Consensual sex and forced intercourse
My room for that first interminable month in England was a three metre square attic conversion on the third level of Chicken Colditz HQ, a sort of penthouse pup tent. It had a single mattress on the floor and the walls tapered in claustrophobically from the cream carpeted floor at such an angle I had to hold the lids of my Samsonites up while I fossicked for clothes. I could only stand up in the middle of the room. Even that was dangerous – an ancient, deeply rutted beam ran left to right across the middle of the tiny room at going-for-a-pee-in-the-middle-of-the-night-braining height.
Opposite the door by the head of the mattress (which, it has to be said, had been made with clean white sheets, a good thick and fluffy blue duvet and two perfectly adequate pillows in white pillow cases), a single fourteen inch television-sized window looked out from a great height over a uniform line of long, narrow, mud brown and windowless wooden buildings, five in total, a sort of English country death camp. The high density hell within these buildings made my quarters look positively five star. I felt intensely uncomfortable being so close to such intensive suffering.
Gabriel’s bedroom (the one she’d abandoned at sixteen but which had remained as she’d left it) was on the second level next to Simon’s bedroom, which was next to the communal bathroom, which was next to Austin’s bedroom, which was the size of a church hall. Mariabella’s bedroom was on the ground floor in what would have been the dining room had there been one. Family Hogg chose to eat at a large wooden table in their huge country kitchen as they never had dinner guests because they never had friends. Kurt and Courtney slept on blankets in the utility room – not brilliant, but it could be worse.
I slept well that first night for a man who hadn’t been the least bit carnally knowledgeable for seven months, a man who had a girl just one floor below ready, willing and oestrogen-and-progestogenally able to play teacher and/or pupil at the slightest invitation. However, I was thirty-five and I did not tip toe about in the small hours having quickies in parent’s homes – those days were long gone. In any case, Gabriel deserved more than spit on her bits and a few hushed thrusts after her own seven months of enforced celibacy – that would have been carnally ignorant. No, we needed to do something special. Something worthy of that first time back in the saddle. Even if it meant booking a room for two hours. I’d thought about it, dreamt about it, fiddled with it. I’d organise it. It was my job.
***
‘Don’t let it get on the seat,’ Gabriel hissed the next day, twenty minutes into what had meant to be a scenic tour of the area.
I looked at her where she lay bent and buckled across the back seat of her fifty pound Skoda in her zipped up North Face jacket, naked from the waist down, my spent penis backing out of her like a Shar-Pei from a pup tent and all I could think to say was ‘Well, what do you suggest?’
At which point she grabbed the back of the seat and leapt on my lap depositing most of me back on me or more specifically on my nice clean jeans.
Fair enough. She was frustrated. And I was ashamed. Especially as she had clearly gone to town on her bits in anticipation of my arrival – perhaps with something more romantic in mind than a country lane quickie – the only hair to survive this frenzy of shaving and waxing being, curiously, a small jet black V aimed at her clitoris. It transpired (in light of current events) that this wasn’t directions: the V stood for Victory: victory for me at my new job; victory in our quest to stage fuck off wedding ceremonies at both ends of the world; victory in our quest to live happily every after. It was a lovely sentiment; a sentiment I applauded; a sentiment I doubted had ever before been expressed in pubic hair.
Still, it sat well with Gabriel’s growing predilection for body art, which thus far comprised tattoos – a Polynesian tribal armband around her left bicep, cat-like scratch marks down her left shoulder blade (move over, Nellie Furtado, Angelina Jolie is the current fixation) and Chinese lettering in the small of her back, two small symbols the meaning of which she wouldn’t share – and piercings, ears (two on each lobe, a few more up around each ear), nose (one subtle blue stone above her right nostril) and belly button (a short string of gems like a twinkling tail from her naval).
On the right girl all this semi-permanent adornment only enhanced and Gabriel was the right girl – petite and pretty and olive skinned. With, I might say, an equally alluring air of innocence.
‘Can you finish me off please, monkey?’ she said flopping back on the seat, legs akimbo.
Ten minutes later, both of us satisfactorily sated in a most unsatisfactory fashion, we set off again, me vowing to have something more savoury organised for our second go, something involving a room and a bed. I promised.
‘Do we really have to live with these people?’ I said a short time later, the all encompassing anticipation of fucking Gabriel now replaced by an equally all encompassing anticipation of fucking reality.
‘It was your idea,’ she said rather unhelpfully.
And she was right. It had been my idea, without question the worst idea I’d ever come up with in a career devoted to coming up with ideas. If only I’d had the resources to put this one through market research. But as with all small campaigns embarked upon without the weight of a major advertising agency behind them, all I had to rely on was my gut feeling. And my gut was feeling rotten.
Gabriel had been perfectly happy where she was – staying with a girlfriend a safe distance away in Durham. Why couldn’t I have just gone there and impressed Family Hogg in short, sharp bursts from afar? Oh, of course, there was the problem of accommodating an extra human and two large dogs in a one bedroom flat. But I was an ideas man and I’d already had several highly hopeful ideas as to where Gabriel might have been sleeping. We’d have simply found a way.
But no. It was my campaign and I was looking at the long term benefits not the short term hell. Like my pre-Eiffel Tower pontificating from the shaded corner of a sunlit deck in Brisbane, it was easy to just go with a few dodgy weeks in the grasp of Chicken Colditz in the interests of a legate leg up and two spectacular weddings at opposite ends of the globe. You only got married once unless you divorced and married someone else and we were determined to make a big deal of it.
‘Why don’t we just pay for it?’ Gabriel had once said down a phone line during her dusk and my dawn.
What she really meant was why don’t you just pay for it? Gabriel, bless her formally threadbare socks, had backpacked and holiday visa-ed her way broke. And while she now had a job, she was going to have to flog a fair few slotted spoons before I could expect any major contributions from her side. In the meantime, she needed her man to earn. I earned and earned quite well. What she didn’t know was that I couldn’t afford two spectacular weddings at opposite ends of the globe.
‘It won’t kill you, Gabriel, just to spend a couple of weeks with your family after all this time.’
‘No. But it might kill you.’
I’d chuckled into my beer and whisked an ankle out of the Australian sun. ‘I think I might turn out to be a bit more resilient than you give me credit for.’…
***
Our stay with Family Hogg was measured in weeks, not months or years, but it felt like a millennium. Each day dawned with a sense of dread and a yearning to remain in bed in my little attic space until it was time to get up, brush my teeth and go back to bed again. I desperately wanted to see North Yorkshire; we both desperately wanted to find a house. But to go anywhere we first had to get out of this house and that meant getting past Mariabella, which was nigh on impossible without being bailed up for an interrogatory chat. So I’d lie in bed and listen to poor Danby wailing in his barn to the distant accompaniment of eight thousand equally distressed chickens and wonder if I had it within me to cope with the new day at all.
Somehow I had to. Mariabella had assured me she’d let Kurt and Courtney out of the utility room the moment she got up, yet I’d seen her go to bed in states that would keep students in bed for days. So I’d haul myself up, shower, feed the dogs and present myself at breakfast in the Family Hogg kitchen around seven.
Austin Hogg’s hardboiled head would be there at the head of the kitchen table listening to Radio Four news, eyes down, lips smacking, hands cracking the tops off miniature replicas and dunking strips of buttered toast in a strangely voodoo-like daily ritual like he was eating his own brains, if only this could have been true. Simon would be to Austin’s left eating a fry up of bacon, sausages and, of course, eggs. And Mariabella would cut a morose leisure-suited figure at the bench, fag in mouth wiping surfaces and seeing to dishes as they came available. The only positive was that Melissa, Attie and the Devil Monkey Baby ate in their cottage a hundred muddy yards further into the Windy Dale Eggs compound. Gabriel, clever girl that she was, rarely rose before eight. She could get away with it. I couldn’t.
After a whispered enquiry as to the good, bad or otherwise nature of my sleep from Mariabella, I would take a vow of silence and eat my fry up of bacon and sausages (no eggs thank you very much) with Simon and Austin – a nerve wracking experience at best when forced to eat in stiff limbed silence, scared to scrape a knife across a plate or chew too loudly. It was awful, even slightly frightening in a first breakfast in prison sort of way, but I did it morning after diabolical morning in the interests of building up some sort of tacit solidarity. By the time Gabriel breezed down as fresh as a daisy, I was a nervous wreck.
Austin and Simon would have long since donned green overalls and green gum boots at the front door and gone to work. But Mariabella would have been at me ever since it was okay to turn the radio off.
One of the overriding annoyances of this Ground Hogg start to the day (a start I felt impelled to endure) was that I was unable to take Gabriel her Japanese green tea in bed. Gabriel loved Japanese green tea. She particularly liked Japanese green tea in bed and I had been more than happy to oblige while we lived together in Brisbane.
Not here…
Among Austin Hogg’s many and varied flagrant waves to the dark ages, he deplored live-in relationships. Until she became Melissa Joubert, Melissa Hogg was virtually imprisoned in the family home. Nothing to do with her having her wicked pre-marital way with some attractive sty hand she met at the Pig in Muck Inn. Everything to do with Attie Joubert already being ensconced in the Joubert marital cottage sneaking-around-in-the-dark distance from Chicken Colditz HQ.
It had been harder for Austin to imprison Gabriel. Especially while she was gallivanting around London and France and Germany and Italy and Switzerland and Austria and Greece and then Hong Kong, Thailand and Australia. He had merely harboured illusions of his youngest and finest creation keeping her genitals to herself. And certainly not shacking up with anybody.
The fact remained: Austin, despite Gabriel’s ongoing reluctance to roll up her sleeves and persecute poultry for a living, still viewed his midget daughter through rose tinted glasses, perhaps magnified. She could do no wrong and here, where he could keep a beady eye on her, she had better do no wrong. I was seen as the potential ogre in this piece, the inciter, the leader astray. We both deemed the delivering of green tea to her bedside a bit too inciting, not to mention suspiciously familiar.
So, as soon as we could disarm Mariabella’s mouth long enough to tell her we were going out, we went out. Anywhere. There was, of course, a house to find, a matter of considerable urgency (more on that later). But when we weren’t house hunting we were hunting for anything to get us out of the house. For as long as possible.
Of course it helped immensely that Gabriel’s new job forced her far and wide across the towns and villages of the north east in her surprisingly reliable little Skoda. So I would just tag along, wandering aimlessly but happily with Kurt and Courtney while she peddled her wares, toddling back to the car when she called my mobile.
On weekends we had to be a little more creative. If there was a market day in Thirsk or Ripon or Hustwickgate, we’d go and have a look. If somebody said we should take a drive through the Yorkshire Dales, we’d take a very long drive through the Yorkshire Dales. If the East Moors Elementary School advertised an unusually large pumpkin at their school fete, we would go and have a look at that.
Or we’d say we were anyway. More often than not, we were rutting in back lanes, my quest to find us a room having got so far as finding the Yellow Pages. Gabriel no longer seemed to mind, had in fact become a regular instigator of these impromptu trysts, and we had managed to get the sex to a level satisfactory to both of us despite the cramped conditions in the back of the Skoda. Kurt and Courtney didn’t seem to mind either. They got to sit in the front.
***
It was pitiful. He was pitiful. A tubby black Labrador with floppy ears and even floppier disposition, he was the same size as my own dogs but horribly out of condition. On occasions I was able to sneak up and peer over the wall without him detecting my approach, which was difficult – he was quite demented and would bark at anything. He cut a forlorn figure hobbling about listening to sounds from outside. Anything – a car door, a distant train, a bird – he’d stop and listen to it. And you had to wonder what he made of those sounds. If Gabriel was correct in her belief that Danby never got out, he wouldn’t know what half those sounds looked like.
Danby’s total purpose here at Chicken Colditz was to bark at anything that moved, something that drove Family Hogg nuts, yet reassured them in their oddly paranoid little way – if he barked at them in broad daylight, he’d surely bark at a vegan with a video camera in the dead of night. I was desperate to take him for a walk, just to see him run around on soft grass, stretch out and sniff new stuff even if it was just stuff inside more walls. So, careful to seem neither here nor there about it, I offered.
Once.
‘Bailey, kindly leave the dog alone,’ Mariabella said moments after whacking a baking tray down on the bench for dramatic effect. ‘He’s not your dog. Kindly leave him be!’
I tried to turn this into an offer to simply help out with his exercise while I was there, one less thing for them to do.
‘And it’ll be one more thing for me to do when I have to explain to emergency services how you came to be in shreds in our yard! If you want to fall out with me, say one more word about the fucking dog!’
‘He’s here for one purpose, monkey. They want him crazy,’ Gabriel said when I vented my one word on her. ‘They’re scared of dogs. Otherwise, why would they have him locked away like that? He’d be running around the yard. They just see it as the next best thing. And for them it’s perfect really – you can’t get to the chickens without passing Danby.’
‘Mmm,’ I said. ‘Because no activist is going to think of the back fence or of cutting across the lawn. They’re going to walk straight up the garden path.’
***
At night we stayed in. The point of being there was to make a point and to make that point we had to be there. Enough. The only consolation was that nights at Chicken Colditz were also strangely mute affairs. Austin and Simon would return from the death camp on the dot of six for their dinner. This would be consumed on their laps in front of BBC News while Mariabella drank and smoked in the kitchen. Austin and Simon would then drink beer and stare at the television or disappear to the Pig in Muck, drink beer and stare at the fire there. Simon, not Austin, would ask if I wanted to go, a carefully managed balancing act of ‘yes’s and no’s.
Conversations at the Pig in Muck never rose above small talk. They couldn’t. Not with the very small man at my elbow with the very big ears, ears finely tuned to the slightest slip. Even paddling about in the shallow end of a deep and meaningful opened the door to some sort of unintended admission, especially with a few pints inside me. So subjects to be avoided were me, Gabriel and life. And animals, particularly Kurt and Courtney who for the benefit of Austin Hogg’s ears were nothing more than glorified guard dogs.
Subjects open for discussion at any superfluous level were New Zealand, Australia, the English weather (Simon never tired of talking about the weather), soccer and rugby. I was passionate about rugby and became almost All Black-like in stature myself when I expounded my theories about the game to wide-eyed Skipton-le-Beans locals in that accent. Simon was an especially animated contributor in these exchanges as he played rugby himself – he was left wing for Hustwickgate seniors. His idol was Jonah Lomu.
The other subject I was happy to discuss was battery hen farming. I was pre-programmed for this as there was no getting away from it. Simon, and even Austin every other hour, loved to talk shop. And while this particular shop was up there with carpet retailers in its appeal, I hung on every callous word and applauded every batch of new chicks, every despatch of spent hens like it was an away win for Bristol. I hated myself for it and would retire to my attic space feeling like a dirty and defiled Judas wanting to sob in the shower for eternity, the distant howls of the dog Danby there to remind me of my obsequiousness.
In a normal house, my nights would have ended there – in guilt-ridden sleep. But this was not a normal house. This was a house of parental dysfunction and late night drunken screaming. My disenfranchised fiancé informed me that this was for my benefit and that if I wasn’t there, the screaming would go on all day.
‘It might not look like it,’ she said, ‘but just like you’re trying to make an impression on them, they’re trying to make an impression on you. Mum usually starts drinking at breakfast and dad’s usually abusing mum by lunch. He’s hardly called her a useless drunken whore all week!’
All this was so foreign to me with my own ‘All you need is love’ family. I was just lucky I suppose. I couldn’t imagine my parents screaming at each other. And I definitely couldn’t imagine my mother lurking drunkenly outside my sister’s boyfriend’s bedroom…
***
Opposite my room in the Chicken Colditz attic was Mariabella Hogg’s study or as she put it, her ‘Get Away From Austin Room’ or GAFAR (pronounced Gaffer). Aside from the kitchen, it was the only room in the house she was allowed to smoke in, a generously proportioned loft space with a small DELL computer work station by a useless postcard of a window, a scruffy old leather arm chair beside a small wooden table adorned with an overflowing ashtray of stubbed out menthol tailor-mades and not much else. Minimalist or austere? If all you did was sit and drink and smoke and brood, I don’t suppose you needed much else. It was a dark and humourless room only made attractive because it was eight times the size of mine.
Mariabella liked to invite me into the Gaffer late at night. To drink with her. Curse the world with her. To slag off her family with her. If I made the mistake of leaving the light on while I undressed for bed, Mariabella would see the light under the door and open it. I quickly learned that the only way to avoid the Gaffer was to get very quietly undressed in the dark and lie very still. Yes, she listened too.
I often ended up in the Gaffer with a pie-eyed Mariabella Hogg late at night. She’d appear in my door in an elaborate pink Phyllis Diller-style dressing gown and beige Ug boots, hair yanked harshly back in a ridiculous pink towelling head band, all makeup sandblasted from her face. She’d ask if I’d like to join her for a night cap in the Gaffer. I’d feign illness or death, but she was always onto me and I was always onto the carpet in front of her Ug boots before you could say ‘Sad cow in an arm chair’. I’d sip Tetleys and say very little. She’d slug vodka and say a lot. Her delivery was neutrally accented and rarely slurred. A relentless nicotine habit had fried her vocal chords to a deep rattling fart; sexy to some, but to these ears like a Harley Davidson on helium. And the stuff that came out of her mouth veered wildly from the convivial to the caustic.
Mariabella on our desire to ‘get out of their hair: ‘Don’t feel any need to hurry. You can stay here as long as you need. I know Gabby’s got a few rental places lined up for you to see, but don’t feel you ought to take any of them. You’re not in our way.’ She smiled darkly. ‘Unless we’re in yours.’
‘Not at all. You’re fantastic hosts,’ I lied. ‘I couldn’t be happier here.’
Mariabella on advertising: ‘I love that ad for Hamlets cigars with the baldy man in the photo booth.’
‘That’s about a hundred years old, Bella.’
‘It is? Oh well, I love it anyway. Did you do that one?’
‘No. It must have been one of the other copywriters. There are several million of us out there catering to the world’s advertising needs.’
‘I could have sworn it would be one of yours. It’s just your sense of humour.’
‘Yes, I can see how you narrowed it down.’
Mariabella on her smoker’s cough: ‘I can’t even laugh in my own home. Unless I’m up here. I only laugh up here. Because if I laugh, I cough and cough and cough.’ She found this funny, so she laughed. And coughed and coughed and coughed, the audio equivalent of gravel guacamole in a blender mixed in short sharp bursts, on, off, on, off.
‘You see?’ she said coughing some more and dabbing at her eyes and nose with a dressing gown sleeve. ‘They’re very cruel about my coughing, especially Attie the slug. Oh, here she goes, he’ll say or here she goes again or someone get her a bucket or shut up, woman, I can’t hear myself think.’ She welled up at that point and I couldn’t help but feel sorry for her. ‘I can’t even laugh in my own home! They all ridicule me! My own husband ridicules me!’ At which point she burst into tears.
Mariabella on Austin: ‘I hate the little twat. I didn’t marry him for his looks and magnetic personality you know. He’s an old fashioned, obstinate little North Yorkshire cunt. Have you noticed how he talks? When he does talk. Quaint old sayings and proverbs. All meaningless. All supposed to make him appear old and wise. All stolen from someone else. There’s not a word of originality comes out that fat little mouth of his.
‘I tell you, this is not a happy place. We’re not happy people. Look at me. Look at Austin. Look at what we’ve done to poor Simon. Look at what we’ve got living next door with Austin’s daughter.’
‘When Austin goes, I go. I take the money and run back to Oxford, God speed the day. Attie and Melissa won’t hang around either. They’ll be off to Australia. I don’t know what’ll happen to Simon, poor pathetic child. He’ll miss his father. He won’t miss me.’
Mariabella on our little ruse: ‘She’s moving in with you, isn’t she?’
‘Who?’
‘Oh, come on, Bailey. If you think I don’t know. I’m her mother. You just watch out for the old ostrich. He can’t see because he’s scared to look. Gabby’s his pride and joy. He hangs on her every word, you just watch. He can’t bring himself to realise she’s a woman now, not his little virginal girl. So is she moving in with you or not?’
‘Officially she’s moving in with a friend in Durham.’
‘Right. And how exactly did you expect this official plan to work when mothers like to ring their daughters at all hours of the day and night?’
It sounded stupid. ‘We were going to say there wasn’t a phone.’
‘I see.’ She regarded me thoughtfully. ‘Bailey, do you think everything through this thoroughly?’
I smiled sheepishly. ‘Amazing how simple things can look from the other side of the world.’
‘Yes, well, as it happens your little ruse, no matter how ridiculous, may well work as I don’t give a toss where she is so long as she’s safe. Austin is your prime source of concern and I don’t think he’s rung his daughter once in her twenty three years.’
‘They’re that close, eh?’ It was a callous comment and I regretted it immediately. Mariabella wasn’t fazed.
‘Austin would tell you they were as close as a father and daughter can be.’
Mariabella on Attie Joubert: ‘He’s the only Boer in the village. Thank God.’ I laughed. Mariabella didn’t. She sucked hard on a menthol, regarded me thoughtfully. ‘You can’t choose your children’s partners, can you Bailey?’
Mariabella on me wanting to go to bed (a nightly issue): ‘Have another drink with me.’
‘I had another drink the last time you asked me to have another drink. It’s two in the morning, Bella and I’ve had more than enough.’ So have you. ‘And I’m still really jetlagged so if you don’t mind…’
‘Pleease! One more drink!’
‘I’m sorry. Honestly. I have to go to bed. I’m really drunk.’
‘One more drink, Bailey!’
‘Sorry. I can’t.’
‘Well, fuck off then!’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Fuck off! Just fuck off, you slimy little shit!’
I fucked off.
Mariabella on her youth: ‘I was the spitting image of your Gabriel, you know, just a few more pounds and taller. She gets her height from her father. But I was. I was the spitting image. You just bear that in mind if you think she’s going to age gracefully.’ She sucked on vodka, sucked on a fag, gazed longingly at the ceiling. ‘Ah, the boy’s loved me, Bailey. Hah! Married one when I was sixteen. Married another when I was twenty one. Married this one when I was too old and drunk to care.’
Mariabella on a subject I thought had slipped under the net: ‘Gabby tells me you’re a bit of a one for the animals, Bailey.’
‘Does she?’
She searched my face and I searched back with externalised innocence – a shrug, a smile.
‘She said you were appalled with your future in-laws choice of business.’
I was shocked. ‘Nice of Gabriel to act as my unofficial spokesperson. I can assure you whatever she relayed to you was taken completely out of context.’
‘Oh? How so?’
‘Well, because I was there at the time and I remember the occasion of this so called criticism. We’d both had a few drinks when the subject of your family’s business came up. Gabriel had been having a gentle go at me about something or other so I had an equally gentle go back at her about this place. That’s all it was and I didn’t mean anything by it. I’m surprised she took me seriously. It was jest.’
‘Jest?’
‘Yes. Jest.’
‘Really? You honestly couldn’t care less?’
‘No!’
‘Well, there you go. Amazing how these things can get blown out of proportion.’ She gazed around the room at anything but me with a sudden air of officious detachment. ‘I assume then there is no need to ask you about a certain rather pointed article titled Assault and Battery, an article authored by someone named Bailey Harland?’
***
This particular young Mac Monkey was a frequent visitor to the smoking area outside the building, as was I. Thus we engaged in five minute conversations from time to time. We never clicked. We never blossomed into bosom buddies. We did however discover a mutual love of animals. And birds.
Sometime later – I forget exactly when – one of these five minute conversations over a cigarette became a request to tidy up some copy: The Mac Monkey had written an article savaging the battery hen egg trade, an article he hoped would be published on a local animal welfare website. He said the article needed a bit of tidying up, that he had always been impressed with my copy, that it was easier to ask me than one of the senior writers who would probably tell him to fuck off. While less than enamoured with his pitch, I agreed to tidy up his article sight unseen.
As it happened, the article did need some tidying up; in the manner an equatorial town needs some tidying up after a tropical cyclone. It wasn’t so much a tweak as a complete rebuild. So much so that the Mac Monkey refused to take any credit as co-author despite providing all the initial carnage for me to sift through. Thus I became sole author of Assault and Battery (a title I also reluctantly take credit for). Which, at the time, I was happy to be as I’d spent upwards of twenty increasingly obsessive and angry hours finessing it on my home computer until it was, in my opinion, a piece of venomous genius no battery hen farmer could read without heading straight to confessional.
I copied it to disc, gave the disc to the Mac Monkey. I fully expected that would be the last I heard of it.
***
She nodded.
I tried to look helpless, which wasn’t hard – it was exactly how I felt. ‘Nice,’ I said to the floor. I looked up at her plaintively. ‘It was five years ago, Bella.’
‘‘Which would have made you…?’
I saw the obvious flaw in my argument and the solidity of hers. ‘Mid to late twenties,’ I said meekly.
‘Hardly formative years, were they Bailey?’
Mariabella’s biting brand of sarcasm was on the nose. It was also on the money. Memories of that article, the only article I had ever written on matters bird or animal, had flooded back the moment an early courtship incarnation of Gabriel had said: ‘My father? Oh, he farms about eight thousand very unhappy caged hens. Yours?’
‘Is this really what you think of us, Bailey? Do you honestly think of us in these horrible, hurtful terms?’
‘It’s not about you, Bella. It’s not about anyone! I was given the facts. I merely rewrote them. It doesn’t reflect my opinions at all!’
‘Well, my word, you certainly poured a lot of passion into something you’re not passionate about. Quite a talent that.’
‘Yes, actually, it is. It’s my job. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t jump to conclusions.’
Mariabella cackled wildly, coughed, then coughed some more. Dabbing at wet eyes, she fought off lingering convulsions. ‘Me? Jumping to conclusions? A damning, supposed expose of our business, authored by our pro-spective son-in-law, is on every activist site on the Internet!’ She tilted her head at me. ‘What conclusion do you want me to jump to, Bailey?’
This was a bombshell. ‘It’s not on any activist site!’
‘Oh, yes, it is. Believe me, I’ve checked.’
‘Where?’
She counted fingers from behind a swirling menthol haze. ‘Citizens Against Animal Cruelty, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, Animals Voice, Earth Liberation Front.’ Her eyes widened. ‘Animal Liberation Front, the most militant animal terrorists in the world, Bailey, although I’m sure you already know. Right there. Home page – click, click!’
I was shocked and appalled. ‘This is news to me, Bella.’
She tipped ash, regarded me with undisguised disappointment. ‘Everyone is entitled to their opinion. If that opinion happens to be somewhat extreme, we are equally entitled to be concerned.’ Her face tilted, darkened. ‘And I have more news for you, young man. It just so happens Gabriel and I are the only members of this family currently aware of the danger you pose.’
I swallowed hard. ‘Austin doesn’t know? What am I talking about! What danger? There is no danger!’
She smiled darkly. ‘To answer your first thought. No. Austin doesn’t know. I know. I also know why you’re here. Both of you. And while I don’t deny Gabriel her fair share once the old coot turns belly up, that share is still highly negotiable.’ She turned away from me, eyes raised to the ceiling. ‘I dear say it would plummet rather dramatically were this to get out.’
At which point alcohol and enmity fused.
‘I don’t have to listen to this shit!’ I said lurching to my feet. I made for the door. Stopped. Turned. Lied. ‘You know what, Bella? You’ve got us completely wrong. We don’t care about the money.’
‘Is that so?’
‘Yes, it is so! And you know what else? I couldn’t care less if this place tumbles down around your ears! Actually, right now, I hope like hell it does!’
And on that unsavoury note, I stormed from the room.
