Gaelic, a different language, an expression of contempt for English-speakers. When these men laughed, it was in bursts that came out like hawked phlegm, and Ferg knew something had been said about his haircut, Mike’s outfit or Pam’s pasty face.

  Jessica and Salim were quiet, and even Dolar had calmed down with the beer on top of the gear, but Mike Toad just went on and on, sending people off to buy rounds and quoting country lore from Gardener’s Question Time. Syreeta pushed her way through the crowd, exciting ribald gulps as she returned from the bar with an armload of assorted-flavour packets of crisps. She dumped them on a glass-crowded, ash-speckled, beer-puddled table.

  ‘When are we going to eat?’ Jessica moaned. ‘Properly?’ No one answered, but Ferg felt he had to pay some sort of attention. He picked out a packet of salt and vinegar, her preferred flavour, and gave it to her. Gloomily, she bit the corner off and spat cellophane into an ashtray. Someone in the crowd said ‘disgusting’. Ferg couldn’t see who it was, but it probably didn’t matter. Three-quarters of the people in the bar were naturally pissed off with them, and the rest were scratched the wrong way by Mike’s routine. It wasn’t the real world here, and the rest of them had better realize that before they wound up at the wrong end of a pitchfork.

  Mike Toad was laughing like a camel. ‘Do you remember that Burt Reynolds movie where the businessmen go canoeing in the forest?’

  ‘Deliverance,’ Salim put in.

  ‘Yeah, Deliverance. Where the fat chap gets bummed flat by hillbilly strawsuckers…’

  ‘Oh, right,’ said Dolar. ‘That’s the one with “Feudin’ Banjos” in it. I tried to work it out once, but that fast-picking stuff is a bitch to do right. Your fingers get cut up.’

  ‘What about it?’ said Ferg.

  ‘Nothing. Just to go by the looks that the barman has been giving you all evening, you’d probably do well not to drop your jeans and bend over while he’s got his dipstick out.’

  Mike laughed too loud. He talked too loud, too. Ferg didn’t laugh. From where he was sitting, he could see angry blotches appearing like sores on the barman’s face. The man wiped his hands on his cardigan, and made and unmade fists.

  ‘Your round,’ Mike said.

  ‘I’ve had enough,’ he replied.

  ‘It’s still your round.’

  ‘I’m stuck back here. I’ll give you the money.’

  ‘So, just because I’m sitting on the outside I’m a waiter?’

  ‘I’ll get them,’ said Dolar. ‘I’ve got to get up to piss anyway. Is there a gents’ around here or do we do it out in the streets?’

  Ferg cringed, and a couple of locals shook their heads. ‘Same again, everybody?’

  There were enough nos in there to mean he got change from a fiver. Syreeta was wearing out too, and Salim hadn’t said much in the last half-hour. Jessica was into her third packet of crisps, and had been forced to stoop to prawn-cocktail flavour. Dolar was getting mumble drunk. Only Pam was keeping up with the Toad, and she was gone enough to be permanently on the verge of uncontrollable giggling. When she laughed, she stretched lines in her face that put cracks in her make-up.

  Pam was a very noticeable girl, more than Jessica or Syreeta. When she went up to get her round, the locals had paid close attention to the roll of her bum under her tight black skirt. And her shirt buttons came undone at the rate of one every half-hour. If Mike didn’t keep his fingers off Pam’s black nylon knees, Salim might be signing up with the local lynch mob and dusting off the ducking stool for unfaithful spouses.

  ‘I wonder how they’re getting on back in town?’ Jessica asked. She’d had a row with her parents over this holiday, and diplomatic relations were temporarily severed. ‘Is there a phone? I should call Mum and tell her we’ve arrived.’

  ‘They’re all dead in London, Jess,’ said Dolar. ‘Everything behind us is dead. We’re at the Dawn of the New Millennium.’

  ‘Too right,’ said Pam. ‘All change for the next thousand years…’

  Things did change. The doors opened and a new group came in, raising the noise level again. They were mainly younger than the drinkers who had been in until now. If Alder had a youth scene, this was it.

  They wore wor
k shirts and unpatched denim. A few had cowboy boots. One had a shotgun slung over his shoulder. Ferg had never seen anyone routinely carry a gun before. Even here, it seemed out of place. He got the impression this bunch wasn’t too popular with the regulars either. Newcomers swarmed to the bar, forcing gaps between the stool conversations, confusing the barman and his two chubby girlies with multiple orders. The Hole-in-the-Wall Gang had just hit the saloon. Someone kick-started the jukebox, and it cranked out one of last year’s minor hits.

  ‘Why do Somerset farmboys get married?’ Mike asked, too loud.

  Pam couldn’t stop laughing.

  ‘Because sheep can’t cook.’

  ‘We’ve got to go and find a campsite,’ said Syreeta, hours of accumulated irritation giving her voice a squeak. ‘We can’t put up tents in the dark.’

  ‘It’s summer,’ said Dolar, ‘it doesn’t get dark ’til late.’

  ‘It’s already late. Look out the window.’

  Ferg was about to get into the argument and back up Syreeta when the disturbance started.

  There was another newcomer in the pub, an excited little greyhaired man with a stick and a bulging neck. He was waving his stick and saying, ‘Give me that back, you hooligan!’ One of the local lads, the one with the shotgun, had a sheaf of papers in his hand. He was waving it in front of the small man’s face like a makeshift fan.

  ‘Give me that back!’

  Ferg noticed a couple of men at the bar turning round to take an interest. They were in their forties, but they had come in with the younger crowd. One was, even more than Dolar, the stereotypical old hippie, a cringing reed with watery eyes and a sparse beard. But the one who counted was sharp-faced and commanding; a tough, smart man. Ferg somehow expected him to step between the disputants and sort out the trouble. But he didn’t make a move, just kept his eye on the developing situation.

  The smaller man was appealing to the bulk of the crowd. ‘You’ve all got to sign. This is what it’s all about, don’t you see. Filthy hippies. This village is becoming a jive joint for weirdies!’

  There were grunts of agreement from some quarters, but the sheaf had been passed from hand to hand among the teenagers while the owner played pig in the middle. Dolar and Mike Toad and the rest were laughing, but Ferg didn’t think it was that funny. It was too late and he was too tired to get involved.

  ‘If it’s signatures you want, Danny,’ someone said, ‘we’ll get ’em.’

  The speaker was a thin girl with long, dark hair and large, dark eyes. She had the papers now, and was laughing as if she didn’t mean it. She had a look Ferg had before seen only on the faces of the three leather boys who had taken him out into an alley during a school disco and beaten the piss out of him when he was fourteen. He didn’t look forward to meeting her.

  ‘Hey, you,’ she said, singling him out as he’d known with a turning gut she would, ‘last of the mohicans. You want to help keep this a filthy-hippie-free zone? Protect the rural heritage? Sign this.’

  She tossed the papers across the table. They fell into his lap ruffled, like a dead pigeon. Dolar picked them up and read aloud from the top sheet. ‘“We, the undersigned, year-round residents of Alder, take objection…” Hey, crew, they need signatures on this petition to stop the vile, unspeakable, lice-ridden festival. Let’s oblige the lady. This is a democracy and everyone ought to be heard from. Who’s got a pen?’

  Jessica gave him a ballpoint, and Dolar chewed the end while thinking of something to write. Finally, he signed ‘Mickey Mouse’ with a flourish, and passed it round. Mike Toad put down ‘Bilbo Fuckoff, OBE’, Pam ‘Edwina Currie’, Salim ‘Bruce Wayne’, Syreeta ‘Betty Rubble’ and Jessica, in a meek and neat hand, ‘Minnie Mouse’. They all thought it was funny.

  Ferg would have passed, but the little man looked at him with narrowed eyes and spat, ‘Vermin.’ Danny was obviously the local bigot. Ferg took the pen and paper and scribbled ‘James T. Kirk’ so nobody could read it. The others had left the address column blank, but he wrote in, ‘Space, the final frontier’.

  None of this was as funny as it ought to be, although the local youths were joining in the laughter as their girl told them what was being written. The petition passed back to them, and they competed to think up funny or silly or obscene names. The angry man was getting angrier, but no one was supporting him. Veins in his neck pulsed like firehoses, his eyes rimmed with water. He was taking this seriously. Ferg wished they’d skipped the drink altogether.

  Mike Toad was getting on with the Alder girl, whose name was Allison, and he introduced the rest of them. She named all her friends, but none of it sank in. Ferg was fixated on Danny and his tantrum.

  Suddenly, the little man swung his stick at the kid who had taken his petition. The wood didn’t connect properly, but the boy took what must have been a painful knock on the shoulder. He reached for the swinging stick, but couldn’t catch it. Danny grabbed for the kid’s shirt, and spittle flew in ropes from between his teeth. He was shouting abuses clinging to the boy. A few buttons fell to the floor. The boy couldn’t react. He put his hand behind him, but didn’t get a grip on his gun.

  Ferg had a fantasy flash of the mess a shotgun blast would make. It would redecorate the whole bar with party strings of red on the beams, the brasses, the tables and the customers. He imagined Danny turning to look at him with eyes that were no longer there, the wall behind him visible through a great ragged hole that filled his head from brow to chin.

  The boy’s fingers touched the stock of the gun. The man at the bar stepped in and broke the fight up. He worked like a cop, detaching the combatants from one another and forcing them apart at arm’s length. When he spoke, his voice was heavy with authority.

  ‘That’s enough. Danny, calm down. You’re not that stupid, Terry. You’re off the roster. Go home, hang up your gun and have your tea. You understand?’

  ‘Fucker!’ spat the boy, Terry.

  The man slapped him. It was an instant, apparently unthinking response, like a trainer punishing a miscreant dog. The boy stiffened, fist halfway up, and backed away. He knew he couldn’t handle the man.

  Danny, yelping with frustration, had gone, ignoring the peacemaker’s offer of a drink. Terry went after him.

  ‘Teddy,’ the man said to one of the boy’s drinking friends, ‘go after your brother and make sure he doesn’t do anything really stupid.’

  ‘Yes,’ he gulped. ‘Okay. Thanks, James.’

  Teddy took off after his brother. Outside, it was fully dark.

  ‘Welcome to Somerset,’ said Allison, sitting down with them.

  10

  Halfway between the Valiant Soldier and his cottage, Danny Keough slumped against the rust-eaten concrete and metal shelter left over from the distant past when Alder had a regular bus service, and cried in the dark. He punched graffiti-etched metal plates with a soft fist, and tried to hold the sobs in his throat like choked-back vomit. He was shaking violently, uncontrollably, from the shoulders down. He pushed himself away and sat down with a thump on the grass-and-earth verge that separated the pavement from a dusty, whitewashed wall. He hugged his petition folder to his chest, further crushing the papers jammed into it. It was ruined. All his work, ruined.

  He had knocked his knee without noticing, and it was a useless knot of pain. There was dirt on his clothes, his petition, his face. Someone had spat in his hair. His eyes leaked like wounds. He ground his dentures, relishing the ache in his gums, and made fists so tight his palms bled. The memory of a painful erection tingled along his urethra. He felt the longest-lived of his needs, the desire to hurt somebody, to destroy something. To wipe out the humiliation of the last fifteen minutes.

  They were after him, and he was standing alone. Everyone in the pub had looked into their pints while the kids crucified him. They had got everywhere, creeping behind faces he had known for thirty years, eating away even at the heart of England. The boy with the gun was Reg Gilpin’s son, the girl who had thrown the petition to
the carnival freaks was Bob Conway’s daughter, Bernie Conway’s granddaughter. They belonged to the village, just like him, but had gone over to the other side.

  It was a clear night, a heatwave night. In the sky, the rind of the moon shone like an obscured face, blind and uninterested.

  He had been assaulted. By the Gilpin boy and by Lytton, Jago’s man. If he only had the money, he would sue. If there was anyone with the backbone to support his side of the story, he’d call the police in. But he realized he was alone. By tomorrow morning, no one in the pub would remember the way it had really been. They were either with the enemy or completely duped. The Gilpin boy had a gun, and Lytton acted as though he could kill with his hands. They had dropped their cover and gone for him. The next assaults, he knew, would be from another direction. They were clever, and he’d have to be continually alert.

  Even before this, he’d suspected a concerted campaign against him. He had trouble with the petition. After the Maskells, several others had point-blank refused to sign; and more put their names down in completely illegible handwriting and fudged when it came to listing their addresses. They were gutless fools, afraid of reprisals. That was the kind of behaviour that left the country open to the enemy. He would have to start all over again. The now battered folder had been new this morning. By the moonlight, he saw that his name and address, which he’d inscribed in a proud copperplate, were smudged. The petition was unpresentable as it was. The freaks had marred it with obscenities and false names, and it had been abused in the tussle. He couldn’t present this to his MP. He wept for the despoliation of his handiwork.

  Finally, there was no more crying in him. He wiped his cheeks with the back of his hand, rubbing grit into wet skin. He found a handkerchief in his jacket pocket and blew his nose until his sinuses hurt. Then he stood up. He felt in his bladder the weight of the tea he’d been given as he went round the village. He unzipped his fly and, still feeling a ghost urge in the head of his cock, pissed in the gutter. He imagined the closed, mean face of the Gilpin boy grinning in the asphalt under his stream. It was no worse than he deserved. He got into his flow and, just as he passed the failsafe point, was caught in the headlights of a passing car. Danny shrivelled, feeling a lance of pain inside his tool as his piss came and went in spurts. Hastily, when the car was gone, he finished his burst and zipped his fly, the last drops seeping through his underpants, running down the inside of his trousers.