Before All Else Read online

  “And cakes of the hot variety.”

  Marcus, mid-slug, spots something down the length of his water bottle. A movement in the distance, a disturbance. He slowly lowers the bottle to take a better look. “I’m not sure, but…”

  Cecily looks to where Marcus is pointing across the field.

  “Seems like some of the sheep have got out.” He watches her quick retreat until the crowds swallow her up.

  Cecily

  “Tilly! Tilly!” Tilly and Amelia are both deeply intent upon something between them and oblivious to the fact that the willow hurdles have collapsed and Tilly’s ten Framlinghams are nonchalantly strolling amongst the crowds. Fly, Tilly’s best working dog, is asleep beneath the cake table, only her black nose visible under the white cloth, apparently off duty.

  Cecily rushes towards them, out of breath. “Tilly. The sheep have got out!”

  “Oh, they’re alright. Not doing any harm.”

  Well, yes, concedes Cecily, that is true - in the strictest sense. They are merely nibbling at the grass between the stalls that hasn’t been trampled in the day’s activities. “So long as no one causes a stampede, we’ll be alright, I guess.” Maybe she should stop shepherding her sisters. “What are you two doing?”

  “Sssh. Melly’s talking to Enzo on her phone. He phoned her. They’re having an argument. Can’t understand a word they’re saying.”

  Cecily and Tilly creep closer, close enough to ring fence Amelia from enquiring ears, close enough to bolster her in what is, evidently, a heated conversation.

  “How long’s this being going on?” Cecily whispers.

  “Oh, about five minutes. She said she was just switching her phone on to check it had charged, and he was there. He doesn’t seem too happy.”

  “Well, nor does Melly.” They look at their sister hunched in the folding chair, one elbow on her knee, the phone pressed to her ear. The other hand twirls and twists a lock of hair. “Listen. Are you sure your sheep are OK?”

  “Oh, they’re fine. Can’t leave her, can I?”

  “Suppose not. Well, just keep an eye on them.”

  “Yes, Cecily. I will,” Tilly assures her in a weary tone.

  Cecily divides her watchful gaze between Amelia and the wandering sheep fanning out amongst the fairgoers. The creatures have lost their bouffant fleeces and are looking altogether less appealing while overall more in proportion with their thin, jointed legs. Where Tilly’s electric shears had cut the soft under-wool from the body, tram lines appear above the white flesh, flowing around the muscles. Their backs and bellies twitch in the unaccustomed coolness as, heads down, they tear and grind at the short-cut grass, wiggling their tails to dispense copious handfuls of round, glossy pellets. She watches as one wanders in through the open flap of the beer tent, appearing, at speed, at the other end, presumably propelled out by the bar staff. Toddlers in buggies stretch out to stroke them, one offering a lick of an ice cream before it is hastily removed by an adult hand. A speckle-faced sheep lowers herself mechanically first onto her front knees and then onto her back in the cool shade of a tree, chewing calmly while surveying the crowds.

  Amelia’s voice rises higher and higher in pitch and urgency. Tilly looks at Cecily and both shrug. “It’s really kicking off now,” Tilly whispers. Cecily feels uncomfortable at such an open display in full sight and sound of all around. Why can’t Amelia just take herself off to a quieter spot?

  Then, abruptly, it is all over. The shouting has stopped. The sisters look again at Amelia, still coiled in upon herself. For the briefest moment, all appears to stand still, until Amelia leaps to her feet, shouting at the phone, as if the object itself conveys all that is loathsome and contemptible about, what must be assumed to be, her former lover.

  The defiled phone leaves Amelia’s hand at speed, following a clear and perfect path into a strawberry pavlova, chinking against a jug of iced lemonade on its way. Amelia kicks at the corner of the table, shouting and swearing. Cecily watches in horror as the top of the trestle slides off its triangulated supports and, tipping to one side, ushers several cakes onto the grass.

  “Amelia. Pull yourself together. This is ridiculous.”

  “Don’t shout at her. Can’t you see she’s upset?” defends Tilly.

  “Just fucking leave me alone,” shouts Amelia as she strides off to the margins of the field.

  “Amelia! Come back!”

  “Oh. Bloody. Hell,” voices Tilly, slowly and ominously.

  The sheep, startled by the ruckus, have, indeed, started a stampede. Three raise themselves up on their hind hooves and, bucking and kicking, knock into fair goers, the PA system, buckets of sand, craft tables. Others pick up speed and run full pelt in all directions, taking with them tablecloths, bunting, electrical cables, cordons. Fly, alerted now to the emergency by the collapse of her impromptu shelter, sets off to round them up, barking and yapping in her efforts to bring order to chaos.

  Other dogs both off and on leads join in the commotion. Men gamely adopt Maori poses to try and capture the marauding beasts who trot daintily past their outstretched fingertips. Children scream, climbing up their parents in a bid to be lifted above the commotion. Those dogs who had either slipped their leads or had freedom to roam, trot over to the mess in front of what was once the cake table, greedily and systematically making in-roads into the cake and cream and fruit, distracted only momentarily by Amelia’s phone issuing the first few notes of ‘Dancing Queen’ before it capsizes irretrievably into confectionous oblivion.

  Marcus

  It is difficult to make out exactly what is going on. Whatever it is, it has a sort of impromptu, unplanned look about it. Sheep rustling? What should he do? Join the melee or stay in post and ensure no one enters the chapel unsupervised or riffles the leaflets? He opts to watch from a safe distance.

  A moment or two later, bizarrely, one of the sheep breaks away from the churning crowd and runs towards him. What is he to do? He rattles the tin of sweets and calls out, quietly, “Sheepie. Sheepie,” unhooking the guide rope. The lumpen creature walks right past his sentry position, drops down into the ditch and pokes its head curiously into the opening of the chapel. “Good sheepie. There’s a good sheepie.” A trembling baa alerts him to the arrival of the next sheep. Well, gadzooks, there is a queue of them, all following the lead sheep and making their way towards him.

  He steps back, still rattling the tin, in the most inviting and non-threatening way he can muster, whispering almost, “Sheepie. There you are, good sheepies,” until at least six have wandered in to have a look. Mercifully a ruddy fellow of the soil then comes along with a couple of hurdles and blocks them in.

  Tilly insists on buying him a pint. “Here you are, lad. Get that down you.”

  He sort of likes Tilly. Very different to any creature he’d met on his commute into and out of London. Not many shepherdesses in Camden. Although, there might have been at one point. Mental note to pursue that line of enquiry. She stands directly in front of him offering up the glass of beer. Orange string tumbles from her pockets; white filling works its way out of the slits in her sleeves. Her hair part-flattened, part-spiky, follows no particular pattern, her blue eyes twinkle with mischief while her nose reddens in the sharp sunlight.

  “Thank you. Although you didn’t have to. Have you got them all rounded up?”

  “Yes. They’re all back. Some dozy bugger left the latch off.” He stands with the glass in his hand, utterly discomforted. It doesn’t seem right to be drinking while on duty.

  “Are you not having a drink?”

  “No, driving home later.”

  Marcus wishes he could summon up some arcane but nonetheless amusing sheep fact when she turns to look over her shoulder.

  “Ah, Jeremiah! Hang on a minute.” Marcus nods vigorously, his mouth now full of the taste of hops, his nose assaulted by bubbles. He’d taken too
big a mouthful. How asinine. Like a fresher at the Student Union bar. All over again. An overwhelming but self-cancelling compulsion to either snort or swallow conflicts with the pleasing novelty of standing in a busy field on a warm summer’s day with someone who appears to be as much at variance with the rest of society as he feels. Turning to Marcus she touches his arm, saying, “Got to go. Thanks again.”

  She waits a second for Marcus to reply. Mouth, throat and now nasal cavity awash, he can only pray for her to depart immediately. Each nod is nearly a swill too far. Mercifully Tilly turns on her heels, allowing him then the opportunity to draw breath and suck the beer down into his stomach, gurgling its plunging, vacuum-inducing way.

  “You alright, mate?” one of the lads asks as he passes with a mallet in his hand.

  “Yes. Yes,” he rasps. “Fine.”

  “That’s OK then. There’s someone here says she knows you…”

  Village

  By six o’clock, Teddy Nesbitt, winner of the Strong Man Competition, had rung the bell a massive forty times and been declared the strongest six-year-old ever. Jasper the donkey had completed his 26th circuit and refused to go any further. The brass band had stowed their implements and got back on the bus for Ipswich. Unwanted bric-a-brac and raffle prizes had shifted themselves one stop further on their unloved and lonely lives. Marcus helped Rev Bethel carry the blue rope back to the church. Tilly loaded up the sheep and the hurdles into the trailer and said she’d be back in a day or two. Tilly’s daughter, Lizzie, and Amelia said a tender farewell.

  The field was emptying gradually. A few diehards including a couple of members of the jazz band stayed on with the crew of the fair to see off the beer. Shadows were lengthening. Midges were rising from the ground. The doughty ladies joined the Scouts in picking up litter. Crows were taking possession of the air. Madge trundled the sweet trolley back to the post office. Amelia and Cecily carried plastic boxes and cake plates back to the house for washing. The vintage cars popped and bubbled their way home. Ned said he’d come back later to lock up. Thistle down floated in the cooling evening air.

  17

  Marcus

  Marcus awakes the next morning. Daylight forms a sharply pointed lightning strike that pierces his left eyeball with the intensity of a laser beam. He has difficulty locating the other eyeball which is subject to a different kind of pain altogether. A pressing kind of pain. With the lucidity of the very confused, his mind decides that this is probably a good thing, a very good thing, given the explosions that are going off inside his head. If something is pressing into his eyeball, then that blocks off at least one expulsion route for his brains.

  With each blink of his one functioning eye he tries to pull back into its rightful position the opposite wall, which, if left unattended, detaches itself and skitters pell-mell with all the other disconnected paraphernalia of his usually tidy bedroom.

  Something about this movement brings a faint memory back to mind. The sensation of whirling round and round, his head flung back helplessly, unable to right itself and the unusual gargle that issued from his throat that was part laughter, part acrid beer.

  Why is he thinking planets? Planets come into it somewhere.

  A groan issues from the other side of his bed.

  Oh, no! What he is apparently reliving is a throw-back to his student days. A monumental hangover. Although, Marcus decides, it is probably better not to focus too strongly on any concept with the word ‘throw’ in it. As in throw up. His stomach, in response to this thought, sets up a similar parabolic spin to the room, but on a completely different plane.

  Ah. It is coming back to him. This thing about planets and spinning. For some reason at about ten o’clock last night, just as the guys in the beer tent were switching off the generators and dousing the lights, he’d got into a discussion with a very earnest ten-year-old about cosmology. At the time, it seemed, planetary alignments could be best demonstrated by a spin on the teacups. The obliging lads had taken it upon themselves to restart the fairground ride and Marcus and the earnest youngster – what was the poor lad’s name? Maximilian? – and some of the other boozers had jumped aboard and shouted out their various planetary affiliations. He’d been Phobos. Where the blazes is Phobos? Where the blazes were this lad’s parents?

  A shape shifts on the other side of the bed. The pain in his eyeball lessens and then increases exponentially.

  But, do you know what, he thinks to himself, it had been a fab night out with the lads. With the lads! When had he ever had a night out ‘with the lads’? Chess Club at uni had been about as riotous as it had got before his married days. Sure, he and Velda had had a social life, or at least in the beginning when they’d invited their neighbours on the new estate round for Trivial Pursuit and a curry.

  Last night had been a blast.

  Velda!

  Another lightning crack goes off in his brain. The adrenalin rush induced by the sudden recall of Velda appearing at the fair yesterday has the benefit of at least slowing down the free flow of his bedroom walls and effects but brings with it a much weightier (pace Velda) issue. Where is she now?

  Staring fixedly ahead at the fleeting wall, it is becoming dauntingly apparent that he is not alone in the bed. Oh my goodness. It isn’t? Is it? He dares not turn his head to look.

  Of course. She’d appeared, out of the blue. There’d been some bizarre story about how she’d become part of this, what was it? Some sort of peripatetic, para-sisters nonsense. Someone had posted on a forum a distress message. Whoever is in the vicinity, known or unknown, hops to and pours tea and sympathy while the defects, shortcomings and indiscretions of the common man are picked over with surgical precision. Apparently yesterday she’d picked up a call from this neck of the woods and galloped (galumphed more like) to the rescue.

  Oh, please, please, no. If she was pouring balm on yet another unwitting victim of the unfair sex, what the blazes is she doing in the bed next to him?

  He has absolutely no recall how they had both got there. None at all. She’d been quite amicable on the field but not in such a way as to suppose they might end up in bed together. After the sheep had been safely corralled and he’d finished the pint Tilly had bought him, she stood smiling by his side, even patted his arm and held on to it while he showed her round the sunken chapel.

  Oh God. Quite another thought occurs to him. They hadn’t…had they? Risking lowering his eyes from the opposite wall, tentatively and slowly in case it wound up its magic lantern spin again, he checks out his attire. Good. Intact. Well, all except for his tie. Socks. Slacks. Belt. Countryman shirt. Still tucked in. All present. Hail, most merciful heart of Jesus.

  Had he given her a key? Had she joined in the carousing on the field? This was long after the day visitors had left. Only the guys from the microbrewery, Bishy Barnabee’s fairground and the gardener chappie, Ned, who had come along at six o’clock to lock up and Marcus had remained. They’d all larked around until, as he explained to the wee lad, Maximilian, Pleiades had made its way into the third quartile of the summer sky. He couldn’t remember Velda turning up again, after she’d trotted off on her rescue mission, but then again, there seems to be a fair amount he can’t quite remember.

  How had he got home? Probably braced between two strong shoulders, toes of his shoes scuffing along the ground, singing ‘We’ll Roll the Old Chariot Along’ to the tune of ‘Nelson’s Blood’, his favourite bar room chant.

  And who on earth is that in the bathroom next door?

  Are there now two stowaways in the flat?

  Had Velda presumed to bring her latest waif to stay?

  There’s a knock on the bedroom door, brisk and businesslike. Should he invite them in? Assuming that Velda would wish her identity hidden, as it is beyond the bounds of all reasonableness that she would wish it known she had spent the night in her estranged husband’s bed, he moves to pull the covers over the
recumbent figure in the bed. So, it is not without some startlement that his eyes focus on his estranged wife pushing open the bedroom door with her ample behind, carrying a tea tray in her outstretched arms. It is suddenly even more imperative to hide the identity of the person who had made their way into his bed. He pulls the covers up tight, decorum momentarily winning out over curiosity.

  Velda advances into the room. Marcus lies rigid, eyes popping. “Marcus.”

  “Velda.”

  A bare arm makes its way through the swaddling of the bedclothes. Marcus’s eyes lock on to those of his wife in mute terror as the person in the bed next to him wriggles and shifts to a seated position.

  “Cecily!”

  “Cecily?”

  “Marcus. Hello.”

  “Well, I’ll go and get another cup, shall I?” offers Velda, somewhat archly.

  “No. Please don’t bother. I’m going. Right now.” Velda leaves the bedroom door wide open and goes to clatter some crockery in the kitchen, turning her back on the bed containing the unusual and still unexplained combination of both Cecily and Marcus. In amongst his confusion and bewilderment at this most unexpected turn of events is also a gut-wrenching panic that Velda might find the green and cream plaster of Paris monstrosity, provenance unknown, in its beheaded state under the kitchen sink. That could possibly be all that is required to move this rather delicate situation into one of all-out warfare. And he really does not have the head for it this morning.

  Neither Cecily nor Marcus wish to look too closely at the other nor ask the unaskable questions. Marcus makes to swing his legs out of the bed to allow Cecily room to exit, given that her side of the bed is close by the wall. Every movement sets off an ominous tolling in his head. Mutely, she straightens her clothing, also all accounted for and intact, before clambering rather inelegantly, given the encumbrance of the duvet and an ancient eiderdown, over Marcus’s aching body. “Sorry.”

  “No. I’m sorry. Can you manage?”