‘Quite a substantial piece,’ I say. ‘Hardly half an hour’s work.’
‘What was your object, Grace?’ someone asks.
Resting one of her elbows on the tabletop and picking at her lip with her fingers, she looks at me again.
‘My object was Paul,’ she says. ‘And you’re right, Paul. I didn’t write all of that this morning. But you are my inspiration. There’s no question about that.’
There’s a pause while people take this in, each interpreting it, presumably, in their own way.
‘I don’t know what to say,’ I say, reaching for a smile and not quite getting there. ‘Does anyone have a question?’
Lawrence Duncan — or Duncan Lawrence — signals that he wishes to speak. I give him a nod.
‘I’m just kind of like playing devil’s avocado here, dude,’ he says to Grace, ‘but what you’ve done there, mixing up the real and the fictional, you know, bringing a real person into your novel, is that OK? How does that play? I mean, in terms of, like, taste?’
‘You mean, is it in bad taste?’ With the fingers of one hand she is still picking at dry skin on her lower lip.
‘I guess.’
‘I don’t think so, because it really happened.’
‘Right.’ He nods, and then his eyes grow wide. ‘Really? Shit.’
‘Yeah, really.’
‘You mean it really happened to someone you know?’
Lawrence Duncan — or Duncan Lawrence — is like a man trying to keep hold of a bar of soap. Grace, meanwhile, appears to be carefully considering her answer.
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘It happened to someone I know.’
There is an interesting discussion to be had here about morality and taste, but I’m not about to encourage it. Plus, there are a lot of people with pieces to read and only a limited amount of time. I suggest we move on. I notice that Grace finally removes her fingers from her mouth and as her hand returns to the tabletop it is shaking.
After lunch, I get through the first two tutorials on autopilot. I dish out my standard advice. Carry a notebook. Read your work out loud. Go for long walks.
The third slot — the last one of the day — is Helen’s. She comes to find me — I’m sitting outside staring at the far side of the valley — and says, ‘I’ve got to get out of here.’
‘Good idea,’ I say, getting to my feet. ‘Where do you want to go?’
‘Let’s go for a drive,’ she says.
‘Er, OK,’ I say, shooting her a glance, to which she responds with a breezy smile.
I unlock the car as we approach it and she jumps in. I reverse out of the cobbled area in front of the house and drive slowly up the steep lane in first gear.
‘Where shall we go?’ I ask when we reach the road.
‘Which way are you familiar with?’ she asks.
‘That way,’ I say, pointing to the right.
‘Go left then.’
I go left.
‘So shall I just drive?’ I ask after a couple of minutes of listening to the rushing sound of the tyres on the road.
‘Whatever you like,’ she says, playing with her ponytail. ‘You can do whatever you like.’
I turn to look at her. She gives me a lopsided smile.
When I see a turning, I take it, and when I see another I take that as well. Five minutes later we are parked in a field, tucked in behind a hedge. I switch off the engine and release my seat belt. I barely have time to register the sound of birdsong from the hedgerow before Helen climbs across and straddles my lap, hitching up her skirt. I put my hands up to the back of her head. I release her hair from the bobble that she uses for the ponytail and she shakes her head, laughing, so that her hair goes everywhere. I have never seen her with her hair down before. There suddenly seems so much of it. She places her mouth against mine. Our teeth clash. Her mouth tastes citrusy. I can hear the birds singing. I trace the outline of her breast through her cotton top. She leans into me with her hips and runs a hand under my T-shirt, over the small soft mound of my stomach. Her other hand goes to my belt. I lift her top at the back so I can undo her bra. With a shrugging motion, she removes this from her sleeve and I stroke her breasts through the top and then underneath the top and she undoes my jeans and I press back in my seat until I can push them down and she helps me and I remember the last time I parked my car in a field and she kisses me harder and her teeth catch my upper lip and I taste blood and I hear birdsong and she removes her top and her breasts rise and fall in front of my face and she presses them into my face and there’s blood on her breast and the sound of birdsong is constant and I now know what sound it was I could hear that time above the low growl of the engine and the chug of the exhaust and the increasingly faint protests of the children. That sound that I couldn’t put a name to at that time. A sound that should be beautiful both in itself and by association. It’s not, though, it’s not for me. But then nothing is. Nothing is beautiful. Nothing makes me feel anything. Everything either exists or it doesn’t. Everything either has a physical presence or it doesn’t. Everything — everyone — is either alive or dead. And that’s about all I can say.
Helen climbs off me, still laughing or laughing again. I don’t know what is funny.
‘Look,’ she says.
The car is surrounded by cows. At the windscreen, the driver’s window, the back passenger window and the rear windscreen, cows stand with their great heavy heads pointed towards the interior of the car.
‘How long have they been watching us?’ Helen asks.
‘I don’t know,’ I say, as I study their long eyelashes, their indifferent gaze.
‘It’s like yesterday morning,’ says Helen, ‘when I read my piece about me and you in your car and everyone around the table was staring.’
‘Were they?’ I say, looking at her and then back at the cows surrounding the car, their huge jaws sliding from side to side like machines made of flesh.
‘You know Grace?’ she says.
I look at Helen again.
‘Is she for real?’ she says. ‘Is she authentic?’
‘One might ask you the same question,’ I say.
Thursday evening. Everyone is gathered in the snug. It’s Grace’s turn to read. Half the students are reading tonight, the other half tomorrow. Of those who are reading tonight, all but two have already read and their performances have been received with due warmth and enthusiasm, but there’s an obvious tension in the air, a sense among the students that Grace is not done yet.
She has been sitting slightly apart, in a corner of the room. It’s a small room and there are a lot of people; someone has to sit in the corner. But still.
She slides forward to the edge of her seat and looks up. Having secured the attention of everyone in the room, she looks down and starts to read.
Most people never meet a murderer. Jonny met two.
At the time when Harold Frederick Shipman was committing his crimes, no one knew he was a killer. One or two had their suspicions; eyebrows were raised and checks were made, followed by more checks, but Shipman went on killing. And although Jonny’s nana died almost certainly at the hands of her doctor, that’s another story, one that would begin to be told three years later in court. Convicted in January 2000, of fifteen murders, Shipman was told he would spend the rest of his life in prison.
He did.
On 13 January 2004 he hanged himself in his cell using bed sheets tied to the bars of his window. He was fifty-seven, just a day shy of fifty-eight.
Jonny was fourteen.
The first report of the Shipman Inquiry, which followed the trial, had already concluded that the former doctor had killed 215 people. Jonny’s nana was not named among them, but that figure would later be revised upwards. The thing was, no one would ever know for sure how many killings could be attributed to Shipman.