Gilbert had set about — with much banging and clattering of pans — to cook some kind of meal. This might have been lunch, it might have been dinner, I couldn’t really say — it was so very dark outside that it was impossible to tell what time of day it was and I had lost all track of time by now.
Kara inhaled on her joint as if her life depended on it. Every so often a seed exploded like a tiny pistol-shot and sent a glowing red spark skittering across the table or onto an inflammable piece of child’s clothing (which is also how accidents happen). Jill and Kara exchanged their joints. They had embarked on a heated discussion about the age at which you should stop breastfeeding. Jill favoured two years old while Kara thought you ‘should let them decide for themselves’. A decision she might live to regret when Proteus was a thirty-year-old civil servant commuting daily from Tring.
At that moment a small child lunged into the room and gave a bloodcurdling scream. I jumped up in alarm — the cry was so ghastly that for a moment I thought it must be on fire and was searching for something to throw over it. No-one else in the kitchen seemed moved by the noise, all except for Terri who stuck a surreptitious foot out and tripped the child up. It ceased the noise abruptly and I recognized it as Jill’s daughter.
‘If you’re hungry you’ll have to wait,’ Jill said to her. The child unearthed a plastic potty from under the table and threw it across the kitchen.
‘Don’t forget we’ve got to kill the goat,’ Gilbert said, casting a doubtful look over a wrecked Kara. In the hierarchy of Balniddrie — although pecking-order might be a more accurate term — Kara was the unacknowledged leader. The goat to be killed, it transpired, was a little billy-kid because, Jill explained, ‘Billy-kids are no use for anything.’
‘I didn’t know we got executed if we weren’t of any use,’ Terri said. ‘I didn’t realize usefulness was the criterion by which we lived or died.’ (Quite a long sentence for Terri.)
‘We’re not talking about people, we’re talking about goats,’ Kara said.
‘Goats, people — what’s the difference?’ Terri said, looking as if she was about to stab Kara with her parasol.
‘It’ll be a humane killing,’ Jill said in an attempt to mollify Terri. ‘Miranda’s going to do it, she’s the—’
— Excuse me, Nora says, but where is Kevin? Have you forgotten he’s in the kitchen?
Kevin, who had been remarkably silent until now (unlike Nora), was helping Gilbert to peel potatoes and carrots in a slow, ham-fisted way. He popped the top of a can of McEwan’s and said, ‘That’s what animals are for, they exist so we can eat them. In the great kitchens of the Palace of Calysveron there’s always an animal roasting on a spit — hares and rabbits, capons, a fine hart, a wild boar, a great ox for the feasts.’
‘That would be a real place, would it?’ Jill scoffed. ‘The Palace of Callyshite?’
‘Calysveron,’ Kevin corrected her. ‘Real as anything else.’
‘Real as this table?’ Jill quizzed. Kevin scrutinized the table as if he was thinking of buying it and finally said, ‘Yes, as real as this table.’ This dialogue would have gone on longer and grown more tedious (although the premise was interesting) if the child hadn’t set off round the kitchen again, at the same hectic pace as before and yet again screaming for dear life. This time it made a beeline for the Aga and was saved at the last minute from immolating itself by a modified rugby tackle from Gilbert. Perhaps they could substitute the girl for the goat in whatever Satanic ritual they were planning for later. A kid for a kid.
Before the Murk got any Murkier, and before we had to face whatever nightmarish repast Gilbert was preparing to serve to us, Terri and I decided to take a tour of the outside. Terri was still holding onto a lingering hope that the dog might be somewhere about. We visited the garden but there was little to see; the combination of endless winter and poor husbandry meant that nothing was growing in it apart from a large crop of dandelions, the few valiant remains of Jerusalem artichoke stems and some poisonous water hemlock that had colonized the burn at the bottom of the garden.
The chickens were free to roam this winter garden, although the sensible ones had gone to roost by now. Kara had said that some kind of fowl pest had been laying claim to the hens and the few stragglers that remained in the gloaming certainly looked rather lacklustre, their feathers dishevelled and their eyes dull. Terri cluck-clucked and chick-chick-chicked at them but they were indifferent to conversation.
Adjacent to the garden was a bumpy field full of some kind of mutant thistle that hadn’t died down in the winter cold. This was where the goats lived when they weren’t shut up for the night in a pig-pen. They were Anglo-Nubians, with floppy rabbit ears and devil-eyes — two nannies and two kids, a big one and a little one, this latter presumably the subject of tonight’s sacrifice.
‘Poor baby,’ Terri said, attempting to kiss it.
Although a little downcast, the goats were quite friendly, certainly friendlier than the chickens, and so we spent some time petting and commiserating until a genuine kind of darkness fell and it grew too cold to be standing around in a field so we made our way back to the kitchen from which was emanating an unappetizing aroma.
Jill was setting the table, trying to make a space amongst the candles and candle-making equipment that were strewn everywhere.
‘That’s my pièce de résistance,’ Gilbert said, pointing proudly to a particularly ugly candle — a pyramid of brown studded with lumps of mauve wax. ‘We could light some of these candles,’ he suggested to Kara; ‘that would be nice.’
‘They’re to sell,’ she snapped, ‘and besides, we’ve got electricity, for heaven’s sake.’
Robin emerged from ‘the wine cellar’, which was actually another pig-pen, carrying several bottles of home-made wine — rose-hip, elderberry and a rather lethal-looking parsnip.
‘I’ll just uncork the reds,’ he said, ‘so that they can breathe for a moment.’ I had a sudden rather unnerving glimpse of the polite schoolboy lurking within the hairy chrysalis — of Robin helping out at parental cocktail parties, handing round salted nuts and topping up the tonic in large, middle-class gins.
‘Yeah,’ Robin admitted, shamefaced, ‘Surrey. Dad owns a firm of estate agents.’
‘Lucky you.’
Andrea and Shug had reappeared by now, their pupils dilated from either drugs or a bout of sexual activity or — more likely — both. Bob also turned up, although where he had been was less clear — another transporter malfunction, I suppose.
‘I am not a number,’ he whispered defiantly to me, casting about warily for a giant bubble that had apparently been chasing him.
Several people I’d never seen before made an appearance for the meal, all of them Balniddrians, presumably.
‘Balniddrians,’ Kevin said, writing the word down in a tiny little notebook. ‘Good name.’
The meal was a strange primeval slop of semi-identifiable ingredients — brown rice, potatoes, carrots, something that might or might not have been a vegetable, all of it vaguely goat-smelling even though not a morsel of goat was in it, according to a vow on his mother’s life that Terri made Gilbert swear on his knees.
‘What did you do with that pan of wax that was on the stove?’ Jill asked Gilbert, who pretended not to hear.
Proteus was ‘asleep somewhere’ according to a rather vague Kara but Jill’s unpronounceable child was up long past her bedtime and had to be force-fed her rice-carrot-wax sludge before falling asleep with her head on the table, by which time she had acquired an almost feverish complexion.