“You don’t say much,” said Ball, waving from the adjacent bench. About a metre separated them.
Carver smiled, noncommittal.
“Why’s that?” said Fiddy, “why’s he so quiet?”
“What,” said Carver mildly, “do you want me to say?”
“Oh, tell us a bit about yourself,” said Ball.
“You first,” said Carver, amiable.
“Oh, me,” said Ball. “Don’t get me started.”
“No, for fuck’s fucking fuck’s sake don’t get him started,” muttered Sedden.
Fiddy said, “Go on, Car. We all wanna know about you. You’re the big star, here.”
“Where?” said Carver, gentle. “Where am I the star?”
“Up there!” roared Ball abruptly. “Dazzling!” He waved the whisky at the sky over the sea, and Charlie sprang up with curious agility from the third bench and grabbed the bottle from him. “You’ll spill it all!”
Then Charlie, standing reasonably steady, tilted the whisky into his own mouth, and gulped two, three, four singles on a breath.
“You’re all a pack of cunts,” decided Sedden. He too stood up, tottered, held to the back of the stone bench. “I’m go’ff to bed.”
“Bye-bye,” said Ball. “No loss.”
Sedden hauled himself, using the bench as a prop, tottered over and, fetching up in front of Ball, smashed him across the face with his fist.
Ball reeled back. A jet of blood, looking much blacker and wetter than the sea, shot into the air.
“Oops,” said Fiddy. He got up in turn and carefully walked some distance along the terrace. There he sat down on the pavement, resting his back on the prongs of the rail, looking at the building’s facade, not the sea-view. He seemed soon to fall asleep.
Van Sedden and Ball, however, were now fighting. They staggered about, grunting and moaning, aiming meaty blows that mostly did not connect. Until, lunging to deliver another of these, Sedden fell over. From his knees, and averting his face, he spat out a curtailed string of vomit, then bounded up again and launched himself in encore at Ball. Ball’s lower face was a mask of murky blood. His fists struck now, but constantly missing Sedden’s head, landing too low on ribcage, shoulders. Sedden swerved at every impact, but did not go down.
From his bench, Carver watched them. If surveillance cameras operated out here, as surely they must, then either the monitors were asleep, or had skived off on some personal errand.
Or else, was that procedure here? Observe always, with no interference. Enough rope for each to hang himself. Or did it make no difference?
It was Ball who fell next. Sedden deliberately dropped down beside him. He sized Ball’s head and neck and pulled Ball in that way towards him, as if to kiss his bloodied lips, or lick them. Ball said, slurred and ridiculous, “You’ve bust my Rolex.”
Carver saw Charlie was standing up as well. He appeared steady, if in a rather lopsided way. In total contrast to himself, he was white, and his face shone – not with sweat, you realised. Tears were running out of both his eyes, more urgently than the blood from Ball’s nostrils.
“Think I’ll have a turn on the old girl,” he said, in a choked yet formal voice, the polite little boy in the playground, frightened, but having had it drilled into him he must always do, say, the Right Thing. “Bit of a cycle about. Bloody good.”
Carver found he in turn had got up. (Only Fiddy remained on the ground against the railing, snoring sotto voce, as if also trying to be as well-mannered as he could.)
Then Charlie broke the spell – and the whisky bottle, which he dropped with a sharp-dull, smashed-sugar crash on the paving. And without a pause he ran, faster than he had seemed capable of before, along the gravel and toward the far east side of the building.
Van Sedden was dedicatedly banging Ball’s head against the pavement.
Carver went over, heaved Sedden up and off and cracked him hard on the jaw. Let go, Sedden sat down on the stone. Lacking the support of bench or railing he then curled slowly over, and lay on his left side, mindlessly gazing at Carver, without interest. Ball was now throwing up. (Carver thought of Iain Cox and E-bone, after Heavy had pushed them. Irrelevant.)
He would go inside, Carver decided. Wake someone and get them out here to clear up.
Before he could take another step, he heard Charlie’s bicycle, noisy in the quiet, tinnily whirring and scratching and pumping, furious and laden, back over the gravel. It must have been stationed not so far off, by one of the more recessed frontages, unseen. And look at it now. Coming back along the drive so very fast, faster for sure than it had been ridden earlier, just as Charlie had run so much faster. Whisky or adrenalin.
No holds barred.
In the moments before it happened Carver understood. Carver was not drunk, in no way affected by the double mouthful of whisky. But he stayed immobile and unspeaking, and watched with the other two who had kept the vestiges of consciousness; Ball coughing and spitting, squinting, Van Sedden shivering, focus, it seemed, partially restored to his vision.
The bicycle erupted to within a few paces of them, then veered straight out across the short edge of gravel, missing all the rose-pots, and onto the stone paving. Charlie was astride the machine, flying easy as a bird, not breathing either very fast. His legs beat up and down rhythmically. His eyes were huge, and dry. Not afraid. He looked – determined. That was it. A striker about to score the winning penalty, a bomb-happy pilot about to release the bomb-hatch above the darkened, semi-sleeping town.
As Carver already knew they would, man and bike burst on, missing the benches now, and the men, over the pavement, that abbreviated border between earth and water – and air.
They hit the barrier of the rail, Charlie and the bicycle, full on, going in this case at quite a speed.
The bicycle seemed to implode, buckling, condensing.
Charlie though lifted like a gull, up, up, over the top of the railing, up there in the sky of void and stars, the wings of his arms spread wide. Then drifting in an arc, not flapping now as when he floundered down the hill, but caught, appropriately gull-like, as if on some supportive current of the night air. In perceived yet unreal slow-motion once more, but graceful at last and self-possessed, he curved across and downward, to the unseen rocks and shore below. Gone.
Sixteen
Gelatinously cold, the lights painted the room and its twelve occupants.
It was otherwise hot, the windows shut behind their blinds. (Looking out on all sides at private grounds or open water, why were such blinds necessarily always down, at least on the ground floors?)
Carver sat on the comfortable but businesslike chairs with the other three men who had survived the night: Van Sedden, Ball, Fiddy.
Even the damaged squashed bicycle had been brought in. It lay on the space of wood-plank floor between the four chairs and the sidelong desk. A fifth witness?
Behind the desk, the other eight; six men, two women. Each wore a dark suit; the women’s suits also, visible during their group processional entry from behind the desk, had trousers. One of the women was fat, if not as fat as Charlie had been, though he would be losing weight now, of course.
The other woman was noticeably thin.
As if to make identification – or comparison – between them easy.
The men were all weights, all kinds, and of four clear racial types.
The entire composite ranged from around the age of twenty-five-seven, (the thin woman), to late fifties, early sixties (the tall slim black man in the Oxbridge tie).
It reminded Carver of job interviews he had sometimes, years ago, attended on errands to do with Mantik. Or panels on TV – except for the amount of interviewers in proportion to the – what were they, in fact – candidates?
Candidates then for what?
Punishment ?
There had been excessive alcohol and a punch-up.
A man had ridden his bicycle at, and himself over, the brink of a cliff.
(Night
and flight, soaring, arcing down. Seconds of utter release – terror – mesmeric unknowing. After which the hard floor of the world.)
Van Sedden had muttered, as they waited here twenty minutes or so for the interviewing panel to arrive, “Ride come comes before a fall.”
And Ball had whispered, “Can it, cunt.”
And Sedden had put his head in his hands and wept. And Ball had got up, sat down, put his arm round Sedden, sat there staring into nowhere as Sedden cried on his shoulder, and Fiddy grunted, and once or twice belched from hangover and bad nerves.
After the panel came in, everyone was pulled together, stiff-upper-lipped, yet quiescent. Soldiers, Carver thought, who would get a beating, (another one), if they did not shine up their gear, stand to attention, wear the masks of discipline, of violence, under total subjugation.
What did he look like then, he, Andreas Cava, child of psychopath moron and crazy fool. He who had let the fight go on until its sheer futility had caused him to intervene. And, as the bicycle ran, too late. Poised there, foreseeing what came next, not attempting– Useless. It was not the drugs that had slowed him down. Not the drink, which he had only reluctantly sipped.
He was removed, was Carver. Always stood a little aside, a step or two back. Uninvolved. Not wanting involvement. The lizard on the wall. The errand boy. The cool partner. The quiet one. The watcher. A spy-machine.
Even if well-hidden, the surveillance cameras and audio-relay had obviously picked up the scene on the terrace. That nobody had hastened from the building in time to prevent a tragedy was due to – it was suggested – an unforeseen glitch in wiring. (Or perhaps, unrevealed laxity on someone’s part?)
They had, nevertheless, been on the spot some two minutes after Charlie descended from view. A ruffled company of men in shirts and jeans, not overtly armed, but unmistakably Security. They had not come from the closed main door.
Everyone present on the terrace, including, till woken, the still-snoring Fiddy, had been ‘escorted’ inside.
They were shut in a narrow side room, that luckily (or logistically) had access to a lavatory, and here Sedden went to vomit, and then Fiddy, and then around and around again, one by one, both politely taking their turns, waiting, gagging in tissues, until the other staggered out from each bout.
Ball had, it seemed, got rid of everything he needed to that way. He sat on the floor – the room had only one chair, and democratically none of them used it.
Whoever was there, aside from seeking and exiting the toilet, kept static and silent. The only noises issued from the lavatory.
(Carver had thought briefly of his father’s aggressive, expressive vomitings. Pushed the memory away.)
About an hour after, all of them were ushered to yet another area, a sort of dormitory with ten bunks, and another adjacent wash-room.
Carver lay down, and watched the darkness, which was only a darker light. (None of this was like the period when this ‘place’ had first taken him.) He drifted asleep once or twice, once woken by one more bout of strenuous puking in the washroom. Donna came to mind now, at the house.
In the first light – dawn presumably – how long had they been here, it seemed more hours than maybe dawn would take to return – five o’clock? Six? – Carver was spoken to quietly by one of the jeaned security men. No names were awarded either way. “Get up, please. I’ll take you up.” And one more of this labyrinthine warren’s steel lifts, and then another succession of corridors, and after these the opening sky in windows, yellowish overcast today, and a view of trees, and surely – the sheds – And then his own allotted room, with its sea view and time-panel.
“Be ready for 10 a.m., please,” said the man. “Somebody will be up to take you.”
“Where?” said Carver.
The man said nothing. The door was shut behind him. But not locked.
Carver did as he was told, naturally.
By 10 a.m., unbreakfasted, but clean, dressed and ‘ready’, two men entered who waved him out, and down, and around, (lifts, corridors, annexes, blinded windows), to the hot room with the wooden floor, and the three others and the bicycle and the judging panel. (And Any Judge’s Main Verdict would be what?)
The thin woman with the slight Italian accent said, “Well, we have listened to you all. From what has been recorded by Security – aside from the interruptive glitching, when sight and sound were lost – your accounts seem to tally with our own.”
She was – was she? – a little like Silvia. Silvia Dusa.
Who was dead. Also dead. But no. Too thin. Yet the hair, eyes – that circling gesture of her right hand, expressive and non-English despite the inevitable probability both she, and at least one of her parents, had been born in Britain –
The interrogation/interview/trial had lasted three hours. During the first hour they had been told, over and over, in varying forms, and as if they had not been present, the facts of Charlie (Charles Michael Slade Hemel)’s final bicycle ride. After that a recess was called. The panel walked out of the door behind the desk, three skirt-suited women entered, and Sedden, Ball, Fiddy and Carver were offered by them water, tea, coffee, crisps and sandwiches. Only Carver and Fiddy accepted. Carver ate a little. Fiddy, made more capacious it transpired by barfing, ate three sandwiches and drank a large bottle of Perrier, only then going off decorously to crap and or pee, returning hale and hearty, so Van Sedden cursed him, before being shushed by Ball. (This lavatory lay just outside the hot room. You had to knock on the hot room’s outer door, explain your mission, and were then let through and subsequently back in. Fiddy had done all without shame. Practiced?)
The next one hour and forty-four minutes, (there was a clock on the wall), entailed each of the four men being told to speak, and speaking, saying what he personally had seen and done, generally prompted, asked to elaborate, or tripped up by the presiding bench of eight-person desk. They all asked questions or broke in with side-long thrusts – “But if you were fighting/ being sick/asleep at that point, how can you be quite certain?”
The man who seemed to be Chinese, and spoke with a soft Mancunian accent, had picked remorselessly on Ball. But Ball seemed, though uneasy and utterly drained, to recognise it all as a gambit. He answered with leaden pragmatism each time. The red-haired Celt, conversely, had it in for Sedden.
Why did they – these people, this ‘Place’, “Us” – need to act out so much? It decidedly was like a caricature drama of a courtroom, once more on TV. Or a game of charades in a pub.
The fat woman picked on Sedden as well. She drove him mad. In the end he slumped down in his chair and seemed on the verge of fainting. That was when they had the second break, which lasted six minutes.
Carver they neither questioned (interrupted) nor psychologically pawed at.
They let him speak. Listened. Said “thank you”, and moved on.
He had, as conceivably they grasped, not been drunk, ill, in a rage or a fight or asleep. But why trust him, why not subject him to the twiddling, needling process the rest had to put up with? They (the ‘Place’, “Us”) knew it all any way. They had the visuals and the sound records. Unless, maybe, there truly had been a major glitch. It seemed unlikely.
When the three hours of hearing and breaks was over, the panel withdrew again. Would they pace back and pass sentence? It seemed not. A woman in a short dress, and a boyish 1940’s US crew-cut, danced in and said they could all get over to their ‘Work’ now. And the outer door was left wide. No Security stood there in its un-Charlie-ish well-tailored jeans.
The bicycle did not get up to follow them out. Nobody had referred to it.
Outside none of them spoke to the others. Not even Sedden to Ball. They wandered off along the corridor beyond the hot room, and the corridor was breathing through a high up open window, showing leaves stitched on a cloudy windless mauve sky.
“Storm,” announced Fiddy, portentously.
That was all.
Charles Michael Slade Hemel. C.M.S.H. Something flicked
through Carver’s thoughts, like a hare through long grass. You knew what it was, but could not see.
He had no idea where the corridor led, but followed it round. No need to make plans. Another young woman, blonde in a completely un-Donna way, stood waiting. She too wore a dress, but carried a clipboard.
“Oh, Mr Carver. Here you are. Just follow me. Mr Croft is waiting.”
Croft sat against the blinded, lighted window, and was in silhouette. An old trick, clichéd – exactly how he had played it the last time. The first time.
“Please sit down, Car,” he said. “The nicer chair.”
The window behind him, though, today was less luminous, the sun in cloud... His silhouette had faded, and drew less significance. Carver had seen its face anyway.
Carver’s eyes, now, did not water.
“Nasty business,” said Croft pleasantly.
“Yes.”
“What did you make of it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Charlie always had this thing about cycling. Kept a bicycle, but hardly ever got on the machine. They’ll have to investigate all the background rubbish, of course. Some emotional problem perhaps.”
Carver did not speak. He wondered if they had yet recovered the body from the shoreline below. They must have done. They would be testing it, what was useable, for substances, irregularities, giving it the third degree as it was now impossible to give that to Charlie.
Croft shifted. His profile appeared, the large nose and jaw, the heavy-lidded eye that today in the gloom did not glint.
Croft rose. “Why not we go outside, have a stroll. Probably be a downpour later. What do you say?”
As before, Carver went after him to the doorway, the corridor, lift etc.