Twenty-Four Hours Page 3

  “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

  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.

  Ellis started the car, wishing that Leona, rather than Ursa, were sitting beside him. Before he could stop himself, he was imagining light shifting on her rounded knees, outlining them in the darkness that lurked below the glovebox of his mother’s car.

  “You know,” said Ursa, half-turning to glare at Jackie, “I was having a really nice time. Not wonderful! Not thrilling! Just nice! Instead of sitting around with a lot of screwed-up no-hopers, I was in a beautiful place with a beautiful garden, and I was enjoying talking to Christo and drinking champagne.”

  “Some champagne!” said Jackie scornfully. “Made right here in New Zealand.”

  “It did well in a competition in France,” said Ursa. “It came first – or almost first.”

  “Second, say,” Jackie suggested. “Or third!”

  “Don’t sit in the back, cuddling the bottle. You look disgusting,” said Ursa. “And don’t try to make out you’ve got taste of any kind,” she added. “You’d cuddle up to cat’s piss as long as it was free.”

  “You bet I would,” Jackie agreed. “Cat’s piss has a delicate, crisp acidity, shot through with suggestions of grubby earthiness, the flavour of gooseberries mixed with a tang of acetone. It has a chunky chewiness to it which …”

  But Ursa raised her voice and talked over him. “And don’t think you can joke your way out of this, Jackie. You purposefully set out to ruin things for me. You just hate to think I might drift away from the Land-of-Smiles, don’t you?”

  Ellis, having driven between the chestnut trees, was turning out on to the road once more.

  “Forget it, Ursie,” said Leona’s soft voice. “You’ll say something awful – something you’ll be sorry for. Or he will!”

  “I don’t need him acting like a sort of Big Daddy,” Ursa cried impatiently.

  “Well, I promise not to act like yours, anyway,” said Jackie, and Ellis could hear a sudden ferocious nudge in his voice – a peculiar emphasis twisting the ordinary words.

  There was a sudden silence – a silence far more violent than the argument had been. Something had been said which changed the whole nature of the quarrel … something unforgivable.

  Ellis longed to check out their expressions, but dared not take his eyes from the road. The car seemed to speed up, almost independently of his foot on the accelerator. Signs announcing that the motorway was a mere kilometre away, rushed towards them.

  “OK,” commanded Ursa in an icy voice. “Stop the car! Stop right now!”

  “Oh, no!” cried Leona. “He didn’t mean it, Ursie. You know he can’t resist a smart answer.”

  “Stop!” yelled Ursa so fiercely that Ellis braked sharply and Leona fell silent. “I want to say something to that … thing in the back, and it’s not safe to say it in a moving car.”

  Ellis brought the car to a graceful standstill. Ursa turned under the strap of her seatbelt and stared at Jackie – slumped behind her, eating – insolently eating – a sausage stolen from the barbecue.

  “Get out!” Ursa said.

  “What?” said Jackie, surprised at last, looking at her obliquely across the half-eaten sausage.

  “Ursie!” groaned Leona. “It’s only making it worse.”

  “Ursie! Ursie! Don’t make it worse-ie!” sang Jackie mockingly.

  Ursa ignored her sister. “Get out of this car,” she repeated. “I don’t want to breathe the same air as you.”

  “You’re going to dump me on the side of the road?” Jackie cried, sitting bolt upright, and making his voice deliberately pathetic. “How am I going to get home?” His voice was thickening a little. Words ran into one another. “And I’m beginning to get drunk, too,” he added accusingly, as if it were Ursa’s fault.

  “Walk!” she commanded.

  “You mean, ‘skate’!” said Jackie. “I’ve got my skates and …”

  “OK! Skate, mate!” she said. She opened her own door. “Because if you don’t get out, I will.”

  “Yeah, but maybe you’ve made some arrangement with Chris – oh, sorry! I should have said ‘Christ’, since that’s who he thinks he is,” Jackie said, making a rude gesture with the sausage. “Maybe he’ll come along in that new red car and …”

  “Are you scared?” asked Ursa scornfully. “Frightened he’ll run you down?”

  “He just might,” said Jackie. “He was the official school bully … got a cup for it at the end-of-school break-up, didn’t he, Ellis? A silver cup with handles and …”

  “He could be a bit rough,” agreed Ellis.

  “Get out!” said Ursa to Jackie.

  “Oh, Ursa, leave him alone,” cried Leona. “He said what he said. You can’t change anything.”

  “Look, I can’t just dump Jackie,” Ellis cut in, protesting.

  “Then dump me,” Ursa cried. She opened her door and pushed one foot out into the darkness.

  “No!” yelled Jackie. “No! I don’t care. Take her home, Ellis. I’ll skate. I’ll hitch. I’ll probably get there before you.”

  Ursa slammed her door shut.

  “Get where?” asked Ellis.

  “She’ll tell you where,” said Jackie. “She’s good at laying down the law.”

  A back door slammed. Then Ursa opened her door again. Ellis thought that perhaps she had relented. But she was only throwing the roller blades out after Jackie.

  “Drive!” said Ursa. “Please,” she added.

  “What did he say that was so bad?” Ellis asked.

  “Oh, it’s a long story,” Ursa replied. “He’s sorry now, but that’s not enough. I want him to suffer.”

  As the car moved off, Ellis saw through the back window Jackie’s shape, picked out in the red glow of the tail light, apparently giving a thumbs-up sign with one hand, and hoisting the bottle with the other …

  “He’s drunk a lot,” Ellis said doubtfully. “He might flake out.”

  “I hope he does,” said Ursa. “It’s not as if I give a stuff about Christopher Kilmer. I know he’s a bit of a creep – sorry, if he’s a friend of yours – but …”

  “He isn’t a friend,” said Ellis shortly.

  “It’s as if I’m being punished for wanting to have a good time,” Ursa complained. “I need it, too. Anyone needs a good time if their computer’s just been stolen, which mine was, last night.”

  Ellis found he was beginning to remember Ursa vaguely from the days before he went to St Conan’s. In his head, a past version had begun flicking on and off like an inconstant ghost – shorter and fatter than she was now, and wearing glasses which had black tape wrapped around one of the arms. She had been a loud girl, he now remembered, always talking – the skirt of her school uniform hitched up over her belt so that it looked much shorter than the regulation length. She must have been wondering about him, too.

  “I thought I knew everyone Jackie knew,” she said, turning her powerful gaze
towards him.

  “I’ve been out of town. Studying.” Ellis quickly added. He did not want Leona to know that only yesterday he had been at school.

  “Studying what?” Ursa asked.

  “General stuff,” said Ellis. He was irritated by her sceptical voice. “What about you?” he asked, glad to hear himself sounding mildly aggressive.

  “Law!” she replied absently, but not as if she were really interested in letting him know. “Law and philosophy. I need the philosophy right this minute, and I’ll need the law a little later on.”

  8.10 pm – Friday

  Ellis, doing what he was told to do, left the motorway on a different road from the one by which he had entered. He found himself driving past lawns and letterboxes and deserted shopping centres, one of a number of cars that seemed uncertain quite where they wanted to go. Ellis recognised the names of suburbs without knowing exactly where he was in the changing city.

  “Right at these lights!” commanded Ursa. “Straight on for a couple of blocks, then right again.” Ellis turned obediently into a wide avenue, lined on either side with well-established plane trees, and became part of a continuous line of cars. They were back in the centre of the city. He knew where he was. He would be home in half an hour.

  Yet, just as he was relaxing and beginning to feel in charge of life once more, the city gave him an unexpected jolt which, almost at once, changed into the feeling that what he was seeing had first come out of his own head. Houses on the left gave way to a floodlit slope of neatly-cut grass; oaks framed a chaste, white building. It was gently lit and glowed in the summer twilight. Dommett & Christie said a notice; cool, plain, discreet, but clearly visible. Integrity Funerals. It seemed he could not escape – might never escape – from Simon’s ironic smile, for Dommett & Christie had organised Simon’s funeral. After his death, Simon’s body had been taken to this white building, and someone somewhere in there had given him a final, enigmatic expression.

  Ellis had not realised just how changeable Simon’s living expression had been until, in the chapel at the crematorium, he found himself face to face with a stillness fixed for ever by the skill of an undertaker … the suggestion of a smile about to begin but never quite managing it. Had there possibly been just a little smugness about that last expression? It was almost as if, in some dead way, Simon knew he had finally up-staged Ellis – had pulled off an act that could never be surpassed. As he thought this Ellis’s hands tightened on the wheel, while his own voice repeated in his head: