Angelmaker (8 page)

The gramophone is a classic: horn in rich brown mahogany and body in inlaid oak, turntable covered in felt and chased in silver. Even the crank is beautiful. It took him months to repair it. The previous owner had had it stored in a loft full of bats.

He winds it slowly, because even in extremis and excitement you don’t hurry a lady. The needle is old, so he puts in a new one. Then he makes a cup of tea, and reads the sleeve notes. Slim Gaillard. Joe has heard of Slim Gaillard. Tall, arachnodactyl Slim, who drank a bottle of whisky with every show and smoked all night, and could play the piano with his hands upside down. Not, please note, with his hands crossed while he himself lay on the piano stool, but actually inverted, with his knuckles.

He puts the record on the felt, and brings down the needle.

Well, that’s not Slim Gaillard. That much I do know.

A woman’s voice, soft and old and filled with emotion. She is not English. French? Or something more exotic? He isn’t sure.

“I’m so sorry, Daniel.”

A bucket of ice water over his head and down his neck. Hairs on his arms like guilty nightwatchmen, all awake. Impossible, impossible. A dead woman’s voice.
The
dead woman. House of Spork’s very own family ghost, speaking to him. It has to be. Who else would apologise to Daniel Spork by phonograph recording, made in some tiny booth in Selfridges for a few Imperial pennies? Who else would Daniel conceal in this bizarre way, discarding brother Slim and moving the label to this record so that no one would ever know what he had?

Frankie.

“I’m so, so sorry. I could not stay. I have work. It is the greatest thing I have ever done. The most important. It will change the world. The truth, Daniel. I swear it: the truth shall set us free!” Rich, splendid, throaty. An Edith Piaf voice. An Eartha Kitt voice. A voice filled with all the passion and regret of a refugee, and all the certainty of a prophet.

“You must never tell. They will stop me. The thing I must do now … it will uproot so many old and rotted trees, and there are men who have made their houses in them. There are men cut from their wood. All the bows and arrows in the world are made of this, and I will bring it down. I will make us better than we are. We must be better than this!”

Joe waits for her to say “I love you,” but she doesn’t, and the other side of the record is blank, an endless white noise spatter, like rain on old cast-iron guttering.

E
die Banister is feeling like a cow. More, she is conscious of sin. Not in any fleshy way, alas, but in her heart. She has transgressed against Joshua Joseph Spork. She has, in fact, stitched him up like a kipper, albeit for the good of mankind and the betterment of the human race. She persuaded herself that it was not personal. That this was the best way. Now, gazing at the little toy soldier he repaired so deftly, and recalling the stifled disappointment on his face when he saw that that was all she proposed to show him, she feels wicked. She is increasingly certain that some part of her has borne a grudge for longer than J. Joseph Spork has been alive, and has chosen this method to revenge itself. Duty, love, idealism and spite all discharged at once. She contemplates her soul, and finds it wanting.

“Bugger,” she tells Bastion. He looks back at her with rosy-coloured marbles, and snuffles. She believes she detects approbation, even reinforcement in his suffering face, but it could be wind. No doubt she will know shortly if it is.

“Buggery bugger,” she says. She picks up the toy soldier and puts it back in the box without a glance. It’s too late to change horses. The deed is done. The wheels are in motion. Edie Banister, ninety years of age and a stalwart of the established order, has pushed the button on the revolution. She sighs again. It’s so odd to be a supervillain, and at her age, too.

She has to admit privately that she may be mad. Although if so, it is a merciless, clear-sighted sort of madness and not at all what a lady might hope for. She has not lost her marbles or popped her garters, or any of the cosier sorts of madness she has observed in her contemporaries. She has, if anything, gone postal. She tries the expression on for size; it carries a sense of outrage, and fatigue.

Yes. Edie Banister has gone postal. A very British sort of postal which does not involve shouting, but rather a sudden and total reverse of a lifetime’s perceptions. Although in truth, “sudden” is not entirely accurate. It happened by degrees, and actually by choice. She took a correspondence course in postality. She postalled herself up.

“I trusted you all to do the right thing,” she tells fifty years of governments, lined up and sheepish in her mind, “I believed you’d get it right. And you!” she adds, to the electorate, “You lazy, venal, self-deluding … ooh, if you were my children, I’d …” But this brings her up short. None of them is her child. No sons or daughters for Edie Banister. Just Bastion, and the faded love of the one whose trust she has betrayed for half a human life. Betrayed in the name of stability and security. A few decades of calm, she reasoned at the time, and the world would set itself straight.

But somehow it all went wrong instead. The onward march of progress has wandered off down a dark alley and been mugged. The Berlin Wall and Vietnam; the Rwandan Genocide, the Twin Towers, Camp Delta; suicide bombings and global warming; even Vaughn bloody Parry, the little suburban nightmare who lived just around the corner, who killed and killed and no one knew because no one bothered to find out. Edie Banister had given her loyalty to an empty throne. There was no progress. No stability. There was just the question of whether things happened far enough away.

The Parry thing had been the end of her comfortable certainty. It began, according to the broadsheets, in a new allotment patch in some midway town called Redbury. The council had at last untrousered the cash and purchased a stretch of green once part of a railway siding, sold in Thatcher’s time to make apartments and studios for wealthy buyers who never showed up. A vegetable competition was mooted, and organic food for the locality, and a sense of community and all the other things Britain no longer did because finance was cheaper and faster and the housing market made money out of nothing. And then they turned the first spadeful and it was over before
it began. A grinning corpse, wrapped in a tartan blanket, and then another and another, and the burg of Redbury had a serial killer to call its own.

Edie could not help but notice that when Vaughn Parry tortured a prisoner and buried the corpse seven inches down in sandy soil, he was a monster, but when the same thing was done at the behest of her own government in a cellar overseas, that was an unfortunate necessity.

Well, perhaps it was. But if so, the world which made it necessary could go hang.

She had taken for a while to going out every night with Bastion, walking the streets and staring up at the houses and offices of a city she wasn’t sure she knew any longer.
Mad Old Edie and her eyeless dog, side by side in the London fog
. Yes. Mad, in the American sense. And, alone in the vast encyclopedia of “furious of Derbyshire,” Edie Banister had the power to make a difference to everything which was infuriating her. A mysterious difference, whose precise nature she did not understand, but whose originator swore would rock the world and unravel the darkness of a thousand years. A gift of science to a world of horrors.

On a Tuesday evening, with the sound of the BBC World Service (soon to be discontinued) in the background, she got a pen and a piece of paper and wrote down a flow chart of her personal revolution. An item to be acquired, and a man to put it where it must go. These in turn would entail disguises, forgeries … but not so many as that. More a confidence trick, really, than a covert operation. All at arm’s length, of course, because there could be consequences, and because her name might still trigger alarms in places which must remain oblivious just a little longer.

And now, looking at Joe Spork’s business card and stroking her eyeless dog, she thinks about those consequences and feels like a cow. She has webbed the young Spork into a muddle of almighty proportions. It was necessary, if distasteful, and ultimately he will be fine. Once they look at things seriously, they will see he was a patsy.

If they look at things seriously. If they take the time. If they don’t need a scapegoat for the redtops. If they feel generous. And there’s that
word again: “necessary.” A magic word to excuse a multitude of sins, and all it really means is “easier this way than the other.”

The only thing she need do now is sit back and watch, and know that she has discharged her debt and made a difference. There’s no danger of anything really bad happening to him. All the old ghosts are surely laid to rest.

So why, having ascertained weeks back that he would do for item two, has she been dragging him here ever since to work on junk? Getting to know him. Discovering that he’s sweet and a bit lost?

No reason at all.

Except that she is feeling, as already noted, like a cow. Cow, cow, cow.

And to be honest … 
was
it necessary? It may have been. It’s quite possible that he’s the only person around with the skills to do the job right. If he learned from his grandfather. If he paid attention. If there are complications any halfway competent clockworker couldn’t deal with. If, if, if. She is conscious that she has heard these arguments before, in the pusillanimous mouths of modern politicians.

She peers at her reflection in the tabletop, wondering. Joshua Joseph Spork, grandson of the great love of her life, but not, obviously, her own. Evidence of her insufficiency.

Is it possible that she has put him in the line of fire out of spite?

Her reflection won’t look at her.

“Mooo,” says Edie Banister.

So now, having been the bad fairy, she will have to be the good one, too, and keep an eye on him.

And with that decision, she finds herself delighted.
Hah. Hah! Hold onto your hats, gents, and avert your eyes, you rose-petalled ladies in your mopsy, mumsy woollens. Banister is back! And this time she’s leading the charge!

Bastion looks up at her, and slowly staggers to his feet. A moment later, he turns his back on her and growls ferociously, then cranes his head round for her approval.

“Yes, darling,” she says, “you and me against the world.”

Which is when she hears a hiss of indrawn breath, and moves abruptly from jubilant to very, very serious.

She is not alone in her flat.

Edie Banister opens her bedroom door to find three men, the middle one very large, standing in her living room in attitudes suggesting that her arrival has come at an unexpected time. They wear solid shoes and drab, ho-hum clothes. The large one is carrying a hammer, held loosely in his left hand, and his zip-up tracksuit top is bulgy under the left arm. He has a small, ski-jump nose, the product of reconstructive surgery, fatuous on his slab of a face. His wingers are younger. Trainee bastards. Edie switches over to automatic.
Action stations, old cow
, she thinks,
these lads have your end in view. Too late to stop it all from starting
. The deed is done. This last meeting with Joe Spork was for the sake of her conscience, not her devious plan. That was set in motion some days back, oh, yes, and indirectly. This is consequence, not prevention.
But in time to take you out of the picture, sure enough. So
.

She smiles, a dotty old lady smile.

“Oh, goodness,” she says, “but you made me jump. You must be Mr. Big—”—
oh, yes, bloody brilliant, Edie: Mr. Big, because he is big, and so many people have adjectives for family names. Dig yourself out, or fall at the first
—“—landry, from the Council. I’m glad Miss Hampton let you in, I’m terribly sorry to be so late!”
There. Someone else is due here at any moment, and I think you’re them. Best come back later, eh? Finish me off in the quiet time
.

The newly-christened Mr. Biglandry hesitates. Edie steps brightly towards him, hand out, and he moves his body to suggest he may take it. Edie has no intention of touching him, oh, no,
not and get a hug from a lad with shoulders so broad. Though in our younger days, we might have enjoyed climbing a mountain like that, mightn’t we? Oh, yes, indeed
. “Oh, where are my manners?” She takes her hand away. The junior bastards are spreading out to block her escape.
I must just get some milk, darlings, to make you tea, all right? Hah! They’d snap me in two. Softly, softly, old cow. You’ve a long way to go and a short time to get there. Objective: escape. Nothing else. So
. “I’ll put the kettle on, shall I, and would you mind moving the furniture? I’m too old, I’m afraid, I did try, but the flesh is weak. Not like yours, Mr. Biglandry. And who are these?”