Ruth Rendell - The Bridesmaid

There was a Demon Dynamo in here. There were a Space Stormer and a Hot Hurricane and an Apocalypse and a Gorilla Guerilla. He passed along the aisles, looking at the machines and at the faces of those who stood and played them, their expressions either still and enclosed or ardently concentrated. At a machine called Chariots of Fire, a thin pale boy with a felt-head haircut succeeded in aligning a row of Olympic torches and the coins came cascading out. He looked very young but he must be over eighteen. Philip had read somewhere that these places were forbidden to under-eighteens, it was a new law, only recently passed. Did they think you magically became wise and mature with your eighteenth birthday?

The boy’s face registered nothing. Philip was the son of a gambler, so he didn’t expect the boy to pocket his winnings and leave. He saw him move on to the Space Stormer.

Cheryl wasn’t there, but he knew now where he would find her.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

At the cafe table she sat opposite him, bribed to be there by the five pounds he had promised her if she came with him and talked. For a while he was withholding it. He wondered when she had last washed her hair—washed herself, come to that. Her fingernails were dirty. When he looked at her right hand, with a cheap silver ring loose on the middle finger, he could only imagine that hand eternally pulling away at the handle on a fruit machine, as mechanically as the hand that pumps equipment in a factory, but without that operator’s indifference. Her face was lined, as only a young person’s can be, with grooves and furrows that make it look not old but only very, very tired.

He had found her at last in an amusement arcade in Tottenham Court Road, having searched in similar places the length of Oxford Street. There he watched her lose the last of her money and turn with what must have become an automatic reflex to try borrowing from the man at the next machine. Philip saw her take the refusal. The man didn’t so much as look at her. He kept staring at the rows of fruit or whatever it was with the concentration of someone taking an eye test. The repeated shaking of his head he finally accompanied with a wave of his free hand in Cheryl’s direction, a pushing away gesture. Scarlet and gold lights, both steady and flickering, the dark depths of the place illuminated with points and spots and glowing furnaces of light, gave to the arcade the look of a stage inferno.

The worst thing was that Cheryl showed no surprise on seeing him. It was as if she were beyond surprise. He could tell in that moment, before he had received any verbal explanation, that all her emotion was now centred upon these machines and what they afforded her, principally upon acquiring more with which to feed them. And, coming up on him, she held out her hand and asked for money. She neither spoke his name nor said hallo, but directly demanded from him in a voice so breathless and intense as to sound deranged, a pound coin or even fifty pee. This was the way a famine victim might ask for food. Next she would be clutching at his clothes.

He said, “Come on, we’re going to have a coffee.”

“Just let me have a pound—or two would be better—and then I’ll come. Give me ten minutes.”

“Now,” he said. “I’m not giving you anything till we’ve talked.”

A look that frightened him came into her pinched face, it was so greedy and so trapped. “Will you give it to me then?”

“I’ll give you a fiver,” he said, feeling sick.

So they had come in here and she had told him how it began.

“You mean it sort of brought you closer to Dad?”

It was difficult getting anything out of her because she was so obviously indifferent, now that he had discovered this secret addiction of hers, as to what more he found out or what he thought. She spoke with a kind of bored reluctance. She had tasted her coffee and pushed it away, affectedly shuddering.

“He was dead. Nothing could bring me closer. It made me feel like him. I suppose you could say that. Or maybe it’s in the blood, maybe I inherited it.”

“You can’t inherit a thing like that.”

“How would you know? Are you a doctor?”

“How long have you been doing it? Ever since he died?” She nodded, making an ugly bored face, but she was restless, picking up the coffee spoon now, tapping the rim of the saucer with it. “What got you into it in the first place?”

“I was walking by. I was thinking about Dad. Not any of you seemed to care about him dying the way I did. Not even Mum. I was walking by and thinking of him. I was thinking of a night we all came back from a holiday somewhere. We were on the ferry and he played the fruit machine, and every time he won, he gave me the money and let me have a go. The boat wasn’t crowded and you were all somewhere eating and there was just Dad and me alone and it was night and stars were shining. I don’t know how I remember that, because it can’t have been up on deck, can it? It was magic the way Dad kept winning and the money just rolling out. I was thinking of that and I thought, Well, I’ll go in and have a go—why not?”

“And you got hooked?” said Philip.

“I’m not hooked. It’s not a drug.” For the first time there was animation in her face. She looked indignant. “There was a guy in there just now said to me I was hooked. ‘You’re an addict,’ he said, like I was injecting something. I’ve never done that. I’ve never used smack. I’ve never even smoked. What’s with people that they think you’re hooked because you like something?”

“You steal for it, don’t you? It’s a habit you steal to keep on with.”

“I like it, Phil. Can’t you understand? I like doing it more than anything in the world. You could call it a hobby. Like Darren is with his sport. You don’t call him an addict. It’s an interest , like you’re supposed to have. People play snooker, don’t they, and—and golf and cards and things, you don’t say they’re hooked.”

He said steadily, “It isn’t like those things. You can’t stop.”

“I don’t want to stop. Why should I? I’d be all right, I wouldn’t have a problem, if only I’d got money. It’s not having money that’s my problem, not the machines.” She laid down the spoon. She pushed her hand across the table, turned it palm upwards, and stretched it out to him. “You said you’d give me five pounds.”

He took the note out of his wallet and gave it to her. It was horrible. He didn’t want to make a ceremony out of this, seeming to pass it over quickly as food to the starving, or at the end of a slow calculated cautionary process the way some people tease a dog with a biscuit, offering it and snatching it away. But as he produced the note, as casually as if he were repaying a loan, she grabbed it from him. She drew in her breath and compressed her lips. The note was held tight in her hand, not put away. She wouldn’t keep it long enough to make that worthwhile.

When she had gone, was lost in there among the machines with their glittering improbable names, he went back to the car which he had left in a side street. It was a little after ten-thirty and dark. The interview with Cheryl had displaced the area of his anxieties. His mind was full of Cheryl and her desperate defence. He thought, She will be driven to steal again, she probably already is stealing, and she will be caught and she’ll go to prison. The selfish, self-preserving ego inside him said that might be the best possible thing that could happen to her. In prison they might give her treatment, they might help her. Her brother knew that this way she would be lost. I must do something, he thought, I must.

The postponement of his return to Senta he now saw must end. There was no putting it off. She would already be afraid, anxious, wondering what had happened to him. As he drove, he began formulating ways of telling her they must part. If the police had discovered anything, he would have been obliged to stay with her, but strangely, they knew nothing. It must be that no witness had come to them, no one had spoken to them of a girl with blood on her clothes or a girl in an empty train on a Sunday morning. It is because she was unconnected with Myerson, he thought. This was the murder of a stranger by a stranger, the kind that is the hardest to solve, the kind that has no reason behind it and no motive.