Chapter Eleven: Saturday
“The next spate of mystery cat sightings started up in the mid-1970s in Scotland. A motorist was surprised to encounter a large cat sitting in front of him in the road near Beith in Ayrshire in June 1974. The animal refusing to move, the driver manoeuvred around the creature and sped on.”
Zoe had overslept. Her head ached slightly too. She had been foolish to drink that second can last night, it wasn’t even as if she liked the taste. At least her parents had not noticed. Thank goodness there wasn’t school today, either. She curled herself into a tighter ball beneath the thick duvet, clasping her ankles with her hands, pulling her legs up until her knees almost reached her chest. It was safe and warm in bed. With any luck her mum and dad had already gone out shopping and she had the house to herself. They were unlikely to disturb her, in any case. She thought back to the events of the previous evening. It had been a weird night. She shuddered involuntarily as she recalled the way the party had eventually broken up.
First there had been that noise she had heard. She should have trusted her first instincts more; they very rarely let her down. Like her first impression of Vince: she remembered thinking he was a bit creepy back then and she had had no reason to change her mind ever since. He does have something about him, though, she had to admit to herself. And last night, he seemed like he was really on the verge of something, like he really was about to conjure up dark forces, when... She shuddered again. Of course, he fancied her, she knew that. Would she ever let him have her? She had speculated about this on several occasions to herself. Under normal circumstances she would not have let him entertain a cat in hell’s chance with her, but he was so urgent and so inexperienced that it might prove to be an interesting experiment. Would her submission make him more or less desperate; give her more or less control? Yes, possibly she decided; she might test which way the cat would jump. Just once.
They had joined hands, she enjoyed that bit. Standing in the darkness, the cold night air, it felt somehow primeval, like she was connecting up with something bigger than her individual self, it wasn’t just Graham and Vince that stood beside her but the whole of humanity, the generations of ancestors, all the hopes of the future. The power of the circle, it was impressive. The candles had been nice too. She had initially asked for them to be extinguished, but they had actually been rather romantic, the tiny flames flickering anxiously as if aware that their own existence was so temporal and precarious, dependent on the benevolence of the wind and rain and of their human creators; they had been comforting too, much as she enjoyed the darkness, particularly when the sky was so clear and the stars so visible, she also knew that she had a fear of its enveloping cloak, and it was this fear that she found so exciting. Vince had started chanting then, to conjure up the spirits he had said. At first it had been rather embarrassing, but he had seemed so serious, so determined, and his voice... it was strange, it could be quite hypnotic. Zoe remembered how the individual words had begun to blur, replaced by a steady mantra, repeated over and over again. Graham had handed around more beer at this point and as the alcohol had had the gradual effect of reducing her inhibitions she had found herself chanting too. Time had begun to lose meaning, as their voices had risen louder and, with their hands still linked, Vince had begun to swing the circle around, initially slowly, walking around the candles in an anti-clockwise direction, but increasingly faster and faster, forcing her to grip on ever tighter to the two young men’s hands for fear that centrifugal force would fling her out of the revolving circle. The candles had danced and blazed until the two distinct pinnacles of light had blurred into one, seemingly spreading to form one large inferno around which they danced, mesmerized. Had she seen something in the flames? Just for a moment she thought that she had seen a black shape forming in the depths of the brightness, rising, spiraling up, swirling around like a dervish, ever upwards as they continued to circle around, spreading out black arms to engulf them... That was when it had happened. Above the sound of their own voices they had all heard at the same moment a terrific bellow, a wild, mad cry and, as they froze and fell silent, a sound of pounding, heavy footsteps very close at hand, rushing towards them. The man - for man it undoubtedly was, although at the time it had appeared as though a demon was in their very midst - was upon them before any of the teenagers could move. Zoe had only glimpsed his face fleetingly, his features contorted with anger, his bald head and dark, formless bulk momentarily intruding into the middle of their erstwhile coupled ring, before the two candles had been bowled over and total darkness had confused the scene. She was fairly sure that she had seen Graham sprawled on the ground, having taken the brunt of the intruder’s initial onslaught, but so terrified had she been by the unexpected culmination of the night’s rituals that she had fled, unceremoniously, giving barely a passing thought for the safety and well-being of her two companions. If they had been sensible, she reasoned, they would have done just the same. It had taken her some time to find her way out of the park: she normally prided herself on having a good sense of direction, but the combination of being spun around in the circle, and then the blind urgency of her retreat, had meant that she had run in totally the wrong direction for some minutes before she had slowed down, confident now that she was not being pursued, and had managed to get her bearings. In the darkness, it was still difficult to pinpoint just where she had arrived at; so panic-stricken had she been that she had not even been aware of whether she had run up or down hill, that would at least have given her some small clue to where she was. As luck would have it, she had only needed to take a couple of exploratory steps further forward, in the direction that she had been running, when she felt the reassuring firmness of a tarmac path beneath her feet; another minute and she recognized the outline of the wire mesh fence that surrounded the tennis courts beside her. Shit! She had found herself on totally the wrong side of the park to the one that she wanted to be for going home. Nothing would induce her to retrace her steps and walk back into the blackness of the grassy wilderness that evening though, instead she had resigned herself to a long walk back along the roads to her own neighbourhood.
Zoe pulled the bed covers tighter about her. She hoped that Graham and Vince were okay; she had no way of knowing until school on Monday; she certainly did not intend venturing back into the park for any more nocturnal gatherings while there was any possibility that the angry man was still at large. And who had he been anyway? Just some drunken vagrant probably, who got a kick out of scaring them. Well he had succeeded. There were no other sounds from around the house. She closed her eyes and tried to go back to sleep but she could not rid her mind of the image of the spiraling shape that she had seen in the fire just before the group had been so rudely broken up. It had not been her imagination. She was sure she had seen something that was not of this world.
•••
Tal’s hand faltered over the third pack of lager. He was weighing up the alternatives: it was a choice between rationing himself to just eight cans to last him for the whole of the approaching week, or weighing himself down with an additional four-pack and struggling back the long two-miles distance from the supermarket to his boat with heavy bags. He surveyed the rest of his provisions in his trolley to see if there was anything that he could put back. It was pretty much all staples: bread, rice, milk, beans, a few tins; nothing too extravagant there. There was the cost factor to consider too, although Tal generally reckoned that alcohol was a good investment on the balance-sheet of life: the more hours that were lost to alcoholic oblivion the less time you had to be spending your money on anything else, or at least to be worrying about the lack of money that you had to spend on anything else. He knew that an accountant might not share his philosophy, but it had always worked well for him. The thought of sober accountancy was all that he needed; he had succeeded in persuading himself: Tal extracted another pack of lagers from the shelf and added them to the pile in his troll
ey. He was about to steer a course directly for the check-out when he noticed ahead of him in the same aisle of the supermarket a figure that he instantly recognized. It was the young chap that was seeing Janet. He had only ever seen Rob in the half-light of evening before, but he had had opportunity enough to study his rival closely and memorize his features precisely. He was with a friend now, another bloke of the same age, they were talking loudly and laughing, standing by the wine section, perhaps, like him, deliberating over what to buy. Tal edged his trolley closer, apparently engrossed in reading the supermarket’s descriptions of the various bottles of New World plonk, but actually intent eavesdropping on the two men’s conversation.
Rob’s companion was talking with the unabashed pomposity of youth about the virtues of one grape over another, “You can generally rely on a Sauvignon. Even the Chileans produce a fairly tasty drop.”
Rob was holding a bottle and reading the label aloud, rolling his consonants in imitation of a French accent, “Premieres Cotes de Bordeaux. This delicious wine, a careful blend... what, as opposed to a careless blend,” he interjected, before continuing, “of Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon grapes, is traditionally vinified.” He stopped, puzzled, “Vinified?”
“Vinification,” his friend explained, “is the process of turning grape juice into wine.”
“Oh, okay,” Rob continued reading, “It has rich fruit aromas combined with a well-balanced, elegant structure and a long finish, and is delicious served to accompany roast meats and cheeses. What bollocks!” he finished. “Who writes these things? Elegant structure!”
His companion was quicker to criticize Rob rather than see rubbished one of the tenets of middle-class society, “You’ve been seeing that bird of yours too much,” he teased, “Some of the rough is rubbing off on you.”
“Shut up,” said Rob, although not angrily, “What do you know.”
“I know you see her every Tuesday night.”
“How?” Rob sounded genuinely surprised.
“You let the cat out of the bag that night after Susie’s twenty-first birthday party when you got so drunk you threw up on the way home. You told Mike Daly all about it.”
“I don’t remember.”
“I’m not surprised. Underneath the tall, old tree with the big ball of mistletoe growing at the top. Ah, so romantic. I’m just saying what he told me,” he added, seeing the look of sudden annoyance in Rob’s eyes. “You can’t keep a secret for long. Not if you go blabbing yourself every time you get pissed.”
“Well, keep it to yourself,” said Rob, glancing around melodramatically, eyeing suspiciously the shabby-looking man with the trolley who had moved uncomfortably close, although who appeared to be fixedly studying the credentials of a bottle of South African white oblivious to their own conversation. “I don’t want my parents finding out.”
“Not much chance of that. So are you seeing her again?”
“I don’t know,” said Rob, truthfully, “She wasn’t there last Tuesday, nor yesterday either.” No, thought Tal, because it had only been this morning that he had seen Janet finally emerge from the family barge, accompanied by her mother, apparently setting off on a shopping mission similar to his own.
“You’re better off shot of her,” said Rob’s friend, “Stick to your own kind.”
“What do you mean?” asked Rob, confrontationally, openly annoyed now.
“No good comes when the classes mix. You don’t want to be diluting the gene-pool, do you?”
“And what would you know about it? You’ve kept very quiet about your Aryan ancestors.”
“Aryan...?” It was Rob’s companion’s turn to sound momentarily bewildered, before he understood the meaning of Rob’s jibe. “I’m just warning you,” he continued, more conciliatory now, “It’ll all end in tears. And, for your sake, I just hope that they are not your ones.”
Rob was belligerent, “I intend to see her again this Tuesday night. I’ll be the one who decides when, and how, it all ends.”
“So be it.”
Tal replaced the bottle of wine and manoeuvred his trolley around the two young men. There was a slight smile on his face, as he mouthed quietly to himself, “So be it.”