The Extremes

Before she was through in the supermarket she bought a triangular cellophane package of sandwiches and a can of Diet Coke from the lunch counter, and lined up at the main checkout to pay a second time. She nibbled one of the

sandwiches as she headed down the High Street, again looking for Eastbourne Road and the hotel.

'Hello, Mrs Simons.'

Teresa turned in surprise, and found that Amy was walking along beside and slightly behind her. The tense expression she had worn during her confrontation in the market had vanished.

Teresa slowed. 'Hi, Amy!'

'I saw you back there, in the market square. Are you having a look round our town?'

'It's beautiful,' Teresa said. 'I love the way the houses sit on the hill, looking down across the park.'

Now she was speaking to someone, she realized that the peaceful quality of the town was a bit of an illusion. They were both having to raise their voices against the noise of the traffic.

'I love it too,' Amy said. 'I do now, anyway. 1 didn't think much of it when 1 was at school.'

'Have you lived in Bulverton all your life?'

'I worked away for a while when I was younger, but I think I'm back for good now. There's nowhere else 1 really want to be.'

'You must know a lot of people here.'

'More of them seem to know me, though. Look, Mrs Simons, I've been worrying about the room we put you in. Is it OK?'

' It's charming. Why?'

'Well, 1 went to America once on a holiday, and everything seemed so modem over there.'

In the bland, silvertinged daylight, Teresa saw that Amy was not as young as until now she had thought. Although she still had an attractive face, and she carried herself as if she was in her twenties, her hair had faint grey streaks and her body showed signs of thickness round the waist. Teresa wondered if she had ever tried working out, as she herself had done two or three years ago. The main benefit she had

found was that while there was no obvious improvement to her figure, she felt she had been doing the best she could for herself. Unless you worked out for hours every week, exercise was essentially about morale, not looking good.

'Look, don't worry about the room,' Teresa said. 'When you were in the US, did you ever stay in one of our motels?'

'No. '

'I've been in motels all over the country. Let me tell you, after a few nights in one of those a place like the White Dragon feels as comfortable as home.'

They had now reached Eastbourne Road with its continual flow of slowmoving traffic in both directions. The noise had increased, and already the slightly eccentric feeling the Old Town had induced in her was slipping away.

Amy came to a halt, and said, 1'd forgotten. I'll have to go back to the shops. I was on my way out to buy something.'

'That's my fault. Keeping you talking.'

'No, not your fault,' Amy said.

'The man I saw you with,' Teresa said. 'Who was he?'

'At the hotel, you mean?'

'No. just now. In the market.'

Amy looked away, across the line of cars and vans, towards the sea. 'I'm not sure who you mean.'

'I thought 1 might know him,' Teresa said.

'How could you? You coming in last night, getting in late.'

'That's what 1 thought. Well, it doesn't matter.'

'No, 1 suppose not,' Amy said, her hair flailing across her eyes.

CHAPTER 7

Nick was already in bed and lounging around with that morning's newspaper when Amy came upstairs and went into the bathroom. He heard her brushing her teeth. A little later she walked into the bedroom and began undressing. He watched her as he always did. She was used to him lying there at night watching her, and didn't seem to mind. To him she still looked the same naked as she had always done. Everything that he had found attractive in the old days was unchanged by the years.

His parents and her husband had been cremated on the same day, less than a week after the massacre, and he and Amy had met at the crematorium. She had been waiting outside the chapel when he emerged, blackcoated, darkeyed, swathed in misery, alone, not supported by any of her friends. They had simply stared at each other. lt was one more upheaval in a week of upheavals, a time of shock when nothing was a surprise. Afterwards they walked back down to the town, side by side, noticing other hearses moving up towards the cemetery on the Ridge, and the attendant camera lights and film crews, and the reporters.

He had no one left, and she was also alone. Subject to powerful feelings neither of them had tried to control, he took her back with him to the hotel in the afternoon, they were together that night, and had stayed together ever since.

That was still a time when people were able to speak about it. There were reporters everywhere, nowhere more than in

the White Dragon, where many of them stayed, and telling the story of what Grove had done became a way of trying to deal with what happened.

Later, it was no longer like that. The survivors found that it was not after all a way, that it added somehow to the horror of what had occurred. Those enquiring faces and voices, sometimes polite, sometimes intrusive, the notepads and tape recorders and video cameras, led quickly to the headlines and pictures in the tabloids, the suffering translated into a series of cliches. At first it was a novelty for people in Bulverton to see the town and its people on television, but then it quickly sank in that what was being shown to the world was not what had actually happened. lt was only an impression gained by outsiders.

Gradually a silence fell.

But five days after the shootings, when Amy and Nick came together again, was still in the time before anyone had learned media sophistication. People spoke from the need to explain, to try to make sense of the upheaval in which they were caught up.

That first night, still in distress after the funeral, Nick woke up into darkness and heard Amy sobbing. He turned on the light and tried to comfort her, but something unstoppable was flowing out of her. lt was not long after midnight.

He sat up beside her in the bed, staring down at her naked back as she sobbed and groaned in her misery. Looking at her, unable to offer comfort, he remembered what she had been to him in the good times, when she was unpredictable, funny and sexy, and causing endless trouble between him and his parents. For a few weeks back then he had never been happier in his life, and that euphoria of being a young man with an attractive and sexually compliant girlfriend had borne him on for months after it had all started going wrong.

She said, her voice muffled by the pillow, 'Nick, if you want to make love again, we can do it.

Then I'll leave.'

'No,' he replied. 'That's not it.'

'I'm cold. Please cover me.'

He loved to hear her voice, the familiar accent and intonation. He fussed around with the pillows and bedclothes, trying to make her comfortable and warm, then lay down once again beside her with his arm cradling her. A long time passed in silence.

Then Amy said, 'Your mum never liked me, did she?'

'Well, 1 wouldn't say'

'You know she didn't. 1 wasn't good enough for her son. She actually said that to me once. lt doesn't matter now, but it used to hurt me. She got her way in the end, and you went off to London.'