Twenty-Four Hours

“Doing here?” repeated Jackie, frowning. “Big question. But what are any of us doing here, if it comes to that? I reckon it’s pretty random myself. What’s that word you were going on about the other day?” he asked, turning to Ursa. “Not telepathy, but like telepathy. It was to do with design or something … that things keep happening because of what’s meant to happen.”

“Teleology,” said Ursa. Ellis thought he could hear her first anger laced with some other mood as Jackie ran on and on, shaking his head in wonder. She was recognising something in Jackie and was unwillingly entertained by it. “Leave it alone, Jackie! Bug off!” she muttered.

“Nobody wants you here,” said Christo, provoked exactly as Jackie intended him to be provoked. He turned to Ellis. “Why the hell are you hanging out with this shit?”

Ellis looked directly at Christo for the first time.

Many years ago, before Ellis could swim properly, Christo and his sister, Sophie, had pushed him into a deep pool down among the willows, and had watched him gasping and choking, struggling and sinking, with chilly interest, pushing him under again and again with their bare feet, only pulling him out at what might have been his very last minute. They had then threatened him with terrible pain if he told either his parents or theirs. They also told him that they had drowned kittens and puppies in that very pool. Ellis found that he still hated Christo, with hatred as fresh and tender as if it had just been born in him. Watching Jackie dance around Christo, as he himself had never been able to do, filled him with hot pleasure.

“I just dropped in to say ‘Hi’” he said, his voice as innocent as Jackie’s. “And then your mum invited us to stay.” He sensed Jackie turn to him as if they were practised crosstalk comedians putting on a show they had rehearsed over and over again.

“Your mum clapped eyes on us and knew we were the right stuff,” Jackie said to Christo, but then he began filling his beer glass from the bottle of red wine. Ellis watched the level rise with incredulity. “She invited us to eat and drink all we could.”

“Well, I’m inviting you to get out,” said Christo. “I suppose Ellis can stay if he wants to,” he said, emphasising Ellis’s name with casual contempt. “But not you! Get out before I sling you out.”

The girl made a sudden sharp move and Jackie, holding the mug of red wine in front of him, gave an odd, gasping laugh.

“You and whose army, mate?” he asked smiling down into the wine. “You and whose army?” He looked up, and Ellis found Jackie had suddenly become alarming, though all he had done was to widen his eyes a little and fasten them intently on Christo.

Christo, who had stepped forward confidently, hesitated.

“Oh, no!” cried Ursa Hammond sharply. She glanced first at Jackie’s bare feet and then at Ellis. “You’ve got a car? You must have.”

“Back in the drive,” Ellis admitted.

“Just go and stand beside it and wait for me,” she said. “My sister’s here too. I’ll find her and we’ll be with you in a moment. You go with him,” she added, looking briefly at Jackie.

“Jesus! You don’t have to go,” exclaimed Christo, sounding desperate. “For God’s sake, Ursie … you’re a guest. Invited! Do you think I can’t cope with this deadbeat? I can easily manage him. I’ve done it a thousand times.”

“Managed me?” said Jackie vaguely. He bunched his right-hand fingers together, and tapped them against the centre of his forehead, frowning. “Was that at school? Wish I could remember! Brain damage, maybe.”

A few, nearby party-goers, catching on to an interesting argument, were watching curiously. Ellis gave them a placating smile, trying to suggest it was all good fun.

Jackie now drank half the mug of wine without a moment’s hesitation. He smiled and wiped his hand across his mouth. “A superior little wine,” he said. “A lovely voluptuous grape!”

“Christo, I’m sorry,” Ursa was saying as she moved away “But just look around you. Everyone’s being so civilised … and it’s nearly Christmas. What’ll your parents think if you suddenly have a punch-up at their party?”

“They’ll blame me,” said Christo. “They’re a couple of selfish shits, and they always blame me.”

“Oh no! They’ll blame me,” said Ursa. “They might even blame Leo! No, thanks!”

And she began to hurry towards the steps that led to the upper lawn. Forgetting Jackie, Christo set off after her, almost leaping beside her, apparently trying to argue her into staying. Ellis had never seen Christo so desperate – so vulnerable – before.

“I hate that bastard,” said Jackie cheerfully. He drank the rest of the red wine as if it were orange juice. “He’s suffering though, isn’t he? Good!”

“Be fair: his parents, his party!” said Ellis lightly, doing his best to sound like a disinterested watcher making a point. “What’s-her-name – Ursa – is she your girl or something?”

“She’s something,” said Jackie. “Not a girlfriend! Not as such! But she’s not going to be his, either.”

“So what’s the story, since you’re writing the plot?” asked Ellis.

“Ursie’s gone to find her sister. You race over and curtsey to the hostess. Do you think she’ll mind me walking out with a few nutritious scraps and a bottle of wine?”

Ellis looked around. He saw meat cooling beside the barbecue, and other bottles of wine half-empty and already looking abandoned. Jackie, sighing deeply and shaking his head like a man being forced to violate his own better judgement, poured one half-bottle of wine into another.

“Red and white makes pink,” he said. “I love bad taste. Love it!” Then he jammed a cork into the neck of the bottle and slid it into one of his deep pockets.

“Innocent grapes died so we could have this wine,” he went on. “They were crushed, mashed to pulp. Anyhow, when I was a kid I had to eat everything put in front of me.”

Ellis set off, crossing first one lawn, then climbing the stone steps on to the other, Jackie bounding beside him. They went back round the house, past the garage and waited, side by side, in the soft darkness under the chestnut trees.

“What’s it all about, anyway?” asked Ellis.

But Jackie did not answer. It was too dim in the shadow of the chestnuts to make out his precise expression, but somehow Ellis believed it would be both sinister and sad. At some time in the past, he suddenly knew for certain, Jackie had also suffered at the unkind, confident hands of Christo Kilmer.

“I can’t stand him, either,” he said.

“No one can,” said Jackie. “It’s starting to drive him round the bend. But, hey – that’s the right place for him. He’ll meet himself coming the other way.”

They waited, while the sound of voices rose from beyond the brick angles of the house, and the smell of the barbecue settled insistently around them. One voice suddenly sounded closer than the others. Ellis looked sideways down the drive towards the house. Quite unprepared for what was about to happen to him, he was overwhelmed by a vision.

Passing through the moving patches of light that shifted uneasily in the curving drive was a girl he knew he was seeing for the first time in his life. All the same, it now seemed to Ellis that for months – maybe even years – he had been expecting to see this very girl, moving from darkness into light and then back into darkness again, as she came towards him, her hair flaring, then fading, brightening sharply, before growing shadowy once again. She was wearing a very short skirt. Her legs were exquisite. They swept her towards him, and she spoke as she came, but not to Ellis.

“Oh, Jackie! Ursie says you’re ruining things for us.”

“Gee, she’s bright!” said Jackie. “It must be all that law she studies.”

“She’s not keen on Christo, if that’s what you’re afraid of,” the girl said. “She just wanted to go to a big party.” Her voice was soft, a little plaintive perhaps, but also amused.

“But life’s a continual big party back in the Land-of-Smiles!” said Jackie, talking, Ellis supposed, the sort of nonsense well-understood between friends. He and Simon had once had a private nonsense language which excluded everyone else. Come to think of it, that private language was one of the things Ellis missed most – now that Simon was dead.

“It’s nothing but parties in the Land-of-Smiles,” Jackie persisted.

“Not big parties like this one,” the girl replied. “Our parties are all scruffy and disgusting.”

“No such thing as a scruffy undertaker,” said Jackie, indulging once again in the language of private reference. He turned suddenly. “Ellis, this is Leo Hammond. Leona! Leona the Lion! Leo, this is Ellis. OK?”

Then Ursa was coming down the drive towards them, almost jogging, with Christo still skirmishing around her, arguing and gesticulating on one side, then leaping to the other, as if hearing his arguments with a different ear, might make her change her mind. When he saw Ellis and Jackie watching him, he grabbed Ursa’s arm, forcing her to stop. Then they kissed – or perhaps he kissed her. It was hard to be sure.

“Bor-ing!” said Jackie, yawning. But for all that, he suddenly sounded, not angry, exactly, but certainly petulant.

7.30 pm – Friday (#ulink_2e97411c-0b4d-551b-9731-19763429f5b9)

Ursa climbed into the passenger seat beside Ellis and sat there in silence. Jackie opened the back door and slid in to recline gracefully along most of the back seat. Leona followed him. It was Ellis’s car, but he felt as if he did not exist for any of them except as a sort of driving ghost. All space in the car was taken over by the argument between Jackie and the angular Ursa, even though, in the beginning, the argument was conducted in silence.

“Shift over!” Leona said. “You’re such a pain, Jackie.”

“Home, James!” Jackie called triumphantly, pointing across Ellis’s shoulder.