Whitstable Read Online Free PDF Page B

I’m sorry. You must understand, surely? Children don’t say things without reason.”
    “Don’t they? Kids can be cruel. You lead a sheltered life, you do. Kids can get at you in ways you wouldn’t even dream of. If they think you deserve it.”
    “Can they?”
    The iron hissed. “You should hear what I get in the ear every day. Dad this, Dad that.”
    “He idolizes his father.”
    “Yeah, the father who sneaked him into the cinema to see that Dracula you’re so proud of when he was eight years old. Oh yeah. Bought a ticket, pushed the bar of the emergency exit, let him in. Like the teddy boys or mods do. To an X film. His son. Don’t tell me that helped any problems he had in school or anywhere else, because it didn’t. He was scared to death of the world before that and, you know what? It made him more scared. That’s why he’s playing silly buggers.”
    Peter Cushing rubbed his eyes. Dare he ask the question? He was compelled to. He had come here. He would never forgive himself if he didn’t.
    “Do excuse me for asking this, but has your boyfriend ever… ever raised his hand to Carl? Hurt him in any way?”
    “No.” The woman cut into his last word. “Les loves that boy.”
    Loves .
    “How long have you known him?”
    “Long enough.” She stiffened. “Why?”
    He loves that boy.
    “As I say… Carl seemed, well, I have to be honest, Mrs Drinkwater… troubled.”
    “Well there’s nothing troubling him in this house, I tell you that for nothing. It’s all in his bloody mind.” The shirt flicked to and fro, the iron hitting it repeatedly like a weapon of violence. She turned her body to face him, hand on hip. “Why do you make those horrible films anyway? Eh?”
    “To be truthful I hate the term ‘horror film’. Car crashes and the concentration camps and what’s happening in Northern Ireland, that’s horror. I think of the fantasies I star in as fairy tales or medieval mystery plays for a new generation. If you take the ‘O’ from Good and add a ‘D’ to Evil, you get God and the Devil—two of the greatest antagonists in the whole of history. And Van Helsing is important because he shows us Good triumphs. After all, Shakespeare used horrific images in Titus Andronicus , and mankind’s belief in the supernatural in Macbeth , and nobody belittles the fellow for that. I think the best so-called ‘horror’ shows us our worst fears in symbolic form and tries to tell us in dramatic terms how we can overcome them.”
    “Yeah, well.” Her face, turning back to the ironing board, betrayed an ill-concealed sneer. “I didn’t pass enough exams to understand all that. We didn’t have books in our house. My dad was too busy working.”
    He sighed. “Mrs Drinkwater, I’m quite sure you don’t want this discussion and neither do I. Please just put my mind at rest, that’s all I ask. Truly. Just talk to Carl. Listen to him.”
    “You’ve listened to him. Do you believe him?”
    “My dear, I’m just an actor. It’s his mother he should talk to.”
    “Or a psychiatrist.”
    “If that’s what you genuinely think.”
    “It’s no business of yours what I think.”
    “You’re quite right, of course.” He stood up, putting his bicycle clips in his pocket. “Perhaps I shouldn’t have come, but please believe me when I say I did so only out of concern for Carl. I apologise profusely if I’ve upset you. That wasn’t my intention at all.”
    “You haven’t upset me,” she said.
    “I’m sorry for disturbing you. I’ll see myself out.” He thought the conversation was over but he’d barely reached the door to the hall before she said behind his back:
    “Why don’t you make nice, decent films, eh?”
    He turned back with sadness, both at the slight and his own ineffectiveness. He knew she felt accused and belittled by his very presence, undermined by his unwanted interference and presumptions and posh voice and good manners and wanted to attack it, all of it.
    “Don’t you