V 02 - Domino Men, The (19 page)

“Where’s Jasper tonight?” I asked, eager to avoid another venting of the Barnaby spleen.  “Where’s Steerforth?”

The driver grimaced.  “Too chicken.  Couple of nancy boys, the pair of them.”

“I don’t believe they’re cowards,” I said quietly.  “It’s just Hawker and Boon.  They’ve got a way of making you feel afraid.”

A grunt from the front seat.

“Have you ever met them?”

“No,” he said, although I could tell by the way he said it that he was lying.

I was about to ask more but Barnaby turned up the volume on the radio as high as it could go and refused to answer any further questions for the duration of the journey.

The phalanx of reporters and photographers who often loiter and preen outside Number Ten in daylight hours had long since retired to bed, and those who were left — the soldiers, the guards, the plainclothes policemen — all parted before me without the slightest murmur of a challenge and I marveled again at the skeleton key effect of the words “the Directorate.”

This time I had walked into Downing Street alone.  Barnaby still sat in the car outside, gloomily turning the pages of
Erskine Childers and the Drama of Utopianism:  (Re)Configuring Bolshevism in “The Riddle of the Sands.”

If anything, the sense of oppression, of walking blithely into the gingerbread house, felt even stronger this time.  I moved through the library, stepped behind the painting and descended into the depths, past the silent gallery of freaks and ghouls, and tiptoed along the twilight corridor until I reached the final cell, the dreadful resting place of the Prefects.

The guard, his hands white knuckled around his gun, nodded brusquely and I think I was able to detect, buried somewhere deep in his mask of military indifference, a flicker of concern, the merest suggestion of compassion.

Inside, the Domino Men were waiting, their gnarled, hairy legs swinging to and fro in their deckchairs.  Everything seemed identical to my last visit, the room as pitilessly stark as before — except for one peculiar addition.

There was an ancient television set in the center of the circle, cranked up far too loud.  I heard the blare of canned laughter, the squeak of poorly delivered wisecracks, the silken voice of one of our most prolific character comedians, but it was only when I recognized the tremulous soprano of my nine-year-old self that I realized with a jolt exactly what it was that those creatures were watching.

On-screen, my younger self walked onto a set which always wobbled and delivered my catchphrase to cyclones of tape-recorded mirth.

Hawker and Boon were staring sullenly at the television, like it was a lecture on photosynthesis which they were being forced to sit through in double-period science.

The smaller man groaned.  “Dearie me.”

Hawker shook his head sorrowfully.  “I’ve got to be honest with you, old top.”

“Got to be frank.”

“It ain’t the funniest thing I’ve ever seen.”

“Let’s be candid here, Mr. L.  It’s about as funny as cholera.”

“It’s about as funny as…”  Hawker thought for a moment, then sniggered.  “A nun with leprosy.”

A dirty smirk twisted Boon’s features into something rubbery and grotesque.  “And we should jolly well know.”

I moved before them, careful to keep outside the circle.

“Why are you watching that?” I asked, as I caught the familiar plonk and grind of the theme tune.

“It really is a clanger, isn’t it, sir?”

Hawker switched off the television, his lips pursed in a moue of distaste.  “What a turkey, sir!  What a tip-top stinker!”

Boon passed his hand to and fro in front of his nose, as though washing away an imaginary pong.  “Phew!”

“Coo-ee!”

I let them finish.  “I want you to tell me where Estella is,” I said as calmly as I could.

Hawker looked at me blankly, then cupped a hand to his ear.  “Who?”

“Estella,” I said flatly, knowing that he’d heard me perfectly well the first time.

“Oh right!  You should have said, sir!  We were going to tell you the other day but you dashed out ’fore we got to it.  Rather rude, I thought.  Bit cheeky.”

“Dashed ungrateful,” said Boon.  “Specially since we’d bent over backwards to make you feel welcome.”

“Where’s Estella?” I said again, trying my best to remain toneless.

Boon got to his feet and surveyed the little limits of his cell.  “Do you miss it, sir?  The old show?”

“The old routine?”

“The roar of the greasepaint?”

“The smell of the crowds?”

Though the Prefects squealed with laughter, I was careful not to let my expression alter.  “Where’s Estella?”

“Pity you’re such a terrible actor, isn’t it, Mr. L?”

“S’pose you might have made a career of it if you’d been any good.  But you’re nothing now, are you, sir?  Is he, Boon?”

“Certainly not, my old Satsuma.  He’s a real nobody.”

“Where,” I said, my voice at last betraying my impatience, “is Estella?”

“What a grump.”

“Someone’s in an awful dudgeon.”

“Young Mr. Lamb’s got up on the wrong side of the bed today.”

I glared.  “I need to know where she is.”

“Yaroo!”

“You’ve got a rotten temper, Mr. L.”

I tried my best not to listen.  “I want to know where Estella is.”

“And you think that’ll be it, do you, sir?  You think, once you find the lady, they’ll let you trot back to your old life?  Bad luck, old chum.  No one ever leaves the Directorate.  You’ll croak in the harness.”

“Where’s Estella?” I said. 

Boon smirked.  “Even chaps who don’t sign up for Dedlock’s mob end up dying for it,” he said.  “Even your daddy, for instance.”

I felt tendrils of panic begin to stir inside me.  “Don’t talk about my father.”

Hawker clapped his hands in joy.  “Splendid, sir!  You were starting to sound like a stuck record.”

“Your pa,” said Boon, “he never signed up for the Directorate.  You’re granddad didn’t tell him a thing about it.”

“He wanted him to have a normal, dull sort of life.”

“And he did, didn’t he, Mr. L?  Your pa — he was the dullest man you ever knew.”

I protested.  “That’s not true!”

“Goodness me, but that fellow was a dullard!”

“And yet…”  Boon smirked.

Hawker rubbed his hands together.  “We did your granddad a favor once.  We told him about the Process.”

“The Process?”  I felt myself on the edge of the precipice.  What are you talking about?”

“And we didn’t ask for much in exchange, did we, Hawker?”

“Certainly not, Boon.  We’re not greedy boys.”

“It was the smallest of favors.  The tiniest trinket.”

“What,” I gasped, “did he promise you?”

“He promised us his flesh and blood,” said Hawker.

“And we were ready and waiting on the day of your father’s accident.”

“Accident!”
Hawker crowed.  “Oh, my little lambkin, now you know the truth of it.”

“We peered into the tangled wreck of his car as he lay dying and we jeered and laughed and poked him with a very big stick.”

The monsters were doubled up with laughter now, jack-knifed in hilarity.

“The look on his face,” said Boon, “as he lay there sobbing!  He thought we’d come to save him!”

“Do you remember,” Hawker gasped, forcing the words out amidst eruptions of laughter, “how we poured petrol on his legs?”

I did my best this time.  I didn’t holler or scream or beat my fists fruitlessly against the glass walls of the cell.  Nor was I tempted to blunder into the circle.  Instead, I simply walked calmly over the door and knocked for the guard to let me out.

“Ta-ta!” one of the Prefects shouted.  “Come and see us again soon, won’t you, sir?”

“Better luck next time, Mr. L!”

More laughter.  I heard the television blunder back into life, heard those brash inaugural chords, the old soundtrack to my life, before anything evil had entered in.

As I stumbled back out into the corridor, my only hope was that the bastards hadn't seen that I was crying.

When I got home, Abbey was waiting for me, sitting at the table in the front room, dressed in a man-sized T-shirt and nursing a hot blackcurrant squash.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hello,” I said carefully and, after a few seconds of trying to guess what sort of a mood she was in, decided to chance a smile.

To my relief, she smiled tentatively back.  “I’m sorry about earlier.”

“No.  I’m sorry.”

“I saw you with that girl…  I suppose I just overreacted.”

“Honestly,” I said, taking off my jacket and throwing myself onto the sofa.  “I’m not interested in Barbara.”

As Abbey grinned, I noticed how thin her T-shirt was, how it seemed to accentuate and draw the eye to the curves of her chest.

“How was your work thing?” she asked.  I wondered if she’d noticed the way I’d been looking at her.

“Oh, you know,” I said.  “A bit knackering.”

“Let me get you a drink, then.”

“A glass of water would be lovely,” I said, and I heard her pad away into the kitchen.

When she came back, she passed me a glass, but no sooner had I raised it to my lips than I felt her hands in my hair, her breath on my skin.

“Abbey?”

The water was forgotten, hastily abandoned on the table, and all at once she was kissing my neck, my cheeks, my temples.  For an instant, her tongue flicked inside my left ear and I shuddered in pleasure.

“I’m sorry,” she breathed.  “Poor Henry.”

She maneuvered herself in front of me, then sat down on my lap.

“Abbey?”

“Shh.”  She kissed me hard on the lips and I responded in kind (as best I knew how).

“I didn’t expect to feel this way,” she said, once we’d come up for air.  “Not so soon.  But there’s something about you…”

Giddy with the moment, I risked a joke.  “I’m irresistible.”

“Don’t spoil it,” she chided, placing her hand on mine, guiding it beneath her shirt as somewhere deep in my stomach I felt the same lurch of panic I’d felt the first time we’d kissed, the awful anxiety of performance, the insidious terror that one might not measure up.

“Are you sure?” I asked.

She kissed me again, I kissed her back and I was just beginning to relax and enjoy myself when my mind was wrenched back to that terrible cell, to the gargoyles in the chalk circle and the relentless cackle of the Prefects.

The next thing I knew, Abbey was no longer sitting on my lap but standing over me, concerned, disappointed, smoothing down her T-shirt.

“What’s the matter?” she asked.

“I’m sorry,” I said.  “I really wanted to—”

“It’s fine.”

“I hate to let you down.”

“You’re not,” she said, although I would have been deluding myself not to recognize the frustration which tinged her voice.

“It’s just that I’ve had a long day.  A lot’s happened.”

“Of course.”

“And…  Oh God—”  Something halfway between a sob and an irresistible urge to vomit began to force its way up my body — the great, indigestible tumor of the truth.

Abbey stroked back my hair, held me close, whispered in my ear.  “What is it?  What’s the matter?”

“I’m sorry.”  I was gulping back tears.  “But there’s something I can’t stop thinking about.  Something in my past.”

Abbey kissed me on the forehead.  “Let it out.”

“I need to tell you…”  My nose had started to run and I could feel grief and rage take hold.  “I need to tell you how my father died.”

The heir to the throne woke the next morning to find Silverman standing over him holding a breakfast tray, a large pot of tea, a sheath of correspondence and a fresh edition of the
Times
, all of it balanced with the kind of dexterous skill one can acquire only through decades of experience.

“Your Royal Highness.  Good morning, sir.”

Arthur wriggled up in bed.  “Plump the pillow for me, would you, Silverman?”

Obediently, the equerry patted the pillow into place.

“I have sleep in my peepers,” said the prince.

With great tenderness, Silverman teased out the granules of dust which had accumulated overnight at the edges of the prince’s eyes.  He walked over to the wardrobe and laid out his master’s outfit for the morning — crisp gray suit, starched white shirt, underpants emblazoned with the prince’s crest and a choice of half a dozen ties, all of them varyingly somber shades of mahogany.

Once the equerry was done, the prince asked:  “What do the papers say?  Be a good chap, would you, and summarize the headlines.”

Silverman scanned the front page.  “The prime minister is flying home from Africa,” he said, and at the mere mention of the man, the prince rolled his eyes in exasperation.  “A new
health secretary has been appointed.  And a rock musician has been arrested for punching a traffic policeman.”

“What else, Silverman?  What aren’t you telling me?”

The equerry cleared his throat discreetly.  “There is a small article about your mother, sir.”

“My mother?”

“Some wholly unfounded piece of speculation about the state of her health.”

“What are they saying, Silverman?”

A moment’s hesitation, then:  “It would appear, sir, that the headline is:  “At Death’s Door?”

“How do they know?  It’s not like anyone’s even seen her for months.”

“It’s only a newspaper, sir.  They are peddlers of exaggeration and hyperbole.”

“I do wonder when she’ll show her face again.  You know, of course, that she never liked me all that much?”

“I’m sure you must be mistaken, sir.”

“Never like Laetitia either, come to think of it.  Of course, that’s why Mother won’t see me anymore.  She thinks I’m weak.  She thinks I’m squeamish.  And I suspect the public tend to concur.  It’s really most unfair.”

Silverman cleared his throat.  “Will that be all, sir?”

Arthur took a sip of his tea and eyed his breakfast.  “Thank you, Silverman.  You may go.”