Stephen Volk - Whitstable

He gazed out of the filthy window of the bus. The countryside lay under a gauze of grime and dead insects.

On December the sixteenth, he had his last job before Helen died. Recording The Morecambe and Wise Special for transmission on the coming Christmas Day. As scripted, he was required to appear unexpectedly beside Eric and Ernie to complain he hadn’t been paid the five pounds for an earlier show. It was a running gag: quite a good one, he thought. People had enjoyed his “corpsing” when he had guest-starred for the first time playing King Arthur, and it was gratifying that the team had asked him back. Helen had said, go on, it would do him good to play against type. To show there was a side of him that was warm and humorous and bright. The side she knew and loved.

Bring me sunshine…

He had thought he could get through it, and he had. Now, once again, he could hear the audience laughing through the grime and gauze of the world around him.

Bring me sunshine…

Even then, he had known deep down that, while the nation roared with laughter, his wife was at home, dying.

“Cream tea for two, please.” He said it automatically, without thinking. “No, how stupid of me.” He smiled. “I mean a pot of tea for one, and a single scone with jam and clotted cream. If you’d be so very kind.” He placed the plastic menu back behind the tomato sauce bottle. “Thank you, my dear.”

“Thank you.” She finished scribbling on her little pad using a Biro with a feather Sellotaped to it in order to resemble a quill pen.

“Excuse me. I’m terribly sorry. Sue?”

“Yes?”

It hadn’t been hard to find The Pilgrim Tea Room on Burgate after a short meander through Canterbury’s narrow streets. It couldn’t have looked more like a tea room if it had tried, with its dark timbers and white-painted plasterwork overhanging a bulging bow window. If not Elizabethan it had a distinctly Dickensian feel about it. He could imagine Scrooge walking by, muffled against the cold in a heavy snowfall, wishing everybody a Merry Christmas and carol singers holding lanterns on sticks. Not a bad role, Scrooge. He would have made a decent fist of it, he thought, had it ever been offered. Standing outside the restaurant, it struck him The Pilgrim was exactly the kind of emporium he and Helen would have gravitated to on one of their day trips. Exactly the kind of place Helen would have chosen. He had almost felt her arm tighten around his, guiding him in.

“Do you mind if I have a quick word? Whilst it’s not too busy. I don’t want to interrupt your work. It’ll only take a moment, I promise.”

The woman looked confused and a little frightened. As well she might be. He didn’t blame her.

“We’re about to close.”

“It won’t take long, I promise.”

She hesitated. “I’ll put this order in first, if you don’t mind.”

“No, of course, my dear. Please do.”

He watched her glide to the far end of the shop, collecting empty plates and cups on the way. A Kentish Kim Novak dressed in a black ankle-length dress with a pinny over it, her hair pinned up under a frilly bonnet, the sort Victorian kitchen maids used to wear. It was an illusion dissipated somewhat by white plimsolls that had seen better days, and the lipstick. The overall effect was cheap and, combined with the ridiculously Heath Robinson quill, somewhat absurd. But the whole place was grubbily inauthentic, designed to milk the tourists for a quick bob or two. History was merely its gimmick. She returned with a damp cloth in her hand and wiped down the plastic table cloth. He lifted his elbows to give her room for her comprehensive sweeps and lunges.

“I’ve seen your films.” She lifted the duo of sauce bottles out of the way one by one. “You’re Christopher Lee aren’t you?”

He corrected her with consummate politeness, tugging on his white cotton glove.

“No, I’m the other one.”

“Vincent Price?”

He kept his smile to himself. “That’s right.”

He pulled the ash tray towards him and lit one of his cigarettes.

“I’d like to talk to you about Les Gledhill.”

The sweeping actions of her arm were energetic but he detected the tremor of a pause which she quickly attempted to hide. The skin on her face seemed to tighten, betraying a tense irritation. Her former relaxed, if busy, manner was suddenly gone. It was as if he had flipped a switch in one of his Frankenstein laboratories and she suddenly looked ten years older.

“You know what? I don’t want to know about him. I don’t want anything to do with him. He’s a nasty piece of work. A sick, nasty piece of work.” The swirling motions of the damp cloth on the table became violent, as well as repetitive.

“Did you know he’s with another woman now?”

“I hope they’ll be very happy together.”

“She has a boy.”

The woman stopped wiping the table top within an inch of its life and stood up straight. He saw her hand tighten round the dish cloth which she had swapped from one hand to the other. Her knuckles whitened and a few drops of water exuded, hanging like tiny baubles from the joints of her fingers.

“Look, I don’t know why you’re interested in him and I don’t want to know. I don’t even want to remember his name. But I have remembered it, thanks to you.”

She turned away but he shifted quickly onto the nearer chair and caught her hand. The one with the damp rag. He felt its wetness seeping through her fingers to his.

“The boy is called Carl. I’m concerned about him, and I’m concerned about his mother.” He was looking up into her face but her eyes were darting around the room now, afraid that the scene was drawing attention.

“Please. I don’t want this man to ruin any more lives. I want to stop him. Is there anything you can tell me? Anything?”

She looked down into the blueness of his eyes. She pulled away her hand, abruptly, to her side, holding it there, then seemed to realise it was an unkindness that was unnecessary to an old man.

“I wish I knew then what I know now, that’s all.”

“Which is what? Please.”

Her voice remained hard, terse with discomfort and something else swimming vast and unpleasant under the surface.

“He fastens onto vulnerable women. He can spot them. He homes in. He uses them. To get what he wants.”

He knew she’d already said too much and regretted it. Horribly so. Giving the table a last, cursory wipe, she turned on her heel and walked towards the kitchen with her shoulders back, eyes front. A teenage boy with his head haloed in the fur-trimmed hood of a parka sat at one of the other tables with his shoes, laces undone, planted on a chair. She flicked his shoulder with the back of her hand as she passed by, hardly looking at him.

“Feet. Off.”

The youth shot her a fierce look from under a heavy fringe. His mane of dark hair shook as he did so. His nose was long and square with a slight line above the tip from rubbing it too much. His eyebrows had begun to join in the middle. Thick lips, succulent yet dry enough to crack. Slightly crooked teeth. A constellation of pimples on his cheeks, some livid red, others turning yellow with pus. The affliction of the young. Another of God’s little cruelties.

“Mum…” he complained in a sing-songy way under his breath.

Cushing felt an intense chill and imagined someone had opened and closed the door, but they hadn’t.

He looked over at the boy in the parka as the latter played with the sugar dispenser, pouring a measured spoonful onto the table then scooping it, plough-like, with the flat of one hand then the other, prodding it into a perfect square, then making a dot in the centre of the square with the top of his index finger. Then destroying the whole artistic arrangement and starting again. He appeared both to be completely absorbed in the activity and completely bored by it. There was a lazy insouciance in the lad’s countenance, something about his very physicality which bordered on barely-contained rage.