Wild Weekend Page 10

  The Goths sat around in the churchyard of St Oswin’s, Great Saxwold, in the balmy August nights slugging back cider and arguing, by the light of red candles filched from Bel’s dinner party drawer, over the proper form for a satanic ritual. The vicar welcomed them warmly, proposed a joint service at Harvest Festival and reported to his bishop a real breakthrough in the diocesan inter-faith mission.

  ‘Right, we’re getting out of here,’ Toni told her followers in disgust. ‘We’re not having some poxy vicar playing his poxy guitar at us. We want a rally on the beach. Show our strength. Flex our muscle. Have a bit of a rumble with the pikeys from outside, maybe. That’ll make them take notice.’

  On the first day of the August Bank Holiday weekend, the Saxwold Sukkubi planned to get together on the sand dunes at a nearby seaside resort to hold a mass rally. Word of the event spread, as Toni intended it should, and inspired other bands of young in time for them to organise. To the south, they styled themselves the Colchester Hellcatz and in the north they became the Bungay Vampires. When all three clans met in front of the candy-coloured beach huts, they fell into pleasant conversation, admired each other’s jewellery and swapped cigarettes. No pikeys appeared to taunt them.

  The East Anglian Times, desperate for a real news event at any time and doubly so in the dog days of summer, sent down a photographer. Anglia Television, already committed to a documentary series titled Tribal Britain and hard up for undiscovered clans, sent a researcher. What had been planned as an enjoyable day of outrage on the beach degenerated, in Toni’s opinion, into a media circus.

  Passionately, she harangued her associates from the roof of a boarded-up ice-cream kiosk. ‘Don’t buy into their conspiracy! Goths refuse to be media victims. We despise the hypocritical values of those who seek to stifle the voices of protest! Fuck off back to Norwich, media scum!’

  The wind whipped her words away. Puzzled, the black-draped crowd dragged on their cigarettes and stood about amiably, kicking up the sand. Only the TV reporter, who was angling her camera about eighteen inches under Toni’s chin, heard what she had said.

  ‘Brilliant!’ the reporter encouraged Toni, batting her Betty Boop eyelashes. ‘Could you give us a bit more that we can actually beep?’

  ‘Tosser!’ Toni yelled, exasperated. ‘Get out of my face or I’ll do yer!’

  ‘Fantastic!’ the reporter said, and went to organise the crowd into a menacing squad who chanted ‘Goth forever!’ and followed up with some well-choreographed stone-throwing.

  By then the Old Farmhouse was in its final stages of restoration. Toni’s bedroom, in which she spent as little time as possible, had carpet, a white-painted four-post bed with muslin curtains, and flower-sprigged wallpaper. She said it made her feel sick and dragged a mattress up into the attic.

  The house was coasting through the final phases of its redemption. A nice girl from Norwich had come and marbled the skirting boards. The kitchen garden was planted and running to a glut of beans and tomatoes. The drawing room had sofas, huge billowing items covered in Bel’s favourite chintz, and on one of these, on that Sunday, Bel was dozing gently to the distant hum of the dishwasher, planning to wake at cocktail time and catch up with the week’s news review on the television which twittered comfortingly in the corner.

  ‘Scenes of violence on the beach at Southwick yesterday when gangs of local youths clashed …’ she heard. Bel half opened her eyes. Oh no. Gangs. Violence. This was what she’d left London to escape.

  ‘Get out of my face or I’ll do yer!’ she heard, and recognised the voice.

  ‘Good God. Toni!’ She sat upright and watched the rest of the bulletin, which featured Toni and her companions at length.

  ‘Toni! Have you seen this! Whatever did you mean, you’ll do her?’ Bel asked in a disingenuous squeal so piercing that Garrick startled in the gnawing of his Sunday bone. ‘Toni! Come here at once. Go and find her, Ollie darling.’

  Oliver pretended to hear nothing and continued with the preparation of his mother’s first vodka and tonic of the evening. When she felt offended, Bel had a way of launching these faux-innocent enquiries which both her children found maddening.

  ‘What?’ Toni demanded, scowling at the doorway.

  ‘You’re on television,’ said Oliver.

  ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake,’ said Toni, flinging herself horizontally along the chintz sofa, so she looked like a giant black slug in a rose garden. ‘So what?’

  ‘No, but I don’t understand!’ Bel protested, pleased with this response. ‘What were you all doing there? What did you mean, do her?’

  ‘Can you call another woman a tosser?’ Oliver enquired, walking carefully around Garrick to hand his mother her tinkling glass.

  ‘I can call you a tosser,’ Toni retorted.

  ‘And what’s that, as well, a toaster? A towser. Whatever you said.’ Satisfied with the line the dispute was taking, Bel sipped her cocktail. ‘Lovely, dear. Just how I like it.’

  ‘Well, of course you can call me a tosser,’ Oliver argued, ‘but I don’t think you can apply that term to a woman.’

  ‘Pathetic,’ growled Toni. ‘I’ll do you and all, if you don’t get off my case.’

  ‘Will somebody just tell me what she’s talking about?’ Bel appealed. ‘I’m not up with all these crims, whatever they are, or this gangsta rap or whatever they call it. What is all this doing-you business?’

  ‘You know what she means,’ snapped her son. ‘You’re just putting on this stupid act.’

  ‘I am not!’ Bel protested happily. ‘I just want somebody to tell me what Toni was talking about. After all, if my daughter goes on the television I’d like to know what she’s saying.’

  ‘Stepdaughter,’ said Toni to her mother. To Oliver, pointing at the glass, she said, ‘Do I get one of them?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he answered. ‘Do you? I mean, have you got legs, are there hands inside those spiderweb mitten things and are you actually quadriplegic and do you want a drink enough to get your arse into gear?’

  ‘Dar-ling!’ his mother reproved him. In Bel’s worldview, the primary function of a man was to keep women happy. When she herself was the woman in question, that function assumed paramount importance. When all that was involved was the pouring of a drink, that function was a sacred duty. When, as in this case, the simple application of old-fashioned good manners would stop an argument turning ugly, there was no higher duty a man could perform.

  Reluctantly, Oliver returned to the recently distressed oak side table on which his mother kept alcoholic supplies for her drawing room and reached for the vodka. ‘Ice?’ he hissed at Toni from between clenched teeth.

  ‘Ice’n’slice, cheers,’ she answered.

  ‘Toni!’ Now Bel was really offended. ‘I don’t mind you being Gothic, or whatever it is, but I can’t stand you being vulgar!’

  Oliver skirted the dog a second time and placed a second tinkling glass on the polished silver coaster by his stepsister’s ear. Toni sank more deeply into the sofa, kicking her booted legs. An outraged yelp was heard and the dog scrambled to its feet and ran for the door.

  ‘And don’t be beastly to Garrick,’ Bel added. ‘He’s only a dog.’

  Carole sat at the least conspicuous corner of a table, in a room above a video store on one of the massive traffic interchanges for which central south London is notable, and doodled on her agenda. The meeting was still on item three, Letter-Writing Campaign, and it was 9.30pm. Around the table sat nineteen people, who were all younger than her, drooping, scratching their beards, massaging their temples and coming to the end of a wrangling debate.

  ‘Are we all agreed now?’ the Chair asked them. ‘Are we all agreed that every local group will recruit a minimum of five volunteers to do letter-writing and delivery for the Death Threat Sub-Committee? Letters to be delivered by the end of April this year?’

  Among members of GLAAC (Greater London Animal Activism Caucus) there was some murmuring.

  ‘No, I’m
sorry,’ declared the Chair, a non-assertive man who resented his role for requiring him to assume authority. ‘We’ve been through this, there’s no other way the Death Threat Sub-Committee will meet its targets. It’s essential that the threats go out in time to get to the MPs before the Fish Farm Bill, so when our guys introduce our amendment on psychological stress in oysters, the key people understand just how serious this is. We’ve taken a vote, it’s a clear decision by the majority of the Caucus sitting in official session.’

  ‘Death threats don’t work,’ complained the delegate from Highbury.

  ‘We don’t know that, there’s never been any research,’ countered the delegate from Brentford.

  ‘Typical scientist, going on about research,’ parried Highbury.

  ‘Well, pardon me for wanting a few facts,’ Brentford sneered.

  ‘WE ARE AGREED,’ declared the Chairman in a firm voice. ‘ITEM FOUR. URBAN FOX CONSERVATION.’

  Involuntarily, Carole shrank into the neck of her sweater. This was her moment. Her paper was among the bundle before them. In this company, she knew she was permanently guilty of the crime of glamour, and therefore needed to tread carefully.

  The Chair turned to her without smiling. ‘Move to congratulate you, Carole, on the fantastic media coverage this week.’

  ‘Congratulate the animals,’ she suggested at once. ‘Weren’t they adorable? Those photographers were just going ga-ga all over them.’ Invoking the new Urban Wildlife Protection Act, she had succeeded in getting the two foxes protected by a court order while an inquiry into the alleged attack on the baby took place. They had been named in the process.

  ‘What are they called?’ the photographer asked.

  ‘We haven’t chosen names yet,’ Carole told him.

  ‘Well, we’d better think of something. They’ll want to know their names. What do you call a fox, anyway? Mrs Tiggywinkle?’

  ‘That’s a hedgehog. What was the fox called? Mr Tod. That was it.’

  ‘Todd, then.’ The photographer wrote the name on a piece of scrap paper. ‘That one with the black feet. And this one can be Sweeney.’

  Before Carole could protest, the accused foxes were named after a nineteenth-century cannibal mass murderer. She looked apprehensively around the table, and was relieved to see nothing but jealousy on her colleagues’ faces. The pictures taken at the photocall at the Farm appeared on the national news throughout the evening and the next day the front page of both the Sun and the Daily Mirror. The Sun’s headline read ‘CONDEMNED’. Seven hundred and forty-three readers had called the paper offering to adopt the foxes.

  ‘We second the motion to congratulate,’ said the delegate from Brondesbury. There was a chorus of yessing around the table, with much nodding of heads.

  ‘Absolutely,’ the Chair agreed. ‘Minute that, OK?’

  ‘But we need to focus on the bigger picture,’ she ventured. ‘While we’ve used the legislation successfully, this does highlight the growing problems we are experiencing with urban foxes.’ There was more nodding around the table; from Brixton to Richmond, everyone, it seemed, was aware of the fox situation.

  ‘What we should be asking ourselves is, are these animals happy? I mean, this incident – alleged incident, I should say – only happened, if it did happen, of course, because of the stress the foxes were suffering in an urban environment.’

  Again, a chorus of approval. So far, thought Carole, so good.

  ‘If my colleague from Brentford will allow it, there is research on fox behaviour, quite a lot of it that was done prior to the Hunting With Dogs Act. I found no mention of attacks on people. What is alleged to have happened is clearly not in their nature. It’s we humans who have turned these animals into killers. Potential killers. Possibly.’

  ‘We get it,’ the Chair reassured her.

  ‘So I’d like to propose a strategic sub-committee on urban foxes,’ she said, hearing her voice fade with nerves. ‘We should be giving these poor animals a decent chance to live in their natural habitat. We should set up a repatriation programme. Reintroduce them into the wild.’

  ‘Good thinking,’ murmured Highbury. Brentford sniffed. Brixton and Richmond leaned forward and spoke together.

  ‘Are you putting yourself forward to head this up?’

  ‘I would say,’ the Chair put in swiftly, ‘that given her achievements this week and the profile Carole has acquired thereby, that she would be the natural chair of such a committee, if we were to convene it.’

  Richmond thought of his track record with the wetland voles and the meagre coverage that had been worth. Brixton thought of his achievements with the Coldharbour Cockatoo Project, which had led to his first TV appearance. No, Carole was not going to ride off with their glory on the back of a couple of foxes. Just because she had once been a model. ‘Point of order,’ Brixton began, with a graceful grin to indicate that his protest was being made in ironic spirit, ‘point of order, Chair. If I might remind you …’

  The Chair groaned to himself and, under the table, started to compose a text to his partner waiting at home. After this, there was going to be a guest presentation from AASS, the Anti Apian Slavery Society, proposing an action plan to liberate oppressed bees from their hives. And four more items on the agenda after that. It was 10pm already. No chance of breaking before the pubs shut.

  ‘Isn’t it nice to get a bit of time just for us?’ Clare Marlow said to her daughter.

  ‘Lovely,’ Miranda agreed. Her mother was looking glossy, the way she did when she was very pleased with herself. In a few seconds the mystery would be solved. ‘I was thinking – have you got something to tell me?’

  ‘Well, yes, actually, I have.’

  ‘Oh God. No, sorry, I didn’t mean to say that.’

  ‘Of course you didn’t. And it’s not “oh, God”,’ her mother told her. ‘It’s “oh, good”. At least, I think so.’

  ‘You mean, good news?’

  ‘Yes, darling, of course that’s what I mean.’

  Miranda quailed, as usual. If a phone call from her mother made her feel like a worm, lunch usually made her feel as if she was role-playing Slobodan Milosevic on trial for war crimes. Whatever she said, she’d be condemned anyway. All the hours and the effort that Miranda put into being excellent, ace and generally perfect would suddenly seem about as useful as Slobodan’s passionate lifetime commitment to Serbian nationalism. And to make it worse, you knew that the whole world would be watching.

  She had done all the perfect stuff, all the same. She had bought a new outfit, because her mother had seen all her snazzy little presentation combos already and would be bound to tell her so. She had had her hair cut, her colour refreshed, her nails painted. The night before she had done an extra hour of yoga, to make sure her whole being was as calm as it could be, and during the morning she had had a yoghurt with her coffee so she wouldn’t feel hungry and lay herself open to criticism of eating too much. Lunch with mother was obviously salad, and heaven help you if you ate it all. They had before them two piles of gutless green stuff grown in Dutch polytunnels and reeking of balsamic vinegar, of which only a few leaves would actually be eaten. Lettuce, thought Miranda: harmless. But oil: death.

  Miranda had memories of her mother being different. There had once been a Mummy who had long hair and went about in dresses and played silly games at bathtime. That Mummy had once got slightly cross when her brother, Simon, climbed out of the bedroom window and played Spiderman over the flat roof at the back of their house. That Mummy had occasionally bought cakes and had actually fried things like fish fingers for her children to eat. Miranda had a clear but astonishing memory of that. Fish fingers. Most of the time, as far as Miranda remembered, that early Mummy had smiled and been nice to her.

  Everything seemed to change at the same time. Mummy started her business, Miranda started her periods, Daddy started living at his university and Simon started to get weird. Then Mummy turned into Clare, and wasn’t, at home so much. When she was aro
und, she was hard to please and very rarely smiled.

  The new Mummy had short hair and her lovely soft tummy disappeared. She stopped wearing dresses and started to wear suits. She was always very worried about wasting time. Miranda assumed that all these changes were natural things that happened to people as time passed. After all, she had changed herself, from a silly little girl into a fully fledged high-achieving almost-perfect woman.

  Just occasionally, Miranda caught sight of herself in a mirror or a shop window and noticed a look in her eye that was well, you could say, defensive. Wary. Almost hunted. But it was just the way the light fell on her face.

  ‘So what do you think of my new job,’ Clare asked her daughter.

  ‘Congratulations,’ hazarded Miranda.

  ‘It’s really exciting, being in politics. Well, in government, anyway.’

  ‘Goodness.’ Miranda found this a useful all-purpose response with her mother. ‘I never thought my mother would be an MP.’

  ‘A minister.’

  ‘How did they do that?’

  ‘Safe seat. By-election. They can do that when someone’s got the skills they need.’

  ‘That’s great,’ said Miranda, wondering what this new job for her mother was going to mean for her. She knew Clare. She’d known her all her life, after all. Clare would not be wasting time with her. There was an agenda.

  ‘Don’t you want to know why they chose me?’

  ‘To be a minister? Yes, of course. Sorry, I’m feeling a bit blank this morning. Minister of what?’

  ‘Technically, it’s Agriculture. But we’re doing something about the name.’

  ‘But you don’t know anything about farming.’

  ‘That’s not the skill-set. They, meaning the Government, need someone good at managing change.’

  ‘Great,’ said Miranda. It seemed to be an acceptable response. ‘Will you have to be photographed at agricultural shows and things?’

  The idea of her mother in green wellies, pinning a rosette on a cow, seemed completely unfeasible.