On-screen, my younger self walked onto a set which always wobbled and delivered my catchphrase to cyclones of tape-recorded mirth.
Hawker and Boon were staring sullenly at the television, like it was a lecture on photosynthesis which they were being forced to sit through in double-period science.
The smaller man groaned. “Dearie me.”
Hawker shook his head sorrowfully. “I’ve got to be honest with you, old top.”
“Got to be frank.”
“It ain’t the funniest thing I’ve ever seen.”
“Let’s be candid here, Mr. L. It’s about as funny as cholera.”
“It’s about as funny as…” Hawker thought for a moment, then sniggered. “A nun with leprosy.”
A dirty smirk twisted Boon’s features into something rubbery and grotesque. “And we should jolly well know.”
I moved before them, careful to keep outside the circle.
“Why are you watching that?” I asked, as I caught the familiar plonk and grind of the theme tune.
“It really is a clanger, isn’t it, sir?”
Hawker switched off the television, his lips pursed in a moue of distaste. “What a turkey, sir! What a tip-top stinker!”
Boon passed his hand to and fro in front of his nose, as though washing away an imaginary pong. “Phew!”
“Coo-ee!”
I let them finish. “I want you to tell me where Estella is,” I said as calmly as I could.
Hawker looked at me blankly, then cupped a hand to his ear. “Who?”
“Estella,” I said flatly, knowing that he’d heard me perfectly well the first time.
“Oh right! You should have said, sir! We were going to tell you the other day but you dashed out ’fore we got to it. Rather rude, I thought. Bit cheeky.”
“Dashed ungrateful,” said Boon. “Specially since we’d bent over backwards to make you feel welcome.”
“Where’s Estella?” I said again, trying my best to remain toneless.
Boon got to his feet and surveyed the little limits of his cell. “Do you miss it, sir? The old show?”
“The old routine?”
“The roar of the greasepaint?”
“The smell of the crowds?”
Though the Prefects squealed with laughter, I was careful not to let my expression alter. “Where’s Estella?”
“Pity you’re such a terrible actor, isn’t it, Mr. L?”
“S’pose you might have made a career of it if you’d been any good. But you’re nothing now, are you, sir? Is he, Boon?”
“Certainly not, my old Satsuma. He’s a real nobody.”
“Where,” I said, my voice at last betraying my impatience, “is Estella?”
“What a grump.”
“Someone’s in an awful dudgeon.”
“Young Mr. Lamb’s got up on the wrong side of the bed today.”
I glared. “I need to know where she is.”
“Yaroo!”
“You’ve got a rotten temper, Mr. L.”
I tried my best not to listen. “I want to know where Estella is.”
“And you think that’ll be it, do you, sir? You think, once you find the lady, they’ll let you trot back to your old life? Bad luck, old chum. No one ever leaves the Directorate. You’ll croak in the harness.”
“Where’s Estella?” I said.
Boon smirked. “Even chaps who don’t sign up for Dedlock’s mob end up dying for it,” he said. “Even your daddy, for instance.”
I felt tendrils of panic begin to stir inside me. “Don’t talk about my father.”
Hawker clapped his hands in joy. “Splendid, sir! You were starting to sound like a stuck record.”
“Your pa,” said Boon, “he never signed up for the Directorate. You’re granddad didn’t tell him a thing about it.”
“He wanted him to have a normal, dull sort of life.”
“And he did, didn’t he, Mr. L? Your pa — he was the dullest man you ever knew.”
I protested. “That’s not true!”
“Goodness me, but that fellow was a dullard!”
“And yet…” Boon smirked.
Hawker rubbed his hands together. “We did your granddad a favor once. We told him about the Process.”
“The Process?” I felt myself on the edge of the precipice. What are you talking about?”
“And we didn’t ask for much in exchange, did we, Hawker?”
“Certainly not, Boon. We’re not greedy boys.”
“It was the smallest of favors. The tiniest trinket.”
“What,” I gasped, “did he promise you?”
“He promised us his flesh and blood,” said Hawker.
“And we were ready and waiting on the day of your father’s accident.”
“Accident!” Hawker crowed. “Oh, my little lambkin, now you know the truth of it.”
“We peered into the tangled wreck of his car as he lay dying and we jeered and laughed and poked him with a very big stick.”
The monsters were doubled up with laughter now, jack-knifed in hilarity.
“The look on his face,” said Boon, “as he lay there sobbing! He thought we’d come to save him!”
“Do you remember,” Hawker gasped, forcing the words out amidst eruptions of laughter, “how we poured petrol on his legs?”
I did my best this time. I didn’t holler or scream or beat my fists fruitlessly against the glass walls of the cell. Nor was I tempted to blunder into the circle. Instead, I simply walked calmly over the door and knocked for the guard to let me out.
“Ta-ta!” one of the Prefects shouted. “Come and see us again soon, won’t you, sir?”
“Better luck next time, Mr. L!”
More laughter. I heard the television blunder back into life, heard those brash inaugural chords, the old soundtrack to my life, before anything evil had entered in.
As I stumbled back out into the corridor, my only hope was that the bastards hadn't seen that I was crying.
When I got home, Abbey was waiting for me, sitting at the table in the front room, dressed in a man-sized T-shirt and nursing a hot blackcurrant squash.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hello,” I said carefully and, after a few seconds of trying to guess what sort of a mood she was in, decided to chance a smile.
To my relief, she smiled tentatively back. “I’m sorry about earlier.”
“No. I’m sorry.”
“I saw you with that girl… I suppose I just overreacted.”
“Honestly,” I said, taking off my jacket and throwing myself onto the sofa. “I’m not interested in Barbara.”
As Abbey grinned, I noticed how thin her T-shirt was, how it seemed to accentuate and draw the eye to the curves of her chest.
“How was your work thing?” she asked. I wondered if she’d noticed the way I’d been looking at her.
“Oh, you know,” I said. “A bit knackering.”
“Let me get you a drink, then.”
“A glass of water would be lovely,” I said, and I heard her pad away into the kitchen.
When she came back, she passed me a glass, but no sooner had I raised it to my lips than I felt her hands in my hair, her breath on my skin.
“Abbey?”
The water was forgotten, hastily abandoned on the table, and all at once she was kissing my neck, my cheeks, my temples. For an instant, her tongue flicked inside my left ear and I shuddered in pleasure.
“I’m sorry,” she breathed. “Poor Henry.”
She maneuvered herself in front of me, then sat down on my lap.
“Abbey?”
“Shh.” She kissed me hard on the lips and I responded in kind (as best I knew how).
“I didn’t expect to feel this way,” she said, once we’d come up for air. “Not so soon. But there’s something about you…”
Giddy with the moment, I risked a joke. “I’m irresistible.”
“Don’t spoil it,” she chided, placing her hand on mine, guiding it beneath her shirt as somewhere deep in my stomach I felt the same lurch of panic I’d felt the first time we’d kissed, the awful anxiety of performance, the insidious terror that one might not measure up.