Vail Read online

  ‘Heee-ggreee-grrughh-heee-yeee.’

  Granny Bertha tries to intercede but her aged limbs are incapable; she pushes Auntie Beatrice forward instead.

  ‘Stop him, stop him! He said never again. He wouldn’t. He’s your son or brother, stop him!’

  ‘The 11.42 is delayed because of a derailment at Harlow,’ Auntie Beatrice replies, who was once a station announcer at Liverpool Street. She tugs at her wrinkled stockings. ‘Tell Norman he needn’t bother. We’ll collect the fish later if Emily doesn’t mind.’

  Father has his hand under Reet’s dress. ‘Get Uncle Forster. Tell Vic,’ Granny Bertha shrills at everyone and no one. ‘He’s at it again. He promised he wouldn’t, the swine.’

  ‘I’m out of stock,’ the cameraman reports from his crouched position, unclipping the reel.

  ‘Oh fock.’ Virgie stamps on her cigarette. ‘Okay, it’s a wrap. Now much have we got?’

  The cameraman hands the camera to his assistant. ‘Two thousand feet, five hundred mute.’

  ‘We’ll break for lunch. Do a set-up in Tesco’s in,’ – she checks her watch, – ‘two hours. Holy Mother, do I need a drink.’

  Virgie, Vail, Suze, the director and crew make their departure leaving Father and Reet on the mattress and Granny Bertha standing impotently over them with gnarled fists and Auntie Beatrice swaying back and forth with a bittersweet smile to the inaudible strains of I’d Rather be a Beggar with You sung by Al Bowlly. Downstairs the grinning lecherous urchins have broken into the kitchen and are taking turns at Dumpy over the gas stove while Little Com, a nasty purple bruise on his/her bald yellow head, is strapped to a chair yelling blue murder.

  [10]

  Vail, in bed in Lord Napier Place, Upper Mall, with Virgie Hance, is having difficulty in rising to the occasion. He is lying naked on Virgie’s black silk sheets and she is toiling over him like a Trojan, – long straggling red hair whipping her snow-white freckled shoulders, – in sweating frenzied effort while her breasts slosh and swing about above him like a pair of prolapsed eyeballs hanging out of their sockets.

  ‘Come on, you bastard, come on!’ she grates at him from the corner of her mouth, scattering cigarette ash into his eyes and hair. ‘Make it stiff, you horny swine!’ and other similar implorations, all to no avail.

  This is rather strange, to Vail as much as to anyone, because not forty minutes earlier, during a recording of Bootstraps in Studio 9, Virgie had scuttled on all fours over the tangle of cables, crawled underneath the desk at which Vail was sitting reading from autocue and, while ostensibly whispering script changes to him, had unzipped his flies and given him head.

  Vail’s performance on camera, as observed by those in the control box, had been his best so far. The director had clapped his hands and Suze had to keep moistening dry lips. The climax of the show had happily coincided with Vail’s personal climax, as was evident from the thrusting incisiveness of his delivery and the shining zeal in his eyes. Afterwards, while Virgie wiped her chin, the entire studio broke into spontaneous applause.

  It was a ‘wonderful’ show and a ‘tremendous performance’ on Vail’s part, as Mrs Stretcher, watching on a monitor, later reported to Laine Vere Jumper.

  Still hot and rabid and lusting for more, Virgie had bundled Vail into the car and ordered the chauffeur to put his foot down and stop for nothing and no one, which nearly resulted in a nasty accident as the Merc took the entrance lane on the way out and narrowly missed a car coming in, driven by Anthony Quayle, the world famous and much-respected actor, who was arriving to do a voice-over for a travel documentary.

  Luckily for Vail, Virgie and Mr Quayle, the black chauffeur was an expert driver and took evasive action by mounting the central reservation and demolishing a directional bollard.

  Once in the flat they got straight down to it, a tumbling, giggling, squealing mass of flesh and limbs as they tore off their own and each other’s clothing. At this point Vail was still fairly eager, had sufficiently recovered his virility, so he thought, to put up a creditable performance, and indeed was quite looking forward to it.

  But. Now. Virgie slumps back exhausted after pumping away at nothing for ten minutes, disappointed and hurt, grinding her gapped teeth in frustration. She lights a fresh cigarette from the one smouldering in the corner of her mouth and sucks in a revivifying lungful. There is silence except for the wheezing of her chest.

  Vail slumps too, staring at the ceiling. There is a faint but persistent tingling sensation in his groin, like the buzzing of an electrical current. He wonders if Virgie’s incessant pounding and grinding has broken something, and gently probes the turkey’s gizzard containing his testes.

  ‘Jesus, you’re not playing with yourself, I hope!’ Virgie retorts, rounding on him angrily, cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth, eyes screwed up against the writhing worm of smoke. ‘Don’t tell me you’d rather wank than screw, you working-class jerkoff!’

  ‘I think you might have damaged my equipment, that’s all.’

  She leans over his nether quarters, mouth gaping aslant to suck in air, and cups him in her hand. Vail recoils as the burning tip of the cigarette, carelessly and unheedingly stuck between her lips, hovers within inches of his flaccid, defenceless manhood.

  She weighs him in her palm, frowning, and it is Virgie and not Vail who stiffens.

  ‘Holy Mother shit!’

  ‘What, – ?’

  ‘You’ve got three balls.’

  ‘No, just the regulation two.’

  ‘I can feel three.’

  ‘Two are mine, the third is an implant. Wayde Dake’s idea. Or rather, Ed Flesh’s. He thought that I ought to be bugged for my own protection.’

  ‘You’ve got a bug in your balls?’ Virgie says in a tone of quiet stupefaction.

  ‘It’s out of the way; normally I never notice it.’

  ‘You mean to say they’re monitoring this? Some guy is sitting in a darkened room somewhere wearing headphones listening to this and taping the sounds my cunt makes on his focking machine?’

  ‘I don’t think it’s that sort of bug. According to Wayde it sends out pulsed signals so that they know where to find me any time day or night. Your secret’s safe with me.’

  At this, however, Virgie seems somewhat downcast. The possibility that her intimate body sounds are being recorded for posterity has caused the muscles in her vaginal walls to contract and fluid to be secreted in copious amounts.

  With her fingertips she feels the implant in its pulpy sac and speaks to it: ‘Testing, testing, testing. One two three. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy hen. Over.’

  ‘You won’t get a reply.’

  ‘Not even if I extend the antenna?’ Virgie says craftily.

  ‘You’re welcome to try,’ Vail says, lying back submissively, a smile burgeoning on his lips.

  [11]

  Vail’s car and chauffeur are waiting in the cold dead street as he leaves Lord Napier Place, Upper Mall, at three in the morning. The chauffeur grins, as one male to another, and says, ‘How’d it go, bawz? You boogie on down wid dat chick?’

  Vail nods wearily and sinks back into the moquette. He has, so he believes, aquitted himself manfully, but at considerable cost to his psychic reserves of equilibrium and wellbeing: he is a man on a knife-edge, balanced precariously between, on the one side, the headlong rush of exotic events, happenings and circumstances, and on the other, the total black emptiness of failure of nerve and lack of resolve. The trouble with being seduced, he has found, is that it’s so seductive.

  The car glides off through the quiescent city taking a tired Vail not, as he thinks, back to his flat, but to a secret destination somewhere south of the river; and the big black chauffeur, hired to protect him, is in fact none other than the leader of a terrorist cell by the name of Fully Olbin.

  The plot thickens.

  When Vail opens his eyes (the ride having lulled him into a gentle doze) he discovers that the car has stopped in a mean littl
e street hemmed in by derelict warehouses. A boat toots nearby, but otherwise all is peaceful and silent as the grave. The tall slablike empty-eyed warehouses shut out the night, rising, so it seems, endlessly into the sky. They, – Vail, Fully Olbin, – might be in a tunnel, or in a groove cut deep into the earth, such is their isolation from the rest of sleeping London.

  ‘What are we doing here?’ Vail naturally wants to know, having expected the flat, a nightcap, and the soft ocean of bed.

  Fully Olbin’s split-melon grin has gone, along with his Uncle Tom patois. ‘There’s a score to be settled, a debt to be paid, Jack,’ he informs Vail in a brisk, matter-of-fact manner. ‘Follow me. Any funny business and I’ll break your toothcaps.’

  Vail sensibly does as he’s told and enters the building behind Fully Olbin, who bolts the door behind them. There is a smell of wet newspaper. They climb umpteen flights of echoing stairs in the darkness and come finally to a long dusty room that takes up the whole of one floor. Fully Olbin leads the way across floorboards worn smooth by generations of porters, warped and soft and dangerously rotten in places, to a meat locker in the corner, the size of a room in itself. He swings open the heavy thick door and gestures Vail inside. Vail enters, feeling something click in his groin, and is confronted by two men, or rather one man and a boy or youth, sitting on packing cases at a table fashioned out of more packing cases. The man is Urban Brown and the boy or youth Vail recognises as the boy or youth from the Sandbach stat who gave him the Temporal in exchange for a favour not yet, he recalls with a sudden sickly feeling, discharged.

  The door thumps solidly shut and Fully Olbin works the long iron handle to seal it. Even the silence outside cannot penetrate. The walls and ceiling consist of dull leaden-looking sheets of metal riveted together as in a ship’s hull. There is a single caged wall light and several rows of metal bars fastened by struts to the ceiling, S-shaped meat hooks with sharpened ends hanging from them.

  ‘Guess what,’ the boy or youth says. ‘I’ve been trying to ring you.’ His grimy torn T-shirt reads: Smash the Blood-Sucking NHS. His hair lies lankly on his shoulders.

  ‘That was you was it?’ Vail says lightly with a grin, hoping to make conversation. He tries not to notice a large area of dried blood on the floor with hair stuck to it. ‘You must be Tex Rivett.’

  ‘Right first time,’ the boy or youth says, grinning with mildewed teeth.

  ‘Sit down, Jack,’ Fully Olbin says.

  ‘After you.’

  ‘No, I’ll stand. You sit.’

  Vail sits. His balls are aching. That damn Virgie Hance had very nearly ripped them off.

  ‘You must have been expecting something like this, Jack,’ says Fully Olbin, stripping off his black gloves to reveal his black hands and large pale fingernails.

  ‘Something like what?’ Vail asks, blinking a little.

  ‘You owe us one, don’t you?’ Fully Olbin says, massive in his chauffeur’s neatly-buttoned grey uniform, gloves clasped in both huge hands at his groin, booted legs straddled apart on the bloodstained floor. ‘Remember?’

  ‘Why yes of course I do. I was just waiting for you to make contact. You know, get in touch. He, – Tex, – said you would sooner or later. Yes you could say I was expecting something like this, yes.’

  ‘We’ve been waiting for the right moment. And this is it. Now we can move. Now that you’re where we wanted you to be, we can act. That’s why we waited, bided our time.’

  ‘I see.’ Vail frowns. ‘Where exactly am I that you wanted me to be?’

  ‘Right where you are, Jack. Rich, famous and successful. You’d be no good to us otherwise, would you?’

  ‘I guess not. What do you mean, ‘good’ to you?’

  ‘I mean in a position to do us some good. You can help us achieve our objective.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘To overthrow the status quo. You know that already. Wayde Dake told you that when he presented the report on Tex, Brown and me.’

  Vail remembers, and the memory niggles at him.

  He says, looking round, ‘So this is what a terrorist cell looks like. I’ve often wondered. Tell me, why meet here, inside a meat locker?’

  ‘Haven’t you noticed, squire?’ Tex Rivett says with his green grin. ‘It’s lead-lined. Get it?’

  ‘No,’ Vail says, shaking his head. ‘Sorry?’

  ‘The signals from that bug you’re carrying can’t transmit from here. They’re blocked. Neat, eh?’

  Vail experiences a shiver of apprehension. But then what, he reasons, would his death achieve? No, they didn’t intend to kill him, because then how could he help them achieve their objective of overthrowing the status quo? Unless his death was an integral part of the plan. But then how would the murder of a media personality do them the ‘good’ that Fully Olbin had spoken of? What ‘good’ could come of that?

  Fully Olbin says, ‘Have you ever heard of the U.M.P.S. Programme?’

  ‘No, I’ve never watched it.’

  ‘You’ve never discussed it in production meetings at Thames with Bryce Ransom and Virgie Hance?’

  ‘No.’

  Fully Olbin unbuttons the front of his tunic and pulls out a large manilla envelope into which he inserts his large black hand and withdraws a sheaf of photographs secured by a metal spring clip. He opens the clip and presents the first photograph for Vail’s inspection. It is captioned U.M.P.S. Programme: Phase One and shows a bulldozer pushing some metal drums into a hole in the ground under floodlights. The driver of the bulldozer is encased in a white polystyrene suit, wears goggles and a mask and rubber gauntlets up to the elbows.

  The second photograph shows the same area in daylight after the bulldozer has filled in the hole and levelled out the ground. Workmen, similarly encased in white protective coveralls, are planting saplings supported by staves driven into the raw tracked earth. In the background, perhaps two hundred metres from the site, is a children’s playground with swings, slide and climbing frame, and beyond that five high-rise flats blocking out the horizon.

  Fully Olbin hands him the next, third, photograph, captioned U.M.P.S. Programme: Phase Two. This shows protective-suited workmen piping liquid from an unmarked grey tanker into a stream. The stream bubbles and froths and yellowish steam rises up through which can be seen a two-storey building with many windows. The next, fourth, photograph is taken from the same vantage point only now the tanker has gone and children are playing in the asphalt yard of the school.

  Another photograph, – U.M.P.S. Programme: Phase Three, – is of a long waiting-room filled to bursting point with upwards of two hundred people. In the foreground a harassed-looking nurse is reading out names from a clipboard, and next to her stands an Indian doctor caught in the act of yawning and rubbing his left eye. The people on the benches are gaunt-faced, haggard, hopelessness exuding from every pore.

  In the next photograph the same Indian doctor is examining a child whose face is blotchily red with raw weeping sores. The child, a girl of about ten, has bare patches where her scalp shows through. Vail passes quickly over this one, hardly bearing to look.

  Without a word Fully Olbin hands him a photograph captioned U.M.P.S. Programme: Phase Four. This one portrays a naked middle-aged woman strapped to a metal table with two laboratory technicians in green gowns and masks leaning over her holding stainless steel instruments: one technician has clamped her mouth open to its fullest extent while the other pokes and probes far down her throat, his hand practically inside her mouth.

  The next photograph is of a similar laboratory scene in which a child of six or seven is fastened upside down to an aluminium frame and a technician is squeezing drops from a syringe into its nostrils.

  When Fully Olbin holds out the next photograph Vail fails to respond. ‘You haven’t seen them all. There’s more.’

  ‘I’ve seen enough.’

  ‘This one shows what happens to the child in the frame when the drops have eaten into the brain tissue, – ’

&nbs
p; ‘I can imagine it, thank you.’ Vail is ashen to the lips and doesn’t feel too well. ‘Is there a purpose behind all this?’

  ‘Behind all what? The U.M.P.S. Programme?’

  ‘No, you showing me these pictures,’ Vail says, handing back the ones he has looked at.

  ‘Not so long ago you resolved to kill somebody and lacked the opportunity. Now you have the opportunity you’ve lost the resolve. We should like to rekindle it.’

  ‘Why did he murder my wife?’ Vail says, pointing his finger at Urban Brown.

  ‘He’s got so used to killing he can’t help himself. He’s a sick man.’

  ‘And yet you expect me to help you, to do you some ‘good’. How can you ask me to do anything at all for you when that man there killed my wife?’ Vail says, weeping. ‘That man sitting there.’

  ‘What do you want me to do?’ Fully Olbin asks gently. ‘Kill him for you in revenge?’

  ‘I don’t know, I don’t know. But he murdered her and you bring me here and ask me to help you.’

  ‘Crazy things happen all the time today, on both sides of the wire. We’re all of us crazy to some degree. It’s not his fault; but I can have him killed if it will make you feel any better.’

  ‘Tell me why I should help you after what he did,’ Vail says, weeping.

  ‘Well.’ Fully Olbin considers for a moment. ‘For one thing, our aims happen to coincide, – or they did coincide until you lost your resolve. For another, you will be revenging the murder of your daughter. And thirdly, though I hate to mention it, it seems so trivial under the circumstances, you still owe us a favour in exchange for the one Tex did you. Without the Temporal you probably wouldn’t have made it past Watford Gap.’

  ‘I made that promise in better days,’ Vail says. ‘I had some hope then. I thought that if I could get to London I could save Bev,’ weeping less now, a tiny cold formation of rage in his stomach making his tears flow less.

  ‘These aren’t better days, I agree,’ Fully Olbin says in a gentle tone of voice. For a big black man he has a very gentle manner. ‘Of course I can’t promise you that they will ever get better. I’m being completely honest with you. And I can’t force you to kill somebody if you don’t want to. But now, or very soon, you will have the Opportunity, and Angie said that given the motivation you wouldn’t hesitate.’