Kelly knew that it wasn’t only Americans who made this connection between sex and violence. Like many women she’d been hit a couple of times by men she had reason to love, who had reason to love her, and being hit was undoubtedly a good reason to stop loving someone, but it was never that simple, even if you wanted it to be. But she never saw why people needed things to be simple. For her, complexity was always the attraction. She did not find herself suddenly attracted to Dexter because of what had happened the previous day with William, but the things that might have driven away a simpler, more absolutist, better, kind of woman didn’t seem to apply.
It was the next morning and they were in Kelly’s car again, and this time they were driving further north up the Al2 to Great Yarmouth. Beethoven was on the stereo. A visit to a seaside town seemed both absurd and appropriate to Kelly. It wasn’t that she was in need of the alleged benefits of sea air or seaside fun, but she had the urge to be a long way from certain aspects of the drama and violence of the previous day.
Dexter was apologetic, if not quite as remorseful as she thought appropriate. He had asked if there was anything he should ‘do’ for old William, but Kelly had refused to engage in any such easy, secondhand solutions. If Dexter thought any action was required he’d have to come up with his own ideas. For her part she thought it best to say and do nothing, and to head for the coast.
In Great Yarmouth she parked on the promenade. It was a grey, flinty day, the air flecked with dampness. As the year cooled, Yarmouth was taking on that beguilingly neglected, abandoned air, although Kelly had known it to feel much the same in mid-summer. They got out of the car and Kelly started Dexter on what she thought would be a long walk for a man with a bad leg, all the way from the pier to the pleasure beach. There was a long row of boarding houses, and restaurants selling steak pie and chips. There were modern attractions, a sea world and a science fiction place where you were given electronic guns and chased each other round a fake warehouse in bad lighting conditions and tried to commit electronic murder. But Kelly had something much less technological in mind.
‘Where exactly are we going?’ Dexter asked.
‘A little place I know. It’s called “Small World”.’
‘What’s that?’
‘I suppose you’d call it a model village,’ said Kelly. ‘Right there.’
They were in front of a high fence and a locked wrought-iron gate that permitted glimpses of the miniature world they enclosed. Dexter paid and they went in. The place might have started out as nothing more than a fussy, over-elaborate garden. Curving paths forked and reforked, crossed and recrossed with a kind of manic energy, and between them were raised flower beds, rockeries, ornamental ponds. But the garden had been colonized by hundreds of miniature handmade models of men and women, none of them more than six inches tall. Around them had grown a frenzy of miniature buildings so that every island bed, every patch of lawn, had been developed and given small housing estates or hospitals, rows of shops, schools and recreational facilities.
It provided a detailed and not wholly inaccurate depiction of English semi-rural life, and yet it was a life lived at a pitch and with an intensity that was untrue to the real world. The village had more of everything than any real village would ever have: a fun fair, an airfield, a petrol station, a running track, a zoo. Everything was happening all at once; every activity was in full bloom. The football and cricket pitches were both in use. There was a bicycle race taking place on the outlying roads. There was a big wedding party gathering outside the church, while at the bank two masked robbers were making their get away pursued by the police. The milkman was making his round. The circus was in town.
But there were strange dislocations in this world. The bedding plants that sprouted beside the railway line were as tall as the signal box. The real goldfish in the ponds were bigger than the model fishermen trying to catch them. In the zoo, the size of the model animals was quaintly inconsistent. A pig might be the size of a lion while an elephant might be no bigger than a horse.
On the other hand, this was also a world plagued by massive real-life fauna. Birds as big as houses would descend and pull monstrous earth worms out of cottage gardens. Gigantic flies would settle on roofs. And when the rain came, a few big drops would be enough to soak the tiny immobile inhabitants.
Not absolutely everything was frozen. The sails of the windmill were turning, and a little electric train careered around a long circuit of track; but things were inert. The passengers at the railway station would never get on that train. Those people crossing the road would never get to the other side. Those drinkers outside the mock-Tudor pub would never finish their drinks, never move from their tables.
Dexter looked around him with a kind of disdain. Kelly’s latest expedition was a disappointment to him. This kind of fare was too humble even for a man with a bad leg and a professed interest in English eccentricity.
‘Is this supposed to be therapy?’ he asked. ‘Yesterday was too exciting so today we do something as boring as possible.’
‘Too much like family fun, eh, Dexter?’
‘It’s not what my family ever did for fun.’
‘I didn’t think you were ready for the white-water rafting just yet, what with your leg and all. Don’t tell me you don’t like it.’
‘It’s fine,’ he said unconvincingly. ‘I’ll bet your father brought you here.’
‘Yes. We used to come and play at being giants. We pretended we could shoot thunderbolts out of the ends of our fingers and we’d decide what and who to zap, and in what order; whether it should be the cricketers, or the old ladies on the bowling green or the drayman with the horse and cart.’
‘I guess you had to be there.’
‘Yes, maybe you did. It’s all right for you, Dexter. For all your problems, you’re going to finish up rich and comfortable, happily remarried to someone, working for the family business, or maybe some other business, but either way you’re going to be just fine. Whereas I can see myself ending up somewhere like this, running some sad little seaside attraction, scowling at the tourists, shouting at the children who are enjoying themselves too much. But maybe you’re right, a miniature village would be too tame. Perhaps I’d rather have something a bit more upbeat, like a crazy golf course.’
‘Crazy golf?’ said Dexter.
‘Yes. That’s the next part of your therapy.’
There were three crazy golf courses to choose from. One of them was newly built and had a pirates and treasure island theme, with concrete rocks and the fibreglass hulls of sunken ships, plastic palm trees and giant skulls and stretches of Astroturf for the greens. Kelly hated it. It wasn’t only because it looked so synthetic, because, after all, how could a golf course be anything other than synthetic, but what she objected to was its store-bought blandness, its lack of soul and patina.
Half a mile or so along the promenade there was one she liked better, a much older course with an animal theme, each hole being presided over by a cheerful plaster animal: a smiling camel or a benign orang-utan. This place did have soul, in a faded, out of season sort of way; but Kelly had come to Yarmouth for the third course situated another mile or so along the promenade, on the very far edge of the tourist beat. There was something truly moving for her about this last place, a course that called itself Putting Land.
This was the one her father had always brought her to, and she still came back from time to time, always with the fear that it might have changed for the worse or even disappeared. But so far it had remained intact and constant, while getting increasingly scuffed and tatty, and it continued to thrill her. Putting Land consisted of just nine, cramped, interlocking holes, each involving some building or architectural feature. They were all made in a clumsily elaborate manner, and you didn’t have to have a love of architecture to appreciate them, but if, like her and her father, you did have such a love then you were bound to be enthralled by the place.
Kelly was aware that she might be running Dexter ragged by dragging him all the way along the seafront, but he didn’t complain and she didn’t care. A bit of penance would be good for him. In any case this trip was’ for her rather than him. But he managed to keep pace with her surprisingly easily. They stood by the entrance and Dexter reached for his camera.
‘Come on, let’s have a round,’ said Kelly.
‘I think I’d rather just take pictures.’
For Dexter a crazy golf course was something you might appreciate for its quaintness or picturesque qualities, and you might certainly photograph it, but it wasn’t a thing you would engage with, much less have fun with.
‘Oh, come on, Dexter, it’s not as if you have to run around. You just have to stand still and hit the ball.’
‘No, I don’t think so.’
‘Come on, Dexter, live a little.’
‘Well, I don’t—’
He still seemed a long way from convinced that this form of pleasure was for him, but Kelly wouldn’t let him escape. She went to the kiosk, paid the old man inside – the latest in a long series of similar old men who’d held the job – and she returned to Dexter with two putters and two balls.
‘Got a pencil?’ she asked.
He reluctantly took the putter but was baffled by the request for a pencil.
‘So we can keep score, Dexter,’ Kelly explained.
‘Do we have to keep score?’ Dexter asked.
‘Otherwise there’s no point,’ said Kelly.
Dexter looked sheepish. This was going much too far, entering too fully into the spirit of the thing, but Kelly found a pencil in the pocket of her leopardskin jacket and swept aside Dexter’s hesitation.
They were the only players on the course, which pleased Dexter since there was less room for embarrassment that way, not that there was anything remotely embarrassing about the first hole. The ball had only to be driven through the centre of a small wooden arch, painted to look like the Arc de Triomphe. If the shot was reasonably straight and accurate then the ball would go directly into the hole on the other side, although neither Dexter nor Kelly managed this simple job, taking a couple of shots each. Dexter handed his walking stick to Kelly before playing each shot and, despite his reluctance, she saw he was taking the game rather seriously. The way he stood, the way he held the club and addressed the ball suggested he knew how to play golf properly.
‘Are you a golfer as well as everything else?’ Kelly asked.
‘Not really. My father made me have lessons when I was a kid, said it would be a valuable business skill. It was years ago, but I guess you never quite forget the basics.’
‘Want to make the game more interesting?’ Kelly asked.
‘In what way?’
‘If we had a little bet.’
‘Money?’
‘Not necessarily.’
‘Then what?’
Kelly appeared to be trying to think of a suitable wager, although she already knew perfectly well what she was going to suggest.
‘How about this for a deal?’ she said. ‘If you win the game you can have sex with me, if you lose you can’t.’
Dexter laughed at the absurdity of the suggestion. ‘What kind of bet is that?’
‘Not such a bad one I’d say, Dexter. The fact is I can’t decide whether I really want to sleep with you or not, can’t decide whether it’s a good idea or not. I suppose I could toss a coin, if you’d prefer.’
Dexter was amazed, as though he couldn’t decide whether the offer was insulting or obscene.
‘You’d really do that?’ he asked. ‘You’d let sex depend on something as stupid as miniature golf?’
Kelly didn’t answer immediately and they walked on to the second tee.
‘Sex always depends on something stupid,’ Kelly said, ‘like whether the guy’s got nice eyes, or whether he’s rich, or whether he pretends to be a good listener. Or it just depends on how much I’ve had to drink, or whether I can stand to go home alone. At least this way I’ll respect you. I always respect a man who can handle himself on the crazy golf course.’
Dexter couldn’t quite unravel the knots of mockery and sarcasm that lurked in that last remark, so he simply said, ‘OK, it’s a bet.’
The next three holes weren’t so difficult: first a miniature log cabin with an open door at each end, then a lighthouse on the top of a low, gently sloping mound of plaster painted to look like rocks. Third was a dog kennel out of which poked an open-mouthed mongrel waiting to swallow the ball and pass it out through some unspecified hole in its rear, which protruded beyond the back of the kennel.
As he lined up the shot Dexter said, ‘Do you ever wonder what it would be like if your father was still alive?’
‘Of course I do,’ said Kelly. ‘I wonder how things would be for me, but I don’t find that nearly as interesting as wondering how they’d be for him.
‘I suppose it comes down to whether or not he’d ever have got to build any of his designs. If he hadn’t, then I suppose he’d have become a very bitter man, but in certain circumstances I can imagine him finding the right people to work with. In one fantasy he finds rich, broad-minded patrons all over the world. He builds wacky galleries and artists’ residences in Southern California. In the Arab States he’s employed to build desert palaces and pleasure domes, and in Japan he’d be constructing wonderful Zen-influenced hotels and apartment blocks, buildings made of plastic and rubber and carbon fibre. That wouldn’t be so terrible.’
Dexter and Kelly took the same number of shots to complete the first four holes. Hole number five featured a freestanding railway tunnel, with one mouth going in and three exits on the far side coming out. The ball might emerge from any of these depending on the speed and direction it was hit. Kelly’s familiarity with the hole was some help; she gained a shot by emerging through the right mouth to get directly on the hole.
‘Then there’s a slightly less highbrow, less intellectually respectable version of my father’s future,’ she said. ‘I think it’s possible he might have found a job in that area where architecture becomes entertainment. I think he might have worked in Las Vegas or Disneyland. Maybe he’d have done a casino in the shape of a space station, maybe he’d have designed a new city of tomorrow. Or maybe he’d have built white-knuckle rides. At the very least he might have designed crazy golf courses. That would just about have been acceptable.’
The sixth hole had a windmill. The ball was driven through an opening that pierced the base, but there were large revolving sails that intermittently blocked the way. Kelly’s ball hit the sail and returned to the tee, and Dexter’s score drew level.
At the seventh hole they were confronted by half a dozen miniature Egyptian pyramids. It looked easy enough to hit the ball between them but there were deceptive angles and areas of loose sand, bunkers of a sort, that made the hole fiendishly difficult. Dexter in his ignorance made light of these and pulled a shot ahead.
The pyramids were child’s play, however, compared to the eighth hole which consisted of an open-sided suspension bridge spanning a shallow ditch filled with water. At first the task appeared to be to hit the ball straight and true so that it crossed the bridge and went on to the little circle of carpeted green on the other side. But the bridge opened and closed like Tower Bridge, and the shot had to compensate for the rising and descending inclines of the two halves of the bridge, and possibly the gap between them. If the ball went in the water it had to be fished out and returned to the tee. Dexter only made it across the bridge at the third attempt, but Kelly did far worse.
‘Then again,’ said Kelly, ‘there’s the nightmare version. My father might have ended up designing shopping malls, junk food restaurants, fancy cocktail bars and clothes stores. That would have been terrible. I’m enough of a snob to think that would have been a fate worse than death.’
‘You’ve thought about this a lot,’ said Dexter.
‘I’ve thought about it far too much.’
As they came to the final hole Dexter was two shots ahead, not exactly an unassailable position, but a good enough lead to make him wonder how, when and where Kelly would offer herself sexually to him. The last hole, however, was so perverse and difficult that it could destroy anyone’s lead, ruin anyone’s good round. It was based on the Ruins of Pompeii and as Dexter set his ball on the tee he could see, some fifteen feet away, a three-foot-high replica of Mount Vesuvius. When the course had been in its prime, little puffs of smoke had emerged from the volcano’s mouth, which was in fact the hole into which the ball had to go. However, between the tee and the miniature Vesuvius were a series of classical ruins of a maze-like complexity. A ball hit into their midst might ricochet off in any direction. Then, once the ruins had been crossed, the ball had to be driven up the ridged, steeply sloping side of the volcano and into its top. The volcano swallowed the balls and did not return them.
‘Let me play through,’ said Dexter. ‘Let me finish my round before you start and then you’ll know what you’re up against.’
‘Whatever you say,’ Kelly agreed.
She found herself staring idly at the construction of the volcano. The chicken wire was showing through in places. The lower slopes needed repainting. Dexter made a pretty good fist of the hole, three shots to get through the ruins, one to get into the volcano.
‘Not bad, Dexter, not bad at all,’ said Kelly.
He allowed himself a little smile of pleasure.
Kelly took her ball, placed it on the tee, eyed the hole, effortlessly brought back the putter, swept it through a short arc and made brisk contact. Dexter couldn’t tell whether the shot was deliberate or not, but the ball chipped into the air, appeared to spin and swerve, then began a swift, accurate descent right into the volcano’s mouth. She had scored a hole in one. Neither she nor Dexter could quite believe their eyes, and they both said ‘Shit’ simultaneously.
She looked a little coyly at him, gave an apologetic flap of her hands. She’d won the round by a single shot. Dexter shook his head sadly and philosophically, as though this was precisely the sort of thing that happened to him the whole time.
‘Look, Dexter,’ she said. ‘You really shouldn’t be too disappointed.’
‘I’m not,’ he said unconvincingly.
‘OK, you lost. So I don’t have to sleep with you. But you know something? The truth is I probably wouldn’t have slept with you even if you’d won.’
‘What?’
‘I said we should have a bet to make the game more interesting. And it did. But I never said I’d honour the wager.’
Dexter was royally pissed off by this. He looked sad and wounded and depressed, far more so than losing a game of crazy golf, or even the prospect of sex, seemed to merit. Kelly took the putters and handed them in at the kiosk window.
‘See you again,’ the old man said.
They walked on to the promenade again, Dexter all brooding silence, until at last he said, ‘Look, Kelly, I realize what I’m going to say will sound like absolute bullshit to you. I realize I haven’t known you very long, and I realize you must get lots of guys coming on to you, but for what it’s worth, I really like you.’
‘Well, thank you, Dexter.’
She said it briskly and coldly, like a school teacher dismissing a child who has a crush on her.
‘The fact is,’ said Dexter, ‘I think I could do a lot more than just like you. I’m pretty sure I could love you. In fact, I’m pretty sure I already do.’
‘Oh shit, Dexter.’
She was embarrassed now. Suddenly Dexter seemed even more like a boy. He seemed naive and adolescent and very green. What he’d said sounded callow and groundless, and perhaps inappropriate, but it didn’t sound like bullshit. Kelly knew that in some sense he probably meant it, and there was an old, not quite escapable magic in the words he’d used, even if she didn’t think there was any way he could really mean them, or perhaps even know what they really meant. Having a man say he loved you wasn’t an experience that came along every day, and it certainly wasn’t something to be tossed aside without some consideration.
‘We could discuss this over a drink,’ Kelly said.
Dexter cheered up considerably. They settled in an empty, high-ceilinged, brown-walled pub and they discussed miniature golf and the English seaside. Then they talked briefly about Los Angeles and California and fear of earthquakes, until Kelly said, ‘Sex is so weird, Dexter. When you’re young it’s so straightforward. You think you’ve got all the answers, and in a way you probably have. Then, as you get older, it gets so much more complicated, not that I mind complications in themselves—’
‘What are you trying to say?’ Dexter asked.
‘I guess I’m trying to say, OK, you win. I’ve changed my mind. You lost at golf but you can still sleep with me. Is that OK? Is that a way we can both win? Let’s go home to my place and get the job done.’
‘Fine,’ said Dexter.
There was too much traffic on the way back. Kelly drove with irritation and determination, getting stuck behind old ladies in their shopping cars. Delayed gratification did not have much appeal for her. She kept trying to imagine Dexter naked, wondered what his body was like, wondered whether he’d be inhibited about it, wondered if some change would come over him once he was in bed. She felt sure that Dexter would be horrified by her interior decor, but as he walked into the chapel he said, ‘Cool place. It’s just as I pictured it.'
‘You must have more imagination than I give you credit for.’
She poured them both outsize tumblers of Scotch, a necessary relaxant, and they began to make love. Dexter was far more passionate than she’d expected, and he was every bit as unhurried as she wanted. He kissed slowly and thoroughly and took his time. He filled the glasses again, and Kelly began to fear brewer’s droop, but it didn’t happen. They began fucking on the sofa of the living room, then moved gradually to the floor, then to the ladder leading up to the bed platform, then to the bed itself. Kelly noticed he brought the bottle of Scotch up with him. He took a mouthful and released it inside her vagina. A little fire burnt up through her. She wasn’t sure she liked it, but she gave him full marks for inventiveness. The end was a long time coming, and the release was harsh and intense.
She said, ‘That was pretty damn good, Dexter.’
He lowered himself beside her and said, ‘Yeah, I was there.’
They both laughed and Kelly turned towards him and nuzzled her face into his chest.
‘And another thing,’ she said, ‘when you’re fucking, your bad knee doesn’t seem to be a problem at all.’
She looked down at Dexter’s legs, then sat up and began gently to massage them.
‘So which is the bad one? The right?’
‘Yes.’
She swivelled and moved her body to get a closer look, and found that both of Dexter’s legs looked identically strong and healthy.
‘They look fine,’ she said.
Dexter didn’t say anything, but he moved awkwardly in the bed, as though embarrassed, and he curled his arms round Kelly and drew her to him. Something was wrong.
‘What is it?’ Kelly asked.
‘Oh shit,’ he said. ‘The truth is,’ and he kissed her gently on the forehead as he spoke, ‘the truth is, there’s nothing really wrong with my leg.’
‘What?’
‘My leg’s just fine.’
‘What are we talking about here?’ Kelly demanded. ‘Sex as a miracle cure?’
She felt his arms tighten round her even more, and his whole body tensed up, as though he was frightened she might flap away.
‘The truth is,’ he said, ‘there was never anything wrong with my leg. I made it up.’
Kelly laughed, a laugh that signalled both confusion and incomprehension. She really had no idea what he was talking about, but it crossed her mind that he might be confessing to some strange psychological condition.
‘I made it up to get sympathy.’
‘Did you really need to do that?’
Kelly tried not to sound accusatory but she was thinking how bizarre it was, an unnecessarily extreme way of provoking sympathy, and beyond that she wished Dexter might have waited a while longer before confessing it to her. It had rather spoiled the moment.
‘I felt that I did,’ said Dexter. ‘For one thing it gave me an excuse to hire you for a whole week. If I’d been perfectly able-bodied you’d have thought it was pretty strange that I wanted to employ you like that.’
‘I suppose I would,’ Kelly said, trying to slow things down to a speed where she could understand the precise implications of what he was confessing to. ‘But hold on, if your knee was all right then you had no need of a taxi anyway.’
The ridiculousness of the arrangement immediately dawned on her. Was he really telling her that he’d been faking the whole time, pretending to have a limp, pretending to have difficulties with stairs and shingle and getting in and out of the car? Why the hell would anyone do such a crazed thing? And she immediately asked herself what else he’d been faking.
‘It was a way of getting close to you,’ Dexter said.
‘It was certainly that.’
Kelly extricated herself from his arms and drew away. She got up from the bed and put on her silk wrap. She felt alone and vulnerable and not at all sure who the strange man in her bed was.
‘Let me get this straight,’ she said. ‘When I picked you up at the station that first night, you fancied me and so you invented the bad leg to give yourself an excuse for hiring me and spending time with me?’
She was trying to put the best possible gloss on things. It almost sounded attractive when she thought of it like that, a diffident man’s fumblingly elaborate scheme to try to get the girl. Yet even as she entertained these charitable possibilities she knew that it wasn’t going to be anything so simple or healthy.
‘But that can’t be right,’ she said, ‘because you already had the walking stick with you.’
‘Yeah, I came up with the scheme long before I arrived in England.’
‘You mean any taxi driver in any town would have done?’
‘No. I only came here because I knew this was where you lived and that you drove a cab.’
‘What?’
‘I read all about you in a magazine. I saw your picture.’
‘You’re mad. Which magazine?’
‘An interior design magazine. It showed you in this chapel. “Country doesn’t mean conventional”.’
Of course she remembered the article, but it seemed pretty unlikely that it had got all the way to the United States and that it had caused a man to get on a plane and fly to England to pursue her. Besides, the article had appeared years ago.
‘It wasn’t that great an article,’ she said.
‘Well, I liked it,’ he said. He shrugged and sat up in the bed. ‘I have a bit more of a confession to make.’
‘Haven’t you confessed enough?’ she demanded.
‘My reasons for coming here were, initially, pretty suspect, I admit,’ he said. ‘Let’s face it, in one way I’m just a parasite who’s interested in you because I’m interested in your father. You see, I’m a great fan of his work – more than a fan. I wanted to meet you because I wanted to know more about Christopher Howell; and the subterfuge was necessary because I’d heard from other people that you’d stopped giving interviews about him.’
There was a dark, hollow silence before Kelly yelled, ‘You shit. You absolute shit.’
‘No, I’m not, really I’m not.’
‘Yes, you fucking are,’ she shouted. ‘Get out of my bed. Get out of my fucking house.’
Her anger was incendiary and all-consuming. It was not to be argued with. Dexter got up from the bed, knowing he wouldn’t be able to explain himself to Kelly at that moment, but feeling he had to try.
‘But in all sorts of ways I’m not a parasite,’ he insisted. ‘And even if I was in the beginning things have changed. You’ve changed me.’
‘Fucking get out,’ she screamed.
She found some things beside the bed, thick paperback books, a hairbrush, a bottle of aspirins, and began to throw them at Dexter. He retreated to the edge of the platform.
‘You don’t know even half the story,’ Dexter said desperately.
‘I don’t want to hear fucking stories.’
Reluctantly Dexter scrambled down the ladder from the bed platform to the living room where he’d left his clothes. He began the awkward process of dressing.
‘I have things to say that I think you’ll want to hear,’ he shouted up to her. ‘Things that you need to hear. Please let me say my piece.’
He could hear her moving about above him and although he couldn’t see her he carried on talking.
‘You see, I’m a lot like you. I’ve always been interested in architecture. It’s one of the subjects I’ve been studying, but obviously I couldn’t tell you that because you’d have been suspicious.’
He saw that Kelly was now descending the ladder. He hoped she might be calmer, but as she came into full view he knew she was no less angry, and when she’d got down to floor level he saw her pick up what looked at first like a huge black serpent. It was the piece of driftwood they’d found on the beach at Sizewell. Kelly had managed to carry it into the house without anybody’s help, and now she was wielding it as though she intended to impale him like a vampire.
Dexter spoke more rapidly. ‘If I’d said I was an architecture student you’d have known right away I was after something.’
‘Shut up, Dexter,’ Kelly said, and she pushed the point of the driftwood snake into his belly.
‘All right. All right. I get the message.’
‘Good. Now get out.’
Still not quite dressed he scurried out of the house into the village high street. Kelly slammed the door satisfyingly after him. There was a three-mile walk to the Phoenix Inn but at least she knew he no longer needed to adopt a limp.
Kelly dropped the driftwood snake. As she locked and bolted the door she felt totally, depressingly sober. There were tears in her eyes and her hands were shaking as she sat on the floor and rolled herself a thick, strong joint. She filled her lungs with the smoke and stared up at the ceiling of the chapel.
She felt angry and used and stupid. She felt she should be better at all this stuff by now, a better judge of men, a better detector of lies and bullshit. Above all, she felt she should be better at not getting hurt, at not feeling this familiar pain. She was lonely, a sensation that was both specific and general, personal and universal. It was a loneliness that another person’s presence could only dispel temporarily. Even if Dexter had not turned out to be precisely the sort of user he was, she knew he’d have still turned out to be a source of pain.
All the old chaos came flooding back. There was a need in her that she feared the mere presence of another person could never wholly satisfy. It wasn’t about sex or love, it was about vacuity, hollowness. There was a big, empty cellar inside her, a void that could absorb and make irrelevant any amount of caring or affection that was poured into it. She recognized this and yet that didn’t stop her needing, nor did it stop her trying to fill the void. It all seemed so familiar, so old hat. She knew, of course she knew, that this all revolved around the loss and absence of her father, and she knew it was time all that was over too.
She did what she often did at moments like this. She reached for her photograph album. It was in no sense a ‘family’ album since neither her mother nor her father had been interested in recording their lives, in documenting their pasts. So the task had fallen to her, pulling together snapshots from diverse sources, begging photographs from relatives or friends, occasionally writing to magazines that had published unfamiliar photographs of her father and asking for copies.
The album fell open at a shot of Christopher Howell standing outside what looked like a log cabin, but was actually a motel unit. She assumed the photograph had been taken by one of his girlfriends. Kelly felt the intruding presence of the unknown photographer and it became a barrier between her and her father. She slapped the album shut. She needed something else, something more potent.
She got to her feet, determined but not highly coordinated, and she went upstairs on to the bed platform where there was a built-in storage cupboard she’d constructed. She opened it and pulled out a familiar cardboard box, removed some tissue paper and packing, and revealed the object of her fascination, her talisman, her last connection with her father, the one secret she had never revealed to any of the visiting parasites.
As a child she had called it her doll’s house, though it was smaller than anybody’s idea of what a true doll’s house should be like, and no doll had ever lived in it. She hadn’t been much of a girl for dolls. In reality it was an architectural model, a maquette, one that her father had made and given to her for her sixth birthday. At the time it had seemed a wonderful and special gift simply because it came from her father, but in retrospect she thought it was a strange present to give to a six-year-old girl, and at times she’d wondered if her father hadn’t really made it specially for her, if perhaps he’d forgotten all about her birthday and had only come up with this as a desperate, spur of the moment thing, something he’d had lying around. Either way it made no difference. She had loved it beyond all reason and still did.
The model was small, on a baseboard that was no more than eighteen inches square, and it rose no more than a few inches from the board. It certainly couldn’t be mistaken for anything other than a house, since it was surrounded by flowerbeds and a garden path, with a car in the driveway and a tiny postman delivering to the front door; yet it was hardly domestic. It resembled a mashing together of any number of different buildings, as though it was a collage of materials and features that had been found in some architectural junkyard and then brilliantly, if dementedly, combined.
There was not a single roof but a series of them: one a mansard, one in Spanish tile, one a steep lean-to, one flat, one a carved gingerbread-house arrangement. Also up on top of the building were various domes, minarets and chimneys that combined to create a roof-line as diverse and complex as that of a small city, scaled down to manageable proportions. Below the roof there was a piecemeal accumulation of doors and windows, more than seemed strictly necessary: bay windows, french windows, stained glass, some circular, some triangular, some simply blob shaped. There was stained glass in the doors too, and along one side of the house there were three doorways, each in a different style of English church architecture: one Norman, one Early English, one a Perpendicular four centre.
The walls were nowhere straight and they never met other walls at right angles. The rooms inside were wildly asymmetrical, often containing strange wedge shapes or oddly curved areas. The whole thing was embellished with curious features, some functional, some not: pillars, spiral staircases, balconies, flying buttresses, gargoyles.
The overall effect was of something ramshackle yet elegant, something primitive but of the future. The model represented a fascinating building with a fierce if unmalicious sense of humour. It was a beautifully, skilfully made model, detailed and delicate. It gave the sense of being made out of fragments and yet there was nothing fragile or sloppy about it.
If it had not functioned very well as a doll’s house, it had still given great scope to Kelly’s childhood imagination. She had fantasized about the life that went on inside it. This was no ordinary family house, she’d decided, at least not for the kind of family she knew. This was a home for heroes, for superheroes, for secret agents and film stars, and maybe for architects. And in her games she was all these things. She was Wonderwoman and Mata Hari and Emma Peel; and sometimes she was the architect too, the woman who had designed the building for her own special and particular needs, who lived there and occasionally, in a bountiful way, let in a few discerning members of the public.
But far more often her father was the true architect and she lived there with him, enjoying a life that was full and exciting and exotic, but still essentially warm and homely. Where her mother fitted into this, where she lived for instance, Kelly had never considered, but certainly not in the house.
Now she examined the model again, inspected it to see that nothing had become damaged or detached, and when she had reassured herself that all was well, that it was still hers and hers alone, she placed it carefully beside her bed, then lay down and curled up so she could stare at the model as she fell asleep, and thereby incorporate it in her dreams.