Twenty-Four Hours. Margaret Mahy

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       8.10 pm – Friday

      Ellis, doing what he was told to do, left the motorway on a different road from the one by which he had entered. He found himself driving past lawns and letterboxes and deserted shopping centres, one of a number of cars that seemed uncertain quite where they wanted to go. Ellis recognised the names of suburbs without knowing exactly where he was in the changing city.

      “Right at these lights!” commanded Ursa. “Straight on for a couple of blocks, then right again.” Ellis turned obediently into a wide avenue, lined on either side with well-established plane trees, and became part of a continuous line of cars. They were back in the centre of the city. He knew where he was. He would be home in half an hour.

      Yet, just as he was relaxing and beginning to feel in charge of life once more, the city gave him an unexpected jolt which, almost at once, changed into the feeling that what he was seeing had first come out of his own head. Houses on the left gave way to a floodlit slope of neatly-cut grass; oaks framed a chaste, white building. It was gently lit and glowed in the summer twilight. Dommett & Christie said a notice; cool, plain, discreet, but clearly visible. Integrity Funerals. It seemed he could not escape – might never escape – from Simon’s ironic smile, for Dommett & Christie had organised Simon’s funeral. After his death, Simon’s body had been taken to this white building, and someone somewhere in there had given him a final, enigmatic expression.

      Ellis had not realised just how changeable Simon’s living expression had been until, in the chapel at the crematorium, he found himself face to face with a stillness fixed for ever by the skill of an undertaker … the suggestion of a smile about to begin but never quite managing it. Had there possibly been just a little smugness about that last expression? It was almost as if, in some dead way, Simon knew he had finally up-staged Ellis – had pulled off an act that could never be surpassed. As he thought this Ellis’s hands tightened on the wheel, while his own voice repeated in his head:

       “…’tis too horrible!

       The weariest and most loathed worldly life

       That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment

       Can lay on nature is a paradise

       To what we fear of death.”

      “Home sweet home,” said Leona a little wearily, interrupting his thoughts.

      “Well, almost!” said Ursa. “Turn right into Moncrieff Street. Here!” she added, though Ellis had already recognised Moncrieff Street, one of the oldest roads in the city. These days it was part of the grid of one-way streets around the city centre.

      Fastened across the window of a darkened shop, Ellis saw a white sheet with words painted on it. Party! Land-of-Smiles! said the blue letters, rough but clear. Ursa groaned.

      “Did you see that?” she said to Leona. “Can’t I go out for an evening without …”

      But now they were skirting the Moncrieff Road cemetery, an historic landmark. Tall, and sometimes broken, gravestones rose, like pale admonishing fingers from beyond a low, stone wall. Someone had sprayed the words Anarchy rules, OK? on the stones – possibly one of the three children in baggy clothes briefly seen as they darted up a path and into the darkness under old trees.

      “The glue gang!” Ursa said, in the absent-minded voice of someone checking off landmarks as she returned to familiar territory. “Is Terry Stamp still hanging out with Jason these days?” She asked this question without seeming to expect any answer. “Three blocks down and turn to the left,” she added, speaking directly to Ellis this time. “It’s a skinny little street – Garden Lane – so don’t drive too fast and miss it.”

      High in the city air, a bright sign flashed on and off. A blonde woman was beckoning with a jerking arm, swinging one bare leg out and back, out and back. Her scarlet mouth widened in a smile then shrank back into a pursed, electric kiss. Ellis drove towards this spasmodic beauty. Beneath her jittering leg was a lighted doorway through which people were either coming or going. And then they were past her, cruising between two lines of largely darkened shop windows. It’s Never Too Late For Breakfast, said a flashing sign. The Southern Grenadier, proclaimed another sign – old, square lettering across the front of a grimy hotel.

      “There! Turn there!” said Ursa pointing.

      Ellis turned the car yet again, this time into a narrow street crowded with houses that were not only old but visibly disintegrating. The lingering twilight, which had seemed so pure out on the plains, had taken on a smeared and grubby quality. On either side he saw rusting roofs, broken fences, and gateposts guarded by long grasses.

      “And now to the left again. It’s really a right-of-way for pedestrians … but people don’t mind if you drive along it. Take it easy, though!”

      Everything around them was so shabby that Ellis felt conscious of the shine on his mother’s car, reflecting light from the street lamps. A long, low building shaped like the letter ‘E’ with its middle stroke missing, seemed to advance wearily through the twilight. Coloured letters flashed in the air above it. A stream of scarlet, electric arrows leaped like frightened fish, arching over and emphasising the blue and green letters below. THE AND-OF- MILES, announced the sign. There was no gate and no fence. LAND-OF-SMILES MOTEL a second dingy sign elaborated at the gate in letters rather more reliable than the electric ones.

      “Home, sweet home.” It was Ursa who spoke this time. “Look, thanks for bringing us back, and sorry about the complications. Like a cup of coffee, after all that?”

      Ellis hesitated. In the silence he heard rackety music beating in from somewhere.

      “Do come!” said Leona. “It sounds as if we’ve got a houseful already, but we can find a peaceful place somewhere.”

      “The gang’s here!” said Ursa gloomily. “As always!”

      Ellis almost said that he’d better be getting home – indeed, he’d been thinking of home with pleasure – and yet, within a breath, the words he was shaping in the back of his mouth twisted on his tongue and came out saying something that surprised him much more than they surprised anyone else.

      “Great! OK to leave the car here?” After all, in spite of everything that had happened, it was still early. Not even half-past eight, yet.

      “Safer than some places,” Ursa said, smiling and sketching the sign of the cross in the air with her finger.