The Extremes

  Then she checked herself: this was England, where firearms were banned entirely, where there were no armed militia groups that she had ever heard of, where you could not make the same assumptions based on someone’s appearance. For all she knew, men who looked like that in England drove taxis, wrote poetry or sold household goods in street markets.

  Even so that first flash of recognition had unnerved her, and as she drew closer she continued to feel wary of him.

  Neither he nor Amy noticed her. Whatever they were talking about was nothing to do with her, but now she was so close she experienced another sense of intruding on the lives of others. She wanted to step right up to them to find out more about what was going on, but couldn’t bring herself to do so.

  She felt that to halt beside the stall would be to make her interest obvious, so she kept going. Soon she had passed. She was briefly within earshot, and she was able to make out what they were saying. The man said, “…want you out of there. You don’t belong, and you bloody know it. If Jase were here…”

  But his words were lost in the general tumult of the place, even though she was only a few feet away from them. Amy made a reply, but it was inaudible.

  Teresa walked on, trying not to be curious. Visitors always encroach on other people’s lives. They can’t help it. And they can’t help being curious about the people they meet: strangers, but strangers with backgrounds and families and positions of some kind in the place where they are encountered.

  Teresa was starting to feel hungry. It was still only the middle of the morning, but most of her was jetlagged back to Washington time. She looked around for a restaurant but there was nothing in the market square. Remembering she had seen a couple of places on the High Street she walked back that way, but when she found them she didn’t like the look of them any more.

  She decided to do what she would if she was at home, and headed for the big Safeway supermarket she had passed earlier. Inside, she went straight to the fresh food counters, thinking how much she would enjoy getting her own food ready, before remembering she was staying in a hotel room where there were no cooking facilities. She was still jetlagged, not thinking right. Or the sight of that man had rattled her more than she wanted to believe. Disappointed, and kicking herself for her momentary forgetfulness, she wandered round the store instead, experiencing the inquisitiveness she always had in someone else’s supermarket. Everything was a fascinating mix of the familiar and the strange.

  There was an in-store pharmacy, and she paused by the counter.

  ‘Do you have anything I can take for migraine?’ she said to the young man who was serving there.

  ‘Do you have a prescription?’

  ‘No…well, I’m visiting from the US. I do have prescription drugs there, but I didn’t bring them with me and I was hoping…’

  She let the words run out, disliking having to explain her life to a complete stranger. Actually, the real situation was more complicated than she wanted to say: she used the prescription drugs as little as possible. After the psychotherapist’s methods had worked a few times, failed a few more times, she had consulted one of her neighbours, a homeopath. She had given Teresa ignatia, a remedy for migraine sufferers, and it had seemed to have some effect. The migraine attacks cleared up for a while, and one of her last decisions before leaving home had been not to bring the tiny tablets with her. She was already regretting this, but right now she didn’t want to take the time to find a homeopath in this town and submit to the long diagnosis all over again. What she wanted was something to kill the headache.

  The pharmacist had turned away as she spoke, and now he laid two packets on the counter before her. She picked them up, and read the instructions and ingredients on the backs. One product was based on paracetamol and codeine, the other on codeine alone. Both had an antihistamine ingredient. In one it was buclizine hydrochloride, which she recognized from medication she had taken in the US, so with nothing else to go on she selected that one, a product called Migraleve. She paid at the pharmacy counter, fumbling briefly with the unfamiliar British currency.

  Before she was through in the supermarket she bought a triangular cellophane package of sandwiches and a can of Diet Coke from the lunch counter, and lined up at the main checkout to pay a second time. She nibbled one of the sandwiches as she headed down the High Street, again looking for Eastbourne Road and the hotel.

  ‘Hello, Mrs Simons.’

  Teresa turned in surprise, and found that Amy was walking along beside and slightly behind her. The tense expression she had worn during her confrontation in the market had vanished.

  Teresa slowed. ‘Hi, Amy!’

  ‘I saw you back there, in the market square. Are you having a look round our town?’

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ Teresa said. ‘I love the way the houses sit on the hill, looking down across the park.’

  Now she was speaking to someone, she realized that the peaceful quality of the town was a bit of an illusion. They were both having to raise their voices against the noise of the traffic.

  ‘I love it too,’ Amy said. ‘I do now, anyway. I didn’t think much of it when I was at school.’

  ‘Have you lived in Bulverton all your life?’

  ‘I worked away for a while when I was younger, but I think I’m back for good now. There’s nowhere else I really want to be.’

  ‘You must know a lot of people here.’

  ‘More of them seem to know me, though. Look, Mrs Simons, I’ve been worrying about the room we put you in. Is it OK?’

  ‘It’s charming. Why?’

  ‘Well, I went to America once on a holiday, and everything seemed so modern over there.’

  In the bland, silver-tinged daylight, Teresa saw that Amy was not as young as until now she had thought. Although she still had an attractive face, and she carried herself as if she was in her twenties, her hair had faint grey streaks and her body showed signs of thickness round the waist. Teresa wondered if she had ever tried working out, as she herself had done two or three years ago. The main benefit she had found was that while there was no obvious improvement to her figure, she felt she had been doing the best she could for herself. Unless you worked out for hours every week, exercise was essentially about morale, not looking good.

  ‘Look, don’t worry about the room,’ Teresa said. ‘When you were in the US, did you ever stay in one of our motels?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’ve been in motels all over the country. Let me tell you, after a few nights in one of those a place like the White Dragon feels as comfortable as home.’

  They had now reached Eastbourne Road with its continual flow of slow-moving traffic in both directions. The noise had increased, and already the slightly eccentric feeling the Old Town had induced in her was slipping away.

  Amy came to a halt, and said, ‘I’d forgotten. I’ll have to go back to the shops. I was on my way out to buy something.’

  ‘That’s my fault. Keeping you talking.’

  ‘No, not your fault,’ Amy said.

  ‘The man I saw you with,’ Teresa said. ‘Who was he?’

  ‘At the hotel, you mean?’

  ‘No. Just now. In the market.’

  Amy looked away, across the line of cars and vans, towards the sea. ‘I’m not sure who you mean.’

  ‘I thought I might know him,’ Teresa said.

  ‘How could you? You coming in last night, getting in late.’

  ‘That’s what I thought. Well, it doesn’t matter.’

  ‘No, I suppose not,’ Amy said, her hair flailing across her eyes.

  CHAPTER 7

  Nick was already in bed and lounging around with that morning’s newspaper when Amy came upstairs and went into the bathroom. He heard her brushing her teeth. A little later she walked into the bedroom and began undressing. He watched her as he always did. She was used to him lying there at night watching her, and didn’t seem to mind. To him she still looked the same naked as she had always done. Everything that h
e had found attractive in the old days was unchanged by the years.

  His parents and her husband had been cremated on the same day, less than a week after the massacre, and he and Amy had met at the crematorium. She had been waiting outside the chapel when he emerged, black-coated, dark-eyed, swathed in misery, alone, not supported by any of her friends. They had simply stared at each other. It was one more upheaval in a week of upheavals, a time of shock when nothing was a surprise. Afterwards they walked back down to the town, side by side, noticing other hearses moving up towards the cemetery on the Ridge, and the attendant camera lights and film crews, and the reporters.

  He had no one left, and she was also alone. Subject to powerful feelings neither of them had tried to control, he took her back with him to the hotel in the afternoon, they were together that night, and had stayed together ever since.

  That was still a time when people were able to speak about it. There were reporters everywhere, nowhere more than in the White Dragon, where many of them stayed, and telling the story of what Grove had done became a way of trying to deal with what happened.

  Later, it was no longer like that. The survivors found that it was not after all a way, that it added somehow to the horror of what had occurred. Those enquiring faces and voices, sometimes polite, sometimes intrusive, the notepads and tape recorders and video cameras, led quickly to the headlines and pictures in the tabloids, the suffering translated into a series of clichés. At first it was a novelty for people in Bulverton to see the town and its people on television, but then it quickly sank in that what was being shown to the world was not what had actually happened. It was only an impression gained by outsiders.

  Gradually a silence fell.

  But five days after the shootings, when Amy and Nick came together again, was still in the time before anyone had learned media sophistication. People spoke from the need to explain, to try to make sense of the upheaval in which they were caught up.

  That first night, still in distress after the funeral, Nick woke up into darkness and heard Amy sobbing. He turned on the light and tried to comfort her, but something unstoppable was flowing out of her. It was not long after midnight.

  He sat up beside her in the bed, staring down at her naked back as she sobbed and groaned in her misery. Looking at her, unable to offer comfort, he remembered what she had been to him in the good times, when she was unpredictable, funny and sexy, and causing endless trouble between him and his parents. For a few weeks back then he had never been happier in his life, and that euphoria of being a young man with an attractive and sexually compliant girlfriend had borne him on for months after it had all started going wrong.

  She said, her voice muffled by the pillow, ‘Nick, if you want to make love again, we can do it. Then I’ll leave.’

  ‘No,’ he replied. ‘That’s not it.’

  ‘I’m cold. Please cover me.’

  He loved to hear her voice, the familiar accent and intonation. He fussed around with the pillows and bedclothes, trying to make her comfortable and warm, then lay down once again beside her with his arm cradling her. A long time passed in silence.

  Then Amy said, ‘Your mum never liked me, did she?’

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t say—’

  ‘You know she didn’t. I wasn’t good enough for her son. She actually said that to me once. It doesn’t matter now, but it used to hurt me. She got her way in the end, and you went off to London.’

  ‘We’d split up months before that.’

  ‘Three months. It pleased her, anyway.’

  ‘I don’t think—’

  ‘Listen, Nick, I’m trying to explain something.’ When she breathed in he could still sometimes hear a sob in the sound, but her voice was steady. ‘I started hanging around with Jase after that. You probably didn’t know him, but your parents did. He often came in here with his mates, he liked a few drinks. Jase had his bad ways, and I never went along with those, but I saw the best of him. I didn’t fall for him straight away, it took a couple of years, but he was always around, often had been even when I was going out with you. I’d been at school with him, but he wasn’t in my crowd then. He was just one of the lads I knew from the village. Up the road, where you never went. You wouldn’t understand someone like Jase, because all you’d notice about him would be the way he got drunk or drove his car with the stereo on loud or went berserk at football matches.

  ‘We were both working over in Eastbourne, but after that he was offered some building work out at Battle. When he’d been doing it for a few weeks a new contract came up and he was offered a steady job as a charge hand. I quit the Metropole Hotel straight away, and we rented a flat in Sealand Place. You know, about half a mile from here. We decorated it, made it nice, and after we’d been living together for a while, we got married.

  ‘I was pregnant within a few months, but I lost that one. The following year it happened again. Then we went three years without getting anywhere at all, until I fell for another baby and we lost that one as well. After that, the hospital told me I probably wasn’t going to be able to have any more.

  ‘That was when things started to go wrong. He went out drinking a lot more than he had, but he always came back and there was never anyone else. He always swore that was something I didn’t need to worry about.

  ‘One day, after we’d had one of our rows, he says to me, had I ever thought about going into the hotel business? You see it was this place, the White Dragon, that he used to come to with his mates when he wanted a few drinks. He’d got hold of the idea that your parents were going to sell the hotel and that he and I ought to buy it from them. We didn’t have money like that, but Jase said money was the least of the problems, because his brother Dave would come in with us. He talked big, and I believed him. We looked into it properly and went to the bank about it. They said no, and I think other people said no, because Jase dropped that idea. Instead, he said he was going to ask your dad for a job. There was an idea behind this, that if he worked hard and your dad grew to trust him, then one day, when he did retire, he might make Jase into a partner.

  ‘Anyway, it came to nothing. Jase went along to see your dad one day, and he was out again almost quicker than he went in. I don’t know what was actually said, but what it came down to was no again.

  ‘This is where you come into it, Nick. He knew your parents hadn’t liked you going out with me, and now he’d married me it was as if he had saved them from having to put up with me, a favour, like. Afterwards, when your dad turfed him out, Jase kept going on about how you must have spoken up against him. He blamed himself too, but in small ways. Kept saying he was a fool for even thinking of trying, he should have known people like you would keep him out. Bitter he was, and he never forgave you.’

  When he first began talking to her earlier that day Nick had assumed, without thinking, that Amy’s misery was the same as many people’s: the unfocused sense of loss when a friend dies. No one had told him anything about the relationships between the people Grove had killed that day, because in a close community like Bulverton it was assumed that everyone would already know. Nick had never asked. All he had was the list of names, the one everyone in Bulverton now had and probably knew by heart. The twenty-three dead, of whom one was Jason Michael Hartland, aged thirty-six, of Sealand Place, Bulverton. Until Amy told him, as they walked down to the town after the funerals, he had not realized that Jason Hartland was her husband, that her bereavement was sharper, closer than most people’s, including his. He was devastated by the deaths of his parents, and also by the way in which they had died, but how much more horrible was what had happened to Amy?

  Grief comes unpredictably, out of control. Nick found himself weeping beside Amy that night, thinking of what had happened to Jase and all the others. Death brings innocence to the dead. Whatever Jason Michael Hartland’s failings in life had been—loutish behaviour, drunkenness, naïvety, running away—death wiped clean the slate and made the dead as children once again.

 
While Nick still lay close beside her, Amy continued with her story.

  She said, ‘Jase was the one the newspapers called “the man on the roof”. He was helping a friend with some tiling, at the house next door to the Indian restaurant, out there by the church. When Grove came down the road Jase had nowhere to hide. He tried to get behind the chimney stack but Grove shot him. His body was thrown backwards by the impact of the bullets, and he slid down the roof on the far side, out of sight. Only a child saw this happen. He was in his parents’ car, which had already been fired at and damaged by Grove. The little boy saw Jase being killed, and afterwards tried to tell one of the policemen. He was so upset that all he could say was “There was a man on the roof, a man on the roof.” Because Jase had fallen back his body wasn’t found until the next day.

  ‘I had no idea where Jase was at the time. We’d had another row, and it felt like it was the last one. He left me. I hadn’t seen him for two or three weeks. He could have been anywhere there was work: Hastings, Eastbourne, one of the villages outside, somewhere along the coast. He often went to see one of his mates when he was angry with me.

  ‘After the massacre, the police listed him officially as a missing person, and put his name on the list with the other people who couldn’t be found. All of them were actually dead, but for a few hours I had the devil of hope in me. More than anything I wanted to see Jase so I could tell him about the massacre. It was such an immense event, so shattering, it affected the whole town, it was on TV and the radio, and I just needed Jase with me so I could say sorry to him for the argument we’d had, and talk to him about what had gone on in the town. I suppose it was a way of coping, or burying my head in the sand. I was awake all that night, round at Dad’s place, and in the morning the police told me they’d found him.’