The Face Read online

  The Face

  Ivan B

  Published: 2010

  Tag(s): "Novel" "Romance" "Bigyny" "polygyny"

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publically performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was obtained of as strictly applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Published by barlebooks.net©2010

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, churches, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Chapter 1

  First Sight

  He saw her on his very first day. What struck him was her tiny heart shaped lips. He’d never seen a mouth so small and lips so classically moulded into a heart shape. It was a shame the rest of her didn’t live up to her mouth. He supposed that once, say a decade ago when she’d been in her late teens, she’d have been a real stunner. Now the past loveliness had faded into a gaunt and harrowed face. Her high prominent cheekbones that once would have added to the profile of perfectly smooth cheeks were now no more than a resting-place for the small bags under the blue eyes. The cheeks themselves were hollow and thin with an exceptionally poor skin tone. In fact the cheeks were so thin that when she sucked her strawberry milkshake through the plastic tube the cheeks discernible moved in and out. He decided that her nose was still nicely proportioned and therefore was neither a landmark nor a blot on her face. Thus it was a shame that she’d disfigured it with her only discernible piece of jewellery, a twisted gold ring with a sort of blob on the bottom that seemed to stick out from the side of the nose and drag the eye away from the perfect mouth. He moved to analyse the face above the nose and studied her eyes, which must have lost their natural lustre some time ago. The eyelids, plastered with a deep blue eye shadow’ had stand-out macroscopic veins, while her thin line of mascara served to emphasis growing crow’s feet wrinkles and tired skin. He let his eyes roam over her body. Her jet-black hair (presumably from a bottle) was probably shoulder length, but it had been tied back into a straggly ponytail by a small hair-tie that had a bright pink flower attached. Her unnaturally long neck had doubtless once had the grace of a swan, now it was scrawny with neck muscles standing out with pulsating muscle movements as she drank. He took in her cloths; a deep blue wrap-round cardigan, that owed more to the shape of judo wear than fashion. Well washed black slacks with those tiny elastic straps that passed under the feet and a pair of scuffed low-heeled light blue patent leather shoes. He suddenly realised that she was thin, painfully thin. The clothes hid the full import of her scant body, but her thinness was apparent in the bony claw-like hands whose nails were adorned with out of place bright vermilion nail-paint that was doubtless meant to match her lipstick, but was at least a shade off. She suddenly put down her empty glass leaving a tiny ring of lipstick on the straw, picked up the small bag of shopping that was beside her slim feet and walked out of the cafeteria. About five foot five he mused as he watched her exit through the doorway. He’d expected a hip swinging walk, a sort of hangover from her once attractive past; instead she progressed with tiny steps as if she was wearing a tight skirt that prevented extended leg movement. She didn’t swing her free arm, she just stood straight and did a tiny step exit.

  Brian leant back in his chair after her departure and observed a few other people. He liked observing people, he kidded himself that it was so he could improve his watercolour skills, but in truth he found people fascinating. It didn’t matter if they were fat or thin, tall of short, beautiful or ugly. He liked to look at their proportions and study their movements. Study how cheekbones that were so prominent on one person could be invisible on another. Note that some people could actually not have a jawline while others had remarkably mobile eyebrows. His mind clicked back to the woman and he pictured her in his mind. She’d had thin black eyebrows that had been plucked into submission, whereas the lady over there… He stopped his mind wandering and observed himself in the wall of mirrors that bounded the end of the cafeteria. Just under six feet, light ginger curly hair that had been bright red when he was a child, muscular build (or was that fat), translucent blue eyes, standard nose (neither long nor short) roundish cheeks, wide mouth and dimpled chin with what he considered to be a strong jawline. He complimented himself on the matching green jumper and jeans combo while his eyes dropped to his hands causing him a deep mental sigh. They were his bête noire being totally out of proportion with the rest of his body in that they were absolutely huge. No one in his family could understand it; he had these enormous hands, but moderately sized feet. When he been young he’d heard mutterings about his Uncle Niall, but as nobody ever talked about that particular uncle he was still none the wiser. He turned and pressed down on the centre of his cafetière with his mammoth hand. He liked his coffee strong and halfway between scalding hot and hand-hot. He poured out the thick mixture and considered what to do next. He’d come to do some shopping and had left his wallet back in his holiday home. He had some small change and his emergency credit card under the mat in his car, but that was for emergencies; was this an emergency?

  Brian lifted the fourth carrier bag onto the kitchen table and started to pack the items into the various wall cupboards of the enormous and well-fitted kitchen. His holiday home wasn’t really a holiday home; it was his cousin George’s home. Brian was just house-sitting for the summer. The house in question being a three story double-fronted Victorian pile that perched on the edge of a graveyard like the set for a horror movie. In the past it had once been a rectory for the nearby church and quite normal, now George was in the process of transforming it into a model railway enthusiast’s paradise. As Brian packed away his goodies he mused on his eccentric cousin. The kitchen was fully quarry tiled and large enough for the average housewife to die for. Indeed large enough to have a five foot square scrubbed pine table in the centre and an eight foot gap all round. However his cousin shunned it and for that matter seemed to disregard the entire ground floor, choosing to live on the top story. Thus the downstairs cavernous rooms with their high ceilings and general airiness were largely unused. There were three large settees in the lounge, but that was about all. George did have a study in the other downstairs front room, but unless he worked in total chaos in was merely a dumping ground. In contrast the top floor housed his bedroom, a dining room with added galley kitchen and a fully loaded bathroom with giant shower cubicle and bidet. Even the single bedroom on that floor had been pressed into service as a small sitting room complete with TV and hi-fi. Brian half shook his head and placed the last of the food away to sat down at the table. The last time he’d been here the entire first floor had been given over to George’s passion: model trains. However, this year that floor was totally empty with the bare boards sporting numerous small holes as testimony to the removed railway track. The railway hadn’t totally disappeared however; it had just migrated into the attic - doubtless to be replaced be something grander. Brian sat down at the kitchen table and started to re-read the instructions that his cousin had left for him. He studied the tiny handwritten note closely. He read it twice and sighed. As ever his cousin was obscure about when he’d return and how to contact him in an emergency. Brian stretched his arms and yawned, he liked coming to house-sit here mainly because he liked Suffolk and his cousin’s house was deep in the heart of rural Suffolk in the village of Burston. Burston was large for a village, but too small to be a to
wn. On the other hand it had all that Brian needed for a holiday. The only slight drawback being that the nearest large supermarket was three miles away on the main road.

  After a check on the washing that he’d thrown into the washing machine Brian made his way to the first floor noting the fact that his cousin had repainted the entire house magnolia and laid giant utilitarian light-green office-style carpet tiles throughout the entire house, barring the first floor. However, as a concession to Brian’s visit, he had laid some carpet tiles in the small bedroom on the first floor. This act was double edged; it said ‘use this bedroom’ and ‘don’t disturb mine.’ Brian placed his toothbrush and shaver in the giant first floor bathroom that still housed an absolute monstrosity of a bath. An hour late he’d finished assembling his camp bed in the freshly carpeted single bedroom and placed his clothes in the built-in wardrobe. He unrolled his sleeping bag and stood back. He checked his watch, went downstairs to cook himself a couple of boiled eggs and clean out the inside of the microwave.

  Later he took a large sketch-pad out of his car and sat down to recreate the face that had haunted him since the supermarket. He sketched it once; twice; a third time and then a fourth before stopping and studying his work. It was no good. He could picture her in his mind in almost perfect proportion, but on the sketchbook pages the face looked more like a living skull with a pair of heinous pouting lips. He closed his eyes and concentrated before trying a fifth time, again to no avail. This was always his problem; he knew what he wanted, but it all came out wrong. He thought about another attempt, but put the pad away. He knew that attempting to draw that face was a diversionary activity. Really he should write a couple of letters before he went to bed, but didn’t know where to start. He’d been working in one place with more or less one job ever since he’d left university and was wondering if it was time for a change. However the very notion of change made him uneasy and breathless. He liked matters to be in careful order and his life to be on what he thought of as a stable footing. Change of career would skew all that and he hated the thought of the unknowns it would create in his life. He decided on the coward’s way out and decided to tackle the letters tomorrow. Instead he tuned the radio to a classical music station, picked up a book and began to read. Now his holiday had really begun.

  Chapter 2

  Second Sighting

  He saw her a second time at the 10:45 service at St Mark’s church, which was the church on the other side of the graveyard from where he was staying. The church, a standard mediaeval Saxon church with a square tower and oak pews, was way over half full by the time he arrived at about five minutes before the beginning of the service. It was then he noticed her; this time not because of her face, but because of her isolation. She was sitting in the side chapel right against the far corner. No one else was sitting in her pew and the rest of the side chapel was empty. A casual glance up and down the aisle told Brian that this was not an accident, she had been deliberately isolated; pushed to one side, sent to the margins, kept apart. The service itself was quite palatable; a mixture of old and new hymns that blended together and a decent twenty-minute sermon that gave enough food to think on and enough loose ends to chew over. However, his mind was occupied by the thin woman, her isolation and her time-ravaged face.

  After the service, despite his best efforts, he was buttonholed by Verity a rather formidable looking lady who was always clad in a two piece tweed suit despite the summer sun. She flashed him a smile and looked at him with her piercing grey eyes, “Why it’s Brian, guess George is on holiday. Where is he this time?”

  “I believe he’s in Romania, certainly the old Eastern Bloc.”

  She shuffled some of the hymn books into a neat pile. “You staying in the old rectory as usual and around to the end of August?”

  He knew what was coming. “Yes I guess I am.”

  She sorted another pile of hymn books, “Diocese should never have sold that house to him, but that’s bye the bye.” She fixed him with a stare, “So can we attack your diary?”

  “Of course, but not too much.”

  She nodded and they passed a few pleasantries before he nodded towards the side chapel, “Who’s the young woman sitting by herself in the side chapel?”

  Verity sniffed disapproval. “Bau Didly.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Bau Didly, spelt B-A-U D-I-D-L-Y. She was a singer in a rock band I believe.”

  The tone in her voice was unmistakable; singers in rock bands were lower than the scum of the earth. Brian persisted. “No-one spoke to her.”

  Verity shrugged, “Local history I’m afraid Brain, people round here tend to have long memories.” She finished sorting the hymn books and glanced at Brian, “I’d stay away from her if I was you, she’d bad news.”

  The tone of her voice said it all; stay away; leave alone; don’t get near. Verity turned away and the matter was closed as far as she was concerned. Her attitude caused Brian to be even more puzzled. He’d never heard of a Bau Didly and wondered what local history could possible cause a young woman to be put into total isolation. He was intrigued.

  After a quick oven-meal-for-one he retreated to George’s study and turned on the computer. Brian mused, as it went through its start up routines, that the rest of the house may be Victorian, but the computer was state of the art. Once it was ready Brian, out of curiosity, peered at the onscreen icons. He counted twenty-three icons of which twenty-one were connected with programmes for model railways. He opened up the Internet, put the words ‘Bau Didly’ into a search engine and pressed the ‘search’ button. To his astonishment he turned up well over six thousand web sites. He settled down and started to read the sites at the top of the list. After an hour he sat back and assembled in his mind what he had discovered. Bau Didly was not a singer in a rock band; she had been the bass guitarist in an all-female rock-group called the Rocqettes. The group had burst onto the scene twelve years ago with a traditional five-piece set up – drums, bass guitar, rhythm guitar, lead guitar and singer – specialising in performing rock and roll songs of the late 1950s and early 1960s. They’d also added their own material and over nearly two years had had five top ten singles; Maiden Voyage, Mermaid Dip, Dryad Blues, Wench Wrench, Señorita Stomp, and a best selling album called Rocqettes Alive! There were even some video clips of them in action that Brian could watch. All the girls had dressed identically in a red gym slip, red bikini top and red high-heeled shoes and performed well rehearsed mini-dances as they played their instruments. He’d also found some fan club close-ups of Bau. It was as he’d suspected, at nineteen she’d been an absolute beauty. As was the vogue at the time all the band members had tried to increase their publicity by choosing names from the rock ‘n’ roll past and deliberately misspelling them to make them unique; Billie Hailie, Little Susie, Jeryy L’Ewis, Lorna Richard and Bau Didly. From the web sites he’d also gleaned that after two years there appeared to have been some sort of argument and Bau Didly left the band to be replaced by Budie Olie. From then on the Rocqettes went into severe decline. They produced three more singles, Lassie Lurch, Hussy Hullabaloo and Paramour Pants, all of which were terrible flops. Even their next album Rocqettes Away! Apparently never even made the top 1000. Of Bau he could find little trace, except that she was cited as author of the Christmas ditty What present can you get for Father Christmas’ Daughter? and that she played in some boy-band as a stand-in guitarist for nine months. She was listed as session musician on a number of albums for roughly another six months and then nothing. None of the sites mentioned her real name and none gave a hint as to why Verity should so condemn her into being ‘bad news.’ Brian left the computer to give the Microwave oven a second scrub before settling down to watch the highlights of the World Rally Championship Rally of Cyprus. Bau Didly slipped from his mind as he watched the high-speed cars and drivers perform in a rally of extreme and utter attrition.

  Brian slipped back into the church for the five o’clock evensong with about two minutes to g
o. Once again Bau Didly was in the side chapel alone and wearing a purple thin summer cotton long-sleeved dress that seemed to emphasis her physical frailty and forced isolation. He deliberately walked across the church and into the side chapel. He gave what he hoped was a friendly smile, “May I join you, or do you wish to be alone?”

  She glanced up at him, fixing him with her blue eyes, “No, please sit down.”

  Conversation then ceased as the vicar and straggly choir trooped out of the vestry and the service began. Whereas the morning service had been pleasant the evensong was dire. The church would probably seat nearly two hundred, but only twenty people formed the congregation. They scattered themselves down the church like blown confetti; thus any verbal output they may have had was lost in the echo chamber of the near empty building. The organist, a rather ancient and feeble old lady, played her best, but unfortunately her obviously arthritic fingers were just not up the task. Finally there was the cold hand of liturgical modification, which had struck out vast chunks of the service, probably on the grounds of time saving (and Brian wouldn’t blame anyone for that). Thus the service became of sort of ecclesiastical gobbledegook with the feeble singing unable to relieve the liturgical agony. Bau left, without speaking as soon as the service had finished. There was no coffee and no Verity to buttonhole him, thus Brian followed her out into the evening sunshine watching her peculiar small-step walk. She paused at the kissing gate and looked back. “You police or a reporter?” She asked in a mixture of rolling Suffolk consonants and short East-End vowels.

  Brian was slightly taken aback. “Neither, I’m a schoolteacher.”

  He pointed to the old rectory on the other side of the graveyard, “Staying there and house-sitting for my cousin George.”