The Magpies A Psychological Thriller

Sixteen


‘So what are you going to do about it?’

‘What?’ Jamie was taken aback by the question.

Mike leaned forward across the desk, his face framed by two computer monitors. ‘I said, What are you going to do about it?’

Jamie fell silent. He held a ballpoint pen between finger and thumb, tapped it on the edge of his keyboard, stared blindly at the screensaver on his monitor. All around him people tapped away at their keyboards, had important telephone conversations, wandered to and from the coffee machine. The server in the corner hummed noisily; the fax machine bleeped. But Jamie was oblivious to it all.

What was he going to do about it?

He had come into work this morning with the need to talk to someone, to pour it all out, to get it off his chest. He didn’t expect catharsis, just some relief. Last night, at 3 a.m., Lucy and Chris had played extracts from War of the Worlds – the seventies ‘rock opera’ – not at full volume, but just loud enough for Jamie to hear it and for it to come seeping into his dreams. He had woken up and jumped out of bed in a state of shocked disbelief and stared at the floorboards. When he was eight or nine, his parents used to play this album late at night after he’d gone to bed. And as a little boy with a large imagination, he had lain awake, convinced that the Martians were coming for him. The album came with a booklet of paintings, in which men and women ran screaming through the Victorian streets, pursued by a Martian death machine; red alien liquid bubbled between once-glorious buildings; a priest held up a cross before an unimpressed Martian who fired off a death ray to obliterate him. All these images of horror and destruction floated before his eyes, along with a few original ones, conjured up by his pre-adolescent mind. In the end, after a week of nightmares, he reluctantly told his mum why he had been so tired and unhappy recently and, filled with remorse, she had binned the album, making him promise that he would tell her if anything scared him in the future. He shouldn’t be ashamed, even if he was a big boy now.

Maybe I should phone her now, he thought. Tell her I’m afraid. Afraid because I don’t know what I’m going to do about it.

How on earth had Lucy and Chris known? They had managed to pinpoint how the Newtons knew about Kirsty’s arachnophobia – they’d mentioned it at the dinner party – but how did they know about Jamie’s old fear? He racked his brains. Had he mentioned his fear of that music to them? No; no he hadn’t. He’d never mentioned it to anyone. Not even Kirsty. In fact, he had practically forgotten that album existed. In the early nineties, someone had released a dance mix of the War of the Worlds music, and he found that it didn’t scare him any more – not in the sweaty centre of a heaving, lively nightclub, anyway. But at three a.m., in the dark, the music coming up from beneath the floorboards brought back all those childhood terrors. He could almost see the alien tripods outside the window. He thought harder, tried to work it out – but there was no way they could have known about his fear. No way.

But he had to put a stop to it. Kirsty buried her head beneath the pillow while he dressed hurriedly, pulling on his jeans and a T-shirt without bothering with his underwear. He went outside and ran down the steps. It was freezing and, apart from the music coming from the basement flat, utterly silent.

He banged on the door and on the window pane. Unsurprisingly, there was no answer. He lifted the letterbox and shouted through it, ‘I’m going to call the police.’ But he knew he wouldn’t. He would be too embarrassed. The music scares me, officer. How pathetic did he want to look? He went back upstairs and got back in bed, and at that very moment the music stopped. He lay absolutely still, dreading that it might start up again. Eventually, he tried to get back to sleep. But he was too angry; his heart was beating too fast. And it would be time to get up in a couple of hours anyway. So he got out of bed again and plugged the Playstation in. He played Call of Duty, imagining that every enemy soldier he mowed down was Lucy or Chris. Kirsty got up too and sat beside him, watching. She barely spoke.

Weeks had gone by since the spider incident. For the first week, Kirsty had made Jamie check the bed before he got in it; the bath before she would turn the taps on; the front room before she would enter it. She was convinced that it was going to happen again: another spider invasion. But when it didn’t, she relaxed, and then crossed to a state beyond relaxed. She took on an air of calmness and serenity. She walked around with her hands on her belly a lot, even though she was far from showing. She bought parenthood magazines and looked up baby sites on the internet. She was imagining herself in a perfect future, a future in which she would have her child and everything would be alright. She seemed to forget all about the problems with Lucy and Chris. She stopped mentioning the spiders, although one evening a spider made an appearance on television and she shouted at Jamie to change the channel. Quickly. Quickly.

Now she sat beside Jamie and watched him exorcise his anger and frustration. At six thirty, as the sun struggled to lighten the sky, she went off to the bathroom to be sick. Morning sickness had arrived with a vengeance. And then they went to work.

Jamie drove her to the hospital – he drove her everywhere now, since she refused to go on the Tube or catch a bus, and he was glad to – and then he went to his own workplace. God, he was tired. He thought he might fall asleep at the wheel. He turned the radio up and let the DJ’s relentless chatter keep him awake. At work, he took the lift to the floor where his office was located and went straight to the coffee machine. The pale brown drink that emerged from the machine didn’t really taste like coffee, but it contained a trace of caffeine and he added a lot of sugar. As he carried the drink over to his desk a snatch of War of the Worlds entered his head and he shuddered.

‘Are you alright, Jamie?’ asked Mike, who sat at the opposite desk. Mike held the same position as Jamie – software installation engineer – and had joined E.T.N. a few months before. He was the same age as Jamie, with the same educational and occupational background, but he was more of a lad: a dedicated pleasure-seeker, firmly single, hanging out with a group of hard drinkers whose main interests were football and women – in that order. As far as Jamie was concerned, Mike was a good bloke to work with, but he wasn’t a potential ‘outside work’ friend. They talked shop most of the time, but today, when Mike asked him if he was alright Jamie saw the opportunity to talk to somebody, no matter how unlikely his choice of confidante, and he grabbed it.

‘So what are you going to do about it?’

That was the question.

‘Why don’t you move out?’

Jamie shook his head. ‘No way. I refuse to let a pair of nutters like that drive me out of my home. I love that flat. I know we haven’t been there very long, but it feels like the place I want to be. The place we want to be. All three of us.’

He and Kirsty had discussed this when the problems with Lucy and Chris started, and then again after the night of the spiders. Should they get away, try to find somewhere new? They both reacted with a firm No. This was their dream flat. Jamie remembered how happy they had been when they moved in just a few months before. It was the most fantastic place – it would be incredibly difficult to find anywhere as good in their price range. There was plenty of space for three, especially after Jamie had turned the spare room into a nursery (he already had grand plans about what he would do). Maybe in a few years, if they had a second child, they would need to find somewhere bigger, but that might also involve a move out of London.

‘We can’t let them win, Kirsty,’ Jamie said. ‘That’s what they want, I bet. They want us to move out. God knows why – maybe they just don’t like having people live above them. Or maybe it’s us. Whatever the reason, I am not going to let a pair of psychos like that force me out of my home.’

‘I’d feel exactly the same if I were you,’ said Mike now. ‘You’ve got to stand your ground. But I don’t know how you’ve managed to keep your temper. If it was me I’d have been down there to sort them, taken some of the boys with me. I’d put a bomb through their letterbox.’

‘I have been down there.’

‘And what happened?’

‘They won’t talk to me. They never answer the door. And the time I went into their garden to talk to them they called the police.’

‘Who were a dead loss, I expect.’

‘Yes. They just told us to keep a record of what was going on.’

‘Big deal.’ Mike looked left and right to see if anyone was listening, then leaned forward. ‘From what you say, these people need dealing with in a more direct manner. You can’t be reasonable with people like them, Jamie. They don’t speak the same language as the rest of us.’

‘But they seemed so nice when we first met them.’

‘Yeah. They were trying to get you to trust them. Or maybe they’re less calculating than that. They might be schizophrenic. One minute nice and friendly, the next – ga-ga.’ He twirled his finger beside his head and pulled a face.

Jamie laughed, despite himself.

‘You must have the patience of a saint. God, people like them want putting down. I really can’t believe that you’re putting up with all their crap, especially with a pregnant girlfriend who’s being scared out of her wits by them. I don’t want to offend you, but you’re not being much of a man, are you? A man’s meant to protect his home – his cave. It’s there, buried inside you, one of the most basic instincts a man can have. To look after his woman and child and their home.’

Jamie looked at Mike. It was easy for him to sit there casting judgement. To an outsider, the whole thing was black and white. But it was more complicated than it looked…wasn’t it?

Jamie wondered. Maybe it wasn’t so complicated at all. All he trying to do was build a home with his girlfriend – his future wife – and their unborn child. And the Newtons were, for whatever reason, trying to spoil it. Maybe it was a simple issue. Maybe Mike was right, even if he did term it in such an outmoded way. It was his duty to protect Kirsty and their nest. So far he had failed. Although Kirsty seemed calm now (too calm?) and happy about their forthcoming wedding, she had been through a lot recently, from the day of Paul’s accident onwards. Jamie didn’t buy into all that macho crap, but maybe, sometimes, there was a need to.

He looked up at Mike, who, apparently reading Jamie’s mind, said, ‘I know what I’d do.’

He slammed his fist into his palm.

Jamie left work early and headed straight to the hospital. He wanted to talk to Paul, to see what he thought. After his chat with Mike, his concentration had been shot: all he could of think of was Mike saying, ‘What are you going to do about it?’ and the way he had punched his palm. He wanted to ask Paul his opinion.

He found his friend sitting up in bed, flicking boredly through a copy of FHM. He put the magazine down when Jamie entered the room. He looked much better than he had the day he had woken up. A shade of colour had returned to his cheeks. Doctor Meer had told Jamie that Paul’s recovery was the quickest and most complete he had ever seen. He was responding well to physiotherapy, he appeared to have suffered no memory loss and all his mental faculties were intact. It was all good news.

‘All alone?’ Jamie asked, pulling up a chair.

Paul frowned. ‘Heather’s just gone to the loo. She needed some tissues to dry her eyes.’

Jamie looked at him quizzically.

‘We just split up. I told her I thought it was for the best.’

Jamie was shocked. ‘Why?’

‘She was getting on my nerves. She’s here all the time, fussing and carrying on. God, the other day she even mentioned the possibility of us getting married. We were only together for a few days before my accident, for Christ’s sake, and from what I remember it wasn’t that great anyway. She’s pretty crap in bed. Just lies there and expects you to do all the work, if you know what I mean.’

‘But you seemed really happy together. That day at the go-kart track…’

‘Did we? I don’t remember.’

‘And you’d fancied her for ages. You said she was really sexy and lovely and that you wouldn’t stand a chance with someone like her.’

‘Well, I changed my mind. She was getting on my tits, so I chucked her. She’ll get over it.’

Jamie was speechless. He had never heard Paul talk like before. This wasn’t the Paul he knew, the Paul who had never chucked anyone in his life. He remembered how Heather had flooded their flat with tears because she was so heartbroken by Paul’s condition. When he awoke from the coma she was so happy. She had been round a few times since and all she talked about was Paul Paul Paul, but now in a happy way. She told Kirsty that she wanted a baby too, and that Paul would be a wonderful father. She told them how she had given Paul a blow job beneath the hospital sheets, when none of the doctors or other nurses were around. She went on about Paul so much that Jamie thought he might go mad if he heard the name once more. But now he could imagine how devastated she was going to be.

‘Why are you acting so cold?’ Jamie asked.

‘Don’t you start, Jamie. That’s exactly what she said.’

‘And don’t you think that’s because it’s true? You were never like this before.’

‘No, I was a poor sap who always let women walk all over me. I was a sad, desperate case. The kind of bloke that women want to be their best friend. I’ve had a lot of time to think since I’ve been in here, and I’ve decided I’m going to change. I’m going to do what I want, and I don’t need some clingy slag holding me back.’

‘Paul–’

‘Paul Paul Paul! Why don’t you all just f*ck off and leave me alone.’ His voice got louder. ‘I’m pissed off with people treating me like a sick puppy.’ He was practically shaking now. ‘I’m going to get out of this bed and change my life. And if you don’t like that, I don’t want you in my new life.’

He picked up his magazine and hid his face behind it.

Jamie was so shocked he couldn’t move. It took all his will power to uproot himself and walk out of the room. His legs were shaking; he felt like he’d been slapped hard around the face. Halfway down the corridor, he saw Heather come out of the toilets. He hurried over to her.

Her fringe was damp. Jamie guessed she had just splashed her face to wash away any sign that she had been crying. She looked forlorn, and when she looked at Jamie she almost burst into tears again.

‘Did he tell you?’ she asked.

He nodded. ‘Come on, let’s go and get a coffee.’

They went to the cafeteria and Jamie bought two coffees. Heather stared at the table, not wanting to catch anyone’s eye or be seen by anyone she knew.

‘Do you want me to fetch Kirsty?’ he asked.

‘No. She doesn’t finish her shift for another hour.’

Jamie stirred brown sugar into his coffee. ‘He told me to f*ck off too.’

She looked up, surprised. ‘But you’re his best mate.’

‘So I thought.’

‘How long have you known him?’

He performed a quick mental calculation. ‘Nearly ten years.’

‘He’s changed, hasn’t he.’

Jamie nodded. ‘I’ve never seen him like this before. I’ve never even seen him get angry before, not really.’

‘It’s the accident. It’s done something to him.’ She sniffed. ‘Though Doctor Meer says he hasn’t suffered any brain damage at all. He says he’s responded to all their tests exactly as they’d hoped.’

‘Their tests mean nothing. He’s changed. We don’t need tests to see that. We know him – we know what he was like before. He wasn’t like this.’

Heather thumped the table. ‘Shit. Why did we have to go to that bloody go-karting track that day? Why? If we hadn’t gone, everything would be alright.’

Jamie said nothing. Heather started to cry, producing a damp hankie and pressing it against her eyes. Jamie knew why they had gone go-karting: because Chris had suggested it. Chris had taken them there, and then he had made that other driver crash into Paul. And now Paul had woken up, but he wasn’t the same. He wasn’t the old Paul they all loved. And it was all Chris’s fault. He felt a current of hurt run through his veins; the sour taste of anger on his tongue. It was Chris’s fault. Chris and Lucy. As Heather cried in front of him he thought of all the things they had done and the anger and hurt and hatred boiled and burned inside him.

They were trying to ruin his life.

They wanted to destroy everything he had.

They were threatening his sanity; upsetting his girlfriend; hurting his friends.

But what was he going to do about it?