Authors: Jonathan Gash
Geoffrey heard from Mr Maddy that Kylee hadn’t reported in. When Bray rang, Geoff told him it was too serious.
“She’s a minor, Dad. The police’ll become involved. Then what?” Geoff had a right to be distraught.
“Mr Maddy won’t want his firm involved —”
“Dad. Listen. After everything that’s happened to us, we can’t take any more. Shirley’s on the brink of recovery, though God knows how much longer it’ll take.”
“Bear with me, son.”
“Let
me
tell
you
what
I
think. This work you’re doing with Kylee, whatever it is, is frankly unhealthy. I want you out of it. She must go back to the authorities. They’re equipped to handle these things. God Almighty, Dad, she isn’t
normal
. Semi-autistics aren’t your job.”
“I made it all right with her father —”
“It’s not all right, Dad!” Geoffrey’s voice rose. Bray knew there’d be no dissuading him. “I won’t have police knocking at my door, never again! I went to the Tech College on Sheepen Road to see Mr Walsingham. He’s given up on the girl. She’s nothing but trouble. He said as much!”
“Tell you what, son.” Bray thought quickly. When all else failed, settle for the best good lie. “If I hear from her – any time at all – I’ll phone Kylee’s father. I’ll talk her into telling Mr Catchpole where she’s staying. That lad, Porky, remember Porky? They reach her through him. You keep in touch with Mr Maddy, Geoff,” he added recklessly, hoping that offspring didn’t know their parents quite as well as they thought.
“What good will that do?”
“She might call in for something.” Almost delirious at the risks he was taking, Bray ploughed on. “I agree. Time for authorities to take over.”
“I’m glad you see it my way, Dad. I can’t keep up this deception any longer.”
“Okay, Geoff. Let me take over. I’ll get Lottie to phone you. She’s sound as a bell. She’ll know what to do.”
Lottie, seated opposite on the sofa, rolled her eyes. She was checking the map of the USA.
“It’s not been sensible, Dad,” his son said, dispirited. Bray’s hopes rose. Was he going to get away with it? “I know she must have been a help over Gilson Mather’s history. And Lottie is a godsend. But this child’s a loose cannon that can sink our family ship, careering about the decks.”
Thank you, Geoffrey, for explaining the metaphor in full. Time to break off when a chat got this far.
“Lottie’ll handle it. She’s just gone to check the next venue after Dallas-Fort Worth. Don’t worry.”
Geoff sounded relieved. “Ring if I can do anything, Dad.”
“Right. Love to Shirley.” Bray replaced the receiver, shielding his eyes from Lottie’s glare.
“I’ll do
what
?” She laid the map aside.
“Everything. I knew you’d make the offer.”
He didn’t make jokes, so she smiled along. She reminded him of the time. Bray was due at a massive question-answer session. Kylee’s second set of answers were all in except for a trickle. The next question was due, with its shoals of guesses.
“Have your shower, Bray. You just have time.”
“My name is Stefan,” the blonde giant laughed, tapping his chest. “I am guard, right?”
Laura was his wife. They had both worked for the police, and ran a security agency. Pop insisted on back-up, a different couple from a separate team.
“You will be careful?” Mom said for the umpteenth time.
“Sure will, lady,” Stefan promised.
To him it seemed crazy. The mother was coming with them to the regatta, so what could go wrong? Stef gave Laura the sign that meant make a show of security so tight it was stupid.
“We’ll stay together,” Mom insisted.
“Sure will. You coming too, sir?”
“No,” Pop said. “I’ve work to do. Just make sure my boy enjoys the show.”
Clint was looking forward to this. Boats would do a kind of parade. Some schools would have boats of their own. Some would have sails. He’d seen pictures.
Pop said they could go, if Mom and Clint took special people to make sure they found the best place to see from. Clint was really glad when the big blond man arrived with his blonde lady and said they’d all stick together in the crowd.
So they went, and it was exciting. Stef told Clint they
did it every year.
“They’re not supposed to race,” he said. He’d put a string on Clint’s wrist like Clint was a baby. “Some schools get kinda carried away.”
“And get in trouble!” Laura added. “Last year somebody fell in.”
“Keep this in your pocket, Clint.”
Stef the guard put a black thing inside Clint’s clothes. He did it, like Clint didn’t know how. It was yuk, with other kids wondering which school he was from.
“Just a small precaution, honey,” Laura said, winking at Mom.
Mom was relieved. She had no idea where the second security couple, a man and a woman, were. Pop had engaged them so they’d be there, earning their money. Electronic tags were excellent where wicked people could linger. People these days did anything for money. Pop and she knew how important it was to protect a child, unlike some parents.
Kids talked to Clint. Stef and Laura stood close. Stef had a walkie, its red light glowing. Laura’s eyes never left Clint. She stood against him. Love for her boy filled Mom. Clint, her son, was reality. All else was sham.
The boats began their approach. Cries arose amid laughter as one boat, oars splashing, pulled ahead. Cheers rose, school chants. Other rowing boats also began to race, oars clashing as the crews strove to get ahead. Two boats collided. Spectators yelled advice.
“It’s so funny, Mom!”
“Always happens, Clint,” Stef said, as amused as the rest.
The instant the parade was over Clint asked could he use the rest room. Laura and Stef said there’d be no worry,
they’d be right there.
Stef checked the toilet areas. Laura stood outside the door while Stef went in with Clint. They emerged a few moments later.
“Can I call my friend?” Clint asked Laura. Mom was beyond the foyer crowd. “From school. We’re pals. I haven’t called him since I left.”
“Whyn’t you call him from home?”
“Didn’t think Mom’d let me.”
Laura was amused, making coy guesses. “Is it a
girl
friend?”
“I can get the number. But I need the money.”
Stef Kirstgaard laughed. “Go on, let the kid.”
Laura gave Clint her call card. “You know how to use this, honey? No wrong numbers, now!”
Clint didn’t know why they laughed, like it was some joke.
He found the call box, got Carlson’s number. Carlson’s mom answered, which was scary, but Clint said he only wanted to say bye. She said wasn’t Clint sweet and put Carlson on.
“It’s me,” Clint said. “We’ve gone away.”
“Yeah. Your mom called my mom.”
“I won’t be back for a couple of weeks. That means —”
“You can’t guess us the answers.” Carlson was disgusted. “For the prize.”
Mom’s head was showing among the people by the foyer entrance. “Get your brother to send it in like you did from camp.”
“Right! Give a guess, then.”
“I don’t know the question,” Clint said, desperate.
“It’s been on twice,” Carlson grumbled, but told him anyway.
Clint closed his eyes and saw sawdust. “Put sawdust.”
Carlson said it was a stupid answer and he’d feel a nerd.
Clint said, “Sure as sure.”
He said bye and got Laura’s card back. They all went for a burger in a nice place where Clint was allowed to eat anything he wanted. He liked Laura and Stef. He didn’t like the other two, the ones who stayed silent who kept staring at him. They were police like Laura and Stef, but not as nice.
Maybe Carlson and Leeta and Melanaya and Elgin would win the million bucks. He’d helped them, like they’d asked.
Another morning in paradise.
Bray was only half awake. He could feel Lottie’s breathing. They had long since given up the pretence of separation.
He rose. Women got out of bed so neatly. A man unfolded in stages, legs do this, spine does that, then the shove upwards. He clicked the tea on.
The curtains drew back on Phoenix, Arizona. From here his third question would emerge. A few moments’ typing, a single tap on a keyboard, and Kylee would transmit it to the TV company. Out it would go with the episode of KV, and the answers would come shoaling in.
Another morning in…
Beautiful, spacious, with acres spacious beyond belief. No wonder America had taken to the motor car.
Today’s subject
Frankly, Money!
Embarrassingly jazzy, but he had been asked so often that it had to be done. It was a new presentation, worked out from a prolonged question-and-answer session in Boulder, Colorado.
The city of Phoenix woke in the dawn. His last talk with
Kylee had created more problems than it had solved. She gave a tirade of abuse, when he asked where she was staying. (“You boring old bugger…”)
There was a choice for this question, decided during the doze-awake nights he sweated through. The sacred luck, that just might do it, lay in choosing ones Davey might still have embedded in his mind. Bray’s wry face reflected in the plate glass. Only now did he realise that it was love that did the hoping, and it was love that would keep on trying.
He knew Kylee’s calculations by heart. When first he’d read about computers, he’d been thrilled to learn that George Boole – founder of the abstracts of computer logic – was the uneducated son of a poor Lincolnshire carpenter. He had tried to tell Kylee this, smiling as he recalled her scathing insults.
“Ten horses in a race, yeah? One in ten, yeah? Ten horses in each of four different races, what’re the chances of guessing all four winners? One in ten thousand, yeah? Jesus, Bray, you’re so fucking thick…”
Now, though, he had it like a poem, but he’d got it. The trickles were still coming. And with each broadcast question came backlogging answers to the previous parts. He’d earned his worst abuse when worrying that she might be overwhelmed.
“You saying I can’t work a fucking programme?” she’d yelled. “If I wuz that fucking iggoran I’d give up,” and so on.
“Morning, darling,” he said to Lottie.
“Morning, love.” He indicated the day, the moving cars just joining up in streams. “Question Three comes in today. I used to think I was quite good at maths.”
“Numbers is different, you barmy old sod,” Lottie
quoted Kylee.
“It takes her less than two minutes to do the breakdown.” He looked up at Lottie. “Can that be true?”
“If she says, I’d just agree.”
“So much agreement,” he mused. “The evidence is in some electronic box, wherever she is. She does it all without a calculator.”
“What happens after?” Lottie asked quietly, drawing up a chair.
He appraised her. “To Kylee, you mean?”
“Yes. The poor girl will go back into care, won’t she? Davey or not, you can’t stave off the authorities.”
“I’ve thought of one,” he surprised her by saying.
“What will you do?”
“My best,” he said. “My very best. She’s done it for me.”
Lottie felt a twinge of jealousy, quickly suppressed. They watched the traffic thicken as the lights dowsed, then rose to begin the day.
Bray almost got the shakes during the question-answer session. It wasn’t the fault of the audience, who were almost boisterously good-natured. Lottie sat with a bookseller who had an array of
Gilson Mather:
Three
Centuries of Living Design
with Bray’s name prominent.
He saw her head lift. He carried it off, clearing his throat and taking time to pour from the carafe, but for a moment he was lost.
“You’ve caught me,” he apologised to the lady in the ninth row, admitting the evident hesitation.
She had asked about trade association websites in England. It shook him. He had a sudden vision of Kylee in a dank cellar, on the run from authorities, the poor girl labouring for his lunatic dream.
“The reason I’m on the defensive,” he resumed “is that people hold serious differences about websites in our creaking old kingdom. Our largest association, LAPADA, offers its members a homepage for a subsidised price. They even host your website. They’re all hyperlinked, of course, and your personal dealership name doesn’t get lost…”
He blagged it, sweating, making out there was heavy
controversy among dealers when there wasn’t much.
“Some claim it should be free.” He managed a smile, getting an appreciative laugh by adding, “The same old fantasy, marketing for nothing!”
It went well, but he’d never felt so worn.
The party afterwards, with the inevitable wine and finger buffet, seemed endless. The antiques and reproduction furniture, some from Bray’s own hands that he recognised like friends, was cleverly distributed on three floors of elegant rooms.
“What was it?” Lottie asked quietly, the minute she could draw him aside.
Five new auction presenters had taken sites, treating the audience to predictions of forthcoming prices.
“Is there a way to help Kylee?” He explained his sudden deep fear. “She’s got nothing, Lottie. The cruellest thing in the world would be to stand idle.”
“Bray!” Lottie showed a brittle intensity he’d never seen before. “Got
nothing
? Let me tell you this, Bray Charleston! She’s got the best friend she could ever have, and that’s
you
. Not me, kind sir, but you. She’s got an enterprise right up her antisocial dyslexic autistic street. She is paid, paid
for
, helped and nurtured, by somebody – namely you – who could have just passed by. She is helped, as far as she’ll let anybody on earth help. She’s been rescued, and it’s all your doing.”
“I’ve used her, Lottie.”
“Can’t you see it’s the best thing she could ever have? Nobody wanted, trusted, admired her, liked her. They made her a dissolute freak, just some wild thing. To you she’s vital. Get it? And you actually like her, for God’s sake! To her it’s life.”
“I don’t understand how you see things.”
“I see them as she does.” Her smile was painful to maintain, audience members still floating by. “Ridiculous to lose confidence when there’s so little time left. Some things just aren’t your fault.”
“That’s the point.” He heard a scatter of applause, and acknowledged a signal from the Queen Anne stand.
“Bray.” Her eyes filled. “You’re frightened, searching for delay. You’re scared and trying to cover it up. So am I. So is Kylee. You saw the state Jim Stazio was in. And I’ll bet George is having kittens.”
“Maybe I should extend it,” he suggested in despair. “Create a fifth question? Kylee said that each one narrowed it down –”
“She was sure with four, Bray. Kylee harped on it. Four, not five or ten. You decided Davey knew four answers nobody else would even dream at. The last question’s due soon. Don’t delay it.”
She waved gaily to the auction leader, signing that Bray was coming.
“You’ve never lost resolve. Lean on me, darling. Like in the song.”
The auction-house senior was laughing as Bray arrived.
“I’m harassed, Bray. It’s the veneer question!” He made out he was overwhelmed in a riot. Folk were making mock threats. “Something you said, I hope!”
“Look,” Bray quickly took over the rostrum. “There’s a generalisation that’s almost perfectly true, often cited in the antiques trade. It’s this: no oak period furniture was ever veneered. Anybody remember the veneer date?”
“Isn’t it 1660?” somebody offered.
“That’s when veneering entered the process. So it’s reasonable to suppose that English-made antiques that pre-date this can’t have been veneered.”
“But oak furniture kept on coming after that date?”
“Right! And we still make simulants, country furniture in heartwood…”
Lottie stood watching in silence. He couldn’t resist touching the furniture, nodding at a surface, once moving a light so its beam was deflected from a veneered cabinet. In his element.
The future seemed ominous. It would spell the end of her and Bray. Never mind the girl, she herself would be cut adrift. Maybe a second edition of the Gilson Mather history, and Bray really might tackle the third volume. She wouldn’t be without work.
Bray’s scheme meant as much success for her as for George Corkhill and his little – now not so little – workshop. And it was a life-saver for Kylee.
For Bray, though? For him it might be disaster. For herself, a mix of loss and achievement. No such thing as pure success.
She heard a burst of laughter from Bray’s crowd. The other display leaders had petered out as the visitors drifted towards Bray. The clock showing that he was due at another venue across the city. She apologised to an auction-house assistant and tapped her wrist. The schedule ruled.
“Countdown?” the woman said, smiling. “Pity. They’re enjoying it.”
“Yes, great pity.”
Geoffrey saw the light in his father’s house. He parked, wondering if Dad was back. Hal and Christine’s house across the road seemed settled for the night, curtains drawn and the car put away.
He heard a TV. Lottie, maybe, returned after all? He’d
only made the detour on a whim, thinking to reassure Shirley he’d driven a few miles out of his way.
He went in. Buster came bounding and wagged about his legs. Geoffrey stood in astonishment, reflexively patted the dog. The air was peculiarly cloying. Kylee sprawled in the livingroom, smoking. She didn’t move.
“Kylee?”
No need for anger. After all, she suffered EDS, emotional deformation syndrome. He’d heard these catchphrases.
“Don’t you know they’re looking for you? Your father, the authorities?”
“Fuck them.”
She flicked ash from her crumpled cigarette. He guessed it was some illegal substance. He found himself trying not to inhale. Buster was quite at ease.
“Kylee,” he said heavily. “I’ll have to contact them.”
“’Kay.” She kept her eyes on some travel documentary.
“Does Dad know you’re here?” He repeated the question but she said nothing.
Without another word he went to the hall phone and called Mr Walsingham.
“She can’t stay here,” he found himself saying. “It’s a matter for the police. Yes, I do appreciate the difficulties. What time is it now, nine o’clock? I have to get back.”
It was really too bad of the Lumleys, who ought to have known better than allow this girl access. Unless, Geoffrey thought suspiciously, Dad had also deceived them. Lottie must have been in on it too. He felt dismayed. Ever since Davey, everything was wrong.
“You ought to come and take charge of the girl, Mr Walsingham,” he said firmly. “After all, she is your daughter. The probation officer’s number is…”
They spoke a few minutes more. Kylee’s father would immediately call the emergency duty officer. Twice Geoff had to insist that it was not for him to provide social support for a vagrant child. And no, his neighbours also denied responsibility. He had no time to wait for the police, and what would they do anyway? The child was smoking illegal substances.
He went back into the livingroom to explain.
Kylee was gone. Buster was standing by the kitchen door, the garden in darkness. He went outside but there was no sign of her. He searched every room in the house, then called Mr Walsingham and broke the news that Kylee had left.
“I’ll ring that emergency officer.” Walsingham sounded dejected.
“The thing is,” Geoff back-pedalled, “the police already know she’s missing, so what good would it do to inform them?”
They decided to delay. Geoff would take Buster to Christine and Hal Lumley. He decided to phone his dad as soon as it was morning in Los Angeles. The whole thing made him feel nauseous. What Bray’s madness would do to Shirley he didn’t dare think.
He checked the house again, wondering if he should have the locks changed. Heaven alone knew what weird companions the deplorable girl had.
“Come on, Buster.”
The leather on Buster’s lead was still damp. The girl must have lived quite the lady’s life here, even taking Buster over the fields. Did she stop for an ice cream at the corner shop, as Dad and Davey used to? He shut his mind to it, and closed the house up.