Rose Leopard by Richard Yaxley Page B

Fanny’s sick little labyrinth and discovered more. Just after she was born, Alice’s mother mysteriously carked and canny Fanny assumed the mantle.’
    â€˜Weren’t people suspicious?’
    â€˜No — because the Driscolls had been travelling o.s. for years. Mrs D was an ex-Spanish flamenco dancer who used to entertain African pirates in Byzantine cafés. No one in Cheltingham had ever laid their crusty pus-ridden eyes on her.’
    â€˜She was murdered?’
    â€˜Mm, but not by Fanny or Geoffrey. Turns out that Mrs D was killed by Fanny’s ex-boyfriend, a Moroccan hashish dealer named Yumut Kan. He was a jealous type who stalked Fanny, saw her legs-akimbo with old Geoffrey and thought he’d come back that night and do her in with a sapphire-encrusted tungsten scimitar.’
    â€˜Fanny May and Yumut Kan. Lovely.’
    â€˜Notice the sapphires? Your birth-stone. Purely coincidence, of course.’
    â€˜You’re a darling.’
    â€˜Thanks. Anyway, when Mr Kan worked out he’d got the wrong bedroom and stabbed the wrong babe, he committed hara-kiri by drowning himself in a vat of liquefied dope. With the gendarmes closing in, Fanny and Geoffrey fled to rural England with baby Alice and their secrets. Time passed and everything was dandy (and occasionally randy) until Alice’s gift was revealed — and Geoffrey remembered his wife’s dying promise that she would be avenged. I will be avenged! — she said.’
    â€˜So Mrs D flamenco’d her deep and dark desires via Alice’s mind?’
    I grinned, squeezed her thin shoulders.
    â€˜Right again. Very good. All of which scared the pants off Fanny and Geoffrey — who couldn’t believe their luck when they found young Alice, dead beside a babbling brook on her fifteenth birthday.’
    â€˜Fell from her horse? Shot by a cross-bow? Head held and mercilessly drowned?’
    â€˜None of the above. Fifteen-year-old Alice Margaret Driscoll had been stabbed through the heart with a sapphire-encrusted tungsten scimitar. Seems that, as well as holding half of ordinary Cheltingham to ransom, she had been blackmailing a new young stable-hand by the name of Mohammed — Mohammed Kan.’
    We were silent, cocooned together in the near-darkness. I felt Kaz drop her hand, squeeze my groin a few times like she was siphoning milk from a cow. I was gazing vaguely at the newly arrived stars, trying to find a pattern, play dot-to-dot.
    â€˜Maybe a bit contrived,’ she told me eventually.
    â€˜I told you before,’ I said. ‘I’m a good writer but a lousy story-teller’
    I loved that trip — most of it, anyway. I loved it because we did it for a reason: we were both bewitched by this innate sense of expatriate connectedness that Australians have for England. Perhaps it was socio-biological — a sort of early-twenties version of the midlife crisis — or perhaps a consequence of seeing too many repeat episodes of The Good Life, but the mythology of the mother country had cut deeply into us.
    â€˜It’s romantic,’ Kaz had said, gazing at a brochure picture of a green empty field.
    â€˜And it’s not America,’ I told her, thinking of sitcoms.
    We pored over magazines, books and travel journals; we transported ourselves and imagined another life where we saw and smelled and lived the history of the place. England, we decided, would be thick and aged, as musty as unopened tomes in a monastic library. There would be a depth and saturation of colour, unlike Australia which is so bleached, so drought- and flood- and sun-evaporated. We thought of ourselves becoming participants in Enid Blyton-world, snuggled in fuggy bed-sits, roving the verdant hills and dales, drinking tea and smiling benignly at the ghosts of marauding Normans and Saxons. We would be like adopted children, returning to a long-ago home that they could never recognise and to parents they