Twenty-Four Hours

But Ursa raised her voice and talked over him. “And don’t think you can joke your way out of this, Jackie. You purposefully set out to ruin things for me. You just hate to think I might drift away from the Land-of-Smiles, don’t you?”

Ellis, having driven between the chestnut trees, was turning out on to the road once more.

“Forget it, Ursie,” said Leona’s soft voice. “You’ll say something awful – something you’ll be sorry for. Or he will!”

“I don’t need him acting like a sort of Big Daddy,” Ursa cried impatiently.

“Well, I promise not to act like yours, anyway,” said Jackie, and Ellis could hear a sudden ferocious nudge in his voice – a peculiar emphasis twisting the ordinary words.

There was a sudden silence – a silence far more violent than the argument had been. Something had been said which changed the whole nature of the quarrel … something unforgivable.

Ellis longed to check out their expressions, but dared not take his eyes from the road. The car seemed to speed up, almost independently of his foot on the accelerator. Signs announcing that the motorway was a mere kilometre away, rushed towards them.

“OK,” commanded Ursa in an icy voice. “Stop the car! Stop right now!”

“Oh, no!” cried Leona. “He didn’t mean it, Ursie. You know he can’t resist a smart answer.”

“Stop!” yelled Ursa so fiercely that Ellis braked sharply and Leona fell silent. “I want to say something to that … thing in the back, and it’s not safe to say it in a moving car.”

Ellis brought the car to a graceful standstill. Ursa turned under the strap of her seatbelt and stared at Jackie – slumped behind her, eating – insolently eating – a sausage stolen from the barbecue.

“Get out!” Ursa said.

“What?” said Jackie, surprised at last, looking at her obliquely across the half-eaten sausage.

“Ursie!” groaned Leona. “It’s only making it worse.”

“Ursie! Ursie! Don’t make it worse-ie!” sang Jackie mockingly.

Ursa ignored her sister. “Get out of this car,” she repeated. “I don’t want to breathe the same air as you.”

“You’re going to dump me on the side of the road?” Jackie cried, sitting bolt upright, and making his voice deliberately pathetic. “How am I going to get home?” His voice was thickening a little. Words ran into one another. “And I’m beginning to get drunk, too,” he added accusingly, as if it were Ursa’s fault.

“Walk!” she commanded.

“You mean, ‘skate’!” said Jackie. “I’ve got my skates and …”

“OK! Skate, mate!” she said. She opened her own door. “Because if you don’t get out, I will.”

“Yeah, but maybe you’ve made some arrangement with Chris – oh, sorry! I should have said ‘Christ’, since that’s who he thinks he is,” Jackie said, making a rude gesture with the sausage. “Maybe he’ll come along in that new red car and …”

“Are you scared?” asked Ursa scornfully. “Frightened he’ll run you down?”

“He just might,” said Jackie. “He was the official school bully … got a cup for it at the end-of-school break-up, didn’t he, Ellis? A silver cup with handles and …”

“He could be a bit rough,” agreed Ellis.

“Get out!” said Ursa to Jackie.

“Oh, Ursa, leave him alone,” cried Leona. “He said what he said. You can’t change anything.”

“Look, I can’t just dump Jackie,” Ellis cut in, protesting.

“Then dump me,” Ursa cried. She opened her door and pushed one foot out into the darkness.

“No!” yelled Jackie. “No! I don’t care. Take her home, Ellis. I’ll skate. I’ll hitch. I’ll probably get there before you.”

Ursa slammed her door shut.

“Get where?” asked Ellis.

“She’ll tell you where,” said Jackie. “She’s good at laying down the law.”

A back door slammed. Then Ursa opened her door again. Ellis thought that perhaps she had relented. But she was only throwing the roller blades out after Jackie.

“Drive!” said Ursa. “Please,” she added.

“What did he say that was so bad?” Ellis asked.

“Oh, it’s a long story,” Ursa replied. “He’s sorry now, but that’s not enough. I want him to suffer.”

As the car moved off, Ellis saw through the back window Jackie’s shape, picked out in the red glow of the tail light, apparently giving a thumbs-up sign with one hand, and hoisting the bottle with the other …

“He’s drunk a lot,” Ellis said doubtfully. “He might flake out.”

“I hope he does,” said Ursa. “It’s not as if I give a stuff about Christopher Kilmer. I know he’s a bit of a creep – sorry, if he’s a friend of yours – but …”

“He isn’t a friend,” said Ellis shortly.

“It’s as if I’m being punished for wanting to have a good time,” Ursa complained. “I need it, too. Anyone needs a good time if their computer’s just been stolen, which mine was, last night.”

Ellis found he was beginning to remember Ursa vaguely from the days before he went to St Conan’s. In his head, a past version had begun flicking on and off like an inconstant ghost – shorter and fatter than she was now, and wearing glasses which had black tape wrapped around one of the arms. She had been a loud girl, he now remembered, always talking – the skirt of her school uniform hitched up over her belt so that it looked much shorter than the regulation length. She must have been wondering about him, too.

“I thought I knew everyone Jackie knew,” she said, turning her powerful gaze towards him.

“I’ve been out of town. Studying.” Ellis quickly added. He did not want Leona to know that only yesterday he had been at school.

“Studying what?” Ursa asked.

“General stuff,” said Ellis. He was irritated by her sceptical voice. “What about you?” he asked, glad to hear himself sounding mildly aggressive.

“Law!” she replied absently, but not as if she were really interested in letting him know. “Law and philosophy. I need the philosophy right this minute, and I’ll need the law a little later on.”

8.10 pm – Friday

Ellis, doing what he was told to do, left the motorway on a different road from the one by which he had entered. He found himself driving past lawns and letterboxes and deserted shopping centres, one of a number of cars that seemed uncertain quite where they wanted to go. Ellis recognised the names of suburbs without knowing exactly where he was in the changing city.

“Right at these lights!” commanded Ursa. “Straight on for a couple of blocks, then right again.” Ellis turned obediently into a wide avenue, lined on either side with well-established plane trees, and became part of a continuous line of cars. They were back in the centre of the city. He knew where he was. He would be home in half an hour.

Yet, just as he was relaxing and beginning to feel in charge of life once more, the city gave him an unexpected jolt which, almost at once, changed into the feeling that what he was seeing had first come out of his own head. Houses on the left gave way to a floodlit slope of neatly-cut grass; oaks framed a chaste, white building. It was gently lit and glowed in the summer twilight. Dommett & Christie said a notice; cool, plain, discreet, but clearly visible. Integrity Funerals. It seemed he could not escape – might never escape – from Simon’s ironic smile, for Dommett & Christie had organised Simon’s funeral. After his death, Simon’s body had been taken to this white building, and someone somewhere in there had given him a final, enigmatic expression.

Ellis had not realised just how changeable Simon’s living expression had been until, in the chapel at the crematorium, he found himself face to face with a stillness fixed for ever by the skill of an undertaker … the suggestion of a smile about to begin but never quite managing it. Had there possibly been just a little smugness about that last expression? It was almost as if, in some dead way, Simon knew he had finally up-staged Ellis – had pulled off an act that could never be surpassed. As he thought this Ellis’s hands tightened on the wheel, while his own voice repeated in his head:

“…’tis too horrible!

The weariest and most loathed worldly life

That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment

Can lay on nature is a paradise

To what we fear of death.”

“Home sweet home,” said Leona a little wearily, interrupting his thoughts.

“Well, almost!” said Ursa. “Turn right into Moncrieff Street. Here!” she added, though Ellis had already recognised Moncrieff Street, one of the oldest roads in the city. These days it was part of the grid of one-way streets around the city centre.

Fastened across the window of a darkened shop, Ellis saw a white sheet with words painted on it. Party! Land-of-Smiles! said the blue letters, rough but clear. Ursa groaned.

“Did you see that?” she said to Leona. “Can’t I go out for an evening without …”

But now they were skirting the Moncrieff Road cemetery, an historic landmark. Tall, and sometimes broken, gravestones rose, like pale admonishing fingers from beyond a low, stone wall. Someone had sprayed the words Anarchy rules, OK? on the stones – possibly one of the three children in baggy clothes briefly seen as they darted up a path and into the darkness under old trees.

“The glue gang!” Ursa said, in the absent-minded voice of someone checking off landmarks as she returned to familiar territory. “Is Terry Stamp still hanging out with Jason these days?” She asked this question without seeming to expect any answer. “Three blocks down and turn to the left,” she added, speaking directly to Ellis this time. “It’s a skinny little street – Garden Lane – so don’t drive too fast and miss it.”

High in the city air, a bright sign flashed on and off. A blonde woman was beckoning with a jerking arm, swinging one bare leg out and back, out and back. Her scarlet mouth widened in a smile then shrank back into a pursed, electric kiss. Ellis drove towards this spasmodic beauty. Beneath her jittering leg was a lighted doorway through which people were either coming or going. And then they were past her, cruising between two lines of largely darkened shop windows. It’s Never Too Late For Breakfast, said a flashing sign. The Southern Grenadier, proclaimed another sign – old, square lettering across the front of a grimy hotel.

“There! Turn there!” said Ursa pointing.

Ellis turned the car yet again, this time into a narrow street crowded with houses that were not only old but visibly disintegrating. The lingering twilight, which had seemed so pure out on the plains, had taken on a smeared and grubby quality. On either side he saw rusting roofs, broken fences, and gateposts guarded by long grasses.

“And now to the left again. It’s really a right-of-way for pedestrians … but people don’t mind if you drive along it. Take it easy, though!”

Everything around them was so shabby that Ellis felt conscious of the shine on his mother’s car, reflecting light from the street lamps. A long, low building shaped like the letter ‘E’ with its middle stroke missing, seemed to advance wearily through the twilight. Coloured letters flashed in the air above it. A stream of scarlet, electric arrows leaped like frightened fish, arching over and emphasising the blue and green letters below. THE AND-OF- MILES, announced the sign. There was no gate and no fence. LAND-OF-SMILES MOTEL a second dingy sign elaborated at the gate in letters rather more reliable than the electric ones.

“Home, sweet home.” It was Ursa who spoke this time. “Look, thanks for bringing us back, and sorry about the complications. Like a cup of coffee, after all that?”

Ellis hesitated. In the silence he heard rackety music beating in from somewhere.

“Do come!” said Leona. “It sounds as if we’ve got a houseful already, but we can find a peaceful place somewhere.”

“The gang’s here!” said Ursa gloomily. “As always!”

Ellis almost said that he’d better be getting home – indeed, he’d been thinking of home with pleasure – and yet, within a breath, the words he was shaping in the back of his mouth twisted on his tongue and came out saying something that surprised him much more than they surprised anyone else.

“Great! OK to leave the car here?” After all, in spite of everything that had happened, it was still early. Not even half-past eight, yet.

“Safer than some places,” Ursa said, smiling and sketching the sign of the cross in the air with her finger.

8.25 pm – Friday

Following Ursa and Leona in at the front door, Ellis was immediately aware that the Land-of-Smiles Motel, though it was no longer used as a motel, was haunted by its past. He was confronted by a small counter, across the front of which narrow ledges and sagging, rusting wires had once supported brochures and flyers advertising city tours. A phone stood on the end of the counter, a phone book beside it, and the wall beside the phone was scribbled and scratched with a swarm of numbers, some of them boxed in so that they could be easily found again. Leaning against a wall beyond the counter was the sort of backpack used for carrying a small child, an unexpectedly innocent object in such weary surroundings.

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