Mean Spirit

And what is Cindy to do now?

Up in the gallery, Jo, the producer, will be in a panic, on her feet, probably unsure — because she’s quite young for this job — how to stop it.

Now some members of the audience have started a rhythmic slow handclap. This is definitely not in the running order. Cindy does a last, desperate twirl. Kurt is smiling. The shit.

Cindy pauses. Pushes out his chest.

The spotlight encircles him. Cindy backs up and it follows him. He’s standing now in front of his chair.

The crowd whoops. Kurt no longer smiles, no longer has that certainty.

The moment has come. No avoiding it.

The pink suitcase still standing, half in spot, next to Cindy’s empty chair, emits a raucous squawk.

‘Get ’em off, you old tart!’ shrieks Kelvyn Kite.

When Kurt Campbell started the machine for the draw, a number of people, Cindy among them, noticed that his smile was tainted by a pure, black fury.

The winning numbers were six, fifteen, thirty-six, forty-two, forty-three and forty-six.

Kurt did not look at Cindy again, but Cindy could almost see the rage shooting out of him like thick, black arrows.

When the team gathered in the green room for a drink afterwards, Kurt had gone. Jo Shepherd dragged Cindy into a corner. She was white.

‘Christ…!’

‘I’m sorry, Jo.’

‘What the hell happened?’ There were great sweat stains under the arms of Jo’s blouse.

Cindy was calm, but no longer high, no longer living in the moment.

‘I think’, he said, ‘that young Kurt forgot his cue.’

‘He bloody didn’t. He wanted you …’ Jo was near to tears ‘… all fucked up in front of twenty million viewers. I knew it was the wrong thing, I bloody knew it.’

Cindy blinked. ‘I’m sorry, lovely?’

Jo shook her curls. ‘Never mind, you got out of it. You turned the tables. You’re a brilliant man, Cindy, we all thought you were completely under. How did you do that?’

‘Wasn’t me, lovely. Kelvyn, it was.’

Jo was smiling and shuddering at the same time.

‘I’ll tell you what, Cindy — public humiliation on the National Lottery … that guy is never going to forget this. I think you’ve probably made yourself an enemy for life.’

‘Yes.’ Cindy bent down and flipped open the case. ‘I suppose I have.’ He extracted Kelvyn Kite, all beak and feathers and big rolling eyes. ‘There’s unfortunate, isn’t it?’

VII

Most of the night, Grayle had avoided it.

Ersula. The matter of Spirit.

She’d taken down the numbers of two hotels in Stroud, but it was clear Persephone Callard was in no fit state to drive her there and she wouldn’t have a cab calling here for Grayle — there were already too many people who knew the house wasn’t empty.

No way out of this.

Past midnight: she lay on her back, in her sweater, under an eiderdown on the iron-framed, brass-headed bed, in the plain, square Victorian bedroom with its small iron fireplace and a view into the dark woods.

From the next room she heard Persephone Callard snort and then moan in her sleep.

They’d eaten microwaved Marks amp; Spencer’s Chinese food — Callard leaving most of hers — and then drank and talked for over four hours, with a lot of stuff coming out.

But none of it explaining what Callard was hiding from. Either she was playing with Grayle or whatever it was really could only be said to Marcus Bacton.

Fathers. They talked about fathers.

They’d discussed Dr Erlend Underhill, eminent Harvard Professor of American and European History, who had two daughters: Ersula who, in her father’s image, was studious, serious, humourless and an archaeologist, and Grayle, of whose writings Lyndon McAffrey, Deputy City Editor of the New York Courier, had once said, This may be journalism, but not as we know it.

They’d spoken of Stephen Callard, the knighted career diplomat, who had become besotted with a lovely black nurse in Kingston, Jamaica, brought her home to be his wife, have his child and die.

‘So what does your father think about what you do?’ Grayle had asked.

‘What I did.’ Persephone Callard’s eyes were hot but hard in the candlelight.

Grayle had accepted a second weak Scotch, but Callard’s tumbler remained on the mantelpiece, and Grayle kept thinking of what she’d said earlier: When I’m pissed I don’t receive.

‘So how does he feel about it, your father?’

Callard shrugged. ‘I don’t know how he feels now. I haven’t seen him in two years. He’s over seventy, spends most of the time in Italy, studiously avoiding the kind of English newspaper that might contain items about me and … what I did.’

‘He’s embarrassed?’

‘He’s glad I’m rich and going my own way. I don’t think he’s really wanted to have anything to do with me since I turned twelve. I was the only woman who reminded him of my mother at her ripest and also the one woman he couldn’t fuck. Hardly remind him of her now, would I? Look at me!’

‘Why are you doing this to yourself?’

‘Maybe I want to die,’ Callard snapped. ‘Maybe I want to die and find out if there’s any truth at all in the kind of shit I’ve been feeding people for the past fifteen years.’

As always when she lay alone in strange beds, sleep receded like the tide on a long beach, leaving Grayle cold and tense and thinking, Why am I here? On every level of the question.

She knew — because he’d said so several times — that Marcus firmly expected her, at some stage, to leave her rented cottage in the village of St Mary’s, on the border of Herefordshire and Monmouthshire, to take up a real career.

She kept telling herself she wasn’t going to do this, at least until The Vision was making enough money for Marcus to hire another writer and maybe a sub-editor too.

So perhaps she was destined to be there all her life.

There should, of course, be a man. There always used to be a man. And yet she’d been faintly horrified when her old boyfriend, Lucas, the Greenwich Village art-dealer, had written to her saying he’d be over on a buying trip in the spring and maybe they could like get together. Cool, refined, Ferrari-driving Lucas, who talked all night about the need for an inner life and would just hate ever to have time for one.

Lucas, Grayle decided, had his place in history and that era had been covered.

It was hard to find a man with an inner life. Maybe this was what drew her back to Marcus. Not in that way, of course, but Marcus, even though he raged and threw things, was certainly the father she kind of wished she’d had.

Grayle also thought sometimes about Bobby Maiden, the English cop. Who’d died in the hospital after a hit- and-run incident — and then been resuscitated and come out of it different. Events had tied them together. Losing loved ones to the same killer.

It was Bobby — mercifully, not Grayle — who had been there when Ersula’s decaying body came to light.

‘Why do you say it’s shit?’ Grayle had asked eventually, when the candle was burning low in the pewter dish. ‘Why do you think you were feeding people shit?’

And the woman had bowed her head, her tobacco hair falling forward.