Enchantment Read online

  MONICA DICKENS

  ENCHANTMENT

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  A Note on the Author

  Chapter One

  Stealthily he prowled among the skeleton trees, sickened by the miasma of their hideous parasite growth. On either side, sharp disembodied eyes spied on him through the swaying vapours of the land of the Undead.

  Ahead, the figure of the half-naked temptress beckoned.

  So die, man-eating witch!

  He plunged, because he tripped over a shopping-bag put down by a customer, and the draped display dummy toppled, sarong of splashily flowered acrylic sliding off her hipless form.

  Tim caught her and righted her, and pulled up her shameless sarong just before Mrs Slade turned round from fingering and dithering over the rolls of patterned towelling.

  ‘This one, do you think …?’ She always asked Tim’s advice.

  ‘The fishes? Very nice.’ Tim threw the heavy roll on to the cutting table. ‘Ten metres you said?’

  ‘Did I? I’ve lost the note. I hope …’

  Mrs Slade watched anxiously while Tim measured and cut. Slash! His bold guillotine scissors decided her fate as abruptly as topping her head. Too late to recant.

  ‘Put that Irish towelling away, young Timothy.’ Mr D. coasted through the cutting counters of Fabrics and Soft Furnishings like an upright walrus in the flat waters between lunch and tea. ‘It’s a horrible mess here. Go and get the pins. Gail will have to re-drape that dummy.’

  ‘I stumbled.’

  ‘You weren’t looking what you were doing,’ frog-princess Lilian said.

  ‘Naff off,’ Tim told the low-slung back view of Lilian’s bustling walk.

  As he took aim with the poisoned dart, the sharp little eyes watched him from the rack of dotted muslin curtains.

  Tim Kendall lived in a one-room flat above Brian and Jack’s house, with a tiny kitchen corner and a shower and dwarf toilet, just wide enough to sit down.

  He got off the bus in the wet dark and went over the busy main road, not with the small crowd waiting at the crossing lights, but darting nimbly through the slow rush-hour traffic, caught for a moment in headlights, like a crazed rabbit. Now we shall see. My brown envelope of adventure will be there, on the mat, waiting for me all day. As he hurried the hundred and fifty yards through the cold rain, he wrote an imaginary letter to the Council, telling them to move the bus stop.

  The house stood right on the main road, small garden in front with dark polluted bushes and a slippery tile walk, wide bay window, past which, although the curtains were drawn, Tim crept on rubber soles to get round to his own door.

  He slipped round the corner between the house and the garage, and up the outside wooden stairs with the loose step that Jack was supposed to have mended. On the platform outside his front door, behind which the brown envelope waited, he looked for the key. Panic. His keys were not in his trousers or jacket. He must have left them inside the flat. He would have to go back down and ask Brian to let him in. What would he say? He began to make up excuses.

  Thank God. The keys were on the new ring with the brutish brass and leather tag clipped to his belt loop. When he took off his jacket today in the hot canteen, Gail had said, ‘Why not one mauve earring, while you’re at it, dear?’

  ‘He sneaks up there like a fugitive.’ At the sound of the upstairs door, Cindy looked up from the books on the table. ‘I don’t trust him.’

  ‘Let him alone.’ Brian was getting the fire going.

  ‘Not right, a youngster like that spends so much time alone. I can spot them at the store, you know, the loners, the quiet ones. Do their work and give no trouble, and then one day it’s explosions and trouble all round, and a microphone under my nose: “He was your tenant, I understand. What are your memories of him?”’ It was possible to talk and make notes at the same time. ‘Oh yes, I can spot them.’

  ‘That’s right. You know. You always know.’ Brian sat back and held out his hands to the obedient blaze that was bright but not yet hot.

  ‘And you’ll agree I know one day, when that runty lad comes down and slices us into small pieces. I sometimes think I should warn them about him at the store.’ Cindy was in the Accounts Department at Webster’s department store, where Tim worked.

  ‘Let him alone,’ Brian repeated. ‘He’s better than the last one we had. That scrubby girl. Perhaps you don’t mind Asians in turbans padding up and down the stairs all night.’

  ‘One Asian. One turban. I hate having lodgers. One day I’ll leave.’

  ‘Go ahead!’

  ‘Don’t raise your voice at me.’ Cindy looked up at the ceiling; two floors up, they could hear Tim moving about. ‘No need to let the world know our troubles.’ They sometimes played a game of being a fighting married couple.

  Brian got up. ‘I’ll start supper.’

  ‘Suit yourself. Have a drink if you want.’

  ‘I said, I’ll start supper.’ In the kitchen, Brian poured a drink, put on a plastic apron which said SKIDDAW, with a picture of that blessed mountain, and peeled potatoes cheerfully. He bought the food and planned the meals. Cindy was studying to be a chartered accountant and had to be accommodated.

  When the fish pie was in the oven and the salad made, Brian took two whiskies through to the front-room.

  ‘Poisson pie just about ready. Can I lay the table?’

  ‘Not yet.’ Cindy wrote furiously, stabbing at the paper, head of wavy yellow hair leaning on one hand.

  ‘Finish afterwards.’

  A shrug of the left shoulder.

  ‘God dammit, get those bloody books off my dining-room table!’

  The square right shoulder came up level with the other.

  With a roar, he swept the books to the floor.

  ‘Steady, Brian. I need this table, don’t blame me.’

  ‘Blame you – I’ll kill you! Kill myself! Burn down the house! See a lawyer. Throw out your supper.’

  While he scaled down the threats, Cindy got up and bent to collect the scattered books, and stood holding the pile, one leg and foot stuck out like a dancer with muscular calves, cheerful outdoors face smiling under the tumbling yellow hair, short tight skirt, spiky heels.

  ‘Cross with Cindy, Bri?’

  He laughed. He opened a bottle of wine and they had quite a matey supper. Afterwards, Cindy took a piece of hard-boiled egg out of Brian’s beard, then worked at the table while he washed up and watched a nature programme. Then they went to their rooms and undressed for bed. Cindy was a man called Jack Garner, who dressed as a woman and wore a wig at home.

  As Tim put his key into the lock, he seemed to see through the door with X-ray eyes that IT was there. It was overdue, his adventure game entry, which would have his score at this stage, and the whole tempting set-up for his next move to extricate himself from the loathsome pit of monsters, or the forest of bones, or the clutches of the siren Witch Wey – wherever his last move had led him – in time to scuttle under the portcullis before the spikes fell, and do battle with the armoured Grots that he suspected of having bone-piercing marrow arrows set up in the guardroom.

  He pushed open the door, then pulled it back and opened it again, to give it another chance. There was nothing on the mat. No square brown envelope. Nothing. The heart in him went dead. His lungs lost their elasticity. He stepped heavily on to the fibrous oatmeal carpet of his narrow studio flat a
nd shut the door.

  He changed out of his dark working suit and went to the kitchen end of the room to get a beer. He poured the beer into a pottery mug with a lid that one of his sisters had brought back from Germany. When you pressed the trigger on the handle, the pewter lid, decorated with stags’ horns, did not open farther than straight upwards, which made it hard to quaff from; but it was a satisfying old Norse kind of drinking vessel that spoke of thonged leggings and foam-crested whiskers and rousting about in the Great Hall.

  With the cold lid up against his cheek, Tim took a long pull, which encouraged him to get out a small frozen shepherd’s pie and put it to cook in the little oven-grill on the counter. This was the time when he would have started on his next moves in the play-by-mail adventure game called Domain of the Undead. Tim had chosen the character of Blch, a gallant warlord, disguised as a travelling minstrel and teller of tales, whose mission was to penetrate ever deeper and deeper into the terrible treacherous land where corpses walked among the living, and the dread Captain Necrotic and his skeletal army were to be vanquished, not by brute strength and foolish courage, but only by the gambits of the swift zoetic rapier, which Blch must in the end (it might take months at this rate) discover.

  Tim had stepped into these intriguing fantasy worlds through joining role-playing adventure games with two or three teenagers from the school where Brian was a teacher. They sometimes used to play round the table at Brian’s house at weekends, and Tim, venturing downstairs to borrow a pair of pliers, had managed to infiltrate their game.

  He was really too old for these games, of course, but they spoke to him in a language he could enjoy. He had learned quickly, and he threw himself under the skin of all kinds of bizarre characters, living the exploits and complicated predicaments they created as they went along with even more gusto than the boys.

  That had been part of the trouble. Because he studied the magazines devoted to this fantastic cult, Tim knew how the games should be played, with props like blood splashes and little plastic model mutants, and legendary dialogue to match, which Neil and Gareth and Sean thought was stupid.

  Tim was twenty-three and they were about sixteen. He bought new adventure programmes for them, but they never really let him into their group. When they stopped meeting round Brian’s kitchen table and arranged the games at Sean’s or Gareth’s place (Neil’s mother would not let him bring friends home), they did not invite Tim unless they needed an extra, and so he had taken up games by mail, and sod the boys.

  Dozens of unseen players might be involved in each play-by-mail game. You knew about them through their role names and could send messages to them through the office of C.P. Games, who master-minded each adventure. Even if you always sent in your entry sheets promptly, the C.P. office, or the post office, usually kept you waiting for the next round. C.P. stood for Carrier Pigeon. A real bird might have been quicker. Last month, the postmen had gone in for industrial inaction just when Blch/Tim had found his way into the noxious lair of Putressa the festerwoman and was desperate to know if he had slain her, or rescued the mummy’s child, or escaped with wounds that would not heal.

  Anticipation of the answer added excitement to life, but the higher you let your hopes go, the deeper the let-down, as with most things in life. This evening’s empty rubber mat announced that great expectations brought great disappointments.

  ‘Expect the absolute bottom worst, then whatever you get is a bonus,’ his sister Sarah had said, and she should know.

  Tim opened two packets of crisps. He was very hungry. He was always hungry, but he never put on weight. He turned on the television and watched it for a while without the sound before he turned it off. He could hear Jack and Brian’s voices raised from below. They didn’t half go at each other sometimes, but they seemed to get on all right. One of them shouted and the other laughed. They weren’t homos. Jack had a woman friend at work, and Tim had glimpsed Brian’s girl friend once or twice at the house: no looker, but a great head of bright yellow hair. The men were just friends, who lived in this house together.

  It would be difficult to have to cater to the moods and habits of another man. Tim was better off alone. But he was lonely. His flat was built under the roof of the house, so the side walls sloped to the ceiling, embellished by dormer windows at the front and back, with low wide sills. He sat on the front window-sill and watched the unremitting cars and vans and buses, and the people walking home to the high flats opposite, or taking out dogs, or jogging on the lighted cement paths of the little park.

  If he had a dog … he would have to work only part time, or live with someone, or ask a neighbour to let the dog out. He would walk it in the dog-wrecked park at the side of the flats, wear a track suit, hurl sticks, throw out a matey remark to other people with dogs.

  The telephone rang. He turned round quickly, as if the ring were a tap on the shoulder.

  ‘Yes?’ His sister Val said his phone-answering voice sounded as if he were in hiding. ‘Oh – how are you, Mum?’

  ‘I’m all right.’ She always said that, although she could do almost nothing now without a lot of pain. ‘It’s how are you, I’m wondering about. You never ring us.’

  ‘I haven’t had any news.’

  ‘Who wants news? I get too much of that already. Your father suspects you’ve had your phone cut off. So I’m ringing to prove him wrong.’

  ‘Well done, Mum.’

  ‘And to say I’ve got a lovely ham, so you must come and have a good dinner. Potatoes, corn, cauliflower cheese, sprouts. Bread and butter pudding or treacle tart?’

  ‘Both.’

  ‘Are you working this Saturday?’

  ‘Let’s see, er –’ He had every other Saturday off. This was one of them. ‘Yes, I’m afraid I am.’ In the shopping centre in the maze of red brick streets behind this house, he had bumped into Gareth, buying cigarettes. Gareth’s brief grunts had grudgingly indicated that they might be playing Anarchy II at his house. Might. Might not. It wasn’t exactly an invitation, but he might not get another.

  ‘Supper, then.’ His mother’s voice always sounded so light and hopeful, although she was half crippled with arthritis and married to a man known as Little Hitler to one and all at the Council offices. ‘We’ll have it cold.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The ham.’ She paused. ‘Unless you’ve got something else planned, Tim?’

  Actually I’m going out with this girl.

  It was easy to lie, and pointless. The family either saw through it, or were not impressed anyway.

  ‘No, I’d like to come.’

  ‘Don’t feel you’ve got to.’ She was so undemanding, it killed you. ‘I mean I don’t want you to get like Gwen Ingles. She pops in. It’s awful having to leave the door open, but I can’t get up quick enough to answer the bell.

  ‘“I’m worn out,” Gwen tells Sidney, “but I’d better look in on poor Annie.” And he says, “You never stop, do you Gwen, I don’t know what the neighbourhood would do without you.”’

  Tim laughed, to show he appreciated her imitation of David Ingles mumbling over his jigsaw.

  ‘He hates her secretly, you see.’ His mother’s voice speeded up with relish. She was getting into one of her sagas. ‘He spends five eighths of his day plotting how to get rid of her without being caught. When that case was in the papers last week about the sleeping tablets, he got the idea of keeping Gwen up late, talking and worrying her about money, and then telling her, you see, that he was worried she was having bad nights.’

  ‘Ha ha. Oh, come on, Mum.’ Ever since Tim could remember, her great indulgence had been to weave imaginary stories about people, known or unknown. As a child, he had loved it, much more than his sisters, and had joined in or even started her off.

  ‘See that man in the field, Mum? He’s going to steal milk from the cows.’

  ‘Of course.’ An eager swallow of saliva. ‘Because his wife has left him with all these children and she took the money that was stuffed inside
the sofa cushion …’

  Since he grew up, it had become harder to play her game. He pretended, because it was oxygen and calories to her, especially now that her life was so limited.

  ‘See you Saturday evening, then. Bye, Mum.’

  ‘I love you, son.’

  He turned on his radio to see whether there was a voice he knew, and walked up and down the room with it, like kids did with bigger ones in the street.

  Paces the room, they would say downstairs. Back and forth like a caged lion grieving for its mate.

  He sat down with the radio in his lap, and looked at it dully, while it told him about a play on in London that nobody liked. Thanks for letting me know.

  The radio was much more companionable than television, where the people were in their own world and speaking to the camera, not to you. When you saw people on television, it was obvious you didn’t know them, but voices you heard on the radio, you could make up faces to go with them, and imagine that you knew them.

  He recognized most of the news readers, who greeted him at different times of day. He liked Mary Gordon, the Scottish girl who read news in the evening and sometimes did interviews: ‘If I may just ask you this …’, very gentle, smiling. She would have soft, fleshy arms on either side of the studio microphone, rounded at the elbows.

  Mary Gordon was one of the special people, men and women, that Tim collected to keep him going.

  When his supper was ready at last, he heated a tin of beans – they prevented heart attacks in pigs, he had read – and poured another beer into a glass, because the German mug was too difficult when you were eating, and he was going to start working his way through a Willard Freeman book while he had his meal.

  Willard Freeman was one of his current specials. He wrote brilliant solo adventure game books. This one was set in the fifteenth century, with a lot of antique period detail of clothes and food and weapons and whatever else Willard knew about, which was plenty, to catch you up in the feel of it. The reader played Varth the Vagabond, fighting and tricking his way through plagues and hooded assassins and mad monks and tidal waves and all the rest of it to reach the last secret chamber within a chamber within a chamber at the core of the giant nautilus shell, where snakes with fangs of wolves guarded the shimmering goblet of gold that would save the peasants from starvation.