[Brenda & Effie 01] - Never the Bride Read online

  I must say, standing there listening to him in the plush, luxurious reception area of the Deadly Boutique, I was inclined to believe him. He was very smart in his pinstripe suit, with his hair smarmed down just so. He was very convincing.

  I was being lulled, drawn in. I was starting to imagine what it would be like to be slimmed and primped, smoothed and ironed. To feel new again . . .

  Effie wasn’t having any of it. ‘I’ve heard your silver tongue before,’ she snapped.

  ‘Indeed,’ he said.

  ‘I think you’re up to no good. What about Jessie, eh?’

  ‘Jessie is a triumph,’ he said flatly. ‘Any fool can see that.’

  ‘But her nephew claims she’s shrinking! She’s withering up!’

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Mr Danby, sternly. ‘Have you seen her with your own eyes?’

  ‘Well, no. But her nephew has no reason to lie . . .’

  ‘Jessie Sturgeon is a work of art,’ he said. ‘And if she continues her treatments here at my boutique she will be a work of art for a good many years.’

  ‘It’s unnatural,’ spat Effie. She was getting very worked up. Probably the memory of thrashing about inside the Deadly Machine was coming back to her, full force.

  ‘Listen to yourself !’ Mr Danby laughed. ‘You sound like a superstitious fool. A torch-waving peasant crying, “Kill the beast! Burn it! Get it away from our town!” ’

  My ears pricked up. What did he mean?

  ‘I’m not superstitious,’ said Effie, haughtily. ‘And I’m by no means a peasant.’

  Mr Danby gave a very Gallic shrug. ‘No matter. You have already spurned our treatments and I see no further reason to discourse on these matters. We will, of course, send you our bill for the few moments you stole inside our “contraption”.’

  ‘Your bill!’ spluttered Effie.

  Smoothly, the little man took hold of my elbow and led me towards an interior door. ‘My assistants will help you to prepare for stepping into the machine, Madam Brenda . . .’

  Madam Brenda! I liked that! It sounded impressive. I felt like a grand, imperious brothel-owner.

  I was feeling quite woozy and complaisant. I let him draw me away from Effie’s side. I was focusing on his cultivated, melodious voice.

  ‘Wait!’ cried Effie. ‘You’ve got to let me come in with her! I’m her friend. I’m here to see that no harm comes to her!’

  ‘My helpers are all she needs,’ said Mr Danby.

  ‘No!’ Effie cried. ‘I must come in with her. Brenda! Tell him!’

  My voice came out softer and more dreamy than I’d intended. ‘Could she, Mr Danby? Could she just sit and wait? She’ll be no bother.’

  ‘No bother?’ Mr Danby said. ‘No bother, you say?’

  And then I was rocking gently on my heels, swaying back and forth. My ears were filled with reverberating voices: ‘No bother?’ yelled Mr Danby. ‘Brenda!’ howled Effie. ‘Tell him!’ Everything was chiming and echoing, as if I was in some ancient Jules Verne diving-suit and their voices were being piped to the bottom of the sea. My vision narrowed into two tiny points of light . . . then nothing

  I was under.

  And ready to be made-over.

  At first it was like being in one of those sensory-deprivation tanks. I lifted my hands in front of my face and couldn’t see a thing. It was silent, too, and I felt as if I was floating, bobbing about in amniotic fluid.

  I should have known this was a mistake. I should never have come.

  But something had compelled me. Was I really under Mr Danby’s influence? Or was I being driven by my own subconscious desires to be born again? I mulled all of this over in a shambolic, bemused fashion.

  I was naked, that much was certain. I blushed with shame, thinking of it. I had divested myself of all my layers of cardies and foundation garments in full view of Effie and those horrid simian assistants. The little women had picked up my clothes, item by item, as I dropped them on to the pristine white tiles. They had folded them neatly and piled them up, like nightmarish shop assistants. I had tried not to look at Effie, who sat there, looking horrified. I wondered what she’d thought when she saw the scarred and mangled hotch-potch of my naked form, which I was usually dead set on hiding from the world.

  What had got into me tonight? Why didn’t I care?

  Effie had made worried noises as I stepped inside the gleaming chrome coffin-shaped machine. Inside, it was like a vast bread-maker. I ignored her protests and let the little women close the door.

  The silence and dark lasted a few moments, and then the treatment began.

  This was what Jessie had gone through. This was what all the women of the town were signing up to undergo. This was what had panicked Effie and made her push her way out. It didn’t seem so bad to me. A few pulsing, flashing, multicoloured lights. Weird, ululating noises. A curious vibration, as if every molecule of my body was being set free to bounce about in the enclosed space. And, as Effie had said, the sensation of tiny hands pummelling and pulling at each portion of my body, stretching and moulding me like dough . . .

  The Deadly Machine was supposed to roll back the years. It was supposed to smooth your furrowed brow and ease the tensions from your clapped-out body. You were meant to step out of it rejuvenated. All those years, and the evidence they had left, were supposed to be leached out of you. Effie had described it as being bled, or having life drained out of you by a vampire’s kiss.

  To me, it felt even more cataclysmic. Whatever the machine did reacted strongly with my - shall we say unique? - biology. Lightning flashed inside the enclosed space. I was jerked about like a puppet and an awful smell of burning filled my nose.

  I was running across the moors, ragged and bleeding, pursued by hounds . . . I was begging in an underpass, frozen with rain . . . I was living in a tower in a grand mansion . . . I was being shown the door, disgraced . . . I was standing on my father’s doorstep and he stared at me in horror. His smart visitors and his wife were calling from the drawing room, ‘But who is it?’ . . . I was walking through the zoo and children were screaming . . . I was lying on an operating table . . . I was opening my eyes. The first thing I saw was the face of my husband, leering down at me from a window high up in a stone wall, his face twisted in a mixture of rage and desire . . .

  How far back was this machine taking me? How much further back was there to go?

  Flashbacks! I was glimpsing moments from my past. And not the best ones. Just the most hair-raising, the most stressful. What was the machine doing? It was taking me back through my long, phantasmagorical existence, through the series of snapshots I had tried so hard to block from my mind . . .

  My hands were playing the yellowish keys of a concert piano.

  My breasts were suckling infants.

  In some squalid alleyway, my throat was being slit.

  Too many memories. Each part of my body has its own memory, its own favourite moments. Each part relived its past so that the different lifetimes overlapped, whizzing around inside my head. They reached a frenzied pitch and I screamed. My voice seemed like a compound of a hundred different women’s voices. I was a crowd. I was Legion, howling in dismay at a ghastly sense of loss inside the machine.

  Everything I’d deliberately forgotten, and everything I’d only half known, came flooding back in those moments.

  It was too much for the machine.

  There was an almighty crack. It was the sound of Excalibur coming free of its stone. Or Robin of Loxley’s oak tree crashing down to the ground after a thousand years in Sherwood Forest. It was the sound of Prometheus being freed from his rock. And of lightning striking the conductors on the ramparts of Herr Doktor’s castle . . .

  It was a huge noise, which robbed me of my hearing for several minutes.

  When I was pitched back into the immaculate laboratory, acrid smoke was billowing everywhere. I fell into Effie’s arms - though, of course, she wasn’t strong enough to hold me. The assistants were squealing, but I couldn’
t hear a thing. I couldn’t even hear the Deadly Machine’s final wail of despair. I felt the reverberations, though, as it shuddered, died and eventually was still.

  ‘My God, woman,’ Effie spluttered, crouching beside me on the floor. ‘What did you do to it?’

  She brought me my clothes and draped them over me. I felt like a huge baby, swaddled, understanding nothing. When my hearing started to come back, Effie was saying, ‘We need to get out of here. We need to leave right now.’ She was speaking in a low, urgent voice.

  I was suddenly more aware of what was going on around me, having suppressed the lurid images in my mind.

  Mr Danby had lost his composure. No longer the purring, composed little man, he was standing before his smashed, still smoking machine and screeching. He beat his fists against his temples and gnashed his teeth. He stamped his feet and swung round to face us. Unfortunate, as Effie was helping me to dress. It wasn’t the most elegant confrontation of my life.

  ‘You have ruined us!’ Mr Danby shrieked. ‘You have destroyed everything.’

  Effie kept her voice calm and low. ‘Ignore him. Let’s just get you sorted and out of here.’

  ‘The machine will never work again! You’ve spoiled it for everyone!’

  At this, the overalled monkey women started to moan and pound their own temples with their tiny fists.

  ‘You could have killed her,’ Effie shouted back at him. ‘I thought my ordeal was bad enough. But look at her! You could have murdered her!’

  ‘There was nothing wrong with my machine,’ he protested. ‘Whatever happened is down to her. She sabotaged it somehow!’

  ‘It couldn’t . . . cope with me . . .’ I stammered. ‘Couldn’t regress me . . .’ I had a shocking headache and my extremities were numb. Other than that, I wasn’t feeling too bad.

  ‘She’s a freak!’ Mr Danby yelled. ‘A monster!’

  ‘Hi!’ Effie cried. ‘Don’t you say things like that about my friend.’ She left me to finish dressing and stormed over to confront him. His assistants leaped to protect him. They seemed wary of Effie. She was wiry and determined: she could have given them all a good thrashing and, after last time, they looked as if they knew it.

  ‘You don’t understand what you’ve done.’ Mr Danby sighed. His whole body sagged. ‘This machine . . . the treatments . . . they didn’t hurt anyone. They couldn’t. What we did here was for the benefit of all womankind.’

  The monkey women chattered excitedly, agreeing with him.

  ‘And these women?’ Effie said. ‘Are they indebted to your machine, too?’

  ‘Hm?’ he asked. ‘Well, yes. They are. Not every patient regressed as far as my assistants. Not everyone would choose to go that far . . .’

  ‘My God,’ Effie exclaimed. ‘You’re insane! Who’d want to be like that? Is this what’s happening to Jessie? Shrinking and withering up? You’ve turned her into a Neanderthal woman?’

  ‘Australopithecus, actually,’ he said. ‘It sometimes happens. It isn’t supposed to.’

  I was fit, and decent enough now, to join in with their conversation. ‘But why?’ I demanded. ‘Why bother? What do you get out of it? What makes you want to go round regressing women?’

  ‘Time,’ he said sadly. ‘What my machine drew out of them was time itself. I was siphoning the distillation of their remaining years out of their cells and their veins. Oh, not in a way that would harm them. Indeed, mostly, it improved them. And I got to bottle time itself. The gorgeous, viscous juice of time.’

  At that point we noticed the glass jars on the shelves on the far wall. Thick red and blue liquids.

  ‘He’s crazy,’ Effie gasped. ‘You can’t bottle time.’

  ‘Oh, I could,’ Mr Danby said. ‘That’s precisely what I did. And now you’ve spoiled it all - you’ve spoiled everything.’

  ‘But what did you want it for? What are you doing with it?’ I asked.

  ‘My mother is lying upstairs in this house,’ he said sadly. ‘She is very, very old, older even than you, Brenda. But her time now is short. She is a very special, very great person, you see, and I have been trying to buy her a little longer—’

  ‘By stealing years and months from innocent women,’ Effie accused him. ‘You’re like Jack the Ripper!’

  ‘Hardly,’ he said. ‘Nobody lost out. Not really. Those women have only decrepitude waiting for them. Who really wants to be old, worn out and burdensome? My machine squeezes and pulverises the cells of their exhausted bodies, wringing out the last vestiges of energy and transforming it into that wonderful syrupy elixir. All my ladies have lost is but the cumbersome years of their decline. Now they are regressed and they enjoy a last, glorious burst of rejuvenation. And so, yes . . . I stole their time, technically . . . but wasn’t it just wasted time? Time when they would be past it?’

  Effie and I exchanged a horrified glance.

  The madman ranted on: ‘Now you see the glory of my plan! You do see, don’t you? I steal their liquid essence, bottle and stopper it up for my dear old mother and, in return, I give them one last golden swansong . . . but only because they ask. And they keep asking. They all want a make-over. It’s a very neat arrangement.’

  ‘It’s vile,’ Effie said, through gritted teeth. ‘And all for some . . . vampire hag in your attic.’

  ‘Mother will be so very disappointed. She will have to be told who caused this disaster. Someone will have to pay.’ He clicked his fingers. ‘Seize them, would you?’

  In his mild way, he had commanded his simian assistants to attack us.

  They weren’t as mild and polite as their master. He ducked away and left them to snarl and bare their pointed teeth at us. They advanced with shuffling steps. Effie and I drew away from them, back to back, as if preparing for fisticuffs in a brawl.

  ‘This is ridiculous!’ Effie cried. ‘Saturday night and we’re having a fight in a mad scientist’s laboratory!’ She sounded almost gleeful. One of the monkey women launched herself at Effie, and was knocked back by a quick slap in the chops. As I’d suspected, Effie was useful in a punch-up.

  Soon, all fifteen, twenty, thirty of the Australopithecine women were hurling themselves at us. Tiny arms and legs flashed out and we were pummelled and punched from all angles.

  ‘Where’s Danby gone?’ grunted Effie, as she whirled into action with her recently acquired ju-jitsu. The women shrank back, horrified at this sexuagenarian dervish.

  ‘He’s fled!’ I cried. ‘Probably gone to explain himself to dear old Mamma.’

  Effie grunted as she flung one woman at a huddle of her companions. ‘Then I suggest we get out of here, the back way, and make good our escape.’

  I waded through the attacking bodies, using every iota of my not inconsiderable strength. Those women were indefatigable, though, and determined to keep us captive. But we were determined too: we weren’t staying in the Deadly Boutique a moment longer.

  ‘Shouldn’t we go upstairs and sort his mother out?’ I asked Effie, as we reached the metal outer door.

  ‘Sort her out?’

  ‘Stake her through the heart, or whatever,’ I suggested, ‘so they don’t start up again.’

  ‘Stake her through the heart?’ With one hand Effie was struggling with locks and bolts. With the other she was helping me hold the little women back. ‘My God, Brenda, this is Whitby! We don’t stake people through the heart!’

  At that moment the metal door sprang open to reveal the chill mist of the backyard and alleyways.

  ‘Will they follow us?’

  But we didn’t turn to look. Effie and I grasped each other’s hands, pelted out into the freezing night and the narrow alleys, twisting, turning and heading for home.

  We had to stop for a moment to catch our breath. We clutched our knees, breathing raggedly, outside Woolworths. ‘Have we lost them?’

  There came no slap-slap-slap of tiny feet in pursuit. There was nothing. Silence.

  Town was eerily silent tonight. We were back in the centre outsid
e ordinary shops. It felt weird, even to think about being chased by regressed monkey women - or about a man who bottled time to feed it to his ailing mother upstairs.

  ‘What have we been involved in?’ Effie asked hollowly. ‘What kind of madness was that?’

  ‘An adventure!’ I grinned. Suddenly I had to ask her the thing that had been bugging me ever since the Deadly Machine had had its nervous breakdown and exploded with me still inside it. ‘So, did it work on me? Did it transform me?’

  ‘Hm?’

  ‘The machine!’ I said, as we set off again; not running this time but walking at quite a clip through the warren of streets towards home. ‘Has it made me younger? Will I knock ’em dead?’

  ‘Oh, erm,’ said Effie, ‘I can’t really tell in this light. The street lamps are too harsh. Maybe it has, maybe it hasn’t. I’m not sure.’

  I chuckled at her evasiveness as we set off up the hill towards our houses.

  ‘Do you feel any different?’ Effie asked me.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ I said, breathing deeply, and realising it was true. ‘Do you know? For the first time in ages . . . I feel alive.’

  Chapter Two:

  The Green Family

  A seaside holiday was just what they needed. You could tell that at first glance. The whole family was peaky. All four - Mum, Dad and the two kiddies - looked exhausted and jaded. They needed sea air, fun and some good home cooking.

  It was Tuesday lunchtime when they arrived in a taxi from the station, laden with all their bags and cases, beach-balls and shrimping-nets. I rolled up my sleeves, got my pinny on and swept into welcome mode.

  My B-and-B was immaculate and ready for them. I’d had a couple of days to prepare and everything was perfect. I’d also had a couple of days to get over Effie’s and my Saturday night adventure. As yet there had been no reprisals - no sign of Mr Danby or his monkey women. That suited me: I was happy to put the affair of the Deadly Boutique right out of my mind.

  ‘Welcome! Welcome to my home!’