Selected Novels by Gillian White by Gillian White

Author:Gillian White [White, Gillian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4804-6534-3
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2013-02-13T22:22:00+00:00

SIXTEEN

WE ARE WATCHING THE irresistible advance of a single-track mind.

Obsession in motion.

Oh, what a thoroughly distasteful person Fergus Johnson is. Who could love him?

Give her her due, Jemima tried.

All this nonsense about a hard life, the suggestion of something deep in his past that he might, or might not have forgotten.

Okay, so some people go through all kinds of shit but they don’t turn out to be vicious, vengeful, vindictive monsters.

You cannot pluck somebody out of thin air and love them, and expect them to love you back. The concept is not only pathetic, but rather revolting. An almost inconceivable self-centredness.

We must not waste our sympathies on people like Fergus Johnson. He has made his own bed and he ought to be made to lie in it.

In prison, preferably.

With no namby-pamby time off for parole.

But like it or not, we have to come back to him. However loosely, we are all involved. We cannot just pretend that people like him do not exist, and ignore him. And yes, here he is with the stud in his nose, in his roadside hideaway with his Reeboks snapping on fir cones, but armed with a gun this time, a weapon that is going to make it possible for him to take some pretty hair-raising risks with the ban-dog.

As he prowls back to his den Fergus notices nothing of the dusky summer’s glory. The air is heavy with the resinous scents of the pines and the crushed sap of the bracken. The evening is hot and already every fragment of sky is twinkling with stars. He notices none of this. Here in this desolate place he can be alone with his sickness, and he creeps to it as a dog creeps behind a hedge in order to lick its wounds.

As he’d known it would be, the dog is waiting for him, motionless, expressionless, as if it is carved out of stone.

He burns.

She took him home to meet Mummy and Daddy, oh yes she did.

It was his thirteenth birthday.

A weekend treat, she called it, and went to great lengths to get permission before she collected him from Ryall and accompanied him to his next approved place of residence — a foster home in Wimbledon, but not just any old foster home: Fergus was headed for rather a unique experience.

The trouble people go to to pander to losers like Fergus. The money we are forced to spend, a waste of human energy, surely, let alone scarce resources.

He had never been near a house like that, save when the Burchalls took him to some decrepit Elizabethan manor and he’d been bored to death and only interested in buying something from the crappy old gift shop.

Mummy and Daddy lived in a brown and white house like this, clung with creeper, nestling into the ancient earth as if it had grown there like the stones and the flowers.

The wooden house looked not only old, but scored and scorched with age. It was more like a ship than a house, the Mary Rose, black beams and slanting passages.

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