Who's Who in Hell by Robert Chalmers

Author:Robert Chalmers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-11-26T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 20

The longer he spent in Bedford, the more Daniel became fascinated by Laura’s unusual brother. Paul had left school at sixteen, gone straight to work at the hospital, and since then had never shown the slightest interest in reading anything he wasn’t obliged to. When they first met, he asked Daniel what work he did in London. He explained, as carefully as he could, the way the desk worked. Two hours later, Paul went up to Laura and asked her what an obituary was. And yet Paul Jardine, Daniel noticed, had a dry sense of humour when relaxed; so dry that most people from Bedford took it for madness. And there was something restful about Paul’s self-absorption. There was no need to speak if you didn’t want to, and he soon learned that Paul meant no harm by his habit of walking over to the stove and making himself coffee, or a steak sandwich, without offering one to you. He never had guests – he had no friends – and the thought simply never occurred to him.

One Wednesday afternoon, with just four days left of his stay, Laura was up at the house on Grant with her mother, who was still distressed after the disastrous dinner. Daniel was at Paul’s camp, sitting in his trailer, listening to an End Time Evangelist on a local AM station. The man’s missionary rage had him reluctantly captivated, so that he didn’t notice Paul disappear outside. A couple of minutes later there was an explosion that Daniel, his mind already on Armageddon, took to be a missile landing in a nearby field. He rushed out to find Paul packing up the detonator coil he’d used to set off a firecracker the size of a mortar. He hadn’t done it, Daniel realised, as a surprise, or as a joke. It was like the coffee: if you felt like a bomb, you fixed your own.

‘You like fireworks?’ Paul asked him.

‘When I was a child,’ Daniel said, ‘I liked the fireworks, but…you know what? The thing I liked best was going round the next morning, collecting all the burnt-out shells.’

‘Yeah?’ said Paul. Then he added, in a matter of fact way, without malice, ‘Well that’s like you’re living now, isn’t it?’

By the end of the afternoon, Daniel was mixing concrete. Laura’s brother wanted it to pour into the Taurus’ front-door cavities, because he’d read in one of his magazines that other car owners who enjoyed high decibel levels had found concrete could minimise vibration. They were listening to a dance track called Acid Conga on Paul’s main sound system in the caravan: a tiny black Nairn amplifier, no bigger than a detergent pack, plugged in to two speakers eight inches square, on each of which a previous owner had painted the symbol of the Red Cross. The equipment’s size was deceptive: its power was not far short of the deafening potential of his car stereo.

The concrete had to be applied in sections, so that each layer hardened before the next went in.

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